OUTTAKES

GUEST POST: NEW ZEALAND EARTHQUAKE ONE YEAR AGO

2012-02-22T10:03:00.000+01:00

This guest post, published with permission, is an e-mail sent from New Zealand by my daughter, who had been staying in the home of relatives in Fendalton, the suburb closest to the centre of Christchurch, when the earthquake hit there at lunchtime a year ago today (on February 22, 2011). She was alone in the building when it struck. The day after, they managed to get out of the city, and from three hours’ drive away - where aftershocks could still be felt and were still happening - she managed to e-mail us this account.

... I took the dog for a walk at 12 noon and she was acting weird. Normally she loves the river, but she wasn’t at all interested. Also I tried taking her down this tree-lined path next to the railway, and she flatly refused, I couldn’t physically drag her down there so we went a different way. I’ve since seen that there have been several massive trees down across that path. Creepy. Anyway, we got back to the house at 12.25 ish (I remember all the times because I was keeping aware of the bus timetable because I wanted to go in to town. (I was being lazy really: I could easily have walked in.)

I packed my bag with my notebook and book etc. to take with me, and sat down at the computer and thought I’d just watch an episode of 90210 and catch the 1pm bus. Then at 12.50pm very suddenly there was very very violent shaking, and the wheely chair I was on was sort of thrown to the other end of the room as the whole floor tipped. Everything was flying everywhere, and weirdly my eyes were fixed on the ceiling, rather than the ground where it was obviously coming from. I vividly remember thinking “Shit! I never asked them what you’re meant to do in an earthquake!”, and of course I was on my own. So I was seriously scared and thought, I need to get out of here or I may actually die. I was very aware that the building was really weak and could just go at any point. So I stood up out of the chair as soon as physically possible. The back door, which is right next to where I was, was jammed. The building had already twisted so much that the door was completely impossible to open. So I grabbed the dog - can’t remember where she was but not far away - and dragged her and myself through the house while stuff was still flying everywhere, and got out of the front door and ran out on to the street as far from a building as possible. When I emerged on to the street, other people had done the same. Very odd way to meet the neighbours I can tell you! Anyway, everyone was very nice.

I couldn’t get hold of Tim or Mel, so just had to wait outside for about an hour or so. Then Mel came back (she’d been in a cafe with a friend), then Tim (from work) and George (from school). Of course at this point no-one knew how localised it was, and no-one knew there’d been any deaths etc. So there continued to be aftershocks, every few minutes, some pretty violent. Also, even when there wasn’t actually a shock, the ground had this weird sort of liquid feeling under your feet - it didn’t feel like the reliable solid ground we know. So ever since, it’s felt like when you’ve been on a boat and then you lie down on dry land. Last night was really scary, staying in a motel (and were very lucky to get a place) because aftershocks just kept coming, every few minutes, and it felt so counterintuitive to be inside a building, albeit on the ground floor. It was also difficult to sleep because my heart was pounding as it was all sinking in; and because of the aftershocks it was scary because you couldn’t be sure that you were definitely safe and it was over. So people were texting me saying things like, “Ah I’m so pleased you’re ok” and I was like yeah, but didn’t want to count my chickens too early!

Anyway, their house in uninhabitable - it’s not rubble, because bungalows don’t do that so much, because there’s less weight on them, but it’s kind of a chunky L shape and the back (the bit I was in) sort of sinks from high to low, as in like 45 degrees... It’s very unstable. So it will be demolished.

Oh, and I went in to work earlier [at the restaurant I’d been waitressing in] to see what I could do. No-one was there and the alarm was going; it was taped off and there’s a massive gash from top to bottom of the wall through which you can see the stairs. And it was eerie: all the tables were still out and crockery all over the place, because obviously it had happened at lunchtime so everyone had just legged it. So that’s over, indefinitely. And Christchurch is pretty much wiped.

So all in all, I am very grateful not to be dead, or worse - trapped. It’s very surreal how everything changes in a couple of minutes, and so strange watching it on the news, and I feel so so sad for those people trapped or waiting for news. They don’t want any “have-a- go-heroes” and are turning away everyone except trained rescuers.

I am feeling overwhelmingly lucky to be alive. I must get some sleep.

