Pandemic Purgatories
A 50-year-old Japanese bluegrass band, new Indigenous-focused TV and radio, and a controversial Link Wray Covid PSA.
Hi, and welcome to the September edition of Switchblade.
Back in mid-August, I had this newsletter all drafted and ready to send, with a jaunty little intro about how we were embarking on a family road trip to Wisconsin Dells (the long-awaited makeup trip for our canceled March 2020 California vacation), and wouldn’t it be fun to finally get away after dealing with the shitstorms that have been 2020 and 2021….
Then, my 5-year-old got Covid. [Insert record scratch sound]
So we isolated, broke the bad news to the kids (again), canceled reservations (again), rearranged work schedules (again) and watched the Paw Patrol movie about a thousand times.
Physically, we’ve fared fine. The few adults who spend time with my son were vaccinated and no one exposed to him tested positive that we know of. I did end up getting sick, but not with Covid. (Shout out to our Pfizer vaxes for holding strong against wiping about a million Covid boogers from this kid’s nose and him coughing in our faces for two weeks.) He’s much better now. Luckily this all happened before the school year started. It could have been a lot worse, although we don’t yet know the long-term effects of Covid, much less those of the Delta variant on children.
Mentally and emotionally, it was a different story that I won’t get into here. The upside, though, is that I drastically cut back on my online time. If you do find yourself isolating for Covid, for your sanity I recommend not subjecting yourself to a daily stream of vacation photos, celebrity nonsense, anti-mask tirades and scary stats (like the fact that our state only had 1% of its ICU beds available when my son was at his sickest). By far the easiest social media detox I’ve ever done.
Link and the Death House
In case you’re wondering how I could possibly connect any of this to our boy Link Wray, it actually wasn’t that hard! Once we knew everyone would be fine, I couldn’t help but think how much more this situation would have sucked without being able to rely on streaming services, food and grocery delivery and Amazon Prime. Then I realized, duh: Link and everyone else did it that way in previous generations. And they didn’t even get the luxury of staying at home.
Link was one of about 70,000 people diagnosed with tuberculosis in the United States in 1956. At the time he was living in Washington, D.C. after serving in the Army during the Korean War a few years earlier. Suffering from a stubborn cough that turned bloody, he finally saw a doctor, got a diagnosis and underwent an emergency 8-hour surgery to remove his left lung. His eldest daughter, Beth, believes this probably happened at Walter Reed Medical Center. Link claimed later that his situation was so dire that the doctors didn’t think he’d make it through the surgery. Afterwards, he was warned that he’d never sing or play guitar again (we all know how that turned out).
Link, along with his younger brother, Doug, who had a milder case, were quarantined in a TB sanatorium, a place that Link called “the death house.” Along with cholera, Ebola and SARS, tuberculosis is still on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ list of diseases subject to Federal isolation and quarantine law. Covid is on the list, too, however I can say from our recent experience it’s pretty much on the honor system at this point.
Without medical records we can’t know exactly which sanatorium Link was sent to, but we do know that he spent the better part of a year recovering both from his extreme surgery and the TB. The likely facility was the crowded Glenn Dale Tuberculosis Hospital and Sanatorium in Maryland, where D.C.’s poorer and non-white patients went. (Wealthy patients, of course, could always shop around for nicer accommodations.)
Leah Y. Latimer wrote a fascinating article for The Washington Post in 2006 about her mother’s time in Glenn Dale after a TB diagnosis late in her fourth pregnancy. The new baby was whisked away at birth and left along with three other young kids in the care of Latimer’s father and aunt while the mother, shocked, worried and heartbroken, was sent by the department of health to quarantine at Glenn Dale.
Like Latimer’s mother, when Link entered quarantine he had to leave his young family behind: his wife, Elizabeth; toddler daughter, Beth; older brother Ray and his family; and his parents. It was totally normal for family members to have to up and leave when they had a contagious illness. Imagine having to move out of your home and miss out on a year of your marriage and your first child’s life because you happened to catch a disease that you couldn’t really prevent catching! If you were put on drugs to treat TB, at that time the standard recommendation was to continue that treatment for two years.
