The Standard

There is no general agreement on what constitutes a "standard," although the existence of the standard requires, implicitly, a distinction between amateur and professional musicianship. According to the definition found here, a "standard" is "a musical piece of sufficiently enduring popularity to be made part of a permanent repertoire, esp. a popular song." Hence the idea of a "standard" applies to popular music and not to what is commonly known as "classical" music. Assuming the collocation, "sufficiently enduring popularity," means, in colloquial terms, that a song has lasted, at what point in its existence does it stop being a mere "song" and undergo the transformation into a "standard"? Is it a matter of sheer repetition or reiteration (re-recording)? And if, by widespread consensus, a song is considered a standard, does that mean it forever remains so, that it shall for all time be considered a "classic"? Alec Wilder, in his highly regarded American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (1972), shows how the vast majority of the songs considered standards were a consequence of the institutional forms of songwriting known as Tin Pan Alley, Broadway musical theater, and the Hollywood musical. Obviously this is yet another way that "popular" is distinguished from "classical" music (the latter played almost exclusively by professionals), that the standard is a consequence of a certain level of industrial organization that allowed for the manufacture and distribution of music stored in a durable medium: material artifacts (records and sheet music), and methods of dissemination (movies and radio). I therefore note that "storage," in the sense of a storehouse filled with stock, that is, a repertory or archive (repertoire), is essential to the idea of a "standard." The latter practice--the publication of sheet music--also helped bolster the idea of "popular" music, since the printing of sheet music enabled songs to be sold to amateur musicians (beginning in the late nineteenth century, largely comprised of fledgling pianists) in private homes. The publication of sheet music also allowed for the formation of the aforementioned archive, since there could be no such archive without printed music.

Hence the rise of the "song plugger." Song pluggers occupied a curious niche; they were pianists and singers who earned their income selling songs in order to promote the purchase of sheet music, demonstrating the virtues of an individual song rather like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman demonstrated the virtues of the latest home-cleaning appliance. However, the singers who first recorded the songs that became standards were not considered amateurs, but professionals; they were not song pluggers. That is, in order for a song to become a standard, it almost certainly had to be recorded by one of the dominant singers or performers on Broadway and in Hollywood during the period Wilder identifies, 1900-1950: Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman, Judy Garland, and Bing Crosby, to name just a few. Many of the songs that became standards were written especially for these highly-regarded singers who were appearing on Broadway and in Hollywood musicals. Most often, standards became more or less identified with the singer that introduced them--they became, as it were, "validated." Hence the standard became a sort of shibboleth: a required performative test, the  purpose of which was to determine the authenticity of the vocalist. The standard became a means of including and excluding authentic performers: in order to demonstrate your "mettle," you had to perform a standard. Every singer "worth his (or her) salt," as they used to say, had to record a standard. Paradoxically, although the very idea of the standard required the existence of printed music, individual performance was valued over the strict adherence to the written composition.

According to Donald Clarke, in The Rise and Fall of Popular Music (Penguin, 1995), by 1950 or so standards were no longer originating in the places they had before (that is, in Tin Pan Alley, in Broadway and Hollywood musicals): "By the early 1950s, however, everything had changed. Blacks were doing their own thing in a new era, for labels created especially to sell to the black market; and good white songs were becoming scarce. The Berlins, Gershwins and the rest had died or retired, and the classic songs they had written could not be imitated" (366). Hence Clarke, among others, subscribes to the view that the decline of Tin Pan Alley coincided with the rise of rock & roll. Perhaps he's right.

As a postmodern art form privileging recording (engineering) over live performance, rock & roll was popular music largely written and performed by amateurs, not professionals, operating outside of the traditional music writing and publishing institutions, making records for small labels that were sold to niche (often regional) audiences. The decline of Broadway and Hollywood musicals, ensemble forms, coincided with the rise of the singer-songwriter, which championed individuality. There were, comparatively speaking, fewer new musicals created in the 1950s than in the preceding decades. One way to understand the rise of the singer-songwriter is to understand that they working outside established institutions such as the Broadway and Hollywood musical. When Elvis (for instance), decided to record songs written by Otis Blackwell (for instance), the cultural continuity suggested by the "standard" was broken. Rock & roll, music played by amateurs (Elvis had no professional training) thus represented a break in established traditions. It should therefore be no surprise that the first important record consisting entirely of standards emerged during a period of nostalgia, the early 1970s. That record was Harry Nilsson's A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night (1973), released during the period which saw the popularity of "oldies" groups such as Sha Na Na and nostalgic films such as American Graffiti (1973). Contemporary records such as Rod Stewart's "Great American Songbook" series represent a continuation of this trend in what is now the decline of the rock era.

