CULTURAL BITS: "When I Was A Boy," by John Entwistle and The Who.

John Entwistle (1944 - 2002) played bass guitar for The Who, but "Thunderfingers" was much more than just one-half of the band's rhythm section. Entwistle was a multi-instrumentalist who could sing and write his own songs. His contributions to The Who's overall sound may not seem apparent at first, but guitarist (and musical mastermind) Pete Townshend understood quite well.

John’s bass sound was like a Messiaen organ. Every note, every harmonic in the sky. When he passed away and I did the first few shows without him, with Pino [Palladino] on bass, he was playing without all that stuff ... I said, "Wow, I have a job.”

A quick primer.

As for Enwistle's songwriting, a dry and often black humor was his specialty.

"My Wife" perhaps is best known, with "Boris the Spider" coming next. There's also "Whiskey Man" from the band's earlier days. They're wonderful, and there also are dark horses like "Heaven and Hell," a non-album track at one time featured in The Who's live shows; "Success Story" from The Who By Numbers, a wry tale of rock and roll religion; and the science fiction saga of "905," which is a highlight of Who Are You, the band's final album with Keith Moon.

One I particularly enjoy is another non-album track, "When I Was A Boy," which borrows just a bit of inspiration from the verse in Corinthians:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Entwistle's song begins accordingly.

When I was a baby I hadn't a care in the world,
But now I'm a man, my troubles fill my head,
When I was five it was good to be alive,
But now I'm a man, I wish that I were dead.

And later:

When I was a boy I had the mind of a boy,
But now I'm a man, ain't got no mind at all,
When I was in my teens I had my share of dreams,
But now I'm a man, ain't got no dreams at all.

The chorus arrives at the point.

My how time rushes by
The moment you're born you start to die
Time waits for no man
And your life's spent, it's over before you begin

Or maybe those aren't the actual words in the last line, even if they're frequently reported as such. What I hear is this:

"And your lifespan is over before it begins," or even better, "And your lifespan is over before it began."

Any way you cut it, it's a downer of a song calculated to step all over your buzz -- and the older I become, the more I can relate to it. At 59, I've outlived "The Ox" by 20 months ... but it's all downhill from here.

As comedian Rodney Dangerfield said, "At my age, if I don't drink, don't smoke, and eat only certain foods, what can I look forward to? From this point on, if I take excellent care of myself -- I'll get very sick and die."

Entwistle didn't wait for old age. He left behind one hell of a legacy, though.

“When I Was a Boy”: Adulthood Stinks

CULTURAL BITS: Bessie Smith.

If I go to church on Sunday
Then just shimmy down on Monday
Ain't nobody's bizness if I do

Is the film clip from Ken Burns' Jazz series? That'd be my guess. A few days ago I streamed a couple of Bessie Smith's compilation albums, and if you know her recorded output by "Gimme A Pigfoot" alone, there's lots more of interest in the archive. Insofar as Bessie Smith could do it her way, she did. The result was a canon that has endured for 80-odd years since her final recordings.

Bessie Smith Cultural Center

At an early age Bessie began performing on the streets of Chattanooga. In pursuit of a better life, Bessie left Chattanooga in 1912 to join a traveling minstrel and vaudeville show as a dancer and singer with Pa and Ma Rainey. As a teenager, Ma Rainey became Bessie’s mentor and she stayed with the show until 1915. She gradually developed her own following in the south and along the eastern seaboard. Ma Rainey greatly influenced Bessie’s showmanship, however Bessie’s elegant contralto and her hypnotizing delivery was very different from that of Rainey.

By the time of her death, Bessie was known around the world. She was a beloved diva who appeared with the best players of the day at sold out concerts in theaters coast to coast. Bessie’s pleasing contralto and mesmerizing showmanship propelled her from poverty to international fame as a singer of “classic” blues tunes, many of which she wrote and co-wrote. Before the Great Depression, Bessie was the highest-paid black entertainer in the world, collecting as much as two thousand dollars a week to sing such songs as her own, “Nobody Knows you When You’re Down and Out,” “Empty Bed Blues,” and “Backwater Blues,” accompanied by the finest musicians of the day, including Louis Armstrong, Lonnie Johnson, and Benny Goodman.

CULTURAL BITS: Frans Masereel and Hugo Claus.

Back in 2004 or thereabouts, NABC's founding brewer Michael Borchers produced a damn fine Belgian ale.

Silent Oath

The joy in Belgium

Drawn from an episode in Hugo Claus’s novel, “The Sorrow of Belgium,” it was Belgian-style Brown, perhaps with a hint of intentional sourness. A portion was aged in oak chips.

"Perhaps" used in reference to sourness aptly summarizes the improvisational nature of our early brewing experiments. Much fun, little pressure and financially sustainable. Those were the days.

As an aside, the novel by Claus (1929 - 2008) is wonderfully insightful, dealing with society and politics in Flanders (the Flemish-speaking half of Belgium) before and during WWII; specifically, Claus tackles the thorny issue of collaboration with the occupying Germans.

Having read the novel, and this being a period when I visited Belgium often, eventually I stumbled across Frans Masereel.

Frans Masereel: The First Woodcut Novelist, by Tamara Fultz (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

What defines our attraction to a particular artist? Education and experience can offer us opportunities to see an artist's work, but whether we like or truly appreciate it is dependent on individuality and personal taste. In my own work, I get to see a wide variety of art in books—from ancient to contemporary—and there are always some artists that I prefer over others. This post is a reflection on one of my favorites: Frans Masereel (1889–1972).

Masereel, a Belgian graphic artist, is considered by some to be the creator of the woodcut novel. There is a certain warmth and linear clarity to woodcuts that I find appealing: everything from the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) to the woodblock prints of Japanese artists in the ukiyo-e style. Masereel's woodcut novels fascinate me because in each one he creates a narrative using strictly images, no text—although there may be an introduction by Thomas Mann or some other great contemporary. For a modern-day equivalent to this kind of work, you might be familiar with the graphic novelist Eric Drooker, whose artwork in Flood! was heavily influenced by the novels of Masereel.

Thomas J. Watson Library has a number of Masereel's woodcut novels. Below are some images that I will let speak for themselves, just as Masereel would have done.

Somewhere online I found a Masereel woodcut of a tree, which may or may not have been an oak. Michael's beer was aged on oak chips, after all. The tree became the label for the ale, which wasn't brewed a second time. The label has eluded me, hidden in a banker's box. Eventually I'll find it.

For whatever reason, I still take much comfort in all this -- Masereel, Claus, Belgian ale, and their confluence in our embryonic brewery. My advice is to do some browsing and explore Masereel's world.