THE SIGNAL from David Katznelson
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”― H.P. Lovecraft
My friend and often music co-conspirator Mike Minky and I attempted to go camping from Aspen to California these past few days since I had to bring the car back home anyway. The camping trip was a bust because of the smoke in the air…everywhere….everywhere but Tahoe where we actually got a hike in yesterday that was blue sky clear in between the days of toxic smoke. But we did get some great music listening in. And as referred to in the last newsletter, started digging into the John Lomax recordings he made in Alabama on a trip in the mid-30s.
How these recordings got to Mike and me is an interesting tale. First there is John Lomax, father of Alan Lomax, who made recordings of musicians/artists during his travels in the 30s. The recordings were made onto disc…cutting grooves as the music was performed. John would often back-announce the music, giving names to the artists and other details about the songs.
In the late 60s, the Library of Congress engaged in a duplication project where sound engineers took these discs, with each side holding 2-5 minutes of music, and transferred a large amount of them onto tape, which at the time was the best-known way of preservation. This project included the transfer of the recordings done by John Lomax, Alan Lomax and others. Before duplicating each disc, the sound engineer at the helm would record himself telling the listener the disc number and side that was about to be heard.
More recently, the library has taken many of these reals of tape and digitized them. And it is those digitized versions. These versions can be accessed by people like me who are doing research or thinking of producing a record or using them in the classroom. The digitized versions come in hour blocks. And listening to them is SUCH a trip, hearing a musicologist, John Lomax in this case, speak to us from the 1930s, after first hearing an engineer from the 1960s introduce the tracks. It is like an audio version of a roman city, each construct being built atop of the previous.
As I blazed through Colorado to Utah to Nevada to California, Mike took notes of each track as we listened through several of these digital hour-long blocks so we could go back later and find the ones that we liked the best. We heard blues, gospel, zydeco, instrumental country fiddle, four-step dance numbers, sermons…all voices from the past that we got to appreciate because of the fortitude of the cultural archivist. As is often the case with these projects, we heard multiple versions of popularly sung songs like “This Little Light Of Mine,” “John Henry” and “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” each with slightly different lyrics evolved by different singers in different cities. And while each recording has deep historical merit, every once in a while, we hit something that was truly phenomenal, some bit of music that that carried with it artistic genius from almost 100 years ago. It was like when Asher and I recently found gold in our pan.
Voices of the American Dustbowl era talking and singing to us in the era of fire and smoke, brought to us by the fortitude of the Library Of Congress who knew that if they were not recorded, they would be forgotten.
And what is even more exciting is that Alan Lomax’s non-profit The Association for Cultural Equity (led by his daughter Anna) is raising significant funds to do the final duplication project for the rest of John Lomax’s hundreds of hours of American audio history. There is more to come.
Life Lessons from Robert De Niro
Interview Magazine has been taking quotes from the interviews they have done with icons over the years, people they have connected with multiple times, and created these “Life Lessons” from them that are totally worth checking out…sometimes even inspirational.
Bob Marley & The Wailers: The Capitol Session '73' to Premiere Exclusively on The Coda Collection
Well Holy Moly, there is another recording…with video accompaniment…of the classic original Wailers line-up with Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and the recently passed Bunny Wailer. Rolling Stone reports that this session was done soon after the band was thrown off the Sly Stone tour, which puts it probably right after the San Francisco sesh that found it’s way onto the album Talkin’ Blues (featuring amazing music, not great mixes and a strange presentation with a Marley interview intermixed between the songs). This looks killer and will be made available for us all on Sept. 3. Back to Reggae School time, Jah Rastafari.
BLOW UP: Joseph Henry on immersive van Gogh
I have had mixed feelings about the immersive Van Gough exhibit and really enjoyed Jospeh Henry’s take on it and the future of this kind of art appreciation.
The 36-Pound Comic Scrapbook That Chronicles the Great Depression
“In 1928, the barber, I.A. Persinger, began compiling this collection of “Wash Tubbs” comics, a well-loved daily newspaper strip by artist Roy Crane, whose adventure graphics popularized the visual sound effects—Bam! Pow!—we know so well today. Soon, though, the scrapbook expanded with handwritten insights from Persinger and his customers on life during the Great Depression.”
WEEKEND LISTEN: Steppenwolf: The Second
Steppenwolf’s second record has been one of my favorites since college, and is truly one of the greatest albums to listen to on a road trip (which I did a few times these past weeks). Yes, the hit Magic Carpet Ride (found strangely enough on side 2) is an undeniable killer…but the rest of the record holds up to its most famous track. Great songwriting like Faster Than The Speed Of Light or 28…and incredible bluesy numbers like Tighten Up You’re Wig, Don’t Step On The Grass, Sam (ending with a drug bust in the recording studio) and Disappointment Number (Unknown) which begins a series of songs that triumphantly end the record…with John Kay’s gritty, signature vocals and Michael Monarch’s underappreciated guitarmanship: this record is a grooving, shaking wonder that the band could never follow up.
A Caution To Everybody
By: Ogden Nash
Consider the auk;
Becoming extinct because he forgot how to fly, and could only walk.
Consider man, who may well become extinct
Because he forgot how to walk and learned how to fly before he thinked.
OK….how about another Ogden Nash poem….they are soooo good (this one goes out to my son Asher who was so bugged by this bug that he ended up moving inside during an outdoor lunch and later asked me pretty much what Nash discusses here):
The Fly
God in his wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.
OK…JUST ONE MORE…and we can even keep to the fly theme:
A Flea And A Fly In A Flue
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, "let us flee!"
"Let us fly!" said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
Do you have a fact checker?