The Facebook photo caught my eye: I know that place.
In stark black and white, it showed the empty Starlite Music Theater, posted with the ask/challenge to recall shows in the place. The Colonie Tent Theater, Coliseum Theater and Starlite looked forlorn. The chairs were gone, exposing dusty rings of terraced floor rising from the empty stage; so desolate that somebody asked, “Did it have seats?”
When I scanned the posts for others’ memories of shows I saw there, I found one citing “David Brubeck. The best!!!”
So I checked the name and found it was by Anne (M.) S., the woman – a high school girl, then – I’d taken to that show.
I posted back: “Right – I took you to see the original Dave Brubeck Quartet, went backstage and got the program autographed and gave it to you. Later saw and reviewed maybe 120 shows there for the Gazette; met many of those performers – discussed Kubrick films with Johnny Cash, had beers with the Everly Brothers and their great band, gave James Brown a photo of my son Zak in his walker, with a James Brown bumper sticker across the front. Brown pocketed it, said, “As long as I have this, I have you.”
Like the “ghost signs” of extinct businesses promoted in fading paint on neighboring survivor buildings, vanished venues echo to us over time. Sounds we heard there hum in memory.
These days, all venues sit silent; waiting, like we do.
But we have hope for them, unlike those that have become dust, or parking lots, office buildings or ashes: the Starlite, Proctors in Troy, Saratoga Winners, the Metro, Allen’s, the Skyway, the Chateau, the Hullaballoo, the Half Moon, the Embers, the University Twist Palace, Roth’s…
Here’s to those vanished, venerable palaces of sound, and the memories of songs we heard there, with our first loves.
I couldn’t tell in what nearby backyard my neighbors were singing: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye.”
But I could hear the song clearly and their jubilation, singing to the end of America’s dank nightmare of incompetence, cruelty, and cluelessness. I could hear the smiles through the voices.
Was the song coming from the Guyanese family diagonally behind us, or the Black family two doors away, or the Dominican family right next door?
I didn’t care.
It was coming from America, and it was beautiful.
On the night Barack Obama was elected, our son Zak joined a spontaneous parade across his then-home city of Washington, DC. In their thousands, strangers stood together outside the White House and sang to George Bush: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye.”
I asked Zak today, “Is that New Orleans?” when he got back from buying champagne and showed me joyous video of a street parade on his phone: drums and brass instruments in Second Line glee from the back of a pickup truck.
He said, “No, it’s in DC” – another song of joy at the eviction of evil.
Casey Seiler’s column this morning (Sunday, Nov. 1) knocked it out of the park. Now editor of the Albany Times-Union, he’s written about nearly everything a reporter can, including concert reviews, where we’d occasionally meet up.
For more than 20 years, I’ve joined the same crew of music-crazed friends to meet in the dead of winter, usually in the far Adirondacks, to listen to, discuss and geek out on music. By tradition, we now end each meet-up with the late, great Allen Toussaint’s immortal cover of Paul Simon’s “American Tune” – which Seiler hails here.
It’s the perfect hymn for our times.
Hearing Simon sing “American Tune” feels incomplete compared to Toussaint’s. In his voice, we can hear everything human and essential about him: His age, his race, his hometown, his weariness and resilience.
Before sharing Seiler’s words, let me recall seeing him at some Jazz Fests in his native New Orleans. At the start of a pulsating, powerful showcase of his music, his 14-piece band was cooking a hot groove just fine when Toussaint came out to join them. They immediately all played better: The Boss is here, let’s go!
Then, at a later Jazz Fest, I was leaving the photo pit after Cecile McLorin Salvant had sung her heart out, and I met Mr. Toussaint, coming in to speak with her. Everybody in the stage and security crews knew him; everybody said, “Hello, Mr. Toussaint.” He answered every person. His dark green Rolls-Royce convertible parked outside the Jazz Tent bore the Louisiana license plate “PIANO.” Nobody else got to park that close. As I bagged my camera in the barricade gap, we both stopped; I was in his way and I had recognized him. And I’ve been grateful ever since for the chance to tell him how very much all his music means to me.
