Bleeding In The Studio; a River Current of Truth
The most underrated, and misunderstood love story that is "Let Me Roll It" written by Paul McCartney, back in '73, performed by Cassie Latshaw and The Rowdy Come-Ups at Carney Fest in 2025.
C’mon dad, roll it to me.
C’mon dad, roll it to me before you go.
Desperation bleeds out of the childhood cry for affection in the form of a simple, yet meaningful round object. A small bouncing ball or maybe a wheel from a model airplane, fascinating in the eyes and minds of colonial childhoods of all those destined to muck over the world by way of indoctrinated fear and unresolved abandonment.
The wheel itself, if only for a moment in agony, approaching the wide-eyed child, connects father to an aperture of both past and present, which is a preview into the future, remembering his own erased childhood through the lens of his painful and daily reminder the world is inexplicably uncertain. Bastardly at times.
The wheel rolls down the hallway a bit, just out of reach of the child, and in a split moment, tears swell up in the father’s eyes as he heads out the door to go work a sixteen hour shift at the aeronautical plant; the systemic war machine in a rhythm of industrialized revolution. The child retrieves the object only to come back to the kitchen to see father gone. Another unexplained disappearance in the crushing confusion and rejection that simply is patriarchy in predestined isolation.
The child grows a bit older to attend school and enters a new world of discovery, laced with an undertone of sadness and anger, yet trauma bonds with fellow orphans of affection as nearly every other father, mother, aunt, and uncle in the village race off to stoke the stacks of manual and mechanized labor to support the imminent war machine of national defense against an encroaching force.
School kids cling to one another as life preservers while rejection and abandonment fill the drowning souls of innocence. By the time puberty hits, the next generation of footballers, scientists, machinists, nurses, and artists have chosen their mates (ride or die friends) through a band of connection, acceptance, and above all, celestial certainty nothing, not even war, will separate them from one another. Becoming in the revolutionary age of murderous nurturing of western society.
Wanna spin some of my dad’s records after school?
The predawn of mechanized british invasion by way of king cotton, slavery ya dig, made possible by aeronautical delivery of goods and services. The war machine of consumption.
A new millennium: Y2K.
My son was born in mid august, back in ‘01. A few weeks later, the first airliner hit the world trade center in new york. I sat on the couch with my uniform half on, lacing my boots to head into my twelve hour shift as the second one hit its target. I looked down the hall at his crib, then back down at my feet and finished lacing my boots.
Within thirteen months, I would roll the ball to my son for the unknown last time before flying off to the middle of the indian ocean to maintain the non-stop stream of bombers to the fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles of the faceless enemy of terror; children from their own livelihoods and ethnic tribes of Mother Earth suffering through decades of colonial encroachment and outcasting. Murder, ya dig.
My unborn daughter nice and cozy in the womb of safety in a nation of hypocrisy.
The predawn of american global hate through intolerance; our fabricated war on terror, still alive and strong today, a quarter of a century later, now turning inward on itself.
They asked me to play ball and I did; when I rolled it back to them, they were gone.
Returning to the River: springtime, 2025.
Cassie Latshaw, Josh Westbrook, Taylor Graham, and Zach Annett took the outdoor stage at Carney Fest last weekend before I got there. I almost didn’t go.
I almost didn’t move to Tulsa.
I don’t geek out much on rock and roll history or what happened in Tulsa, decades ago in that corner brick church on east third and south trenton avenue under the vision of leon russel and shelter records. Did I enjoy their music of the era and benefit becoming through endless volumes of folk soul and spirit-in-pain disguised as rock and roll angst over the years? I surely did; a mysterious certainty. Just never became the frequency engineer to decipher it all. Never became playfully or whimsically curious about myself to be still long enough to go back in spirit to pick up the ball and roll it to myself, rescuing the innocence of discovery from his own family trauma.
I walked a few blocks over to the event on a soft, cool and sunny day after nearly a week straight of rain, hail, and flooding and turned the corner, gave the young man my money, bought the ticket and walked down studio row to a celestial gravity of soul that was Cassie Latshaw belting out “Let Me Roll It” on stage with her bandmates for the cause. From my street, I could hear the one before, a soul-revealing original called “Everyone’s A Big Deal.”
Yeah I saw the church and the carnies and the grieving attempt to preserve some decaying glory but I wasn’t there for nostalgia and the building didn’t pull me in; something comin’ outta dem speakers had me Jake Blues-summersaulting-down-the-church-isle-of-light towards the altar of mesmerizing grief; the ghost of all human suffering.
The grit and soul of Cassie Latshaw channeled the frequency of timeless pain through generations of consequence melded with uncertainty amplified by the heartbreak of ascension through industrialized genocide of national and ethnic harmony. I’ve never heard the damn song yet Cassie’s version that day had me bawling in seconds dancing solo in my own cosmos of connection and remembering. I had no clue where the song came from until she said something about McCartney after.
Music is spiritual and their version with Josh Westbrook on vocal harmony and guitar, my new favorite and inspirational bass player Taylor Graham, who also did the damn thing on backup vocals, and Zach Annett on drums (probably vocals too) picked me up and body slammed me into the red dirt memory of its music and human arts scene, both then and now, through the mind of childhood discovery and bodily memory. Absent fear. Transferred through the soul of an abandoned child, bleeding in the studio of adulthood, for all the world to hear. I let go of the wheel.
McCartney rolled the ball.
Cassie and The Rowdy Come-Ups rolled it back.
Music artists have their own spiritual collection of covers they perform and I preserve their sanctity. Treasure it. Will die with their secrets undisturbed. But when it’s done in a manner to inspire a fanatic of emotion to run back and listen to Latshaw’s debut album while simultaneously researching the origins of “Let Me Roll It,” the spiritual transference of grief comes alive, not by the Beatles catalog and the solo journeys of each member thereafter but by the violent hammering on the bass guitar in the recording studio in Lagos, Nigeria, all those lifetimes ago, somewhere near the geographic origin of all human life.
She followed the glorious cover with another original banger, “Misery,” footing me across the river bank of covid’s echo, just a few short years ago. Uncertainty exacerbated by imposed isolation. She closed the set with a quick history tutorial from a Tulsa band back in the 60’s, simply called, Smith, fronted by Gayle McCormick, in “Baby It’s You.” Cassie and her intermixing of Rowdy Come-Ups delivered every song, original and inspirational, in a cosmic evolution of the Tulsa Sound clawing at the hems of soul while tugging booties to the dance floor of rhythmic suffering. Shit moves ya, dig.
Transference.
In the wheel of life, there are canon events to mark the cosmic fret board of becoming within a scale of human suffering, experience, and most debilitating of all, unmet expectations exploding from the realms of perceived control. Accumulate enough canon events within a lifetime and the construct of melodic tone emerges from the dirt of bodily memory.
Pick up any instrument of divine remembering and those events bleed into the creation of music. Sometime during the blood letting, the two spirits (human and voice) become one. A unity of unconditional acceptance through defiance. A union of precise communication through unmeasured emotion.
My kind of music.
The kind that bleeds in the studio. The everlasting power of Paul McCartney’s bass tone in “Let Me Roll It” bled through a man on the edge, raging against patriarchal defiance, and total self destruction, martyred by the astronomical emotion of repeated loss, while helplessly witnessing it all crumble around him from the safety of a shoddy studio in a foreign land. And he still did the damn thing. The brilliance of the man within the artist was the acceptance of it all by not cleaning it up in post production. Everyone favors the guitar riff but it’s the sleep-deprived hammering on that bass string that gives it authenticity. Not gear, not studio effect. It was the hammering that led me down the rabbit hole of discovery.
Blood in the water.
Cassie Latshaw and The Rowdy Come-Ups did the same thing, some fifty-plus years later, on a live stage. With her voice of soul and red dirt remembering projected through an atmosphere of her own becoming. To bear witness to an artist in vulnerability is unquestionably gravitational. The trick is to let go of what is presumably known and allow the emotional current to push or pull the soul through the river of coded memory.
Only the river banks can store the crushing pain of losing a mate, or the violated theft of a long-trusted instrument, or the snow melt and decay of human compassion, but the greatest artists convey the blood letting in their music for the world to experience. The scale of selfless expansion in a vacuum of hope. Service to others from the life raft of experience and witness of truth.
Their live performance at Carney Fest ‘25 didn’t send me down a rabbit hole of discovery through the ages of rock and roll originating in the dirt fields and iron shackles of the mississippi delta blues. I was born there.
Their devotion to the art of remembering through an amplified soul revealing connected me to the truth of all human suffering, on any river bank. Emotion and love of a thing overflowing the channel of measure, words fail.
My heart is like a wheel. Let me roll it to ya.
Stringer.
Stringer’s note: no pics from their set at Carney Fest. Ya had to be there, ya dig.
Check out Cassie Latshaw’s album here: Memoirs of a Monkey Girl. My favs are Bobby Jean, Misery, The Love and Let Go Kind, It’s Not the End, Wolves Like You, Bad For You, and Stoned All Alone.