The main thing is authenticity of feeling. And blues creates this space where you can say whatever you want. Anything is allowed from the gory and the terrible to the exultives. And we give the example of there's a song by Skip James, 22-20.
And it's just this beautiful, cleaning blues. And you don't realize unless you listen to it a couple of three times that he's talking about cutting his lover in half with a shotgun. But anything is allowed in the blues, because it's this forum between performer and audience to have emotional expiation, to get off your mind, whatever you want to get off your mind. Greetings, future fossils.
Welcome back for episode 183 of the podcast explores our place in time. I'm Michael Garfield, and this week we welcome Mike Madison of the Tadeshi Trucks Band and Ernest Suarez, Professor of English at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, who have together written a beautiful book, Poetic Songverse, blues-based popular music and poetry about how in the 20th century, which they call a thorough explication and revelation of the literary power in blues-fueled songwriting. Those of you who have been with me for a while know that I've actually spent more time on the microphone as a singer-songwriter than as a podcaster starting at the age of 16. And reading this book was a kind of exercise in spiritual genealogy.
Or maybe it's kind of like paleo-medirology in that we're going back and examining the antecedents for our present atmosphere, all the stuff we take for granted. One of the most common human biases is to imagine that things were always this way. That's why origin stories are so deeply important. And prospecting the stratigraphy of the Wyoming Badlands, reading this book, dunked me into the flux and transformation that actually defines our world on time scales so slow, sometimes it takes a masterful work of history like this book to notice.
Although it's highly unprofessional to say so, I will admit to kind of botching this interview through the sin of over-preparation. I took entirely too many notes, highlighted probably a full 20% of this book, got a bit ambitious with my questions, but Mike and Ernest are cool cats. And I am deeply grateful and delighted that their press office sought me out and that they were willing to sit down and indulge me in this exploration of their work. But before we get started, I just want to do the thing, you know, the song and dance, if you will, appreciating the new patrons that are helping me keep this show going.
Shara Pichinotti, Leo Neohorster Cook, Ivy and Greg Bogle, Tim Castell, and Edo Benai, along with everyone else, bringing me incrementally closer to my goal of what Kevin Kelly called the 1000 True Fans that can make this podcast sustain itself. And also a special shout to Kevin Arthur Wollmitt, who recently picked up my 2013 City of Jules EP for 25 bucks on Bandcamp, Data Analytics as its own kind of archeology, and it's kind of depressing looking at your music sales peaking in 2014 and realizing, but anyway, let's use this. All of it goes into the stew, right? To peg this episode in time, I have other earlier recordings I was planning to put out first, but Russia's invasion of Ukraine this week has me reflecting on simple things.
The way that just as layers of rock settle on one another, eventually the weight compresses ancient trees into diamond, the way my Angelou said, I know why the caged birds sings. I decided this episode had to jump the queue and go now, because we're living in a very orific hour in which work songs, protest music, anthems, dirges, and ballads bloom like lotuses from the shit of history. It's very clear that history isn't over right now. So yes, plenty more music to be made, plenty more poetic song verse to write.
Be sure to check the show notes, get yourself a copy of this book and read it. It's great. Thank you and enjoy. This is an amazing book.
I'm so glad that you sent me a copy. I can't tell you how delighted I was to read this, how attentive I felt to it. It's been a long time since I read something that I feel like not only shed so much light on cultural history, but also helped me root my own mind and life and career work in such a deep and well-rott genealogy. So I just start, Mike and Ernest by thanking you for this work and just politely suggesting that you write a sequel.
Because I really wanted you to go even deeper into the past with it and bring it even further into the present day. So yeah. OK, thank you. I think perhaps the right place to start is just to give our listeners a bit of personal background.
Mike, how about you go first and just talk a little bit about your life and what brought you into writing this book with Ernest and then we can take it from the other side? Sure. Well, I'm a musician, singer, songwriter. I have my own band Scraptomatic and I also play with the Tedesky Trucks band.
And I've been doing that in different iterations for almost 20 years now. And I met Ernest when he was writing a piece for the Washington Post on Derek Trucks. When I was in his band and he suggested that he talk to me on background and we started to talk about poetry and music that we liked him just kind of hit it off. And so Ernest was the one who suggested that we attempt a book based on a course that he'd been teaching for many years called Poetry and Rock at Catholic University.
So that's my bit. And I've been a college professor for over 30 years. And 20th century, 21st century American literature and also obviously deal with music too. And the thing that really made this book be as good as I think it is, and that's pretty amodest to say, but nonetheless I'm very proud of it, is that I was able to meet Mike.
And that what we were able to do was put this book together together. I don't think any one person could have written this book. I think it took the two of us with my background in literature and music and Mike's background in music and literature. We had lots of overlap, but we also had differences that sharpened each other's thought and I think made the book stronger.
Definitely. You know, one point, Mike, that you didn't just mention in your story is the Harvard graduate piece. And actually, I want to not to jump ahead, although I'm terrible at organizing these conversations in a linear way. But I know that one of the threads that you both plucked through this book and that I'd like to explore with you is the way that the history of Poetics Songverse, we constantly see that the high brow and the low brow being introduced to each other and remixed.
