foxtales

Poems and Prose by Tim Fox

  • The Pretenders

    I have half-assed many things in life, but hardly ever my writing.

    Writing is where my exhibitionistic tendencies and craven need for praise collided.

    So when my English 110 instructor, Shayne, announced on the first day of class that we had to write a journal–three entries a week about anything we wanted to write about–I was all in.

    This was in 1984, and English composition still had a hazy hangover of 1970s, born-to-late-to-be-a-hippie-but-really-want-to-be hanging over it–which was great. By the time I was an English comp teaching assistant in the early ’90s, it was steeped in literary theory. Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan and Jacques Leotard had published their big books in the ’60s, but their structuralism and poststructuralism and deconstruction and Lacanianism and postmodernism had taken a while to filter down to actual writing classes; they were more concerned with writing about writing more than writing itself. Which was also great. But it was all new to me, and by mid semester I was just happy to get things turned in on time, let alone deconstructed.

    The freedom of mid-’80s English comp flowed over into in-class writing assignments and exercises, too, yielding more chances for me to show off and seek praise. One day we free-wrote in class to 1950s-era magazine advertisements as promps. I called mine “Man in a Grocery Store with a Lot of Bread.” It was a short story about a man hoarding 20 loaves of bread to be ready for nuclear attack. “But don’t you think you’ll get tired of all that bread before the nuclear winter?” a boy asks him. “That’s why I have this canteloupe,” he says, and then the sirens start going off. Another day, she asked us to bring in records with our favorite music. I brought in a Lou Reed song called “Leave Me Alone,” only to be upstaged by a young woman who brought in Cindy Lauper’s “She Bop” and delighted in telling us all what it was really about. And then there was the time she asked us to write about some favorite song lyrics.

    In true born-to-late-to-be-a-hippie-but-really-want-to-be fashion, I picked Jackson Browne’s song “The Pretender.” And in true overachieving English nerd fashion, I didn’t just write a few sentences about what it meant to me, but wrote an essay framed by a story–which may or may not have actually happened–of me sharing a copy of the lyrics I kept in my wallet with a friend at a party.

    I looked forward to my instructor’s gushing response to my deep analysis of Jackson Browne lyrics. Instead, she wrote, “Boy, Tim, we must be reading ‘The Pretender’ in 2 different ways! I’ve always thought those was pretty depressing stuff (at least the 2nd part).”

    Of course, it had been “the 2nd part” that I had praised as being the perfect distillation of my life to that point–girls, gathering material possessions (clothes, records, Polo cologne, and a pair of Bass Weejun penny loafers, mostly, bought by overworking myself at McDonald’s), and the future. It was kind of a distillation of my high school experience, in chronological order. As such, the “future” part was the least well-developed–I’d only started thinking of myself as having a future six months or so earlier–but it was key to the whole thing–and why I didn’t understand what my instructor found depressing about it:

    I dreamed of a future, a future far away from high school and all the phony friends I had there. In a way, my dream of the future was a combination of my previous fascinations, bundled together and place din front of me, rather than behind me. They became goals, reasons to go away for schools, reason to stop playing around and start studying, reasons to try to do something with my life. I was bored with the present, nauseated by the past, but fascinated by the future.

    Of course, with 36 years’ of hindsight, this is depressing in every way. Not only is the original lyric depressing–“I’m gonna be a happy idiot, and struggle for the legal tender, where the ads take aim, and lay their claim, to the heart and the soul of the spender”–but my interpretation is depressing, because the future I was “fascinated” with didn’t go far beyond material success, which I had no idea how to achieve, or how little that kind of success would come to mean to me beyond helping to provide for my family and keeping the creditors at bay another month.

    But at a higher level, my future was not one of being “The Pretender,” but “The Pretenders.” I pretended to be an editor. I pretended to be a historian. I pretended to be a journalist. I pretended to be a PR flak. I pretended to be a technical writer. And I have done well at all of these things by picking up scraps of information here and there, various writerly tricks and gimmicks, mashing them up, and writing with confidence about things I knew little to nothing about.

