Because when you become a father, you never know how it’ll all turn out.
Vernon looks like an anvil dropped on him from the sky, an anvil in the shape of his famous son.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Hollywood Photo Archive/Mediapunch/Shutterstock (10195161a) Elivs Presley Elvis Presley Archive 1973
Lisa Marie recalled the only time her dad ever spanked her.
She misbehaved, and he told her to stop. Because she was 5 or 6, she kept doing whatever it was and he gave her a light spank on the tush. She probably cried a little bit and then bounced back and rode around on her tricycle. Whatever. Moment forgotten. A blip in her day.
Much later that night – she said it had to have been 2, 3 in the morning, Elvis woke her up, all emotional, and told her how sorry he was and he’d never do it again.
He had been sitting around for HOURS worrying about what he had done.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
When I lived in Philadelphia – a million years ago, with my boyfriend who was in law school at U. Penn – I became intimately familiar with Henry Ossawa Tanner’s paintings since so many of them hang in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and we went to the museum almost every week. Or, at least a couple times a month. It’s such a great museum.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1859, Tanner was the first Black artist to break through into international fame. Although he was educated in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (he enrolled in 1879, and was the only black student), he ended up living for most of his life in Paris. I believe he is buried in Paris. (He was eventually given the Legion of Honor in 1923, France’s highest honor.) Tanner did not have to wait decades for his work to be recognized, he did not die forgotten and then his work was discovered posthumously. He was here to enjoy his success.
While at the Pennsylvania Academy, Tanner met Thomas Eakins who was busy revolutionizing American Art. Eakins saw something in Tanner, recognized his gift, and “took him on” in a powerful mentor relationship. (Tanner eventually painted Eakins’s portrait, one of only a few painters who got the honor). Of course Tanner faced racism every step of the way. He was unwelcome in almost every space he entered – although in France it was a little less restrictive. It had to have taken incredible guts and stick-to-it-iveness to stay the course.
Tanner started, as many painters do, with landscapes.
“View of the Seine looking toward Notre Dame”, 1896
“The Arch” (1919) – I saw this one at the Brooklyn Museum. It may be part of the collection there, Brooklyn-ites, take note.
There are a couple of reasons, though, why his work stands out from his fellow Impressionists. For me, looking at his work as a whole it is a reminder: Bring yourself to your work. Whatever that means. Do your thing, and do it as best you can, but don’t leave yourself out of it, because the only thing that is unique about you is your you-ness. That’s it. Only one of you. So BRING IT. I learned this young, because of pursuing acting. It helps you keep your perspective during cattle-call auditions, where it feels like you’re wandering in a wilderness of hugely talented people (and this is TRUE). All you can do is believe in yourself and that your unique-ness has value and that someone will want it, and if others DON’T want it, oh well, someone else will. SO. Tanner began painting small homey scenes showing people of color living their lives, doing simple activities, like praying before dinner, etc. This shattered stereotypes of depictions of black life. Even saying that is an understatement. Basically what Tanner was doing hadn’t existed in American art before he came along – at least not to the level at which he was doing it. He had an international reputation (mostly because of his later religious paintings, which I’ll get to in a second). He was famous. His paintings went around the world, under-cutting the racist depictions of black Americans for a very wide audience.
His most famous painting, to this day, is “The Banjo Lesson”.
“The Banjo Lesson” (1893)
The painting is very beautiful, but it’s also revolutionary, in a quiet insistent way. Most importantly, the painting challenges the minstrel context inherent in banjos, etc. The normal context of banjos in the racist context is a black man performing, being a clown, being happy with entertaining others. Tanner’s painting, however, shows a tender inter-generational scene, connoting continuity and family bonds – and – even more important – brings up questions/contemplations that go far beyond what is portrayed: had the father or maybe grandfather been a slave? Considering the year “The Banjo Lesson” was painted: Most probably he was. What we see here, then, is a man – who is poor, who lives in humble conditions, etc. – but he is free, he is a man free enough to have a little bit of leisure time to spend passing on to his grandson how to play the banjo.
One thing about Tanner’s use of light: Tanner’s work features so many instances of different light sources coming into shadows or hitting black skin, light pouring in from different quadrants. Tanner’s use of light is quite intricate. My boyfriend and I used to look at his paintings and try to figure out the light sources. Look closely at “The Banjo Lesson” and try to track where all the light is coming from. Because it’s not just from one place.
