The Echo Chamber

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Episode 11: Soul to Soul at 50 Mar 03, 2021

Show notes

On March 6, 1971, a group of some of the top musicians from the United States -– Ike and Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, the Staple Singers, and more -– boarded a plane bound for Ghana to perform in a musical celebration that was dubbed the “Soul to Soul Festival.” Thousands of audience members filled Accra’s Black Star Square for a continuous 15 hours of music. The festival was planned in part for the annual celebration of Ghana’s independence, but also as an invitation to a “homecoming” for these noted African-American artists to return to Africa.

This episode revisits the famed music festival on its 50th anniversary and explores the longstanding legacy of cultural exchange with African diasporans originally set forth in the 1950s by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. Tune in for interviews with noted musicologist John Collins, poet and scholar Tsitsi Ella Jaji, concert goers and more.

This story was originally produced for AfroPop Worldwide. To hear more stories from this Peabody-award winning show, visit www.afropop.org..

Episode 10: A Plea for Peace: Leonard Bernstein, Richard Nixon, and the Music of the 1973 Inauguration Jan 19, 2021

Show notes

As we gather this week to witness the inauguration of our new president, we find our nation in a state of great political unrest. While certain recent events of violence at the Capitol are no doubt unprecedented, it is certainly not the first time an inauguration in our country has been met with divide. In 1973, the United States was reaching the concluding stages of our involvement in the Vietnam. And while the war would soon come to an end, the proceeding weeks leading up to the inauguration were met with some of the most intense and deadly bombing campaigns the war had witnessed. The anti-war movement was unhinged. They had marched, they had protest – all to seemingly no avail when it came to changing the foreign policies of Richard Nixon. So what to do next…. American conductor, Leonard Bernstein, gathered an impromptu orchestra and choir to perform a “Concert for Peace”, following his belief that by creating beauty, and by sharing it with as many people as possible, artists had the power to tip the earthly balance in favor of brotherhood and peace. Special thanks to Michael Chikinda, Alicia Kopfstein, Matt Holsen, and Bernie Swain for sharing their insight and memories of the musical events surrounding Nixon and his second inauguration in 1973. A Plea for Peace: Leonard Bernstein, Richard Nixon, and the Music of the 1973 Inauguration ARCHIVAL: Not everybody is here this weekend to celebrate. Thousands of demonstrators are expected. They’ve spent weeks organizing and are here to protest the war. “This is one anti-war demonstration that Mr. Nixon is not going to avoid. Past demonstrations he has fled town, nobody sees him now. He’s never explained to the nation why he ordered these saturation bombing rates on Hanoi and Haiphong, but this is one time he’s going to have to be present. We know he’s not going to be out of town and we want to be there at the same time.” Alicia Kopfstein (AK): The number of people who were in DC, it was thousands upon thousands. 18,000 were at the cathedral alone. To have the cathedral so full like that… full to the gills. There was no room. It was just overwhelming, to try to find a place to park, of course, but to be with so many like-minded people. Contrasting with so many protests now where there’s violence, it was so peaceful. There was such an attitude of goodwill and camaraderie and companionship. That was just incredible. I’m Dr. Alicia Kopfstein, I teach at American University and I’m a contributor and co-editor of a recent collection of essays called Leonard Bernstein and Washington DC. I was a singer in Leonard Bernstein’s “Concert for Peace” that happened at the Washington National Cathedral in January of 1973. ARCHIVAL: Introduction to the three official inaugural concerts tonight. There’s a fourth unofficial one. Leonard Bernstein is conducting what is called a “Concert for Peace” at the Washington Cathedral. Admission is free, arrangements have been made to pipe the program outside. It is thought that 10,000 persons might show up, many of them anti-war protesters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ku9HUWZDas AK: There was hope, there was desire for peace, there was love, but there’s also a resignation, a fear because people had done their utmost to try to protest the war and it didn’t seem to change anything. Years and years and years of protest still led to the Christmas bombing. So it was just, we’re getting desperate. Let’s do everything we possibly can. The Vietnam War went from 1959 to 1975. When Nixon was elected the second time, it was shortly after some more horrors in the Vietnam war. We had Kent State and the Pentagon papers, the My Lai massacres. Films and photographs were available in Time and Look and all the major magazines and newspapers showing women and children and young people just lying dead by the road. Shocking for people in this country. There were a lot of anti-war protests and Bernstein participated in those anti-war protests. Michael Chikinda (MC): The Nixon administration was very frustrated with the lack of progress in resolving the situation in Vietnam. So they began what was later dubbed the “Christmas Bombings”. There was this very intensive bombing campaign to try to force the Vietnamese government into submission. It was a very unpopular decision. ARCHIVAL: The sound in the background is a jet that is gone by. I can hear some bombs in the distance. The sky is lighting up. So something’s gone on somewhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4a8xFesASg AK: It was a two week bombing campaign with over 20,000 tons of bombs dropped on civilian areas of Vietnam. Over 1600 people were killed, civilians mostly. Over 2000 homes were destroyed. So, this is what people in the United States were hearing about. ARCHIVAL: Arriving from New York. Ms. Baez said recent US bombing rates had delayed her departure from Hanoi for a week. After a warm greeting by family and friends in San Francisco, she outlined some of the bomb damage described by one of her colleagues as far heavier than the London blitz. LINK: Joan Baez On Visit To Vietnam (Bay Area Television Archive MC: The American composer Vincent Persichetti was approached by Nixon’s second inauguration committee on the recommendation of Eugene Ormandy, the principal conductor at the Philadelphia orchestra with a commission. They wanted him to compose a new piece of music that would accompany the text from Lincoln’s second inaugural address of 1865. The administration realized how unpopular the Christmas bombing was. Initially they approached Persichetti and asked him to maybe remove certain passages that they felt could somehow be construed as critical of the Nixon administration’s policies with Vietnam. And then ultimately they decided to remove the piece entirely and go a different direction. My name is Michael Chikinda. I’m head of the Theory Area at the University of Utah school of music. And I wrote an article for the Journal of Music and Politics entitled “Lincoln, Persichetti, and the Second Inauguration of Richard Nixon: A Study in Artistic Vision Versus Political Expediency.” The inaugural committee were very concerned about anything that could bring further controversy to what was supposed to be a very celebratory event. There were massive protests going on across the country in Washington. And so they wanted to squelch any possibility of something that would be inflammatory that would really stoke the fire. There were these memos back and forth. And then they finally decided ultimately that even after they removed some key phrases, they still felt the spirit somehow of Nixon’s second inaugural that somehow people might draw a connection between this line of texts in Lincoln’s speech to certain policies of the Nixon administration. So they said, we’re going to dispense with this altogether and we’re going to look for other texts. They looked at Longfellow’s Hiawatha, the Declaration of Independence. They even looked at bizarrely at some poetry by Ray Bradbury. I think that was one of the most curious things that… just imagined for this….Okay. This is a presidential inauguration, right? You have the speech by one of the most important and beloved presidents from US history. Oh no, no, we can’t have that! Instead, let’s look at the poetry of Ray Bradbury called “Madrigals for the Space Age”. When you