FUNERAL MARCH

The Martin Luther King Parade, Los Angeles, 2005.

 In the midst of a bitterly contested war on par with Viet Nam, and a blood-letting of the funds for many public programs, can we not as a major city rally more notice and enthusiasm in memory of a man who dedicated his life —and insured his demise—on behalf of peace, justice and basic human dignity?

 Of course we can’t. And I was fully ashamed long before I heard that the tab for Bush’s upcoming inaugural festivities would top 40 million dollars. As a nation we apparently have no trouble finding that kind of chump-change when what we’re celebrating is an out-dated, “faith-based,” race-specific nationalism inspired by fear, anger and an insatiable lust for building up our empire and Taking It On the Road. We’ve triumphed over due process, don’t forget, with a mandate and political capitol to spend.

 As my son and I squeezed along the crowded sidewalks on Monday, a young black man passed me and muttered under his breath, “If you ain’t black, get off the f**king track.” And who could blame him? As far as he’s concerned, I should just stick closer to my own parade route, distinctly north of this one. After all, it’s been made perfectly clear to him —and long before yesterday—what it really takes to get the rest of America cheering and on its feet.

Joe Henry
South Pasadena, CA
18 January 2005

GOING DOWN SLOW

A Remembrance of Ray Charles.

In 1967 I was six years old and my family moved from Charlotte to Atlanta, leaving behind all kinfolk and everything I knew to be familiar. In our new house I shared a room with my older brother Dave, and we went to sleep every night listening to a white Bakelite Phillips radio. I had never had a radio before, and listening to the disembodied voices issuing from the nightstand was to me like looking at the images of dead World War I soldiers through my grandmother’s stereoscope. (In her collection there were several pictures of decaying foxhole comrades, faces frozen in death grimaces and with their leathery skin and gums receding from their teeth. I don’t know why she had them.) Every singer I heard —Jim Reeves, Ray Price, Dusty Springfield, Jimmy Dean, Henson Cargill, Johnny Cash—sounded to me like people who were already dead and reaching out from beyond the grave. If not the singers themselves, then certainly their messages were from the next world. These were coded messages from God, like the ones delivered by people who went into religious trances and spoke in tongues like some of my aunts did.

I felt vulnerable and up-rooted as I lay in the dark, the room smelling strange and unlived in. A nearby streetlight showed through the tops of the curtains and formed what looked to me like a pair of slanted eyes in an upper corner of the room —a kind of visitation—and my mother had to stuff towels into the gap between the curtain rod and the ceiling.

Memory has compressed time and all of this I remember now as if it had been a single long night: the smell of new paint, the slanted eyes, the late innings of a Braves game interrupted by the news of the death of Judy Garland, her little-lost-girl voice playing softly behind the announcer’s, still wishing upon a rainbow.  And then, finally, signing off the evening’s broadcast (there used to be an end to them), there was Ray.

Ray Charles has been from that moment forward an unearthly presence in my life; speaking to me in a stage whisper, from just out of frame, like a long-gone great uncle in a tintype photograph whose old letters you have just discovered. And on this night in 1967, as I lay trembling in the bunk above my brother (who seemingly slept through everything) the song Ray sang was “Yesterday.” Even then, I believe, I knew that what he was getting at was a brutal recognition of mortality —his and mine. It wasn’t just a song about lost love, as it was when a young Paul McCartney sang it, but a grown man’s realization that time has slipped quietly from beneath him and will continue to. Just why, he couldn’t say; but though the singer grappled with his own responsibility in the matter —as if accepting some might allow him a margin of control—it was clear that time would not stop consuming itself, and there were plenty more “yesterdays” on the books than would be “tomorrows.”

"Suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be,

There's a shadow hanging over me..."

I was terrified. Ray wasn’t sugarcoating anything for the sake of an audience hoping to be entertained. He infused the lyric with a funereal finality that I, even at six and a half, couldn’t fail to recognize.

I “got religion,” as they used to say in North Carolina, in a big hurry. And if it was fear and panic that put me on my knees (as it does many) it didn’t defuse the joy of my new-found salvation: I began to listen the way my mother studied the letters of the Apostle Paul, looking for every kernel of understanding that might be a lamp along my own musical journey. Music became my religion and songs my lexicon. Ray Charles was a church elder.

