Van The Man

Last month I posted a blog on Van Morrison’s upcoming shows at the Hollywood Bowl—happening at the end of this week, Friday and Saturday, November 7 and 8—during which he will perform live his masterpiece Astral Weeks (1968). In conjunction with his upcoming performances, the L. A. Times posted both an article and a rare interview with Van the Man that anyone even remotely interested in his music must read: he discusses his life, his career, his music, poetry, and art all with remarkable candor. I am very disappointed that I cannot attend his concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, although information in the Times article as well as his website indicates that the concerts will be recorded and released on both vinyl and CD by the end of the year. When the actual dates are announced I will post them here.

Halloween Rock

The songs one might consider placing under the broad rubric of “Halloween Rock” occupy a curious niche in rock music history. They do not especially exhibit the tendentiousness of the “novelty song,” those occasional or ad hoc songs recorded to raise money for a certain charity, for instance, or recorded to capitalize on a current consumer fad or craze. Nor do they form a coherent subgenre of rock music, having no recurring, identifiable characteristics, thus making them different from a highly commercialized popular musical form such as the Christmas song. Another difference from Christmas music is that “Halloween Rock” is not necessarily music one plays at Halloween, but all year long. Nonetheless, there are certain tunes that one inevitably is compelled to play at Halloween, such as “The Blob,” “Monster Mash, “Psycho Killer,” “Werewolves of London,” and “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”, the latter song actually used in the movie Halloween. None of these aforementioned songs are particular “scary” in my view, although they are all highly memorable pieces of music, and somehow seem especially appropriate to play at this time of year.

Yesterday Scene-Stealers.com posted a list of the “Top 10 User-Submitted Halloween Rock Tunes,” consisting of readers contributing to “the perfect Halloween rock playlist.” I invite everyone to check out the list—complete with videos—that, while extraordinarily heterogeneous, marked by different styles and different historical periods, actually contains some interesting choices: among them, The Kinks’ “Wicked Annabella,” The Sonics’ “The Witch,” Electric Light Orchestra’s “Fire on High” (from the album Face the Music, the back cover of which is pictured above), The Who’s “Boris the Spider,” and what, for me anyway, is the most interesting choice, Crispin Glover’s rendition of “Ben.” Crispin Glover, remember, starred in the 2003 remake of Willard (1971), a story about a young man’s fascination and strong identification with rats. “Ben,” a huge hit for the young Michael Jackson, was the title track to that film’s 1972 sequel, Ben. Although Willard and its sequel are generally considered “campy,” for an alternative view I would recommend everyone to read Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux, in particular the chapter titled “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible.” Deleuze and Guattari are especially fond of the film Willard as an illustration of the principle they name “Becoming-Animal,” the strong identification certain human beings have with certain animals, imitating them, modeling their behavior on them, in short attempting to become them. Contrary to a film such as The Wolfman, for instance, which depicts the horror of becoming Other, Willard explores the deep desire to do just that. (Vampire films often explore similar territory.)

At any rate, over at Scene-Stealers.com a list of favored “Halloween Rock” tunes follows the “Top 10” Halloween songs, and I invite everyone to peruse it. Moreover, I wish all my readers, now and in the future, a Happy Halloween!

End Of An Era

The website switched.com announced yesterday—October 28, 2008—that JVC, the final company producing standalone VCRs, has ceased manufacture of the venerable machines. Obviously yesterday was an historic day. Apparently, JVC will “continue to serve customers with a need to play back VHS tapes by offering up DVD/VHS combo units, but those looking for a shiny new slice of retro in 2008 will be out of luck after remaining inventories dry up.” Since the first VHS VCR was introduced in 1976—the JVC HR-3300, priced at $1,400 and weighing 30 pounds—that is, 32 years ago, over 900 million VCRs were manufactured worldwide, “with 50 million of those boasting a JVC label.”

I can't say that I'm "sad" about it; indeed, I have given away many dozens of VHS tapes to students and others—consisting of both pre-records as well as material taped off of television—the past year and a half or so, but I don’t see myself ever completely “VHS free.” I have too much rare material that simply can’t be found on DVD (at least at the moment), not movies so much as much as live TV and hard-to-find TV interviews--some of it from the late 1970s. And what's wrong with keeping some of those old tapes that have vintage television commercials on them? I simply can't motivate myself to transfer all of that old material to DVD-Rs. Ugh.

