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I recently discovered these liner notes in an old computer. Originally, this essay was intended to accompany Rant In E Minor, the last Bill Hicks release he oversaw before passing away from pancreatic cancer in 1994. Doubtless Bill would be chagrined to learn how much larger in death he’s become than he was at the end of his 32 years. This piece was written shortly after Bill’s death, while the sting of his passing was still with those of us who loved him off as well as on stage, and long before he became the posterchild of disaffected grunge-lovers and the cognoscenti. Ultimately Rykodisc decided to pursue “a different design direction” (as I recall it), and there was no room left for the liner notes.
I’ve cleaned up the grammar, but otherwise, they’re just as written in the mid-’90s.

Bill Hicks
Rant in E Minor

You’re holding the last work of Bill Hicks, comic.
It’s not only the final record Bill personally oversaw with the intention of a public release – it’s his farewell and the way he wanted to say goodbye.
During the interval between this newest album, and the last, Relentless, a couple of things happened that bear mentioning: First, Bill died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 32. Second, legions of sycophants, groupies, wannabes, bloodsuckers and money-grabbers have suddenly embraced him as their posterboy, a martyr for the ‘90s who could make you laugh.
They did not know Bill, but he knew them. He saw through them to the bone, whether their rings were on their pinkies or through an eyebrow. Bill gives special attention to those deserving individuals on this disc, and God help them. Hicks had a number of vices in his short life — of which he spoke often and fondly –but hypocrisy was not one of them.
Many of the same people who pronounced Bill too edgy and self-destructive while he was alive now want to cozy up to his memory. They all want a little piece of Bill – to say that yep, he sure was a comic genius, and it’s a dirty rotten shame you didn’t know him like they did.
They knew nothing of Bill. But who did?
Not the showbiz insiders who heard cash registers chime whenever his name was mentioned, but could never figure out how to tame the savagery in his social commentary enough to position Hicks in the right sitcom. That, of course, is where all good comedians go when they run out of ideas or decide to cash in rather than cultivate an original opinion and express it uniquely. Bill Hicks’ mind was too subversive, too independent to be straitjacketed into some vapid half-hour product for mass consumption.
Musicians too, especially those on the vanguard of the current alternative scene, like to call Bill one of their own, and their claim resonates with some legitimacy. Hicks spoke passionately about disaffection, dislocation and the other demons that continue to plague America’s youth. He was also an unabashed music lover and talented enough in his own right to add (in collaboration with longtime Hicks producer Kevin Booth) musical counterpoint to the tracks on Rant In E Minor.
What may of them never knew is that offstage, Bill was most often anonymous and contemplative or, in his early days, partying his ass off. Out of the spotlight, Hicks was an affable fellow who read serious books and harbored a genuine desire to see the face of God revealed. Great music inspired him, and in turn, his comedy inspired numerous contemporaries in the rock world. But unlike some of his nihilistic counterparts in music, Hicks believed seeking personal solutions was at least as important as railing against society’s shortcomings in public.
It was his own journey, he’d say, nothing he’d necessarily recommend to anyone else. Yet, in his short time, he did more exploring than most men twice his age. This guy who loved to sleep in found himself nonetheless up at all hours wrestling with an idea because his mind wouldn’t shut up and let him doze off.
Comedians on the club circuit who crossed paths with Bill also own a place in the Rubik’s cube of his personality. Hick’s place in the pantheon of comics will be debated in green rooms across the country until all the deli trays are empty and some new face gets stuck with the tab. They’ll argue about what he contributed, who he was influenced by and who stole from him. While he was around, they marveled and how Bill’s mind worked and debated his ideas incessantly. They could mimic him, but they couldn’t match him.
Only a few understood that what made Bill’s routines kill was the degree of personal integrity he invested in every bit. And once you fell in with that notion, the only remaining choice was to either be yourself – which, by definition, wouldn’t be Bill – or admit that you were a simple jester; a teller of jokes, a latter-day vaudevillian. Which is not to say you couldn’t be rich and famous and have a TV show with your name on it.
In the dewy shadows of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning In America” campaign, comedy clubs sprouted like mushrooms, and Bill Hicks worked nearly every one of them during the 1980s. Apparently born without a modesty gene, Hicks frightened some people with his unflinching frankness on stage. Hicks made his bosses crazy by driving paying customers out into the night with harangues about audiences sleepwalking through life (long before The Matrix did the same). Those same club managers would then see Bill’s darkness dissipate like a freak thunderstorm. As his clouds lifted, the show tightened, and he’d lure passersby into the venue until nearly every empty seat was refilled. No matter his mood, Hicks’ material was always unique. Friends and family routinely blushed to hear some bit of their lives transmuted into comedy, while the ‘80s bowheads and their frat-rat boyfriends grumbled that Hicks had no fag jokes, no wife jokes, or wicked impressions of foreign-born convenience store clerks.
Had he wanted, Bill could have composed a set of such material in his sleep and walked away wealthy. Instead he chose the path recorded here, and as always, Hicks’ words cut because they carry the weight of conviction.
When he flays open a victim like Billy Ray Cyrus, Rush Limbaugh or even Jay Leno, Hicks is totally in the moment, up to his eyeballs in righteous indignation. People loved his integrity. They admired that, in a world where beliefs are only as firm as poll numbers suggest they ought to be, someone was actually up in front of them speaking his mind. Further, Hicks required that his audiences think, and they returned his high estimation of them with adulation. He is the only artist I’ve ever seen whose crowds aspired to be worthy of a performer, rather than the other way around.
Listen now to what Bill wanted you to hear. It is by turns insightful and filthy, harrowing and hilarious. Hicks gathers all of humanity’s most provocative images and rubs our collective noses in them. Sure, Hicks drops the “F” bomb like Hansel and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs. But alongside the expletives is as much heartfelt spirituality as a half-dozen houses of worship export on a high holy day. Rant in E Minor skitters through the strata of social ills like an Uzi at a skeet shoot, exploding every myth in sight. This is the last document of the public Bill Hicks, and it will leave you breathless.
“I feel especially good about this record,” says producer Kevin Booth. “Every one of them has killer material, but this is the one that I think captures Bill at the intensity you’d experience at a live show. The others give you Bill at a level of 7 or 8. This is Bill on 10, hitting on a cylinders.”
Doubtless some will claim that Hicks goes to too far here. He lampoons the Pope. He lambastes flag-lovers and his anatomical references are straight out of sixth-grade gym class. He asserts that we are all slaves of mass media and a market economy kept stupid, slothful and intoxicated by power mongers whose motives only start at sinister.
In a world uncomfortable with irreverence, Bill did more than suggest the emperor had no clothes. He most pointed bits blew up skirts and depantsed the rest of us until everyone involved stood psychically naked facing each other. Ultimately, with no beepers, bumper stickers, or gangwear to sort us according to tribe, Bill mused that we might be brothers and sisters after all.
And in a world where entire economies depend on making someone the enemy, Hicks often went overboard to demonstrate how infinitesimal the differences between us really are. No wonder many people found him threatening.
But can you go too far with an idea? And how free is a society if we hold the stars and stripes sacrosanct, but have no tolerance for the freedoms (freedom of speech, for example) that the flag represents? Consider that, after you’ve let Bill do his job as a comedian one more time.
And know that Bill Hicks remains an elusive person upon whom his fans project that which they want to see. To some, he was a brilliant social satirist; to others, he was simply a foul-mouthed juvenile. Both contain a germ of truth. But whether you think of him as comedy’s answer to Kurt Cobain or the funniest person never to attain household name status, know that the closest you’ll ever get to knowing Bill Hicks is on the disc enclosed here.
That should be close enough. And it gives Bill the last word. He’d like that.
Kevin Phinney
October 1996

