Review: The Hours Are Long but the Pay Is Low: A Curious Life in Independent Music
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by Bruce Sylvester / Troubadour, Thursdays 2 – 4 pm
Some distinctive indie labels could have emerged nowhere but in the city of their birth: Sun in Memphis, Motown in Detroit. In his candid, shoot-from-the-hip The Hours Are Long but the Pay Is Low: A Curious Life in Independent Music (315 pages; 3 Fields Books-University of Illinois Press) Bloodshot Records co-founder Rob Miller holds that view of Chicago, where for 25 years (l994-2019) and 300 albums, Bloodshot brought us a “Cash meets Clash” fusion of insurgent punk and country including Mekons, The Waco Brothers, Neko Case, Kelly Hogan, Justin Townes Earle, Alejandro Escovedo, Lydia Loveless, The Bottle Rockets, Wayne Hancock, Scott H. Biram, and Robbie Fulks. Its audience was people “looking to classic country for the substance and excitement they used to find in punk.”
As for Miller himself, “From this compressed and untutored scramble through the swirling, exciting mess of America’s musical landscape, the love of what was between the genres and below the mainstream had seeped into my bones.”
The seeds for Bloodshot were sown during his years at WCBN-FM at University of Michigan, a station that comes across as much like WMBR. “At the time, college radio was a powerful force in underground music, part of a subversive and righteous cause.” Heroes and legends of American roots music would come by to talk and perform on the air. “By way of explaining how every rock & roll song came from the blues, John Lee Hooker sang, a capella, Chuck Berry’s raver Nadine at a slow, mournful tempo. The thought of it still gives me chills.”
Mekons once showed the importance – and their appreciation – of independent college/community radio by visiting WMBR to record a song.
The Hours Are Long is also a foodie love song to a fast-changing Windy City most tourists never see – small clubs and ethnic eateries – as well as some beloved restaurants (no chains) along the highways touring musicians travel.
Awash in witty cynicism, Miller’s well-turned phrases can be a joy, but there can be anger here too. He goes after sacred cows, narrow-mindedness of some listeners, the musical industrial complex, and the Bloodshot acts who did terrible things in his home. A few carefully worded lines may aim to avoid a libel suit stemming from paragraphs on money issues that led to selling the label to Exceleration Music. But in his time helming Bloodshot (as he says of earlier years scouring used-record stores), he had the thrill “of bedlam, of discovery, of the unknown.”
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Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination at The MFA
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by Bruce Sylvester / Troubadour, Thursdays 2 – 4 pm
John Singer Sargent, Villa di Marlia, Lucca: The Balustrade, 1910, The Hayden Collection—Charles Henry Hayden Fune
A perfect museum show for the spring season, Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination at the Museum of Fine Arts cuts across time, continents and concepts with about 120 paintings, photographs, sculptures, tapestries, scrolls, embroidery and more going from antiquity to the present including works by John Singer Sargent, Japan’s iconic Hokusai and Ansel Adams. Some are grand in scale. On the other hand, Imogen Cunningham has a black-and-white photo of a single magnolia blossom.
Two William Blake watercolors show Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the first garden in the Bible. For that matter, the word paradise derives from ancient Greek and Persian terms for garden or secluded garden.
The moment we enter the show, we encounter subtlety: the sound of footsteps on the gravel at the royal garden of Versailles.
Gardens often, but not always, convey tranquility. A large 16th-century carpet from India shows real and imaginary animals that are not all harmonious. Note the winged elephant with claws on its hooves and a bird perched on its back. The rocks in a Chinese garden represent distant mountains in the background. In their mythology, the gods live in the mountains.
Each room in the show has a theme. Sometimes their seating fits their theme. One bench in particular is imaginative, funny and totally appropriate. One room is devoted to the gardeners who create the gardens.
Another room looks at the relationship between gardens and power. Napoleon’s beloved empress Josephine developed an interest in botany during her youth in Martinique and later established a royal botanical garden. We see a few her porcelain dessert plates, each with a single plant in its center. The sides of her accompanying ice cream coolers portray plants.
Continuing the French element, there are gowns with floral patterns from Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior. From 19th-century France, there are paintings of their private gardens that Claude Monet and Gustave Caillebotte had created. Are they symbolic self-portraits?
Gardens can appeal to our senses of smell. A scent station invites us to sample aromas of a few plants.
The show is an unusual and very successful collaboration among four MFA staffers with totally different specialties joining together to create a whole that manages to be both cohesive and eclectic. Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination is at the Museum of Fine Arts through June 28. Tickets are for timed entry. It coincides with the 50th anniversary of its annual Art in Bloom festival (May 1- 3) bringing together art from MFA collections—ancient to contemporary—with floral interpretations by New England garden clubs, professional designers and MFA floral volunteers.
Erastus Salisbury Field, The Garden of Eden, about 1860, Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865
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