make a choice to remove something as important as President Lincoln’s speech and expect that that’s not going to have fallout you really, the naivety it’s just…it’s hubris. But when you make this step, when you decide, okay, this cannot see the light of day, you know, take it out. That inevitably always ends up having the opposite reaction. You know, in the case of the Nixon administration, they thought that by removing the Persichetti piece with the text by Lincoln, the press just had a field day with it. You know, what? You’re censoring Lincoln? There’s a wonderful cartoon by a satirist Wayne Stayskal and in the first frame, it shows this figure violently kicking Persichetti in his posterior and the leaves to the score flying Helter Skelter. And this person be anybody from the committee, Ken Reitz, Ed Cowling, whoever saying, Sorry Mr. Persichetti, your composition is being deleted from the inaugural concert because it mentions war. A little embarrassing to the president se feel. Then in the second pane of the cartoon, another figure walks up to this person who’s just kicked Persichetti. And he says, Oh dear, here’s another that mentions rockets and bombs. Well, get rid of it, whatever it is. And this person says, “Uh, it’s the National Anthem! Oh, on second thought we could play it softly!” I love that because that just really captures the field day the press was having with this, right? And at the same time, the utter absurdity, if the situation, you know, the thing that you can put a lid on these things. LINK: Lincoln, Persichetti and the 2nd Inauguration of Richard Nixon: a Study in Artistic Vision Versus Political Expediency MC: Richard Nixon was very fond of Eugene Ormandy and very appreciative of the work Ormandy did with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Wanting to have Ormandy in the Philadelphia Orchestra play, this was a personal preference of the president as was the inclusion of course of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. ARCHIVAL: Almost 70 years later, Tchaikovsky wrote this piece. It’s also a favorite of Mr. Nixon, as we told you, he first heard it in Philadelphia, played by this orchestra in 1970… MC: That amongst everything else was something that had to be on the program. Now, why again, with all of the suspicion surrounding Lincoln speech, the defeat of Napoleon in Russia, you know, and some people were referring to Nixon as a dictator, given his policies of Vietnam. Why was there no connection drawn there? Really? Do we want some sort of tacit comparison between Nixon and Napoleon, but again, that was no problem there, you know, because Nixon absolutely loved the 1812 overture. The other thing is there are cannons! It’s scored for cannons going off. MC: It’s just so funny. I mean, there’s no problem, no pains of conscience with the 1812 Overture, but Lincoln’s second inaugural address, hmm…that won’t do. It really boggles the mind, the thought process that goes into these sorts of things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sUI9KSdEtw&feature=emb_logo LINK: On January 20, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon and Charles W. Colson talked on the telephone from 1:04 am to 1:46 am. The White House Telephone taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 036-018 of the White House Tapes. LISTEN AK: At the same time, Francis Sayre was the Dean of the Washington National Cathedral and Dean Sayre and Bernstein got together to decided to give a concert for peace in protest. And even though Dean Sayre said this is not an anti inaugural, it was scheduled on the same night at the same time. So what worked to perform? Haydn’s Mass in Time of War, it features ‘a dona nobis pacem’, a desire for peace. This is what he was hoping for. Also I’m sure Bernstein picked the Haydn in part because he knew modernist works took too long to rehearse. And this was put together very quickly with very little rehearsal. Matt Holsen (MH): I got a call from somebody from Choral Arts from Norman Scribner, he was the director of the Choral Arts Society. And he was like the guy to go to for a choir in DC. There wasn’t time to do auditions for the Concert for Peace because I’m sure Bernstein called them and said, Can you have me a choir ready to rehearse in a week? I was on his list and he said, Do you want to do something with Bernstein again? And I said, sure. And I showed up for rehearsal. Photo courtesy of the Choral Arts Society. AK: It got pulled together amazingly quickly with phone calls. I remember Bernstein walking out somewhat resigned to a rehearsal with an amateur choir and he gave the downbeat and conducted a clear beat pattern. And the chorus sounded absolutely fantastic. And Bernstein blossomed and began just conducting the feeling of the music. MH: We had one or two piano rehearsals, and then we had maybe one or two rehearsals with Bernstein, and then we did the concert. It was pretty intense. My name is Matt Holsen and in ’73, I was a bass in the choir for the Concert for Peace. I was 20 at the time. And it was extremely exciting. I really didn’t even understand a whole lot about what was going on in the war and in politics at that age. I really didn’t, but I was happy to be part of something protesting Nixon’s second inauguration. But mostly it was just, you know, working with Bernstein, which is a real pleasure. I mean, it’s…everything is so easy when you have a good conductor. There’s something about …the only way I could explain it is you just latched onto his hands and you did it. He made it easy. Bernie Swain (BS): My impression, right from the beginning was that Bernstein had shouldered the burden of making up for any deficiencies in preparation or previous experience of this group. That he was going to personally lead them through the piece by sheer force of will and charisma. He leaned into the piece and into the space of the orchestra and into the chorus, exerting a level of psychic and even moral energy that by the end left him completely drained. His hair was wet and limp. His face was running, his clothes were soaked through. He had basically rung this performance out of the orchestra and the chorus. My name is Bernie Swain. I was working in Washington in 1973 at the age of 23, and I attended the anti-inaugural Concert for Peace at the National Cathedral on the evening before the re-inauguration of Richard Nixon. When the news came out that Bernstein might do a concert, I was very interested. The ticket would be free and available at noon, so they expect that a big line of people. My girlfriend’s classmate offered to go down. The limit was three tickets per person in line, and she offered to get a ticket for herself and tickets for us. And it turned out she got there at noon was basically first in line. And so we got first Pew tickets to the concert. I was in the very first seat, the aisle seat of the first pew. When the VIP’s arrived, most of the people who filed in directly across from us were people that we recognized. There was Senator Charles Mathias. There was Eugene McCarthy, there was Ted Kennedy and his sister, there was a whole range of big names of the Democratic party lined up just opposite us. Made us feel even more privileged because we were basically had the same sight lines they did. We were at the same distance that they were. There was a sense of fellow participation, of common bond because we knew we were all there for the same reason. MH: I understood it as a counter inaugural. You know, that’s what people called it, you know, we are the counter inaugural concert. And I remember a lot of people talking about how well I’m glad my name’s not on any program because I work for the department of such and such. You know, there were a lot of people were like federal employees. There were a lot of members of the National Symphony who played and who, again, didn’t want their names on there because it was controversial. Although I gather the National Symphony felt snubbed because Nixon had wanted the Philadelphia Symphony to play. And I think everybody in DC knew that the Philadelphia was a much better orchestra. BS: Of course, people were angry because they had not wanted Nixon reelected. They were doubly angry over the war. They were triply angry because of his choice of the inaugural concert. Not only had he snubbed the National Symphony, which was the traditional agent for the inaugural concert, but he had selected Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which people took to be a fairly warlike choice. It just seemed like another lack of class on Nixon’s part. So I was particularly happy that Bernstein had chosen in a sense to rescue them by bring…

