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

by Carlo Rotella

  Taylor is not bitter about being pushed from rock toward the blues, even though at times this musical direction seems to be carrying him away from a shot at celebrity. “It’s a waste of energy to worry about it. That’s the way it is. They haven’t beaten me. I ask, how am I going to get around the way things are? That’s what you learn in Catholic school: there’s the way things are, and you try to get around them best you can.” After a pause, he adds, “I play all the rock I want now,” meaning that there’s enough rock in his blues to satisfy the impulse awakened in him long ago by the British invasion. “The sound [of the blues] changed, in large part thanks to Hendrix and Clapton. A lot of the young black blues players wanted to sound like that.”

  Maybe Taylor’s guitar playing is so compelling because it tells his story: the tale of a brother who just wanted to rock; the devious-cruising path, by way of the blues, on which that impulse launched him; the balance between his musical desires and those of his audience. The story has an epilogue: inside Linwood Taylor the bluesman, locked away in a dungeon but with spirit unbroken, the Linwood Taylor who wants to be Eddie Van Halen (rather than, say, B. B. King) broodingly awaits a chance to break loose and crank it up. “Hey, man,” Taylor says, leaning close and nodding slowly for emphasis, “I still have my Marshall half-stacks”—stored away, he means, but not forgotten. The Marshall stack is the iconic hard-rock amplifier setup, the distortion-crunching sonic Armor of the Gods worn by Hendrix, Van Halen, and countless others, including Slash, when they stormed to rock stardom in a welter of feedback and bombast. They’re all brothers-in-arms that way. Linwood Taylor, too.

  The romantic myth of the natural bluesman, that outsider in overalls inspired to sing the essential folk truths of his people as he sits on the porch with bottle and guitar after a day in the fields or on the street corner, is mostly sentimental claptrap founded on facile assumptions about race and identity. The myth, which has had a long run in American culture, contributes to the enduring popularity of musicians of the 1930s like Robert Johnson, who is reputed to have sold his soul to the devil at a rural crossroads in the Mississippi Delta, and Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, a sophisticated fellow with eclectic musical tastes and a fondness for fine suits whose handlers obliged him to perform a narrow repertoire of folk and blues songs while wearing prison stripes, acting the part of a paroled savage. The myth of the natural bluesman contributed as well to American culture’s forgetting of the great early blueswomen, who were mostly too cosmopolitan and polished to fit the myth’s requirements, and to the revival in the 1960s of a taste for the blues among rock fans looking for cultural bedrock on which to ground their pop preferences.

  The myth obscures the simple truth that the blues, as a musical form, is a craft and not a birthright or an existential condition. And these days, most people who play and listen to the blues have to work their way into it via other, blues-derived music. If even the bluesman Linwood Taylor traces his musical lineage from the guitar heroes of rock, where do you go to find a character who doesn’t come to blues without first passing through the veil of another genre? If even the bluesman Linwood Taylor needs Alison Leadbetter-Hines to teach him to sing the blues, where do you go to find a character who claims the blues as an inheritance? It turns out that you don’t even have to leave Washington: you go to Capitol Hill.

  Senator Blanche Lincoln, a 42-year-old white Democrat from Arkansas, was the Year of the Blues proclamation’s crucial supporter in the Senate. Bob Santelli and his associates rallied other senators to the cause, but Lincoln was its most active and passionate advocate. “Blues is part of my heritage,” she asserts boldly, her Arkansas accent rounding the edges of her voice. “I grew up in Helena, in the Delta. I come from a seventh-generation Arkansas farm family. We’d been in the area for a long time. My dad was a farmer, and he had a business office in a bank building where KFFA was, the oldest blues station in the country. I used to go up and hang out at the studio. Sunshine Sonny Payne, the deejay, was a contemporary of my parents. I can remember my mother picking me up at kindergarten and riding to my dad’s office, and hearing blues there. It was just part of my life.” In Helena in the 1960s and 1970s, with rock and soul already dominant in young people’s culture, the blues “wasn’t a pop thing. It was a part of your basic diet, your daily normal life, a mainstay. It’s always been such a large part of our lives in the Delta. Like grits ‘n’ greens, it’s a mainstay for us, even if it’s a novelty or an art to others.”

