Going Back Home: Chester D and Spain

Chester D. Wilson, cover art
by Spain Rodriguez. 1989.

Back in the late 1980’s before South Beach was populated by AT&T Park, million dollar condos and fine eats, it was a light industrial and working class neighborhood. There was a dive bar called Bouncer’s around Townsend and 2nd, that served up cheap burgers and beer to the ironworkers in the area, and a big helping of local blues every night.

My ex-husband Chris played blues guitar, and we owned an indie record label, Blue Jazz Records, which was a labor of love, primarily supported by my day job at Winterland Productions. We recorded blues & jazz bands that played places that are long gone, like the Last Day Saloon, the Lost & Found, the Blue Lamp, or the upstairs bar at the Paradise Lounge. The “big-time” gigs were the Fillmore, Slim’s, The Calalyst in Santa Cruz or Doc Ricket’s Lab in Monterey.

Chester D. Wilson (video) was one of our artists. When we were introduced to him at Bouncer’s, he was a 73 year old retired construction worker, playing country blues in the style of Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson.  It was Jefferson’s music that inspired Chester to build his own guitar as a young man and start playing juke joints around his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana. One night at a dance, a white man shot him in the left hand. Chester would always explain that although a white man took away his ability to play then, a white man also took him to the hospital and made sure he was taken care of. “We are all just people,” he would say, “everybody’s good and bad.”

Chester moved with his father to work in the shipyards during WWII, and stayed in the Bay Area, working as a laborer and in construction. At the suggestion of Sonny Boy Holmes, an old friend, Chester taught himself to play the guitar left-handed. It took him a long time, but he was dedicated and began playing gigs again. After he retired, he started to play more regularly, and would play at the 24th and Mission BART station just to get out and stay in practice.

Chester at the Fillmore! Poster by
Whit Clifton (Wolfgang's Vault)

In 1989, we recorded him live to 2 track analog tape at Sound & Vision, a small studio south of Market. Most of the songs were solo, with occasional backup from Peter Chase on blues harp and Gary Bergman on rhythm guitar (Waterfront Blues Band). We included short interview segments between the songs, so people could hear Chester's story in his own words. When we started talking about cover art, he said that he’d met an artist while playing at the BART station that promised him a drawing. So that’s how we got a beautiful portrait of Chester by Spain Rodriguez for the cover. At the time, we could only afford to release the album on cassette, giving half the batch to Chester to sell at his gigs. He loved Spain's art, and Spain gave him the cover drawing as a gift.

Around the time we were working with him, Chester had some fun gigs. He opened for Johnny Winter and John Mayall at the Fillmore, and he played the SF Blues Festival at Fort Mason. "All my songs are true," Chester said in 1989. "They are about traveling, mean-hearted women and tough times. With the death of legends in the Blues like Muddy Waters and Lighting Hopkins, there's not many left who play our style of the Blues anymore."

In the turmoil of my divorce and subsequent moving around, I lost track of Chester, the original tapes, and the mechanical of the cover art. If he’s still around, he would be in his 90’s now. I was honored to know him.

PDF of BAM Magazine review/interview and cover F&B | YouTube video 1990.

Another post about Whitney Houston

I’m going to take a moment to jump on the nostalgia bandwagon with everybody else writing about Whitney Houston.  She was beautiful and gifted with an amazing voice, which made her very public decline heartbreaking to watch.  Her career spanned decades, and I think her music managed to touch most of us at some point in our lives, whether we were pop music fans or not.

I never met her.  But I used to drive the freeways of LA with her voice booming over my cheap car stereo, trying my best to keep up with her.  Back in the late 1980’s – early 90’s, when I was working for the licensed merchandise giant Winterland Productions, we made T-shirts, posters and programs for her tours. At the time, Winterland was doing most of the major acts: Eric Clapton, Elton John, Michael and Janet Jackson, Madonna, U2, Cher, Springsteen, etc… out of all these, I hate to say, Houston always had terrible sales.  This was always a mystery, because lots of people obviously loved her. She was notoriously uneven and nervous in live performance, and I can only speculate that people were glad to see her, but didn’t find it a performance worth commemorating with a $25 T-shirt. 

