Stuff I’ve written, published or not:

Johnny Ace Crosses Over

It’s Christmas night, 1954, between sets for a “Negro Christmas dance” at the City Auditorium in Houston, Texas. A sharp crack from a .22 caliber pistol ends the life of John Marshall Alexander, Jr. He was only 25 years old. Although the official report claimed accidental suicide as a result of Russian Roulette, rumors circulate to this day suggesting that John Alexander was murdered–probably over publishing money. I have always known that Johnny Ace pulled the trigger.
One achieves fame in this culture largely through the creation of a persona, identified with artistic, political or notorious acts. This persona is then given mass exposure. Such fame has been bestowed upon (and often taken from) thousands of people over time. The key to lasting fame as an artist is a lifetime of consistent, quality work that continues to merit such exposure. “Consistency,” in this case, means perseverance in a similar style as opposed to continually excellent but diverse contributions. Artists who die young, in the trajectory of ascension, are virtually guaranteed renown. Examples abound throughout the history of popular music. Let’s discuss two.

Like Johnny Ace, Robert Johnson recorded only a handful of songs for a targeted (“negro”) audience. There are only two known pictures of him, and he died a violent death while still in his twenties. Had he not been poisoned on that fateful night, in two weeks he was due in New York to appear in the massively successful “From Spirituals to Swing” program put on by John Hammond in Carnegie Hall. Johnson was presaged by Skip James, whom Johnson covered/borrowed from, and who many think was his superior. But James didn’t die after recording less than twenty songs for Paramount in 1930; he languished in obscurity before being dug up by enthusiasts in the 60’s for more touring and recording. At this point he was an old man, essentially covering the same material done in his youth. Although his singing was even better, any potential mystique of James’ earlier career was diluted. Johnson, however, was safely dead. The mythology surrounding his life, art and demise was building rapidly. Not only were ascendant white stars like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards paying him homage, there was a persistent (and entirely specious) rumor that Johnson had made a pact with the Devil at a crossroads in Mississippi to gain his extraordinary talent and appeal. He is now popularly regarded as the master of the Delta blues.

Like Ace and Johnson, Curt Cobain only recorded a few songs, created a popular persona, and died young. He too initially recorded for a targeted audience—“grunge,” or “alternative.” His rise was much more immediate and sustained than the other two, given the ability of the industry to capitalize on it more expeditiously. His combination of considerable talent and lost potential will forever outlast the tragic figure behind the image. He is now regarded as almost the savior of rock and roll.
None of these people had the chance to either fall from grace through artistic compromise or outlive their cultural relevance. They didn’t meaningfully diverge from the artistic formula that initially brought them recognition. They also died young, making their personas and musical contributions ripe for commodification. In effect, they have been turned into glass figurines to be lovingly dusted off, and placed back on the shelf.

Johnny Ace was the stage name adopted by John Alexander. Those who wish to know more about both personas should read James M. Salem’s excellent book “The Late Great Johnny Ace.” Alexander grew up poor in a tough section of Houston, and (after a short stint in the Navy), moved to Memphis. It was there, in the early 50’s, that he started his musical career. Although he was neither the most talented nor influential artist to emerge from that period, Alexander was in the right place at the right time. Sun Records was documenting an astonishing cultural synthesis. Black and white idioms were colliding and throwing off beautiful sparks. Alexander performed and recorded with many major talents, including B.B. King, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, Johnny Otis, and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. He played piano in a largely apocryphal band dubbed “The Beale Streeters” which included singer Bobby “Blue” Bland. It quickly became obvious that Alexander (now Ace) had vocal abilities of his own. He specialized in what became known as “heart ballads,” and recorded several of them: “Angel,” “My Song,” “Cross My Heart,” and “Pledging My Love”–his big hit, released three days before his death and later covered by Aretha Franklin. These sides were straight-up make-out music, and very popular in the black community. His other recordings are up-tempo rhythm and blues rockers.

