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Today's
Stories
October
3 / 5, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
All Armi
October
2, 2003
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
What's
So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
The
Ashcroft-Rove Connection
Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair
Hamid
Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)
Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess?
Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
Recent
Stories
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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|
Weekend
Edition
October 3 / 5, 2003
Conceits of Authenticity
Scorsese's
Blues
By WILLIAM BENZON
Editor's Note: Five episodes of Martin Scorsese's PBS blues
series have now aired. The first two--"Feel Like Going Home"
by Scorsese and "The Soul of a Man" by Wim Winders,
were self-indulgent, badly-informed, and generally awful. Scorsese
opened with a fife and drum corps and later went on a long journey
to Mali. His point seemed to be that all music played by all
black people anywhere is part of the same stew. Even if that
were true, it's a one-liner, not 20 minutes of screen time. Wenders
went into outer space with a Voyager on a silly riff I won't
even summarize here. The fourth film in the series, "Warming
By the Devil's Fire" by Charles Burnett, had some good moments
and a lot of good documentary footage, but too often Burnett
seemed to lose interest in the fictional plot he wove against
his archival material and the center didn't hold. The fifth,
"Godfathers and Sons" by Mark Levin, is about former
Chicago blues record producer Marshall Chess, who grins constantly
whatever he's saying, like Bette Midler in The Rose. His film
had some good location and archival music shots, some current
stuff that too often seemed contrived, and so much faux-black
videotape that images that should have been interesting just
got tiring because of their preciousness.
As of this writing, there are two films
to go in the series: "Red, White and Blues" by Mike
Figgis and "Piano Blues" by Clint Eastwood. Figgis's
film is about the use of blues by British rock groups; he's got
a lot of live people to work with and a huge amount of archival
footage, so that should be interesting. Eastwood knows and loves
jazz and blues and he's a good piano player himself as well as
a fine director, so the blues series promises to end better than
it began.
By far the best film in the series thus
far has been the third, "The Road to Memphis" by Richard
Pearce. Pearce respects the music and the musicians, his photography
and editing are superb, and he never turns the film into an homage
to his own sensibility.
The night Pearce's film aired, I asked
writer (Beethoven's
Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture) and jazz horn player Bill
Benzon for his thoughts on the series to that point. What follows
is his response.
--Bruce Jackson
Dear Bruce,
I've decided to take you up on your offer
of space to publish some thoughts on Martin Scorsese's current
PBS series on the blues. I note in passing that, according to
the website for the series, the phrase "the blues"
has been trade-marked. Needless to say I am not going to put
a little superscripted "TM" following each use of that
phrase.
Bill
The Blues
The series has been extravagantly uneven
so far. Richard Pearce's very fine study of B. B. King and the
road is all a reasonable man, woman, or child could want in a
blues documentary. But the pieces by Wim Wenders and Scorsese
are self-indulgent monsters that disrespect the blues and cast
doubt on the craft of film-making. [I have also seen the fourth
episode, directed by Charles Burnett. I liked it, but will not
comment further on it here.]
Though I do not recall hearing "authenticity"
mentioned in either of the segments by Scorsese and Wenders,
the idea dominates and ultimately destroys their work. They want
the blues to Mean Something, and that something has got to be
Very Cosmically Deep. In contrast, Pearce focused on the music
and the people and let meaning fend for itself.
Scorsese's conceit
Scorsese's basic conceit sank him from
the get-go. The idea seems to have been to follow Cory Harris,
a contemporary bluesman from Denver, on a journey to discover
the roots of the blues. The problem is that, whatever Harris's
virtue as a young bluesman playing in old styles, he's not a
scholar and, on the face of it, not very sophisticated about
roots and history, either personal or cultural. So, either you
take him at face value, and thus saddle your piece with his limitations,
or you present him in an ironic light, which would be a tricky,
dangerous and churlish thing to do.
It's as though Scorsese wanted to present
the Authentic Negro Blues from the mouth of an Authentic Source.
