The Golden Old-time Music Camp-Out came to Boon­ville last weekend for the second time. It used to be in Yreka, way up north. This is the second music festival to relocate to Boonville in the last few years, the first being the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, not that Sierra Nevada and the Golden Oldies have much music in common, if any.

Before I Am Love, directed by Luca Gaudagnino and released into American movie theaters this summer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer John Adams had never written a soundtrack. In a way he still hasn’t, since more than 30 minutes of music he supplied for this Italian soap opera without the suds were cannibalized in one and two minute bites from his earlier work. It’s not an unusual way for a composer to get a screen credit, even from beyond the grave. Beethoven did it for A Clockwork Orange, Mozart for Amadeus, and Bach for Tree of Wooden Clogs. Each one of those was a far better movie than I Am Love. At least Adams is still alive and might one day sign on to a movie worthy of his gifts.

Adams once turned down an invitation to do a film score for Francis Ford Coppola, but the composer seems to be on board for I Am Love, which cost him little or no creative energy. After having seen a rough-cut of the film in London in 2009 he made some suggestions, and for the American campaign he has promoted the movie along with the film’s star and co-producer Tilda Swinton.

Lauren’s Restaurant should be packed to the rafters this Saturday night when Nahara, Boonville’s fledgling songbird and healing arts masseuse, takes the stage for her first live performance as a professional singer.

Nahara has performed before, both at the Varity Show and she had a solo role in the recent production of Dearly Departed by the AV Theatre Guild, where she demonstrated the range of her evocative voice. She’s been hard at work during the past months writing songs I have no problem characterizing as beautiful. Locals can accrue some boasting rights when these songs hit the charts and everybody’s scrambling to get tickets to her sold-out concerts. “Hey! I saw Nahara back in the day when she first started at Lauren’s!”

When it comes to the commemoration of dead musi­cians, few women enjoy even a moment in the posthu­mous spotlight. They were rarely given the chance to compose, and until the 19th century — and even then — did so for the most part furtively, if at all. The influential Viennese music critic, Eduard Hanslick, writing in 1854 summed up the prevailing view, one still not fully laid to rest, when he claimed that “women are by nature pre­eminently dependent upon feeling [and therefore] have not amounted to much as composers.” According to this nonsense, composition required masculine control of musical material, rather than feminine outpourings. The composer broods, his woman sulks. Although Robert Schumann and Frederic Chopin are both somewhat androgynous figures, they nonetheless have been getting something of their celebratory due in this, the bicenten­nial of their births.

The musical terrain stretching between the entrenched aesthetic positions of parents and those of their teenage children is dotted with mines and ordnance laced with mustard gas. After enduring countless bom­bardments of Lady Gaga singing “Alejandro, Alejandro” over the car radio, with one of my kids having fed the coordinates into this long-range howitzer, I fear that my shellshock may be permanent.

The ‘village stage’ in the grove of big timber behind the Apple Hall and the ‘valley stage’ at the rodeo grounds in front of the big grandstand were far enough apart that the music at either wouldn’t be drowned out by the other. In between was the ‘dancehall’ where DJs played recorded music. Then there was the ‘drum temple,’ a big grassy area surrounded by vendor booths. People were dancing everywhere, on stilts at the village stage, indoors at the dancehall, with veils at the drum temple, and shoulder to shoulder at the valley stage.

Don Carlos

When Jamaican-born reggae legend Don Carlos (nee Euvin Spencer) took the valley stage at dusk on Saturday night the moon was at her zenith, the thick smell of marijuana was in the air, and the crowd was shoulder to shoulder, except for occasional couples who were a good deal closer. One woman was on her back momentarily in the middle of the walkway with her man giving her mouth-to-mouth. The imposing lawman, deputy Orell Massey, stood by smiling as a great river of humanity flowed past him into the area in front of the main stage. Don Carlos kicked off his gig. The crush was impenetrable. I shouldered my way through with a camera and a gas mask, the marijuana smoke being as impenetrable as the crowd. Don Carlos was magnificent. It was said that he will be headlining the revived Reggae on the River this year in Southern Humboldt.

