The Quality of Mercy

Those who follow my blog will remember that this past May, in a series of entries, I followed the forensic excavation that took place at the Barker Ranch in Death Valley, California, where Charles Manson and his followers purportedly buried up to three murder victims in 1968 or 1969 (no bodies were found). The latest development in the ongoing Manson saga occurred yesterday, in Sacramento, where the parole board heard the plea for compassionate release for terminally ill former Manson family member Susan Atkins. The 12-member California Board of Parole voted unanimously to deny her request for compassionate release, which would have allowed her to die outside of prison. With the petition denied, the process that would have allowed her to do that is over, meaning that she will surely die behind bars, in what doctors say will be the next few months.

Surely it is well known that Atkins (now 60) played a central role in the Tate-LaBianca murders in a violent two-night rampage in the Los Angeles area in August 1969. Convicted of murder, she has served 37 years in prison. Now ill with brain cancer, with one leg amputated and the other paralyzed, doctors report Atkins has only a few months to live. According to an article posted on the Los Angeles Times website yesterday,

The initial request for release consideration was made by doctors and prison officials after it was determined that Atkins had less than six months to live. Officials at her prison in Chino approved her release, as did officials at corrections headquarters in Sacramento. “She can't care for herself, she can’t feed herself or even sit up in bed by herself,” said her attorney, Eric P. Lampel. In addition to the cancer, Atkins had her leg amputated. “The reality is, even if she gets this compassionate release, she won’t leave her hospital room.”

The reports indicate that Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (and author of Helter Skelter) supported Atkins' release largely because of her failing health. According to yesterday’s report,

In an e-mail to Atkins’ attorney in support of her release, he [Bugliosi] wrote that the notion that “just because Susan Atkins showed no mercy to her victims, we therefore are duty-bound to follow her inhumanity and show no mercy to her” was wrong, Bugliosi said.

I strongly agree with Bugliosi: mercy is an essential part of our very humanity. (Perhaps Bugliosi had in mind Nietzsche's insight, that if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.) Vengeance is sweet, but it is not justice. Justice is not the issue here. Justice, in the sense of punishment, already has been enacted by the State. Atkins' petition should ask us not simply to rehearse the heinousness of her crimes: they have been endlessly reiterated in sensation-mongering documentaries and true crime books, so there's little need for me to review them yet again. Rather, her situation requires us to listen to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." If vengeance is sweet, mercy is sweeter, as Portia said in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d [constrained=forced]
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice . . . .
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

As Shakespeare reminds us, when we ourselves ask for mercy, we hope and pray to receive it. Why is it so easy to withhold it from another? Are there those among us so accursed that they are beyond the act of mercy? Is there no shred of humanity in them? To paraphrase Bugliosi: Just because she showed no mercy doesn't require or demand us to act likewise. Moreover, I think Shakespeare anticipates an insight that Dostoevsky made in Crime and Punishment, and one we are well to remember: there is no justice in this world ("in the course of justice, none of us/Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy"). If we all got what we deserved--if we all got what's really coming to us--none of us would be saved. Most certainly this understanding is essential to the Christian message: Christ tempers justice with mercy, and if you don't hold to that, then you're not a Christian. Make no mistake, dear reader: all our sins shall be remembered--yours as well as mine.

Soon, in so many days, she shall be no more. And perhaps you shall imagine, then, that justice has been done. But if you hold any sort of religious belief, then she shall be judged--in a method and manner that you and I cannot conceive: the wind bloweth where it listeth. The act of grace is beyond you and me. But mercy is not, and that's the real issue: these events reflect on you, the disposition of your own self, not on one who has already inherited the accursed share.

Soul Stealer

Cover illustration courtesy of Michael Easton and Christopher Shy

Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading Michael Easton’s and Christopher Shy’s wonderful new graphic novel, Soul Stealer (DMF Comics). Dark, original, and sophisticated, Soul Stealer is just simply a beautiful, marvelous book, one whose imaginative depth enchanted me in a way that I haven’t been for years. I love the vivid quality of its storytelling and its deft, seemingly effortless synthesis of world mythologies—Egyptian, Greek, Celtic—into an highly unusual syncretism that allows for unpredictable plot swerves and unexpected linkages of characters. A recent news update at Christopher Shy's Studio Ronin website indicates that Soul Stealer has exceeded half its print run during its first week of sales, suggesting that I'm not alone in my assessment of the book's value.

The story’s protagonist, Kalan, is a young, Etruscan warrior once cut to pieces by a brutal, hulking savage named Apis Bull, part man, part ox. Like the Frankenstein monster—whose remorseless loneliness and parentless lineage Kalan shares—Kalan is less a man than an assemblage (“there were days I wasn’t even sure who was calling the shots inside”), re-membered and restored to life by a magician named Strabo, the father of his lost beloved, Oxania. Motivated by his profound, eternal love for Oxania—taken from him by the capricious Gods—he can do nothing but wander for all eternity through time and space, searching for a sign, some way that he might re-unite with her. His undying love is both a blessing and a curse.

Kalan has been cursed, but has also been compensated with a special gift. The quest for Oxania may form the continuing narrative, but Kalan’s gift forms the story’s special intrigue. The God Osiris has given him the ability to traverse between worlds: he is able to enter hell, find an individual soul, and deliver it to the land of the living—hence the title of the series, Soul Stealer, of which this initial codex forms the first book, titled “The Beaten and the Damned.” The novel’s fluid narrative consists of interludes of a blissful, lyrical quality (composed largely of Kalan's memories of his time with his beloved) that punctuate explosions of action, all augmented by Christopher Shy’s beautiful artwork, distinctive for its masterful control of light, poised between functional representation and evocative (non-representational) expressionism.

