April Fools For Christ

On an Easter Sunday about 45 years ago, our little family was a little late for services at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Detroit. We found seats in a pew near the back, on the right near the aisle. The congregation was half a verse into "Jesus Christ Is Risen Today." As we reached for our hymnals, my English-born grandmother, Lily Sharley, sighed with pleasure and said, "I'm so glad we got here in time to sing this." It was a powerful moment for me, fixed in my memory and dreams; and this pew looks about right.

Kathy and I visited the cathedral Tuesday afternoon after I'd given a speech in nearby Dearborn to 300 funeral home managers. I received the invitation thanks to my musical buddy Gary "Boom" Baker, whom I've known since he assisted with President and Mrs. Nixon's funerals, which I oversaw in 1994 and 1993 as director of the Nixon library. Gary's now an executive of SCI, owner of over 2,000 funeral homes and cemeteries.

The funeral business is worried about losing customers, the mainline church about losing congregants. One brand-new solution we fixed on is good, old pastorship. The two keynoters at the SCI conference, celebrant trainer Glenda Stansbury and I, found ourselves in a degree of friendly opposition. She travels around the country training laypeople and the occasional atheist to celebrate and preach at funerals because, these days, many family member of decedents distrust the church, don't believe in God, or just assume we'll do a poor job. In my remarks, I said the church had better not be too willing to cede that ground.

Our hosts asked me to tell Kathy's and my Nixon funeral stories (you try getting Henry Kissinger to stay within five minutes for a eulogy sometime, plus there was that moment with G. Gordon Liddy) before talking about funeral ministry. It was a chance to really unwind, since they gave me an hour and 15 minutes (which will alarm the people of St. John's). As Episcopalians will, I mentioned the priesthood conferred on all Christians by baptism. Arriving at St. Paul's on Woodward Ave. a few hours later (not far from the Fox Theater, where my homey Eminem arrived in that fine new Chrysler in his Super Bowl ad), Kathy and I were warmly greeted by a genial man on his way to the parking lot. I announced a little boisterously that on April 1 I'd celebrated the 50th anniversary of my baptism at St. Paul's. He replied that he was the Very Rev. Scott Hunter, installed as dean of St. Paul's four years ago, also on April 1. Couple of April Fools for Christ, the dean and I.

Born To Drum

Not many details on this little guy except that he's four and Charlie Watts had better watch his back.

Hat tip to Gary Baker

Nine Songs On The 241

If your iPod's on shuffle and "Revolution 9," from the Beatles' so-called White Album, comes up, you're probably going to be tempted to skip to the next song. That I didn't do so this morning seemed to be a signal to see what I could learn from a southbound from Yorba Linda, Tuesday-before-Thanksgiving random playlist. My theory, you see, is that when your iPod has more than 10,000 songs (I have 10,005), it becomes sentient. Sometimes, like this morning, it picks nine perfect songs right in a row.

Choosing the Beatles' longest, most obscure cut was my iPod's challenge not to be MP-3 ADD -- not to skip over two, four, or ten songs while looking for the perfect one but instead to settle down and hear what the spirit of music was saying. So I gritted my teeth and listened carefully to the John Lennon-Yoko Ono sonic adventure that Paul McCartney and producer George Martin fought tooth and scale to keep off the album. I'm glad they failed. A pastiche of found sounds, from choirs to passionate moaning, "Revolution 9" matches the album's foreboding theme and tone.

As you might imagine, a minute-by-minute summary of the song is on-line, including a transcript of Lennon saying, about a minute in:

They found a shortage of grain in Hartfordshire, and every one of them knew that as time went by, they’d get a little bit older and a little bit slower…factory work…five percent in the, in the uh, the district, they were intended to pay for...

We'll revisit that Hartfordshire factory with Mick and the boys in a moment. The Beatles were actually quoted in my second song, Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion," from his first solo album in 1972: "I know they say 'let it be', but it just don't turn out that way." Named for a dish in a Chinese restaurant and written about a deceased pet, the song, like the White Album, echoes with Vietnam-era urban elite discouragement, as do other songs on the album "Paul Simon" such as "Everything Put Together Falls Apart" and "Paranoia Blues." It was, after all, the year of the reelection of Richard Nixon, for whom no one Pauline Kael and probably Paul Simon knew in Manhattan would vote. A year later, as Watergate raged, Simon released the more elegiac "American Tune," set to music from J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion: "We can't be forever blessed."

