A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

I've been extremely busy this week hurriedly finishing an article on Ingmar Bergman's film The Serpent's Egg (1977) for a forthcoming (UK) book publication titled European Horror Cinema, and I haven't been able to focus as I'd like on a couple blog topics that I've been desperately wanting to write. (The article I agreed to write for that publication is already a month overdue.) Rather than fail to post at all, however, I thought I'd post instead an essay I wrote recently in response to an article that was widely circulated in a newsletter on my college campus. While you do not have the opportunity to read the article to which I was responding, I think you can nonetheless piece together the gist of that article's argument based on my copious references to it. I should tell you that I was told in person by the individual to whom I was responding that I didn't "get" his essay, but with all due respect, I think I did "get" it, loud and clear. I hereby post my response, I suppose unfair to the writer of the original article because you don't have in front of you his article to which I was responding. I hope you enjoy my essay anyway--it stands on its own merits. There's nothing like reading other people's mail. What follows is the original text I sent to the editor of the newsletter: what was eventually published, in a subsequent issue of the newsletter, was substantially cut. Here, finally, is the original version of my essay, for all the world to see.

Dear [Editor]:

Sorting through the several issues raised in your article, "Literature No Longer Matters" (The Examined Life 15:4), I conclude that you believe there's literature and then there's Literature. "[M]ost Americans do not read" Literature, but rather "literature," that is, the pages of "Sports Illustrated, People, and Time" (p. 1). You, one who teaches Introduction to Ethics classes, should know better than to formulate an argument based on a false dichotomy between ill-defined concepts. Literature is produced by "Dostoevsky, Hugo, Shakespeare, Dante, Eliot, Dickens, Chaucer...whoever wrote Beowulf...[and] Phillip [sic] Roth" (p. 3). Given other names you reference in the article, I assume to this list one should add Plato, Aristotle, Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy, and Kierkegaard. Those who produce "literature" are (by inference) journalists (all of whom one assumes would be much younger than Philip Roth, whom you've placed among some pretty august company, I might add) and the unnamed author who may write "a novel about a character whose movements are determined by his genetic makeup and his chemical reactions to the environment" (p. 2). Since no author or title is named, I assume this is merely a caricature of a fictional fiction–again pointing to a severe flaw in your argument, namely that both "Literature" and "literature" remain ill-defined concepts–just as do the collocations you employ later on, "good fiction" and "bad fiction." You write, "Good fiction is heroic, revealing the struggles of a contemplative soul overcoming himself and his environment" (p. 2). Given this formulation, what would you make, for example, of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, in which Jim's final heroic act is also deliberately suicidal, an attempt to erase his earlier act of cowardice? Jim "overcomes himself," true, but I can conclude that only because the term (category) "overcoming" contains enough qualities to be sufficiently broad (transitive) in application. Likewise, it is also possible to say that suicide is a way of "overcoming" oneself. It can also be said of Jim that he "overcame" the theological injunction against suicide as well.

In contrast, you claim that "Bad fiction is anti-heroic, depicting sociological characters who lack an imagination and a will, being simply a reflection of society, a cheap product of the environment" (p. 2). Again you provide no examples or illustrations and omit any definition of "sociological characters," whatever they are, meaning that once again you have omitted the evidence essential to the logic of your argument. I would agree with you that there are some poor books out there, but this is neither a new insight nor a profound one, nor a feature peculiar to our age. I'm inclined to agree with Oscar Wilde: "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written," thus avoiding the problem(s) of using moral categories to talk about the content of a book. (Translation: Since certain books contain knowledge that you do not value, what they contain doesn't count as knowledge at all.)

