Bumper Christmas Retro Music Edition

1. Song Mining
I recently interviewed Greil Marcus about his book The History of Rock’n’Roll in Ten Songs (it can be heard at Radio New Zealand's website here). With the imminent release of The Complete Basement Tapes – six CDs, well over 100 songs that Dylan wrote while woodshedding with the Band in 1967 – I had to ask about them. I wondered whether – now that the sessions were finally seeing daylight – this would change the public’s fascination with them. Marcus’s response shows that his fascination with the Basement Tapes hasn’t dimmed since he wrote a whole book on the sessions, Invisible Republic, in 1997:

You know there’s a lot of material – there’s 30 something songs – that have never been heard before, that haven’t been bootlegged or leaked out, song by song, on Dylan’s own Bootleg Series. Certainly there’s stuff I never heard before. And what’s fascinating about it, in the context of the whole set – which I think is going to start this conversation all over again – is you know how down-to-earth and ordinary and ah, work-like a lot of the stuff is.
The [phrase] that leapt to mind when I was listening to the stuff that I hadn’t heard before was “song mining”. These people are digging into what look like songs but they aren’t really. And you just keep digging to see if you find something in there that will explain itself, that will say, ‘No! No! Go in this direction, not that direction’ Really digging in the ground, and finding a root, and grabbing onto that root and thinking, ‘Well this root must lead somewhere, and maybe you find where it leads and maybe you don’t. These are people mining for songs.
And I think that when people listen to all of this material – and its 140 tracks – they’re going to be fascinated by the way that fragments and cover versions of songs that weren’t that interesting to begin with, and experiments that really don’t go anywhere, surround these songs that seem like gifts from the Gods. It’s going to make the whole question of creation, of creativity and writing, and playing and improvising, even more mysterious than it already is.
In some ways the mystique of the Basement Tapes I think is going to be washed away – replaced by the spectre of a bunch of people getting together every day to fool around – in a clubhouse, in a kind of boy’s club.
On the other hand you can say, Well okay, but where did this stuff come from. My God: ‘Tears of Rage’, ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ … did some visitation come down and strike these people with lightning, and then go away and leave them to play with ordinary hands – as they weren’t doing for a few weeks?
I don’t know. But I love the way there is stuff here that is mediocre, that is second rate, and stuff that seems like junk – it sounds bad and it’s very hard to hear – and has flashes in it that are as strong and as disturbing as anything in the formal masterpieces that these sessions produced.
So I think you can tell by the way I’m answering that I don’t know. That I don’t know how to answer your question. That it’s as if you have to learn how to start listening to the stuff as if you’ve never heard it before. And see what story it tells.

2. His Back Pages
At last, a one-stop shop of Greil Marcus’s archives: articles, interviews and reviews, regularly updated. It was a very smart idea to compile a series of links to all the songs in his “Treasure Island” of essential discs Marcus added to Stranded, the 1979 anthology he edited in which music writers wrote about their “desert island disc”. (The essays by Lester Bangs on Astral Weeks, and M Marks on It’s Too Late to Stop Now are unsurpassed. Bangs’s masterpiece aside, one of the best reviews of Astral Weeks I ever heard was from an older woman who just said, “You breathe in, you breathe out, you breathe in, you breathe out.”)
3. Writer’s block
Of the six artists featured in Marcus’s 1975 classic Mystery Train (Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, the Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley) only Newman’s career seems to have continue, rather than ended with pathos. Still, the exposure didn’t come without a cost to his productivity. In 1983 – I think in San Francisco’s BAM magazine – Newman said:

When I’m writing songs, the minutes are like hours – I sit there with nothing, just a big picture of Greil Marcus in my mind hanging over the piano as I think, ‘Ah, I don’t think this guy is gonna like this one, because I’m doing the same stuff he criticised me for before.

