Jason Isbell

I would be remiss if I didn't note that Dave Marsh conducted two great interviews yesterday for Sirius radio.

The first was with Van Morrison.

The second was with Jason Isbell, former member of the Drive-By Truckers, current leader of the band, the 400 Unit. Dave was kind enough to let me sit in, and for someone as enraptured by the guy's music as I am, it was a total treat.

He's a big, quiet man, 30 years old, with dark hair slicked back, snaggly teeth, slightly pop eyes, and the big shoulders and neck of a worker. Thick Alabama accent. He's small town rural and smart as a whip. He has this quiet, slow way of talking where he considers your question and then puts complete answers together, confident but not arrogant. He looks like he doesn't much care for being interviewed, but he cares for the music and recognizes this is another way to get it heard.

The thing that Dave hit on and that struck me was the air of respect Isbell has. It's in his songs: his ability to see both sides of an issue like a soldier returning from war or a tough break-up. He listens. And he learns from all sides. And then he writes these big songs that don't lecture or even make points as much as ask questions.

That respect seems to come from where and how he was brought up. Like Drive-by, his perspective tends to be from the bottom-up. He said (or was it Dave?) that they were making not so much Southern rock as rural music. And in his case anyway, rural music refers to everything from Otis Redding to Muscle Shoals (where he recorded both his solo CD's) to Outkast to Jimi Hendrix. It's an outsider's, working person's take on the world.

Partly as a result of that and partly just cause he seems dead honest, he says he doesn't write too many happy or optimistic songs. He said that more often than not he finds himself facing dilemmas and worrying how things are going to turn out. I picture him writing songs the way you might look at a broken piece of equipment: "Damn! Now how am I gonna fix that?"

All of which may make Isbell sound far too serious and depressing. Last night, after the interview, I went to his show in NYC. And it was just this glorious, heart-felt, inspiring blow-out. He's got four other members in his band, including a little long-haired bass player who looks like he's from Star Wars (what were those fuzzy creatures?) and an angular, ratcheting fellow guitarist, both from Jason's part of the South. Drummer's from Northern Alabama, too; keyboard player presently living in Brooklyn.

His first CD was wonderful. But this second one is better: full of big pop hooks and a wide variety of styles all held together by the band's kick-ass approach and his big voice. There's what you might call a Percy Sledge ballad, complete with a tangy horn section; intense rockers that crescendo up and up; a country-western song or three but sung with no fake nostalgia, just dirt farm directness; and throughout (they played from 10:15 at night till 1:15, with a ten minute break) this amazing directness.

I see something similar with Ozomotli live. And Los Lobos. This sense of a band that's doing what it loves and recognizes it's work and is going to get it right both for its own self-worth and because it wants the crowd to get what they paid for. At one point, in the midst of a solo, Jason and the bass-player got into a quick balancing contest: each standing on one leg and seeing who'd be the first to fall over. This as the music teetered on what seemed like impossible heights and finally fell. On one of the great new songs, "Cigarettes and Wine," Isbell sings of the memory of this woman, saying it lingers inside him still: "wrapped up like a twenty dollar bill." Except you have to hear him drawing out the word "wrapped" till it's like winding up a rubber-band airplane, getting ready for release.

We talk a bunch about whether rock&roll is still alive. I stopped myself a couple of times last night to check that these five people playing guitars, drums and keyboards were really making this heroic, this demanding a storm of music. They were. Not a hint of nostalgia or condescension. Respect for what had come before but no sense that they were trying to duplicate it. Rather, the music seemed to say, times are tough. And this rock&roll thing is an honest way to talk about it.

You know that kind of loopy, dazed look someone gets when they're so deep into what they're doing that they're forgetting to breathe or swallow? Every member of Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit had it more than once last night. It was full fucking steam ahead; jump on if you want a ride.

Towards what? Ah. Their closing song, the crowd drenched and hoarse, was a cover: Into the Mystic.

