A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears (Nation Press) by Antonino D'Ambrosio is a very passionately conceived and written book. That album (as I must have mentioned a score of times on this blog) is one of my favourites and definitely worthy of full-length treatment, but overall I felt unsatisfied by the book.

"The making of" in the title is in the broadest sense, painting the entire social changes of the early 60s as its backdrop. Of course as an early 60s "protest album" (Cash's own description of the record) that context is not irrelevant, but I think the book fails to really distinguish between the topics with a primary relationship to the album, and those that reside in the outer circles of background. It's A Rough Guide to the Greenwich Folk Boom, the Civil Rights Movement, Music in the Civil Rights Movement and Johnny Cash and Peter La Farge and Some Other Stuff from the Last 50 years in American Popular Culture, which is ... well, OK in theory and would have been better received by me if basic facts of the album itself did not remain cloudy. Also, it's a short book and each of those topics is Big, you know? It's a lot for 230 pages.

Some of the songs of the album (the official album, let alone the outtakes etc) actually go unmentioned through the whole book, and from reading it you wouldn't know, say, who played drums on it. Perhaps I have been trained by Dylanology to expect too much; books about his albums include details of every running sheet, every session, every player, every outtake and alternative version. I'm open to the idea my expectations are skewiff, but even trying to step back from that, there were rather more questions than answers.

The Johnny-Cash-on-the-studio part of the making of Bitter Tears sometimes left me confused. For instance, in the space of a page or so we have conflicting information about Cash's contract at Columbia. On page 64, "[L]earning from his tenure at Sun, Cash made sure the freedom to explore and record different kinds of sounds ... was included in his new deal at Columbia." This is interesting; of course Sam Phillips' aversion to letting his hit machines branch out is well known. (He wouldn't even let Cash record a gospel album, which you would think not terribly controversial in the mid-century mid-South.) But I'm very interested to know of the actual terms in his Columbia contract which guaranteed more artistic freedom. Sadly The Smoking Gun doesn't have a copy of the contract. A couple of pages later, the book quotes producer Bob Johnston (of "Is it rolling, Bob?" Highway 61 Revisited fame) saying Cash was "encountering the same king of stuff [creatively] at Columbia [as he had at Sun."] It leaves me wondering, if "the freedom to explore" was really included explicitly in Cash's contract a) in what terms and b) how could he encounter obstacles to something to which he was contractually entitled? How did that all actually work? Alas, the book does not tell me.

At this point in the story is the recording of The Lure of the Grand Canyon, a project I was not familiar with and still has not been released on CD. Released in 1961, it consists of six tracks, the first five of which are classical pieces and the last Cash's spoken word; you can hear the Cash track here (complete with singing mules!), at the wonderful WFMU Beware of the Blog. Please do so. Composer Ferde Grofé and conductor Andre Kostelanetz have other albums on Columbia going back to the 50s and before, and rather than a mavericky tangent powered by the singular artistic vision of J.R Cash, doesn't it make sense to see the Lure of the Grand Canyon as a project Columbia would have done anyway, and used Cash's mainstream star value to lift up its profile? D'Amrosio says Cash "brought in" conductor Kostelanetz, implying our hero was the creative force. Perhaps true, and I'd love it to be, but I dunno, I'd like to hear more about it to accept that story. This is what I mean that the book raises more questions than it answers.

In Stephen Miller's Johnny Cash: The Life of an American Icon it states it 'was an employee at Columbia Records, Gene Ferguson, who had first alerted Johnny to "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." A Heartbeat and a Guitar doesn't mention Ferguson and gives the impressed the Bitter Tears album sprang solely from Cash palling around Greenwich Village with La Farge and others. No doubt Columbia preferred Cash the hitmaker to Cash the artistic maverick with mavericky ideas about, say, doing a live album from a prison but I find myself wondering exactly what the internal involvement was with the genesis of the record. I would like to have known more of the actual mechanics of how the record comes to pass. It does not diminish the importance of Johnny Cash as a popular artist who pushed and exceeded the boundaries of his genre and time to know that, like all of us, he was pushing and being pushed amid many forces, administrative and bureaucratic as much as any else. I would never begrudge a retelling of the Birmingham bus boycott story but the book is more interested in those wider social events as animating forces than the mundane facts of life, even creative life, that actually produced this record.

