A man who needs no last name, Willie is to Country what Neil is to rock: the Buddha, bestowing laid-back grace on all those who bask in his benevolent THC-tinged glow. Born April 30, 1933, in Abbott, Texas, Nelson begins writing songs at age seven. After serving briefly in the Air Force during the Korean War and studying agriculture at Baylor University, Nelson moves through a series of luckless, low-paying career changes–disc jockey, door-to-door vacuum and encyclopedia salesman. By 1958, in dire financial straits and married with children, Nelson is forced to sell his songs for cheap (“Night Life,” later a hit for Ray Price, went for the princely sum of $150). By 1961, he’s inked a proper publishing deal, which results in Patsy Cline turning Nelson’s “Crazy” into a Country gold mine. In 1975, he releases Red Headed Stranger, pioneering the “Outlaw Country” movement–along with Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash–with stripped-down honky-tonkisms and the most soulful nasal twang since Hank the First. Red Headed Stranger remains a marvel of American beauty. After all the highs (lending a helping hand to the American farmer and smoking a joint on the roof of the White House) and the lows (that duet with Julio Iglesias; the 16 million-dollar raft of shit from the IRS, and, as a result, his shilling for Taco Bell), he has become the embodiment of everything that is good and right about the American experience. Trust us: There are few moments more soulful in this life than hearing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” take wing on a summer breeze. — JONATHAN VALANIA

WILLIE NELSON + STRUGILL SIMPSON + MARGO PRICE @ THE MANN 9/11

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER

NPR: David Byrne is, of course, the lead singer and frontman of the Talking Heads. The band recorded hit songs like “Psycho Killer,” “Life During Wartime,” “Once in a Lifetime,” “Burning Down the House,” and so many more.

He is also a solo artist in his own right and has recorded instrumental electronic albums, pop records, and spoken word. He’s collaborated with Brian Eno, St. Vincent, Philip Glass, and Selena to name a few. He’s written books, scored soundtracks, even wrote and directed his own movie, 1986’s True Stories.

If you wanted to find a common theme in his work, maybe it’s that David Byrne has always worked to push the boundaries of what pop music can be. While at the same time, he takes high art – the kind of stuff you see in Manhattan galleries or in repertory theaters in Brooklyn – and makes it more accessible and familiar.

American Utopia is his latest project. It started as an album in 2018, then he toured on it with a handful of dates across the U.S. Only, he’s David Byrne, so he went the extra mile and added 12 musicians, all dressed alike in gray suits, carrying their instruments like a marching band and dancing with them. Everything’s also wireless. With nothing binding them to one spot, they can dance and move completely freely. It’s not like any concert you’ve ever seen.

He parlayed the tour into a full on Broadway production, premiering in 2019. Then, American Utopia’s live show became a movie directed by the one and only Spike Lee. That dropped late last year.

If you happen to be in New York, American Utopia will be returning to Broadway on September 17. You can also experience the show on your TV. The concert film is streaming now on HBO Max. It will also be debuting in theaters for the first time on September 15. David Byrne chats with us about American Utopia and his return to playing live music. He also shares some of the music he’s been listening to lately and tells us about where he learned his iconic dance moves. Plus, he’ll tell us why his very different brain powers his art. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: David Byrne — Talking Heads architect and post-New Wave elder statesman of all things arch, artsy and oblique — is the Marcel Duchamp of 20th Century rock n’ roll, transmuting the artifacts of the mundane and the quotidian into magical charms to ward off the confusion, dread and ennui of modern life. He is, in other words, an antidote for our current season in Hell, and his arrival at the Mann last night backed by what is, for lack of a better description, The Greatest Marching Band on Earth, to deliver humane tidings of comfort and joy in the guise of high concept performance art, came not a moment too soon. For the past six months he has been touring the globe in support of his latest album, the archly titled American Utopia, and putting on what I can safely say without fear of exaggeration is, as of this writing, the Greatest Show on Earth. That is not hyperbole, if anything that is an understatement.

In terms of the setlist, the show is an ecstatic blend of modernized takes on Talking Heads quirk-pop classics and the oblique strategies and heartfelt ironies of his post-Heads solo work and collaborations with the likes of Brian Eno, Fatboy Slim and St. Vincent. Which, on paper, sounds fairly pro-forma for an artist of Byrne’s stature and vast back catalog of cutting edge work, but to see it in person, it is nothing short of jaw-dropping — a post-post-modernist miracle of human ingenuity, precision and grace. I call it MOMA-rock: A rapturous  marriage of modern dance, minimalist grandeur, shit-hot musicianship, and gorgeous gale-force chorales that sing the body electric — all performed without wires, fixed instruments, pre-recorded backing tracks or shoes. All of it cooked up by the beautiful mind of David Byrne, who, at the onset of his autumn years, with his thick shock of pure white hair, has evolved into a glorious amalgam of Mark Twain and David Lynch — simultaneously folksy and wise and kind and still barefoot in the head after all these years, displaying the tireless vitality and artistic potency of a man a third of his age. MORE

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR BUZZFEED In 1965, Tacoma, Washington’s The Sonics released a debut album of raw-boned, hemorrhagic garage-punk and maximum R&B called, simply, Here Are The Sonics. Exponentially louder, wilder, and weirder than their woolly-bully frat-rock brethren on the SeaTac teen club/roller rink/armory circuit, The Sonics sang about witches, psychopaths, Satan, and strychnine as a social lubricant, along with the more standard themes of hot girls and fast cars, or, even better, fast girls in hot cars. The 12 tracks on Here Are The Sonics capture the needle-pinning, speaker-blowing, tonsil-shredding, balls-to-the-wall mating call of five hormonal mid-’60s teenage savages forever in hot pursuit of Mad Men-era booze-cigarettes-sex-magic and the glorious din that made it all possible.

Fifty years after its release, Here Are The Sonics still sounds, as one wag aptly put it, “as raw as a freshly scraped kneecap.” On the continuum of rock ’n’ roll as a 20th-century art form, Here Are The Sonics remains a vital and important relic, the aural equivalent of a prehistoric cave painting, as primitive as it is seminal. It changed music. More accurately, it changed the people who would change music.

Jack White called it “the epitome of ’60s punk.” Kurt Cobain said it had “the most amazing drum sound I’ve ever heard…it sounds like he’s hitting harder than anyone I’ve ever heard.” On “Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy concludes his itemized list of the essential artists in the definitive hipster record collection by invoking The Sonics four times in a row, as if casting a spell.

Feeble national promotion and ham-fisted distribution may have ensured that few outside of The Sonics’ Pacific Northwest stomping ground heard Here Are The Sonics when it was first released, but in the fullness of time its sphere of influence now transcends generations and spans continents thanks to the Esperanto of electrifying noise.

Just don’t tell The Sonics that.

“I think that’s overstating it a little,” says Larry Parypa, 68, The Sonics’ guitarist and de facto leader, when I recite some variation of the last two paragraphs to him. “I’m not sure how much influence we had on rock ’n’ roll.” “Parypa” is a Hungarian name that means “man of strong horse or something,” he says, but I just don’t see it. Parypa is more mild-mannered than you’d expect from a man whose claim to fame is playing guitar on a song called “Psycho,” and, it turns out, is suspicious of grand statements, especially about his band.

“I know we did some things that were very different, but to that degree? I don’t know,” he says with a shrug. We are sitting in the living room of Parypa’s house situated in a leafy suburban cul-de-sac outside of Seattle and paid for not by The Sonics’ paltry record sales royalties (about $4,000 a year) but a decades-long career as an insurance adjuster from which he finally retired earlier this year. He is only mildly amused when I point out that it only took 55 years for the guitar player for The Sonics to finally be able to quit his day job. Parypa is oddly joyless given that the thwarted rock star dreams of his youth have finally come true in his old age. Perhaps he senses, deep down, that it’s come too late.

Parypa is not a sentimental man. You have to look hard to find signs that the guitar player from The Sonics lives here. He doesn’t have copies of the original pressings of The Sonics’ ’60s recordings. No film footage of The Sonics performing live or even a video clip of their 1966 performance on Cleveland’s Upbeat, their one TV appearance. He doesn’t even have any old photos of the band from back in the day. “We just never kept that stuff,” he says, again with the shrug.

There are a few framed gig posters tucked away in an upstairs hallway — but nothing older than five years ago. Parypa never even bothered to tell his now-adult daughter that he was in The Sonics when she was growing up. She had to find out on the street when she was 14. “She must’ve gone to a record store and saw my picture and asked the guy behind the counter and I guess he made a big fuss,” he says, with that I-don’t-see-what-the-big-deal-is tone of voice he adopts when talking about the band. “She came home with a Sonics album and was like, ‘What’s this all about?’”

The reason we are debating the band’s place in the canon of rock ’n’ roll is that a reconstituted Sonics — Parypa, saxophonist Rob Lind, singer-songwriter-keyboardist Jerry Roslie, all three original members, plus bassist Freddie Dennis and drummer Dusty Watson (replacing original bassist Andy Parypa and drummer Bob Bennett, respectively) — are on the verge of releasing This Is The Sonics (out earlier this week), the first proper Sonics album in nearly half a century.

