Lost In The Grooves

We seem to be experiencing technical difficulties in the archive since the move to the New! Improved! Blogger. None of the photos are showing up. Our team of seasoned experts (oregano, basil, some thyme) are hard at work. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Very shortly, my summary of this past year’s music. Please be patient.

One of America’s best record stores — hell, one of the world’s best record stores — will close on Sept. 30, 2007. Village Music, in Mill Valley, California, has fallen victim to the high price of doing business in Marin County, and proprietor John Goddard has decided to sell off his stock, as well as the mind-boggling array of memorabilia which covers his walls.

Actually, it’s not just the expense. As John notes in a press release I got the day after I got my annual (and treasured) Christmas card from him, this year’s featuring a photo of Little Jimmy Scott and Ruth Brown standing in front of the shop, “While the deciding factor in this decision has been the rent levels necessary to maintain a business in Mill Valley, this is only one of several reasons I’ve reached this decision. Basically — it’s time. I’ve had a great time here for a great many years. The things I’ve learned, the people I’ve met, and the ways in which my musical horizons have expanded (and, on some levels, solidified) have been probably the major focus of my life for 40 years. It has been, for the most part, wonderful.”

I’ll say. When I moved to California to work at Rolling Stone, it was my great good luck to rent an apartment in Sausalito, the town which lies at the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Not on the tourist side, but on the side overlooking the Bay where the fishing fleet (what was left of it), the houseboat community, and the residents’ shopping district on Caledonia Avenue were. My place had a stunning view of Mt. Tamalpais, at the foot of which Mill Valley sits.

Naturally, being in the business I was in, I got loads and loads of records, many of which I didn’t want. Just as I was about to be choked out of my home, one of the record reviewers I worked with mentioned a place where I could unload them, just a few miles away. That place was Village Music. John’s policy was simple: you got credit, or you could take cash. He bought stuff for half what he sold it for. New albums in the store were $3.88, three for $10. Used albums went from a dime to quite a lot of money if they were rare enough. And there were lots and lots of albums.

Not only that, John knew a lot about most of them. He seemed to treasure American musical history more than anyone I’d met to that point, and he was evangelical about the stuff he liked. “You’ve never heard that? Take that home today!” But John, I’ve only got $16 credit, and I’ve got this other stuff… And out would come one of the mysterious pieces of paper that lived in and around the cash register. “Okay, now you owe me.” And accounts would, inevitably, get settled. But this music wasn’t just something that lived on round pieces of vinyl for John. He had an unbelievable network of people alerting him to out-of-the-way clubs and concerts and churches where the people who’d recorded those records were playing. You’d get a telephone call if you were among the lucky inner circle: “Mighty Clouds of Joy, Tuesday evening, church in Oakland. Interested?” “Ernest Tubb is playing in Morgan City tonight. It’s kind of a haul, but I’m going.” And, of course, if you heard of something, you’d call him. I was plugged into the zydeco circuit and always passed that news along.

Eventually, his knowledge and his stash of records increased to where expansion was inevitable. One night, I cooked a big pot of gumbo at his house and we drove it to the store, where a number of people waited with sledgehammers and a case of beer to knock down one of the walls. He’d acquired a lease on the store next door, and was going to double his space. It took about a week for that to fill up, but it did relieve the congestion somewhat. Nor were these just record collectors with the sledgehammers. John’s clientele included a great number of people for whom access to the information in the grooves he sold was a matter of vital interest: professional musicians. And, this being Marin County and the ’70s, the great majority of them could be filed under “rock stars.” It wasn’t at all unusual to be shopping with Mike Bloomfield, Nick Gravenites, Marty Balin, Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, or Maria Muldaur. I’m still pissed off at Bloomfield, whom I met when we both reached for the same Barbara Lynn album at the same time. “I need this,” he said. But I saw it first! “Well, I’m Mike Bloomfield and you’re not and I need this.” We eventually became friendly, but that was also the only copy of that album I ever had a chance to own. I still haven’t heard it. And, just as with the live music, these people passed on the knowledge they got: one day I walked in on a warm spring day and the most beautiful acoustic guitar music was playing. I asked what it was and he said “Slack key. Ry Cooder found a bunch of it in Hawaii and brought some back for me. I don’t have any for sale, but I’ve got some ordered. Want me to save you some when it comes in? It’s expensive…” It was, but it was worth it.