I thus anticipate the coexisting with the videocassette—both VHS and Beta (my Sony Betamax is alive and well)—for many more years. Perhaps these material artifacts of a déclassé technology will do nothing but collect dust, but the technology has been too much a part of my life to dispense with it so cavalierly.

Pop Aphorisms: X

1. The fact that rock ‘n’ roll is about a whole lot more than the music is rock culture’s equivalent of the elephant in the living room.

2. It is a common occurrence to find two fans who like the same band and the same music to have absolutely nothing whatsoever to say to one another—because their reasons for liking the music are so completely different.

3. Only in an age of commerce can a record be considered classic when it’s been reissued more than once.

4. Rule #9: No one has sold an LP or CD who hasn’t later regretted doing so, for the simple reason that one realized only too late that there is someone, somewhere for whom the designation OOP—out of print—has no meaning.

5. The iTunes Music Store is simply the digital equivalent of a superstore—meaning the larger it is, the more indistinguishable and homogeneous the product.

6. Rule #10: The larger the record collection, the larger the number of insignificant records one owns; the reason these records are held on to—but remain unplayed—is explained by Rule #9.

7. The Collector’s Dilemma: the greater the number of records, the greater the number of worthless records, but to purge the worthless ones is to contradict the principle of collecting—therefore, for the collector, there is no such thing as separating the wheat from the chaff: the collection is beyond Good and Evil.

Classic Soul

Yesterday I came across Greg Kot’s compelling homage to Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops, who died October 17 at age 72. (Pictured at left are the Four Tops at London’s Heathrow Airport in 1966. From left are Duke Fakir, Levi Stubbs, Lawrence Payton and Obie Benson.) For those who may not know his role in the group, Levi Stubbs was the distinctive, lead voice of the Four Tops, a group that had 24 hits in the Top 40. It’s impossible not to have heard the music of the Four Tops, the epitome of what’s known as “Soul music,” particularly their three greatest songs discussed below, all released through Motown.

I found Greg Kot’s analysis of the following three songs of the Four Tops so insightful that I was compelled to re-blog them here. His complete blog on Levi Stubbs, in the on-line version of The Chicago Tribune, can be found here; I have extracted below only his discussion of the individual songs. I hope you find his individual discussions as insightful as I have.

“Reach Out I’ll Be There,” released August 1966, No. 1 pop hit: Stubbs throws a lifeline to a friend dying of neglect. Realizing the situation is desperate, he sings as if someone’s life depends on it, and it just might; the lyrics hint that a suicide is imminent (“all of your hope is gone”). The three remaining Tops (Obie Benson, Duke Fakir and Lawrence Payton) usher in Stubbs with a wordless “Ha!” as if spurring on a stallion. The beat clip-clops into place, a flute telegraphs the melody, and then the peerless Motown rhythm section locks into gear. The drama elevates each time the band drops out, save for James Jamerson’s driving bass line and a rattling tambourine. Stubbs lands hard on the final syllable of key lines: “… the world has grown COLD … drifting out on your OWN … and you need a hand to HOLD.” Stubbs isn’t just offering help to a friend in a time of need. He is pleading for her deliverance. With each “reach out,” Benson, Fakir and Payton push Stubbs higher, until desperation cracks through the seams in his voice.

“Standing in the Shadows of Love,” released November 1966, No. 4 pop hit: The clippity-clop beat echoes “Reach Out.” The desperate empathy of the previous hit transforms into bitterness and accusation. Now the narrator is plunged into unfathomable heartache: “You’ve taken away all my reasons for living.” The narrator stumbles down a street, bereft, trying to understand something beyond his control. He’s been abandoned by the love of his life. “Hold on a minute,” he cries, as if trying to stop a bullet, and the song veers into a brief but ferocious conga-drum breakdown. The song is the saddest of all battles; the listeners know the outcome before the narrator does. When he finally grasps that there no stopping the inevitable, the effect is devastating. “It may come today, or it may come tomorrow/But it's for sure I've got nothing but sorrow.”

“Bernadette,” released February 1967, No. 4 pop hit: Paranoia runs deep and wide in this classic of lust and jealousy. Stubbs addresses the title character, a siren whose beauty seduces other men and then blithely discards them against the rocks. But the most lovesick of them all is the narrator himself. He is consumed by fear; everywhere he looks there are suitors begging for Bernadette’s affections, and he frets he will lose her forever. He tries to woo her back by falling to his knees and proclaiming the utter worthlessness of his life without her. The horns and backing voices drape a cape of melancholy around Stubbs’ sagging shoulders. “Keep on needin’ me,” he cries. The song fades, and finally falls silent. But Stubbs returns two seconds later for one final outburst: “Bernadette!” It’s one of the great moments in the Motown catalogue, and certainly the most chilling.

