When Old Pete Ruled The House-With Banjo Man Pete Seeger In Mind

When Old Pete Ruled The House-With Banjo Man Pete Seeger In Mind  

CD Review

By Zack James

Pete Seeger: headlines, footnotes and-a collection of topical songs, Pete Seeger, Smithsonian/Folkways, 1999

“You know you are wrong Seth about that first time we heard folk music, Woody Guthrie folk music in Mr. Lawrence’s music class back in seventh grade at old Jeramiah Holton Junior High,” Phil Larkin told one Seth Garth former old time music critic for the now long gone The Eye. Paid music critic a not unimportant point back in the day when alternative newspapers like The Eye survived and flopped on the sweat of unpaid unrequited volunteer labor and today too when the social media are flooded with citizen critics by the barrelful and everybody claims some expertise. Paid or not though Seth had called up Phil to verify what his fellow folk aficionado Jack Callahan and more recently drinking partner at the Erie Grille had told him when he had called upon Jack to refresh his memory about the first time he/they had heard a Woody Guthrie song. Jack had told Seth about the time that Mr. Lawrence had tried to unsuccessfully ween the class away from their undying devotion to the jail-break rock and roll music that was sweeping up youth nation just then. Then being the late 1950s. Seth had accepted what Jack said because he was after all a fellow aficionado, even if Seth had had to shoehorn him into the genre at the beginning and because he knew that Jack would not spread word around that Seth was not totally on top of every bit of arcane folk music lore around.  

So it was a reputation thing Seth was worried about even these many years later. He had mentioned Jack and his conversation at the Eire to Phil in passing one afternoon and Phil had said he would think about any possible earlier listening. This was important since Seth had become very cautious about using any information not fully verified ever since early on in his journalistic career he had made the cardinal error of not checking out hearsay and rumor fully. He was berated by his tough editor for that mishap. Never again. So he was using his double check method on this question since he had been asked to write an unpaid article about the old folk days for the prestigious American Folk Song Review.    

Phil continued the conversation by telling Seth, “Tell that jackass Jack Callahan didn’t he remember that in fourth grade Miss (now Ms.) Winot had played This Land Is Your Land  on that old cranky record player of hers in order to teach us some kind of  civics lesson, taught us that we were part of a great continental experiment. Remember that she had played the Weavers’ cover of that song with Pete Seeger doing that big bass voice thing and some other guy whose name I don’t remember was booming out the baritone and Ronnie Gilbert who just passed away was doing a big time soprano thing.” Jesus, Seth thought to himself Phil was right, right as rain. The two spoke of a few other non-music issues and then they both hung up.           

That was not the end of it for Seth though, not for his article anyway. See Phil’s mentioning of the name Pete Seeger had sent a chill down his spine. Pete Seeger, and only Pete Seeger had been the reason that he had been ever cautious about sources. Back in 1965 he (and Jack and Jack’s then girlfriend now wife, Kathy, and he thought Mary Shea was his date) had attended the Newport Folk Festival that summer. That was the summer that Bob Dylan exploded the traditional folk universe by introducing the electric guitar into some of his songs. Did so on the stage the final night of the festival to boos and applause. Seth had been working his very first job as a free-lancer for the East Coast Other, another of the million small publications starting up and falling trying to find a niche in the print universe (free-lancer by the way since the usually cash-stripped publication had nobody else going to the concert so Seth got the assignment).   

Here is where Seth had gotten into trouble though. He had a friend, a sound man friend who worked at the Club 47 in Cambridge who was doing duty at that job for the festival. A couple of days later he had run into the guy in Harvard Square and had asked Seth if he knew what had happened on the stage the night Dylan went electric. The guy swore that Pete Seeger had at some point pulled the plug on Dylan in disgust at taking folk music out into the common trough of rock and roll. Seth could hardly believe his ears-this was the hook that he would run his story on. In the event he put this hearsay into his article. No big deal, right. Just something to spice up the piece. The article was published with that information in it. No problem for a while. About a month later he was called into Larry Jeffers office, the editor of the East Coast Other then and shown a personal letter to the publication from Pete Seeger disclaiming the whole story about pulling the plug on Dylan and was looking for a retraction. Seth immediately went to the Club 47 to check with the sound man. It turned out that the sound man had not actually seen Pete pull the plug but had heard about the story from one of Dylan’s sidemen. The newspaper issued a retraction and Seth had egg all over his face.          

