Denise Sullivan

Author, Arts & Cultural Reporter and Worker

August 28, 2025 • 2:41 pm 0

Eyes on the Prize + Big Crime

Sixty two years ago today, when Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Len Chandler gathered onstage to sing “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, conditions world and nationwide were less than ideal and in many cases grim. And yet, the mass gathering of people of all ages, ethnicities, and beliefs, the speech by Dr. King, and all that singing of freedom songs, delivered a sense of hope that the world could mend and change.

Baez has continued to sing for liberation causes. Though she’s announced her retirement, she shows up to Bay Area protests and events to lend her voice, from the stage and from the crowd. Dylan isn’t so much a protest singer anymore as something more: A Nobel laureate. Chandler died an activist and freedom singer, on this day in 2023. He used his voice to raise money for progressive candidates and causes until the end.

In today’s top news in protest music, last night, Neil Young performed a new song, “Big Crime,” live for the first time with his band, the Chrome Hearts. Young has been very much on the front line of street protest this time around and uses his voice as a performer to fight fascism. He has particularly waged a fight against his music being used for commercial ventures and especially preventing it from being co-opted by the right.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8gbK8uoqKhlACSeenUPkFQ

Fifty five years ago, following the massacre of four unarmed students by Ohio’s National Guard at Kent State University on May 4, Young famously wrote “Ohio,” recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Young has of course made some missteps in his political action though for the most part, he has been on the people’s side, in favor of environmental wellness, human rights and against wars.

On the heels of the life-changing events at Kent State, Devo — first a concept, then a band — formed. With a point of view, something to say, Devo attempted not to lose sight of what it meant to remind us: that humankind has been heading in the wrong direction for some time and the devolution we were warned about is upon us (A new documentary on the group tells that story very well). That members of Devo were also present on that day at Kent State and collaborators with Young was no coincidence: They are artists interested in bringing the news.

That both styles of music, the old guard and the new, reached me at the right time of life, as a young person seeking answers through songs, makes me a lucky listener. I’m always listening for messages in songs, as well as appreciating music for the sheer joy and beauty it brings into the mixed bag of life. Throughout the ’80s, ‘90s and ’00s, there was plenty to protest and music from which to choose, from Dylan, Young, Devo and countless others: Punk resisted right-wingism and racism and so did hip hop. Public Enemy’s Chuck D rightly nailed it when he noted rap and hip hop were broadcasting the news from Black America. The long history of resistance music spans the globe and will not be silenced. It’s just that sometimes, the noise of the news is so loud, it’s harder to hear the music. Once in awhile, a song or video cuts through (insert your favorite here).

From 2007-2011 I worked on a book about the different strands of resistance music and how the form was faring at the turn of the 21st Century. It seemed to me to be a latent period for American protest movement and music. But then, the revival: Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter put organizing and the music that goes with it, back into the public consciousness. You might even say the movements were a wake-up call after a long slumber that included the invasion of Iraq, the bail out of the banks and an increased awareness of police brutality because of phones and social media broadcasting the horrors. That’s a pretty offhand, incomplete characterization of those years, but if you’re reading this, you have a general idea of what I’m talking about, even if I don’t…

Yet this is to say: This is why we don’t stop. This is what is meant by keeping one’s eyes on the prize. This is why I am writing this today, on the anniversary of the March and on the day after Young debuted a new protest song. We are no longer on the precipice…we are immersed. The need for protest and the music that goes with it in this country has never gone away. There have been and always will be artists like Tom Morello and M.I.A. and Chris Pierce and Jesse Wells and Carsie Blanton, out there getting the job done. When a new song drops in the heat of a moment, by an artist old or young or in the middle, I’m always pleased to hear it, as a fan of music with a desire for change. It’s a chance to pause and say thanks to everyone who is unafraid to take a stand. Today, it’s thanks to Neil, for staying in the game. As a song, “Big Crime” is unlikely to change the world or become an anthem, but then, again, we don’t know what will. We simply have to believe in a more hopeful future and be willing to work toward it.

Filed under: anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-war, video, , , , , , ,

August 17, 2025 • 10:54 am 2

What Would Jerry Do? Notes on Dead & Company, Inc.® © ™

Back in the Paleolithic era, I worked as front desk receptionist for concert promoter Bill Graham and had several encounters with members of the Grateful Dead family. Not that I knew who they were at the time: it was a big part of my identity as a modern music lover to not know, though I’ve come around to their sound and specifically to Jerry Garcia.