The other issue you raise, and which I find is a rather important one, is that of a putative opposition between word and image, or the opposition between verbal art and visual art, again revealing your tendency to lure your reader into dichotomizing traps. As many intellectuals interested in the history of art and literature have observed, this opposition between word and image is based on the so-called "metaphysics of presence," that is, the Word is more proximate to the Truth than the Image (which is debased, and trivial, and deceptive, and so on, which your use of the parable of the Cave as an example emphasizes). This conceptual opposition is expressed in your article in several ways: Literature vs. TV, Literature vs. movies, Literature vs. the computer screen, and also in a very specific way in an anecdote about the movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings vs. Tolkien's novel The Lord of the Rings. "As good as the movie is, my fourteen-year-old daughter [omitted] said the book [of The Lord of the Rings] is better [than the movie]. Why? 'Because the book has the characters' thoughts.' That is right: the mind is quicker than the eye, the reader's imagination is richer than a movie producer's images...." (p. 2). Using this logic, you therefore would discourage [omitted] from reading any dramatic literature because dramatic literature–and certainly movies are a form of dramatic representation–demands that the reader/spectator make inferences about characters' thoughts and motives rather than employing a narrator to provide explicit statements about them. If this were so, you would have her avoid a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet, for example, because the reader has no direct insight into Hamlet's motives. Not true, you might say: Shakespeare uses the device of the soliloquy, in which the character externalizes his or her thoughts. Rightly so, but then why have generations of readers puzzled over the character of Hamlet? Perhaps because there remains a contradiction between what he says and what he does, so we're back to square one: since we lack any direct insight into his motives, we have to rely on other ways to uncover them. Likewise, I assume you would not condone Greek dramatists, and no modern classics such as Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons, Tennessee Williams's A Glass Menagerie, or Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Certainly you don't believe this, nor have you told [omitted] to avoid Shakespeare or any of these authors. Since it is clear that you can't take this part of your own argument seriously, neither can I. However, the effect of all this is that your discussion of The Lord of the Rings boils down to the proposition that the book is better than the movie, an assertion so painfully banal that I can't believe you actually made it. Anyone familiar with the literature of deconstruction will recognize this "logocentric" opposition, founded on the notion of "presence." Pitting the book against the movie is yet another version of the opposition that pits original against copy. But I am not interested in demonstrating the untenability of the authentic/conventional (pure/popular) opposition. I don't wish to recapitulate what has become the most standard sort of deconstructive reading.

Your insistent denigration of vision and of the visual, however, is of great concern to me. (I'll neglect pursuing your rhetorical slight-of-hand when you substitute "the world of appearances" for "images" [p. 1]). A revealing moment in your essay occurs during an off-hand remark, presumably intended to be humorous, that "Bad fiction is...as edifying as watching a colonoscopy" (p. 2). I assume you had at least two purposes for making this remark: to juxtapose the categories of bad fiction and excrement (nothing new there), while also, simultaneously, referring to the historic moment when Katie Couric had her colonoscopy televised nationally (March 2000). It was, perhaps, a rather bold and audacious event, certainly unique, which invites a number of readings: that of the prurient "spectacle," that is, of mind-numbing mass entertainment that invokes associations with the Roman coliseum. For some, no doubt, the experience of watching one of America's sweethearts having her colon examined proves once and for all that nothin's sacred–yet another indication of our hopelessly degraded culture, typical of any argument, such as yours, that employs a rhetoric of degeneration. Such arguments chart social trends as a downward course, relying on readers to decode such a journey Platonically, as a deviation from the Good. Of course, one might argue, on the other hand, that she, Katie Couric, had the general Good in mind, to raise public awareness of colon cancer despite the general squeamishness on the subject. Her concern is justifiable: colon cancer is the second biggest cancer killer after lung cancer. Current statistics show that about 76,000 people die from it a year. In fact, Couric's husband, NBC legal commentator Jay Monahan, died of colon cancer a couple years before her broadcast, so it is probable that she had personal reasons for calling attention to the virtues of preventive health care technology, which took precedence over any "sensational" aspects of the broadcast.

Your incidental remark about a colonoscopy thus belies an issue suppressed in your discussion, namely, to avoid any mention or reference to the value of vision and seeing in the sciences, particularly the medical sciences, a discipline in which the word/image antithesis, that so animates your essay, is simply not applicable. Certainly you wouldn't claim that the establishment of the study of microscopy in the eighteenth century, which led to the discovery of microorganisms and the formation of sciences such as dermatology, was just an uncritical preoccupation with the "merely" visual, or "the world of appearances" (p. 1). Of course, it is true, as Barbara Maria Stafford points out, that while microscopy became a scientific enterprise in the eighteenth-century, moral concerns quickly came into conflict with "exploratory curiosity" (Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images, p. 180). She observes:

Our contemporary interest in playful learning, in computer sketchpads, and in video games relying on children's fascination with electronics was already predicted in eighteenth-century interactive technology.... Lurking beneath the surface of various attempts to make scientific training graphic and attractive was the much broader polemic concerning the right or wrong presentation of information. Long before the onset of nineteenth-century Positivism, arguments were mustered for severing enjoyable watching from exacting observation. This dichotomy was promoted by the rise of the logocentric critic as rational censor, external to the inferior sensory field of inquiry being judged. (180)

Thus, over two-and-a-half centuries before Katie Couric's broadcast, moralists had already raised the aesthetic issue of the proper presentation or exhibition of empirical observations.