A song for the weary
CASEY SEILER
Next week marks five years since the death of Allen Toussaint, a true renaissance figure in American popular music. With just a few days left before what’s likely to be a fractious Election Day and the nation facing yet another surge in coronavirus infections, that’s enough of a hook for me to exploit to write about something, anything other than politics or the pandemic.
Or sort of — you can decide by the time we’re done.
A masterful piano player and vocalist, Toussaint wrote classic songs — funk, soul, R&B and more —ranging from “Working in a Coal Mine” and “Fortune Teller” to “Mother in Law” and “Southern Nights”; those songs that have been covered, respectively, by artists as wildly diverse as Devo, the Rolling Stones, Ernie K-Doe and Glen Campbell. He was a masterful producer of singles and albums by the Meters and Labelle, and wrote the horn charts for productions such as The Band’s “Last Waltz” farewell concert.
I volunteered to interview Toussaint over the phone for the Times Union in 2014, as a preview of his appearance at Mass MoCA. He was every bit the courtly gentleman I had anticipated, answering my questions in a quiet, thoughtful voice that at times seemed to hover just a few clicks of the dial above a whisper.
He talked about losing his home in Hurricane Katrina nine years earlier, a catastrophe that forced him to leave New Orleans and resettle for an extended period in New York City. He spoke of the collaborations and friendships he had made during his exile as “a blessing.”
Near the end of our interview, I asked the 75-year-old Toussaint if new songs and compositions were still occurring to him as readily as when he was younger.
“Now more than ever before! I wake up in a hurry to get to the pen and page,” he said. “Yes — I’m inspired because I move around more than I used to, and inspiration is every door I open, every corner I turn, every other way I turn my head to look. And I enjoy inspiration all the time; it makes life so wonderful. Just on my own, I’m simply the me that I know, and after a while the me that I know is not very exciting. But all the new things that happen around me — everything is a surprise.”
I’ve interviewed a lot of people, including artists whose work has inspired me immeasurably. But I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an answer to a question that has stayed with me like Toussaint’s. I’d put it up there with my favorite passages from Walt Whitman, who once wrote in a slightly more fist-shaking mode: “I do not snivel that snivel the world over,/That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth,/That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears.”
If you want to see and hear Toussaint’s knack for creation in action, go listen to his version of “American Tune,” a song that Paul Simon released on the 1973 album “There Goes Rhymin’ Simon,” which included production contributions from Toussaint.
You’ve almost certainly heard the song, which over the course of five decades has been covered as often as Toussaint’s most popular compositions. It’s about being wrung-out, dog-weary, as beaten down as a man or woman might feel after watching their home and possessions washed away by a hurricane or seeing a loved one ferried to the hospital: “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered/I don’t have a friend who feels at ease,” the singer tells us. “I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered, or driven to its knees.”
In the last verse, he dreams of his own death, and his soul rising over the scene of the Statue of Liberty departing New York Harbor, destination unknown. “I don’t write overtly political songs,” Simon once told an interviewer, “although ‘American Tune’ comes pretty close, as it was written just after Nixon was elected.”
Toussaint had been performing the song live as part of his touring act, and recorded it back home in New Orleans a month before suffering a fatal heart attack after a concert in Madrid.
In recent months, I’ve gone back to Toussaint’s version every few weeks — it’s a salve, even as the singer concludes by wishing for nothing more than rest in the face of “the age’s most uncertain hour,” and all that’s gone wrong.
There’s comfort in knowing that this expression of resilience at the edge of despair is five decades old, and immense strength to be drawn from the way that Toussaint’s velvet tenor wraps around his piano.
He sounds beaten down but not yet defeated — American to the bone.
A feature in this dive-bar; Observations, would-be aphorisms, remarks and what-not.
The hardest knot you’ll ever tie – tight enough to stymie a shipful of sailors, a campful of Boy Scouts – will happen by accident in the laces of the second shoe you’re tearing off to jump into bed with your best-beloved.
Just so, every tool, device or system will fail five feet, five microns, five turns of the wrench from finishing the job – prompting the vilest curse you know.
Except for ViceGrips and duct tape – no fails or curses for them.
The David Byrne/Spike Lee film “American Utopia” (HBO) offers a brilliant, highly caffeinated jolt of hope when we really need one.
