From 2009:

It is revealing that Mercer published no poetry, presumably because he felt he had no gift for writing it. Only in the crucible of collaboration did his talents manifest themselves completely.

Does this diminish the significance of his achievement? Must he necessarily be considered a lesser artist than a writer who works exclusively on his own? To make such a claim, after all, is by extension to relegate all forms of collaborative art to a lower level of excellence simply because of the process by which they came into being….

Read the whole thing here.

James Taylor sings his “Rainy Day Man” on the BBC. This live performance is an excerpt from an episode of In Concert, originally telecast on November 16, 1970:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“And, the conversation turning to what one [would] choose to do given another life, he said in the manner of a man who knows what he’s talking about, I shan’t be doing music. I shall be being it.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams, in conversation with Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1958 (quoted in The Element of Lavishness: Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1938-1978)

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” I’m writing about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

20. The Best of Booker T. and the MG’s (Stax)

Most of the twenty-five albums on this list have something important in common: with few exceptions, they’re very white. So, for the most part, were my childhood and youth.

Smalltown, U.S.A., is some twenty-odd miles from the banks of the Mississippi River. In certain ways it’s always been more southern than Midwestern: I’m just old enough to remember separate entrances and drinking fountains, and it wasn’t until I entered sixth grade in 1967 that black children started turning up in my classrooms. Blacks and whites never made friends with one another at school and rarely mingled elsewhere, and my neighborhood was lily-white long after I left Smalltown to make my way in the larger world. This sharp division of the races is easy enough to understand, for it happens that a black man was lynched in Smalltown in 1942, and there were still plenty of people around when I was a boy (including my father) who remembered that terrible day well, though I never did run into anyone who was willing to talk about it.

All this notwithstanding, I’ve been fascinated by black art and culture for as long as I can remember—without, however, succumbing to the Quentin Tarantino-like temptation to pretend that I’m anything other than what I am, which is…well, very white. I’m content to be a sympathetic onlooker, and delighted when the seriousness of my interest in a culture not my own, and the modesty with which I approach the task of trying to understand it better, are acknowledged by those to whom such things come naturally. When I wrote a one-man show about Louis Armstrong, one of the actors who played the role said to me midway through a rehearsal, “I can’t believe a Caucasian wrote this.” You should have seen the smile on my face.

How could such a thing have happened? Music bridged the gap, flinging wide the door that my cloven community nailed shut for as long as it could. I loved jazz as soon as I heard it, and I was similarly excited by much of the black pop music that started to be played on our local radio station around the time I first started listening to rock and roll. Not all, though: I didn’t care for Motown, which I found too slick by half. I might have felt differently if I’d heard Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder, but the only Motown artists I remember hearing on the radio in Smalltown were the Supremes and the Jackson 5, who didn’t suit me at all.

So I became a Stax man, thanks mainly to Booker T. and the MG’s. In addition to serving as the house rhythm section for Memphis’ Stax Records, they cut dozens of instrumental singles on their own, some of which became modest crossover hits. One of them, “Hip Hug-Her,” came out in 1967, and it knocked me across the room when I first heard it a couple of years later. Everything about that no-nonsense record is perfect: Steve Cropper’s everybody-listen-up guitar introduction and terse background riffs, Booker T. Jones’ purring solo organ lines, Al Jackson Jr.’s hard-as-nails backbeats, “Duck” Dunn’s dirt-simple bass playing.

If you’d asked me, I suppose I would have said that “Hip Hug-Her” was “black music,” but I didn’t think of it that way. To me it was music, period. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all to learn that Cropper and Dunn were white, something I didn’t find out until much later. Rightly or wrongly, I took it for granted that their music, like jazz, belonged as much to me as it did to anyone. John Fogerty, lately of Creedence Clearwater Revival, felt the same way, and I can’t better what he wrote about Booker T. and the MG’s in Fortunate Son, his 2012 autobiography: “For years and years I have said that Booker T. & the M.G.s were the greatest rock ’n’ roll band of all time. I’m talking about soulfulness, deep feeling, the space in between the beats. How to say a lot with a little.” I would have killed to play bass in a group like that.

