Pickamania in Silver City, NM: Bluegrass Music Grows Up

Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys

My first experience with a bluegrass festival was way back in 1974, together with my buddy Emmett Collier on our Grand Tour of the West, and my first true foray into the world of backpacking and independent travel, cutting off those ties with Mom and Dad and the girl I might've left behind, if I'd had one. I remember the dates distinctly because I left the day I turned twenty. I didn't return 'home' for over six months. Hey, I was hungry. And it was the holiday season. The rest is history.

MYSPACE REVOLUTION IS A REVELATION, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

The biggest paradigm shift in the popular music industry since 1955 has occurred and is now a fait accompli. The previous cultural and musical revolution occurred when greasy long-haired redneck rock-and-rollers from the South knocked corporate crooners from the North off the charts and changed music forever. In 1954 when Bill Haley first poked his head on to the charts, Sinatra and Como, Page and Fisher, Clooney and D. Day (Rosemary and Time) ruled the music sales charts as they had for years. By 1956 they barely retained a toe-hold as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Gene Vincent, all scored big hits, many of them right off the Louisiana Hay Ride as ‘hillbilly’ music become ‘rockabilly’ and ‘race’ music felt its way toward ‘soul.’ They would be joined in 1957 by Sam Cook, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and in 1958 by Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Eddie Cochran. The industry responded by signing its own version of watered-down rebellious youth music, much of it brilliant in its own right, in the form of the Everly Brothers, Bobby Darin, Paul Anka, Pat Boone, and ‘Little Ricky’ Nelson (not to mention Alvin and the Chipmunks), but by then the die was cast and the damage was done. The ‘old guard’ would never return. Pop music belonged to youth.

What does it all mean? It means that people reserve the right to create their own music and have it heard by others, without corporate interference or oversight. Not surprisingly this usually happens at the edges of corporate contentment where dissatisfaction takes root and creates fruit, freed from formula and following the inner cry for expression. That era in the South can hardly be described. Imagine families living in shacks dotting the countryside, with a dozen kids all going to school barefoot, cussing and fighting, never tamed by Church or State. And that’s the white people! The condition of blacks was unspeakable, one room shacks in open pastures, the wind blowing through the walls’ cracks, from which they share-cropped or ‘tenant farmed.’ I saw my first wood stoves there long before it became Foxfire hip, all this in the ‘richest country in the world.’ Whites there were consumed with their own inner demons and so were the blacks. The Civil War had never really ended and the Republican Reconstruction had yet to really begin. You either conformed or rebelled or you got the Hell out of Slidell. Or you sublimated those impulses into your art. That world ended with the Welfare Act of 1965.

Fast-forward fifty years and it’s happening again. It never really stopped happening of course. After the initial rock-and-roll years things settled back into a smug Tin Pan Alley predictability until the edges of the culture began screaming to be noticed by the center again, this time from the UK. Losing its colonies and its preeminent position in the world to the US, the UK was ripe for cultural revolution in the ‘60’s. Taking cues from the US and cross-breeding it with the existential fashions of the Continent, England came up with something truly original and brought it over to the US to remind us of what we had almost forgot, the boogie factor. Cross-breed that again with Beatnik poetry, a Harry Smith-inspired folk revival, ‘soul’ music and an unpopular war (sound familiar?) and the time was right for all Hell to break loose, the Psychedelic ‘60’s, followed in quick succession (and no certain order) by Southern rock, hard rock, soft-rock, and folk-rock. Once again the Industry raised its ugly head in the mid 70’s and incorporated beyond anything ever imagined, sending the Eagles, the BeeGees, John Denver, and disco music out to all corners of the world, all on vinyl and safe for public consumption. The New York ‘new wave’ and British punk rock said ‘fuck all that’ of course, and they were spot-on. So it goes in an endless dialectic between growth and contraction, thesis and antithesis, corporate crap and individual creativity, right up to the current day.

