Etta James: 1938-2012

Two of my favorite songs by one of the finest soul and blues artists this country has ever known.

 

Seattle survivors face down the middle age bulge

Watching the recently released documentary “Pearl Jam 20,” an insiders look at the formative years and continuing career of one of the most influential bands of the last two decades, I was reminded of just how powerful that moment was when, seemingly out of nowhere, a handful of bands broke out of an insulated Seattle music scene in the early 1990s and resuscitated a music world that seemed to be in the last throes of terminal self indulgence and creative stagnation.

The film follows an arc familiar to most music documentaries about massively successful acts: The early struggle to pull the band together and overcome adversity; the sudden, nearly overwhelming acclaim; the band members fight to hold onto their sanity and artistic integrity; and finally, the equally strenuous endeavor to stay relevant as fickle audiences move on to newer, younger acts.

Thought the tale is writ large in Pearl Jam’s case, the same scenario holds for many of the band’s lesser-known Seattle brethren, as well. While none of these acts reached the same commercial pinnacle, many of them continue to produce vital, challenging music that serves as an adult antidote to the hyper-caffeinated, joyless blitz of modern pop.

Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan are two veterans of that era who have emerged with their sense of purpose and humor firmly intact. The former leaders of the critically lauded bands Afghan Whigs and Screaming Trees, respectively, the pair met after the Whigs became the firs act from outside the Pacific Northwest to sign with Seattle’s pioneering underground music label, Sub Pop, in 1989. They have since moved on to successful solo careers, producing some of the emotionally toughest, most uncompromising blues and R&B-based music in recent memory.

In 2007 Dulli and Lanegan joined efforts as The Gutter Twins to release “Saturnalia” a sunless grotto of a record that conjoins black ravines of brute force and sly insinuation throughout its diverse chambers of sound. Since that time Dulli has released several albums with his current band, Twilight Singers, which build on the experimental mix of funk-laced rock he perfected in the mid 90s. Lanegan, meanwhile, has worked with artists as diverse as Belle and Sebastian ingénue Isobell Campbell, Queens of the Stone Age, and British electronic act Soulsavers, quietly compiling a musical legacy that, combined with his solo work and past band efforts, ranks with the finest of the last 20 years.

Lanegan is set to release a new disc, “Blues Funeral,” in February.

In their present incarnations, neither artist has made the slightest effort to recapture the waves of teenage fans and alternative hipsters that swarmed to their previous acts during the height of the early 90s “grunge” hysteria. While any random snap shot from the red carpet of the latest Grammy Awards will reveal a sad race of Botox, collagen, and silicone-infused mutants locked in a desperate struggle with fading youth, both Dulli and Lanegan have all-too-happily succumbed to the ravages of their debauched pasts, weathered faces, faded tattoos, and protruding paunches proudly displayed in publicity photos and on stages across the world.

That lack of pretense and artifice may be due, in part, to a unique aspect of the Seattle scene detailed in the Pearl Jam documentary — its insulation from the mainstream music world and the degree to which its bands depended upon one another’s cooperation and friendship.

Inevitably, of course, that era also produced its fair share of cautionary tales to stand hand-in-hand with its successes; musicians that were never able to fully navigate the strange new waters of adulthood.

Former Soundgarden singer, Chris Cornell, long recognized as one of the most gifted singers in rock, has run through a series of incarnations since the group disbanded in 1997. Recording three albums with ex-members of Rage Against the Machine in the group Audioslave and working most recently as a solo artist, the man seems stymied by the sheer number of choices available to someone clearly vying to place himself in the same commercial peer group as Beyonce and Justin Timberlake.

While I’ll be the first to applaud artistic experimentation and risk taking, covering Michael Jackson songs and subsuming one of the most recognizable voices in music beneath layers of synthesized beats and production tricks simply reeks of self-doubt and confusion.

On a brighter note, Cornell is reportedly working on new material with the reunited members of Soundgarden for an album release sometime in 2012. The move highlights what may be the easiest way to deal with the uncertainty of the present — by simply picking up where you left off 15 years ago and carrying on.

Others, of course, have found their own, darker devices to carry them across their pre-fame years, with former Alice in Chains bassist Mike Starr being only the latest in a depressingly lengthy roll call of Seattle music veterans to succumb to that place and time’s fascination with all things narcotic.