Despite the cool weather, a great many people were exposed to the sunshine and moonlight, especially one thrilling young woman who wore nothing but face paint above her waist. The moonlight became her, but by the time it got dark, she’d found her shawl. It got pretty cool. By midnight, the waxing moon had disappeared over the hill to the west, a few drunks had gone over the hill to the east, and the music had moved indoors so the sleepless Boonville natives could get some rest.

Cool might also describe the attitude of many locals. People in Boonville like their rural setting, sequestered from the turmoil of the outside world, the seething oppression out there that a lot of Regge music is all about. Bumperstickers extolling liberal platitudes are all very nice, but when a huge crowd of artists and fans singing their demands for love and fundamental change invade our sleepy little town, our sleepy residents become uncomfortable. And parking becomes a problem for downtown businesses.

Most of the stores and cafes seemed to be doing a spanking business. The lines for morning coffee were so long at Mosswood Market and the General Store in Boonville on Saturday morning that by the time I got there all they had left was decaf. Little groups of vagabonds with their packs, their inevitable dogs and their inevitable guitars took up positions to panhandle passersby. In one group, a banjo had been stolen, and the fund drive was to get the victim a new banjo. “We only need $165, couldn’t you please help us out?” Another guy only needed $6, he had $2, which he pulled out of his pocket to show how honest he was. Why did he need six bucks? He and his two friends, who were waiting in the car, wanted tacos. Some of Louis Perez’s friends had set up a taco stand in front of Pic N Pay. “We haven’t eaten all day,” the guy who needed taco money said. It was only a little after 9am. But they had the appetite of youth and the taco meat smelled delicious. I gave him 6¢, 1% percent of his stated goal. He was disappointed but hid it well, showering me with gratitude as I strolled on.

Rasta Street Musician

A street musician with harmonica and guitar was working the crowd with old Dylan standards like Desolation Row. He was very young and his guitar one of those cheap little things you can get for $10 at a yard sale, but he played it so well it sounded better than a Martin Dreadnaught. The young man sang, “Right now I can’t read too good, don’t send me no more letters, no, not unless you mail them from Desolation Row,” and blew his harp.

Down in front of the ice cream parlor, Nahara had set up her massage table and had some street clients in a state of bliss. The General Store was standing room only, Alicia’s had a crowd, and so did the Redwood Drive In. There was a steady flow of gasoline at the pumps, about 80¢ a gallon higher than Ukiah; but, hey, this is Boonville!

Back at the Fairgrounds, the musicians were still in their camps, but the drummers were energetically pounding out a rhythm to a big group of women getting their morning jazzercise — there was one Gene Simmons-type dude, it wasn’t all women. But most people were milling round the dozens of booths full of exotic clothing and jewelry. And the food stalls. All sorts of divine aromas drifted along on the breeze. As the day wore on, the grills were soon sagging under the weight of roasting meat and the lines of hungry music lovers were getting longer and longer.

Jah Thunder Wisdom was grilling African food Ghana style –salmon, chicken, cholo fries, black-eyed peas. The longest line was at the Indian food booth, but they were too busy to talk to me about their fare, which must have been tasty. A kid of maybe ten or twelve, Bakyne, was selling knitted bags; he had an armful and strolled the pathways. (They were very cool bags, and sales seemed brisk.) Everyone was dressed in such outlandish costumes, mostly red, gold and green with lots of khaki shirts and patches, that a straight-looking fellow like me stood out as an oddity, and my merely conventional garb garnered a few snide comments.

Deputy Craig Walker told me everyone was behaving themselves pretty well. One fellow had to go over the hill for drinking too much cheap vodka, but he was back the next day ,and another guy had to go over for buying him more cheap vodka, after he’d been specifically advised not to. The deputies were vigilant and understanding, settling most disturbances with a few words of advice to the bad actors.

It all ended Sunday night, and if you couldn’t hear the music from anywhere in town, KZYX simulcast it over the radio.

Now all that’s left to do is clean up the debris and count the cash. My Monday evening Boonville was immaculate, and the cash probably had been counted.

