Creedence and cool, the prematurity of Greg Tate's death, open questions in "John Wesley Harding," blackface and the return of Jim Crow, and a backstage confrontation
He once wrote that the Beatles were middle class in background and the Rolling Stones working class, which shows you how much he cares about either. Or, as I read, anything else. I made it a point in ‘Lipstick Traces’ never to allow the word postmodern to appear in its pages, even in the bibliography, because I thought it was a shibboleth, a fraudulent concept that didn’t exist, even if that meant leaving out one book that I actually learned from.
I don’t think one dumb mistake negates an entire body of work. Popular music was not his area. The concept certainly became a shibboleth, but so did the spectacle. As he says, he never cared what anyone called these things. He took the term from others. What mattered, he wrote, whatever one thought of the term, was what it was meant to name: a break or rupture around the Reagan/Thatcher era that marked the beginning of a new form of control under capitalism—deregulation, globalization, etc. If you accept such a break—& according to yr writings you do—then you’re in agreement about the concept. And it’s what he does with the concept that counts, as I said. And you know that Clover & Kristin Ross & many others whose work I assume you respect learned as much from him as I did. Are all of us just hoodwinked?
I would have liked to have taken that seminar of yours if I hadn’t been nine at the time (and yet to learn about you). The supposed contradiction in the basic theme of “Standing In The Doorway” with the expressed belief in the same lyric about the grace of “God” being near might be worth a seminar in and of itself.
I’m going to guess that you’re not a fan of Grayley Herren’s book on the album from five years ago or you’d surely have mentioned it in your Real Life Top 10 column.
I grew up with my dad listening only to the Oldies station in the car, so I heard a lot of CCR. I got burned out on it, as I did with most of that stuff. With the passage, I've come back to it, thought, and I love it. CCR, to me, has the same quality that Rodney Crowell attributes "Walk The Line." It's not really of its time, or any particular time. Eschewing the trends of the day, embracing a more minimalist approach, has allowed the music to age gracefully in a way that many of their contemporaries didn't. And Forgerty's descendants are rife throughout much of the music I love, heartland and rooks rock and Americana.
Lots of great questions, answers, comments here, as always. But this edition of Ask Greil is especially good.
I'd like to add:
John Wesley Harding. After writing and recording all those Basement Tapes songs throughout '67, Dylan takes a train down to Nashville to make a new record with all new songs. Does not recycle a single BT song, as The Band would do 6 months later. Hardly anyone had yet heard those Dylan songs and yet the author of them was so creative and one might argue at the height of his powers, he wrote and recorded an entire album of new songs. Incredible.
More Creedence. Although a few SF psychedelic bands dismissed them (anybody can play that they complained. Oh yeah? Why don't you try making a hit single at 2:30 running time instead of meandering jams?) the greats all appreciated CCR.
Dylan in his '69 Rolling Stone interview when asked what the best song of the year was so far, said that rolling on the river one. George Harrison when meeting up with John Fogerty many years later said: The band (Beatles) all loved Creedence. Rolling Stone Brian Jones, by then exiled from the band he helped create, wanted to create another band inspired by the Bayou Country LP out at the time. Of course, Brian wouldn't live to see that happen.
Jim Morrison loved CCR and as Fogerty tells the story in his autobiography, Jim crashed a post gig CCR party in Miami in '69 where the Doors frontman was on trial for his infamous obscenity charge stemming from the Doors show there in March of that year. John tells of a conversation where he lamented that the machines are going to take over music while Jim counters that the human element will always survive in art. John comments on the irony of his outlook being more pessimistic than that of the man who wrote a song about killing his father.
Finally, at a Taj Mahal show in LA in '87, Harrison and Dylan, by then Wilbury brothers, showed up to watch as separately, did Fogerty. They all joined Taj and his band onstage later and each led a few songs with Dylan encouraging John do play Proud Mary because if he didn't play his old songs anymore (and he was touring at the time, but only playing his newer material) people would think PM was a Tina Turner song! So, he played it that night and their jam can be found on YouTube if it's still there.
