I Get So Excited, The Doo-Dads, See-Saw Scenes and Greatest Kids of All!

I love Ian Hunter, unconditionally.  I love Mott the Hoople, of course, but I especially love his solo work, which is when I came on the scene.  And, someday, I'll no doubt write my track-by-track explanation of why You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic ranks up there with the best of the best in my world (but I might just try that with something completely neglected like Short Back 'N Sides first).  It doesn't matter because, elementally, one of the things Ian Hunter always sticks close to and what I love him most for, was most clearly exhibited by a song off of his first solo album, a song called "I Get So Excited." That song, which closes the album, is 4 minutes of ecstatic effusion.  "Call me a fan, that's just what I am," Hunter shouts against a driving guitar and drum rhythm that pushes him to prove his conviction to the last moment.

What "I Get So Excited" luxuriates in is precisely that piece of rock and roll DNA which I find to be missing in most of today's rock--a willingness to celebrate all-but-out-of-control fun.  The Doo-Dads--a children's rock group founded by members of indie-cred-out-the-wazoo groups like Absolute Ceiling, The Bindlestiffs and  The PedalJets and Ken Lovern, whose credits include work with great Kansas City blues and jazz singers Ida McBeth and Kevin Mahogany--manages to carry forward that element of rock and roll in a way almost no one else in rock does.  For that reason, which is just a starter, I think Yeah!, Yeah!, Yeah!, the first Doo-Dads record in five years, is as fine a rock and roll record as I've heard in a long time.  (P.S.  I think 2012 is already a great year for music, and the albums I have set aside to focus on this one are extraordinary and heavyweight....but this record needs to be considered in that context.  This album should be played next to Springsteen's Wrecking Ball, Santigold's The Master of My Make Believe and Killer Mike's R.A.P. Music--the Doo-Dads are making an important contribution to the overarching dialogue.)

Yes, unapologetically, Yeah!, Yeah!, Yeah! is a record aimed at kids.  "Gimme Some Room," the frenetic opening rocker, is a song crying out for space kids need to express themselves. It's high energy from the beginning, exclamatory drums and keyboard almost out of control. When lead singer Mike Niewald cries out "Let's go, go, GO!," he's not holding back, and it's understood that the kids in the house are being called chips all in.  I've seen the Doo-Dads live often enough to know the response is more exuberant than any casual adult listener could imagine. That's precisely because the music earns it.

The second song on the album, "The Greatest Kid," may be an excellent album's finest moment, but it has to be.  It starts off telling every member of the audience, "You're a Star," reinforced by big sustained chords and bass.  Musically, the song is a cross of the always-underground Big Star and the ground-defining Beatles--all aimed at letting kids know they're beautiful just they way they are.

"Hey Mr. Robot" follows as a sci-fi freak-out, again, loyal to the earliest tradition in rock and roll, the novelty song from outer space.  In this case, Lovern's scary movie organ dances around the narrative of a child obsessed with a favorite toy that, unfortunately, is not waterproof.  When Mr. Robot goes to his somewhat grisly end at the bottom of the swimming pool, backing singers cry you "won't come up," with an abject horror worthy of Dr. Demento and, what? ...Count Five and the 13th Floor Elevators, for starters.

The record never lets up. Shiner's Paul Malinowski's production and heaps of guitar sustain provide big rock bravado to adventures like "Ridin' My Bike" and hanging out at the "See-Saw Scene."  "What Are You Waiting For," with its refrain "welcome to the great outdoors," sounds like the greatest TV show theme for a series not yet created.  "Popcorn Party" is an ecstatic Bo Diddley rave up with dynamics that echo at least one wonderful Velvet Underground cut about euphoria out of bounds. And "Lemonade Stand," the album closer, is a convincing argument that childhood itself is not without its own ironic distance, a sense of nostalgia built into summer afternoons chasing those that came before.

