All posts by Roger Moore

About Roger Moore

rocklobster3.JPGRoger Moore is a writer and musical obsessive who plays percussion instruments from around the world with an equal lack of dexterity. An environmental lawyer in his unplugged moments, he has written on subjects ranging from sustainable development practices to human rights and voting rights, as well as many music reviews. A native Chicagoan, Roger lives in Oakland, California with his wife Paula, who shares his Paul Weller fixation, and two young children, Amelia and Matthew, who enjoy dancing in circles to his Serge Gainsbourg records and falling asleep to his John Coltrane records.

Roger Moore’s Musical Timeline

1966. Dropped upside down on patio after oldest sister listened to “She Loves You” on the Beatles’ Saturday cartoon show. Ears have rung with the words “yeah, yeah, yeah” ever since.

1973. Memorized all 932 verses to Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

1975. Unsuccessfully lobbied to have “Louie Louie” named the official song of his grade school class. The teacher altered the lyrics of the winner, the Carpenters’ “I Won’t Last a Day Without You,” so that they referred to Jesus.

1977. After a trip to New Orleans, frequently broke drumheads attempting to mimic the style of the Meters’ Zigaboo Modeliste.

1979. In order to see Muddy Waters perform in Chicago, borrowed the birth certificate of a 27 year-old truck driver named Rocco.

1982. Published first music review, a glowing account of the Jam’s three-encore performance for the Chicago Reader. Reading the original, unedited piece would have taken longer than the concert itself.

1982. Spat on just before seeing the Who on the first of their 23 farewell tours, after giving applause to the previous band, the Clash.

1984. Mom: “This sounds perky. What’s it called?” Roger: “ It’s ‘That’s When I Reach for My Revolver’ by Mission of Burma.”

1985. Wrote first review of an African recording, King Sunny Ade’s Synchro System. A reader induced to buy the album by this review wrote a letter to the editor, noting that “anyone wishing a copy of this record, played only once” should contact him.

1985. At a Replacements show in Boston, helped redirect a bewildered Bob Stinson to the stage, which Bob had temporarily confused with the ladies’ bathroom.

1986. Walked forty blocks through a near-hurricane wearing a garbage bag because the Feelies were playing a show at Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club.

1987. Foolishly asked Alex Chilton why he had just performed “Volare.” Answer: “Because I can.”

1988. Moved to Northern California and, at a large outdoor reggae festival, discovered what Bob Marley songs sound like when sung by naked hippies.

1991. Attempted to explain to Flavor-Flav of Public Enemy that the clock hanging from his neck was at least two hours fast.

1992. Under the pseudonym Dr. Smudge, produced and performed for the Underwear of the Gods anthology, recorded live at the North Oakland Rest Home for the Bewildered. Local earplug sales skyrocketed.

1993. Attended first-ever fashion show in Chicago because Liz Phair was the opening act. Declined the complimentary bottles of cologne and moisturizer.

1997. Almost missed appointment with eventual wedding band because Sleater-Kinney performed earlier at Berkeley’s 924 Gilman Street. Recovered hearing days later.

1997. After sharing a romantic evening with Paula listening to Caetano Veloso at San Francisco’s Masonic Auditorium, purchased a Portuguese phrasebook that remains unread.

1998. Learned why you do not yell “Free Bird” at Whiskeytown's Ryan Adams in a crowded theater.

1999. During an intense bout of flu, made guttural noises bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Throat Singers of Tuva.

2000. Compiled a retrospective of music in the nineties as a fellow at the Coolwater Center for Strategic Studies and Barbecue Hut.

2001. Listened as Kahil El’Zabar, in the middle of a harrowing and funny duet show with Billy Bang, lowered his voice and spoke of the need to think of the children, whom he was concerned might grow up “unhip.”

2002. During a performance of Wilco’s “Ashes of American Flags,” barely dodged ashes of Jeff Tweedy’s cigarette.

2002. Arrived at the Alta Bates maternity ward in Berkeley with a world trance anthology specially designed to soothe Paula during Amelia’s birth, filled with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, and assorted other Khans. The project proved to be irrelevant to the actual process of labor.

