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‘Unhalfbricking’: Fairport Convention Change Folk Music Forever
Fairport Convention’s third album, ‘Unhalfbricking,’ was a folk-rock game-changer. It was also touched by unspeakable tragedy.
On its July 1969 release, Unhalfbricking, the third album from British folk-rockers Fairport Convention, should have been a cause for celebration. It was the sound of a band approaching a creative peak while finding their identity; a daring set that drew upon traditional English folk and US rock to create something new. It represented a giant step forward for songwriters Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson and saw the band welcome folk violinist Dave Swarbrick into the \fold.
But two months before its release, tragedy struck. In the early hours of May 12, 1969, the band were driving back to London after a gig at Mothers in Birmingham when roadie Harvey Bramham fell asleep at the wheel. Thompson, who was sat next to the driver, noticed the van was careering towards a motorway pole and grabbed the wheel. “Harvey woke up and tried to correct the steering, but it was too late,” Thompson wrote in his 2022 memoir Beeswing, “We began to roll to the left, and as we spiralled into a long tunnel, all I could silently scream to myself was, NO, NO, NO – THIS IS NOT HAPPENING.’”
All of the passengers were thrown out of the vehicle, except for guitarist Simon Nicol, who had been suffering from a migraine and was stretched out on the floor. Martin Lamble, the 19-year-old drummer whose fluid, jazzy playing set Fairport apart from the folk crowd, and Jeannie Franklyn, a fashion designer whom Thompson had recently begun dating, suffered fatal injuries. Thompson, bassist Ashley Hutchings, Braham, and Nicol were all injured. Vocalist Sandy Denny was traveling in another van, but was understandably traumatized by the event. At a point where Fairport should have been on the verge of a great breakthrough, they seemed broken beyond repair.
Only a few months earlier, Fairport began recording Unhalfbricking with a sense of purpose, with Denny’s traditional folk background ever more influential. “Fairport now seemed to be on a path,” Thompson reflected in Beeswing. “Even if we could not truly articulate our destiny, the ingredients were there – playing some traditional British songs and writing our own material in a British style. All we lacked was a mission statement.”
U.S. added 206,000 jobs in June. Total number of jobs created under Biden now is 15.7 million
Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
July 6, 2024
For all that certain members of the media continue their freakout over Biden’s electability after his appearance in last Thursday’s event on CNN, it is Trump and his Republicans who appear to be nervous about the upcoming election.
Journalist Jennifer Schulze of Heartland Signal noted today that as of 8:00 this morning, the New York Times had published 192 pieces on Biden’s debate performance: 142 news articles and 50 opinion pieces. Trump was covered in 92 stories, about half of which were about the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. Although Trump has frequently slurred his words or trailed off while speaking and repeatedly fell asleep at his own criminal trial, none of the pieces mentioned Trump’s mental fitness.
But for all of what independent journalists are calling a “feeding frenzy,” egged on by right-wing media figures, it seems as if the true implications of Project 2025 are starting to gain traction and the Trump campaign recognizes that the policies that document advocates are hugely unpopular.
On July 2, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts assured Trump ally Steve Bannon’s followers that they are winning in what he called “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” In March, Roberts told former Trump administration official and now right-wing media figure Sebastian Gorka about Project 2025: “There are parts of the plan that we will not share with the Left: the executive orders, the rules and regulations. Just like a good football team we don’t want to tip off our playbook to the Left.”
This morning, although Roberts has described Project 2025 as “institutionalizing Trumpism,” Trump’s social media feed tried to distance the former president from Project 2025. “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” the post read. Despite this disavowal of any knowledge of the project, it continued: “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
In what appeared to be a coordinated statement, the directors of Project 2025 wrote on social media less than two hours later that they “do not speak for any candidate.”
Aside from the fact that “[a]nything they do, I wish them luck,” sounds much like the signaling Trump did to the Proud Boys when he told them to “stand back and stand by,” Trump’s assertion and Project 2025’s response can’t possibly erase the many and deep ties of the Trump camp to Project 2025. Juliet Jeske of Decoding Fox News noted that Trump’s name shows up on more than 190 pages of the Project 2025 playbook.