                                        ***

We moved to a suburb north of Detroit just as I was to begin high school, and by then I had immersed myself deeper into Ray’s canon and all of the elements it contained: roadhouse R&B and storefront gospel, Nat Cole, Fats Waller, Blind Lemon and Frank Sinatra. And Bing Crosby and Charlie Parker. And Rosetta Tharpe. And Leadbelly, Perez Prado, Hank Williams and Chet Atkins. It was all in there as surely as Miles Davis encompassed Louis Armstrong and Marlon Brando, and Bob Dylan constructed a persona by fusing Woody Guthrie, Arthur Rimbaud and Cassius Clay. I understood the truth of that alchemy long before I knew it took genius to achieve it.

And that’s an awful word, genius. It sounds vaguely dirty, and it is certainly an anchor around the neck of anyone it tries to describe; for they want to take flight, and we want to trap them in amber, lest they double-back and forsake the investment we’ve made in them -tarnishing the good name of the pageant and embarrassing its sponsors.

As I sit here this morning at my long table, though, the Genius that is Ray Charles has trapped himself in amber by becoming what I first mistook him to be, through his disembodied voice years ago: dead. He has wholly contained his earthly self by allowing the trajectory of his arc to describe all at once a beginning, middle, and an end; by connecting one horizon to the other. And by so doing he has left the rest of us behind to make a narrative out of the non-linear; to form a lasting image of him that will continue to sustain us through our desperation.

And these are truly desperate times. It has been less than 24 hours, as I write this, since Brother Ray has departed, and our nation cannot be roused from her 21-gun rewrite of Ronald Reagan’s own arc into amber just a few days ago. The girl can’t help it.  We have become too deeply invested in Reagan’s charade of a benevolent America, and its mask has allowed us to make convenient war upon a sad and brutalized region, killing on behalf of our own adolescent desire for comfort and dominance, sparing only those who would agree to desire as we do. “Believe it because you need to,” seems to be Reagan’s legacy; and it would appear to be enough for many people who find the deaths of young soldiers and even younger civilians to be fair trade for spreading the gospel of western might and consumption. And all forgivable because we’ve had the piss scared out of us.

But we’ve always been afraid. Of darkness and change, of new paint, slanted eyes, Judy Garland, stereoscopes, foxholes, aunts who speak in tongues and, finally, of death.

When I picked up my twelve-year-old son Levon Ray from school on June 10^th and told him the news of his namesake’s passing, he said without pause, “Sorry, Dad. I’m sorry your road sign is dead.” He understands that abstraction very well because it barely is one.

Ray Charles has, in fact, been my eternal signpost since long before I knew I would ever be in need of such a thing. Ray couldn’t protect me from rough roads or bad directions, or from the bitter truth of mortality, but what he did do was reaffirm for me that there is beauty in life’s brevity, and a lusty joy to living in spite of it. I mourn him but I can accept his death because he always spoke to me in the only way that the Eternal Servants of God can address the mortal: with the disembodied voice of the long-gone.

Joe Henry
South Pasadena, CA

GEEK LOVE: LORNE GREENE

In 1966, as a 5-year-old living in Atlanta, I loved songs without thinking about them as a matter of any choice. I listened to them the way I ate a jelly sandwich: eagerly, and soon ready for the next one. I'm fairly certain that I didn't think of a song, initially, as something that someone had imagined and then constructed, but rather like a thing that was mined, like salt. And like salt, I didn't yet feel the need to go actively in search of songs: They were on every table, waiting to be savored.

