My own horn

Pardon me if I sound breathless. One of my writing heroes forever and ever is
Nat Hentoff. An editor at Downbeat in the late 1950s and for many, many years a
columnist for the Village Voice, he wrote many volumes on jazz, music in general
and on diverse subjects such as religion and First Amendment rights.

Yesterday, I found out via a Google search that he quoted me in his 2004 book
"American Music is." It's just a few words, but it's incredible to me that Nat
Hentoff read something I wrote and that it stuck with him enough to have it be
the keystone for a point he made in one of his books. I always
figure I just churn it out and hope that somebody will notice. Well, I guess
somebody really did.

The quote comes from my article on Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup in the long
out-of-print "MusicHound Blues: The Essential Album Guide"(Visible Ink Press,
1998).

To see Hentoff's big quote, click here.

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

Buckley paid price for rare gem

Lately I've been thinking about (and listening to) Tim Buckley's "Starsailor."

After 39 years, it still seems as fresh and contemporary as the day I excitedly ripped off the shrink wrap and laid the vinyl LP on my turntable to ride the stellar sound waves.

It's a short album, barely 45 minutes, but its scope belies its brevity.

Released in 1970 on Frank Zappa and Herb Cohen's Straight Records label, this was the record where Buckley went for broke -- and pretty much ended up out of the record business for a couple of years.

Buckley had matinee-idol looks and a choir-boy tenor. Because he played an acoustic 12-string guitar, he was lumped into the folk-rock category. However, his music was never as simple musically as the term "folk-rock" -- with its three- and four-chord progressions -- implies. Exotic sounds, harmonically challenging accompaniments and Buckley's prodigious multi-octave range were there from the start, but for the record business what mattered was a singer-songwriter who looked good and had a sweet voice.

On "Starsailor," his sixth album, Buckley reached the outer limits of his evolving fusion of folk, rock, jazz, Latin, world, avant-garde and electronic music. The title track featured Buckley singing a string of impressionistic lyrics, but through recording-studio technology, his voice became its own accompaniment and created a soundscape that did indeed seem to sail the stars.

Needless to say, the sounds and time signatures that were exotic to Western ears in 1970 (today, the widespread availability of music from distant shores has shown how commonplace such "complicated" rhythms are in other parts of the globe) made "Starsailor" a commercial loser.

Buckley was the producer of this album, which meant that he had full control of the artistic presentation and choice of material. For that, according to Lee Underwood, who played guitar with Buckley for many years, the record label would not release another album till Buckley ceded artistic control.

That's all well and good, but copies of "Starsailor" are still sought out by a growing number of aficionados as we approach the album's 40th anniversary in 2010.

Its impact has outlasted the Straight label, which pretty much closed for business by 1973. The label did resurface in the late 1980s, when through a licensing deal with Enigma Records, many Straight releases were reissued on CD.

By then, Buckley was long dead (gone tragically in 1975 of a drug overdose), but the label that punished him for "Starsailor's" lack of commercial success did not leave "Starsailor" in the vault. Perhaps Herb Cohen (Zappa was no longer involved after they parted ways acrimoniously in 1976) thought CD sales would help recoup any lingering losses from the original project, but more than likely those losses had long been written off and proceeds from the reissue would be a little bit of gravy.

However, Buckley did get a measure of respect from Enigma in the CD reissue. Not only did it include printed lyrics and production notes that weren't part of the original vinyl release, the cardboard outer packaging (which was used in those days to prevent CD theft from stores) lavished praise on him:

"If you have a five-and-a-half octave vocal range, it's a shame to limit it to your average everyday pop. And this record is a living testament to the fact that Tim Buckley, at least, was smart enough to recognize that simple fact. But he wasn't able to act upon it without paying a price. ... Conundrum or no, Buckley bravely pushed on into the largely uncharted territories where he found himself more in the company of the likes of John Cage, Cathy Berberian and Rahsaan Roland Kirk than his pop contemporaries. The album that exhibited his stunning musical growth (and which Buckley regarded as his magnum opus) was 'Starsailor.' "

In short, no guts, no glory. Buckley risked a great deal to put out his magnum opus, but if he hadn't taken the risk, he never would have painted his masterpiece.

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

PS: Enigma was acquired by Capitol Records soon after the Straight reissues and disappeared as a separate label in the very early 1990s.

PPS: Buckley was the last performer seen on the original run of "The Monkees" in 1968. He sang "Song to the Siren," a slightly revamped version of which appeared on "Starsailor" two years later. Below is the one from 1968, with the voice of Micky Dolenz introducing him.

Pragmatism, who wins?

Like Bob Dylan's description of "John Wesley Harding," President Obama is never known to make a foolish move. Of course, if you're a critic of Obama, you'll be howling about that statement because you think every move he makes is foolish, but I don't want to talk about the differing views on his strategy, goals or results. Here I'm using "foolish" to mean "rash."

