Epiphone Interview: Jason Ringenberg

Epiphone

http://www.epiphone.com/News/Features/News/2019/Epiphone-Interview-Jason-Ringenberg.aspx

February 18, 2019

For over 15 years, Jason Ringenberg, the leader of the legendary proto-Americana band Jason & Scorchers and one of the greatest “front-men” in the history of modern Rock & Roll, took on the persona of Farmer Jason, performing at small theaters and high school assembly halls to the one audience that all entertainers—past and present—have feared the most: kids.  Kids either like ya or they don’t. And no amount of logic or bribery—be it juice box or cheese stick—will influence them. But kids loved Farmer Jason, and Ringenberg went on to win an Emmy Award for writing, singing, and teaching to a new generation of youngsters how to be a friendly farmer provocateur, heal the environment, and honor all the creatures in the circle of life. (Eat your heart out Vice President Gore.)  

 
But for those of us lucky enough to have witnessed the first generation of the Scorchers in full bloom and watched Mr. Ringenberg walk across long tables seated with record executives from Warner Brothers, Capitol, Asylum, and Sony, and squash their cocktails glasses to dust with his boot heels while singing Hank Williams at Mach 5 volume, we always knew there had to come a day when Jason the rocker might trade his chicken slop boots for cowboy boots one more time. 
 
Now, Jason Ringenberg is indeed back with a new album, Stand Tall, which shows that his verve, uncanny stage presence, and rock mojo is in perfect running order.  But his return to “adult music” was not inspired by a Scorcher’s wannabe band with perfect skin and an Instagram account but instead by the forced tranquility of a month-long writing residency at the Sequoia National Park. From the galloping beat of the title track through the entire album, it’s clear that nature has been kind to Jason who has entered a new musical era where the only limits are his imagination. Rockers of all ages, this is your final warning: Mr. Ringenberg will not be going down without a fight, nor will his ever-present and battle- weary stage hands, the Epiphone EJ-200 and his Masterbilt DR-500MCE.  We spoke with Jason in the middle of a month long residency at the 5 Spot in Nashville, one of the city’s great music bars that is a regular haunt for friends and collaborators including Epi fans Todd Snider and Fats Kaplin. Thanks to Scott Willis for the fab photograph
 
Thanks for speaking with us, Jason and congratulations on a truly great new album. Did the arrival of the songs for Stand Tall come as a surprise? 
 
Yeah I’ve been just doing the children’s music thing for so long. For about 15 years I was really heavily into that. So, it was a big adventure going into the grown up world. I did a month writing residency at Sequoia National Park. That’s where the whole thing started. I had pretty much given up being a recording artist anymore, honestly. I didn’t think it was in me or there was a demand enough to do it. So, the National Park Service called me up—
 
That sounds like an artist’s dream…
 
I know! I thought someone was joking. I thought someone was playing a trick on me. And when I found out they were for real I said Yes! before they finished their pitch. I went out there and spent a month in the mountains and wrote a bunch of songs. So that spurred me to get myself together and make some music. 
 
When did you become aware that what you were writing might turn into an album? 

I think the second or third day I realized something special was going on and this was going to be a very unique situation. It was just wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever been away from the normal grind of reality before. I’ve had breaks like we all do—a few days in Ireland or something like that. But when you do it for three weeks it’s a whole different deal.   
 
Now that you’re back in the adult world as you say, what stands out as far as your performance on this record? 
 
I find that I’m singing as good as I’ve ever sung. There’s something about my voice now where I’m singing better than I ever was. So that was a big help in the studio. It did surprise me. Most folks as they get older they lose the quality of their voice. Fortunately for me the opposite is happening. 
 
Like Sinatra…
 
Exactly! (Laughs) And also, for this album I decided to go outside of Nashville, not because I don’t like Nashville. But I just felt since I work here and live here I needed a break. So, I went to Carbondale, Illinois where I went to college. There’s a studio there and a guy named Mike Lescelius, who does really great work. I got with him and I got the rhythm section from my first band and I got some fine guitar players from up there. I ended up bringing a little bit of help from Nashville, too.  Steve Fishell played some God-inspired steel guitar. But mostly it was done in southern Illinois—back to my roots. 
 
The musicianship on the album is terrific. What did you notice about recording with musicians from outside of Nashville?
 