The traditional record industry is dead or dying and something else has come and taken its place. This time the medium is the message, the medium of Internet, and it’s not about stealing songs by download. It’s about choice, supply and demand. The pop music revolution that started in the US and got cross-bred with the UK, has caught fire in the rest of the world as well. Increasingly widespread affluence and its ironic counterparts, discontentment and artistic release, has spread to even the smallest countries. Art is something to be created by the ambitious individual, not handed down from corporate boardrooms. IPod and other MP3 players are but the visible symbols of the change. MySpace and other Internet social networks are at the heart of it. There you can listen to anything, if not everything that’s ever been created, all for free. Some die-hards grumble, but radio was always free, wasn’t it? Just like love, you don’t pay until you want to possess it, or see it performed live.

Sometime around 2005 the word got out that something was going on by Internet that any band could use to its advantage in this cut-throat industry. Those who signed on first might reap the largest benefits, of course, so by 2006 the race was on, ironically many times by the fans themselves, making sure that ‘their’ band was represented with its best songs. It was chaotic of course but fun to watch as it evolved. Chaos slowly organized itself and most bands have an ‘official MySpace site’ by now, sometimes to the exclusion of all others, sometimes to the exclusion of its own website, all this in a medium that barely even existed a decade ago. I got my first e-mail address in 1999, before most of my friends, but not all. Any band that doesn’t have a MySpace site by now just doesn’t care much about its future. It’s not that hard.

So what does it all mean? In short for me it means that ‘plays’ and ‘views’ of a band’s MySpace songs and site are a valuable look at a band’s level of popularity. When I was looking to book bands in Arizona, that’s the first thing I looked at. The numbers of plays and views tend to be similar, rarely one as much as twice the other, but that in itself tells a tale. A band with more views than plays seems to be ‘breaking out,’ with a surge of publicity as cause and effect. A band with more plays than views tends to be stable with long-term fans looking to listen. There is still an element of chaos, of course, multiple sites for many bands, etc., so the figures are somewhat provisional and any conclusions should be approached with caution, but are nonetheless enlightening. So what do the numbers say? Surely they must be skewed toward youth-oriented groups and hip-hop, right? Do country music groups do MySpace? The results are interesting. I see them as a reliable gauge of popularity, not money, but popularity. I’ll tell you next week. Do your own survey if you like, and we’ll compare notes. Stay tuned.

DENGUE FEVER OUTBREAK IN FLAGSTAFF- Dozens Will Die Happy

I’m sorry for the delay in this blog, but that’s what happens after a profoundly moving experience. I usually reserve such superlatives for Great Moments in Thought, Religion, or Love, but there are exceptions. That’s why I got into the music business after all, or why it got into me. I always knew it had the capability for profound effects on the region of the upper chest area, and Dengue Fever did not disappoint. I first saw this group on TV somewhere, either in Thailand, US, or UK, sometime either 2004 or 2005, long before they started climbing world music charts. The blurb was about a Cambodian group making waves in LA. They didn’t look all that Cambodian to me, but they were certainly memorable, a petite Asian with a monster voice singing in Khmer while a band of renegade Angelenos backed her up, playing a type of music I’d never heard before, 60’s Cambodian pop/rock. I planned to see them at SXSW in 2006, but that was before I’d ever been to SXSW and knew what a traffic jam it was. They got lost in the shuffle. So I started following their web site looking for a place to catch them in the flesh, all the while catching snatches of their songs. It wasn’t just that I liked them, but with our mutual connection to Asia, it was something I needed to be on top of. That opportunity came in September of the same year at Bumbershoot in Seattle on my way back from Alaska. If SXSW was a traffic jam, Bumbershoot was a certifiable cluster-fuck. Fortunately Dengue Fever came on early, and they were great, but nothing like last Tuesday’s show in Flagstaff. That was transcendent. Or maybe it was just because it was MY show. I guess I’ll have to catch them again soon, just to know for sure.

