The Doomsters

I’VE NEVER BEEN MUCH in thrall to the doomsayers. They used to be charmingly represented in single-panel cartoons as a bearded old man hefting a sign on which is block-lettered something wittily apposite; now they’re spewing their bile over talk-radio and internet shows. They have the skills of a cult leader, offering acceptance into an elite group that welcomes you once you have accepted the terms of membership, largely a matter of understanding that the persecution you feel comes from groups you can hate.

Thomas Hardy

I’m stopped right there. I don’t feel persecuted. I have learned that those responsible for denying me access to economical housing, healthy foodstuffs, and affordable healthcare are the white male gazillionaires who have created a world for themselves in which they are safe from the regulatory laws that, in a sane society, would stop them.

But I’m now in a state of what I’m terming “anticipatory persecution.” As an elderly white male of a solidly middle-class upbringing, I’m one of those whose paths long have been smoothed by our racist, patriarchal society. Thanks to a long marriage to a financially responsible spouse, my unreliable income has been pooled into a retirement fund that should see us through our dotages. I also have access to a robust health insurance plan that keeps my ticker ticking even as my ability to walk is waning and arthritis is waxing all over the place. I figured I could age and die in relative peace.

Voice of Freedom

JEROME KERN AND OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN insisted that they wrote “Old Man River” with Paul Robeson in mind, which is no surprise given the way the song luxuriates in a bass-singer’s range. They began work on it in 1925; it would hit the stage two years later. Robeson’s first public performance as a singer took place in Boston in 1924, and he sang again a few months later at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. The songwriters either discovered him fairly quickly, or got to know his voice by way of the many private recitals Robeson had been giving  during the preceding years.

His father was a former slave who became a Presbyterian minister; his mother a mixed-race Quaker who died when the boy was six. Robeson attended Rutgers College (as it then was known), graduating in 1919 as a football star and class valedictorian. He earned a law degree from Columbia University three years later and was admitted to the bar – but by that time was being sidetracked by music and theater.

He had made his professional stage debut in 1924 in Eugene O’Neill’s “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” at the Provincetown, where a scene of him kissing the hand of a white woman created enough of a scandal to make the papers. He then starred in a revival of O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” the success of which landed Robeson his first movie role (Oscar Micheaux’s “Body and Soul”) and a recording contract.

The 14 CDs in this collection offer 287 songs recorded between 1925 and 1958, although there’s an eleven-year gap after 1947 because Robeson was too much of a political hot potato by then to be welcomed by the labels represented here. His repertory was comparatively small, and wisely so: Although his vocal quality was astonishingly warm and unique, he lacked the training for operatic roles, and he knew it. He added few art songs to his repertory, and stayed away from the opera stage.

Tom Paxton: A Fond Farewell

THERE WAS NO SENSE OF MELANCHOLY in Tom Paxton’s performance on Oct. 19 as he entertained a gathering of the faithful at the Eighth Step in Schenectady. True, it was part of his final tour before a well-earned retirement (he’ll be 87 on Hallowe’en), but he was as engaging as ever, a dynamic presence with a catalog of classic songs to his credit. And he was supported by the duo of Don Henry and Jon Vezner, known as the DonJuans, who have been performing and songwriting partners with Paxton since 2017.

Jon Vezner, Tom Paxton, and Don Henry

During one of his tours with the Kingston Trio, I interviewed Paxton in his dressing room after a show and mentioned how envious I was of him with so many tour dates ahead. He looked at me as if I were nuts. “It’s an awful grind,” he said. “Nothing to be envious about.” That was about forty years ago. Paxton estimates that he’s been on the road for sixty. A grind it may, but I’ve shared a lot of pleasure with an audience that has attended concert after concert, and that knows all the words and isn’t afraid to use them.

Thus it was, even as he launched into his opening song, “I Can’t Help but Wonder,” that the audience was right there with him, murmuring the lyrics as if they were emerging like apparitions in a dream. Because that’s the feeling you get when invited to sing songs you’ve know all your life, songs that are poignant and meaningful or just plain fun. All of that. Even better, you’re singing them back to the fellow who wrote them. And who is not above being in thrall himself to fellow artists: he noted that the fact that Johnny Cash recorded “I Can’t Help but Wonder” on the sixth (and last) of his “American Recordings” series was a dream come true. (And Paxton did a spot-on impression of Cash’s voice while telling us about this.)

Embarrassment of Riches

From the Theater Vault Dept.: During the late 1980s, an experiment in theatrical presentation settled into a small Schenectady theater for a couple of seasons. Run under the auspices of Proctor’s Theater (as the much less-ambitious entity styled itself back then), Proctor’s Too brought in an array of unexpected talent, among them Santa Fe-based Theater Grottesco. Founded in Paris in 1983 by former members of Theatre de la Jeune Lune (who also visited back then), the company is still going strong, having relocated to New York and Detroit before settling in New Mexico in 1996.

