Coffee with Jill Sobule

Sarah, Underdog and Jilly Sue

My friend, Underdog Victorious, just returned from New York City -- she had the time of her life. (And thank you again Tami for making it possible.) Underdog had coffee with the Strange Light Cafe's patron saint, Jill Sobule. Earlier, Underdog was fed pineapple by punk cabaret artist Amanda Palmer. All the gory details in the near future. New York and Boston will never be the same -- and neither will Underdog Victorious.

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Cool paintings

Underdog, AFP -- and jazz hands

Update on "Singing in the Dark"

I just received an Email from Susan McKeown:

“Dear Vincent,

It's a bit hectic here this week as I draw all these threads together to launch the album and tour. In the midst of it I passed the $7,500 mark on Wednesday and backers are still signing up, so I'm thrilled that so many people are being reached and have come to help. Thank you so much for helping to spread the word...

Best,

Susan”

She would still love the help. And thank you for supporting her dream!

Vincent

The Path in Autumn

Last week Diva took me to Quarry Hill Nature Center. We often go there when we are down: the butterfly garden, the birds fluttering about, the water shimmering on the pond. It is a Manet painting come to life. It is like that place in my head I go to when I want to create.

We went somewhere different this time. A place I hadn’t been since I was a child, as part of a class trip, and had since forgotten that it even existed: an abandon grave yard hidden in one corner of the nature reserve. At first it didn’t look like a cemetery. It looked like an ordinary field on the side of a hill. Reading the sign at the entrance, I realized over 2,000 bodies were under our feet.

Cemeteries have never affected me that much -- all my relatives chose cremation. Their ashes were scattered in the north woods of Minnesota. Knowing they are where they wanted to be gives me solace. There was no solace here. It just unnerved me and left me shaken.

I haven’t really written or drawn in a week because of it. So many feelings were flapping in my mind like a skull full of sparrows. I wanted to say something profound but there was just too much in my head. What was each person’s story? What was the life each had led until they were dumped in this field? If I had lived a hundred years ago -- would I have been committed to the state hospital and be lying in an unmarked grave right now -- right here? Would my life have amounted to no more than that? I was overwhelmed and numb.

In the end, I just decided to say what I felt and hoped that is enough. I felt the way a soldier who fought at Gettysburg must have felt visiting the cemetery of their departed comrades. After all, these were soldiers in a war -- a war for understanding and acceptance for people like Diva and I: the mentally ill.

That war is far from over. At my feet were thousands that died in a very bad place: a place they once called an insane asylum. We don’t call it that anymore. We want too forget that we ever treated humans that way. We did. Only fifty or so of their graves are even marked. This is my Gettysburg. This is hallowed ground.

Diva looked at me and whispered, “When I die, bury me here.”

I understood, perhaps for the first time in my life, we are soldiers too. And we are only part way up the hill.

Vincent




http://www.qhnc.org/about.html

It All Sounds Like Chuck

Back in high school there was an artist in my class that I looked up to. His name was Andy and he was stunningly talented. He loved the music of the “rock group” Yes, which I never really got -- still don’t. I loved Neil Young, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, ELO and Supertramp. Whenever I played him any of my music, Andy would shake his head and say it all sounded like Chuck Berry in way that made me feel ashamed -- made me feel common. Thank God I never played him any of my Olivia Newton-John records.

Fast forward thirty years, Diva played me the movie Cadillac Records about Chess records and the birth of rock and roll. Sure, one can argue the point, but whenever I go round and round with someone on this -- it keeps coming back to Chuck. This guy picked up a guitar, put blues and country together, and invented rock and roll. He walked into Chess records, cut some tracks and duck-walked across the stage: segregation began to crumble, women of all races swooned as men (and women) started to play guitar just like that. I don’t care who you slap down on the table (from Louis Jordan to Little Richard) to trump me on this -- they didn’t have a guitar on their record that sounded like THAT. Nobody did. Now everybody does.

My friend was right -- it all sounds like Chuck. Andy saw a hick from the deep south walking out of a tarpaper shack with a guitar in a gunny sack. I see a gentleman who change the world as much as Bach or Beethoven.


Here is Chuck’s Ninth Symphony:

“Johnny B. Goode”
by Chuck Berry

Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans
Way back up in the woods among the evergreens
There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood
Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode
He never ever learned to read or write so well
But he could play the guitar like a-ringing a bell

{Refrain}
Go go Johnny go, go
Go Johnny go, go
Go Johnny go, go
Johnny B. Goode

He used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack
And sit beneath the trees by the railroad track
Old engineers would see him sitting in the shade
Strummin' to the rhythm that the drivers made
People passing by would stop and say
Oh, my how that little country boy could play

{Refrain}

His mother told him, "Someday you will be a man
And you will be the leader of a big old band
Many people coming from miles around
To hear you play your music when the sun go down
Maybe some day your name'll be in lights
Saying Johnny B. Goode tonight

{Refrain}


Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEq62iQo0eU

Singing in the Dark

This week I received a sweet E-mail from Dublin singer/songwriter Susan McKeown telling me how much she loved my blog. She also sent me an MP3 of her new song “A Woman Like That” (with lyrics based on the Anne Sexton poem “Her Kind”). The compelling song was a wonderful surprise. I have been looking forward to hearing her upcoming album, Singing in the Dark, ever since I read an interview with her in the Spring 2010 issue of NAMI Advocate.