Wisely they enlisted the production services of Detroit garage guru Jim Diamond (White Stripes, The Dirtbombs), who laid down the law on day one.

“I told them, ‘You know, you’re not 19 years old, so it would be silly to try and copy your ’60s records; having said that, we have to stay true to the spirit of those recordings,’” he says a few weeks later, calling from somewhere in the ruins of the Motor City. “I want you to play like you haven’t gotten any better than when you were 19. Raw and mean. If it’s not punk as fuck, I’m not putting my name on it.”

Well, Jim Diamond put his name on it, as well he should. Despite the 48-year gap between albums and the fact that the median age in the band is now 70, one spin of This Is The Sonics makes a persuasive case that The Sonics are still The Rawest Band on Earth. Parypa can still swing a riff like a Louisville Slugger, the drummer still beats the drums like they owe him money, the sax player still honks as if he’s horny, and the singer still sounds like he gargles with gasoline and can’t be trusted with breakable things. All of which means The Rawest Band on Earth are now old enough to be your grandfather — and more popular than they ever were in the prime of their youth.

Anthony Bourdain, host of CNN’s Parts Unknown, used “Have Love, Will Travel” in promos for the current season. He emailed the following when I asked him why: “The Sonics were true originals, garage before garage, the way rock and roll should be: loud, dirty and dangerous.”

The cruel irony of The Sonics story is that Jerry Roslie, the guy who screams like an electrocuted banshee on record and writes songs about guzzling strychnine for kicks and going psycho at the sight of a beautiful lady, is pathologically bashful, bordering on socially phobic, a condition that seems to have worsened over the years. It wasn’t much of an issue when he was living a quiet, anonymous middle-class life in the suburbs of Tacoma, laying asphalt for a living. But all that changed in 2004 when Land Rover licensed The Sonics’ version of “Have Love, Will Travel” for a TV ad, triggering a revival of interest in the band.

In 2007, after years of politely declining lucrative reunion tour offers, The Sonics begrudgingly agreed to reunite for one night and perform a completely sold-out show at the Cavestomp! garage-rock festival in New York. Backstage before they went on, everyone had butterflies — after all, it had been 40 years since they plugged in together — but Roslie was scared shitless. Could he still do this? Did The Sonics still have it? Would the audience laugh at these sad old men trying to relive long-past glories? “We heard that New York can be a pretty tough crowd,” he says. “I remember before we went on looking around for a garbage-can lid to shield me from the rotten fruit and vegetables. When they opened the curtain it was like déjà vu, spooky, we’d gotten older but the audience was the same age as they were when we played back in the 1966. And they welcomed us right away.” And 21st-century audiences have been welcoming them ever since.

In the eight years since they played CaveStomp, The Sonics have crisscrossed the globe repeatedly — not bad for a band that never got farther east than Cleveland back in the day. “We’ve played in European countries where they don’t speak much English,” says Lind. “And the crowd is down at the front of the stage singing every word of ‘Strychnine’ and waving their beer bottles.” When The Sonics played Mexico City last summer, they were so mobbed by autograph seekers after the show it took half an hour to go the 20 feet from the backstage door to the shuttle van. When they played in Spain, grown men cried in their dressing room, begging to touch the hem of their garments. Two months ago they flew to São Paulo, Brazil, for a completely sold-out one-night stand. The next morning they were mobbed in the hotel lobby by autograph seekers. One eternally grateful fan passed the band a handwritten note with the following message.

To The Sonics

Thank you for existing and the good job you did (and still doing) for mankind.

Big Respect,

Rodrigo

Sao Paulo, Feb. 2015

Not too shabby for an ex–insurance adjuster, retired commercial airline pilot, former proprietor of an asphalt paving business, laid-off Experience Music Project tour guide, and the guy who played drums for Lita Ford from 1980 to 1984.

Tacoma and all points in between. Every red-blooded, non-jock male under 25 has a rock ’n’ roll band. Or wants to start a rock ’n’ roll band or just got kicked out of a rock ’n’ roll band or at the very least goes out to see rock ’n’ roll bands all the time. Because that’s where the girls are. Jerry Roslie and Rob Lind are no exception. Roslie plays keyboards and Lind blows sax. Their band is called The Searchers. “We started going out on Saturday nights on a dual mission and the mission was: hear rock ’n’ roll bands and meet women,” says Lind, a recently retired US Airways pilot, on the phone from his home in North Carolina. “We’d see something cool and then go home and try and play it and kinda get it wrong, but in the process make something that was ours.”

One Saturday night they met a guitar player named Larry Parypa, who had an instrumental band with his brother Andy called The Sonics — named after the sonic booms emanating from nearby McChord Air Force Base. But something was missing. Like Lind and Roslie, the Parypa brothers liked their rock ’n’ roll loud and mean. They quickly agreed to join forces and ditch The Searchers moniker in favor of The Sonics, which was wise because there was already a band called The Searchers in the U.K., with actual hits. By process of elimination, Roslie became the band’s lead singer. He was the least bad of the bunch.

“People always ask me how come you guys are so nasty and dirty, and I always tell them that Seattle bands were jazzy and swingy and really good musicians,” says Lind. “Down in Tacoma, where we grew up, it was a blue-collar city, our fathers all worked in mills and on the waterfront and all we wanted to do was rock ’n’ roll. We wanted to kick your ass.”

“We all wanted to play hard music, and it got so aggressive,” says Parypa. “We wanted loud drums and back then you didn’t mic the drum kit, so if you wanted loud drums the drummer had to hit really hard. That meant everybody else had to turn up to be heard over the drums, and Jerry would have to scream to be heard over the din. And that just became our sound.”It was slow going early on, but soon they landed a regular Friday-night gig at a teen club called the Red Carpet, which would become for them what the Cavern Club was for The Beatles: the place where they got their chops from playing marathon four-hour sets nightly, learned their lessons about stagecraft the hard way, and began harvesting the fruits of their labor, namely girls and beer. “After a while, we’d pull up to the back to load in our gear and there would already be a line of kids waiting to get in that stretched around the block,” says Lind.

Some nights Roslie’s preternatural bashfulness would get the best of him and he’d succumb to debilitating stage fright. “He’d look out at a packed crowd and turn to me and say, ‘I’m not singing tonight!’” says Parypa. “I’d be like, ‘But you’re our singer!’”

The Sonics soon caught the attention of Buck Ormsby, bassist from The Wailers, who had started Etiquette Records to put out his band’s recordings and harvest local talent. He told them if they had a record under their belt, they could command at least twice the $500 they were pulling down a night at the Red Carpet. But to make a record you had to have some original material, and at that point The Sonics were still just a cover band. Roslie went home that night and wrote a this-evil-chick-done-me-wrong song, as was the style of the day, around a catchy stair-stepping riff that — when played simultaneously by the guitar, sax, and organ — sounded as menacing as the title. He called it “The Witch.” Ormsby liked what he heard and took the boys into a two-track studio in Seattle that was primarily used to cut ad jingles.

“We were all of 17 and so keyed up and nervous that when they pressed ‘record’ we played it three times as fast as it was supposed to be,” says Lind. “I remember afterwards laying on the living room floor at the Parypas house and listening to the master, and all of us were distraught. We felt like we’d totally screwed it up and we’d spent $500 of our own money to record it.” The Parypas brothers’ father was so incensed he called up Ormsby and threatened to drive over to his house and punch his lights out for ruining his sons’ budding musical career.

Six months later it was a hit.

Despite the phone ringing off the hook with requests for “The Witch,” the big Seattle radio station WKJR refused to play the song before 3:30 p.m. — when the kids were home from school — for fear this creepy, lo-fi song about a witch would scare off the lucrative daytime homemaker audience. Despite such restrictions, the single sold 20,000 copies in the first week of its release. “The record label was like, ‘Holy crap, you guys are hot! We have to follow this up with an album!’” says Lind. “And we were like, ‘OK, when are we going to make this album?’ They said, ‘Tomorrow.’”

That night after playing their standard four-hour set at the Red Carpet, they asked the owner if they could stay and rehearse for a few hours. They worked up a couple numbers that Roslie had been chipping away at: “Boss Hoss,” inspired by a bitchin’ red Mustang he saw in a hot-rod magazine; and “Strychnine,” a bitter white crystalline powder widely used as a rat poison that causes convulsions and death through asphyxia in humans. It was also widely rumored at the time that LSD was cut with strychnine, which turned out to be a myth spread by law enforcement types to discourage use of the hallucinogen. A third original, the aptly titled “Psycho,” was made up on the spot that night. The rest of the album would be fleshed out with covers from their live set, including their now-iconic version of Richard Berry’s “Have Love, Will Travel.”

