Giving away my book!
Chapters from Pity the Genius: A Journey Through American Guitar Music in 33 Tracks
My second book, Pity the Genius, has been out for a while now. I'm electing to share this book with all you wonderful subscribers at this point. So starting today, I'm going to post a chapter a week. Or thereabouts. This will be in addition to any other posts. I’ll note that some of these were shared a good while back. So I may repeat myself.
Not a guitarist? No matter. To me this book is about far more than guitar players. It's about the human experience, the mysteries of creativity, and the wonders of the human heart and mind.
To wit:
“It is rare to find an accomplished musician who is also an accomplished, insightful writer. Joel Harrison’s Pity the Genius is the best of both worlds. Harrison finds the brightest light and the most secret dark in his subjects, and writes them out so they become, for a while, your own experience. If you are at all curious about the phenomenon of obscure mastery, including perhaps your own, read this book. Pity the Genius is a clear source of self- awareness for writer and reader alike.”
— W.A. Mathieu: Composer/ educator/ Author of The Listening Book
As usual, I would be very happy if you would become a paid subscriber!
This is one of the most searing stories from the book—
Arthur Rhames: Live at My Father’s Place
There is virtually no record of this man’s life on earth save scratchy live 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 60’s and 70’s, still stunned and searching for superlatives to describe someone no one really knew.
Arthur grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in the 1960’s in a troubled home. His parents were absent, he was raised by his aunts. Beginning in the late 60’s he styled himself as a blues rock player in the mode of Johnny Winter, and right away bested all the local competition. In the battle of bands at Brooklyn Tech he 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 Coltrane, McLaughlin, and Hendrix had all found a common body.
The recordings we have are shadows, suggestions. 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 a volcanic trio called Eternity with Cleveland Alleyne on bass and Collin Young on drums, and he began dressing in white robes having joined the Hare Krishna movement, his tone searing, distorted, blues-drenched. This music sounds like a sort of exorcism, howls and wails like someone running from a burning building. You hear the blackness 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. He’d play a virtuoso lick and then do the same thing with his left hand draped over the neck. It’s said that 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 in fact players such as Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano report hearing him back in those times, out on Union Square, or wherever. He was a closeted gay man and died of AIDS in 1989 at the age of 32. Few know his name.
The story becomes ever more impossible to absorb. Being a phenomenally gifted guitarist was insufficient. Rhames took up the tenor saxophone in his early 20’s and soon his ability there rivalled his guitar playing. He recorded with Coltrane’s late-career drummer Rashied Ali, and the playing is at an astonishingly high level. Then, incredibly, he mastered the piano. Drummer Jeff Siegel, who was in Arthur’s band in the early 80’s, 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 20’s 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.
In the 80’s Arthur played small clubs around town, wearing out everyone in the band with burning tempos and marathon sets. He 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 of more recognition. Coryell banished him. Perhaps the friction was that two minutes of Arthur Rhames rendered Coryell irrelevant.
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 42nd Street. He recorded, but none of the records gained any purchase. The reasons, those that are apprehensible, 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, recall, was a gatekeeper for the young lions in those days, and he savaged Rhames, making fun of not just his playing but how he dressed and looked. Crouch called him a Coltrane clone, and here he was playing with Coltrane’s own team, Elvin Jones, Rashied, and Reggie Workman. 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, 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 in New Paltz.
And then there was the fact that he was gay, and terrified of being rejected if any of his contemporaries knew. Vernon Reid, who considers him a seminal influence, is quoted as saying Arthur was “afraid that if he was ‘out’ that all of us in the ‘hood who loved and worshipped him as an artist would turn our backs on him.” Vernon goes on to say that his experience of accepting Arthur’s homosexuality changed his views on the subject, taught him the type of tolerance that now is a given. Vernon visited him in the hospital at the end of his life and brought Arthur 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, and recuperate at the home of a friend, he died.
His brief flame of a life demands an explanation. There’s always a disconnect between what the culture values and what a visionary offers. But this disconnect is something of a record-breaker. Rhames staked out the impossible on his instrument, the unhinged, dissonant, and wild. 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. Perhaps he was trying to banish the trauma of his upbringing through his devotion to sound. Music like a hurricane, it tears at your skin. Pity the genius.
If Arthur Rhames could die broke and obscure, it suggests, according to Vernon Reid, 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. You could argue that some of his early work is derivative, but who’s isn’t? 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 hurt his prospects. 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, in this case the ghetto of Brooklyn, and inspire us all to give more, to be more, to sacrifice more. And the message, too, is that the visionary, the emissary, is often a target. His or her heart, seeming 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, entirely original and holy 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 we do so risking sentimentality. It makes courage take center stage. 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 suffocating weight from their chests. Had he survived he’d have eventually broken through. But 2023 is not 1980. 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.