    When I listen to The Pretender now, it’s not the title track that gets me, but “Bright Baby Blues”:

    I've been up
    And down this highway
    Far as my eyes can see
    No matter how fast I run
    I can never seem
    To get away from me
    No matter where I am
    I can't help thinking
    I'm just a day away
    From where I want to be

    writefoxllc

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  • Oh Bela!

    In 1984 I left my hometown to attend college in what was, to me at the time, the big city of Kansas City, Missouri. It was only an hour away, but the cultural distance was staggering—and exciting.

    I had only been significantly away from my hometown—excluding family vacations and holiday trips to central Kansas—once. Earlier that year I had gone to Washington, D.C., as part of a civics program called Presidential Classroom. How I was nominated to go is a mystery to me. I was kind of aimless academically by then—I certainly had no idea about government or politics—but the local Jaycees pitched in $50 and my indulgent and long-suffering (with me) parents kicked in the rest.

    When I got home, the only thing I knew was I never wanted to live in St. Joseph, Missouri, again, and after that the summer of ’84, I never did.

    In college, I started writing arts and entertainment stories for the school paper. One of my proudest moments was when I mentioned to my editor, who was a junior and therefore super cool, that I liked Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. Like any journalist, he followed up with a question: “How does a kid from St. Joe know about the Velvet Underground?”

    The short answer was the Rolling Stone Record Guide, but the longer answer was that I had long enjoyed, and prided myself on, knowing about music that was diverse and beyond the mainstream. Yes, the summer of ’84 had been filled with Born in the USA, Purple Rain, and Heartbeat City like everyone else’s, but Tusk, Street Songs, Alive She Cried, And Howlin’ Wind were also in heavy in my rotation. Not import bin stuff, but more interesting than radio.

    That fall I also met a girl named Andrea, who was an art major and a Lou Reed fan, too—The Blue Mask was her jam. We were just friends, but we spent a lot of time together. One night she suggested we go to a midnight screening of The Hunger. I’d never heard of it but it sounded dangerous and cool and David Bowie was in it, so off we went.

    When “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” started playing, I about lost my mind. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I loved it, so dark and mysterious and menacing. Andrea and I we listened to it a lot that fall, but it didn’t send me down a Goth rabbit hole.

    In fact, I didn’t get around to owning any Bauhaus until five years later when their collection Swings & Heartaches: The BBC Sessions came out. I had just started grad school, and additional two hours from homw, and this, plus cassettes of The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, Sly and the Family Stone’s Greatest Hits, Sade, Book of Days and a “hip-house” show, taped off the college radio station, were the soundtracks for those innocent days.

    Oh youth … when creepy tales of a dead monster movie star could bring new feelings scratching at the moldy lid of small-town conformity and conservatism … undead undead undead …

    writefoxllc

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  • Mind Games

    Ellen always tells me, “You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to interpret your dreams,” and she’s right. The unfinished school paper, the forgotten class, the phone that will not work … these are all classic dreams for someone who’s personality looks like this:

    But more abstract dreams and the unconscious have always fascinated me. I was interested in psychology in high school not because I wanted to help people but because I was interested in subliminal messaging. In 1972 Wilson Scott Key published his book Subliminal Seduction. He followed that up with Media Sexploitation (1976) and The Clam Plate Orgy (1982). I found all of these books in the St. Joseph Public Library, my second home, and devoured them, though they all had the same message: the media, especially advertisers, were using subliminal messaging to manipulate us into buying products.

    About the same time I was reading Key’s books, a movement was afoot to identify hidden messages in rock songs, especially songs by heavy metal bands. The main method for delivery was said to be “back-masking,” or engineering phrases into albums that could only be heard when played backward. I spent a lot of time trying to find hidden messages in songs like “Stairway to Heaven,” though I was skeptical about the idea of being affected in any way by a message you couldn’t hear.

    Subliminal?

