Category Archives: Roundtables

An Introduction to the Music of Eritrea

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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I come from a land in Africa bordering the Red Sea. Its name is Eritrea. There’s no reason for you to know it. I barely know it beyond its past. The country is one of the most informationally opaque in the world, governed by a regime convinced isolation and control trump vulnerability to invasion by land or Western politics. It took 100 years from that start of Italy’s reign to the end of Ethiopian occupation for my people to stand freely beneath their own flag. Twenty years later, they flee one of their own.

map_of_eritrea

In North America, the music of my home remains largely unknown outside the diaspora.
While the fetishization of East African women in hip-hop has been extensively documented, references to Eritrea by popular bands have either had nothing to do with the country (Future of the Left’s “Arming Eritrea”) or ignored it altogether (Bright Eyes’ “Haile Selassie”). Lupe Fiasco’s latest track is also titled “Haile Selassie” and uses excerpts from the Emperor’s speech on inequality at the 1963 United Nations General Assembly:

“That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; That until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation…[Until that day, the African continent will not know peace.]”

If these words seem familiar, the same excerpt was featured in Bob Marley’s “War.” The General Assembly address occurred less than a year after Jamaica’s independence; the General Assembly address occurred less than a year after Haile Selassie annexed Eritrea and declared it the 14th province of Ethiopia, leading to a war for independence spanning 30 years.

Another of the excerpts in Fiasco’s “Haile Selassie” involves the act of silencing:

“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

There are many ways to destroy a cultural identity. Forbidding access to a language is one of them. The year 1962 was also the year Haile Selassie burned all books in Eritrea written in the country’s most widely spoken tongue, Tigrinya, and decreed all new books and educational materials would be printed solely in Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia. The role of Eritrean music, for decades already a call to arms against occupiers, skyrocketed in significance.

In terms of global distribution, this music has at best been lumped in with the synthesizer-averse E?thiopiques series. Emulations of Eritrean music have also appeared stateside by well-meaning bands (e.g., Fool’s Gold’s “Yam Lo Mosech“). Yet, the Eritrean heroes responsible for inspiring large swaths of the country to fight for independence — singers who were jailed and tortured as political dissenters — have seen limited exposure beyond their borders.

The reasons are numerous. To Western ears, Eritrean music has about as much rhythmic variation as mud; the same drumbeat can be heard at roughly the same tempo on the majority of songs; the length of each song typically falls between 6-9 minutes: Pop music this is not. And truly, these songs are for dancing, which in certain Eritrean traditions entails shuffling in a circle while shrugging one’s shoulders to the beat.

Listen, I know. I know how this sounds. I expect no miracles from new listeners. It took decades for me to embrace it. The voices were shrill. The singers’ frequent inability to commit to one pitch per vowel an affront to whatever thread of Puritanism I inherited from America. The meandering saxophone — an aural figure so revered it was employed during a minute of silence when Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki held a gathering in New York City in 2011 — haunting more songs than I care to admit.

Historically, ours has been a music of metaphor and self-censorship. For more than half a century, Eritreans have been singing about their presumably-human-and-definitely- DEFINITELY-nothing-at-all-to-do-with-political-independence loves because they couldn’t sing openly about their own country. Some tried; eyes were lost. And yes, occasionally the lyrics were about romance, but mostly they were about the endless pursuit of freedom.

Below are a handful of songs/videos featuring Eritrean performers. Some highlight the kraar, a stringed instrument present in many Eritrean songs. By no means is this a comprehensive list. While the Tigrinya tribe of Eritrea is its biggest, there are eight other ethnic groups in the country, each with its own language, style of dance, and festive garb. Additional songs and artists can be discovered on Eritrea 24, Spotify, and other online primers.
 

The Arresting Sound of Cardiacs

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Cardiacs are a British band from Surbiton. They were active from the late 1970s through 2008 — a lengthy career that can be divided into at least two distinct phases — and in that time they produced several difficult-to-describe albums. I like aspects of all their records and rank certain pieces alongside any earthly music that I have heard, from any era and any nation. (In fact, some of you might just want to cut to the chase and check out my personal favorite Cardiacs composition, “The Everso Closely Guarded Line,” before reading any further. It’s the final track from their 1989 album, On Land And In The Sea: an attention-demanding eight-minute mini-epic distinguished by recapitulated sequences of Baroque-style melodic counterpoint. The last three or four minutes coalesce into a rhythmically complex, anthemically rousing passage of such startling beauty that my heart swells in my chest and my eyes get all watery every time I listen to it. I recommend turning off the phone and the lights before hitting play. It’s available here in HD audio:
 

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Don’t forget to adjust your YouTube settings for full quality!)

Adoring the band as I do, I have often thought that it would be nice to share my enthusiasm with friends and acquaintances. But Cardiacs can be a tough sell. Most people have simply never heard of them. But it also turns out that lot of the people who have heard of them don’t like them.

They are a challenging proposition. I’ll concede that right away. Their overall sound is a rebarbative fusion of punk and progressive rock. Like a lot of classic punk acts, their music is often abrasively loud and manically fast, and combines grating, adenoidal vocals with aggressive guitar-based riffing. But like a lot of progressive rock bands, they have a penchant for odd time signatures, multi-layered arrangements, surprising chord modulations, and unpredictable song structures that eschew the traditional verse-chorus-verse template. Tim Smith’s lyrics are also strange and obscure, shot through with grotesque humor and playful mock-infantilism. Themes of suburban alienation (“A Little Man and a House”), the confusion and profusion of sexual desire (“Buds and Spawn”), and apocalyptic religiosity (“Fiery Gun Hand”) are all discernable, but rarely resolve into a coherent statement; the results can be entertaining, frustrating, and unsettling, by turns.