Chris, singing "All-Star" by the once popular rock group Smash Mouth. (Photo by Katie Toler)

Tucked away in a bar-room corner, crouched on a chair, the part-owner of Noyo Bowl in Fort Bragg does his best to emulate Aaron Neville. Beneath neon beer lights and a deer head, he sings “Tell It Like It Is” into a microphone. It’s Saturday night, the O’Doul’s clock reads 10:40, and, for better or worse, Karaoke Night at the bowling alley is hitting full stride.

I’ve heard of things like this before—small joints, bowling alleys, hole-in-the-wall bars—where karaoke becomes the main event on weekends.  Here, the part owner DJs behind a table and the patrons memorize the song selection booklet and come back every Saturday night to sing.

By 10:45, the part-owner/DJ has moved on to Stevie Wonder, and, wincing in apparent pain, belts out the final lines to “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Surprisingly, this does not seem to hold the crowd’s attention. They leaf through song books, picking tunes they feel would showcase their vocal abilities. The place is humming with mild excitement, as folks are generally concerned and focused on their stage debut. They drink and wait.

“Just need some of that liquid courage!” I hear a man say to a friend, trying to persuade him to take the stage.

A tiara adorned woman, dressed in a pink flowered shirt with braided red hair, dedicates a song to Scott. “I love you, Scott,” she says, as “Thank You” by Dido starts playing.  She boils over with passion. During the final chorus, she walks over to Scott and begins rubbing his shoulders while her voice fades with the music. From my angle, I am unable to see his expression, though he seems rather nonplussed considering the romantic fervor directed toward him.

It’s more than awkward. I turn to my friend Steve, and tell him with a smirk, “We’re not allowed to laugh unless we’ve been up there,” to which he replies out of the corner of his mouth, “We’re not allowed to laugh, but we’re allowed to feel slightly uncomfortable.”

Rindy, the bar-maid, tells me the karaoke usually gets going around 10. At this point in the night, “it’s a locals’ bar,” she says. This is evident to me.  I feel like an out-of-towner.

A man named Chris–who’s wearing leather pants that leave little to the imagination–steals the show. He tells me he’s been doing karaoke here for over 10 years. Chris was in the high school choir and sung with the radio before hitting a rough patch in his life. He left music behind. He was reintroduced to music by a woman who stole his heart and invited him to karaoke one night. “Whatever happens in life, this makes me feel better,” he told me, sipping a Miller Genuine Draft.

Karaoke is a weird thing. For some people it’s something fun to do every lunar eclipse. Others, who never got to play in a band in high school, who sing aloud in the car craving their moment in the spotlight, use karaoke as a release—and as Chris said, a means to feel better.

The Noyo Bowl is a time warp, something recent generations are still unfamiliar with. It’s poetic. It’s real. In an age of Rock Band and American Idol music video games, my experience at Noyo Bowl proves drunken bar karaoke has stood the test of time. That the people want to be heard.

]]> http://theava.com/archives/7172/feed 2 http://theava.com/archives/7088 http://theava.com/archives/7088#comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:12:30 +0000 Steve Heilig http://theava.com/?p=7088

Greil Marcus, meet Van the Man.

One foggy afternoon long ago, I was taking a solo hike on the Marin ocean cliffs. The fog was so thick one could only see a few feet ahead. Sound was muffled too, yet I kept thinking that a voice was wafting thru the air. And it was a voice I thought I recognized.

After what felt like an hour of so of this, I nearly bumped into another figure, in cape and cap and with cane, walking slowly in the same direction. He was a short man, and I almost ran him over. “Christ, ya fookin’ startled me!” he exclaimed in a heavy Irish brogue. And then I recognized not just the voice, but who it belonged to: Van Morrison.   “I’m sorry, man!” I apologized. And then, without thinking, I launched into a little heartfelt speech about “how much I have loved your music for many years…loved your concerts…drove all over the place with your tapes playing… some of best memories in life…” etc, etc. Through all this, he just stood there, looking at the ground where the tip of his cane was grinding into the soggy soil. I finally ran out of words at about the same time embarrassment hit, and shut up. After a moment of silence, Van “The Man” Morrison looked up, slowly shook his head, and said: “I sure don’t know why people feel the need to tell me this kind of shite.”

