John Stewart

California Bloodlines Side A

If you google “John Stewart” to find out more about the recording artist after you purchase one of his records secondhand for 89 cents because it’s called “California Bloodlines” and you are Californian, google will give you results relating to the host of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, assuming that you were misspelling his name and meaning to look him up, and that you did not care about the prolific folk singer-songwriter.  I did google "John Stewart" which showed results instead for "Jon Stewart."  I did not ask to search instead, as I had initially intended, for "John Stewart," so I have grown acquainted with the recording artist exclusively through record stores.

I am moving out of my house a week from tomorrow and one of my projects has been to listen to all of the John Stewart records I have acquired and decide which I want to keep.

I certainly shall keep California Bloodlines for I find it to be a generally listenable record with moments of originality and excellence.  For this reason I bought The Phoenix Concerts (1974), a double live LP, when I saw it for $1.89 at the same record store, and why I bought respective 1970, ’72, and ’73 recordings Willard, Sunstorm, and Cannons in the Rain, all of which I have listened to in passing no more than once.

Looking through my other records, deciding which ones to keep, I noticed that John Stewart was the third that made the Kingston Trio one more than a duo.  He was the one without a cleft chin.

California Bloodlines Side B

The lyrics and ambience of the songs on California Bloodlines describe a rich connection between the history of western settlement and the present (or at least then present) American reality.  The eponymous first song on the record tells of a state’s identity as the veins and arteries of the singer, a history literally pulsing through his flesh.  “Mother Country” is a spoken storytold song about a newspaper article in the San Francisco Chronicle and the reanimation through Stewart’s imagination of turn of the 20th century life—”Why, they were just a lot of people doing the best they could,” he put it simply.

What interests me about this mode of research, and accessing of media in general, is that it is unmediated by present-day modes of either media or commerce—all five of my LPs, all six records, cost less than a beer at the bar, either in the local record store bargain bin or from the not-for-profit thrift store; and I listed to them without the internet, cable, subscribing only to electricity.  

When I googled “John Stewart” I did not clarify that I had meant John Stewart, that I did not misspell the name of my intended search result.  If I did clarify I don’t remember, because all I know—or at least consciously remember—I just know from these records, and at a certain point I decided I would leave it at that, I would comprehend him exclusively through the mode of his early ‘70s hey-day—I would set them on the turn table, plop a needle on them, and tap my toe while reading the inserts.  And, as you may have guessed, catalogue the experience as it happened in a vaguely avant-garde personal essay about the privilege and power of certain modes of media over others.

Willard A

“And this song is a lie.”

—John Stewart, “Never Goin’ Back”

I started with California Bloodlines because I could not find a date on it, and I bought it first, so I assumed this coincidence to mean enough that I should listen to it first.  At least the familiarity I had with it would lend to an accessible introduction, perhaps.  Perhaps the sentimentality that I hold for my state and all croons directed towards it would shine through the opening words.  

In the insert to Willard John Stewart looks like a bohemian boyscott, his hair 1965 Beatles length, neckerchiefed, in the studio, in one photo contemplating, in another laughing, then mugging, next boyishly smiling, strumming, a talent plucked from the glow of the campfire, or perhaps the festival at harvest, entertaining the dust bowl era farmers seen in the old photograph on the back of the record.

A degree of theatricality—perhaps even schtick—is in the music and performances of the Kingston Trio and their era (not as bad as their contemporary Lawrence Welk and his kitschfest variety show), an artificiality that Christopher Guest and company made great light of in A Mighty Wind.  John Stewart does not put on voices or play characters in his songs; instead he is an era-less, eternal troubadour, passing through the world of the West and its railroad tracks and highways, through its fields and mountains, and telling its story as though it could be either 1972 or 1892.

“The Dakota sky made me feel like the river / runnin’ free, runnin’ free,” and he has a “belly full of Tennessee” just two songs before, and before the side is over he is “back in Pomona,” a song dedicated to the iconography of blacksmithing and the county fair—the LA County Fair, as it turns out.  We also learn in an astericks that “Ginny us slang for racehorse groom.”

