New CDs: John Phillips, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Jenni Muldaur

New CDs: John Phillips, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Jenni Muldaur

By Steven Rosen

John Phillips
Man on the Moon
Varese Sarabande (www.varesevintage.com)
5 stars

Giving some due to the minor impact of his 1970 solo album John the Wolfking of L.A., the only real success the late John Phillips had after the Mamas & the Papas broke up was his autobiography – an early example of the rock-star confessional that horrified readers with the time (and, ultimately, life) wasted being too zonked on drugs to function well. Still, he did have the cachet and connections to hook up with some important people on various projects during those lost decades, and since his death in 2001 the resultant material has been slowly trickling out.

First came Pay Pack & Follow, which he had been recording for Rolling Stones Records. Some other archival releases followed, and now comes his most interesting project – the short-lived (and critically reviled) 1975 Off-Broadway musical he wrote that was produced by Andy Warhol, Man on the Moon. The project, alas, is most interesting for its back story.

Phillips became infatuated with creating a musical fantasy after watching the 1969 moon landing, and started working on Space. He found a producer (Hair’s Michael Butler) and director (Michael Bennett, who would go on to create A Chorus Line), as well as a would-be star, his wife, Genevieve Waite.

But that collapsed, partly due to his drug intake. Somehow he eventually got Warhol involved, and the thing eventually opened as a much-recasted and already troubled Man on the Moon with Waite, Phillips, Denny Doherty of the Mamas and the Papas, and Warholite Monique Van Vooren…and then closed after terrible reviews.

Listening to the 38 cuts on this CD, which include a few tracks recorded live from the theater audience by Warhol, himself, you can see why it failed. The music, here mostly performed by Phillips in a tentative voice with folksy arrangements, is a pastiche of styles since he lacked a coherent aesthetic for a Broadway musical.

Some are faux Weimer cabaret or Jazz Age ditties; others try to rock like Transformer-period Lou Reed (“Midnight Deadline Blastoff”) and sound thin and brittle. Others, like “If King Can, Who Can’t,” just seem forced or trite.

It’s impossible to tell from these recordings if the theatrical production meant to be Rocky Horror Show-camp or have some narrative sensitivity. But there are some good numbers that show Phillips’ deep-seated gift for melody and arresting lyric – “Star Stepping Stranger,” “Welcome to the Moon Man,” the bluesy and powerful “Handcuffs,” the bizarrely religious “Truth Cannot Be Treason,” the Bowie-like “Yesterday I Left the Earth" with its great chorale singing.

Another interesting aspect is the chance to hear Waite sing. Her voice had an unusual pinched, high-pitched quality, somewhere between Billie Holiday and Betty Boop, and Phillips gave her a beautiful song, “There Is a Place,” as a showcase. A different time and with better health, maybe Phillips could have made a rock-based Broadway musical that really worked. This wasn’t it, but it has enough worthwhile songs to merit a listen.

Standout tracks: “Welcome to the Moon Man,” “Yesterday I Left the Earth.”

Buffy Sainte-Marie
Running for the Drum
Appleseed (www.appleseedmusic.com)
7 stars

The best thing about a unique voice – and Buffy Sainte-Marie’s fierce, proud vibrato certainly qualifies as one – is that it defies age. It’s neither a voice of youth nor of middle age; it belongs to an individual and is always as fresh as a fingerprint.

On Running for the Drum, her first recording in 13 years, when Sainte-Marie lets that voice soar unrepressed, as she does on “No No Keshagesh,” “I Bet My Heart On You” and “Working for the Government,” she really rocks! Yoko Ono’s got nothing on her.

That’s maybe an odd thing to say – the 68-year-old singer-songwriter of American Indian ancestry is mostly known for 1960s-era folk-protest songs, some related to her ethnicity, and later for the Oscar-winning pop ballad “Up Where We Belong,” which she co-wrote.

But when she sings those fast songs, you can hear how much she loved rockabilly as a kid and has retained its spirit. She even pays respect to Elvis with “Blue Sunday,” which borrows a beat and an attitude from “Heartbreak Hotel.”