Full show notes at the publisher

**Episode 8: Yoko Arimichi** Oct 06, 2020
Show notes

This is an expanded version of a story that originally aired on KALW in 2018 when Yoko Arimichi and her Powell Street Blues Band were celebrating their 40th anniversary at The Saloon in North Beach. The band formed when Yoko was busking around Powell and Market Streets in the late 70s.

Yoko Arimichi and her Powell Street Blues are currently one of the longest running acts at The Saloon, one of San Francisco’s oldest bars. Yoko can wail on an electric guitar with a flair that combines B.B. King, Chuck Berry, and Neil Young.

“We arrived [in the US] the same date, different year, but same date, that The Beatles first came to the United States. Every year February 7th I see The Beatles anniversary and I always think, mine too!”
She was born in Japan and raised playing classical music, but her life changed when The Beatles came to the Tokyo Budokan in 1966. She swapped her classical flute for a guitar, finagled passage on an American cargo ship toting Mazdas from Hiroshima, and never looked back.

Special thanks to Yoko Arimichi and her Powell Street Blues Band, Myron Mu and all of the staff at The Saloon. This story was produced in collaboration with Mary Franklin Harvin.

Episode 7: The Osaka Ramones – The International Impact of Shonen Knife Aug 31, 2020

Show notes

On this episode of The Echo Chamber, Shonen Knife – a story of cultural exchange through the cassette tape. But also a story of an era in history just before the stronghold of the looming internet drastically changed, among so many other things, the way we consume and discover music. It was a time when culture – as writer Karen Schoemer said – was precious, you really had to fight for it. A closer look at how cassettes, alongside fanzines and college radio, all worked to create an environment that made possible the seemingly improbable circumstance of an all-girl band from Osaka, Japan eventually opening for Nirvana – one of the biggest musical acts of the 90s, and how these women have retained their status of cultural influence some 40 years after their bands’ origin. This episode features interviews with Shonen Knife; Karen Schoemer, former music critic of the New York Times; and Brooke McCorkle Okazaki, Assistant Professor of Music at Carleton College and author of the forthcoming book, Shonen Knife’s Happy Hour: Food, Gender, Rock and Roll The Osaka Ramones – The International Impact of Shonen Knife Naoko Yamano (NY): Sheena is a punk rocker [sings The Ramones “Sheena is a Punk Rocker] NY: I’m Naoko, I play the guitar. Atsuko Yamano (AY): I’m Atsuko, I play the bass guitar. Risa Kawano (RK): I’m Risa. I play the drums. NY: Shonen means boy in Japanese and it’s a very old brand name of a pencil knife. And the word ‘shonen’ has very cute feeling and the knife has a little dangerous feeling, so when cute and dangerous combined together, it’s just like our band. So I put that name. Originally I liked The Beatles a lot when I was a child, and then in the late 70s, punk pop movement was happening and I became a big fan of The Ramones or Buzzcocks. First I listened to their music through radio. There was a radio program in Osaka and they played The Ramones or Buzzcocks. Many punk music… When I was 15 years old I got an acoustic guitar. The strings were so hard and I hurt my fingers so I couldn’t play the acoustic guitar but after I get an electric guitar a few years after that. I rather like pop melody line punk rock, and inspired by such kinds of bands, I wanted to start my own band. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsOGXEwl1Z8 Brooke McCorkle Okazaki (BM): Shonen Knife – they formed in 1981. Naoko decided to form a rock and roll band after she heard some Ramones on the radio. My name is Brooke McCorkle Okazaki. I am an Assistant Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and I am the author of “Shonen Knife’s Happy Hour: Food Gender and Rock and Roll”. Michie and Naoko were currently working as secretaries and workers in a machinery company in Osaka, and Atsuko was actually still a high school student. She wound up graduating and going to fashion school. They all worked day jobs until 1994 when they went on the big North American tour. And it was then when they decided to quite and become full time musicians. So they were slugging it out for a good 13 years before becoming full time musicians. And they’ve been full time musicians since then which is just amazing. NY: The Japanese Minna Tanoshiku means “Let’s have fun together”. We recorded it at our friend’s house and everybody was very DIY. One day a guy who’s record label is called Zero Records came to our show and he offered that he would like to release our record. For that cassette album we copied 40 cassettes and we put our kissmark on each jacket. First I got postal mail from Calvin Johnson from K Records and then we exchanged letters because there was no internet at that time and of course there was no facsimile too. So Calvin Johnson said he wanted to release our album from his label K Records. So we sent our master tape to him by postal mail and then he made our cassette tape. Calvin Johnson (CJ): The cassette came along and it was something where you could just make 30 or 50 cassettes and it didn’t cost $1,000. Cassettes had existed for a long time, but it was only around that time 1980, 1981, that they became viable in terms of their portability and their sound quality. So I took this concept into the world of underground music. We created our releases using that technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAYST2XNBdU CJ: Another big influence was Folkways Records. The idea there seemed to be documenting things. And then making it available to whoever was interested in finding out about it or appreciating it. And I think at K we took on that a lot too. Find people in our town or Olympia or around that seemed worth documenting. Trying to present the same thing to the world. ARCHIVAL MTV KURT LODER: Cute, keen, well fair enough, that’s Shonen Knife. The most lovable punk band on the planet. Or for that matter, off it. The Japanese group spent December on a tear through the midwest opening for Nirvana, whose members had been converted to the way of the Knife on a European tour the two bands had shared two years earlier. ARCHIVAL KURT COBAIN: About five years ago when you guys put out the Burning Farm EP on cassette, well my friend Calvin from Olympia, he sold me that tape. I bought that tape from him because he works at K Records. And I heard it and I fell in love with it. And it’s taken a long time for people to hear you guys. We are glad that we finally got to go on tour with you. Now a lot of people, at least in England, love you guys. NY: In 80s, Shonen Knife was only playing in Japan. And our first outside of Japan show was 1989. We just had only one show in Los Angeles. And in 1991, we played in four cities in the United States including Los Angeles where Kurt Cobain came to see us. NY: Kurt wrote, When I finally got to see them live I was transformed into a hysterical 9-year old girl at Beatles concert. Wow! I’m very honored about that and I thank to him, Kurt, very much. AY: Kurt came to our show and that time he didn’t say anything to us, but later he offered to open as a support band for Nirvana. NY: We started touring from 1991. Members of Nirvana made contact to our management at the time and they want us to open up for their show. So everything changed. ARCHIVAL NIRVANA: They went into their first song and everyone seemed sort of baffled and next couple songs…you know, they won over the audience by the night. But I remember I was an emotional sap the whole time. I cried every night. You couldn’t help it. NY: I didn’t know about Nirvana at that time, so I felt a little bit scary to tour with them because they looked very wild. But after we met them, they were very polite – good gentlemen – and the touring was very nice because they were just breaking and every show is packed, so it was a very good experience. Karen Schoemer (KS): It was like coming back to me, the Nirvana connection…and the Sonic Youth connection. And kind of reminding me at that time, like basically anything Sonic Youth told you to like, you just loved. They had this incredible influence – culturally, musically, fashion, you know, just everything. So that was one part of it that I had kind of forgotten about, about just how Sonic Youth had a lot to do with them kind of breaking in the states. My name is Karen Schoemer. I’m a former music writer. From 1989 until 1994 I was a regular contributor to the New York Times writing features and criticism. And then from ‘94 until ‘99 I was the pop