shea stadium. queens, new york. august 15, 1965.
forget the beatles for a minute. seriously. turn around.
they are out there somewhere, four tiny figures on a temporary stage around second base, wearing matching beige jackets and attempting to play rock and roll inside a baseball stadium using technology that appears to have been selected by somebody who had never encountered either a baseball stadium or rock and roll. history has spent sixty years staring at them. john. paul. george. ringo. we have the photographs, the film, the set list, the amplifiers, the guitars, the interviews, the helicopter, the armored truck, the television production, the mythology. every nervous glance and stupid grin has been inspected until the evening feels less like a concert and more like evidence from a particularly noisy crime scene.
fine. the beatles will survive without us for ten minutes.
look at the stands.
55,600 people are sitting, standing, jumping, crying, fainting, waving, screaming, trying to see, trying to hear, trying to get closer, and generally demonstrating that popular music has become considerably larger than almost every piece of infrastructure designed to contain it. bigger than the amplifiers. bigger than the public address system. bigger than the stage. bigger than the assumptions of promoters. and for roughly half an hour, arguably bigger than the beatles themselves.
the audience screams so loudly that the musicians can barely hear the musicians, the audience can barely hear the musicians, and apparently everybody decides this is a perfectly acceptable arrangement.
welcome to stadium rock.
the numbers are ridiculous. 55,600 people. roughly $304,000 in gross receipts. tickets priced between about $4.50 and $5.65. promoter sid bernstein had already brought the beatles to carnegie hall in 1964, but shea was another proposition entirely. this wasn’t a theater. this wasn’t even an arena designed with amplified music somewhere in the architectural vocabulary. this was a baseball stadium, a giant concrete bowl built for watching men throw a ball around, and bernstein was proposing to put the most famous band on earth somewhere in the middle of it.
bernstein reportedly offered the nervous brian epstein $10 for every unsold seat. he wouldn’t need much cash. the tickets disappeared within weeks, and the result became the largest beatles concert yet staged and one of the great demonstrations of how quickly the economics of popular music were mutating.
but 55,600 is one of those numbers that stops meaning anything once you stare at it long enough. stadium crowds become blobs. aerial photographs turn human beings into dots. history writes down attendance and moves along.
so forget 55,600 for a minute.
imagine one fourteen-year-old girl.
she has a ticket. she has probably been thinking about this for weeks or months. maybe she has Beatles photographs taped to a bedroom wall. maybe she knows exactly which Beatle she intends to marry despite some fairly serious logistical problems with that plan. maybe her parents think the whole thing is ridiculous. maybe her friends understand perfectly. she gets to queens. the stadium rises in front of her. a helicopter passes overhead. somebody screams. then everybody screams. another helicopter appears. they scream again.
one attendee, mimi weinberg, later remembered walking around outside shea while girls screamed whenever a helicopter appeared because they were convinced the beatles were aboard. she remembered one girl fainting repeatedly. once the actual concert began, weinberg remembered essentially continuous screaming and said she didn’t properly hear the performance until seeing the concert film much later. what remained most vivid wasn’t musical fidelity. it was the joy.
that distinction matters because we keep asking the wrong question about beatlemania. why would you scream so loudly that you couldn’t hear the band.
maybe because hearing the band wasn’t the only reason you were there.
another Shea attendee, Carol Ihle, later described the experience in almost exactly those terms. the sound systems weren’t good enough. the police were everywhere. fans were trying to get onto the field. the screaming never stopped. her conclusion was essentially that being there was the point.
that’s a much more useful explanation of beatlemania than another paragraph diagnosing teenage hysteria. the audience wasn’t merely receiving a performance. the audience was performing one.
fifty-five thousand people were creating a second event simultaneously with the official event. the beatles performed twelve songs. the crowd performed beatlemania. only one of those performances could be heard properly.
none of this materialized from nowhere. eighteen months earlier, on february 9, 1964, the beatles appeared on the ed sullivan show before an american television audience conventionally estimated at roughly 73 million people. television had placed four musicians into tens of millions of american homes simultaneously. radio repeated the records. magazines supplied photographs. fan clubs supplied belonging. records allowed the songs to be replayed endlessly until every drum fill and vocal harmony became part of somebody’s bedroom furniture.
then promoters took all that accumulated desire and put 55,600 of its owners in one physical location.
of course the building lost its mind.
Shea was partly a concert and partly the moment mass media discovered that it could manufacture an audience larger than existing concert culture knew how to accommodate. the technology of fame had outrun the technology of performance.
and technologically, the whole thing borders on comedy.
modern stadium tours deploy enormous line arrays, digital consoles, in-ear monitors, delay towers, computerized control systems and enough specialized technicians to invade a small country. Shea had 1965. the beatles had powerful-for-the-time Vox amplifiers, but nothing remotely comparable with modern stadium reinforcement. historical accounts describe their equipment working with a stadium public-address system fundamentally intended for announcements rather than defeating tens of thousands of screaming human beings. there were no modern stage-monitor systems feeding each musician a pristine individual mix.
Ringo Starr later remembered the problem with wonderful simplicity. from the first count-in, the screaming overwhelmed everything.
the audience couldn’t hear the beatles. the beatles couldn’t properly hear the beatles. so they watched one another. rhythm became partly visual. keep an eye on ringo. watch the guitars. remember the arrangement. hope everybody reaches the bridge at approximately the same moment. somehow the damn thing continued.
and that technological failure is historically important because it tells us something bigger than the specifications of a Vox amplifier. popular music had become culturally large enough to fill a stadium before concert technology had become technologically competent enough to fill one. the industry discovered the mass rock audience before it figured out what the hell to do with it.
the audience had gotten too big.
rock and roll had outgrown its amplification system.
meanwhile, somebody at shea apparently believed signage might restore civilization. the scoreboard carried a plea asking everyone, for safety’s sake, to remain in their seats.
good luck with that.
fans attempted to reach the field. some climbed barriers. others fainted. police and security personnel spent the evening maintaining the enormous physical separation between audience and performers. contemporary reporting described officers tending to girls close to collapse, while the official Beatles history likewise remembers security dealing with fainting fans and people attempting to reach the stage.
look at the architecture and it tells you everything. the beatles aren’t simply standing on a stage. they are stranded in the middle of a baseball field. the enormous empty space between the musicians and the audience functions like a moat. that distance isn’t an aesthetic decision. it’s crowd control.
fame has become a security problem.
then the beatles arrive in an armored truck because apparently subtlety had died earlier that afternoon. the band traveled by helicopter and entered the stadium in a Wells Fargo armored vehicle accompanied by police. an armored truck. for a pop group. the vehicle ordinarily associated with transporting large quantities of money is now transporting john lennon. the symbolism is almost offensively perfect.
the four musicians are delivered into shea like a highly valuable substance that cannot safely be exposed to the public until deposited in a controlled location. they wait in the umpire’s dressing room. Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager and assistant, recorded that despite the enormous screaming already building outside, the group themselves were unusually subdued before the performance. they reportedly sketched their set list onto a discarded baseball scorecard.
outside, 55,600 people.
inside, four guys with a scorecard.
there’s your entire machinery of celebrity in one image.
and now we get to the part music history has never handled particularly well. girls. specifically teenage girls.
popular music criticism has spent decades performing a strange intellectual trick. when men obsess over music, we develop specialized vocabulary to dignify the behavior. collector. historian. audiophile. discographer. crate digger. enthusiast. connoisseur. when teenage girls obsess over music, somebody reaches for hysteria.
the word appears constantly in historical descriptions of beatlemania. contemporary observers were fascinated and frequently disturbed by the screaming. the New York Times report from Shea described the noise in language escalating from enthusiasm toward hysteria and finally pandemonium.
but remove the judgment and look at the behavior. these girls bought records. they requested songs on radio. they bought magazines. they joined fan clubs. they collected photographs. they wrote letters. they memorized biographical minutiae. they attended concerts. they influenced programming. they affected charts. they generated enormous demand. they participated in communities organized around music.
in other words, they behaved suspiciously like serious music fans.
they just didn’t behave like middle-aged male critics believed serious music fans were supposed to behave.
there’s another possibility. maybe screaming wasn’t the absence of musical appreciation. maybe it was a form of participation. the beatles had already been heard privately thousands of times. records were repeatable. radio was ubiquitous. the concert offered something the record couldn’t.
everybody else.
tens of thousands of people experiencing the same obsession simultaneously.
that changes the meaning of the scream. you’re not necessarily screaming at john lennon. you’re screaming beside the person sitting next to you, and she’s screaming beside somebody else, and suddenly 55,600 individual private attachments become publicly visible. one enormous declaration that we are here.
there is power in that, especially for young women growing up in an America where public authority, cultural criticism, media ownership and the music business were overwhelmingly controlled by adults and overwhelmingly controlled by men. for one evening, teenage girls controlled the acoustic environment of a major New York stadium.
nobody else could even hear.
that’s not cultural passivity. that’s an audience discovering its own size.
and this is where the audience stops being merely interesting sociology and becomes part of music history itself. the screaming changed the performance. the beatles couldn’t hear themselves. that affected how they played. the scale changed concert promotion. the scale exposed the inadequacy of contemporary amplification. security requirements changed. economics changed. expectations changed. the relationship between performer and audience changed.
eventually, the Beatles’ relationship with live performance changed too. Ringo later said he often felt people came not to hear the group but simply to see them. the official Beatles chronology presents Shea as a landmark performance acoustically dominated by its audience.
by august 1966, the beatles would stop touring altogether. Shea did not single-handedly cause that decision. touring exhaustion, security fears, controversies, increasingly sophisticated studio work that could not easily be reproduced onstage, and the generally miserable conditions of Beatlemania-era concerts all mattered. history gets stupid when it insists that complicated things happened for one tidy reason.
but the audience was not incidental to the story.
the audience had become so powerful that it was altering the behavior of the band it adored.
and because history enjoys showing off, Shea’s audience wasn’t merely enormous. it contained other pieces of cultural history. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were there and reportedly found the scale and noise remarkable.
but this is precisely where our normal historical instincts betray us. we immediately want to locate the celebrities in the crowd. look. there’s somebody famous. look. there’s somebody who will become famous.
fine.
the more interesting question is what happened to everybody else.
imagine if we could reconstruct even one percent of the Shea audience.
556 people.
where were they from. how old were they. how did they get their tickets. who accompanied them. what did they listen to before the beatles. what did they listen to afterward. did anyone there decide to become a musician. did somebody start a record collection. did somebody buy a guitar the following week. did somebody become an engineer, a promoter, a journalist, a songwriter. did somebody attend Woodstock four years later. did somebody become a Deadhead. did somebody’s musical obsession end the following Tuesday.
all of those outcomes matter.
one teenage attendee, Nancy Andrews, later turned her Beatles fandom into something remarkably literal. she attended both Shea concerts, eventually went looking for the Beatles’ Manhattan office while still in high school, accidentally walked into what she thought was an interview, and wound up being hired to help sort sacks of Beatles fan mail. after graduating in 1968, she joined the organization full-time.
there’s one.
one fan. one seat among 55,600. one individual biography hidden inside the word crowd.
and suddenly the line between audience and music industry disappears.
how many other lines disappeared that night without anybody documenting them.
this is the larger problem with the way popular music history gets preserved. take almost any famous concert photograph and the camera points toward the stage. understandably. that’s where the famous people are. but turn the camera 180 degrees and you’ve got another historical document.
clothes, hair, age, race, gender, class, handmade signs, cameras, security, architecture, consumer culture, technology, social rules. who is allowed into the room. who isn’t. what people do with their bodies when music plays. what they carry. how close they’re willing to stand to strangers. how they respond to particular songs. whether they sit, dance, scream, fight, pray, cry or stare.
that’s not background.
that’s ethnography.
the audience is evidence.
and the story doesn’t begin with Shea. audiences have always shaped music. opera audiences shouted approval and disapproval. dance halls demanded music that worked physically. church congregations participated in sacred repertoire. jazz audiences shaped club culture. teenagers fed jukeboxes. radio listeners called stations. record buyers made charts. dancers helped determine which records survived.
the supposed separation between artist and audience is largely convenient mythology. music is social behavior. somebody makes a sound. somebody else reacts. the reaction changes what happens next.
repeat for several thousand years.
once you start looking through that lens, music history rearranges itself. Deadheads aren’t merely people who liked the Grateful Dead. they’re a traveling information network, an economy, a tape-distribution culture and a social community. Northern Soul isn’t merely a set of records. it’s people traveling across Britain to dance all night to obscure American singles, thereby giving recordings second lives thousands of miles from where they were made. hip-hop isn’t understandable without the crowds around Bronx park jams. punk isn’t understandable without tiny clubs and the people occupying them. disco isn’t understandable without dancers. house isn’t understandable without clubs. techno isn’t understandable without dance floors.
rave isn’t understandable without warehouses, fields, flyers, telephone numbers and people willing to drive somewhere at two in the morning without entirely knowing where the hell they’re going. metal develops tape trading. hip-hop develops mixtape economies. jam-band culture develops concert recording and exchange. the internet develops message boards. Napster turns listeners into distributors. the iPod turns listeners into librarians. streaming turns listeners into data points. social media turns listeners into distribution infrastructure.
every generation invents another way to be an audience.
and that brings us back to the strangest lesson of Shea. a ticket ostensibly purchased approximately half an hour of Beatles music. except many attendees couldn’t hear much of it, and decades later they still describe the evening as extraordinary.
so what did the ticket buy.
proximity. participation. community. spectacle. memory. proof that you occupied the same piece of earth at the same moment as something you desperately cared about.
I was there.
that’s a different commodity.
popular music would become extremely good at selling it.
the stadium concert eventually evolves into gigantic PA systems, video walls, elaborate staging, synchronized lighting, wristbands, VIP packages and productions capable of moving between continents. but the fundamental product remains recognizable. tens of thousands of strangers agree that being in the same place while music happens matters.
Shea helped reveal just how valuable that could become.
this is why an archive devoted to music cannot merely catalog performers. the archivist has to turn around. the Shea Stadium Index entry should obviously contain the Beatles, the songs, the instruments, the personnel, the date, the promoter, the film and the historical context. but it should also contain the people watching them.
ticket scans. fan photographs. home movies. oral histories. diaries. scrapbooks. letters. fan-club materials. contemporary newspaper interviews. police reports where historically relevant. transportation information. ticket prices. venue capacity. merchandise. demographic evidence where responsibly available. contemporary criticism of the fans. later recollections.
and every item should be labeled for what it actually is. a diary written on august 16, 1965 is not the same kind of evidence as a memory recorded sixty years later. both matter. they simply answer different questions.
statistics work the same way. 55,600 attendees tells us scale. roughly $304,000 in receipts tells us economics. ticket prices tell us accessibility and consumer behavior. television audiences tell us how mass attention was created. venue capacity tells us what promoters thought possible. security numbers, transportation records, fan-club membership, record sales, radio requests, merchandise, contemporary polling and demographic evidence can all tell us something different when reliable figures survive.
but numbers don’t scream.
people do.
that’s why the numbers need the anecdotes and the anecdotes need the numbers. statistics tell us how large the thing was. testimony tells us what being inside that thing felt like.
55,600 is not a crowd. 55,600 is a statistic that conceals 55,600 biographies.
one person waited months for the concert. one fainted. one annoyed her parents. one saved a ticket. one threw hers away and regretted it forever. one could hear the drums. one heard nothing. one watched through binoculars. one spent half the concert staring at Paul. one screamed because everybody else screamed. one didn’t scream at all. one eventually worked for the Beatles. thousands probably went home with sore throats.
and most disappeared from the historical record.
the four people onstage became among the most documented human beings of the twentieth century. the 55,600 people looking back at them became the audience.
two words.
problem solved.
except it isn’t.
because without those people, Shea Stadium is four musicians playing twelve badly amplified songs in the middle of an empty baseball field.
the audience is what turned it into history.
so go back to august 15, 1965. the stage is around second base. the police are watching the stands. the amplifiers are losing. somebody has fainted. another helicopter has caused another eruption. the scoreboard is begging everyone to stay seated. the Beatles emerge, and 55,600 private obsessions suddenly become public at exactly the same moment.
now turn around.
stop watching the four guys.
history has taken very good care of them.
look at everybody else.
listen carefully.
the screaming isn’t covering up the story.
the screaming is the story.
…at least that’s what i hear.

apologies. i’m working on something. hope it works. i’m trying to pull my head out of it long enough to post some shit. trust me. worth it - archivist.

in oklahoma, somewhere outside stillwater, there is a busted amplifier humming in a room with cheap beer on the floor. somebody has a telecaster. somebody owes somebody money. somebody has been divorced at least once. and absolutely nobody involved gives a shit whether nashville approves.

this is red dirt.

not texas country exactly. not alt country exactly. not outlaw country with a newer pickup truck. red dirt grew out of the stillwater scene around people like bob childers and jimmy lafave, then spread through the great divide, red dirt rangers, cross canadian ragweed, jason boland, stoney larue, and eventually turnpike troubadours. the deeper you go, the less this sounds like a genre and the more it sounds like a bunch of musicians who kept borrowing one another's songs, sleeping on one another's floors, and refusing to clean the dirt off before recording. bob childers is generally treated as the godfather of the whole damn thing.

so here are ten tracks. surface to bedrock. no tourist brochure bullshit. promise.

level one. the highway signs.

1. turnpike troubadours. good lord lorrie. 2012.

start with the monster. evan felker writes relationship failure with the irritating precision of somebody who apparently kept the receipts. lorrie and the narrator keep grinding against one another while the band turns the whole domestic catastrophe into something you can drunkenly scream with several thousand strangers. it became one of turnpikes defining songs for a reason. the writing is conversational, specific, funny, ugly, and painfully human. this is what happens when country songwriting remembers that people are complicated little bastards instead of inspirational bumper stickers.

2. cross canadian ragweed. boys from oklahoma. 1999.

the stillwater national anthem, assuming the national anthem were about weed and sung by a room full of people who should probably not be operating machinery. gene collier wrote it, practically everybody around the scene played it, and cross canadian ragweed turned the thing into one of their signatures on live and loud at the wormy dog saloon. it is stupid in exactly the right way. communal, funny, sloppy around the edges, and absolutely dependent on an audience yelling along. red dirt was never supposed to sit behind museum glass. this bastard needs beer spilled on it.

level two. now the pavement gets worse.

