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Chapter 14: Send Out a Lifeline
- Michigan State University Press
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CHAPTER 14 Send Out a Lifeline M eanwhile, back in the house on 15th Street, the New York community was receiving periodic infusions of news and cultural guidance from Mel and Fort Hill central. These infusions included the first of what would become a long series of music tapes prepared by Mel from a growing collection of 78 rpm records that he and Jim Kweskin were assembling in their travels around the country. The record collection was being lovingly preserved and stored in the Hollywood houses. The “Melzak” tapes were conceived as a compendium of the best popular music that had been produced in this country over the decades, carefully selected and sequenced. In choosing pieces for the tapes, Mel was looking for music that seemed to have been produced easily and spontaneously, when the spirit moved through the musicians and singers, without the labored effort of repeated takes and after-the-fact engineering. (The 78 rpm medium, in its simplicity, encouraged this possibility.) It was the same standard Mel used in evaluating his own music, and he was using the tapes to educate us in this principle, as well as to have ever more influence on what we listened to and thought about. The first tapes were of “race music,” the black rhythm-and-blues music that Mel had listened to during his young adulthood, and which gradually evolved into rock and roll. Later tapes moved into numerous other styles, from country and western, to swing, to World War II–era pop, and everything in between. Tapes of the evolving music for Jim and Mel’s new album also came to us from time to time, and finally the finished album itself arrived: Richard D. Herbruck Presents Jim Kweskin’s America, co-starring Mel Lyman and the Lyman Family. On the front of the jacket was a collage by one of the Hill women, composed of some of the community’s favorite images of what made America special: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, John Kennedy, Gene Autry, Henry Miller, Billie Holiday, Vince Lombardi, Jimmie Rodgers, Lyndon Johnson, Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, et cetera. On the back of the jacket, Richard Herbruck, the ostensible producer of the record, describes the excitement of the recording session and the interaction of the unlikely assemblage of musicians. “All in all it was a magnificent experience, one to never be duplicated. . . . And then we were done. The spirit of this once great country of ours had come and left its mark as minute little tracings on a plastic disc 118 | Chapter 14 and the second American Revolution was underway.” The liner notes also included a little essay from Jim, talking about the astrological sign of Cancer and its deep relationship with the musical history of this country: American Soul, still flowing in deep strains of hope and conquest. That soul was the Freedom that the earliest American dreams of and fought for which was the freedom to find God in themselves and follow Him, and it was finally born on earth as the spirit of a nation which would live in men, in Cancer . . . the sign of the birth of God in Man. [The American soul has been repeatedly expressed in great musicians born under the sign of Cancer] . . . and people who could truly hear them have felt history before it happened. I am here once again to sing that song for you. And as this album was born in a burst of spirit and recorded simply in three days as it was sung . . . a new life for the world is bursting forth from the Heart of America. The soul that is born in Cancer must always find its completion in Aries, when God and man become one. You can read the story of it in Mirror at the End of the Road by Mel Lyman. It is the story of life from the moment it doubts itself and receives its first intimations of immortality to the time it becomes God . . . as it grows from Cancer to Aries. You can hear that story in this album if you will step aside and let your soul listen. I am singing America to you and it is Mel Lyman. He is the new soul of the world. Jim Kweskin You might wonder what he is talking about here. This little essay is an even more generalized , simplified, and romanticized version of American history than any that appeared in...