12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Definitve Look At Blaze's Early Creativiy, September 21, 2008
This review is from: Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley (North Texas Lives of Musicians) (Hardcover)
"Living In The Woods In A Tree" by Sybil Rosen
The name Blaze Foley is spoken with the kind of certain reverence reserved for very few among many artists, guitar pickers, and folk and country music aficionados. Since his murder in 1989 he has been eternally elusive as a person and the landscape and music communities around both the country and world reverberate and are replete with anecdotal tales of his life, in all of its virtuoso beauty and heartbreaking squalor, which have since made him a legend in death despite the fact that he was a musical vagabond and unknown to the masses as an artist for most of his life.
Blaze's story is one of constant evolutions of the personae while polishing his art much the same as the mourners now polish his black granite gravestone. Blaze Foley was an expert guitar picker and songwriter who was known almost as much for his rampant eccentricities as he was for his soulful blues and heartfelt performances. Before Blaze Foley was a moniker he was Depty Dawg and before that Tex and before that Michael David Fuller.
Depty Dawg happened to be the version that Sybil Rosen encountered and fell in love with in the mid 1970s. He was already an accomplished musician and harmonist after having traveled with his itinerant family as a gospel group for the majority of his youth. He was soon to have a creative hemorrhage and bleed out beauty with both the pen and the guitar which Sybil was to witness firsthand during her time with him when he wrote many of the achingly ethereal and enduring songs of his cherished oeuvre. In fact, most of the early ones are either for her or about her. Merle Haggard, John Prine, and a hundred other musicians of high regard have covered Blaze's ballad "If I Could Only Fly" and that was written as an ode of an inevitable tortured parting of ways with Sybil Rosen, the author of this book.
This creative breakthrough occurred while; due to poverty, romanticism, and the counterculture nature of the times the two were, in fact, living in the woods in a tree in the boondocks of Georgia. It was an old shell of a house that was never finished due to the constructor's love of a woman being thwarted. He had no reason to finish the project. After having ingratiated themselves to the good graces of the proprietor of the property at that time they were allowed to live in their symbiotic isolation and further grow their bond as soul mates. The Depty created and kept improving and it wasn't long until the only step left for him to take was the trial by fire rite of musical passage of playing his own songs live. He started playing little gigs in Georgia and as their love grew it wasn't too long before his talent was clearly of the caliber to take him elsewhere. It was now time to invent Blaze Foley.
Blaze wrote, sang, and played his drunken heart out in New York, Chicago, Georgia, Muscle Shoals, Alabama and, most famously and infamously in Austin and Houston, Texas. Texas was where Blaze would become a legend. Blaze never held a job due to his own version of artistic integrity and this, in small part, is what led to his and Sybil's parting in Chicago. Sybil went her way and Blaze went his.
Sybil Rosen had been inspired by Blaze and by a professor for whom she was a nanny to stretch her own creative wings. She began with short poems and quickly found her own literary way. She was on her own and with new loves and prodigiously producing manuscripts for plays and children's books after a short time. She even wrote for daytime soap operas but just for the check. Still, the lightning in her creative mind had struck. She gained more and more strength as a person with each success and with the help from her counselor who helped her to confront an identity problem in which she had always struggled to define herself. She shared that neurosis with Blaze but he confronted it by creating new selves. She had simply felt like a Jewish girl "Without a face."
The world then spun at a different angle and dropped a meteor on Sybil's perception. She received a phone call in 1989 to inform her that Blaze Foley was dead. The exact circumstances were unknown when she received the call except that he had been shot in Austin and it had been fatal. It had been nearly 10 years since she had seen Blaze and in going on with her life she had seldom thought about him although she kept reminders of her time in the woods with him on display wherever she lived. Also, she had saved her letters from him and a lock of his ponytail along with his 45 of "If I Could Only Fly" among her discarded drafts of her own plays from the same time period. She hadn't bothered to look at any of these in years but the idyllic time in the woods and their parting would soon come to haunt her in a regretful yet nostalgic way. Regretful in that she felt guilty about not thinking of her first true love in years and nostalgic to the tune of the wind in the trees and the memory of Blaze first playing the beautiful songs that he'd written for her in their Thoreau-like seclusion.