music critic at Newsweek. KS: The thing that was central to me at that time was that was sort of big commercial music. There was MTV which had like hair metal and Madonna and there was just like huge pop music and then there was this resistance to it which was in like clubs and fanzines and college radio. And so we were kind of like underground, dropouts of mainstream music. So the serious to me was like less in the music than it was like in the kind of purity you were supposed to have of sort of the ethics of just being against commercialism. And as more and more bands were getting signed to major labels it was this big thing about like maintaining your purity and not like selling out. So in that sense Shonen Knife was kind of a part of that because they were so defiantly against anything polished. BM: The reaction, especially in like hipster places like CBGBs and stuff, might come off as thinking Shonen Knife is instrumently incompetent or unpolished. But I actually think that that lack of virtuosity is an asset. It goes back to ideas of gender and gender stereotypes too. Masculinity in rock and roll has typically been conveyed by virtuosity, especially on the guitar. I mean, you have scholars like Robert Walser and Susan McClary who have both talked about, you know, the guitar is a phallic symbol and abilities on guitar as these abilities of masculine expression and dominance. I think about like, you know, Van Halen or somebody like that, just, you know, shredding on guitar and, and, you know, being elevated in some way because this technical virtuosity. So the opposite, this embrace of the sort of DIY teach yourself how to play kind of aesthetic that Shonen Knife has, is something that I think makes their music more accessible to non-musicians in a way. People see them and hear them and are like, this is something that I could and provides that kind of inspiration. And especially to young women, it’s an example of like this isn’t something you have to spend 20 years of private lessons doing. This is something you could go home, buy a guitar and teach yourself three chords and be able to play. And that’s okay too. And it’s just as valid as, you know, an intense shredding solo. And I think that’s part of why Kurt Cobain was so entranced by them. They didn’t perform virtuosically, but they didn’t ever feel bad or apologize for it. They’re genuinely playing music that makes them happy and it makes listeners happy. I think that’s one of the main charms of Shonen Knife. When I was around 19 or 20, I was a fan of the Powerpuff Girls, the cartoon series, it was on Cartoon Network. And one night when I was watching, they had a music video that happened to be Buttercup, I’m a Super Girl that Shonen Knife performs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7ZFeViTl4g NY: The author of Powerpuff Girls invited us to join the tribute album, Buttercup is a very strong, positive character. So, I wrote that song to make a very powerful song. BM: I had never seen an all-female punk fan before. I knew about The Go-Go’s and The Bangles, but I’d never seen women really rock out like that. Even more specifically Japanese women because you know, there’s so many stereotypes in the United States about Asian women. And so it was really inspiring and awesome to see those women playing punk rock and representing sort of musical versions of the Powerpuff girls. Seeing someone like that, playing on television on something that’s cool as Cartoon Network was an inspiration. KS: There were all these interesting women making music, taking the same sources that male bands were doing. But just trying to say, I hear this a little differently. I feel it a little differently. My goals with it are a little bit different. I’m not trying to be polished. I’m really trying to feel this music in the way that’s right for me. BM: The Riot Grrl movement, which was coming out around the same time Shonen Knife was hitting it big globally in the nineties. And they are a strong contrast to some of those other female punk style bands, like The Breeders or The Slits or something like that in that Shonen Knife embraces their femininity. The idea of cute or kawaii culture in Japan, it’s a little different from how it’s perceived in Europe, and in the United States. By embracing this femininity or this cuteness, Shonen Knife is actually reclaiming girliness as a tool of feminist power. That they’re not nearly as blatant as some of the other UK groups or American groups. They’re not like we’re feminists, we’re here to kick ass. Shonen Knife instead is about embracing what it means to be a woman and taking pleasure in that, which can include wearing cute dresses on stage, singing about ice cream or cream puffs, or, you know, puppy dogs. KS: When I think back on how I felt about Shonen Knife at the time. Like they were kind of a joke at the same time. And I think that goes in with the kind of exotic quality of it. I think that was the part of it that I was a little uncomfortable with. That we were sort of laughing at them even as we were kind of underneath it all kind of laughing at ourselves because fandom was also such a huge part of that scene. You heard that kind of fandom in Shonen Knife. You could imagine them being over there in Japan and being like, we love the Ramones, you know, and being like, we’re going to play the Ramones and, and it came out sounding like totally warped but at the same time it had that sort of genuine exuberance and sincerity that I think we all really related to. NY: We were happy to play at CBCB. KS: CBGBs at that time, there could be like six bands, like every night of the week. NY: The club was very long an sometimes it’s a little hard to watch the band. KS: The stage, like to get downstairs to the bathroom, there was a space that felt like it was about two inches wide. And then the area in front of the stage seemed like it was about four feet wide. It was a really awkward sized room. New York was still very grimy. It’s still had this hangover from the seventies and I miss that a lot, glad I got to be there. NY: I was happy to play such a historical place. And when I was a high school student, I listened to Blondie or Talking Heads, like many bands played at CBGB. So when I got a CBGB t-shirt I was so happy and I was wearing it every day. KS: By then, you know, CDGB’s like real kind of glory days as influencing music with Television and Blondie and all that stuff, you know, that was kind of long over. But it was still a place that a lot of people played and it still had all of that…you know, it had the disgusting bathroom and it had the terrible layout and it had the pistachio gumball machines that you would put a quarter in and you would get these like pink pistachios that left pink stuff all over your hand. At that point uou felt a little bit like you were entering in a shell of something that had been really, really important, but it was still there. You still got to partake of it. People like Joey Ramone would be sitting in the back. It’s still had a lot of that, like rank glamour to it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCnHb3UJeKg NY: Marky Ramone came to see us when we play in New York in nineties and he played the drums for us and we played some Ramones songs on stage. And also we toured with CJ Ramone in the United States a few years ago. T BM: The first time I saw Shonen Knife was in Philly and it was when they were doing the tour with CJ Ramone. So that was a very different experience from some of the other shows they’ve seen. The show was intense. A lot more hardcore punks were at that shows. There’s a lot of moshing and it’s not something you really expected at a Shonen Knife show. People moshing to Banana Chips is not something I ever thought I would see and in this lifetime, but I’ve seen it. So that’s kind of cool. In the eighties, Hello Kitty was first making its way to North America. But it was really the early nineties when it explodes. When you start to have more and more Sanrio goods at the mall. Then of course Nintendo and Sega Genesis were the other sort of main introductions to Japanese popular culture I think for people of a certain generation, but Shonen Knife musically is likely one of many people’s first exposures to Japanese music culture. Aside from say, Yoko Ono. Shonen Knife in terms of Japanese bands was really one of the first to become part of this phenomenon that eventually was known as Japan’s “Gross National Cool”. It’s this idea that after Japan’s economic bubble bursts at the beginning of the 1990s, they went through an economic slump, but in…

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Episode 6: The Past, Present & Future of Maximum Rocknroll Jul 24, 2020

