ERUPTIONS OF FUNK

THE PLAN HAD BEEN . . .

to leave Minneapolis just before the end of the Dylan Symposium, fly back to Penn State that evening, teach my seminar on CRITICAL ISSUES IN RACE AND ETHNICITY the next morning, switch my suitcase from Minnesota clothes to Alabama clothes, and get on down to Tuscaloosa for the conference titled ERUPTIONS OF FUNK, organized by poet and critic Anthony Bolden. But NorthWest Air had different plans, it seems, and I spent the night in Detroit, a place I love to visit, but I prefer to get beyond the airport. So I was rerouted to Alabama the next morning, missing my seminar, and arrived far earlier than the conference staff had been expecting. Still, they had someone in Birmingham to meet me at the plane, and they were so kind as to drive me by a department store so I could get clean socks and some short sleeve shirts. Then I was ready for the conference.



. . . where one of the first panels featured an excellent talk on the BOONDOCKS comic by Howard Rambsy, a graduate of Penn State's PhD program and currently on the faculty at Southern Illionis State (and keep an eye out for his first book, coming before too much longer, and well worth your reading). Howard was kind enough following the conference to share some of his photos with me. As you can imagine, he did not take this photo of himself, as I did not take any of the photos you'll see here in which I appear. I will try to tag the other photos Howard took in which the provenance isn't as obvious as in those two cases.

One panel included, left to right, Emily Lordi, Ondra Thomas-Krouse and Scott Brown.



Thomas Sayers Ellis, Kalamu ya Salaam Tracy Morris and I gathered around the table where all the sound and visual equipment was stationed, a good twenty feet away from the podium with no remote. This produced some comic effects as we took turns being the "A.V. Nerd" for each other. Thomas showed up at Penn State to give us a poetry reading just a week later.





The panel I was on included Cheryl Keys, Mark Anthony Neal and R. Scott Heath. My own talk here arose from Tony Bolden's desire to have someone give a paper on Alabama-native Sun Ra. So I ventured some remarks on Sun Ra's musical engagements with his own home state. I'll post the opening portion (about Hughes, Baraka and Coltrane) on this blog shortly.





Kalamu and I also spent some time puzzling over a recalcitrant trope we found on the laptop screen.

Scott Heath, like several others, took his turn at the master control.

Mark Anthony Neal started out on the dais, gravitated to the AV table, and wound up wandering productively in the netherworld of funk and critique, much to the benefit of all of us. Mark was also the only cultural studies guy I've ever heard invoke the too nearly forgotten D. J. Rogers, who was not a DJ, but whose "Say You Love Me" will change your life.

Another panel gave us talks by Karen Ohnesorge, Rondee Gaines, Melva Sampson and Sabrina Freeney.

The fine folk in Alabama took very good care of us. Here Mark Anthony Neal and Scott Heath, having finished dinner, contemplate the potential move of a major dude from Penn to G'Town.

Tony Bolden wonders what he hath wrought.

Kalamu ya Salaam pays honor to the next generation.

Historian Scott Brown brought his bass with him all the way from UCLA, and got up on stage with the poets both nights. The first evening he jammed with Kalamu ya Salaam; the second night brought us a spirited improvisation between Scott and Tracy Morris, which elicited two surprises: (1) Tracy Morris was a fan of the group Queen, (2) Tracy Morris turns out to have an excellent singing voice. These photos are by Howard Rambsy.

and then it was over -- the sweet air of funk clung to the grounds of Alabama -- it was hard to tear ourselves away.

BOB DYLAN SYMPOSIUM PART 2

DINKYTOWN BLUES

The day following our pilgrimage to Hibbing, we gathered on the campus of the University of Minnesota to get the academic portion of our proceedings started. But we didn't start in the usual way, and the first item on the program would have gotten me to Minneapolis even if there hadn't been a Dylan Symposium. Our opening keynote consisted of a performance, all too short, by "Spider" John Koerner and Tony "Little Sun" Glover. These names are familiar, of course, to all those too familiar with Dylan's personal history as two of the people who taught Dylan much of what he knew about folk blues when he wasn't attending classes at the university. They were regulars on the Dinkytown scene and performed at the Ten O'Clock Scholar. If you purchased the official bootleg edition of Dylan's live 1966 CD, you saw the award-winning liner notes that Glover contributed to the project.

