Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / Murder Ballads: Dark, Disturbing & Shocking Stories with Author Steven L. Jones [Episode 167]

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Murder Ballads: Dark, Disturbing & Shocking Stories with Author Steven L. Jones [Episode 167] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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He recorded one forty five single called I'm Gonna Murder my Baby, where he's
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announcing to a judge and jury in advance of his own crime. I just
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want to tell you, I'm going to murder my baby if she don't stop
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cheating. And Lion, he was involved with a married woman convinced that she
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was cheating on him, busted into her apartment and he shot her and a
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first responder police officer, and both of them died. Rock and Roll,
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I mean, I'll leave you. You're reading little Hans this. It's time
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to rock and roll roll. I totally booked. Welcome to Booked on Rock,
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the podcast for those about to read and rock online at booked on rock
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dot com, where you can find every episode, along with links to listening
0:46
platforms, exclusive videos, blogs, and the latest rock book releases. Life
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we all know is dictated by death. It looks behind us, our constant
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companion, impelling action and reverie, both languid and tens If many trade belief
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in a literal soul for some notion of psychic essence, few wish to give
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up the secular ghost too soon or unexpectedly, or even at all. So
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it makes sense that some souls dictate songs about it. Try to capture something
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key or novel or timeless about the inevitable in as immediate and a mode of
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a form as music. That's an excerpt from a brand new book by Stephen
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L. Jones called Murder Ballads Old and New, a dark and bloody record.
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The book is an exploration of an age old topic, our human need
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to document the horrors of the world around us. Stephen is here to talk
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about the origins of the murder ballad, what makes up a horror ballad,
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and some of the murder ballads recorded in punk, post punk, alt country,
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and folk by artists including Johnny Cash, The Smiths, Bob Dylan,
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The Clash, the Drive by Truckers, Lou Reid, and some obscure songs
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with stories that are almost hard are true, including a nineteen fifty four song
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which would eerily forecast the doom for the man who created a song called I'm
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Going to Murder My Baby. This story and many more coming up with Stephen
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L. Jones. You can hear a playlist of the murder ballads we talk
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about in this episode on the show notes page. Stephen, Welcome to the
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book. Down Rock podcasts. Thank you. I'm really happy to be here.
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Thanks for having me for the meeting. First, let's start with how
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would you define a murder ballad? Well, the sort of classic definition of
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a murder ballad, which I stray from in the book, but murder ballads
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ed they generally refer to traditional songs about homicide that are based partly or mostly
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in fact, but over time become folklore because they're adapted. Sometimes they're passed
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down for centuries, and a lot of them came from England and Scotland.
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They were collected by a musicologist in book form in the nineteenth century named France's
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Child, So a lot of them are called child ballads. But a lot
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of them came to Appalachia with the Scots Irish because a lot of them were
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Scottish I'm sorry, yeah, the Scots Irish and the English, some Scandinavian
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Irish. It's not just them, but a lot of them originated in Scotland
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and England, came to America and became part of what later would be called
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country music. They were hillbilly songs sung in Appalachia, and there are variants
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like what are sometimes called broadsheet style that are more about current events, like
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you know, songs like stagger Lee about an actual murder that took place,
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you know, in early twentieth century Saint Louis, and they have a kind
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of newspaper like feel. But the really old ones, one of the things
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that's interesting about them is by the time they arrive in our time, because
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people continue to play them and record them, they're often altered by the artists
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and bits and pieces, so you can trace whole genealogies of these songs.
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So that's the standard definition. I expanded it in this book and in some
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of the articles that published it before. There's been a lot of writing about
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murder ballads in the last ten twenty years, and I wanted to focus also
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just on songs of tragedy, songs about unimaginable tragedy and death, so I
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extended the subject to include war, madness, terminal illness, natural disasters,
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coal mining disasters, car wrecks, and even things like funeral customs. And
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to some to reis the inevitability of death and having to face it. So
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that's the not short answer. The traditional songs tend to be collected by musicologists
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and people in universities. You know, but they got a lot of publicity
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in the last around the turn of the century because of the release of something
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called the Anthology of American Folk Music that collected some of these songs, and
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people like Nick Cave and PJ. Harvey did updates, did old songs new
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or did adaptations of these old ideas, and so it had a new currency,
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kind of a revival around the turn of the twenty first century. The
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book comes out of a collection of essays you originally wrote for a blog called
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murder Ballad Monday. So the question is, what was it that drew you
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to these songs initially? What is your fascination with this genre? I should
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clarify first about half of them in their first form were in murder Ballad Monday,
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which was part of the folk journal sing Out. The other ones were
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written specifically for the book. But an answer to the big question, and
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I really wish I had a punchy, sexy answer, like I remember the
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first time I heard a murder ballad that blew me away, And I'm honest
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to God, don't it was a piecemeal thing. I've been immersed in music
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all my life, came from I'm a musical family, My father was a
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choir director of my mother was a violinist, so I was hearing everything from
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classical to jazz, to pop to country when I grew up. I grew
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up in Kentucky, so there was a lot of country music around. So
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one of the inputs was my family. My mother's side of the family were
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country people, descended from dirt farmers in rural Kentucky, and my grandfather was
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a carpentero, made his own guitars. I grew up hearing him. We
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would go visit him in the country from Louisville, the city where I lived,
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and he would play story songs that he had written, and he would
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also play current country hits by Dolly Parton and Porter Wagner and stuff like that.
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And some of these songs would slip in there, and I don't have
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a clear grasp because I was so young, but I know that that kind
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of piqued my interest. And then I was a huge rock and roll fan.