If Elvis sang “black,” then Johnny Ace sang “white,” but not in the personable, expert style of Nat “King” Cole. All of Ace’s ballads are unsettling if not down right creepy. The band (usually the Johnny Otis or Johnny Board Orchestra) lurch through the funereal tempos, with piano, drums, bass, sax and vibes all showing a certain lack of chops if not sincerity. Tuning is clearly optional. Everyone is playing at the same time, partially unaware of what the others are doing, and yet creating an organic, united environment. The overall ambience is of instruments in a small room, heavily laden with reverb and tape delay; sometimes both. Production values are primitive, especially compared to the amazing quality of Ray Charles’ contemporary Atlantic Records offerings. Ace is the blinking radio tower in this barren musical landscape: remote, distant and alone. There is almost an overwhelming sense of emotional detachment and longing in his voice. The entire effect is nothing so much as an R&B “Hall of Presidents,” in which “emotional” songs are delivered by a group of primitive automatons. Few other performers (Howlin’ Wolf, Skip James, Robert Johnson and Fats Waller’s pipe organ sides come to mind) have been able to capture and sustain such an unearthly quality.

The lyrics can be dismissed as maudlin overstatement and high-school hyperbole:

Be with me, right here in my arm (sic).
You’re my queen. You’ll always be.

I cross my heart, and hope to die
If I should ever, ever make you cry.

I would suggest, however, that they employ cliché for a higher purpose—transcendent, non-transient stillness. “Always” and “forever” appear so often in these lyrics as to suggest something more than sentimentality:

I’ll forever love you, the rest of my days
I’ll never part from you and your loving ways.

Clearly, this singer is interested in something beyond the moment. Upon listening, one is almost immediately transported into the world created by Johnny Ace. On the surface, this worldview revolves around the triumph of love and the pain of loss. Deeper down, it describes a longing for existence in the comparatively still hub of life’s wheel instead of its whirring, tumultuous spokes. The song “The Clock” sums it up nicely. It’s probably the slowest of all Johnny Ace songs, the dragging tempo underscored by an echo effect on the drums.

I look at the face of the clock on the wall
And it doesn’t tell me nothing at all.
That face on the clock just stares at me
It knows I’m lonely and always will be.

The ultimate goal of these performances is to stop time itself, or stretch it as close to infinity as possible. “Angel” and “Cross My Heart” more easily suggest a nightmarish, Lynchian murderer/lover figure than an amorous suitor. After all, an angel (like one’s fame) lives forever. The object of desire in the song is also compared to a ghost:

You may not know, but you haunt me
You may not know, but it’s true
Oh my dear, you’re an angel
I’ll always be in love with you

It’s easy to imagine Johnny singing to a picture, or mannequin—or corpse. Complicated and messy human interactions are carefully excised. This band, this singer, recording in that time, successfully stepped outside of temporal bounds.

But back in the dressing room that Christmas night, Johnny Ace dealt his last hand. Apparently, the grind of touring 300+ dates a year had taken its toll—he had gained 25 pounds and had grown a moustache, negating his boyish charm. He had also been in possession of the handgun for several weeks prior to his death, and was given to pointing the unloaded weapon at friends and associates and pulling the trigger. After exhibiting this unpleasant behavior again in the dressing room between sets, he put the gun to his head, saying, “I’ll show you how it works.”
He left behind one of the smallest and most internally consistent bodies of works by any artist. He only recorded 21 songs.

Immediately after his death, “Pledging My Love” shot up the charts. Tribute songs “Johnny Ace’s Last Letter” and “Why Johnny Why” were hurriedly recorded and released. The myth machine went into overdrive. It was rumored that Big Mama Thornton (who shared the bill with Ace that night) was on Johnny’s lap when he shot himself. Some witnesses describe Ace’s normally kinky hair standing straight up as he died. Other rumors place Elvis in the crowd at the Civic Auditorium. There are some now that argue that “Pledging My Love” is the first rock and roll song (although it doesn’t rock), because it crossed over: it was bought in droves by white teenagers and played on white radio stations. A young Paul Simon received a publicity shot of Johnny Ace he had sent away for, and years later wrote a song about it:

It came all the way from Texas, with a sad and simple face
And they signed it on the bottom “From the late great Johnny Ace”

John Marshall Alexander, Jr. will remain forever obscure. Clearly, a combination of emotional instability, modest success, shady record and publishing deals, and constant touring rendered him ultimately incapable of going on. Johnny Ace, on the other hand, had set himself up all along for immortality. There’s almost nothing in his recorded body of work that doesn’t intimate or long for it.