2003. Emceed a memorable memorial concert for our friend Matthew Sperry at San Francisco’s Victoria Theater featuring a lineup of his former collaborators, including improvised music all-stars Orchesperry, Pauline Oliveros, Red Hot Tchotchkes, the cast of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Tom Waits.

2003. Failed to persuade Ted Leo to seek the Democratic nomination for President.

2005. Prevented two-year old daughter Amelia from diving off the balcony during a performance of Pierre Dorge’s New Jungle Orchestra at the Copenhagen Jazz Festival.

2006. On a family camping trip in the Sierra Nevadas, experienced the advanced stage of psychosis that comes from listening to the thirtieth rendition of Raffi’s “Bananaphone” on the same road trip.

Deerhunter: Eligible Receivers Downfield

Heavy Rotation

You expect lead singers to be tall and gangly, but Bradford Cox, of Atlanta’s ambient noisemakers turned gonzo garageband Deerhunter, is in a league of his own, with a physique that would make even presumed invertebrate Iggy Pop look like a fullback. This isn’t because he’s trying to be cool. Like Joey Ramone before him, he has Marfan’s syndrome and looks like he will blow over in a strong wind. But over the years, Cox and his cohorts, notably percussionist Moses Archuleta and guitarist/ keyboardist Lockett Pundt, have stayed grounded by growing nimbler and smarter than most of their peers. If they were a football team, their recent work would resemble the controversial A-11 offense used by California’s Piedmont High and a handful of other schools featuring gangly, underweight smart kids. Fluid and fast, the two-quarterback A-11 offense turns every member of the team into an eligible receiver, making even familiar plays seem off-kilter and unpredictable.

Cox, who records beguiling solo records as Atlas Sound, occasionally posts excellent micromix playlists on his website that underscore his unpredictability (one recent list has Aaron Neville, Lee Hazlewood and Shuggie Otis brushing shoulders with the Residents and Robert Wyatt). Despite these, I was a bit behind the curve warming to Deerhunter. Even though I admired the mind-melding sonic collages on 2007’s Cryptograms, they exuded a chilly air that, in my more curmudgeonly moods, left me running for the nearest vinyl slab of Al Green or Merle Haggard. I had them pegged as a shoegaze band, and I’m just not that interested in footwear.

But last year’s sprawling double whammy, Microcastle/ Weird Era Cont., adds more than real guitars and real songs; it has a fluidity and humanity that I thought was beyond them. You can hear familair strains on almost every track, but the band’s playbook is now covering new ground, turning the field into a dizzyingly blurry hybrid of ambient drone (Can, Stereolab, 4AD bands) and thumping avant-rock (Velvets, Television, Feelies, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and even Cox’s beloved Echo and the Bunnymen). At a time when most of us probably feel like we could be blown down in the next storm, it’s weirdly comforting to know that you don’t have to be Metallica or Motorhead to compete in the big leagues.

Deerhunter, “Nothing Ever Happened”

Deerhunter, “Agoraphobia”

Love Hurts: A Post-Valentine Playlist

Playlists

Neil Sedaka, “Love Will Keep Us Together”
Joy Division, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
Etta James, “I’d Rather Go Blind”
Roy Orbison, “Love Hurts”
Chet Baker, “My Funny Valentine”
Van Morrison, “The Way Young Lovers Do”
Otis Redding, “Try a Little Tenderness”
Fairport Convention, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes”
Leonard Cohen, “I’m Your Man”
Magnetic Fields, “Love is Like a Bottle of Gin”
Lucinda Williams, “Side of the Road”
Nina Simone, “Lilac Wine”
Velvet Underground, “Pale Blue Eyes”
Bon Iver, “Skinny Love”
Antony and the Johnsons, “Fistful of Love”
George Jones, “He Stopped Loving Her Today”
Replacements, “Answering Machine”
My Bloody Valentine, “Sometimes”
Sleater-Kinney, “Turn it On”