Yet Henry Baker's controversial vivisection of frogs, during which "the skin of the belly was slit from the anus to the throat and stretched with fish hooks in front of the microscope" in order to demonstrate the circulation of blood (Good Looking 181) is a far cry from a televised colonoscopy, despite issues that could be raised regarding the right or wrong presentation of information. Perhaps Philip Roth wouldn't find it edifying, but it is reasonable to assume that if his doctor (does he have one? does he have one who reads literature? who uses a computer?) found some symptoms indicating that he, Philip Roth, may have colon cancer, he would order his patient, Philip Roth, to have a colonoscopy. Assuming that Philip Roth respects his doctor's opinion, and assuming he values his life, I think that he would consent to having the exam, that is, to allow a prosthetic device to microscopically expand the range of human vision in order to confirm or deny the nature of the symptoms. Edifying or not to the patient, what the doctor could see would provide him knowledge.

As you can see, I read Roth's remark differently than you do. I see it as a statement occurring within a larger discourse. Like any industry, the publishing industry has a discourse, organizing itself around certain naturalized oppositions. Publishers organize their product around categories of legitimacy. By way of analogy, so, too, does the American institution of higher education, via The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which is published every year a list of Ph.D.-granting institutions, a list arranged according to the legitimacy of the program(s), figuratively named a "ranking." I say that publishers have a "product" in the sense that the book was first invented (the cover and binding, the leaves or pages, and its divisions: the title page, the table of contents, the chapters, the index) and like any human invention is therefore a form of technology. (It also happens to store information, like a computer's hard drive or a CD-ROM, although its storage form is alphabetic rather than digital.) Like any technological apparatus, the book is manufactured and distributed and obtained through institutions (primarily bookstores, which may or may not have a "Starbuck's" [p. 1]) that are organized around categories of legitimacy, for instance, "Romance Novels," "Art/Photography," "Popular Music," "Classics," "Cliff's Notes." The point is that the institution itself has sanctioned the antithesis that holds that "authentic" books are something distinct from "commercial" books, though both categories remain ill-defined. This authentic/commercial antithesis is sufficient to generate the real/fake distinction that informs your essay. Like Roth, you understand the history of literature as a series of authentic Literary moments that have deteriorated into conventionalized (popularized, vulgarized) expressions (literature, movies, TV), transforming the history of Literature into a field of "commercial" or debased imitations of some real thing, and thus you have organized Literary history around the proper names of acknowledged masters of the book (p. 3), dismissing the rest.

For these reasons, I don't see Roth's statement as particularly insightful; rather, it expresses his irritation that the authority for the transmission of culture has shifted from books to TV and the movies, that is, to what Walter J. Ong, S.J., in Orality and Literacy, calls "post-typographic" or "electronic" media, which Roth perceives to be illegitimate means. Why this is cause for such alarm or lamentation I'm not sure; perhaps he feels that he no longer has the Pharisee-like control over ideas–proper ideas–that he once had. Alternatively, perhaps time has shown that he isn't an acknowledged innovator on the order of Chaucer or Shakespeare. I also think that his argument is just plain wrong. My experience, which apparently contradicts yours and Roth's, is that there are not only more and bigger bookstores now than ever before, but bookstores which in fact have several floors in them, such as the Borders bookstore on Dodge Street in Omaha. How you arrive at the conclusion that "We have cycled back to the dark ages" or that "Literature No Longer Matters" (p. 1) in the face of such empirical facts is beyond me. Literature, and the book, is alive and well.

