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Aaron Gilbreath
Aaron Gilbreath has written essays and articles for Harper's, The New York Times, Kenyon Review, The Dublin Review, Brick, Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and Saveur. He's the author of This Is: Essays on Jazz, the personal essay Everything We Don't Know, and the forthcoming book Through the San Joaquin Valley: The Heart of California. @AaronGilbreath

Finding Grace Between Love and Loss

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor

After leaving her husband, one young adventurous woman met a man whose deep troubles revealed themselves after she’d already fallen in love with him. In The Sun magazine, Piper Vignette writes about how she starts to find herself. In transition and on the move with her daughter, she confronts the ways her identity had been shaped by illness and the expectations people placed on her, and ponders the person she might have been and person she could still become.

It didn’t matter that I could intellectualize his brokenness. After Luke I was not OK, not for months. But I’m not sure anyone noticed, which scared me more than anything. He was just a boy. He might as well have been every boy I’d ever had, then lost. It was about more than that. It was about failure and the poverty of single motherhood. It was about what I was supposed to be, in contrast to what I was. How to explain that our wilderness felt like an extension of my own body? But in leaving Luke I’d abandoned pieces of myself: The wet-nosed black bear with her cubs. The marsh and scented redwood fog. His arms around me all night. I ached. It was about sickness, and those reasons I’d first begun writing as a child. It was: What next? After Luke I tried to deconstruct belonging: What it meant. How you got it.

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Link Wray’s Rustic Masterpieces

Rock'n'roll guitarist Link Wray (1929 - 2005) performs on stage at The Venue in London, 2nd June 1979. (Photo by David Warner Ellis/Redferns)

Like a musical missing link, guitarist Link Wray played instrumental music that had no antecedent, yet it signaled the end of the old staid pre-WWII America and ushered in rock and roll, metal, and punk rock. His 1958 hit “Rumble” remains his best known song, though not quite a claim to fame. Mention Wray’s name and many people stare blankly at you, even though they’ve likely heard his songs like “Rumble” and “Ace of Spades” in films like Pulp Fiction.

For the Oxford American, John O’Connor writes a much-deserved portrait of Link and the trio of under-appreciated vocal albums he recorded in the early 1970s inside his family’s chicken shack. O’Connor writes the definitive story of what are called the shack sessions, talking with a lone surviving relative and with the man who produced the recordings and has a complete unreleased fourth shack album. So how did these sessions come about?

Verroca was intrigued and, before returning to New York, asking Link to record an album with him. “What attracted me was how pitiful the whole situation was: this guy who did so much for rock & roll and doesn’t know it. It broke my heart.”

Link must’ve felt himself to be at a turning point. The pain and frustration of the years, a desire to be heard again, came bubbling up. Two days later, he phoned Verroca with a list of demands: no more fucking clubs; you pay the expenses (groceries, utilities, all that); and I want an advance. Verroca agreed to the first two. A serious collector of southwest Native American jewelry and artifacts (“It was the sixties,” he explained), Verroca sold most of it off, including a belt that had belonged to Cochise, the Apache leader, to finance the recording.

The notion to record in the Shack was a no-brainer. Link was comfortable there. Verroca thought it might yield something strange and loose. Again, it was the sixties. A return to simplicity was in the air. But the Shack was also an acoustic fish tank: maddeningly percussive and clunky. Link’s guitar was so loud it bled into the drum and piano mics. Verroca came up with an idea of placing Link’s amp out in the yard and miking it from the window, which had the odd result of broadening the guitar’s range while also effecting a sonic down-surge.

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Living to Create: Talking Music and Writing With Drummer Emily Rose Epstein

Katie Stratton/Getty Images

People who know Emily Rose Epstein know her as the propulsive drummer in Ty Segall’s band. From 2009 to 2015, Epstein toured and recorded with the guitar wizard and his crew of talented friends. She and Segall met at the University of San Francisco. They were both media studies majors. During Epstein’s first few years drumming with Segall, she continued pursuing her interests in journalism and editing. She interned at Thrasher magazine, San Francisco Weekly, Razorcake, Jello Baifra’s record label Alternative Tentacles, and she DJ’d and booked guests at the legendary student radio station, KUSF. Like her work history, her musical influences range widely, from Subhumans to Bob Wills to The Byrds. Naturally, her musical interests come through in her writing.

