MARK LANEGAN Field Songs (2001)

I am retired grunge girl who now dabbles in housewifery. The angst coveting girl in flannel and cut-off grey sweats who listened to Nirvana, The Cure and Violent Femmes was left in the mid-nineties. Since then I had been looking for something. Music that excited me the way Smells like Teen Spirit had when I first heard it. The way The Pixies “Bone Machine” made me crave Japanese fast food. And though my torment had morphed from wild and dramatic teen agony to a quieter rebellion, I still needed a voice for it. I needed angst with experience.

And I know I’m not the only one. I know you’re out there. I see you in the coffee shop line with your kids wearing your tell tale converse. We catch eyes and smile knowing that we both dreamed of being satanic cheerleaders. So this is for you, us, the ex-grunge kids.

 I knew Mark Lanegan as the lead singer of Screaming Trees, a fringe grunge band that had some success. Their song (that I knew every word to) “Nearly Lost You” in 1992 was a hit. And when I heard his voice for the first time as a solo artist, I knew I had found it___what I was looking for.

 Field Songs from beginning to end is poetry. Decidedly different from his work with Screaming Trees, Lanegan’s solo efforts are personal and intimate. His whisky-drenched and smoky voice is steeped in knowing, and I gladly drink it up every time I hear it. It’s gritty, lyrical and pains-takingly direct

 The stars and the moon

Aren’t where they’re supposed to be

For the strange electric light

It falls so close to me.

Love, I come to ride

High on that seasick rolling wave

And you know that I am

Just trying to get out

Oh the glorious sound

Oh the one way street

But you can’t get

Can’t get it down without crying

That’s from One Way Street and dare I say it, it grips me. Every time. If my soul could sing to me it would be Mark Lanegan’s voice emanating from my gut with the three pack a day habit and all. No Easy Action, a hard driving anthem, continues down that path.

 When all is done and turned to dust

And insects nest inside my bones, I see

I stagger in a daze outside my tent

No time for being alone

To bleed

The hopeless singing of a round

That much we know to do

Before we go back underground

No easy action

Then the music slows and eases into Miracle, a dues ex machina minute in the middle of an album of suffering.

 I promise you a miracle

And it will be done

Upon this one last disappearing

Bells toll, new lands and I look up

Sometimes

To see this old black Mary

Reach down for me

But the relief doesn’t last long. Don’t Forget Me (and this could be my lovely cynical self) has a bitter sarcastic edge:

 …I know that there’s somebody new

Much better than me

When that change starts to swing, keep in mind one thing

Don’t forget me dear

Because my love is true, give my best to you

Don’t forget me dear

 I won’t lie. I admit I’ve sung this in the shower hoping whose words will somehow reach my ex’s ears. But my favorite has to be Resurrection Song. It’s sorrowful and comforting.

 …Night lays me down when I’m fading

When I can’t go home because they hate me

To sing that resurrection song…

I listen to music to feel familiarity. Connection. I only mentioned a few of the songs, but the rest resonate. They are laced with images of being lost and looking for an anchor. Although there are no answers, in the end with Fix, there is a sort of acceptance or resignation that you do what you need to, to get through and perhaps, just perhaps, love.

 Love will be what’s hidden

In every single fragment

I look and I fly

A flower born from you

And I am joined with you

And adorned with you

Field Songs is a story. Hardships in life, hardships in love. Melancholy, certainly, but there are also moments of hope woven through.

If you ever get a chance to see him live do not miss the opportunity. He’s captivating. He also has many side projects including Queens of The Stone Age, The Gutter Twins (his collaboration with Greg Dulli from The Afghan Wigs) and Isobel Campbell (from Belle and Sebastian); and they are all fantastic.

Field Songs is essential listening. I’m glad I found it. The retired grunge girl in me is too.

Beth Navarro grew up in the Chicago suburbs fortunate to be surrounded by a family of storytellers that nurtured and encouraged her writing and acting dreams. Currently she is a resident writer and actor in Los Angeles’ critically acclaimed Theatre Tribe.  Her play Def.i.ni.tion, will be produced in 2010 and her short film, After, will be hitting the film festival circuit this fall.

A long channel of breath, Ginsberg

called him, the old stroked-out poet

with half-shut eyes and stiff lips

limning an image of the lean

smokestack balanced like a column

of air at the microphone,

momentarily stable,

transpiring his songs. Later,

never the same twice, electrified,

Dylan winking, jolting, twitching

and bouncing at the piano

to taunt the audience—those who

sat quietly enough to listen

among the refrain of boos and jeers

yelling “Traitor!” and “Go home!”

over the snap of energy

that incensed their sense of what was right—

to hear how, the peaceful column of air

now dispelled in the nasal yawps,

the teasing shouts and suitor’s wry

sly grins, the head held back,

the blue eyes fixed high

above the blank void of crowd,

mouth stretched uneasily around

the bony bridge of teeth, the thin man

declared, in the grip of some ecstasy

or vision, amid the vast

winding twisting concentric

rings of sound, that was exactly

the point: not what he said but how,

the tune twisted so far

beyond the decorous mean.

