Stewart Francke Journal

2011-06-13T12:04:00.001-07:00

2011-05-02T14:48:00.001-07:00

aarrggh! I'm trapped in a facebook-twitter satanic vortex of promotional promises and the cd ain't even out yet. My life is on life support.

2011-04-29T11:51:00.001-07:00

My friend Sue Whitall has written an excellent new book on my favorite singer ever, Little Willie John. Check out the page. http://ping.fm/XqLne

2011-04-26T14:29:00.001-07:00

We're doing tons of new things to talk to people about this new record as it's a brand new biz. Any promotional ideas out there?

2011-04-25T10:05:00.001-07:00

New cd is going out to kickstarter supporters next 2 weeks. Official release 5/17 thru website--natl release 5/31. Callahan's show is 6/3.

2011-04-06T20:46:00.001-07:00

Thursday night Cleveland gig with Seger & SBB has been postponed until May. We'll see you then. Feel better Bob (flu).

2011-04-03T19:33:00.001-07:00

Looking forward to playing Cleveland this Thursday, opening for Bob Seger & the SBB at Quicken Loans Arena. Give a shout if you're going.

2011-03-30T11:56:00.001-07:00

For the out of towners: http://ping.fm/IPL7Z

Opening The Bob Seger Tour

2011-03-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

When you play a show, particularly a big show like last night with Bob Seger, everything moves fast. It’s a heightened reality with a thousand mini-events removed from ordinary life—all part of why I love it and why my band members love it. What stays with you is the feeling the music gives you, how well you connected with the faces in the crowd, the people you see and make your music with, and maybe a couple other flashes of things.

But last night in Toledo, my band & I will surely recall one singular thing when we think about this gig months from now. In the midst of our soundcheck, we all looked out in the sea of empty seats to find Bob Seger sitting alone, listening to us. Folks, this doesn’t happen. I’ve opened for dozens of the big time acts that come through town, and you rarely see the headliner, let alone have him sit and check you out. This kind of interest and respect from a superstar is unheard of, and it quickened our purpose, got our mojo workin’.

I carry a large band too, and we arrived at the Huntington Center in downtown Toledo just before Bob’s soundcheck. His production staff and sound crew immediately found me and my manager and we went over details with a quick efficiency. Again, this is not the norm—generally the opening act has to chase somebody—anybody--down and sneak in a line check before doors open. As we were soundchecking, up one of aisles walked Seger’s longtime manager Punch Andrews, who shouted up to the stage with his usual pugnacious encouragement, “Mr Francke…kick some ass!” This was, of course, our singular mission.

I’ve been around rock’n’roll and show biz organizations long enough now to know that the vibe of the crew, management, tech people—everyone associated with the star—takes their attitude cue from the demeanor of the artist. Exuding the same warmth and empathy found in his songs, Seger’s team treated us not as some pain-in-the-butt ancillary act, but rather as an integral part of the evening’s entertainment.

To his fans, Bob Seger is the last of the great lion-hearted rockers, a true working class hero who has lent big time rock and roll the common qualities of dignity and empathy. So to join Bob on a date in the Midwest, playing to folks in Michigan and Ohio, is to some extent a celebration of who we are around here and what we believe in. Hearing his amazing book of songs both in soundcheck and in his show carries a connection with the way we reacted to signs of life in our youth: how we came to love a Seger song, where we were and who we were with, and how we came to feel that his songs were our own—a part of our own life. It's not the flavor of the month; it=s not Rhianna or Lady Gaga. His songs are more like oxygen.

The first rock concert I ever went to was a Seger show at the Saginaw Civic Center. I was 15. Seger had recently released Live Bullet, just months after performing at my sister's High School Senior party in Bridgeport, Michigan. Bob had been a road dog for many years already at that point and had worked hard and waited longer than most to make it.

Last night, during “Night Moves,” Bob’s finest moment, his enduring appeal became clear to me--why we continue to care so deeply. If you grew up in the time and place that I did, "Night Moves" contained nearly everything you cared about or did: The loss of innocence, in hopes of a greater awakening; backseat sex, because there truly was no particular place to go; the movement of weather, especially in summer; and the identification of an idealism we were just beginning to harness. In short, "Night Moves" is about a love of the world.

The reality of the demands in life has never been more concrete. If you grow older (which is the most pleasant condition when faced with its alternative), you meet them, embrace them, struggle with them, avoid them, or dismiss them. What's in question, and what Bob Seger is singing about, is the character you exhibit when meeting these demands. What kind of courage it takes, what kind of grace, how much vision is required. The point of "Night Moves" is this: You can't cheat life. You pay for everything. As I looked out at the audience while performing last night I thought, “Where were we going, riding around in those cars all night on empty two lane roads when we were younger?” Well, here we all are.

So thanks for the great gig Bob. Thanks for lending us your genial, accommodating crew, the artistic legitimacy of your stage, and mostly, your faithful audience and their knowing adoration. The folks in your audience know what it means to fight hard, win and lose; they know how rough it’s been around here lately; but they also know that layin’ down that hard earned cash for a ticket to a Seger show is a sure thing.

We were on the receiving end of the emotional largesse from this audience as well. It’s rare for an opening act to play to a full house, and rarer still for that crowd to listen and respond, but that’s what Bob’s audience gave us. Thanks Bob, for the great gig.

2011-03-21T05:57:00.001-07:00

Stewart Francke To Open First Night of 2011 Bob Seger Tour, March 26 at Toledo’s Huntington Center.

2011-03-14T07:36:00.001-07:00

Finishing mixes for new cd--just wrapped one with Thornetta singing--made it sound like an old Bond track. She's amazin, a natural resource.

2011-03-11T08:32:00.001-08:00

Signed a deal yesterday with Untreed Reads, e-book publisher, to write memoir about my experience with leukemia & bone marrow transplant.

Radiohead's "Creep"

2011-02-28T07:04:00.000-08:00

This is another piece from Between The Ground & God, a collection of writings published in book form in 2005 by Ridgeway Press. This piece first appeared in the Metro Times in 1994.

Radiohead's "Creep" is an amazing record; it may be post-punk rock's most fully realized link with the varied elements of early rock and roll. Even though Radiohead writer/singer Thom Yorke may have been attempting to distance himself from the clutches of classic rock traditions, "Creep" cements a deal between grunge and pre-Beatles rock.

And like a lot of the most interesting rock songs, "Creep" is something of a one-off, an isolated event. Originally hidden on a 1993 album called Pablo Honey, the song is now a re-released hit on alternative radio. It came well before Kid A & OK Computer, Radiohead's twin masterpieces.

Slurring out a story of immense alienation, Yorke's singing sounds like the sluggish dissolve of a fading siren. Where blues singers use broken cadence and the dropped word to match the feel of the rhythm section, Yorke uses the punk's swollen alliteration to sound even more like the ugly outsider. He's not the classic rock anti-hero who will one day be redeemed by a large audience for the purity of his stance; the guy in "Creep" is too consumed by self-loathing and misanthropy to even strike a pose.

"I wish I was special, you're so fucking special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo

What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here."

The singer is trapped first by his alienation, then by his desire, and finally by his lack of humanity. Yorke whispers the final chorus without any guts or vision. He (the singer's character, which may actually be the singer himself) is a creep, not to be admired or dismissed. What "Creep" is really about is loving the refuge that rock and roll provides, loving all of its stylistic and emotional possibilities. The creep does belong, finally, in a song with virulent guitars and the general dis-ease of a Dostoyevsky story.

Yorke also tosses jabs at popular culture and the alluring promise of the ad world--"I want a perfect body"--before sullenly addressing the object of his desire and the distance of his alienation: "You're just like an angel, you float like a feather in a beautiful world."

But it's not the world Yorke dwells in. His is a world of masks, of the spiritually dead. The social contradictions in the song are nearly hopeless--what's left after the failure of innocence? We guess that Yorke is crushed by the plasticized consumer culture while the girl, via her unrequested beauty, is naturally included.

About mid-song Yorke breaks into a chilling falsetto, as if there was nowhere left for his physical expression to go. Howled over gristle and bone guitars, this middle eight ties together rock's great antiquarian highlights--Elvis Presley's "Blue Moon," Jimmy Logsdon's really weird "Midnight Blues," Roy Orbison's "In Dreams," even Marc Bolin's elegant explorations of exclusion--with the anti-romantic punk of the Sex Pistols and Nirvana. "Creep" progresses on as well as it recalls earlier music; in this sense it has an achieved beauty that's as rare as it is difficult to sustain.

Hit The SF Facebook Fanpage

2011-02-26T16:00:00.001-08:00

Stewart Francke Facebook Fanpage

Happy Birthday Mitch Ryder: Devil With A Blue Dress

2011-02-26T12:12:00.000-08:00

Today is Mitch Ryder's 63rd birthday. Both a friend and mentor, Mitch is also one of the great rock singers and songwriters--a talent people don't often associate with him. We first met when I wrote this profile of Mitch for the Detroit Metro Times back in 1994. Here it is again, in celebration of his birthday. Mitch himself is touring in Europe as we speak--enjoying the success he describes in this piece as a form of salvation.

Happy Birthday man, you're one of the great American artists. Here's many more years of hearing new records together...Love you.

"I don't know what it is about Mitch Ryder, but he has one of the greatest voices in America." --Brian Wilson

"Somewhere deep inside my wreckage, I will shine." --Mitch Ryder "Let It Shine"

"A shouter is what they call me," says Mitch Ryder, now in his late 50s and still in search of his own soul. The irony in Ryder's secondhand self-description comes both from time's indifferent march and his own sometimes-tortured progress: That's to say, Mitch Ryder ain't Mitch Ryder anymore. Not the one we know. Hasn't been for some time.

The Mitch Ryder we speak of remains, of course, a boy, or at least a very young man: Dark hair hanging in a hip '60s slope, in chinos and a tight T-shirt, mouth stretched taut in a wild scream, a Marlon Brando look-alike singing some of the most joyous and unforgettable rock and roll ever made.

That Mitch Ryder is famous, a singer responsible for melding hard rock and R&B into what they called blue eyed soul, perhaps better than anyone, ever.

The Mitch Ryder sitting in front of me at a Royal Oak restaurant--hat on backwards, sunglasses, still athletic, his hairline the biggest concession to age--is a man who has worked hard to come to terms with that youthful specter of himself, that summer of love revenant who had the world at his feet.

To the current Mitch Ryder, that kid is a frozen image--an image that connected gloriously with his age, an image America fell in love with, but still an image. And that image creates an unsettling stir of expectation, frustration, broken promise, joy and heartache for Ryder today.

"Who cares who Mitch Ryder was in the '60s?" Ryder says. "It's got to be irrelevant because it serves no purpose. But it's also completely understandable. At a very young age, we achieved the success that people strive their whole careers for. It's unfortunate that we found success so early on in life. I honestly feel when I listen to those old songs that they symbolize that success and also recall the memories of being a victim of a system that was in force at that time. "Devil With A Blue Dress" is still included in the American landscape, whether it's at a sporting event or in a movie. That little piece of us will go on."

The tendency today is to reduce Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels to a kinetic period piece, to lump them in with classic rock or oldies tours. Even astute rock critics have distilled Ryder's contribution to rock down to just a pair of exuberantly conceived medleys, 1965's "Jenny Take A Ride" and 1966's "Devil With A Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly".

The fact that the Wheels ended far too soon obscures their legacy. Add to that Ryder's later move away from soul into a musical form characterized by a joyless expressiveness and commercial failure, and the conflict becomes clearer. Yet the truth, marketplace be damned, is that he improved as he progressed. Ryder's value lies first in the fact that he survived, and secondly in the manner in which he's survived.

"It could be very depressing, were it not for the fact that I found rebirth in Europe," Ryder says. "I feel saved. I've learned to accept the way that Americans feel. But I don't have to let it stop me or slow me down. I don't take it to heart. I've put the memories in their proper place in my life, and I've allowed myself to move on and try to continue to fulfill my destiny as an artist."

Although the greater part of his career (everything after 1971) has been spent in a kind of obscurity, Ryder has increased the complexity of his search and the depth of his spiritual and moral investigation. In the young Mitch Ryder, we hear a raw eroticism. In his 11 records since that time (released independently and on Line Records, a German label), we hear a man attempting to make sense of his own often sordid experience.

Before he was Mitch Ryder he was Billy Levise, a kid from a good home on Detroit's East Side in love with black music and Hank Williams. In 1962, you could hear some of the good stuff on the radio, yet you could breathe it in downtown Detroit clubs like the Village (now a burlesque theater on Woodward just north of downtown's theater district) or the Twenty Grand (now known as the Grand Quarters on Grand Boulevard just east of Woodward).

"I could tell there was a marked difference between Pat Boone and Little Richard," Ryder says of that time. "Like any kid, I had to choose the kind of music that excited me; I had to claim it. My heroes were black singers. It just happened that way. I didn't know what Little Richard was angry about, but I knew it came out in his sound. I naturally chose to go near the people that were making that music. The funny part is that it alienated me from my peers in school. Their whole thing was a case of beer, a football game and getting laid that night. So I went elsewhere and I found a great deal more than I was expecting."

Ryder was drawn to this scene by the music's sensuality and its veiled political promise. Bent on what they might later call the dream of democratic bliss, white kids fell in love with the sound and style of R&B in the early '60s. In Ryder's story, two things of note happened at the Village: He learned how to sing and he met Johnny Badanjek, Jimmy McCarty, Joe Kubert and Earl Elliott--The Detroit Wheels.

"They thought the way I did," Ryder says. "We were kids that liked the same music. The Beatles were very powerful at the time and like any American kid we said, "Fuck the British. We can do that." It=s a fierce anti-British thought that continues to this day.

Yet before they were officially the Wheels, they were Billy Lee and the Rivieras, playing sock hops and dances at the Walled Lake Casino or sitting in at the Village. At 16, Ryder, with money from his parents, went to Los Angeles to fulfill what he considered to be his teenage destiny.

"My parents were very supportive," Ryder says. "They bought me a sharkskin suit, put me on a plane and gave me some money. I was dropped off, petrified, at Hollywood and Vine. I sat in the hotel room for days, just going out for food, and one day I put my suit on, walked out of the hotel, stopped and got my shoes shined and walked down to RCA. The secretary was sitting in the lobby. And I said something like, 'Is this who Elvis Presley records for?' She said 'Yeah.' I said, 'Well then, I'm at the right place.' I went back to the hotel and waited. Days passed. I had to go back home with the bad news -- quite humiliating."

When he returned from L.A., he cut a single, "Fool For You," for Carrie, a gospel label, and set about making the Rivieras happen. In 1963, the band cut Bobby Freeman's "Do You Wanna Dance?" for Bryan Hyland's Hyland Records. A year later, Billy Lee and the Rivieras became a sensation at the Walled Lake Casino, where they would play for as many as 3,000 kids a night.

"It was a very tight show," Ryder says, "a show we approached in warlike terms. We did make a couple attempts at doing that British thing, but we realized it wasn't honest, wasn't righteous, and they were full of shit."

After hearing of the band through local radio DJ Dave Prince, producer Bob Crewe -- then known for his work with the pop group the Four Seasons -- flew to Detroit to hear the Rivieras open for the Dave Clark Five. After dragging his feet a bit, Crewe offered a recording contract.

By 1965, they became Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, having selected the singer's name from a phone book in Manhattan, where Crewe had brought them to record.

"The hotel we were staying in had 19 or 20 lives in it and only five were human," Ryder says. "It was at 71st and Broadway -- Needle Park. We hung tight and waited."

When they finally got into the studio and recorded a medley of Ma Rainey's "CC Rider" (via Chuck Willis) and Little Richard's "Jenny Take a Ride," the Wheels were just doing what they'd been doing all along back at the Casino.

"The medley thing came about because we never felt like stopping," Ryder says. For the most, they cut things live in the studio. One of the reasons for the manic, unhinged tempo of "Devil With a Blue Dress" was that the Rolling Stones happened to be present at the session.

"When the recordings came out, everything was primed to the point of perfection," Ryder says. "Bob Crewe was a master at working the phone, a real hustler. It exploded because everything was in the right place. It took about four weeks for 'Jenny' to reach the top 10."

Crewe was also skilled at cutting thrilling tracks. Where he failed was in not seeing that Ryder's attractiveness was a combination of the singer's raw sexuality and the band's accomplished understanding of R&B forms.

Other hits -- "Little Latin Lupe Lu," "Sock It To Me Baby" -- made Ryder and the Wheels stars. He was, the thinking went at the time, another acceptable white substitute for Little Richard. The Wheels provided the sonic and spiritual groundwork for what would become the much-heralded, high-energy "Detroit sound".

"Once they said, 'This is you, you have hit records and you'll continue to have them,' we started to take it all for granted," Ryder recalls. "I can comfortably look back at that group and say we were deserving, but it's in the way we were manipulated and victimized that brings the painful memories up."

Just as success arrived, Crewe felt Bandanjek, McCarty and Kubert to be expendable (Elliott had already left for the military). In 1967, Crewe persuaded Ryder to go solo in bombastic fashion -- a big Vegas horn band, glitzy costumes and an album, "What Now My Love," that featured sappy arrangements and Rod McKuen's lyrics.

