RIP Michael Jackson

By Robbie on July 1, 2009

A few hours after I heard the surprising news, Linda Ray at No Depression asked me for a few sentences about Michael.  It's a little darker than I might have written a day or two later:

"Michael Jackson hugged the peak for what constituted, in pop-culture-years, an eon: about 1970 to 1990. For all that time he was on his best game, and for more than a little of it (the Quincy Jones years) he was sprinting out at a safe, superior distance from all competitors. On those terms -- maintenance of superabundant talent and visionary innovation -- he compares to the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Sinatra...and hardly anyone else in popular music, actually.

That child abuse (perpetrated on and by him), self-mutilation, psychotic narcissism, and God knows what other grotesqueries should have so thoroughly interpenetrated this American success story is a dismal reflection on a number of things. Celebrity-besotted America, naturally. The satraps and sleazy ten-percenters who abetted in sealing off any exit doors from the singer's delusional happyland. And -- not to be too grandiose -- even our democratic ideals are tarnished by Mr. Jackson's untimely death: any poor kid in America can grow up to be president, or, if he's abysmally unlucky, multimillionaire superstar.

You can listen to his sweet, sincere, hair-raising treatment of "I'll Be There," or any of four dozen others from the early 1970s, and be moved again and again by the spectacular natural force of his voice. Moved enough to forget, if you like, that a lot of these performances were, whether in a vaguely internalized or a sickeningly specific sense, coerced."

In a more personal vein, I got hooked on the J5's "Third Album" when I was seven. During the summers we took in a "fresh-air" kid from New York City, a black kid called Cliff who quickly became a good friend and an air-guitar-playing, bed-jumping, J5 co-idolator. A debate that then raged among us kids in the early 1970s was: Osmonds or Jacksons? Of all the dumb positions I've taken since, I'm glad to say that I never even regarded this as a serious choice.

In 1999, Peter McDowell at the Chicago Cultural Center had me put together a performance in honor of Michael's birthday. That was the beginning of my long "tribute CD" odyssey, and it got me to thinking a little about him, because I hadn't, much. I hadn't theretofore bought his records, or learned any of his songs to perform, or considered myself a fan beyond the J5. Yet I found that I knew lots of his songs just from constant ambient reiteration, and, when I listened to them more purposefully, found them exquisitely assembled and compelling in some hard-to-define way. In other words, I discovered the basic and obvious qualities that had long ago endeared this music to everyone else around the world. At that time it occurred to me that Michael was my generation's Elvis. He was our common musical denominator, originator of the template, pointer of the path, the central guy that we all grew up with and of whom nobody could live in ignorance. In fact the only reason I wouldn't overplay the comparison is that I think he was better than Elvis artistically. Better dancer, better singer, better song guy; and he stayed better at it all longer (even outliving him, a little). Let the squabbling begin...

As a postscript I'll pass on a couple interesting remarks some friends made. Jenny Scheinman noticed that the Quincy-Michael records were audacious and unusual conceptions, that balanced a dark and rather creepy persona with just the faintest note of levity that made them fascinating and hard to resist. Yet Robbie Gjersoe resisted with little effort. Where I find the Quincy music still to sound like it was recorded just the other day, he thinks it sounds like it was recorded in just the year it was. And he adds that for robot-y donk-donk weirdo dance music, he much prefers Talking Heads. Last, Terry Anderson noted on his blog that Michael's popularity confirms that Songs Matter -- hooks and clarity and phonology and all that -- a good point and a cheering one to stress on this still-dark occasion.

(And one more postscript -- thanks to all who came to my shows this weekend!)

attn: east coast!

By Robbie on June 24, 2009

I have three dates coming up this weekend. At the risk of overshadowing the tour page, they are:

Friday June 26 - Club Passim, Cambridge MA, 8PM

Saturday June 27 - Iron Horse, Northampton MA, 7:30P

Monday June 29 - Mercury Lounge, NYC, 7P

The Northampton show changed at some point from a headlining set to a fundraiser for Steve Ferguson, the original NRBQ guitarist, with me doing an opening set. Bad news for the four area people who wanted to come see me play for a cheap cover, but good news for the thousands of comfortably-off New Englanders who appreciate the amazing legacy of that band and would like to help an ailing guitar god meet his medical bills.