  When the Year of the Blues campaign came to her looking for support, Lincoln jumped at the chance not only to celebrate “the way blues has reached out to people around the country and around the world” but also to remind everybody “where it comes from.” As she sees it, the blues can only thrive to the extent that it continues to flourish in places like the Delta. “The blues is still alive in the Delta,” she says, allowing to float in the air the implication that it’s perhaps not so alive in other places. “Blues came from heavy labor and discrimination and poverty, and the Delta is still impoverished.”

  Lincoln has made encouraging economic development in the Delta one of her principal legislative concerns (even though, to follow the logic of her own argument, success in that endeavor might well cut into regional production of authentic blues by lowering the incidence of hard times). Looking out for the region’s material well-being dovetails with her personal desire to see her hometown music properly honored. “Blues certainly matters culturally,” she says, “and we want to preserve and highlight it, but without a doubt it’s also an economic tool. I’ve been beating my brains out up here trying to convince the administration and others that the Delta is impoverished and needs help, like Appalachia got 40 years ago. And this blues history is an important part of bringing people and interest to the region.”

  She goes on to tout annual festivals in Memphis and Clarksdale, Mississippi, elements of a larger regional effort to exploit economically the cultural charge of the blues. Drawing on the example of New Orleans, boosters and preservationists in Memphis and the Delta region—and Chicago, in the North—have begun to theme these places as homes of the blues. They want to attract tourists and conventioneers looking for the roots of rock and soul, a sense of connection to cultural history, or, more often, just a passable facsimile of a down-home good time. This kind of packaging of blues experiences (which often includes retailing the myth of the natural bluesman) can seem as lamely contrived as the logo-emblazoned goody bags designed to resemble little cotton sacks handed out to the press and corporate ticketholders at the big Radio City show in February, and the production of blues-under-glass for tourists doesn’t promise to inspire musicians to breathe new life into the genre. But if the blues presents an opportunity to attract business, then hard-pressed communities will exploit that homegrown resource. A genre that has survived both the neglect and the love of the American people can probably survive a little cut-rate imagineering.

  Most people think they know the home of the blues when they see it: a bare-bones juke joint or a cropper’s cabin in the Delta, the low-rise brick kitchenette buildings and hole-in-the-wall lounges of Chicago’s South Side. It requires a mental stretch to see Capitol Hill, the Kennedy Center, the spanking-new EMP building in Seattle, or PBS and NPR stations as homes of the blues. But they are, and the expectations and aesthetic preferences that hold sway in such places help to define the state of the blues as it enters its second century.

  You can see and hear the blues-rock aesthetic in action at the Sunset Grille, another unlikely home of the blues, as Linwood Taylor plies his trade. After “Crosscut Saw,” he delivers a set built around more standards—“Dust My Broom,” “I’ll Play the Blues for You,” the inevitable “Sweet Home Chicago.” He sings Hendrix’s signature slow blues “Red House,” too, by request. He doesn’t mutter “That’s all right, I still got my guitar” when he gets to the solo, as Hendrix did, but the sentiment can never have been more appropriate.

  To close the first set, the ba
nd kicks into “Drivin’ South,” a Hendrix instrumental that owes a debt to Albert Collins and the Texas shuffle. The rhythm section settles into an eight-cylinder groove, and Taylor goes for an excursion into the blues-rock territory traversed and defined by Hendrix and Clapton and an army of guitarists that has followed their examples. Liberated to go long, his guitar lines extend and wrap around themselves to form lyrical tangles from which new melodic figures emerge, climbing up and out. His noise range expands into rock’s buzz and crunch, and even a typical pose of the big arena rock show makes an appearance when he executes a downward run terminating in a power chord and then raises his picking hand skyward to let it ring out. In the middle of the tune, the musical ideas flowing out of him one after another, he detours through the Allman Brothers’ endless “Mountain Jam” and raises an echo of the closing frenzy of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” before making his way back, discursive but purposeful, to Hendrix.