She has always had political bite, best shown here by an effective remake of her eerie and still-relevant “Little Wheel Spin and Spin.” Sainte-Marie also still writes ballads of the “Up”-lift variety – “Too Much Is Never Enough" --which are nice as far as they go, since her plaintive voice usually helps them avoid sentimentality, although an update of “America the Beautiful” (with some new words honoring Indian tribes) can’t surmount the treacly arrangement.

Working with producer Chris Birkett, Sainte-Marie gets an interesting effect on some of the faster songs, conjuring both tribal drums and dance-club abandon. Overall, this is an album, and a career, with a lot of vibrancy. To paraphrase the title of one of her best-known compositions, it’s not time for her to go yet. Not by a long show.

Standout tracks: “No No Keshagesh,” “I Bet My Heart on You”

Jenni Muldaur
Dearest Darlin’
Dandelion Music (www.dandelionmusic.us)
9 stars

Since the failure of her high-profile, major-label 1992 debut, Jenni Muldaur – daughter of Maria and Geoff – has kept busy with collaborations, tribute-album contributions, and providing backing vocals for a who’s-who of prestigious artists, from Rufus Wainwright to Eric Clapton.

But she hasn’t ventured another solo album until the new Dearest Darlin', a rip-roaring and enthusiastic nod to jump blues/R&B/soul music/soulful rock. It shows she’s been spending a lot of time listening to great old records (or attending Ponderosa Stomp) and getting what they’re about, then bringing it all back home with her own crackling versions.

The title song is a Bo Diddley classic (and has a guest vocal by Joseph Arthur that sounds Diddleyish), but many of the others are so obscure one doubts that even the Detroit Cobras would know them – Big Maybelle’s “I’ve Got a Feeling”; a jazzy, hipsterish Charlie Rich song called “There’s Another Place That I Can’t Go” (that must have influenced “The Beat Goes On”); Meredith Howard’s erotically seductive and bluesy “Just Kiss Me Once”; a sweetly plaintive late-period NRBQ song, “Blame It On the World”; and more. She wrote one song, a dreamy ballad of a closer called “Comatose Town.”

There’s a retro quality to the arrangements, even the overall concept, similar to Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones. But this is even tighter and hotter musically, and totally lacking in self-consciousness. Muldaur’s mom has recorded this kind of music before, but daughter’s voice has a throatier, punchier quality. It’s reminiscent of the pinpoint-control forcefulness and sometimes-explosive, sometimes-choked emotionalism of Brenda Lee.

Muldaur is aided by a fine band that gives the recordings a live feel: Guitarist Sean Costello (who died last year), Tower of Power saxophonist Lenny Pickett, keyboard player Brian Jackson, drummer James Wormworth, plus featured guests including the mysterious Jimi Zhivago.

Muldaur, respectful of the role of back-up singers, makes sure the ones here – who include her sister, Clare – are upfront and full-bodied, so they sound responsive rather than programmed or dubbed-in. This is on Muldaur’s own label, and maybe she wanted to stay as far away as possible from a major like Warner Bros. – which put out her 1992 record – after that experience. But, truth be told, they’d all be glad to have Dearest Darlin.’

Standout tracks: “I’ve Got a Feelin’, “There’s Another Place That I Can’t Go.”

(These reviews all first appeared in Blurt (www.blurt-online.com).

The Baseball Project Becomes a Band

Charging the Mound
AltRock veterans take a swing as The Baseball Project

By Steven Rosen

Cincinnati Reds history will be made when The Baseball Project (Steve Wynn, Scott McCaughey, Peter Buck and Linda Pitmon) makes its first appearance at the Southgate House on Saturday night.

No, these venerable, veteran Alternative Rock musicians — better known for their work solo (Wynn) and with such bands as Minus 5, R.E.M., Young Fresh Fellows, Miracle Three, Dream Syndicate and Gutterball (Wynn again) — won’t be announcing they’re buying the Reds and changing their name to The Sex Pistols. Instead, they plan to use the local date to publicly debut their brand-new song “Pete Rose Way,” written by McCaughey and recorded earlier this week for the upcoming Baseball Project Vol. 2 album.

