Credit Karma

Years ago, when I was an emerging bassist with a passion for eighth-note pulse-rock, I was flown to London for a unique opportunity.  The gig was to replace a weak album track for a well-known, high-charting band whose bassist was apparently struggling with issues.  At the time, digital instruments were not common, machine-generated instruments were obvious and the management decided to 'fly in' another player.  For the biggest paycheck I'd ever received, I was to lay down a simple, basic, eighth-note, pocket-heavy part, on what was to be a chart-topping single.  I got to play along to a band whose music I paid for on vinyl, in those days.  The catch was, I had to sign serious documents swearing I would never disclose my identity.  

Of course I was told that my work only 'might' be used on the recording, although the authorship would be attributed to the regular band members.  I signed, received a fat 4-figure check, a taxi back to Gatwick where I boarded a prepaid Virgin flight home. Not even an overnight stay.  In New York City, the music scene for sidemen was pretty male-dominated.  I felt like bragging but I couldn't.  I'd sworn away my rights and I take these things seriously.  So while I banked the check, I was stripped of the notch in my musical belt--the credit, the album listing-- things which musicians crave and hoard like trophies. Still, it gave me some personal swagger.  I felt 'heard' if not seen.  

Some years later, when Bill Wyman quit The Rolling Stones, bassists world-over were salivating to audition for the gig.  I was a young single mother playing mostly bars in the city, unable to tour.  One amazing Saturday night, at a well-known dive bar in the east Village, Bobby Keys came to drink and sit in with our band.  He ended up playing an entire 7-hour marathon night-- insisting, during breaks, that I was going to be the next bassist for the Stones.  I've heard a lot of alcohol-fueled talk in my day, and every single deserving career-bassist in New York was gunning for this miracle opportunity. Meanwhile, a sober Bobby called me during the week-- left messages on my voicemail.  He'd talked to Keith, he said... and sure enough the management called me to schedule. But I declined.  They called again.  I declined again-- I had a young child-- that was my priority. Again, they offered babysitters... other kids were on the road.  Just come... play... Well, I knew I'd be a sideman, not a band member... and did I want the larger-than-life thing? Me-- in a semi-glorified studio apartment with my little boy, my books and my 8-track tape machine?  I was happy. And I couldn't really fathom Mick Jagger welcoming a woman as anything but a back-up singer.  Bobby called back; again and again I declined.  I also knew the shortlisted guys and they were my heroes... it was a place for which I didn't want to compete, nor did I really belong in their company. I mean-- Darryl Jones played with Miles. I worshipped him, saw him every chance I got.

A couple of weeks later I was on 48th Street and one of the store clerks actually noticed me... Hey, he remarked, I read you were on the Stones' shortlist.  Not me, I answered.  But from that moment on, I was given the retail-respect most players were used to.  So while I didn't share, divulge or brag... there were some perks.

In and out of college, it's a thing... people ask.. will I get credit? It seems to make all the difference. I once judged one of those King of the Blues contests at Guitar Center alongside the late Bill Sims and the also late incomparable Hugh McCracken.  Before the judging we had to fill out a form with our 'credits'.  Hugh kept peeking at my pathetic sheet and asked me what he should put down.  He played rhythm on BB King's The Thrill is Gone.  Doesn't that just about knock us all out of the park?  What a humble, quiet genius he was. Credit? Plenty.  

But how about all those amazing pocket-players who graced the old records that made our hearts jump and our feet tap as kids?  Some of them remain uncompensated, unnamed.  I think about them-- about the great talents who died penniless or under-acknowledged while instagram celebrities of this culture are regaled and overpaid for nothing but popularity contracts... hype.  It's hard to even know what these airbrushed people actually look like, let alone sound like, in the naked dark.  

I wake up to my old clock-radio alarm and there's often some ironic reminder of my past.  I Love Rock and Roll.. my dear best friend and bandmate Alan Merrill who struggled and strained for credit for his hit song.  On a morning two weeks ago, 'my' song came on.  Even with the plastic old speaker, I could recognize my bass fingers in a heartbeat.  The song will live; the credit will die.  It gave me a little jolt for about a minute-- me the aging old songwriter/poet whose anonymity is almost ensured.  

