The good folks at Queens University keep putting me to work, and I’m glad. We’ve got two more writing workshops that you can sign up for starting now.
The first one is “Writing In 3-D,” which covers the basics of learning how to write well — and how to see the world with a writer’s eye. It’s a two-day class from 9 a.m. to noon on Aug. 20 and 27. Click here to sign up.
The second workshop is “Writing What You Feel,” which focuses on writing the personal essay. It’s also a two-day class, from 9 a.m. to noon on Sept. 17 and 24. Click here to sign up.
UPDATE: If you go to those pages, you might see a notice about coupon discounts for the workshops. Here’s a message from Katie Yates at Queens:
There are a couple class discounts for current Queens students, Queens alumni, and people who refer two or more friends to the class. Learn more at www.queens.edu/continuing-education or e-mail yatesk@queens.edu.
By the way, in case you’re interested in both workshops: There’s a little bit of overlap between the two classes, but most of the material is fresh.
I hope to do at least one more class in the fall, and I think we’re going to try an online class in the spring for folks who live out of town or have a hard time getting to Queens on a Saturday.
These classes are a lot of fun for me, and I think you might actually learn something along the way. Holler if you have questions, thoughts, suggestions for other classes, etc.
I was driving home Wednesday, feeling a little down, not sure why, and the Black Crowes’ “Jealous Again” came on the radio. Somehow it was exactly what I needed.
Their firsttwo albums have been in my ears for 20 years now, and they always make me happy and glad to be alive and listening to music. And so I tweeted this when I got home:
Just about any problem I got, the first two Black Crowes records can fix.
Which gave me a thought.
What fixes you?
What do you turn to when you’re feeling bad that always makes you feel good?
It could be anything — a ballgame on TV, a photo album, an old dog, a stiff cocktail… whatever it takes.
I’ve been needing to spiff up the blog over here for a while now — I’ve got some upcoming projects that make more sense to mention here than in my regular spots at the Charlotte Observer. I’ve also been wanting to play around with some of the newer tools on the Web. So this makes sense as a way to do both.
Tonight I created a Tumblr called whatfixesyou.tumblr.com. It took about 10 seconds to start. But I need your help to fill it up. Tell me what fixes you.
You can leave a comment here or email me: tommy@tommytomlinson.com. Keep it simple — you don’t need to add all the backstory, just let me know what works. And if you can send along a photo or video or link, all the better. I’ll stick everything in the Tumblr and we’ll see what it looks like. I think it’ll probably look best if you add your name and where you’re from — “Jen from Cleveland” or “Bob from Alabama” or something like that. Pass it on to your friends if you’re so inclined.
Who knows? Maybe this becomes some strange and wonderful self-help manual. Or maybe it just becomes a place to talk about Black Crowes records. No harm, no foul. Drop me a line and let’s see where it goes.
Marshall Crenshaw writes top-10 hits for a radio station that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s the station with loud guitars but sweet melodies, complex chords but sing-along hooks, performed by singer-songwriters with cynical minds but bottomless romantic hearts. You can create that station on your iTunes playlist but you can’t hear it much out in the world unless one of those performers comes to your town. I’d been waiting for Marshall Crenshaw for almost 30 years.
I’m not sure where I first heard “Someday, Someway.” I vaguely remember the album getting a great review somewhere, and so I went and got it on cassette. Over the years I’ve played that first album more than maybe anything else in my collection. As I found love and lost it and found it again, when I wanted quiet lyrics or big guitars, as I moved forward and reached back, it always spoke to me. Still does.
He’s put out a dozen records since then, and there’s something on every one that sounds just like that radio station in my head — “Whenever You’re On My Mind,” or “Someplace Where Love Can’t Find Me” or “What Do You Dream Of?”
Last Friday night he sat in a chair on the little stage at the Evening Muse, maybe 100 people in the crowd, and he played for about an hour — 20 songs and not a lot of small talk. He alternated newer stuff with songs from what he called “the oldies bag.” (He said “Here’s one of my obscure numbers…” before kicking off “Someday, Someway.”)
