Lawrence Ferlinghetti died.

Does anybody know who that is now?

Back in the sixties they did not teach to the test. You still could not go to public school in the metropolis, but if you lived in the suburbs, there were fewer than thirty kids per class and there was enough paper for the mimeo machine and plenty of money for school supplies.

Not that we loved school. Does anybody really love school?

And by time I got to high school they had the track system. Actually, it started in junior high, but they were more devious about it. There were ten classes per grade but the numbers were out of order, so it wasn’t clear who was smart and who was dumb. Supposedly. If you cared, you could figure it out. But in high school the classes were ranked 1-4. 1 was the top. 2 was smart but not super-smart. 3 was…really bad, either you were intellectually challenged or a delinquent. And 4…meant you were truly mentally retarded. That’s the term they used back then anyway, before the advent of euphemisms, before we started giving people false hope and still taught that the world was a vast and ugly place and you’d better prepare for it. 1’s & 2’s went to college. There was enough money to place the 4’s in training programs. But if you were a 3…you fell through the cracks, good luck.

Anyway, unlike in junior high, you weren’t with the same people for every class. And you weren’t necessarily the same number for every subject. But if you were a Jewish suburbanite chances are you were in all 1’s, because if you didn’t do well in school you could not come home, or when you did you’d be beaten to a pulp. Believe me, it happened. There was no “time out.” Our parents were not our best friends, they truly had no idea what was going on with us. And optimism reigned.

So it all came down to which teacher you had. And believe me, I had a lot of bad teachers in high school, but I found even worse ones in college. At least in high school they focused on teaching. In college, where everyone had a Ph.D., many professors thought they were too good to teach, and were lousy at conveying the subject to boot. That’s how I ended up becoming an art history major, the teachers in that department were alive, they’d talk about ice cream shops around the corner from museums, they allowed questioning, irreverence, but…

Most of what I learned I learned in high school, because the teachers were better, more stimulating. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot outside the classroom in college, but inside? To a great degree a giant waste of time.

But anything went in high school. Once again, no one was teaching to the test. In New York they had the Regents, and we had have annual achievement tests but the results were never released to us, they were for internal purposes only.

And if the teacher was great, it was amazing what you could learn. When I was a freshman I was failing algebra, it was so boring, the teacher sent a note home to my parents and you can imagine what happened after that. But as a sophomore I had a different teacher and got an A+. You can jump through the hoops all kinds of places, but whether you learn anything is something different.

Anyway, my sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Hurley, was hip.

First and foremost she was in her twenties. Now that was much older when you were a sophomore, but Mrs. Hurley had a fashionable short haircut and wore au courant clothing and she was a culture vulture. She’d tell us what plays she went to over the weekend, movies. And we’d go on field trips too. Not that there were no limits. If you tested them, Mrs. Hurley would discipline you. But if you did the work, it was a wild adventure, that was probably my most stimulating class in high school.

And we studied Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Most people hate poetry. Because they can’t understand it. But you can understand Ferlinghetti. And Ferlinghetti was unfettered, he didn’t write with the audience in mind, he wasn’t worried about who he offended, he just needed to speak his truth.

He’s associated with the Beats, he was the first to publish Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” but in reality he came from the generation before.

Ferlinghetti was highly-educated. Back when education was about expanding your mind as opposed to preparing you for a job at McKinsey or the bank. No one gave a rat’s ass what would happen after college. You were gonna enter the world and figure it out. And if you had a stupid job, well your mind could drift while you were doing it and you could pay the bills and explore and test limits when you were off the clock.

So, Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco and opened a bookshop with a buddy, they each laid down $500. That’s how City Lights was born.

Do people still make a pilgrimage there?

Used to be San Francisco was exotic. Three hours away. Not only was California not denigrated, most people didn’t even think about it, it was another land, it might as well have been a different country. Except for the fact that’s where the entertainment came from. We were aware of that.

So, at first City Lights was a paperback bookstore. And then it became a salon and a publisher. You’d hang out there. Not just scanning the titles, there were chairs, you could have a meeting. It was an epicenter of modern culture.

Have you read Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”? You need to. It’s the story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and…the amazing thing is it happened only a few years before, but it’s like it all happened on another planet. Today it’s about conforming. Or making money. Or both. Intellectual development is tertiary at best. And too many people who profess to live the life of the mind have just checked off boxes, they cannot think, and it all comes down to thinking. You don’t need a college degree to know how to think. Then again, many people need help. But with the right background, the right surroundings, you too can learn how to test limits, to push the envelope.