But this opening was a serious opportunity for hero worship to me. These men are the surviving members of the triad (they were never actually a trio) whose records were released under the name of KOERNER, RAY & GLOVER. Those LPs, BLUES RAGS AND HOLLERS followed by, believe it or not, LOTS MORE BLUES RAGS & HOLLERS, were required listening for any of us who were interested in that fecund site where bohemia and the acoustic blues met.

And Tony Glover bears a certain responsibility for my own development. His book, BLUES HARP, was like a bible to me in my youth. The book was dedicated to Kenneth Patchen and Sonny Boy Williamson. That's all you really need to know in order to grasp how important Glover was to so many of us. Here in one person we found the worlds of poetry and blues converging in the first really new manner since the days of Sterling Brown (who I was also to meet in my youth).


"Spider" John Koerner I had last seen opening for Taj Mahal one night more than three decades ago. I think it's a mark of the high esteem in which Koerner is held by most who really know the music that Taj spent a good five minutes near the start of his set just going on about how privileged he felt to appear on the same stage with Koerner. How often do you hear that sort of praise from the person whose name heads the bill?


For this set, "Spider" was working with a twelve string, and you wouldn't know from his energetic playing that this was a guy who'd recently had a triple bypass. The duo was forced to do an encore by the enthusiastic audience, and most of us would have been happy to spend the rest of the day just listening to them.


But we had our own business to get to. Still, it wasn't your usual scholarly affair. I'll have to remember to tell my sister that I got to shake hands with Bobby Vee. To Dylan fans, he's the guy Elston Gunnn (a Dylan precursor pseudonym) played with for one night, but to my sister, who owned his records, he will forever be known as the guy who sang THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES.




These two guys were the MOST Minnesota people I met all weekend. The fellow on the left is Dave Engel, a Hibbingite who was on a bowling team with Dylan and who has published a book titled JUST LIKE ROBERT ZIMMERMAN'S BLUES. The gentleman in the pink shirt is Dan Bergan, who was one of our guides on the tour of Hibbing. Bergan graduated from Hibbing High and came back later to teach there for thirty years. He's the one who found that stage drop you see in the Hibbing High photos I posted the other day. Bergan was in the same graduating class as Dylan's brother, David, and says the younger Zimmerman was, in his opinion, the more talented of the two.

You'll notice that both Steve Scobie (glasses and red shirt) and I are seen wearing black leather jackets. This is because we are both academics.

Steve is the author of ALIAS BOB DYLAN, which is by far one of the more readable and worthwhile books on Dylan. He's also a fine poet (with two Dylan-related volumes among his works: SLOWLY INTO AUTUMN and AND FORGET MY NAME). He's also retired now, which he wasn't when I met him at Stanford University's Dylan conference some years ago. Must be nice.

One of the real highlights of the symposium was sitting in the hotel bar listening to Steve Scobie and C.P. Lee singing songs they'd learned in their youth, Glasgow street songs and folk revival staples. Lee had given one of the better plenary addresses, expanding on the work he did in his estimable book LIKE THE NIGHT: BOB DYLAN AND THE ROAD TO THE MANCHESTER FREE TRADE HALL. Another truly worthwhile address was the keynote by Greil Marcus, but then one of the interesting things about the symposium was the percentage of really good work that was presented. If you've glanced at the Dylan bibliography, you know that it's opinionated and not always well written, but this symposium offers reason to hope that it's getting better all the time (oops! wrong musical referent there).







Here you see me with poet Anne Waldman and Maria Damon (who was also seen just a couple posts ago with Kamau Brathwaite - lots of poetry in that town). Waldman was a regular on the Rolling Thunder Review and can be seen in RENALDO AND CLARA, that is, if you can ever see RENALDO AND CLARA. Anne became a friend after I met her at the Naropa Institute so it was good to see her again and catch up on family news. Her own plenary session was an interesting mix of commentary, remembrance, quotations from Allen Ginsberg's scattered passages on Dylan, etc.