The questions that the artists who emerged from the Seattle music scene of the early 90s have struggled with aren’t unique to musicians, but affect anyone who’s not yet content to settle back into a middle age of flaccid complacency and nostalgia: How does one remain vital after that initial rush and energy of youth has fled, when the vice of family and finances begins to press and distort the dreams that were once inseparable from your waking life? What does it mean to be an adult who refuses to play the same sad, self-defeating games that the inhabitants of this world have fashioned into their everyday lives? How do you grow up without giving up?

Pearl Jam and the best of their contemporaries have emerged into a new century battered and changed but ultimately determined to stay true to the vision that sustained them through their pre-fame years of dank practice basements and broom closet-sized clubs.

Anyone working out their own path through the strange land beyond the Valley of the Wonder Years, myself included, should take heart from their example.

A new music for an age-old plague

The sound is etched in the national memory like a voice from a long-forgotten dream: The familiar melody of the “Star Spangled Banner” being wrenched and warped through a Stratocaster guitar, a stack of Marshall amps and the body of a thin, electric haired African-American into the cry of a country ripped asunder by war, where the values and institutions once taken for granted have been cast in the new, harsh light of distrust and anger.

It’s a sound, in fact, born of a time not unlike our own.

Yet in contrast to the 1960s, which culminated in Jimi Hendrix’s early morning performance of the National Anthem at the Woodstock Music Festival, our own decade has produced no corresponding soundtrack to map the fears and paroxysms that have gripped America since the morning of September 11, 2001 and the emotional, physical and financial upheavals that followed in its wake.

The collision of art and social awareness reaches back far longer than the ‘60s, from Woody Guthrie spinning tales of labor camp organizers and their brutal treatment at the hands of the authorities, to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” a searing account of the aftermath of a lynching, an all-too-common occurrence in pre-civil rights America of the1930s.

In the decades that followed, musicians would question their elected officials in more overt ways. With the advent of rock and roll in the ‘50s, the political establishment began, for the first time, to sniff out the subversive potential hidden within popular music. That potential would burst into the open in the mid-‘60s, as musicians rode a wave of protests centered around America’s undeclared war in Vietnam. The violence of the era coupled with its enormous social upheavals to provide fuel for a decade of nearly unprecedented creativity. The music and lyrics reached beyond the clichés of an earlier time to question, provoke, and celebrate ideas and customs never before addressed in so overt a manner.

The list of great, socially conscious songs from that era reads like a ‘60s greatest hits list: “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones; “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye; “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan; “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane, and countless others all helped usher in a new, darker and more fully aware sensibility to popular music.

While bands like the Sex Pistols and Gang of Four would carry that spirit forward into the next two decades, by the turn of the century any pretense musicians may have harbored about addressing issues beyond their own fickle desires seemed to have been abandoned entirely.

Or perhaps we simply need to look deeper. In the weeks and months following 9-11 there were grand pronouncements by noted critics to the effect that the terror of that day would lead to a new renaissance of socially minded artists invading the airwaves of the nation.

That never happened. But look beyond the cavern of popular entertainment into its far corners, and you’ll find webs of independent music that run like arteries to the very heart of what it means to be a human being in the twenty-first century.

Among the more recognizable of these acts are: Drive-by Truckers, and their tales of rural poverty and desperation; Radiohead, perhaps the penultimate band of modern paranoia and all-encompassing dread; Nick Cave, a former goth-rock poster boy turned chronicler of black-humored, urban nightmares; The Roots, who, despite their gig as Jimmy Fallon’s house band, continue their run of impressively forward thinking albums; and Tom Waits, a musical surrealist who has become ever more outspoken about America’s involvement in the Middle East, as one listen to “Hell Broke Luce” off his latest studio album will attest.

While none of these artists indulge in the kind of hand-on-heart grandstanding of bands like U2, by putting a human face on the terrors of the moment, they may have accomplished something even more important. To my ears, these bands have produced music that stands its ground in the face of conformity; that calls out hypocrisy and the politicians who use race and religion to convince people to vote against their own best interests; that stares into the face of the pampered elites who deride the working class of this country as lazy malcontents while handing out billions in corporate welfare.

As this country moves towards another Gilded Age—the period during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries when corporations consolidated their stranglehold over the American working classes—it’s time for artist, of all stripes, to earn their place in society and address the times we live in.

As Occupy Wall Street and other movements spread throughout the country, it’s time we had a music the equal of that energy.

What looks to be a great documentary about one of this century’s most inspired, and under-appreciated, guitarists.

