All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.
All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our editors featured many COVID-19 stories from across the web, and below, we’ve narrowed down 11 picks that really resonated with us. This roundup is focused on reported features; we initially included a few pandemic essays in this category, but those will instead appear in the upcoming Best of Essays list.
The Atlantic‘s coverage of COVID-19 was exceptional this year, and Yong’s deep, thoughtful September feature lays it all out. How did the U.S. get here? Everything that went wrong was predictable and preventable, and despite all of its resources and scientific expertise, America’s leaders failed monumentally to control the virus at every turn.
The coronavirus found, exploited, and widened every inequity that the U.S. had to offer. Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID‑19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history.
Another devastating read, “The Pariah Ship” by Michael Smith, Drake Bennett, and K. Oanh Haat, recounts the nightmare journey of Holland America’s MS Zaandam.
The pandemic has exposed the flaws of tourism, and cruise ships are a symbol of the disastrous effects that COVID-19 has had on the travel industry as a whole. Princess Cruises’ Diamond Princess, which departed on January 20 this year from Japan’s Port of Yokohama, was the first ship to suffer a major outbreak. Clark’s account of the voyage and subsequent quarantine of the ship’s 3,711 passengers and crew is riveting yet terrifying. He weaves stories of numerous people on board, from the more-privileged (a pair of traveling couples called the “Four Amigos”) to the overworked and underprotected (like security crewmember Sonali Thakkar). His reporting of the U.S. government’s response is superb, especially from the perspective of Dr. James Lawler, the infectious-disease expert called in to lead the evacuation of American passengers back to the U.S. We also get a glimpse of what the experience is like for the ship’s captain, Gennaro Arma, who was eventually the last person to disembark.
The Amigos, reduced now to three, along with the 325 other American evacuees, were still waiting on the buses. They had spent three hours idling on the pier and then, once they drove to the airport, sat on the tarmac for two more hours. Now, as the delay extended into a sixth hour, the passengers were nearing revolt. They were exhausted. And more problematically for the largely elderly passengers: The buses had no bathrooms.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., where it was still Sunday afternoon, the fate of the waylaid evacuees was being decided. Around the time the passengers were exiting the Diamond Princess, Japanese officials had blindsided their American counterparts with the news that some of the passengers boarding the buses had actually tested positive several days before. Soon many of the highest-level members of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response team, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, were arguing about what to do. Representatives from the CDC continued to fear spreading the virus. William Walters, the deputy chief medical officer for the State Department, wanted to bring everyone home anyway. Those urging the evacuation noted that the planes had been prepared with isolation units to contain the sick.
As the debate raged, the evacuees were demanding to be let off the buses, quarantine be damned, to find a bathroom. Carl was breathing so hard his masked breath fogged his glasses as he strained to control his bladder. Some seniors were crying. Finally, a few were allowed to relieve themselves in bottles beside the bus or were brought to a nearby terminal.
After her son, Junior, killed himself in April 2020, Kelli Wilson discovered that he’d been active on a “pro-choice” website — the choice in question being to kill oneself. In her deep dive into the intersection of suicide and the internet, Vice writer Shayla Love describes how Wilson is now advocating for legislation that would “increase the liability website servers have for the content on the sites they host.” Love doesn’t name the website Junior frequented “due to the concerns of experts who believe that naming it explicitly could lead to self-harm by distressed people.” She refers to it instead as “Suicide Solution.” It wasn’t an easy choice to make, Love explains, because there’s nothing easy when it comes to suicide — including assigning blame:
I wrestled with how to write about a site like Suicide Solution. Even publishing an article at this length, that includes details of what makes the site dangerous, is a controversial choice. Suicide survivors and researchers alike cautioned against publishing the site’s real name. At least one expert I spoke to was hesitant to be interviewed at all because of the fear that they would contribute to driving more people to the site. And, in fact, it might. In one thread I read on Suicide Solution about how people found the website, several users referenced a past VICE article from 2015. Our choice to not to use Suicide Solution’s real name is a reflection of the uncertainty that plagues this arena— about how the internet confers risk, how the ease of finding the site contributes to that risk, and the variability in how people will use the forum.
Still, [April] Foreman [ a psychologist on the executive board of the American Association of Suicidology], said that it makes sense to think that if we just control all the information online about suicide, then people won’t die by suicide anymore. But Suicide Solution’s many incarnations throughout the decades are enough proof that a community like this one may never fully disappear. Trying too hard to stifle it could only drive it back to the Dark Web, out of sight.
“Suicide was a leading cause of death for youth before the internet and before social media, before bulletin boards,” Foreman said. “It has gone up some, but it was a leading cause of death before all of those things because something else is going on. At the end of the day, you could get rid of that website. And I don’t think that you would see an appreciable change at all in in suicide deaths.”
Instead, she thinks the more critical question to ask is: What need is Suicide Solution meeting—even dangerously so—and how do we create systems and supports around the person so that they don’t have to turn only to the internet to feel supported?
But even before COVID-19, jet-setting content creators entangled themselves in problematic scenarios, posing questions about privacy, safety, and ownership, among other issues. These seven reads explore the world of travel influencers in the age of Instagram, and the implications of the industry and its content on tourism and politics.
In recent years, Western travel bloggers and “adventure tourists” have come to Pakistan to discover the country and write about its beauty, while some — like Cynthia Ritchie — have ended up becoming political voices. Ritchie, who calls her work strategic communications, has received extraordinary access to restricted areas and officials, and her critics accuse her of being “a propagandist for the military with a white saviour complex.” In response, Ritchie and others, like Polish travel vlogger Eva zu Beck, see themselves as truth-tellers and storytellers. At the Guardian, Samira Shackle reports on the politicization of tourism in Pakistan.
The fanbase that has developed around Ritchie can be split into two camps. The first enjoys her travel content, and her sunny portrayals of Pakistan. For the second camp, who actively support the military and spend their time on social media attacking anyone they see as insufficiently patriotic, Ritchie is a useful ally, an outsider who reflects their worldview. “More power to you Cynthia. Keep exposing the filthy culprits who have eaten up this country like mites,” wrote one Twitter user.
In 2019, questions about Ritchie’s links to the army intensified on social media when she posted footage of a trip to Pakistan’s heavily contested tribal areas. She told me that the trip had actually taken place in the run-up to the 2018 election, and that it had been part of an “interview process” at which military officials were “assessing and monitoring me, my experience, and determining my worth and capacity as an individual”, and that afterwards she was offered a big project. It is difficult to know what to make of comments like this, given that at other times Ritchie flat-out denies working for the military.
Having offered this puzzling explanation, Ritchie then dismissed the entire controversy over the pictures as just another fuss about nothing. “Look, if I had anything to hide, I wouldn’t be publishing these things,” she said. She pointed out that anyone who wants to travel to the tribal areas needs army permission: “You can’t access some of these areas without the military.”
In the spring of 2019, when areas of Southern California experienced a vibrant superbloom, thousands of tourists trekked to the fields of Lake Elsinore to pose with the poppies. And when the owner of the Instagram account @publiclandshateyou saw a photo of an influencer sitting among (and ruining) the flowers while holding a can of soup, he’d had enough. At Jezebel, Anna Merlan talks with the man behind this account, who educates people on the negative effects of Instagram tourism on the environment.
Right now you’re focusing pretty heavily on damage done during the superbloom. That must be because it’s the hot thing to photograph right now.
Exactly. Previously it was graffiti on rocks in national parks, but the superbloom is the thing of the moment. Influencers see this cool thing, do what they need to do to promote their products or take a cool picture. And then they move on to whatever else is cool, whether it’s, for instance, going out to the California coast, going past “closed” signs and taking a picture under a waterfall. Or whatever. And then Lake Elsinore, where Walker Canyon is, gets stuck with the aftermath. The people who live there. They have a poppy preserve that looks like a checkerboard. The people who did the damage are long gone. They’re on to the next thing.
The pushback you get seems to be a lot of comments like “they’re just flowers,” with the case of the superbloom photos, or comments that you need to calm down and focus on “real problems.”
I do try to respond to that and try to provide my point of view and get people to see, who might have lived in a city their whole life, who might not understand the biology of these areas. I say to them, “You’re not wrong, but I think that a lot of these bigger problems are symptoms of people not thinking about the little things and their impact.” Whether it’s the impact of of me stepping on a couple poppies or me getting my takeout tonight in a styrofoam container, people aren’t thinking about the impact of their actions and that’s applicable to small things like going off the trail, all the way up to big global issues like climate change or microplastics in the water.
Instagram is the last open social media platform in Iran, where Iranians have felt freer to be themselves. For high-schooler and influencer Roya, this means taking photos of herself on the streets of Tehran, sans hijab, or wearing bright eye makeup or going sleeveless — types of things that are frowned upon by Iranian authorities. But as Instagram evolves into more of a space for organizing and political change in Iran, the government has increased surveillance on the app, writes Mehr Nadeem at Rest of World.
The increased threat of arrest is giving pause to Iranian Instagrammers who once saw the platform as a safe space to post freely.
Vania, a 17-year-old aspiring violinist who created her Instagram account to post videos of her music, saw that her friends were becoming careful of their online activity in the wake of the crackdowns. “One of my friends sings [on Instagram], and she was so worried, she did an encrypted location of another country in the caption so that they wouldn’t think she was Iranian,” Vania told Rest of World. It’s illegal for women to publicly sing in Iran, unless they perform to female-only audiences.
Sahba, an Iranian artist based in Canada, said she has second thoughts before posting to Instagram, even from her home in Vancouver. “I wasn’t really worried until the November protests, when I saw how people were arrested on the streets because of their social media posts,” Sahba said. “I try not to censor myself politically, but it’s something that’s always going to be in my head.
Posing in front of photo-worthy facades like colorful street murals and famous buildings is one thing, but snapping a picture on someone’s property — in front of their pretty pastel door or on their adorable wraparound porch — raises issues of privacy and etiquette. At Curbed, Alexandra Marvar explores homeownership in the age of the Instagram travel influencer.
Travel blogger and micro-influencer Valerie Furgerson, @redgypsea, says she’s never had a negative interaction with a homeowner: “A sort of influencer photographer’s code that I live by is, if you’re going to be shooting in a residential area, know what shots you want to get ahead of time and be quick about it. Not all tourists live by this code,” she says. “We definitely saw full-on photo shoots happening at Rainbow Row in Savannah, complete with big reflective umbrellas. I have found that if you are respectful of the residents, they will also be respectful of you.” I came across Furgerson’s feed by searching for pictures of Rainbow Row and reaching out to users who did photoshoots directly on the shipping pallet-sized front porches of these private homes.
