Liberty City and Here & Now

March 11, 2009 by info.

A child’s leg ripped off by a runaway car in a riot. A politician thrown in jail for his peaceful community organizing. An unarmed motorcyclist brazenly beaten to death on the street by cops. Sitting in the audience inside the Carnival Studio Theater of Miami’s half-billion-dollar Cesar Pelli-designed Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts and listening to accomplished actress April Yvette Thompson recount these memories of her childhood, it would be easy to imagine she’s talking about things that happened in, say, apartheid South Africa. Or some other regime a million light years removed from Obama’s America. But in fact, these events took place just a couple miles up the road, three decades ago, in the predominantly black community that inspired the title of Thompson’s riveting one-woman show, Liberty City.

Thompson and co-writer and director Jessica Blank conceived this award-winning production in New York; it premiered at New York Theatre Workshop last year. But it came home to Thompson’s birth city for a two-week run in February, and drew crowds of both those who came to Miami long after the McDuffie riots tore the city apart and were shocked by the play’s depiction of how blatant ‘70s corruption and racism were, and those who lived through that era – and remember it ever so well. Thompson slips into the skin of the various family members she portrays, from her sexy aunt who succumbs to crack to her sometimes hard-headed activist father. Liberty City is a well-written, skillfully performed show that deserves an extended run, at either the Studio, or better yet at the Caleb Center, the community center in the middle of Liberty City itself. This is history Miamians need to see.

The next weekend (March 5-8), the Studio hosted another important performance: the Miami Light Project’s annual Here & Now festival of newly commissioned performance art. Choreographers Alexey Puig Taran and Rosie Herrera presented one work each. In Symbol, Taran and two female dancers moved energetically and frantically around the stage, at one point swinging on platforms hanging by ropes, seemingly in a constant battle to survive. The energy was impressive, but the movements were just not convincing/breathtaking enough. Herrera’s Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret, on the other hand, was funny and insightful. Her cast of drag queens, a little girl, gay lovers, a gamine, etc., were like a rococo photographic tableau by Miami Beach artist Carlos Betancourt brought to life. Repeatedly, women were humiliated in their performances of femininity, while the trannies were triumphant in theirs: It’s easier to act like a woman than to suffer the oppression of actually being one, Herrera seemed to be saying.

The Friday and Saturday performances were followed by a special presentation by Here & Now alum Natasha Tsakos. The creator of Up Wake gave the lecture she delivered at the TED conference earlier this year; in its wide-eyed, wow-I’m-a-benighted-liberal-intellectual sincerity, it came across a bit as a parody of a TED lecture. Tsakos rambled about the importance of the marriage of technology and theater, as if Laurie Anderson hadn’t already done that back around the same time Liberty City was burning. But the overall point of the evening was crucial: Theater has the ability to make us aware of our everyday lives in radical new ways. “Through your mask, people let theirs go,” Tsakos put it poetically.

The Arsht center has struggled financially and aesthetically. But these two shows, along with the commission of Camposition’s 1000 Homosexuals last fall, demonstrate the important role the Studio can play in housing risky new works by Miami’s growing cadre of creative performers and their producing organizations (like Camposition and MLP). Encore!

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Weird, wondeful Labelle

February 16, 2009 by info.

“I’m diabetic and menopausal,” Patti LaBelle declared early on during Labelle’s show last night at the Jackie Gleason Theater (aka the Fillmore Miami Beach). She was apologizing — well, explaining really; LaBelle ne regrette rien — for her sweat, and crankiness, and generally rather bizarre behavior. No worries: Being a diva means never having to say you’re sorry. And catching Labelle on their reunion tour means catching three divas in their creative primes. And yes, I know that LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash are all in their mid-’60s.

