I find this album absolutely mesmerising! Love it. I’m off to rest my heavy head on a bed of California stars.
Billy Bragg & Wilco – Mermaid Ave
I love this album and keep going back to it. There is something haunting about it. Billy Bragg and Wilco took the scraps of Woody’s unpublished songs and made them into this. It’s imbued with Woody. Fabulous.
Woody
Woody
‘This machine kills fascists.’
So clever. How did you think of that?
‘There’s not many men that done the things that you’ve done’. Bob Dylan said that about you.
I was only a kid when you died in 1967 – just eighteen years old and you were fifty five. But I was already besotted with a lot of your work. I had a whole bunch of your records that I played incessantly. That was the year that I bought your autobiography Bound For Glory.
We couldn’t have been much more different could we? – Separated by the best part of forty years, an ocean and a world of experience.
You were born in Okema Oklahoma and I was born in Surrey England. We did not have wide open plains, tornados, Indian reservations, black slaves or rattle snakes in Walton on Thames. We did not have guns, dust storms or dusty old hobos who rode the blinds. There were no lynchings, shootings or crooked Southern politicians who solved problems with their fists, or bosses who employed vigilantes to get their own way. Walton was very provincial and English. Yet Woody – your songs still spoke to me. You painted the pictures in my mind. I lived it through you.
My family was pretty ordinary too. None of them were burnt to death, or died of madness or ran for office. My father wasn’t involved in assassinating black people, or dubious property deals and he did not join the Ku Klux Klan.
Our worlds could not have been more different could they? But I could still relate to what you said.
You were a one off.
What made you that way Woody? You went against the grain.
How come you were brought up in a prosperous conservative family, full of racism and violence, and you developed the mind-set you had? Where did you get your sensibilities from?
What made you so special?
You took up the guitar and set about entertaining people with your songs. You busked around the country, painted signs, carried out odd-jobs, and even ran a radio show.
You rambled, lived rough and rode the trains with the poor, the down-and-outs and blacks, tramped round the country, playing to the strikers and disenfranchised, and you believed in a better world.
What made you such an optimist?
How come you weren’t a racist like all the others? Where did that compassion come from? What made you believe in fairness? It seems to me that there was something special inside you. You couldn’t simply ignore what was going on around you. You were forced to do something about it and fight for what you believed. You seemed to believe it more strongly than anybody else.
It seems to me that you kept your vision simple. You believed in justice, freedom and equality. The rest followed on from there. You were a communist and pluralist because of equality. You took people as you found them regardless of the colour of their skin. Back then both those beliefs were dangerous. But they didn’t faze you, did they Woody? Where-ever there was injustice you were the first to speak up, to write songs and join the picket line. You weren’t intimidated. You fought racism and championed the underdog. You were a union man because you saw that as the only way to put a stop to the exploitation of working people.
Woody – you were a one-man political organisation, a social dynamo, a fearless radical. Compromise was not in your language, was it?
You did not court popularity did you?
You took up social issues, like the dust bowl refugees, and put forward their case for justice.
The compassion and fury poured forth from your guitar.
You loved life, nature and women. You were never happier than when outside, under the sky, with the sun, stars and mountains. I could feel that in your songs – particularly This Land Is Your Land.
But you also had a dream. You could see a better world a coming. You saw science providing the answers. Electricity from the hydroelectric would turn deserts into fertile land. There would be a land of plenty in which all men and women would prosper.
All we had to do was defeat fascism.
Which brings me back to that slogan – this machine kills fascists.
It taught me a valuable lesson. You don’t defeat fascism, hatred and exploitation with violence. You defeat it with love, reason and music. A guitar is a machine that can reach into peoples’ hearts and change them. A guitar is better than a rifle. Songs are better than bullets. Words can kill fascism. Ideas hold great power. Your words still move me. You put poetry and idealism into song. It still has impact decades on.
We might have been born worlds apart but I’m joined to you like I was your twin.
I just wanted to say thank you Woody.
Today’s Music To Keeeeep meee SSsSSAaaaNnnnEEe – Billy Bragg – Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key
I love the way he brought those old Woody Guthrie lyrics to life.