Crescent City music weathers the storm

With portions of eastern North Carolina still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Irene and, over the weekend, Tropical Storm Lee spawning tornadoes from the Gulf Coast to the Florida Panhandle, it seemed appropriate to consider the music of a region nearly wiped from the map during one of the most destructive hurricanes ever to make landfall in the U.S.

On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina came ashore in southeast Louisiana, causing severe destruction along the Gulf Coast from central Florida to Texas. The most significant number of deaths occurred in New Orleans, which flooded as the levee system catastrophically failed. Eventually 80 percent of the city and large tracts of neighboring parishes became inundated with floodwaters, which lingered for weeks. In Louisiana alone, over 1,500 people were killed.

Along with the loss of life, the state, and the world as a whole, came within a hair’s breadth of losing something nearly as precious: a musical and cultural heritage as unique and historically important as any in the country.

Since it first came under American control following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, New Orleans has been a crossroads where French, Creole, Irish, German, and African influences have mingled and interbred to create a musical mélange of fascinating depth and variety.

The first public performances of African derived music in New Orleans occurred in the1700s, when the city’s slaves were allowed to gather in Congo Square, a large open space just north of the French Quarter, to sing, dance, and play music. Many of the instruments used during these gatherings came from a cross section of cultures: drums, gourds, banjo-like instruments, and quillpipes, as well as European instruments such as the violin, tambourines, and triangles.

As immigrants from throughout Europe, the Caribbean and other parts of the world moved through the city, that same spirit of invention through necessity would work its way into nearly every subsequent musical development, finding its penultimate form in the music most associated with the region.

Moving like a spirit of the future rising from the city’s troubled past, the earliest sounds of what would become know as jazz were a far cry from the somber, delicate tones often associated with the genre today. The raucous squeals, blats, fanfares and roars of that music were nothing less than the sounds of a race and a region’s coming out party, a loud sweaty affair cut through with blues, gospel, military marches, and even European classical music.

In the hands of men like King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton and, most certainly, Louis Armstrong, it was also a music of great beauty and emotional nuance, the sort of sound that could speak for not only a single city or state, but an entire nation.

Yet, like most things that lurk up from the Deep South, the origins of the music are hazy with swamp fog and shadow. Though jazz spread quickly throughout New Orleans in the early years of the 20^th century, it was nurtured in the back alleys and speakeasies of Storyville, the city’s red light district. The notion that jazz was somehow unsavory, tinged with immorality, would cling to the music as it was exported via New Orleans musicians to the far corners of the States.

While jazz is rightfully the music most identified with the city, another mongrelized form, known as zydeco, also took root around the same time. Born in the surrounding countryside and swamps, zydeco arose from a synthesis of traditional Creole and Cajun music, along with blues and gospel. The music incorporated such everyday household items as washboards and spoons set to the rhythmic sway of accordions, guitar and bass to create a rough hewn sound that served as a country cousin to jazz’s more urban blare.

In the 1950s and into the following decade, a new generation of musicians emerged who would place the cities indelible mark on the emerging sounds of rock, soul, and funk.

Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Sam Cooke recorded seminal rock and roll sides backed by the cream of New Orleans session musicians, who added a previously unheard ferocity and swing to a music still in its infancy.

The city’s soul and blues artists have played an important, though often overlooked, role in the development of their respective music. Irma Thomas, possessor of perhaps the finest voice south of the Mason Dixon Line, recorded the first version of “Time is on My Side,” which would be one of the first significant hits for the Rolling Stones. Allen Toussaint, one of the most prolific producers and writers of the twentieth century, penned songs that become million sellers in the hands of others, including “Working in the Coalmine,” “Fortune Teller,” and “Southern Nights,” a pop and country crossover hit for Glenn Campbell in 1977.

Drawing inspiration from the cities tradition of second line brass band parades and African American Indian Mardi Gras chants, groups like The Meters, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and the Wild Magnolias created music for the brain and body that remains unequaled in its ferociously devil-may-care, celebratory resonance.

A seemingly endless stream of eccentric piano savants, from Professor Longhair and James Booker, to Henry Butler, and the aforementioned Jelly Roll Morton, are an essential part any listening experience when it comes to New Orleans’ master musicians.