Well it's true that Nashville musicians are the best players in the world. And I’ll record here for the rest of my life, more than likely. But also, Nashville players…they really don’t remember they played on your record. Whereas these guys, they told me this is the opportunity of a lifetime. They said thank you for having me, I’ve always wanted to play on an album. That reallly touched me. They gave it something way down deep. It was that kind of thing. They brought deep emotions to the table. And that helped me a lot because I didn’t know if I was valid as an adult music artist anymore. To hear people say that sort of thing was a big help and inspiring. 
 
Was there a track on the album that pointed the way for you?
 
I think “God Bless the Ramones” is a pretty cool track and “Lookin’ Back Blues,” which is the single. Overall, I think this is some of the best writing I’ve ever done. It gets harder and harder to get the songs as you get older. It is for everybody.  But now I’ve got to make a living for myself. I’ve got two kids in college. The music business is a very different world from when it was when I last put out a record in 2012. And my last 'Jason' record was 2004.  So it’s a whole different reality.
 
I’m sure a lot of the people you knew in the industry have left now. What stands out to you about the music business after being away so long. Is it easier in some ways to be in more control?
 
Certainly for the people who can manipulate technology it’s a great world (laughs). I’m not one of those people. 
 
How are your Epiphones holding up?

The Epiphone EJ-200 and the Masterbilt they are just workhorses for me. I don’t just say that because I’m an endorser. Golly, they take a beating. They are amazing and they sound great. No matter what Epiphone you pick up off the rack, they all have a certain level of quality to them.  And for a touring musician, I’m sold. I’ve now been an Epiphone player for 25 or 30 years and exclusively an Epiphone player for the past 15 years. That’s it! They can’t be topped. 

Also read our classic interview with Farmer Jason here

Three Weeks in the Wilderness Put Jason Ringenberg Back in the Groove

The Scorchers frontman discusses Stand Tall, his first solo album since 2004, ahead of his residency at The 5 Spot

By J.R. Lind
https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/features/article/21046169/three-weeks-in-the-wilderness-put-jason-ringenberg-back-in-the-groove
February 7, 2019

As the twangy, whirligigging supernova of a frontman for the seminal cowpunk band Jason and the Scorchers, Jason Ringenberg has fired up fans and confounded the establishment since the early ’80s. In recent years, he’s delighted children with his Farmer Jason persona. But in early 2017, he felt a pang that strikes plenty of artists sooner or later: Perhaps he just wasn’t vital anymore.

For Ringenberg, of all people, to question his vibrancy runs counter to the mythos that has surrounded him for more than three decades. This man — who struts and wails through exhausting live shows, consuming the energy of alt-country aficionados (or their smiling kids) like the firebox of a steam locomotive — is having an existential crisis?

“I didn’t think the audience was there, and my own muse wasn’t there,” Ringenberg tells the Scene. “I’m not going to be a martyr, but I had been thinking it was time for me to accept my recording career was over.”

But then he got an unexpected call from a ranger at Northern California’s Sequoia National Park. The National Park Service has an artist-in-residence program, wherein artists — usually visual artists, naturally — live in the park, and in exchange for room, board and inevitable inspiration, they produce works of art. Or as in Ringenberg’s case, they perform.

“I thought it was joke,” Ringenberg says. “But they were experimenting with doing musical artists, and I think it was Farmer Jason that drew them to me. It didn’t take them 30 seconds into their pitch before I agreed.”

Ringenberg headed west in June 2017 with the idea that he’d perform “Take a Hike” for visiting kids and get three weeks of head-clearing vacation on the Department of Interior’s dime.

“When I got there, everything just changed,” he says.

With the majesty of the Sierra Nevada mountains and the quiet (except for the diesel generator that ran his refrigerator) surrounding him, a dam broke within. Out poured song after song after song, in what he calls the easiest songwriting experience of his career.

The result is Stand Tall, Ringenberg’s first album under his own name since 2004’s Empire Builders. And whereas that earlier record was a product of its time — it’s the post-9/11 middle finger to the Bush era that Green Day’s American Idiot tried to be — the new effort is definitely the product of a place. 

Ringenberg’s songs often evoke a strong sense of place, but as is appropriate for a country-fried band with a lead singer from rural Illinois, the Scorchers’ geography is Southern and Midwestern. Stand Tall looks toward the setting sun. The instrumental title track opens the album, leaving no question that these songs come from beyond the Marfa line, sounding like the theme to the unmade fourth Man With No Name film.

Other tracks were clearly inspired by Ringenberg’s residency. “Here in the Sequoias” stands back to back with “John Muir Stood Here,” the latter a shouty paean to the Scottish-born naturalist, who after wandering to the South from his home in the Midwest, went to California to advocate for public land. 

