Talking Pictures

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Talking Pictures

Rocky Road

Still Crazy.

Radio host Dr. Demento tunes in to the rock-and-roll film ‘Still Crazy’

By David Templeton

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. His column is not a review, but a freewheeling discusson about life and popular culture.

AS A CHILD of the ’70s, I’ve long felt a weird love-hate nostalgia for anything representative of that decade–especially the music. Though genuinely embarrassed that I still know all the words to songs like “Hurry on, My Wayward Son” and “Come Fly Away,” I need only hear a few bombastic chords of such tunes to launch me headfirst into a helpless fit of loud karaoke and some not-so-youthful spasms of high-energy air-guitar.

This being my attitude, I shouldn’t have been too surprised at my roller-coaster response to the beguiling British comedy-drama Still Crazy.

A funny, surprisingly emotional coming-of-middle-age story, it’s about a pretentious ’70s rock band called Strange Fruit (think Journey, only more so) and the attempts of its scruffy, declining members to launch a reunion tour after 23 years of musical obscurity. The film stars Stephen Rea as the band’s guitarist–forced into stocking restroom condom machines for a living–who still longs for the glory days of his youth, and Billy Conolly as the roguish roadie who rejoins Strange Fruit, mainly out of curiosity about whether the mismatched bandmates can keep from self-destructing this time around. The film features songs written by Mick Jones of the now defunct Foreigner and Jeff Lynne of the equally absent Electric Light Orchestra.

I leave the theater humming, but within an hour, I feel the sharp pinch of melancholia nipping at my mind. Still Crazy, with its bittersweet, youth-cannot-be-reclaimed, let’s-all-mourn-the-days-gone-by overtones, is beginning to bum me out. I need a touchstone, someone to ground me to the present while helping me put my feelings into some historical context.

So I call up Dr. Demento.

“Oh my,” sympathizes the good doctor, alias Barry Hansen, internationally renowned for his groundbreaking ’70s radio show and still playing his surprising mix of musical oddities and rare recordings on over 100 stations around the world. (Currently, there are no Sonoma County stations running the Dr. Demento Show, though an energetic letter-writing campaign is under way to coerce KFOG in San Francisco and KFOX in Santa Rosa to return the show to their airwaves.)

“I kind of felt what you did when I saw Still Crazy,” Demento admits, “only in reverse. I felt bad for these poor guys at first, but later on, I really started rooting for them. ‘You can do it! Get your act together.’ I found that it all rather tugged at my heartstrings. Not that it made me miss the ’70s or anything.”

When not spinning his offbeat tunes, Demento maintains his reputation as a respected musicologist, with a scholarly knowledge of rhythm and blues. Before making a name for himself in the ’70s, the young Barry Hansen worked the fringes of the Los Angeles rock-and-roll culture, playing keyboards in a short-lived band called King David and the Parables, and working as a roadie for the colorful electric hippie-blues band Canned Heat.

“As a former roadie,” Demento remarks, “I somewhat identified with the Billy Conolly character. It made me somewhat wistful for my roadie days.”

“You know, in the movie it was the roadie got all the groupies,” I point out. “From your personal experience, can you corroborate the accuracy of that?”

“I don’t have anything to report there,” Demento says, chuckling. “Canned Heat didn’t attract that many groupies while I was with the band. What can I say?”

RETURNING to my nostalgia for the ’70s, Demento offers this musical synopsis.

“To me, what the ’70s did for mainstream rock and roll was that it took the ideas of the ’60s and refined them, made them bigger and more impressive-sounding. Because, among other things, studio technology improved incredibly during the ’70s. Instead of four tracks, you had 24. You had better noise reduction. There were just so many more things you could do.

“The songs themselves,” he notes, “didn’t evolve very much, if at all, from what was being written in the ’60s. But they could make them sound so fine that people were fooled. The other big invention of the ’70s, of course, was the ‘Power Ballad.’ “

“The Power ballad. Like ‘Come Fly Away,’ ” I suggest.

“Exactly,” he affirms, replying so quickly that I don’t have time to confess knowing the lyrics. “The kind of song that could inspire 20,000 concert-goers to all wave their lighters in the air at the same time. It formed a strange kind of community, all those people with their thumbs on their lighters. Whether the song was a piece of dreck or not, it sounded damn impressive.”

“At the end of Still Crazy,” I mention, “the Fruits sing their own bombastic power ballad, ‘The Fire Still Burns.’ “

“Which was either just good enough or just bad enough to be a believable ’70s rock anthem,” he says.

“Still,” I counter, “It’s a bittersweet moment.”

“Oh, I agree,” Demento says. “It’s the classic rock-and-roll desire to never fade away. Even so, it’s normal for bands to rise up and then fade away. It’s been the case through the 20th century that most generations of kids despise the music that their parents listened to. That’s the normal evolution of pop music. Fortunately for bands like Strange Fruit–and even for real bands like Styx–some kids defy the age-old trend and end up getting into the music of previous generations.

“To these open-minded individuals,” the good doctor says with one last chuckle, “belongs the history of rock and roll.”

From the February 18-24, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

White Studies

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White Studies

Like Whites on Race

The race struggle shifts to white studies. Now what?

By Jeff Howe

WHEN IT COMES to the humanities, academic disciplines have more in common with sitcom legal beagle Ally McBeal than might be immediately apparent. This is not to make light of higher education; great works of art, great scientific discoveries, and great tweedy fall looks have all emerged from our prestigious university system. But like the show that made bi-gendered bathrooms a topic of national conversation, disciplines emerge from our culture and are a vehicle for observations about that culture.

Both offer snapshots of contemporary American society.

From this perspective, critical white studies–which, if not a discipline in their own right, do constitute an academic Zeitgeist of sorts–begin to make more sense. The premise of white studies is fairly simple: White is a race like any other; the close examination of white culture will produce knowledge and understanding–a consciousness–that will contribute to the dismantling of those subtle, pervasive privileges that whites enjoy at the expense of other races.

“The question becomes, Can you talk about the contributions whites have made without discussing the terror that whites inflicted on other races?” says Charles Gallagher, a sociology professor at Georgia State University who has taught classes on race and ethnic relations both there and at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs.

