On the shoulders of giants

When genius arises, it seems to eclipse its own past. Beethoven lays down the mature musical structures of his time and superimposes a seemingly indeterminate stream of consciousness. Duke Ellington opens the locked-in unison of the swing band to soloists who are as personal and idiosyncratic as a coyote howl cutting through the winds sweeping the pines. The New Grass Revival lifts the tight-ass virtuosity of bluegrass into frantic hymns of psychedelic joy.

In his fourth year traveling the chitlin' circuit with R&B acts -- the Isleys, Little Richard, Curtis Knight -- Jimi Hendrix would not have been mistaken for a musical genius. Here's a serviceable blues of his from 1965.

A little more than a year later he turned rock and roll upside down with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, bending time, adding feedback and other noises unheard in prior notes, and like the geniuses before him stretching forms and boundaries. Here he is in 1970:

One approach to genius says it requires honesty, character and courage. I heard this model from one of my kids, who was studying Wittgenstein. There's the tripartite soul: mind (honesty), body (character), and heart (courage).  Or truth (honesty), joy (character), and love (courage).

I'm struck by how much we demand innovation. Genius seems to require standing on the shoulders of others, and adding something new. Picasso was an ordinary juvenile painter, the Beatles an everyday rave-up band in Germany, and Hendrix a typical journeyman r&b guy. Until. While they were all still in their 20s when they broke free, all had spent years intensively studying the traditions of their day. Freedom seems to come to the young more easily than the middle-aged. Mozart, Ornette Coleman, Monk, Dizzy and Bird -- all barely out of their teens when each of them first elaborated their new sound. But Coltrane was 30 before he found his sheets-of-sound way. 

And why did they break free and others don't? They had honesty. Beatles vs. Stones? Easy. The Beatles were extraordinarily honest, and the Stones posed. John and Paul had a nose for bullshit, and George and Ringo were humble as the day is long. Character? Hendrix was a man's man, releasing a libidinous creativity from his body whenever he played. Courage? Picasso, the Beatles and Hendrix were inveterate explorers, in their prime refusing to retreat to what was easy for them. 

Who will stand on the shoulders of past geniuses next? It's so hard to predict. In writing, arranging and playing, Mick Ronson was the equal of his two great partners, David Bowie and Ian Hunter. But when he was freed to play his own music, like with the New York Yaquis, the sound reduced to sentimentality. Similarly, the extraordinary fiddler Jason Crosby, who plays frequently with Bob Weir and Phil Lesh and others in the jamband scene, is locked in a less-revelatory sweetness when left to his own devices. Ronson was always worth seeing, and I catch Crosby frequently. But while they can break down what others have to say, they have more trouble finding a personal truth that transmits as genius. Here's Jason Crosby playing Bertha with Lesh and friends. What you can't tell from one song is how deeply Crosby tunes into the aesthetic and band he is playing with. He plays his solos from the inside of the song:

I have my hopes still for Derek Trucks. Burdened by the Allman Brothers legacy -- nephew of an original Allman and inheritor of the Duane Allman slide guitar seat -- most of his music is exceptionally well played Southern rock, jazz, r&b and blues. But he also has a more-contemplative (and to my way of thinking, more honest) sound that is unusual and inspiring. Listen to him blend his slide guitar with traditional Indian music:

So far, Trucks is weighed down by two traditional mentors -- the Allman Brothers and Ali Akbar Khan. He plays rock too close to the Allman Brothers for me, and eastern music too close to classical Indian for me. But one day, when he chooses to be himself, he may find a way to synthesize the two. Like how Carlos Santana blended Cuban, Mexican and psychedelic music. Or how Duane and Gregg mixed jazz, hard rock and blues to create Southern jamband music in the first place. 

To nature, not nation

Rock and roll blossomed in the 1960s at the same time that nationalism and imperialism were under relentless attack. The flag was burned, mom and apple pie were mocked, and students around the world demanded a new order. Who says Johnny should go to war? Who says the tradition of Jim Crow is OK? Who's protecting an individual conscience?

The counterculture helped spawn the great recording artists of the day, and vice versa. The message in the lyrics was not "I'm proud to be an American." Anything but. Hendrix deconstructed the violence in the Star Spangled Banner. World War II had exposed the connection between nationalism and genocide. Vietnam exposed the connection between nationalism and the similar bloodiness of legal, mechanized war.

But by 1984, record buyers embraced "Born in the USA" with delight and hardly a passing nod to its ironic message. Reagan was a pale enemy compared to Nixon. What gives? What gave?