Combining the truly amazing and underappreciated voice of LaBelle with Dash’s and Hendryx’s also impressive vocals and Hendryx’s songwriting prowess, Labelle was perhaps the most important girl group of all time. They bridged the era of the ’60s manicured vocal groups with ’70s rock and funk, and were instrumental in the creation of disco. Songs like “Get You Somebody New” and “Lady Marmalade” are classic feminist anthems. I recently interviewed Dash, Hendryx, and their old manager Vicki Wickham for the Herald (I interviewed Patti several years ago): check out the article. (also pasted below).

The show was off the hook and off the wall. Allegedly when the Blue Belles became Labelle, backup singers Hendryx and Dash were empowered — but LaBelle definitely still rules the stage. A couple numbers in, she kicked off her shoes, sending them sailing across the stage, then soon replaced them with one of several pairs of pumps arrayed on the piano. She frequently checked herself in a hand-held mirror. When the singers came out for the second half, she went up to Dash, reached inside her band member’s dress and ripped out her shoulder pads (apparently, they were sticking out). At show’s end, Patti peeled off her false eyelashes and handed them to fans.

Weird, yes, but endearing too — and definitely not scripted. Besides, oh, can she sing (though the reverb was way too thick). They all had on the kind of funky outfits they’re famous for — the same ones on the cover of Back to Now, their reunion CD. Hendryx looked like a statuesque goddess in a tight catsuit. She bumped and ground some male fans who came on stage for “Lady Marmalade.” At show’s end, she climbed on top of the bass drum and played the high-hat and cymbals with her bare feet.

The show was wacky and uneven but full of energy. During the audience interaction part of the show, one fan recalled seeing them playing New York’s Continental Baths every other week in New York, back in the ’70s. Labelle’s never been accorded their proper place in history — those seeing them now can get a sense of what was. And if they’re like this at 64, imagine how they must have kicked it in their 20s.

Just like they never left — Labelle is back
BY EVELYN McDONNELL
In 1970, the three singers who comprised the group Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles needed a change. In their nine years together, they’d had moderate success as a harmonizing vocal trio. But the girl group era was over, and Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash needed to either shake up their formula, or break up.

Enter Vicki Wickham, former producer of Ready Steady Go. She and Dash had stayed in touch since the Blue Belles performed on that influential English TV show. When Dash told Wickham the Blue Belles were in crisis, the Londoner flew to New York to see the group perform in its old stronghold, the Apollo Theatre. ”We blew the Apollo away,” Dash says now. “We actually had them laid out.”

Wickham took the singers back to swinging London and became their manager. Thus began a makeover that was almost a revolution, as girl group became rock band.

The group, newly renamed Labelle, evaporated aesthetic barriers with its atomic mix of soul, rock, dance and gospel, most famously on the proto-disco smash Lady Marmalade. Breaking out of the usual R&B circuit in space-oddity costumes and recording feminist anthems penned by Hendryx, they broke new ground for black and female artists.

”There was nothing or no one like Labelle,” Hendryx recalls thinking when, in preparation for the group’s current reunion, she went back to listen to those old albums. “No wonder our fans were so crazy about us, and why we attracted the multiracial, multisexual and multicultural crowd we did.”

Forty-eight years since the trio first joined, and 32 years after they separated over creative differences, Labelle is back. Last fall, the three founding members released the CD Back to Now, featuring producers Lenny Kravitz, Wyclef Jean, and Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. A tour brings them to Miami Beach’s Fillmore at the Jackie Gleason Theater on Sunday.

”It feels really good,” says Dash. “There are moments during the show when it seems like we never left. The moment we walk on and hear the audience’s response to our being together lets me feel like something very important is happening.”

THE BLUE BELLES

The Blue Belles formed out of two girl groups, the Ordettes and the Del Capris. All the singers were from New Jersey, except for LaBelle, who was from Philadelphia. (Founding member Cindy Birdsong left in 1967 to join the Supremes.) They had such minor hits as I Sold My Heart to the Junkman. By the end of the ’60s, the group was suffering from bad management and a dropped deal with Atlantic. But mostly, history was on the verge of passing them by.

”Times had changed,” says Hendryx. “The world had changed. We’d gone from the cocktail hour, picket fence, suburban dream to free love and the British invasion. Feminism was coming into being. We’d gone through civil rights. So much had happened, and we were still the same pretty much.