The whole story of whether Pete Seeger pulled the plug or not on Dylan became part of the urban legend of the folk scene and still has devotees on both sides of the dispute long after Pete is dead and Dylan in out on another leg of his never-ending tour. But you can bet six two and even that one Seth Garth will be checking sources to see if Miss (now Ms.) Winot was the original proponent of Woody Guthrie’s music. Enough said.     

When Mister Beethoven Got Rolled Over-With The Music Of Mister Chuck Berry In Mind

When Mister Beethoven Got Rolled Over-With The Music Of Mister Chuck Berry In Mind

CD Review

By Zack James

Chuck Berry: The Definitive Collection, Chuck Berry, Chess Records, 2006 

You never know when two or more old guys, two or more mature forget the old unless you seek peril gals too but this one is about guys, will gather down memory lane or what will trigger that big cloudburst. Seth Garth and Jack Callahan two old time friends from high school in Riverdale had an abiding interest in music successively rock and roll, the blues and folk music (never losing interest in any in the process just that one would wax and wane at any given time). Seth had eventually become as an early part of his journalistic career a music critic for the now long defunct The Eye, an alternative newspaper out in the Bay Area in the days when he, Jack and a few other guys like Phil Larkin headed out there to see what everything was all about in the intriguing Summer of Love, 1967.

Recently though Seth and Jack, and occasionally Phil would get together and talk music shop at the Erie Grille where they would down a few scotches to level out (their expression). One night they had been at Seth request discussing the first time they had heard the legendary Woody Guthrie sing his songs, or one of them anyway. As it turned out Seth had drawn a blank on when that might have occurred and he begged Jack to think the matter through since he was preparing an article, an unpaid article, for the American Folk Music Review and needed a frame of reference. Jack had come up with the answer-in Mr. Lawrence’s seventh grade music class when he put on Woody and a bunch of other stuff to try to ween them off rock and roll which the man hated (and which they loved, loved to perdition). Seth had accepted that answer (although later he contacted Phil again about the matter and Phil reminded him about the song This Land Is Your Land covered by the Weavers with Pete Seeger in Miss Winot’s fourth grade class on her cranky old record player and he would use that source in the article).     

All this talk of that fateful seventh grade music class, and Mr. Lawrence, is probably what solidified everybody in the class in their devotion to rock and roll. But that was a hard fought and paid for devotion. A few days after the night with Jack at the Erie Grille Seth woke up from a nap thinking about the time in Mister Lawrence’s class when he was being crazy about Beethoven, wanted the class to appreciate classical music.  Seth, Jack and Phil had had enough and started in one class singing Chuck Berry’s throwing down the gauntlet Roll Over Beethoven and the class cheered them on. Of course in this penalty-ridden world Mr. Lawrence took his revenge and the trio spent several afternoons after school since they refused to apologize for their outbursts. Seth smiled to himself-Yeah, rock and roll will never die. To prove that assumption just listen to Mister Chuck Berry’s gold star compilation here. And be prepared to do something rash.     

Once Again-The Summer Of Love,1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet

Once Again-The Summer Of Love,1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet

By Jeffrey Thorne

The Scribe said it best one night, one cold San Francisco night, a summer night when the Japan currents went awry and reminded one of old Mark Twain’s witty sayings about the coldest winter he had ever spent-August in the city of sweet brethren Saint Francis, when he declared (so like that mad man to use the seventh person imperative for such small letter events), that the breeze coming through the land would shake society to its foundations. Would make nine to five a bore, make that long suburban tract complete with dishwasher and sanitary garbage disposal obsolete before the last mortgage payment hit the dirt, would make those three point two kids and that one dog a victim of old-fashioned thinking. Said, get this for a guy who became a non-believer, a non-believer in risen Christ if you can believe that very early in his teens (and went to church, side door church just to sit a few rows behind some lovely he was pining over just to watch her ass so yes a non-believer) that the new dispensation was at hand-if we could keep it, keep the bastards, and you know who the bastards were then-the night-takers and guys who conned you into nine to five dreams, suburban flats and, what was it three point two kids (we will pass on the not mandatory dog) from barking at the door.   