The influences that shape this movement seem, at first, contradictory. White studies may be the first strategy of social inquiry to embody both the success and the failure of multiculturalism on college campuses. In this way, the discipline of critical white studies is very much of our confused world, a world in which Ally McBeal represents either feminism’s wholesale retreat or its final victory, depending on who’s providing the analysis. It’s a world in which Politically Incorrect draws millions of weekly viewers, while politicians scrutinize their speeches for language that might offend anyone.

The ideas underpinning the study of whiteness seem evident: After years of failed policies and dashed hopes, Americans are willing to have a go at just about anything that proposes to suture our gaping racial rifts. So it’s surprising that until the University of California-Berkeley hosted a conference addressing whiteness studies in the spring of 1997, the field hadn’t even appeared on the national radar screen. It’s true that the tradition of ethnicity scholars studying white culture dates back to such classic essays as W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Souls of White Folk,” from 1920. But it’s because the history of America’s race struggles involved consolidation (e.g., bloc voting) and strategic exclusion (e.g., black nationalism) that white people who studied ethnicity tended to ignore their own.

Until now, that is. As with any trend, the impetus behind critical white studies bubbled up simultaneously from several different quarters and has taken many different forms. Matt Wray, a professor at Berkeley and co-editor of White Trash (an anthology of essays exploring topics such as slasher movies and the cult of Elvis), studies chain-saw art. Noel Ignatiev, a fellow at Harvard and editor of the Race Traitor journal, proposes to study whiteness only as a method of abolishing whiteness altogether. Jeff Hitchcock is more of a pragmatist; he founded the Center for the Study of White American Culture and holds conferences intended to “improve people’s ability to function in multicultural society.”

WHITE STUDIES draw together a diverse group of people with a diverse set of objectives, and thus can’t be pegged to a traditional ideological spectrum. What most tend to agree on is that traditional liberalism has become bankrupt, and that the path to racial equality involves “racializing” whiteness.

But the emergence of white studies has raised the ire of critics from both the right and the left. Shelby Steele, a race scholar at Stanford University and winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Content of Our Character, feels white studies reaffirm notions of “black despair” and “white privilege,” and claims whites will use it to absolve themselves of racism. Other race scholars have expressed concern that white-studies departments will compete with other race and ethnic studies departments for already-scarce funding and resources.

Even white-studies scholars themselves caution against interpreting the examination of white culture as the celebration of white culture. Most ominous of all concerns is that white supremacists could co-opt white studies for their own purposes. It sounds ridiculous, but white supremacists share many of the same interests, if none of the same ends, as white-studies scholars.

“I’ve been in high schools where kids say, ‘Hey, if they get a Latino club, we want a European club.’ And these are the kids who are going to be showing up at colleges offering courses in white studies,” says Chip Berlet, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a Boston-based think tank that tracks far-right groups. Berlet has spent the past 17 years talking to white supremacists and advises white-studies scholars to begin taking these movements seriously. “Pat Buchanan is on TV every night in this country, talking about issues that are often white ethnocentric. Critical-white-studies people simply don’t have that exposure. There are people who are going to take the themes of a critical-white-studies course and twist them into supporting white supremacy.”

Gallagher has interviewed dozens of college students about perceptions of their own color. He readily acknowledges the threat posed by white-pride movements, but says the hope is that after taking a class examining their race, students leave with a heightened sensitivity to what it means not to be white. “A lot of white 18- to 20-year-olds are struggling with their history, with a narrative of whiteness that doesn’t evoke terror, slavery, or the Ku Klux Klan,” Gallagher says.

“But in constructing a positive identity, they also have to talk about how whites have always been privileged.”

Because each successive generation of white Americans moves further and further away from its country of origin, a vacuum has opened up, and many students, Gallagher says, are simply trying to find an ethnic identity. The goal is to expand that search to include an understanding of how other ethnicities have shaped American culture as well.

When Gallagher taught at Colorado College, one of his white students was so impressed by his class that she focused her senior thesis on how fellow students perceived their racial identity. “I thought of myself as a white person,” says Jennie Randall, who is now a first-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania. Gallagher’s class, Randall says, “made me realize there were a lot of assumptions I took for granted.” Randall, who grew up in predominantly upper-middle-class environments, says her exposure to non-white students had been negligible.

“For me, the issue of race had always been somewhat troubling, and I think a lot of white people have a lot more anxiety about race than they’re willing to admit,” she says. “Because there’s an assumption that race is only an issue for blacks, it’s surprising to discover that you’re as affected by it as anyone of color.”

Randall adds that of the white students she interviewed for her thesis, only those who had taken classes concerning racial identities had thought about their own whiteness.

For students like Randall, who would be unlikely to join the Klan even without a class in white identity, the process of examining herself as a “racialized other” has enriched, but probably not changed, her life.

For a student teetering on the edge of white pride and white consciousness, however, a curriculum in white studies could turn anger and confusion into understanding and empathy.

It’s a tall order to fill–to turn the tide of white resentment and prepare America for a harmonious, equitable coexistence in an increasingly multiracial society–a society in which the melting pot looks more like gumbo than New England clam chowder.

From the February 18-24, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

The Scoop

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We Are Them

By Bob Harris

BENEATH downtown Chicago lies a city with no addresses, no jobs. Some residents barely have a name. Between the bright lights of the city above and their murky reflection on the river below lies Lower Wacker Drive–a dark underworld surrounded by side streets, parking spaces, and loading docks. That’s where many homeless go on cold nights to escape the bitter wind and sleep for a few hours on the warm ventilation grates. Some stay just for a night or two, some for an entire winter, a few even longer.

On a Chicago winter night, with the windchill far below zero, the cover of the city above and heat of the warm grates below can be literally the difference between life and death. On any given night here, there might be a few dozen homeless people–or 100 or more. I know it’s there.

I’ve slept down there myself.

Here’s a story I don’t often tell:

In the spring of 1984, I graduated from college with a flashy engineering degree, a plum job with a Fortune 500 company, enormous financial potential, and a mountain of student loans.

