Great Exudations

I was living in Chicago when I hit my 40’s. And I was getting tired of haunting the same old bars, doing mostly the same old thing with pretty much the same old crowd. So I started taking guitar lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music (OTSFM). It was a magical place back then. The students were an eclectic group of many stripes and of all ages, gathering weekly in an informal, non-degree based setting with a neo-hippie vibe. It changed my life in ways both large and small and opened me up to new forms of expression. They would run classes in eight week blocks and once you got past the introductory course, you were free to join a wide range of classes for many musical styles and instruments — from singing to banjo to percussion to dance to songwriting. Perhaps the most fun were the so-called “ensembles,” mini band experiences in which you would explore a particular group or musical genre during each block, sometimes running sequentially for years on end. I joined ensembles focused on the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Beck, the Smiths, and the Beach Boys. You learn a lot from playing with other people. My friend Cathy used to say, “know your role!” and that’s pretty good general life advice. With the 70’s ensemble, I got to play an afternoon set on a public stage at the Taste of Chicago in Grant Park. I was pretty off-key that day but it didn’t matter. Nobody died. It was an important lesson in singing. Rather then trying to sing like someone else (i.e. to match the record), learn to sound like yourself. Another generalizable life lesson. One of my all-time favorites, though, was the Mellow Gold class which explored the sock rock hits from the 1970’s by Ambrosia, Bread, the Carpenters, Poco, Seals and Crofts, Elton John, Maureen McGovern, Hall and Oats, and John Denver. “Wildfire” by Michael Martin Murphey became a mock anthem to be worked into a song set whenever possible. Real fun was had. Great friends were made. How could they not? It was telling that after we sang a little Neil Diamond or Neil Sedaka ditty, we would immediately start to laugh, mostly at ourselves. A lush and joyful absurdity is a beautiful thing.

As you look back on life, certain patterns emerge. We yearn for something new, some novel experience or skill, but we also enjoy familiar ritual. It’s finding a balance somewhere between learning a brand new song and telling the same old joke — and sometimes the joke is in the repetition. One classmate in the 70’s ensemble was named Dave, a great dude, slightly older than me. He had this groovy Native American style guitar strap that you might see in a Santa Fe gift shop. I don’t think it had exactly inlaid turquoise but that’s pretty close. And as we’d don our gear at the start of class I used to love calling out, “Hey, Dave, who gave you that strap, Billy Jack?!” I’ve told that joke dozens of times and it still cracks me up. And if he got sick of it, he never let on. New and old. Novel plus ritual. As Guy Clark spoke-sang it, “the stuff that works, the stuff that holds up.”

And in the course of these here classes, you’d naturally meet folks and become friends. And my night being mostly Thursday’s, and being of German-Irish descent, there was a natural tendency to find a watering hole afterwards. For me it started at the Grafton Pub with a guy my age named Eric. We would drink Guinness and shoot the shit. Compare notes on life, the way you do. We all need that so that we don’t stray too far off course. Then after a few weeks another guy joined us. Then one of the gals, and we all eventually followed the crowd up the street to Ricochet’s Tavern, a pretty generic dive bar but with a jukebox. I think that was the key, in the end. Pump in a few dollars and sing along, sometimes even dance a bit (the worse the better!). One of the juke buttons was balky, and I had another running joke that I wore out with my friend Cathy: “if it sticks, you get Styx!” (not sure why but I always hated Styx, even though I more than tolerated cheesier acts like Barry Manilow… life’s funny that way). At its height there might have been 15-20 or more folks there from the OTSFM, just chattin’ and singin’ and a-carryin’ on. Beer and bourbon. Gettin’ to know the bartenders. Teachers would often show up. It was a whole cast of characters, kinda like “The Simpsons.” Stayin’ up too late, anyhow, for a school night. They only had chips and pretzels, no hot food, but the “Tamale Guy” would usually make the rounds selling his grub from a cooler. One night a local butcher came in selling mustards and meats. That felt a little odd but I bought some anyway. You can never have too much mustard.

There was a semi-regular named Andy, terrific guy, who kindly tolerated our antic behavior. For whatever reason, a group of us “regulars,” including Larry, Virginia, Karen, myself and others, decided to encircle and serenade him with Dave Mason’s “We Just Disagree” (his unexcused absences poignantly underscored by the opening line, “Been away / haven’t seen you in a while / how’ve you been? / have you changed your style?”). We took to burying the song deep in the jukebox set and then we’d sneak up on him at the bar, whilst he was immersed in conversation, and hit him with full-throated chorus. His combined physical agitation and good humor at this was like catnip to us, and this scene was repeated in variations many times thereafter. Yet another ritual to stave off life’s madness. I very much look forward to its return someday! And the pay-off was all the better when he conveyed to us this story. It seems he had been shopping at Jewel-Osco one day when the song was suddenly playing overhead. He said that his head instinctively darted back and forth down the aisle, fully expecting to see us peering around the corner. I revel in the idea of what it would take to pull that off — persistently stalking Andy and waiting for the right moment, talking to the store manager, patching an iPhone into the PA system. Alas, it was a mere coincidence. But one that also speaks volumes about the emotional reach of Dave Mason. As if there was any doubt.