That was the rub, that little counter attack from out of the blue when we thought the world had stopped turning on itself

and had gone upside down that eventually would do in even the Scribe, would turn his mouth to ashes, would turn a sainted brethren (not many knew his given name was Francis in those days when everybody was “reinventing” themselves including clustering up new monikers to get washed clean (also a Scribe expression) down the gutter road, float him out to the Japan seas long before he ever heard the Duke blast that high white note. Yeah, blast the times, blast the whole fucking world for taking down a brethren as pure as snow.    

Once Again On History In The Conditional-Or In The Spy Thriller Conditional-The Film Adaptation Of Ken Follet’s “Eye Of The Needle” (1981) -A Film Review

Once Again On History In The Conditional-Or In The Spy Thriller Conditional-The Film Adaptation Of Ken Follet’s “Eye Of The Needle” (1981) -A Film Review

DVD Review

By Will Bradley

Eye Of The Needle, starring Donald Sutherland, Kate Nelligan, 1981

No question, although one might posit that we or they should move on, the whole Hitler saga from World War II has made many a writer, spy thriller writer, producers and directors plenty of gold, plenty of coin. Especially around the question of what would have been the response if, well, let’s say Hitler had known definitively that the Allied invasion to free Occupied Europe (occupied by Hitler and his minions) was to be at Normandy Beach rather than elsewhere come D-Day. That is no abstract question for the protagonists and their foes in the film under review the adaptation of Ken Follet’s Eye Of The Needle. Moreover not only are profession academic, men of learning and such, smitten with such speculations but your average thriller writer had taken up the cudgels big time. Of course history in the conditional is always tricky for the academic, for the professor with one big idea contingent on that vague conditional but apparently is the fount of wisdom for the thriller boys and girls.

Here is why for Follet devotees. Henry, I will follow Lance Lawrence’s’ recent trope of saying somebody, so Henry somebody in this case, played by pliable Donald Sutherland,   who the hell knows since he is a high-end, high-born German spy, placed in England even before World War II started that Auden September 1939 when he, Auden, blew town, the agent using a million aliases when it suited him was a key operative keeping tabs on what the freaking Brits were doing for war preparations. He would not let anything get in his way including nosey landladies and the trademark way of dealing with such trouble at the end of a stiletto, hence needle, the eye part you can figure out. He was able to operate free as a bird for most of the war until things got dark in Germany, better, took a turn for the worse on the Eastern Front where the Russians, who bore the brunt of the action against madman Hitler and his crowd, started their long journey to Berlin and the raising of the red flag over part of that city. What they wanted to know, what Hitler wanted to know, and this is good military policy mad men or not, was where General Patton was going to launch what even Hitler knew was a run to Berlin from the West. But where. That was Henry somebody’s task-to find out and to deliver the proof to the big boss himself in Berlin via a convenient U-boat off the Scottish coast.

Normally such an operation by a pro like Needle would be a piece of cake and in real life maybe that would settle things but this is spy thriller theater, so everything has to be a travail-and it is. Needle got the definitive proof on film and that was the start of his journey home. The problem was the Brits, Scotland Yard, were on to him, knew he has done some nasty things to get and keep Father Hitler in power- and information. The chase was on with the coppers about two, maybe seven steps behind the elusive Needle. Until he reached Storm Island, well-named having been shipwrecked with a stolen boat during a storm, a trawler, as that U-boat waited impatiently for his call. The Storm Island situation despite its isolation though would be Needle’s downfall once he encountered an embittered former Royal Air Force pilot who lost his legs in a civilian automobile accident of his own mistaken doing, his wife and child all who have left sweet home London for the boondocks and stormy weather.

