Chapters from my new book

Pity the Genius: A Journey Through American Music in 33 Tracks

As I have said in previous posts, I have been writing a collection of 33 essays about American guitar music for the past couple of years. Along the way I have shared a handful of those. The name of the book is Pity the Genius: A Journey Through American Music in 33 Tracks. It is now about to be released. Technically the date is September 15th, but pre-orders are available on various platforms including Amazon.

A handful of bookstores will carry it. But if you can’t find it, I hope you’ll just go ahead and use Amazon.

I believe in this new platform—Substack. There are those who are releasing their entire books here. Obviously I am not doing that. But what I would like to do is share a portion of these essays with you as the weeks go by. With apologies, most of these will only be shared with paid subscribers.

As usual, I deeply appreciate anyone who feels inspired to upgrade to a paid subscription.

The story of this man’s short life is pretty devastating. But incredibly inspiring and moving, too. Here’s a taste, albeit a pretty heavy one, of what this book is about. Celebrating creativity, celebrating the guitar, celebrating music that has changed our lives, inquiring into the deep chasms of the creative process, celebrating the human spirit in all its hues, dark and light, telling untold, or barely told stories, saying “Hooray” for the underdog.

It’s all there on Cymbal Press. Thanks for reading.

https://www.amazon.com/Pity-Genius-Journey-through-American/dp/1955604169

Arthur Rhames

Eternity – Live at My Father’s Place

1978

There is virtually no record of Arthur’s life on earth save scratchy recordings from basements or parks, out-of-print blowing sessions on vinyl, a couple of grainy YouTube videos, and the testimony of friends, now in their 60s and 70s, still stunned and searching for superlatives to describe someone no one really knew.

Arthur grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in the 1960s. He had a difficult upbringing and left home at age sixteen, living for a time at the Hare Krishna temple in downtown Brooklyn. Arthur styled himself as a blues rock guitar player in the mode of Johnny Winter, and by high school he was besting all the local competition. In the battle of bands at Brooklyn Tech Arthur always won, and in an incredibly short period of time, around 1972, he expanded exponentially upon his blues-rock foundation and began playing torrents of notes as if Robert Johnson, Coltrane, McLaughlin, and Hendrix had all found a common body.

The recordings we have of of his guitar playing are shadows, suggestions, which is why I’ve chosen a Youtube clip to represent him playing with his volcanic trio, Eternity. (youtube.com/watch?v=lKfqhHZprws) Everyone who heard him live said you had to see it to believe it, incredible dexterity, a new guitar vocabulary built at that burgeoning nexus of modern jazz and rock. He formed Eternity in the mid-1970s with Cleveland Alleyne on bass and Collin Young on drums. The music from this concert video sounds like a sort of exorcism, howls and wails like someone running from a burning building. His tone is searing, distorted, blues-drenched.  The high-speed melodies and wide leaps are virtuosic—fast, and incredibly precise rhythmically, clearly the result of obsessive practicing.

You hear a deep stew of African American musical history in Arthur’s sound. Obviously, he knew Hendrix intimately, you hear his R&B roots, and then the extrapolation and fragmenting of those roots into the free jazz of the moment. Legend has it that he’d  play a virtuoso lick and then do the same thing with his left hand draped over the neck.  Arthur hardly slept, he would sometimes practice eighteen hours a day, often in the park. He was always broke, he couch-surfed, and was both winningly friendly and deeply private. Rhames often busked in Manhattan, and players such as Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano reported hearing him back in those times, out in Union Square, or around New York City. He was a closeted gay man and died of AIDS in 1989 at the age of 32.

The story becomes ever more impossible to absorb. Being a phenomenally gifted guitarist was insufficient. Rhames’ first instrument was actually the tenor saxophone which he began when he was nine. He began playing guitar when he was fourteen. Then, incredibly, he mastered the piano.