Lind remembers the recording session was booked for the middle of the night to get a cheaper rate. “We used to call Etiquette ‘Cheap Screw Records,’” says Lind. “It was like 3 a.m. Everything was done in one take. We’d be like, ‘We could probably play it better if we did it again.’ And the engineer would be like ‘Naw, sounds great, let’s move on.’ I remember the top of the piano being covered with burgers and soda cups and there was this thick fog of cigarette smoke.”

Etiquette hired famed rock photographer Jini Dellaccio to shoot the band for the cover. Formerly a fashion photographer, Dellaccio had started turning her lens on the moody, hirsute young men that peopled the local music scene with striking results. Always shooting in black and white, Dellaccio eschewed the fussily arranged studio setups that were de rigueur at the time in favor of spontaneous shots taken in rustic outdoor settings near her home along the waterfront.

The Sonics’ debut sold well in the Pacific Northwest but distribution snafus kept the album from breaking nationally. “They would start playing it on a radio station in Miami, but by the time they got the records into stores there, the radio station had moved onto other things and it died on the vine,” says Parypa. “I think that kind of thing happened a lot.”

Still, Here Are The Sonics opened a lot of doors for the band — including regional tours with The Kinks, The Mamas & the Papas, and the Beach Boys — and tripled their asking price for headlining gigs. “I remember the first time we got paid $1,500, boy, we felt like we were The Rolling Stones,” says Lind. And in a big-fish-little-pond way — getting drunk with The Kinks, trading backstage pranks with the Beach Boys — they were. After all, The Sonics’ prime directive always was and forever shall be getting laid, and, for a time at least, it was raining women. And when it rained it poured.

“We did not want for female attention back then and sometimes that caused problems,” says Lind. “We used to play a lot out in cowboy country. Not a lot of people know this but if you go over the Cascade mountains, all of eastern Washington is like Kansas, basically one big wheat field and combines. So when we would play out that way; lots of dudes would come to the shows in pickup trucks wearing cowboy hats and plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Well, their girls were attracted to us — we were young, skinny, good-looking guys and we’re up there playing rock ’n’ roll music.” This kind of thing happened all the time. Invariably the band would be cordially invited by jealous boyfriends to discuss the matter over knuckle sandwiches in a darkened alley behind the club. It got to the point that The Sonics guys started learning karate.

It wasn’t just jealous boyfriends they had to worry about. Though it’s hard today to understand what all the fuss was about, in 1965 — especially in the rural redoubts of the Pacific Northwest — having hair longer than a buzz cut marked you as some kind of beatnik-commie-queer. “We’d stop at some gas station out in the middle of nowhere and we’d ask directions how to get back to the interstate and the owner would say, ‘Oh sure, boy — say, are you a boy or a girl?’ Ha ha. Like we hadn’t heard that a million times,” says Lind. “Then he’d give us directions and we’d thank him and soon find out the directions lead to the middle of nowhere. We used to refer to them as ‘Sonics Directions.’”

They toured around in a shit-brown ’62 Ford van they christened The Turd. “When the sun hit at a certain angle you could see there was some writing on the side of the van that said EAT OUT MORE OFTEN,” says Jerry Roslie. “We couldn’t stop laughing about that, because, well, we were 18.”

When Etiquette decided they’d played out the string on the first album, it was time to record another one. Tomorrow. “Again, we had, like, no songs,” says Parypa. Though many rock snobs worship at the temple of Boom, which is widely recognized by the iconic Jini Dellaccio shot of the band on the cover — five tall drinks of water dressed head-to-toe in midnight-black and Beatle boots, elegantly staggered and striking poses of sullen teenage cool before a backdrop of whited-out oblivion — musically speaking it’s kind of a wet firecracker. The frantic energy of the debut has dissipated, Roslie largely abandons his lacerating vocal style, and the improved clarity of the recordings doesn’t really do the band any favors. The Sonics always did their best work in the murk.

By early 1966, when Boom was released, the times were clearly a-changing. The Beatles and the Beach Boys and Dylan had moved the game to a whole new level. Recording artists were expected to be poets and seers taking rock ’n’ roll to strange new places — places well beyond The Sonics’ reach as songwriters. They were primitives in a new age of artistes. Not that they didn’t give it the old college try. In late ’66 they jumped to Jerden Records, a Seattle label with deeper pockets thanks to labelmates The Kingsmen’s million-selling version of “Louie Louie.” Jerden sent them to Hollywood to record at Gold Star Studios, hoping for higher fidelity and a more current sound. It was a disaster. “We wound up hating it,” says Lind. “We’d just as soon forget that one.” The band disowned the record before it was even released, and it died a quick and ignominious death upon arrival. In the aftermath of their ill-advised slouch toward the fringes of competence, finesse, and commercial viability, The Sonics crumbled like vampires in the dawn’s early light of psychedelia, and its members soon vanished into the jungles of Vietnam, straight jobs, and the middle-class domestic tranquility of the suburbs from whence they came.

Which brings us back to where we started. The sun is going down on Larry Parypa’s house. The man of strong horse is looking a little saddle sore. He’s dreading the epic trek to São Paulo next week. “It will be fun to play in Brazil, but that’s going to be a horrible flight,” he says. The band’s upcoming coast-to-coast U.S. tour — a first for The Sonics — is also cause for concern.

“I live for that hour on stage, but everything else is bullshit,” he says. “You’re always tired, you get home at 2 a.m. but you’re kind of hyper, and you’ve got to be in the lobby at 6 a.m. to go some other place. And then when you get there, they want to do interviews and all that stuff. I hate waiting, I hate sitting in those little cramped greenrooms, I hate airplanes.”

Though The Sonics have managed, thus far, to defy the restraints of senior citizenship, time waits for no man. Not for very long, anyway. None of them are getting any younger. At 65, Freddie is the baby in the band. Lind and Roslie are septuagenarians, and Parypa is not far behind. Not to mention Roslie underwent a heart transplant back in 2008. Let’s face it, rock ’n’ roll is no country for old men. I ask Parypa how much longer he thinks The Sonics can keep this up. “I ask myself that all the time,” he says. “I asked Jerry about that like three weeks ago. He’s in the same boat, like, ‘When do we quit, man?’”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview first published on October 19th, 2006.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Welcome to part two of our bazillion-word interview with esteemed jazz critic Francis Davis, wherein our man Fran will be talking non-smack about Coltrane in Philly, Sun Ra on Uranus and the pre-historic beginnings of Fresh Air. If you are just finding us for the first time, you can find Part One here, along with his illustrious CV. When we last left our hero, he was beaten, bloodied and long haired, handcuffed in the back of Philadelphia Police Department paddy wagon charged with aggravated assault and battery on a police officer. In other words, it was the ’60s.

Phawker: Okay, so you bust out of prison. It’s you, Tom Waits, John Lurie and Roberto Benigni wading through the swamps of Louisiana. No wait, that’s Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law. Jumping forward, how did we decide to become a jazz critic?

Francis Davis: Slowly. In 1978, Terry Gross, who, as you know, later became my wife asked me to do a regular jazz segment on Fresh Air. She had a three-hour show in those days. And she needed to fill a lot of time. And she asked me to do a feature on jazz, on out-of-print jazz in particular. I wanted to make it clear that this wasn’t a show by some old white guy in his basement. Like, ‘this record’s really rare.’ I wanted to do a history of jazz paying attention only to the gaps. So I started writing the scripts and working hard to deliver them as if I was just saying these things off the top of my head. And then I got laid off at the record store I worked at which, you know, put me on employment compensation and gave me a lot of time. Terry and I went to England in ’79, and being out of my country for the first time I had kind of metamorphosis in a sense that you had no history. You could be anybody you want to be because nobody knows who you are. [And that was very liberating] So I really started wanting to write when I came back. And I did a few things for the Courier-Post, most of which were not jazz pieces. They paid very badly, but the great part about it was that they didn’t care if you knew something about it or not. As long as there was a Jersey connection, and as long as you remembered to mentioned what high school the person went to.

So I had all this time. I didn’t have a lot of clips, but I had a lot of the scripts, which were very good scripts actually. You know, a little over-written, but it goes with the territory when you first start to write… And I was on unemployment compensation, so I was getting a check every week and I could just sit and write. And do, like, 20 records reviews a day. And sometimes I did. So I built up this body of work and eventually people noticed me…

Phawker: Were you as interested in pop music or rock and roll as you were in jazz?

Francis Davis: Yeah, at one point I was. But writing about music for me meant writing about jazz, you know. And the other thing is that insofar as pop music is youth music, there has to be a point at which — and this certainly isn’t true for Bob Christgau — but for most of us there has to be a point at which keeping up with it, as I put it in the intro of Like Young, becomes as absurd a notion as keeping up with sex, or something. By the way, everybody hates the Killers new CD. I kind of like it, but anyway.

Phawker: How long was your little segment, about five minutes or so?

Francis Davis: Well, that’s what we always joked about. No, it was supposed to be 20 minutes, but because we had all the time in the world to fill, it was ‘Hey, 37 minutes? Fine! The guest isn’t here yet.’ And the show was live in those days too. They had very few things on tape.