Show notes

On today’s episode, Maximum Rocknoll – the story behind the famed punk institution. Beginning in 1977, a group of Bay Area music fans led by Tim Yohannan, began a weekly radio show out of the studio at KPFA in Berkeley, California. The driving impulse behind the show was simple – an unabashed uncompromising world of punk rock. By 1982, the punk scene had grown into a worldwide movement and the founders of the show launched Maximum RocknRoll as a print fanzine, dedicated to anti-corporate ideals, leftist politics and relentless enthusiasm for DIY punk and hardcore bands from every inhabited continent of the globe. Over the next several decades, what started as a do it yourself labor of love amongst a handful of friends had extended to include literally thousands of volunteers and hundreds of thousands of readers. For many, it became the punk rock bible. The inky smudge of the black and white newsprint providing a voice in community for young teenagers around the world, introducing them to bands and a sense of creative expression they had not known before. By 2019, the landscape of the punk underground as well as print media itself had dramatically shifted and MRR announced the end to its print publication. Over these 42 years with over 1600 radio shows and 400 issues of fanzine to its claim, MRR came to represent a certain do-it-yourself ethos that extended far beyond the music itself. As the print scene came to an end last year, I invited some well the longstanding Maximum contributors to come together for a night to talk about that the zine and its lasting impact on the global punk scene. Here’s our conversation.. The Past, Present & Future of Maximum Rocknroll:The Story Behind the Famed Punk Institution Brandi Howell (BH): Tonight we have with us Martin Sprouse, Paul Curran, and Matt Badenhop. And before I introduce them, I just wanted to play a little taste of the early days of the radio show. BH: So if you guys wanted to introduce yourselves a bit and kind of give your background and how you were first introduced to the magazine. Martin Sprouse (MS): Yeah. My name is Martin Sprouse. I grew up in Southern California. So my first introduction to the magazine was the first compilation. Me and my friend, Jason Traeger, and Pat Weakland. We were doing our own fanzine in San Diego called The Leading Edge. And we found that record, Pat knew it was coming out and we found like the day they were unboxing it in a record store and we just go – Oh wow! Cause it was the first time we knew there were hardcore bands playing up here, you know, that they existed up here. Because in Southern California, we’re spoiled with them, but it was nice to see all these kids doing things. And then from that our local record store started carrying Maximum Rocknroll from the first issue on. And when we first looked at it, it was like so different than what we’re used to. You know, we’re used to Flip Side and Ripper, but Maximum to our teenage eyes was this thick. It had politics right on the cover and I was going – Holy shit, this is great! You know, it was newsprint, it was messy, just like it is now, you know, but it just looks so different, you know, and then we just kept buying issues. And we started coming up here and visiting in ’84, ’83 … staying at the Maximum house. And then I moved up here in ’85 to become part of Maximum. Is that enough background? And I stopped doing Leading Edge and started working on Maximum and been involved with Maximum projects since then. Leading Edge fanzine. artwork by Jason Traeger BH: And Paul has also been with the magazine and various bands since 1983, contributing to all the graphics and the record reviews, he lists himself has a house cleaner. And now as a member of the powerful and mysterious MMR board. Paul, how did you first learn about Maximum? Paul Curran (PC): I first learned about Maximum probably by seeing the magazine. I grew up in Benicia, which is a suburb…kind of far out suburb of the Bay area. But my dad lived in Berkeley on Telegraph Avenue. So I would come visit my dad and just hang out on Telegraph. And I think I saw it MRR in Universal Records, which was a olden days record store. And on page two or three, it shows where the radio show is broadcast. And it was broadcast locally on KPFA, which is a very powerful signal. And so I could get it out in Benicia and just listened to MRR and learn about punk rock. And, yeah, having that Berkeley connection… I, boy, I’m just, I was just like thinking like how much detail to tell, but, when you listen to the radio show, they would just tell people, like call in if you want to be a guest DJ, it was that simple. And I was like, Oh, I want to be a guest DJ. So I called in and I was a guest DJ. And through that connection ended up volunteering at the magazine, doing little paste up layouts of things. And it’s all downhill from there. Ad for Universal Records & Tapes Maximum Rocknroll, No. 8 (Sep 1983) BH: And Matt, you first came, moved to the Bay Area in 2011? Matt Badenhop (MB): Yeah, I was just thinking when Martin was talking, my getting involved with the magazine was kind of the same, but like many years later, like in the mid to late nineties. But I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas and me and my friends found it at Borders from from that big distribution that we were doing so, and then we, you know, as we started doing bands and touring and stuff, we would come out here and stay at the house and yeah, just, you know, knew a lot of the people connected to the magazine by that time. So naturally when I moved out here in 2011, I got recruited as a record reviewer and do radio show and all the other stuff now, too. BH: And Martin, I was wondering if we could step back and just kind of give a background of Tim and sort of who Tim Yohannan was, the founder of this, the legacy. MS: I don’t know how many people met Tim or just knew of him afterwards, but yeah, he was a pretty insane, but very special dude. I mean, some of his best characteristics was he loved fucking punk rock. He loved music, you know, just full on everything about it. And he loved, he was very, he’s one of the few people I met that has a very strategic mind. He’s always like 20 steps of everybody else. Not in a competitive way, but just thinking about new things, new projects, just to keep pushing forward, it was pretty amazing. He was not shy to do things that have never been done before. And he also had this laugh. Yeah. Everyone remembers the laugh, but you know… BH: I feel like all the like, cause Dirk [Dirksen] had such a laugh… there’s another impresario of famous punk club that also had like, yeah,… MS: Yeah…Tim, Dirk and Jello [Biafra]… put them in a room together, craziest punk rock history thing, and just these very crazy personalities. And when they’re all together, it’s pretty amazing. But yeah. And Tim Yo, he was just, I mean, there’s so much bullshit that’s come out since he died. Like, people weren’t really there, but they were just always talking shit about like he controlled everybody. It was just like this communist house and all that shit, but that was all, none of that that’s even remotely true. But also Tim was really open to bringing people into the projects. Like 13 year old kids, you know, barely know how to play instruments. He’d play their demo on the radio show. Someone said they want to write a review at Maximum. And there they live in East Bay. He’d make sure they get over here and write reviews. I mean, that was a special quality and that was honest. He didn’t, it wasn’t something he was trying to do. It was just second nature to them. It’s also just being part of the punk community. part of Maximum. And also a lot of other people had a lot of say in Maximum. It wasn’t just, it wasn’t a dictatorship at all. It was always this, whoever did the most work got the most say, it’s just kind of how organically Maximum’s structure worked. Tim Yo and Jeff Bale BH: And you personally making the decision to move…you’re a teenager when you moved. Left San Diego and moved up and moved into punk rock house. And like, what was that decision based on? MS: I forgot to mention, I was writing some reports for Maximum – San Diego scene reports. I don’t know, like ’83, I don’t know for a while there. And just coming up here and visiting and the whole weird story about me moving up here, I’ll make this really quick is me and my friend Jason were up here visiting and,Joan and Bessie from The Wrecks who were on the first compilation. They were…this was all in the first Maximum Rocknroll house over in Berkeley, right? Yeah. Oakland – Berkeley, right on the border there. And all of us were hanging out. And when we’re done hanging out that weekend, Tim set us aside and proposed that me, Bessie and Jason come and move up here and take over the magazine. This is ’84 and it’s because he wanted to start a punk club. And that was the very beginning of Gilman. At least the idea. So what happened is Joan and Jason didn’t want to move up here. So I moved up here by myself and it wasn’t really, we didn’t really use the term coordinators yet, but I came up here and just had a pretty big role in the magazine. So that was it. Yeah. Moving the house moved from Oakland, Berkeley over to Clipper Street in the city. And also, I remember I was down in San Diego, I think, 18, 17, or something like that. And Tim would call me up in the afternoon. He goes, yeah. And he would like come back from work and start looking all over the Bay area for place where you can open a punk club, but we also could live. And I was going – Ugh, I’ve been going to punk shows for a long time, but I wouldn’t want to live where their shows were. You know? Cause America was a little different. It wasn’t like European hostile things or squats where it’s nice. It was just like, and he goes, yeah, I found this thing. Maybe we could build bedrooms in the corner. I’m like – Holy shit. I’m not going to live there. You know? But it worked out where he found this really nice house on Clipper and then Gilman Street came a little bit later. Um, What’s the dude’s name? Victor Hayden actually found the building where Gilman started. So I know that was, I don’t know. I just wanted to be part of Maximum. It was nice. I’d been doing my own fanzine for so long. It just was nice to just be around a large group of people and be in San Francisco. But I was scared shitless. When I moved to San Francisco. The day I moved here as listening to some radio station and Penelope Houston was doing an acoustic version of a Ramones song. And I said – Fuck, man, this is going to be terrible! Really bummed me on. And I liked Penelope and used to like the Ramones, but I just thought it’s going to be so grown up. Things were changing. And it really, I was fearful I made the wrong decision, I mean seriously because San Francisco had older punk scene, you know, and we hadn’t really dived into the East Bay thing. You know, we’re all those amazing hardcore bands that were on the first record. That was truly a fear of mine. BH: But fear not because Not So Quiet had just come out it… MS: And also everyone that I knew from magazines started coming over and it had a way more youthful thing as well as it was just a nice collaboration of people that have been around since Day 1 and knew people. That was what that was true for all Maximum projects. And still now, you know. BH: If you could give a little background about Not So Quiet and kind of the influence, and we have a few clips we can maybe play. So Martin had selected a band 7 Seconds. Can you talk a little bit about the track and then we could give it a listen or we can, let’s just, let’s give it a listen first and then… MS: Everyone’s going to love it, right? BH: So this is a selection from the comp that Martin first heard… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bSEJCY56-w BH: So you’re a teenager in San Diego and you hear this song. MS: It’s 7 Seconds. They’re great. PS: That’s how long a song should be too. MS: I think it was 49 seconds. Is it under a minute? Isn’t it? It is anyways. I still love that song. Right? The first seven inch was out and just like, they just had a whole different vibe of what’s going on. Like, you know, Saying, fuck racism. Fuck this. Fuck that…that song was called. Fuck your America, which still holds up. BH: Had you listened to anything like that before much? MS: Oh yeah, like I said, I think 7 Seconds’ first seven inch was out by then. And that was a super special 7 inch, Skins Brains and Guts. It’s totally great. And they had a couple of demos out before that, but also just love the sound of that song. It was when 7 seconds was it three-piece then, and I don’t know. Kevin Seconds is a special dude, too. So yeah, that song, I still love that song. I still love every song on that record almost except The Oven is My Friend … Church Police, some band that Jello probably put on that compilation. BH: I was wondering if you could just share, there are like 42 songs or something on the album, but you know, you can get away with that on an album when they’re like one minute long punk songs, but you were saying the…It’s sort of, so most of them, it was a representation of Northern California hardcore bands, but one band that stood out for you as a band, it like 12 year old kids. MS: Yeah. This is, this is a whole podcast in itself – very important. This band called The Maniax from Fresno. And this is really just kind of, I’ll make this story as short as possible, but it really shows you what Maximum is about. So there are a bunch of kids that 12, 13 years old, right? Like crazy young. They listened to Maximum radio show like Paul was saying, and then they didn’t even know how to form a band. They didn’t know how to play instruments. They didn’t know anything. And they made this crappy little, like it wasn’t even a demo. It was just a song on a cassette, sent it to the radio show. And there’s a clip of the radio show somewhere where Tim and Jello are just going – Maniax, you guys are great. Give us a call. We want to bring you up here and do things. PC: Didn’t they say that they just recorded the tape and sent it. Like it wasn’t even a copy of the tape. MS: No, it was like they made this tape for a Maximum and I think they recorded over like a, you know, some other music, like their parents’ music was just like the scrappy. BH: An Abba album or some disco… MS: I know…Tim and Jello were so you, there is a tape and you can hear how enthusiastic they are, and that’s really the essence of Maximum. And then the funny thing quick on the. The song that’s on the Maximum Rocknroll compilation. It’s crazy. It’s the second longest song. The first longest is Flipper, which is almost expected, you know, the droney Flipper thing. Maniax, the guys that didn’t know how to do anything, but just put their heart into it. They had the second longest song. And I think that’s because they didn’t know how to! They didn’t know stop. It goes on forever. And then the other quick thing is you listen to that song and the music or the guitars instruments go in and out. And you’re like, what are these kids about? What are they trying to do? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8fcTl5mmlE BH: Surround sound. Yeah. MS: And then you figure out the story is that they’re in the garage. They didn’t know how to record. So they were towing a little red wagon around them and with a boombox. And then whenever a wagon went near the guitar, you’d hear the guitar. When the wagon went near the drums, you’d hear that, like everyone thought like – Oh, they’re really crazy. These kids, these kids are fucking smart – Fresno! And then you find out like, they just didn’t know how to do anything, which made it even better. And then. For all those that want to know more about it. There was a 15 minute documentary about The Maniax on YouTube that Dale Stewart from Fresno, he’s documenting everything about the Fresn…