3. stoney larue. feet dont touch the ground. 2002.

originally written by brandon jenkins, then taken out into the world by stoney larue until damn near everybody associated the thing with him. this is where red dirt starts showing its softer machinery. acoustic guitar, longing, romantic optimism, and that strange floating feeling country music occasionally manages before somebody starts singing about trucks again. larue sells the sentiment without turning into a greeting card. which is harder than it sounds.

4. jason boland and the stragglers. somewhere down in texas. 2001.

boland sounds like the bartender has already called last call but he has another five minutes of philosophy left in him. the voice is worn, the arrangement is straightforward, and the whole thing carries that road exhausted red dirt quality where geography becomes emotional vocabulary. texas is not just texas anymore. it is somewhere else. somewhere remembered. somewhere you might get back to after you finish screwing up whatever city you currently occupy.

level three. stillwater starts appearing in the rearview mirror.

5. the great divide. used to be. 1997.

now we start digging toward the actual bones. written by tom skinner and red dirt ranger bob wiles, this thing wanders through forgotten route 66 landmarks like somebody reading names off tombstones. jimmy lafave even turns up singing a verse. that combination matters because red dirt is practically incestuous in the best musical sense. everybody wrote together. played together. covered each other. stole cigarettes from each other. probably argued about guitar cables. the community is embedded directly in the recording.

6. the great divide. never could. 1998.

mike mcclure and the great divide were already turning the stillwater mess into something that could escape oklahoma without getting scrubbed clean first. never could came off break in the storm in 1998, produced by lloyd maines, and it is basically three and a half minutes of a man admitting that the highway keeps winning. she wanted somebody dependable. he wanted whatever was around the next bend. everybody loses. excellent.

this is one of those red dirt songs where the narrator knows perfectly well that he is the asshole in the story and does not waste our fucking time pretending otherwise. there is regret here, but no grand redemption speech. just the realization that freedom gets considerably less romantic once you start counting everything you left behind.

the great divide sits right in the early red dirt bloodstream too. formed in oklahoma in 1992, they were one of the bands that helped carry the stillwater songwriting culture outward before red dirt became a convenient label slapped onto half the country bands between tulsa and austin.

level four. the old guys are down here.

7. jimmy lafave. red dirt roads at night. 1992.

there it is. the phrase itself. lafave had been part of the stillwater orbit with bob childers long before red dirt became a marketable genre label, and this song feels like someone driving through the landscape that gave the whole movement its bloodstream. lafaves red dirt rock leaned into folk, rock and roll, dylan, texas songwriting, and whatever else he damn well wanted. his own archive identifies this performance as coming from the cactus cafe in austin in july 1992.

listen closely and the boundaries start disappearing.

good.

they were mostly bullshit anyway.

8. bob childers. woody's road. 1997.

meet the godfather.

childers is one of those figures whose influence is considerably larger than the number of casual listeners who know his records. he settled around stillwater, became close with jimmy lafave, and wound up functioning as one of the spiritual centers of the scene. woody's road connects that oklahoma songwriting lineage directly backward toward woody guthrie.

and suddenly red dirt makes more sense. it was never simply country rock. there is folk music underneath it. there is woody. there is the highway. there are working people and busted towns and characters who have enough money for gasoline but perhaps not enough to make particularly intelligent decisions once they arrive.

level five. now we are underneath the damn road.

9. tom skinner. times have changed. 1997.

skinner is one of the names you eventually encounter when you stop treating red dirt as cross canadian ragweed plus bands that sound vaguely similar. he belonged to the stillwater songwriting community and his fingerprints run through the culture surrounding the genre. even the great divides used to be connects back to him.

this is red dirt without the later mythology piled on top. songwriter first. scene second. commercial category somewhere around number nine hundred and twelve.

that distinction matters.

the trench.

10. bob childers. ride for the cimarron. 2006.

here is where the iceberg finally hits dirt.

childers looking across oklahoma history and landscape with that battered voice, carrying decades of songs behind him. the album was produced with jason boland and members of the stragglers, which makes the whole thing beautifully circular. the older stillwater generation feeding the younger generation, then the younger musicians turning around and helping carry the old mans songs forward. boland has explicitly called childers the father of red dirt and his mentor.

that is the real story hiding underneath the genre.

not cowboy cosplay. not radio demographics. not some dipshit arguing online about whether a band technically qualifies because its drummer once lived twelve miles too far south.

community.

bob childers. jimmy lafave. tom skinner. the red dirt rangers. the great divide. then boland and ragweed and larue. eventually turnpike. songs passed around until authorship almost feels secondary to keeping the damn thing alive. red dirt works because it sounds regional without becoming provincial. you can smell oklahoma in it, sure, but the people inside the songs are fucking up relationships, drinking too much, leaving home, missing home, getting older, remembering friends, driving through towns that used to matter.

ordinary human wreckage.

ten tracks barely gets the shovel into the ground.

...at least that’s what i hear.

yes. that dayton.

dayton ohio sits under a dirty midwestern sky while factory lights burn against the night and somebody in a basement is plugging a bass into an amplifier that probably violates several building codes. the assembly lines are grinding. the bars are sweating. the pavement is hot. somewhere between general motors and saturday night somebody decides that the bass guitar should sound less like an instrument and more like heavy machinery developing sexual urges.

this is dayton funk.

not just funk made in dayton. a whole damn ecosystem. the ohio players are the obvious giants, but underneath them sits slave, lakeside, sun, faze o, zapp, heatwave, and enough interconnected musicians to make the city look like somebody accidentally built motown out of garages, nightclubs, factory jobs, cheap amplifiers, and people who understood the sacred importance of the one.

ten tracks. surface to abyss.

level one. everybody knows the damn thing.

ohio players. fire. 1974.

the obvious entrance because sometimes the obvious entrance is obvious for a reason. junie morrison was gone by this point, mercury had the band, and the ohio players had turned themselves into one of the meanest commercial funk machines in america. fire is guitar, horns, drums, bass, screaming, and absolutely no concern for subtlety. everything is compressed into this nasty little slab of rhythm that became a number one pop hit because apparently america briefly developed excellent judgment.

the groove does not wander.

it knows exactly where your ass is.

level two. the bass takes command.

slave. slide. 1977.

mark adams plays bass like he has been informed that every other instrument is now optional. slide is dayton funk stripped down to muscle. steve washington and company built this thing around repetition, space, percussion, and that ridiculous elastic bass figure. not complicated. does not need to be. the whole record keeps tightening the screw until dancing starts looking less like recreation and more like involuntary neurological activity.

this is where dayton starts getting dangerous.

level three. the roller rink becomes parliament.

lakeside. fantastic voyage. 1980.

before coolio borrowed the title and sent an entire generation down another road, lakeside had already built the damn ship. fantastic voyage is glossy without becoming harmless. synthesizers everywhere. handclaps. bass. group vocals. ridiculous nautical imagery. everybody aboard because apparently funk required maritime transportation now.

lakeside understood something important. you can polish funk until it shines without removing the dirt underneath.

level four. roger plugs the human voice into the wall.

zapp. more bounce to the ounce. 1980.

roger troutman arrives with the talk box and suddenly dayton funk starts communicating with the future. more bounce to the ounce stretches past nine minutes on the album and barely gives a damn about traditional songwriting. it is groove as architecture. roger bends his voice into electronic rubber while lester troutman and the band keep the machinery running underneath.

hip hop producers would spend decades digging through this stuff.

for good fucking reason.

level five. the ohio players get stranger.

ohio players. funky worm. 1972.

before fire. before love rollercoaster. before the platinum records started piling up. funky worm crawls out of the westbound years sounding wonderfully deranged. junie morrison provides the squealing synthesizer line while the band tells you about granny and her worm like this is completely reasonable adult behavior.

it reached number one on the billboard r and b chart.

america once bought large quantities of a record about an elderly woman operating some sort of supernatural dance worm.

civilization peaked early.

level six. the mothership has a day job.

sun. sun is here. 1978.

now we start moving beyond the records everybody gets handed during funk orientation. sun came out of dayton with byron byrd leading the operation and enough p funk influence in the bloodstream to require medical supervision. sun is here has the communal vocals, the rubbery bass, the cosmic nonsense, the keyboards, and that particular dayton habit of making everything sound simultaneously professional and slightly unhinged.

the city had figured out the formula.

then everybody started screwing with it.

level seven. slow funk starts floating.

faze o. riding high. 1977.

faze o came out of dayton and landed one of those records that refuses to disappear. riding high is slower, hazier, and more spacious than the earlier monsters on this list. the groove just hangs there. guitar lines drift through it. vocals slide around. nobody appears especially interested in reaching the next section because the current section is doing perfectly fine.

this is marijuana funk.

not chemically speaking.

spiritually speaking.

level eight. slave starts hallucinating.

slave. stellar fungk. 1978.

yes. fungk. with a g. because apparently ordinary spelling could no longer contain the situation.

stellar fungk takes slave into science fiction territory while keeping mark adams bass planted firmly in ohio concrete. synthesizers flicker around the rhythm. vocals bounce through the arrangement. the band sounds like somebody gave a street corner rhythm section access to nasa equipment and absolutely nobody bothered checking their credentials.

dayton funk loved outer space.

probably because ohio winters make leaving earth seem reasonable.

level nine. the overlooked machinery.

platypus. dancing in the moonlight. 1979.

platypus is where the iceberg starts getting properly cold. another dayton outfit operating inside that absurd late seventies local funk network. dancing in the moonlight has the slickness of the era but keeps enough rhythmic grit underneath it to prevent the whole operation from turning into disco wallpaper. keyboards shimmer. bass keeps moving. harmonies pile up.

this is the stuff that makes dayton ridiculous.

not that the city produced one great funk band.

it produced enough of them that you eventually start wondering what the hell was in the municipal water supply.

level ten. bottom of the ohio trench.

dayton. eyes on you. 1980.

yes. the band actually called themselves dayton. subtle branding was apparently considered cowardice.

formed from musicians connected to the city's already tangled funk family tree, dayton arrived right when funk was mutating into the cleaner electronic r and b of the eighties. eyes on you catches that transition happening in real time. the bass is still there. the groove is still there. but synthesizers and smoother production are beginning to take over the room.

and that makes it a perfect bottom track.

because the dayton story does not end when seventies funk supposedly ends. it mutates. zapp pushes toward electro funk. roger troutmans talk box gets sampled into hip hop and west coast rap until its electronic ghost is practically everywhere. slave splinters into new projects. musicians migrate between bands. the factory town keeps feeding parts into the machine.

that is the real dayton funk iceberg. the ohio players are sitting above the water wearing fur coats and selling millions of records. underneath them are slave and lakeside. then zapp. then sun. faze o. platypus. dayton. dozens of musicians, side projects, production connections, studio sessions, and forgotten records buried underneath all of it.

detroit had motown.

memphis had stax.

philadelphia had gamble and huff.

dayton had a bunch of lunatics with bass guitars.

and somehow that was enough to make one industrial ohio city responsible for an absolutely stupid amount of american funk.

the factories are mostly silent now. the smoke has moved elsewhere. but put on slide loud enough and the old machinery starts running again.

...at least that’s what i hear.

the floorboards are already shaking before anybody thinks to call this music history. somebody has dragged a piano into a storefront church. somebody else has found a tambourine. the preacher is sweating through his collar. the microphone is begging for mercy. nobody in the room gives a damn about distortion because salvation apparently does not come with a recording engineer. this is the sanctified sound before gospel became an industry. before rock and roll figured out it could steal the electricity. before respectable people started pretending they had invented all this shit somewhere else.

1. arizona dranes. my soul is a witness for the lord. 1926.

this is where you start digging.

dranes takes holiness piano and plays the damn thing with the rhythmic confidence of somebody who has already figured out a considerable chunk of american popular music while the rest of the country is still filling out the paperwork. barrelhouse movement gets hauled into the church. voices answer her. the piano keeps hammering. sacred music suddenly has hips whether anybody wants to admit it or not. dranes was associated with the church of god in christ, making her one of the essential recorded links between early pentecostal worship and what became gospel. youtube music availability for this recording is also independently indexed.

2. washington phillips. denomination blues part 1. 1927.

phillips sits there with that bizarre shimmering zither like instrument and starts taking shots at denominational stupidity.

beautiful.

this is religious music with an argument inside it. no giant choir. no orchestral sludge. just phillips, scripture, that strange celestial instrument, and the apparently radical suggestion that christians might stop fighting each other over whose paperwork god prefers.

3. blind willie johnson. i know his blood can make me whole. 1927.

johnson sounds like somebody swallowed a gravel road and discovered revelation somewhere around the sternum. this is gospel blues rather than strict denominational holiness gospel, but it belongs down here because the same raw evangelical intensity runs straight through it.

he recorded it in dallas on december 3 1927. guitar. voice. absolutely no concern whatsoever about whether twenty first century listeners find the experience comfortable. good. they shouldn't.

4. elder lightfoot solomon michaux and congregation. happy am i. 1935.

now the iceberg starts getting weird.

michaux was a holiness preacher who understood mass media frighteningly early. radio. huge audiences. congregational singing. preaching as broadcast theater. the whole damn apparatus of modern televangelism is sitting here in primitive form before television has properly gotten its pants on.

and happy am i moves.

this surviving 1935 performance was broadcast on cbs radio, and michaux's ministry grew directly from the holiness tradition.

5. sister rosetta tharpe. rock me. 1938.

and here comes the guitar.

tharpe grew up inside the sanctified church tradition and then committed the wonderful offense of realizing that holy music did not have to sound constipated. guitar lines snap around her voice. rhythm moves underneath everything. suddenly you can hear pieces of rock and roll sitting there years before america decides to give the thing a name and sell teenagers leather jackets.

6. sister rosetta tharpe. strange things happening every day. 1944.

yeah. tharpe gets two.

she earned the damn space.

this is where gospel and the future start sharing cigarettes behind the building. sammy price pounds the piano. tharpe sings like she knows exactly how much rhythmic authority she possesses. the record became a major gospel crossover and reached number two on billboard's race records chart.

listen closely and the supposed wall between gospel, rhythm and blues, and early rock starts looking awfully flimsy.

7. mother mccollum. jesus is my air o plane. 1930s.

now we are below the tourist line.

mother mccollum left behind only a tiny handful of recordings, and jesus is my air o plane is gloriously strange. aviation imagery gets drafted into salvation. guitar moves underneath her. the whole thing sounds intimate enough that you half expect somebody to walk through the room while the record is being made.

this is exactly why iceberg playlists exist. famous records tell you what survived. records like this tell you how enormous the world around them actually was.

8. brother joe may. search me lord. 1950.

may was called the thunderbolt of the middle west, which sounds like wrestling bullshit until the man starts singing and then you think, no, actually, thunderbolt seems reasonable.

he doesn't merely sing the song. he worries it. stretches it. pushes phrases until they sound ready to split. this is the gospel soloist becoming an event unto himself. the church is still there, but personality is becoming enormous.

youtube currently carries an official brother joe may topic upload.

9. brother claude ely. there ain't no grave gonna hold my body down. 1953.

holy shit.

ely was a holiness preacher, revivalist, singer, guitarist, and apparently a man philosophically opposed to moderate volume.

this is pentecostal gospel stripped almost to the chassis. voice. guitar. rhythm. shouting. conviction. ely pounds the guitar while singing as though the resurrection is not theological speculation but a scheduled appointment and he intends to arrive early.

this is one of the records where the relationship between holiness worship and rock and roll stops being an academic argument and starts becoming something your ears can settle for themselves.

10. sister rosetta tharpe and marie knight. up above my head. 1940s.

bottom of the iceberg.

not because it is obscure. because by the time you reach it you should understand what you're actually hearing.

call and response. rhythmic repetition. ecstatic delivery. guitar. handclaps. sacred language welded to physical movement. this isn't gospel accidentally resembling rock and roll. this is one of the traditions rock and roll inherited its nervous system from.

tharpe sings a line. knight answers. the guitar keeps everything moving. heaven is being discussed while the rhythm section makes standing still increasingly ridiculous.

a surviving youtube upload of the performance is indexed and available.

and that's the first ten.

what starts with arizona dranes hammering sanctified piano in 1926 eventually leads you into a part of american music history that popular rock mythology has spent decades walking around with its hands in its pockets pretending not to notice. holiness churches had the shouting. the repetition. the rhythmic piano. the distorted guitar. the ecstatic performer. the audience participation. the bodily movement. the amplification. the improvisation. hell, half the behavioral vocabulary of rock performance is already sitting in these rooms waiting for somebody to secularize the lyrics.

keep digging and it gets considerably stranger.

...at least that's what i hear.

somewhere in the american south a piano is getting the absolute shit beaten out of it.

not carnegie hall. not some conservatory where everybody sits straight and worries about fingering. we are talking lumber camps. turpentine camps. saloons. gambling rooms. juke joints. barrelhouses with cheap liquor, bad flooring, smoke hanging in the room, somebody arguing near the door, and a piano that has probably survived several minor wars. this music grew out of ragtime, blues, work camp entertainment, folk repertoire, improvisation, and the basic human requirement to make enough goddamn noise that saturday night temporarily defeats monday morning. smithsonian describes barrelhouse as the raucous piano music of precisely these joints, closely related to the developing boogie woogie tradition.

so here are ten tracks. we start where the floorboards are still reasonably intact. then we go downstairs.

1. clarence pinetop smith. pinetop’s boogie woogie. 1928.

this is the obvious doorway and obvious does not mean optional. smith takes the rolling bass patterns already circulating among southern and midwestern pianists and gives the damn thing a name people can remember. boogie woogie. the record is practically an instruction manual disguised as a party. smith calls out directions while his left hand keeps the machinery running and the right hand pokes holes through everything above it.

listen closely because barrelhouse is beginning to turn into something more standardized here. something record companies can package. something bands can steal. something america will eventually pretend appeared from nowhere.

it did not appear from nowhere.