"The group should have stayed together," Ryder says flatly. "Crewe drove a wedge into it. His self-interest overruled the wisdom of giving us an identity. His frame of reference was Vegas; in his mind that was as high as you could go. He kept telling me I deserved more; he played on my vanity and my youth. But you've got to understand: The group was headed for a crisis anyway because of Jimmy and me. Jimmy had the wisdom to see it was about guitars and drums. I didn't feel that way. I didn't have the courage to make it happen and neither did Jimmy. Crewe exploited that. Here I've got tons of money, girls everywhere, everything I've ever wanted. Why? Well it must be because I'm great. It wasn't a hard sell."

By early '67 it was all but over. The Wheels continued for about a year without Mitch; Ryder himself toured with the show band for some time before it became evident it was all wrong. The money was huge (as much as $18,000 per show), but it was squandered.

And the bad feelings among the Wheels lingered. Since then, Badanjek has never seen a royalty check from those great Wheels singles. And Ryder sees himself as the unknowing naif, victimized by a corrupt system. In the summer, the oldies tours and the old hits help him financially; in the winter, the wolf is at the door.

Thinking back, Ryder recalls "a very dark time": "My personal life suffered, my business dissolved," he says. "I had a divorce pending and two lawsuits against management. As far as I knew, everything was given to me and now they were taking it away. Why?"

In 1968, Ryder returned to Detroit briefly before going to Memphis to work with Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn at Stax. Released in 1969, the Detroit/Memphis Experiment is a flawed masterpiece. When Ryder sings with great acumen, he lacks soul. When he sings with real conviction, he's a little out of the pocket. Only on the marvelous "Liberty" is he both technically and emotionally sound. As The Detroit/Memphis Experiment was about to be released, Ryder hooked up with Creem magazine founder Barry Kramer in a management situation. Out of step with both psychedelia and the burgeoning singer/songwriter movement, the record stiffed.

"Barry set about trying to re-introduce me to an American audience," Ryder says. "And here I am, hair down to the middle of my back with a mustache. Becoming a hippie and losing myself."

The Detroit Wheels got together one last time, on Sept. 17, 1969, in Sarnia, Ontario. The event would have gotten noticed if it wasn't held on the last night of the Woodstock festival. The closest the group ever came to re-forming with any meaning was with the short-lived 70s supergroup Detroit. Featuring Ryder, Badanjek and guitarist Steve Hunter, the band released an eponymously titled album in 1971. Full of ferocious guitars and hermetic grooves, Detroit is, along with the MC5's Kick Out the Jams, the seminal Motor City hard rock record -- complete with a scorching cover of Wilson Pickett's "I Found a Love" and Dave Marsh liner notes.

The band's cover of Lou Reed's "Rock and Roll" became huge--an early '70s FM radio staple, yet that wasn't enough to keep Detroit from dissolving in front of Ryder's own eyes.

"The problem was we lived what we were. I had changed management and allowed my politics to affect the direction of my music. So I hooked up with John Sinclair. Now that was a wild experience."

Then, the dark night of the soul.

"The subsequent years were the darkest period in my life," Ryder says. "I was still living here, if you can call it that -- extremely paranoid and self-destructive.@

Embittered, fractured and strung out, Ryder moved to Denver to work a day job and sort himself out. He stayed five years. "I was able to detox and become very spiritual," Ryder says. "Not that I found God, but I found life. I was completely out of the public eye. I had to work for my support. All of a sudden it was like what I felt as a teenager again. I became extremely productive. I'm thankful I was able to pull myself out of it. I'm not here to tell anybody about drugs. I'm saying that for me as a person, they're completely unproductive and hurtful. I don't need 'em. Not that I didn't go to therapy kicking and screaming."

The musical result of his time in Colorado, 1978's How I Spent My Vacation, ranks with John Lennon's "Mother," Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" and Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear as examples of personal honesty and artistic clarity.

Released on his own Seeds and Stems label (as was its follow-up, Naked (But Not Dead), How I Spent My Vacation runs from the poignant ("Passion's Wheel") to the sexually explicit ("The Jon") to stately punk rock ("Tough Kid"). The record is also notable for laying bare Ryder's sexual ambivalence.

"It's one thing to be frank about your sexuality," he says, "and it's quite another thing to be mistaken about your sexuality while you're being frank about it."

More than that (or because of it), this was rock and roll of an uncompromising, unguarded nature as done by one of its troubled architects. In its theme and tone, How I Spent My Vacation said that the world of appearances is both real and a mask through which we painfully see more ultimate forces at work--that our only protection from the destructiveness of self-deceit is the presence of others.

If the young Mitch Ryder wanted to sock it to you, and the Mitch Ryder of Detroit wanted to retreive something stolen from him, something he could barely recall, then this new Mitch Ryder wanted to above all else disturb you by shouting out the unwelcome truth.

Ryder's affiliation with Line Records produced more records -- Live Talkies, Got Change For a Million, Smart Ass -- before he again found himself at an American major label, this time at the insistence of John Mellencamp. Their collaboration, 1983's Never Kick A Sleeping Dog, featured a torrid take on Prince's "When You Were Mine" as well as a bare duet with Marianne Faithfull. The record's momentum eventually withered after selling a respectable 80,000 copies. Two other Line records, Red Blood, White Mink and In the China Shop, were released after the Mellencamp record.

Ryder still tours regularly, both here and in Germany, where his audience is larger, younger and more enthusiastic. He will still occasionally perform with Johnny Bee and McCarty, as he did the night before we spoke. But the Wheels, as they were in 1967, do not exist.

"I think it's been forgiven," Ryder says of their past trouble. "I think they understand it wasn't my fault."

Even so, the enigmatic McCarty wasn't present when Ryder and the Wheels were given lifetime achievement awards by the Motor City Music Awards in 1994. Later, when Ryder sang "Devil With a Blue Dress" at the awards ceremony, it still sounded alive and relevant. Yet he must dream of performing an American show where the emphasis is on the material from his later work rather than Break Out!

The American record industry, he says, wants people to believe that "the only way you can be successful is to walk through fire."

"Well, I've walked through the fire and I don't believe that's true. I believe there's another way -- I just haven't found it. I can be satisfied knowing that I'm pursuing my art honestly or I can long for that mass adulation. What's that worth in terms of me being able to live my life? I'm in hot pursuit of a life that's peaceful and fulfilling, and still I'm wondering, 'Why can't I do this in America?' I want to be famous again in America. My music's good enough. I don't know where the conflict comes from, but I can tell you I'll get to the bottom of it sooner or later. It may come to pass that it's just a wish."

After a couple of failed marriages, Ryder is again married and living in the Detroit area with his wife, Megan, and her children. It is a measure of his own self-respect that he's now attentive to the fragile nature of familial connections; they matter greatly to him, perhaps as much as the artistic struggle.

"Right now I'd like to see all of us -- my stepchildren, me, my wife -- feel emotionally safe," he says. "If I had a wish for anything in my life, it would be that we go on, on the best possible terms."

If not resolved, then Ryder's conflict is well clarified-a beginning to peace of mind. Maybe he's defeated that clinging notion of sorrow and self-doubt just by getting better at his craft and caring for his family. Maybe that's all we have.

But you just can't kill those frozen images, those haunted pledges of a time when we all seemed so much younger. And you can't, despite all of its promise and deliverance, rock and roll them to death. You've got to swallow hard and learn to live with it, whatever it is.

"Rock and roll as defined is about rebellion, sex and unfortunately drugs," Ryder says. "You have to accept it but you don't have to embrace it. I've found I can't embrace the drug culture. Questions of my own sexuality have been explored and dealt with through my music, so I'm comfortable with it. That leaves rebellion. It's the one anchor to rock and roll that I can't raise up out of the water. Because I'm afraid I'll no longer know what the music is about. Rebellion helps me define my youth; by holding on to it I can still claim my youth. In the end, if you don't have the money and the mass adulation, at least you have your dignity and your self-respect intact. You can say, 'Look, I've been true to this.'"

WE MADE OUR FUNDING GOAL! A NOTE TO SUPPORTERS

2011-01-03T08:16:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone...This Kickstarter cd funding campaign began 40 days ago with the hope that fans & friends would buy into the concept, then feel that new music of mine was worth layin' down some hard-earned money for--before they heard it. So with that hope was a large amount of apprehension. Add to that the dark economy in Michigan and that I'd not released any new work since 2002 (except for "Motor City Serenade" with the Funk Brothers in 2006)---this was a very uncertain thing.

So to say this morning that I'm knocked out by the love and affirmation is to only speak to half my feeling and a quarter of my gratitude to you all. We not only made the goal but surpassed it! Great thanks to everyone in my audience. More than the money, the process brought ideas and ideals into clear focus about what it is I'm doing as a musician, who you are and what you want from me, what my songs are about and how they attempt to connect, and who we are as a community.

Although I'd read and researched quite a bit about the concept of crowdfunding and this site specifically, it remains a new idea, largely untested. As I've said, I do believe it's the future for artists to continue working, a necessary part of a musician's ongoing relationship with audience as it relates to creating new music. It's worked well for acts with a larger international profile, but requires true commitment and loyalty in the artist-fan relationship.

We'll soon be in touch with all of you who pledged for your addresses, T-shirt size, instructions for shows and of course getting you the cd--everything associated with fulfilling these rewards. I've tried to thank all of you privately, and will, but several of you were very encouraging with ideas at the very beginning of this process (hey np) and a couple of you used your jobs and status as radio & tv show hosts, tastemakers and journalists to let the public know about this--thanks for that.

I also want to briefly say something about why I continue to live and work here in Detroit, and what that consciously means each day to me. When I first heard Mitch Ryder, Levi Stubbs, David Ruffin, Aretha Franklin, The MC5 or Bob Seger as a young kid, it completely turned my head around about new ways to think, dress, and live. We've now taken that music--our music--into what was once called middle age without any loss of passion, excitement or interest. We’re only now able to prove, just like sculptors and painters and pilots and accountants and corporate executives, that you can get better at songwriting and performing as you get older.

If you're a musician and you're from Detroit, I think there really is a certain way we do things around here. Yea, it’s always been about attitude--Kid Rock's built an empire on attitude. It's how we wear what we wear, and how we take the stage. But it's also about forgiveness and tolerance and soul and love and avoiding the chasm between artist and image. It's about leaving a part of yourself on every stage you take and never faking it, whether you’re playing powerfully loud rock and roll or soft jazz. The pure life in the phrase “Kick out the jams, Motherf*%^r” surely led to the equally redemptive phrase of Bruce Springsteen’s, “It Ain’t No Sin To Be Glad You’re Alive.”

It's a phrase many of us live by. I am alive, and I’m more than glad, as hard as these times have been.

As a musician and songwriter, I work in the complimentary genres of Rock and Soul for several reasons. One idea says that this kind of music has stayed with us for so long and with such popularity because it says that all of us are at heart alike in love, longing, fear, hope and ambition. I embrace that idea, largely cuz it's true.

Soul is, for better or worse, about suffering, survival and then, an ornery optimism. It’s about scar tissue. Soul is faith when cynicism is easier. It's hangin’ in there when you've had it. It’s knowing we’re born to die, yet living with real passion. It's not necessarily about unconditional love, but it is about letting a person's character be your main source for your judgment of him or her. Al Green says that soul is "fearing no evil." Maybe that describes it best. It's a quality of heart, especially after you know all there is to fear. The late great Solomon Burke said he dreamed of writing a song that would do no less than save the world if everyone sang it.

The romantic aspects in my songs come from trying to find what's heroic when faced with any kind of unrelenting reality, whether it's no job, no money, cancer, loss, any unlivable situation that you must live with. Maybe just facing it is heroic. Everyone has their own moment of hardcore reality, where they see who they really are and what their life is really worth. I try and tell myself this: No one gets out alive. It's not like you're gonna do something so great or make so much money and you're then gonna get a reprieve from this sentence and live forever. So why not approach problems with a joyous heart, in touch with community, and the knowledge that it's just a brief trip through time.

Easier said than done. But looking into the abyss is no way to make a living. Music at its best should compel those that hear it toward some kind of physical change: learn more, have more compassion, become interested in its shared ideals, open up, dance your ass off, let it reach you, have some fun. Music is the one art form principally about feeling. I’ve seen this in action when playing at large venues, bars, weddings, wherever--the individual waking up to the community and a community alive, open and aware enough to welcome him or her into it. Which is what you've just done for me--I'll soon return the favor with music and shows.

Have a great 2011, and I'll talk to you soon.

2010-12-27T11:33:00.001-08:00

We're just a few bucks shy of our goal with less than a week to go. Response has been fantastic, and a little more help would put us over--very important because this is an all-or-nothing funding site. You get rewards for different amounts donated, with most pledges just $15 or $25. Kickstarter SF link: http://kck.st/edX8ix

2010-12-22T09:12:00.001-08:00

My new cd funding is close to $12,000...we just need $3000 to reach goal. Thanks. Help out at link -- Merry Christmas! http://kck.st/edX8ix

A Few Thoughts On The Biz: Where We Are Now

2010-12-19T09:14:00.000-08:00

This is a note to all the supporter of my kickstarter funding project, about the changes in the music business and the fresh opportunities for independent artists. If you'd like to pledge, hit this link:
http://kck.st/edX8ix

Welcome to this creative project funding platform, a part of the new normal in the music biz. The change in the business over the last couple years means exciting times for independent artists and music entrepreneurs. In this new era, the traditional gatekeepers are disappearing, and new distribution outlets, marketing techniques, and business models are popping up all the time.

Because of the internet, every artist is a world artist, with the ability to reach fans in other countries. And the business change affects musical content too—although this new record of mine will be a full length cd, in the coming year I would also like to release a 6 song cd after it, or a 3-song EP every three months or even a song every month. The new model is about you, and my musical relationship with you. Much is possible.

No excuse exists with today’s technology to wait for the star-making machinery to make it happen for you, but that’s always how I’ve conducted my career. In fact, so much of what’s happening now has been my reality for many years as an independent, DIY musician—funding production, using smaller distribution on a budget, talking personally to radio about airplay based on the quality of the songs, working in a niche creatively, doing regional press, investing in your own career, being a part of a music scene and playing shows in unusual venues.

Over the past several years we’ve worked hard to firm up quality business relationships, with publishing administration (Casablanca Media in the US & Canada, Open Times in the UK & Europe), distributors, licensing companies and all areas of the media. But the most important aspect to success as an independent artist is to keep it fresh. New songs and new shows and new ideas. This is where your funding is crucial right now; I’ll get new music out on a very consistent basis.

The marketing and promotional ideas we’ll be using once this record is released include reaching out through social networks, blog tours, traditional print and all forms of TV, satellite and terrestrial radio, online and physical retail, and continued communication through the website with all of you.

The new model hinges on the fact that recorded music, in downloads or physical cds, is now the loss leader of the entertainment industry. Downloads are free, by and large, to a lot of music lovers, especially younger ones. Whatever the many reasons, the old model has disintegrated, and the reality is that fewer and fewer people are paying for music.

It seems like arguing against file sharing or free downloads is kind of like getting pissed at water for being wet--it's something that simply is, and is here to stay. And from where I sit as an independent artist, if I'm candid about it, free music is both angel and devil--my primary interest as a musician is to communicate and connect with my audience the emotion and ideas in a song, to pass the buzz of creation along and have it become part of your life.

So songs passing freely from ear to ear is what I want to happen! But I also need to continue to do my job as a functioning, air breathing, bill paying, food eating artist who lives in the commodified real world. Mozart went to Emperor Josef, one sole patron. With this model, there are hundreds and eventually thousands of supporters, and it’s a healthy conversation -- the artist creating their music, the fans communicating directly with the artist, although I ain’t no Mozart.

With free music as the norm, the fear is that we'll eventually just have records from superstars on one end and hobbyists on the other, squeezing out the regional artists and bands, the older singers and songwriters, and the crucial contributions of the more eccentric and avant garde. But I'm surely not telling you to stop downloading free stuff or file sharing—on the contrary. I’m just saying a) make sure it’s not my stuff (smile) and b) I think it’s a mistake to think we’re making some grand statement against corporate fat cats and their out-of-control capitalist ways by downloading free music.

And I'm also saying to all of you how much I appreciate your support in this, how important it is in today's new world, and how you're making our world a sane, thinking and fair one by sanctioning this transaction and others like them. Thank you for having some faith in me, my work and my commitment to it.

Making a record--from the writing of melodies and lyrics, arranging, casting musicians, recording basic tracks, myriad overdubs of vocals, solos, strings and horns, rewriting, re-recording, hiring art design for a cover, then mixing and mastering and manufacturing--takes every bit of focus and vitality I have to give. If I do it with full emotional wattage, (and there ain't no other way), it allows precious else in its orbit. It's the most demanding of any possible mistress--imagine the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction on steroids, even crazier, screaming “do it again!” Devoting yourself fully to it makes your knees weak, makes your roof leak, makes your bones squeak--and there's nothing else I'd rather do.

Then, when the record's done and coming out, it calls for an entirely different skill set that involves: promotional persistence (which leaves you feeling spent and icky--imagine asking your father in law for money 200 times a day), marketing moxie, an understanding of brand and image (that feels contrary to the very real human connection you seek when actually writing and recording the music) and most importantly, functioning as a bandleader and employer of other musicians and taking the songs out in front of people--maybe the most thrilling and challenging part of this large process.