There are hints of the wilderness elsewhere, too. At first blush, Jesus’ cousin seems an odd subject for a biographical rock song. But “John the Baptist Was a Real Humdinger” leaves the listener wondering why it took so long for the bug-eating, establishment-hating wild man to be so honored.

“I had been compelled by the character, and the Baptist was a wilderness-driven human, so I think the Sequoia experience compelled me,” Ringenberg says. “It doesn’t make fun of him or deify him.”

Throughout the album there are fun Easter eggs for those whom he describes as “old-school folks who care about sequencing.” “God Bless the Ramones,” a remembrance of the Scorchers’ first big out-of-state tour (a loop through Texas with the punk pioneers), leads into a cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride.” It’s a sort of two-song microcosm of the sonic amalgam Ringenberg has been perfecting for decades. The Rodgers tune is followed by “I’m Walking Home,” the tale of a disaffected Confederate soldier heading west (appropriately enough) to Bristol, Tenn., where Rodgers and others would record the foundational songs of country music.

Armed with the new tracks and a handful of covers, Ringenberg knew he had an album. Not wanting to be beholden to a record company, he funded it through an IndieGoGo campaign for release on his own Courageous Chicken imprint. If the solitude of the Sequoias had convinced him he still had music to give, the crowdfunding effort convinced him he still had an audience. 

One of the rewards for donating to Ringenberg’s IndieGoGo campaign was the promise that the singer would record any song in his catalog with a personal message for the donor. And 186 recordings later, he felt vital again: Fans requested not just beloved anthems like “Broken Whiskey Glass,” but deep cuts he hadn’t thought about in decades.

“These were songs that meant something to people, and I said, ‘I really should be making music,’ ” Ringenberg says. “It is a value to people. Not tens of thousands of people, but people who matter.”

Filled with new confidence, he set to record. He enlisted bassist Gary Gibula and drummer Tom Miller, his bandmates from his pre-Nashville college days at Southern Illinois University, and recorded at what he describes as a “tin-shack studio” in rural downstate Illinois.

“I had thought about recording in Southern Illinois for a while, because there’s some good records coming out of there, so it made sense to give it a whirl,” he says. “It wasn’t a return to roots, but it was neat chemistry. It was a good choice. They’ve known me for decades, so I was able to have a sense of history.”

Long past the days of piling into a van for months on end, Ringenberg will instead do a four-night residency at The 5 Spot, playing the 6 p.m. slot every Thursday in February — a concession to his fans that Ringenberg is happy to make. Back from the mountains with renewed confidence and new songs, the frenetic live shows that built Ringenberg’s reputation should feel fresh again, like the bracing wind blowing through the tall trees.

Jason Ringenberg Recounts Opening for The Ramones on 'God Bless The Ramones': Premiere

by Gary Graff
https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/country/8496562/jason-ringenberg-god-bless-the-ramones
February 5, 2019

Jason Ringenberg hasn't made much music as either himself or with his longtime band The Scorchers in recent years, spending most of his time in the guise of family music act Farmer Jason. But an invitation from the National Parks Service to spend a month in northern California's Sequoia National Park creating music was too good to pass up -- and resulted in the new Stand Tall album, whose feral "God Bless the Ramones" is premiering exclusively below.

"The National Park Service called me up and said, 'Would you like to be the Artist in Residence at Sequoia National Park for a month?' and before they said 'month' I said yes," says Ringenberg, who's releasing the partly crowd-funded Stand Tall Feb. 7 on his own Courageous Chicken Entertainment label.

He did a couple of shows during that time, both as himself and as Farmer Jason, but mostly Ringenberg says "they just wanted me to wander around and write songs. I didn't even have to write songs about sequoias. I could write what I wanted to write about.

"It was a life-changing experience. Any time you spend that much time in one of our great national parks, it's gonna change you, no question about it."

The experience led to Ringenberg's "first adult music in a long, long time" -- since 2004 on his own and since 2010 with the Scorchers (if you consider that adult). He took the Sequoia songs to Murphysboro, Ill, where Ringenberg recorded the 11-song set with co-producer Mike Lescelius, blending anthems such as the title track with cheeky historical observations ("Lookin' Back Blues," "John the Baptist Was a Real Humdinger," "John Muir Stood Here"), the solemn "Hobo Bill's Last Ride" and, yes, a song about his circumstances in "Here in the Sequoias." And, Ringenberg notes, "I wrote a song about the Ramones and us opening for the Ramones underneath this giant Sequoia tree named after the first African-American colonel in the U.S. Army (Charles Young) and also the first African-American commandant of the National Park Service -- how can that go wrong?"