She wrote her graduating thesis on Patti Smith’s gender identity. She wrote an earlier paper about Led Zeppelin and the occult, and for SF Weekly, she wrote about her local Bay Area music scene. Rock musicians don’t get enough credit for their intellect or literary interests. I mean, Queen’s guitarist Brian May is a damn astrophysicist! Epstein shatters rock stereotypes. She proves that just because you thrash a Gretsch doesn’t mean you can’t curl up with books and string together beautiful sentences. You can, to be cliché¸ do things yourself. That’s what punk is: not dressing a certain way, but dictating the terms of your existence. Epstein took a break from touring in 2015 to work in LA, where she grew up, and plays in the country band, Blue Rose Rounder. She was kind enough to speak with me about her other life as a writer and reader.

***

Aaron Gilbreath: You started playing drums in a punk band at age 13 with a bunch of older guys from UCLA, and you were so young lots of venues made you sit outside before the gig. When did you get interested in writing and journalism?

Emily Rose Epstein: It was instilled in me from a young age that I would be a writer. My grandparents were both writers, and my uncle. My grandfather, Robert Epstein, was the Executive Arts Editor and a writer for the LA Times and the Herald Examiner, and he nurtured my creativity from a young age. We wrote poetry together all the time. He would share his work and make sure I was always making something new myself. He was a really inspiring person to be around ─ my first muse! I think more than anything I always thought I would be a poet, but journalism became something I could do more rigorously in an academic environment and potentially as a career. I always felt that it was more fun to make art than to cover it though, so that’s what dislodged the idea of being a career writer.

I was very into zines, punk journalism, and archives when I was younger, but I don’t think I became personally interested in journalism until I went to college. I never took it seriously until then. At that point I got deep into it ─ audio, print ─ just because it seemed like the right move for someone who was into the arts and writing.

AG: So it wasn’t the shrinking of newspapers or writers’ shaky financial prospects that dislodged the idea of a writing career? That is a tough decision for many writers and editors, though: do you take the risky road of making your own stuff, or do you pursue a hopefully more stable career editing, producing, or publicizing others’ work.

ERE: Yeah, thankfully I wasn’t faced with that. Music kind of took over my life and I lacked the time and drive to do anything but creative writing while I was playing music professionally, or whatever you want to call it, ha ha. It’s hard to say what path I would have taken had I not been whisked away by Ty.


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AG: Just to clarify, your grandfather shared his arts journalism with you, or his poetry? Or both?

ERE: Both! But mostly the poetry. Writing, brainstorming, working was central to his existence, and I think he knew I was really excited by that stuff, so we wrote every day and read every day. Writing was like magic, and he could always summon the spirits in both of us that were moved to make things. I was young when he passed, so I don’t think I was fully aware of, or able to grasp, what he was working on professionally.

AG: So poetry and prose? Have you continued writing poetry, or does it inform your other writing?

ERE: Oh of course, yeah. I’ve always written poetry, always will. I think I write less now than ever before, but now I’m writing differently. It’s interesting being in a country band: you almost have to learn a new way to write, and I’ve really been enjoying the simplicity of that. It’s satisfying to get back to the basics, to learn how to say something with fewer words, to get down to basic emotions that everyone can relate to but to figure out a way to do that in the most meaningful way.

The biggest gift the teachers gave me was telling me to get out into the city, the world.

AG: Muses are so essential to refining our interests and building confidence, so it sounds like you were fortunate to have a few in the family. Did your family history lead you to pursuing your media studies degree at USF? And did your time at USF help you refine your professional and artistic pursuits?

ERE: Perhaps, yes. Many members of my family work in the arts or are artists in some capacity, or writers, or work in the media, so I suppose it was always something I was around and in tune with. But honestly I didn’t know what I needed from school while I was there. (It’s true that “Youth is wasted on the young!”) I just knew that I needed to commit to getting a degree, and I wanted to major in something that could help me figure out what my path would be. USF’s Media Department was interesting. It certainly connected me with some fascinating people and lifelong friends, but the biggest gift the teachers gave me was telling me to get out into the city, the world, to look for real opportunities to work and create and consume media, so that’s what I did. I devoted myself to independent print, music, and film in the Bay Area in every way that I could, as a creator, consumer, lover, fighter.

