Everyone is talking about how the music business is falling apart... and maybe the business of it is. But in this whiplash fast culture of more shiny glitzy whew, some things remain unchanging. Like the way a great song played in a moment, especially a packed bar or to a dancefloor roiling with teenagers, is one of the greatest human connections going.
Maybe it's not about columns of numbers and exponential growth curves, but it's real. It hits you in a place beyond words... and with temperatures close to zero on two straight nights in Cleveland, Ohio -- a city struggling to maintain its place in the American Dream -- the faithful came out. For a band of men who played too many great songs with fervor and aplomb, for 18 high school kids on fire with the possibilities and for Kristine Jackson, a young woman who let's her guitar and vocal tone do the talking.
It wasn't about being "big time," it was about how the music makes you feel.
That ain't marketing, y'all, that's the real shit rocking through your veins!
“You Can Always Tell A Dreamer…”
Midlife Chryslers, High School Rock-Offs + A Girl On The Verge
Kristine Jackson sits onstage, a mahogany wash of wavy hair spilling over her shoulders, her voice lower than old bourbon, her smile the luminescence of the sun breaking through a three day cloud bank. She’s in some ways unexceptional to look at – and then she takes her fingers to the guitar sitting on her lap and finds her underneath swell into the emotional core of a song, and you can’t look away.
At 28, Jackson is hitting her creative prime. A writer, a singer, a player – trumpet as well as guitar, she has an easy rapport with her weapons and she’s unafraid to blur the lines between the blues, ripples of country and rock at its most essential.
The Parkview – “the Joint at the end of W. 58th Street, three blocks North of Detoit’ – defines a neighborhood bar. Low ceilings, cheap beer, good food and patrons who work hard, bring that commitment to the places they spend their off time – and being Cleveland, Ohio have a strong sense about the real when it comes to their music.
On a snowy Friday night, they’re out en masse for a fundraiser to send Kristine Jackson and her comrade Austin Walking Cane to Memphis for the International Blues Challenge. It’s head-cutting of a slightly higher order on Beale Street where the Memphis blues is the highest sacrament, disparate cultures running together on the banks of the Mississippi.
This night, though, Jackson doesn’t come to kill, rather she’s intent on rattling the bones of Leadbelly and Howlin’ Wolf, Louis Armstrong, even the lives that cross her own and inspire her to write. This is music made for its own sake… for the players and the listeners to bask in…
In a place where people come to be, artifice doesn’t work. Indeed, posing is an Express Ticket to getting bum-rushed. These folks take their music like their liquor: neat, straight, no chaser.
It’s honest place the daughter of a boogie woogie piano player sings from. Earthy. Unadorned. But redolent of the pain and conflict, the shoring up as it all caves in. Kristine Jackson isn’t polished to perfection; she’s perfect just the way she is. Maybe more perfect in her humanity – because the falter in that dusky alto offers a truth beyond technique. And the ParkView is the kind of bar where artifice won’t hold, and the brutality of how it is, along with the exultance and release in great songs played well is the reason to come out in single digit temperatures after a long week of toil.
She’s sat in with Robert Lockwood. Been embraced by Buddy Miles’ musical director. But mostly, she chases her own muse with a voice that is comfort and erotic tension, sweat and exhaustion and the search for higher ground. She may play the blues, but – like Bonnie Raitt – she understands how to ignite them into a celebration of how good it is to be alive. Embracing the Beatles, exploring an obscure jewel like “St James Infirmary” or a well-trod classic like “Midnight Special,” you know that musical salvation is enough to get you through whatever it might be – because a 20-something girl who’s as at home on a electric guitar as an acoustic, who can sing unerringly -- yet seemingly without thinking -- of the trickiest complications.
Kristine Jackson isn’t pushing, isn’t worrying about the marketing plan. She’s writing her songs, honing her craft, trusting the moment will hold and the talent will take her where she needs to be. It’s songs for their own sake, notes bent to bleed every last atom of emotion from them.
It’s a potent reminder of how powerful the unfiltered, non-machined/plastic-injection-molded-pop can be. Local Plain Dealer columnist Michael Heaton can be found sitting in the back nodding his acknowledgement of the turpentine’n’truth reality she reveals. He’s old school Cleveland; he is a voice that is everything that lies in the heart of this community.
So too is Kevin Richards, the Executive Director of the Roots of American Music who brings indigenous American musical forms into schools to expand understanding of history, culture and evolution. A veteran of the local bands, a seasoned guitar teacher and a man committed to making a difference, he sees the reality of what Jackson witnesses with her slight self, her fiery guitar-playing and that voice that doesn’t shrink or shirk and never gives up its angel of the river bank tone.