I think this unlikely blending of two ostensibly opposed popular musical genres — punk and prog — aggravates some listeners for reasons that are as much ideological as aesthetic. To be more precise: I think the music of Cardiacs inadvertently exposed the deep formal conservatism behind the putatively radical aesthetic assumptions of the British music press in the 1980s, according to which punk and prog were regarded as essentially equivalent to matter and anti-matter. Certainly, the punk-worshiping journalists of the early 80s were primed to despise anything that smacked of prog almost reflexively; the idea that a band might try and bring both genres together to forge a new idiom simply could not be countenanced. Consequently, Cardiacs were repudiated more harshly than many bands of the same era that committed the (more ordinary) musical sins of blatant commercialism and shameless derivativeness.

For example, reviewing the Big Ship 12-inch (1986) — Cardiacs’ first vinyl release — Mick Mercer of the Melody Maker suggested that somebody should “arrest these peasants before they get another chance.” For Mercer, it was as if the band had committed some kind of musical crime. A year later, reviewing A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window for the New Musical Express, Jack O’Neill was even harsher: “Cardiacs are the sound of both feet in the grave,” he opined. What’s more, shortly following O’Neill’s review, the editors at the NME — a powerful organ of musical opinion at the time — seem to have taken the unusually vindictive step of blacklisting the band altogether. Even if another musician or band cited Cardiacs admiringly, the subsequent article or interview would eliminate the reference; no one was allowed to say anything good about them!

It wasn’t just the press who reacted with revulsion in those early days. I witnessed at first hand the hatred that Cardiacs could inspire in an audience on what was (tragically, for me), the only occasion that I ever saw them perform live. The year was 1984, and I was fifteen years old when I caught Cardiacs as the support group for a headline act that I am now embarrassed to name — although of course it was that headline act that I had actually gone out to see. (OK, it was Marillion, but please don’t hold that against me, or more importantly against Cardiacs, who really don’t sound anything like Marillion at all.)

I can still clearly recall that both Tim Smith (lead guitar, vocals, principal song-writer) and Sarah Smith (saxophone) were wearing garish, clown-like make-up, to disturbing fake-jolly effect. I also remember a few obviously choreographed bits of cabaret-style theater. For example, there was a curious Brechtian mini-drama during the final number, in which Tim was joined onstage by an MC-figure in tie-and-tails who presented him with a bottle of champagne and then showered him in confetti — a display that seemed to move Tim to tears. (You can see a version of this set-piece here, played on a much larger scale and stage for a more receptive crowd.)

Cardiacs were hardly the first band to incorporate such antics into their act, of course. But at the time, even the slightest gesture towards such self-consciously “arty” theatricality was very much out of fashion. I doubt most of the teenagers in the crowd had ever seen anything like it — I certainly hadn’t — and the unfamiliarity of the performance style might partly explain why the response was so blisteringly savage. Within a few minutes of taking the stage, Cardiacs were under attack; bottles, cans, and homophobic obscenities (anything different was “queer” in Cardiff in 1984) were hurled at them in a barrage that lasted for pretty much the entire set. (In retrospect, the viciousness of the crowd only made Tim’s clown-child onstage persona seem even more vulnerable and incongruous — thereby adding to the affectively off-kilter dynamic that he was clearly trying to generate.) It was a pretty horrifying scene, really, but the band just played right through the storm of missiles and insults as if it wasn’t happening. Perhaps they had already got used to that kind of reception; I’ve read it was even worse at other gigs on this tour. (Apparently, at one show irate audience members set fire to the stage curtain in an effort to drive the band off). Still, it cannot have been easy to keep going in the face of such violent hostility.

As for me — I pretty much loved the band instantly. I’m not sure what it was, but I just knew the audience had got it wrong — and that something was happening on that stage that was a lot more interesting and unexpected than what I had come out for that night, even if I wasn’t fully able to process it. The sound and the look were unusual, no doubt about it. But it got under my skin and into my head and I knew I wanted more.

Unfortunately, I didn’t even know what the band was called. The ticket and posters just said “Marillion plus support.” It would be some days before I learned the name, talking to an older kid at school who it turned out had also been at the gig (apparently he’d seen the word “CARDIACS” stenciled on an amplifier or equipment box or something). And even when armed with this information, I could not find any records by the band in the local shops. (Reasonably enough; Cardiacs had yet to release anything on vinyl, as it turns out, although they had released several recordings in a cassette-only format of very limited distribution. In the absence of the Internet, however, I had no way of knowing any of this.)

In fact, almost three years would pass before I finally stumbled over a Cardiacs album one fateful day in 1987, while browsing the racks in Cardiff’s justly famous Spillers Records. It was called A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window; the cover image was a black and white photo of a giant daisy. I saw the name, I remembered that weird, intense, disconcerting gig from what already seemed like eons ago (three years is a long time when you are a teenager), and I bought the thing, unheard and untested, and eagerly caught the bus home to play it.