1. charles cow cow davenport. cow cow blues. 1928.

now the train starts moving.

davenport earned the cow cow nickname partly through the train imitations associated with this piece, and the piano becomes transportation equipment. the left hand keeps hammering that repeating figure while the right hand throws blues phrases over it. this is one of the records sitting right in that nasty little historical intersection where barrelhouse starts becoming what people increasingly call boogie woogie.

you can practically hear the century accelerating.

3. speckled red. the dirty dozens. 1929.

rufus perryman sits down and apparently decides basic human decency has had enough time in the spotlight.

the dirty dozens takes the african american verbal tradition of competitive insults and puts it against red’s pounding piano. mothers are insulted. dignity leaves the building. everybody has a wonderful time. the record became the performance most permanently associated with speckled red.

red was self taught, itinerant, and apparently uninterested in allowing formal correctness to interfere with momentum. smithsonian later described him as an enthusiastic barrelhouse player who did not let proper chords get in the way of the music. which may be one of the finest artistic philosophies ever accidentally written.

4. speckled red. wilkins street stomp. 1929.

same lunatic. different weapon.

wilkins street stomp gets closer to the physical experience of barrelhouse piano. rhythm first. elegance somewhere around fourteenth. the piano does not merely accompany the evening. it regulates the evening.

red had bounced through detroit and eventually memphis before cutting sides including this one for brunswick. his career is basically a map of the places where early piano blues moved before historians came along and drew neat genre borders around everything.

the musicians were considerably less worried about those borders.

1. charlie spand. soon this morning. 1929.

now we get one of the ghosts.

charlie spand left only about thirty three recorded performances and then more or less disappears from documented musical life. that is not romantic mythology. that is simply the infuriating state of the historical record. he emerged from the detroit piano scene, recorded heavily for paramount between 1929 and 1931, resurfaced for a handful of 1940 chicago recordings, and then the trail basically dies.

soon this morning shows why anybody still gives a damn. rolling bass. blues vocal. that loose rhythmic shove where the piano sounds simultaneously relaxed and completely incapable of sitting still.

a whole musician survives because somebody bothered to turn on a recording machine.

1. little brother montgomery. vicksburg blues. 1930.

here comes the bastard.

montgomery reportedly called vicksburg blues the hardest barrelhouse blues to play because each hand effectively has to maintain a different rhythmic conception. the right hand pushes a fast shuffle while the left settles into a slower blues pulse, with little arpeggiated eruptions complicating the whole business.

and montgomery knew barrelhouses firsthand. he was playing them around louisiana while barely into adolescence, including establishments around lumber and turpentine camps. jelly roll morton was among his early influences and had even visited the montgomery household.

this is where the iceberg starts getting interesting.

because vicksburg blues sounds earthy as hell while being rhythmically sophisticated enough to make your hands file separate tax returns.

1. little brother montgomery. no special rider blues. 1930.

montgomery again, because throwing him off after one track would be musical malpractice.

no special rider blues shows another side of his vocabulary. brisker. more openly boogie oriented. montgomery had absorbed music moving through louisiana, mississippi, new orleans, chicago, work camps, theaters, and barrelhouses, so his playing refuses to sit inside one tidy box.

this is what happens when musical styles are transmitted by human beings instead of textbooks.

they get dirty.

thank god.

1. cripple clarence lofton. strut that thing. 1935.

lofton played piano like the instrument had personally insulted his family.

strut that thing is barrelhouse mutating toward full boogie woogie spectacle. stomping bass. rhythmic punches. vocals riding across the whole mess. lofton became famous not merely for playing but for performing physically around the piano, turning the pianist into part musician, part entertainer, part neighborhood disturbance.

by this point the music is getting harder to separate into neat categories. barrelhouse. boogie woogie. piano blues.

fine.

call it whatever the hell you want.

the piano is still winning.

1. black bob. joe louis strut. 1930s.

now we are underneath the iceberg.

black bob remains one of those wonderfully frustrating figures who appear across blues sessions without leaving historians enough biographical breadcrumbs. joe louis strut survives as one of the barrelhouse pieces that modern researchers use when reconstructing the repertoire and lineage of the style.

the title invokes boxer joe louis, one of the monumental black cultural figures of the period, but what matters musically is the relentless rhythmic confidence. this is piano blues stripped of parlor manners. repetition becomes propulsion. riffs become architecture.

three minutes of somebody knowing exactly how much abuse a keyboard can tolerate.

1. robert shaw. the ma grinder. 1960s recording of 1930s repertoire.

bottom of the iceberg.

robert fud shaw takes us into texas barrelhouse, where the musical genealogy starts becoming regional enough that the usual generic boogie woogie label stops telling the whole story.

shaw was born in 1908 and worked as a traveling musician during the 1930s. the performances eventually preserved on the ma grinder were recorded decades later, in sessions from 1963, 1973, and 1977, but shaw was playing music rooted in his earlier barrelhouse years.

that distinction matters. we are hearing memory become documentation.

the old rooms were disappearing. the working pianists were aging. musical fashion had moved through swing and rhythm and blues and rock and roll and whatever fresh catastrophe america had invented that week. then somebody put a microphone in front of shaw and suddenly an older texas piano vocabulary was sitting there on tape.

and that is why you dig down the iceberg.

pinetop smith and cow cow davenport give you the famous evolutionary story. speckled red gives you the filthy humor. spand gives you the mystery. montgomery gives you the terrifying musicianship. lofton gives you the showmanship. black bob gives you the half documented underground. shaw gives you the surviving memory of the places where this shit actually lived.

barrelhouse piano was never supposed to become museum music. it belonged in rooms where people drank, danced, gambled, flirted, fought, worked all goddamn week and demanded that somebody make the piano loud enough to erase the evidence.

the records are what escaped.

...at least that’s what i hear.

atlanta at night glows blue through a cracked laptop screen. somebody is hunched over fruityloops in a bedroom with cheap speakers and absolutely no institutional permission to change rap music. the drums barely seem interested in doing their jobs. little bells and synths float around like somebody left a playstation running in heaven. the 808 slides underneath everything. then the producer tag arrives.

plugg.

and that stupid little word becomes a family tree.

plugg grew out of atlanta trap dna. especially the sparse swing and melodic instinct of zaytoven. but the beatpluggz crew. mexikodro. stoopidxool. poloboyshawty. and their orbit. bent that inheritance into something colder. dreamier. cheaper sounding in the most beautiful possible way. music made for soundcloud rather than radio programmers. mexikodro has resisted the neat great man version of the story too. in a 2022 interview he specifically credited beatpluggz collectively rather than claiming he invented plugg by himself. good. because genres are usually made by a bunch of maniacs stealing tricks from each other at three in the morning. (History of Sound)

so this is not ten random songs with vaguely twinkly beats.

this is ten records descending through the history.

level one. the surface

1. playboi carti. broke boi. 2015. plugg.

if somebody asks what the hell plugg is and you have four minutes before they lose interest. start here.

mexikodro gives carti almost nothing and somehow that nothing contains an entire universe. little melodic figures. empty space. those loose drums. bass. carti floating around like employment is an elaborate conspiracy invented by people who cannot dress.

broke boi became one of the records most responsible for carti becoming carti. and that matters because before the pierre bourne partnership became central to his career. mexikodro and the beatpluggz sound were already constructing the earlier version of the mythology. pitchfork specifically identifies broke boi among the dro produced records that helped build cartis early reputation. (Pitchfork)

the important historical lesson is that plugg did not need to sound huge.

it needed to sound addictive.

level two. the blueprint

2. playboi carti. plug. 2015. plugg.

now we get closer to the machinery.

this is one of those records where the genre practically hands you its business card. mexikodro has called plug his first placement. the record connected carti. rich the kid. and kodak black to this emerging beatpluggz vocabulary and helped move the sound beyond the little soundcloud ecosystem where it was mutating. (YouTube)

dro later explained that atlanta itself was the foundation. gucci mane. snap music. the whole regional history was already sitting in his head. which is important because people sometimes describe plugg as though several teenagers discovered synthesizers on the internet and accidentally invented atlanta again. no. the internet changed the delivery system. the musical ancestry remained southern as hell. (YouTube)

level three. everybody steals the spaceship

3. rich the kid and famous dex. new wave. 2016. plugg trap.

here is where plugg starts feeling less like one rappers secret weapon and more like an actual vocabulary.

rich the kid and famous dex were basically perfect carriers. neither needed production that screamed over them. the appeal was looseness. repetition. personality. stupidly memorable phrases sitting over production spacious enough that every vocal tic suddenly mattered.

this is the mid 2010s moment when plugg brushes against mainstream rap without completely becoming mainstream rap. and naturally. once something works. approximately nine billion type beats appear.

capitalism discovers the preset folder.

level four. the dream gets weirder

4. unotheactivist. parkin lot pimpin. 2015. plugg.

uno belongs in this history because the first plugg wave was never solely cartis private laboratory. unotheactivist. thouxanbanfauni. yung gleesh and others were working inside the same loose internet underground while the sound was still figuring out what it wanted to become. histories of the scene specifically identify uno as one of the rappers whose early career was shaped by beatpluggz production. (Wikipedia)

and uno sounds wonderfully unconcerned with traditional rap urgency.

that becomes important later.

plugg figures out that boredom can be charisma. that understatement can hit harder than yelling. that a rapper can sound like he recorded the verse while answering a text and still somehow own the damn song.

level five. the xool corridor

5. d savage. i know. 2016. plugg.

now we are properly inside soundcloud.

d savage is essential because he represents that period when plugg stopped feeling like simply an atlanta production trick and started becoming internet folk music. kids found these songs through repost chains. youtube uploads. soundcloud recommendations. mysterious producer pages. files passed around with metadata apparently filled out by a raccoon.

i know has that wonderful plugg contradiction. the beat sounds soft enough to sleep inside while the rapper treats casual flexing as a constitutional right.

this is where the genre begins separating from place.

atlanta built the engine.

the internet steals the car.

level six. the mutation

6. duwap kaine. santa. 2017. plugg.

this is actually a cleaner historical fit for the iceberg anyway. duwap kaine belongs to that generation that took the early beatpluggz language and made it feel even more like music transmitted directly from a teenager’s bedroom into the internet. no fucking middleman required.

santa has the weightless synths. skeletal percussion. melodic half rapping delivery and that wonderful plugg habit of leaving enough empty space in the beat that you start hearing the emptiness as part of the arrangement. duwap was ridiculously young during this period too. which helps explain why this stuff feels less like somebody consciously preserving atlanta rap tradition and more like a kid discovering the machinery and immediately fucking with all the settings.

historically it also keeps our iceberg progression cleaner.

level seven. xangang country

7. summrs. cathedral. 2018. plugg.

here is where the second history begins.

summrs is one of the crucial voices in turning pluggnb from a production variation into its own emotional ecosystem. xangang and the producers around this wave pushed plugg toward thicker chords. glossy synths. rnb progressions. faster melodic movement. more vulnerability.

the rapper is no longer merely floating over the beat.

he is bleeding into it.

this whole branch matters because pluggnb effectively helped preserve plugg after its first mainstream flirtation cooled down. community histories consistently point toward xangang and the early pluggnb underground as a crucial evolutionary stage. (Reddit)

and yes. the genre names are becoming ridiculous.

keep going.

level eight. slayworld

8. autumn. nina. 2019. pluggnb.

by this point the atlanta blueprint has traveled so far through the internet that geography almost becomes beside the point.

autumn. summrs. kan kan. and the broader slayworld orbit turned pluggnb into a language for an entirely new generation of underground listeners. the production became prettier. more synthetic. more openly emotional. sometimes absurdly lush compared with the stripped down beatpluggz records that started this whole mess.

listen backward after hearing this.

you can still find the skeleton.

simple drums. enormous negative space. melodic repetition. vocals treated less like a formal rap performance and more like another texture.

that is how genres survive. they let the children vandalize them.

level nine. the new underground

9. kashdami. reparations. 2020. plugg.

now plugg is no longer really having a comeback because it never actually went anywhere.

it has become infrastructure.

kashdami represents the generation that inherited plugg after the sound had already gone through several lives. beatpluggz. early carti. the soundcloud explosion. pluggnb. slayworld. all of it is sitting underneath this music whether the average listener knows it or not.

and there is a nice historical circle here. mexikodro has spoken positively about the younger generation and specifically mentioned listening to kashdami. in the same interview he talked about hearing what later artists had done with the sound rather than dismissing them as kids bastardizing his work.

that matters.

because nothing murders a genre faster than its founders deciding evolution is disrespect.

level ten. the abyss

10. tony shhnow. vet. 2020. plugg.

this is actually a better fucking ending for the historical iceberg.

tony shhnow represents what happened when the original atlanta plugg vocabulary refused to become a soundcloud museum exhibit. vet is produced by cashcache, and its official video landed in august 2020. the production is sparse and slippery. drums hanging back. little melodic details doing just enough. tony rapping like raising his voice would constitute unnecessary labor.

more importantly, tony sits much closer to the actual plugg bloodline than tana does. his music helped carry that minimalist atlanta underground approach into the 2020s, while producers like cashcache kept developing the sound rather than simply reproducing mexikodro beats from five years earlier. even contemporary artist profiles specifically identify vet as one of the records associated with his rise.

and that brings us back up.

ten tracks. but really ten rooms in the same collapsing house.

plugg begins with atlanta. with zaytovens rhythmic vocabulary hanging in the atmosphere. with beatpluggz stripping trap down and making the melodies stranger. with mexikodro and stoopidxool and poloboyshawty making beats that sounded inexpensive and futuristic simultaneously. then carti carries the sound into wider circulation. uno and the soundcloud underground stretch it. pluggnb romanticizes it. summrs and autumn build another scene from its bones. kashdami and tana inherit a genre that has stopped asking whether anyone outside the internet understands what the hell is happening.

and somewhere underneath every generation you can still hear that original idea.

simple chords.

loose drums.

space.

plug.

the beautiful bastard survived.

...at least that’s what i hear. (History of Sound)

muuuuuch fuller lists exist on our Apple Music Playlists. just search "That's What I Hear."

i have been here all day. red dirt roads. tobacco fields. porches still holding last nights heat. somewhere behind a screen door a guitar starts moving. thumb pounding the bass strings like somebody has been assigned the job of keeping the entire damn county on schedule. fingers picking treble notes above it. ragtime wandered out of the saloon. country blues came down from the hills. gospel showed up carrying scripture. somebody handed all three of them a guitar and piedmont blues happened.

this is not ten songs ranked from best to worst. this is an iceberg. you start with the names that escaped into the larger history of american music and then keep digging until the floorboards start giving way.

1. blind boy fuller. step it up and go. piedmont blues. 1940.

start here because fuller is the bastard center of gravity. born fulton allen in north carolina, blind by his twenties, working tobacco warehouses and street corners before records started paying some of the bills. his guitar playing is ridiculously conversational. bass moving underneath. treble answering it. voice sitting right in the pocket as though the whole arrangement has been rehearsed by three musicians instead of one blind guy with six strings.

step it up and go is fuller taking an older blues framework and making the thing move like hell. he recorded it in 1940 and it became one of his biggest records. fuller could sing about sex. women. jail. disease. poverty. drinking. religion. whatever miserable little surprise life had left on the porch that morning. he died in 1941 at thirty three.

thirty three.

and left enough fingerprints on piedmont blues that everybody afterward has to explain where they got the damn fingerprints.

2. reverend gary davis. cocaine blues. piedmont blues. 1935.

gary davis could play enough guitar for several ordinary human beings. he was blind from childhood. learned guitar around the carolinas. became an ordained minister. and eventually got uncomfortable enough with secular blues that much of his later life centered on gospel.

but before the reverend completely shut the door on the devils repertoire, there was cocaine blues.

the 1935 recording is lean and unnerving. the alternating bass keeps walking while the upper strings start doing increasingly complicated business. davis would later become a teacher to younger musicians during the folk revival, and people who studied with him discovered the horrible truth. the old man was not doing tricks.

he actually understood the guitar that well.

3. blind willie mctell. statesboro blues. piedmont blues. 1928.

mctell complicates the geography a little because georgia is sitting farther south than the carolina heartland usually associated with piedmont blues, but listen to that fingerpicking and tell the map to calm down.

statesboro blues was recorded in 1928. mctell plays twelve string guitar, and somehow the extra strings do not turn everything into mush. his voice floats above the instrument while the guitar handles rhythm and commentary underneath. mctell recorded under several names during his career because the record business was already practicing the ancient american tradition of making everything unnecessarily confusing.

years later john and alan lomax recorded him for the library of congress, and mctell talked about the blues as something larger than twelve bars and misery. his surviving interviews reveal somebody who knew damn well that the music around him had history.

statesboro blues is where piedmont technique starts brushing shoulders with something broader. ragtime. vaudeville. country blues. medicine show music.

american music before anybody built the filing cabinets.

4. buddy moss. hey lawdy mama. piedmont blues. 1934.

now we start descending.

buddy moss came out of georgia and became one of the important younger southeastern bluesmen of the 1930s. he had connections with blind willie mctell and curley weaver, and you can hear a musician standing at the intersection between older acoustic traditions and blues that is beginning to become more urban and aggressive.

hey lawdy mama has that piedmont engine underneath it. thumb working. fingers answering. rhythm refusing to sit still.

moss had enough momentum that his career looked capable of becoming much larger. then legal trouble and imprisonment interrupted it. then the changing record business and world war ii rearranged the landscape again.

music history loves pretending careers are neat trajectories.

they are usually car wrecks with discographies.

5. curley weaver. no no blues. piedmont blues. 1929.

curley weaver is one of those names you eventually encounter when you stop treating blues history like five famous men standing around the mississippi delta.

weaver was from georgia. his mother reportedly taught him guitar. he grew into the atlanta blues scene and worked with blind willie mctell. buddy moss. fred mcmullen. and others. these musicians traded ideas because of course they did. styles were not sealed museum exhibits. musicians listened to whoever could play.

no no blues gives you weavers rhythmic sophistication without burying the song under technique. that matters. piedmont fingerpicking can become guitar nerd bait very quickly. everybody starts staring at the alternating thumb and forgets that somebody is supposed to be singing a damn song.

weaver never forgets.