My dad worked for Chevrolet and drove company-issued cars. Tape players were new to automobiles, and Chevrolet provided-for demonstration purposes-their own tapes consisting of a strange assortment of popular songs, bridged together by promotional voice-overs espousing the virtues of the latest coupes and sedans, Malibus and Biscaynes. This was the only tape we had in the car and it had as its climax a track featuring TV star Lorne Greene, who played Ben Cartwright on Bonanza, a Chevrolet-sponsored Western series. Greene performed a spoken-word song called "Ringo," which tells the story (in first-person narration, against a big-sky cowboy soundtrack) of an Old West rider who discovers a man that had been shot and left dying in the desert. After nursing the wounded man back to health, the two men go their separate ways, only to come face to face years later when Greene's narrator has become a sheriff and the recovered man a feared, ruthless outlaw. When the inevitable showdown happens, the gunfighter spares the sheriff's life in payback of his long-ago kindness, only to be gunned down moments later by the sheriff's posse. The sheriff, realizing there had existed an undetected spark of good in the hated fugitive, hangs up his star in disillusionment, leaving it literally on the grave of the outlaw.

Greene's deep baritone seemed ominous in the dark of the backseat as we drove home from a Braves game, or a rare dinner out. It scared me, to tell you the truth, because the song was really about mortality-the character's and mine. Ringo was a misunderstood renegade-evil in deed, but ultimately moral, just and redeemable. And destined, like all of us, to die anyway. I took it all in because it was there in front of me as insistently as the long drive home.

In our "formative years," few of us know we are being …formed. And I certainly didn't know that many TV actors were cranking out cornball fare simply because they could. What I heard and took to my heart was song-as-narrative, singer-as-actor. That's why, I guess, by the time I was coming of age and the singer/songwriter movement was happening, the song-as-confessional that was the code of the road couldn't touch me. My heart was already spoken for. I didn't care about songs being vehicles of autobiographical expression anymore than I cared about being a bubblegum teen angel. I had already learned that songs were short stories-small films and character studies.

When I finally moved on to more artful versions of this discipline than "Ringo," to songs by Randy Newman, John Prine, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan and even Fats Waller, it was because I'd already been primed. Lorne Greene may have been Sunday night's prime-time TV attraction, but for me, in 1966, he was God's messenger. And he seemed to be saying, "Who do you want to be: Bobby Sherman or a gunslinger?"

(Courtesy of CMJ New Music Monthly Issue 117, October 2003)

back to top

THELONIOUS MONK "HACKENSACK"

The music of Thelonious Monk is, for me, purely devotional and endlessly life-affirming. And I am devoted to it, as Monk was my doorway into jazz. In fact, I still remember where I was standing, at 15, in a friend's makeshift photo darkroom when he dropped the needle on "Hackensack", the first track on Criss Cross (still my all-time favorite). I was electrified by its playful melody, its willful dissonance, and its swinging take on the blues. Not to mention the lightning communication between Monk and his altoist Charlie Rouse: the greatest marriage of sense and sensibility since Duke Ellington found Johnny Hodges. In fact, no one save Ellington composed more melodies than Monk that sound now so utterly inevitable. I am reminded of the quote from Picasso where he said, "when I was 22 I could paint like Rembrandt, but it took my whole life to learn to paint like a child." To me, "Hackensack" is the sound of a man completely in control of his powers, but down on his knees like a kid, painting with his fingers.

   Joe Henry

back to top

THE GHOST IN THE SONG

I had a dream. A "vision," I'm tempted to say. But that would sound too mystical, and make me sound like…I don't know, like…Sting. Not something I can afford at this particular stage of my life and career. But damn it, I did have one, and it came out of nowhere. And the vision had a voice, and the voice spoke a word: Ornette. It didn't need to speak the other word, for I knew. And the vision that had unleashed the voice knew I knew. I also knew what this vision was suggesting in regard to That Name That Needs Not Its Brother: I needed Ornette Coleman's musical voice to complete the song with which I was at that precise moment struggling. Ornette. A towering figure in the history of modern jazz, and one of its chief architects. You can look it up yourself and that's what it will say. Even he wouldn't argue that, though he doesn't volunteer such information himself; because he has always and only operated on a plane that exists far above the conventions of what is call "Jazz." Jazz pretends, of course, to have no constraints. But in a world that presents itself as an ideal of freedom, Ornette has been too free for the likes of many. And he has paid a price for that, having been as much maligned as exalted.