"God Bless the Ramones" is, in fact, a real-life musical memoir of the week the Scorchers spent opening for the iconic punk troupe in Texas back in 1982. "We were just a bunch of hillbillies from Nashville; We'd done shows around the country, but this was a whole new level," Ringenberg recalls. "We didn't have a clue what was going to happen. I have nothing but good things to say about how they treated us -- Dee Dee, especially. He gave us bass strings, chicken wings, beer from their dressing room. Everybody was really nice to us -- except the crowd.

"This was before you could check things out on the Internet. We had no idea that it was tradition at Ramones shows to absolutely bombard the opening band with...well, things I can't repeat in a publication. Very, very vile stuff. Having said that, we got a lot of fans out of it, too, because we didn't back down."

Ringenberg is planning to support Stand Tall with four weekly residency shows starting Feb. 7 at the 5 Spot in Nashville along with a March 9 show in Carbondale, Ill., followed by a U.K. tour -- in addition to Farmer Jason concerts. He also has "another half a record" written that he hopes to settle into recording at some point soon. "This is challenging me enough, I can tell ya," Ringenberg says of Stand Tall. "There’s a lot more to keep up with in the music business now than there was 10 years ago. I really can't believe the response we got for this; People were just stepping up and contributing a lot of money. It really touched me, actually -- very deeply."

Goodbye, Peter Tork. The Monkees made believers of us all.

By Probyn Gregory

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/goodbye-peter-tork-the-monkees-made-believers-of-us-all/2019/02/22/ccc90c3e-36df-11e9-a400-e481bf264fdc_story.html?utm_term=.bcae6a92c5dd

February 22, 2019

It may be difficult to imagine now, but there was a time in the 1960s when a pop band, in a single year, outsold the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined — and not even a real band at that. Really, the group was four strangers thrown together on a TV show about a band all living in an imaginary group house. Both the band and the show — the Monkees — were instantly and wildly popular among a certain set of American kids.

Those kids are now in late middle age (or older), and that band is finally going home. In 2012, lead singer Davy Jones, at 66 years old, was the first to die ; on Thursday, 77-year-old Peter Tork died from a rare form of cancer. Along with Mike Nesmith, Tork was one of the two real musicians in the quartet. (Stephen Stills had recommended Tork for the role after being passed over for beingtoo snaggle-toothed.) The other two Monkees — Jones and drummer Micky Dolenz — were actors.

The most technically skilled in the group, Tork had trained classically and played guitar, banjo and French horn and was particularly talented on keyboards, though he was best known on the TV show as the band’s bassist. Nesmith has been quoted as saying that Tork, not himself, should have been the band’s main guitarist.

When it was revealed that the Monkees sang their songs but did not play the instruments on their first album, there were understandable catcalls of “Prefab Four,” a reference to the Beatles’ nickname “The Fab Four.” The session players behind the scenes who did the musical lifting were some of the industry’s best; so was the group of songwriters, which included Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Neil Diamond and Harry Nilsson. On the show, Tork played the role of lovable dunce, a foil for Nesmith’s common sense, Dolenz’s antics and Jones’s endless wooing of (and by) young women.

The Monkees managed to gain control of their musical direction after their second album, “More of the Monkees,’’ and began eschewing the session musicians previously foisted upon them. The band finally sang and played on their third album, “Headquarters,” which produced no hits but began to showcase the group’s talents. (“Headquarters,” like all of the band’s first four albums, went double platinum.) Tork’s many skills then came in quite handy in the recording studio: That’s Tork on the iconic piano intro to “Daydream Believer,” he is at the harpsichord on “The Girl I Knew Somewhere,” and his riffing on “You Told Me” would still test many banjoists today.

After he left the group in 1968, Tork engaged in various endeavors — a friend recalls working with him as a singing waiter in Los Angeles. Tork got as far as London, where he played banjo for George Harrison’s “Wonderwall” film, but in the early 1970s, he returned to California, where he taught music and other subjects at a host of local schools. In the 1980s, when MTV began re-airing the Monkees series, a new audience emerged and reunion tours were held. Tork performed in these until as recently as 2016.

My own fascination with the band dates to 1966, when, at age 9, I was hit amidships by the TV show. Like many kids my age (some of whom might not admit it now), “Meet the Monkees” was my first album. To me, the Monkees were the zenith — the vibe, the songs, the zany humor, everything about them made me and everyone I knew the target demographic of the era. I ended up following a musical path and have, for the past 20 years, been a part of Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s band.

