Hugh Masekela / Bobby Bare Jr. / The Brought Low

BOBBY BARE JR.
1 April 2003: Europa — New York THE BROUGHT LOW
30 March 2003: CBGB’s Downstairs — New York

by Kandia Crazy Horse

Flight to Canada
Or, The Redneck Negress Goes to Rockville Having run afoul of the weather for some time, I was overdue for the high-octane Rock Show this past week. Those of you resident in the metropolises and hep college towns invariably have one friend who’s a rock critic and know that this creature is perpetually broke (without insurance). Thus the healing balm of a shrieking wall of guitars is just about this poor soul’s — meaning I — last and best hope for remedy. In 1976’s Flight To Canada, his career second-best bicentennial blues, Ishmael Reed spins the tale of trickster runaway slave Raven Quickskill, who escapes from Massa Swille to the Great White North: “He preferred Canada to slavery, whether Canada was exile, death, art, liberation, or a woman. Each man to his own Canada….”Flight to Canada” was responsible for getting him to Canada. And so for him, freedom was his writing. His writing was his HooDoo…It fascinated him, it possessed him; his typewriter was his drum he danced to.” Well, I too (at least metaphorically) am ever desirous of following the North Star to freedom…especially in these days of warmongers run amok. For all that my computer is oftener than not a shackle, the writing can occasionally be a late modern HooDoo that sends me out to witness the sons of drums do their thang and make it funky in the clubs. The irony is that I have located my Underground Railroad to freedom — what certain Texans would turn into free doom per Gil Scott-Heron — in the music created by my “traditional enemies”: rednecks and white trash, unwittingly protected by the partisan bands’ balls-to-the-wall guitar armies. My own Canada is a place of flux, remade whole again and again whenever and wherever the likes of the Drive-By Truckers’ (Mike) Cooley should plug his flying V into an amp. For all that the notion of a southern rock band from Brooklyn may seem anathema to the misunderstood and undervalued genre’s diehard fans, the Brought Low are a very good substitute when one’s favorite bands like the Truckers — and now Bobby Bare Jr. in all his guises — insist upon remaining Dixie-bound. My most recent spell with the Brought Low at Gotham’s venerable CBGBs coincided with the enactment of Mayor Bloomberg’s much-reviled smoking ban. The Brought Low’s audience may have been chafing at the city’s affront to their bohemian lifestyle and suffering nicotine withdrawals, but the band still ran on enough fumes from southern rock to set heads banging. Straight down from hard rock Valhalla came the aptly named instrumental “Right On Time” to start the proceedings off at the high-energy pitch maintained for about 60 swift minutes. The Brought Low carry on as if citizens of a shadow America where Ted Nugent is the Unfunky President. Chuck Berry is certainly the founding father of the land where this (one-time trio, now-)four piece’s soul is from, as they tacitly hold up the progenitor of rock & roll’s primeval language as The Troglodyte from which all essential chords and driving riffs come. Loud as all of Funkadelic on their best song, “What I Found”, perhaps as if they were trapped in a bubble of Eddie Hazel’s axe refracted to the nth power, the band is all lean, no excess. Fo-sheezy they are the kind of big, ramshackle men we love, with tattoos of flaming dice on their forearms visible as they brandish their Les Pauls and potbellies blatantly displayed in Miami Dolphins tees. Yet the music itself is largely unadorned, although “Blues For Cubby” saw drummer Nick Heller on the verge of swinging in Mitch Mitchell territory during the tight jam. Front man Ben Smith gave the verbal nod to Led Zeppelin as he launched into the mighty fine “City Boy”, but sonically invoked the metal legends’ pulverizing thrusts, not their vaguely psychedelic leanings and misty mountain hops. It’s Mountain, among others, whom the Brought Low seem to give propers to in the wake of power trio Gov’t Mule’s own campaign, minus the twang, gospel and modal jazz trends so prevalent in the Mule’s sound. Ben Smith and his boys appear to be the promising rock outfit least likely to employ a Wurlitzer or Theremin; they’ll not be ringing the LA Largo-located Jon Brion camp for production duties anytime soon. But don’t let that steer you away from the straightforward, simple pleasures their music purveys. The Strokes, Interpol and other New Rock City bands may be applauded for making the world safe from the kind of heavy volume stoner rock these Brooklynites deal in, but the Brought Low, along with Drag City’s the Suntanama, are probably the best local rock band (the Burnt Sugar being something beyond rock & roll, Jesse Malin’s now solo, will check out Maplewood this week…and the jury’s still out on the Damnwells). Bobby Bare Jr. is a trickster as crafty as Quickskill, a Nashville native responsible for all sorts of complex meditations on the