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Culturalist Kurt Andersen wryly observes the American scene as author, essayist, radio talk show host

May 18, 2010 Leave a comment

Although he’s lived in New York longer than he lived in Nebraska, author Kurt Andersen was born and raised here and maintains close ties here.  He is best know to some as a journalist and to others as a public radio show host, but he’s lately established himself as a fine author as well.  If you have not read his work I encourage you to do so.  It is thoughtful and entertaining.  He is another in a long line of superb literary talents from Nebraska.  His books include The Real Thing, Turn of the Century, Heyday, and last year’s Reset, a meditative piece on the current American crisis of confidence he adapted from an essay he wrote for Time.  He is a much-in-demand essayist for leading publications.  Andersen is also a top-rate journalist, pundit, and interviewer. He’s a great interview himself.

The following piece appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com) soon after the publication of his second novel, Heyday. I eagerly await his next.

 

 

 

Culturalist Kurt Andersen wryly observes the American scene as author, essayist, radio talk show host

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

The world is Kurt Andersen’s oyster.

In a media career of dizzying variety this Omaha native, who co-founded the irreverent Spy magazine and was fired as editor-in-chief of New York magazine for being a provocateur, has become a hip observer of the American cultural scene. He dishes up his wry musings as a columnist/essayist for haute New York pubs, as a novelist, as host/reporter for Public Radio International’s Studio 360 and as a co-founder/contributing editor for the new online content site Very Short List. His earlier cyber foray, Inside.com, was short-lived.

Two new projects find him fixing his discerning eye on an epoch in the nation’s past and on a watershed moment for his hometown. His new novel Heyday (Random House) explores America at a threshold moment in history and his March 25 New York Times magazine piece examines the cultural boom underway in Omaha.

Whatever the medium, he displays a deep curiosity for and broad knowledge of subjects across the cultural landscape. His vantage point is the center of all things — New York. He’s been there now nearly twice as long as he lived in Omaha, which he left soon after graduating Westside High School for an Ivy League scroll.

“Kurt is a cultural journalism icon in New York City. I can’t think of anyone who’s thought of more highly in the realm of cultural commentary,” said Film Streams Director Rachel Jacobson, who got to know Andersen when they both worked at WNYC in New York. “He’s certainly brilliant, but he’s also incredibly easy-going and wonderful to talk to.”

His brilliance long ago marked him as one of those most-likely-to-succeed types. The magna cum laude Harvard grad soon made good on his promise by rising fast up the journalistic ladder in the ‘80s-‘90s, as a Time magazine writer, critic and editor, as a New Yorker columnist, as editor-in-chief of Spy and New York magazines. He’s been a contributing writer to the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone. He still does a weekly column for NY magazine.

With its look at the excesses of the 1980s, from New York’s garish party scene to bogus health gurus to the elitist Bohemian Grove camp’s weird goings-on, Spy tapped into the ironical Zeitgeist of the time. Its success was a rush.

“Very heady indeed,” he said. “We didn’t know when we started Spy quite how tough it would be to do, and how long the odds against such a thing working were — the classic too-stupid-to-know-better situation. It was heady and intensely fun, but also draining and occasionally terrifying.”

His firing from NY magazine was “more stunning than painful,” he said, as “it came so entirely without warning — circulation…advertising was up, the magazine was reinvigorated…lots of positive buzz. It felt like getting shot out of a cannon in the middle of Times Square, and I hadn’t even known I was inside a cannon.” He felt better when staffers “quit in solidarity” and press accounts unearthed the reason for his firing. “The magazine’s coverage had pissed off various associates” of then-owner Henry Kravis, “who had asked me to stop covering Wall Street,” Andersen said. “I came out of it feeling OK about the whole affair. Plus I got more than a year’s severance pay. And it made me decide finally that if I was going to write novels, as I’d always thought I ought to do, now was the time to try.”

It’s hard to imagine this one-time enfant terrible is now a doyen in New York media salon circles. Read one of his columns or listen to one of his reports though and you find he’s lost none of his youthful urbane wit or acerbic bite.

In recent years he’s taken a longer view of things as an author. His first book, The Real Thing, was a collection of humorous essays. With his best seller first novel, Turn of the Century, in 1999, he proved he could apply his smart, funny, insider’s take on social-cultural trends in the digital media age to the extended format of a book and tell a rousing good story in the process.

With his well-reviewed new novel, Heyday, he looks back to the 19th century at a defining moment in America’s past, when, from 1846 to 1848 a remarkable confluence of events unfolded to usher in the nation we recognize today. He looks through the eyes of well-drawn characters swept up in the American Experiment to reveal a world in flux and speeding toward modernity. The story is ostensibly centered in New York, London and Paris. but these teeming, messy capitals of progress are really the launching points for a cross country trek that allows the paths of its main characters to intersect with the currents and movements of the times. The wide open frontier, the spartan utopian communities, the makeshift settlements in Kanesville and the Great Salt Lake, the rough-hewn town of San Francisco and the wild northern California gold diggings all become key locales.

Heyday goes on sale March 7.

Andersen’s also throwing his attention these days to Omaha, where he researched that Times piece about “the cultural moment” the city’s enjoying thanks to some nontraditional movers and shakers. Since the 2004 death of his mother he has no family left here, yet he finds himself drawn back to this place and its people.

He sat down with The Reader at M’s Pub in December to talk about his new book, the radio show, life after mags and his take on Omaha’s urban renaissance. The tall, graceful man cuts a cosmo figure with his stylishly casual attire and suave air. He’s a careful listener who answers questions thoroughly, eagerly. He wears his ironic intellectualism without affect. His connect-the-dots way of analyzing subjects makes for good conversation.

In a 2003 interview Andersen spoke about facing down the fear of making the leap from journalist to novelist with Turn of the Century.

“I was confident I had the basic level of craft to put together sentences in different ways. Not having the tools, foundations, crutches…of journalism was completely liberating, especially the first two months,” he said of this first turn at novel writing, discounting “a feeble effort” years earlier. “But then it was completely terrifying because writing a long form thing of anything is terrifying, but also because it was this thing I had never done before. And, frankly, part of the attraction to me of trying new things is the scariness. I find if I know how to do something too well I get bored or it’s just not interesting.”

Century’s present-day milieu of New York media wheelings and dealings found Andersen on familiar ground. But Heyday’s 19th century setting meant getting-up-to-speed on an era far removed from today.

He said “to write a historical novel has a whole other set of horrible, technical challenges. You know, I’d read ‘em, but I’d never really thought about, What version of 19th century language do you invent?”

He steeped himself in the times.

“I spent about a year-and-a-half doing nothing but research,” he said, “and it was bliss. I never went to graduate school, so I felt like this is what graduate school in its ideal form would have been like. I had the basic idea for the story and everything, so it was work, but it was the best kind of work because I didn’t have to write anything.

“I read a million books, lots of diaries. Especially I found the diaries very useful because it gives you a sense of the colloquial manner of speech rather than the kind of Hawthorne, Dickens formal literary language which is how we imagine everybody spoke in the 19th century all the time. Obviously it wasn’t. And so in…just immersing myself in all kinds of diaries, it gave me a sense more of how the language was actually spoken.”

To commune as it were with some of the places that comprise his novel he trod the very areas in Paris and in northern California he writes about.