The first album, "Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails," came out last year and became a surprise hit, by indie standards, with its rockin’, literate and often philosophical songs about the careers of Satchel Paige, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Harvey Haddix, Sandy Koufax and others. (The opening song, “Past Time,” which questions whether baseball’s glory days are behind it, mentions in passing Rose’s famous slide into Ray Fosse in the 1970 All-Star Game.)

The members of the quartet now consider The Baseball Project the name of one of their numerous bands — and it's receiving equal billing on the Southgate House gig with Minus 5 and Wynn, both of whom have new albums out. Before this tour, The Baseball Project had played live just a few times, including at Wynn and Pitmon’s wedding and on The Late Show with David Letterman.

Speaking by phone from Portland, Ore., where The Baseball Project is recording its new album, McCaughey describes the Pete Rose song as “not slow but pretty quiet.”

And he continues: “I haven’t been to Great American Ball Park, but I’ve been to Riverfront and remember seeing that street, so I started making up a little song about it. It’s sort of double entendre, about that road and also about the Pete Rose way of playing baseball, but it’s a sensitive song.

“It doesn’t come down on Pete; it’s actually a favorable song. I don’t take him to task for betting on baseball and being a liar. It’s more a reflection on the kind of player he was and that there’s a lot to be learned from that. And also that there’s something to be learned from the mistakes he made, although that’s referred to very lightly.”

Actually, Wynn explains in a separate phone-call interview, there might be a second Cincinnati Reds-related song when Vol. 2 appears. “I’m reading The Long Season by Jim Brosnan, so that may creep into some songs,” he says.

(Brosnan, a relief pitcher traded to the Reds in 1959, wrote about that season in what is considered one of the first books by a baseball player that was candid and truthful.)

Wynn, 49, and McCaughey, 54, have been lifelong baseball fans. And Wynn, growing up in California, did sportswriting as a teenager and thought that would be his career.

“Then I saw the Sex Pistols play Winterland (in San Francisco) and that was the end of that,” he says.

His first band of note, L.A.’s Dream Syndicate, channeled the Velvet Underground’s prickly, shadowy, idiosyncratic Rock & Roll with uncanny intuition. How did he get from that to baseball, the all-American national pastime? He sees a natural connection.

“Baseball is such a game of eccentricity and individualism,” Wynn says. “You can be an absolute freak, a malcontent, out of your mind and still excel as an individual regardless of how good your teammates are. It’s a game of the oddball individuals, and that appeals to a Rock & Roll fan or musician. It’s not a jock mentality: 'Live and die for the team, rah rah rah.’ It’s where an out-of-shape pitcher can strike out a bonus baby or where a guy can pitch a no-hitter on acid.”

That last reference is to the late Dock Ellis, the Pittsburgh Pirate who claimed he pitched a no-hitter on LSD in 1970. Alas, Wynn explains, The Baseball Project does not have a song about him — Todd Snider, Barbara Manning and Chuck Brodksy already have written ones.

“I don’t want to be the third or fourth person to write a Dock Ellis song,” Wynn says.

The Southgate House show will consist of two sets, with the four band members mixing up material throughout from The Baseball Project, Minus 5’s new album Killingsworth and Wynn’s latest solo album Crossing Dragon Bridge, plus songs by Young Fresh Fellows, Dream Syndicate and Gutterball.

“It’s like a music festival with just four people,” McCaughey says.

Besides the Rose song, there will be another important baseball-history event at the Southgate House show. Marcia Haddix, widow of Harvey Haddix, is coming from Springfield, Ohio, to see the group play “Harvey Haddix” live. The song, written by Wynn, is a bittersweet account of how Haddix, a Pittsburgh Pirate, pitched 12 perfect innings in a 1959 game — 50 years ago — against the Milwaukee Braves only to lose in the13th.

Although some have called it the best game ever pitched, Major League Baseball in 1991 declared it isn’t even formally considered a no-hitter, much less perfect, because he lost. Haddix was still alive at the time; he died in 1994. The song argues that Haddix should be added to the select list of pitchers (including the Reds’ Tom Browning) who “officially” have thrown perfect games.

“She loves the song and has become a regular e-mail pal of mine,” Wynn says. “She decided she wanted to come with her two daughters and their husbands for this show. We’re blown away.”

(This first ran in Cincinnati CityBeat, Sept. 16, 2009.)

