Southern Bookman

Farewell, Dave Hickey, the last gonzo

Dave Hickey like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson brought an intense personal sensibility to journalism.

The last of a generation that began with Wolfe and Mailer's "new journalism," Hickey gained cultish fame with his 1997 collection "Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy."

The essay collection champions Hank Williams, Liberace, Stan Brakhage, Norman Rockefeller, Chet Baker and other popular artists with the same attention he gives to Cezanne, de Kooning, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. In an essay on basketball, he praises Julius Erving and James Naismith's original game rules.

Hickey, who like Thompson and Mailer defined himself as an outlaw rebelling against prevailing cultural strictures, died Nov. 12 at age 82 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He'd been battling heart disease for years.

A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Hickey as a child moved with his family to Los Angeles. He ridiculed Texas' provincial boosterism, but never lost the state's contrarian viewpoint. When Hickey was 11, his father, a car salesman and jazz musician, killed himself, a major influence on Hickey's independent outlook.

Rootless as a young man, Hickey opened an art gallery in Austin called "A Clean Lighted Place," which struggled against the Texas capital's parochial aesthetic values. He then moved to New York City, where he managed a gallery, reportedly quitting in protest of a Yoko Ono exhibition.

Discovering himself as a writer, Hickey was editor of Art in America before finding a home as a professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, becoming the most famous representative of that school since Jerry Tarkanian's Runnin' Rebels.

In one of the best essays in "Air Guitar," Hickey celebrates Las Vegas for its freedom from New York City and Los Angeles' cultural dogmas. He also loved Las Vegas' wide-open entertainment and gambling culture.

"Air Guitar" and the influential chapbook "The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty," earned him a MacArthur "Genius grant," in 2001, the proceeds of which he fed into Vegas slot machines.

While he appreciated mass popular culture, he also called for a return to rigorous standards in judging artworks. He blasted the contemporary art world for its commercialism and turn from traditional artistic values.

Like his journalistic predecessors, Hickey was accused of machoism, although he considered underappreciated abstract painter Joan Mitchell the best artist of her generation. Feminist critics saw his defense of beauty as elitist. At the end of his career, he published "25 Women: Essays on Their Art." That too was viewed as paternalistic.

Hickey wrote for a variety of publications, including Art News, the Village Voice, Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone. Along with art and popular music, he also wrote about television and the movies.

In "Air Guitar," he recalled the Texas writer Grover Lewis, and Lewis' friendship with Larry McMurtry, ground also covered by a McMurtry memoir.

Hickey biographer Daniel Oppenheimer wrote a warm appeciation of Hickey for Texas Monthly, the first to report Hickey's death.

As Oppenheimer details, Hickey like other literary exiles remained stamped by his native land.

 

"Something in the Water" painstakingly details Macon's musical history

Seminal rock and rhythm and blues legends Little Richard, Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers all called Macon home.

Dynamic rhythm and blues performer James Brown, born in Augusta, also launched his career in Macon, whose flourishing nightclub scene and musical promotion network rivaled that of Memphis, New Orleans and Nashville.

The midsized Georgia city's musical legacy extends beyond those supernova perforrmers, as University of North Georgia history professor Ben Wynne painstakingly documents in Mercer University Press's "Something in the Water: A History of Music in Macon, Georgia, 1823-1980."

The first part of the book is hampered by Macon's rather ordinary musical history from antebellum years through the middle 20th century. Wynne gives a plodding rendition of local performers, music teachers and promoters. Macon's small-town cultural life is not distinguished from that of other small Southern cities, although the desire for cultural improvement is admirable.

A few moments catch fire in his stodgy narrative, such as his rediscovery of Macon's Pickens sisters. The trio produced hit records and performed on national radio shows and in the movies in the 1930s.

Jane Pickens Hoving, the trio's musical director, went on to an enduring career in New York City music and theater from the 1940s through the 1960s. She starred in films and Broadway musicals, and hosted her own radio and TV shows on national networks.

The book's momentum rises in the postwar era with Wynne's look at the careers of Little Richard, Redding, Brown and the Allman Brothers and lesser known Macon musical figures. A strength is Wynne's detailed summary of the rise and fall of Phil Walden and Capricorn Records, which launched the Allman Brothers' superstar career.

While Wynne's in-depth history of Macon's musical heritage in the 19th and early 20th centuries bogs down in details, he gives a solid account of the city's international fame in the rock era.

