Will The Circle Be Unbroken

Charlie will willingly admit that one of the first things he noticed about me was my record collection. I had quite an impressive array of Rock'n'Roll, including Beatles albums, as well as cult favorites such as Love and the Byrds. Charlie was a dedicated folkie, but I had already passed through that phase a few years before we first met.

In 1968, after Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" was released, Charlie and I drove to Los Angeles to see him at the Troubador. It was fun! Arlo's 18-minute talking blues stretched out to over a half-hour satiric riff on Thanksgiving dinner, his arrest and the Vietnam war.

It was our first shared music and one of the first of many concerts we have enjoyed together. From blues and folk, to jazz and punk, to new wave and rock we've developed quite a breadth of taste. We've always been thrilled by what's current, as well as moved by traditional music.

Arlo was steeped in many of those traditions, and, in fact, probably learned talking blues by osmosis from his father. He inherited the Guthrie voice in every sense of the word. Not only does he have his father's flat nasal sound, but he picked up the outlook, too. Woody Guthrie was a social commentator as much as he was a songwriter. His guitar might have proclaimed "this machine kills fascists," but his songs went after social injustice. From hard-hearted bankers to dust bowl devastation, from union workers to migrants, from vigilantes to working class heroes, Woody had a song for them all. He spread the news about hardships and injustice. He could just as easily be heartfelt and serious as he could be ironic. That's where Arlo gets his wry humor.

And "Alice's Restaurant" was a natural outgrowth. The song was a phenomenon, and unlike anything else of its era, it looks backwards and forwards at the same time. The cut took up the entire side of the album and was in regular radio rotation on college stations and alternative FM. It tells how Arlo tried to clean up the mess after a communal Thanksgiving dinner, but finding the local dump locked, he tossed the garbage by the roadside, was arrested, sentenced and fined for littering. The criminal record later precluded him from the draft. He was unfit to go to Vietnam and kill communists because he was a litterbug. This musical story took all the anti-war anger, outrage and shouting and converted it to deadpan absurdity. We loved it. The tune was catchy—I can still hear it and hum it after nearly 40 years—the refrain easy to sing, the narrative funny and it was scathingly anti-war. It was the graveyard laugh we all needed at the time.

Arlo went on to record other songs, and sing with other musicians, most notably, his father's friend Pete Seeger. Both of them lived east of the Hudson River, and spent plenty of time in each other's musical company. Just last fall when we were poking around an antique store in Beacon, New York, Pete's hometown, Charlie noticed a flier taped to a window advertising an Arlo and Pete concert at a local school that coming Saturday night. We thought we might be able to get back there in a couple of days, but it was just wishful thinking.

I have been reminded of all these people and all that great music, as well as the course of our musical tastes, these last few weeks as we have avidly followed the lastest twist in Bruce Springsteen's life. Pete has been on Bruce's mind lately, too. Out on tour now with the Seeger Sessions band, who backed him on an album full of songs made famous by Pete Seeger, he stopped by LA earlier this month. I couldn't help but think back on that first concert Charlie and I went to, and how much has changed in our lives, and how many things are the same all over again. Bruce's album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" and the show are chocked full of both overt and subtle protest songs. Sitting there in the Greek Theatre I was overcome by a mixture of moods and feelings. Bruce takes us back.

Back in the late 60's we were angry and anxious about a war halfway around the globe, that was increasingly deadly and unwinable. The casualties were mounting and the atrocities were just beginning to surface. It would be nearly a decade before the government would accept the mood of the nation and the inevitable futility of the war and decide to pull out after wasting over 58,000 lives. Once we pulled out of Vietnam, we had plenty of reconciliation work to do right here in the U.S. It was a brutal lesson, but we thought America wouldn't be bringing that grief on ourselves again very soon. Surely Vietnam had taught us not to be so cocksure that the American way was the only way, and not to put young lives on the line in a foreign land for some selfish cause.