For the sake of a prequel and partial sequel to the business at hand, I accidentally experienced the Dead at a Day on the Green concert in 1976 when they co-headlined with The Who. At the time I didn’t know or care that the big events staged at Oakland’s stadium would became a kind of testing ground for the full scale festival tours we know today. It didn’t help I didn’t know “Scarlett Begonias” from “China Cat Sunflower” or to that to my unformed mind, experiencing the Dead was just a three hour endurance test before the Who hit the stage. I was not transformed, my consciousness was not altered by their music, as some members of the band and the people who love them claim, though today, I quite like most all of Garcia’s and lyricist Robert Hunter’s material. I like to think I have grown into it.

But even back when, I knew Jerry was Jerry, and later in my role as receptionist, I certainly knew enough about receiving office visitors that I was not to waylay people of his renown at the entrance with formalities like announcing their arrival. In the flash it took me to recognize a musician, he could walk past me, nod, and in Jerry’s case, with his cherubic smile, head bowed and hands jammed in his pockets, proceed without pause, into the open main office, then in the direction of Bill’s corner sanctum. Same went for Carlos. Santana. He and Jerry were of course legends by then, their reputations enshrined thanks to their inimitable, celestial guitar styles. I was less generous about their music then, but showed respect anyway: These were people born in the same decade as my parents. Then again, I can’t claim to have displayed anything resembling even courtesy the day an even older man dressed in a fur loin cloth and carrying a walking stick announced his arrival.

“Bear for Bill.”
“Excuse me?”
I couldn’t hide my contempt, buzzing over the line to Bill’s assistant.
“Someone named Bear is here for Bill?”
“Send him in.”
The shock registered on my face compelled a co-worker witnessing the scene to whisper my way.
“Bear is Owsley.”
“And?”
“He invented acid.”
I get it now.

On another day, Mountain Girl announced herself. My lack of exposure to hippie culture was pitiable and the name drew a complete blank. I said something like, “Say what now?”  I feel sorry for being just one more person to judge Carolyn Garcia based on her chosen name and hope she can forgive me. Perhaps we might even agree that Jerry would be “rolling in his grave” in connection with some of events of the last few weeks celebrating the 60th anniversary of the formation of the Grateful Dead. 

Thirty years ago, on August 9, 1995, Jerry Garcia died. His diabetes raged, his heart gave out and his body failed him while detoxing from a lifetime of drug dependence. A few days later, his life was celebrated with a public memorial concert in Golden Gate Park. By that time, the Dead had been doing big business for some time, thanks to constant touring and their first top 40 hit, “A Touch of Gray.” Never mind then that Garcia’s health was down and his addictions were up: The show must go on as the Dead’s touring, merch and ticket sales were doing the kind of big boring business the music industry represents today.

The bands formed in Jerry’s wake include The Other Ones, The Dead, Further, Ratdog, Phil Lesh & Friends and the Rhythm Devils (there are more). But the extreme monetization of all things rock ’n’ roll, psychedelic and Dead had been well under way for several decades. The Grateful Dead as corporation was just another aspect of its long strangely quirky and contradictory trip.

Beginning in 2015, Dead members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart began billing themselves Dead & Company; by 2023, they played to bid goodbye to touring with their Fare Thee Well shows. Those dates, according to published accounts in music industry trade magazines and other media outlets, grossed $114.7 million over 28 shows, though they were hardly the end. In 2024, Weir, Hart and an amalgamation of musicians played a 30 show stand at the Sphere in Las Vegas and earned $130 million that year as Dead & Company. This year’s Dead & Company returned from the dead, again, for 18 shows at the Sphere and three in Golden Gate Park to mark the 60th anniversary of the formation of the Grateful Dead and 30 years since Jerry’s passing. The tour receipts for this year have not yet been published, though some fiscal facts are known.

Tickets for the Golden Gate Park weekend ranged from $600 for three days and went up to $7k for the VIP Package. The concerts brought $150 million to the city’s economy, $7 million into the Parks and Recreation Dept. according to local media, and some untold sum for promoter, Another Planet Entertainment, not to mention the band, its agents, managers and other profiteers. I don’t know much about the Grateful Dead but I’ve read the books and can tell you that profit was not a big motivator when the band was founded. Money and possessions were seemingly of little interest to Garcia.