Roy Orbison, “Love Hurts”

Otis Redding, “Try a Little Tenderness”

Etta James, “I’d Rather Go Blind”

Joy Division, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”

Bon Iver, “Skinny Love”

George Jones, “He Stopped Loving Her Today”

Fairport Convention, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes”

Antony and the Johnsons, “Fistful of Love”

Holiday in Cambodia: Khmer Rock, Dengue Fever and the River of Time

Heavy Rotation, Slow Jams

Part One: Life During Wartime

Last week, when Aretha Franklin put on her oversized bow hat and melted fire with her inaugural version of “America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee)”—Samuel Francis Smith’s 19th Century rewrite of a German rewrite of “God Save the Queen”—a piece of my heart held the memory of another queen of soul, one generation and half a world away, who met with a more tragic fate. Blessed with a voice of equally staggering power and beauty, Ros Sereysothea rose from poverty and illiteracy to become the most beloved singer in her native Cambodia during the sixties and early seventies. Thanks to the excellent Los Angeles combo Dengue Fever, discussed below, the music of Ros and her contemporaries is finally experiencing a rebirth on both sides of the Pacific.

Ros’s story carries a distinctive rock twist. Along with the cherub-faced godfather of Khmer soul, Sinn Sisamouth, a former Royal Court crooner turned unlikely garage rocker, and the more playful female vocalist Pan Ron, who makes me think of Martha Reeves, Ros meshed Khmer music with the range of Western sounds that made their way across the Pacific during wartime—everything from Motown and classic R&B to surf, psychedelic and garage rock. Eastern sounds from Bangkok to Bollywood also entered the mix. The resulting Khmer rock underground was like nothing else heard before or since. A track like Ros’s “Chnam Oun 16” (translated as “I’m 16” or “Sweet 16”) virtually defies description, but to me it sounds a bit like an even more intense Asha Bhosle performing an upbeat Aretha number, backed by the 13th Floor Elevators. The song sounds so alive that it seems to mock death itself for its weakness and cowardice.

Ros Sereysothea, “Chnam Oun 16”

As John Swain captured in his Indochina memoir River of Time, Khmer rock’s seminal figures remained upstarts in their heyday; even Ros and Sinn scrounged for cassette sale revenue and never reached the upper echelons of Cambodia’s economic elite. But their musical revolution came to an abrupt end after April 1975, when Pol Pot’s forces overrode Cambodia. Few of the leading Khmer musicians survived the genocide. Sinn Sisamouth was sent to a work camp and executed. Pan Ron disappeared. Ros Sereysothea’s demise remains the subject of conjecture, but Greg Cahill’s short film about her life, The Golden Voice, concludes that after her discovery in a slave labor camp, she was forced to sing pro-Khmer Rouge songs and marry one of Pol Pot’s henchmen, who later had her killed. In another account, she died from malnutrition in a Phnom Penh hospital weeks before the Vietnamese invasion ousted Pol Pot. Either way, this achingly beautiful and surprisingly rocking music—which often paired melancholy sentiments with sparkling melodies—virtually disappeared, preserved only because fans risked lives and livelihoods hiding priceless cassette tapes. The musical history of a generation went undercover in the face of what Hannah Arendt, commenting on a different genocide, termed “the banality of evil”: ordinary people following orders confiscated and destroyed the tapes, even as they were silently humming these same songs under their breath.

Sinn Sisamouth, “Ma Pi Noak”

Pan Ron, “Rom Ago Ago”

After the click-through: Dengue Fever and the renaissance of Khmer rock and roll.