Latimer says in her article that having TB in the ‘50s was shameful. Some opted to tell neighbors and friends that a loved one had died rather than admit that they’d gone to the sanatorium. A lot of people believed it was hereditary. I don’t know that any of this stigma happened with Link, but I do know that once he got out, he felt “like death warmed over,” he said, still frail and weighing only 90 pounds when he created “Rumble” in July 1957.
A while back in the Link Wray fan group on Facebook, someone shared this clever photo: The cover of Link’s self-titled 1971 album (which features him in profile) with a KN95 mask placed on top to make it look like he was wearing it. Most members found it to be a funny pandemic PSA, but a couple got offended, claiming the photo was pushing a political agenda. I’m sorry, but the man in question…literally almost died from a highly contagious respiratory virus?? I think we can surmise that he—and anyone else who lived through tuberculosis, the Spanish Flu, polio or any another epi/pandemic—would be on the side of not contracting one. Just saying.
Side note: My dear friend Dr. Hannah Alsdurf, an infectious disease epidemiologist, has spent much of her career researching and fighting the spread of TB globally. Clearly she knows much more than I ever will. You can listen to her talk about it here.
Book Updates
No new news this month. Keep your eyes peeled for a 2022 publication date for my Link Wray biography. Bazillion Points, my publisher, has a dedicated email list for the book that you can sign up for. That and this newsletter are the best ways to find out about pre-orders, pub date announcements, events and everything else book-related when the time comes.
Here’s something I could use your help with: podcasts. Do you know of a great podcast that might want to welcome a Link Wray expert, review the book or feature Link’s story? Feel free to hit reply on this email and send me your suggestions. (And in case you missed it, I was on Who Cares About the Rock Hall talking about Link back in December 2020.)
Potpourri
Some things you may want to check out this month!
+ “Rumble” is nowhere to be found on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. I realized long ago that nitpicking a corporate music magazine’s best-of list is a fool’s errand (the “presented by Apple Music” banner at the top of the article is a big red flag for one thing!) but yikes. This seems like a big miss! You have to wonder if the voters just aren’t familiar with Link or the song. That’ll change in 2022, hopefully.
+ There’s a new Seattle-based Indigenous radio station called Daybreak Star Radio. Ninety percent of the artists played are Native American or First Nations.
+ Guns N’ Roses worked “Rumble” into “Welcome to the Jungle” at a Pennsylvania show this summer. As you know if you watched Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, Slash is a fan. (Widespread Panic also busted it out at a recent show.)
+ If you’re in Canada, Indigenous musician and activist Buffy Sainte-Marie has some Ontario tour dates coming up in late November. She’ll also be part of the Albuquerque Film and Music Experience later this month, which features Rhea Seehorn from Better Call Saul and a screening of Fanny: The Right to Rock, a music documentary I CANNOT wait for. Looks like the festival has virtual components if you can’t make it to ABQ.
+ This guy on Instagram is selling a cool oil painting likeness of Link’s 1971 album cover. It’s out of my budget right now, but if you’re looking to add some Link flair to your home, hit him up.
+ I never predicted I’d write this sentence, but I’m low-key obsessed with this Japanese bluegrass group, Bluegrass 45. Read all about their 50-odd-year history in this Bluegrass Today article.
+ Have you seen the Anthony Bourdain documentary, Roadrunner? Maybe it was that I was inside a movie theater for the first time in two years when I watched, but I loved it. Great music, too. It articulates so many of the misconceptions about the effects of fame on entertainers and creatives. It also examines the ethics of the tourism entertainment complex—and as someone who spent several years working in travel media, that theme really hit home.
+ I’m way late to this, but RIP ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill.
+ As a big Taika Waititi fan, I’m really excited to watch his new Indigenous-centric series Reservation Dogs, which began airing on FX on Hulu August 9. It was filmed on location in Oklahoma and of course Link’s music shows up. I’m a binge-watcher so I’ll be waiting until I have time to take it all in. If you’ve already started watching, let me know your thoughts!
That’s all I have for now! Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll talk to you in November. Taking October off to work on book edits and some other projects.
Dana