1. I knew when I returned to Willy Vlautin's book The Lucky and the Left late this morning that, aside from eating, resting my eyes, and letting Gibbs out and back in the house, I wouldn't do anything else until I finished it.
I was right.
Brief background: Along with writing novels, Willy Vlautin works as a house painter and is the songwriter and lead guitarist of the Portland retro country soul band (the band's description) The Delines. He played a similar role for several years in another band, Richmond Fontaine.
The Lucky and the Left is a Portland novel that is not taking place in the world of Portlandia, not a story about characters living in service to the slogan "Keep Portland Weird", not a story about downtown post- George Floyd confrontations between law enforcement, demonstrators, and Proud Boys in Portland, nor is it about anything else that commonly stereotypes Portland.
No, Willy Vlautin writes about the fading working class world of Portland, about people hanging on by a thread, with much of the story taking place in St. John and neighboring areas of North Portland. It's about house painters, a stripper, waitresses, the aisles of Safeway and Fred Meyer (not Whole Foods and Market of Choice), broken families, cans of Olde English 40s, diners, and dive bars.
In this world of brokenness, family violence, hard work, and adolescent anger, the novel centers around a relationship that develops between Eddie, a house painter, and Russell, Eddie's eight-year-old next door neighbor and Eddie's dog, Earl.
I'll leave it at that. If you should happen to read this book, you'll want to know as little as possible about what transpires and experience this world and these characters without spoilers.
Physical violence didn't dominate this novel, but when it occurred, I'll just say it was difficult for me to bear.
2. Today I read the news of the death of David Clayton-Thomas, known primarily for his work as the lead singer for Blood, Sweat &Tears.
Clayton-Thomas first appeared with Blood, Sweat & Tears on the band's second album, titled simply Blood, Sweat & Tears.
When I bought and listened to this album in the summer of 1969 (it was released in 1968), its blending of rock, blues, jazz, gospel, and, briefly, classical music gave me a deep pleasure I'd never felt before.
In junior high, I had bought at least one Al Hirt album (Honey in the Horn) and had collected several Herb Alpert albums and so I'd already developed a love for trumpet driven music, but nothing I'd heard prepared me for the instrumentation of Blood, Sweat & Tears in support of the incredible vocal range and stylings of David Clayton-Thomas.
Now, fifty-eight years after the release of Blood, Sweat & Tears, two of its features stand out to me, two things I never could have said about this album when I was fifteen years old.
First, the album opened and closed with "Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie". These two tracks were adaptations of French composer Erik Satie's 1888 composition for piano entitled, "Trois Gymnopedies."
Those classical music tracks transported me, at fifteen years old, into a dreamy world of beauty and wonder. I know now, that along with George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" and "An American in Paris", these two tracks became my gateway into classical music, a love I pursued more purposefully in my college years as I attended the Spokane Symphony for the first time, listened to classical albums in the library with headphones at North Idaho College, and began to purchase and play classical music albums.
This impact of Blood, Sweat & Tears came back to me today. I had Symphony Hall on the radio as I read The Left and the Lucky and the great classical guitarist Christopher Parkening came on the air playing Erik Satie's "Trois Gymnopedes". Listening to him delivered me back to the other worldly experience Satie gave me, via BS&T in 1969 and also took me back to when used to listen to Parkening play Bach on the guitar on an LP I bought on a whim, never having heard of Parkening, at the Whitworth College bookstore.
Secondly, I didn't think much about this when I was fifteen years old, but now I know that David Clayton-Thomas was a brilliant interpreter of songs other artists had recorded. At fifteen, I didn't know that, say, when The Turtles recorded Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe" or when Vanilla Fudge recorded The Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" that this was known as one artist covering a song first done by another.
Now, all these decades later, I've come to love listening to cover versions of songs and three of Clayton-Thomas's covers stand out to me on the Blood, Sweat & Tears album.
In no particular order, here they are, three songs that Clayton-Thomas and BS&T borrowed from other musical traditions and genres and made their own.
"You've Made Me So Very Happy" was first recorded by Motown's Brenda Holloway in 1967 and Clayton-Thomas and the band manage to pay homage to the Motown sound while also transforming this song into a work of their own.
"And When I Die" was written by the great singer-songwriter Laura Nyro when she was 17 and was recorded in 1966 by Peter, Paul and Mary. Later on, Nyro recorded the song herself. Both versions are beautiful. Mary Travers takes the vocal lead in the first version and Laura Nyro sings the song solo in her version. I listened just now to the it recorded live at the Manhattan folk club, The Bottom Line.
The Blood, Sweat & Tears version brings a new power to this song with the instrumental arrangement and David Clayton-Thomas, like Peter, Paul &Mary and Laura Nyro, sings it with soulful power while taking it out of the folk and acoustic blues realm and into a realm of jazz and blues that has its own power. It's unforgettable.
Now, all these years later, I think the gutsiest cover on this album is of the iconic Billie Holliday's song "God Bless the Child". A part of me says, whoa, bro, leave Billie alone! But I'm glad Blood, Sweat & Tears didn't leave this song alone. To me, they open the song in church and then it begins to swing a bit and the great feel David Clayton-Thomas has for this song takes it over. But, the goose bump moment comes for me at 3:10 with the jazzy breakout of piano, trombone, trumpet, and saxophone solos. Then back comes Clayton-Thomas and someone brought a harmonica to church and as the song winds down, we are back in the pews again and guys take us out of this song with the same kind of worshipful sound they played to bring us in.
Really. The more I think about it, this album might have had more impact on my future love of multiple genres of music than any other, especially when I was in my teens.
RIP David Clayton-Thomas (1941-2026).
3. Back in April, not knowing a thing about Willy Vlautin, Debbie and I went to the Bing in Spokane to hear him interviewed by Jess Walter.
The interview is archived with the other Northwest Passages presentations on YouTube.
I listened to this interview again tonight, having finished The Left and the Lucky.
The interview reminded me that Willy Vlautin set out to give this story a noir feel. He wanted to create a world in the shadows of Portland, a world of brokenness, instability, potential and realized violence, and of cigarettes and alcohol. He also wanted to leaven this noir world with decency. He succeeded. All of these dark elements co-exist with certain characters who are good -- as the novel develops, I wondered: will the darkness or the decency prevail?
I found out.
No comments:
Post a Comment