Highway 61 Revisited: the Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock, & Country Music
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Highway 61 Revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock, & Country Music Gene Santoro OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Highway 61 Revisited Also by Gene Santoro Dancing in Your Head (1994) Stir It Up (1997) Myself When I Am Real (2000) Highway 61 Revisited The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock, & Country Music Gene Santoro 1 2004 1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright © 2004 by Gene Santoro Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Santoro, Gene. Highway 61 revisited : the tangled roots of American jazz, blues, rock, and country music / by Gene Santoro. p. cm. ISBN 0–19–515481–1 1. Popular music—United States—History and criticism. 2. Jazz—History and criticism. I. Title. ML3477 .S21 2004 781.64'0973—dc22 2003024872 Book design and typesetting: Jack Donner, BookType 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents Introduction 1 I. Avatars 1 Louis Armstrong 7 2 Woody Guthrie 17 II. The Postwar Jazz Era 3 Mary Lou Williams 33 4 Max Roach 37 5 Sonny Rollins 49 6 Chet Baker 64 7 Miles Davis 68 8 Herbie Hancock 80 III. Rebirth of the Blues 9 The Gospel Highway 93 10 Chess Records 99 1 1 The Folk Revival 104 12 Willie Nelson 119 13 Lenny Bruce 124 14 Sweet Soul Music 135 IV. In the Garage 15 Bob Dylan 153 16 Electric Blues Revival 171 17 Buffalo Springfield 179 18 Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris 185 19 The Grateful Dead 193 20 The Band 204 21 The Firesign Theatre 216 22 Bruce Springsteen 223 23 Tom Waits 235 V. Possible Futures 24 Ken Burns, the Academy, and Jazz 243 25 The Politics of Music: Don Byron and Dave Douglas 257 26 Cassandra Wilson 265 27 Marty Ehrlich 278 28 New Jazz Fusions 283 29 Ani Difranco 297 Index 302 Highway 61 Revisited A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. —Walter Benjamin Music reveals a personal past which, until then, each of us was unaware of, moving us to lament misfortunes we never suffered and wrongs we did not commit. —Jorge Luis Borges Introduction HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED OFFERS, I hope, alternate ways of seeing the evolu- tion of American pop culture, especially music, over the last century. It opens with twin chapters on Louis Armstrong and Woody Guthrie. In the book’s unfolding narrative, this complex pair of geniuses represent the headwaters of significant and twisty currents flowing through the last hundred years of American pop-music history, here separating into isolated backwaters or bypassed channels, there merging into an unavoid- able river with many deltas, but always, whether incrementally or with white-water force, shaping key portions of the cultural landscape. Both Armstrong and Guthrie began as folk musicians performing for small marginal groups. Armstrong became the dapper virtuoso who survived endless varieties of racism while inventing the musical language that trans- formed jazz from folk music to art, though he never stopped insisting (unlike many of his more recent progeny) that entertainment was an indis- pensable aspect of his art; he enthralled a mass multiracial audience, which made him forever synonymous with jazz as well as rich, though he insisted on living relatively simply. Guthrie kept his talents deliberately rude, at least on the surface, because he wanted to dissolve the stage’s fourth wall by not seeming any more professional than his listeners; he smelled bad and dressed like the hobo he’d been, dynamited mass success whenever it got too near him, and became famous anyway, the catalytic icon ener- gizing the wavelike resurgences of American roots music that have punctuated every decade since. Armstrong, a black outsider by birth, wanted in, in his genial way—though thanks to America’s color bar, he rarely forgot where he stood. Guthrie, a white insider by birth transformed by family tragedy and Okie alienation and leftist politics, in his brusque way wanted out. But both challenged many of American society’s cher- ished imperatives and ideals, implicitly as well as explicitly, in their art, their opinions, their attitudes, and their lives. Highway 61 Revisited traces how these dynamics and their corollaries spool through post–World War II American culture via selected figures and moments that illustrate the interplay at work in various contexts. In 2 Introduction the process, it argues that these interactive tensions—between races, between musical art and pop entertainment, between high art and func- tional art, between art and commerce, between