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Chapter 5: River of Ice
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Between that time and the next time I met him, it seemed like a tidal wave had happened, in my world anyway. I'd been playing at the most prominent folk club in America, the one called Gerde's Folk City, and was on the bill with a bluegrass band, The Greenbriar Boys, and had been given a rave review in the folk and jazz section of the New York Times. It was unusual because I was the second act on the bill and The Greenbriar Boys were hardly mentioned. I had played there once before and had gotten no review. This article appeared the night before Carolyn's recording session and the next day Hammond saw the newspaper. The sessions went well and as everyone was packing up and leaving, Hammond asked me to come into the control booth and told me that he'd like me to record for Columbia Records. I said that, yeah, I would like to do that. It felt like my heart leaped up to the sky, to some intergalactic star. Inside I was in a state of unstable equilibrium, but you wouldn't have known it. I couldn't believe it. It seemed too good to be true.
My whole life was now about to be derailed. It seemed like eons ago since I'd been in Flo Castner's brother's apartment in southeast Minneapolis listening to the Spirituals to Swing album and the Woody Guthrie songs. Now, incredulously, I was sitting in the office of the man responsible for the Spirituals to Swing album and he was signing me to Columbia Records.
Hammond was a music man through and through. He spoke rapidly-short, cut phrases-and was edgy. He talked the same language as me, knew everything about the music he liked, all the artists he had recorded. He said what he meant and he meant what he said and could back it all up. Hammond was no bullshitter. Money didn't make much of an impression on him. Why would it? One of his forebears, Cornelius Vanderbilt, had stated somewhere, "Money? What do I care about money? H'ain't I got the power!" Hammond, who was a true American aristocrat, didn't give a damn about record trends or musical currents changing. He could do as he pleased with what he loved and had been doing it for a lifetime. He'd been giving opportunities to the humbled and the vulnerable for longer than anybody could remember. Now he was bringing me to the Columbia Records label-the center of the labyrinth. The folk labels had all turned me down. That was okay now. I was glad about it. I gazed around Mr. Hammond's office and saw a picture of a friend of mine, John Hammond Jr. John, or Jeep as we knew him on MacDougal Street, was about my age, a blues guitar player and singer. Later he'd become an acclaimed artist in his own right. When I met him he had just gotten back from college, and I think he had only been playing guitar for a short time. Sometimes we'd go over to his house, which was on MacDougal Street below Houston, where he'd grown up, and we listened to a lot of records out of an amazing record collection . . . mostly blues 78s and grassroots rock and roll. I never made the connection that he was the son of the legendary John Hammond until I saw the photograph and only then did I put it together. I don't think anybody knew who Jeep's father was. He never talked about it.
John Hammond put a contract down in front of me-the standard one they gave to any new artist. He said, "Do you know what this is?" I looked at the top page which said,
Columbia Records, and said, "Where do I sign?" Hammond showed me where and I wrote my name down with a steady hand. I trusted him. Who wouldn't? There were maybe a thousand kings in the world and he was one of them. Before leaving that day, he'd given me a couple of records that were not yet available to the public that he thought might interest me. Columbia had bought the vaults of '30s and '40s secondary labels-Brunswick, Okeh, Vocalion, ARC-and would be releasing some of the stuff. One of the records that he gave me was The Delmore Brothers with Wayne Rainey, and the other record was called King of the Delta Blues by a singer named Robert Johnson. Wayne Rainey, I used to hear on the radio and he was one of my favorite harmonica players and singers, and I loved The Delmore Brothers, too. But I'd never heard of Robert Johnson, never heard the name, never seen it on any of the compilation blues records. Hammond said I should listen to it, that this guy could "whip anybody." He showed me the artwork, an unusual painting where the painter with the eye stares down from the ceiling into the room and sees this fiercely intense singer and guitar player, looks no more than medium height but with shoulders like an acrobat. What an electrifying cover. I stared at the illustration. Whoever the singer was in the picture, he already had me possessed.