It’s very fashionable these days for small labels and bands to use analytics and other online marketing data to try and determine who their audience is and what they want. These tools eventually have their place somewhere in the post-release process, but I think it’s contrary to the pure artistic impulse. I make music that satisfies its own standards and traditions and tells my story, songs that will then hopefully reach you the same way I want to be reached. I want to be moved and move you, be excited and excite you--not market to you. I hope this update gives you some idea of how your money will be applied, and how we’ll make it work as efficiently as we can, in many different areas.

A VERY Brief History of the Record Business

1. Early 20th Century: Musicians play live music in symphonies, operas, chamber ensembles, pubs, houses, bars, fields and the workplace.
2. 1930s: The wide use of radio transformed time and space and made it possible for huge numbers of people to enjoy free music. Vinyl LPs allowed folks to take music home and play it.
3. Post WWII Expansion -- Record labels brought recorded music to market while publishing companies found ways to exploit the “song” through licensing.
4. 1960-2000 Motown, The Beatles, 45rpm vinyl singles, modern recording methods, Rock Star era, cassettes, cds, computers & mp3s.
5. File Sharing: Napster, itunes & the iPod -- The power shifts from the record companies to the tech companies, the music fans—and the artists themselves.
6. The End Of The Corporate Record Labels? -- When the labels realized people were trading MP3 files online--their own customers interested in music—they decided to aggressively sue them.
7. Where We Are Today—and why success for independent solo artist has never been more in focus. Large labels are becoming banks, and their problem is that the single income stream they have traditionally participated in (sales of recorded music) has drastically shrunk.
8. The New Artist Model --- The traditional record business has never really been good for MOST of us musicians. Technology has shifted the power base from the record labels to the artists and managers—but ultimately to you, the music fans. A middle class of musicians is forming where people can make a living or part of a living in music more predictably. They are pursuing a business model that puts them in the center of the equation and gives them more choice about their career path.
9. Creative Funding Platforms -- where performer and fan/patron are meeting with direct relationships enabled by interest & technology. Can't make a fortune anymore, but you can make a living. You are surrounded not by fad and infatuation, but by music Fans.
10. The Future -- Mobile music and images (content) on the UMD (Universal Mobile Device). Listen to music, watch your favorite artists rehearse, read lyrics, call home, call friends—limitless immediate involvement with music and artists. Artists can record today and get a new song to you tonight, with artwork & lyrics and video.

2010-12-09T07:31:00.001-08:00

@ The Ark in Ann Arbor tonight. Concert for Peace. 7:30pm. See ya there.

To My Son on Confirmation Day

2010-10-09T19:04:00.001-07:00

Dear Stewie,

The day you were born was one of the three great days of my life, not just because I had a son, but because it was you. You had a distinctive and attractive personality from the moment you opened your eyes. You staked a claim in my heart and in this world from your first howling cry.

It’s hard to explain, but when you become a parent, you’re still just yourself, the guy you were in school and in bands and everywhere else, wondering how you can make your kid’s life a happy and productive one, and also wondering what kind of person you’re raising.

You’ve evolved recently from being a happy and humorous little boy to being a kid, now on to being a teenager, and it’s been interesting and exciting to watch. You’ve always had a great yearning for adventure, and I think you’re sometimes worried you’re not always where the action is. But you have that wondrous gift of making things happen wherever you are—you're where the action is, because you make things fun around you.

You’re an amazingly moral person, particularly for such a young guy, and you always have been—concerned with what was right and wrong, what was the best thing to do, and what the consequences were for other people should you or they do something. I’m very proud of you for many things, but that stands out. You deeply love your family, and that doesn’t stop with your parents and sister. You love your cousins and aunts and uncles, and you let them know you love them.

That maybe is your most remarkable characteristic—you’re a joyously affectionate boy, and you need affection in return. Try not to lose that as you get older and bigger. It’s not a sign of weakness—in Europe the toughest, most macho men are also the most affectionate with friends and family. You’re a loving person, and what better thing can be said about someone?

You’re an amazing athlete, with tremendous natural gifts. Plus you work hard to refine those gifts, and you put the time in to make yourself better. I’m very proud of you for that, and look forward to watching you make the most of your gifts.

Your life is something great to watch and witness—such a huge creation coming from that great April day when you were born. You love and are loved in return, you’re great at things you love and want to sink your teeth into, you’re very very funny, with a crazy sense of humor, and you have a large and diverse interest in all things in this world, from sports to nature to cars to music to different places.

Stay true, stay young, stay hungry, stay funny, stay interested, stay happy and loving. You’re a dream come true for me as your Dad, and I look forward to watching you grow into a young man. Love you with all my heart.

2010-09-10T18:31:00.001-07:00

We're playing a show at the Trinity House tomorrow night, 9/11. 38840 6 Mile Road, Livonia. (734) 464-6302
Full band, w/ acoustic stuff 2.

2010-09-01T15:54:00.001-07:00

PS to AB&E show announcement: I won't be packin' heat-not a gun anyway. Music is our weapon; songs r the ammo; we heal the wound with soul.

2010-09-01T10:42:00.001-07:00

Stewart Francke & Large Band
Live on the Ford National Stage
Sunday, September 5 @ 7pm
with the legendary band WAR!
Arts Beats & Eats in Royal Oak

The Big Man. G Stewart Francke, 1924-2010

2010-08-18T11:29:00.000-07:00

I think it was my friend Rob Dewar who dubbed my dad The Big Man. No offense to Clarence Clemons, that other big man, but the name came to life as part testimonial to his size, 6’4”, and his large presence, his encompassing capacity for love and concern, his benevolent and instructive role in everyone’s life, and the depth of his acumen and intelligence. It was a Big Name, but he lived up to it and walked tall with it, gracefully and powerfully. We used to laugh and say we were gonna get bracelets that said “WWBGD” because he was never flustered or without direction. He was the rudder.

The Big Man. He was a giant of a man, an enormous spirit among us, imbued with a pragmatic optimism that in his mind made all things in this country seem possible. It’s something my sisters & I constantly heard growing up—“You can do anything in this country. You can come from nowhere.”

He believed that dreams were merely ambitions, and could be realized with work, friendship, teamwork and vision, yet he was keenly and emotionally aware that the starting line in this country was not the same for all of us. He was an egalitarian in this sense, although he worked in the framework of capitalism, and trusted capitalism until he saw it fall apart at the end of his life. Ultimately he truly placed his faith in democracy as the way to live together.

He didn’t intellectualize his sense of what democracy meant, or ignore it, or just live with it and enjoy its benefits; he and his generation DID something about it. As Mayor of our hometown of Saginaw in the 1960s, he was an outspoken advocate for civil rights. He championed a uniform civil rights policy for state and local governments so that there would not be discrimination against minorities among different municipalities. While mayor, he was also president of the United Negro College Fund, bolstering his belief in realized dreams through a concrete connection to public education.

He and councilman Henry Marsh worked with then Michigan governor, George Romney, to pass legislation at a state level to benefit minorities and inner cities. In October of 1963, the Michigan Conference of Mayors adopted their resolutions for an aggressive stand on civil rights which, among other things, called for equal employment opportunities and equal housing rights for all. I’m very proud of my dad’s commitment to civil rights, his commitment to equality, and his friendship with and support for Mayor Henry Marsh, his successor and Saginaw’s first African-American mayor.

I’m named after him. Growing up with the same name as a self-assured man with his place already soundly carved out in the social fabric of our town and state wasn’t always easy. Add to that the fact that my dad & I were entirely different as people, as men, and it was a confusing, sometimes angry relationship when I was in my late teens and 20s.

He was, however, far more understanding than he was rigid and didactic, and had been a musician himself as a young man—a drummer, no less. He loved his music as much as I loved mine, and once we grew toward each other, working to come to terms with it all—big band, jazz, rock and roll, each other—we found that we were both floating in the same stream of the Great Song, that incredible continuum of music that runs from Louis Armstrong and Billy May to James Brown and The Beatles with only changes in tempo, volume, lyrical content and whether it was a coronet or a strat in the 8 bar solo section. Of the many gifts he gave me, I most appreciate the love of music—a working knowledge of all the American music. Once we started to listen to each other, and each other’s music, everything improved. He went from urging me to sing Sinatra standards on Cruise Ships to getting why rock and roll was such a life-changing thing.

He once saw the legendary saxophonist Sonny Stitt, a fellow Saginawian, in an airport, and was proud that Sonny introduced him to his guys as “a drummer.” And he surely hadn’t played in years.

I think most of us sons try to impress and please our fathers, and either succeed and live with it or give up for the sake of self revelation and survival. I had to give up there for awhile, and just do my own thing in my own way, because I couldn’t find the words to explain to him what I was trying to do, trying to be, how the artist’s life is undefined and chaotic if you’re looking in from the outside, but often highly disciplined and ascetic in actuality.

We couldn’t bridge our differences for awhile: He understood and succeeded in big business; I saw it as manipulative and cold. He hated long hair; I grew it to my ass and loved it. He loved music and knew many musicians, but never thought of a musician’s life as stable or enduring--living as an artist was no way to make your way in love or family or career. He loved order, discipline and predictability; I’d always lived a disciplined life privately but courted chaos and unpredictability until my own kids were born. To impress him and earn his respect and acceptance, I had to reject him and his lifestyle.

I had his name but none of his gifts, or so I thought at the time, and no one stood up to disagree. He was too overwhelming, too gracious, too confident, so gifted as a public person and only plagued with self doubt later in his life.

I remember when he & my mom came to my graduation day from college—I was young, angry and hubristic, and failed to recognize how important it was for them to have a kid graduate from college, a real regret now. In addition to that, the commencement speaker was Jim McDonald, then VP of GM, my dad’s employer at the time, so it was a momentous deal. In my disgust with all things bourgeois and straight, I thought it a good idea to wear nothing but socks underneath my gown, and hope the wind didn’t blow the gown to reveal my birthday suit. When I told my dad I was probably the only naked graduate, to my surprise he found it funny. He understood and loved my mom’s joyous eccentricity and recognized it in me I guess. But when he was 19, he was a Lieutenant in the Air Force, with a world of responsibility and war thrust upon him. There was no sowing of wild oats for him as a young man.

We tussled and struggled through my youth and early adulthood, always loving each other deeply but not understanding each other much. I was successful as an athlete in school, and he showed his pride and love and respect.

When I began playing music full time at 20, he didn’t get or really approve of what I was doing, when in fact, as it’s turned out, it’s almost identical to what he’d done: live in and love my own community, identify the strengths and weaknesses of my community, reach out to others through words and music, try and stay involved out front in a visible way with a message that says that each of us has a true connection to each other and profound singular value, even in our anonymity. The thought is then to help us all identify and change how we live together. He sought to change what he saw while accepting and building upon what was already good about people and place; I continue to try and do something similar. With music, sometimes the objective is just to make people happy or carefree, minus any political entanglements.

In my early 20s I recall playing one of the toughest joints in Michigan, out on Groesbeck Highway, a biker bar with a rough, drunk, mean, indifferent audience. It was smoky, loud, vulgar, violent, sexual, and if you rocked you went over. My kind of place at the time. My parents were always ridiculously loyal in coming to hear me sing or watch sports when I was a kid, and that night I looked out through the smoke and dust and humidity at a table in the middle of this joint to see my mom in her nicest evening dress and my dad in a suit after leaving some GM function. By the end of the night, they’d made friends with everyone around them, buying drinks and shots, listening to the band, having fun, never wasting a minute.

The men that came out of the Depression and WWII were stoic kind of guys. Their models were John Wayne, Gary Cooper, the austerity of Hemingway. My dad was gentle, sweet, patient and kind, but was not an exception to this rule of avoiding any mawkish display. Ever. Not a lot of random praise or expressions of love were spoken, so he showed his love through little actions or hand-made projects. When I was 11 he made me this large box adorned with Sports Illustrated photos of my favorite players in all sports—Walton, Unitas, Jabbar, Willie Horton, Namath. It took a ton of carpentry work, but was apparently easier than saying “I love you.” So be it.

Although retirement at 65 and the 20+ years that ensued were certainly no friend to him and his self esteem, it was a great gift of time for us. We grew to be closer than just father and son; we became best friends and confidantes. I called him or he called me 4-5 times a day for at least the last 15 years, and the same was probably true with my sisters.

When I was very sick with leukemia and going though a stem cell/bone marrow transplant, he would talk to me about sports, the great common subject, as if nothing was wrong, keeping me in the flow of daily life—a very important aspect of survival. And he would never flinch when the toughest questions came at him.

I remember one night, the two of us alone in my room, when I said that I was struggling so hard to survive and live, and it felt like I was losing. I said to him that maybe there’s a way to die as well as live and I should seek that, that acceptance and dignity. Can you imagine your only son talking to you about his own death? I cannot. But he just calmly agreed with me without dramatics, said that, yes, there is surely a way and time to die, but I should just keep giving it one more day and see how I went. It was such pragmatic encouragement…no histrionics, no exposed fear, just emotional consistency and the kind of faith that’s real, not pie-in-the-sky with religious nonsense and your worth tied to your right to live. He had emotional consistency by the truckload.

That night he waved off the orderly who usually took me by wheelchair down to x-ray, and just talked about the Lions and how lousy they were (it was a Sunday in November) and how they’d been lousy since Bobby Layne, and did I remember Pat Studstill and Karl Sweetan and all the Lions that I’d loved as a kid. It was the most kind and humane thing anyone’s ever done for me. I was slumped in the wheelchair with a heart infection and no blood counts and couldn’t talk, but his soliloquy got me through the night. He stayed with me that night at Karmanos, sleeping in a tiny chair for his large frame, and woke with the same kind encouragement he’d given me the night before. He’d seen me through perhaps the longest, worst night of my life. And we both love the Lions to the day he died, good, bad or worse. It was our team, and a real bond between us.

I think at some point in the middle of his life he made it his code to ask about your life and times, your school, your work and family; it was a transgression to discuss himself in conversation, a betrayal of his stoic code.

I also think it’s fitting that his town, Saginaw, a place he loved and served and had to return to almost magnetically over the years, is naming a bridge after him now. It’s a real honor to him and his vitality. He and my mom and their generation extended a hand--they built relationships like bridges. They got stuff done—built a Zoo, developed relationships with Japan, built parks and a Civic Center.

Since he died, much has been written about his public life and achievements. Great men often don’t make good fathers. He would’ve scoffed at the idea of him as anything but just a guy, and I can’t imagine a finer father. He was to me just my dad, always there, a robust sense of humor always humming, always fired up to see you when you walked in to his place, and see his grandchildren and sons and daughters-in-law. As I wrote and recorded more music, worked at my career, and played different and larger shows, he expressed his pride and love for me at every turn. I gotta tell ya, although I had long ago stopped seeking his acceptance or approval, it felt pretty good once it was earned and expressed.

On the last night he was conscious, July 29, I sat on the bed, held his hand and said to him, “Dad, there’s so much love being expressed about you and your health. You’re the most beloved man I know, the most beloved man on earth.” With his eyes closed and mouth open, looking as if he was between worlds, he held up both hands and pantomimed playing a violin. The humor was there to the end—that act said to me: “Big fuckin’ deal. Stop blowin smoke up my skirt. I’m busy dyin’ here.”

For every moment but those last few, he was always busy living—with enormous vitality, kindness, humor, love and sense of responsibility that will remain unmatched in its unique confluence of gifts. He and his generation lived all the slogans we need to remind us to live—“I’m gonna live ‘til I die;” “Money can’t buy happiness, but it’s easier crying in a Cadillac.” They didn’t need maxims; they were the Nike generation before there was one. They just did it.

On the morning of July 30, my sister & I held his hand and I put my hand on his chest, feeling his heart flutter then simply stop. That mighty and inclusive and loving heart just ceased working.

I have no idea what, if anything, happens to us after we die. But I do believe that, while life certainly ends, love endures in many forms, forever. If my dad were alive tonight I’d call him and read this to him to see if I got it anywhere close to right. He probably would’ve said, “Don’t let them think I went to Michigan.” Those Spartans, so touchy to the end.

I’ve been told it will get worse before it gets better, this ache in my chest, this desperate and sorrowful longing, this numbing distraction, the sheer physical part of missing someone no longer in this world. I’ve gone to call him several times, walked to his house many times since he’s been gone, as it was part of my daily ritual when he was alive and we were up north near his home. I don’t mind admitting I’m a grown man who is very much wayward, a grown man who has lost his footing and balance right now, because the gift my dad gave me when I was young and searching and angry and uncertain is this: he knew that all who wander are not lost.

2010-07-30T17:17:00.001-07:00

My Dad was A beautiful guy, a man of matchless grace and humor. He died today, and thanks go to so many folks who showed us love.

2010-07-08T10:14:00.001-07:00

Walking around with a broken heart as I watch my dad exit this world. We all often have to live with things that are unlivable.

2010-06-17T09:36:00.001-07:00

I've been in hospital all week w/ infection of parotid gland, but tomorrow night's Magic Bag show is ON. We'll be there and we'll be rockin. Rock is all about swollen glands.

2010-05-14T11:30:00.001-07:00

Show announcement: Stewart Francke & band w/ Carolyn Striho @ Magic Bag, Fri June 18. First Detroit show in awhile--tix at 248 544-3030.

2010-04-26T08:19:00.001-07:00

Just left the ArtsBeatsEats presser at the Baldwin in RoyalOak, where Ford was announced as sponsor. It will be an amazing musical weekend.