To say it another way, Dead & Company do not embody the spirit of the Dead and its commitment to alternatives to commercialism and mainstream culture. That is if there is such a thing as a spirit of a band: In the Dead’s case, that bird has definitely flown. I can say more, much more, but won’t now except: In 1996 I spent six weeks on the road with the Further festival. It was unpleasant to say the least and I survived it by immersing myself in nightly sets by Los Lobos, a band I am certain has a spirit because I can feel it. 

And yet, there are still some traces of Jerry’s spirit around if you are looking for it in the city that raised him. Whether its the makeshift shrines in the Haight, stenciled Jerry bears on sidewalks around town, or the annual Jerry Day free concert at McLaren Park, I could swear some days, especially in August which marks his birth and death, he hovers.

Jerry Day was established in 2003 to celebrate the Excelsior District’s most famous son; this year a street there was named for him. But the future of Jerry Day is imperiled due to “lack of funding” and city support. How could this be in a city of 80 billionaires? How could this be in a city whose mayor is worth millions made from the profits of Levi Strauss, the jeans favored by hippies and punks and everyone else, you may ask and I will answer: We are a city that creates and then commodifies everything: From rock ’n’ roll, psychedelics, and cannabis, to the Grateful Dead, to mention but a fraction of what comes from Northern California. We even have a Counterculture Museum to keep the idea of an underground in place. 

No, I don’t blame the latest generation who want to partake in their own rituals or a virtual tribal love rock musical: It’s the cost to play the game I can’t relate to. There’s also the carbon in/carbon out trucking and busing of staging and sound equipment on public park grounds, our much-needed oasis in a largely concrete residential neighborhood that’s hard to get your head around. 

Jerry loved Golden Gate Park. It’s east to west world map of flora and fauna literally inspired his guitar playing. But following the three dates of Dead & Company there, the three-day Outside Lands festival and last week’s straight vanilla “alt-country” event, the concerts have trampled the landscape and turned the largely working class, Democratic voting blocks of the outer Richmond and outer Sunset neighborhoods into a parking lot.  And we did nothing to prevent it. Oh sure, we voted to make the Great Highway a park, but we got very little in return for that either.

The highway, its nearby grid of avenues, and the park itself, were built on sand dunes. They were not designed with an in and out flow of 60,000 non-residents a day in mind. These neighborhoods of families, people with disabilities, seniors and people of all ages who speak more languages than in any other area of the city are boxed in. Many of us are in the work force and use the roads to travel to and from our jobs. There are hospitals and other services that bookend the park and people need access. And then there is the wildlife that has been displaced for a month by top volumes, distracting spotlights, and cyclone fencing not to mention the human footprints marring their paths home.

Jerry used the park himself to find peace and quiet: That’s where he was found one morning in his car in 1985 with a shit ton of drugs on him and in him (in 2025, concert goers in the park enjoy the brain freezing drug of nitrous oxide). Communing with nature takes many forms but the combination of numbing out in these times seems less like a tribute and more like a cop-out.

Granted, my distress is not about the disruption outside my window but is intertwined with the upheavals worldwide. If you’re reading this, you wake up screaming in some form or another, whether about detainment, displacement, about the genocides, dictatorships, rolled back rights and the current incompetence at most levels of leadership [release the files]. And yet these cries are signs of our human connection, our consciousness, the kind once encouraged by the Dead or psychedelics or a combination of the two. 

Even though now it seems like no one is listening, those of us who are awake and alive are the miracles we are seeking. The shakedown, whether in the park, at the Dead & Company HQ or on the national stage is just another version of life in all its stages: good, bad, ugly and beautiful.  So I keep doing what I do. Live my life accordingly. Sometimes I ask myself, what would Jerry do? And while I choose not to check out, I can’t deny we’re living in a blast furnace. Yet I see no choice but to play it through, and just keep truckin’ on.

Filed under: anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-war, Arts and Culture, California, rock 'n' roll, Rock Birthdays, San Francisco News, , , , , ,

July 21, 2025 • 4:55 pm 0

It’s All One Long Funeral Song

Allen Ginsberg claimed he wept when he heard it  for the first time.