Many different winds began to blow chillingly and warmly of new revelations that were soon to adorn and ornament Sybil's perceptions and memories of who Blaze was by revealing who he had became in the years following his departure from her life. He had resumed his nomadic ways and kept playing and singing ceaselessly. He had kept his sensitive side intact but revealed little of himself outside his music. He had also become a legendary drunk who wore his politics and internal issues as belligerence toward other people. That notwithstanding, he also had an extremely devoted flock of admirers which was what kept him in bed and board most of the time. Everywhere she turned Sybil was finding out new stories about him posthumously from his Austin contingent and, in turn, she was able to innumerate the intimacies and qualities of the Depty Dawg she had known, loved, and lived with for those years in the 70s. For both sides these revelations were a shock and welcome elaboration on a life that was very compartmentalized. Blaze was many different things to many different people but above all, he was a master musician, songwriter, and guitar player.
It was certainly news to Sybil that Blaze had become a legend in his own time. The manner in which he was murdered (defending an elderly black friend) had duct taped the legitimacy of his legend forever as The Duct Tape Messiah. He was thusly named for his penchant for using duct tape on everything. Now Sybil was finally able to hear recorded songs that he had written while with and without her presence. She was left grasping and wondering about her personal influence and contribution to it all. She was left to wonder if she was Blaze's one true love and he was hers. His lyrics left the roadmap of a heart savagely traveled and abused, by self and others, and now she was to gas up the engine in her fertile mind to try to decipher it all.
There are throngs of new Blaze fans every year. There is a festival dedicated to him in Austin. The multitudes are now hearing what wasn't available for years. And his legend grows like jasmine.
Ms. Rosen has written one of the most compelling books that I have ever read and I read voraciously. Even if I didn't know every Blaze lyric I would have been enthralled. She seamlessly weaves the past and present through her narrative with such skill that it's never clunky or out of place exposition. Her analogies and timeless resonance with words had me reading individual sentences over again. I read the book twice in a row. Ms. Rosen's autobiographical segments are every bit as engrossing as her dialogue with Blaze, Marsha, Gurf and all of the unique people she talked to. Everyone had something to offer. This gem was also exquisitely edited and I can't over emphasize the gift of prose that churns through this book like one of their observed leaves effortlessly spinning toward the ground from the tree house of long ago.
"Stars burn out. Legends last forever."-Blaze Foley
Kevin W. Mattingly© 9-21-2008 Harrisburg Times
Amazon, Marsha Weldon and Sybil Rosen have my expressed written consent to use any of the content of my review as they so choose.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fine memoir of a sensitive soul, November 16, 2008
This review is from: Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley (North Texas Lives of Musicians) (Hardcover)
Sybil Rosen lived with Blaze Foley in the seventies, during a time of transformation in both of their lives. He wrote his best-known song, the beautiful "If I Could Only Fly," for her. Her relationship with Blaze may have been, as she describes it, a "fleeting idyll" in the grand scheme of things, but as she looks back from the distance of years through the uncertain filter of memory, and through the light of Blaze's subsequent notoriety and stature, she finds deep, resonant meaning. And this journey into her personal past also illuminates overall the vibrant times of these southern hippies, artists and musicians living the underground life in the seventies, and takes us down some little-known backwaters of the Texas music scene, providing a depth and color missing from many accounts of this rich, creative milieu. And, on top of everything else, Sybil Rosen is a skilled writer of beautiful, moving prose. This book is not only a welcome addition to UNT Press' fine Lives of Musicians series, but also to the literature of Texas music and to the literature of the counterculture. [...]
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