Today’s Music to keep me SsSSsAaaaAnnnnNeEE in Isolation – Woody Guthrie
There has never been anybody like him and never will be again. His music is something I never tire of. I keep going back for more.
Today’s Music To Keep me SssSAAaaNNNnEEE in Isolation – Woody Guthrie – Dust Bowl Ballads
The great dust storms were caused by intensive farming. The hedges were grubbed up, the soil lost its structure and a drought caused the dust to fly. The human catastrophe was exacerbated by the banks forgoing on mortgages and tenant farmers being kicked off their land.
It is particularly poignant when we now see the effects of our greed and numbers having a global effect. We are changing the climate of the whole planet.
The great dust bowl was a local effect. We are heading towards a global catastrophe on a much worse level.
Woody is unique. He sang about the way this terrible event affected the lives of the people caught up in it.
I hope lessons are being learnt.
I play Woody regularly. He never ceases to affect me!
In Search of Captain Beefheart – A journey through the Underground of Rock
In Search of Captain Beefheart
Foreword
Fight for what you believe with passion not violence.
Be prepared to take some heavy blows!!
Liz & Opher walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Boston 1971 – featured on the front page of the Boston Evening Globe
Preface
Jack White launched into the searing riff that was the intro to ‘Death Letter Blues’. It shot me straight back to 1968 and the thrill of seeing and hearing Son House. Son’s national steel guitar was more ragged than Jack White’s crystal clear electric chords, and nowhere near as loud, but the chords rang true and the energy and passion were exactly the same.
Meg pounded the drums and the crowd surged forward.
It was Bridlington Spa in 2004. White Stripes were the hottest thing on the planet. The place was packed and the atmosphere electric. I was right near the front – the only place to be at any gig – the place where the intensity was magnified.
It was a huge crowd and they were crazy tonight. I could see the young kids piling into the mosh-pit and shoving – excited groups of kids deliberately surging like riot cops in a wedge driving into the crowd and sending them reeling so that they tumbled and spilled. For the first time I started getting concerned. The tightly packed kids in the mosh-pit were roaring and bouncing up and down and kept being propelled first one way and then another as the forces echoed and magnified through the mass of people. At the front the crush was intense and everyone was careering about madly. My feet were off the ground as we were sent hurtling around. I had visions of someone getting crushed, visions of someone falling and getting trampled. Worst of all – it could be me!
For the first time in forty-odd years of gigs I bailed out. I ruefully headed for the balcony and a clear view of the performance. I didn’t want a clear view I wanted to be in the thick of the action. It got me wondering – was I getting to old for this lark? My old man had only been a couple of years older than me when he’d died. Perhaps Rock Music was for the young and I should be at home listening to opera or Brahms with an occasional dash of Wagner to add the spice. I had become an old git. Then I thought – FUCK IT!!! Jack White was fucking good! Fuck Brahms – This was Rock ‘n’ Roll. You’re never too old to Rock! And Rock was far from dead!
The search goes on!!
We haven’t got a clue what we’re looking for but we sure as hell know when we’ve found it.
Rock music has not been the backdrop to my entire adult life; it’s been much more than that. It has permeated my life, informed it and directed its course.
From when I was a small boy I found myself enthralled. I was grabbed by that excitement. I wanted more. I was hunting for the best Rock jag in the world! – The hit that would send the heart into thunder and melt the mind into ecstasy.
I was hunting for Beefheart, Harper, House, Zimmerman and Guthrie plus a host of others even though I hadn’t heard of them yet.
I found them and I’m still discovering them. I’m sixty four and looking for more!
Forget your faith, hope and charity – give me Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll and the greatest of these is Rock ‘n’ Roll!
I was a kid in the Thames Delta, with pet crow called Joey, 2000 pet mice (unnamed), a couple of snakes, a mammoth tusk, a track bike with a fixed wheel, a friend called Mutt who liked blowing up things, a friend called Billy who kept a big flask of pee in the hopes of making ammonia, and a lot of scabs on my knees.