Drummer Jeff Siegel, who was in Arthur’s band in the early ‘80s, describes walking into his first gig with Arthur and seeing him on the keys sounding like a mix of Art Tatum and McCoy Tyner. Minutes later he learned Arthur was actually the sax player on the date. Only later did he learn Arthur’s main instrument was guitar. I suppose it’s redundant to point out that virtuosity on one instrument is rare, on two rather shocking. Three? Unheard of. If you’ve practiced for a 6– or 8–hour stretch you know it’s grueling, the pleasure quotient wanes, and it becomes more about obsession, maybe desperation. Your bones ache, your brain starts to boil. 18 hours? How did he do it?

He was a man of huge appetites. At a diner after a gig he might consume two lamb sandwiches, two plates of pancakes, and multiple deserts. In his late twenties he began to obsessively lift weights. If you roomed with him after a gig you might not sleep, because all night long Rhames played guitar, sang Hare Krishna songs, listened to the cassette recording of the performance, and built his body. Arthur would spend the wee hours working out series of intervallic sequences that ate up the entire neck, licks that were very difficult to play. He sought a new language.  His approach on the guitar differed from his approach on piano and saxophone. He believed each instrument had its own identity and should be dealt with in its own specific way. He was expert at standard jazz harmony on sax, for instance, but usually chose not to play that repertoire on guitar.

In the ‘80s Arthur played small clubs around New York City, wearing out everyone in his bands with burning tempos and marathon sets. He made a small income from playing in a popular R&B band at the time called Slave, but after a couple of years he quit the group. Arthur mostly didn’t own his instruments; he would borrow guitars or horns, some of which seemed strung together by rubber bands. A Japanese video crew filmed him at the Jazz Forum, one of the only times he was professionally documented. The master tape was destroyed in a flood in the studio it was housed in before anyone could see it. No other copies survive. He toured as an opening act for Larry Coryell. The relationship was said to be fractious, Coryell dismissive of Rhames, Rhames demanding more recognition. Coryell banished him.

John Coltrane’s bassist, Reggie Workman, called him a messenger.

Arthur, like other savants before him, had little idea how to live on planet earth. He slept in the park, got attacked and beat up, he wandered the streets, and for a time worked as a security guard in a peep show on 42^nd Street. He recorded, but none of the records gained any purchase. The reasons seem to be made of fairy dust and voodoo curses. Apparently the only substantial press he got in years of gigging was a take-down in the Village Voice by the infamous critic Stanley Crouch. Crouch came to a set in the mid-1980s at Mikell’s on the Upper West Side with Wynton Marsalis. Arthur would say of that gig that everyone was going wild except those two, who sat frowning with their arms crossed at a front table. Recall Crouch was a gatekeeper for the so-called young lions in those days, a club Arthur would have had no interest in joining. Perhaps this was an avant-garde set that wasn’t to Crouch’s (or Wynton’s) liking. But why would Crouch, who was one of the most intelligent, capable writers I ever met, take a cruel tone, savaging Rhames, making fun of not just his playing but how he dressed and looked? Crouch called him a Coltrane clone. If that was the case why would Coltrane’s own bandmates, Elvin Jones, Rashied Ali, Reggie Workman, and even Coltrane’d wife, Alice, get on stage with him? Clearly these figureheads thought he was dedicated to and capable of moving Coltrane’s legacy forward. This type of personal attack from a jazz critic is, to me, disgusting and shameful, especially given Rhames’ monstrous talent and dedication to his craft.

The Crouch article deeply depressed Arthur, and he pulled back from playing publicly. With no permanent place of residence, he lived for a while with a woman, who was also his manager and who was reputed to be a “hit-person” for the mafia. Arthur owed her money which he couldn’t pay. She wanted to sleep with him which was a no-go, so she threatened to have him killed if he ever played in New York again. Rhames went into hiding upstate, living for a time with pianist John Esposito, who had been a frequent member of Arthur’s group. While living there Arthur worked as a counselor for teens, largely set aside music and got into health foods and yoga.

