Arlo's Moment

When playing Dustbowl Ballads by Woodie Guthrie for environmental geography students, I would sometimes ask which students had heard of him. The number who had was small when I began teaching was small and is now near zero. I would begin explaining who. he was by saying he was "Arlo's dad" until I realized that Arlo (who is the age of my dad) is not so well known himself anymore. One exception: a former BSU student has Arlo as a first name because her parents (roughly my age) were such big fans.

But I digress. This is a post about Arlo and his most favorite song, Alice's Restaurant. (sometimes called "Alice's Restaurant and Massacree"). I assumed that he was still well known because anybody who is roughly my age remembers hearing this on hard-rock radio stations every Thanksgiving day. It is not played much on other days because it is 18 minutes long. It is also not played much on hard-rock stations because it is a folk song. 

But like Don McLean's 9-minute ballad American Pie, it is a long-format song that most people in the United States of a certain age can sing almost from memory. Why this is, I don't exactly know, but both songs do speak to an historic moment, and in a way that people are able to appreciate regardless of their political leanings. 

It is played on Thanksgiving Day because it tells the true story (with some embellishments) of young Arlo's arrest for littering on Thanksgiving Day 1965. There is more to the story, of course. Listen carefully to figure out how this became a protest song.

I might not have thought to play this for the Planet Sings class, except for a poignant coincidence. The song is (in part about Arlo's good friend Alice Brock, who died just a couple of days before Thanksgiving this year. His thoughts on her passing are presented at the end of this post. It is from him his production company's page. The photo shows him with Alice and their mutual friend Rick, who was part of the 1965 hijinks. They are shown on the steps of the church building that Alice and her husband were living in at the time, which now serves as the headquarters of the Guthrie Center. 

I cannot help but mention two small connections. First, in 2019 (the year we did not realize how lucky we were for all the things we got to do), he and his daughter Sarah performed at the Zeiterion Theater in New Bedford as part of a 50th-anniversary tour of the 1967 song. Among other things, we learned about the movie version of the song. It is not an excellent movie, but it is pretty interesting, especially since the arresting officer plays himself in the film. After the show, we were lucky enough to say hello to Arlo as he stepped from the stage door to his tour bus, before the crowed had found him there.

Second, it was on our anniversary in May of this year that we found ourselves in Stockbridge at the Main Street Cafe, which is located in the general store that served as a summertime extension of the original restaurant. The restaurant itself is "around the back" in a place now known as Teresa's Café, which seems to have closed during the pandemic. Alice's memory is still honored, however, as shown in this photo I grabbed after a wonderful brunch around the front. 

"You can get anything you want"
RIP Alice Brock

I have confirmed that this a half-mile from the nearest railroad track.

Samba Update

Brazilian singer-songwriter Rogê updates the '60s/'70s golden era of samba on his new album "Curyman II -- the second in a planned trilogy. NPR music journalist Will Hermes provides context and a review in this November 22 contribution to Morning Edition.

Below is the album in question. 

Even the Forest Hums

Vitalii Bard Bardetskyi is a DJ, record-shop owner, music producer, and (randomly) wallpaper expert from Ukraine who is currently living in exile in Bonn, Germany. He came to my attention because of a conversation with Scott Simon, one of my favorite journalists. On Weekend Edition Saturday, they discussed Even the Forest Hums, Bardetskyi's  recent compilation of Ukrainian music, mainly jazz or jazz-adjacent. 

The conversation reveals the importance of music as a part of cultural identity and of cultural identity as a part of political resistance. I recommend listening carefully to this discussion, perhaps listening twice, as I did. This musical project comes as the NATO prepares to be dismantled from within and Putin gains an ally in his war on Ukraine. 

The compilation is current, but the music itself was recorded -- by many artists -- during the previous Russian occupation of Ukraine. Not mentioned in this conversation is the fact that one of Putin's excuses for the reconquest of Ukraine is that there is no such thing as Ukraine. It is just a part of Russia in this view, making Bardetskyi's work deeply and importantly political, even though it has not a single word of political content in its lyrics. 

Lagniappe: How I heard this music

I listened to the album in its entirety during an early-morning drive to a coastal rowing session, and I found it nourishing and sustaining as I limit my intake of news for my own mental health these days. 

I understand this story because of something I learned during a 2004 visit to my charch's partner congregation in Transylvania, which has been occupied by Romania for the last century or so. From  1965 through 1989, this meant it was ruled by the increasingly brutal Nicolae Ceaușescu. 

One of the translators for our visit had been a teenager during that dictatorship. Ilena described lying down in the center of her house to listen to radio broadcasts from the Voice of America on the lowest possible voume, lest they be reported by neighbors. She also said that she spent a couple of days in prison for reading a poem about Transylvania that one of her classmates had written. Ilena was not held longer than that because her father had Communist Party connections, which is similar to the leniency that Bardetskyi had enjoyed. 

But the classmate who had written the poem Ilena read was held for seven years. There had been nothing overtly political about the poem. It merely celebrated the beauty of the land of Transylvania. But it celebrated that in contrast to Romania as a whole, so she was punished severely. An indication of her character is that when she was released, she apologized to Ilena for the two days she had spent in prison years before. 

The incoming president of the United States is using the word "peace" when referring to his plans for Ukraine. But the word has a different meaning when used by such a deeply violent person, and that meaning is "appeasement" of his patron. For me, listening to this album is a genuinely peaceful act of solidarity with Ukraine.

Busking Geography

 

NPR journalist A Martinez interviewed Cary Baker on today's Morning Edition about his recent book Down on the Corner. Beginning with Baker's first childhood encounter with street-corner performers, they discuss his exploration of the street performance as a vital node in the history and geography of music. 

Among other things, they discuss a fascinating sub-genre of busking that has been gaining wide exposure online: situations in which a famous artist crashes a performance of their work by a busker. In the example cited, it has been an 18-million-view boost to both Levi Mitchell and the more famous musician he was emulating. 

The interview ends with the author's thoughts on how to interact with public musicians. My family and I often pause in the way he recomends, and we've had a lot of nice experiences as a result.

Why Music?

When I saw this on social media today, I immediately reposted it with the caption, "And of course, music is also geography."

Geography is sometimes called the Science of Where, and the geographers in my department often use three questions as our guide: 

• Where is it?
• Why is it there?
• So what?

We use these to apply geographic thinking to all manner of things. As we see throughout this blog and the class it accompanies, music is a perfect example. Music always comes from somewhere, and it tells us something about that place. And most music goes somewhere, telling us about the connections among places. As our connections increase, music is part of a rich tapestry of change. 

When I posted the infographic, a former geography student replied right away, referring to her adult son:

I can’t tell you how pleased I am that my son took up band in fifth grade and has stuck with it into college. I am not a musical person. I can’t read music at all. Whenever I see him play with the marching band or orchestra, my heart is full. It’s all those things in the image. It enriches his life and mine.

As I write this, Massachusetts voters are considering an end to the requirement that all high school students pass a particular, very narrow exam in order to graduate. I have been teaching here over the entire life of that requirement, and I have seen the damage that has resulted from the narrowing of the curriculum. 

I hope we are on the verge of a return to a more diverse and inclusive pedagogy that has as much music, art, drama, sewing, cooking, metal shop, and photography as my own education did. And let's start with music!

¡Con Salsa!

 When I arrived in Bridgewater in 1997, I worked late into the night quite often. I had a new job with mostly new classes to prepare, I was a new father with a tiny baby to help care for, and my doctoral dissertation committee at the University of Arizona thought it would be fun to make me re-write an entire book they had initially approved.
My companion on those late nights was sometimes National Public Radio, especially on Saturday night when the local (but globally important) affiliate WBUR played Latin American music ALL NIGHT. 

Specifically, the program Con Salsa aired from midnight to 5 a.m. In those days, listeners could call in to request or dedicate songs, and I remember that more than a few of those requests were from my new home town of Bridgewater.
The show continues to be on the air, as it has been for almost 49 years, though now it runs 10pm Saturday to 3am Sunday. It is still five full hours, curated by José Massó III, a true scholar of the music of Latin America, particularly that of the Caribbean. He describes the show as five chapters of music and commentary, often tied together by a particular theme or by homage being paid to a particular artist. 

One thing I love is that the show begins almost without notice -- whatever is happening at 9:59 ends and then this song plays for seven minutes before Massó says anything at all. 

This is very unusual for public radio, which usually has a lot of chatter at the top of the hour. I have gotten used to this soft opening over the years, and only learned the back story when Massó explained it during the episode of October 5-6, 2024. 

Listen to the story of Con Salsa during a during his appearance on The Common.
The title of the song is simply "Puerto Rico" but the inspiration for the song was a particularly poignant moment in the history of the island. That moment was at the very end of 1972, when the musician Eddie Palmieri was among many Puerto Ricans who were desperately combing the beaches of the island, in search of some sign of life from the Pittsburg Pirates baseball star Roberto Clemente. 

It turns out that he perished in a plane that he had chartered for a humanitarian mission to Nicaragua.

Sergio, Play Yo Piano

Credit to Will.I.Am. for the title of this post. Read on ... 

In the summer of 2006, I was walking through music/book store with my mother when I noticed a whole rack of CDs (this was 2006, after all) entitled Timeless, by a band I had not heard of: Black Eyed Peas. 

I stopped in my tracks and then tried to explain to my mother why this was so exciting. The face on the CD was that of a young Sergio Mendes. Sergio Mendes! 

As I later wrote in a 2013 post on my main blog, this is an artist who perhaps more than any other brought samba to audiences in the United States. He visited New York shortly before I was born, and shortly afterward exiled himself there, eventually moving to Los Angeles, where he died on September 5, 2024.

Back to that 2006 recording. The TimelessI project is one of many of his collaborations, in this case giving Black Eyed Peas a major role in many of the songs that he had made famous decades before. Among the most popular of these is "Mas Que Nada" and it is in this track that rapper Will.I.Am. encourages his friend's instrumental solo with those words. 

So popular had he become in the United States -- and particularly in New York City -- that a 1993 Seinfeld episode has the character Kramer indignantly ranting about his importance, and erroneously assuming he was well-known in Brazil.  

Notable tracks and stories I'll be sharing in class:

Fanfarra Cabua Le Le (1992)

Mas Que Nada 2006

Mas Que Nada 1966 video (see Wikipedia for much more about this song)

Sergio Mendes obituary on NPR (audio)

Sergio Mendes highlights on NPR (including obituary text)

Sergio Mendes, 83, Dies; Brought Brazilian Rhythms to the Pop Charts (NY Times)

Sergio Mendes - Magalenha (Video Original)

Mendes had a cameo in an otherwise very unremarkable movie Be Cool