In summer I added to the debt load with credit card spending to cover relocation, rent on a cool condo, three-piece suits to wear in the office, and the assorted household crap you buy when you first have a house to hold.

By fall, I realized that, emotionally, I couldn’t function at all in a corporate environment. So I quit.

Getting another, similar job was out of the question. So I went home and lived with my parents for a while. This was worse. My father had worked a mind-numbing blue-collar job for more than 25 years. I’d had a chance at something better and blown it in less than 25 weeks. I was profoundly depressed. My weight ballooned.

The best job I could find was in … telemarketing. This had to be the bottom. I was wrong.

Surprisingly, I was excellent at sales. Since I could create the illusion of perkiness with customers while mentally debating the merits of public self-immolation vs. a simple, discreet 10-story fall, it wasn’t long before the company wanted me to enter management. I suddenly had a chance to go from 20 bucks a day to 20 grand a year.

So I arrived in Chicago, suitcases and hopes in hand. A high school friend agreed to let me sleep on his couch until I was on my feet. But while he was away on a visit, his roommate threw me out.With no fixed address and no place to keep myself presentable, it wasn’t long before the job went away as well. I couldn’t go home a failure again. And there was nowhere else left to go.

My long Chicago winter was about to begin.

I never considered myself “homeless” at the time. I just didn’t have anywhere to live. I thought of “homeless” people (when I gave them a thought) as, uh, bums. I didn’t realize how many homeless people are former mental patients in need of medication, Vietnam or Gulf War vets with severe emotional damage, or just ordinary folks way down on their luck.

Sometimes, when I could find a gig, I could afford a room at the YMCA, which was tolerable, if sticky. Or sometimes I ‘d sleep at the airport, moving around between terminals so security wouldn’t get wise.

Sometimes I sang in the subway for meal money. Sometimes I just stared into space. More than once I stood freezing in the wind on the Michigan Avenue Bridge and thought about throwing myself into the icy river below. But it’s less than a two-minute walk from where I stood on that bridge to the warm heating grates beneath Wacker Drive and, as for many in my situation, survival for another night.

You try getting a job without a fixed address. Try leasing an apartment without a job. Try just getting an interview while carrying a dirty suitcase with all your belongings in it. And even if you do get a job, try opening a bank account without being able to prove residence. Try not just giving up.

And y’know what? I had it easy. I wasn’t old or sick or injured. I had a college degree. I had blond hair and blue eyes. I wasn’t black or Hispanic or female, so I never had to deal with prejudice. I didn’t have a kid to take care of. I didn’t drink or have a drug addiction.

And my tendency to overeat was certainly no longer a problem.

Yet it took me almost six months to climb out of that hole and become a functional, if struggling, member of society again.

Recently the city of Chicago essentially closed off Lower Wacker Drive, installing steel fences and allowing shopkeepers aboveground to lock the gates all night. The only reason for the gates is to keep the warmth of the ventilation grates away from people who have nothing.

Where will the homeless go? How many will survive the next cold night? Presumably, they’ll just disappear.

I pray none of them disappears as I almost did.

From the February 18-24, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Bridge-Builder

In person: Divakaruni speaks Feb. 25 in Santa Rosa and Feb 26 in Sonoma.

Divakaruni’s fiction spans two worlds

By Patrick Sullivan

MOVING TO the United States really made me renegotiate my boundaries and, in some ways, even reinvent myself as a woman,” says Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. “For many, many immigrant women, it’s the same.”

Speaking by phone from New York City, the best-selling Indian-American author is explaining in her warm, rich voice the important role personal experience plays in her fiction. Divakaruni is a published poet and the author of Arranged Marriage, a collection of short stories that captured the American Book Award in 1996. But she is best known for her breakthrough 1997 novel, Mistress of Spices, a story of passion and magic that became a surprise bestseller. Both books draw heavily on the author’s own experiences as an immigrant.

Now the newly released Sister of My Heart (Doubleday; $23.95) carries on the theme, capturing the dilemmas and opportunities confronting women with one foot in traditional Indian society and the other in the modern world.

The novel tells the story of Sudha and Anju, two young women raised as sisters in an old-money family in Calcutta. Born on the same day into a traditional household, both deprived of their fathers by tragedy, they’ve shared a powerful emotional bond since birth. But as they come of age, their relationship is tested by romance, arranged marriage, family secrets, and emigration to America.

At the center of the book lies the girls’ traditional Indian family, upper-caste and wealthy, determined to follow time-honored rules of decorum. That’s a subject about which Divakaruni, who was born in Calcutta, writes from personal experience.

“I come from a very traditional family, but we weren’t rich enough to own one of those mansions,” she says. “But many of our friends did live in places like that.”

When she was 19, Divakaruni and her brother were permitted to come to the United States by her father when he took a job here. After graduate school, she settled down in the Bay Area and began her writing career, also finding time to start a family and organize a telephone help line for immigrant Asian women.

Divakaruni, now 42, has clearly struck a chord with her work. Her fiction has won a bevy of awards, and The Mistress of Spices is being made into a movie that may hit the theaters as early as next year. She credits her success, in part, to a growing recognition by publishing companies of the value of diversity.

“Fiction should portray a multitudinous American world, because that’s the reality,” she says. “There’s been a real effort on the part of publishing companies to make a variety of ethnic voices available to readers, and I think that enriches American literature.”

Some have criticized Divakaruni for her portrayal of women, arguing that she perpetuates negative stereotypes about Indian society. But the author says she’s just telling it like it is.

“In my years of working with women who were in great distress, I’ve seen many of these problems, and I think they needed to be written about,” Divakaruni says. “Hopefully the intelligent reader will see that while this is in the Indian context, it’s really about women in a larger sense. The oppression of women is going on in all communities.”

Still, Divakaruni also recognizes the positive aspects of traditional culture and the value it places on family and community. Her life, like her fiction, walks a careful line between the two worlds. Six months ago, she moved with her husband and two young from the Bay Area to Texas, where she now teaches at the University of Houston. Like the characters in her book, she sometimes finds herself struggling to balance the demands of family and career, tradition and modernity. The key, she says, is to combine the best parts of both. Of course, that isn’t always easy.

