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Rumpus Book ClubSWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #18: Some Questions About the Tradition
Johnny Cash’s late covers are superior to their original recordings, but are they traditional?
I’m stuck this morning in the Tea Lounge of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and it’s possible that the poor hipster who does the baby sing-along at the Tea Lounge is coming in any minute, God help me, and there are two-year-olds bouncing off the walls and smearing their H1N1 hands on every surface, and usually, under these circumstances, I just turn up the music in my earbuds to eleven, to tune it all out, but instead I’m listening to what’s playing on the Tea Lounge p.a., because it happens to be Johnny Cash’s recording of “One” by U2. In general, I pretend U2 is not happening—when I see Bono’s shades I try to avert my gaze—but I love Johnny Cash’s version of “One,” which, while not as good as his truly unsurpassed recording of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt,” or, for example, “The Beast In Me,” the Nick Lowe song he did under the same dark cloud, which is to say the American Recordings period 
when Rick Rubin seemed to bring Cash back from the brink of annihilation by capturing the resignation and mortality in his voice, is nonetheless some of the finest folk music of the last twenty years. Without fail, Cash’s late covers are superior to their original recordings, and, with just a guitar and his unstable, uncertain intonation, he manages to say more emotionally than most singers say in their entire careers. I cannot, for example, hear “Hurt” without weeping. I was at a pizzeria in our neighborhood a month or so ago talking to a waitress friend when “Hurt” came on the stereo, and in the middle of the conversation I needed to excuse myself. And I don’t feel this way about the Nine Inch Nails recording. I admire it, and I think Trent Reznor has a great ear for sonic textures, but he doesn’t make me weep.
However: my certainty about the excellence of the late Johnny Cash (and this is not to exclude the early Johnny Cash, who is equally good but more rock and roll) leads to a related question, which is today’s question, the question I am brooding about now and have been recently: would I consider Johnny Cash’s American Recordings period somehow traditional?
To answer the question, if indeed the question can be answered, you have to start with the folk revival of the late fifties and early sixties. Or, at least, this is always a useful place to begin any discussion of folk music. The folk revival is the music with which I became conscious of the world, in that I was in diapers, and then in elementary school, when some of that music was being released and popularized and talked about. Those were songs that we were taught to sing in music class, Pete Seeger songs, Joan Baez songs, Bob Dylan songs, Phil Ochs songs. In my house, The Clancy Brothers (Liam Clancy, rest in peace), were an affirmation of my mother’s Irish-Americanness, and to a child, the world that was spoken of in those old folk songs was (as I was also trying to say recently about Traffic’s recording of “John Barleycorn”) fascinating and exotic. It didn’t seem coincident with the world out the windows (the Connecticut suburbs), but it was just as real to me. When you are four or five you are permeable that way.
Still, did the folk revival genuinely summon the lost world, the world of Appalachian folk music the 19th century and early 20th century, or the English and Celtic folk traditions that preceded it by hundreds of years, did it revive the true spirit of folk music, the original spirit, or did it somehow just reproduce it? Is it enough if the folk revival photocopied the songs, if that is what it did? An example, for me, would be the Simon and Garfunkel recording of “Scarborough Fair.” This recording, according to people who know more about this history than I do, was cribbed from the excellent Martin Carthy, who taught it to Paul Simon when the latter was living in England in the early sixties. Carthy revived a version popular in the 19th century— although some version of the “Scarborough Fair” may go back much further (some people seem to think it’s about the Plague, so that’s how far back it may go). I can’t, however, shake the feeling that popularizing the song—though the Simon and Garfunkel version is lovely, with its sublime Art Garfunkel lead and its great descant melody—somehow conceals or smothers the original strangeness of the lyric. Or does it? Is it enough that the song in the main, is still there, still has the “Then she’ll be a true love of mine” refrain? I wouldn’t even know the names of most of the spices used in the kitchen if it weren’t for the Simon and Garfunkel recording. I thought parsley was something crammed into the chicken-shaped tray in my T.V. dinner in elementary school, something my mother heated up for me when my father wasn’t coming back from the office in time to see me and my brother and sister before we had to be in bed. The delicate loneliness of “Scarborough Fair” was my loneliness. But was that a contemporary feeling, a feeling of the 20th century suburbs, or a feeling that was coincident with the tradition in old folk music?
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December 17th, 2009 at 7:10 am
My friend the composer Danny Felsenfeld sent a comment about the above, and he has acceded to my wish to have it posted: “Rick, I loved your essay about tradition, and I think I’m actually going to assign it to my Writing About Music class next semester. It says a LOT about a LOT from a flawless perspective–meaning that of someone who knows with hands and heart and head what they are talking about but is also not professionally invested in staking out a small patch of territory in same. I’m also glad you mentioned classical music without going in deep, because that is an entire other essay because even as a composer you are hardly ever taught to be daring, new, change the world, or if you are, it’s by increment–you learn about what Beethoven DID to the symphony, which made it impossible for others to write symphonies in the old ways, so Mahler came along and…It can get a little tiresome. And in the meantime, your technical schooling is all about baroque counterpoint, sonata form, and, maybe at the end, some “advanced harmonies” like Strauss, Mahler, Wagner, and Early Schoenberg. Then you learn about the Second Viennese School, those great tradition adherers/breakers and you are stuck with this idea that you have to start THERE and go forth, and that if you don’t somehow you’ll be doing it wrong. For example, a visit to the Cite de Musique in Paris leads you to the lone conclusion that music began with chant and worked its way up to Boulez. And if you are not part of this continuum, you are not part of the discussion.”
