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Me. Albert King. Another planet.

About 25 years ago, I was driving cross country for the reasons you might expect of a 20-year old who was utterly lost. Where the hell was my life? It had to be somewhere. It was not in the big city suburb I grew up in. Not in the rows of desks at that sheep factory called High School from which I barely graduated and not in any of the sheep factories of higher learning, none of which I bothered to apply to in favor of a succession of waitress and waitress-like jobs and hanging out in bars, and not in the telenovelas of the lives of those I met but had no way to connect with because no one spoke my language. Where was my life? Where were my people? Some hints could be found in books, yes. In music, certainly.

But what did art and music have to do with me? How could I find a life to relate to when I didn’t even know my own location? I could find no discernible roads, no apparent steps to climb, no conceivable destination to maneuver toward. Lost. So I figured, what the hell, I might as well drive around. At least that way my body would be doing what my mind already was, and there’s something oddly satisfying about matching those two up. I got behind the wheel and headed in the only viable direction for a music lover in Boston (or anywhere, really): South. And West.

After a few weeks, as luck would have it, my car broke down in Austin, Texas. According to my navigate-by-vibe road plan, I was heading there anyway, mainly because I heard you could listen to actual people play real music on instruments they were born to hold. You can tell the difference between music played because you’re trying to get over and music played because that’s what your momma and daddy did and so you picked it up too, to see what you had to say. I heard they had players like that in Austin, especially the blues guys.

This is what I wanted. I wanted to find the world that resonated with such sounds so I could live in it. With the great purity of adolescent longing, my aim was to eviscerate the opaque presence of whatever was marketing my own life back to me. Music could do that. Hey, we’re talking music here. Music is food. Music is life. Music is the proof that goodness exists, and that there is a way to meet joy and love and despair and all manner of inner states in their non-conceptual form. So of course I loved music, all kinds, but for this skinny white girl, Blues cut the deepest. If I was going to drink in any tradition, it was going to be that one.

In fact, without music and Texas, the trip never would have happened. One night, I was sitting in the front seat of my cab (yes, my cab) at 2am outside a Boston nightclub on a sticky August night, waiting to see if anyone had misplaced their designated driver. My cab had no A/C because, well, girl cabbies don’t get respect, so I had the windows down, seat slid all the way back, smoking a cigarette, feet sticking out the driver side window, radio on. Loud. Two songs came on in sequence that presented me with my own personal one-way ticket out of Palookaville.

First: “Dancing in the Dark,” by Bruce, which had these killer, killer lines,

Man, I’m just tired and bored with myself…
…I want to change my clothes, my hair, my face.
I ain’t getting nowhere, just living in a dump like this.
There’s something happening somewhere, baby. I just know that there is.

I heard that last line and I don’t know what happened next. I snapped.

It was over.

I was done with the cab, Boston, this version of being alive, you, me: my clothes, my hair; I didn’t care if I ever saw my own face again. Done. There was something happening somewhere and for sure that somewhere was not here. I didn’t know what I was going to do tomorrow except that it was not in any way going to resemble today.

Next up, “Cold Shot” by Stevie Ray Vaughan. My reaction this time had nothing to do with lyrics and everything to do with the scream of joy that burst from my heart at the sound of a Texas shuffle and, more, something about the naturalness of SRV, 80s drum sounds notwithstanding. In this moment, I got what “cool” was in general and in music in particular and I stand by my definition to this day. It means not being in a hurry. Even if you’re playing fast, you take your time. Texas musicians are the ultimate in what’s-the-rush musicianship. I mean just listen to any Willie Nelson song from any era. With every verse, you’re not sure if he’s even still in the room but then, just in time, without a bone in his body, he comes in a moment before the moment disappears. That is cool.

But I digress.

So I quit my job, put everything in the back of my sister’s car (somehow I scammed her into “lending” it to me) and began to drive.

South.

West.

Until one night many weeks later when I was heading into Austin and realized, oh crap, I’m about to miss the exit, swerved to catch it, and ran over a meridian strip, busting up the front end of my poor sister’s car. Wallet check revealed about $119. Poof. I lived in Austin.

