Aunt Esther at age 96

Last winter I drove to Providence, RI full of trepidation and sadness. My incredible Aunt Esther, my maternal grandfather’s sister, had pneumonia. I was going to see her to make sure I had the chance to say goodbye.

To everyone’s, including her own, surprise, she pulled through. “I saw the pearly gates—and they shut!” she said to us bemusedly. Thus we were able to have the pleasure of gathering together in Providence this summer to celebrate her 99th birthday and the start of her 100th year.

And thus WRNI had the opportunity to take an audio snapshot of my sage, spunky and inspirational great aunt. You can listen to it right here.

You can’t grow up in in the home of a political radical from the 1950s and 60s without hearing Peter, Paul and Mary. I’m very sad to hear of the death of Mary Travis. She raised the roof for freedom and justice her whole career. If there’s a heavenly place where great spirits celebrate together Mary is surely whooping it up with them now.

• NY Times Obit
• Bio of Mary Travis from peterpaulandmary.com
• Statements from Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey

Sometimes I think I´m gonna lose my mind
But it don´t look like I ever do
I loved so many people everywhere I went
Some too much, others not enough

I don´t know, I may go down or up or anywhere
But I feel like this scribbling will stay

Maybe if I hadn’t seen so much hard feelings
I might not could have felt other people´s
So when you think of me, if and when you do,
Just say, well, another man’s done gone
Just say, well, another man´s done gone

This clip is from the fabulous documentary, Man in the Sand, about the making of Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue record. Mermaid Avenue is the first in what has become a small series of recordings by artists tapped by Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora to set unrecorded Guthrie lyrics to music. After his death, it was discovered that Woody had left behind 1000 some lyrics that had never been recorded as songs with music.

I watched Man in the Sand last night on Netflix. I’ve loved Mermaid Avenue since it came out in 1998 but did not realize this documentary about the making of the record has been around nearly as long. It’s really, really good. It’s a like a diamond in the rough. So many sparkling, unpretentious moments of beauty. (Though it also grapples with the pretentiousness of Guthrie and of the artists who participated in the Mermaid Avenue recordings.)

The film worked on me emotionally on so many levels. The movie begins with Billie Bragg’s quest for Woody’s America, in an attempt to understand Woody well enough to approach the daunting responsibility of giving musical life to his unrecorded lyrics. These scenes and others throughout the film are deeply evocative of the times my father lived through and the left politics that shaped my family’s experience and world view.

Then there are all the approaches to Woody.

Bragg’s approach to Woody’s America, which I already mentioned.

Woody’s daughter Nora’s approach to her father—how she has used her work as her father’s archivist and as the midwife to the musical rebirthing of his songs to come to know him better and in ways that were not possible for her during his short lifetime; he was ill with Huntington’s disease most of the time she knew him and he died when she was 17. Inter-cut with scenes of Bragg and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and others recording Woody’s lyrics are scenes of Nora speaking intimately, often fighting back her tears, about her family life, both her childhood memories of it and what she has come to understand later as a historian.

Arlo Guthrie appears in just one brief sequence—to recount how he learned that This Land Is Your Land was by his father one day when it was taught to him at school. He recalls running home in tears because the other kids knew his own father’s song better than he did. Woody was already ill and not playing much music. But Woody, with physical difficulty, showed Arlo the chords and helped him learn to play it. So much of Woody’s tragic complexity is in this brief story, which Arlo caps with a slightly coy rendition of one of the now famously long suppressed verses of the song.

Another tragedy that the film is now echo for is the untimely death of Wilco’s Jay Bennett, who died very unexpectedly this past May at age 45. While there are many other evocative scenes from the film that I wish I could have found on YouTube, this one is lovely, with Tweedy’s vocal more spare and plaintive than on the Mermaid Avenue version, accompanied just by Bennett, whose lovely piano playing is out of frame until the camera tracks around to the position where you can see the both of them in frame.

In many of the scenes with Billy Bragg and Jeff Tweedy and the others from Wilco and with Natalie Merchant and Corey Harris, it looked to me like they, as well as others involved in the project, kept getting these jolts, as if they are repeatedly startled by beauty they are finding in Woody’s poetry and in the music it has inspired in them.

The film coveys the often painful contradictions among noble human values, the exultations of human creativity and the flawed humanity of the people who fight for equality and freedom and try to make enduring, beautiful things. It shows these many dimensions in Woody and in the people who came together to make more of his songs known and make him more knowable to us as an artist, as a social conscience and as a man.