Needle figured to be on easy street via this nice quiet hellish homestead as he waited for that U-boat. Problem though is grilled by that embittered pilot, and bedded if you can believe this, by that neglected wife, played by Kate Nelligan, who was just lonely because of hubby’s neglect as was Needle since he was a loner. Along the way said pilot got wise to our Needle but paid the price for that knowledge with a dip face-down in the cliff-drenched waters. Wifey, after a few rolls in the hay with Needle which she did not complain about, finally learned the truth when she discovered her husband’s body and subsequently Needle made what would be his fatal mistake by saying he had just seen her husband alive. Knowing he was nothing but a German agent she went mano a mano with him to protect herself and her son. In the end that is enough to seal Needle’s doom long before the coppers showed up. Still I wonder if Needle had gotten to the U-boat and gotten to see his master in Berlin whether Hitler knowing the route of the invasion would have changed things. Better ask a military historian. 

When Sylvia Sidney Battered Her Eyelashes-The Once And Future…Princess- Ms. Sidney and Cary Grant’s “Thirty-Day Princess” (1934)- Film Review

When Sylvia Sidney Battered Her Eyelashes-The Once And Future…Princess- Ms. Sidney and Cary Grant’s “Thirty-Day Princess” (1934)- Film Review

DVD Review

By Lance Lawrence

Thirty Day Princess, starring Sylvia Sidney, Cary Grant, Edward Arnold, 1934

Lest one forget this country, this United States in a republic, yes, republic with a small “r,” despite what fragility that designation has come upon of late, of the past fifty or sixty years. Our forebears, oh you know this but let me get it off my chest, our winter soldiers when that meant something, drove the British, dear Mother England, into the deep blue sea, into the Atlantic and thereafter, what did Ben Franklin say, formed a republic-if we could keep it. But there has been a lot of backsliding on the question, on the question of giving a pass to every royal Tom, Dick and Harry. Of every Kate, Jane and Mary. Of worrying to a frazzle about what Princess somebody was wearing, or not wearing, of giving a pass to all kinds of stuff our forebears, rightly, would have blanched at while decayed royalty goes about its unsavory business. There I have it off my chest. What brought me to the froth was a look at the movie under review, The Thirty-Day Princess, where in the heart of the Great Depression, in 1934, in this country (and worldwide), fairy tale princesses had center stage. Which told me before I remembered about Henry James and his robber baron era novels which had plain, ordinary, rich Americans, male and female, pining away for some title, some sign if formal nobility to separate them from the hoi polloi, that this infatuation has a long pedigree.

I have left the reader in the lurch enough let’s get down to brass tacks. The off-kilter king of Taronia, Tiberia, something like that, some mythical European country does it really matter since it is mythical needed cash, big amounts of cash, to do the kingship business up right and to live in the splendor he was used to in the old days. Along comes Mr. American Moneybags, Mr. Plutocrat, does it really matter his name, played by perennial unlikable guy Edward Arnold, a guy who didn’t jump out the window in 1929 and had been working the chump bond market to get back on easy street offered to get the king 50 mil, 50 million just walking around money now that even pan-handlers would turn their nose up at now but big dough back then.

The problem: times were tough, and investors were wary of foreign market bonds after all kinds of floats had gone bust so they needed a hook, needed a front. The front turned out to be the king’s daughter Princess something does it really matter the name, royalty okay, played by battering eyes Sylvia Sidney who could tidy things up with a trip to America to hustle the bonds, put the king and commission crazy Moneybags back on jump street. She went but early on in New York she contracted mumps and would be out of action for, okay, thirty days if you read the title of the film before reading this screed. The deal was off, done, forget jump street. In that case though you would have underestimated commission crazy Moneybags. He came up with the bright idea of getting a substitute who looks like the princess. Guess what he finds- one who looks amazingly like the princess, Nancy something, does it really matter her name, played by a woman who really did look like Sylvia Sidney but who was a down at the heel actor living on cheap street between skimpy parts. She grabbed the role, the dough and maybe something for the resume after playing hard to get.

