The News and Views from Jack ErdieFolks,
Three Events.
1) Acoustic Challenge at Sing Sing in the Waterfront. Tuesday, Oct. 11, 8pm.
2) DownUnder Coffee House in the Unitarian Church on Western Avenue on the North Side. With Robert Wagner. Saturday, Oct. 15, 7:30 - 9:30.
www.alleghenyuu.org/downunder3) ELDER STATESMEN OF SONG. Three of the best songwriters on the planet.
Doug McCarty, Dave Wells, and Sam Flesher. Three Penny Opry, Starlite Lounge in Blawnox, Saturday, Oct. 29 at 8pm.
One Story.
Pigment Diver.
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I'm participating -- I won't say competing -- in another Acoustic Challenge. Tuesday the 11th, (that's this Tuesday), at 8 pm at Sing Sing on the Waterfront.
An acoustic challenge, in my experience, is when you are playing an acoustic set of music in just about any beer garden or bistro the sound system of which has been set up to accomodate classic and blues rocker wannabe cover bands. (You know who you are, and I know where you live.) And the genuine configured natural acoustics of which are nil. But in this case it is an event where four or five different singer-songwriters get to play a fifteen minute set of their best music, and after they have all sweated, bled, and distilled a lifetime of suffering and joy into these fifteen minutes, a panel of underqualified, or self-qualified judges will award them with the right to go on to the finals, where they get to do it again at an even more unblinkingly mad fever pitch, against three other neurotic finalists.
I won one of these once, so I'm assured that my neurosis and fangs are intact. Tuesday night at 8. I'm told it doesn't matter how many come and cheer you on, nor how high the applause meter goes. We will be judged on originality, how well we engage the audience, musicianship, songcraft, and other honorable but often murky and highly subjective criteria. But if you come, I promise to be irreverent, and at my most hardcore and loving jackness, and the devil take the prize.
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Down Under Coffee House w/ Robert Wagner.
I shouldn't have to introduce Robert Wagner to anybody anywhere in the tri-state vicinity who cares a damn about the timeless combination of great music and truth. In the recent Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, one of the interviewed folkees said that, in the folk heyday, when they heard that so and so was playing, say, at The Gaslight, the immediate question was: "Do they have anything to say?" I'm a lot like that. Technical proficiency minus vision doesn't so much bore me as it makes me feel that my spirit and mind are sliding, like the present political climate, back towards a primordial ooze from which so many have given too much to evolve us out of. Vision with a modicum of proficiency? I'm there, raindogs, I'm there. Robert has a lot to say, his tongue is on fire. Sometimes it's slow-burning, sometimes it flashes out Vesuvius to burn away the layers of complacency, hypocrisy, and mind-numbness to quicken the spirit, and sharpen our own resolve to see clearly, think wisely, and act accordingly. Bob's been a touchstone for my own work for a decade now, and the effect hasn't hurt me one bit. It's helped keep me vital.
I'll be playing, too.
Now the DownUnder is cozy. It's hosted by the Unitarian Church on Western Avenue on the North Side. The very music-supportive Stephen Hirtle, always a gentleman whose brimming intelligence I've never known to be hurtful, emcees. The parishioners make the best desserts and you can get them for around a dollar apiece. The fee for drinks is also negligible. For more info, check out this link: www.alleghenyuu.org/downunder
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Saturday, October 29th at 8pm. Three Penny Opry. Starlite Lounge in Blawnox. The Elder Statesmen of Song. Doug McCarty, Dave Wells, and Sam Flesher. This is guaranteed to be: A Life-Affirming Night of Undiluted Inspiration, Straight From The Muses Musk. If you're the music loving equivalent of the Christmas Catholic, who only attends mass that one time per year, this is the show you've got to see. And I'll tell you why:
Each of these songwriters has been woodshedding at their craft for decades. Before most of us had even attempted to pen our first Dylan or Lennon imitations, these men had reached a level of impeccable wordsmithing and melody molding. Nearly every line in any one of their songs has the ability to linger, smoldering, in the mind for days.
