January 15 would have been the 96th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. It was a long road to the third Monday of the month when all 50 states observe the federal holiday named in his honor. Largely owed for making the dream of MLK Day a reality is Stevie Wonder: Back in 1980, he wrote the pointed song, “Happy Birthday,” then launched a 41-city U.S. tour (and invited Gil Scott-Heron along) to promote the idea which was first mooted by Rep. John Conyers in 1968. The musical efforts were ultimately the key in collecting the millions of citizen signatures that had a direct impact on Congress passing the law signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, declaring a day for MLK.
Observed for the first time in 1986, some states were late to participate, however, by the turn of the 21st Century, all were united in some form of remembrance of the civil rights giant. “Happy Birthday,” which served as Wonder’s King holiday campaign theme (and is now the “official” King holiday tune) is the last track on Hotter Than July. The album also features “Master Blaster,” Wonder’s tribute to Bob Marley (Marley had been scheduled for the tour until he fell too ill which was how Scott-Heron came to participate). In his memoir The Last Holiday, Scott-Heron details his own journey with music and activism, as he retraces the long and winding road Wonder took to bring home the last US federal holiday, with the help of a song.
The Hotter Than July tour brought Scott-Heron and Wonder to Oakland, where they played in the name of King, along with Rodney Franklin and Carlos Santana. In a weird turn of events, the concert on December 8, 1980, coincided with the night John Lennon was killed. The musicians and crew learned of the tragedy from a backstage television, and the job fell to Wonder, with Scott-Heron and the other musicians at his side, to deliver the shocking news to an arena of music fans.
“For the next five minutes he spoke spontaneously about his friendship with John Lennon: how they’d met, when and where, what they had enjoyed together, and what kind of man he’d felt Lennon was,” wrote Scott-Heron. “That last one was key, because it drew a line between what had happened in New York that day and what had happened on that motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, a dozen years before. And it drew a circle around the kind of men who stood up for both peace and change.” Scott-Heron devotes the final pages of The Last Holiday to a remembrance of how the murder of Lennon fueled the final drive to push for a federal observance of the official MLK Day.
The politics of right and wrong make everything complicated
To a generation who’s never had a leader assassinated
But suddenly it feels like ’68 and as far back as it seems
One man says “Imagine” and the other says “I have a dream” -Gil Scott-Heron
Scott-Heron was a lifelong campaigner and champion for human rights himself, beginning on his 1970 live album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. There is no doubt he would have much to say of the unfortunate confluence of this year’s King holiday with the inauguration and the project known as 2025. The parenthetical title refrain from his song, “Alien (Hold On To Your Dreams)” (see clip below following his topical poem, “Whitey on the Moon/(Mars)”) has been spinning around in my head, alongside the words of Dr. King collected from one of his sermons from the early ’60s. Whatever confronts us today, whatever dangers real or perceived that touch our friends, families and fellow humans in these perilous times, in these words and songs may you find comfort and be inspired to act in love.
Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. – MLK, Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr., Joan Baez and Harry Belafonte
Joan Baez was a junior at Palo Alto High School when she first heard Martin Luther King, Jr. speak at a conference for young Quakers. She would go on to sing for the non-violent movements for civil rights, social, economic and racial justice and against the war in Vietnam.
“King was giving voice to my passionate and ill-articulated beliefs,” wrote Baez in her memoir. Her “exhilarating sense of ‘going somewhere’ with my pacifism” in the aftermath of that speech would lead her to join King on marches in the Jim Crow south and at the historic March on Washington.
If you don’t already know about Baez’s history as a lifelong activist, you certainly would not get it from a viewing of the ahistorical Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, released in US theaters this Christmas.
Loosely based on Dylan’s arrival in New York City in 1961, the film covers the songwriter’s introduction to the Greenwich Village scene, his meetings with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and his intimate relationships with Baez and the fictional Sylvie Russo, a stand-in for his real life steady, Suze Rotolo.
“During the height of the civil rights era Bob wrote, among other songs, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,’ ‘The Death of Emmett Till,’ [‘Only A Pawn In Their Game’] and of course, ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ which became a kind of anthem,” Rotolo wrote in her own memoir of the Village in the ‘60s. In the film, “Blowing in the Wind” is framed in his repertoire to be more like an annoyance or an albatross.