A younger, equally skillful lyricist working from a smaller pallet, Belfast-born Christian folksinger Brian Houston wrote my third song, "Practical Reminder," a mid-tempo rocker from his 2005 album,"Thirteen Days In August," about an unnamed local Eleanor Rigby, an Enneagram 2 with a full-on martyr complex:

She's always loneliest when she's with other people
She just saves all of her tears until they leave
For if politeness were a virtue, then I know she's be a saint
She could deny herself for Ireland in the next Olympic games

Living a less circumscribed life was the great, deeply troubled Janis Joplin, whose powerful last album, "Pearl," was recorded with a band called Full Tilt Boogie and released a a few months after her 1970 death from a heroin overdose. FTB were journeymen musicians whom Joplin was proud to have assembled into the rock-solid, cool-rocking band she'd always wanted. She wrote the song that blasted from my Saturn's speakers this morning, "Move Over," which is well lubricated by Ken Pearson on the Hammond B-3 organ and features a powerful guitar solo by Canadian John Till, who some years before had been hired by Ronnie Hawkins after the musicians later known as the Band abandoned him for Bob Dylan.

It always seems to come back to the Band lately. The next song the mischievous iPod dished up could've been a Band song, with its country-style acoustic guitar and, I thought I heard, the hint of a mandolin. But as promised, it's back to Hardfordshire for the Rolling Stones' "Factory Girl" from 1968's "Beggars Banquet." I always thought of this Jagger-Richards song, which even has a country fiddle on it, as an invocation of an American mountain folk tune, but as a matter of fact, all that music came from England, Ireland, and Scotland to begin with. As Keith Richards said in 2003:

To me "Factory Girl" felt something like "Molly Malone", an Irish jig; one of those ancient Celtic things that emerge from time to time, or an Appalachian song.

Ancient indeed, since that was two songs in a row that had me wallowing in memories from high school. Thankfully, Lyle Lovett came along next with something newer, a genuine American country song, "Promises," from his stunning 1996 album "The Road To Ensenada." A sad, hopeless-sounding apology, it's a song St. Paul would have loved:

Promises given
And promises broken
Words stain my lips
Just like blood on my hands

And words are like poison
That sinks down inside you
And some things you do
You just don't understand

This minor-key Lovett original took me from nostalgia to discouragement to curiosity. When did he and Julia Roberts split? The year before the album came out, I see. Evidently Lovett fans have been plumbing it for clues about their breakup for years.

My musical buddy and recent pilgrimage partner Gary Baker tells me that his fellow Van Morrison fans are similarly well informed about the Belfast-born (that's twice in nine songs) living legend's love life. (There are relatively few details at Morrison's otherwise exemplary Wikipedia page.) His "Gypsy In My Soul" turned out to be the next song in my rotation. By this time I was hurtling past Rick Warren's Saddleback Church and listening to Morrison's nasal, supple tenor:

It’s just the gypsy in my soul
Make me pack up my things and go
It may seem like I’m on a roll
But it’s just the gypsy in my soul

Morrison, who used to live near members of the Band in Woodstock, appeared at their Last Waltz concert in 1976. Bob Dylan was in Woodstock as well, and in 1967, in the house called Big Pink, the Band recorded a song he wrote, "Orange Juice Blues," that was released in the 1970s on "The Basement Tapes." The ninth and last song in in my random playlist, it was playing as I rolled into the St. John's Church parking lot. Richard Manuel's beautiful, lost falsetto rang in my ears all day:

I had a hard time waking this morning
I got a lotta things on my mind
Like those friends of yours
They keep bringing me down
Just hangin' round all the time

PERFECT Songs: "Baby Don't You Do It" (1964)

The Band, performing at the Academy of Music in New York City in late December 1971. Gary Baker and I were hanging out with Levon Helm and the tuba player, Howard Johnson, a couple of weeks ago in Woodstock. First recorded by Marvin Gaye; produced and written by the legendary Motown team of Holland-Dozier-Holland.