Two of the regulars were a set of seemingly inseparable friends, aptly/alliteratively named Janet and Judy. Both very nice but who, for a short spell, adopted the unfortunate habit of sneaking up on you at the bar and slapping you, pretty damned hard, right on your ass! We called them, in those days, the Spank Sisters. For a while I developed a tic that had me quickly checking my shoulder for their presence and angling my butt perpendicular to the bar. It was fairly annoying, honestly, but in a benign way. Anyhow, they had a circle of friends that overlapped mine and they enjoyed camping trips to the Wisconsin lakes, and probably also into Michigan. I have a fairly deep aversion to camping and wasn’t about to find out the exact locations first hand. Janet had made several invitations for me to join in these outdoor adventures, but I assiduously declined using various dodges and filibustering techniques. But as she persisted over the several months, I finally landed on my list of non-negotiable demands for such a camping scenario to unfold, virtually guaranteeing that it would not. They are as follows and with an intended comedic escalation:

1. A warm bed.
2. A hot shower.
3. Cable.
4. A bidet.
5. An inflatable sex doll with a mouth shaped like “O”!!

Needless to day, I never went camping. Janet was, of course, in on the joke all along and we short-hand referenced these mock conditions as “The Five Things. ” Nuance and novelty against ritual and repetition. Maybe our lives, when optimized, find that dynamic-balance. This static-flux. We are always and yet never changing. Perhaps that’s as it should be: to always dig for new material but knowing sometimes that the humor is in the eyerolls (and that a joke doesn’t get old until the teller gets tired of it!). Things for us to ponder. And feel free to use this list to whatever end you may desire. Meantime, I’ll be at the bar.

As I looked more closely at this comic coaster portrayal of the despicable and abhorrent and cowardly and smug and oleaginous and duplicitous and prevaricating — you could literally teach an SAT prep class on pejoratives with him — Ted Cruz (R-Texas), I homed in on the GOP elephant sitting at the bar. Notice that his trunk is, ah, truncated (pause for applause), and that it is also continued in disembodied form as the snout/spout of that uber-loser Cruz’s teapot. Furthermore, I would note that the teapot is purposefully positioned directly under the derrière of the seated elephant, who is giving him the side-eye. If you complete the circuit, you have the clever pachyderm drinking the wine/Kool-Aid which gets figuratively crapped out into the teapot that forms a second visual arc up that ultra-idiot Cruz’s arm and into his cup for him to slurp down like the giant poseur-fool that he is. What a genius, that artist (KAL is Kevin Gallagher, the heavily-decorated editorial cartoonist for The Economist and The Baltimore Sun)!

Eat shit, Ted Cruz!!

“If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”

Edward Hopper

This is the roundabout story of how I came to discover and love “Baltimore,” one of Randy Newman’s deeper cuts. I, of course, can remember his popular song “Short People” (from the 1977 album “Little Criminals” that also contains “Baltimore”). It was the first major hit for Newman and peaked at No. 2 for three weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 (held off at the goal line by Player’s “Baby Come Back” and the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive”). But I also recall it wasn’t a hit with everyone, including several family members and friends who took it somewhat personally. There was serious public backlash, as well, including threats to the artist, radio boycotts, etc. And in 1978, the Maryland delegate Isaiah Dixon unsuccessfully tried to introduce legislation that would have banned the song from airplay (a notion far more toxic than the lyrics, even in their misinterpretation). But what seems obvious in retrospect, and the artist himself affirms in several interviews, is that the song is simply ironic. He is holding the mirror up to bigotry and the judgment of people based on appearances. The song’s bridge clearly gives the thematic counterpoint with “short people are just the same as you and I/ it’s a wonderful world.” And Newman did a similar songwriting trick with point-of-view on “Rednecks,” which has the irony cutting both ways. But I digress. This story is about the song and the city of Baltimore….