  By letting the guitar do the singing, he has broken through from competence to inspiration. He’s telling a story that matters deeply to him, a founding myth of classic rock: how Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and B. B. King placed the ax Excalibur in the stone, and how it was drawn from the stone by Hendrix, Clapton, Duane Allman, Carlos Santana, and other rock guitar heroes, who conquered the world with it; how these heroes and their successors built the kingdom of rock and, within it, a new home for the blues, a sacred shrine to the roots music that made rock possible. It’s obvious from the near-ecstatic response to “Red House” and “Drivin’ South” that this story is charged with special passion and meaning for the Sunset Grille’s clientele. They are, in that sense, Taylor’s people.

  As the evening lengthens into the second and third sets, he sings many more blues standards and samples the rock songbook, doing his best with the vocals and playing ever more thunderous guitar. During the second set he leaves the stage mid-song and executes a bar walk, playing flurries of notes as he proceeds. The excursion has a ginger quality—he has some difficulty moving customers out of the way so he can get safely up on the bar; he makes sure not to kick anybody’s drink while he’s picking his way along, ducking down so as not to brain himself on the ceiling; and he carefully dismounts with a movement that says “Let’s not turn an ankle here” rather than “Rock on!” But the crowd loves it. The Sunset Grille’s patrons will go home satisfied, and only an authenticity snob would begrudge them that satisfaction.

  Still, you don’t have to be a snob to recognize that the blues is somehow diminished when it becomes junior partner in a merger with rock. His typical audience, Taylor admits, is “clueless” when asked to venture beyond, “you know, Muddy Waters-to-the-Rolling Stones,” a tightly delimited canon of heroes, songs, and reasons to care about the blues. He knows that the regulars at the Sunset Grille expect plenty of hot guitar licks from him and not much else, but he still tries to strike a balance between satisfying them and “showing some growth and restraint” as a bluesman in ways they might not notice or appreciate. For better or worse, though, they’re his core audience, and his business is to make them happy.

  Maybe the Year of the Blues campaign will help to recruit a new audience for Taylor. The Year of the Blues is only going to matter, he thinks, to the extent that “it effects change, gets some young people interested. Put it in the schools. Otherwise, it’s just window dressing.” Bob Santelli, working hard to create the next generation of blues fans, would agree. The kind of grand-scale institutionalizing and constituency-building that Santelli has undertaken will take time, if it happens at all, and at the moment it’s not entirely clear what qualities a new, younger audience might value and reward in the blues it wants to hear. Will such listeners want more rock content or less? More R&B and soul content or less? Will they hear the blues as black music, white music, neither, or both? Will they come to the blues as roots music? Folk music? Proto-hip-hop? American “world music”? All or none of the above?

  In the meantime, Taylor’s core audience keeps coming back, although everybody’s a little older every time out. Far removed from the big doings afoot on Capitol Hill and at EMP and in other centers of power and wealth, his Year of the Blues is shaping up to look a lot like every other year of the blues he’s ever had and those he can foresee in the future. You can see his situation as crisis or continuity, as evidence of contemporary problems in the blues or as evidence of the historically consistent facts of blues life. Taylor, in keeping with his adopted genre’s worldview, sees it both ways. And if he’s ever disheartened by the historical conditions and personal compromises that have shaped his career and brought him together with his audience at the Sunset Grille, he can always seek consolation in what matters most: that’s all right, he’s still got his guitar.

  * * *

  Original publication: “Linwood Taylor’s Blues,” Washington Post Magazine, August 24, 2003.

