I'm Back!

Ay ay ay! I haven't posted anything in a terribly long time. I'll get on it, swear. But if anyone actually ever reads this thing, well, here's some stuff I've been writing for JezebelMusic.com, along with a bunch of news that I compile that you can read or not: http://www.jezebelmusic.com/tag/erin-sheehy/

And here's an excellent video of Tina Turner who is my Sixth of July American hero for being a super badass performer with great legs.

Good Rockin' Tonight

A Moment In Rock Out History

Wynonie Harris looked like he might sell you a lemon or sodomize your daughter. In one of my favorite photos of Wynonie, he’s wearing a light blue suit and a Big Bad Wolf grin and holds his arms outstretched as if to request a dance. Hair-creamed, pencil-mustached and cocking an eyebrow, he’s probably had one drink too many and will surely press too close on the dance floor. But that oozing “come to daddy” smirk of his worked time and time again. By the age of 21, Wynonie Harris had fathered three bastard children with three different women and he sure didn’t stick around to raise them. A carouser, womanizer and master of ribald, Wynonie Harris had one foot in the blues and one foot on the unpaved boulevard of rock n roll.

In the early forties, Harris became known as “Mr. Blues” while playing nightspots like the Club Alabam in LA and the Rhumboogie Club in Chicago. To clarify, Wynonie’s blues were not the ambling, mournful drawl of the Delta blues or the smoky sultry warble of cabaret “city blues.” Wynonie’s were jump blues. Somewhere between boogie-woogie and rock n roll—in both chronology and style—the jump blues were a playful, wiggling wobbling blues, the kind you bounced your shoulders to. In songs like Wynonie’s “Loving Machine,” the bass hopped, the piano danced nimbly, hands clapped on the offbeat, trumpets blared, and saxophones squawked and went hoarse. Wynonie’s party was twinkling fun.

As a frontman, Wynonie Harris was what you’d call a blues shouter, the guy who could really hang with a live band, pushing his vocals over all that percussion and brass. The rasp in his voice sounded more symptomatic than innate…like he had a tickle in his throat, a dry cough or—more probably—he’d been shouting in the nightclub all weekend. He forced tunes up through his throat, but all that effort didn’t translate into emotional thrust: Wynonie didn’t have the chops of a great R&B belter. He’d just get louder. Sometimes by the end of a line like “Don’t roll those bloodshot eyes at me, I can tell you’ve been out on a spree,” Wynonie would half-speak his last couple of words. But this style made him seem offhand and cool, which worked when you sang about sexin’ and boozin’.

Wynonie’s songs were almost all about whiskey and sex, though he made a few memorable tunes about wine as well, (“Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” “Drinkin’ Sherry Wine,” and “Drinkin’ By Myself,” to name a few.) Blues lyrics were often liquored up and full of sexual coding, but there was something so overt about tunes like “Don’t Take My Whiskey Away From Me,” or “I Like My Fanny Brown,” that Wynonie became most known for his racy numbers.

Though they were so often about sex, Wynonie’s songs weren’t made for the bedroom. They were bawdy lilts, shared like a good dirty joke. Before singing the blues, Wynonie had been a comedian, a dancer, and a drummer, and you could hear it in his timing. Take the self-penned hit, “Good Morning Judge,” in which Wynonie sang about ending up in the courthouse after every time he’d “bent” the rules:

She’s five foot two with eyes of blue and pretty as a queen,
I didn’t know her pop was a city cop, and she was just fifteen!

Drumbeat. Drumbeat.

Good morning judge! Why do you look so mean, sir?
And Mr. Judge, what can the charges be?

By the time his career started slowing down in the mid-fifties, Wynonie had sunk into the bilge of novelty songs and misogyny, and it became hard to find much wit in a song like “Keep On Churnin’ (Til The Butter Comes.)” But some of those numbers from his heyday, like “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and “All She Wants To Do Is Rock”—where the “-ck” clued you in to the real operative word—swung with such an ease, and pushed the limits of “decency” without dissolving into goofy euphemism. Their style would be imitated by future rock n rollers like Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis.