Gradually — organically, Hendryx says — Labelle began to reinvent itself. Out went the old-fashioned bouffants and matching dresses; in came futuristic, funky outfits by Larry LeGaspi and Richard Erker. ”Vicki said there was no reason we have to all wear the same gowns and hairdos,” Dash recalls. “She looked at it as presenting females in a different way.”

Wickham similarly transformed the group’s sound from one of close harmonies to an interplay of three women belting to be heard in the stars. ”They were very stuck in a sort of conventional arrangement of lead with some backup,” Wickham says. “I felt groups should be a group. One person didn’t have to sing all the leads if others were capable. Three great voices could be brought much more to the front. The songs were not pretty songs, they were much more rock, and needed singing with a different attitude.”

Some of those songs were being written by Hendryx, encouraged by Wickham and the band’s new freedom. ”There was a connection to me for sharing ideas and feelings, which I thought I wanted to do by being an educator, which is what I intended to do with my life,” Hendryx says. “By writing and connecting that to music and voice, it became obvious what I was really meant to do.”

LaBelle was worried about alienating Blue Belles fans. ”Pat was totally resistant to change. She didn’t want to change the name, her costume — she didn’t want to do anything differently,” says Wickham. But the singer’s followers “still came because they were intrigued to see what Patti LaBelle was doing. Even before the costumes we were getting such a diverse crowd, from the gay crowd, obviously, who saw something in these women who were outspoken and singing songs about sex, about religion, the revolution will not be televised — things they’d never heard women sing before. A sort of intellectual crowd hooked onto them. And then with the costumes came an even bigger gay crowd.”

Gay men related to these extravagant divas in the process of reinvention. Women saw them as mold-breakers. And Labelle smashed through a racial barrier when they became the first black group to play the New York Metropolitan Opera House.

”The feminist thing, we didn’t realize we were as strong as we were. We did set a precedent. Look now: We were the innovators, we changed the whole look of black artists period,” Dash says.

TIME FOR A BREAK

But by 1976, the women were ready to go their own ways. ”They needed to break up,” Wickham says. “They’d been together so long, they needed their own lives.”

LaBelle went on to have her own extremely successful career as a chart-topping singer, as well as a cookbook author. Hendryx had found her idiosyncratic voice and recorded several acclaimed new wave and funk records; she’s now working on a performance art show with an ”audio tutu.” Dash played on the disco circuit, then recorded with Keith Richards and the Xpensive Winos. She worked often with club legend Sylvester, who died of complications from AIDS in 1988, and remembers her last performance with him, in Fort Lauderdale.

”I remember us sitting by the pool that day,” Dash says. ‘He had these beautiful sunglasses on and a wrap around his head. All these people were coming up to us, and he said, `Tonight will tell it all.’ Meaning there was so much love, tonight will tell us how much they really love us. It was one of the most fabulous shows I have ever done. And it was the last time I ever saw him.”

LaBelle, Hendryx and Dash got together for a few songs and performances over the years. They approached their reunion tentatively. LaBelle wanted to make sure they still had their sound. They did.

”Chemistry is what kept it going,” Wickham says. “It was still there, and the sound was still there.”

Back to Now features nine new tracks and one from the vaults. Hendryx said it was important that they record new songs, rather than just be another oldies act, regurgitating the past. Dash says that once again, Labelle is making history: “We have an opportunity now to show them that this can happen in the industry. We’re setting examples: One being that we are the original members and we have come back after 30 years. And then the ages that we are, not trying to blow that up to make it more important than music. But to be able to say to others, it’s never too late to enforce your creative dreams.”

© 2009 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.

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Grammyrama

February 9, 2009 by info.

Not only was MIA sartorially the fly in the ointment last night at the Grammys — literally, she looked like a bug — but she was the best part of the rap pack, maybe because I could understand what she was saying. It was cool to have those guys together, but it was coolest that MIA repped/rapped for the ladies. Pregnant, nonetheless. Pull up the people!

