Once upon a time—in the late ‘60s to be specific, when the generation gap was one of the media’s favorite nightly stories—America asked itself whether rock lyrics were to be admitted as serious poetry. Much seemed to hang in the balance: for the youth, the legitimization of the art with which they most passionately identified; for the professional poets and their employing institutions, the gatekeeping of the Western tradition of high art itself.
I vaguely recall a filmed spot in which some eminent academic poet—let’s say it was Richard Wilbur or Howard Nemerov—considered the question with due gravity, and, pointing to rampant, unrecognized cliches in the art-pop songs of the Beatles; or to blunderous incongruities in the Beat- and Bible-inspired verses of Dylan; or to egregious overreach in the overt and ostentatious poeticism of early Paul Simon, concluded that, no, this is most certainly not poetry by any sober and discriminating standard. Youth cursed in disdain and dismissed the exercise. The establishment harrumphed in vindication, and the host acted as if something important had been settled here today.
In my opinion, they got the answer right—song lyrics are best considered something other than textual poetry—but for all the wrong reasons. It has nothing to do with seriousness, accreditation, and value and everything to do with the inherent differences in the art forms.
Song lyrics are language yoked to the shape of a melody, answering to its phrases and contours like muscles and nerves to a skeleton, synched to its tempo. And because (at least to my ears) melody speaks more directly to visceral emotion than mediated language ever can, song lyrics are largely invested with their resonance and meaning by this pre-existing condition, this tune. There is no cliché that can’t be redeemed a great melody, and try though they may, great lyrics can seldom elevate a banal one.
To paint with a finer brush, poetry and music have been indistinguishable at many times in pre-Gutenberg human history, and in our own time we can find many perfectly valid declamatory hybrids, from the groovy polemics of Gil Scott Heron to the surreal droning memoir of Ivor Cutler to the clinical post-modernist concoctions of Laurie Anderson.
Still, textual poetry of the last, say, 400 years—metrical or free—is clocked only to itself and is entirely on the hook for whatever heat it might generate on the page. It is the thing itself. On the other hand, asking whether a song is poetry by looking at it on paper is no different than judging a film by its screenplay. It might fare well or poorly in your opinion, but in any case, it is not the artifact.
So when Kingston’s Stockade Guitars Owner Ted Lawrence and the violinist, songwriter, and former member of the Breeders Carrie Bradley conceived of the in-store Stockade Guitars OG Concert series—in which text writers and songwriters both are featured on each bill—there was nothing to be settled culturally, just, Bradley observes, different parts of the brain and the heart to be exercised in these truly intimate two-act encounters with working artists.
“Stockade Guitars opened in October 2015,” says Lawrence. “In the following Spring, I was approached by [singer-songwriter] Rebecca Martin to do a series of in-store performances with her and her husband, Larry Grenadier [legendary jazz bassist with the Brad Mehldau Trio and many others]. It gave Rebecca the opportunity to get a close-up public reaction to her new material before recording and touring. We continued to do in-store performances with various artists until Covid hit. Then it all stopped.”
Covid, of course, transformed the entire venue landscape in the Hudson valley, and Kingston, the county seat, seemed especially hard hit, losing flagship venues like BSP, the Beverly, and the Anchor in one fell swoop as well as a variety of ad hoc performance spaces and series. The re-emergence of performance spaces from Covid winter is an ongoing narrative, and hardly a fait accompli. Still, the ground is stirring with new life.
“Lately,” Lawrence continued, “I had been thinking about restarting in-store shows and I approached Carrie Bradley about playing. She suggested that we create a series that combined literature, original writers and poets, with original music. We call it Stockade Guitars OG Series and we’re having a blast. The shows are casual. No cover charge; we pass a tip jar around. It’s BYOB, bring a cushion or chair, or sit on the floor. The talent has been amazing. Add a dose of Carrie Bradley hosting and playing some of her own songs and it’s a fun and memorable early evening at the local guitar shop.”
For Bradley, the very notion of the in-store performances and readings—small, curated, unvarnished, illuminated by unflattering overhead fluorescence—has been central to her experience as an artist in the American underground of the ‘80s and beyond. It was a ride she took from the literate primitivism of the Boston folk scene of the ‘80s all the way to the biggest festival stages with the Deal sisters in the ‘90s. (Carrie’s playing is all over the two Breeder’s classic records, Pod and Last Splash.)
“I was a laser-dorky English major in college, but also played in the regional symphony,” she says. “Then I met a kid who wrote his own songs and recorded them on this thing called a ‘four-track.’ I was like, ‘Whaaaa?! How do you do that??!’ I recorded tracks for him in his dorm room and did a few open mics. One thing led to another, and I ended up composing for live performance in plays and then joined a student bluegrass band. I was so clueless how to play anything without sheet music that they named the band Timid Fiddle. But people danced!”