Folksinger Len Chandler started to play it when the words and music were first published in Sing Out!, the folk song magazine, at the end of 1962. Patti Smith performed the song when Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. 

Among the timeless songs he wrote in his early period, Dylan characterizes “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and others as “all one long funeral song.”

And while it was not specifically written to confront nuclear winter, Kronos Quartet and the Hard Rain Collective released two versions of “Hard Rain” last week, to commemorate 80 years since the first atomic bomb was detonated as a test on July 16 in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

A second drop, “Hard Rain (Drone)” — as in the style of music — is a spoken word version. The collective recordings include voicings by Laurie Anderson, Ocean Vuong, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Satomi Matsuzaki, Willie Nelson, Iggy Pop, Asha Boshle and many more. Terry Riley’s raga, “Komal Reshab Asavari” is central to the theme (read more about the project and other songs devoted to world health and the biosphere at Redhot).

At last week’s Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War in Chicago, Kronos performed “Hard Rain” with Allison Russell.

“You know, it’s remarkable that a 21-year-old singer-songwriter wrote this song in 1962 and how — when you observe and know the words of this song very clearly, how important it is to our time right now,” Kronos founder David Harrington told Democracy Now.

Harrington was joined on the program by physicist Daniel Holz, chair of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and one of the organizers of the assembly which gathered Nobel laureates and nuclear experts to raise awareness of the growing (yes, growing) risk of nuclear war, particularly against a backdrop of climate change.

“…The likelihood that we’ll sort of stumble into a nuclear war and the end of civilization … has gone way up… We’re bringing together Nobel laureates and nuclear experts and trying to find a way forward, a way to reduce the risk, get the messages out to the public and also to leaders that here are steps that can be taken to reduce this. We need to get the awareness back, and we need to do everything we can to prevent the sort of nuclear annihilation that would impact literally everyone on the planet,” said Holz.

This piece by Norman Solomon in The Nation is a must-read in case there remains any doubt, “nuclear winter is a climate issue.”

It’s understandable if you missed the 80 year commemoration of the Trinity test, given the week that was. But there is still time to prepare for a suitable remembrance of August 6 and 9: It’s been 80 years since bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are very few survivors, or hibakusha, as they are known, left to speak about the horrors of the A-bomb. In 2019, I spoke to one — an American citizen detained at age 14 in Japan while visiting relatives when World War II broke out. 

Today, the planet – not just the region impacted – but the entire planet will simply not survive a nuclear explosion. The sun will not sun. Famine will ensue. The past is our future. War is still unhealthy for children and other living things.  Please contact your representatives and support candidates accordingly.

Originally published in Down With Tyranny!

Filed under: anti-war, , , , , , , ,

January 20, 2025 • 5:03 pm 1

Hold on to your dreams

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.

Hold on to the dream.

Filed under: anti-racist, anti-war, Arts and Culture, Bob Marley, Concerts, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Gil Scott-Heron, Immigration Reform, income disparity, Poetry, , , , , , , , ,

December 30, 2024 • 9:23 pm 2

The Complete Unknowns

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?

Filed under: anti-capitalist, Arts and Culture, Blues, Bob Dylan, Civil Rights, film, Folk, Greenwich Village, Poetry, Protest Songs, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

December 21, 2023 • 6:49 pm 0

It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Writing

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.

Filed under: Arts and Culture, Books, rock 'n' roll, , , , , ,

March 7, 2021 • 9:07 am 1

Bloody Sunday: Freedom Highway Revisited

Five songs into their set at Chicago’s New Nazareth Church, the Staple Singers get down to the real, and the reason, they called their gospel meeting on April 9, 1965.

“A few days ago freedom marchers marched on Selma to Montgomery, Alabama,” says Roebuck “Pops” Staples. “And from that march, words were revealed and a song was composed. And we wrote a song about the freedom marchers and we call it the ‘Freedom Highway.’ And we dedicate this number to all the freedom marchers, and it goes something like this.”

Tearing into their new song as if it was a longtime traditional favorite, the Staples evoke the energy and resistance of the historic freedom trail for voting rights, right there at their South Side parish. Though few could’ve predicted or believed that the messages of the Martin Luther King, Jr.-led movement would still be necessary or relevant 50 years on, this timeless performance at the height of the fight has been mercifully preserved, restored and reissued on Legacy’s new Freedom Highway Complete—Recorded Live at Chicago’s New Nazareth Church, April 9, 1965, for all the world to once again bear witness and hear the beauty in a song.