Continue reading Holiday in Cambodia: Khmer Rock, Dengue Fever and the River of Time →

The Wonderful Truth About Burma

Heavy Rotation, Rants and Raves

I love art and I love rock, but to say that “art rock” has usually been neither would be an understatement. This problem calls to mind Matt Groening’s French sex comedy paradox: the French are funny, sex is funny, and comedy is funny, yet French sex comedies are are never funny. I know, there are good exceptions, from Robert Fripp in his livelier moments to Brian Eno, when he’s not busy recording ambient seal mating noises to play at low volume in European airports. But if art rock is usually a fever, my most reliable cure for three decades running has been Boston’s Mission of Burma, a band that still cranks its amps to eleven even though its guitarist has tinnitus. How “art rock” is Mission of Burma? Well, they’ve recorded two songs about Max Ernst. But unlike, say, Don McLean whining about how nobody loved Vincent Van Gogh, Burma’s art songs are alive with a visceral, spiritual connection to their subject matter. “Dada-dada-dada-dada-dada-dada,” it turns out, makes for one rocking chorus.

I’m only slightly embarrassed that my most-played “new” album of 2008 was Matador’s re-release of Mission of Burma’s 27 year-old Signals, Calls and Marches. Meticulously produced by Ace of Hearts svengali Rick Harte, it doesn’t sound remotely dated. Since the Zeroes have already seen the likes of Interpol, Kaiser Chiefs, Ted Leo, M.I.A., and just about everyone else channeling the early Eighties underground, the time is ripe for a Burma renaissance. Mission of Burma is enjoying a surprisingly productive second life since its 2002 reunion; if you think the band is a nostalgia act, play 2006’s scorching The Obliterati right after any other recent release. One of the best shows I saw in 2008 was Burma’s San Francisco performance of everything from Signals, which reached even further into the band’s back pages with the dark and mysterious “Peking Spring.”

Matador’s 2008 reissue of Signals actually improves on and completes the original version. This year’s model adds four tracks to the original EP’s length, including both sides of one of my all-time favorite singles (Clint Conley’s wonderfully grumpy grad school anthem, “Academy Fight Song,” and Roger Miller’s frenetic “Max Ernst”) and two formerly instrumental tracks from the same sessions (“Devotion” and “Execution”) that the middle-aged Burma gang gave a vocal makeover sometime after recording The Obliterati. Without the dynamics of the original Signals‘ signature number, “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” the reworked songs still blend beautifully, sharing a style that has one foot in the conservatory and the other in the mosh pit. The sum total is thirty-five minutes of heavenly bliss disguised as punk rock. About the only thing I miss is the lyric sheet from the original release, which arranged all the words in alphabetical order.

Mission of Burma, “Academy Fight Song”

Mission of Burma, “This is Not a Photograph”

Continue reading The Wonderful Truth About Burma →

Battle of the Beards

Diatribes, Slow Jams

When I started writing about music in the Eighties, a prominent beard on a musician was often viewed as a sure sign that the performer was an out-of-touch hippie fossil, or barring that, a member of ZZ Top. That started to change during the goatee epidemic of the Nineties, which I was convinced would make facial hair disreputable for decades to come once the grunge bubble burst. But history has proven me wrong, because the late Zeroes have seen an outgrowth of musician facial hair worth of a post-Civil War presidential campaign, along with a revival of the hierarchy of beards. In what follows below, I’ll survey some of the notable beards of the moment, ranked from zero to ten on the Sanders-Hudson index. For the uninitiated, that index celebrates the beardly perfection of saxophone visionary Pharoah Sanders and Band keyboardist Garth Hudson, whose historic contributions have done for beards what Christopher Walken has done for the cowbell.

Facial outgrowth isn’t always a sign of greatness, or vice-versa. Patchy-faced Bob Dylan and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy have sometimes dabbled in facial hair, but these are not beardly men; you might as well put a spoiler on a Volvo station wagon. Nobody knows that better than Tweedy himself, the author of “Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard” (“things got pretty weird, and I grew Bob Dylan’s beard”). And beardrevue.com gave a major thumbs down to Stuck Between Stations favorite Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), ranking him three points below the composite band score assigned to current beard icons the Fleet Foxes. Explaining the Captain’s lowly 5.9 ranking, the site noted: “His lip ferret was merely average. And his poet’s beard was never much more than the obligatory mark of a mad musical genius.”