The passion behind the album is something near and dear to our hearts here at the Strange Light Cafe: understanding madness and creativity. The lyrics are from poets of the last thousand years who were writing through the lens of depression, mania or substance abuse.

Susan has financed the album on her own so far, a true labor of love, but she needs our help to finish. Please go to http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1597578099/singing-in-the-dark and learn what you can do. If you help, you could receive signed advance copies, extra tracks, tickets to her show, attend meet and greets or even suggest your own reward.

Your assistance is needed, not only to finish the album -- but to give it a proper release and to make sure it is heard. Help Susan complete her dream. Together we shine.

Vincent


Below is the Anne Sexton poem that the song “A Woman Like That (Her Kind)” is based on and a link to the video.

“A Woman Like That (Her Kind)”
Lyrics: Anne Sexton
Music: Lisa Gutkin

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1597578099/singing-in-the-dark

Daniel Johnson is Alive and Well... and Living in Texas

At the beginning and the end of the great documentary “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” the artist/songwriter is seen as a ghost. The producer points out (via his commentary on the DVD ) that that was intentional, since Johnston is a ghost of what he once was. He certainly knows Daniel better than I (having spent two years with him making the film) but I am in awe of the two Daniels in the film.

The first Daniel was a sweet, scrawny McDonald’s employee with endless charm. He recorded amazing album after album on a cheap cassette recorder and handed them out to anyone who would listen in Austin Texas during the early 80’s. He slyly conned his way on to MTV when they came to town and stole the show. But something went wrong just as the door to stardom was opening.

A friend and the editor of the Austin Chronicle, Louis Black, was pulled out of bed on Christmas of 1985 and brought to see Daniel in the middle of the local river -- and a mental breakdown. Louis remember the aftermath the way one would recall a jumbo jet crashing into their toddler’s wading pool on the veranda:

“All great artist are crazy -- but there is a difference between the abstract artist being crazy and this person doing damage to you or to himself... here was a real sick person... we did the most pedestrian thing possible -- we committed him.

“If I was around with Van Gogh -- I’ve always had contempt for the people who didn’t understand genius -- and here I am being given my shot and what I was saying, ‘Please put him in the hospital. We don’t wanna have to deal with him. We don’t know what to do.’”

Another friend of Johnston, Jeff Tartakov, recalls, “When I went to visit him in the hospital they wanted to know what my relationship with Daniel was. I had been working informally as his publicist, but -- ummm -- I needed to tell them something a little bit better than that and I assumed that Randy Kemper, after having been beaten over the head with a lead pipe, did not want to continue managing Daniel, so I said I was his manager.”

Jeff was tireless in sending out tape after tape to bands around the music world until over a 150 acts from Tom Waits to Beck had covered Johnston’s powerful and quirky songs. After all, Jeff’s client was simply unable to perform live due to his prior engagement. Johnston was once mistakenly discharged from Bellevue and showed up at the legendary birth place of punk rock, CBGBs. He was the opening act. They loved him.

That memorable week he also recorded with Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground, wandered around New York as his host (the band Sonic Youth) tried to find him. He was tossed on a bus for home, got off too early and caused an elderly lady to jump out her second story window. He was walking past her place and decided to help her by exorcising demons he decided were bothering her. Johnston wasn’t a legend when he went to New York, he was when he left.

And the other Johnston? The Johnston of today? The one who is a ghost of his former self? He now lives in Texas when he is not touring the world. But this time it is his wonderful music that leaves the audience speechless -- not his behavior. His unique art work has garnered shows from London to LA, selling for thousands of dollars. He may not be the angelic, playful kid (or a lit bomb rolled into an unsuspecting room) that he once was --- but his legendry wit is anything but phantom. He told an audience at the Sundance Festival just what he thought of “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” after a screening in 2005:

“As comedies go it is pretty funny: Daniel goes to jail, Daniel goes to the mental hospital, Daniel crashes a plane.

“I sure appreciate my parents -- when I ended up in a mental hospital because of my manic depression they let me live back at home at my age... they allow me to play piano but not too late at night... and dad doesn’t like it when I draw naked women.”

I am ashamed to admit it, I just heard Daniel Johnston’s music and have seen his art for the first time last week. It is as unpolished, real and charming as Daniel -- either Daniel.


You can see and hear more of Daniel Johnston at his site.

Walking the Cow

Just in case you think Daniel’s music is dark and serious enjoy “Walking the Cow” from his 1983 release, Hi, How Are You? It highlights his wicked senses of humor.

I dedicate this to my friend, An Introspective Mess.


Walking the Cow
By Daniel Johnston


Trying to remember,
But my feelings can’t know for sure.
Try to reach out
Bur it’s gone...

Lucky stars in your eyes...
I’m walking the cow...

I really don’t know how I came here...
I really don’t know why I’m stayin’ here...
Oh, oh, oh. I am walking the cow....

Lucky stars in your eyes...
I’m walking the cow...

Lucky stars in your eyes...
I’m walking the cow...

Tired to point my finger,
But the wind keep blowin’ me around
In circles... circles....

I really don’t know what I have to fear...
I really don’t know why I have to care...
Oh, oh, oh. I am walking the cow....
Lucky stars in your eyes...



Click Here For the Video

Daniel Johnston music is available here, from his site.