The whole world is wondering what’s wrong with the United States

Yes, we want peace if it can be found

Marching freedom’s highway, 

I’m not gonna turn around…

Stay on freedom’s highway until the day is done

Following an introduction from Pops encouraging folks to sing, clap, and shout amen, the group (accompanied by Al Duncan on drums and Phil Upchurch on bass) eases in parishioners with the familiar invocation, “When The Saints Go Marching In.”  But they waste no time getting to the darker stuff, slipping in the Hank Williams tale of “The Funeral,” concerning the closing of the casket on a little curly-headed boy. The secular movement standard, “We Shall Overcome” is delivered easily enough, serving as the crowd-participatory number it was built to be, though in the Staples’ hands, all is holy. Their originals like “Freedom Highway” and “Tell Heaven,” and the arrangements of spirituals like “He’s All Right” strive to tear the roof off the chapel and touch greener pastures, delivering the listener from all earthly distraction. For gospel singers like the Staples family, “Jesus Is All” (one of the set’s previously unreleased tracks) and “Help Me Jesus” are not just proud declarations of their savior’s name, they are a way of life, a deep faith that does not ask its adherents to acquiesce in God’s presence; it puts the holy spirit in charge, so that the faithful may take action on the streets and in all matters of the everyday, fearlessly and free.

Church was where the gospel group first practiced its faith as family singers—Roebuck, Pervis, Cleotha, Yvonne and Mavis—in the late forties and early fifties, developing an acoustic folk-gospel style with a bluesy feeling, distinguished by soul-solid lead vocals by Mavis and piercing, bending guitar by “Pops.” They recorded for a number of labels including Vee-Jay (famous for releasing blues acts and later, the Beatles) where they had some early success with “Uncloudy Day,” (a song Bob Dylan recently called the “most mysterious thing” he’d ever heard). In later years they joined the Stax label where during the apex of soul music, they enjoyed Top 40 success with funk-based, gospel-powered hits like “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There.”  In between these distinct eras, the Staples were signed to Epic where their A&R man and producer Billy Sherrill (remembered mostly for his Nashville productions) assisted in the development of merging their sacred and soul sides. For the Freedom Highway session, he arranged the necessary equipment be brought to the church and recorded the service/rally. Mobile units were in their infancy at the time, but the project was not conceived as a “field” recording. Before release, the tracks were edited, telescoped, and worked to conform to studio and broadcast standards, purposefully leaving behind the churchy and ambient parts, though even with the tweaking, the set was a revelation. Becoming one of the era’s most beloved recordings, it was also long left out-of-print, only to become highly sought after (a 1991 Legacy reissue titled Freedom Highway is not the original recording, but rather a compilation).

StapleSinger_cover

Bolstered by the anticipation of the tracks becoming once again available digitally and on vinyl, the new and expanded edition produced by Steve Berkowitz and Nedra Olds-Neal stands to surpass the original’s already relic-like status. By daring to return the tapes to their original form and to recreate the evening from front to back, Freedom Highway becomes all at once a historical document, a spirit-lifting gospel session, and a fist-raising call for freedom now. Accompanied by rock and soul historian Robert Gordon’s liner notes which ascertain the place of race in music and in the country then and now, the Staples brand of “message music” is spelled out for non-believers and anyone else in need of a nudge.

Leaping into faith-based music in times of uncertainty is natural; gospel survives on rock solid melodies and timeless messages of liberation which by design were created to subvert slavery and oppression. And while the marchers in Ferguson, New York and Oakland in recent months may not have exactly had the notes of “Freedom Highway” on their minds when they shut down roadways, its words were already written on their souls.  Built to travel the distance, and as necessary as in the hour they were recorded, these songs performed 50 years ago (and some scored a hundred years before) are available to accompany movement, anytime, anywhere, there is a fight for voting rights, civil rights and human need. These songs’ messages are as urgent now as they were then, as is faith in the idea that the march will ultimately be won, mile by mile, hand in hand.