It seems to me that every move this president makes -- whether I agree or disagree with it -- has been "well thought out" or possibly even "carefully planned." But this careful consideration is damping down the boldness of hope that supporters saw in him during the campaign. (Governing is different from campaigning, but that's a truism I think the president probably can't afford to heed.)

Obama didn't start campaigning on "it's the economy, stupid," as Bill Clinton did in the 1992 campaign. Obama began making noises about running for president as an opponent of the war in Iraq -- which to some degree influenced the way the economy went, but that's a story for another time. However, he had to change his tune along the campaign trail because the spectacular collapse of the American economy ultimately was the only issue that mattered at the end of 2008.

From that point on, Obama has been greatly compromised. To counter accusations that he was simply "too green" (and I don't mean "environmentalist") to handle the presidency, he has courted -- particularly on his economic team -- people who have credentials. As the Washington Post pointed out in a September 2008 article, Timothy Geithner was a partner with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in engineering the Bush administration's response to the collapse of the financial industry. With Geithner now subbing for Paulson in the Obama administration, we still have two-thirds of that power trio playing the same tune, when it comes to bailing out the economy. (There's a conspiracy debate on whether Goldman Sachs, from whose loins Paulson sprung, is the puppeteer behind every bubble and bust of recent memory. See Matt Taibbi's article "The Great American Bubble Machine," from the July 9 issue of Rolling Stone and Matthew Malone's article in Conde Nast Portfolio.)

You could almost hear the president's pragmatic, political, community-organizing wheels turning. Let's see, the economic crisis opens doorways to revisiting a host of ills with price tags on them: the cost of defense, the cost of health care, the security costs of dependence on international oil markets to supply energy to fuel the economy, the costs of global warming, etc.

His argument? Now is the time to address these issues with new thinking instead of politics as usual, to clear away programs from the past that no longer work, and to make way for programs that create a more secure and prosperous future.

For instance, there's stimulus money to help alternative energy projects, which the administration hopes will create tons of jobs domestically in the near and long terms. It's a very pragmatic response that makes sense within the terms of its own argument, but the devil (and all the arguments) are with the details of what will be favored and funded.

Similarly pragmatic is the administration's global warming response. Rather than tax companies to limit carbon emissions -- because "tax" is such an unpalatable word -- the White House preferred to push "cap and trade." Cap and trade offers a "free market" solution, with all the potential for graft, corruption, market manipulation, influence peddling and economic roller-coaster rides fueled by speculative markets. A carbon tax's effect on the economy and on carbon emissions would be more clearly measurable and controllable, but it's pragmatically (politically) unpalatable. (Look at these analyses from very different POVs by Robert J. Samuelson, a Washington Post columnist, and Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist.) Will cap and trade with all its potential pitfalls produce the desired results? Maybe, but cap and trade looks more like the administration trying to have it both ways -- to look tough on the environment while giving opponents great power to shape the solution. The need for solutions is urgent, but all that they're able to push through because of the slow-grinding gears of politics is Band-Aids.

I think the health insurance debate is the biggest sign yet that the administration is eventually going to rue its pragmatism as it tries to get something, anything done. President Obama wants to create a "public option" of health insurance that would compete with the private sector. Some of the critics, economic conservatives who routinely argue that the government is fundamentally incapable of being well-run, suddenly argue that the private sector would be unable to compete with the badly run government when it comes to providing health insurance. What does that say about how well-run the current free-market health-insurance system is?

Those who argue that administrative costs that drive up the price of health insurance would be drastically reduced in a single payer system -- a system that conservatives and libertarians (they're not the same thing although their thinking may at times align) tend to decry as "socialist" -- are disappointed in Obama, seeing the public option as a timid attempt to mollify free market capitalists. (See what Obama's former doctor has to say about the public option in this article from Forbes.)

Blue Dog Democrats, fatigued with the rising costs of government that have their constituents rightly worried, have been notable opponents in forestalling action on health insurance.

So compromise and pragmatism are leading to inaction and inertia. Remember when the economic firestorm began in earnest in the fourth quarter of 2008? A vast array of free market capitalists (Bernanke and Paulson come to mind as two, Geithner has been a public-sector guy his whole career) suddenly became believers in Keynesian economics (I know the Libertarian Party didn't; they have a strong faith), which essentially says that when economic chaos erupts, the government needs to take action to restore order. (Actually, it would be a more correct summary -- but less "guy I'd like to have a beer with" talk -- to say that Keynesian economics suggest that the government needs to manage markets to keep free market entropy from becoming macroeconomic chaos. Free market capitalists tend to believe that the markets are self-correcting and that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet every now and then, so we're better off with the occasional chaos, no matter how deep the collapse, than with having the government regulate the economy.)

Every action, including maintaining the status quo, has its downside, but what's the upside of the status quo? Everybody complains about health insurance, but nobody does anything about it.

That may be the most foolish move of all.