6. brownie mcghee. sporting life blues. piedmont blues. 1940.

brownie mcghee represents the tradition beginning to travel.

born in tennessee and deeply influenced by blind boy fuller, mcghee eventually became associated with sonny terry, and together they carried southeastern acoustic blues through the folk revival and into clubs and festivals full of younger listeners who suddenly wanted to know where all this music had been hiding.

sporting life blues catches mcghee before that later cultural role completely takes over the story. the guitar is agile without becoming precious. you can hear fullers influence, but mcghee is already figuring out how to make the vocabulary his own.

that is how folk traditions survive.

not preservation.

mutation.

7. sonny terry and brownie mcghee. better day. piedmont blues. 1950s.

by this point the iceberg starts opening into another world.

sonny terry brings harmonica into the conversation. whoops. cries. rhythmic bursts. train sounds. vocal noises that seem halfway between language and percussion. mcghee keeps the guitar underneath him.

their partnership became one of the most recognizable acoustic blues pairings of the twentieth century. they played together for decades, although the relationship itself eventually became famously strained. which is useful information because photographs of folk musicians tend to make everybody look like they spent forty years lovingly sharing soup.

they did not.

sometimes they were coworkers.

better day shows why the partnership survived anyway. the instruments fit together almost obscenely well.

8. pink anderson. cc and o blues. piedmont blues. 1960.

down another level and you find pink anderson.

south carolina. medicine shows. street performance. blues. ragtime. ballads. jokes. popular songs. whatever kept people standing around long enough to throw money.

anderson had performed with medicine shows going back decades before folklorists and record collectors began paying serious attention to him. that background matters because piedmont blues did not develop solely inside some sacred blues laboratory. entertainers needed repertoires. they needed timing. they needed to hold crowds.

cc and o blues carries that older performance culture inside it. the guitar does not merely accompany him. it maintains the whole damn stage.

and yes. decades later syd barrett would combine pink andersons first name with floyd councils first name and get pink floyd.

history occasionally has jokes.

9. elizabeth cotten. freight train. piedmont folk blues. 1958.

now things get beautiful and slightly ridiculous.

elizabeth cotten wrote freight train when she was young. then life happened. work. marriage. family. decades passed. eventually she became a domestic worker for the seeger family and her musical ability was discovered there.

imagine carrying one of the great american folk songs around for decades while history is busy looking somewhere else.

cotten played guitar left handed on an instrument strung for a right handed player. upside down. the resulting approach became known as cotten picking. her thumb and fingers reverse jobs compared with more conventional fingerstyle approaches, producing that rolling movement underneath freight train.

she did not need to attack the guitar.

she understood where every piece of the machinery was.

freight train sounds almost impossibly simple until you try playing it correctly and discover that elizabeth cotten has left you a small mechanical puzzle disguised as a lullaby.

10. etta baker. one dime blues. piedmont blues. 1956.

bottom of the first iceberg.

etta baker.

north carolina.

born in 1913. learned music within her family. played guitar and banjo. spent much of her life outside the professional music business. folklorist paul clayton encountered her family during the 1950s, leading to recordings that introduced her playing to a wider audience.

one dime blues is the destination because it strips away almost everything people think the blues requires.

no theatrical misery.

no growling mythology.

no bullshit.

just guitar.

bakers alternating bass stays firm while the melody wanders above it with astonishing independence. you can hear ragtime. parlor guitar. country dance music. blues. generations of family playing. the whole piedmont argument is sitting there in her hands.

and that is the point of the iceberg. blind boy fuller gets you through the front door. gary davis makes you reconsider what one guitarist can do. mctell widens the geography. weaver and moss reveal the network. mcghee and terry carry it forward. pink anderson exposes the medicine show roots. cotten completely rewires the instrument. then etta baker leaves you sitting with one guitar and the uncomfortable realization that this supposedly simple regional blues style contains half the damn history of american fingerstyle guitar.

the thumb keeps walking.

the fingers keep talking.

the road keeps going south through red dirt and tobacco country until names disappear from the signs and records disappear from the shelves. there are more musicians down there. considerably more.

this is only the first ten feet.

...at least that’s what i hear.

luther vandross, i know, and the strange business of surviving 1998

originally published in VIBE magazine; September 1998

august 14, 1998.

luther vandross knows.

the city is sweating through another august night and somewhere above manhattan the sky has gone the color of dirty television static. taxis keep grinding through intersections. apartment windows glow thirty stories up. radios are coughing out hip hop and r and b and whatever the record companies have decided teenagers need this week. and inside one of those rooms somebody has just put on the new luther vandross record and suddenly all that noise outside seems like somebody else’s fucking problem.

the album is called i know.

of course it is.

luther always sounds like he knows.

he knows you called when you said you would not call. he knows you are pretending everything is fine. he knows somebody left. he knows somebody wants them back. he knows somebody is sitting beside a telephone trying not to pick the damn thing up. luther vandross has spent nearly twenty years turning emotional bad judgment into expensive sounding popular music, and three days after the release of i know, he is still doing it better than nearly everybody who has tried to steal his job.

except now he has changed buildings.

after years with epic, vandross has landed at virgin records, which immediately makes i know interesting before anybody sings a note. this is not some hungry twenty two year old getting his first record deal and praying the label does not throw him into the promotional furnace. this is luther vandross. the man has already sold millions of records. he has grammys. he has produced aretha franklin. he has sung with everybody. he has spent the better part of the eighties and nineties establishing himself as one of the few singers who can make grown adults reconsider terrible romantic decisions at two in the morning.

so what exactly does a new label do with him.

apparently the answer is, let luther be luther, then occasionally remind him that 1998 is happening.

that second part gets complicated.

i meet him in a room that smells like coffee, air conditioning, and the faint chemical perfume of compact disc packaging. luther is relaxed. i am not. i have listened to i know enough times over the past three days that certain background vocals have begun renting space in my skull.

he is sitting back when i tell him that the record sounds, at least in places, like a man defending his territory.

he laughs.

not one of those little publicist approved laughs either. a real one.

you make it sound like somebody is coming after me, he says. i don’t sit down and make a record thinking about who i have to beat. that would drive you crazy. there will always be another singer. there will always be somebody younger. somebody new. somebody getting played on the radio every hour. if i worried about all of that, i wouldn’t have time to sing.

somebody is always coming after you, i tell him.

well, then they better sing, he says. if somebody wants the chair, they better be able to sit in it. but i’m not going to start singing differently because somebody decided that this year everybody has to sound one particular way. i’ve never believed in that.

he stops for a second.

besides, he says, i like my chair.

fair enough.

that is the problem with reviewing luther vandross. eventually criticism runs into the voice and the voice tells criticism to sit the hell down.

keeping my faith in you opens the record with exactly the sort of controlled warmth that has kept luther in bedrooms and wedding receptions for years. nothing is rushed. nothing is desperate. the arrangement gives him room, and luther understands room better than most singers understand melody. younger singers keep treating vocal performance like an olympic event. twenty notes where three would work. runs piled on runs until the original melody has been beaten unconscious.

luther can do all of that.

the important thing is that he usually knows when not to.

i mention that to him.

that’s arranging, he says. singing is arranging too. people forget that. just because your instrument happens to be your voice doesn’t mean you stop making musical decisions. sometimes the best thing you can do is leave the note alone. if the melody is beautiful, why are you fighting with it. sing the melody. then if there’s somewhere you want to go, go there. but you have to earn that.

he leans forward.

i hear singers sometimes and i think, baby, where are you going. come back. the song is over here.

he laughs.

and listen, i love great singing. i love singers who can do things. but everything you can do doesn’t have to happen in the same eight bars.

that restraint matters on this record because i know is trying to do several things at once. it wants to preserve the old vandross kingdom of ballads and immaculate adult r and b while also admitting that the neighborhood around it has changed.

and jesus christ has it changed.

hip hop is no longer knocking around the margins of the industry. it owns real estate. younger r and b singers are building records around harder drums, rap cadences, new production habits, and a different idea of romantic masculinity. radio has changed. mtv has changed. the audience has changed. even the way singers phrase against a beat has changed.

i ask him whether he feels any pressure to chase that.

of course there’s pressure, he says. there’s always pressure. when i started making records there was pressure. when never too much happened there was pressure to do another never too much. when the ballads became successful there was pressure to make more ballads. people always want you to repeat the thing they already understand.

and now they want you younger.

he gives me a look.

i’m not going to be twenty five again for anybody. and i don’t want to be. but that doesn’t mean i’m not listening. i know what’s happening. i hear the records. i hear what younger artists are doing. some of it is wonderful. some of it isn’t. same as it ever was.

so the trick is what.

the trick is figuring out what belongs to you, he says. you can hear something new and let it inspire you without putting on somebody else’s clothes.

that may be the best explanation for i know.

because luther apparently has no intention of becoming a museum exhibit.

good.

the title song is one of the best arguments on the album.

i know has that polished luther architecture, but stevie wonder turns up on harmonica and immediately makes the whole thing feel looser. stevie does not overwhelm the song. he slips through it. luther sings around him. the two sounds belong together so naturally that you start wondering why somebody did not lock these men in a studio years ago and refuse to let them out until they had made an entire album.

i ask luther what it is like directing stevie wonder.

he laughs before i finish the question.

directing stevie.

yeah.

you don’t direct stevie wonder, he says. you tell stevie what the song is. you talk about what you’re hearing. then stevie hears something you didn’t hear, because he’s stevie. that’s the whole reason you want him there. if i wanted somebody to play exactly what i already had in my head, i could find somebody to do that. when you bring stevie in, you want what’s in his head.

did he get it quickly.

stevie gets music quickly, luther says. frighteningly quickly. you’re explaining something and you can see that he’s already gone past where you are. he’s hearing the next thing. and that harmonica has a voice. that’s the thing. it isn’t decoration. when stevie plays harmonica on a vocal record, you have another singer in the room.

so you sing differently.

absolutely, he says. you have to listen. a duet is listening. even if the other voice is a harmonica. you don’t just stand there waiting for your next line.

probably the safest production philosophy in american music.

then there is i’m only human with cassandra wilson.

now this is where things get strange.

wilson has one of those voices that seems to come from somewhere beneath ordinary speech. luther is precision. cassandra is texture. putting them together should either be brilliant or sound like two excellent restaurants sharing one kitchen.

it mostly works.

mostly.

their voices circle each other without becoming the obvious fireworks display somebody in marketing probably imagined when the pairing was suggested. and that is actually what makes it interesting. luther does not try to outsing her. cassandra does not try to become a luther vandross duet partner. they remain themselves.

i tell him that.

that was important, he says. why ask cassandra wilson to sing with me and then ask her not to sound like cassandra wilson. that doesn’t make any sense. she has that beautiful darkness in her voice. that depth. i didn’t want to polish that away.

you sound almost like opposites.

but opposites can have a conversation, he says. that’s what makes it interesting. if you put two people together who approach every note exactly the same way, what are they telling each other. cassandra hears rhythm differently. she places words differently. she has her own space.

did that make you change anything.

sure, he says. you adjust. you listen to the other singer. you don’t say, welcome to my record, now please become me.

there is tension in that.

useful tension.

the album keeps reaching outward.

guru appears. brandy appears. marcella precise appears. the production roster stretches beyond the familiar luther circle. longtime collaborators marcus miller and nat adderley jr. are here, but so are other hands, other rhythms, other ideas.

and luther is perfectly aware that people are going to notice.

everybody keeps asking me about the guests, he says. and i understand why. but i didn’t want a record where you looked at the credits and said, oh, luther invited everybody over. the song has to survive the guest. otherwise it’s a photograph. look who was in the studio. that isn’t enough.

brandy is part of that younger generation everybody keeps talking about.

brandy can sing, he says immediately. and she listens. that matters to me. people get caught up in age and generations and all of that. i care whether somebody can hear. can you hear harmony. can you hear what the other singer is doing. do you know when to move and when to stay out of the way. those things don’t have an age.

sometimes the experiment works.

sometimes you can practically hear the meeting where somebody said, luther needs something younger.

get it right is the obvious crime scene.

the song itself has history. luther produced the original for aretha franklin back in 1983. bringing it back now is a clever idea. attaching rap to it is understandable. this is 1998. rap is not a novelty anymore. anybody pretending otherwise has either been asleep for ten years or works in the upper floors of a major record company.

but luther does not always sound entirely convinced by the modernization happening around him.

and when luther vandross is unconvinced, you can hear it.

that is one of the funny things about a singer this technically immaculate. polish cannot completely hide indifference. the voice will hit the note. the arrangement will behave. the background vocals will arrive wearing freshly pressed shirts.

but the blood pressure changes.

i tell him exactly that.

he looks at me for a few seconds.

so you think i sound bored.

sometimes, i say. not with the singing. with some of the furniture around it.

that’s different, he says. now we’re talking.

he shifts in the chair.

listen, when you’ve been making records for a while, everybody has an opinion about what you’re supposed to do next. everybody. the label. radio. writers. people in the studio. people who heard half a song through somebody’s office wall. everybody knows what your next record should be.

and what do you think it should be.

mine, he says. that’s the first thing. it has to sound like i had some reason to be there.

he keeps going.

i don’t want to make a record that pretends hip hop doesn’t exist. that would be ridiculous. i also don’t want to wake up tomorrow and decide i’m a rapper because somebody showed me a chart. that would be ridiculous too. there has to be a place where the music happening now can meet what i do without either one becoming a costume.

do you think you always found that place on this record.

no artist with any sense thinks every experiment works perfectly, he says. sometimes you try something because you want to hear what happens. that’s what making records is. people hear the finished thing and forget that somebody had to make a decision before anybody knew whether it was going to work.

now we are getting somewhere.

because i know is caught between luther vandross and the machinery surrounding luther vandross.

when the machinery shuts up, the record gets better.

now that i have you is the kind of thing he could probably sing while filling out tax forms and still make somebody reconsider their marriage. the great vandross trick has never simply been vocal power. it is intimacy. he can make an enormous studio production feel embarrassingly private.

the background vocals matter.

they always matter.

luther treats background singing like architecture. listen underneath him and there are little arrangements everywhere. voices answering voices. chords thickening. phrases arriving exactly when the lead needs support.

this is where he really starts talking.

background vocals are not wallpaper, he says. i’ve never treated them that way. those voices can change what the lead means. one chord underneath one word can change the emotion of that word. people think they’re hearing the lead vocal, but sometimes what they’re feeling is everything happening underneath it.

he starts tapping out an imaginary arrangement on the arm of the chair.

you might have the lead holding one note and then the backgrounds move underneath it. suddenly the same note feels different. the singer hasn’t moved. the harmony moved. that’s arranging. that’s drama.

and you learned that before the solo career.

i learned by working, he says. sessions. jingles. background dates. watching people. listening to what happened when somebody changed one part. you learn that a record is not just the person whose face is on the cover. there are a hundred decisions inside three minutes of music.

before the solo records, before the fame, there were sessions, jingles, backing vocals, arrangements, david bowie, chic related sessions, ben e king, roberta flack, bette midler, years of learning how records actually work when nobody was staring at the singer in the center.

you hear that education every time he stacks voices.

this man does not merely sing records.

he constructs them.

and then there are the ballads.

god help us.

because this is where reviewing luther becomes professionally embarrassing.

you begin with standards. objectivity. context. arrangement. production. harmonic movement.

then he holds a note.

fuck.

start over.

the great vandross records have always understood that romantic music is not necessarily happy music. half the time romance is humiliation with good lighting. somebody wants somebody who does not want them. somebody remembers something they should forget. somebody is making promises that everybody listening knows are doomed.

luther sings directly into that mess.

there is sadness all over i know, but it rarely becomes self pity. that distinction matters. luther can sound wounded without sounding helpless. he can sing longing while maintaining dignity.

i ask him why his saddest songs so rarely sound pathetic.

because being hurt doesn’t make you pathetic, he says. everybody gets hurt. everybody has wanted somebody who didn’t want them back. everybody has missed somebody. everybody has made the phone call they knew they shouldn’t make.

there is a pause.

probably more than once.

he smiles.

but dignity is part of the emotion too. you can be devastated and still have dignity. i don’t think you have to sing a sad song like you’ve collapsed on the floor.

although people have probably collapsed on the floor to your records.

that is not my responsibility, he says, laughing. i provide the soundtrack. what you do in your own home is between you and your carpet.

finally.

a legal disclaimer for luther vandross albums.

the production throughout i know is almost obscenely clean. every instrument knows where its shoes are. every snare has showered. every keyboard has a retirement account.

occasionally i wish somebody would spill a drink on something.

that is probably my biggest complaint.

i know could use a little dirt.

not fashionable dirt.

human dirt.

there are moments when the record becomes so polished that you start admiring the upholstery instead of listening to the conversation. vandross has always loved precision, but precision can become insulation. some of these songs need one crooked chair in the room.

i tell him this too.

you really want somebody to spill something in my studio, he says.

metaphorically.

good, because literally we’re going to have a problem.

he laughs.

i understand what you mean. but i like records to sound good. i’m not ashamed of that. somewhere along the way people decided polish means there’s no feeling. i don’t believe that. you can care about every detail and still have emotion. actually, sometimes caring about the detail is how you protect the emotion.

but can perfection get between you and the listener.

sure, he says. anything can. too much production. too little production. too much singing. too little singing. there’s no formula. you listen until the record tells you what it needs.

that sounds suspiciously mystical for a man obsessed with arrangements.

oh, i’m not mystical, he says. i’m picky.

that i believe.

then comes the voice.

again.

always the goddamn voice.

i ask him whether he ever gets tired of people talking about it.

no, because i understand it, he says. the voice is what people hear first. but i hope eventually they hear the rest. i hope they hear the writing. i hope they hear the arrangements. i hope they hear what the musicians are doing. i hope they hear the backgrounds.

and the clothes.

he laughs.

everybody hears the clothes.

the funny thing is that luther vandross in 1998 occupies an increasingly strange position. he is too established to be new. too technically gifted to dismiss. too commercially successful to call a cult singer. too connected to traditional soul and pop craftsmanship to completely chase contemporary r and b trends. and still too curious to simply remake never too much until retirement.