southern sound that we ought to be bitterly jealous of in Gotham’s cultural void. As to his voice, it’s a true one like my friend Patterson’s…but then I am nothing if not a fanatic of Neil Young, Gil Scott-Heron and Leon Russell. At the Polish disco Europa in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint section, the amiable and ramshackle author of the marvelous Young Criminals’ Starvation League (Bloodshot), an emotional sub-concept album distinguished by horns and finely observed portraits of human despair like the Shel Silverstein cover “Painting Her Fingernails”, represented and kept it real big time. Real…compared to what? Well, to a fascinating range of late modern masters. Like those perennial critic’s darlings (guilty!) Big Star: heard live at Europa, much of Brother Bare Jr.’s music coalesced as post-punk derivations of that Memphis band’s sound, sans the lovely fey aesthetic of the late Chris Bell and supplemented by a good deal more twang and boogie. Like Esther Phillips: the sad grit of Bare’s voice invokes her as I sit here listening to her brilliant cover of Scott-Heron’s “Home Is Where The Hatred Is”. And Bare’s horn-drenched songs, such as “The Ending” and my much beloved “I’ll Be Around”, swing with those lilting beats peculiar to the earliest, freshest era of jazz fusion. Indeed, Brother Bare’s music is not solely hard rock nor is it alt-country, but soulful in a way that the majority of indie rockers and Americana folk never are these days. Imagine if Bare were in fact to continue in the vein of Young Criminals’ or even elaborate on the full-tilt boogie of his previous Bare Jr. outings by recording in the company of the jaw-dropping Donny Hathaway sessioneers — Richard Tee, Willie Weeks, Eric Gale, Cornell Dupree — and others — Bonnie Bramlett, Airto Moreira, Daniel Ben Zebulon and Allen Toussaint — with a guest spot from Arthur Lee for an even darker bite. Not a soul in all rockcritdom would be able to withstand the onslaught of such a prophesied masterpiece and Bobby Bare Jr. would finally be as famous as he deserves to be. Not surprising that he might be better served by aging masters than his peers when it comes to collaborating. That is not to say that his band at Europa, helmed by divine axe-slinger Chris Masterson, were unworthy. Their collective work was superb, augmented by a trio of guest musicians Brother Bare referred to as “The Horns of Death.” They were more than ably at Bare’s service, as he debuted with the deliciously self-reflexive “The Monk At The Disco”, not long after the sound man had flooded the atmosphere with fog from the smoke machine. The not-dim-enough dance floor remained empty as far as the perimeter of the “Circle Of Fear” that divides indie audiences from their heroes. (Nothing such exists at hip-hop, Afropop and neo-soul shows — seems we Africans are more eager to taste our artists. Why not? We own them.) Masterson especially proved the strength of his gifts when switching to an odd electrified mandolin and meshing seamlessly with the horns on the heartrending character study “Flat Chested Girl From Maynardville”. Mentored and his songwriting nurtured by the late Silverstein — Bare opened with one of his poems — this scion of a classic country star managed to successfully cover Morrissey (“What Difference Does It Make”) and (perhaps unwittingly) reference the Jackson Five with a lyric from “Monk’s”: “Dancing machines with broken feet, Glamorize their desperate needs…” Upon first encountering the jovial, curly-haired Brother Bare, it ain’t evident that he is so sharp and smart, capable of composing complex songs that are literate and original, characterized by frustration, heartache, irreverence for tradition and levity. It’s almost inconceivable that Young Criminals’ Starvation League was completed in seven days. Even Bare Jr. tunes like “Brainwasher” and “Why Do I Need A Job”, as present at Europa, rocking sorrow or desperate mirth with an acid kick, do not prepare one’s ears for the depth of his emotional and sonic resources. “I’ll Be Around”, with its lazy strum reminiscent of flava from Stevie Wonder’s delicate “Summer Soft”, was the showstopper that, coupled with “The Ending”, fleetingly immortalized Bare on the spot. What I wouldn’t give to have somebody write a rough diamond like “I’ll Be Around” for me and sing it often. Of course, I am horn bitch and whenever you get some horny horns in the mix, be it Funkadelic, the Memphis Horns or my new favorites in Bare’s outfit, you will catch me up as the Dancing Fool. Hence the Redneck Negress — that is I, overjoyed to be instantly devoted to yet another group in the Drive-By Truckers’ loose axis — reared her ostrich plumed head. Brother Bare really ought to record Young Criminals’ successor in New Orleans at SeaSaint with Allen Toussaint at the knobs, and should he take his Second Line-suffused par-tay into the Quarter, he might just see this sista — what Mark Anthony Neal calls a ThugNegressIntellectual elsewhere on this site — wrestle with Eric Lott and do the Oyster Dance. On “Dig Down”, Bare laments the sonic greed of the previous two generations of rockers: Chuck Berry, Chuck Berry, you wrote the only original song