Check out more Donald Levin poetry here at shaking like a mountain: http://shakinglikeamountain.com/shaking/2010/03/04/at-the-red-lobster-in-duluth-mn/

learn more about molly gaudry at http://mollygaudry.blogspot.com/

Song I listened to the summer I turned fifteen: Radiohead’s “High and Dry.” I was studying writing for six weeks at Andover and there was a boy with a guitar singing beneath a tree on the quad. I still remember his name: Jeff Agia. He introduced me that day to Radiohead. What a crush I had. What a silly girl I was. He never knew I existed.

Song I listened to most, in high school: Keith Jarrett’s Vienna Concert, “Part 1.”

After Andover, I decided not to go back home to the jocks-and-thugs high school everyone there attends; instead, I moved to Cincinnati where I would try out a school for the arts. A Jazz Theory major, I borrowed this album from my professor and never returned it. I especially didn’t return it when I realized I was a terrible musician and should switch majors to creative writing. A parting gift, let’s call it.

Song I listened to after leaving California forever: Moby’s “My Weakness.” I went to the University of Redlands for college; it was one of the only schools with an undergraduate creative writing degree. It was in southern California, where I’d always dreamed I’d end up. Then, my sophomore year, my grandfather died. I quit college and went home for the first time in four years. I was nineteen. I listened to this song a lot, alone in my bedroom, missing all my friends. A few months later, I would move back to Cincinnati.

Song I listened to the summer before I left Cincinnati forever: Thom Yorke’s “The Clock.” I guess I’m skipping ahead several years. This would put me at twenty-seven. I knew I’d be leaving. I’d finished college, finished an MA, was working as a barista, which made me hate myself. Two degrees and working in food service, waiting on rich housewives who liked to belittle. I left.

Song I listened to after moving to Philadelphia / Song I listened to while writing We Take Me Apart: Ani DiFranco’s “Dilate.” I’d packed some bags, some books, and hit the road, stopped in Chicago and met many fine writer-folks at AWP. I went from there to Philly, to Baltimore, to New York, and back to Philly, where I got work teaching the GED to post-incarcerated men and women in a halfway house. Throughout it all, I listened to this song. I wrote my first book. I stopped listening to this song in April 2009.

It’s January 2010. Can you believe it? And for me this means it’s time to write another book. The first was an exercise in language, technical and stylistic matters; the next will be an exercise in truth and love. Here are some songs I’ve been listening to lately, among plenty of others I don’t know why I’m not mentioning instead.

Song I’ve been listening to lately #1: Bon Iver’s “Re: Stacks”

Song I’ve been listening to lately #2: Calexico’s “The Book and the Canal”

Song I’ve been listening to lately #3: Yo La Tengo’s “By Two’s”

Song I’ve been listening to lately #4: The Antlers’ “Shiva”

And, finally, songs I listen to every morning, immediately upon waking: Paul McCartney’s “Dance Tonight” and “Calico Skies.” Every morning, yes. Because they help me get started happy.

Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake in Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart

Neither instant classic nor pillar of the genre, the movie (adapted from novelist’s Thomas Cobb’s 1987 book of the same name), isn’t strikingly original either. The fact that it succeeds, even manages to create an imprint, falls squarely on the slumped shoulders of Jeff Bridges, long one of our more under-appreciated American actors, delivering a full-scale performance with graceful aplomb, and ultimately creating one of the signature big screen turns of 2009. It’s an effortless portrayal, filled with guile and propelled by instinct, one that is weighted with authenticity and totally devoid of blandishments.

                First-time director Cooper, who, by all accounts, stuck closely to Cobb’s novelistic intentions, brings a similar authentic feel to his under-the-radar directorial style. This is an actor’s movie, the sort that a Hal Ashby or Robert Altman would have once been drawn to, although in Cooper’s hands it is a purposefully straightforward film, lacking the extended complications or the multiple sources of conflict that the aforementioned filmmakers would have utilized to greater effect. Cooper does acknowledge the movie’s antecedents, with overt allusions to genre milestones like A Face in the Crowd (1957), Payday (1973), or Tender Mercies (1983).