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You know, that was the music of my era. And I was
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also a voracious reader about rock and roll, so I knew about its country
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roots, it's blues roots and stuff like that. It kept coming across mention
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of these songs, especially into relation to in relation to people like Bob Dylan
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and the band, you know, they would mention these weird old folk songs
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and these dark folk songs, and it just piqued my interest. And then
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I mentioned there's this thing called the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music. It
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was compiled by a real odd ball named Harry Smith. It was a record
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collector. He was also an artist and the cultist as a real character at
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the Chelsea Hotel. But he compiled it from records that were recorded in the
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late twenties and early thirties and the early days of you know, commercial recording
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seventy eight rpm, you know, Shellac records. And he included a lot
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of murder ballads and a lot of songs of tragedy in this collection. And
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it was re released on CD in nineteen ninety seven, and that's when it
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became a mania for me any of us who love music, like I'm sure
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we both do. There are touchstones like that where you heard something and you
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were never the same again. Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. It's one
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of those Wizard of Oz moments where the door opens and everything's now in color,
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like I had never imagined that there was such a rich I just thought
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folk music. I had this conception that sort of boring and you know,
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unsophisticated. And then I heard all these gripping, touching, tragic, weird
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songs, many of them about death, and from that point on it really
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did become a kind of mania. And I've always been a history buff and
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somebody who researches genealogy and researching these songs, collecting them, learning about them
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is a lot like genealogy, because they have ancestors, they have cousins,
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and I became really intrigued by mapping that out. One of the things I
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wanted to point out was people still make songs like this. Yeah, this
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part gets right up until the current day. In fact, actually, Stephen,
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you got me to listen to Bob Dylan's JFK song Murder Most Foul.
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Yeah, And I remember when it first came out a few years back.
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That's good, you know, But I was more focused or more preoccupied with
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the length of the song. And then when November came around sixtieth anniversary of
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the JFK assassination, I found myself just thralled with that song. I listened
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to it over and over again last weekend. Yeah. It has that quality
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of almost of like incantation, and a lot of old old time music does.
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And Dylan, you know, is famous for having eighty verses to a
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song. You know, but you know, it becomes hypnotic after a while,
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and you just keep seeing the images. And I think that that event,
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the jfk assassination, is a you know, is is kind of still
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an open wound in this culture. So I thought I was fascinating that he
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you know, that he that he did that. But to what you're saying
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this, Yeah, the book is current goes right up until the current day.
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Yeah. I think the well, the oldest song in the book is
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from the thirteenth century and that's the first chapter, first section, and I
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think the most recent ones from twenty fourteen. There was a twenty seventeen,
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but we had to edit it for length, but the Dylan one is twenty
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twenty or twenty twenty. You're right, You're right. See, I don't
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want I think or did it come out during the COVID. I think it
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came out during COVID. It did come out during COVID. Yeah, yeah,
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and everyone keeps thinking he's done and then he comes out with something else.
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There's an emotional connection to this. The introduction to the book beautifully written,
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quite emotional. Can you share the listeners a bit of that, Your
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background, how your difficult experiences with loss of loved ones inspired to write this.
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I you know, I want to preface it by saying I'm not different
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than anyone else. We all. I mean, that's one of the things
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that drew me to want to write about this, because I've said before,
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I mean, some people they think this is going to be a lurid true
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crime book. Well there's some of that in there, because there's ghastly murders
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in it, but you know, instead of being a book about terrible things
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that happened to people, it's a book about how people cope with terrible things
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that happened to them, and how they turn to music and especially songs which
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are kind of simple and singable and you know, shareable. But for me,
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yeah, I had, like many of us do, just a one
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of these gluts where several tragedies happen in a row or you know, and
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it's so devastating, like, you know, how am I going to get
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through this? I lost my mother three of my mother's sisters and my first
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wife within a two year period, all to cancer. And it happened at
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a point in my life where we had just bought our first house, she
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had just been sworn as an attorney. We were started, we were going
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to start a family. So it's just the devastating experience. And I mentioned
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it in an introduction because it remains to this day. This happened, you
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know, I'm getting up there. This was a while ago, but it
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was the most life changing experience I ever had, and it's still with me.
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And it was the first time I had to rethink everything in my life
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and really confront had on what we don't like to which is death and the
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agony of watching a loved one perish when there's nothing we can do to help,
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which all of us eventually experience. You know, it changed me and
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I spent a lot of years I made more personal art. I'm also a
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painter, and I made more personal art, and I just tried to kind
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of tackle this notion of generations of family and of loss and how we cope.
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And it helped me feel a kinship with other people. You know,
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so we feel so distant and alien and you know, I've always fervently believed
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if we could cut through a lot of external stuff, we have far more
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incommon, you know, than what separates us and what you know, what
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do we have more in common than laws? I mean, everyone has to
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suffer that. So yeah, that definitely was one of the things that led
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me to poke into this subject and to talk about it. And there was
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you know, by the time I finished it, it took you know,
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a little over two years to write. You know, there was a real
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feeling of closure. Yeah, but you'd never done with this subject. But
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I had tackled a big chunk of it and felt like I've made peace with
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it. You did talk about the songs going back to I think you said
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with the thirteen hundreds, I started the whole book with the earliest song.
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It's a song called Fatal Flower Garden. Yeah, that's where I was going.
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Yeah, the very first murder ballad. That's the one, right,
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I mean, that's the earliest one in the book. It's not the earliest
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book, okay, Because I wondered how far back does this go? Then
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Francis Child, the guy I mentioned who collected these in this five volume massive
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set, his go back to around the same era the Middle Ages or the
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earliest ones that we know of, and a lot of the you know,
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a whole bunch of the earliest songs and the Child collection of songs are actually
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about Robin hood. But yeah, the Fatal Flower Garden is derived from a
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twelfth century or thirteenth century ballad that was probably sung by a troubadour you know,
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who traveled from you know, town to town, and it was originally
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called Little Sir or Little Saint Hugh. It's a ghastly story about a little
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boyer's murdered. It's just bizarre to find it on a hillbilly recording from like
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nineteen thirty sung by a duo I think from North Carolina. Nelstone's Hawaiians.