Phawker: Was it called Fresh Air then?

Francis Davis: Yeah, my segment was called Interval. And you know, part of the time would be taken up by playing records. I didn’t excerpt records. I played complete tracks. That’s one thing I never liked about reviewing for NPR shows. I don’t know what you get from playing 30 seconds of something. Getting back to your question about pop, I’ve written about pop but usually just because something had interested me for years and years, like the piece I wrote about the Velvet Underground.

Phawker: Where did the Velvet’s piece first appear?

Francis Davis: The Atlantic Monthly. But that was because Bill Whitworth, the editor, asked me if I’d be interested in writing a piece about the Rolling Stones, who were mounting one of their many tours at the time. This I guess this is ’89 or ’90. And you know, no I wasn’t.

Phawker: Didn’t you call them ‘blown-out satyrs’?

Francis Davis: That’s the first sentence of the piece. I think I can write on a very personal level about pop. But I don’t think I have the kind of weight of authority that I have when I’m writing about jazz. And it’s the same thing. Bob Christgau has written about jazz but I think pop critics are treading on very dangerous territory when they write about jazz. And even Bob’s got stuff wrong. I don’t mean factually wrong. Its something I just disagree about. I think opinion is non-negotiable. It’s my way or the highway. But no, I don’t feel the need to sort of share my opinion with’ about the new Beck record, which I haven’t heard, as I do to share my opinion of the new Ornette Coleman record.

Phawker: Just to finish up the Terry thing. Is that how you guys met? Through the show?

Francis Davis: No, I think the first time we met was in the store. I dunno, the first or second time. And I remember we had a conversation about Ella Fitzgerald and about Paul Desmond. Because I really loved Paul Desmond. And she was surprised given my taste for, like, free improvisation and so on, that I liked Paul Desmond. I want to write a piece about Paul Desmond by the way.

Phawker: I don’t know anything about Paul Desmond.

Francis Davis: Paul Desmond was the alto saxophonist in the Dave Brubeck Quartet. And in a way one of the whitest players that ever lived. But in a sense he was the token black in the Brubeck Quartet. At least until before they hired a black bass player. He was a very ‘black’ player. I mean, there are many, many tenor players, including white tenor players, who were influenced by Lester Young. And the influence is kind of transparent. Because Desmond’s playing another instrument, an instrument in a high register, it’s not as obvious. But Desmond is so far behind the beat and so Lester Young-like, but in a good way. Anyway, but that’s how we met.

Phawker: And you sort of hit it off from there and the rest is history?

Francis Davis: Well, she knew I knew a lot about jazz and wanted to do a whole strip of different music features. There’d be one on jazz, there’d be one on folk music or something, and actually I was the only one who did it for a long time because people would lose interest. In fact, I think in the end we weren’t getting paid anything, or maybe $20 a throw.

Phawker: Lets jump ahead. You have been working on a Coltrane book for 10 years…

Francis Davis: Yeah. Fitfully. It’s long overdue. I don’t mean it’s long overdue in the market, I mean, in terms of the contract, it’s long overdue. Yeah, I have a very indulgent publisher. It’s a straight bio. But the publisher would be horrified to hear it described as a critical biography because they always fear that. In the marketplace that means it’s a kind of dense book that’s not really a biography but really a book of criticism. But you know, these things weave in and out. And I don’t know how you can write a biography of an artist without it being a critical biography in some ways. There have been numerous Coltrane biographies, but I think what’s missing, really, is Philadelphia. Because there were a lot of people, there still are a lot of people here, who are kind of important to the story who nobody really bothers talking to very much.

Phawker: What role do you think Philadelphia played in his art?

Francis Davis: Well, what was he, 18 when he came here? I dunno, he had finished high school. He studied at the Granoff School. I think in Philadelphia there were two things that had an impact on him. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a Philadelphia sound. I think there’s a Philadelphia mind set, or sensibility or attitude or whatever. The other thing, the thing he became caught up in, musicians will tell you, and it’s funny, some people intend it as a criticism, that there was an obsession with technique in Philadelphia. And it’s funny, with Coltrane that technique becomes a form of mysticism. It’s almost as if like, the deeper you get into chords, the better of a musician you are, the better person you become. It’s such a discipline. Its almost like this zen kinda that. And that’s Philadelphia. And Coltrane came to epitomize that.

Phawker: When was Coltrane here?

Francis Davis: Well he got here about ’44, ’45. Again, he didn’t come here for the music. He came here for the work, along with his mother, who had recently been widowed. When he left it’s kind of hard to say. He left gradually. He maintained a residence here. Which is still there, but I’m not sure when he last actually resided here. But he was gone by ’57. He joins Miles [Davis] by ’55 and he’s kind of gone by then really. Sometimes you read things and you think Coltrane lived his whole life here or something, because Philadelphia is very possessive and it has a king-sized inferiority complex because of its proximity to New York.

(At this point, Terry calls and Francis excuses himself to make a dinner date with his wife at Zeke’s Deli. If you go, try the whitefish. Dynamite whitefish. Lastly, apologies for false advertising, there was a fairly lengthy Sun Ra discussion that must have wound up on the cutting room floor. We’ll look for it and slap it on the end if we find it [We never did.–The Editor]. We blame the intern. That’s the beauty of having an intern. At Phawker our motto is: We’ll get it right, eventually.)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published back in 2006. It’s still a fascinating read.

Welcome to the second installment of our Grumpy Old Men series, wherein we learn from our elders and soak up their salty yarns like Bounty Quicker Picker-Upper. Yesterday we had Robert Christgau, today Francis Davis. Tomorrow? The Pope. What’s that you say? You never heard of Francis Davis. Oh buddy, it’s good thing you found us! Check out his CV:

He has written about music, film, and other aspects of popular culture for The Atlantic since 1984 and was appointed lead jazz critic for the Voice in 2004. He was jazz critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1982 to 1996, jazz editor of Musician from 1982 to 1985, and a staff writer for 7 Days from 1988 to 1990. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Arts & Leisure and Book Review sections, The Nation, Connoisseur, Rolling Stone, Wigwag, The Oxford American, Stereo Review Sound & Vision, High Fidelity, the Boston Phoenix, The Absolute Sound, ARTicles, Cadence, Down Beat, Jazz Times, Elle, Audio, The World & I, The Wire, The Black American, the Village Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, and The Times Literary Supplement (London).

Yow! He is also married to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. We talked to him about his 10-years-in-the-making John Coltrane bio, Sheets of Sound, what it’s like to get beaten up and thrown in the hoosegow by the Philly cops for being a smartass hippie back in the Sixties, and who’s on top in bed. Just kidding. He wouldn’t answer that question.

PHAWKER: Say your name please…

FRANCIS DAVIS: Francis Davis.

PHAWKER: You’re Philly-born and -bred. Lived here your whole life.

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah.

PHAWKER: Where’d you grow up?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Southwest Philadelphia. Around 58th and Elmwood Ave.

PHAWKER: And what kinda neighborhood was that back then?

FRANCIS DAVIS: At the time it was a very ethnic, Catholic neighborhood: Italian, Irish and Polish. In fact, many of the kids who I went to school with who were Polish still had parents who spoke, you know, Polish. Spoke Polish? Is there such a language? [laughs]

PHAWKER: Are you Irish stock 100%?

FRANCIS DAVIS: No. But Celtic. I guess my father was Welsh.

PHAWKER: And your mom?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Irish. Very Irish.

PHAWKER: And where did you go to high school?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Bartram. It was an integrated high school, which was very rare in Philly at the time. Well, I believe, anyway. And this would have been 1964 when I graduated. So not only was it very integrated, it was also the height of the civil rights era. So it was kind, of you know, hip for black kids to invite white kids to the parties and vice versa. Not that I, you know, threw any parties myself. We also had a great influx of Jewish kids, and then we even had an Indian kid, who wore, you know, a turban. And the black kids used to call it his doo-rag. So you know, I think now to find such a high school you’d have to watch a television show. I mean I think they’re only high schools like that on TV. And we had, like, hoods and National Merit Scholars.

PHAWKER: And is that what first opened you to black culture and music and things like that?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Well, to jazz, in a way. At that time there was a commercial jazz station in Philadelphia: WHAT-FM. In those days, not everybody had a FM radio yet, you know. And certainly kids’ radios tended to be transistors, which were little AM radios. So the hip thing to do was to listen to FM. In particular to listen to WHAT-FM, the jazz station, 96.5 I recall. So it probably was black kids who first taught me about that, including a kid I went to school with who was Bill Cosby’s cousin.