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

Two kings

The Michael Jackson circus continues, and I'm jumping belatedly into the ring. It's sad to see a talented person die, especially when he peaked so early and suffered such a long decline.

Sure, Jackson was a pop star from an early age, and one of the few to become more popular in his adulthood than in his youth. He didn't suffer Frankie Lymon's fate.

However, there's no question that his best work was in the early 1980s with the mega-selling albums "Off the Wall" and "Thriller." They were his first two albums after becoming free of Motown, and most of the rest of his career was spent trying to figure out how to top (or even match) that opening salvo's creativity and excitement, but whether he recorded with producer Quincy Jones (who in addition to "Off the Wall" and "Thriller," also produced "Bad") or with producers like Teddy Riley in an effort to update his sound -- there was always a sense that the subsequent albums were retreads of "Thriller."

And what's the reward anyway for creating the best-selling album of all time ("Thriller"), being an eye-popping dancer, and elevating the music video from a clumsy promotional item to an opus in its own right?

Life in a bubble.

To be fair, Jackson had no real childhood, working from well before he became a star at age 11. Perhaps his family could say "no" to him, but once Jackson was on his own, he was surrounded by functionaries who had to say "yes." He never could visit a supermarket or a movie like you or I could. Fans would surround and demand.

Jackson's story is a lot like his former father-in-law's -- Elvis Presley. Presley got his privacy at "Graceland," surrounding himself with his "Memphis Mafia," while Jackson's bubble was "Neverland." Did he see himself ironically as Peter Pan or did he romanticize Peter Pan's never growing up? We'll never know because no one asked what he actually thought about anything. The questions were all about life as a celebrity.

Presley was known as "The King" -- short for "The King of Rock and Roll" much to the bemusement of folks like Chuck Berry -- but Jackson claimed even bigger ground, being crowned "The King of Pop," of which rock is only a subset.

The success of both depended on the complex history of race relations in America. Elvis' initial popularity was based on his being a white man who sang like a black man. Jackson proved that a black man singing like a black man could be even bigger than The King. It was a sign of how times had changed.

Both Presley and Jackson had hits with songs that dealt directly with race: Presley with "In the Ghetto" and Jackson with "Black or White."

"Black or White" is the more interesting of the two because of Jackson's changing complexion. He claimed his skin lightened because of vitiligo, a disease in which the skin's pigment slowly disappears. Generally speaking, vitiligo creates patches of pale skin. The Mayo Clinic says, "Medical treatments for vitiligo aim to even out skin tone, either by restoring color (pigment) or by destroying the remaining color." Jackson denied that he did the latter, but it's very unlikely that vitiligo would have left him with such an even skin tone over his whole face. So if he did whiten his skin, did he really believe "it doesn't matter if you're black or white"? It may be the most interesting and personal question posed by his songs, which lyrically are as impersonal as his performance and music was passionate.

He didn't have life experience outside the bubble, and it shows in the paranoia of "Billie Jean" and "Beat It." "We are the World," which he co-wrote with Lionel Richie, when you get down to it is little more than a commercial jingle. It's anthemic, yes, but doesn't say much. The single was a sensation because of all the performers who joined to sing on it, including icons Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, and because the cause of providing relief to famine victims in Ethiopia was so compelling. It also made charity another form of American instant gratification: Buy a record and end world hunger. (By the way, the USA for Africa Foundation still exists and is still fighting poverty and hunger.)

Although Presley had various co-songwriting credits through contracts that his manager, Col. Tom Parker, foisted on songwriters through the years, Presley admitted that he could not write a song. Depending on outside songwriters helped pierce the bubble and let Presley tackle songs about a variety of scenarios that were outside his experience, like "In the Ghetto."

Presley was 42 when he died in 1977, and Jackson was just 50, which some say is the new 40.

Allegations that doctor-assisted use of prescription drugs that may not have been necessary and may have helped cause their premature deaths are similar. In both cases, the stories suggest the doctors had a murky sense of ethics or were unable to say "no" to their famous patients. (Looking at medical ethics statements issued by the American Medical Association over the years actually hints that the relationship and service offered by a physician is much more complicated than most people believe and that a physician may ethically say "yes" depending on their judgment of the situation.)

It's unclear from the historical record whether Jackson dubbed himself the King of Pop or whether it was a name imposed on him. But when he married Lisa Marie Presley, it seemed clear that he understood the iconography of American pop and that he wanted to create a dynasty, lending legitimacy to his reign as the King of Pop by marrying the King's daughter.

Jackson also named one of his children Prince Michael. If that seems odd to you, think about this, it's a combination of George Foreman naming his children after himself (Jackson's daughter is Paris Michael) and taking the name of another pop star, Prince, into the dynasty. Prince is Prince's actual first name (he was born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958, so he had just turned 51 when Jackson died).

Prince was also the only serious challenger to Michael Jackson's rhythm and blues throne at the time when Jackson was at his peak. Prince's "1999" and "Purple Rain," released during "Thriller's" long run on the pop charts were outsold by Jackson, but nonetheless, "Purple Rain" was a 10 million seller, and only a few recording artists besides Jackson have hit such a sales milestone.

