FREEZE FRAME

This morning, flipping through the tabloids in the checkout line at the local supermarket, I had a flashback to an incident a few years ago when, following a pleasing lunch at Grafton Street in Harvard Square, I was suddenly “surrounded” by a photographer snapping, with paparazzi-like frenzy, photo after photo of me walking along Mass. Ave. Such audacity! Such an invasion of my personal space! And it only got worse (or better . . .) when passers-by began to slow down and gawk at the apparent celebrity in their midst. One person even stopped and called out to me, “Who are you?”

To my credit, I took all the attention in stride (literally—I was still walking), though if the episode had gone on much longer I might have been tempted to grab the photographer by the camera strap and fling both him and his equipment under a speeding bus . . . and that despite the fact that he was my lunch companion and good friend, Fionán O’Connell! (Check out Finn’s fine photographic work in his online gallery.)

Anyway, musing on that incident this morning, I had a hard time mustering up sympathy for all those real celebrities who complain constantly about being accosted by zoom lenses and blinded by flashbulbs: they should be pretty slow indeed to swat at the hand (or the head) of the very media that gave them their celebrity status in the first place. And they could have it worse. In fact, they could have the problem that I experience seemingly every time I get my photograph taken: the problem of “interlopers” stepping into the line of fire at what master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson has described as “the decisive moment.”

This happens to me constantly. For example, about 5 years ago I was posing for a shot requested by a photographer when suddenly I felt a different sort of shot—a sharp elbow in the ribs delivered by legendary Boston Bruins power forward and NHL Hall-of-Famer Cam Neely. SMILE, he instructed me as he dusted off his knuckles. Clearly, I follow instructions pretty well.

Another time I was minding my own business (as always) when another fellow with a tough-guy reputation sidled up to me just as the photographer had me in his sights and said, "Do you mind . . . ?" "Oh, why not?" I said, and we shared a chuckle. After all, those were the good old days when Charlie Weis was still undefeated (0-0) as football coach at Notre Dame . . .

The worst, though, are the artistes—especially writers. I think it was 2004 and a couple of fine-looking women asked if they could have their picture taken with me at an event that I happened to be gracing with my presence. What could I say? I have a soft spot for the ladies. Well, I guess that Seamus Heaney and Chet Raymo do too, and somehow they became the raison d’être of this photograph. No fair!

Musicians, too, can be desperate lens hogs. For instance, back in 2005 I was hanging out in Dublin (I like to do that occasionally) when a fellow who identified himself as Rocky De Valera—what an unlikely name!—jumped into the frame and said, “Hey, didn’t I see you at the debut performance of my band, The Gravediggers, in the pub at University College Dublin back in 1978?” Well, maybe . . .

I like to hang out in NYC occasionally, too. And that was where jazz guitar maestro Gene Bertoncini leapt into the picture. So a quiet meal at Le Madeleine for me and le famille becomes a photo op for him. Sadly, that French bistro has since closed its doors; rumor has it that as the padlocks snapped shut Bertoncini exclaimed, “I brought down the house!”

But what really gets me is when a senior colleague interlopes into a private photograph. I guess it was 6 years ago, my 19th year at UMass Boston and Shaun O’Connell’s 38th, that I became aware of what he must be thinking: “Ha—you’re only half the man I am.” Yeah, well by the time this photo was taken, I had begun to catch up, if only by a small fraction each year.

ANDRE DUBUS: THE TIMES WERE NEVER SO BAD . . .

So . . . this past week I attended a screening of a film documentary on short story master Andre Dubus (not to be confused with his son Andre Dubus III, also an accomplished writer of fiction). Comprising interviews with family, friends, fellow writers and former students, a wonderful selection of still photos and even some grainy old home movie footage, The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus presents a candid portrait indeed—both intimate and measured—of a complex man and subtle writer, quietly yet emphatically teasing out the deeply intrinsic relationship between his life and his work. Directed by Edward (Ted) Delaney, the 90-minute film is altogether compelling as Delaney is unabashed in his admiration for Dubus yet is equally unabashed in acknowledging that he could be a difficult person . . . father, husband, friend, neighbor.