“I don’t mind people just taking photos,” said T’s pink-shutters neighbor (whom I’ll keep anonymous), “but really I find it an invasion of my space when it’s on my porch.” If she’s returning on foot to her home and sees someone on her porch taking pictures, she hangs back until they’ve wrapped up their activities. But on more than one occasion, she’s been startled to open her front door to a person, or a group of people, posing in front of her. “The other thing,” she says, “is that it opens up liability issues that I don’t even want to think about.”
While visiting Arizona’s iconic landmarks and tourist hotspots like the Grand Canyon and Horseshoe Bend, Lisa Chase, writing for Outside, examines our obsession with documenting ourselves in nature, and the evolving art and process of photography in the era of iPhone-toting outdoor enthusiasts.
There have to be 75 to 100 of us here, all with smartphones in hand, tapping away. One teenage girl positions herself in warrior one pose on a rock, her back to the sun, slender arms overhead, taking a selfie. Nearby there’s a group of French guys murmuring “C’est magnifique” as they take photos of themselves in the gloaming. I think about an article I’d read by Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who has studied the psychology of selfie culture. “A selfie, like any photograph, interrupts experience to mark the moment,” she wrote in The New York Times in 2013. “The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us ‘on pause’ in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations ‘on pause’ when we send or receive a text, an image, an email, a call. When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.”
In December 2019, celebrities and Western travel bloggers were invited to attend a music festival in Riyadh, put on by Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, in order to promote tourism to the region. “The Instagram posts coming out of the festival looked more Coachella than Sharia,” writes Krithika Varagur, and for those who attended the event, criticism was harsh. At Rest of World, Varagur asks: How could these influencers accept a paid trip from a repressive monarchy?
Despite this, several prominent influencers turned down the MDL Beast trip on ethical grounds, including American actress Emily Ratajkowski and American model Teddy Quinlivan. Quinlivan, who is transgender, said on her Instagram story: “If you have any semblance of journalistic integrity, maybe it might be a cute idea not to take money from foreign governments that, um, I don’t know, openly kill and assassinate journalists [and] LGBTQ+ people. Suppress women’s rights, suppress religious rights – I mean the list of shit goes on.”
“Every traveler has an obligation to think about the ethical consequences of their trip. … But it is even more critical for influencers because they are such important role models, especially for young people,” said Dr. Ulrike Gretzel, who researches technology and social media marketing at the University of Southern California. “Uncritically spreading political propaganda is unethical under all circumstances and especially in the form of branded content, where the lines are very blurry, and the audience might therefore not recognize it as such.”
“If you’re going to work from home indefinitely, why not make a new home in an exotic place?” In the New York Times, Erin Griffith shares the stories of those privileged enough to escape lockdown by joining the globe-trotting, remote-working set. But they eventually realize it’s not what they expect it to be. These digital nomads may not call themselves travel influencers, but the idyllic, away-from-home settings they work in — as they wait out the pandemic — are the same.
Others are struggling with the same vacation fatigue experienced by Mr. Malka, the Cabo-to-London-to-maybe-Bali wanderer. According to research conducted at Radboud University in the Netherlands, it takes eight days of vacation for people to reach peak happiness. It’s downhill from there.
When the pandemic hit, Mr. Stylianoudis, the lawyer, was on the island of Koh Phangan in Thailand. At first, he couldn’t complain about the tropical locale. Each day, after work, he swam in crystal-clear water. But after five months, he was itching to get out. He had become a regular at the island’s 7-Eleven. He even grew tired of the beach — something he hadn’t thought was possible.
The feeling of being trapped in paradise was hard to explain. “I started to feel like I was in a sequel of ‘Lost,’” he said.
In 1912 two musicians were playing near the Union Depot on the corner of Elm Street and Central Track in a pocket of Dallas, Texas where, if you believed what the local papers wrote, you’d be wise to keep your money in your shoe. One was 24, likely playing his signature 12-string guitar. The other was 18 or 19 and blind with an acoustic guitar strapped across his imposing frame.
People passed by, some dropping change they could afford to part with. To hear the older one tell it, their music sent women running over to give them hugs and kisses. From there, they’d head a few blocks down Elm Street or Commerce, talking about women, music, and survival, the 24-year-old with the 12-string leading the blind man. They’d stop outside of local businesses, most likely pawn shops, and play. The older one would learn plenty about the blues from the blind one. Their little pocket in the middle of Dallas is known as Deep Ellum. You could walk the whole area in 15 minutes.
Around 1915 the two would part ways and never see each other again. The older one left Dallas with his 12-string. In 1918 he went to prison for murder. He spent the next 20 years in and out of incarceration and was dead by 1949. His name was Huddie Ledbetter, but he went by Lead Belly. The blind man would purportedly die in a Chicago blizzard in 1929. People called him Blind Lemon Jefferson.
In his Nobel Prize lecture, Bob Dylan credits Lead Belly’s records with getting him into folk music. George Harrison stated that without Lead Belly there would be “no Beatles.” Kurt Cobain would make similar sentiments about Nirvana. In his autobiography, Blues All Around Me, B.B. King wrote that he “flat-out tried to copy” Blind Lemon Jefferson. That line of influence traces directly through Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones.
Almost exactly 100 years later, a modern songster named Charley Crockett would stand at about that same spot playing for people’s change, though the Union Depot had been gone for over 70 years. Anyone with an ear for musical history would hear Crockett’s stories-disguised-as-songs and his blues style as an homage to men like Jefferson and Lead Belly and to a long-ago era of music, but Crockett wasn’t standing in that spot for its history. He was there for a particular kind of foot traffic; the kind where feet were attached to bodies that found street music endearing. By that point in 2014, he had survived for nearly a decade as a musician living on the streets. He’s said to be a distant relative to Davy Crockett, and he’s covered more of the United States, hitch-hiking and hopping trains, than the Texas legend ever did.
Almost exactly 100 years later, a modern songster named Charley Crockett would stand at about that same spot playing for people’s change, though the Union Depot had been gone for over 70 years.
While the journey reflected in his songs has since garnered him national acclaim and landed his music on both the Blues and Americana charts, Crockett is barely a chapter in the story of Deep Ellum. Then again, the stories of Deep Ellum tend to be written in disappearing ink. You won’t find plaques commemorating Blind Lemon Jefferson or Lead Belly’s time there, though it’s more responsible for Texas Blues than any one place could claim. It was a haven for punks and counterculture in the ’80s and breakout stars in the ‘90s. A “Deep Ellum act” can mean anyone from T-Bone Walker to the Old 97’s to Erykah Badu to St. Vincent to Leon Bridges.
For over a century, Deep Ellum has been a spot where Dallas has put either the people it didn’t want or didn’t know what to do with. Crockett fit right in. There’s no way to quantify how different modern music might sound if Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson never spent that time together. But Crockett’s journey to Deep Ellum is as good a start as any to try to explain how music has managed to keep returning to this neighborhood whose own city has never fully understood.
***
By the early 1920s, one third of eligible male residents in Dallas were reportedly members of the Ku Klux Klan. In the first quarter of the 20th century, the few blocks of Elm Street, Main Street, and Commerce that made up Deep Ellum were a center of activity for African Americans in the heart of a city that some claim was run by deep prejudice. “Dallas was an intensely racist place,” said Alan Govenar, co-author of Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas, the most exhaustive text on the history of Deep Ellum.
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Technically, Deep Ellum has never really been a neighborhood. Rarely have many people lived there. Recently immigrated Jews opened up pawn shops. The Model Tailors sold suits. Black-owned movie theaters and vaudeville houses opened. Places like the Gypsy Tea Room and Park Theater, managed by Ella B Moore, offered live jazz, gospel, blues, and vaudeville shows.
All this happened based on a confluence of realities. Deep Ellum was about a half mile from downtown Dallas. African Americans who had to venture to the heart of Dallas, perhaps for an errand at City Hall or to purchase something, would find few places where they could eat or even use the restroom. “Segregation was formal,” said Jay Brakefield, who co-wrote Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas with Govenar. “It was legal.” African Americans could buy clothes most places in Dallas, but in Deep Ellum they were allowed to try them on beforehand. And once there, they could enjoy live music. It was within these circumstances that a Black and Jewish business and entertainment district formed right under the Klan’s nose.
It was only natural that musicians found their way to the streets of Deep Ellum, many trying to escape a life of manual labor, singing about the harshness of the world around them. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s lyrics covered the spectrum of human suffering, as mundane as mosquito bites and as crushing as destitution or incarceration. “The lyrics that he sang were about the breadth and depth and scope of human emotion,” said Govenar. Jefferson was from East Texas, and his ability to move around Deep Ellum and in and out of greater Dallas on an apparently daily basis is a testament to how much people loved hearing him play. Jefferson claimed that he could get around just fine by himself, but Lead Belly isn’t the only guitar player who is said to have led him around Deep Ellum. T-Bone Walker claimed that, as a young boy, he used to pass Jefferson’s cup around and collect tips. Walker would have been only 19 when Jefferson died, but it was in that same year that Jefferson would release two recordings that showed Jefferson’s influence and an evolution of his style. Walker’s electric blues guitar innovations and his brand of showmanship became commonplace with live guitar music. Chuck Berry cited Walker as his influence.
But Jefferson is the Father of Texas Blues. In the ‘20s commercial recording scouts found Dallas, and Jefferson’s songs were impossible to miss. Paramount Records sent him to Chicago for numerous recordings, and he became a radio star. “He was the first commercially successful solo blues artist,” Brakefield said. His songs reached the Delta and helped inspire the modern blues movement. “It was like him and his guitar were part of the same being,” B.B. King wrote of hearing Jefferson as a child in Blues All Around Me. “You didn’t know where one stopped and the other started.”
***
The city of San Benito, where Charley Crockett was born in the 1980s, is in Texas, but it was worlds apart from Deep Ellum. Also the birthplace of Tejano music legend Freddy Fender, it’s about 20 minutes from the Mexican border and eight hours from Dallas. Soon after his birth, Crockett and his mother moved 11 miles east to Los Fresnos, a city with less than 6,000 residents, more than 90 percent of them Latino. Crockett’s arrival coincided with his father’s departure. “He was living a rough life,” Crockett said of the man whose last name he claims. “He was pouring concrete and working on shrimp boats and ending up in ditches on the side of farm roads instead of making it home. He wasn’t around.”
