Attention All Pickpockets

298

[e=d y 2/28 wee hrs.]

[comically unnecessary limitations as creative kick-in-the-ass: 1st writing I’ve done in many a time, & I didn’t realize I was doing it

(these are all records I was digitizing, impressions recorded in realtime. talking to myself as usual, started typing down on a lark.)

most use every 1 of the 140–even less factoring in names/titles. texting generation, weaned on getting the most out of every character

unsurprisingly painful omitting so many details… still, I would stand by a pretty good number of these. might even be worth reading!]

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‘Mass of a Pilgrim People’: silly-long spliced(?) applause brks for 1ce earned; MedMissSister+Paulists=magic. Jauntiest-ever “LOTWTC”! #rips

‘Mass for the Secular City’: Absurd, triumphant, bracing - & unsettlingly modern. See also St. Pius X Choir version of their “Kyrie”. #rips

‘Red Sovine’s 16 New Gospel Songs’: E.C.-indebted country-gospel w/ a dash of swamp geetar; great wacky-to-weepy gamut-running tunes. #rips

Del Wood, ‘Are You From Dixie?’ Disappointing lack of vocals, though Opry piano undeniably #rips - crack band, too. Still, short/overpriced.

Ric Masten, ‘Breakin’ Through’: Rare, wry meeting of beat-folk & gen-you-wine twang. Like most beat LPs, some groaners, but more hits. #rips

The Pennywhistlers, ‘A Cool Day & Crooked Corn’: Immaculate mostly-Balkan traditionals, with a bright hat-tip to These United States. #rips

James Talley, ‘American Originals’: OK, VERY 80s singersongwriter; maybe takes title “Baby, She Loves a Rocker” a little too seriously #rips

Vikki Carr, ‘1 Hell of a Woman’: & so she is! The impossible 70s soft-country LP whose string arrangements don’t schlock - they BITE. #rips

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Addenda: only bought the Del Wood for the songtitle “Psychedelic Mockingbird”; Red Sovine opening number implies all dogs go to heaven #rips

Addendum: James Talley side B is actually kinda ace but 2 songs in 3 about yr man being “Open All Night”/”Ready to Go” seems excessive #rips

Addendum: until today, I had never heard anything SO ’80s that even the harmonica sounds like a saxophone. #rips

Addendum: OK. it figures the arranger behind “Ode to Billie Joe” + S&G’s “Bridge…” would be such a mad genius with this material #rips

Addendum: SHIT. Hard-won “Old Rugged Cross”-style gospel sustain on last chord of “Holy My Hand” busts into riotous titletrack reprise #rips

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[this batch o’records is the product of a 70s/80s singersongwriter infestation of america’s $ bins before which yr humble critic was helpless

selections from most of these LPs can be heard on the most recent edition of Attention All Pickpockets “sing a song of seven-pence”. thanks.]

p.s.:

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(UPDATE: Yesterday eve in Boston at the Brighton Music Hall, Mr. Callahan, impeccably dressed, began his set without a word, without a sound but the first plucked notes of this song. From where I stood, all I could see behind the microphone were the very corners of his mouth. I can’t say for sure, but from time to time I felt as if they bent together, upwards, into a fleeting smile. Only, only when standing at the microphone, stock still, only when obscured. A mystery to and for my eyes only.)

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I’m beginning to think that this is the best music video of the year to date.

After the beautiful, understated Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, Apocalypse finds Bill Callahan sharper than ever, and moments of sweet perversion abound for those with open ears. All of this needs to be written about, and it will. But the triumph of Apocalypse is in its implausible equilibrium, the masterful, blindsiding swerve from meta-cowboy swagger to an entirely different, entirely more delicate embodiment of self-awareness – from a sweeping apocalyptic vision to an apocalypse of self.

In this way “Riding for the Feeling” is the “Jim Cain” moment of this newest anti-manifesto[¹], a moment of sublime questioning, a ride that, in the most beautiful way possible, ultimately goes nowhere. In “Jim Cain”, Callahan ends where he started, “in search of ordinary things”; here and now, after six minutes of riding that feel like an eternity of straight lines, he is unsurprised to find himself still riding, still saying the same goodbye to faces now long-distant.