One of the sad ironies of Dubus’ life and career is that he became a household name only after he was critically injured in a car accident in 1986, a month short of his fiftieth birthday. The film reconstructs in graphic detail the circumstances and the aftermath of that horrific incident, in which Dubus, stopping Good Samaritan-like to assist at a highway accident involving a car and a motorcycle, was struck by another motorist. Suffering multiple trauma (eventually he lost a leg), he was wheelchair-bound for his remaining thirteen years of life. I remember the accident very clearly (happening just north of Boston, it received a lot of attention in the local news media), and I am grateful for Delaney’s sensitive telling of “the rest of the story.” And certainly that episode in Dubus' life validates the film's title, which is borrowed from the title of one of Dubus' collections of stories, which opens with an epigraph from Saint Thomas More: The times are never so bad but that a good man can live in them.

Yet what I am most grateful for regarding the documentary in its entirety involves the insight it affords into two of the central recurring interests in Dubus’ fiction. His early life in Louisiana defined by his troubled relationship with his father, Dubus apparently returns again and again in his fiction to the subject of fatherhood (and of sonhood). Apparently he also returns again and again to the subject of women in the lives of his male characters. I say “apparently” because I have not—yet—read Dubus’ work extensively.

But I have begun. In fact, the day after viewing Delaney’s documentary, I pulled off the bookshelf my barely thumbed-through copy of the collection The Times Are Never So Bad and started with the closing story (not quite randomly—it had been mentioned in the film), titled simply “A Father’s Story.” Am I, as the father of three daughters, a biased reader of this stunning narrative? Au contraire: I think I am utterly qualified to declare it the most staggeringly truthful depiction of a father-daughter relationship I have ever encountered. The things we do for love, I thought after reading it. As it turns out, “A Father’s Story” is available online on the website of Narrative Magazine. Read it now.

NEW GUITAR SUMMIT: SHIVERS

In the summer of 2007, I published an essay, “My Coeval Archtop,” in The Massachusetts Review: part personal narrative, part cultural history, it focused on my beloved vintage jazz guitar—a 1956 Gibson ES-125. As I relate in the essay, that love of my life landed in my lap thanks in no small part to a true conversion experience I had in July of 2001 when my wife and I (on her birthday, no less) went to see the New Guitar Summit, a jazz guitar trio backed by bass and drums, play at The Rendezvous, a seedy roadhouse in Waltham, Massachusetts. Here’s how I remembered that experience:

Of the three guitarists, only Gerry Beaudoin had marquee jazz credentials. The other two came to the idiom through the back alley—Duke Robillard as multi-time winner of the W. C. Handy Award for best blues guitarist and Jay Geils as co-leader of the top-forty blues-rockers The J. Geils Band. But each of them was more than able for the sort of music they played together—straight-ahead swing in the tradition of Charlie Christian, who had introduced the electric guitar to jazz during a celebrated stint with legendary clarinetist Benny Goodman from 1939 to 1941. Taking to the bandstand without fanfare, the New Guitar Summit opened with a neat arrangement of “Broadway,” a number associated with the Count Basie Orchestra. By the end of that first tune, I could feel the tectonic plates of my world shifting beneath my seat. How wonderfully happy those three men—those three middle-aged men (all in their 50s)—seemed as they took turns improvising multiple choruses over the chord changes. Their “jazz boxes”—their curvaceous archtops—snug beneath their right arms, their left hands running up and down the sveltely-tapered necks, their fingers stringing notes from the fretboards like strands of pearls hung in décolletage, they strummed and plucked with unabashed abandon, with unabashed joy. And so it went, tune after tune after tune—“Seven Come Eleven,” “Flying Home,” “Glide On,” “Jim Jam.” By the end of the evening, I was a seismically changed man. Driving home around midnight, I turned to my wife at a red light and said, “That’s what I want to do with my life.”