AG: That is a gift, and you made incredible use of your time. Between ThrasherRazorcake, KUSF, and Alternative Tentacles, is it safe to say you were considering editing or journalism as a career?

ERE: Oh yeah, I never had any grand ideas that any of the music I would make would be popular or could support me, so I always assumed that I would work for an independent publisher or publication and do creative writing and music on the side.

AG: What was it about independent publishers that attracted you? You didn’t consider working for New York book publishers like FSG or interning at The New Yorker?

ERE: I considered working at several larger publications. I had an option to be a part of a program in London for writers that would have positioned me to intern for Rolling Stone London, but I decided to do a tour with Ty instead. I don’t know, I guess I never got far enough in my “career” as a writer or editor to know how that would have panned out, but I am a huge fan of small publishing houses where you can really sink your teeth into what you’re doing, where you can be a part of every process of publishing if you want to. I love the informality and the intimacy of that kind of environment. I’ve never been more inspired, really, as when I was working for RE/Search Publishing a few days a week, editing, transcribing, brainstorming, conducting interviews, working on layouts for books, fact-checking. I would come home and my young brain would never turn off: I had Schwaller de Lubicz and Timothy Leary and Philip Lamantia and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Andre Breton and Lydia Lunch and Leonora Carrington and Throbbing Gristle dancing through my thoughts all day and night, peppering every aspect of my life with rich new ideas. I assumed you’re not going to get that full-on immersive experience at a large publishing house, but I guess I don’t really know!

AG: Was your interest in both playing music and writing ever a problem or source of confusion for you, or did these different pursuits fit together in your mind?

ERE: It fit together at the time when I was writing for publications like SF Weekly. I was able to showcase bands in my columns that weren’t otherwise getting attention in the Bay Area, like the Baths (later the Royal Baths), Sic Alps, CCR Headcleaner, Rank/Xerox. That was exciting to me. But I do wish I had figured out ways to fit them together in my brain and body sooner; it took me a long time to feel confident with the songwriting process and letting my words collide with melodies. I think until quite recently I was self-conscious about sharing personal writing. I could write about other people’s music all day, but I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to fuse those two passions into one form, without collaborators steering me along the path or validating my work.

AG: So does that mean you’re currently writing your own music and also doing more personal writing? I was curious whether you were drawn to first-person narratives or memoir as well as journalism. As for being self-conscious about sharing, what changed for you?

ERE: Yes, I am writing a ton of music these days and have been for the past few years. That’s the bulk of the writing I do now. I still feel quite uncomfortable with the nakedness of writing memoirs or first-person narratives for anyone but myself. My songs are pretty bare, but I feel comfortable doing that because the writing is caressed by melody and rhythm. I’m an open book in a lot of ways, certainly emotionally, but I am pretty private too, so I think it would be a difficult transition to write and share in that way.

As far as being self conscious about sharing, I overcame that after getting out of a really difficult period in my life. I think for a year or two I really struggled when I left Ty’s band with understanding who I was, what I needed from life. I knew I needed to get out on my own in so many ways, but I didn’t know how, didn’t know what the goal was, didn’t know what I was capable of. I had a lot of difficult things happen in my personal life during that time, and I think when you learn really tough life lessons that force you to sort of wake up in a way you’ve never had to before, you also begin to realize how short life is, how universal pain is, how incredible people are around you. As those changes were happening within me. I really learned to love and forgive myself in a way I never had been able to before, and with that, I kind of also learned to learn to not give a fuck. There was just something in me that got lighter in the face of the heaviness. So now when I sing and write, I sing and write with a confidence I never was able to have before. I just really don’t care if people don’t like what I’m doing, and I’m even more grateful than ever when people connect with what I’m doing in a positive way, because I’m really living to create again, and I do hope that my music connects with people and is comforting in the ways that country music can be and has been for me.

I would come home and my young brain would never turn off.

AG: One of the interesting things about your writing is that you were an active part of the musical world you covered for SF Weekly. Playing music then, you were surrounded by so many incredible bands and personalities. Did profiling buddies like Sic Alps or John Dwyer present any challenges or tensions?