PHAWKER: How old were you?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Seventeen. I was reading Saturday Review and Evergreen Review and things like that. And they covered jazz in those days. There was a critic that I liked named Martin Williams, who I especially liked who also wrote for Evergreen Review and Saturday Review. Because I was reading poetry I knew about the then-named Leroi Jones, who, you know, I knew him as a poet before I knew him as a jazz writer or jazz critic. But anyway, it was a short step from reading them and those magazines to buying Down Beat and a magazine called Jazz and so on … and I noticed there were people I was reading about who weren’t being played on that station. So I would save my pennies, sometimes literally, and buy, usually cut out records that were on sale for $1.98 or so by Cecil Taylor or Ornette Coleman. So between that station and stuff I was buying I was hearing lots of stuff. And that’s how I started.

PHAWKER: And what got you into reading these fairly mature literary magazines as a teenager?

FRANCIS DAVIS: I don’t know. I always read. When I was a kid I was never treated like a kid in my family. In the house where I was growing up, I was the only male in an otherwise female household with my mother, my grandmother and an aunt. In some ways I was a little bit spoiled. My grandmother lost her son in World War II and I was named after him. And in some ways, this is sort of a a black concept, in some ways I was the replacement child for her. And also because grandmothers spoil ya anyway. But the person I was named after was smart. He was the only person in the family that had graduated from high school. Because I had his name, it was just assumed that I would be smart, too. There were never kids books around, per se. So the books I read when I was a kid were, you know, the same things my mom was reading. Which meant a lot of Mickey Spillane. I was fascinated by the look of type on a page. When I would write stuff on my own, if it wasn’t for school, I would get a piece of loose leaf paper, which was wide ruled, and do two lines in each one because it looked more squished together, like typeface.

So, you know, I was just interested in writing. My senior year in high school I got a job at the Free Library branch at 51st and Kensington. Essentially it was a minimum wage thing where you put books away. That was all you were allowed to do if you weren’t union. But during the summer it was a dream job because hardly anybody came into the library. So there’d be three or four to put away and then I had all the time in the world to read. And I could also check any book out that I wanted and not have to worry about bringing it back. There was one stretch in particular when I was a senior in high school. Right around the time of the Kennedy assassination. My grandmother died not long after that. And there were a lot of arrangements to be made. Relatives were coming from different places and nobody was paying much attention to whether I went to school or not, so I would just stay home and read. And I know that in my senior year of high school and the beginning of freshman year of college, I read probably 90 percent of everything I’ve ever read. [Laughs] That’s when I read Lolita, The Invisible Man, Rabbit, Run, etc. Pretty much everything Norman Mailer had published up to that point. And I was just digesting all this. And I was just reading these things the way people watched television shows, you know. And also not having to do papers on them or anything or discuss them in class. Again, I probably started reading say, Saturday Review, because a writer who I had read and liked was on the cover. And Evergreen I started reading because in the very first issue Norman Mailer had a piece in there. And I was kinda obsessed with Mailer back then. Especially the way he wrote about writing, how he changed this word and replaced it with another word because it was more masculine, and so on. So I started to write a novel myself. It was more or less The Great Gatsby, but with teenagers, you know?

PHAWKER: What was it called?

FRANCIS DAVIS: It had various titles. The one I remember was Let Him Be Foolish. Never finished it, by the way. It started out as a short story and became a never-ending novel. It just got longer and longer. I’m glad it no longer exists.

PHAWKER: So then you went to Temple?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah, yeah. I started at Penn State. Then I went to Temple.

PHAWKER: Oh, freshman year you went to Penn State?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah then I transferred to Temple. You know, Penn State seemed too rural to me. I had never been out of the city in my life. And I was used to having, like, a newsstand at ever corner. At Penn State there weren’t even corners. I used to get lost trying to find a classroom that I had just been to a few days before .

PHAWKER: There’s no grid to follow.

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah, to orient myself. It was also, at least in the fall of 1964, Penn State was overwhelmingly white. And suddenly I was with all these kids from small towns from Philadelphia who were the most casually racist people. They were not bad people, but the racism was just something I wasn’t used to.

PHAWKER: And what was this sort of racial mix at Temple?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Well, it was still largely white. I had classes that didn’t have a single black person in them, for example. But it wasn’t quite like Penn State. And I guess gradually it got more integrated. It’s funny, I think sometimes there’s this perception of Temple having a much larger black enrollment than it does because it’s in North Philadelphia and because of the basketball team and because of WRTI, the jazz station. But it was predominantly white when I got there. But I don’t think, outside of a historically black college, that there would have been a college I could have gone to that wouldn’t have been predominately white at the time.

PHAWKER: Tell me a little bit about what you remember of white flight in the city and how the whole city changed in that whole time period you described.

FRANCIS DAVIS: Well I never witnessed it. It was just a fait accompli. If I went back to my neighborhood today, you know, it would be completely black. I should clarify: there’s West Philadelphia and there’s Southwest Philadelphia. Back then it was very Italian, so much so that if you weren’t Italian… (laughs). Forget being black. If you were Irish or Polish you were taking your chances walking through there. Cause there were always great rivalry between the Italian kids and the Irish kids. But you know, within a few years those neighborhoods were black, predominately black. But it’s not like I witnessed it. I was gone by then.

PHAWKER: Your dad is out of the picture?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah, yeah, I never really knew my father.

PHAWKER: Do you recall that big race riot that happened in North Philly in ’64? From what I’ve read it was crazy. It went on for three days!

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah yeah. Well, you have to remember that it seemed, between that and the next year, that there were riots all over the place.

PHAWKER: What was your reaction to all of that?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Well, dismay. Dismay. And I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why at the time. But I think looking back everybody had a sense, that the civil rights movement was relinquishing the high ground. Relinquishing the moral high ground. And certainly I think in retrospect, whatever other benefits it had, that was also true of Black Power. I mean, the moral high ground is very important. I couldn’t articulate it any better at the time. But, you know, sadness. But also comprehension. The Phillies’ ballpark used to be at 21st and Lehigh. So, I’d seen enough of North Philadelphia to know why people were fed up. I don’t know if it was smart to do what they were doing, nevertheless I could understand, you know?

PHAWKER: Okay, so you graduated from Temple.

FRANCIS DAVIS: No, I never graduated. I dropped out. After about five years. [laughs] It was the Sixties. That’s how I usually explain it.

PHAWKER: Ok. Tell me, when did you get Sixties-fied?

Francis Davis: Well, I dunno. Just in terms of the academic career. I had a habit all along of only paying attention to and going to classes that I was good in and blowing off the rest. And you know, essentially I was very good in the English courses, the history, political science, and religion courses, because mostly what you did in religion was read novels anyway, you know. Temple had a great religion department back then, by the way. I believe it was the first secular religious department in the United States. It was headed by a guy who turned out not to be all what he was cracked up to be, named Phillips, I think his first name was Bernard. But he was DT Suzuki’s translator. Suzuki is the guy who exploited…the Salinger collection Nine Stories. He was pretty lofty academically, but he wasn’t a good classroom teacher. But they had great people in the department. I remember a guy named Murray Goldman who was, in addition to being a religious professor, he was a Jungian psychiatrist, a rabbi and a songwriter, you know, who wrote songs for a short lived band that had Kevin Bacon’s brother in it. It was called Good News. So Murray would be in class and he’d quote like George Santayana and Otis Redding in the same sentence. That blew me away.

PHAWKER: But you dropped out..

FRANCIS DAVIS: I dropped out. It’s sort of like I dropped out gradually. I stopped going to classes and then I didn’t enroll for the next semester. And I was able to get a job in a bookstore. It’s not like we had a lot of money in my house, so that helped. And it’s not like I thought of…this is a long digression and I won’t get into the details, but I got arrested one night in 1968.

PHAWKER: C’mon, it’ll up your street cred.

FRANCIS DAVIS: Well, I got arrested essentially for questioning the cops. We were in West Philly at the time. They were stopping people and searching people who they thought looked ‘suspicious’ and very often that translated into anyone with long hair, really, cause they thought they’d get a drug bust or whatever. So, I actually got along really well with the cop who stopped me and searched me, we were kinda joking together, I think we smoked a cigarette together or something.

PHAWKER: You had long hair?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah. So I made the strategic mistake of calling the precinct and complaining about the policy when I got home. Because the cop had more or less told me that’s what the policy was. So they sent cops to my door. And there was this whole charade of like, ‘Did somebody here call for the police?’

‘No, I called the police station.’

‘But did somebody here call for the police?’

‘No, I called the police station.’

And so on and they kept inching their way in the house. I probably wise-cracked or something. And they beat me up. And if they touch you they have to charge you with assault and battery. It was a bad case because they had charged me with assault and battery — ‘aggravated A and B’ as they put it — you know, on a police officer, but they forgot to charge me with anything else. So it’s just like, ‘So what happened? You just went up to a cop and started punching him? That’s hard to believe.’ But anyway, that night, my mother in a panic called a lot of people including my boss at the book store and my Uncle Frank the truck driver, and one of my professors, who called two other professors from Temple, so they were all there at my arraignment.