Though she barely knew it, her life was at a crossroads with the known pathways of literary establishment at one fork and the vagaries of musician life at the other. “My vague life plan was to keep writing and teaching lit, but by the end of college, my heart and mind were really divided about whether to pursue music or writing. My dad was a director at New York State Council on the Arts, and two of his departments were music and literature. I vividly remember having lunch with one of his colleagues who was editor-in-chief of Poets & Writers at the time, and explaining my dilemma. She said, ‘Carrie, which is funner?’ (Her husband was a successful poet, and she had a front-row view of the angst.) I said I supposed music, if you put it that way. And she said, ‘Then do that!’
“But eventually I went off to grad school for fiction writing, having decided that was a more serious goal. By October, I had found my crew, and, yup, we started a band. My best friend was learning ukulele. Then her cousin started sending cassettes of his original songs that he was writing up at a different college for fiction writing. They were hilarious and eccentric and sweet. So we started doing the same, and the cousin moved down, and we made up our first band, Ed’s Redeeming Qualities.
“We were near Boston—an amazing town during the rise of indie rock—so that was our HQ for gigs. We were such a homely lot—acoustic, sparse, weird lyrics. But music writers loved us for the writing, so the darn thing took off. We were nominated for a Boston Music Award the same year as the Backstreet Boys. Eventually a wonderful team of promoters (Tommy Johnston and Joyce Linehan, very active in Boston to this day) took us under their wing, and we created something very much like a house concert series, except it was at the Rat (the Rathskeller, in Kenmore Square—literally underground, and home for bands like the Pixies and Bullet Lavolta and Dinosaur Jr. and Til Tuesday).
“It was called Ed’s Basement, and happened every Sunday. They put out candle lit cafe tables in the pit and served coffee and brownies next to the beer taps. ERQ opened and closed, and in between, it was a salon-style mix. We made our own paper currency that people could spend when they came back. We brought writers from New Hampshire, and they packed the bill with other musicians (Robin Hitchcock came, River and Rain Phoenix, anti-folkers Roger Manning and Latch, locals galore, the Breeders had their US debut with us) and filmmakers and experimental artists of all kinds.”
“That was probably my first experience with what I’ll call in this context the “in-store” vibe (although I came to know it well in the era of independent records stores, when that was a common tour stop). At the time, I was going back and forth between playing for tens of thousands at festivals (Nick Cave and I had a two-person writing workshop at the catering tent during Lollapalooza; contact highs from hellos with people like Steven Tyler and Bjork) and playing for ten people in a coffeeshop in say, Dallas, or Charleston. There were thrills to both, of course. But the intimacy of the smaller shows was different.
And writers were always on the bill. Music and prose or poetry…it’s the train and the river.”
Bradley seems to believe that a re-investment in the micro-venue and the close encounter is exactly what is called for now. Additionally, many of the artists she has met across her journey—mature, fully realized voices as vibrant and productive as ever—can find new audiences in the micro-venue and the curated series, long after the big, well lit-stages have turned away.
“With complete respect for all the cool venues in the Hudson Valley,” Bradley says, “I think the experience that unfolds in this kind of room is different, special. ‘Dialogue’ comes to mind again, and of course, ‘intimacy.’ In Ed’s Basement, we got to be on a first-name basis with many of our fans. We would routinely stop and ask if anyone had any questions, by raise of hands. Goof-ups were shared, and even cherished—I mean, who amongst us are perfect, or need to be, even if we’re on stage?
“I think that the people who come to these kinds of shows share a love of pin-drop silence, the absence of see-and-be-seen, the no pressure to belly up to the bar, not being dependent on the sound system or the backdraft of noise from people who aren’t there to listen. And: spontaneity. Anything can happen in an intimate space. Unpredictable moments, tangents, audience participation, unrehearsed thoughts.”
Of the fortuitous meeting with Larence, Carrie says, “When I met Ted, I had been nursing an idea for a long time about starting a house concert series in my apartment in the Catskill Mountains. I have kind of a perfect layout for it, with a mezzanine loft, but I’m way in the boonies. He said, without hesitation, ‘How ‘bout we do it at the shop?’ It was a perfect moment. It made so much sense. His shop is in the epicenter of Kingston, and while he’s so unassuming, he is a community leader, and the shop was already a gathering space. He’s a talented longtime musician himself, and, in his third career, a magnet for folks who care.”
Stockade Guitars OG Series is taking the holidays off but are resuming every other Wednesday, beginning with Amy Rigby (writer TBD) on January 17. Upcoming are Juliana Nash, Simi Stone, Sandy Bell, and Chris Maxwell, and many more.
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