Since Scorsese is white he can't be that source, such are the
ways of Authenticity. So he found himself a suitable black voice.
But Cory Harris's ideas about the blues didn't come to him as
passed down through some Secret Black Tradition. They come to
him from a complicated century-old public discourse that has
been very strongly shaped by white men seeking the Authentic
Soul of the Natural Man in various forms of black music. This
authenticity is thus in the eye, ear, and desire of the seeker
and only contingently a property of whatever that desire happens
to fix upon.
Yes, I do know about Magical Performances.
I've seen them, and I've even participated in them. They are
important, very important. But they are only obliquely related
to this intellectualized Authenticity. The magic begins and ends
in the time and place of the performance itself. It has little
to do with the pedigree of either the performer or her material.
It doesn't matter who the performers learned from, who they listened
to, or who they most admire. The magic cares only for the performance.
Pedigree, however, seems important to
Harris and, by implication, to Scorsese. Thus half way through
the piece we find ourselves listening to an old player of the
cane flute, Otha Turner. His fife-and-drum music certainly deserves
documentation; but it's not the blues no matter how  generously conceived. At one point Harris
asked him about the blues and Turner cleverly deflected the question.
He said that, as a performer, he had to play music his audience
wanted and that music mostly wasn't blues. But, yeah, he'd sneak
a little blues in there at the end of the evening.
I wonder.
What I suspect is that, at that moment,
Otha Turner became the Native Informant telling the Anthropologist
what he figured the anthropologist Wanted to Hear. Why? Because
he's polite, that's why. He didn't want to embarrass the anthropologist
by revealing his ignorance.
Still, how did we get to Otha Turner
in the first place? In your note to me, you mentioned Mystic
Negro Nonsense. That's one factor. Turner has been cast in the
role of a Wise Old One infused with the Wisdom of the Cosmos.
To that I'd add Charlie Keil's discussion
of moldy figs in his Urban Blues. As you know, the term was coined
by musicians to designate those white experts who seemed to believe
that Black Authenticity was the Special Preserve of Decrepit
Old Black Men with One Foot in the Grave. In this case, Cory
Harris has assumed the moldy fig role, a real change up that:
moldy fig in dreadlocks. Add to that the apparent fact that Turner
is the last proponent of the cane flute and he becomes irresistible
to Seekers of Authenticity.
Never mind that he's not much of a performer
these days, that the drummers backing him were more interesting
that he was. Never mind that there wasn't a blues lick or feel
anywhere in his playing. Whatever the blues Really Is, it isn't
necessarily the blues, is it? It's become something else, the
Touchstone of Authenticity.
We've now got the beginnings of a nice
Russian doll of authenticity, with Otha Turner inside Cory Harris
inside Martin Scorsese. Scorsese uses a bit of film magic to
insert an African doll inside Otha Turner. Scorsese's particular
bit of magic has a name; it's called a match cut. Perhaps the
best-known match cut in film history is the moment in 2001 where
Kubrick cuts from a bone tumbling in the air to a space ship
cartwheeling above the earth's surface. A very effective maneuver.
Scorsese used it to cut from a clip of
Turner playing his flute to a West African man playing a similar
flute. The distance between Africa and America has now been miraculously
erased and African has been cast in the role of Ultimate Source.
Harris goes to Mali where he talks to three contemporary musicians,
Salif Keita, Habib Koite, and Ali Farka Toure.
Keita has one of the great soaring voices
in the world; Koite's guitar style seems to span the Atlantic,
encompassing African, European, and American elements; and Toure
has learned from the Authentic American Acoustic Blues. Each
of these musicians is a contemporary artist strong enough to
bear the weight of a program devoted to his music alone. But
there is no sense of that in this piece, where they are reduced
to bit players in a misguided and ill-informed search for the
Roots of the Authentic African Blues. There is no Authentic African
Blues, but there is much fine contemporary African music.
As for the American Blues, it got jammed
into the beginning of Scorsese's segment. I enjoyed the archival
footage of John Lee Hooker, Son House, Muddy Waters, and Leadbelly.