Will Rogers did it 75 years ago, and now I’m trying to reclaim the op-ed page as entertainment. Think of it as a Bill Mahr monologue without Bill, or an attempt to let some hot air out of the editorial. The first of these I wrote last fall when the debate season was starting to lurch into gear. It seems whenever I’m at home on a weekday, the television is locked onto MSNBC for Hardball with Chris Matthews, Tucker, who remains annoyingly smug even after ditching his bowtie, and Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
Watch enough of this stuff, and it begins to seep out of every pore and, eventually, onto the computer screen…

The Not-So-Great Debates

The major presidential contenders have been squaring off in televised debates for months now, but with the Iowa caucuses looming, many of us are only beginning to pay attention.
And there’s a reason we haven’t been tuning in – which it has nothing to do with distractions from Britney, Harry Potter, his gay headmaster, Dumbledore, or how many shopping days we have left this season. We’re not stupid, and we understand that in this era of 24-hour news cycles, editors and producers are scrambling for something to catch our attention and the ad dollars that come with it. The candidates, most of whom can use all the exposure they can get, are only too willing to show up in Des Moines, Saratoga or on the banks of the Ganges if it means they’ll be in front of a national audience long enough to “look presidential.”
But so far this campaign season, what we’ve gotten is less information and more posturing soundbites. It’s as though the race for the White House is our newest reality show. It was never the best program on the tube, but now that the Hollywood writers’ strike is in full swing, it may soon be the only show in town not in reruns.
Why is it that media pundits seem more focused on handicapping the contestants than in addressing the issues? If you’re going to treat candidates for the highest office in the land like contestants on Project Runway or Survivor, let me suggest we simply start challenging them in the same way. Who can wrap him or herself in the flag most attractively? Can the frontrunner beat the opposition in an actual footrace? Who wins immunity this week? Who’s being voted off the dais? We can send newscasters back to their TelePrompTers, and let Heidi Klum strut out to tell Democrats and Republicans alike: In the world of politics, one day you’re in; the next day, you’re out. Auf Weidersehen, darling.
Why so cynical? Well, look at the fireworks produced by the debates so far: In an early debate on the Republican side, Rudy Giuliani made Ron Paul look like a naïve schoolboy who failed to appreciate our role in the War On Terror. Congressman Paul suggested that the fanatics who flew planes into our buildings must have been angry at something, and that if we really wanted to disarm the terrorists, we might consider the possibility of attacking their motivations instead of their relatives.
Then two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton created so much of a firestorm with her equivocating response to a question on immigration that viewers scarcely noticed what moderator Tim Russert did to poor Dennis Kucinich. Here’s Kucinich, a serious presidential contender – someone earnest in his pursuit of the nation’s highest office, and a man present to answer questions about where he would lead the country – quizzed about his encounter with a UFO.
Kucinich is a gentleman, and answered the question as asked. That’s too bad, because it displayed him at best as a fringe candidate, and at worst as a complete crackpot. Had someone asked me, I’d have said, “You know, a few days before he died, Abraham Lincoln dreamt people in the White House were mourning the assassination of the president – something which had never happened up to that point in American history. Was he mentally unstable?
“Now, do you have a policy question for me on one of those little flashcards of yours?”
It’d be nice if the moderators held themselves to the same standard of gravitas they set for Democrats and Republicans alike. And, if not, let’s just abandon any pretense of solving the country’s problems and install hidden catapults behind the lecterns so that we can ask questions like, “What’s the airspeed velocity of an unladen African swallow?” as the gatekeeper does in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Or imagine the fun when Joe Biden or Tom Tancredo mistakenly reveals his favorite color to be… “Blue. No… Green!” “ARRRRGHHHH!”
Hell, I’d TiVo that.

This was written shortly after the murders at Virginia Tech, and modified a few months later. I still hear the phrase “face of evil” attributed to someone, or some thing, new every few weeks on the news.