Therefore, when you claim hyperbolically that "no one has sat down with them [our students] to read literature" (p. 2), you can't really believe that they haven't read a work of literature in their college career. What you're really saying is that the students are not reading the literature you think they should, that what they're reading is illegitimate or conventional, that they are reading books which contain knowledge that you don't count as knowledge. Personally, I think some of the students in your "control group" of 25 were "pulling your leg," to use a colloquialism. At any rate, it may be that they are poor readers, and need to become better readers; on this point I think we'll agree, and you and I can do something about improving this ability. But this is a different matter than claiming they don't read literature–or rather, Literature. Just so the point can't be conveniently neglected, the late Cliff Hillegass, who began Cliff's Notes and named the form eponymously, acquired his rather significant fortune because teachers across the country were teaching canonical literature–check out the titles available as Cliff's Notes. I suspect that there are very few of these titles you would say fall outside the recognized body of canonical Literature. So don't tell me Literature isn't being taught; I know better, and the fortune Cliff left behind confirms it. Whether students are actually reading the assigned books is a different issue entirely, unrelated to the question of whether Literature still matters.

The Great Lost Albums: Two

Last month, under the rubric The Great Lost Albums: One, I wrote about John Simon’s first album, John Simon’s Album (1970), arguing that it is one of those “great lost albums” in the history of rock music (others that come to mind would include the Beach Boys' Smile, for instance, or Big Star's #1 Record, although John Simon's album is by no means that famous). I found John Simon’s Album to be an amazing, unaccountably neglected but grand record, and an essential piece of Americana. (I recently purchased his second solo album, Journey [1972], in vinyl format on eBay, but it only just arrived in today's mail and I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet.) While I have no intention of beginning a semi-regular column on “great lost albums” (I didn’t use the subtitle “One” in the earlier post to indicate the first in a series, but simply to say, “here’s one”), I couldn’t resist the temptation to write about a second "great lost album" that I'm quite sure is obscure, so obscure, in fact, that is virtually unheard of: Tim Dawe’s Penrod (1969).

I cannot say that the idea of a “great lost albums” column does not appeal to me, because in fact I think there are a great many “lost”--in the sense of unaccountably neglected--albums in the history of popular music that I'd love to write about. But I have a strong hesitation to create a “great lost albums” column, primarily because of a deeply held conviction that such a column requires a grand informing myth, a myth in the sense of fiction. This myth can be conveniently stated in a rather succinct form: initial rejection is the sign of worth, and I can't say that I'm entirely inured of the idea's appeal. As Robert Ray has observed about the first true artistic avant-garde, Impressionism—initially reviled and rejected by the critical establishment—eventually gained credibility because “rejection and incomprehensibility” were transformed into signs of “ultimate value” (82). In other words, the initial rejection and neglect of a work is a sign of artistic greatness. Ray writes:

In initiating this move, Impressionism prefigures postmodernism’s diminished concern for the work of art itself, as opposed to the contexts in which such work might occur. With the rise of what Gerard Genette has called “the paratext,” meaning and value become highly negotiable, just like commodities, just like the paintings themselves. And theory and publicity turn out to be the principal tools for influencing the ways in which art will acquire meaning. (82)

And publicity, observes Simon Frith in his essay “Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music,” is one of rock’s “ideological effects.” Discussing the role of myth in rock criticism, Frith observes:

Rock criticism depends on myth—the myth of the youth community, the myth of the creative artist. The reality is that rock, like all twentieth-century pop musics, is a commercial form, music produced as a commodity, for a profit, distributed through mass media as mass culture. It is in practice very difficult to say exactly who or what it is that rock expresses or who, from the listener’s point of view, are the authentically creative performers. The myth of authenticity is, indeed, one of rock’s own ideological effects, an aspect of its sales process: rock stars can be marketed as artists, and their particular sounds marketed as a means of identity. Rock criticism is a means of legitimating tastes, justifying value judgments, but it does not fully explain how those judgments came to be made in the first place. . . . the question becomes how we are able to judge some sounds as more authentic than others: what are we actually listening for in making our judgments? (136-37)