When she nailed a performance though, she really knocked it out of the park. Her recorded performances were always spot on and mixed to perfection. I’ve seen many posts that include a link to her amazing rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl in 1991 (such as this post on The Mary Sue, which also includes a lot of good biographical detail).   The one time I saw her live was at the 1994 Grammy Awards at Radio City in NY.

The producers made the weird choice of having her start the show singing the first verse of I Will Always Love You acapella, and she wavered a bit (plus the audience had no idea the show had actually started, and were still milling around schmoozing), but as the song went on she found herself, and the audience response soared along with her, applauding wildly at the big finish. I will always remember her this way, and I hope her troubled soul finally found some peace.

Wolverine Sings!

Hugh Jackman in SF.
Photo by Joan Marcus

Hugh Jackman in Performance, May 3-15 at the Curran Theatre, San Francisco.

This was a fun show! Jackman charmed and joked with his adorning audience from beginning to end, gleefully poking fun at the dichotomy of his action hero Hollywood persona and his life-long love of musical theatre. Throughout this entertaining song & dance show, stories and references to Wolverine kept coming up, most humorously a video bit that juxtaposed Wolverine and Peter Allen, and a continuing joke with his “personal trainer” insisting that the studio needed Jackman to bulk up.

While Jackman is a talented performer, the heart of this show seems to found in his interaction with the audience and his personal stories. He laughed and joked and wandered through the first three rows of the audience, cheering on audience members who brought glow sticks, flowers and feather boas. He answered people that called out to him, and remembered people’s names if he had heard them. It was one of the most intimately engaging nights I’ve spent in the theatre for a long time.  There was an excellent band, 2 female back-up singers, the “trainer,” and a couple of Australian performers. He even brought the Curran’s stage manager out on stage for a bow.

The show itself mostly worked, the few rough spots were quickly forgotten in the energetic pace of the evening.  Jackman has a quick wit and a strong voice; he’s the perfect musical theatre leading man.  The show opened, as Oklahoma does, with Jackman off-stage singing Oh What a Beautiful Morning (“There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow…”) and it was easy to visualize him starring in Trevor Nunn’s production of the show. He followed this with some high energy show tunes, and a very funny version of Fever that got a great audience response. There was a movie songs medley that mostly worked, Staying Alive was hysterical and I’ve Had the Time of My Life was great. Then it sort of took a bad turn, as my husband commented, it’s really hard for a man to successfully perform Lady Marmalade. Things picked right back up with a series of Peter Allen numbers and a very funny story about his early role as Salesman #8 in The Music Man (he sang all the parts in the rapid fire opening number of the show himself). Luck be a Lady Tonight was a natural fit. I hope someday to hear him try some Sondheim.

My favorite parts were two ballads Billy Bigelow’s Soliloquy from Carousel (nailed it!) and Peter Allen’s Tenterfield Saddler and a hearfelt tribute to the Australian outback and the aboriginal people that included him singing Israel "IZ" Ka'ano'iKamakawiwo'ole's version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and hope to catch him again on Broadway in the future.

Are all the “Action Chicks” in the music business?

Since getting home from San Diego, I’ve been ruminating on an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying Comic Arts Conference panel I attended called “Where are all the Action Chicks”? Meaning, “Where are all the strong female lead characters in TV, Film and Comics”?

