My best,

Rick M.

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

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

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

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

And: I too know a lot about being misunderstood on Twitter.

Sorry if that was misread!

Thanks, all!

“Writer Rick Moody explores “traditional music” on @The_Rumpus, and, somehow, mentions yours truly (??)”

http://twitter.com/m_carefully