Some white boys stole it, we all still sing along
Chuck Berry sing to us one more time
Before Fred Bizkit freezes everybody’s mind But by the time he and his compadres dropped Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noize” (popularized by Quiet Riot) as a knowing, elegiac, almost chamber-rock closer, he seemed more than poised to assume the mantle of Savior of Rock ‘n Roll. Let us pray (via the sacred profane) that the Powers That Be enable him to continue unchecked upon his avowed mission. With rich idols like Bobby Bare Jr. on the pop landscape, my flight to Canada can be indefinitely deferred. Unlike his clueless successors in Generation Y bands like the Strokes, so enamored of cool posing and disaffection, and his y’allternative forebears/peers such as Jeff Tweedy and Ryan Adams who would rather be the Glimmer Twins, our Brotha from Nashvegas represents not only for the deified lineage of Music City mavericks (hola Kris Kristofferson, you fine-arsed devil you) but the inherent superiority of Africanized Americana as well. Indebted as I am to the Drive-By Truckers and now Brother Bare for providing the space for a young black woman to reconstruct her identity within the context of rock & roll, this avant-redneck spirit must take a seat at the back of the bus when rivaled by the pan-African aesthetic of global jazz ambassador Hugh Masekela. Where the Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera utterly changed my life’s direction as the Allman Brothers Band’s Live At Fillmore East did almost thirty years ago, Masekela has also been present at almost every significant turn of my development: he played a benefit in New York City to fund my father’s first trip to Africa in the early 1960s; his niece was a school mate during boarding school; his turn-of-the-Seventies masterpieces Masekela, The Promise Of A Future and The Union Of South Africa provided a consistent soundtrack for my early-Nineties college-era house parties; “Blues For Huey” (especially its later deconstructed funk reprise on Home Is Where The Music Is), along with a rediscovery of Gil Scott-Heron’s oeuvre, offered moral and ethical sustenance in a period when I became unmoored from two decades’ worth of black power ideology; and his recent concerts have been the occasional welcome respite from a life spent on the road in pursuit of The Boogie. If Brother Bare’s music is defiant in the face of the love-less world labeling one a loser and the threats of a particularly Dixie-bred swamp of pathology, Masekela’s is all about maintaining one’s inner adhesions before both mundane and supernatural forces of evil. Apartheid his virtual lifelong foe — as the American South’s own version must somehow inform the music of Bare Jr. and the Brought Low — Masekela’s back catalog through the latest, Time (Sony Legacy), is some hardcore southern rock assisted by juju music and High Life, township jive you can boogie to from way down south where Prince Henry The Navigator once sailed. When gloriously aided by the Fiorello LaGuardia High School Symphonic Choir at Carnegie Hall on his 1987-hit-turned-celebratory anthem “Bring Back Nelson Mandela” — he exhorted, “Get off your rusty dusties…Let’s shake some booty for Nelson Mandela!!!” — Masekela’s song was interchangeable with any of the premier protest works from our own Civil Rights Movement, the locus where my parents encountered the era’s heroes such as Mama Afrika Miriam Makeba, Letta Mbulu, Masekela’s old employer Dollar Brand aka Abdullah Ibrahim, and the Man Himself. In fact, I could almost not quite enjoy the show on a certain level, not merely because I only arrived by the intermission but because I was devoid of the company of my parents: my father who befriended South African cult warriors like Willy Kgositsile at a crucial time when blackfolk weren’t feeling the Motherland; and my mother who graciously allowed me to abscond with the entirety of her Hugh collection on vinyl and lived in Lesotho under the terrifying days of the ancien régime. Let me tell you, you don’t quite know fear if you weren’t raised by parents who themselves came of age under the fist of Jim Crow (my mother was the same age as Emmett Till) and you have never landed at Jan Smuts airport in Joburg after a fourteen hour flight at the bewildered age of fifteen and wondered whether They were going to ask for your papers, find them unsatisfactory and haul you off to one of the infamous prisons like the one that kept Nelson Mandela severed from his people for decades. Overactive imagination perhaps (the same imagination and quirky persistence of vision that’s solely responsible for my rockcrit career), but that level of terror was underscored live when Masekela delivered his best performance of the evening on “Stimela”, a harrowing and beautiful composition about the plight of dispossessed black men in southern Africa