Highway 61 Revisited

Program Notes

Welcome to the New World District. I spent a few days exploring the back country of the Mississippi Delta, saw some Indian Mounds, ate some southern food, passed the nights in blues clubs in and around Clarksdale, and saw the one and only Scott H. Biram. I’m going to tell you all about it, friends.

But first a couple important program notes. Somewhere along the way I realized it would be best to tell this story in reverse order, so that’s how it’ going to play. That, and it was getting too long, so it will be in two parts, starting with the end of Part 2.

Highway 61 Revisited

Part 1 - Messengers

The End.

As I was walking back to the car I realized I had lost my Scott H. Biram t-shirt.

This is the photo that got me kicked out of the club. Double click to enlarge and then take a minute to examine it.

Pretty good decisive moment photo, eh? That is straight out of camera. Not a single adjustment. I knew there was a good chance it would get me kicked out of the club, or maybe beat up, but I thought the risk was worth it. I was literally four feet directly in front of the bouncer and there was no way he was going to miss what I was doing. But I saw the balls on the tables all nicely spaced and then the colors and the shapes and then the peripheral elements started coming together and I took the camera from the bag, manually focused as I was bringing it up to the composition, clicked once and put the camera back in the bag before the bouncer’s hand was on my shoulder and he was screaming at me to get out and hustling me towards the door. That’s probably the most pure decisive moment photograph I’ve ever shot.

But I have mixed feelings about decisive moment photography. It’s something I’ve practiced of course. I was raised on Cartier-Bresson. But it’s a style from a bygone era and in today’s environment I see it as a parlor trick more often than not. The decisive moment is typically more about style than substance.

The club we’re in is called Messengers. On one side there’s a dance floor and a bar. on the other a pool hall. When I walked in I wasn’t thinking about photography. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was blissfully empty-headed and just happy to be in the moment.

That changed when I saw the lights and the colors and the people. I did a head check. Could I pull off taking a few photos in this place? Both in technical terms of capturing what I was seeing in camera and practical in terms of not getting beat up. Was I comfortable or uptight? Was I bullet-proof, or vulnerable. The head check said bullet-proof and – even better – I was in a special zone. At that moment my head was a finely tuned documentary photography machine.

I got permission from this lady to take a couple shots while she was playing pool, She just looked so fabulous, I had to ask.

I also had permission, tacit at least, to take the shot that got me kicked out. The blond woman lining up her shot in that photo is Lillian. I’d met her earlier in the night, after the Scott H. Biram show, and was out club hopping with her and her boyfriend and another guy named Mark who I had met the day before at the benefactors party.

But to be fair, I sneaked a couple shots as well. The one above of the ladies on the dance floor could have got me kicked out much sooner. And this one, which may be my favorite of the bunch:

So I wasn’t altogether innocent, and anyway, I’ve been around long enough to know that innocence is no excuse. I accepted the fact that I could be thrown out or worse. But in my heightened state of photographer consciousness, I thought it would be worth it.

Footnotes: 1.) See the Styrofoam cup on the pool table? These days you have to ask yourself, should I remove that from the photo? I think the answer is pretty much the same as it always was, but nowadays you also leave it there because that’s something you wouldn’t see in a crappy AI generated photo. 2.) While escorting me to the door, the bouncer yelled at me — YOU HAVE THE NERVE TO DO EXPERIMENTAL PHOTOGRAPHY HERE? And the emphasis was on HERE? In my head, such as it was, I was like, well yea, I have the nerve. Like duh. But then I thought - wait, what? Experimental photography? I wasn’t doing experimental photography. I was doing straight up documentary, nothing experimental about it. I must have misunderstood, but I can’t think what else he might have said. But I got why people would be pissed off about an old white guy sneaking photos in a place like that. I don’t like the look myself. At least if someone else is doing it. For me to excuse myself, the photos had to be good. Still not sure that justifies it, but it justifies me pretending, at least.

This is Lillian from the first pic and her boyfriend whose name I don’t remember. I’ll call him Jeff. I mean no disrespect, he’s a cool guy and seemed like a good guy. I was just too wasted to remember names. I only know Lillian’s because we traded Instagrams.

Anyway, I met them outside the club after the Scott H. Biram show, along with Mark. They told me they were from the Bay Area. Mark, I later learned, was of recent Lebanese descent. He was from Birmingham, Alabama and had grow up a racist towards blacks, largely he suspected, because of the racism he was hit with for being Lebanese, but had seen the error of his ways and was a cool guy now. I would learn all that later. At that point I was just standing there empty-headed, enjoying the feel of the night with the reverb from the Biram show still bouncing around in my head. Somehow I was able to have a coherent conversation with Lillian about the show.

I was really enjoying not thinking and just being out in the warm, southern night air after a great show, involved in an intelligent conversation, on their part at least, with interesting people. It ended up with them inviting me to go to the next bar with them. It had been a long time since I’d been invited to hang out with the cool kids and I was more than happy to just go with the flow. We landed in faux dive bar with an old blues guy playing slide guitar. We were in the back and I wasn’t paying much attention to the musician, but it was funny when at one point someone in the audience called out for him to play Stevie Ray Vaughn. “I’m a Blues guy from the Mississippi Delta,” he said. “I don’t play that Texas shit.” Maybe he didn’t actually say “Texas shit,” but if not, it was clear that he meant “Texas shit” by his tone of voice.