Who knows how the dynasty will continue? However, much like Elvis' posthumous career, Jackson's will feature a ton of repackagings of already released material, rehearsal material for the shows he was planning to put on in London (like Elvis' posthumously released final tour film) and who knows how many rarities and unreleased recordings landing in the marketplace over the coming months and years, making Jackson, like Elvis, one of the hardest-working dead men in show business, for sure.

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

Freedom's tweets

This week we witnessed a surprising intersection of pop culture and history, with social networking tools and sites such as Twitter and Facebook becoming the principal means of getting news about the protests in Iran.

Let's face it, for most of us Twitter and Facebook represent a way to waste time or a way to promote something, whether a company, product, service or ourselves.

Now, they've become news media staffed by citizen journalists after the government in Tehran cracked down on foreign media's ability to report from within Iran.

Social networking is a pop culture phenomenon like comic books and television as much as it is a means of interpersonal communication like the telephone or e-mail. So it's getting its day in the sun as a means to get around repression, a tool for freedom.

The unrest in Iran over the charge that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the government rigged his re-election calls to mind a similar set of circumstances that occurred 20 years ago this very month: The unprecedentedly bloody suppression at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

The Communist Party government decided to shock and awe the protesters, using ammo and weapons suited to the battlefield rather than for crowd control of unarmed civilians. The army killed not just protesters, but also indiscriminately fired at ambulances and rescue personnel as well as buildings surrounding the protests.

The protests were silenced and Communist Party rule continues to this day, suppressing dissent not only by the threat of force, but also by controlling and censoring news and information outlets, including the Internet.

It's done with the complicity of Western companies - like Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft - who otherwise act like champions of information access. In return for access to the huge Chinese market (1.3 billion souls and rising), they sign a pact with the devil. They abide by China's rules that filter access to content the party doesn't want in people's hands and that call for the companies to provide information on users when the government demands it.

Take a look at this 2006 episode of Frontline. If you don't want to watch the whole show, click on Chapter 6 and wait for the performance of American information technology executives before a Senate committee. It reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) quote from Lenin or Marx that goes something like "when we hang the last capitalist, he'll sell us the rope."

So social networking may have had its day as a news outlet, but don't expect repressive regimes to keep their hands off for very long. In their efforts to control their people, they will find a means to control the flow of information in whatever form it takes and in whatever medium it flows.

The only good news is that people are endlessly innovative, and for a brief moment, something like Twitter can catch repressive rulers napping.

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

Follow me, I don't know where I'm going ...

The folks at blogger.com say that I can increase return visits to this blog by putting the Followers widget at the top of the sidebar (to the left), and so I have.

Here's what they say: "Readers often visit a blog and enjoy it but fail to return. With the followers widget you can get all readers to return and become a fan. We highly recommend that you write a post about your followers widget and encourage all readers to become a follower."

So, go ahead and click on the Follow button at the top left of the page just below the title bar. Join me in my rambles. I will do my best to make the return visits enjoyable.

"The present-day blogger refuses to decompose."

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

No. 1 with an asterisk

There are many ways to approach writing about popular music, but the one that's the most concrete is what I'd call the "sports or athletics approach."

What I mean by that is that in sports there are winners and losers, and achievements are documented precisely. The best time in a relay race or a swim competition may be a world record. There may be intangibles in the play of a Michael Jordan, for instance, but the intangibles -- his artistry, you might say -- wouldn't matter if he hadn't won consistently.

So when it comes to pop music, the sports approach documents the top-grossing tour or the best-selling album but never deals with asthetics, which probably makes sense in a culture that rises and falls on the bottom line (mostly falling of late, but that's another topic).

Interestingly, this statistical approach to pop music achievement suffers from the same flaw as sports stats do: It's hard to compare statistics across different eras. When Babe Ruth hit his record numbers of home runs, the competition was different (black players were not in the major leagues, the pitcher's mound was a different height, etc.), the schedule was different (fewer games per season) and the potential substances used by players to cheat (saliva applied to baseballs as opposed to steroids applied to players) were different from what they were in Barry Bonds' day.

When Roger Maris failed to break Ruth's record of 60 homers in 154 games, which is the length of the season in Ruth's day, his record-setting 61st homer hit in the 162nd (and final) game of the 1961 season was given what's been called an "asterisk." In other words, Ruth's record still stood as the best ever hit in the old schedule side by side with Maris' record as the best ever hit in the new schedule.

The prevailing theory about why baseball commissioner Ford Frick decided to acknowledge the different schedules and thus preserve Ruth's record is that he biased in favor of Ruth and against Maris. Even so, it's easy to see that there's some justification for saying that a record set in one era, under a specific set of conditions, is different from a record set in another.