                Crazy Heart’s well-traveled tale concerns itself with Bad Blake (Bridges), yet another country and western macho poet with a fistful of magical songs, heartsick and stumbling towards oblivion with a lungful of cigarette smoke and gut full of bourbon. Blake bounces from Bowling Alley stage to straight-up saloon gig, often puking mid-song, piloting himself with laid back charm or churlishness, almost broken with regret, yet nursing dreams about reversing his showbiz status. His shaky encounters with a trio of antagonists set the stage for an admirably unforced and neatly ambiguous tale of redemption. Colin Farrell is surprisingly competent in the part of Tommy Sweet, Bad’s protégé turned superstar pop commodity, while Robert Duvall (who mined much of this same territory when he starred in Tender Mercies) brings some down-to-earth vigor to his few scenes as Bad’s now sober pal and father figure, Wayne. The typically incandescent Maggie Gyllenhaal rounds out the triumvirate as a young single mom and journalist with (you knew it) with a misbegotten penchant for bad boys.

                The seemingly infallible T. Bone Burnett (partnering here with the late Stephen Bruton) once again delivers a soundtrack with acumen__ a batch of songs that seem realistically poised between classic outlaw C&W and the peculiar wryness of those leftfielders from the Townes Van Zandt school. Attitude-wise, the point-of- view is cut from the Kris Kristofferson prototype (physically, Bridges could be the guy’s younger brother), the guy with the long hair and cowboy hat, submerging his intellect behind the drawl and the drink, one of those guys who buys right into pop cult diviner Nick Tosches theory of straight up C&W music: “And ultimately there’s something about the depths of the human soul expressed within the confines of a rhinestone-embroidered puce suit—something not only of innocence and demonology but of proper perspective as well—that can’t be found elsewhere in this garbage heap that we call culture. ”

                Crazy Heart acutely digs into the mysterious songwriting process, albeit one that demythologizes at the same time, hinting strongly hints that dues paying is a central part of that process.

                The same simple but sage methodology might apply to Bridges career. Since Crazy Heart comes up a little short in a variety of ways, its true strengths emanate directly from Jeff Bridges. Any movie-movie barroom chitchat would be promptly elongated if a debate ever sprung up over the actors best moments in a career filled with highlights and good choices. A quick, extremely partial (and highly personal) list: The Last Picture Show (’71), Fat City (’72), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (’74), Rancho Deluxe (’75), Stay Hungry (’76), Cutter’s Way (’81), Starman (’84), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (’88), The Fisher King (’91), American Heart (’92), Fearless (’94), The Big Lebowski (’98), The Door in the Floor (’04); all in all a potent delineation of superb choices and exemplary execution from an absolute American big screen acting treasure.

                Bridges, replete with unfettered belt and charmingly slurred voice (it’s actual rhythms established through chain-smoking and perpetual drinking), is another middle-aged American male somehow cast adrift, captivatingly lost between bad intentions and good expectations-a species Bridges does well— a still likable loser, weak, yet imbued with fierce pride. The performance is scented with melancholy and all the more effective for it, adding a redemptive tone to the overall proceedings that doesn’t delve into heart tugs or corn. 

(Suggestion: Put your cash on Bridges walking away with the Best Actor Oscar. It’s a done deal.)  

Scott Duhamel writes about film for The Providence Monthly, all things pop for PopKrazy (www.popcrazy.com)  his own blog, (http://culturevulturetime.blogspot.com/), and to our great fortune, shaking like a mountain.

Read the shaking interview with Crazy Heart author, Thomas Cobb (http://shakinglikeamountain.com/shaking/2010/01/15/shaking-talks-to-novelist-thomas-cobb-about-crazy-heart/)

cartoon by Arsenio Orteza

He left behind the frozen landscape
and empty mines of his Midwestern home
to head east, for New York
where he heard it was all happening.
At every stop along the way to the Port Authority
he jumped out to grab a smoke
and check on the heavy battered Gibson
riding in the luggage compartment
beside his big suitcase. In between
he took in the fields and crossroads
of the vast country.

When he landed in the city
he walked happily down Eighth Avenue
through smells of pickles and pizza
to locate himself in a railroad flat
on the sixth floor of a walkup
where he peed on the rats
in the bathroom in the hall.
Days he made the rounds
of the folk clubs in the Village
singing for owners in his rough voice
the songs he had written on the backs
of invoices from his father’s store.
Nights when he wasn’t singing somewhere
he spent soaking in the tub
in his kitchen and dreaming of the future.

But the gigs got shorter and came less often
and he started getting to parties
after the important people had left.
The record company stopped returning his calls
and one day a club owner told him, “Look,
I’ve seen it all, and you just don’t have it,”
just as his money ran out
and rather than ask his father for more
he took the A train back uptown
but not before leaving his guitar at the Salvation Army
on Spring Street at the corner of Lafayette
and twisting his harmonica rig
into the shape of the state of Minnesota
and dropping it in a trash holder on the street.
He jumped on a Greyhound back to the north country
where he learned how to cook
or at least defrost and reheat fish
at the Red Lobster in Duluth.

He gave up listening to music at all
though occasionally lyrics formed
unbidden in his head
while he stood over the big stove
turning flounders that smelled of butter.
He hummed these secret tunes to himself
growing old behind the cries of the servers
clamoring for their orders.