Marcus’s response? “You know, anybody who reads something I’ve written and comes back and tells me something about it that I didn’t know – that’s a valuable a reader as I can ever hope to have. And that’s happened with musicians and people who aren’t musicians. I really can't talk about other people’s reactions to my work, at least not positive reactions, it just comes off as self-congratulation. I’m lucky that I’ve been able to write, to find people to publish me, and to find people who read me. So that’s all I can say.”
4. Country gentlemen mystique
Speaking of the Band, I stumbled upon these 1969 reviews from the Village Voice of the Band live at the Fillmore, and of their second album. The writer, Johanna Schier, has a charming straightforward style, with a wry wit, a talent for an apt metaphor – and musical insights. (Though she describes Robbie Robertson on stage as “sweetly bashful”, she also hears Smokey Robinson in the chorus of ‘I Shall Be Released’). Schier soon befriended Janis Joplin, and with her future husband John Hall wrote ‘Holy Moon’, the b-side of ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. The pair then founded the group Orleans.
5. Ballad of a Teenage Queen
We have heard a lot from Jerry Lee Lewis over the years, especially about rock’n’roll and the Devil, but little from his child bride, Myra. At last, she breaks her silence. “They were looking for a place to stick the knife into rock & roll. And Jerry gave it to them—well, I did, I opened my mouth.”
6. Click track
From David Hepworth, a link to a batch of classic Motown hits with the vocals removed. I know, that seems criminal, but it is so illuminating to be able to concentrate on the Funk Brothers.
7. Down the avenue again
Van Morrison’s paranoia about YouTube seems to have dissipated. Three extraordinary, lengthy clips have recently been added to the site, without legal intervention thus far. The legendary It’s Too Late to Stop Now 1973 shows at London’s Rainbow were broadcast by TVNZ later in the 1970s on The Grunt Machine and talked about for years; a high-def version has been up for a while. Now, two other full-length concerts from the same period are online. At Winterland in February 1974, in B&W, the band is his usual combo from “Street Choir” period – also featured at the Rainbow, but lacking the string quartet. With a completely different – and integrated – band, but several of the same songs, he can be seen in full colour at the Orphanage, San Francisco in July 1974 (note the presence of Tom Donahue, the deep-throated influence on all FM rock jocks). Both feature Morrison’s ‘Caravan’ can-can schtick. Perhaps best of all is this 10-minute clip from the Fillmore East in September 1970, introduced by Bill Graham: maybe the earliest filmed version of his ‘Cyprus Avenue’ tease. As a taster to the Winterland gig, here he is covering Dylan’s ‘Just Like a Woman’.

8. Funky, funny and fun
More back pages: here is how the Victoria University of Wellington’s student newspaper Salient reviewed Abbey Road in 1969. Mike Bergin described the medley of songs on side two as “a mess”, whereas that was the only passage Nik Cohn liked in his New York Times review. But Bergin showed a lot of promise in this and other reviews; sadly, he died not long afterwards in a car accident.
9. Back to the Island
In July, Glenn Jowitt – one of New Zealand’s greatest photographers – died suddenly. He was mourned in Auckland by about 400 of his closest friends in a moving, multi-cultural ceremony. The NZ Herald asked me to write an obituary.
10. Take the Coltrane
A crucial influence on Glenn was the expatriate New York photographer Larence Shustak, who taught him at Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch in the mid-1970s. Glenn was a dedicated music fan and an enthusiastic guitarist (in the 70s he even looked like his hero, Gram Parsons). A connection he had with Shustak that I never knew until researching for the obituary: in the 1950s Shustak took many compelling shots of New York jazz musicians.
11. A little bit frightening
Musical racism 101: ‘Kung Fu Fighting’, or how to express the whole of Asia in just nine notes. No, not the lyrics – which are bad enough – the influence of the arrangement has been even more pervasive, reports NPR.

Dreams to Remember

At Stax Records the walls came tumbling down, twice. The first collapse of the legendary Memphis label began in December 1967, when Otis Redding’s sudden death was quickly followed by Stax’s separation from its distributor, Atlantic Records of New York. The death of Redding took out the label’s biggest solo star, while still in his ascendancy. The split with Atlantic didn’t just remove Sam & Dave from its books – the dynamic duo had only been “loaned” to Stax by Atlantic – it removed Stax’s entire back catalogue from its books. A hidden clause in Atlantic’s distribution contract said that ownership of the masters was vested in them, although Stax had made and paid for the recordings.

Another event in 1968 damaged the culture of Stax irrevocably. The murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel – a location that was one of the few to welcome visiting black musicians – altered the racial harmony that had existed at the label from the beginning. In a city where racism and segregation – both official and entrenched – survived long after the civil rights breakthroughs elsewhere, Stax was an integrated oasis. It is crucially important to the Stax story that its house band Booker T and the MGs (right) was a “mixed crowd”. Booker T was the quartet’s black, teenage keyboard prodigy; drummer Al Jackson its black, metronomic groove master; Steve Cropper a white, quiffed C&W-influenced guitarist; and providing the fluid bottom-end came from Donald “Duck” Dunn, an amiable white bass player.