December 17th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Have you seen Matthew Loiacono’s reaction to this article on his twitter feed?
“Writer Rick Moody explores “traditional music” on @The_Rumpus, and, somehow, mentions yours truly (??)”
http://twitter.com/m_carefully
December 17th, 2009 at 11:12 am
@Isaac: If it wasn’t clear, I was actually being humble. I feel honored that Rick would think of me when writing on this topic. I’m not the biggest pro at communicating how I feel in 140 characters.
Sorry if that was misread!
Thanks, all!
December 17th, 2009 at 11:32 am
@Matthew It was totally clear. I thought your response was humble and awesome, that’s why I posted it. Rick has introduced me to some of my favorite new music with this column, and I thought it was cool to see an artist featured be so pumped.
December 17th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Oh, here’s another p.s. to the above. For those interested, Matthew’s new URL is http://matthew-land.com. The old one, heartstack.org, will work for a while, but he’s moving in a new direction. So interested parties can use the new address to check out what else he is up to.
And: I too know a lot about being misunderstood on Twitter.
December 17th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Twitter miscommunication is practically its own genre at this point.
December 18th, 2009 at 2:54 am
Rick,
I don’t think any discusiion on American music can be complete without mention of Jerry Garcia. (I know, I know. I can hear the groans all the way from Iraq.) Please. Let me explain…..
There’s a theory that argues that evolution isn’t a steady process, but the result of sudden, dramatic mutations, or miracles, if we’re thinking religiously. Rather than studying the through-line of tradition in American music, I find it helpful at times to consider, instead, the mysterious appearance of musical genius, which morphs the form into something strange and new. I don’t think this event can be rationally explained, as can tradition, but of course we all know it when we hear it. You could argue that it’s the tradition itself that gives the individual artist their power, but when you listen to Monk (Thelonius, not Meredith), or even Guthrie, what strikes me is how DIFFERENT they sound than the tradition, how completely unexpected and original. And we need to excuse ourselves at those moments, as you did in the cafe when Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt began to play. Cash was a true oddball, as you know, and was considered quite a freak in country music circles. Yet it’s the freakish tremble in that voice that gets you, that grating against the tradition. Watch Dylan shouting into the English chorus of booing at the Royal Albert Hall, his electric guitar slung over his shoulder like a weapon, and you get the same sense of isolation and irreverence. Which brings me back to Jerry…..
My Hurt moment came as I was driving to Rhode Island to visit a chef friend a few years back. My second wife was in the passenger seat and very close to asking for the divorce after listening to nothing, since our departure from New York City, but Dead. And then it happened….Comes A Time, from, as I recall, the Buffalo War Memorial in ’77. In Dead circles, somehow still active, there is always talk of the moment when you “got it”. I felt the tension melting between us in our rented car, and I finally turned to see a look of shock on her face begin to shake into weeping. I pulled over, and I’m not ashamed to say there were tears from both of us before that solo, a soaring, wrenching aria that can only be understood operatically, was over. Jerry is truly rooted in tradition (he even gigged with a jug band in his early career), but it’s how he departs from these traditions that makes it so interesting, and so easily returned to, again and again. “I never knew……” Hope told me later that weekend, still amazed.
Garcia doesn’t come to you steadily. It touches you suddenly, but somehow gently, a truly strange kind of talent in the rough world of rock and roll. Part of his spell can be explained pharmaceutically, I know, and his mid-career projects probably required more cocaine than an Eagle’s album. But that sound remains, the coolness and the sly humor of his playing still tricking the tradition.
Rick Gray
Sulaimani, Iraq
December 18th, 2009 at 7:18 am
Rick, I have to say that I am very grateful and honored to get your notes from Iraq. Honored that my little column is something that merits attention from that part of the world. And maybe sometime on or off the comments page you can tell me a little bit what you’re doing. I would be interested to hear.
