A Howl For David Maloney

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”― H.L. Mencken

Soon after my daughter started Kindergarten, I was introduced to an older fellow named David Maloney who filled in for teachers who were ill or helped out when they wanted another adult in the room for a project. Kaya’s teacher Doug Zesiger (who is a legend among Kindergarten teachers, even writing a play for Kaya’s class around the Flaming Lips album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots) told me I needed to connect with David…that we shared a passion for old time blues and folk music. So one day after I was helping serve Kaya’s class lunch, David and I grabbed a salad and sat down for a chat. David was not only an enthusiast around the history of folk music, but he was also a seasoned folk veteran himself, having had modest success breaking out of Seattle with his duo Reilly and Maloney in the 1970s.

David was a folk singer in the classic sense: writing deceptively simple songs that told poetic tales of his life, stories about the world around him, in very much the Woody Guthrie school…the type of folk music that bubbled up in Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Reilly and Maloney were winding things down when I met David, and he was writing and record solo compositions regularly. While my daughter’s school did not utilize David’s musical gift, once in a while he would teach her class…and a few years later my son’s class…and they would come home singing his songs. During a year that Doug’s wife Annie taught music at the school, she (being a veteran singer/songwriter in her own right) taught the lower school classes David’s song Ridin’ On The Old Rainbow, which they sang as a group during a school performance.

As a parent who deeply loves music and music makers, I was so thankful that the kids got to spend time with an authentic artist like David. When he played an annual folk music festival in San Francisco’s Mission district, Barb and I took the kids to see him perform in front of a real audience…seeing him talk through the stories behind his songs before he played them, watching him do what he had done all of his life. It gave them the opportunity to see him as more than a singing substitute teacher: he was part of a musical movement who had fans and a bushel of songs to play.

Reilly and Maloney

David Maloney very quietly retired from teaching in 2019. But when the pandemic hit, he responded by regularly posting songs on Nextdoor…for his neighbors…and subsequently on a Youtube channel. Proving that he was in no way slowing down, he filmed himself playing covers, newly written songs, gems from his catalog. When he heard the howling that was going on at 8pm every night (remember when we used to do that, to prove that we were all still around?) he wrote a song about it and when the Covid-era solitude felt real, in the dark of the night, he recorded the heartbreaking, beautiful Are The Stars Any Brighter. After George Floyd’s death, he wrote a reaction: The Lonely Death of George Floyd. Song after song, David modestly kept showing a mastery oral folk tradition, of writing meaningful musical stories about our collective experience, with sweet lyrics and melodies.

I have been helping the city of San Anselmo book musicians for their Live On The Avenues summer music series and as we started thinking about who to have perform, we all agreed that David Maloney would be perfect. But when I went online to look for contact information, I was shocked to find out that he had passed away in April. What is more, outside of a nice piece in a Seattle newspaper, there was nothing written about it; a great folk musician had passed, and no story was told, no song was sung.

My closest connection to David were the Zesigers, and my first reaction to hearing of David’s passing was to call them to understand what had happened. It seems that David was on the mend from a complication with his heart, but a few weeks into his recovery was found unresponsive by his wife in his recording studio, where he had been writing a new song, dying while doing what he loved.

This next Saturday, September 16th (from 5:30-8:30), instead of David playing in San Anselmo as we had initially wanted, there will be a tribute to him where a slew of singer songwriters will be performing his songs and telling stories and memories about their dear departed friend. Annie Zesiger has taken on the huge task of producing the event—wrangling the musicians—even getting his longtime partner Ginny Reilly to come down from Seattle to perform.

Folksingers act as narrators for those of us who pay heed to the stories they tell in their songs. To have their songs passed down is the highest form of “mission accomplishment.” David’s songs will live on in the streaming channels and on Youtube, but this weekend they will be sung live by people who were inspired by his worl, the perfect tribute to the gone but not forgotten troubadour.

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Memphis Music Hall of Fame's 2023 inductees

The great Gus Cannon, whose birthday is today (he would have been 138), is one of the inductees into the 2023 class of Memphis’ Music Hall of Fame. Why he has not been in there for years? I really don’t know…but he is now, along with Deanie Parker and The Spirit of Memphis Quartet.