PHAWKER: So what happened? Did the case get dropped?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah. I’ll tell you what was really funny. One of my character witnesses was to be one of my professors, who as it turned out had gotten arrested for picketing Hubert Humphrey because he wasn’t radical enough — boy, those were the days. Anyway, weird twist of fate, his arraignment is the case right before mine. And the judge was not very sharp, definitely a patronage hire. He had a hard time trying to keep everybody straight standing before him in the courtroom. And he points to my professor. ‘And who are you?’ And Henry had just been sentenced by him, just a few minutes prior. Like you know, a fine or something. So he says ‘I’m his professor.’ And the judge says, ‘Professor, huh? I just had a professor in front of me and I found him guilty.’

PHAWKER: And he didn’t even recognize him? Was this guy senile or he didn’t see that well or what?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Senile.

PHAWKER: Turns out, justice is blind. Just to clarify: the cops worked their way into the house and you were being cocky and what? One of the cops just punched you in the face?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah. Of course I didn’t hit them back.

PHAWKER: So how much of a beating did you get? Was it more than one punch?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah.

PHAWKER: They beat on you for a while?

FRANCIS DAVIS: Yeah.

PHAWKER: And then took you off in handcuffs. And charged you for assault and battery. God bless America.

FRANCIS DAVIS: It’s tough being in the paddy wagon in handcuffs because there’s nothing to hold on to.

PHAWKER: Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard about that.

FRANCIS DAVIS: You’re banging around every turn and stop. [Laughing] And you just pray they locked that back door.

End of Part One. Tomorrow: John Coltrane, Sun Ra, climbing to the top of the jazz crit-ocracy and meeting a cute little feminist radiohead named Terry.

ESQUIRE: He has to go. Now. This moment. Donald J. Trump cannot be allowed to be President* of the United States for a single second longer. It’s not simply that he is unfit for the office he holds. I mean, that’s true of Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, too. Trump is something worse. He has proven himself to be a national security threat, the most serious one in Washington since the Royal Marines burned the place. He’s a traitor to his oath and to his country. He needs to be forced out, either through the provisions of the 25th Amendment or through an accelerated impeachment process. Any elected officials who do not agree with this simple and obvious fact dishonor the offices they hold with every second they decline to do it hereafter.

He is responsible for all of it. He is responsible for the assault on the Capitol and for the incredibly lax response from the Capitol Police. He created an atmosphere in which the worst impulses in the worst cops all over the country are inflamed and encouraged until the Capitol Police refused to defend…the Capitol. He has to go. Now. This moment.

[…]

He is responsible for all of it. This country has a serious fascism problem now. It has a fascism problem that is fed and encouraged by what is at best a fascist-adjacent media ecosystem and, at worst, a communications network that would embarrass Goebbels. There is a genuinely subversive rightwing movement in this country that found its focus in this president*, and that will be rested and ready when the next one comes along. There is no Republican politician with either the courage or the clout to cure the prion disease that has now eaten away all of the party’s higher functions and reduced it to a rough beast that is no longer anything but an accumulation of base and abandoned appetite. History has turned down a dark alley and he sent it there. He has to go. Now. This moment. MORE

NEW YORKER: The musician David Byrne once compared the intuitive writing of Bill Buford to the work of the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. Since 1995, Buford has contributed nearly fifty pieces to The New Yorker. He has written about a wide array of subjects, including his butchery apprenticeship in Tuscany, the connoisseurs who seek the perfect dark chocolate, and the art of breadmaking in Lyon, France. The New Yorker’s former fiction editor, he has also published three books, including “Among the Thugs” and “Heat.” One of my favorite pieces by Buford is “Delta Nights,” a ruminative Profile of the country-blues singer Lucinda Williams, published in 2000. Williams, Buford observes, is an amalgam — a musician capable of working in a multitude of genres and conveying a variety of keen emotions. Like some of her musical influences, she’s gifted with a voice so rough and husky that the singer Emmylou Harris once described it, in Buford’s paraphrasing, as “capable of peeling the chrome off a trailer hitch.” Her music often calls upon, and simultaneously subverts, Southern narratives. Her work, Buford writes, “is more poem than song, a surrealistic invocation of Southernness not unlike the kitschy religious shrines and turquoise serpents and bottle-cap Christs in Lucinda’s own house. It’s a bit of mythmaking, by a poet of loss, about a place that’s receding from experience, and that might never have been there in the first place.” Williams’s explorations of the Delta in her music echo Buford’s own childhood recollections of the South. At the core of the region’s mythos, he notes, in languorous ripples of prose, is a love affair with the notion of loss and dispossession. Williams’s earthy musical tones and biting verses exquisitely capture this sense of loss. It is her ability to transform personal melancholia into vibrant, evocative strains, Buford discovers, that captivates listeners—and offers a raw glimpse into the genesis of a singular musician’s artistic journey.—Erin Overbey, New Yorker Archive Editor

NEW YORKER: It’s a damp Delta night in January, and we’ve pulled into Lambert, in Quitman County, Mississippi, at one time a modestly prosperous cotton town, now reduced to a rather curious thing. The railway station—stripped down and operated in an only-one-man-needs-to-run-it kind of way—is still functioning as an agricultural freight stop, more or less as it always has, but it seems to be the exception. The town center consists of two rows of Main Street-like buildings, vaguely Victorian in design, relics of nineteenth-century antebellum cotton commerce, almost all of them abandoned. One of these would have housed the barbershop, or the bank, or the post office. Now they’re home to whomever, whatever, anybody, nobody. One was the Rexall drugstore. (The “x” in Rexall has broken off.) The feeling of the place is of impoverished improvisation, variations on a squatter’s theme, and Lambert’s empty buildings have been taken up by anyone who has the know-how to crack open a padlocked door and get the electricity turned on. As we pull in, flames leap out from a corner, the only light on a street without street lights: it’s a barbecue, the pit constructed from fallen loose bricks, right out on the sidewalk. The town seems to be deadly desolate, and yet, weirdly, it is also busy with people.

It’s Saturday night, and we’re in the heart of the heart of the Delta, the homeland of the blues. Our drive began in Clarksdale, near the birthplace of Muddy Waters, and continued through the very crossroads where Robert Johnson, seventy-two years ago, was supposed to have done his legendary transaction with the Devil, exchanging his soul for a satanic facility on guitar. And for half an hour we’ve been on county highways, all straight lines and right angles, cutting through plowed fields of cotton and soybean, seeing no other vehicles, no people, no lights except the distant dull blue of a farmhouse television, and then this explosion of busyness, in this place near no place, an embellished dot on a road map. We park, get out. Main Street is thrumming—a heavy, amplified bass coming from behind a number of boarded-up store-fronts. We pick a solid, thickly painted door, which gives after I push against it, and it opens up to the sweet, acrid smell of a woodstove, a smoky array of blue and green lights dangling from an overhead pipe, and, atop a stage in the corner, a sixty-year-old man in a two-piece suit and brown patent-leather shoes—Johnnie Billington playing electric guitar.

This is the first stop on a visit to Delta juke joints, and it’s impossible not to be impressed by that profoundly unmodern, unreconstructed feeling that you still find in the South. I’m here because of an interest in Lucinda Williams, the Louisiana-born singer and writer, and although she isn’t with me tonight (she’s in Nashville, singing with the North Mississippi All Stars—as it happens, a Delta blues band), the Delta has served Williams as a highly personal, emotional reference library, something she keeps coming back to in her music, for images or metaphors or, sometimes, for its famous twelve-bar arrangements and its flattened blue notes. Williams is forty-seven, and, obsessively working and reworking a small collection of tunes, has created a concentrated repertoire of around three dozen exceptionally powerful songs. For a thirty-five-year effort (Williams began playing when she was twelve), that works out to about a song a year, and it’s still possible to see a live show in which she gets a little carried away—and she always seems to be on the verge of getting a little carried away—and hear almost the entire œuvre, as was the case about eighteen months ago at New York’s Irving Plaza, when Williams’s encores went on longer than the act, and the audience emerged, after nearly two and a half hours, thoroughly spent, not only by the duration of the program but also by the unforgiving rawness of the songs. They’re unforgiving because they are so relentlessly about pain or longing or can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head sexual desire, but most often they’re about loss, and usually about losing some impossible fuckup of a man, who has got more charm and charisma than a civilized society should allow, and who never lives up to any of the promises he made when he was drunk, on drugs, in lust, in love, incarcerated, in pain, insane, in rehab, or, in some other essential but frustratingly appealing romantic way, unaccountable. He’s usually from Baton Rouge, Louisiana (and a bass player), or from Lafayette, Louisiana (and a bass player), or from Lake Charles, Louisiana (and a bass player), or maybe from Greenville, Mississippi (and a bass player), and the songs come across as both very Southern and also painfully autobiographical. Ouch! you think after you’ve heard Lucinda Williams for the first time, this girl has gone through some shit. Her songs are not traditional rock and roll, if only because they are more written, more preoccupied with the concerns of language and image, than most rock tunes. They’re not country, although there is an occasional twangy country element. They’re not folk, even though “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” her 1998 album (and her first commercial success), got a Grammy award for the best contemporary-folk record of the year. And they’re not blues, even though they are informed by something that might be described as a blues attitude. MORE

FRESH AIR: CNN correspondent Brian Stelter says President Trump’s “cozy” relationship with Fox News is “like nothing we’ve seen in American history.” In his new book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, Stelter describes the president as a “shadow producer” to Fox News host Sean Hannity — who, in turn, acts as a “shadow chief of staff” for Trump.