Lee mostly gets it right visually; and Byrne has changed up the production only slightly since its Palace Theatre presentation in September 2018 awed me with its choreographed and detailed, perfectionist precision, righteous polemical power and joyous musical punch.
However, the world has become distinctly more dire since then, so Byrne’s message has grown more necessary and vital. Just as sound, lyrics aside, Byrne and his constantly moving 11-piece band offer compelling arguments for immigrant assimilation, for vital multiculturalism, the defeat of racism and exploitation and the focused power of close cooperation.
It’s a band of moving parts, barefoot members in matching gray suits, as if the Big Suit Byrne wears in “Stop Making Sense” has diffused into a hive-mind organism that breathes and moves as one.
Layer on lyrics of strong, if sometimes oblique, persuasion, and the thing packs an irresistible message.
To explain how sweet-hard this hit me, let me cite the home-video back-story at our place that perfectly prepared me for it.
First came an Aaron Sorkin double-header:
The reconstituted cast of “The West Wing” (NBC 1999-2006) performs on a nearly bare stage the “Hartsfield’s Landing” episode. It shows a frightening collision between the crucial necessity of intelligent governance (imagine!) and the possibilities for further disaster or positive change that electoral politics present in our own terrifying fork-in-the-road time. This reunion event benefited “When We All Vote” and urged that we do.
“The Trial of the Chicago 7” recalls events in an America as divided as now. Though things seemed somehow less frightening then – a time of federal dirty tricks against progressives – its echoes in our own time feel heartbreaking.
Similarly, the non-Sorkin “A Family Thing” (scripted in part by Billy Bob Thornton) argues for racial harmony across agonizing, generations-deep hard secrets of kinship and acceptance.
Looking back further, and more directly at the stage, I recalled the intelligence and buzz of Talking Heads shows at UAlbany’s Page Hall, Albany’s Palace Theatre and Saratoga Performing Arts Center, where Byrne also led his horn-powered 10 Car Pile-Up; then Byrne band shows at The Egg. After the SPAC Big Suit show, I got to speak with Byrne backstage where he answered every question I asked, in paragraphs, but with an at first disconcerting delay.. He paused so long that I thought at first he hadn’t heard me or had simply spaced out. No, this was a very deliberate thoughtfulness that felt, finally, like the deepest sort of courtesy.
So, I was really ready for the David and Spike show to lift me up.
It did.
Like Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense” film of the Big Suit tour (whose fantastic SPAC show was delayed by a would-be jumper on the Dolly Parton Northway bridge over the Mohawk) the new “American Utopia” production gangs up gradually on the viewer/listener.
The band grows from stark, cryptic, quiet small-scale musings. Byrne sits alone at a table and speaks, then rises to speak some more. Like Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull, he muses on a pink model of a brain, as music seeps into the shimmery silver three-walled space around him. It’s serene as a library at first, then alive with sound and motion, evolving in shrewdly paced stages. Singers and players congregate around him, always in motion since their instruments – the drum set is split among five mobile percussionists – connect wirelessly to unseen amps. The effect is of fluid grace, a moving gang of growing sound. Early on, Lee places the camera overhead in the lighting grid as bodies below go all geometric in an ever-shifting human landscape and the music itself swells. Later, Byrne remarks to both crowd and camera that looking at humans is more interesting than looking at a bag of potato chips or, by extension, any product.
David Byrne, and brain, and the first inklings of the band growing behind him at Albany’s Palace Theatre in September 2018. Michael Hochanadel photo
Tunes jukebox together from both the newish, fairly straight-ahead rock album that gives the production its name and from the electric funk of the augmented mid-80s Big Suit era Talking Heads. When a song from this bygone, boomer-fond era emerges, the crowd goes happily bonkers.
In a show with a previous band at The Egg the evening after Barack Obama was elected president, Byrne told us, “Now everything changes.” More would and should have changed; but Byrne’s current hope for change in “American Utopia” is hard-won, but real – and not naive at all. It is comprehensive and quietly fierce. (Check out his Reasons to be Cheerful: https://reasonstobecheerful.world/.)