ERE: There’s always a strangeness to writing about your friends’ bands; you are biased in so many ways. It’s also difficult to get your friends to remember that they need to communicate with you as though you don’t know all the facts when you’re interviewing them. That stuff can be tricky. I think I spent more time editing my CCR Headcleaner interview than anything else I’ve written, just because there was so much in there that no average reader would be able to understand. Other than that, I never really experienced any challenges. All of the writing I was doing for the Weekly or my interviews for KUSF were so informal and basically fluff pieces, so the bands were just happy to be featured, and I was happy to be able to give them the attention I felt they deserved. I suppose if I had been doing longform journalism at the time, it would have been more difficult to be totally truthful or give the reader everything they think they want.

AG: On tours, did you bring along books and hit bookstores in different towns, or was that kind of literary life too difficult on the road?

ERE: I read incessantly on the road. I would go through tons of books on tour. I would finish my books and then finish Mikal’s books and then have to pick something up on the road sometimes! I loved hitting up bookstores and thrifting for books around America and the world, though. I really miss having that much time to devote to reading. It was great being on the road too, planning out what to read depending on where you were going. There was a tour where we spent a lot of time in France, so I made sure to bring Celine. Huysmans, Vonnegut, Brautigan, and Didion were always favorites of ours for traipsing through America.

AG: When you quit touring with Ty, was that an indefinite hiatus, or do you intend to drum with Ty again?

ERE: I never say never, but there’s no sign of that happening anytime in the near future. I’m not really playing drums these days, and Ty and I are on different creative wavelengths. I love him and think he’s doing great things always. He’s one of those people who has endless creative energy and I really admire that, but I know I needed to get out on my own and explore the things I wanted to do, and his creative needs are forever changing, too, so he and I are both thriving creatively but separately at this time!

Beyond “Rumble”: Talking with John O’Connor About the Other Link Wray

David Warner Ellis/Redferns

Most stories about guitarist Link Wray focus on his 1958 radio hit “Rumble,” a vaguely menacing, instrumental rock song that had no predecessor. They talk about how he punctured his amp with a pencil to get a grittier sound, maybe about the way his slick-hair, rockabilly, leather jacket look predated Elvis’. For the Oxford American‘s new music issue, journalist John O’Connor focuses on Wray’s lesser known masterpieces: the three albums fans call the shack sessions.

Despite the influence Link Wray’s instrumentals had on rock and roll on both sides of the Atlantic, from The Who to Jimmy Page, nothing brought Link much financial security or relief from the grueling life of touring tiny holes-in-the-walls. To retool his career and break free from the instrumental rock genre where he made his name, Link and his brothers started jamming in the early 1970s in the family’s rural chicken shack. The sessions mixed blues, folk, gospel, and country, featured singing, and produced rootsy music that sound like no other in Wray’s vast catalogue. Yet somehow, few people have written about this milestone in his creative life. O’Connor’s story “Mystic Chords” stands alone in the Link Wray literary canon. O’Connor talked with me about Link, journalism, and writing this epic story.

If I read your story correctly, you didn’t know much about Link Wray before researching this article. How did you find him and the story of his shack albums?

You read it correctly. My friend Dacus put the song “La De Da” from Link Wray on a mixtape a few years ago (“mixtape” isn’t quite right, but you know what I mean, a Dropbox thing) and I was like, “What the fuck is this?” I’d always thought of myself as educated about obscure ’70s rock or Americana or whatever you want to call it. I’ve got a hard-and-fast rule in record shops about buying LPs from ’71, 72, 73 ─ precisely the Shack era ─ if the price is right, and especially if there’s a funny-looking dude on the cover. So I was embarrassed that I’d never even heard of Link. And puzzled. I mean, how was it possible that I made it into my 40s without ever hearing Link Wray and the other Shack records? What else had I missed? All this stuff came up online about him having invented the power-chord, and how the rock gods all worshipped him: Townshend and Page, Dylan and Young. My embarrassment deepened, as did a curiosity about Link. That he was Native American added a layer of intrigue, because at that point, besides Robbie Robertson of The Band and Buffy Sainte-Marie, I probably couldn’t have named a single Native American musician, I’m ashamed to say. Actually, I could’ve named some: Karen Dalton, Jesse Ed Davis, Jimmy Carl Black, who played with Zappa. But I just didn’t know they were Native American, which is weird. This was all very maddening to me. Then, trying to find out more about Link got to be pretty dispiriting pretty quick. So much of what was written about him seemed cursory, half-baked, or worse. I had two early conversations with folks ─ Greg Laxton of the now defunct website linkwray.com, and Sherry Wray, Link’s neice ─ that convinced me basically everything I thought I knew about Link was wrong. Greg put me in touch with the producer Steve Verroca, who nobody had heard from in years. The story was writing itself.