The death of MLK and the racial mores and tension in Memphis are crucial to the Stax story. In Robert Gordon’s rich, absorbing new history of the label, Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion (Boomsbury USA), the issue of race is like a bad-ass backing vocal against the two-part harmony in the forefront: the music and business angles. Stax has been well covered over the years; dominating the work of Stax scholars and obsessives worldwide are Peter Guralnick’s moving, wide-ranging Sweet Soul Music, and Canadian musicologist Rob Bowman’s exhaustive Soulsville. But in Respect Yourself, you can taste the grits.

Gordon is a Memphian, who has been writing and directing documentaries about local music for nearly 30 years. He connects with the way musicians work and live, and he is also a superb story teller. Respect Yourself is the book he has been writing in the back of his mind since he first picked up a pen, producing two other classics in the meantime. It Came From Memphis (1994) was mostly about the city’s alternative rock scenes of the 1960s and 1970s, with Elvis and Stax barely mentioned, and Can’t Be Satisfied (2002) was an atmospheric, sensitive biography of Muddy Waters. Like Guralnick at a similar stage, Gordon has now produced a trilogy that evocatively recreates the culture in which American popular music was re-invented and heard worldwide.

Reeling from the blows it took in 1968 after Redding died, Stax quickly rebuilt itself under the new management of the visionary, risk-taking black entrepreneur Al Bell. His first task was to create an instant catalogue by recording and releasing 28 new albums simultaneously in an extravagant marketing gesture called the Soul Explosion. Extravagance soon became a byword at Stax, which had been founded by Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, two sensible, generous-hearted, white, small town music lovers. The frugality of Stewart’s approach is captured in the waste-free backings that Booker T and the MGs provided to the label’s first wave of recordings.

That extravagance was exemplified by the solo career of Isaac Hayes, Stax’s biggest star in the flamboyant Bell years. For Hayes (below), who first made his name as a Stax songwriter and producer, mostly for Sam & Dave, it meant recording albums with tracks that lasted nearly 20 minutes, wearing gold chain mail and little else as stage costumes, and driving a gold Cadillac, gifted to him in gratitude by Stax.

Pimp my wheels doesn’t begin to capture the swagger of the Shaft era, but does hint at another element of the story: the gangster-like behaviour of Johnny Baylor, a black hustler Bell hired to make sure distributors paid their bills and radio DJs played their records. Baylor, who likely put on a gun before his underwear, and his henchman Dino Woodard seem to be characters out of a Blaxploitation movie: they worked in entertainment, they had a great soundtrack, but their actions were deeply sinister.

It was Baylor who brought the walls of Stax tumbling down for the second time, when his bags were searched at Memphis airport, because of an unrelated bomb threat. Inside his bag were stacks of greenbacks, totalling more than $129,000. This alerted the FBI and IRD on to Stax: they were suspicious of the legitimacy of the money, and of other shadowy practices at the Southern, black-owned, independent company. Over the next couple of years Stax inexorably came apart, when debts to its local bank – itself a shaky, dodgy institution – were called in, and many were found to be fraudulent thanks to a bank employee taking backhanders. By 1976 the doors of Stax’s famous studio on McLemore Avenue were padlocked by armed guards, its publishing assets and master tapes taken by receivers. The label has since been sold several times, but is now in good hands at Concord Records, and thanks to revivals spurred by tributes such as The Blues Brothers and The Commitments movies, countless cover versions, and mostly the sheer strength of the back catalogue, the music Stax made has never been forgotten.

What makes Gordon’s book the best yet on this story – which is familiar to aficionados, but unknown to the millions who love the hits – is his identification with the musicians, their characters, and the community from which they sprung. So too is his use of the Memphis Sanitation workers’ strike of 1968 as a parallel story to relate just how pervasive and enduring racism and segregation was in the city.

