Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  Vance’s lingering distaste for talking about himself as a fantasist may also go back to his own adolescence, when he arrived in high school very young after skipping grades. The character of the awkward youth with a made-up world in his head recurs in his writing, as does the scene of popular kids tormenting a loner. The most prolifically homicidal of his strange dreamers is probably the Demon Prince Howard Alan Treesong, who speaks in the voices of imaginary avatars and terrorizes a school reunion. Norma used to say that her husband was Treesong. John told me that his father prefers to think of himself as a less dastardly Cugel. Put them together, Treesong the dreamer with streetwise Cugel, and you get Vance, whose long labor at his trade grew from a youthful discovery: you can turn idle dreaminess into purposeful art, and you can turn art into a paying gig.

  Now Vance has begun to lose words. When he made a little show of waving me toward his bar and said, “Go get yourself a drink of single-malt scotch,” he laughed and added, “There’s a word I can’t remember to describe that. It has a sense of aesthetic mastery, of command, but also a sense of thinking highly of yourself.” His old favorite “punctilio” came to mind, as did “hauteur” (sixteen listings on Totality), but neither seemed quite right, so I didn’t say anything. During our conversation he had already summarily dismissed several people, including two celebrated science-fiction writers I grew up reading, as a jackass or a show-off. Volunteering the wrong word might qualify me as both. I went to get my drink, leaving him to consider the exact shape of the hole the lost word had left behind in his mind. It might not be lost forever, though. It could well turn up in Michael Chabon’s prose or that of the contributors to Songs of the Dying Earth or in Ursula K. Le Guin’s. Maybe even in mine.

  * * *

  Original publication: New York Times Magazine, July 19, 2009.

  The Year of the Blues

  THE UNITED STATES SENATE—An august body, yes, but not widely regarded as authoritative when it comes to lamenting in song a mean mistreater’s offenses or bending a guitar note so fiercely that the high and low E strings kiss—has designated 2003 as the Year of the Blues. It has been exactly one century, the Senate’s resolution reminds us, since W. C. Handy, the first great popularizer of the blues, had a life-changing encounter at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, with a rag-clad stranger who played slide guitar with a knife blade and sang about going “where the Southern cross the Dog.” Handy may well have embellished that dramatic episode of discovery, but it has passed into musical mythology as the moment when the blues caught the ear of the nation and began to exert its far-reaching influence on American culture and the whole world’s musical habits. A year-long series of well-funded, high-profile celebrations has been arranged to mark the blues centennial—at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, at Experience Music Project in Seattle and other museums to which EMP’s blues exhibit will travel, and on public television and radio stations across the country.

  All very nice, and thanks for the overdue recognition, but Washington-area blues gigs are hard to come by these days, and Linwood Taylor has a living to make. With almost all of a long three-set evening of work still in front of him, Taylor, one of Washington’s leading blues guitarists, is playing the opener of “Crosscut Saw.” Flanked by bass player and drummer, he stands on a small triangular stage in the corner of the cozy front room of the Sunset Grille, a roadhouse-style bar and restaurant set among the minimalls, chain stores, and subdivisions that line Columbia Pike in Annandale, Virginia. Forty or fifty people are listening, drinking, dancing, having a good time. The average age looks to be at least 45, and pretty much everybody except Taylor and the drummer is white. “Crosscut Saw” is the second tune of the band’s first set, which opened with an uptempo Freddy King instrumental. Before the band came on, the Sunset Grille’s customers listened contentedly to a recorded mix of songs by ZZ Top, the Who, Eric Clapton—well-ridden warhorses of classic rock.

  Taylor’s a lean, knotty fellow with prominent cheekbones, a soul patch beneath his lower lip, and a wolfish smile. When dressed for a show, all in black and hung with extra adornments at the wrists and ears, he looks like a friendly pirate. Bluesmen, like novelists, are “young” until they’re 50. He’s 47, and eight years have passed since he was recognized by the magazine Living Blues as one of 40 musicians under 40 to watch out for. It’s getting to be time for Taylor to either break big in the blues world or prepare to settle for his current status as a local figure in a city not known as a blues capital.