I could go on and on about Soul Stealer, just simply a great imaginative accomplishment. Happily, it promises to be the first by Michael Easton, who has co-written yet another in a different (forthcoming) series, The Green Woman, with author Peter Straub—the latter having provided an excellent Introduction to Soul Stealer, incidentally. As Straub rightly notes, Soul Stealer “rings with . . . the voice of a true storyteller, big and capacious and truthful.” He goes on to say, "Michael Easton and Christopher Shy have made a wondrous book," and I heartily agree. I look forward to reading the subsequent books in the series, and, of course, the pleasures of returning to Soul Stealer once I've emerged from my recent euphoria.

Byrdland

Having my abscessed wisdom tooth pulled a couple of days ago has to be one of the most miserably painful experiences of my life despite the use of so-called "painkillers," the reason, at least in part, why I haven't been the most diligent blogger the past few days. However, today I pulled myself up by the proverbial bootstraps in order to compose this blog, prompted by this being--so I learned this morning--Roger McGuinn's 66th birthday. The daily paper carries a column, “Today in History,” followed by a short column listing "Today’s Birthdays" (meaning the birthdays of celebrities). While perusing the paper this morning, between occasional sips of my Slim Fast (when I shall eat solid food again I have no idea), I read that Roger McGuinn turned a mere 66 years old today. I say "mere" because, for some reason, I thought he should be older in age, making me realize that all those great Byrds albums were made when he was a young man in his 20s. To put things in perspective, he’d barely turned twenty-six years old when the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo was released in July 1968, forty years ago this month. Roger McGuinn (born James Joseph McGuinn III in Chicago in 1942) was always the understood leader of the Byrds, the band whose debut single, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” was recorded in January 1965, when McGuinn was a mere twenty-two years old. Former Byrds member David Crosby is on record as calling Roger McGuinn a “genius,” and perhaps he is. Most certainly he is an individual possessing an indomitable spirit, a deeply resilient and persistent individual, with great musical instincts, which is why the Byrds lasted as a band as long as it did.

Perhaps because of my age at the time, the Byrds’ earliest hits—“Mr. Tambourine Man” “All I Really Want To Do,” "Turn Turn Turn"—while undeniably powerful, influential songs, now seem to me to be the most dated, the most “stuck in time.” Recorded late in the folk era and after the Beatles’ annus mirabilis of 1964, they are folk songs played as the Beatles might have played them, distinguished by their marvelous harmonies (the lingering influence of folk harmonies) and McGuinn’s uniquely amplified Rickenbacker guitar. For me personally, the Byrds really took flight with Fifth Dimension (1966); with all due respect to their earlier hit singles, I think “Eight Miles High” is more sonically interesting than these earlier tunes, a song that in retrospect reveals the band’s willingness to experiment, to push themselves and at the same time push musical boundaries, and not to continue on with more of the same. I cannot say with certainty that Fifth Dimension is my favorite Byrds album, nor can I say it is their “best,” but then nothing about the band or its distinguished career compels me to make such claims. Put on any album from Fifth Dimension onward and there’s nothing at all dull or uninteresting happening musically; each one is unique in itself, a thoroughly engaging musical soundscape that makes listening to their albums one after the other a grand and fascinating musical adventure—a claim that, no doubt, is made by fans of the the most adventuresome bands—The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and so on. Make no mistake, the Byrds do not pale beside these legendary bands, but stand side-by-side with them as a peer.

I must be one of those few fans and admirers of the Byrds who don’t think they missed a proverbial beat between Younger Than Yesterday (released February 1967) and The Notorious Byrd Brothers (released early January 1968 but recorded for the most part in August and November 1967), the latter album being the one made during the departure first of David Crosby and then Michael Clarke, both original members of the band (Gene Clark had left earlier, in the spring of 1966). I agree with David Fricke, who wrote about The Notorious Byrd Brothers, “Falling apart as a rock band, they became an art project, a brilliant, intrepid studio entity abetted by a fine complement of hired hands (guitarist and soon-to-be Byrd Clarence White, electronic music pioneer Paul Beaver, steel guitarist Red Rhodes, future Eric Clapton drummer Jim Gordon) and a sympathetic and imaginative young producer . . . named Gary Usher” (liner notes to the 1997 Columbia/Legacy Super Bit CD reissue). I think Fricke is exactly right: in Gary Usher the Byrds could not have found a more sympathetic producer, and the result, issued the first week of 1968 but recorded primarily in August and November 1967, is a record of great beauty and originality, if entirely a product of the studio.

I hardly need mention the record that followed, Sweetheart of the Rodeo (released 40 years ago this month) is now considered one of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time by Rolling Stone. Previously consuming the Byrds through confiscation of singles purchased by my older sister, and borrowing LPs from friends, I’m proud to say that the first Byrds album I ever purchased with my very own stack of quarters was Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde (1969) which—this again according to David Fricke—“has the humiliating distinction of being the lowest-charting album in the group’s original studio catalog.” I’m delighted to know that at the time, unbeknownst to me, of course, I helped out the album’s meager sales by +1. To this day I think the musically schizoid “King Apathy III” is one of McGuinn’s best avant-garde compositions, and “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man,” co-written by McGuinn and Gram Parsons, a classic, a satire of the sort matched only by Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee.” The album also has the distinction of including both “Candy” and “Child of the Universe,” both written for the utterly byzantine (and now "cult") film Candy (1968), although only the latter song was included on the soundtrack, the former having been rejected by the producers. Indeed, I bought every Byrds album subsequently released, all made with the line-up of McGuinn, Clarence White, Skip Battin, and Gene Parsons: Ballad of Easy Rider (1969); Untitled (1970), which, as everyone knows, contains one of McGuinn’s greatest compositions, "Chestnut Mare"; Byrdmaniax (1971)—the death masks qualifying it as one of the great LP covers of all time--and Farther Along (1971), the band’s warm and serene final album (before, ironically, the 1973 over-hyped reunion album made by the original line-up, which bombed). I still possess all these vinyl LPs, and know them as well as old friends.