I do know a fair bit about the Greenwich folk boom and the Civil Rights movement of this period so I admit that might lie behind some of my frustration. The Native American politics of that period (or any period really) are far less familiar and you may call me hypocritical for accusing the author of the opposite on this score: I would like to have heard more about it. Peter La Farge was not "an Indian", but like Cash adopted that as a persona which makes for a fascinating parallel between the two which I was hoping to see teased out more. I recall as a child people telling me, while contemplating Cash LP covers, "you can see the Indian in his face as he gets older" and it seemed reasonable to me. But of course you couldn't. Cash had no Native ancestry, and he sheepishly retracted the claim after he got sober in the 60s ("the higher I got, the more Indian I got.")

Cash gravitated towards the persona of the outsider in his public life, and this sort of fantasising is part of the addiction, in a way. It's not politically unproblematic of course but at least he disavowed it when his mind cleared of barbiturates. The magical thinking of La Farge, who died in 1965 and sadly never made it to the "survivor" phase of his addictions, is a more interesting case. His father was a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist who was very active in "Indian" rights advocacy, leading one of its major organisations. The books sort of suggests he "let people believe" he was Native. Perhaps initially, but once he made a clean break of his Colorado upbringing and landed in Greenwich Village did people "just believe" or did he given them a nudge along? The liner notes of the Bear Family release of La Farge's As Long as The Grass Shall Grow and On the Warpath, written in 1990, state flatly he was "a full-blooded Nargaset Indian" which is simply not the case. He had no Native American ancestry. I don't enquire into this to judge him or wag a finger (the Native American activists quoted in the book don't seem to reflect on it) however failing to deal with it left a gap in the treatment of La Farge in the book. It doesn't take an enthusiastic armchair psychologiser to see some low hanging fruit here. Here's kid who grows up in the shadow, and eventually becomes estranged from, his Pulitzer Prize winning father, who also happens to devote most of his time not to his kids but to public advocacy for Native American rights and the misfit son adopts a "more Indian than thou" public persona. Daddy issues, much? I don't mean to be flippant (well perhaps I do) but D'Ambrosio is not averse to some critical theory or reaching into the minds of his "characters" and yet on this interesting issue of cultural appropriation - which goes to the heart of his project, yes? -- he lets it slide by without a mention. If you're going to devote two whole pages (in a 200 page book) to the history of Carnegie Hall, as the book does, but not give a paragraph in passing on this stuff, I'm sort of afraid you have lost me.

I was moved to read about how "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow" is still regularly spun on radio stations serving upstate New York around "Lake Perfidy" and the extensive bibliography has given me a lot of things to follow up for which I am grateful. If you were the kind of person who wanted to read a whole book about one album, you should probably still get this one but I think the topic is very far from being fully explored in print.

This is tremendous news. Someone has written a full length book on one of my favourite records and, in my view, one of the most significant and interesting records of popular music.

Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indians by Johnny Cash.

That someone, Antonino D'Ambrosio, has an article in Salon which covers the ground much more briefly but is a must-read. I'm glad he hits upon the point of Cash being a folk singer as much as a country singer, that's a song I've been singing for years and is the only way you can appreciate him in full.

Cash demanded that the industry explain its resistance to his single. "I had to fight back when I realized that so many stations are afraid of Ira Hayes. Just one question: WHY???" And then Cash answered for them. "'Ira Hayes' is strong medicine ... So is Rochester, Harlem, Birmingham and Vietnam."

This is a great video I hadn't seen before, Cash doing "Apache Tears" live in 1988.

Thanks to @rubysquee for bringing this to my attention. A 70s Charlie Rich biography!!

I can't disagree a public library should quietly cull it from their 2009 collection but I'd hope they'd at least sell it for 50c so I could buy it .... And then frame every single page.

Here's some latter day Charlie, playing out his jazzbo streak which honestly fit more easily than the awkward pseudo Elvis rockabilly thing of the 60s. Pictures and Paintings is a great album you should consider adding to your collection, and if you already have: play it again tonight! Although my favourite song is really probably "Rolling With the Flow."