Among my top three favorites here on any given day (and the others may change) is the song "Why , Why, Why."  Yes, it's a mid-tempo reflection on just how many questions children have about the world around them.  Monique Danielle's gospel-inflected backing vocals insist that these childhood questions are as important as any existential dilemmas yet to come. From Lovern's always exuberant and colorful keyboard to the swelling rhythm section (which starts with a spare, yes questioning, bass line and builds to remarkable emphatic urgency), this cut celebrates a passion for learning.  Again, a trait I'll argue the Doo-Dads comprehend in a way most grown ups (nevermind most of their musical peers) just don't understand.

Building Bridges Everywhere, the Unifying Vision of Ron Casanova

I learned yesterday that my friend Ron Casanova died. 

(Our friend, a voice in my head corrects....because so many people I know shared a connection with Casanova, and a connection to Cas was somehow inherently intimate.)

I haven't yet learned the details of his death, but I knew Cas was HIV positive so early in our relationship that it seemed he'd always been staring death down.  And I haven't seen Cas in ages either, not since a Poor People's Summit in Philadelphia in the late 90s. 

So it's almost shocking how much this hurts. I can smell his pipe and his paints, together the fundamental incense of his home on 34th and Garfield, the home he shared with his girlfriend, Karen and her son Ethan.  Re-reading passages from the memoir he wrote with Stephen Blackburn, I can hear his soft gravelly voice insisting on a point, sussing out the heart of what he really wants to say. 

I can hear him laugh, too. In the memoir, he claims that he never had much of a sense of humor, but that doesn't mean he didn't laugh.  He had a warm laugh, a booming extension of that voice, and it was a laugh that was acknowledging a point of connection.  With Cas, there was no discernible break between the political and the personal.  Every bond mattered.

I don't suppose Cas ever took bonds for granted.  A Puerto Rican African-American, he grew up in the 1950s in a racist environment outside of even his own ethnic community, the only support network he had scrounged out of a life on the streets on the Upper West Side of New York.  Some of his earliest memories involve running away from his orphanage in Staten Island seeking out his sisters and brothers on 104th and 115th street.  At 16, burglary landed him in Coxsackie Correctional Facility; his own version of a Randall P. McMurphy ploy then put him in Matteawan State Hospital in Dutchess County, Beacon, New York--an experience that led him to call One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest a "good story" but a whitewash. 

When I met him in 1991, he'd lived a lifetime of activism after prison, starting with the Greenwich Village Scene of the early 60s and culminating in his key role in the Tompkins Square homeless movement.  In all of that time, Casanova had lived close to the edge, battling heroin addiction and often living on the street. He arrived in Kansas City a self-proclaimed "born again," but he never once preached religion to me.  He was too politically savvy and pragmatic for that.  Also, I knew how certain memories stung--preachers preaching at the hungry on the promise of food.

Cas taught me a lot about such humiliations caused by people pledging to do good.  He taught me more than I could ever list here.  Those lessons started the very first time I met him when he showed me and a group of friends the movie Takeover, by filmmakers Peter Kinoy and Pamela Yates.  That movie documented the 1989 Housing Now! march on Washington,  resulting in a May Day housing takeover coordinated across the United States.  The movie starred Casanova as a key leader who emerged in that struggle.  But the line I always remember is something Cas says about the strong women leaders at the front of the movement.  At a crucial moment, they don't hesitate and debate strategy as he implies men would.  You can hear the smile on his face when he says, "They led, and I followed."  It plays in my head like a mantra.

He taught me in earnest when I attended his Saturday morning meetings with the homeless at Metropolitan Lutheran Ministries Homeless Center on 10th street.  He invited those in the center to share their stories, and I learned the details of how hard it was to look for work, trying to get out of the shelter system.  I learned about showers and shoes.  I learned about shelter trustees and other reasons so many of the homeless hated the shelter system.  They didn't argue so much as confirm each others' experiences.  Cas's role was to invite them to discuss possibilities.