Donald Levin teaches English and chairs the English and Modern Language Department at Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan. He is the author of two poetry books, New Year’s Tangerine (Pudding House, 2007), and In Praise of Old Photographs (Little Poem Press, 2005); a novel, The House of Grins (Sewickley Press, 1992); and poetry and fiction in numerous print and electronic journals. Samples of his guitar work are on YouTube at RivrRidr902’s channel.

Mark Cutler sings/plays/shakes the mountain/2-27

Last Saturday night, fifty-plus hearty spirits crowded the Mediator Fellowship Hall in Providence, RI, braving the churlish end-of-February weather for a night of shiny music, shimmering poetry and shaking prose. It was shaking’s maiden voyage public-wise, a shakingdown cruise so to speak. Everyone survived. Yea, I dare say even flourished__ to the delight of the writers and presenters (Jericho Brown, Marita Andrade, Jo-Ann Reid, R.A. Stovetop Lawson, Liz Carter, Scott Duhamel and shaking editor Mr. Don), and a trio of fine singer/ songwriters (Mark Cutler, Chris Monti and Anthony Loffredio).

[View with PicLens]

That’s not very hip, we’re just saying—the editors

Just Kids

By Patti Smith

Illustrated. 279 pages

Harper Collins

Another writer once proclaimed Patti Smith to be the “Godmother of Punk,” and it would be tricky to dispute that she doesn’t deserve the title. Her 1975 debut album, the seminal Horses, uses an effective blend of well-crafted poetry and three chord guitar rock with beautifully placed feedback to set a standard for a generation of rockers. Bands such as R.E.M. and The Smiths, which fielded influential musicians of their own, have remarked on the impact of Smith’s music on their own development.

It could be argued that all good art, at its core, is no more than the amalgamation of the personal coming together in beautiful harmony with the vast world of technique and perspective that preceded it. Art is also a search for new ways to express our experience as humans. Success in artistic endeavors often relies on chance encounters and serendipitous intersections of lives coming together. It is this philosophy, in part, that Smith shared with the controversial photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, who looms as an important and reassuring presence throughout Smith’s early career.

When she was barely twenty years old, Smith embraced the notion that dedication to one’s craft was essential to success. While her early material isn’t overly topical, history must play a role in the creative act; art happens in a particular time and place, in this instance New York City. Smith’s arrival to the New York art scene of the early 1970’s could not have been better timed and gave her access to a unique set of experiences. Perhaps, her integrity as a performer remains unquestioned because of her strict devotion to artistic values learned at the beginning of her development. While Smith’s success can be traced to a committed work ethic, she was able also to recognize important opportunities for growth as they happened. These factors allowed her career to culminate in a perfect storm with her first record, Horses, which propelled the poet/punker into the realm of serious artist where she remains today.

Smith’s recently released memoir, Just Kids, does a beautiful job of connecting the dots of her early career. The book walks us through her arrival and development as a hungry artist in New York City. It’s a familiar tale as she struggles with money and jobs. She has moments of clarity and doubt about her work. She meets lots of people, some already famous, some on their way to being so.

What may set Just Kids apart, however, from so many other memoirs and tell-all biographies is that Smith made a conscious effort to be frank about those early years in NYC, while forgoing the cheap confessional aspects that typify the genre. Just Kids isn’t concerned with the dysfunctional lives that may have been swirling about Smith at this time. Instead, it seeks something nobler than peddling gossip about the scene’s heyday. It wants to set the record straight about her development as a musician and to breathe new perspective into Mapplethorpe’s often misunderstood artistic vision.

While the agenda of Just Kids is to illuminate those heady days and to rehabilitate Mapplethorpe’s reputation as an important artist of that era, it reads as a valentine to the struggles she endured before earning her success. Indeed, it’s those struggles that Smith uses to define her life; it’s as if she sees herself wedded to Mapplethorpe as a newcomer to NYC’s established art scene, where Warhol looms large. Warhol’s achievements set the commercial bar at a ridiculously high level, his art worth millions, while starving artists like Mapplethorpe and Smith can barely scrape up the money to get one of them into MoMA.

There are many such anecdotes in Just Kids. The reader learns how Smith fed her imagination from a young age when she developed a voracious appetite for books. Her family, poor but thoughtful people, live in New Jersey, from where, through a stroke of luck, she is able to escape by bus to the Big Apple after being asked to leave the teacher’s college she was attending. In one of the more shocking moments of Just Kids, the reader learns that the move followed an unplanned teen pregnancy, where the child was brought to term and then given up for adoption.

She is still in a fragile state and desperate to make something of herself when she arrives in New York. She has vague ideas of staying with friends who have since moved, so she sleeps in the park and in doorways until she meets Robert Mapplethorpe. He helps extract her from a sticky situation and they eventually find a place to live together.