Evil Has a Face

If the stock market could trade Evil as commodity, it’d be time to buy. These days the “Face of Evil” belongs to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose visit to America was marked by The New York Post headline, “The Evil Has Landed.” This comes after much tough talk from Ahmadinejad, ranging from assertions that The Holocaust never happened to his stated wish that Israel be wiped from the face of the Earth.
The media knows that whenever “evil” gets trotted out, Americans prick up their ears. Last summer, evil wrapped its coils around pro wrestler Chris Benoit, who murdered his wife and family in a testosterone-fueled rage before committing suicide. Or maybe Crandall Canyon mine owner Bob Murray had it right: When the mountain he was excavating in Utah claimed the lives of six miners and another three who died tried to rescue them last summer, Crandall proclaimed the mountain itself to be evil. Typically, “evil” is a tag reserved for sentient beings who ought to know better – the Scott Petersens and O.J. Simpsons of the world. But check the cable headlines every few days and there’s some new culprit clawing from the primordial ooze to spike a teacup with radioactive material, kidnap a child, or set a chunk of California ablaze. Before you can say “Special Bulletin,” the media alarm has us all metaphorically crouching under our desks, waiting for The Big One to drop. To paraphrase mythologist Joseph Campbell, “When you have an invisible cure for a non-existent disease, then you really have something you can sell.”
News editors and producers understand that nothing moves their product like an unexpected bloodletting. And although no one has publicly tallied the financial bump in broadcast ratings and rack sales that occur whenever violence erupts, we can safely guess it’s in the millions of dollars, which is good news since the coverage itself can run into serious money. When the U.S. began its invasion of Iraq, CNN marked the occasion not only with a new set of graphics, but a few bars of iconic theme music.
Apparently, we eat it up. Americans can’t seem to turn away from the faces of mass murderers. But what are we looking for when we peer into their eyes? Here’s Evil Personified, we’re somberly informed, and now you and I are gazing upon it. As witnesses, our first response seems to be to emphasize the differences between them and us – thereby putting distance between their misdeeds and our own more measured responses. Traces of the perpetrator’s individuality are sketched out in a few journalistic keystrokes, progressing quickly to bromides about “cold and distant” loners who were “filled with rage.” In this age of the 24-hour news cycle, their images flicker and taunt us – suggesting that if only we could think long enough, or hard enough, or deeply enough, we’d be able to understand the inexplicable.
Over and again, it’s the same tableau: Our Man on the Scene, clutching a microphone and nodding gravely, allows eyewitnesses to share each piercing detail on the half hour. A click away, a tabloid-trained reporter adds “perspective” as the concerned-but-indignant voice of the people. Then there’s a patchwork biography disguised as a Special Report, to help us identify that tipping point in the perpetrator’s life, followed by the timeline of his or her offense. See, it’s all there in black, white, and color: Another textbook example of evil at work in the world.
It’s easier to dispatch such a complex problem with the simple rubric “Evil” than to entertain, even for an instant, the mystical grace that prevents each of us from wandering into McDonald’s armed to the teeth one sunny morning.
Why do the distant gazes of Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Charles Manson haunt us so, and, more importantly, how does it serve us to wonder about them at all, if the most insightful determination we can arrive at collectively is that they’re “evil?” If we must wade into the water of absolutes, shouldn’t such a pronouncement follow a consideration of the events and personalities involved, rather than a pre-emptive conclusion that short-circuits any attempt to think more deeply?
Maybe we find it hard to turn away because we want to discover what it takes to make that leap into infamy. It seems unlikely that these miscreants sat at a school desk behind us and, on career day, considered the plusses of mounting a bloody rampage that ends in blaze-of-glory suicide. Who grows up thinking, “I could be the next Zodiac Killer?” Do we ask, should we – if we aren’t all capable of such carnage were it not for some vital puzzle piece of DNA or socialization? Certainly we guess at what makes them snap; how long they marinated in real or imagined abuse before their psyches were so thoroughly poisoned that their insanity made sense.
In this age of life lived through reality TV, Orange County Housewives grouse that their remodel is behind schedule or the regular massage therapist is on vacation, and our travails all look petty – until one of us goes ballistic. But most of us won’t Lose It. Instead we’ll remain in single file, order the latte, and wrestle privately with our worries and hopes until the next payday. What is it that keeps the Silent Majority from taking up arms against their supposed sea of troubles and by opposing, end them, along with the lives of those they hold responsible? After all, the Columbine Kids were raised among us, as were Timothy McVeigh and Virginia Tech Shooter Cho Seung-Hui. And if we don’t ask ourselves what it all means, not as statisticians or psychologists, but as thinking human beings trying to comprehend our coexistence, then what good is the media saturation we’re forced to endure every time one of us goes berserk? Are we just rubbernecking, the way we still do over 9/11 or the Kennedy assassinations or the Lindbergh baby kidnapping? Are these simply jolting anomalies in the progression of a natural world? Sorting it out is like asking lightning where it likes to strike.
Actually, as a label, “evil” has a connotation similar to lightning striking; it’s totally random, patently beyond mortal control and something neither you nor I are ever likely to encounter. Fine. So what are we supposed to do with we’re confronted with these images when they’re delivered to our doorstep? Become so frightened of our neighborhoods that we keep our kids inside and only allow them out in the backyard to exercise? Enter and leave the house via a locking garage? Post no internet bios and chat online only with people we’ve met in real time? Take up a martial arts course, keep an assortment of pepper sprays handy, and leave no caller IDs anywhere? Surely our insatiable curiosity means more than to rubberstamp the media’s notion of who ought to be today’s Worst Person In the World. The degree of our fixation on these miscreants suggests that they have something vital to teach us –not about themselves, but about us. If most of us don’t want to join the ranks of Evildoers, but some do anyway, where did they slip, and how can we avoid doing the same?
There are more than six billion of us surfing these unstable tectonic plates as we hurtle too quickly through space and life, skidding toward inevitable deaths we can expect to be unpleasant and untimely.
Maybe what we’re looking for in those twisted faces is some reassurance that at least today, we’re not among the evil – or their luckless prey. It’s like the old joke about scanning the obits for your own name before heading out to work. Thank the Deity of your choice (or your own abs-of-steel moral core) that it was someone else out of the six billion of us who twisted off, maybe while you were NOT hunting down that guy in the Escort who cut you off, then flipped you off three exits back. Evil is not a condition or a diagnosis. It’s a succession of choices, made by someone born as innocent as any of us. You deserve congratulations, all right, for choosing compassion even as you rush from appointment to obligation. But don’t kid yourself: You could choose wrong one day, just like the face on the news. Evil forever seeks a new poster child.