For my own part, I first saw the Johnny Ace Memorial Album in a friend’s dorm room. Johnny is on the cover, as the Ace of Hearts. He wears a bland, toothy smile. One of his heavy-lidded eyes is on the camera and the other fixed on some point distant. I didn’t pay much attention to his music until years later, drunk and piled into the back of a car. Johnny Ace music poured from the speakers, and I looked at the rural landscape rushing by. When I saw the distant radio tower I understood. I’ve loved his music ever since, and was able to find another copy of the Memorial Album (his only record—still in print) with different songs on it: “Angel,” “No Money.”

When the Zippers first toured the Midwest in 1997, I made several musical pilgrimages. Ken Mosher and I visited Sun records, conning our way into the recording studio. Afterwards, we went to Ardent studios and met Jody Stephens, former Big Star drummer. He gave me Jim Dickenson’s number, and he and I discussed Johnny Ace at length. He told me he had a picture of Ace in his coffin. I later saw that picture in Salem’s book.

In Houston, I met a guy who told me the Civic Auditorium still existed. I stuffed a couple beers in my coat and we drove downtown. The original structure was indeed still there, but had been bizarrely and inappropriately added onto in the 60’s. A strange steel and glass structure had been raised around the original brick building. We walked in, and found several construction workers inside. No one seemed to notice us, although I had made up a story to cover our intrusion. We found two identical, cramped dressing rooms on either side of the stage. One “felt right,” and we opened our beers, toasted Johnny Ace, and drank. Weeks later, my Houston friend (who was a paralegal) went to the city records department and found the police and coroner’s reports from that Christmas night. He faxed them to me, and I read the handwritten eyewitness accounts for myself.

The next time we came through Houston they were tearing the Auditorium down.

Johnny Ace lives on.

Visa Från Utanmyra

There’s a Swedish word, vermod, for which there is no easy English translation. It can best be described as a kind of melancholic longing: nothing as simple as sad, or maudlin. Our culture tends towards the sentimental. Perhaps it’s because we’re not condemned to eight months of winter and the midnight sun. You can hear vermod, however, when you listen to Jan Johansson’s masterpiece Jazz På Svenska, and in particular the opening track, “Visa Från Utanmyra.” Our aural analogue might be Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmastime Is Here” from the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack, minus the wallowing and swing.

Beginning in 1962, Johansson (piano) and Georg Riedel (string bass) recorded jazz variations on sixteen Swedish folk songs. Their improbable goal had spectacular results. The mens approach was understated and clean. “Blue” notes and dense chords abound, but always in the service of melody and musical narrative. The result, which translates as “Jazz in Swedish,” is a Scandinavian classic and the biggest selling jazz album in Swedish history, selling over a quarter of a million copies. It is virtually unknown stateside. It could be Jazz På Svenska’s parochial nature—why should we be interested in somebody else’s folk songs when we can’t be bothered with our own? Well, because this is a transcendent album. It is a study in sense and simplicity.

“Visa Från Utanmyra” sets the tone. Suitably autumnal, the arrangement is as crisp as leaves under your feet. The melody is stately, processional and a little resigned. But there is a musical “lift,” a kind of redemption, to the structure. The song seems to ignore the boundaries of “sad” minor keys and “happy” major ones. It passes through them, sweeps them up, as its narrative unfolds. It defines the difference between “alone” and “lonely.” The musicians make the most of repetition: Riedel’s constant bass figure underpins Johansson’s variations on the main melodic line, increasing emotional depth with each restatement. The recording is a little dark but a master class in acoustic engineering. The only affect is a touch of plate reverb—not too much—giving the tracks a haunting, roomy sound. It’s an analogue recording made by picky Swedes. The bass is clean and full, and the piano practically edible. The production values of Jazz På Svenska are an indictment of the modern, tinny and thin digital recordings of today.

Johansson did what all great artists do: he borrowed from one form, applied it to another, and created something new. It’s not clear that anyone else would have considered it a good idea to arrange old folk songs—especially European ones—as jazz. Jazz was American, and new, at least to the century. It was innovative and restless. “Visa Från Utanmyra,” like the rest of Jazz På Svenska, is contemplative. It is a cup of steaming tea, yet to be tasted, because we are distracting by the wind in the trees outside our window.