I almost regretted the truth that I knew lay at the heart of my vision, because it seemed so dauntingly out of my reach. But…we of little faith. The Vision, as it turns out, also paid a visit to Ornette, who must have been, truly, more surprised by its revelation than I was. For even after hearing both of my names back-to-back, I feel certain that he was confused. Maybe he even tried adjusting the rabbit ears on his receptor through which he has, by all evidence, been receiving for years visions of bell-like clarity. Yes, perhaps he was confused. But he is not, by any estimation, a man of little faith. He is faith's dutiful servant.

And he brought to me, finally, with very few questions asked, the emotional core of my song, and laid it at my feet -which were at that moment hovering inches off the ground. And that song had a voice, and that voice had a name…

Not all truth is funny. But that which is funny is true. I don't believe you heard me. I said, what is funny is invariably, undeniably and inescapably just that: the truth. And just so, the truthful voice of Richard Pryor has been haunting me; dancing around my face like a bee; has turned my head like a strange smell, and has stopped me as quickly and as effortlessly as a spider's web that I have just walked through. I recoil, out of balance, stymied by human frailty in the face of that near-invisible strand which is timelessly, triumphantly animal. We fear the animal. Hate its base motivations; hate its mindless destruction and arrogant reproduction. Hate its stench and compassionless, selfish resolve. But listen: The thing that you hate in others is almost always the thing that you really hate about yourself. More truth (I'm not making this up). But somehow Richard Pryor turned that reflection of himself upside-down and backwards, like one seen in a cereal spoon: the things that he loathed about himself he loved others for, recognizing in them a familiar human frailty and a timeless, animal urge to survive. No matter how foolish most people look doing it. Surviving, I mean. And to be sure, we do look ridiculous, even when we are doing it with a straight face and in nice clothes. We are animals, thinly disguised in spats and bowler hats, trying to hang on. Yes, surviving is rarely gracefully done, but it is beautiful to witness. And somehow, against all odds, Richard Pryor himself continues to survive. Not ten miles from where I now sit, collecting my thoughts, Richard is probably watching TV, napping, or cursing those who surround and help him. And they curse him back, I imagine, once they've left his room. But they love him, for being a contentious, frail, timeless, ridiculous, hateful and beautiful animal, who has somehow survived under the burden of almost unspeakable truths, giving us back, as clearly as a silver spoon, reflections of ourselves as people we can love and forgive.

The ghost of Richard Pryor (even though he is still in possession of it) has, yes, haunted me of late. I don't know why, exactly, or why now. But there was no mistaking whose ghost it was when it arrived. Listen: When I began writing songs for my eighth record SCAR, one song presented itself above the others and began to dictate policy. As it started to unfurl, I recognized that the voice of the song, the first-person narrator, if you will, was not mine. I was being used. But then, I don't as a rule write songs about myself. Not so's you could tell, anyway, or at least not so as I can tell. I don't mind it in other people so much (liar), but for me it feels like such a vain pursuit. How arrogant, to assume your ideas and feelings so meaningful to others that they must be expressed. I mean, Who wants to know?!!. So when I felt myself visited upon, occupied by the countenance of another —in this case Richard Pryor— it was natural for me to surrender to it. I was only too happy. Songs can then become rather like your teenage children: you can take credit for them, but they are more or less responsible for themselves and their own ambitions. Who wants to know?!! Perhaps your mother, I would respond. Especially if those feelings about to be expressed carry even a grain of what is supposed to be…The Truth. And songwriters, for some reason (and you know who you are) frequently believe they are trafficking in The Truth. I'm not sure who's to blame for that. But almost nobody ushering forth any real and significant truth thinks that that's what they're doing. Or at least they wouldn't admit it. Truth of the highest order is to be resisted, dragged from you on the gallows; played as a trump card and only as a last resort; because The Truth is frequently not good news to anybody. It rarely appears heroic at the time, to be the bearer of truth, but more like an affliction. Like having God in your midst: who wants to know!!? Not your friends, I can assure you. Read on.