Can You Hear Them Now?

The Brill Building, on Broadway near Times Square, was headquarters for legendary songwriters such as Bacharach and David, Leiber and Stoller ("Yakety Yak"), Ellie Greenwich ("River Deep Mountain High," with Phil Specter), and Doc Pomus ("Save The Last Dance For Me," with Mort Shuman). More about the Brill Building sound here. Music bud Gary Baker (above) and I stopped by on Sunday, at the end of our musical pilgrimage. All we could hear outside the historic doorway (though artists were usually instructed to use the side entrance) was the sound of Manhattan traffic -- but hey, that's what inspired George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."

Gary and I talked politics during the 17 minutes we weren't talking about music, family, and faith. When I shared that I didn't much care who gave money to politicians or in what amounts so long as voters are fully informed about it and pay close attention, he recommended OpenSecrets.org. Drop by and see who calls the tune for your local officials.

Tell Them The Promised Land's Calling

As Gary Baker and I looked for Levon Helm's mailbox (#160) this afternoon along a country road near Woodstock, New York, I decided that pilgrimage was the right word for our weekend's work. Holy Land pilgrims, such as we 20 from St. John's last summer, walk in Jesus's footsteps along desert paths. Musical pilgrims strain to hear echos in the woods. The roots of the olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane remember the agony of Jesus's lonely final night of freedom. The trees in this neighborhood had the best seats in the house as amazing popular music was conceived, recorded, and performed.

The purpose of today's mailbox reconnaissance was to make it easier to find our way to the Midnight Ramble tonight on Levon's farm. Once there, of course, we had to stop and take a picture. It's a pilgrimage, right? Just then a young couple from New Jersey came along and told us how to find Big Pink, the nearby houses where the late Rick Danko and Richard Manuel once lived, and the road where the photo was taken for the Band's second album. On second thought, maybe we're putting on airs by calling it a pilgrimage. The young man was only a little nuttier than we, because he'd looked all this stuff up before hitting the road for Woodstock.

But did we follow his directions to Big Pink? You knew that we would. Because here (it's now Big Orange-Yellow) the Band and Bob Dylan recorded "The Basement Tapes" and the Band its masterful first two albums, with songs such as "The Weight" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." The germ of the idea for a music festival at Woodstock in 1969 was organizers' optimism that the Band would agree to perform and the then-reclusive Dylan, also a Woodstock resident, would show up at the last minute. They did, he didn't, and because of local politics, Woodstock ended up in Bethel, 90 minutes away. As you know, Joni Mitchell didn't write a song called "Bethel." Yet Woodstock gets almost all the tourism, which isn't inappropriate given that original germ of an idea. Helm, after all, is still here, as is Band mate Garth Hudson.

Gary and I made plans for our pilgrimage a few months ago. We've been music buddies since 1993. Before deciding to be buried on the grounds of the Nixon Library, President and Mrs. Nixon sent me to Rose Hills in Whittier, California, where many Milhouses and Nixons are buried, to investigate possible sites. There I met Gary, who helped us with arrangements for both Nixons' Yorba Linda funerals (when he wasn't programming alt.-country playlists for the Rose Hills employee cafeteria and designing the $1 million pipe organ for the Sky Rose Chapel and playing Van Morrison songs for the installers through the state-of-the-art PA system he'd also designed).

One day Gary was driving me back from a planning lunch for Mrs. Nixon's funeral when I asked if he'd ever heard of a Texas singer-songwriter named Joe Ely. He smiled and pushed a button on his CD changer and loaded Ely's album "Love and Danger." Gary and I now have our music loaded onto iPods. Meeting up Thursday evening at JFK, we rented a car, dropped Kathy at her sister's in Tuckahoe, and headed for the promised land. On the way he introduced me to the Kings of Leon and Terry Evans, which I liked. I played him Pat Donahue (which he liked) and Conor Oberst (less so).