© Magdalena Gray, 2012

MEETING JIMI HENDRIX, 1967

2012-02-19T16:10:00.001+01:00

I was a student at York University in 1967 when the Jimi Hendrix Experience came to play a gig in one of the college refectories. A clairvoyant student social secretary had booked them before they were famous, for a fee of well under £100. By the time of their York date they were a sensation. ‘Hey Joe’, recorded in London in October 1966 and released two months later, had been in the Top 10 for the past three weeks, following Hendrix’s club appearances in front of rock-giant guitarists like Clapton and Townshend in London, which had created a remarkable buzz around him. Nor had it hurt that he was so very photogenic.

In such a situation, suddenly able to command real money, most rising stars would have blown out a barely-paying student gig. Hendrix didn’t. He, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell arrived - albeit very late. Their van had broken down on the way north.

Shortly after midnight on the morning of February 19th - 45 years ago today - the three of them were in a “dressing room” (a seminar room and bathroom, if I remember it aright) getting ready to perform. I was a student journalist. I knocked on the door and was asked in. And there, from about 12.15am and for around 25 minutes, I was able to chat with Jimi Hendrix, who was already dressed for his performance in black jeans, black pointy boots and a yellow, very London-boutique satin shirt.

We stood side by side, leaning back against the side of a table, smoking cigarettes, and he spoke quietly and warmly, with what my diary of the time recorded as “typical New York buoyancy” (whatever that meant). He was about my own height but his high-heeled boots and big hair made him taller. It was kind of him to spend time with me just ahead of a performance - something I’m not sure I appreciated at the time - but I liked him at once and he put me very much at my ease.

Mostly we talked about Bob Dylan - a mutual enthusiasm. Hendrix said, almost shyly, how much he admired Dylan as an artist and as the embodiment of cool. This was long before either had recorded their very different versions of ‘All Along The Watchtower’, but it had been reported that Hendrix had been given copies of a Dylan single or two that had been withdrawn shortly after their release in the States. (This can only have meant ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’ ) I said I’d read this story and asked him about it, but he couldn’t recall the song titles. We were interrupted from time to time by Noel Redding rushing about self-importantly, primping his hair over and over in a nearby mirror. He did himself no favours alongside Hendrix, who had no self-importance whatever but was unassuming, straightforward and thoughful.

I took my leave of him a little before 12.45 and at 1 o’clock in the morning the gig began. It was the billed as the Jimi Hendrix Experience but the other musicians could have been anyone. My diary tells me I watched “his one-hour performance, which was, in the main, excellent - especially his full-length version of Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.” The quiet figure in the dressing room had become the electrifying, strutting star, the shaman showman, humping the stacks of amps one minute and theatrically quiet the next, but more often and more interestingly inducing his own trances by that always extraordinary guitarwork. I never saw him again.

MEMORIES OF HAMA

2012-02-17T11:16:00.001+01:00

There has been violence in the Syrian city of Hama - only half an hour by road from that other town of carnage, Homs - since protests erupted there last March (2011). On June 3, protesters in Hama were targeted by secret police and the military, and more than 50 people were killed. Hundreds were injured. On 1 July more than 400,000 protestors were estimated to be massed in the streets. Two days later, tanks rolled in and killed more than 20 civilians. Many more were injured and raped. At the end of that month the army went in again, and in this so-called “Ramadan Massacre” at least 100 more people were killed in the city.

The struggle against the regime continues, though, and by the end of last month activists claimed control of four Hama neighbourhoods. Government-paid snipers, active since at least last summer, continue to shoot civilians.

Hama remembers even worse days thirty years ago, when Assad’s father was in power. In April 1981, in revenge for a “terrorist attack”, the army massacred 400 of Hama’s male Sunni Moslems, picked out at random. Then in February 1982, as Wikipedia describes it, “the Syrian army, under the orders of the president of Syria Hafez al-Assad, conducted a scorched earth policy against the town of Hama in order to quell a revolt by the Sunni Muslim community... the attack has been described as one of ‘the single deadliest acts by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East.’ The vast majority of the victims were civilians.” At least 25,000 people were killed, including 1000 soldiers. The city was sealed off for a month, electricty and water supplies cut. That was the scale of the violence.