Much as the album draws together seemingly contradictory fragments of Callahan’s documented psyche, “Riding for the Feeling” is also a meditation on his entire body of work, a contradiction, a casting aside of narrative. “With intensity,” the drop of water immortalized in the galloping “The Well” “evaporates by law” before it can fulfill its name by, well, dropping. More broadly, it is a song about Apocalypse itself, an apocalypse upon an apocalypse, a revelation that revelation is beyond us. “I realized I had said very little about waves or wheels or riding for the feeling,” Callahan regrets as he listens to his own tapes (is this somehow one of them, both written and recalled in the same strange moment?) This song is many things at once, it seems to exist outside of time: a premonition of the album to come; a conscious determination of what has come and what must follow; a purging, a catharsis, a confession; a repentance, an addendum, a completion to what is in retrospect a work left unforgivably unfinished, and the apprehensive hope that this last offering will be accepted.

“I asked the room if I’d said enough,” he sings, but inevitably, “no one really answered”. They never really could have. He knows this.

“What if I had stood there at the end and said again and again and again and again and again, in answer to every question: ‘Riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling, riding for the riding for the riding for the ride’?” Perhaps this would be enough; perhaps this could be the album, this line. Perhaps these four words can bear the weight of an apocalypse. Perhaps they will be spoken at the end of the world.

“Would that have made a suitable goodbye?” And out of nowhere, the last chord rings out and we are left for a moment in silence, the ride never-ending but no longer being told. I’m not sure it is suitable, that moment always evoking a sudden pang no matter how many times I listen, but it will do.

But all of this was supposed to be about the video. I suppose it’s impossible to talk about this image in itself; it is the song, it is the ride, it is the feeling. At first I found it maddeningly repetitive; now I’ve learned to watch for the feeling, to feel. That’s really all there is to say.

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(Here, in Apocalypse you will find another of this year’s most stirring collections of music. Listen here [once the archive is restored] for “Drover” – and please, please watch the video above, remove yourself from all distractions and simply ride.)

As long as we’ve known them, (with what seems like every release they offer up to our wandering ears), “[ ] of Spaces (Corners)” have introduced themselves as someone new,[¹] acknowledging with a half-smile that we’ve met before – maybe many times – but trusting us, as friends, to respect their shifting self-identification.[²] And we do. It’s almost an honor, a moment of humbling intimacy when this new, moment-ous name is uttered, a static-shock handshake that freezes time, then tumbles effortlessly into an unspoken embrace: and suddenly recognition, recollection, can continue from where they left off. We smile unreservedly and ask after family and mutual friends, swap stories from the intervening years – for while we’ve tried our best to keep up, life always seems to intercede in that bittersweet way of hers; this time, it’s been two years, and the joy of meeting is softer than ever.

For those of us brought together by their music, this act of naming allows us to connect over times we remember and those before our own, to share memories and to take on the willing burden of new remembrances, new stories that together make up their story, and ours with them. We thumb through photo albums, laughing, clutching our hearts at the strange sadness sometimes seen in their smiling eyes. Someday I will tell a new friend: “I met them when they called themselves Village of Spaces, and for a time I found a home there.” And I will sing of Alchemy and Trust (for by then I will sing more freely, self-consciousness stripped away leaving only endless gratitude), and neither of us will ever forget.

For Alchemy and Trust is a house, a home, the human landscape and beyond it… and yes, it is a village. It is a red-painted door on a porch left wide open to a yellow-lit hallway,[³] the acrid sweetness of wood burning slowly. It is the house my grandfather built for his family from the ground up in Camarillo, California, and it is that same house when they left it behind for another by the sea, their beds, tables, dressers, everything left behind, lovingly carved directly into walls lovingly erected – and lovingly left behind at the proper time, though not without a certain wistfulness. (This is not wrong, this is human, this is good, the way to peace, to acceptance, this is as it should be.) “Please don’t ever forget me,” Dan Beckman-Moon sings, speaking for himself, for his family,[⁴] for the Spaces we all have known, for that home and all homes that have been or will be. As if we could.

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Their home has a stove in it;[⁵] so does mine, but for the time being the oven can’t be used without provoking the carbon monoxide detector. There are no scents of baking wafting from my kitchen, then, only admonishing alarm shrieks too unsettling to risk again, but my burners heat up just fine, just like theirs – gas, a strange transition for me. Many meals have been burned, but these sounds bring me closer to facility. I have never listened to Alchemy and Trust while cooking, but I think I will this time.