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They're called Hawaiians because they there was a trend at the time to do hillbilly
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folk music with steel guitar, so it sounded like the Pacific Islands. It's
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the song even more haunting because there's this luau feel and then they're singing about
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this boy who's tempted into a yard because he throws his ball in there,
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and then there's a jump cut in the song where he's on his dying bed
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and he's like dictating his last wishes. It's an example of how these murder
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ballads sometimes have sections of them removed or facts removed, so by the time
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we hear them they're even more mysterious and weird. But it's actually rooted in
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this story about little Saint hu or Sir Hugh, and it's a blood libel
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murder. It was one of these horrible times in the Middle Ages where Jews
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were accused of killing a boy and all this madness descended on the town and
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they, you know, they hanged all these co conspirators because a Jewish merchant
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admitted under torture, of course, that he had committed the murder. And
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it was part of a you know, a crime, you know, a
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Jewish conspiracy to kill gentile children. So it's a horrible, horrible story.
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But for me, there's just something absolutely bizarre about the fact that it ends
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up centuries later. A version of it ends up in a you know,
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a nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties hillbilly side that's collected that's collected by Harry Smith
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for the And Harry Smith was a smart enough guy. He saw the ironies
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of these things He was an animator and inventor. He designed this set of
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songs like a kind of a cult document. I kind of cherry picked some
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of the songs. I want to ask you about one. We go to
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the mid fifties four and this is I'm going to Murder My Baby by a
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Memphis bluesman, Pat Hare. Is that the present Pat Hair? You write?
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This song from nineteen fifty four proved prescient in remarkable ways. Can you
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talk about this song how this would be a prediction of what was to come
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sonically in rock music, but also how it forecasts the doom for the man
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who created the song? Absolutely? Yeah, Pat Hare. His given name
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was Auburn Hair, which is the worst blues name I can think of,
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next to Halan Wolf and the Sonny Boy Williamson and Blind Willie mctel and so
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forth. But his grandmother mercifully gave him the nickname Pat. But he was
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basically it was a terrific blues accompanist. He didn't do a lot of sides
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on his own, but he played with Allan Woolf, with Sonny Boy Williamson,
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the second most famously with Muddy Waters. In fact, he's on Muddy's
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Muddy at Newport album. That's him. He replaced Jimmy Rodgers Muddy Waters famous
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guitar player. But he was a drinker, and you know, like a
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lot of cases we all know about, he was amiable and sober, and
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when he was drunk, he was a real pistol. The thing that's kind
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of fascinating about it, there are two things that are most interesting to me.
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By the early fifties, Sam Phillips, the musical genius who gave us
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Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash and you know,
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also found a lot of blues talent. But he hired Hair to work for
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Son Records in Memphis as an accompanist. Hair did so, and he recorded
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one forty five single while he was there under his own name that Phillips never
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released, and I've never been able to find anything that explains why. But
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if you listen to it, you can kind of figure it out. It
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was this just incendiary electric blues song called I'm Gonna Murder My Baby. They're
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two remarkable things about it, which you alluded to, that I write about.
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The first is that this came out the same year as Elvis' is that's
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all right, mama, which is the beginning of the rockabilly rock and roll
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era, and it sounds like Hendrickson led Zeppelin because he's got his little ant
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cranked up to the point where it starts. The sonics are just astonishing,
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and he does these guitar runs that look forward to hard rock and heavy metal,
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but it's nineteen fifty four. And then on top of it, he
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sings this outrageously dark comic monologue where he's announcing to a judge and jury in
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advance of his own crime. I just want to tell you I'm going to
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murder my baby if she don't stop cheating and lion. Now, there are
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lots of cheating and lion songs in the blues, in country music, rock
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and roll, rap, you know, but this one is one of the
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darker ones that you'll find, especially in the fifties. And I think Sam
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Phillips must have just kind of thought this is a little too out there,
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you know, so he held it back. But then the second thing that's
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so interesting about it is that the tragic irony that he fulfilled the idea of
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the song, his drinking got worse. He was often on the lamb running
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from warrants from state to state, but Muddy wanted to keep hiring him because
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he was a good guitar player. And he ended up in Minneapolis at some
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point, and he was involved with a married woman. He was convinced that
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she was cheating on him, and deep in his cups, he took some
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shots at her window one day and then finally busted into her apartment and he
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shot her and a first responder, a police officer, and both of them
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died. And he claimed that I did not even remember it later because he
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was so drunk. He actually got sober in prison, he went to AA,
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he quit drinking. He played in the band, the prison band,
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which was called Sounds Incarcerated, which I think is a funny detail. And
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he actually, yeah, he was such a model prisoner that he was probably
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going to get paroled. But he died I think of cancer when he was
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just in his fifties. But it's an incredible story, and for a long
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time it was a hard track to find. You can find it on YouTube
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now, but it's still kind of startling to hear. It's because it's just
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a really severe kind of larynx shredding vocal with this guitar that just you know,
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you can't believe is being recorded in nineteen fifty four. I mean it
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sounds like the Stooges or you know, led Zeppelin or something. You know,
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A full ten fifteen years later. The book Down Rock Podcasts will be
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back after this. There's a song in the book from nineteen eighty four by
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the Smiths called Suffer Little Children. This song was inspired by a true event
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and one that clearly affected one of the songwriters, which is Morrissey. The
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Moore's Murders between eighteen sixty three nineteen sixty five in Northwest England, five children
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were murdered by a demented couple, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Many of
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the victims were only a few years older than Morrissey, who was born in
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nineteen fifty nine. This would seem to be a carthartic song for Morrissey to
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sing. Do you feel that that is what compels an artist to write a
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murder ballad? Is there usually a strong personal connection to the song? It
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varies. I think that there's got to be something. I mean, there
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are people who you know obviously recording a you know, a song that's about
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something sensational can also you know, get you noticed, and certainly there's folks
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and especially in rock and roll, tried as much in that instance. You
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know, one listen to the song makes it completely clear. It's utterly sincere.