Kramer, Stuller & Misiroglu

The panel seemed promising (and had a huge line for a CAC panel). The moderator Katrina Hill (ActionFlickChick.com, see summary here) was joined writer/scholars Jen Stuller (Ink Stained Amazons) and Gina Misiroglu (Encyclopedia of Women in Popular Culture) who both did a heroic job of summing up the history of female heroes in Film, TV & Comics in ten minutes each. Comics writer Marjorie Liu (Black Widow) and the always insightful J. Michael Stracznski (Thor, Wonder Woman, etc…) were there and had interesting things to say but left early. Rounding out the panel was a bevy of media chicks & actresses including Jill Pantozzi (MTV Splash Page), Adrianne Curry (America’s Top Model, who was dressed in a Princess Leia Slave costume), Cindy Morgan (TRON), and Clare Kramer (Buffy).  Morgan told an interesting story about an on-line campaign to pressure the producers at Disney to include her in the new Tron: Legacy film, but otherwise, this panel seemed to kept circling around the usual litany of complaints with no real substance or suggested solutions.  I didn't disagree with most of what was said, but with all the brains in the room, I hoped for more. The fact that Angelina Jolie, arguably the chief female butt kicker in film these days, was just there the day before promoting Salt went without comment.  I think the public actually enjoys seeing a strong female heroine, but it has to be the right female heroine.  We need to figure out how to keep building on our successes. It will be interesting to see how Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is handled in the upcoming Avengers film.

2010 The New York Times Co.

One of the panel participants asked “where are the women who could really kick some ass?”  I’ll tell you… have you seen Christina Aguilera lately? An article in Sunday’s New York Times (Pure Gaga: Spectacle Rules by John Caramanica) got me thinking about this.  Here are all these ladies in pop music: they are rich, famous, have athletic bods, wear crazy revealing costumes, and they can dominate an audience (Photo: Lady Gaga, foreground left, and Beyoncé, right, in the "Telephone" video). The point of the article was a compare/contrast between the sincere, singer-songwriter Lilith Fair style performers (not doing well) and the outrageous spectacle of the Lady Gaga generation bad girls.  Maybe the general public wants distraction from their problems instead of introspective confessions?  I don’t know, but if you are looking for women in spandex that look like they could kick some ass, here they are.

JMS & "WW 601 Players"

One comic heroine that is still kicking ass is Wonder Woman, who just got a controversial reboot by DC and J. Michael Stracznski. Although I understand some people’s concerns about the change to her iconic outfit, personally I’m glad to see her wearing clothes that she can actually fight in without her breasts or butt falling out.  It’s funny in a way that Wonder Woman is finally getting to cover up and Lady Gaga and Beyoncé in the photo above are obviously referencing her and not wearing much, but I digress…. I bring this up because I witnessed what must have been a ComiCon first at the JMS spotlight session, a staged reading of a comic book.  Bummed out that Wonder Woman #601 wouldn’t be out in time for SDCC, he brought in 4 voice actors (the "Wonder Woman 601 Players") and had them do a dramatic reading of the characters, while he narrated and the drawn pages were shown on the big screen.  Overall, I like this change. JMS is strong in character development, and I loved his reboot of Thor and his mythological world. I’m not sure how this version of the character will fit within the DC Universe (or if DC will completely screw it up when the next big crossover event comes along), but I’m willing to give WW & JMS a chance (here's another review I agree with).

Keepnews honored by NEA

There was an announcement today in the SF Chronicle that Orrin Keepnews will be honored as a "Jazz Master" by the NEA at a ceremony in Washington DC (photo by Chris Hardy / The Chronicle).

Eons ago, when I was involved in the music biz and NARAS, Orrin was a NARAS trustee, and we worked on a string of Jazz reissue projects for MCA (my post about these projects).

Orrin has worked in Jazz forever, co-founding Riverside Records, a New York independent label that in the 1950s released material by jazz greats such as Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and Wes Montgomery. He moved to SF in 1972, and since then has won four Grammy Awards (one for an Ella Fitzgerald boxed set we worked on together) and a Trustees Award for Lifetime Achievement from NARAS. A prolific writer of album liner notes throughout his career, he wrote a book published in 1988, The View from Within: Jazz Writings, 1948-87. Jazz is his life... Congrats to Orrin on this much deserved recognition.