When later I came upon Morrison singing in a pub on the West coast of Ireland — a landscape which reminded me of nowhere so much as West Marin or Sonoma — I just held my tongue. But for many years, the famously brilliant/cantankerous/mystical/bluesy/inebriated Irish musical legend lived in Marin county, and would pop up at local musical gigs, wander the streets, support his par­ents’ little record store in Fairfax (where the only clue was the whole wall of VM LP covers), and confound his almost cultish fans.

Around that time, budding musicologist and “cultural critic” Greil Marcus lived in Berkeley — he still does — and interviewed VM for Rolling Stone magazine on Marcus’ way to becoming one of the most respected — and prolific — living authors on modern music and much else. Among his many works, Marcus has written a whole book on a single album, Dylan/The Band’s “The Basement Tapes,” titled “The Old, Weird America,” exploring the confluence of sources — African, Euro­pean, and much more — that produced American folk, blues, country, and unlabeled mixtures thereof.

Now Marcus delves into what might be called The Old Weird Ireland in a new book on Van Morrison. “When That Rough God Goes Riding” — the title of one of Morrison’s songs — is, true to Marcus form, a very personal meditation, so idiosyncratic that some of it likely makes sense only to the author. The guy is all over the place, which is what his readers expect. Some of the diversions and analogies and efforts to discern and extract near-cosmic meaning from a single song or even a grunt or note had me snorting in bafflement or disbe­lief, although I certainly kept on reading and most other VM fans likely will, too.

“Van always looked to me like a half-homicidal lepre­chaun who lived under the bridge,” Marcus quotes a fellow critic. At a recent bookshop reading for this work, Marcus disdained media coverage in more recent years by writers who seem gleeful to report that VM appears older, fatter, and balder then in his early years. But beyond his 45 years of music VM is most renowned for being “difficult,” unpredictable, reclusive, and most importantly, gifted unto genius.

He’s been called the Greta Garbo of rock, and he rarely suffers journalists and most likely was not about to cooperate with this book, although I don’t know if Mar­cus even asked; probably not — Marcus is too smart for that, and like me has been dissed in person by his idol even after authoring a laudatory cover story on him. Sometimes one just can’t win.

So why suffer the scary leprechaun? Because from time to time during those decades of musical searching, he has produced some of the most stunning, lifting, and timeless “popular” music of anyone, anytime. His per­formances on record and stage can be full of exaltation, religious yearning, desire, celebration, pain, you name it. But like his few peers — Dylan, Lennon/MCartney, and, er, maybe a couple others — it’s undeniably been hit and miss. But he’s produced a few of the most beautiful love songs of all time — try “Tupelo Honey” for starters — and a few extended, unplanned séances that are inde­scribably deep. Check “Listen to the Lion,” for example, wherein Morrison lets loose what Marcus calls his inner “yarragh,” with “a voice that sounds so exalted you can’t believe a mere human being is responsible for it..” Or as Morrison has said, when pressed, “The question might really be, is the song singing you?”

From the start, Marcus notes, Morrison “lacked the flair for pop stardom possessed by clearly inferior sing­ers;” further, “what he lacked in glamour he made up in strangeness.” After knocking around Belfast with a blues-based bar band called Them in the mid-60s, even scoring a few semi-hits like “Gloria,” he lurched out on his own just in time for the fabled 1967 Summer of Love. But Morrison was never no hippie. He eventually moved back to England when California seemed too laid-back and New-agey, and his first solo LP’s center­piece was “TB Sheets” — “an endless cynical number about a woman dying of tuberculosis.”