Cas and I formed an early alliance because he so clearly understood and articulated the connection between homelessness and other social issues, including freedom of expression.  I was a co-founder of the Greater Kansas City Coalition Against Censorship, and Cas's vision and message helped to illustrate the limits of conventional wisdom about free speech.  He could tell anyone willing to listen how and why the media really only showed one side of poverty issues, talking to "experts" for guidance instead of the people who lived it every day.  Because of our alliance with Casanova and the Kansas City Missouri Union of the Homeless, the Coalition went beyond its established Culture Under Fire anti-censorship activities to co-host a nationwide Break the Blackout Summit, which featured leaders from poor peoples' organizations who came together to discuss common strategy and arrived at a landmark media sharing agreement.

Cas would show Takeover anywhere and everywhere he could and talk to people about the connection between his homeless movement and their lives.  I will forever be thankful to Michelle Markowitz at Davey's Uptown Ramblers Club, one of the most popular music clubs in our city then as it is today, for letting us hold regular events in what was then a small space.  Cas would show Takeover, and then he'd get up and say a few words that drew a bar of weary regulars into impassioned discussion.  (Howard Zinn might have been happy to know some of us first heard of A People's History of the United States during Cas's barroom testimonials.) He would enlist Kansas City's legendary Sin City Disciples for a terrific event (one of those nights when a sense of community and shared ideas seemed far more important than the money) at Harlings Upstairs, and his call would find response from many others on the local music scene, including the Midwestern Musical Company.

Out of all of this support, he worked with a band of local homeless to build three Empowerment Houses, where people lived together collectively.  Though all but one of those homes would collapse after only a short while, Cas never quit working to steer resources to the local homeless community.  When the house of cards would come tumbling down, he'd still be standing there looking for a way to rebuild.  What didn't collapse was a vision of possibility he planted in more hearts and minds than we could ever possibly count.

Over the four years he lived here, he turned more and more to his painting.  I felt like I watched his art grow exponentially more accomplished and more powerful over those last couple of years, living in that little house on Garfield.  Maybe, in some ways, it was because, his health uncertain and medications making him sick, he knew his vision was his greatest strength. 

It could also be argued that he knew vision was the greatest poverty in the world surrounding him, the one he most needed to address.  Toward that end, he found new ways to work with art. In addition to neighborhood reading classes he'd held for some time, he enlisted art students, such as Jeremy McConnell from the Kansas City Art Institute, to hold free classes for neighborhood kids in his front yard on Saturday mornings.

At one point, Cas and I made a trip to my hometown in Oklahoma, Bartlesville, so that he could show his art at the town's West Side Community Center as well as one of our churches.  He received enthusiastic reaction drawing connections between those using the town's new food pantry and shelter and those who weren't necessarily on the streets but who had lost their jobs in the decade's corporate downsizing. Cas's constant message was that we needed to come together, as he always signed his name "through peace, love and understanding."  Two decades before Occupy, he showed such bridges could be built everywhere that he went.

So now Occupy is here and Cas, the man I knew and loved, is somewhere else. In his final days, he no doubt took some satisfaction in the hope that his inclusive vision was catching fire. As suggested by the name of his book, Each One Teach One, he never wanted to leave his work without finding someone else to take over.  The only thing is no one can truly take Cas's place.  No other vision is quite his.

Perhaps that's why one seemingly minor passage choked me up when I was re-reading his book today.  It's that passage where he talks about his sense of humor:

"Most jokes make me angry rather than amused because most jokes are at the expense of another person. I don't see the humor in that....But I draw and paint a lot of cartoons. I like to do cartoons because of the lightness that goes into them. Painting something happy helps me have that mood."

There's a contradiction there that's as simple and complex as being human.  And that's what Cas did best--boldly model what's best about humanity and call on us to share it.  His whole life was an argument why.


Please checkout Takeover, available at http://www.skylightpictures.com/

And Each One Teach One, http://www.amazon.com/Each-One-Teach-Poverty-Activist/dp/1880684373/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336620386&sr=1-1

Power & Lights On, The Griot Gathering and the Sound of the City

The East Meets West of Troost compilation, The Griot Gathering, is a unique album in the strictest sense.  For starters it explicitly tackles Kansas City issues--from the disregard for human life at the Honeywell plant, to the dismantling of the public school system, to the racist dress code in the Power & Light District—while contemplating their connection to a range of universal issues including the fate and purpose of hip hop.  That focused directness underscores its uniqueness, but that also unifies the album because it works like a train of thought.