The music business is pretty flakey, and ‘World Music’ is even flakier, probably because no one really even knows what it is, or what it should be. For an English-speaker, it tends to be “none of the above” in the ‘multiple choice’ of listings, and considering the English-speaking world’s dominance of the music and entertainment industries, that’s probably the way it should be. Tell that to the people who book world music festivals. Whether because of their legendary quirkiness or more likely to provide backfill logic to the fact that world music is going nowhere fast, there’s always someone who’s going to book a bluegrass group or a blues band or something, explaining dryly, “America’s still part of the world, isn’t it?” This does not help promote the genre, though it might help promote an otherwise struggling bluegrass band, of which there are many in the US. Ditto for Mexico where groups who are nowhere near the top of the charts in their own country find themselves written up in encyclopedias as representatives of their respective genres, all because at least one member of the group fearlessly promotes them in the English language, while an all-Spanish group like Mana’, who hit number 4 in the US charts overall with millions of sales, gets no mention whatsoever. So world music execs toss out big words like ‘indigenous’ while simultaneously falling right into the hands of those with the best marketing department. Dengue Fever certainly is second to no one in the category of ‘mixed origins’- they hired her after all- but then they mix metaphors in time as well as space and offer no apologies, nor should they. This is psychedelic surfer sixties Asian pop, remember. If some critics sniffed “wayward eccentricity” after their GlobalFest showcase in New York in 2007, tell that to the hundreds of Cambodians who flock to their shows when ever and where ever they play. I wish we’d had them in Flagstaff, for while the show was a huge critical and sensory success, the Tuesday night crowd was not enough to turn a profit. But that’s my problem.

Ch’hom Nimol is a wonder to behold. While not the group’s founder, she is its pretty face, and the direct link to the group’s spiritual origins in Kampuchea. Nimol is a cross between Cinderella and an Asian Janis Joplin, the fragile soul in the glass slippers boozily belting out Asian pop hooks in a voice much larger than her own small frame should logically accommodate. It’s not an act. For a girl from Battambang raised in refugee camps (she speaks good Thai btw) to now be touring the world at the head of a LA rock group is truly the stuff of fantasy and legend. Maybe they’ll let me write the book some day. If the Khmer lyrics leave you wondering what she’s really singing about, then have another drink. Isn’t that Asia’s biggest attraction anyway, tradition and family and folk wisdom packaged in a shroud of mystery for sale to the highest bidder? If it all seems chaotic and frenetic and frenzied under the harsh glare of sunlight busily cracking through urban skies, it’ll get better when the sun goes down and the little multicolored twinkling lights come on and you listen to sweet melodies reminiscent of Chinese brush paintings in misty country sides. Or maybe you’d rather pretend that the lyrics are about Zen enlightenment or Triad treachery. The Khmer lyrics let them be whatever you want. So what if they’re mostly silly love songs adapted and modified to many different beats, similar but different? That only proves what I’ve known for a long time: it’s about the music, not the lyrics. Only a very few artists depend on lyrical content, if you can even understand all the words anyway. Dengue Fever can do well on that count, too, what with lines like, “you called me up because I’m sober and you wanted me to drive.” But however much Nimol may want to ‘connect with her audience,’ the bottom line is, mysteries sell well. Most Asian girls have Teddy bears back home on the bed, not whips nor opium pipes, but you don’t need to know that. Mysteries sell. These guys play infectious entertaining, and downright addictive indie pop with an Asian flavor, and that’s the bottom line. Think tom yam rock and roll.