Critic Dave Marsh once characterized "Bernadette" as "scarifying," which I think is exactly spot on. While I greatly admire all of these songs, there is a certain something to "Bernadette" that makes it perhaps the best of the three. Most certainly all three are examples of classic soul.

Memento Mori

I may have missed it, but Bill Wyman’s website made no mention of his birthday yesterday—his 72nd. The former Rolling Stone didn’t acknowledge his latest mile marker, preferring to let it go unremarked. Perhaps he no longer finds it worthy of mention, age being an aspect of our lives that seems to have only a slight connection to our subjective, lived experience. Born 24 October 1936, he was born only about a year and ten months after Elvis Presley, who had he lived would have turned 73 years old this year, and roughly three months from his 74th birthday. According to this interesting blog entry, Bill Wyman “has the distinction of being one of the last of the Sixties rock and rollers to do national service in Britain.” And as the author points out, the last American rock 'n' roller of historic significance who was conscripted was Jimi Hendrix. Had he lived, Hendrix would have turned 66 years old next month (born 27 November 1942).

Perhaps as a consequence of Bill Wyman’s age, I woke up today think of my father, who at age 72 had full-blown leukemia, and died about a month and a half after his 73rd birthday. Subsequently, my thoughts turned to the written epilogue at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon, which despite its specific historic reference contains an insight I think we’d all do well to remember:

It was in the age of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled. Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.

Memento mori

Pop Aphorisms: 9

I went ahead and posted nine more aphorisms today, so as to make the number I’ve posted on this blog at this point total an even 70. Several readers have written to me encouraging me to collect my aphorisms into book form, and I thank them very much for the vote of confidence. I’m currently pursuing the possibility of a book of aphorisms, but for such a book to be feasible (with an accompanying “Aphorism-A-Day” tear-off calendar as a possible product tie-in), I’ll need to write 365 of them (and one for leap year), meaning that after this particular posting I’ll have only 295 to go (plus another for leap year). They have been very popular, and I thank everyone for checking in from time to time for new additions, but whether I can write (well) about 300 more aphorisms to make a book remains to be seen. Ars longa vita brevis.

1. John Wayne was a great movie star because no matter the part, he was always John Wayne; his lesson was not lost on those pop singers who also became movie stars—Elvis, for instance—because they knew always to play themselves.

2. MTV Cribs—a show based on a fundamental contradiction, that one can present as ordinary the lives of individuals whose lives are extraordinary; the television equivalent of the Hollywood fan magazine.

3. The massive success of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” is demonstrable proof that the most successful pop songs always have been sentimental.

4. When popularizing rock ‘n’ roll, Elvis faced the problem of being perceived as lowbrow; what is known as “art rock” or “prog rock” at least succeeded in making rock music middlebrow.

5. The Beatles did collectively what they could not have done—did not do—individually, revealing that collaboration gives artists a better shot a success than artists working alone: Dylan, for instance, found The Band; outsiders such as Scott Walker weren’t as fortunate, explaining why his career has been so fraught with frustrations.

6. The musical career of Elvis Costello is an illustration of what happens to a generalist lost in a world of specialization.

7. The best rock bands understood the value of the name: imagine if the Rolling Stones were known as the Bongo Beatniks, or Black Sabbath as the Yellow Rosaries: bands that chose names such as The Chocolate Watchband or The Peanut Butter Conspiracy were far too fatuous ever to be taken seriously.

8. One need look no further for the politics of pop than in the so-called “answer song”: neither sequel nor remake, the answer song is an attempt to impinge upon and then supersede the discursive force of the target song.

9. To lift a phrase from Harold Bloom, popular music is, and always has been, a hopelessly overcrowded field, which explains why the “one-hit wonder” ought to be considered the rule rather than the exception.

Pop Aphorisms: 8

1. Concerts once were performed for the purpose of being recorded, but now concerts occur for the purpose of promoting a record.

2. There’s a very good reason why lists comprised of “the best rock (or pop) records (singles, etc.) ever made” are frequently published while “the worst rock (or pop) records ever made” never are: the latter requires one to put forth artistically defensible reasons for the choices made.

3. No music critic should be allowed to use the word “brilliant” in a review or article for the next 15 years, thereby allowing words such as “good,” “ordinary,” and perhaps even “banal” to regain their rightful place in the critical vocabulary.

