The Soundtrack of My Teens–Hearing Neil Young Live in 1969

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This is really exciting news. On June 6, to promote his forthcoming memoir Waging Heavy Peace, Neil Young will speak at BEA, the annual book industry convention. I’ve been attending BEA most years since I got started in the book biz in 1978, back when it was still called ABA, and have usually taken a pass on the guest speakers, but not this year. I am very eager to be there for Neil’s appearance and I’m sure lots of other book people will be there too. His publisher, the Blue Rider imprint of Penguin Putnam has put out this release along with the news, explaining that he will be interviewed by someone to be named later. [May 24 update: It’s been announced that Neil’s interlocutor will be Patti Smith.] Speaking of interviews, Jian Gomeshi of CBC Radio One’s “Q” program conducted a great interview last year with Neil, and Daniel Lanois, producer of Neil’s 2011 album “Le Noise.”

I’ve admired Neil since I was fourteen when I saw him perform in Cleveland. I went with my older brother Joel–with whom I would later operate our Cleveland bookstore Undercover Books–and despite my being way under-age, Joel, who would have just turned eighteen, somehow got me past the front door with him. Confirming my memories, Jimmy McDonough’s indispensable book Shakey describes the venue as “a tiny basement coffeehouse,” though I recall it also served liquor. I recall Neil played two consecutive nights, and we even went back for night #2. This was soon after Buffalo Springfield had split up around when his first solo album was released, and before Neil released “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere,” the first album with Crazy Horse.

Neil played solo acoustic sets both nights, but he also had a backing band that opened on its own and later played with him, a tight and country-tinged outfit called Natchez Trace, about whom I’ve found a faint trace online. From that source, a Buffalo Springfield fan site, I see that the shows were on Saturday, May 31 and Sunday, June 1. I recall that the club was not crowded either night. At some point during the two nights, Joel and I availed ourselves of the opportunity to go up and say hello to him. I extended a hand and shared a shake with Neil, then so young, and a bit shy in fringed buckskins and extremely thin, as he was not many years past the polio that had defined his early years, also chronicled in Shakey. When I hear Neil speak on June 6, I’ll be remembering those La Cave gigs and the early days of Neil’s career.

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#FridayReads, March 23–“Diary of a Company Man” & “Wayward Saints”

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#FridayReads–DIARY OF A COMPANY MAN: Losing a Job, Finding a Life by James S. Kunen, whose Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary was a key 1960s text. After he was laid off from his corporate job in February 2008, Kunen describes himself as too young to retire, too old to hire. I’m still reading that first section of the book, over the weekend I’ll read how he weathers the storm of disemployment and comes out somewhere on the other side. Having experienced my own layoff, Kunen’s is a pitch-perfect rendering of the experience.

Also reading and loving Wayward Saints, a tragi-comic tale of rock ‘n roll, family, and second chances in life, by Suzzy Roche, of the singing Roches.

Update: I’ve now finished both these books, and loved them both, among the very best I’ve read thus far in 2012.

The Kunen book was really excellent on finding a new way through (mid-)life. Enduring my own layoff and disemployment, it was really inspiring to see Kunen, who’d worked in corporate PR at TIME, Inc. before he got dumped by the corporation, discovers a new meaning teaching English to immigrants. It’s titled Diary of a Company Man, and I kept thinking of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for a Common Man,” only it’s not etched in musical notes, but prose.

I’ve also now finished Suzzy Roche’s novel and found it to be an infectiously readable treat. I really loved it. It’s filled with wonderful characters spanning the generations and memorable situations. While Roche undoubtedly drew on her years as a traveling musician to flesh out the story, it doesn’t read as if it’s merely a novel about rock ‘n roll written by a musician; it’s a truly satisfying novel by a real writer, clearly not something that was just tossed off. Among the most striking features of it was the relationship between the musician protagonist, Mary Saint, and her mother Jean, from whom she’s long been separated. They learn how to forgive each other for past injuries. The second was the friendship between Mary Saint and her  roommate Thaddeus, who becomes her confidant and motivator, able to push her to see what she’s still capable of doing.

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D.C. Launch Party for Peter Beinart’s “The Crisis of Zionism”

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First version of this post was written after I’d eagerly RSVP’d to the New American Foundation that I’d be attending the launch party next Monday for Peter Beinart’s brave new book The Crisis of Zionism. I’ve been to several recent events at their NYC loft, and was glad I’d be able to make this one too. Turns out, however, the reception will actually be at the NAF offices in D.C. Still, with Peter under assault for reasonable and progressive positions he’s taken that are correctly critical of the American-Jewish establishment and Israeli policy, in the book, in a NY Times Op-Ed, and on his new blog Zion Square, I’m going to keep this post up, to accompany two others I’ve written recently, Netanyahu & the Right Wing vs. President Obama and Iran and Iraq–Deja Vu All Over Again? and send it out via social media as I would for any other post. With Israel perhaps on the verge of an ill-considered attack on Iran, the times are just too charged with peril to do anything less.