On “The Colonel’s Brief,” longtime Honeywell worker and human rights fighter Maurice Copeland declares the necessity of political dissent as an act of patriotism.  With “Community Update,” Rapper Dirty D (aka King Kihei) focuses on the nuclear weapons plant issues that motivate Copeland’s activism, stressing its significance to the larger community.  Then, Cherith Brook’s “Honeywell” directly calls out the Kansas City nuclear weapons plant for giving hundreds of workers chronic beryllium disease.  Sahjkaya’s reggae-flavored “Nuclear Weapons” contemplates the insanity of nuclear testing, and, on “Self Destruction,” rappers Theodore “Priest” Hughes and Desmond “3-3-7” Jones (aka The Recipe) specifically tie the suicidal nature of nuclear weapons production and the military industrial complex to the orchestrated ignorance and destruction of American society as a whole.

Dirty D’s and the Recipe’s “Recess/Parent Teacher Conference” take the focus on social destruction to the specifics of a public education system under attack.  Sahjkaya returns with “Political Strings” to call out the “set up” that needs to be fought down.  With “Power and Lights Out,” Dirty D confronts the fatal flaw in the KC Chamber of Commerce’s crown jewel, and the Recipe asks “What Happened to Hip Hop” in this moment of need.  R&B singer Flowrese brings a refrain that questions each of the rapper’s answers—“money”…”greed”…”igonorance”—by keeping the question of hip hop open, “Did we lose sight of what kept us strong, what helped us to hold on?”

The last track, “Palm of Your Hand,” another collaboration between Dirty D and the Recipe (with a distinct, building intensity at least in part thanks to producer Smart Alec) is all about hanging onto that sight and holding on.  Against a staggered heartbeat rhythm and an impassioned, obscure R&B sample—“everywhere you go/everywhere you stand/you know you hold my heart in the palm of your hand”—each rapper testifies to his vulnerability at the mic, his need for the audience to hear him to complete what he’s trying to create.  It’s a manifesto that blasts through the line between artist and audience—“strap your heart to your palm and make them haters heads bop!”

The Griot Gathering argues that the value of music cannot be separated from its context. Seven out of the CD’s 11 tracks carry some mix of ambient sounds.  A bird sings spontaneous accompaniment to Maurice Copeland’s spoken word intro, traffic sounds accompany the Recipe on at least one cut, and Dirty D sounds like he’s rapping about the Power & Light District from the District.  The jazz-flavored protest Honeywell, featuring marching band drums and horns, actually overturns the concept of background and foreground in its recording—the listener is clearly in the crowd, handclaps louder than the performers.  What may be pure happenstance, wanting to include a great political event in the larger soundtrack, fits as if intentional --everybody willing to lend a hand gets to be centerstage.  The music of the city doesn’t stop at studio walls, and the work of the Griot Gathering has just begun with its last refrain—“everywhere you go/everywhere you stand.”  


 The Griot Gathering Web Page

Power and Lights On, Part Two

On Tuesday, April 15^th I tagged along with the 250 person-strong Pay Up KCP&L Tax Day Parade from Barney Allis Plaza to the Bank of America Building (which houses not only Bank of America but also KCP&L and Great Plains Energy), AMC Theaters and Computer Sciences Corp.  Designed to highlight the way these organizations' millionaire CEO’s and the corporations themselves avoid paying taxes 99% of Americans do, this was an amazingly effective piece of street theater.  Marchers told their 99% stories and organizers presented oversized checks estimating taxes left unpaid by the rich.  The march was generally accompanied by honking horns and smiles by passers by, and, after an initial show of force, even the poker-faced security at Bank of America did not seem unsympathetic.

Because of its profit driven model, the utilities company (and its parent company Great Plains Energy) uses decreases in its profits as an excuse to raise rates and downsize.  Last year, the company eliminated 150 positions, and it has raised rates by 66% over the past six years.  Meanwhile, this company pays no federal income taxes and, as Lenny Jones of the SEIU Healthcare union pointed out, CEOs aren’t paying tax rates comparable to their administrative staff.  