For the record (but not the film or the original LP) CCR did perform at Woodstock, but they decided not to have their performance featured in the 1970 movie. The Band did likewise and a few others. You can find the CCR set or at least three songs filmed on YouTube now in great quality and marvel at how strong drummer Doug Clifford has to be to keep playing the same beat for however long Keep On Chooglin' keeps on. John and Doug, as well as bassist Stu Cook, survive while Tom Fogerty died over 30 years ago from AIDS and nobody has ever reconciled since the break-up over 50 years ago. John is over 80 now, still performing his CCR show after decades of either never playing or never playing CCR. Doug and Stu were sued by John to stop playing CCR themselves and calling it CCR(evisited). I like most of John's post CCR work, but wish there had been more, which perhaps, there would have been, were he not being sued and countersued by his old nemesis, Fantasy Records and movie mogul, Saul Zaentz. One might ascribe their huge success in '69-70 to John's voice, but where did his ideas and songs come from as their pre-CCR songs, sometimes sung by Tom, are pale imitations of Motown and Animals-like Brit Invasion songs, although not nearly as good. Like a baseball pitcher or a fighter in the ring, John had a couple of peak years that few, if any, could match. He was a contender, was somebody and never became a bum like Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront. But like Brando, he could never quite recapture the magic of his youthful prime (except that Brando had The Godfather, of course).
I was at that show in Berkeley, sitting behind Bonnie Simmons and the rest of the KSAN crew. In memory, we clapped for over half an hour but maybe it just seemed that long. Love reading about it here. Thank you.
Yet, wasn't attitude the lesson Jake Riviera tutored all his assembly line creation acts in mastering? I'll have to go back and see if you, Greil, have done any content analysis on what EC tried so hard to be...Namely, literary which I've figured each time I've tried giving EC a second, third, fourth or fifth chance over the decades since.
Being mostly a folkie and jazz explorer in sound with a load of myth-head that kinda schlepped me around, a "literary" experience is what I most sought when I sat to listen to a whole album straight through (rather than create mix tapes where the larger frames of reference my tastes responded to filled most of my recreational time).
Some kinda Lit experience unique to an artist's sensibilities is what I so often sought out, accepting well executed Theater of the Absurd well timed and delivered spontaneously as in lively stand-up, even from some clearly nearly illiterate rockers and experimentalists I've spent some passing fancies time with and blue collar hard to come by dough that I've spent on those I wanted to spend some time with (mytho-poetically or wittily delivered...) Balms, comfort and keys to the highway is what my yoot-ful seeking after inspiration was filled with.
Tio Mitchito
A neighbor from the far end of Berkeley along the gamier Oakland line back in mid to late 80's, 90's and a bit of the aughts before I got priced out and moved to Concord and working class gigs in Contra Costa County until Wage Stag-Nation made even that beyond my wage-earning abilities....
Well, Jameson was a Marxist, hardly enamored of French theory. If you can’t feel how alive his book Postmodernism remains, I don’t know what to say. No one in the ‘90s thought more carefully about what it meant to live through that historical transition. There are one-sentence insights that other authors would have taken a book to elucidate. It’s easy now that they have been absorbed by reality TV to mock words like “postmodernism,” but he was fully aware of the dangers. Academic writing is neither good nor bad; it’s all about what you shoot with it. He chose the right targets.
I once suggested to Joshua Clover that the best American band was CCR. He didn’t even take the notion seriously enough to argue, he just scoffed. But I remember sitting in a little cafe in Cinque Terre in the ‘90s & “Fortunate Son” came on the speakers. I looked out at the Mediterranean feeling like someone in a Hemingway novel, all from a little song I couldn’t even hear that well with all the chatter around me. (This experience is one reason I don’t trust audiophiles.)
In June 1978, I attended my first concert at the Santa Monica Auditorium, about 3,000 people, where a triple-bill of Mink DeVille, Nick Lowe/Rockpile, and EC played. For some reason, EC got mad about 40 minutes into his show and stormed off the stage. I didn't know any better, so I thought it was fabulous. Little did I know this was evidently part of a pattern in his early years ...
Stevie lived the blues and played with emotion, which is why I loved him. He rekindled the blues and turned me on to them, along with a local guitarist named Paul Black. He paid tribute to those who came before him, especially Albert King, which is why I even know about Albert King. I saw him play half a dozen times, including his second to last night at Alpine Valley, and I thoroughly enjoyed every show. Speaking of Alpine Valley, I saw Elvis Costello there and he was a complete asshole to the crowd. Lou Reed was supposed to be the headliner but he broke his ankle and had to bow out. So the Violent Femmes were called upon to fill the gap and EC became the headliner. The Femmes completely blew EC out of the water (granted they were the home town band), and he was pissed and admonishing the crowd to get into his show, which we refused. If he would have complimented the Femmes we would have been more receptive I believe. We left early.