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(Alchemy and Trust is among the most staggering releases of 2011, and with gentle hands it has held my love since it first touched my ears. I know that I will look back upon our first meeting with no less fondness at year’s end, and far, far beyond. It carries my solemnest, brightest and most emphatic recommendation, and I hope that you will accept the invitation to enter in, as I have to my great delight.)

[It also contains what is far and away the most beautiful string of words put to pen in quite some time: “Migratory messages from Appalachia’s backbone.” Think for a moment what that language holds in it, draws to it.]

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll see you in ninety days,’ I said, ‘I have to feed some children, they’re starving, they can’t wait for me to go around and try to collect by nickels enough to give them something to eat. They have to eat now, and I’ll pay you, don’t worry.’

“He says, ‘Aunt Molly Jackson, don’t you offer to walk out with them groceries.’ I reached under my arm and I pulled out my pistol and I walked out backwards and I said, ‘Martin, if you try to take this grub away from me, God knows that if they electrocute me for it tomorrow, I’ll shoot you six times in a minute.’”

– Aunt Molly Jackson, The Library of Congress Recordings, 1939.

In all the liner notes of all the records I’ve ever laid against my palms, flipped over gently, I have never encountered a more punch-to-the-gut line, never felt my eyes flutter in such momentary incomprehension, never felt my heart jump so rabbit-like out of my chest. If you have ever heard Aunt Molly Jackson sing, there can be no doubt in your mind, as there is no doubt in mine, that this is the truth.[¹]

Any skeptics are implored to open themselves, to let themselves be vulnerable, to Aunt Molly’s “I Love Coal Miners I Do”, composed in “nineteen hundred and thirty one, two weeks after I started on my tour, collecting finance for the miners’ children in Kentucky. I began to feel blue and lonesome and homesick for home.” Her plaintive cry will make your legs quaver, will strike you down to the ground in its skin-flaying starkness, a capacity for all emotion at once – unwavering solidarity is met with something that is not nostalgia, that is stronger and more nuanced than nostalgia, with solastalgia [²] for a home scarred by such evil, such loss; near-but-not-quite (never-quite!) resignation to the acerbic taste that will never leave her mouth, a roiling, spilling repugnance for the System – but most humblingly of all, all entwined, bound with a blindsiding tenderness, the ‘love’ of the title yet love is not enough, this is somehow more, forging all into a single, unified, relentless force, a force much like the unions she fought so hard to preserve, a squealing freight train throwing up sparks as it careens toward Washington, a strength of will that has not been seen since in American protest song and which perhaps may never be possible again.

“I have all most lost my voice I can not sing eney more I got so week that I could hardley walk a cross the floor and all I am Abble to do is to compose songs that will teach the laboring class right from rong.”

This written just weeks before her passing, to folklorist John Greenway, a man who loved her work so much as to carry the weight of that voice – and, in turn, all that had been carried by that voice – on his own back after her wildfire-spirit had been purportedly snuffed out, to lay the strain of so many years on his own vocal cords, completing The Songs and Stories of Aunt Molly Jackson with reverent voice, the clarity of once-and-for-all vitalized songs bound up with the crackle (in every sense) of her storytelling,[³] sparkling even in the sneering face of adversity. These songs will never pass away, yet neither will the desperate need for them. John Greenway knew that and so do we.

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“Aunt Molly Jackson Defines Folk Songs Once and For All Aunt Molly Jackson is the toughest woman I ever heard of. She was a union organizer for the National Miner’s Union, she was a nurse, a midwife, and chronicled the history of her people in songs and stories. She suffered hardship, injustice, and lived through the deaths of many dear ones, but kept her spirit strong and kept the stories living.

(Listen here for her reading.)[⁴]

– Rosalie Sorrels, Miscellaneous Abstract Record No. 1

Rosalie Sorrels strikes me as pretty tough herself, although this virtue manifests itself in very different ways. Unlike Aunt Molly, she had the luxury of singing love songs, poem-songs, songs of untempered joy, and her storytelling is prettier, more delicate, more sentimental. Yet even if the urgency of Aunt Molly’s improvised, lived-in story cannot be tapped for all Sorrels’ empathic power, she reads these words with the utmost sincerity and deepest love. “The only kind of song that is a folk song, is what the folks composes out of their really lives, out of their sorrow, and out of their happiness, and all,” she says, surely knowing that some of her own songs may not pass this test, yet knowing also that some do. In those songs, the spirit of Aunt Molly and the spirits of countless other strong women are speaking through her, and she can feel it; that’s why she cannot help but read this story. To mean it.