And so I think that that's like a key detail in the background here, right? That like Grammy award winning blues songwriter and Harvard graduate. And then you're meeting somebody who is an esteemed academic in the sort of blues journalism context. So I mean, I don't know if that's where we should start, but I do think maybe the right place to start is in helping sort of articulate the thesis of this book, the fact that you have identified a literary genre that you argue is not getting enough attention.
And you propose a bunch of hypotheses for why that might be, especially toward the end. But one of those is this, the way that it does not capitulate to being contained within one stratum of society. And that I'd really love to hear you kind of unpack this idea of Poetics Songverse with the goal of exploring the way that it challenges boundaries in all these different ways. Yeah.
Well, one thing that we talked about very early on when we started conceiving of the book is how there's certain artists in the rock genre who are kind of considered poetic. And you might see some lyrics by Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell in the back of a contemporary poetry anthology. But they always kind of seemed misplaced and orphaned there. And the lyrics themselves really didn't rise to the level of what we would call great poetry when they're disassociated from the music.
So what we were investigating is this nexus, this place where poetry or poetic leaning lyrics meet music and how they help each other and reinforce each other and become this other thing. And as we were kind of articulating what we were thinking and talking about a couple years into the writing process, Bob Dylan was all of a sudden awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. And if you read the Nobel citation, they're basically saying, we know this isn't really literature, but it's literary. And anyway, he's great.
He deserves a Nobel Prize. And that kind of just spoke to exactly what we were saying is there's this thing that we don't have a vocabulary or language to talk about. And so we've batted around some terms of what we might call it and Ernest finally landed on Poetics Songverse. And so that's kind of how we got there as talking about a new genre.
Yeah. And I think that a key in the book is that the moment that we concentrate on is the moment that blues based popular music, rock, but other forms too, come into sustained contact with poetry in the big cafes through Billin's reading and then giving interviews and and other rock stars. Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, they start reading what he's reading and dipping into the poetry. And the poetry starts informing the songwriting.
And it makes for a very unique moment where, as Mike was saying, the sonics, all the instrumental, the vocals, the performance are used to enhance the lyrics. And it becomes another thing. It becomes a literal genre that we call Poetics Songverse. There's a point early in the telling of this story that I'm going to try not to pull too many direct quotes from this, but it's just it says, after the session for his second album, blues and haiku, Jack Kerouac, Wepton went on a drunken binge because the accompanying players Alcorn and Zu Simms left the studio before listening to the tapes.
Many poets were influenced by music and detected strung links between their poems and jazz or blues, but musicians tended to see a little or no relationship between the two forms, though they were glad to get a pain gig. Like, clearly, you see this, as you just pointed to with Dylan winning the Nobel, you see this changing over the decades since, but then you have, you know, bookending this on the other end of it. You have Gil Scott Herons refusing his title as the father of rap and hip hop, like refusing to be acknowledged in that way, calling himself a bluesologist. And so I'm curious because it seems there's a sort of a media theory piece of this for me that, you know, you talk about the emergence of the rockstar mythology, the way that the mystique was constructed and how much that had to do with video.
And like the image of musicians that didn't exist before. And I'm just curious to what degree you think a lot of this intermingling of styles, media, genre, etc. Has to do with simply the changing technological background or where you see that kind of explanation faltering. Well, you know, we, a few times in the books, we touch on this with poets and musicians kind of looking each other in the eye over the, over the gorge.
And in each, each has what the other wants. The musicians want to be taken seriously, intellectually, and they want to have the gravitas of, of, of being involved in literature. And, and then the poets have what want what the musicians have, which is cultural cache, they want to be hip. They want to be cool.
And, and so in a way, the, the, the meaning of it to make sense. Each, each has what the others looking for in a sense, not to say that all poets are, are dorks and all musicians are cool because that's been established. That's not true. Yeah, I think that it just came to the moment where the circumstances were right.
To speak to your point about media, media is always changing the way music is thought about and recorded from, you know, the introduction of the jukebox to electric instruments. And then what you get in the 60s is what seems for the time. Of course, not compared to today is a media boom. And these musicians get a lot more coverage.
And they need to make themselves distinct from one another. And at the same time, as Mike was mentioning, they start to have these high art, if you will, desires that they want to be taken seriously. Dylan wants to be taken seriously as a writer. And part of what happens with the media boom is that they have to see more and more distinct from one another.
And they start inventing persona, a voice to speak through. You know, Dylan has had has been many people have observed. He said four or five persona throughout his career. I think Mick Jagger says at one point, I was changing who I was every six months.
And what adopting the persona allows the artist to do the gifted artist anyway is to speak from a different perspective. And it's why we see just this explosion from those early Dylan albums all the way into the late to mid 70s of these albums that are exquisitely written. That doesn't mean that there weren't great lyrics attached to songs before this time, because there were. But what you start getting is a concentration in a concentration with the real emphasis with the real intent on part of the artist to try to write something that they feel is powerful.
So to that point, one of the threads that I feel really gets treated very well in this book is the tension in the world of a professional musician between that artistry and being an entertainer, right? The like the artist as entertainer or the entertainer is artists. This, you know, you talk a lot about, like you give the example of Bobby Gentry sort of disappearing and how countless talented musicians just walked away. Or that's probably just a very small fraction of the ones that were never actually heard because they were illegible to the economy.