Just as compelling an argument is Jim Henke, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame VP of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs. An impressive title, one that implies intellectual hoist and the seriousness that comes with an archival mission, Henke spent 15 years at Rolling Stone, many of them as Music Editor and wrote pivotal pieces on U2, Bruce Springsteen, the Clash, Eric Clapton and Raitt – as well as authoring books about Jim Morrison, John Lennon and Bob Marley.
This is a man for whom the music animates his acute intellectualism. Kristine Jackson possesses him in the way tent show revivalists pull the spirit through their faithful. It’s not show business tricks, but throwing the switch on what music brings – and Henke isn’t afraid to surrender to how good it is.
For Jackson, who the Rock Hall is sponsoring on her quest to Memphis, this is the reason for doing it, the why and the essence of what can be realized in a perfect moment nobody else might see.
The next night at the Northside in Akron, Ohio, another local bar with large vibe next to a genuine red’n’white checked tablecloth old school Italian restaurant, the Midlife Chryslers are throwing down Wilson Pickett, Frankie Miller, the Stones and John Hiatt songs with a smile-inducing fervor. For Michael Stanley, the local record-setter at Blossom Music Center, it’s his covers gig with no visibility and a battle cry of “No rehearsals, no excuses…” that lets him blow out the carbons.
And it, like Jackson’s no-frills set, is elation and a Telecaster through the right kind of amp.
The idea that souls can be set free in small places without enough ventilation, cast onto hard waves of Sly Stone, the Temptations, “Red House” and the Beatles, isn’t crazy; it is a rite of not just celebration, but the release of everything you’ve endured all week. To be light, to be wild, to be free – even just for a few hours – and remember your shiniest, most heroic self can be realized with a few cold beers, a cluster of friends or a second date that is both tentative and intense and a band that is there to play, to ride the same shafts of sound you’ve come to hear.
For many of the patrons both nights, it is the music that emancipates them from the worry, the shackles, the have to. It is the same for the musicians – the Chryslers have not one, but two legendary drummers in the house: the Raspberries Jim Bonfanti and Joe Vitale, known for his work with Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joe Walsh and Dan Fogelberg, who both sit in with a palpable zeal. These are men who’ve done it all, but there’s no place they’d rather be on a Saturday night than a crowded room in a town that’s seen better days.
That is the reason to believe, the power of music. That is why the players do it… why the people come. It is why music remains critical to who people are, and yet, that is the first thing lost on the people who chase music for fame and money.
In a world where it costs money to record, to tour, to have the time and space to create, those needs got co-opted by people losing sight of the reasons people respond. Caught up in quantifiables, they lose track of the fact that what makes music so necessary are the things you can’t touch…
If the record business is in trouble, it’s from “machining hits” and forgetting profits can happen on smaller numbers – but those numbers need to be gleaned from true connections, honest realities, emotions people can’t find the words for.
We’ve become a quick hit, fast buzz place. People move on. Kids are fickle.
But really, what are they given to believe in? Beyond – maybe – a notion that this song represents some milestone or memory of theirs that’s important. But what about reminding people that the songs are the grouting that holds the tiles of their lives together? Getting people to view these nights as reasons to stay engaged in how they live, what they dream, how they get happy or through it?
Because you don’t need mondo-platinum to matter. Michael Stanley never had a gold record… people beyond Northeastern\ Ohio have no idea about the dignity and valor culled from real places had in his songs… But he didn’t forget. He keeps strapping it on, taking little bandstands and making solo records that are stunning core samples of the state of the average American wondering what the hell happeined.
Just as importantly, those records rock.
Like Kristine Jackson, with her slow burning blues, people still rock. You watch that girl and it’s seeing a Roman candle in slow motion – letting off all that heat and sparkling night-sky-scraping blazing glory. Jackson knows the potency is in the songs, where she puts them, how she sings them, the way she bleeds through melody and confession of euphoria and devastation.
And you can say seeing music’s for the old. Another generation. Certainly the people in those bars ran the gamut from 20s through their 60s, screaming at the solos and calling for more beer over their shoulder. They come to believe; they come to let go. Mostly, they come alive.
You can write it off as one more thing that’s dying. Another generation’s deal.
Except on the afternoon between the Jackson and the Chryslers, there at the House of Blues, 18 bands came together for the 13th Annual Cleveland Rock-Off. Eighteen bands culled from 70. Bands that played speed metal and power punk, ska and hip-hop-infused hard stuff, rock and indie pop.