    Key’s idea of subliminal messaging in advertising is now so obvious, and I never did find anything as scandalous as even “Please patronize our snack bar” hidden in “Stairway to Heaven.” As lyrics became more explicit in every way, the idea that any song needed a “hidden” message became absurd. When Ozzy Osbourne was taken to court because his song “Suicide Solution” allegedly influenced a teen to kill himself with the barely discernible phrase “Do it! Do it!” whispered over and over, the lawsuit ignored more obvious (again, played forward) lyrics like:

    Evil thoughts and evil doings
    Cold, alone you hang in ruins
    Thought that you’d escape the reaper
    You can’t escape the master keeper

    I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been reading Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Not the real thing, yet, just the introduction by the editors of the Barnes & Noble Classics edition I picked up kind of randomly last week. (I can’t leave a bookstore empty handed.) Freud started as a regular doctor with a special interest in neurological pathology, physical problems with identifiable physical causes. However, he became interested in physical problems that didn’t have physical causes. His research and thinking and studies led him to his revolutionary theories of the unconscious–for example, the id, the ego, and the superego.

    What interests me so far about Interpretation of Dreams is the idea that dreams are the mind’s way of sorting out what has happened during the day, and making sense of it by attaching the day’s events to similar events from our past. It’s much more nuanced than this, and again,  I’ve only read the introduction, but my understanding now is like this: Since the events rarely match up perfectly, the mind invents connections that seem to us bizarre, but in dream language make perfect sense. Freud’s addition is to say that those previous similar events are rooted in long-suppressed memories or traumas, so the things that we see in a dream–a lobster, for example–is not really a lobster, but a representation of, say, an angry parent. Even the most bizarre dreams make sense, it can just take a lot of imaginative work (Freud’s method was “free association”) to figure them out.

    Of course, Freud is not fashionable these days, even though late in life he did reject one of his kookier ideas, the “seduction hypothesis.” The answer to most psychiatric problems today is medication, augmented by some form of talking therapy. But Freud literally opened our minds to the reality that even today, with all of the technology we have at our disposal, our minds are universes we will likely never fully understand. We look into the night sky and see the void, and we look into the void and see ourselves.

     

    writefoxllc

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  • You Gotta Move

    It’s Day 5 of Gray and Gloomy here in the ‘Lou, and the wind is picking up and the rain is falling and the temperature is falling, so my thoughts turn internal.

    Not that that should be news to anyone. I am inwardly focused to a fault, and yet curiously concerned with the image I project to the world. Maybe that’s the bane of all inwardly focused people. We focus inwardly because we internalize what we think the world is thinking about us, which of course is never accurate–either the world’s perception or our own perception of the world’s perception.

    But I digress.

    When I included “Move” on my list of verbs to focus on in 2018, I was thinking “Exercise,” but I didn’t want to say “Exercise” because that’s such a cliche and so narrow. “Move” is better because it can include all sorts of progress and change and is really easy to do. It could just be get off the couch and do something, like clean the basement–which literally moves things but also causes your emotions to move as you realize your kids don’t care about the stuff they used to care so much about, and that so little of the stuff you once thought important is useful.

    However, when I wrote it I really was thinking “Exercise,” because it’s been a tough few months for me and exercise–which I am somewhat obsessed with because, again, internalization of outside perceptions. Here is how it has gone:

    Early November: An unusually warm and windy day. I went for a run. The street cleaners were out picking up leaves and mulching them on site. Running west from Kingshighway on Murdoch, I saw a huge cloud of leaf dust hovering around the orange mulching truck at the top of the hill. I quick shifted and ran further north to Devonshire, but not, as it turned out, far enough. By the time I got home I was hacking, and that hack turned into sneezing and wheezing that lasted for days.

    In early December, finally recovered from that, I had my best exercise week in ages. I lifted weights, I rode the bike three days, I went to Pilates, I went to two classes at the Y. Then, sometime over the weekend, I lifted a 50-pound bag of kitty litter out of the trunk of the car the wrong way and twisted my back. The pain increased until I finally went to Urgent Care after passing out in the middle of the night. The Urgent Care people were less interested in my back than in the passing out. Aneurysm? Heart attack? Stroke? The list of potential catastrophes I thought myself too young for grew as I waited for test results, all negative. It was just a kitty-litter-related back sprain.