I don’t usually include pictures in this blog, simply because there are too many of them out there and their content is too easy to slosh around the mouth and then ultimately spit out, while the US populace becomes increasingly illiterate by the day. But this time is an exception. For one thing I want it to be clear the headlines refer to the music, not the disease. For another thing I want to show the band backstage, rather than their usual publicity photos, which you can find anywhere. These are a bunch of really nice people after all, driving their own van cross-country and then playing their hearts out like it all has meaning. It’ll be a sad day when I book them or see them and it’s ‘just business,’ playing the set lifelessly and then going on or going home. It’s probably inevitable, though. I don’t see how they can maintain such an energy level forever. Actually I’d probably include some concert pics here also, but my wife Tang cut off Nimol’s head in the photo, so that’s that. I’m sure that was no Freudian slip, though I confess to enjoying my quick hug. They enjoyed Tang’s massages, too. Stay tuned for the further adventures of Jack Free and Thai girl in America.

Last Days- About a Boy called Kurt

It’s probably a few days too early to remember Kurt Cobain on the fourteenth anniversary of his death April 5, but it’s never too early or too late to celebrate the appearance of a half-way decent movie on TV, even cable, which seems to be a bit lamer in Asia than elsewhere. It’s even harder when you’re stealing the signal from the Philippines so have no monthly guide to what’s on that month and your remote control’s on the blink so you don’t even know what’s on that day. You have to be alert. The worst part is always catching a movie in progress and maybe seeing it several times before you finally get it all in the right order. Fortunately some movies give the title at the end also. Unfortunately some don’t. In a way it’s good since it forces you to judge a movie on its own merits and your own critical skills, rather than advance reviews and sales figs. I’ve discovered a few gems on my own that way, like ‘Crash’ before it got flick of the year and ‘Babel’ copied it stylistically, or ‘Donnie Darko’ before it became a cult classic or the director’s cut came out or Jake Gyllenhaal became a major star and frolicked with Heath Ledger in Mr. Ang’s classic Brokebutt Mountain.

So I was so desperate for some true creativity that I welcomed a strange movie that came on at ten in the evening the other night. The best ones typically came on later than that, or earlier depending on your reference point, but that only works when jet-lagged or insomniac. Still I usually crash at ten or shortly after, so need some impetus to add some wood to the fire and stay up later. That came from a strange movie that started off something like an update version of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, though it quickly became clear that these were drug-addled meshes, of a young rocker avoiding responsibility and his friends and almost everything else but his own fantasy world. When he finally gets carried out of his house, in pieces, in the last scene, parallels with certain historical figures became obvious, and quickly confirmed when closing credits named Gus Van Sant as the director of Last Days, loosely based on Kurt Cobain’s ultimate demise.

The movie is worth seeing, if not for the biography of Cobain, which it’s not, then for the sheer artistry of Van Sant’s work. While it may seem exploitative to concentrate on an artist’s downfall rather than his highlights, it’s also enlightening. Van Sant certainly has a right, being a Pacific Northwesterner himself with subculture credentials in Drugstore Cowboy and other films, and an outspoken homosexual himself. Anybody who would put William Burroughs in cameo appearances is okay in my book. Perhaps more to the point was that Cobain himself wasn’t so enamored of his own highlights. While some critics may feel that the work was ‘oddly disjointed’, that’s probably the case with heroin addiction itself, isn’t it? If the work was not a biography, then neither was it a documentary, but rather a work of art. Is Picasso’s work not ‘oddly disjointed’? People are so accustomed to seeing film as a medium the visual equivalent of pulp fiction novels that they’re closed to other uses of the medium. The same is true of music, in particular Cobain’s music. While a simple take would consider grunge a successful blend of heavy metal and punk, Cobain himself was at heart a poet, or he wouldn’t have had fans the likes of Patti Smith, nor me for that matter. It’s no coincidence that grunge all but died with him.