“It’s really a juggling act. Some days, it’s clear what the best aspects are, and some days it’s not,” Divakaruni says with a warm chuckle. “And, of course, my children have their own ideas about that.”

Divakaruni will make two local appearances. First she speaks at 7 p.m. on Feb. 25 at Copperfield’s Books, 2316 Montgomery Drive, Santa Rosa (578-8938). Then she appears at 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 26 at Readers’ Books, 130 E. Napa St., Sonoma (939-1779).

From the February 18-24, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Spins

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Spins

Heart Songs

Solid gold: Tony Bennett gets royal treatment on new ultradisc reissue.

Trio of country, rap, and lounge classics

Chris Wall Tainted Angel Cold Spring Records

IT’S ONLY FEBRUARY, but Chris Wall’s Tainted Angel is already making a strong pitch for country album of the year. Austin-based Wall may not be a mainstream radio star, but he is no stranger to masterpieces. After scoring a major songwriting hit with the uncharacteristically whimsical “Trashy Women” (as recorded by Confederate Railroad), he used his royalties to establish Cold Spring Records and recorded 1994’s Cowboy Nation, an astonishingly creative tapestry of hardcore honky-tonk. Now, after a four-year studio hiatus, Wall returns with an entirely different, but similarly potent, collection. Gone is the polished production of Cowboy Nation, replaced with a stripped-down sound that is perfectly calibrated to the album’s collective mood. But one thing remains unchanged: Wall’s subliminal intellectualism. No, we’re not talking the sort of self-conscious smarts brokered by tea-drinking folksters, but rather a sort of easygoing highway literacy that deciphers truth in whiskey shots and broken hearts. For instance, the fiddle-saturated “Big Blue Teardrops” is a gorgeously crafted swing number that explores the lighter side of regret, while Wall’s hardboiled baritone roams the atmospheric parallels between taverns and churches on “God’s Own Jukebox.” And “Dylan Montana’s Last Ride” is simply one of the most moving country tunes ever recorded. Pack this album on your next road trip: wherever you’re headed, it’ll get you there faster. Chris Weir

The RZA As Bobby Digital Gee Street

MASTER P and Puff Daddy have been reigning over hip-hop’s recent chart successes, but a more iconoclastic and influential wellspring has been the Wu-Tang Clan. From their two classic group efforts (1993’s Enter the Wu-Tang and 1997’s Wu-Tang Forever) to consistently strong solo works by rappers like Raekwon and Method Man, the group has set the high standard for MC skills and has shaken hip-hop with a dry, haunting minimalism. The sonic mastermind behind Wu-Tang Productions is the group member known as the RZA, and he’s finally released his own solo work after producing an endless stream of Wu-Tang spinoffs. Packaging himself as a high-tech blaxploitation hero on As Bobby Digital, the RZA finds more dramatic humor but less desperate focus than usual. Not a great rapper himself, he rallies fine guest support from around the Wu-Tang camp, and though he uses other producers, the sound is all his–eerie loops of stark piano riffs, rough vocal tracks, sparse beats, and the displacement of even sparser samples. Behind his comic-book Bobby Digital character, the RZA has a disc that’s compellingly uneasy–the sounds that lurch and the songs that fade abruptly make it clear that this ain’t no disco. Karl Byrn

Tony Bennett with Count Basie & His Orchestra In Person! Sony/Mobile Fidelity

FORGET ALL THOSE shabby-chopped, pink martini-swilling swing posers. Before he became an unlikely unplugged MTV icon, America’s quintessential lounge singer teamed up with the Kansas City swing king at Latin Casino in Philadelphia for a classic 1958 dinner-club set. On a newly released reissue, Sebastopol-based audiophile company Mobile Fidelity gives this dynamic live concert recording the 24-kt-gold ultradisc treatment. And once the annoying crowd noises die down, you’re left with a sonically superior chronicle of Bennett, with his captivating bel canto, at his peak. Bennett’s belting vocal on “Without a Song,” from the musical Great Day!, will blow you away. But his haunting reading of the Ellington chestnut “Solitude” is the icing on the cake. And you can bet he silences the noisy drunks at the front tables. Ah, Tony! Greg Cahill

From the February 18-24, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Cottage Recording Industry

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Grizzly Bare

By Charles McDermid

IT’S NOT UNCOMMON to find a disheveled Roger Tschann working behind the mixing desk at his Grizzly Studio in a bathrobe and slippers. Tschann’s commute consists of rolling out of bed at his Petaluma home/studio, so his disheveled ‘bedhead’ has become somewhat legendary.

The Grizzly Studio experience is what studio owner and Flying Harald Records chief Tschann, 28, describes as ‘the seedy underbelly’ of the recording industry. Yet one cannot argue with his success. Having engineered CDs for such local bands as the Conspiracy, Cropduster, Eric Lindell & the Reds, the Burdens, Dieselhead, Little Tin Frog, and most recently Royal Pine, Grizzly ranks as the pre-eminent studio for a wide range of local talent.

“Roger’s methods are a little unorthodox, but the bottom line is the job,” says Michael Houghton, managing editor of a local music magazine. “The truth is that every local band in the know goes to Roger. He’s someone you relate to.”

It’s no problem relating to Tschann’s equable manner and grassroots bohemianism. After all, Grizzly has recorded everything from gangsta rap to country.

“My studio is a party, so I’ve got no problem with bands that do whatever they need to get their groove on,” explains Tschann. “Part of what a recording studio is about is going to somebody who knows how the band sounds. We’re going to have to rock if we want to find what puts a band in its best light.”

Self-taught, Tschann began recording bands in 1993 as a Santa Rosa Junior College student. The Conspiracy’s “Too Far Gone” became Grizzly Studio’s first finalized product later the same year.

“I got into it by buying one of the first ADATs [Alesis Digital Audio Tape, a professional and affordable VCR-sized recording device that democratized the industry] and building a one-room studio in my mom’s garage. It even had some closets to stick amps in,” Tschann recalls. “It was cramped and stinky, hot and miserable. It’s amazing that anyone would put themselves through that. It was pretty rock ‘n’ roll, though.”