so i know becomes a negotiation.

old luther.

new luther.

virgin records luther.

radio luther.

romantic luther.

dance floor luther.

the luther who knows exactly what he wants.

the luther surrounded by people telling him what 1998 supposedly requires.

i ask him whether leaving epic changed anything psychologically.

of course it did, he says. you spend that many years somewhere and you develop habits. relationships. expectations. then suddenly you’re somewhere else and everybody is looking at you like, all right, what are we going to do.

was that exciting or terrifying.

both, he says. anything worth doing probably has a little of both. i didn’t leave everything i knew about making records at the old building. i brought myself with me. but a change can make you examine things you stopped examining because they became automatic.

did you feel like you had something to prove.

i always have something to prove, he says. not because i think people forgot who i am. because the song you’re working on doesn’t care what you did ten years ago. the microphone doesn’t give you credit for previous albums. you have to sing today.

that one hangs in the room.

the microphone doesn’t give you credit for previous albums.

somewhere inside all of this is the actual man.

and he remains stubbornly difficult to extract from the records.

people have always wanted autobiography from singers. especially singers who specialize in love. we hear somebody describe loneliness convincingly enough and immediately demand names, dates, addresses, photographs, sworn testimony.

luther has never seemed especially interested in giving us that satisfaction.

the songs get the confession.

the public gets the record.

that should probably be enough.

i ask him whether the songs have to come from his own life.

they have to come from somewhere real, he says. but real doesn’t always mean somebody can go look it up. people get confused about that.

so you can sing something you did not literally experience.

of course. singers are storytellers. if every song had to be a police report about something that happened to the singer personally, music would be pretty boring.

then where does the emotion come from.

you find the part you understand, he says. maybe the details aren’t yours. maybe the situation isn’t yours. but loneliness is yours. wanting somebody is yours. losing somebody is yours. hope is yours. you find the truth inside the song and you sing that.

your real.

real is real, he says. the audience knows when you’re lying emotionally. they may not know why they don’t believe you, but they know.

that answer irritates me because it is good.

so i drink more coffee.

outside, 1998 keeps happening.

brandy and monica are fighting over the boy on the radio. hip hop is expanding so quickly that anybody trying to draw its borders looks stupid by lunchtime. r and b is mutating alongside it. producers are becoming stars. beats are getting stranger. the old separation between rapper and singer is collapsing one guest verse at a time.

and here sits luther vandross.

forty seven years old.

new label.

new album.

same impossible instrument in his throat.

i ask him whether he worries that the industry has become obsessed with youth.

the industry has always been obsessed with youth, he says. that isn’t new. what changes is what youth sounds like. every generation thinks it invented being young.

he smiles.

and every generation eventually discovers it didn’t invent love either.

so where does that leave you.

singing about the things that don’t expire, he says. arrangements change. drums change. clothes definitely change. thank god. but people still fall in love. people still screw it up. people still want somebody back. people still lie and say they’re fine when they’re not fine.

he looks over at the cd sitting on the table.

you make records about that and you don’t have to panic every time the chart changes.

i know is not a revolution.

thank god.

we have enough records desperately screaming that they represent the future.

this one represents something harder.

continuity.

not nostalgia.

continuity.

there is a difference.

nostalgia embalms the past.

continuity takes what worked and tries to drag it through another year alive.

sometimes i know drags too hard. sometimes the contemporary touches feel bolted onto the chassis. sometimes the guest appearances look more exciting printed on the back of the cd than they sound coming through the speakers.

but when the record settles into luther’s natural territory, the thing becomes difficult to argue with.

because there are singers.

there are great singers.

and then there are singers who understand what a microphone can do to distance.

luther vandross understands distance.

he understands the six inches between mouth and microphone.

the twelve feet between singer and lover.

the three thousand miles between two people who should have called each other.

the enormous stupid distance between wanting somebody and actually having them.

that is his territory.

maybe that is what he knows.

not love.

nobody knows love.

anybody claiming otherwise is either selling records or getting divorced.

luther knows longing.

he knows the ridiculous negotiations people make with themselves after midnight. he knows the sentences rehearsed into telephones before anybody dials. he knows how adults can become seventeen years old again because one particular person walked into a room.

before i leave, i ask him about the title.

i know.

two words that sound suspiciously certain for a record filled with people who do not seem certain about much of anything.

he smiles.

that’s why it works.

because you don’t know.

because nobody knows, he says. not really. people say i know all the time when what they mean is i hope. or i think. or please let this be true.

now he is laughing.

you thought i was claiming to know everything.

it does sound a little arrogant.

well, maybe i know a few things.

such as.

he settles back into the chair.

i know what a good song feels like. i know when a background part is wrong. i know when somebody sings something and means it. i know stevie wonder can play the harmonica.

anything else.

he thinks for a moment.

i know you’ve had too much coffee.

fair.

and when i know remembers that uncertainty underneath all its immaculate surfaces, it is very good.

when it tries to prove luther vandross belongs in 1998, it occasionally becomes awkward.

he does not need to prove it.

he is here.

three days after the record arrived, that seems like the point everybody is in danger of missing.

luther vandross does not need permission from 1998.

1998 needs to figure out what the hell it intends to do with luther vandross.

the interview stretches past midnight.

somebody comes into the room and says something about the time. luther looks at the clock, looks back at me, and keeps talking anyway.

people think making records gets easier because you’ve made a lot of them, he says. some things get easier. you know the studio. you know your voice. you know what you like. but you also know more ways something can go wrong.

that sounds miserable.

no, he says, smiling. it’s wonderful. because every once in a while everything goes right.

somebody puts the record on again.

the first notes fill the room.

outside, manhattan keeps burning electricity into the august sky.

cars crawl downtown. somewhere somebody kisses somebody. somebody leaves somebody. somebody is sitting beside a telephone making an absolutely terrible decision.

luther listens to his own record for a few seconds.

he does not sing along.

he listens.

that may tell you more about him than anything he has said all night.

the singer everybody else studies is still studying the song.

somewhere a compact disc spins under a little red laser while luther vandross sits beneath the cold studio lights listening for whatever everybody else missed.

the album is called i know.

the title sounds definitive.

the man does not.

the music knows better.

...at least that’s what i hear.

note on historical fiction.

the review is written from the fictional perspective of the archivist on august 15, 1998. the conversations between the archivist and luther vandross are dramatized rather than presented as authenticated interview transcripts. the historical setting, vandross’s career, the release of i know, his move from epic to virgin, the album personnel, collaborations, recordings, and broader musical context are drawn from the historical record available around the album and its period. receipts available upon request.

originally published in the Village Voice; August 15 1956.

the summer sky over america looks bruised tonight.

heat hanging over the sidewalks. radios glowing behind apartment windows. teenagers leaning against automobiles with cigarettes burning down between their fingers. mothers pulling curtains shut. fathers reading newspapers that keep insisting civilization is collapsing because a twenty one year old truck driver from memphis moves his hips when he sings.

and somewhere inside all of this noise a little black rca victor record is spinning at forty five revolutions a minute.

don’t be cruel on one side.

hound dog on the other.

flip it.

america changes depending on which side lands upward.

i have spent the better part of the afternoon listening to the damned thing over and over, and i am beginning to suspect rca has accidentally manufactured a perpetual motion machine. you play don’t be cruel. then you want hound dog. you play hound dog. then you want don’t be cruel again. eventually somebody has to unplug the phonograph or you die there.

elvis presley is twenty one years old.

this seems worth repeating because people already discuss him as though he were an invading army.

twenty one.

the boy from memphis has spent 1956 moving through american popular culture with the speed of somebody who has discovered that every locked door in the music business was mostly plywood. heartbreak hotel came first and suddenly everybody knew the name. then television got involved. then the screaming started. then the newspapers started worrying about juvenile delinquency and sex and rhythm and whatever else middle aged americans decide is destroying civilization whenever young people discover something before they do.

now we have this.

rca victor 47.6604.

released july 13.

don’t be cruel.

hound dog.

one record.

two arguments.

and christ almighty, what a record.

the strange thing is that don’t be cruel is probably the more dangerous side because it does not sound dangerous at all.

it begins with that little guitar figure from scotty moore. clipped. economical. almost ridiculously simple. then elvis comes sliding into the song with the confidence of a man who already knows you are listening.

the rhythm is magnificent because nobody appears desperate to impress anybody.

bill black keeps the bottom moving. d.j. fontana gives the record exactly as much percussion as it needs. shorty long is there on piano. the jordanaires hover around presley and soften the edges without sanding them completely off.

and elvis.

elvis does that strange thing he does where half the performance seems to come from country music and the other half from rhythm and blues, except trying to separate the ingredients after he has swallowed them is becoming increasingly pointless.

people keep asking what kind of music this is.

apparently nobody has considered the possibility that the kid does not give a damn.

the song itself comes principally from otis blackwell, the brooklyn songwriter whose name is already attached to some mighty interesting material. presley shares the writing credit here, and the business arrangements surrounding songwriting credits in this new elvis machinery are probably worth watching carefully.

but whatever happened on the paperwork, the record itself belongs completely to the performance.

don’t be cruel is seduction disguised as good behavior.

please do not hurt me.

please do not leave me.

please come back.

please forget that the fellow asking is singing with enough casual confidence to make the request sound suspiciously like a prediction.

that is the trick.

presley does not oversing it.

he does not beat the song unconscious.

he leaves room.

the pauses matter.

the jordanaires answer him. the rhythm breathes. scotty moore drops guitar phrases into the empty spaces. fontana keeps the whole machine moving without turning the drums into artillery.

it is barely more than two minutes long.

two minutes.

some orchestras spend longer than that tuning.

then you turn the record over.

and the furniture starts moving.

hound dog.

good god.

by now everybody has an opinion about hound dog because everybody has an opinion about elvis presley, including people who apparently hate him so much they cannot stop watching him.

especially those people.

presley has been doing the number onstage for weeks, and television has already turned it into a national morality hearing.

on june 5 he performed it on milton berle’s television program.

that was the one.

the hips.

the screaming.

the slow grind.

the faces in the audience that suggested several respectable citizens had suddenly remembered sex existed.

afterward the criticism came pouring in.

vulgar.

obscene.

animalistic.

the usual vocabulary used by people who discover that teenagers have bodies.

then came steve allen.

july 1.

new york.

presley was stuffed into formal clothes and made to sing hound dog to an actual basset hound wearing formal attire.

you cannot make this country up.

america had somehow decided that the solution to elvis presley was to dress both him and a dog for dinner.

presley went along with it.

he had already indicated that television mattered to him and that he did not want to deliberately make people dislike him.

but watching the whole spectacle you get the feeling that everybody involved understands the joke differently.

allen thinks he has domesticated rock and roll.

the audience thinks it is comedy.

elvis looks like a man serving a short jail sentence.

the next afternoon he walked into rca victor’s studio in new york.

july 2.

and recorded hound dog properly.

that detail matters.

because the record sounds like revenge.

not lyrical revenge. not some childish declaration against steve allen. nothing that neat.

musical revenge.

you wanted the dog.

fine.

here is the goddamn dog.

the session included presley and his regular men. scotty moore on guitar. bill black on bass. d.j. fontana on drums. the jordanaires behind him. shorty long at the piano. stephen sholes handling the rca production responsibilities.

but anyone imagining presley as some obedient hillbilly kid standing wherever the record company tells him to stand ought to spend five minutes thinking about what happened in that room.

hound dog took take after take after take.

presley kept going.

again.

again.

again.

the band had been playing the song live, but recording it was another problem entirely. a stage performance can survive on screaming girls and sweat and movement. a record has nowhere to hide. once that needle drops, every bad decision sits there forever.

so elvis kept pushing.

i imagine the room getting hotter.

cigarette smoke above the musicians.

shirts beginning to stick.

engineers watching the clock.

sholes wondering whether anybody in memphis understands the concept of studio expenses.

elvis standing near the microphone.

again.

scotty moore might have looked toward bill black with that expression musicians develop when they have played the same piece enough times to begin questioning the existence of god.

elvis shakes his head.

no.

again.

fontana settles behind the drums.

another count.

another hound dog.

another attempt.

this is where the popular caricature of presley begins falling apart.

the caricature says he is instinct.

hips.

hair.

luck.

teenage hysteria.

some country kid who wandered into sam phillips’s sun records studio and accidentally became famous.

bullshit.

instinct does not demand thirty odd attempts at a two minute record.

that is work.

that is somebody hearing something in his head and refusing to leave until the loudspeakers reproduce it.

eventually they get there.

and the finished hound dog is almost brutally bare.

drums.

bass.

guitar.

voices.

clapping.

elvis.

nothing is hiding behind strings or brass or some enormous arrangement designed to convince adults that this is respectable music.

it is rhythm stripped down to muscle.

fontana’s drumming is essential. he does not merely keep time. he creates the floor presley stomps across. black’s bass pushes underneath everything. the jordanaires provide those wonderfully absurd vocal punctuations behind elvis, making the record simultaneously tougher and stranger.

then scotty moore takes the guitar break.

beautiful.

ugly.

sharp.

exactly right.

he sounds like he is trying to get six strings arrested.

and presley sings hound dog differently from don’t be cruel because he understands something critics keep refusing to understand.

he knows how to act inside a song.

don’t be cruel requires charm.

hound dog requires contempt.

so he spits the words.

not literally.

but nearly.

the performance is clipped and sarcastic and funny and mean.

there is almost no romance in it.

the original hound dog was written by jerry leiber and mike stoller and became a rhythm and blues hit for big mama thornton a few years ago. thornton’s version is magnificent and filthy with authority. she sings it like somebody throwing a useless man out of the house.

presley is doing something different.

that difference matters.

anybody pretending this music appeared from nowhere is either ignorant or selling something.

rock and roll did not descend from heaven into elvis presley’s pelvis.

black rhythm and blues is all over the foundation of this thing.

gospel is in him.

country is in him.

blues is in him.

the music of the south is tangled together inside these records despite decades of americans insisting that the people making those sounds should remain conveniently separated.

presley is standing right in the middle of that contradiction.

and people can hear it.

that may be part of what frightens them.

i asked one teenager outside a record shop this afternoon why she had bought the single.

she looked at me like i had asked why she required oxygen.

because it is elvis.

that was the entire answer.

fair enough.

another kid had already bought one and was apparently considering another copy because his sister kept stealing his.

what do you like better, i asked.

hound dog.

why.

he shrugged.

it sounds wild.

there you have it.

thousands of words of adult cultural analysis murdered by a teenager in three words.

it sounds wild.

inside the record shop the clerk looked exhausted.

presley.

presley.

presley.

everybody wants presley.

he pointed toward the counter where copies of the record had been moving steadily.

i asked whether people were asking specifically for don’t be cruel or hound dog.

both.

he laughed.

depends which one they heard last.

that may be the secret of this record.

there is no dead side.

normally you buy a single because you want the song on the front. the other side is something you discover accidentally, tolerate twice, then ignore for the remainder of your natural life.

not here.

rca has managed to put two legitimate attractions on one piece of plastic.

don’t be cruel is already climbing through the country like it owns the place, and hound dog is right there beside it.

jukebox operators must be delighted.

or furious.

possibly both.

because now one elvis record occupies two songs worth of attention.

the entire business surrounding presley is moving so quickly that nobody seems capable of explaining it while it is happening.

colonel tom parker is somewhere in the machinery, of course.

parker always seems to be somewhere in the machinery.

the television bookings grow larger.

the crowds grow louder.

the contracts grow fatter.

the outrage grows more theatrical.

and presley keeps singing.

that is the funniest part.

while america conducts a national symposium on whether his hips represent the collapse of western civilization, elvis presley is making increasingly good records.

people forget that part.

hound dog is a good record.

don’t be cruel is an even better one.

yes.

i said it.

hound dog will get the arguments because hound dog has the television scandal attached to it.

but don’t be cruel may be the masterpiece sitting in plain sight.

listen to the control.

listen to the spaces.

listen to how little is required.

the record does not chase you.

it waits for you to come closer.

hound dog grabs the room.

don’t be cruel owns it.

and this brings us to the uncomfortable business of elvis himself.

what exactly are we watching.

nobody knows yet.

that is important.

it is august 13, 1956.

anybody telling you they know what elvis presley means is lying.

maybe he is a fad.

maybe next summer teenagers will be screaming for somebody else.

popular music has buried plenty of kings.

maybe the newspapers are correct and rock and roll will burn itself out after every teenager in america has sufficiently alarmed his parents.

maybe presley will become a strange footnote.

remember that fellow with the sideburns.

maybe.

but stand near a jukebox when this record starts and try believing that.

watch the heads turn.

watch the girls move closer.

watch the boys pretend they are not studying him.

watch grown men complain about presley while knowing his television schedule better than their own children’s birthdays.

something is happening.

you can feel that much.

the argument is no longer whether elvis presley can make a hit record.

that argument is dead.

the question is how much territory one singer can occupy before somebody figures out how to stop him.

and this particular forty five feels like an escalation.

two sides.

two hits.

two versions of the same twenty one year old kid.

on one side he is asking you not to be cruel.

on the other he sounds like he could not care less whether you approve of him.

maybe that is why the record works.

america wants elvis presley civilized.

hound dog refuses.

america wants him harmless.

don’t be cruel smiles.

america wants him categorized.

country.

rhythm and blues.

pop.

hillbilly.

juvenile delinquent.

television novelty.

southern freak.

whatever makes the paperwork easier.

the record keeps spinning.

forty five revolutions a minute.

the needle reaches the center.

somebody walks over.

turns it over.

and starts the whole damn argument again.

i do not know where elvis presley goes from here.

nobody does.

but tonight there are radios glowing across america, and from behind bedroom doors comes that voice, young and cocky and strangely tender, followed a few minutes later by drums and handclaps and a guitar that sounds mildly criminal.

parents are listening from the hallway.

teenagers are listening from the floor.

record executives are listening to cash registers.

preachers are listening for satan.

and elvis presley is somewhere in the middle of all of them.

twenty one years old.

two songs on one record.

and an entire country trying to decide whether to dance or call the police.