Crockett, his mother, and eventually his grandmother shared a small trailer parked on Old Port Road with nothing to see but the oranges, grapefruit, and sugar cane growing around them. Most of his memories of his time in South Texas fall under two categories: poverty or music. Tejano singers like Freddy Fender and Johnny Canales would perform nearby, and Crockett’s mother would encourage singing while doing chores or just to pass the time. “Music was really kind of everywhere in that rural area,” Crockett said. “I think it was just part of the culture.”
Looking for more opportunities, Crockett and his mother moved north to Irving, just outside Dallas, when he was 9. His mother worked non-stop in those days, but their lives didn’t seem to be improving as Crockett grew old enough to understand their struggle. Sometimes a “city of opportunity” only paints a clearer picture of one’s poverty by contrasting it with the expensive shops and generational wealth that’s flaunted in Dallas. In the summers Crockett would go to New Orleans to live with his uncle, who worked in a restaurant in the French Quarter. Before Katrina there was still a heavy street culture in the city. Bands played everywhere. Crockett arrived in New Orleans for the first time as a 10-year-old who had spent much of his childhood in isolation. Suddenly he was immersed in a city of diversity, music, and mischief, playing cards for his uncle in bingo halls. The food, jobs, and agriculture weren’t unlike Los Fresnos. New Orleans had the soul of the Gulf Coast he was born into but injected with vibrancy.
Back near Dallas, his mother lost her job while Crockett was still in high school, but still managed to buy him a guitar from a pawn shop. By the time he was 18, he was completely purposeless. He took that guitar and just started “hobo-ing” around Texas. He’d squat with people he’d meet without a thought or plan for the next day, let alone the next week. “I really felt limited by what I thought my future had to offer me,” he said. He was learning how to steal to survive, “and just kind of becoming a delinquent, getting into trouble, doing stuff I shouldn’t be doing.”
One day, he was sitting on a park bench near a baseball field in the town of Farmers Branch when a woman walked by and threw him 50 cents. In those days, music wasn’t an ambition as much as an introduction to other musicians he could pass the days with. Jamming with street musicians in Carrollton, Crockett met a man who was planning to drive to Northern California the following day. Crockett begged the man to let him join. He knew nothing about the area and had no real reason to want to be there. “I just wanted so badly to get out of my situation,” he said.
So, Crockett rode along on the ride west, but as they neared their destination, the driver decided he had no intention of bringing a new friend to his town, so he stopped in Vallejo, California and let Crockett out in a parking lot with nothing but a guitar.
***
Pre-World War II Deep Ellum served a purpose to the future of music by putting musicians in physical proximity to each other before they went their separate ways and made their names elsewhere. “There was a cross-fertilization that occured between musicians and among musicians who got together,” Govenar said.
It wouldn’t be the last time those same streets would play that role, but as would be the case in later eras, its real lifeblood were musicians whose music was never recorded and whose names were never written down. In a preview of “Exploring 508 Park,” a yet-to-be-released documentary directed by Govenar about the recording studio about a mile from Deep Ellum where Robert Johnson recorded a significant portion of his catalog, 508 Park committee member Carol J. Adams said that, in the area around Deep Ellum, the 1920s and 1930s were, “a time of displacement that created musicians who were practically homeless traveling around with their guitars.”
Then again, the stories of Deep Ellum tend to be written in disappearing ink.
The Great Depression hit some of the local businesses hard, and Deep Ellum’s deterioration became apparent. In the 1950s, Elm Street was converted into a one-way street heading into downtown and away from Deep Ellum, and perhaps not-so-coincidentally, making it much less convenient for drivers to happen upon the largely Black and Jewish area. A collection of merchants came together to carry a coffin down Elm Street in a mock funeral for Deep Ellum.
By 1969, an elevated Central Expressway was built directly over the 2400 block of Elm Street, plowing over what was once the center of gravity for what used to be Deep Ellum and making a distinct line between downtown Dallas and a place where something else once existed. By that point, Deep Ellum had long died its first death under the traffic of a rapidly growing Dallas.
“For me, the sound of the cars rattling overhead evokes the ghosts of Deep Ellum,” Govenar said.
***
The parking lot where Crockett was dropped off wasn’t far from Vallejo’s town square. It seemed as good a direction as any to start walking. He and another musician who was dropped off with him started playing music in front of local businesses and met some young musicians doing the same. They were heading to Santa Rosa and had room in their van, so Crockett hopped in, discovering a culture that would dictate the way he lived the next few years of his life. “Kind of immediately, to be honest with you, there was this acceptance of the drifter thing I was becoming,” Crockett said. “There was no judgement from a bunch of people I’d never seen before.”
As he met more people, he wandered and played in more environments. There were hikes in the hills of Santa Rosa. There were jams on rural open land. There were open mics in town or trips to San Francisco when someone was heading that way. He stayed in Northern California for about a year. In that time, he worked on farms, slept in pastures or barns or spare rooms, lived on communes, did co-operative work or work-traded for food and board, and hitch-hiked with everyone from musicians and hobos to Hare Krishnas. “That’s where I really got comfortable hobo-ing,” he said. “Then I took that [skill] to the rest of America with me.”
The transience that followed Crockett’s time in California might have you believing that the country is far less vast than it actually is. He traveled east and eventually north to New York City where he played on the streets and subway platforms. He still wasn’t much of a musician. “I had a couple songs, but I was comfortable on the streets. I knew how to blend right in with street culture.”
Crockett continued this lifestyle for the majority of his 20s. There was strategy and deliberateness to his survival. It required an ability to befriend people and a willingness to sleep on floors or on benches outside. Seasons dictated what city he might be in. New York City in the summertime. Heading back to North Carolina as it started to get cold. Try to make it to New Orleans by October and potentially stay there until May and try to move along before the hottest months. There were stretches of the New York trains where he could get a few hours of unbothered sleep. During the Occupy Wall Street movement, he was regularly sleeping and living in parks, not because he was part of the movement but because “it was a window when that was being tolerated,” he said.
If the itinerant musician sounds like a relic of the past, Crockett would invite you to look at the current statistics for poverty in the U.S. He was living his life on the fringes of society, and a guitar was the only thing separating him from much darker existences. “I saw an enormous amount of homelessness traveling around this country,” he said. “I’m talking about homeless people with disabilities, veterans, people from outcast sections of society, people with mental problems, deep systemic multi-generational poverty, [and] drug addictions. It was never lost on me how close I was to that, sharing the same space.”
He was living his life on the fringes of society, and a guitar was the only thing separating him from much darker existences.
***
Plenty of people have their own stories about Jeff Liles, but no matter who’s telling the story, they all seem to agree that he’s someone who’s lived many lives. He’s a guy who could refer to founding NWA member Easy-E as “Eric” (he was also the first DJ in the country to play an NWA song on the radio, in Dallas, and was fired the next day for it). He’s likely booked more ultra-famous bands in Dallas than there are albums in your record collection. He performed an alternative spoken-word act on the same Lollapalooza tour as Snoop Dogg and Devo.
But in 1985 he was just a kid trying to convince a guy named Russell Hobbs at the Theatre Gallery, a rundown venue Hobbs had just opened up in an even more rundown stretch of warehouses, to let his band perform there. In-between booking the show and the date of the performance, Liles’ band broke up. He went back to Theatre Gallery to tell Hobbs.
“I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t walked through those doors,” Liles said, parked outside of where Theatre Gallery used to stand, over 35 years later.
Hobbs asked him if he’d be interested in a different task: helping him book bands. Together, Liles and Hobbs would become the early architects for what some would refer to as the “golden age” of Deep Ellum. It wasn’t called Deep Ellum then, in the sense that a place where no one went to with nothing to offer didn’t need a name. It was Hobbs who had read about a bygone era of music in a place called Deep Ellum. Liles was originally afraid to use that term as it was essentially a reference to an African American pronunciation of Elm Street. Liles lost the argument.
Theatre Gallery was a refuge for musically inclined misfits as much as it was a concert venue. Everything about its early days was DIY and, in all likelihood, very illegal. “We just gave away free beer,” Liles said. “You paid $5 and got beer all night. There were no licenses.” The Republican National Convention was held in Dallas in 1984, and the Dead Kennedys performed outside the convention in protest. According to Liles, when the police came to break it up, they mistook Hobbs, who was simply watching the performance, as being involved and demanded he get the stage off the property. That stage made its way to Deep Ellum and became the Theatre Gallery stage.
Soon, Hobbs opened up the Prophet Bar and Club Clearview in 1985, Club Dada in 1986. A new Gypsy Tea Room opened up in homage to the old Deep Ellum. Liles says a movement started with three specific bands from three Dallas suburbs: Three On a Hill from Carrollton, Shallow Reign from Richardson, and End Over End from Highland Park. “Those three bands were bringing in suburban kids,” he said. “They were hiding from their parents. Those kids started the music scene in Deep Ellum.”
Those bands were eclipsed by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, arguably the first great band to come out of modern Deep Ellum — The New Bohemians would break up after the release of their second album, in 1990, and Brickell would marry Paul Simon. Liles and Hobbs hired Jim Heath to be the “sound guy” for Theatre Gallery and Prophet Bar despite his lack of experience. Heath would form The Reverend Horton Heat, a modern “psychobilly” band with a large cult following.
In the mid-80s, Deep Ellum was a scene with no rules and no definition of cool. It was the height of J.R. Ewing’s Dallas and rebellious teens were being suffocated by the images projected on their North Texas lives. It coincided with radical punk movements also manifesting in New York and Los Angeles. In a 1987 story in D Magazine, Skip Hollandsworth wrote of Deep Ellum, “The little underground scene, mostly centered in new-music nightclubs, was so ephemeral that by the time mainstream Dallas had heard of one of these clubs, it had already shut down and another had opened somewhere else.” Deep Ellum became a place where Dallas parents were terrified their children would be exposed to drugs, crime, skinheads, and violence. None of those worries were unfounded.
Still, it was growing rapidly, partially on the strength of Liles’ bookings. Dinosaur Jr. played Theatre Gallery for $50. The Replacements played and hung out in Deep Ellum for three days. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, the Flaming Lips. Liles has a story of Michael Stipe of REM doing yoga naked on the Theatre Gallery roof. It was a mixture of bands, kids, punks, and misfits walking the streets in the shadow of downtown Dallas.
Then Trees opened in 1990. “Trees took it to the next level,” Liles said. A venue on Elm Street with a capacity of about 500, it would book Radiohead, Soundgarden, Elliott Smith, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, and Geto Boys, all at the height of their popularity. Pearl Jam performed for less than 40 people at Trees and played basketball in the parking lot beforehand.