Enter Marshall, does it really matter the name as you can now guess, a muckraking newspaper publisher who has a bullseye on the back of crooked Mr. Moneybags, played by pretty Cary Grant in his early career, who was ready to move mountains to squash Moneybags’ operation. Until he met the “princess.” Then all caution was thrown to the winds and he acted like any other American who has forgotten that this country is a republic with a small “r.” He fell for her big-time and in an unseemly manner if you asked me. The “princess” fell for him hard too so what we have here is the two millionth variation on the old Hollywood tried and true “boy meets girl” trope that that glamor town made into a very profitable art form. Problem: princess turned actress was living a lie, was just a hireling once Marshall somebody gets on to the grift.       

Don’t worry though things smoothed out a little when Marshall ( I don’t have to say “somebody” at this late part of the piece, do I) realized that he loves that democratic down at the heels actress whose heart really was of gold and that was that. Needless to say although Taronia got its bonds money Mr. Moneybags got his comeuppance too. Only in America.

On The 84th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky- Fourth International-We Need A Socialist International More Than Ever

On The 84th  Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky- Fourth International-We Need A Socialist International More Than Ever 

By Harry Sims

Usually I am a behind the scenes guy dishing out anniversary dates and other facts and figures to site manager Greg Green and/or the recently created Editorial Board but I felt compelled to write a little something about the anniversary, the 80^th anniversary this month of September, of the Fourth International that will be forever linked to the name of the great Russian Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In accordance with the seemingly obligatory notice of transparency that accompanies anything today greater that what you had for breakfast at one time I was close to those who were carrying on the wilted tradition of the Fourth International after Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent down in Mexico in the summer of 1940. Aside from that though, as the headline to this introduction telegraphs, we are still in need of an international that will lead the way forward for humankind’s hopefully more equitable future. Such progress as we are now painfully aware does not happen automatically but must be planned and led by people committed to such aims. The same is true for those who want to revive the night of the long knives that was the hallmark of the 20^th century and now the first couple of decades of the 21^st century. So the die is cast.

Here is a short primer for those legions who do not have the foggiest notion of a what an International, Fourth or otherwise, is or was. These institutions are associated with various historical epochs of the socialist movement in all its struggles-victories and defeats. The first short-lived International was associated directly with the personages of the socialist revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of the Marxist wing of socialism back in the middle of the 19^th century. The two important events beyond the fact of creating the first international devoted to the struggle for socialism were the support for the Northern side led by Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War and the stalwart defense of the Paris Commune, the first workers republic, of 1871 which was drowned in blood by Thiers and his mercenaries. The Second International before it became a “mail drop,” before it dropped the ball in not opposing World War I on any side, an event we are commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the Armistice this year as well, was the first mass organization of international socialism toward the end of the 19^th century. With the rapid rise of industrialization under late capitalism working people swarmed to this organization to defend them. In 1914 with the aforementioned failure to oppose the bloody war which decimated the flower of the working classes of all European nations its historic important as a serious force for social change much less socialism was finished even if the shell lingered, still lingers on today.

The Third International, Communist International, Comintern, and the Fourth share not only the personage of Leon Trotsky but purported to have the same aims at various points up to World War II. The Comintern was created as a direct result of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 by leaders Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky among others for the direct purpose of leading the world socialist revolution. When that task was abandoned in practice under the Stalin regime in Russia Trotsky in exile and with not enough resources called for and established the Fourth International we are commemorating.

Traces of that Fourth International like the Second still exist but unlike the first three Internationals it was essentially still-born in a time of defeats, serious defeats for the working classes especially with the rise of Hitler in Germany. So why beside nostalgia for an old International associated with the name of an honest revolutionary do I write this short piece today. Like I said the headline has telegraphed what is needed, what I think is needed today-another International, a fifth International if you like to lead the fight against the one-sided class struggle that is being waged by the international capitalist classes. While Trotsky’s organization for many reasons including the decimation of its cadre in Europe during World War II never got off the ground some of its programmatic points in the key document that came out of the conference which established the organization-the Transitional Program- read like they could have been written today.