I loved this record instantly, too, and even recognized some bits and pieces from the show I had seen (such as the repeated refrain of “that’s the way we all go” from the title track and the song “RES”). This time, though, I was encountering them in the context of an ambitiously “modernist” concept album (or near enough) about the fear and loneliness and false bonhomie engendered by contemporary urban life — and the idea that something bigger than the big city might be glimpsed out of the “whole world window.” (For a lengthy review that does a superb job contextualizing both the band and this unusual record, check out the essay by Sean Kitching in The Quietus from last year)

I was now a bona fide Cardiacs fan; nevertheless, I somehow missed their next album (1989’s on On Land and In The Sea) — probably due to my being wrapped up in my final year at university — and then in the early 90s I left the UK for the United States, and got distracted by … well, a whole bunch of things. After a few more years I even got rid of my record player (though not my records) and over a decade passed when I didn’t listen to the Cardiacs music at all.

But just a couple of years ago I was going through my old vinyl records with a view to finally selling them off when I found my (now more than twenty-years-old) copy of A Little Man and a House … and found myself wondering “what happened to these guys?” And this time, thanks to the marvelous technology of the Internet I was able to make a belated rediscovery of the band. I think this is the closest I have come to that uniquely 21st century experience of hooking up with an old high-school sweetheart in middle age via Facebook. I feel as if I should have loved this band all my life; that other groups were mere dalliances by comparison to this — the real thing. Getting back into Cardiacs has felt like coming home, and for the last few years I’ve listened to them with more passionate interest than almost any other band, almost as if I’ve been trying to make up for lost time.

I swiftly learned that they too had gone through some major transitions in the early nineties, transforming from a six person line-up featuring saxophone, keyboards, and a second percussionist along side guitar, bass, and drums, into a leaner and meaner guitar-driven quartet. To my delight, I also discovered that I liked this later incarnation as much as the band I first fell for back in the 80s. The musical texture of their sound obviously changed with their instrumentation, but all the things that I loved — the strangeness and complexity and inventiveness and emotional intensity — were still there in abundance. They still had the capacity to disturb and they still had that wild, ecstatic, manic joyfulness.
 

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Rather less happily, I also learned of the terrible series of strokes that laid Tim Smith low and almost ended his life in 2008 (apparently when he was just on the eve of completing the first Cardiacs album of the 21st century). According to several reports, while Tim’s mind is as sharp as ever, he is now partially paralyzed and badly in need of ongoing physical therapy. I continue to hope that one day we may hear better news from the Cardiacs camp regarding his condition, but for the time being, at least, it seems unlikely that he will be able to lead his band onto to a stage again. (The story is covered here in article from The Guardian. I suspect this article represents the only time Cardiacs ever got a write up in the mainstream British press, which is a bitter irony and a damned shame all by itself.)

For a few years after this disaster, the Cardiacs website was dormant and the albums slipped out of print (although old copies would sell for quite shockingly inflated prices on eBay). As of last year, however, the shop at their website re-opened, and you can now buy all their albums once again, direct from the UK. So if after reading this and listening to any of the tracks I’ve chosen as a selection, if you do decide you want to hear more, PLEASE consider ordering the CDs from Mary at the website. A good portion of the proceeds will go towards Tim’s ongoing medical expenses, so you can actually feel good about an act of self-indulgence, even as you acquire some of the most interesting and under valued British pop music of the last century. Humanity point and hipster points in one happy purchase — you can’t go wrong!

OK, time now for a few sample tracks from across the career. This is an entirely personal and idiosyncratic set of choices — other Cardiacs fans might have made a very different selection — but I’ve also tried represent some of the different musical phases of the band with the few choices.

1. TO GO OFF AND THINGS

That link to the disturbing original video, although personally I’d rather just listen to the track which is intense enough as it is. This version is from the CD re-release of one of those obscure “cassette only” albums from the early 1980s, The Seaside. I actually remember them playing this when I saw them; the stop-start riff was very distinctive, and the whole band would freeze each time the music stopped. I think it’s this kind of track led music critics to call Cardiacs a Pronk band (after the unlikely mixture of Prog and Punk). Tim rejected the label, preferring “psychedelic” — if you have to have a label for us, he said — but this is indeed pretty pronky, IMO. Recently covered by Napalm Death.

2. A LITTLE MAN AND A HOUSE

A fade-in and crash, followed by some ominous parping on the horns and strings, and then those too fade away, replaced by muted industrial clanking sounds, over which a tentative, anxious character sings of his eagerness to get to work on time. And things get stranger from there. I think this album really needs to be heard of a piece … but maybe this first track will whet your appetite. (You should skip I’m Eating in Bed if listening to the whole thing, BTW, and listen to it later; it’s a fine track — but it was not part of the original album release and doesn’t really belong there.)

3. THERE’S TOO MANY IRONS IN THE FIRE
 

A delirious single from 1987. I. Inspired performances from the rhythm section in particular. Love this one. Echt Cardiacs.

4. BUDS AND SPAWN
 

 
This version kindly uploaded in HD so your dog can appreciate the higher frequencies. From On Land And In The Sea. This track completely defies my powers of description. It comes in so many different pieces and the tempo shifts are truly boggling — I can’t imagine the amount of rehearsal required to pull this off. And yet it really doesn’t feel like prog-muso showing off to me. It’s just too damn manic for that. I hear something new in it every time.