How to explain the Monkees’ unlikely staying power, their stalwart presence on oldies radio? I think many baby boomers, obviously, found them accessible and relatable, certainly unthreatening. But more importantly, Tork once said the band had real chemistry — not just any four young men could have done what they did. I think there was a sense of vindication they shared among themselves that critics had turned up their noses at the supposed ineptitude of the Prefab Four and were proved wrong — in which case, all among us who are judged and found to have come up short still have a chance.

Most of all, there are the sounds of those hits, pristine in their peculiar moment, which when matched to those particular voices, still succeed. They form a part of the soundtrack of many baby boomers’ lives, a validation of their memories, making believers of us all.

Probyn Gregory is a veteran freelance musician who lives in Tujunga, Calif., with his wife and son. He will play guitar, banjo and trumpet with “The Monkees Present: The Mike & Micky Show,” when it begins a three-week tour this Thursday.

Remembering Peter Tork: The Monkees’ Beloved Clown Saint

ROB SHEFFIELD

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/monkees-peter-tork-tribute-rob-sheffield-797659/

February 22, 2019

Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, Mickey Dolenz and Peter Tork

Peter Tork had the funniest line at the Monkees’ 50th Anniversary Tour show, three years ago: “If you’ve been following us from the beginning, just remember one thing. Any one thing.” If you were lucky enough to see the Monkees live over the past decade, you know being in the room with Peter Tork was one of the planet’s happiest places to be. He was the funniest Monkee, their Ringo, their truest hippie, always happy to pitch in with a banjo solo or a bit of his dazed flower-child wisdom. This man knew how to rock a black-velvet silver-button tunic. That’s why fans around the world are grieving his death Thursday at 77. As he promised all those years ago in “For Pete’s Sake,” he made the world shine.

Before the Monkees, Tork was a folkie on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit, scrounging and passing the hat for tips. When he auditioned for the TV show in 1965, he played the clown, a summer-babe blonde with a simple mind but a heart of gold, on guitar with his bandmates Micky Dolenz, Mike Nesmith and the late Davy Jones. The Monkees were famously assembled by Hollywood producers for kiddie TV — Tork and Nesmith were the musicians, Dolenz and Jones were the actors. But their music turned out to be far more lasting and influential than the show. The Monkees ran just two seasons, but “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and “Last Train to Clarksville” and “Sunny Girlfriend” and “Star Collector” are forever.

Tork was a crucial reason why. He co-wrote the theme song “For Pete’s Sake,” turning his peace-love-and-understanding plea into a pop classic. He was always their hippie conscience, adding his plucky vocals to “Shades of Grey” and “Your Auntie Grizelda.” “With all due modesty since I had little to do with it, the Monkees’ songbook is one of the better songbooks in pop history,” he told Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene in 2011, correctly. “Certainly in the top five in terms of breadth and depth.”

Tork got hired on the advice of Stephen Stills, who remembered him from back in the old folkie days. “Stephen was the guy who looked like me on Greenwich Village streets,” Tork said in Eric Lefcowitz’s band history Monkee Business. “That’s how I recognized him — I walked up to him and said, ‘You’re the guy that looks like me.’ And he said, ‘Oh, you’re the guy I’m supposed to look like.’” They sounded alike, too, but Tork got the Monkees gig; Stills went on to Buffalo Springfield and CSNY. In the Seventies, they were housemates in Laurel Canyon’s most infamously decadent hippie pad, an experience they both miraculously survived.

At first, the Monkees were dismissed as phonies. Tork, who paid his dues in the Village scene, took the backlash a lot harder than the others. But the band took control of their music on the gem Headquarters, famously the second-biggest album of 1967, behind the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. As Lillian Roxon wrote presciently in 1969, in her pioneering Rock Encyclopedia, “It was the music people who first discovered that the Monkees were good guys. Everyone else followed. By 1968 it was distinctly not done to put down the Monkees.”

He wrote “Can You Dig It?” on the TV set, in his dressing room, for the band’s 1968 movie Head. As he told Greene in 2016, “The basic lyrics came to me and these changes I had stored in the back of my brain spring forth and dictated that kind of vaguely Spanish/North African harmonic sense. I was writing about the great unknown source of all.” The Ben Stiller Show did a great 1992 parody called “The Grungies,” with Ben Stiller as a Chris Cornell figure and Bob Odenkirk as Mike Nesmith; the bandmate called “Tork” looked exactly like Kurt Cobain in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video and blew the band’s advance on $50,000 worth of Chinese food. In later years, as the band toured in various incarnations, the Tork Factor was always key. (Micky: “I dressed up in my hippie regalia.” Peter: “I almost drowned in one of those!”)

