American Music

I went to a great old time music party/show last night. Once in a while there is the kind of party so full of creative energy and welcoming fun that it fills your mind like a wonderful painting or a touching song or an amazing meal. An inspired thing was created in the party itself. It was in a loft just south of downtown in a barren neighborhood amongst a bunch of warehouses dotted with gentlemen's clubs. Some enterprising and adventurous fellow lives there and keeps his living room empty except for a piano, a few mics, a lot of extra chairs and his kitchen full of beer. Amazing, wonderful music was made, and there was dancing and joy.

It wasn't like being in L.A. It was like being in Portland, in Vermont, northern Arizona....in just about every place that I have ever lived since my early 20's. In all of these places and apparently here in L.A. too there are groups of mostly young people getting together, dressing up, well, down I should say, imitating old time musicians from the early decades of the past century, drinking, smoking, partying and playing music into the wee hours with abandon. The opening band was headed up by a skinny young blond fellow with pomaded hair and 1950's style dress pants over his destroyed loafers and a thrift store white button down rolled to the elbows. From his narrow 20ish year old body he somehow managed to powerfully pull the ruined voice of a 60 year old chain smoking black man from the south. It was great! He played mandolin and was accompanied by a skinny guitarist with a nice old resonator and new white wing tips, a long-haired, clear voiced young lady fiddler, and a cheerful, chubby jack of all trades who alternated between the piano, the washboard and the jug. Doc Bocs, the Carter Family, Smithsonian Folkways recordings, Roscoe Holcomb, Jimmy Rogers, Lefty Frizzell, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams and Kitty Wells are just a few of the closely studied and imitated icons of American musical roots talent that are drawn upon by crowds like these to create entertainment and joy.

I grew up watching Madonna on MTV. Yet I spent my twenties learning to play Carter family tunes on the guitar. I know how to play a lot of them. And everyplace that I go I find other people who do as well. This music sounds right to me. It feels right to me. It makes the world feel right to me. I'm certainly not the only flatpicking refugee from the digital age, or the most serious by far. A friend of mine in Portland used to spend much of his time online digitally compiling various versions of traditional songs. Pretty geeky, huh. But it didn't sound geeky when he played them. He sounded alive and wild and totally consumed by the music. I don't know exactly what is going on here. It's kind of a weird, and certainly unglamorous sort of movement. I guess that's part of the point. The anti-MTV cribs kind of musicians. Music parties in random lofts or apartments or cabins out in the woods, potluck and even with homemade hooch sometimes, advertised only by word of mouth. And at these parties you find artists, budding filmmakers, writers, farmers and revolutionaries and probably a few closet computer programmers and bank tellers. Maybe this is my generations counterculture rebellion. Undoubtedly worshipping at the roots of American music in impromptu location for free feeds some cultural need. We need traditions. We need something spontaneous. This party and others that have come before are about as human and un-digital and un-commercial as it gets. It's a real experience in real time. Also, American music is a truly beautiful and great fusing of American traditions. We may have a sorry country in many ways at this point, with over six million people currently living with no income whatsoever and no help from social programs while wall street grows fatter and corporations monopolize the very air we breathe until we can't but exhale and participate in lining someone's unsavory pockets. We do have some wonderful unspoiled riches though, like a surviving democracy, our natural resources, our unparalleled diversity, our thirst for creative enterprise, and our unique and wonderful music. Playing it and loving it and keeping it alive is one way to love America. To love something that's really good about America.