I liked the music-centrism of the show, and thought that the ladies in particular rocked it. Carrie Underwood (and her lady shredder), Sugarland, even Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift — that wasn’t country, that was some serious soul music. Those ladies had studied at the altar of Aretha as much as the amazing Adele and Jennifer Hudson had; does being country now merely mean you have blond (naturally or, more often, not) hair? And was I dreaming or did Thom Yorke just cavort manicly in front of a marching band on a major awards show? I must have dozed off (just seeing Allison Krauss win yet more Grammys makes me sleepy); that couldn’t have happened.

The record industry has actually been paying attention to A&R, it seemed to me after last night’s telecast, not just scouting young hotties; there was some serious talent in the Staples Center. Big exceptions: Katy Perry and the Jonas Brothers. I don’t believe for one minute Katy likes girls. Joe Scarborough called the Jonases’ performance with Stevie Wonder the day the music died, and I have to agree.

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Over the Miami Moon: Albita and Miami Light

February 6, 2009 by info.

Albita was belting “Guatanamera” when the moon broke out between the clouds over Lili’s and my heads at the North Beach Bandshell tonight. Ah, moon over Miami — hey isn’t there a song about this (I saw Rufus Wainwright sing it once in South Beach; there’s a picture of me and him and Margarita in some paparazzi’s slush pile from that night. But I digress). It was just another night in the Magic City — except it was the opening night of the Global Cuba festival and the 20th anniversary party for the Miami Light Project, our city’s premiere arts presenting organization. Not to mention it was MLP director Beth Boone’s birthday — happy birthday Beth. I wish it weren’t so cold out.

Celia, and Tito, and Benny More, and salsa in general live in Albita’s strong as history voice. She sang every big salsa hit — isn’t “Guatanamera” the Cuban “Free Bird”? But I couldn’t accuse her of pandering even as she shouted “Azucar!”, for, as she was careful, to note, “Celia tiene tumbao.” Yes, it was a night for the exile community, as she shouted, “Viva Cuba libre!” But as annoying as the old guard can be, and as well coiffed as the night was, isn’t this a huge part of what makes Miami great? Imagine if history truly beknighted the Havana nightclubs of the ‘50 the way it does the Harlem clubs of that era; would clave reign supreme? Musicologically speaking, I firmly believe that pop achieved its aesthetic apotheosis in salsa as early as it did in bebop. But maybe the moon has gotten to my head.

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Lux Interior, RIP

February 4, 2009 by info.

I saw the Cramps for the first time at the Living Room in Providence in about 1984. No man has ever tottered more sexily on stiletto heels. It was one of the most dangerous shows I have ever seen. These were humans unleashed. I am truly sad; he and Ivy were as “real” as they get.

Oh, and strangely, he died in the same hospital in which I was born: Glendale Memorial.

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Asher Roth plays beer pong

February 3, 2009 by info.

Last week I went to a frat party. It was an assignment. I watched Asher Roth play beer pong for work. This is what I went to Brown for?! Story’s at Vibe.com.

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Lost in the Super Bowl

February 2, 2009 by info.

Given his recent political activism and the current economic headlines, I thought Bruce Springsteen might use his gigantic bully pulpit last night to play something a little edgy and provocative — one of the dark ballads from The Ghost of Tom Joad, perhaps, or at least a little “Badlands.” Nyuh-huh. The Boss went right for the Bud Lite moment, and God bless him for it: We all need some pure, joyous entertainment, and if we can’t get it from a Super Bowl halftime show, then we’re really going to be in the throes of depression. Forget the panic; Bruce is savoring the manic pop thrill of Obama’s rising. He and the E Streeters looked and sounded great. And yes, I was taken aback with the unapologetic commercialism of his final statement: “I’m going to Disneyland!” First the Wal-Mart fiasco, then the Super Bowl, now Team Rodent?! And what the heck does a California theme park have to do with anything anyways? At first, I thought he meant Disneyworld, because he was in Florida. But a little Google search showed me that once again, Asbury Park’s favorite bard is smarter than I am.