Not like today. Today rebellion is based on falsehoods. The San Franciscans of yore would laugh at this, shake their heads. Because facts were accepted, they were well known, it was what you did with those facts that mattered. And every convention was up for grabs, if you did something because someone told you to…you were still in school, you certainly weren’t living on the west coast.

We don’t have these provocateurs today. There’s no money in it. But these people didn’t care about money. As long as they had enough to live.

So that’s why all that great art came out of the sixties. It wasn’t a vacuum, art led the public, business was for old men in suits. If you wanted to know what was going on you listened to a record, or went to a movie, or read poetry. That’s where truth was. Life truths.

Now I’m sure there are schools that teach Jay Z’s lyrics today. And Jay has had some great things to say. But like in so many other avenues of life, the past has been forgotten. Today’s sports heroes have no sense of history, it’s well-documented, now it’s all about the present. And we must march forward, but we cannot forget the past.

What if today’s students still studied Ferlinghetti? They wouldn’t be so willing to be on reality television, to be used and abused as fodder for the brain dead. No, if you see the possibilities, you can expand your own mind.

You can go online and read some of Ferlinghetti’s poems.

But you probably don’t have the time.

But we had nothing but time. We were bored. We came up with things out of thin air to entertain us…

“but then right in the middle of it

comes the smiling

mortician”

These were famous lines in Mrs. Hurley’s class. I know them as well as I know Beatle lyrics. They’re at the end of the poem “Pictures of the gone world”: https://bit.ly/37GvpRK

And that world is truly gone. But it has informed me. And so many others.

If you read Ferlinghetti, you know where Bob Dylan came from. Read “I Am Waiting,” it’s a very short step to Dylan’s sixties work: https://bit.ly/37KoYwY

Is Dylan sui generis or just a man of his time, an exponent.

Study history…the great discoveries were in the air. If someone didn’t invent it, another person would have nearly simultaneously.

That’s what it was like in the sixties. It was a cauldron of creativity.

“A Coney Island of the Mind” was published in 1958.

You can make a strong argument that it all started there. 

When are we gonna let this guy out of the doghouse?

Let’s get very specific here, and leave emotions aside. What Wallen said is vernacular that is used in the black community all the time, the N-word is a part of hip-hop culture and employed on recordings. That does not make Wallen’s usage right, but it does speak to intention.

Now let’s be clear. Only black people have the right to use the N-word. They have reclaimed the use of a derogatory term and switched the meaning to be positive for themselves. Kind of like Donald Trump and “fake news.” No, I do not think they’re equivalent, I’m just broadening understanding of what went down here.

So what we’ve got is a hip-hop culture so pervasive that an ignorant guy from Tennessee used the N-word to say goodbye after a night of drinking. If you’d asked this idiot, he’d have said he thought he was doing nothing wrong, that it was a term of endearment. Watch the video, too many people are commenting without having seen it: https://tinyurl.com/2y9ylgjw

If the goal is to educate people and have them change their behavior, at this point Morgan Wallen is being done a disservice. He issued an apology video, I suggest you watch it: https://tinyurl.com/yyx2sa7e The original was posted to Instagram, where people speak to each other unfettered. Instagram is the public square of today, not the “New York Times” or CNN or Fox, to their ignorance and chagrin. Instagram even supersedes Facebook, although they are both owned by the same parent company. And, Facebook skews old while Instagram skews young, to active music listeners who are aware of Wallen.

So, what is the appropriate penalty for Wallen’s crime?

Well, for the politically correct police, for media insiders, for those who have contempt for someone with a southern accent, it seems to be expulsion forever! Wallen’s career must be killed just like Billy Squier’s. As for those Dixie Chicks, they were excised by country radio. And that was wrong. But let’s not rewrite history, the Chicks doubled down, they were the opposite of conciliatory. That was their choice. My only point is these are false equivalencies.

So what message is the holier-than-thou cancel culture sending Wallen fans? That they’re ignorant and to be laughed at. Their feelings should not be considered at all. So, you’ve got a huge swath of Americans giving Wallen no break, and another huge swath embracing Wallen, to a degree as a protest.

And there’s no umpire in music. No one to mete out the appropriate punishment. So is Wallen going to be excised from the airwaves and playlists forever? When does he get out of music jail?