“This is a relationship that is extraordinary, because Trump shapes Hannity’s show [and] Hannity advises the president on policy and personnel,” Stelter says. “And then at 9 o’clock sharp, the president is watching Hannity deliver the talking points that they have already discussed.”

But Stelter notes that Trump’s close relationship with Fox News goes beyond Hannity. “Fox is Trump’s safe space. It’s where he’s not going to be humiliated, where he’s not going to hear uncomfortable truths,” Stelter says. “There’s just no example of this kind of alliance between a president and a media outlet ever before.”

Stelter adds that Trump’s reliance on Fox News has created a dangerous feedback loop — especially with regard to COVID-19. “When the virus was silently spreading in the United States in February and early March, some of his biggest stars [on Fox News] downplayed the threat, almost edged into denialism,” he says. “And the biggest problem about that is that Trump heard it. He echoed it. They echoed Trump back. So we’re into this grotesque feedback loop where they’re telling each other it’s going to be OK, and they are lulling the president into a false sense of security about the virus.” MORE

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FRESH AIR: It’s impossible to understand the Trump era, with its unparalleled polarization, without tracing Stephen Miller’s journey to the White House. That’s what my guest, Jean Guerrero, writes in her new book, “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, And The White Nationalist Agenda.” She describes Miller as the architect of Trump’s border and immigration policies, helping Trump, quote, “conjure an invasion of animals to come steal American jobs and spill American blood,” unquote. She describes the ideological arc of Miller’s life and investigates his ties to right-wing mentors and far-right groups. She adds, many are baffled at how someone so young with so little policy or legal expertise gained so much power, outlasting and overtaking his mentor, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. Her book helps show how he did it.

Guerrero is an investigative reporter who formerly was with KPBS, the radio and TV station in San Diego. She previously covered Mexico and Central America for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. She’s the author of a previous book called “Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir” about growing up with a Mexican father and Puerto Rican mother.

Jean Guerrero, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let’s talk about the arc of Stephen Miller’s ideology. He was anti-immigration in high school, and you describe him as growing up in California at a time when there was a strong anti-immigration movement. What are some of the things in his world, in his personal life that you think helped lead to his extreme views on immigration? MORE

FRESH AIR: That’s the sound of an immigration raid getting underway in the new six-part documentary series “Immigration Nation” now streaming on Netflix. Our guests today are the series’ co-directors and co-executive producers, Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz. They spent three years filming immigration enforcement actions and their effects after President Trump took office, and they had remarkable access to agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. As you’ll hear, the filmmakers’ relationship with ICE deteriorated sharply after the agency saw rough drafts of the planned episodes.

The series follows ICE agents, their supervisors and spokesmen, activists, immigrants and their families and even a smuggler who guides migrants across the U.S. border for hefty fees. The stories are compelling, and they raise questions about the impact of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. Shaul Schwarz and Cristina Clusiau have collaborated on several previous documentaries, including the Emmy award-winning films “A Year In Space” and “Trophy.” Schwarz spent time around the U.S.-Mexican border for his 2013 film “Narco Cultura,” which premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2013. Schwarz and Clusiau joined me via Skype from Brooklyn. MORE

Please don't retweet this sequel to my first Trump/Biden "ramp video". Because Trump spent 10 whole minutes defending his West Point walk at his rally today.

Telling him he's a whiny b*tch might send him over the edge.@realDonaldTrump @JoeBiden #VoteTrumpOut pic.twitter.com/R0tE6F4iUE

— fact (@FindAClearTruth) June 21, 2020

BUZZFEED: It’s a shame that the name “Pete Davidson” is now synonymous with the name “Ariana Grande.” I can’t imagine dating someone in my mid-twenties for a few intense, absurd months, and then having that relationship die like a star burning through its own fuel supply, only after it’s come to define a significant portion of my public persona. Davidson became one of the most overexposed celebrities of 2018, the face of Big Dick Energy and the boyfriend of a few other famous women. But the tabloid coverage from those relationships clearly got to Davidson, despite the fact that he’s plenty talented in his own right.

Though he has continued appearing on Saturday Night Live and released a Netflix stand-up special in February, he has avoided social media almost entirely and has refused most press interview requests (through representatives of his movie, he declined to speak with BuzzFeed News). And in 2019, he moved back to Staten Island, where he grew up, to live in the basement of a house he bought with his mother.

But on Friday, he’s releasing his biggest project yet: The King of Staten Island, a comedy-drama directed by Judd Apatow and written by Davidson, Apatow, and Davidson’s best friend, Dave Sirus, and available on demand. The movie marks Davidson’s first starring role in a feature film and is demonstrably semiautobiographical. Davidson plays the lovable but frustrating Scott, a man in his mid-twenties, stuck in arrested development after his firefighter father dies while saving someone on the job. He aspires to be a tattoo artist, but like his friend says, his work is “mad inconsistent.” He’s sweet and easy to root for, but he’s an idiot. When he attempts to tattoo a 12-year-old he runs into on the beach, he ends up setting up his widowed mother/roommate (played by an upsettingly hot Marisa Tomei in a very Long Island mullet) with yet another firefighter (Bill Burr). The King of Staten Island isn’t Davidson’s first attempt to become something more than a famous boyfriend, but it is his best work thus far.

At just 26, Davidson has lived more than a few lifetimes. He’s been the son of a hero, a celebrity accessory, an asshole, and a self-described crazy person. Yet he still manages to be appealing, charming, and lovable, even if it’s not always clear why. With The King of Staten Island, Davidson finally has the room and the self-awareness to present a fuller version of himself. It’s too simple to paint him as nothing more than a traumatized son who is still grappling with the loss of his father, or to suggest he’s just another white-guy comedian who doesn’t know where and when to punch. In Staten Island, he shows that he’s both and a whole lot more. MORE

[Illustrations by ALEX FINE]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally ran back in November of 2011. We are re-posting it today on the second anniversary of his untimely death. Good night Mr. Bourdain, wherever you are.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Anthony Bourdain is a man who needs no introduction, but for those not in the know or without a consumptive cable habit, understand that he is the enfant terrible of the foodie world who came of age on the Punk Rock Planet of New York ‘77 simultaneously pogoing to the likes of the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, and Patti Smith and shooting smack in the shithole bathrooms of CBGBs. Upon graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978, he ran the kitchens of various fancy Big Apple eateries — including the Supper Club, One Fifth Avenue, and Sullivan’s — before winding up the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in 1998. In 2000, he penned the gonzo fin de siecle memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, which expanded on his infamous New Yorker piece, Don’t Eat Before Reading This, that begins thusly:

Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger–risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese and shellfish. Your first 207 Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your 208th may send you to bed with the sweats, chills and vomits. Gastronomy is the science of pain.

Kitchen Confidential soon occupied the New York Times best seller list and led to Bourdain hosting his own show on the Travel Channel, No Reservations, wherein he trots the globe sampling the outre customs and exotic cuisines of various indigenous peoples and, for fear of offending his hosts, and in the pursuit of damn good television, bravely chomps down just about everything put in front of him, including: sheep testicles, ant eggs, seal eyeballs, a whole cobra with its heart still beating, and, most disgustingly, a warthog’s anus, which required him to take Cipro for two weeks. In my book, he is pretty much The Coolest Man On Earth. Given that chefs are the new rock stars, I hereby dub him ‘The Lou Reed of Food’ — just remember you heard it here first, folks. Recently, Phawker got Bourdain on the horn to talk about eating dog, shooting smack, dissing Philly and, of course, hating on Billy Joel.

PHAWKER: You caused a bit of a ruckus a few years back when you sort of dismissed Philly as a “two-horse town,” Stephen Starr and George Perrier. Would you take that back if you could? Do you still feel that way?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I certainly would take it back in a hot second. The only thing that’s in my way is there are increasingly large numbers of really good restaurants there or interest places for sure, a large number have come to Philadelphia since I made that comment. But having great restaurants only is not generally what I do. I’m looking for something different. If you had a huge Cambodian community, that would be interesting. Good fine dining which Philadelphia has, good Italian food which Philadelphia has, that’s not making a show for me yet.

PHAWKER: Aside from the fancy-pants restaurants in town, which there are more and more of these days, there is interesting stuff out in the neighborhoods.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I don’t know anything about it. It’s a personal failing that we haven’t found a way into yet. We will, there’s no doubt about it.