Wow, that’s a strong start. When writers have questions that they’re compelled to answer, things get interesting, and the stories that result can have more urgency than ones that arise solely from a desire to tell a story. So when you started searching for answers, was there just a dearth of information about Link? Or a lack of humanizing detail?

There were a couple of starting points, like Jimmy McDonough’s article, which came out not long after Link’s death. He knew Link and seems to have talked to everyone else who knew him. It’s a fun read. But it’s also a tribute, as McDonough admits, a piece of hero worship, and therefore limited. And it came out twelve years ago. There wasn’t much else. Link didn’t give many interviews. Not by choice. He just wasn’t asked. This partly explains why so many of the stories about him are recycled and/or patently false. When he died, some obits referred to him as “Frederick Lincoln Wray.” At no point in his life was he named Frederick. It was also said that he had one son, when he had four. Anyway, that stuff’s easy to check. What’s nearly impossible to dissect is all the family conflict and bad feeling that endure over Link’s publishing rights, and the competing narratives, some of them legal in nature, about Link and his legacy. It’s still very raw for these folks.

Producer Steve Verocca is a key player in this story. Was he surprised you found him? And what happened when you started talking to him?

Greg Laxton got me in the door with Steve. I think he was skeptical. But Link’s music is also Steve’s legacy, in a way, and he was ready to talk. He had a pretty successful and multi-tentacled career, but as I say in the piece, Link sort of presides over it all. After we talked a couple of times, Steve hinted that he had some Shack-era stuff he was willing to share with me, but he wanted me to come to Virginia to see for myself. He didn’t say what it was, only that my mind would be blown. I thought maybe he had some outtakes or something. He surprised me there. But this speaks to your question above, too. My two principle sources were Steve and Sherry Wray. They disagree on essentially every point. Not just about Link. They’d disagree about what time of day it is. By the time I started talking to Steve, I’d already spent a lot of time on the phone with Sherry. So what happened when I started talking to him was my head started really spinning.

As a journalist, how do you build trust with a skeptical source like Steve Verocca? 

By talking to them, being patient, listening. People, generally, want to talk, even to complete strangers about incredibly personal stuff. They want their versions out there. You just have to be patient. Most people will go their entire lives without anyone ever asking them what they think about something. Nobody’s ever asked them for their opinion about anything, ever, and then suddenly you come along.

So Steve Verocca and Sherry Wray’s accounts conflict on nearly every point. As a journalist, how do you negotiate that sort of conflict between sources, especialy when they’re your two primary sources?

Checking with other people as best you can. I forget what the journalism rule is, something like cross-checking with two or more sources, or trying to. I offer a caveat in the piece along the lines of, I’m just trying to find a plausible centerline here. You know, looking for the path of least resistance. I’m on the outside looking in. Link’s dead. His brothers are long dead. Almost everyone who knew him or played at the Shack is dead. So I’m kind of at the mercy of secondhand stories. Maybe a good way to think about it is like a conversation between two people who’re both monologists and waiting for the other person to shut-up so they can resume talking and finish what they were saying. You’re a moderator, but one who’s also speaking to a dozen other people who’re weighing-in about what’s being said.

Link fans will salivate to hear that a whole fourth shack album exists and remains unreleased. In your piece, Verocca says he’d like to release this “When the time’s right.” Do you know if he has anything in the works? Are you going to help get that music out there? Do I sound like a crazy fan here? It’s just, when a person reaches an advanced age, biology has sort of made the time right.