 

Catching up with Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman"

On a beautiful autumn Sunday afternoon, I decided at last to watch "The Irishman," Martin Scorsese's take on Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance and other famous mob murders.

The film featured a murderers' row of famed mob-noir actors: Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, Al Pacino, Jesse Plemons, even Steven Van Zandt in a cameo role. And Ray Romano shows up as a mob lawyer. Michael Imperioli and Ray Liotta must have been busy.

While Pesci was mesmerizing as the crime boss Russell Bufalino, DeNiro as the hit man Frank Sheeran and Pacino as Hoffa burn up the screen in their dual appearances. The two acting legends keep pushing each other to more flamboyant mugging and vocal histrionics.

Taken from Sheeran's memoir, "I Hear You Paint Houses," the exhausting three and half-hour film written by Steve Zaillian and directed by Scorsese for Netflix hinted at Mafia involvement in the John F. Kennedy assassination, as well as Hoffa's death. Like a homicidal Forrest Gump, DeNiro's every-man hitman Sheeran keeps showing up, even killing "Crazy Joey" Gallo at a restaurant in Manhattan.

Scorsese and Zaillain give tantalizing tidbits of mob culture: "I Hear You Paint Houses" is code for "I hear you kill people." There's a long mystifying dialogue about a fish left in the back of a car, connected to Hoffa’s killing. Right: "He sleeps with the fishes."

Conspiracy buffs will levitate at references to old Joe Kennedy's mob ties, JFK's disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, and other hints of mob anger at what they saw as the Kennedys' betrayals. The CIA is not mentioned. There is a muffled mention of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.

The epic makes references to other mob films, directed by Scorsese and others. The depiction of Gallo's murder echoes the famous scene in Francis Ford Coppolla's "Godfather" in which Pacino's Michael Corleone kills the mob boss and crooked cop at an Italian restaurant. This time, the killer doesn't go to the bathroom to find the murder weapon.

A huge banquet honoring Sheeran, where Van Zandt appears as singer Jerry Vale, recalls the wedding scene in Coppolla's movie. Bits from "The Sopranos," "Goodfellas,"  "Casino," "Scarface" and "Mean Streets" fly by.

Pacino and De Niro appeared in "Godfather Part II," but in separate tracks. "The Irishman" was the first film in which they faced off against each other.

I was gratified that the movie made a passing reference to Ed Grady Partin, the Baton Rouge Teamster boss whose testimony sent union president Hoffa to prison. In my youth, Partin's strikes often shut down Louisiana's capital city for months. Partin met his downfall trying to organize workers at publisher and TV station owner Douglas Manship's Morning Advocate.

"The Irishman" is like a greatest hits album featuring stars of yesteryear. The movie is a feast for history, conspiracy, Mafia and film buffs. The soundtrack of old '50s and '60s songs, compiled by the Band's Robbie Robertson - also touch the nostalgia synapses.

God, the film is long. Scorsese might have cut closing scenes of De Niro in his nursing home, reminiscing about the old days of carrying out mob hits and confessing his sins to a young priest.

But, hey, it was De Niro, filling the screen.

 

 

 

 

 

New Yorker shines with Paul McCartney interview, Thomas McGuane short story

The New Yorker's current issue proves again that we boomers refuse to go gently into that good night.

Longtime Editor David Remnick unshelves his writing skills in a long profile of Paul McCartney, who at 79 seeks to reframe the Beatles legacy and his subsequent career.

The issue also offers a vintage short story by 82-year-old Thomas McGuane. "Not Here You Don't" examines the environmental deterioration and declining ethos of freedom in Montana, McGuane's longtime home.

Those who experienced 1960s pop culture first-hand can also relish film critic Anthony Lane's typically insightful review of Daniel Craig's last James Bond film, "No Time to Die." Recent film-goers will mourn Craig's farewell as earlier Bond fans did the exit of Sean Connery.

Remnick's revealing piece on McCartney arrives at a big moment for the pop superstar. A remix of his latest album, "McCartney" III," is topping the charts, and he's publishing a collection of his lyrics dating back to his teen years. Poet Paul Muldoon wrote essays for "The Lyrics: 1956 Through the Present."

The biggest event is the long-delayed arrival of a re-edited version of the 1969 film "Get Back," which takes a lighter view of the Beatles' breakup than the original movie. Peter Jackson's film, taken from 56 hours of material, will be streamed on Disney Plus at Thanksgiving.