There’s a scene recreating Dylan and Rotolo’s meeting at a 1961 folk-a-thon at the Riverside Church, the historic hub of progressive gathering in New York City. And there is a brief moment when the Russo character explains to a befuddled Dylan that she works at the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), organizing the Freedom Rides from North to South — in fact one of Rotolo’s jobs in the era.
Facts are also, that in 1963, Dylan walked off the all-important nationally broadcast The Ed Sullivan Show when he was asked not to play his song, “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues.” For those unacquainted, the John Birch Society is a radical far right group and the song is a satire.
That not much is made of the realities of the causes and concerns that moved both Baez and Rotolo to become immersed in movement work and the folk scene is perhaps understandable: A Complete Unknown is after all, a version of a story of Dylan becoming Dylan. But the gaps in the story of Dylan’s own connections to civil rights and the songs he wrote in their favor are woefully understated in the film, as are his friendships with the people in his circle (where, for example, were the nods to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott? Phil Ochs? Odetta? Lead Belly, at least, appears in an 8×10 photograph). There are also no poets, comedians or jazz musicians in the film’s version of the Village, though they are among those who also contributed to it being America’s bohemian center of its time.
Nor are there any three dimensional Black artists or musicians depicted in the film. The one scene in which a Black musician has a speaking role was made out of whole cloth and is particularly egregious: The fictional bluesman, Jesse Moffette (portrayed by Big Bill Morganfield whose father in real life was blues legend Muddy Waters) is played as a drunken mess when he appears with Dylan on Seeger’s public television show, Rainbow Quest. That Rainbow Quest really existed and featured musicians Rev. Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee is undeniable. The inclusion of any one of those artists would’ve made an interesting, albeit fictional meeting between Black and white, established and next generation musicians. But the creation of a fictionalized and stereotypical bluesman is not only in poor taste, it was a missed opportunity to introduce new listeners to the musicians who influenced Dylan and generations of future folk, blues and rock musicians.
One full episode of Rainbow Quest was devoted to Dylan’s friend and contemporary, Len Chandler, another figure on the Village scene who was eliminated from the story told in A Complete Unknown. It was Chandler who drove Dylan on the back of his motorbike to deliver his first album to Guthrie in the hospital.
“We took out our guitars and played Woody songs,” said Chandler.
Len Chandler and Bob Dylan at Newport Folk Festival, 1964, photo by Jim Marshall
Chandler and Dylan hung out, traded songs, learned their trade and celebrated their song publications in folk journals, Broadside and Sing Out! And while Chandler spent considerably more time in the South fighting for the rights of Black Americans (like Baez, it was his calling), it’s significant that Dylan appeared shoulder to shoulder with both of them at the March on Washington (though the film makes a bungle of computer generated imagery to recreate his appearance there).
Considering what could’ve been is a fool’s game but I’ll play it anyway: Dylan’s first recording session was as a harmonica player on another one of his heroes records: Harry Belafonte’s “Midnight Special.” The often told story of Dylan throwing his harps in the trashcan afterward would’ve made a great cinematic moment. The inclusion of a civil rights giant would’ve again been a nice prompt for a young viewer to dig deeper into Belafonte’s role in American civil rights, music and Dylan’s own history.
Oh but there’s more: Dylan famously had a crush of the wanting to marry her kind on Mavis Staples. Here again, was another missed opportunity to demonstrate how the singer’s dreams listening to and playing music with his inspirers became his reality. Instead, there is a Black woman of intrigue in the film who Dylan dumps in short order after her appearance. We have no idea who she is or is supposed to be standing in for, but a little like the nameless “mistress” played by Angela Bassett in Masked in Anonymous, she is there to let us know the main dude is an equal opportunity romancer.
The studio players on Dylan’s recordings, Paul Griffin, Sam Lay, Bruce Langhorne, as well as his producer Tom Wilson, could all have been elevated to characters with even one or two-line speaking roles, if only to let the audience know these cats were not just extras to add color to the cast: These were seasoned professionals hand-picked for the records that transitioned Dylan from solo folky to serious, original artist.