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It's a haunting song. It was one of the first songs that Morrissey
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and Johnny Marr put together for the Smiths. And he was from Manchester and
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this was in Manchester and the moors is where these killings took place. Like
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you said, they were committed by this deranged couple. Ian Brady was a
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Nazi sympathizer and a sadist and was diagnosed to psychopath in Britain. But Mayra
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Hendley was just a secretary, real average young woman. She came from an
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abusive background. I don't want to oversimplify, you know, how something like
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this could happen, because part of what makes the songs haunting is the fact
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that we just can't understand how these things can happen. But yeah, they
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coaxed children into their car, assaulted and killed them and buried them on the
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moor and then they would go back and have picnics as really ghastly. There's
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a song by Richard Thompson that I write about in the book too. Both
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he and Steven Morrissey grew up with this in the background, overheard at dinner
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tables with their parents, and saw the scary pictures of the police and all
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these dogs looking on the moor for the bodies and stuff like that clearly haunted
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them. You know. Morrissey's lyric that he wrote for It's very you know,
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he was a guy influenced as much by romantic poets like Keats and Wordsworth
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as he was by the New York Dolls. It's a really haunting song where
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the children themselves sing to Myra Hendley, we will haunt you when you laugh.
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You might say we're a team. You might sleep, you might sleep,
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you might sleep, but you will never dream. That's like a purse
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from the victims, you know. And it's a song that its loveliness is
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in dire conflict with its subject matter, which often, you know, makes
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a song more haunting. So the next question is from a listener's perspective,
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maybe it's the same thing. Is it any different from the artists who wrote
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it? Is there something personal that we're tapping into when we're hearing new songs,
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These types of songs. I think every bit as much as we're fascinated
24:21
with death. Jim Morrison was where guy was fascinated with death. Yeah,
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well, rock and roll was one of the places, certainly in the sixties
24:29
and then into the punk era, where you were sort of allowed to go
24:33
to the dark side. But I think, you know, if you look
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at popular culture, I mean, Stephen King sells more books than anybody in
24:41
the country. Probably it's funny. I like I said, some people assume
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this will be a lurid book, and I don't want to judge anybody.
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I'm interested. I'm drawn to dark things, and I grew up with horror
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movies and scary comic books and stuff like that, and I love all that
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stuff too, But I think that there is a need. People have,
25:00
a genuine human need to pursue that shadow side of life in order to tolerate
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the kinds of often violent reversals of fortune they're going to face. I can't
25:14
remember. I just heard somebody say it somewhere, maybe it was in a
25:15
TV show or a movie, but he said, I'd like scary movies because
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they make real life less scary, absolutely, and they're safe. It's like
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a fairy tale. You know, it starts with once upon a time and
25:29
ends with they lived happily and very after. Even if it ends horribly,
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it's just a movie. It's just a damn movie. So it gives you
25:36
a safe outlet. I think that's a real important part of these songs.
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It gives you a safe outlet to face some of our worst fears and some
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of our most traumatic emotions. And I think it's it's essential to have a
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way to make stories about things, and you know, not to go too
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far into it. But I would also say that the thing that makes a
25:57
dark story or a tragic story tolerable in music, for example, is a
26:03
good tune. You make some beauty out of it. You know, a
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lot of modern art confuses people because they say it looks frenzied and crazy and
26:11
ugly. And you know, when I used to teach at the Art Institute
26:15
of Chicago, I would say, well, that's because the period in which
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it was made was pretty awful in a lot of ways, and people are
26:22
trying to make as best they can something aesthetic out of that chaos. And
26:27
I think that you can apply the same thing to you know, a fine
26:32
art painting to a John Carpenter Halloween film, or to one of these dark
26:37
songs. Let's get to the drive by Trucker song two Daughters in a Beautiful
26:41
Wife from two thousand and eight. This reminds me of something that happened nearby
26:47
in Connecticut, the Cheshire home invasions. Yes, okay, yeah, that's
26:52
what I thought about, right near me, next town over. I remember
26:56
that. One of the changes that we ended up making in the book.
26:59
The my publisher, Farrell House, wonderful publisher of kind of off the beaten
27:03
track edgy books, but they decided, you know, let's avoid first person
27:10
accounts and so forth and stick to more objective voice in the book. Because
27:14
I lived in Richmond when the murders happened, that inspired Pat Hood of drive
27:18
by Truckers to write that song to Daughters and a Beautiful Wife, And so
27:23
I didn't include any personal content, but it really affected me very strongly that
27:27
one because I was a part of the art and the music community in Richmond,
27:33
and Kathy and Brian Harvey were very well known and very well loved within
27:37
that community. They had two small children. Brian was in a band called
27:41
House of Freaks, who long before the White Stripes had a like drummer guitar
27:48
duo thing going with kind of a rockabilly, you know, kind of sweaty,
27:53
punky rockabilly sound. But he had pretty much quit music to raise a
27:57
family. And you know, they lived in a really nice, you know,
28:02
sort of middle class neighborhood in Richmond. Brian inadvertently left his door ajar
28:07
one morning. It was New Year's Day. They were going to have friends
28:11
over for a party on New Year's Day and a couple of ex cons were
28:15
cruising in a van looking for a house to rob, and they slipped in.
28:19
It was a home invasion. They slipped in, They held the family,
28:22
tied them up, and held them captive in the basement. It just
28:26
turned into this chaotic nightmare. They used a hammer and a knife to bludgeon
28:33
and stab them to death. They were helpless and had to watch each other
28:37
die. And then they stole a wedding ring, a laptop. It was
28:41
just an unfocused, like we were saying, a moment ago, one of
28:45
these crimes where you want to find a reason to make it more tolerable,
28:49
you know. But Pat Hood, who's a great guy. I'm a huge
28:52
drive by truckers fan. I interviewed him about it, and he just said
28:57
that it so disturbed because he just had his first child when this happened,
29:03
and he knew the Harvey's. They were not close, but he knew them,
29:06
and he saw it on the TV and it just blew his mind and
29:08
he just had to do something. And you know, he's a composer,
29:12
musician, songwriter, so he wrote a song and he wrote it in the
29:17
you know, I think he's an agnostic. He's not a religious guy,
29:21
but he wrote it from the point of view of a father in heaven who
29:26
doesn't know why he's there, which is actually an old country motif you find
29:29
in a lot of songs there are letters from Heaven songs. But he adapted
29:33
that idea and you know, wrote this very poignant song about how in heaven
29:40
maybe everything is Saturday morning, two daughters and a beautiful wife just romping with
29:44
your kids. He said that was the most peaceful image he could think of,
29:48
was the family ramping on the bed, care free, and that he
29:52
had to write a song with that image in it in order to process the
29:57
grief of that's what happened. Now. Initially he was hesitant to put the
30:02
song out, but there was something that ultimately eased his concerns. He was
30:06
hesitant to talk to me too. Patterson. He's a real approachable guy.