I hope he releases it, but I don’t think he plans to do it anytime soon. A mutual friend reminded me the other day that Steve’s an old school record biz cat. Releasing stuff digitally just doesn’t register. He wants a physical product. And the chances of that are probably pretty slim, unfortunately. But you never know. Steve loves this record. It’s his favorite Shack record. He’s very proud of it. So it follows that he’d want people to hear it.

You admit you’re not a fan of “Rumble.” Now that you know so much more about Link and his music, and have listened to about everything he recorded, what do you think of his earlier, better known rock instrumentals?

I mean, I know what this stuff must’ve meant at the time, given the context. A few years before, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” was No. 1 on the Billboard charts, a runaway smash hit! So, obviously an improvement. Which is the understatement of understatements. But it’d require some time-travel on my part to really appreciate “Raw-Hide” and “Jack the Ripper” and the rest.

The Humanities Marketplace As a Circle of Hell

Ian Nicholson/PA Wire/Press Association via AP Images

After earning two undergraduate degrees and a graduate degree, Athena Lathos, a self-described “Friendly Neighborhood Millennial,” still struggles to find adequate work, even in academia. Like many of us writer types, she had to work retail while applying to numerous other jobs that never contacted her back.

On her blog Bertha Mason’s Attic, Lathos shares her travails as a humanities major in the job market, as she tries to imagine that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t another dumpster fire. It isn’t as if she doesn’t recognize the pitfalls of her academic pursuits. It’s just that our capitalistic culture rewards too few people for them. The beauty is that her blog post makes her abilities evident: her wit, intellect, narration mixed with analysis, the engaging narrative voice, self-awareness, and deprecation so essential to compelling, insightful personal nonfiction. Please, someone help this talented, passionate writer and scholar find a job deserving of her.

Before I finished graduate school, I met with a career counselor at OSU and explained that I might like to pursue a career where I could remain part of university life, i.e. as a low-level administrator. For jobs even at that tier, she told me I would likely need another MA in “Higher Education Administration.” Really? Another MA? That I would have to pay in full for? To use the same programs and software that I had already been using as an instructor at OSU? Okay.

I heard her, but I also ended up applying to a lot of entry-level admin jobs, most of which amounted to working as a receptionist. I didn’t get any interviews.

After a summer of job searching, and increasingly desperate for cash, I began working retail at a local bookstore, thinking that I could continue looking for a position while I earned minimum wage. I ended up there for a year. Every few months, I was given tasks that increased in complexity and responsibility – everything from daily bookkeeping to making bank deposits for the store – while being told it wasn’t likely I would ever get a raise beyond a cashier’s minimum wage. At the store, nearly all of us had a college education or more, but we were treated like high schoolers with little to no intelligence. For example, one member of upper management referred to us as “the blind leading the blind.” Another, when I gave my two weeks notice, assumed it was because I was starting college as a freshman in the fall, expressing utter shock after she learned that I was 24 with an MA degree. In addition to those comments, there was the daily drudgery of being condescended to and degraded by everyone’s favorite I-must-speak-to-the-manager-immediately shoppers, who a) routinely berate you for store policies you have no control over and b) treat you like a thoughtless robot.

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The Making of Nirvana’s Most Vulnerable Album

Kevin Estrada/MediaPunch/IPX

In the 25 years since Nirvana last performed, we’ve seen a slew of posthumous releases and documentaries. One of the most enduring monuments to the band’s brilliance is their 1993 MTV Unplugged performance. Yes, they played a rare acoustic set. They played Leadbelly and David Bowie covers, and were joined by the Meat Pupppets. But the show contained an affecting vulnerability that still cuts right through people like me, who are old enough to have watched the show when it first aired. Kurt laughed. He talked with the crowd. The audience wasn’t moshing or jumping around. Fans were enchanted, especially when Kurt spoke with them one-on-one after the show. Unplugged became one of the band’s best selling albums. For The Ringer, Alan Siegal talks with the musicians, producers, and fans who made this historic night happen.

Craig Marks (editor, Spin): When he did “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” it wasn’t one of those things where a month later, or a week later, or a year later, you’re like, “That was great,” even though you didn’t really know it at the time. You knew the dead second that it was happening that you were witnessing something phenomenal. You didn’t really even know he had it in him. It was that good.