All of this discussion has served as a sort of preamble to my actual discussion of Tim Dawe’s Penrod, improbably re-issued on CD in March of this year by Collector’s Choice Music. My preamble, I hope, explains why the very idea of writing about a “great lost album” carries with it any number of problems, the primary one being, as I've previously indicated, that it depends upon the myth that neglect guarantees greatness. Ironically, the album's scarcity on vinyl, the relatively few copies of it in an actual material sense, has guaranteed that it will fetch a premium price on eBay (on the rare occasions it shows up for sale), especially since it was originally issued on Frank Zappa’s highly collectible Straight Records label, which also issued Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica and Alice Cooper’s first three albums, among others. These albums went on to great success--in the case of Trout Mask Replica, achieving "classic album" status--although its "classic" status may be an effect of the myth mentioned above. Why do I think so? Because one strategy of modernist art (the twentieth-century term for Romanticism, what Frith refers to above as the myth of the artist) was to protect artistic works from mass appropriation by appealing to their aesthetics—by using their difficulty—as an essential category determining their artistic supremacy. Stated another way, this idea means that any really great work of art should be difficult—that is, it should stubbornly resist mass appropriation (resist being enjoyed by the masses). For the cognoscenti, the more difficult to listen to the music is, the better it must be. There's a great scene in Elvis's Jailhouse Rock which enacts in dramatic form this very idea, when Vince Everett (Elvis) visits Peggy Van Alden's (Judy Tyler's) parent's house, during a discussion about "atonality" in jazz music (I'm not going to describe the scene--see the movie).

Of course, I'd heard of Tim Dawe prior to buying the CD issue of Penrod, the one reason why I was prompted to buy it in the first place. It was through the Bizarre/Straight promotional LP Zappéd (1969) that I first heard of Tim Dawe (“Little Boy Blue”); because it was issued on Frank Zappa's label (I was a fan of Zappa and the Mothers of Invention), I'd always been motivated to buy it. But I never ever saw Penrod in the record bins, back in 1969, the year of its issue, in 1970, ’71, '72, or any other time (until I saw it for sale on eBay decades later). And in fact, I’m still astonished that the album has been issued on compact disc, but I thank Collector’s Choice Music very much for the inspiration to do so. (Someone else must believe it to be a good album, too.) It took me almost forty years, but I finally had a chance to play and listen to Penrod. Today, I took a walk of almost sixty minutes, and I played the album on my iPod the entire time. It was a short sixty minutes.

I’ve been calling the album Penrod, although Richie Unterberger, in his excellent liner notes to the CCM CD re-issue of the album, remarks on the album cover’s basic indecisiveness: is the name of the musical artist Penrod, or Tim Dawe? Is Penrod the actual title of the album, or the name of Tim Dawe’s band? If the artist is Tim Dawe, why is his picture so small, and placed in the lower left-hand corner on the cover, while the album’s apparent title is displayed in such large print? Moreover, there’s even confusion about the actual identity of Tim Dawe: it is widely reported on the web, so I've discovered, that Tim Dawe is a supposed pseudonym of Jerry Penrod, the bassist on Iron Butterfly’s first album, Heavy (1968), and later a member of the rock band Rhinoceros. However, according to Richie Unterberger, Tim Dawe is not a pseudonym of Jerry Penrod--his name is actually Tim Dawe. In order to clarify whether Penrod is the album title or the name of the band, Unterberger (thankfully) got hold of the album’s producer, Jerry Yester, who informed him that Penrod was the name of the band fronted by Tim Dawe. Despite the clarification, which designation is correct? To refer to the album as simply Penrod, Tim Dawe's Penrod (as I have been), or the group Penrod's eponymously titled first album? I can't definitively say.

Perhaps more importantly, who are the members of the obscure band, Penrod? No one you or I have heard of, I'm afraid. Penrod was composed of:

Tim Dawe-(acoustic) guitar, vocals
Arnie Goodman-keyboards
Chris Kebeck-(electric) guitar
Claude Mathis-drums
Don Parrish-bass

But even more importantly, why, in my estimation, is Penrod a "great lost album"? How do I establish its greatness without appealing to the notion of what Frith calls "authenticity" in one of its many guises?

"Anything but the boring," Roland Barthes wrote, and I heartily agree. That's the peculiar strength of Tim Dawe's Penrod: anything but boring. Richly varied musically, it has a broad palette, featuring consistently good songwriting and excellent musicianship. As Richie Unterberger points out, it's rather obvious that an album issued on a label named Straight "would never be a 'straight' or conventional rock record." Thank goodness. He calls the album's assembly of songs "an enigmatic mixture" of tunes and styles, and that is true--that is its peculiar strength. Does the album reveal the influence of psychedelia? Yes, occasionally. Country-western? Yes. (A great single release, which could have been sent to country radio stations, would have been comprised of "No Exit (Cafe & Gallery)" b/w "Nothing At All.") Folk? Yes. Blues? Yes--the stand-out track being, by everyone's estimation (everyone who's actually heard the record, that is) "Junkie John," a dark, funereal meditation on drug addiction containing the marvelous lyric, "when he walked into a room, you got the feeling that somebody just left."