In the meantime, I’ve managed to catch Duke Robillard live-and-in-person several more times, including at Johnny D’s in Somerville where we had a moment to chat about guitars and such. I even attended a guitar workshop with him in Rhode Island, and of course I’ve managed to keep pretty much up-to-date with his recording output, including his most recent release, A Swinging Session. With tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton on board and Bruce Katz holding forth on the Hammond B-3 organ, it’s closer in spirit to my all-time favorite of Duke’s albums, the heavily jazz-inflected Swing, than to a more straight-ahead blues album like Duke’s Blues. Like all of Robillard’s albums, though, it’s a great mix of guitar-centered instrumentals and finely-turned vocals (the latter including some jukebox novelties from the 1940s). I’ve had A Swinging Session in my iPod mix for about two months now, and it still sounds fresh.

In the additional meantime, the New Guitar Summit—Robillard, Beaudoin, and Geils—also have a new release, Shivers. Anyone who has followed NGS from the start will realize quickly that three of the tunes included here—“Broadway,” “Flying Home” and “Jim Jam”—are exact reissues from their earliest CD sampler, Retrospective. (They also have a fine CD titled simply New Guitar Summit. They have a great DVD too, Live at the Stoneham Theatre, which I reviewed very positively a few years ago in the glossy quarterly magazine Just Jazz Guitar.) But the eight new tunes on Shivers complement those previously-released numbers very nicely indeed, as NGS more or less repeats the winning formula of playing either standards from the jazz repertoire (“Shivers,” “Honey Suckle Rose”) or standard-like originals (“Blue Sunset,” “Wellspring Blues”) while also adding a twist or two. In this case, the most interesting twist involves the guest vocalist—surprisingly, Canadian rocker Randy Bachman of The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive fame. He takes care of business (as it were) in fine fashion, showing off his bluesy vocal chops on “Your Mind Is On Vacation” and “Everybody’s Crying Mercy,” a couple of tunes penned by jazz pianist and vocalist Mose Allison. From start to finish on Shivers the arrangements are tight and the extended solos uplifting. It too will get its fair share of iPod playing time.

IF THERE'S A BLUES GUITAR HEAVEN . . .

Recently I came upon a blog entry that riffs sardonically on the notion behind that 1974 chart-buster by The Righteous Brothers, “Rock and Roll Heaven.” Equal parts catchy and corny, the song’s refrain—“If there’s a rock and roll heaven, well you know they’ve got a hell of a band”—prompted this hermeneutical musing:

For years, the notion of heaven as a sort of celestial amphitheater has captivated generations of slack-witted rock fanatics. One need only ponder the logistics for more than a second to realize this notion, however rosy, is deeply flawed and most assuredly false. In fact, if there is a “Rock And Roll Heaven”, one can rest reasonably assured that they’ve got a terrible, disorganized and awful sounding band.

Fair enough. But the death last March of Canadian blues-rocker Jeff Healey makes me wonder if Blues Guitar Heaven might be a bit more harmonious. I still remember the first time I heard—or even heard of—Jeff Healey. I was driving to work on the Southeast Expressway when his version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” came on the radio: I almost rolled my soccer-mom minivan over the railing and onto Neponset Circle. I remember thinking, “Take that . . . George Harrison”: although none other than Eric Clapton plays the guitar solo on the original Beatles version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on The White Album, for my money Healey’s recording was instantly the definitive one. For my money, indeed: that very afternoon I went out and bought the Jeff Healey Band’s LP Hell to Pay—which also became one of my first CD purchases when I made that conversion not long afterwards. Imagine my surprise, though, when I discovered via the liner notes that George Harrison actually plays acoustic rhythm guitar behind Healey on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Fair enough.