Not until later in life did I get to know other, older kinds of black pop music. Several more years went by before I heard and fell for Louis Jordan, Ray Charles, and B.B. King, and it wasn’t until I saw Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World eighteen years ago that I became passionately interested in country blues. I had no idea when I first heard Crosby, Stills & Nash, for instance, that the unaccompanied vocal introduction to “49 Bye-Byes” that David Crosby sings is a very close imitation of the first line of Robert Johnson’s Come On in My Kitchen. But I’ve loved soul music ever since I was a teenager, and it was Booker T. and the MG’s who first brought me the good news.

(To be continued)

*  *  *

Booker T. and the MG’s play “Hip Hug-Her”:

Booker T. and the MG’s play “Green Onions” on stage in Norway during the 1967 Stax-Volt European tour:

Thora Birch listens to Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman” in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World:

*  *  *

To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

To read about album #13, go here.

To read about album #14, go here.

To read about album #15, go here.

To read about album #16, go here.

To read about album #17, go here.

To read about album #18, go here.

To read about album #19, go here.

I posted this for the first time on November 11, 2008. It’s still relevant, and (I suspect) always will be.

* * *

On October 9, 1918, an HMV sound engineer named Will Gaisberg set up a primitive piece of recording equipment immediately behind a unit of the Royal Garrison Artillery stationed outside Lille and recorded a British gas-shell bombardment. His purpose in doing so was to preserve the sounds of war before the coming armistice caused them to vanish forever from the face of the earth.

According to HMV’s catalogue, the recording, which was commercially released, consisted of

the actual reproduction of the screaming and whistling of the shells previous to the entry of the British troops into Lille. It is not an imitation but was recorded on the battlefront. The report of the guns and the whistling of the shells is the actual sound of the Royal Garrison Artillery in action on October 9th, 1918. No book or picture can ever visualise the reality of modern warfare just the way this record has done…it would require only the slightest imagination for one, by means of this record, to be projected into the past, and feel that he is really present on the battlefield witnessing this historic chapter of the war.

Here is Gaisberg’s own account of the making of the recording:

Gradually we came within the sound of the guns, and eventually, when only a short distance from Lille, we pulled up at a row of ruined cottages, in one of which the heavy siege battery had made its quarters. In the wrecked kitchen we unpacked our recording machines and made our preparations before getting directly behind a battery of great 4.5′ guns and 6′ howitzers, camouflaged until they looked at close quarters like giant insects. Here the machine could well catch the finer sounds of the “singing,” the “whine,” and the “scream” of the shells, as well as the terrific reports when they left the guns.

Dusk fell, and we were obliged, very reluctantly, to pack up our recording instrument and return to Boulogne–and to England; but we brought with us a true representation of the bombardment, which will have a unique place in the history of the Great War.

This recording is one of the most haunting and disturbing documents of the past that I know—one made all the more haunting by the knowledge that Will Gaisberg accidentally inhaled some of the gas from the attack, which damaged his lungs irreparably. In London he fell victim to the international flu epidemic that was then ravaging the city, and died on November 5, just six days before World War I came to an end.

A century later, I can’t help but wonder how many Americans now understand the original meaning of what used once upon a time to be called Armistice Day. “This is either an indictment of the American public school system or my own curiosity and comprehension, but I still can’t summarize what World War I was fought for,” a well-educated friend of mine tweeted over the weekend.

What seems sadly clear, though, is that our collective awareness of that unimaginably terrible conflict is fading fast, perhaps in part because no one who served in what Woodrow Wilson called “the War to End War” is still alive. Frank Buckles, the last American veteran of World War I, died in 2011, at the age of 110.

If you think of Frank Buckles and his comrades today—and you should—take a moment to think about Will Gaisberg as well.

* * *

HMV D378, “Actual Recording of the Gas Shell Bombardment, by the Royal Garrison Artillery (9th October, 1918), preparatory to the British Troops entering Lille”:

UPDATE: Is this recording completely authentic? Read more about it here.