4. No band or artist in the history of popular music has ever been able to overcome one daunting, fundamental ambiguity: is it art, or is it commerce? Of course, neither have the movies.

5. The fact that studios, and studio technology, are utterly essential to rock music is openly acknowledged by the elevation of the recording engineer to the status of a band member—as true for Elvis in the ‘50s as it is now.

6. The reason albums contain credits attributing a specific instrument to a specific individual is simply an acknowledgment of the specialization and division of labor that has been a feature of the industrial revolution since its inception.

7. Psychedelic rock—the aural equivalent of a hallucinogenic trip—is not simply the result of distorted amplification, but also of the first rock generation growing up spending Saturdays at the movie theater, with its astonishing array of cinematic genres, styles, periods, and budgetary quality.

8. A rock song that “says something” is the aural equivalent of a 1950s “problem picture,” explaining why both the songs and the movies are now largely forgotten.

Neal Hefti, 1922-2008

I learned today that Neal Hefti, former big band trumpeter, arranger, and composer who worked with that era's illustrious band leaders such as Count Basie and Woody Herman, and who later became famous to Baby Boomers for his theme to the 1960s TV series Batman, died on October 11 at age 85. He passed away at his home in Toluca Lake, California, slightly over two weeks before his 86th birthday.

I have a special sentiment for Neal Hefti for two reasons. One reason is that he was born in my neck of the woods, in Hastings, Nebraska, on 29 October 1922. He was a small town kid from a poor family who became one of the most influential big band arrangers of the 1940s and 1950s. After his distinguished career as a big band arranger, he went on to score many successful motion pictures. His film score credits include Sex and the Single Girl (1964), How to Murder Your Wife (1965), Harlow (1965), Boeing Boeing (1965), Barefoot in the Park (1967), The Odd Couple (1968), A New Leaf (1971), and, significantly, Lord Love a Duck (1966)—this latter film the second reason I’ve a special spot for Neal Hefti.

Despite its occasional misogyny which audiences today may find hopelessly déclassé, Lord Love a Duck, directed and adapted for the screen by George Axelrod (playwright of the Broadway hit The Seven Year Itch) and starring Tuesday Weld, Roddy McDowall, Ruth Gordon, and Harvey Korman, is one of the most audacious American films of the 1960s, and also one of the best. It is now widely considered a cult film, but its rewards are many, and the film is more accessible than generally perceived. I love Hefti’s score to the film—incidentally, the one written either immediately before or immediately after the composition of the Batman theme—as it is slightly irreverent of pop music, suitably appropriate to the iconoclastic themes in the film. Anticipating the themes of The Graduate (1967) by almost two years, Lord Love a Duck is a satire of the American “Plastic Society” of the 1960s (think of Frank Zappa's “Plastic People” from 1967's Absolutely Free) with particular emphasis on three types of American women: the vacuous teenage girl (Tuesday Weld), the middle-aged, promiscuous divorcee (Lola Albright), and the monstrous, domineering mother (Ruth Gordon). But the film’s satirical targets are many, among them the empty rituals of teen culture, the preoccupation for material acquisition and fame, religious hypocrisy (the drive-in church sequence is wonderful), and, yes, even AIP Beach movies. In a wonderful sequence, a film producer, T. Harrison Belmont (Martin Gabel—pastiching Sam Arkoff?), presented as the producer of such Beach movie "classics" as The Thing that Ate Bikini Beach, Cold War Bikini, and Bikini Countdown, is seeking a fresh starlet for his latest picture, titled, we eventually learn, Bikini Widow. Arguably influenced in its aesthetics by the French New Wave, I strongly recommend Lord Love a Duck, although I realize its sense of humor may not appeal to everyone. I, for one, watch the film two to three times a year.

Now hard to find (available only on vinyl LP), Neal Hefti’s score for the film is well worth a listen, as are most of his film scores, widely available from various sources. The comprehensive obituary of Neal Hefti in the Los Angeles Times can be found here, while more information about his career, as well as his extensive discography, can be easily found by conducting a web search.

Pop Aphorisms: 7

1. An old adage advises not to judge a book by its cover; it is therefore the height of folly to judge an album’s greatness by the album cover. As always, the exception proves the rule.

2. The emergence of Rolling Stone magazine in the late 60s is historic only in the sense that its publication openly acknowledged the dependency rock and pop had on the institution of criticism that validated—attributed importance to—the music.