I saw the original Beatles film years ago, transported by the band giving an impromptu concert on a London rooftop as office workers and passers-by on the street watched in wonder.

In pushing the film, McCartney looks back on his tortured relationship with John Lennon. McCartney says Lennon caused the Beatles breakup, for which McCartney was blamed at the time. He also says he remained friends with Lennon despite Lennon's harsh public insults, and admired Yoko Ono, whose marriage to Lennon was seen as breaking the band apart.

McCartney in an amusing aside punctures the Rolling Stones, calling the Beatles' major rivals a blues cover band.

Younger generations will  likely wonder what all the fuss was about. Yet watching the Beatles perform their songs will make them understand why their moms and dads, and grand-moms and grand-dads, loved the band's music so intensely.

I'm always happy to see in the New Yorker stories by McGuane and a few other remaining writers of his generation. Contemporary short stories often don't engage me, as was the case in the current special issue of Oxford American showcasing new Southern writing.

The emerging generation of writers formed in college creative writing programs display a similarity of techniques and banality of characters and situations.

In contrast, McGuane makes the reader wonder how he achieves such power from his deceptively simple language. He ties his stories to broader social and environmental changes. As he discusses in a separate interview, McGuane uses the short story to illuminate the West's environmental and political crises.

Like McCartney, McGuane is a master storyteller who remains relevant for younger generations as well as we aging boomers.

 

New York City looks ahead with return of Broadway, Village Vanguard

Broadway's back, and so is the Village Vanguard.

New York City this week welcomed the return of its famous theater district and vintage jazz club after an unprecedented 18-month shutdown.

One of my favorite New York City landmarks, the TKTS discount ticket booth in Times Square at Broadway and 47th Street, reopened Tuesday as a line of theater lovers waited. A couple from South Carolina bought the first discounted tickets, according to a New York Times roundup of Broadway's reopening.

Long-running favorites "Wicked," "The Lion King," "Chicago," and "Hamilton" again filled Broadway stages. "Waitress" had been running for a couple of weeks, and Bruce Springsteen gave solo performances of his musical beginning in midsummer.

The theater district will get into full swing this autumn with the return of Jeff Daniels in "To Kill a Mockingbird" and Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster starring in a revival of "The Music Man."

Meredith Wilson's ballad "Till There Was You" will sound sweeter than ever when "The Music Man" opens at the Winter Garden Theater in December.

The Village Vanguard reopened Tuesday, beginning a six-day engagement by trumpeter Ron Miles, who's performing with pianist Jason Moran, bass player Thomas Morgan, guitarist Bill Frissell and drummer Brian Blake. 

Wall Street Journal jazz writer Larry Blumenfeld reported Thursday that the vintage Greenwich Village club installed a new mahogany bar and Steinway grand piano during the shutdown. In recent months, the club's been streaming concerts.

Pianist Fred Hersch, who attended Miles' show Tuesday, donated the piano to the club. Hersch, who boosted spirits during the first days of the pandemic with Facebook concerts from his home, will appear at the club with his trio in October.

Blumenfeld reported that music is pulsing again at Birdland, the Blue Note and Jazz at Lincoln Center's Dizzy's Club in New York City. Clubs are also returning in San Francisco. After closing because of Hurricane Ida, Preservation Hall in New Orleans is coming back.

Hamilton writer and star Lin Manuel Miranda appeared on the Richard Rodgers Theater sidewalk to greet the returning audience. He proclaimed "live theater's back" and led a sing-along of "New York, New York."

Broadway had returned after its longest period of darkness.

 

 

A weekend tale of two cities: the Braves, Shakespeare, Nashville and Atlanta

The new Fifth and Broadway district in downtown Nashville flowed with tourists packing the heat-scorched sidewalks Saturday afternoon.

Rising above the venerable Ryman Auditorium and old-time draws like Tootsie's Lounge, the complex offers food courts, office buildings, clubs and the impressive National Museum of African-American Music.

Fifth and Broadway perches between the Ryman and Bridgestone Arena, home of concerts and the NHL Predators. It's also near the Country Music Hall of Fame and Broadway clubs.

My wife and I had driven up from Atlanta to visit our daughter and see the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's "12th Night." The night before, I'd gone with my son to witness the Braves' thrilling victory over the Giants at Truist Park.