    It took weeks for that to clear up, and in fact it still sticks a little when I sneeze or cough or move the wrong way, but it’s mostly gone. But then I got a cold. And then it went away. Mostly. And then it came back. One night it was keeping me awake and I felt so bad I went to Walgreen’s at 3 a.m. for Extra Strength Nyquil. And it’s still lingering, the sniffling and the draining and the yuck.

    Where is this going, this tale of vanity and mortality awareness?

    Well, I’m not sure, but it seems as good a time as any to experiment with placing a video on my page: Mississippi Fred McDowell performing a song about humility and mortality awareness that I grew up with as a Rolling Stones song, “You Gotta Move”:

     

     

    writefoxllc

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  • Thought I’d Something More to Say

    For Christmas 1981 or ’82, my sister gave me Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. That New Year’s Day it snowed, and snowed and snowed and snowed, and I remember sitting on the beanbag in her bedroom, listening.

    It was easy to imagine–as the heartbeat fade-in that starts the album segued into the swirling steel guitar of “Speak to Me” into the comforting drone of “Breathe” into the synth-and-sound-effect laden “On the Run”–that I was not on a bean bag in my sister’s bedroom in the house I hated but was, in fact, traveling through space, the snowflakes outside the window gliding by against the gray sky like the stars when the Millennium Falcon goes into hyperdrive.

    Most of the album was familiar to me. It was in heavy rotation at album-rock station KY102 out of Kansas City, especially the second side, which opens with “Money.” But the one song I had never heard on the radio before was the best–“The Great Gig in the Sky,” featuring Clare Torry’s wordless but amazing vocal performance.

    In fact, I now think that most of the best parts of the album, which has sold some 45 million copies since its 1973 release, are wordless. Not one for subtlety, lyricist Roger Waters sort of put it all out there. The themes of Dark Side of the Moon, most cohesively expressed on the first side of the album, are time, death, and futility, all neatly summed up in these lines from “Breathe”:

    Run, rabbit run
    Dig that hole, forget the sun
    And when at last the work is done
    Don’t sit down it’s time to start another one
    For long you live and high you fly
    But only if you ride the ti    de
    And balanced on the biggest wave
    You race toward an early grave.

    In case you missed it, the next song with lyrics–introduced by a small orchestra of clanging bells (“Time”! Get it?!)–opens:

    Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
    You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
    Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
    Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

    And closes:

    Every year is getting shorter, never see to find the time
    Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
    Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
    The time is gone the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

    No, not subtle, but if you’re 15 or 16 years old and living in a place you desperately want to escape, and if you like to write half pages of scribbled lines, words like that hit home.

    Whether wittingly or not, Dark Side of the Moon laid out the themes that would obsess Waters over the course of the next two studio albums–time, death, futility, and, increasingly, stardom. His lyrics grew darker as the band transformed from perfectionist studio geeks to megastars on the heels of Dark Side‘s success. Had they found themes that gave their lives meaning, or simply a formula for giving disaffected ’70s youth what they wanted?

    I often think of Pink Floyd as pioneers of the “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me” genre, in which musicians find it increasingly difficult to write about much beyond their miserable experience as incredibly successful musicians. From Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty to Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” (and Metallica’s remake of the same), the late ’70s were about decrying your fate as the overpaid, overdoped, and oversexed musician who has to turn it on every night for the fans. This is still a standard trope of rock music.

    Pink Floyd perfected and crystallized the genre in their 1979 double album, The Wall. I spent most of the second half of my junior year of high school in my sister’s bedroom after school sleeping while The Wall rolled on endlessly on 8-track tape, over and over and over again, day after day. I now recognize, with hindsight and 30 years of mental health crises behind me, that I must have been clinically depressed at the time–and that The Wall made it worse. Still, at the time I found the album cathartic and complementary to my increasingly dark and cynical worldview.

