My Own Private Idaho Soundtrack

I recently had the pleasure to re-screen Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho. Idaho starts out on a dead run with River Phoenix standing still in the middle of a road, looking into the distance and seeing that big landscape smile back at him, only to narcolepsy-out and wish-fulfill a loving mother. A quick jump to hustling, the Muffler Man, more hustling, and then those salmon chasing their dna up the stream -- and that’s before we are done with the opening credits. (And it must be said: River Phoenix is relentlessly alive in the film, giving the character layer upon layer of emotional depth.) The movie is a noted hybrid, with, to mention but one filmic aspect, the use of 8mm (documentary-like) footage to conjure up pieces of the past. But that hybridity also pervades the soundtrack. Eddy Arnold, Rudy Valee, Bill Stafford (who won an Independent Spirit Award for his work on the film), Madonna, Elton John. You get the picture. I can’t remember when I first saw Idaho, but I know I didn’t watch the end-credits and hear Shane MacGowan’s rough trade tale of The Old Main Drag.

The Pogues - The Old Main Drag [buy]

Bill Stafford, apparently known in the pedal steel world as “Mr. Smooth,” floats mysteriously through a number of musical interludes and gracefully pedal-steels his way through moving versions of “America the Beautiful” and "Home of the Free.” Unfortunately, they did not release an official soundtrack for the film and I haven’t been able to locate either of Stafford’s contributions online, but you can watch some clips of Bill and friends at his website having a good time and grinning through some laid-back Hawaiian songs, and this number:

wouldn't matter anyway

Sitting in Oli’s living room in Algete, Spain, I first heard Todd Snider singing “Iron Mike’s Main Man’s Last Request.” And God how I laughed with that song, and still sitting there stunned at how intimately Snider inhabited that character. He made real the subtle yet blunt reality of working class life, something that most people who talk or sing about poor folk have little real connection to. Snider's standing with, not singing about. Tonight I heard his most recent album, The Excitement Plan, for the first time, and found “Corpus Christi Bay” -- another perfectly sketched story of a man and the world he lives and that lives him. Here's a bit of America for you.

Todd Snider - Corpus Christi Bay [buy it at Snider's site]

with all this fever in my mind

Tallest Man on Earth - Where Do My Bluebird Fly [buy]

with friends of our own

Image from a Utah Phillips appreciation site. That's Kuddie sporting the smaller rose tattoo, with Utah Phillips to his left.

This one's for Don and Jack. See ya soon boys. Safe Journey.

Round the big fire there's good food and music,
Til the warm evening fades like a slow fiddle tune,
In silence we linger, bad times forgotten,
Our babies asleep, 'neath the great silver moon.

Kuddie - Scott's Creek Bluff [buy]

Billie Sunday, no.5, With a little help from my friends

So my friend and workmate Ed Moloy went down to Austin, Texas for one of those out of control librarian/archivist conferences, found his way to a Kat Edmonson concert, and promptly fell head over heels for the singer. It's not hard to hear why.

Kat Edmonson - Summertime [buy]

SalGal texted me today from the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass fest in San Francisco. Tons of great artists, including Mavis Staples, Todd Snider, and Booker T jamming with the Drive-By Truckers.


Booker T & the MGs version of "Summertime" has a somberness which captures something essential about the song.

Booker T. & The MGs [buy]


But then there's Billie and the gang putting another spin on the whole affair. Bunny Berigan's muted trumpet practically tells the whole story, but then Billie steps in as only Lady can to complete the tale.

Billie Holiday - Summertime [buy]

but flower too

I've been given a body. What should I do with it,
So singular, so my own?

For this joy, quiet, to live and breathe,
Who, tell me, am I to thank?

I am gardener, but flower too;
In the world's dungeon I am not alone.

On the windowpanes of eternity,
My breath, my warmth has already settled.

On it a pattern is pressed,
Unrecognizable of late.

Even if moment's gloom streams down -
The pattern, so dear, won't be crossed out!

-- Osip Mandelstam (1909)

Huey plus Jerry equals ?

Image from Dead.net

“This time there was no Grateful Dead to confuse the Party’s supporters...”

In popular media mythology the 1960s was a decade-long political and cultural confrontation between the Woodstock generation and what Nixon would come to call “the silent majority.” What is presented is basically one mass of people versus another. But like all myths that image is an extreme oversimplification, perhaps no more apparent than in regards to those who are grouped as “radicals.” Whether we want to talk about the internal divisions within the main civil rights organizations, the disagreements between counter-culturalists and political radicals over how to change society, or the battles between insurgent feminists and the male-dominated leftist organizations of the day, you don’t have to read too far in the history of the period to notice how much conflict existed within those not belonging to that so-called silent majority. In his history of the period, There’s A Riot Going On, Peter Doggett does a good job of tracking these differences as they relate to the more general politics of Rock and Roll in the late 60s and early 70s.

One of the more amusing, yet instructive, instances of culture clash that Doggett recounts concerns the March 5th, 1971 benefit concert for the Black Panther Party that the Grateful Dead headlined. During a plane trip to New York City on September, 16, 1970 (2 days before Hendrix’s death), the Dead had a long, enjoyable conversation with BPP leader Huey Newton -- of which the FBI filed a report on a few days later. (Huey and Jerry and the boys conversed while in another section of the plane Ray Charles beat the Dead’s tour manager, Sam Cutler, at chess.) The Dead were not known as a revolutionary political group, but they liked Newton and The Panthers’ concrete, everyday efforts to feed and clothe the poor in the Oakland community were just the sort of DIY social work (like the Diggers’ similar efforts) they supported. So when Newton later asked them to play the benefit concert the band agreed. They were to share the stage with two BPP-affiliated revolutionary groups, The Lumpen and The Vanguard. I haven’t been able to locate any information about The Vanguard, but you can read about and listen to The Lumpen’s 45rpm blast of R&B revolutionary-rhetoric, “Free Bobby Now,” over at the excellent GarageHangover (which includes comments from some original band members). As for the Dead’s set, well, as Doggett writes “even with an abridged set built around the mid-60s R&B hit “Turn on Your Lovelight,” [the Dead] made little impact on the predominantly black crowd.” (One song! Shortest Dead show ever?) This one-song-show isn’t listed on Archive.Org, but you can get a feeling for what the Dead were sounding like at the time from their February 1971 run at Capital Theatre -- the second night of which is conveniently released as Three From the Vault.

Grateful Dead - Bertha
Grateful Dead - Easy Wind