Thursday, May 7, 2009
Up From the Couch
My parents had this exceptionally long green couch in their living room which I would take a nap on after I got home from high school, often accompanied by the afternoon jazz show playing on KBOO, Portland's non-profit, listener supported radio station. One afternoon I woke to voice somewhere between thunder and lightning intoning "I'm sorry, the government you have elected is inoperative ...Click! Inoperative!" This was Gil Scott Heron doing H20 Blues and I think it was a kind of transformative moment for me. I'm sure I had already heard "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and I could recognize the voice even if I didn't know the name of the artist. But wow, here was attitude about the government and the weirdlimbo Nixon-Ford placeholder world of 1974 and 75 that was happening around me that I could relate to.
McCord has blown. Mitchell has blown no tap on my telephone
Halderman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean
It follows a pattern if you dig what I mean.
Years later there was that famous quotation about rap being the CNN for a good part of America and Gil Scott Heron has been canonized as being one of the primary godfathers of rap music. For me, the most descriptive of all Gil Scott Heron albums is Bridges. His music, commentary, and poetry took me to all kinds of worlds and exploration, certainly in regards to politics, poetry, and issues of black inequality. But also musically, the keyboard and drum jams of The Bottle and Home is Where The Hatred Is on the Gil Scott Heron, Brian Jackson and the Midnight Band album It's Your Worldwere some of the most exciting musical jam moments I had encountered.
His prime output was pretty prodigious: fifteen albums of music and/or poetry between 1970 and 1982 with a unique voice and a level of fairly high and consistent. Yet Gil's demons with drugs finally overtook his creativity. The seven or eight performances I saw in the eighties or nineties were anything but consistent. One time in the late eighties his band was ready to go for a Seattle matinee performance, but the plug was pulled because Gil didn't make the plane from the Bellingham gig the night before. And he was still in pretty rough shape when we saw him the next night in Portland. But by contrast, there was the Bumbershoot shows of 1981 where he previewed B Movie before the Reflections album was released. It was just Gil and his Fender Rhodes or as my friend Katie would call it "his little piano" and it still stands out as one of the smartest, most intense performances I have had privilege to have witnessed.
Wolfgangs Vault has a gem of a show from 1977. It comes a year after the shows captured on It's Your World, and contains a lot of music from Bridges, which hadn't hit the streets yet. It is hard not to want to embed the whole show, but I chose to include the opening rap because it reminds me a lot of when that voice woke me up on the couch taking about how "America's faith is drowning, beneath that cesspool-Watergate."
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:48 PM
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