Rebekah Mercer, who sits on the board of the Heritage Foundation, was one of Trump’s top donors in 2016; her family founded and operated Cambridge Analytica, the company that misused the data of millions of Facebook users to push pro-Trump and anti-Clinton material in 2016. Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has appeared in a Project 2025 video. Trump’s own super PAC has been running ads promoting Project 2025, calling it “Trump’s Project 2025,” and many of its policies—killing the Department of Education, erasing the separation of church and state, ending renewable energy programs and ramping up use of fossil fuels, deporting immigrants—are also Trump’s.
Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, as well as both of its associate directors, Spencer Chretien and Troup Hemenway, were in charge of personnel in Trump’s White House, and the theme of Project 2025 is that “people are policy,” by which they mean that hand-picked loyalists must replace civil servants. Trump’s former body man John McEntee, who reentered the White House as a senior advisor after having to leave because he failed a background check, was in charge of hiring in the last months of the Trump White House; he helped to draft Project 2025. Key Trump ally Russell Vought wrote the section of Project 2025 that called for an authoritarian leader; he is also on the platform committee of the Republican National Convention.
If indeed Trump knows nothing about Project 2025 and has no idea who is behind it, his cognitive ability is rotten. As former chair of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele wrote, “Since [Project 2025] is designed to institutionalize Trumpism and you know nothing about it, then why do you echo some of its policy priorities during your rallies? Coincidence? And how exactly don’t you know that Project 2025 Director Paul Dans served as your chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, and Associate Director Spencer Chretien served as your special assistant and associate director of presidential personnel? And folks say we should be worried about Biden.”
Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 indicates just how toxic that plan is with voters. As political scientist Ian Bremmer dryly noted, it seems that “the second [A]merican revolution apparently [is] not polling as well as the first in internal focus groups.” Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson was even more direct, saying that Trump was trying to distance himself from Project 2025 because “most of it polls about like Ebola,” the deadly virus that causes severe bleeding and organ failure, and has a mortality rate of 80 to 90%.
The extremism of the MAGA Republicans was on display in another way today as well after The New Republic published a June 30 video of North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, currently the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, saying to a church audience about their opponents—whom he identified in a scattershot speech as anything from communists to “wicked people” to those standing against “conservatives”—”Kill them! Some liberal somewhere is gonna say that sounds awful. Too bad!… Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it.”
Today the Vatican turned against one of those extremists when it excommunicated pro-Trump archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was the Vatican’s diplomat to the U.S. from 2011 to 2016, for “schism” after he refused to recognize the authority of Pope Francis. Viganò has repeatedly attacked Francis’s Catholic Church for being “inclusive, immigrationist, eco-sustainable, and gay-friendly.”
Also today, Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing Trump’s criminal trial for retaining hundreds of classified documents, to dismiss charges that can no longer be prosecuted in light of the Supreme Court’s decision that a president cannot be charged for crimes committed while engaging in “official acts.” They also called the case “politically motivated” and asked Cannon to stop the case entirely in light of Justice Clarence Thomas’s suggestion that Special Counsel Jack Smith was not properly appointed.
The other big news today was that the U.S. added 206,000 jobs in June, bringing the total number of jobs created under this administration to 15.7 million. Last month’s numbers were, once again, higher than economists expected and, according to economic analyst Steven Rattner, above job growth levels before the pandemic. He added that these jobs are not simply a bounceback from the depths of the pandemic: 6.2 million more Americans are employed now than before Covid hit.
Poking fun at the calls for Biden to step down, conservative lawyer George Conway posted: “Biden needs to RESIGN NOW before any more of these terrible job things are created.”
In a speech today in Madison, Wisconsin, Biden vowed to stay in the race, and the speech appeared strong enough that right-wing extremists, including Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and activist Laura Loomer, posted on social media—falsely—that he was having a medical emergency aboard Air Force One. Tonight, George Stephanopoulos of ABC interviewed Biden without a teleprompter or notes, focusing only on Biden’s age without any questions about policy. ABC News posted the interview transcript with the president’s conversation portrayed the “g”s dropped off the words and with other colloquial pronunciations spelled out, as if it were dialect. Trump, whose words the press tends to turn into clean prose, has refused to do an interview under the same conditions.
The Great Unconformity: On heading to a future with a deleted past.
The Sarah Kendzior Newsletter
July 3, 2024
The week before my country stopped having a government and started having a king, I went searching for the Great Unconformity. I drove cliffside five thousand feet high, gazing down at crushed cars that didn’t make it.