I’ve added lots of Healey to my CD library since then, including his posthumous release, Mess of Blues, which features a number of live cuts that testify to how, even as he was battling the sarcoma that would finally kill him at age 42, Healey remained a literal “guitar hero,” a vital musical force who could hold his own with the best of them. Blown away from the start by his technique and his attack, I didn’t realize until the first time I saw him perform—in a Tiresias-like cameo in Patrick Swayze’s knock-em-down-drag-em-out film Road House—that Healey, blind from infancy, played guitar in an unorthodox fashion, seated and with the instrument lying flat across his lap: that contributes to his distinctive phrasing and note-bending. On Mess of Blues, Healey delivers the goods one final time—as if from beyond the grave.

But Healey’s premature death reminded me of another guitar hero who died young—the matchless Stevie Ray Vaughan. In December of 1984, on the eve of undertaking a 12-hour solo drive, I bought a cassette of his album Texas Flood . . . and was enthralled from the moment I heard those opening double-stopped notes of “Love Struck Baby.” Twenty-five years and hundreds of thousands of miles later, I am still enthralled: SRV was a guitar player who had something to say on guitar and the talent to say it. When he died in a post-concert helicopter crash in 1990, the blues world lost a transcendent figure.

Which brings me to the question of whether “Blues Guitar Heaven” would suffer the same plague of prima donna-driven dysfunction that the aforementioned blogger projects for “Rock and Roll Heaven.” Not by the evidence of this priceless YouTube video featuring none other than SRV and a young Jeff Healey jamming on “Look at Little Sister.” If there’s a blues guitar heaven, who better to front the house band than Jeff Healey and Stevie Ray Vaughan?

"THE SMOKER" . . . STILL SMOKIN'

This weekend I picked up three books, for a dollar each, at a library booksale: a first edition (signed, no less) of Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls; a copy of Zoli, a novel about European Gypsies by New York City-based Irish novelist Colm McCann (I’ve had this title on my list for a while but hadn’t gotten around to picking it up); and Kissing in Manhattan, a collection of linked short stories by David Schickler.

I immediately dove into Schickler’s book . . . and was immediately reminded of the mixed reviews it received when it first appeared in 2001: a number of the stories strain the reader’s credulity, as at times both characters and action push the envelope of plausibility even for narratives set in NYC. One notable exception, however, is “The Smoker,” the story that gave Schickler instant celebrity when it first appeared in the June 19, 2000 issue of The New Yorker. What a debut: I remember reading it at the time—and I still remember the envy I felt! I felt it again when I re-read it this weekend. I’ll not give away any of its details here . . . but I will provide this link to the full text of the story. While the collection in its entirety may come up a bit short, “The Smoker” is an absolute keeper. Give it a read: I think you’ll agree.

MUSICAL INTERLUDES

Recent months have included a number of musical hits and misses at this address. As usual (for one reason or another), we missed some of the major musical events of the summer . . . such as the late July concert in Boston by The Eagles: by all accounts a stellar event. We also missed some lower-profile shows that I had on the calendar, like local blues guitar legend Ronnie Earl making all-too-rare appearances both in Fall River and in Natick and flashy blues guitarist Walter Trout playing in Fall River. Also, at the Regattabar in Cambridge, Jay Geils, Gerry Beaudoin and the Kings of Strings, featuring violinist Aaron Weinstein (whom I happened to see sitting in with legendary guitarist Les Paul at the Iridium jazz club in New York City a few years ago—only 17 years old at the time, a true child prodigy, he stunned even Les with his Stéphane Grappelli-esque virtuosity). Also Hubert Sumlin and Steady Rollin’ Bob Margolin playing at the Regattabar. Heck, we didn’t even get to see Ernie and the Automatics—the blues band fronted by car dealer Ernie Boch, Jr.—playing at Firefly's in Quincy!

