by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Thanksgiving in Nashville, With Ry Cooder and Friends

       This time every year I listen to the Last Waltz concert, which took place on Thanksgiving Day 1976 in San Francisco: the Band and friends – Joni, Neil, Bob, Muddy, Eric, Van, and the rest – celebrating the band’s history and saying a weird and needless farewell.  

Concert Vault has audio of the full four-hour-plus concert, including a bit of the “Canterbury Tales” read in Middle English and the Lord’s Prayer recited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of all people.   Lately, it has added full video: a simple black and white feed probably used by the sound and light technicians to keep track of things.  (It’s available on YouTube, too.)   To see The Last Waltz in B&W is a strange, reverse effect; this concert, known first through a movie expertly filmed and edited in 70mm by Martin Scorsese and put out in wide release, is now a video bootleg, a concert seen through the keyhole.

That’s the effect of seeing so  many of the full-length concerts now posted on YouTube.   Once a home for short videos, the site now hosts dozens of shows that are seen as too long to support a commercial release.  The Tedeschi- Trucks Band’s full-concert reworking of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen is one.  

The Americana Music Association’s concert honoring Ry Cooder is another. It took place in September a year ago, but I wouldn’t have known about it except for YouTube.   I graze there for old slide guitar videos from time to time, and one night, there it was: a Last Waltz-style gathering of Cooder and his friends and associates from over the years – Flaco Jimenez, Loretta Lynn, Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell, Jason Isbell, Taj Mahal (doing a stage-shaking Statesboro Blues) and Jackson Browne (doing “Fountain of Sorrow”).  Through it all, there is Ry sitting on a chair stage left and working his rack of customized guitars: the sideman as star.  

Meant as an ending, The Last Waltz was the beginning of something: it was the concert that carried the old-time musical revue (perfected at the Grande Ole Opry) into the age of the multiplex, whence it has migrated to YouTube.

The Americana concert is here.   Happy Thanksgiving from Ry Cooder and company.

Sanders at Georgetown: Socialism for Thanksgiving

     “Ideology,” anyone?  

At Georgetown yesterday, Bernie Sanders gave the most consequential address of his political life, taking time and care to explain (as Mother Jones put it) that “yes, he is a democratic socialist, and you should be, too.”  

Habitually extemporaneous, to prepare for the Georgetown event he put his text through several drafts and used a teleprompter.  

It was an extraordinary address, one equally rich in video “bites” (such as these six on NPR) and extended historical analogies, such as this one, quoted in the Mother Jones piece:

Almost everything [Roosevelt] proposed was called “socialist.” I thought I would mention that just in passing. Social Security, which transformed life for the elderly in this country, was defined by his opponents as “socialist.” The concept of the “minimum wage"—that workers had to be paid at least a certain amount of money for their labor—was seen as a radical intrusion into the marketplace and was described as "socialist.” Unemployment insurance (the idea that if you lose your job at least you have something to fall back), abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining (the rights of workers to engage in negotiations with a union), strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as “socialist.” Yet as you all know, all of these programs and many more have become the fabric of our nation and in fact the foundation of our middle class.

Sanders represented socialism as thoroughly in the American grain, a rich compote of national traits akin to the ones we celebrate at Thanksgiving.

By now it seems obvious to say that our political system has truly passed through the looking glass when Sanders is derided as a fringe candidate while half a dozen half-cocked extremist Republicans are seen as representing the views of “ordinary Americans.”

But alas, the point needs making.  Even as they presented Sanders’ address appreciatively, both NPR and Mother Jones referred matter-of-factly to his “socialist ideology,” with all the connotations – of rigidity, militancy, state repression – that the word carries even today.

It’s as if they didn’t hear a word he said.   And if NPR and Mother Jones can’t hear Bernie Sanders clearly, who can?