    But again, not an album of subtlety, and if you didn’t get the point of lyrics like:

    So ya
    thought ya
    might like to
    go to the show
    to feel the warm thrill of confusion
    that space-cadet glow
    I’ve got some bad news for you sunshine
    Pink isn’t well, he stayed back at the hotel
    and they sent us along, as a surrogate band
    and we’re going to find out where you fans really stand

    British director Alan Parker made a big-budget half animated, half filmed movie to drive it home. (As a friend much later told me, “The only good thing about The Wall was Bob Geldoff in the movie.”)

    In the end though, it’s the music and the sound effects  and the random voice overs that still endear me to Pink Floyd. Listening to Dark Side of the Moon again this afternoon, some 35 years later, I finally realized what others have realized before me–that Clare Torry’s improvised performance on “The Great Gig in the Sky” tells the whole story of the album. Her cries begin in a combination of joy and terror, as at birth; build and become more frenetic as adult responsibilities and banality intrude; soften as old age sets in; and finally die, in a whisper, as will we all.

    I guess you don’t need all those words when you’ve nailed the sound.

    writefoxllc

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  • Keep On Rockin’ in the Joe Town

    In the late 1970s, my hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri, was a hotbed of pop music criticism.

    Bibens Neil Young

    The reason was two young reporters at the St. Joseph News-Press and Gazette, Conrad Bibens and Terry Jordan.

    For a couple of years, I faithfully clipped their album and concert reviews from the paper’s weekend Spotlight magazine, which published the television listings for the week, and other sections of the paper. I recently found the collection while cleaning out my dad’s house.

    Bibens’ album reviews compose the largest part of the stash. Each review is a little gem, starting with background on the artist, including previous recordings if he or she had any, before launching into a thoughtful critique of the work itself.

    For example, his review of Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps opens with, “There’ve been times when Neil Young represented all that’s good about rock ‘n’ roll,” before summarizing Young’s years with Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, and his solo work. “His output was erratic and often sloppy, sounding like a man trying to work out his personal problems on vinyl,” Bibens writes. (Which, of course, he was.)

    Of that album’s acoustic side, he states, “Young sounds as if he’d be at home at a folk festival,” while cuts on the electric side “are fierce enough to blow any punk group right off the stage.”

    His closing claim that the album shows Young to be “a vital performer who seems ready for whatever changes the 80s will bring” didn’t turn out to be quite accurate, as Young would flounder to find a style before returning to form at decade’s end with Freedom and its early ’90s follow-up Ragged Glory, but based on the promise of Rust Never Sleeps, it was a sound statement.

    Bibens Top 10At the turn of the decade, Bibens wrote “A personal top ten of rock in the 70s.” Some of his list is predictable–Led Zeppelin’s fourth album (“Stairway to Heaven,” etc.) is #1, followed by The Who’s Who’s Next–but there are surprises from a 35-plus years perspective: A Yes album? Eagles? Poco?

    Jordan, at least based on what’s in my collection, wrote more concert reviews. Kansas City was the place for concerts, and the headlines alone tell the story: “Boston gives smoking concert.” “Concert overshadowed by bad location” (Ian Hunter). “Tarnished Legend” (Stephen Stills). “Styx wows 13,000 at Kemper.”

    When heavy rain came to Summerjam ’79, the headline wrote itself: “REO rides the storm out.” However, Jordan followed that bit of predictability up with a clear-eyed overview of the proceedings. REO, “a band from the Corn Belt that was eager to please,” catered to its “predominantly high school crowd.” Pat Travers’ “Ted Nugent-inspired heavy metal was sluggish.” Santana’s “traditional favorites . . . were dispensed with rather perfunctorily.” One-hit-wonder Jay Ferguson (remember “Thunder Island”?) was canceled.

    Jordan Summerjam '79

    Sometimes I fantasize that I’ll be asked what the most influential book I ever read was, and I will say, without missing a beat, “The first edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide.” Now I think I’d have to follow that up with, “Oh, and the pop music critics at the St. Joseph News-Press and Gazette.”

    writefoxllc

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  • All Aboard? The M-Train!