But here we are in 2006, floundering in the chaos of Iraq for "the gleam in some fool's eyes." And all those old songs sound new and right again. Bruce is just as indignant at social inequalities and wartime jingoism as Arlo, Woody and Pete. The major social issues of the 60's—war and civil rights—are still with us. When Bruce sings "Pay me My Money Down" its dance tempo energizes us to belt out the message of a fair and living wage for hard work, and "We Shall Overcome," and "Eyes on the Prize," long standards of the 60's civil rights movement, could just as easily be adopted by the marchers at any current immigration rally. But the tunes that are the most chillingly relevant are two anti-war tunes. "Mrs. McGrath," an anti-recruiting Irish jig is over two centuries old, and the original Pete Seeger composition, "Bring 'Em Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)" was written in 1965 specifically as an anti-Vietnam war song. In concert, "Mrs. McGrath" is pointed commentary, that Bruce has updated with the verse where the mother bewails her maimed son, crying:
"All foreign wars I do proclaim
live on blood and a mother's pain
I'd rather have my son as he used to be
Than the King of America and his whole navy!"

I appreciate its history and its relevance, but I'm not gripped by it. However Bruce's updated version of Pete Seeger's "Bring 'Em Home" is passionate, poignant and simply soars, like the best Springsteen anthem. In concert, Bruce begins the song solo, a single voice filled with longing.
If you love this land of the free
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring them back from overseas
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

Now we'll give no more brave young lives
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
For the gleam in someone's eyes
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

But when the band joins him, the song swells with the power, urgency and determination of a whole chorus of voices. Bruce—and anyone who marched in those anti-war rallies—knows what it will take to "bring 'em home." Consistent, unified and massive resistance to the politicians.

The men will cheer and the boys will shout
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Yeah and we will all turn out
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

The church bells will ring with joy
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
To welcome our darling girls and boys
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

We know what we're in for. It's going to take a rising tide of public sentiment, massive marches and a change of administration before we admit Iraq is a quagmire. We know the gantlet we will have to endure. Politicians will denounce war protesters as traitors, lie to the public and erode civil liberties. But we've been here before. While Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld dodged the Vietnam war as only scions of the rich can do, many of us marched, shouted and sang.

We will lift our voice in song
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Yeah, when Johnny comes marching home
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

If you love this land of the free
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home
Bring them back from overseas
Bring 'em home, bring 'em home

We join voices with Bruce on this hymn in hope, determination and pride. It is a song filled with optimism and love and lifts our spirits with the best sort of patriotism. At the same time I'm filled with a deep and weary melancholy, that after all these decades we have only come round to the same place again. How much our lives have changed since 1968, and yet how little; forty years on Charlie and I are still sitting at a concert listening to anti-war songs. We deserve and wish for better in our leaders than that they simply blunder back into our worst American tragedy. I just want to find out what price we have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice.

Stimulation

Our juice of late is coming from the week we spent in the midwest in May and a couple recent trips to L.A. here in June. Not that Santa Barbara lacks for points and events of interest at this time of year, but festivals and parades don't always do the trick of lighting up the circuits for our peculiar passions.

Earlier in the spring, when we would mention to acquaintances that we were about to head for Milwaukee, we earned some very blank expressions and the inevitable question, "Why? You got family there?" No, not family, but friends--ones who we normally see only when they come west--and Frank Lloyd Wright. No one questions our good friends Julie and Jim, who've lived in Holland, Michigan and Racine, Wisconsin as well as Grafton (20 miles out of Milwaukee towards Green Bay), when they take the obvious holiday in Santa Barbara every few years, but we need the excuse of pursuing the work of the world's greatest architect to explain a trip in the opposite direction.

It turns out that Milwaukee is a very attractive city of an ideal size and scale, but for us the main gig is its centrality to so many important Wright structures that we wanted to visit and absorb. Wright began his career in architecture in Chicago and opened his first private practice in the suburb of Oak Park. So we made the two-hour drive and spent three days taking in the beginnings of truly modern architecture, not just in America, but in the world: Wright's turn-of-the-century home and studio, the soulful Unity Temple, and a couple dozen early commissions that essentially defined the Prairie Style--all within the modest boundaries of Oak Park, IL. And a short drive onward to South Chicago brought us to the landmark Robie House that's still yielding its secrets as restoration progresses.