On all these dates I'll be toting 160 extra pounds of baggage known as Robbie Gjersoe. Robbie and I have what I immodestly think is one of the best duo shows in country music. We sing and flatpick so naturally with each other after all these years, it's almost like we're married. I would marry him, too, if he had just a little more pizzazz in the sack!

Please come out and see us play...buy me a beer...say something inadvertently insulting.

ha-ha not-funny

By Robbie on June 22, 2009

On Friday I went with some friends to a comedy club in Manhattan's meatpacking district to see the ever-brilliant Maria Bamford. On the bill was a second, male comedian, and off it, but stealthily piggybacked on, were two others, a Korean lady and a middle-aged man from Queens. All three illustrated in their own styles why Miss Bamford, to her credit but maybe not overall liquidity, exists in a realm above stand-up as a form and a circuit. Here are some things she didn't do: perform a blow-job on the microphone; berate the audience for not laughing at her; indulge in faux-improvised, Carson-like "saves" on failed jokes and botched deliveries; tell jokes; solicit applause for the wait staff; laugh at herself; exploit any particularities of her body to brand herself, or pre-empt anyone's crude impression of her by insulting her sex or race or weight or ethnicity; swear (much); yell; riff on things we've all noticed in our everyday lives. Her success lies partly in not showing strong interest in the observers out in the room.

If you've heard my records you don't need the disclaimer, but: I like coarse jokes plenty. And laugh at enough run-of-the-mill stand-up (including the Korean lady's blow-job joke). And understand the usefulness of and need for some professional standardization even in an art that affects to be spontaneous and scabrous. But how about a little creativity along with it? In the acoustic country galaxy with which I'm familiar, a few giant stars like Earl Scruggs and Tony Rice have distorted the gravitational field, pulling in swarms of less-imaginative artists with their massive stylistic inventions. From what I can see of stand-up, a few bold old-timers, like Lenny Bruce and Bill Cosby, have done the same. 

The setting in which the careerist cut-ups have to perform has its own difficulties. The merciless hawking of watered-down drinks. The dumpy set with brick wall, stool, straight mikestand, funny-font club logo. The grim office-party dullards pressed tightly into rows of sticky black tables. The manic succession of act after act after act. I observed to my friend Bryn that my instinctive response to each new person popping out from the curtain to prod my funnybone was an ice-cold, gritted-teeth revulsion. "Yes," he said, "each one has afresh to turn the giant battleship around." Though I've never worked in comedy, it looks to me even tougher and more crowded with miserable humans than music, and Bryn's metaphor, with its odor of war and Sisyphean effort, strikes me as dead-on.

To close on a more upbeat note, I saw the Roundabout Theater's production of "Waiting for Godot" two days later, and thought it was terrific -- inspiring, hilarious, and full of heart. It's tricky enough to manage a piece of music or theater with an element or two of excellence, much less this, with its pretty evenly fine cast, set, costumes, and script. A good script is like combustible material and performers the sparks. My kids and I were talking about what Samuel Beckett was getting at for a long time afterward, and if anyone from the show happens to read this -- thanks!

messages from moscow

By Robbie on June 17, 2009

Have you seen the movie Andrei Rublev? I watched it over the course of several nights last week; if you care to check out this 220-minute meditation on God, nature, the urge to create, and the problems of existence, I recommend you set aside a week, too.

Andrei Rublev must be the most artistic movie I've seen. Artistic in almost every implication you can imagine: slow, searing, thoughtful, indulgent, mind-blowingly gorgeous, determinedly engaged with the plight of humanity, indifferent to a mass audience, and, in every frame, the work of a single, unyielding, mad mind. Think of the lush black-and-white compositions of Antonioni, and add in the crazy-complex camera maneuvering of Orson Welles as well as the half-a-Screen-Actors-Guild-directory's worth of extras of a Cecil B. DeMille picture. And animals. And here's the really crazy part -- all three-and-a-half hours of this big-bucks, mystico-monastic musing comes from the 1960s Soviet Union, at the end of Krushchev and into the beginning of Brezhnev. The latter is said to have walked out of a screening midway in disgust. The film was censored, butchered, and withheld from Western eyes for some years.

The 15th-century monk and icon painter who is the film's namesake is called to Moscow by the elderly Theophanes the Greek to decorate the Cathedral of the Annunciation. In his travels he meets a jester and some witches, and is roped to a cross. Trying to paint, he undergoes a crisis of faith. Later, in Vladimir, which is being fiercely contested by two sibling grand princes and a Tatar army, he kills a man in the process of saving an idiot girl from being raped. His crisis deepens into a vow of silence, which Rublev lifts at the end after observing an act of blind faith with a happy conclusion: a teenage boy, all conviction and no experience, leading a group of workers in building a bell. 