Throughout his life Arthur hid his homosexuality, terrified of being rejected if any of his contemporaries knew. It’s important to remember that at the time, even amongst the typically liberal jazz community, homophobia was rampant. As AIDS began to devour young men, people became not just prejudiced, but terrified of the gay community. I’ve been told by African American friends that in that time the Black church considered being gay a greater sin than being a thief or murderer. Vernon Reid, who considers Arthur a seminal influence, told me that Arthur was "afraid that if he was 'out' that all of us who loved and worshipped him as an artist would turn our backs on him." Vernon went on to say that his experience of accepting Arthur’s homosexuality changed his views on the subject, and taught him the type of tolerance that is now more mainstream. I’ve heard other musicians say the same thing.

Vernon visited Arthur in the hospital at the end of his life and brought him a guitar. Ravaged by AIDS, Arthur played a few licks and said, with complete optimism, "When I get better and get out of here, I'm going to concentrate on the blues because this experience has given me a new insight into human suffering.” The day before he was set to leave the hospital to recuperate at the home of a friend, he died.

Of Arthur’s death John Esposito said in an extended conversation we had: “Someday there will be a reckoning and admission  in human terms for how destructive our society’s homophobia has been. This country has a terrible history of discarding human lives. How many Arthur Rhames-type scientists, writers, artists, inventors have been destroyed? Unfortunately, the male jazz community has been complicit in all this.” After attending Rhames funeral, the great saxophonist John Stubblefield told Esposito that amongst his peers Rhames was talked about as the inheritor of the jazz legacy that extended from Armstrong through Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.  You don’t get that type of acclaim if you’re an “imitator” or a “clone.”

This brief flame of a life demands an explanation. But what is it? There’s always a disconnect between what the culture values and what a visionary offers. But this chasm of a disconnect is something of a record-breaker. Pity the genius. Rhames staked out the impossible on his instrument. What are any of us willing to do, to sacrifice, to endure for what we believe in? He bent the guitar to his will. There was nothing safe about his choices. He was seeking freedom in the way Sun Ra did, and that freedom was a pinhole at the time, not a big, wide doorway. There’s no doubt he would have had more recognition had he been white and straight. His struggle and demise were inextricably tied to the racist, homophobic, classist, and conformist culture of his era. And yet—Arthur remained committed to a goal of transcendence. He remained positive, he modelled devotion in the music community, doggedly rehearsing, studying, growing, workshopping, playing anywhere and everywhere. It was a spiritual journey for him.

Vernon Reid said to me that if Arthur Rhames could die broke and obscure, it suggests that the world is random, meaningless, and absent of justice. Music is not a meritocracy. We’re left chewing on ambiguous concepts such as karma, luck, timing. It certainly didn’t help his financial prospects to situate himself in the avant-garde. With all this ability couldn’t Arthur have become a sideman to one of the reigning bandleaders? It’s said that he could be tough to work with, tardy to gigs. This certainly affected potential employers. Also consider that he might blow away anyone else on the bandstand, and thus become something of a liability to a certain type of leader.

We have to see the positive. Arthur speaks to the infinite potential of the human race. A genius can emerge from anywhere, at any time, and inspire us all to give more, to be more, to sacrifice more. But the accompanying message is that the visionary, the emissary, is often a target. His or her heart, seemingly so strong, is easily cut in two.

More and more everyone sounds the same. Thank the internet. The obscurity of Arthur Rhames, and maybe the arc of such a life itself cannot happen again, because everyone copies the copiers now. YouTube has changed everything, made everyone a star in their own living room. Virtuosos are everywhere, but what is not everywhere are the dark, sharp, original edges that gave Arthur his sound, the lacerating energy that all but slaps you in the face. There was nothing pretty about this man’s life or times. Those edges you can only develop in isolation, unobserved, where no one hears or understands you.

His ecstasy we gladly draw inspiration from. His anguish we can only surmise, and to do so we risk sentimentality. You could call him courageous. But people like Arthur don’t have a choice, they’re not thinking so much about a reward, they’re just trying to unload the weight from their chests. Had he survived, he might have eventually broken through. Times have changed since 1980. But then, to play with that level of ferocity, to be that raw and rough, and be Black, and be gay? Any one of those things alone could have killed him.