Steve Forbert: Steve Forbert’s Midsummer Night’s Toast

Steve Forbert's album Mission of the Crossroad Palms, released in 1995, which would make him at least 40 on this cover, though it's hard to tell

Birthday greetings to Steve Forbert, who celebrates No. 57 today.

Once upon a time, Forbert was anointed “the next Bob Dylan,” if for no other reasons than they both wrote music, played harmonica and came from states that started with Mi. (Minnesota and Mississippi).

Of course, this made them no more similar than William Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis because they both wrote books. Forbert’s songs were simpler, peppier and younger; Forbert often wrote about his world, with “a young man’s ear;” Dylan wrote about the world around him with an old man’s eye.

“Being called the next Bob Dylan wasn’t exactly a good thing . . .,” wrote Steve Leggett on allmusic.com, “first because who on earth would want that hung around his neck, and second because his approach and style were nothing much like Dylan in the first place. It was a recipe for perceived failure . . .”

A career letdown for sure. Forbert’s Romeo Tune, on his second album Jackrabbit Slim in 1979, peaked at No. 11, but he never got that high again; of course he wasn’t the next Dylan because there’s no such thing, anymore than there’s a next Ali or Sinatra or da Vinci.

 ”It was just a cliché back then, and it’s nothing I take seriously,” Forbert said in a 2009 interview with NPR (npr.org). “I’m off the hook — I don’t have to be smarter than everybody else and know all the answers like Bob Dylan.”

Many of Forbert’s early songs were coming of age, and having come of age, material wasn’t as prevalent. He’s continued to write and perform, and his work has matured, even if you can’t tell it by looking at him. It’s hard to believe the artist staring back at you from 2009′s The Place And The Time, his most recent album, was then 55.

Or maybe age is in the eye of the beholder. Young and hopeful, Forbert went down to Laurel for love  with “just a touch of madness in my eye” (“I’m glad to be so young talkin’ with my tongue, Glad to be so careless in my way”). He still looks young and hopeful, although even Forbert’s optimism didn’t spare Laurel (“It’s a dirty stinkin’ town yeah”).

(On a personal aside, we once wandered into Laurel, Miss. during the heyday of Forbert’s popularity on an overnight ride to New Orleans. I asked our server at the all-night diner if she knew that Forbert had written a song about her town. When she said no, I figured it best to spare her the details lest she spill the coffee. And though my memories are bleak, I don’t remember Forbert’s description being wrong).

A link to Steve Forbert’s Midsummer Night’s Toast below:

 I got my fingers a-tapping on the hard,
stone steps.
I’m waiting for lightning and the rains to fall.
Young lovers are loafin’ with their sidewalk smiles
And all their rainbow dreams.

sources: allmusic.com, wikipedia.org, npr.org

John Prine: Day Is Done

John Prine's 1995 album Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings; if Dylan is looking for Lake Marie, it's track No. 5

Birthday greetings to singer/songwriter John Prine, who celebrates No. 65 today.

Many years ago, my friend TC and I shared, in no particular order, a love of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, 3 a.m. and Casey’s Tavern. Many nights when we had exhausted all three, he would inevitably request John Prine be put on the turntable (that’s how long ago it was).

The first time I told him I had no Prine, he was aghast, almost insulted. Second-class was charming in a taproom, not in a music collection. You need to listen to John Prine, he scolded, but when I learned that Prine had started out working for the postal service, like TC, I dismissed him. Postal workers stick together, I assumed.

Years later, long after TC and I had moved on to more respectable pursuits, I was in a used CD store (that’s how much later). I came across a Prine album (cover above) and because you could sample the fare before buying, I played it with TC’s words in mind. It took only a few notes to realize TC was right. Somewhere he was smirking and didn’t know why.

Irony is, Dylan, master of Blood on the Tracks, would always have agreed with TC.

Dylan on Prine, as told to the Huffington Post: “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. All that stuff about “Sam Stone” the soldier junky daddy and “Donald and Lydia,” where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that. If I had to pick one song of his, it might be “Lake Marie.” I don’t remember what album that’s on.”

Lake Marie is on Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings, the album I sampled in the CD store. Talk about blessings. But, like a lot of Prine’s work, not many people bought it. According to wikipedia, Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings reached 159th on the charts; no Prine album has been higher than 55th, which is far more an indictment of the audience than the performer.

It’d be even less, perhaps if not for Roger Ebert (and TC), who was one of the first to discover Prine in Chicago, where Prine delivered mail by day and sang at night (TC worked for the postal service by day and wrote sports at night).

Prine, on being discovered by Ebert, according to ottawaxpress.ca: “I was singing at this little out-of-the-way club in Chicago and Ebert stopped in one night, got himself a beer and he had just walked out of a movie because the popcorn was too salty or something like that. He sat and listened to my songs and the next day instead of writing about the movie he wrote about me. The headline was ‘Singing Mailman Delivers The Message.’ He said my songs were like little movies and a lot more interesting than what they were showing down at the theatres.”

Prine’s next album harkens back to that long-ago headline. The Singing Mailman Delivers will be released later this month; Prine’s website says it will include live and studio recordings dating back four decades. I’ll be thinking of TC when I get my copy.

Lyrics from Day is Done (link below), also on Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings, written by Prine and Gary Nicholson:

We’ll carve our names
On a tree
Then we’ll burn it down
So no one in the world will see

And we’ll make love
While we watch the flame
Then we’ll walk away
As if we never had no shame

sources: wikipedia.org, huffingtonpost.com, ottawaxpress.ca, johnprine.net

Around the World in Music: Jamaica’s Mikey Dread

Mikey Dread: World War III

 

Born Michael Campbell in Port Antonio, Jamaica in 1954, the late Mikey Dread got his start with his radio show: Dread at the Controls.

He surely was. His show was one of the first to emphasize the island’s own reggae singers, and became No. 1 in Jamaica. Soon after, Dread became a popular artist in his own right. The rock group The Clash were among his fans, and they invited him to work with them. Dread produced and collaborated with them on their albums and his. The cut below from World War III in 1980 was produced while Dread worked with The Clash; it became a No. 1 album on the British reggae charts.

Over the years Dread produced almost everything to do with reggae – his own albums, TV shows, radio shows, documentaries – and other artists outside the genre. He worked or toured with Carlos Santana, Bob Dylan, Guns and Roses guitarist Izzy Stradlin, among others. In the 1990s he returned to college in Florida and graduated with honors from Lynn University.

From the back of the World War III album:

No time to lose, so I make a haste
The effects of my haste . . . . . . . . an awful waste
In time . . . . . . . . . . (again) . . . . . . . . . so here I am
Where I began . . . . . . . .
Therefore I belong
Where I began
“At the controls”

Mikey Dread died of a brain tumor in 2008 at his home in Stamford, Connecticut.

Tuesday: Walter Becker
Next Monday: Around the World: Canada