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Last week I received a copy of David Bromberg‘s new solo acoustic CD Try Me One More Time (Appleseed Recordings APR CD 1099), which contains several songs of interest to the GD audience. I’ll be featuring “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” in GD Hour #971, and I may get to “When First Unto This Country” before long. (The CD also has “Buckdancer’s Choice,” whose title alone makes it interesting!) Hearing this fine CD prompted me to dig out my other Bromberg discs. GDH971 will also include “The Holdup,” the opening cut from Bromberg’s 1974 album Wanted Dead or Alive. This album features most of the Grateful Dead on four songs: “The Holdup,” “Someone Else’s Blues,” “Danger Man,” and “The Main Street Moan.” Further inspection of the liner notes yielded a fact I either had never noticed or had forgotten: “The Holdup” was written by Bromberg and George Harrison! Also in my stash: Midnight on the Water, originally issued in 1976, featuring pedal steel guitarist Buddy Cage on several tracks, including “Dark Hollow.” A twofer CD, My Own House/You Should See the Rest of the Band, originally released in 1978 and 1979, respectively. You Should See… had a cover by Gahan Wilson, reproduced in the CD package but much too small. (Bromberg also had a B. Kliban cover, on Reckless Abandon.) Bromberg is of the same generation as the Grateful Dead, David Grisman, John Sebastian, and all those other middle-class kids who tapped into the American musical tradition and built songbooks for themselves that combined well-chosen covers and fine original songs. I just love his cover of Ian Tyson’s “Summer Wages,” on How Late’ll You Play Till?

From Yahoo news:

A former manager for the Grateful Dead has been sentenced to five years in federal prison for tax evasion, prosecutors said.

Ronald Leon Rakow, 69, was ordered to begin his prison term in June for evading payment of $2.2 million in taxes owed to the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. attorney’s office said Tuesday.
….

Rakow had asked for a lighter sentence, but U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Morrow rejected his request. She said he chose to break the law to support his “comfortable lifestyle.”

Here’s a very interesting and comprehensive article about Rakow through the window of a Scientology investigation:

One of the most interesting (and sleazy) names we’ve come across in investigating the Reed Slatkin case has been Ron Rakow.

According to trusted sources, Ron Rakow flew to Switzerland in 2001, allegedly at the behest of his “good friend” and fellow Scientologist Reed Slatkin, in order to investigate “irregularities” in Slatkin’s overseas accounts. The catch? According to documents filed so far, there is some question as to whether these “Swiss accounts” existed in the first place.

As part of a last-ditch effort to fend off increasingly suspicious investors, Slatkin forged documents from a major Swiss bank to back up his story that the funds were frozen pending an investigation into possible money laundering. When investigators attempted to confirm the existence of the accounts, they came up empty handed and discovered that the account numbers themselves, as given by Slatkin, corresponded to no known Swiss accounts under his, or any other name.

…

Publicly, Ron Rakow seems to be best known for his days with the Grateful Dead, although there are differing opinions on how good a job he did while acting as the band’s manager – or “manager”, as he is derisively referred in this footnote to an article that appeared in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment Law & Practice (How the Grateful Dead Turned Alternative Business and Legal Strategies Into A Great American Success Story By Brian C. Drobnik, Spring 2000 Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 242-266, footnote #135):

“Under their contract with Warner Brothers, they had split revenue ten ways equally among each band member, their two roadies and their two managers. The inception of Grateful Dead Records created a straightforward arrangement between the band and Grateful Dead Records “manager” Ron Rakow (whom they had hired to direct the project). There was also a separate agreement between Rakow and Garcia for Round Records projects. This, of course, introduced jealously to utopia. However, Garcia was doing virtually all of the songwriting and arranging, with others receiving royalty cuts as “arrangers.” The understanding was that Grateful Dead songs really were arranged on stage, over the course of dozens of live performances. In this sense, including a drummer as an arranger may have been more than simply a political gesture, though Scully argues otherwise.” 

There’s a lot more on that page.

The story of Joshua Bell in the DC Metro (which I mentioned on Sunday) has been making the rounds. The URL has been passed around among musicians from coast to coast, and talked about on some mailing lists I’m on, and everyone I’ve gotten it from has given it a pretty warm response.

In some other venues, not so much.

Kevin Drum, in the Washington Monthly:

The tone of the story is a sort of artificially mournful tsk-tsking over our inability to recognize beauty in the world around us, take time out to smell the roses, etc. etc.

I’m sorry, but this is just idiotic…. I’d be surprised if as many as one out of a hundred can tell a good violinist from a great one even in good conditions. And despite the claim that the acoustics of the L’Enfant Plaza station were “surprisingly kind,” I’m sure they were nothing of the sort.

