The Nabokov Letter

In my and Rebecca’s book, Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side (FAB Press, 2006), we discussed Donald Cammell’s proposed film of Vladimir Nabokov’s “unfilmable” novel, Pale Fire (1962). As his biographers, we were told of a letter Donald had received from the famed author regarding Donald’s proposed adaptation of the novel, but the letter written by Nabokov—of which Donald was justly proud—was never recovered during the many years my wife Rebecca and I worked on our book, which went to press three years ago this month.

We are happy to report, however, that the letter from Vladimir Nabokov to Donald Cammell was discovered by David Cammell, Donald’s brother, just a couple of months ago, in December 2008, among his personal papers. During the writing of our biography, David assured us of the letter’s existence because he’d read it—but was unable to locate it despite his best efforts. Although the letter now has been found, its discovery, obviously, has occurred too late for inclusion in our book. And yet, now that the letter has been recovered, happily it is available for all the world to see. Although all of the late author’s work is closely guarded, Dmitri Nabokov has kindly given his permission for the letter to be distributed in cyberspace. We are deeply grateful to him for granting permission. If anyone wants confirmation of this permission, you may contact Dr. Stephen Blackwell, Professor of Russian at the University of Tennessee—Knoxville and moderator of the NABOKV-L discussion boards, with whom Dmitri Nabokov is in close communication. I have discussed Donald’s proposed adaptation at length on the NABOKV-L, and a copy of the letter was sent to all list members who wanted one.

Becky and I were mildly surprised by the date of the letter—July 30, 1971—as the treatment Donald had written of Pale Fire—the treatment we have a copy of and have read, anyway—is dated May 1974. Although we knew he was always at work on various film projects, we were confident that during the 1970-71 period Donald was entirely focused on a film project titled Ishtar (not to be confused with the Dustin Hoffman-Warren Beatty film released in 1987). But it is now clear that he had begun thinking of adapting Pale Fire during this period, perhaps even earlier. Donald admired Lolita and also Kubrick's film adaptation of it, and also admired Nabokov's novel Despair, filmed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1978. In July 1971, when the letter was received, Donald and Myriam Gibril were living in David Cammell’s flat on Old Church Street in Chelsea, literally just around the corner from Mick Jagger. Somehow, the letter must have subsequently remained in David’s flat, over the years eventually getting mixed in with David’s other papers, only to resurface thirty-seven years later, and almost thirteen years after Donald’s death in April 1996. As Nabokov was not profligate of praise, we can certainly understand why Donald was so proud of the letter. Below is a copy of the heretofore unpublished, and largely unknown, letter. Although Nabokov suggests a possible meeting, I am quite sure that no meeting ever took place between the two men.

Diarmid and Broccoli

Happily, Diarmid Cammell’s good friend, Carol Staswick, wrote to me last night in regard to my recent post on my memories of Diarmid, supplying me with some additional information and also correcting some information I’d included in it. I’m pleased to able to share that information here, in order to set the record straight. I am thankful Carol wrote to me. First of all, I’m happy to report that she and Diarmid did, in fact, see Donald’s film White of the Eye, some time before 2000. She remembers Diarmid’s reaction to the film being “mixed, along the lines of: it’s disturbing that Donald chose that subject, but the camera work was very artistic.”

Regarding his childhood acting career, she remembers his view toward it differently than I do. It seemed to her that he was not so dismissive of his early acting. She says he seemed proud of having been part some successful TV dramas. In addition to The Prince and the Pauper, which I’d mentioned, she mentioned a TV play by John Mortimer titled David and Broccoli (1960), which I’d forgotten about, but remember being told about. I don’t recall Diarmid specifically mentioning this TV play to me, although David Cammell had mentioned it to me, as he personally knew the barrister and dramatist John Mortimer (who died just this past January at age 85) because of his career in film production. I’d claimed that Diarmid dismissed his early acting career, saying he referred to it as an “embarrassment,” and I mentioned this because I specifically asked him about his acting career on two separate occasions. The second time I asked him about it, I clearly remember him saying to me, “Oh, it’s an embarrassment really. I don’t want to talk about it. Someday when I know you better, maybe.” My reply was simply, “Fair enough.” Actually, the only reason I knew about his career as a child actor in the first place was because David Cammell had told me all about it prior to my first introduction to Diarmid, in 1999. And even before he angrily called us demanding that his name be removed from our book (for reasons detailed in my previous post), he’d previously written me an email requesting that I remove all references to his acting career (we had been sending him document files of the chapters in draft form as email attachments). So all of these instances contributed to my perception that he was highly dismissive of that portion of his life; perhaps I am wrong in that assessment. Personally I thought it was fascinating and I wanted to know about it, not because I intended to go into it in any depth in our biography of Donald, but because I was actually interested in knowing about it. Perhaps rather than using the word “embarrassment,” I should have said that he was “ambivalent” about it, which seems to be more accurate given Carol’s recollection. And most certainly she knew him much better than I did.