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Episode 5: The Rise of the Mabuhay Gardens Jun 10, 2020

Show notes

The story of a small Filipino nightclub that transformed into one of San Francisco’s most influential punk venues. “To play, you need a place – be it where you live, the street, a venue. For unrestricted play, you need an unrestricted playground. Dirk Dirksen envisioned The Fab Mab just as such a playground. Without him and The Mab, there might not have been the great punk scene in the late 1970s in San Francisco. The San Francisco punk scene was fun. I miss it. But as Iggy Pop said, ‘Let’s Sing.'” — Mindy Bagdon Special thanks to Denise Demise Dunne, Liz Keim, Penelope Houston, Ron Greco, John Seabury, V Vale, Janet Clyde, and Kathy Peck. The archival interview with Dirk Dirksen is from Vale’s RE/Search Conversations 13. Production support from Mary Franklin Harvin. From Pinoy to Punk: The Rise of The Mabuhay GardensAn Oral History of San Francisco’s Early Punk Scene Penelope Houston (PH): The Mabuhay was not your average rock club. Denise Demise Dunne (DDD): Here was this little club all of a sudden attracting the energy. Ron Greco (RG): The Dills, Negative Trend, The Avengers… DDD: So of course you are going to say, Oh, what is going on over there. PH: More and more people started coming to town. The Ramones played there. Blondie played there. It just became the punk mecca. RG: When I was real young, I would go by and see this place. It was there for years. The music itself was nothing really developed yet in the very beginning. It was just a supper club. People would do the Mabuhay dance and stuff like that. DDD: Dirk was helping Ness with the Amapola show. Amapola was this Filipino night club singer and she was popular within the Filipino community and had a TV show on Channel 26 and a number of characters from The Mab had performed there. My name is Denise Demise Dunne. I was Dirk’s assistant at the very beginning of The Mab. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFxkCuncwU0 V Vale (VV): Hi, welcome to The Counter Culture Hour. I’m your host V Vale and I published starting in ‘77 Search and Destroy, the punk publication chronicling the rise of the punk rock cultural revolution. My guest tonight is Dirk Dirksen, the impresario of The Mabuhay Gardens. LINK: RE/Search Publications Dirk Dirksen: We were open for ten years, did 3,600 plus concerts. VV: The thing was at the time things were so conservative that no club wanted anything to do with punk rock until Dirk Dirksen showed up and made The Mabuhay Gardens available. DD: Ness downstairs at The Mabuhay was having a tough go of it, so I came in and said, Look – how about if you give us Monday nights because that is your dark night. Let me try that and I will guarantee you $175 a night at the bar. I didn’t have $175 at the time, but I figured there are enough people I know that if I say hey, c’mon down and if they each drink two beers, we’ll meet the guarantee. And within a very short time we were grossing more on the Monday than he was grossing on the weekend with name Filipino acts. Mindy Bagdon (MB): My name is Mindy Bagdon. My film’s name is “Louder Faster Shorter”. At one point on Mondays, which was a dead period on the Broadway strip, Dirk convinced Ness Aquino who owned the club to let him put on different acts. Little by little, it went from sort of vaudevillian variety acts to where The Nuns, who were one of the first groups to play there, apparently they went up to Dirk and they found out this venue was available and they said, Well can we put on a show? And I remember I was walking up Grant Avenue and Vale’s then girlfriend was coming down and proceeding me was the drummer for The Nuns and he was handing out flyers. VV: My girlfriend who looked like a rocker – I guess I looked like one too, you know with platform shoes and spiked hair and all that junk, just superficial style – my girlfriend was walking down the street and a really short guy said, Hey…feel like coming to our band’s debut at The Mabuhay Gardens, which none of us had heard of because it was Filipino. I’ll put you on the guest list! Those are the magic words for any so-called real punk rocker. So we went and then the rest is history. MB: The first time we went to The Mabuhay there were more people on stage than there were in the audience, because it hadn’t gotten around. But within two weeks it was packed. I mean, word got around town. Don’t forget this is before the internet, before smart phones, it was literally person-to-person or on the telephone or snail mail to say this venue was doing this. And like I said, within two weeks it was jammed. The joke was Bruce Conner, the famous artist, said – You’d be watching a band and you said, well I can do this too. So you’d go home and learn at least one chord on your bass and you’d get on the stand and you were the audience one week and now you are on the stage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMRSD7KQFbA Kathy Peck (KP): I’m Kathy Peck, bass player for The Contractions and the co-founder and executive director of H.E.A.R, Hearing Education Awareness for Rockers. I came here with Don Peck and he was playing drums with Mary Monday. She actually started the punk scene at The Mabuhay Gardens. She was like the first one. There were other people that played there but she was the one that really…she was amazing. MUSIC: Mary Monday, I Gave My Punk Jacket to Rickie KP: She came from a dancer background, but she was really punk. She was just wild! And I would hear stuff at The Mab and see it being played. I loved the music. I got inspired by Mary and I had a bass – a Hofner Beatle bass. I was learning to play. I was self-taught. Yeah, it was really exciting. People were like, they call it pogo-ing or whatever, slam dancing. It was like very crowded and electrifying. DDD: Dirk at that point asked me to be his assistant and it was like, Yeah, but I can’t type. Because I basically avoided typing because as a female you get pigeoned holed into being someone’s assistant. And he said, Well you don’t have to type that much and you get to do a lot of things around there. John Seabury (JS): Pretty often during the evening he would be wearing what looks like the Groucho Marx nose with the glasses and eyebrows, except this one had a dildo instead of a nose. DDD: Mustache, glasses, a bit overweight. I remember the beige jacket, the beret on his hair, and the poodle in his arms. The was the first time I met Dirk. JS: At the end of the evenings of course, he’d come out on stage and tell everyone to get out which no one is ever paying attention to. So he had a real police whistle which he would blow as hard as he could through the PA til people would leave. His favorite line was “We can’t make anymore money off you, so get out!” I’m John Seabury. I started out playing in a band Psychotic Pineapple back in the 70s and I’m a graphic artist. I did all of the graphics for the band. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg9Ikg9MeQ0 RG: I went to this nightclub called The Night Break, I guess you go downstairs on Columbus. This guy walks up to me. This big eye ball t-shirt and this big chicken hawk hair, red flaming hair, and he looks at me and says, Do you play guitar? And I say yeah. And so we talk for a little bit and within 30 days we each get Marshall stacks. That’s how quick it was. Zoom, zoom, zoom. Before we were Crime we were the Space Invaders. Ron Greco, Ron “The Ripper” Greco. I had a Gibson Ripper Bass and everybody goes – Man, you rip a lot! Ripper! DDD: I took the job and would come in and help him go through all the paperwork. Listen to some of the demo tapes of the bands that came in. Get their press announcement, like Devo. I still remember it saying, Achtung, De-Revolution has begun! RG: I got the band members together and said, Let’s walk in and talk to the owner. We had a good time there talking to him and so we arranged a show to play. MUSIC: Crime, Live at The Mabuhay Dec 1978 PH: In 1977 I moved down to San Francisco to go to the Art Institute in North Beach. And after I got there I started to see these posters around town for this band called Crime. And they were really intriguing posters and they weren’t like anything I’d ever seen. They were at a club called The Mabuhay. I was 19 at the time but they let people in 18 or older but they let people in because it was also a Filipino restaurant, so they were able to let minors in. My name is Penelope Houston, I’m in a band called The Avengers. We started in 1977. That was my first band. I’d been going to these shows and ran into Danny Furious who ended up being The Avengers drummer. He had a friend in Los Angeles, Greg Ingraham, and he brought Greg to SF to be in a band with him. Danny had rented part of a warehouse out in Dogpatch and they had a PA set up for their rehearsals. I was staying over there one day hanging out and everybody was gone and I put on some records and started singing through the PA. I just fell in love with the power of amplification. I was like, this is so awesome. I’m so loud and then when they got back I said, I’m going to be your singer. Liz Keim (LK): When I found the club, I felt at home. I could be exactly who I was and still be part of it. I was freed. My name is Liz Keim and along with Karen Merchant, we created the film, In The Red. It’s a punk document of the late 1970s mostly filmed at The Mab. For the last 40 years, I’ve also been working at the Exploratorium. I’ve been the director of the Cinema Arts program and I’m one of the senior curators. WATCH: Ears, Eyes and Throats: Restored Classic and Lost Punk Films 1976-1981 DDD: Oh, it was fabulous. There were people that came in for the first time to explore and they were still looking hippie. Then there were folks who had taken on the persona. Leather jacket, jeans, black pants, ripped t-shirts. You’d walk down the corridor and there were all these little crevices with people hanging out there. LK: You’re a night creature, looking for that place to be that feels like home. DDD: I was one of those creatures cuz you’re just kind of there and you’re watching. LK: I went up to UC Davis to study art and that was a kind of isolating experience, when I came back into San Francisco I was looking for an intimacy in some ways. Looking for those smaller landscapes. I started filming. I prefer observing and critically assessing where I’m at and I was drawn to the experimental film genre so I wasn’t looking for something that followed a bell-curve narrative or you know was scripted outside of any experience I was living in. So for me it was just capturing a kind of way of being in San Francisco. There were all kinds of relationships that didn’t have to feel permanent where you didn’t have to have names, there was just something about a recognition. DDD: There was just this excitement. There was the energy back to that word. LK: It was about being in the mosh pit. It was about hanging on to someone I didn’t know just for counterbalance and it was fine because my counterbalance was as into me as a counterbalance as I was into him or her as a counterbalance. You didn’t have to talk. You know, in some ways we just talked through our bodies. Maybe The Mab was an analog experience for me. DDD: I was at KSAN at that point and Lou Reed came in for an interview, he was playing at the Old Waldorf. And he brought this guy in with him and the DJ didn’t want to deal with him and said, well, show him around. So we are talking and I’m showing him around and I’m telling this guy about The Mab and what’s going on cuz Lou has his show and I said, Oh, I’ll take you there. You know, and this was Jim Carroll. JS: Once we got in The Mabuhay, Dirk was really good to us. He had the sense of humor, he kind of got us. So somethings he would have us open for someone really inappropriate like the Jim Carroll Band or somebody like that just because he was being perverse about it. We opened for Jim Carroll twice. And the second time word was out that Patti Smith was in town playing the Old Waldorf and she is probably going to show up and jam. So the Mabuhay was double packed that night. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S27d1Jrxgs DDD: Patti Smith, Patti Smith, Patti Smith! JS: After the set we were backstage and Dirk comes up and goes, Hey you know, Patti Smith is coming. We were like, Yeah yeah, we heard. Well she needs to borrow a guitar and we were like – No! Because we know she is going to break the guitar. DDD: When Patti played The Mab, it was mesmerizing. JS: Of course most of the players in the scene at the time would have run home and gotten a guitar just to give to her to smash. Dirk goes off and he comes back ten minutes later and goes, Please guys, please….really, just one guitar for Patti. And we were like, No – forget it! So the band was on and Patti did show up and it was really mobbed and all I could see of the band was the tops of their heads and then I just see the guitar overhead going smash, smash, smash and that was it. And it’s probably in a museum somewhere now. DDD: It was awestruck. Like, wow! I mean, these are stupid words to come up with because it was just there and here’s this persona mixing this punk with poetry. It was like, yeah, this is it. This is just taking it to a whole different level. Because there were so many levels. There was the fun part, there was the political part, and here is the poetry – here is the art. LK: Hanging outside was like the preamble or whatever. You got your sense of whether it was going to be crowded and what the energy was like. You didn’t just rush in. It was a lingering. The kind of slow meander and then you would hope to just squeeze in and get by admissions. And maybe having enough money for a beer. ARCHIVE: PUNK TV SPECIAL, San Francisco Daytime Show “People Are Talking” MB: Early on people would throw beer bottles at the stage and that was very dangerous. So they actually thought maybe we will put a screen up between the band and the audience but that didn’t sound like a good idea. So then he got the idea, Ah ha – I’m going to make 55 gallon drums of popcorn! VV: All the super salty popcorn you could eat. I realize later the theory is that this makes you buy drinks. JS: Free popcorn on the tables. It was really old popcorn and it wasn’t for eating – it was for throwing at the bands. PH: There would be this big mess of popcorn and jumbled chairs and tables knocked over and it was kind of like a disaster zone. DDD: I remember being in my house and all of a sudden just having this paradigm shift. The music was playing and all of a sudden, WHAP! Like – reality is not the same anymore. MUSIC: The Ramones – Judy Is A Punk DDD: All of a sudden something woke up inside of me. I didn’t even know what it was called at that time but it was like, Oh, something – something just changed here. LK: Not having much money it was like how to get into these places without it. You could sometimes climb in through the front window at The Mab and one time someone came and grabbed me and said, Dirk wants to talk to you in his office. So he goes, You don’t think I see you sneaking in all of the time! You know, no more of that. But it didn’t stop you. It was part of the culture. We were there to just get it however we could. WATCH: Louder Faster Shorter, by Mindy Bagdon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufHdeaKQiiM PH: The first show we played at The Mab, we had been asked two weeks before if we would play this show – an after party for The Nuns. Between when we heard about the gig and when we played it we went to LA and were visiting with friends of mine from Seattle, The Screamers. Tomato DePlenty and Tommy Gear. And I remember Tommy and Tomato saying to me, Oh you can’t do cover songs. You guys need to write your own songs. So we got back from LA and we had about a week to go and were like, alright let’s write some original songs. So we sat down and wrote “Car Crash”, “I Believe in Me”, “Teenage Rebel” – maybe six songs, original songs, in that week. Then when we got up to play our first time on a…