And then there is the short shrift given to Dr. King, whose “I Have A Dream” speech Dylan and Chandler listened to in real time, on the day it was delivered.
“That’s what I remember from the speech, being behind another monument with Dylan and silencing ourselves, and sitting in amazement as we heard that wonderful speech unfold,” Chandler remembered. But the take on historic Black preaching in A Complete Unknown, comes in the form of a man in a fedora and trench coast on a soap box. Listed in the credits as “civil rights speaker,” the character is but a token symbol for the movement that reached its very apex during the era depicted in the film. The scenes at the Newport Folk Festival would take me another viewing to de/reconstruct but they suffer from similar missed opportunities to display Black excellence and inspiration (Lightnin’ Hopkins, Willie Dixon, Fannie Lou Hamer, for God’s sake).
What could’ve been a simple and effective portrait of young Dylan and the ways folk musicians, women, and Black Americans intersected with the Civil Rights Movement and helped to shape the counterculture and ideals that came to define the ’60s, is in the end, just another piece of product, a part of the Dylan Industrial Complex: The books for days, the several documentaries, a museum and archive, a brand of liquor, a Christmas album, ornaments, and a line of bobbleheads…these are but a fraction of the branded, approved, licensed and unlicensed materials on offer in his name. Why should I have wished that a biopic be anything more than a distraction, an entertainment?
In the end, the contributions to the Civil Rights Movement made by women and Black Americans are the real hidden figures and unknowns obscured in the Hollywood retelling of Dylan’s own early ‘60s story. As impenetrable as the “real Dylan” may be or seem to be, I left the film not thinking about him, but wanting to ask the folks living and passed over, how does it feel?
This week San Francisco’s literary festival, Litquake, celebrates 25 years of supporting writers, publishers, bookstores and the literary arts here in the Bay Area.
Running October 10-26, Litquake is the big event of the year for the Bay Area’s literary community. The mostly free readings and panels during Litquake and Litcrawl have become starting places for some of our writers and remain a testing and resting ground for those with more experience in need of a little recharge. These days, I mostly write about books, but when the festival rolls around, it’s a chance to remind myself, I too am a writer of books.
The festival’s co-founders, Jack Boulware and Jane Ganahl are my kind of people: Journalists and authors by trade, they dared to dream beyond the newsroom and share their love of the writing life with their immediate community. As their cohort of writers grew to include novelists, memoirists, biographers, sexperts, technologists and performance poets, the festival grew and grew, blossoming into its current incarnation as year round foundation and a 10+ day fest, culminating with an evening LItcrawl. Boulware and Ganahl have since stepped down as directors and as of this year, the organization welcomes its new director, Norah Piehl. Litquake is also powered by a small staff and tons of volunteers.
Though the years, I’ve been lucky to participate in the annual festival as a reader. Litquake has always been a place to try out new ideas and styles and as a writer I’ve test run biography, memoir and poetry, to get a feel for how the work sits with an audience of listeners. Litquake month has also served as a time of the year to create new work, to reset and reclaim one’s writing life, and affirm, that we are still readers and writers, no matter where the day or our lives may take us.
In more recent years, I’ve volunteer-organized and curated readings at Litquake in support of independent bookstores, particularly during San Francisco’s gentrification crisis. In 2014 we celebrated 55 years of Marcus Books. In 2015 and 2016, we honored the Mission District booksellers Modern Times Bookstore Collective, Alley Cat, Dog Eared and Adobe Books with standing-room-only events at the Make Out Room as fundraisers for Litquake and the grassroots United Booksellers (UBSF has since disbanded, but not before publishing a series of chapbooks, The City Is Already Speakingin collaboration with poet laureate Kim Shuck and featuring contributions by Tongo Eisen-Martin, Alejandro Murguía and other Bay Area poets). This year, the festival honors bookstores citywide at its opening night fundraiser, the Bookseller’s Ball. We are lucky to have so many bookstores here in San Francisco (my go-to is Bird & Beckett Books and Records). Despite digitization, the pandemic, extreme rent and operating costs (like insurance), San Francisco’s independent bookstores are strong and thriving.