Later, Tanner moved into religious territory. Many of his religious paintings could also be classified as landscape paintings, and so it makes you think about the religious stories depicted in different ways. He’s giving you a different perspective, an Impressionistic and non-literal perspective, on a very familiar story. Like here: “The Good Shepherd”:
Isn’t that just stunning?
Two more:
He did many paintings of Mary, and all of them are haunting, beautiful, moody, with deep rich colors. His work makes you re-think Mary. Like here:
And the gorgeous “Flight Into Egypt”:
I am leaving the best for last: Tanner’s painting called “The Annunciation.”
“The Annunciation” is quite literally overwhelming when you see it in person.
Look at how far beyond the normal edge of symbolic allegorical painting Tanner had gone! Seek out “The Annunciation” if you’re ever in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’ll take your breath away. I seriously gasped the first time I saw it.
Tanner died in Paris in 1937. Happy birthday to this pioneer.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
“I’m very much against expressing a categorical view of the world. I hope I can continue to discover something, and not to underline or bolster up what I already know.” – Paul Muldoon
It’s his birthday today.
Like Seamus Heaney was, Paul Muldoon is a giant in modern poetry, and, also like Heaney, a rural Ulster man. He grew up on a farm in County Armagh, a Catholic in the middle of a Protestant majority. His parents tried to shield the family from the political realities of the moment, although they were nationalists. The Troubles reverberate through Muldoon’s verse. He’s published over 30 books of poetry. He is now a professor at Princeton. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize. He’s won every prize.
He went to Queen’s University Belfast, where Seamus Heaney was one of his teachers (post on him here). It was a hot time in Belfast, not just politically, but also in the literary scene, and Paul Muldoon was very much a part of that. Some of the names at the time: Michael Longley (post here), Derek Mahon (post on him here), Ciarán Carson (post here), Medbh McGuckian (post on her here), Frank Ormsby, Muldoon – they were all part of a writer’s workshop in Belfast called the Belfast Group. Much of Heaney’s earliest work came out of it.
Muldoon is a big risk-taker in his verse, just like Frost was. He is dazzling, but not showy. The pages of today’s poetry journals are filled with Muldoon imitators. Muldoon is a brainiac, as most autodidacts are. He is voracious in curiosity and scope. Information is there to be used, messed with.
With all of this, Muldoon is also an eloquent poet of “the Troubles”.
While he often writes long poems, today I’m posting a brief one. It’s only five lines. Five lines is all you need to describe an entire WORLD … if you’re as good as Paul Muldoon, that is.
Ireland
The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it’s lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.
QUOTES:
Paul Muldoon:
On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.
He was born in Portadown, County Armagh, in 1951 and brought up near the Moy, a village to which his poems return. Muldoon’s mother was a teacher with strong literary interests, his father a farm laborer friendly to the Republican cause, a Lawrentian formula that resulted not in Sons and Lovers but in poems about complementarities and incompatibilities. Fruitful and tragic misalliances are a recurrent theme in his poems, wired and triggered by ironies that can be unexpectedly savage or heartbreaking.
Roger Conover, Eire-Ireland:
Muldoon’s is a poetry which sees into things, and speaks of the world in terms of its own internal designs and patterns.
Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, on Muldoon’s Mules:
A strange, rich second collection.
Adam Kirsch, New Republic:
If virtuosity is all that a poet can display, if his poems demand attention simply because of their elaborateness and difficulty, then he has in some sense failed.
Michael Schmidt:
[Paul Muldoon] read Frost with special attention, though the American’s impact on his prosody and narrative strategies is limited, except when he is producing, as in “The Mountain” ironic connections.
Paul Muldoon:
[Robert] Frost was important to me early on because his line, his tone of voice, was so much a bare canvas.
William Logan:
Muldoon is … in love (not wisely but too well) with language itself. … Too often the result is tedious foolery, the language run amok with Jabberwocky possibility (words, words, monotonously inbreeding), as if possibility were reason enough for the doing.
Adam Phillips, London Review of Books, on Muldoon’s lectures:
[The lectures] are about poetic influence more than anything else … Muldoon is generous and expansive in his naming of names; he is the exemplary poet as fan.