I had seen him at the bar before the show started, chatting and drinking water from a bottle, and when the show was done he stood up and sort of shrugged his shoulders and walked back over there. People came by and shook his hand, got him to stand with them for pictures, asked him to autograph their old albums. He didn’t seem to mind. But it was hard to tell.
By some measures you could say Marshall Crenshaw never quite made it. “Someday, Someway” peaked at no. 36 on the pop charts. His one top-10 hit was co-written with, and for, somebody else — “Til I Hear It From You” by the Gin Blossoms. He did three Buddy Holly songs late in his set (he played Holly in the movie “La Bamba”), and they fit right in with his own songs. But Holly died a legend at 22, and Crenshaw is playing little clubs at 56.
But here’s the thing: Every person in that little club Friday night was paying attention. It was almost too quiet for a concert. It was more like church. I don’t know how many souls Marshall Crenshaw has touched, but he touched mine, and you could tell he had touched a lot of others in that room. That’s its own form of making it.
In the middle of the show he played a new song called “Live and Learn” — click the link and you’ll see a version with a full band, but at the Evening Muse he was alone with a guitar. It sounded like it could’ve come straight off that first album, straight out of that great lost radio station somewhere. Marshall Crenshaw is still putting out the signal.
This is for everyone who signed up for my workshop, Writing In 3-D, at Queens University on June 5. If you stumbled across this and you’re interested in signing up, here’s how to do that — the deadline to enroll is noon Friday. For those of you who have already signed up: Thanks. I think this’ll be fun.
Some logistical stuff:
Here’s a map of the Queens campus. The workshop is in Room 226 of the Sykes Learning Center, building 31. (Note that this is a change — it was originally scheduled for Sykes Auditorium.) I believe those of you who have signed up have already gotten information about parking. If not, email me.
Lunch is on your own. There are several good restaurants nearby (holler if you want any recommendations)… I’ll probably brown-bag it and sit outside somewhere if the weather’s nice. Feel free to hang out and chat.
You don’t need to read anything in advance… but here are a few things y’all might like that relate to some of what I’ll be talking about.
The comments on this blog post feature some of the best newspaper and magazine writers in the business owning up to their worst writing (the movie trailer at the beginning is funny in a most painful way).
This sweet, simple feature is beautifully written — but the real beauty here is a gifted reporter seeing what others wouldn’t have. (This is the best version I could find — sorry about all the ads.)
And finally, here’s an inspirational talk from Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the bajillion-selling book “Eat, Pray, Love.” This video is about 19 minutes long. It’s worth it.
As Woody Allen said: 80 percent of success is showing up.
The house lights were still up when Loudon Wainwright III walked onto the stage. So he could see that the 1,200-seat Knight Theater, beautiful as it is, was maybe two-thirds full. I wonder how many times he and Richard Thompson, separately and together, have played to theaters of quiet but devoted fans with empty seats in the back, all their talent not enough to fill the house. Talent doesn’t always sell tickets.
But God almighty, the talent.
Wainwright is 63 now, Thompson 61, and there’s no need to feel sorry for them — they’ve been able to do what they love and make a good living it for something like 40 years apiece. But you hear Wainwright crack open his family secrets and spill them on the floor, or you hear Thompson rev up a guitar break as powerful and precise as a Ferrari running through the gears, and you wonder why they’re not playing arenas.
And then you’re glad they’re not, because it would never be this quiet and you would never get this close.
Here’s Wainwright, in a rare moment at the piano, singing about how he notices his kids like to sing in the same key. Here’s him in “White Winos” singing about his mom liked her white wine, almost (but not quite) to the point where she would let loose her anger about his dad. Here’s him in “Unfriendly Skies” trashing an airport official named Susie who cracked his precious Martin D-28, then wouldn’t let it on the plane. (He calls her Susie because he doesn’t want to get sued. Then, in the next line, he lets slip that her name is Angela.)