It was at Bird and Beckett in 2019, that we hosted a full house for a comeback discussion with author David Talbot on Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of My Stroke, which he survived in 2017 and lived to write about. Talbot, a longtime supporter of independent booksellers and up and coming authors, has since survived a second stroke. You may offer financial support to him and his family by linking here.
As a literary community, I like to think we are mindful of supporting authors in need, as well as our elder writers and readers. For the last five years, I’ve been associated with Litquake as a teaching artist with The Elder Project, a community writing program offered to older adults. Facilitating these groups, meeting writers and hearing their stories has been an unexpected source of inspiration. The program continues to grow and each season we welcome new writers at all levels of their practice. It’s a great joy and privilege to carry on the work, conceived by poet, Jessie Scrimager Galloway, with our participants and my fellow teaching artists.
I had hoped to return to this year’s festival to read from my new book, Len Chandler: Shadow Dream Chaser of Rainbows, along with some as yet unpublished work. Due to a conflict, I will not be reading as scheduled, though I hope to find an alternative venue to test drive the new writings. Stay tuned to this space for updates and until then, I will see you at the festival. As always, thanks for reading and for your support of this webpage.
Now that it’s September and the clouds here in San Francisco have cleared, I have some news to share: A new publication – the slim volume pictured above is on a new press – and it was made not only in memory of a movement hero, but in support of voting rights for all.
The story of Len Chandler is one of a path taken by chance. Among the countless singers, students and teachers from coast to coast who sat in, stood up and rode freedom’s highway for the voting rights of their fellow Americans in the Jim Crow South, Chandler had an extraordinary knack for topical songwriting and an unwavering dedication to racial justice. From his home in Akron, to the heart of the Greenwich Village folk scene, Chandler was introduced in short order to humorist Hugh Romney aka Wavy Gravy, poets Bob Kaufman and Langston Hughes, and folksingers Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan. Swiftly recruited by Pete Seeger to join the singing organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he was sent to Arkansas to register voters.
“You have to take the lead from somewhere and there were only a few performers around who wrote songs, and of them, my favorite was Len Chandler,” said Dylan. Compiled from rare interviews with Chandler by the author, Denise Sullivan’s concise tribute, Shadow Dream Chaser of Rainbows, pays homage to an unsung folk hero and provides instruction and inspiration for artists and activists pushing for change in perilous times.
This project has been long in the making: It started nearly 20 years ago when I embarked on the research for Keep on Pushing. It was resurrected when I was invited by the Bob Dylan Center to contribute an essay to a proposed catalog, and it was completed with the creation of a small press, Lyon Editions. Your purchase of Len Chandler: Shadow Dream Chaser of Rainbows will not only support its makers, it will contribute toward supporting voting rights and poll watching organizers, specifically in Georgia.
Rest assured Chandler is missed this election season, but let’s vote in his memory and in the memory of Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others who lost their lives in the name of civil rights. A vote for Kamala Harris will see to it that the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is passed, ending voter suppression in all its forms, once and for all.
Thank you to our friends at Bird and Beckett Books and Records for the proper launch on August 28 as we commemorated 61 years since the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and one year to the day of the passing of Chandler. Full book talk and discussion here. Purchase books here. Thank you.
Back when I wrote for the music press part time and worked at a small record label where it was also my job to answer the phone, I received a call from San Quentin. Immediately a recording played, stating the call was coming from a California correctional facility, though I was surprised to learn the call was for me. Though I did not know the person, he was seeking a member of the press to write about the sudden cessation of the prison’s writing program. He said it was imperative to get the word out so that some action could be taken to preserve the incarcerated population’s right to read. I listened to the plea, said I would do what little I could, and called a reporter, a friend of mine’s sister, who worked at the San Francisco Chronicle. I think the calls came a couple of more times, but there wasn’t much I could do. To my knowledge there was never a news story about conditions at the prison or its literacy programs. At the time, I didn’t realize there wasn’t any meaningful oversight of the state prison system and that “privileges” like food, exercise and activities were withheld at random, say, if a guard took a dislike to an incarcerated individual.