I mean, you talk about, you know, Motown and how Marvin Gaye's success once Gaye starts writing about political topics was a surprise to, was it not about your own? Sorry, the owner of Barry Gordon. Yeah, Barry Gordon was shocked because he was so sure that what's going on was going to be a commercial failure. And so, you know, this speaks to something that you write later on when you're talking about Gentry, you say, how do we talk about what we aren't supposed to talk about?
And so, you know, I'd love because we haven't actually been remiss and haven't actually anchored this in your history of the blues and the emotional basis for and influences that weighed on the formation of the blues. But you talk a lot about misdirection in blues lyrics and the way that black writers were hiding their actual intent from their producers, if not the initiated audience. So like this particular issue of the unspeakable, which also shows up in the psychedelic counterculture and hiding the euphemistic language and so on. So there's this relationship between, I guess, what I'm saying is like truly novel work that cannot be yet understood or properly valued by the business in which a musician finds themselves.
And then also the political danger of speaking truthfully. And I'd love to hear you both talk about that and how it shows up through your book. Sure. Well, you know, with the blues, we kind of identify four pillars of the blues, what make it the blues.
And we don't have to go to in depth, but one is insistence rhythm. One is the blues form A, A, B, which is usually iterated in a 12 bar blues, you make a statement, you repeat the statement and then there's a responding statement. The third part is blue notes, which are quarter or half tones, which don't fall on the western scale. We have to take our instruments and whether it's guitar, you have to bend up to it or piano, you play two adjacent notes to give the festival a blue notes, which are just very humanizing, they are humane.
And people can identify with that. But thirdly, the main thing is authenticity of feeling. And blues creates this space where you can say whatever you want. Anything is allowed from the glory and the terrible to the exaltants.
And we give the example of, there's a song by Skip James, 22-20. And it's just this beautiful, keening, blues and you don't realize unless you listen to it a couple of three times that he's talking about cutting his lover in half with the shotgun. But anything is allowed in the blues because it's this form between performer and audience to have emotional expiation, to get off your mind, whatever you want to get off your mind. But that said, when we use another example of Skip James, who has a song called Crow Jane, and you realize he's singing about maybe a woman named Crow Jane and how he's going to kill her and put her down in her grave, that could be what he's singing about.
But anybody who was initiated, I guess, and was hip to what he was saying, knew that he was talking about getting rid of Jim Crow in the south. And that was a very revolutionary thing for a black man to be saying in the 1930s. I could get you killed. But it was a risky thing, but it was also an authentic thing because he meant it.
And also, I think he knew that it would speak to the people who understood the blues dynamic. They'd know what he was talking about. And I think that's the same thing when you get into Dylan and you get into the psychedelic music too, is the language isn't necessarily coded, but it's available for the initiated, for those who are cool enough to get what's going on. And I think that works in the artist's favor and it works in the audience's favor.
They feel elected, and the artist feels like he's talking to his people, finally, or her people. Anyway. To pick up on what Mike was saying, the blues having that frank, straightforward language, and even when it's coded, even when there's a story that is not apparent on top. It's still direct statements, blunt direct statements.
And as rock starts, rock and roll in the 50 starts evolving out of the blues, what happens to as American poetry starts to change. It changes away from the very complicated, elusive, modernist poetry of, say, T.S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens. And what you start getting is a poetry that is based instead of on modern aesthetics or traditional metrics, what you start getting is a poetry that's based on the human voice.
And the blues are based on the human voice. And that creates the synergy where the two forms can then come together. As an example that we give in the book, if you were a relatively well-educated young musician, and you were trying to look for sources for lyrics, if you were looking at T.S. Eliot, maybe if you're a Bob Dylan, you get something.
But that wasn't true for most blues musicians. But when they went to beat cafes and other venues that featured contemporary poetry or read it in books and heard rich, sophisticated language in the human voice, speaking more politically. They could find a source for lyrics. And that's exactly what happened with Dylan, with Johnny Mitchell, with McCartney, with Lennon, with Jagger, with Jim Morrison.
And that is what created the public song verse. So, yeah, this leads into this other question I had for you, which is about another tension you explore through the book in the distance between the artist and their audience. And the way you talk about early, in the blues, there's no need to reserve one's approval or disapproval until the end when applause is traditionally invited. The response is instantaneous and becomes part of the story.
And then let's telescope that through Jim Morrison, inviting people onto the stage, getting thrown off stage by a security guard who thinks that he's crashing his own concert, the way that the punks challenged this. And then now we've got people reacting in real time when you go live on Facebook. But in the midst of all of that, you talk about the way that the revolutionary, and forgive me for trying to bite off more than we can do with every single question, but this one, the way that the revolutionary energy, the transgressive, liberating component of first blues, and then early rock and roll, and then reinvigorated rock and roll, and then punk and so on, there's always this molten, hot thing that cools and is co-opted by industry, and it's turned into exactly what it was originally against. And I'm curious about your thoughts about this sort of back and forth between the songwriter as, I guess, kind of like a griot, someone who's part of their community, who's a story keeper for the people engaged with them at high level.