Pictures and Paintings

Tim is doing a series of eMusic posts at Johnny's. He's even speaking to eMusic reps.

Part One
Part Two

Part Three to come.

I'm mostly done on the issue (even if I could bloody log in to Crikey to comment, which I can't), unless something very new happens. I'm trying to focus on the music and let the rest fall where it may.

This has been a Bad News Day in my personal music world, which I may rant about after I've processed it a bit.

BUT WAIT!! When Bob slams a window, he swings wide open a door so I am most thrilled to see Tim Dunlop's new music blog at Crikey has gone live. Yay, Tim! Apart from being (or because of being??) one of the world's stand up blokes, his taste in music is impeccable.*

We are not very well served by professional, MSM or semi-MSM music blogs in Oz, so this is red hot orsumness all 'round.

*with the exception of his woeful Randy Newman blind spot.

1) Shaun has a new blog. I assume I am allowed to tell people.
2) Lazy journo slapdown re: Leonard Cohen. You may have seen that inferior cover versions of Hallelujah are number one and two on the UK charts in the coveted Chrissie week. Not bad for a song that is merely ninth best on its original album.
3) Stereogum's 50 Most Popular MP3s of 2008 (or as Bob Dylan would say 2000 and 8) available for free/legal download. Some 200MB later I can confirm I really just don't dig indie rock/pop very much. What is it about the human voice that is so hateful it must be smothered so far back in the mix? See also: country, alt. I tried, dagnabbit! OTOH, YMMV.
4) An amusing macrumors forum post (h/t Barry Saunders on Twitter) from October 2001 on the announcement of "Apple's New Thing", known to you and I as "the iPod." I had a grand old time laughing at the retrospectively couldn'tbemorewrongness of the "who could possibly ever want more than 64 meg of space for music!!! Steve Jobs has gone CRAZEEEE" sentiments. But really, in 2001 I was still using an audio tape walkman and a few years later someone showed me mini discs and I kind of thought that would be all too much trouble to bother with. Our thinking about portable music has so utterly changed in such a short period of time. Then we didn't know we NEEDED it. Now I am 99% digital. I don't regret it at all, for lots of reasons. I have a small flat and a goodly percentage of living room wall space is taken up with CDs racks, which I barely look at these days let alone flip through. I had an idle thought the other day I could get rid of the racks, shift up the lounge and then I wouldn't have to smash my shins on the filing cabinet/telephone table everytime I try to squeeze through to get to/from the computer. But then the idea of a home without too many CD racks made me sad, and I banished the idea. Also, seems a waste of the nice callouses I have on my shins now. Barely notice.
5) Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog just because I have enjoyed it a lot this year.
6) Skepchick's Top 10 Jackasses of the Year.
7) An epochal moment: the last time any dumb awards show will have a chance to snub The Wire. You won't have Bunky to kick around any more!
8) 2008 Golden Winger Awards for Excellence in Wingnuttery

I beg forgiveness dear reader for having to mention Coldplay on this fine blog, but I would like to do so in correcting some misonceptions of an alleged music journalist.

It was on ABC's PM radio show on Wednesday night. SMH journo Bruce Elder had this to say about the Joe Satriani/Coldplay plagiarism case:

"It is almost that it is almost impossible to define what constitutes plagiarism in music, particularly in popular music because there are so many songs that are very similar. I mean all you have to do is listen to a very old classic which is the Archies' Sugar, Sugar and I believe that the chord progression in Sugar, Sugar has been used in something like 20 or 30 other pop songs."

The 12 bar blues is one of the most widely used chord progressions in music history. Yet no-one bothers fighting a plagiarism case over using it (and not just because establishing the origins of the progression would be almost impossible) because it is not the chord progression that gets people into trouble for music plagiarism cases. It is the melody. Elder would known that if he would have done some simple research. UK guitarist Garry Moore recently was busted because a guitar solo of his was very similar to a German pop song. And then there is the case of George Harrison and My Sweet Lord.

Of course, bands do copy their influences. But that is a different kettle of fish. The copying of influence tends to relate to more intagible elements such as style and sound.

