September 28, 2004

By Sheila Lennon / The Providence (R.I.) Journal

7:44 p.m. Tuesday (Blogroll)

Incredible String Band: Clive Palmer, Mike Heron, Lawson Dando.

Incredible String Band has all ages calling for more: It's been 30 years since the Incredible String Band played this continent, and their first show on the U.S. tour Thursday night at the Iron Horse Cafe in Northampton, Mass., was rollicking fun.

Guitarist, singer and songwriter Mike Heron opened by joking modestly that they'd waited in vain for a tribute band to come along, and finally decided they'd have to be their own tribute band.

Before it was over, the band, without founder Robin Williamson but with the amazing Welshman Lawson Dando on keyboards, kazoo, Indian harmonium, sticks and many more odd instruments, brought down the house with music that has always been nearly indescribable. ("British psychedelic folk"?) Listen instead: Here's Paintbox (but there's no female voice on this tour) and a bit of A Cellular Song. (These links take you to Amazon pages where you may choose your audio format.)

At the height of their popularity, in the late '60s, the band swelled as the musician girlfriends of the players joined the caravan. Imagine buskers spilling out of a carnival wagon dressed like Robin Hood (that's Heron, at right) and Maid Marian, playing all sorts of odd instruments found on trips to Morocco and India, singing of hedgehogs, a minotaur and a witch's hat, and opening a song with a small female voice whispering, "Amoebas are very small..."

ISB could have become merely a jug band banging out ditties -- you can actually hear this direction in 2000's Just Like the Ivy, which brought together Palmer and Dando with Robin and Bina Williamson instead of Mike Heron. Indeed, the only sour note Thursday night for me was a banjo solo by Palmer, singing like Tiny Tim. I'm not a bluegrass fan at all, though, and deadpan plucking has never appealed, no matter how technically admirable.

Dando -- looking simultaneously like hippie Puck and a happy Alfred Hitchcock in an elephant-print tunic -- is a wonderful addition, both visually and musically; if you didn't know the old crew you'd think he'd been a founder rather than the slight, wispy Palmer, whose Incredible Folk Club in Edinburgh spawned the whole thing. Palmer left after one album for the hippie trek to India, and wasn't part of the heyday. Smiling frontman Heron performs in jeans and a workshirt, Palmer in a flannel shirt, so Dando's old hippie garb is the thread to the old days.

But Heron is the showman here, making small talk and grinning through the song transitions and setups, grinning again, perhaps wryly as he sings, as a grown man, "Amoebas are very small..."

Those wonderfully nonlinear lyrics never let them down. Mike Heron's voice -- always better than Williamson's -- remains strong, and the group's harmonies were splendid, especially on the wonderful, processional ending of A Cellular Song, sung in rounds:

Amoebas are very small

Oh ah ee oo there's absolutely no strife
living the timeless life
I don't need a wife
living the timeless life
If I need a friend I just give a wriggle
Split right down the middle
And when I look there's two of me
Both as handsome as can be
Oh here we go slithering, here we go slithering and squelching on
Oh here we go slithering, here we go slithering and squelching on
Oh ah ee oo there's absolutely no strife
living the timeless life

Black hair brown hair feather and scale
Seed and stamen and all unnamed lives that live
Turn your quivering nerves in my direction
Turn your quivering nerves in my direction
Feel the energy projection of my cells
Wishes you well.

May the long time sun shine upon you
All love surround you
And the pure light within you
Guide you all the way on.

Some songs were absent because they were Williamson's, such as First Girl I Loved, which Judy Collins recorded, changing the gender, as well as Jackson Browne. But no matter.

When it all ended, the geezers rose, shouting "More," and got two more songs. Then the younger crowd stepped in with insistent rhythmic clapping, which drew Heron out one more time to say, "That's all we have, but thank you, we'll be back."

The tour continues. They'll be in Texas this weekend. Catch 'em if you can.

Lyrics; many clips at ARTISTdirect (but there are none from The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, perhaps their best album); more clips at Amazon.com; guitar chords for 25 ISB songs (MS Word).

Links:
Incredible String Band
Amoebas Are Very Small: The Incredible String Band Story
Be Glad, for the Song has No Ending
Incredible String Band Mailing List Page
Guide to British Music of the 1960s: Incredible String Band

Related: Creighton's Collection of Classical Music from independent artists. You can hear Lawson Dando's classical piano work here.

Something Bad Has Begun by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens -- both links are to photos) in the L.A. Times (reg.req.):

I was flying to Nashville last week with my 21-year-old daughter to explore some new musical ideas with a record label there. Ironically, I was trying to remain low-profile because of the speculation that it might have raised in the music world about a return of "the Cat." Media attention was the last thing I wanted. But it seems God wanted otherwise....