“Good Rockin’ Tonight” became Wynonie’s big hit in 1948, when he took it from Roy Brown and sexed it up real good. Brown sang “Good Rockin’ Tonight” like a button-up Jackie Wilson, all hiccuppy but real straight in rhythm and tone, lacking those Wilson slides and falsetto wails. Wynonie made “Good Rockin’ Tonight” sway, the saxes leaning, looping, dragging, and Wynonie singing his smoothest, really hitting the notes. Elvis Presley later sang his own rendition, high-energy and full of teenage growl. But there was a pleading note when Elvis sang “Meet me in the alley behind the barn,” where Wynonie’s ease made it a casual invitation.

Wynonie Harris’ career petered out in the fifties and he spent the last years of his life tending bar in California. He died of esophageal cancer in 1969 because he’d partied too hard and shouted too loud. Most people first stumble upon him when they’re charting Rock N Roll genealogy. He’s a hidden root in the family tree.

Another New Show: Mother's Day Special

Songs about Mamas!

Click Here: New Episode of Brooklyn Beat!

CLASSIC RAP THIS TIME AROUND

Click Here to Listen to My New Radio Show: BROOKLYN BEAT!

(i'm totally corny, but the music rocks)

Rocking Out!

Hey Hey, Skin I'm In

Of all the images from the four fashion-related exhibitions currently showing at the International Center of Photography (ICP), one hit me hardest with its flash and brassiness: "Self-Portrait" (1977) by the Cameroonian photographer, Samuel Fosso. Fifteen at the time of the photograph, Fosso—a slim young man in a baby afro and a sailor cap, shiny space cadet shades, high-waisted bells and a button-up with sharp starched lapels like paper airplane noses—stands with his right leg slightly bent and his left hip swayed, just barely, to the side. Fosso’s a little sweaty, posing in front of a drapey backdrop that screams prom night, but he’s got such a composed swagger that he makes that pubescent forehead grease of his look like supermodel gleam. Photography lights are visible in the shot. Set up far in front of the camera, they call attention to Fosso’s process as he creates his own badass character right there in front of us, for us. The whole scene is reminiscent of Jimmy Cliff as Ivan in the 1973 film The Harder They Come: a drug dealer, Ivan poses for photos in pinstripes and leopard print, with shining pistols in his hands, before lunging into his final bullet-wracked crime spree and death. Life is short, so make yourself a legend while you can.

The other 1970s figure that Fosso channels in Self Portrait is Sly Stone. I always picture Sly as a style icon with substance, all fringe and beads and rock star heroism, shirtless but piled high with accessories. There’s a seemingly naked boldness to these guys’ eye-catching “Look at me!” style…then again, Sly and Ivan and Fosso are all cloaking themselves in constructed personae. But isn’t that what adventurous fashion is all about? Putting yourself out into the world, but as you want people to see you?

I finally peeled myself away from Self Portrait to look at the rest of the exhibits, but Sly kept coming back to me. I couldn’t stop humming that track from his 1973 album Fresh: “The Skin I’m In.” The clothes I wear, and the things they dare me to do…hey, hey, skin I’m in.

Skin—its texture, its quality, its sheen—is, for me, key to understanding the differences between the four fashion exhibitions at ICP. In Weird Beauty, the exhibition of contemporary fashion photography, many of the highly stylized, heavily retouched images play with and subvert daily life. (Take, for instance, Steven Klein’s “X-Urbia,” a series from the March 2007 edition of W, wherein fembot-esque models in red and blue wigs languish in a suburban setting, bathing in green paint and OD-ing on Froot Loops.) In the works from this exhibition, the featured clothes are by high-end designers, the people wearing them are models, and everybody’s skin either glistens and shimmers all bronzy or looks flat and matte and pale like paint. Not much realism here—this is weird beauty, odd and angular enough that I can appreciate its aesthetic but feel I’m not even expected to aspire towards it.

