converselyspeaking

I love this record. Broonzy endorsed having a good time, and when I play his music, I have one as well. In Good Liquor Gonna Carry Me Down he makes the case that nothing will stop his drinking—not a 16-year-old’s promise of sex, not his doctor’s threat of transplanting monkey glands, not his current girlfriend’s threat that some other man would carry Broonzy’s business home.  That is a man who is dedicated to his drinking. It is the only song reference I know to monkey glands, a belief from about 1900 that an old man could be rejuvenated by transplanting pieces of chimpanzee testicles into his scrotum. It didn’t work. There were rumors that Yeats had the procedure, which made stories about relationships with Maud Gonne and her daughter much more interesting.

Hip-Shaking Strut has the earliest example of an elephant joke I’ve found. What did the rooster say to the elephant? How about you and me not stepping on each other? (That’s funny, says me.)

It is a 15th-anniversary compilation of some of the performers on Electra. Twelve artists, a song each: Long John, Tom Rush; So Early, Early in the Spring, Judy Collins; Linin’ Track, Koerner, Ray, and Glover; Girl of the North Country, Hamilton Camp; 900 Miles, Dick Rosmini; The Last Thing on My Mind, Tom Paxton; Born in Chicago, Paul Butterfield Blues Band; Fair Beauty Bright, Kathy and Carol; White-Winged Dove, Mark Spoelstra; Blues on the Ceiling, Fred Neil; Rompin’, Rovin’ Days, Bruce Murdoch; Power and Glory, Phil Ochs. Record labels loved to put out samples of their product. Back when the Dillards records were hard to find, I bought Breck Hair Presents a Hootenanny on eBay because it had two of their songs.

Some things don’t change: A young man born in Chicago in 1941 was told to get a gun. Something that did—Elektra said simply 15^th anniversary, relying on the schools to have taught its customers that ‘annus’ was Latin for year. The cardboard album cover is long gone. The picture in Discogs features a photo of each artist; I guess Rush, Collins, Ochs, and Paxton were selling the most records because they were in the top row. The Elektra logo is on a blue background in the first ‘O’ in Folksong.

My favorite song of the bunch is by the Butterfield Blues Band.

He was quite a star. Wikipedia almost ran out of words to praise his works: He had prolific output in Piedmont Blues, gospel, country blues, and songs of social protest. He expanded his repertoire to include urban blues, jazz, and traditional folk songs; he was on radio and the Broadway stage as well as in many movies.

‘One Meatball,’ his biggest hit, was the first million-seller for a black artist in the U.S. He sang for FDR in the White House in 1941. He sang at the 1963 March on Washington. He was friends with Bayard Rustin. Discogs has 201 of his records. Sadly, there isn’t anything remarkable about this one. I bought it from my roommate who made sure he had some Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker as well. Man, Hopkins has over 300 records and Hooker nearly 800. I’ll see what’s on streaming.

I bought this record, which was a cut-out, used in 1981 or so because WXRT had played Taj Mahal’s Nobody’s Business But My Own frequently enough to make me want to have it. He did a wonderful job of imitating Wolfman Jack saying Ain’t this XERB, baby. I saw this copy in Philadelphia and got.

Turns out it was the only song I was glad to hear. Kris Kristofferson and Joan Baez singing Hello In There is fine, but not better than John Prine. I like to hear Kristofferson sing Me and Bobby McGee, but here the vocals included the entire festival.

It was California in the good old days, I guess. The organizer wanted to keep the crowd and the ticket price down. Wikipedia says that one year when the festival sold all the tickets, people listened from the highway instead of crashing in. That wasn’t like the Newport Folk Festival or Woodstock. Wolfman Jack was a mysterious figure until American Graffiti came out in 1973. In Ohio in 1970 the folks who had heard of him argued about his age, size, and racial/ethnic heritage based on his raspy voice. Having a black performer (Taj Mahal) put on a black voice to imitate the Wolfman helped to maintain the mystery.

The New York Times asked for help to make a mix tape about autumn. I know the number one song for autumn—heck, it’s probably number 2 and 3 as well, and the best song for wedding receptions, first dates, and anything else you play music for: Moondance by Van Morrison.

Also good are King Harvest by The Band [it even has harvest in the title] and Hazy Shade of Winter by Simon and Garfunkel to cut the sweetness of Moondance. Yes, I was in high school in 1968.

Another record that is much better than I remember (or perhaps ever knew). The lyrics of rock and roll, blues, and folk have a simple goal—don’t get in the way. These songs—the epitome of singer/songwriter skills–are poetry. She rhymes barter and martyr in Roses Blue. In the Gallery, the artist she addresses says don’t love me now, I am dead. Then he says Please love me now, I am dead. That’s a lot artier than You Really Got Me.

There are some red clouds at sunset on the album cover; otherwise the clouds are only in Both Sides Now. I know I’ve changed my mind about that song. It’s probably plenty to recall life’s illusions rather than, say, get smacked over the head with a 2 by 4. I love Bob Seger’s line—I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then. Knowing is overrated.

I inherited this record a couple years ago and had no idea how good it was. I was skeptical about a young English woman with granny glasses trying to cover Son House. My mistake—she didn’t want to sound like him, she BECAME Son House when she played. Such a sad story—she died of a brain tumor about 10 years after this album came out. Listen to her on YouTube.

The lyrics to Fingerprint Blues sound like an episode of CSI or Law and Order. I’m a good child, but now I’m prison bound … when they found my gun, they found my switchblade knife, oh lord, they had my fingerprints twice … I’ve been skippin’ and dodgin’, goin’ from town to town, my friends have left me, lord, my fingerprints have been found … if you can’t come to the courtroom, please come to the prison walls.

I heard somebody refer to BankAmericard recently. It’s been 50 years or so since they changed the name. (I raised my kids to call Nissans Datsuns, but I don’t care about credit cards.) I thought of Albert Collins, whose 1978 album Ice Pickin’ contains Master Charge, a song that used outdated names for Mastercard and Visa to complain about the bills his wife ran up shopping with them. He said it was $500 the first day (about $1900 in today’s dollars). Me, I live near a fancy shopping block in Chicago, and the prices in the windows there are very high. I don’t know what’s expensive any more.

Collins was a superb blues performer. I saw him at Biddy Milligan’s on Sheridan Road in the late ‘70s. He earned his nickname of Master of the Telecaster that night. He was part showman, part shaman as he used all of his 100-foot guitar cord to dance through the revolving door as he was playing a solo. He encouraged the folks on the sidewalk to come on in, and then danced back through the door without missing a note.

I’ll get to the four albums of his I have. I wanted to tell the story about BankAmericard and his remarkable performance while Master Charge was stuck in my head.