So Elder has it wrong but that does not mean Satriani has a case. But to my ears, there is a definite similarity in the melody and it will be an interesting case to follow if it gets to the courts.

Amanda's note: There is a audio-visual comparison of the two songs here.

Leonard Cohen ticket buying expedition FAIL.

Updated the Sydney Dylan Society page with some newses. One, C.P Lee is in the country in November and will be popping along to the meeting on the 17th. He's out for some conference thingy in Melbourne. His books on Dylan, Like A Bullet of Light about Dylan films and Like the Night about the1966 UK tour, are very highly recommended. I'm quite excited about it.

Second, "Drawn Blank" the exhibition of Bobby's artwork is on at the 29 Spring St Gallery in Bondi Junction from tomorrow, 29th October through to the end of November. We're having a Halloween viewing this Friday so I'll be sure to let you know if he's hopeless with the watercolours. A signed print is yours for only $3000 I hear! Make mine a double.

Photos of the great unveiling. Dylan pr0n over the fold. The listening part will take a bit longer.

Instead of assembling furniture, shelving the hundreds of books still in my bathroom, washing up, improving myself in myriad ways, exercising or writing a thesis I got a cask and watched The Jane Austen Book Club which looked like the least loud and obnoxious film Foxtel was pushing on me.

I enjoyed it muchly!

I LOL'd!

I ;-('d!

I only rolled my eyes once or twice.

I like a well made, vaguely amusing and distracting romantic comedy. They are few and far between. I don't require it to rewrite the boundaries of the genre or challenge my preconceptions or strike a blow for any kind of -ism, I merely wish it to be moderately well written and acted, presented in good faith and with as few scenes as possible that use the word "pubes." All I ask is that, no matter how forgettable, it is aimed at humans over, say, 25 rather than ... well, rather than whomever the hell watches Judd Apatow movies voluntarily. I think TJABC is somewhat more than moderately well done and worth 106 minutes when you're in the mood. It's not as sharp perhaps as it might have been, but it has enough moments.

There is a whole Ursula Le Guin subplot for the SFinistas! Like seriously, Ursula Le Motherfracking Le Guin gets a subplot!

I did love that reading books was a given, a good and a whole frame for life which it is amongst pretty much everyone I know. There are long slabs of dialogue about specific Austen plots which since I haven't actually read any of them this millennium (and have mostly managed to avoid the various Firthian iterations) I mostly struggled to recall, but the lines are given such warmth in delivery and with enough larger narrative tension, you can appreciate it anyway. It probably had me at the opening sequence, a montage of the main characters enduring the minor irritations of modern life than rang true and made me laugh.

It gets a 65% at Rotten Tomatoes but those 35% are stinky boys so we can discard their views. The genuine Austen mavens over at The Austen Blog seem well disposed. (Bonus hiarious wot abut teh menz?? in comments. Let it be known teh menz fair a great deal better in this than teh wimmenz in ... oh, practically anything else.) I don't know what the La Trobe students at Rethinking Jane Austen say, but I wouldn't mind knowing.

And you know, romance. But whatevs. I don't care about that. Not at all. *sniff*

The trailer on YouTube.

Keeping on topic, here is Johnny Cash singing " Austin Prison." As you see in the trailer one of the lines is about Austin being the capital of Texas. It's curious isn't it that despite Ausin's place in the country musical firmament there are not more songs about it? Maybe I just can't think of them right now.
10 Austin Prison.mp3

Paul Cashmere asks re: iTunes, "If it doesn`t work for Estelle or AC/DC or The Beatles or Kid Rock, then who is it working for?"

A: Um, consumers?

Let's ignore the questionable correlation=causation assumptions underlying the whole thing and the extrapolation way beyond the evidence (is it too obvious to point out that what applies to The Beatles applies to ... well, practically no one else?) Cashmere doesn't mention this section from the WSJ article: "This year, Kid Rock ... has had a massive radio hit with "All Summer Long." Ah yes, commercial, mainstream radio. Nothing at all corrupt or restrictive about that method of promoting music!

And AC/DC's new album which won't be on iTunes? Exclusive to WalMart in the USA. This is a paradigm-busting improvement, how? And who benefits?