art and politics, and between America’s mainstream and marginal subcultures—form the fertile tidepools incubating most interesting modern American popular music, up to contemporary hip-hop and neofolk. Since this book isn’t encyclopedic, it tries to demonstrate how this works by telling several overlapping stories in a variety of formats and styles. One portrays a colorful cast of characters from the American Parade whose art surfaced marginal subcultures into mainstream US cultural life, usually with political and social impacts. Another follows the mingling of jazz (and its attitudes, especially its improvising drive, the risky business of American existentialist art) with some of the nation’s many pop culture streams: folk, rock, country, soul, hip-hop, poetry, comedy, TV, and movies. Yet another traces the development of genuine popular or “folk” cultures within (and often despite) the growth of corporate mass media, like the ubiquitous homemade garage bands that sprang up mushroomlike among boomers between the 1960s and 1980s, inadvertently creating a rock “canon” out of a patchwork of material while inculcating in millions the endangered pleasure of making their own music. And yet another suggests that if our politics over the last two decades has been recycling into a new McCarthy era, our culture is also doubling back to revive and reexplore modes of alien- ation and expression from those Cold War days. (This isn’t to say history repeats itself, exactly. Today’s hipsters aren’t 1940s Beats, but they do share a certain inchoate alienation; poetry slams at little bars and book- stores today aren’t just reissues of 1950s coffeehouses; the Web isn’t merely a technological update of fan lists, postwar radio, and indepen- dent labels; South Park doesn’t just reprise Lenny Bruce or the Firesign Theatre. But they form potentially suggestive parallels.) Connecting these are thematic leitmotifs like oral culture, racism, authenticity, drugs, outsider art, white versus black marginal subcultures, and so on. There’s an autobiographical thread as well, varying in thickness. Partly that’s because the process of discovering the affirmation of human creativity and possibility that music and art, whether “folk” or “high,” represent in the face of evil, greed, stupidity, and general human frailty changed my life, as it has so many, and shapes it still. And partly it’s because I began this book after September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers in my hometown came down and, like so many, I felt the need to retrace my footsteps, and America’s, trying to understand how I wound up here—and where we might go next. Most of these chapters began life in (often radically) different guises, in the following publications: The Nation, New York Times Book Review, Chamber Music, Fi magazine, Jazzwise, and Pulse. Others were Introduction 3 specifically written for this project, to fill out its narrative and thematic arcs. I want to thank my longtime editor, Sheldon Meyer, whose patient intelligence is priceless, as well as his assistant, Peter Harper; my produc- tion editor, Joellyn Ausanka; and my agent, Denise Shannon. As for my family and friends, who offered sympathetic ears and shrewd feedback, no thanks are enough. This page intentionally left blank part I Avatars This page intentionally left blank 1 Louis Armstrong FROM 1925 TO 1928, Louis Armstrong made an astonishing series of recordings, the jazz-creating legacy of his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, a succession of studio groups that virtually never performed live. In 1927, the young cornetist led his band into a meticulously hilarious version of a classic composition Jelly Roll Morton had made famous, “Twelfth Street Rag.” The track sounds like the opening shot of a revolution—except that the revolution in Armstrong’s head and hands had already been in full swing for years. Unlike most revolutions, from the first it displayed an ingrati- ating, inviting sense of humor and charm. Dippermouth, as his early New Orleans pals dubbed him, used the rag as a trampoline. As his horn frac- tures the tune’s familiar refrains, ragtime’s precise, cakewalking rhythmic values suddenly coil and loop and stutter and dive, the aural equivalent of a bravura World War I flying ace dogfighting tradition. Every time Armstrong comes precariously near a tailspin, he pulls back the control stick and confidently, jauntily, heads off toward the horizon, if not straight at another virtuosic loop-de-loop. The relentless joy brimming in the sound of young Satchemouth’s horn, the glorious deep-blue and fiery-red tinged Whitmanesque yawp of it, has an undeniably self-conscious edge.