Confusing Grace With Outer Space

It goes without saying that certain rock stars have the same mysterious allure as movie stars. One lesson these rock stars learned from movie stars is to seldom grant interviews, that is, they learned early on that the secret to success is to make it impossible to determine the fictive from the real. In the same way that "star power" often overcomes the dullness of a bad movie, there's more to great rock 'n' roll than actual music. The allure of The Residents, it seems to me, has always been in the way they went about establishing themselves as different. Like all those who have gone about forming counter-discourses, they exaggerated the power of their antagonist. Taking a cue from The Mothers of Invention's We're Only In It For the Money (1968), they challenged the legitimacy of rock 'n' roll by casting themselves as the dark double of the Beatles, as the anti-Beatles, as the cover of their first album reveals. At the beginning of their career, economics dictated they commit themselves to the medium of music (the manufacture and distribution of records), but as their later career has demonstrated, they were really interested in pursuing the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk or "total work of art," an assemblage of music, painting, theater, poetry, and primitive architecture (Vileness Fats). In fact, "primitive" is the sound they sought: they went about making music that rendered the idea of influence extremely difficult to determine. They made records as if in a cultural vacuum and in total isolation, which is why their records sounded like nothing else. The very few live shows they did in the 1970s (they didn't begin to tour until the early 80s after the introduction of the Emulator) were short, cacophonous, and outrageous bursts of Guerilla Theatre, evoking nothing so much as Babel.

I'd never heard of The Residents until the fall of 1979, in October or November of that year when Eskimo (1979) was getting a good deal of play on the stereo system at the record store I often visited. (Gone are the days spent in record stores listening to new music, at least for me.) An employee there who bought and and sold used records highly recommended the album to me. Not having a whole lot of money in my pocket at the time, I begged off, so he sold me instead a used copy of Not Available (released the previous year) for, if I remember correctly, the bargain price of $2.50. Although narratives of personal experience have become commonplace in cultural studies, I'm not convinced they are a particularly good idea, as they have always seemed to me to be too confessional, sounding too much like a religious conversion. So I'll stop there except to say that I began to listen, and to collect, The Residents, and have done so for over three decades now. I cannot speak for others, but for me it seems that the record that first prompted my interest in a band is the record I shall always hold in the highest regard. So it is with Not Available. Had The Residents, say, stopped recording after The Commercial Album (1980), the lukewarm critical response to which, as legend has it anyway, disappointed the band, Not Available would have assured their lasting fame, for in the history of popular music nothing like it has been recorded before or since. It is, as we once used to say, totally off the wall. Personally, I think Not Available and "Walter Westinghouse" are among their very finest moments.

Hence I was very keen to put on the headphones and give a close listen to the latest re-issue of Not Available, released earlier this week on CD through MVDaudio, a version of the album which promised the restoration of 7 minutes edited out of the original (1978) version. In order to find out whether this claim were true, I selected at random three previous releases of the album on CD (those CD issues without any bonus tracks, of course) in order to assemble a representative sample from which to determine the album's running time. The results are as follows:

	Label	Cat. No.	Year	No. Tracks	Time
	East Side Digital	ESD 81232	1997	5	35:35
	Bomba	BOM 22011	1997	5	35:35
	Euro Ralph	CD O34	2005	5	35:27
	MVDaudio	MVD5122A	2011	5	42:28

The MVDaudio CD reissue is indeed 7m longer, give or take a few seconds. Conveniently, each of the various CD releases has five tracks corresponding to the five parts or movements on the album, which makes it rather easy to determine in which parts material has been restored. The differences in track length are as follows, taken from the iTunes player on my MacBook Pro:

	Track	ESD 81232	MVD5122A
	1	9:34	10:56
	2	10:02	10:04
	3	6:36	10:11
	4	7:01	8:54
	5	2:22	2:22

The restored version indicates that in its original form, Not Available was composed of four parts all of roughly equally length, between ten and eleven minutes long, with the fourth part eventually cut down with the additional fifth part forming the Epilogue. As can be seen, for the original LP release--reiterated on all CD reissues up to this time--most of the material was cut from tracks 3 ("Ship's A'Going Down") and 4 ("Never Known Questions"). The bulk of the material edited out is at the ending of Part Three and the beginning of Part Four, lyrical instrumental passages performed on a synthesizer (is that a Moog or Buchla synth?). Having listened to the MVDaudio release several times now, I think I prefer the longer version to the original (edited) release. After all, it's hard to listen to the previous versions knowing that material has been edited out, and I like the additional music.

Happily, the Residents' website promises an April re-release by MVDaudio of the digitally enhanced stereo mix (43:44) of Meet the Residents from about twenty years ago. If time permits (things for me are pretty busy at that time) I'll post a blog on that reissue, but in the meantime I will continue to enjoy the gloriously restored version of Not Available.