The Monkees were always a fractious collection of personalities. As Tork diplomatically put it in Rolling Stone, “If you stop to think about it, there are six pairs in a quartet.” A 2001 tour fell apart; Tork took the blame, admitting, “I had a meltdown and I messed up.” He bowed out of the current Nesmith/Dolenz tour, saying it was to concentrate on his Lead Belly tribute album Relax Your Mind, though there were already worries about his health.

But he lived long enough for the 2016 reunion Good Times!, easily the best Monkees album since the Sixties. Producer Adam Schlesinger was the first actual Monkees fan ever to make a Monkees album. At the 50th-anniversary show in NYC, Papa Nez joined Dolenz and Tork via Skype to sing “Papa Gene’s Blues.” “Me and Magadelena” was a career-capping ballad written by another fan, Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, with Nesmith, Dolenz and Tork all rising to the occasion. Some of us Monkees fans spent years waiting for that song. “I’ve never heard Michael be so emotionally available as a singer before,” Tork told Rolling Stone. “It’s astounding to be in the middle of it. I look around and go, ‘What is this?'”

My favorite Monkees song is on the Head soundtrack, “As We Go Along,” a Carole King ballad with guitar glaze from Ry Cooder and Neil Young. In the movie, it comes right after a lonely moment for Tork; he sits sad in the corner, covered in confetti, frowning in his dashiki and love beads. Then, as the song begins, he’s in a dream sequence where he’s walking in the snowy mountains. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful moment — this blonde hippie boy in this wide open space, looking around at it all with wonder. It’s how I will all remember Peter Tork.

Aretha Franklin, Politicized and Alienated

By Armond White
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/movie-review-amazing-grace-aretha-franklin-documentary/
December 11, 2018



Aretha Franklin’s musical expressiveness and vocal power have ranked among the certainties of human achievement for more than 50 years, ever since her R&B single “Respect” was released in 1967. Her role was suddenly besmirched this summer, on the occasion of her funeral, which served as the pretext for an eight-hour-plus, live-streamed political rally: Competing Democratic-party operatives and politicians (from Jesse Jackson to Al Sharpton, Bill Clinton to Jennifer Granholm) repeatedly praised Franklin in progressive terms as representing “women,” “blacks,” and “empowerment.”

Now, New York's Film Forum is showing Amazing Grace, a documentary of Franklin recording her 1972 gospel album of the same title, a presentation that should retrieve Franklin’s reputation from the cramped, racially restricted, misinformed party line.

The Amazing Grace album was Franklin’s collaboration with California musician the Reverend James Cleveland and his New Temple Missionary Baptist Church choir. The film misses the opportunity to show their artistic rehearsal to emphasize the real-time recording. Cleveland tells the audience, “I want to remind you that this is a church, and we’re here for a religious experience.” But the documentary, directed by Sydney Pollack, whose only other doc was his last film Sketches of Frank Gehry (2006), lapses into the unexplored conundrum of live performance and cultural authenticity that confounds secular reviewers and scholars.

Here’s Franklin at age 30, in awesomely strong, ingeniously imaginative voice, looking trim and pretty in a white tunic and sequined bodice (later in a gray chinchilla coat), demonstrating her emotional roots in black Baptist faith and black popular communication. She starts the two-night recording with Marvin Gaye’s “Wholly Holy” and moves through such church classics as “How I Got Over” and a pop-gospel medley of James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” In the latter, the vigorous chorus (under the direction of choirmaster Alexander Hamilton) repeats “everythingeverythingeverything-oh-everything!” — giving modern, youthful, rhythmic intensity to the Protestant standard.

This artistic and personal transformation, which is part of what defines Franklin’s greatness, must always fight against the insulting insistence that black artists are naturally gifted, non-intellectual, and therefore best understood the way their exploiters see them — through a racial-justice lens, not as individuals working out their soul salvation.

The doc’s high points bear out this restorative contradiction: Franklin sings “Amazing Grace” in a tour de force of simultaneous beseeching, thinking, and rejoicing. At the end of “I Have Heard of a Land Where We’ll Never Grow Old,” she ad libs “I’m so glad I got religion!” It’s an archaic expression from the era when former slaves and descendants of slaves formed their moral and spiritual awareness through Christian precepts, similar to Afrocentric dogma about ancestors. Franklin wears Afrocentric garb on the Amazing Grace album cover; her pop-gospel emphasis fuses the traditional and revolutionary connection.