There’s some funny discussion of Bruce in my Facebook profile:

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Populism repopulated

September 11, 2008 by info.

I’m back.

For the past year-plus, I joined the dark side: I was working for an Internet company called MOLI, first as editorial director, then as an editor at large. It was actually an interesting immersion into the world of digital startups; I learned a hell of a lot, and met a lot of cool people. The best part of the gig was getting to assemble my dream team of bloggers, and edit them every day.

That’s done now. We all got laid off a couple weeks ago. So there’s a dozen more top writers looking for work right now; I recommend them all.

The past six months I wrote a blog for MOLI called Populism. I’m copying those blogs into here now, so they don’t disappear forever. Starting with my farewell column, which pretty much sums it up:

The internet is like an octopus, reaching out with eight tentacles to find its own head. There’s stuff going on everywhere — good, bad, and ugly — but there’s a constant search for a center. My year-plus experience at MOLI has been like a twist on the old riddle: “If a group of talented writers blog into the cacophony of cyberspace, do they make a noise?”

Yes, I like to think, even if the MOLI View has sometimes acted as much as a literary salon as as a magazine. But what a salon it has been! Donnell Alexander has been our Robert Benchley, Rob Levine our Alexander Woolcott, Theo Kogan our Tallulah Bankhead, Richard Pachter our Harpo Marx (sorry Richard, I couldn’t resist!). We’ve had at least two Dorothy Parkers in Wendy Case and Jana Martin. The quality of the writing for the View has never ceased to amaze me. I mean, I knew these people were good when I brought them on, but that day after day they delivered smart, savvy, funny, moving, provocative, and occasionally scandalous reads — plus Queen Juliana’s thoughtful, poetic videos — was beyond my expectations.

Getting a couple handfuls of writers across the country to file original, insightful copy daily should have been like herding cats. But it wasn’t. MOLI’s contributing editors have been consummate professionals, and Natasha Bright, Audra Hodges, and I merely had the pleasure of shepherding their prose through the damn CMS. We were polishing gems, like Cathay Che’s dating and surfing anecdotes, Celeste Fraser Delgado’s stories of working in a youth crisis center, Rebecca Wakefield’s acerbic political anaylsis, and Neal Pollack and Erika Shickel’s hilarious parenting conversations. Our two writers’ retreats truly were like days-long salons — and great bonding experiences for this group of now friends.

I’m indulging in all this back-patting because the View is sadly coming to an end. MOLI is changing direction in the ever-shifting, drifting techno-idustrial economy, and my crew and I are out of jobs.

Our profiles will still be here, and some of us will probably still blog in them. Otherwise, look for us in the blogosphere. These are people who need to be heard, and I’m sure their distinctive voices will find new homes. We may not all meet at the MOLI water cooler anymore, but please, use that Google tentacle now and again, and come say hi.

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Johnny Gets His Guitar

September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 8/27/08)

Long before he was channeling Keith Richard into his role as Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp (sigh) was a swashbuckling guitarist himself. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, he played in a band called the Kids, one of many new wave acts trying to make it big in a part of the country geographically — not to mention psychically — far from the established music meccas: South Florida. Not many people know that before bass and Gloria, Miami was a rocking town. As the film Rock and a Hard Place: Another Night at the Agora documents, bands like the Kids, Cichlids, Charlie Pickett, etc., were creating the soundtrack of a tropical Athens (in fact, REM were Pickett fans).

Depp is the only member of this scene who went on to great fame — and he did it as an actor, not a musician. But even the world’s biggest movie star can’t let go of those rock-star fantasies. I suppose that’s why Depp’s strapping his guitar on again; this weekend, he’ll play in a Kids reunion in Pompano Beach, as part of the Sheila Witkin tribute concert that also features Pickett, Slyder, the Romantics (featuring a veteran of the SoFla scene), Z-Cars, and Tight Squeeze.