[…]

“I Am a Union Woman Aunt Molly Jackson This is a true song.”

– ibid.

It’s beyond me to add to this line. This is the way it was and is.

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Knowing, meaning, believing. That’s what this all is about.

Sound carries strangely in manmade spaces.

A lull: the last roaring gasp of Horseback’s The Invisible Mountain fading away, and then —- across the suite, as if by some strange design, two plucked piano tones break a silence not yet born. Just that, and no more: two notes, the second breaking off sharply, ushering in an interminable stillness. There must be something behind these tones, but the channels of sound that weave themselves throughout my home have never flown naturally, their path disrupted, rerouted by staid blocks of concrete. These arbiters have seen fit, it seems, to offer only these two notes.

The absence of rhythmic grounding begins to evoke in me an unexpected tension as I await the sporadic, seemingly aimless repetitions: one by one, their jarring entrances reaffirm my already-keen attention. But they aren’t repetitions at all: I begin to notice within the maddening insistence of the line subtle, unsettling nuances.

The peculiar forcefulness, the crisp progression of these notes is intimately familiar – and steadfastly unplaceable. I’m reminded of Philip Glass’ Metamorphosis series for solo piano, but it feels even barer; bare, yet somehow not at all barren. My focus is by now rapt, devoted; as each note diligently flings itself forward, somewhere in my consciousness a wall is wearing down, and behind it must lie recognition. I think again of the tangible walls that define my living space, that disrupt the organic currents of sound and echo, trying to reconcile the certain graciousness in which they improbably convey to my ears these brittle, skeletal sounds with their ambivalent, intractable refusal to recognize the right to pass of their musculature, whatever it may be —-

when

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barely audible even by comparison, a final delicate plink decays – but not into silence, offering instead its expiring breath to a gasping, then lively, fiddle. The aural elisions could hardly be more total, more immediate: the golden age of rough-hewn, spontaneous American field recording and a typically polished composition in the ultramodern minimalist tradition, an introverted, solitary academicism and the tangible presence and solidarity of a responsive, engaged community… all blur together in that dizzying moment —- and

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at once, I know. I’ve played the piece countless times, included it proudly on my demo and inaugural radio broadcasts, let it wash over me with a degree of surrender that often eludes me. The “transition” that plays such a key role is really more of a translation, or even something that could be called an intrapolation, but whatever it is, to my great sadness and despite my best efforts it’s long since been rendered unavoidably rote to me through rampant repetition, intimate familiarity. Yet in this moment the piece is reimbued with every bit of the invigorating audacity I remember from my first encounter with these sounds; I hear it as new. I hear it as new again, perhaps even more intrinsically so than the first time and

in those sounds, I hear something I’ve never before consciously acknowledged, something essential: beneath the crackle of the fiddle sparks into being a single flicker of the piano, one final, intergenerational, cross-cultural chord. Suddenly, as the fiddle continues in its guileless exuberance, the almost spiritual warmth that had always been present behind the solitary intellectualism of the piano is drawn at last to the surface, and I understand.

This is the genius, the ingenuity of Brian Harnetty’s compositions; even in the absence of his reappropriations of field recording, his work is at once of two eras. The track, “The Night Is, and Lights Are”, is the opening movement – in many ways the manifesto – of his collaborative album with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy; the album is entitled Silent City, and as the fiddle too fades away, ushering in for the first time a living silence, I realize for the first time the fittingness of that name. In urban spaces, the play of sound and silence is thrown into chaos; these are songs imagined for the purpose of mingling with that silence, perhaps from a distance. Silent City is a sort of coming to terms with that silence, a conscious decision to reject a fruitless opposition and instead to work with it to create a new, contemporary American sonic landscape.

It is to his infinite credit that he carves a space in that landscape for folksong to breathe.

(See above for a link to my admittedly-shaky first broadcast of Attention All Pickpockets, the radio show that gives this humble language-space its name. And to hear still more, here’s “Sleeping in the Driveway”, an active collaboration with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, the ringing cords of his voice stretching to follow the contours of an aimless, fractal melody – a giving-of-voice to centuries of accumulated, disembodied yet unforgotten echoes.)