The darker corners of the city’s past have also been explored by its artists. Dr. John, who once went by the moniker “The Night Tripper,” recorded an entire album, “Gris Gris” based on the very real history of voodoo practice, which has long been touted by the New Orleans tourism board as a draw for gullible tourists and the gothically-inclined.

Earl Palmer, Lee Dorsey, Snooks Eaglin, Guitar Slim…the list of talented musicians who began their musical lives in New Orleans is staggering.

In the brief time I’ve spent there, I’ve found New Orleans both fascinating and strangely depressing. Much like Memphis, Tenn., it trades on past glories and a feigned mystery that vanished many decades before. Plagued by drugs, political corruption and no clear plan for the future, the city teems with the stale odor of cheap beer and drunken college kids who neither know nor care about its history or importance to American culture. In the aftermath of Katrina, the way forward for the city seems even less clear.

What remains, however, is important: an abiding wildness that has been stamped down and tortured into the strained civility and vanilla plainness that holds sway throughout most of the country.

Presently, New Orleans depends for its livelihood on promoting the type of behavior other large cities, like New York, try to discourage, to sweep under the proverbial rug. It has been argued that New Orleans is not really a part of America at all, but more a sovereign nation unto itself existing as a sort of living advertisement for debauchery, drag queens and French architecture.

Reviled as a modern day Babylon by televangelists and politicians alike, it’s a city that should expect little sympathy or help from the world beyond the borders of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. Like foreign stragglers abandoned at an amusement park, the people of New Orleans will simply have to get mean and take care of themselves, and each other.

That sense of isolation, the fear of remote and possibly unhealthy otherness mixed with its joyous celebration, can be heard in the vast array of sounds born of a city that has come to function as a sort of national id— a much reviled, though vital, part of our musical and cultural makeup.

Singer’s death has roots in music history

The death of singer Amy Winehouse on July 23 brought an all too obvious end to the career of the latest in a long line of gifted musicians who have seen their art, and finally, their lives, extinguished by drug abuse.

It also offered an excuse for the guardians of moral rectitude to scurry from their dank hiding places to once again bemoan the degradation of modern art and its corrupt purveyors.

What is rarely discussed, either by fellow artists Tweeting their eternal love, or by conservative proponents of this nations asinine drug war, is the physical and emotional imperative some homo sapiens have toward drug use and the entire panoply of pleasures and torments that comes with it.

By and large, artists take drugs for the same reason lawyers, auto mechanics, and Baptist preachers take drugs; for the same reason humans since the dawn of self awareness have taken drugs: to get outside, into, and far away from themselves; to let all the bile and stupidity of everyday life spill off their bones; for a few, simple moments of peace.

Artists, however, add another, more amorphous, reason to the equation: Creation—the process of putting that experience to use, as inspiration, as a different way of seeing the world in order to find new creative paths.

It’s a tradition that stretches back to antiquity and forward into the modern age, from the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and Arthur Rimbaud, to jazz pioneers Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

Opiates in particular have held a seemingly ageless fascination to the artistically inclined. While Coleridge is said to have written one of his most well known poems, “Kubla Khan” under their influence, the drugs, most pervasively in the form of heroin, have proven all but impossible to bend to the artistic will for any length of time, first seducing, and finally annihilating its users.

A quick glance at any music history book will offer up a nearly endless list of famous and not so famous drug casualties: Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jimmy Hendrix, Johnny Thunders, Shannon Hoon, Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley.

While each of theses musicians certainly had their own, deeply personnel reasons for deciding to turn their bodies into walking laboratories, I would argue that the very thing that made their art so essential, that made them risk everything do devote their lives to a profession that this country has never truly valued or taken seriously, is, for some, inseparable from the impulse towards the chemically induced experience. Intertwined amongst the seemingly healthy drive towards creation, it appears, lurks the very opposite, an open-armed leap towards oblivion.

I would also argue that, however personally destructive it may be to the lives of those involved and their families, that impulse must be accepted as a professional hazard, in the same way that a police officer risks taking a bullet, or a fireman risks getting severely burnt. The fact is, most cops and firemen are able to perform their entire careers without ever being injured; but the risk is always there, thanks to the physical and psychological framework that called them to those professions.

One of the seemingly insurmountable facts for the morally astute is that much of the greatest music of the 20^th century was made by artists deep in the throes of drug experimentation or outright addiction: “Exile on Main Street” by the Rolling Stones; “Lady in Satin” by Billy Holiday; “Layla” by Derek and the Dominoes;” the complete discographies of Hank Williams and John Coltrane.