The Palace Theatre crowd at David Byrne’s “American Utopia” production at Albany’s Palace Theatre. Michael Hochanadel photo
In its honed confidence, its slick packaging, its nonstop action, the music packs unarguable urgency, culminating in Janelle Monae’s angry-compassionate “Hell You Talmbout” (Byrne asked her permission) that climaxes in a litany of mourning slain Black people. This perfectly follows “Burning Down the House,” thematically and musically. After each victim’s face appears projected behind the band, Byrne and band command “Say his (or her) name!”
Yes, say their names. And hail the names of David Byrne and Spike Lee for expressing the vivid mixture of daily dismay and battered hope that anyone with a functioning brain and moral sense must feel in these troubled and troubling days.
Thanks, gentlemen; and the men and women you assembled on the stage to dazzle us on our screens.
Jon Landau’s famous quote – “I’ve seen the future of rock and roll and its name is Bruce Springsteen” – mostly gets it right. But that Schenectady show was as much about where Springsteen was coming from as where he was going.
Dave Mason’s “Alone Together” (1970) leapt off the shelf at me, and not just because it’s on marble vinyl and Mason autographed it when he played downtown Albany’s Alive at Five summer freebie concert series. Maybe because I think it’s his best.
Mason recorded “Alone Together” after touring with Delaney & Bonnie, an influence as clear as the earlier (mid-1960s) smash impact of Chicago blues on the Rolling Stones, Cream and other British bands. In fact, it’s a perfect echo that Eric Clapton personifies, as a member of blues power trio Cream, a touring member of Delaney & Bonnie and Tulsa shuffle enthusiast himself.
“Alone Together” hit early in Mason’s up-and-down solo career, usually with solid but unremarkable bands. Meanwhile, he periodically stepped into a brighter spotlight with top-shelf collaborators, then just as quickly stepped back out.
The mercurial Mason joined and left Traffic three times, recorded on “Electric Ladyland” with Jimi Hendrix, then toured with Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, all in the 1960s. In the early 70s, he recorded with George Harrison, who’d also toured with Delaney & Bonnie, as did Eric Clapton. A few years later, Mason became second guitarist in Derek & the Dominoes with Clapton but quit after recording a few songs and playing a single live gig before Duane Allman replaced him. After making solo albums and leading his own bands in the 1980s, he joined and left Fleetwood Mac in the mid-1990s, then quit a tour with Ringo Starr & His All Starr Band after rehearsals.
Mason’s 15 studio albums, six live sets, 12 compilations, plus several Traffic albums, include a full-album project with Cass Elliott, a song with Phoebe Snow and dozens of other sessions, most in the 1970s.
Dave Mason played the Union College Memorial Chapel in Schenectady, NY, in October 1972; six years after Jimi Hendrix played the same stage. Michael Hochanadel photo
The “Alone Together” album credits (using original spellings and with selected credits added) list Leon Russell (Delaney & Bonnie’s bandleader), Delaney & Bonnie themselves, Jim Capaldi (Mason’s bandmate in Traffic), John Simon (The Band’s producer), Jim Keltner (every great LA pop-rock record of the 70s, the Traveling Wilburys, Little Village), Jim Gordon (maybe as many top sessions as Keltner, Derek & the Dominoes), Chris Ethridge (the International Submarine Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers), Carl Radle (Delaney & Bonnie, Derek & the Dominoes, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, the Concert for Bengladesh), Larry Knectel (soon to found Bread), John Barbata (Jefferson Starship), Rita Coolidge and Claudia Lennear (both members of Delaney & Bonnie and Friends), Don Preston (Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention), Mike DeTemple, Jack Storti, Lou Cooper, Mike Coolidge, and Bob Norwood.
Eric Clapton isn’t in these credits or on the album, confusing listeners who thought Slowhand had played the guitar solos; no, it’s Mason.
Mason produced “Alone Together” with Tommy LiPuma, and recorded in Los Angeles at Sunset Sound and Elektra Recording Studio with engineers Bruce Botnick and Doug Botnick; mix engineer was Al Schmitt.
“Alone Together” seems to zig-zag stylistically among Tulsa -time rockers (the Delaney & Bonnie/Leon Russell influence), bluesy pop (ala Clapton), quiet troubadour tunes and psychedelic guitar (Hendrix). Song by song, and most could have been hit singles, it traces a troubled emotional through-line in perhaps a single relationship.