Tschann ultimately left the confines of mom’s garage for The Ranch, a converted farmhouse, now a multiroom facility with several isolation booths and, most important, air conditioning. “A large part of what I do is technical, but it is equally creative as well,” Tschann says. “[Making a record] is like directing a film: you must bring certain things into focus and know what to leave in the background.”

From the February 18-24, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Prairie Sun Recording Studio

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Prairie Sun Recording Studio

Dream Maker

Music man: For more than two decades, Prairie Sun owner Mark Rennick has attracted world-class musicians to his Cotati recording studio.

Prairie Sun Recording Studio chief Mark Rennick is a musician’s best friend

By Charles McDermid

I’LL TELL YOU TWO THINGS,” says recording studio owner Mark Rennick, who is known almost exclusively by his nickname, Mooka. “First, the best thing about what I do is the cool people I meet. The second thing is that I call everybody Bubba.”

Fair warning for an interview session that proves to be an exercise in loquacity. Touring Rennick’s sprawling Prairie Sun Recording Studio compound for even a brief stretch finds the 46-year-old displaying the range of interests required of an owner, manager, engineer, producer, and, most important, musician. One moment Rennick is addressing the pros and cons of digital recording equipment, the next he’s picking up a nearby stand-up bass and plucking the strings reflectively.

“I want to be an artist. Period,” says Rennick, who in his limited spare time performs in a politically charged spoken-word ensemble, the Abolitionists, and plays bass in the local Kay Irvine Band. “The recording-studio business is really just a means to an end. I run an artist’s colony that sometimes I’m forced to approach as a business.”

As such, Rennick and his wife, Cherrie, are immersed in the innumerable responsibilities inherent in running an operation that is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

“If people want to record, we have to be there. It doesn’t matter if it’s 2 in the morning on Christmas Eve, we’ll have an engineer in there,” says Rennick, whose workday starts at 7 a.m. and invariably ends between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. “We have to cram sometimes, so it can be high pressure. People snap and lose it all the time.”

“It’s a competitive business, and with the trend today of buying equipment and doing it at home, a studio must have its own niche.”

THE ROAR OF A CHAIN SAW marked the genesis of Prairie Sun, founded in 1978 when Rennick bored a tremendous hole through the living room wall of his rental house in Cotati. “We needed a control-room window,” recalls Rennick, who at the time was studying East Indian music at Sonoma State.

From that spontaneous beginning, Prairie Sun has evolved into one of Sonoma County’s best-kept cultural secrets, a place where art and science meet. Along with thousands of other musicians, Van Morrison, Primus, Faith No More, the Melvins, and surf music creator Dick Dale all have recorded at Prairie Sun or used its post-production facilities. Producer and engineer Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies, Led Zeppelin) does work at PSR, as does Sonoma County artist Tom Waits, whose Bone Machine CD, winner of the 1992 Grammy for Best Alternative release, was co-produced by Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, entirely at Prairie Sun.

In an industry overrun with power lunches, cell-phone palaver, and high-tech sterility, Rennick has managed to maintain a “middle-class, mom-and-pop honesty.” Perhaps because of this, Prairie Sun, named for the Prairie Grass Restoration Project in Rennick’s native Illinois, has accomplished the difficult task of appealing to local bands with small budgets and little experience while garnering established national acts via industry word-of-mouth.

Down ‘n’ dirty in the cottage recording industry

The studio is known as a residential recording facility with a technical bent toward vintage analog-recording equipment as well as state-of-the-art digital technology. “We have a strong blend of old and new. We emphasize unique acoustical environments,” says Rennick.

Take it as a testament to the rolling hills of the west county that a further aspect of Prairie Sun’s niche is location. “It’s a real gem,” says Jeff Sloan, a former studio manager at Prairie Sun for seven years who recently oversaw all production for Waits’ newly completed album set for release this spring on Epitaph Records. “Sonoma County has a lot of little places like that tucked away. [But] it’s a real music retreat–no phone calls or worry about where you’re staying, and you’re 10 feet from the studio.”

IN 1981, after being “encouraged” to relocate by beleaguered neighbors in Cotati, Rennick teamed with Clifton Buck-Kaufman, an art collector and co-founder of the annual Cotati Accordion Festival, and moved Prairie Sun to an old 12-acre chicken ranch just off west Highway 116.

Over the last two decades the sprawling compound where Buck-Kaufman’s family had lived for more than 75 years has evolved into “a full turnkey, multifaceted recording facility.” But the bucolic exterior hardly suggests the high-tech setup within. Cows and horses plod about aimlessly. The grounds, which hold a commanding view of the windswept and cypress-encrusted countryside, are most notable for a pen of Shetland ponies, an enormous garden, and a well-used basketball hoop. The personality of the place could not be more laid-back.

Alongside the half-dozen converted barns, sheds, and cottages that accommodate record-making are three guest houses where musicians often make extended stays with family or entourage.

“A ‘turnkey’ studio means you can do a full-tilt project there,” Sloan says. “You can complete the whole process in one location.”

Briefly, the steps involved in recording begin with rehearsal and pre-production, move to tracking and overdubbing, and end with mixing and mastering. Prairie Sun has three actual studios, each suited for specific needs.

Studio A is the primary mixing room, containing a 48-track mixing board and an overdubbing isolation booth. Studio B is the main tracking, or recording, room: “It’s acousticized and has no parallel walls to eliminate sound trapping,” Sloan explains.

Studio X and the live areas are down in the old cement hatchery rooms, one of which, now called the Waiting Room, is Tom Waits’ preferred acoustic environment.

“[Waits] gravitated toward these ‘echo’ rooms and created the ‘Bone Machine’ aural landscape,” Rennick says.

On this day, occupying a full corner of the cavernous main room of Studio X is an enormous pile of exotic instruments used by Waits while recently recording his yet-to-be-titled new album. The array runs the gamut from the gauche to the ramshackle, the most identifiable objects being huge, old wooden drums, antique carnival pianos, guitars of all shapes and sizes, and a heap of rusty yard tools.

“What we like about Tom is that he is a musicologist. And he has a tremendous ear,” Rennick says. “His talent is a national treasure.”