  The Sunset Grille’s patrons, of course, don’t know or care much about any of that. They’re already warmed up and loose, partying with the unfrantic ease of people who’ve been doing it for decades and can handle both their booze and their hormones. A Colonel Sanders–looking white-haired dude in sporty hat and red suspenders, identified by a passing waitress as “the house sweetheart,” dances with all the ladies. A still-youngish blond cutie in faded denim cutoffs has been draining cocktails at the bar at a giant-slaying rate, but she makes her way without staggering to a clear spot in front of the stage and does a curiously modest shimmy, all smiles.

  Two fifytish men—sneakers, jeans, T-shirts stretched over pooched-out guts, mustaches—are leaning forward and nodding briskly along with Taylor’s playing, each holding a draft beer in his right hand in the traditional incurve-wristed keg-party posture that brings the beer up close to his chest. One turns to the other and says, “The thing I like about this guy is he takes care of your guitar fix right away, doesn’t he?”

  He sure does. Taylor plays a great deal of strong, fluid, nimble guitar, displaying command of a variety of blues styles as he inventively reassembles their familiar components. Having opened the set with a burst of instrumental virtuosity, he’s settling into the evening’s work, pacing himself to get as much as he can out of each musical idea before moving to the next. It’s 9:15, and his playing will still sound fresh at the end of third set, well after midnight. He used to be faster, wilder, but maturity as a guitar player has brought a sharper feeling for the melodic and expressive qualities of the music. He’s not just repeating licks and wailing on guitar, although there’s plenty of wailing to go around, enough to satisfy the two men with the draft beers and all the other patrons of the Sunset Grille.

  Guitar heroism can take you a long way, but if you aspire to be a first-rate bluesman, and not just another hotshot sideman, there comes a time when you have to sing the blues. When Taylor chokes off a lick, steps close to the mike, and sings the first lines of “Crosscut Saw,” his first vocals of the evening, there’s the slightest hitch in the audience’s response, a collective, not-quite-conscious “Hmm.” Taylor freely admits that he’s not a great blues singer, or even a very good one. He gets by well enough when chugging along at speed, playing guitar chords and fills to frame the lyrics he barks out. But the stiffness in his singing, the lack of blues fluency, still comes out at the ends of lines, where a blues singer should hold and bend a note. And on a slow blues his voice feels badly exposed. You can hear that he’s often talking and shouting through a song, artfully relying on his guitar playing to carry his voice. The Sunset Grille’s patrons never stop moving to the music or calling out encouragement, but every once in a while when he sings, another almost imperceptible echo of that “Hmm” ripples through them. They seem slightly relieved whenever he takes a guitar solo.

  At least for the next few hours, the Sunset Grille, of all places, is the home of the blues. It’s Saturday night, and middle-aged white baby boomers have gathered on their suburban home ground to hear their music. Some would say that the blues isn’t supposed to belong to these people, that it’s supposed to belong—if you accept that a cultural form can belong to anybody at all—to the black working class. But to deny that white enthusiasts exert a decisive influence on the sound, the business, the future, the very meaning of the blues today is to deny the roundness of the earth. Much of the black blues audience moved on to R&B and soul
music in the 1960s; today, black blues fans tend to be concentrated in the audience for a smooth-groove subgenre, soul blues, purveyed by singers like Tyrone Davis and Denise LaSalle who are well known mostly in the South. Since the 1960s, the blues-influenced rock of the Rolling Stones, Clapton, Led Zeppelin, et al., has recruited white fans who dominate another, much more powerful constituency within the blues audience. They typically like their blues guitar-heavy and rocking, and rough enough to be recognizably descended from folk music (which satisfies them as to its authenticity), à la Muddy Waters or Buddy Guy.