And then you get into these situations where you have a mature ecosystem where you've got Robert Plant and Jimmy Page way up there at some great distance from the audience, and then things kind of collapse again, and then you've got Bruce Bringsdine with a real long guitar cable playing in the crowd. And yeah, just your thoughts about the stratification and the alienation. Well, I think, again, if we're mostly talking about poetic songers in the rock genre, rock is an outgrowth of blues. I mean, blues is the direct precedent for rock, and those four elements of the blues that I identified as the main purpose that they serve is that what the blues is trying to do, it's almost like, I see it almost as a small ritual.
And it is trying to break down barriers, it is trying to open communication, it is trying to level the playing field between the performer and the audience, and it's inviting people in. I mean, that's what an insistent rhythm does. If a rhythm comes straight, everybody can rely on it, and everybody can immediately participate, whether you're clapping, whether you're dancing, whatever. It's the same thing with the AA blues form.
You make a statement, you repeat it, you suddenly have people on the hook who need to hear the beat part, they need to hear the response. It's bringing people in. And that's the same thing with blue notes, those humanizing notes that everybody can relate to, and finally the authenticity feeling is what you want to hear. You want this guy to be, or this woman or whoever's performing, you want it to be as real as possible, because you want to identify with it.
And so blues being the foundational part of rock and roll, I think that's always going to be part of rock and roll, is that it is constantly leveling, it is working against hierarchy. And I think as you identify those historic ups and downs in the history of rock, I think that's what it constantly does to itself. It returns to those base commands of the blues, is that we are breaking down walls here, we're bringing people in, and we're leveling the playing field. And I think this played especially well to the moment that Poetic Song Verse was really taking off, which is with those early Dylan albums, and then especially with those Dylan albums of the mid 60s, and then all the other bands explode.
What is also happening politically are things like the Civil Rights Movement, Women's Movement, and more than anything, the war in Vietnam. And what that does is these are serious topics, and it unites not only, but particularly youth culture, and it gives the songwriters something to say, not always directly about the war in Vietnam or the Civil Rights Movement, of course, but it makes them start questioning. And start thinking about things that they are dissatisfied with in society and looking for alternatives. So it gives them topics, it gives them serious things to say, it leads them to start thinking about themselves, their relationships to others, in a more potent way.
And I think that plays an important role in creating Poetic Song Verse. So I want to back trace for a minute here, because we're there in the vein with blues, to talk about the role of pain and suffering in all of this, and to talk about it both at the level of the individual artist as well as these sort of larger historical movements. I love that you cite Louis Hyde and Trickster makes this world, which is one of my favorite books. You quote him as saying, Trickster speaks freshly where language has been blocked, gone dead, or lost its charm, and some shameless double dealers needed to get outside the rules and set tongues wagging again.
And then later you quote Robert Bly, who talks about leaping poetry, associative freedom and psychic flight in language and spirit, and how reinvigorating poetry largely resided in what he called leaping language. So there's something about, as someone who has found myself accidentally trespassing on someone's land or foolishly overstepping an invisible social or cultural boundary. We'll leave that in. It's just perfect.
But there's something about, on the show we talk about collapse a lot, and the silver lining in sort of the end of the world as we know it. My friends call it Duma Optimism on their podcast. And so I'm just the emotional complexity and the way that it's related to suffering and specifically trauma and the well-described effects on creativity and creativity as a kind of spiritual. And so I think that creativity has a kind of spiritual path among the traumatized.
Yeah, I would just love to pull the string and the two of you riff on that and see where it takes us. Well, yeah. I mean, with the blues, what I hear most often is I know about the blues, but I can never say the blues because maybe the person I'm not black or I wasn't raised in south and I haven't suffered, you know, at the hands of society or something like that. And I immediately disagree with that.
I think the great thing about the blues is, yes, it was definitely the end result of African Americans who created it out of a pressing cultural need. And it kind of came to the form, the very discreet, perfect little form that it is. But the blues is such a part of all of American music now that it really belongs to everybody. And I think the beauty of it is, is that whether you're black or white or whomever, every single human being can identify with suffering.
And again, the blues isn't just about suffering, but the blues is not afraid of suffering, it's not shy away from it. But it's definitely, it is not just the realm of African Americans. That's kind of what I wanted to stress. That there was an article the other day in Rolling Stone talking to a bunch of younger black blues artists who were bemoaning, you know, the state of blues.
And that has been taken over by white kind of blues rock guys. And my response to that would be like, well, it's always been there. And it always will be there. So what are you going to make of it?
Our saxophone player said something the other month that I just still find so humorous. He's black and we were talking about the state of the blues. And he said, well, if you leave shit lying around long enough white people are going to pick it up and say it's theirs. So if you want to re-inject some African Americanness and blues, it's just a matter of enough practitioners picking it up.
So when it comes to talk about cultural appropriation stuff with the blues, I don't really buy it. It's kind of there for all of us, especially Americans who have an innate understanding of it in a way that people, you know, in Europe for example, do not. I think it's one of our heritages and birth rights as Americans. And part of my playing blues is trying to point that out that it's really our shared cultural heritage.
And we know about it innately whether we admit it or not as Americans. Part of it too is the blues evokes a lot of tones. Your question was about how negative experiences, suffering of whatever kind affects the artist. And without a doubt, that strong emotion.