I needed a place to stay while I figured stuff out and so did what anyone would do in such circumstances. I went to a bar. I waited and watched for someone who might give me a place to stay in exchange for as little as possible, which, when you’re 20 and cute is basically everyone. Soon the people at the table next to me were buying me drinks and it turns out that amongst them were two other cute girls in their 20s, sisters, Kathy and Linda, whose 3rd roommate was moving out in two weeks to go live with her boyfriend and I could have her room if I didn’t mind sleeping on their floor for awhile. Mind? I was thrilled. As fate would have it, Kathy was a waitress at Antone’s: Austin’s Home of the Blues and she said they were hiring and I should apply, which I did, trembling. Antone’s? Antone’s?? If you knew anything about blues music at that time, you knew this was where Stevie got his start and also the Fabulous Thunderbirds and that at Antone’s there was a crew of musicians who could nail your heart to the wall without looking up. They were called the Antone’s House Band and if there were ever a group of musicians who were not trying to market themselves to you, it was they. Soulful, deep, deep, soulful, night after live-music night, backing up John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins, James Cotton, you name it. The night I went into apply, Otis Rush was playing to about 10 people and I had what was as close to a satori experience (as I now might call it) as I’d ever had, before or since. Don’t ask. I can’t describe it. No one could.

I was hired, due to having been a cocktail waitress twice before, once in a nightclub in DC called The Bayou (only recently defunct) and the other time in the bar of a restaurant, lunch shift. If you’ve ever worked lunch hours in a bar, you’ve pretty much seen it all in terms of drunks so  I was in and it was at this exact moment that my real life started.

Pretty much everything good in my life can be traced back to that moment. I found a home for my love of music. I learned everything you could ever want to know about how to listen to music and I heard things that would blow your mind, if only I could turn my ears inside out and broadcast what they have taken in. The house band produced a serious boyfriend for me. I heard and hung out with and deeply dug all the blues guys mentioned, plus Albert King, Memphis Slim, Jimmy Rogers, Eddie Taylor, Junior Wells, Barbara Lynn, Hubert Sumlin, forget about it, the list goes on beyond, beyond, beyond.

After about a year, the happiest year of my life for sure, Antone’s started a record label. I didn’t work in the daytime, so was deemed an eligible employee and that’s how I started a 10+ year career in the music business. Anyway, there’s so much more to this story, endlessly more, but suffice to say at this point that I made a lasting and potent connection to the Blues, the kind of connection you know will last because it had always been there to begin with, you just didn’t know it.

So that is road #1. But one road does not a crossroads make. The Buddha produced the second road and at some point, a point to be later described, I drove to Mississippi, sat at the intersection  of Highways 61 and 49, picked up the live wire of blues in my left hand and the live wire of dharma in my right and stuck them together to see what would happen.

Stay tuned.

Some of you may know that I am a huge music lover. I worked in the independent music business for about 15 years. I have heard things that would make your mind explode. (In a good way.) There are a few recordings that I count as my always-fresh, completely beloved, never-tire-of-listening-ever-ever musical loves. They include (but are in no way limited to) the full length recordings Muddy Waters, Folk Singer and John Coltrane & Johnny Hartmann, and these songs: Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come,” The Allman Brothers’ “Blue Skies,” Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” Vladimir Cosma’s “Sentimental Walk,” Ini Kamoze’s “Hot Stepper,” The Johnson Mountain Boys’ “Christine LeRoy,” Tony Bennett’s version of “The Way You Look Tonight,” Dinah Washington’s “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” The Abyssinian’s “Satta Massagana,” and, even though he’s not a musician per se, I have to include Lord Buckley.

I have no idea what these recordings have in common beyond that I love them. Some always make me cry, others always make me laugh, and all always, always delight me. I can’t count how many times I’ve listened to them. Guru’s first solo recording, Jazzamatazz, Vol. 1 is definitely on this list. So when I heard today that the Guru died of cancer at age 48, I was so sad and also so grateful for having heard his music.

God is Universal; he is the Ruler Universal: may you attain complete realization in whatever realm you choose to inhabit next.