Possibly the best example of the sports approach to pop music writing is Chart Watch, a column ably and succinctly written by Paul Grein. (He has been doing this for a long time. He launched the Chart Beat column in Billboard magazine back in 1981, left that post in 1992 and has been doing Chart Watch ever since, first, as a wire feature for newspapers and now on Yahoo's music site.) Grein always finds an angle that lets him tie together various aspects of his report on that week's top 10 best-selling albums.

In his Chart Watch for the week ending May 3,2009, he talked about the age difference between 67-year-old Bob Dylan, who was at No. 1 with his "Together Through Life" album, and 16-year-old Miley Cyrus, who was at No. 2 with her soundtrack to "Hannah Montana: The Movie." From there, Grein launched into a quick history about how Dylan set and regained the distinction of being the oldest living recording artist ever to land a No. 1 album.

It's fun to read that Dylan set the record in September 2006 when his "Modern Times" album hit No. 1 and Dylan was 65; that he lost it when Neil Diamond, then 67, hit No. 1 with "Home Before Dark" in 2008; and that Dylan regained the record in May because he was older, almost 68, when "Together Through Life" was released. Before that, you had to go back to 1964 to even find an over-60 recording artist with a No. 1 album: Louis Armstrong, who was 62 when "Hello Dolly" hit the top of the chart.

But getting a No. 1 album in 1964 is definitely not the same as getting a No. 1 in 2009.

In 1964, the chart was compiled differently. Although people assumed it was a sales chart -- providing statistics that could not be argued -- the sales reports came not from a tally of actual sales but from a mix of sources that could distort the sales reporting. The dimensions of that distortion became apparent in 1991 when Billboard began basing its charts on sales statistics gathered by Nielsen Soundscan technology.

Using universal product codes (UPCs), Soundscan tracked sales right at the cash register, which seems a fairly reasonable way to do it.

Country and rap records, previously relegated to their own respective ghettos in the charts, suddenly took many positions in the Billboard 200 chart of best-selling albums. They also took many positions in the upper reaches of the chart, that is, the Top 20 and even the Top 10, where very few of these albums had gone before. This meant that either country and rap suddenly became very popular in the week between switching from the old reporting system to Soundscan, or that there was something very wrong in the old reporting.

Nobody has suggested that Soundscan is hugely flawed, and it seems unlikely. Its biggest and most obvious drawback would be that it could not track sales in stores that didn't use UPC technology or sales of records that didn't have a UPC, but by the time the system was instituted, this would have affected a very small number of stores and records.

Pop critics and observers had serious discussions about the whole issue at the time. Could it be that the sales of adult-oriented albums like "Hello Dolly" were overreported in 1964 and that the sales of rock 'n' roll albums were underreported in the year that The Beatles broke big in the United States? Did the sales dominance of Fleetwood Mac in late 1970s reflect reality or the reporting sources' dislike of disco?

I don't know whether anyone ever did a comparison of the Billboard album charts in the pre-Soundscan era to the sales certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to see whether they correlated or were widely divergent.

The RIAA awards Gold and Platinum records. These designations are based on sales, but the RIAA doesn't use Soundscan or Billboard's old methodology to count albums sold. The RIAA tracks sales based on units shipped minus returns, statistics the RIAA gets right from its members (record labels). Certainly, the RIAA is depending on the honesty of record labels(!), for heaven's sake, to make its awards, but they would be less likely to cook the books in favor of an album that label executives liked than the people sampled in Billboard's old formula, where reporting sources in the field clearly favored certain kinds of records.

When you're a label executive, sales are sales and you don't have to like the Spice Girls -- or Bob Dylan, for that matter -- to say that their albums are selling well for your label.

Soundscan is not the only difference in the business either. To hit No. 1, "Together Through Life" racked up sales of 125,000. Compare this with the 4 million in advance orders that propelled Garth Brooks' "Ropin' the Wind" to No. 1 in 1991. Music sales have gone through the floor in recent years, so being No. 1 ain't what it used to be when the Soundscan era began.

It's very likely that "Together Through Life" sold -- and is selling -- at about the pace that most of Bob Dylan's albums have sold throughout his nearly 50-year career. He has a loyal audience of longtime fans and a spate of younger ones added through the years. Longevity is one stat that can't be argued and, in many ways, that means more than being the oldest recording artist to have a No. 1 album -- especially since you can't truly compare stats across eras.

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

When Tisdale was 'ho(t)'

College Hall of Famer and veteran NBA player Wayman Tisdale died today, May 15, 2009.

I heard about Tisdale's death as I listened to a Web-stream broadcast of WBGO, a New Jersey public radio station that plays jazz. The station had former Yankees star Bernie Williams on live. Williams, who plays jazz guitar, was talking about his new album, Moving Forward, and mentioned that one of the players on the album was Tisdale and that he had just learned that the 44-year-old had died of cancer.

Tisdale and Williams played on the album together via overdub. They were never in the studio together and had not met. Williams, who is heading out on a musical tour to promote his album, said he had been looking forward to meeting the former power forward.

I met Tisdale back in 1995. It was a broiling June day in Arizona, and I was invited to check out his band, The Fifth Quarter, which was rehearsing in his home studio in northeast Phoenix.

When one of his band members complained that it was hot, Tisdale smiled and said that it wasn't just "hot" but that it was "ho" (pronounced "ha"). The player asked Tisdale what he meant, and Tisdale said that it was so hot that it took too much effort to pronounce the "t."

Tisdale, then 30, played five-string electric bass guitar and had been signed by Motown Records' smooth-jazz subsidiary, MoJazz. He was excited about the imminent release of his first album, Power Forward.

That was only one of the dreams that had come true for him in the previous year. After years of playing in "purgatory," as he called his 1989-1994 stint with then-perennial losers the Sacramento Kings, he had signed at well below his market value with the Phoenix Suns in September 1994.

The Suns, with Charles Barkley as power forward, had battled to the sixth game of the NBA finals to cap their 1992-1993 season, and had made it to second round of the playoffs in the 1993-1994 season. The team lost that year to the Houston Rockets in a toughly fought seven-game series, in which Barkley, suffering a groin injury, was not able to deliver his clutch heroics.

What the Suns got in Tisdale was someone to spell Barkley -- who contemplated retirement after the Rockets series -- during the 1994-1995 season, so that Barkley would be fresher when crunch time came in the postseason.

What Tisdale got was to hitch his wagon to a star. Although he knew Barkley would be the full-time power forward, he also knew that the team would be playoff-bound.

So he smiled his umbrella smile through the games and went to the playoffs for the first time in 1995.

Adding Tisdale was not a magic potion for the Suns. They suffered the same fate, losing to the Houston Rockets in a tough seven-game series, which came down to a 1-point loss in Game 7.

But for Tisdale that was not a disappointment.

He told me about his days with the Sacramento Kings: "I had so much time! I used to look at the end of the schedule and say, 'Oh, April 23? That's when we'll be finished.'"

With the Suns, he wasn't sure when the season would be over till it was over.

Tisdale, born June 9, 1964, in Fort Worth, Texas, grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he picked up the bass guitar and basketball.

As a junior at Booker T. Washington High School, he led his team, the Hornets, to a 1981 state championship. As an Oklahoma Sooner, his career was similarly full of achievement -- he was a three-time All-American and became the Sooners' career leader in scoring and rebounds.

Then, he played on the gold-winning U.S. basketball team in the 1984 Olympics and went on to play 12 years in the NBA. He retired in 1997 from the NBA, as a member of the Suns. Soon after, he became the first Sooner in any sport to have his number retired. Just this April, Tisdale was named to the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

It was late, about 11 p.m., when Tisdale's band finished practicing that June evening in Phoenix. His wife Regina, cradling their 4-month-old daughter, Gabrielle, sat watching the practice. She confessed that his music schedule in the off-season was making it tougher for the family to see him than the intense NBA season schedule did, because when Tisdale was in town for home games he did not work on his music career, preferring to spend his off hours with the family.

They had three other kids, Danielle, then 11; Tiffany, then 7; and Wayman Jr., then 4.

As the practice wrapped up, there was some talk of a late-night session to tune some things up, but one player said he was bushed.

"You can't hang! You can't hang!" Tisdale taunted through his broad smile.

When he finally sat down to talk, Tisdale said, the band was "something to keep me going during the summer, instead of sitting around."

He sure wasn't sitting around. "Now, I've got a record deal, and I'm traveling just as much" as during the NBA season, he said.

Then, he paused.

"With four kids!"

Tisdale started playing music for his father's church when he was in fifth grade: "I just started picking it up. I never had a lesson. I just play by ear."

Why the bass, which he played more like a lead guitar than a traditional bass?

"I've always loved the bass. I thought the bass always carried the groove and the personality of the band. I didn't want to play the drums, I never wanted to play the guitar; I've always wanted to play bass," he said.

Tisdale wrote songs to get his own feelings out. "Instead of writing it out or writing a book about it, I was able to put it in music."

The inspirations came in spare moments, "like first thing in the morning when I wake up, I hear a tune, I go straight to my studio," he said. "When I'm in my music world, it takes me all the way away from things that are going around."

The music served him well.

After Power Forward, he released seven more albums. Four of them landed in the Top 10 of Billboard's Contemporary Jazz chart, and his 2001 album, Face to Face, went to Number 1.

His last album, Rebound, was released last year, and beyond the obvious allusion to his role as a basketball forward, it referred to his hope that he would rebound from the cancer that was discovered in 2007. (It was in his leg, which was amputated below the knee during his treatment.)

The Tulsa World reports that Tisdale started a national tour last month, after a chemotherapy treatment.

The paper also reports that he told a Tulsa crowd gathered to confer the "Legacy Award" on him in April: "In my mind, I've already beaten it."

Even though some would say he lost his battle, I think he really won because it sounds as though he never lost his umbrella smile.

We all die, but how many go out smiling?

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

Jeff Buckley: Son traced father's footsteps to life's edge

I posted this blog July 30, 1997, on Compuserve. I wanted a wider audience to see it, so I posted here. (The review at right was published Monday, Nov. 24, 1994. Click on the image to make it large enough to read. It is copyright © 1994 by The Arizona Republic.)

---

A certain yearning, ghostly quality in Chris Isaak's voice reminded me of Tim Buckley, so I asked Isaak if he was a fan. He said, "No." (So much for some of those theories "critics" espouse.)

However, Isaak offered that he'd heard Buckley's son Jeff and that he was a mean guitar player. I filed that info away mentally. Even though I was a big fan, I hadn't realized that Tim Buckley had any kids.

After Jeff Buckley made a little bit of a stir in subterranean New York, he signed a record contract in 1993. He soon put out an ep, Live at Sin-E, and followed up with his full-length album, Grace, in 1994. I was struck by how much he looked and sounded like his dad.

Jeff Buckley's voice had that yearning, ghostly quality in spades. When I interviewed him in advance of his visit to Tempe's Mill Avenue Theater in November 1994, it became clear that he was not a fan of his dad's. Why should he be? Tim abandoned Jeff's mother, Mary, before the boy was born.

His own man

Jeff wasn't exactly resentful. He said he liked his father's music, but that he liked other music much more. He covered Leonard Cohen on his album.

After interviewing Jeff Buckley, all I had were questions. Was his musical talent hard-wired into his genes, a present from his long-dead dad? Even though Jeff was not a fan of his dad's music, there was a similar exotic bent to their vocals and choice of chords. Is destiny a product more of nature than nurture?

Jeff Buckley admitted that he wasn't happy in school, that there was no job track for him, that he lived and breathed being a musician. Just like his dad! Now that he was performing and recording he said, "I'm the luckiest boy in the world."

The news of Jeff Buckley's death at age 30 on May 29 left me breathless, like a blow to the stomach. "Not again! He was so young!"

Not again? Jeff Buckley only died once, drowning in the Mississippi on the edge of Memphis. Yet it did seem like a deja vu. His dad died of a toxic combination of heroin and alcohol at age 28 in June of 1975. Jeff said he had met Tim only once, just a few weeks before the overdose.

Outrunning demons

When I talked to him, the son seemed determined to be stable; to outrun the demons that plagued his dad. Now, there are unresolved questions about why he drowned in the Mississippi. Some say he was a smack user.

I can't imagine his mother's sadness. To lose a child at all is tough, but to lose him in a way that dredges up the long-dead past must be painful beyond belief.

Jeff Buckley's career got off the ground in Greenwich Village, a place that loomed large in Tim Buckley's career development as well. Jeff's first major appearance was at a tribute to his father. He sang Tim's Once I Was, a song that asks, "Sometimes I wonder, just for a while, will you ever remember me?"

Some of us will remember them for a long time and wonder if sons are always doomed to walk in their fathers' footsteps.

Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo

Dog days of summer bite snakes

I posted this blog about the Arizona Diamondbacks on July 10, 1999, on Compuserve's personal pages. I find it interesting to read again in light of what's going on with this team a decade later.

---

When the Arizona Diamondbacks went on a tear through the National League in the first two months of the season, the question in the back of everyone's mind was, "Are they contenders or pretenders?" When they kept winning through the middle of June, the Diamondbacks seemed to have completely shed the losing skin of 1998. They looked like they were for real.

Just like that, though, the questions have resurfaced. The Diamondbacks have gone from a four-game lead in the National League West to three games behind the division-leading San Francisco Giants since mid-June.

To win the division or a wild-card seat in the postseason, the Diamondbacks have to buck nearly 40 years of expansion-era baseball history. The Los Angeles Angels, baseball's first expansion team, is the only one (so far) to have a winning record in its second year. (The Angels also set a 70-win record for a debut season.) The general rule has been that expansion teams need to suffer years of losing before breaking through. That rule has been broken in the '90s, though. The Colorado Rockies made it to the postseason in their third year, and the Florida Marlins won the World Series in their fifth season.

Despite a spending spree on free agents, last year's Diamondbacks came nowhere close to challenging the Angels' debut-year record. The off-season spending on free agents for 1999, including pitcher Randy Johnson, argues that the team is determined not to let last year's poor performance get in the way of their determination to go to the postseason this year.

Energized by the resurgent offense of Matt Williams and Jay Bell and a career year by Luis Gonzalez (all of whom are All Stars this year), the Diamondbacks, after a 0-4 start, became the hottest team in the National League through the middle of June. Then, the Braves, superhot Reds and Cardinals came to Bank One Ballpark, and the team started losing. Sports Illustrated predicted that the homestand would be a reality check for the snakes, and it was.

A phantom offense?