Here's a link to some of the reissue projects I did with him: http://www.allmusic.com/artist/kim-munson-mn0001369026/credits

Kosmic Trip at the Grammy Museum

Finally made it to the Grammy Museum at LA Live.  Strange Kozmic Experience, a special exhibit they had featuring material related to The Doors, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix was definitely worth a look.  Aside from video, clothes and all the memorabilia you would expect in an exhibition like this, there were some nice surprises.  Somehow, the fact escaped me that Janis Joplin thought of herself as a painter as much as a musician. The exhibit included a wall of large canvases painted by her featuring stylized, angular figures. It was great to see R. Crumb's sketches of her along with the Cheap Thrills album cover. Also on display were several letters Joplin had written to her mother and I was shocked to recognize that I had the exact same boxed stationary back in high school (ivory with a multi-colored filigree in the corner).  As I looked at her wild, loopy handwriting, this odd connection humanized her for me, and I ruminated on how young Joplin, Hendrix and Morrison were when we lost them (all 3 died at 27).  Standing before a wall of Fillmore posters, I couldn't help thinking about all the years I worked for Winterland Productions (the licensed rock t-shirt manufacturer) and how, decades after their deaths, the legacy (and merchandise) of these artists is still such a source of fascination and nostalgia.

Many photographers were included: David Gahr, Elliott Landy, Lisa Law, the late (and great) Jim Marshall and Bob Seidemann. The photos that helped establish the identities of the Doors (the Morrison Hotel) by Henry Diltz and the "young lion" portraits of Jim Morrison by Joel Brodsky were of particular interest to me, because I had seen such perfect prints of them in sequence before.   

In general I thought the rest of the museum was well done, aside from a bit of a sound bleed problem.  There were displays exploring the roots of most of the major genres of music, along with a nifty interactive time-line that allowed a fun and easy exploration of the interrelationships of the music of different eras and the key artists.  I was happy to see displays about songwriters and their methods, and about studio musicians and recording studios.  People that play the Rock Band video game would probably love the interactive Roland Live exhibit. The museum also featured a large touring exhibit about the legacy of Michael Jackson. I was fascinated to see the gloves and costumes in real life, trying to get an idea of who he really was under all those sequins. Again, I found myself drawn to his handwritten lyric sheets, contemplating the evidence of his personality and inspiration left behind on these documents, which were probably the most directly personal things there.

Of course, the Grammys and the telecasts got a lot of real estate.  You could hear about production logistics, see costumes and lists of winners, and watch outstanding performances.  As a past president of the SF chapter (1992-3), I attended a few of those shows in LA at the Shrine and at Radio City in NY.  In those days, I don't think NARAS was organized enough to support an institution like this, and I was glad to see this change for the better.

Tribute to Archie Green

A Celebration of the life and work of Labor Folklorist Archie Green will be held at San Francisco State University's McKenna Theatre on June 21st for 1-4 pm.

Archie, who passed on last month at the age of 91 (see my blog entry for 3/29/09), took special joy in collecting the songs of the labor movement, so it's totally appropriate that the event will include musical performances by Hazel Dickens, Mike Seeger and Elaine Purkey. Please RSVP to Archie's son, Derek Green at derekgreen (at) att.net.

Please check the SFSU site for directions, parking information, etc.

Excellent SF Symphony Performance

I have to quickly make note of the fabulous chamber music performance Marc and I saw this afternoon at Davis Symphony Hall. San Francisco Symphony musicians played three very diverse works and rocked them all. The first piece was Repentance, a world premiere of what I can best describe as a tone poem for cello, bass and 3 guitars by SFS artist in residence Sofia Gubaidulina. It was followed by two string quartets, Bedrich Smetana’s Quartet No. 1 in E Minor (From My Life) and Beethoven’s Quartet in B-Flat Major for Strings, Opus 18, No. 6 (La Malinconia). Nadya Tichman, SFS Associate Concertmaster and the 1st violin on the Beethoven, really nailed it, but I have to admit I was really blown away by the Smetana. This was an obviously complicated and difficult piece, and the 4 musicians, Sarn Oliver, Mariko Smiley, Yun Jie Liu and Margaret Tait played it flawlessly and with passion. The musicians were accompanied by an audience member sitting about two rows behind us that skillfully and loudly snored off and on through the whole thing, LOL. Brava everyone!!!