Once he got down to writing, he found a sense of period vermisilitude in the upstate New York home he kept until recently. The isolation and tree-lined fields of this country home “fed the dream” of 19th century life, he said, “in a way that living in New York doesn’t quite as easily.” Still, he wrote more than half the book from the office he keeps upstairs in his Brooklyn home. One advantage to being in the city, he said, is that Studio 360 is recorded in Lower Manhattan, “within blocks of where the Five Points were and where all the Lower Manhattan life in my book is set. It was fantastic walking past these things almost every day.”

He tried hard to avoid a pitfall many novelists fall into. “The thing with a historical novel is you do all this research and it’s tempting to show off your research and contrive the story to go here and contrive it to go there,” he said, “and that’s a real thing I found myself having to watch.” He’s happy with the modicum of “celebrity cameos” he integrated into the story, including “plausible” meetings between select characters and such famous personalities as Charles Darwin, Walt Whitman and Alan Pinkerton.

The whirlwind period at the heart of the book is one that’s held him enthralled.

“I’d had the very germ of the idea for this book for a long time, before I even wrote the first novel (Century),” he said. “And I think it began when something I read made me realize that in this one month of 1848 so much happened that I’d never seen connected before. In the biggest sense, all these revolutions in Europe, gold discovered in California, our winning the war against Mexico, the Communist manifesto published. Of course, I was already aware of the golden moment in literature of Whitman and Poe and Thoreau and all the rest and the beginnings of modern newspapers and photography and all that.

“So before I even decided to write the book I started researching and the more and more I discovered about this moment — of the telegraph and the railroad and feminism and communes, I thought, Why has no one ever said that this was the threshold — that this was when modern life as we know it began? And once I started going down that route, I just became obsessed and then started inventing a story I could use as the armature to tell that larger story.”

If Andersen has his way, scholars and historians will view 1846-1848 in a new light.

“We think of 1776, 1782, 1787 as the birth of America, but I’ve really come to think that in a more holistic cultural, economic, political way this moment bears looking at as when the prototype was getting made,” he said. “I don’t know of any other moment when so much stuff that you can look at from today and say, Yeah, I see where this thing we now experience — the seed of it was there. I mean, beyond the sort of three-branches-of-government-in-civics stuff.”

He said never has America been as swept up in so much change as it was then. The challenge for him as a storyteller, he said, was to “try to make palpable…just the sheer excitement of this and terror of this moment of incredible change and newness.” For him, there’s no comparison between the social-cultural explosion of 1846-1848 and that of, say, Height Ashbury or the digital revolution. “The birth of America, the birth of the modern age is a long affair, but I honestly can’t imagine a better couple of years to look at…the sense of world turned upside down.”

Andersen also likes the fact he takes on a swath of American history not oversaturated “in fiction or in our popular imagination” the way “the Indian Wars, the Old West and the Civil War” are.

“One of the reasons this period appealed to me, in addition to my thinking it’s an amazing time, “he said, “ is it’s more virgin territory. People saw the Indians were fucked but the Indian Wars were still on the horizon, 20 years hence. It’s the moment before slavery became this thing that busted America apart. Most people didn’t yet have any sense it was the fissure that would explode 10-12 years later. It’s another kind of germ of potential waiting to explode in the same way that all the good things or the new technologies were germs about to explode.”

He also felt pulled into the era by the extant photographs of the time, when the earliest such images on record were produced.

“When I started looking at period photographs I realized that we who live in this highly photographic, video-mediated age today can feel a connection to a period where photography existed in a way we can’t quite feel a connection to ten years earlier, when it didn’t. I just think that’s true,” he said. “When it’s all about drawing, that’s the old days, whereas, when I see these early photographs of the streets in Paris during the revolution, it’s alive. It was amazing to mere there were photographs of that. It gave me this sort of visceral sense of connection because it was real, it was a photograph, rather than simply an account in prose or drawing.”

Then there’s the inventions and innovations the era heralded in that anticipated today’s information age technologies and tools.

“When you look at photography or the telegraph, I mean to me everything from daguerreotype to television, that’s just a refinement,” Andersen said. “This mechanical, instant picture was the big change. The same with the telegraph. The telegraph to the Internet, it’s all just refinements of instant communication.”

There are other reverberations with today he found compelling.

“As I was doing my research about the Mexican War, our first foreign elective war, I was like, Hmmm, what does that sound like? I began writing the book in 2002,” he said, “when Bush was preparing to invade Iraq because they might attack us essentially. That was James K. Polk in 1846. In effect, Polk said, We’ve got to invade Mexico or they’re going to invade us. The Mexican War is a war people don’t know much about today, but so interesting because this was an imperial war…a foreign war…a war we chose to fight. I already had all these other ways in which I thought this time had resonances with that time, but that was yet another.

“It’s just a fresh view of a piece of American history. Not that I made it fresh, but I think by kind of depicting it, people might just realize, God, I never thought of it this way before or I don’t know much about this time.”

The primary characters in Heyday are emblematic of the great enthusiasm and anxiety of the new age dawning.

Ben Knowles is a young, idealistic Brit of means who turns his back on the Old World for the promise of the New Arcadia. His departure for America is hastened by a misadventure in Paris, where he’s both witness and unwitting agent of revolution. In the figure of Ben, Andersen provides a prism for viewing America from a “foreigner’s eyes…seeing “it for all of its ugliness as well as excitement. I wanted somebody who was thrilled about the idea of America and who would then be disappointed or not,” he said. Through Ben we see “this thing being made up as it went along” — what Andersen calls “the early adolescence of America.”

Ben finds an incarnation of the new nation’s spirit in Polly Lucking, an emancipated woman from a luckless family. She, like her late dreamer father, is enamored with all that is new and possible, only more practical about it. As a female of independent persuasions but poor straits she pursues two professions open to feminists then — prostitution and the theater.

Duff Lucking is Polly’s “wounded soul” of a brother. A disgraced veteran of the Mexican War, he’s a fireman with a suspect knack for always smelling out a good blaze. Haunted by the Lucking family’s many tragedies and his own wartime trauma, he sees mendacity all about him and anoints himself avenging angel, like a 19th century Travis Bickle, to cleanse the unholy land.

Timothy Skaggs is a bohemian, bon vivant, journalist, daguerreotyper and would-be astronomer. This cynical commentator on his times, is also a hedonist who indulges his huge appetites for life. The oldest of the bunch, he is at once friend, mentor, devil’s advocate and surrogate father figure to the others.

There are Dickensian overtones to the book, from the harsh class system to familiar types that embody the best and worst of human kind. Among these archetypes are sweet urchin Priscilla Christmas, repulsive b’hoy Fatty Freehorn and the sinister aristocrats, the Primes.

The villain of the piece is Gabriel Drumont, a Corsican whom we meet serving in the Paris national guard. An ugly encounter at the start of the book propels Drumont on a journey half way around the world to avenge his brother’s death. Each character is escaping some aspect of his or her past. Each is pursued by a specter of fate. Drumont is that Angel of Death. He also serves as the old guard counterpoint to what he considers the anarchic, libertine, insurrectionist actions of Ben and Co. A restorer of order to a “disordered world.”

“He (Drumont) is a very different human being than the rest,” Andersen said. “A hard person, driven by honor and duty. To an extreme degree. But I don’t regard him as mad or even evil. As I read and read and read into the period I came to believe this idea of honor and duty was a much more potent presence thing in life 160 years ago than it is today. I just think that’s true.”