    If Courtney Barnett had to lose “Best New Artist” to someone at this year’s Grammys, I’m glad it was to Meghan Trainor.Thank You

    Trainor–whose second album, Thank You, drops today–brought a blast of non-preachy positive body image lyrics to the world with her first single,  “All About That Bass.”

    Her millennial-friendly feminism was much needed in a pop universe overdosing on codependent-is-cool fantasies of brushing one’s teeth with Jack Daniels, puking in bathtubs, taking your clothes off on the second date, and being sent off to rehab.

    The follow-up single, “Dear Future Husband,” added a naughty-but-nice tease with an almost-rhyme using the word “bed.” Her duo with John Legend, “Like I’m Gonna Lose You,” turned the average blah-blah love song into a meditation on mortality, while “Lips Are Movin’” was the perfect 21st-century kiss-off (“You can buy me diamond earrings / And deny-ny-ny, ny-ny-ny, deny-ny / But I smell her on your collar so goodbye-bye-bye”).

    With all of those hit songs on one album, Trainor was already not a one-hit-wonder–but what would she do next?

    Well, if the first single from Thank You, “No,” is an indication, Trainor has pulled off the greatest musical second act since the Beastie Boys followed up their  frat-boy-anthem-meets-Zeppelin-catalog-sample debut, License to Ill, with the incredibly dense, rich, and only occasionally misogynistic Paul’s Boutique.

    “No” is one of the stickiest earworms ever written (“I never learned to cook / But I can write a hook,” she sang in “Dear Future Husbund.” Indeed.), but its feminism is even clearer, more direct, less tentative: “Thank you in advance, I don’t wanna dance (nope) / I don’t need your hands all over me / If I want a man, then I’mma get a man / But it’s never my priority.”

    Yes, the pool anthem of this summer was released weeks ago. But I bet you already love it:

    My name is NO
    My sign is NO
    My number is NO
    You need to let it go
    You need to let it go
    Need to let it go
    Nah to the ah to the no, no, no …

     

    writefoxllc

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  • The National Blues Museum: How ‘Lou Can You Get?

    NBM StreetfrontThe National Blues Museum, which opened to the public April 2, 2016, rightfully places St. Louis among other American music capitals like New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, and Chicago. If Route 66 is the Mother Road, the blues is St. Louis’s Mother Lode.

    The museum is in the heart of downtown St. Louis’s Mercantile Exchange District on Washington Avenue. The Mississippi River flows a few blocks to the east. On its shores, thousands of newly freed slaves first set foot in Missouri more than a century ago.

    Those former slaves, their families, and the people who followed them from throughout the south carried with them an emotional legacy of oppression that flowed in their veins and out of their fingertips, their voices, and their tapping toes through the blues–a musical form that is the root of all popular music before and since, from jazz to rock to country and beyond.

    “The movement of the blues from south to north, its survival and spread through ever-changing technology, and its continuing legacy and influence are the museum’s main interpretive themes,” says Jacqueline Dace, the museum’s director of internal affairs, who walked with me through the museum.

    One of the first stories shared in the museum’s 16,000 square feet of exhibit space is that of W. C. Handy. Handy came to St. Louis in the 1890s from Alabama and spent his first Missouri nights sleeping on the riverfront. His 1914 composition “St. Louis Blues” immortalized the connection between the River City and the blues. Before the automobile, most people moving north from the Deep South had to go through St. Louis, bringing the music with them. Even as some people moved on, the music stayed.

    The museum then opens up to pay homage to the women of the blues–including the only video that exists of Mimi Smith, singing, appropriately enough, “St. Louis Blues.” This space also features exhibits that recognize the blues’ early branches, from jug bands and tent shows to vaudeville, which expanded the music’s audience in the north beyond urban areas.

    Because the blues originated as an oral tradition, it had to be written down and recorded to become a permanent part of American culture. Sheet music began to be widely published and distributed in the early 20th century, but in the 1930s the father-son team of John and Alan Lomax traveled thrNBM Posteroughout the south with a car full of recording equipment to capture the music as it was actually played–and felt.

