...and now, a rock 'n roll book review...

Long Time Gone by David Crosby

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

you can learn a lot from biographies/autobiographies. this was no exception.

when it comes to rock and roll excess, who can separate truth from fiction from legend? when i saw the book i thought, cool—i can hear all about it from him. and that’s kind of the way the book goes, except that it augments what he says with what everyone else says: roadies, ex-lovers, business partners, damaged hippie freaks, ex-managers, fellow musicians and everything inbetween. all of that stitched up together gives a fuller picture than him, telling it like he remembers it. more often than not, everyone else reinforces whatever he says, and there’s the co-author with a timeline and photos and other documentation in case anyone goes off track. nice detail all around, especially when things go straight to hell and then get even worse.

there's him in the early days, riding around on a motorcycle wearing a leather cape. his love of/insistence upon three ways and little harems to take care of him. that whole hippie commune mentality, that share everything, with that everybody-in-and-out-of-everybody’s-house at all hours /everybody having sex with each other lifestyle. and him being a dick at any and every given opportunity because he thought he was soooooo great.

i don’t know. i think david crosby has a beautiful voice and he’s written some beautiful songs but after reading this and barney hoskyn’s “waiting for the sun” i think neil young is sooooooo great.

everyone else in rock and roll that does this level of drugs and debauchery for as long as he did dies in a pool of their own vomit. not “the cros”—probably because he got sent to prison for several years, and that’s what ultimately forced him to get clean. i knew some junkies in my day but at one point, just about everyone decided they didn’t want to die and they stopped doing it. somewhere in the 80s (the 80s!) he was looking at his rotting teeth and his swollen ankles and the sores and severe burn marks all over his face and body and he’d cry and feel sorry for himself and then he'd do some more freebase. (yikes-a-doodle-doo.)

sure, he went through hell with gasoline drawers on, but by his own admission, he was the one that bought the ticket for that ride -- triggered in part by his choice to deal with the sudden loss of his then girlfriend christine hinton with heroin instead of therapy.

and this was the guy that melissa etheridge chose to borrow a cup of sperm from to have not one but two kids with her then partner julie cypher? they couldn’t find jeff beck or eric clapton or something?

i don’t smoke and i don’t even do drugs and this book made me want to stop drinking coffee and eating meat and freaking detox whatever funk i had out of my system, just get it off of me. i just wanted to steam and sauna and take three showers and thank Jesus i never tried heroin. or cocaine. or freebase. or crack. or whatever everybody’s gotta be smoking or snorting these days. whatever.

and wow. he and his then girlfriend jan (who was even more strung out than he was) got clean and sober enough to get married and have a kid. i read that and i had to put the book down and when i did, i thought, the human body is a miraculous thing. or as the old black folks down south would say, He’s a wonder-working God.

bizarrely enough, i knew all their songs so well that when any particular ditty were mentioned in the book, i could hear it in my head. and i’ve never owned any of their records. even now, i don’t sit around listening to any of their songs. they were on permanent rotation that hardcore on the radio when i was a kid.

PS: um, yeah. this is kind of a must-read. especially if you’re a musician and you want to half-way know your rock and roll history.

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lessons learned from "american gangster"

i went to see american gangster this afternoon with my friend at the magic johnson theater in harlem. where else could i go to hear this uptown story but uptown? i felt so guilty about liking it as much as i did, in part because frank lucas did way more harm than good to my neighborhood. i don't care how many turkeys he gave away every thanksgiving. heroin killed the heart of harlem. he had to know the impact of what he was doing, and he didn't care. justifying it by saying that someone else would have done it anyway is a massive cop-out.

as we walked home afterwards, i thought long and hard about my time in a ground floor apartment on E. 100th street between 3rd and lex. the area so desperately wanted to be yorkville but it was standing on the verge of spanish harlem, with projects and abandoned buildings everywhere. it was dangerous on my block. and scary. i would watch filthy scab-covered junkies crawl into and out of the abandoned building across the street from me at any given hour like mice do in those mgm cartoons when they're eating a hunk of swiss cheese. dealers did their business on the rooftop, lowering the drugs to the ones who handled business on the ground with the actual buying and selling. each drop was one order. the money went here with one person, the drugs went there with another person, while little kids were parked on bikes as lookouts on each corner at either end of the block. it was a well-run money-making organization these young black kids had on their hands. a part of me couldn't help but wonder what they would be able to pull off if they were ever allowed to be a part of the corporate world.

one evening, i distinctly remember seeing a line of people going up the block, waiting, as the drug dealers scrambled to accomodate them. everyone was panicky because the line was so long. but no one left. i remember thinking, how good is this crack, anyway? heck--how good is crack, period? i recall falling into a conversation in a bar downtown with a part-time junkie who was also a full-time wall street exec of some sort. when i told him where i lived, he was suitably impressed. there's really good shit on your block, he murmured approvingly.

why did this cross my mind after seeing that movie? i don't know. maybe what i lived through on E. 100th street was a minature version of what i'd seen on the screen. maybe it was the closest i'd come to seeing the mechanics of how the drug thing worked on the street, firsthand. the business side of it all -- that was the connection.

what's the upshot? what did i learn from all this?