Andersen spent three years writing and another year revising his “big tapestry” of a novel. He’s now “trying to figure out” what he’ll make the subject of his next. “I had given myself until the end of the year, (2006)” he said. “I have a couple of different novel ideas…I will be onto.”

Meanwhile, he’s busy with Studio 360, the omnibus program that works from the digressive edges to tie the threads of complex subjects. An installment of its “American Icons” series, which explores American works of art, won a 2005 Peabody Award. The honored show considered the search for the Great White Whale in Herman Melville’sMoby Dick. An upcoming “Icon” looks at the Midwestern perspective of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s melancholic The Great Gatsby.

He swears he doesn’t miss the magazine game. “No, I really don’t get a twinge to do that. Various things, including Studio 360, slake that appetite,” he said. “I had ten years of kind of like an unbelievably fantastic magazine-making experience, so I feel like, Why push my luck? Maybe I could do another magazine gig that would be fun, but I kind of don’t think so. No, I’m very happy writing books, doing the radio show. And I’m involved in this little Internet thing….called Very Short List (www.veryshortlist.com). We recommend one movie or one book or one piece of music or one web video a day…”

He also doesn’t miss being the boss. “I’m happy frankly not managing a lot of stuff and people,” he said. “You know, I get to have my ideas, talk to artists and filmmakers for radio and write my books, and other people are sort of in charge of the operations. I like having as small a part of my life as possible be about management, deciding how much people should get paid and all that crap.”

He has the freedom to discover his hometown’s emerging new face and persona. “I find it really heartening and hopeful about urban life in a frankly improbable place like this one,” he said, “where like a real vital set of scenes are happening. You know, there’s the Bemis art thing happening…the Old Market-retail-condo gentrification thing…the film scene…the music scene with Saddle Creek Records, Timothy Schaffert’s Lit Fest…It seems as though there’s a kind of critical mass of this stuff developing. I think it’s fantastic. I’d find it delightful and charming if it were in Dayton, but I didn’t come from Dayton, so I find it really nice this sense of it being a really livable place.”

He has more than a passing interest in Film Streams as a member of its advisory board. FS director Jacobson got to know Andersen when she worked at WNYC, which co-produces his radio show.

“He has been such a great friend both to me and to Film Streams,” she said. “I’ve felt like I can call on him to ask his opinions about anything, from lobby décor to press ideas to programming choices. He’s also planning to curate a series of regional movies…in the fall…I am thrilled that he’s still interested in having a connection to Omaha, and couldn’t feel more fortunate that his affiliation with Film Streams might play some role in that. ”

What his Times piece and a recent Studio 360 segment reveals is that Omaha’s cultural boom is driven by a new matrix of artists-entrepeneurs, not the Great White Fathers of the past.

“It’s this literally alternative history that I think is important for making it a city that feels pleasant and interesting and civilized to me. I mean, yeah there is the canonical history of Omaha and then there’s this other one, and I find it’s this other one not decided in board rooms…necessarily that’s key.”

“You can point to a relatively small group of individuals starting in the late ‘60s, with the Mercers and Ree Schonlau, up through Robb Nansel and Rachel Jacobson today, who for whatever combination of altruistic, aesthetic reasons made certain choices that made things to my eye and taste nicer here than they could have been. This could all have been knocked down as well as Jobbers Canyon,” he said, meaning the Old Market. “I could point to other cities around America where that is what’s happened.”

Omaha’s emergence as a cool urban center, he said, proves “individuals actually can make a huge difference and that’s part of the story. I’m really happy it happened the way it did and I’ll tell you, it has worked out better for Omaha than probably anyone would have predicted. I think Omaha is very fortunate.”

The Omaha model reinforces a lesson he said he’s learned: “That large risk-taking can work out OK if you really have a singular vision and stick to it and work hard and have fun doing it.”

Studio 360 is carried by many public radio stations. Check your local listings.  Heyday is now in fine bookstores everywhere.

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Acclaimed Author and Nebraska New Wave Literary Leader Timothy Schaffert

May 18, 2010 3 comments

Omaha and greater Nebraska own a strong literary scene, and one of its leading lights is novelist Timothy Schaffert.  I wrote the following piece for The Reader (www.thereader.com) after the publication of his second novel. He’s since had a third published and will soon have a fourth out. He and the (downtown) Omaha Lit Fest he founded and directs may not be what a lot of folks associate with this place, but his acclaimed work and the work of other notable Nebraska authors make clear this is a vibrant space for writers.  I’ve had the pleasure of reading the work of many of these writers, also of interviewing the authors and profiling them.  I’ll be posting more articles about Timothy, his work as a novelist, and his lit fest as well as more articles about other Nebraska writers whose work you should know.

 

NOTE: The 2010 (downtown) Omaha Lit Fest, Curiouser & Curiouser: The Book in Flux, is September 10-11 and as usual it features an impressively talented and quirky roster of guest authors and artists.  You can find a link to the fest via my links roll.

 

Acclaimed Author and Nebraska New Wave Literary Leader Timothy Schaffert

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

Author Timothy Schaffert is in the vanguard of a literary movement that finds Nebraska writers like himself all the rage for their high craft and wry style. For the recent (downtown) Omaha Lit Fest he organized, he touted Omaha as “a town of writers” and invited many of its literary lights to take part in readings and panel talks.

But with an acclaimed novel to his credit, The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2002, BlueHen), his soon-to-hit second novel already generating heat and a third under way, this leader of the Nebraska New Wave is taking some time to speak about his own work.

Reared on a Hamilton County farm 60 miles from Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, Neb., he grew up in a rough-hewn place unkind to the artist’s bent. The feeling of outsidedness he wore like a badge of honor permeates his work, replete with characters who revel in their own alienation. In his debut novel, the emotionally scarred but resourceful Rollows are rural Nebraska orphans scrapping a life together from the ruins of an antique shop. In his follow-up, The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (2005, Unbridled), set in the same fictitious county, low-rent lounge singer Hud tries reforming the shambles of his broken family, including a son gone off with a touring gospel music act. All of Schaffert’s characters ache with the sweet melancholia of oh-so-sad country songs. Their earnest, whimsical longings are both plaintive and funny in a world where dreams held fast haunt folks.

Not unlike how the sisters feel estranged from their enviorns and misunderstood by family and friends, Schaffert felt adrift as a budding writer in corn country.

”Oh, I didn’t think anybody understood me. I never felt like I fit in. I felt like I’d come from some other plant and been dropped onto this farm. I was pretty much a loner. I mean, I’ve always been close to my family, but there’s no secret I’m not quite of the same sensibility,” said Schaffert. ”All through school I was scrawny. I didn’t play sports. I had chronic acne. I had scoliosis. And I had ulcers, so I was worrying about everything in addition to just sort of scrabbling through life. I was a complete physical and mental wreck. So, I always felt kind of strange.”

 

 

 

 

Just as dispirited Mabel Rollow finds satisfaction in imagining her demise, Schaffert wallowed in adolescent angst as a kind of guilty pleasure and act of rebellion.

“I used to fantasize some dramatic suicide that I would then oversee as a
ghost, to see how people regretted letting me slip away,” he said.

Much like the elaborate stories the girls concoct to explain or justify their eccentric straits, Schaffert found solace in the stories he loved to read and write from a young age. “I read whatever I could get my hands on.” An inveterate comic book fan, he created his own characters and spun his own tales. He even began writing plays in junior high, once directing his own work.