Headed through the Nashville throng, I was startled to remember the empty dirt lot where Fifth and Broadway now stood. Over the years during periodic visits to Nashville, I'd marked the construction's slow progress. Now, as the crowds swarmed by, I had a moment of dissociation in realizing that this congested setting had once been that barren place.

Fifth and Broadway give me a spell of Nashville envy, although the tourist horde was overwhelming. Sure, Atlanta has the Beltline, the College Football Hall of Fame, Mercedes Benz Stadium and State Farm Arena, but lacks a downtown draw like Fifth and Broadway. The comparable Centennial Yards development at the Gulch appears years away.

On our way from east Nashville to the Shakespeare play, we got bogged down in traffic headed to the Titans' exhibition game against the Cardinals at the downtown Nissan Stadium. Like Atlanta, Nashville is a sprawling interstate-enmeshed city that burgeoned without rational urban planning.

As with the Braves, the Shakespeare production required traveling by car and parking in the garage of a corporate office tower. The Nashville Shakespeare Festival gives outdoor performances at an amphitheater that's part of the One City complex, one of the many multi-use projects popping up around the city, as in Atlanta.

Enhanced with Tom Mason's rock-flavored arrangements of Shakespeare's songs, the Nashville troupe presented an ebullient "12th Night." In the role of the fool Feste, Mason set a festive mood for the company, playing his guitar with the backing of a drum and bass and giving Shakespeare's lyrics a Nashville flair.

Arrayed in modern dress - boots and cowboy hats prominent - the  cast adorned the comedy of cross-dressing, mistaken identities and concocted letters with a light sit-com mood.

The crowd left happy, just as the Braves fans had the night before.

 

 

 

Farewell, Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones' elegant drummer

Charlie Watts would have been happy playing drums for a jazz trio in small dark clubs.

Instead, Watts gained fame with the Rolling Stones, performing in huge stadiums around the world.

The band's rhythmic pulse for 60 years, Watts died Tuesday at age 80 in London. Fellow rock stars hailed him as one of the era's great drummers.

With his tailored suits, patrician style and art-school sensibility, Watts brought jazz-world cool to the world's rowdiest band.

Accentuating Keith Richards' forceful guitar riffs with restrained jazz progressions, Watts gave the band's hardest rock songs a swinging pace. While Watts learned his craft playing along with bebop records, he also loved American big-band dance numbers.

Taking a break from the Stones, he recorded with jazz bands he put together, and performed on stage in 1985 with a 32-piece orchestra that played swing classics like "Stompin' at the Savoy."

Along with other British rockers, Watts was born during World War II, and grew up during the country's postwar deprivation. Baby-boom heroes like Watts came from a different world.

Watts died just as the Rolling Stones were to embark upon another world tour. After a recent medical procedure, Watts had withdrawn from the grueling schedule.

Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood and Richards will still play the band's famous songs. But the Rolling Stones won't be the same.

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Don Everly, a true American original

The Everly Brothers recorded a folk masterpiece during their glory years as one of rock and roll's most influential pioneers.

"Songs Our Daddy Taught Us," recorded in 1958 after the Everlys had scored pop hits with "Wake Up Little Susie" and "Bye Bye Love," arrived as folk acts began rivaling rock performers in popularity. 

With the death of Don Everly Saturday at age 84 at his home in Nashville, the Everly Brothers are receiving deserved tributes as giants of early rock and roll. Don's younger brother Phil died in 2014.

The Everlys released 15 top 10 hits from 1957 to 1962, and were hugely influential. Their angelic harmonies, driving acoustic guitars and sexual vulnerability and swagger set a standard for the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Peter and Gordon,  the Hollies, Graham Parsons, the Byrds, and so on.

National obituaries honoring Don Everly have given little attention to the Everlys' folk masterpiece, "Songs Our Daddy Taught Us." Along with giving traditional songs a timeless glow, Don and Phil revitalized vintage country hits like "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine," first recorded by Gene Autry in the 1930s.

Their rendition of the traditional English ballad "Barbara Allen" to me is the best folk recording ever made. Their chiming voices make the ancient lyrics almost unbearably sad, and Don Everly never falters in playing a basic 3/4 rhythm pattern on his acoustic guitar. Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong and singer Norah Jones's 2013 album "Foreverly" re-produced the Everlys' album note for note.