But to some people, Trees, and Jeff Liles, will always be known for the night they booked Nirvana in 1991. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had come out four months earlier and there were more people outside trying to get in than had tickets. Trying to accommodate Nirvana’s label, Liles hired more bouncers to prevent the crowd from rushing the stage, but a few songs into the performance Kurt Cobain lept over a bouncer with his guitar into the crowd. The guitar hit the bouncer in the head. Furious, the bouncer punched Cobain in the face. Cobain retreated backstage.
…a few songs into the performance Kurt Cobain lept over a bouncer with his guitar into the crowd. The guitar hit the bouncer in the head. Furious, the bouncer punched Cobain in the face. Cobain retreated backstage.
One thing was clear to everyone there: If Nirvana didn’t finish their set, there would be a riot in Deep Ellum. Liles had to convince Cobain. He found him hiding in a broom closet sniffing heroin and managed to get him back on stage.
“The rest of the show was great,” Liles said.
***
By 2008, Crockett had mastered survival, but he was just starting to master music. He’s a self-taught guitar player, originally unable to play the most basic G or C chords. Instead, he would wrap his thumb around the top of the guitar’s neck to hold down strings, “like choking the neck of a chicken.” He wrote his first song (“Fool Somebody Else”) this way, by experimenting with this finger and thumb placement, moving up and down the guitar’s neck until he’d found enough strums that sounded right. He went 10 years before recording that song.
“Why don’t you fool somebody else.
Do it to yourself. Tell me how it feels.
When you hold somebody tight
And the trust is gone
In the middle of the night
Got to fool somebody else.
Do it to yourself, tell me how it feels
When you hold somebody tight
Then they gone
Like the middle of the night.”
To this day, he has almost never used a guitar pick for a live show or recording. His travels and the musicians he met influenced his music. Older musicians heard him play open-mics and told him he was playing the blues, something he was barely conscious of. He realized that Robert Johnson’s lyrics sounded a lot like the life he was living.
It was in Manhattan, in Lucky Jack’s, that Crockett got the invitation to go to Europe. A regular there from Denmark had heard him play multiple times and told him he’d be a hit there. He offered up his place in Copenhagen and said he’d set him up with gigs at bars and cafes. Crockett took him up on the offer but ended up making as much playing on the streets as he did in bars and cafes, and before long, he’d overstayed his welcome. So he took the money he’d made and bought a train ticket to Paris without knowing a word of French.
He started playing the streets with a surprising amount of success. Perhaps to the French, there was a novelty to this American playing his version of the blues. “They could hear the Louisiana thing in me, which obviously the French have a big connection to that culture,” Crockett theorized. Remarkably, Crockett survived in Paris for almost a year without ever learning the language. “The language barrier was a surprising gift in that it separated me from the culture and put me in a place where I lost all fear,” he said. He couldn’t understand what anyone was saying about him, anyway, so he just played with confidence.
American culture tends to demand that we create self-narratives by which to live by, false identities that dictate the person we become. “I think in the streets of Paris, I killed that person,” Crockett said. “When I hit New York stateside again, I was a changed person. I just had no fear.”
American culture tends to demand that we create self-narratives by which to live by, false identities that dictate the person we become.
Back in America, he was starting to expect to make money playing on the streets, and he was getting results. He’d mapped out cities like New Orleans and figured out where to play and when in the day to move from Royal Street to jostle for space and ears in Cafe Dumont before finding a blues jam later that night. He was playing at least eight hours a day, whether in New Orleans or New York. “Do you know how good it feels to go from begging and stealing to having $30 in your pocket?” he asked. “And as soon as that money goes out I could just make $30 more right then.” Some of his music might lean toward country, gospel, or even jazz, but now he could command a room or a block of street, which was more important than any technical skill he’d learned. Even now, he won’t commit to a traditional genre of music, coining the term “Gulf Coast Boogie Woogie” for what he does.
One day in 2010, Crockett was busking on the subway platform at the Lorimer stop in Brooklyn. Riding the G-train was a 19-year-old street musician named Jadon Woodard, rapping to passengers for tips. When the doors opened, Woodard could hear the rhythm of Crockett’s guitar playing and thought he could rap over it. He convinced Crockett to move from playing on subway platforms and get on actual trains with him. Crockett had a song called “You’re So Strange” that Woodard loved. Together, they each started making more money than either had on his own.
The next time Crockett returned to New York the following year the two linked up with another guitar player and a trumpet player. The group would play on moving train cars for 12 hours a day. “We were making hella money,” Woodard said. On a good day they’d pull in $600 or $700. They called themselves the Train Robbers.
The four band members and a videographer who filmed their performances split a $500 apartment in Bushwick and paid the deposit in small bills. Crockett convinced them to play folk and blues rhythms and Woodard found them easy to rap over. New York runs off the subway system, and thousands of people were seeing them perform each day, some of them in the music industry. They were getting interest from record labels and getting offered residencies to play a few hours a night. A lost Train Robbers album was recorded in the women’s bathroom of a rehearsal space in Brooklyn. Eventually they were making enough money to split two apartments among themselves.
‘Do you know how good it feels to go from begging and stealing to having $30 in your pocket?’ he asked.
Thinking they’d finally made it, they signed a management deal that would ultimately tear them apart. Looking back, Woodard and Crockett agreed that the management was determined to change their sound to something more mainstream and was unfair in terms of publishing rights. That same management arranged a deal with NBC that would largely increase their visibility but would surely push them in a different direction musically. As they walked into a Manhattan office to sign the deal, Crockett backed out and disavowed the management label. “The band didn’t even know how I was feeling,” Crockett said. “I just dropped the bomb on them in that office.” They were still technically handcuffed to the management deal, but Crockett’s decision essentially ended the Train Robbers.
“I harbored some [negative] energy for a while,” Woodard said. “But we were all young and we were all caught up in everything.”
***
The first time Ken Bethea, guitarist for the Old 97’s, went to Deep Ellum was in the fall of 1987. He’d just graduated from the University of Texas. In Austin, he had been indoctrinated to believe that everything in Dallas was lame, but his favorite band, the Butthole Surfers, was playing at Club Clearview on Main Street, just off of Elm. “I thought, ‘I bet that’s in the Deep Ellum place they talk about. Elm? Ellum?”
He left the show with a black eye and a notion that there was something special about the area. “I went there on a Wednesday night and had the best time that I’d ever had in my life going somewhere solo,” Bethea said.
After that night, Bethea ended up living in Denton, Texas for a year, where he’d meet the drummer Philip Peeples. When they moved back to Dallas, Deep Ellum was evolving quickly and driven by music. Bands were meeting other bands, breaking up, and the best members of each band were forming newer, better bands. Rhett Miller and Murry Hammond were hanging around the scene, playing in bands or individually. Eventually the four of them would meet and form the Old 97’s.
The Old 97’s didn’t originally try to play Club Dada or the early days of Trees. They aimed lower than that and played in places without cover charges. One of those places was a cowboy/country bar called Naomi’s Lounge about the size of a Starbucks. “I’d be standing right next to the door as people would come in and I’d have to lean away while playing guitar to let them in,” Bethea remembered. They were winning over fans, and the physical area that made up Deep Ellum was so condensed that the whole scene could hear about a great performance in the same night. “We were playing all the time,” Bethea said. “Rhett was writing so many songs.”
The seeds of Deep Ellum that were planted in the ’80s were growing uncontrollably in the ’90s. Suddenly, along with national acts that Liles and others were bringing to the area, homegrown bands were catapulting from Deep Ellum to national success. Tripping Daisy was a Deep Ellum act that became a household name. Toadies, a Fort Worth band that broke into the Deep Ellum scene, released Rubberneck in 1994, which would sell over a million copies. The Old 97’s would go on to have an enormous national following — one they enjoy to this day. In all likelihood, each member of each of those bands saw each other perform multiple times in Deep Ellum. “The butterfly effect of hearing that things were working out for Tripping Daisy was huge for us,” Bethea said. “We thought, ‘if they can do it, and Edie Brickell can do it, we can do it.’ You want to keep up.”
Every North Texas band with any semblance of success that decade had to play Deep Ellum. The band Funland was an area favorite. Deep Blue Something and Bowling For Soup would be loosely affiliated with the scene. A young St. Vincent saw Tripping Daisy perform at Trees multiple times before eventually joining the Polyphonic Spree, a large choral rock band founded by Tripping Daisy front man Tim DeLaughter.
Meanwhile, when the New York rap duo Mobb Deep came to Deep Ellum, a local singer named Erykah Badu opened for them. Badu’s 1997 debut album, Baduizm, has sold over three million copies. Labeled “the queen of Neo-soul,” Badu has mostly remained in Dallas for the past two decades, almost like she’s looking over its music scene, popping up for surprise performances or guest DJ sets in Deep Ellum and hosting a birthday concert event there every year.
But as Deep Ellum’s streets were packed every night, the crime didn’t seem to be receding. The depiction of crime in Deep Ellum over its various eras has usually been exaggerated but rarely unfounded. Fights broke out, and rich kids were mugged, and for the first time, perhaps ever, greater Dallas was paying attention. A shift was happening in the early aughts as devotees to the scene grew frustrated seeing it be co-opted by polite society, and polite society was just as quick to label it dangerous.
Things came to a head in 2004 when the Old 97’s, by then a popular national act, returned to Deep Ellum for a show at the Gypsy Tea Room. A man named David Cunniff attended the show with his two teenage daughters. Cunniff got in an altercation with a man that quickly turned violent. It would end with Cunniff temporarily immobile, his neck broken in front of his children.
The man who Cunniff fought had affiliations with skinheads. By most accounts, any legitimate skinhead presence in Deep Ellum was long gone and largely an ancillary product of the ‘80s punk movement. But greater Dallas had heard the stories. “I remember people saying, ‘If you can’t be safe at an Old 97’s show, something’s wrong,’” Bethea said. Within a year, Deep Ellum was basically a ghost town.
“This area went dormant in the 2000s,” Liles said. “Trees closed. Dada closed. Bomb Factory closed. Clearview was gone.”
***
Crockett’s journeys can sound like a romantic ode to a simpler time, but outrunning poverty can bring mistakes, and risks can seem smaller when you have almost nothing to your name. Even before Crockett left Dallas his half-brother got him in legal trouble by getting him involved in stock manipulation. “My brother got me into some under-world Dallas stuff when I was younger,” he said. “All that stuff blew up and everybody went to prison.” His brother was sentenced to seven years. Crockett says he had to defend himself in court but wasn’t convicted based on his apparent ignorance of the scheme’s machinations.
In 2014, he says he’d find himself on the wrong side of the law again, when Virginia police caught him with a considerable amount of marijuana. A sentencing was pushed back and jail time was a possibility, but even probation could prevent him from traveling state to state and ending the musician’s life that he’d adopted.