But in addition to the big names that frequent Prairie Sun, notable local bands such as the Sorentinos, Tarnation, Bracket, Dixie Star, Jumbo, Woodbine, Skatz 007, and even local R&B legend Johnny Otis also have recorded at the Cotati studio.

“If somebody works his day job and has a part-time job, saves every penny that he’s got to come to my studio, I must be as responsible to him as I would want someone to be for me,” Rennick says. “I have the ultimate respect for any artist willing to work on realizing his dreams.”

From the February 18-24, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Heirloom Restaurant

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Heirloom Restaurant

Rare Gem

Crown jewel: Heirloom Restaurant on the Sonoma Plaza offers Old World charm and fine food to rival the region’s best established eateries.

Heirloom inherits locale, collects culinary kudos

By Paula Harris

IT’S A RARE TREAT to discover a restaurant that not only consistently delivers quality dishes but also includes a generous dollop of verve and imagination. Such a find is the aptly named Heirloom Restaurant & Lounge in the historic Sonoma Hotel on Sonoma Plaza. The venerable old corner building, built in 1880, may have had a checkered Wild West past and many incarnations, but for the past couple of months it’s been home to Heirloom.

Inside Heirloom’s dining room, a huge, wonderfully preserved wooden and mirrored Italian bar (built in 1909) is a charming centerpiece. The well-trodden, ancient wooden floor and the butterscotch-colored glass lamps hanging from the high ceiling add to the stately but cozy ambiance.

We tried lunch and then returned to sample dinner. The lunch menu is moderately priced and quite varied. We nibbled on warm crusty bread while soulful Italian vocals from the soundtrack of the movie Big Night flowed from the sound system.

The winter vegetable torte ($7.75) with herbed farmer cheese and market greens was a pretty picture. The generous slab had a brioche-style crust, exposing colorful layers of puréed sweet potatoes, turnips, celery root, and roasted red onion. Also on the lunch menu was grilled sterling salmon ($11.75), a moist, perfectly cooked fish accompanied by fresh baby dandelion greens and a serving of plump appaloosa beans with slivers of green picholine olives and flecks of thyme.

Ready for more, we returned the following evening to find tea lights flickering on the tables. Big Night had been replaced by the slinky-voiced Sade.

We launched into the spinach and frisée salad ($7.25), a tumble of fresh greens in a very light white balsamic vinaigrette with some delicious additions: wafer-thin slices of red d’anjou pears, toasted slivered almonds, and slender triangles of creamy carmody cheese. A winning combo.

The roasted Wolfe Ranch quail ($9.50) was another highly imaginative melange of tastes and textures. A perfectly gold roasted quail was stuffed with bread, leeks, and sage. It was served hot and crisp atop a bed of fresh watercress and garnished with pink, delicately flavored chioggia beets, tangy kumquat slices, and sweet toasted walnuts. The tastes “pinged” and played off each other like some celestial pinball machine of flavors.

The simply titled “egg noodles” ($11.25) turned out to be a rich-tasting pasta concoction with broccoli rabe, toasted garlic, and pancetta. These distinct but harmonizing flavors were heightened with chicken stock, marjoram, and a touch of pumpkin seed oil. The dish was garnished with slivers of aged Parmesan.

The roasted sea bass ($16.50) won further praise. The thick, soft flesh was a luminous white, tender, and moist. The fish rested on a pile of finely shredded cooked cabbage and was garnished with a trio of airy oval-shaped salt cod and parsnip dumplings. The entire dish seemed to be infused with the concentrated brine of the ocean, yet didn’t taste overly salty, perhaps because it was balanced by a sweet onion broth.

Chef Michael Dotson, formerly of Plumpjack restaurant in San Francisco, manages to amplify flavors by layers, depths, and contrasts. He’s obviously not scared to experiment, as most of the dishes are elevated by inspired touches. If we had one quibble, it would be that there are no vegetarian entrées available for dinner, but that could change as we’re told the menu will rotate.

THE DESSERTS ARE delightful. A hazelnut crème brûlée ($5) had an intense nutty flavor augmented by a pair of buttery hazelnut cookies. A warm chocolate soufflé cake ($5) with pieces of candied oranges and a cappuccino crème anglais was a chocoholic’s heaven. And the warm pear crisp ($5) with huckleberry ice cream was short on crumbly topping but long on orange zest aromas.

The fresh farmer cheese ($6) reminded me of restaurants in Lyons that routinely insert a cheese course between the entrée and the dessert. The cheese selection almost always includes fromage blanc (a smooth soft cheese served with sugar and thick cream). I’ve never forgotten the taste.

The farmer cheese used at Heirloom was a bit chalkier in texture, and it included honey instead of sugar, but still had that tangy sweetness and was a close approximation of the French version. The drizzles of thick wildflower honey and warm slices of grilled walnut bread were delicious additions.

The restaurant has a midsize wine list. The Kunde Sonoma Valley viognier ($28) we selected was light and fresh, with a slight floral quality that paired happily with our various courses.

As for the service, everyone we encountered was personable and efficient without being obtrusive–another reason to seek out this fresh new treasure and prepare to feast.

Heirloom Restaurant & Lounge 110 West Spain St., Sonoma; 939-6955 Hours: Lunch, from11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. daily; dinner, from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. daily Food: “American prepared with a French hand,” says the chef. Ambiance: Cozy 19th-century elegance Price: Moderate to expensive Wine list: Adequate selection Overall: ***1/2 (out of 4)

From the February 18-24, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Susie Bright

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Susie Bright

Suddenly Susie


Michael Amsler

Bad attitude: Sexpert Susie Bright gets down and dirty with her wildly eclectic Best American Erotica 1999.

Susie Bright surfs the erotica tidal wave

By Patrick Sullivan

THIS TIME OF YEAR I get inundated with these books about how to be a hot babe in bed,” says Susie Bright, voice dripping with amused contempt. “I’ve got this thing; it’s so funny. It’s a beautifully packaged box that claims to have everything you need in it, from stories to playthings. In fact, I’m going to open it up while I talk to you. I just can’t wait to see this junk.”