At the outset, I have disqualified Devendra Banhart, because that would be too easy, like naming Jesus on a list of famous sandal-wearers. This list is for beard-growers, and I have it on good authority that Devendra was born bearded to traveling circus performers from Caracas. Here are my rankings in this year’s Battle of the Beards:

• Kyp Malone, TV on the Radio (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 7.5)

The guitarist-singer from Brooklyn’s innovative art rockers-turned-mutant funkateers had this year’s beard competition all sewn up. But, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Kyp has now trimmed his beard.

TV on the Radio, “Dancing Choose”

• Jim James, My Morning Jacket (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 7.0)

James’ Kentucky combo may well rank as the most hirsute band of the past decade. But he’s docked two notches here, because his Prince falsetto on this year’s Evil Urges is less convincing than that of Spoon‘s Britt Daniel, and worse, he has reportedly switched to a mustache.

My Morning Jacket, “Wordless Chorus”

More beards after the click-through Continue reading Battle of the Beards →

Music That Cooks: Our Thanksgiving Playlists

Playlists

For this year’s Thanksgiving, I posed this question to our Stuck Between Stations co-conspirators: “What music are you thankful for, and what would you suggest eating with it?” The results are posted below, including my edible playlist and helpings of pot luck from Zoe Krylova, Scot Hacker, Christian Crumlish, Benoit Baald, and Dan Haig. Need more Thanksgiving cheer? Check the heartwarming stories of Johnny Thunders struggling with a frozen turkey and the Rickrolling of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Zoe Krylova’s picks

PJ Harvey: rare steak and a baked potato
Patti Smith: hot chicken curry
Devendra Banhart: venison stew and a chimay
Vetiver: salad of mixed greens and wildflowers, elderberry wine
Bjork: dim sum
Joni Mitchell: assorted crackers and exotic cheeses
Neil Young: ribs
Classical Indian music: samosas and chai
Sun Ra: dark chocolate and smoothies
Reggae: jerk chicken & fresh lemonade

P.J. Harvey, “When Under Ether”

Sun Ra, “Pink Elephants”

Scot Hacker’s Picks

Elizabeth Cotten: For doing Fahey before there was Fahey, for being a chick doing the real gospel blues, for doing sweet folk without getting all Joan Baez on our asses, for making me float. Listen here. Note: The video above doesn’t do Cotten justice – definitely check out the Smithsonian collection of her works for the full effect. Recommended eating: Goat curry with IPA.

Music of Indonesia, Vol. 20: Indonesian Guitars: For reminding that none of us have heard the end of what the guitar is or does, or how it sounds. There’s always more pineapple to suck the juice out of, one more finger to lick. For reminding that the delta between Daniel Johnston, Japanese koto, and Bill Harkelroad converges on the Indian Ocean. Listen here. Recommended eating: Chicken satay and limeade.

Elizabeth Cotten, “Freight Train”

Continue reading Music That Cooks: Our Thanksgiving Playlists →

Guns n’ Sodas and the Great Leap Backward

Quick Shots

What would you say to the crazy guy in the park muttering about alien spaceship landings on the day the mothership finally beams down to bring him home? The makers of Dr. Pepper must be wondering the same thing. Earlier this year, Dr. Pepper notoriously promised that if professional head case Axl Rose finally released Guns n’ Roses’ perpetually unavailable Chinese Democracy album to the public after 17 years –and thereby deprived the music world of one of its best synonyms for incompleteness–it would give a free Dr. Pepper away to every American (except for departed guitarists Buckethead and Slash). That day has finally arrived. Any time today, and today only, you can visit the Dr. Pepper website and claim your free soda.