Most of us think it very noble to search for God. It's romantic. It's poetic in a rugged, wind-blown, Sam Shepard-y kind of way. To be a searcher. I'll start over. To search for God is hip. To find Him is another matter altogether. For finding God makes one responsible for Him. Like finding a stray kitten: once you've seen it you become somehow morally obliged to it. And then you've become one of them, "a cat person." And nobody you know wants to see you coming with that Stray Kitten. Because you will try, they fear, to make it their kitten as well. You will try to make them Cat People. Truth is the same way: God help you if you actually see it, know it, because then you're saddled with it. Better to be vaguely, honorably in search of the truth. In search of God. Richard Pryor saw Truth before me or anybody else had a chance to warn him, poor bastard. He turned a gritty corner one day as a young man in Chicago and The Motherfuckin' Truth was on him -not like a stray kitten, but like a full-grown alley cat who has just eaten and still isn't satisfied. He held onto it, this "cat." Made a coat out of it, and wore it to New York; hid his secret heart beneath it and opened it like a curtain onstage; wore it when he got high with Miles; had it on when he went down on Pam Grier; pretended he'd never seen it before, didn't know whose coat it was, when he married up with a pipe and became angry and tired and disillusioned and full of self-loathing, and doused himself with brandy and lit the fuse, melting that animal spirit deep into his own. He tried to swear it off, but The Truth was on his skin like a rank smell, and he became responsible for its delivery, even when he couldn't live up to its message.

And of course, nobody can live up to it. But for those who live up to the attempt at living up to the truth, there is reserved a special place in heaven. And there are no cats there, smelling up the place. But Miles is there. And Malcolm X and Buckminster Fuller and Buster Keaton, Nathanael West, Charlie Parker, Flannery O'Connor, Preston Sturges, and Robert Johnson. ("Where's Moses?" someone asks. That's him at the bar with Roberto Clemente.) And some day, hopefully not soon, there will be Ornette Coleman and there will be Richard Pryor. And they will sit over cups of fresh coffee, or so I choose to believe, and say, "Damn. Glad that's over."

But as I was saying in the beginning, I found myself in a tussle with this song. It mocked me. It was frank in a way that embarrassed me, and was so without irony or apology. I looked at my hand as it wrote this foolishly pretentious title onto a page: "Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation." I wondered aloud at why the listening nation was tearful, and felt myself ridiculed for my naïvete. Worse still, this song cannibalized every other song in my bag, and spit out seeds that looked themselves defiant and unfamiliar. From then on, every song I wrote was covered in the same pitted skin and had a dusky flavor. The song is in a minor key, played in what Ray Charles used to call "the death tempo." It purports to be a classic blues, three verses and a bridge that say, in essence, "The thing I most desired was you, and I let you slip away. I was a fool, but you are also to blame. And now I am slipping away too." Without the well-documented tragic life of Richard Pryor for a reference, the song seems easy enough going by, and fairly one-dimensional. Rosemary Clooney could have sung it nicely. But once my hand reached over in a final flourish and revealed the title, I heard the piece as Richard's own paradoxical love song to America: hating it but still desiring and needing its acceptance. And then I could hear it no other way. I felt free to admire it if I chose, as if someone else had written it, but just so I wasn't free to impose any editorial upon it; not to even so much as alter its preposterous name. And whenever I hear the song now, after the fact, it sounds like someone's footsteps behind me in a fog. It always seems to be gaining on me, and never answers back if I say, "hello?" At some point during the process of writing and recording this song, I stoically surrendered my will, pretending I really had a choice to do otherwise.

When I finally assembled a group of musicians in a Los Angeles studio, I drew heavy guns: young jazz titans Brad Mehldau and Brian Blade; bassist Me'shell Ndegeocello, and guitarist Marc Ribot among them. It was like taking a group of neighborhood bullies with me into the abandoned house at the end of the street: I was spooked and wasn't going in alone. When the song in question came up in rotation on the second of four recording days, it arose and hovered like it had been summoned at a séance. It hung suspended like a tightrope walker, daring me to meddle further. And its path was (as are all paths) leading straight towards a deathly, inevitable finish. Enter Ornette Coleman. As he stood before me in a Manhattan studio two weeks later to add his part (the culmination of the original Vision), he had a light about him that could not begin to be hidden by the bushel basket to which the Bible refers. He was, to all who bore witness, in obvious cahoots with the ghostly presence of Richard Pryor who had earlier taken over the proceedings. And from this man —small and gentle at seventy years old— there came forth a sound like a wail of mortal panic; wrestling, then giving way to a reluctant understanding. Notes unraveled like the frayed end of a rope, and with a fluttering, dry tone that was like the fading, flashing gills of a small fish left lying on a bank. Picasso said that, "every act of creation is first an act of destruction. The artist's hand is the hand of a matador." And just so, Ornette deconstructed my song right in front of me, but he assumed the point of view of the bull, already on his knees.