Here’s an overdue eulogy for the western hero I wrote in late summer of 2007. . .

How the West Was Lost

I got a chance to see 3:10 To Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford recently, and I left them both with my head swimming in a sea of nostalgia and confusion. What happened to our love for the Western Hero? Why do today’s audiences prefer superheroes and wizards and Wookies to that serape-wrapped, cigar-chewing gunslinger with the lethal squint?
There’s something about the western, and the Old West in general, that still captivates the little kid in all of us, I think – and ladies, that includes you. It’s about real unknowns, possibilities, and peril only a few generations removed from where we are now. It’s about uncharted horizons, the danger of being filled full of arrows and scalped by those through whose land we stole. There’s something about hardship and privation, and the testing of our collective mettles that makes us turn inward and ask if we, under those circumstances, would have had “the right stuff.”
But sometime after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid appeared in 1969, America abandoned the Western hero, in the same way that many contemporary African Americans reject the Bedraggled Bluesman as an embarrassing remnant of a past we’d rather forget. Or perhaps it was the rise of anti-heroes, those amoral characters portrayed as neither good nor bad, but compelling nonetheless. I’m talking about the Bonnies and Clydes, the Michael Corleones, Liza Minelli’s Sally Bowles from Cabaret, Jane Fonda’s hooker in Klute and dozens more, including Butch and Sundance themselves. The Old West of Gunsmoke and Bonanza were places where the bad guys and good guys were readily identifiable, or so we thought, until Dustin Hoffman sided with the Indians against Custer in Little Big Man. Cowboys have been playing catch-up ever since.
Every once in a while, there’s an anomaly like Silverado in the ‘80s, or Unforgiven and Dances With Wolves in the ‘90s that remind us of why we loved westerns in the first place. They take us well out of our world where we have such limited control over our lives, and put us in charge of everything except the elements.
In 3:10 to Yuma, Christian Bale plays a homesteader who’s lost part of his leg in the Civil War, and along with it the respect of his wife and teenaged son. To turn a much-needed fast buck, he joins a detail to squire a murderous outlaw (played with delicious malice by Russell Crowe) to the prison-bound train – the 3:10 To Yuma, Arizona. Their trip unfolds like the Messiah’s temptations in the wilderness – there’s an Indian ambush, and Crowe’s character offers an increasingly attractive series of bribes. Of course, Bale’s hero only becomes more resolute when the stakes are raised, and we admire that.
But don’t we also long for that kind of world, where we have decisive moments that test and reveal our own true nature? In most of our lives, there’s simply no opportunity for that kind of confrontation, unless you’re in law enforcement or serving in combat. When something goes wrong in our world, there’s no one standing 30 paces away on Main Street that we can stare down and demand satisfaction from. Instead, we’re caught in the gooey limbo of never finding the one responsible for our frustration. Instead, we’re lulled into giving up the chase after a few numbing minutes of Pressing One for English, Pressing Three if this is about an existing account, holding for the next available operator, and finally being patched through to someone we know is not responsible for putting a cactus needle in our backsides with their crappy service.
The Old West remains a tough sell to moviegoers largely because we regard it now as a minefield of political incorrectness. You’ll get no argument from anyone who’s ever seen an episode of Deadwood. Former slaves and slavers roamed the landscape. We were busy making and breaking treaties with Native Americans even as we systematically exterminated them, along with the buffalo. And a number of the folk heroes we revered were particularly unworthy of our adulation.
Consider Exhibit A: The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford. Here, Brad Pitt plays James the desperado, and it’s his best performance in years. His outlaw hero is a mood-swinging sociopath, but Casey Affleck plays Ford as a man captivated by James’ legend and the sway it holds over a world with so few celebrities. Ford regards Jesse in the same way perhaps that Booth viewed Lincoln, or Mark David Chapman came to fixate on John Lennon. If I kill Jesse, Ford reasons, I become him. Casey Affleck reveals Ford slowly, in a deadly game of distrust opposite Pitt’s Jesse James, and for a while, we wonder who’s going to kill who first, which is quite a feat since we know from history how it all turns out.
When it’s all said and done, the Assassination of Jesse James, like Brokeback Mountain, isn’t really a western at all. It’s a character study, and these characters, with their hidden motives unfulfilled desires, are much more like you and I today.
Me? I long for the cold steel of pearl handled six-guns at my fingertips and the chance to look my troubles in the eye before someone shouts, “Draw!”

First, thanks to the many folks who’ve called or e-mailed to say they’ve seen “Souled American” in PEOPLE magazine (the January 16th issue, page 45), and to offer their congratulations and support. Now February’s Black History Month offers an opportunity to back up and basically re-launch the book, so toward that end, you’ll be able to see, hear, or find cyber evidence of those efforts from the following places:

Nationally, I appeared with Tavis Smiley on his NPR program, “The Tavis Smiley Show” on Christmas Day. It’s archived to hear on his website, which is easily Googleable (for lack of a better word) by entering — in quotes — both “Kevin Phinney” and “Souled American” in Google’s search field, then scrolling down to Tavis Smiley. It’s very well produced, and Tavis asks some very pertinent and pointed questions.