5. DAY IS GONE
 

 
Can’t find this in higher than 240p, but this should be good enough to get the flavor. With this track we jump to 1992 and the Heaven Born and Ever Bright Album album — the first by the more stripped-down four-piece the band became in the 1990s. This is a remarkable composition that manages to look backward to 1960s psychedelia and forward to the future of pop, at the same time. In another instance of the band’s bad luck, ROUGH TRADE (the record label) went bankrupt shortly after this record was released and the album became impossible to find till 1995 when Tim was able to re-release it on his own label.

6. FIERY GUN HAND
 

 
A relatively straight-ahead rocker (well, almost … the instrumental break is quite mental). From Sing To God (1996), a double album that most fans consider to be Cardiacs’s masterpiece. I think I like on On Land And In The Sea (1989) slightly more, but both are wonderful, and Sing To God has just been re-released in a deluxe 180g vinyl pressing for all you true audiophiles.

7. DIRTY BOY

For this one, I’m just going to quote a section of Sean Kitching’s recent review of that deluxe new vinyl edition of Sing to God, since he offers a better summary of this song than I could possibly write myself.

‘Dirty Boy’ is perhaps the album’s crowning achievement. It begins with a guitar riff reminiscent of Alice Cooper’s ‘I’m Eighteen’ and alchemically transmutes its base material over the course of its nearly nine minutes duration with celestially ringing sounds constructed by innumerably overlaid strata of acoustic guitar and incredibly drawn out sustained vocals that when performed live had an undeniably consciousness-altering effect on all those present.” (For the whole review, go here.

8. THE EVERSO CLOSELY GUARDED LINE
 

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Here it is again just in case you didn’t play it already. And here they are doing it live many years later — bootleg sound, of course, but they pull it off.

Enjoy!
 

The Music Machine: Black Glove and the Loneliest Garage

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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The Music Machine were —

Sean Bonniwell – vocals, guitar
Keith Olsen – bass
Ron Edgar – drums, vocals
Mark Landon – lead guitar
Doug Rhodes – organ, flute, vocals

I’m going to say it again – the “Canon” means nothing. Not in comics, not in literature. And certainly not in music.

There are the little demolitions. The knocks, the craters, the crumbling walls. But it’s not just the Harold Blooms of the world that hang onto the idea, however stupid, that popularity can ever be indicative of quality, that, in the end, in matters of taste, history is always right.

A simple demonstration.

What was the fiercest band of the mid to late sixties “garage rock” explosion? The smartest songs? How about the most adventuresome?

Ever heard of the Music Machine?

No biographical summary of mine would ever be equal to the writing of Richie Unterberger, who interviewed Music Machine singer/songwriter Sean Bonniwell for his 1998 classic book Unknown Legends of Rock and Roll. So for a more thorough overview of the band’s history, pick up a copy of the book, or check out a full transcription of Unterberger’s interview with Bonniwell here.

But really, the songs and performances are their own justification.

The Music Machine hailed from Los Angeles, California, and were formed out of the trio The Ragamuffins. Bonniwell, him of the tough songs and gruff voice, was a graduate of folk quartet The Wayfarers, who released three LPs for RCA in the early 60’s. Listening to those recordings now, it’s hard to imagine the sounds to which that sweet voice would be twisted.

Driven by Bonniwell’s taut songwriting and unhinged voice, the band rose to prominence in the L.A. rock and roll scene and spilled over nationally, scoring a top 20 hit with “Talk Talk,” their scattered, stabbing first single. Like all of the greats, they were discovered in a bowling alley, performing continuous, uninterrupted 90 minute sets for their attentive fans and, presumably, bewildered bowlers. These days, they’re primarily known as “that band” that future Fleetwood Mac producer/engineer Keith Olsen got his start in. (It’s him playing the mean detuned bass guitar on these recordings. He also designed and built the fuzz boxes used by the band.)

At this distance, what you might hear in the Music Machine is really dependent on your own familiar frames of reference. For 60’s popular music enthusiasts, what you have in this soup is essentially a smart, violent Iron Butterfly on speed instead of downers. (A glance at the relevant time lines will tell you which direction this influence lies — the L.A.-via San Diego band Iron Butterfly released their debut album in 1968, two years after the national success of the Music Machine’s “Talk Talk.”) As this comparison might suggest, as much as the “proto-punk” label has been thrown at the Music Machine, it’s perhaps “proto-prog” that’s most present in the arrangements, specifically the segmented nature of the instrumental hand-offs. The songs are rarely constructed by block chords moving around the neck of the guitar – rather, the unusual, doomy chords are suggested by interlocking melodic lines carried by multiple instruments, each staying within its own narrowly defined frequency range.

In the above, “Talk Me Down,” and “You’ll Love Me Again,”  you’ll hear the same arrangement sensibilities, stop-start dynamics, gruff then shrieking vocals, wordless screams and pseudo-James Brown mannerisms and funky bass with roller-rink Farfisa organ skating along atop. The line up of the band that recorded (and apparently, endlessly rehearsed) these songs didn’t last long — breaking up sometime in 1967, less than two years into the life of the band. They were, it is said, plagued by bad luck, negligence, short-sightedness, and mismanagement at every turn. And yet, somehow, they managed to squeeze out at least a dozen perfect songs, even if a real full-length statement eluded them.

It’s a fate that could easily have met their contemporaries, Love, or The Zombies, both bands which had tremendous early success with singles that were just indications of the greatness to come, both of which managed to put together transcendent full-length albums before retiring to that great rock and roll second-hand shop in the sky– Forever Changes and Odessey and Oracle, respectively.