The demonstration was peaceful, good-natured and unifying.  A mock court proceeding outside of the Bank of America building brought much needed humor to a serious situation, while unforgettably illustrating the fundamental injustice.  If demonstrations seek to help people feel their strength in the face of power, the Tax Day Parade managed to not only achieve that aim but find the fun in the process.

Pay Up KCP&L will meet again on May 1^st at 9:00 a.m. at the JC Nichols fountain before confronting a meeting of KCP&L shareholders from 10:00 to 11:30.  If you could make it, I know you wouldn’t be sorry, and your support would be more than welcome.

Stole My Heart, John Velghe and the Prodigal Sons Build a Bigger Home

"I've had the chance to say a lot of cool things into the microphone over the past couple of weeks but nothing as cool as what I'm about to say," John Velghe stated, smiling and looking at the back of the house mid-set Saturday night.  Just returned from the South by Southwest (SXSW) Austin music conference, where he played with his old friend Alejandro Escovedo in a show with guests like Lenny Kaye and Garland Jeffreys and a surprise appearance by Peter Buck and Mike Mills, Velghe knew how much weight he was putting on whatever came next.

"I'd like Abigail Henderson and Chris Meck to come up," he said, and the crowd at the Record Bar broke into applause, hoots and hollers. Henderson and Meck are the first couple of the largest community of interconnected musicians I've ever seen in Kansas City. Their organization, the Midwest Music Foundation, also just hosted its third annual MidCoast Takeover--this year featuring 32 of Kansas City's finest performing for two straight days at Austin's Shangri-La. The buzz from those shows has reverberated on many levels (32 band stories for starters), and they received a sizeable mention (and picture) in USA Today.

But this moment was about the stand-out performance on John Velghe's debut solo EP released last year, his duet with Henderson on a cover of Iggy Pop's "I Wanna Be Your Dog."  Everyone on earth plays that song for the broiling assault it wants to be, but Henderson and Velghe hold back.  Saturday night, as on the record, they luxuriated in the sensuous simmer of the thing, Meck providing an equally controlled guitar part, shimmering stardust, hinting at a crown nebula.

Eventually, Velghe's guitarist Mike Alexander [I hope a relation] began to push the song toward a rock crescendo, and everyone--Henderson and Velghe included--performed the final refrains with building bravado. Almost as soon as the song began to sound like the Stooges (or Jett or Escovedo), it came to an end.  This was the Henderson/Velghe version, and nothing outshines that thing they can do. [I hear Escovedo did Henderson's part at SXSW, and I'm sure it was great, but it wasn't that.]

To say Saturday night's show was, first and foremost, heralding the first CD by John Velghe and the Prodigal Sons (Don't Let Me Stay) is also to say the show was about mixing things up.  After all, the Prodigal Sons ("and daughters" as Velghe pointed out, since two different women performed with the band live, and three play on the album) features guitars from the punk band Hipshot Killers propelled by the drums that give (first) name to Mike Dillon's self-described "jazz, funk, rock, crunk" Go-Go Jungle, Mr. GoGo Ray.  The Sons' three horns come from funky hip hop big-band Hearts of Darkness, reggae's New Riddim and the night's opener, Diverse, a jazz band born out of Bobby Watson's UMKC program and intent on reinvigorating the sound of Kansas City. Lawrence-raised singer-songwriter, Kirsten Paludan joined Velghe on the mic numerous times, as she does on the album, and cello and violin players came from, respectively, the UMKC conservatory and Missouri Western. This intersection between traditional and avant garde jazz, funk, punk, reggae, and classical all merge seamlessly in Velghe's music.