“Only You Know and I Know” – The album opens with this cautionary tale as mid-tempo Tulsa shuffle. A kicking bass line sets up laced guitars including a discrete interstitial acoustic, then an electric guitar solos with repeating triplets into a chorus with fine harmonies. As coda, an even better electric guitar solo revs up all the cool stuff from the first.
“Can’t Stop Worrying, Can’t Stop Loving” – Lush acoustics beckon us into a dark night of the soul where dreams are hammered low and the troubles we try to leave behind crawl into the suitcase anyway.
“Waitin’ On You” – Tulsa time again, with beautifully-balanced keys and guitars; then harmonies carry us toward hope that is not easily won. There’s a cheerful, spunky break, then a chorus pledges to build happiness, if possible…
“Shouldn’t Have Took More Than You Gave” – Another chiming keys and guitars tag-team, but also another roller-coaster accusation, in a stately build. Then a wah-wah electric guitar injects a mournful feel as the drums shift things up. Guitar and vocal join in a fatalism that edges into guarded optimism that the despairing opening returns to ice up again – beautiful pain.
SIDE 2
“World in Changes” – A crisp, meshed-acoustics intro, with organ edging into a fat-back groove. The vocal declares love a two-way street, like an announcement of something new. Then a powerful, surging organ solo pushes an upshift, cueing a falsetto vocal with exuberant whoops.
“Sad and Deep as You” – Slower, contemplative and just as emotionally complex and soft-spoken without drums or bass, this layers a gentle vocal on a firm piano line, positing the eyes as metaphor, tool and weapon.
“Just a Song” – Another warning, this soft-rock cautionary tale cruises mellow, a mid-tempo stutter-step shuffle spiced with banjo. Sweet women’s voices repeat Mason’s phrases declaring consolation and independence and “oooh” beautifully in the seams.
“Look at You Look at Me” – What a great build! Organ and piano chug under a plaintive vocal, then guitars shimmer to pick up the beat, the piano catches up and the vocal opens like a heart. The chorus – “I’m feeling, up I’m feeling down…but now my feet are on the ground for everyone to see” – curls with riffs that carry into an “All Along the Watchtower”* groove. Mason plugs in and hits full flight under the unguarded vocal admitting “I need you every day.” Mason takes it back down to acoustic guitar and piano before the electric edges in, takes over and guides the band’s lift-off echoing both “Sad and Deep as You” and “Can’t Stop Worrying, Can’t Stop Loving.” Mason’s beautiful tone and graceful phrasing carry such emotion you want the fade to keep going since it soars to a ghostly but serene voice at the end.
Dave Mason at the Union College Memorial Chapel, Schenectady, NY. Michael Hochanadel photo
If the early songs feel edgy, like rocky waters, “Alone Together” glides into shore in a satisfying, mature resolution, noisy and proud. But, what else lurks on that misty island, that emotional land-fall?
Mason is entitled to evoke “All Along the Watchtower.” He played acoustic 12-string guitar on Hendrix’s immortal Dylan cover the year before he made “Alone Together” and recorded it himself on “Dave Mason” (1974, reissued 1995). On “Alone Together,” he echoes the ecstatic acoustic guitar chug that helped push Hendrix’s version. Also, check the new composite tag-team Playing for Change cover, featuring numerous artists who’ve played here including Warren Haynes, Cyril and Ivan Neville, Bombino and Amanda Shaw.
Hats off to the Gazette’s Brenton Blanchet for digging out such cool stuff about the Rolling Stones’ Palace Theatre shows, April 29, 1965.
In the Sept. 24-30 Ticket, he nailed perfectly the excitement of that British Invasion uproar coming to town. Fans’ memories and artifacts helped him tell that vivid story.
Also, I was there, in one of four press seats for reviewers that night. And the show was way better than I’d dared hope. In fact, I got the review assignment in part because none of the other Gazette music writers wanted to go.
We all thought they were done. And we were wrong, in a big way.
And as magnetic, powerful and totally commanding – in short, magnificent – as the Stones were that night, the 13-piece (!) Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra was even better, earlier that same week, playing Brown’s Brewing Company’s Revolution Hall in Troy.
Hoke's Jukebox 