The last great rock music uprising in this country, the Seattle scene of the early 90’s, was awash in drugs from its earliest days, a fact that became all too clear with the deaths of the aforementioned Staley and Cobain, and the immolation of countless other careers.

Far from being a positive force, in fact, any cursory examination of the state of music during the era when drugs were virtually a required staple of every musicians diet, the 1970s, should be proof positive that whatever meager gifts the gods of Chaos can bestow, the hangover is a killer: bloated stadium rock, countrypolitan crooned by urban cowboys; and the bland thud of disco—each of these paid witness to a community rotting from the inside out and too stoned to care.

One could also point to the countless musicians who have sought to emulate their idols by cultivating their habits, only to find out too late that talent and tireless work, not chemicals, were the true secrets behind the masters work.

The darkness inherent in the creative impulse cannot be separated from the light without destroying it, leaving it enervated and without depth. To put it simply, it’s probable that creative people will always be drawn to drugs, to altering their perceptions. Some will be strong enough to come through the experience, some won’t. That’s part of the job.

Of course no amount of theorizing can be any comfort to Amy Winehouse or her loved ones. There must have been moments when she was clear-headed enough to reflect on the squalor of her existence, on the wasted opportunities and family torment she was responsible for.

It’s probable that Winehouse had already squandered a good portion of her talent over the five years since her last album, time which, judging from her brief public appearances, was apparently spent in a haze of drugs.

By the time of her death, she had become a joke, a walking punch line. Death, at least, has restored a measure of dignity and, hopefully, placed the emphasis back where it belongs: her music.

A little old-time religion courtesy of Bloodkin’s Daniel Hutchens

Voices: Bob Dylan at 70

I don’t remember the first time I heard Bob Dylan’s voice, but I remember the first time I listened.

I must have been 16 or 17, and the world inside my head and outside my door was changing, quickly. The album was “Bringing it all Back Home,” Dylan’s first foray into electric rock music and his first step outside the insular world of the early ‘60s folk scene, with its strict adherence to the past and its acolytes who had all but proclaimed him as their savior.

At the time, the music on that album was over 20-years-old, incomprehensibly ancient to most teenagers, myself included. But sitting in my parents living room that mid-summers night listening to the scarred vinyl disc spin out a series of strange, sad, funny and ominous songs, I was struck by something unfathomably ancient and utterly modern, by a voice speaking from the graveyard of history about the fate of the entire human endeavor. That voice was hypnotic, rude and angry; filled with joy and resigned to the ultimate sorrows of this world.

I was hooked.

In the months and years ahead I would track down every album, song, book, and reference to Dylan that I could find. Though his music would continue to change throughout his career—from harsh garage rock, to mellow country, to what I can only describe as gypsy-carnival folk—the one constant that remained through the years of musical and lyrical shape-shifting was the voice, that rarest of instruments that has been described as both masterful and tuneless, by turns grating and deeply moving.

It’s a voice as old as the first American settlers and as current as last week’s news of yet another politician caught in a snake pit of deception. In that voice I hear: boxcars, atomic bombs, coal mines, germ warfare, the silence of winter wind through bare western limbs, empathy, good humor, corrosive and irrational rage. In that voice I hear the weight of history and the abhorrence of being tied to the past.

For all the emphasis placed on his lyrics, I would argue that Dylan’s voice is the true core of his art. For someone who wrought such a revolutionary shift in popular music, his command of intonation and phrasing harks back to a much earlier era, when singers understood that the slightest shift of emphasis, the slurring of a vowel or pitch of a certain syllable, was crucial to the meaning of the song

On his early recordings, Dylan seemed to be channeling the spirits of Appalachian miners, Mississippi Delta sharecroppers, and Depression-era wanderers, reaching for a depth of experience and knowledge well beyond someone in his early 20’s. His phrasing was startling because it dispensed with the veneer of sophistication cultivated by most popular singers, and instead found inspiration in the regional dialects and intonations of the rural south and mid-west. It’s a remarkable contrast to the popular singers of today, who seem to be joined in a competition to sound increasingly juvenile and devoid of character.

Which isn’t to say that Dylan’s music lacks humor. On the contrary, a handful of the man’s songs contain some of the finest, laugh-out-loud moment in rock history. Songs such as “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues” in which Dylan wakes up bald, naked, and senseless following a boat wreck, and later, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” which relates the fantasy saga of Melville’s Captain Ahab discovering America, are among the finest comedic songs in the English language. On both these songs Dylan can be heard laughing at his own words, a jokester doubled over at his own pranks. It’s a vein of humor that runs from Lenny Bruce to Mad Magazine; that recognizes and seeks to come to terms with the absolute absurdity of modern life.