Photo credit: Bobby Cochran
With that hanging over him, he realized he hadn’t seen his mother in nearly four years. He decided it was time to go home. While in Dallas, he decided to check out a blues jam happening in Deep Ellum. He met a guitar player named Alexis Sanchez, who currently plays guitar in Crockett’s band. That same night, Sanchez introduced him to a guy who had been performing in Deep Ellum named Leon Bridges. This was before Bridges would release his debut album with Columbia Records and win a Grammy, but his name was bouncing around those few blocks. “Something about meeting Alexis and Leon allowed me to realize that there was a renaissance happening in Deep Ellum,” Crockett said.
Crockett was as confident in his abilities as he’d ever been, but his publishing rights were still controlled by his old managment foralmost another year. So he went back to Northern California and worked manual labor, waiting out his contract with a head full of songs. When the time came, he recorded an album on his own and received donations from locals up there in order to print copies of it. He called it “A Stolen Jewell.”
In 2016 he faced a judge who held his future in his hands. Crockett told the judge about his musical journey, his progress, and his determination to make a real career of it. He even had a record he could show as proof. “They were going to take everything away from me,” he said. “I begged him. Told him I wanted to be legit.” Crockett’s plea resonated with the judge, who spared him any serious punishment for the 2014 marijuana charge. Armed with a guitar, an album, and a second chance, he went to make a name for himself, and he knew exactly where to go.
“It was from that moment,” Crockett said. “I hit the bars in Deep Ellum [as a performer] harder than I ever had.”
***
Kendrick Lamar was performing at a re-opened Trees in 2012, and Cam McCloud just wanted a minute of his time. “I was at the front of the stage at the dead center,” McCloud said. “I’m watching him and turning around and watching the whole crowd, and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want to do.’” After the show, he freestyled for Lamar, who validated his skills.
A few years later, McCloud was fired from his job at Olive Garden for missing a shift to open for Florida rapper Gunplay at Trees. In 2015, McCloud would become the rapper and visionary behind Cure For Paranoia, a genre-defying hip-hop/soul group that D Magazine deemed “the poster boys of the new Deep Ellum.”
Trees had been reopened in 2009 by Clint and Whitney Barlow — Clint was a former drummer for Vanilla Ice. They also reopened Bomb Factory, a 4,000-plus capacity venue that books national acts. “The Barlows, as far as I’m concerned, are responsible for the revitalization of Deep Ellum,” said Pete Freedman, the president and co-founder of CentralTrack.com, a daily cultural guide to Dallas named after the street that Central Expressway demolished and separated downtown from Deep Ellum.
Freedman has witnessed and chronicled nearly every step of that revitalization, which represents the most eclectic era of Deep Ellum. Hip-hop had never gotten much substantial coverage or attention in Deep Ellum. Bands ruled the golden era. But hip-hop is arguably the most popular genre in America now, and it’s helping carry today’s Deep Ellum with acts blowing up and being surpassed before mainstream Dallas even hears of them, like the punk acts of the ’80s. “Deep Ellum always reflects the zeitgeist of whatever’s popular,” Freedman said.
A Dallas collective of individual hip-hop acts known as Brain Gang made waves in Deep Ellum at the beginning of last decade. From that group, Blue, the Misfit would go on to have a collaborative relationship with Kendrick Lamar, Bobby Sessions would sign with legendary hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings, and the producer, Justus, signed with Interscope and was pegged as Dr. Dre’s protege.
Cure For Paranoia reached a turning point when McCloud snuck backstage at Bomb Factory for a performance by West Coast rapper The D.O.C. and saw Erykah Badu and her entourage walking towards him (Badu and D.O.C. have a child together). McCloud approached her and freestyled, impressing her. The next week he got a call. Badu wanted them to open for her birthday concert. The group played at Three Links on Elm Street every Tuesday before bars temporarily closed due to COVID-19, typically packing the venue.
“Deep Ellum is just all over the place,” McCloud said an hour before opening for Houston rapper Bun B, his hair dark purple with a strip of lavender running through it. “I think that’s why it definitely shaped me as an artist. Because you can put us anywhere. We can literally play anywhere. We’ve opened for rock bands. We’ve opened for country bands. You name it. It’s the ultimate domino effect.”
The variety in Deep Ellum, which has expanded in size over the years, but still mostly extends to about six blocks of Elm, Main, and Commerce, is staggering. Every weekend there are hip-hop, punk, country, blues, jazz, folk, and metal shows. “The Deep Ellum music scene is the Dallas music scene,” said Freedman.
“I’ve been to every town in the U.S. and played gigs,” Bethea said. “There are very few places like Deep Ellum in the United States. It’s singular.”
***
Freedman can tell you exactly when Crockett came back to Deep Ellum in 2016. “I couldn’t go to a bar without sitting on one of his CDs,” Freedman said. Crockett had taken his signature hustle, as well as the guerilla marketing he and the Train Robbers had learned, and applied it to the streets of Deep Ellum. Unlike New York, he could canvass all of Deep Ellum in an hour.
“The first night I met Charley I saw copies of his CDs on toilets,” Liles said. “I grabbed them and said, ‘Is this you?’ He said, “Yeah, man.’ I said, ‘C’mon man, have a little respect for yourself as an artist.’ I gave them back to him and told him to just hand them out to people.”
“I put them on top of urinals in every bar in Deep Ellum,” Crockett said.
Crockett was playing two sets a night all over Deep Ellum. On Commerce is a New Orleans-themed Cajun/jazz bar called The Free Man — about the same size as the now-closed Naomi’s where the Old 97’s got started. It’s hard to imagine a crowd more suited for Crockett’s music. Next door is Adair’s Saloon, a tiny dive bar Crockett could play for hours. It cost nothing to walk in and hear Crockett play and sing in rooms where he wouldn’t even have needed a microphone. After Leon Bridges broke as a national sensation, a collection of lucky Wednesday night patrons in 2015 at Twilite Lounge on Elm Street saw Crockett perform with Bridges providing backup vocals.
When he was playing in Deep Ellum he let customers name the price they wanted to pay for a copy of “A Stolen Jewell.” It wasn’t the first time people were appreciating his music, but something was happening on those streets that was new to him: He was gaining reputation. “‘A Stolen Jewell’ was the break for me because Dallas writers and Dallas musicians and the Fort Worth community started championing me immediately.”
Soon, Crockett moved from cleared out corners of bars to stages in venues all over Dallas. He was drawing paying crowds and things were snowballing behind his work ethic. Since 2016, Crockett has released seven albums to critical success with another album Welcome To Hard Times, coming out in July. He toured Texas, and then the United States. Last summer, he headlined an international tour, returning to Europe with his name on marquees in Spain, Sweden, and Paris.
“He didn’t start recording until he’d had all this time on the streets,” said Thomas D. Mooney, a music critic for Rolling Stone and Texas Monthly. “So he had a late start actually recording, but once he started making albums he had this hard-working, hustler mentality that’s in his songs. And he’s not pretentious when he’s on stage. Fans realize that he’s working just as hard at his job as they are at theirs.”
And he’s not pretentious when he’s on stage. Fans realize that he’s working just as hard at his job as they are at theirs.
In June 2019, he was invited to headline the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, arguably the most legendary country music venue in the world. For someone who’d played the streets and “backdoored” bars and clubs all over the country, it’s a surreal accomplishment. “I believe that stage was built up by a lot of artists back in the day who came at it like I have, with the real hard work,” he said. In November, Crockett headlined The Troubadour in West Los Angeles, a stage that’s helped make countless stars.
“[Being in this industry], you know when people are the real deal or not,” said Liles, who now books shows for The Kessler, a venue in a different Dallas neighborhood called Oak Cliff. “Charley Crockett is the real fucking deal.”
“I’m really happy that my brother blew up,” Woodard said. “Make sure you tell Charley he owes me that song, ‘You’re So Strange.’ I’ll come to Texas and we’ll record it.”
Crockett once begged a man to take him to Northern California just to get away from Dallas. At the time, he didn’t understand that the music he’d travel the country and world learning owed such debts to the place he was trying to escape. Knowing what he knows now, having become an obsessive historian of music, he doesn’t waver on its impact. “Deep Ellum is as important to American music as New Orleans or Memphis,” he said. It’s only fitting that when he returned, Elm Street, Main Street, and Commerce were ready for him to come back and play his part in bridging Deep Ellum to its past. He represents both the street musician whose name you never heard and the nationally touring acts that began in those same streets.
“Areas that have a micro-culture of music are based on a foundation of artists who didn’t necessarily ‘make it out,’” said Mooney. “They keep the scene what it is. I think why Charley’s been able to transcend that area and still have such respect in Deep Ellum is that he’s a lifer. He’s lived his music.”
“I feel like Crockett is the human embodiment of Deep Ellum,” McCloud said before taking the stage to rap for an audience of hundreds.
***
In 2022, Uber plans to operate over 3,000 employees out of a soon-to-be-constructed 23-story tower with adjacent parking garage on the westernmost edge of Deep Ellum. The project officially broke ground last November. “The live-work-play environment of Deep Ellum, honestly, it just has us psyched out of our minds,” Uber spokesman Brian Finch reportedly said last fall.
What this means for the culture of Deep Ellum going forward depends on who you ask and what they think about the current commercialization happening there. There’s been an influx of boutiques, restaurants, breweries, and bars with waitresses who dress like they’re catering to a college fraternity clientele.
These aren’t unique developments for an American city. “Creative people create an identity for the neighborhood, they give it a cool factor, then the real estate developers come in and price them out of the neighborhood,” Liles said. Few people have traditionally lived in Deep Ellum (though that is currently changing), so it’s not people who are being pushed out. It’s places, and if you believe those lamenting the death of Deep Ellum, it could be the music. “A building that’s committed mostly to local bands and the local music scene isn’t going to generate a whole lot of revenue,” Liles said.
It won’t surprise you to hear that this isn’t the first time that Deep Ellum has been pronounced dead, and while it’s certainly changed over the years, devotees of the scene were panicking over its changes during the height of its most exciting movements in the ’80s and ’90s. Freedman believes that Deep Ellum operates in 30-year cycles and attributes much of the hysteria over its current changes to “good ol’ days syndrome.” He points out that Uber is building its tower over four vacant lots and that most of the trendier places popping up are doing so in empty building spaces or struggling businesses that the frustrated parties weren’t supporting anyway. “Deep Ellum of today shouldn’t be the Deep Ellum of 1988,” he said. “Under what guise should it be? There were skinheads.”