Willard B

Just as California Bloodlines starts its first side with “California Bloodlines,” Willard starts side B with “Willard,” a song that—while not bad—tries way too hard.  PErhaps it is impossible write a good song that begins, “Willard, he’s a loner / living by the railroad track.”  However, there lies a great virtue in singing a ballad with complete sincerity, and indeed I quite enjoy the schmaltz of the chorus because it is so unpretentious with none of the self-satisfaction with which you can hear Paul McCartney sing his 3rd person ballads.

And his mamma knows that he was once a child.Mamma she was the first one to hear us cry.And my mamma knows that I was once a child.Could it be we’re all just Willard in disguise?

I was struggling to imprint ink into my notebook while sitting on the sofa, listening to Side 1, so I grabbed John Stewart’s double live album to write on, thus solving the problem.

“All American Girl,” Side 2, track 3, hints at the potentially fascist message of John Stewart’s music—the “All American Girl” is “a blue-eyed blonde,” queen of our country’s history, a white history narrated by Stewart and populated by his ancestors—a simpler, old-fashioned, bucolic world that seems to resemble the vision of Thomas Kinkade more than my own.  The song that just finished declared “that across the hill from Placerville the wind sure can set you free.” Thomas Kinkade is from Placerville; those same winds that bore him into this world and set him free.

The song playing now is called “Great White Cathedrals” and begins, “Was it you all along, good Jesus?”  Has pop culture justly blacklisted a retrograde songwriter who ignored the revolutions of the ‘60s and instead embodied a conservative persona based on Woody Guthrie, the great troubadour leftist of the 20th Century?  His songs don’t have outright political messages like Guthrie’s or an actual conservative songwriter like George Jones (whose record Good Ol’ Bible I did decide to get rid of).  The resolution of “All American Girl” is “she knows she has changed from the dreams that haunt her in her bed.”  That is unsettling in a timeless way, and interesting beyond most of whatever dated anachronism pop culture considers to be the great ouvre of American music.

“Marshall Wind” brings me all the way back.  It speaks to me directly and personally, he shouts out “‘Get back, JoJo,’ that’s what Paul said,” in a climax self-consciously evoking that of “Hey, Jude,” for the geography is mine—Paul knows nothing about Tucson, much less California grass—the song is mine; it is not New York’s, not England’s, not Nashville’s.  Highway 1 runs through my hometown, and “Til the day was done on highway one / Dancing off the bottle was the Sunday sun.”

Sunstorm Side B*

Spoken word, “this was a story about Haley’s Comet,” increasing crescendo as a man tells of going on the roof of his parents’ motel in Lexington, Kentucky to see Haley’s Comet, it hung over the neighbor’s barn, the same song form as “Mother Country,” storytelling with repetitive background music as verse to the sung chorus, in this case, to a tune that is reminiscent to the theme from “Reading Rainbow”:

Kentucky lightshine 

well it fall from the sky 

Kentucky lightshine 

Stranger in the sky.

Now that I suddenly find myself to be a John Stewart scholar, I find this song engrossing—Haley’s Comet represents the decades that pass between each generation’s great flares, and makes us think of the first great frontier writer Mark Twain who came and went with the comet.  While “Mother Country” is charmingly cheesy in its hopeless nostalgia, “An Account of Haley’s Comet” is not good, though admirable its unique vision and originality of form.

Inside the record is a photo of John Stewart with his family, his son wearing a San Francisco ‘49ers shirt that says “I’m a niner.”  Here follows a series of rhetorical questions based on what, to me, is an obvious duplicity in being both a literal ‘49ers football fan and being an actual inhabitant in a society created by literal ‘49ers:

Did he realize that years later a budding California scholar would analyze that his father has made a living appropriating an aesthetic born of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill and the rush of 1849 and the millions of people that followed in the coming century, and that he had inherited that tradition like the affinities for the local football team?  Did it occur to those who made the record?  And, if so, was it on purpose?

There is also a picture of John S. Stewart, John Stewart’s dad, smoking a pipe.  It turns out the “Account of Haley’s Comet” was his dad’s story, recorded in San Rafael on a Sony TC-110 stereo cassette machine.”  I feel like a jerk now for panning it as a terrible song to start a record because it’s actually a great, touching tribute to his father, and the first song on Side B.