As I’ve never really been a fan of the band, I could ignore the media hype over Chinese Democracy if it weren’t for a few things:
• It’s messing with my sense of integrity. Back in the day, I considered the head cases in the Replacements to be the anti-Guns n’ Roses, delivering mostly heart and soul where Axl and his gang delivered mostly hype and bluster. But hell must be freezing over, because Tommy Stinson of the Replacements is now Guns n’ Roses’ bassist.
• It’s reminding me that Axl Rose is an idiot savant, not just an idiot. It wasn’t just a lucky fluke that “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine” have become air guitar/ karaoke classics. As late finishers go, he’s certainly no Brian Wilson, but file the band under guilty semi-pleasure–and skip the icky power ballads.
• Since Axl Rose has been known to pen lyrics that make him come off like Ann Coulter with better hair, it’s interesting that the “new” album features a sample of Martin Luther King.
• Despite Axl’s best efforts, I still think he’s only the second-best rock degenerate to use China as a metaphor (see Johnny Thunders, below).

Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, “Chinese Rocks”

Guns n’ Roses, “Chinese Democracy”

Kind of Blue

Diatribes

For months, I’ve wondered what music I’d want to listen to once the long election march toward the post-Bush era was finally over. The always-reliable Carrie Brownstein had some great pre-election suggestions in her Monitor Mix blog —the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today,” Al Green’s version of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”—but like me, she found that on election night the only real answer was to make your own music. From NYC’s Union Square, she reported “magically becoming tolerant” of “the Bacchanalia I usually associate with drum circles, Hemp Fests and Renaissance Fairs.” Fresh off the plane from two days of voter protection work in Nevada, I had a similar moment, banging on an assortment of random percussion instruments with my three year-old son Matthew like a giddy hippie who’d staggered through one too many Dead tours asking for a miracle.

By the next morning, though, I knew exactly what I wanted to hear. On his unlikely path to the Presidency, Barack Obama kept his cool very much like vintage late fifties/ early sixties Miles Davis. Like Obama, the Miles who recorded Kind of Blue was hardly a radical; his subtle power was less iconoclastic than Ornette Coleman’s similarly timed Shape of Jazz to Come and less dramatic than the Giant Steps of his sideman John Coltrane. Yet Miles too was a forward thinker who nailed his moment in history. Sensing that hard bop’s routine of riffing had become a bridge to nowhere, he dispensed with straight chord progressions in favor of modes and shaped sounds that still seem almost as fresh as they did nearly half a century ago. After enduring a parade of hotheads, blowhards, dimwits, and trigger-happy supermodels, I’ll spend today celebrating the simple virtues of the “cool”—not in the snarky sense of “hipper than thou,” but as a credo standing for resilient grace and poise in the face of chaos.

As an occasional hothead, I can’t help wondering whether the cool President-Elect Obama who channels mid-period Miles also has a little Bitches’ Brew bubbling under the surface. Before I could even complete this thought, I discovered that someone has already done a mash-up of Obama’s speeches and electric Miles, notably “Feio” from the Bitches’ Brew sessions. There’s a new deal in town, and I can’t wait to listen.

Miles Davis, “So What” (featuring John Coltrane)

This Band Could Save Your Life

Diatribes, Heavy Rotation

Can you think of a band that could save your life? I didn’t ask which band could be your life, the subject of the Minutemen‘s classic “History Lesson, Part II” and Michael Azerrad‘s survey of the American rock underground circa 1981-1991. The question posed here is more literal. A Reuters article this week reported that the Bee Gees’ falsetto-fortified 1977 disco hit ‘Stayin’ Alive,” which clocks in at 103 beats per minute (bpm), almost perfectly matches the 100 per minute rate that the American Heart Association recommends for chest compressions during cardiopulmonary resuscitation. A recent study at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria found that listening to “Stayin’ Alive” helped 15 doctors and medical students perform chest compressions on dummies at the appropriate speed. By contrast, Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” despite its title, plods along at a potentially lethal 50 bpm.

No disrespect for the Bee Gees, who started out as a rather classy British Invasion band, but I suspect the disco-loving doctors stacked the deck on this one. Quick review of an online bpm directory reveals that the medical authorities strangely bypassed plenty of songs registering exactly 100 bpm, including such life-affirming ditties as “Straight Cadillac Pimpin‘” by 8-Ball and MJG and “No Shelter” by Rage Against the Machine. But I’m probably just getting defensive because I had to give a guy CPR once, and the song I recall hearing in my head was “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones, which races along at a frightful 175.8 bpm. Miraculously, he survived. For years, I’ve harbored the delusion that the Ramones helped save his life, when the life they helped save was mine.