Hammond told me that he knew of him from way back, had tried to get him up to New York to perform at the famous Spirituals to Swing Concert but by that time he had discovered that Johnson was gone, had died mysteriously in Mississippi. He'd only recorded about twenty sides and Columbia Records owned all of them and was now about to reissue some.
John picked out a date on the calendar for me to come back and start recording, what studio to come to and all that, and I left high as a kite, took the subway back downtown and raced over to Van Ronk's apartment. Terri let me in. She'd been in the kitchen doing the domestic thing. The small kitchen was a mess-bread pudding on the stove-stale French bread with crusts on a cutting board-raisins and vanilla and eggs piled up. She was coating the bottom of a pan with margarine and waiting as the sugar was dissolving. "I got a record I want to play for Dave," I said as she let me in. Dave was reading the Daily News. In the pages, the American government was blasting away in Nevada, testing nuclear weapons. The Russians were testing nuclear weapons all over their country, too. James Meredith, a black student in Mississippi, was barred from getting into the classrooms at the state university. There were bad things in the news. Dave looked up, peering at me over a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. I had the thick acetate of the Robert Johnson record in my hands and I asked Van Ronk if he ever heard of him. Dave said, nope, he hadn't, and I put it on the record player so we could listen to it. From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up.
The stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard. The songs weren't customary blues songs. They were perfected pieces-each song contained four or five verses, every couplet intertwined with the next but in no obvious way. They were so utterly fluid. At first they went by quick, too quick to even get. They jumped all over the place in range and subject matter, short punchy verses that resulted in some panoramic story-fires of mankind blasting off the surface of this spinning piece
of plastic. "Kind Hearted Woman," "Traveling Riverside Blues," "Come On in My Kitchen."
Johnson's voice and guitar were ringing the room and I was mixed up in it. Didn't see how anybody couldn't be. But Dave wasn't. He kept pointing out that this song comes from another song and that one song was an exact replica of a different song. He didn't think Johnson was very original. I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite. I thought Johnson was as original as could be, didn't think him or his songs could be compared to anything. Dave later played some sides by Leroy Carr and Skip James and Henry Thomas, and said, "See what I mean?" I did see what he meant, but Woody had taken a lot of old Carter Family songs and put his own spin on them, too, so I didn't think much of whatever it meant. Dave thought Johnson was okay, that the guy was powerful but that it was all derivative. There was no point in arguing with Dave, not intellectually anyway. I had a primitive way of looking at things and I liked country fair politics. My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix, and there wasn't any way to explain that to anybody. I wasn't that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn't my particular feast of food. Even the current news made me nervous. I liked old news better. All the new news was bad. It was good that it didn't have to be in your face all day. Twenty-four-hour news coverage would have been a living hell.
I let Dave go back to his newspaper, said I'd see him later and put the acetate back in the white cardboard sleeve. It wasn't a printed cover. The only identification was written by hand on the disc itself and what it said was simply the name Robert Johnson and a listing of the songs. The record that didn't grab Dave very much had left me numb, like I'd been hit by a tranquilizer bullet. Later, at my West 4th Street apartment I put the record on again and listened to it all by myself. Didn't want to play it for anybody else.
Over the next few weeks I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player. Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition. The songs were layered with a startling economy of lines. Johnson masked the presence of more than twenty men. I fixated on every song and wondered how Johnson did it. Songwriting for him was some highly sophisticated business. The compositions seemed to come right out of his mouth and not his memory, and I started meditating on the construction of the verses, seeing how different they were from Woody's. Johnson's words made my nerves quiver like piano wires. They were so elemental in meaning and feeling and gave you so much of the inside picture. It's not that you could sort out every moment carefully, because you can't. There are too many missing terms and too much dual existence. Johnson bypasses tedious descriptions that other blues writers would have written whole songs about. There's no guarantee that any of his lines either happened, were said, or even imagined. When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue . . . it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that. Also, all the songs had some weird personal resonance. Throwaway lines, like, "If today were Christmas Eve and tomorrow were Christmas Day," I could feel that in my bones-that particular yuletide time of the year.
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