Concert Review: Bryan Ferry at the Palace Theatre in Saint Paul

Bryan Ferry on stage at the Palace Theatre, Saint Paul, August 5, 2017. (Photo by Pondie.)

Marquee of the Palace Theatre in Saint Paul. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Last night I saw one of my favorite musicians live at the Palace Theatre in Saint Paul: Bryan Ferry. I’ve been a fan of Ferry’s music, both solo and with Roxy Music, for several years, and he’s been at the top of my list of artists that I hadn’t seen in concert yet. Ferry didn’t disappoint, bringing a set list full of gems from his formidable back catalogue. At age 71, Ferry still looks dapper, stylish and handsome as ever. He didn’t say much during the concert, and the closest he got to telling any stories was saying, “These songs are from here, there, and everywhere.” Ferry’s nine member band did a terrific job of re-creating tricky Roxy Music songs like “Ladytron” and “If There is Something.” Kudos to all of the band members, especially Jorja Chalmers, who handled saxophone duties, a job essential to capturing the sound of Roxy Music songs. 

Opening for Ferry was the British singer/songwriter Judith Owen, who played a half hour of songs that reminded me of Carole King’s work from the 1970’s. Owen was playing with bassist Leland Sklar, who has played on over 2,000 recordings, according to Wikipedia. Sklar has played on many of James Taylor’s albums, as well as albums by Leonard Cohen, Phil Collins, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, Rod Stewart, and Barbra Streisand. Owen also featured a percussionist, cello, and violin, which lent her songs an engaging sound. Fun fact: Judith Owen is married to Harry Shearer, well known for playing bassist Derek Smalls in This is Spinal Tap and for voicing numerous characters on The Simpsons.

Ferry played keyboards on quite a few songs, and also blew some nice harmonica solos on a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate,” and the old chestnut “Let’s Stick Together.” As a vocalist, Ferry still smolders effectively, even if he’s lost some of his top range-the high notes on “More than This” just aren’t quite there anymore. But Ferry’s voice still has great emotion in it, and his voice now adds a melancholy vulnerability to his songs. 

My only disappointment from the set list is that Ferry didn’t sing any of the songs from his most recent solo album, 2014’s excellent “Avonmore.” (Which I reviewed back in 2014 here.) Well, and if I’m being honest, there are some Roxy Music songs like “Over You,” “Dance Away,” and “Same Old Scene” that I would have loved to hear as well. But that’s a small quibble when you’re seeing a rock legend up close. I was a little surprised that Ferry sang “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” which has to be the weirdest Roxy Music song. It’s a good song, but it is weird-it’s a critique of capitalism as Ferry gets a little too attached to a blow-up doll. The lyrics aren’t sung, but spoken like a prose poem. 

The Palace Theatre was a superb venue for Bryan Ferry, as its style of decaying glamor fits his own aesthetics quite well. The open seating on the floor meant that my wife and I were very close to Ferry, and it was fun to watch his facial expressions throughout the show. It’s very evident, for all of his British reserve, that he really enjoys what he does. Ferry seemed quite touched by the huge audience reaction at the end of the show, which he fully deserved. 

Set list:

The Main Thing

Slave to Love

Ladytron

Out of the Blue

Simple Twist of Fate

A Waste Land

Windswept

Bête Noire

Zamba

Stronger Through the Years

Can’t Let Go

Remake-Remodel

In Every Dream Home a Heartache

If There is Something

More than This

Avalon

Love is the Drug

Virginia Plain

Let’s Stick Together

What Goes On

Jealous Guy

Editions of You

Book Review: 1939: Countdown to War, by Richard Overy (2009)

Cover of 1939: Countdown to War, by Richard Overy, 2009. My American paperback edition replaces Neville Chamberlain's picture with Winston Churchill, which doesn't make sense, since Chamberlain was Prime Minister in 1939. But Churchill's face is no doubt more familiar to American readers.

Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister from 1937-1940.

Historian Richard Overy.

We all know how World War II started. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Simple, right? Well, like many events in history, there’s more complexity than we might think. In his 2009 book 1939: Countdown to War, British historian Richard Overy takes us through the final week before the invasion day by day. Even during those last days of August, there was still hope among many leaders in France and England that war could somehow be avoided. 

Forming the backdrop for the events of 1939 was the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1938, which had ended with the Munich Agreement. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously said of the Munich Agreement, “I believe it is peace for our time.” Chamberlain hoped that Hitler would be satisfied after Munich, but instead, Hitler made it clear that Germany wanted the Danzig Corridor, former German territory that had become part of Poland after the Treaty of Versailles. Poland allied itself militarily with France and England in 1939, and those two countries pledged to come to the aid of Poland if Germany invaded. 

