Living With Music: Christian Bauman
By GREGORY COWLES
Christian Bauman is the author of three novels, including most recently “In Hoboken.”
My new novel, “In Hoboken,” is about a group of young musicians and their varied dysfunctions. Before I was a novelist, I was a musician and songwriter and folk singer of sorts. This was in the 1990s, and there was a terrific acoustic music scene strung across the country. I did a lot of split bills, and I opened for a lot of great artists (as one will do when one is less than famous). This playlist consists of my favorite tunes from a few of those people.
1) Damn Everything but the Circus, the Story. The line of the title isn’t hers, of course, but Jonatha Brooke wrote the song, and like Buddy Mondlock’s “The Kid” it steel-slivers a hole directly into my chest, and for the same reasons. I played a split bill with the Story at the Nameless Coffeehouse in Cambridge, Mass., (along with Jim Infantino and Anne Weiss) the weekend they signed their first record deal in 1991. I had just signed something, too: enlistment papers. I played well that night (not always a given) then put down my guitar and reported for basic training at Fort Knox, Ky. A chapter about halfway through “In Hoboken” bears some resemblance to this concert.
2) On the Way Up, Peter Mulvey. Like Ani DiFranco and Martin Sexton, Mulvey is one of us, generationally. I opened two shows for Peter in June 1996, at Passim in Cambridge. I was less than a year out of the Army. Jennifer Kimball sang with him that night, and it was the first time she played her own material in public since she’d left the Story. The whole of Mulvey’s album “Rapture” is brilliant as well as iconic of that era, and has lost none of its edge over time. “On the Way Up” was not my favorite song of his until I rediscovered it after some mental trauma of my own a decade later.
3) The Midnight Special, Odetta. The Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., was one of a handful of venues (like the Iron Horse in Northampton, or the 333 in Annapolis) that were always nice to me even when they certainly didn’t have to be. I had close to a zero “draw” (the number of people who could be counted on to show up if I was on a bill) yet they kept booking me anyway. One September they had me open three shows for the legendary Odetta. She was a captivating woman, gesturing with long arms and long fingers, singing strong even though she was old and clearly tired. We sat in the back after sound check and drank tea and talked about the state of the world.
4) The Ballad of Jamie Bee, John Gorka. As seniors in high school, Gregg Cagno and I began regularly attending, then volunteering at, the Sunday-night open mikes at Godfrey Daniels, the legendary music room on the south side of Bethlehem, Pa. A great bluegrass picker named Jessie Grimm patiently taught us how to sing into a microphone and tune onstage (among other things). His roommate was John Gorka, a young songwriter then, today one of the best lyricists in America. John was still dropping by Godfrey Daniels from time to time back in 1988 — trying out for the first time new songs he still hadn’t memorized, songs that now draw applause at just their opening chords. “The Ballad of Jamie Bee” is one of those songs of his that just shuts you up and shuts you down. It’s rare indeed to be able to deliver such an emotionally devastating song wrapped in such subtle and meticulous lyrical sleight of hand. Gorka does all this, and he can sing, too. It makes you want to go home and chop firewood instead. Or write novels. The beautiful thing about John Gorka is that he inspires not artistic jealousy but joyous jealousy — watching him, you quickly realize you can’t do what he does, but he never fails to make you want to go and do a better job of whatever it is that you do.
5) Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, Pete Seeger. Of course I’ll never get to sing with Woody Guthrie, but I got to sing “Do Re Mi” with Woody’s sister once, out in Oklahoma, and a few years before that I got to sing it with Woody’s buddy Pete. This was an outdoor, summertime benefit concert, and the backstage was a stand of woods along the Delaware Canal. Seeger was plucking his banjo in a shady spot, and I walked up to him and asked if he’d sing one with me during my set. He kind of took a step back so I said, “It’s a Woody song,” and he said, “How old are you?” and I said “25″ and he said “O.K. then, I’ll do it.” I still had a few good playing years ahead of me at that point, but if I had never sang again after that day, I would have been just fine. Like Odetta, Pete has long arms, and he stretches out and calls to you to sing with him, to sing louder, to drown out the fools and keep singing till we outnumber ‘em.
6) The Day Roy Orbison Died, the Marys. Don Brody was a polio-scarred, rock ‘n’ roll warrior from Ohio; his partner Connie Sharar was a harmonizing hipster from Hoboken. Don, who wrote the Marys’ songs, was for years a fixture at Maxwell’s and was often referred to as the Mayor of Hoboken. On New Year’s Eve 1996, the coalition known as Camp Hoboken (the Marys, Linda Sharar, Gregg Cagno, the Amazing Incredibles, myself) split a bill at the First Night festivities in Flemington, N.J. This being Flemington, we wrapped up by 11, and everyone went scurrying into the cold with gear and guitars and girlfriends to get it all packed so we could find warmth and beverages somewhere. As it happened, midnight struck as Don and I sat on the now empty stage along with my future wife. The three of us took a drink of something, then we all went outside with our arms around each other and looked up to see if the stars were any different in 1997. Just short of a year later, Don proved the constellations wrong by dying. Vin Scelsa himself hosted the tribute at the Bottom Line. Those of us who were there all agree that, dead or not, Don joined us onstage that night. It’s not lost on me that Don Brody’s two best-known songs (this one, long-championed by Scelsa on his “Idiot’s Delight” broadcasts; as well as “Ringing in My Ears”) are both contemplations on death: about the raw anger of the survivors, as well as the intense, painful gratitude toward the deceased of what they gave before they left.
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