Guralnick laid the groundwork in 1985 with Sweet Soul Music, which also covered other aspects of soul which didn’t emanate from Memphis (ie James Brown, Muscle Shoals). Bowman’s verbose, earthbound epic made one’s eyes water from the detail, and lacked the flair to move a reader from the armchair to the turntable. (Soulsville has a new purpose now as a book-length series of footnotes adding information about incidents to Gordon’s fast-paced, yet thorough, story-telling.)

Thanks to Gordon’s skill, the humanity of the characters comes through: Jim Stewart as the sober founder, out of his depth; his sister Estelle Axton – the hero of the book – whose open-mindedness welcomed talented black youths inside the studio; the dignified prodigy Booker T; the reliable Steve Cropper; the brilliant if flawed Al Bell. There is a sense of foreboding as the story unfolds: Stax is like a rollercoaster that sails through social and business barriers, taking risks at every corner, then builds up speed so that inevitably gravity comes knocking, in the guise of a hooded taxman and bank auditor. Gordon gets the sense of community and family that were essential to Stax’s success, and describes music making with just the right amount of colour and knowledge that while reading one is transported to the dance floor. Above: Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton.

Gordon has been interviewing the participants for almost 30 years, some of them for the 2007 Stax documentary Respect Yourself, which he co-directed. While the acknowledgements and suggestions of further reading and listening are helpful, I could have done with more precise information in the appendix about exactly who he interviewed, rather than general attributions to, say, Guralnick, who was one of several people who provided Gordon transcripts of their own interviews with key players. (Dead or alive, the interviewees are all quoted in the present tense.)* Also, the occasional subjective quip – which increase as the story continues – can sometimes intrude.

L-R: Jerry Wexler, Sam & Dave, Al Bell.

Gordon is understandably sceptical about Atlantic executive Jerry Wexler’s protestations of innocence in the saga of the company’s ruthless contract with Stax, but this could have been examined further. Wexler brought the incident up moments after Gordon began his interview with an innocent question, which is interpreted as “he protesteth too much”. Wexler could also have been racked with guilt, and haunted by the clause decades later. He was known as hard-nosed but always respected as a music man, not a suit: he could well have been oblivious to it. In his own biography, Wexler uses almost exactly the same words as he said to Gordon, and names Paul Marshall as the Atlantic lawyer responsible for the master-grabbing clause in fine print neither party had read. Also, there is a mention of Wexler asking Jim Stewart if he was interested in Aretha Franklin, whose contract at Columbia was about to finish. $25,000 was too much for Stax, so Atlantic signed her directly. I am unconvinced that Wexler would be so coldblooded towards the small Memphis label, whose musical and personal style he so admired, that he would suggest this while knowing of the hidden clause.

That small niggle aside, even when the business story of Stax begins to dominate the racial, political, and most importantly the musical angles, Respect Yourself is an exhilarating, often heart-breaking history. It will satisfy Stax aficionados and the newly converted, and does justice to the story by providing a context to the miracle of Memphis – and by opening up the music itself, like a re-mix editor looking for a hidden hook in the original multi-track tapes.

When I first visited Memphis, on an overnight stopover in 1988, I asked a white taxi driver where we were in relation to Stax. “Sex?” he said. “You want sex?” It was mainly my accent (in Georgia, asking for a Beck’s beer, after much confusion I was offered a Bax) but the confusion typified the disinterest that mainstream Memphis had in its local success story. One of the most gratifying elements of Gordon’s book is the conclusion, which suggests this disdain – much of it a product of institutional and inbuilt racism – has now evaporated. In the wake of Elvis’s death and the tourism dollars generated by Graceland, a new respect has been granted Stax. But the positive ending isn’t about filling motel rooms, it’s in keeping with the spirit of the label. The Stax Museum of American Soul Music – its premises a replica of the studio, on the original site – now contributes enormously to the community with its music and education programmes. This street-level activity proves to the neighbourhood children, whose grandparents once danced outside the doors of the studio, that music will not just help take you there, but to respect yourself.

* Update – apparently more expanded footnotes are to appear on Robert Gordon’s website, alongside some pure musical gold he rescued when visiting the Stax building as it was demolished: a stash of reel-to-reel tapes, featuring jam sessions by Booker T and the MGs, radio stings, etc.

Visit the Memphis Music Hall of Fame website for many rare pictures and links to audio interviews and video clips. The Stax Museum also has many video clips. Here is a Spotify playlist of 252 songs mentioned in the book, compiled by Jim Higgins of Milwaukee.