Look, clearly there are issues with all the new methods of digital delivery and their impacts on artists and labels and whoever else are many and complex. And by nature I am an album buyer. But am I really supposed to feel sorry for the major labels because they've been outmaneuvered by another big company doing a better job at giving people what they want? Uh huh. The model is going to change again no doubt, but if it changes to what the labels are pushing, I really can't imagine it's people like me who will win.

DailyLit is a concept that may send certain people in paroxysms of grief re: western civ. Serialised books via RSS (or email). I haven't really decided what I think of it, but I'll give it a go.

Isn't "The Millionaire's Inexperienced Love-Slave" the most wonderfully reedonkulous title? Even for something from the Harlequin stable? I was tempted to get it but it costs $4 and I am all about teh free. That is how I roll.

There is plenty of free, either the usual public domain classics or current works distributed under Creative Commons. I got The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James but at 200 plus installments ("War and Peace" is over 600!) I might break down and just buy the bloody thing before then. I also signed up for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow and daily articles on US Presidents from Wikipedia.

There's this new show, see, on Ch.7 tomorrow night at 7.30pm The One: Search for Australia's Top Cold Reader Psychic. I've attended a few of the studio tapings on account of a good friend of mine, Richard Saunders, is one of the judges. I met Richard through the Australian Skeptics and he has taken on the daunting task of being commercial TV token skeptical whipping boy for low rent reality show. Go, Richard! Join our Richard Saunders Fans Facebook page! So I am in the audience for episodes 2 and 4 and watched episode 5 filming from the green room and back of the studio yesterday.

Richard has done an excellent job with a very tough gig, and has managed to institute a few extra controls on the "tests" although even with that they barely rise above parlour game level (except for one which is just deeply full of FAIL on the crass test.) And yes there's a legitimate discussion to be had about doing more harm than good in legitimising the mystery-monging but these shows are going to happen anyway and in Richard they actually had someone capable of, under pressure, quickly breaking down what was happening and really revealing the workings of cold reading on the spot. Of course he only gets a few lines and the vast bulk of logical fallacies, utter non-sequiturs, post-hoc rationalisations and face-palm moments have to go unchallenged. But the lines he gets are good, although its all in the editing, I guess. I took lots of notes in the last two sessions I was at so I might make further comment once I see the edited version. Podblack blog has made a loose comment about live blooging the first show. I hope she does, that should be fun.

I didn't take any of Skeptico's Cold Reading Bingo cards but perhaps you can print out some to play along at home. I guarantee you odds vastly better than the local Lions club version. You can't lose, in fact.

In my time there I saw lots of readings and "challenges" but not a single inexplicable or even particularly impressive thing, I did see a lot of the standard psychological techniques done to varying degrees of inexpertness and the glorious laws of probability at work. Which doesn't mean it won't "make good TV." It was interesting although LONG to sit through an entire day of faffing about for a few minutes of film. That's the glamour of showbiz I guess.

On the other end of the scale of seriousness I've been reading Ray Hyman's The Elusive Quarry: A Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research and it comes highly recommended.

Hey so this is how people make money from those Amazon affiliate things, huh? Too late, as usual! I'm pleased to say first Shaun and now FXH succumbed to my amateur mesmerism attempts and bought and read/are reading Celine Dion: Let's Talk about Love by Carl Wilson.

I did have a whole muxtape playlist lined up to go with the State of Origin ("You Don't Know How Much I Hate You" by Rodney Crowell etc etc) but then I accidentally deleted it so ... bad luck. The replacement is just one song from the last 12 albums I listened to:

"Live Your Life" - Recapturing the Banjo. Everything Otis Taylor does is interesting. Here is with a bunch of bluesy guys reclaiming the banjo.

"African Dialects" - Peter King Nigeria 70, Lagos Jump I got this digitally but I really want the liner notes.

"A Grand Night for Swinging" - Mary Lou Williams A Grand Night for Swinging "probably the most influential woman in the history of jazz"

"Busted" - Maceo Parker Roots and Grooves Only the first disc thus far, which is Maceo doing Ray Charles. The second is his own stuff, which I look forward to.