The Bridge

Dave Marsh writes:

People ask me why I remain devoted to rock/blues/rap/soul music. You can see it in their eyes, even if they don’t ask, that they wonder why an almost 60-year-old man would still be so wrapped up in things that are so flimsy and childish (to them). I have spent most of my career trying to articulate the reasons. This morning I read an email from a friend, who lays it all out with extreme clarity. Granted, this is in some respects a singular story and certainly an example of lousy shrink/great patient. (“Intact” must be jargon. Nobody who is at all informed about this issue could think that anyone who has been abused is “intact” psychologically. But professionals insulate themselves from their own emotions by pretending otherwise.) Abuse isn’t the only reason that I—or my friend—love the music. But it is a huge part of why we regard the music as something that has saved our lives in the truest sense.

I want to say this again, now, because I think there is a storm coming that will include more witch-hunts against hip-hop and maybe metal, especially with a Presidential administration run by someone associated with the Oprah Winfrey wing of punitive cultural criticism. I will join the fray again, on the side of free speech, and for as long as I am able. I hope people who read it will learn to think in the same terms. For every kid who needs what the email calls the “bridge,” we need to support this culture, no matter how off-track it may become in other ways. Somebody is surviving because of this and giving the worst parents an excuse to take it away (or for that matter, indulge in further abuse because of it) is unacceptable. Period.

This shrink that deals with the cardiology patients asked me what I do to alleviate my stress. I told him, "Get out on the road. I get away from all this, and just get out on Route 66, Arizona, New Mexico. Just get me out on that road. Everything else is secondary. I don't feel any stress out there." I added that I can only go so often, due to finances and time. But that is the thing that alleviates my stress more than anything else in the world.

Then he started asking me a lot of questions about my fucked-up childhood, and he asked me a lot of questions about how I could have survived all that.

He kept saying, "There must have been some significant person that cared about you as a child. Statistically, that is the only way abused kids come out of that intact."

I kept insisting to him that there was no such person. I never connected with any of my teachers as a kid. My grandmother on my dad's side cared about me, but she died of a heart attack when she was fairly young, when I was like 5 or 6 years old. And that was the end of anything with me and any grandparents.

The shrink kept saying, "There had to have been someone." He was looking for some significant bonding person with me who got me through it. I kept telling him there *was* no one.

I told him about when the cops came over, and how they did nothing.

No one ever did anything.

I said, "If I had grown up in the '90's or in this decade, I would have been removed from the home. Back then, no one did anything about this stuff."

When he finally accepted that I was a weird statistic, that despite what all the psychology books claim, I did *not* have a significant person in my life who cared about me, he was at a loss. (You are supposed to have at least one significant other that really cared about you for you to not end up as ultra-permanently damaged goods, beyond repair.)

I decided to just put it on the line at this point, because I had already told him enough examples of the horrendous abuse I suffered as a kid.

He seemed a bit dazed and stunned when I finally said, "Look. I didn't have a significant person. This is how I survived. It was my albums. It was my Rolling Stones albums, my Jimi Hendrix records, my Bob Dylan albums, Marvin Gaye, Zeppelin, Yardbirds, and whatever else I had. I listened to those albums over and over, and because of them, I knew there was some other world out there, other than the hell I was living in. I knew from listening to those albums there were people that existed out there, that did not have the warped values my parents had. And I was going to find those people one day. There was no doubt in my mind. Listening to those albums, I knew there was some better place, and one day I would be a part of it---away from all this. It wasn't like I was hoping, it was something I knew. There was no choice involved. One day, I would be out of that hell, and I would be in some other world, and that would be wherever that music came from. I listened to music constantly. Music was not my escape. It was my bridge."

I told him, "It got me out of there, mentally. It individuated me from my parents. That is what got me the fuck out of there, that is what made me not end up like my little brother, who became bonded to the violence, and who could never stand up to my parents, and who could never individuate from them."

I said, "Any guidance I ever got as far as coping came from those albums. That music was my significant person." I then quoted the lyrics from "Jumping Jack Flash" :

I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag
I was schooled with a strap right across my back
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas!
But it's all right
I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash, it's a gas!