At the end of the first evening of the symposium, my friend Richard Flynn persuaded me to join him in a trip across town to a little gallery that was hosting an exhibit of photos of Patti Smith. I'm not nearly the fan of Smith that Richard is (which is why you don't see a photo here of me in front of her photos), but I'm a huge fan of little galleries and of the art of photography, and I have to say the photos were impressive. The exhibit was to honor Frank Stefanko's book of his Smith photos, which you can see three gallery goers admiring here.


Afterwards, Richard and I headed back over to Dinkytown, to a pasta restaurant that had been recommended to us by one of the Dylan Symposium organizers, Colleen Sheehy. We wound up sitting upstairs, which is where Dylan sat when he lived in that building long before it had become this amazing restaurant. What Colleen hadn't told us, though, was that this is the weekely gathering spot of Minneapolis's Tango aficianados. There was a remarkably adept Tango combo on the stage, and slowly swirling couples Tangoed below us as we had our dinner.

So, we started the day with the Blues and ended with the Tango, all of which made perfect sense in a Dylan context. Remember that episode of Dharma and Greg that ends with her playing drums in Dylan's band as Dylan picks out a polka on his electric guitar? That's how the whole weekend went--

DYLAN SYMPOSIUM 2007

The previous post included my meta photo taken from the porch of Bob Dylan's childhood home as the current owner was taking our photo. Here is the owner's photo -- you can see me on the porch taking my picture of him.

Next up -- the symposium in Minneapolis.

BOB DYLAN SYMPOSIUM PART 1

THE NORTH COUNTRY

The day before the University of Minnesota Symposium on Bob Dylan got down to the work of scholarly exchange, everybody piled into a bus for the trip three-and-a-half hours up country to Hibbing (which, as it happens, is the birth place not only of Dylan but of the Greyhound Bus Company). Hibbing turned out to be both farther North (about fifty miles from the Canadian border) and smaller than I had expected. The trip up was enlivened with Dylan videos and pleasant conversations with the gathered Dylanologists.

Still, I was just a bit taken aback by this sign.

But it turned out this had nothing to do with us. Hibbing High had been host to a most successful stage show for children, hence the turtle reference. A sign more relevant to our pursuits was found embedded in the sidewalk at the entrance to Zimmy's cafe and bar.

And here we see Gordon Ball, author of several books on the artists of the Beat era, enjoying lunch at Zimmy's.

After lunch, our next stop was the open pit iron mine that was Hibbing's original reason for being. The locals are fond of comparing this "largest hole in the world dug by humans" to the Grand Canyon. I was struck by something else, though. When Dylan was first trying to get started as a musician, he headed West, playing around Denver and in Central City. If you've ever been to Central City, Colorado, you've no doubt visited its original reason for being, an open pit gold mine. What was it about humans gouging huge holes in the earth that seems to have exercised a magnetic attraction on Dylan in his formative years? Each of us was presented with a little plastic bag contining taconite balls, the current form of iron product from this nearly depleted mine, leaving each of us with the prospect of having to explain our taconite balls to the Transportation Safety agents at the metal detectors in the airports we would pass through on our way home.

Then it was on to Hibbing High, built by the mining companies as partial compensation to the residents of Hibbing when they were all forced to pull up stakes and move the town out of the way of the widening mine.

I don't know about you, but my high school did not feature chandeliers in the hallway dangling from ceilings of twisted horsehair covered in decorative plaster.




In the library we found these classic panels.

And the auditorium, in which Dylan was booed at one of his earliest public performances, proved to be by far the fanciest venue in which he was to appear for many a year. He had a larger audience here, despite the booing, than he was to have in his first appearance at Carnegie Hall's Chapter auditorium.

This is one of the surviving drops still hanging at stage front. There were many of these available for the various Hibbing theatrical productions, and the auditorium had what was for the time truly sophisticated lighting and sound equipment.

Even with Zimmy's on the main street, and these signs running along the street by the high school, most Hibbing residents don't make much of Dylan, and the youngest don't know who he is. But Hibbing is invested in Dylan increasingly, hosting an annual Dylan Days festival around his birthdate. This year's Dylan Days will feature a performance by Maria Muldaur, who has recently released a collection of Dylan's love songs.