American VI: Johnny Cash's Final Album

2010-03-01T18:17:00.000-08:00

Johnny Cash dreamed our dreams for us. His songs were huge, unfettered visions that cascaded down through the halls of American history. As they rumbled, these dreams gathered our shared symbolic debris like metal to magnet: fire and damnation, a solitary train whistle, soldiers limping by, prayers unfolding, marriages lasting, marriages imploding, working men hanging on, larger than life men on their knees, men and women of all kinds contending with a lingering psychic titter from too many drinks or too many pills or too many whores or too many wars.

Cash carried with him that necessary American schizophrenia—we don’t like our heroes all good or all bad. He was the quintessential man with two faces. There are evil songs from a God-fearing man ("Delia's Gone"), or impossibly good songs from a man aware of the dark shadow that stretches across his heart ("I Walk The Line"). And all those wonderful story songs ("The Ballad of Ira Hayes," "Don't Take Your Guns To Town") where the narrator's morality was revealed when you least expected.It's ironic that before he died, Johnny was embraced by a young alternative audience after the 90s country boom ignored him. Here's a man who remained on the inside flap of American culture and politics for the better part of 30 years. He hosted a number one television variety show (1968-71), befriended presidents and preachers, even turned in the most menacing Columbo cameo ever. Even after his death in 2004, Cash continues to define cool for a generation that can't seem to come up with its own icons.

His voice was as dry as dust, a dolorous rumble that laid bare 50 years of stone hard desire. He

best made his case with just that voice and stark guitar playing, yet how he jostled a world awake with this simplicity. Cash made a song vivid via the inexplicable and mysterious qualities we can only call the "grain" of the voice. As they tumbled out of his mouth, lines like “I fell in to a burnin’ ring of fire” or “Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone” sound as if they'd grown out of the dirt beneath his feet.

His songs echoed a lifetime's worth of arcane fables and common folklore. Although the “Old, Weird America” is now ubiquitous, obnoxious and without meaning, Johnny Cash lived in it and told its stories, before they had a name for it. Yet out of Cash's voice something small and resolute often escaped, leaving us with an intuitive sense of that quicksilver beauty in life we can never define. All that--and he’s Rosanne's old man to boot.

The latest release in his series of Rick Rubin-recorded stark song cycles, called American VI: Ain't No Grave, is the sixth and final installment of Cash's acclaimed American Recordings album series. American VI is a metaphysical country-folk record, if such a thing exists. It's about

salvation, friendships, family, faith, Jesus and the inevitability of suffering and the price of survival. If you're young and new to Johnny Cash, seek out his older Columbia records before listening to the American series--they can be too cold, too private and almost Biblical in theirrendering of life. American VI is no different; it's the testimony of an old and ill man.

Once he called my house as I was assigned do a Q&A with him. And he said those

famous words---"Hi, this is Johnny Cash." I couldn't speak for 15 seconds.

We all knew Johnny Cash, in a way. I miss the resolute morality he brought to music, and just knowing he was in the world. Damn, life, unforgiving.

Gusoline Alley, 20 Years On

2010-02-22T10:49:00.000-08:00

In my late 20s and early 30s I spent every Thursday night in a ritualized drinking effort with friends, where we'd start at the huge marble bar at the much missed Les Auteurs and end up at Gusoline Alley, which we'd close. It was often debauched, always fun, and never dull. I miss a lot about life in the pre-9/11 world, because the tone of living is now nearly fever pitched. Everything, all the time. And everything seems to get harder lately. Younger people seem angrier than we were, and more anxious.

We certainly drank to get drunk, but it was more than that. It was a weekly existential outing in the Midwestern winter, creating an opportunity where you literally did not know what would transpire, and how it would end. I've always been a bit of a kochleffel (Yiddish for pot-stirrer), so the combustible personalities and absinthe-like concoctions we drank suited the situation by my lights.

Like a lot of things I used to do, the drinking had to come to an end. Children, and family life in general, require an emotional consistency and a psychological equilibrium that binge drinking doesn't include, although that never stopped my parents much. However I did stop into Gus's the other night, maybe the first time I've been back there in 15 years. I don't drink anymore, but I loved it all over again--little about the place had changed.

Royal Oak is now a faux-Greenwich Village, six streets of restaurants, leather and bohemian suburbia. But Gus's remains a regular welcome spot, a drunkard's dream: the stools are still low, the drinks are still cheap, the waitress is still kind, the door man is still Pat and still friendly, the bathroom is still easy to find and the jukebox remains the conscience of the place.

I first wrote about Gus's 18 years ago, and unlike much else in today's world, it still applies to the neighborhood bar of my once and future dreams: On any given night, it seems that every song that punches its way through the thick air can be a quiet reminder of the formerly sober you, of a drunken emotion, of a love lost or found, of a better time, or a far worse time, or of just another loud song smothering you chatting up a girl. To many, it's the latter.

Though Gus`s was once a dumpy and secluded neighborhood bar for regulars who were musicians, writers, weirdos and artists--kind of a mutant Shriner's club--it now attracts the college/yuppie thing and what I can only call the hard core pierced and tattooed. It's a testing ground for not not judging a book by its cover.

Or maybe I'm not the first young songwriter who just drank way too much and romanticized a favorite watering hole. I'm no fan of the whole Bukowski Boho rap, so Gus's to me is no stand-in for the bar in Barfly or some "necessary" stop along some mythical historical trip because of who once hung out there. I was there when it was the Center Street Bar, and there the first night Gus bought it, and it was never necessary, just fun. And all of us musicians and writers and starlets (yes Detroit has starlets) who hung out there did so because it was then the only place to go, not a place to be seen.

I remember so many nights floating away with the music in there. Patsy Cline was in then out, now in; Roxy was a constant. Both Elvis's, The Femmes, and Glenn Miller ("I've Got A Girl In Kalamazoo") shared the same stage. The records of neighborhood musicians were heard here. That's the best part about it--the staff regularly rotated the selections, involving things previously thought impossible with spinning discs in a public place--spontaneity and immediacy. And they'd quickly change the song if something lame was selected--music criticism in action! The Clash always sounded good there, as did Johnny Cash.

If it sounds like I spend too much time looking back on the innovations of a jukebox at a local bar, I ask you this: Where else in this world could you hear Sinatra's "Summer Wind" followed by the Undisputed Truth's "Smiling Faces Tell Lies" right after The Fleshtone's "Ride Your Pony?" Or Little Feat's "Spanish Moon" after The Beatles' "There's a Place?" It was at least worth a drink and a listen.

Gusoline Alley remains an oasis in a tough town. From the speechless & nameless outta work sunlight drunks to the big haired rock chicks to the pastel wearing Birmingham Biff and Bloomfield Sally; from the wordless old men, the aging bikers and perky young artists, to the unloved and lost forever; from the mascaraed femme fatales and it-grrrls to the beer bellied softball jocks and well-past-it frat boys, to the oh so weary auto workers who now have all day to sit and drink...it’s a place to sit and drink and hear a good song.

There we all were, 20 years later. And they all drink and linger or drink and leave or drink alone or drink and talk or drink and laugh and listen, while they wait for work or rain or peace or snow or, simply, closin' time. Some things are built to last.

Standing In The Shadows of Motown: What Is Soul?

2010-02-17T08:10:00.000-08:00

Last night I pulled out the DVD of Standing In The Shadows of Motown, Alan Slutsky's adoring documentary on the Funk Brothers and the more quotidian aspect of the Motown dream. It's been several years since I last watched it, and I appreciated it--the film and the story--even more this time around.

Standing In The Shadows is on the surface a documentary in the accepted sense, filled with nostalgic, emotional interviews, the dramatic re-creation of events, and concert footage that brings it all home. But like many a labor of love it's more a document of hope and evanescence—a wish for what once was.

The film ultimately functions as an atonement of sorts. It’s a codified chip on the shoulder, calling for the world to sit up and give props to this tremendous group of musicians that actually made the records we still love so much, The Funk Brothers.

Simply put, they were the guys in the band--the lucky and hard working musicians that found themselves riding a cyclone, or at least making hay inside that cyclone. It's mind boggling to consider their chart success--more Billboard hits than the Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys and Elvis together!

I remembered that Standing In The Shadows was released on the same weekend as Eminem's 8 Mile. There's no small irony when a film about a group of predominantly black musicians who didn't get their due for 40 years arrives at the same time as a hugely popular Hollywood vehicle for a white musician working quite well in a black idiom. The beat goes on, a cynic would say. But a cynic would not stay cynical with the information that the passing of time has given us--revealing Eminem to be a genius and Standing In The Shadows to be a classic documentary. It worked out well for all concerned.

Director Paul Justman and writer/conceptualist Alan Slutsky keep it focused and don't attempt to reduce the Motown mythology down to size or place it in less romantic terms. But it's very real and workmanlike: Make no mistake that they were Detroit guys workin’ for a living, playing jazz in clubs ‘til the wee hours, taking road gigs with whomever, while at the same time musically informing the inchoate writing of the Beatles & Stones with their recorded performances (and everyone else as well).

But their story only screws you into your seat when they’re presented as soul musicians, playing soul music in Detroit, on the songs that have become as familiar as old shoes to us around here.

The film tries to get at this question...and it's a slippery thing. What is soul? And it even inspires an answer: As an attributed quality to a friend or someone we admire, it's a spirit that's the product of having lived. It's the result of having said the right and wrong thing at the wrong and right time, of having loved too hard, too long, too often. It's knowing the absurdity of love and still loving. It's faith when cynicism is easier. It's hangin’ in there and showing up and making sure your shoes match. Soul is, as Al Green says, "fearing no evil." Maybe that describes it best...soul is guts.

Soul is also a quality of heart, especially after you know all there is to fear. When set against our inevitable outcome and the scope of the universe, there's an inherent helplessness to mankind. Music either distracts us from this harsh reality or softens its lack of choices, or maybe both. Soul music actually says it's gonna be all right. Solomon Burke dreamed of writing a soul song that, if sung by every man and woman, would save the world. Well, Motown didn't save the world. But it changed it, forever, and for the better.

As a musical genre, soul is a little easier to get at. In fact it seems that if a producer were to take the concrete elements of a Motown record, he could easily reproduce it: It starts with a loose-but-tight groove, a tambourine, then a piano played like a rhythm guitar, a swirling Hammond organ, four on the floor kick-snare drum pattern, percolating guitar slides with quarter note "chinks", unbelievably playful bass lines, counterpoint horn arrangements that are never too much and never too little, sweeping strings and soaring voices. There ya have it. Thank God for those Bruce Willis records in the 80s and the recent splash of new "old school" soul records, which proved once and for all that it ain't that cookie cutter easy.

Soul music remains dependent on that mysterious quality of heart we discussed a paragraph ago, a quality consistently captured in the movie. But the point is that these guys were so far inside the dream that the dream was untrue, or unreal, for them. To tear the mythology down would be to simply say what's always been and is still true for musicians--they didn't get paid enough. Money or attention.

So, as always, we let the music do the talking. The concert footage still holds up well, particularly Joan Osborne's passionate take on of Jimmy Ruffin's "What Becomes Of A Broken Heart?." Ben Harper has never been my cup of tea, and he comes off in the film as too soft, somewhat uncommitted to the music, and not really a soul singer.

Standing In The Shadows lets Berry Gordy a bit off the hook if you're in the camp that says it's not fair that the Funk Brothers didn't get more props or bread, or that James Jamerson, the genius bassist that defined pop-soul bass playing, had to scalp a ticket to sit in the balcony at the Motown 25 party. But if you understand that this is a star-based business in a celebrity-driven world, you reluctantly accept that these musicians are getting far more recognition than most and never as much as they deserve. Such is life.

It's no secret that black (and white) musicians and innovators have been ripped off in more ways than one. What makes this issue complicated is that Motown was, of course, the paradigm of black owned business. The film can't quite reconcile all this; in fact Justman and Slutsky don't really try. They just try and make it right, right now, in the movie.

The film's slight faults are more glaring with time. Standing In The Shadows is a little light on Holland-Dozier-Holland, Smokey Robinson and Norman Whitfield, the songwriters that wrote the bulk of this tremendously joyful music. It does try and include the arrangers in the Motown diaspora, but ultimately it's strictly about the guys that were shoulder to shoulder and ear to ear in the snake pit, the double edged moniker for the studio on West Grand Blvd.

Standing In The Shadows accomplished a lot. Now we all know their names--Jack Ashford, Bo White, Joe Messina, Joe Hunter, Benny Benjamin, Johnny Griffith, Uriel Jones, Eddie Willis, Bob Babbitt, Jamerson, Pete Allen, Johnny Trudell, among others. Those of us making music around here already knew their names, and we continually honor them every time we play, sing, or write a note. It's a debt that can't truly be repaid, but it sure looks like you die tryin'.

From Clarksdale To Detroit: John Lee Hooker and The Black Bottom Blues

2010-02-16T05:29:00.000-08:00

Maybe it was a lift on the tailboard of a wagon, or on a cotton cart going to gin. Or if you were lucky, it was a Greyhound bus flying up Highway 51 out of New Orleans, on to Memphis and Cairo, then Chicago or Detroit. But more frequently it was the treacherous freight train that took a rounder like John Lee Hooker from his home in Clarksdale, Mississippi to his eventual destination in Detroit.

You can hear nearly all of this in Hooker's "Hobo Blues," recorded in 1949: Running through the tall, slippery grass toward the shadow of the slowing train, squatting to hide your movements from the dreaded switchman and his nightstick. Your cracked hands slam on to the icy couplets while your legs dangle perilously; you hope to swing them into a blind baggage car with no side door and a warm corner. Now safely out of reach of the brakeman's club, you slither across the steel brake rods that run from car to car. There is no room for error. It is, as are most acts of violent desperation, without a second act. But you know what waits back home for you—Jim Crow, work and death. You’ve gotta keep heading north. So lonely, so scared, so far from home. From this a young man's blues are born.

Hooker's early life in Clarksdale was not merciless, just confining. His father was a minister, his mother in the choir. Hooker first learned "the boogie"--his signature one chord guitar vamp--from his stepfather, Will Moore. Moore was often visited by noted bluesmen. Charley Patton, Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson were regulars. Young John Lee took it all in and split for a bluesman's life at age 14.

After 16 years of rootless wandering, he settled in Detroit in late 1942. Hooker first worked as a hospital orderly, then as an hourly grunt at the Conco Steel Factory and, later, at Dodge Main, a gilded abyss if ever there was one. He was a part of this century's Southern black diaspora; by 1943, more than 200,000 blacks had arrived in Detroit from the South, ready to take advantage of an average hourly wage of 55 cents an hour.

What happened next in Hooker's life--his ascension in the blues world--is, of course, why we're here. But let's first move forward to how he’s regarded today: More than the most influential of the post-war blues artists, Hooker is known as one of the most compellingly individual stylists ever, in any genre.

At his best Hooker was wildly emotive. He took the country blues (originally 8 and 16 bar forms) and the modern urban blues (12 bar stanzas of three lines each with the first line repeated) and fashioned a model wholly dependent on the transference of his own emotion and his own notion of universal truth. His allegiance was to feeling, and less to form or tradition. His guitar style was pure blues anarchy: sometimes his songs carry a verse 12 bars, sometimes 14, sometimes 10 and 1/2. Other times they just hang on the root chord for 64 bars and fade.

"I write songs on the basis of life and people," Hooker said to me in an interview before he passed away. "I like to do songs with meaning."

Delivered with a brooding intensity and often a scary wordless humming, his "songs with meaning" are barely removed from the field hollers of the Mississippi Delta. Hooker's half-spoken, half-sung style and extemporaneously broken rhythms make him the most "African" of the latter day bluesmen. By using observation and street experience as his basis for knowing and understanding, Hooker gave rock and roll its sense of realism. Everyone always talks about Woodie Guthrie, Ramblin Jack and Little Richard when it comes to Bob Dylan’s influences. To me, he’s always sounded like nothing but a Hooker disciple.

Hooker's blues aren't one long song of dystopia. It’s still the blues in sound and spirit, and make no mistake that his was a hard story, but it's not a hard luck story. John Lee Hooker knew success.

The first record he ever recorded--1948's "Boogie Chillun"--reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B charts. So if Hooker is the referential post-war bluesman, and the first to be commercially successful, then where did his blues come from? And where will they continue to go? On with our story.

--Crawling King Snake

Having little conception of Northern urban life, Southern blacks migrated up to Detroit on the promise of Henry Ford's pledge of $5 a day, often risking all to escape their conditions and join a cousin or an aunt who had made it up and found work in the North.

Hooker's boyhood visitor Blind Blake recorded "Detroit Bound Blues" in 1928, singing, "I'm going to get me a job, up there in Mr. Ford's place, stop these eatless days from starin' me in the face." Of all the later bluesmen, Hooker had the greatest knack for riffin’ from memory and assimilating all of his disparate sources. He would rework standards--"I Left My Heart In San Francisco," Glenn Miller's "I'm In The Mood," "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer"--and call them his own.

He never forgot his train trip North. "Crawling King Snake" itself was a remake of Tony Hollins' 1941 recording, done in typically irreverent style by Hooker. The song is clearly informed by Hooker's hobo days: Hoboes hated the "snakes"--railroad switchmen adorned with an "S" shaped lapel button. A "Crawling King Snake" was the meanest switchman, a real bad ass. The Devil Incarnate.