Michael Schmidt:
Muldoon often builds with baroque delicacy a trellis of ironies over the rather rudimentary themes and subjects. He likes the Metaphysicals, he likes conceits.
Clair Wills, Times Literary Supplement, on To Ireland:
[There is] something irreducibly esoteric about this trip through the weird and wonderful land of Irish letters, and the quirkiness, bordering on whimsy, will no doubt alienate many readers. This is unfortunate, because the book also contains some of Muldoon’s most forthright reflections to date on the relations of history, literature and politics.
Seamus Heaney:
Robert Frost, a poet whose roguery and tough-mindedness are admired by Paul Muldoon, once wrote about the art of filling a cup up to the brim ‘or even above the brim’. This impulse to go further than is strictly necessary is presented by Frost as the most natural thing in the world. It’s why young boys want to climb to the tops of birch trees and why grown-up poets write poems.
William Logan, on Hay:
Everyone interested in contemporary poetry should read this book … In our time of tired mirrors and more-than-tiresome confession, Muldoon is the rare poet who writes through the looking glass.
Paul Muldoon:
I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing – that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one’s door.
Seamus Heaney:
“This work [Paul Muldoon’s book ‘The Annals of Chile’] gives the impression of coming clean and being clandestine at one and the same time. It is Joycean in its combination of the everyday and the erudite, but it is also entirely sui generis, a late-twentieth-century work that vindicates Muldoon’s reputation as one of the era’s true originals.”
Michael Schmidt:
His formal and verbal inventiveness leads away from self. In Madoc he risks rewriting the lives of Coleridge and Southey, as if they had fulfilled the ambition of Pantisocracy and set up their community on the banks of the Susquehanna. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks to Stephen Hawking comment tersely and in character on the enterprise. It is very funny, very learned, a high-table game. He speaks for a while histor of thought, talked down, as it were, but not trivialized. “I’m interested in ventriloquism, in speaking through other people, other voices.”
Seamus Heaney:
[Muldoon is] one of the very best.
Paul Muldoon, who talks a lot about Robert Frost:
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
And finally:
“It’s Never Too Late for Rock’N’Roll”
By Paul Muldoon
It may be too late to learn ancient Greek
Under a canopy of gnats
It may be too late to sail to Mozambique
With a psychotic cat
It may be too late to find a cure
Too late to save your soul
It may be too late to lose the heat
It may be too late to find your feet
It may be too late to draw a map
To the high desert of your heart
It may be too late to lose the poor
It’s never too late for rock’n’roll
It may be too late to dance like Fred Astaire
Or Michael Jackson come to that
It may be too late to climb the stair
And find the key under your mat
It may be too late to think that you’re
Never too late for rock’n’roll
We have to believe a couple of good thieves can still seize the day
We have to believe we can still clear the way
We have to believe we’ve found some common ground
We have to believe we have to believe
We can lose those last twenty pounds.
It’s her birthday today. The quote in the headline was Rowlands talking about playing Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence, but it could be said about many of her roles, particularly the ones she did in her husband’s films. Far far out there on a limb, or on a mountaintop, without an oxygen tank, without a net, whatever metaphor you want. That’s how far out she goes.
I’ve written so much about her, my favorite living actress, and here’s a roundup:
For the Criterion release of Love Streams, I wrote and narrated a video essay about Rowlands’ work with Cassavetes. Here’s an excerpt from the video (the whole thing is in the Special Features on the DVD):
When Gena Rowlands received her Lifetime Achievement Oscar, I was hired to write the narration for the tribute reel played at the ceremony. Angelina Jolie read what I wrote. Unfortunately, it isn’t online. (It was a trophy moment, personally to hear “Angie” saying MY words.)
Here’s Gena Rowlands’ highly entertaining speech at her Lifetime Achivement ceremony, complete w/Bette Davis anecdote (they did an amazing TV movie together, “Strangers.”)
I wrote the booklet essay – reprinted here – for Arrow Film’s release of Another Woman (part of a Woody Allen box set) – it’s one of her best performances, and it’s rarely discussed.
“When Gena and I are home together, we’re husband and wife. On the set, we’re deadly combatants. We have great respect for each other, like enemies do.” – John Cassavetes
“Nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.” – James Weldon Johnson, preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922)
It’s his birthday today.