Both Edward Steichen and Martin Munkacsi, two of the mid-20th century artists whose works are on display as separate exhibitions, photographed mainly celebrities—athletes, actors, politicians—in staged or studio portraits. The photos are glamorous but accessible: mean ol’ Robert Moses glancing dashingly at the camera, the platinum blonde Jean Harlow bent down to catch a drag off her cigarette during a tennis match. Everyone’s shot in soft light, so that Gary Cooper and Paul Robeson and Katherine Hepburn all glow, like angels or pearls. Unlike the models of Weird Beauty—good-looking canvasses for the artistic expression of designers and photographers—these celebrities are meant to embody a style. The assumption is that we know and maybe love these figures: we might even hope to be one of them someday. “Even if you haven’t a photogenic nose or wistful cheekbones, you are still potential material,” reads the 1935 Harper’s Bazaar article, “You’ll Be in Hollywood Yet,” on display in the Munkacsi exhibit. The pliant, nuanced grayscale of these photos similarly invites us to take part in this fantasy.

The illusion of effortless glamour is absent in “This Is Not A Fashion Photograph,” ICP’s collection of photojournalism that “touches on style as a means of personal expression.” Most of the people in these photos look pretty beat: no glimmer or glow to their skin. In Lisette Model’s 1950 photo, “New York,” she’s shot a couple in formalwear—think tuxes and pin curls—looking a little bedraggled. The man’s weary expression, the tensed veins on the woman’s neck, the forehead-creases of a long day and the splotchiness of a night of drink are neither softened by lighting nor edited out. But the imperfections don’t diminish the elegance of the subjects. Rather, they humanize this pair because we see some level of failed effort. For all we know, Kate Hepburn flew out of the womb in a biplane and well-tailored pantsuit, but these two are clearly in costume.

The costumes in This is Not A Fashion Photograph run the gamut. Larry Clark’s 1968 “Acid, Lower East Side,” shows a young man in luchador style face-paint and a fringed poncho, slack-jawed and slouching in the middle of an empty downtown street. From the looks of it, he is tripping pretty hard on acid. The depth of field really dramatizes the shot: far behind this boy, streetlamps burn bleary and the lonely New York street succumbs to shadow. This certainly isn’t a pastel afternoon in Haight-Ashbury, and there’s something so sad about the fact that there’s no one else around, save apparently Mr. Clark, to watch this kid on his psychedelic parade.

Many of the photos in this exhibition are of New Yorkers, from the burly matrons in fur and veils and high contrast lighting on the South Ferry-bound 9th Avenue Local to the dazed and sweaty patrons of Studio 54 in silken white Saturday night gear. These certainly are not fashion photographs: though no less carefully composed than the images in the “artier” exhibits, these photos give the sense of a scene that’s been captured rather than constructed. In This Is Not A Fashion Photograph, the subjects’ connections to time and place are key. Notice George Strock’s inclusion of a small, out-of-focus cluster of men outside the billiard hall in the background of his 1941 portrait, “Satchel Paige waiting for pool hall adversary, Harlem, New York.” One of my favorites is the 1966 Bruce Davidson shot, “High school student smoking a cigarette on East 100th Street.” The kid wears a severe side-part and a funky, stripy modernist sweater. But the article of clothing is not what makes this kid stylish. What makes this kid stylish is the biology book in his right hand and the cigarette and switchblade in his left. What makes this kid exude cool is his scowl. He’s not just wearing an awesome sweater; he’s wearing his version of “high school student on East 100th Street.” And that is why these journalistic photos are so influential on the fashion photography of today, which doesn’t sell clothing so much as persona.

I used to sneer at people who put very much effort into their clothes and appearance—especially when I lived in Los Angeles, where it seemed that hours of primping left everyone powdered to the same texture and tone—but here in New York I’ve come to love the pageantry of subway fashion. Fur hats and plastic dresses, special edition sneakers and fake eyeglasses; there’s something so human about trying to build one’s own unique character from the little frivolous things in life. And then there’s this contrast between what we’d like to be and what we are: tired-looking, parched by fluorescents and central heating, beaten down by the wind and the double shift and the Metropolitan Transit Authority. So while I love to see the rockabilly girls, in all their glory and red lipstick, dolled up just so and headed out for the night, I’m more touched by the rumpled business suits and wilted hairdos retreating home, defeated. Skin I’m in, hey, and the things I’ll never, never win.