During the ’80s, the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs created the conditions that led to the over-incarceration we see today, particularly of Black and Latinx individuals. Scholars, like Michelle Alexander and Angela Davis among others, contend incarceration is a racist system of control that extends outside prison walls. There is plenty documented on the subject and I invite you to read more
Today there are over 2 million people living inside America’s prisons. According to the Sentencing Project, at the time I received the call from San Quentin, there were about 40,000 people in prison at the cost of approximately 6 billion dollars annually. Today the state spends over 60 billion on incarcerating its citizens. Two new books on the subject, mostly in the words of people who have done their time, suggest that prisons are a modern day form of slavery and that we abolish the prison nation.
When I received that phone call from San Quentin some years ago, I did not know that the prison population would increase by 500 percent over the next 40 years. Surely by now, most every American knows someone whose life or family has been impacted by the carceral system.
Writing and educational programs have been restored on and off in the California system, though mostly, they are off.
Over the years, I thought about that phone call, the lack of coverage of the prison system in the media, and lack of oversight behind prison walls. I became aware of the prison industrial complex — the relationship between businesses and institutions — as well as the basic human rights violations of incarcerated individuals, and corresponding mobilization efforts, inside and out, to raise awareness of the injustices and correct the abuses.
I am still learning about how we talk about the injustices of incarceration. Hearing stories from people who have lived the horror of America’s prisons seems to offer the most hope toward solutions. I recently viewed the documentary, The Strike, and learned more about the historic California State Prison hunger strike; I listen to Prison Radio, which broadcasts the voices of incarcerated, and look forward to the compact commentaries, often prophecies from Mumia Abu-Jamal. I read the San Francisco Bay View, one of the few publications that delivers firsthand coverage from incarcerated reporters; and I have spoken to San Franciscans who do what they can, using their time and talent to care for incarcerated loved ones and strangers.
Please take a moment today to consider the over 2 million Americans incarcerated. If interested, one action you can easily take is to support the Prison Literature Project: They send books to incarcerated individuals which is not as easy as it sounds — it’s a process and they are specialists. Thanks for reading today. Songs also contain information. Thanks for listening.
Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. (aka Biggie Smalls) are hip hop legends, but actor and playwright Biko Eisen-Martin recognized their ends as a take on Shakespearean tragedy. Inspired to write a play about the pair after acting in a production of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Eisen-Martin’s “Pac & Biggie Are Dead” runs throughout June at BAM House, home of the Lower Bottom Playaz, in Oakland.
“I wouldn’t call it an existential romp, but more of an existential quest,” he says.
Read more about the play and Biko Eisen-Martin’s career as a playwright, actor and visual artist here: My latest for Bay City News.
Earlier this year in San Francisco, there was a live, all-star tribute to 92-year-old folksinger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Making his way around the world in the ‘50s, and a friend of Woody Guthrie’s during the pivotal modern era of American folk music, the contemporary celebration of Elliott was also a benefit for Sweet Relief, the 30-year-old organization founded by Victoria Williams to assist musicians in need. Oddly, the show was mostly void of political content save for a few remarks by musical director Joe Henry, 64, and Jackson Browne, 75, nodding to Guthrie and the roots of American folk and topical song.
Showing up in Elliott’s honor were Joan Baez and Bob Weir, both 83, and Steve Earle and Rickie Lee Jones aged 69. Of course there were younger performers on the bill, but my eyes and ears weren’t trained on them as much as they were on the older adults onstage and in the house: I gleefully whispered to my husband that unusually, I was among the youngest in the room.
Len Chandler was a protest singer, movement worker and unsung hero from the Civil Rights Era, a frontline campaigner in the fight for voting rights, racial and economic justice and against wars of aggression. He performed with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez at the March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom in 1963 where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic “I Have A Dream” speech. In 2021, I was commissioned to write a piece on Chandler and his relationship to Bob Dylan in front of the opening of the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, OK. The essay is emerging here for the first time before its publication as a commemorative limited edition booklet on the life of Chandler (with expanded content). A portion of the book’s earnings will be contributed to voting rights organizations. Order here: Len Chandler: Shadow Dream Chaser of Rainbows/In memory of a movement hero
“You have to take the lead from somewhere and there were only a few performers around who wrote songs, and of them, my favorite was Len Chandler,” wrote Bob Dylan in his book, Chronicles.