“Even then the act of writing was a kind of salvation,” he said, “and I found some comfort in that. It was something people thought I was good at, so that was rewarding  because when you’re this scrawny kid who can’t play football in a small town in Nebraska, where football is king, you wonder what your worth is. Something I learned at a difficult time was that well, yeah, maybe I do have some talent I can explore. Maybe this is something I do care about and something I can learn more about it. And, you know, that kind of carries you through.”

While an artist’s life was in little evidence between his over-the-road truck driver father and blue collar surroundings, Schaffert’s mother was “an avid reader” whose book club selections became fodder for her bright and curious son.

”I ended up reading these really terrible, raunchy best sellers by Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susan and Sidney Sheldon when I was in the 6th grade. I appreciated them for their drama and melodrama and all these events that happened in them.”

His “developing appreciation of literature” took flight in high school, when he read such signposts of youthful disaffection as 1984, Catcher in the Rye, Farenhite 451 and Lord of the Flies. He loved Roald Dahl’s work. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he studied journalism and English, his “sense of language” flowered under mentors Judy Slater, Gerald Shapiro and Marly Swick. Notice for his work came early. He was published in the Prairie Schooner as a University of Arizona grad student. He paid bills writing career guides and filling editorial posts at alternative papers, including The Reader, all the while penning his award-winning fiction.

“I guess I really started paying attention to language when I started reading (William) Faulkner, (Flannery) O’Connor, (Eudora) Welty, (Tennessee) Williams and all the great Southern writers. Their language really amazed me. Early in college I was trying to write in that vein, but mine was highly overwritten, purple prose. Then that tabled out and I found my own voice. I played a little with language in different ways. For me, the writing process begins with the concept or the character and…coming up with situations. Then there’s bringing it to the page. Putting words to it is a whole other dimension. You learn how language can actually change the direction of a book on a sentence to sentence level.  Then there’s the way characters talk to each other and the discovery of who the characters are and what the novel is. So, for me, language is pretty powerful.”

The figures populating his novels first percolated in his head years ago, appearing in short stories he later drew on for his books.

“I sort of pictured the characters in a place where I grew up. There are details from the landscape where I grew up and probably some of the people I grew up around. But for the most part I just indulged my imagination, taking bits and pieces from what I heard, from the newspaper, from daily life, and worked them into the fabric of the novels. I always feel like there’s something perverse about my imagination. I don’t think I could ever just write directly from life. I need to filter it through this warped perspective.”

His penchant for seeing the quixotic and mysterious in the seemingly mundane lifts his Midwestern gothic stories to a state of grace. Whatever acts of folly his protagonists commit, they do so in affirmation of their own existence, choosing inevitable disappointment to feeling nothing at all.

In Phantom Limbs, Mabel and Lily make holy relics of objects their father, who killed himself, left behind. Where no facts exist to explain their abandonment by, first, their father and then their mother, they invent details to suit their own devices. Mabel and others make regular pilgrimmages to a farmhouse, where a paralyzed girl tells them what they want about their lives from the totems they bring. Lily embarks on a road trip that is a pilgrimmage of another kind — to find and confront her mother. In Daughters of God, Hud and company are trapped in a maze of memories, places and things that define them. All around him, Hud’s reminded of his shortcomings — the failed marriage he can’t restore, the prodigal son he can’t bring back, the daughter he can’t fully possess and the best friend he can’t forgive. Each figure bristles at being confined to limited possibilities. Each rebels in their own way. Hud won’t let his family slip away, even as they resist his efforts. Ozzie, his former pal, resorts to breaking stained glass windows, so that he can repair something, anything, unlike the damage in his own life he cannot fix.

Schaffert enjoys giving his lost souls refuge from “realty” in flights of fancy that reveal universal sensitivities, vulnerabilities, absurdities and ironies. “It’s very easy to convince ourselves that we are the only people on Earth. We do take ourselves very seriously. The writer Paul Auster makes the argument that realist fiction is not real at all. It doesn’t resemble real life, but that the more fantastic and more magical fiction actually bears a closer resemblance,” Schaffert said.

His in-progress new novel marks a departure in some ways. First, its events unfold in the space of a day. Next, it’s set in an urban, rather than rural, milieu filled with rich, spoiled characters miserable despite their wealth. Finally, its tone is more “overtly comic” than his earlier work. The episodic story reveals the conceits and hypocrisies of privileged snobs preparing for a party. It’s the sort of delicious fun house that a gifted satirist such as Schaffert loves to play in.

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Bobby Bridger’s Rendezvous

May 11, 2010 2 comments

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and Congress of ...

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You would be hard-pressed to find a more singular artist then Bobby Bridger, who has carved out a niche for himself in music that no one now or in the near future is ever likely to challenge.  I was first introduced to this self-described epic balladeer in the 1980s, when I saw him in a sublime stage musical entitled Shakespeare and the Indians, with book and lyrics by Dale Wasserman and music by Alan Jay Friedman, that had its world premiere at the Firehouse Dinner Theatre in Omaha.

I saw him again not long after that when he performed solo at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, where I was the PR director.

The following story appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com) in 1998. I’ve kept in touch with Bobby through the years and written about him a few more times, including on the occasion of the release of his widely acclaimed Buffalo Bill book and his autobiography.  My blog features additional Bridger stories I’ve written.

By the way, Bridger now has several books to his credit, including, A Ballad of the West, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West, Bridger, and his latest, Where the Tall Grass Grows, Becoming Indigenous and the Mythological Legacy of the American West.

NOTE: An August 12 email from Bobby announced he is retiring his A Ballad of the West performance as of mid-July 2011 because it has run its course and he wants to pursue other projects.  He may be hanging up the buckskins, but his singular focus on music and the history of the West will survive in the huge body of work he’s produced.

 

Bobby Bridger

 

Bobby Bridger’s Rendezvous

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

“Majestic mountains rise to heaven, kiss the clouds as they go drifting by. Golden eagle soaring upward, drawing lazy circles in the sky. The forest sings of wilderness, the prairie sings of space. The river sings of freedom, the wind sings with grace. Sing with grace! I’m bound for Yellowstone, and the high plains of Absaroka.” ––”Absaroka,” from Bridger’s new epic ballad “Pahaska”

A history lesson has never looked quite like this. Epic balladeer Bobby Bridger, bedecked in buckskins and beads, an acoustic guitar slung over one shoulder and a dusty trail of hair flowing from under his wide-brimmed hat, casts a spellbinding presence performing one of his odes to the Old West. With genuine mountain man blood coursing through his veins, Bridger does some serious communing with frontier spirits during his nearly sacred one-man shows in which he is singer, shaman, teacher, guide.

Bridger, who’s presented his dramatic interpretations of the West before Wyoming ranchers, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines and Russian schoolkids, breathes new life into history otherwise recorded only in books, films or paintings. His lyrics and verse are a celebration of the West and a commemoration of its passing. They tell how a nation came to be forged from heroism and hypocrisy, brotherhood and betrayal, discovery and death. How a dream was lost. A people injured. His songs are mourning wails and hopeful pleas. Hymns offered in the name of understanding.

Bridger, 53, defies categorizing. The Houston-based entertainer is a poet, author, actor, singer-songwriter, historian and storyteller. He draws on all these skills when performing “A Ballad of the West,” his ambitious, three-part epic ballad cycle chronicling the early American frontier. The project, which has consumed him the past 25 years, occasionally brings Bridger to Nebraska, where many of the key figures he sings about once roamed.