Only later, near the song's end, did he rise out of the character of the fallen beast to take up the sword and cape himself and finish what we all knew had been coming. The rest of us in attendance -my co-producer Craig Street, the arranger Steven Barber, and our engineer Husky Hoskulds-could only watch as Ornette rendered from the song what only a man of his experience can fully exact, leaving me the tail and an ear. I won't say that it was easy for him to get to the root as he did, but it was essential to him, and he would settle for nothing else. He was restlessly unsatisfied after several takes that the rest of us thought brilliant, and said to me, "I know the saxophone so well. And I still hear myself Playing the Saxophone. I need to keep going until I'm not playing sax anymore but just playing music."

He kept going. Perhaps Ornette Coleman felt as I did, just as resigned to the path laid out before him. We all have brief moments of clarity, where for just an instant we are allowed to see that, regardless of frustration and doubt, we are exactly where we are supposed to be. And we inch ahead, heartened, if somewhat tentative like a tightrope walker at a death tempo. I now see that perhaps Richard Pryor finessed me into the presence of Ornette Coleman for no other reason than so that he, Ornette, could ring my bedside phone on the morning of my fortieth birthday. For when I picked up the receiver and heard Ornette playing "Happy Birthday" over the wire, what it sounded like to me was more truth of which Richard Pryor was somehow the unlikely messenger. I heard: Know it or not, you are exactly where you are supposed to be at this moment in your life. And then I heard this: when you write a song for Richard Pryor, perhaps the fear and longing you think you are expressing as his, is your own.

Joe Henry
Los Angeles
© 2001 by Joe Henry

back to top

SPARE RIBS TUSCAN-STYLE WITH WHITE WINE, GARLIC AND SAGE.

Need:
* Slab of pork spare ribs
* Dry white wine
* 5 cloves of garlic
* Fresh sage
* White flour
* Olive oil
* Kosher salt
* Cracked black pepper
* Parsley
* Aged Peccorino Romano cheese
* Arugula

Take a large slab of spare ribs, and cut into individual pieces by slicing between each rib. Dredge lightly in flour and shake off any excess. Sprinkle liberally with salt and cracked pepper.

In a large, deep, heavy pan, heat 2 table spoons of olive oil over medium-high heat. Put in ribs and brown well on all sides. When nearly browned, scatter crushed garlic in and around the ribs so it too becomes sauteed.

When ribs are browned, add 2 table spoons chopped fresh sage leaf and toss. Then add a cup and a half of white wine to the pot, tossing ribs with a wooden spatula, scrapping loose the goodness at the bottom of the pan. When wine has bubbled up for 30 seconds or so, turn heat to low and cover. Let simmer for 40-50 mins, turning occasionally to coat ribs. If more liquid is required, add a bit of water.

While ribs are nearing completion, boil water and cook a pound of spaghetti, al dente. Strain in a collander that has been lined with fresh arugula, thus wilting the greens.
Remove ribs and place attractively on a warm platter. Sprinkle with kosher salt and dust generously with finely chopped fresh parsley.

Toss the cooked spaghetti and arugula into what remains in the rib pan. Transfer to a pasta bowl and dust with chopped parsley and grated peccorino cheese, and cracked pepper.

Serve at once with steamed green beans (with a drissle of olive oil and a squeeze of fresh lemon), a pane rustica and a hearty red wine.

Call your loved ones to the table. Put on a record by Earl Hines. Be grateful for all of the above.

back to top