The knowledge that performers existed who didn’t perform in California got John to thinking, and this led him to start throwing his famous parties. There was a bar at the other end of town called the Sweetwater where a lot of the local musicians hung out and sometimes performed, and John started renting it twice a year for private invitation-only parties. One was for the store’s birthday in September, and the other was a Christmas party. Customers clamored to perform, and were nearly always routinely turned down; John had an iron-clad idea of who he wanted every time. Sometimes, of course, this meant building a backup band, so there was never any trouble finding musicians for that. But other times, the performers brought their own bands. The parties would be catered by barbeque joints or some of John’s customers in the food business, and there’d be a cash bar.

John sought out performers down on their luck, performers who he felt should have wider exposure, and he cannily invited people who could improve their fortunes to these parties. Within weeks of a story appearing in the Village Voice about the all-but-forgotten jazz vocalist Little Jimmy Scott playing rat-holes in Newark, he was on the stage at the Sweetwater astonishing a crowd that had never heard of him. Six months later, his first Warner Bros. album appeared to a swarm of enthusiastic, I-didn’t-know-he-was-still-alive reviews. The Christmas parties always featured Charles Brown, who, before Michael Jackson appeared on the scene, had the best-selling single by a black artist ever, “Merry Christmas, Baby,” recorded in 1947, and selling seasonally every year thereafter. Mr. Brown hadn’t been such a good businessman, and when he made his first Sweetwater appearance, he was eking out a living in Oakland teaching piano lessons. He, too, was amazed that this crowd knew him, and played one after another of his hits. Finally, he said “A very long time ago, we recorded a song that’s been very good to us ever since. It’s called ‘Merry Christmas, Baby.’ Would you like to hear it?” The crowd roared. Mr. Brown faked a double take. “Really? You do?” Pandemonium. His career saw an uptick, too, not long afterwards.

Not that contemporary performers were neglected. There was always something good to drink there, but I swear I wasn’t hallucinating when I saw Elvis Costello backed by Commander Cody, James Burton, Jerry Garcia, Sammy Hagar, Austin de Lone, “Teenage” Steve Douglas, and one or two others I’m spacing on at the moment. The audience was just as diverse. Carlos Santana and John Lee Hooker always shared a table, and I saw one show from a seat at the bar, where I was between Tanita Tikaram and Pearl Harbor — babe city!

The main thing, though, was that John has never thought of music as a product. Records, yes. Music, no. He’s always been a fan, which is why he nearly passed out the first time B.B. King (a major record collector himself) or Cab Calloway walked into the store. I can’t speculate on what he’ll do next, but I bet he’ll be doing something to do with his passionate love of American roots music.

As for me, I’m hoping I can get there once more before the place closes, and maybe even treat myself to a souvenir. The real souvenir — the word is, of course, the French verb “to remember” — is the education I got in that store and through knowing John Goddard all these years. You can’t put a dollar figure on that, but if you want, we can figure out a way to do it with credit.

I suppose it wasn’t a total surprise to wake up this morning and read that James Brown had left the building. He was, after all, 73 years old, and when you advertise yourself as the hardest working man in show business, you, well, you work hard at it. And there was never any doubt that James worked hard.

I got to see him up close once, in one of those random moments that happen when you least expect them. My friend TV Tom used to be the publicist for the Parliament-Funkadelic organization in their heyday, around 1977-78, which meant that there were several James Brown alumni on the bus: bassist Bootsy Collins, who fronted his own amazing band which included his brother Catfish (who’d played alongside Bootsy in the Brown band), saxophonist Maceo Parker, and trombonist Fred Wesley. Bootsy was always grateful for the protection the man he called “Mr. Brown” had given him as a young, green, but phenomenally gifted 16-year-old bass player, on the road with the “Sex Machine”-era Brown band. Catfish, Maceo, and Fred, however, would just give you the evil eye if you asked them about “Mr. Brown.”