He was here most recently in September to perform benefit concerts in Lincoln and Omaha for the Prairie Peace Park. His performances, including one at Unity Church, introduced area audiences to “Pahaska,” the third and last part of his trilogy. Pahaska, Lakota for “long hair,” was the name given by Native Americans to William F. Cody, a.k.a. “Buffalo Bill.” Cody is forever linked to Nebraska, where he scouted for the cavalry and later launched his “Wild West” show. Bridger portrays Cody from a young boy to an old man, assumes the personas of those who knew him and serves as the tale’s narrator.

While in town Bridger also taped an upcoming “River City Folk” program with host Tom May. During the session, recorded at the studios of radio station KVNO 90.7-FM on the UNO campus, Bridger performed selections from his epic ballads as well as from his non-Western work.

Bridger’s immersion in the West began 35 years ago and sparked a quest to tell, in song, its epic story. That he’s stayed this non-conventional path so long reveals much about the man. It meant turning his back on a budding folk-country-pop recording career in the late ‘60s-early ‘70s.

“My family still thinks I’m absolutely stark raving mad for abandoning that, and all the obvious riches it held, and chasing this other thing,” he said.

He cut records on the Monument label in Nashville and for RCA in Hollywood. He collaborated with legendary studio musician-producer Fred Carter, Jr. He scored feature films. He was poised for a run at the big-time.  But he was unhappy. He chafed under the creative limitations imposed by music executives, who wanted formulaic love songs, not epic ballads.

“In the mainstream music business you’re expected to fit into a mold of whatever’s the flavor of the month. All they really want is a puppet that sings to belong to the masses, and I didn’t want to do that,” Bridger said in his soft Southern twang over a mug of tea at the mid-town Barnes & Noble.  “It was extremely frustrating. Executives at RCA told me, ‘No one wants a history lesson from an unknown folk singer.’ But I knew the only job an artist has is to evolve the form. And I thought the only way I’m going to be happy is to push all the chips in the middle of the pot and gamble on it.”

A Louisianian by birth, Bridger found both his subject, the West, and the form to express it in, the ballad, at about the same time. While a student at Northeast Louisiana University he discovered he might be the great-grand nephew of mountain man Jim Bridger, which spurred his research into the fur tapping era. Meanwhile, he discovered the writings of John Neihardt, the late epic poet from Nebraska whose “Cycle of the West” is THE source material for western scholars.

Bridger, who never met Neihardt, nonetheless describes him as “a guiding inspirational light” for “chronicling this great Homeric story of the Western hemisphere.” Bridger’s first two epic ballads parallel Neihardt’s.

As if drawn to the ballad “by the ethers,” Bridger found in it the medium to tell the epic story welling up inside. “On a ballad-collecting expedition in northern Arkansas I heard a woman sing a ballad from ‘The Canterbury Tales’ in Elizabethan English, and that experience hooked me forever. She was just as hillbilly as you could ever imagine, but she was raised in a little pocket of people that had held onto the old-timey songs,” he said. “I was just flabbergasted by the power of a song…of a ballad that could endure and thrive over physical oceans as well as oceans of time. I came back to school just obsessed with finding a folk song about Jim Bridger.”

 

Jim Bridger

Jim Bridger

 

 

He never found one, so he began writing one himself. Others followed, and before long he had an epic ballad in the making.

“My original interest in Jim Bridger only led me into the greater story that he was simply a part of. I realized everything that had been painted and written about the West could be sung about, and it didn’t have to be cowboy songs. The only aspect of the American West that had been recorded in song is the cowboy era, a little ten-year period. The rest of it had never been dealt with by the balladeers. No one had chronicled the mountain men or the immigration wagon trains or the Indian Wars. There was a void there.”

Bridger changed that with his first epic ballad, “Seekers of the Fleece,” which depicts the mountain men who opened the undiscovered country west of the Mississippi and forged a strong alliance with the native peoples they met. Its central figure is Jim Bridger, whom Bobby’s genealogical research proved was indeed his great-grand uncle.

His relative’s exploits form the backdrop for an odyssey about the harmony existing among whites and Indians before the onslaught of encroaching civilization. The song “Rendezvous” — about the trade fairs on the Green River in Wyoming that brought trappers and natives together in peaceful commerce — paints the early West as a Paradise Lost. It yearns for how things were before the great migration and expansion turned ugly.

His second ballad, “Lakota,” describes, from Native Americans’ perspective, the spoiling of the West as seen through the eyes and words of the holy man Black Elk, the vigilant conscience for a long-suffering people.

His third ballad, “Pahaska,” tries reconciling the myth and reality surrounding Cody and his relationship with Indians.

Bridger, who published his first two ballads in book form and adapted them into full company outdoor musicals, is writing a biography on Cody. He often performs and conducts research at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming. For years now he’s spent each summer in the state. In “Pahaska” he sings, as the elder Cody, a love song to Wyoming called “Absaroka” that expresses both men’s deep feelings for the place.

For a long time Bridger struggled finding an original slant on Cody, America’s first bona fide celebrity. He wrote and discarded two versions of “Pahaska” before finally hitting the mark. “I wrestled with him for 25 years to get beyond the mythology and the debunkers to reveal who the real man was…and to present the Indian side of Cody.”

His “new interpretation” portrays the complex man as a genuine friend of Indians whose shrewd use of them and the buffalo in the Wild West show guaranteed its success while giving Indians a venue for preserving their endangered culture and buffalo a sanctuary from likely extinction. Bridger feels sure he will stir up a hornet’s nest of controversy with certain academics, who view Cody as a genocidal exploiter, by suggesting the frontiersman-turned-entertainer “created American show business as we know it.” He adds, “He was creating theater based on his real experiences, often with the very people who partcipated in the historic events. And he got it all directly from Plains Indians. ”

What is it about the saga of the West that’s motivated Bridger to keep at it so doggedly?

“It’s our Homeric story. It’s the backdrop that produces the heroic archetypes of a nation. Aside from our quest to land on the moon, it is the great American heroic story. But even that pales beside it. If truth be told the men who went to the moon knew a lot more about where they were going than the fur trappers who went to the head waters of the Missouri River in 1822. Most of them had never seen anything like it before. There was nothing in their whole genetic coding that could have prepared them for the Rocky Mountains or the tall grass Great Plains.

“I just stumbled into it, and it’s the kind of thing that in ten lifetimes you couldn’t chronicle. There’s so many stories…”

Although he sometimes wonders what might have been had he stuck with more commercial material, he rarely looks back now. “I’ve spent my whole life involved with the West and I have no regrets about that because I’ve created a singular career. No one does what I do. I’m doing exactly what I want to. I know it deep in my cellular structure, and that’s vitally important.”

 

 

 

 

After he walked away from potential fame, however, he dropped out, fled to the wilderness and adopted an extreme lifestyle  — all in a search for meaning. “I was disillusioned and didn’t know what to with myself. I went down to the Big Bend area of Texas and lived in the Chihuahua Desert for nearly two years,” he said. “I didn’t eat any cooked food. I dressed in skins. I slept outdoors. I was trying to get right to the edge of that existence…living nomadically, fasting, performing all sorts of cleansing rituals.”