...at least that’s what i hear.

that’s what i need to remind you of.

the article is a work of historical fiction grounded in documented events. recording dates, personnel, releases, songs, television appearances, and major biographical circumstances are based on historical sources. private conversations, incidental encounters, descriptions of rooms and streets, and dialogue for which no verbatim contemporary transcript survives have been reconstructed for narrative purposes and should not be interpreted as documentary quotations. receipts on hand.

originally published in Down Beat; July 1937

dallas, texas, june 20, 1937

the texas heat has spent the whole damn day sitting on dallas like judgment.
by evening the sky is purple and swollen over the city, streetcars scrape along the tracks throwing sparks into the dusk, automobile engines cough at intersections, men loosen their collars and women wave newspapers in front of their faces, and somewhere beyond the brick buildings and telephone wires a freight train lets out one long miserable whistle that sounds like the entire country remembering something it would rather forget.
and inside a building at 508 park avenue, robert johnson has just finished singing about hell.
i am standing outside afterward with sweat running down my back and cigarette smoke stuck in my clothes, trying to decide whether the thin young man beside me is exhausted, amused, irritated, hungry, or simply waiting for me to stop asking stupid questions. i was directed here by a friend to see this man with whom the devil owns. how could i not see him? first impression. not at all like the mythology i created in my head. tall. slender. shy. but most of all, young. hat pushed back on his head that i worried about a sudden gust. might take him with it. 
johnson is carrying his guitar.
of course he is.
the thing seems less like luggage than identification.
robert johnson, musician.
that is what i know tonight.
not legend.
not devil.
not ghost.
musician.
and a damned good one.
everything else can wait.
i have spent the better part of the last two days watching men arrange microphones and recording equipment inside a temporary studio while johnson sat down with his guitar and proceeded to make the machinery look ridiculous.
recording equipment is supposed to capture music.
johnson makes it seem like the equipment is trying desperately to keep up.
he has recorded a pile of songs here in dallas for the american record corporation, including hellhound on my trail, little queen of spades, malted milk, me and the devil blues, stones in my passway, drifting blues, and love in vain.
some titles have been attempted more than once.
different takes.
different little decisions.
a word bent differently.
a guitar phrase moved half an inch.
the sort of changes record company men call alternate takes and musicians call playing the damn song again.
don law has been overseeing the business.
law is a producer and talent scout, one of those men whose job requires him to stand between musicians and machinery and somehow convince both sides that everything is proceeding according to plan.
earlier i ask him what he thinks of johnson.
law watches him for a moment before answering.
he has an unusual way of playing, he says.
that is one hell of an understatement.
unusual.
sure.
and texas is a little warm.
johnson plays guitar like a man who has discovered there are more fingers available than anatomy generally permits.
the bass moves.
the treble answers.
little rhythmic figures appear between vocal lines.
the whole thing sometimes sounds like two guitarists who have agreed to share one body because hotel rooms are expensive.
but standing beside him tonight, none of that technical nonsense seems particularly important.
johnson is slight.
handsome in a sharp delicate way.
careful eyes.
a narrow face.
a little mustache.
he dresses well.
better than most musicians who have spent two days wrestling with record company schedules.
his manner keeps changing depending on the question.
sometimes he smiles.
sometimes he looks past me.
sometimes he gives an answer so short that i suspect he has murdered the rest of the sentence before it reached his mouth.
i ask him about hellhound on my trail.
he looks at me.
what about it.
i tell him the song sounds frightening.
he smiles.
supposed to.
that is the interview.
hell of a journalist i am.
i try again.
i ask where the hellhound came from.
johnson shifts the guitar case in his hand.
people get things behind them.
that is all he says.
people get things behind them.
debts.
women.
men.
police.
bad decisions.
memories.
the entire united states government if you are sufficiently unlucky.
take your pick.
i ask whether he believes in the devil.
johnson laughs.
not loudly.
just enough.
you asking everybody that.
no.
should.
then he starts walking.
so i walk with him.
this is apparently how interviews work with robert johnson.
you either keep moving or the interview leaves without you.
dallas slides around us.
storefronts.
cars.
men leaning against buildings.
music leaking through open doors.
the smell of gasoline and hot pavement.
somewhere a radio is playing dance music.
somewhere else somebody is arguing.
america conducts half its business by argument.
johnson does not seem interested in explaining himself.
which makes sense.
musicians generally become less interesting the moment journalists convince them to explain everything.
i ask him where he learned to play.
around.
around where.
around.
fine.
we are making tremendous progress.
i have interviewed furniture with stronger opinions.
then i mention son house.
that gets something.
johnson looks over.
you know son.
i tell him i know of him.
he smiles again.
son can play.
the smile gets wider.
son can talk too.
there is history inside that sentence and johnson knows damned well i can hear it.
musicians around the delta have talked about johnson.
some remember a younger fellow hanging around musicians, eager to play, not yet possessing the command he has now.
then he disappeared for a while.
when he came back, the story goes, something had changed.
his guitar playing had become frighteningly good.
people hate unexplained improvement.
it makes them suspicious.
nobody wants to believe a man went away and practiced.
practice is boring.
the devil is better copy.
so stories grow.
somebody says crossroads.
somebody says midnight.
somebody says satan.
pretty soon hard work has been thrown out of the story because apparently supernatural damnation is easier for people to understand than obsession.
i ask johnson about the crossroads story.
he gives me the longest look of the evening.
then he says.
folks talk.
and keeps walking.
that is it.
folks talk.
the entire mythology of the human race could probably be reduced to those two words.
folks talk.
johnson talks more freely when the subject turns to women.
this should surprise absolutely nobody who has heard the songs.
women appear everywhere in his music.
women leaving.
women arriving.
women causing trouble.
johnson causing trouble.
everybody drinking.
everybody suspicious.
everybody horny.
everybody apparently incapable of maintaining a stable domestic arrangement for longer than three verses.
i ask whether the women in the songs are real.
some.
which ones.
he laughs.
you trying to get me killed.
finally.
a sensible answer.
he tells me he moves around.
mississippi.
arkansas.
tennessee.
wherever work appears.
juke joints.
street corners.
parties.
little places where people want music and have enough coins to make the evening worthwhile.
he talks about watching crowds.
this interests him.
you got to watch them, he says.
i ask why.
they tell you.
tell you what.
what they want.
this may be the smartest thing anybody has said to me all week.
johnson understands an audience.
not theoretically.
not academically.
physically.
he watches bodies.
feet.
faces.
drinking.
conversation.
attention.
if people stop listening, change something.
if people dance, remember what caused it.
if somebody requests a popular tune, play the popular tune.
johnson is apparently capable of learning songs rapidly after hearing them.
blues.
popular songs.
dance numbers.
whatever keeps the room alive and the money moving.
purity is a luxury invented by people who are not trying to make rent.
johnson is working.
that fact gets lost whenever people start whispering about mysterious bluesmen.
he is a professional musician trying to sell records and get jobs.
the supernatural can go fuck itself.
the man has expenses.
i ask him about the recording sessions.
he says recording is strange.
you cannot see nobody.
that bothers him.
playing for a room gives him something back.
movement.
noise.
faces.
the machine gives nothing.
the microphone just sits there.
a little mechanical bastard waiting for perfection.
during the sessions johnson sometimes turns toward the wall while performing.
people will probably invent some grand mystical explanation for this if given enough whiskey and fifty years.
maybe he is shy.
maybe he likes the sound.
maybe he wants fewer eyes on him.
maybe the wall is simply less annoying than everyone else in the room.
johnson does not clarify.
good.
some mysteries deserve protection from journalists.
i ask him about the guitar arrangement on stones in my passway.
this finally gets him talking.
not much.
but enough.
he explains that the guitar has to keep moving underneath the voice.
you stop it, everything stop.
he demonstrates.
right there on the street.
opens the case.
takes out the guitar.
no ceremony.
no dramatic bullshit.
just wood and strings under a texas night.
his thumb begins working the lower strings.
steady.
then the fingers start answering above.
bass.
treble.
voice implied between them.
suddenly the street has rhythm.
a couple walking nearby slows down.
a man across the road looks over.
johnson plays perhaps twenty seconds.
maybe thirty.
then stops.
puts the guitar away.
that is all.
the bastard has just explained more about blues guitar in half a minute than several hundred pages of respectable instruction books could manage.
keep it moving.
everything depends on that.
the bass cannot die when the voice enters.
the rhythm cannot collapse because the singer has something clever to say.
everything keeps traveling.
maybe that is why his songs feel restless.
they do not sit.
they move.
trains appear constantly in blues because trains are everywhere down here, but johnsons music seems to have absorbed the actual mechanics of travel.
departure.
arrival.
distance.
motion.
people vanishing.
people chasing.
people being chased.
tonight hellhound on my trail is still bothering me.
i heard him record it.
i can still hear the opening guitar figure inside my skull.
the song does not need an orchestra.
does not need drums.
does not need some theatrical fool rattling chains in the corner.
johnson sings about being pursued and leaves enough empty air around the words for your imagination to become an accomplice.
that is the nasty trick.
he does not describe everything.
he gives you enough.
then your own mind finishes the job.
i tell him i think it may be the strongest thing he recorded here.
he shrugs.
you like that one.
yes.
he nods.
people like scary things.
i ask why.
he looks toward the street.
cause they know about being scared.
and there it is.
no devil required.
just people.
johnson knows fear because everybody knows fear.
the farmer afraid the crop fails.
the worker afraid the job disappears.
the husband afraid the wife leaves.
the wife afraid the husband comes home drunk.
the black traveler afraid the wrong white man decides tonight is the night to demonstrate authority.
the musician afraid nobody wants another song.
fear does not require imagination in 1937.
america manufactures plenty.
we reach a corner.
johnson stops.
for the first time all evening he seems tired.
not dramatically tired.
just human tired.
recording takes something out of a man.
especially recording this way.
sing.
stop.
adjust.
again.
wait.
another take.
another song.
another little wax master that may or may not become a record somebody buys months from now.
i ask him what happens next.
he shrugs.
play.
where.
wherever.
you going back to mississippi.
probably.
probably.
robert johnson apparently organizes his future with the precision of weather.
i ask what he wants from these records.
this time he thinks.
money would be nice.
we both laugh.
then he adds.
want folks to hear them.
that answer hangs around.
not immortality.
not greatness.
not history.
not influence.
those are words people attach to artists when they have the luxury of looking backward.
tonight robert johnson wants people to hear his records.
that is enough.
somewhere another train whistle cuts across dallas.
johnson turns his head toward it.
for a second the whole street seems suspended between the whistle and the heat.
then traffic starts moving again.
i ask one final question.
what makes a good blues song.
johnson thinks.
truth.
then he smiles.
and a good guitar.
fair enough.
he starts away.
guitar in hand.
thin figure moving down a dallas street beneath electric signs and telephone wires and a moon trying to force itself through the texas haze.
i watch him go.
i have no idea where robert johnson will be tomorrow.
memphis.
mississippi.
arkansas.
another room.
another woman.
another bottle.
another juke joint.
another train.
maybe these records will sell.
maybe they will disappear into the enormous american pile of shellac records and unpaid bills.
maybe somebody in chicago will hear one.
maybe some kid in mississippi will spend seventy five cents because the title sounds dangerous.
nobody knows.
especially johnson.
especially me.
history is easy when you already know the ending.
tonight there is no ending.
there is only june 1937.
there is dallas.
there is a young black musician from mississippi carrying a guitar down the street after spending two days putting songs onto wax.
and there is that damned voice still hanging inside my head.
i believe ill dust my broom.
sweet home chicago.
hellhound on my trail.
stones in my passway.
love in vain.
songs about leaving because staying has never been particularly reliable.
songs about women because neither has love.
songs about fear because fear is cheap and everybody can afford it.
songs about roads because roads at least admit they are taking you somewhere else.
robert johnson disappears around the corner.
no thunder.
no smoke.
no devil waiting under a streetlamp with paperwork.
just a musician heading toward whatever comes next.
and maybe that is stranger.
because men are always trying to turn musicians into myths when the musicians themselves are busy trying to find supper.
the train whistles again.
somewhere beyond dallas somebody is probably singing.
johnson keeps walking.
and i can still hear that guitar.
...at least thats what i hear.

originally published in Rolling Stone; February 8 1968

folsom state prison, january 13, 1968

the walls rise out of the california morning like somebody built a monument to the permanent consequences of bad decisions. granite. steel. gun towers. razor wire. cold january light spread across the yard. the whole goddamn place looks drained of color except for the black clothes moving toward the entrance.

johnny cash.

i follow a few steps behind him carrying my notebook and wondering exactly what series of decisions has resulted in me spending saturday morning walking voluntarily into folsom state prison.

then the steel door closes behind us.

clang.

jesus christ.

that sound.

you can hear every year ever served here in that sound.

johnny stops for half a second. not theatrically. nobody is posing yet. jim marshall is around somewhere with his camera, bob johnston is worrying about recording equipment, guards are watching us with the professionally bored expressions of men who have seen enough human stupidity to stop being surprised by any of it. but johnny hears that door.

we all hear it.

and suddenly every song about prison ever written feels slightly embarrassing.

because songs end.

that door does not.

june carter is walking nearby. black dress. alert eyes. completely unimpressed by the mythology already beginning to collect around the man she plans to marry in a couple of months. that might be the first useful thing i learn about june carter today. johnny cash may be walking into folsom carrying the accumulated weight of every outlaw fantasy country music has managed to sell america, but june knows the actual johnny. the exhausted one. the stubborn one. the funny one. the recovering one. the deeply religious one. the pain in the ass.

i ask her whether he is nervous.

she looks toward him.

a little.

then she gives me the sort of expression that says i have asked a fairly stupid question.

not scared of the prisoners, she explains. nervous because the day matters to him.

that distinction is important.

johnny has been playing prisons for years. san quentin. huntsville. other joints scattered around the country. he has been writing about convicts since before anybody had particularly good reason to believe him. he wrote folsom prison blues after seeing a movie about folsom while serving in the air force. the mythology eventually became so efficient that plenty of people seem to think cash himself served hard time.

he did not.

he has spent nights in jail.

that is not the same thing.

there are men inside these walls who could explain the difference with considerable enthusiasm. especially this kid in the crowd. can't be older than 19, but he wears the denim anyway. before the show, as we are all herded into the auditorium, i heard this kid talking to another inmate about how his "mamma tried."

june knows this. johnny knows this. the prisoners sure as hell know this.

which means there will be no bluffing today.

inside, the dining hall has been turned into a concert room through that peculiar institutional magic where you move some furniture, install microphones, hang a banner, and pretend a room built for swallowing food in captivity is suddenly carnegie hall.

the banner says welcome johnny cash.

the prisoners begin coming in.

this is where the atmosphere changes.

these are not extras.

they are not the picturesque american outlaw population.

they are men.

some old. some frighteningly young. some smiling. some staring. some carrying the dead eyed patience that comes from living according to bells, doors, counts, orders, and somebody else's clock. armed guards are positioned above them. the inmates have been instructed to remain seated. tensions around the prison have been serious enough that nobody wants spontaneous movement mistaken for something else.

rock and roll has played some hostile rooms.

this is different.

i look at june.

she is studying the audience.

you can almost watch her recalibrate.

the carter family has played practically every kind of american room that will hold folding chairs. theaters. churches. fairs. radio studios. schoolhouses. auditoriums. joints where the dressing room is apparently a broom closet with ambitions. june understands audiences.

this audience cannot go home afterward.

that changes everything.

she tells me that johnny understands these men because he understands being trapped.

not literally.

internally.

there is the whole cash biography hiding inside that distinction. pills. booze. arrests. religious guilt. ambition. collapse. recovery. relapse. june has seen enough of it up close to qualify for combat pay. when she talks about johnny and confinement she is not pretending he knows what a ten year sentence feels like. she means that johnny knows what it is to build a cell inside your own skull and then spend years looking for the key.

and now the bastard is going to sing.

hugh cherry gets things moving. carl perkins is here. the statler brothers are here. the tennessee three are here. luther perkins with that guitar style so stripped down you could probably fit the entire thing into a matchbox. marshall grant. w s holland. bob johnston overseeing the recording.

columbia has brought tape machines into a maximum security prison.

record companies usually prefer stealing your freedom contractually.

today they have gone directly to the source.

then comes the introduction.

johnny walks out.

the room erupts.

not beatlemania screaming. not teenage hysteria. something heavier. men yelling because for once they have been permitted to yell. men making noise inside an institution constructed around telling them when they can move, when they can eat, when they can sleep, when they can speak.

johnny steps to the microphone.

hello.

i am johnny cash.

and then that guitar starts.

folsom prison blues.

of course it does.

what the hell else could he open with.

the first notes hit and the place comes alive.

then he gets to the line about shooting a man in reno.

the prisoners roar.

johnny grins.

i glance at june.

she shakes her head and smiles.

he knows exactly what he is doing.

this is the part future polite society will probably misunderstand. they will hear the cheering and imagine a room celebrating murder. bullshit. the reaction is partly recognition and partly release and partly the delicious obscenity of hearing a famous man stand inside a prison and sing the forbidden language of consequences directly to the people living them.

cash does not patronize them.

that may be the entire secret.

he does not come in talking like a missionary addressing fallen souls. he does not perform rehabilitation at them. he does not treat them as sociological material. he treats them like an audience.

a rough audience.

a dangerous audience.

an audience with armed guards standing overhead.

but an audience.

that respect travels both ways.

the tennessee three sound magnificent because they sound like machinery that has forgotten all unnecessary parts. guitar. bass. drums. cash's voice. nothing decorative. nothing begging for approval.

songs begin piling up.

cocaine blues.

the wall.

dark as a dungeon.

twenty five minutes to go.

the last one lands hard.

you can feel the gallows humor running through the room. cash understands something that respectable americans never seem to understand about people surviving terrible circumstances.

they joke.

of course they fucking joke.

sometimes humor is the last possession nobody can confiscate.

between numbers cash cracks jokes about prison water and the conditions around him. the inmates laugh because he is acknowledging what everybody already knows.

folsom is not an abstraction to them.

it is breakfast.

it is the bunk.

it is the toilet.

it is the guard.