Anyway, Tom and I had flown in from the East Coast, since I was doing a story on the band and, with Tom, would follow them from Savannah, Georgia to Washington D.C. over the course of four or five days. We’d flown non-stop from L.A. to Atlanta, and were going to get some tiny plane to cover the last leg, but the weather coming in had been very unpleasant, and I’m a fearful flyer at the best of times. (Almost Famous wouldn’t be made for years, but I am so there during that airplane scene.) Tom and I looked at the map, saw how close Savannah was, and decided to blow off the flight and pick up a rental car instead. We were going to have to do this anyway, and the chances were better that Atlanta would have a “floater,” a car not assigned to a pool, and, thus, not subject to dropoff charges. And hey, it was the record company’s money.

So we approached the Avis counter, which was next to the Hertz counter and maybe one or two others. As we were standing in line, Tom gripped my arm. “Don’t look, but that’s James Brown standing over there in the Hertz line!” So I casually rolled my eyes, and there he was. He was very short, very black, and had ridiculous hair. James Brown, all right.

Our line moved pretty quickly, and it became evident, the closer we got to the counter, that the black guy at the next counter was working for James Brown, because the dialogue was repetitive. Clerk: “I’m sorry, sir, but the card’s not going through.” Guy: “I’m certain there’s some mistake. We always use you people. The name is Brown, James Brown.” Clerk: “Yes, that’s the name I show, but the card’s not going through.” Guy: “Could you please try again?” Clerk: “Yes, sir. Let’s give it a minute.” And there would be some more business, and the card wouldn’t go through. “Do you suppose we should go vouch for him?” Tom wondered, more idly than asking a serious question. “Naaah, it’s the card that’s the problem, not the Godfather.”

Our business took a while, because we insisted on a floater, and civilians aren’t supposed to know about them. And we got to hear that dialogue several more times. The guy was just not going to give up. I think Tom was on the verge of taking his card over and putting it down for the beleaguered star when the clerk said “Well, how about that? It came up fine this time! I don’t know what the problem was, but it’s solved now.” At this point, James hustled up to the counter and said “It’s the car we always have reserved for us. The Lincoln. The purple Lincoln.” Tom made a face and tried not to laugh.

But I’ll tell you one thing: as we walked with our keys to the car we’d rented, we passed James Brown and the guy in the hall, and neither Tom nor I was brave enough to open our mouths and say a thing. Short, black, ridiculous hair, but the man had one powerful aura around him.

***

Actually, in the middle of writing that, I remembered the time I didn’t meet James Brown. In the early ’70s, John Goddard of Village Music, arguably America’s greatest record store, bought a warehouse full of King Records, and I discovered, through him, a goldmine of American music. I bought dozens of them, and one thing they all had in common was the address: 1540 Brewster Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio. I became obsessed with King and its amazing hillbilly and R&B artists, although I didn’t bother to pick up any of the albums John stocked by the man who had saved the company’s life in the late ’50s by being the only person on the label to have substantial hits: James Brown.

A lucky gig found me working in Chicago and picking up a nice check for it, so I arranged (back in the days of “triangle fares,” which let you add on a destination to a round-trip ticket for a negligible amount) to visit friends living near Dayton, Ohio. And, I reasoned, while I was there, I could drive to Cincinnati and visit 1540 Brewster.

Which, of course, I did. And found nothing. Well, not literally nothing, but the huge space was empty except for a little lady behind a desk. John had asked me to find any memorabilia, particularly photos, but also press releases, point-of-sale material, anything they might have, and, if there was a lot of it, to call him collect so he could arrange to pay for it and have it shipped. Naturally, I asked her about that first. “Oh, we got rid of all of that. Just threw it out. We saved some of the more important stuff, though.” Oh? I brightened up. “Like Steve Lawrence’s first contract. Did you know he started with us?” I almost passed out. Threw it out???

Just at this moment a string-bean with an explosion of orange hair walked into the room, obviously back from lunch, asking if he’d had any messages. “No, but there’s this young man who’s come asking about King. Maybe you folks have something he’s interested in?” “Sure,” the guy said, and said “Come with me.” We walked down a hall, and he stuck a key in a door labelled James Brown Enterprises.

Even with that warning, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. The room froze as I walked in, and the redhead said “It’s okay, he’s with me.” He then introduced himself as James Brown’s road manager. (Note for historians: I remember his last name as Jaffee, although I note that Alan Leeds was Brown’s tour director at this time. Anyone out there can straighten this out?)

