I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: JAY FARRAR-NonComm (May 17, 2019).

I didn’t like Uncle Tupelo back in the day. So when they broke up I didn’t really care.  I was supposed to care about the alt-country movement, but I didn’t. So I wasn’t interested in Sun Volt or Wilco.

Years later I have really gotten into Wilco and I feel like I’m supposed to dislike Jay Farrar because of the acrimonous split back in the day. But heck without the split, there’d be no Wilco.

I’ve never given Jay Farrar or Son Volt much thought.  So here’s my first real listen to him.

In this setting I find that he sounds a lot like John Doe, a deep soulful voice with acoustic guitar and electric accompaniment.

Jay Farrar‘s soulful folk sound graced the NPR Music stage Friday afternoon for the last day of NonCOMM. While he softly strummed his acoustic guitar, his Son Volt bandmate Mark Spencer backed him up on electric.

This set was made up of Son Volt songs.

He started with “The Reason” a thoughtful song and an indicator of what the rest of the set would sound like.  Calm music, lovely harmonies and pretty backing guitars.

Up next was “Reality Winner” which he introduced as saying “she was put in jail for sharing the truth.”  It’s a powerful song about a real incident that made news at the time but, like so many other things, it was eclipsed by the daily insanity of our government.  From The Boot:

Reality Winner, born in the South Texas town of Alice, is a veteran of the United States Air Force. On June 3, 2017, Winner was arrested after leaking a confidential document to an online news site, The Intercept.  “It’s a really unjust situation where Reality Winner leaked information for the right reason,” Farrar tells The Boot. “She proved that there was Russian interference in the 2016 [presidential] election.”

The lyrics:

What have you done, Reality Winner?
Reality Winner, what have you done?
This jail is a stone-cold answer
The biggest mistake of a Texas lifetime
In this ballad of the commander-in-chief
Is there any mercy for this standing belief?
Felt like gaslighting, not something to just accept
Proud to serve, just not this president
Those that seek the truth will find the answers

Up next was “Devil May Care”

Spencer harmonized with Farrar on a few songs; their vocals joined beautifully together for the chorus of “Devil May Care.”

There isn’t a lot of diversity in these songs.  Farrar’s voice is great but doesn’t change all that much.  They are good folk/country songs.  But I think it might be his presence that makes these song work so well:

The crowd was singing along to Farrar’s set and there was a feeling of mutual respect flowing between the performer and his audience. He has a stage presence that’s just plain cool. Not everyone can wear sunglasses inside without looking like a total jerk.

He introduced the next song saying that these songs are on the new Son Volt album of protest songs.  You may say “What is there to protest and I’d say Just about everything.”

Before singing “Union,” Farrar made a statement about there being protests about everything lately. He continued to tell this story through song while Spencer killed it on steel guitar.

This is a simple song that lays out our country’s divide and recounts Farrar’s father’s belief about the need for something to bind the country together: “He said national service/ Will keep the union together.”

“The 99” is also straightforward.  It may not be timely in the title (I don’t think people use that phrase as much anymore), but the sentiment is spot on:

Journalists in jail covering the scenes
The profit columns rise for the corporate machines
Take the stand now, protest and holler
Desecration of the land for the almighty dollar

Ninety-nine percent
Ninety-nine percent
It’s a trickle-down world
Like you’re stuck in cement

All of the songs were from the new album Union, but he ends the set with an old song.

The mood was brought back up as the set concluded with “Windfall”, a two-decade-old Son Volt song [from Trace].

It is certainly more positive, I guess from back when things were a bit better (the 90s).

[READ: June 3, 2019] “A Dream of Glorious Return”

It’s not often that people intentionally read twenty-year old news.  Maybe for historical reasons or, in my case, because you want to read a piece by a particular author.

So here is a twenty-year old essay from Salman Rushdie about the first time he returned to India after the fatwa had been put on his head twelve years earlier.

He returned to India in April 2000 (I guess the 90s weren’t great for Rushdie).