The Great Unconformity is evident only in its absence. It does not tell the whole story but highlights missing chapters — if you already know enough to know that they are missing. It is lost time in its most literal sense, deleted history bracketed in rock.
I was looking for the Great Unconformity because I wanted assurance I could find it — that I was still sharp, still nobody’s fool. I’m going to need those skills, because our present is dying a little more every day.
We are heading into a future without a past.
That is nothing new for autocracies. Pol Pot proclaimed history irrelevant and started his rule at Year Zero. Stalin pioneered the deletion of dissidents a half century before photoshop. The US, the British, and Israel peddled tales of “lands with no people” while murdering the indigenous people inhabiting them.
Every founding national myth contains a lie. The cruelest lies are those that succeed through erasure.
As the US lurches to autocracy, I turn to geology, because it is an honest broker. It retains every painstaking detail: rocks that grow an inch each millennium, fossils encased in stone. Every rock is a coffin, every coffin is a book.
Geology is an ally at the end of the world. It assures you there was a world, there is a world, and you are part of it.
Except, of course, for The Great Unconformity.
The Great Unconformity is a mystery: a gap of missing time in the geological record between 100 million and 1 billion years long. Traces of it are found in rock formations around the world. There are competing theories as to how The Great Unconformity happened — erosions, explosions. The evidence of absence looks different depending on where you go.
My husband and I began our search for The Great Unconformity by accidentally entering the Colorado National Monument. This would seem impossible, seeing as the Colorado National Monument is 20,000 acres of canyons with sheer cliff walls, but we managed to arrive with oblivious aplomb.
The culprit was a battered guidebook of “America’s Most Scenic Drives” that has sat in the backseat over our twenty years of marriage. I flipped through it on a whim while my husband drove, checking out the Colorado section.
“It says here,” I read, “that if we go to Grand Junction, drive six miles past a cattle guard onto a dirt path, turn onto something called Divide Road, and find the creek that flows two ways, that we’ll have a perfect view of The Great Unconformity!”
My husband agreed that this was a great idea. A mountaintop is a bad place for whims.
We made it to Grand Junction, failed to find a cattle guard, lost GPS, and wound up on the entry road to the Colorado National Monument. We paid the entrance fee, figuring our dirt path maybe got turned into a national monument sometime after the guidebook was published. We were Missourians in Colorado, high on altitude and delusion.
“Do you know where the Great Unconformity is?” we asked a cashier at the gift shop.
“The what?”
“The Great Unconformity!” we cried.
“What does it look like?”
“Nothing!” we said. The Seinfeld of geology.
“Then why are you looking for it?”
“Because we want to see things that aren’t there!”
To the relief of the clerk, a park ranger appeared, confirmed that there was indeed something called The Great Unconformity in the park, but that it was “like, everywhere — there, only not there. You’ll know it when you don’t see it. It’s hard to explain.”
At the Colorado National Monument, The Great Unconformity appears — or doesn’t — as a gap between the brick-red Chinle Formation of 210 million years ago, and the dark gray igneous rocks from the Precambrian era of 1.7 billion years ago.
What happened in between? Who knows. Two layers of time sit on top of each other, like everything’s cool, like there’s not an invisible billion-year mystery gap. All is red or brown or grey and laden in shadow. We were supposed to notice when something looked off and use our knowledge of what looks normal to render that judgment.
“I think I see it,” my husband said at every bend.
“Where?”
“It’s that thing.”
“What thing?”
“You know, the grey, the red — that thing!”
“Oh yeah, that’s it! Or under it. Or above?”
“Or that’s not it at all,” he said sadly.
“Why are you so obsessed with finding nothing when there’s so many things to look at?!” our son demanded from the backseat. He was alone; our daughter was at camp. He was stuck on a road trip with Vladimir and Estragon for parents.
“Finding nothing is important,” I said, “because it’s not there, and we don’t know why! So we need to see it, and then we’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“Why there’s nothing instead of something. Or how. How nothing replaced something.”
“Who cares?”
“I’ll care when our time is labeled nothing, too,” I said, but only in my mind.
Out loud, I told him to get good pictures of the cliffs to show his sister.
Maybe he’d find The Great Unconformity, and capture it, and I’d rest, knowing it could be done.