Musical connections continue: Hooker's "Crawling King Snake" is virtually identical to Peetie Wheatstraw's "Road Tramp Blues," cut in 1938. Victoria Spivey, regarded as the greatest blues singer of the ‘20s and ‘30s, also employed “snake” imagery. She recorded "Black Snake Blues" as well as "Garter Snake Blues" with her long time partner Lonnie Johnson, and Johnson also played guitar on Peetie Wheatstraw's "Road Tramp Blues."

And in 1929, Blind Lemon Jefferson, another of Hooker’s boyhood house guests, cut "That Crawling Baby Blues," moving the theme closer to Hooker's adulterous interpretation: "Some women rocks the cradle, I declare she rules the home/ Married man rocks some other man's babe, fool thinks he's rockin' his own."

But it was Jefferson's serpentine imagery, in the 1926 recording of "That Black Snake Moan," and "Black Snake Dream Blues" a year later, that may have stayed with Hooker the most. Whether he actually heard any of these recordings is ultimately not totally knowable; the point is that the entire blues idiom is a small world, a conversation informed by a wonderful remark and the timelessness of the boogie.

--The Hastings Street Opera

By the late 1940s, Hastings Street was to Detroit what Beale Street was to Memphis--a boisterous, musical, tough strip of real life in the black community. A part of the Black Bottom section, Hastings Street was lined with clubs bearing names like Club Paradise, Club 666, The Band Box and Brown's Bar. The most famous chronicle of this period is in a record called "Hastings Street Opera, Parts I & II," recorded in Detroit by one Bob White, aka the Detroit Count. Hooker was very much a part of this musical community, as were Eddie Kirkland, Eddie Burns, Sippie Wallace, Baby Boy Warren, Cow Cow Davenport, Tampa Red and a young Yusaf Lateef.

Hooker worked up his brilliant signature "Boogie Chillun'" at Henry's Swing Club with Big Maceo Merriwhether, a popular boogie woogie piano player known for his song, "Detroit Jump." Another Merriwhether hit, "Maceo's 32-20," served as a snapshot of the Black Bottom area: "I walked all night with my 32-20 in my hand, looking for my woman, well, I found her with another man...when I catch a man with my woman I usually tear his playhouse down." The song is evil, mean, funny--and true.

Hooker cut nearly 300 sides between 1948-52. Among them was "John L's House Rent Boogie,” which used a Rent Party as a colorful device for overcoming dire financial situations. In reality, underclass blacks lived in unsanitary squalor. Attempts to move elsewhere were met with active hostility by the both the white populace and resettled blacks. The Northern dream was, to many, now a nightmare. Unfaithful husbands and wayward fathers, low wages, high rents and a shattered morality. In the mid-fifties, Hastings Street and the entire Black Bottom section was razed to clear a path for the Chrysler Freeway.

Hooker's career picked up late in his life, the result of 1988's The Healer and 1993's Mr. Lucky. Though they largely dilute the essence of Hooker's early gifts, the records feature modern recording and superstar guests that once again highlight the extent of his influence.

His duet with Van Morrison on "I Cover The Waterfront," Hooker's most ambitious and sentimental “reworking” of a standard, shows the disciple equal to the deity. The record's ghostly anguish in fact recalls much of Morrison's own work, particularly "Into The Mystic." In both songs, the ship the singer sees off the coast of the harbor is alternately a symbol of salvation and escape. Both songs suggest our natural state of isolation and helplessness in this universe, tempered only by brief respites of joy.

Morrison is more than an occasional duet partner; he's Hooker's practical and spiritual heir. He first recorded with Hooker in 1972, singing the standard "Never get Out Of These Blues Alive" on a now deleted ABC LP. Hooker returned the favor on his excellent 1977 live LP, The Cream, on which he broods through a chilling version of Morrison's nightmarish "T.B. Sheets."

Though we've passed over Hooker's days in the college, his version of "T.B. Sheets" and his relationship with Morrison brings our story full circle: Hooker, a black, American, pre-war blues artist, and Morrison, a white Irish, post-war rock and soul singer, represent an entire musical movement. One man is a symbol of America's primary musical innovation and the other Europe's embrace and development of that model.

"Yes I run around for months and months, from gin mill to gin mill to honky tonk, Now it's too late, just look at what I've done--Now I've got the dirty T.B."

That’s not a line from “TB Sheets.” I don’t know if Van Morrison ever actually knew of this 1929 recording, again by Victoria Spivey, when he recorded "T.B. Sheets," his own tale of illness, fever, and paranoia. But you can bet Hooker knew of it. If he didn't, he’d surely heard Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Pneumonia Blues," also cut in 1929.

How long song titles. impassioned ideas or a blues riff lingers on the wind, flowing out of a black man's clapboard house or on to a train in the deep South, then into the heart of a tough young kid in Belfast, is never easy to know. We'll also never know how an itinerant force of nature named John Lee Hooker came to embody an entire cultural tradition and even make it inclusive of his oppressors’ lives and desires. Let's just call it the enduring relevance of the blues, Hooker style.

2010-02-09T12:10:00.001-08:00

I've been a Pepsi lover for years. Overconsumption. New study finds link between pop and pancreatic cancer--deadly. Bye Bye pepsi 2day

2010-01-22T12:52:00.001-08:00

Do The Right Thing. Health Care Now.

http://ping.fm/f0iQ5

2010-01-21T18:37:00.001-08:00

No more politics. Affordable health care for all now.

Cut The Crap--Get Us Health Care We Can Afford

2010-01-20T13:29:00.000-08:00

Because I have the often mentioned, little understood "pre-existing condition," having had leukemia and a successful bone marrow transplant, I can only get health insurance through one insurer, Blue Cross. I cannot be a part of my family's policy, which would save us nearly $5000 a year in premiums, nor can I add them to my policy. My wife and children have a separate policy with American Community, who today doubled our premiums after a "review" of our policy. Translation: Either my wife or my kids went to the doctor last year, and may even had a prescription or two. Consequently we have what amounts an additional monthly mortgage payment to pay for health care. Even at that the co-pays are usurious. I-we-us--can't afford it. Period. Who can?

Now, because of the results of a special election in a distant state from mine, we're being told that the Obama health care plan is dead. I won't bore with you with the odious facts surrounding this country and our lack of a national health care plan; let's just say that we can't get out of our own way because of a ridiculous ideology.

The Massachusetts Senate race and its consequences crystallizes the problem: Debate is only about personality and the insipid left/right extremes of ideology; ideology wins, the media calls it "voter reaction to the present situation," and health care dies. Again and again, nothing gets done--we're the losers, time and again. Ideology is pointless; change the system.

The Republican candidate in Massachusetts, Scott Brown, wooed the Teabag/Libertarian crowd with the standard talk about "getting government off our backs." To what end? So these insurance companies can crawl further up our ass? I mean, where's ANY upside for us, the people in all of this pointless rhetoric?

Apologies for the scatological vocabulary, but I'm very angry, and feel insignificant and used. The mood of these times. I'll entertain electing anyone who can get something done. Probably what the Italians said before electing Mussolini, but here we are.

The populist refrain of "Throw the bums out and get new blood" holds no water these days. We see with the Kennedy seat that it's either continued status quo or the other extreme. So as an electorate we just bounce from pole to pole depending upon results, and nothing gets done.

Don't like the left? Vote the right in, with predictable results. Don't like the right, vote the left in. There's only an eyelash difference between them anyway, and the result is no results for us. They personally become enriched or empowered, as do the coterie of people who funded their election, who are usually already wealthy.

But we get stuck holding the bag. Health insurance, mortgages, credit, property insurance...it's getting very difficult to survive in this system. All of these libertarian tax zealots vote the likes of Scott Brown into the Senate because they're worried about taxes...that's the least of our worries. They never consider living with the alternative, which is not easy. For industrialized countries, we're among the least taxed, with the most services.

At least when I pay my taxes, I'm getting something for my dollars, or my fellow brothers & sisters are getting assistance, social programs or educations. Same cannot be said of my interactions with insurance companies, mortgage companies, phone companies, ad nauseum.

All the people in Congress are worried about media portrayal, so they posture. Mostly they're worried about maintaining power and influence, which they use in a frivolous game of Congressional pecking order. Stay in office, stay connected, keep the gravy train rollin'.

The health care question and process is surely complex, detailed, difficult and politically (and socially) combustible. But it's also very simple if we act from a philosophical--not ideological--point of view. And that begins with health care as an earned right upon birth.

After that, it's just about political will. Period. The Obama administration has thus far shown little political will outside of getting elected. Bring that same understanding of the time, place and people to the job. Just cut the crap and get it done. We're all dyin' on the vine out here. We need a simple, affordable health care plan. We can afford wars, both covert and semi-declared. We can afford bailouts for enormous and enormously corrupt corporations. Cut the ideological crap and give us a health care plan we can afford.

Comes A Time: Jill Jack's Songwriter Sessions

2010-01-04T12:07:00.000-08:00

Jill Jack is one of my longest held and best friendships in music. She sang with me in the early 90s, when both of us were taking the first broad, uncertain steps toward solo careers. Since then we’ve worked together not infrequently, been proud parents of kids at the same school (not parents of the same child, but hey it’s all a blur), and been friends and fans of each other’s work. We essentially have the same job—principal songwriter in a large band bearing our own name, which makes you de facto bandleader, conceptual visionary, reluctant employer, and automatic arbiter of musician’s complaints and frets. So we’ve had a lot of vocational issues to talk through and laugh about through the years.

If you’re reading this anywhere in Michigan, you’re likely aware that Jill needs no further explanation. She’s won, like two thousand Detroit Music Awards (actually 24 and counting), and has built an audience based on eclectic, intense and genuine live performances. Genuine is the defining term here. I’ve known few performers with less conflict between who they are on stage and off than Jill Jack. You get all of her in a performance, and then some.

Jill has also released several lovely cds in the past that fall loosely in the alt-country category to a lot of fans, but were always rock records with country leanings to my own ears. Love Hotel was one such terrific record, built on poetic metaphors and Jill’s clear, fetching voice. Her band has been a wonderful group for many years—Billy Brandt, himself an established folk artist and archivist, on guitar, mandolin and vocals; the brightly talented producer Nolan Mendenhall on bass; Ron Pangborn on drums, probably the finest drummer for songwriters and the specific idiosyncrasies of their songs in the Motor City; and pianist Dale Grisa, who has the talent, wisdom and restraint to approach songs with a sparse, melodic certainty.

All that musical experience and accomplished dexterity would be attenuated, however, if there weren’t compelling songs to sing and play. With her brand new cd/dvd, Songwriter Sessions, Jill delivers on the promise she’s been making to her adoring audiences in clubs and theaters for 15 years. It’s a record as brave as it is enjoyable. Jill, her band, and an extended group of musicians recorded all new material over two nights at the Hartland Music Hall in Hartland, Michigan in front of fresh audiences both nights. I’ve always loved Jill’s natural rapport with audiences, but she has had the guts here to forgo all spoken introduction to her songs and let them live or die on their own merits—a wise choice, and it succeeds with a shining warmth anyway.

The cd package is completed by a full length DVD concert film of the performances. It concludes with two bonus studio tracks, one of them being “Live Like There’s No Tomorrow.” I’d say if you want to know who Jill is as a person and artist, listen to this last song first, then move through the concert songs. It’s very difficult to complete a picture of your self, your world, and your music, a picture that your band and audience can understand and relate to, and Jill makes it sound easy with “Live Like There’s No Tomorrow.”

Writing, rehearsing and recording all unheard material with a large band is an enormous task and immense leap of faith, and Jill and her enhanced 9 piece band make it sound like it’s a well worn set, full of swampy rhythms, bluegrass harmonies, brilliant guitar and pedal steel playing and smart arrangements. Jill knows how to cast a band: Some of our area’s finest musicians help with this recording. Drew Howard on pedal steel and dobro, Jason Dennie on mandolin, Colin Linden on shimmering guitar parts, and Jen Sygit, Mark Iannace and daughter Emma Jack on vocals. As beautifully as it’s all sung and played, the material is crisply recorded and mixed by Neil Sever, Linden, Jason Fisher and Jim Kissling. Jill and her band will celebrate the release of Songwriter Sessions with a couple concerts this month--the first being January 9 at Callahan's in Auburn Hills, followed by a show January 15 at the Black Crystal Cafe in Ann Arbor.

But it’s Jill’s show. Where in the past her singing was a tug of war between Emmy Lou Harris and Dusty Springfield, or between a sweet, knowing country tone and a heartier soul delivery, she’s now firmly in control of her own tone and style. Her vocal command is buoyed by an understanding of her own melodic phrasing and the harmonic construction of her songs. Her songwriting has grown to seemingly include classic country (think Harlan Howard’s simplicity), traditional singer-songwriter stylings that she and I both grew up with (Joni Mitchell, acoustic Bob Seger, Bob Dylan) and even the sophisticated chord changes of Broadway giants Richard Rodgers or Cole Porter. The full effect is an artist and band in full bloom—a complete, sweet statement of living, loving and learning.

Songwriter Sessions is largely a quiet affair—intimate in its sound, seating and message. Where the songs were once built around Jill’s under-rated acoustic guitar playing, the rhythm section now delivers its own internal feel, swaying and grooving with Jill’s lyrics and, ultimately, her singing.

All 15 songs are tender, written and sung as affirmative maxims or detailed narratives—little movies for the ears. By keeping her arrangements unadorned and clean, Jill relies on her lyrics to carry the brunt of each song’s emotional tone. This further confirms what I meant by this record being brave—the lyric needs to be very much a part of life, and living, with each emotional detail carrying a sensory reality, something we can touch and see. No small feat, and it works. “My Heart’ll Never Be The Same” and “Child Within” exemplify this lyrical discipline the best, with “Tumbleweed” carrying on in the continuum of folk sing-alongs.

Jill’s music has matured to the point where many of her songs now sound obvious, i.e. they had to exist at some point. Almost like found melodies, or when you first hear a song and swear it should’ve been a song long before. It’s called connecting, and it’s the sign of a real artist, open to her own defeats, victories, hopes dashed, dreams fulfilled, her muse, her loneliness, her misplaced love, and her romantic successes. The songs carry those things we can’t easily discuss, one of art’s higher purposes.

It’s thrilling to hear another musician realize any artistic dream; when it’s a friend, it’s as inspiring as it is thrilling. In any scene, in any era, in any part of the world, there’s a tendency to forever catalogue someone where they were when you first discovered them. We change and grow and develop and become more than we were, however. We are not what we were when. Not always, anyway. If you want living proof of this premise, live with Jill Jack and her Songwriter Sessions for a few days.

Don't Bust Your Conk--Cab Calloway's Hepster Dictionary

2009-11-24T15:16:00.000-08:00

A few entries from THE NEW CAB CALLOWAY'S HEPSTER'S DICTIONARY, Language of Jive (1944 edition). How much we still use these words and phrases, particularly among musicians. Sinatra had his own language as well, with "bird" (penis) and "Harvey" (square guy) being among the entries. Nowhere near as hep, er, hip as Cab. Check these out.