    Their recordings, housed in the Library of Congress, preserved the art and soul of the blues. Examples of the Lomax’s equipment are on display, in front of a photograph showing the interior of their heavily loaded car.

    “It’s amazing to me that they traveled around with all of that recording equipment, when today you could do what they did with your phone,” says Dace. “I can’t imagine what the musicians thought when they saw them.”

    In the 1940s and ’50s, Chicago gained an upper hand over St. Louis in the blues tradition because of the Windy City’s many recording studios. By then, it was easier for musicians to get to Chicago, and selling recorded music allowed musicians to make a living by playing the blues. But St. Louis had a secret weapon: Chuck Berry.

    Berry, who still lives near St. Louis and until recently performed monthly at Blueberry Hill on the Delmar Loop, brought the blues to American teenagers in the 1950s.

    “He is the father of rock ‘n’ roll,” Dace says, pointing out a display of the diverse group of artists who have recorded Berry’s classic “Johnny B. Goode.” From Judas Priest to Emmylou Harris to Peter Tosh, “Johnny B. Goode” is the story of the blues itself: the “country boy” who lived “deep down Louisiana close to New Orleans” and “never ever learned to read or write so well / But he could play the guitar just like a-ringing a bell.”

    A decade later, as middle-class American teenagers were discovering folk music, English musicians like the Rolling Stones were discovering the blues. As Richard Cohen points out in his forthcoming book, The Sun and the Moon and the Rolling Stones, they were children of World War II–kids who had grown up in bombed-out buildings, living on rations into the 1950s. The blues’ themes of “sadness, solitude, and forces outside of one’s control,” to quote an exhibit label, resonated powerfully with them. The “British Invasion” was on the way–ironically, with a musical form that was distinctly American.

    One of the museum’s most poignant cases memorializes what Dace calls “the two kings”–Bobby Rush, King of the Chitlin’ Circuit, and B. B. King, King of the Blues. The case houses one of Rush’s outfits and King’s famous guitar, “Lucille,” on loan from the B. B. King Museum in Indianola, Mississippi.

    “A musician named Lil’ Ray Neal played this particular guitar at B. B.’s funeral,” Dace explains. “The story is that as soon as he started playing it, it started to rain. Neal just started going crazy on the guitar. And as soon as he stopped playing, it stopped raining. That’s why I say Lucille has a mind of her own. Lucille is real.”

    Dace also recalls when National Blues Museum Executive Director Dion Brown (former executive director of the B. B. King Museum) took Rush through the museum a few months ago.

    NBM Harmonica

    “He got kind of emotional when he saw this case,” she says. “He said it was the last time he would ever appear with B. B. King.”

    The museum makes its own contribution to blues’ technological heritage through its interactive exhibits. At “Jug Band Jammin’,”  visitors can record themselves “playing” traditional jug band instruments, like the washboard, and watch a playback of the jam session on video. Another exhibit demonstrates how different artists have interpreted various blues songs over the years–Led Zeppelin’s version of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” took me back to high school.

    But the highlight is “AAB,” the musical experience that follows visitors throughout the museum as they create the lyrics, title, and album cover to their own blues songs, adding harmonica, piano, and guitar while exploring the museum. A recording of the song and the lyrics are sent to the “musicians” via email before leaving the museum.

    One of the great myths of American society that has been exploded in recent years is that of the post-racial society. It occurred to me while touring the museum and seeing the many photos and videos of white musicians performing traditionally black music, often alongside black musicians, that music may be the only place where true racial harmony is possible.

    Someday, that harmony may flow out of the music and into everyday life. But until then, there’s the National Blues Museum.

    National Blues Museum Hours, Ticketing, and Parking Info

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  • Pop Life

    The first thing I liked about Iggy Pop’s new album, Post Pop Depression (Loma Vista), is that the band members are not just pictured but actually identified on the front of the album. It’s as if Pop, who has been mostly a solo artist since his band The Stooges broke up in 1974, is saying, “I can’t do this alone, guys.”