He showed me to a seat, and everyone went back to what they’d been doing. In the case of the couple over at the next desk, that was (him) counting $20 bills into an attache case and (her) languidly puffing on a cigarette. This action was even more noticeable than it might have been because of the very short skirt she was wearing and the huge emerald that had been pierced into her left nostril.

“Those people out there,” the roadie said, “they don’t care about anything! We were the only asset they had, and now James is with Polygram, and they had to give James Brown Enterprises all his files but the rest of it? Pfffft! They don’t have any idea what they’ve got, they don’t know what to do with it, and it’s driving everyone crazy. All I can say is, it’s great your friend got all those albums, because if they weren’t pressed on such cheap plastic, they’d probably already have recycled them, too. Sorry, I’d like to help, but…” and he shrugged.

As a naive white kid in my mid-20s, I was freaked out enough by the scene around me, so I thanked him, shook his hand, and went back to my car. The last I saw of 1540 Brewster was in my rear-view mirror.

The good news, incidentally, is that a lot of the King tapes and acetates were, in fact, saved, and are being sorted through by people who do know what they’re doing. The bad news is, the people who own the label still don’t have a clue. But James Brown’s legacy is safe, thanks to the aforementioned Alan Leeds.

The very bad news, though, is that his legacy is now at an end. Thanks for everything, Godfather.

Had my third annual Christmas dinner at the dancer’s last night — kabocha squash soup followed by an excellent wild-hare ragout — followed by a troll through German television looking at Christmas stuff (and a remarkable documentary about people who escaped over the Berlin Wall — or tried to — on what must’ve been the Burden of History Channel, since what’s that got to do with Christmas?) but, alas, nothing on the way home to match the delightful aftermath of our first annual dinner, which I recounted here.

Actually, this Christmas had a weird edge to it. Saturday, walking to stock up at the store (Berlin doesn’t open again until Wednesday morning), I heard rapid footsteps approaching me from behind. My New York instincts took over, and I looked over my shoulder to see a little guy in a green hooded windbreaker, arms filled with boxes of awful Glühwein, running like crazy. His face was flushed, and he had a full beard, which, as he passed me, made me think of a garden troll, since he had his hood up. I heard more footsteps, and saw a skinny young guy running after him. It was too late for me to do anything, and I’m not sure I would have if I could have, because the situation looked pretty ambiguous. At Bergstr., the little guy hung a right, and the skinny guy passed me, panting audibly. (New Year’s resolution for you, dude: it involves cigarettes). As I turned left, I saw the skinny guy, almost doubled-over, grab a cell phone and make a call. I guess it was just a larcenous wino and maybe a guy from the store where he stole the wine, but it was an odd sight.

Not to mention that last night, getting out of the U-Bahn by the dancer’s, there was what appeared to be a flaming cocktail parasol burning brightly on the platform and some Arab-looking guys walking away from it. I took the wrong exit, which was fortunate, because by the time I got to where I saw the exit I should have taken, it was awash with police cars and vans, and cops interrogating a large crowd of these same Arab-looking guys, who might have been rousted out of the Internet cafe on the corner. Guess this year was Crimesmas.

But I did have a story for today in readiness, something that happened to me about ten years ago. It doesn’t make me look particularly smart, for the most part, but it does have a weird ending.

I was walking to the store, along the same route as Saturday, when a white van pulled up and the passenger-side window rolled down. A youngish guy asked me, in German, if I needed speakers. Well, it just so happened I did, since the ones I’d cobbled out of a defunct stereo system a friend had given me had crapped out. One didn’t work at all, and the other was iffy. What luck! But…what was going on?

The guy started speaking rapid-fire German, and I asked him to slow down because my German wasn’t that good. “English?” he asked, and I said sure. “Wow, that’s good; we’re from Holland and our German’s not so hot either. Listen, we’ve been working on a club here in town, setting up the sound system, and this guy’s not sparing anything; it’s a great system, and he’s paid a lot for it. Anyway, we ordered the equipment, and somehow they shipped us double the number of speakers we needed, so we’re making a little extra Christmas money on this job and we’re selling them super-cheap. These are great speakers: look at this.” He pulled a loose-leaf notebook out from somewhere and showed me an article from some high-end stereo magazine I’d never heard of. The speakers he had had come in third, just beneath two brands I’d heard of. Interesting!