While some may criticize Cobain for his failure as a role model, that’s certainly a role he never asked for, and frankly, any culture that looks for role models in rock-and-roll musicians probably deserves what it gets. To say that maybe they take themselves a bit too seriously would be an understatement. The ‘Death Cab for Cuties’ leader said a couple years ago that it was his job to interpret the world and its politics for his listeners. That’s nice work if you can get it, but the main job is to entertain, pure and simple. The fact that Cobain never aspired to be a culture hero is a credit to him. The fact that others did may have been what killed him. Looking in a mirror can be scary sometimes, especially when it’s weirdly distorted and lots of other people are looking, too. A friend of mine said school let out early that day in Japan. I became a fan from watching the ‘Live Unplugged’ gig, but mostly posthumously. If it wasn’t clear before, it certainly is clear now that many of the most famous artists and entertainers of all time got there not necessarily by skill alone, but equally by luck. My off-hand five-finger calculation is about equal parts skill, marketing, longevity, timing, and pure dumb luck. If that’s not obvious by how many underdogs rise to the top, it’s certainly obvious by how many industry darlings fall flat. Feature films may have always been and will forever be dominated by ‘the industry’, given their high production costs and massive organization required, but everything else is fair game.

Pop music, including rock, blues, jazz, hip-hop, salsa, merengue, cumbia, ranchera, mawlam, gantreum, luke toong, rai, bhangra, etc. is just that, people’s music, and left to its own devices, will likely stay that way. It was only when ‘the industry’ took over American/English pop music in the mid-70’s that the non-English-speaking world really became aware of it. Apart from the Beatles, who were marketed under a Thai name, the rest of the 60’s oeuvre was discovered in Thailand only after the mass marketing of The Eagles, John Denver, and the Bee Gees had opened doors. I assume it was similar in the rest of the world. This in turn inspired and revived a Thai music industry that thrives to this day. Still the live entertainer in Thailand is little more than a human jukebox and little more is expected or him than to faithfully reproduce a song exactly as it was recorded and played ad infinitum on the radio. Accordingly Thais clap as a song starts, at the point of recognition, not at its end as a reward for a job well done. Radio’s even more psychologically numbing, sometimes repeating a song immediately after its first play. If a song is judged by your inability to get it out of your head, this’ll put it over the top. How groups like Carabao ever did truly creative work makes their success even more amazing.

Maybe Hollywood, whether the film or the music industries, is no place for the truly creative individual, alone with his art in a sometimes hostile world. The emphasis these days is certainly more on attitude than art, more on technological posture than technical perfection. Thus technology gives and technology takes away. Accordingly I deplore the ‘dumbness’ inherent in the new mass media while admiring the democracy. But is the new Internet democracy capable of creating anything significant? Much work has been processed through the ways and means of Internet, but does anything owe its existence to it? Communism was great at distributing wealth but never created much. It would have been interesting to see where Cobain would be in his career right now if he’d survived. Most of the Grunge set have dropped from the public eye if not from life altogether, all except Chris Cornell, ex-Sound Garden. He always seemed a bit more ‘commercial’ than the rest, though I can appreciate his giving Artis the Spoonman some publicity. Kurt himself dismissed Eddie Vedder as ‘corporate’, but it’s not always easy for a poet to understand a story-teller, kind of like John and Paul. Twenty-seven seems to be the magic age for rock suicides, the age where you either straighten up or check out, doesn’t it? That’s the age I finally left Mississippi ‘for good’, so the psychological profile fits.

If Cobain were still alive I could see him singing some severe gutter blues, where his angst and anguish really lay, and a direction that fellow Grunge junkie Scott Weiland drifted toward. Maybe with time he would’ve drifted toward a more country-style blues like his hero Leadbelly, but we’ll never know, will we? With an oeuvre that consists of a scarce few works, we’ll never know how far he could have gone, but he was certainly more than a flash in the pan. I think history will see him as a latter-day Robert Johnson who sold his soul so he could play guitar, a tragic figure imbued with tragedy. Maybe one day a computer will channel his spirit and we’ll get the posthumous collection. Meanwhile see the movie. It’s got no Nirvana music, nor biographical information, but unflinchingly follows the downward slide of a US hero and heroin shooter, all without any graphic images. The movie’s been out a couple years by now, but better late than never.