So . . . who did we hear and see? Well, we got the summer off to a decent start with blues guitarist Jeff Pitchell playing in Natick. Pitchell, who hails from Connecticut, is not really a household name (note: he channels Stevie Ray Vaughan pretty effectively . . . but there will never be another SRV), but his show was fine and entertaining and I’ve added his CD Heavy Hitter to my iPod.

Another evening well spent was a family outing to the South Shore Music Circus in Cohasset (about 20 miles south of Boston) for a performance by a band called Rain that does a Beatles show, essentially tracing their career start-to-finish by performing their tunes live on stage. They not only sound like The Beatles—they also look like them (at least from a distance) . . . and they do costume changes, hair changes, etc. A very impressive “sound spectacle”! We all enjoyed it immensely—thanks in no small part to the venue: the South Shore Music Circus is a big-top tent with a revolving stage and not a bad seat in the house. (We saw the classic Canadian rockers The Guess Who perform there a few years ago—Burton Cummings, Randy Bachman and company: probably the best concert I’ve ever attended.)

One of the musical disappointments of the summer was the concert at the Somerville Theater featuring Shelby Lynne, a sort of crossover country/rock singer. The Boston Globe had an interesting feature on Lynne, so I decided that we all should go. Well, as my eldest daughter observed, she was “hot”—blonde, sexy, slim—and a pretty good singer; but she had no stage presence whatsoever (for someone in the business 20 years that’s kind of strange), and her band was a bunch a self-indulgent noodlers given to long meandering solos that simply took up time and sucked the energy out of the show. (One of the solos was even on a bass flute—an oxymoron if I ever heard one!) Lynne is pushing a new CD of tunes sung by Dusty Springfield many decades ago—an okay album . . . but overall the concert experience left something to be desired. . . .

Without a doubt the highlight of the summer was getting to see our long-time musical hero John Pizzarelli perform at Scullers Jazz Club in Cambridge. We’ve been fans for close to 15 years—we tuned in to his crooning and his guitar-playing long before his Foxwoods Casino commercials on TV made him a household face and voice—but this was the first time his passing through town coincided with an open date on our family schedule. He was great—well worth the wait! In fact, he was so much worth the wait that having taken daughters 2 and 3 to see his Friday night show, we returned on Saturday night with daughter #1. She even got to meet him after the show!

DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS . . . AND OTHER SUMMER READING

Summertime . . . and the reading is easy—or at least easier than during the other seasons of the year. I had no particular goal or plan for summer reading when I got started in June, but looking back over the past three months, I see that I’ve taken a decent run at my fiction bookshelf in particular.

I began by devouring in pretty much one sitting Steve Martin’s novella Shopgirl—a wistful tale of loneliness and love: an odd but engaging little book. Then I read Don DeLillo’s novella Pafko at the Wall; it is actually the prologue to his novel Underworld, but it was published in a stand-alone edition in 2001, the 50th anniversary of “the shot heard round the world,” Bobby Thompson’s pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants against the Brooklyn Dodgers on October 3, 1951, which the narrative focuses on. I started with those two shorties because I wanted to establish some readerly momentum early in the summer.

Next up was Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men—as dark and as grim and as gripping as anything I’ve ever read (including Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, which I read a number of years ago and still have not recovered from). I’m not sure when I’ll be ready for the movie. . . . After that I stayed deep in the heart of Texas with Larry McMurtry’s Texasville, the sequel to The Last Picture Show, which I read in the summer of 2007. I had been surprised by how unsophisticated (in a narrative sense) The Last Picture Show is—Texasville is even less sophisticated (and much longer), and I have to admit that I almost gave up on McMurtry’s yarn-spinning a number of times . . . but then there would be some little plot twist or character quirk that kept me going. And I guess the ongoing midlife (mis)adventures of protagonist Duane Moore must have me sufficiently intrigued, as I’ve already picked up a copy of the next installment, Duane’s Depressed. (Apparently there’s a fourth installment too, but the reviews of it are so bad that I’ve promised myself that I’ll not go there.)