"Some Kind of Kindness" - Firewater The Golden Hour Phineas has a real thing for them so I thought I'd humour him. Do not know what I think yet. PS, buy his new print. Then you can be as cool as me.

"Reaching" - Famous L. Renfroe Children Long lost and strange gospel soul that showed up on eMusic.

"Our Time" - John Hiatt Same Old Man Well you know I've been waiting for this one. I won't say much because I'd like to write something longer. But this song grabbed me first up.

"Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" - Hayes Carll Trouble in Mind Ditto, won't say much now but it's great.

"Oh How to Do Now" - The Monks The Monks The Monks are one of those cult 60s bands. Formed from GIs in Germany. Nice fun fuzzy gonzo rock and roll.

"Need Someone to Hold" - Creedence Clearwater Revival Creedence Country

Brahms: Sonate Für Klarinette Und Klavier Es-Dur, Op. 120 Nr. 2: II. - Peter Daum, Dieter Klöcker, Josef Suk & Werner Genuit I read somewhere online that the second movement of Opus 40 here was some of the "saddest music ever." I like sad music. it's pretty sad but it's also over 10MB so this is another thingo from the same record.

"I Saw My Youth Today" - Richard Shindell Reunion Hill

The following is mostly a plea to Zoe on account of her awesome new food blog.

I had seen a few references to The Paper around the innertubes in the last few days and thought: weird. The Michael Keaton movie? Weird. If any of 1994s cineofferings was going to make a comeback to the zeitgeist, you'd think it'd be The River Wild. But then I read some recommendations of a couple of my favourite TV-related blogs (they both link to this) and I understood there was a new MTV reality series of that name. Of course it is not on telly here but of course I acquired it anyway. It follows the exploits of the Cypress Bay High (Florida) student newspaper. After the first minute I had to check Wikipedia to see that it was actually a reality show, so staged and scripted it seemed. But of course to a teenager in 2008 reality TV is so completely normal and even something to aspire to and we have reached the point where mock- has seamlessly cycled into doc- (umentary).

Mock will eat itself.

Time for a new muxtape. Since Laura alerted me to this particularly witless example of crushingly unfunny and pointless op-ed busy work and since I got a few Google hits in the last week looking for a "jazz muxtape", I thought I'd do a jazz muxtape. And they say bloggers are undisciplined, narcasscistic jerks -- Schembri (practically everytime I read him) more than proves you don't need to be 13 and writing in your PJs in your mother's basement to write like you're 13 and writing in your PJs in your mother's basement.

Hear my muxtape here.

Anyhow. I'm very much a "don't know much about jazz, but I know what I like" and this is pretty much the first 12 things I came to, with some exceptions because a lot of tracks (ie. everything I have by Charles Mingus) is over the Muxtape limit of 10MB in size. Also kept it to instrumentals. Jazz vocals is a mux for another week.

These are the albums the tracks are from:
Robert Mazurek- Playground. This was recommended on a message board thread about "heroiny jazz."
Sonny Rollins-Way Out West "I'm an Old Cowhand" is my fave but I put that on a mux before.
Art Pepper-Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section
Irving Fields Trio-Bagels and Bongos
Getatchew Mekurya-Negus of Ethiopian Sax. African jazz is a whole topic by itself.
John Coltrane-Plays for Lovers
Dizzy Gillespie and Machito-Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods
Andre Previn- West Side Story
Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins
Thelonious Monk - Blue Monk
Buddy Rich with Dizzy Gillespie-Monterey Jazz Festival 1958-1980
Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans-Know What I Mean?

I whined a little down the page about the lack of reviews in print of the fabbo John Hiatt gig, Drum Media took their sweet time but they've got one. Don't squint, click for big version. I didn't mention Henry Wagons in my review, I thought he was pretty good. His band had their album launch at the Hopetoun a weekend or two ago and I almost got my act together to go. Almost.

This article was the pits when it was in the New York Times last week, it's even worse now the Herald has recycled it. The story? A couple of men in middle age had heart attacks and a computer geek eats junk food. I do think there are some interesting issues in the bizarro "professional" blogging world, this is a stupidly sensational hook for it.