Susan Abbott interviewed me for Analog Salon #15. Following are my expanded Notes prepared for that evening on the KGNU patio in the sky in downtown Denver:
Songs and background for M Thornton’s Analog Salon #15
Longer Cuts of Songs on a Playlist by KGNU: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfh7VPXTN_2E
#1 Generalist / Existentialist / Liberal Arts
This Is Your Life!
Tried to do it all, rolling through life funded by curiosity based in the humanities and American Studies major
Start off with a song mix: Doors for Soft Parade “Petition the Lord with Prayer” and Patti Smith’s Gloria “Jesus Died”: Speaking Words of Poetry
Thornton’s overview of his education, jobs, careers, and interests: St. Catherine’s elementary school, Regis High School on the Northside, Lake Forest College, Conway Landscape Design School; swept and mopped the Coliseum after the Stock Show, taxidermist trainee at Jonas Brothers, pounding spikes for the Colorado and Southern, computer programmer, bartender in Chicago, summer temp at Denver Botanic Gardens, gardener at Crestmoor Downs; Landscape Architect at AHEC, English Teacher at DSA; Art, Music, Clothes, Gardening, Bicycling are his themes
Mix tape of James Brown with Oliver Nelson It’s a Man’s World followed by Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man: Talking Gender Roles and the subtle nuances of Words in Lyrics without ignoring traditional tropes
Shook James Brown’s hand at Turn of the Century, and saw Tammy Wynette and George Jones at Cheyenne Frontier Days
Wide ranging musical interests evinced by syllabus from American Literature that layered Genres, Themes, Theories, Schools of Literature
Mix of Bowie TVC15 and Tenth Avenue Freeze Out are funky tunes by white boys, concerts I went to: Iggy Pop dream nonsense sung by Bowie, and a Story of his beginnings by Bruce Springsteen
#2 Words and Place
Community ties define Place: church, scouts, school, neighborhood organizations — Organized Baker Residents, La Alma Lincoln — art organizations, galleries, museums, the BUG performance art space; English Speaking Union; news outlets and magazines; radio stations; Biennial Culture Club and Analog Salon
Sukiyaki song by Kyu Sakamoto — Japanese song from 1963 played continually on sister Norine’s 45 turntable; sister was a bit of a Beatnik, who brought me to the Scotchman for malts and burgers while she cruised with her girlfriend; sisters put on plays for neighborhood in our yard; Norine’s duck which she won at the Regis Carnival, and parakeet wandering the house
Robbed by three guys of different races; mix of races in our neighborhood: Jimmy lifting weights, playing tether ball, and checking Jack LaLanne, Allan best friend at 1st grade, Marty and Richard whose family were from New Jersey and father a printer at the Rocky, May and Oye Japanese girls, and David whose father was an architect and Mason, Italian families made up the Bryant block in the Highlands, middle class that held fast to its properties
Rather than listen to rock ’n roll, I listened to the Rat Pack and folk singers, because my sisters were 10-15 years older than me — their father died and our mother married my father after she moved from Chicago to Denver, and he left a year after I was born; I heard Irish songs from the family of the twins that two of my sisters married
Mother stenographer in Short Hand; Four Women who babied me without saying much: like Sukiyaki, all the words were open to interpretation — I hardly spoke for three years, just pointed to make my desires known
Shopping Centers were my Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: Lakeside, JCRS, Westland were the shopping spots that developed to the west of North Denver, as families moved to the suburbs but we stayed where we were; I identify consumerism at that time as a mark of affluence and so my mother insisted on getting narrow sized shoes for me at JC Penney’s in JCRS: she was fashion conscious and wanted to dress her young man
Genus Loci: North Denver to West Wash Park to Baker — bicycling all over city, delivering papers, telegrams, and commuting on bike, after living in KC after high school commuting to work 30 miles each way vowing to never do that again; lived in my first house for 16 years, when most of my classmates moved a time or two, further west for their middle class ambitions, and have now lived in Baker for 50 years, after staying with Mom intermittently as she moved through apartments in West Wash Park
#3 Words and Traveling: Clothes determine your origins
Mack the Knife by Ella and Basie: Kurt Weill translated to Scat evolving from forgotten lyrics
I bought a Purple Vest thrifting before the concert with Ella and Basie in Berlin; Clothes make the man; Fashion from fatigues and a beard to cords and clogs to fit in after being stared at like a member of the Baader Meinhof group: arrived as an exchange student in 1970 to protests in Berlin, broken windows on the Kurfürstendamm, rode the train to all points within the walled city and so I learned to explore on foot by bike and by train
Grand Tour: Pamplona hippies and Military thugs during the Running of the Bulls having read Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and La Fiesta; we arrived after moving through rain in Austria, Switzerland, and France
#4 Gardening and Music
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: first cd recording of analog record; broke down after buying an import vinyl of Twin Peaks, could only get a cd of Nusrat, so bought a cd player and replaced it two years ago because I keep all the platforms — 45s, LPs, CDs, Cassettes of mixed tapes — to play them as I scratch through the music collection