Thanks to CD technology, recordings from the late 60s period of the Byrds have emerged, such as Live at the Fillmore—February 1969, issued on CD in 2000, recorded—putatively—at the band’s commercial nadir, and more recently, Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971, featuring the McGuinn-White-Battin-Parsons lineup—just simply a great live band—issued by Sundazed about six weeks ago. One can hope that more such releases shall be made in the future. Outside of the Byrds albums themselves, I recommend, for those interested, McGuinn's Live From Mars (Hollywood Records, 1996) as an excellent place to start, as it serves as a sort of musical autobiography, as McGuinn takes the listener on a musical journey, discussing and playing his own music, its sources and inspirations, as well as the music which influenced him, beginning with Elvis's rendition of "Heartbreak Hotel."

And so, as of today, Roger McGuinn is 66 years of age and--who knows?--a member of the AARP. Perhaps so, but I hope not. I think not. Occasionally I have met a person in my life whose attitude and behavior makes me wonder if that person were ever really young, "young" as in youthful, having experienced the excitement and newness of the world through young eyes. (I must be thinking of "youth" because the experience of the past few days has made me feel, physically at least, old.) This meaning of "young" is the meaning of the word that Dylan sings about when he urges one to be "forever young." Perhaps it is only appropriate, therefore, that at 66, one should offer Roger McGuinn the birthday wish of being "forever young," or perhaps, phrased another way--to remain younger than yesterday.

Falsetto A-Z

Surprisingly, one discovers the word falsetto, literally meaning “false soprano,” actually has two different meanings at answers.com. One definition reads, “A male voice in an upper register beyond its normal range,” while the other reads, “The treble range produced by most adult male singers through a slightly artificial technique...” What precisely, then, are we hearing when we hear falsetto singing? For a form of singing that is so essential to popular music, I find it somewhat surprising that its status is so culturally ambiguous: abnormal on the one hand, “slightly artificial” on the other. To call it a form of singing by males that is artificial associates artifice with femininity, a linkage that Michael Jarrett identifies as ultimately deriving from use of the castrati in Italian opera, the castrati being emasculated men whose physical alteration when boys allowed them to sing like women when adult men. The castrati were known as voci artificiali, "artificial voices."

But as Majorie Garber has pointed out, the operatic use of the castrati eventually gave rise, after the social practice of creating them ceased, to the bel canto singing style, the style favored by Italian-American pop singers (255). And, as Michael Jarrett has observed, that style "helped fashion the rock universe" (231). He writes:

Dean Martin's croon profoundly affected Elvis Presley, but it also attracted the black gaze of desire. Chuck Berry comes from this tradition (though perhaps by way of Slim Galliard). And Marvin Gaye readily admitted: "My dream was to become Frank Sinatra. I loved his phrasing, especially when he was very young and pure.... I also dug Dean Martin and especially Perry Como (quoted in [Gerald] Early, ["One Nation Under a Groove," New Republic, 15-22 July 1991] 30) (231)

Doo-wop popularized falsetto because, according to Simon Frith, the male voice was broken "into its component parts such that the combination of all its sounds, from low to high" defined masculinity ("Brit Beat: High Signs," Village Voice, 7 June 1994). No wonder, then, that most successful male pop groups always had a member capable of singing falsetto; in the Bee Gees' case, when Barry Gibb (pictured) decided to sing falsetto with "Nights on Broadway" on Main Course (1975), the Bee Gees were, de facto, transformed into Barry Gibb's band.

Falsetto A—Z, A Primer
Little Anthony & The Imperials, “Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-Ko-Bop”
The Bee Gees (Barry Gibb), “Nights on Broadway”
[Canned Heat (Al Wilson), “Goin’ Up the Country”] (see comments)
Lou Christie, “Lightnin’ Strikes”
The Delfonics, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)”
Elvis (Presley), “Blue Moon”
Art Garfunkel (Simon & Garfunkel), “Bridge Over Troubled Water”
Eddie Holman, “Hey There Lonely Girl”
The Impressions (Curtis Mayfield), “People Get Ready”
Mick Jagger (The Rolling Stones), “Emotional Rescue”
Eddie Kendricks (The Temptations), “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)"
Led Zeppelin (Robert Plant), “Whole Lotta Love”
Curtis Mayfield, “Freddie’s Dead”
Aaron Neville (Neville Brothers), “Mona Lisa”
Roy Orbison, “Crying”
Prince, “Kiss”
Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody”
Smokey Robinson (& The Miracles), “Ooo Baby Baby”
Leo Sayer, “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing”
Tiny Tim, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips”
U2, “Lemon”
Frankie Valli (The Four Seasons), “Sherry”
Brian Wilson (The Beach Boys), “Good Vibrations”
Brian Wilson (The Beach Boys), "Don't Worry Baby" (see comments)
X (John Doe), “White Girl”
Neil Young, “Tonight’s the Night”
The Zombies (Colin Blunstone), “She’s Not There”

Rare 1960s Ephemera Showing Today on TCM

Turner Classic Movies is showing some rare and unusual films from the 60s today for those interested. A couple of the films aired on TCM about a month ago, but some, to my knowledge, have never shown on TV. None of these films are considered classics, but as museum pieces they are well worth screening. All times are Central Daylight Time (CDT).