Maybe Wallen should apologize directly to those who’ve dropped him. Individually. Cumulus, iHeart, Big Loud and the streaming companies who have demoted him. Come on, what is worse than standing up in front of your parents, or the school principal, and admitting you’re wrong? Talk about shame. But if we never let Wallen back he and his fans will become embittered, the problem will only get worse.

Now the truth is if Wallen had employed an anti-Semitic trope, this would be more difficult for me. Then again, if Jewish culture was so pervasive that Wallen used a term that showed he was influenced by it and embraced its language as his own, that would be different. Once again, Wallen was not using the N-word as a put-down, and if you think otherwise, you yourself are ignorant.

The truth is Morgan Wallen is the best thing to come down the pike for country music since Chris Stapleton. But Stapleton is 42 and Wallen is 27. Stapleton kicked around in the fringes of the spotlight before he broke through. Wallen was essentially nowhere and then he got somewhere. And believe me, being thrust nearly instantly into the public eye is quite discomforting and alarming. You want to be famous, but you’ve got no idea that people and the media are out to get you, anybody with a profile has experienced this, it’s good copy, it garners eyeballs.

So Wallen is the best thing to happen to country music since Chis Stapleton because his music is more authentic than what Nashville has been selling. Nashville has been pandering for years. Talking about trucks, family and babies. As if no one involved ever swore or crossed the line. Instead of homogenizing himself for the radio, Wallen sounds like he’s from the country, he’s got a twang, he’s closer to the roots of the music than anybody presently on the airwaves. What Nashville is purveying is middle class safe, when many people are struggling.

As for country music itself…too many commenters are too good for the format/music. They think it’s hicks singing unpalatable songs. But they have universities in the south, there are smart people in the south, just because they talk differently we’re going to take them off the playing field?

The public has spoken. Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous” has been number one for six weeks straight. Not that the public is always right, but when was the last time we had a white musical artist speaking from the heart that has resonated at this level? I can’t remember!

Cancel culture has gotten out of control. There’s a cabal of people looking for infractions, trying to get everybody to check themselves, to subdue their behavior. And it’s not only speech, it’s books and movies too. You just can’t do that, someone might be offended.

I’m not saying everything is okay, but that the line is unclear, and until we push back instead of backing down and discuss where the line should be we’re doing our culture a disservice.

Do I think what Morgan Wallen said was right? No. Do I think he should be penalized for his behavior? Absolutely. But does it have to be black and white, does Morgan Wallen have to be deleted from mainstream behavior forever?

This country is divided. And it’s very clear that one side is being fed disinformation on a regular basis. And if you’re not scared, you must be on the side trading in falsehoods. Wallen got caught partying during Covid and was kicked off SNL. That was the right move, but SNL let him back on! As for his partying… Too many citizens are victims of unending falsehoods such that they don’t know what the truth is. All these right wing “news” outlets saying Covid is a hoax and masks don’t work… Who do we hold responsible, them or those they’re speaking to? By keeping Morgan Wallen in the doghouse we’re just reinforcing the beliefs of those we should be embracing, saying the left is intolerant and one false move and you’re out. That everyone should hew to their dictates. Statues of Confederates torn down? Yes. Renaming schools with the moniker “Abraham Lincoln”? Ridiculous. If we continue with this zero tolerance policy no one will be free, no one will pass. Because the truth is we are all human and we make mistakes, if not in the public eye, at least in our family and communities. Imagine if we could never recover from those statements.

I call for Morgan Wallen to IMMEDIATELY be reinstated on radio and streaming service playlists. Let this be a teaching moment. Let these outlets put out press releases saying what the point is, that it’s been made, and they’re embracing Morgan Wallen back into the fold, because America is one big tent and we all need to get along, that we all make mistakes, but they are all different and should engender different penalties and Morgan Wallen has paid the price.

And he has. Come on, this scandal will be part of his career forever. It will be on his Wikipedia page for time immemorial. It will be in plain sight. It will fade, but it will be there. Wallen made a mistake, but he was not being aggressive and poking society in the eye. He was just drunk and ignorant and he should know he can’t say that.

I think he now does.

And many more people do too, especially his fans.

But if we continue to nail Morgan Wallen to the wall, the tide will turn, the accusers will lose more than the offender. What did Don Henley sing, that it was about forgiveness?

We need some of that here now.