But it is the personal exhortation of Franklin’s artistry that must be reclaimed from the propagandists. A cut to Cleveland during “Amazing Grace” features the profound emotional display that is an irreducible truth of religious communication, accessed through singing God’s word in songs of personal experience (testifying). That prayerful moaning and celebration (“This is the sanctified church,” Cleveland states) combines reflection with devotion and is distinctively eloquent. In this millennium, secular black activists have become unrooted from that articulation — and have lost the emotional force and moral foundation that Franklin, even in this doc, still represents.

Pollack’s doc has two major flaws: The spectacle isn’t specific enough (as when the Reverend C. L. Franklin makes his mack-daddy entrance), and the camera frequently searches to catch Mick Jagger in the crowd (as if white rock royalty is needed to confer significance). No wonder Film Forum’s marquee boasts an embarrassing New York Times blurb: “Like a trip to the Moon.” It suggests that black experience is still alien.

The Democratic-party delegates ruling the dais at Franklin’s “homegoing” this summer were transparently attempting to galvanize Aretha’s fans and black and rhythm-and-blues fans. They were trying to assert a particular race- and culture-based partisanship, one that has been familiar since the time Aretha first made her impact on the American scene, during LBJ’s Sixties.

Democrats’ attempt to usurp (appropriate) black culture and black religion is unacceptable. Surely Aretha’s emotional expression transcends politics. (“I got to change your point of view,” she sings on “Until You Come Back to Me.”)

Admittedly, when Bill Clinton recalled Aretha’s “Think” (“It’s the key to freedom”) on the funeral dais, it was a cagey populist moment.

The plainly stated emotional needs of Aretha’s “Call Me (The Moment You Get There)” have been replaced by the greedy pornification of contemporary pop and hip-hop. Politics and “empowerment” are not why people responded to Franklin. That’s Murphy Brown nonsense.

Specious political praise of Franklin’s art turns it into something unreachable. It denies the youthful honesty of tracks such as “Baby I Love You” and “Think.” Goddess Aretha is unrecognizable. How can “Natural Woman” be praised in the era of Caitlyn Jenner? Her great tracks evoke a less cynical time.

The feeling of the “Respect” recording is more important than the idea behind its lyrics: You can live without another person’s respect (who hasn’t), because you hold self-respect inside you.

Is playing into the approval of white people the only way that bourgeois black people can think to confirm their significance? To reduce Franklin’s art to the propaganda of “empowerment” and activism disrespects the daily significance of the civil-rights movement and its basis in the sanctified church.

ARMOND WHITE — Armond White, a film critic, writes about movies for National Review and is the author of NEW POSITION: THE PRINCE CHRONICLES, at Amazon. @3xchair

Roy Clark, 'Hee Haw' co-host, Country Music Hall of Fame member, dies at 85

By Juli Thanki

https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/11/15/roy-clark-dead-85/1978910002/
November 15, 2018


Roy Clark performs with Roy Acuff on "Hee Haw"

Country Music Hall of Fame member Roy Clark, a versatile entertainer who starred on the iconic television show "Hee Haw," died Thursday at his Tulsa, Oklahoma, home due to complications from pneumonia, according to his publicist. He was 85 years old. 

A fleet-fingered instrumentalist best known for his 24 years as co-host of the long-running country themed comedy show, the affable Clark was one of country music's most beloved ambassadors.

"He's honest," said fellow Country Music Hall of Famer Harold Bradley when Clark was inducted in 2009. "Whether he's playing guitar or singing, he's honest. Whatever he does, he sparkles."

He brought heart and humor to audiences around the world, guest-hosted "The Tonight Show" multiple times, worked with greats like Hank Williams and blues artist Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, and inspired countless pickers, including a young Brad Paisley, with his instructional guitar books.

“I play because of him,” Paisley said Thursday afternoon as he choked back tears. “I don’t think that, without Roy Clark and Buck Owens, my grandpa ever picks a guitar up. And if he never picks a guitar up, neither do I. I think it hits me so hard today because I’m realizing for the first time that I kind of owe him everything.”

Roy Linwood Clark was born April 15, 1933, in Meherrin, Virginia. The oldest of five children, he grew up in a musical family.

He learned how to play banjo and mandolin at an early age, but it was the guitar that spoke to him. "When I strummed the strings for the first time, something clicked inside me," he told The Tennessean in 1987. 