5:00am—MRS. BROWN, YOU’VE GOT A LOVELY DAUGHTER (1968)
Herman’s Hermits travel to England for a high-stakes greyhound race.
Cast: Peter Noone, Herman’s Hermits, Stanley Holloway. Dir: Saul Swimmer. Color, 95m [LTBX]

6:36am—From The Vaults: THE BACKGROUND BEAT (Short, 1965)
A short doc by director Ralph Nelson exploring how he uses music and scoring in his pictures. Includes examples from Once A Thief (1965). B&W, 7m

7:00am—HOLD ON! (1966)
Rocket scientists consider naming a space ship after Herman’s Hermits.
Cast: Peter Noone, Herman’s Hermits, Shelley Fabares. Dir: Arthur Lubin. Color, 86m [LTBX]

8:30am—WINTER A-GO-GO (1965)
A teenaged ski bum tries to turn the lodge he’s inherited into a hit music club.
Cast: James Stacy, William Wellman, Jr., Beverly Adams. Dir: Richard Benedict. Color, 88m [LTBX] Note: Includes the tune, "Hip Square Dance."

10:00am—UNDER THE YUM YUM TREE (1963)
A lecherous landlord tries to steal a woman from her fiancie.
Cast: Jack Lemmon, Carol Lynley, Dean Jones. Dir: David Swift. Color, 110m [LTBX] [CC]

12:00pm—DEAD HEAT ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND (1966)
A sophisticated crook mounts an intricate plan to rob an airport bank.
Cast: James Coburn, Camilla Sparv, Harrison Ford. Dir: Bernard Girard. Color, 107m [LTBX] Note: Includes a very early film appearance by Harrison Ford.

2:00pm—DUFFY (1968)
A playboy tries to rob his father with the help of a gentleman crook.
Cast: James Coburn, James Mason, James Fox. Dir: Robert Parrish. Color, 101m [LTBX] Note: all existing versions of this film on video are missing one minute of footage when Duffy tries to force himself on Segolene. Plus it is letterboxed!

3:45pm—THE HAPPENING (1967)
A kidnapped gangster joins forces with the hippies who abducted him.
Cast: Anthony Quinn, Faye Dunaway, George Maharis. Dir: Elliot Silverstein. Color, 101m [LTBX] Note: Too bad this rarely shown film wasn't paired with Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg's PERFORMANCE (1968).

5:30pm—HOMICIDAL (1961)
A nurse and her husband conspire to collect a rich inheritance.
Cast: Glenn Corbett, Patricia Breslin, Eugenie Leontovich. Dir: William Castle. B&W, 87m [LTBX] [CC] Note: not all that rare, but TCM is airing it letterboxed.

7:00pm—LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER (1964)
When a one-night stand results in pregnancy, a musician and a young girl try to resolve the issue together.
Cast: Steve McQueen, Natalie Wood, Tom Bosley. Dir: Robert Mulligan. B&W, 100m.

Melismania

In music, melisma, commonly known as "vocal runs" or simply "runs," is the technique of changing the note (pitch) of a single syllable of text while it is being sung. Music sung in this style is referred to as melismatic, as opposed to syllabic, where each syllable of text is matched to a single note. A common example of melisma, or the singing of several notes sung to one syllable of text, is the Gregorian chant. For an example of syllabic singing, think of the Beatles’ “Penny Lane”:

In Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs
Of every head he’s had the pleasure to have known
And all the people that come and go
Stop and say hello

While melismatic singing is quite common in popular music, few singers have used it, or are able to use it, tastefully. Nelson George, in The Death of Rhythm and Blues, refers to Sam Cooke (pictured) as a popular singer who effortlessly used melisma to marvelous effect:

No analysis . . . can capture the naturalness of Cooke’s sound. There was something ingratiating about his voice that entranced listeners and inspired a whole generation of male vocalists to try to approximate his supple sensuality and flowing melisma. (These would include David Ruffin, Johnnie Taylor, Otis Redding, Bobby Womack, Lou Rawls, and Jerry Butler.) (79)

Think of Cooke’s use of melisma with the monosyllabic word “You” in his hit “You Send Me.”

However, in popular singers less gifted than Sam Cooke, excessive (over) use of melisma results in melismania, defined by Michael Jarrett as

an obsessive compulsive disorder characterized by multiplying the notes sung to every syllable of text; melisma taken to excess.... melismania
. . . seeks to manufacture authenticity—to signify belief in the face of unbelief—through intense virtuosity . . . it creates rampant “affective inflation” that subverts its own efforts.... melismania is a particularly audible expression of what Lawrence Grossberg calls "sentimental inauthenticity." (82-83)

Melismania is variously known as “Mariah Carey Syndrome” or “Whitney Houston Syndrome,” although among Caucasians it is known as “Boltonism.”