But first he talks about the many times he left India.  First when he was thirteen and went to boarding school in Rugby, England.  While he was away his father sold their family home in Bombay.  Salman was devastated and is still angry about it.  He believes he would be living there today if they still owned it.

In 1981 he wrote his first novel (Midnight’s Children) about trying to reclaim India.  In 1988, he was planning to buy a house in Bombay with the advance money for The Satanic Verses.  After it was published, he was no longer allowed to set foot in the country of his birth.

India was the first country to ban the book–before it even entered the country. This was done in a desperate (and unsuccessful) attempt by a politician to win Muslim voters.  The ban was still in place as of 2000.  I had no idea that India had a battle between Muslims and Hindus which I gather is still going on.

In the later 1990s, there was some kind of agreement between the British and Iranian governments that effectively set the fatwa aside and opened up India to him.  He was granted a five-year visa.

This trip had made many people very nervous.  But he wanted to go, because if he didn’t go, he’d never know if he could.  Plus his son Zafar wanted to see his homeland.

His arrival is uneventful to the country, but a huge deal to him as the country comes racing back at him all at once.

He talks a lot about politics and the corruption that is evident in the country.  Like Laloo Prasad Yadav and his wife Raori Devi.

Some years ago Laloo, then state Chief Minister was implicated in the Foder Scam [public money was used for cows that didn’t exist].  Laloo was jailed but first managed to make his wife the Chief Minister, and blithely went on running the state, by proxy, from his prison cell.

Had I read that twenty years ago I would have been stunned that a country could be so corrupt.  But I am reading it in 2019, the age of trump where he has put all of his cronies in office and is allowing his criminal friends to go free while he himself commits crime after crime and I realize that we are worse than India was because we pay lip service to our freedom and democracy while it is trampled. If the upcoming election doesn’t kick these criminals out of office then we are toast.

Zafar was twenty and was engaging with India seriously.  At first he noticed the poverty, terrible Indian MTV, and Bollywood movies.  But Salman couldn’t tempt him into Indian national dress. Salman wears the loose kurta-pajama outfit, but Zafar wears a T-shirt and cargo pants (although by the end he is wearing the white kurta, but not the pajamas).

Rushide say that his son has not read more than a few chapters of his books.  Children need their parents to be parents not novelists.  But now he is getting a crash course in Salman’s novels.  As they travel around Salman talks about the places and people that inspired parts of his books.

Rushdie says he knew this first visit would be a big deal.  He imagined that the second one “Rushdie returns again” would be less important and the third would just be “oh here he comes once more,”  But for now security wants him covered and hidden whenever he goes out.

Bill Clinton’s visit to the subcontinent was at the same time as his own (forty percent of Silicon Valley start ups are started by people of Indian origin).  People fawned over Clinton:  “India and the US the two great democracies….all said without any sense of irony at all.”

The India that remains in thrall to extreme religious–communalist sectarians; the India that cannot feed or educate or gave proper medical care to its people; the India that can’t provide its citizens with drinkable water–these were not paraded before The President of the United States.  (Apparently they were paraded before the current one, because he seems to be trying emulate that part).

Zafar gets sick eating the shrimp.  Salman should have reminded him about the basic rules for travelers in India:

always drink bottled water, make sure you see he seal on the bottle being broken in front of you, never eat salad (it won’t have been washed in bottled water) , never put ice in your drink (it won’t have been made with bottled water) … and never, never eat seafood unless you’re by the sea.

As the essay ends, the press has become aware of Rushdie’s visit.  It becomes news and Muslim politicians are up in arms.  One of them plans to go to a prominent mosque and call for a demonstration against Rushdie.  If the numbers are sufficiently large it could bring the county to a stand still.

In the end only two hundred people show up to protest–in India that number is smaller than zero.  In fact, when he goes to The Commonwealth Prize reception later that night, he is greeted warmly–friends and reporters smile at him. He even gets a few “welcome homes.”

Even the media seems over it.  One commentator wrote: “He is reconciled with India and India with him.”

Now twenty years later, it all seems like so much ancient history.  And Rushdie might even be a better writer.