Yet Hama is also an attractive city, and in the mid-1990s it was possible to go there, as I did, and find peace and warm hospitality.

The river Orontes flows sedately through the middle of the city, and, back then at least, the riverbanks were cool and green, with gardens, parkland and deciduous trees. It might almost have been England except for the magnificent, vast wooden water-wheels - the norias - some of them survivors from the middle ages, built to pump water for irrigation. There were four of these huge structures - perhaps sixty feet in diameter, yet slender, almost fragile-looking - attached to one end of a ruined warehouse, with two smaller ones closer to the weir that served them all.

I sat on a park bench to watch and listen as they made their slow, rickety rounds. They’re often described as making a groaning noise, but the sounds were more like an old motorbike revving. A coot bobbed along on the water, and a huge butterfly circled a limed tree nearby. There was a sudden, strong smell of mint on the breeze. A little way off a rat crouched on the riverbank. (Could Mole be far behind?)

Up in the town, as darkness began to fall, the streets began to throng. I queued in a shop that made and sold only long strings of sugary doughnut (xurros). It came winding out of the hot machine as it was finished, curling around onto a waist-high circular bed of shining metal. You pointed to indicate what length you wanted, and a fat man in an apron chopped off your slice and charged you accordingly. The place was steaming and crowded, like an unaccountably popular fish and chip shop. I was the only non-local, and most of the customers were young and friendly. Later I looked down from a Restaurant and Coffee Shop terrace at the pretty convergence of river, roundabouts and roads, where shops glittered and the central circle of roundabout was strung with a crown of yellow lightbulbs. There was light too behind the water dripping from the largest norias. Wailing musak was put in its place by the far more amplified muezzin.

Hama also rejoiced in its fleet of working vintage taxis - as good a collection of 1950s Detroit monsters as you’d find outside of Havana. They were mostly painted yellow, as seen in Yankee movies, and they were wired so that whenever they were parked, their headlights blinked in a frantic alternating sequence.

I wandered into the back lanes, fell into halting conversation with a local English teacher, and after handshakes and cinnamon coffee outside his house, I was invited in, and was happy to accept. We stepped through the front door straight into an open courtyard, with one room off at each end, each lined with chairs as around the edges of a dancehall. One room was for the men, and the other for the old men. (It goes without saying that no women were in sight.) The house, I was told, was 300 years old, with a traditional ceiling of reeds and wood, and tiled floors. The owner’s uncle had died only the day before, aged 103.

It was all very polite and seemly. As everywhere, the formal rituals of greeting had humane purpose. It’s a formality that allows warmth - warmth through decorum, mutually savoured. The small group of men I spoke with, via my host, said they thought their lives were “easier” than ours in the West: less stress. The teacher asked me, though, with polite puzzlement, why it is that we need to drink alcohol when we get together with our friends. Why can we not enjoy the pleasure of each other’s company without drinking? It was a good question, and one I’ve often remembered since. I still don’t really have an answer.

Today, of course, I have to wonder whether the men I met are still alive. Have those back lanes been shelled? Does that 300-year-old house survive? Do the gigantic medieval wooden wheels still turn?

THE QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST - NO. 2

2012-02-13T16:58:00.001+01:00

Buick PR photograph

DAVE VAN RONK: 10 YEARS GONE

2012-02-10T12:47:00.002+01:00

Dave Van Ronk died ten years ago today (10 February 2012). He's an important figure. This is a large part of the entry I wrote on him in my book The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

David Ritz Van Ronk was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 30, 1936, grew up partly in Queens, attended Richmond Hill High School, sang in a barbershop quartet at 13, dropped out of high school at 15, joined the Merchant Marines, learnt the ukelele, loved jazz, moved to Greenwich Village, and became a professional musician in 1956. He discovered pre-war blues via ‘a chance encounter with a recording of ‘Stackolee’ made by Furry Lewis’, as Van Ronk said himself: ‘Taking it to be a form of Jazz, in which I was primarily interested, I made some further investigations and discovered a whole field of music…. and so, having only such singers as Furry Lewis, King Solomon Hill and Leadbelly for models, when I tried to sing these songs I naturally imitated what I heard and, if I couldn’t understand a word here or there, I just slurred right along with the singer. At that time, nobody listened to me anyway.’