He’s funny, heartbreaking, weird — he does a little Michael Jordan thing with his tongue in between verses — and worth the money all by himself.
But then Richard Thompson came on.
He played his bagful of alternate-universe hits like “Crawl Back (Under My Stone)” and “I Want To See the Bright Lights Tonight.” He absolutely killed a cover of Britney Spears’ “Oops… I Did It Again.” He filled every song with riffs and rolls and leads, always in service to the song, but at the same time proving that he’s one of the five best acoustic guitarists in the world.
And he played “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.”
If you know any Richard Thompson song, that’s probably the one — it’s on the setlists of a million folkies on open-mike nights, and iTunes shows me two dozen covers (I like the Mary Lou Lord version on “Live City Sounds,” recorded in a Boston subway station). It’s about a robber and the girl who loves him and the fine motorcycle they ride, and it’s tragic and epic and inspiring all tangled up in those six guitar strings and the way, at the end, that Thompson stretches out that last riiiiiiiiiiiiiide.
It was a performance strong enough for a million. About 800 of us got to see it. We went home lucky.
I warn you now, this will be a long and winding post… but you’ll hear some good music along the way. The first thing I want you to do is listen to this song “Kandi,” by a band called One Eskimo.
Lately I’ve been reading a fabulously cranky blog by a music-industry insider named Bob Lefsetz. He spends half the time telling record companies they’re screwed because they don’t understand how young people consume music, and the other half saying it doesn’t matter because all the new bands suck anyway. He’s self-contradictory and dismissive and you’d want to jump out the window if you ended up next to him on a plane. But every so often the joy he gets from music finds its way into a post. He’s the one who turned me on to “Kandi,” and sent me off on a musical walk in the woods.
It turns out the chorus from “Kandi” is lifted from a song by the R&B singer Candi Staton called “He Called Me Baby.” If you know Candi Staton at all, you really know your R&B or you know her one pop hit from the ’70s, “Young Hearts Run Free.”
(Yes, people did dress like that in the ’70s.)
Here’s her version of “He Called Me Baby” — the YouTube is just a photo of her, but it’s worth it to stop and listen.
That’s some classic Southern soul right there — you can draw a line from there to “Rock Steady,” to my ears anyway.
The only other thing I knew about Candi Staton was that she was once married to Clarence Carter, the blind Alabama soul singer. Clarence Carter you probably do know, especially if you have ever spent more than two hours in a Southern bar with a jukebox, because in that time, you are guaranteed to hear “Strokin’.” (lyrics NSFW but irresistible)
Let me ask you somethin’… What time of the day do you like to make love?
I sincerely hope Clarence has made six billion dollars from “Strokin’,” but he made a lot better music in his prime — just about every song was a cheatin’ song and they were all great. Especially “Slip Away.”
Back to “He Called Me Baby.” It wasn’t originally an R&B song either; a follow-up post from Lefsetz shows it came from Harlan Howard, the legendary country songwriter who wrote “Heartaches By the Number,” “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down” and dozens more country hits. His biggest hit was “I Fall To Pieces,” by Patsy Cline, and yep, it turns out Patsy did a version of “He Called Me Baby.”
You can wander off as far as you want when you do this sort of thing — I spent a couple of hours getting farther and farther from home, losing track of the song completely, until I somehow ended up at Leo Sayer and figured it was time to turn around.
I was telling somebody the other day that I’m getting shallower in my middle age. The big issues of the world — the things I ought to care about, especially as a professional journalist — don’t move me as much as they should. But sports and love and books and friends and music and dogs — I care about those things deeply, sometimes irrationally, and more than ever.
If you’ve come this far, God bless you, you probably care about some of those things too.
This blog has been dormant for a while as I made the transition from the fellowship life in Harvard back to the working life in Charlotte. I couldn’t figure out quite what to do with it considering I was already doing a blog for work. (And part of another.) But I think I’ve figured it out — here is where I’ll talk about music, and books, and sports, and some of those other passions that don’t quite fit what I do for a living. (Although I have managed to work it in on the job here and there.)