30:11
I mean, he's the kind of rock star you like, who like you
30:12
can talk to him after a gig or whatever, and so I was able
30:15
pretty easily when I started writing that to contact him. But he told me
30:21
after the interview that he felt relieved because he was really nervous that I was
30:25
going to write some tawdry, ugly thing, and that was a real concern
30:30
for him and for me. In this book, there's a funny thing that
30:34
happens with a tragedy. As we get some distance from it, we can
30:38
joke about it. You know, the Lizzie Borden house where she asked her
30:42
parents to death in the nineteenth century, is now an airbnb, and you
30:48
know they advertise it on Halloween. You can go to the murder rooms and
30:52
sleep there and so forth. And some people find that distasteful, but I
30:56
don't think people get really upset because it was long ago enough. There are
31:00
a few tragedies in this book that were recent enough that I really really wanted
31:04
to be careful to make sure that I was respectful, that I didn't pull
31:11
any punches about what happened, but that I also you know, I just
31:15
wanted, like pat Hood did, to be cognizant of the fact that these
31:19
are real people. You know, these are real, precious, unique lost
31:25
souls, and something happened to them that's just unforgivable, you know, or
31:29
unimaginable. We did mention Dylan's twenty twenty song by that is twenty twenty the
31:34
murder most followed. There's another song in the book from nineteen sixty five,
31:38
Desolation Row, that's among his greatest songs. The epic final track on his
31:42
album Highway sixty one revisited an album that you aptly describe as a careening folk
31:48
masterpiece. You spotlight the opening lyrics, and I want to ask you about
31:52
this. The lyrics are they're selling postcards of the hanging, they're painting the
31:56
passports brown, the beauty part is filled with sailors, the circus is in
32:01
town. Can you talk about these as you write curious words and why they
32:07
stand out to you? They stood out to me for years just it's just
32:10
a great writer. And wow, that's a kind of you know, there's
32:13
this sort of carnival feel of like, you know, even if you don't
32:15
know exactly what the images are and what they mean, it's just evocative.
32:21
But I thought, you know, what a callous image they're selling postcards of
32:23
the hanging, you know, I thought it was just like about a kind
32:27
of callous commentary on consumerism at its worst, you know, hawking postcards of
32:32
an execution. Later I found out it came from life. There's a little
32:38
known phenomenon. It's better known now, but it was a chapter of American
32:43
history that has just been you know, kind of put into the memory hole
32:46
for a long time. It's the phenomenon of lynching postcards and what that means
32:53
is in the nineteenth century, up until the thirties, it was a common
32:59
practice lynching. Of course, we now have a better idea how common lynching,
33:04
primarily of black Americans, was, But they used to take photographs and
33:08
distribute them as postcards. They would pose people beside these miserably abused and murdered,
33:19
accused criminals who never went to trial. They'd bust them out of jail
33:22
and hang them from a lamppost or something. They're mostly black men. I'm
33:27
in a quick aside. There's a collection of these that were put together for
33:30
an exhibit and it's called Without Sanctuary. It's the one book in my library
33:35
I can't look at. I just can't look at these pictures. And it's
33:39
not because they're so gruesome. It's because I see human beings like me smiling,
33:45
laughing, pointing at this, and I just it's another example where it's
33:52
just so hard to take. I don't know what to I don't know what
33:54
to do with it. But Dylan, his father lived just down the block
34:00
from a place where one of these lunching postcards was made in Duluth, this
34:06
seaport Duluth. Everyone knows dilings from Himing, Minnesota, but his father was
34:10
from Duluth. I forget the year. I think it was about nineteen ten,
34:15
but the circus came to town and a couple of teenagers claimed that they
34:21
had been attacked and robbed by black rousedabouts. Anyway, a mob descended and
34:27
dragged these people to I think it was fifteen sixteen black men, to a
34:32
kind of kangaroo trial, and they decided that three of them had done this.
34:37
It later turned out it was completely dismissed in a civil investigation later,
34:43
but they strung them up on a lamppost and took a picture. And Dylan
34:45
learned about this from his father. Well, once you know that that quality
34:51
of the song, which is kind of a phantasmagoria about American culture, and
34:55
a lot of it, you know, is darkly humorous, it really contact
35:00
xctualizes it in a dark way. And Dylan, of course, in his
35:04
early music especially, wrote a lot of socially conscious anthems, like the Lonesome
35:08
Death of Hattie Carroll and Masters of War. You know, we all know
35:13
those songs. By the time he did Desolation Row, he was moving away
35:16
from that. He wanted to write more visionary stuff that was less explicit,
35:21
and he didn't want to just be a spokesperson, you know, for kind
35:24
of a political spokesperson through his generation. But it's not like his conscience went
35:29
away. He still cared deeply about civil rights and stuff like that. But
35:34
yeah, that I mentioned that in a chapter about lynching songs, and the
35:37
two most famous that I talk about are miss Otis Regrets by Cole Porter and
35:44
Strange Fruit, which most people know that Billie Holliday did such a devastating version
35:49
of for so many years. My favorite things are music, art and film.
35:53
I mean, I just can and I love books. But you know
35:55
that things will stick with me. Something I hear, something I see.
36:00
And it used to be he had to go to libraries and you know,
36:04
sift through all sorts of records and stuff. The Internet certainly makes it easier
36:08
sometimes to find what Sure does. Well, this is what I'm doing as
36:12
we speak, because there's a lyric in Murdermost Foul that gives me the chills,
36:16
and that is the one he says riding in the back seat with my
36:22
wife, and then the following line is headed straight on into the afterlife.