“Look, every penny we make on this deal is free money, so we’re not going to rip you off,” he said. “We’ll sell them to you for DM 200 a pair. Hey, you have any friends who need speakers?” In fact, I did. I’d been bitching about mine going out while I was at the radio station where I worked, and one of the guys there said he’d just blown one of his and didn’t know if it’d be cheaper to get it fixed or just buy new ones. “So why not buy two pairs and sell him the other? That way, you make money on the deal, too.”

I looked at them, and the address on the boxes was a company in South Carolina. But I wasn’t sure. They might have been stolen, for one thing, but by Dutch guys with their own van? That didn’t seem plausible. But the facts were the facts: I had some extra money, I needed speakers because mine were dead, and here was an opportunity. So they drove me to my bank around the corner and, at my insistence, stayed in the van while I hit the cash machine. We drove back to my place, I paid them, and they helped me unload the speakers into my front door. I asked for a receipt, since it was a professional expense, and got one, with an address in far north Berlin on it. “Just remember,” the guy said, “if for any reason you’re dissatisfied, just bring them back, opened or not, and we’ll refund 100% of your money.” So…how could I lose?

After I got back from my trip to the store — I still had to eat, after all — I hooked them up. They sounded okay, but I was suddenly feeling weird about the whole thing. There was one person I knew who’d have the skinny on these things, a guy in Austin who had sold high-end stuff to unimaginably wealthy Texans, so I fired off an e-mail to him. Almost immediately, he wrote back. “Were the guys who sold you this in a white van?” he asked. How bizarre, I thought. How could he know that? I said yes, and he sent me back a URL for something called the White Van Speaker Scam. From looking at it, it seemed like I was the only person in the world who didn’t know about this. I’d let my greed and my desire to get my stereo working again — and, let’s face it, my wanting to buy myself a Christmas present, since nobody else was going to — cloud my better judgement. I felt like a moron.

So I packed the speaker back up, and looked at the receipt, then checked the map. It was in Wittenau, which was a long ways away, and I’d have to take a cab, but I was going to do it. The next morning, I hailed a cab, and the driver let me load all four speakers into the car. About DM 20 later, I was at an industrial park of some sort out in the middle of nowhere. It took some doing, but we found the “suite” listed on the receipt — by now, the cabbie had gotten into it and was hoping I’d get my revenge on the scamsters. Anyway, I knocked on the door, and guy opened it and said “We’re holding a meeting. We’re not open.” I responded in English and told him that I had a receipt in my pocket that said I’d get a 100% refund within three days, and I was returning the speakers. “You’re returning them?” he said, amazed. “You’re the first person who’s ever done that!” Yeah, well, I was returning them. We hauled them into the space, and sure enough, there was one of the guys who’d sold them to me, dressed in a suit, standing in front of a blackboard with diagrams labelled in English: “Sales Talk,” “Customer Satisfaction,” stuff like that. “You’re not returning the speakers?” he said. “What was wrong? Were they defective? We’ll replace them.” No, I said, I just got a better deal. He goggled. “You did? Where?” Ah, I lied, my little secret.

At that point, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a couple of bills. Just a couple, but high-denomination. “Man, this is all the money that’s in the place. You’re going to leave us penniless.” Like, by then, I cared. It was exactly enough, and I thanked him and left. The cabbie was still there, although I’d paid him. “You got your money back?” he said. “Great! I’ll drive you to the U-Bahn for free. It’s good to see that sometimes you can stand up to the gangsters and win!”

Two days later, the guy who buys my used CDs showed up at my house. I told him the story, and even he had heard about the White Van Speaker Scam! “If you want good speakers, though, I know where you can get JBL studio monitors for 1/3 their normal price.” Oh, yeah? “Sure,” he said, and named a huge electronics chain. “They price them cheap to get you in there and hope you buy more stuff. But this price is only for 24 hours.” And a couple of hours later, I had a new pair of excellent speakers, made by a firm I’d heard of, set up and working in my house. I’m still using them, in fact.

Remember, this was ten years ago. Today, all you have to do is Google “white van speaker” and you get a handful of pages. I’m still very grateful to the guy in Texas for making the connection. Not to mention the righteous cabbie and the honest scammer.

Ho ho ho, as they say.