They soon did. He became a Washington Square regular and an established figure in the Village, recording, performing and keeping an open house several years before the young Bob Dylan came to town, slept on Dave’s couch, got Dave’s future wife Terri Thal to be his first manager, learnt some of Dave’s repertoire, stole some of Dave’s repertoire and generally looked up to him as the singer who ‘reigned supreme’. Except of course financially. He was almost always on small, worthy record labels. Hence his famous wry remark: ‘Other entertainers record for money; I record for Prestige.’

This is his friend Elijah Wald’s summary: ‘Dave Van Ronk was a founding father of the 1960s folk and blues revivals, but he was far more than that. For one thing, he was a marvelous raconteur, one of the funniest and most quotable figures on the Village scene…. Dave honed his tales along with his music, while holding court in cafes, bars, and from his apartment on Sheridan Square. As a musician, mentor, and barroom philosopher, his influence was so great that the block he lived on was recently renamed Dave Van Ronk Street. This is an honor that would have made him particularly happy, because much as he loved music, he loved the Village almost as deeply. From the time he moved there in the early 1950s until his death…he never considered living anywhere else.’

(He lived on MacDougal in the late 1950s, moved to 15th for a while after getting together with Terri, then ran back to the Village, specifically to Waverly Place, holding court there through the 1960s; he moved to Sheridan Place when he broke up with Terri, and lived there for the rest of his life. The ‘Dylan’ apartment was the one on Waverly Place.)

Van Ronk more or less invented the milieu of the young white city folk-blues, and though he wrote little material of his own, the entire East Coast singer-songwriter oeuvre would have been different without him. He set very high standards of guitar-playing, not least in demonstrating what richness of instrumentation could be achieved on the lone guitar. His own guitar mentor had been Rev. Gary Davis but Van Ronk made what he learnt his own, bringing a more modern consciousness to finger-picking without any loss of complexity or imaginative dexterity.

When people write, as they often do, of what tender guitar work he puts alongside his ‘rough voice’, they are half right: they’re right about the guitar. But the voice is not merely ‘rough’ - often there’s nothing rough about it at all. To listen to Van Ronk is to hear is one of the most resourceful, subtle, alive voices ever put on record. Hear his early cover of Dylan’s ‘He Was A Friend Of Mine’ - here is a great artist, communicating as directly as Dylan himself, his tone a unique mix of keening and shimmer.

It’s only very rarely indeed that someone cuts through as strongly and exhilaratingly as he can. Danny Kalb wrote that ‘Dave Van Ronk’s sound was unafraid, funky and a joyous challenge…. The challenge was, I think, to go for it all the way, and don’t look back.’ Tom Waits said: ‘In the engine room of the NY Folk Scene shoveling coal into the furnace, one Big Man rules. Dog faced roustabout songster. Bluesman, Dave Van Ronk. Long may he howl.’

Kalb’s ‘unafraid, funky…joyous’ describes the voice far better than Waits’ ‘howl’; but Waits’ affectionate portrait suggests the large man’s energy and impact around town while also putting his finger on one of the reasons why Bob Dylan ‘made it’ in a way that Van Ronk never could. Look at photos of the two of them together in the early ’60s and, a decade on, at the Friends of Chile Benefit Concert. Dylan is the lithe, sexy, charismatic one; Van Ronk is the awkward, fat-faced one with sweaty armpits and a beer gut. But if he didn’t have the right image for national celebrity, nor the songwriting ability, nor the killer instinct, no matter: he had everything else. He was an unforgettable live performer, a stratospherically gifted guitarist, an all-time great singer, a shrewd observer of other people (including of Dylan), a generous host whose place was where everyone came for all-night poker games, abrasive talk and good cheer, and with all this, he was also a figure of gravitas - a great man. In Chronicles Volume One, Dylan’s vivid, detailed portrait of Greenwich Village when it was new to him contains no other portrait half as long, half as warm, half as fulsome or half as respectful as of Dave Van Ronk.