I don't wish to speculate on why the album sank like a heavy stone all those years ago, other than to point out that the proper functioning of a record label's publicity office heavily depends upon the myth Frith mentions above, the Romantic myth of the creative artist. The album's fundamental ambiguity regarding the identity of its artist--Penrod, or Tim Dawe's Penrod, or Penrod's eponymous first album (featuring Tim Dawe), violates the basic myth upon which publicity rests, and in turn operates. Roughly forty years on, perhaps its time for Tim Dawe's Penrod to find the audience it so richly deserves.

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

And so Nobel laureate Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, one of the great figures of Russian literature, primarily known in the West as a chronicler of Communist atrocities in Russia, died Sunday at the age of 89. That he lived to such an old age is remarkable considering his unusual life, marked with cancer, prison, labor camps, exile, controversy, and, frequently, condemnation. Deported from Russia in 1974 for his insistent criticism of the Soviet government, and subsequently stripped of his Soviet citizenship, Solzhenitsyn lived first in West Germany and then, for a short time, in Switzerland. Eventually he was invited to the United States under the auspices of Stanford University, which enthusiastically vowed to allow him to continue his anti-Soviet writing. He eventually moved to Cavendish, Vermont, where he (ironically, given his years in prison and labor camps) enclosed his property with a fence topped with barbed wire and set up a closed-circuit television system. According to the obituary in the Los Angeles Times, “He once claimed to have made no more than five phone calls from the retreat over 20 years.”

Known in the West for The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes, 1973-78), a scathing indictment of Stalin’s repressive police state, Solzhenitsyn was in fact an excellent novelist, author of novels such as A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), The First Circle (1968), and Cancer Ward (1968). These are all very fine books, concerned with any number of important issues, not simply with (Soviet) politics, but it was his lot—which he apparently came to resent—to be used by the Western media primarily for his functional, propagandistic value as an individual who suffered terribly at the hands of an enemy state--the U.S.S.R. (One of the standard ploys of the propaganda system in the United States is to emphasize the crimes and atrocities of an avowed enemy while minimizing the importance or significance of its own.) While there is no question of Stalin’s brutality—that has been so well documented that I hardly need rehearse it here—Solzhenitsyn’s exclusive value to the United States during the period leading up to the collapse of the Berlin wall was as someone who could document the crimes of a Communist state—too bad, because it diverted attention away from his considerable gifts as a novelist.

Solzhenitsyn enthusiastically returned to Russia in 1994, after spending roughly eighteen years in the United States. He bought a country estate near Moscow—in yet another irony, the retreat once used by Stalinist henchman Lazar Kaganovich—and resumed the reclusive way of life that characterized his years in Vermont. His books on Stalin's gulag were valuable to the West during the years of the Cold War, but it is his novels that now attest to Alexander Solzhenitsyn being one of the great figures of Russian literature, no small feat considering the number of great writers from that country.

Groovy

Although the word “groove” is generally understood as a musical term referring to a song’s rhythm—its groove—the word can refer to a number of issues besides rhythm, among them sex, class, and whether you're "high," that is, on drugs. Although the word is strongly associated with the 1960s—The Young Rascals had a #1 hit in 1967, for instance, with “Groovin’,” and there was also a hit song titled “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)”—the word dates back to the 1930s, if not earlier. A quick search of the word at answers.com indicates that the origin of the word is 1937, but it is highly likely that the word was introduced (first) into jazz vocabulary by Louis Armstrong—who has been credited for coining and popularizing slang words such as “cool,” “cat,” “pops,” and “daddy”—sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s. One can imagine that, for Armstrong, "to be groovy" meant in the mood to make a record (since all records had grooves), or high, since he was admittedly a life-long user of marijuana (referred to as a "joint" in the 60s, marijuana imbibed in the form of a rolled cigarette was, in jazz culture, referred to as a "viper").

The first to be in the groove were African-American jazz musicians, early in the 1930s. They are no longer around to tell us where this groove came from, but scholars have speculated. Maybe it began with that relatively new invention, the phonograph, whose sound came out right when the needle was in the groove; maybe the musicians—virtually all of them men—were creating yet another metaphor for sex.... “The jazz musicians gave no grandstand performances,” wrote an admiring reviewer in 1933, “they simply got a great burn from playing in the groove.”