I said, "If that is not about survival, I don't know what is."

He had this really stunned silence.

Then he said he was entirely appalled by what he was hearing from me about my parents, and that he found it to be very disturbing. He then told me that when he ran the monitor on me to measure my stress and how it effects my heart (I forget the name of the equipment or the name of the test), when I was talking about the abuse I endured from my parents, that I did not react very much physiologically, which he found really surprising.

I said, "Because it is just a matter of fact. Just like this wall here is white, or that the sky is blue, it is a matter of fact that I was abused to the point where someone should have removed me from that home."

He said that my stress level on the heart thing when I talked about my parents not having major variations in it means I am "coping" with what I had been through, and he said it is surprising given how bad the incidents I told him were.

He said most people would have had a far greater physiological reaction talking about things like that.

He then told me I am "extremely gifted and talented." I don't know where he got that from.

To my surprise, he told me I don't even need to come back to see him again. He said, "You have your survival skills as far as dealing with it. You know how to deal with what you have been through."

We Insist!

Lew Rosenbaum writes:

This is a note I would have written to Strat a year ago, and copied to my sister Greta; or perhaps the other way around. The point on the triangle that was Greta is not available, except in my imagination or to communicate in some way with the ancestors as some are wont to say. My saying this to you in no way attempts to lessen the value of what I am saying, nor am I simply dwelling on a hole in my life, nor am I only saying how glad I am for the many years I had to do what I had to do and the years I have with you as well. Perhaps it's all of the above and more.

It's about a performance that Diana and I saw on the lucky Friday the 13th of February.

Last fall, as I sat contemplating the Symphony Center series ticket offerings and ticking off the many things I'd like to see and would never see in the coming year, and thought of the times Diana and I discussed going to concerts, and agreed that THIS YEAR we would, but that because of our hectic schedules we'd wait to the last minute so that we wouldn't be obliged to go out when we were too tired, and then of course when the time came we WERE too tired or forgot or had scheduled something else and so we COULDN't GO -- this year as I contemplated that multifaceted list of offerings, I told Diana it is time we made time for what we wanted to do rather than just let it go by, and the two of us scraped away the concerts we could do without and came down to five during this season: 3 classical programs and one dance program and the program we heard tonight.

We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite composed by Max Roach in 1960, a piece I had never heard before. I had no reference point to it except that it sounded interesting and I've heard Max Roach before and so we booked that.

First, the performers were superb. Julian Priester on trombone was one of the people who originally recorded the piece. Ron and Clark Bridgewater on Sax and Trumpet were great, Ira Colman on bass had a stunning solo to start one of the five pieces that make up the suite, and the three percussionists talked to each other throughout. Ray Mantilla (75 years old!) on the congas was on the original recording and, in the last section dueled back and forth across the stage with percussionist Nelson Clarke, and holding the whole thing together was drummer Lewis Nash, center back, where Roach would have been playing. He was phenomenal.

The most amazing phenomenon of the evening of phenomena was Dee Dee Bridgewater, who I thought wrung every ounce of emotion possible out of her not always verbal vocal performance -- at time shrieking what needed to be shrieked, and starting, in the first section called Driver Man, with a refrain that she hissed at the audience: "All I got in my mind, the driver man and quittin' time."

The unit played off each other so well, with Bridgewater opening most segments up and closing each segment with repeat refrain[ but always in between, as the musicians played to each other, melding a kind of dance and appreciation with the others that was emotionally exhausting. The lyrics, written by Oscar Brown Jr., were spare and demanding as the music.

The music howls, cajoles, screams in both birth pangs and the slash of the driver's lash, and wails as all good brass sections must. There is also something very sensual/sexual about the way a bass player makes love to his instrument, perhaps because the instrument is so life size that embrace, foreplay and orgasm seem to be happening on stage without any attempt to mask it. And in the long introduction to the one section of the suite Colman did make love to his instrument.

The suite ends with a section titled Tears for Johannesberg -- and as Bridgewater brought all the performers out at the end to receive applause, she closed by saying that there are no more tears necessary for Johannesberg, but we have tears in our own back yard that we have to deal with. If we stand together, we can deal with them. We Insist.