At some point, an earlier owner of the house where Dylan had lived as a child had the garage door rendered as the cover of BLOOD ON THE TRACKS. There's a guy down the street who drives a truck for Lay's Potato Chips, and the sign on his truck dwarfs this one.

And this is Dylan's home.

The present owner of the home, in a meta moment of turnabout, asked us all to line up around the porch so that he could take our photo.

We also visited the Armory, scene of the adolescent Dylan's performances with THE GOLDEN CHORDS, his band of the day. I wasn't entirely sure what this sign was warning me about.








Inside the Armory we found several women's curling teams in action. This is a sport I've only seen on television during the Winter Olympics, so it was intriguing to see it up close and get a better idea of its intricacies. The story that Dylan introduced the Beatles to curling during a pot party in New York, leading to the appearance of the sport in their film HELP, appears to be an urban legend.

So, that was a day in Hibbing, the town that moved. They all hope they don't have to move again. Maybe the reason the young Dylan felt he was in the wrong place was that the town had orginally been in another place.

KAMAU BRATHWAITE IN MINNEAPOLIS

I'm in Minneapolis tonight, having flown in this morning for a symposium on Bob Dylan, about which more later. But this evening was all poetry. Kamau Brathwaite was giving one of his marathon readings and talks at THE OPEN BOOK on Washington Avenue.



As is his custom, Brathwaite's presentation was a reflection upon his entire life and work, from his early days in Barbados, through his time in England and Ghana, his return to the Caribbean, touching down in his major books along the way. It's always good to revisit the familiar terrain of Brathwaite's earler career, but there is always the excitement of the newer works that come into view at the end of each of his readings, and tonight was no different. The new work was startling in its appearance. I won't say more, as you'll want to witness it for yourself as it becomes available.

A special note of thanks to Maria Damon, one of the organizers of the event. It was thanks to a notice she posted over at the POETICS list that I knew this reading was scheduled. I made sure I got into Minneapolis in time for it.

Thanks, too, to Gregory Rigsby and C.L.R. James, who first introduced me to Brathwaite's works some three decades ago.

EVERY GOODBYE AIN'T GONE INTERVIEW

Here's a link to a phone interview Leonard Scwartz did with me for his Cross Cultural Poetics radio program. Our subject is the collection EVERY GOODBYE AIN'T GONE.

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/groups/XCP/XCP_121_Nielson_11-19-06.mp3

On radio you couldn't tell that my name was spelled incorrectly! Leonard, I think you'll agree, does a great job of reading some of the poems from the volume.

THE PASSING OF A CLASSIC

At the beginning of my career in academia, I worked as an adjunct in the department of English at Howard University. My office was on the second floor of Locke Hall, overlooking the historic quad. It was an office I shared with poet Calvin Forbes, and we used to joke that the department had lodged the poets in the room at the farthest remove from the chair's office. But it was a great place to work and I relished the fact that I was located in the building named for the legendary Alain Locke.

One day early in my time at Howard, as I walked down the stairs to class, I noticed a huge crowd of students gathered around the door of the large lecture hall just off the entrance. I was used to such sights at the beginning of the semester, as freshmen and sophomores hustled to get into oversubscribed lower division courses, but this was well into the semester and, as I quickly discovered, many of the students standing in the doorway and along the aisles of the lecture hall weren't even registered in this course; they simply wanted to hear the lecture.

I had witnessed something like this in my own undergraduate days at Federal City College, when each day of C.L.R. James's classes in the department of history brought a new group of visitors who just wanted to be able to hear James speak.

So I stuck my own head into this packed lecture hall at Howard to see what was up. As soon as I saw who was lecturing, I understood. It was Frank Snowden.

This was a course in the department of Classics. Frank Snowden remains to this day the only professor of classics I've known of who routinely drew such crowds to his courses. At a time when enrollments in classics were in steep decline, here was one faculty member who consistently drew crowds. And it was entirely because of his work as a scholar.

I had first become aware of Snowden when I was a student. In a bookstore one day, I came across his volume BLACKS IN ANTIQUITY. It was on a shelf with other volumes that were making a stir at the time, by authors like Ivan Van Sertima (THEY CAME BEFORE COLUMBUS) and Chancellor Williams (THE DESTRUCTION OF BLACK CIVILIZATION). Snowden's book soon became a constant presence on my coffee table. (I didn't actually drink coffee at home, but that's what everybody always called the table in front of the sofa, which was largely a holding area for books in my house.)

