Amurka: Love it. Loathe it

What I love about America:

The blues, jazz and country music. Powdered sugar donuts. The Boundary Water Canoe Area. American friends. My siblings and nephews and nieces and their families. My cousins. The Rocky Mountains. New York. Minneapolis. The Vikings. Chicago. Baseball and NFL. Minnesota in the winter. Minnesota in the summer. The idea of Las Vegas. Graceland. Al Green. John Prine. Bob Dylan. All the great music studios in Memphis and Muscle Shoals. The Neville Brothers. Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons. The Mississippi Delta, Bobby Gentry, Dr. John and Tony Joe White. The Sonora desert. The creative spirit that comes up with The Sopranos and cool apps. George Jones. Doc Watson and Mississippi John Hurt. Progressive Americans who have some perspective. Sanctuary cities and the dwindling tribe of dissenters.  Grape Nuts.

What I loathe about America:

Gun culture. Racism. White privilege. State religion. The Republican Party and nearly everyone of its reprentatives in office. The piss poor education and health systems that are touted as ‘the best in the world’. The self delusion. The outright lies American politicians tell and the eagerness with which Americans lap them up. Hollow patriotism. The justifications and pontifications by pundits, politicians and preachers that give cover to the gun culture, racism, white privilege and state religion, the Republican party, the piss poor education and health systems, the hollow patriotism, the outright lies and self delusion. The American military and foreign policy. The Trump family. His phalanx of evangelical cheerleaders.  Americans refusal to travel and lack of curiosity about the world. The belief that the Democratic Party and Joe Biden are ‘going to save us’. The belief that ‘with a new President we’ll return to normal’. The self delusion. The false religion. The popcorn culture. Mainstream country music. AM Radio. Wall Street ruling the roost. The headlines about another mass shooting. Another black man killed for being black. Purple junk food that fizzes.   Please, just go away.

The Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me The Most: Number 1

Willy and the Poor Boys/ Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969)    Cosmo’s Factory/ Creedence Clearwater Revival (1970)

Creedence Clearwater Revival were my Beatles.  In those critical years, between the age of 13-15, when so many musical templates get tattooed into the soul, Creedence music was my main source of ink. It wasn’t that I didn’t hear and like other stuff but no group grabbed me so completely or sounded so urgent and necessary as CCR.

 

I was playing a board game with Tim Amstutz, whose dad was a diplomat in Rangoon, in Fali Kapadia’s living room.  Cottonfields started to play.  I asked Tim who the group was and he said, “Willie and the Poor Boys.” I had never heard anything like this before. The music that made its way to the slightly-past-it’s-prime hill station in north India where I did my education tended to classic rock ‘n roll. It was dominated by the groups of the British Invasion—The Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Clapton, and of course the Fab Four.  What American music circulated through the school’s dormitories was heavy or psychedelic. Iron Butterfly were huge as were Grand Funk Railway, Steppenwolf and Alice Cooper.  I liked it but lying still, deep down inside me was a musical swamp of unknowing that was waiting for another sound to set it free.

 

I had not yet found a name for that sound but it rang with the voices of Tennessee Ernie Ford, the Sons of the Pioneers, and Johnny Cash. It seemed straightforward and committed to melody and harmony rather than technical pyrotechnics or heavy riffs.  It told stories and was faintly spiritual.   All of the things that made up the DNA of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

 

For some time after I first heard Cottonfields I thought Willie and the Poor Boys was the name of the band but that didn’t last long.  Some invisible switch was flicked and suddenly CCR were everywhere. They were the biggest band in the world. (EMI even released the album in India before most of Europe and Australia.)  There was little other music that interested me. My inner bayou that had been lying quiet till now began to stir. Every song on Willie and the Poor Boys excited me. It was a music I could understand and believe in.  Unlike Steppenwolf and Cream which were so different and ‘out there’, CCR’s music felt like it was coming from within.  To a fourteen year old in boarding school this stuff was as sacred as the Bible. And it meant far more.

 

All of CCR’s albums were circulating in school but after Willy and the Poor Boys it was Cosmo’s Factory that I really latched on to.  I knew every word to every song by heart and never got bored with it.  Cosmo’s Factory represented rock ‘n roll for me.  This was the definition of cutting edge, exciting and even dangerous.  John Fogerty’s edgy and bold guitar style and the lyrics about spells, devils, hoo doos and bad moons fascinated me in the way the Ouija Board attracted others. The music rocked. The songs were mysterious.  And it sounded so good way up loud.

 

Many years would pass before I understood how truly influential CCR were.  What I understood to be simply rock music was in fact a gumbo of so many forms of American popular music. Every style of music that I have grown to love over the nearly 50 years since I first heard Cottonfields pervades CCR’s music: rockabilly, country, R&B, the blues and gospel.  If you want a compact history of American popular music listen to Creedence.

 

They issued 7 studio albums of which 6 are considered essential documents of American rock and roll. (The seventh is regarded as one of the worst records of all time!) What is almost incomprehensible is that those 6 albums—the foundation stones of several sub genres—were made over a mere 24 months between July 1968 and July 1970!

 

When it comes to choosing the record (in this case, records) that have influenced my musical taste and journey more than any other there is simply no other choice than Creedence Clearwater Revival.

 

 

The Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me the Most: Number 2

The Latest Ghazals Nazms/ Jagjit and Chitra Singh (1982)

I had returned to India for a short visit in the winter of 1983. I rode my cycle down to Civil Lines in Allahabad one afternoon and was struck by the proliferation of cassette tapes.  It wasn’t that they were a novelty exactly; I remember buying a Carole King tape in Madras’ Burma (smuggler) bazaar in 1977.  But in the 70s they were a novelty. Expensive and only available in a few shops.

But that afternoon in Allahabad they were all over the place. Pushcarts with huge speakers lined both sides of the main road. On each cart piled high were thousands of precorded cassettes.  And the music available was not just film songs but folk music, classical music, music in the local dialect of Hindi, Muslim religious music, bhajans and ghazals.

At one cart I heard a beautiful song (I like to remember it was Kaghaz ki Kasthi) and asked the seller who was singing. He showed me the tape that was to becomce the second most influential record in my life. It was Jagjit and Chitra Singh’s prosaically titled Latest Ghazals Nazms.

At the time I had no idea what a ghazal or nazm was. And I had never heard of Jagjit or Chitra Singh.  In fact, though I had grown up in India and been a fan of Hindi movies for years I had never really ‘got’ filmi music. Indian music to me was classical: Pannalal Ghosh, Bhimsen Joshi and Ravi Shankar. Records my dad had introduced us to.  But what I heard that afternoon was something completely enrapturing. Melodic, a mix of Indian and western instruments, a complete absence of  the sonic bombast and glitz that characterised film music.

I bought several tapes of the singing duo who I later discovered were husband and wife and over the next several years played them over and over and over. That cheap tape catapulted me headlong into the great ocean of South Asian music: ghazals, bhajans, nazm, Sufi kalam, qawwali, dhrupad, khyal, lokgeet, Nashensas, Rafi, Ustad Amanat Ali, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Farida Khanum, Kishore Kumar, Kishori Amonkar, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Ghulam Ali, Kumar Gandharva, Mukesh, Asha and and and and.  I cannot imagine my life without the music of the subcontinent. And to think it all happend because of an evening bike ride into town.

 

 

The Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me the Most: Number 3

Serving 190 Proof/ Merle Haggard (1979)

There are some genres of music that can cause friendships to end.  Hip hop. Hair metal. Country.   “You like (fill in the blank from above options) music? You gotta be kiddin’ me!” I am not free of such deeply ingrained biases.  And if it were not this record, number 3 on my list of most influential albums, I would still be a dumbass country music hater.

I have no idea why I bought this record but I do remember buying it at a Dinkytown record store in the early ’80s. Maybe it was the bottle of whiskey in front of Merle or the lady bartender in the background. I worked for most of my college years as a bartender or manager of a bar, so perhaps there was some unconscious law of attraction going on. Who knows?

As it turns out I could not have made a better choice for my first country music purchase.  Merle Haggard is (or was until his death four years ago) one of the greatest craftsman of American song and Serving 190 Proof includes a couple of his bonafide superlatives. Consider the wry My Own Kind of Hat, the ennui-drenched Footlights or the achingly beautiful Roses in the Winter.

Every song on this and almost every Merle Haggard record is a mini movie script.  His soulful singing brings each character and scene to life.  More than any other country singer Merle sings with such an honesty and openness that the thin line between performer and song is simply obliterated.

From this amazing record I turned from sneering country music detractor to absolute country nutcase.  Pretty good for 35 minutes of music.

The Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me the Most: Number 4

Zombie/ Fela and Afrika 70 (1976)

My old friend and fellow cook Ned is responsible (again) for introducing me to an album that changed my life forever.  This time it is the Afrobeat classic Zombie by Nigerian saxman Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

This is a record that you cannot be ‘iffy’ about.  From the jittering guitar riff that opens the 12 and a half minute put down of the Nigerian military junta as a pack of zombies the excitement, anxious energy and urgency never slackens.  Fela essentially created the Afrobeat sound which took Highlife–the light trumpet laced dance music of Ghana and Nigeria–and soldered on huge slabs of James Brown funk and the jazz improvisation .

Zombie which is one of the best of Fela’s many very good records took Nigeria by storm.  Whenever people would see a soldier on the street they would put on a blank expression and make like a walking corpse.  Of course, it wasn’t long before the zombies came down hard on Fela sending 1000 troops to his residence and laying waste to his family, killing his mother, destroying his home, studio and master tapes.  Fela was not cowed.  He marched with his mother’s coffin to the President’s house and a few months later released another devasting musical attack Coffin For a Head of State.

Fela’s music is one of the power surge forces of the Universe.  It absolutely blows you away but makes you feel incredibly good and happy.  From this record, my very first exposure to African music, I set out a journey of discovery to all other parts of Africa which has proven to be one of the most exciting musical adventures I’ve ever had.  Absolute gold!

The Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me the Most: Number 5

Let’s Stay Together/Al Green (1972)

I spent my junior year of high school in a poor county in eastern Kentucky. The school district was one of the poorest in the state. And the state ranked 49^th of 50 in education quality.  It was an interesting year. The year of Goats Head Soup, Rock On, Benny and the Jets and Ramblin’ Man.

It was also the year I was introduced to a singer named Al Green. A black kid named Robert sat behind me in English class. He liked a jean jacket I wore that had a big silk “?” sewn on the back.  We chatted from time to time and eventually I let him have the jacket.  For his part he kept encouraging me to listen to Al Green, making his first name sound like I-owe.

In those days AM radio seemed to play everything. Bowie one minute, Cher the next followed by Edgar Winter or Roberta Flack. And sometime after Robert mentioned Al Green to me I heard Let’s Stay Together.  It was instant love.  The taut trumpet intro, the whispered ‘let’s stay together’, the rolling shuffle of the drums, the sweet soaring strings and then …‘I I I’ m/so in love with you’.    The greatest soul voice in the United States enters the fray and over the course of 3 and half short minutes leaves you breathless and gasping for more.

This record, number 5 on my list, opened my ears to soul, gospel, rhythm and blues and funk, the music of black America of which I have still not tired.  Thank you Robert!

 

 

The Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me the Most: Number 6

Live in Cook County Jail/ B.B. King (1970)

I had no idea what the blues was.  I don’t even recall thinking about it.   I didn’t know B.B. King from Martin Luther King.  But there was a song on the jukebox in the basement of the cheap student pub I worked at called The Thrill is Gone.  I loved that song.  A fellow cook named Ned one day borrowed me a record he thought I should listen to.  It was B.B. King Live in Cook County Jail.   The rest, as they say, is history.

I couldn’t quite get what was going on. B.B had this slightly feminine voice which often careened off into a falsetto cry. And every so often he would literally rip these short, shocking breaks off his guitar that left you anxious because they seemed like incomplete sentences. I didn’t know if I got it but I knew there was something in there that was speaking to me.

The record is a wonderful document of B.B’s concert for inmates of Chicago’s infamous Cook County Jail and includes classic performances of some of his classic songs. Particularly, Sweet Sixteen, Worry Worry and of course a stonking The Thrill is Gone.  I put the album on a cassette and listened to it a lot. Ned and I often joked about all the agony in How Blue Can You Get

I gave you a brand-new Ford
You said I want a Cadillac
I bought you a ten dollar dinner
You said thanks for the snack
I let you live in my penthouse
You said it was just a shack
I gave you seven children
And now you want to give them back
Yes, I’ve been downhearted baby
Ever since the day we met
I said our love is nothing but the blues
Baby, how blue can you get?

I don’t know how long it took but pretty soon I was scrounging around for more and more blues: Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi John Hurt, Memphis Slim, Slim Harpo, John Lee Hooker. And then I turned around and went back down to the Delta and discovered Mississippi Fred McDowell, Son House and the possessed singing of Skip James.  Because of Live in Cook County Jail I learned how the blues are the foundation of almost everything good in American music which in turn caused me to deepen my love for jazz and soul music and gospel and rock n roll. In fact, this record marks the beginning of my real appreciation of the depth and seriousness of American music.

The Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me the Most: Number Seven

Raag Yaman Raag Shri/ Pannalal Ghosh (1960)

It is hard to name an Indian classical music album that is more beautiful than this classic release by Bengali flute maestro Pannalal Ghosh.

Ghosh is credited with pioneering what was usually considered a folk instrument, the bansuri (bamboo flute), as a serious classical instrument.  He got his start, as so many in the Indian musical world do, scoring or performing for film soundtracks but his talent and the gorgeous tones he was able to produce quickly led him to be embraced by the classical music fraternity.

Raga Yaman is one of the foundational ragas of the classical repertoire and should be played in the first part of the night.  Raga Shri, considered more complex and dedicated to Lord Shiva, is highly devotional and to be performed at sunset.

This record has been part of my listening world as long as I can remember and has led me deep into the endlessly fascinating and rewarding universe of Indian classical music.

 

 

The Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me the Most: Number 8

Underground/Thelonious Monk (1968)

‘Jazzy’ was a word that my parents used to refer to any music that was uptempo, had a slight beat and was secular. Eddie Calvert was ‘jazzy’. So too were The Beatles.  The family record collection had no real jazz LPs though.

The day I realised that there was a certain kind of music called jazz, without a y, was when my brother Gregg played me Thelonious Monk’s Underground. He spun a tale about how Monk had been a soldier in WWII and the Nazi prisoner on the cover was a real German Monk had stuffed and brought home as a trophy.  I was sucked in and for years thought that all jazz musicians lived in basements strewn with straw, wine bottles and hand grenades.

I can’t remember what I thought of the music on the album but over the years I’ve fallen completely in love with it.  Monk’s unique approach to the piano—awkwardly syncopated, highly patterned, weirdly timed, bursting with surprise—is on full display here from the very opening bars of the opening track.  Accompanied by his long term partners on saxophone, drums and bass Monk takes the listener on a musical adventure that matches the endless possibilities of the cover art.  Underground swings and prances (albeit in Monk’s patented mode) from start to finish.  For years it was the only jazz record I owned and because it opened the door to the jazz universe it comes in at number 8 most influential album.

In Walked Bud

The Ten Albums That Have Influenced Me the Most: Number 9

I’ve often wondered where my left-leaning political inclinations have come from.  I was raised in a conservative evangelical missionary family and many of my cousins are ardent supporters of the Orange oaf who currently sits in the White House.  Liberal political opinions are not things that you’d expect to come out of this background.  But I have never felt sympathy for the conservative argument.  I seem to have popped out with a pre- determined political point of view.

My older brothers are ultimately responsible. It is their passionate arguments with my dad about Nixon and the Vietnam War, which I observed as a nine and ten year old, that were my Politics 101. And it was the records of the Chad Mitchell Trio that they introduced into the family that subtly reinforced their strong liberal attitudes.

From the age of 10 to 14 I listened to the Chad Mitchell Trio more than any other singing group. Especially the album All American Boys, which takes ninth place in my list.  The Chad Mitchell Trio were one of the  better of the many folk groups (the biggest being The Kingston Trio and Peter Paul and Mary) that dominated American college campuses in the early 1960s.  They sang beautiful three part harmonies accompanied by acoustic guitar, mandolin and banjo.  Unlike the Kingston Trio, CMT were not averse to singing about current events and mocking conservative America. Whether it was poking fun at the extreme world view of Barry Goldwater, mocking the John Birch Society’s paranoia or supporting the civil rights movement, they were always on the left hand side of the political road.

I knew nothing about these people: Barry Goldwater, Jimmy Hoffa or John Birch. But later in life when I did learn more I would often hum the Chad Mitchell Trio song about them that I knew by heart. CMT records were my introduction to American politics but also to folk/acoustic music. Both things have stayed with me ever since. All these years later my collection is full of acoustic feel good music with vague political overtones.  Like their song One Man’s Hands . Thanks boys!