Johansson was born in Söderhamn, Sweden, in 1931. He came to the piano after learning guitar, accordion and organ. He, like so many other Europeans, was entranced by American jazz, and became a student of swing and bebop. His was a highly realized sense of melody, no doubt helped along by meeting the great, lyrical American tenor saxophonist Stan Getz as a student. The feeling was reciprocal: he was the first European to be invited to play at the Jazz at the Philharmonic; an extraordinary series of concerts starting in 1944 that featured the best jazz had to offer. Beginning with Jazz På Svenska, Johansson went on to record more classics: “Jazz in Russian,” “Jazz in Hungarian.” Each redefined the old as new. A month after turning 37, Johansson died in a car crash on the way to a gig in a church. What he left us is the amazing document of his recordings and an all-to-brief YouTube clip. There is a definitive picture of him in the cd booklet. His eyes are dark, and his hair recedes. He sits at the piano. His intense look is not quite a glare because of the vulnerability on his face. This is what he wrote in the liner notes about “Visa Från Utanmyra:”

Probably not from Utanmyra, it just happened to be written down in that village. There are some words by Olof von Dalin: “The deepest anguish on earth / to lose the one you hold dearest. The heaviest sorrow / which blackens out the sun / to love the one / you will never get.”

Unrequited love is certainly a time-honored theme, but this song is wondrous enough for you to invest in it your own experience of triumph, loss and redemption.

Listen to the song here.

Snüzz-fest

The parking lot machine spit out one dollar coins as change. How appropriate that Martin Van Buren’s blank stare is stamped on them. I thought about using them to buy beer, but most of my beer that night was free, and I knew Glenn’s reaction would be the same as mine: “What the fuck am I supposed to do with these?”

I saw Roger first. “We haven’t officially met,” he said, and spent the next half hour doling out chocolate squares to me and Django. Starving, I went out for a burger with two friends, and spoke of recent heartbreak. They were wonderfully solicitous, but hinted that maybe we should change the subject, so I wouldn’t take the stage in a bad mood. It occurred to be that I didn’t feel bad at all; the night ahead was already a palliative, and besides—I had given that woman my full participation. Regret obviated. I was nervous about performing, not having taken the stage in a year. That feeling receded as I ate. As we walked back to the club, the line took up the whole block.

If I had to describe the night, I would call it heaven. I’m an idealist; prone to exasperation and disappointment. I believe we design the life we’re living, and for most people, misery is fundamental. But I entered a space last night filled with intimate, if half-remembered faces. I heard people talk about fear, and loss, and love, without a trace of pain. Everyone was fully there; everyone gave themselves over to it. The artists sang each song as if it was their last. The crowd closed their eyes and sang along, and howled in approval. It was heaven to me because people acted that night the way we should act all the time: they participated in a sacred act, formed a community of love, and allowed themselves to weep openly, in joy and remembered loss.

I told Greg to hot up the stage, since I would be on next and wanted my work cut out for me. It was good that he had two songs—one shouldn’t have to cram his kind of vocal and guitar playing abilities into three minutes. I sat by the back door and had a full-blown panic attack. It was tough to talk myself down, being in the sway of such a lizard-brain, fundamental kind of fear. It was useful, though, as a foil for the selfless energy all around me. I was worried about how I would be perceived, in a room of abundant love. I was trying to get out of doing my job, which is to leave my own bullshit worries on the side of the stage, attenuate myself to that energy, and articulate it. I gave myself a two-line pep talk. “Who are you doing this for—yourself? You’re doing this for Snüzz.”

And so I did. I’m a pro, but won’t devote any lines to the ways in which my performance could have been better. It was certainly good enough, considering I had never sung the song or played with that band before, and there was no time to warm up. It’s a strange thing, introducing yourself to the drummer as you hit the stage. “Hi, I’m Tom. Don’t go changing the key on me!” Once I got my footing, I roared into it:

They’re putting on the blue light now, girl
They’re having a sale on the world

My fear was unfounded. The crowd bore me along, and Robbie’s shriek from the front of the stage threw me into overdrive. Besides, I was lucky enough to be the voice of an incredible song, deeply resonant with me. I put everything I had into it, and got off in a daze.

I knew I had hit it out of the park when Django walked up to me a few seconds later. Django—who doesn’t share my burdens of pitchiness or performance anxiety—put his arms around me and paid me the greatest professional compliment I have ever received:

“You fucker.”

And on it went: a positive feedback loop of performance and song, artist and audience, anticipation and ecstatic release. No one wanted it to end—we never do—but I had to tear myself away from the song-swap at the Station hours later to get back to kids in bed and an indulgent babysitting friend.

All of us, when describing the benefit, will at some point talk about the money raised. I’m not discounting it, but I know it’s ultimately a drop in the bucket. Love won’t put supper on the table or pay the medical bills. Our little community last night flew in the teeth of our “on-your-ownership” society. We gave, and received, that which cannot be quantified, or put in your pocket. But we’ll still talk about the money, because it’s the imprimatur of success.

I fished the dollar coins out of my jeans this morning and dumped them in my change jar. When it fills up, I’ll take the kids to the grocery store and have them empty it into the machine that will exchange the coins for bills, less a sizable percentage. Then we’ll blow it on what we want, instead of what we need. I’ll remind the kids, with each purchase, how much we started with and how much this or that cost. The idea is to give them a sense of commerce and commodity, but they’ll persist in believing its free money until they’re on their own. Until then, I’ll spend every day trying to teach them the real meaning of value, and worth.

HELL
The riff came to me in the car as I approached a stop light: BAA-dum, Dum-be-dum, Dum-be-dum, Dum-da-dum. I didn’t have to worry about rushing home and getting it down. I can’t really write music anyway, and didn’t have any kind of recording equipment. Besides, it wasn’t going to get out of my head until I heard it played. I liked the way it repeated itself, as if trying to emphasize a point that might not be understood. The riff was the last thing “Hell” needed.

I had unconsciously been working on the song most my life. It was the decades-delayed response to listening in horror, as a kid, to frantic evangelical preachers on the AM radio. When I was six, we moved from Ft Lauderdale, where I was born, to the tiny Appalachian town of Burnsville, North Carolina. Because my parents bought a new Chevrolet Blazer and built a cabin on a mountain, we appeared to be of means. Some people asked us if we owned Maxwell House coffee. As I walked on the mountain, Floridian tourists would stop their cars and speak to me loudly and slowly, as if I was deaf, or stupid:

“Excuse me! Do you have television? Is this plant edible?”

The mountains, impediment though they were, did admit radio and TV. I sat closely to my dad’s shortwave in the log room where I slept with my two older brothers. I remember little about the local station, besides the hellfire preaching and the maudlin song played at the end of each broadcast day, “Climb Every Mountain:”

Climb every mountain, ford every stream
Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream

This was hardly encouragement. I didn’t like climbing any mountain, much less all of them. And dreams are only wishes anyway. You have to go through all that climbing and fording and following just to find what you want to wish for? Screw that noise!

The religious broadcasters likewise offered little hope. They did describe, breathlessly, how one could be damned. Attending the wrong church would do it. Their programs were a half-hour run-on sentence; a pinched, gasping soliloquy. They scared the shit out of me. It was nothing but rage and the smirking satisfaction of retribution. They nurtured my growing suspicion that I was, and would always be, an outsider. Even after I had gone off to college in Chapel Hill in the mid-eighties, a group of “holy rollers” pulled their bus up to the auditorium during a middle school dance and began bodily hauling kids out, putting them on their bus to “save” them.

My family was not Baptist, only nominally Presbyterian. We attended church so seldom that the minister once asked us to stand up with the rest of the “visitors.” It was an unsubtle, passive admonishment: we had been there before. Nevertheless, I began to have religious feelings around puberty. I lay in bed, extending my arm in the air, imagining—feeling, really—a hand reaching down to grasp mine. The connection was never quite made. At other times I couldn’t shake the image of a disgusted God, wadding up my paper prayers and throwing them away. I can’t remember what I prayed for. Probably help to stop masturbating.

At UNC I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, recognizing the preacher’s intricate description of hell. On and on it went—putrification without decay, heat without light, regret without reconciliation. The passage about eternity stuck with me:

“What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended.”

By this point, having only recently gotten stoned, drunk and laid for the first time, I smiled at the quaint overstatement. That year I gave away the copper cross I first wore to college. The last remnants of those beliefs were dusted away by Joseph Campbell’s books on comparative religion, which I read after college. Well, almost: the message of hell, and how it was delivered, stayed with me.

A few years later, a friend and I were driving back to Chapel Hill from band practice. A 1930s calypso came on the Chapel Hill college radio station. The minor-key riff, played by trumpet and saxophone, rose like a shroud from the flagstones.

“Turn it up,” I said.

By this time I was familiar with Cab Calloway’s white tails and wide smile. I was buying Fats Waller records and listening to his unsettling pipe organ blues. I knew and loved Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli’s Hot Club of France, so sweet and a little sad. I was digging deep into the perdition and heat of Duke Ellington’s “jungle” music from 1920s Harlem. I had even heard calypso: the Andrews Sisters’ sunny, mutated version of “Rum and Coca-Cola” (originally by Lord Invader, about Trinidadian mothers and daughters whoring themselves to American GIs). My parents’ non-threateningly exotic Harry Belafonte record was called calypso. But it sounded nothing like what I heard that day: “Seven Skeletons Found in the Yard,” by Lord Executor:

Hideous discoveries and monstrous crime
Always happen at the Christmas time…
For the old year murder and atrocity
Was the New Year’s serious calamity
What shock Trinidad
Those seven skeletons that the workmen found in that yard

The horns clashed and bounced. The riff, with its curious stops, burbled with urgency and menace. Executor recited as much as sang, with a newsman’s detachment. Clearly, he had an important message, but the lyric was so dense and his patois accent so thick as to make it nearly indecipherable. The last verse stunned me:

While the workmen they were digging the ground
The grinning skulls of human beings they found
Feet together and head east and west
Number five was a watchman, among the rest
Number six had the hands and the feet on the chest
And number seven the Mysterious Guest
That shock Trinidad
Those seven skeletons that the workmen found in that yard

What could he possibly mean by “the mysterious guest,” and why did it so unnerve me? How could a band with no drums be so rhythmically tight? How could any music be equal parts Cuban and klezmer? A call to WXYC identified the song, as well as the cd on which it had been reissued, Rounder Record’s Calypso Breakaway. I bought it. Rounder and other labels had issued several such calypso compilations. I got all I could find.

It was like discovering a hidden room in your childhood home. It wasn’t jazz, but played with jazz instruments: trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, piano, cuatro (a four-stringed guitar) and string bass. It was rhythmically complex, even though the British had outlawed drums in the colony. It described a small, self-contained community, populated by singers who had adopted power names: Lord Executor. Roaring Lion. Modern Inventor. King Radio. The Growler. Lord Invader. Wilmouth Houdini. They sang about unfair laws, women, murder, and weddings gone awry. They sang about each other, as friends and competitors. They sang about their greatness. Mostly, they offered advice, admonition and wry commentary. It was a world away from “Day-o, daylight come and me wan’ go home.” Like John Lennon writing “A Day in the Life,” these guys read the paper and wrote a song.

Structurally, old-school calypso is much like blues. Calypso chord changes are almost always of two variants: single-tone, using only two chords, and double-tone—similar, but with an extended middle. Blues also has a (usually) standard set of changes. Many, if not most, of the 30s calypsos are in a dark, minor key. Their instrumentation, even the backing band on the recordings, is similar if not identical. Like blues, calypso is distinguished by the riff, melody, and the singer’s personality. Executor became my favorite, followed by The Growler.

Growler’s single-tone “In the Dew and the Rain” was another song about prostitutes in Port of Spain. Its repeated lyrical refrain and aggressive delivery, though hardly unique in the style, made it a template for “Hell.” The second verse was downright inspirational:

Oh believe me I don’t know what to say
What account they will give on that Judgment Day
“Too late, too late!” then shall be the cry
When Saint Peter puts water in the eye

I often sang this verse before beginning “Hell” during live performances. It was a shout-out to The Growler and a petition to be included in that canon.

In the months after our first record, The Inevitable, was released, I wrote a new batch of songs. Jimbo cranked them out consistently while I puttered and fussed. I had a good batch of ballads, but needed an up-tempo number. As I read “The History of Hell” by Alice K Turner, it dawned on me that this was perfect calypso material.

For me, the important thing in music is that it should rock. Most of what I listen to rocks, if it’s Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, Howlin’ Wolf or Big Star. Obviously, this is not the “rock” of rock and roll. It’s the rock of the church and the roadhouse; the rock of pure emotion and intent. The age of the performer or recording is irrelevant. Those calypsos rocked me, and I wanted to write one, too. The trick to incorporating musical styles as a songwriter or performer is to do it well or not at all. I was never going to write Fear of a Black Planet, though I loved it. Calypso was doable.

I had tried once already. Early on, I wrote a double-tone called “Hot But Sweet.” I don’t remember the lyric at all, which tells me a lot. As a reference, since no one in the band had heard old-school calypso before, I played them “Seven Skeletons.” Because of that, and my inability to come up with a better one, we incorporated Executor’s riff. The whole thing was a mess, and I ended up scrapping it after a couple performances.