They draw, write and paint together and the reader gets a picture of domestic tranquility. They develop a strong bond and pledge to make it together as artists in a town at the epicenter of high culture. This bond, forged in the depths of poverty, forms the crux of the story told in Just Kids. And it’s a story about gratitude, a willingness to sacrifice creature comforts for the sake of art and a dedication to watch each other’s back.

Smith has chosen an interesting way to tell her story by detailing as much about Mapplethorpe’s evolution as an artist as her own. It’s the picture of the time she spends with him that makes Just Kids revealing— stories that don’t shock, but move with emotion instead. A great example is her account of their days in the Chelsea Hotel, which seems to have happened at a fortuitous time in their development as both people and artists.

At the Chelsea she begins to come out of her creative shell and find her poetic voice. Surrounded by influential writers and artists, she begins to gain confidence in her own talents. She befriends Gregory Corso, who becomes something of a poetic mentor to her. She writes a song for Janis Joplin, hails cabs for a drunken William S. Burroughs and is mistaken for a boy by Allen Ginsberg on the prowl. During this period at the Chelsea, it’s easy to see how her confidence would grow, being able to share her work and life among cultural icons

Mapplethorpe was an important guide to Smith. In a note she wrote to him before he died of AIDS in 1989, she sums up his presence in her life: “You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together.”

Smith also tries to shed some light on the often misunderstood art Mapplethorpe created in his short life. As a much-maligned target of right-wing fanatics like Jesse Helms, Mapplethorpe’s work became a symbol of all that was wrong with publicly-funded art in the 1980’s. While many of his photos dealt with homosexuality and tried to put a face on those who would become afflicted with the scourge of AIDS, he was branded a pornographer and worse by many conservatives looking to make a name for themselves in the culture wars. Smith humanizes the man as a tender, thoughtful friend and an inspiration to her own work.

Smith’s willingness to share the poverty of these early NYC years with the reader is palpable. Smith and Mapplethorpe’s constant lack of food seems to work as a metaphor for the hunger necessary to make it as an artist or musician in NYC. The description, while meaningful and detailed, left my stomach rumbling as I wished I could get them both a sandwich to tide them over. It was an aspect of the memoir that certainly had a visceral effect on me, no matter how romanticized.

Of course, to anyone interested in reading a rocker’s memoir, the famous figures mentioned in the pages are what give a book like this its cultural cachet. Just Kids doesn’t disappoint in this regard. The reader gets to mingle with famous Beat writers and drag queens, rock n’ rollers not long for this life and wealthy patrons that ease the burden of trying to create art without a steady income. The reader also gets a steady stream of Smith’s reading list of favorite authors that she uses to illuminate certain aspects of the life she has chosen to live. Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet are frequently referred to in the text and, at one point, she visits Rimbaud’s French birthplace.

Reading Just Kids, it is easy to think of both Smith and Mapplethorpe as outliers and rebels. As a writer, I am envious of their persistence in creating without self-doubt, without looking for the kind of immediate payoff that measures success most days. They pay their dues and Smith seems to relish the idea of transcending the poverty that she implies was a necessary component to developing her craft.

The memoir seems to be a way for Smith to express her appreciation for a life that was shaped not only by her talent and will, but the harsh reality of NYC and all the characters that come with the territory. When she quotes other writers, we get the impression that she is walking in the aesthetic footprints of those who came before her and embody the tradition of the creative outsider.

Smith clearly relishes the role of the quiet, artistic rebel, a throwback to another time. She regards the pursuit of art with a romanticized view, arguing that art and artists are necessary to society, if only out on its fringes. She’s after an ideal, something that happens on the edges of society where craft is perfected and moments of beauty occur before commoditization. Mainstream audiences won’t care about the poems or sketchbooks, won’t be impressed with altars or necklaces assembled from the cheap and the found. However, Smith wants the readers to better understand the artistic impulse that she and Mapplethorpe were working from, an attempt to find truth.

The epigraph to Just Kids concerns itself with this idea nicely. Here, Smith writes of Mapplethorpe, saying: “In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.” Smith wants the reader to understand that trying to see “God” in the common experience is what makes art so worthwhile. Early in his artistic development, Mapplethorpe had success using found items to make new things from an open-eyed discovery of his surroundings.

Reading the memoir, it was easy to see how she could appreciate the artistic progeny she helped to influence, but could loathe the ruinous lifestyle of someone as talented as Kurt Cobain. His biography, Heavier Than Heaven, seems to have some parallels with Just Kids, as Cobain overcame his poverty through a single-minded approach to crafting songs and making music that felt both raw and polished. But Smith apparently feels that creativity should be a buffer against dependence, imbalance and emotional turmoil, for she is not satisfied merely to assess her ideals for an audience but rather seeks to show how she lived them. No poser or slacker, her dedication to imagination was the road less traveled. Towards the end of the book she discloses the fact that she knew well before the age of 30 that she would never have to punch another time-clock. That seems credible, especially for an artist who would go on to exert such influence and create such culture-shifting output.