1. cut out the middleman. frank lucas went straight to the source in southeast asia for a product that was ultimately better than everyone else's
   
2. undercut the competition. he sold a better product at a cheaper cost
   
3. branding is key. he called his product blue magic. whenever anyone made that point of purchase, they knew what to expect
4. word-of-mouth is your best advertising tool. once the word went out on the street, that's all anyone wanted to buy
   
5. they will want you -- and in frank's case, need you -- when you don't need them. frank's competition came calling when they realized he beat them at their own game

now that i think about it, all of these things are what independent musicians and labels are using to attempt to create a new model in the music industry.

there were other lessons, too. stuff like, don't do the crime if you can't do the time. still and all, it was interesting to see a business model applied to drug dealing. how hollywood was that movie? frank lucas is alive and well in north carolina. nicky barnes is in the witness protection program, working a 9 to 5 like any other lemming. but something tells me that there's way more to the story than what i saw. (thus begins my winter reading list...)

this might explain it

Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek and the Dominos (Rock of Ages)

by Jan Reid

i can’t remember when the song layla sank into my consciousness.

i was a proper church-going little girl, i was in the deep, deep south and hee-haw was on tv every week. i was surrounded by cousins and sweet dirt and sky, and the sun was always shining, even when it rained. everything was drenched in twang and rock and gospel. i remember a little battery operated transistor radio in my bedroom that had a strap on one side of it. i remember lying on my stomach, playing with my paper dolls with that radio right next to my head, listening to the allman brothers.

no one told me that what i was listening to was for white people, that i was supposed to be at the r&b end of the table because i was black and that’s what black people listened to. i instinctively knew that table was mine and i could sit whereever i wanted. later, much later, in college and even in my early time in nyc—when i was supposed to be surrounded by smart cool talented individuals—i can distinctly remember them (black and white) balking when i said which butthole surfers record i preferred or how much i liked bands like husker du and captain beefheart and the pixies or how i loved mudhoney way more than nirvana for that supermuff but cobain wrote catchier songs or how i was going to go see john doe somewhere downtown the next night. the question hung in the air like pastel colored streamers at a mexican prom: how did i know so much about rock? rarely ever would anyone ever actually ask. (too bad.)

“you’re an anomaly,” some white someone told me once.

“oh really,” i said flatly. i couldn’t believe that he meant that as a compliment. but he did. “maybe i’m the norm,” i casually suggested. “either way,” i continued, “how would you know?” (and no, that's not all i said. not by a long shot.) i'm probably always going to remember how his face changed as that one sank in.

that whole blipster thing is just one more stupid chapter in a continuing bizarre racist saga of “how to sell music to america” that some yahoo set up when they figured out how to make money off of records back in the day. now that they’ve come up with a name for The Only Black Person At The Show, they can patronize with some degree of accuracy and still be completely off the mark.

but i digress.

i think duke ellington was dead-on correct when he said there’s only two kinds of music—good and bad. unknowingly, the song layla set it off for me. or was it freeform fm radio? i don’t know.

i never thought much of eric clapton as a vocalist or as a guitarist (yes, he’s great—no, he’s not a deity) but i did love derek and the dominos. the more i listened to the music, the more i wanted to know more about where all of that passion and feeling and desperation came from. i heard snippets of stories here and there. and what happened to the drummer sounded like a wierd urban legend. but then i found this layla book and had it all explained to me, in such lurid detail that i could almost feel their collective exhaustion after some drug addled binge in the english countryside.

all of that 70’s excess—the heroin, the alcohol, the ferraris that were paid for in cash, the hookers that duane allman had imported from macon for their sessions in miami—that’s in there. but the love story at the core of it all is compelling stuff. and ultimately, the way clapton takes his feeling and pain and makes art is effing brilliant.

but it's the never-ending twang of that slide guitar that embraces something inside of me -- that something that knew sacred steel in a traditional church setting before elmore james made his presence felt and then duane allman turned it into something else. my southern ways are still there. they're completely intact and ever-present. thank Jesus.

oh. and duane and greg look like some hayseeds i went to school with, for real—which made me love them even more and miss the south of my childhood.

i don’t want to meet eric clapton. i want to meet bobby whitlock.

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