New Politics, Summer 2016
In October 1969, pianist/singer/composer Mose Allison recorded
"Monsters of the Id." At a time when recent history had
witnessed a police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention, the police
crackdown on protesters at Berkeley's People's Park, and popular
backlash against antiwar, New Left, counterculture, and Black Power
sentiment, Allison began by warning that the title characters no
longer remain hidden, but have come out in full view. To the
accompaniment of a slightly discordant horn section, Allison—singing
in his characteristic style, with its idiosyncratic pauses and
accents—spins a variety of often ghoulish metaphors that remain
just as timely in today’s era of Tea Party, torture reports, Stand
Your Ground, and Donald Trump—They're sprouting through the
cracks ... They're deputizing maniacs/ Creatures from the swamp
rewrite their own Mein Kampf.
By the time Allison recorded "Monsters of the Id," he had
been on the music scene for more than ten years, and, though
commercial success largely eluded him, he had gained a devoted
following on the basis of his jazz persona and his witty, literate,
and sardonic lyrics (who else, for instance, would write a love song
titled "Your Molecular Structure" with phrases like Your
molecular structure is really something swell/ A high-frequency
modulated Jezebel?). Born in 1927 in Tippo, an
unincorporated town on the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta,
Allison had grown up on the white side of the Jim Crow line. After
a stint in the military and graduating from Louisiana State
University with a degree in English, Allison migrated to New York
City in the mid-fifties, where he worked backing up such jazz
luminaries as Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, and Stan Getz. Immersing
himself in the New York jazz scene while holding tight to his
southern roots, Allison ultimately would craft a style reflecting a
capacious range of influences, including such jazz musicians as
Lester Young, Erroll Garner, and Thelonious Monk; blues singers Percy
Mayfield and Muddy Waters; popular performer Nat King Cole; composers
Bela Bartok and Charles Ives; and literary figures like Kurt Vonnegut
and Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
Allison cut his first album as leader of his own trio, "Back
Country Suite," for Prestige Records in 1957. Inspired by
the pastorales of such composers as Duke Ellington, Igor
Stravinsky, and Aaron Copland, Allison strung together nine
instrumentals and one vocal track portraying southern life, fusing
the earthy vernacular of the Delta blues with the brio and
sophistication of modern jazz. As Allison's biographer, Patti Jones,
points out in One Man's Blues: The Life and Music of Mose
Allison (London: Quartet Books, 1995), it was rare for a
white musician to play the country blues in this era when the modern
civil rights movement was in its infancy, and several years before
the folk and blues revival of the sixties—two years, even, before
Samuel B. Charters’s pioneering study, The Country
Blues—especially one who "was earning impressive
credentials in New York City as an accomplished pianist in the modern
jazz idiom, a more sophisticated musical style harmonically,
melodically and rhythmically."
The one vocal track on "Back Country Suite" is titled
simply "Blues," though it would later come to be called
"Young Man Blues." In his conversational voice, Allison
sings a lament for the lost status of youth, with its strength and
virility, and the pre-eminence of age and wealth. Well a young man
ain't nothing in this world these days—voice unaccompanied,
like nothing so much as a field holler, before the piano comes in.
Beginning with this simple line, a generation of younger American
writers and musicians would take note, first of the music's energy
and vitality, and then, often much later, the discovery of the
performer's race. In Richard Farina’s early-countercultural novel
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me (1966), set in 1958
in an Ivy League school, protagonist Gnossos Pappadopoulis complains
when he comes into his dorm room and finds his friends listening to
Dave Brubeck. “Burn that Brubump crap, man, I’ve got new sounds.
What are you doing, starting a Mickey Mouse club or what?” Gnossos
hands “Back Country Suite” to Heff, his black roommate, who says,
“Who’s Mose Allison? ... Never heard of him.... An’ I don’t
dig names like Mose…. It’s Uncle Tomming.” “He’s white,
baby,” Gnossos replies, “Don’t lose your cool.”
Similarly, science fiction writer/television critic Harlan Ellison
would write in 1969 that the “biggest aural shock of my life ...
was finding out, about ten years ago, that Mose Allison was white."
Blues singer John Hammond reflected his similar experience in Los
Angeles in 1962, having heard Allison on record: “I imagined him to
be a black guy from Chicago or Memphis. An old-time blues-singer guy.
Was I ever surprised when I walked ... [into] the Lighthouse and saw
Mose Allison, a white guy, playing in this club.” As Allison would
remember, even Muddy Waters was surprised on their first meeting,
having assumed Allison was black.