In some ways, that story's in the artists he covers.  That night, Velghe and family covered the Jam at that band's greatest pop moment, The Gift, with the song "Town Called Malice"; and they covered the Replacements at that band's greatest pop moment, Pleased to Meet Me, with the song that serves as the apex of that moment, "I Can't Hardly Wait," and they covered Bruce Springsteen with a song that could also be given the same distinction, "Hungry Heart."  Velghe introduced that song, dedicating it to the Ramones (for whom Springsteen wrote it), underscoring the pop impulse at the heart of most rock revolutions. The pop impulse is an effort to open the door to those who are shut out.  Some punks may not remember why we were drawn to that music in the first place, but Paul Weller, Paul Westerberg and that guy from Jersey do. The rock and roll circus canvas was held open for them by the likes of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Smokey Robinson and John Lennon--the biggest tent artists imaginable.

Velghe descends from that line, particularly the way John Lennon could take all the enormity and raw power of the rock and roll that came before him and deliver it in a lullaby. Both that scope of vision and that intimacy, after all, are the elements that most obviously connect Lennon to Velghe's mentor Alejandro Escovedo in part by way of Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople (so, then, yes, David Bowie, too).  Those same elements tie Lennon to Alex Chilton and both of them to the Clash and Velghe's early and apparent inspiration, Paul Westerberg and the Replacements.

You can hear all those folks in Velghe's CD (which I had to, I mean needed to) buy at the show.  But you can't really isolate them.  Suffice it to say, "I Can't Hardly Wait"--with all of its punching horn urgency and almost crippling vulnerability--would fit beautifully on this record.  For me, though, the song that sums up where this line can go is maybe the record's quietest moment, "Iron Skin." That one is a lullaby, a dark and seemingly ancient lullaby, all the more beautiful for the way it fingers despair.

From beginning to end, Don't Let Me Stay, is a warm and brilliant record.  It starts off diffidently flirting with the risk of relationships, having lived long enough to know things tend to end badly.  By mid-record, it's finding comfort in the fact of hope on the country-flavored "Heaven's Waitress" and the ability to dream on the exuberant rocker "Austin (You Sorta Stole My Heart)."  After the climactic paranoia of "Owe My Soul" and the wounded triumph of "Mumbling Town" (a riot act aimed at indirectness), the last three songs sing of solidarity in the face of loss. The characters in these songs have pieces gone forever, but as this closes, they've found ways to work with the contradictions and the pain.  Ghosts, too, are part of this community, a rock and roll town pitted against malice.

I write a lot about community, so much so that I worry about using the word for fear of being cliched.  I'm not sure I've ever written the names Abigail Henderson and Chris Meck without attaching that concept, which is one reason they are heroes of mine, so much so I grow self conscious in their presence.  As Velghe's record recognizes from verse one, part of life is that we let each other down. Whatever approximates redemption lies in how we fight forward together anyway. John Velghe and the Prodigal Sons, in their live show and on record, embody that vision as only the finest groups can.

Postscript:  One of the many highlights of the show that can't go unmentioned came as an opening act.  Hermon Mehari's trumpet adds plaintive, searching touches to many of Velghe's songs when he plays his role of Prodigal Son (particularly on "The Occupier," "Assume the Ground," and "Mumbling Town"), but his band Diverse Trio delivered an exciting opening set.  Both bassist Ben Leifer and drummer Ryan Lee maintain the urgency of each moment while making sure the band swings.  Mehari, meanwhile, manages to eloquently state beautiful melodies while playing with a sense of boundaries as daring as any free jazz.  That set closed with Kirsten Paludan and John Velghe coming out for one song before Hearts of Darkness frontman Les Izmore and drummer Brad Williams (Ryan Lee went to keyboards) managed to turn the house out with anthemic KC hip hop. Expect a Diverse blog in the not-too-distant future. I needed to buy that CD, too!

The Prodigal Sons and Daughters, once again (cause a couple only got indirect mention and everyone deserves it)--

John Velghe, singing with a guitar
Mike Alexander, lead guitar
Chris Wagner, bass
GoGo Ray, drums
Hermon Mehari, trumpet
Sam Hughes, saxophone
Mike Walker, trombone
Kirsten Paludan, vocals
James Mitchell, cello
Katie Benyo, violin (live)
Whitney Williamson, violin (on record)
Catherine Root, violin (on record)