Precious

Danny Alexander writes:

One of my favorite Kansas City musicians, one of my favorite musicians period, is a woman named Kristie Stremel. When I first saw her, she was playing guitar with the band Frogpond, which had some notoriety in the late 90s after Art Alexakis produced its album, "Count to Ten."

Stremel was the perfect foil for the somewhat reserved lead singer of that band, Heidi Phillips. While Heidi diffidently addressed the mic like Kurt Cobain's lost sister, Stremel would work the crowd, fist pumping, bounding around the stage, and eventually, climbing the rafters. It was a wonderful contrast live, but it never felt like it would last.

After Stremel left and formed her own band, Exit 159, I understood why. She'd woodshedded with her two new bandmates all summer and emerged early in the fall with a full set of poignant, catchy and hard-rocking material. I still have the newspaper I was holding in my hand during that first show, its margins full of notes on songs I had never heard before. I knew I'd be writing about them. And I did, early and often, as they toured across the country twice and found their way into regular rotation on local alternative radio playlists.

After the first year, the bassist left, and the band took on more of a punk style reflecting the sensibility of its newest member. They had a strong second year together, taking on yet another player, three of them having fronted their own bands before. They played the Viper Room in Los Angeles where, word had it, 26 labels were in the house. Nothing happened. And then the inevitable tensions tore them apart.

Stremel went on to record as a solo artist, and her songwriting grew increasingly sophisticated both musically and lyrically, but, unfortunately, without a consistent band to back her up, she never regained the kind of audience she'd had with Exit 159.

Friday night, Exit 159 reunited, and the show was fantastic. The band played to an attentive packed house, as hard as it ever did but with a more supple touch. The band members have all gotten better in the 10 years since they broke up.

The drummer was always good, but he used to play on the stiff side of Max Weinberg, with perfect posture. The perfect posture's still there, but what's unusual about Rob VanBiber's style is also key to his strength--he's precise as hell, and Friday night he played more dynamically, with a deeper pocket and a ton of surprising fills, all the while hitting hard as ever.

The bass player, Jamey Wheeler, was always a strong second vocalist for Stremel, kind of a warm, almost sweetening, complement. His vocals seem even stronger today, more self-assured. He takes a verse in one song, and it's a great moment, but the best thing about the two of them is a certain call and response between their vocals. I'd also forgotten how much his bass style, rooted in jam band fluidity, provided a unique counterpoint to everything else going on and helped define Exit's sound.

My wife Lauren had never seen Exit before, except that she had gone with me last weekend to watch them rehearse in the studio. That day, they ended with this new cover of "Simply the Best," the Tina Turner song, that got Lauren beaming.

Later, in the car, she said, "They need to play their own stuff the way they played that song."

I reassured her that, with the sound coming through a soundboard and with a crowd in front of them (rather than the two of us and the drummer's wife), it would all be at that level. I was hoping....betting...

And, fortunately, I was right. They came out with every bit the intensity of that cover. Stremel and the crowd were ringing sweat midway through the set, and it only built from there.

They played something like 90 minutes ending with covers of "Something So Strong" and "Little Red Corvette," an old rave-up of their own called "Cigarette Kiss" (the traditional set closer) and then "Simply the Best."

One of the great things about Stremel with a 3 piece is that she takes lead on guitar. And it's not that she's some great guitarist, but she knows how to make you feel a solo, even if she fucks it up she salvages it (which happened at some point Friday night).

That was always a highlight of the "Little Red Corvette" cover in the old days.... In that quiet bridge at the center of the song, she'd bend over and seemingly search for the notes on her lead--and it was always this moving moment, very hard and on the edge of atonality, but somehow perfect.

She had several moments like that Friday, but one of the wonders of the Tina Turner song (which has never before been a favorite of mine) was not only how she made it her own but also how she managed to make it a vehicle for one hell of an exciting guitar solo after the bridge. Everything exploded into the final chorus, and it was a perfect finale to the night.