This is very funny—and it is an absolutely brilliant bit of musical improvisation from Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye. I think my favorite moment is when Louis says “but don’t forget Fats Waller” to rhyme off of Danny’s Gustav Mahler, and without missing  abeat Danny replies “I wouldn’t do that” in what to my ear sounds like a Waller imitation. Genius stuff, this.

Long time readers of Hungry Blues will know that my love of Louis Armstrong began with his deep importance for my dad. I also grew up listening to and watching the movies of Danny Kaye, who was another of my dad’s artistic heroes.

In addition to changing the design, I’ve added the Disqus comment management system, I’ve pared down the sidebar, and I’ve added pages for my Opentape and for my other activitiy around the web (twitter, flickr, tumblr, last.fm, ma.gnolia, etc.) via friendfeed.

I made one other change, which, for me, was the biggest. When I launched this blog in 2004, the tagline was “Searching the life and times of my father, Paul Greenberg,” and that has remained the tagline until this redesign. Now the tagline is the much blander “Ben Greenberg’s weblog.” One reason for the change is that the original tagline has sometimes misled new visitors to site. I’ve received a good number of comments and emails addressing me as Paul. While it’s an honor to be mistaken for my dad, I’d rather avoid the confusion.

But the main reason for changing the tagline has to do with how other things have changed since I began this blog. When I started Hungry Blues I was figuring out, through my blogging, what my father’s history had to do with my present. That isn’t really a question anymore. I’ve made the connections, and it’s changed the course of my life. Around the time I moved this site from the hosted Typepad blogging service over to my own WordPress setup, I wrote:

Starting this blog has led me to friendships and political activism with Movement veterans. It has taken me to Mississippi and Alabama. Hungry Blues has led to my current work as a journalist and in internet communications for a human rights organization.

The focus of Hungry Blues broadened, but most everything on the blog has been part of “searching the life and times of my father.” This is still the case, and it will continue to be explained on the About page.

Today is the fourth of Cheshvan on the Jewish calendar—my father’s eleventh yahrtzeit (anniversary of death). It just so happened that in 1997, the fourth of Cheshvan fell on Election Day. It was oddly apropos for my dad. He fought for voting rights in the South as one of Dr. King’s lieutenants, was an expert on proportional representation, designed and implemented the overhaul of New York City’s method of school board elections and was a director of and advisor to many electoral campaigns—perhaps most notably those of New York City Mayor John Lindsay.

Bob Adamenko, Paul Greenberg and John Lindsay in 1965 at Lindsay's first public appearance after becoming Mayor of NYC.

It’s sad that my father did not live to see this presidential election. He would be so thrilled with Barack Obama quite possibly on the threshold of becoming America’s first Black president—and with how Obama’s campaign has been so expansive and revitalizing for American politics. (I can also imagine the arguments he would get into about whether Obama is a progressive candidate; the main thing would be to argue, not to settle on a position.)

Thank you to the readers and commenters at Hungry Blues, to the people from my father’s past who have contacted me through this site, and to all of the new friends and contacts I’ve made through the work I started here.

—

(More information about the photo of my dad and John Lindsay is here.)

I was feeling sad that way you do when loss catches you by surprise. Then I figured out what I’d do.

The older poems are all in the archives, along with a few others.

Now I’m trying to decide if I should also post one of Dad’s autobiographical sketches. I just might.

It was the first time I’d gotten into music like this. I think it was around my sophomore year in high school that I hit my saturation point with the Beatles. I never stopped liking them, but I moved on. In high school and college, I found Neil Young, Frank Zappa, King Crimson, Steely Dan, Greatful Dead, Talking Heads, Joni Mitchell, Jaco Pastorious, Parliament/Funkadelic, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus—to name just some, at random . . .

After my dad passed away in 1997, I took it to a new level with Frankie Newton. I compensated for the fact that he only has about 50 recorded songs by collecting recordings by everyone he associated with. For several years, I immersed myself in Newton’s musical milieu, high art, pre-Bop Jazz of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the earlier stuff from the 1920s, the foundations.

After a while, the Jazz obsession mellowed. Maybe around 2000, I started actively listening again to music from the second half of the 20th century and to current 21st century stuff.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s all come back around to the Beatles. With the help of YouTube, my 4-year-old has been doing with the Beatels what I did starting in around 5th grade. The favorite record for some time has been Let It Be. I am sure we have watched each song played on the rooftop of Apple Records at least 100 times. It’s a good thing the Beatles are so damn good, cause otherwise I’d be going out of mind.