36:30
Yeah, and just an aside, the chapter where I talk about that song
36:34
and about jaff JFK songs, I build it around a really weirdly read song
36:39
or an unusual for him. Yeah, that's by you in my mind.
36:44
That was another one I want to ask you about, which, Yes,
36:45
the day John Kennedy died, and it's from The Blue Mask, which was
36:50
kind of his return to form in the eighties. He got sober, he
36:54
got married. After years of being sort of the poster boy for a decadent
37:00
rock and roll behavior, he said, I want to be a poet I
37:02
want to be, you know, because he always had literary aspirations for rock
37:06
and rolland so he made this terrific record called The Blue Mask, and it
37:10
just every song is like a chapter in a book about, you know,
37:15
where he's at at that point in his life or what he's feeling and thinking
37:19
about. And the oddest one is this this kind of plaintive ballad called the
37:24
Day John Kennedy died, where he in typical low sort of atonal phrasing,
37:31
sort of recites this lyric about he goes back and forth between his own memories
37:37
at Syracuse University. Like so many boomers, he remembers exactly where he was
37:42
when it happened, when the Kennedy assassination happened, and then he contrasts that
37:46
with really moving lines about you know, I dreamed, He starts all these
37:52
lines with I dreamed there was a point to life. I dreamed that all
37:54
these idealistic things that clearly Kennedy meant to him and so many others from that
38:00
generation that was shattered when he when he died. I didn't mention it in
38:05
the book, but the quote that you just gave from murder must foul reminds
38:10
me that the next song on that I think it's the next song sequenced on
38:14
that song. Maybe not, but I think it is is the heroine,
38:17
and it's a ballad. It's sort of indistinct or unclear who it's about,
38:23
but it's about this woman he admires, and he later acknowledged it was Jackie
38:28
Kennedy. And of course Jackie. This is before I was born, but
38:34
I know the images. I know the you know her with the blood spattered
38:37
dress and and you know just how strong she had to be and that.
38:43
But there's something very moving to me about somebody like Louie, who could be
38:47
so cantankerous, such a flat You know. I love his music and I
38:53
wouldn't have wanted to be in a room with him, but there's something very
38:57
moving to have him be so vulnerable that John Kennedy's death really really crushed him.
39:02
One song in the book that I'm super familiar with, but I'm not
39:06
sure how many people are. It's just it's a it's a crazy story.
39:09
It's the Charles Manson song ceased to exist and how this becomes a Beach Boys
39:14
song. Yeah, well, what's the story behind this? One chair for
39:17
those who may not be aware of this one. The middle right about the
39:23
middle of the book is the longest section in the book, and it's called
39:27
Charles Manson Murders the Sixties, and I walk into going to great detail.
39:30
It focuses on a song by Sonic Youth called Death Valley sixty nine and a
39:36
Neil Young's song called Revolution Blues. But I also mentioned that song. It's
39:40
hard to know how much of the Manson lore people know, but Charles Manson,
39:46
you know, when he was getting out of prison in nineteen sixty seven,
39:50
his plan was he and his followers, the family. They called it
39:52
Operations Superstar. Manson had learned to play guitar. He was actually taught by
39:59
Alvin Creepy Carpas of the mab Barker Gang when he was in prison how to
40:02
play guitar. He was a competent guitarist, a competent singer. That's all
40:07
I can give him. Yeah, and that other guy, by the way,
40:10
is in a lot of those documentaries. Alvin was his name, Alvin
40:14
Alvin Carpas his nickname was Creepy. Yeah. He was excited by the Beatles
40:19
and he said, well, when I get out, I'm going to go
40:21
to the hedonistic wonderland of California, collect followers, and I'm going to become
40:25
a rock and roll superstar. Before the murders happened, before the Tate La
40:31
Bianca killings happened in nineteen sixty nine, he was a fixture in the Hollywood
40:37
Topanga Boulevard, etc. Area. Neil Young ran into him. A lot
40:43
of people did. But Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, you know the
40:46
Wilson family. We all think, no, now, we're a troubled family.
40:51
They had an overbearing father who was abusive towards them, and Dennis always
40:55
had drug and alcohol problems and so forth. It seemed to have trouble figuring
40:59
out what's a healthy place to be. And he came home. He picked
41:04
up a couple hitchhikers in the middle of the hippie days that he didn't know
41:07
were members of the Manson family because no one knew what the Manson family was.
41:13
He brought him home to his fancy bachelor pat on Hollywood Boulevard. Then
41:16
he went to a Beach Boys session. When he came back, there was
41:21
this weird little Jesus like guru standing in I think he was standing in the
41:25
driveway the Wizard. He's the wizard, and he saw him and thought,
41:30
this guy looks dangerous, and he said, you're not going to hurt me,
41:31
are you. Anyway, long story short, the Manson family ended up
41:37
crashing at Dennis Wilson's place for quite some time, and first Wilson was caught
41:42
up in it and thought, oh, I'll try to help promote Manson's music.
41:46
And there are stories about them actually recording and Brian Wilson Mike Love being
41:51
there, you know, and with the Manson family recording that, Dennis said
41:54
that they erased the tapes. But anyway, yeah, long story short.
42:00
This went on for a while and the family helped themselves to his wardrobe,
42:04
his cars. He was losing, he was hemorrhaging money. He eventually got
42:08
so scared of the family that he just left and I think he had his
42:13
manager throw them out. But Charlie was really angry at him because he had
42:17
said he was going to help his music career. One of the main reasons
42:21
he was pissed was because Dennis had adapted his song Ceased to Exist Charles Manson
42:29
composition, which was originally I think in the book I call it an ego
42:31
fried anthem to ego death or something. Yeah, I love the way you
42:36
were died that. Yeah, the death of the ego. Yes, that
42:38
was a big part of the acid thing, you know, the Eagle must
42:42
die. It had sadistic overtones. It was you cease to exist and I
42:46
will dominate you. Dennis Wilson transformed it into a love song, an unlikely
42:52
love song, by changing it to cease to Resist and called it never Learned
42:58
Not to Love. And he actually recorded it with the Beach Boys. It's
43:02
the B side of their single Bluebirds Over the Mountain from a year before the
43:07
Tate La Bianca murders. Dennis took sole writing credit, which I think is
43:13
probably justified because they took a lot of his money. But he terrorized Dennis
43:19
Wilson, extorted money out of him, He threatened his child. He delivered
43:22
thirty caliber I think bullets to his mailbox and stuff like that and really scared
43:27
Wilson pretty badly. Wilson said he was tremendously relieved that he was later arrested
43:31
for murder. But that song, it was even on the Mike Douglas Show.