Yesterday we visited a magnificent interactive Woodstock museum near Bethel. It's odd to see albums from your collection presented as museum pieces. Standout interviewees in the many video kiosks included former Attorney General Ed Meese, who had nothing good to say about Woodstock, and former Sen. Norm Coleman, who was there and dug it. Perhaps the wisest comment about the performers during those three fairy tale days came from one of their successors, Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid. "They were up there saying, 'This is what we do with our lives'," he said, "challenging everyone else with the question, 'What are you going to do with yours?'"

We then caught a show at the Bearsville Theater, built on the site of Dylan manager Albert Grossman's legendary studio, where everyone from the Rolling Stones and Bonnie Raitt to R.E.M. and They Might Be Giants have recorded. It was an interesting if cerebral fusion set by Grateful Dead-connected guitarist Steve Kimock which was driven by Kimock's miraculous 18-year-old drummer son, John Morgan Kimock, and which really caught fire when Kimock traded solos with Band-connected guest guitarist Jim Weider, whom we hope to hear tonight at the Midnight Ramble.

That's right. We're going to hang out with Levon. We've already been to his house once.

Photo of Bob Dylan on someone else's body; and the Band

When He Locks Into That Backbeat

Along with buddy and blues hound Gary Baker, who helped us lay President and Mrs. Nixon to rest at the Nixon Library lo! these many years ago, your correspondent is heading to Woodstock (40 years after the great event; better late than never) to see the Levon Helm Band's Midnight Ramble on Saturday night, in the legendary Band vocalist and drummer's barn. They say you never know who'll drop by. Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen did and wrote a song about it, "The Man Behind the Drums," on his new album, "The Rose Hotel." This account of the Oct. 10 Ramble gives you the flavor:

Intimate? It really was like standing around in somebody’s living room and watching a world-class band crank out some of their favorite songs. For more than two hours, I stood no more than 15 feet away from Levon Helm as he churned through some of the funkiest backbeats I’ve ever heard. I was begoggled.

Helm wasn’t singing. He’s still on doctor-ordered vocal rest after a successful throat operation in August, but that certainly hasn’t slowed him down any behind the drum kit.
Larry Campbell – Dylan’s longtime guitarist – led the band, and what a band it was. A fabulous four-piece horn section, including the great Howard Johnson on baritone sax and tuba. Gruff-voiced Brian Mitchell behind the grand piano. Teresa Williams and Amy Helm adding not only plenty of angelic harmonies, but also some serious sass and sizzle at the microphone. And, oh yeah, there was Jim Weider – the guitarist in the Band’s post-Robbie Robertson days – firing up guitar licks that seemed to come flying in from some fifth dimension.

The songlist was sublime. There were plenty of Band classics – from the opening “The Shape I’m In” to the show-closing “The Weight,” with stops along the way at “Long Black Veil,” “Chest Fever” (with a crazy-good Campbell-Weider guitar duel) and a towering rendition of “It Makes No Difference” with Williams and Amy Helm pouring their hearts out.

And if you never paid serious attention to the latter-day incarnation of the Band, the fiery Campbell-Weider duet on “Remedy,” would definitely find you re-thinking your position.
There was a nod to the Dead with “Tennessee Jed” (also on Helm’s great new album, “Electric Dirt”) and a sweet, folksy version of “Attics of My Life.” There were blues, honky tonkers, a country waltz, soul (Amy Helm’s reading of “Everybody Loves a Winner” was one of the highlights of the night) and a heaping helping of strutting New Orleans funk, including “Deep Ellum Blues” (with Helm on mandolin and some wild hoochie coochie dancing) and “All On a Mardi Gras Day" (with the horn section parading through the audience).

Old Boys' Night Out

Billy Bob Thornton (who takes Rick Danko's verse on "The Weight" and sounds eerily like the late, great Band-man) was among the special guests at Levon Helms's Midnight Ramble in Woodstock in August 2008. My music buddy Gary Baker and I are making the pilgrimage in November, although we should probably act our age...Hey, wait a minute: We are!