  The blues-rock aesthetic holds sway at the Sunset Grille, and the restaurant’s “off-white-collar crowd” (as a manager described it) has cohorts in high places. Taylor says, “I play where the guys who work for roofing companies come, and I play for the guys who own the roofing companies. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, all kinds”—all kinds of baby boomers, that is, who share a belief that the blues matters because it’s roots music. The most powerful members of this far-flung tribe of blues lovers—contemporaries in Congress, the software and movie industries, and the big-money end of the culture business—are in a position to institutionalize that shared belief.

  They’re busy doing just that. The Year of the Blues campaign is an initiative of Experience Music Project, the museum founded by Paul Allen, who made his billions as Bill Gates’s founding partner at Microsoft. EMP and the corporate backers it has recruited—led by Volkswagen, which, thanks to the memory of the Beetle, enjoys a permanent association with Sixties nostalgia—have made a serious commitment to the Year of the Blues, supporting and publicizing an integrated year-long campaign kicked off by the Congressional resolution and a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of living blues talent and their celebrity admirers at Radio City Music Hall in February. On September 7, the Kennedy Center, in a major departure from its previously casual attention to the blues, will devote its Open House Arts Festival to “Celebrating the Year of the Blues.” In addition to an impressively varied lineup of performers, there will be how-to sessions on singing the blues and playing harmonica. If all goes well on September 7 and at other scheduled blues shows on the 17th and 18th, the Kennedy Center plans to start programming the blues on a regular basis.

  The live shows prepare the ground for the Year of the Blues campaign’s other features, most of them scheduled to appear in an attention-getting cluster in the fall. The centerpiece is PBS’s set of seven 90-minute blues documentaries, overseen by Martin Scorsese and directed by an honor roll of moviemakers that includes Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, and Wim Wenders. The campaign also features a traveling Chicago blues exhibition created by EMP, a radio series produced by Public Radio International, a companion book, CDs and DVDs, and a nationwide push to get the blues into the high-school curriculum.

  The mastermind behind this convergence, Bob Santelli, is the CEO of EMP, a happily cacophonous museum of popular music housed in a Frank Gehry building in downtown Seattle. Santelli, a strapping, friendly fellow of middle years who used to be an academic but looks like he’d rather be snowboarding, had the idea of getting Congress to declare an official Year of the Blues. The declaration itself doesn’t actually count for much—it’s not like the Senate was voting to waive taxes for anybody who can sing “Stormy Monday”—but it helps to get the word out, and it demonstrates that people in high places are taking the blues seriously.

  “I want this music to thrive,” Santelli says. “The blues is the bedrock of American popular music. As most of its legends and stars grow old and die, this musical form needs a shot in the arm to allow it to compete with other forms. I grew up in the Sixties, so thanks to the Rolling Stones and Cream, I got into Muddy Waters. But young people today haven’t been exposed to it.” For the blues to thrive, somebody has to recruit listeners. Santelli doesn’t aspire to capture the attention of every kid in the classroom, but he needs to reach one or two in the back, the more adventurous and independent-minded consumers who are inclined to find their musical pleasures in a slightly esoteric niche market like that for the blues. Santelli’s long-range goal is to build just such a younger constituency to succeed boomers like himself, who are beginning to age out of that phase of life in which one steps out regularly to hear live music and keeps up with the genre by buying new recordings. The Year of the Blues campaign’s effort to inject blues into the schools may ultimately be its most important element.

  “EMP can’t teach anybody how to sing the blues,” Santelli says, “but we can educate people, and the hope is that if we put the music and information in front of people they’ll take it from there.”

  It’s early afternoon on a Wednesday, typically the busiest day of Linwood Taylor’s week. Seated on a wooden chair in the music room of a small white house in Wheaton, Maryland, he intones, Mee meh mah moh mooooo. Guitarless, Taylor uses his hands to feel the action of his diaphragm and to keep his jaw from dropping open; when he sustains a note he spreads them to either side, palms up, and closes his eyes. Alison Leadbetter-Hines, his voice teacher, sits facing him, straddling a piano bench and tapping out pitches on the piano with her right hand. Bookshelves filled with sheet music line the room. On the wall above the piano is her framed diploma from the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music in Winchester, Virginia. Classically trained, Leadbetter-Hines also sings show tunes, jazz, and church hymns. She readily admits that she’s no blueswoman, but she knows all about singing.