*When looking for the name of the song I realized I had started with side B, which is also where “Mother Country” lands on California Bloodlines, which leads me to believe that it was released around the same time as Sunstorm.

Sunstorm Side A

My oh my how times does fly 

Makes you want to lay right down and die.

John Stewart has written a song called “Big Joe” about a truck driver, and “Joe” about a songwriter whose unnamed girl shines for him.  I am listening to a song called “Cheyenne” right now.  “Big Joe” was on an album called Willard, which features the song “Willard.”  John Stewart, the singer of the proper noun.  I just learned the song/album “Sunstorm”/Sunstorm comes from the line “Livin’ in an Oklahoma loner’s sunstorm.”  Filling out a fictional song with “real” people’s names and the names of real places can lend specificity to abstract concepts, personality to fictional people, like coloring in the lines with something familiar.  This is a trope immortalized also in near-contemporaries Paul McCartney and Jimmy Buffet, “Eleanor Rigby” and “Margaritaville,” for example.

The side finishes with “Arkansas Breakout.” It’s a fucking barnburner.  

Like the Wheels of a train  

you must run run run from the rain. 

Like the Wheels of a train  

you must run run run from the pain.

Cannons in the Rain Side A

As I take my first bathroom break, still listening through the walls, it strikes me that I am enacting a fairly disrespectful piece of pseudo-literary criticism—writing about a work as I experience it—all consideration, perception, and appreciation occurring as I describe my own interaction with half a dozen circles of plastic I saved from the trash.  Better than nothing.

John Stewart is divided in time on Cannons in the Rain—on the cover is Stewart as a maroon/sepia-hued wheat-chaff-chewing civil war era young man, and the back shows a window with two curtains, one slightly pulled and attached to the peeling wallpapered wall, revealing hints of foliage outside, an arcadian scene abandoned by time.  Inside the record in the third “center photo” he is a 1970s Aviator-bespectacled country crooner at an outdoor concert, labelled by a badge on his breast pocket that reads “performer.”

The first song is another in the genre of romanticizing a frontier local and its rough and tumble past.  Now it is “Durango.” Without a doubt “Take me down to Mexico” is a worthless cliché; but, unlike the James Taylor version (“Mexico”), the song is listenable. 

Cannons in the Rain B

Each song on the record is dedicated to a different person or group of persons. Most intriguingly “Anna on a Memory” is “for Coyote.”

“Armstrong,” which begins side B, is the first song not about (mid)western white folks doin’ what they do:

Black boy in Chicago 

Playing in the street 

Not enough to wear 

not enough to eat.

It’s a song, as it turns out, about not-white people around the world watching the moon landing on TV, that is observing white people occupying a space that is not theirs, much like westward expansion and the flag plantings in Texas, California, etc. Glorious government-funded destiny.  This song is “for Scott Carpenter and John Glenn.”  Neil Armstrong died last night.  Lance Armstrong stopped lying about his steroid use.

The last verse of the song ties the moon to Eden:

And I wonder if a long time ago 

Somewhere in the universe 

They watched a man named Adam 

Walk upon the Earth.

In terms of topicality, droughts on the plains are certainly timeless, here is this great line from “Wind dies down”: 

How’s your river flowin’ this week? 

It’s as dry as the scar on a cowboys cheek.

Title track is dedicated to Mom and Dad.  I don’t get it:

How could you go, Virginia 

And play that drifter’s game 

He sold to you the thunder 

was cannons in the rain.

Is Virginia the state, or a woman?  Is it about the Civil War, or just getting duped by a man?  Is it simply an elegant abstraction of the hopeless quixotic visions ( “Your Don Quixote’s windmills / were giants in his eyes.”), falling into the romantic trap of aggrandizing your situation and falling for the liars who play into your fantasy?  Is that not what is happening here right now with myself?  I am re-experiencing nostalgia through old vinyl records, living in Monterey in an insulated past-worshipping void; but John Stewart makes it noble, he reinforces my romanticized black hole, because if there was thunder, if there were windmills, they would be something else—all that remains are the stories of our history that echo through my living room like cannons in the rain.