Lauren, who never does this, went over to Lawrence to watch her play again Saturday. I'd already committed to reviewing the Pretenders show for our alternative weekly, the Pitch. I have an almost three decade old soft spot for Chrissie, but I wanted to be at Kristie's show again, watching the exact same set all over. Frustrated as I was, that's a good feeling to have.

Lester Bangs on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

Dave Marsh writes:

I think Lester Bangs' essay on Astral Weeks (from Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, edited by Greil Marcus) is probably as good as Lester ever got, which is more than just considerable. I am not sure to this day whether his vision of humanity was extremely limited or the most expansive one that I know—it is maybe both, kind of alternately—or whether it's just that we arrived at different solutions to the same problem, which is the problem of thinking you're dying, dying of fear and isolation, and then not dying but also not feeling quite as fearful and isolated and starting to betray yourself by growing up, maturing. We traveled different roads but they had points of nearness where we could reach out and touch—or almost touch, Lester might say—and there was never a time when I felt like we were on different sides of the wars fought to preserve individual humanity. (I ain't speaking for what he felt; I don't know, exactly. I know some of it but not all that much for sure.)

Anyway, this is the guidelines by which the new Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl should be judged, IMO, especially this passage:

What this is about is a whole set of verbal tics—although many are bodily as well—which are there for reason enough to go a long way toward defining his style. They're all over Astral Weeks: four rushed repeats of the phrases "you breathe in, you breath out" and "you turn around" in "Beside You'; in "Cyprus Avenue", twelve "way up on"s, "baby" sung out thirteen times in a row sounding like someone running ecstatically downhill toward one's love, and the heartbreaking way he stretches "one by one" in the third verse; most of all in "Madame George", where he sings the word "dry" and then "your eye" twenty times in a twirling melodic arc so beautiful it steals your own breath, and then this occurs: "And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves."

Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along. Sometimes he gives it to you through silence, by choking off the song in midflight: "It's too late to stop now!"

It's the great search, fueled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least be glimpsed.

It truly may be that this is pretty much everything I have ever sought from music, and to those who damn transcendence as an object of desire—or maybe i mean, as a prospective achievement—all that I can say is, the answer to the question of who is damned is obvious and universal, and yes, it's the wrong question. The goal of what Lester is writing about here—the goal of what Lester writes here—is to transcend not one's humanity but the conditions of the world that make it so painful; and he understands the fundamental principle, which is that there is no way around the universal state of humanity, there is only a way through it. And if that is not transcendence, then I have no idea what it would be, in (this is ridiculous but important) practical terms.

I say this all so defensively because, I guess, sometimes people think that what Lester wrote is dated; sometimes I think it myself. But I think that the best of it is as close to timeless as needs be discovered in our lifetimes.

More on Working on a Dream

Barbara Hall writes:

There's so much to listen to in this record. My ears are all jammed up with it. I love the operatic nature of it. As much as anything, I love the long phrasing which allows Bruce the time and space to sing. I just love hearing him sing. Not the modern Bruce staccato singing but the old Bruce chasing down these endless melody lines singing, but with a brand new, or old school, understanding of how to do it. It strikes me as funny and sad and weird that he is one of the best soul singers of our time.

The romance of the record, and the phrasing, too, reminds me of The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle. Not in a nostalgic way, but in a way where those songs finally figured out what they were really meant to accomplish.

There are only a couple of songs where he overloads the lines with lyrics. Mostly, he just creates this space to maneuver. I guess the overall thing, much as the last album, is the harmonics, the sense of space, and the unusual and unexpected forms of filling that all up.

But here's the thing. This record isn't like anything we've heard before. You almost can't compare it. It's of a piece, or mise en scene as the filmsters like to say. A friend was asking me what it was like and I said it was mostly like a film score. In the best way. In that you can't really break it down or take anything out of context. Listening to it while I drive makes me a little drunk. I wonder what I'd say if I got pulled over.