Striding into the question of Garcia requires so much preparation for me that I don’t know if I can do it just yet. I have such mixed feelings on the subject. As you know, there are and were Deadheads among my nearest and dearest, and I did, on occasion, see a gig or two by them, having been urged to do so by friends who’d waited in line for entire days to secure the tickets. Now that the dust is settling, I do think that Garcia was an old soul, if also one who punted on his talents rather spectacularly. Insofar as he bears on the subject at hand, the tradition, I agree entirely that he had one foot in traditional music throughout his career. I think his playing is unthinkable without bluegrass, and even at their most “psychedelic” (probably the period I like best, in fact, with Pig on organ) the Dead don’t make sense without reference to the kind of collective improvisation and community of bluegrass and Old Time. That is all true. And in this regard I will say that I was flipping by the Dead station on satellite radio not too long ago and I chanced to listen to a fascinating discussion of the provenance of the song known as “I Know You Rider,” which you probably recognize as a staple of later dead shows (usually paired, I think, with “China Cat Sunflower”). It’s “woman’s blues,” I think (and Janis Joplin covered it), or one source says as much, but despite the fact that there are a lot of early versions, it’s a little unclear where the original came from, I think, or that is my recollection. (This is always my favorite kind of song, the kind with no clear origin.) In a way, then, the Dead version of “I Know You Rider,” by a collection of MEN on electric instruments, really gets to the heart of the dialectical problem of tradition with respect to the march of history. It’s IMPOSSIBLE for the Dead to play a “traditional” version of this song. The only thing they have going for them is the song itself. And yet they plunge on, heedless of the contradictions, of the impossibilities, and, remarkably, they get to one of their rather soulful moments (on, e.g., EUROPE ’72), because the lyric is so amazing! “I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train,” indeed. One thing I give Garcia credit for is owning a lyric. When he committed to a song, he tried to make the lyric his own. He WAS the narrator. (I’m thinking of “Black Peter,” or “In the Attics of My Life,” or perhaps most tellingly “And We Bid You Goodnight,” from LIVE DEAD.) There is no reason, on paper, for me at least, why a song like this should be good. The rhythm section, especially later, is awful, excepting Lesh, the rhythm guitarist has his problems, the succession of keyboardists (excepting Pig or T.C.) really forgettable, the Donna Godchaux backing vocals weren’t so great, and the one guy in the band who was legitimately great as a player was normally so high that he was nearly a superfund site of poisons. And yet it’s an amazing song, and frequently very moving.
These, I guess, are just the kinds of paradoxes I’m trying to drive at here. The reverence for the traditional music is, for me, important, as is the recognition that you can never get there from here.
I could go on and on, but
December 18th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Rick,
I don’t feel it’s the right forum here to get into Iraq, but I will have you know I’ve invited the Kurdish peshmerga guards who patrol the area outside my house to a Christmas dinner, when I plan to play them a China Cat/Rider sequence from the Europe ’72 tour. I’ve experimented with reaction to Garcia in a number of places overseas, mostly in Africa, and have seen reactions that ranged from instant, joyous recognition from a group of Kenyan secondary school students, who started dancing, to a serious young policeman in Nigeria who told me, kind of threateningly, that it sounded like the devil (I played him Dark Star, from the “Nightfall of Diamonds” show in New Jersey in ’91).
In thinking about tradition, I find I do catch myself feeling a little homesick, especially at this time of year. I keep thinking of Rockefeller Center. I don’t miss the tree as much as the fact that I will miss the sound of Phil Lesh’s bass around the corner in Radio City Music Hall on February 23 and 24th. Phil turns 70 on March 15th, and I worry I may be missing an important and moving event in American music.
Rick Gray
Sulaimani, Iraq
December 20th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Hey Rick,
My name is Gaven, and I was one of the principal singer-songwriters for the Kamikaze Hearts. A friend of mine told me that I’d gotten slighted on the internet by a celebrated author. Being half French, I absolutely FEED on negative vibes so I came over here looking for red meat. To my disappointment you weren’t that harsh and I mostly agreed with your assessment of my old band.
My compositions might’ve been a “little on light side” as you say. Unlike Matt, I had a lot of trouble hearing past the Hee Haw-ness of our instrumentation. My songwriting for the Hearts frequently reverted to a parody/homage of the pop-country acts my Mom would play in the car when I was a kid like Eddie Rabbit and the Gatlin Brothers. I lack imagination. Fine.
I can understand not being able to “get behind” my singing. Objectively, I can hear that I sound quite a bit like Kermit the Frog on the verge of tears. No problem.
I agree that Bob is an amazing lead guitar player. By far he’s the most gifted natural musician I’ve ever played with.
And I agree that Matt on the mandolin always stole our shows. Even my own wife used to tell me that Matt was the only interesting thing to look at on our stage. If you think he’s good at stringed instruments, you should hear him play drums. When I met Matt he was drumming at pick-up gigs with the best jazz guys in town. I saw him trade fours using a fork and knife for sticks once and I fantasized about getting a band together with him before I could even pronounce his last name.
But there’s one thing you wrote that I just cannot let stand.
There’s NO! FUCKING! WAY! that Matt looks ANY younger than me. And so much younger that “he could have been the offspring of the others in the band”?!??!? How dare you?
How dare you? No, for this I’m afraid it has to be muskets at dawn my friend. I’ll take Ronnie Milsap as my second. For yours you can exhume the corpse of one of those traditional, frowny-faced, “I tend to speak-sing ’cause it makes me sound wicked tough”, daddy-figures you exalt.
Awaiting Satisfaction,
Gaven Richard
December 21st, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Gaven, I surely didn’t mean to slight, and I loved the band live that time up in the Adirondacks where Nina and I played first. There was a warmth and offhanded generosity to the set, for sure. And I will fall on my sword on the Matthew-looking-younger-than-the-rest-of-the band thing. If that will preserve the peace.
My best,
Rick M.