An extremely important figure in 20th century American culture, James Weldon Johnson was born in 1871 and died in 1938. He is often lumped in with the Harlem Renaissance, but he was a little bit older than that generation. His work was not really a precursor; seen in the timeline of events, it’s almost like he was “preparing the space,” he was enlarging the room to include more voices. Those clamorous years of the ‘teens and 1920s were so jam-packed with events it’s hard to tell who was influencing whom, and what came first, but seen with the benefit of retrospect, Johnson’s work was essential to basically laying down the ground rules of the Harlem Renaissance. Things were already happening, things were changing, but his project – to codify, catalog, capture, explain – was very important, because it set the stage, it gathered together voices that had been ignored and dismissed, especially from “genres” like hymns and sermons, not considered literature. Someone had to make the case for the material’s relevance and worth. This was what James Weldon Johnson did.
He did it all. He was a teacher, a civil rights activist, a diplomat, a lawyer, a poet, an editor. He served as secretary for the NAACP. He was the first African-American to be accepted into the Florida bar. He eventually became the first African-American professor at New York University. He also taught at Fisk University, lecturing on literature and art. He grew up with formidable parents, particularly his mother, who was a teacher in a public school and passed on to her two sons a love of education, language, and English literature. Just as Jean Toomer did, he spent time as a teacher in rural Georgia, a crucial experience for him, witnessing the poverty, illiteracy, racism of a backwoods world. He was responsible for extending the education in black schools in the area to the 10th grade, so that kids had options, a place to stay where learning could conceivably continue. He also traveled to Haiti, under occupation by U.S. Marines at the time, and wrote a book about it. He was appointed consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua. It’s about 10 lives in one!
I haven’t mentioned his collaboration with his composer brother, J. Rosamond Johnson!
For my Substack, I wrote about the Bloomsday celebration I’ve been going to (more or less) for 20 years, and my history with the book, and Dad, and lovable finance bro, and meeting people where the sole bond is knowing the entire score of Oliver! The piece is really about finding your people. I found mine. And I’m going to hang out with them later today, like I do every year.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
I’ve been celebrating Bloomsday for 20 years, in the real world, and here on my site. If you’ve been visiting here for any length of time, you know this. There are too many posts to count, and James Joyce has his own category. Not just a tag, but a CATEGORY. Writing about him – and his books – has been a great pleasure, especially since I am not a scholar, I’m just a reader – and writing about his books have been a really fun way to enter into them on my own terms.
But for today I’ll link to four things:
My annual Bloomsday post, where I talk about the book, the reaction to it, positive and negative, and Joyce’s place in the sphere of things.
It’s about Dad, and reading the book for the first time. It’s about the Bloomsday celebration I’ve been going to since 2004 at Ulysses pub down in the financial district. It’s about finding your people. And how I found mine.
He shot Deer Hunter, Deliverance, The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These alone would put him in the history books. These are some of the most influential films ever made, and how they LOOK is a huge reason why. He worked up until the end. One of the last films he shot was Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, starring Gena Rowlands.
Some of his shots rank as my favorite of all time.
Glenn Kenny wrote a beautiful tribute when he died in 2016. Zsigmond not only worked in a flexible way, adjusting his style to the material, he was a personal artist himself: he shared with us how he saw the world, how much he understood light and what light meant to any given atmosphere (so many people take light for granted), as well as his ability to morph into the mindset of the director and the story.
American cinema of the 1970s, with its influential and distinctive diversity of style, helmed by exciting new directors like Hal Ashby, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, John Boorman, Michael Cimino, Steven Spielberg, was helped along in the look/feel of the images by two emigre cinematographers, Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács. Both hailed from Hungary. They were friends. The Russians rolled into Budapest in 1956 to crush the revolution against Soviet rule. It was a brutal crackdown, enraging other nation-members of the USSR. It was an ominous harbinger. (The crackdown enraged the world. Elvis dedicated his performance of “Peace in the Valley,” in his final appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957 to the people in Hungary, calling for Americans to make donations in support of the Hungarian people. Ed Sullivan announced the address where to send donations, and millions of dollars poured in. Recently, because of that support 50 years ago, a park in Budapest was named for Elvis, and he was also granted posthumous Hungarian citizenship. Like I keep saying, stating the obvious, Elvis is everywhere).