But in The Music Machine, we just have those scattered singles, two-minute angry screeds against, what, exactly? Girls. Loneliness. The human struggle for life in a hostile, hateful world of selfish pursuit and gluttonous predation? Complete with horrifying duck calls? Hell yes!

What’s that? You love that terrifying song, but you’d much rather hear it whilst watching the band limply mime the tune? And you’d really like them to be introduced by Casey Kasem? Here you go! Happy to oblige!

What happened to the Music Machine is almost too mundane to summarize. Dissatisfaction. Too little money, too many ways to split it. Exploitation and exhaustion. Too many bowling alleys, not enough nights in the studio. Regardless of the details, they went the way of any great group, leaving, unfortunately,  with their ultimate promise unfulfilled.

But oh, what wonderful remains.

You can purchase the entire Music Machine catalogue in two meticulous releases from Big Beat– The Bonniwell Music Machine and the Ultimate Turn-On. If you’ve enjoyed these clips, you’ll love the heck out of these reissues.

It’s an interesting mental exercise to imagine future music enthusiasts digging through the past decade of music, looking for hidden gems of the era, unknown or forgotten bands of that time period. In the case of the Music Machine, they had the serious advantage of lots of regional exposure, hell, of a national hit, even if the trick wasn’t repeated. And even though the rest of their catalog was obscure, the flag, the signal flare, was there. “Here we are. Come listen.”

What hope, exactly, does a band have today?

The bowling alleys, the bars of listeners, the VFWs, the dance halls, the venues, all gone, as is regional radio. All the ways a band had to make themselves known to their neighbors. And so even while recording equipment gets cheaper and cheaper, cheap instruments better and better, the audience continues to shrink. What brave soul would wade into that sea of unfiltered musical content in an attempt to extract the unknown gem?

I don’t envy them the attempt.

I’ll leave you all with two last songs — “In My Neighborhood,” a Music Machine novel in two minutes, and a track from the much-maligned and almost completely invisible Sean Bonniwell follow-up to the Music Machine, which turns a more nostalgic eye toward the past, in retreat from the present.

 

Going to Brownsville? Take that Right Hand Road.

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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There’s not much to Durhamville, Tennessee, where Sleepy John Estes (born John Adam Estes, January 25, 1899 according to his grave/born John Adams Estes, January 28, 1900 according to his World War I draft card– June 5, 1977) was born and buried, with a life in nearby Brownsville sandwiched between. To get there, you drive narrow, mostly straight, country roads. The speed limit is 50, but that’s only to encourage the locals who could certainly drive faster to watch out for the rare stranger who has to take the roads much slower. For Tennessee, the land is flat, though, being Tennessee, that means it has some gentle rolls to it. It’s mostly farmland, interrupted by wavy lines of trees in the low spots where the creeks lay. I’ve always come into Durhamville from the south, so it’s one farm after another, then a cemetery on the right, more farms, and then the cemeteries surrounding the Elam Baptist Church on the left. Maybe a quarter mile up the road is “downtown” Durhamville, which is four empty wooden buildings at a crossroad—three brick store-ish looking buildings on one side of the street and one wooden building on the other that gives off a kind of post-office-ish vibe. They are obviously no longer safe to enter.

Once tractors were cheaper than sharecroppers, there wasn’t any need for even as little of Durhamville as there was.
But the Elam Baptist Church is still something of a tourist destination, kind of, if I, going out there every year or so to Sleepy John Estes’s grave, count as a tourist. The church you can see from the road sits on a slight rise, surrounded by graves and a fence. This is the old white Baptist church. Down the lane that runs next to the church is another church, the old black Baptist church. According to the people I found at the church, it has a white congregation now. It has a smattering of graves near it. And then, the next lot south, is an enormous cemetery, one that seems to be made up of one-third Esteses, none of whom are Sleepy John. If you’re looking for him, he’s buried next to his sister in a kind of no-man’s land where the three cemeteries come together.

Sleepy John’s grave, taken by itself, isn’t actually that interesting. You can see it on Find-a-Grave and spare yourself the soggy shoes and the bug bites. But standing in the cemetery full of Esteses is totally worth it. For one thing, it’s hard to think of Sleepy John Estes as some isolated lone bluesman when you’re standing among fifty of his family members. Most of the Esteses have Masonic symbols on their graves—even Sleepy John’s sister—so it’s easy enough to imagine that he probably also was a Mason, which, in rural Tennessee in his lifetime would have been part social club, part survival strategy. Mostly, you get the feeling of Sleepy John being a part of a large family in a close-knit community that sat in a place fundamentally rigged against them. Just looking at the dead Baptists, Durhamville must have had three black people for every white person, and yet who got the nice church and the churchyard burial? Not the Esteses.
 

 
The most important thing you can see by going to Durhamville, if, for some reason, you actually would want to go there is that, if you are going from Durhamville to Brownsville, perhaps to see the girl you love, with her great, long, curly hair, you do, indeed, take the right-hand road.
 