Please crank up the following and wish him well on his journey–

Loungin’ (w Donald Byrd)

Le Bien, Le Mal (w MC Solaar)

]]> http://www.susanpiver.com/wordpress/2010/04/29/guru/feed/ 3 http://www.susanpiver.com/wordpress/2009/02/11/publishers-dont-do-what-the-music-business-did/ http://www.susanpiver.com/wordpress/2009/02/11/publishers-dont-do-what-the-music-business-did/#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:02:49 +0000 Susan http://www.susanpiver.com/wordpress/?p=521 Hello book publishers. You’re starting to scare me.

I work in publishing but was a record label executive from 1990-2001 and am fascinated by parallels between the two industries. When it comes to the digitization of product and attempts to master/mangle the phenomenon of social media, the publishing business is where the music business was about 10 years ago. And although publishing probably sets its collective IQ (not to mention good manners) as superior to the music business, I can’t find evidence that their reactions to industry sea change are substantially different.

While attending this week’s O’Reilly’s Tools of Change in Publishing conference, I heard a lot of this:

There is still time to change course and we’ve got to do something now—but we don’t know what.

In the meantime, let’s co-opt whatever new trends we see out there by assigning some low-level marketing person to troll Twitter or hiring a social media consultant.

Please, please don’t let us end up like the record business.

If there’s anything to be learned from the recent past, it’s that none of these thoughts are worth pursuing. The “somebody do something” mentality duplicates the kind of hoping-for-the-best attitude espoused by long-time executives in music who simply could not or would not question the viability of the professional cocoons they’d built for themselves. And who can blame them—corporate mega structures are schooled in consolidation as the primary means of growth, not fleet-footed, shape-shifting responsiveness to change. But now we’re in a world where getting bigger is not the answer, getting smaller is.

The question I hoped would be addressed at the conference was: How will publishing avoid being trapped by its own environment? But it never was. Instead, I noticed a lot of talk of waiting and seeing how things are going to work out before making any earth-shaking, world-class responses to a world that has already changed.

At the conference, I was excited for a keynote aimed at comparing the music and publishing industries. Although entertaining, it lacked vision. The speaker talked about how only wimps fear the freedoms of the digital marketplace and attempt to control intellectual property rights and that at least we’re not going to start arresting people like those thugs over at the RIAA. I was disappointed not to hear a more sophisticated dissection, beginning with debunking the idea that digital downloads killed the music business, or could kill publishing.

Downloads did not kill the music business. Shortsightedness and turf-protection on the part of music business executives did. Piracy and changing distribution schema will not kill the publishing industry. Shortsighted infrastructure-protection on the part of publishing houses will.

What offed the music business—and what the publishing industry is facing—is a corporate structure built to churn out hits to subsidize an entire product line. (For more detail on how this happened–boring to everyone but me–see this 2007 post.) Rather than developing artists, exploiting regional marketplaces, and building financial models that can support a mid-range list, both industries sold their souls out to entertainment at the expense of art and expression. Both are in the business of selling many copies of a few items, not a few copies of many items—the kind of product that can be shot out of a cannon, dominate the retail market, and then basically disappear—because anything else is simply too complicated for a similarly bulked up corporate retail environment to track. The appearance of downloads and file sharing could almost be seen as a desperate measure on the part of consumers to listen and read in an un-mandated manner.

Commodification of bookselling is the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room, not e-books or DRM (Digital Rights Management) or the Kindle.

Without making friends with this beast, my guess is that in 2-5 years we’ll see a publishing industry that looks like the music business does today: Super-downsized major companies selling a product line aimed at an older demographic and a jillion new companies creating the next generation of publishers, retailers, and readers. Just like in the music business, some in publishing will be mourning the death of the business while others will be wildly excited because all they see is opportunity.

At Tools of Change, Sara Lloyd of Pan-MacMillan nailed it when she said, “Publishers understand markets, but not customers.” As anyone in the music business could have told you years ago, the customer is now a human being, and publishers—who still see retail as their customers—don’t know how to build products for individuals who might want to discuss, interact with, congregate around, or add their own $0.02 to the content. The customer has stepped out of the bookstore and into the foyer of the publishing houses, they are knocking on the doors of authors, and asking to be addressed as individuals. They will consent to purchase, not when coerced by a front-of-the-store display or fabulous media coverage, but when their friends start talking about how awesome/helpful/inspiring/powerful the actual book itself is. And this—the book itself—is what publishing has lost sight of in the attempt to build market share. To change this kind of corporate culture will require super-human “change management” to flip a mega-entity staffed by people who are petrified of losing their jobs into a business that can be one step ahead (instead of ten steps behind) consumption trends.