The Story Behind Stephen Schwartz's "Seance on a Wet Afternoon"

The Origins of Stephen Schwartz's "Seance on a Wet Afternoon"

By Steven Rosen

After composing the music and lyrics for “Wicked,” one of this decade’s biggest Broadway smashes, Stephen Schwartz decided to move to opera for his next challenge. Only once before had he attempted the form -- what he calls a "very bad one-act opera" while in college.

His new “Séance on a Wet Afternoon” – based on a tense, psychological British suspense film from 1964 – had its world premiere on Sept. 26 with Opera Santa Barbara. The company is celebrating its move into the restored Granada theater by commissioning the new opera from Schwartz. There will be two additional performances on Oct. 2 and 4th.

This is Schwartz’s first full opera – he has written the book and libretto and spent the last three years developing and orchestrating the work. “It’s been all-opera all the time,” he says, by telephone from a friend’s New York apartment. (He lives in Connecticut.) “It’s been unbelievably time-consuming and attention-consuming. I had a co-orchestrator, and it still took me solidly from last November to just a couple weeks ago to get that done.”

The film “Séance” concerns a disturbed medium named Myra Foster, played by the great Broadway actress Kim Stanley, who enlists her husband Bill (Richard Attenborough) in a scheme to kidnap a young girl so she can pretend to use her “powers” to find the victim.

The film by director Bryan Forbes, from a novel by Mark McShane, is well-respected among film buffs and Stanley received an Oscar nomination, but it is not especially known to the public-at-large. “It has the advantage of being both a classic and obscure,” Schwartz says.


For the opera, Schwartz moved the setting from London to San Francisco to take advantage of the kind of rainy, chilly, moody American climate that seems suitable for the story, its sets and costumes. Myra posits that her and Bill’s own deceased 11-year-old son Arthur speaks to her during séances, and she uses him to “find” the young, kidnapped daughter of wealthy industrialist during her trance-like séances.

Of course, it is all a scheme – with her husband’s reluctant support – to garner her attention and fame by “saving” a child after she has lost her own. As one might expect in tragedy, things slowly but spectacularly go wrong as Myra attempts to maintain a pleasant demeanor to the world while hiding her roiling inner neediness and delusions.

Schwartz, 61, has already won three Oscars and three Grammys for his composing, and has been nominated for five Tonys. Before “Wicked,” a celebrated revisionist take on “Wizard of Oz,” his hit stage productions included “Godspell” and “Pippin” – written in the early 1970s, shortly after his graduation from Carnegie Mellon University with a B.F.A in drama.

Born and raised in New York, he took classes at New York’s Juilliard School of Music while still in high school. In Hollywood, he has written lyrics for the Disney musicals “Enchanted,” “Pocahontas,” and “Hunchback of Notre Dame.” (He wrote music and lyrics for the animated film about Moses, “Prince of Egypt.”)

But during all his time as a Broadway/Hollywood composer, he has also been an opera aficionado. In New York City, he was a friend of Michael Jackowitz, a house doctor for the New York City Opera. “It so happens his partner doesn’t like opera, so on many occasions I got to accompany him,” Schwartz says.

Jackowitz now lives in Santa Barbara, and thought of Schwartz when opera officials expressed interest in commemorating a new work. “He said, ‘You should call my friend Stephen Schwartz. He likes opera and said he’d be interested in writing one someday,’” Schwartz explains. (Jackowitz is now “Séance’s” executive producer.)

Contacted by the opera company, Schwartz thought of “Séance,” which he had seen when new. “It’s very memorable – it’s one of those movies with a sustained creepy mood to it, so it stayed with me,” he says. “Obviously, Kim Stanley’s and Richard Attenborough’s performances are remarkable. I was in drama school, so Kim Stanley was one of the heroes. I remembered it for her performance.”

Actually, Schwartz had another reason to remember “Séance.” Shortly after “Wicked” had opened on Broadway, a William Morris Agency literary agent took him to lunch to pitch some ideas for musical theater. One was “Séance.”

“I said to him for several reasons I didn’t think it was a good idea for a musical and then forgot about it – but obviously I didn’t forget about it,” Schwartz says.