Van Ronk was always shrewd and honest about Dylan. They fell out in a major way just once, and he said so: ‘We had a terrible falling out about “House of the Rising Sun.” He was always a sponge, picking up whatever was around him, and he copped my arrangement of the song. Before going into the studio he asked, “Hey Dave, mind if I record your version of Rising Sun?” I said, “Well, Bobby, I’m going into the studio soon and I’d like to record it.” And later he asked me again and I told him I wanted to record it myself, and he said, “Oops, I already recorded it myself and I can’t do anything about it because Columbia wants it.” For a period of about two months, we didn’t speak to each other. He never apologized, and I give him credit for it.’

Van Ronk was just as transparent about the younger musician’s stories and myth-making (or lies, as some call it), again stepping back and seeing it in the round, and speaking for others as if all were as generous-minded: ‘We accepted him not because of the things he had said he’d done but because we respected him as a performer. The attitude of the community was that it was all right, it was cool. He gets on stage and delivers, and that’s fine. His pose didn’t bother us. Nobody was turned off by it. Whatever he said offstage, onstage he told the truth as best he knew it.’

Van Ronk’s perspective was wide enough, too, that he could see sides of Dylan beyond the folkclubs. This, for instance, is accurate and at the same time very much his own judgment, independently arrived at: ‘Bobby is very much a product of the Beat Generation. Dylan really does belong in a rack with Kerouac. You are not going to see any more like him. Bobby came into Beat poetry just at the very tail end. He towers above all of them, except perhaps Ginsberg. But Bob was a latecomer and will have no successors, just as his namesake had no successors.’ Every bit of that is extremely shrewd, and there are few who have dared venture, in plain terms like that, that Dylan ‘towers above’ all those revered Beats.

...In the filmed interview with Van Ronk given to...Dylan’s office for the archives, and made available for use in Scorsese’s No Direction Home, the big bear-like figure, the Mayor of MacDougal Street, has become the mellow, shy, silver-stubbled, bronchitic, self-deprecating man with a laugh that makes the viewer laugh, a vulnerability that is touching (again, a strong contrast to that most steely interviewee, Dylan himself) and a generosity of spirit, a fondness for Dylan and an appreciation of his contribution to a whole musical community - all of which makes him one of the film’s most fragile yet valuable contributors: still, after all these years, giving out and being real.

‘Even now,’ wrote Danny Kalb, ‘I can almost hear him laughing freely and deeply, unfortunately still smoking those damn cigarettes, even as we, his friends left behind, weep and celebrate him at the same time.’

His many recordings cover a long, long period and vary enormously. If a ‘best’ has to be specified, then it is probably the work of the early 1960s that captures it most powerfully: yet whatever you pick out you’ll find yourself more than amply rewarded.

Dave Van Ronk died of complications arising from his cancer, in hospital in New York City, on February 10, 2002.

[Van Ronk quotes from various unfootnoted sources. ‘Dave Remembered’, Danny Kalb, 2002, online 14 Sep 2005 at http://members.aol.com/silvastr/danny/danny.htm (no longer working a link, 2012). Elijah Wald (to whom thanks for some information) quoted from the website page promoting Van Ronk’s memoir, edited with Wald & completed by him after Van Ronk’s death, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, a Memoir, New York: Da Capo, 2005; quote seen online 14 Sep 2005 at http://elijahwald.com/vanronk.html#whiff.]

YES, DICKENS

2012-02-07T14:23:00.000+01:00

Columnists have thought it smart to write pieces on how tiresome they find the Dickens bi-centenary ballyhoo. They are what's tiresome. So is the hypocrisy of the relevant Guardian academic rentamouth, Prof. John Sutherland, who yesterday published his Dickens-is-overrated piece (including a list of all the Victorian novelists he claims to find superior) . . . and today publishes his book The Dickens Dictionary, whose sub-title is ‘An A-Z of England’s greatest novelist'.

Dickens too can easily be accused of hypocrisy, and on a less shallow scale; certainly the great campaigner against injustice was vile to his wife and to his children. But he was, and therefore is, a great writer, and it seems more reasonable to say so today than to be “spewing" cheap shots.