British Pathé newsreel coverage of the hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities on August 25, 1948, during which Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers publicly confronted one another for the first time. Chambers testified that Hiss had helped him spy on the U.S. for the Soviet Union:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (trans. Constance Garnett)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two new musicals, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical and Cyrano. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

Yet another new jukebox biomusical, “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” has opened on Broadway, and it’s not awful, not even close. In fact, some parts of the show, in which Adrienne Warren impersonates the washed-up R&B singer who dumped her wife-beating spouse (Daniel J. Watts) and transformed herself into a glitzed-up rocker at the venerable age of 45, are genuinely entertaining. Nevertheless, I’m afraid—very, very afraid—that “Tina” will be a hit….

The jukebox biomusical, in which the smoothed-over story of a pop star’s life is turned into the plot of a musical whose score consists of that star’s hit records, is an uncreative bastard genre that has done much damage to Broadway. The rising popularity of jukebox shows is choking the life out of the traditional musical in much the same way that the success of comic-book franchise movies has all but killed off the adult-friendly films that used to dominate America’s multiplexes. Every time a jukebox show rings the box-office gong and moves into a New York theater for a long, profitable run, it becomes that much harder for a better show with new songs and a fresh plot to carve out a place on Broadway. Why should a theatrical producer bet on a necessarily risky musical like, say, “The Band’s Visit” or “Hadestown” when she could be backing “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” instead?…

“Cyrano,” Erica Schmidt’s new off-Broadway musical version of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” is half of a great small-scale musical, performed and produced with such flair that you’ll be tempted—up to a point—to forgive its fatal flaw. 

Ms. Schmidt, who doubles as the show’s director, has given us a warm-hearted, unselfconsciously romantic prose rendering of the oft-told tale of the idealistic soldier-poet with a very long nose (Peter Dinklage) who lacks the courage to declare his unrequited love for the beauteous Roxanne (Jasmine Cephas Jones). Mr. Dinklage, a superlatively gifted four-foot-four character actor with a gorgeous bass-baritone voice who was catapulted into stardom by his eight-season stint on “Game of Thrones,” is close to ideal as Cyrano…

All of which brings us to the score, which is the work of The National, an indie band whose Philip Glass-flavored art-rock songs are hugely and deservedly popular with millennial listeners. Alas, they haven’t a clue as to how show tunes work…

*  *  *

To read my Tina review, go here.

To read my Cyrano review, go here.

The trailer for Tina:

Peter Dinklage talks about Cyrano:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I explain how American theaters rarely perform older plays—and what effect that has on our theatrical culture. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

The most revealing news of the 2019-20 theatrical season was the announcement last month of a pair of big-ticket revivals, Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” both of which are set to open on Broadway next April. What made it so noteworthy is that “Virginia Woolf,” first performed in 1962, has already been done there four times, most recently in 2012-13, while “American Buffalo,” first performed in 1975, has been done three times, most recently in 2008.

Why do these two well-worn plays get revived so often—and why are they coming back to Broadway so soon? Three interlocking reasons come to mind:

• Unlike most older American plays, they’re small-cast one-set shows (“Virginia Woolf” calls for four actors, “American Buffalo” for four) that can be produced cheaply.

• They contain flashy roles irresistible to well-known male actors looking for a challenge (“American Buffalo” will star Sam Rockwell, “Virginia Woolf” Rupert Everett).

• They’re known by name to everyone who knows anything about 20^th-century theater, in part because both plays were filmed to outstanding effect.

Above all, though, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “American Buffalo” are full-fledged American classics—and if you define an “American classic” as a great play that is revived with reasonable regularity, then only a small number of 20^th-century plays fill that bill. But that’s not because of a shortage of great modern plays: It’s because our theaters tend not to revive older plays, classic or otherwise

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

A scene from the 2012 Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (as previously mounted at Washington’s Arena Stage). Tracy Letts and Amy Morton play George and Martha:

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

19. The Band, The Band (Capitol)

Of all the rock albums I bought after reading about them in The Rolling Stone Record Review, The Band, which turned fifty years old this past September, is the one that meant the most to me in my youth and means as much to me (if not more) today.