This troubling swing of culture -- nationalism is bad when things are going bad, good when things are going good -- seems adept only at showing what is already obvious. The ambivalent voices that expose multiple views of the truth are drowned out as if they're pussyfooting.

For the last couple of years, the music of the long-defunct band The Band has enjoyed a subtle crescendo of popularity that inevitably will raise Robbie Robertson to the same reverence shown to Bill Monroe, or Woody Guthrie, or Louis Armstrong. They're game-changers in the identification of an American music. What are The Band's successors called? Americana. I recently spent a lovely night at Phil Lesh's place, Terrapin Crossroads, listening to his sons and friends cover song after song by The Band. I love these songs. I love the fact that so many bands nowadays play The Weight as an encore. I tell my friends proudly that in my Woodstock, New York days I was an acquaintance of The Band's brilliant singer and bass player Rick Danko.

Here's a great cover of The Weight. Watch as they rehearse it how the energy and confidence builds. At first only Mavis Staples is fully comfortable (it's been a standard part of her set for years) but by the end they're all tuned into the song's joy.

But I'm worried a little about my own love for this nostalgic music. These are songs written by a Canadian that honor and embellish the rural frontier of America as a romantic and unique time. No doubt The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down has one of the great anti-war lyrics of all time: "You take what you need/ And you leave the rest/ But they should never/ Have taken the very best." At the same time, it's a song of nostalgia for a time of war. It reverently conjures Robert E. Lee, the great American symbol of honoring the enemy, despite the fact that this elegant Southerner sat atop a hierarchy designed to wage a despicably bloody defense of the horrorshow of slavery.

If you're nationalist, it's easy to be uplifted by God Bless America. If you're anti-nationalist, the counterweight is This Land is Your Land. Woody Guthrie wrote his anthem -- This land is your land/ This land is my land -- in anger at the message that Kate Smith was sending. (Guthrie's original lyrics twisted Irving Berlin's words to say "God blessed America for me." It's a hymn to nature, not nation.)

There's a direct lineage from Woody Guthrie through Bob Dylan to Robbie Robertson. But isn't there as much danger from nostalgia -- drawing more from the jaunty, white-only prosperity of Stephen Foster than the soulful weariness of spirituals -- as there is from flag-cloaked, fascistic modern country songs of nationalism?

One thing that isn't nationalistic about Robbie Robertson's music is his rhythmic and melodic invention. The Band releases my body in happiness with buoyant rhythms and touches my heart with poignant, intimate tunes. The music is personal. Robertson connects directly with individuals. It's music that fits into a ballroom. I like the Stones and Who as much as anybody. But they have a legacy to answer for. They introduced arena rock -- anthemic songs that support thousands of fist-pumping disaffected youth in a collective, shared energy -- a pattern of music that coopts the same species-trumps-individual message as the military spectacles organized by Hitler  [selection from Triumph of the Will] or the self-congratulatory cheers of a Mary Kay convention. It's why I keep my distance from U2 and The Killers. They bond their live audience into a gran faloon, Kurt Vonnegut's term for a group that unites as if for common cause, but whose association is actually quite purposeless.

My distrust of nationalism isn't exactly political. Voices like Bakunin and Kropotkin, Proudhon and Ron Paul seem whistlers in the wind. They recognize the repression of the individual that is an unwelcome byproduct of any institution.  But they ignore the paradox that any effective response to institutional repression, from the inside or outside, requires the formation of a counter-institution and an identity as an anti-nationalist or anti-institutionalist.

Instead I find myself touched by the words of J. Krishnamurti [selection from U.N. speech], the Indian-born occultist who embodied the Jesus who angrily overturned the money-lenders' tables. Distrust all identification with institutions, all patriotism. Honor every capacity for personal freedom as a path to reuniting with the bigger consciousness that is available. And I translate that as finding music that allows me to be intimate with a personal joy, love and truth that might be universal but doesn't need anyone except myself in the room to be energized.

Can't resist including The Last Waltz version of The Weight. There's Mavis again igniting the heart, and Rick emoting his way through the "Crazy Chester" stanza. Rick was a goofy guy, and he might as well have been named Crazy Chester.

Heaven is within

My mind is good at sensing fault, honing in on the cause, labeling it, and gleefully passing judgment. We're miraculous self-improvement machines, every one of our 100 trillion cells checking its own health all the time, and passing along any warning signs so repair cells can scurry in and get things fixed.