The title "Everything But the Burden" brings to mind a thought I had watching Django Unchained: One must presume there's a bit a resentment about the way white people get to horn in on the fun stuff Black people do without putting up with any of the shit, but it gets a bit thick when you try to horn in on the revenge. One would think the riposte would be, if you want to get in on the revenge, why don't you just get yourself a stick and start hitting yourself over the head with it?
As a fan of Barry Gifford's poetry and novels, I looked up the Creedence review you referenced--what a piece of crap. If he was RS's best critic, I'm survived the magazine survived. He makes one point--Fogerty's okay, the band stinks--over and over, saying it with three different sets of words but no new thoughts to add. I'd be curious if you were to reread it if you'd agree with my assessment, or if you think I'm giving Gifford the critic a bum rap. Here's a link: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/creedence-clearwater-revival-95106/
I don't like Vaughan, but if "inauthentic" is a fault, so much for the Stones, the Sex Pistols, and a hundred other great bands. Authenticity's a criterion for gatekeepers.
As I wrote in my original comment, people like what they like. But I don't think boring and inauthentic is really the end. It doesn't, for instance, account for the respect he earned from his peers and mentors - B.B. King, Albert King, Johnny Copeland, Albert Collins, and a few white guys too, like Eric Clapton. Are those musicians incapable of distinguishing boring and inauthentic? Since I missed out on his career when he was alive, I don't have a context for all this SRV animosity, but it reminds me of the John vs. Paul wars of the early 70s. Maybe you had to be there.
He once wrote that the Beatles were middle class in background and the Rolling Stones working class, which shows you how much he cares about either. Or, as I read, anything else. I made it a point in ‘Lipstick Traces’ never to allow the word postmodern to appear in its pages, even in the bibliography, because I thought it was a shibboleth, a fraudulent concept that didn’t exist, even if that meant leaving out one book that I actually learned from.
I don’t think one dumb mistake negates an entire body of work. Popular music was not his area. The concept certainly became a shibboleth, but so did the spectacle. As he says, he never cared what anyone called these things. He took the term from others. What mattered, he wrote, whatever one thought of the term, was what it was meant to name: a break or rupture around the Reagan/Thatcher era that marked the beginning of a new form of control under capitalism—deregulation, globalization, etc. If you accept such a break—& according to yr writings you do—then you’re in agreement about the concept. And it’s what he does with the concept that counts, as I said. And you know that Clover & Kristin Ross & many others whose work I assume you respect learned as much from him as I did. Are all of us just hoodwinked?
I would have liked to have taken that seminar of yours if I hadn’t been nine at the time (and yet to learn about you). The supposed contradiction in the basic theme of “Standing In The Doorway” with the expressed belief in the same lyric about the grace of “God” being near might be worth a seminar in and of itself.
I’m going to guess that you’re not a fan of Grayley Herren’s book on the album from five years ago or you’d surely have mentioned it in your Real Life Top 10 column.
I grew up with my dad listening only to the Oldies station in the car, so I heard a lot of CCR. I got burned out on it, as I did with most of that stuff. With the passage, I've come back to it, thought, and I love it. CCR, to me, has the same quality that Rodney Crowell attributes "Walk The Line." It's not really of its time, or any particular time. Eschewing the trends of the day, embracing a more minimalist approach, has allowed the music to age gracefully in a way that many of their contemporaries didn't. And Forgerty's descendants are rife throughout much of the music I love, heartland and rooks rock and Americana.
Lots of great questions, answers, comments here, as always. But this edition of Ask Greil is especially good.
I'd like to add:
John Wesley Harding. After writing and recording all those Basement Tapes songs throughout '67, Dylan takes a train down to Nashville to make a new record with all new songs. Does not recycle a single BT song, as The Band would do 6 months later. Hardly anyone had yet heard those Dylan songs and yet the author of them was so creative and one might argue at the height of his powers, he wrote and recorded an entire album of new songs. Incredible.