Finally, a word from our sponsor, Rufus Thomas.

Bars and barbers

For most of the country Waitangi Day is a holiday that comes at the perfect time, when we are in denial about returning to work. The action at Waitangi itself has become theatre of the absurd. This year, TVNZ is footing the bill by paying Tame Iti’s expenses. The reasoning is sound if not the ethics: he is good box-office and great visual talent. And by making the news rather than just covering it, those extra ratings bring in more advertising so that we can see more quality television. And, like Shortland Street, it lifts the numbers of Maori on our screens.

Writing about the demise of The Bulletin I mentioned my surprise at how long the slogan “Australia for the White Man” had stayed underneath its masthead: until the early 1960s. Even now you could expect to hear that line expressed along with a belch somewhere west of Alice. Maybe not in an “Abo bar”, but to see it in the hip ’60s, in a magazine that was helping to bring civilisation to the white Australian? No wonder Robert Hughes, Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer were shooting through to London.

Poneke emailed to say that the official White Australia policy wasn’t abandoned until 1973, by prime minister Gough Whitlam, and pointed to his blog about this, which detailed the overt racism in New Zealand within living memory. One legendary example was how difficult it was for a Maori to get his hair cut in Pukekohe in the early 1960s.

By coincidence, I had just come across this incident in the back pages of NZ Truth. It was in June 1961, a year after 150,000 New Zealanders had signed the No Maoris No Tour petition. (The All Blacks went ahead and toured South Africa without any Maori players, but for the last time. In 1970 Maori were included but as "honorary whites": Danie Craven needed Sid Going at the box-office.)

Pukekohe, declared Truth, “is a town with a colour bar.” Maori comprised one in seven people of the 5700 citizens in the market-gardening town just south of Auckland. Indians and Chinese were a good proportion as well, but the colour bar applied only to Maori. If you had the misfortune to be the tangata whenua of Pukekohe:

You cannot sit upstairs at one of the local picture theatres. You can go to only two of the town’s half-dozen barbers with the certainty that you won’t be subject to the humiliation of being refused service. Even some beauty salons have refused Maori women admission.

One young Maori truck-driver from nearby Waiuku told me that he went to the pictures in Pukekohe with two pakeha mates.

His two mates were told they could go upstairs but that he would have to sit downstairs. This has happened to dozens of Maori people.

A couple of years earlier, the cinema distributed upstairs tickets to some “selected Maori”. They didn’t like being singled out for special treatment, so sat downstairs with their friends.

Until recently, reported Truth, Maori men had also been barred from one of the local hotel’s two bars, while Maori women could drink only in the section next to the hotel (and then only if their husbands brought them out their drinks). And another cinema had opened up, in which Maori were welcome to sit upstairs.

Pukekohe’s Maori leaders have done their best to fight the colour bar that rends their town. But the fight seems hopeless. The Maoris have pocketed their pride and resignedly accepted the discrimination …

But imagine the shock and humiliation of an out-of-town Maori passing through Pukekohe who stops for a haircut. He walks into a barbershop, sits down, picks up a magazine to wait his turn. Then someone tapes him on the shoulder and tells him: “They don’t cut Maoris’ hair here, mate.”

For all the mud the paper slung at Maori on other issues, racism towards them was one cause that Truth didn’t mind campaigning about. (I suppose it made up for the “pai gorry Hori” jokes they ran into the 1970s.)

In 1954 the paper reported that at least one of Rotorua’s four licensed hotels wouldn’t let Maori drink in the lounge bar. A Maori returned serviceman was their example. He entered the bar on crutches and was meeting a European friend and his wife. The two men hadn’t seen each other since the war, where the Maori had been injured fighting for King and country in the desert. The publican said Sorry: your friends can stay, but you’ll have to leave …

“Admittedly,” [said Truth, letting itself down somewhat] “there are Maoris in Rotorua still more suited to an indolent, generous and carefree life that Polynesians are natural heirs to.

“Whether this gives any one race the right to discriminate against them or the thousands of others who are useful and sometimes talented citizens, is a question that should be very quickly answered by the conscience.”

The events at Waitangi may seem like posturing, on all sides, but it doesn’t take much digging to see why it’s a necessary annual ritual. Some may be promising – or threatening – that the Maori seats are about to become history. But history isn’t even history yet.