  The Professor of Micropopularity

  ON A MONDAY EVENING in September, James Schamus and a dozen students in his graduate seminar in film theory at Columbia University were discussing the dialogues of Plato. Each participant who spoke called on the next speaker, and Schamus gave the group plenty of leeway to tussle with the text, but every once in a while he raised his hand and intervened to guide the conversation. The course was called Seeing Narrative, and the discussion centered on Plato’s skepticism about the ability of any visible thing to represent ideal truth—a skepticism that, say, a bunch of beautiful images strung together in a movie could communicate the perfect, invisible idea of Beauty.

  Schamus, in bow tie and jacket, his mobile face alight with intentness, said, “In Plato, the philosopher’s job is to love knowledge, logos, but it’s always corporealized, and the body fools your senses, your perceptions. The soul is invisible and doesn’t change, and it wants to connect to other such invisible, unchanging things”—including Truth and Beauty in their ideal forms—“but it’s trapped in a body that’s always taking it to visible things that are never the same.”

  During a break at the midpoint of the four-hour seminar, Schamus checked his BlackBerry. There were, as usual, lots of messages pertaining to his other job: for the past nine years he has been CEO of Focus Features, the specialty unit of Universal Pictures. As the head of a successful movie studio owned by a giant corporation, Schamus finances, produces, and distributes movies that are “independent” to the extent that that label describes a style, a target audience, a price tag. “They make smart movies for low budgets,” as Tim Gray, who oversees Variety, put it. Focus’s Oscar winners include Milk, The Pianist, and Lost in Translation, among others.

  Schamus has also had a prolific career as a writer and producer. He has made eleven films with the director Ang Lee, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain. Along with two partners, Schamus ran Good Machine, a production company that between 1991 and 2002 made and distributed a series of important indie films like Safe and The Brothers McMullen. Until he got too busy with Focus, Schamus, who is 51, also did uncredited rewrites on the kind of expensive popcorn movies that Focus Features doesn’t make (but he wouldn’t tell me which ones).

  The messages that came in while Schamus taught Plato included a notice that a preview screening of Hanna, a thriller to be released next April, had been moved from Nyack, New York, to Paramus, New Jersey. Other messages tracked how The American was doing in Europe and how DVD sales of the strange-but-cute documentary Babies were doing at Target. The news was good.

  Focus was doing remarkably well in a time when the movie industry was still in the midst of an upheaval brought about by the decline of the DVD, piracy, and the general economic crisis, among other factors. After a boom in the late ’90s and early ’00s, when hedge-fund money flooded Hollywood and the indie sector was riding high, the ensuing contraction had taken out many of Focus’s competitors. Paramount Vantage, Warner Independent, and other specialty units were gone, but Focus was hanging on with one of the largest shares of the indie market, exploiting its
excellent relationships with distributors around the world.

  “Focus has made a profit every year,” Schamus told me on another occasion. “Some years it was modest profit, and in some years we did extremely well. But modest profit is not enough. We’re part of a big corporation; our margins have to be justified. I’m not particularly a fan of late capitalism in general, but I realize our movies have to make a profit.”

  With extended speculation in the air that the cable company Comcast would buy Universal from NBC, a deal that could either include Focus or lead to it being sold off as a separate entity, Schamus was under more pressure than usual to have a very good year. So far, so good. Greenberg, a slacker romance starring Ben Stiller, did not do as well at the box office as it did with critics, but Babies did surprisingly well, and The Kids Are All Right and The American were breakout successes. With two releases still to go, 2010 was shaping up as a big winner.

  There really isn’t anyone else like Schamus. There’s no precedent for a real academic—he’s a professor of professional practice in Columbia’s School of the Arts, a teacher and scholar who has served on the editorial board of Cinema Journal—to have a first-rate career as a writer, a producer, and an executive in the film industry. As Tim Gray put it, “There have been a couple of film scholars who wrote scripts, but he’s the only person in the business I’ve ever seen who said, ‘I can’t go to Cannes because I’ve got to work on my doctorate.’ I liked his book about Dreyer, but I understood about a third of it.” The book, based on Schamus’s dissertation, is a study of the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud, a film that Schamus has described as “the single most obscure Scandinavian formalist failure.”