Three FBI agents escorted me away from my daughter and asked me questions. At first, it sounded like they might have me mixed up with somebody else, as they repeated the spelling of my name.

"No. Y-u-s-u-f," I carefully spelled out. The agents looked a bit puzzled.

As they continued asking questions, some of their queries were obviously not related to me, so I thought this must be a matter of simple mistaken identity. Whether it was a mix-up or not remained unclear because they weren't under any obligation to give me a reason; the green visa waiver form I had so neatly filled in earlier had effectively denied me any right to appeal or answers. It was only when an immigration official read out to me a legal reference number that he mentioned some implication with "terrorism" — no further details necessary....

God almighty! Is this the same planet I'd taken off from? I was devastated. The unbelievable thing is that only two months earlier, I had been having meetings in Washington with top officials from the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to talk about my charity work. Even further back, one month after the attack on the World Trade Center, I was in New York meeting Peter Gabriel and Hillary Rodham Clinton at the World Economic Forum!

Had I changed that much? No. Actually, it's the indiscriminate procedure of profiling that's changed. ...

ABC also interviewed him. That is to be broadcast Friday night on 20/20.

Related: You Say Yusuf, I Say Youssouf...: The Cat Stevens incident has its origins in a spelling mistake

I heard Peace Train on the radio in western Massachusetts this weekend (for the first time in decades). The dj cracked that the singer had just paid a visit to Maine, but didn't stay long.

Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories. Everybody but me has blogged this by now. J.D. Lasica, writing in Online Journalism Review, find that Google News's electronic editing serves up largely anti-Kerry sites when you search for "John Kerry":

In addition to mainstream news outlets from both sides of the political fence (say, NPR and The Washington Post on the left and The Washington Times and New York Post on the right), there were 34 anti-Kerry screeds from the second-tier websites. There was only one pro-Kerry item, from CommonDreams.org.

Far from an isolated example, the pattern has repeated itself throughout the past month. Small conservative Web sites such as Useless-Knowledge, Men's News Daily, Michnews and ChronWatch turn up in disproportionate numbers when clicking on news about John Kerry. Useless-Knowledge, for instance, made up 12 of the first 100 results for John Kerry on Friday, and 11 of the first 100 results Saturday.

By contrast, a search on George Bush or George W. Bush typically results in a fairly neutral, evenly balanced set of results from both sides of the political spectrum, with many of the same small conservative sites showing up to sing the president's praises.

What's going on? Have Google's search results been hijacked by Fox News?

The story offers a few possible explanations, and there are more at J.D.'s site, New Media Musings, here and here.

I asked him in e-mail yesterday if Google, in the wake of his inquiry, indicated that it's going to re-weight its algorithms.

His reply:

Google News' chief scientist told me after the story came out that he'll look into it and appreciates all feedback, positive and negative, but he didn't go so far as to say they're re-evaluating their algorithms.

Congress considering H-1B expansion: Deal could add 76,000 H-1B visas: Displaced Techies blogger Gina Minks sends along this from The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc:

IEEE-USA has learned that key Members of Congress are readying legislation to substantially increase the number of foreign professional(s) permitted to work temporarily in the U.S. on H-1B visas. This time, rather than raising the H-1B cap – currently at 65,000 visas annually – they intend to establish a new exemption for international students who earn a Masters or PhD from an U.S. institution. Worse, the proposed exemption will have no cap and will be permanent.

There's more at news.com.

The Unfeeling President: Righteous anger from E.L. Doctorow, the author of Ragtime, in an East Hampton, N.Y. paper:

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq....

The Book of Bob: Newsweek's David Gates interviews Bob Dylan in a motel somewhere in the Midwest. Best quote:

You would have to be Bob Dylan—which is what all those stalkers must ultimately have wanted from him—to grasp fully what he's trying to tell you. But it must have to do with his having to accept the loss of his original mode of creation, in which the songs seemed to come to him without his knowing what he was doing. Does he still have that same access to—I don't know how to put the question. He helps me out. "No, not in the same way," he says. "Not in the same way at all. But I can get there, by following certain forms and structures. It's not luck. Luck's in the early years. In the early years, I was trying to write and perform the sun and the moon.

Still playing word games: "The difference between me now and then is that back then, I could see visions. The me now can dream dreams."

Does anybody else remember Acts 2:17? And it shall be in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of My Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

Issues again: Following up on yesterday's tale of the teacher's election issue quiz, blogger Scott at perturb.org has created his own issues quiz, and documents it well. The statements are taken from the actual words of Bush and Kerry. Vote on the issues, see who will deliver for you.

Face it folks, you're unlikely to have a beer with either presidential candidate, but you'll live under their policies and the consequences of their policies for a long time. Don't be surprised later.