Beyond the program though cadre, new cadre are needed to continue the forlorn fight against the greedy vultures who control the means of production and finance and that is where Leon Trotsky’s desperate and usually lonely fight to bring the 4^th International to the light of day can still serve as a model going forward. He, Trotsky, a man who has led the Russian Revolution of 1905, has subsequently been exiled and escaped the Czarist prisons when that revolution was crushed, had been central to the seizure of power in the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, had been Commissar of War during the bloody civil war against the counter-revolutionary Whites and their international imperialist allies, and had led the fight to save the revolution when the dark hand of Stalin and his henchmen pulled the hammer down stated unequivocally at the time in 1938 that establishing a new international to fight the dark clouds coming over Europe was the most important task he had done in his life. In our own epoch we are looking for such men and women to continue the task. They will have to read about and look at these 1938 documents and that very uneven struggle along the way.

Workers Vanguard No. 1139	7 September 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

Reforge the Fourth International!

(Quote of the Week)

Eighty years ago, on 3 September 1938, the Fourth International was established under the leadership of Leon Trotsky. In opposition to the reformism of the social-democratic Second International and the Stalinized Communist International (Comintern), its founding document, excerpted below, provided the framework for building a new world party of socialist revolution. It is the task of the International Communist League to reforge the Fourth International, which was destroyed by a revisionist current under Michel Pablo in the early 1950s that renounced the need to build Trotskyist parties.

It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.

Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program, which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program, which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying. The Comintern has set out to follow the path of Social Democracy in an epoch of decaying capitalism: when, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses’ living standards; when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petty bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state.

The strategical task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism but in its overthrow. Its political aim is the conquest of power by the proletariat for the purpose of expropriating the bourgeoisie.

—Leon Trotsky, “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” commonly known as the Transitional Program (1938)

She Came Out Of The Karoo-The Music Of Tony Bird-A Review

She Came Out Of The Karoo-The Music Of Tony Bird-A Review

CD Review

By Zack James

Sorry Africa, Tony Bird, 1986

During the 1980s Seth Garth had been taking on more and more purely political assignments for the New Times Gazette, a successor newspaper to the old alternative The Eye for which he had gotten his first jumps in journalism as the film and music critic. It wasn’t that he had lost interest in covering the happenings in the world of independent cinema and the edges of popular music but that in that period there were political trends around the struggles for liberation in Central and South America and Southern Africa that for the first time since the slowdown of the Vietnam War back in the early 1970s required attention. And so Benny Gold, his editor from back in The Eye days who had moved on with the Gazette assigned him more and more of those political assignments with the idea that he would weave those in with some off-beat cultural pieces.    

One night he had been in the Open Space, a new music club in the Village [Greenwich Village]that had previous been a coffeehouse, a popular one, the Unicorn, to hear a new guy out of Africa who Seth was told had an interesting beat, had combined the sounds of Mother Africa with more popular Western music. This was the kind of off-beat combination that he was sure Benny Gold would go for. As the MC for the evening announced the performer, Tony Bird, he was surprised that out came on the stage a young white man backed up by an all black group of sidemen. Seth had known that there were some, not enough, white youth who were supporting the various black liberation struggles in Southern Africa, particularly in South Africa but he was not prepared for a white musician to surface who supported those struggles although he should have known that fact going in.    

Tony Bird let everybody in the place know where he was coming from when he started singing a very heartfelt and upbeat song, Sorry Africa, taking on the burden on his shoulders of expressing sorrow at the way the white man, the way his people had treated the ones they had conquered one way or another. Very moving. 