Accordion: Squeeze-Box or Groan-Box
Ain't coming on that tab: won't accept the proposition. Usually abbr. to "I ain't coming."
Armstrongs: musical notes in the upper register, high trumpet notes.
Barbecue: the girl friend, a beauty
Battle: a very homely girl, a crone.
Beat: Lacking anything. Ex, "I am beat for my cash", "I am beat to my socks" (lacking everything).
Beat it out: play it hot, emphasize the rhythym.
Beat up the chops (or the gums): to talk, converse, be loquacious.
Bible: the gospel truth. Ex., "It's the bible!"
Blew their wigs: excited with enthusiasm, gone crazy.
Blip: something very good. Ex., "That's a blip"; "She's a blip."
Blow your wig: get excited, enthusiastic
Boot: to give. Ex., "Boot me that glove."
Break it up: to win applause, to stop the show.
Bust your conk: apply yourself diligently, break your neck.
Canary: girl vocalist.
Capped: outdone, surpassed.
Chirp: female singer.
Clambake: ad lib session, every man for himself, a jam session not in the groove.
Clarinet: Licorice Stick or Gob Stick
Comes on like gangbusters: plays, sings, or dances in a terrific manner, par excellence in any department. Sometimes abbr. to "That singer really comes on!"
Corny: old-fashioned, stale.
Creeps out like the shadow: "comes on," but in smooth, suave, sophisticated manner.
Crumb crushers: teeth.
Cups: sleep. Ex., "I gotta catch some cups."
Dicty: high-class, nifty, smart.
Dig: meet. Ex., "I'll plant you now and dig you later."
Doghouse: bass fiddle.
Doss: sleep. Ex., "I'm a little beat for my doss." [See dosshouse]
Down with it: through with it.
Drums: Suitcase, Hides, or Skins
Fall out: to be overcome with emotion. Ex., "The cats fell out when he took that solo."
Final: to leave, to go home. Ex., "I finaled to my pad" (went to bed); "We copped a final" (went home).
Fine dinner: a good-looking girl.
Fraughty issue: a very sad message, a deplorable state of affairs.
Freeby: no charge, gratis. Ex., "The meal was a freeby."
Frisking the whiskers: what the cats do when they are warming up for a swing session.
Frolic pad: place of entertainment, theater, nightclub
Fruiting: fickle, fooling around with no particular object.
Gabriels: trumpet players.
Get in there: go to work, get busy, make it hot, give all you've got.
Gimme some skin: shake hands.
Got your boots on: you know what it is all about, you are a hep cat, you are wise.
Got your glasses on: you are ritzy or snooty, you fail to recognize your friends, you are up-stage.
Gravy: profits.
Groovy: fine. Ex., "I feel groovy." [Didn't know it was such an old expression.]
Ground grippers: new shoes.
Gut-bucket: low-down music.
Hard: fine, good. Ex., "That's a hard tie you're wearing."
Hard spiel: interesting line of talk. [From Yiddish]
Hincty: conceited, snooty.
Hype: build up for a loan, wooing a girl, persuasive talk, cajole.
Ickaroo: someone who can't dance or dig the jive
Icky: one who is not hip, a stupid person, can't collar the jive.
Igg: to ignore someone. Ex., "Don't igg me!)
In the groove: perfect, no deviation, down the alley.
Jam: improvised swing music. Ex., "That's swell jam."
Jelly: anything free, on the house.
Joint is jumping: the place is lively, the club is leaping with fun.
Jumped in port: arrived in town.
Kill me: show me a good time, send me.
Killer-diller: a great thrill.
Knock: give. Ex., "Knock me a kiss."
Kopasetic: absolutely okay, the tops.
Land O'Darkness: Harlem
Lay some iron: to tap dance. Ex., "Jack, you really laid some iron that last show!"
Lay your racket: to jive, to sell an idea, to promote a proposition.
Lindy Crush: Girl or Guy you would just LOVE to dance with.
Line: cost, price, money. Ex., "What is the line on this drape" (how much does this suit cost)? "Have you got the line in the mouse" (do you have the cash in your pocket)? Also, in replying, all figures are doubled. Ex., "This drape is line forty" (this suit costs twenty dollars).Lock (v.): to acquire something
Lock up: to acquire something exclusively. Ex., "He's got that chick locked up"; "I'm gonna lock up that deal."
Melted out: broke.
Mess: something good. Ex., "That last drink was a mess."
Mitt pounding: applause.
Muggin': making 'em laugh, putting on the jive.
Murder: something excellent or terrific. Ex., "That's solid murder, gate!"
Nix out: to eliminate, get rid of. Ex., "I nixed that chick out last week"; "I nixed my garments" (undressed).
Off-time jive: a sorry excuse, saying the wrong thing.
Off the cob: corny, out of date.
Out of the world: perfect rendition. Ex., "That sax chorus was out of the world."
Piano: Storehouse or Ivories
Ready: 100 per cent in every way. Ex., "That fried chicken was ready."
Ride: to swing, to keep perfect tempo in playing or singing
Righteous: splendid, okay. Ex., "That was a righteous queen I dug you with last black."
Rock me: send me, kill me, move me with rhythym.
Sad: terrible. Ex., "That man is sadder than a map." "That was the saddest meal I ever collared."
Sam got you: you've been drafted into the army.
Saxophone: Plumbing or Reeds
Sky piece: hat.
Spoutin': talking too much.
Stache: to file, to hide away, to secrete.
To dribble: to stutter. Ex., "He talked in dribbles."
Togged to the bricks: dressed to kill, from head to toe.
Trilly: to leave, to depart. Ex., "Well, I guess I'll trilly."
Trombone: Tram or Slush-Pump
Truck: to go somewhere. Ex., "I think I'll truck on down to the ginmill (bar)."
Tuba: Foghorn
Twister to the slammer: the key to the door.
V-8: a chick who spurns company, is independent, is not amenable.
Vibraphone: Ironworks
Violin: Squeak-Box
Wrong riff: the wrong thing said or done. Ex., "You're coming up on the wrong riff."
Xylophone: Woodpile
Yarddog: uncouth, badly attired, unattractive male or female.
Zoot suit: the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit

Boogie Stomp! American Piano Masters

2009-10-13T02:54:00.000-07:00

Ten days ago, I caught a show downtown that reminded me with fresh vigor why I'm a musician. So this particular column is less a performance review than it is a celebration of that show and all that’s good and true in musical expression. It was a night of American music as played by two American Masters, with its own point of view, its own deep intentions and traditions, and total freedom from the traps of age, fashion, era, whatever. I’m not into the whole “old is better” thing either; there’s plenty of valuable and great music being made today. This show just had all the goods.

The show in question was on Friday night, October 2, at the ornate Gem Theater. Titled Boogie Stomp!, it’s a simple premise—two pianists, Bob Seeley and Bob Baldori, playing stride, boogie-woogie, blues and backbeat rock & roll on twin concert grand pianos. Between songs they talk about their lives, careers and influences with an anecdotal ease that creates that rarest of things—the artists and audience in a shared revelry that then creates this third presence in the room. A higher love. As performing musicians, it’s what we all strive for with every show.

The relationship between Seeley and Baldori began when they met at a tribute to Chuck Berry's original piano player, Johnny Johnson. They started working together soon after Baldori went out and sat in at Seeley's regular gig at Charley's Crab in Troy. A mutual interest in the "two piano" boogie style of legendary greats Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons led them to work out some of the original four hand classics. They also discovered a common repertoire of mutually familiar blues, boogie and jazz tunes that Baldori could also double on harmonica. From there it was a short step to creating original pieces for their live show.

A brief look back at this mongrel of a genre: By the late 1930s and throughout the '40s, the world of jazz and popular music was dominated by what was known as “The Big Three" of Boogie Woogie piano---Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons, and Meade Lux Lewis. Their style was called Boogie, but their playing covered a country mile, and included jazz, blues, swing, stride, ragtime, barrelhouse, and the roots of rock and roll.

In this age of adult attention deficiency, rapid resolution and the endless catering to juvenilia, Boogie Stomp! and both Bobs are a welcome antidote. Both men are over 60; both perform with the vitality of 25 year olds. More importantly, both men illuminate, in slightly varied ways, this long river of American music right before our eyes and ears.

Seeley is the last living connection to the founders of blues and boogie—Sippie Wallace, Meade Lux Lewis, Big Maceo Merriwether, even the legendary executive and talent scout John Hammond. He’s honored the world over as the finest living stride and boogie piano player, winning competitions and performing in European music meccas like Paris and Moscow annually. He's a musical God in Europe. An indomitable 82 that would pass for 55 at any point, Seeley sits with the terse, rounded shoulders of a boxer and plays with a rumbling, clarion intensity. Pure magic.

Baldori had a Top 10 hit in 1966 with his band The Woolies, covering Bo Diddley’s seminal “Who Do You Love” with producer Lou Adler. He then became one of Chuck Berry’s indispensable sidemen and friends, playing with rock’s founder everywhere from the White House to the Silverdome over the last 30 years. His playing has deep roots in early electric blues--Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and Memphis Slim are dominant, but this is extravagantly alive music in the here and now, not some vintage period piece relic.

Between these two men, a musical continuum of 100 years is writ large, stomped out and hand delivered with the dynamic thrust of a freight train. Baldori is more in the Johnny Johnson--Professor Longhair style while Seeley actually learned his chops from Lewis. He has a lighter touch than Lewis however--more poetic, like Jimmy Yancey playing Beethoven on a bender. In another day, both players might've been called Cat House piano players. Both have booming left hands that are like granite in their time keeping.

Baldori, coming from rock & roll and Chicago Blues, is more the overt showman. His harp playing is as exciting as anyone since Paul Butterfield or a young James Cotton, with a bullrush of distorted notes quickly giving away to bright, melodic runs and at times comic physical expression. Between songs he lays out the genesis of all this music, where it went and what it became, while Seeley tells stories about his vast career with self effacing wit.

Is Boogie Stomp! blues? R&B? Rock & Roll? Boogie-Woogie? Jazz? It’s all that, plus the historical oral tradition of the shaman, the elder or high priest. Is it academic? Nah. Is it history? Yea, but it’s way more fun than school ever was. All this ran through my mind as these guys were replicating the famous 1938 night at Carnegie Hall when Hammond joined Ammons, Lewis and Pete Johnson together for a performance that launched what was called the “boogie craze.” All these complimentary styles—from Boogie to Rock to Blues to Soul—are creations and extensions of the black experience in America. Both Bobs are white, but they set all that straight in their historical overview.

Now, I have to make known this small disclaimer, although my exuberance for this show was not increased by our friendship. When I was 19, I had two once-in-a-lifetime mentors. First was Boogie Bob Baldori himself, who put me in his band when I was greener than green. I could barely play a lick, and my hip quotient was zero. But he saw something he liked, and he taught me everything--how to work an audience, how to wrap a cord after a gig, how to listen to each other on stage, how to conduct business. He taught me about keeping tempo, using dynamics, how something quiet can kill an audience (in a good way), and how a band should work with and around the singer. He taught me where the back of the beat is. He turned me on to Howlin Wolf, Robert Johnson, Henry Adams and Luis Bunuel. He took me to Chicago repeatedly to see the best blues acts, where I'd meet these eccentric characters deep inside the music business. It's one of those debts you can never repay--you just try to live up to it.

Through Bob and his band, I was soon playing bass on some dates with Chuck Berry, who taught me about guitar playing, syncopation, feel, lyric writing and vocal clarity. Here I was working with the guy who literally wrote the book. Listen to Chuck sing—he enunciates every syllable, like the King’s English.

Baldori and Seeley have now shot enough footage all over the world that a documentary also called Boogie Stomp! will soon be finished. It will document how the basic elements of boogie woogie---rhythm and improvisation over a blues form--became the backbone of American music. Boogie Stomp!will also tell the story of the two Bobs and their unlikely pairing--two heads, four hands and two pianos that almost blew the roof off that lovely old Gem. The joint was packed, and at curtain's close we were all still standing and cheering. Do yourself a favor...see Boogie Stomp! when it comes 'round again, hopefully during the holidays.

Don't just wait for the flick.

The House I Lived In: Frank Sinatra & His Music

2009-09-21T08:37:00.000-07:00

It seems like Frank Sinatra and his music are more alive today than when he was actually with us. TV shows, remastered re-issued cds, Vegas tributes and now a Twyla Tharp Broadway revue featuring his music called "Come Fly With Me"--Frank is everywhere these days. Loved, revered and admired for his tough, take no crap attitude and of course all the wondrous music.

It's nothin' new to me. Frank's always been in my house or in my head. Growing up, Sinatra’s music filled my house. As a boy I recall the presence of his voice being a symptom of good times--parties, Saturday nights, perfume and cigarettes, cuff links sweeping down to pat my hair. People briefly at the top of their game. Certain songs--”Fly Me To The Moon,” “Tangerine,” “Where Or When”--still evoke the fragile good fortune that comes with familial and social blessing. Sinatra is so laden with family emotion and generational demarcation that writing about him has seemed daunting.

In my adolescence, Sinatra became all that was square and phony: anathema to the counterculture, actually now the dominant rock and roll culture. When compared to rock’s songwriters, songwriters like Gershwin, Porter, Van Huesen, Cahn and Kern seemed like Tin Pan Alley irrelevance. That's what we thought anyway. It was not the only thing I was wrong about. I now know that the Sinatra songbook, particularly the songs of Cole Porter, represent stylized imagination at its most refined. Genius is often one word where there once were eight. And the currency of timeless work is in tackling the big subjects: Love, Death, Aging, Faith and Loneliness.

Anyway, my father hated rock and I hated Frank. Our stalemate was beautifully balanced. I’m not entirely sure when the thaw came, but, to paraphrase Mark Twain, I can’t believe how much the old man has learned in the last few years. There are still some things that can put a young listener off on Sinatra--his mythical meanness, his ribbing of Sammy Davis in the Rat Pack days (which was extremely misleading; Sinatra was an ardent civil rights activist), his clumsy interpretation of rock songs (in George Harrison’s “Something” Frank sings, “You stick around, Jack, it may show”), his punchy sentimentality, his ultimate descent into self parody. (All of the greats, with their style once so powerfully fresh and seminal, seem to eventually erode into self parody.)

Like many of this century’s great artists Sinatra is highly enigmatic. James Isaacs points out in his liner notes to Sinatra In Paris that there’s an artistic schizophrenia attendant to Sinatra’s genius: There is Sinatra--an artist worthy of mention in the same breath as Picasso and Casals--and Frank--everybody’s Pal Joey, the King of the Ring-A-Ding-Ding, in Dave Marsh’s words “the original Gangsta rapper.” It’s the difference between his singing voice, that cello-like instrument sustaining rosewood notes and romantic dreams of The Love, and his speaking voice, which is never more than a few short blocks from Hoboken via Las Vegas.

The cocky swagger fronts the bruised feelings--That's Frank. My father has always said that Sinatra achieved his tone from having his vocal cords stomped on, from getting kicked around. Sinatra was washed up a bit at 38, between recording contracts, singing poorly, divorced and hopelessly in love with Ava Gardner, not working as much as he had in his “Voice” period.

There’s little question that he went on to become the greatest interpretive singer we’ve ever heard. It was Frank who perpetrated the macho myth; Sinatra, on the other hand, lived to sing. He never condescended to his audience. Instead he increasingly valued his audience and moved closer to it as he aged. He eventually transcended popular culture completely and made age and enduring--rock’s great enemies--his most potent subject, save love.

I have a bootleg of Frank, Dean and Sammy at Sam Giancana’s club in Chicago, the Villa Venice, in November of 1962. The height of their powers. It’s hilarious, poignant, utterly embarrassing and totally dated--great period piece farce. Any good singing, even any respect for the audience’s expectations, are secondary to boozing. Out of the blue a woman, a fan from Milwaukee, hesitantly approaches the stage. Says she drove all night and can’t she please hear a serious song? Martin tells her to buy an album. Much laughter. Frank, meaner, mockingly offers her bus fare home. When she insists on hearing “Nancy” there’s an enormous sea change: Frank becomes Sinatra.

Along with “Night and Day,” “Nancy (With The Laughing Face)” was something of a charmed talisman for Sinatra; he would eventually record it four times before retiring. But on this night he becomes contrite, shuts Dean and the crowd up, calls her request “fair and reasonable” and proceeds to kill the song. Not a dry eye in the house. Frank knew where his bread was buttered; Sinatra loved his audience and had the goods to reach both their hearts and souls.

Ironically, Sinatra actually hurried the demise of the big bands he loved so much by ensuring that the front man was the focal point of the performance. It’s what he did with the projection of language that kills me, even after much hard-headed analysis. Instead of using melisma or even “sung” syllables, Sinatra developed a legato conversational quality that emphasized meaning as much, if not more, than melody. In another irony, it was this quality of Sinatra’s that then paved the way for rock’s great lyrical expressionists--Dylan, Lennon and Joni Mitchell. When they first showed up, Frank hated ‘em. Same with Elvis. By the late 60s he was doing TV with Elvis and regularly recording rock related material.

Every singer--really anybody who sings--marvels at Sinatra’s physical gifts. It’s been said that his jaw has a certain shape that accounts for some unusual projection of sound, etc. One thing is true. When he sang, nothing but sound came from his mouth; that is, very little breath or forced vibrato accompanied the full voice. In this sense his instrument was much like a cello--a brandy soaked tone reflected from wood and string.

Sinatra also did much to invent the concept album, an innovation usually associated with Sgt. Pepper or Tommy. While at Capitol in the 50s he alternated humongous concoctions of swing--Songs For Young Lovers (1954) Come Dance With Me (1959)--with sad song cycles like In The Wee Small Hours and Where Are You? 1958's Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely is simply one of the finest collection of mood songs ever recorded. “What’s New,” “Angel Eyes,” “One For My Baby” and “Blues In The Night” all on one record. Of course much credit goes to a trio of brilliant arrangers--Billy May, Gordon Jenkins and the unmatched Nelson Riddle--for this amazing emotional range over the years.

After starting Reprise Records in 1961, Sinatra had one unqualified triumph, 1965's September Of My Years, and a late 60s string of very interesting failures. But it’s the love songs we’ll forever expect--no, need--from Sinatra. Love songs are becoming a scarce commodity today. And no one sings of the Big Love anymore, that nostalgic notion that says that action is larger than intent.

My father used to tell me, once a day it seems like now, to TURN THAT GUITAR DOWN and get a hair cut, put on a tux and make a livin’ singing Sinatra songs on cruise ships. And my buddies and I would drag our ass into the garage, turn up the guitars and laugh at how short sighted and unhip he was. Now I call up the old man and he’s listening to my own record in the background. I’ve been trying to get him to listen to some of these remastered Sinatra cds for almost six months. I can’t get him to listen, can’t get him to talk about how great Frank is. He wants to talk about rock & roll or my music, of all things. Our stalemate remains beautifully balanced.

The GM Bankruptcy and the Failed Promise: Next Time Kiss Me First

2009-09-02T11:05:00.000-07:00

In Detroit in the fall of 2009, to be pissed off or scared is nearly the norm--and I'm not alone. Like many of the 122,000 salaried GM retirees (and their wives, husbands and children) who are in the process of getting comprehensively screwed by what is or was General Motors, the US government, and the US bankruptcy court in the Southern District of New York that's handling the GM bankruptcy, I'm bitter.

Nearly thirty years ago, my father, a GM employee until he retired in 1989, received a life insurance policy from GM as a form of compensation. It's something he was proud of, something that gave him real peace of mind over the years.