Deep Ellum’s music survived during the racism of the 1920s (and the less transparent racism since). Will it survive the capitalism of the 2020s? Prior to the restrictions due to COVID-19, the streets of Deep Ellum were flooded with people every weekend, even as crime in the area remains a talking point. Deep Ellum’s cool factor is built on the credibility of places like Trees, Bomb Factory, Twilite Lounge, Three Links, The Free Man, Club Dada, Adair’s Saloon, and so many more. Dallas has woken up to Deep Ellum. “I think it’s amazing,” said McCloud, the last person to be accused of conforming his music to anyone. “It just means more money coming in. The music will be fine. That’s what they’re coming for.”
Dallas has woken up to Deep Ellum.
The rapper Post Malone, from the Dallas suburb Grapevine, is not a Deep Ellum artist — prior to his national ascent, he was characterized as a soundcloud artist — but after his single “White Iverson” went viral in 2015, making him a household name overnight, his first Dallas show was at Trees. He played “White Iverson” two times during a 25-minute show, latching on to a bit of the neighborhood’s credibility. “These things don’t happen by accident,” Freedman said. “Deep Ellum is still unequivocally, without a shadow of a doubt, the proving grounds.”
The story of Deep Ellum is the story of music’s relationship to physical space. It can feel like there are no traceable links of influence or even knowledge between the various musical eras of Deep Ellum. Whenever an era ended, it must have been impossible to imagine music ever coming back. But it always did, behind musicians and the people who wanted to hear them play. “In 25 years there won’t be anything wrong with [Deep Ellum] turning over a little bit,” Bethea said before smiling. “As long as they’ve got a statue of the Old 97’s down there for people to worship.”
“Maybe one day all this will go away,” Freedman said from a dark booth in Twilite Lounge. “But for now, I’m still going to play in it.”
***
Now, imagine it’s a Friday night at some point in the future when public gatherings and live music are allowed and deemed safe, and you just saw a show at Trees that you’ll talk about for weeks, exaggerating whatever details you still remember. You’re walking out the front door onto Elm Street with about 400 other people. It’s entirely possible you haven’t been sober since halfway through the set list. It’s 11:30 and the streets are packed with people, some of whom are probably going to manage to find a little trouble to get into, and you haven’t yet determined if you’ll be one of them. Maybe you aren’t ready for the night to be over. You could grab another drink somewhere or find some late-night food. Or you could walk around the area and settle for the first place that’s playing the kind of music you want to hear.
As the Trees crowd pushes you about 50 feet down Elm Street and you try to determine your immediate future — the only future that seems remotely important in that moment — you might look up and see a mural facing you from the brick wall across the street. It’s a tinted image of a man dressed in black with sunglasses and a cowboy hat standing in a field of bluebonnets. The man’s name isn’t on the mural, which is fine. A mural like that in Deep Ellum is for the type of person who already knows who Charley Crockett is.
Or maybe, you’re ready to go home and bask in the buzz of the performance you just witnessed. You’ll have to find your way to the designated ride-share pickup zone on Commerce — the necessity of which is a testament to just how much Deep Ellum has changed. It’s two streets over, so you’ll probably want to cut through Radiator Alley to get to Main Street. As you breeze through the alley, you might see another mural of a stout man wearing a suit and holding a guitar with two musical legends flanking him on each side. Their names are Freddy King and T-Bone Walker, and little crowns are painted above their heads. But those two are clearly in the background. It’s the stout man who’s front and center. No crown is above his head; only a bright circle, almost like a halo. The image is a recreation of the only known photograph to ever exist of this man. His name was Blind Lemon Jefferson.
The people and businesses that make up this era’s Deep Ellum have been drastically impacted by COVID-19 and its attendant restrictions. If you would like to support and help keep this tight-knit and historical community vibrant in the future consider donating to Deep Ellum 100, an organization giving grants to workers, musicians, and artists who have helped make Deep Ellum what it is.
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Jonny Auping is a freelance writer based in Dallas, Texas. His work has been featured in Texas Monthly, The New Yorker, VICE, New York Magazine, Slate, and McSweeney’s.
Tommy Potter, Charlie Parker, and Max Roach performing. William Gottlieb/Redferns
I am a jazz devotee, the kind with shelves of jazz books and photos of John Coltrane and Charlie Parker in his home office. Because I love music so much, I want to understand where it came from, and learn about the people who made it.
What is jazz? “It can be said that the entire story of jazz is actually a story about what can urgently be passed down to someone else before a person expires,” Hanif Abdurraqib writes in his book Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes on A Tribe Called Quest. “Jazz was created by a people obsessed with their survival in a time that did not want them to survive, and so it is a genre of myths—of fantasy and dreaming, of drumming on whatever you must and making noise in any way you can, before the ability to make noise is taken from you, or until the noise is an echo in your own head that won’t rest.”
Jazz is a uniquely American creation. People all over the world play it, and no matter how many talented white musicians play it, it was created and primarily redefined by Americans of color. Jazz is music that cannot be separated from the racially divided country that produced its musicians.
“Put it this way,” Duke Ellington said. “Jazz is a good barometer of freedom… In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.”
Like critic Gary Giddin’s arbitrary map of post-war jazz, this list collects just a few of my favorite stories — mostly about my favorite period of jazz, from Bop to Hard bop. You’ll find a lot of worthwhile jazz reading in collections by Whitney Balliett, in the anthology Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, and in Robert Gottlieb’s Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now. James Baldwin’s short story ”Sonny’s Blues” is essential jazz fiction. Of course, you could write a huge list of must-read jazz books, though these are the stories that stay with me, or that handle jazz’s big names and issues exceptionally well. I’m sure I missed many things. But as Miles Davis said, “Do not fear mistakes.”
Sante’s short essay is two things: an etymology of the term “funky,” and a profile of mythic, 19th century New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, whose song “Funky Butt” turned “funk” into a musical concept. One of the many important figures who helped create what we call jazz, Bolden was a respected improvisational player in his time. Unfortunately, no recordings of Bolden survive, and reliable historical details are hazy. We know that he was institutionalized and died young. Sante conjures Bolden from the haze, painting a vivid, living portrait of a musical mystery man and his era.
He starts with a location: the site of a demolished church that doubled as a dance hall where Bolden performed. “On Saturday nights,” Sante writes, “it was rented for dances which lasted until early light, so that the deacons must have put in a hard few hours every week washing up spilled beer and airing out the joint before the pious came flocking.” As a reader I have a bias for stories of lost or nearly lost people and things, but Sante’s voice and sideways way of telling this one is what ultimately stays with me. This piece seamlessly weaves scenes with conversational exposition. And the essay’s structure does what essays can do: start in one place and end in a very different place.
No matter how much you love Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald, no one can deny that Billie Holiday remains one of jazz’s greatest singers. Along with her stirring music and delivery, she stands as a tragic symbol, “a victim,” as critic Francis Davis writes, “of both injustice and her own vices.” In this probing piece, he illuminates her artistic achievements and enduring stature by peering behind persistent stereotypes and listeners’ projections to see who Holiday truly was as a person and a singer. “The singer nicknamed ‘Lady Day’ or just ‘Lady’ has become an all-purpose Our Lady of Sorrows,” Davis writes, “embraced by many of her black listeners (and by many women and gay men) not just as a favorite performer but as a kind of patron saint. She touches such fans where they hurt, soothing their rage even while delivering a reminder of past humiliations and the potential for more.” Davis also wonders how she became so deeply connected to the idea of sadness. Part of the answer has to do with her masterpiece about racism and lynching, “Strange Fruit.” “If the story suggests that ‘Strange Fruit’ ultimately became a way for her to release her anger,” Davis writes, “it also suggests that her anger could be unfocused, her racial indignation mixed up with resentment at her mistreatment by the men in her life, her persecution by the law, and the public’s preference for blander female singers.”
“The Charlie Christian Story” (Ralph Ellison, Saturday Review, May 17, 1958)
Although famous for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison published many essays. This one is about pioneering electric guitarist Charlie Christian, whose scorching solos made too few appearances on record but whose small body of highly stylized work transformed amplified music. By a twist of fate, Ellison grew up with Christian in Oklahoma City. Unfortunately, Ellison’s essay is not online. You can read it in his book Shadow and Act. While you’re there, read his essay on Charlie Parker, too, “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz.” Ellison was a singular voice and his ideas created a lasting portrait of racism in America. Reading this essay makes me grateful he was so influenced by jazz.
You might not know Charlie Christian’s name, but when you hear an electric guitar, be it rock or jazz or Blues, you hear Christian. “Some of the most brilliant jazzmen made no records,” Ellison writes. “So at best the musical contributions of these local, unrecorded heroes of jazz are enjoyed by a few fellow musicians and by a few dancers who admire them and afford them the meager economic return which allows them to keep playing…” Christian almost became one of those lost local musicians, but thankfully, he ended up in Benny Goodman’s band and lived long enough to get some of his genius on record.
“Bird-Watcher” (David Remnick, The New Yorker, May 12, 2008)
Charlie “Bird” Parker was one of the most influential musicians in history. An indisputable genius, he also suffered greatly, died at age 34, and left a vast body of work that people are still studying decades after his death in 1955. David Remnick profiled one of those hardcore Bird fans, Phil Schaap. The obsessive, detail-oriented Schaap had hosted the Parker-themed radio show “Bird Flight” for 27 years back in 2008. It was a show that fed a jazz fan’s curiosity while also testing their patience, or as Remnick put it, blurred “the line between exhaustive and exhausting.” Remnick doesn’t question Parker’s contribution or examine his music. He focuses on the way jazz completely shaped Schaap’s life and on his approach to his radio show. (Schaap was partially raised by jazz legends, including drummer Jo Jones, with whom he watched cartoons and played records.) Why does he play countless, poorly recorded, live renditions of Parker songs? Why does he pontificate on air for hours on historical minutia and the meanings of song titles and lost recordings? Because jazz obsessives like Schaap preserve the details of a musical history that increasingly few people care about. Ultimately, Remnick recognizes that Schaap’s invaluable cultural service goes beyond jazz, that “Schaap puts his frenzied memory and his obsessive attention to the arcane in the service of something important: the struggle of memory against forgetting—not just the forgetting of sublime music but forgetting in general.” Bird was one of a kind, and Schaap is, too.