If, in a sense, McMurtry’s version of Texas helped to dilute the bleakness of McCarthy’s version, in which the human capacity for utter evil is truly palpable, then Richard Ford’s Independence Day (the sequel to The Sportswriter, which I read two years ago) helped to add some gravity to the male midlife wistfulness of Texasville. Like McMurtry’s novel, Independence Day focuses on a man in his late 40s trying to make sense of life as he knows it—and trying (not always successfully) to live a decent life: trying to be a decent parent and a decent ex-husband and a decent citizen within his community, and so on. . . . McMurtry’s vision is mostly comic—Ford’s is not. . . . Independence Day is long and slow-moving, but altogether compelling, and I already have on the shelf the next installment of the adventures of Ford’s Frank Bascombe—The Lay of the Land.

After those two doorstoppers, I needed something a bit shorter and a bit less dense, and Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher fit the bill: it is deftly plotted with engaging characters and a thematic center with something at stake (the way that “the religious right” would take over even our youth soccer fields). A very satisfying read: entertaining but also thought-provoking. Perrotta will be visiting UMass Boston on Sunday afternoon, November 16th to read from his work under the banner of the fourth annual Shaun O’Connell Lecture.

Speaking of UMass Boston, the next book I picked up was Inland, the fourth novel by old friend and now-retired UMB colleague K. C. (Chet) Frederick. Unlike his first three novels, which are all set in unnamed countries in eastern Europe, this one is set at a graduate school in the American Midwest in the late 1950s. The novel captures the early Cold War paranoia of its time and place: populated by interesting characters and punctuated by finely executed scenes, Inland is well worth reading.

As soon as I put down Inland, I picked up another book engaging with the Midwest in the 1950s: Bill Bryson’s often-hilarious memoir of growing up in Des Moines—The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. I plucked that book off the shelf in a summer house in Rhode Island where I was visiting for the weekend; I was enjoying it so much that when the weekend ended I was tempted to steal it (well, borrow it . . . ) from our absent hosts, but I opted to get it out of my local library instead and finish it off.

After a few good laughs compliments of Bryson, I guess I felt ready for more denseness and darkness as I then returned to Cormac McCarthy—this time to his mostly-south-of-the-border-down-Mexico-way novel All the Pretty Horses. What a terrific book! I think I would include it on my Top 10 list of all-time favorites. The personal quest undertaken on horseback by young John Grady Cole takes on a mythic edge that cut deep into my readerly marrow. And reading this novel helped to underscore for me the difference between a yarn-spinner like McMurtry and a true storyteller like McCarthy: the world of McMurtry’s Texasville is mostly a projected pseudo-Texas, at times really a caricature of Texas, whereas McCarthy’s Texas-Mexico border country feels altogether grounded in “the real world.” Coming soon to a bookshelf near me: the other two volumes of “the Border Trilogy.”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (as it were), I decided to expand my range and so picked up The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Junot Diaz. The hype surrounding this novel—specifically the fact that it took Diaz upwards of 10 years to write it—reminded me of the hype that accompanied the publication of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim Two Boys a few years ago: put off by the hype, I was mildly skeptical about O’Neill’s novel . . . until I starting reading it. Ditto for my experience with Diaz’s novel: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is really an impressive piece of writing. In effect an exegesis of Dominican-American culture and society, the novel is both thematically and stylistically rich (much of the narrative as well as much of the dialogue is written in Spanglish); at times horrific in its depiction of “La Era de Trujillo” in the Dominican Republic, it is yet both humorous and poignant. In other words, it is very satisfying in every respect.

With August winding down, I concluded my summer reading with something completely different: Out Stealing Horses by Norwegian novelist Per Petterson. I have to admit that despite the critical acclaim this novel has received, I found it rather plodding and shapeless: not uninteresting . . . but hardly riveting. Still, I can’t complain, given the wealth of books that I did manage to work my way through from June through August.