Last week, at 85 and in poor health, he received a letter from GM and the newly-involved Met Life insurance company stating that the entire policy was cancelled immediately, although he could re-apply within 31 days to pay his own premiums for an individual policy of up to $100,000. The monthly premium for that amount--a fraction of his long-held existing policy--would be $847 a month. Not possible for most folks, let alone a widower on a pension. And it comes with another lovely little clause: if he were to die within two years of initiating this policy, the only benefits paid out would be the collected premiums, not the $100,000.

Going off an actuarial table that I found at the Social Security Administration website, if an 85 year old man were to actually buy the full amount of the policy he held for all those years, premiums would be more than $45,000 for a single year. Then, consider that term life insurance policies hold no cash value, and that the actuarial tables show a one-year mortality rate for 85-year olds of about 11%. The bottom line, as corporate lemmings like to say, is this: There is not enough -- and there was never going to be enough -- money in the so-called bail-out to pay for any sustained period of time for the impacted retirees and their beneficiaries. When it comes to the bail-out, the bankers got theirs, the insurance giants got theirs, but the auto companies and their employees got theirs from behind.

This is of course morally reprehensible. Disgusting. Had he known 35 years ago that this would happen to his policy in his late years, he surely would've bought adequate life insurance along the way. That opportunity is now ripped away from him, gone. My mother passed away in 2008, so this next disturbing aspect is not an issue with our family. But the question looms: What of the thousands of other men and women of his age who are GM retirees who will now leave elderly spouses and impaired dependents penniless upon their own death?

My dad epitomizes the Greatest Generation. He was a lieutenant in the Air Force during WWII, came home, went to MSU, married and began a family. He then worked at the GM Assembly plant in Flint after the war, on the floor, before returning to his hometown of Saginaw to run the credit arm for Draper Chevrolet for many years. He's always been a car man, and he gave the auto trade his life. He began working as a salaried GM employee in Trenton, NJ in 1971, and stayed there for several years before being promoted to Detroit in the early 80s, where he oversaw a field team of 15 lobbyists working in the country's state capitals. He retired in 1989.

He was raised with a sense of obligation toward his community. You got involved and aligned your own ambition with the common welfare of your place and your people. He was the mayor of Saginaw from 1962-'66, nominated the city's first black mayor, and twice ran for State Senate. He was President of the Michigan Municipal League. While at GM, he aggressively and successfully fought for our current seat belt laws.
So when I think of my dad, I think of someone who always treated life as a progressive, optimistic adventure. He loves America and believed in and loved every minute of his GM work life. To him, life was a grand experience, to give in to the cliché, a journey of possibilities. I know few people more beloved by others than my dad, and it's probably because I've never known a better listener. His manner is to always inquire about your welfare, rarely talk of himself—and listen. His life has been made up of people of all walks, all means, all creeds, and colors. He lived his life not as he found it, but as he made it happen.

He grew up on the east side of Saginaw in the 20s & 30s, a place that formed his values and convictions But as he aged, he accepted the world’s change, and found in himself the ability to change, to think less conventionally, to think broadly about things he once thought were absolute. I think of him as someone who held in his heart the fire’s center. Someone who was alive–alive with talk, alive with faith, alive with friendship, alive with responsibility, wanting many things at the same time, always saying the reassuring thing, ambitious while still being someone you could count on, always.

And even if he thought his life to be at times too hard or frustrating, he never shared that desperation; he kept on greeting the good and the bad with the same face. And when things were really good, and he was at GM in its best days, he never lost his common touch. And when things were really bad, he did that hardest thing, and put his head down and took care of his family while maintaining his dignity.

Now it's really tough however. His health care has been decreased as well, but not eliminated in full. Amid all the recent bailout billions, banking loans, insurance industry debt forgiven, and exorbitant bonuses paid to men and women who performed poorly, something like this is being done to a man like my dad, and thousands like him. After believing things were one way for more than 30 years, to find that you're uninsured and not feeling well is very much akin to the Bernard Madoff situation, which was considered the crime of the century. And the government is finding money for those plaintiffs! Is the GM Bankruptcy also a crime?

It was, of course, the members of President Obama's task force who forced this--a result that said such costs would not be supported any longer. And it was Obama's resolution that said that public resistance, from the likes of Rick Waggoner, would be met by getting kicked to the curb (which he was, and quickly). Now that the political will has been shown to cut off these costs (and with precious little blow-back from anyone anywhere), it's not as if there will be political will to restore them. So I hold President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner accountable in this, for their lack of vision, and lack of concern.

It won't be GM, and it won't be the government, and it won't be Met Life, but possibly there's enough in something called the Motors Liquidation Corporation till to do something for these retirees. Or, there may one day be a class action settlement on all this, but it will be well after my dad's gone, and will likely be next to worthless, pennies on the dollar. There's no legal recourse, no answer from congressmen I've contacted, no answer from Met Life or GM. New GM (GM Reinvention) doesn't want to know about "old" GM--that's also very clear.

This last generation of GM corporate leaders, from Waggoner, Bob Lutz and John Smith on down, should be held directly accountable, their hundreds of millions in bonuses made conspicuous in comparison to the retirees' losses. In fact I hold the last generation of GM leaders responsible for the litany of failure that crushed GM, once the safest bet in the world: the Fiat fiasco, the bungling of the Oldsmobile shutdown, the Aztec, the Hummer, the disastrous end to the original Electric Vehicle program, and of course the poor financial planning that ultimately left the company far too vulnerable to the events of the past year.

A Michigan-based group called the GM Retirees Association hired a San Francisco law firm to bring their cause before the Bankruptcy Court, with no success. As their lead counsel said to me yesterday, "The first thing we learn in law school is that very few wrongs in this world are actually redressed."

The beautiful go blameless, part XXIV.

Little Willie John Weather

2009-08-20T16:42:00.000-07:00

If you're into soul music as much as I am, and particularly early Detroit soul, you're gonna love this. 'Cuz two wonderful things happened this summer regarding the greatest, in my opinion, of all the soul singers, Little Willie John.

Actually three things happened this summer that remind me of LWJ and his continuing influence, but the third thing is not good at all--the sad sad death of Michael Jackson. To me, MJ was the last of something I revere and love--the brilliant string of solo romantic male soul singers, possibly starting with Nolan Strong or Clyde McPhatter and definitely ending with Michael. So many greats came between them--LWJ, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, David Ruffin, Donny Hathaway, James Carr, Ben E. King, Luther Vandross. As you can see, Detroit figures famously in this continuum of singers.

On to the better things I mentioned earlier. One of them is personal, in this sense--I was contacted through a friend by Little Willie John's son, Kevin John, who still lives in Detroit and preserves his father's lofty reputation. I was thrilled to get to know him a little bit, and look forward to more talks about music with him. We've had some good exchanges about his dad, and about soul music in general. The other event is something we all can get with: a new collection called Little Willie John,Heaven All Around Me: The Later King Sessions, 1961-63,on Ace Records out of the UK, released earlier this summer.

Now, some brief introductory comments seem necessary when discussing early Detroit artists like Little Willie John, Jackie Wilson or Nolan Strong. It's necessary to discuss genre, location and intent--what they were tryin' to do-- with these singers. Genre is the primary premise for organizing and expressing the emotional details of their music; location informs why they sang what they sang and how they sang it. Their shared intent was probably simple–to make some money singing exciting songs before their career ended. But in one sense, they were all saved by soul, their music left immortal by how they sang.

Little Willie John's high tenor singing, in songs like "Talk To Me, Talk To Me" and "Fever," is best described as thunderclap music--music to be heard from an open window on an evening when the sky is turning somber just before dark. The clouds are steel grey and heavy with rain, and the air--it's late August--is fixed with heat. This is Little Willie John weather. Right now, tonight.His musical offspring are also soul singers: Bob Seger knew where to find his own soul; he knew the distance from Detroit to Memphis to be easily traveled. It's this connection, via Ann Peebles' "Come To Mama" (changed to "Come To Papa" for 1973's Beautiful Loser) and Otis Clay's "Tryin' To Live My Life Without You," that illuminates soul's colorless, borderless state.

The story goes that Seger was so disgusted with the Eagles' crappy1980 rip-off of "Tryin To Live My Life Without You" (give a listen to the bass line and rhythm guitar on "The Long Run") that he had to cut it himself and get it right. "Tryin' To Live My Life Without You" is introduced by Seger on his live Nine Tonight as an "old Memphis song" yet it was actually recorded by Clay with the Hi rhythm section and the Memphis Horns in Chicago in 1972. Seger may have felt a sense of debt to the song's composer, George Jackson. Jackson supplied Seger, for better or worse, with his monumental hit "Old Time Rock and Roll." If Seger felt indebted, it was probably to the soul tradition; he's one of the few white rockers who can truly deliver in a strict soul idiom.

My point is that the essential Detroit music is sewn by a thread; George Clinton has as much in common with Iggy Pop as he does with Nolan Strong; Kid Rock channels Seger as well as David Ruffin. It’s not easily traced; it’s just something you feel.And when viewed as disparate elements in a related social chain, the music seems to say much more. Smokey Robinson & Stevie Wonder’s "Tears of a Clown," for instance, at first listen just another jilted love song, tells the story of the black attitude in Detroit in 1968: "If there's a smile on my face/ it's only there trying to fool the public." While Smokey wasn’t the activist others were, he spoke for far more than the lonely people in his songs. And the thing about Motown--who wasn't a listener? Hell, who still isn't?

As they were building Motown, Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson were quite vigilant in acknowledging the sources of their new sound. Gordy, as a songwriter for Jackie Wilson and others, was both a fan and participant in the 50's doo-wop, R&B and rockabilly scene that was to fuel the popular music of the sixties and seventies. Authenticity was something Gordy concerned himself with, although commercial appeal was most important to the Motown machine. Today, there's little question that Motown was, as Gerald Early writes, "The most triumphant black sound in American history." It was not only real, it was real good.

But Little Willie John, recording in the 50s and early 60s before his death at a very young age, wason his own. His music is a product of his own passion, vision, humor and ambition. Life isn't fair; a life chasing hit records is even less fair. So I'm not trying to naively demand that we remember a great singer like LWJ, who is certainly beyond obscure to a modern audience, but to illuminate him as a model and clarify his connection to the artists and music today. (Check out how the spoken middle section of Nolan Strong's 1954 hit "The Wind," for instance, sounds like a scratchy outake from Michael Jackson's Thriller.)And while LWJ earnestly sought "cross over" success, it was on his terms. For Willie John and Nolan Strong, it meant the chance to challenge white America's dominance of the fifties and sixties, an opportunity to reject the dominant ideology of the culture they saw and felt yet could not fully participate in. Willie John in particular shrugged off the final degree of American alienation by refusing to borrow from white culture. He paid dearly for this, but his immediate musical offspring--James Brown--succeeded in subverting all ideology. He invented a new music and language.

Barely five feet tall and only 21 when he recorded Joe Seneca’s "Talk to Me, Talk To Me," Little Willie John sings the song in a voice of desperate passion. He sounds twenty years older, a man prematurely celebrating and disowning his own mortal soul. As he pleads with his lover to talk with him, his voice implies what will happen if she doesn't.

"Talk To Me, Talk To Me" wasn't Little Willie John's biggest hit. He is best known for "Fever," which he recorded in 1956 and took to #1 on the R&B chart, and "Sleep," a 1923 song that Benny Carter and Les Paul had cut in the early fifties and Willie John adapted to vocals in 1959. "Fever," of course, was recorded later by countless other artists, most notably Peggy Lee, and became a top ten pop hit, though Little Willie John's version far outsold hers.

Born William Edward John in Arkansas in 1937 (some sources say William Brooks) John moved to Detroit in the forties when his father, Mervis, took a job at Dodge Main. Willie John began singing in the United Five, a gospel quintet fronted by his elder sister Mabel.He was only 14 in 1951 when Johnny Otis, the R&B band leader who was also a scout for Syd Nathan's King Records in Cincinnati, heard Little Willie John sing at an amateur talent show at the Paradise Theater in Detroit. Nathan passed on him and instead signed the Royals, who appeared on the same bill. By the time of their monstrous 1954 "Work With Me, Annie" smash, the Royals had become Hank Ballard & the Midnighters.

Willie John then sang big band standards with Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Paul "Hucklebuck" Williams,and recorded with the legendary Joe Von Battle in Detroit before Nathan signed him in 1955. At one of Little Willie John's initial sessions, King producer Henry Glover sped up a simple jump blues song of Titus Turner's called "All Around The World" and Little Willie John had his first hit.While the song was still on the R&B charts, Willie John wrote and recorded the sadly elegant "Need Your Love So Bad," a song of such sensual feeling that it's hard to believe the singer is only 19. To hear his tortured tenor crackle out of an AM radio in the fading light of an evening in 1956 must have been more than haunting. This was R&B that was no longer ambivalent in its aim or origin. It was carnal concentration in the white Eisenhower world. But his singing said that everything was now up for grabs.

"Fever," recorded March 1, 1956, followed "Need Your Love So Bad," and Little Willie John was a pop star. Somewhatarrogant and a notorious spendthrift, Willie John began angering the wrong people. Though he still recorded wonderful material--"Young Girl," "Person To Person," "There is Someone In This World For Me"--he didn't have another hit until "Talk To Me, Talk To Me" in 1958 and "Sleep" a year later. In 1961, the bottom fell out. "It Only Hurts A Little While" was the last performance of note; he was dropped by King after a final recording session in 1963. This is the period the new Ace cd deals with, and it's brilliant.

After stabbing a man to death in a Seattle cafe, Willie John was sent to prison in Walla Walla, Washington, where he died on May 27, 1968, not yet 32 years old. This is where his story takes on the Faustian myth of the blues man Robert Johnson: men so distinctly gifted at such a young age that they must have sold their soul to the devil for their talent. Robert Johnson is "saved" by history's recognition of his genius--a genius that rock and roll has since built much of its own myth upon.

Rumors of vicious beatings and fights with inmates abound (James Brown went to see him in prison and Willie John greeted him in a wheelchair), but his death is largely credited to pneumonia, although the 1968 death certificate reads heart attack. Brown later cut a tribute LP, Thinking of Little Willie John...and Other Nice Things, but Little Willie John, who seemed to understand love and loss greater than any other gospel trained soul singer ever, remains a legend neglected. Check out the ACE cd if you love impassioned singing in any style. It's Little Willie John weather.

Michigan In Summer/Radio Bummer

2009-08-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

I recently spent a week up north with my family at a place on Lake Huron--same spot I've been going to since I was a boy. Just a couple hours away, it's in vast contrast to life here in Detroit. Driving north on M-13, which splits off from I-75 just north of Bay City, you enter some kind of agrarian time warp. Driving through these towns--Kawkawlin, Linwood, Pinconning, Omer, Au Gres--my nostalgia mingles with all the recent changes.

What this economy has wrought on these small towns. Twenty years ago these were towns filled with small factories, mills, farms and small services. Back then, there was just a hint of the encroaching exurbia, a gentrified, touristy, more cosmopolitan northern town. Now these towns show only traces of the old order--farmers still raise a fine spray of silt behind their tractors on summer afternoons, and manufacturers still empty a few workers out to roadside bars at midday. But not like they once did. M-13 is now like a traveling flea market; boats, cars, furniture, clothing–everything is for sale on lawns for miles. I noticed that even the homes themselves are often for sale.

The core of life is now about entertainment and lifestyle enrichment; we all seem to be consumed with enjoying enjoyment. The farms are smaller, the mills and factories are largely gone, and every little ranch house has a satellite dish. I'm certainly a part of the entertainment culture, but I'm also resistant to change. I like it the way it was--which is of course now only in my memory.

In the middle of our week, we drove up to Tawas, a gleaming resort town rimmed with cottage motels right on the water. On the road to Tawas, there are several square miles of chalky white hilltop quarries. The town in the middle of all this, Alabaster, is little more than the home of the U.S. Gypsum Company, a business founded in the 1890's by some guy named Daniel Houghton. Gypsum is actually a derivation of alabaster, which has been used to make drywall for most of this century. The entire setting sits like a bleached ghost town, hazy and surreal, with water towers, silos and quansut huts that recall an earlier, more productive time. The white dust shrouds the entire quarry. But the Gypsum-works stand as a testimonial to this time of transformation, this move from making things to making things fun.

Evidence of the old way of doing things, and how that's all come to pass, is everywhere. The most haunting fixture is a two mile aerial tramway that stands, eerily immobile, on cement based towers that run well into Lake Huron. This method of hauling Gypsum from the water looks antiquated, even sinister. I'm told it still runs, with its huge, conical containers swaying above the icy blue water. The company still employs workers, though not like it once did, and far away from this old site. At the gates of the Gypsum works sits The Alabaster Bible Church, a ramshackle house with one cracked stained glass window and white soot on its steps.

I love looking at a corn field or wheat field in the wind as much as I do the ocean. I guess that makes me a Midwesterner through and through. If you're reading this, you're most likely a Midwesterner too. You know and understand the obligations of being a Midwesterner. In the true Midwest, we rarely deflect this obligation. We place the value of living in loyalty to a few friends and family, maybe one or two chosen institutions, and finally in a deep trust with the land and water around us.

Small AM radio stations are sprinkled throughout this part of Michigan; in the summer you drive through them, a crackling aural gauntlet, leaning into the plain talk and forgotten songs as if into a lucid warmth. Removed from the radio wars in Detroit, these stations simply play what they think sounds good to the people around them--presumably without focus groups, person by person marketing, and demographic surveys. I like hearing a crop report with my music.