Apparently the word was defined in 1937 as meaning a “state of mind which is conducive to good playing,” but by the process of metaphorical elaboration, soon most any pleasant or pleasing activity could be “groovy.”

Before long, there were groovy audiences as well as groovy performers, and by the 1940s things in general could be groovy. Love was groovy, skating was groovy, even pitching a no-hit baseball game was groovy.

In the 1950s the word was adopted by the Beats, whose music of choice was jazz; from jazz culture Beat culture borrowed both a vocabulary and a sensibility (for Beat Jack Kerouac, the preferred form of jazz was “bop”). By the mid-60s, the word was adopted by the rock culture, which borrowed a number of styles, including a strong non-conformist posture, from the earlier jazz culture (the Dionysian one descending from Charlie Parker) including drug use, which presumably put you "in the groove," that is, enhanced your musical creativity.

Groovy was in the air everywhere in the hip, laid-back counterculture of the 1960s, when feeling groovy was the ultimate ambition and praise, as well as the title of a hit song. To groove was “to have fun.” “Life as it is really grooves,” declares a fictional letter from a group of groovy young dropouts in a 1969 short story by John Updike.

By the mid to late 1970s, however, “groovy,” as an indication of approbation, had fallen out of favor. “In the groove” could still refer to musical rhythm (or a great sex life), but no one who wanted to be perceived as “cool” dared use the word “groovy.” Hippies were no longer hip, and if you were “feelin’ groovy” it meant you were decidedly un-hip, an anachronism, déclassé. I suspect that no one born, say, after 1970 ever considers using the word "groovy," although it does crop up occasionally, in pastiches of the 1960s (Austin Powers), for instance, or when used by nerdy protagonists (such as Ash in the Evil Dead films).

Videos
The Groove Tube (1974)
Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987)
Army of Darkness (1992)
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)
The Emperor's New Groove (2000)

ElectroComp 101

Electronic Music Laboratories, builder of the ElectroComp Synthesizer Model 101 (or just the EML synthesizer, pictured), started business in 1968, building some simple modular synthesizers the purpose of which was educational: to teach schoolchildren about electronic music. According to Mark Vail’s book Vintage Synthesizers, the first machines—referred to at the time as “black monsters” because they had to have a 200-pound weight requirement in order to discourage students from stealing them—were sponsored by the Department of Education of the State of Connecticut. After undertaking the synth-building venture, however,

The EML founders soon discovered who they were competing with. “Moog was one step ahead of us,” says Murray. “We were following closely at Moog’s heels, but using different techniques. Most of Bob Moog’s early equipment used discrete transistors, which tended to drift. You had to continuously tune the components. We used a slightly different approach: Linear integrated circuits called op amps were becoming feasible for consumer-type equipment at about the time we got involved with this business, so we relied heavily on those to get better performance from our circuitry. We earned a reputation of making equipment that was rock-solid and dependable.” (136)

Apparently the EML synthesizers were quite dependable. According to Allen Ravenstine of Pere Ubu, interviewed by Michael Jarrett,

[The educational synth] had to have certain properties. It had to be very simple, and it had to be virtually indestructible. It also was designed in such a way that, while it had various elements of a synthesizer in it (oscillators that made sine waves, triangle waves, and square waves; filters, high-pass and low-pass; and an enveloper to change timbre), all of these elements had to be in the box—the same box—but none of them should be connected internally.... One of the synthesizers I bought has a serial number of one hundred and something. Whenever I had a question, I’d talk to the guy who built it. I was the first guy that ever tried to use these things in a rock ‘n’ roll environment. I never played the keyboard like a keyboard. I can’t play a tune on a keyboard. I used the keys as triggers. (107)

Some Artists Who Have Used the EML Model 101:
Brian Kehew and Roger Manning, The Moog Cookbook
Tommy Mars and Peter Wolf, with Frank Zappa
Allen Ravenstine, Pere Ubu

Some Representative Recordings:
Pere Ubu:
The Modern Dance (1978)
Dub Housing (1978)
New Picnic Time (1979)
The Art of Walking (1980)
390° of Simulated Stereo (1981)

The Moog Cookbook:
The Moog Cookbook (1996)
Ye Olde Space Band (1997)

Frank Zappa:
Joe's Garage, Acts I, II, & III (1979)