If anything, Allison made a bigger impact on British musicians. Pete
Townshend, for instance, would describe visiting an American friend
living in London in 1963, who pulled "Back Country Suite"
from his sizable record collection. "The man's voice was
heaven," the Who’s guitarist recalls. "So cool, so
decisively hip, uncomplicated and spaced away from the mainstream of
gravel-voiced Delta bluesmen.” Then, when his friend showed
Townshend Allison’s photograph, Townshend continued, "‘He's
fucking white!’ I scream. A real, cool, relaxed, genuine,
funky, hipped out, WHITE hero." Former Rolling Stone Mick Taylor
would remember, “If you were British playing the blues in the
1960s, you were influenced by Mose Allison.” As testament to his
influence, a wide range of musicians have covered Allison’s songs:
American performers like Johnny Rivers, Bobbie Gentry, Bonnie Raitt,
and Chris Spedding and bands like Paul Butterfield’s Better Days,
Hot Tuna, Blue Cheer, and even the Spiders—the band that would
evolve into Alice Cooper; British bands and performers like The Who,
John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, The Yardbirds, Elvis Costello, and the
punk band The Clash. Former Cream bassist Jack Bruce backed Allison
on the live album “Lessons in Living” (1982); Van Morrison,
Georgie Fame, and Ben Sidran released a tribute album, “Tell Me
Something: The Songs of Mose Allison” (1996); and American
singer/songwriter Greg Brown recorded a 1997 homage, “Mose Allison
Played Here.”
Allison’s crossing of racial boundaries—in his music, his voice,
his name—embodies what jazz critic Albert Murray terms “the
incontestably mulatto” nature of American culture. But Allison
realizes this whole concept is problematic, based as it is on a large
degree of white appropriation of African-American culture, a topic
Allison would satirize in his 1989 song “Ever Since I Stole the
Blues”: Well the blues police from down in Dixieland, tried to
catch me with the goods on hand/ They broke down my door but I was
all smiles, I had already shipped them to the British Isles.
The opposition between black/white represented only one of several
boundaries Allison worked to break down throughout his career. His
entire oeuvre focuses on merging such opposites as
southern/northern, rural/urban, highbrow/popular. As he explained in
1962, "I've always figured that you've got to be able to
assimilate what normally seem to be opposing elements. That's
the way reality is." He has ignored the boundaries of
musical genre (and in the process, given fits to the marketing
departments of his various record companies). His music reflects the
polyglot diversity of American culture, a fact demonstrated by the
wide range of songs he has covered—including jazz by Duke Ellington
and Dizzy Gillespie; country by Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell;
blues by Percy Mayfield, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, and
Willie Dixon; and such standards from the Great American Songbook as
“St. Louis Blues,” “When My Dream Boat Comes Home,” “The
Tennessee Waltz,” and “You Are My Sunshine” (the latter of
which Allison presents in a mournful rendition much more in keeping
with the song’s lyrics than more upbeat, popular versions).
As an example of his defiantly pluralistic fusion of various cultural
traditions, Allison spent several years in the early-seventies
listening to classical piano sonatas as well as modernist composers
like Elliot Carter and avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor in an
attempt to improve his ability to play—and improvise—with his
left hand. Today,” he commented in 1974, “I’m not so dependent
on the one-handed bop style I used for quite a while.” Allison also
is a student of world music, arguing that all music can be broken
down into a small number of categories. “In fact,” he has said,
“there’s only three kinds of music: Bach, the blues, and
Schoenberg. Bach is linear, melodic; Schoenberg is new sounds,
twelve-tone harmony; and a universal blues is played in every
country. Everything else is a mixture of those three elements to a
certain degree.” As for the blues, “All societies have something
akin to the blues. There’s a universal lament that’s
interchangeable with country blues, and I’m real interested in
that.... I went to a Chinese opera one time in San Francisco and
there was an old guy who sounded just like Lightnin’ Hopkins to me.
They were essentially singing blues harmonies.”
Drummer and occasional Allison accompanist Billy Cobham has described
what he calls Allison’s “American folkloric proletariat
connection.” To a large extent, this vision grows out of Allison’s
working-class view of his work, based on his relationship with his
various record companies. Allison’s first record contract, with
Prestige, required him to produce six records in two years, paying
him only $250 per record. The contract was fairly standard for its
era, though as Allison’s biographer Patti Jones comments, “From
the artist’s perspective, flooding the market with an overabundance
of material, especially if musically inconsistent, could only be
damaging to the consumer’s perceptions of the artist’s work. More
significantly, the notion of a new, developing recording artist being
legally obligated to deplete his or her catalog quickly, producing
music in assembly-line fashion, is a short-sighted practice
militating against long-term success. Unless the artist is naturally
prolific, mass production often results in a burn-out that destroys
the creative process, taking the artist’s career with it.” His
next record company, Atlantic, pushed Allison to record more
commercially accessible music. “They kept sending me all this Gene
Autry material,” he said. “They wanted to make a pop singer out
of me.” By the seventies, Atlantic was pressuring Allison to add
back-up singers and a disco beat.