Bobcat Goldthwait (comedian-filmmaker): When they did that song, I remember the hair standing up on my arm.

Beth McCarthy-Miller (director, MTV Unplugged): That song told a thousand tales. It felt like he was singing all the pain that he had through that song. It was crazy.

Charles R. Cross (journalist-Cobain biographer): You get the sense that he’s just gonna fall apart, it’s like a car without its wheels, and yet, in the end, he plows through it.

Gillian Gaar (journalist): The thing he did, and he did it in a number of Nirvana songs, you’ll notice, [is] where he’ll be singing full bore, going all out, but then in the final verse he’ll go up an octave. And then really ratchet the energy up.

Scott Litt (producer, MTV Unplugged in New York): It fucking killed me—particularly where he paused before the end and gasped.

Amy Finnerty (Vice president of music and talent, MTV): The breath in between the breath. He made time stop. Time just stopped.

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What Was Andy Warhol’s Factory Really Like?

Lothar Parschauer/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

To many young people now, artist Andy Warhol is just that stylishly dressed dude who made that soup can painting, but back in his prime in New York City, Warhol was the influential center of a powerful artistic community both venerable and strange. Warhol was mysterious. He influenced pop culture. He controlled a vast network of other artists and hangers-on. He had a group work and gallery space called The Factory, where artists, friends, sycophantic scenesters, and assorted oddballs involved themselves with him, did drugs, painted and made films, and tangled themselves in Warhol’s never-ending psychodrama. The amphetamines surely worsened peoples’ relationships by heightening the paranoia, but art somehow got made, too. For The New York Times, Guy Trebay and Ruth La Ferla ask participants about Warhol and the Factory, creating a fascinating oral history of a bizarro scene that had as much to do with sex and appearances as it did art.

Benedetta Barzini, 75, Vogue model, actress. Factory years: 1960s.

There was also this about the Factory: There were all these people hanging around hoping to find themselves but losing themselves more and more and more. I think Andy enjoyed seeing the suffering.

Danny Fields, 78, music industry executive, former manager of the Ramones. Factory years: 1960s.

There was a time when we went to Peter Knoll’s [heir to the Knoll furniture fortune] apartment on East 72nd Street. Andy was sitting on a sofa while Ivy Nicholson [model and actress] was disgracing herself, crawling around on her hands and knees bemoaning her love for Andy. Every so often Andy would, not violently but with a slight lift of his foot, kick her like a tiresome child or a dog you did not want to hurt but wanted to go away.

Dustin Pittman, photographer. Factory years: 1969-75.

He chased you and then — there is no gentle way to say this — he moved on. When Andy dropped the Superstars, they were upset. They all expected Andy to take care of them. They felt they certainly had a part in Andy’s fame.

Geraldine Smith, 69, actress. Factory years: 1960s.

He liked people that he thought had star quality. He put you in his movies, and then it was up to you to parlay that into something else. A lot of people didn’t.

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Working to Preserve Traditional Gospel Music

AP Photo/Ron Frehm
The golden age of gospel music overlapped with the civil rights movement, yet approximately 75 percent of the music has already been lost, its records destroyed, undocumented, and thrown away over generations. At Oxford American, Will Bostwick writes about historian Robert Darden’s efforts to collect, catalogue, and digitize what’s left in the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, an archive at Baylor University in Texas. So how did so much of gospel get lost?

Ask them why, and the answer gets complicated. “Part of it is racism,” Darden says. “Part of it is economic.” Part of it has to do with the consolidation in the music industry (some record companies hold the copyrights to these songs, but, lacking financial incentive, don’t make them available in any form). And the last part, as he sees it, is the religious aspect of this music. Marovich put it to me this way: “When I was growing up, there was always, in our neighborhood, a couple of guys in white shirts and black ties that wanted to talk to you about Jesus. And you wanted to run the opposite direction from those guys. . . . Gospel is a little frightening to the unknowledgeable.”