Plus, of course, IT WAS A METRO STATION. People needed to get to work on time so their bosses wouldn’t yell at them. Weingarten mentions this, with appropriately high-toned references to Kant and Hume, but somehow seems to think that, in the end, this really shouldn’t matter much. There should have been throngs of culture lovers surrounding Bell anyway. It’s as if he normally lives on Mars and dropped by Earth for a few minutes to do some research for a sixth-grade anthropology project.

I’ve just spent 40 minutes reading the comments on that page, and most of them are even more hostile than that. Over at Salon, David Marchese went off on the piece, too:

The apathy came as a surprise to Weingarten, whose article evinces the kind of elitist snobbery that’s exactly what classical music doesn’t need. From the description of the crowd at one of Washington’s most “plebian” subway stations (“ghosts” with “ID tags slapping at their bellies”) to Bell’s shock at the fact “that people were actually, ah … ignoring me” to the title’s insulting swine allusion, the reader is treated to highbrow condescension of the highest order.

I don’t get it. The article seemed entirely good-natured to me. I don’t know anything about the violinist, Joshua Bell, nor about the writer, Gene Weingarten. But both men seemed to regard this as an opportunity to have some fun and maybe learn something. I learned a lot from the piece – not least of which is that there’s a solo violin composition I need to get hold of – and I did not come away with the impression that either the writer or the musician was being snooty or condescending.

Weingarten did a chat on the Post’s web site on Monday:

In slightly different ways, several people are asking the same question: Was this story intended to be an indictment of the soul of the federal bureaucrat? Was I suggesting that these people, by their nature, are less sophisticated, less open to beauty, less culturally mature, less aware of their surroundings, than the average person?

The simple answer is, no. It was not my intent, nor could anyone reasonably draw that inference from the story. We didn’t have a control group; we had only one shot at the experiment, and you just can’t fairly generalize one way or another. I really believe this.

Weingarten also offered this:

Before we start with questions, I want to give you this link sent by Helene Jorgensen. Nearly 20 years ago, Bruce Springsteen did a similar thing in Copenhagen, where he joined a street musician to perform “The River.” Not many people noticed him, either.

And:

[responding to a questioner] Why was the premise condescending? I can tell you honestly that the premise was nothing more than a zero-based experiment — we had no idea how it would turn out. My suspicion was that he’d be largely ignored (though not THIS largely ignored) but other editors felt just the opposite.

I’d like to know if anyone else found the tone of this story condescending. I really tried to avoid that. Frankly, I was glad that the Kantian scholar said the results implied nothing about the sophistication of the passersby. It would have been awkward if I’d been forced to conclude that these people were Philistines, because, deep down, I didn’t feel as though that was the case.

And:

Bell is a nice guy who can relax and have fun, and he was extraordinarily gracious to me. I don’t think this experienced humbled him, particularly, though he saw the humor in it. He knows it was not a referendum oh his talent.

A friend in The WELL pointed to a story in the Washington Post by Gene Weingarten: Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.

The setup: World-famous violinist Joshua Bell set up like any other busker in Washington’s L’Enfant Plaza metro station and played his Stradivarius for 43 minutes during the morning rush hour, while Weingarten observed. A video camera captured the whole event; Weingarten contacted various eyewitnesses afterwards, revealed the experiment, and published this wonderful article.

I loved it. I’m a professional musician (I call my stuff “psychedelic country-folk”), and although I usually work in more formal and satisfying performance spaces, one of my favorite gigs is at the Farmers’ Market in my neighborhood. And one of my favorite things about that gig is that is a zero-pressure affair; I can leave my ego at home. No one is there to hear me perform, so I can do whatever I want. I have been exposed to thousands of people who wouldn’t have heard me otherwise, sold quite a few CDs, collected modest but serviceable sums in the tip bucket (and email addresses for my announcement list), and provided an awesome new experience for uncounted toddlers who were seeing a live musician for the first time in their lives. So this story had a particular attraction for me.

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

…

A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston’s stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.

…

Bell’s been accepting over-the-top accolades since puberty: Interview magazine once said his playing “does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.”

Bell always performs on the same instrument, and he ruled out using another for this gig. Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master’s “golden period,” toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to perfection.

Bell participated in exactly the right spirit:

“At a music hall, I’ll get upset if someone coughs or if someone’s cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.” This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Weingarten did his homework for this piece. He talked about some of the music Bell played, most notably this one:

… “Chaconne” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It’s a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won’t be cheating with some half-assed version.”

Bell didn’t say it, but Bach’s “Chaconne” is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It’s exhaustingly long — 14 minutes — and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.

Weingarten and Bell reviewed the tape afterwards. There was much to learn from this experiment, and the writer shares some observations.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.
…
Bell wonders whether their inattention may be deliberate: If you don’t take visible note of the musician, you don’t have to feel guilty about not forking over money; you’re not complicit in a rip-off.
…
For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.
…
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?

This piece works the way John McPhee’s pieces in The New Yorker do: he tells a fascinating story and sheds light on a number of interesting things along the way.
There are a few video clips along with the story. It’s a great read.