And in general, the better the artist, the more tones, the wider range of feeling that artist is able to evoke, whether it's a William Faulkner or Ralph Ellison in the novel or a blues musician through his or her own. And if you listen to Dylan, for instance, there is just not one tone, one emotion that he draws on. And often he draws on various emotions at the same time that seem contradictory. And it creates another type of mix.
But I think that's part of the richness of art in general. And in general, the greater the artist, the more they have to tap into all the different, the array of feelings that human beings have. So, yeah, just to explore this a little bit more, I'm thinking about a conversation I once had with Arthur Lawrence Gonzalez who wrote a book called Deep Survival about what determines whether someone does or does not survive a life threatening, sudden, like a plane crash or a shark attack or whatever. But then he wrote a sequel called Surviving Survival about trauma and what it takes for someone to get on with their life.
And one of the things he spoke about in that book is that there's basically three ways to get on with it. One is through writing or creative work, one is through travel, and one is through helping others less fortunate than yourself. And one is through how people hold themselves together after a traumatic event. And two of those seem like they're about exploration.
And they link into something that you brought up a little while ago in talking about the rockstar mythos component of all of this, which is that I really felt for Bob Dylan in the passage where you talk about how he starts to become a victim of his own reputation. He feels that he's mischaracterized. He wants to go underground from the underground. Marvin Gaye has a similar thing.
Jim Morrison, you talk about his frustration with his image as a sex symbol, which he created. He assiduously helped create it. And plenty of people have argued the same kind of thing has happened to many others that are in the pantheon here. That there's a big piece of, you talk about it as the Faustian component of being able to achieve success, the Faustian twist, the fairy tale slight of hand that accompanies wish-granting.
It's possible to get what you want before you understand the nature of what you want. And I don't know, there's just something about, again, the tension between even genre categorization, the way that you talk about how in an individual piece of music we're playing with people's expectations. You know, you're giving them, like, some of the best blues is holding that basic blues structure for long enough to deceive the audience that's going to keep doing that. And then it takes some weird turn.
So yeah, I'm curious what your thoughts are on the role of surprise and the unexpected in all of this and the way that, you know, some of the pioneers of Poetics Songverse grappled in a very real visceral way in their lives, again, being subject to the oppression of other people's expectations of them and how they were able to trickster their way out of this and what that says about the development of Poetics Songverse generally. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I can speak to that. I mean, just as a performer, for example, I meet a lot of people who are up and coming musicians and they want to know how it works and how you break into the business and stuff like that. And my answer is usually, well, I mean, it's like my friend Paul and I who's in Scrapimatic with me.
We used to always comment, Armada was the same as the New York Lotto is, you got to be in it to win it. And you find success in it by doing it. And then if you do gain some success by doing it, then you have to do it more. And then you have to do it more and more and more.
And so I think what people don't necessarily see who aren't on the performing side of things is that you have to get out there every night and you have to give everything you've got. And then the next night you have to do it again. And there are nights when you're not going to feel like it. And there is no, I don't feel like it has to be done.
And I think that's what happens to a lot of these musicians and rock stars and people who find great success. This thing literally takes on life of its own. And it's hard to keep giving people what you have. It's just a very odd way to make a living.
And you also have to find ways to isolate parts of yourself and not give everything you have. You can't do it 100% every night because that's technically impossible. You would flame out and people do what they have. But I don't know.
I mean, that's just kind of my perspective on it as a person who travels around and performs. And I'm not 100, 100 performances a year. Ernest, I'd love to hear you speak to this. But it reminds me of one of my favorite live album quotes of all time, which was Anita Franco saying the worst part of this job is that I have to go to every single audio Franco concert.
Yeah. Well, I mean, and it's true. And you have to begin to develop strategies to keep reserves of energy and emotional energy and creativity. And you don't want to get to the point where you are just using a bag of tricks and you're not being genuine or authentic or honest.
But you also have to have strategies. And it's a weird conversation that you end up having with yourself on how you can deliver every night. Yeah. What I'd add to that is that in the moment that poetic song verse is really developing, it's that these people, very young people, you have to remember, the figures we've mentioned were from their late teens to mid 20s when they were exploding nationally and internationally.
And then there was the added pressure that as Lucinda Williams put it, after those Dylan albums, everyone wanted to be an artist and not just an entertainer. And of course, they had to be both. They had to entertain. And then what they also wanted to do was create something lasting and worthwhile that spoke to people.
And think of that. You're 23, you're 24 years old. And you have that pressure on you, not just on what you've written, but what you have to write next to live up to that. And it's not just that a few thousand people are going to notice, it's going to be tens and tens of millions of people.
And that's a lot to deal with. And I think that type of pressure affects artists in that some dropout or dropout for a while, as Dylan himself did. Or another effect is they keep inventing persona. They keep inventing different voices to speak through.
So I think all of those personal and cultural pressures come to bear on the creation of this art form. I'd like to keep jumping around at this point and invite the two of you to talk a little bit about this chapter that you have on the fantastic beyond surrealism and psychedelia. Because it strikes me that, again, there's this force that I see in the totalizing influence of electronic and digital media, the way that we're wrapped up in it now that has to do a lot with not just challenging the cultural stratification of modernity. This hard line between the poet and the songwriter.