It’s not the first time Depp has rejoined his old bandmates: The Kids played the first Witkin tribute in 2007. Witkin was a concert promoter who helped build the South Florida scene; her son Bruce was also in the Kids. The ‘07 concert was caught by the Rock and a Hard Place filmmakers. Depp wears a vest, beret, and his instrument hanging low. Be still, my heart.

Rock ‘n’ roll, like any arts career, is a crap shoot. Rock and a Hard Place perfectly captures that sense of failed dreams, the ones that got away. I mean, if even having the hottest guy on the planet in your group doesn’t get you an English countryside mansion, whatcha gonna do?

It’s not the first time Depp has rejoined his old bandmates: The Kids played the first Witkin tribute in 2007. Witkin was a concert promoter who helped build the South Florida scene; her son Bruce was also in the Kids. The ’07 concert was caught by the Rock and a Hard Place filmmakers. Depp wears a vest, beret, and his instrument hanging low. Be still, my heart.

Rock ‘n’ roll, like any arts career, is a crap shoot. Rock and a Hard Place perfectly captures that sense of failed dreams, the ones that got away. I mean, if even having the hottest guy on the planet in your group doesn’t get you an English countryside mansion, whatcha gonna do?

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Twin Cities Bards

September 11, 2008 by info.

Maybe it’s the Scandinavian influence, but Minneapolis is probably the cleanest rock ’n’ roll city in America. I remember the refreshing lack of pollution being my first impression, when I began visiting the Twin Cities in the mid ’80s, hanging out on the fringes of the then-verdant rock scene, back when the Replacements, Husker Du, Babes in Toyland, Rifle Sport, Breaking Circus, and Soul Asylum were still around. I was well aware the metropolis had its seedy underbelly– a dark side that New York Times media columnist David Carr documents chillingly in his addiction memoir The Night of the Gun. In fact, I usually stayed with a bassist who doubled as the scene’s biggest drug dealer – let’s call him Sven. But even we pale, tattooed potheads went for hikes around Minneapolis’s many lakes and parks. Remember that scene in Purple Rain when Prince drives Apollonia out to a lake on his motorcycle? The call of nature is never far away in Minneapolis.

Perhaps all that clean air offers a stark contrast to the pockets of depravity and hard-luck characters. Two of the best records of the year so far come from Minneapolitans skilled at spinning tales of gritty realism out of a city not known for its grit. On the Atmosphere album When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, rapper Slug writes about a waitress trying to pay off student loans, a lost-soul rock star, and on “Dreamer,” a single mom struggling to make it from day to day. With a mantra chorus of “but she still dreams after she woke tight hold on that hope/ sometimes it can seem so cold do what you gotta do to cope,” it’s probably the best feminist anthem by a male rapper since Tupac’s “Dear Mama.” Spieled out over jazz piano riffs and spry, live backpacker hip-hop, these are unsentimental but sympathetic portraits worthy of Bruce Springsteen or Joe Strummer.

(Originally published on MOLI 8/21/8)

The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn explicitly toasts Strummer on “Constructive Summer”: “I think he might have been our only decent teacher.” Finn cut his teeth in Minneapolis but formed the Hold Steady in Brooklyn. Whereas he used to locate many of his songs in the back woods and alleys of the Twin Cities, on Stay Positive, he writes about all of America. On first listen “Constructive Summer,” with its backdrop of paper mills and parties, became my instant summer anthem – I was driving around the Upper Peninsula, after all, in a county where the red steel plant of a container company is the largest local employer. I interviewed Finn a couple years ago, and not surprisingly, he knew my old friend Sven. Sven could have been the model for many of Finn’s characters: the big-hearted drunk, the tragedy looking for a savior.

Minneapolis is in the heartland, so maybe it’s not so surprising that it’s produced two of the aughties’ Strummers – Woody Guthriesque champions of the downtrodden and unsung. Unlike the Minneapolis bands of the ‘80s, these bards aim for the anthems. Maybe grit is in the eye of the beholder.

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