Making no money off his own records, Allison survived through
songwriting royalties and incessant touring. In the eighties, he
typically played 220-230 nights a year, a lifestyle he wryly
commented on in such songs as “The Getting’ Paid Waltz” (1989),
“Cabaret Card” (1994), and “Nightclub” (1971)—Been
working in nightclubs so long, can hardly stand the break of day/
Run-down rooms and bad pianos, but it’s still the only way. In
his mocking narrative on his own lack of commercial success, “Gettin’
There” (1987), he laments: If I was selling fantasy, I’d be a
millionaire/ But I’m not disillusioned... But I’m getting there.
In
the late sixties, Allison wrote “Top Forty,” a blistering satire
of the commercial style of music Atlantic wanted him to produce
(though he did not record it until 1987)—When I make my top
forty, big beat rock and roll record everything is gonna be just
fine... /No more philosophic melancholia, eight hundred pounds of
electric genitalia. Allison rejects accusations of cynicism,
though, saying in a 1986 interview, “To me, the most cynical
musical experience of this century is when you get four
self-indulgent young millionaires together and they tell everybody
all they need is love.”
The black humor and ambivalence running throughout Allison’s work
reflects the literary influence of writers like Vonnegut. Lyrics like
I don’t worry about a thing, ‘cause I know nothing’s going
to be all right grow out of his conviction that “ambivalence is
just where we are. The universe is built on the interaction of
opposing forces. You’ve got to learn to live with that. You have to
be able to entertain opposing ideas at the same time.” The darkly
humorous world view is summed up in the title of his 1982 song,
“Kiddin’ on the Square,” which he says is “one of my favorite
street sayings; doesn’t seem to be in use anymore and probably
needs explaining. It could be paraphrased as ‘jivin’ for real’
or joking with serious intent—sounds like someone I know.” For
instance, Allison presents a droll take on the apocalypse in “Ever
Since the World Ended”: Dogmas that we once defended no longer
seem worthwhile/ Ever since the world ended, I face the future with a
smile.
Allison’s
blues sensibility provides a vehicle for his social and political
commentary. As he has said, “So much of the country blues is
innuendo and disguised comment. You really have to know the jargon to
be able to get through. In other words, the plantation blues were the
oppressed saying it right out in front of their tormentors and the
tormentors didn’t even pick it up.” In his own work, Allison
rarely sings about specific topical issues, giving his commentary
more universal relevance. His 1962 song, “Your Mind is on
Vacation,” could just as easily describe our current crop of
political pundits and talk-radio hosts—If silence was golden,
you couldn’t raise a dime/ Because your mind is on vacation and
your mouth is working overtime.
“Everybody
Cryin’ Mercy,” recorded in the summer of 1968, makes oblique
reference to the contemporary situation of war, assassinations, and
racial rebellion, but remains timeless in its commentary. People
running round in circles, don’t know what they’re headed for/
Everybody cryin’ peace on earth, just as soon as we win this war.
Innuendo and indirection do not make Allison’s lyrics less pointed.
His 1971 song “Western Man,” for instance, is a two minute and
forty second history of imperialism. Western man had a plan, and
with his gun in his hand/ Free from doubt, went right out on the
world. “Big Brother,” first written in the late sixties,
remained just as relevant when he got around to recording it in 1989
(and equally so in today’s world of NSA spying and Citizens
United)—Don’t say nothing bad about a CEO …/ I only tell
you ‘cause it’s true, Big Brother is watching you.
Allison takes more direct aim at modern celebrity culture in “Who’s
In, Who’s Out” (1993)—Let’s all get excited about the
party to which we’re uninvited—and the competing priorities
of consumer culture in “Dr. Jeckyl and
Mr. Hyde” (1989): Do I show my concern for the needy, For the
folks who are living outside/ Or am I just plain greedy, Dr. Jeckyl
and Mr. Hyde. “The More You Get” (1997) focuses on the
fundamental insecurity of acquisitive consumerism—The chance to
make money is hard to refuse/ But the more you get, the more you got
to lose—while “Numbers on Paper” (1997) highlights the
dehumanizing nature of capitalism: Numbers on paper, designate
your ration/ In or out of fashion, world beyond compassion.
In
a career spanning more than sixty years, Allison has confronted not
only his own commercial irrelevance, but also his own aging. And like
everything else, he has done so with his typical ironic humor.
“Certified Senior Citizen” (1994) warns, You may ignore me,
but doctors adore me…You don’t like my drivin’, I don’t like
your jivin’—while “My Brain” (2010) offers the reminder,
My brain is losin’ power/ twelve hundred neurons every hour.
Most poignantly, in 1997 Allison offered a redux of his original
vocal performance with “Old Man Blues.” Forty years after
bursting on the scene lamenting the lost status of the young man,
Allison now portrays the cultural logic of consumer capitalism
shifting power to youth, with its sex appeal and purchasing power,
while marginalizing the elderly. Well an old man ain’t nothing
in the USA. .. And thus Allison brings the story full circle.
But is the man serious?
Nah,
he’s just kiddin’ on the square.
No comments:
Post a Comment