Some of us get credit for what we didn't do... taking the rap for a friend.  All those writers who claim they are responsible for anything we find in their poems or work. After a while, resonance is built-in-- a signature... a voice.  I've been reading Javier Marias... he often played with the concept of authorship... in Tomorrow in the Battle..' he ghostwrites for a ghostwriter, shows up with the imposter's identity at a government office.  It gets complicated. 

Didn't you play with Patti Smith, a medical person asked me this week as I got up from his chair? No, I didn't, I replied. Browsing the shelves in Barnes and Noble, she has her own little section.  Kind of amazing. The irony of life-- of fame, of random success or failure... the luck of some draw.  My ex-husband, the poster child of under-acknowledged rock players, was once asked, as we sat down to eat in a restaurant, 'Aren't you famous?'  He looked at me, looked at the flirtatious waitress, and replied... I'm hungry, pointing to the menu.  

To the unacknowledged, undercredited greats, I salute you, my heroes... Heaven stands still.

Collections- 2

On the very first day of school I was confused when the teacher announced she was coming around to 'collect' the papers on which we had drawn our self-portraits in crayon.   It baffled me that she wanted to take home our childish work and put it in a box.  My Mom had always given me old candy tins and cigar boxes for my 'collections'.  These I piled up and secured with a rubber band.  Children are natural collectors; my passions were rocks, shells, small rubber dinosaurs and tiny glass animals.  Some children on the block collected insects or worms-- the ambitious ones caught butterflies and pressed them sadly between plastic sheets where they miraculously, unlike other things, retained their beauty although dead.

By second grade, I began to save stamps-- they looked so amazing swimming around in their box, like fragile paper mosaics...  and they were labeled with exotic words and people I'd never seen-- landscapes and fairylands.  Some of them had traveled so far to live in my little room.   On rainy days I'd take the boxes out and look at their contents... I'd line them up and study them one by one-- I'd create little plays and vignettes and move them around, hold them up to the window or shine a flashlight on one and then another.

At school, I began to understand there were other meanings to words.  After all, there was the collection plate on Sundays, the toll collector when we crossed bridges, the trash and bottle collector
who came for pick-ups, and later, the tax collector.  What I don't remember is ever exceeding the limit of my boxes.  I did glue the special shells onto a felt board so I could hang them on the wall... but mostly, my little collections remained happily within the boundaries of their containers.  My father had a stack of Roman coins in a tennis-ball can.  I was not allowed to open this myself, but I often sneaked into his closet and shook it around like a tambourine.

These days, when I visit an art fair or museum, they often ask me-- am I a visitor, a dealer or a collector--  the collector, here, being the preferred tag, because they continue to offer you categories and boxes to check so they can identify your 'area of interest'.  An adult collector is a buyer-- someone who acquires things not just because they are beautiful or interesting, but because they are assumed to have value.  You are not just an audience here, but a necessary participant.  The whole show is for your entertainment, your enticement to support the platform-- to buy, spend money, perpetrate the system.  The wares are a few dollars' worth of canvas and paint, or material-- but pulled from the tall hat of the art gallery, they are transformed into 'art'-- they are labelled not only with a signature and a title, but with a corresponding number of dollars which affects the way you perceive these, after a while.  Of course there is true talent out there, but it is less common among the unending unloading of product.  Imagine the numbers of students finishing art school every year, entering the vast pool of what already exists-- not to mention the posthumous forgotten in overpopulated storage bins.

Despite the galactic numbers of images available on anyone's internet allowing nearly anything to be viewable at any time in your home, the acquisition ambition has never been stronger.  It seems also, each successive generation has a certain nostalgia for objects of the previous generation-- vinyl, vintage leather, watches, jewelry, fashion.   Everyday things, removed from their 'era', are not just collectible but valuable.  Online auctions have grown from primitive eBay beginnings to thousands of high-end auctions which offer anything from old master paintings to cars to grand homes and purchasable islands.  For some items, the more they are traded, the higher the value.  Almost everything is searchable, and eventually find-able.