 
Now we’re getting at the interesting thing about Sleepy John Estes. Mr. Hugh Clarke, of “Lawyer Clark Blues,” was a real person in Brownsville. “Vasser Williams” who gets what amounts to the world’s best auto-shop commercial in “Brownsville Blues” was likely Vassar Williamson, who was living in rural Lauderdale County in 1930 with his wife, Morene, and their son, Verlon. (I base this both on the fact that this is the only Vassar living in Lauderdale County and that Sleepy John drops the last syllable in a lot of words in this song—Durhamville gets shortened to Durham, Brownsville to Browns. No reason “Williamson’s shop” couldn’t get truncated to Williams’ shop.) I couldn’t nail down a Martha Hardin, but there are a couple of possible women (A Martha Ewell, whose father was Jim Hardin died in Dyer, just northeast of Brownsville, in 1956 at the age of forty. Right name, right general area, right general age. And there are a couple of older Martha Hardins buried south of Brownsville, possibilities if we imagine John taking up with 50 year old women when he was a young man. And that’s assuming her last name isn’t Harding or, considering John’s mumble, possibly Hardeman—both last names you would have found in Brownsville or the surrounding county before the song was recorded.). The streets Sleepy John refers to are real streets you can drive down in Brownsville—Wilson and Bradford.
 

 

Now, I’m trying to walk a tricky line here because I, personally, find the backstories of songs in most cases rather tedious. I don’t care how many songs Pattie Boyd inspired, for instance. But I don’t think that what Sleepy John was up to was quite that simple. Steve Leggett over at All Music calls Brownsville Sleepy John’s Spoon River, as in Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, and I think this gets as close to Sleepy John’s artistic project as I’ve seen anyone bother to come.

Sleepy John wasn’t attempting to literally or figuratively seduce anyone by writing a song about them (at least, not in the way George Harrison or Eric Clampton were Boyd). He was, I think, transforming the ordinary people and places that surrounded him into something aestheticly meaningful. He wasn’t writing a song for, say, Hugh Clarke that would curry favor with him (or at least not that alone). He was trying to do something to Clarke through that song, to make Clarke valuable to Estes’ audience not because he was a good lawyer, but because the song about him was good.

Sleepy John was what we might these days call “adding value” to the place he lived with and the people he lived among by making them subjects of song. Think about how powerful it is, even though we all know it’s corny, when we go to a concert and the performer says, “Hello, [whatever place the performer is in tonight]!” That feeling of “Where we live matters to this artist we like!” Now imagine what that must have been like to have Sleepy John singing songs about the people in these little unknown towns, being able to go to record shops, or at that time, probably furniture stores, and finding records with people you knew mentioned on them.

I just finished Steve Johnson’s chapbook, Obscure Early Bluesmen (Who Never Existed), which, in a brief nineteen pages manages to mercilessly skewer every single thing about white people and our long, problematic love of old, obscure blues. One of the jokes of the book is that almost all of these fake bluesmen, of course, recorded a version of Stagger Lee. It’s just expected—of course every blues singer, even those that don’t exist, would have a version of Stagger Lee.

But “Stag” Lee Shelton was a real person. Billy Lyons was a real person. And we still sing about them. We don’t know who first wrote that song, but that song made those men immortal, after a fashion.

You listen to enough Sleepy John Estes and you start to suspect that he is deliberately up to something similar. He is, by god, going to write songs so catchy about these people and this place that they live on and become mythological. They are real and more than real.

I debated a long time about whether Sleepy John Estes was obscure enough to write about. Take three seconds to type “Sleepy John Estes” into Google and you’ll be able to read about what an enormous influence he was on Bob Dylan, how Ralph Peer recognized his talent, how Led Zeppelin “borrowed” heavily from him.

Sleepy John hasn’t been lost or forgotten—even if the people in the church near where he rests have no idea who he is—and he’s likely someone you’ve heard of. His music, even the old stuff, isn’t that hard to get into because he had such impact on the gods of 20th century popular music. You’ll recognize songs and phrases and vocal approaches, even if you think you don’t know him. And a lot of his songs are just flat-out fun. Try “Milk Cow Blues” which somehow sounds like a person wound three music boxes all playing the same song and set them off to playing that song at slightly different times. There’s no reason the song shouldn’t shake apart into nonsense, but somehow it doesn’t. It’s genius, awesome, and makes clear his jug band roots.
 

 
But I think what’s been obscured about him is that he wasn’t just the musical progenitor of songs we love. He had an artistic drive, an aesthetic sensibility. He was up to something in that place with those people. He wasn’t just writing about them—his songs aren’t three-minute documentaries. He was trying to do something to and for them.
But, I’ll admit, I’m struggling to even find the words to talk about what that something is. And I want to get at it. To put it into words that would make you appreciate what it’s like to stand next to someone’s grave, to see his people in the dirt there with him, and to listen to those songs and hear him singing about them like they mattered, not just to him, but to the larger world.

So, this is the thing about Sleepy John Estes: he had a goal and it wasn’t just to write the best songs he could or to be the best guitarist he could, though those are fine goals. He knew music could do something and he wanted it to do that something for and to the people he knew.

And when you stand in those places, among those familiar names, looking at how the real world maps onto Sleepy John’s artistic world, it feels like he may have done it, may have brought those two realms close enough together that some of his ordinary world was able to escape and live on.
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Editor’s Note: One of Betsy’s comments on this thread has been turned into a follow up post with youtube examples here.

Index To The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of

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Welcome to the HU roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. For the next couple of weeks we’ll be running posts from HU guests and regulars on bands, singers, or musicians who are neglected, forgotten, obscure, underrated, or some combination of all of those.