1. Michael Jackson

PYT (Pretty Young Thing)

Hearing a breathless Michael Jackson whisper his way under somebody’s clothes in this intro is almost as much fun as knowing that LaToya and Janet are doing the call and response background vocals. By time he commands, ”Pretty young things, repeat after me,” you can’t help but think he’s singing directly to you.

2. Donna Summer

Bad Girls

Come on, there are actual police whistles in this song, and the guitar is relentless to say the least. “Toot-toot, hey, beep-beep” is probably one of the best lyrics of all time.

3. Rufus featuring Chaka Khan

Tell Me Something Good

If this song doesn’t reek of sensuality, then Chaka Khan can’t sing. Check out the brothers in the band responding to each verse with the best grunts the tribe could utter.

4. King Floyd

Groove Me

The slightly off-key groans that happen at completely unexpected moments in this song land it firmly in the realm of perfection. And the laziness of the horns makes you want to dance lying down.

5. Marvin Gaye

Got to Give it Up

Who are all these people having such a good time in the background of this song before Gaye even starts to sing? I’ve got to invite them to my next party.

6. Prince

I Wanna Be Your Lover

Let me get this right. This man gets away with telling a woman that he’s broke and doesn’t want to pressure her, but if she’s at all interested, he wants to be the only one to make her come….ahem…running. Oh the wonders of an impenetrable falsetto!

7. Aretha Franklin

Jump to It

Aside from one of the loveliest wars between a lead and her background singers that I’ve ever heard, this song includes Franklin scatting her way through the bridge and imitating the synthesizers on the track.

8. Maze featuring Frankie Beverly

Before I Let Go

If you don’t already love this song, if you are not swept toward glee by Beverly’s opening call to whomever may hear, if you can listen to his impassioned lead into the band’s focused bridge without singing along, then you are not a human being.

9. Teddy Pendergrass

I Don’t Love You Anymore

At some point in the studio, Pendergrass gets downright tired of singing and just starts to half yell to the woman, “Maybe someday when we get our heads together…” And these horns don’t even bother to feel sorry for the poor guy. You would think that the man who was so good at making us make love wouldn’t be able to walk out on anybody as mad as he is here. RIP, Teddy P.

learn more about jericho brown here

suddenly so sad I couldn’t speak…

You turned on some jazz,
slow round notes
the saxophone mellow as sunshine.

This is what you do
to my life: turn the dial
and music
snakes its way,
inexorably through every dendrite and follicle

until beauty
lights up the tired brake lights
of cars creeping through the storm in front of us,
the lace-iron struts
of the heaving beaten bridge,
and even the gleaming green and black puddles…

Alison Luterman

Alison Luterman’s two books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Press) and See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions.)  She also writes essays and plays, and performs with the improvisational dance theatre troupe Wing It!  Her blog is www.seehowwealmostfly.blogspot.com.  She teaches through The Writing Salon in the San Francisco Bay Area.

by R.m. Cresser

When does it dawn on you that you want to play the piano? When your mother keeps dragging you off to see her best friend, Dame Myra Hess? When the toy piano you got for your fourth birthday is the only thing you managed to save from the earthquake? Or is it when you pass a musical instruments store, suddenly begin trembling, go inside, sit down at the first bench, and, without knowing how, spin off what the astounded salesman identifies as Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue?

 None of these things happened to me, and yet I wanted to play the piano. More precisely, I wanted to play jazz piano. There were three problems with this. The first was I was so unmusical that even in elementary school I belonged to that half of the class briskly defined by the music teacher Mrs. Fleming as “non-singers,” meaning I drew a lot of scales while the hearty of tone were practicing “Amazing Grace.” The second problem was that the closest I’d ever come to a piano was my record collection. And third, this desire for the keyboard didn’t come over me at some Mozartian five or Lisztian nine, but at 17, when most prodigies were already washed up and most teenagers had other kinds of boogies and blues distracting them.

On the other hand, there were encouragements to my ambition. One, I wanted to play jazz piano. Two, I wanted to play jazz piano. Three, I wanted to play jazz piano. And then there was Andrew Kobel, the neighborhood piano instructor. For years I had been looking across the street at the sign in his first-floor apartment window — ANDREW KOBEL, PIANO TEACHER, TRADITIONAL, JAZZ, MODERN — without feeling any personal tug. More than that, Kobel himself had made sure his public appearances were exercises in antipathy. When he wasn’t leaning out the window to chase ball-playing kids away from his apartment building, he was stomping down to the candy store or the deli with visions of the tone-deaf he might trap underfoot. This was no minor specter since his left foot was on an elevated stand, as though a leg deformity had left him with little choice but to act like the display case of a shoe store. Needless to say, this accessory branded him on some tongues as The Crip, while others saw more than a passing resemblance in his gait and Bela Lugosi’s Igor in the Frankenstein movies. For me, though, Kobel’s real eeriness was found in some apparently divine ability to listen to the same hammer blows on his piano morning after morning, afternoon after afternoon, few of them producing anything as complex as “Three Blind Mice.” Where had he gotten so much patience? Or, the baleful version of the same question, what made him satisfied with so little?

