Extending the Line

Holding the Note: Profiles in Popular Music by David Remnick.  Knopf.  304 pp.  $20.87 *****

I have no idea how David Remnick does it.  He’s the editor of the New Yorker, which, the last time I looked, was a full-time job.  But he also churns out books on a variety of subjects, everything from Barack Obama to Lenin’s Tomb to Muhammed Ali.  He publishes a variety of articles in his own magazine (as this book attests), and when there is a truly momentous public event, like a former President being indicted, he always weighs in with an opinion that seems right on the money.  In his spare time, he hosts the New Yorker Radio Hour (which I seldom listen to because I don’t have the time, but I enjoy it when I do).

He also attends a fair number of concerts.  He got this habit from his parents, who let him know how important it was to support major artists and how precious such moments could be.  Although his mother had MS and his father eventually had Parkinson’s, they took the family to see Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, and Nina Simone.  And instead of playing Muzak in his dental office, Remnick’s father went with Big Mama Thornton and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.  (The people getting drilled weren’t the only ones screamin’.)

If the artists in this collection have anything in common, it is that they had long-lived careers (Charlie Parker is the exception, but that piece is really about one of his greatest fans and promoters, a New York guy named Phil Schaap who had a long-time radio show).  And Remnick is writing not so much about their great and famous days, but about their survival as artists.  It’s no easy thing to have a career in music that spans generations.

My tastes don’t quite converge with Remnick’s, but they come close.  I’m interested in Leonard Cohen as a person, if I didn’t follow his singing career.  The profile of Cohen leads off this collection, and I’d read it in the New Yorker before, even copied it to read again.  Cohen was a fascinating figure because, like Patti Smith (the piece that ends the book), his real ambition was as a writer, a poet and novelist, and he had to be persuaded, practically dragged out on the stage, before he ever performed one of his songs.  He always needed some chemical help, if only booze, a trait he shared with Buddy Guy (whom I have seen perform, but who is no kin that I know of).  Guy regularly needed two shots of cognac before any performance, and liked to include some moderately obscene patter between songs, modeling himself on comedians like Redd Fox.

A lot of details in his profile were startling to me, such as the fact that Guy created his first guitar out of the wire from mosquito screens and a couple of cans.  He had decided he wanted to be a musician after hearing such people as Guitar Slim at juke joints in Louisiana, and took off soon for Chicago.  But like many blues legends, Guy had an extremely difficult time making ends meet, and didn’t actually start to make good money until he was in his fifties.  He’s still around, and prosperous, at the age of 87.

Aretha Franklin didn’t have as much trouble getting started because her father was a world-famous preacher, C.L. Franklin, and she began singing in the church at a young age.  She had a powerful voice from the start; her problem was years of abuse from men (including her father) and problems with her weight.  As much of a celebrity as she was, she insisted all her life on being paid in cash before the performance, and she kept that packet of money in plain sight as she performed.  Billy Preston had the best statement about her.  “I don’t care what they say about Aretha.  She can be hiding out in her house in Detroit for years.  She can go decades without taking a plane or flying off to Europe.  She can cancel half her gigs and infuriate every producer and promoter in the country.  She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her.  She can go into her diva act and turn off the world.  But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you.  And you’ll know—you’ll swear—that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.”  This from a man who toured with Ray Charles.

The contrasting pieces on Keith Richards and Paul McCartney are fascinating.  As a child of the sixties, I think of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones together, the two great bands of my time.  But though the Beatles run was comparatively short, they produced an enormous range of music, while the Rolling Stones—though they have continued to perform forever, it seems—still rely on the old chestnuts that they recorded in their early days.  They still can’t get no satisfaction.  Richards, for Remnick, is primarily an example of a human being who has consumed mammoth amounts of drugs and alcohol and somehow survived.  And Remnick’s characterization of recent Rolling Stone performances is the funniest passage in the book.

“Few spectacles in modern life are more sublimely ridiculous than the geriatric members of the Stones playing the opening strains of ‘Street Fighting Man.’  The arena is typically jammed with middle-aged fans, who have donned apres-office relaxed-sized jeans, paid the sitter, parked the minivan in the lot, and, for a few hundred dollars a seat, shimmy along with Mick, who, having trained for the tours as if for a championship bout, prances inexhaustibly through a two-hour set, at his best evoking the spawn of James Brown and Gumby, at his worst coming off like someone’s liquored-up Aunt Gert, determined to trash her prettier sister’s wedding with a gruesome performance on the dance floor.”

I was surprised to learn that, in a mammoth Bruce Springsteen concert extravaganza, absolutely everything is choreographed, right down to the fist pumps.  Springsteen sounds like a man who, though he could easily kick back, or give a different kind of concert, is almost afraid to stop doing what he does, as if he needs the rush.  He still gets huge crowds, of course, like the Stones (who are expert in financing their enterprise.  Remnick includes the startling detail that, since 1989, they have grossed two billion dollars).  Bob Dylan also continues to perform, sometimes to smaller crowds, but resolutely refuses to rely on his earlier, mose popular music.  He’s an active engaged artist and when you attend his concert you’ll hear his latest work.  I was also stunned by how this great songwriter and Nobel Prize winner discussed his inspiration.

“These songs didn’t come out of thin air.  I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth.  It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock and roll, and traditional big-band swing orchestra music . . . .  If you sang John Henry as many times as me . . . you’d have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.

“All these songs are connected.  I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way . . . I thought I was just extending the line.”

Two interviews with Patti Smith round out the collection.  I actually didn’t like the one volume of her memoir that I read, but in an interview she’s fascinating and charming.  The collection also includes pieces on Pavarotti and Mavis Staples.

Every piece is a gem.  No wonder they were printed in the New Yorker.  The editor liked them too.