Coming up in Seattle, I’ll be with Megan Sukys and Dave Beck on Thursday, Jan. 26 at 2 p.m. as their guest on KUOW’s “The Beat.” And on January 31 at 7:30 p.m., I’ll be reading and signing at Seattle’s best-known indie bookstore, Elliott Bay I’m in Portland, Oregon at Powell’s bookstore, the largest indie bookstore in that city, on February 13. Check Powell’s website for the exact time.

Also in the works for February are reviews or features around the country, including an appearance with an old friend, Michael Calleri, on his new radio program, “The Newsroom,” in Buffalo, NY. There’s a distinct possibility of something appearing in my former home of New Orleans in the Times-Picayune from Keith Spera, in Detroit from my college entertainment-writing colleague Doug Pullen, and a few words from the local paper in Lubbock, The Avalanche-Journal, where one of my first inspirations in journalism still abides, William D. Kerns. (For those of you who don’t know, I attended Texas Tech in Lubbock, where I sat behind would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley in magazine writing class.)

On a side note, I found both Doug and Bill Kerns while trying to track down my college journalism prof, Steve Monk. I did reach his wife, Gaye, who let me know Steve passed away six years ago after a bout with lung cancer. Steve was such a genial spirit, and so sharp with both his tongue and a No.# 2 pencil that I found it nearly impossible to satisfy him and irresistable keep from trying. You simply couldn’t have asked for a more encouraging or more involved mentor. I’m deeply saddened that he’s gone, and that I’d fallen so far out of touch as not to know until now. Gaye and his kids are soldiering on, and she was both upbeat and gracious in our brief time together on the phone.

Back on the hustings, look for these big doings: I’m still in negotiations to appear in Memphis at the Stax Museum in February for Black History Month, still speaking with the folks in western Washington at WSU in Pullman about appearing there — and perhaps attending the Lionel Hampton Jazz Fest in nearby Moscow, Idaho at the end of February. And I’m pleased to say that Cleveland radio host Bobby Jackson and I are working on a multi-houred series on “Souled American,” which we rather ambitiously hope can be on the airwaves, yes, in time for Black History Month.

Last but far from least, I’m looking forward to a possible return to Austin in March for South By Southwest 2006. With Neil Young as the keynote speaker, it ought to another fascinating four-day Death March from one hotel or pub to another. I’m waiting to find out if there’ll be another panel on race and music — if so, and I’m invited, I could never resist the opportunity to listen and learn.

More detail as these events and/or articles firm up.

I’ve been a Seattlite for just about a month now, and life is finally starting to take on a sense of the routine. A week after I arrived, I visited KUOW, one of two public radio stations here, and this was to appear via ISDN (a high-audio-quality designated phone line) on the Tavis Smiley show. No one was certain when my recorded appearance would air, so we’ve been monitoring the airwaves and hoping to either catch it, or hear from someone who has. Insofar as KUOW is concerned, they seem like terrific folks and have an amazing facility there, so I may see if there’s a way I can wheedle myself back into radio without going the commercial route.
Insofar as “Souled American” is concerned, there have been some terrific reviews published overseas in MOJO and UNCUT magazines, and I hope to get those posted in the near future. A simple trip to Google will get you most of the others.
Speaking of reviews,.. if you like “Souled American,” and its message — that the differences between us are not nearly so great as the commonalities among us — I encourage you to post a review on Amazon. I’m led to understand that potential buyers really do use the site as a consumer guide, so any kind of endoresment from the general reading public would be most helpful and greatly appreciated.
And last for today, I want to say congratulations to my family at KGSR on the occasion of their 15th Anniversary. My understanding from chatting with Jody is that the show was a blast and that the move to a new locale (although we’ll all miss the ACL Soundstage) was a smart choice that paid off. As this week also marks a quarter century since we’ve lost John Lennon, it’s good to know that his work of bringing unity and peace through music continues with the many people he inspired — including my friend Jody Denberg. We’re about to link my site with the KGSR site, so those of you in Cyberville will find it easier than ever to click from here to there (where my John Fogerty interview can be heard), and back here for updates about me and my exploits regarding a “Souled American” documentary, CD box set, steak knives and commemorative plates (just kidding on the last two).
I’ll go into more detail on my progress in the next installment. Suffice it to say that I am wearing the worst haircut I’ve had since the 1960s — it’s growing out, but I still look like an extra from the cast of “Slingblade” (”Uh-huh”), and struggling to find new friends in a foreign land. I do like that it’s a Blue State — but sometimes think I’d cash in on all the political correctness for a margarita that really has a kick to it. I’ll post again soon.

Join Kevin at his book release and signing on Friday, September 30, at 7pm at Book People, 6th & Lamar in Austin. Buy the book, get it signed, and rub shoulders with the author!

Rub more than shoulders at the after party at Saxon Pub, 1320 S. Lamar, Austin. Stephen Bruton opens for Omar And The Howlers. Say “Souled American” and get in free!