Peace & Love

Today, July 7, is Ringo Starr's 68th birthday (born 1940)--Happy Birthday, Ringo! According to his official website, the Beatles' former drummer was asked recently by Access Hollywood what he hoped to receive for his birthday this year. His answer? "Just more Peace & Love." He said, "it would be really cool if everyone, everywhere, wherever they are, at noon on July 7 make the peace sign and say 'Peace & Love'." Therefore, wherever you are in the world, join him in making the peace sign and saying, shouting, writing or quietly thinking his birthday wish: "Peace & Love."

Meanwhile, according to a report published yesterday in the TimesOnline, Ringo's birthplace at No. 9 Madryn Street, Liverpool, in an area of mid-Victorian Era buildings, where he was born Richard Starkey 68 years ago, is apparently to be demolished after a decision by English Heritage not to list it. According to the TimesOnline report:

Starr lived in Madryn Street for the first four years of his life before he and his mother moved around the corner to Admiral Grove. English Heritage’s main reason for rejecting the listing request, therefore, is that Madryn Street has no real links with the Beatles.

But according to additional information in the report, fellow Liverpudlians turned against Ringo when

he made dismissive comments about Liverpool on Jonathan Ross’s BBC1 show in January, saying there was “nothing” he missed about the place. A shrubbery sculpture of the drummer was later beheaded.

Apparently it doesn't pay to be honest. Perhaps as a Liverpudlian himself, Sir Paul ought to intercede and go about saving Ringo's birthplace, in deference to the the old adage, "honesty is the best policy."

The Art of Noise

Introduced to the rock world at the Monterey Pop Festival, held June 16-18 1967, the Moog synthesizer was the most sophisticated and expensive noisemaking machine ever invented. Although seldom considered as a noisemaker, that is more or less how the synthesizer was initially perceived, given its first uses in popular music were weird and unusual sounds. There were various noisemaking machines introduced earlier, of course: Bebe and Louis Barron, for instance, were accomplished at using electronic noisemaking devices, creating the unearthly sounds—i.e., noises—used on the soundtrack to MGM’s SF classic Forbidden Planet (1956). But even before them, Spike Jones fired guns and banged pots and pans (among other things) when he set out to “murder the classics.” Other accomplished noisemakers include John Cage, Harry Partch, Frank Zappa’s beloved Edgar Varèse (pictured), Sun Ra, Yoko Ono, and of course Lou Reed, whose Metal Machine Music (1975) would have been inconceivable without these earlier composers preparing the way.

Hence the Moog synthesizer can be considered as simply another means of making noise, albeit a highly sophisticated one, and all noisemaking ritual has its anthropological roots in the charivari. According to answers.com, charivari is defined as, "A mock serenade (e.g. for newlyweds) of loud, discordant noises using pots and pans, cowbells, guns and other noisemakers; by extension, any cacophony of out-of-tune noises." The word is French, from the Old French for “hubbub,” perhaps from Late Latin carībaria, headache, from Greek karēbariā: karē, head + barus, heavy.

Here’s what Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his essay “Divertissement on a Folk Theme” (from The Raw and the Cooked, University of Chicago Press, 1969), says about the charivari:

The Encyclopédie compiled by Diderot and d’Alembert defines “charivari” as follows:

The word . . . means and conveys the derisive noise made at night with pans, cauldrons, basins, etc., in front of the houses of people who are marrying for the second or third time or are marrying someone of a very different age from themselves. (288)

One can see from Levi-Strauss’s definition the origin of the meaning of charivari (in American English, shivaree) as "mock serenade": if the serenade celebrates romantic love, the charivari satirizes it.

The recent re-issue on CD of Mort Garson and Jacques Wilson’s charivari, The Wozard of Iz (original release: 1968), subtitled “An Electronic Odyssey” and produced by electronic music pioneer Bernie Krause, is a good illustration of the early uses of the Moog synthesizer. A media satire using The Wizard of Oz to structure the heroine's journey to the "Upset Strip," The Wozard of Iz is badly dated by virtue of its (heavy) use of late 60s slang and for being too obviously created for juvenile audiences (nothing about it is in the least way subtle), but it is interesting nonetheless as an illustration of how the synthesizer was perceived as nothing more, early on in its history, as a novelty. Most certainly it was Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach, released a couple of months after The Wozard of Iz in 1968, that first gave the synthesizer musical credibility, demonstrating to a skeptical audience that the synthesizer was something much other than an expensive toy.

I made the observation in an earlier post that early on in its history any unconventional or radically new knowledge is at first perceived to be a bad joke--Freud's theory of psychoanalysis, for instance, and Darwin's theory of human beings evolving from monkeys were, in fact, both considered bad jokes. I suggested that popular music's appropriation of the "psychedelic experience" was initially perceived as a bad joke: the first albums containing the word "psychedelic," such as the Blues Magoos' "Psychedelic Lollipop," used the word in a joking way. The idea of the joke permeates early albums claiming to be psychedelic, for instance, Friar Tuck and His Psychedelic Guitar (1967), The Animated Egg (1967), Hal Blaine's Psychedelic Percussion (1967), and so on. The Wozard of Iz illustrates the same idea: like these other, aforementioned records, it sold poorly, because it lacked both credibility and substance, and was just so much noisemaking. Conversely, Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach sold well because it was straight. Unlike Spike Jones, who set out to "murder the classics," Switched-On Bach approached the music with the utmost seriousness, as high art, and the role of the synthesizer as a noisemaking toy was minimized, if not absent altogether. In other words, Wendy Carlos set out to do anything but perform a charivari.