The index below is alphabetical by musician covered, and will be updated as the roundtable goes along. Feel free to tell us about other best bands no one has ever heard of in comments.
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Introduction: Best Music You’ve Never Heard Of — Noah Berlatsky

Pamela Bowden — Noah Berlatsky

Wilmer Broadnax — Noah Berlatsky

Cardiacs — Ben Saunders

Betty Carter — Jordannah Elizabeth

EGOIST — A.Y. Daring

Music of Eritrea — Rahawa Haile

Sleepy John Estes — Betsy Phillips (and a follow up post here.)

Jane Jensen — Kinukitty

The Music Machine — Sean Michael Robinson

Natural Snow Buildings — Dana Schechter

Music of New Zealand — Chris Gavaler

Esther Mae “Mama” Scott — Paige McGinley

Norma Tanega — Quinn Miller

Thoughts of Ionesco — Chris R. Morgan

Thumb of the Maid — Osvaldo Oyola

Windham Hell; Virgin Black — Otrebor

Conclusion: The Best Roundtable No One Has Ever Heard Of — Noah Berlatsky
 
Addendums

Best Writer No One Has Ever Heard Of

Best Artist No One Has Ever Heard Of

 
 

The Best Music You’ve Never Heard

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This is a sideways introduction to our roundtable on The Best Band You’ve Never Heard Of, which will begin next week. An index to the roundtable is here.
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Dr._Franklin's_Island

 
The Hunger Games is a best-selling book that pretty clearly always intended, or at least wanted, to be a best-selling book. Katniss has become a recognizable one-word brand, like Beyoncé or Rihanna — and that iconic fame in our world simply mirrors her celebrity status in the world of the book. The Hunger Games can be seen in some ways as a satire of reality TV and the rapacious culture of fame, but the emphasis on viewing and spectacle also seems like a kind of dream, or wish — Suzanne Collins imagines everyone watching Katniss as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone will watch Katniss; she is, and was always meant to be, a rock star.

“Dr. Franklin’s Island,” by Ann Halam (Gwyneth Jones) on the other hand, is an unknown YA book that seems like it always intended to be unknown. The novel is told from the point of view of Semi, a shy science nerd who’s won a trip to a research facility accompanied by other science nerds and a couple of television personalities. Semi finds the pospect of interacting with all the other kids, much less being televised, terrifying — and in response to her wish, the plane crashes in the middle of the sea, and everyone dies except her, a cool girl named Miranda, and a cranky, unpleasant boy named Arnie.

The three have some amazing adventures; the island is controlled by mad scientist Dr. Franklin, who injects them with animal DNA and transforms them into superhero animal people. But this isn’t a superhero story where the hero saves the world and everyone cheers. Instead, the action of the story is all almost completely private. One of the loveliest passages in the book, and in some sense the most spectacular, occurs after Semi is transformed into a manta ray.

I was floating in water. It was over me, under me, all around me. It was the air that I breahted. I wasn’t frightened. I still felt good, and delighted with my new body. Sunlight was warming my back, and that felt very nice. I glided up toward the shimmering liquid light, until I was breaking the surface and looked around.

Katniss’ big moment is triumphing on TV; Semi’s is just the sensation of being in her body; of swimming within the prose, quiet, unobserved, inward turned.

Shortly after this, Semi sees her friend Miranda, transformed into a bird, and then realizes that the two can’t speak to each other. The isolation is terrifying…but

Next thing I knew, everything was white. It was like being inside a cloud: like being surrounded by the dazzling, soft, white cloud-country you sometimes see from a plane window. I saw Miranda, standing with her back to me. I knew it was Miranda at once, Miranda the way I remembered her from the beach.

From the isolation of the water, Semi goes to a no-space. This turns out to be a kind of imaginary meeting place enabled by telepathy — but it also could be read as reading; the white cloud-country is the blank of the page, and the connection between Semi and Miranda is the private, quite connection you have when you have with Semi when you read the book. Rather than a hero who competes and wins and gains the adoration and pity of crowds, Halam’s book leads her shy character through a series of escalating isolations — from island, to manta ray, to cloud telepathy. There are adventures and dangers and friendship, but none of it is acted out in public; it’s all a secret. The world never finds out what happens to Dr. Franklin, or hears about his experiments; the kids manage to change back to human, and have the ability to resume their animal forms, but they’re (understandably) afraid of being experimented on, and never tell anyone. This is the last passage in the book.

I know that we can transform again. I believe it will happen, some way, somehow. I think about breathing water and swimming through the music of the ocean. I think about having a skeleton of supple cartilage instead of brittle bone. I think about feeling my whole body as one soaring, gliding, sweeping wing. I know that Miranda will never forget being able to fly. I dream of another planet, with an ocean of heavy air, where I can swim and she can fly, where we can be the marvelous creatures that we became; and be free, together, withno bars between us. I wonder if it exists, somewhere, out there….

An uninhabited island isn’t enough; Semi wants to go away to a whole different planet, where she and Miranda can change and be together, alone. In part, this seems like a gracefully hyperbolic extension of the closet; a gay utopia of sensuous transformation where the atmosphere is different enough that unnameable love is possible. But it’s also a dream of invisibility — to be lost, in a different form. It’s even a kind of invisibility within invisibility; this isn’t something that “really happens” in the novel — it’s a wish, a coda, outside the narrative, a fantasy within the science-fiction, imagined within imagination, both buried under and outside the story. It is displaced; a vision without a viewer.