3. The reason why most rock critics are so uncomfortable with the “one-hit wonder” is that it contradicts one of the sustaining myths of rock criticism: the concept of a career, that is, of a musician’s so-called “artistic development.”

4. It is a profound distortion of history to say that Punk rock was music written and played by amateurs.

5. The best lyricists in popular music intuitively understood Sartre’s dictum that one’s brilliance is not a result of having said certain things, “but for having chosen to say them in a certain way”—too bad most critics haven’t understood it.

6. One would very much like to say the difference between a fan and a critic is that the former has an uncritical identification with a particular band’s music.

7. Fanzine: same thing as a slick magazine on the newsstand, except it is printed on the photocopy machine, the writing is even more unpolished, and the vocabulary isn’t as impressive.

8. Ambrose Bierce observed about “destiny” that it allowed a tyrant to defend his crimes, while it gave a fool an excuse for failure: within the institution of entertainment, the concept is referred to as either “producer interference” or, occasionally, “lack of publicity.”

9. The surest guarantee a band has of having made a classic record is that it fails commercially when first released: initial failure is a guarantee of greatness.

10. Desert Island Discs: a game music critics invented when up against the deadline for an expected article. As an indulgence, it is possible only when having way too many albums to listen to within a single lifetime.

Folsom Prison News

Glenn Gould scandalized the classical music community in the 1960s when he acknowledged that the recordings on his LPs were spliced together from multiple takes. Appropriately, Gould compared this process to filmmaking, where scenes are often shot out of order and subsequently edited together to form a coherent sequence. By the 60s, though, the splicing or editing together of multiple takes should have been old news. The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” for instance, was composed of two different takes, played at different tempos and in different keys, spliced together, synced by speeding up one take and slowing down the other. Equally as famous, Art Garfunkel’s vocal on Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was painstakingly assembled from many dozens of takes.

Thus it should come as no surprise that one of most significant moments in 60s music—and in the creation of the Johnny Cash mythos as well—never happened. On “Folsom Prison Blues,” the opening track on perhaps the most important recording of Johnny Cash’s career, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (recorded January 18, 1968; released July 1968), Cash sings the lyric, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” which is followed, memorably, by the cheers and approving applause of the inmates. But as Michael Streissguth reveals in his book, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece (2004), the crowd response to Cash’s lyric was spliced in sometime later by Columbia Records producer Bob Johnston. In short, the moment consists of “canned” crowd noise, and is not the savage response of brutal prison inmates. The moment, although a cornerstone of the Johnny-Cash-as-folk-hero myth, is yet another instance of tape splicing, not the reproduction of an authentically recorded live sound.

Since the recording is so historic, however, Columbia has chosen to leave the moment in its edited, post-recorded, form on its new, 40th anniversary 3-disc boxed set, At Folsom Prison Legacy Edition, choosing not to release it sans cheers and applause. However, the revelation included in the brand new release (this past Tuesday) is that instead of the widely-known opening of the album—silence, until Cash intones “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”—the new Legacy edition begins with radio DJ Hugh Cherry commanding the inmate audience to remain quiet until after Cash greets them. Additionally, the new boxed set includes that day’s opening act, the Statler Brothers and Carl Perkins, and additional duets (besides “Jackson,” of course) with June Carter.

Do these revelations diminish Cash's achievement? Of course not: the Beatles made tape splicing famous, and their legend remains firm, as does Glenn Gould's. As Gould himself pointed out, by the 1960s, studio recording had become analogous to acting in the cinema.

Pop Aphorisms: 6

1. “The Top 500 Albums of All Time”—another name for the outcome of a questionnaire, a device derived from a nineteenth-century parlor game.

2. Certain records—such as Led Zeppelin’s first album—are worth purchasing simply because of the album art; listening to the record is the buyer's choice.

3. Bubblegum is to psychedelic music what fat free Half and Half is to whole milk: the musical equivalent of non-alcoholic beer.

4. Writing rock criticism is both unfulfilling and self-defeating: no matter how much one says or does, the criticism can never be as fun or interesting as the record itself.

5. The Sixties phenomenon of the “Supergroup”: an example of a marketing ploy that is able to flourish exclusively in an age of commerce—and the Age of Warhol.

6. Sturgeon’s Law states that 90% of everything is crap, except in the case of rock and pop music—then it’s 95%.

7. CD bonus tracks are the aural equivalent of the cinematic sequel: another way of scraping the last bit of cream from the side of the jar.