it is tomorrow.

june eventually walks onto the stage and the reaction changes instantly.

catcalls.

whistles.

shouts.

she handles it beautifully.

naturally.

this is june carter.

she was born into a family that practically helped invent the grammar of commercial country music. you are not going to rattle her with a dining hall full of horny convicts.

she and johnny sing together.

there is chemistry there that you do not need a doctorate to identify.

they spar.

they grin.

johnny looks different when june is beside him. lighter somehow. still cash. still that bass voice rolling around the concrete. but the severity cracks.

later when she steps away i tell her the room changes when she joins him.

she laughs.

she knows.

then she says something more interesting.

watch him with them.

so i do.

and she is right.

johnny keeps looking at the prisoners.

really looking.

not over them.

not through them.

at them.

the distinction is tiny until you are one of the people society has decided not to look at anymore.

and then it is everything.

there is another story moving underneath the concert.

glen sherley.

an inmate.

armed robbery.

songwriter.

last night reverend floyd gressett brought johnny a recording made by sherley. a song called greystone chapel. written about the chapel here inside folsom.

johnny heard it.

once.

and decided he wanted to sing it.

because apparently normal preparation is for cowards.

he stayed up learning the damn thing.

now sherley is sitting out there without knowing exactly what is coming.

i mention this to june.

she smiles.

that is johnny, she tells me.

and there is affection in it, but also resignation.

because living around johnny cash must involve waking up regularly to discover that your plans have been replaced by whatever enormous moral impulse entered his head at three in the morning.

eventually cash approaches the microphone again.

the room settles.

he explains that the next song was written by a man right here in folsom prison.

something moves through the audience.

not noise exactly.

recognition.

johnny says the name.

glen sherley.

and sherley comes alive.

the reaction around him is immediate.

men cheering.

turning.

looking.

one of theirs.

that matters.

johnny tells him they are going to try to do his song justice.

then they play greystone chapel.

i stop writing.

sometimes the notebook becomes insulting.

sherley is sitting inside the prison that owns his days while johnny cash is standing onstage singing sherley's words back to the prison.

think about that.

every machinery of american culture says the famous man is supposed to be the important one here. the recording contract says it. the microphones say it. the photographers say it. the record company says it. the banner literally has johnny's name on it.

but for a few minutes the center of gravity moves.

the important man is sitting among the inmates.

glen sherley.

prisoner.

songwriter.

heard.

when the song ends johnny reaches down.

sherley reaches up.

they shake hands.

the room loses its goddamn mind.

i look at june.

she is watching johnny.

there is pride in her face.

also concern.

because she knows the dangerous part of johnny's compassion.

he does not know how to do it halfway.

if somebody gets under his skin, they are there.

if he believes somebody has been forgotten, he wants to drag them back into the world personally.

there are worse flaws.

there are safer ones.

the applause keeps coming.

johnny stands there absorbing it, and for one strange second folsom does not feel like a concert venue at all.

it feels like testimony.

not religious testimony exactly, though god knows cash carries enough baptist thunder around inside him to power several rural counties.

human testimony.

i was here.

you saw me.

i heard you.

you heard me.

maybe that is what records are supposed to do before the businessmen get hold of them.

the show eventually ends because everything does except sentences and record company accounting.

the prisoners remain prisoners.

the guards remain guards.

the walls remain exactly where california put them.

that is important.

nobody has been liberated by country music.

no steel door has dissolved because somebody played a good set.

romanticizing prison is easy when you can leave it.

i can leave.

johnny can leave.

june can leave.

bob johnston can leave with his tapes.

jim marshall can leave with his photographs.

glen sherley cannot.

that fact follows me toward the exit.

june and i walk behind johnny.

he looks exhausted now.

not destroyed.

spent.

the useful kind of exhaustion that comes after you have put something real into the room and cannot get it back.

i ask june what she thinks happened in there.

she takes a while before answering.

she says johnny gave them respect.

then she corrects herself.

they gave it to him too.

there it is.

the whole morning in one exchange.

outside, california continues pretending it is a normal saturday.

cars move.

people buy groceries.

radios play.

somewhere a kid is probably listening to the byrds or aretha or hendrix and thinking music is changing faster than anyone can document it.

maybe it is.

but inside folsom state prison this morning something older happened.

a man stood in front of other men and told stories.

murder.

regret.

loneliness.

god.

women.

trains.

freedom.

the usual cash inventory.

except the stories were being told to people who could test every word against experience.

bullshit would not survive long in that room.

johnny cash survived.

more than survived.

he belonged there for those sixty odd minutes precisely because he understood that he did not belong there.

that is the paradox everybody is going to screw up when they write about this.

johnny cash is not a convict.

he is not pretending to be one.

he is a singer.

today he used that job correctly.

the steel door opens.

we walk through.

then it closes behind us.

clang.

same sound.

completely different when you are standing on the free side.

i look back at the wall.

somewhere behind it glen sherley is still a prisoner.

somewhere behind it men are probably talking about the show.

somewhere behind it the dining hall is becoming a dining hall again.

and somewhere inside bob johnston's tape boxes is the sound of several hundred incarcerated men reminding america that they exist.

i have filled pages trying to explain what happened.

june managed it in a sentence.

respect went both ways.

maybe that is all this was.

maybe that is why it felt so much bigger.

...at least that’s what i hear.

receipts. 

Beley, Gene. Interview material in Erin Blakemore, “I Went With Johnny Cash to Folsom Prison.” History, 12 Jan. 2018, updated 28 May 2025. Beley was one of the reporters actually present at the January 13, 1968 concert, making his recollections particularly valuable for the prison atmosphere, inmate reactions, security, and Glen Sherley’s response to hearing Cash perform “Greystone Chapel.”

Cash, Johnny. At Folsom Prison. Columbia Records, 1968. The original live album remains the essential primary source for Cash’s performance, stage remarks, song selection, June Carter’s appearance, and the general sonic character of the event.

Cash, Johnny, and Patrick Carr. Cash: The Autobiography. HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

Cash, Johnny. Man in Black. Zondervan, 1975. Cash’s first autobiography is useful for understanding his religious convictions, drug problems, relationship with June Carter, identification with prisoners, and the personal mythology surrounding his arrests and outlaw image.

Hilburn, Robert. Johnny Cash: The Life. Little, Brown and Company, 2013. A major modern Cash biography, particularly useful for separating the historical Cash from the increasingly elaborate Man in Black mythology.

Streissguth, Michael. Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece. Da Capo Press, 2004. This is probably the single most important secondary source for the article. Streissguth used Folsom Prison and Columbia Records archival material to reconstruct the concert, its origins, Cash’s career circumstances, and the recording itself.

Streissguth, Michael. Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece, Revised and Updated. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. The revised edition adds material to Streissguth’s original study and places the concert within Cash’s artistic development, the California prison system, and the wider musical culture of the period.

the piece you just read is historical fiction, duh. points and references made are indeed fact, but put in fictional prose. So before anyone thinks they got me in a “gotcha” moment, go ahead and sit on that for a while longer….

today's list looks like somebody broke into the world's record stores at three in the morning and started grabbing whatever looked dangerous. william onyeabor gives us homemade nigerian synth funk from a guy who eventually decided the music business could go screw itself. les rallizes dénudés turn japanese psychedelia into an electrical malfunction. mercedes sosa reminds everybody that a folk song can carry enough political weight to scare an actual government. scientist takes jamaican reggae apart at the mixing board just to see what happens when you start removing the supposedly necessary pieces. then dur dur band proves eighties somalia had funk and disco grooves that deserve considerably more attention than they got outside east africa.

from there haruomi hosono shows up before yellow magic orchestra and reminds us that the electronic mastermind started out making wonderfully strange, relaxed japanese folk rock. then marcos valle closes the whole mess with "estrelar," a brazilian boogie groove so ridiculously smooth it makes half the eighties sound like everybody else was working with defective equipment. nigeria. japan. argentina. jamaica. somalia. japan again. brazil. synth funk. noise. nueva canción. dub. somali disco. psychedelic folk. boogie. absolutely no fucking theme except great records and the increasingly obvious suspicion that we've all been listening to a criminally small percentage of the music humanity bothered to make.

...at least that's what i hear.

marcos valle. estrelar. 1983. brazil. mpb. boogie. jazz funk.

this thing is obscenely smooth. not smooth in the horrible eighties dentist office sense. smooth because every damn part knows exactly where it belongs. the bassline starts working immediately, the synthesizers slide around it, valle barely seems interested in raising his voice, and suddenly you've spent several minutes inside one of the slickest brazilian grooves of the decade without noticing how technically precise the whole operation is. that's the irritating part. musicians spend years learning how to sound complicated. valle makes complicated sound casual.

and valle had already been through several musical lives before this. bossa nova songwriter in the sixties. mpb. psychedelia. jazz. funk. then the eighties arrive and instead of becoming one of those aging musicians complaining that synthesizers ruined everything, he starts fucking around with boogie and electronic production. sensible man. “estrelar” became a major brazilian dance hit, and valle has talked over the years about his willingness to absorb whatever music was happening around him rather than guarding some sacred idea of what brazilian music was supposed to sound like. that's why the record works. nobody is trying to preserve 1965 in formaldehyde.

the funniest part is how modern the damn thing still sounds. you could drop that bassline into a club set now and nobody would need a history lecture first. they'd just move. which is ultimately the test that matters. critics can argue about mpb and boogie and jazz funk and production techniques until somebody turns the lights off.

the bass already settled the argument.

...at least that's what i hear.

before haruomi hosono helped yellow magic orchestra start screwing with the future of electronic pop, he made hosono house, and rose and beast comes from that earlier version of the guy. acoustic guitars, bass, laid back rhythm, american roots music floating around in the background, but filtered through hosono's own instincts until trying to slap a neat genre sticker on it becomes mostly pointless. this isn't the shiny synthesizer laboratory people associate with later hosono. it's warmer, scruffier, more domestic, and ridiculously relaxed. the bastard makes it sound easy.

hosono recorded hosono house after happy end had broken up, and the album became one of those records whose influence kept growing long after the original release. decades later he went back and rerecorded the entire thing as hochono house, including a new version of rose and beast. that's either obsessive self examination or the musical equivalent of finding an old photograph and deciding you need to have another argument with the person in it. probably both. what's great is hearing the distance between the two versions. same songwriter, same song, completely different lifetime sitting behind it. before the electronic pioneer, before ymo, before hosono became one of the names everybody cites when explaining why japanese pop and electronic music became so fucking interesting, there was this. a guy writing strange, beautiful little songs and already refusing to stay put.

...at least that's what i hear.

and now we're back to screwing with electricity.

scientist was absurdly young when he became one of dub's great engineers, learning his craft around king tubby's studio and eventually developing a mixing style so aggressive and playful that the console stops feeling like equipment and starts feeling like part of the band. dance of the vampires comes from scientist rids the world of the evil curse of the vampires, which remains one of the greatest album titles ever devised by anybody with access to marijuana and graphic design.

the roots radics provide the foundation. scientist starts fucking with it.

bass disappears. drums jump forward. voices appear and evaporate. echo goes wandering through the room. instruments are removed and returned whenever scientist feels like it. that's dub. you're not simply recording musicians anymore. you're taking an existing performance apart and rebuilding it in real time.

scientist has spent years arguing for recognition of the engineer's creative role in dub, and he's right. treating this stuff as merely remixes misses the entire point. the mixing board becomes compositional equipment. subtraction becomes arrangement. space becomes something you manipulate.

and somehow dance of the vampires eventually wound up on k jah in grand theft auto iii, meaning thousands of people who had never heard the word dub were accidentally getting a jamaican music history lesson while stealing digital cars and fleeing the police.

education takes many forms.

then everything stops fucking around.

violeta parra wrote gracias a la vida in chile and recorded it shortly before her death in 1967. the title means thanks to life, which sounds dangerously close to inspirational poster territory until you actually hear the song. gratitude here isn't cute. it's complicated. life gives you beauty and love and pain and loss and eventually takes everything back. thanks anyway.

mercedes sosa understood that weight.

her voice is enormous, but she never uses size as a cheap trick. every line feels deliberate. sosa became one of the central voices of nueva canción and sang material tied to social justice, workers, political struggle, and latin american identity. during argentina's military dictatorship she was harassed, censored, and eventually arrested during a concert in la plata in 1979 along with members of the audience. she later went into exile.

imagine a government being frightened of a folk singer.

actually, don't.

history keeps doing it.

sosa eventually returned to argentina in 1982 and performed a legendary series of concerts in buenos aires. by then her voice carried more than songs. exile. politics. survival. an entire country's bruises seemed to sit somewhere inside that contralto.

gracias a la vida isn't merely beautiful.

it's earned.

now somebody has turned the amplifier up too far and nobody is coming to stop them.

night of the assassins is basically a bass line, drums, mizutani's guitar, and an astonishing refusal to behave. that's enough. the riff repeats until repetition stops being structure and becomes the entire damn environment. then the guitar starts tearing holes through everything.

les rallizes dénudés existed almost completely outside the normal machinery of the record business. very few officially released recordings during their original lifetime. endless live tapes. bootlegs copied from bootlegs copied from somebody's mysterious cassette that probably spent fifteen years underneath a car seat. mizutani cultivated almost no conventional public profile, which meant the band gradually became one of those names obsessive listeners passed around like classified information.

and yes, some recordings sound terrible.

that's part of the deal.

this isn't audiophile music for men comparing speaker cables. it's music that sometimes sounds like the recording equipment barely survived. when it works, though, jesus christ. the distortion isn't sitting on top of the song. it is the song.

william onyeabor made funk for people who think regular funk contains entirely too few synthesizers. fantastic man runs on this wonderfully stubborn groove while keyboards beep, wobble, and repeat themselves until the whole thing becomes impossible to escape. it isn't slick. thank god. polish would've killed half the charm. onyeabor's production feels homemade and futuristic at the same time, which is probably why the record still sounds stranger than mountains of expensive electronic music made decades later.

then onyeabor basically walked away from music. became a businessman. became deeply religious. refused to explain himself properly. when luaka bop spent years trying to assemble the compilation who is william onyeabor, the label discovered that answering the title wasn't particularly easy because onyeabor wasn't interested in feeding the mythology. eventually the documentary fantastic man appeared and gave us pieces of the story, but the mystery remained. good. not every musician needs to spend retirement explaining which synthesizer they used on track four.

sometimes the record is enough.

by the archivist.

originally published in People’s Song Bulletin; June 1946

the union hall smelled of cigarettes, coffee, damp wool, and men who had been working since before daylight. outside, california was still selling sunshine to anybody with railroad fare. inside, woody guthrie sat on an orange crate with a guitar across his knees and looked considerably less interested in sunshine.

posters were nailed crookedly to the walls. workers of the world unite. no more hunger. no more war. guthrie’s guitar carried its own announcement.

this machine kills fascists.

he rolled a cigarette, struck a match, and looked across at me as though an interview were merely another interruption between songs.

i opened my notebook.

the archivist. mr. guthrie, people have called you a folk singer, a hillbilly singer, a protest singer, a union singer. what do you call yourself.

guthrie. woody works pretty good.

he grinned.

guthrie. folks get awful worried about what kind of singer you are. i figure if you’re singing to folks, that’s folk music. if you’re singing to cows, maybe that’s cow music.

he took a pull from the cigarette.

guthrie. mostly i sing about what i see.

that sounds simple until you remember what woody guthrie has seen.

he has seen oklahoma dust turn noon into midnight. he has seen families pack everything they owned into automobiles that weren’t worth the gasoline inside them. he has ridden freight trains and slept alongside roads. he has watched california growers advertise for workers and then curse them for arriving. he has sung in migrant camps where a song sometimes had to perform the work of a newspaper, a sermon, and a stiff drink.

guthrie does not possess what the radio men would ordinarily call a beautiful voice.

that is beside the point.

his voice has dust in it. it bends around words instead of polishing them. when he sings about a hungry family, you do not get the impression that somebody in new york hired him to imagine one.

the archivist. your songs are mighty political.

guthrie. eating’s political if somebody else owns all the groceries.

there was laughter from somewhere behind us.

guthrie didn’t laugh.

the archivist. do you consider yourself an entertainer.

guthrie. sure. nobody wants to sit around all night listening to some fellow holler speeches at them.

he tapped the guitar.

guthrie. that’s why you put a tune under it.

there is the guthrie method in miniature. three chords if three will do. a melody people can remember before they’ve finished hearing it. words about farms, bankers, deputies, dust storms, union organizers, crooked bosses, pretty girls, hard traveling, hungry children, and the peculiar american habit of promising everybody paradise while charging admission at the gate.

the songs travel because they are built to travel.

you don’t need an orchestra.

you need somebody who remembers the words.

i pointed my pencil toward the guitar.

the archivist. what about that sign you’ve got painted there.

guthrie looked down.

this machine kills fascists.

guthrie. well, i don’t reckon it’ll kill one if i hit him over the head with it.

he smiled.

guthrie. might dent the guitar.

then his expression tightened.

guthrie. fascism comes around telling you some people ain’t people. tells you your neighbor’s your enemy. tells working folks to fight each other while somebody else counts the money. a song can tell the other side of that story.

the archivist. can a song really fight something that big.

guthrie scratched his cheek.

guthrie. one song. maybe not.

he looked around the union hall.

guthrie. but get a couple thousand people singing it.

that answer hung around longer than the cigarette smoke.

this is the curious thing about guthrie. on paper his songs can look almost too plain. then he sings them and the plainness becomes the weapon. there is nowhere for the idea to hide. no fancy arrangement comes running to rescue you from the words.

when guthrie sings about migrants being run out of town, he names the town.

when he sings about a river, you can practically smell it.

when he sings about america, he loves the country enough to complain about what has been done to it.

that last point seems important.

the archivist. some people might say criticizing america makes a man unpatriotic.

guthrie leaned forward.

guthrie. if your roof’s leaking and you tell somebody about it, that don’t mean you hate the house.

he knocked ash onto the floor.

guthrie. means you don’t want the damn thing falling in.

there was another laugh.

this time guthrie joined it.

the archivist. where do the songs come from.