My friend Pam Rossi had her wonderful weekend radio show on WCSX, Over Easy, cut in half time-wise recently because her programmers cited a new kind of Arbitron rating, where barely a fraction of Detroit's 4 million people report on listening and viewing habits. Over Easy is a show devoted to real music, with real musicians--many of them regional artists, like yours truly, and it has a large and loyal audience. It's been a Detroit institution for nearly 20 years, first with Carey Carlson as host, then with Pam. It's been something the music community can agree on and celebrate...I mean, what makes "us," us? Things like Over Easy. In our growing technology-based, bottom-line-driven culture, shows like Pam's are considered expendable. It's hard, however, to justify many many things just based on their economic value. Rural AM radio may be the last place to find random radio programming in the form of traditional Top 40.

I try to avoid playing cds while driving because popular music is still, for better or worse, found on the radio. And it's still largely concerned with love and its losses, digging back into childhood or extending far into life for its romantic inventions.

While driving late one night last week on M-13 I heard, among other things, both the terrible and the transcendent: Bocephus's new "Forged By Fire," his father's (Hank Williams) "Kaw-Liga," Kenny Chesney's Summertime," Sam & Dave's "Hummin'," Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds' "Don't Pull Your Love Out," and Sam Cooke's gorgeous "Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen." Unconcerned with mega numbers and musically-hip perceptions, these stations provide for a listener an emotional autobiography, playing songs that fall between the fading of the big bands and the beginning of rock, or between what's now classic rock and what's new country.

At the time I made little point of these observations, outside of noticing the pull that popular music still has as it guides us toward a way in which we want to live. But that suggestion is enormous. It’s the notion that these aren’t merely old songs on rural radio, but instead brief illuminations of the contrast between what's simple and what's sophisticated in America, between what's popular culture and what is high art–at times even between what's bad and what's good. American culture is a beautiful mess, dependent on a conversation half-heard and talked over, yet somehow still well received. So there--now I feel much better enjoying "Delilah" by Tom Jones as it sizzled across the wires just outside Au Gres, followed quickly by the okra bean report.

Love & Marriage: The Problem With Prop 8 Decision

2009-06-07T20:37:00.000-07:00

This journal entry is also my first column for yournewsdetroit.com--please check out this new online news source when you have a chance. Thanks.

I realize that the debate over same sex marriage is a divisive one, among friends and sometimes even family members. However last week’s upholding of Prop 8 in California is depressing. For people looking for the right to marry the person they love and have it validated by society, it must be enraging.

I’ve been in what the court (and most of the country) refers to as a “normal” marriage for 20 years. They’ve easily been the best years of my life, although they’ve also been very challenging. Marriage is a little like hang gliding or scuba diving or even a near-death experience--only those that have been there can truly provide any lasting insight to it--why it works or doesn’t work, why it’s the most enlightened experiment in human connection, or why it may be mankind’s most preposterous folly. (I believe the former.) Like those other activities I mentioned, you can only know by doing, and there’s no going back.

I can’t speak for my wife, but I got married for many reasons--most were emotional, some societal, others never to be understood. It was important for me to be jumping into something, in a social sense--into a kind of acceptance, into a practiced art, out of my own panicky rebellion. I didn’t settle, as all unmarried people will accuse those that marry; I armed myself. If you haven’t notice lately, it’s an often brutal and unpredictable world, with loyalty and honesty being rare. If life is a game played against chaos and death, against entropy, then marriage means having more home games on your schedule than away.

So I’m writing this as an instinctive reaction to the California Prop 8 ruling, which upheld making same sex marriages illegal. Here’s the main point of this thing to me: no one ever called into question my ability (my right?) to marry the person of my own choosing.

The Prop 8 ruling is correctly perceived by the gay community as a double-barreled attack on human rights. I’m sure that the Christian righties and other opponents of gay marriage find the impetus for their opposition based in some public employment of what they consider to be moral. However, it seems to me that arguing about pre-established or preferred sexual behavior is akin to arguing the morality of a tree--that is, it’s something that simply is, static and obvious. So this ruling tries to give all of us the parameters of what a marriage is or should be. If you don’t think that affects you, and you happen to be a heterosexual, you’re wrong.

Our supposedly sophisticated and free society tends to be embarrassed by the entire idea of sex. What’s known as the “Other” or “Otherness” in this culture--anyone outside the accepted notion of what or who an American is--should never be automatically associated with unaccountable behavior. And that’s exactly how I read Prop 8’s results. Gay people are not to be trusted. Ridiculous.

Accountability, in fact, may be the only measure of a man or woman—gay or straight--that the government need concern itself with, if they need to concern themselves at all. The irony is that nothing, and I mean nothing, leads to more stringent accountability than the shared promise and demands of a marriage. So the questions should be ours, and they should be directed at opponents of civil same sex unions. For starters--Why are you not in favor of intelligent people moving freely toward a life of love and societal accountability?

They would probably counter with the belief that it’s simply wrong—immoral—to conduct yourself in this way and thus illegal for the state to condone behavior so contrary to “God’s wishes.” Being just a simple human, I could never assume to know God’s wishes. And so often, the word morality is used as a means of oppression, a cover for political tyranny and failed imagination. For the sake of argument let’s call morality any action that is unselfish, kind and noble. Add to that the fact that it’s any action done with some sort of Karmic concern; that in the long run we won’t be sorry for what we’ve done, whether it’s in line with some petty human law or not. Or better yet: moral action is simply action which is life affirming.

We're currently all talking about this issue with an idealistic, moral and even romantic view. The practical side of it is even more compelling--I have several gay friends that want to be married for the real life reasons, in addition to love and emotional security. They want what hetero marriages take for granted--health care when a spouse or partner is covered, tax breaks filing jointly, equal protection under the law.

As insignificant as it may seem to the hetero-married or the unmarried, it makes a difference when your relationship is validated by both society and our byzantine government. It's just one less thing to worry about.

The fight for equality and justice is a fight for all of us, gay or straight, white or black, man or woman. When law is created or upheld due to a hazy consensus on religious beliefs, it's inherently at odds with logic. If there are real values, and I believe there are, and those values celebrate, affirm and explore human life, then they should be confirmed by American society as good. Anyone wishing to marry another person they’ve deemed fit for them is saying to me that they’ve made some peace with their own idea of freedom and commitment. They know that with that freedom comes a responsibility to look and listen, to own up to their idea of love, and feel in their hearts and bones what God or Time requires of them. And that no law can touch.

Saginaw All Area Arts Award Acceptance Speech

2009-05-10T20:29:00.000-07:00

This is essentially a litany of memories for my hometown, plus a long list of thank yous. I made this speech last Thursday night, May 7, upon receiving a 20th anniversary Lifetime Achievement Arts Award from the Saginaw Cultural Enrichment Commission. I'm very grateful for it, and it was a beautiful evening, with many other winners. If you read something that sounds ironic or humorous, it was intended. For instance, there of course is no stipend associated with the award.

To the members of the Arts & Enrichment Commission, to your honor Mayor Seals, to all of you in the audience. Good evening. Thank you for inviting me and my family back to Saginaw and my deepest thanks for this honor. It means a great deal to me, coming as it does from my hometown and the people here. And in these tough economic times, the generous annual stipend that goes with this award will really help.

Saginaw means so many things to me now--so many memories are conjured up when I drive in from the highway or cross the Holland Bridge. I try to hang on to them as I grow older….skating at Hoyt park in the brittle cold air, slow dancing to the Stylistics at the Y with the Schmolitz sisters. If anyone's seen the Schmolitz sisters. I'd love to hook up with them again.

I swear it was just yesterday that my friends & I were rumblin' outta the Court Street Theater on a Friday night, with our mullets & letter jackets…too cool for school, ten thousand watt fools, existential cowboys in a one horse town. There we were, and these really were our nicknames--Big A, Cedric, Rodney, Chinaman, Carley Carl, Doobie & Smoothie.

We’d drive around town all night in those big ol’ 70s cars burning tons of fossil fuel, with V-8s and snow tires, long bench seats and girls by our side. Chevrolets, Oldsmobiles, her daddy’s Electra deuce and a quarter, with Stroh’s and sloe gin, goin' to hear a guy in polyester pants sing like John Denver at the Holiday Inn lounge over on Davenport. But that was all more than 30 years ago now. I shoulda never blinked.

Then there was Saginaw in Summer: river raft races, playing baseball for the Uncolas, tennis at Garber courts with the cotton buds blowing by in the hot wind and Get Back on the loudspeakers. All these ghostly names come back to me …Freddie stark, Kenny Tabascko, George Purdie, Charlie Raymond, Ted Grigg, the Loicana sisters…where are the Loicana sisters? Goin to get slurpies and pretzels at Bill’s Party Store, until Jim would chase us out. I went back to Bill's today since I was back in town, and Jim’s still there, 34 years later!

So many memories: Watchin’ Shakey Jake do the shake & bake at Hoyt Park, my grandma’s wild rhubarb in her backyard, night rides for ice cream at Mooneys, the Children’s Zoo, WSAM & WTAC, James Bond movies at the Temple, swimming at Anderson pool, Mr Hot Dog, Officer Ed, chester miller, the crisp, electric Friday nights at Arthur Hill stadium watching football under the lights, the smell of cigars and fresh cut grass in the clear autumn nights.

It was a great gift to grow up where and when I did, and to cross paths with the people I did. We were kids then, and things like the war and economy were a million miles away. We thought of football, baseball, music, movies and friendship.

Football was really the main thing at that time–my first and best coach in any sport was my youth football coach John Picard. He was, as a lot of you know, the spirit and coach behind The Pickles, a city league flag football team for boys ages 7-11. I actually started playing for him when I was 6, and then played every fall for the next 5 years.

The team was run by Mr. Picard as the ultimate non-star system: navy blue sweatshirts, no numbers, blue jeans, black cleats and helmets spray-painted a Notre Dame gold. It said to us, “You’re better than no one else and no one is better than you. “

He ran the team with extreme punctuality, discipline, respect, simplicity and precision. He knew my dad, and I remember on the first day he asked me if I was his son. “Yea,” I quietly replied. His coddling reply was “It’s ‘Yes Sir’ or ‘No Sir’ or get the hell outta here”. I was 6!! And a sensitive boy!! He only used last names and he’d sometimes smack you on the helmet or swat you in the rump, things you probably can’t do to young kids today. But we all quickly got used to that, and learned to recognize the consequences associated with being late, a missed block or a fumbled snap. It encouraged us to be better... and I loved the whole thing.

Mr Picard does unfortunately call me by first name now, but it seems a struggle, and I wish he’d just call me Francke. The things I learned from him have lasted me a lifetime. The discipline and sacrifice allowed me to gain a scholarship and compete in sports at a collegiate level.

Many of the things taught to me by Mr. Picard and reinforced by my parents actually helped me realize the demands of an artistic life and also survive a long & difficult illness. Some kids did go away in tears, and he never did allow any mothers near practice (which we all secretly loved) but last time I checked the world remains indiscriminate in handing out difficulty and heartbreak. You gotta be tough, smart and prepared. Mr. Picard gave us that. In my songs, and in my imagination, Saginaw’s been a place both common and sacred. Writing songs about this place has allowed me to discover my self. I am, and we are, Midwesterners. In the Midwest, we place the value of living in loyalty to friends and family, maybe one or two chosen institutions like a church or a union, and finally in a deep trust with the land and water around us.

My music has allowed me to understand these things about myself… Why am I drawn to soul music? I’ve had to come up with an answer to this question: What is Soul? Soul is, for better or worse, about suffering, survival and then, bearing an ornery optimism. It’s about scar tissue. Soul is faith when cynicism is easier. It's hangin’ in there when you've had it. It’s knowing we’re born to die, yet living with passion. It's not necessarily about unconditional love, but it is about letting a person's character be your main source for your judgment of him or her. Al Green says that soul is "fearing no evil." Maybe that describes it best. It's a quality of heart, especially after you know all there is to fear. Solomon Burke said he dreams of writing a soul song that would do no less than save the world if everyone sang it.

I guess that’s an ideal close to the one I strive for. I’m trying to write songs about what we choose and what we lose while on this journey—how easy it is to get lost, and how difficult it is to transcend. But getting lost is also a part of the process--you get lost in the music, and find yourself along the way.

I’m also interested in the "now-what?" that comes after our illusions fall apart. " How you gonna live after your world falls apart? After 9/11? After you’ve lost all our money? After you’re told you have cancer? After the death of someone indispensable to you. What are you gonna do about it?" The romantic aspects in my songs come from trying to find what's heroic when faced with that kind of unrelenting reality. Maybe just facing it is heroic. Everyone has their own moment of hardcore reality, where they see who they really are and what their life is really worth. That’s the moment you try and capture in a song. I try and tell myself: Be happy you were born each morning; make some music today; stir it up a little, make somebody smile. Looking into the abyss is no way to make a living.

Here's a brief story about the spirit of survival, about what we call in music the “gospel vision:” I recall sitting in a dismal waiting room, with a table full of Redbooks and orange chairs, waiting to have a Pentamidine antibiotic breathing treatment to fend off pneumonia. I was very thin, very bald and still very very sick, just a couple months after my bone marrow transplant day, when I had no hematological signs of life–no white blood cell count, no red blood cell count, very low platelets, on and on. Next to me, the only other person in the room, was a lovely older black lady, also very sick, hooked up to a central lumen and looking very very tired. We smiled at each other, a knowing smile that is exclusive to people battling cancer while also still striving to be people, or, persons. In the upper corner of the room was a small tv. On this particular morning in early 1999, the tv stations were all flush with the same image: an immaculately dressed President Bill Clinton privately testifying before a Special Prosecutor on the details of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. You remember: “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” That day. We both watched this for awhile, another person trapped by events out of his control. After about 25 minutes of Executive Squirming, the lovely lady turned to me and said, “Ain’t it nice to see someone who’s more fucked than we is?” Now that’s the gospel vision, turning all of the things that conspire against us into, if not things that lift us up, at least something we can laugh at.

Thanks to the Nancy Koepke, Marsha Braun and everyone involved with the All Area Arts Awards. I want to thank my friend Bob Martin, who has been an enlightened supporter of me and my music for nearly 30 years. You’re fortunate here in Saginaw to have a soul and intellect of Bob’s caliber, someone who’s kept the cultural heart of the tri-cities beating. Right from my very first night gigging at Meinberg’s in 1981, Bob was there and “got it.”

Another terrific person who got it is Sue White of the News, who has been vigilante in attending shows and writing about my career. I’d also like to thank Bo White for his historic joint over on State street, and the way he values musicians. I want to thank all of the Saginaw people that make it worth it—friends, audiences, radio people and record buyers… I’m thinking of guys like Tiny, the door man at the Pub, who helped carry our gear out at 3 in the morning when it was 3 below, all through the 80s. And my friends from my third hometown of Au Gres and Pt Lookout—thanks for coming and good to see y’all.

Thanks to my good friend and assistant Pete Wurdock, who has been profoundly encouraging in the down times and clear headed in the good times and always selfless in his help. I want to thank all my old band mates, particularly the late Guy Garber, who had terrific musical instincts and left us too soon. And of course a shout out to Johnny Krogman, Johnny Van Benschoten, Duane Miller & Jeff Shaw for getting together at an assembly at Arthur Hill and inspiring me to play guitar when I was 14 or 15. Thanks to my friend Brian d’arcy James, just nominated for a Tony award for Shrek. Thanks to my friend Rob Dewar, who’s been about the closest thing I’ve had to a brother.

I’d like to thank my good friends and mentors, Dave Marsh, Bob Baldori & Mitch Ryder, and all the many many musicians I’ve played with over years, and all the great musicians & songwriters from this part of the world, from Isham Jones to Jack Bruske to Ben Weissman to the Funk Brothers to Dick Wagner to Mike Brush To Jeff Scott to Carl McRae. I’m standing on their shoulders.

I of course thank my Mom, who is surely watching and metaphysically asking from the 5th Dimension if I shaved for this event. As all of you know that knew her, my mom had a wonderful random kind of vitality and humor that I may have been lucky enough to have inherited just a bit of, and it has made me well suited for a life in music. I love you Mom, wherever you may be now. I want to thank my Dad, who is in many ways my best friend and just a beautifull guy—a model of what a man can and should be—love you Dad. Of course I want to thank both my sisters, Martha & her husband John, and Kit & her husband Jamie, for their friendship, gift of life, and a roof over my head when I came up here to play.

I want to thank my beautiful kids, Tess & Stew, who gave me a renewed love of the world and an urgent passion to make some kind of a record of my life here on this journey. My kids have made me want to make music that matters, to write and sing songs that carry some kind of moral force.

I don’t think I have the appropriate words to fully thank my wife, Julia, who has been everything to me since we met nearly 30 years ago—muse, lover, girlfriend, wife, sounding board, sponsor, supporter, great mother of our children, critic, manager, best friend, and the last link to sanity during the really hard times of cancer, death and addiction. I realize that everyone has their own fights to fight, yet no one but the two of us can really know what we’ve been through together. Julia, you’ve handled desperate, desperate times with unbending grace and beauty, always. We all know the old saying “Behind every man is a good woman. etc." In our case it’s “Behind me is Julia saying get a real piano player to play that part.” I love you Jule with all I got. So thank you for this wonderful award and for making a kid from Saginaw very proud and happy. Good night.