Long before such publications as Martin Bernal's BLACK ATHENA, Snowden's book was already doing the valuable work of correcting the damage done by what DuBois had termed "a venal" cabal of scholars who had assiduously gone about the business of occluding African history from view. What Snowden did was on the face of it an obvious and simple idea. It was just something that most historians had been too racist to contemplate. Snowden had combed through the extant record of the classics, bringing to the fore all those texts and art works that demonstrated conclusively the central role of African peoples in antiquity.

It was a life's work, and Snowden devoted his life to bringing his studies to successive generations of students and new scholars. He was an excellent lecturer, a demanding professor, and a tremndous encourager of talented youth. Howard was lucky to have him, and to keep him.

Frank Snowden finally retired some years ago, after teaching at Howard for five decades. In 2003 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. He died last month, in his 95th year. His books are still in wide circulation, and now, as when I first came across the book, the place to start is with a careful reading of BLACKS IN ANTIQUITY.

LARRY'S POETRY FORUM

On the road, as always --

Last week I was in Columbus, Ohio, to read poetry at Larry's Poetry Forum, which takes its name from the bar in which it has been held for lo these many years. The Forum, for some time now organized by David Baratier (shown here under the sign of the camel), has been going on for decades and shows no sign of flagging. There, across the street from Ohio State University, each week a visiting poet performs, followed by an open mic.

One of the people I had the good fortune to meet that evening was Michael Hummel, proprietor of "Used Kids Records," which certainly takes the award for most striking name for a collector's emporium. Michael, shown here in a particularly mischievous moment at the mic, is himself a musician, with a musician's sense of timing and a wonderful sense of humor.

Also taking to the mic that evening was Stephen Mainard, a teacher in the area with whom I had a great conversation about poets and the work of wording.

David Baratier met me for dinner before the reading and we had a chance to renew our acquaintance. We had only met once previously, in the course of my only visit ever to the Associated Writing Programs conference, at which David usually has a table for his Pavement Saw Press. I've always admired the work of that press, and of the poets it publishes, and so running into David that first time had been like coming across a small oasis in the dry stretches of the AWP. [And why is it, do you think, that local papers never run those stories about the AWP that they so love to publish about the MLA -- Clearly not for lack of similarly inviting titles in the program.)

At any rate, for one cold night in March, I had the pleasure of poetry and drinks with the poets of Columbus. Next time you're in the area, find your way over to Larry's and ask for David. And while you're at it, stop by USED KIDS RECORDS at 1980 N. High Street, "upstairs" as Michael's card insists.

LEROY JENKINS

On Friday we lost another great artist, Leroy Jenkins. I first heard him in the glory days of the Revolutionary Ensemble, the improvisatory jazz trio featuirng Jenkins on violin, Sirone on bass and Jerome Cooper on drums. The idea of two string players and a drummer was striking enough, something that wasn't seen much in jazz at mid-century, but this wasn't any Stephane Grappelli jazz (though that would have been worth lending an ear); this was full on free jazz of an uncompromising order. I first heard the group on their A&M LP, THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC, with its eye-catching cover and ear-catching performances. The group wasn't able to stay on the road for long, but they made a lasting impression and the individual members went on to make major statements in other contexts. Among my favorite Jenkins outings were his LIFELONG AMBITIONS release, a 1981 performance with Oliver Lake, and a stunning solo violin concert at Ann Arbor in 1977. That one was broadcast over NPR, with an introduction by poet A.B. Spellman, on the unforgettable JAZZ ALIVE series.

Just two years ago, the Revolutionary Ensemble was reunited and released the appropriately titled AND NOW. They still played with the fervor and inventiveness of decades earlier, and the sound of a violin-fronted innovative jazz unit was still as unusual as it had been on first hearing. Jenkins was a wonder to hear and a frequent collaborator with artists in other fields. He was a poet of the strings and will be missed wherever music gathers.