….and also it’s about the 1970’s revival that took place in the 1990’s. I had come of age in the 70’s and still regard that era as producing some of the best and most eclectic music to this day. The late 60’s and early 70’s was the heyday of the freeform radio format (progressive radio), in which DJ’s had wide latitude over what they played. I turned eight in 1972 and fondly recall the bacchanalia of music streaming from my clock-radio in those wonder years. “Angie” by the Stones followed “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul. “The Streak” by Ray Stevens into “Ramblin’ Man” by the Allman Brothers. “Touch Me in the Morning” by Diana Ross versus “The Morning After” by Maureen McGovern. They stacked Skynyrd, the Spinners, and Edgar Winter. And, man, the Stylistics! The Doobie Brothers atop the Brothers Johnson. Paul McCartney’s “My Love” against Mary MacGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers.” And on and on (and “On and On” by Stephen Bishop!). It’s a lot like my current iTunes playlists, come to think about it….

So I was in medical school in Baltimore from 1987-1991. I had taken an elective course in psychiatry and one perk was a summer externship at Guy’s Hospital in London during the summer of ’88. Five of us traveled and we considered it more of a cultural exchange than anything medical. Now, keep in mind that the medical students in UK are four years younger than in the States. They take their A-levels toward end of our equivalent high school years and then go straight into professional school. But despite their tender age (we were all of 23 or 24), they could party like pros and once or twice a month on Fridays they hosted “inflamm’s” (the walls and windows would bead up with condensation, hence the name, short for “inflammation”). These which sweaty, beery affairs set to the music of the Smiths, the Housemartins, New Order, etc. but also with a healthy dose of good old 70’s pop. It wasn’t lost on me at the time that the ones that got us dancing with pure abandon were songs like “Rock the Boat” by the Hues Corporation, as well as the hits of Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees, and ABBA. It was like a massive do-over. The songs you wanted to let-go dance-to back in the day but just couldn’t for fear or lack of opportunity (in my case, braces and a bad haircut). We were “born again” in the best, and maybe only good, sense of the term. These “inflamm’s” were fantastic! When one of us slipped and broke his scaphoid (wrist bone), it was all deemed well worth it, even by him…

But now fast forward to winter of ’90-91 when we are veterans of the med school game and headlong toward graduation. This is the eye of the storm, a brief period of relaxation before we launched for internship followed by residency, each step further differentiating us along the pathway of our chosen medical specialty. Around this time I was invited by a classmate to see a hip band from Scotland called the Trashcan Sinatras (their album “Cake” from that era holds up quite well). They played Max’s on Broadway in Baltimore that winter and the place was jammed. I recall waiting with curious anticipation since I really didn’t know their music. And then it happened. The song that introduced them to the stage and brought the crowd to an early peak came booming through the PA. It was a perfect musical moment. Instantly recognizable was the opening piano salvo to “Dancing Queen” by ABBA, and I was floored. First off, I love the song and always have (though loath to admit it back in the day). It’s a flawless pop tune exquisitely packaged. Delicately balanced are the saccharine sweetness, the rich cheesy goodness, and a dash of melancholy — in saying that all songs, dances, concerts, good times come to an end. And the place went nuts for it! They put on an amazing show and I will always love them for that kick-off. And it reinforced that deep and powerful pull of nostalgia, same as we had felt during those UK “inflamm’s.” It started the gears turning and not long after we resolved to have a pre-graduation 70’s party for Spring 1991…

In preparation for the big event, I took charge of the music. At the time we boasted a CD player, turntable and cassette deck. Since I didn’t want to have to play active DJ, and certainly didn’t want people changing records or discs mid song, I felt it best to pre-tape the whole party soundtrack onto a series of cassettes with a built-in ebb and flow (kids these days have it so easy!). The source material was a little tricky and came from different quarters. Rhino Records were a big help in that they had reissued compilations from the 70’s, as had Billboard with collections of songs by year. I purchased a handful of greatest hits CD’s by Neil Diamond, Queen, and the Bee Gees. I’m sure I already owned ABBA, Bread and the Carpenters (the ABC’s of any real party!). My cousin Mark actually hand-delivered a vinyl copy of “Saturday Night Fever,” which I still cherish to this day. But for some of the more nuanced songs, I hit a few record stores looking for 45’s. This landed me “Spiders and Snakes” by Jim Stafford, “The Streak” by Ray Stevens, “Drift Away” by Dobie Gray, “Nobody Does It Better” by Carly Simon, and finally “Short People” by Randy Newman. I spent many hours planning the song order and recording the songs, which was a joy unto itself. I’m not sure the modern generation will ever understand the combined tension and thrill of committing to the tracks on a mixed tape. The songs were a statement about yourself, a mile marker of your tastes and musical progress. Back in high school you could play it safe, sure, with the Stones, Zeppelin, Springsteen, Pink Floyd, CCR, etc. You could edge out a little with Little Feat, Joe Jackson, the B-52’s, and Blondie. Or you could go way out there, which I was essentially deaf and blind to at the time, being full-rutted in classic rock. But looking back it might have been Tom Waits, the Stooges, MC-5, Patti Smith, Joy Division, the Minutemen, the Feelies, or Gary Numan. I missed most of that on first pass but started catching up in medical school with the Smiths, the Cure, etc. and then got turned on to more chill contemporary sounds like Morphine, Mazzy Star and Massive Attack in the 90’s. Beyond that my tastes continued to evolve as I was turned on to the Flaming Lips, Thievery Corp, the Eels, Sparklehorse, Mark Lanegan, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Neko Case, Wilco, the Streets, Sufjan Stevens, Madlib, the White Stripes, Joe Henry, Gillian Welch & Dave Rawlings, Old Crow Medicine Show, Amy Winehouse, Air, etc. (the tide of new music for me went out around 2012 after buying a fine album by Tame Impala… you just lose touch at some point). But it’s telling that two of my all-time favorite songs are “Daniel” by Elton John and “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac. Those, of course, were massive radio hits, and yet so much depended in those early days on the opinions of your siblings and friends, the crowd you ran around with, the radio stations in your area (WHFS), etc. And many of my friends who married young seem fixed in amber when it comes to their musical habits. You can hear the highwater mark in their playlists and cultural references. I was lucky to find out that there is life after John Cougar Mellencamp and R.E.M (after “Out of Time” was released in 1991, I walked into a sparse dive-bar in Baltimore’s Pigtown… and as I approached the jukebox, a slightly older and grittier dude pre-empted me with, “I’ll give you five bucks NOT to play ‘Shiny Happy People’!!”)…