Some of my favorite Dylan performances are also some of his most seemingly off-handed. On “Wedding Song,” from the sadly overlooked album Planet Waves, he sounds like a man who just wandered in after a hard night of drinking and sat down with his guitar, stringing together an incantation of bitterness and commitment as the first rays of dawn creep over the carpet. “What’s lost is lost, we can’t regain what went down in the flood, but happiness to me is you and I love you more than blood,” he sings in a ragged, Jewish hillbilly drawl.

That same spirit of informal abandon can be found in an earlier song, “Day of the Locusts,” from one of Dylan’s earliest “comeback” albums, the strange, wildly uneven New Morning. As the titular insects invade the campus of Princeton University, Dylan describes his combined jubilation and horror as he waits to pick up an honorary diploma with a drug-addled friend.

“Outside the gates the trucks were unloading,

The weather was hot, nearly 90 degrees,

The man standing next to me, his head was exploding,

Well, I was praying the pieces wouldn’t fall on me.”

When he finally escapes the surreal scene, headed for the Black Hills of Dakota with his lover, he does so with the voice of a man who’s made it out by the narrowest of margins, with his life, and more importantly dignity, in tact.  

Listening to Dylan’s finest albums, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, you can hear how his voice has inspired and guided the musicians he’s been lucky enough to work with, from guitarists Mike Bloomfield and Charlie McCoy, to members of the Band, who stuck by Dylan’s side through the bitterness of his first post-electric tour. In turn, you can hear Dylan give himself over to the pure sound of that inspiration, summoning the courage to let the music grow wild, to nearly get away from him; to follow that music and then command it to follow him, his words, his voice, and then to let it all go again, raging in glorious bursts of the here and now that mark his best work as rightfully among the best ever.

While I gloried in Dylan’s classic period stretching from the early 1960s to the mid- ‘70s, I joined most critics in dismissing much of his later work. After a long fallow period in the 1980s, I had virtually written Dylan off as a burned out casualty of the Me Decade. His music, lyrics and voice had grown thin, unpersuasive, without purpose.

But while Dylan’s muse has not always been faithful to his talent, his reemergence in the late ’90s as a scarred sage of love and doom has proven among the more inspirational musical resurrections of the last century.

Dylan’s voice has changed significantly over the years, culminating in an instrument ground down to its essence, constricted yet increasingly nuanced. Like jazz legend Billy Holiday, he’s managed to find new vocal crevices and shadows to explore even as he leaves behind some of the more elaborate tricks of his younger incarnation.

Echoes of the profound changes Dylan wrought in popular music are inescapable: Without his lyrical innovations the radio would still be awash in” moon-in June,” “I want to hold your hand” drivel. Locating his vocal influence, however, can be more challenging. You can hear echoes of it in the paranoid warbling of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke; in the hobo-blues of Tom Waits, and the angry, searching artistry of P.J. Harvey and the late Chris Whitley. While each of these artists are sonically dissimilar, they each share with Dylan the ability to inhabit a song to its core, to move beyond mere playacting and touch something in the listener that, were one so inclined, might be called the soul.

While it’s hard for me to imagine what Dylan, who turned 70 in May, could possibly mean to a teenager of today, my older, hopefully wiser self still feels that connection from several decades past. Instead of the young punk challenging the world and all its stale hypocrisies, what I now hear when I listen to Dylan is the perfect voice for these confused, end-of-days obsessed, dark ages.

In the end I believe the power of that voice is beyond talent, or training, or technique. I believe it’s a skill that’s more than a skill, unexplainable even to Dylan himself. Like the greatest American art it contains a mystery at its core that simply cannot be explained.

I, for one, will keep listening for as long as he cares to share that mystery.

Southern Rock veteran looks back over 40-year career

When The Marshall Tucker Band roared out of Spartanburg, SC forty years ago, guitarist/vocalist Doug Gray could never have predicted that the band would go on to headline packed stadiums and be proclaimed as one of the progenitors of Southern Rock, a blues, jazz, and country infused style that came to dominate the sound of mid-70’s radio and helped launch the careers of countless gifted musicians south of the Mason Dixon line.

