Standing In The Shadows of Motown: What Is Soul?

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

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.

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

Do The Right Thing. Health Care Now.

http://ping.fm/f0iQ5

No more politics. Affordable health care for all now.

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

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

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.