                                                                                         

THE PROGRAM BOOKLET PROMISED a full-length show with a large cast, but the stagehands could be seen nervously scurrying as the audience settled. Finally, the announcement: all of the cast and scenery had been delayed at O’Hare. The four stagehands would produce the show with a minimum of accoutrements.

"Richest Deadman," from a
more recent production

Those stagehands being, naturally, the Theatre Grottesco company, a Detroit-based ensemble that combines mime, dance and circus techniques into a theatrical experience that, as the prologue to “The Richest Deadman Alive” suggests, is not going to be your run-of-the-mill play.

What bogged down this production and ultimately proved to undermine the success of the show was the way in which this piece, conceived and written by the four performers, got into too traditional a groove. Terence McNally, for instance, could make a nice door-slammer out of this story of a man misdiagnosed as dead who joins his purported widow in a spending spree of his insurance money.

The Last Day

Guest Blogger Dept.: We hand over the reins again to Robert Benchley, who has an almost-timely piece about the end-of-the-season vacationer’s farewells.

                                                                                              

WHEN, during the long winter evenings, you sit around the snap-shot album and recall the merry, merry times you had on your vacation, there is one day which your memory mercifully overlooks. It is the day you packed up and left the summer resort to go home.

This Ultimate Day really begins the night before, when you sit up until one o’clock trying to get things into the trunks and bags. This is when you discover the well-known fact that summer air swells articles to twice or three times their original size; so that the sneakers which in June fitted in between the phonograph and the book (which you have never opened), in September are found to require a whole tray for themselves and even then one of them will probably have to be carried in the hand.

Along about midnight, the discouraging process begins to get on your nerves and you snap at your wife and she snaps at you every time it is found that something won’t fit in the suitcase. As you have both gradually dispensed with the more attractive articles of clothing under stress of the heat and the excitement, these little word passages take on the sordid nature of a squabble in an East Side tenement, and all that is needed is for one of the children to wake up and start whimpering. This it does.

On the Offense

TURNS OUT YOUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS were just as filthy-mouthed as you. Filthier, even. Written bawdry has a long tradition, of course, but with the onset of the age of recorded sound, we were able to hear, as often as we wished, the kinds of story (and language) that previously were the province of men’s smokers.

Writing of Thomas Edison’s earliest experiments of audio recording, Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni note, “Reliable earwitness accounts tell of Edison and his men repeatedly shouting ‘mad dog’ into the machine and then gleefully running it backwards to hear from the tinfoil one resounding ‘God damn’ after another.” The temptation go blue has always been compelling.

Some recording artists went much farther than mere blasphemy, as proven by “Actionable Offenses,” a single-CD collection on the Archeophone label subtitled, “Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s.” Indecent they are. Gleefully so.

Archeophone’s mission is to rescue acoustic-era recordings from obscurity, and the label has copped a GRAMMY award and many nominations along the way. Until 1925, audio recordings were created using a large horn as a microphone. Audio waves set a diaphragm at the horn’s narrow end into motion, and that drove a stylus to cut a cylinder or platter. Frequency response was limited and further obscured by repeated playback.

I Don’t Have to Do That

AS EACH FLEETING WEEK swipes another physical ability and leaves a fresh pain in its wake, I’m comforted by the mantra I summon: I don’t have to do that. It’s not belligerent. It’s a gentle reminder, obedience to which keeps me free of ache and frustration.

For example. I’m six feet four inches tall, a height offset, particularly when viewed from a distance, by the bulges I wear in a horizontal direction. And I probably would measure up now as an inch or two shorter, thanks to spinal collapse and my general crouch, but I haven’t measured my height in years. I don’t have to do that.

That height, combined with what I assume was a pleasantly accessible mien, often inspired shorter fellow-shoppers to ask me to reach items down from high shelves. I happily obliged. Now my shoulders are shot – I blew out both rotator cuffs by hammering a stage platform into being – and I can barely reach to the height of my head. Should someone ask that favor now – well, you know where I’m going. Of course, they don’t ask, because that accessible mien has also gone away.

Which means I’m merely a grumpy old man – I’m 68 as I write this – who becomes one of many trudging a grocery cart through a checkout line reminiscent of Cold War-era photos of GUM store queues. This makes me a target for the complainers which, despite my infirmities, I am not. “How long are they gonna make us wait here?” might go the opener, or “Can you believe that parking lot?” (Are we questioning its existence?) or “Whoever heard of paying five bucks for a carton of eggs?” My tactic is to first pretend I’ve been startled out of a reverie and ask the questioner to repeat the query. Then I shrug – a shrug can be a focus-grabbing gesture – and respond, respectively, “I’m in no hurry,” “It’s a beautiful thing,” and “I wouldn’t know. I have hens.”