I think what all those things have in common is connections — in the same way that a chorus from a new song echoes back through tracks cut long ago, a line from a book or a play from a football game can vibrate with memories while at the same time being its own thing, right there, in the moment.
Go back to the top of this post and listen to “Kandi” again. It’s a great song. See where it takes you. We’ll meet back here shortly.
I’m coming late to the party on the news that Casey Kasem is retiring from “American Top 40.” To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure he was still alive, although his profane in-studio rant (BAD LANGUAGE ALERT) will surely live forever. It’s been a long time since I thought much about Casey Kasem. But for a few crucial years, he was the most important entertainer in my life.
This is going to make me sound like an unbelievable geek, so it’s accurate. From the time I was 11 or 12 until I was 15 or 16, I wrote down the Top 40 every week. I’d write down the artist, the song, the label, and off to the side I had a little arrow saying how far up or down the song was since the week before. In my town the Top 40 show was Sunday mornings — when we went to church — and so I’d put my little Sears portable tape recorder next to my Sears stereo and tape an hour (as much as the tape could hold) of the 3-hour show. Sometimes, when the preacher went long or we went out to lunch, I’d miss part of the show. Then I’d beg my mom later in the week to take me down to Norwich Street, where a bookstore that sold porn and cheap paperbacks was also the only place in town that sold Billboard magazine. Then, with the printed Top 40 in hand, I’d fill in the blanks in my little notebooks.
I rooted for some songs and against others — I remember really hating that Diana Ross theme from “Mahogany” for some reason, and of course it sailed right to No. 1. But there were thrills too — I couldn’t believe that something like “Ballroom Blitz” made it all the way into the top 5. Still love that song.
I couldn’t have told you back then why I was obsessed with the Top 40. I’m not all that sure I can tell you now. It had something to do with giving a sense of order to the world — the same reason I used to keep a scorecard for the baseball Game of the Week until I fell asleep in about the fifth inning. (I couldn’t get into regular-season baseball even when only one game a week was on TV.)
It had something to do with the dawning idea that some things in life were cool but also uncool, that you could like them and make fun of them at the same time. Everyone I knew listened to “American Top 40″ every week but everyone always made fun of the long-distance dedications — the thing Casey was ranting about up above — because they were so corny. We always had our little parody versions — We all thought the canine kidney transplant went well, but the next morning little Fluffy died in her sleep, and we’ve never been the same since… Casey, in honor of our little Fluffy, could you please play “Highway to Hell?”
But mostly, I think, it had something to do with fitting in. When I was little we listened to nothing but country in our house, and it took me years to get up to speed to what the other kids in school knew by heart. (I still remember hearing two classmates sing the break in “Black Water” and having NO idea what song it was.) This was a problem on many levels — I remember seeing everybody crowd around a kid with Nikes when I had never even heard of Nikes and had just recently found out about Adidas Stan Smiths, which of course by then were totally and completely out of style. When you’re 12, little stuff like that is somehow the most important information in the world, and I never felt like I was in on the conversation. Except for music. At that time — middle school, early high school — if you knew the Top 40 you could get by. And so I think what Casey Kasem gave me every week was comfort. One little part of my life where I wasn’t out of step.
Even back then, it wasn’t true that everybody was listening to the same music — I knew that from my country years. Now, of course, you can scan the iPods of your typical fifth-grade class and find everything from show tunes to Swedish death mental. We have access to more music, more movies, more clothes, more everything. I don’t miss the days when the Top 40 defined music. But I do miss getting out those notebooks every Sunday, drawing my little arrows, wondering what song was coming next, and what Casey would tell me about it. He helped me figure out the world, three minutes at a time.
There’s a new post about missing MTV. I’m still trying to figure out which stuff I write belongs over there (a work blog) and which stuff belongs over here (a personal blog). Of course, mostly I’m just trying to keep my head above water now that I’m back at work. Holler if you have any ideas for how to divide the blog (or how to keep from drowning, for that matter…)