The experience proved a crucible for him. “After a three-day period in a cave eating roots I came face to face with the hypocrisy of trying for this purity in the desert in an E-mail world. I realized, ironically, that I was running from the spotlight. That I was afraid of being on stage and really opening up who I was to people. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be in the  spotlight. I wanted to, but I just didn’t know how. And so I came back and made the album ‘Heal in the Wisdom’ and became involved with ‘Shakespeare and the Indians’ and ‘Black Elk Speaks’ and all that stuff.”

“Heal in the Wisdom’s” theme — of letting go the past to heal in the now and after — grew out of Bridger’s self-imposed exile and his grief over losing two close friends. The title track has become his signature tune and, among other things, the closing anthem for the Kerrville Folk Festival in Austin, Texas, an event he’s played since its inception.

Bridger said music industry-types misread the album’s spiritual context to claim he was “a born-again freak,” adding, “That wasn’t true at all. I had been born again, but not like they thought. It represented getting out of the desert and getting back in the spotlight.”

After the release of “Wisdom” in 1981 on his own Golden Egg Records label, he turned his attention from recording to the theater. He landed the lead in Dale Wasserman’s folkloric musical “Shakespeare and the Indians” (debuting at Omaha’s Firehouse Dinner Theater) and co-starred in a theatrical version of “Black Elk Speaks.”

He moved to Austin in the early ‘70s and was a pioneer in its development as an arts haven. “I was a part of that whole genesis of the Texas music scene,” he said. “It was truly an alternative thing and I found people there who were doing what I did by going against the grain and swimming upstream: Willie (Nelson), Michael Murphy, B.W. Stevenson, Steve Fromholz, Kinky Friedman. A journalist there referred to me as “a misfit in a city full of misfits.’”

Having come to terms with himself and his quest, Bridger next had to find the right voice for communicating his vision. He had begun performing his ballads in traditional theatrical settings — on stage, with sets, dramatic lighting and all the rest. But it didn’t feel right.

“After it succeeded in the theater that success bothered me because I felt it was still sanitized. I wanted to break out from that Fourth Wall and address the audience…and the only way I could get through there was to step off the stage out into the audience as a balladeer. So I started living out of the back of  my truck and going to Wyoming cowboy bars on Friday and Saturday nights when folks were rip-roaring drunk and the places were about to blow up. Nine times out of ten they would kick me out and never want to hear me again. But that tenth time I would catch ‘em and put ‘em under the spell. Then I knew it was working as a balladeer.”

He’s since appeared on “Austin City Limits” and re-released “Heal in the Wisdom” on CD. He is recording his epic ballads on CD as well.

It is a credit to Bridger’s performing power he’s able to conjure a distant time and place with merely his period garb, soulful music and stirring verse. He usually performs unplugged — no lights, no mikes, no videos.

“In the world of MTV you’re told immediately what to see with every song lyric,” he said. “What I prefer doing is letting you create your own image of the lyric and place in your mind, and hopefully I can take you back in time with me. That creates a unique experience for you and a unique bond between the two of us. It’s a vestige of an ancient form of communication…exactly what Homer was doing.”

His salty tenor voice soars with deep-rooted feeling. His vibrant Martin guitar resounds with no-holds-barred bravado. His work remains something all too rare today: genuine. It may not be cool or politically correct, but it is honest and heartfelt. There’s no attitudinal baggage. Just a passion to sing for the people. To sing our story.

“At the Rendezvous, white man and the Sioux…smoked the pipe, traded hair…for the maidens fair. To the Rendezvous, men came from St. Lou…wanting beaver and mink, bringing whiskey to drink. On the Rendezvous, 1832, on the Green River side, where I took my first bride…a black-eyed Shoshone, daughter of Eagle-man. At the Rendezvous, white man and the Sioux…traded fur for their guns, raced their ponies for fun. And with Rendezvous done, Mountain Men were one.”
––”Rendezous” from “Seekers of the Fleece”

For more information on Bridger and his music, check out his web site at:  www.bbridger.com

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Hard times ring sweet in the soulful words of singer-songwriter-author Laura Love, daughter of the late jazz man, Preston Love Sr.

May 1, 2010 4 comments

 

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Image by armadilo60 via Flickr

As a journalist I knew the late Omaha jazz musician Preston Love Sr. fairly well, but I didn’t know about his daughter, Laura Love.  By the time I learned of her, Preston was gone. My work as a  journalist and the relationship I had with her father led me to Laura, whom I first got to know through her autobiography. Then I heard her music.  Then I interviewed her, by phone, and I felt as if I’d known her all along.  Like her father, she’s an immensely talented musician and author.

My story about her appeared in a somewhat truncated form in The Reader (www.thereader.com).  I offer it here because I would like to introduce more people to her and her work.

 

Hard times ring sweet in the soulful words of singer-songwriter-author Laura Love, Ddughter of the late jazz man, Preston Love Sr.

©by Leo Adam Biga

A version of this story appeared in a 2006 issue of The Reader (www.thereader.com).

 

Hard times never sounded so sweet as sung by Laura Love, the Seattle jazz-folk-R & B-gospel fusion artist whose bittersweet Nebraska past informs her soulful work.

The singer–songwriter-bass player was born and raised in Lincoln, along with her sister Lisa. The girls did part of their growing up in Omaha. Meanwhile, their single mother, Wini Jones, a lithe, sophisticated, swing-era big band singer-turned social worker, bounced around as mad as the March Hare. Paranoia gripped her. Between psych ward stays, undergoing electric shock treatments, her sanity wavered. Her young daughters awaiting the next breakdown. There were attempted suicides. Once, heeding the voices inside her head, she readied herself and the girls to hang themselves before the family cat interrupted the proceedings.

“A lot of the things she did were irrational, illogical, but when you’re a kid you go, ‘Oh, that’s just Mom.’ You don’t necessarily have a label for it. You don’t necessarily notice it as a pathology or a psychotic reaction,” Love said. “You just know that it’s really damaging. Then you get good at gauging where it’s going and when it’s going to come on — what’s going to trigger it.”

From the 1960s to the mid-1970s, the sisters flitted in and out of foster care homes as their mother went in and out of mental hospitals. With Wini unable to hold a job for long, bills piled up and creditors hounded them. Living on the edge, the family rarely stayed in one place more than a few months. Amid the dysfunction and chaos, they improvised a survival strategy that somehow staved off fatal disaster.

Just when Laura and Lisa staked their independence as teens, they discovered the father they’d been told was dead was alive. His name — Preston LoveSr. Omaha’s ebullient jazz icon. He’d been a sideman with Count Basie and played with scores of other legends. He’d hired Wini to front his touring band in the late ‘50s and the married man with kids had an affair with his lead singer. Laura and Lisa were the result. It was not his first affair and the girls were not the only children he sired out of wedlock. As if that wasn’t mind-blowing enough, Laura, then a budding musician, found a man who looked and sounded just like herself, yet whose cavalier attitudes about fatherhood challenged her ideas of Daddy Dearest.

 

 

“At 16 I’d lived my whole life not having a father. And when you don’t have one you make up the perfect father,” said Love, who found hers didn’t share her storybook fantasies. “Meeting him was just such a huge deal to me and I was so sure it would be for him, too. I just longed and yearned to have this family connection with him and to really understand who he was. It was a life changing experience for me and it took me many years to realize it wasn’t the same experience for him.”