But back to the subject matter: Kovács and Zsigmond, two Hungarian cinematographers, living in Budapest in 1956, roamed the streets, filming the violent crackdown with an Arriflex camera using the last of their 35-mm film. They smuggled the footage out of the country (footage which would soon be seen around the world, and is still part of our collective – or should be – understanding of that event). Kovács and Zsigmond transported their footage by train as far as they could go, then jumped off, and walked into Austria on foot. Eventually, they moved to America. They both got their start shooting biker pictures for Roger Corman (an unofficial film school for so many people). A documentary was made about their friendship, and my friend Matt Zoller Seitz reviewed it for The New York Times.
So let’s rack up the major projects shot by these two emigre-cinematographers from Hungary.
And let’s take particular note of the fact that they continued working on major projects even after the heyday of the 1970s subsided. Their style adjusted to the story. THIS is artistry, as well as professionalism. Style is sometimes obvious, and style is sometimes invisible, but no less valuable to the story.
László Kovács Easy Rider Five Easy Pieces The Last Movie What’s Up, Doc? The King of Marvin Gardens Paper Moon Shampoo New York, New York Paradise Alley Frances Ghostbusters Mask Say Anything My Best Friend’s Wedding Miss Congeniality
Vilmos Zsigmond McCabe & Mrs. Miller Deliverance The Long Goodbye Scarecrow The Sugarland Express Close Encounters of the Third Kind The Deer Hunter The Rose Heaven’ Gate Blow Out Real Genius The Witches of Eastwick The Bonfire of the Vanities Jersey Girl Melinda and Melinda Black Dahlia Cassandra’s Dream
Zsigmond died in 2016.
Here’s an interesting 1980 Rolling Stone interview with Vilmos Zsigmond, after he finished shooting the wildly out-of-control ambitious Michael Cimino film of Heaven’s Gate (a movie shoot so out-of-control it brought down one of the oldest production companies in America, United Artists. An entire book was written about the Heaven’s Gate shoot.)
In 2016, Blow Out screened at Ebertfest, and the great Nancy Allen was in attendance. This was right after Vilmos died. In the QA afterwards, I asked if she had any stories about him she wanted to share as a tribute. My question comes at around the 30 minute mark, but the whole thing is worth your while.
One of Vilmos Zsigmond’s last films was Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks (2014), starring Gena Rowlands as an old lady who decides to take dance lessons, realizing she had given up on having new experiences,. It’s not a very good film, mainly because the script had not been sufficiently adapted from the theatre-script, but Rowlands is great in it (and it’s fun to see Rita Moreno too as Rowlands’ nosy downstairs neighbor in their Palm Beach old folks’ condo-complex.) The film was clearly shot on a low budget. It takes place mostly in interiors, showing its roots as a theatre production, and it’s pretty uninteresting in terms of the visuals, not a lot of flourishes with the camera. Scenes have a dead quality. I went to a SAG screening of the film, with a QA with Rowlands afterwards. They filmed the entire thing in Zsigmond’s country of origin, Hungary, even though it takes place in Florida (hence, all the interiors), so they needed to light those scenes as THOUGH the rooms looked out on the beach with all that pinky-purple ocean light. There is one scene (and it’s worth it to see the film just for this moment), where Gena Rowlands’ character, a person who thought she was done with life, or at least done with new things, sits in a chair in her condo and stares out at the red/gold/purple of the sunrise. She is so relaxed, so peaceful. It’s one of the few moments of pure silence in the film, justified just by the fact that we always want to have the time to watch Gena Rowlands thinking about things.
But part of the magic is how Zsigmond filmed it, and the glow of the light on her face, intense and deep rich golden, the warmth of it, in the moment you can actually feel the warmth. I went into the film not knowing anything about the shoot itself, and when it was revealed that they filmed the whole thing in Hungary, that that light on Reynolds’ face was artificially created start to finish, I was shocked. I didn’t know Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks was filmed in Hungary and I never would have known, because of that LIGHT.
Zsigmond worked with deep and thoughtful artistry even on second-rate material because that’s who he was as a cinematographer.
Also he’s the kind of guy who knew he had to do right by Gena. And he did.