"Dixie"

Having listened intently the past few days to the Band’s first album, Music From Big Pink (1968), today I found myself compelled to begin listening to the Band’s eponymous second album (released September 1969), the album that contains one of the Band’s most famous songs, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. A wonderfully dynamic, dramatic, and utterly compelling song, it was famously covered by Joan Baez, who had a hit single with the song about a year and a half after The Band's release. It was subsequently covered by Johnny Cash on his album John R. Cash (1975). In the context of the late 1960s and the Vietnam War, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," while set during the days after the end of the bloody American Civil War, was generally interpreted as a song having an anti-war sentiment, while also invoking the Biblical parable of Cain and Abel. Presumably, the song was an attempt to identify and overcome the tensions of an American population divided in its support for the Vietnam War, to speak to both groups in a way that also acknowledged their mutual sense of patriotism.

Like the Bible's Cain, the singer of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," Virgil Caine (Cain?), is a farmer:

Virgil Caine [Cain?] is the name
And I served on the Danville train
'Til Stoneman’s cavalry came
And tore up the tracks again
In the winter of ‘65
We were hungry, just barely alive
By May the 10th Richmond had fell
It’s a time I remember oh so well

Chorus:
The night they drove Old Dixie down
And the bells were ringing
The night they drove Old Dixie down
And the people were singin’
They went Na, La, La, La, Na, Na . . .

Back with my wife in Tennessee
When one day she called to me
“Virgil quick come see—there goes Robert E. Lee”
Now I don’t mind choppin’ wood
And I don't care if the money’s no good
You take what you need
And you leave the rest
But they should never
Have taken the very best

[Chorus]

Like my father before me
I’m a workin’ man
Like my brother before me
Who took a rebel stand
He was just eighteen, proud and brave
But a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the mud below my feet
You can't raise a [Cain?] Caine back up when he's in defeat

[Chorus]

The key poetic figure in the song is, of course, Dixie. There are few popular songs in American history more controversial than "Dixie," a song both adored and despised. Improbably, "Dixie" is a song that, prior to the Civil War, received ovations from both abolitionist Republicans and proslavery Democrats. After the Southern succession, it was adopted by the Confederacy as its national anthem. The song was played at Jefferson Davis's inauguration, but Abraham Lincoln so loved the song that he had it played at his second inauguration.

According to Michael Jarrett, "Dixie" was introduced on the Broadway stage on 4 April 1859 by Daniel Emmett, the founder of the first professional blackface minstrel troupe, and was an instant hit. But, as Jarrett observes,

...the popularity of "Dixie" resulted from the song's basic slipperiness. It seemed eager to serve all sorts of agendas and capable of insinuating itself into a variety of contexts. . . . "Dixie" is far more redolent of meaning than it is explicity meaningful. It functions as a poetic image. Generations of Americans, nostalgically drawn to the idyllic scene it calls them to conjure, have revered it. And generations, enraged and offended by the antebellum stereotypes it asks them to celebrate, have reviled it. (27)

Hence, the power of Dixie is in its multivalency: inherently ambiguous, it is a sentimental anthem associated with the American South, but also, consequently, a symbol of racism. But rather than be stymied by the figure's inherent cultural ambiguity, Mike Jarrett thinks we ought to listen to the song "anew." He writes:

How about straight, as a song of exile? Heard this way, it echoes psalms of captivity found in the Old Testament and anticipates the lamentations that abound in blues and, especially, reggae. Or how about ironically, as a signifying song? "Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton. Yeah, like hell I do!" (28)

The slippery multivalency of "Dixie" allowed Mickey Newbury to incorporate the song into his well-known medley, "An American Trilogy," a song that, beginning in 1972, Elvis began performing during his live concerts. A portmanteau song celebrating the diversity of America, Newbury's "An American Trilogy" is composed of three songs: "Dixie" (South), "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" (North), and "All My Trials" (the individual citizen).

I raise these issues because today while listening to "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," I wondered why Elvis had never covered the song. Certainly he was capable of singing it. Certainly he was capable of singing it well. Did he reject it because he perceived it as a song of amelioration, a song about mending fences, and hence too much associated with the moderate Left (i.e., Joan Baez)? I turned to Elvis's rendition of "An American Trilogy," thinking that this song might well have been his "answer" song to the Band's earlier song. Having watched the Band's rendition of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" as performed in The Last Waltz (1978; filmed late 1976,)--available on youtube.com--it struck me that there was a remarkable similarity between the orchestration and staging of The Last Waltz and the orchestration and staging of Elvis's Las Vegas shows, especially his arrangement of "An American Trilogy." In other words, the Band's performance of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" in The Last Waltz was influenced by Elvis's earlier response to that very song, with his version of "An American Trilogy," also available on youtube.

My Albums Were Fair and Had Pink Sun in Their Hair

Previously, in my blog entries of May 16 and May 31, I have discussed my experiment of trying to listen to all the rock and R&B albums released in the calendar year 1968 in the order, as best as I can determine, in which they were released. I'll refer readers to the earlier blogs for an explanation of the motivation for such an unusual (and self-indulgent) project. At any rate, it occurred to me this morning that I hadn’t posted July’s listening schedule, which can be found below. As I’ve stated before, I cannot claim that my list is infallible, but I continue to work on it and to try and improve it. What I've discovered is that there were dozens of albums released during the months of July and August--more so in terms of numbers of releases in a single month than in any previous month--so as you can see, July’s list is rather long (assuming the information I've come across is accurate). First up is The Band’s classic Music From Big Pink, released forty years ago today, on July 1, 1968. Here's what I have put together for July:

The Band, Music From Big Pink 7/1
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Creedence Clearwater Revival 7/5
Tyrannosaurus Rex, My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... 7/5
The Nice, The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack
The Doors, Waiting for the Sun 7/11
Buffalo Springfield, Last Time Around
Family, Music in a Doll’s House
Nilsson, Aerial Ballet
Phil Ochs, Tape From California
The International Submarine Band, Safe At Home
The Grateful Dead, Anthem of the Sun
Bloomfield-Kooper-Stills, Super Session 7/22
The Moody Blues, In Search of the Lost Chord 7/26
The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo 7/29
Cream, Wheels of Fire 7/29

As you can see, a number of historically significant records were issued in July 1968. As usual, corrections and additions are welcome.