That first meet came in 1976 at Lincoln’s Zoo Bar, where Preston was performing. She saw an item in the local paper about the return of the veteran musician to the area music scene after years heading up Motown’s west coast band. The name was the same but could this possibly be the same man whom her mother said died in a car accident? When she approached him after a set to inform him she thought she was his daughter, he confirmed it. They spoke at length and saw each other more times over the years. Lisa met him, too. Laura even sat in to sing with Preston and his band on stage. Once, he dedicated the classic ballad “Laura” to her when she surprised him by walking in unannounced to see him perform in a London club that was part of one of his many European tours. “That was sweet,” she said.

He offered no apology for his wicked ways. He rationalized it as rites-of-passage for men on the road. Laura couldn’t square such nonchalance with his warm persona.

“As affable and good-natured and smart and talented as he was,” she said, “he really didn’t have any sense of responsibility for me whatsoever. He had an incredible distance and familiarity at the same time. He was so accessible and inaccessible, just a walking contradiction. He never denied me access to him, but I never really got access to him either, unless I sought him out. We never didn’t get along, it’s just that we didn’t have a great connection either. He was just kind of a happy-go-lucky guy that went through life sort of hedonistically, doing what he pleased. On the one hand, it was a cool way to live your life and on the other hand there was this kind of trail of carnage left.”

 

Preston Love Sr.

 

 

The times she reached out to him posed problems for Preston, his wife Betty and the family. Betty made it clear Laura and Lisa were unwelcome at the Love home. A few years ago Laura was touring with The Temptations when Preston was booked to serve as the band leader for the group’s Omaha concert. It was a gig he’d handled before. As Love tells it, “At the last moment he begged off and took another gig…because it was a very sore subject with Betty that I was in existence, that I was in the world. It was their agreement to sort of ignore that. Her agreement, I think, with him was, I don’t like it, but if you’re going to do it, don’t put it in my face. So, in order to be respectful to her, he just bailed out…”

Despite feeling unappreciated here, Preston was undeniably a big fish in this small pond. He didn’t want a scandal to sully his name. He was a major presence by virtue of the steady gigs he performed locally, the long-running music column, “Love Notes,” he wrote for the Omaha World-Herald, the public radio jazz program he hosted for years on KIOS-FM and the many talks he gave about jazz as a visiting artist and lecturer. An opinionated and brilliant man, he spoke frankly and eloquently about black music and would not hesitate to call out or slam musicians he felt disrespected the art form. He was also an oft-quoted observer of the north Omaha scene. He wore well the term “legend” so often attached to him.

By 2000, Preston was pushing 80. Back in Omaha he basked in the glowing reviews of his 1998 book, A Thousand Honeycreeks Later, while in Seattle she enjoyed breakout success in her own career. After a period when they spoke very little, he began pressing her to come visit him in Omaha. In 2002, she did. Preston, his wife Betty and their children Norman, Richie and Portia were there. It came just in time, too, as Preston fell ill in 2003 and passed away the next year.

“It was a very sweet gathering. I enjoyed everyone’s company so much. They were warm and generous and loving to me. It was a great experience to have before he died,” Love said. His death came months before the release of her own acclaimed memoir and companion CD, You Ain’t Got No Easter Clothes (Hyperion Books and KOCH Records), which focus on her Nebraska odyssey. Chapters correspond to songs. References to north Omaha’s ghetto include Sacred Heart School, where she and Lisa went, and the Spencer Street Barbershop, where they took refuge from bullies under the watch of resident poet-barber-philosopher Ernie Chambers.

She bravely revisits her perilous early years in clear, simple prose and lyrics. Despite all she went through, Love’s words soar with a wry, forgiving tone that avoids any of the woe-is-me self-pity that she would have been justified expressing.

“I don’t feel sorry for myself. I do really feel grateful for those experiences now. I see people growing up now that don’t have nearly the resources I had. I mean, I had a really hard life growing up, but my mother, crazy as she was, gave me the tools to have a good life. She introduced me to reading and literature and musicals. If you can read, you can go anywhere and you can leave any horrible circumstances, at least for that time. I look at kids I know now that have no idea how to live in the world or how to cope with adversity or have no interest in reading and are intellectually impoverished. Or, kids that have been really well taken care of financially but have no rudder — no sense of how to do anything.

“So, one of the things I really treasure now is that even though we were really poor and had these really humbling and humiliating experiences my sister and I were also — through living in foster homes and all-white neighborhoods — exposed to how the other half lives. It’s kind of one of those, If-you-can-see-it, you-can-be-it, things. We understood there weren’t people living the way we were living. They were all around us. Some of them were our friends. We understood we had things in common with very poor and very wealthy people. We understood, especially living with a bipolar person, one day can be bad and the next can be just a blast.”

The irony, she said, is that her sense of La Dolce Vita mirrors that of her father, who emerged a bon vivant even though he came from a poor single-parent home himself. Preston was one of 11 children raised by Mexie Love in a ramshackle house jokingly called “the mansion.” He didn’t meet his father until he was a young man.

“I think a part of my basic personality is a lot like Preston’s,” Love said, “in that I just feel like life is good, and if today sucks tomorrow might be just incredibly fun.”

After two years at UNL, Love left Nebraska at 20 to follow a guitar player named LeRoy, whose band she sang in. Years later, she confronted her past in her work when fans encouraged her to expand on the rough childhood she alluded to in the liner notes of her early records. Mining that past proved healing.

“The whole experience was incredibly cathartic for me,” she said. “I remember I would just sit there, pour myself a shot of whiskey and start typing on the computer and start getting into the story. There were times I was almost scared to start writing because I’d left off at a place that was still painful or I was coming up to a place that was painful and I had to finish the story and to examine deeply how I felt and look back at what happened. Then I’d put the computer away and I’d get out the tape recorder and there I was again, having to think about it in a different way as I put it down lyrically in some way that made sense and evoked some kind of emotion. So, before the catharsis there was pain.”

Leaving Nebraska years earlier was cathartic for her in a similar way. She said getting away can be a healthy thing, even if you venture into uncharted waters as she did in the Pacific Northwest, where she and LeRoy no sooner arrived than broke up, leaving her to figure out a future alone.

“I think one of the things you need to do is leave comfort to challenge yourself. It wasn’t very nurturing or comfortable for me when I first got out to Portland and then to Seattle. It was hostile. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have an advanced degree or anything. It made me have to dig deep and look for a job, look for a friend. I just like hit the pavement as far as music went.”

Left high and dry in Portland, Love clung to one truth. “I didn’t know if I was going to have a career in music but I knew I absolutely needed it in my life.”

She scoured local papers “looking for anyone who was jamming” or “might possibly have gigs.” Again, she pushed beyond her comfort zone. “I got into sort of a funk garage band. It made me step put of myself and establish friendships with people and do things normally I’m not that great at, like being social. I was in a little Pop 40 band for a minute called Desire. It really is a huge education to go out there and just try to find people who are where you are musically or just a little bit further.”

Fixing on who she was as an expressive artist proved daunting. “I didn’t know what kind of music I really wanted to do. I mean, I was really drawn to jazz as well as funk as well as folk and pop music, and so to find out what I wanted to do I had to keep finding out what I didn’t want to do,” she said. Being African-American, she’s struggled with others’ expectations of what music she should or should not make.

“Oh, yeah, constantly. When I was kind of dabbling in funk music, we did a couple gigs in some black establishments and I just remember being stared at by the crowd and them thinking I wasn’t black enough. There’d be like dead silence after every tune. It was a really good band, too, but we only had three black people, including myself, and the rest were white. I remember saying, ‘We’re going to take 10 minutes and we’ll be right back,’ and this woman yelled out, ‘Hell, take twenty.’”