Their songs are resplendent with humor, wisdom, heart, and humanity. I hear them and think: Hear is the essence of great artists who know the time to live, love, impart vision, absorb wonder, is short. Every hello is a kind of "Good-bye. Remember me as I have immortalized you all in song."
I first knew Doug when I was about sixteen. I'd been to his cabin on the Colfax River just outside of my hometown of Fairmont, West Virginia, with my father and others, and heard Doug play. He knew all kinds of fingerstyles when all I could manage was flailing. He could play slide. His lyrics were born from his own gritty experiences with beat poets and bluesmen for midwives. The first time I heard his Fire Escape Revival, the hairs stood up on my forearms and nape. A lot of his songs still have that effect on me.
Doug was the one who helped me get away from the melody-weak process of coming up with poems, or lyrics, first and then trying to stretch them over too-small or too-dull canvases of sound. I still do this occasionally. But he planted the seed of focusing equally on the melody as upon the lyric.
Doug introduced me to the work of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Tim Buckley, Jack Kerouac, and many others who have influenced my own writing.
I met Dave Wells and Sam Flesher through the Calliope Songwriters' Circle about a decade ago. When I returned from Los Angeles, about three years ago, I hadn't seen either of them in probably five years. Yet I remembered big chunks of a lot of both of their songs, and had often thought of them.
Sam Flesher is outgoing, exuberant, extremely thoughtful and generous. Dave Wells is quiet, shy, extremely thoughtful and generous. The songs of either one of them will stand the test against any of the famed songwriters of the past century; will stand and shine triumphant.
If you come to this show, you will know that each of their songs will sink into your soul and become a life-enriching part of your consciousness. I know I'm speaking hyperbolically. Yet I don't feel I'm exaggerating.
People know and sing Sam's songs around the world. In China. In Israel. In Central Park, New York, Sam once found a folk singer singing his Splendor Bridge. When he asked the kid how he knew that song, the kid said, "I collected it in the hills of Appalachia."
People should be singing Dave's songs the world over, too.
Three Elder Statesmen of Song. And all by accessible, down-to-earth, well-traveled, and well-versed fellas.
This may be your only chance ever to catch the musical equivalent of an aurora borealis.
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Pigment Diver
So, I went fishing on the Monongahela, just a little ways out of town. I hadn't been fishing in twenty years or so, and was never a very successful if you went by the number of fish I snagged. If you counted the grand ideas I'd netted, though, while sitting on overturned buckets on soggy banks, you'd have to agree that fishing was always kind to me.
So I got the cheapest child's pole I could find at Dunham's Sporting Goods. (I prefer Dunham to Dick's for several reasons, some simply semantic, but mainly because Dunham was my paternal grandmother's maiden name.) I went into Frick Park on a rainy evening and scared up some slimy nightcrawlers. And the next day, off to the river I went.
I found a quiet spot. Very rocky. I was saddened to see how the rocks were all stained with some industrial dumping run-off, and the water was a brown-green murk which appeared to hold no life at first. I must've been near the site of a once-thriving, now long-defunct steel mill or paper mill or something. I could see rusted ribs of metal structures arching out from the scant woods here and there along the bank.
I baited my hook and cast the poor worm into the toxic water. A tiny plop sounded, made even tinier by the din of the big trucks barreling down the nearby highway. I had brought my own bucket, trying to keep with tradition, hoping that might help me to gradually remember the basics of the sport. I turned my bucket over and sat down.
After about ten minutes of nothing, I became entranced by the sunlight sparkling off the surface wavelets, and zoned out. Off in the psychic distance, a melody approached like a heavy laden coal train with rusted axels. I tried not to give it too much credence. Them trains'll switch tracks just around the bend if you really start to depend on their arrival. They're contrary. So, I was listening, but aloofly, and other thoughts were vying for the same channel of attention.
Then the river erupted with a tremendous splash, and a dark, elliptical form jettisoned out of the water, showering me and everything around. My grip tightened instinctively on the pole at the same time as my mind said, "Let it go! You can fight a fish this big! It'll drag you into the undercurrent. Let go!"
But my line remained slack. And as the mist of water settled, I saw that it wasn't a fish but a woman that had emerged from the river. She was wearing a diving suit; navy blue rubber from head to flippers, and Captain Fantastically-large goggles, and a snorkle tube.
"You scared the hell outta me," I said, and tried to laugh. The subsiding adrenaline, though, had left me nauseous.
"WrrrWrree." She shook her head. (Why deny the obvious? I knew she was a woman. Most men don't have breasts that show through their wetsuits.) She pulled the snorkle base out of her mouth.
"Sorry!"
"I didn't even see you go into the river."
"Probably because I started about two hours ago."
"Really? People snorkle the Monongahela? What are you looking for, the fingerprints of ecological disaster? The perfect mix of sludge and sulphur?"
"I don't know about people, but I'm looking for pigment."
"Pigment?"
"Yeah, pigment. The root word of which is not pig, by the way. Pigment. I paint. I like to use found pigment."
"Okay. Pigment. Well you just scared the pigment out of me. If you scrape the loam around my feet here, you'll probably find enough pigment to fill a large canvas with a Hieronymus Bosch type of scene."
She raised her goggles with one hand. I'm sure she didn't intend it, but it was like a magician's gesture. Ta-da! Behold! From behind the mask, dazzling hazel eyes, large and hypnotic, teeming with more frenetic life than the salt-water aquarium at the zoo. She held the other hand out to me, palm down.
"Give me your hand," she said.
I reluctantly obeyed. She ran a soft rock over my palm, leaving behind a blue line.
"That's bizarre," she said.
"Tell me about it," I dead-panned.
"No. No. I mean the color should be a sort of brick red, like the rock. See?"
The rock was indeed brick red. She asked me to turn my hand over. I did, God knows why. The magic of her eyes compelled me. She drew another line on the back of my hand. Guess what color it was?
"Really? That's... Wait, let me try..."
She unzipped a rubber fanny pack, dropped the red rock in, and pulled out a sort of yellow ochre one.
"The other hand, please, monsieur."
"What am I at a Dead concert? Can't you just paisley my back with some henna, Jenna?"
I held out the other hand. She rubbed the soft rock from my wrist up to my elbow, leaving behind a fat, you guessed it, BLUE line.
"That's amazing."
"Okay."
"No. Honestly. This is pure pigment. Well, all right. It's the industrial equivalent of pure pigment. Proof that there is fine print of beauty even what you would think to be only complete and utter destruction. I mean, these mills around here, around everywhere, really, were like poisonous beasts that vomited their toxins 24/7 into the rivers and streams. I'm probably tumorous from diving this river alone. But look! Pigments that don't normally occur north of the Amazonian, created by chemical reactions between the sulfur, the ammonia, the formadehyde, and the natural components of certain indigenous rocks. Beauty from ruin."
I was going to ask how rocks could be considered to be living in poverty, but thought I might just embarrass myself by asking, so I let it go.
"Beauty from ruin." I wasn't being sarcastic. I was thinking about songwriting. And fishing the tragic waters of the Mon.
"Pure pigment," she said, "doesn't produce any color other than itself."
"Hmmm."
"So something in you must be reacting with the pigment to turn it blue. Some chemical. Some toxin. Something."
"That's enough," I said. I was pleading, really, if you listened hard enough.
"What?"
"That's enough for now. I was fishing. I'd like to go back to that now."
I swiped the water from my bucket seat and sat back down, began reeling in my line.
"Oh. Okay. Bye."
She put the snorkel in her mouth, pulled the goggles over her eyes and began to sink into the water.
"Wait."
"Wrrrfff?"
"If you'll be around this way again, look for me. I'll be here fishing. I'd like to talk to you again. I'm just not ready today to ponder my blueness. Okay?"
She looked at me for about five seconds, then smiled around the snorkel and nodded.
Maybe I'd found a friend. Then she jumped up, and with a showering splash that scared all the fish away for hours to come, disappeared into the mysterious and magical Monongahela.
