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.”

Sonny Days

IN THE END, it comes down to your Moldy Fig quotient. If, like me, you rooted yourself in a jazz era that barely stretched into the Second World War, making friends with bebop has been too much of a challenge to pursue. Sure, I’ve been tempted by Bird and Diz, but never enough for a lasting commitment. At least at first. My horizons eventually broadened thanks to the same vehicle that got me interested in non-mainstream music in the first place: friends who insisted I listen to something that was new to me.

I wish I’d had this Sonny Clark set back then. Mosaic Records has just released The Complete Sonny Clark Blue Note Sessions, which captures the recordings made under the pianist’s name between 1957 and 1961, resulting in nine LP releases. Clark is remembered as an inventive exponent of the “hard bop” movement, a label I find too ill-defined—but there’s a lot of hard-driving, angular music in these grooves.

And then there’s something else, to which I now wish to point you. Acquire this set (and do so soon, because you know how quickly these limited-edition Mosaic sets tend to sell out) and head to Disc Five. That’s the “Singles Session,” recorded November 15, 1958, with bassist Jymie Merritt and drummer Wes Landers. The idea was to create recordings for jukebox play. From the first notes of Don Redman’s “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You,” we’re on very accessible ground. Clark had a history of solo-piano work, and it shows. It’ll lure you on in, your fig condition notwithstanding.

Trumping the Tramp

HE WAS FAR FROM A SAINT. We want to forgive him because he was funny as hell, a process that grows less and less difficult as the misbehaviors of others in the public eye grow (or are revealed to be) more heinous. Charlie Chaplin’s biggest sin was that he liked women, liked them young, and liked them to satisfy a prodigious sexual appetite. Chaplin’s biggest crime was his outspoken political stance, which was misinterpreted vigorously enough to win him a fat FBI file and eventual banishment from the U.S.

Scott Eyman’s meticulous study places the comedian’s film career against a rising tide of manufactured disapproval, culminating in the horrific kangaroo trials to which Chaplin was subjected and deftly (but not at all overtly) paralleling them to the kind of ideological nonsense we’re sprayed with in the age of MAGA. You think Trump is a dangerous idiot? Wait’ll you get to know J. Edgar Hoover.

Chaplin’s early years are sketched with sympathetic precision, covering the important points of his career and examining a fraught relationship with his show-biz parents: a father, famed for his music-hall turns, who was mostly absent and soon dead, and a soubrette mother who lost her mind. Although Eyman doesn’t indulge in too much psychological speculation, he sees this a stage-setting the relationships Chaplin eventually with the friends, co-workers, and, especially, women in his life.

He started as a boy performer in England, eventually landing a berth in the Fred Karno troupe, which toured knockabout sketches throughout the U.K. and, ultimately, across the U.S. In 1914, when Charlie was 24, he was invited to make films for Mack Sennett. In breathtakingly short order he created the character of the Tramp and placed him 36 one-reelers, all in the space of a year. Skyrocketing popularity led him to set his own terms for his subsequent 25 films, now two-reelers, that he wrote and directed for two different companies through the end of 1917.