Confusing the matter even more is the fact many people “can’t quite tell often if I’m black, so they can’t quite tell what I should be playing. People always ask me, ‘What are you?’ I think one of the reasons they ask is they want to infer or have some notion about what I should be playing.”

The pull of music not deemed black still tugs at her.

“Even now, I’m just really, really loving bluegrass music, and there’s not a lot of black folks in bluegrass music. And folk music — you don’t run into a lot black people there. So, at times I have a little identity crisis there, thinking I don’t fit cleanly into any genre. Because I like so many, I have never really settled on a genre. I just write what feels good to me and sounds good to me.”

Those diverse roots set her richly-layered music apart.

“Yeah, I think it’s my strength and my curse sometimes that I love all kinds of music. When I write a song it’s like there’ll be bluegrass and folk and funk and jazz in it. And I love to do that. It’s not like I consciously seek out all these influences — they’re just in me. I listened to all kinds of music growing up in Nebraska. Radio was so much better in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I remember listening to WOW Radio in Omaha and KFOR in Lincoln and hearing this huge array of music. You’d hear James Brown and then Joni Mitchell, and it wasn’t like insulting to your intelligence. It didn’t occur to DJs and programmers back then that you couldn’t like folk because you liked rap or that you couldn’t like R & B because you liked country.”

Music labels prefer specialization to eclecticism, as she found in her dealings with Mercury Records, whom she was signed to for awhile.

“Particularly when you’re on a major label, they really want you to fit cleanly into a genre and kind of push you into that. And I think there is a lot of frustration among the labels about — What radio stations are going to play this?”

Her maturation as an artist coincided with her move to Seattle in the mid-’80s.

“I fell smack dab in the middle of the grunge scene, which is great, because I really wanted to learn how to play an instrument and with grunge you didn’t really have to know how to play an instrument, you just kind of had to have one. I remember buying a bass and getting a gig really before I even knew how to play it.”

Devoted to teaching herself to play, she made ends meet growing and selling pot.

“I bought a lot of records and I learned how to play with them. I listened to how the bass lines worked inside these records and things like that. I’m an ear player, but I had a lot of time on my hands to kind of figure things out.”

Her musical voice emerged in the process.

“The early ‘90s is when I really started putting down chords and melodies and writing my own music and that’s when I really started to define what I wanted to hear as my own sound. To some extent, it was limited by my ability to play guitar or bass and to play and sing at the same time. So, I was somewhat defined by my limitations as well as my broad musical experiences.”

Love said she writes when the mood “hits me,” adding she doesn’t have the “this-is-a job” discipline artists in music cities like L.A. or Nashville exhibit. However laidback she appears, she concedes to business realities. “Occasionally I write songs just for the fun of it and just because a melody hits me or something like that, but I have to have the motivation of a record deal to write songs.”

She’s musing over a possible new album that would mix original songs with her renditions of such beloved American tunes as “This Land is Your Land,” “Shenandoah,” “John Henry,” “Erie Canal,” “Red River Valley” and “Five Hundred Miles.” She feels these American classics are unfairly maligned or ignored. “They’re profound and incredibly powerful songs. Just beautiful songs. Just because we learn them when we’re younger doesn’t mean they have no value.” This project comes on the heels of her writing eight songs for a new musical, No Boundary, that premiered in New York.

With the success of her book and her music, she’s in a good place professionally. Her touring finds her playing festivals and clubs from coast to coast. More importantly, she’s in a good place emotionally. She shares a house with three other women — her partner Pam, her manager Mary McFaul and her sister Lisa. In 2002 Laura and Pam became foster parents to a baby, Chrsity, they’ve since adopted.

Her realization she is gay took time.

“Well, you know, as I got older I realized I like boys and I like girls, but I really, really like girls,” she said, laughing. “I’ve had a few really serious, long-term relationships with men. I was engaged a couple times actually. I just never quite felt comfortable there. I’ve jusr realized in my adult years that my deepest partnerships and connections were with women. I ended up falling in love with a woman who was actually dating the same man I was dating.” That was 20-odd years ago. She and her current partner Pam have been together nine years.

Laura’s mother is still alive. After years of separation, Love moved her out west and built a home for her. Untreated, Wini’s mental state worsened. One crisis after another convinced Love “I’d bitten off more than I could chew.” When asked to voluntarily commit herself Wini resisted but finally relented. Since being put on the newest psychotropic drugs, she’s thrived in a group home setting. “She’s very happy there. She’s very able to be regal and queenly and above it all,” Love said.

The specter of mental illness is something “I often think about,” Love said. Referring to her and her sister Lisa, she added, “We’re both prone to depression and despair and those kinds of things. I don’t know whether those things are learned or genetic. But, you know, I find my responses to things sometimes very much mirror my mother’s. I just have more coping strategies than my mother ever did.” Lisa is also doing fine, having just been accepted into an RN program.

 

 

Wini “doesn’t know of” her daughter’s book. “She’s in this isolated community there and I don’t want her to know of it,” Love said. “I just think it would hurt her because she’s never admitted to having any mental illness at all.”

What Love’s father would have made of her book is a mystery to her, except she notes, “He didn’t really do guilt, so I don’t think he would have felt guilty.”

For a long time she harbored hard feelings toward him, dismayed by the blase way in which he held her. She’s since come to terms with it all. “You know, he did what he could. He did what he was capable of,” she said. She’s even come to the point where, she said, “I’m grateful for the independence and autonomy his absence fostered in me. In the small amount of time I spent with him in my life, I never really heard him complain about his own deprivation. He never bemoaned his own fate. You just do. You realize your life is what you do with it.”

She did not attend his funeral. He died in 2004 after a long illness. His wife Betty is also deceased. Love maintains an awkward relationship with her half-brothers Norman and Richie and her half-sister Portia. She’s never met another half-brother, Preston Love, Jr., who’s recently returned to Omaha.

“I talked to him when he was in the hospital and kind of made my last peace with him and told him I loved him,” she said. “You know, I did not have that really big a connection to him in life other than he was my father and…I just thought it would be an odd thing to have people coming up to me offering me their condolences. I was one of his children biologically, but not really in day to day life.”

She regrets not having got to know him better but feels he’s a part of her, from the way she looks to the way she holds court on stage. “It’s funny because now that I make my living at music I see so many similarities in my performance to his, as far as being happy and talking to people and feeling very fortunate to be able to do all this. He would play some of the most beautiful ballads and play them with such soul but still this underlying playfulness, and I’m very much like that, too.”

Again, not unlike her dad, she’s apt to say politically incorrect things. While he rarely did on stage, she makes a habit of it, enjoying, as she describes it, a “definite free-association, stream-of-consciousness kind of thing going on there.” She proudly proclaims her Green Party sympathy and anti-Republican antipathy, using the stage as a kind of platform for her beliefs. Airing her political views has cost her work, she said. “Sometimes I wish I could suck the words back up into my head.” Still, she added, “it’s kind of a game to see how many ways you can screw The Man. It makes life more interesting and more fun.”

All of her CDs can be found at www.LauraLove.net.

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Categories: African-American Culture, Authors/Literature, Family, Laura Love, Music, Omaha, Preston Love, Race, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , ,