The cumulative effect of the tracks reminds you of an old newspaper blown down an alley in the French Quarter, revealing first one headline then another, documenting a world that is at best uncaring, at worst absolutely malevolent. Bad things happen within these pages, grainy black-and-white images flicker past and are gone. Children starve or freeze or are murdered, lovers betray and kill each other or remain faithful and die anyway, trains seem always to crash instead of reaching their destinations, assassinated presidents are in coffins taking their rest, the Titanic hits the iceberg (Wasn’t it sad when that great ship went down? the singer asks sardonically). When farms fail in three successive songs, Smith seems to be making some gleeful point.
You marvel about the ability to laugh in death’s face, to make jokes about starvation and joblessness and sadistic bosses and the chain gang, yet time and again you hear in these voices and words a dark stoicism. Perhaps only Uncle Dave Macon could have written a song about hard times and named it Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train. Maybe that’s a Southern trait; more likely it’s a just human one.
The most dissonant note is struck by the song Smith chose to place next to last, Ken Maynard’s rendering of The Lone Star Trail, a stilted and clumsy pastoral that reminds you of the sound track to a bad 1940s Western, with Maynard singing nasally of rolling prairies and lowing cattle and smiling ranch foremen and the sweetest girl in the world. Placed anywhere else it could be an almost pleasant reverie, but taken in the context of what has gone before all those murders and dislocations and gone lovers and prison sentences, all underpinned with those sliding blues guitars it’s as out of place as a court jester at a funeral, and the ear is unprepared for such a sentimental vision of life. Perhaps Smith saw it as a joke; more likely he meant it to serve as a sort of pause, a screen saver, a time to consider the tale you have been told about a lost America, a kind of bookmark to set all this apart from the final song.
This is Henry Thomas’s “Fishing Blues”, set to panpipes that sound older than America, older than anything. The sound is liberating, freewheeling, with an undercurrent of mystery not communicated by the words. On the surface it’s just a song about getting a line and bait and a pole and going down to the fishing hole and catching a catfish, bringing it home, and frying it up. Baits and lines and poles normally have a sexual symbolism in blues; the fish is a sometime signifier for female sexuality. But there’s nothing overt in the song, no innuendo in Thomas’s voice, which makes the song stranger still. You notice not what is present but what is absent, Smith was well aware that the fish also represented spirituality, and it acquires this meaning only in the context that Smith has placed it in.
After repeated listenings you realize that Smith’s genius was not only in selection but in placement, and that he had made a collage or crazy quilt of music in which everything matters, an impressionistic painting where every brushstroke counts.
In 1988 Smith became Shaman-in-Residence at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and longtime friend Rani Singh began the enormous task of gathering together the Harry Smith Archives, assembling his legacy, and sifting through the complicated and unlikely life Smith had led. A grant from the Grateful Dead’s Rex Foundation allowed Smith to live the last few years of his life in a productive and, for Smith, relatively stable manner.
After the Anthology was reissued on CD, Smith received a Grammy in 1991 for lifetime achievement. Smith would die later that year, but ascending the steps to the stage in a tuxedo must have seemed to him a transcendent moment.
I’m glad to say that my dreams came true, he told the audience. I lived to see the world changed through music.
He was eulogized at his memorial by the likes of Dave Van Ronk and Ed Sanders of the Fugs, but the memorial that will always be around is the Anthology itself. Smith had set out to document the past, but in the end it seems not a replica but the living past itself.
YOU WOULDN’T STEAL THIS RECORD, Greil Marcus wrote famously in a review, establishing once and for all the criteria by which greatness is judged. A great record is one you’d steal if you couldn’t get it any other way.
People steal David Johansen and the Harry Smiths. In less than a year I’ve lost eight or ten copies. I’ll take the jewel box down from the shelf, and it’s empty. It was there a week ago. I’ll loan a copy to a friend, and another friend will take it from him. Either the disc contains some marvelous new encoding that causes it to vanish after an arbitrary number of plays, or once they hear it, people just have to possess this record.
It was at the University of Minnesota that I first heard about the Johansen record. A professor of American literature was talking about Harry Smith and his folk anthology. You’ve got to hear this album by David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, the professor said.
This seemed something of a non sequitur. I thought of the New York Dolls. I thought of Buster Poindexter. I don’t think so, I said.
But he wouldn’t have it. He was a convert, a true believer. He was washed in the blood. He drove us across Minneapolis to a record shop called the Electric Foetus.
Got that new David Johansen? he asked a clerk.
Right over there, the clerk said, pointing, as if an unknown record on an unknown label was as common as locating a loaf of bread in a convenience store. The professor paid for the record and handed it to me, a faintly superior expression on his face as if he knew something I didn’t.
He did.
From the first notes of the first song it was apparent this wasn’t a mere tribute album. I recalled Elvis Presley being quoted as saying: I don’t sound like nobody. There was an almost eerie connection to Rabbit Brown, whose song “James Alley Blues” is covered, but Johansen didn’t sound like nobody either.
They sit regarding you from a black-and-white photo on the cover of their first album, The New York Dolls, with expressions that vary from simpers to cold stares. The five young men seated on the sofa are dressed in what looks like thrift-shop hooker garb, and they are pancaked and rouged and lipsticked, the square root of decadence. David Johansen is the one in the middle: huge, dark bouffant and platform shoes, mouth a painted Cupid’s bow.
Over all, the photograph is a sneer, an upraised middle finger that says, I don’t give a goddamn what you think. They’re going the Stones one better, not androgynous like Bowie or effeminate like Elton John but into some whole new territory. All in all they look just the way David Johansen says he wanted them to look: sixteen and bored shitless.
This is all geared to shock, or at least it was in 1973, when the album was released. The Dolls need to be taken in the context of 1973: the Eagles are flying over Hotel California, Bruce Springsteen was gearing himself up to be the future of rock n’ roll, his Time and Newsweek covers already on the horizon. The Dolls even shocked New York a little, very briefly. New York is notoriously hard to shock.
The music on the album is the aural equivalent of the cover, defiant and clarifying, an inside joke that says, There’s something happening here, and we don’t care if you know what it is or not. Flailing guitars and drums and an out-of-step bass kick in at ninety miles an hour and then accelerate in little two-minute concertos that sound like the early Stones bereft of all restraints and social concerns and literary pretensions. They sound like elevated trains and car collisions in which folks perish the neon cacophony of New York at night, the world ending not with a whimper but in a bedlam of rending crashes.