What had gotten to Seth that night though and he was as surprised at this as he was that Tony Bird was a white African man was a song that he finished up with, She Came From The Karoo. The Karoo being the outback in the country he came from. What was strange about the song was that except that the locale was Africa it could have been a song of love and lost in America. More to the point was the vision that Seth had of the woman Tony was speaking of, a woman who came out of the mist with a red sundress on and effected all around her with her bright Botticelli smile and demeanor. Seth thought that little idea, the idea that a woman could spark such imagination out in the bush was the hook that he would use in his article. That and that Tony Bird, a black liberation  struggle fighter in his own right had no apology to give to Africa.     

Riding With The King-The Music Of B.B. King

Riding With The King-The Music Of B.B. King

CD Review

By Zack James

Riding With The King, B.B. King, Eric Clapton

“You never know where music, the muse of music if that is the right way to say it, if it is not redundant” Seth Garth said to his old friend Bartlett Webber one night when they were discussing various musical trends and commitments over a few drinks at Friday’s in downtown Boston. Seth had just been commenting on the hard fact that the guys and gals who were holding up the blues traditions of that quintessentially black musical form were mostly then younger whites who had gotten their baptisms of fire back in the early 1960s maybe the 1970s when as part of the British invasion of rock groups (the Beatles and Stones mostly) who worshiped at the feet of the old bluesmen and as part of the folk revival of the early 1960s when the young were looking for roots music and hit upon some old time country blues singers they got hooked on this genre.(That worship at the feet was no mere expression since as august a group as the Rolling Stones made their way to Chicago, made their way to legendary blues label Chess Records, made their way to meet Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.) 

Seth went on, “You know with very few exceptions, maybe in the old days guys like Taj Majal and more recently Keb ‘Mo young blacks were running away from their “blues is dues” contributions, except the hip-hop artists who were savoring those blues as backdrop to their new language experiences.” Bart nodded his head not so much because he was as knowledgeable as Seth about musical trends, he wasn’t, but because ever since Seth had turned him on to various non-rock and roll forms of music such as these blues and folk music he had deferred to him on such subjects.        

That deference to Seth had not been happenstance since for early in his journalistic career starting with the American Folk Gazette when he was still in college he had been a music critic most frequently and profitably before it folded long ago when the ebb tide of the 1960s faded the prestigious The Eye. Moreover although Bart was a true aficionado Seth would be the one to lead the way forward musically ever since the old days back in Riverdale when Seth had been the guy who turned the crowd they hung around with to that folk music that was coming over the horizon. He would take the lead here as well ever since both men had attended a concert at the Garden by Big Bill Bloom, the legendary folksinger from the 1960s. Both men had agreed to walk out of the performance before the encore as a protest to the hard fact that Big Bill could no longer sing, was practically talking the lyrics through. That experience got Seth onto the trail of an idea. He wanted to check out all the singers still standing from back in the day who were still performing and rate them on the question of whether they still had “it.”  As it turned out some did like David Bromberg and his band who burned up the joint one night downtown. The late Etta James didn’t, didn’t have it. And so the quest.      

That quest was now centered more particularly on the fading fast few blues masters still around. That is where Seth began to see that break in the black blues tradition as two generations or more removed from Southern country life or hard inner city industrial madness which had brought a couple of generations north in search of a better life and the music needed to pick up the pace as well bringing forth the whole electric blues scene that hummed cities like Chicago and Detroit in the early 1950s. That brought them to this-B.B. King and Eric Clapton CD. Clapton, one of those British invasion guys who was crazy for the blues (and classic rock, now classic rock, with the likes of Chuck Berry who Clapton to this day swears he does not know how Berry did what he did with a guitar as hard as he looked to find out what the master was doing) and the King were going to perform together at the Garden in a week or so.

At the concert Seth and Bart had been apprehensive when they saw ancient B.B. and his latest version of Lucille being escorted to a seat on center stage with Eric Clapton to the side. Not to worry though the work they did was a great success. Seth mentioned to Bart though that he was not sure where the new generation would get their blues from since they would never go away, the blues, the causes for the blues, whiskey. Women, work, and a wad of dough just like rock and roll once guys like Eric passed away. This CD was their work to insure the future whatever may come-okay.