But also boundaries, pretty much of all kinds, including the boundary between the real and the unreal. And I mean, this is like we're living in an age of people are teaching courses on how to recognize deep fakes and disinformation now at the college level. So as you note that, secondly, I bet at the confluence of high and popular culture that Dylan the Beats and others advanced, a phenomenon that further unsettled people's assumptions and helped energize language and sonics in rock and poetry. I'm also thinking of other writing I've seen on moving text in the psychedelic videos, you know, the way that the sort of synesthetic component of an LSD trip remixes sight and sound and the other senses.
And I'm just, anyway, that's just the diving board for the two of you to explore how this is actually a much bigger conversation than merely the psychedelic. But it has these roots in an interrogation of the realist assumptions of the modern age and where that's brought us and how poetic song versus has written that and contributed to the way that we think about it now in the 21st century. Yeah, well, I mean, in that chapter, we talk about how, you know, if poet and song versus has elements of actual poetry in it, this wanting to rise above the quotidian day to day to be different and outside of what culture expects of one and trying to get to some sort of greater truth. I mean, I think that's just part of writing poetry in general.
But as poetic song versus started to take off, it just happened to coincide with the first thing out of the counterculture in the 60s, which was really fueled by, you know, or accompanied by complemented sometimes, maybe not drugs and drug use, especially LSD. And you know, we all know the famous example of Dylan turning on the Beatles to marijuana, et cetera, et cetera. But we talk about how drug use in the counterculture in rock and roll and in songwriting, how it appears there, when it's used as a tool for exploration can lead to very successful members. It can also not and can lead to very trite recycled ideas about what drug use is all about.
And we use the example of the child's light return, Jimi Hendrix's song as something that is very successful, probably drug related public songers. And then there's the Amboy Dukes, which was Ted Nugent's first band that has a song Journey to the Center of Your Mind, which is almost like an idiotic cliff's notes. It seems to be a drug song, but somebody has probably never taken drugs. And so there can be the sentimentalizing, simplifying thing that happens up.
It can also be this opening up perceptively and heading into new frontiers of the imagination. Mike, that song, that Ted Nugent, Amboy's Duke song, it might also be the product of somebody who's just taken way too many drugs. That's true. It could go either way.
I bet those people are burning, they think that they're saying something profound. Something else to point to is that of course the LSD, which we should remember, is legal in most of the United States for most of the 60s in a speech yard, LSD art on the cover of Life magazine. There are experiments with it at Harvard and other universities. It does have a powerful effect on the music, but it's not just LSD and hallucinogenic drugs.
It's surrealism. It's symbolist poetry. All of those movements that had influenced the beats and given that surrealist quality to beat poetry and other type, deep image, color free of the time and many other forms. Part of the reason why Dylan is such a catalyst is that he is reading and listening to all of this.
And so he's the one who's able to bring it all together, really synthesize it and point the way. There's a particular aspect of this which I find really curious and consistent through all of this, which you talk about, Federico Garcia, Lorka, and the Duende, and the notion of this, Lorka writes, seeking the Duende there is neither map nor discipline. It exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand. It shatters styles.
I love that you actually repeated this quote at the end of the chapter because I was like, I got it on Duende twice. And yeah, there's something about this relationship between questioning the known, questioning the bedrock of quoteity and reality, reaching out beyond it, animated by the dissatisfaction, but also the duende as a spirit that comes up through the earth, through your feet while you're dancing. One of the things that seems to come out here is not to get like, I'm not too philosophical about this, but like the resurgence of the non-human or the influence of the supposedly immaterial in a kind of like non-dual relationship with matter and the body and all of that. So, you know, there's something about one of my favorite historians, William Irwin Thompson, he had a chapter in his book, Coming Into Being, where he talked about the computer screen as the portal through which all of the spirits that they talked about in the Rig Veda, the humans and animals teamed up to shut out the spirit world from the human world.
And that our technologies have allowed them back in. And Eric Davis wrote, I don't know if you're familiar with his stuff, he was a music critic for years, he wrote a fabulous book on technology and mysticism and religious belief called Technosys back in the 90s. And he said a lot about what he calls reanimism, like the way that high technology is returning us to this sense of being immersed in an ecosystem of intelligences that are really other to us. And yeah, I'm just curious, because this is not, I don't know, it's not something that you really like linger on so much in this book, but it's a strand that I see playing out through the history of poetic song verse about the way that the pre-modern magical traditions, who do, and all of these things are major features of the history of blues and rock and roll.
And, you know, it strikes me that making this merely a story about people is maybe in some way almost missing the point that there are other forces at play, not to get to, I don't know, superstitious. Well, but that's traditionally been an element of the blues, is this interfacing with the dark arts or the devil, the famous story of the blues man meeting the devil at the crossroads at midnight and being gifted with this extra otherworldly talent. I mean, that's baked in to the blues and legends of the blues, and we kind of make a correlation there between the idea of the poet as this necromancer who's dealing with forces beyond our world and in the European tradition too. And, you know, it's interesting when this starts manifesting itself in the poetic song verse because we have this new thing, this new media entity that develops, which is the rock star, who, you know, through their work and through their concerts, but also through the culture and media become larger than life.