Yes, a great writer. The objection to TV adaptations - less so to today's than to those ghastly children's television serials of days gone by - is that they emphasise the wacky names, grotesquerie and plot, when of course it's the writing that's the superlative core of his genius. So often he contradicts the foolish notion we have that nineteenth-century writers are far too wordy - so often he can say in a clipped phrase what would take any contemporary writer a paragraph. Yet he is, too, so very powerful when he expands into rhetorical luxury. And it's hard to comprehend any denial of his vividly persuasive imagination or acuteness of observation.

Here are a few passages I love, from just one of his novels, Bleak House:

“Mr. Vholes put his dead glove, which scarcely seemed to have any hand in it, on my fingers, and...took his long thin shadow away. I thought of it on the outside of the coach, passing over all the sunny landscape between us and London, chilling the seed in the ground as it glided along."

“[Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock] start for home...out of Paris...Concert, assembly, opera, theatre, drive, nothing is new to my lady, under the worn-out heavens... Sir Leicester is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored. When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man, to have so inexhaustible a subject."

“It is a dull street, under the best conditions; where the two long rows of houses stare at each other with that severity, that half a dozen of its greatest mansions seem to have been slowly stared into stone, rather than originally built in that material. It is a street of such dismal grandeur, so determined not to condescend to liveliness...and the echoing mews behind have a dry and massive appearance, as if they were reserved to stable the stone chargers of noble statues."

“...in a large house formerly a house of state, lives Mr. Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now; and in those shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in nuts. But its roomy staircases, passages, and ante-chambers still remain; and even its painted ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman helmet and celestial linen, sprawls among balustrades and pillars, flowers, clouds and big-legged boys, and makes the head ache... Here, among his many boxes labelled with transcendant names, lives Mr. Tulkinghorn... Here he is today, quiet at his table. An oyster of the old school, whom nobody can open.
Like as he is to look at, so is his apartment in the dusk of the present afternoon. Rusty, out of date, withdrawing from attention, able to afford it... The titles on the backs of his books have retired into the binding; everything that can have a lock on it has got one; no key is visible..."

Excerpts, of course, snatch things from their context, and those above are the more powerful and numinous within the book, where they resonate within the great ebb and flow of the novel, sounding in the deeps of its themes, its atmospheres and passions, just as on the small scale of a short passage itself, a word or phrase reverberates against another a sentence or two before or after. The last passage above, for example, is part of the long and masterly scene-setting for the drama of Mr. Tulkinghorn's murder there: a drama in which the impact of violation is more felt because it violates not only the man but the privileged, guarded hush, so strongly established by Dickens, of the room in which it occurs.

There are Dickens novels I still haven't read - Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge - but they surely cannot better Bleak House, or Dombey and Son, or Great Expectations, or even, for all its marring facetiousness, the compelling Our Mutual Friend. Those readers who were alive in Dickens' own day were luckier than us: they had the chance not only to read his work but to go to hear his readings - hugely attended, clamorous, larger than life. Their core, though, was words. His great writing.

REBECCA

2012-02-04T18:18:00.004+01:00

It was rash of Neil McCormick in The Telegraph to give Rebecca Ferguson's debut album Heaven a 5-star review and to compare her to Nina Simone - but his heart was in the right place and he was responding to what he sees in her, rather than, as so many have done, dismissing her without listening or viewing, simply because she emerged via The X Factor and is entangled with Simon Cowell's Syco machine.

The videos for her two singles are boringly formulaic and almost identical, and her album disappoints - only three strongish songs, too much high-end voice - but she doesn't. She's a thrilling singer, a beautifully nervous live performer whose integrity shines out through her inventive phrasing when she “does covers” (I tried to describe this once before, when, on The X Factor, she tackled one of my least favourite Dylan songs). Musical integrity shines out no less on this, the acoustic version of her first single, ‘Nothing's Real But Love’ (and if the video disappears again, you'll find it here on YouTube):

What a voice! And the woman has dignity. If I were in Britain (or Dublin) in the next few weeks I'd go and see her like a shot. More than once. Especially at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. (It's a good small venue, by rock concert standards; it's just across the street from the wonderful Philharmonic Pub; and it's in Rebecca Ferguson's home town.) Her tour dates are:

Bridgewater Hall Manchester

Mon 20/02/12