THE DANISH POET

THE DANISH POET, shown left, just won an OSCAR a few minutes ago -- The Danish poet Piet Hein, in between writing his "grooks" and describing the "super ellipse," gave the world the Soma Cube, shown right.

coincidence? perhaps --

yours,

Nielsen

I. the Scooter Libby Jury

"What, me lie?"

The Libby defense has followed a course that must seem curious even to the most jaded of court house spectators.

On the one hand, the defense argues that Libby was so preoccupied with the cares of his position, what with fighting terrorism before breakfast and all, that he simply forgot that he had told numerous people that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative in the weeks prior to his conversation with Tim Russert. So, he was not lying when he testified under oath that he had heard this news for the first time from Russert. He had simply forgotten that he had heard and repeated this information before, and then forgot as well that Russert and he had never discussed Plame.

Now that would be shaky on its own, but it's the other half of the defense that has me scratching my head. As each of the prosecution witnesses appeared to testify that Libby had indeed shared this information with them in the weeks prior to his phone call to Russert, the defense attorneys suggested that the witnesses themselves had faulty memories.

The argument, then, appears to be that Libby was not lying, because he had simply forgotten saying the things that he didn't say, because the people he said them to are misremembering conversations that didn't happen, despite the fact that the defense is that they did happen but Scooter couldn't recall them.

He's called "Scooter" for a reason.

Decades ago, Gil Scott Heron had a piece titled, "We Beg Your Pardon, America."

It may soon be time to resurrect that recording.

SOUL SURVIVOR

That was one cold Friday night in State College, but I bundled up and skidded down to the recently rennovated State Theater to see sombody I'd been waiting forty years to watch perform live, Betty LaVette. Back in the day, which is to say back in my day, I walked around the streets of D.C. humming the chorus to "Right in the Middle of Falling in Love."

It was a great song, one of many she released in a career than began with her first studio release at the age of sixteen. But, as happens all too frequently in the music industry, the broader recognition her talents deserved just wouldn't seem to come.

Despite a string of soulful records easily the match of much better-known artists, LaVette's career never quite brought her the successes that seemed to come so easily to many who had much less to offer. But Betty LaVette never stopped working, turning out one house after the other with her burning soul work outs. Records like her cover of Joe Simon's "Your Turn to Cry" would grab hold of your heart and wouldn't let go till you gave yourself over wholly to the music. Her work on John Prine's "Souvenirs," at a time when his own record company was still praying he'd be the next Dylan, found the heart of the song, brought out the R & B framework hiding within that folkie material.

But the industry was never entirely behind this remarkable talent. Just when she should have been reaching her peak, her label dropped the album whose release she had eagerly awaited.

This "child of the seventies," as one of her CDs is now titled, never gave up, and neither did her audience. There were modest highlights, like her killer performances in the stage show Bubbling Brown Sugar. Then, three years ago, things finally began to break Betty's way. One of her CDs won the W.C. Handy award, the world of music journalism began to pay attention (everybody loves a comeback story, even me), and she landed a recording contract again.

And has been touring like a Dylan or a B.B. King ever since. Which is how I came to find myself in front of her at last, in the second row, just four feet away from her, as she did her set at the State Theater. The crowd was small that night, but wildly appreciative. (One car load of folks had driven all the way from Philadelphia for this show.) Betty and her band responded with a show that must rank among their best. There have been few moments in my recent years of concert-going that can compare to hearing Betty LaVette singing "As Close as I'll Get to Heaven" at the climax of her show, or what we all thought was the climax -- till she did an incredibly gutsy thing. Betty LaVette closes her shows now by letting the whole band leave the satge and standing there alone to sing "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" with a voice that lifts you out of your seat, out of your day, out of the everyday and makes a Baptist out of you. Even the atheists in the crowd were happy with that, just as all of us who had stumbled through the frozen February streets to get there were none-the-less happy to feel that chill reaching down our spines as we listened.

and here we see Betty LaVette and bassist Patrick Prouty in the lobby of the theater afterwards. One of the great things about small theaters and shows like this is that you can talk with the artists following the show.

Betty's back on the road, at the top of her talents, and with all her music back in print. Do yourself a favor and send your browser over to one of those on-line stores you visit and get some of Ms. LaVette's soul-stirring works. You can thank me later.