…but, again, I digress. When I went to record “Short People” from the store bought 45, I noticed on the flip side a song I had never heard before. It was called “Baltimore.” I gave it a spin and it was struck by how different the vibe was from the pop-novelty song opposite. It begins with a little syncopated piano motif that runs throughout the whole song, in some variation, and steadily builds to a chorus that thumps in straight-time as Newman sings, “Ohhh, Baltimore, man it’s hard just to live…. just to live.” And in it he captures a melancholy that is at the soul of Baltimore since the 1960’s, call it the pre-“Wire” era. There’s a documentary about Sun Ra called “A Joyful Noise” from 1980 that has several performances and scenes filmed in Baltimore. It’s well worth the time as a nice time capsule on both the composer and the city. There’s something about the light, a bit harsh, and the skyline (as Mr. Ra looks out from a rooftop one afternoon), a little sad, that helps to plot the decline. Erosion by degrees. A burst of investment and growth was to come in the late 80’s and 90’s followed by more sideways-down, punctuated most emphatically by the death of Freddie Gray in 2015. Oh, Baltimore. Man, it’s hard just to live. And it feels as if Randy Newman saw it coming, all the way from LA…

But it turns out that, despite his also penning a number of major hits for Disney-Pixar films like “Toy Story” and “Monsters, Inc.,” Randy Newman has a history of courting controversy. In this case, his sin was in writing a dark and somewhat judgmental song about a city he had never visited. Without getting too much into the ethics of songwriting (since John Fogarty wrote “Proud Mary” without ever seeing a riverboat… and Springsteen never went “racing in the streets”), it is perhaps more permissible to write a hopeful song or paean to a city with which you are only vaguely familiar. In an interview, he confessed that he had only traveled through Baltimore on a train and read an article in “National Geographic” (funny, especially if not true!) and felt that the good people of Baltimore had sound reason to be upset. So, he owned it. But here’s the thing. I don’t think he really had to. First, his controversial songs are often veiled-satirical (see “All in the Family” for a TV show analogy to his “Yellow Man” song). He takes on the voice of certain narrow-minded characters to hold the mirror up to bigotry but also to armchair liberal hypocrisy (in other words, we all suck!). He should be congratulated for having the stones to take all that on and, often enough, pulling it off. Secondly, and more importantly, he was fucking RIGHT about Baltimore all along despite (and maybe because of) his distance. The bittersweet taste of time’s vindication is his for the slow-drinking. Now, don’t get me wrong. There is much to love about Baltimore, past and present. And I, as many do, have hope for its return to some sort of glory. So much history and kitsch-tory is to be found among all the potholes and littered side streets, if you close your eyes and know where to look. In many ways, I prefer it to the stuffy, stratified, self-important, and stupidly expensive Washington, DC (where I grew up). But just as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross gave us the five stages of grief ending with acceptance (of death), so does the 12-step program begin with admitting/accepting that you have a problem prior to recovery (in rebirth). Randy Newman isn’t long on solutions, I’ll admit, but he does seem to have a knack for our collective diagnosis. The song rings utterly true in 2022.

And in the end, the 70’s party (circa 1991) was a resounding success. I bought a cheesy, nautically-themed polyester shirt in a consignment shop that smelled like fish when you sweated. Somehow that seems fitting. If I find the picture, I’ll post it. Sadly though, it’s not in scratch-n-sniff.