With that, the noted author and sexpert, on the phone from her home in Santa Cruz, begins enthusiastically ripping into one of the many offerings of erotica filling up bookstore shelves in time for Valentine’s Day. It’s quickly apparent that this particular item is not up to Bright’s standards. The candle is “cheesy,” the feather “looks like a pigeon dropped it outside,” the scented body oil is “really stinky.” Even the silken cord–included as a naughty nod to light bondage–doesn’t pass muster.

“These things are almost designed to make you fail,” she says. “You know what this silken cord is? It’s like one of those things you tie curtains back with. It’s a drapery accessory. One of these days, I’d like to do a documentary where I take people into an average hardware store and show them how you can get really high-quality S&M equipment for cheaper than anything you can find in a sex-toy shop.”

Bright, who speaks Feb. 23 in Sebastopol, does have a certain amount of self-interest at stake here. The series she edits–The Best American Erotica–is also out on those crowded shelves, fighting for visibility.

The irony is that this explosion of New Wave erotica, much of it written by and for women, might not exist if it weren’t for the work Bright did as a pioneer in the field. The Herotica series she began editing in the late ’80s blazed a trail that has since become a six-lane interstate. Not that Bright is really complaining–she’s pleased as punch that sexy stories have gone mainstream. And she’s not worried about the fate of The Best American Erotica 1999 (Simon & Schuster; $13).

“I have no shame about my book, because my book is not cheesy,” she says with a laugh. “It is not insinuating that if you follow these instructions or techniques that something’s going to happen. I’ve become very anti-technique over the years. I finally realized that the people who are the hottest in bed were hot because they just got so turned on and let their body go with what was motivating them.”

Sex in all its wild variety has long been the focus of Bright’s attention. Of course, that’s true of many of us, but the woman the press has dubbed America’s premiere “X-rated intellectual” has been on a crusade since she was a teenager, fighting with an evangelistic fervor against what she views as puritanism, intolerance, and hypocrisy.

She edited the audacious lesbian magazine On Our Backs and toured the country with her presentation How to Read a Dirty Movie, but she is best known as a provocative writer. Her 1997 bestseller, The Sexual State of the Union, was a withering attack on a rouge’s gallery of anti-pleasure villains, taking on both the “homophobic right wing” and the “sexaphobic left wing.”

Bright has made a career out of defying labels and reconciling apparent contradictions: She’s a pro-porn feminist and a lesbian who sleeps with men, among other things. Above all, she’s committed to frank discussion of human sexuality–which can make her a bit disconcerting to talk to.

In fact, Bright is chock full of advice about how to spend the most romantic (and, for some, the most anxious) holiday of the year, even if you’re spending it alone.

“Why should single people give love up to the yuppies in the hot-air balloon with the champagne flutes?” Bright says. “Maybe you want to get into celebrating the platonic love in your life. Or, like I told one friend of mine who was crying in her soup about being dumped, ‘You’ve always said you wanted to have all these sexual adventures that you couldn’t have when you were with what’s-his-name. Now’s your chance.’ “

Or you could just curl up with a good collection of erotica. But that begs the question of where you find the really good stuff, a problem Bright confronts every year when she pulls together Best American Erotica, which she has edited since its inception in 1993.

“In some ways, as a certain style of stroke book, it’s a failure,” Bright says with a laugh. “I mean, I know what my little favorite turn-ons are, and I can go and pick up those plain brown wrappers and turn to my favorite section and Jill off. I know exactly what will press the button every time. But for sustained reading, you need something that gets to you on emotional, intellectual, soulful levels.”

From the beginning, her series has attracted big-name writers such as vampire queen Ann Rice, Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler, and Nick Baker (author of Vox). But Bright values unknown authors just as much, as long as they can deliver a well-written story with a compelling erotic quality that pulls in the readers, regardless of taste or sexual orientation.

The new book’s 21 eclectic tales offer a bit of everything. There is Anne Tourney giving tips on “How to Come on a Bus.” There is a frustrated Robin superheroically lusting after a deeply repressed Batman. There is gay sex, straight sex, Internet sex, men getting spanked for having Internet sex, first-time sex, sex with razors, and more.

“It’s a bit like travel writing,” Bright says. “You don’t write stories about the beauty and wonder of Hawaii or India just for people who’ve already been there and love it. It’s to let people feel like they’re the armchair traveler, that they get to go to all these places without actually having to do anything and feel some of the thrill, feel the attraction, feel the sympathy.”

In this era of Oval Office trysts, you might think that real life offers erotica some pretty stiff competition. But at the mention of Ken Starr’s infamous tome, Bright merely sniffs in disdain.

“The Meese report was much more sexy,” she says. “One of my favorite sayings was that I masturbated to the Meese report until I passed out. They used real pornography to make their case. They quoted things liberally. But the Starr report was trying to be original, and it stinks..”

So, what’s next for the one-woman sexual revolution? Bright, now 40, admits she’s uneasy about being an aging sexpert in a culture obsessed with youth. But a recent weekend with a group of older nudists reassured her.

“When they had their clothes on, they looked like a bunch of old biddies. When they took them off, it was like, ‘Wow, you’re good looking!’ ” she says with a laugh. “In another 30 years, I’m probably going to be a full-time nudist.”

Susie Bright appears at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 23, at Copperfield’s Books, 138 N. Main St., Sebastopol. For more information, call 823-2618.

From the February 11-17, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Anne Lamott

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Anne Lamott

All about Anne

By Patrick Sullivan



THERE ARE, it’s now clear, two Anne Lamotts. The first we know very well: She’s the acclaimed author of such finely crafted novels as Rosie and Crooked Little Heart–fiction that sears, soothes, and surprises with its keen eye and wry sympathy for human weakness. This Lamott has also graced the world with Bird by Bird, one of the better books on the shelves about the art of writing.

And then there’s the other Anne Lamott, the author of the new Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (Random House; $23).

The book, Lamott’s third autobiographical work, chronicles the author’s long journey toward religion. Raised in a profoundly secular Marin County household, tempted by a number of belief systems during her troubled life, Lamott at last found a home for her spiritual longings at a small interracial Christian church. Traveling Mercies is the story of how she washed ashore in that unlikely place.