I was ready to take another crack at the form once I had found my theme. Heaven, all harps and clouds, holds no interest. Hell is an artist’s playground. How much paint, how many words have been used in its description? How many brain cells have burned out inventing its endless torments? If I sang about hell, I would labor in an ancient vineyard. I would create a palliative for the AM preachers’ fearful certainty. I would console myself by taking a hard line against jerks, rewarded for bad behavior. I would become the ghost of Marley, who got such a marvelous entrance and exit.

It was easy enough. No need to beat my brains out on a chord progression: I would write a single-tone. The melody came, as they often do, by trying out several possibilities over the changes. One felt good. Its rhythmic pattern required words with certain syllables:

In the afterlife
You could be headed for the serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But tomorrow there’ll be hell to pay

A good start—bad news right from the beginning. Leaving room for interpretation, I was careful to make the song as much about hangovers as damnation. This verse would be repeated as a refrain. The next one needed to be a wake-up call:

People listen attentively
I mean about future calamity
I used to think the idea was obsolete
Until I heard the old man stamping his feet

The first phrase was fairly standard calypso wordsmithing. I first heard it in Wilmouth Houdini’s “War Declaration,” a jab at Executor, among others. Houdini wrote “He Had It Coming,” which was popularized by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan as “Stone Cold Dead in the Market.” I had some vague idea that the “old man,” instead of God or Father Time, was the future me—stamping with impatience at my sedentary, rudderless self. Now that I am my future self, I agree.

I had initially wanted the whole song to be descriptions of hell’s various torments. Nothing redemptive; just a kind of pain buffet. Only one of those verses survived. Before alteration, it read:

This is a place where eternally
Fire is applied to the body
Teeth are extruded and bones are ground
Then rolled into joints which are passed around

I changed the last line to “baked into cakes which are passed around” when remembering a Bugs Bunny cartoon in which a giant Elmer Fudd says “I’ll grind your bones to make my bread!” That image was more evocative, and didn’t have to be explained to the parents. Regardless, I was proud that I had written a lyric with the word “extruded” in it. There’s not too many of those. Next, it was time to describe what qualities won’t save your hell bound ass:

Beauty, talent, fame, money, refinement, top skill and brain
But all the things you try to hide
Will be revealed on the other side

This is about the time, after Marley’s jaw drops, that he hollers about “mankind being your business.” The last couplet reminded me of the traditional gospel song “God’s Gonna Cut ‘Em Down:”

But sure as God made day and night
What you do in the dark will be brought to the light

Santa can do this stuff too. You better watch out.

I was stumped for a last verse. The song needed a fiendish bow to wrap it up. Once again, Executor showed me the way. I remembered his song “My Troubles With Dorothy:”

Now the D and the O and the R and the O and the T and the H and the Y they say
Now Dorothy darling, you made me tame
You want the Executor to lose his name

What a great device! The last verse came tumbling out.

Now the D and the A and the M and the N and the A and the T and the
I-O-N
Lose your face, lose your name
Then get fitted for a suit of flame

You lose face by wearing the lampshade one too many times, or by infernal immolation. Either way: there are actions, and there are consequences. Demonic tailors seemed a nice touch. The song was almost finished. All it needed was a killer riff. Despite fruitless efforts to write one, it waited for me until that day when the light turned red.

It felt, as the best songs do, like it had already been written. In some ways it had. I’ve never thought I created “Hell” out of whole cloth. The theme was planted, eons ago, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. The music is standard single-tone calypso. The lyric contains a trail of breadcrumbs that leads back to Growler, Executor and Houdini. I had written something, I believed, that could have been performed in the Carnival tent in Port of Spain, but only by me.

I brought the lyric sheet to the next Zippers’ practice at Ken Mosher’s house. Chris Phillips was setting up the drums. I told them excitedly about the new song and read the words. When I finished, Chris P looked up from adjusting his bass drum legs.

“Jesus, man,” he said, shaking his head. “Goddamn.”

Ken just laughed.

“Survival Training” An article about my son’s leukemia, and early treatment.  Published in The Independent, 10/7/07

“The Ghost and Squirrel Nut Zippers” Memories of a haunted French Quarter studio. Published in The Independent, 10/31/07

“Radio Broadcast, 1850″ A fictitious transcript from the 19th Century.