Among the singing foot soldiers in the civil rights movement, the students and teachers from coast to coast who sat in, stood up and rode on freedom’s highway, and of all the folksinging pamphleteers and poets who swarmed Greenwich Village in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, only Len Chandler emerged from that fabled period an under-looked groundbreaker and a foundational freedom singer, a kind of cosmic twin to Bob Dylan.
“We talked all the time,” said Chandler. “I can’t remember what we talked about but half the time, it would be philosophical, our different approaches to things. We could talk for two days on whether it’s a straight line or circle,” he said, recalling that vortex, that wrinkle in time in Greenwich Village where the cultural happenings of the ‘60s were beginning to reveal themselves. “I’d argue today that it’s a circle. The circle is built into everything. It’s built into our DNA, it’s built into the way the cosmos is formed. Everything is circular.”
The Village swirled with poets, playwrights, and artists of all stripes, mixed with locals and others from afar, far-out people who sought a fluid place to become who they thought they were meant to be – the kind of place and kind of time where young Len Chandler (from Ohio) and young Bob Dylan (from Minnesota) could meet, become friends and learn how to frame, shape and deliver a song.
“He sang quasi-folk stuff with a commercial bent and was energetic, had that thing that people call charisma,” Dylan wrote. “Len performed like he was mowing down things. His personality overrode his repertoire. Len also wrote topical songs, front-page things.”
Ordering infoLen Chandler: Shadow Dream Chaser of Rainbows
Jazz musician Les McCann died of pneumonia in Los Angeles on December 29, 2023 at age 88. As a leader and sideman, he recorded countless albums and made major contributions to the soul-jazz music of the ’60s and ’70s. His piano work has also been sampled frequently in the modern hip hop era. McCann has been most often remembered and celebrated for his performance of the Eugene McDaniels song, “Compared To What.” Performed live with Eddie Harris at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1969 and released on their album, Swiss Movement, McCann on vocals and piano gave the song a certain punch and swagger. This is an edited transcript of my talk with McCann, about the origin of the song – widely considered to be the greatest protest song of the Vietnam era – and his thoughts on life in 2016, from his then 80-year-old vantage point. May he rest in peace – with condolences to his surviving loved ones and friends.
“When I began my career in LA we had immediate attention. And whenever you have attention, you have other people coming around, trying to get your attention. I was performing with my trio at LA City College and Eugene McDaniels came by one night. I didn’t know who he was, but he liked what were doing and started hanging out. I thought he was the greatest male voice I’d ever heard. I invited him to join my group.
We started working together, and the money wasn’t good, but it was the beginning of us being professionals. He was different from all of us. He could speak English. A lot of people who didn’t like him, didn’t like him because of that. He was a very bright man, very clever. He knew what he was doing and he went after it. I believe he was the son of a pastor.
We were kinda like friends, he’d sit in, but we also hung out. We had a vocal group, a choir, and we’d get together and sing, 12 people, but all were potentially looking for their own career. When he came to us, and said, “I got a record deal, they gave me a lot of money,” we were happy for him, but not only did he stop singing the music we loved for him to do, he started doing all these other things. When they offered him the big money, some people thought he was being a traitor to jazz. But we were all just trying to make it. I was his reminder, the one who told him, don’t forget where you came from, don’t forget why you’re here.
He didn’t know he was a songwriter, but he’d ask me what I thought: Everything he showed me was unbelievable. I didn’t know he loved Bob Dylan. When I first heard “Compared To What,” it was just a set of words, there was no music. It had the words “God dammit” in it, and it was one of the reasons stations wouldn’t play it. No one had ever done that before. They were his words and I was speaking them: This was Gene son of a preacher, questioning whether he should speak his truth, which involved speaking words a preacher’s son shouldn’t say. It also involved a man speaking perfect English and being Black.