Gray could also never have predicted the sudden disintegration of the original band following the death of bassist Tommy Caldwell, who, along with his brother Toy, played a key role in the musical direction of the tight-knot group.

After the original band split in 1981, Gray soldiered on, recruiting new members and touring compulsively, carrying on the legacy of the band that is still a staple of classic rock stations across the country.

Last week, Gray took time out from his busy schedule to talk to Junkyard Opera about the band’s history, its future, and their upcoming performance at the Freedom Fest event at the Duplin County Events Center.

Junkyard Opera: How did the band first come together?

Doug Gray: “We just wanted beer for the weekend. We were all in high school together in Spartanburg and we just started playing together. Our principal thought we were so good he would let us out early to do shows. All our friends and family understood. We were very lucky in that respect, because that’s a rare thing.

“Me and Toy ended up going to Vietnam and when we got back, we decided to put the band back together. We got the name off a keychain somebody had with the name Marshall Tucker on it. It turned out he was a local piano player. I just recently found out he’s been living in Columbia, SC and just retired from working as choir director of a church.”

J.O.: Who were some of your earliest musical influences?

Gray: “Really just what the people around me and my family were listening to: Hank Williams, Sr.; Bill Haley, who I saw when I was seven-years-old; Elvis was a big influence on everybody. Later on I got into B.B. King and Sam Cooke.

“Toy and I used to go see the Pabst Blue Ribbon Jazz Festival in Greensboro, N.C. when we were in high school. We’d see Dionne Warwick, Thelonious Monk, all kinds of people. That was back in the days when you just got up there and played what you felt, and it wasn’t so organized or written out.

“There were a lot of different influences in the band. Toy was the real country person in the band; Tommy was into R&B. I believe one of the most important parts of everybody’s life is to listen to music and be able to choose different styles to listen to.”

J.O.: Tell me about some of your experiences from the band’s early days.

Gray: “We traveled all up and down playing the strip joints in South Carolina, opening for the Allman Brothers Band and other people. When we finally got a gig in New York, we ended up playing in a club for 42 people. Some of those places were pretty rough, but we were young and it just seemed like a big adventure to all of us.

“I remember one time we were coming from Albuquerque headed to San Antonio, and we stopped at a red light and all the beer and liquor bottles went rolling to the front of the van. By the time we got about halfway through that tour that van really stunk. We ended up leaving it in L.A. and getting our own bus in 1974.

“Later on, we had this band opening for us that wore wings on their back. We didn’t know what to make of that. I kept thinking if they jumped around too much they were going to kill themselves. We just looked at each other and were like, ‘Do we really want to follow this.’’

J.O.: What was it like going from playing the club circuit to headlining arenas?

Gray: “This is when I realized we’d finally made it: We went to play a club in New York, and we were just these redneck guys pulling up in a dodge van. We played the show, and it was just a few people in this place, so we played, got drunk, had a good time and went back home. Three months later, we’re opening for the Allman Brothers Band at Madison Square Garden in front of 20,000 people. That’s pretty freaky stuff; it plays with your mind. Nobody knows they’re going to be a star. We just got together and said ‘Let’s give this one shot. Let’s see if we make any money.’

“When you’re on the road you lose connection with reality. You make a sacrifice to be away from your family. For the first five years, we were touring 300 days a year. We still do 220 days, even now.

“When the money started rolling in, it got scary. Suddenly, all these entertainers that we had grown up watching were coming to see us play; we didn’t know what to do. But I can honestly say, no one changed. No one got too far out.

“Over the years, a lot of people have opened for us who’ve gone on to be big in their own right: Charlie Daniels, Hank Williams, Jr., Alabama. We’re still friends with all these people. I was just talking to Charlie Daniels recently about some of our old friends and what’s been going on with everyone.”

J.O.: Did you feel like the band was part of a Southern Rock scene or was that more of a media creation?

Gray: We never really thought about it; we just played the music we played. But a lot of people got weirded out about it, like it was limiting their success. It never bothered us being seen as a southern band, because when you think about it there were people doing it before us, like Gladys Knight and Otis Redding—they were southern rock.

“When everyone started trying to get away from it, I never did. I’d just as soon be regional and keep that flavor to my music. It’s something you don’t hear much anymore.”

J.O.: What was the songwriting process like?