The blame for the sudden downturn was laid on the bullpen. Blown saves, after all, had been the main reason for the team's bad start. When the team was winning, the offense overcame a number of blown saves. The team clearly needed a better bullpen to reach the postseason. However, if the problem was just in the bullpen, pitcher Randy Johnson, the team's other All Star, would not have been shut out while pitching four strong games in a row. The Diamondbacks have racked up only seven hits in those Johnson starts. Aside from a few nights when they scored in double-digits, the offense has been in a terrible slump since the Braves series, a fact that doesn't help the bullpen or starting pitching.

To state the obvious, even though pitchers get the credit for wins and losses, the best they can do is give their teams the chance to win. To win, the offense has to score.

The Diamondbacks look as prepared as anyone else in the National League West (except for the amazingly resilient San Francisco Giants) to make it to the postseason, at least on paper. They've got the toughest pitcher in the league in Johnson, one of the leading base stealers in leadoff man Tony Womack, and one of the most potent offenses. They've also made moves to shore up the bullpen -- including a deal that brought steely-eyed closer Matt Mantei over from the Florida Marlins.

However, one of those factors -- the potent offense -- was not expected to be there as the season began. Could it be a phantom? The math is against the aging Williams. Even though he was unlikely to have as bad a year as last year, Williams can only expect his numbers to go down from his peak years. Bell, on the other hand, seems to be benefiting from batting No. 2 behind the fleet-footed Womack. Seeing more fastballs from pitchers interested in trying to keep Womack off second base, Bell has set a career record in home runs by the halfway point of this season. Can he keep up that pace, or has he returned to his considerably more mortal pace of previous years?

The evidence so far points more toward the "contender" side of the equation, but that's not a foregone conclusion. The second half should be interesting. Fans certainly have to hope that it's a coincidence that the team started losing just as the hot weather started.

Summer lasts a long time in Phoenix.

Copyright © 1999, Salvatore Caputo

I hate the Web

I used to write a print column about pop culture for a living before weblogs, aka blogs, existed.

Blogs are pretty much like my column was, except of course that I was edited by people who had my back when it came to spelling, grammar and just plain making sense.

The Web has irrevocably changed the entire culture (insert "no duh" comment here, you know you want to), not just pop culture. Presumably smaller and smaller enterprises can succeed because the Web lowers the bar to entry. This blog, for instance, is a free product. It doesn't cost me anything, except time, to put up. This free content is somehow monetized by the company that gives me the opportunity to put it up.

The big change is that whatever money is made is disconnected from the work that went into providing this content.

That wasn't the case when I did it in print. I was an employee and the monetization of content - essentially the advertising revenue - was passed on to me in the form of a salary, so I was monetizing, too.

The Web is killing print, so that model I used to work under is working for fewer and fewer people at my end of the spectrum. Stars of whatever medium will always be well-rewarded (well, maybe not the stars of poetry in the Western world), but the paying opportunities that used to exist for thousands upon thousands of good writers are rapidly diminishing because the Web is, well, worldwide and creates a downward income curve that seems counterintuitive.

As print-media outlets drastically cut the size of their staffs or fold into oblivion, the Web does not offer localized information sources that have an income model that can support anything like the staffs that had been employed at newspapers and magazines.

The Web detaches place from the business equation.

Oh sure, if you have a business that can only work by being in a brick-and-mortar location, like a restaurant or a bar, you're golden in the age of the Web, and you can actually cut your advertising costs by putting up your own Web site and incorporating the right keywords to drive search-engine users to your local establishment.

But Amazon.com is an example of just the opposite. With modern delivery systems, including real-world services like FedEx and virtual delivery via Kindle, there's no need for a brick-and-mortar location to sell from. All you need is a site that's a glorified mail-order catalog, continuously updated and with a virtually unlimited inventory accessible at a moment's notice. Whether you're searching for an obscure or a popular book, the process is fairly easy and almost the same, and you don't have to go to the store. It's right there at the end of your fingertips.

City magazines and newspapers are place-oriented, and to date they've offered the only viable opportunity to underwrite the cost of gathering news information through primarily local advertising. But now that viability is gone because advertisers - whether Mom-and-Pop businesses, big-bucks corporations or some guy who's trying to sell his old truck - are fleeing to the Web, where results are more immediate, more apparent and less costly.

So while there are plenty of entrepreneurial types who are putting up local Web sites that provide local information, none of them (at least, that I know of) is able to provide more than a few writing jobs and those at relatively low pay.

As Will Dana, managing editor of Rolling Stone, recently wrote in his "Editor's Notes" column: "Maybe Homeland Security should be helping to keep the print media alive. A few years from now, there's a good chance there won't be many newspapers left - if any. So what happens when some cyber-terrorist zaps the Internet or takes out a couple of satellites, and suddenly there's no communications infrastructure? This is not such an outlandish thought - deep in the Pentagon, there are people who do nothing but worry about these things. Aren't you going to wish someone was throwing the paper on your doorstep?"

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo