Turman Finds Out Just
Where Michael C. Hall andPrincess Goes Are Going

The Village Voice

VOL . LXIII | NO. 5 DECEMBER ISSUE , 2021

Like to Buy Some Bitcoin?
Barkan Looks Into
Eric Adams’s Faith in
Cryptocurrency

December 2021

Eight Voice Writers
From Back in the Day 1
Remember theInimitable Greg Tate

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Years of New YorkThe Village Voice

December 2021

2

be patient
be persistent
be powerless
be home.
F I N D YO U R H O M E AT C O R C O R A N .C O M

4 The Front

Eric Adams is a true believer incryptocurrency. Ross Barkan asks what’s in
it for the rest of us New Yorkers.

8 CityState

Everyone knows that Rikers Island is adisaster. Frank Pizzoli talks to the folks
looking for alternatives.

9 La Dolce Musto

Which actors are going to have to pastea smile on their face as they sit in theaudience and listen to Oscar acceptancespeeches? Musto runs down the list of thisyear’s undeserving losers.

11 Comix

Will 2024 bring forth a reborn king?
Ward Sutton heads to Merry Lago! forthe holidays.

12 New York Mirror

Looking to put on a local production of
The Music Man? Brittany Natale went toQueens to look at rentable period gowns,
hats, doublets, and shoes from stage andscreen at the TDF Costume Collection.

14 The Voice Firmament

Remembering a colleague, mentor, andfriend. Former Voice writers share theirstories about the brilliant culture warrior,critic, and musician Greg Tate.

Editorial
EDITOR IN CHIEF R.C. Baker
ART DIRECTOR Darrick Rainey
PUBLISHER Brian Calle

18 Holiday Visions

Ready or not, it’s the holiday season in the
Big Apple. James Hamilton and Mark
Jacobson look at joy and ennui past andpresent.

Contributors
Ross Barkan, Daniel Felsenthal, Sasha Frere-Jones,
Nelson George, Michael A. Gonzales,
James Hamilton, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, Mark Jacobson,

25 ClublandJoe Levy, Miles Marshall Lewis, Scott Malcomson,
Michael Musto, Brittany Natale, Frank Pizzoli,
Matt Rogers, Tricia Romano, Ward Sutton,
Katherine Turman, Vincent Velotta, Elizabeth Zimmer
ASSISTANT EDITOR: Laura Bell

Advertising
CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER Steven McKenna
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LIVE MUSIC & CLUB CATEGORY DIRECTOR Andrew Gyger
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Cover photo by James Hamilton

In the driver’s seat of a wondrous Hammond organ: Dominic Cangelosi
providing that roller skating groove.

21

FeatureBringing 253 million (give or take)musical tones into the world

Folks of a certain age were scared out of their wits by it. Kids
(and the young at heart) have gone round and round to it. Jazz
buffs and rock aficionados have been wowed by it. Matt Rogers
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at the roller rink, and go-to instrument for some of the 20th
century’s biggest stars.

Katherine Turman goes the distance with
Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum,talking touring, COVID, and live showswith frontman Michael C. Hall and theband.

27 On the Boards

Psychedelic journeys with historic
personages: Elizabeth Zimmer takes a trip
with Flying Over Sunset.

28 Panel

Discussion

In a review
of Douglas
Wolk’s All of theMarvels, Daniel
Felsenthal explores
the personaland cultural
ramifications of theMarvel Universe.

30 Jockbeat

Vincent Velotta comes down hard on theanti-vaxxers tarnishing the history of social
protest by star athletes.

The Village Voice

VOL . LXIII | NO. 5
DECEMBER, 2021

InsideDecember 2021

Matt Rogers

CONTENTS

3

The Village Voice

December 2021

4 The Front

ERIC ADAMS WANTS TO
SELL YOU SOME BITCOIN
Investors are mining Bitcoin upstate. New York City’s incoming mayor
wants to bring the crypto gold rush to the five boroughs.
By Ross BarkanW

hen Eric Adams, the next mayor of
New York City, triumphantly flew
down to a political conference in
Puerto Rico last month, he told reporters he had paid for his trip there.
“I paid my own way. I learned the best way totell people to mind their business is to comeout your pocket and cut your own check, so

I’m here on my time,” Adams said at the SOMOS conference, hosted by a nonprofit benefiting the Latino community. “It’s on mydollar, my dime, and my time.” Adams left
out that he had not traveled on a commercial
airliner. Instead, he flew on a private jet belonging to Brock Pierce, a former child actor
who is now a wealthy cryptocurrency entre-

Incoming mayor Eric Adams is a true believer in crypto. Others in the city are not so sure.

preneur. The Adams campaign said Adams
had paid for the flight, but declined to provide proof.
The news that Adams, a booster of big
business, was traveling on a jet owned by acryptocurrency heavyweight was not a surprise for those who have been paying attention to him. Adams, a Democrat, hasalready said he’d take his first three paychecks in Bitcoin, and has called for cryptocurrency to be taught in schools. Along withthe mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, Adams
has emerged as a prominent champion for a
nascent industry that is awash with cash
and drawing fresh scrutiny from regulators.
“When you hear Eric Adams talk about
cryptocurrency, what he’s talking about istrying to impart an enthusiasm for emerging technologies, to think of New York as ahome and to encourage investors and technologists to understand that they have apartner with the city,” says Andrew Rasiej, a
top member of the Adams transition teamfocusing on technology. “A lot of people aretalking about having a deputy mayor fortechnology. The good news is we alreadyhave a mayor for technology.”
Adams, the Brooklyn borough president
and a former police captain, is one of themore intriguing and unpredictable mayorsto-be in modern times. He narrowly won a
crowded Democratic primary with the support of outer-borough, working-class New
York. At the same time, he unabashedly
courted real estate and Wall Street elites,
taking large campaign donations fromsome of the wealthiest and most powerful
men in the world. Rupert Murdoch, Michael
Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio all countthemselves as enthusiastic Adams backers.
De Blasio forged a close alliance with thecity’s largest real estate developers but kept
a chilly distance from power brokers in theworlds of tech and finance. Adams, a regular at tony Manhattan nightclubs, has signaled that he will be much more
accommodating. Unlike de Blasio, Adams
has openly picked fights with the left flankof the Democratic Party.
Cryptocurrency fits this Adams brand.
The most well-known and valuable currency, Bitcoin, is barely more than a decade

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6

old, and has surged in value since early2020. One Bitcoin is now worth tens of
thousands of U.S. dollars. Once devoid ofsignificant value, Bitcoin has made a number of traders and investors inordinately
wealthy in a short amount of time. The pricing of the coin and other digital currencies,
like Ethereum, is incredibly volatile; it is notOnce devoid ofsignificant value,
Bitcoin has made anumber of traders
and investors
inordinately
wealthy in a shortamount of time .
uncommon for digital coins to gain and lose
value rapidly over the course of a day. (Disclosure: I own small amounts of cryptocurrency.) Unlike an ordinary bank transaction,
cryptocurrency transactions are incredibly
difficult to track. There is no central bank orsingle administrator. Currency is sent individually on a peer-to-peer network andtransactions are verified digitally in a ledger
called blockchain. The anonymity can
breed illegality, with international crime
cartels turning to Bitcoin to launder cash.
Some crypto enthusiasts champion thecoins as a way to build toward a radical libertarian future, beyond the reach of banking regulators, but more and more investors
now talk up the potential for digital currencies to be used in ordinary transactions, likedollars on a debit card. Other boosters see
cryptocurrency as a worthy investment vehicle, like digital gold, and a hedge against
rising inflation. Large financial firms havedramatically increased their crypto investments over the past two years, ever since
the price of Bitcoin surged around the beginning of the pandemic. “The analogy
would be to a credit card payment system.
You’d have a Bitcoin payment system,” says
Joseph Trevisani, a senior analyst focusing
on currency and economics at FXStreet.
“Does that involve infrastructure, jobs,

firms operating here, and links to the rest of
the financial world? Would that create jobs
here? Without question.”
Ultimately, cryptocurrency remains a
speculative vehicle. The coins are data kept
in a secure online ledger and do not exist in
any physical form, unlike paper money.
They gain value based on investment andbelief. The currencies have intrinsic value
because people with billions of dollars believe they do. New York City itself is home
to a number of firms that trade in cryptocurrencies, but it’s the poorer, upstate regions
where Bitcoin operations have begun totake over. The act of mining, or creating,
Bitcoin—a highly complex computer process that creates a cryptographic systemthat generates new Bitcoin and facilitatestransactions—is incredibly energy-intensive. Thousands of electricity-guzzling
servers are required; to meet its carbon-reduction goals, China banned the practice,sending several miners to New York andother states. Former industrial hubs in upstate and western New York have grown attractive to Bitcoin miners because
electricity and land are cheap, even as environmental groups decry the activity and callfor a ban on the practice.
Given the lack of space and the enormous energy costs, the five boroughs areunlikely to be a hub of Bitcoin mining anytime soon. In fact, there is relatively little
Adams himself can do, as mayor of New
York City, to directly grow the cryptocurrency industry. State government, not themunicipality, regulates most financial activity. New York State is one of the strictest regulators of cryptocurrency in America,
requiring firms that participate in the industry to obtain a so-called Bitlicense from theState Department of Financial Services.
Akin to banking licenses, Bitlicenses require financial disclosure and anti-moneylaundering and cybersecurity compliance,
among other stipulations. Roughly 30 companies have won a license or charter since
the introduction of the rules, in 2015.
It’s entirely unclear what policy changes
Adams will seek on the cryptocurrency
front. His spokesman did not return a request for comment, and he has declined toelaborate further on his plans. Municipal
workers must accept payments in U.S. dollars, not cryptocurrency, and it would be an
exceedingly challenging endeavor to over-

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haul a payment-processing system for hundreds of thousands of employees. Getting
more private businesses to accept cryptocurrency could be another goal, but few
people are likely to abandon credit anddebit cards carrying U.S. dollars for a fluctuating digital currency. “The mayor can work
to change laws to get the city to accept payments for some transactions in crypto. That
they can do without state approval,” says
John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent
Albany, a good government group. “There’s
an opportunity cost to everything government does. You have smart people with limited time and you’re thinking about how toshoehorn the city’s activities so they can use
crypto … it’s stupid.”
Another question, also unresolved, iswhether Adams himself owns Bitcoin, or
any other cryptocurrency. His campaign declined to answer a Voice inquiry, and he has
not indicated publicly if he has bought ortraded cryptocurrency. As mayor of New
York City, he could have direct influence
over the price of Bitcoin if he becomes a frequent enough booster. The billionaire Elon
Musk has moved cryptocurrency markets
through tweets alone. Adams could decide,
like Suarez in Miami, to create New York
City’s own coin. In November, the Miami
mayor announced that he would be converting the millions of dollars in proceedsthat MiamiCoin has created into a Bitcoin“dividend,” potentially sending money innewly created digital wallets to city residents. One avenue of interest for crypto enthusiasts—and one potential area for bothrisk and reward for city workers—is pension
fund investment. Adams cannot directly
decide how the city pension funds invest,
but he could wield his bully pulpit to influence the decisions unions make. New Jersey’s Common Pension Fund D has small
holdings in blockchain and digital holding
companies, while two pension plans in Fairfax, Virginia, have invested in crypto assets.
The incoming mayor’s embrace of cryptocurrency is perceived, at the bare minimum, as a symbolic gesture. De Blasio wasnever as anti-tech as his reputation suggested—he once teamed up with Andrew
Cuomo to land the taxpayer-subsidized
Amazon headquarters in Queens—but hewas never going to be openly friendly or inviting to the millionaires and billionaires
seeking a certain amount of accommodation and ego-gratification. Tech companies
did continue to expand in New York underde Blasio: Facebook last year agreed to leasenearly all the space in the James A. Farley
Building, in Midtown. Supporters of thecryptocurrency industry hope, in the longterm, that Adams could seek to boost firms
with tax breaks on par with those Amazon
would have received, had their headquarters been planted in the city. But the grassroots backlash was fierce, especially since
Amazon is a trillion-dollar company in noneed of government largesse. It was also
never clear that Amazon could hit its lofty
job targets. And the nascent crypto industry
is not yet a robust employer.
Business in the five boroughs will likely
continue apace, no matter what Adams
does. And for a city still struggling to recover tourism dollars lost during the pan-demic and address myriad otherchallenges—homelessness, gun violence,
unemployment—it’s unclear how much it
really matters whether New York becomes
America’s cryptocurrency capital. “If you
look at New York’s employment problems,
it’s how to employ a lot of semi-skilled andunskilled people and address income inequality,” says Kaehny. “Crypto is such a
non-answer.”

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8 CityStateThe Village Voice

December 2021

RIKERS ISLAND IN THE
CROSSHAIRS OF REFORM
Can a borough-based system of jails improve conditions for inmatesand officers alike?
By Frank PizzoliIn What to Do About Closing Rikers, a recent
Vital City report, co-authors Elizabeth
Glazer and Michael Jacobson call Rikers
Island a “humanitarian crisis,” and recommend numerous fixes, eventually leading
to a borough-based jail system with 2,200
beds. (Vital City is a venture dedicated to actionable ideas that will strengthen New York
City’s social fabric, and issues reports eachquarter in advance of the city’s budget.) The
report also calls for 250 medical and/or mental-health beds in city hospitals, in order toplace inmates in treatment-appropriate settings. (Jacobson told the Voice he was hoping
for an eventual total of 1,000 hospital beds.)
According to NYC Department of Correction
deputy commissioner of public information
Patrick Gallahue, the current census at Rikers
hovers between 5,300 and 5,500.
Glazer previously served as former governor Andrew Cuomo’s deputy secretary of
public safety, and led Mayor Bill de Blasio’s
Office of Criminal Justice. Jacobson spent
the 1990s serving as Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s
probation and corrections commissioner,and is currently executive director at the
CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance. As their report went to press, thispast September, the humanitarian crises at
Rikers burst into public view. That month,
New York State Attorney General Letitia
James did an official tour of the facility, telling Fox 5 News the jail is “plagued by dysfunction, neglect, and violence.” Amidst
staffing shortages, de Blasio has relievedcorrections officers of performing courtroom accompaniments with 100 NYPD officers. At one point last summer, as the DOC
faced a surge of corrections officer resignations, as many as 3,000 of the 8,000 officers were not reporting to work at Rikers.
Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association president Benny Boscio told radio hostJohn Catsimatidis about dangerously longhours and unsafe working conditions:“We’re having the roughest time in my 22year career ever. Officers are working triple
shifts, which includes … in some cases 30
hours straight. It’s a really unsafe situation
for us…. My corrections officers are suffering.”
In October, Governor Kathy Hochul andde Blasio arranged transfer to two state prisons for about 230 women and transgenderindividuals, as one measure to remedy officer shortages. Melvin Collins, 39, told CBS
New York in early October that he’d beendetained for three years awaiting trial on

felony-burglary charges. “Officers’ lives arein jeopardy, it’s true. And the inmates’ lives
are in jeopardy too,” he said. “You have somany violent people coming into jail because of what they’re getting picked up foroff of the street. I’ve gotten jumped. I’ve
gotten sexually assaulted.” He has 13
stitches in his face from stabbings and wason suicide watch at the time of his televisioninterview. By early December, 15 inmates
had died while in custody, according to Pix
11 Live News.

White-Harrigan
admires Vital City’sreport, “but unlessthe buck stops
with someone
with authority inthe mayor’s office,it’s just anotherreport.”
These conditions exist in spite of numerous policy-reform recommendations coming from every direction. The problem is,there’s no coordination. “The NYC criminal
justice system is not a system. No one partanswers to any other part. Every group involved has their own views on how to proceed with everything, including reform,”
Glazer tells the Voice in a phone call. Jacobson explains, “We’re going from a highly
concentrated system into a dispersed one
spread throughout the city,” adding that thismeans “several things need to happen simultaneously, involving many city departments—labor relations, budget, staffing.”
Calling the current imbroglio a “structuralproblem” with “no figure whose central job
is to focus on closing Rikers,” the Vital City
report recommends that Adams create two
new leadership positions: a deputy mayor
for justice policy and operation, who would
manage the interacting parts of the justicesystem and oversee Rikers’ infrastructure,
construction, and social programming, anda second position that would report “to thenew deputy Mayor, with an unswerving
commitment to the transformational goals

The Justice 4 Women Task Force, created by the WCJA,
protesting at Rikers Island.

of the project—with day-to-day responsibility for the project.” Political insiders whisper that Mayor-elect Adams will indeed‘elevate’ the profile of the city’s corrections
services by having it managed at the deputy
mayor level, as called for in the report.
Would better coordination through new
mayoral positions with teeth make a difference? Reverend Sharon White-Harrigan,
executive director of the Women’s Community Justice Association, thinks so. She
serves on Adams’s transition team and his
Public Safety Committee. “Our movement
to decarcerate, advocate, and organize wascreated because the women of Rikers were
often treated as an afterthought,” she tells
the Voice by phone. WCJA’s mission is theclosure of Rikers’ Rose M. Singer facility
housing women and gender-expansive
New Yorkers—“We must work to get themhome,” White-Harrigan says. A justice-impacted woman of color herself, she served
time at Rikers in 1992 while being adjudicated on manslaughter charges resulting
from a death that occurred while she wasbeing raped: She stabbed her assailant in
self-defense, leading to her rapist’s death.
Echoing Glazer, White-Harrigan says,“Coordination would help. Why do wekeep calling it the ‘criminal justice system’
when there’s no seamless system inplace?” She admires Vital City’s report,“but unless the buck stops with someone
with authority in the mayor’s office, it’s justanother report.”
Sasha Ginzberg, executive director of the
Borough-Based Jail System within the
DOC, is tasked with constructing jails in
Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and theBronx that can house 3,300 residents insmaller-scale housing facilities that arenear their communities of origin. Moving
forward, her core principles involve “building smaller, safer, and fairer facilities withno more than 32 residents housed in single
cells,” she tells me in a phone interview. The
new construction will have modern air conditioning, heating, and natural light. “We
are intentionally developing a new model
setting that includes adequate space for interviews, counseling, lawyers, educational

Women’s Community Justice Association

programs, and outdoor recreation directlyin the housing unit,” Ginzberg explains.
“We want to provide residents with what
they need, and deserve, as they movethrough the system.”
On better coordination of reform efforts
through the two specifically tasked mayor’s
office positions called for in Vital City’s report, Ginzberg says, “Centralized is always
better, but doesn’t often exist in a city andbureaucracy our size.” Even so, reform efforts have come into better focus due to“the impressive movement formed by justice advocates, former​ly incarcerated individuals, and the DOC,” she adds. So
passionate about her goal, Ginzberg tells
the Voice she’s already filed an application
to have the island designated a “public
space” when the 2027 hoped-for closure of
the jail finally occurs. “Rikers Island needs
to close,” Ginzberg stresses.
Regarding the media reports that onsome days last summer as many as 3,000
corrections officers were not available forwork, Gallahue states, “Efforts to get staff
back have reduced absenteeism by 81% andhave reduced the number of ‘triple shifts’ by93%.” In mid-September, City Hall issued
an executive order declaring that any officer
who is AWOL will be suspended without
pay for 30 days.
A former public defender who represented thousands of cases, NYC City Council member Tiffany Cabán, District 22, who
represents all of Rikers Island, tells the
Voice by phone that she doesn’t believe
shifting to a borough-based system is theanswer. She explains, “We should be pursuing a multi-pronged public health approachthat is empirically proven to increase public
safety where policing and incarceration
have failed.” Cabán wants “the public toknow that, for example, released-on-baildata indicates less than 1% of those released
are rearrested and a small number withinthat percentage for a violent crime. That’s
empirical evidence showing that downsizing and eventual closing is the proper approach.” She concludes, “We need to finallyacknowledge that the system of incarceration itself is part of the problem.”La Dolce Musto

By Michael MustoThe best performances every year are
from actors trying to appear gracious
about not getting Oscar-nominated,even though by all rights, they know
they deserved to win. Alas, some ofthese actors happen to be in relatively obscure flicks that don’t have a big Oscar push,and others are simply ignored in favor of
flashier performances. Other factors pop up,
too, like the fact that the nominators don’t
feel they owe the actor a nod based on theirbody of work, not to mention that they might
not be what’s known as “a member of theclub”—i.e., a known player within the Hollywood scene. Here are my 10 favorite 2021
turns given by actors who will simply have tosettle for my appreciation instead of the
Academy’s.
Renate Reinsve
The Worst Person in the WorldIn this bracingly original Norwegian film
by Joachim Trier, Reinsve is a 30-something
Oslo native who impulsively switches careers—and personal direction—as readily as
she changes outfits. She leaves her loving,long-term boyfriend for a guy she meets at aparty, clearly entranced by the spontaneous
silliness of their physical games, which include armpit sniffing and spending time in
the bathroom together. All through this andthe pathos that follows, Reinsve—who won
Best Actress at Cannes—is suitably unpredictable, making Julie riveting without eversugarcoating her choices. Alas, Oscar won’t
choose to nominate her, since the category
will most likely be filled with Princess Di,
Tammy Faye Bakker, Lucille Ball, and otherbigger names.
Martha Plimpton
Mass
Mass is a low-budget gut-punch of a film inwhich the parents of a teen who’s been murdered via gun violence at school meet withthe parents of the kid who did the shooting.

These actors
will simply haveto settle for myappreciation
instead of the
Academy’s.

All four actors are good, but Plimpton is by far
the standout as the victim’s mom, who strains
to be polite and nonconfrontational but can’t
help exploding into anxious rages. I would
call Plimpton a lead, but she’s landed in theBest Supporting Actress competition, where
she’s up against costar Ann Dowd, who’s also
gotten praise and a push. The result will probably be bupkis.

Devyn McDowell
AnnetteIn Leos Carax’s avant-garde musical allegory, a puppet baby grows into a real girl,

Kathryn Hunter
The Tragedy of MacbethYes, this Tragedy may be begetting another
Oscar casualty. Playing all three witches who
predict Macbeth’s terrible fate, actor/theater
director Hunter coos and melts and reappears and haunts, laying the groundwork forthe film’s startling tone. But while Hunter did

Dakota Johnson
The Lost Daughter
The costar of 50 Shades of Grey—anddaughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson—has turned out to be a real actor.
While Olivia Colman is deservedly getting
honors for her Lost Daughter performance asa vacationing professor with seriously conflicted views about family, Johnson is also terrific as a younger woman facing a similar
struggle. Her support helps Colman shine,
but that kind of thing only gets you a “thankyou” in someone else’s speech.
Jeffrey Wright
The French Dispatch
In Wes Anderson’s dizzyingly clever ode
to journalists abroad, so many art-house actors pop up that the second you start thinking,“Where’s Tilda?” she’s there, with false teeth.
And in the last of the film’s three chapters,
Jeffrey Wright (Basquiat) arrives as a foodwriter who’s partly based on James Baldwin
via A.J. Liebling. Wright comes off skillfullyloquacious, but it’s the kind of sophisticatedperformance that film critics groups are more
likely to recognize than the Oscars are.
Milena Smit
Parallel Mothers
Penelope Cruz is en route to getting nominated for her captivating performance in Pedro Almodóvar’s melodrama (complete withan old Hollywood twist), but Smit also scoresas the young lesbian who has evolving feelings about whether she wants a baby andwhat she’s willing to do about that situation.
As with The Lost Daughter, these parallelmothers give parallel performances, but unfortunately, there’s only room for five people
per category.
Eugenio Derbez
CODA
Mexican comedy star/director Derbez isfabulous as the unconventional musicteacher of a hearing daughter of deaf parents.
He’s quirky, tough, and ultimately lovable,Siân Heder directs Eugenio Derbez in CODA.

played by McDowell, who is now all of 7 years
old. McDowell has only one scene, but that’s
not the problem; Beatrice Straight won Best
Supporting Actress for a single, seething
scene in Network (1976), and McDowell is as
powerful as Straight was. In her spotlight moments, she has to make you forget the amazing puppet she’s morphed from, while also
holding ground with dad Adam Driver in recrimination-filled dialogue and singing, andshe is miraculously good at all of it. But themovie is too weird for Oscar’s taste, and besides, children don’t usually get Oscar nods.
For every nominated Quvenzhané Wallis(the stunning star of 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild), there are a lot of rudely snubbed Jacob Tremblays (he was astounding in 2015’s
Room). My feeling is that the Oscars should
bring back the honorary award for juveniles,
which they gave starting with Shirley Temple
and ending with Hayley Mills. That type of
special prize also serves to spare kids from direct competition.
Corey Hawkins
The Tragedy of Macbeth
Hawkins (In the Heights, Straight OuttaApple TV+win Best Supporting Actress from the New
York Film Critics Circle, my dark prophecy isthat Oscar nominators will find her turn too
esoteric for their taste (and there’s that actor
overload problem, too). But not to worry—
Oscar favorite Denzel Washington’s bravura
achievement as Macbeth is sure to get noticed. He’ll be nominated tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow….
Harriet Sansom Harris
Licorice Pizza
All kinds of actors are nabbing kudos for
Paul Thomas Anderson’s swirling look at a
bumpy 1970s relationship, but one of the funniest scenes of the year has Broadway/TV
fave Harris as a memorably wacky power broker. Harris plays Mary Grady, a real-life, now
deceased casting agent, who pummels Alana
Haim’s aspiring actress character with questions, comments, and concerns from outerspace. (“You’re like an English pit bull dog!”
Grady exults. “With sex appeal! And a very
Jewish nose!”) No one could have played thescene better than Harris—but screaming andcrying is usually an easier road to a nomination.

9

The Village VoiceTen great ’21 film performances that won’t get an
Oscar nomination

Compton) is superb as Macduff, the Thane ofFife, who gets locked into a competition to
the death with the title character in Joel
Coen’s dark and whispery Shakespeare adaptation. He’s tough and poignant and, according to Indiewire, he “runs away with a movie
that keeps him largely on the margins.” Theproblem is, there are so many actors doing
great work in the cast that even Coen’s wife,
three-time Oscar winner Frances McDormand, probably won’t get nominated for her
stir-crazy Lady Macbeth.

December 2021

THANK YOU AND
GOOD NIGHT

coaching the girl to sing “Both Sides Now”
with guts instead of prettiness. (That she later
seems to ignore everything she learned is oneof the film’s problems, and certainly not theactor’s fault; his lessons were persuasive tome.) Fellow supporting players Marlee Matlin
and Troy Kotsur are understandably getting
noticed for their heartbreaking work, but
Derbez’s scene-stealing antics might nothave enough gravitas for Oscar to bite.
What’s more, while the film was scooped up
at Sundance for a whopping $25 million, it
didn’t end up being a hit, and that kind of
cash-flow crisis has a tendency to impact trophy-holding chances. Derbez is crowd-pleasing in a movie that hasn’t drawn crowds.

The Village Voice

December 2021

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11

December 2021

The Village VoiceThe Village Voice

December 2021

12 New York Mirror

THE SECRET LIFE OF
BROADWAY COSTUMES
Some of the stage’s most recognizable outfits get an eco-friendly
encore in Queens
Words and photos by Brittany NataleTo my left: A psychedelic feathered tunic from Hairspray. To my right: A pairof leather boots that look to have beenworn by Thomas Jefferson (the stage
character, not the politician). No, I’m
not backstage at the Neil Simon Theatre
circa 2002, nor did I just pay a pretty penny
to see Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. In
fact, I’m not even in Manhattan—I’m a borough away, in Queens, at the TDF Costume
Collection.
If you are a lover of the theater, or just enjoy the wardrobes, this collection is equivalent to heaven—but instead of rosy-cheeked
cherubs backed by angelic harp music,
you’ll find bedazzled suits and brocade opera gowns. Oh, the drama.
The 40-plus-year-old collection is thebrainchild of the Theatre Development
Fund (TDF), the not-for-profit organizationthat has been devoted to making the performing arts more accessible since 1968.
(You are likely familiar with their iconic red“TKTS” booth in Times Square, offering
discounted Broadway tickets.) The collection came about when the Met Opera donated costumes from 22 productions during
their Lincoln Center move. After a shortstorage-space stint upstate, in Saratoga
Springs, TDF took the reins and jumpstarted a rental program for theater nonprofits to borrow from. The collection spentits earlier years near Columbia University
before making its way over to the West 20s,
where it lived from the 1970s through 2011.
Currently, it is housed on the lower level ofthe historic Kaufman Astoria Studios, andboasts an extensive inventory of costumes,
accessories, shoes, and more. Though “extensive” may be an understatement—they
now have somewhere around 85,000 itemson hand.
“The collection of things available forrent only comes in via donations,” explains
Stephen Cabral, the director of the TDF
Costume Collection. “No money is spent onpurchasing or altering.” Even with this vastarray of material, Cabral, who has been involved with the collection for nearly 30
years, says that they do not consider themselves a “one-stop-shop.” For instance, youmost likely will not find much contemporary clothing here. What you will find is
many aisles, each three- or four-tiers high,full of showgirl outfits, Renaissancedresses, men’s 19th-century suits, medieval
headpieces, and 18th-century bustle
drapes, to name just a few genres covered.

To illustrate just how specific we’re getting—there is a section designated for tabards and surcotes, garments that werecommonly worn in the Middle Ages. Thereis also a wall dedicated solely to shoes, organized by color and style. (During my visit, I

tributions also stream in from touring companies, theaters, film productions, andmore. In 2016, the inimitable Bob Mackie
donated 35 wardrobe boxes full of his designs, including glittery pieces that werefeatured on The Carol Burnett Show and in
Bette Midler’s Gypsy. Because of its convenient location, the collection will sometimes get pieces from Kaufman Astoria
Studios productions that have wrapped. To
this day, they still receive donations from
the Metropolitan Opera, the company that
helped spark it all. “There are still some Met
Opera pieces [in the collection] from that1960s donation,” Cabral adds.
The rental program, which was once
upon a time only open to nonprofits, now
services a wide range of clientele. Whether
people need to get their hands on historically accurate costumes or just want to add
some razzle-dazzle to a project, they comehere. The collection has done weekly rentals for Saturday Night Live and has supplied
costumes for photo shoots, and pieces have

The world of costumes may look all glitz
and glamor, but it has come a long way
since its bleak beginnings. As explained by
Marlis Schweitzer, professor of theater andperformance studies at York University
and the author of When Broadway Was the
Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American
Culture, for most of the 19th century, many
Broadway stage actors paid for their own
costumes—for example, chorus girls werealso appeared in award-winning films suchas Birdman and 12 Years a Slave. Of course
there are also countless smaller productions, such as a New Jersey high school’s recent rendition of Beauty and the Beast, thatutilize the collection’s stock. In 2019 alone,it lent costumes to more than 1,000 productions throughout 35 states, saving an innumerable amount of costumes from thelandfill along the way. “For a lot of our customers, we are also helping them savemoney,” Cabral tells the Voice. Rental prices
are affordable and depend on the costume,rental times, and production size, with nonprofits receiving a discount. The collection
even has a mail-order program in place forthose who may not be located near enoughto visit and pick up themselves. The staff isleft to shell out for their shoes and tights.
“While managers of elaborate Shakespearean productions would occasionally pay
for some costumes, this privilege was often
restricted to leading ladies, leaving supporting players to pay for their own gowns
and accessories,” Schweitzer tells the Voiceby email. Although some performers were
reimbursed, many were not. “It wasn’t until the successful actors’ strike of 1919 thatmanagers were financially obligated toprovide costumes for all performers,” sheadds.
Starting in the 1890s, Broadway shows
were not just entertainment spectacles but
also conduits for consumerism. It wasthen, Schweitzer explains, that commercially focused theater managers began toconstantly making magic happen, whether
the customer lives in Manhattan or Minnesota.
Running through the collection is athread of emotion and an air of mystery;sometimes items come unlabeled, making
it hard for the collection’s staff to know theexact origins of a piece. “I always wish thecostumes could speak,” says Cabral, “because I would like to know their lives.” Andoh, the stories they would tell.
The Intricate World of Costumes

Marching off to new fates on stage and screen.

came across an understudy’s pair of brightpink heels from the Mean Girls musical.)Items are split into two rooms, labeled “regular stock” and “special stock,” with “special stock” holding unique, historicallysignificant, or pristine-condition pieces.
Think, flashy sequined blazers worn by famous stars and puff-sleeved dresses theBridgerton sisters would be jealous of. As
items age over time, they may eventually
end up in the “distressed” section. “Distressed stock works well for something like
Les Mis or A Christmas Carol,” Cabral points
out.
Donations sometimes come in from
Broadway when a show ends, if a show is alimited run, or when musical numbers are
cut during previews. A large number of con-partnering with unexpected industries(heard about the recent seasonal Mariah
Carey McDonald’s menu?), but thesequirky collabs aren’t anything new. Decades ago, department stores would often
join forces with theaters during Broadwayshow openings. “For example, in 1910,
show windows along Fifth Avenue and34th Street celebrated the opening of the
new play Chantecler, starring box-office favorite Maude Adams, with elaborate windows swathed in red fabric and chanticleer
lace,” Schweitzer relates. “In this way, thestage and show window merged into one—merging theatrical spectatorship with aconsumer gaze.” The re­imagining of the-13

The Village Voice

Running throughthe collection is athread of emotion
and an air of
mystery.

ater design and costume, the deaths of thebiggest commercially focused theater
managers, and the rise of the Hollywood
celebrity eventually caused the curtain tocome down on this cooperative method.
Triffin Morris, director of the costume
production graduate program at UNC
Chapel Hill and author of A History of theTheatre Costume Business, points out that
there have been costume makers in New
York City for centuries. “The earliest shop
I could document was Dazian, establishedin 1842, which is now a business specializing in theatrical fabrics,” Morris says, going on to explain that at the turn of the 20th
century, small costume shops and a handful of larger operations that created,
rented, and sold the costumes began popping up, and by the 1920s there were midsize businesses credited in playbills.
The grandfather of the modern costume shop, however, is Ray Diffen, an
Englishman who made his way to America
because of Sir Tyrone Guthrie, an influential theatrical director. “Ray, in turn, employed well-known people in the industry,
such as Jane Greenwood, Barbara Matera,
Sally Ann Parsons, and Martin Pakledinaz,” says Morris. “Barbara and Sally
Ann both went on to form their own
shops.” You may be familiar with Parsons’s
brilliant creations for the Rockettes, or Matera’s extravagant pieces for one of Broadway’s longest-running shows, The Lion
King. A number of significant changes havealso occurred in the industry over the

December 2021

realize the significance of outfitting theirleading women in impressive couture.
“Women of all ages and social backgrounds flocked to the theater—as did designers and buyers for department stores,”she says. A century before livestreaming
and the Internet, this was a way for fashion
lovers to discover new trends.
Nowadays, we might see celebrities

You can never have too many shoes—and always keep an extra pair for the understudy.

years. “The biggest is probably the specialization,” Morris states. “It is now unusual
for a person to both design and create thecostumes.” Another is the quality of thecostumes—older costumes were frequently heavier, and fabrics, such as cotton
and wool, would often break down more
quickly. “The invention of stretch fabrics
has meant that garments can fit tighter andbe more comfortable,” she says. “All ofthese factors mean that modern garments
hold up better over time and are more
comfortable for the performer.”

The Show Must Go On
Today, New York City’s costume industry
is one that is deeply collaborative and has aclose relationship with the Garment District.
Many different people from varied backgrounds come together to help bring a costume, whether for the stage or screen, to life.
Timelines can vary, with film-costumeschedules often being tighter. Those forBroadway are often built to spec, and require
exact measurements of performers. “I keepsaying there’s no 13th floor at Macy’s, where
you can buy all your costumes for Broadway,” Brian Blythe, founding member of the
Costume Industry Coalition, says, laughing.
“It is a cottage industry in New York City.” It
has also faced its fair share of struggles because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the
costume industry is not only iconic, it is also a

It wasn’t until the
successful actors’
strike of 1919
that managers
were financiallyobligated toprovide costumes
for all performers.

Mad hatters: Ready for prime time again.

vital part of the city. Whether you’re getting acustom costume made or renting throughTDF, the city’s costumers have proven thatthey can not only transform the stage but
they can also transform lives.
“When people leave the theater, in particular, they are usually talking about theperformers and ‘Weren’t those costumes
beautiful?’” Blythe says. “There is a humanconnection between creating a character
through costume, and that human connection is what people latch onto when they are
moved by a performance or they see themselves in a performance. It is definitely
something that needs to continue to be celebrated.”14 The Voice Firmament

The Village Voice

December 2021

FLYING HIGH: MEMORIESOF GREG TATEI

Funk, jazz, rap, painting, literature, sci-fi, race, film, history—
the extraordinary writer could explicate and elevate any subject
under the sun

only knew Greg Tate to nod hello to inbegan contributing throughout the paper.
the hallways of the Voice offices, back in
These were scribes who were documentthe late 1980s and early ’90s. I wasn’t
ing the vast array of popular culture thatwriting for the paper yet, but like so
was rising out of the streets and clubs of
many readers, I had long been dazzled’80s NYC and transforming music, film,by his uncompromising, often funny,
always incandescent prose.
How about this, from a 1982 Voice
Literary Supplement article, “Harlem
When It Sizzled”: “Consider Harlem’s ’20s as a kind of funked-up
Weimar Republic for bloods, andyou’ll have a grasp on why that era
has gone down in Afro-American
lore and literature as a time of grandcultural renaissance. Which is to say,one where radical trends in AfroAmerican art and politics convergedwith the black bourgeoisie in a bacchanal of strident nationalism, newmoney, and bohe­mian revelry.”
C’mon! That is one dense ideasper-sentence ratio, but man does it
go down smooth.
So there I was, a painter with a day
job pasting up ads, and I was too shy
to do more than say hello to this guy
with the intimidating intellect.
But now, as the editor of the Voice,I realize what a dope I was not tostrike up a conversation with a writer
who sometimes added “Iron Man”
to his byline. Tate passed away lastTuesday, December 7, at the age of64, and I’ve just finished editing agroup of pieces by those who were
inspired by him, worked with him,and called him friend. This was one
brilliant yet open-hearted, generous
guy, who would’ve been happy backin the day to school me on Jean-Michel Basquiat (“Flyboy in the Buttermilk: The Crisis of the Black Artist in Greg Tate’s colorful array, 2017.
White America,” November 14,1989). Ultimately though, I didn’t comliterature, theater, art, and all the spaces inpletely miss my chance—because, as you’ll
between. Stanley Crouch, Lisa Jones, Barrysee below, Greg Tate always had someMichael Cooper, Joan Morgan, Harry Althing for everybody. —R.C. Baker
len, and Carol Cooper were among thefolks whose bylines appeared regularly inthose pages.
Sentence for Sentence,
But there was no one with the style, inOne of the Bestsight, and range of Greg “Ironman” Tate, aD.C. native filled with enthusiasm for the
When I was in my 20s I was lucky to begin
bohemian, the adventurous, and the radifreelance writing at the Voice, largely becal. Greg was a fabulous writer who undercause of its great music editor Robertstood rhythm, metaphor, and hyperbole
Christgau, who’d built an amazing roster
like a master musician does harmony, timof Black writers. Most entered the paperbre, and tone. Sentence for sentence, Greg
through writing a “Riff ” for Bob, and thenwas one of the best writers in a publicationthat was all about attitude, personal POV,and cultivating your singular voice.
Unlike some of my VV comrades, whoboasted and strutted when they had a big
piece in the paper, Tate was always easygoing and mellow, with a disarming mannerthat made him a natural leader. Off thepage, he co-founded the Black Rock Coalition and a marvelous ensemble, Burnt
Sugar Arkestra, which took his extensive
musical taste and manifested it in covers ofclassics and original compositions that reflected his critical insights. In the community of NYC artists who came of age in the’80s, Greg was a touchstone and mentor.
I haven’t cried yet about his departure. I
have just moved through my days in a daze,stunned that I won’t read another piece byhim, see him with his band, or sit downwith him again in fellowship, talking about
where the culture was, is, and will be. I do a
lot of documentaries now and had plans toinclude him in several of them, because
Greg knew so much and was great at sharing his knowledge. There’s no one who canfill the void he left. He was that unique andthat brilliant. —Nelson George
Heart for Miles, Soul for Light Years
I was the music editor of the Voice from1989 to 1994, and I edited Greg Tate during that time. Though let’s be honest here,
editing Greg’s music pieces was a little likebeing the coach who looks up from his clipboard and says it’d be a good idea if Mi-

chael Jordan played that night. (And solong as we’re being honest, Phil Jackson
did a lot more to help Jordan elevate hisgame than I ever did for Greg.) Then later,in 2016, I came back to the Voice as interim
editor in chief, and Greg was willing tocome back and bless us with his writing—aPazz and Jop essay, reviews of Jay-Z and
Kendrick Lamar, a cover story on Barry
Jenkins and Moonlight. I’d like to take somecredit for that (and—keeping it 100—that
Jay-Z piece actually needed some work),
but I knew it had much more to do with the
Voice than with me. The Voice was a placethat let him run free, flex, shatter the backboard glass, rewrite the rules of what could
happen on the page and in your mind,squeak and scrawl and squawk and skronk,
blow his goddamn horn pretty much any
way he wanted to, which was lots of different ways. And he wanted to make sure others had the chance to do the same.
The compassion. Thatman’s compassion. It was ineverything he wrote—heart
for miles, soul for light years—
but it was also there every
time he walked into the room.
The Voice music section published the great writing of
Joan Morgan and dream
hampton because Greg
walked those writers over tomy desk and introduced
them. If a writer makes a difference one time out, that’s alot. If they make a difference
every time out, that’s god
level. If they then make ittheir mission to open doors
for others to do the same,
they’re Greg Tate.
Miles Davis died on September 28, 1991. It was a Saturday. Greg delivered his copy
on Monday morning. I read it
and wondered: How? Therewas stuff in there that would
take a lifetime, and I didn’t
quite get that part of it was figuring out how to put yourwhole lifetime into what you
wrote. The piece is in Flyboy in
the Buttermilk, and I’m going
to quote the part I never forgot, the part that was likethunder and birdsong and thebarbershop and a lecture halland a prayer service rolled
Tricia Romano
into one: “The reason blackmusic occupies a privileged
and authoritative place in black aesthetic
discourse is because it seems to croon andcry out to us from a postliberated world of
unrepressed black pleasure and self-determination. Black music, like black basketball, represents an actualization of thoseblack ideologies that articulate themselves
as antithetical to Eurocentrism. Music and’ball both do this in ways that are counterhegemonic if not countersupremacist—rooting black achievement in ancient black
cultural practices. In the face of the attempt to erase the African contribution toworld knowledge, and the diminution of
black intelligence that came with it, theMind Zapper
On Tuesday, December 7, Pearl Harbor
Day, writer-musician Greg Tate died. For
many people who considered him a friend
and mentor, as well as folks who knew andloved his work, it’s yet another day “thatwill live in infamy.” I first met Tate in theoffices of the old Village Voice building on
Broadway. It was 1986 and I’d joined thejust begun Black Rock Coalition (BRC), a

If a writer makesa difference one
time out, that’s alot. If they make adifference every
time out, that’s
god level. If they
then make it their
mission to open
doors for others
to do the same,
they’re Greg Tate.
national nonprofit organization dedicatedto the complete creative freedom of Blackartists, after meeting Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid in Sounds, a cool new andused record shop on St. Marks Place.
Though I’d initially begged off with the“I’m not musician” excuse, when Reid
mentioned that writer Greg Tate was involved, I knew I wanted to be down. As awannabe writer since childhood, I wasconstantly searching for literary heroes
who would inspire me higher. “You guys
should meet,” Reid said. I had no thoughtsof me and Brother Tate, as I sometimes affectionately called him later, becoming
homeboys, but as an avid admirer of his
work for four years, I was happy just to bein his aura.
In 1982, I was living in Harlem but rodethe D train every day to Fort Greene, in
Brooklyn, where I was attending Long Island University Brooklyn as an English

major. In those years, the Village Voice wasa weekly that came out on Wednesday
morning. As an aspiring bohemian who
relished provocative arts criticism and reportage, it was a necessary periodical purchase that I read while taking that long rideto campus.
As a fan of various kinds of music ranging from Sly Stone to Led Zeppelin to theSugar Hill Gang, whose groundbreaking
1979 song “Rapper’s Delight” was rap’s
first big hit, I read the record reviews first.
Over time certain names became familiar(Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs, and Greil
Marcus), but at some point the byline “byGreg Tate” appeared and instantly zapped
my mind as though electric-shocked.
The first review I absorbed was on funkmaster George Clinton’s then latest discComputer Games. However, Tate’s critique(“Beyond the Zone of the Zero Funkativity”) wasn’t like anything I’d ever read.
While I’d come of age in the era of newjournalism (Tom Wolfe! Joan Didion!) andthe gonzo dispatches of Hunter Thompson, Tate’s texts were all that and a bag ofBlackness. Tate not only dropped dime on
the P-Funk nation and the album, he wrote
in an Afro language that rocked funky
joint.
Damn near 40 years gone, I can’t remember the exact words, but reading thepiece straight felt as though someone put amojo on me. Tate’s review was hypnotic
and I was in a trance until the last word.
You must understand, in the early 1980s
there weren’t many (any?) Black writers inmainstream arts publications, let alone awordsmith utilizing poetic prose, sci-fi references, swaggering syntax, and other textual trickery that brought the subjects(music, books, art, and film) alive.
Tate’s sentences were sprawling firebreathing dragons of many colors. The endof that story was the beginning for me, themoment I realized that a Black writer could
be smart and street simultaneously, a cool
nerd who could hang on the corner withthe dice throwers, chill in a jazz club withthe sax blowers, and, later, lean over a
typewriter until the morning light knocking out the many paragraphs that make adope story.
While decades later it might sound hyperbolic, Greg Tate, both the man and his
work, changed my life: the way the crime
writing of Chester Himes changed my life,
the way soul godfather James Brownchanged my life, the way funnyman Richard Pryor changed my life, the way Harlem, Pablo Picasso, Gordon Parks, and mybook- and movie-loving momma, Frankie,changed my life.
Between that first Tate article I read andour first meeting four years later, his workschooled me on numerous subjects that included post-structuralism (and the Harlem
Renaissance), free jazz (especially Cecil
Taylor), cyberpunk, the hopscotch narra-

tives of Ishmael Reed (and Don DeLillo),
and the noir shoe-gaze drone of AR Kane.
In addition, Tate put his stamp on thesonic/art/dance phenomenon that was/is
hip-hop culture and rap music, becoming atown crier for the culture as he championed Run-DMC, Public Enemy, and De La
Soul. One of his titles is “pioneering hiphop journalist,” but, like flyboy Jean-Michel Basquiat, he wore many crowns.
When I wrote my first record reviews
for a small punk zine in 1986, dropping
pseudoscience about Fishbone and theBeastie Boys, I bit Tate’s style so hard hemust’ve woke up screaming. Over the pastfew days, digging various memorials andmemories, I realized I wasn’t the only one.
“We imitated Tate’s writings the way hopeful be-bop musicians in the ’50s tried toplay like Bird,” I explained to a friend hours
after I heard he was gone.
I was blessed to discover Greg Tate’s
black magic realism when I was in college
and used his artistic beacon of bugged-out
Blackness as the guiding light in how I
heard and viewed the world. For a generation of writers that followed in Greg Tate’s
giant steps, he taught us how to transcribe
sounds and visions into textual worlds ofwonder, WORD! —Michael A. Gonzales
A Man You Could Trust
Greg Tate was the Voice music section, forme. I first encountered his writing in 1982,
when I was 15, well into my decision to be amusician and start a band. As far as I could
tell, music criticism was written by people
who’d never been in a recording studio or
played a show. Tate’s writing was different,
as if he were there with us, feeling thesame surges of disbelief and wonder.
The early ’80s was an almost implausibly
healthy time for music in New York. Alongside the rap and detuned guitars, there wasa third stream that has been slightly obscured by history. The variants of jazz andimprovised music coming out of the loft
scene and the cohorts around Ornette Coleman were white-hot in 1982. There’s no sin-

The Parade of Black Excellenceand Beauty
When I think about Greg Tate, I don’t think
about his writing, I think about him as aperson. I picture his kind face, I see his sly
smile, I hear his warm chuckle and his low,smooth voice. I see his colorful array ofhats and scarves and tinted glasses, his
nonchalant way of holding court, which
was commanding and effortlessly cool,
nonetheless. I think of one summer afternoon sitting on the steps of BAM, taking in
the “parade of Black excellence andbeauty,” in Greg’s words, basking in theirglory.
Greg had an aura, if you believe in suchthings, that vibrated. Standing next to him
was like standing next to the sun. Compared to many people, I didn’t know Greg
that well—or that deeply— but that didn’t
matter. He treated you just the same.
In 2000, I was newly hired at the Voiceas an editorial technical assistant, which
was slightly more than a glorified intern. I
sat across from the communal computers
and it was my job to help writers get theirstories into the archaic ATEX editorial system. Greg would banter with me as I set up
a Hotmail account for him and imported
his pieces. Once, I glimpsed a rough draftof an article and ribbed him: “Mr. Tate!
Where is the punctuation!” He chuckled,“Gotta give the editors something to do.”We developed a rapport—he would teaseme for not liking jazz (my father was a jazzbassist) but loving epic deep house andTate’s ballot for the 1983 iteration of the Voice’s Pazz & Jop Supplement.

VV Archives

The Village Voicevery fact of black talents without precedentor peers in the white community demolishes racist precepts instantaneously. In
this war of signifying and countersigning
Miles Davis was a warrior king and wewere all enthralled.”
So too with Greg Tate, a warrior of themind, a king to all who read him.
—Joe Levy

VV Archives

15
December 2021

Headline from the December 1982 Voice Literary Supplement.

gle reason why this chapter doesn’t have thesame profile now as, say, “Beat Bop” orGlenn Branca, but I am glad that Tate wrote
about Cecil Taylor and David Murray andeveryone who was creating that wave of live
music in downtown Manhattan. All of that
was as important as the stuff getting press
beyond the Voice, and without Greg Tate,much of it had no critical corollary in thepress. As much as we love him for the bigger
pieces, his work on downtown jazz was animportant intervention that changed my focus. I trusted him because of what he said
about Bad Brains in that 1982 article, andthat translated into my feeling OK about
trying Cecil on Greg’s word in 1983. The
coin of the realm when connecting people istrust, and few generated it like Greg Tate.
—Sasha Frere-Jones

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December 2021

regrets. Greater still is that he will never beable to read the book he encouraged me towrite. —Tricia Romano
These Three Words

Headline from the December 1989 Voice Literary Supplement.

techno (“You like the jazz of today,” he said,
to which I had no comeback). Years later,when I had written something about my father and jazz, he emailed: “Awwwww—another victim of jazz snobbery at home andwork … the apple never falls far from thetree/we become our parents by and by … but
let me know how many jazz fanatics offer tosend you jazz they know you’ll like—you’ve
made yourself a target and we’re relentless,like jehovah’s witness! GT.”As the Voice went through its many iterations, I began to work on an oral history
book about the paper, and when his band
stopped in Seattle, Greg and I went out for
Chinese food. I expressed my reservations
about doing a project of such magnitude.
Who cared, except us? He told me to havefaith in the subject, and in myself.
“Because,” he said, over the din of theclanging dishes, “they still write books
about Hamilton and Beethoven and shit.
The beauty of the reading public is there’s
a huge film-going and music following for
this, with no hype. A hit can be a bookabout the history of salt. Or the natural history of the senses. The millions of people
who bought those books probably neverthought about salt before or were curious
about it, nor were they curious about thehistory of perfume. Those writers broughtthem into the show. Right?” he said, looking at me through his tinted glasses.
“People who read—they’re like an intellectual silent majority. For books, you justdo your work. You do it right and they willfind you. So don’t think about it. You haveto completely get out of the journalistic
mindset of it being topical or trendy—
they’re gonna read it because you make itinteresting to read.”
Later, when I wrote a Facebook post
asking for title advice, Greg’s submission
inspired the title I tentatively settled on:
Commies, Hippies, Pinkos, Queers!: An Oral
History of the Village Voice—the Newsweeklythat Changed the World.
“Fred McDarrah used to lovingly andjokingly refer to it as ‘Our Commie Pinko
Fag Rag,’” Greg posted in the comments.
“Uptown when I told folk I wrote for The
Voice they said ‘Oh You Write For That Gay
Paper.’ And not as an insult but just as amatter of fact. Cause nobody asked if I was
gay—they just recognized the paper had abold uncompromising sexual identity in atime and place when being gay was

VV Archives

equated with being loud proud and militant like being Black was.
“All that said my hat in the ring is—with
all apologies to 80s rap sensations Whodini—The Freaks Came Out To Write, thensexy retrospective subtitle…….Alternately I
got Once Upon A Time At The Voice: The
Oral History Of A Black, White, Commie,
Pinko Queer Rag Red All Over.”A genius, as always.
A few years later, I went to re-interview
him in NYC. And I had another request: I
wanted (finally) to go to a jazz club with
Greg Tate in Harlem. He must have beenamused—all those years of ribbing had finally paid off. He emailed: “I’ll be Black in
town and down.”
But he had a family emergency, so wenever got to do it. It is one of my greatest

Grief can punch you full in the face. And
the legs will wobble, like Zab Judah catching a bad one from Kostya Tszyu. But when
it waylays you, then grief seizes your heart,chokes your chest, and even the screamthat you fucking need to give voice to rightnow dies stillborn in your throat. The way I
felt looking at three words on my phone in
the middle of a meeting.
Greg Tate passed.
I don’t have a unique claim to calling
Tate friend, mentor, or creative lodestone.
What I do know, what I hold dear in thismoment, is the memory of being a young
Black man learning to write in the pages of
the Village Voice of the early and mid-’90s
under the tutelage of Greg Tate. Not that
he would have claimed such an assignation
had you asked him. Tate was only being,
well, Tate. The sun just shines. We’re theones who bathe in the light.
But then the sun sets. We’re left in thedark. Trying to remember the feel of thatheat on mind and soul. Trying to sift every
fragment of memory. Mine have been tumbling fast and free since I read those threewords, like a run of Coltrane quarter notes,
to use an analogy that befits Tate.
I’m the kid in college sustained by the
Village Voice, my daily bread. The 22-yearold walking into 36 Cooper Square alreadyenthralled by my personal trinity of theword—Nelson George, Lisa Jones, andGreg Tate. They were all wizards, but Tate
was my Gandalf. I certainly followed him
around like a Hobbit. Terrified that I’d annoy him, but helpless to do anything else.
Some days that meant munching lunchon Astor Place as Tate schooled me on thefiner intricacies of Paul Beatty’s The WhiteBoy Shuffle. Some days it meant Tate listening to me struggle with young writer anxieties, like the time this magazine called
The Source wanted to hire me as music editor and I was waffling until Tate said go

We weren’t bestfriends, we weresomething more
Algonquin Round
Table-ish on theBlack-hand side.
take the damn job.
You were never going to be Greg Tate.
You were never going to imitate him.
Which was, in a way, freeing. What he did
was give you permission. To fully invest
yourself in the art of the word. To find yourown balance of rhythm and melody. To
seek a poetic beauty even in the context ofwriting critical narrative. And to paint it
unambiguously Black.

Always leading the way: Greg Tate onstage with Burnt Sugar at the Théâtre de Cachan in Val-de-Marne, France, February 2010.

Miles Marshall Lewis

Quoting from memory: “What color
were the ancient Egyptians? Blacker than
Mubarak, baby.” I think that was the lead, or
nearby it, to an essay Greg wrote on Martin
Bernal’s Black Athena. It was a very Tate flipand-twirl: The heated late-’80s debate overBlack Athena concerned race and the ancient world, but Greg plopped it on top of
the morning paper. He made it impossible
to look at Egypt’s president/dictator Hosni
Mubarak in the same way again. Greg embraced the performance of race with consistency, devotion, compassion, andplayfulness; taken all together, that was
unique to him and a public service. He wasfun; thus, “baby.” I remember editing him
once when he said, “We’ve got to black thisparagraph up a bit.” Greg’s pieces read like

We imitated Tate’s
writings the way
hopeful be-bop
musicians in the’50s tried to play
like Bird.
live performances, which they assuredly
were not; extracting an essay from him
could be as fraught as surgery. He was absolutely serious about getting his role right—
Greg “Ironman” Tate from Harlem U.S.A.,
as he used to sign himself on the Voice’s Letters page. He appeared there frequently, often under attack, usually making offense
the best defense. He believed in revolution
through music, a public-private revolution,and on the occasions when that wasn’t
enough he pushed outward into his beloved
science fiction, flying the Afrofuturist flag.
It’s weirdly easy to imagine Greg, with his
laughing sweet smile, revolutionizing thehereafter. —Scott Malcomson[Editor’s note: Those classic Tate lines
opened a 1989 multi-page feature with theequally Tate-ian headline “History: The Colorized Version, Or, Everything You Learnedin School Was Wrong.”]
Lessons We Didn’t Know We Needed
I first met Greg Tate in the flesh the same
summer day I dropped LSD in Fort Greene
Park, July 1995. I remember asking him his
favorite Beatle straightaway (John, obviously), as if that were the most importantconversation to get out of the way. Publish-

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Black It Up a Bit

ers were giving Tate the runaround for his
unpublished novel, Alter’d Spayde, and—tripping on acid or not—I couldn’t fathom aworld where a Greg Tate novel could get
rejected. (I’d learn the vagaries of the publishing industry myself years later.) I was
24. Though I’d already been reading him
since high school, Tate was only 37.
When my mother thought Michael Jackson’s “Bad” video was so fantastic back in
1987 and I had reservations that I couldn’t
articulate (being 16 years old), the Village
Voice published Tate’s “I’m White! What’s
Wrong with Michael Jackson,” and I knew I
wasn’t crazy. Reading Tate’s Miles Davis
obit in the Voice years later, he wasn’t afraid
to say Miles “went out like a roach” for how
he abused Cicely Tyson. When he dissed
Public Enemy for the misogynoir of “Sophisticated Bitch” and “She Watch Channel
Zero?!,” I got lessons in feminism I didn’tknow I needed. Reading Flyboy in the Buttermilk the same summer of my Vibe magazine internship, I’d also worked downtown
as an elevator man, and some rich older tenants laughed at the book’s marketing tag:“Are you ready for the hiphop nation?” (Istill spell “hiphop” without the hyphen
mainly because of Greg’s propensity.) My
thought was: The joke’s on you, jack. Greg
Tate is one of the strongest, most creative
critics of culture in America, period.
Someone gave me his phone number fora Meshell Ndegeocello story I was writing
for The Source magazine, told me to call him
at 2:00 a.m., and there he was: available,
wide awake, full of brilliance for a kid he
didn’t know. He complimented me on thepiece that hallucinogenic day in Brooklyn;
Tate reading me, encouraging my writing,was HUGE to me. As I got a much better
handle on my writing process over theyears, I felt as if I could see the matrix codeof other writers’ work as I read it. I could
never read the matrix of Greg’s work. To say
his writing was one part Amiri Baraka, twoparts P-funky Afrofuturism, with someBlack cultural nationalism, arcane musicalreferences, and a few million-dollar words
thrown in is to say nothing. The code of his
writing was far too heavily encrypted forthat. Reviewing DMX in the Voice, I once got
away with the word “floccinaucinihilipilification”—it didn’t bring me any closer tosounding like Tate. Nothing could, for anyof us. Young padawans with the pen all tried
to write like him and failed; it’s how wefound our own village voices.
I named my LLC “Furthermucker
Films” last year because Tate used theword consistently. His “Hardcore of Darkness” essay (1982) talked up how surprised
he was that his brother Brian loved a new
dreadlocked punk band called Bad Brains:“goddamn, these furthermuckers must not
be bullshitting.” Later that year, in “Beyond the Zone of the Zero Funkativity,” hementioned that George Clinton’s Computer Games (the one with “Atomic Dog”)
was “one signifying furthermucker 20
times over.” For me, furthermuckers muck
further. It’s folks who stretch the envelope,
think outside the box, go beyond the pale.
Like Tate himself. Fourteen years ago,
Greg permitted me to “Go forth & let thefurthermucker fly and multiply”—we were

December 2021

I am now far older than Tate was when
we first met. Something I find astonishing.
A fact that has less to do with my own inevitable graying than with the stature Tate
held even as a man in his 30s, the weight
we all invested in him, and the grace withwhich he bore it.
All of which, in the end, gives me threedifferent words to hold onto.
Greg Tate lives. —Selwyn Seyfu Hinds

Workin’ man.

talking about my old blog, Furthermucker—and so I did, making my roots
clear to folks who know their Tate-isms.
Just last week I texted Greg, asking him
to make a cameo in my short film, Numbers
Up. He’d be on an Amtrak that day, he said,
but “congrats on the directorial turn.” He
donated to my film-fundraising Kickstarter last year. He was famously supportive, always down to look out for thecookout. I published him in my lit journal,
Bronx Biannual (a speculative fiction story
he called “Pangborn”). He published me in
his lit journal, Coon Bidness. I tapped him
for my latest book, a biography on Kendrick Lamar. We weren’t best friends, wewere something more Algonquin Round
Table-ish on the Black-hand side, something more literary and unique. He was thegreatest mentor I never had.
Then there’s his music. I’d first see him
perform with Mack Diva, one of the many
proto-iterations of Burnt Sugar, at Kokobar
cybercafé, in Fort Greene in the mid-’90s.
(My favorite tune: “Blessed,” from The
Witches of Bushwick.) Me and writer KarenGood Marable once had a special moment

Tricia Romano

ringside at the Blue Note watching Burnt
Sugar take flight. Living in Paris for sevenyears, I’d catch Burnt Sugar a few times at
the annual Sons d’Hiver festival in Val-deMarne. I filmed him in Paris for a documentary of mine. After Greg and I conversed
onstage at Morehouse College some years
ago, producer Chuck Lightning, of Janelle
Monáe’s Wondaland posse, whisked him
off to hear some early Dirty Computer
demos. Despite Tate’s co-sign, an invite
wasn’t extended. (Insert “LOL” here.)
For years, I lived in Harlem right between him and my father, on Edgecombe
Avenue, and that felt right. (I hit up one of
Tate’s annual New Year’s parties that heused to throw at his apartment like a literarysalon.) I watched him and my father in Summer of Soul this year (my dad, Darryl Lewis,
attended the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, the subject of Questlove’s documentary), and that felt right, too. Always been a
proud son of Tate, one amongst many. I’ll
never again get to yell “TATE!” down theblock when I see him coming first; that getsme choked up. Ase, furthermuckers.
—Miles Marshall Lewis

Lewis and Tate reading at the Hue-Man Bookstore, in Harlem, May 2006.

Brenda Joyner

The Village Voice

December 2021

18 Holiday Visions

THE SPIRITS OF THE
SEASON, THEN AND NOW
Two longtime Voice hands look at a half-century of holiday craze andmalaise in Gotham
Photos by James Hamilton, captions by Mark Jacobson
Lighted Plastic Santa, 1979
Truth be told, I’ve never been one
for the so-called “Holiday Season,”my views being pretty much in linewith those of Sergeant Raymond
Shaw, the brainwashed assassin
played by Laurence Harvey in theoriginal Manchurian Candidate.
“Twelve days of Christmas,” Shaw/
Harvey says with weary patrician
disdain. “Isn’t one loathsome
enough?” Be it the totemization ofa fat Aryan paladin of capital who
keeps tabs on who’s been naughty
and who’s been nice and the NSAlike lists he checks twice, the annual exhumation of Andy Williams’s“It’s the Most Wonderful Time ofYear” to accompany the approachof yet another panhandler, the hellacious traffic, or the crap
weather—the shortest days of theyear are typically my longest.

Cop and Santa
Street Salesman,
1970
Maybe this feelinghas something to
do with how the little cruelties of “normal” life—a slight atwork, the rise of theprice of gas, theseemingly arbitrary
exercise of powerby local authorities—take on an extra edge during theHolidays. “Look at
this!,” you can hear
Fox News say during their War
Against Xmas coverage, reporting on
the ticketing of thispoor soul whose
only crime was selling blow-up Santas.
“Right on Christmas Day.”

Christmas Tree in an Apartment Building Lobby, 1988
It isn’t that I am a reflexive Scrooge or refuse to participate in a consensus
of joy. I can picture myself as the Dad of Big City fantasy: bounding out ofa yellow cab in front of a Park Avenue apartment house to hand the smiling doorman an armful of brightly wrapped presents from FAO Schwartz
and a little something special for the wife from some guy on 47th Street,because really, who are you if you don’t have a diamond guy on 47th
Street? I want to be merry, ho, ho, ho. I want to be gay, hey, hey, hey. But
when I walk into the lobby of an anonymous apartment house smack inthe middle of The Season, it just makes me lonely and blue.

Rockefeller Center Ice Rink, 1981
Or maybe it is the hustle of the mass culture. When confronted by the relentless, seasonal, fake entreaty to universal brotherhood, you recognize your inner Harry Limeand admit you wouldn’t know, or care, if one of those little dots down there suddenly
stopped moving.

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The Village Voice

Intrepid, 1996
If the Holidays are supposed to be about the preservation of the past through tradition and ritual, nothing in the Big City is immune to change. Every day things disappear. A few nights ago, as we drove down what New Yorkers still call the West Side
Highway, despite Giuliani renaming it Joe DiMaggio Highway in 1999, we noticed
that the cursive “Seasons Greetings” on the front of the USS Intrepid that James
had photographed a few years before was no longer there. That is just as well. Afterall, in 1944, the newly constructed Intrepid fought the Japanese at Leyte Gulf, thelargest battle in recorded naval history. Hundreds of boats were involved, dozens
of which were sunk. More than 20,000 men and women lost their lives. Two decades after that, the Intrepid played its part in the carpet-bombing of Vietnam, killing who knows how many thousands more. Regardless of what one believes about
the price Americans must pay to maintain their freedom, the USS Intrepid, with
100 planes of prey perched on its 870-foot-long deck, including detachments of
VA-36 Roadrunners and VA-60 Waldos, not to mention a full complement of 127
mm anti-aircraft cannons, could hardly be described as an emissary of peace onearth, goodwill to men.

Keith Haring in the Subway, 1981
This doesn’t mean that the hometown would be better off without the Holiday
Season. As explained by Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade, there are twokinds of time, the sacred and the profane. Each society must invent its particularversion of sacred time and place, the recurring “axis mundi” of its existence.
You’ve got to have the sacred to offset the numbing, endless procession of the
profane. Once established, the sacred creates a continuum of its own, an archetypal portal to a unperimetered landscape where the conventional boundaries ofpast, present, and future fade away. That said, the local suspects that Eliade’s
magic doorway to the sacred plays better on a smaller, more specific mnemonic
canvas, like, say, a single blank space in a subway station frequented by denizens
of a vanished downtown subculture.

Camels Backstage at Rockefeller Center, 1988
In the times of pandemic, even the Biblical is not fixed. As documented in this Hamilton photo from 1988, there have always been three camels backstage waiting to maketheir appearance during the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacle. Yet, as I noticed while attending the show with my granddaughter last week, even that had changed.
About to turn 4 years old, it was Alice’s first show, which I found appalling. Ordinarily, she would have been to plenty of shows and movies by now. Instead, she’s spent a full
third of her time on the planet cooped up in a one-bedroom apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, with her telecommuting parents. Radio City wouldn’t make up for all that, but
the grandeur of the surroundings and cumulative number of children’s smiles over the past 90 years has done much to mitigate the demoralizing factoid that the hall, built
by the robber baron Rockefellers, is now in the stubby hands of James Dolan, unloved owner of the New York Knicks. For Alice’s visit, we even got to meet a Rockette, the fabulous Soultana. This duly noted, it was quite a shock when the Three Wise Men arrived onstage on their camels. There were only two of them! Two Wise Men on two camels,
as far as I counted. Was one at the vet, or simply taking the night off? Was it an oblique commentary that two camel-riding Wise Men were sufficient in this anti-intellectual
era? A “supply chain” issue? Did the management simply assume no one would notice? Luckily, none of this concerned Alice, which was all that mattered.

The Village Voice

December 2021

20

Passing Souvenir Menorahs From One Mitzvah Tank to the Other, 2021
It was the first night of Chanukah, so the plan was to drive out to 770 Eastern Parkway, Temple of the late Rebbe Schneerson, the proclaimed messiah of the Lubavitch
people of Crown Heights. Yahweh saved us the trip, as the rebbe, or his likeness,came to us. Through the eerie post-pandemic quiet of Midtown came the caravan ofhorn-honking “Mitzvah Tanks,” each bearing a giant photo of the Brooklyn savior.
From every window of the converted RVs poked the heads of young revelers passing
boxes containing menorahs to each other and shouting their now familiar question
to motorists and passersby: “You Jewish?” For Jews like me, who grew up in the notso-promised land of Queens dutifully attending Hebrew school and lighting eight
successive candles to place in the window, this is a vexing question. You can tellthem that you don’t see how your religious background is any of their business. You
can tell them, “Yeah, but not like you,” which is accurate, since getting Bar Mitzvahedand duking it out in schoolyards with classmates who mockingly sneezed “ah-ah-ahJew” when they saw you coming will never be enough. It is a problem of identity, likeso many others in the Big City. Go to Colorado, tell people you’re a New York Jew,
part of a century-plus saga of immigrant brilliance, and they don’t believe you because you’re not wearing a black hat. On this night, however, my resentment all but
vanished. The palpable joy, the delirious happiness pouring from the Mitzvah Tanks
made it impossible not to give in. There’s something that gets me about almost any
ecstatic religious experience, and the Chabadniks are nothing if not ecstatic. For amoment it didn’t matter that many of the celebrants thought the earth was created
six thousand years ago, and wouldn’t get vaccinated unless the rebbe told them to.
They were waking up the town, bringing the party. So I answered, “Yeah, I’m Jewish,”which was followed by a cheer and a shower of boxed-up menorahs flying out of the
Mitzvah Tank windows. Hamilton didn’t get one, but then again, not being one of the
Chosen People, he didn’t expect to.

Andrew and Child (on the cover), 2021
Then there’s Andrew, a Black Santa. Jolly as all get-out, surrounded by the Halal
carts and hawkers of knock-off Gucci bags on 49th Street, this was Andrew’s
first stint as a sidewalk Santa. Being a self-described “Times Square person,”
who hung around with the breakdance troupes that would attract tourists six
rows deep on hot summer nights prior to the 2020 lockdown (in addition to putting in time as Big Bird and Grover), Andrew thought he’d give the gig a go. It was
something of a revelation. “I put on this costume and I can just feel all the negativity flow out of me,” Andrew says, peeking over starburst-frame glasses. Being
Santa is “the real cure for depression, my own and everyone else’s, just talking to
the kids. Grown-ups too, everyone. They love me and I love them.” He says heeven gets to bring joy to his old buds from the breakdance days, Cowboy and
Ray the bucket drummer, showing off the airline-size bottles of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky, which he keeps as presents for the crew.
Macy’s “Believe” Sign , 2021
“Think we got to get that,” I said to James as we passed Macy’s. New York is known
for extravagant Holiday store windows, but this was different, just a stark three-story
cluster of white lights spelling out “Believe” in script affixed to the unadorned 34th
Street facade of the town’s most famous emporium. Believe. Compared to the LCD
riot around the corner, the single word was as stark as a commandment frompreacher Jonathan Edwards’ 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
Believe! But what was supposed to be believed during the Holiday Season of 2021, in
the midst of the slow-motion apocalypse, with mutant viruses shape-shifting every
other day? Was it the products displayed in the store’s ground-floor windows: Burberry, Longchamp’s, Tissot, Footlocker, Sephora? Or the fake-weed dealer in the truck
across the street? Was it one narcissistic paean to the cult of self-empowerment, orwere they really talking about God and faith? It was something to contemplate, achallenge of sorts, I was thinking, when Hamilton said, “It’s not much of a picture.”
But then he shifted angles. He didn’t do much, just a few degrees to the right and up,
but that’s Hamilton for you, a reader of the imperceptible. The adjustment put the
Empire State Building, only a block away, into the shot—the glorious Empire, spire ofKong, in our hearts forever the tallest building in the world. Now, it was a picture. Because if there was anything we believed in during this Holiday Season, or ever, it was
The City, the one we knew, the one that was and will be.

Feature

By Matt Rogers

In 1927, when Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer
packed theaters across America, Rosa
Rio thought her future as an organist wascurtains. Fresh out of Eastman School ofMusic with a degree in silent-film accompaniment, the NOLA native had thought
she’d made the big time in the Big Apple, securing regular gigs playing the magnificently massive pipe organ, with its fourrows of keys, at Brooklyn’s Fox Theater.
“The thing I thought I was going to be doing
for the rest of my life,” Rio (1902–2010) told
me in a 2006 interview, “was playing the big
theater organ for silent motion pictures.” By
the end of the 1920s, however, the roar of
the “talkies” had muted the dreams her parents had previously tried to discourage. As
was true for most professionally trained
women of that era, teaching had to suffice—until Rio heard about a new instrument
showcasing at piano company Steinway on
57th Street. Called a Hammond organ, it
uncannily bore her theater-organist husband’s last name, but neither he nor thesales reps seemed to know how to work thething, which looked like a peculiar wooden
piece of furniture. But for 25 cents an hour,
you could practice at the store, getting any
sound you wanted. So Rosa Rio—aided byher gift of absolute pitch—spent manyweeks “just experimenting with the drawbars to get the sound I wanted on that organ.” The man who had invented thesemechanical drawbars, Laurens Hammond,
was all about such experimentation. Located just above the upper keys, a drawbar
could be gradually pushed or pulled, eachincrement mimicking the stops and tabs
used to change airflow (and hence, sounds)
on a pipe organ. The reportedly tone-deaf
inventor told Popular Mechanics he’d designed his new instrument to be “flexible
enough to allow the musician to explore
new possibilities in beautiful tone colors …
[and] also permit him to blunder into horrid
noises.”Despite not being a “he,” with the opportunities that offered, Rio soon found hersonic mix of beauty and horror on this burgeoning keyboard, then found herself pulling those drawbars for America’s hottest
medium for talk shows and entertainment:
radio. On Sunday evenings, millions of tantalized listeners across the country heard

her lurid accompaniment for the soon-tobe-iconic radio drama, starring 22-year-old
wunderkind Orson Welles, which asked,“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts ofmen?” Not only did the Shadow know, but
Rio’s evolving know-how synthesizing
tones and emotions proved effective. “We
could get odd qualities out of the Hammond

Rosa Rio pulling a drawbar in 2006, and also at the keys in the previous century.

organ that you could not get out of any
other,” she recalls. “You could do any kindof effect, [including] what we called in the
trade ‘stings,’ to make you feel the terror of
the voice of Orson Welles.” With The
Shadow a smash, Rio’s radio career flourished, an in-demand auditory staple stationed behind a 400-pound “portable”

Although many were to blame, the father offour resolved that the only way to remedy
his role in the disaster was to go for a final
walk along the shore, not far from the Hammond homestead. With the New Yearbarely a night old, he stepped off a pier into
the shadowy waters of Lake Michigan. No
suicide note was found—only a scattered,

Matt Rogers

becoming what he called “an independent
inventor.”
And so Hammond invented, having substantial success throughout the 1920s, withnumerous inventions, sales, and brushes
with celebrity under his belt. But Ziegfeld
Follies’ royalties for his stereoscopic Shadowgraph lasted only so long. He’d estab-

21

The Village Voice

From The Shadow radio show to Billy Preston and the Beastie Boys, thebig, boxy B-3 organ has been wowing listeners for going on a century

On January 2, 1897, Laurens Hammond
may have noticed a shadow lurking
over him as it gently planted a kiss on his
cheek around 2 a.m., before leaving theroom where the 18-month-old and his exhausted mother, Idea, lay in their Evanston,
Illinois, home. Laurens’s mother had noticed, but her toddler’s restless nights had
left her too exhausted to rouse. The previous 12 nights had also been restless for her
husband, William, who’d been involved in ascandal through the collapse of the National
Bank of Illinois, where he’d served as second vice president and director. William
was also a director in a startup company trying to exploit the burgeoning technology ofelectricity; specifically, electric streetcars
on the south side of Chicago. The startup
had received a $2.4 million loan from Hammond’s longtime employer—upon closer inspection, the books looked cooked.

rain-soaked trail of handwritten ledger
notes.
Being the only Hammond son, perhaps
Laurens would have drifted into finance
had his father not allowed the Calumet
Electric Street Railway Company to shatter
his mind and short-circuit any filial advance. But a $60,000 life insurance policy(nearly $2 million today) allowed the Hammonds the financial freedom to uproot andmove closer to European relatives. Idea
pumped her artistic side, displaying her
paintings in Paris, while the kids wereschooled in French and German. Laurens
loved to tinker. He demonstrated his nascent forward-thinking by designing an automatic automobile transmission that
Renault engineers were entertained by, butultimately rejected—first not believing the
12-year-old standing before them was responsible for the design, then not believingthat steel could bear such a mechanical burden. Undeterred by the thumbs-down,
Hammond kept messing around, patenting
a $1 barometer at 16. His inventive mind returned stateside when World War I rumblings encouraged his mother to move thefamily back to Evanston. Upon eventually
graduating from Cornell University in mechanical engineering, he set his course on

December 2021

THE STRANGE HISTORY AND
VIBRANT PLAYERS OF THE
HAMMOND ORGAN

keyboard, which was rolled on dollies
through the corridors connecting Rockefeller Center’s NBC studios in order to bringmusical fright to shows such as Inner Sanctum, Counterspy, and The Haunting Hour.
Though it was startling the lives of millions,Rosa Rio believed the Hammond organ had
saved hers.

December 2021
The Village Voicelished the Hammond Clock Company in1928, and one day he went about tearing
apart a cheap piano in his Evanston workspace loft, above an old grocery store. It
wasn’t payback for the piano lessons he’dhated as a child. Tickless clocks and 3-Dmovies (using his stereoscopic Teleview invention) had made him a master at developing small synchronous motors that could
keep perfect time, regardless of the irregular starts and stops that regional electric
power companies commonly provided tohouseholds. The Hammond Clock Company made over 100 different models, selling enough timekeepers to support 700
employees, but by 1932, with the Great Depression already forcing 150 other clock
companies to liquidate (with Hammond Co.
on the hook for $400K to banks as well), heand his team of engineers were desperately
chucking ideas against the wall to see what
stuck, no matter how gimmicky.
Their latest gimmick involved ripping
apart that piano in order to hook up “tonewheels”—metal wheels about the size of adollar coin, not unlike the ones turning his“I’m going to scare
a lot of people
with the incredible
number of toneson the Hammondorgan before I die.”clocks—to switches he’d wired under the piano keys. Hammond imagined that maybe
it could be an inexpensive, toyish keyboard
one could plug into a common home radio’s
speakers through which one could generatesome—generously speaking—“music.” Yet
the deeper the engineers dove into generating tones from electric current, and themore tones they measured and frequencies
they produced from these consistently revolving wheels, the more they realized they
were onto something worth making noise
over. Hammond gobbled up the latest physics research on musical sound, treating eachspinning tone wheel generator as a harmonic math problem, not unlike what Dr.
Thaddeus Cahill had done in 1897 when hepatented his Telharmonium—the world’s
first synthesizer—the same year Hammond
became fatherless. Cahill utilized similar
concepts and technology, upon which Hammond would improve, particularly the theory and use behind turning tone wheels intosound generators.
Cahill’s wondrous machine—also calleda Dynamophone—was essentially a power
plant, as each tone required its own motorand banks of transformers to mix the tones.
His first iteration, the Mark I, was “only”
14,000 pounds, while the subsequent MarkII and III versions, built of steel and brick,weighed over 200 tons, were 60 feet long,and manipulated by rows of keys. Because
speaker systems didn’t exist, the $200,000
apparatus took advantage of the technology
of existing telephone wires to broadcast its

sounds directly into telephones, and theninto rooms via phonograph-like megaphones. Unlike Cahill, however, Hammond
had no interest in creating tones through atelephone line (and further irritating telephone operators confused by sudden wavesof “music”) and instead planned to utilize
the speaker technology of the day. He also
learned that pairing a coiled magnet witheach tone wheel was essential to any consistent and sustained sound creation.
The first sonic breakthrough mimickeda flute. “Instruments” were added until
they had 91 tone wheels connected via
switches to two manuals (keyboards) anddesigned drawbars. Pedals were added forbass notes and volume. Laurens Hammond called it an organ, and soon hauled it
to the patent office—which Hammond described as having “marvelous acoustics”—
gave a demonstration and lecture for theoffice’s impressed employees, and was expedited a patent on April 24, 1934. The
show certainly helped, but the promise of
manufacturing jobs during the Depression
was key.
Word spread. Henry Ford wanted half adozen of what Hammond called “these
Model A organs,” and offered to help manufacture them (Hammond politely declined).
George Gershwin wanted one. The Roosevelts. No matter the steep $1,250 Depression-era price tag. Hammond lassoed thiscelebrity demand for promotion, and utilized theater organists to demonstrate hiscreation at racetracks and roller rinks. Organist Milt Herth played one on his“Stompin’ at the Savoy” solo on the radio.
Manufacturing only two organs a day at firstmade it hard, but eventually Hammond
sold 1,400 organs in the first year; his PR
department claimed each organ could generate an infinite amount of tone colors andharmonics yet was thousands of dollars
cheaper than any pipe organ. That advertising translated to over half-a-million dollars
in sales over the first two years, while also
attracting playerhatin’ heat from pipe organ
purists, who rejected said claims for Hammond’s “organ,” organizing enough ire toconvince the Federal Trade Commissionthat the Hammond Clock Company was indeed perpetrating a fraud in even calling it
an organ.
“Porter Heaps told me he wanted to refute all of these erroneous stories being put
out about the Hammond organ,” recalled
Rosa Rio, who in 1937 was readying for The
Shadow. “And he did.” Heaps, a church pipeorganist who worked for Hammond, did so
as part of an ear test Hammond had ingeniously devised to prove his musical product was, indeed, an organ. Fifteen lucky
students, along with nine not-as-lucky subpoenaed musicians and experts, assembled
at the University of Chicago’s chapel to decide on aural legitimacy. In one cornerstood the chapel’s colossal Skinner pipe organ; in the other was the opponent, at about
1/30th the cost, with its tone cabinets concealed behind the organ pipes. Screens
blocked the jury’s view, so theoretically they
could only hear the 300 classical musicsnippets performed. Score: 50% hit rate forthe students; the “experts” swung between
chance and 90%. Some say the fix was in,Matt Rogers collection

22

Fifty-three organists and 10 tons of Hammond organs at Chicago’s Soldier Field, in 1949.

but FTC lawyers changed their tune, allowing Hammond’s claim that this wooden box
was actually an organ—but with a stipulation. Hammond’s marketers would need tochill on their claim of tonal infinity. Hence,
after much “research,” Hammond capped
the number of tones their organs were capable of producing at a mere 253 million—almost two tones for every American.
Though they didn’t get a dollar for every
tone produced, millions of greenbacks
flowed into the newly minted Hammond
Instrument Company. Laurens wasawarded the Franklin Institute’s John Price
Wetherill Medal for this scientific sonic invention, which by WWII found its way onto
the Queen Mary, no less, and into over a
thousand churches spread over three dozen
countries. One of those countries was Brazil, where a young red-headed organist was
holding court in a swanky Rio hotel. The
tourists admired her high-heeled pedal
work, as well as her swinging organ arrangement of a local choro called “Tico Ticono Fubá.” That Latin swagger may have belied the squareness of Ethel Smith’s name,but it was just the fresh combination Hollywood was looking for. In the 1944 film Bathing Beauty, Smith was showcased on a
Hammond BV, her blue high-heeled feetspotlit, the instrument surrounded by adozen mature “girl scouts” out of a HughHefner dream, who plead for Smith to “gobelow the border for some South American
jive.” Smith complies, putting her finger
and foot virtuosity on full display. The resulting “Tico Tico” made Smith a star, andsold many a platter for Decca Records, regardless of whether Rosa Rio thought
Smith’s act was jive (she did). Laurens Hammond was as thrilled as Smith’s tambourine
tappin’ scouts, as it was the white girl consumer demographic of his dreams. For
Smith, four more features followed in quick
succession, then Disney nabbed her for
1948’s Melody Time, in which she performs“Blame It on the Samba”on a blonde Hammond emanating animated bubbles, while
Donald Duck and José Carioca serenadeher. It was quite an impressive run—and an
exemplar of post-war cultural appropriation—and synched nicely with Hammond’s
capitalist pursuit of a home invasion.
In the summer of 1949, the Chicago Tribune wanted to go big in celebrating the20th anniversary of its Chicagoland Music
Festival, hoping for 100,000 spectators toinvade Soldier Field. So in addition to theusual singing contests, dance routines, andmarching bands (including 1,000 accordionists!), the publication looked locally for
unique entertainment. Now a $5 million
company, Hammond’s latest line of Model
M spinets—smaller, cheaper, geared for thehome—sought to spin heaps more bottomline gold, and Porter Heaps was tapped tolead 53 organists, aptly christened the Hammond Organ Ensemble, with four concert
organists and the rest amateur. All dressedin white, they were arranged midfield facing conductor Heaps like a precursor to today’s Wi-Fi icon. Exactly how many of thequarter-million tones performed by 10 tonsof Hammond organ were heard above thecrowd’s “oohs” and “aahs” during the ensemble’s generation of “La Golondrina”
and “The Lost Chord” is, unfortunately,
lost to history.
Out on the West Coast, meanwhile, another independent inventor was making
history in the Land of Make Believe in a
makeshift L.A. television studio, as the starof one of America’s first all-music TV
shows: Korla Pandit’s Adventures in Music.
The beautiful, beturbaned, three-piecewearing organist never said a word during
his performances, his composed stare, flitting fingers, and percussive hand slaps instead doing all his communicating, as themysterious musical elixir emanating fromhis Hammond C-2 guided the viewer—usually with an exotic dancer assist—to the farflung locales of Turkey, Brazil, and India.
Which was where—in his mind, manner,and myth—Pandit was from. John Roland
Redd, a fair-skinned African American music savant from Missouri, who knew his opportunities as a Southern Black man were

23

The Village Voice

credible number of tones on the Hammondorgan before I die.”“The first time I heard Jimmy Smith I almost had a heart attack,” saxophonist Lou
Donaldson recalls to me. He stood front row
in the recording studio on many Smith sessions, including 1959’s now iconic The Sermon! “I didn’t know what that was—a train,
a hurricane, something.” That “something”
was a wall of sound incarnate, and groove
greased onto everything Smith touched, nomatter the genre, across many dozens ofLPs, thus shaping the soul of jazz and eventually seeping into the worlds of blues, soul,
funk, rock, reggae, and, later, hip-hop.
Smith became notorious for his competitive
mean streak; if you didn’t know he was theKing he’d surely—particularly if you were a
bassist—tell ya. “Jimmy would introduce
himself as the world’s greatest bass player,”renowned session bassist Jerry Jemmotttells me. “That’s the pride he had in his ability to play bass lines, and he played greatbass lines—no doubt about it!”
Record labels big and small scooped up
organists around the country. Millions of albums sold on the backs of folks such as
Jimmy McGriff, Richard “Groove” Holmes,
Mel Rhyne, Gene Ludwig, Jack McDuff,
Don Patterson, Larry Young Jr., Freddie
Roach, Hank Marr, “Baby Face” Willette,
Lonnie Smith, Charlie Earland, Reuben
Wilson, and scores of others. Many recorded their 12-inch platters over in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, on engineer Rudy
Van Gelder’s Hammond C-3. Most “serious” jazz critics scoffed, associating thesound with low-brow pursuits and the number of funky pop tunes. But packed clubs became organ rooms, a Hammond organ andLeslie speaker permanently parked onstage. The organ trio sound grew so popularthat organists were often being paid double
union-scale for their bass-player-less gigs.
Planned obsolescence wasn’t hip yet, andthe overengineered technology proved durable on the road.
The C-3 heard on Van Gelder’s gilded
wax was basically a B-3 in fancier furniture,
which mattered only if you had wanted toshow off the footwork down below that a
C-3, with its top-to-bottom wood frame,
would obfuscate. Women were most visible
onstage in the jazz scene “manning” aHammond organ—as compared to other instruments—and fancy footwork, as Ethel
Smith had illustrated, was a must-see partof the show. Singer and pianist Sarah
McLawler, who’d been leading her all-female jazz group, the Syncoettes, since 1949,
was entranced by what she’d seen Wild Bill
Davis achieve, switched to the Hammond,and began recording. Her trailblazing encouraged other women—notably, Shirley
Scott, Trudy Pitts, Bu Pleasant, Gloria Coleman, and Rhoda Scott—to take theirchurch-honed Hammond skills to a bigger
platform. Whereas Ethel favored heels,
Rhoda Scott preferred her feet bare. A minister’s daughter out of New Jersey wholearned to play on the church’s B-3, Scottfound inspiration at places such as Newark’slegendary Key Club, where she’d hear artists like McLawler with her husband, violinist Richard Otto. “Sarah on organ played inher stockings,” Scott remembers. “And theDecember 2021

try skating to one? Millions did, as Hamnet. Though forbidden by Hammond
mond organs found their way into rinks—
honchos to display Leslies, savvy sales reps
roller and ice. “The Hammond organ
stashed the speakers for their clients, a seresponds to skating because you can get acret handshake that would ramify music for
lot of percussive sounds out of it,” says Canyears to come.
gelosi. “Which is what’s needed in skating,
While Hammond rejected Leslie’s invenbecause they like to skate to a heavy beat.”tion, jazz musicians were all ears. Although
Cheering fans in baseball stadiums andFats Waller had recorded a 78 of “Jitterbug
hockey arenas were also being egged on by
Waltz” on a Hammond organ in 1942, andthe mighty dynamics of the Hammond. The Duke and Basie had toyed with tone wheels,company now had numerous models fromthe overwhelmingly Black world of jazzwhich to choose, including a spiffy one
clearly had not been Hammond’s target.
called the B-3, which had a beefier vibrato
Black churches, sure, but Laurens’s mind
and harmonic percussion, geared toward
was clouded when it came to clubs. Don
the working musician. In its quest to beLeslie’s wasn’t. And how many churchgoingcome America’s aural apple pie, however,musicians (and clubbers) sitting in pews
Hammond PR folk knew “mom” was the
had nodded in and out Sunday morning afsecret to keeping that whitebread buttered.
ter a late-night Saturday club gig, the power“Mothers seem prettier in a home that has aof the organ and the Leslie reverberating in
Hammond organ,” blurbed the companymore than a few weary heads?
issued Hammond Times, reading like a magBy the late ’40s—with the big bands in
ical domestic cure-all, an instrument thatwhich they’d worked now too expensive to“fills her home with harmony that leaves nodeploy—a few enterprising pianists appliedroom for tensions.”
their orchestral chops to the Hammond/
Back in 1937, there was plenty of tension
Leslie combo heard in these churches.
when Don Leslie brought his brand new“Wild” Bill Davis was one of the first to strip
Hammond organ home, set it up, and began his act to Hammond organ, guitar, andto play. The sound he was getting lacked thedrums, gigging throughout the Eastern searichness he’d heard in the big L.A. showboard and eventually landing a record deal
room where he’dat RCA Victor. “Billbeen hooked. Leslie
had a different
loved theater organ,
style, a wonderful
and was tantalized
big band sound,”by the Hammond’s
recounts Dick Hypromise of emulatman, who shared a
ing one. “He figured
regular gig without it wasn’t the orDavis at Well’s
gan but the HamChicken & Wafmond speaker that
fles, in Harlem.
sounded inferior,”“He used the Lessays Pete Fallico, alie speaker, but it
longtime Hammond
was a different
historian andkind of use thanfounder of the Jazzthat which would
Organ Fellowship.
recall a theater or“So he built one thatgan; he used it so it
better emulated thatsounded like awonderful Doppler
whole brass seceffect produced by ation. I learned
true pipe organ.”quite a bit just sitLeslie happened toting opposite.” Hybe a radio engineer
man wasn’t the
The Shadow saved Rosa Rio’s career.
and inveterate tinonly one getting
kerer, so he invented
schooled. A younga tone cabinet whose
self-taught pianist
revolving innards—via the flick of an atout of Philly caught Davis’s gigs in Atlantic
tached switch on the organ’s console—could City and was awed at how Wild Bill proessentially “throw” treble and bass aroundjected his organ trio sound like a big band.
a room, better emulating the way pipe orWith Davis’s encouragement, James Oscar
gans spread sound in space. But when he
Smith bought an organ on the installment
proudly took his new “3-D” wooden speaker plan, then woodshedded a year in a wareto Hammond to demonstrate how he hadhouse, putting a chart of the foot pedals onjust improved their product—even offering
the wall so he wouldn’t need to look down.
up his innovative technology in exchange
When Smith fluttered forth, in 1955, Bluefor employment—his Doppler tuchus wasNote Records scooped him up for a raw live
shown the door. Perhaps a bit cocky from its
recording at the Club Baby Grand. Opening
FTC victory, Hammond was not interested
with the Ellington classic “Caravan,”in collaboration. Undeterred, Leslie formed
Smith’s speeding Hammond/Leslie convoy
his Electro Music company and began maknever looked back. Pre #vanlife, heing different-sized Leslie speakers forsqueezed his gear and trio into a Cadillac
churches, theaters, and anyone who’d takehearse, traversing his “portable” rig gig tothem. Demand grew so much that customgig, spurring others to follow suit. A former
ers entering Hammond dealer showrooms
tap dancer, he preached relaxed ankles,
would insist that their Hammond organ
while modeling his holistic attack after hornpurchase come with a Leslie speaker, inplayers. “I’m going to scare a lot of people,”
stead of the provided Hammond tone cabihe told the Hammond Times, “with the inMatt Rogers collection

fallow, had invented in Pandit the perfectcharacter for Hollywood, and steadfastly
carried Pandit’s identity as his own until hedied (even his kids thought he was a Brahmin from New Delhi). It was genius-level
cultural appropriation that made Ethel
Smith’s Latin-tinge maneuvers seemrookie-league. Like Smith, Pandit demonstrated that this instrument was a naturalfor the screen, as overhead camera angles
revealed the dexterous, all-limbs demands
required by such peculiar playing of peculiar sounds—what would eventually be categorized as “exotica.”
Though Pandit’s show was initially regional, bigger TV platforms helped mainstream Hammond organs over the 1950s.
Long before Fonda and Simmons, exercise
pioneer Jack Lalanne brought his war on
flab to living rooms, as he cheerfully flexed,stretched, and summoned, all to the encouraging, improvised (and no doubt
sweaty) Hammond organ accompanimentof Dave Bacal, known for his Latin Touch LP.
Soap operas were also migrating to thesmall screen from radio. As The World Turnsfeatured Rosa Rio, while another soap,
Front Page Farrell, featured her buddy Dick
Hyman, who also had his hands in gameshows, such as The Jan Murray Show and future Let’s Make a Deal host Monty Hall’s
NBC debut in New York City.
Hyman, who recorded more than 100 albums throughout his long career (as well as
performing with jazz giants like Bird andDizzy), never met a keyboard he couldn’t
hack—the Hammond organ was no exception. “The Hammond organ was the original synthesizer,” Hyman tells me. “It was a
way of constructing tones by their overtones—by their harmonics—and, as such, it
was considerably more an efficient musicalinstrument than, say, a Moog synthesizer.”
Hyman’s use of tone wheel harmonics was
not only efficient for games and soaps but
also for numerous “lounge” LPs in the ’50s
and ’60s, featuring punny titles such as
Strictly Organic. He was the go-to keyboardist for the Ray Charles Singers, The Brass
Ring, and lounge-meister Enoch Light. David Harkness, Richard Wayne, and DavidHelman were just a few nommes de Hammond he employed, some for Reader’s Digest box sets that are still collecting
Goodwill dust at a store near you. “Somehad a groove, some were more muzaky,”
Hyman remembers. “My career kind of illustrates the varied uses of the organ, because I had several careers going. One as ajazz player and the other was these pop aspects. I never played organ in a roller skating rink, but I made an album which
pretended I was doing exactly that.”
Dominic Cangelosi didn’t have to pretend, having started playing his Hammondin roller rinks like L.A.’s Moonlight Rollerway in 1958, as well as recording a rainbowed plethora of skating-themed organ
45s for Rinx Records. “Yellow records werewaltzes, purple records were tangos, orange
records are foxtrots,” Cangelosi tells me.
“They were color-coded so that when a[skating] coach or teacher wanted a certain
tempo, like, say, a waltz, they would pick ayellow record.” If you enjoyed exercising toan organ with Jack LaLanne, then why not

The Village Voice

December 2021

24

violin and the organ sounded so good together, I would listen with ears and eyes
wide open and be thrilled.” Scott appliedthat thrill to all her limbs, but particularly to
her feet, which danced their own pedal orchestra. Often paired with just a drummer,
her unparalleled limbastic shows stretched
instruments and bodies alike. After recording a few obscure LPs locally (and being often confused with the better-known Shirley
Scott), she moved to Paris, recording andspreading B-3 gospel throughout Europe.
By the time Jimmy Smith was cookin’
Back at the Chicken Shack, Laurens Ham-

“Mothers seem
prettier in ahome that has a
Hammond organ,”
blurbed thecompany-issued
Hammond Times,
reading like amagical domestic
cure-all.

ass talents to London too, where he waswrangled to augment the sound of the biggest band in the world. As exemplified in
Disney’s current Beatles documentary
opus, Get Back, we see Preston—though
playing a Lowrey organ, not a Hammond—earn his unofficial title as the fifth Beatle.
We also see the Leslie speaker being used asa tool not for organ but guitar. George Harrison had encouraged his bandmates to try
using it for guitar and vocals (check “Tomorrow Never Knows”), and eventually it
became a go-to tool for other singers andguitarists, such as Eric Clapton and Steve
Winwood, digging the psychedelic vibe theLeslie could bring to tape.
Around the same time, Deep Purple’s organist, Jon Lord, squeezed his B-3 onto theset of Hugh Hefner’s TV show Playboy After
Dark, amongst a throng of lingerie’d ladies
and “far out” dudes, who’d all soon be dancing orgiastically to the English band’s debut
smash hit, “Hush.” “Hush” could also havebeen Lord’s ironic name for his screaming
Hammond/Leslie combo, to which headded Marshall amps for even more power.
A classically trained pianist, Lord’s life became organ-centric after hearing the bluesy
grit of Jimmy Smith, McDuff, McGriff, andothers, who transistorized inspiration for aslew of keyboard psychedeliacs: Goldy McJohn and Steppenwolf were growling roadanthems; Mark Stein and Vanilla Fudge
were laying out loud, sludgy soul; Steve
Winwood was jamming first with the
Spencer Davis Group, then Traffic, while
also slipping into Electric Ladyland for
Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile”; Felix Cavaliere, of the Rascals, filled most bass partsof their hits with his pedals; Robert Lamm
pushed the Chicago Transit Authority, andon and on.
The Hammond/Leslie tag-team circuit
had spread throughout pop music and geographical fiefdoms, and well beyond the
predominantly white world of psychedelicrock. Up in Detroit, Funk Brother organist
Earl Van Dyke had been fueling the Motown sound. Down in New Orleans, organist and bandleader “Poppa Funk” Art

Neville led the mardi gras mambo funkparty with McCartney faves the Meters. In
Kingston, Skatalite founding father androck steady pioneer Jackie Mittoo’s handiwork laid reggae’s foundation; out East, in
Plainfield, New Jersey, Bernie Worrell musically organized the ineffably funky chaosof Funkadelic; down South was Greg Allman and his band of brothers; and out West,
Gregg Rolie was singing and playing his
gringo ass off for Latin rock maestro Santana, while Bobby Espinosa and El Chicano
were living la Viva Tirado in L.A. And even
Stockhausen was employing it over in Europe, for experimental works like “Mikrophonie II.”
And as arena and stadium shows, with
their expected pyrotechnics, exploded in
the 1970s, organists such as Lee Michaels
and Keith Emerson met the demand by
juicing and stacking Leslies, while Brian
Auger said the hell with it by mainlining directly into a set of Marshalls. The world of
jazz organ also demanded a heavier bottom, as ’70s record producers’ low-end
theories sought electric bassists to buttressthe B-3. Organ vets like McGriff, Groove
Holmes, Shirley Scott, and Jimmy Smithknew they didn’t want a bass player, but
hip-hop heads certainly were thankful (until the lawyers arrived) 20 years later for allthat soul and funk jazz sample fodder.
Prime example, the Beastie Boys even
named a song after Smith’s “Root Down,”
after ripping the groove, and named another “Groove Holmes,” arranged by “thefourth Beastie Boy” keyboardist Money
Mark, after the group rediscovered theirinstrument-fiddling ways. Over the courseof a half-century, the roots had indeed
been put down.
So if the Hammond organ sound was so
prevalent, and more than 1,000,000 organs
sold worldwide, how did Laurens Hammond’s company go bankrupt in 1975, twoyears after he died, at the age of 78, and did
Don Leslie, who lived to be 93, have the last
laugh?
“TUNE IN TO THE NEXT EPISODE
OF …” [ORGAN SWELLS]…
Matt Rogers

mond had retired. But the company washaving it both ways during the 1960s. Theyreaped from white and Black markets, men
and women, from the home and the club,and from their tacit auricular handshakewith the Leslie speaker. The circuits werelaid out. One took root in Memphis, where
14-year-old Booker T. Jones snuck into ahonky-tonk and had his ears and mind
blown by Brother Jack McDuff ’s trio. “JackMcDuff could just mesmerize people with a
Hammond organ,” recalls Jones. “I was
making $7 a night playing bass, but Jack
McDuff didn’t have a bass player.” Inspired,
Jones decided to switch to the organ, foundthree local OGs who became the MGs, andproceeded to make instrumental hits, theirundeniable grooves thickened by Jones
stacking his organ bass on Donald “Duck”
Dunn’s electric bass lines. In 1962, “Green
Onions” set a new R&B standard, raising
the bar organist Bill Doggett had set with
“Honky Tonk” six years earlier. “I don’t
think there would have been a ‘Green Onions’ without ‘Honky Tonk,’” states Jones.
“I was just so influenced by the feeling, themelody, the rhythm, the sound of the Hammond, the way it made people feel. It justmesmerized the whole city.”
In NYC, the mob-tied Sweet Chariot
Night Club, billed as a “Nite Club with
Soul,” certainly sounded like a good idea in
1963—besides actual churchgoers picketingout front, objecting to the jazzed-up gospel’n’ liquor mix, who wouldn’t want to hearfire and brimstone in a swanky midtown
Manhattan club, all the while being served
by waitresses decked out in sexy angel outfits? Nineteen-year-old guitarist and regular patron Al Kooper certainly did, attracted
also to the driving, mesmerizing Hammondorgan playing of club organist Bobby Banks.
Part of the club’s ruse was a deal it had with
Columbia Records to record its concerts,
hoping to give a wider secular ear a taste forthe commercial sacred. Kooper’s buddy—
Columbia staff producer Tom Wilson,
who’d been working with upstart Bob
Dylan—was tasked to lead the club’s debut
session. The resulting LP, Introducing the
Sweet Chariot, is a sanctified scorcher, featuring the likes of the Lorraine Ellison–led
Golden Chords and The Nathaniel Lewis
Singers, all backed by Bobby Banks’s fiery,foot-stompin’ organ. The club’s evanescentluck wasn’t as lasting as the album’s deep
cuts, however, as within the year the church
protesters won out.
Kooper’s luck proved much better. He
loved Banks, Booker T., and Jimmy McGriff, but knew such organ runs were beyondhim. Chutzpah wasn’t, though, so when
Tom Wilson asked if Kooper wanted to attend a Dylan session Wilson was producing, Kooper jumped, hoping perhaps tosneak in a guitar lick or two. As fate would
have it, he instead found himself behind a
Hammond B-3, staring at his hands ’cause
he couldn’t hear the notes from his fingers,
as the Leslie was isolated elsewhere in thestudio. He’d snuck onto the organ when
Wilson was distracted, discovered fortuitously that it was already on (he lacked thestartup know-how), and began riffing onsome song he’d just heard Dylan working
on called “Like A Rolling Stone.” When
Wilson protested to Dylan after the takethat Kooper was no organ player but simply
a guitarist, Dylan reportedly responded, “I
don’t care what he is, make the organ
louder!” The Kooper “style,” based on ignorance, grit, and bliss, would be copied
throughout rock ’n’ roll.
Around the time that Kooper’s fluky
Dylan assist floated up the pop charts, but
before the electric guitar ruled the world,
you’d just as likely hear an organ solo as asoloing six-string. And as 18-year-old Billy
Preston was busy proving live and via his
second LP, he needed no Hammond help
whatsoever. Though Jimmy Smith surely
would’ve title-scoffed, Preston’s aptly
named Most Exciting Organ Ever kicked off
with Dylan mentor Pete Seeger’s “If I Had
a Hammer,” then proceeded to show off
Billy’s gospel-rooted bag of instrumental
R&B and soul. An impressed Ray Charles,
who’d briefly messed around with a Hammond, hitched Billy’s flamboyant singin’/
dancin’/playin’ routine to his own revue
for touring and TV. Preston still found time
to “free funk” for his next album, Wildest
Organ in Town!, a collaboration with another church-trained organist making pop
inroads, Sylvester Stewart, and also hadtime to lend his hands to the King of Wild
himself—Little Richard—joining fellow
precocious wildman Jimi “Jimmy James”
Hendrix for future Richard keepers like “I
Don’t Know What You Got But It’s Got
Me.”
As the story goes, Little Richard couldn’t
handle the guitarist’s wildness, and Hendrix, tired after years of chitlin’ circuit constraints anyway, took his freak flag to the
U.K. (the rest is history). Preston, always
looking to stretch himself out, took his wild-

Dick Hyman never met a keyboard he couldn’t hack.

Clubland

By Katherine TurmanI

t’s Thanksgiving eve, 2021, and a youngish(20s to 30s) crowd of reasonably hipstermusic lovers at The Sultan Room, in Bushwick, appear to be, well, thankful to bemingling cheek-by-jowl in front of the
low-slung stage. The circular room’s spaceage, mid-century mien is bathed in blue
light, there’s a line at the bar, and about 10%of the convivial patrons are masked. Bouncers check IDs and proof of vax on the sidewalk right outside the front door.
They’re awaiting a New York trio witheclectic talent, a so-far smallish local andnational profile … and an arguably world-famous singer beloved mostly for his work onscreen. That said, Princess Goes to the
Butterfly Museum vocalist Michael C. Hall
met his band compatriots on Broadway,when the three were in the musical Hedwig
and the Angry Inch, Hall stunning vocallyand visually as the titular bewigged genderqueer East German singer.
Multi-instrumentalist Matt Katz-Bohen,
whose young daughter suggested the band’s
mouthful of a moniker (which doesn’t faremuch better as PGTTBM, though “PrincessGoes” seems to be the preferred shorthand),is a current member of Blondie; drummerPeter Yanowitz has logged time with The
Wallflowers and Morningwood, among others. Hall, known to most through his multilayered portrayals of TV’s Dexter andfuneral director David Fisher on Six Feet Under, is a somewhat enigmatic lead singer,
which suits Princess Goes’ art-rockish,dancey, moody, New Wave leanings. Therealso seems a debt owed to Lazarus- andBlackstar-era David Bowie. (Hall starred in
the New York production of the off-Broadway play Lazarus, with the Star Man’s personal blessing.)
The trio could as easily gig with Euroglam-rock upstarts Maneskin, or, had they
been a band in the 70s, could have traveledin the same circles as German-born East
Village icon Klaus Nomi. Diversity and defying easy categorization can be an artistic
boon, though not necessarily for radio or
easy commercial success. But Katz-Bohen
offers, deadpan, that Princess Goes might
get airtime “wherever Taylor Swift isplayed, I guess. WFUV is a great station.
Even New Sounds on NPR.”
Onstage in a button-down black shirt
and sooty smudged eye makeup, with angular streaks on his cheeks, Hall emotes with arestrained focus and passion not unlike his
TV characters. For this show, Yanowitz
shines in a glitter headband, while keytar-

keyboard-Thunderbird-bass-playing KatzBohen sports an asymmetrical haircut andmulti-tasks seamlessly between keyboards
and strings.
The group vibe matches the music. At
The Sultan Room, they play songs fromtheir 2021 full-length debut, Thanks For
Coming, plus older tunes and some newsongs slated for the next LP. Many of Princess Goes’ songs feature space-age, cinematic, semi-orchestral post-rock musicalelements (think soundtracks to the late-’70s
films Coma or Logan’s Run). There’s the
creepily haunting, futuristic yet irresistibly
danceable “Nevertheless,” which seems
thematically akin to “Ketamine,” a song off
their 2019 EP that also appears in the firstseason of Dexter revival New Blood. The lyrics were inspired by Hall’s own guided ketamine journey, which he described in aprevious interview as “the phenomenon of
having the experience of parallel and insome ways contradictory trips with someone and how that mirrors the challenge ofmaybe being in a relationship.”
Post-Thanksgiving, Princess Goes
headed to the U.K. for their first-ever tour
there. After their initial shows, the trio appears on a Zoom screen, smushed together
on a sofa backstage at the 200-capacity Esquires club, in Bedford, England. Soundcheck completed, the band talked to the
Voice about their full-circle journey during
the pandemic.
“We played at the Mercury Lounge on
March 12, 2020, the night before New York
City shut down. And then the first time weplayed again was back there, on October 30,
2021,” says Yanowitz. “So it was kind of likefinishing what we started.” Of the October
return gig, Hall says, “It was like everything
had been just a really long, detailed, boring
dream. So it was really celebratory. I thinkpeople were just really excited to be out andseeing live music in a room full of three-dimensional human bodies.”
When the group started out, several
years ago, the lyrics to “Love American
Style” were the first Hall wrote for the band.
That tune’s still in their set; asked to elucidate on his growth since then, the frontman
offers, “I don’t really know. With these
guys, I have such license to just try whatever
emerges and try to make it work musically.
In some cases, the lyrics or a melody comes
first, but I think because this is sort of a newthing for me, I try not to spend too muchtime analyzing how it’s happening or what’s
working and just keep going.”

Michael C. Hall taking the lead at The Sultan Room, in Brooklyn.

Alexander Thompson

25

The Village VoiceOf rocking during a pandemic, and frontman Michael C Hall’s famefacade of an abandoned mall in Ohio,” Hall
explains. “We were interested in the idea ofsome photograph of an abandoned mall justbecause it seems to encapsulate somethingessential about the current vibe in the country. We found that exterior photo, [which]also looked kind of like the entrance to amuseum. And it looked kind of like a skull
as well. It just resonated with all of us. So wewent with it.”
The Sultan Room, site of Princess Goes’
last gig before heading overseas, is a creatively and carefully rendered 300-capacity
venue (with a companion restaurant, Turk’sInn). It is also the first NYC venture for coowner Varun Kataria. The live room debuted in June 2019, before the pandemic

December 2021

PRINCESS GOES
GOES ON TOUR

During the 2020 lockdown, Princess
Goes completed Thanks For Coming, which
they say was not particularly influenced by
the pandemic. The grinding, almost headbanging heaviness of “Vicious” segues intoa lovely delicate section, the unexpected dynamics perfect. Another sublime live entry
is the almost childlike feel of “Tomorrow’s
Screams,” Thanks for Coming’s 13th track.
On the record and live, the dark drama iscompelling and cerebral, boosted to themore primal rock side when Katz-Bohen
picks up a bass.
The album-cover image is a photo of a
black and white building with four columns
under an ominous sky. It’s not a museum,
per se. And definitely no butterflies. “It’s a

The Village Voice

December 2021

26

struck. “We took off like a rocket ship upon
opening. We were surprised by it,” Kataria
recalls. “We presented the music we believed in and people showed up for it indroves. Alicia Keys played a secret show alittle over a month after we opened, a jam
session with Gary Clark Jr., Kamasi Washington, and Leikeli47, among others. We
could barely believe what was happening.”
Kataria says that he views The Sultan Roomas having “something of a Vegas by way of
Istanbul, futuristic mid-century loungevibe” but with a “Midwestern spirit of warm
hospitality, not typical of New York club culture,” and Princess Goes definitely fits thataesthetic bill.
So, is music back in New York City? The
answer, from nearly everyone, seems to be“Yes and no.”Kataria literally says, “Yes and no,” explaining, “On one hand, I’ve had plenty ofnights of dancing and seeing shows andthinking ‘this feels normal,’ while on the“We wereinterested in theidea of somephotograph ofan abandoned
mall just because
it seems to
encapsulate
somethingessential about thecurrent vibe in the
country.”other, we’ve seen a number of cancellations
due to COVID, and international performers getting stymied by COVID regulations
or backlogs in bureaucracy.” His experienceis that show-going habits are ever-changing. “Some shows have felt surprisingly exuberant, the audience zealously drinking
and dancing, while others that we expected
to perform well turned out to be duds, beyond any explanation other than somethingthat feels like generalized anxiety about going out.” Says Katz-Bohen, “There’s somuch going on and so many shows. We saw
Idles play two nights in a row at Terminal 5.
Amazing. No social distancing. They werelike, sharing spit with everyone in the audience. And gloriously so.”
One might hope that the spitters are triple-vaxxed, as the Omicron variant had justbecome headline news the night of the
Princess Goes Brooklyn show. On the threesome’s U.K. tour, which ended on December 9, in Toxteth, in Liverpool, the band wasjazzed to be playing their first-ever gigs outof New York. In our Zoom, four shows intothat tour—which would include stops in
Dublin and Belfast—the band members of-fer their take on playing in the U.K.: “Here it
new lineup. Hall, who is 50 but looks much
feels like nobody’s wearing a mask, and it
younger, was in a short-lived band in coljust feels like people are excited about going lege, but this is his first shot at the real
to shows and feels kind of normal actually,”
thing. Each member brings different musiobserves Yanowitz, “in the sense that a lot
cal influences to the group, and, as Yanowof people are turning up for the shows anditz explains, they share “the DNA ofthey’re ready to rock. They were loud andplaying in Hedwig. It’s not just a glam musienthusiastic. And they have been for all four cal or pop music, it’s a little bit all over. It’s
shows that we played so far. They’ve been
got ballads. So in that sense, we like to keep
really engaged. They know the music.”a palette of all those kinds of music in our
However, a few shows after that Zoom chat, writing.”
one of the band’s too-packed U.K. gigs had
Katz-Bohen went to NYC’s La Guardia
to be divided into two performances, due to(the high school that 1980’s Fame was based
just-launched capacity restrictions. Buton), Yankowitz grew up with a pianist-combands and audiences both appear eager toposer and sometime-painter dad, but Hall
cooperate and make concessions if the end
had a more suburban musical experience inresult is in-person live music and togetherNorth Carolina and Vienna, Virginia. “I was
ness.
friends with this kid who had three older
Kataria observes, “While it does feel
brothers and we would go down to their
good to be back in the swing and presenting
basement—red, white, and blue shag carevents that are generally well attended, it
pet—and play their records,” Hall recalled
doesn’t really feel like the time to breathe ain a previous chat. “I remember gettingsigh of relief.” Bushwick, one of New York’s
Queen’s The Game and Styx’s Cornerstone
younger, busier later-night scenes, often ap- for like my second- or third-grade birthday
pears the same as it was in the “before
party. I would listen to them both every day
times.” “Shows are happening all overwhen I got home from school. I remember
Bushwick,” says Kataria. “But there is amemorizing the words to “Babe” [Styx] begravity to it, an appreciation that I feel now,cause I wanted to sing it to this girl that I
and I get a sense that others are feeling it
liked after school.”
too, that being in dark rooms together andReviews of the U.K. dates mention, butlistening to loud music with cool lights anddon’t dwell on, the fame of the band’s frontassorted beverages is something we reallyman. Writer Natalie Owen saw the Rescue
like to do, and we miss it tremendously
Rooms gig in Nottingham and cited “thewhen we can’t do it.”charmingly beautiful electronic rock music
The Princess Goes’ Sultan Room show
… where each song has its own identity.” A
was packed when the band took the stage.
write-up from the Thekla party-boat show
“I’m sure Michael C. Hall’s profile helpedin Birmingham did note that “some memwith attendance, but in all other ways it was
bers of the audience kept making non-ina real rock show, with exuberant perfortrusive heckles inquiring ‘what happened tomances by the artists and authentic enjoyDexter?’” But Hall? The reviewer writes,
ment in the crowd,” recalls Kataria. There’s“The performer extraordinaire responded
a history of actors-turned-musicians, into the inquiries with quick wit and the signacluding David Duchovny, Kevin Bacon, andture smile.”
more, and some who go the other way, like
Although Thanks For Coming came out
Alana Haim and Jared Leto.
It’s reductive to dwell on, butalso impossible to ignore. “Imean, probably there’s a certain percentage of fans who
check out the music because
they know me [from TV], youknow, and that’s, that’s cool,”says Hall. “You know, hopefully, once they listen to themusic, they’re either into it ornot. And that’s what it’s about
after that, you know, but,yeah, it’s definitely a part ofwhat gets people curious initially.”
Despite their bona fides,
like most any new band,
Princess Goes’ started at thebottom: small clubs in New
York where the band walks
through the crowd to get onstage, tiny dressing rooms,
and finding time between
family and other gigs to create together. They do havewhat they term the “clubhouse,” their own studio andpractice space in Union
Square. But the struggle toget a leg up as a band is as
Princess Goes, with their game faces on.
real for them as it is for any

in 2021, its follow-up is already essentiallycompleted, and the musicians are eager totour as much as possible. But Princess
Goes is also getting its business house inorder. “One thing that came out of thepandemic, we were able to find management. We didn’t think that was evensomething that could happen, especiallyduring a pandemic,” Yanowitz says overZoom, back at the Esquires club. “We
found this amazing group of people[Linda Carbone and In De Goot Entertainment], and they helped us find an international and a U.S. booking agent.
Slowly, we’re just inquiring out to people
that are into what we’re doing.”
More pandemic bummers, though,haven’t dampened the band’s enthusiasm:“We’re already going to come back overhere because we had to postpone ourshows in Germany and Ukraine. We’re going to be having fun and exploring what
this band can do live, which is this worldthat is new to us because we’re only reallyused to playing one show [at a time] in New
York, and then waiting. So this is crazy,”
Yanowitz tells me, looking around theirbackstage area, rife with graffiti. “Like,
we’re doing shows every night, so every
night is different. Energy is different. Our
energy is different. We just try to be in the
moment and like, see what we can bring to
the night, you know?” The band’s attention
is pulled away from the Zoom conversation as Katz-Bohen looks to the side, wherea club employee is apparently gesturing to
Princess Goes that it’s showtime. It’s a bit
after 8 p.m. in England.
As for next year, COVID willing? As Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum preparesfor their debut show on the Esquires stage—
which has also held Muse, Coldplay, andRoyal Blood—Yanowitz enthuses: “Morerocking in 2022!”

Paul StoreyOn the Boards‘Om’ Is Where the Heart Is: Flying Over Sunset finally lands
By Elizabeth Zimmer

Sunset begins as
grand opera andends as a sitcom.
Played here with brittle brio by Carmen
Cusack, Mrs. Luce invites two equally influential men—British writer Aldous Huxley(played by British actor Harry Hadden-Paton), whom she already knew, and Cary
Grant (American Tony Yazbeck), anotherBrit, who transformed himself from an impoverished child vaudevillian into one of
Hollywood’s major matinee idols—to join
her and Gerald Heard, the Anglo-Irish
writer and scholar who in real life guided
Flyin g Ov er Sunset

Vivian Beaumont Theater
150 West 65th Street
212-239-6200
Through February 6, 2022

both Luce and Huxley on their first acid trips
and who here is played by Robert Sella, tojoin her at her oceanfront home for a sharedexperience. Heard urges his famous charges
to chant a mantra before, during, and after
their LSD-fueled adventures.
Back in the day, we young ’60s academics, clustered down the coast from the setting of this show, used to joke about adoctoral examination that would merely require candidates to state “the mystic syllableof complete content.” The answer, ofcourse, was “OM.”
Sunset begins as grand opera and ends asa sitcom; begins infused with the wonderful
tap choreography of Michelle Dorrance andfinishes with a bunch of talking heads so altered by their chemical adventures that all
they do is shut up and chant. In between, themarvelous, trippy lighting (by Bradley King)and mid-century modern scene design (byBeowulf Boritt) carry the characters from a
Hollywood drugstore, where Huxley rhapsodizes over the paintings of Botticelli hefinds in an art book while his dying wife
picks up a prescription; to the Beverly Hills
office of Grant’s wife’s psychiatrist, to whom

Dancing through the doors of perception: Harry Hadden-Paton as Aldous Huxley.

Joan Marcus

The Village VoiceS

outhern California has attracted morethan its share of seekers for a century;
the remarkable light, dry heat, silly
palm trees, pulsing ocean, and sweetbougainvillea overwhelm the senses.
Add to these the mind-altering capacity ofdrugs like LSD and you have a promising
theatrical concept.
Writer/director James Lapine and his collaborators, composer Tom Kitt and lyricist
Michael Korie, got their new musical, Flying
Over Sunset, on its feet nearly two years ago,
only to have it vanish, along with all the
Broadway shows, at the dawn of the pandemic. The extremely informative houseprogram, with essays about the four main
characters and much else, was publishedearly in 2020 and has been waiting patiently
for this moment, with the show finally open
at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont.
I went to graduate school in SoCal about
a decade after the events of Lapine’s “biofic,” grounded in a series of real encounters
and taking liberties with the future. The
piece collects two high-powered figures andtheir guide, all users in the mid-’50s of the
newly rediscovered chemical lysergic acid,and eventually deposits them in the opulent
Malibu digs of Clare Booth Luce, “womanof the century,” who was by turns, andsometimes simultaneously, a playwright, amedia queen, a congresswoman, and the
U.S. ambassador to Italy. Married to media
magnate Henry Luce, who founded Time,
Life, and Fortune, her extraordinary life wastouched by tragedy when her only child, herdaughter Ann, died in an accident at the ageof 20.

27
December 2021

TRIPPING WITH THE STARS

Grant behaves with imperious
rudeness; to Clare’s patio, where, allalone, she manages a dramatic orgasm without benefit of digital manipulation.
And that’s just the first act, alongwith the revelation that Grant, an
abused child, was originally Archie
Leach, a young dancer and acrobat
whose mother dressed him in girls’
clothes and whose father had hiswife committed, causing her to vanish mysteriously from Grant’s life.
“The function of the brain is to protect us from being overwhelmed bythis enormous mass of information,” Grant’s wife’s shrink tellshim. “[LSD] helps us to rediscover
events from our past that may give
us insight into ourselves.” Yazbeck
as Grant tap-dances up a storm withhis younger self, played by Atticus
Ware. Other supporting actors fill
multiple roles as well as dancing,including Emily Pynenburg (whoalso does a turn as Sophia Loren);
Laura Shoop, who plays Huxley’s
wife; and Kanisha Marie Feliciano
Joan Marcus
and Michele Ragusa, who perform
other key figures in the lives of theTapping into the senses: Tony Yazbeck as Cary Grant.
principals.
The score is mostly forgettable,
and when the superb tap dancing by the enwith the exception of the title song, whose retire cast in Act 1 disappears into the flowery
frain brings to mind Sondheim’s “Nothing’sbowers and crashing waves of Act 2, that mysGonna Harm You,” from Sweeney Todd. The
show’s message is benign and timeless: BE
tic syllable of complete content starts to muHERE NOW. But when “now” lasts nearlytate. By the end, instead of feeling elevated bythree hours, and when most of what the audithe meditative sound of “Om,” we find ourence gets to do is watch other people tripping, selves murmuring “Oy!”28 Panel Discussion

The Village Voice

December 2021

LET US COMPARE
MYTHOLOGIESA new book ventures to the farthest reaches of the Marvel Universe andreturns with stories to spare
By Daniel FelsenthalIn a utopia, there’d be an issue for everyone. For me, it was Uncanny X-Men No.
414, which I read on the floor of a Pine
Sol–scented Barnes and Noble when I
was 11. Seated pretzel-legged in one of
the aisles, I found something unexpectedly
weighty in the Marvel comic: Abused by his
father, a boy literally explodes. A lapsed superhero named Northstar discovers him in
his home’s rubble. Northstar is gay, weknow, because Professor Xavier, founder ofa school for “gifted youngsters” with mutant powers they need to learn how to control, wants to hire the flying, ultrafast
Canadian; he’d like to diversify his teaching
staff so that his students have homosexualrole models.
“Huh?” I thought, dropped from thedrab retailer into a friendlier dimension. I’dnever read anything so frankly queer before. The year was 2002, and I only knew
gayness as the butt of jokes. Studio films
were smattered with swishy stereotypes forcomic relief, while the lyrics of Top 40 hitmakers like Eminem and DMX mademincemeat of homosexuals. In the wide
world of graphic novels, superheroes might
have been popular fluff, but they were still
the just-off-center province of nerds, meaning they could address the marginalizedwith empathy. The experience of difference
was the hidden soul of Marvel’s corpus: Secret identities, found families thrust together by their afflictions, and outcasts withlife-altering urges that manifested aroundthe time of puberty had evident nonstraight connotations. Possibly because of
corporate oversight, these undertones only
occasionally rose to the surface. Yet rise,
they did.
In Issue 414, Northstar admits his sexual
orientation while flying the exploding boy
to safety. The child freaks out. “You’re afruit,” he exclaims. “Put me down.” The
boy’s uncontrolled powers kill him, but only
after he and Northstar have a heart-toheart. Reading this scene, I felt as thoughsplit sides of my own fledgling self werespeaking calmly: the child who had inhaleda culture of bizarro brutality and discrimination, and the adult who was attracted tomen and did not want to ostracize anyone.
Marvel’s writers and artists often know
how to reach these places in young—mostly
male—readers. I came for the spectacle ofcartoonish violence, the largesse of adventure. I stayed because past the masks andglitz were alienated, relatable characterswith wasted good intentions and emotionalturmoil they locked inside. In the past two
decades, the Marvel Cinematic Universe
has saturated society so deeply these tales
no longer feel like the province of outsiders.
I’ve gotten older, too, yet the company’s stories still reverberate in my head like personal philosophies. “With great power
comes great responsibility,” Peter Parker’s
Uncle Ben tells him. Behind the wearinessof this line’s overexposure is the weight of
mythology, like a favorite verse from the Bible one quotes in a moment of self-doubt.
Douglas Wolk’s new book, All of the Mar-vels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story
Ever Told (Penguin, $28), draws on how
Marvel’s narratives are both intimate andculturally embedded. The project has an inescapable hook: Wolk read all 540,000
pages of comics the corporation has published since 1960. A discerning fanboy, he
excluded particular imprints and characterlines he did not consider “canon,” yet thebook bears the alluring scent of the completionist, someone who reached the end, as
the opening sentence tells us, of “the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created.…” Critically, Wolk doesn’t
log all 27,000-plus comics that compose thepublisher’s lumbering megatext, butcherry-picks a series of through lines he sequences with a conversational, entertaining
voice and casually whip-smart analysis.
There’s a section on Marvel’s failed forays
into the movie business during the 1980s
and early ’90s, an ignominious period thatmade its characters seem unfilmable; chapters that dive deep into the psyches of Spider-Man and Doctor Doom; an interlude
that discusses the surprising predominanceof nurse protagonists in the publisher’s
early years; and another that considers thelegendary working relationships of writers
and artists such as Stan Lee and Steve
Ditko. Wolk highlights a mixture of whatmatters most in comics history, and what helikes. If there’s an issue for everyone, Wolk
knows which comics have touched on his
own idiosyncrasies—and when Marvel’s
mirror version of the world, Earth-616, rotates with surprising relevance around ourailing planet at large.
Naturally, his issues are different frommine. I can’t say I care enough about hammer-wielding Thor to enjoy a couple dozen
pages and ample footnotes about his exploits, and I wish Wolk had given more
space to Daredevil, whose gritty gymnastics
on skyscrapers and tenements sparked myown childhood fascination with cities—
plus, the blind lawyer born Matt Murdock is
the rare marquee-name superhero with aphysical disability. Instead, Wolk focuses on
the underknown Shang-Chi—until the recent flick Shang-Chi and the Legend of theTen Rings—and the 300-comic, multi-series“Dark Reign” cycle, which Wolk argues,
compellingly, is “the best work of fiction
I’ve seen about life under the Donald
Trump administration—the one that mostaccurately captures the slow-grinding despair and tension of that period in American
culture....” Wolk’s argument is weakened,though, by what he does not include. Afterall, the terror induced by the Trump era ishardly over, and while he mentions that
“Dark Reign” actually came out during the
Obama years, he neglects to consider how