  Right now, she’s taking Taylor through vocal exercises to improve his mechanics. They’ve been doing these exercises together every week for fifteen years. Taylor concentrates on using his diaphragm to pump air up into the resonating chamber of his head, focusing the note “on the bone,” as Leadbetter-Hines says, which means getting it to ring most intensely at a spot just above where the bridge of the nose meets the skull. “You want to connect from here to here,” she says, putting one index finger below her navel and the other between her eyes. When Taylor does it right, his voice seems to leap out of him and fill the room. When he does it wrong, he strains and falls off-key.

  On this day, some extra urgency animates the lesson’s familiar routine because Taylor recently had a rough singing night at Bangkok Blues in Falls Church, Virginia. His voice started to get ragged, which used to happen to him all the time before Leadbetter-Hines improved his technique. Between exercises, they discuss Taylor’s various theories about why his voice gave out. He’d had gigs on consecutive nights, and the new guitar player who sat in played too loud. Also, he forgot to drink his protein shake the day of the show, and his trainer has been beating up his abdominal muscles with esoteric medicine-ball workouts at the gym. Taylor and Leadbetter-Hines agree that his rough night was probably a one-time occurrence, not part of a larger backsliding crisis, but they’ll be alert for any other signs of trouble.

  Leadbetter-Hines doesn’t want Taylor to get too anxious about his voice, though, since that will only choke him up. “You already think too much,” she tells him, kind but firm, big-sisterly. “You have to let the air make the sound. You stop and start the air with your gut, and just let the pitches tumble.” When she sings along with him, the music seems to rise up from deep inside her of its own volition; she lets it out, rather than pushing it out as Taylor does. Even his dedication can work against him. When he pushes too hard, eager to get it just right, his technique falls apart.

  That Linwood Taylor sings the blues at all is a testament to his ambition and discipline. When he began getting serious about the blues in the early 1980s, he saw that playing the guitar wouldn’t be enough. In part, it was a practical recognition. “When I went to blues jams it quickly became obvious to me that if you sang you stayed up longer,” he says. “There would be twenty guitar players, and only three of them sang.” But the respect accorded to singers at the jams pointed to something deeper than practical necessity. The call to sing the blues goes to the heart of the music because the genre’s seemingly inexhaustible power comes primarily from the stories it tells about being caught up between s
orrow and joy. Even the most guitar-obsessed noodler must concede that, and even the most soaringly virtuosic blues solos proceed from and refer back to the human voice singing simple phrases freighted with complex feeling. Being able to play fast or mimic old recordings note-for-note is not at all the same thing as being able to tell a blues story.

  Taylor would not settle for being anything other than a frontman, the guy who sings and gets the lion’s share of the glory, and he was resourceful enough to squeeze the most from his modest vocal potential. After observing the importance of singers and impressing everyone with his guitar playing at his first two blues jams, he went home and learned Willie Dixon’s “I’m Ready” so he could sing it at the third. “Not being a tuneful kind of person,” he says, “I did the best I could.” He didn’t have any traditional blues vocal training—he had not learned to sing in the black Protestant church, nor had he served an apprenticeship to an experienced blues singer—but, having assessed his own limitations and noted the examples of blues-influenced diseurs like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, he sought out recorded models of conversational blues singing. “I listened to Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf. They’re basically singing like they talk. They’re not always that tuneful themselves, you know. They actually talk a lot.” He doesn’t remember how “I’m Ready” went over the first time he sang it at a blues jam, “but I know it was horrible and I know I knew I would get better.”

  He also knew he needed help. Eventually, he found Leadbetter-Hines. “I had a lot of bad habits to get out of,” he says. “Not using my diaphragm, overblowing. And I have asthma. I had to build up endurance and stop straining.” She helped him make himself into some kind of singer, if not exactly a great blues singer, and they still work hard at it.