Jawbone Press: ISBN: 978-1-916829-10-7
Alan Dearling shares some thoughts about this new and fascinating new book
As Cary Baker says on his website:
“Trust me: I realize better than anyone that the world is not clamoring for a new music journalist returning to the field at age 67. But that hasn’t stopped me. My forté has long been my grasp on music history, from the blues to bebop to the Beatles to Big Star and beyond. And music histories are what I’ll be writing.”
It’s not a bad way to preface this brief review.
This is a fun book. Informative, fly-on-the wall (or, the view from the punter on the tube, or, the street corner), and full of rather lovely vignette ‘stories’. It’s also a good introduction to many well-loved and less known blues artists, street musos and eccentrics. I especially found it interesting to find out more about the street performances of characters like Moondog, Peter Case, Wild Man Fischer, Ted Hawkins and even Lucinda Williams. There are also dozens of anecdotes from Cary Baker providing the back-stories about the lives of artists who not only sang and played on the streets, but in many instances slept in parks, movie theatres and on park benches. Arvella Gray is one example, who was blind, shared many tall stories, and recorded tracks for just one album, ‘The Singing Drifter’ (1973). Baker tells us that the 2005 reissue was well-received both by ‘Rolling Stone’ and the ‘New York Times’.
‘Outsider’ status is quite frequently afforded to street performers. Larry ‘Wild Man’ Fischer was about as ‘out there’ as you can imagine. I personally followed his oddball releases with Frank Zappa and the duo, Barnes & Barnes. Wildman produced on-the-street rants rather than songs and was usually unaccompanied. He certainly often bad-mouthed Zappa, singing that “Frank’s got money in the bank”, whilst Larry resented his lack of fame and fortune. His repertoire included ‘Fish Heads’ (“eat them up, yum”), ‘My name is Larry’ (“pronounced Normal”) and ‘Merry-Go-Round’ (with its monkey chanting chorus). Baker recounts some of the tales about Wild Larry’s ‘performances’, including Pamela Des Bares’ memory of an indoor show:
“He got up onstage and started singing his songs – warbling, shouting, really…singing wasn’t his specialty… At one point he jumped down off the stage and sang all around the perimeter…then outside the freaking venue…And then he came running back into the venue, got back on stage, and finished the song.”
Here’s another snapshot of the fundamental experience of busking early on in a famous career. Billy Bragg says,
“The significance of busking in my career is that I’m still basically a busker…at Bearded Theory (festival in Staffordshire) I probably played to twelve thousand people…and the whole time that I was onstage, I was more or less busking…you have to suss out what’s going on and adapt to this and that …I’m doing it by the seat of my pants.”
“This book allows us to hear the full story of feeding the street, as it has been done for over a century in the United States. It gives us a glimpse into the lives of the buskers who have enriched our daily existence with music and performance art. It’s a dollar in the hat, with the acknowledgment that the world is always a better place when busking is a part of the picture.” Dom Flemons tells us in his heartfelt foreword.
It’s actually that and more, since Part 5 provides six chapters from Europe including contributions from Elvis Costello (nicely titled: ‘Watching for detectives’) and Billy Bragg and Madeleine Peyroux.
I immersed myself in the tales, the stories included in the book, and it has led me into researching about a number of the artists, the buskers and street performers included. And you can’t say much better than that!