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2023 Phil Ochs Fellowship Announcement

The Woody Guthrie Center, which is home to the Phil Ochs Archives, is offering a financial infusion to the right scholar who is doing some research around the life and career of Phil Ochs. Any takers?

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‘The Thief Collector’ Review: An Art-Heist Documentary With an ‘Oh. My. God.’ Factor

I watched this documentary on an airplane yesterday. What began as an intriguing study of the infamous heist of an early De Kooning painting evolved into a batshit crazy story of a couple who not only (probably) engaged in years of thievery, but also (might) have written about all of them in the guise of short stories (leaving their confessions for us to find after their death)…and may have even been involved in a murder (at least one). A great documentary.

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David Crosby :: Kids And Dogs (1971)

I love David Crosby’s first solo record, If I Could Only Remember My Name and one of my favorite moments is Jerry Garcia’s guest guitar solo on Laughing. What I did not realize is that the two, Garcia and Crosby, explored their musical mesh beyond the recordings on the record. This track, Kids and Dogs, which was released on one of the expanded editions of Crosby’s solo record, gets an in-depth treatment from the good folks at Aquarium Drunkard. Worth a read….REALLY worth a listen.

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Four 1,900-year-old Roman swords found in incredible Dead Sea cave discovery

“Researchers believe the swords - which were found with a pilum, the head of a javelin - were stashed in the cavern by Jewish rebels during an uprising against the Romans in the 130s CE.”

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MAN PLEADS GUILTY TO SELLING BODY PARTS FROM HARVARD MORGUE

The horror of it all: “The self-styled "blood artist" was also…found with multiple buckets full of human remains when the cops came knocking with a search warrant. Inside those buckets, police found multiple human brains and other organs, as well as a child's mandible with teeth intact.”

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Bear attack victim mourns dog who saved his life

Think of this as a cleanse from the last article…

"I was running down the road and the bear is right behind me," Miller said. "I was yelling at the dogs, 'just keep running' and trying to keep them in front of me. The third time he ran up and stopped dead, about six feet in front of me," Miller said.

That's when Spyro, the Schnauzer, stepped up….

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Roy Lichtenstein’s Former Home on Long Island Hits the Market for $4.4 M

“The Waldmans purchased the property with Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein as a summer retreat in 1968. Together, they built a separate outbuilding as a studio and additional living quarters…Over the years, the Waldmans hosted a number of notable art world figures including painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly, dealer Leo Castelli, and Guggenheim director Thomas Messer.”

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The White Dress

By: Marya Zaturenska

Imperceptively the world became haunted by her white dress.
Walking in forest or garden, he would start to see,
Her flying form; sudden, swift, brief as a caress
The flash of her white dress against a darkening tree.

And with forced unconcern, withheld desire, and pain
He beheld her at night; and when sleepless in his bed,
Her light footfalls seemed loud as cymbals; deep as his disdain,
Her whiteness entered his heart, flowed through from feet to head.

Or it was her face at a window, her swift knock at the door,
Then she appeared in her white dress, her face white as her gown;
Like snow in midsummer she came and left the rich day poor;
And the sun chilled and grew higher, remote, and the moon slipped down.

So the years passed; more fierce in pursuit her image grew;
She became the dream abjured, the ill uncured, the deed undone,
The life one never lived, the answer one never knew,
Till the white shadow swayed the moon, stayed the expiring sun.

Until at his life's end, the shadow of the white face, the white dress
Became his inmost thought, his private wound, the word unspoken,
All that he cherished in failure, all that had failed his success;
She became the crystal orb, half-seen, untouched, unbroken.

There on his death bed, kneeling at the bed's foot, he trembling saw,
The image of the Mother-Goddess, enormous, archaic, cruel,
Overpowering the universe, creating her own inexorable law,
Molded of stone, but her fire and ice flooded the room like a pool.

And she was the shadow in the white dress, no longer slight and flying,
But solid as death. Her cold, firm, downward look,
Brought close to the dissolving mind the marvellous act of dying,
And on her lap, the clasped, closed, iron book.

Painting By Janet Werner

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”
― H.L. Mencken