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Episode 4: Brubeck sons on their legendary father Apr 29, 2020

Show notes

This bonus episode features my interview with two of Dave Brubeck’s sons, Dan and Chris Brubeck. Excellent musicians in their own right, the two shared intimate memories of growing up with their father and his legendary contributions to modern jazz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1369MM9B40 The Brubeck Brothers Chris Brubeck: We’re sitting about 10 miles away from the house where we grew up. My dad used to work in San Francisco and come home and he’d go to bed. And then my mom would say like, you gotta be quiet. Your poor dad didn’t go to bed till three or four in the morning. So part of the technique of keeping us quiet was that we had these little cheap record players almost in every room, including the room that was adjacent to my dad’s room. We had these Disney records. Tunes like Someday My Prince Will Come, Alice in Wonderland. So my dad’s asleep and yet probably subconsciously he’s hearing [hums melody of Someday My Prince Will Come]. After a while he comes up with this idea, he says, you know, those actually are really good tunes, even though they’re from cartoons. Then he started playing Someday My Prince Will Come. Miles Davis walks into a club in San Francisco and hears my dad play. Then his next record, Miles’ record is called Someday My Prince Will Come. So you’re staring at two of the brats that accidentally had something to do with those songs becoming jazz standards. Just trying to be quiet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcTeAWh8Ous Chris Brubeck: I’m Chris Brubeck, and I play in the Brubeck Brothers quartet. I play electric fretless bass, and sometimes bass trombone. Dan Brubeck: And I’m Dan Brubeck. And I’m a drummer with the Brubeck Brothers Quartet. Up here in Oakland it was just an open room with piano in it and whatnot. Chris Brubeck: A kitchen and a big dining room table. And this redwood pocket door that opened up to this studio was big enough for a grand piano and for drums to set up and, you know, just a beautiful space with big bay windows. And from those windows, you could literally see the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay bridge, and the Richmond bridge. As little kids it was really fun to go to camp outside and look at the twinkling lights and you know, it was very magical as a little kid also, if I wasn’t thinking about music, I was thinking about like Willie Mays is down there somewhere playing baseball, you know, he was my hero. I know for me, one of my favorite things to do in the world, I’d like to hear the group we rehearse I’d crawl under the piano, And there, I couldn’t be in anyone’s way, knowing what step on me. And I got to hear all the low overtones of the piano and it got to you the bass and the bass drum really well. That, to me, it was like heaven, just lying down and listening. Dan Brubeck: Where I slept, there was probably 10 feet from a door where my dad would practice and he’d often practice at night or be writing composing at night. So I don’t think there were too many nights where I didn’t fall asleep when he was home to him practicing and composing. It there’s always, I was always hearing music. But I was lucky too, because he had at his rehearsals Morello, who is an incredible drummer, but of course we didn’t know they were incredible drummers. We just heard all these guys and there, you know, it’s Uncle Paul, Uncle Joe, you know, So for us, it was just like these guys that were friends of my dad’s that played. Chris Brubeck: Paul was like a visiting member of the octet. Dan Brubeck: He didn’t study with Darius Milhaud, but he got called in to play in my dad’s octet, which was the first group that he started. Mostly people that were studying with Darius Milhaud. Chris Brubeck: Milhaud was open-minded and loved American jazz so much that he said here’s a counterpoint exercise and old school would be, it would be, you know, Bach Prelude #2,, analyze it. He would say the chord changes for that popular jazz tune How High The Moon are very Bach-like when you think about it, create an arrangement using counterpoint to that tune. That was like, what a hip professor. And so those kinds of class exercises based on who played what in that class was the foundation of the group the octet. Dan Brubeck: Paul Desmond. He said he heard my dad playing. He said, well, there was this crazy Indian guy playing piano. And he was in like three keys at the same time. I didn’t know where to start. You know how to play with him. Then he started hearing where he was coming from. And then, you know, he got interested in a whole Darius Milhaud approach. And then he saw, okay, he’s, you know, he’s got this concept that he’s working on. Chris Brubeck: Polytonality at a jam session in the late forties was not something you were going to stumble across every day. It was originally Paul that heard Joe Morello playing with Marian McPartland and said, I’ve heard this drummer. He’s great. So Paul recommended Joe. Dave talked to Marian McPartland she said, okay, you know, this could work out. Dave talked to Joe and Joe said, I’ll only leave if you guarantee me that you’re going to give me a drum solo every night. Cause he never got drum solos with Marian. And when Paul heard Joe played, he only played with brushes and you know, he’s got a great touch and he’d be great. But Paul really had no idea what Joe unleashed would be like. And so they did some concerts together and he got the promise solo. Paul went, wait a minute! I’m supposed to be the guy that’s really featured. People went nuts. I wasn’t signing up to suddenly have a Buddy Rich in the group. So in fact, their very first recording session, it was like high noon or something. Paul said, I’m not going to this recording session. If you have Joe Morello on the drums, that’s how much I don’t want this guy in the group. And Dave said, well, I’m sorry to end the relationship this way Paul, but I think that this is the perfect guy for our group and you can’t see it yet. So we’re going to do the session without you. And I think they did one session without him. And then Paul blinked first, and then he came to the next one. Then it’s music history. Joe Morello and Marian McPartland Dan Brubeck: Gene came along later. Chris Brubeck: There was one family, the Bates brothers. There were three bass playing brothers that lived in San Francisco. So all of the musicians knew if you needed a bass player, just call the Bates house, you know, in the old days of telephone, one phone number, no cell phones. Yeah. You’d say, is Norm available or is Bob or Phil. Norman Bates and Paul were in love with the same woman, a glorious, beautiful woman. And she liked them both. And she said, You know, fellas I’ll make a choice based on which one of you will quit Dave’s band. And Norman was willing to, and they ended up getting married. And Paul kept on going in his bachelor ways and staying in Dave’s group. When Gene came into the group, part of that was that Norman had left to be with his new wife and they needed a new bass player. They knew he was great rock solid, you know, at that point, It was really important, like the personality. Does he have the personality that is going to fit with Joe and Paul. Dan Brubeck: There were some personalities there, for sure. Chris Brubeck: And by the way, I don’t mean to imply that that Joe and Paul like hated each other or anything because after a while, Paul just couldn’t avoid some kind of grudging respect for the guy that, dammit took all these drums solos, was winning all the poles in Downbeat magazine for being the best drummer. If it wasn’t Buddy Rich, it was Joe. Gene was such a role player. He let everyone do their thing and he just held the fort. Could Gene be steady and handle going on the road? He was African-American. There were tours in the South and some places they would go to play, they would say, wait a minute, we didn’t know that you had a black bass player. We don’t allow Negroes on stage with white guys at the University of Georgia. In a way it’s kind of parallel to sort of like movies about Jackie Robinson, being the cat to deal all this stuff and be cool under pressure. And Gene could do that. He had just had a heart of gold loving guy. Dan Brubeck: When my dad would lose it with people like that, you know, saying, well either he plays or we go, or whenever, which he did, he never played if they wouldn’t allow Gene to play, but Gene would calm my dad down because he was used to it. He had gone through it as whole life. And I think in general, he was a real calming element in the band. And because he was kind of this ego-less bass player type guy, You know, he got along perfectly well with everyone on an individual basis and kind of bridged everyone together all the time. Chris Brubeck: It was turning down something that would have had an enormous economic impact on our family. At that point, having five kids, that’s a lot of mouths to feed and all that reality. I remember one of those stories that came out of there is that Dave’s manager saying something like, you know, Dave, you had white bass players for years. Why don’t you just get that other bass player back? So you don’t lose these 30 gigs. And my dad said to the famous manager who also managed Louis Armstrong and Sugar Ray Robinson. A tough guy named Joe Glaser. He said, well, Joe, how would you feel if they said you can do this tour, but you got to get rid of your Jewish manager. And that sort of says it all. My father’s biggest heroes that he ever knew personally in music and were Duke Ellington and Darius Milhaud. Oh, it was actually Darius Milhaud that instilled in my father this philosophy is that when you visit other countries really keep your ears open. And that is the key of stretching your mind and the possibility of you creating something new and bringing it into your art for him. Dan Brubeck: Everywhere my dad went, he would listen to the street music or whatever people were doing in schools and tried to take it all in. And I think that was the important element of the State Department tours in terms of how it affected my dad. He then use those influences and brought it into jazz. Blue Rhondo. That’s a tune that’s at nine eighths. So it’s an odd time signature. And he heard a street musician playing, like drums on the corner somewhere and listened for a while and analyzed it figured out that it was in 9/8 and different patterns. So he listened long enough to understand how it all was coming together. In that tune too he also had the blues, obviously that’s like the most American form of jazz. He collected all those things and it was maybe some of the first fusion music or world music, you know, you can put it that way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9GgmGLPbWU Chris Brubeck: The pinnacle, the zenith for us all culturally, politically in every kind of way was when Dave finally got the Kennedy Center Honors. For Dave, who probably had performed for just about every president, you don’t get the Kennedy Center Award posthumously. So we thought like, How old does Dave have to get to have this happen? But it was so beautiful that it happened when Obama was president. It was worth waiting for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hyi-CXAWY8&t=36s Chris Brubeck: Obama, as our president stood for all the advances in our society that we hoped would happen when they were big into their civil rights efforts. The known band was Christian McBride on bass, Miguel Zenon on sax, Bill Charlap on piano, Bill Stewart on drums, and Jon Faddis on trumpet. So that’s great. And they played Un-square Dance. Then, Herbie Hancock who had already narrated the film. He came out and he jammed on Take Five with those guys. Now, the other thing that’s enormously meaningful to our family is Dave right away said because the artists being honored never play. He said, I want my sons to play. And the director said, no, much to Dave’s disappointment. Through the whole thing he is going, I’m so bummed out that, you know, you guys aren’t playing because that’s, what’s really unique to me that somehow we did it as a family, you know, played together too. But secretly the director’s favorite thing is alway to have these gotcha moments that he can capture on camera. So secretly we were supposed to play and Dan for example, Dave had no idea that Dan was with his family in Washington and Matthew, our youngest brother was also… they were secreted away in different hotels. He knew that Darius who had flown in from Africa was there and that I was there and we kept saying, well, we’re going to, uh, like NEA grant meetings and stuff, which was going on in my life at that time, we were basically lying through our teeth because we were having these rehearsals backstage. So he really didn’t know until the announcer says, Oh gentlemen, the sons of Dave Brubeck….This piece of scenery goes away. And there we were playing Blue Rondo Alla Turk together. And it’s a famous moment because the director caught my dad who you can clearly see mouthing going, Son of a bitch! You know, he was like, and the director still considers it like the crowning glory of any celebrity honoree being caught at that thing. So it was great, but then we all watched it at my house when it was really broadcast. And so we get to that part of the show and we saw that the four minute version of Un-Square Dance with all those great jazz musicians had been cut down to a 53 second version. Then they had a version of Take Five, which also included the US Army Jazz Band. Dan Brubeck: I don’t know that anyone caught that significance of that, but the US Army Jazz Band now is an integrated group, but my dad, World War II was in Patton’s army and he was on the front. He put together the first integrated band. And so that’s what that US Army band was trained to represent. But, you know, because they do everything really fast and it wasn’t really explained, it was very inside. You’d have to know that he was considered the first person to have an integrated army band. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kDjbbtslYI Chris Brubeck: It was cool. And we’re watching that and it was a great arrangement and they were singing like, wow, wait till we Herbie Hancock played his ass off and then we’re going, Oh my God, they cut Herbie Hancock out of Take Five. And we’re going like, We’re toast. They’re never going to show us now. And son of a gun, they kept us, some director made that decision because we thought if you’re cutting out Herbie Hancock, we’re out of there. Dan Brubeck: And that was my dad’s birthday too. That was the other part of it. Chris Brubeck: It literally was his birthday. Dan Brubeck: So somehow in the middle of Blue Rondo, we managed to sneak in Happy Birthday. Chris Brubeck: A polytonal version, which is, yeah, it was just, it was just so cool. He was so happy. And then great things happened that of course you never see, like, what about your favorite was like, we had to…they slathered on makeup for all of us, all this stuff was disgusting and we’d go up after the performance we’re back there and the secret service came up and they said, there’s an intermission and Obama wants to meet you guys. So you got to come down, but you got to leave like right now. So we’re like, Oh, and you know, trying to get the stuff off my face and then you have to go through security. Like you’re going through, even though we’d been through it and we never left the building just to get backstage again, you had to go through all the security things. So they were honoring Mel Brooks too at the same time. So we’re standing there in line to meet him backstage with Michelle. And I’m standing next to this lady that has these Wagnerian pigtails and hubcaps and stuff. Cause she was in a beer garden costume for Springtime for Hitler. I’m sitting next to these very happy, proud and gay brown shirted stormtroopers that were really Broadway dancers like, Oh my God, we’re going to meet him right now. And Herbie Hancock, right? It was like su…

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Episode 3: Dave Brubeck and The Jazz Ambassadors Jul 06, 2019