Throughout 1939: Countdown to War, Overy deftly explores the hour by hour diplomacy of the final week of peace. Overy makes it quite clear that Hitler never believed that France and England would actually keep their word to Poland. As always, Hitler used best case scenario reasoning to inform his planning. Since he thought that France and England wouldn’t actually fight him over Poland, then why not take Poland? Adding to Hitler’s hubris was the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on August 23^rd, which ensured that, for the moment, the Soviet Union would not enter into a war against Germany. Hitler thought he could have a local war with no other countries interfering. The Non-Aggression Pact emboldened Hitler to go ahead with the invasion of Poland, which was scheduled to begin on August 26^th. However, Hitler soon canceled the invasion, which was then rescheduled for September 1^st. 

One thing I particularly enjoyed about 1939 was Overy’s nuanced portrait of Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain’s historical reputation has ebbed and flowed, but I think in the minds of most people he remains the symbol of appeasement. Chamberlain remains fixed in memory as the man waving the paper saying “it is peace for our time,” in contrast to the pugnacious Winston Churchill saying “We will fight them on the beaches.” Of course, we in 2017 have the benefit of hindsight-we know that Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” will blow up in less than a year. But, as Overy shows, Chamberlain changed his mind about Hitler after Munich: “Neville Chamberlain is often painted as a man who searched for any way of evading conflict in 1939, but though he always thought peace preferable to war, he had few illusions about Hitler by the beginning of 1939. In March he described Hitler to a guest as ‘the blackest devil he had ever met.’” (p.15) Chamberlain was not going to back down if Germany invaded Poland, a point that he made clear in a letter he sent to Hitler on August 22, 1939.

Overy does an excellent job of describing the diplomatic exchanges among the countries during these days, and the back-channel attempts at brokering some kind of deal to avoid a war. There was hope on both sides that a major war could be avoided-some in England and France thought that standing firm would cause Hitler to back down, and Hitler remained stubbornly convinced that England and France would never honor their treaty obligations to Poland and actually fight. 

Overy unearthed an odd attempt at back-channel diplomacy by Birger Dahlerus, a Swedish businessman who had connections to English diplomats and also to Hermann Göring. Dahlerus worked furiously to bring both sides together to broker a deal, and he met with Göring early in August, but was unsuccessful.

Even after the invasion of Poland on September 1^st, there was still drama, as Chamberlain presented Hitler with an ultimatum demanding that German troops withdraw from Poland immediately. Originally, the ultimatum did not have a time limit, which left members of Parliament confused as to whether a state of war existed or not. A time limit was set for 11AM on September 3, 1939, and when there was no response from Germany; Chamberlain announced that England and Germany were at war. World War II had begun.

1939: Countdown to War is a slim volume, just 124 pages, not counting footnotes and index, but it tells the story of a momentous time in history, as Europe entered into another destructive war.

Book Review: Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal, by Margarita Engle (2014)

Paperback cover of Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal, by Margarita Engle, 2014. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Author Margarita Engle.

The Panama Canal was one of the largest construction projects in the world. Originally begun by the French government, and then finished by the United States in 1914, the Canal cost some $375 million dollars, and many human lives. More than 5,000 workers died during the U.S. phase of construction, in addition to 22,000 workers who died during the French attempt. Margarita Engle’s 2014 novel Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal, tells the story of the building of the Canal. Written in verse, it focuses on Mateo, a 14-year-old boy from Cuba who takes a job building the canal in order to escape an abusive father, Henry, who is from Jamaica, and Anita, a native Panamanian girl who sells herbs and medicines. 

The title Silver People comes from the racial stratification among those workers hired to build the Canal. White workers and engineers from the United States were paid in gold, while darker-skinned workers from the Caribbean countries were paid in silver. Workers were also housed in different places according to their skin color. Engle paints a vivid picture of the racial segregation among the workers, and the resentment that it brought.

Engle does an excellent job of capturing the voices of the different characters, and she even has sections of the book that are narrated by the trees, or by howler monkeys in the rainforest jungle. It’s an interesting technique that adds to the picture of a landscape being radically transformed in the service of commerce. 

Silver People is written for young adults, and I would recommend it to anyone, youth or adult, who is interested in learning more about the construction of the Panama Canal.

Reflections on the 14th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference

Poster for the 14th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference in Saint Paul, Minnesota, 2017. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Me with Sam Lanahan, the grandson of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, June 26, 2017.

Author Scott Donaldson speaking at the Conference, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Last week I attended the 14^th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference in Saint Paul. It was an excellent opportunity to meet some of the leading Fitzgerald experts from around the world, and to indulge my own burgeoning fascination with Fitzgerald. 

I read Fitzgerald in high school, back in the late 1990’s, The Great Gatsby in 10^th grade, and some of his short stories after that. But for some reason, even though I loved Fitzgerald’s writing and bought several of his books, I didn’t go on a Fitzgerald binge the way I did with Hemingway at around the same age. So now I’m finally really digging into Fitzgerald’s life and work, and it’s been richly rewarding. He’s a great author who is still having a significant impact on popular culture, and he led a richly fascinating life. His writing obviously still speaks to people in a meaningful way in 2017, 121 years after his birth. 