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My Love of Live Music in NYC–It All Began w/The Drongos in 1983

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Now well past my twenty-fifth year of living in New York City, I’m still a fan of going out to hear live music in Gotham. Last week, for instance, I attended two great shows, blogging about them here and here. Tonight, finding the video I’m coupling with this post I was reminded that I was keen on hearing live music here even before I thought about moving to the metropolis.

In 1983, then living in Cleveland and running Undercover Books and Records with my sister Pamela and brother Joel and our parents Earl and Sylvia, Joel and I drove to NYC one summer weekend for a record release party. The band with the new album was The Drongos, an ebullient New Zealand quartet. We were already fans of the outfit, and making it even better was that they were managed by book biz friends Mike Shatzkin and Martha Moran. Their debut album was feted, I think, somewhere around Irving Place, though I could be mistaken about the location. I do remember it was a great night, because the album was not only on hand to be celebrated, but of course the band too. The friendly foursome–Jean McAllister, guitar and keyboards; Stanley John Mitchell, drums; Richard Kennedy, guitar; and Tony McMaster, bass–wrote their own songs and played several of the ten tunes from their self-titled LP during the evening. Looking at the album sleeve today, I recall such great songs as “Eye of the Hurricane” and “Life of Crime.” “Non Citizen,” written by Mitchell, typified the uneasy world of a visitor living in a country’s shadows:

Living life as a non-citizen
Living under the table, keep your profile low.
Leaving friends landed in another time,
Came looking hoping to find the stages set.

Stony faces sleeping in the subway
And in the nights hiding in the clubs, they let it show.
Swim or sink, winning or losing,
No one said the city had to play a good clean game,
I say:
 Deep down, where we live
 Life seems so absurd
 But we keep on making the best of the western world.

Today those lyrics read like an 80s rock ‘n roll version of Tom McCarthy’s splendid 2008 movie “The Visitor.” Even while singing sensitive lyrics like those, The Drongos were a damn fine rock band, superbly professional musicians, entertaining, and tons of fun to hear live.

That whole trip with my brother, and that summer night in particular, was a great time. I remember it all fondly, not least because Joel died suddenly in 2008. Soon after moving to NYC in ’85 I looked up Jean McAlister and Tony McMaster, who were married and by then had a young daughter, Carmen. I remember a golden day I shared with them and baby Carmen in Riverside Park. As is wont to happen with so many bands, circumstances spun them out of their collective orbit, which doesn’t diminish the great band they were for a good stretch of time.

I was reminded of all this tonight when I saw that Richard Kennedy is still playing music, living in the UK–has a terrific new video on Facebook of him playing guitar, pasted in above. H/t to Ira Nonkin who posted it on Facebook, and to Martha Moran, who brought it to my attention. So glad I still have my LP, so I could shoot the sleeve for this blog essay. The original album pictures were shot by photographer Leslie Fratkin, another old friend of Mike and Martha. For his part, Mike has also blogged about working with The Drongos. // more …. [Click ‘Continue Reading’ to see detail of album photo]

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Comic NY Symposium March 24-25

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I’m really looking forward to attending the upcoming two-day program at Columbia this weekend, Comic NY, which I’ll be covering for Calvin Reid, editor of PW Comics World from Publishers Weekly. This will be a sort of reprise of the PEN World Voices Comics event, “Getting Real with Super Heroes” that I also covered for PW Comics World last year. If you love comics, or New York, and you’re around Saturday or Sunday, I suggest you drop by the Low Library for this free event (though seating is limited). Worth noting this event is being “held in association with” Will Eisner Week, in memory of the great comic artist. If you don’t live in NYC, or won’t be around this weekend, watch this online space where I’ll cross-post my Comics World contributions. The Twitter hashtag will be #ComicNY. Meantime, I hope you enjoy the brief video from the program planners.

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A Book Talk about Jim Tully

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I was delighted a few weeks ago when Paul Bauer and Mark Dawidziak, authors of Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, and Hollywood Brawler, my favorite biography of 2011, came to NYU to speak about their book at NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House. I’d been in touch with Paul and Mark last November after I blogged about the book in a piece called Lost American Writer Found–Jim Tully and so was excited to attend their talk and meet them in person, especially because my artist wife Kyle Gallup and our actor and writer son Ewan, would be coming with me.

Paul and Mark gave a great talk, using photographs and film clips to anatomize the story of Tully’s life. Their book chronicles the life of the hobo writer-turned Hollywood insider who minted the hardboiled style of prose that would become even better known later on in the books of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Dashiell Hammett. The pictures accompanying this post should give you some flavor of their talk. It was a treat meeting them afterward, and the next day, having Paul over to our apartment for tea and rugelach. He’s been a second-hand book dealer for many years and so it was great to not only talk about Tully, whose early book Circus Parade I’d been reading, but also to show Paul volumes from our library.

Last November I wrote this about their book, which I stand by today as my summing up of the authors’ visit to New York City.

