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721

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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C-Span’s Brian Lamb–Good for TV, Good for the USA, Good for Books

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I read with interest last night the news that C-Span founder Brian Lamb’s decided to step aside as active CEO of the network, leaving the leadership to a two-person combo, Susan Swain and Rob Kennedy. I’ve worked with Brian and Susan and I’m very happy for them both–for Brian, who can step back a bit after close to three decades in day-to-day leadership of the innovative network, and for Susan, who like Brian has always been a pleasant presence on-screen and great to deal with on any matters relating to their prodigious coverage of nonfiction books. In fact, if publishers and authors have not given C-Span an award for its coverage of current affairs and issues books, it’s hight time we as an industry did so.

I got to know Brian, and Susan, when as an editor with Times Books of Random House I edited a book with him in 1998-99. It was Booknotes–Life Stories: Notable Biographers on the People Who Shaped America, drawn from Brian’s on-air conversations with the more than 500 biographers he’d interviewed on “Booknotes,” the program that preceded his current showcase, “Q&A.” Imagine a book filled with the insights of Robert Caro (on LBJ), Ron Chernow (on John D. Rockefeller), and Blanche Wiesen Cook (on Eleanor Roosevelt), and multiply it times a couple hundred. One of the great evenings of my career was the night we launched the book at Barnes & Noble’s Union Square store, with Brian moderating a discussion among Caro, Chernow, and Cook. After the signing, as we all headed across the Square  to a restaurant I had the chance to introduce myself to Caro, whose indomitable book on Robert Moses, The Power Broker, had crystallized in me a dream to live in New York long before it was a practical possibility.  As we were crossing 17th Street, I said to Caro, “Your book made me nostalgic for the city and a time I never lived in.” Caro stopped in the street, turned to me and in his broad Bronx accent marveled, “No one’s ever said that to me.” I was some kind of glad that night, especially when Caro later told me that he long admired my late author Edward Robb Ellis and his books, The Epic of New York City and A Diary of the Century.

Working on the manuscript with Brian, he was always self-effacing and eager to hear my take on the material. Despite what I’ve seen expressed by a few commenters below the TPM story on this development, C-Span has no partisan agenda, and neither does its founder. And the neutral ‘C-Span look’ that hosts have when callers phone in and make their aggressively partisan points? It’s no accident; rather, it’s a product of Brian’s studious refusal to choose sides in Washington. By now, if a D.C. backbench politician isn’t being heard, it’s not for lack of opportunity via C-Span and other cable networks. I’d argue that C-Span has made hearing from politicians almost routine, and while we may feel we get too much of them nowadays, I believe that’s an improvement over the era when few members of congress not in leadership positions were even heard from.

Detractors might say that Speakers of the House still control the camera, and that’s true, but not for lack of C-Span trying to expand the number of lenses positioned in the chamber. Now, if the Supreme Court would finally accede to Lamb’s request that they allow cameras in their Court–something he’s asked for repeatedly over the past several years–we’d also have a somewhat more open third branch of government.

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#FridayReads/March 16–Cornbread Mafia

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#FridayReads/March 16 The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate’s Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History, Jim Higdon’s terrific book coming out in April. This blurb for it appears above the author’s bio:

“I knew of course that decades ago, Prohibition pushed moonshiners further into the hollows of Appalachia; now in Jim Higdon’s pulsating true thriller I’ve discovered that crackdowns on pot are propelling today’s newly minted desperadoes deeper into the wilds of rural America, determined to harvest their crop and supply millions of Americans with the bud they crave. Higdon has written a speeding bullet of a book that turns grower Johnny Boone into one of the most fascinating characters I’ve encountered in years. If Hunter S. Thompson were still with us I believe he’d be praising The Cornbread Mafia and telling his pals to read it. But since Dr, Gonzo is gone, I’ll do the job myself: ‘Read The Cornbread Mafia for a hit of real-life excitement. This is a true-crime drama that will keep you hugging the edge of your chair.'”—Philip S. Turner, bookseller, publisher, and blogger at “The Great Gray Bridge”
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“Dreams From My Father” & Kodansha Globe, 1995-96

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As some of my book biz friends know, in the 90s I had a good long tenure as an editorial executive with Kodansha America, the NY office of the largest Japanese publisher. Although we published some Asian-oriented titles, it was a mostly U.S. list with such books as the national bestseller al bestseller Having Our Say, by the centenarian Delaney sisters, and A Diary of the Century:Tales From American’s Great Diarist by Edward Robb Ellis, which sold well and got lots of coverage, including a rare hat trick when the author appeared on all three network morning shows the week of publication. I just blogged about Eddie a few weeks ago, on the anniversary of what would have been his 101st birthday.

During my five years with Kodansha, I also started a trade paperback series that in some ways anticipated the fine list published nowadays by the New York Review of Books Classics imprint. Kodansha Globe combined titles in cross-cultural studies, anthropology, natural history, adventure, narrative travel and belle lettres. I developed the program with my astute and affable Japanese boss Minato Asakawa, with valuable contributions from talented editorial colleagues Paul DeAngelis–who introduced me to the work of Owen Lattimore, whose 1950 anti-McCarthyite broadside Ordeal by Slander I would republish in 2003–and Deborah Baker, about whom I’ll say more below. By the time I left Kodansha in 1997 we had published more than ninety Globe titles, including the first paperback edition of Barack Obama’s debut book Dreams From My Father

The Globe list included revivals of notable books that had fallen out of print: Man Meets Dog, on the origins of the human-canine bond, by Konrad Lorenz, Alone, a harrowing account of survival near the South Pole, by Admiral Richard Byrd, Blackberry Winter, the youthful memoir of Margaret Mead, and All Aboard with E.M. Frimbo, a classic of train culture by New Yorker stalwarts Rogers E.M. Whitaker and Tony Hiss; originals like Sarajevo, Exodus of a City, a biography of the besieged city by Bosnian playwright Dzevad Karahasan, which the Voice Literary Supplement made a year-end best book during the Balkan Wars; and reprints of current hardcovers from major houses like Peter Canby’s The Heart of the Sky, on the resilience of Mayan culture in the Americas and Alex Shoumatoff’s The Mountain of Names, chronicling the history of human kinship and genealogy, which before dying last year Christopher Hitchens made the springboard for one his last columns. We also developed a strong list in books on Central Asia, including four books by the master chronicler of the region, Peter Hopkirk, whose The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia was the top-selling Globe title. // more w/illustrations . . .