The Phoenix Concerts Side A

A live album can help with context when you don’t know a group very well.  We learn which songs were most relevant to the audience at the time, and which hold special significance to the creator of the song.  Comparing the tracks to those of the records to which I have just listened it is apparent that some songs I have not heard; I do not own the complete John Stewart ouvre, I am afraid. Also I do not know if any are old Kingston Trio hits, though I doubt it, as he is the sole songwriter in the credits.

“You Can’t Look Back” sounds like an accidental retelling of the Orpheus myth.

For “the Pirates of Stone County Road” he creates the quintessential post WWII family room image of listening to I Love a Mystery! et al and getting lost in your imagination’s play with the sounds of the radio—which is exactly what the radio renaissance is about, what I am saying with this essay!  An ever-accelerating proliferation of media is destroying personal imagination, individual experience with a work of art, the popular consciousness, everybody’s lowest common denominator first reaction becomes our mediator with art, politics reality.  The world and its media cloak interest me not.  Life is elsewhere.

“All of the characters in the shows can come to life in your mind exactly as you wanted them.  Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.”

It is 2012 and I am listened to a 1974 live record in which the singer brings people back to 1950 to sing a song about pirates.  I wrote down from Walden today

But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools!

The Phoenix Concerts Side B

I don’t understand why double albums have A/D and B/C records instead of A/B and C/D records, because you have to switch records twice to listen in order; but that is how they make records.

Today I went to my friend Chad’s English class.  They had prepared questions on sustainability and were split into 3 groups who rotated between conversations with myself and two other experts in English.  I was hungover and the day was a surreal struggle.  I rode my bicycle, brought my copy of Walden, and wore my best thrift store outfit.  I brought a package of cookies that I realized had “kosher fish gelatin,” as both an offering and a prop for my vegetarianism.  “10 dollar outfit!” one student exclaimed when I told the thrift story of my jacket, trousers and shoes.

I wanted to explain the instability of American consumption for consumption’s sake, not for the sake of sustainability—consumption as reuse, as elections to maintain sustainable infrastructure, consuming to sustain, not to waste.

The Phoenix Concerts Side C

For me it is greater than just physical—I believe in ideas that last, that withstand the passage of generations with their integrity.  The capitalist power structures dictate a process of fad and rejection, a burst of commerce and a run-off of waste.  The sixties did something exciting because the youth-marketed commodity of rock and roll was appropriated by musicians with integrity, and commerce and art became one—anything more commercial eventually became waste (for a comprehensive Linda Ronstadt collection of half a dozen LPs find 10 dollars and visit a few places that sell used records), and anything more art becomes a fetish object (one time I saw a copy of Two Virgins and, needless to say, I was very excited).  The Kingston Trio is not very interesting, nor is Judy Collins, nor is John Denver, nor are all the other boring mainstream folk acts of the ‘60s.  But is it possible that there, in that trio, contributing the baritone notes to the harmony, the one without a baby’s bottom chin, was the most important and quintessentially Californian singer-songwriter of the 20th century?

As I listen to John Stewart sing “California Bloodlines” live in Phoenix in 1974 on my record player a week before I move out of my house, I cannot help but feel a little sentimental.  I am making the great transition between country music tropes, leaving home for the road—instead of being in my place, I am that place, carrying it with me, and sharing it with whoever cares to ask.

There’s California Bloodlines in my heartAnd a California heartbeat in my soul.

It’s inevitable getting nostalgic for what you still have when you are going through the conscious acts of preparing to let it go.  It’s a process of deciding what of this life you have lived is and will remain you—what you decide to keep and what must be let go.

The Phoenix Concerts Side D

I have decided I am going to keep all of the records.

I know a man name E.A. Stewart 

He spelled it S-T-U-A-R-T 

And he had some of the finest horses you’ve ever seen

 Today on Science Friday they did a Neil Armstrong tribute and played a version of "Armstrong" different than the one I had heard.   When I just googled "Armstrong John Stewart" this cover version was the first result:

This was the third: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-december-2-2009/lance-armstrong