I was especially taken with the shots of Son House's right hand
guitar technique; he really flailed away, yet the resulting sound
was crisp and precise. Perhaps that should have been pointed
out in the voice over. While it's an easy thing to see, not everyone
would specifically notice it. Why notice it? Because music is
technique; even when it summons the cosmos, technique matters.
It would have been helpful, as well,
to point out that Lead Belly's best-known song, "Good Night
Irene," is not a blues. But, the moment you point that out,
you might be tempted to point out that Lead Belly's repertoire
was full of tunes that were Not Blues. If Leadbelly sang all
kinds of music then how could he possibly be a Dyed-in-the-Cotton
Bluesman? And if Leadbelly isn't the Real Deal, who is?
Wenders' mythologizing
Frankly, it would be better to drop this
whole tangled authenticity mess. But, no, Scorsese just handed
it to Wim Wenders. And Wenders turned it into a film school exercise.
Before entertaining that rant, however,
let me say that the last half of Wenders' piece, featuring recently
discovered footage of J. B. Lenoir, was a treasure, though he
should have cut the agonizing interview with the couple who shot
it. I particularly enjoyed hearing Lenoir sing about the war
in Vietnam. The blues for the most part has avoided political
commentary, so it was a minor revelation to hear a bluesman with
different ideas. And I enjoyed hearing Lenoir give devotional
lyrics a blues setting; that too was new to me, if not to the
blues.
But bringing this footage to light hardly
redeems Wenders from the first half of the segment. Here authenticity
took the form of shooting contemporary footage that's been tricked-up
to look Authentically Old. This footage has Chris Thomas King
and Keith Brown playing, respectively, Blind Willie Johnson and
Skip James, two classic bluesman whom Wenders much admires.
As Scorsese told us that Wenders was
doing this, and that he used an old hand-cranked camera to shoot
this fictionalized film-within-the-film, it's a bit difficult
to cry "foul" on that account. But I'm going to do
so anyway. I can understand wanting to do this as a technical
exercise, but I don't see what this technical exercise tells
us about the blues. I fear we're being given more Authenticity,
that the old-timey look is supposed to give these myths a sheen
of truth they do not otherwise merit.
What worries me most, however, is the
music within these fictions. While watching the segments I had
assumed the music consisted of archival recordings by Johnson
and James. When I went to the website to verify this, I ran into
difficulties. Skip James is credited with archival performances
for this segment but Blind Willie Johnson is not. Was Chris Thomas
King singing for Johnson? Is so, that needed to be made clear
in the film itself, before we saw the first footage.
It gets worse. This morning I looked
up the credits for Charles Burnett's episode and was surprised
that T-Bone Walker wasn't mentioned, though footage of him certainly
was in the program. In this instance the website credits are
wrong. Maybe they're wrong for the Wenders episode as well. I
can't blame that on Wenders' aesthetic judgment, but the blame
has to fall somewhere. This kind of negligence does seem of a
piece with the organizational arrogance that asserts trademark
ownership over "the blues."
It undermines the integrity of the whole
project. I shouldn't have had to consult the website in an effort
to determine the veracity of material presented in the program.
As it is, I don't know who I've been listening to.
But I digress.
One bit of Wenders' mythologizing is
particularly revealing. Toward the end of the segment the voiceover
says something to the effect that, unlike Skip James, Johnson
had little desire for fame and fortune. He was content to live
out his life in obscurity and play his church music.
Is that true, or is that a sentiment
that Wenders placed in Johnson because that's what he wants to
believe of this Authentic Black Bluesman? One romantic fiction
is that of the over-arching and ultimately self-destructive genius,
such as Goethe's Faust. Another is that of the Noble Peasant,
content to live his life in tune with the world in his humble
circumscribed orbit. That seems to be the fiction Wenders is
placing on Johnson. Maybe the real man would have worn it well.
But I don't know.
And I have the strong impression that
Wenders doesn't care, that he's more concerned with the fabrication
he can weave from bits and pieces of Johnson's life and music.
In what way does Wenders' preening self-importance honor the
blues, its musicians, and its fans? How does the memory of Blind
Willie Johnson, and Skip James too, benefit from having their
lives and music turned into a virtuoso piece of film school juvenilia?
How can such fakery reveal the truth of any blues?
Pearce's honor
Given that both Scorsese and Wenders
became lost in their search for authenticity, I was not expecting
much from Richard Pearce's segment, "The Road to Memphis."
I was thus completely surprised when I saw this well-crafted,
respectful, joyous and loving documentary unfold. Pearce creates
a sense of music as lived experience rather than music as a canvas
on which an auteur paints his own picture about the meaning of
it all. This is a rich piece of work, far in excess of my ability
to comment on it.
Above all else, it gives us a sense of
how the blues resides in various overlapping communities of people
rather than existing as some cosmic essence that somehow oozed
up out of the Mississippi delta. We saw the musicians interacting
with one another on the bus and rehearsing before a gig. We saw
them talking to club owners and signing autographs for fans.
Toward the end there was a marvelous segment where Bobby Rush
was buying a shirt for the evening's performance at a big bash
in Memphis, the W. C. Handy awards. He and the clothier traded
down-home cliches for a minute or two and then exchanged an elaborate
handshake. Much of it was probably an act for the camera, but
it was an act that only amplified the essential ease and familiarity
of their interaction.
Perhaps the most telling single conversation
was that between Sam Phillips and Ike Turner that took place
in Phillips's old studio. Both men have secure places in the
history of American music; both broke new ground in the DMZ running
between white and black Americans. Few black performers worked
harder to bring their music to a white audience than Ike Turner;
once he hooked up with Tina, he succeeded big-time. Sam Phillips
had been a small-time studio owner in Memphis until he found
Elvis Presley, the kind of musician he had been looking for,
a white singer who sang black. Before that Phillips had recorded
many black musicians, Ike Turner among them. Ike made it emphatically
clear that he always felt comfortable in Phillips' studio.
Phillips clearly believed that, however
much Elvis may have learned from black performers, he was, himself
and in his own right, a worthy performer (my words, not his).
Though not an Elvis fan, I do believe Phillips is correct; Elvis
had the magic. In contrast, Turner insisted on the derivative
nature of Elvis' style. I believe that Turner is correct as well.
The two men were unable to negotiate a formulation that suited
them both, so Turner simply left the room.
That conversational stand-still speaks
volumes about the complicated weave of black and white that has
determined the course of American music for over a century. What
it says, alas, exists is only in the interaction between those
two proud and accomplished men, their words, postures, and expressions.
That too is authentic. In giving us that conversation Pearce
showed us the peculiar problem that crippled Scorsese and Wenders.
If you know nothing about the blues, that conversation has lessons
for you. If you have advanced degrees in cultural studies, that
conversation has lessons for you. If you're setting out to document
some music, the fact of that conversation has lessons for you.
Moving on, it was good to see so much
attention given to the story of WDIA, the radio station in Memphis
where B. B. King got his first job. Radio has played a critical
role in American music, so it was good to see Pearce give so
much attention to this particular station, one that once reached
a tenth of black America. Aside from its role in broadcasting
the music to millions, WDIA itself was and remains a venue where
musicians, DJs, record people, and fans meet and talk to one
another. By presenting WDIA as the setting for and subject of
a rich set of interviews throughout the segment, Pearce encompassed
the blues community on both the large scale "millions of
people over decades of time" and the small, conversations
between, e.g. B. B. King and a DJ.
And then there were the performances
themselves. We heard complete songs, not fragments. We saw Rush
working his audience, heard a preacher in full voice, and B.
B. King as well. "The thrill is gone." The thrill is
gone. Yes indeed it is, and for the umpteenth time. Richard Pearce
honored the blues.
William Benzon
is a jazz musician and author of Beethoven's
Anvil.
This review originally appeared in The Buffalo Report,
edited by CounterPuncher and blues historian Bruce Jackson.
Weekend
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