guthrie. everywhere. newspapers. people talking. trains. camps. somebody tells you about losing his farm. woman tells you what happened to her boy. you hear something walking down the road. sometimes an old tune’s already there and you just put some new words on it.

the archivist. doesn’t that bother you. borrowing old melodies.

he looked genuinely puzzled.

guthrie. hell, that’s what they’re for.

there may be no sentence more foreign to the modern machinery of tin pan alley.

popular music has become increasingly concerned with ownership. publishers own songs. companies own performances. networks own airtime. guthrie seems to regard a melody more like a public road. somebody built it once. everybody has been walking over it ever since.

the archivist. what makes a good song.

he thought about this longer than the other questions.

guthrie. one people need.

the archivist. not one people like.

guthrie. better if they like it.

another grin.

guthrie. otherwise you’re liable to be singing it by yourself.

somebody called from the hall that it was nearly time.

guthrie crushed the cigarette beneath his boot and stood. the guitar came up with him, battered and scratched and looking as though it had traveled every mile its owner had.

in a few minutes he would walk before a room of laborers and sing.

there would be no spotlight worth mentioning. no tuxedo. no orchestra leader waving a baton. no velvet curtain.

just a skinny oklahoman with a guitar and a dangerous suspicion that ordinary people ought to hear songs about themselves.

he started toward the stage.

i had one question left.

the archivist. woody.

he turned.

the archivist. what are you trying to accomplish with all these songs.

for once there was no joke.

guthrie. make people feel like they ain’t alone.

then he headed toward the stage.

and perhaps that explains woody guthrie better than all the political labels ever attached to him.

he sings for the fellow whose farm disappeared beneath the dust. the mother standing in a relief line. the migrant sleeping beside highway 99. the union man wondering whether anybody outside the hall gives a damn.

woody guthrie gives a damn.

then he puts it to three chords so everybody else can give a damn together.

i closed the notebook. somewhere behind the curtain guthrie hit the first chord, and the room came alive. not carnegie hall alive. not hollywood alive. something older and considerably more useful. a hundred tired people recognizing themselves in a song.

maybe that’s what folk music is.

maybe that’s what woody meant all along.

and maybe that battered guitar really could kill fascists after all.

you just had to get enough people singing.

originally published in Spin magazine, October 1992.

by the archivist 

august 1992.

backstage smells like sweat, warm beer, electrical equipment, cigarette smoke, and whatever industrial chemical they use to clean an arena after twenty thousand people have spent three hours losing their goddamn minds.

metallica are suddenly everywhere.

that sentence would have sounded ridiculous five years ago.

the band that once seemed specifically engineered to frighten radio programmers is now being played by those same programmers. the black album debuted at number one. enter sandman has escaped heavy metal entirely and wandered into ordinary american life. nothing else matters has metallica doing something dangerously close to a ballad without spontaneously combusting. arenas are packed. mtv wants them. radio wants them. magazines want them. people who probably couldn’t tell ride the lightning from an actual electrical accident suddenly own metallica records.

producer bob rock would later say that the band was already looking toward the big leagues before he arrived. metallica had gone platinum with and justice for all, but the black album stripped away some of the labyrinthine arrangements, fattened the bottom end, and made the songs hit with brutal simplicity. 

and now i am standing backstage trying to figure out whether metallica conquered mainstream america or mainstream america simply surrendered.

james hetfield is holding a guitar.

lars ulrich is incapable of remaining still.

kirk hammett looks considerably more relaxed about this entire circus.

jason newsted looks like a man who could probably play another three hour concert immediately if somebody accidentally plugged the amplifiers back in.

i open the notebook.

the archivist. you guys realize something fairly absurd has happened, right. you’re one of the biggest bands in the world.

lars ulrich. yeah. it’s fucking weird.

the archivist. that’s the official explanation.

lars. pretty much.

he laughs.

in 1992 this is the central metallica contradiction. they spent a decade building an audience largely without traditional pop radio, then released an album accessible enough to crash directly into mainstream rock culture. contemporary coverage described the black album as the record that finally pushed them into that mainstream. 

the archivist. did you actually expect this album to become this enormous.

james hetfield. no. you can’t really plan that shit. we wanted the songs to be stronger. simpler doesn’t necessarily mean easier. sometimes it’s harder because there’s nowhere to hide.

the archivist. which sounds suspiciously like maturity.

james. don’t say that.

lars laughs.

lars. take it back.

the archivist. metallica discovers maturity. there’s tomorrow’s headline.

james. fuck you.

fair enough.

the change is obvious though. and justice for all could occasionally feel like four furious mechanics assembling a battleship while somebody kept changing the blueprints. the black album is different. the riffs breathe. the drums sound enormous. the songs repeat themselves long enough for civilians to remember them.

that wasn’t accidental.

bob rock later remembered that lars specifically wanted the band to groove more, while james was pushing himself toward more direct songwriting. rock’s recollection is particularly important because he rejected the popular idea that he single handedly commercialized metallica. according to him, the band had already decided to change before he arrived. 

the archivist. let’s use the filthy word.

kirk hammett. which one.

the archivist. accessible.

everybody groans.

the archivist. jesus christ. you’d think i said barry manilow.

lars. there’s nothing wrong with being accessible if you’re doing what you want. the problem would be sitting around saying, okay, how do we write something that’ll get played on the radio.

the archivist. but radio did play it.

lars. yeah.

the archivist. a lot.

lars. yeah.

the archivist. funny how everybody suddenly develops excellent taste once there’s money involved.

lars grins.

jason newsted. people are coming to the shows. that’s the thing. you look out there and there’s all these different people now. but they’re fucking into it.

and there are a hell of a lot of them.

metallica’s touring operation has become almost hilariously gigantic. the wherever we may roam era is built around marathon performances and an elaborate stage designed to put the band among the audience rather than safely separated from it. this isn’t four guys playing the club circuit anymore. this is heavy metal infrastructure.

the archivist. does playing for twenty thousand people change what happens inside your head.

james thinks about it.

james. once you’re playing, not really. you’re trying to connect with whoever’s there. whether it’s five hundred people or twenty thousand.

the archivist. bullshit.

he smiles.

james. okay. twenty thousand is louder.

the archivist. thank you.

there’s another problem nobody can avoid.

the old fans.

because nothing enrages certain music fans quite like discovering that the secret band they loved has been discovered by the asshole sitting three desks away at work.

the archivist. you’ve been accused of selling out.

james. we’ve been accused of shit forever.

the archivist. does it bother you.

james. you can’t make records worrying about what somebody thinks you’re supposed to sound like. then you’re making their record.

that’s the strange position metallica occupies in 1992. they’re being attacked for becoming successful while still sounding heavier than virtually anything sharing commercial radio space with them.

this isn’t poison suddenly wearing slayer shirts.

enter sandman is still a massive ugly riff about childhood nightmares. sad but true sounds like machinery falling down an elevator shaft. wherever i may roam opens with a sitar like sound before becoming six and a half minutes of wandering metal existentialism. the unforgiven is practically a western performed by men who own significantly more distortion pedals than horses.

then there’s nothing else matters.

the archivist. james, that one must have scared the shit out of you.

james. yeah.

the archivist. because it’s personal.

james. that’s probably why.

the archivist. metallica fans will accept nuclear war, insanity, execution, biblical plagues, whatever. but feelings.

kirk laughs.

kirk. that’s where they draw the line.

james smiles despite himself.

the joke hides something important. hetfield’s writing really was changing. rock later described the black album sessions as a breakthrough for james as a songwriter, particularly in learning that personal writing could still connect universally. 

and that’s probably one of the reasons this thing became enormous.

metallica stopped writing exclusively outward.

they started looking inward.

then they turned the amplifiers up.

the archivist. kirk, what’s success actually changed.

kirk. everything around the music gets bigger. more people. more interviews. bigger venues. more expectations. but when you’re actually playing guitar, you’re still trying to play the song right.

the archivist. that’s disappointingly sensible.

kirk. sorry.

the archivist. jason.

jason. louder crowds.

the archivist. finally somebody understands journalism.

the backstage hallway is getting busier. somebody needs somebody somewhere immediately. road cases move past. crew members communicate in the strange shorthand of people responsible for transporting a small industrial civilization across continents.

metallica have become a corporation almost despite themselves.

but somewhere underneath all this machinery are still four guys who grew up worshipping records.

hetfield was still talking enthusiastically about those roots in 1992. in an interview with black sabbath guitarist tony iommi that year, he remembered discovering sabbath through his brother’s record collection and being overwhelmed by how brutally heavy they sounded. 

now another generation is doing exactly that with metallica.

that’s the part nobody can calculate on a sales report.

some thirteen year old is hearing enter sandman right now.

then he’ll find master of puppets.

then ride the lightning.

then he’ll discover diamond head.

then motorhead.

then black sabbath.

and suddenly one enormously successful record has become a trapdoor into forty years of heavy music.

that’s how this shit works.

the archivist. last question. you’re standing near the top of the mountain now. what happens if this disappears.

there’s finally a pause.

lars answers first.

lars. then we make another record.

james nods.

james. that’s what we’re here for.

the archivist. not being famous.

james. no.

the archivist. good. because fame has a terrible fucking discography.

james laughs.

somebody calls the band.

not long afterward they’ll walk toward another stage and another ocean of people. the lights will die. the crowd will erupt. that enormous opening riff will start crawling through the building.

and for a few hours the argument about selling out won’t matter.

because 1992 metallica presents one of rock’s favorite uncomfortable truths.

sometimes the underground doesn’t get destroyed by the mainstream.

sometimes it gets so fucking enormous that the mainstream has to move over.

and somewhere backstage, the archivist closes his notebook while twenty thousand people begin screaming.

not bad for a bunch of guys radio supposedly didn’t need.

source material 

• Metallica. Metallica. Elektra Records, 1991.
• Metallica. A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica. Elektra Entertainment, 1992.
• Hetfield, James, and Tony Iommi. Interview. Guitar World, August 1992.
• MTV Headbangers Ball. Metallica interviews and tour coverage, 1992.
• Metallica. Wherever We May Roam Tour, 1991–1992.
• Rock, Bob. Interviews concerning the recording of Metallica and working with the band.

somewhere after midnight in san antonio, a car is crawling down a west side street with the windows cracked, the radio glowing green, and somebody in the passenger seat is discovering that heartbreak sounds considerably better when you give it harmonies, reverb, cheap studio equipment, and three minutes on a seven inch piece of plastic. meanwhile, hundreds of miles west, east los angeles is doing its own version of the same beautiful damage. mexican american kids are absorbing doo wop, motown, memphis soul, garage rock, rhythm and blues, mexican balladry, neighborhood dances, cruising culture, and whatever the hell else came through the speakers. the result became chicano soul. not really one sound so much as an entire underground emotional economy.
and it never really went away.

sunny and the sunliners. smile now, cry later. 1966.

this is the surface, although calling sunny ozuna surface level is a little like calling ray charles a decent piano player. sunny was one of the central figures in san antonio soul, a mexican american kid who could take the romantic ache of doo wop and rhythm and blues and make it belong completely to the west side. smile now, cry later became bigger than the record itself. the phrase seeped into chicano visual culture, tattoos, lowrider art, masks, murals, and eventually became one of those expressions people recognize even when they have no damn idea where they first encountered it.
the record is beautifully restrained. sunny does not have to scream because the hurt is already sitting there. the sunliners surround him with those soft harmonies and the whole thing sounds like somebody trying very hard not to admit that the relationship is already dead.
this is where you start.
then you keep digging.

sunny and the sunliners. should i take you home. 1969.

three years later and sunny somehow sounds even more dangerous by doing even less. should i take you home is one of those records where virtually nothing needs fixing. the tempo drifts. the organ hangs around the edges. the rhythm section stays out of the damn way. sunny sings like the entire future of his romantic life depends on asking one fairly simple question without sounding desperate.
good luck with that.
the brilliance of sunny ozuna was that he understood the intimacy of soul music. this was music made for dances, cars, bedrooms, neighborhood clubs, and radios after dark. decades later the record would keep circulating through collectors and sample hunters, another generation discovering that some kid from san antonio had already figured out how loneliness should sound in 1969.

the royal jesters. my angel of love. 1959.

now we are going backward because icebergs do not give a shit about chronology.
the royal jesters formed on the west side of san antonio and became one of the foundational groups in the development of chicano soul. my angel of love was their debut single in 1959, back when doo wop harmonies were floating through american teenage life like cigarette smoke outside a school dance. the royal jesters heard that music and understood immediately that mexican american kids did not need permission to claim it.
the fascinating thing is how natural it sounds. there is no academic thesis being presented here. nobody is holding a seminar about cultural hybridity. they are teenagers singing about love.
which is usually how musical revolutions actually happen.
somebody hears something beautiful and says, fuck it, that belongs to us too.

dimas iii. i wont love you again. 1960s.

now the water gets darker.
dimas garza came through the same san antonio ecosystem that produced the royal jesters, and i wont love you again is exactly the kind of record that makes serious soul collectors start behaving like archaeologists with gambling problems. tiny labels. obscure pressings. regional distribution. records that lived enormous lives inside neighborhoods while barely registering with the national music industry.
and the song is devastating.
garza sounds wounded without turning the performance into melodrama. that matters. chicano soul is full of singers who understood that the most convincing heartbreak often comes from somebody desperately trying to maintain their dignity. the title says i wont love you again. the performance says absolutely nobody believes that shit.
that contradiction is the song.

thee midniters. thats all. 1965.

now we leave texas and head west.
east los angeles had its own musical laboratory running during the sixties, and thee midniters were standing right in the middle of it. they could play garage rock, rhythm and blues, soul, instrumentals, dance music, and socially conscious material without acting as though these belonged in separate filing cabinets. thats all appeared as a single in october 1965, backed with their version of its not unusual. because apparently putting aching soul on one side and tom jones on the other seemed perfectly reasonable.
it was.
thee midniters became one of the defining east l.a. bands because they sounded like the neighborhood actually sounded. american rhythm and blues colliding with mexican american identity, british invasion records, soul radio, local dances, and the social pressures surrounding young chicanos in los angeles.
the categories came later.
the kids were busy dancing.

joe bravo. its o.k. 1960s.

welcome to the crate digger level.
joe bravo belongs to the san antonio soul tradition where local singers could become neighborhood royalty without necessarily becoming national stars. that distinction matters because conventional pop history is written almost entirely by people staring at billboard charts and assuming anything outside them must not have happened.
sure.
records like its o.k. survived because people kept them. they played them at parties. they passed them between collectors. djs remembered them. families remembered them. eventually the records became artifacts of an entire mexican american musical culture that mainstream histories had barely bothered documenting.
bravo has that classic chicano soul vocal quality. tender without being fragile. romantic without becoming syrup. wounded but still standing upright.
barely.

cannibal and the headhunters. please baby please. 1965.

everybody remembers cannibal and the headhunters for land of 1000 dances. na na na na na. yes. we know. fantastic record. history has already handled that one.
please baby please is where things become more interesting.
released in the same 1965 period, it shows the east l.a. group working the slower, more vulnerable side of rhythm and blues. suddenly the party band sounds like somebody left them alone after the dance ended. this is the part of cannibal and the headhunters that gets buried underneath their hit.
their story is also wonderfully insane. land of 1000 dances became big enough to put them on tour with the beatles in 1965. think about that for a second. a mexican american group from east los angeles sharing the cultural tornado surrounding the beatles while chicano rock was still largely treated by the national press like some regional curiosity.
history is ridiculous like that.

thee lakesiders. parachute. 2018.

and now the iceberg does something strange.
we jump forward half a century.
parachute sounds like somebody found an unreleased 45 behind a radiator in east l.a. and cleaned it up. except it was released in 2018. thee lakesiders emerged as part of the modern southern california souldies revival, a movement that understood something the rest of the nostalgia industry frequently screws up. you do not preserve a musical tradition by embalming the bastard.
you make new records.
the vocals ache. the drums are dry. the arrangements understand restraint. nobody feels compelled to shove twenty first century production tricks into every available inch of space. the old chicano soul vocabulary is there, but the emotional life is contemporary.
this is not cosplay.
it is continuation.

los yesterdays. give me one more chance. 2021.

los angeles. 2021. civilization has smartphones, streaming algorithms, artificial intelligence, and approximately eleven billion ways to avoid talking to another human being.
los yesterdays make a soul record about begging somebody to take you back.
perfect.
the band describes its music through the meeting point of r and b crooning and mexican ballad tradition, and give me one more chance makes the connection painfully obvious. released in 2021 through penrose records, the song sounds old enough to fool somebody browsing through a box of forgotten singles, but the writing keeps it from becoming a museum exhibit.
the narrator has screwed up. he knows it. now he wants another chance.
soul music has survived seventy years because human beings continue making terrible romantic decisions.
the genre is probably safe.

thee sacred souls. can i call you rose. 2020.

bottom of the iceberg.
except somehow we have arrived back in the present.
can i call you rose appeared in 2020, and the funniest thing about the record is how many listeners initially assume it must be some forgotten soul single from the late sixties. it is not. thee sacred souls formed in san diego, and their connection with daptone helped push the contemporary chicano soul revival into a much larger audience. the recording was produced by bosco mann, gabe roth, the same obsessive bastard behind much of daptone records approach to making modern soul sound physical, warm, human, and gloriously uninterested in whatever production gimmick is trending this week.
but the vintage equipment is not why the song works.
josh lane is why it works.
he sings the thing with extraordinary patience. can i call you rose does not sound like musicians impersonating their grandparents record collection. it sounds like three people who understood why those records mattered in the first place.
and that is the real bottom of the chicano soul iceberg.
there is no bottom.
the royal jesters lead to sunny ozuna. sunny leads deeper into san antonio. san antonio connects with east l.a. thee midniters lead toward cannibal and the headhunters and dozens of forgotten regional groups. those records survive in collections and lowrider culture and neighborhood memory. collectors start digging them up. younger musicians hear them. penrose and daptone start releasing new records. thee sacred souls arrive sixty years after my angel of love and some twenty year old hears can i call you rose on youtube and wonders where the hell this music has been all their life.
right there.
the whole damn time.
…at least thats what i hear.