My introduction, as shallow as this may seem, was through Reservoir Dogs. “You put the lime in the coconut”, etc. My brother said to me, “It’s a stupid song, and you think it’s just a gimmick or a novelty song, but try to sing along with him. It sounds so eas but it is not easy. It’s impossible to sing along with him!” Try it. Bren is right.
It’s Harry Nilsson’s birthday. There he is up above “getting one Beatle drunk” during their four-year-long bender, where they caused a lot of trouble, made music, and heckled people at the Troubadour (getting thrown out for said heckling). Nilsson’s catalog is fascinating. I was recently listening to “Down” and I was just blown away by his vocals.
My GOD.
Nothing I can say can top my brother’s writing on Harry Nilsson. Bren got obsessed over a decade ago after watching a documentary on Nilsson. Bren was not familiar with Nilsson’s work or career (despite being obsessed with the Beatles), and he was blown away by what he discovered. How had this man not become such common knowledge that it took Reservoir Dogs to re-introduce him to a new generation?
Later, when Bren was in the throes of his Scott Walker obsession, he dug into one of the connections between the two artists, with a little Randy Newman thrown in:
Like a lot of artists whose music I own (I still like to own music: will never give it up), Waylon Jennings is on almost constant rotation. He’s always there. In playlists, first of all, but also … he recorded so much, and I have all of it, so even on Shuffle, he’s usually present. His voice touches me for some reason I can’t quite describe in words. I’ve tried. Maybe it’s his openness: you can feel it. There’s not much bullshit there, in terms of ego or facade, although he obviously had both – in spades, at times. He was frustrated (understatement) with the conservative restrictions Nashville (i.e. the country music establishment) put on him – put on everyone – down to the kind of sound you were “allowed” to use, the kinds of instruments that were “acceptable” – not to mention your own personal lifestyle. Jennings was not down with all of that. He came from a mix of musical backgrounds. Born in Texas, and befriended by Buddy Holly when he was just a teenager … rockabilly was obviously a major influence. It was how he got his start. But the “abilly” part of “rockabilly” is the country influence, the mix of genres which all these guys created. It was a revolution and he was part of it. He did do the strict “country thing” for a bit, and he’s a wonderful country singer/songwriter, but he also had a big folk music influence on him – and he marketed himself as a folk artist – his first album was called Folk Country. It was a sign of things to come. He was about to shake things up in country music in a major way, and country music would never really be the same.
A word about that: When rockabilly started to rise in the ’50s, with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Buddy Holly … the country music industry panicked. It was really Elvis who caused the panic, although it probably started with Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” – a MONSTER hit. Then Elvis came along, and in a matter of a couple of months he had something like 4 or 5 songs in the Top 5 on every chart – pop, r&b AND country … a sure sign that the boundaries between genres were dissolving. Country fans (i.e. white people) were buying rhythm & blues records, rhythm & blues fans (i.e. black people) were buying rockabilly records, and all these rockabilly boys were buying country music, and many had set out to be country-music singers in the first place, since “rockabilly” didn’t really exist as a “thing” and r&b was seen as for/by black people. So the mashup that began – with the dovetailing of these three styles, and throw in a little gospel too, had huge appeal, and that appeal crossed cultural and racial lines. Nashville panicked. THIS wasn’t country music!! Nashville’s response was racist in nature: some said it explicitly, some just implied it, but the message was clear: Some of this stuff just sounds too … black. (Little did they know that Ray Charles would come along down the line, and his Grand Ole Opry/Hank Williams influence was so strong, he made inroads into the country establishment, recording some stuff in Nashville. But that was in the future. In the ’50s, there was resistance to racial blending, in art, in politics, in the real world – but with music, the blending couldn’t be held back. You can’t segregate the airwaves.) Anyway, it was a confusing time for “the suits” and they ended up basically banning Elvis from their charts – and a couple others too – but it was mostly Elvis since he dominated their charts. This affected people like The Everly Brothers too – who were also “banned” even though their style has so much country in it. It wasn’t like a decree came down, but Nashville saw how Elvis was all over their charts in the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 slots and they had none of it, and so shut him out. Country music put up a wall around itself to shut out progress and change. Faron Young, a singer-songwriter, observed: “Elvis vaporized country music,” a comment I’ve never forgotten.
Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis, Johnny Cash
Waylon was a teenage DJ in the mid-1950s, caught up in the rockabilly thing (he was fired from a couple of DJ gigs for playing Chuck Berry and Little Richard. So you see the landscape). He was taken under the wing of Buddy Holly, and he ended up touring with them (he was on the “Winter Dance Party Tour”, the one where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper – including everyone else on board – was killed). But he was coming into an era – the 60s – when country music calcified, or at LEAST was not open to “the new” at all. It was their way or you didn’t get radio play.
“They wouldn’t let you do anything. You had to dress a certain way: you had to do everything a certain way…. They kept trying to destroy me…. I just went about my business and did things my way…. You start messing with my music, I get mean.”
— Waylon Jennings
Waylon made albums, had some quasi-hits, but eventually he shattered the wall by going “outlaw”, going rogue, with others, including, crucially, Willie Nelson. The two of them – who most decidedly did NOT “fit in” – took country by storm, as well as “crossed over”. They did a number of albums together. The country music industry wobbled on its foundations. This was the 70s.
Eventually, Waylon rejected the “outlaw” label -it was becoming too kitsch, too much of a “brand” – and country music in many ways retreated. The rise of Garth Brooks – whom I do like – represented a slick and polished version of the music … not much “outlaw” stuff going on there, right? He was a “good boy” as opposed to a “bad boy.” And his fan base, albeit huge, did not want to grow with the times. I mean, they all threw a bitch-fit when he wrote “We Shall Be Free” which included the lyrics “When we’re free to love anyone we choose…” Okay, fine, be a bunch of backwards bigots. Watch the world pass you by. Country is again revitalizing, although it is still mainly white (at least in the mainstream: get out of the mainstream and there’s all kinds of other stuff happening) … but people like Miranda Lambert and the Pistol Annies, or the mega-star and crossover wonder boy, Eric Church, who has a Waylon-type stature and a Waylon-type trajectory – are kicking ass, and reaching people outside the country-music-belljar. Eric Church looked around at the country music industry and thought, “Fuck these goody-goodies.” In one interview, he said most country music was made for “Christian soccer moms”, perhaps the biggest burn I’ve ever heard. Eric Church is a Christian but I know – and everyone knows – what he meant by that burn. And now he’s one of the biggest stars in the world. He fills stadiums in Germany, Scotland, all over.
I’ll get to Eric Church in a bit.
Waylon was a hard-living man, who drank, chain-smoked, was addicted to amphetamines in the 60s and 70s. His health was ravaged. He married four times – and the last one – to singer Jessi Colter – “stuck.” She was with him to the end. They did a number of duets together: go to YouTube and find them. As I said, there’s an openness in Waylon’s voice – a depth of tone – and this lends itself beautifully to duets. There’s so much FEELING there, and the feeling – the tenderness – is unexpected with someone who looks so WILD. Hearing him sing with a woman, his loving-ness, his openness to her … it’s tender, and pained, and human. He was a flawed man, and the best of country music is all about acknowledging your flaws. Everyone’s a fuck-up in country music. Nobody’s perfect. The songs are filled with mistakes, ruined lives, alcoholism, infidelity, bad choices, violence, regrets … You don’t feel so alone when you listen to it. We could use a little more of that today. Self-empowerment positive messages are fine, and in some cases necessary. But as a grown adult woman, with miles of bumpy road behind me, I gravitate towards flawed people, people who have made mistakes, and hopefully grown from them – but maybe not grown from them, maybe they’re just haunted (I mean, listen to George Jones) and their art is their way of dealing with being haunted. This is the stuff I love. This is where I feel, as the kids say, “seen.”
One of the first songs he recorded, I’m pretty sure he was still a teenager, was “Jole Blon”, with Buddy Holly and Tommy Allsup on guitars, and King Curtis on sax. HISTORY.
The death of Buddy Holly was a formative moment for Waylon Jennings. Buddy Holly was a big-brother figure, a mentor, an early supporter. Here they are together, in Grand Central Station, just a little over a week before the plane went down.
Waylon was on that tour, and he gave up his seat on the flight to someone who had the flu (the tour busses were freezing cold). As they parted, Buddy Holly joked, “Hope your bus freezes your ass” and Waylon said, “Yeah, well, hope your plane goes down.” All in fun, just a joke. Waylon carried guilt for the rest of his life about the whole thing. He wrote multiple songs about Buddy Holly, the first one being “The Stage”, not only for Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, but also Eddie Cochran, killed in a car accident in early 1960.