Classic Jazz Recording

Sometime ago, a friend Googled me and said, “In the results, I got all these old Jazz recordings. Is this you?” Actually it is me. Eons ago, when I first moved up to San Francisco from LA, my ex-husband and I owned a small record label called Blue Jazz Records. We recorded pianist George Michalski, the Waterfront Blues Band, Johnny Nitro and the Doorslammers and a few other people. The company itself wasn’t successful, in fact it cost us a lot of money, but other things came of it. I became president of the NARAS chapter, found a steady job at Winterland Productions through Bill Graham, and best of all, I met husband Marc. The other thing that came out of this was work on a huge batch of Jazz reissue CD’s in the mid -1990’s, and these are the recordings that search engines still find.

Orrin Keepnews, the jazz producer who owned Riverside and Milestone Records (Thelonious Monk, Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans, etc…) was a long time board member and national trustee of the SF NARAS chapter. Last I heard, he’s still around and working at 86! Anyway, back in the mid-90’s the major record companies were buying up classic jazz labels and remastering all the music that could be rescued for re-release on CD. For jazz fans, this was a matter of some urgency. Manufacturers of recording tape had tried different formulas and materials at different times in the past, and many of the 2 and 4 track master recordings from the 1930’s and 40’s (even the 1960's) were literally falling apart. Record masters prior to that were recorded on reverse metal plates (remember, we are talking about technology used to press vinyl 78, 45 & 33 RPM recordings). The problem with the metal plates was that they warped, but still the deteriorating tape was a bigger priority.

Orrin was doing a bi-coastal thing. He was not only a respected producer knowledgeable about the artists and the circumstances of all the recordings, but he was also well known as a writer on jazz history. Because of this, he was hired by BMG to work on reissues of the Verve and Bluebird catalogs in New York, and he was also hired by MCA to work on reissues of the Decca, Commodore and Chess catalogs in LA. As he found himself alternating between the two from week to week (at 72!), he hired me as an assistant producer for the LA project, and we did about 20 reissue CD’s together (listed at the bottom).

We did all the digital sessions at MCA’s mastering studios in Burbank. A couple experiences are really burned in my mind. The first was when we played the original 1938 master for Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit (youtube video). This is probably hard to imagine now that we are accustomed to hearing extremely compressed digital music through tiny (tinny) ear buds, but to hear the lush analog 2 track master recording of this beautiful and haunting song through state-of-the-art recording studio speakers was a transcendent experience. You could close your eyes and imagine her singing into the microphone right in front of you. Unfortunately, the tape was in bad shape. We knew we would only have one chance to capture it digitally and the tape fell apart in strips as it played through the machine. The original was lost forever (but we got the digital capture!). I consider the opportunity to hear it that way one of the more fortunate things in my life.

The second thing was a visit to collector and jazz producer Steve Lasker. This was another unreal aural experience. Mr. Lasker lived in a… I’ll be kind and call it disheveled...house, right on Venice Beach with two huge shaggy St. Bernard dogs and hundreds of pre-tape metal masters. So, we’d sit in this funky living room with the wads of dog hair blowing around on the floor, surrounding a playback system he’d rigged up with an old Pioneer turntable. He would take a roll of quarters, and judiciously place them around to balance out the warping, and do other mad scientist type adjustments. To hear this music from the 1910's & 20’s come to life again was really something. And then the dogs would start to howl along, and we’d all laugh (and sneeze).

Here’s a partial list of recordings, many of these were boxed sets of 2 to 4 CDs:
The History of Chess Jazz - The Commodore Story - Billie Holiday: the Complete Commodore Recordings - Ella (Fitzgerald) : the Legendary Decca Recordings (this was a 4 CD set that had Grammy nominations for Best Historical Recording and Best Liner Notes in 1996) - Lester Young: The Kansas City Sessions - Jelly Roll Morton Last Sessions: The Complete General Recordings - Louis Armstrong: Satchmo at Symphony Hall - Pete Fountain: Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? - James Moody: Return from Overbrook - Art Farmer: Out of the Past - Ella and Friends - The Nat King Cole Trio Hit That Jive Jack: The Earliest Recordings and Hamp: The Legendary Decca Recordings of Lionel Hampton.