► Reactions: Fans, fellow country musicians remember Roy Clark

Within weeks of learning his first chords, the teenage Clark was playing behind his father at area square dances. Not long after that, he was performing on local radio and television. 

"The camera was very kind to me, and I consider myself to be a television baby," Clark said in 2009. "At first, it wasn't that I was so talented, but they had to fill time. ... So they'd say, 'Well, let's get the kid.' Later, I got to where when I looked at the camera, I didn't see a mechanical device. I saw a person." 

While still in his teens, he worked briefly on a show fronted by Hank Williams, became a national banjo champion, and was invited to perform on the Grand Ole Opry.  

Clark's deft musicianship caught the ear of Jimmy Dean, who performed on television and radio in the Washington, D.C., area. Dean hired the young musician, then fired him due to his repeated tardiness. "He said, 'Clark, you're gonna be a big star someday, but right now I can't afford to have someone like you around,' " Clark remembered in a 1988 Tennessean article.

Dean's prediction came true, eventually, but during his early days in Nashville, the unknown Clark and banjo player David "Stringbean" Akeman worked any stage they could find. "We would play drive-in theaters, standing on top of the projection booth," Clark told The Tennessean in 2009. "If the people liked it, they'd honk their horns."

Las Vegas to Leningrad

In 1960, Clark joined rockabilly/country artist Wanda Jackson's band, playing guitar and opening her shows at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas.

Jackson was on Capitol Records, and after Ken Nelson, the label's A&R man, heard Clark at one of her concerts, he signed him.

As a solo artist, Clark's breakout came in 1963 when his version of Bill Anderson's "Tips of My Fingers" hit No. 10 on the country charts, and he found crossover success with the 1969 smash "Yesterday, When I Was Young." (In 1995, he performed that song at Mickey Mantle's funeral.) 

In 1992, Steve Wariner also recorded "Tips of My Fingers," and his rendition went higher on the charts than Clark's had three decades earlier. Anderson still laughs when he remembers Clark's reaction: "Steve and I were backstage at the Opry, and Roy comes walking in. He doesn’t look up, and he doesn’t say ‘Hello.’ He gets right up even with us, and he just holds his hand out and says, ‘I’ve put (the song) back in the act.’ Steve and I just hit the floor.” 


Buck Owens and Roy Clark on "Hee Haw"

When "Hee Haw" premiered in 1969, Clark's role as Buck Owens' comedic foil endeared him to country fans and introduced him to new audiences. This, combined with hits like "Thank God and Greyhound" and "Come Live with Me," made him one of the genre's most popular stars.  

He won the Country Music Association's Comedian of the Year Award in 1970 and the Entertainer of the Year Award in 1973; later in the decade he won a slew of CMA Instrumentalist of the Year Awards, both as a solo musician and with Buck Trent. At the 25th annual Grammy Awards, his recording of "Alabama Jubilee" won the Best Country Instrumentalist Performance award.

As an entertainer, Clark forged his own trail. He became one of the first country stars to tour the Soviet Union when he embarked on an 18-date excursion with the Oak Ridge Boys. Twelve years later, he returned to the USSR for a "friendship tour."

He was also the first country star to open a theater in Branson, Missouri. The Roy Clark Celebrity Theater opened in 1983, and several other artists followed him to the tourist-friendly town. 

In 1987, Clark became a member of the Grand Ole Opry. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2009 alongside Barbara Mandrell and Charlie McCoy. 

"Roy Clark made best use of his incredible talent," Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum CEO Kyle Young said in a statement Thursday morning. "He was both a showman and a virtuoso, with a love of music that beamed across air waves and into millions of living rooms, where families gathered to watch and listen."

When the Country Music Association celebrated the 50th annual CMA Awards in 2016, Clark, seated with a five-string banjo on his lap, and Paisley helped kick off the show. They played a snippet of Buck Owens' "Tiger by the Tail," but it was their re-enactment of Owens and Clark's famous "Hee Haw" lines that brought the loudest cheers:

"I'm a pickin'....and I'm a-grinnin'"

After the awards, Paisley wrote on Twitter, "I will never, ever get over this moment."

Clark is preceded in death by grandson Elijah Clark. He is survived by Barbara, his wife of 61 years; his children, Roy Clark II and wife Karen, Dr. Michael Meyer and wife Robin, Terry Lee Meyer, Susan Mosier and Diane Stewart; his grandchildren, Brittany Meyer, Michael Meyer, Caleb Clark and Josiah Clark; and his sister, Susan Coryell.

A memorial celebration will be held in the coming days in Tulsa. Details are forthcoming.