After starting out as child performers in their family's musical act, the Everlys skyrocketed to fame after starting out in Nashville as songwriters. While Don wrote "Cathy's Clown" and "Til I Kissed You" and Phil "When Will I Beloved," many of the duo's greatest hits were written by the married songwriting team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant.

Don, with a register a bit lower than Phil's, sang most of the lead vocals, with Phil doing the high harmony and guitar fills. Don's driving acoustic guitar had its own electric power. Keith Richard called him one of the greatest rhythm guitarists.

The Everlys came from the country harmonic tradition of the Louvin and Delmore Brothers and Jim and Jesse, adding the urban flavor of rock and roll. While not raw like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, they possessed an edge and flair.

Their voices were like a single instrument, ethereal and yet familiar. Along with their essential songs of early rock and roll, let's remember their accomplishment as folk music interpreters.

Frank Rich, Stephen Sondheim and Jonathan Tunick hail re-release of D.A. Pennebaker's "Company"

Frank Rich revisits his theatrical past in an interview with Stephen Sondheim and his longtime orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, heralding the re-release of D.A. Pennebaker's documentary, "Original Cast Album: Company."

Published in New York magazine, the interview marks Rich's return from a long silence during the covid quarantine. The formerly all-powerful New York Times theatrical critic had forged a new chapter of his career writing on politics for New York. But his pieces ceased during the pandemic.

The interview with the 90-year-old Sondheim and 83-year-old Tunick marks the return of Pennebaker’s rarely shown 1970 documentary "Original Cast Album: Company."

Re-released through the Criterion Collection, the restored 53-minute film documents the making of the cast album of Sondheim's classic musical, which featured the beloved songs "The Ladies Who Lunch" and "Being Alive."

Rich says he conducted the interview via zoom last December, leaving his New York City apartment where he'd been isolated during the pandemic to walk to a nearby sterilized studio. 

Introducing the interview, Rich recalls meeting Sondheim when Rich was the theater critic for his college newspaper. The young Rich saw a pre-Broadway production of the musical in Boston, before "Being Alive" had even been written.

Rich also extols Pennebaker's brilliant career, launched with "Don't Look Back," covering Bob Dylan's 1965 British tour, and "Monterey Pop," which chronicles the 1967 Monterey music festival.

In the most poignant moment of the interview, Sondheim and Tunick recall "Company" star's Elaine Stritch's late-night breakdown during the cast recording. Stritch after struggling to perform "The Ladies Who Lunch" fled from the studio. The next day, she returned in full makeup to flawlessly carry out the number.

As Rich recounts, Stritch battled alcoholism for years, finally overcoming the disease to achieve a late career renaissance. Sondheim and Tunick say that Stritch was known for taking "nips" from a bottle during performances to overcome stage fright.

Taking an 11 p.m. recording slot originally scheduled for fellow fragile star Dean Jones, who claimed to have a scratchy voice, Stritch found herself too drunk to complete the number. Pennebaker hastily captured the moment after shutting down filming for the day.

Jones' similar ordeal to record "Being Alive" is another dramatic highpoint of Pennebaker's documentary. Later known for starring in Disney comedies, Jones was a brilliant singer who left behind a promising career in musical theater.

The interview also reports that new Broadway productions of "Company" and Sondheim's "Assassins" are scheduled for the fall. In "Company," Jones's character Bobby will be female, adding biological pressure to Bobby's anxieties over middle age and whether to marry.

Rich fans hope the interview signals his return to New York magazine. Perhaps he'll delight us with more pieces on the theater, along with continuing his acute political insights.

 

 

 

 

Discovering Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle"

Jim Croce is the latest singer/songwriter  for whom I've gained greater appreciation.

While driving through the wilds of suburban DeKalb County Thursday, I was surprised at the excellence of Croce's "Time in a Bottle" when I heard the song on Sirius XM radio.

As if hearing the song for the first time, I was captivated by the song's lyrics. I'd never before appreciated the song's poetic power.

Later, I discovered that Croce , who died at age 30 in a plane crash in Natchitoches, Las., had written the evocative ballad, along with his other hits.

Over the years, I'd enjoyed listening on the radio to "Big, Bad Leroy Brown" and "I Have to Say I Love You in a Song," but I never thought of Croce as a major artist.

But hearing "Time in a Bottle" while embroiled in heavy traffic transported me to a magical place.