The plot is of course not exactly the point, though you can tell from it whether this is your kind of Friday-night fun. Also of minor import are the occasional anti-totalitarian resonances, sensible to crudely hypersensitive viewers like Mr. Brezhnev, evidently, in the occasional political figure behaving absurdly or the intense suffering of the Christian principals. This movie has bigger and more elusive fish to fry than this regime or that. It uniquely provides us with the flavor of life in the 1400s -- the dullness, for one thing, an oppressive dullness relieved only by flashes of sickening violence, the moron prattlings of pandering entertainers, the majesty of a natural landscape, a pretty picture or song, and the perpetually discontented mind of mankind. Speaking of bells, does that ring one? Though we can all get to Moscow much quicker than these monks could, we are evolutionarily in the same stuck condition as the bewildered people in Andrei Rublev.

Having acknowledged its overarching humanism, though, I think it's legitimate enough to consider this film as assigned sociological viewing; you need to watch it as you need to watch Triumph of the Will. More, it's necessary to watch, I'd say, as a sheer human accomplishment, that of an unstoppable visual creator and philosopher, Tarkovsky, who was able to rise above the privations of his time and place, and to triumph over very heavy odds -- those same privations and anti-artistic social restrictions, more or less, under which Leni Reifenstahl and many others caved.

I am counting Sergei Eisenstein among these "many others" after having had a brief, alarmed look at Alexander Nevsky. This unintendedly creepy document from the wonderful Soviet Union of 1938 dramatizes the heroism of the Grand Prince of Novgorod, who in the 13th century crushed the invading Livonian Knights (from what we would now call Germany, get it?) and compromised cannily with the Mongol Horde, militarily on the decline at the time. Eisenstein must have had the same idea of taking refuge in a distant century to save his work from prying paws. But this is a piece of work infected with the hysterical need to save itself. The dazzlingly lit hero intones dumb, bloodthirsty cliches. The Teutons (wearing black buckets upside on their heads and carrying flimsy spears) and their Russian sympathizers and embeds glare and glower as in bad community theater. "Rus! Rus!" yell throngs of staunch, simple villagers. Behind them, a warped and damaged recording of an original score by Prokofiev melancholically rumbles. I don't see what, other than an out-of-control multiculturalism, might lead people to rank this leaden hunk of demented, jingoistic hackery alongside other films of the time -- 1938 alone was the year of "Bringing Up Baby" and "Pygmalion." It's not that I don't feel any compassion for artists under duress; but the sad message of Alexander Nevsky is that the creative urge is sometimes better stifled than shoehorned.

how to be miserable as a professional musician: a ten-step guide

By Robbie on June 14, 2009

1.     Regard your skill set with self-satisfaction -- as rounded, complete, and impeccable.

2.     Imagine that your tiny corner of the world of music is the world of music.

3. Treat the grubby commercial aspects of the profession -- poring over contracts, comparing the fine points of different distribution platforms, self-promotion -- as the province of "the suits."

4. Treat the grubby menial/muscle aspects of the profession -- driving and repairing vans, hauling gear, arguing with promoters, delivering grinning Gene-Kelly-like performances under punishing or humiliating conditions -- as the province of someone else, someone less creative and fragile than yourself.

5. Forget that anyone before you who tried to make a living in the fine arts faced any difficulties.  Or that that anyone around you working in more profitable professions (lawyers, engineers, postal workers) ever made any sacrifices.

6. Imagine that the well-known saying "No matter what line of work you're in, you're always a salesman and a bill collector" (thanks to my friend Jordan for teaching me this well-known saying) is suspended for musicians.

7. Imagine that the usual consequences of exploitative sex -- social ostracism if you use it to advance your career, chlamydia if you use it as a giveaway for fans -- are suspended for social-norm-smashing and hormonally-overburdened musicians.  In fact, go ahead and sleep with anyone.

8.  Resent people with no discernible skill and much discernible money.

9. Take no time to reflect on who you are, what you do well, and how best to present this to strangers -- just do whatever comes to you, which is by definition art, seeing as you are an artist and all.

10. Never forget that all your failures are the doings of a conspiracy of soulless profiteers and knaves, while all of your successes were owed you.