The trouble is, this rambling, self-absorbed book is much more about Lamott than it is about spirituality, religious community, or anything else. Like Woody Allen, Lamott is well known for a certain brand of lovable narcissism, but here she has concentrated so obsessively on herself that all else fades into the background.

Early on, Lamott sets us up for disappointment by writing well. The powerful introductory chapter paints a vivid picture of her childhood, her relationship with her atheistic, leftist parents, and her small steps toward faith. The compelling climax comes when she describes how, in the fearful grip of drug and alcohol addiction, she stumbled in a hangover fog into St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, where she was slowly won over by the raw spiritual power of the congregation. The reader is hooked: We’re ready for a thoughtful exploration of the ramifications of religious faith in a secular age.

We don’t get it. Instead, if this book were a broken mirror, shards of glass scattered on the ground, God’s left eye would be reflected in one tiny sliver, and Lamott’s face would be staring out of every other piece.

Now, granted, this is a deeply personal subject. But do we need an entire chapter on one of Anne’s moles, which she thought might be cancerous (it wasn’t)? Do we need another on Anne’s decision to get dreadlocks? Maybe there is a book that could make this material relevant and compelling, but Traveling Mercies isn’t it.

Again and again, the Almighty steps in to save Lamott from such grim disasters as the day her son lost a swim flipper while snorkeling and had to go sit dejectedly on the boat. But Lamott begs God for help, and sure enough–zazaam!–an entertaining mob of seals appears. Then heaven strikes again, though not with a repetitive seal display: “Instead–God must have been in one of her show-offy moods–the next thing we knew, the boat was surrounded on both sides by dolphins, literally hundreds of dolphins leaping out of the waves everywhere you looked. …”

This is a witty book, and we’re never allowed to forget it. Here’s the drill: Someone around Lamott does one of those annoying things–like acting superior or voting Republican–that make up so large a part of life’s rich tapestry. Then the author details her uncensored inner reaction–usually psychotic rage. Finally, the relentless punch line: “I realize I may be a little sensitive on this topic.”

The biggest problem, though, is that Lamott has toured this territory before and done it better. Her relationship with her father, her experiences with dying friends, the difficulty some folks apparently had with her conversion: It all showed up in a different form in Crooked Little Heart. There, through the insulating device of fiction, the reader could focus more on the emotion and less on the writer.

Still, buried deep in Traveling Mercies are some gems: The author’s gift shines through in such places as the devastating scene of her father’s death. It’s enough to give hope to fans of the old Lamott. True talent doesn’t fade this quickly. When the author is ready, she’ll dazzle us again.

Anne Lamott appears at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 17, at the Veterans Building, 282 S. High St., Sebastopol. Proceeds benefit Western Sonoma County Rural Alliance. Tickets are $8 in advance from Copperfield’s Books, $10 at the door. 874-3029.

From the February 11-17, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Talking Pictures

Rocky Road Still Crazy. Radio host Dr. Demento tunes in to the rock-and-roll film 'Still Crazy' By David Templeton Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. His column is not a review, but a freewheeling discusson about life and popular culture. ...
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White Studies

Like Whites on Race The race struggle shifts to white studies. Now what? By Jeff Howe WHEN IT COMES to the humanities, academic disciplines have more in common with sitcom legal beagle Ally McBeal than might be immediately apparent. This is not to make light of higher education; great works of art, great scientific discoveries,...
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The Scoop

We Are Them By Bob Harris BENEATH downtown Chicago lies a city with no addresses, no jobs. Some residents barely have a name. Between the bright lights of the city above and their murky reflection on the river below lies Lower Wacker Drive--a dark underworld surrounded by side streets, parking spaces, and loading docks. That's where...
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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Bridge-Builder In person: Divakaruni speaks Feb. 25 in Santa Rosa and Feb 26 in Sonoma. Divakaruni's fiction spans two worlds By Patrick Sullivan MOVING TO the United States really made me renegotiate my boundaries and, in some ways, even reinvent myself as a woman," says Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. "For many, many immigrant women, it's...
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Spins

Heart Songs Solid gold: Tony Bennett gets royal treatment on new ultradisc reissue. Trio of country, rap, and lounge classics Chris Wall Tainted Angel Cold Spring Records IT'S ONLY FEBRUARY, but Chris Wall's Tainted Angel is already making a strong pitch for country album of the year. Austin-based Wall may not be a mainstream...
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Cottage Recording Industry

Grizzly Bare By Charles McDermid IT'S NOT UNCOMMON to find a disheveled Roger Tschann working behind the mixing desk at his Grizzly Studio in a bathrobe and slippers. Tschann's commute consists of rolling out of bed at his Petaluma home/studio, so his disheveled 'bedhead' has become somewhat legendary. The Grizzly Studio experience is what studio...
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Prairie Sun Recording Studio

Dream Maker Music man: For more than two decades, Prairie Sun owner Mark Rennick has attracted world-class musicians to his Cotati recording studio. Prairie Sun Recording Studio chief Mark Rennick is a musician's best friend By Charles McDermid I'LL TELL YOU TWO THINGS," says recording studio owner Mark Rennick, who is known almost exclusively...
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Heirloom Restaurant

Rare Gem Crown jewel: Heirloom Restaurant on the Sonoma Plaza offers Old World charm and fine food to rival the region's best established eateries. Heirloom inherits locale, collects culinary kudos By Paula Harris IT'S A RARE TREAT to discover a restaurant that not only consistently delivers quality dishes but also includes a generous dollop...
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Susie Bright

Suddenly Susie Michael Amsler Bad attitude: Sexpert Susie Bright gets down and dirty with her wildly eclectic Best American Erotica 1999. Susie Bright surfs the erotica tidal wave By Patrick Sullivan THIS TIME OF YEAR I get inundated with these books about how to be a hot babe in bed," says Susie Bright,...
Read more

Anne Lamott

All about Anne By Patrick Sullivan THERE ARE, it's now clear, two Anne Lamotts. The first we know very well: She's the acclaimed author of such finely crafted novels as Rosie and Crooked Little Heart--fiction that sears, soothes, and surprises with its keen eye and wry sympathy for human weakness. This Lamott has also graced...
Read more
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