More Creedence. Although a few SF psychedelic bands dismissed them (anybody can play that they complained. Oh yeah? Why don't you try making a hit single at 2:30 running time instead of meandering jams?) the greats all appreciated CCR.
Dylan in his '69 Rolling Stone interview when asked what the best song of the year was so far, said that rolling on the river one. George Harrison when meeting up with John Fogerty many years later said: The band (Beatles) all loved Creedence. Rolling Stone Brian Jones, by then exiled from the band he helped create, wanted to create another band inspired by the Bayou Country LP out at the time. Of course, Brian wouldn't live to see that happen.
Jim Morrison loved CCR and as Fogerty tells the story in his autobiography, Jim crashed a post gig CCR party in Miami in '69 where the Doors frontman was on trial for his infamous obscenity charge stemming from the Doors show there in March of that year. John tells of a conversation where he lamented that the machines are going to take over music while Jim counters that the human element will always survive in art. John comments on the irony of his outlook being more pessimistic than that of the man who wrote a song about killing his father.
Finally, at a Taj Mahal show in LA in '87, Harrison and Dylan, by then Wilbury brothers, showed up to watch as separately, did Fogerty. They all joined Taj and his band onstage later and each led a few songs with Dylan encouraging John do play Proud Mary because if he didn't play his old songs anymore (and he was touring at the time, but only playing his newer material) people would think PM was a Tina Turner song! So, he played it that night and their jam can be found on YouTube if it's still there.
For the record (but not the film or the original LP) CCR did perform at Woodstock, but they decided not to have their performance featured in the 1970 movie. The Band did likewise and a few others. You can find the CCR set or at least three songs filmed on YouTube now in great quality and marvel at how strong drummer Doug Clifford has to be to keep playing the same beat for however long Keep On Chooglin' keeps on. John and Doug, as well as bassist Stu Cook, survive while Tom Fogerty died over 30 years ago from AIDS and nobody has ever reconciled since the break-up over 50 years ago. John is over 80 now, still performing his CCR show after decades of either never playing or never playing CCR. Doug and Stu were sued by John to stop playing CCR themselves and calling it CCR(evisited). I like most of John's post CCR work, but wish there had been more, which perhaps, there would have been, were he not being sued and countersued by his old nemesis, Fantasy Records and movie mogul, Saul Zaentz. One might ascribe their huge success in '69-70 to John's voice, but where did his ideas and songs come from as their pre-CCR songs, sometimes sung by Tom, are pale imitations of Motown and Animals-like Brit Invasion songs, although not nearly as good. Like a baseball pitcher or a fighter in the ring, John had a couple of peak years that few, if any, could match. He was a contender, was somebody and never became a bum like Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront. But like Brando, he could never quite recapture the magic of his youthful prime (except that Brando had The Godfather, of course).
I was at that show in Berkeley, sitting behind Bonnie Simmons and the rest of the KSAN crew. In memory, we clapped for over half an hour but maybe it just seemed that long. Love reading about it here. Thank you.
You/we clapped and clapped because we thought/hoped he’d come back and play an encore—or really the second half of the show.
Yes, exactly.
Yet, wasn't attitude the lesson Jake Riviera tutored all his assembly line creation acts in mastering? I'll have to go back and see if you, Greil, have done any content analysis on what EC tried so hard to be...Namely, literary which I've figured each time I've tried giving EC a second, third, fourth or fifth chance over the decades since.
Being mostly a folkie and jazz explorer in sound with a load of myth-head that kinda schlepped me around, a "literary" experience is what I most sought when I sat to listen to a whole album straight through (rather than create mix tapes where the larger frames of reference my tastes responded to filled most of my recreational time).
Some kinda Lit experience unique to an artist's sensibilities is what I so often sought out, accepting well executed Theater of the Absurd well timed and delivered spontaneously as in lively stand-up, even from some clearly nearly illiterate rockers and experimentalists I've spent some passing fancies time with and blue collar hard to come by dough that I've spent on those I wanted to spend some time with (mytho-poetically or wittily delivered...) Balms, comfort and keys to the highway is what my yoot-ful seeking after inspiration was filled with.