Pieces of a universe. Clockwise from upper left: Avengers No. 93 (1971), Marvel Tales Annual No. 1 (1964), The Amazing Spider-Man No. 102 (1971), The
Amazing Spider-Man No. 20 (1965), Tales to Astonish No. 87 (1967), Daredevil No. 24 (1967).
RCB collectionthat comprise it need not reflect a company’s corporate culture, office culture, or thepolitics and values that its brass have intheir own lives. They can, and will, be whatever brings in the most cash—wheneverMarvel reflects a “minority” identity in a
new comic or film, the company is only expanding into a new market of consumers.
And since films make so much revenue
abroad, Marvel’s social perspectives are not
only bound by American mores but also
those of international markets with different notions about personal liberty and freedom of expression. Clearly, Wolk has acomplicated relationship with superheroes,
but the extent to which he buys into themmakes his omissions conspicuous. Weirdly,
he never even tells us that the ur-corporation of global kiddie domination, The Walt
Disney Company, has owned Marvel since2009.
In its beginning, Marvel comics stoodout because they showed people the futilityof their heroes, seducing their hearts while
drawing a fine line of vulnerability to separate these crime-fighting allegories from
fascism. Peter Parker’s famous adage
moves us not because Spider-Man has su-

A discerning
fanboy, Wolk
excludedparticular imprints
and character lines
he did not consider“canon.”perhuman abilities but because his life is an
exercise in disappointment and helplessness. However subconsciously, we understood his proverb as “with very little power
comes great responsibility,” and such a predicament is why many continue to find theweb-slinger relatable. Yet as capitalism andfascism seem to draw closer together everyday—I can’t help but think of Upton Sinclair’s quote “Fascism is Capitalism plus
murder”—people are fittingly revealing
how they take (probably, they always did)the action-packed adventures and Übermensch abilities of superheroes at facevalue. Numerous news stories have covered
how apparel from The Punisher, as well asfrom Captain America, have become ubiquitous at alt-right rallies. Of course, sympathetic characters are often used for evil
gain—malignant people have for millennia
co-opted the pacifistic Jesus Christ to justify
wars and bigotry. Instead of painting
crosses on their shields before embarking
on a crusade, the devout thugs of 21st-century America put on a Target-bought skull
shirt.
Wolk doesn’t purport to be interested ingoing behind the scenes at Marvel, perhaps
because other authors beat him to it—notably, Sean Howe in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (2012). But All of the Marvels
needs at least a chapter on the company’s
corporate history, as well as a more direct

acknowledgement of the hand its changing
leadership has played in shaping Marvel’s
many-layered tale. Wolk writes about theimprints individual writers and artists left
on particular series, but one is left to wonder: Just how much autonomy did they
have, and when did their corporate bosses
meddle? Wolk does take some shots at thecompany’s inherent hypocrisy, saving thispointed couplet for his book’s last line : “A
story can never leave you; a corporation cannever love you back.” But I wanted him to
twist the knife another few rotations, andthen blast the company with an energy bolt
and Hulk Smash it—maybe that’s just my
bloodthirsty self. Just after his erudite
chapter on the appearance of presidents inMarvel comics, he includes a hilarious reference to Donald Trump’s sole cameo in an
excellent 2009 issue of New Avengers—thehero Luke Cage moves the future president’s limousine out of New York City traffic in order to allow an ambulance to pass.
“I—I will sue the—!” sputters Donald’s
character, too scared to complete his threat.
Afterward, Wolk drops a bomb: “Trump’s
subsequent, uncharacteristic-for-presidents invisibility in Marvel’s comics may or
may not have anything to do with the factthat one of his major real-world donors andclose associates, Ike Perlmutter, has been
the CEO of Marvel Comics, and then of
Marvel Entertainment, since 2005.” The
shifty, perhaps legalistically safe syntax
Wolk uses while offering this significant
revelation is difficult to get behind. And it
must be noted that Perlmutter, the largest
shareholder in Disney, is in fact a chairman
at Marvel now, and no longer its CEO—helost the position after purportedly spouting
racist garbage about actors in an Iron Man
sequel, threatening to shoot a company executive, and being generally opposed to diversity in the MCU.
Still, in large part, All of the Marvels isquite successful: Wolk’s engrossing, richtome is cheerfully serious about the tangled
skein of an ongoing story, and he sets thebounds of his argument early and clearly.
But in these decidedly non-innocent times,
Wolk needs to attack the corporate overlords of the stories he loves with more than aglancing blow. If representation is threatened, stories themselves are threatened. An
imperative response is to send constant, irritating missives from the bottom of our intellects up to the top of the capitalist foodchain.
So peer past the surface of comics’ unholy scrolls and consider how their aims
might be distorted and blinkered. Remember that, like the talent of many establishment cultural facets, such as Hollywood
movies, popular music, and the evening
news, Marvel’s creators could be so muchtruer to the lived experience of humanity
than the vicissitudes of industry and its Doctor Dooms will allow. Let Wolk’s deserving
text be more than free marketing material
for a corporation. That is to say: Don’t buy
All of the Marvels for the superhero fan inyour life this holiday season. Buy it for thecritical thinker who uses alternative worlds
and fantastical allegories as a lens of analysis, so they can pick apart a failed utopia
made in the image of our own.

29

The Village Voicenot a defense of Marvel’s business practices, currently or historically, or of the business practices of any of their corporate
parents, nor is it a defense of any of thesecomics’ creators as people…. It’s also not a
defense of these comics’ retrograde, myopic history of representation, in terms ofboth the characters who appeared on theirpages and the people who created them.... It
not only does not defend, but actively disavows, the elements of mainstream comics
readership that try to keep it the province ofstraight white men, with boxes full of backissues, who want everything to stay exactly
like it was when they were kids.”
Granted, his book is none of thesethings—but it also doesn’t criticize themquite directly enough. Discussing theShang-Chi series Master of Kung Fu (1974–83), Wolk uses letters to Marvel’s editors by
the prominent sci-fi author William F. Wu,
who was offended by the comic’s frequent
stereotyping, to show how an Asian American of the time reacted to the book’s racial
issues. A wise move (as usual, Wolk provides a considered, multifaceted discussion), his thoughtfulness is nonetheless a
bit undermined by his effusive praise for the
book’s writers and artists, who renderedsuch stereotyping into existence. And while
he delves into the colorists’ absurd inability
to render an Asian skin tone, he mostly lets
Jack Kirby off the hook for his hackneyed
depictions of the citizens of Wakanda, themade-up African nation in which the Black
Panther is king. My own predilections mademe wish that Wolk would linger longer on
the LGBTQ embrace of X-Men, and I positively ate up his incisive analysis of how Spider-Man repeatedly contends with older
father figures as mentors and villains. Thenagain, these are the dynamics in the Marvel
Universe that always captured my imagination, even when I was too young to understand why.
Any mythology that encourages us tochoose our favorite myths lends itself toconsumer capitalism. As I saw myself in Uncanny X-Men, today’s queer youth mightembrace Eternals (2021), the first film in the
MCU to have an openly gay character,though hopefully they’ll remember the decade-plus it took the franchise to introduce
a hero who wasn’t arrow-straight. Wolk
does little to recognize the company’s complicated relationship with its so-called “truebelievers.” This term, introduced withseeming innocence by the avuncular Stan
Lee more than half a century ago, points to abygone optimism in the capitalistic potential of youth culture, one which both jokingly and seriously demanded a kind ofreligious obedience, all in a voice like theannoying leader of a boy-scout troop. “Forsomeone who lives in our society,” Wolk acknowledges, “having some familiarity with
the Marvel story is useful in much the same
way as, say, being familiar with the Bible isuseful for someone who lives in a JudeoChristian society: Its iconography and influence are pervasive.” Those who are awareof the evangelical stranglehold on American politics can only balk at the notion that
our society is not Judeo-Christian, but
Wolk’s grander point alludes to how corporations create their own mythos. The stories

December 2021

the story’s dystopian political aspects might
have allowed it to pass muster with thecompany’s then CEO, major Republican
donor Ike Perlmutter.
Wolk gives short shrift to other popularheroes, notably The Punisher, and in thatparticular case for plausible reasons: “He’sa wish-fulfillment figure for bloodthirsty
creeps; he’s had his stylized skull logo coopted by American police.” The symbol has
become a frightening calling card in recent
years for alt-right vigilantism, but I think
the anti-hero’s comics often have enoughsorrow, ambivalence, and pulpy, funny
bluntness to defy those who read advocacy
into his gun-toting persona. Wolk also doesa critical drive-by on J. Michael Straczynski,
whose storylines on The Amazing SpiderMan between 2001 and 2007 “incorporated
a few intriguing ideas, as well as some very
bad ones.” Considering that Straczynski
framed my childhood love for all things Peter Parker, I was surprised by Wolk’s speedy
means of dispatching with him. Still, in certain ways, disagreement isn’t a liability but
instead the point: Marvel’s interwoven folklore allows readers to pick their own stories
as well as storytellers—even if one of themisleading aspects of mainstream comics isthat their true author is a corporation.
We never lose sight of Wolk’s own authorship, one of the reasons he can weave
together a series of curated, argumentativeplot summaries over almost 400 pages. A
writer with less control would put us tosleep. One chapter discusses Wolk’s difficulties relating to his son, citing his passion
for the arts and the boy’s bent toward mathand “complex systems” as an unbridgeablechasm. “I worried, neurotically,” he tells us,
with admirable honesty, “that the kid I
loved just sort of tolerated my presence.”
What allowed him to bond with his then
10-year-old? Of course, the endless labyrinth of Marvel: “He had lots of questions
about them all, and I could answer them—thefirst time that had really happened betweenus.” The formulation is potent for its details(for example, how Wolk’s son isn’t really interested in music except for “certain videogame soundtracks”), even if any reader can
predict what will bring them together the
moment the chapter begins.
Wolk himself is an excellent, longtime
music critic, and he devotes a fantastic interlude to the appearances of both real andmade-up musical figures in the fictional
multiverse. The author’s omnivorous obsessions and his light touch for applying
them give All of the Marvels space to breathe.
“X-Men became to comics approximately
what David Bowie was to music: the signal
to every misfit out there that they weren’t
alone and that things might be okay after
all,” he tells us, with characteristic friendliness. A critic’s bevy of knowledge, Wolk
knows, is only as interesting as their sensibility.
The book incorporates some exemplary
Marvel panels, but these are irritatingly too
small to read without a magnifying glass.
And Wolk’s sensibility falls short in its examination of Marvel as a business, even if
he makes his intentions clear up-front in aseries of bullet-point disclaimers forecasting what All of the Marvels will avoid: “It is

The Village Voice

December 2021

30 Jockbeat

RODGERS AND IRVING:
ANTI-VAX ALL-STARS
It ain’t your father’s athletic protest
By Vincent VelottaM

ove over, New York Jets! There’s a
new No. 1 on this year’s “Naughty
List” in the sporting world. And thedishonor belongs to a group that’s far
more formidable at damaging the
sports scene: players whose rise to the top of
their game has convinced them that they’verisen above the facts.
The NFL and NHL have implemented
vaccine policies as the pandemic continues,
and MLB may do the same. Meanwhile, theNBA hasn’t enacted anything yet, but selectcities such as New York have pandemic-era
laws that prevent unvaccinated players fromperforming at indoor arenas. Such policies
have spawned a vocal minority of anti-vax
players whose often preposterous stances
have damaged the legitimacy of the athlete’s
voice on socio-political issues.
The perpetrators are well-known. The
Brooklyn Nets’ own Kyrie Irving hasn’t
played this season, after refusing to get vaccinated—a stand he’s taken for the sake of
personal freedom and being a “voice for thevoiceless,” adding to a long list of controversies that include his claiming the earth
might be flat. “I do research on both sides,”he said in 2017, before ultimately apologizing to schoolteachers who complained that
his comments were causing issues in theclassroom. But more research is likely
needed: During the pandemic, Irving has
liked social media posts promoting a conspiracy stating that vaccines are part of a plot

Elvis Presley
received the polio
vaccine on The
Ed Sullivan Show,in 1956, which
was credited
for a massive
surge in teenage
vaccinations.
by Satan to connect Black people to a mastercomputer. While he’s at it, perhaps Irving
should ask himself who the voiceless reallyare. His newfound supporters in Texas senator Ted Cruz and a team at Fox News? Or the
799,000-and-counting Americans who

Because if the pandemic ended tomorrow, the actions of this duo would be what’s
remembered about the stance athletes took
during this historic period. Are embarrassing conspiracy theories and provably false
claims really what the athlete’s voice is becoming known for? This is the very same
platform that Muhammad Ali used in his
principled protest of the Vietnam War, sacrificing three years of his prime after losing
his boxing license as a consequence for refusing to be drafted into the army. In thatsame era, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar boycotted
the 1968 Olympics—a decision that would
cost the UCLA star his only chance to capture the gold in an age when NBA players
could not yet participate. “... the idea of go-

have lost their lives to this virus?
Then there’s Green Bay Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers,
whose charismatic air of mellow
intelligence paired perfectlywith stints on Jeopardy! as a contestant and host. But Rodgers’s
chill image was shattered in November when he appeared on
The Pat McAfee Show to discussrevelations that he misled the
public about his vaccination status. Initially revealing allergies
to an unspecified component of
the Pfizer and Moderna vaccinesand hesitancy toward the Johnson & Johnson option because ofrare cases of blood clotting, Rodgers then went on a rant of uninformed chaos. “This idea that it’s
the pandemic of the unvaccinated, it’s just a total lie.… If thevaccine is so great, then how
come people are still getting COVID, spreading COVID, and unfortunately dying fromCOVID?” he asked, rhetorically.
Aaron Rodgers: Not exactly a team player.
But his input is misleading; theCDC states that the unvacciing to Mexico to have fun seemed so selfish
nated are 5.8 times more likely to contract
in light of the racial violence that was facing
COVID and 14 times more likely to die fromit, showing both the effectiveness of the jab
the country,” he wrote in a 2017 book detailand the tendency of the inoculated to dising his relationship with coach John
proportionately spread the virus. Vaccines
Wooden. In 2016, the platform was used by
Colin Kaepernick when he knelt during thearen’t 100% effective, but neither are helmets. Will Rodgers play next Sunday withnational anthem to protest racial inequality
out one?
and police brutality—a move that ended hisRodgers continued by noting that vaccareer as an NFL quarterback. What does
cines might have adverse effects on fertility,
Rodgers risk in spewing his dangerous falsities? A $14,650 fine for violating the NFL’sand admitting that he’d treated a bout withmask policy and a local partnership with
COVID with the anti-parasitic drug IverPrevea Health. While the backlash coming
mectin on the advice of comedian Joe Roat Rodgers and Irving might mirror thosegan. (Both have been debunked by the CDC
who were vilified after standing up for admiand the FDA.) The quarterback missed one
rable causes (Ali was referred to as thegame due to testing positive, but can con“black Benedict Arnold”), time will not turntinue playing with the risk of more fines if hetheir fiction into fact.
breaks protocol. Among the lengthy list ofrestrictions, unvaccinated NFL players must
The megaphone of fame is one that ensocially distance and wear masks at indoor
tails responsibility, especially in the misinfacilities, and have to travel separately fromformation era we live in today. While
the team. There are other outspoken antiexperts have varying opinions on the effectiveness of celebrity vaccine endorsements,
vax athletes, such as tennis star Novak
even the most minimal of results can be lifeDjokovic, who has put his status in January’ssaving amid a global pandemic. Just ask
Australian Open in limbo as he refuses to reveal his vaccination status. But Irving andthose who remember Elvis Presley receiving
Rodgers are major celebrities as well as suthe polio vaccine on The Ed Sullivan Show, in
perstar athletes, which is what makes their
1956, which was credited for a massive surge
outrageous—and highly publicized—comin teenage vaccinations. While they don’t
ments so damaging.
command anything near the star power thatPresley did (nobody does, in our age of divided media bubbles), athletes like Irving
and Rodgers are looked up to as role models
by a similar demographic. Their words carry
more weight than most—enough to overshadow genuine acts of social responsibility,
like what Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin accomplished by getting his entire football program vaccinated in a state that holds anabysmal 47% inoculation rate. Yes, Kiffin
was recognized for his efforts, such as on aninterview with MSNBC. But Irving and Rodgers are constantly in the headlines, an especially somber note given that the states theyplay in (New York and Wisconsin, respectively) are currently feeling the impact of
COVID surges.

MPH Photos / Shutterstock

In 2018, Fox News host Laura Ingraham
unintentionally coined what would becomea rallying cry for athlete activists: “Shut up
and dribble.” The comments were aimed at
Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James, after
he criticized President Donald Trump;
James would later use that phrase as the titleof a miniseries he produced that exploredactivism in the NBA. But in the mess that Irving, Rodgers, and others have created, thescientific community probably now agrees
with Ingraham.
One has to think that a socially active
sports star like James mobilizing this issue would go a long way toward recovering the reputation lost to the athlete’s
voice these past two years. But the Kingof the Court is not the King of Rock ’n’
Roll: James maintains that he doesn’t
consider vaccination to be a social justiceissue, despite CDC data showing that minority groups are statistically more likely
to succumb to COVID, for multiple reasons.
As James and other stars know, there’s
more to players than just the game. But insuch a critical time, will they speak up to protect the legacy of their predecessors? Or will
they continue to simply shut up and … well,
you know the rest.

31
December 2021

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