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From Publishers Weekly:
Texas journalist Phinney’s first book traces the history of race relations as seen through commingling musical crossovers and a parade of personalities: from Al Jolson to Louis Jordan, Billie Holiday to Bonnie Raitt, Zip Coon to Pat Boone. This comprehensive coverage spans all genres, including blues, country, gospel, jazz, R&B, ragtime, rock and rap. With blackface minstrelsy, “whites opened a portal to their own hidden creative impulses,” and Phinney explores this theme as he covers “white men in transparent blackface” (Eminem), “multi-culti chanteuses” (Mariah Carey) and “sepia Sinatras” (Johnny Mathis). Anecdotes abound, and many music history milestones punctuate Phinney’s probing critical commentary. Analyzing Nat King Cole’s singing style and how it made him “one of the first modern artists to ‘cross over’ from black to white popularity,” Phinney recounts how Cole, only months before the premiere of his 1956–1957 NBC television show, was assaulted onstage in Birmingham, Ala., by five white men. Phinney writes with verve and vitality, articulately charting hundreds of black and white intersections in this definitive roadmap to racial rhythms. 45 b&w photos. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description:

•Combines social history and pop culture to reveal how jazz, blues, soul, country, and hip-hop have developed

•Includes interviews with Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, B.B. King, David Byrne, Sly Stone, Donna Summer, Bonnie Raitt, and dozens more

• Confronts questions of race and finds meaningful answers

From Jim Crow to Eminem, white culture has been transformed by black music. To be so influenced by the boundless imagination of a race brought to America in chains sets up a fascinating irony, and Souled American, an ambitious and comprehensive look at race relations as seen through the prism of music, examines that irony fearlessly—with illuminating results. Tracing a direct line from plantation field hollers to gansta rap, author Kevin Phinney explains how blacks and whites exist in a constant tug-of-war as they create, re-create, and claim each phase of popular music.

About the Author:

Kevin Phinney, an entertainment journalist based in Austin, has written for the Austin American-Statesman, Premiere magazine, and the Hollywood Reporter. In 1988 he joined KGSR-FM to become co-host of its Morning drive-time program, “Kevin & Kevin.”

Souled American: How Black Music Transformed White Culture

The 50-year-old song that started it all
‘Rock Around the Clock’ made Bill Haley the first rock star
By Todd Leopold
CNN

Friday, July 8, 2005; Posted: 11:48 a.m. EDT (15:48 GMT)

Fifty years ago Saturday, “Rock Around the Clock” hit No. 1 and stayed there for eight weeks.
SPECIAL REPORT

(CNN) — He was, James Miller wrote in “Flowers in the Dustbin,” “the world’s first — and to this day, least likely — rock and roll star.”

Bill Haley was 30 in 1955, a family man with several children and a job as leader of a mildly popular band, the Comets. With his spit curl and paunch he looked like a salesman or, maybe, a disc jockey — which, indeed, had been one of his previous jobs.

He’d had a couple major chart hits but didn’t think much of rock ‘n’ roll; it was simply the hot thing at the time, something popular with the kids that got the dance halls jumping and paid the bills. Haley’s background was in Western swing, a la one of his influences, Bob Wills.

So he may have been destined to be a musical footnote if it weren’t for a movie, “Blackboard Jungle,” and the song that blasted over the opening credits: “Rock Around the Clock.”

Fifty years ago Saturday, “Rock Around the Clock” hit No. 1, a position it held for eight weeks on the Billboard charts. “Rock ‘n’ roll,” an expansive term coined a couple years earlier by DJ Alan Freed, had now been to the pop mountaintop, a position it would never quite relinquish.

Within six months, a trickle of rock ‘n’ roll hits — by artists such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Carl Perkins — would become a flood as the king of them all, Elvis Presley, emerged with a hip-shaking frenzy and changed the course of pop music for good.

Elvis, Little Richard, Berry, Domino, Perkins — they’re all considered founding fathers, legendary names still recognized as rock ‘n’ roll pioneers. But Haley? How did a pudgy, un-rock ‘n’ roll guy become the man who made the first huge rock ‘n’ roll record?

Kevin Phinney, author of the forthcoming “Souled American: How Black Music Transformed White Culture” (Billboard Books), puts it succinctly.

“He was the right man at the right place at the right time,” Phinney says.

Following the trend
“Rock Around the Clock” — its full title is “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” — wasn’t the first rock ‘n’ roll record. Wynonie Harris did “Good Rockin’ Tonight” in 1947; Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man” came out in 1949; the Ike Turner Band’s “Rocket 88,” credited to Turner saxophonist Jackie Brenston, was released in 1951. The latter generally gets the rock historians’ vote, though the music can be traced back to blues and country records from much earlier.

But Haley knew a trend when he saw one, and rock ‘n’ roll was starting to get noticed amid the Teresa Brewer, Perry Como and Patti Page records that dominated the charts.

A handful of disc jockeys, including Cleveland’s Freed; Nashville’s John R. and Gene Nobles; Atlanta’s Zenas Sears, and Los Angeles’ Hunter Hancock were playing the music on their radio stations, some of which were clear-channel 50,000-watt broadcasters with a nighttime listening area extending hundreds of miles away.

But rock ‘n’ roll was a niche music. The DJs often worked the night shift. The songs could be raw; after all, “rock ‘n’ roll” was a euphemism for sex. And — in the largely segregated 1950s — most of the artists making the music (called “race” music until the mid-1950s) were black, recording for small, independent labels. Their versions sold well, but didn’t get played on mainstream radio.

By watering down the beat and the message, it was folks like the Crew Cuts, who covered the Chords’ “Sh-Boom,” and Pat Boone, who did “Ain’t That a Shame,” who had the big radio hits. Radio was still waiting for a white man who could really sing this black music.

Haley and his band had recorded “Rocket 88″ not long after it came out, and with the Comets (the name changed from Saddlemen) he had a hit with “Crazy Man Crazy” in 1953. That success led to a contract with a major label, Decca.

The band recorded “Rock Around the Clock,” a song written for them, in 1954 under the tutelage of producer Milt Gabler. Gabler made the drums sound huge: He “placed three microphones around [session drummer Billy Guesack’s] drum kit, and asked him to hit rim-shots on the snare drum, in order to produce a heavy backbeat,” Miller wrote.

And then … nothing. The song topped out at No. 23 on Billboard’s charts.

That may have been the end of the “Rock Around the Clock” story if it hadn’t been for Peter Ford, actor Glenn Ford’s son.