The pleasure of The Hunger Games seems like it is in large part, and is meant to be in large part, the pleasure of participating in a pop culture phenomena; it’s about watching with everyone, and being part of the everyone through watching. Dr. Franklin’s Island instead enjoys being somewhere, and something, unseen. While everyone else is talking about Katniss, Semi swims on her own page, through music no one has heard.

Captain America: Half-Truths

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I was looking forward to reading Truth: Red, White, and Black following the smattering of positive notices the comic has received on HU of late. Noah’s recent article certainly gave me the impression that this was a comic which would transcend its roots in the superhero genre. The words “difficult”, “bitter”, and “depressing” are certainly words to embrace when encountering a Captain America comic.

I’ll not stint in my praise of the parts which do work. I like the naturalness of Robert Morales’ period dialogue and the shorthand used to delineate 3-4 characters in the space of a sparse 22 pages in the first issue. I like that Faith Bradley takes to wearing a burqa just to make a point. The idea that the first Black Captain America should be sent to prison the moment he steps foot on American soil is not only sound (linking it with the events of the Red Summer of 1919 mentioned earlier in the book) but resonates with reality.

Faith_Shabazz

I like that Baker has a way with faces and makes the characters distinct even if they are almost all dispensed with in the course of 4 issues. His devotion to caricature (he is a humorist at heart), on the other hand, lends little weight to proceedings which are deadly serious—the violence is anaemic, the action flat, the misery imperceptible, and the double page splash homage to Simon and Kirby’s original Cap utterly out of place (or at the very least executed with little irony). I like the idea that when Isaiah tries to save some white women about to be sent to the gas chambers, they react to him with a fury as if asked to couple with a dog. It’s a troublesome passage of course since it implicates Holocaust victims in their own brand of racism.

One big problem for me, however, was that the comic wasn’t depressing enough. If the super soldier experiments are meant as a distant reflection of the Tuskegee syphilis study, then the comic doesn’t quite grapple with the true nature of tertiary syphilis and, in particular, the effects of neurosyphilis. The latter condition is described quite bluntly in Alphonse Daudet’s autobiographical In the Land of Pain and the effects are nothing short of a total breakdown of the human body, oftentimes a frightening dementia. Not the blood spattered walls which we see in one instance when a soldier is given an overdose of the super soldier serum but years of irredeemable and unsuspecting torture.

A nod to this lies in one of the test subject’s post-treatment skull deformation as well as Isaiah Bradley’s ultimate fate, but it barely registers in the context of a form wedded to the Hulk and the Leader. Yet even these moments are quickly discarded in favor of action and adventure—there is simply no time for the horror to deepen. The great lie underlying this tenuous reference to human experimentation is that no one has ever become stronger due to a syphilis infection—which is exactly what happens to a handful of test subjects. Not only is the condition potentially lethal in the long term but it has destructive medical and psychological consequences for the families of the afflicted as well as the community at large. To lessen the moral depravity of this historical touchstone in favor of saccharine hope seems almost an abnegation of responsibility.

The reasons for the strange disconnect between purpose and final product are perhaps easy to understand. No doubt editorial dictates and the limits of the Captain America brand came swiftly into play. But there remains the secondary motive of this enterprise. Reviewers have naturally focused on the “worthy” parts of Truth but in so doing they fail to highlight that it is in no small part an attempt to insert the African American experience into the lily white world of Simon and Kirby; an updating of entrenched myths and propaganda resulting in a nostalgic reinterpretation of familiar tropes (confrontation with Hitler anyone?). As such it partakes deeply of the black and white morality of the original comics— its easy virtue and comfortable dispensation of guilt.

truth-6-1

It’s telling that Merrit (drug dealer, arsonist, murderer, and kidnapper), one of the most egregious villains and racists in the entire piece, is also a Nazi sympathizer. The other unrepentant racist of the comic (Colonel Walker Price) is a murderous eugenicists with his hands on the very strings of racial and genetic purity.  Is racism only for villains? Why not rather the very foundations of American society; an edifice so large as to be almost irresistible. There are small hints of this throughout the text of course, but the desire for closure and the sweet apportioning of justice overwhelms a more meaningful and truthful thesis. While there is every reason to believe that racism against African Americans has improved haltingly over the decades, I would be more guarded in my optimism if our attentions are turned to people living in the Middle East and Latin America. In the real world, Captain America wouldn’t be one of the enlightened heroes of the tale, but one of the torturers and perpetrators. Even Steve Darnall and Alex Ross had the temerity to recast Uncle Sam (the superhero) as a paranoid schizophrenic in their own comic recounting America’s woes.

And what of the final fate of these villains? Well, we all know what happend to Hitler and Goebbels. That leaves Merrit who sits scowling in jail presumably imprisoned for life and Price who is threatened with exposure at a stockholder’s meeting by Captain America. And what of real life eugenicists such as Harry H. Laughlin, Charles Davenport, and Harry J. Haiselden—death by natural causes one and all, certainly not the judicially satisfying conclusion of public disgrace. The organizations which funded their work still abound in good health; their followers retiring to the safe havens of rebranding and renaming.

In the final analysis, Truth is still meant to be an uplifting story of tainted patriotism. As social history and activism by the backdoor Truth is commendable but it’s almost as if the authors were afraid to make too much of a fuss. Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years A Slave has no such qualms and is an orgy of violence, despair, and depression—a film which I have no intention of ever watching again. I have no intention of ever reading Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s Truth again but, in this instance, for all the wrong reasons.