Instead of coming up with an answer to those questions, I crossed the street to find another reason for asking them. Sitting in his dark, over-furnished living room, Kobel heard out my aspirations as though they weren’t the most preposterous thing he’d ever heard but would need a few extra minutes to recall what exactly had been. In the meantime we exchanged pledges of good faith — $25 for a half-hour of learning what the ivory and ebony things were supposed to do. It seemed reassuring to think that Thelonius Monk had started this way too.

Kobel never asked why jazz, in particular. I attributed this to several things. First, there was his total lack of interest. I was 7-8 Tuesday evenings and 11-12 alternate Saturday mornings, over and out. If I wanted to squeeze in a few hours of practice on his spare piano during the week, that was free and fine. Then there was his conviction, more than visible after a few lessons, that it didn’t matter if I wanted to play bebop jazz or Javanese folk songs, I was never going to get there, that both of us would have already accomplished a great deal if I managed to remember after a few years that Every Good Boy Does Fine. No question, both these attitudes were discouraging, did nothing at all to exemplify that positive reinforcement we like to discern in inspiring teachers. But — and this was another reason he didn’t care about jazz ambitions — Kobel had never longed to be inspiring. On the contrary, his few remarks not having to do with half-notes and quarter-notes had to do with the foul fates that had given him synovitis at an early age (“and made me The Crip, as they say around here”) and forced him to make a living teaching six-and seven-year-olds. Putting aside the niceties, he simply didn’t like his pupils, resenting their siege on hours he had once planned to devote to the concert hall.

So I labored on without understanding, sympathy — or much of a taste for practice between Tuesday lessons. This, of course, was hardly conducive to mastering my instrument On the other hand, not showing up at Jack’s luncheonette or Marty’s drug store wouldn’t have been conducive to getting weekend dates, pool hall partners, or lines on temporary jobs, so the dilemma was acute. It became more gnarled when the person showing up at Jack’s and Marty’s instead of going to Kobel’s rehearsal piano started being called the Jazz Piano Player. Clearly, I had stumbled into a variation on that old agony about not being able to have one’s cake and eat it, too — an expression that, before then, I had never truly understood. But in fact wielding a cake fork with the utmost aplomb had been the reason behind wanting to be a jazz pianist in the first place.

What it seemed to come down to was this: jazz pianists were smart, cool, and imaginative all in the same package. Cops could be smart and gangsters could be cool, but neither was especially imaginative. Classical musicians could be imaginative and even smart, but hardly cool. Rockers could be imaginative and cool, but who had ever accused them of being smart? Within jazz itself there also seemed to be a hierarchy. The saxes weren’t smart, the drummers weren’t cool, and the bassists weren’t strikingly imaginative. Besides, I had neither the wind for reeds, the money for drums, nor the strength for basses. But the pianists, on the other hand, they were not only laying the foundation for others and getting their own moments on stage, they also were the ones who had seen the world and, wearily or not, had opinions on what they had seen. They were the composer Monk, the expatriate Bud Powell, the virtuoso Art Tatum. At their most banal they were still Dooley Wilson and Hoagy Carmichael, who had hung around with Humphrey Bogart, spies, and traitors. Jazz pianists had it all covered, and that’s how I wanted my time to go by, too.

And Andrew Kobel played along for a few months. Why shouldn’t he have? Not only was he getting paid for pointing out little more than where the C was, but, as I soon grasped, he was close to appreciating me as an exception to his usually taciturn misanthropy __ with me he let it flow more freely. Was it because I was significantly older than most of his students? Because the musical situation was so obviously hopeless, he needed other themes for our time together? Because I triggered thoughts of his own frustrated ambitions? Whatever the reason, I heard all about his synovitis, his fury at having been willy-nilly incorporated into the city’s educational system (“they come here at eight o’clock because they have to be in school at nine”), and his growing impatience with his wife Gladys (“she likes the small kids, treats them like they should be ours”). In his own way he was a supreme artist because there was nothing he couldn‘t disdain if he applied his concentration to it long enough. The only thing he found right about firemen was that they got to work off their guts sliding down poles. The only thing legitimate about lawyers was that they wanted to be governors and senators like all the other crooks. The only thing wrong with people you read about in the papers — Adlai Stevenson, Albert Einstein, Elvis Presley, Salvation Army generals, Prospect Park muggers — was that they were still breathing. And don’t get him started on classical musicians. The only thing classical about them was that you needed to organize an archeological dig to find their brains.