“The Grandest Duke” (Geoffrey O’Brien, The New York Review of Books, October 28, 2010)
Ostensibly a review of Harvey G. Cohen’s book Duke Ellington’s America, O’Brien’s essay expands to cover the grand scope of Ellington’s entire professional creative life. One of history’s greatest composers, Ellington was not strictly an American jazz composer. He was a visionary global artist, even though he was shaped by, and in return shaped, the racially segregated America he inhabited. Stanley Crouch, a respected poet, novelist, columnist, and provocative figure in jazz literature, called Ellington “the most American of Americans.” Ellington not only managed to succeed commercially in a divided nation, he succeed without compromising his artistic freedom, his musical vision, or his identity. Like the book it reviews, O’Brien’s essay goes beyond biography to examine how Ellington managed his career, his public image, and of course, his music, across decades of American life. “Reading Cohen’s book,” writes O’Brien, “we begin in one nation and end in quite a different one… Of many artists it can be said that deep cultural currents can be read through their work; much rarer are those who, like Ellington, worked so powerfully and subtly on those currents as to transform them.”
Miles Davis said, “At least one day out of the year all musicians should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington.” Ellington’s range is so vast that he’s worth reading about twice here. Responding to Harvey G. Cohen’s book Duke Ellington’s America, biographer Claudia Roth Pierpont takes her examination of America’s Beethoven in a more particular direction than Geoffrey O’Brien did in his review. Drawing its title from Ellington’s unfinished piece “Black, Brown, and Beige,” Pierpont’s piece focuses on what Ellington’s career reveals about race in America. “Black, Brown, and Beige” was not well received. This stung Ellington especially hard, since the work celebrated Black history, following the many strands of Black culture from Africa to the United States. For insight, she follows Ellington’s long musical life back to its beginning:
“More than half a century after the Civil War, the most famous night club in New York was a mock plantation. The bandstand was a done up as a white-columned mansion, the backdrop painted with cotton brushes and slave quarters. And the racial fantasy extended well beyond décor: whites who came to Harlem to be entertained were not to be discomfited by the presence of non-entertaining Negroes. All the performers were black—or, in the case of the chorus girls, café au lait—and all the patrons white, if not by force of law then by force of the thugs at the door. …Ironically, it was the Cotton Club that allowed Ellington to expand his talents, by employing him to arrange and compose for a variety of dancers, singers, miscellaneous acts, entr’actes, and theatrical reviews.”
“What,” Pierpont asks, “was he thinking?” Meaning: how does Ellington’s early period square with his middle and later periods? It is a legitimate question about an artist whose work and reputation tried to transcend race in a world that would never let any artist of color remain unaffected by racial dynamics.
Crouch is a respected poet, novelist, columnist, and provocative figure in jazz literature. In 2003, JazzTimes fired him as a columnist for his article “Putting the White Man in Charge,” where he correctly argues that “white musicians who can play are too frequently elevated far beyond their abilities in order to allow white writers to make themselves feel more comfortable about being in the role of evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated.” Crouch did fine without that magazine. He’s opinionated. Some critics claim he has too narrow a set of aesthetic guidelines for what good jazz is. But he wrote the best book on Charlie Parker, called Kansas City Lightning, and his ideas about music, race, and history are brilliantly observed, finely articulated, and thought-provoking. I like my thoughts being provoked, just like I like my music to push me. In this book Considering Genius, Crouch writes many powerful, controversial jazz essays. “At the Five Spot” covers Thelonious Monk’s 1957 stint at the iconic Five Spot club in Manhattan, painting a portrait of this singular jazz composer and stylist at what is arguably his creative peak, and what makes him a genius. Originally written in 1977, the piece appears in his book Considering Genius.
Crouch and poet and critic Baraka had a contentious relationship, but after JazzTimes fired Crouch, Baraka defended Crouch’s right to his musical opinion, especially with music. Baraka examined jazz at a time when few Black critics were publishing essays about the music. He has written timeless, influential pieces about jazz and race in America, most notably “Jazz and the White Critic.” He challenged critics to quit examining the music without examining its musicians’ lived experience, treating the music as if it emerged sui generis, as a collection of sounds, when it was, as he writes, inseparable from “the attitude that produced it.” “The major flaw in this approach to Negro music is that it strips the music too ingenuously of its social and cultural intent. It seeks to define Jazz as an art (or a folk art) that has come out of no intelligent body of socio-cultural philosophy…” He begins the essay:
Most jazz critics have been white Americans, but most important jazz musicians have not been. This might seem a simple enough reality to most people, or at least a reality which can be readily explained in terms of the social and cultural history of American society. And it is obvious why there are only two or three fingers’ worth of Negro critics or writers on jazz, say, if one understands that until relatively recently those Negroes who could become critics, who would largely have to come from the black middle class, have simply not been interested in the music. Or at least jazz, for the black middle class, has only comparatively recently lost some of its stigma (though by no means is it yet as popular among them as any vapid musical product that comes sanctioned by the taste of the white majority). Jazz was collected among the numerous skeletons the middle-class black man kept locked in the closet of his psyche, along with watermelons and gin, and whose rattling caused him no end of misery and self-hatred. As one Howard University philosophy professor said to me when I was an undergraduate, “It’s fantastic how much bad taste the blues contain!“ But it is just this “bad taste“ that this Uncle spoke of that has been the one factor that has kept the best of Negro music from slipping sterilely into the echo chambers of middle-brow American culture. And to a great extent such “bad taste“ was kept extant in the music, blues or jazz, because the Negroes who were responsible for the best of the music were always aware of their identities as black Americans and really did not, themselves, desire to become vague, featureless, Americans as is usually the case with the Negro middle class.
Gary Giddins has long been one of jazz’s most passionate and incisive authors — authoritative but approachable, rigorous but not academic. You see him speaking in many jazz documentaries. He wrote the Village Voice’s his “Weather Bird” column for years. In 2002, he decided to create what he called “an overview” of jazz records during the post-swing heyday of Bop, Hard bop, free, avant-guarde, and modern jazz, so he challenged himself: He would create a map by selecting a single jazz song for each year between 1945 and 2001. Just one song. Then he’d write a paragraph about each song — for 57 songs! That was a gargantuan undertaking that exhausted me just thinking about it, and “choosing,” he wrote, “was an exercise in frustration, even heartbreak.” Why subject himself to this? “I hoped to offer a purview that balanced achievement and innovation.”
He acknowledged his subjective map’s inherent flawsone and the many ways readers would disagree with his choices. (Only one song? The year 1957 alone produced countless jazz masterpieces!) “An infinite number of maps were possible,” he said, “all of them valid.” Instead of debating him, Giddins wrote, he invited readers to make their own selections to enjoy the process of revisiting the music. “For me,” he wrote, “the key reward was in exploring hundreds of records I hadn’t revisited in years. Some records that I expected to include no longer sounded as good; others I had previously neglected now filled me with admiration.” Reading this is fun. You can dip in and out for years, reading your favorite years or your favorite artists. And although I will never subject myself to the grueling process of mapping jazz’s years myself, I do appreciate the chance to listen closely to the music. That’s why anything like this matters.
”Heroine” (David Hajdu, The New Republic, December 24, 2006)
Jazz has no shortage of brilliant, tragic figures. Sometimes their destructive behavior is inseparable from their body of work. Foremost among them was singer Anita O’Day. Many listeners called her the greatest of all jazz singers, but the substances that helped her swing also ensured she never reached the top like Ella Fitzgerald. Hadju explores how O’Day’s singular delivery, her whole approach, was unfortunately related to inebriation. Or in his words, he shows us “the error in defining her by either her substance abuse or her singing alone. The two were not inextricable; they were one.” Even short pieces like this make it clear why Hajdu has long been one of America’s foremost writers. “Her music was the manifesto of her devotion to kicks at all cost,” he writes. “Ecstatic, indulgent, risky, excessive, and volatile, it was drug music, improvised in a state of simulated euphoria and imagined immunity.”
O’Day has long been an artist more difficult to accept than she is to appreciate, because of the primacy of dope in her aesthetic. We like our junkies tragic, preferably taken before their time, like O’Day’s long-gone contemporaries Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday (or, in rock and roll, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain); and in their music we want to find the evidence of mad genius run wild (Parker) or gothic decay (Holiday). We know that heroin is an evil soul-killing venom, and that is pretty much all we want to know about it. We want to hear only about heroin’s inevitable betrayal, not about its seduction. We most certainly do not want to think that music as spirited and delightful as Anita O’Day’s work in her prime could be good because of its debt to heroin.
Another great O’Day piece is Matthew C. Duersten’s “The Moon Looks Down and Laughs,” from Flaunt Magazine. It isn’t online, but you can read it in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing 2002.
Heard of Nelson Symonds? Me neither. The guitarist’s talents attracted the attention of B.B. King and Miles Davis. During a 1965 performance, John Coltrane told Symonds’ band “This is the best organ trio I’ve ever heard.” And yet Symonds only recorded one proper studio album as a leader and a few collaborations. His ouevre is mostly what writer Chantal Braganza calls “crude recordings that get shuffled around like playing cards.” Why didn’t Symonds tour, release more albums, and have a more visible career? Why, when jazz left Montreal, did he stay? This is a fascinating story of an overlooked talent who crossed paths with giants but never joined their ranks.
Those old enough to remember often cite Symonds’ nights at the Black Bottom as among the best of his career. Out-of-town acts—Miles Davis, John Coltrane—would drop by after their gigs to see what all the fuss was about. Once, at the end of Symonds’ set, Davis pulled him aside. “What’s your story, what you playin’?” he asked. “Hey man, I do what I can,” was Symonds’ answer. “I like it,” said Davis, but it’s hard to tell if Symonds did. He was constantly self-effacing about his licks, sometimes to his own detriment. Whenever friends asked him to record albums with them, they got the same response: “Man, I gotta practice. I’m not ready.” For the most part, Symonds wasn’t interested in any aspect of the business that didn’t take place in a smoky club.
This is one of those academic pieces that doesn’t read like an academic piece. Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall, but any deeply researched story about the compassion and financial support of the Jazz Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter — whose name graces many mid-century jazz titles — is worth reading. Jazz would have much less music were it not for her support, and this profile does her contribution justice. Here is the abstract: “While a coterie of bebop loyalists keep alive a caricature of Pannonica de Koenigswarter that has been woven into some of the music’s most durable myths, she has, for the most part, been relegated to the dustbin of history. A closer look at Nica’s 40‐year reign as New York’s ‘Jazz Baroness,’ however, reveals an iconic figure whose extraordinary life was played out at the nexus of gender, race, and class during a particularly transformative period in American popular culture.”