“Let’s say amen again,” says Pops Staples on the restored set’s recovered audio tracks. “Let’s keep on marchin’…Keep on marchin’ up freedom highway.”

(This review appeared originally in Blurt online, upon the release of the 50th anniversary edition of Freedom Highway)

Filed under: anti-war, Arts and Culture, Black Power,, Bob Dylan, Civil Rights, Folk, Freedom Now, Gospel, Protest Songs, , , , , , , , , , ,

August 19, 2020 • 9:14 am 0

How to support small presses, indie films and theaters during the pandemic

Notes, Contacts, Name CQ's here

Liam Curley, warehouse manager at the Small Press Distribution, Berkeley, CA. During the high season of the pandemic’s shelter-in-place orders, it was lonely in SPD’s warehouse where Curley worked by himself, receiving and shipping orders by hand at a fraction of his usual pace.(Photo by Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The Chronicle)

During the early phase of the coronavirus shutdown, small publishers and the Northern California distributor that ships those books to market were doing all right, operating with scaled down staffs and shipping customer orders direct. But as the fall publishing season approaches, with no end to the virus in sight, the closures indefinite, and college course texts and bookstore futures shaky, the small press industry is navigating the same uncertain future as everyone else. If there is a silver lining to this catastrophe, small presses are generally more attuned to matters of race, gender and class than the big five publishing houses: There is a demand for books authored, edited and published by Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). I wrote about the longstanding spirit and principle of intersectionality in small press publishing for the San Francisco Chronicle. I hope you’ll read the full story here.

SFE-SFLives

Documentary filmmaker Anne Flatte stands outside the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Her film,  “River City Drumbeat,” is about a year in the life of drum corps in Louisville, Kentucky.  (Photo by Kevin N. Hume/S.F. Examiner)

Some of the changes from digitization that impacted publishing even before the pandemic also reverberate through the art of producing, making and presenting independent film – a corner of the film business where woman traditionally find more opportunity than they do in Hollywood.  For the small art houses that regularly show movies by and about subjects that might not otherwise be seen on the big screen, the pandemic closures threaten to wipe out old time cinemas and movie-going entirely, though the best makers and curators are adapting.  Here in San Francisco, we can stream directly from our beloved Roxie, Balboa and Vogue Theaters, among others.  Filmmaker Anne Flatté is screening her latest work, River City Drumbeat, via virtual cinema. She and her co-director chose a youth drum corps as their compelling subject and made a visually captivating and emotionally powerful film about cultural legacy and survival. As a viewer, you can choose to watch indie films like River City Drumbeat in a way that supports local businesses instead of using your typical streaming services. Why would you? Well, the main multi-media/marketplace exploits its workers.  And the business models of the big streaming services also steal a disproportionate amount of revenue from the people who actually make the art. Those fat cats don’t need your money and artists need to be compensated for their work. Read more here.

Please support a small local press, filmmaker, theater or business today or this week: They need us – and we need them – if ever we’re going to get through this mess.

Filed under: Arts and Culture, Book news, film, San Francisco News, , , , , ,

March 27, 2020 • 6:40 pm 0

Musical activism in the pandemic age: Betty Soo on safe distancing

Hello faithful family of friends and readers: First things first, I wish you health and safety in these troubling times. I’ve been keeping my head down, safe distancing and generally following the recommendation of my state and local leaders to shelter in place. Here in San Francisco, we went on the unfortunately termed “lockdown” at midnight on March 16 in an effort to “flatten the curve.” There is so much left to learn and know about this virus. I will continue to cover its impact from my usual arts and cultural perspective as long as necessary.

During early March when measures to control the coronavirus had still not widely limited performances at bars and nightclubs and elder states-players like Patti Smith and Elvis Costello carried on with gigs from the Fillmore in San Francisco to the Hammersmith Apollo in London, Austin-based singer-songwriter Betty Soo (pictured above) put the brakes on her live performance schedule to reflect on the potential hazards of proceeding with cramming people into confined spaces in the time of a pandemic.  I hope you’ll read my profile of Soo and the other musicians who led the way in the movement to seek alternatives to live performance in the time of the pandemic, not only to keep themselves healthy, but their fans, and you at home too.  Read the full column in this month’s edition of Tourworthy.

Filed under: Arts and Culture, Folk, Texas, Women in Rock, , , , , , , ,

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