According to a story Ford tells on his Web site (http://www.peterford.com/ratc.html), as his father was working on a hard-nosed juvenile delinquent drama called “Blackboard Jungle,” director Richard Brooks heard Peter Ford’s copy of “Rock Around the Clock.” Brooks decided the song was perfect for the movie.

“Blackboard Jungle” was released on March 25, 1955, and — very quickly — “Rock Around the Clock” was everywhere. Perhaps the last people to notice were Haley and his Comets.

“We just really didn’t realize until it was being played all over the place and we were getting calls from Ed Sullivan,” Comets saxophonist Joey Ambrose told CNN.

‘Tension and release’
The song was a phenomenon. Teens danced in the aisles in theaters where “Blackboard Jungle” played; in some places, there were riots.

Rock ‘n’ roll had arrived — and it was a menace. It would carry the stigma — or badge — of being not quite fit for polite society (Frank Sinatra called it “music for cretins”; white Southerners called it much worse) for years to come.

But Haley couldn’t capitalize much. He had a couple more hits (notably “See You Later Alligator”) and made a quickie movie (called, naturally, “Rock Around the Clock”), but was gone from the charts by 1957. The singer had a burst of popularity in Britain — Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend and Graham Nash credit Haley shows with their own love of rock — but he had become an oldies show anachronism by the time he died of a heart attack in 1981. He was 55.

Phinney believes that Haley, in some ways, was a fluke. If he hadn’t ushered in the rock era, it would have been someone else.

“Look how quickly he was outstripped by other white rockers,” he says, mentioning Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly in quick succession.

And then there was Elvis, Sun Records owner Sam Phillips’ answer to his perhaps apocryphal statement, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”

Elvis was handsome. Elvis was charismatic. Elvis was dangerous. Elvis could sing “all kinds,” as he himself once said. And, as he also said, “I don’t sound like nobody.” When a major, RCA, bought him from the independent Sun for $35,000, all bets were off.

“I think the miracle of Elvis wasn’t just that he was telegenic,” says Phinney. “It’s that all of the music melted together in his mind. He was a man able to articulate what people wanted and reached for. … It was all about tension and release.”

Though Haley’s Comets were a crack band, the leader of the group just didn’t have that charisma. Miller describes his voice as “solid as a plank — and as wooden.”

But rock ‘n’ roll is often a series of accidents — the right people, the right chemistry, the right sound. Bill Haley created an outstanding rock ‘n’ roll record, and he knew how to put it across.

Haley himself knew what he had.

“No matter how bad a show might be going some night, I know that song will pull us through,” he said. “It’s my little piece of gold.”

R&B singer begins court proceedings with popularity undiminished

BY MARK CARO

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO - The accused child pornographer sat alone on the courtroom bench, his fingers entwined in his lap, his face the definition of neutral, with a bit of fatigue thrown in.

He wore an olive three-piece suit over his lanky frame and his hair lay in neat cornrows, with a tiny tail sticking out the back. Occasionally he swayed his head from side to side, stretching his neck muscles, though as morning turned into afternoon, that head more often became bowed, his eyes closing.

Two fairly heavy-set men occasionally joined him on the bench, but they didn’t speak. Other people, involved with unrelated cases, were scattered around the courtroom, which wasn’t even a third full.

Just another day in court. You’d never know this particular defendant had the best-selling album in the country.

In fact, while R. Kelly was waiting almost two hours for his hearing to start last week (after he showed up more than an hour after the case’s scheduled call time), Billboard magazine was announcing that his “TP.3 Reloaded” had retained its No. 1 slot on the Billboard 200 album chart for the second straight week.

It’s no mean feat to be simultaneously atop the entertainment world and beneath the foot of the legal system, especially when the charges involve sexual misbehavior with a minor. Michael Jackson’s recently completed child-molestation trial was widely considered a career-killer - and he was found not guilty on all counts.

And although Kelly lacks Jackson’s widespread cultural appeal, the Chicago-based R&B singer-songwriter-producer is currently the more popular recording artist. Jackson’s last album of new material, 2001’s “Invincible,” sold 2 million copies in North America, about half of what Kelly’s “TP-2.com” sold around the same time. Kelly’s 2004 album “Happy People/U Saved Me” sold more than 3 million copies; 1998’s “R,” exceeded 8 million in sales, about the same as Jackson’s “Bad.”

Kelly, 38, was arrested and charged in April 2002 on multiple counts of child pornography involving a tape that allegedly shows him having sexual relations with a teenage girl. At Wednesday’s hearing, one of the girl’s friends said she was about 14 when the tape was made.

Kelly and his lawyers have maintained that he’s not the man in the tape. But that didn’t stop comedian Dave Chappelle from airing an R. Kelly parody video, “Pee on You” (a reference to an act reported to be on the tape) on a 2003 episode of his Comedy Central show. Cartoonist Aaron McGruder last week announced a similarly themed Kelly swipe on his upcoming Cartoon Network spinoff of his comic strip “The Boondocks.”

Many a career has crumbled in the face of such ridicule, but Kelly’s ongoing success is no joke. Since the allegations were made public, he has released six albums, almost all of them million-sellers.

Although Chicago’s radio stations, save WGCI-FM, pulled Kelly’s often sexually provocative music from the airwaves after his arrest, the ban was short-lived, and Kelly is a staple of urban and hit radio stations, as well as BET (Black Entertainment Television).

“I don’t think there’s much mystery to that,” WBBM-FM (B96) music director Erik Bradley said. “His fans love his music, and it’s a phenomenal album. I don’t think people boycott their favorite celebrities when they have legal trouble hanging overhead.”

It’s also worth noting that despite the nature of the charges, Kelly’s core audience hasn’t changed.

“He’s a major-league female artist,” Billboard R&B/hip-hop senior editor Gail Mitchell said. “I don’t know. I think maybe for them the jury is out until something actually happens.”