It’s always 420 somewhere, especially here in Portland, Oregon, where a cannabis dispensary seems to stand on every other corner. I smell weed while biking with my daughter through quiet residential neighborhoods. I smell weed while driving with my windows closed. I smell it at the food carts and on the clothes of college students whose papers I used to help revise at Portland State University. Last year I was skating a park around 8 am one morning, and I smelled weed. No one was walking a dog. No one was playing Frisbee golf. I swear the squirrels must have been blazing in the trees. It’s easy to feel like I’m part of a small minority of Portlanders who don’t get stoned. But legal cannabis is more than easy stoner jokes and giggly good times. Legalization is decriminalization, and that’s a very important distinction in a nation that both disproportionately incarcerates people of color for minor offences and clings to an ineffective, military battle approach to the social and health challenge of addiction. Weed is far less harmful than heroin and alcohol, but it can still be harmful when habitual. And arrests have ended too many lives.
In 2016, to celebrate Pennsylvania becoming the 24th US state to legalize medical marijuana, Longreads editor Cheri Lucas Rowlands compiled a marijuana reading list, called Weed Reeds. This list is an extension of that, featuring stories that have come out since other states decriminalized recreational and medical cannabis, and since advocates have started reframing marijuana as cannabis. Still, as serious as legalization is, people still puff, puff, puff on porches, pass the pipe at picnics, and drop tincture in their beers to lighten backyard parties. Legal weed ain’t all science and medicine. It’s a huge lucrative industry, and that makes for dramatic stories, personalities, and trouble.
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“Grow Industry” (Nicholas Hune-Brown, The Walrus, March 12, 2013)
In 2013, when two U.S. states had legalized recreational marijuana, there were signs that Canada would end its nine-decade-long marijuana prohibition. People were wondering how to capitalize on this historic opportunity, to become, as The Walrus put it, ”the Seagrams of weed.”
There are certainly parallels. Like the marijuana ban today, the prohibition against alcohol—much stricter in the US than in Canada—did not eliminate the drug. It just created a grey market with shortcuts and loopholes, easily exploited if you were someone like Samuel Bronfman, a canny Canadian businessman who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. The Bronfmans were hustlers, Russian Jewish immigrants who set up a string of “boozariums” along the Saskatchewan–North Dakota border, ferried alcohol across the Detroit River, and shipped it into the US aboard schooners. In 1928, they expanded their empire by purchasing Seagrams, the Montreal-based maker of such popular brands as Seven Crown. When Prohibition ended, they were in the perfect position to solidify their hold on the market, and Seagrams became the largest distilling business in the world.
The spectacular explosion of cannabis’ ambitious startup MedMen is a tale for the tech era. The company themselves couldn’t always figure out if they were a tech company or a cannabis company. They just knew they were rushing to capitalize on the lucrative opportunity presented by legal cannabis. They modeled their stores after the Apple Store. They published a glossy culture magazine called Ember that ran articles like “Is CBD the New Tylenol?” In an attempt to reach the masses and normalize cannabis consumption, they ran an expensive ad campaign where they’d cross out the word ‘stoner’ and replace that loaded term with words like ‘Grandmother.’ “One image,” the story says, “featured a uniformed police officer.”
This is the story of how the cannabis industry comes down from its high.
In some cases, vendors, unable to get cash for the product they have supplied to the company, have instead been taking payment in MedMen stock. As of mid-May, its stock price was down more than 95 percent from its late-2018 high, according to data from the Canadian Securities Exchange.
Normally, a business in such dire straits could seek federal bankruptcy protection. Because of weed’s legal status, that option is not open to MedMen.
MedMen was faring worse than most, but the rest of industry was also coming down hard from its high. There were too many entrepreneurs trying to blaze the same path as Bierman, competing for a pool of legal sales that was not growing fast enough, with too much regulatory uncertainty hanging over them. In the year leading up to March 21, the United States Marijuana Index, which tracks top cannabis stocks, fell by more than four-fifths.
When one of The Globe and Mail editors suggested writer Ian Brown grow weed as an experiment, Brown borrowed a high tech, automated grow device called a Grobo and set his operation by his office desk. From the dizzying number of varietals to choose from to the sensitive environmental needs of the plants, there are many reasons professional grow cannabis. But could technology like Grobo really democratize and simplify cannabis production?
“I think people will come to love growing,” Mr. Dawson said as we neared the end of our factory tour. “But it’s a much more complex problem than we anticipated.” He was enthusiastic, but wary, because he knew the secret behind the popular misconception that cannabis is a weed anyone can grow anywhere. The truth is, growing good cannabis is way, way harder than it looks.
Eventually, we loaded the Grobo into the hatch of my car. I drove to Toronto and dollied the hulk up to my desk at work. I felt like a revolutionary. There it stood for three weeks while I tried to find something to grow in it.
By now, many Americans are at least faintly aware of the comical mid-century progoganda waged against marijuana consumption, which included slogans like “The burning weed with its roots in Hell!“ The rhetoric has cooled, but myth and pseudoscience still shape many Americans’ view of cannabis use, and propoganda takes many forms. In this piece, Levitan takes a look at the untruths, fear-mongering, and logical fallacies that inform the case that the book Tell Your Children: The Truth about Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence makes against cannabis. He also indicts New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell for his piece, “Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?” which, even when justified, is a modern sport in itself. “Combined,” Levitan writes, “these two works offer a master class in statistical malfeasance and a smorgasbord of logical fallacies and data-free fear-mongering that serve only to muddle an issue that, as experts point out, needs far more good-faith research.“ It must also be said that science is still trying to understand the way cannabis works on, and that weed is not harmless, even if it isn’t from HELL.
An important piece of Berenson’s argument is that rates of marijuana use have risen at around the same time as an increase in diagnoses of schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis. For example, separate studies from Finland and Denmark show an increase in such diagnoses in recent years. The authors of both studies wrote that the increases could be explained by changes to diagnostic criteria, as well as improved access to early interventions. In both cases, the authors do not rule out an actual change in incidence. But Berenson makes that possibility seem a firm reality, and that the rise in marijuana use is responsible. There is no real evidence that he’s right.
Berenson’s connection of marijuana to violence seems even more tenuous. He writes that violence has increased dramatically in four states that legalized marijuana in recent years: Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. He notes that the number of violent crimes in those states has increased faster than the rest of the country between the years 2013 and 2017. On its face, he’s not wrong, but this is a great example of the liberties one can take with numbers.
Here is that contested story described in Levitan’s Undark article. It’s Malcolm Gladwell, so this article is designed to be a simple one that makes complex issues easy to digest. That’s his bread and butter. The question is whether this piece is credible or not. That said, the title raises an important question, and the subhead states an important point about legalization: ”Permitting pot is one thing; promoting its use is another.” Too bad things are rarely as simple as that.
A journalist shares what her experience with prescription painkillers taught her about the value of decriminalization.
Current federal leaders have said repeatedly that cannabis is not a medicinal substance at all, just as members of many administrations did before them. In doing so, it seems, they chose to reject the clear definitions and determinations that have been agreed upon by a majority of medical experts and regular citizens in the U.S. and a growing number of nations around the world.
At the same time, the U.S. assigns more favorable legal status to around 50 different opioids than it does to cannabis or psilocybin mushrooms, all but a handful of which are manufactured prescription drugs (think “opium poppy straw”; heroin, originally a prescription drug, has been retired). As of last year, the U.S.was also producing more opioid prescriptions than it has residents. And according to recent statistics, another American dies from opioid abuse every 10 minutes.
Before he founded High Times, Tom Forcade was a renegade journalist willing to throw a pie — or a lawsuit — in the face of anyone restricting his constitutional freedoms.
Much as the underground press provided a forum for the New Left and counterculture of the 1960s, High Times served as the national message center for the 1970s movement to bring marijuana to the mainstream. During Forcade’s four years publishing the magazine and funding the marijuana lobby, possession of small amounts of cannabis was decriminalized in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oregon. The first Americans began receiving marijuana for a medical condition. High Times editorials from those days seem almost prophetic now: warning against the corporate interests that would descend upon legalized weed, and noting the ways in which international drug wars could serve as cover for imperialist adventures. (Forcade’s own extralegal activities have a legacy as well, but that information has mostly lurked in government agency records, in the memories of tight-lipped collaborators, and in the research files of my forthcoming book about him)
(Photo by Uwe Zucchi/picture alliance via Getty Images)
David Gutowski | Longreads | July 2020 | 5 minutes (1,500 words)
“At the end of the day, I have to sleep with myself.” Over the 18 years of publishing my literature and music website Largehearted Boy, that has always been my creed. When offered sponsorships and advertising from products I didn’t believe in, that belief guided my advertising (and lifestyle) decisions. When my bed became crowded while working for Amazon Books, insomnia set in.
My world pivoted in the mid-2010s. Then shook. Then reversed on its axis. In 2014, I separated from my wife, got a divorce, and met the love of my life. I left Brooklyn for Manhattan. Website advertising, long in freefall, plummeted even more. In 2016, my personal life disintegrated along with my savings. I attempted suicide and was forced to finally deal with lifelong mental health issues including major depressive disorder and borderline personality disorder. I returned to school in 2018 to finish my undergraduate degree in creative writing. My mental health, at long last, improved, and with it, so did I.
At thirty-five, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. One year before my diagnosis, my mother died from complications after heart surgery. At the time of her death, my mother had cancer — lymphoma. Five years prior to Mom’s death, my father passed away from a brain tumor, a metastasis from the cancer melanoma.
Two years after I had completed my chemotherapy treatment for cancer, I gave birth to Olivia. My miracle baby.
Speaking on a podcast about Coronavirus, Best American Travel Writing series editor Jason Wilson “declared that this was ’the extinction event’ for a certain type of travel publishing.“ In an essay for Guernica, Wilson expounds further, considering the ways travel restrictions and fears about infection will shape the way people write about travel, while acknowledging that all we can do is speculate and wait. And until then, we can read travel books like Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana as Wilson did. We can reminisce about past journeys, and we can see how the stories in future editions of Best American Travel Writing look compared to ones before COVID-19.
In the months that have passed since my pessimistic podcast appearance, I’ve had a change of heart about the future of travel writing. Of course it will survive, as it has before, even if the publishing models radically change. Travel writers, once again, will embrace new forms, experiment, borrow from other genres and find novel approaches. Many people have suggested that, once we’re free from lockdown, more modest domestic or local travel, rather than exotic foreign adventures, will take center stage. They say narratives about home might become significant and popular.
When I think of local travel, I think of Hopkins Pond, a small body of water in the wooded park near my home in Haddonfield, New Jersey. The park is not very well maintained by the county, but on sunny days it’s still beautiful. I often take long walks there around the edge of pond, where I’ll encounter a handful of people fishing, joggers, or families riding bikes. In most ways it’s a completely typical suburban recreational area.
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