“I felt it didn’t have the right energy for musical theater,” he explains. “It’s very dark, which isn’t by itself a problem, since there have obviously been dark musicals like ‘Sweeney Todd.’ But it felt moodier than musical theater, and the characters didn’t feel to me like musical-theater characters in terms of how they would sing.”


However, Schwartz explains, “Séance” did feel appropriate for a modern opera: “It was just as instinctive when I was thinking of what would be a good opera that I thought of it,” he says. “You can use music to create mood more in opera. The music tells the subtextual story much more, so the characters are saying one thing and the music telling you something else.

“And ‘Séance’ has lots of subtext, where things are going on under the surface that are not what the characters are saying. The ways they express themselves vocally, and the kinds of characters they are, just seem more operatic, if you will. That’s all just instinct and I could be completely wrong, but that’s how my response went.”

If there is another film classic close to "Seance" in tone, Schwartz says, it is Billy Wilder's 1950 "Sunset Boulevard," featuring Gloria Swanson as a delusional fading film star cloistered in her mansion. "Theyre very similar underneath in terms of that kind of character who wants something so desperately she makes very misguided decisions that bring her and everyone around her down," Schwartz says. "The ending of 'Séance' is so close in some ways to 'Sunset Boulevard' I had to consciously find ways to not make it the same."

Incidentally, Schwartz did get back in touch with the William Morris agent when he decided to go forward with the opera. “I phoned him and asked, ‘Do you think it will be all right with your clients?’ He said, ‘I don’t represent them, I just thought it would be a good idea.’ That’s one of the first times I’ve heard of an altruistic agent,” he says, laughing.

Working within the idiom of Broadway and movie-musical songs, Schwartz found composing an opera a new and great challenge. “There are certainly set pieces, structured more like arias than musical-theater songs, but they are ‘set pieces’ in the forms of solos, duets, quartets,” he explains.

But that’s not the key distinction between opera and the Broadway musical. “It’s more in the kind of voice and the way music is used,” he continues. “It’s not amplified so you have to compose differently for the voice to be heard above the orchestration. In theater or pop music, you have the music going on and people sing above it, and if you can’t hear them you turn up the microphone.

“You can’t do that in opera so that was a challenge,” he says. And then simply orchestrating was a challenge, because theater writers don’t orchestrate their own work – the closest would be Leonard Bernstein. I’m not talking about a pop score like ‘Godspell’ or ‘Spring Awakening’ where you’re dealing with a small group of pop musicians. This is a 46-piece orchestra, and learning how to write for that has been an enormous learning curve for me.”

The style of music, too, is different, Schwartz says: “I think people who know my work will know I wrote this, (but) it is more in the tradition of modern classical music that Broadway music.”

Still, there are recognizable themes – “One Little Lie,” an aria sung by Myra to Bill when he loses faith in the scheme, is meant to have a sinisterly memorable and suitably haunting minor-key melody. Schwartz also hopes her deceased son’s appearance will result in a suitably ghostly musical theme.


To sing the part of Myra, the medium, Schwartz chose New York City Opera soprano Lauren Flanigan. The baritone Kim Josephson has the part of her husband. Schwartz decided early on about what kinds of voices he wanted, but he still had doubts. “There was some question whether it was better for Myra to be a soprano or mezzo soprano. “Part of that was practical,” he says. “There are more sopranos than mezzos. Lauren Flanigan, who is singing it for me, says I’ve really written a mezzo role with some high notes.

“One of the things I’m consciously trying to achieve is for the words to be understood,” he says. “We will have super titles because audiences expect them now, but I’m trying to make it so you understand every single word without titles. Technically with female voices and with sopranos particularly, once you’re above a certain range it’s almost impossible to understand words. So one has to be conscious if you want comprehensibility and not just sound.”

Schwartz chose his son, Scott, to direct. It will also be his first opera, after the Broadway productions “Bat Boy: The Musical” and “Golda’s Balcony.”

"Working with my father on ‘Séance’ has been a thrilling experience,” Scott Schwartz says via E-mail. “To collaborate with him on the story and to develop a visual language to complement his music and philosophical ideas has been a joy, and always deeply inspiring. He, of course, is known for his work in the musical theater, but he has stretched himself into new styles of music and musical storytelling and, I think, deepened his scope as an artist."