Show notes

In 1958, the Dave Brubeck Quartet embarked on a tour of Europe and Asia sponsored by the U.S. State Department. HEAR THE STORY.This episode features interviews with Keith Hatschek, Program Director for Music Management and Music Industry Studies at the University of Pacific; and Mike Wurtz, Assistant Professor and Head of Special Collections and Archives at the Holt-Atherton Special Collections at the University of Pacific Library.The archival recording of Dave Brubeck is from his interview with Monk Rowe from the Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College. Dave Brubeck and The Jazz Ambassadors Dan Brubeck: The more repressed a society is, the more they admire the freedom you can find in jazz. Jazz is America. People behind the Iron Curtain started falling in love with jazz. Chris Brubeck: The idea was if we get jazz musicians to go out, that represents freedom. People could express themselves in this kind of way out of that kind of democracy comes that kind of expression. ARCHIVAL: Louis Armstrong Chris Brubeck: You’re not going to get a repressed environment like communism. That seemed to be the idea. I mean, if you saw a Louis Armstrong back then you know, your heart opens up and you’re like, wow, this is great. This guy is totally cool. He loves everyone and he’s expressing himself and he just made people happy all over the world. So that’s a way better defense against fighting communism than fighting might with might and all that, you know. It’s like nowadays, maybe we would just bomb them or something. Brandi Howell: Welcome to The Echo Chamber. I’m your host, Brandi Howell. On today’s episode, The Jazz Ambassadors, a blue note and a minor key, America has its secret sonic weapon, jazz. This was a headline in 1955 when the United States seeing jazz as propaganda to promote democracy abroad sent its top musicians overseas. The music they thought was a universal language, knowing no national boundaries. So off they sent the so-called jazz ambassadors, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, and lastly, Dave Brubeck. His experience with the program is the focus of this episode. Keith Hatschek: It was a brilliant use of what we have come to term soft power. Eisenhower realized that bullets and bombs ultimately would never decide the outcome of the future of this battle between the capitalist system and the socialist system. He very wisely invested in cultural exchanges. They were dubbed unofficially the “jazz ambassadors”, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie. The groups were chosen to go overseas and play their music. This battle for the hearts and minds of all these territories around the world who were not directly linked to either the Western powers or the Soviet Union played out not so much in a military sense, but in a cultural sense. Why not send a jazz quartet and have them go and do their thing in these various countries and territories? I’m Keith Hatschek. I’m the author of “The Impact of American Jazz Diplomacy in Poland During the Cold War Era”. As far as my interest in the jazz ambassadors, I teach at the University of the Pacific and we are the place where the jazz musician Dave Brubeck and his wife Iola decided to bequeath their papers and all of their archival materials. They both attended school here in the 1940s. Dave went on of course to become a world renowned jazz musician and composer and humanitarian. And one of the things that really struck him was that he was a GI during World War II. He was in the European theater of operations and he ended up leading a band called the Wolf Pack. And after the war, after hostilities had ceased. the band stayed on and they played both for GIs, but also refugees who were displaced over there. And it really gave him a look into what it was like in Europe in the aftermath of the devastation of World War Two. Later, when he became more popular in the 1950s, his music started to be broadcast over the Voice of America. ARCHIVAL: Voice of America Music USA #357-B, Interview with Dave Brubeck(Listen to full VOA show at the University of North Texas Special Collections) Keith Hatschek: And one of their most popular shows was called The Jazz Hour. It was hosted by Willis Conover, a Washington DJ. As a result Brubeck’s music got behind the Iron Curtain in a way that it couldn’t have otherwise gotten there because Western records and books and movies were not allowed to be had in communist control. So Brubeck’s music became pretty popular behind the Iron Curtain. Archival Dave Brubeck: The Voice of America was so appreciated. But there should have been far more of that type of thing. At the risk of death, people were listening. He came on every night out of Washington. And the average Russian, when he speaks English, sounds like Willis Conover. They took those chances to secretly listen, and we’ve been to secret meetings in places like Poland. The last thing they said to me, just before we came home, 60 people in the jazz club, one fellow stood up and said he wanted to give a toast. And he said, when you go home, remember we want freedom as much as you do. Keith Hatschek: Jazz is a improvisitory media. The idea that the members of a jazz group are going to be having a conversation musically, they’re going to have give and take and dialogue. Many people felt that that was analogous to the democratic process. People in the Soviet Bloc saw jazz, not only as exciting and youthful and energetic and rhythmic, certainly that was a part of it. But the idea that jazz musicians would venture out without a script, they would create art and music and share it. There was something about that that was very attractive to people who were living an incredibly ordered and regimented life. At one point, the threat of jazz music and its great impression it was making on Soviet citizenry led Stalin to view any form of jazz music, whether it was listening to it, owning it, making it or forming it or composing it as being out of bounds. At one point saxophones, which had been around since the late 19th century were confiscated and all musicians were told if you own a saxophone, you have to bring it to a certain office. And if you were registered as a musician on saxophone, you had to turn in your card, the cards were destroyed and you were given an oboe or clarinet or a bassoon, and you had to change instruments. That’s one thing, musicians always resourceful. Jerzy Matuszkiewicz who’s one of the most celebrated Polish jazz musicians of all time. He said we were jamming a lot and the neighbors would complain. The militia would come and the first thing they would do is they would threaten us and say, are you playing that decadent Western music? And of course we were, but we just said to them, Oh no, no, no, no. It’s a Polish folk song – just our version of it. The militia, many of them were so poorly educated that they didn’t know what Polish folk music actually was. So they got away with it. ARCHIVAL DAVE BRUBECK: The idea of freedom, if there’s a dictator, the first thing they’re going to stop is jazz. Absolutely. Hitler’s stopped it immediately. Stalin stopped it. It just gives the people of a country too much idea of what it would be like to be free. People just don’t realize how little freedom there was. Some people weren’t allowed to speak. But they would sing maybe or hum – some way they’ll get through. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xCQ86Euk9I Keith Hatschek: There was a music committee of academics and critics that was convened. They made recommendations to the State Department. At the same time groups that were popular – Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie. Those were groups that were going to be more popular and a bigger draw out on these jazz ambassador tours. So they happened to be ones that in the early years of the touring program were ones that were invited to go and perform. In 1957, discussions between the State Department and Brubeck’s booking agent ensued and it was agreed that he would go on a European and Asian tour. And part of it would be underwritten by the State Department. Well, everything moves slowly in government circles. There are some correspondence from the late 1957 time period discussing the tour. How long it would go for, where it would go, what countries would be covered. The reality was it worked on two levels for Dave Brubeck and his group, his music had become more popular through its broadcast over the Voice of America. ARCHIVAL VOA: Music USA coming to you on 72 35, 9,515 to 10 kilo cycles. Let’s hear more of the recordings of Dave Brubeck in the next half hour of the Voice of America jazz program. Keith Hatschek: So the hope was more people would come to hear the group and their music and more people would eventually, especially in the countries such as India and Ceylon and Iran and Iraq, where there were record stores and bookstores that it would actually spur some sales of Brubeck’s recordings. But on the other hand, Brubeck knew that some of the places they were going, for instance, Afghanistan – it’s fascinating. They played in Kabul and Brubeck commented that when he looked out in the audience, most of the audience was made up of serving Soviet officers who were there on their version of foreign exchange. They were building roads. They were building runways. They were building bridges, but they too, through the Voice of America, knew of Brubeck and his music, and they gave him a standing ovation. They loved the performance. ARCHIVAL DAVE BRUBECK: President Eisenhower sent us behind the Iron Curtain. 1958. We went first to Poland, then to Turkey Afghanistan, the periphery of Russia, Iran, Iraq, East and West Pakistan, India and Ceylon. And on my mind is we’ve got to get together. Keith Hatschek: Music had a way of breaking down the ideology. When the tour was finally all coming together, they ended up visiting nine countries on behalf of the U.S. State Department as jazz ambassadors, and in every country they visited, people were ecstatic. For many of them, tThey really believed that it was giving them a key to what they want to do with their own life. One of the countries was Poland. And of course, Poland at this time was a satellite country of the Soviet Union. And so the group spent two weeks in 1958 in Poland. They played 13 concerts. That fascinated me because there was a letter in the archives, Dave and Iola Brubeck saved a lot of their fan mail. So this was a letter from a musician who had gone to seven of the concerts in Poland. And he wrote with such passion about how much he learned about himself as a musician by attending these concerts and listening to the music and observing the way the musicians interacted. It struck me as being kind of a life-changing experience. And so I thought, I wonder if this guy is still alive. So that led me to the idea of a research trip to Poland, which I was fortunate enough to do in 2007. And I got to interview over a dozen musicians who met and were influenced by Dave Brubeck and his quartet in that historic 1958 tour. I hired a student research assistant from the University of Warsaw. He mentioned that his grandmother had quite a collection of jazz albums that she had accumulated over the years from the gray market. And I said, Oh, that’s interesting. He said, and I think she really did like Dave Brubeck and I said, Oh, that’s great. And then the next day he said, well, I talked to my grandmother and she’s very happy that you’re here. She was in her eighties at that point, I said, great. And I thought for a minute, I went away, which he liked to speak about that. He goes, I don’t think so, but I’ll ask her. So later in the same day, he sent me a text message and said, my grandmother would like to speak with you. Helena Zaworska. She was a woman of letters and had been an editor of the leading intellectual language journal for many, many, many years in Poland. She was a huge jazz fan as a college student and for the rest of her life, a woman of great intellect and great creative imagination. And so the fact that she was not able to get access to much of the great literature of history. And that until she became a doctoral student and she was finally allowed to go for a year and a half and study at the Sorbonne, she had never left Poland. She knew that she only had a very limited view of what life and world could offer. So jazz music became her lens. It became her way to travel. She would close her eyes and listen to the wonderful jazz music that was on the Voice of America each evening, as well as she and some of her friends began to collect black market jazz records. She would travel on Sundays by train 13 hours round trip from Warsaw to Krakov where a friend of hers had a much larger jazz record collection and they would spend the whole afternoon early evening just luxuriating and listening to jazz music of their choice. She talked about what that meant to her at the time, how jazz and particularly Dave Brubeck and his music played an important role in her own life. She said, Jazz and particularly Brubeck, took on the status of myth to us. What it represented was bigger than the music itself. By immersing ourselves in jazz recordings, we became independent during that hour, which was the only way to truly feel freedom at that time – through the music. There was really no hope of ever being able to travel. Jazz allowed us to dream, to retain some sense of idealism because we thought the limits on our freedoms might last forever. Mike Wurtz: Before I start moving things up there. It is. Look at that, Paul Desmond was already out. So we’ll set that here. And then I think what we’re going to do is put these on this cart and now comes the fun part. Cause I gotta move the really heavy one that doesn’t work…Okay, one more time. This is the Brubeck Collection. It’s actually on either side of this particular range. Pretty much everything on this side is paper. Everything on the other side is audio and video. Do you need me to tell you who I am? Brandi Howell: Yeah, If you want to introduce yourself here. Mike Wurtz: I will do that. My name is Mike Wurtz. I am Head of Special Collections at the Holt Atherton Special Collections at the University of Pacific library in Stockton. Among the hundreds of collections that we curate, it includes the Brubeck collections. This is… let’s start with wait, and I’ll tell you what we’ll work backwards. This is actually good, cause this is the combination of civil rights and international diplomacy. Let’s rewind back to 1960, and this is a very famous story about Dave. He’s planning to do a trip of the South. And it turns out that the southern universities that he’s playing at will lose funding if they have an integrated band on stage. So Dave cancels much of that tour at a great financial loss. And we’ve got a really wonderful letter from his managers in New York saying, get a white guy in your band for this tour because you need this money. But Dave ends up canceling the tour. Dave is very clear that he’s not going to do that with his band. This is his band. It’s an integrated band. We’ve got another letter from the mid sixties where Dave is integrating audiences in Alabama. They had never had integrated audiences at the University of Alabama up until Dave played. And then after that, it’s always been integrated audiences. Let’s fast forward. 1976. Dave is asked to go to South Africa. He writes into the contracts that he will always have integrated audiences. This is apartheid South Africa. And so Dave goes down there and sure enough, after a couple of shows, one of the audiences was not integrated and Dave canceled the rest of that tour. No financial loss because it’s in the contract now. These are the kinds of things that we can have that support this whole idea of international diplomacy. Dave and Iola kept a great deal of stuff and that having this material. It’s important for us to unde…

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