Tune in today, February 23rd, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Phone #: 844-6-VOLUME, 844-686-5863

Twitter: @lefsetz or @siriusxmvolume/#lefsetzlive

Hear the episode live on SiriusXM VOLUME: siriusxm.us/HearLefsetzLive

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app: siriusxm.us/LefsetzLive

From: Tom Johnston

Re: Re-Bad Company

I’m a little late here, but the fact that Paul Rodgers, in any given format….Free, Bad Company etc isn’t in the Hall is a travesty. He is the best Blues Rock singer I’ve ever heard and I’ve heard and played with some of the best. He’s a great guy, down to earth, easy to get along with, who has a gift (timing and tone, showmanship) and isn’t afraid to let it rip. Always a fantastic show with Paul and Simon Kirke. I did love Andy Fraser’s bass playing as well. And Paul Kossof and Mick Ralphs were both great players with different styles that complemented the pure rock those bands put out with Paul Rodgers leading the charge!

Tom Johnston

_____________________________________

From: Paul Brady

Subject: Re: Trick Or Treat

Hi Bob,

Thanks for digging out Trick Or Treat again…and the fulsome praise. Bonnie Raitt hits the stratosphere when she opens up in the second verse!

Not sure where you heard I was managed by Paul McGuinness but that wasn’t the case, though we are passing acquaintances.

At the time I was managed by Damage Management out of London.. whose other act was Dire Straits. It was David Bates of Fontana Records UK who put me with Gary Katz.

We started in A&M studios and the Village Recorder in LA, moved to Bearsville NY and mixed in the Hit Factory NYC. It was a whole new and hugely enjoyable experience, working with the heavy gang. Gave me a lot of confidence. You’re right  there never was a breakthrough cover of ‘Can’t Stop Wanting You’, though it was recorded by Johnny Hallyday on his 1994 album ‘Rough Town’ featuring, among others, Bonnie’s long time bass player Hutch Hutchinson. I’m still at it, writing and recording and, until Covid, playing live. Too late to stop now!

Stay well and keep on telling it like it is.

Paul Brady

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From: Steven Page

Re: Steven Page Live From Home XLI

Thanks so much for coming to last night’s show and for writing about it. I’m so glad that the best part for you was the same as it is for me – the folks at home, singing along, kibitzing in the chat, and even playing along on their own instruments! It blows my mind that we’re at forty-one shows now, with no sign of letting up, as this incredible community of people from all over the world keep showing up every week and honestly, I’m only a small part of the whole thing now and I love that. At Christmastime, the audience set up a gift exchange for each other, without my involvement at all. Their holiday gift to me was a surprise video of fans playing and singing one of my songs, “The Chorus Girl,” which I re-ran last night. The Patreon has been a great plus as well, where, for $5/month, folks can re-watch or catch up on any past shows they may have missed.

Last year, after seven years of writing and prep and workshopping, my first musical, Here’s What It Takes, was in rehearsal at the Stratford Festival in Canada, where it was supposed to open in May and run all summer. Obviously, that, along with any touring plans, disappeared and I went home and tried to figure out what to do. Lots of musicians were doing livestreams on Facebook and Instagram, but with the help of my friend Dan Mangan and his company Side Door (sidedooraccess.com – check them out), I tried out doing a paid Zoom livestream and was hooked. I have my screen set up so I can see 49 people at a time, so it doesn’t feel like I’m singing into a void. Instead, I watch folks singing along, or making dinner or doing yard work and we all feel some connection that doesn’t normally happen in online concerts.

After a few shows with Side Door, I started doing them on my own (well, not entirely – my wife, Christine, runs the Zoom and the Discord server upstairs). I started working at making the audio and video as good as possible, and have tried to make each show as different from the week before. That’s the part that’s really different from touring – on the road, with a completely different audience every night, the set list needs to be a fairly consistent balance of hits with some newer stuff added in, which makes each show necessarily similar. With the weekly livestreams however, many of the audience are regulars, so I’ve learned to stretch and do stuff I’d never have done otherwise: I’ve played every album, both BNL and solo, in order, I’ve done every b-side, covers, holiday songs, new stuff – with a running tally of 210 different songs so far. You’re right that it’s definitely geared toward the die-hard fan, but we all are welcomed and will soon feel like they’re among friends, in-jokes and all. For me, and for so many of the audience, Saturdays are something to look forward to and the shows give us a chance to reset. It’s done wonders for my mental health! I have no idea how this might change the way I play shows once we’re all together in person again, but I know all of this has forever changed my relationship with my audience in a truly positive way. I miss my friends and family and I miss being on the road, but I’m happy to have found some silver lining.

Best,

sp