43:37
If anyone's old enough to remember, the Mike Douglas Show. You can
43:40
find that clip on YouTube, and Dennis is in hippie clothes and he cruons
43:45
this song with sincerity and it's just one of the creepiest artifacts of the nineteen
43:50
sixties. You can find the first version of that. Part of the book
43:54
I ever wrote was actually first published years ago in murder Ballad Monday. And
44:00
when it came out, Manson was alive. You know, he died of
44:04
cancer several years ago, and I thought, you know, he's got a
44:08
lot of followers still. I wonder if he's going to read this thing that
44:12
I wrote about him. And I knew that Ed Sanders of the Thugs,
44:16
he wrote a book about Manson called The Family, and Manson was so angry
44:22
with things that he said in it that he mailed him a cow tongue.
44:25
Sanders found this wet box in his mailbox and as a cow tongue in it.
44:30
And after that article came out, I went to the mailbox with some
44:35
trepidation for a while, just fearful that Charlie would someone in the news of
44:43
his birth came. You were relieved, Yes, yes, the book down
44:49
Rock Podcasts will be back after this A couple more songs to wind down the
44:55
story of the Clash song Somebody Got Murdered from nineteen. You know, this
45:00
is interesting because this is not only about a true event, but an event
45:04
that literally just happened, right, I mean Joe Strummer, Yeah, being
45:07
asked to write a song for a film and then he saw something. I
45:10
closed the book with that song. I'm a huge Cash Clash Cash fan too,
45:15
Johnny Cash. We'll get to Johnny Cash too. Yeah. And for
45:20
me, Joe Strummer was one of those you know, John Lennon type deaths,
45:25
just somebody. He kind of lost his way after the Clash for a
45:30
while, but then he was really coming back and he was doing a kind
45:32
of world music thing. There was that great moment in the movie about him
45:37
where he said, yeah, I used to make fun of hippies and then
45:39
suddenly I realized I am a hippie. Yeah. Yes, So there was
45:45
a more expansive warmer Joe coming around. But anyway, so big Clash fan.
45:52
But yeah, San Denista Clash fans will know the Clash put out London
45:55
Calling in seventy nine eighty, which was this dynamic, brilliant album, and
46:00
then they're like, well, they sold it as it was priced as a
46:05
single, and they said, well, let's do one better. Let's put
46:07
up a triple album, and they put out a triple album called Sandinista.
46:10
Well, inevitably you're going to have some filler you run out of your best
46:15
songs. So it's a weird record. It's very much the white album of
46:20
the Clash. You know. It's got some great songs and then some really
46:22
strange songs. But tucked in the middle of it is this song called Somebody
46:28
Got Murdered, which feels like it's going to be a kind of punk anthem,
46:31
but it's really strikingly. It has a very tragic feeling of pathos about
46:37
it because it's just about it's about stumbling on a body and then just asking
46:43
questions about how did this happen? And it was, as you alluded to,
46:45
it happened. It was based on an actual event. Strummer had been
46:50
asked by William Friedkin to write a a like a hard kind of punk number
46:55
for a movie he was making, and Strummer said okay and got off the
47:00
phone. And the first thing he does is he goes to a parking kiosk
47:06
in London and there's this young guy who's just been I can't remember he was
47:10
shot or stabbed to dead, but he's laying in a pool of blood beside
47:14
the kiosk. And apparently, as with some of the other crimes that we've
47:17
been talking about, it was like for five pounds, you know, they
47:22
took like a five pound note and killed the guy. And that inspired he
47:25
wrote the lyric immediately, and then he turned the lyric over to Mick Jones,
47:30
you know, his then songwriting partner, who wrote the He wrote the
47:32
music and sang it, and it's the song is written as a kind of
47:37
series of thoughts, you know, And the most moving thought that he has
47:40
for me is, you know, he says at one point, I've been
47:44
very hungry, but not enough to kill. And for me, that's the
47:47
very soulful philosophical quality of Joe Strummer, because he's trying to put himself in
47:52
the in the shoes of this killer, and he's thinking, maybe he was
47:57
desperate, Maybe he was he was hungry, maybe that five pounds seemed like
48:01
the only way he could survive. But for me, that's the line that
48:06
just gets me every time, I've been very hungry but not enough to kill.
48:09
That's the story of that song. The late great Joe Strummer and the
48:14
late great Johnny Cash too. One last song to ask about, which is
48:16
Johnny Cash's cover of the Nine Inch Nails song Hurt from two thousand and two.
48:21
What do you think it is about his version that stands up so much
48:25
more than the original, which I love the original from Nine Inch Nails,
48:30
but it's there's something about that Johnny Cash version. Well, I think it's
48:34
telling that Trent Resner says it's not his song anymore. I mean, Resnor
48:38
himself acknowledged that Cash he owns the song now in death, and he wasn't
48:44
bitter about it. He said that when he first heard it, it sounded
48:47
alien to him because it was a very personal song that Resner had written,
48:52
I think about his own heroin addiction and a breakup in his life. And
48:57
he was a fairly young man when he wrote this, you know, and
48:59
so it's a you know, that kind of gloomy gothic industrial sound, a
49:04
sort of tailor made I think for angst full young people. Nothing wrong with
49:09
that. We all had something like that, and it doesn't mean that you
49:13
don't like it later, But the Cash took that song, and if you
49:16
don't know the story, this was for the Rick Rubin produced American recordings that
49:22
Cash did late in his life. It revitalized his career. And the thing
49:25
that Rubin did that was so smart was two things. He stripped Cash down
49:31
to just cash in the most simple instrumentation so that incredible voice could dominate.