Eventually I came down off of my cloud a bit and remembered that the beautiful young people had told me they were from the Bay Area, and my brain came around to asking if they’d been to Burning Man. Most people at Burning Man are from the Bay Area and it turned out they were major burners, especially Lillian. She actually worked for the organization year round and lived in Gerlach. Jeff was a machinist and they both worked on major art installations. Those of you who know me best might have some sense of how impressed I would be by someone who lived year round in Gerlach. The Black Rock Desert is so fucking incredible. It would be big time adventure to live there for a year. That’s something I would love to do, and may well do in the near future, so we had stuff to talk about. The conversation ebbed and flowed. Some beers were downed. Then at some point we left the fake dive bar and went to the pool hall, which was a real dive bar.

I’m sorry I don’t have a better shot of Scott H. Biram. I was making it a point to enjoy the show rather than being a photographer and I only took a few snaps to have a visual memory of the fact that I’d been there. And I think performance photos are mostly a waste of time. Unless you are someone like Charles Peterson with fantastic access and a shitload of talent.

Biram’s performance was really great, albeit way too short. Biram is a very high level songwriter and guitar player of blues, rock, country, and gospel. He is a one man band but most definitely does not sound like one. He has four or five guitars onstage, his favorite obviously being the old Gibson hollow body acoustic/electric. Unfortunately, you can’t really see it in the photo, but it’s a beautifully worn instrument. He plays in front of a several stacks of amps and the sound guy told me he had like sixty stomp pedals, or maybe it was 30. Whatever, it was a lot. He provides his own percussion with a stomp board. All that produces a wall of very good sound. Being right in front of it is one of the better sonic experiences I’ve had at a concert.

As a benefactor, I had access to a special area with all the free booze I could drink, and that night I could drink a lot. Although I had been sick earlier, I had just the right combination of medicines to fix it and appropriately for a Scott H. Biram concert, whiskey was the final missing ingredient. They had Four Roses and after a few my head was right where it needed to be, both for the concert and after.

The Scott H. Biram character in the songs wants to live a righteous life but keeps getting pulled back into sin by whiskey and bad women. Summarized like that it sounds like stereotypical country, but it’s far from that. His world seems every bit as lived in as Hank Williams, or Son House, and his tribulations are uniquely individual even if they fall into a much broader category. And his high level expertise as a blues, rock, country and gospel musician gets mixed up in most of his songs, no matter the dominant genre. If we just call him a rock musician I have to talk myself down from considering him one of the greatest of all time. I think it’s quite possible he’s that good.

I became aware of Biram from the movie “Hell or High Water” which featured his song “Blood, Sweat, and Murder” which I liked enough to look at the credits and check out the artist. It’s telling how good a song that is and that it’s nowhere close to being one of his best. If you want to check out his records, I’d start with Graveyard Shift, The Dirty Old One Man Band, and The Bad Testament. All are a bit uneven, and all have at least several truly great songs. And you’ll get the vibe.

I don’t like ranking artists, both because no two great artists are the same and also because so much of it is just about personal taste, but it seems to be an inextricable part of human nature. I try to limit it to tiers. To name a few examples, among artists I’ve liked for decades I consider The Cure, David Bowie, and The Rolling Stones to be top-tier. Artists I like a lot such as Cracker or Everlast strike me as being more on a second level tier compared to them. It seems crazy to consider Scott H. Biram in the same category as The Cure, David Bowie, or the Rolling Stones, but an argument can be made. I think a big factor you have to consider before laughing it off is the fact that he is doing almost everything by himself whereas those other artists are collaborating with hosts of other top professionals. I think the quality of the writing and guitar playing put him in the conversation. Crazy, eh?

When he booked the Deep Blues Festival I thought that was a good excuse to go back down to Mississippi and explore the Delta some more. That, and Biram is such a great blues player, I thought maybe he’d do a lot of covers of Son House and the like. Then it occurred to me that maybe I could get a great photo of Biram as we’d be at the home of the Delta Blues where so many of his biggest influences were from. So I messaged him on Facebook to see if he wanted to meet me for a little story and some photos, but I never heard back. I took that as a hard no and didn’t bother him about it after that. It’s too bad though. I think I could have come up with something great.

This was my the lunch I had outside of Rosedale, Mississippi on the day of Scott H. Biram show. Looks like shit, right? Well, it’s Egg Foo Young, but I’m not sure eating actual shit would have made me any sicker. I was afraid I was going to have to stay in bed all night and miss the concert, but I managed to sleep a few hours and then put together a pharmeceutical concoction that not only got me through the night, but allowed my head to be in the right place to get the photos in the pool hall.

Before that I travelled the back roads of the Mississippi Delta, ate some great southern cooking, met lots of people, and saw some blues acts in clubs around Clarksdale. I’ll tell you all about it, but I’m out of space and will have to leave it here for now. Keep an eye on your inbox for the upcoming parts in which we’ll see a bit of the countryside, attend a VIP party, and take in a few shows.