who are “disappeared” or conscripted into the gold, diamond and other mineral mines of Johannesburg and elsewhere and made to toil after the “shiny elusive stones” for 16 hours a day, conveyed to their final destination by a menacing mystery train along their own lugubrious Trail of Tears while their crops are ruined and kin people slaughtered. Masekela’s lachrymose horn solo and hoarse cries were invested with an enviable authority, as the choir’s fragile crescendo on the word stimela was like a cautious sunrise and the veritable sound of reaching the mountaintop. It not only made palpable again my time in Maseru dancing at brais to the popular group also named Stimela, but devastated the self that wholly belongs to the African Diaspora who is as appalled now by the continued exploitation of the world’s poor as when I first heard and really understood Masekela’s stunning and similarly themed “Gold” from Masekela. The Carnegie show truly was a pan-African evening, with band members from Sierra Leone and Cameroon as well as southern guests Busi Mhlongo, Jabu Khanyile, Khaya Mahlangu, Tsepo Tshola, Vusi Mahlasela and Angélique Kidjo from Brooklyn-by-way-of-Cotonou on board. Even white South Africans Morris Goldberg on saxophone and pennywhistle and Anton Fig on drums helped expand the Continent’s parameters. The LaGuardia students, themselves a simulated Rainbow Coalition well-led by director Jerry Ulrich, gave off lusty accompaniment as they displayed how astonishingly acute were their powers of absorption when faced with the challenge of singing in Xhosa — no small feat to these lips which can still never quite nail the clicks in Makeba’s monster jam “Pata Pata”. The highlights were the women: “Queen of Zulu Music” Busi Mhlongo memorializing Zimbabwean Dorothy Masuka’s 1950s heyday and mimicking the elderly township women without accounts who seek others to bank for them; then Kidjo with her blonde brilliantine Afro channeling Mama Afrika on the song the latter made popular, “Soweto Blues”, about youngsters who defied the oppressive government in 1976, changing the direction of the country, and were fired on for their “arrogance.” High spirits broke the sound barrier when special “surprise” guest Paul Simon took the stage to bring Mr. Masekela his birthday cake and reunite with some of his Graceland band members, featuring Bakithi Kumalo on literally walking and groovy bass on a romp through hit “The Boy in the Bubble” (sadly, if tellingly, this appearance got some whitefolks overly giddy in a way they never demonstrated for the African performers). As more traditional rock reared its head, I pondered how sublime it would be if Masekela sat in on Bobby Bare Jr.’s next album in reflection of his legendary trumpet assist on the Byrds’ “So You Wanna Be A Rock ‘N Roll Star”, those Los Angeles folk-rockers being the granddaddies of the sonic space which allows me to embrace Brother Bare’s genius (and obviously, let Bare be coaxed into singing in Xhosa). My soul complaints are no “Bajabula Bonke”, “Vuca” or guest spot by a resuscitated Letta Mbulu doing the sub-Spector apocalyptic “Ade” — not that I even dared hope for “Head Peepin'”, “The Big Apple”, “Languta”, “Dyambo” or “Blues For Huey”. We did get “Grazing In The Grass” of course, and a breezy joy it was. While Masekela breath may not be as expansive as in the past, and though resplendent in indigo he was not still the Young Turk of Monterey, he remains a late modern master who bravely utilizes his trumpet and fluegelhorn as a long, strong arm of liberation. Vuca Somali and everybody else in this wide world quickened by Africana as by nothing else. What is Africa to me? A safe haven for the soul and the planet’s saving grace. It is also a continent darkened by both interracial and intraracial evil (Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Soko, Jean Bedel Bokassa, Robert Mugabe, anyone?) and tribal superstition that allows AIDS to thrive and decimate its population. So, if I can embrace Azania in all her fraught complexity, ought I not be able to do the same for our own Dixie, groaning beneath the weight of plantation radio? There is accountability everywhere for those who are free in mind, body and spirit to walk tall and slay the dragons of injustice — like the Draconian government of the Architect of Apartheid — be they born outside Joburg like Masekela or in Tennessee like Bobby Bare Jr. No one awake is allowed to take any shorts. As Jabu Khanyile sang, Africa, if you sleep and wait and think some other continent is going to help you, life will pass you by. Vuca Afrika, Dixie and every place else fraught with peril. It ain’t Nation Time but rather the hours when we must cleave to the wisdom and innervisions of our culture heroes whether they speak truth to power with a click or a twang. What is Africa to me? A different blue sensibility and calendar to order the world by. As with all the shows I’ve witnessed, at Carnegie and Europa (pun intended) we were definitely on African Time. This trickster done flown.