Ultimately, the music business sacrificed music to save the business. Hopefully, publishers will realize that if books are similarly sacrificed, what will be left is an industry that doesn’t care about its product, focuses on creating grandiose supply chains instead of amplifying demand, has no idea what its customers want, sees value only in commodification, and has to keep spinning out hit after hit after hit just to keep the doors open. The result? A beast that consumes itself. I truly wish I had heard some mention of this at the conference. Maybe next year.

(skip first 1:05)

Click on album cover to hear the track:

Check out the whole recording here. Please. You will be so happy.

Jimmy Ruffin

While writing my book on heartbreak (”The Wisdom of a Broken Heart,” due out in September ‘09), I’ve turned again and again to that time honored source of knowledge and solace: music.

Here are the lyrics to my current all-time fave. It is just so wrenching and poetic. Grab a kleenex and enjoy.

WHAT BECOMES OF THE BROKEN HEARTED

Songwriters: James Dean/Paul Riser/William Weatherspoon

As I walk this land of broken dreams
I have visions of many things
But happiness is just an illusion
Filled with sadness and confusion

What becomes of the broken hearted
Who had love, that’s now departed
I know I’ve got to find
Some kind of peace of mind, maybe

The roots of love grow all around
But for me they come a tumblin’ down
Every day heartaches grow a little stronger
I can’t stand this pain much longer

I walk in shadows searching for light
Cold and alone, no comfort in sight
Hoping and praying for someone to care
Always moving and going nowhere

What becomes of the broken hearted
Who had love, that’s now departed
I know I’ve got to find
Some kind of peace of mind, help me

I’m searching though I don’t succeed
But someone look, there’s a growing need
All is lost, there’s no place for beginning
All that’s left is an unhappy ending

Now what becomes of the broken-hearted
Who had love, that’s now departed
I know I’ve got to find
Some kind of peace of mind

I’ll be searching everywhere
Just to find someone to care
I’ll be looking everyday
I know I’m gonna find a way

Nothing’s gonna stop me now
I’ll find a way somehow
I’ll be searching everywhere

No, brother, I'll never grow better
'Tis useless to tell me so now
My broken heart is only awaiting
For a resting place under the snow
I was thinking last night, dear brother
How happy our home was with joy
When a serpent crept into our Eden
In the form of fair Christine LeRoy

I was thinking last night of our wedding
One year ago only tonight
When we stood 'neath the gaslights so happy
In jewels and garments of white
When she came with the face of an angel
To wish us a lifetime of joy
My heart sank within at the malice
In the face of fair Christine LeRoy

Diamonds gleamed high in her tresses
Falling back from her ivory brow
And glistened like stars in the heavens
On her fingers as white as the snow
When she gave her white hand to my husband
I knew he thought me a toy
By the side of that radiant beauty
That beautiful Christine LeRoy

Time passed away and my husband
Grew thoughtless and careworn each day
I knew 'twas the wiles of the demon
Who so artfully lured him away
When at last one bright evening I found them
'Twas a sight all my life to destroy
Hand in hand with her head on his shoulder
Sat my husband and Christine LeRoy

Now brother, be kind to your darling
For my heart has grown sick now and faint
For the thoughts of the wiles of the demon
In the beautiful form of a saint
When I sleep 'neath the snowdrifts of winter
Where no sorrow or pain can destroy
Just tell them they've murdered me, brother
God forgive him and Christine LeRoy

Satta Massagana

The Abyssinians

So beautiful. Such harmonies. So ridiculously laid back. National anthem of reggae, some say.

I hear that the non-English sounding lyrics (Satta Massagana Ahamlai, for example) are Hebrew. But I speak Hebrew and I don’t understand these words. But what do I know. Jah Rastafari.

08-satta-massagana.mp3

From the “Diva” soundtrack from about 20 yrs ago.

sentimental-walk.mp3