He also would perform medleys of Buddy Holly songs in his concerts. Here’s another tribute song he wrote called “Old Friend.” It’s so sad.
One of his first real hits was “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” – which holds up, as all his stuff does. It’s one of my favorite Waylons. Here he is performing it on the Johnny Cash Show. The two of them were roommates for a time. That had to be a crazy fucking apartment, let me tell you.
See how cleancut he was! There’s a rockabilly swoop to his greased-up hair, but he’s all buttoned up. The man was FINE … and has an uncanny resemblance to my Window Boy, particularly in the first photo booth picture posted above – it’s almost eerie – that’s what he looked like when I met him, a gorgeous RAKE – so there’s a visceral response there. But it’s hard to square young Waylon with the long-haired cowboy he became not long after. Then came the breakthroughs. Like he said above: being told what to do with his music made him mean. His declarations of independence came with great albums called things like Ladies Love Outlaws and Lonesome Or’nry and Mean. He was NOT “family-friendly”. His song “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” couldn’t be more clear. It’s an indictment. It’s a callback to country’s real roots … to Hank Williams … saying “Yeahhhh, I don’t know what you all are doing with your countrypolitan sheen, but Hank didn’t do it this way.”
I love that song so much.
Now we come back to Eric Church:
34 years after Waylon called up the ghost of Hank to shame country music into remembering its roots, Eric Church came out with “Lotta Boot Left to Fill”, which refers back to Waylon’s song, and then further back to Hank, re-establishing the continuum. It’s an indictment. Eric Church has said the song criticizes the country-music big-wigs who refuse to accept the “new” – which Church, with his rock and metalhead influences – his bad-boy un-family-friendly sex-pot stoner vibe – represented. In other words, “Lotta Boot Left to Fill” is the words of country fans who reject him. Honestly, the song could go either way. When I first heard the song, I put it in line with all of the other songs Church has written criticizing Nashville. He’s an outsider. The FANS picked him, not the “suits”, and the “suits” are happy to make that money, but deep down they resent outsiders who come in and shake things up.
Regardless, here is Eric Church’s rager of a sequel to Waylon’s song about Hank Williams, where he sings:
“I don’t think Waylon done it that way
And if he was here he’d say “Hoss, neither did Hank!”
Jennings and Willie Nelson were soulmates, and the clips of them performing together are wonderful. You can feel the mutual regard, the appreciation. Their voices are so different but they blend together beautifully. Here they are performing “Good-Hearted Woman”.
Oh, and wait, detour to duet with his wife, Jessi Colter.
Then the outlaw thing started to lose its appeal. Once everyone jumped on the bandwagon … once country music was transformed, with Waylon, Willie and others injecting some wildness into it, opening up the sound … Waylon got sick of it. He wrote a song called …
“Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand?”
LOL.
You know that I couldn’t let this post end without mentioning this song …
“Nobody Knows I’m Elvis”
You can practically hear the smile in his voice.
And who can forget his cameo in Follow That Bird, where he sings a duet with Big Bird, and he’s so easy and focused, you never for once remember Carroll Spinney is inside that suit.
Plus he also appeared on Sesame Street, which I find so touching.
In the mid-80s, he and Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson created a “supergroup” called The Highwaymen (another term for “outlaw”). They put out a couple of albums, and I remember watching them play at Farm Aid in 1993.
I’ll close this up but hopefully you’ve had fun watching and listening to these clips.
One of my favorite genre of song is what I call the “Bad Sport” breakup song. Songs about breakups that are not sad and regretful, mournful and longing, but pissed, and a little bit petty. Being a bad sport is just as honest as saying, “I miss so-and-so, my heart hurts.” I love the songs that are like, “I’m better off without you anyway.” (Kelly Clarkson is a master at this kind of song.)
I love Jennings’ hilarious cover of “You Can Have Her.” Every time the huge angelic chorus comes in, it makes me laugh.
He’s not just singing the song alone. He’s so over this broad who did him wrong he calls in in the big guns, the gigantic chorus is there to back him up in his Kiss Off.
Happy birthday, Waylon. I haven’t even scratched the surface here. Even your name is slightly epic, since it evokes so much. There’s only one of you. To this day, if you say the name “Waylon” everyone knows who you mean.
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