You know, even to this day, called them rock gods, you know, and they took on the stature of being otherworldly, you know, almost deity-like. And again, I think that is going back to what we were talking about previously. I think that consumed people. I mean, obviously, there's all the famous rock stars who never made it past 27, you know, who died.
But also, I think that overwhelming persona really made artists feel like they were trapped, and I think it led to things like people disappearing or, you know, cooking up other elements or different personas so they could keep going forward. And in every age, you have artists who are trying, who tap into or attempting to tap into or assessing what it would mean to tap into something beyond the material. Whether it's the Greeks with the various gods or some more contemporary forms of spiritual practice or other types of practice, what artists are looking for is to mind the full experience. And that, certainly for human beings, is part of the full experience.
And in order to evoke that, we see whether it's Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Jim Morrison reading Surrealist poetry or taking LSD or contemplating different forms of mysticism, what they are doing is looking for perspectives, ways of seeing the world. And that's part of the dynamic that happens with poetic solvers is that these people, their intent is to try to put together something that's artistic, something that goes for the lyrics to go just beyond being a vehicle to carry the melody. So, you know, this, there's a section here where you're talking about, it almost seems like you're making an argument here that, let's see, where is this, that Ken Kesey was kind of indirectly responsible for the concept album, which I won't, like, you know, it's fascinating. You're talking about the magic bus trip and you quote Stone's history of this and saying being there, mere vulgar location was instantly beside the point.
From the moment the first demented teenager waved and naked farewell as Neil Cassidy threw the clutch, everything entered the new menace. And again, given everything that you've said about the tension between the artist as a human being and the artist as an institution, I think, you know, one place that we might ground this conversation is in the way that Warhol's horrific prophecy came true and everyone has their 15 minutes of fame on the social web. And now, regardless of your level of celebrity, the alienating influence of social media is one in which everyone is curating themselves for everyone else. Everyone is acting like the individual is an institution now in a way that people like the people you write about in this book were suffering in a much more unique way in their time.
And so I'm curious about your thoughts about all of that, about the way that it seems like this is a genie we can't put back in the bottle, that there is a complicated, non-linear kind of boundary between the private and the public now, between who I think I am, who other people think I am, the kind of person I'm trying to project. And I think if we're to, again, sort of root the conversation around poetic song verse in something that listeners can apply to their own lives, it might be in that in the way that there is this inherent conflict between the person and the story of the person. That is, as you know, in this chapter in the Fantastic, a huge part of the success of this form and of the kind of religious hold that popular songwriting has over people and the way that people feel that they're like participating in these legendary tales. And so that's, again, that's sort of a turn that anyway you want to question.
Well, I think part of an element of poetic song verse that is definitely rooted in the poetic side of it is that suddenly people are writing songs that have the depth of meaning that poetry does, that intentionally these songs are packed to the rafters and overstuffed with different layers of imagery, different meanings that you can peel off it, it instructs the listener to return to the work very much like poetry itself does. And we quote McJagger a couple times saying the same thing where he's like, you have to remember what absolute garbage popular music was at the time. It was how much is this doggy in the window. And then all of a sudden you've got the lyrics on the backs or in the sleeves of these albums and you can sit there and listen to a song a thousand times and still get something new from it if it's well rendered.
And I think that's part of the appeal and part of the allure is that these are things of value that you'll have to live with. You'll have to continue to go back to the well to figure out what this is and why it's meaningful to you. And that said too, I hate to interrupt but I wasn't quite sure we're going to go this long and I need to go to a rehearsal. So that's a best possible reason.
I'm sorry to have to bail out but I could go on forever. This is really fun. Thank you. Yeah, we'll break a leg.
But Ernest is a fountive wisdom. I definitely keep talking. I will. I've been meaning to actually email you both here for a while but I didn't want to just blow up your inbox before we actually have this conversation.
So I look forward to following up with you. Please do. That'd be great. Great respect for your work.
Deeply enjoyed your solo album. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah.
To just get back to your point about the genie in the bottle, the genie can never be put back in the bottle. Robert Penn Warren says at the end if his great poem Audubon, the name of the story is Time, but you must not pronounce it its name. And that's what Dylan is trying to do. Dylan takes all of these different sources going back to Shakespeare, farther back than that.
All the blues, folk music, word play of jazz and brings it all into the moment. As he says in his Nobel Prize speech, he says what I wanted to do was bring it all and make it live with the current of the day. And that's what happens is he takes all of this material and makes it with the current of the day that so many people, but particularly young people are all experiencing of what's happening as well as other musicians. And I think that's a big reason why it takes off so much.
So I have two more quickies if you have the time for it. Yeah. One is just a question for you about where you see given the historical network, not like a single trajectory, but just this ball of constantly coevolving influences. Looking back so carefully at how this has all gone over the last hundred years, do you feel like you have any sense for where music is headed?
I think it seems like there, as you say, towards the end of this book that this is going on now, not just in the US, this is happening all over the world. There are lyrically ambitious songwriters working in rock and other modes in China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Africa, Eastern, Western Europe, Scandinavia, everywhere. So at what point does it become not just one thing or did it become not one thing? And is there anything that we can say about the future of poetic song verse that isn't also not true?