What set these bands apart is important: they were all in high school. The youngest an 8-year old bass player who kicked ass. They were judged on musicianship, originality and presentation. They sang mostly originals – and these kids all wrote pretty strong songs.
Just as important as the talent on the stage were the bodies in the HoB. Not quite capacity, but beyond full, the room packed with young people coming out to see their friends, to see what’s going on, to thrash and mosh, but also to dance, to flirt, to listen. They, too, come alive on that dance floor… in the balconies… on the stairways…
Yes, it is the certainly the rush of hormones coming into their own. The boys furtively watching the girls. The girls checking out the guys. The bands both preening and pushing through their insecurity. The thrust of rock swagger in its most elemental. It is the richest cocktail of them all: music because you have to.
And on display, the self-possession is staggering. Because even in the theater of I’m-too-thin/fat/tall/stupid that all teenagers inhabit, the assembled has found a way to cling to the music and swing that vine to a place where they blind you with the thrust that loud music provides.
Whether it was an almost experimental 4 piece dressed as Indians called Blast Shields Up!, who used two large upright drums to create a stark yet complex rhythmic jungle gym to stretch their thrown-all-the-way-out-there vocals across, or the pop rock of Red Reign, anchored by a spright in red tights who wasn’t afraid of a high pitched revamping of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” they came to play. Hard.
A band from Mentor called the Refugees didn’t win. Anchored by a girl who had as much star power as anyone on a major label, they pivoted out of their own song into a swan dive into the ultimate AOR anthem “Stairway To Heaven” with a conviction that would’ve made Robert Plant smile.
Cheyne-Stokes, the band who preceded them and finished second, hit just as full-frontal. With a singer who evoked Jim Morrison’s hardcore bohemianism even as they frame their music closer to modern sonics. Charisma can’t carry alone, but Cheyne-Stokes understands that if you bring it, sling it and spend the time on getting your songs right, that’s where the fuse – whether acoustic on a pair of high stools or in full-rut with everyone plugged in -- ignites.
Certainly for the acoustic/metal merging The Whenever Plan, it was making the familiar strange. For Rumored Alone, it was the tearaway clothes and attitude that marked their kind of rock. But in the end, the Sharp Edges – a band mining classic hard rock with absolutely no reason to be anything but what they are – won.
It’s the point of rock and roll, really. To be what you are. Completely. To own the night, the moment, the spark that bursts into flames. We are all creatures who blaze, who yearn, who want to kick out the jams. No matter who they are, what they do… Find the person who doesn’t think they rock, and I’ll put that check in the mail.
Because that is the truth beneath all truths: no matter how timid, how meek, how beaten down, how trapped in a life you never intended, everyone thinks they rock, everyone wants to kick out the jams. There’s an unbridled force inside that wants to be released. We all want to blow it up… to remember when we were most alive.
Whether it’s a high school kid reaching for whatever the world can hand them… Kristine Jackson finding how deep the songs can take her… or the huddled masses watching a guy who kept the pilot light on not for vanity, but for what the music did for him and the people who came to listen… that is the power of rock & roll.
It doesn’t just deliver, it redefines. It remembers the best we are. It lets that loose, lets it fly, lets us – even if only for the space of one little song – be all that, and more! It comes with a beat and the way a guitar line well-played, a perfect downstroke, the crack of a stick on a high hat can reach inside and reset the buttons.
People who worry that the music is going to die have missed the point. Maybe the accountants, the marketing people who don’t consider what it is they’re selling and think it can be reduced to tangible realities without ever spending a night watching people play because they have to will find a way to strip all the passion and meaning out of the music business.
And that is the good news.
If the music is about the people who make it, the people who love it, it can be the thing that survives. It can put people back in their lives. It can remind us about the essential realities of who we are – the things that can’t be brokered. Yes, hysteria can be harnessed… and there will always be a place for teen idols and moments that burn off and later embarrass.
Just as importantly, over two nights in a city that is hemorrhaging jobs and opportunities, there remains a mandate, a need for somewhere you can go where everything is possible, combustible. That is what music does: for the people who make it, the people who love it, the ones who consume it… and are consumed by it.
Scrape it all away, what’s left is the diamond. The kind of diamond that cuts you open, leaves you begging for more. If you doubt it, make a pilgrimage to Memphis for the International Blues Competition and find Kristine Jackson where she’s trying to make her mark. Whether she wins or not, your soul will always have the scrawl of her signature, the fingerprints of a true believer who can touch you with her guitar and take you places you didn’t know with her voice.