It's no wonder people become hoarders in this culture.  Things are so available and viewable in numbers-- so easy to 'have' at the click of a button, a PayPal 'confirm'... free shipping, the anticipation-- the arrival.. the joy or disappointment... the perpetual Christmas, the careless cheap collections-- for the ones who find happiness in sheer number, the ones who agonize and painfully decide, the ones who like fickle lovers detest within days the very item they have bought-- the research and storytelling, the 'marketing' of a period or a place-- celebrity provenance... There are people who pay many times the value of an item because it belonged once to Madonna, or Andy Warhol, despite the fact it had little relevance to their life...  it has gained the status of a relic, and is doubly collectible.

The amount of available 'art' on the market is overwhelming.  I grew up thinking I 'knew' every important painting and its location.  Now I can't keep track of the museums opening globally, everyday, in every city... in multiples.  As old collectors die, their holdings are acquired or donated to institutions so we find ready-made collections within collections.  Upcoming artists are promoted and marketed with a vengeance; the Warholian model has been extended-- where he put the soupcan ironically on the canvas, now the art is almost simultaneously produced as skateboards and T-shirts-- coffee mugs and umbrellas-- phone cases and sneakers, toys and souvenirs.  Art advisors and gallerists, like stockbrokers, navigate options for their clients and guarantee their full art wallets remain so.  Artists run their studios like a business, maximizing output, manipulating sales, jumping from gallery to installation to institution, merchandising their product and becoming overnight superstars.  It takes years for a tree to grow tall, but some  seven-figure art is produced in an hour.  It seems wrong.  But the art audience is massive, and buyers are impatient and greedy-- insatiable.  Facile art suits the competitive 'soft' market.  Collecting is epidemic.

The 'look' of contemporary art, to me, has a certain built-in clock.  I can smell obsolescence the way I never trusted those beanie babies children begged for in the 1990's.  It's all too easy-- too facile.  Part of the beauty of being--say, a record collector in the 1960's-- was the chase.  Ask Keith Richards-- how he came to America and went to record shops.  Things were rare-- things were treasured.  They were listened to and looked at and loved, the way I loved the tiny glass animals in my Eldorado box.

I am finished collecting, now.  It is a time in my life to take stock of what I have and look at things.  Besides the art, I'm not sure anyone will appreciate my home 'museum', but I have grown to understand the soul of objects and the words they elicit.  My friends tease me because I still don't have a mobile phone... but I spend many hours outside observing and listening to the city.  I come home and am embraced by modest things I find beautiful and compelling.  It is enough.

Blurred and Muddy

Another Saturday post-gig late-night.  All musicians have these hours where you are wired and tired but never that good kind of closure-exhaustion like doctors have after a successful surgery.  It is we who feel cut open and badly sutured too often-- we are the operators, but we are also the patients; we suffer from our own performance-- we criticize and rehash and wonder how we ever got the idea of standing in front of a drinking crowd while we pour out our hearts and try to make our instruments speak our angst.  Why would anyone want to do such a thing-- public humiliation, emotional guillotines, our own version of original karaoke of ourselves without a prompt?

Nothing I can locate on the new Time Warner line-up.  Of course, once I get used to numbers and a system-- -they change it.  Nothing is ever familiar these days; even my dial-tone tonight seems wrong.  PBS is usually good for a 4 AM film--- but at the moment they are once again showing this Muddy Waters/Rolling Stones/Chicago from 1981.  I've seen this before--- several times, although somehow I've never been able to stay with it.  Tonight I'm a little desperate for distraction, can't face Facebook or my voicemail… tomorrow the gig won't be quite as raw as it seems in the immediate 'wake' hours; I need to feed the distance.  Suddenly 1981 seems kind of innocent.  Muddy is the young/old Muddy I remember meeting at the Bottom Line.  I sat on his lap that one night--- on his hard, trunk-like legs and felt his calloused rough hands.  I was kind of a girl.  Bob Dylan sat in, too, that night-- not on him but with him, although Muddy seemed to care little for Dylan who was in one of those periods where he'd lost a considerable amount of star power.  Hard to imagine.  