Once personal scandal had driven Wright out of not only Oak Park, but also out of the country in 1909, he eventually settled his practice back into familiar territory in Spring Green, WI, a bit west of Madison, in a complex of buildings he called Taliesin. So we spent a day taking that in and trying to comprehend how the succession of structures there corresponded to the triumphs and tragedies of his very lengthy career. On the drive back to Milwaukee we stopped off at the awesomely situated new convention center he designed for Madison in the 1930s--something that wasn't built until the start of the 21st century.

Milwaukee happens to also be within a stone's throw of probably the most important building of the 20th century--the Johnson's Wax administration building in Racine. Though the Fridays-only tour schedule and the robotic tour guides provided by the company feel a bit airless, one cannot walk into that "Great Workroom" and not feel exhilarated and stimulated in a very profound way. This is why we traipse off to odd corners of the country--simply to walk into these brilliantly planned spaces, whether it's the elegant spread of a Prairie house, the curiously intimate public meeting hall of Unity Temple, or the soaring cathedral of commerce that is the Johnson building. The human spirit is always honored in the most simple and logical ways. The visitor is repeatedly taught what modernity can mean in its best sense.

This past Sunday, though, we found ourselves equally charged by an architectural vision of a very different sort: Simon Rodia's towers in Watts. Unlike Wright, Rodia clearly never planned a bit of his assemblage of iron, concrete, and wire. He had only basic hand tools, and employed the most elementary of building techniques. He simply built...and built some more as the spirit moved him. But there is an exuberance in the sheer gutsiness of these towers and arches and walls. We see the joy of building and a brazen courage to pursue an unconventional passion.

The Watts Towers, though, are not all about irrationality and goofy dreams of grandeur. There is a keen, if naive, aesthetic sense at work here that rewards detail examination. The expanses of broken tile, crockery, bottles, and seashells dazzle the eye and tap into a basic feel of what Southern California has always been--cheerful, spacious, and free.

Our motive for visiting the Watts Towers was that we had tickets that evening for performance artist Roger Guernveur Smith's one-person "show" called "The Watts Towers Project" at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. In it, Smith assembles a loose personal narrative as chaotic, emotive, and seemingly random as Simon Rodia's towers, but Smith keeps circling around that neighborhood landmark of his youth and building toward personal identification with the mysterious Italian artisan he calls that "multi-lingual illiterate." Having just been to see the towers that afternoon, and experiencing the ambient surface of Watts, we had no trouble catching Smith's allusions to Marco Polo, helicopters, barbecue, and fireworks.

The excursion to Watts came less than a week after the Springsteen concert at the Greek Theatre--in a very different neighborhood of L.A. The treat here was less visual, though equally invigorating. Springsteen is touring the material on his recent Seeger Sessions disc with a band of over twice the size of his E-Street compatriots, working together as a string band, a brass ensemble, and gospel choir all in one.

If it takes Bruce to get America listening once again to American folk, spiritual, and political protest, then we're in good hands, and the music is well represented when he takes it abroad in front of audiences that are apparently even more enthusiastic than at home. He's also reworking several of his rock standards into jazz, big band, and swing formats, just to celebrate all the modes of great indigenous music beyond the borders of rock 'n' roll. And Bruce hasn't missed several opportunities to update older music by seamlessly blending new and timely lyrics with the received text (see the blog post below this one for two wonderful examples).

Stimulated? Hell, best keep the defibrillator handy.

A Better National Anthem?

Here's the link to two bracing examples of what audiences are hearing at Springsteen shows these days besides those superb readings of the American folk classics on his Seeger Sessions disc and the total re-workings of some of Bruce's own songs. These gems should be all over the radio, and if the anti-war movement doesn't make "Bring 'Em Home" into a new National Anthem...well, they're missing the obvious gift of a way to crystalize their message into a phrase and a tune that will inspire more people than a thousand speeches or petitions. And "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" comes here in a much better performance than elicited by the Leno show setting. Check them both out here:
Bruce Springsteen News: brucespringsteen.net