I was excited to meet several of the scholars attending the conference, but Scott Donaldson was the one I was most excited about. I’ve been aware of Scott Donaldson’s work for about twenty years. At some point in 1995 or 1996, during my freshman year of high school, I picked up The Stories of John Cheever. The compact little paperback, with its distinctive bright red cover with the large, swooping C on it, quickly transported me to a post-war suburbia full of drinking, adultery, and page after page of gorgeous prose. At some point over the next year or two, I found Donaldson’s 1988 biography of Cheever at a bargain bookstore in an outlet mall. I read bits and pieces of it, but didn’t read it cover to cover, and I added it to my growing Cheever collection. A couple of years later, I learned that Donaldson and I were both alums of The Blake School. My awareness of Donaldson’s work has increased in the last couple of years, with the reissue of his biography of Fitzgerald, Fool for Love, by the University of Minnesota Press in 2012, and his 2015 book The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography. I recently reviewed Fool for Love and his 1999 book Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald. 

Scott Donaldson was very nice, and he was actually the first person I talked to at the conference, he was walking out of Hotel 340 as I was walking in, so I said hi to him, told him I’d enjoyed his books, and mentioned that we had Blake in common. He said he’s always looked back fondly on his time at Blake. His talk Monday afternoon was about Tender is the Night, and he said his next book will be about Tender. Later in the week I was able to ask Donaldson if he had known William F. Buckley when he was at Yale. Donaldson laughed and said, “I used to beat him at bridge all the time!” It turns out that Donaldson and his roommate regularly played Buckley and his roommate. He told me that it was obvious then that Buckley was brilliant. I knew that Donaldson had written a biography of Charlie Fenton, a professor at Yale who taught a class called “Daily Themes.” I told Donaldson that Buckley also had great things to say about the “Daily Themes” class. 

I also met Sam Lanahan, grandson of Scott and Zelda and son of Scottie Fitzgerald. He gave a talk about some of Zelda’s relatives, which was fascinating and informative. Lanahan has some resemblance to his grandfather—the eyes and nose especially. Lanahan was also an excellent speaker, with a quiet charisma that drew the audience in. As I was listening to him, I thought, “This is probably similar to what Scott Fitzgerald was like.” I chatted with Lanahan briefly after his talk, and he was a delight. 

One of the highlights of the conference was an early morning session with A. Scott Berg, who has written acclaimed biographies of Fitzgerald’s editor Maxwell Perkins, Charles Lindbergh, and Woodrow Wilson. (I reviewed Berg’s biography of Wilson here.) Berg was a fascinating speaker; I could have listened to him all day. He’s actually named after F. Scott Fitzgerald, as his mother was reading Fitzgerald’s novels when she was pregnant with him. Berg and Chris Keyser discussed the upcoming Amazon TV series The Last Tycoon, based on Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel. It sounds pretty interesting, and the clips they showed made it look good. I hope it’s better than the 1976 movie that Elia Kazan directed, which I reviewed here.

I also heard James L.W. West III speak, he’s the editor of the Cambridge edition of Fitzgerald’s collected works; the 16^th volume in the series is due to be released later this summer. Anne Margaret Daniel spoke at the same session—she’s the editor of I’d Die for You, the volume of uncollected Fitzgerald stories that just came out in April, which I reviewed here. I asked Daniel after her talk about the uncollected pages still in the Fitzgerald collection at Princeton—what Fitzgerald called false starts—and if she thought those would ever be published. She said they wouldn’t, since they were so clearly unfinished and never meant for publication. But they’re still available for scholars to see at Princeton. In that same session Don Skemer spoke. Skemer is the Curator of Manuscripts at Princeton and handles the Fitzgerald papers there. He spoke about how Fitzgerald’s papers came to Princeton, and he dispelled the notion that the University didn’t want Fitzgerald’s papers. That was what I had read, so I was glad to know that Princeton understood the value of Fitzgerald’s papers, even though he was out of fashion as a writer at the time they accepted the papers. There was initially some reluctance on the part of John Biggs, the executor of Fitzgerald’s will, and Scottie Fitzgerald to allow access to letters that described Zelda’s mental illnesses, but with her death in 1948 the decision was made not to restrict access to Fitzgerald’s papers. I think this was a very smart move, as the open availability of Fitzgerald’s papers has aided so much of the research that has produced biographies that continue to kindle interest in Fitzgerald’s life and work. 

There was also a superb bus tour of Saint Paul’s Cathedral Hill/Summit Avenue/Crocus Hill/Summit Hill neighborhood, where Fitzgerald grew up. I was fortunate enough to be on the same bus as Dave Page, the leading expert on Fitzgerald’s time in Saint Paul. Page was the co-author of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Towards the Summit, which I reviewed here, and the sole author of the recently published F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer and His Friends at Home. Page knows just about all there is to know about Fitzgerald’s time in Saint Paul, and I learned a lot of new information on his tour. 

The Fitzgerald Conference was a lot of fun, and thanks should go to Fitzgerald in Saint Paul for helping organize it.