Gray: “Toy was the main songwriter in the beginning, then Tommy started writing songs, also, and then everybody kind of got into it. There was never any competition; either you had a song or you didn’t. We would use sound checks to run through the new stuff we’d written; we never played any stuff from the show, it was always new stuff.”

J.O.: How did the death of Tommy Caldwell in 1980 affect everyone in the band?

Gray: “What a lot of people don’t know is that Toy and Tommy’s younger brother had also passed away, so for Tommy to die was kind of like double indemnity.

“It did change things. We took out another guy, but every time you’d close your eyes, you’d be like ‘That’s not Tommy.’ It just didn’t feel right.

“We took a couple of months for Toy to decide what he wanted to do. Toy and most of the others reached the point where they didn’t want to continue. I wasn’t ready to let it go, so we worked it out with the lawyers so me and Jerry Eubanks could continue on with the name. Luckily, I was friends with some of the biggest promoters in the world, so it made it easier.”

J.O.: How did the solo album you cut around this time come about?

Gray: “I got offered to sign a solo deal in 1981, to do more of a pop or soul type style. I’ve always been an R&B fan: I used to sneak in to see James Brown when I was 10. So I put out the word that I was looking for songs in that vein, in the soul style.

“I tried to choose songs that would have different feelings and emotions that I’ve gone through over the years. All the original band ended up playing on it, except Tommy, of course. Then I took it around and had a lot of other people add their parts to it, like some Nashville session guys and The Memphis Horns.

“It was really like the stuff I was doing before I joined The Marshall Tucker Band. I really felt good about the results but ended up putting the tapes away because it was time to do another Marshall Tucker Band album and that’s where my loyalty was.

“It had been nearly 10 years since I had listened to it. I was going through some stuff in the warehouse recently and the cassette just fell out, I sent it to Sony and they decided to put it out. It’s made it to number 31 in the Americana charts.”

J.O.: What’s kept you going all these years?

Gray: “When everybody wanted to give up on The Marshall Tucker Band, I’d walk into my study and look at the gold records on the wall, and I’d think about everybody who’d bought one of our albums to make that possible, and everyone I’ve ever played for, and I just couldn’t quiet, even when everybody else wanted to.

“This band has always been considered the fans best friend. Most people don’t realize it, but we sign autographs for an hour and a half after every show. When you’ve been around as long as we have you don’t consider them fans any more, they’re friends.

“We’re still around because we care about our people and our friends. There’s an honesty and a reality about this band that still shows. We’ve never been much for being fake.

“Another thing is, we’re very self-contained. The trucks come rolling in with everything we need; we have the website where the fans can order everything and get all the information about the band. It’s kind of like we’re the biggest faceless band ever, which is kind of nice because I don’t have to put on makeup to look good.

“I live in the woods and the locals are very loyal, a lot of them don’t even know what I do. They just know I’m a guy who’s into music and who doesn’t have a bunch of wrecked cars in his front yard and keeps his grass mowed.

J.O.: Tell me about the band’s current line-up.

Gray: “We’ve got B.B. Borden, who used to play with the Outlaws and Mothers Finest, on the drums; Pat Elwood plays bass for us; Marcus Henderson is on flute and sax; Rick Willis, who’s played with a lot of North Carolina groups including Jackson Crossing, is on guitar; and then we’ve got Stuart Swanlund, who’s been with me 25 years, on guitar and pedal steel.

“Most of these guys are from Spartanburg and they’re all guys who want to be here and love getting out and playing.”

J.O.: What are some of the recent projects the bands been involved with?

Gray: “About a year ago, we filmed a part for a movie called “Angel Camouflaged.” In the movie we show up to play a show on the wrong day and have to try to come up with something the crowd will like. We decide to do a version of the Run-DMC song “It’s Tricky.” I’d never heard the song, but I think it actually came out pretty good. It was fun; it was probably one of the most different things we’ve ever done.

“We’re also cutting a record next year. We’re looking for southern rock and roll songs. We’ve got five songs but we’re looking for seven or eight more.

“We’ll be releasing all our early albums on vinyl over the next two years. They just sent me the artwork for the first releases and I was knocked out, they look great.”

J.O.: What can fans expect at the Freedom Fest performance?

Gray: “Be prepared to move back a little in time. Bring the kids out and just have fun, enjoy the music. I think a lot of people are going to be uniquely surprised, because there are a lot of people who don’t remember us from years ago, so this will be a brand new thing to them.”

One of the finest Dylan covers ever recorded