Popularly known to rock aficionados as the “brown album,” The Band is, in my firmly held opinion, the best rock-and-roll record ever made and one of the best pop records of any kind, a work of creative genius in which rock, country, and folk are blended together into an indissoluble amalgam for which the term “Americana” might have been coined. What pop music should be, it is.

The Band was reviewed in Rolling Stone by Ralph J. Gleason, who is now mainly remembered as a jazz journalist but was no less interested in other kinds of pop music, and whose 1969 review, which I read in book form two years after the fact, made me go right out and buy that extraordinary record. I can’t remember having read a review that conveyed more clearly in words alone the essential quality of a work of musical art:

I hear these songs as a sound track to James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, to the real documentary of the American truth. They are sparse songs with never a superfluous note or an unnecessary syllable. And yet the sparseness, like a Picasso line, is so right that it implies everything needed. Lean and dusty, perhaps, like Henry Fonda walking down the road at the beginning of Grapes of Wrath, it says volumes in a phrase…

With their flashing images of the American continental landscape…they speak for the continent in “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” They could have called the album America, Robbie says, and after you play it a few times you know what he means. We live in these cities and we forget that there is more than 3000 miles between New York and the smog of Los Angeles and those 3000 miles are deeply rooted to another world in another time and with another set of values. “King Harvest” takes us there.

The hymn-like quality of the voicings, the use of counterpoint and contrapuntal rhythms by the singers, the weaving of the voices in and out into a pattern that grows each time you hear it, are the things that make the sound of this music so compelling. In “King Harvest,” as in other songs, individual sections with contrasting timbres, moods, rhythms and sounds are juxtaposed to make a totality that is so open it can cover whatever you feel. The sense of doom, almost Biblical in its prophetic warning, of “Look Out Cleveland” is unique in contemporary popular song, so far removed from the obvious morbidity of some of the songs of past years as to be an adult to their child. (This music, of course, is mature, made by men who know who they are and what they want to do. Its appeal to the teenybopper Top 40 audience seems, on the evidence, to be limited.)

Maybe so, but the appeal of The Band to my fifteen-year-old small-town self was overwhelming. I wouldn’t have put it this way back then, but it was the first pop album I’d heard that spoke to me with the same profundity and complexity as did the best jazz and classical music—and if I’d known anything about country, I would have known that it is also as true to the pain and uncertainty of adult life as any of the songs of Hank Williams or Bill Monroe. Gleason nailed it: The Band is mature music.

In retrospect, I simply can’t understand why such a record hit me where I lived. I was anything but mature in 1971. Yet I have no doubt that it did so, especially “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” an unsentimentally told tale of the suffering and courage of a southern farmer which made me weep then and does so today. After listening to it for a half-century, I can say with the absolute assurance that only the passage of time can give that “King Harvest” is a truly great work of popular art, a miniature masterpiece that is directly comparable in quality to, say, Frank Sinatra’s “One for My Baby,” George Jones’ “The Grand Tour,” Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman,” or Charlie Parker’s “Parker’s Mood.” (Or Schubert’s “Wanderers Nachtlied II,” for that matter.)  Having once heard it, I knew what popular music at its very best was capable of saying about human experience, and have never again gladly settled for anything less.

(To be continued)

*  *  *

The Band plays “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” from The Band, recorded in 1969. The members of the group are Rick Danko on bass, Levon Helm on drums, Garth Hudson on organ, Richard Manuel on piano and lead vocals, and Robbie Robertson on guitar. (On this track, John Simon also plays electric piano.) The song is by Robertson:

The Band rehearses “King Harvest” at Robbie Robertson’s studio in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1969:

To hear me talk in detail about The Band with Scot Bertram and Jeff Blehar in 2018, go here.

*  *  *

To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

To read about album #13, go here.

To read about album #14, go here.

To read about album #15, go here.

To read about album #16, go here.

To read about album #17, go here.

To read about album #18, go here.