Last night during live music I noticed myself withdrawing into judgment two big times. The first was during Moby-Dick, a modern work performed by the San Francisco Opera. As I sensed fault -- uh, where are the melodies, and why does everything feel like a transition, and it's pretty warm up here in the balcony, and these lyrics are pushing me too fast -- I battled to stay in touch with what was actually going on on stage. I lost the battle and left. I'll probably never listen to Moby-Dick again, and so I'll go to my death ignorant about whether it was me -- the Flipper burger I had, the two drinks at Absinthe, the heat, my own restlessness -- or the choice of singers, or the hall, or the composition itself. I say I didn't like it, but in truth I didn't give it a chance. I just reacted negatively and got myself out of there. That's how my ego works on me. It's as if culture is analogous to my cellular structure, and needs fear and caution to motivate repair and strength.

Because the second time I noticed my withdrawal into judgment was more compartmentalized and definable, I was able to overcome it and stay with the music. After I walked out on the opera, I headed to Phil Lesh's joint in San Rafael, Terrapin Crossroads. He was playing a bluegrass set with his sons and other friends. Just the idea of that touches me. Bluegrass players start as living room musicians, and so there's a family tradition: the Carter Family, its spinoff Cashes, the Whites, Osbornes, the other Whites called the Kentucky Colonels, the Stanley Brothers, the Monroe brothers, the Scruggs family, Red Allen and his sons Neal and Harley, the Dillards, and on and on, and in Marin, the Leshes.

What I walked into couldn't have felt more surprising and lovely. The lovely part was the song being played well, Early Morning Rain. I remember talking up Gordon Lightfoot to my friends in the early Seventies, and getting reluctance. Isn't he too sappy? Too Old Folk? Too commercial? Folk, bluegrass, country and rock were crossing over each other, and sometimes it was jarring in unexpected ways. The mind likes what it likes, and doesn't want to let in the new without being sure. I've seen a lot of bluegrass bands do Early Morning Rain, and Lightfoot himself, and the Leshes' version was pure commitment to a place and a feel and a harmony. The surprise was Phil's own contribution. His bass tone was characteristically subtle, staying low, resonant and cleared of bright spots so that it could unobtrusively take care of the bottom. But my mind was telling me to watch out. It sensed something different going on, and it went to work to label it either danger or delight. What I then heard was that Phil was playing the melody, the absolute lead line of the song, without changing his instrument's posture as a humble contrapuntal contributor. He was alone out there, and the band was following his melody. I wondered how often I had heard a bass sing an aria like a soprano, and it's probably not often. Sure, in a solo. But this was the very structure of the song itself being led by the bass. It was as if he took the song's introspection and amplified it by moving it into an instrument that by nature is largely introspective.

Here's a clip from another Lesh and sons show:

So what did I get judgmental about? It didn't happen during Early Morning Rain. It was later, when guitarist Ross James started playing the hell out of his Telecaster. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong, or at least seemed wrong to my ego threat machine. It wasn't that he was overplaying or had picked the wrong genre to fit, or anything about his technique, which seemed flawless enough and inspired enough. It was the licks themselves, which sounded like straight country licks adjusted to allow a knowing wink that this was only barely updated stuff that every Nashville sideman has to learn. It was when I heard "barely updated" cross my mind that I could label what seemed to be in need of repair. He wasn't playing these licks to learn them and challenge them. He was playing them to show that he knew them. It was like he was mugging. That's OK at times, but not right then. The rest of the band seemed to be deep into the difficulty of exploration in the tightass speed and complex harmonic requirements of bluegrass. He seemed outside that context, as if he was playing to the audience -- the one that I was part of, and the one that was on stage with him -- while the others were playing for themselves and each other and the constant search for divine sound.

I don't want to be on Ross James' case. It's one sample. Maybe he was just in his cups last night, enjoying his extroversion. Maybe he was clowning around because it was the right time for him to clown around. That, too is a problem with the whole judgment apparatus. It sure likes to universalize and make things absolute and sealed shut. If I had been in a clowning mood, Ross James might have delighted my self-centered ego.

Here's a funny thing I noticed one day about Phil Lesh. In the Skull and Roses version of Bertha, through the whole song Phil is mostly playing the riff from the song Judy in Disguise. He shows how a simple riff can be worked and reworked and explored in the context of a single song, and still humbly support a band and create a feel. It's introspective work, even if the riff is danceably extro.