List emended 7/22/08

"For What It's Worth"

Perhaps one of the best-known songs of the decade of the 1960s is Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” released as a 45 rpm single in January 1967 (not included on the first pressing of the band's first LP, it became such a huge hit that later pressings of the album replaced one track and included it instead). It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that "For What It's Worth" appears on the soundtrack of just about every documentary one can find about that tumultuous decade. I think a good, concise interpretation of the song--the complete discussion of which can be found here--is as follows:

The . . . song . . . manages to warn of increasing polarization and violence in American society, without taking any stand other than that of acceptance of diversity and free speech. In other words, it comments on politics without itself being political.

I believe this to be a standard interpretation, but I find the claim that the song "comments on politics without itself being political" to be extremely revealing. Interestingly, the historical origins of the song don’t especially shed light on its meaning, although it clearly partakes of what was referred to at the time as “youth culture.”

The song was inspired by an event in November 1966, the year during which Buffalo Springfield started playing as the house band at the famed Whiskey A Go-Go on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. At the dawn of the psychedelic era, on Saturday, November 12, 1966, near a club at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights named Pandora’s Box (pictured), supposedly 1,000 youthful demonstrators (I say “supposedly” as the number strikes me as dubiously high) erupted in protest against the perceived repressive enforcement of recently invoked curfew laws. As I understand it, these curfew laws were passed in order to get a handle on underage drinking going on at some of the Sunset Strip clubs catering to a youthful clientele (a painfully banal explanation, to be sure). Apparently some business owners wanted the authorities to pass laws that would help rid the Sunset Strip of vast numbers of loitering teenagers as well as the growing number of "hippies," the pan-handling presence of which were discouraging patrons from attending their drinking and dining establishments.

Referred to as the “Sunset Strip Riot”—inspiring the movie Riot on Sunset Strip (1967)—apparently the event was characterized by some rather typical youthful expressions of outrage: rock throwing (where did the rocks come from?), an attempt to set fire to a city bus filled with terrified passengers, and various other acts of destructive vandalism. The event was referred to in the L. A. press as a “riot,” perhaps to link the disruptive moment to the more destructive and socially significant Watts riots of the year before. The net result was that within the year—by August of 1967—Pandora’s Box was demolished and paved over to make an easy access road to Crescent Heights off of Sunset Boulevard. That's one way to solve a problem.

As is widely known, the so-called “Sunset Strip Riot”—and perhaps the Watts Riots the year before—inspired then Buffalo Springfield band member Stephen Stills to write “For What It’s Worth,” recorded about three weeks after the so-called "riot," on December 5, 1966. The lyrics are so well known it hardly seems necessary to reproduce them, but I do so below for the sake of convenience:

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down

There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Gettin’ so much resistance from behind
It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down

What a field day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side
It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the Man come and take you away
We better stop, hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down

Although famous, and strongly associated with the decade of the 1960s, I find this a hard song on which to get a critical handle, especially as any sort of trenchant "social criticism." For one thing, what’s the level of intellectual commitment to the so-called issue of freedom of expression (a value that is, of course, never actually named)? It seems more like a sum of commonplaces strung together rather than expressing any deeply felt social outrage. The title, especially, doesn’t help: the colloquial expression, “For What It’s Worth,” offers only a minimal commitment to an idea; it seems a strangely noncommittal title for a song that putatively contains acute political insight. A better title might be, “My Two Cents’ Worth,” as that phrase more accurately suggests the level of extent of the emotional engagement with the issue(s). No doubt it was influenced by the overt political protest characteristic of 1960s folk music, but it lacks the clear statement of a political position that these songs make explicit. In this sense, we can see that it positions itself somewhere between outright polemic and disinterested social observation: “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.” The line reminds me of something a fence-riding high school guidance counselor told me in response to the Kent State campus shootings in 1970. If it is considered, narrowly, merely as a response to the so-called "Sunset Strip Riot," then it amounts to nothing more than an argument insisting that teenagers ought to be able to have fun when they want to have fun.

In retrospect, the whole song smacks of fence-riding. In Canto III of Dante’s Inferno, the fence-riders—named "Neutrals" in J. D. Sinclair's translation to desribe those who never took a position in life—are situated in the vestibule to Hell, Hell refusing to let them in because they never made a decision on anything during their lives.

To properly understand the song, I think, we need to focus elsewhere than on politics, and recognize that it owes something to the ideas in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), and Kesey’s use of the mental institution as a metaphor for everyday life: “You step out of line, the Man come and take you away.” Think of the 60s novelty song “They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”—that was, incidentally, released in July 1966, four months before the Sunset Strip Riot, and about five months before Buffalo Springfield recorded "For What It's Worth." One of the novelty song’s lyrics refers to the “funny farm,” which is, of course, a colloquial reference to an asylum. The narrator of Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief Bromden, uses the phrase “the Combine” to refer to the large, invisible system of coercion that society uses to control and manipulate individuals. I’ve written a great deal, recently, about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, so I don’t think that his fame and notoriety during this period in the 1960s needs rehearsing. The way authority is referred to only in the abstract--"man with a gun," "resistance from behind," "the heat," the Man"--also supports the idea that the song refers to the repressive operations of "the Combine."