Well, there's always been a lot of different types of artists. One of my favorite bands is the Almond Brothers Band. The Almond Brothers Band were probably the best instrumental rock band ever, but what they are not is practitioners of poetic solvers. You also have at the same time that Dylan and the Almond Brothers and all these folks are playing, you have just pure pop music, which is top 40 entertainment.
What you did hit a period from the mid 60s to probably the mid 70s and a little beyond is that you had a concentration of writers who were serious musicians and also very serious lyricists who were also the most popular musicians of the time. You know, think of the stones, the beetles, the doors. They were all over the radio, all over the culture, and they were trying to do something ambitious. I think you get similar things with some of the rap artists in the 80s and 90s and into this century.
What I will say is that now probably the folks who are the most serious musicians lyrically still exist, but they are no longer the most popular top of the charts musicians, which doesn't mean they aren't making a living and they aren't selling well. Jason Isabel certainly sells some records, but Jason Isabel does not sell records like the Rolling Stone sold records or like Joni Mitchell sold records. You do mention Hendrick Lamar in this book. He's fantastic.
I mean, he's fantastic. That's where I say the rap hip hop side of things is where the great lyrical content has been kept alive. Not only there, but perhaps that's the most visible, the most popular type of artist that keeps writing in this mode. I'm asking you to step out on a limb and do something that makes most academics uncomfortable, which is to prophesy.
Do you feel like you have a sense for where the momentum of all of this is taking us? Well, I think that the moment is always waiting for the great artist. In many ways, Dylan seemed to have popped out of nowhere and he ignited. He didn't come out of nowhere.
As we detail in the book, there was many things that he learned and he had predecessors, but he was able to put it all together. I think that's probably what will happen. What will happen eventually is someone will come along who can put things together in a different way and that it will inspire other artists and then that will take off. But there's certainly serious artists writing today.
Some of our friends are good friends, Luther Dickinson with the North Mississippi All-Stars. Just a sensational lyricist and a sensational musician and puts all types of great things together. But what Luther with the All-Stars music is always pushing ahead and pulling from behind. They're deeply rooted in the blues, but then also looking for ways to experiment with new types of techniques and forms.
The last question I have for you is a more personal question. Given what your comments earlier about how so much of this revolutionary creativity emerged among teenagers or 20-some things, you mentioned in this book that Pete Seeger is like, I hope I die before I get old. Well, that didn't happen. And so much of what animated the punk movement now, like Portlandia, makes fun of these people.
For the yuppies, the way that, again, to borrow on Lewis Hyde and his book Common as Air, he talks about these successive enclosures of the commons. And I'm at the point in my life now, I look back on my 20s and I pray that those were not my most innovative creative years as a writer and as a musician. But it's also, that kind of getting into the middle of one's life is also something that you see in institutions. An institution, not just an individual, is also in some ways just gets to an age where it's no longer about growth and discovery and it's about maintenance and repair.
So anyway, I guess my question for you is just reflecting on your life and what of music history you have lived through, how you see these kinds of concerns and these kinds of questions and what elder insight you might have to offer in your own personal reflections about these kinds of things. Well, I think a lot, as you were pointing out and as we had mentioned, things evolve oftentimes from youth culture because it's a fresh perspective. It's a fresh set of eyes. We have to remember that literary modernism in English was invented in the 1920s by a group of maybe 50 to 100 artists, most of them in their 20s.
It's Hemingway Living Broke in Paris along with a bunch of other artists. It's often out of that youth dynamic that you get new forms evolving. At the same time, what that doesn't mean is that that once an artist has matured gotten older that they're done with because many artists continue to keep writing great material and recording. Fantastic songs.
Look at Springsteen. Well into mid and even middle age. But usually what happens is they find their form in their youth. And then after they found that form, they might change it, modify it, go in different directions, but that's what forms the basis for it.
And I think it's that fresh perspective that you have when you're young where that usually happens, although it's certainly not exclusively happens. Some people are artists that don't, although less in the music genre, but that don't really find their groove until they're well into middle age. So there is no formula. The only consistent thing is to keep going at it, keep trying, keep seeing what you can find, what you can come up with.
Don't be too enamored with the success and don't be too frightened of failure. That's a beautiful place to put it. Ernest, thank you so much. You and Mike both wrote just a spectacular book.
And I also appreciate you collating all of the songs that you referenced in an amazing Spotify playlist that I'll make sure to put in the show notes. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking this much time. This has been a lot of fun.
I think Mike, they have a show tonight or if they're going to just a rehearsal sound check. But boy, I saw a Tedesky Trucks band. They've been in town in DC. And there's a band that you're getting spectacular shows.
And Mike would never say this, but he is a great lyricist, not a good lyricist. He's a great lyricist. And part of it is that what Mike has done is he's so well read, so versed in all the arts that you bring. He is able to bring all of these different things into his song making.
Yeah, notably. I will be sure to point people towards his work and yours beyond this book when we actually publish this. So it'll be a few weeks, but I'll let you know. And now that we've actually spoken, I feel like I can actually drop some stuff that some of my own work.
Oh, is it okay for me to even like, you know, you can feel free to reach out anytime. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks a lot. Yeah, I have a ton of people that I'll be recommending your book to.
So anyway, have a lovely night and I'll be back. Take care. Have a most excellent now.