PHAWKER: Where are you planning to eat when you get to Philly?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I’m in the middle of a tour so generally I pull in late in the afternoon, all I have time for is to check into the hotel, throw some water on my face, take a bite of cheese from the complementary cheese tray, do my gig, by the time I’m doing the signing and the picture taking afterwards I collapse into my bed at 1 AM, wake up at 4:30 or 5 and I’m off to the next city. So unfortunately this time around I will shamefully not be getting around.

PHAWKER: Let’s talk about some of the stranger things you’ve eaten – sheep testicles, ant eggs, seal eyeball, whole cobra with it’s heart still beating, warthog’s anus, which required you to take Cipro for two weeks – where do you draw the line? Is there anything you wouldn’t put in your mouth?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I try to avoid dog, that’s for sure. I’ve managed to gracefully avoid having that presented to me. I try to be a good guest. I try to eat whatever’s put in front of me. But at the same time, I’ve made efforts to not find myself in a position where my host is surprising me with dog.

PHAWKER: There is a Mexican place here in Philly called Los Taquitos De Puebla that sells eyeball tacos.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Oh yeah, that’s very classic, I’ve had a lot of that in Mexico. That’s very ordinary food. I’ve had a lot of it. It’s good.

PHAWKER: Touché. Is it cow eyeball?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Yes.

PHAWKER: A couple things here I wanted to check off in the true/false column. Did you really tell your kids that eating at McDonald’s causes retardation?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I wanna be careful for libel purposes here, but I may or may not have suggested that there might be some linkage.

PHAWKER: Fair enough.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: That was hyperbole I think. I have definitely said that it’s icky and might have suggested a link with cooties.

PHAWKER: How do you stay so trim while cooking and eating for a living?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: It’s really something to think about. If I’m shooting in Italy for ten days, the crew and me we’ll all gain ten pounds. If I’m shooting in Italy or south of France I try to schedule a shoot some place where the food’s not very good or we don’t have much expectation of eating heavily, maybe a noodle and broth culture or someplace like a very poor country. We try to mix it up, cause you know, if I’m shooting in Italy, France, and Spain all in a row, I will come home and find myself 15 pounds heavier. With me, if I put on six pounds it feels like a ton.

PHAWKER: Let’s talk a little about your take on vegetarianism, which you have labeled a “first world luxury.”

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: What I mean by that is, personal choices people make in their own homes and their own communities, I have absolutely no argument with. If you choose for whatever reason, reasons of conscience or personal preference or for whatever reason, if you live in Philadelphia and choose to live a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, I hardly argue about it. It’s your choice. In fact, if you’re traveling to Rome or Paris or the industrialized world, again, these are restaurants you can generally call ahead and inquire if they have vegetarian options and you can eat reasonably well. But I have found from my personal experience that many of the most of the most interesting and amazing places in the developing world, it’s very awkward and will not be understood when you say, “I cannot eat what you’re offering me. I will not eat what you’re offering me.” First of all, it strikes me as being curious when one would go to Thailand or China, these amazing countries with these amazing cuisines and not wanna find out as much as you can about their culture, especially their cooking culture which is so extraordinary, but you would again and again find yourself having to offend often very poor hosts who are very proudly offering you their best. Like it or not, they will just not understand and not accept it, they will be offended and in some cases disgraced in front of their neighbors. I just see it as rude, with traveling, to be many of the places I’ve been, to insist on eating in your preferred style would force you to be rude.

PHAWKER: When in Rome, right?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I believe when in Rome, eat as the Romans. Otherwise, why bother to go? Most of the relationships I’ve made around the world are to my willingness to accept with good grace and good humor and with gratitude what’s offered.

PHAWKER: What is your take on the whole ‘buy local’ or the slow food movement?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I’m all for it. Who could possibly be against it? It’s wonderful that we increasingly have these options. Even at its silliest and most ideological it’s certainly a good thing.

PHAWKER: Not that you’re an expert on these matters, but what do you make of this notion that the only way to feed the world is through factory farming?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: That is an inescapable fact, an unavoidable fact. We’re not going to revert to an agrarian society where every foot of real estate in the entire world is arable land. There are millions of Indians toiling on farms now working their fingers to the bones so their kids can be engineers. Who will work these farms of the future that we’re talking about? It’s the sort of thing that people who already envision this, like Berkeley, where they’re getting plenty of good delicious local vegetables and live in a fertile area, feel free to say. Many of the people in the world who work on farms are working hard so the next generation doesn’t have to. It’s hard to be a farmer. Also, a rice farm struggling to make a living for his family in Vietnam is probably pretty damn happy with pesticide. It’s inconceivable. There aren’t enough fish in the world to feed the whole world. Unfortunately, fish farming is a way that a lot of the world can eat. Hopefully we can do it in a sustainable and non-toxic way, there aren’t environments contaminating some of the few remaining wild fish. I don’t like Big Corn, I don’t like the system as it is, but there are a lot of hungry people out there. That’s what has to balance these things. I’m very happy any time I hear of a small farmer doing organic local seasonal food and forming relationships with chefs and restaurants, a real community of growers and some providers, people cooking and selling food – that’s great. But we have to be realistic about what our planet is. All these things are interlocked. In order to change the world, it’s not just our food supply we’d have to change, we’d have to change our entire socio-economic structure worldwide. Unless the Khmer Rouge get back to power as an international force I don’t see that happening.

PHAWKER: What do you make of the whole Occupy Wall Street movement?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I understand the anger. My understanding of what their message is, I don’t know what it is, it’s not so well defined in my head but I certainly understand the anger and frustration. I’m generally supportive of that anger, a banking system that’s privatizing profits and socializing losses. I’m against that. Who wouldn’t be? Except the bankers.

PHAWKER: You’ve been very frank about your appreciation for recreational drug use over the years. If there was one drug you could take now consequence-free out of all the drugs you’ve tried, what would it be?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Oh, heroin. Consequence free? No health effects?

PHAWKER: No health effects, you can’t get arrested.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: When I had the time, and I didn’t have any personal responsibilities, or the responsibilities of being a father – I certainly enjoyed that part for a while until it ruined my life, as it always does.

PHAWKER: No one ever seems to beat heroin. Heroin always wins.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: Yeah, that’s kind of the point. It’s a death-trap of sorts.

PHAWKER: I know you dig music, what you’re listening to these days?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: I’m obsessed with the Rome album, the Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi album. I think it’s awesome.

PHAWKER: I wanted to confirm this very hilarious Billy Joel story, that you banned the playing of his music in your kitchen, that he heard about this, came to your restaurant, snuck into the kitchen and posed for pictures with your cooking staff, then emailed the photos to you and said “See, I’m in your kitchen” —  that is all true?

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: We had had dinner previously, he called, made a reservation and he came in and we had dinner together, and we got along very very well. He was well aware of my position on his music before he came to dinner. We’ve had dinner a number of times. But yes, he did sneak into my kitchen once and sent me a photograph saying, “I guess you do let Billy Joel in your kitchen.” It also said, “PS, I also hate the Grateful Dead.” I like him very much by the way, I’m just not a fan of his records.

RELATED: In 1965, Tacoma, Washington’s The Sonics released a debut album of raw-boned, hemorrhagic garage-punk and maximum R&B called, simply, Here Are The Sonics. Exponentially louder, wilder, and weirder than their woolly-bully frat-rock brethren on the SeaTac teen club/roller rink/armory circuit, The Sonics sang about witches, psychopaths, Satan, and strychnine as a social lubricant, along with the more standard themes of hot girls and fast cars, or, even better, fast girls in hot cars. The 12 tracks on Here Are The Sonics capture the needle-pinning, speaker-blowing, tonsil-shredding, balls-to-the-wall mating call of five hormonal mid-’60s teenage savages forever in hot pursuit of Mad Men-era booze-cigarettes-sex-magic and the glorious din that made it all possible.

Fifty years after its release, Here Are The Sonics still sounds, as one wag aptly put it, “as raw as a freshly scraped kneecap.” On the continuum of rock ’n’ roll as a 20th-century art form, Here Are The Sonics remains a vital and important relic, the aural equivalent of a prehistoric cave painting, as primitive as it is seminal. It changed music. More accurately, it changed the people who would change music. Jack White called it “the epitome of ’60s punk.” Kurt Cobain said it had “the most amazing drum sound I’ve ever heard…it sounds like he’s hitting harder than anyone I’ve ever heard.” On “Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy concludes his itemized list of the essential artists in the definitive hipster record collection by invoking The Sonics four times in a row, as if casting a spell.

Feeble national promotion and ham-fisted distribution may have ensured that few outside of The Sonics’ Pacific Northwest stomping ground heard Here Are The Sonics when it was first released, but in the fullness of time its sphere of influence now transcends generations and spans continents thanks to the Esperanto of electrifying noise. Anthony Bourdain, host of CNN’s Parts Unknown, used “Have Love, Will Travel” in promos for the current season. He emailed the following when I asked him why: “The Sonics were true originals, garage before garage, the way rock and roll should be: loud, dirty and dangerous.” MORE

Philadelphia Municipal Services Building 6:03 PM Saturday May 30th by ALEX PATERSON-JONES