49:38
And the other thing he did was he fed him songs. He fed him
49:43
hip hop, he fed him depeche Mode. You know, he's like,
49:46
have you heard this song? And Johnny was Johnny Cash was open enough to
49:51
hearing new sounds that he would listen to these CDs that Rubin would burn for
49:54
him. And one of the songs on there was Resner's Hurt, which on
49:59
the nine Inch Nails version is a kind of dark gothic, very dramatic song,
50:05
and it is powerful. But Cash took it. He changed one word
50:08
and left the whole rest of the lyric intact, but he made it.
50:13
He turned it from a song about like a young person's angst into a song
50:19
about an old man facing death. And then it's it's an absolute rarity and
50:24
that it has a video that goes with it that is absolutely perfect for the
50:30
song. And just is good in its way, has cash you know,
50:35
sitting at a banquet table with a guitar, it looks weak, he's frail.
50:39
He's, oh yeah, it's it's shocking to see because a man looking
50:44
back at his life, you know, just some regret. Well, my
50:46
Empire of Dirt is the one that really, I mean those lyrics had to
50:50
have spoken to him, because he was looking back like was it all worth
50:54
it? Well? And he's and he's at the you know, there's it's
50:57
interspersed with footage when he was young and robust and some and healthy. And
51:01
then we see the House of Cash, this you know kind of this you
51:05
know country Western museum that's just in a shambles with broken gold records, and
51:09
so that line that Resnor wrote and you can have it all my empire of
51:14
dirt, you know. I mean he was a Christian, and so partly
51:17
he's saying, you know, partly I think he's lamenting, feeling like he
51:22
wasn't his truest self or his best self while he was alive. But I
51:27
think he's also you know, just looking on his past and everything the accumulated
51:31
and thinking what's it worth? You know? All? Yes, the money,
51:35
the fame, the in the end what matters, and also in the
51:39
end, what part of what moves me about that song and the video is
51:44
also just that in the end world the same doesn't matter what you have.
51:47
In the end, you know, we're all going to face death and the
51:51
unknown of what happens after death. And of course, one of the most
51:54
poignant of shots in that video is of you know, his bedrock partner of
52:00
of so many years, June Carter, standing on the stairs at one point
52:02
watching him, and she's her face flutters with emotion, and it doesn't feel
52:07
corny or exploitative. It just feels incredibly emotionally direct and soulful and a great
52:16
man at the end, debilitated and his body he had all these ailments,
52:22
but there's such you know. His daughter rose Anne said it was something like
52:29
it. You know, it was a brilliant, gripping work of art.
52:30
And how could anyone, how could anyone complain with that about that because because
52:35
some people thought it showed him too frail. But for me, the very
52:38
brave and extremely moving song and I wanted to close the whole book with it
52:45
as a kind of coda, even though it's clearly not about murder. It
52:49
is just about the fact that, you know, we all face death and
52:52
we all have to find a way to make peace with it. A great
52:54
artist has the courage to bear all. Yes, he puts on Terry's look,
53:00
I look weak, I look frail. I get it. But this
53:02
is this is me right now, this is me at the end of my
53:06
life. Yeah, it's it's a powerful It's like the song was written for
53:07
him. Yeah. It really is just almost almost mystical the way that worked.
53:14
And it's interesting too because there were I mean, there were shared overtones
53:17
between those two guys. I mean they were both kind of brooding men who
53:22
you know, had been through been through drug addiction come out of it.
53:27
I Mean there were years in Johnny Cash's early career where you know, he
53:31
was on death polls. You know, he was so messed up on amphetamines,
53:36
and you know that people thought he wasn't going to survive. But he
53:38
did survive. But this almost a father son feeling, you know, for
53:43
me to the two versions of the song, and they were both very complimentary
53:46
of the you know, of the two versions. But yeah, I I'll
53:52
mention I guess in closing just that I happened to be in grad school at
53:55
that time. This was shortly after my first wife's death, and so I
54:00
I went to grad school late. I got my MFA so I could teach
54:01
college. So I was the old guy. All the other painting students were
54:07
twenty somethings, and this was the heyday of sort of postmodern conceptual art.
54:14
Everything's detached and no one wants to express feelings. It's all about ideas and
54:19
concepts and stuff. And that video of Cash singing that got passed around to
54:24
like everyone, everyone I knew was watching it, and they were all in
54:28
tears. These you know, these brainy art students were all falling apart at
54:32
this song. And you know, I said in the I say in the
54:37
book, maybe that was Cash's final accomplishment. He made sincerity safe for ironists,
54:45
referring to that kind of the way young folks. And I was one
54:50
wants to we'll kind of fall back into irony, fall back into snark because
54:55
it's just a little too hard to sometimes face unflinching reality. And I think
55:00
God bless him because Cash introduced his music to a whole new generation Gen X,
55:07
you know, and people are still discovering it because of those records Murder
55:10
Ballads, old and New at Dark and Bloody Record. It's out now through
55:14
Feral House and you can find it wherever books are sold and where can people
55:17
find you online? Stephen. They can find me at my I have an
55:22
art and author website which is I think S. L. Jones Art dot
55:28
com. Ferrell House, my publisher. You can look there. I have
55:32
a professional Facebook page. If you just look up Steven L. Jones you
55:37
can find Frankly, if you just google Steven old Jones, you'll find LinkedIn,
55:40
You'll find Twitter X. I'm sorry, you'll find all that. Yeah,
55:45
I'll find them all. Put links on the show notes page too,
55:46
so people can reach out to you. Great greatly appreciate that, all right,
55:51
Stevid, thank you so much. This was a fascinating discussion, the
55:53
fascinating book, and we've only really gotten just a little bit of it.
55:57
So much more in this book, So congrat Thanks great. No, I
56:00
love talking to you. I love talking about it. That's it. It's
56:12
in the books.