“Biographers Bauer and Dawidziak steep the reader in Tully’s lifelong struggle to make himself into a significant person; glimpsing his continual act of self-creation is what I found thrilling about this book. The authors chronicle how even in relatively prosperous years, he continued striving to create himself and forge his work. . . . What’s great about the Tully bio–and other books like it that achieve this deep level of discourse with their subject’s life–is that the reader has a chance to assemble, in ways the biographer shows one how to do, how a literary career is lived and aspired toward, and achieved. The successful biography spans the decades and folds of a life, making the living subject comprehensible and one whom we understand. That’s what happened for me with Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler, and why this book will be on my best list for 2011.”

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Bonding with Shotgun Jimmie & John K. Samson at the Bowery Ballroom

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I love one-man bands, those musical artists who can stomp, holler, and play licks while animating a whole set entirely on their own. Soloists like this captivate an audience with talent, musicianship, and personality. Last Thursday night’s show at the Bowery Ballroom offered ample pleasures like these, with the fresh and funny Shotgun Jimmie opening for master singer-songwriter John K. Samson in a show for the ages. Jimmie was charming, talented, playing kick drum with his foot, ripping on his Fender electric, and singing his quirky songs of striving and nerdy romanticism, maintaining despite all disappointments a cockeyed optimism. Even the title of Jimmie’s latest album suggests wit and wordplay: “Transistor Sister.” Here are some lines from the opening track “Late Last Year.”

Oh my darlin’ the legs under this table/are independently bumpin’ in to mine/They’re on a mission dispatched to disable/My defenses and they’re working just, fine

Like the Canadian rockers Library Voices, John K. Samson’s lyrics exude a literary quality, filled as they are with learned allusions to explorers, the classical world, and existential reality. He’s co-founder of a publishing collective in Winnipeg called Arbeiter Ring Publishing, a sort of Workmen’s Circle for books, which recently brought his Lyrics & Poems 1997-2012. As a book professional myself, I am intrigued with this rocker who also has a big footprint in the book and publishing camp. I see that Vancouver writer Steven Galloway, whose novel Ascension I published in 2002, has articulated what’s special about Samson’s work:  “John K. Samson is one of Canada’s finest living writers. He creates a world with a phrase, devastates with a word and restores hope with an image. Many novels do not contain as much humanity and emotional resonance as one of Samson’s lines. As a writer I am torn between admiration and jealousy; as a reader I am enthralled.” // more w/photos . . .

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Stomping Feet in NYC with The Pack A.D. & Elliott Brood

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Last Wednesday night I had the privilege of hearing two great Canadian bands on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, enjoying their back-to-back sets enormously. First up was The Pack A.D., a female duo from Vancouver who play hard-charging drums + guitar raw punk style. Guitarist Becky Black is angular and lanky, kind of a girl version of The Sadies’ Dallas Good, while lead singer Maya Miller drums fiercely and handles show banter with alacrity. With signature songs like “Sirens,” “All Damn Day Long,” “Making Gestures,” and “Haunt You” (with a great arcing chorus vocalized against a pounding drum beat, Black sings, “I died/I died/I died/I’ll haunt you,” stretching out the “I’ll” till it’s more wail than words. Their wall of sound made a helluva sonic impression on me and since then I’ve been loving their recent album, “Unpersons,” which I bought at the merch table. I was joined there picking out a CD by my CBC Radio 3 show buddy Steve Conte, a comics artist and comics dealer from New Jersey.

Next up in Pianos’ tight little music room on Ludlow Street were the Ontario trio called Elliott Brood, whose gritty sound feels as if it’s been imported from the early days of sound recording. More raw than roots, it’s a sonic stew of acoustic guitar, banjo, reverb-ed Fender Stratocaster, harmonica, and thumping drums. Mark Sasso, standing stage right, handles the acoustic, banjo, and mouth harp, while the electric’s in the hands of Casey Laforet, seated at the other side, and in the middle is drummer Steve Pitkin, who also has a small keyboard to the side of his drum kit. Mark and Casey traded off singing lead, also swapping high and throaty harmonies on many tunes. Mark and Casey are bearded, hatted, and vested, reminiscent in appearance of Band members from their prime, Rick Danko and Levon Helm. Their set list was composed of songs from across all the Elliott Brood  albums, including the latest, “Days into Years.” The analogy to The Band isn’t purely visual, as like those original greats from the North Country, Elliott Brood seems to have composed their songs by channeling roots from the last century, or maybe the century before that. For the current album, they borrow the motif for its ten songs from the conceit that a young man in our era has found letters of a WWI doughboy who’d written home about the terrors of the trenches. The signature song for this strand on the record is “If I Get Old,” a verse of which has these lines:

And when we got here we were young men/What we’ve done has made us old/Left to die out in these frozen fields/So far away from home/And if I live to see the end I’m going to make a brand new start/But I’ll never be the same again without my youthful heart. // more . . .

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