One song I’d identify as a “lifesaver” without resorting to mathematical determinism is “(Reach Out) I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops, whose lead crooner Levi Stubbs passed away yesterday. It’s as thorny as a hook-laden love song can get, with “confusion” rhymed with “illusion” and an outstretched hand offering solace in a “world crumbling down.” Almost as good is the 1986 British hit that Stubbs inspired, “Levi Stubbs’ Tears,” which probably ranks as Billy Bragg‘s finest moment. The song is a bittersweet character study of an enduring woman that says more about living with dignity in hard times than a dozen of Bragg’s wordier political anthems. “When the world falls apart, some things stay in place/ Levi Stubbs’ tears run down his face.” When the nameless woman in the song quietly places the Four Tops tape back in its case, her world remains bleak, but she’s managed to survive to face another day, a little wearier and a little wiser. Call me corny, but at a time when the world sure seems like it’s falling apart, keeping the heart moving a little may be the most subversive impulse available. And it’s not just based on math.

Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop”

Four Tops, “(Reach Out) I’ll Be There”

Billy Bragg, “Levi Stubbs’ Tears”

Strange Fruit

Diatribes, Rants and Raves

Do you remember the first time you heard a song that gave you the chills? For me, that moment happened the same month Richard Nixon resigned. Too young to fully grasp current events, I still knew that a disturbing otherness was intruding into daily routines, something unsettling enough to make grownups forget their keys at the supermarket or lose their train of thought in mid-sentence. People seemed strange, and I didn’t know why. During these culminating moments of Watergate, a Billie Holiday anthology from the library gave me my first taste of “Strange Fruit.” For reasons I couldn’t explain, the way she sang her way through her numbness captured the unsettling strangeness around me. I had no idea that the song was about lynching; for years, I still thought it was about fruit. Decades later, when I saw photographer Amy Kubes’ “Little Worries” collection, which features images of a bandaged pear and a cantaloupe wearing underpants, I couldn’t stop hearing “Strange Fruit” in my head.

For the past few weeks, “Strange Fruit” has followed me everywhere. Partly that’s because recent events made me recall a picture of two studious-looking little boys who reminded me a bit of myself—little Robert, dressed in a Brooklyn Dodgers t-shirt, looking over the shoulder of his big brother Michael, with his face buried in a newspaper. But these boys were the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the newspaper in Michael’s hand bore details of their parents’ impending execution. Robert and Michael became the adoptive sons of Abel Meeropol, a Bronx-based schoolteacher, union activist, and occasional poet/ songwriter who wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. After seeing Lawrence Beitler’s gruesome image of a lynching in Marion, Indiana, Meeropol wrote a haunting poem that he later turned into “Strange Fruit.” One wonders whether he saw the Rosenbergs’ execution, which Jean-Paul Sartre once termed a “legal lynching,” as strange fruit of a different sort.

The iconic picture of Robert and Michael reading the newspaper reappeared in the news this month along with new evidence confirming Julius Rosenberg’s involvement as a Soviet spy, while adding to doubts that Ethel was guilty of more than being a loyal wife. That news prompted the Meeropol brothers, who spent decades attempting to prove both parents’ innocence, to confront the strange reality that things were not quite what they seemed. Ironically, the revelations about the Rosenbergs coincided with the near-collapse of the banking system and plans for the most sweeping state takeover of private enterprise in American history—not because of a Russian invasion, but because under-regulated and over-leveraged financiers ran out of ways to creatively repackage crushing debt. Time will tell whether the reaction to this crisis will, 78 years after the lynching that inspired “Strange Fruit,” lead to the election of our first African-American president. I’m trying to be hopeful, but much of the time, I’m singing my way through my numbness and feeling a little strange.

Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”