I first heard Mark Mulcahy's music three and a half years ago, at a live performance in Somerville, MA. I was blown away by the songs and by his performances of them and have been a huge fan ever since. A couple of months after the show I found an mp3 of one of the songs that I'd heard and I just had to blog it. I wrote:
A ways into the set Mulcahy took his hands off his guitar and he and the bass player and drummer applied their voices, just their voices, to this song. You could hear the sounds from the bar, separated from the lounge by a wall and a hallway. But the performance space was silent while the three men sang this. The sounds of the bar and pretty much everything else in Somerville dropped into the background.
A few days later Mark's management contacted me and asked me to take down the mp3, so I did.
The song is a dialog between two people who've been through something that far too many of this generation's young couples have been through.
A very recent performance of the song is now on YouTube, so I'm posting it for you all again. Great to see Mark is back on stage; I hope he comes through Boston soon.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 15, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Connecticut has produced musicians more famous than Mark Mulcahy, but few who have been more influential.
Just how influential is evident on “Ciao My Shining Star: The Songs of Mark Mulcahy” (Shout Factory), a CD and digital collection of songs by the singer, songwriter and one-time leader of the New Haven band Miracle Legion. After Miracle Legion, he fronted Polaris, which wrote the theme for the Nickelodeon show “The Adventures of Pete and Pete.”
The 41-song collection (21 on a CD, an additional 20 available online only) features covers of Mulcahy and Miracle Legion songs performed by artists that include R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, the Pixies’ Frank Black, Fountains of Wayne’s Chris Collingwood, Dinosaur Jr. and the National.
It’s a loving tribute, to be sure, but not to Mulcahy. Rather, “Ciao My Shining Star” is a remembrance of his wife, Melissa Rich, who died unexpectedly a year ago, leaving Mulcahy to raise their 2-year-old twin daughters.”
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.
Though I did not know his name until today, Heinz Edelman has been one of my artistic heroes for decades. He was the illustrator and designer who made the visual landscape of the animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine. Heinz Edelman has died at age 75.
The movie’s mod-psychedelic look, which typifies the era’s spirited graphic art, emerged around the same time as the related psychedelic work of Terry Gilliam, Alan Aldridge and Victor Moscoso, but it has its own whimsical aesthetic. The bulbous Blue Meanies, which personify an evil mood as actual villains, pursue the innocent, well-coifed cartoon Beatles across an ever-shifting milieu of mysterious seas and holes that can be magically picked up and moved. The yellow submarine itself stops in an ocean of pulsating watches, representing time, to light a cigar for a friendly sea monster.
Notably, the designs prefigured contemporary music videos, especially in their use of dancing typography. Letters spelling out the lyrics “Love is all you need” morph into a strobing neon wallpaper pattern.
“He became famous because of his work on ‘Yellow Submarine,’ ” said the graphic designer Milton Glaser, a friend. “But that celebrity actually obscured his real talent and imagination.”
A highly successful advertising and editorial illustrator in Germany, England and the Netherlands, Mr. Edelmann was known for combining Impressionist and Expressionist sensibilities leavened with wit, humor and irony. He developed a distinct graphic style that influenced many artists in Europe and the United States. He was given a Masters Series exhibition at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2005.
In the 1960s he was experimenting with a stylized, soothingly fluid, neo-Art Nouveau manner. That caught the eye of Al Brodax, producer of a successful animated Beatles television cartoon series for children. He chose Mr. Edelmann to be the chief designer of his first feature-length animated film, “Yellow Submarine,” built around a 1966 song of the same name, credited to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with lead vocals by Ringo Starr.
It was not easy to get initial approval for “Yellow Submarine.” The Beatles were unenthusiastic about Mr. Brodax’s more conventional-looking cartoon series (not done by Mr. Edelmann), Newsweek reported in 1968; their manager, Brian Epstein, was a stumbling block as well.
The tide turned, Newsweek said, during a stroll through the Tate Gallery in London, where Mr. Brodax and Mr. Epstein happened upon J. M. W. Turner’s “Peace — Burial at Sea” and marveled at that painting’s intense colors.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could get those colors to move?” Mr. Brodax asked.
Mr. Epstein replied, “We would need great art.”
Mr. Edelmann was the perfect artist, Mr. Epstein finally agreed, and “Yellow Submarine” had some of the Turner’s shimmering quality.
It was a career-defining work, “designed, for the most part beautifully,” Renata Adler wrote in The New York Times in 1968, “in styles ranging through Steinberg, Arshile Gorky, Bob Godfrey (of the short film ‘The Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit’), the Sgt. Pepper album cover, and — mainly, really — the spirit and conventions of the Sunday comic strip.”
Despite the huge influence of “Yellow Submarine” on the culture of the time, Mr. Edelmann admitted that he could never quite connect with the 1960s aesthetic. Once the film was complete, he altered his approach to avoid being pigeonholed as a psychedelic artist, becoming considerably less ethereal and decorative and turning to what was on the surface his darker side, though it was never really morose but rather ironic.
I am grateful to Mr. Edelman for his part in the creation of this imaginative world that has long been one of my favorite places to visit. Thank you, Heinz Edelman. Rest in peace.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 26, 2009 at 3:35 am
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.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 24, 2009 at 2:35 pm
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.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 13, 2009 at 10:39 pm
My google alerts on “Hungry Blues” sometimes turn up interesting things. Steven Taylor of the Fugs has written a song that is also called Hungry Blues. It’s very much in the spirit of the original song that my blog is named after. It’s not quite as good, but it’s a tall order to be asked to measure up to Langston Hughes and James P. Johnson. May the visions of both songs come to pass.
If you’re new to this blog or just have never checked out the song on my About page, here’s the Hughes/Johnson composition. More info about it is available on the About page (scroll to the end).
I first discovered Blossom Dearie’s music in 2001, when I heard her song Manhattan in one of the musical interludes for a Fresh Air episode in the first weeks after 9/11. I had never heard Blossom Dearie and I was completely floored—by the lyrics, by the performance, by the perfectly nostalgic wistfulness that was overwhelming after the tragedy that had just struck, the recollection of innocence.
And Tell me what street compares to Mott Street in July
Sweet pushcarts gently gliding by
The great big city’s a wonderous toy
Made for a girl and boy
We’ll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy.
In 2001 or 2002 my wife and I went to see Blossom Dearie perfrom at Danny’s Skylight on W 48th Street in Manhattan, where she played regularly for years and where the photo, above, from the NY Times obit, was taken. Her voice had lost some of the whispery quality that used to characterize it, but she was still a master of understatement and timing—and her piano playing was brilliant as ever. It was one of the great performances that I have seen.
I’ve put together a new Opentape as a tribute to Blossom Dearie and her music. Click on the song list to listen.
(This blog post is adapted from one I posted earlier on my tumblr. Photo by Rahav Segev for The New York Times.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 10, 2009 at 12:30 am
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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