My search for the heart of Rock began in 1959 and I had no idea what I was looking for when I started on this quest. Indeed I did not know I had embarked on a search for anything. I was just excited by a new world that opened up to me; the world of Rock Music. My friend Clive Hansell also had no idea what he was initiating when he introduced me to the sounds he was listening to. Clive was a few years older than me. He liked girls and he liked Popular Music. Yet he seemed to have limited tastes. I can only ever remembering him playing me music by two artists – namely Adam Faith and Buddy Holly. In some ways it was a motley introduction to the world of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
I was ten years old which would have made Clive about twelve or thirteen, I suppose he could even have been fourteen. That is quite a lot of years at that age. We used to got off to his bedroom, sit on the bed and he’d play me the singles – 45s – on his Dansette player. He’d stack four or five singles on the deck push the lever up to play and we’d lean forward and watch intently. The turntable would start rotating; the mechanism clunked as the arm raised, there were clicks and clunks as the arm drew back and the first single dropped, then the arm would come across and descend on to the outer rim of the disc. The speaker would hiss and crackle and then the music kicked in. We watched the process intently every time as if it depended on our full attention.
The Adam Faith singles were on Parlaphone and were red with silver writing. The Buddy Holly was on Coral with a black label and silver writing. We reverentially watched the discs spinning and listened with great concentration to every aspect of the songs. It was a start.
Yet Rock ‘n’ Roll was by no means the only quest I’d started on. I was an early developer. I’d hit puberty at ten and can imagine myself as the scruffy little, dirty-faced kid who climbed trees, waded through ditches, got covered in frogspawn and lichen and was suddenly sprouting pubic hair – very confusing.
Life was going to change for me. I was in a transition phase.
In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant ReadReviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 December 2019
Verified Purchase
What a great read , what a journey , If you like music you’ll love this book . From the folk roots of London to the crossroads of Robert Johnson . From the delta of blues through to Greenwich village ! From the Haight Ashbury hippy time to Hull ,Intrigued you should be ! I couldn’t put this book down it took me on a musical journey back in time from Blues Folk Rock and Punk and back again , Excellent ! Hats off to Opher . Dylan Thomas Jones .
Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos)- Woody Guthrie
At this time of vilification and fear for the dreaded ‘Immigrants’, it is good to remember what Woody Guthrie wrote about the plane crash at Los Gatos. Illegal immigrants were being exploited as cheap labour and then shipped back to Mexico. The plane crashed and they were killed. The reporting was of a bunch of ‘Deportees’ being killed.
Woody wanted to write a song commemorating them as ‘real’ people. He wanted to incorporate all their names.
At this time – a religious festival – a festival of plenty – we would do well to remember the real message. These immigrants are not the evil rapists, drug dealers and murderers we have to build walls against; they are real people. We should care.
One thing I despise is the hypocrisy of many religious people – Jesus wasn’t about building walls and carrying guns was he??
The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting
The oranges are filed in their creosote dumps
They’re flying ’em back to the Mexico border
To take all their money to wade back againGoodbye to my Juan, farewell Roselita
Adios mes amigos, Jesus e Maria
You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deporteesMy father’s own father, he waded that river
They took all the money he made in his life
It’s six hundred miles to the Mexico border
And they chased them like rustlers, like outlaws, like thievesGoodbye to my Juan, farewell Roselita
Adios mes amigos, Jesus e Maria
You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deporteesThe skyplane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon
The great ball of fire it shook all our hills
Who are these dear friends who are falling like dry leaves?
Radio said, “They are just deportees”Goodbye to my Juan, farewell Roselita
Adios mes amigos, Jesus e Maria
You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees
Today’s Music To Keep me SSsssaAAAaNNnnneeEe in Isolation – Billy Bragg
The Mermaid Ave album brings together two of my favourites – Billy Bragg and Woody Guthrie – Fabulous.
Today’s Music to keep me SsSSAAaaaaNnnnNeEe in Isolation – Woody Guthrie – Dust Bowl Ballads
I keep going back to Woody. He’s an inspiration.