I could do what I wanted on my record label and so I recorded the song. But it was nothing like it was six years later when we did it on Swiss Movement. All that happened right there. We were just doing what we thought was great. It took me six years, but the way everyone now hears it happened in a moment, instantly onstage.
_____
“We think we’re unique, that nobody knows what we go through, but it’s not about the singing it’s about being a human, living in this world. These are lessons on learning how to love, trying to find our place and be who we are…You need to deal with the fear and the bullshit. We’re taught to be afraid of everything. Don’t do this or that: It’s said on purpose, part of the curriculum of this earthly school. Everyone has a blueprint, everyone sets out to do their thing. It’s all here, for us to learn. I’ve never stopped learning.
Earth ain’t meant to be heaven. We’re all angels having an earthly experience. Everything you can think of happens right here on this earth. If it wasn’t for sex and money and fighting, there would be no problems. It’s all how you look at things. We all have intuition.The real truth is in the quiet of who you are. I walk hand in hand with who I really am.
I remember my other lifetimes. I don’t want to do the same things over and over. It might take many times but the choice is whether we decide to live in love or in the things we fear.
Every time you do an interview, ask yourself the questions you want the answers to, ask everything you want to know of yourself: You’ll hear things you never heard before. You already know all this. It’s not anything you haven’t heard before.
Fear or love.
You have go through it and deal with it.
It’s how get to where we want to be by the time we die.
As one who started writing about music for publication in high school and started working professionally as a columnist for a regional music paper before college graduation, some might say I’ve earned space to vent about the state of the music press. Lucky for all of us, Paul Gorman wrote Totally Wired! The Rise and Fall of the Music Press, so I didn’t have to. A well-considered overview of the 100-year-old music press, it’s almost the book I would’ve written (though without the British accent. I wouldn’t have confused Penelope Houston for Penelope Spheeris, though I probably would’ve confused every guy who wrote for Rolling Stone named David, so there’s that). Anyway, I loved the book and you can read more about Totally Wired in my latest column for Tourworthy. And if you want a little bit more about my life writing about rock, there’s this:
By the time I was writing full-time in the ‘90s, it was a good time to earn a dime by writing about music, on assignment and for hire, with or without a byline, and for cranking out content for the nascent Internet which had very little in the way of information on offer until we entered the data.
(Me getting it together while Laurie Anderson patiently looks on – photo by Bobby Castro)
I contributed to what was called the first online music magazine, Addicted to Noise (consult the Wayback Machine) and the reboot of Crawdaddy! and newsstand magazines like Paste, Harp, Ray Gun, Q, MOJO, and others I care not to name. Digital back issues are hard to come by with rights having been bought, sold, and rendered inaccessible by the general public. Every few years I write a plea like this, hoping a tech savvy reader will lend a sister a hand and free my digital archives (no such luck). If a print edition existed, I have at least one copy archived (in case anyone is seeking material for a time capsule or a bonfire).
Even without digital evidence of my work, I continue to gather knowledge, form wild opinions and indulge in some meandering riffs, online and in print. I’ve written on jazz and blues, punk and hip hop, and all forms of arts and culture. But my interest in rock has waned, considerably, and perhaps understandably given its late stage decline (see: latest works by the AI-assisted Beatles and the ungodly Rolling Stones). I am rarely surprised when I hear the music business or the publishing trade being cited for racism, sexism and homophobia, or when artists and writers claim victimization (I often cover these angles in my occasional Soundinista columns). The latest case of the Go-Go’s co-founder Jane Wiedlin and several more women accusing DJ Rodney Bingenheimer of sexually assaulting them when they were teenagers at his underage disco is disturbing and heartbreaking (though for those of us paying attention, not entirely unexpected).
Sometimes it’s unclear to me what I would do if I could ascertain whether rock ‘n’ roll never forgets or rock ‘n’ roll always forgets; whether time waits for no one, if I could turn back time or if time has told me. I do know at one time I loved rock ‘n’ roll and everything about it — the way it sounded, its hair and its clothes. The music imprinted my soul, provided sanctuary and inspiration, gave me a lifetime of listening and a wide, now small, circle of friends. Yes, I’m certain that’s all true and yet, these are the good times.
Denise Sullivan 