Tio Mitchito
A neighbor from the far end of Berkeley along the gamier Oakland line back in mid to late 80's, 90's and a bit of the aughts before I got priced out and moved to Concord and working class gigs in Contra Costa County until Wage Stag-Nation made even that beyond my wage-earning abilities....
Keep on doing!
TM
Mitch Ritter
Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, Psalmsong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of A-tone-ment seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee\Hearsay
When an editor or agent says something won't work or won't sell it's almost a guarantee that they will find a way to make it work--with someone else.
Nice to see Barry Gifford mentioned in a musical context!
Well, Jameson was a Marxist, hardly enamored of French theory. If you can’t feel how alive his book Postmodernism remains, I don’t know what to say. No one in the ‘90s thought more carefully about what it meant to live through that historical transition. There are one-sentence insights that other authors would have taken a book to elucidate. It’s easy now that they have been absorbed by reality TV to mock words like “postmodernism,” but he was fully aware of the dangers. Academic writing is neither good nor bad; it’s all about what you shoot with it. He chose the right targets.
I once suggested to Joshua Clover that the best American band was CCR. He didn’t even take the notion seriously enough to argue, he just scoffed. But I remember sitting in a little cafe in Cinque Terre in the ‘90s & “Fortunate Son” came on the speakers. I looked out at the Mediterranean feeling like someone in a Hemingway novel, all from a little song I couldn’t even hear that well with all the chatter around me. (This experience is one reason I don’t trust audiophiles.)
In June 1978, I attended my first concert at the Santa Monica Auditorium, about 3,000 people, where a triple-bill of Mink DeVille, Nick Lowe/Rockpile, and EC played. For some reason, EC got mad about 40 minutes into his show and stormed off the stage. I didn't know any better, so I thought it was fabulous. Little did I know this was evidently part of a pattern in his early years ...
Stevie lived the blues and played with emotion, which is why I loved him. He rekindled the blues and turned me on to them, along with a local guitarist named Paul Black. He paid tribute to those who came before him, especially Albert King, which is why I even know about Albert King. I saw him play half a dozen times, including his second to last night at Alpine Valley, and I thoroughly enjoyed every show. Speaking of Alpine Valley, I saw Elvis Costello there and he was a complete asshole to the crowd. Lou Reed was supposed to be the headliner but he broke his ankle and had to bow out. So the Violent Femmes were called upon to fill the gap and EC became the headliner. The Femmes completely blew EC out of the water (granted they were the home town band), and he was pissed and admonishing the crowd to get into his show, which we refused. If he would have complimented the Femmes we would have been more receptive I believe. We left early.
Stevie Ray lifted this off the ground — for me, it’s more than enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KWofpGTZ70
The title "Everything But the Burden" brings to mind a thought I had watching Django Unchained: One must presume there's a bit a resentment about the way white people get to horn in on the fun stuff Black people do without putting up with any of the shit, but it gets a bit thick when you try to horn in on the revenge. One would think the riposte would be, if you want to get in on the revenge, why don't you just get yourself a stick and start hitting yourself over the head with it?
As a fan of Barry Gifford's poetry and novels, I looked up the Creedence review you referenced--what a piece of crap. If he was RS's best critic, I'm survived the magazine survived. He makes one point--Fogerty's okay, the band stinks--over and over, saying it with three different sets of words but no new thoughts to add. I'd be curious if you were to reread it if you'd agree with my assessment, or if you think I'm giving Gifford the critic a bum rap. Here's a link: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/creedence-clearwater-revival-95106/
It was a only much later that John played all the instruments. Creedence was a band. And they had SNAP.
WRT to Stevie Ray Vaughan, I can summarize his music in a few words. Boring and Inauthentic. The end.
I don't like Vaughan, but if "inauthentic" is a fault, so much for the Stones, the Sex Pistols, and a hundred other great bands. Authenticity's a criterion for gatekeepers.
As I wrote in my original comment, people like what they like. But I don't think boring and inauthentic is really the end. It doesn't, for instance, account for the respect he earned from his peers and mentors - B.B. King, Albert King, Johnny Copeland, Albert Collins, and a few white guys too, like Eric Clapton. Are those musicians incapable of distinguishing boring and inauthentic? Since I missed out on his career when he was alive, I don't have a context for all this SRV animosity, but it reminds me of the John vs. Paul wars of the early 70s. Maybe you had to be there.