    And why should he? Pop turned 69 last week. He has lived a life that would have killed most people a long time ago, but he is still here, writing lyrics that are as powerful as anything on my favorite Pop album, 1977’s The Idiot. In fact, they are more powerful because many of them are about himself, and age, and the inevitability of death–a theme that must have hit Pop like a thunderbolt when his pal and producer David Bowie died earlier this year.

    The album opens with “Break into Your Heart.” “I’m gonna break into your heart / I’m gonna craw under your skin / I’m gonna break into your heart / And follow / Till I see where you begin,” Pop intones. No, this is not a love song; it’s a plea for understanding from a man who has lived under the shadow of his own mythology for forty years. At the end, he adds to those opening lines, “And the wall comes tumbling down / And you finally let me in.”

    “American Valhalla” reveals direct autobiographical references to that mythology and its dark limits. “I’ve shot my gun / I’ve used my knife / It hasn’t been and easy life.” The band eventually drops away completely, and we get Pop’s voice alone, growling, “I’ve nothing but by name / I’ve nothing but my name”

    In sum, Post Pop Depression is less “Lust for Life” and more “Prayer for Life.” It’s the angry young man of Fun House and Raw Power turned inward. But there is plenty of anger still there. Because this is a family blog, I won’t quote verbatim his kiss-off to Internet trolls that closes the album in “Paraguay,” but it’s great–and so is Post Pop Depression.

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  • The St. Louis Artist Who Helped The Artist Formerly Known as Prince

    EXCLUSIVE TO THE WRITE FOX BLOG

    rainbow-children-prince-album-cover

    Since Prince’s death last Thursday, many stories have surfaced about his love of the arts and his compassion for others, but in 1998 both of those themes came together right here in St. Louis. The result was a lot of happier kids and one very happy artist, whose work would become the cover of Prince’s 2001 album, The Rainbow Children.

    Cbabi Bayoc is that artist. At the time, his work was on display at Dignity House, a program of Neighborhood Houses, on Union Boulevard (today the Boo Cat Club). Prince was in town for a concert in Collinsville, Illinois.

    Prince asked some staffers to drop off food and other items for the kids in Dignity House’s after-school program. The artwork impressed the staff members so much that they snapped some pictures and took them back to Prince.

    Prince loved the name “Dignity House” because of how it could empower kids. When he saw the artwork later, he loved it, too. He reached out to Bayoc to buy some of his paintings.

    “He originally bought five paintings, but about two years later one of his people called to ask about buying some more,” Bayoc remembers. “I sent him some photos and he bought three more. Then a few months later a young woman with his organization called again to buy the rights to one of them for use on an album cover.”

    The painting was titled The Reine Keis Quintet. Reine Keis is Bayloc’s wife. He painted it after she suggested that he make more paintings of women.

    “Because Prince bought all the rights, including naming rights, he renamed it The Rainbow Children,” Bayoc says.

    So what was it like knowing his artwork would be used as the cover of a Prince album?

    “It was a big honor, but I didn’t see how big it was until I started to get email from places like Japan and Australia from people wanting prints of the image,” he says. “I couldn’t provide them because Prince had all the rights, but it was exciting to know my work was being seen and liked around the world.”

    Even with the attention all things Prince are getting today, Bayoc is modest about his achievement.

    “You never know what’s gonna happen. You just keep doing what you do,” he says. “But it does give me a special feeling knowing how many people cherish the image.”

    Today, Bayoc is still producing art, and it’s still on display–in Reine’s bakeshop/art studio SweetArt in the Shaw Neighborhood (2203 S. 39th Street).

    I think I know where I’m headed for coffee tomorrow!

    Special thanks to my wife, Ellen Reed-Fox, Vice President of Development for Neighborhood Houses, for tipping me off to this story! Dignity House, which is no longer operating, was a program of Neighborhood Houses from 1975 until 2010. 

     

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