So far, Opera Queensland in Australia has agreed to stage a production, probably in 2011. Schwartz is hopeful there will be more. “Other opera companies expressed interest and will come check it out,” he says. “If they like it and feel they can sell tickets to it, they will put it into their seasons. And if not, not.

“I have been told by various artistic directors and managing directors of opera companies that their audiences are looking to see new pieces,” he says. “Whereas ten years ago if they put a new piece into the season, that would be their least seller, now I’m told the new operas are leading sellers. It is incredibly encouraging if it continues to be true.”

(A different version of this story ran in Jewish Journal of Los Angeles on Sept. 2, 2009.)

On Wisconsin: The Badger State's Museums Feature Ohio Art

On, Wisconsin!: Learning from the Badger State's Art Museums

By Steven Rosen

(This first ran in Cincinnati CityBeat, 9-23-09)

A recent trip to Wisconsin reaffirmed for me the exciting correctness of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s efforts to build collections in Folk/Outsider Art and Contemporary Crafts. This year, the museum has displayed work from two new collections — Chicago collector Robert Lewis’ Outsider Art and Cincinnati collectors of Contemporary Craft Nancy and David Wolf.

Next, of course, it needs to find a way to show such work permanently, possibly in a new building that is an art/architectural statement in itself.


Activities in Wisconsin, especially in cities along the Lake Michigan shore, reflect some bold ways to do that. They also reveal the national interest in Folk/Outsider Art and Contemporary Crafts — especially those created by Ohioans.

I had never heard of ceramist Jack “Ohio-boy” Earl until I saw his work at the impressive John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, one of the nation’s top museums for such work. It’s about an hour north of Milwaukee. The arts center is separate from but has historic connections to nearby Kohler Co., which makes kitchen and bathroom plumbing fixtures and tile and stonework.

Turns out that Earl, a university-trained artist from northwest Ohio, has a long history of accomplishment in often-autobiographical, offbeat and often-humorous figurative ceramic work. He was one of the artists-in-residence at Kohler Co. way back in 1974.

His pieces were part of the museum’s 15-artist American Story exhibit, which also featured established, trained painters like Cuban-refugee Expressionist Jose Bedia as well as Outsider (or Visionary) artists like the late Hawkins Bolden, a blind man who constructed “scarecrows” out of scrap.

Racine — about an hour south of Milwaukee — has a modernist, downtown art-museum building that opened in 2003 and is devoted to the museum’s specialization in Contemporary Crafts. Alas, I missed one recent show — Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey. One of Frey’s colorfully invigorating ceramic sculptures is a standout at Cincinnati’s Wolf collection.

Milwaukee Art Museum, meanwhile, has the most architecturally striking building in the city, Santiago Calatrava’s 2001 Quadracci Pavilion, which contains the wing-like Brise Soleil, a movable sunscreen that gracefully covers or exposes the pavilion like giant, fluttering white wings.

A separate building houses the museum’s permanent collection, which is extremely strong in Folk, Self-Taught and Outsider Art. That collection, which has its own prominent gallery, includes one standout example of southern Ohio folk art — “Standard Bearer (Pair of Black Figures)” consists of almost life-size figures carved by an unknown Hamilton artist in the 1880s. They might have been used at an African-American fraternal organization or mortuary service and are as valuable as pieces of history as art.

Perhaps the best example of how much Wisconsin appreciates Ohio art is in the fact that the Kohler Foundation — which works cooperatively with the Kohler Arts — late last year bought an endangered “visionary art environment” in Springfield, near Dayton.

It is now restoring the site, called Hartman Rock Garden, which was built by the late H.G. “Ben” Hartman in his backyard during the Great Depression. It consists of small stone and concrete structures depicting subjects related to American and world history.

Eventually, Kohler will turn it over to a Springfield non-profit. The foundation, which previously restored a Louisiana sculpture garden, is now looking at sites in Missouri, Georgia and Wisconsin.

“There’s not another foundation doing this,” says Terri Yoho, Kohler Foundation’s Executive Director. “These are treasures to the local communities in their states.”

There’s a lot we can learn from Wisconsin.


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CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosen@citybeat.com