When I was studying film in school, I fell in love with it (Fellini, Bergman, Bunel, et al) because it was like entering someone's dream. This record is like entering some dream Bruce is having, too. Sonically, lyrically, atmospherically. I suspect it might take years to get it entirely.

I guess that's why he's Working On A Dream.

In Praise of The Cramps: Lux Interior R.I.P.

John Floyd writes, in response to a question about what made The Cramps great:

Jesus, where do I start? They cut their first and best records in Memphis, and I read about them at the time in the local paper and bought the records the minute I could find them (Gravest Hits was the first I owned; the original singles collected on that record were sold out by the time I knew about them) and when I heard them, they ripped off my head. It was everything I grew up hearing, thanks to parents who loved rockabilly without knowing the music even had a name; my own interest in punk rock and the Memphis band Panther Burns, who were doing things similar to the Cramps' early work, had never met so definitively for me, and it all made sense. So the Cramps, for me, were rock and roll, forget about prefixes. I learned so much from them, through their ultra-obscure covers and the songs and artists they talked about in early interviews -- it was like a history lesson funneled through punk-rock noise, and that was right up my alley at the time, and probably still is. The Cramps helped to make me a rock and roll fanatic, one of those termites who cares about Link Wray outtakes and the Sonics and just how glorious weird rock and roll can be sometimes. They haven't made a record I've cared about since Smell of Female, which must be from '83 at the latest, but what they did to me as a fan is immeasurable. I've loved the Cramps like I've loved the most important music in my life, and even though he farted off the last 30 or so of his, musically speaking, I hate that Lux Interior doesn't have one anymore.

Rediscovering the Wonders of Music

Danny Alexander writes from Overland Park, KS:

I stopped off at Target on my way home from work and bought Working on A Dream on the day it came out. I put it in, and "Outlaw Pete" lasted almost exactly the length of my ride home. It was a singular experience in my listening life. I didn't follow the lyric, aside from the refrains, but the music moved me close to tears at that first point where it grows quiet, and then the music swelled again, and I had that feeling I have watching an epic western, that I didn't know where it was going to go, but I was just glad to be along for the ride. I don't remember all the particulars of the sound swelling in my car, but at that point, where I turn off 95th Street onto Connell and wound through a neighborhood to 91st, I felt like I felt as a teenager-- when music told me of limitless possibilities, when I knew the feel of the key to the universe in that old parked car. But this was a different universe, and a different car.

From 91st, I took another jog through a neighborhood on a street called Knox until I reach 89th, where I live. The music was drawing to a close, and I'd moved close to tears twice more. What I knew, pulling into my spot, was that I wasn't ready to go on to the next song yet. I thought of that moment in "This Magic Moment," when you talk about exchanging glances, lifting the needle and starting the record again.

Fortunately, I didn't have to move on, or I had an excuse not to. I came in the house and showed the CD to my wife Lauren, and we went up to our room and put it on the beatbox. It reminded me how good music is when it's played by the side of your bed, filling up your room with worlds worth dreaming about. We wound up cuddling, and just listening. Lauren was beginning to doze by "The Last Carnival." but she was also surprised, in a good way, that it had flown by so quickly. Lauren also said she appreciated Bruce writing "Queen of the Supermarket" for her, longtime checkout girl that she is.

I haven't had this kind of reaction to a record in so long that I think I'd begun to think music couldn't do that for me anymore. It figures Bruce could prove that wrong. But even though I had a sense I was going to like this record more than anything since The Rising, I didn't expect this, this feeling of Christmas morning coupled with a starry night on section roads.

I suspect that's the happiness that critics keep noting. (I haven't read the reviews so much as comments about them, although I did read that lame Spin thing.) There's a joy here, but it's nothing so simple as a man being content. It makes me think of Sonny finding that brand new piano in his hands in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues." The joy I hear is a man (and a whole crew I'd guess) who's rediscovering the wonders of music. I feel certain he had to go there to take me there so completely, so quickly. As I've said many times, I'm a slow listener. It's very rare I'm affected in any way approaching this so quickly. I'm a happy man tonight, and that's not a simple thing at all; just precious.