Anyway, I’m telling you all of this to try to explain what it was like to hear this John Lennon outtake from 1968. I love the rooftop performance of “I’ve Got a Feeling.” And I’ve always thought that John makes the song with the song fragment he weaves into Paul’s bluesy love song. What I didn’t know until earlier tonight was that John had recorded “Everyone” separately. From what I could read online, there are a couple of versions out there. So far, I’ve just found this one. It’s rough around the edges, the Julia-like guitar part doesn’t seem totally worked out—and it is beautiful. John really gets me at the end. After the circular lyrics, delivered over repetitive guitar picking, he trails off with that “everybody got the wrong time, everybody got the wrong time . . .”

Alan Greenberg is an interesting character. It would seem that his life is made up of random encounters and friendships with some serious heavy hitters (Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger), but he has also worked behind the scenes on such divergent productions like MANDINGO and Bertolucci’s 1900, and most importantly has had a thirty-two year creative partnership with German auteur/madman Werner Herzog (GRIZZLY MAN, EVEN DWARVES STARTED SMALL). While the exact nature of what it exactly is that he does in that partnership is hazy at best (Greenberg jokingly refers to himself as Herzog’s “typist”, referring to the fact that he banged Werner’s story notes for FITZCARRALDO and COBRA VERDE into workable scripts), Werner’s fearlessness in the face of nature and highly dangerous individuals obviously rubbed off on Alan enough for him to take on the formidable task of making LAND OF LOOK BEHIND, a film ostensibly documenting the funeral of reggae superstar/shaman Bob Marley that turns out to be much more.

After showing a map of the island of Jamaica (focusing on the area called “land of look behind”), we see a man with a machete and giant spleef chopping down fruit stalks to gather miniscule toads that live inside them for the length of their lives. He then goes on to explain (in a very musical patois) that we are in the shanty town of Quickstep, at the edge of the nasty Land Of Look Behind badlands/forest, ominously named by the locals as “Me-no-send-you-no-come”. He then proclaims to the wilderness his desire for some industry to come and build factories so he and his townspeople could have some work, instead of collecting toads for some biologist. Soon we are in the presence of Jammy Galloway, a rasta who explains his devotion to Jah and his purpose for “eating” herb before leading a group of devotees through some chanting and drumming, then we’re off to the procession of the recently deceased Bob Marley’s casket through Kingston, where seemingly all day-to-day business has stopped in order for all and sundry to pay respects (the shot of families sitting atop a parked Esso fuel truck is an arresting one). We see the funeral itself, with what had to be the largest open gathering of Rastafarians in the history of the outlaw religion (all inside are covering their dreads, but not so much outside, where one serious young man declares that “When a prophet dies, twenty thousand lions are born”, while a non-dread exclaims that “Bob Marley smoked one hundred spleefs a day! One hundred spleefs a day!!”). Other scenes include performance clips from Lui Lepki and Gregory Isaacs (who is also interviewed), a visit with poet Mutabaruka, and a riveting sequence where a young man named Hansel drags on a spleef until it’s gone and sings along to Bob and The Wailers’ “Crazy Bald Head” in total reverie, and the viewer sees exactly what director Greenberg intends: a sense of dignity and devotion to self and the serving a higher purpose that tears away at the squalor and oppression of one’s daily life.

For a film that had no actual distributor, LAND OF LOOK BEHIND has gone on to be considered one of the greatest documentaries of it’s decade, if not ever, and it’s easy to see why: there is no pompous narration, no cloying sense of sympathy for the subjects, nor is it outwardly trying to manipulate the viewer’s emotions. Plain and simple, it just drops you into an area and lets the pictures and people tell the story. Taking Herzog cinematographer Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein along because of his intrepid nature as well as his masterful eye, Greenberg does a fine job of catching some really memorable images and scenes (the Rasta jail, audience members dancing in total ecstasy), and manages to edit all of it into a cohesive whole that never drags. While those coming in looking for an out-and-out tribute to Marley the artist will be disappointed, they will be rewarded by a touching overview of what he represented to the people of his homeland, a much more fitting homage indeed.

Read the rest to learn about some of the special features of the DVD package.

Read my tribute to Alan and view some clips.

Buy it now.

[youtube]PnIJR3PWTT8[/youtube]