When that shockingly missed the Top 40 (although “Brown-Eyed Girl” — his “least convincing recording” — did) he retreated, and “wrote a set of songs about childhood, initiation, sex and death, which finally took form as Astral Weeks.” Throw in a drag queen and some superb jazz musicians just making it up behind him, and over 40 years later, that 1968 LP remains an unsurpassed pinnacle of modern music, a touchstone for not only aging boomers but many other people of much younger vintage. It is indescribable but of course Marcus tries, and some of his passages read as if he is attempting to ape Morrison himself. But he is spot-on in noting that it is imbued with “the kind of hermetic glow that tran­scends fame.”

Astral Weeks is almost enough to make one believe in the goofy concept of “channeling.” Morrison was all of 23 years old at the time. That may be the single most astonishing factoid in rock and roll; at a minimum, it proves my suspicions that Van Morrison was born some sort of an Old Soul.

The next few years and albums were almost as amaz­ing, up through 1974’s Veedon Fleece. Since that early peak, Marcus sees Morrison’s music as “a story made of fragments” which follows “a road bordered by meadows alive with the promise of mystical deliverance and revelation on one side, forests of shrieking haunts and beckoning specters on the other, and rocks, baubles, traps, and snares down the middle.” His assessment of Morrison’s recorded output is of course subjective and questionable — he dismisses a decade and half of output after 1979, but some of those LPs feature some of his best moments. But there’s little arguing that his catalog has been a spotty one. Morrison purportedly flirted with cults like Scientology and yes, made some real stinkers in the 90s. “Sometimes you make mistakes, and some­times you’re bored” is all he has said about that.

Fame can be a curse in many ways, from the much-lamented loss of privacy onward to death of the soul. Maybe most common is when a “star” starts to believe he/she is super; art then dies. Morrison has never fully fallen for that, despite all the Grammys, election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and young idiots like me gushing at him. But Marcus perceptively points that at some point Morrison started sounding self-conscious, even like he was faking it, and for me, the real problems were when Morrison continuously complained, about the music industry, mostly. Marcus holds that this is due to the unavoidable alienation that comes with aging in a modern culture that “becomes an affront to one’s entire existence.” However justifiable, who wants to hear a wealthy musician who has largely been able to follow his muse wherever he wants bitch and moan about agents and record labels? Not me.

But then Van Morrison will show up at a club like San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, or at a big arena like UC Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, and enrapture a crowd into deep reverence, playing all of Astral Weeks as he did last year, or playing whatever he wants. Some­times he even smiles. And — not that he’d care — all is forgiven, and we are left grateful for his muse and his music. Again.

Long may he yarragh. ¥¥

(‘When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison,’ by Greil Marcus (Public Affairs; 195 pages; $22.95. Steve Heilig, a longtime music critic, was banished to the Principal’s office for shouting the chorus to Van Morrison’s hit “Gloria” in a semi-Tourette’s moment while in the third grade.)

]]> http://theava.com/archives/7088/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/6977 http://theava.com/archives/6977#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:21:09 +0000 Daniel Mintz http://theava.com/?p=6977

It’s uncertain whether the debt-ridden Reggae Rising — stepson of the long-running but now defunct Reggae On The River — music festival will be held this year but those who are wondering will find out on June 17.

That’s the deadline that Humboldt County has given to Tom Dimmick, the festival’s owner, to pay the money he owes to a range of agencies, including the Sheriff’s Office and the California Highway Patrol (CHP), and satisfy their concerns about the event.

Jazz is often held to be the most direct form of per­sonal expression: the taciturn cool of Miles (or do I mean cruelty?); the flighty genius of Bird; the strato­spheric humor of Dizzy; the volatile arrogance of a Mingus. A long-favored cliché has jazz as a symbol of democracy. House Concurrent Resolution 57 — loftily promulgated way back in 1987, during the anti-Jazz Age also known as the Reagan Years — begins its lit­any of platitudes with the claim that jazz “makes evi­dent to the world an outstanding artistic model of in­dividual expression and democratic cooperation within the creative process, thus fulfilling the highest ideals and aspirations of our republic.” A corollary to this is the rejection of musical monarchy. As educator and pianist Billy Taylor put it in a well-known essay entitled “Jazz: America’s Classical Music”: “There is no conductor directing the musical flow, but rather, the interaction of individuals combining their talents to make a unique musical statement.”