Saw Tony Bennett at the Paramount; I would sing “When in Rome” from the Bill Evans and Tony Bennet album sweeping carports as a maintenance guy
Crestmoor Downs gardener: took a sauna after work and the bus to the Rainbow on Monaco and Evans to New Wave Concerts to get in line early to see Devo, Iggy, Blondie, Roxy Music
40th birthday at 7 South before it was the Hi-Dive, I got the Robert Johnson record that day; saw Crash Worship there, naked and smoky; later showed students Itchy-O in concert; at the BUG which I helped start, saw the Denver Sound evolve from the Denver Gentlemen, 16 Horsepower, Janet Feder
#5 Teaching and Music
Student Assistant dies at PS1, who had graduated the year before and was taking a year off before college, daughter of Councilman — I carried her casket at a bagpiper led funeral at St.Dominic’s; Donna in Cambodia for a month and I turn 50 years old with a Guy Party; Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys song is popular and video of her trip as she returns
At Denver School of the Arts, I’m given the British Literature class but was an American Studies major, and so I made up the curriculum which was attractive to students though not consistent with what other Brit Lit teachers were doing, and so it goes as I sat at home reading Victorian novels the next summer, thinking Is This Work
I started to accentuate the difference between American and British English, noting to students that My Country Tis of Thee is the tune of the British National Anthem which the Sex Pistols lampooned in 1977 the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation — the song was banned in England; I would then play the record on a turntable in classroom loud: God Save the Queen
I saw David Thomas at Wallabis on Broadway around the same time that the Sex Pistols hit their target; Thomas recorded with the Pedestrians, a word like pedagogy that I dislike for their wrong connotations, pedestrian often used to denote lame or common, and pedagogy the practice of a teacher though a pedagoge was the slave who accompanied Roman children to school; never thought myself a slave to the system as a teacher — developed my own curriculum in all the classes I taught
#6 Speeches over Music
No Sell Out by Keith Leblanc on Tommy Boy Records was a speech set to beats
War by Bob Marley was taken from a Haile Selassie speech
I taught the AP English Language class at DSA, taught rhetorical strategies, and so these speeches, as well as Barack Obama’s speech on Race became instrumental to how strategies, speech, and beats intertwine
#7 Romanticism vs Romance (students didn’t know the difference)
Thrill of it All by Roxy Music vs It’s My Party by Brian Ferry: gender bending — New York Dolls, Velvet Underground, David Bowie
Fellowships at Oxford and Steinbeck Institute, and at Oxford I studied English Romantic Poetry, to return to the USA and include more Romanticism in my classes, linking the lyrics of Bryan Ferry with Isaiah Berlin’s lectures on Romanticism
Art Rock and Glam Rock coincided and opened up Punk Rock and New Wave
#8 Censorship and Constitutional Law
I took a class in college on Constitutional Law with a professor who set us straight every day, but I submitted a paper late, one weekend late, and my counselor said you don’t do that with Dr. Steamer, but I questioned him on his stand on censorship and said enough about the law for him to give me a high grade though the paper was late: keep freedom of the press.
QOTSA –Feel Good Hit of the Summer
The lyrics alone should be enough to give a person pause. Music and censorship — Louie, Louie; White Rabbit; Tonight’s the Night by Rod Stewart after Hal and Charlie on KHOW talked about the misinterpreted lyrics that my oldest sister became concerned about
I saw Queens with Gogol Bordello at Red Rocks and the move to Start Wearing Purple was a bit silly but inspiring to many people
#9 Soundtracks
Mondo Cane instrumental to song More by Frank and Basie
Martin Scorsese Mean Streets soundtrack not released but new standard: I made a cassette tape of all the music from the movie and called it Meano Streets
Soundtracks collect great pop songs that you might not hear if you don’t listen to pop radio like Dick the movie soundtrack
Classic composers whom I collected: Nino Rota, John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Henry Mancini: so first I talk about Words and speech introducing music, and now we hear soundtracks leading to Pop Songs
Music TV shows I watched before I had money for records or a turntable: Hullabaloo, Paul Revere in Where the Action Is, Soul Train, American Bandstand, Lloyd Thaxton lip-synching
#10 Crooners and CD box sets: Blondie, Roxy, Los Lobos, and Talking Heads
Elvis Costello’s best country song: Hank Williams — Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do; best musical autobiography — Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink
Tom Waits as a Carnival Barker at Paramount, Tony Bennett at the Paramount when we were the youngest audience members and then at DBG when we were the oldest, Lou Reed on Berlin, Frank Sinatra on Only the Lonely; sad songs like Bowie singing Wild is the Wind by Johnny Mathis
Rosalia’s Chicken Teriyaki — women singers; Nilufer Yanya, PJ Harvey’s Medicinals, Dinah Washington’s TV Is the Thing This Year, Duffy
Started the Analog Jam chronology with Sukiyaki the only Japanese word Americans were familiar with attached to a unrequited love song and finished with Chicken Teriyaki that Rosalia says crosses styles in a fun way
elk bellows: Quit Nickel and Diming Me as a send off, with music from O’Ray containing lyrics from my memoir Woman Rae on elkbellows.com