In February of 2005, Darden wrote an op-ed in the New York Times lamenting the loss of these treasures from gospel’s golden age: “It would be more than a cultural disaster to forever lose this music,” he writes. “It would be a sin.” The apparent imbalance of that remark stuck with me. By any honest standard, we sin regularly. A cultural disaster seems like a much more grievous affair. But I also had the feeling that he was onto something—that the loss of this music was a moral failing born out of a history of oppression and neglect. He explained to me that when he wrote that, he had in mind Jim Wallis’s (at the time controversial) claim that racism was America’s original sin.

The day the op-ed came out, Charles Royce, an investor from New York with no particular ties to gospel music, called Darden and asked what needed to be done to save what remained of the music. With Royce’s funding, and with the institutional support of Baylor University libraries, Darden and his colleagues started the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. In a 2007 interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Darden said, “We see it as kind of like those seed banks up around the Arctic Circle that keep one copy of every kind of seed there is in case there’s another Dutch elm disease. I just want to make sure that every gospel song, the music that all American music comes from, is saved.”

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How the U.S. Systematically Puts Black Farmers Out of Business

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As if farming wasn’t difficult enough, with the physical exhaustion, expensive equipment, and unreliable weather, racist lending policies continue to winnow away the number of black sugarcane growers in Louisiana. Only 2 percent of farmers in the U.S. are black. In Iberia Parish, Louisiana, the number of black farmers decreased by 44.7 percent between 2007 and 2012. For The Guardian, Debbie Weingarten focuses on one of those families, the Provosts, and how racist lending policy and outright intimidation put them out of business. What redlining was to black home ownership, racist loaning practices are to black farmers. But in sugarcane it’s deeper than that, because American sugarcane farming began as a plantation system that both used enslaved black workers and worked to sustain the racist social hierarchy through beatings and lynching. You can see the effects in the Provosts’ fields, which now belong to a bank.

In 2008, June’s second season farming on his own, the sugarcane production cost was $615 per acre. But June [Provost] was only loaned $194 per acre. After weeding and fertilizing, he had little left to repair or purchase equipment. By fall, he could barely afford to pay his workers, let alone plant new cane for future production.

The Provosts argue that First Guaranty Bank and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved years of unfeasible loans that were too small for the scale of June’s production and dispersed too late in the season – and that when he failed, they collected on his collateral.

Such lending discrimination, Angie argues, can be observed just by looking at the fields around south Louisiana. By summer, white farmers’ fields are well-drained, weed-free, laser-leveled, whereas black farmers’ fields are overrun with Johnsongrass, a noxious weed – visual proof, says Angie, that black farmers are provided fewer resources than white farmers.

“You have to see it as a giant web, and every time you move in one way, it pulls you back in another,” says Hank Sanders, an attorney who is regularly involved in strategy with the Provosts’ legal team. “White supremacy is such a powerful thing … and it manifests itself in these various entities and institutions.”

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A Burger Made of Money

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By offering burgers, donuts, pizza, and ramen at his assortment of casual eateries, Micah Camden has built himself into Portland, Oregon’s most successful restaurateur. He owns more restaurants than anyone else, which wasn’t his goal but is saying something for a city known for star chefs and great food. At Willamette Week, Leah Sottile profiles Camden to understand what makes this 40-year old millionaire tick, as he ventures into vegan ice cream and another fast food concept. Some Portlanders see his restaurants as agents of gentrification, their aesthetics bland and homogenous, popular with tourists. Some find his personality contentious. He doesn’t care. He grew up on fast food, and he gives people what they want: fast food and value.

 His approach to entrepreneurship, in general, is at odds with the city’s usual way of doing things.
“I think he doesn’t give a shit about authenticity or any of these hang-ups that a lot of us have,” Huffman says. “Everybody’s trying to do stuff that feels sincere or something in a way that you don’t want to do things that feel calculated or douchey. And Micah’s like, ‘I want to make money!'”
Matt Brown, co-owner of Bunk Sandwiches, agrees that part of Camden’s success is his ability to hang up his chef clothes and to approach food without culinary-school pretension.
“When you’re wearing the whites, you’re going for a niche part of the pie,” Brown says. “When you’re wearing that hat, you want to get written up in Bon Appétit and be celebrated for providing something wonderful for their market. Fast casual means taking yourself out of the equation and thinking, ‘What does everyone else in town want?’ He approaches that pretty well.”

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