If nothing else, a close analysis of the song warns against any attempt to transform pop songs into agitprop.

The Pinch of Ridicule

In yesterday's blog, I said that nothing could appear a less promising topic than the movie career of Elvis Presley. Observing that movies in general have always been culturally ambiguous because they blur clear distinctions between art, commerce, and mass communication, I then immediately suggested that the films starring Elvis Presley are an exception to this culturally ambiguous status: they are not considered ambiguous at all, but rather as artless mass entertainment. In its most negative formulation, they are used as an example of Elvis’s tastelessness, made simply for crass commercial reasons: although nothing but tripe, they remain, nonetheless, quite profitable. What I didn't discuss yesterday are the reasons for this widespread cultural perception, and it's not clear to me that the reasons are due to the actual films themselves.

The reasons for this perception are best explored in a remarkable essay written by a former teacher of mine, Linda Ray Pratt, titled "Elvis, or the Ironies of a Southern Identity," which can be found in Kevin Quain, Ed., The Elvis Reader (St. Martin's Press, 1992). In one of the best pieces ever written about Elvis, in the essay, writing as a Southerner herself, she discusses Elvis with the kind of understanding and empathy that those outside the culture often lack. I remember having brief conversations with her about Elvis--this back in the early 1980s, just a few years after his death, probably while she was thinking about the issues that ultimately emerged in this particular essay. She makes so many acute insights that it is impossible to list them all here, but here are a few insights that may help explain why Elvis's films are held in such widespread contempt, even by those who perhaps have never seen but one or two of them, and perhaps even by those who have never seen them at all--to see them would demonstrate a noticeable lapse in taste. Writing about Elvis in the context of Southern culture, she says:

C. Vann Woodward has said that the South's experience is atypical of the American experience, that where the rest of America has known innocence, success, affluence, and an abstract and disconnected sense of place, the South has know guilt, poverty, failure, and a concrete sense of roots and place.... These myths collide in Elvis. His American success story was always acted out within its Southern limitations. No matter how successful Elvis became in terms of fame and money, he remained fundamentally disreputable in the minds of many Americans. Elvis had rooms full of gold records earned by million-copy sales, but his best rock and roll records were not formally honored by the people who control, if not the public taste, the rewarding of public taste.... His movies made millions but could not be defended on artistic grounds. The New York Times view of his fans was "the men favoring leisure suits and sideburns, the women beehive hairdos, purple eyelids and tight stretch pants".... (96-97)

Observing that Elvis "remained an outsider in the American culture that adopted his music," she goes on to say:

Although he was the world's most popular entertainer, to like Elvis a lot was suspect, a lapse of taste.... The inability of Elvis to transcend his lack of reputability despite a history-making success story confirms the Southern sense that the world outside thinks Southerners are freaks, illiterates . . . sexual perverts, lynchers. I cannot call this sense a Southern "paranoia" because ten years outside the South has all too often confirmed the frequency with which non-Southerners express such views. Not even the presidency would free LBJ and Jimmy Carter from the ridicule.... And Elvis was truly different, in all those tacky Southern ways one is supposed to rise above with money and sophistication. (97)

Regarding the deification of the dead Elvis, she observes:

The apotheosis of Elvis demands . . . perfection because his death confirmed the tragic frailty, the violence, the intellectual poverty, the extravagance of emotion, the loneliness, the suffering, the sense of loss. Almost everything about his death, including the enterprising cousin who sold the casket pictures to National Enquirer, dismays, but nothing can detract from Elvis himself.... Greil Marcus wrote in his book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music that Elvis created a beautiful illusion, a fantasy that shut nothing out. The opposite was true. The fascination was the reality always showing through the illusion--the illusion of wealth and the psyche of poverty; the illusion of success and the pinch of ridicule; the illusion of invincibility and the tragedy of frailty; the illusion of complete control and the reality of inner chaos.... Elvis had all the freedom the world can offer and could escape nothing. (103)

Her final, acute insight is painfully true: by saying that Elvis could escape nothing, she means escape Southern mythology, both what he inherited as a Southerner by birth, and what someone from the South is perceived to be by non-Southerners (think: Deliverance). In a sense, his movie career failed because he was never allowed by the general culture to be a movie star. Even Jimmy Carter as president couldn't escape the stigma of being from the South: the mass media was brutal on him, his brother Billy, and even his daughter Amy. Although Dr. Pratt corrects an observation made by Greil Marcus in his essay "Elvis: Presliad," Marcus nonetheless cited portions of the above passage in his scathing review of Albert Goldman's biography Elvis (1981), a biography I've cited on a few occasions. Her essay helps immensely to explain why so many were offended by Goldman's biography of Elvis: his (perhaps unconscious) contempt for the South and for Elvis's Southern identity taints almost every page.

But rather than fixate on the mote in our neighbor's eye, perhaps we ought to examine the sources and motivations for our own perceptions, in this case why Elvis's films are widely considered jokes, even by those who may have never seen them, or seen very few. To extrapolate a bit on Linda Ray Pratt's essay, we might say that those perceptions may largely be determined by factors that have nothing to do with the films themselves.