The Checkerboard 1981 seems like a hold-over of the 70's.  People were still badly dressed; Mick has on some kind of lame orange-colored v-neck track suit or sweat pants.  He is chewing gum while Keith swills his Jack and looks still like the old Keith in his white Oxford shirt.  Muddy seems not all that impressed by the Stones although he seems to enjoy repeating 'Mick Jagger' in that great Muddy accent which post-Adam Levine has new irony.  Mick is goofy and mugging for maybe some girl.  Of course the whole night is a set-up.  I read somewhere the Stones asked the club owner to let in mostly black people and he could only muster like 10.  They show the waitress numerous times… the whole table-seating thing is annoying and obtrusive.   Muddy is unflappable.  He is rough and raw and always the same--- just right--- never slick, always gets you.  All these forgettable rap lyrics we incessantly hear … all the Jay-Z dynasties and unbreakables and niggahs… and Muddy says You don't have to go and it is enough.  Mick mugs and imitates and even wails a little, but there is something silly and childish even with Keith and Ronnie licking out.  It was better before they got up there.  But it took all those people sitting in to make us realize how much better it was before they got there, even though no one would have filmed it.

There is something still innocent about these rockstars going to a small club, even with the film crew and the set-up and the girlfriends and the entourage and the bottles of Jack flowing and the bullshit.  There is still something innocent because the music is still live and no auto-correct or backing tracks and it's American black music from the time just before Hip-Hop and it feels rootsy and folksy and direct and important. This is a document-- not so much editing and we hear the music, we know the truth.  It is a truth that obsesses the Stones, and Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin, Clapton--- all the white rock stars.  And there is Muddy… same as he ever was, with his big face and big hands, and his You said you loved me baby…why don't you call me on the phone when people still had those big black receivers and curly cords and you had to be home when your baby called and it was important and magical.

1981---before AIDS was discovered-- people still had the 70's recklessness and the time factor in relationships because there was no email or texting and no overkill.  There was still the 'waiting'.   Songs and records and tapes and radio were important.  John Lennon had just been killed--- we were still in shock, but in a way that marked the end of the 1970's...   I remember that year so well--- as I entered Central Park today for my gig--- I thought about how none of that Strawberry Fields hype existed, none of the shitty folkies sitting around playing Lennon songs for tourists and cheap photo ops of the sundial with flowers and John and Yoko memorabilia.  John still wandered our streets and peeked into local bars and shops.

I had just moved into this model's apartment--- it felt like a palace-- it had double-height ceilings and a brick wall and a sleep loft and a tiny balcony.  I knew I'd be the happiest I'd ever be in that place, and I was.   Right at that moment when Mick was onstage at the Checkerboard, I had my appendix out and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein were down the hall and we'd hang out on the hospital roof.  Everything was perfect.  My love affairs and my stray dog and my apartment and my new bass guitar and the gigs at CBGB's.

Tonight those PBS Stones (and I, too, for that matter) have all since finished with their future babies and those kids are grown, and except Keith, most of the wives and girlfriends have separate lives… they are gray and wrinkled and changed, and the money flows, the Jack Daniels has maybe stopped-- -the gum-chewing silliness.  Our Muddy is long gone, and only the memory of his wooden hands is with me… and the sameness of his performance--- always Muddy---hard again, hard always… just the recording quality changing… but the blues, despite the millions of bands who claim to own it and feel it and play it… the blues will always belong to Muddy…and John Lee… and Albert and Freddie and BB… like a primary color.  We pay tribute, we learn, we listen… but like the past we can't change what preceded us-- no surgery or remixes can alter what was, clear as clear, pure as pure.  Everything but muddy, no matter how we try or do not try to muck it all up.