The power of that appeal among females was hammered home to former WGCI president and general manager Marv Dyson when he had front-row tickets for an R. Kelly concert at the Tweeter Center after the allegations were made. “There was a lady standing next to me, and she asked me to move because she said, `I want him to see me, and I don’t want him to think I’m with somebody,’” Dyson recalled. “I was totally shocked.”

Raised in housing projects on the South Side, Robert Kelly began recording with his band Public Announcement in the early 1990s and established himself as a commercially formidable solo artist with the multiplatinum 1993 album “12 Play.” While his arrangements and smooth tenor at times suggested gospel, his favorite subject matter was, and is, sex.

It’s a topic he sings about bluntly, with no room for confusion with love.

Such single-mindedness exacerbated his awkward position at the time of his 2002 arrest. He wound up scrapping his next album, “Loveland,” for fear that the songs would play awkwardly in light of the charges.

Meanwhile, B96 removed the two Kelly songs in rotation when the allegations became public, “Feelin’ on Your Booty” and “Down Low (Nobody Has To Know),” because, Bradley said, their content seemed inappropriate in context. Program director Todd Cavanaugh told the Chicago Tribune at the time: “Child pornography is not a funny thing. … If he is found innocent, we will definitely re-address the issue, but right now, there is no R. Kelly on B96.”

The station reversed course in a matter of weeks.

“Upon the release of his next album (`The Best of Both Worlds,’ with Jay-Z), we put the songs in rotation immediately because the songs were so great,” Bradley said.

Does B96 ever receive complaints about playing Kelly’s music?

“No,” Bradley said. “Never.”

This despite the fact that, after initially toning down the sexual content and revealing his hurt feelings in the song (”Heaven, I Need a Hug”), Kelly has returned to his explicit ways.

The new album’s attention-getter is a five-part single/video called “Trapped in the Closet,” a lurid soap opera about a guy who cheats with a woman whose pastor husband turns out to be sleeping with another guy (all while the narrator’s wife also is embroiled in an affair).

Each part, told over the same hypnotic groove that builds in intensity as the chapter progresses, was unveiled separately in the weeks leading up to the album’s release, stirring up interest like a series of “Desperate Housewives” cliffhangers.

Such a move seems especially canny when you consider that Kelly essentially is prompting fans to exchange one kind of suspense for another.

“`Trapped in the Closet’ took the focus away from R. Kelly and what’s going on in the courts and put it into what’s going to happen in the next record?” said Bob Burke, vice president and managing director of the New Jersey-based radio trade magazine Friday Morning Quarterback.

Kevin Phinney, author of the upcoming book “Souled American: How Black Music Transformed White Culture” (Billboard), called Kelly’s epic single “clear evidence that he and his record company know this is what people want to buy. Yes, it’s shameless, but in an era when Missy Elliott can have an across-the-board hit talking about whether she shaves her `cha-cha,’ then this is cutting-edge stuff.”

Nelson George, author of “Hip Hop America” and other books examining African-American cultural impact, views “Trapped in the Closet” in a more artistic light. “The concept of this cycle of songs is people keeping secrets, so he’s actually grappling with his demons in his art,” he said.

Rev. Bamani Obadele, who led the failed 2002 campaign to persuade WGCI to stop playing Kelly, had a less charitable assessment. “Instead of being `Trapped in the Closet,’ I think he should be trapped in a mental institution because he’s one sick man,” said Obadele, who was particularly offended by Kelly’s portrayal of a closeted gay clergyman. “He needs help, and it’s unfortunate that people have chosen profit over morality.”

To some, Kelly’s continued popularity is a sign of our culture’s ever-shortening memory when it comes to scandal. Last week was Jude Law’s nanny affair and Colin Farrell’s sex tape. The week before was Brad and Angelina. Kelly’s 2002 arrest seems like ancient history - and the longer his lawyers protract the pretrial process, the more that memory fades.

Then there’s the question of whether people even expect decent behavior from artists and celebrities anymore.

Or maybe we’ve simply reached the point where so many stars are tarnished that we’ve conditioned ourselves to divorce art from the artist.

“I think most people are totally separating what he does for a living, which is making music, from what he’s accused of in his personal life,” Dyson said.

Even Obadele considers Kelly “a very, very talented young man,” but he faults the African-American community for being too forgiving.

“There’s not been a hard line drawn in the sand in the black community,” the reverend said. “I was the only minister in this community who spoke out against him and called for the boycotts. I don’t think that any other community would tolerate this type of action from one of their alleged superstars who had this type of pattern.”

Everyone seems to agree that all bets are off when the trial finally begins - supposedly this fall, though no specific date has been set. Collective denial won’t be an option if the daily news reports are filled with distasteful accounts of the singer’s alleged exploits, particularly those related to practices normally reserved for the bathroom.

“Those are the kind of details that take it from a guy being horny to a freak thing, which makes people uncomfortable,” George said. “If he’s convicted, there will be hard-core black music fans who will support him, but it’ll be tougher with the Wal-Marts of the world.”

Even if Kelly is found guilty, the radio program directors aren’t sure what they’ll do.

“I think it really depends on the audience and what they demand,” B96’s Bradley said. “The best way for us to stop playing any artist is for the audience to say they don’t like the music.”

“The listeners will have to give us direction on that,” echoed current WGCI program director Ellroy Smith.

Back at the West Side’s Cook County Circuit Court, R. Kelly politely waved off a reporter’s pantomime request to ask him a question as he stood in the lobby surrounded by four men in suits. Passersby, particularly young women, brightened up when they recognized him, waving and yelling, “R. Kelly!” or “Hey, baby!”

He nodded his head in recognition, then exited out the front door with his entourage, who led him into a black Ford Excursion.

The doors were shut quickly, and the SUV took off.

But it will be back.