CLARKSTON, Minnesota. Professor Willard Clesko has been a fixture at Drover College here for nearly three decades, a fact of which he is simultaneously proud and a bit chagrined. “I’ve had a long and rewarding relationship with this institution,” he says, a note of ambivalence creeping into his voice. “On the other hand, that’s all I’ve had.”
Hootenanny in progress!
Clesko came to the campus of this small liberal arts school as an 18-year-old freshman with a suitcase in one hand and a guitar in the other, but he neglected his music while he studied hard to get good grades and justify the expense of an undergraduate degree to his parents, who raised him on a dairy farm not far from here. “They didn’t understand how important it was to me to be a part of the ferment of the time,” he says of the heady days of the early 1960s, when he first heard the music of the man who would become his hero, Bob Dylan. “There was a definite divide between the frat rockers who listened to Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs and the intellectuals who listened to Dylan,” he recalls. “Unfortunately, my sense of guilt over the financial sacrifices my parents made prevented me from blowing off my studies to pursue a career in music.”
Sam the Sham and the . . . hey–cultural appropriation!
But all that has changed now that Dylan has received the ultimate recognition of his artistic merit, a Nobel Prize in Literature, and Clesko has saved enough money to retire comfortably. “Folk music is now on a par with War and Peace,” he says. “I’m going to retrace my steps and find the young folkie part of my personality I let wither and die on the vine so long ago.”
But Clesko has stumbled coming out of the gate, getting tangled up at his first “open mic” night in a coffee shop at the edge of campus here. “He’ll be okay,” says organizer Todd Hedspreth. “He just needs to get rid of the footnotes.”
“So glad they invented the bomb. Not sure I could pull this off this look of existential dread without it.”
Footnotes to text are the occupational hazard, if not the occupation, of long-time academics such as Clesko, and were famously derided as an impediment to graceful prose by Noel Coward, who said “Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.” The habit of sourcing every image in his lyrics has produced a halting, circumlocutory style that left Clesko’s first audience scratching their heads and yawning. “If your love’s like a red, red rose, just say so,” says Eleni Weston, a sophomore English major. “You don’t have to drag the verse out to comply with the Chicago Manual of Style.”
Clesko’s turn at the microphone entitles him to two songs on what is a slow night, with many students having left at the end of academic year for unpaid internships or minimum-wage summer jobs. He clears his throat, strums a few chords, then begins to sing “Jump Down, Turn Around, Change the Toner Cartridge,” a song modeled on an African-American work chant that he has updated to fit the miseries of his own job in an under-funded and under-staffed department.
Jump down, turn around, change the toner cartridge,
Jump down, turn around, change it every day.
But just as he’s getting a response from the audience, with a few patrons beginning to clap their hands, he digresses and loses them.
Oh, Lawdy, we ain’t got no cartridge.
[The use of the double negative is not meant to imply that it is standard English, or to recommend its usage among educated speakers; rather, it is an attempt to replicate a vernacular idiom with fidelity, but without endorsement.]
Oh, Lawdy, thesis gone be late.
The crowd, or what is left of them, applauds politely, although many checked their phones or otherwise became distracted while Clesko wool-gathered his way out of their hearts.
“Thanks everybody,” he says with an ingratiating tone that goes over the heads of the young and disaffected audience. “This next song has been peer-reviewed, hope you like it.”
He begins to finger-pick in an Appalachian mountain style, then cuts loose with “If I Had a Teaching Assistant”:
If I had a teaching assistant, I’d work her in the mo-or-ning.
I’d work her in the eve-ning, all over this campus.
[Drover College is in full compliance with state and federal wage and hour and overtime laws; in cases where department budgets preclude payment of monetary compensation, students are given course credit for time spent on classroom instruction or research.]
I’d sing about love between, professor and his students,
all over this campus!
Just between us, I never cared for Dylan. And after reading this, I care for him even less.