Not that Kobel didn’t have his soft side. Gladys, for instance, might have liked the child pupils more than he did, but she turned into Uriah Heep when they missed their lessons, insisting they still owed their money. Kobel didn’t want to hear about it. “They got these parents pushing them to be Arthur Rubinstein geniuses,” he said, waving her quiet at the start of one of my lessons, “and all the kids want to be geniuses at is cowboys and indians. Bad enough we take their money under false pretenses when they show up, we don’t have to take it when they don’t, too.”

He also had a fondness for Kools smokers like himself, deciding that both an upstairs neighbor and one of the owners of the deli around the corner were “all right because they don’t listen to that crap they’re always saying about Kools.” For historical purposes, “that crap” wasn’t about how smoking might be bad for you, but about how a menthol brand like Kools raised questions about the masculinity of the men smoking it.  And then there was his deepest of all vulnerabilities — a grandfather who had apparently been the one who had driven him to the Steinway every morning with Biblical admonitions of what might happen to the whole family if he didn’t put in the necessary exercises. Whenever the subject was anything remotely bearing on practice or regimens or dedication, “the old son of a bitch” (the only name I ever heard) came in for commemoration as the ultimate standard for seriousness and sense of mission. I didn’t think of it as a stretch to infer that the synovitis hadn’t gone over too well with “the old son of a bitch”, and that Kobel had been limping through the years hauling cauldrons of guilt and bitterness with his grandfather bobbing up and down inside. He just hadn’t lived up to expectations.

Either had the Jazz Piano Player. It suddenly became an awkward necessity to avoid any place (living room, bar, hall) where a piano might be found; Smart, Cool, and Imaginative didn’t need any lynch mob demand to sit down and demonstrate what they had learned at Kobel’s crippled knee. It didn’t help, either, that Jerry Lee Lewis was showing more staying power than John Lewis and Fats Domino more than Fats Waller. And all those expert opinions about who was a great-great-great player, a great-great player, and simply a great player — what were they worth when all of them could run off complex riffs before Kobel had finished lowering himself into the leather chair next to the piano and asking where we were? Where we were, it had become evident, was with the illiterate who made his living selling old books — a laudable enterprise in itself and a testament to the resolve of the handicapped, but maybe also just a teensy-weensy unmeasured for attaining happiness or any of its sugarless substitutes.

Kobel beat me to the punch. Arriving for one of our alternate Saturday morning sessions, I found him already drawn up at the piano in his chair and adding to the five or six Kools butts he had already left in his glass ashtray. He had a question: What the hell did I think we were doing? Somewhere in the middle of my stammered answer came the word music, and that was enough to make him stomp the floor with his elevated shoe. Music? Music? When he turned on the radio, he heard music. When he played a record, he heard music. Even when he went to a goddam parade, it was theoretically possible to hear music. But what he had been hearing over months of Tuesdays and Saturdays was somebody trying to learn scales and apparently bent on unlearning them as fast as he learned them. There was more music in the upstairs neighbor banging the pipes for heat in January. He knew radiators more gifted than I.

I understood he was trying to make a point. And I appreciated his concern so much that I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to go on, that I would pack up my exercise books, and disappear from his life forever then and there. But he had another lesson in mind, and it had to do with more than clef signs. Taking a long drag on his Kool, he studied the ash he had produced, then slowly, deliberately tapped it down on the back of his other hand. I saw the wince, but not much else.

“Hear that?” he asked. When I seemed to convey the thought that the only thing I’d heard was a marble or two rolling around in his head, he repeated the demonstration, right down to the silent wince. “This time?”

What can I say? Maybe I was already busy thinking about moving on from the Jazz Piano Player to the Lion Tamer or the Caliph of Baghdad. He had to spell it out. The ash on his hand had been painful, but he hadn‘t cried out. The same way the piano hurt when it was abused by somebody like me, but had to keep it inside. I didn‘t believe in inanimate objects having a capacity for pain? What the hell did I know?

The moral wasn’t exactly Aesopian in its ramifications, but it was enough to get on with — and get out of Kobel’s apartment with — that day. Every once in awhile after that I pictured him shutting himself into his studio, away from his pupils and Gladys and “the old son of a bitch,” lighting up a Kool, and asking the piano whether or not it was in pain. And if he got the wrong answer, giving it a kick on the pedals with his elevated shoe.

Donald Dewey has published 27 books of fiction, nonfiction, and drama. His biographies of actors Marcello Mastroianni and James Stewart have been widely translated, his sports books have gone through several editions, and he has won awards for both his fiction and his drama. He has had some 30 plays staged in the United States and Europe.