As for his knowledge of Arabic, she believes I misunderstood something Diarmid said, and I believe she’s right. She says that in the 1970s, Diarmid translated from the French a book titled The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual by Abdallah Laroui, for which his knowledge of Arabic was useful. But she writes, “He never mentioned to me any professional translations from Arabic (at least I don’t recall any such mention), nor did he put any on his resume. He did say that his Arabic script was quite good.” On this latter point I’m sure she’s right: what he must have told me was that his Arabic script was very good, a remark which I mis-remembered as him saying that his Arabic was very good--a big difference. So I apologize for including incorrect information in my earlier post.

Carol appended to her email the last picture she took of Diarmid, taken just this last December, while he was preparing to barbecue salmon. I thought I would share it. He has much more gray hair than the last time I saw him a few years ago, but then again, I suppose I do, too. And of course he was ill. The picture is very much like him--his smile, that impish twinkle in his eye; but what particularly strikes me about the picture is the strong family resemblance to Donald, which I’d never noticed before as being so pronounced, but it sure is in this picture. Carol asked me to take special note of his green Tibetan wool socks and his custom-made sandals—so inimitably Diarmid! I am privileged to have known him; would that we could have patched up our disagreement before he passed away.

Diarmid Cammell, 1945-2009

Today I received the incomparably sad news that Donald Cammell’s youngest brother, Diarmid Cammell, died this past Friday, February 27, at the age of 63. Becky and I both were fortunate to meet Diarmid some years ago, spending a couple of memorable occasions with him over bottles of fine wine, during the research phase of our book on Donald. We spoke to him on the phone many times during our research, during which he would frequently regale us with stories of his father, Charles Richard Cammell (1890-1968), whom he adored. I suspect that Diarmid’s appearance in this world was something of an unexpected surprise for his father, Charles Richard Cammell, who at the time of his youngest son’s birth was a few months shy of 55 years old; Diarmid’s mother, Iona, was in her mid-40s. Perhaps he was conceived during a celebration toward the end of the second world war.

Reading our book, however, one would think that Diarmid had very little to say about his famous brother, but that was due to Diarmid’s demand that we remove all references to him, and quotes by him, just prior to the book’s publication in April 2006, due to his extreme dislike of the controversial theory we put forth in our book, that his brother Donald suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), the result of being sexually molested as a small boy. Diarmid demanded that we remove all references to the years of his youth, when he was a successful child actor on stage and in film, his later career as a photographer in both the UK and Europe, and his personal views of Donald’s films—he loved Demon Seed, thinking it Donald’s best film, had never seen White of the Eye, and detested Performance—he had a strong dislike of Mick Jagger based on a brief run-in with the rock star in the mid-60s, during an occasion when Donald had invited Mick to visit his parent’s home. We were allowed to include in our book a brief mention of his troubling and debilitating mental illness, but beyond this and very few other instances, very little mention of Diarmid remains in the published version of our book. But his views and insights are, nonetheless, reflected throughout, and he was an essential source of information and of contacts.

Diarmid Victor Charles Cammell was born in London on 21 July 1945, the third and youngest child of Charles and Iona Cammell. A precociously gifted child, he achieved early renown as a child actor, appearing on the London stage in one of Robert Bolt’s first plays, The Flowering Cherry (1958), which starred Ralph Richardson and Celia Johnson (and, later, Wendy Hiller), at age 12. Subsequently, he appeared in the Boulting Brothers’ sex comedy A French Mistress (1960), starring the French sex kitten Agnes Laurent, although was mistakenly billed in the film’s credits as David Cammell. He later appeared in an episode of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Disney, The Prince and the Pauper: The Pauper King (1962). He also appeared on some LP recordings of medieval British plays issued in the early 1960s. When I asked him about his career as a child actor, he dismissed the whole thing, saying it was an “embarrassment,” and refused to talk about it.

In late adolescence, he developed a mental illness that plagued him the rest of his life. He told me it was manic-depression, and after one particularly violent episode, he was jailed for his behavior. One person told us she remembered him ranting he had “the power of God,” while another told us he at times could hardly care for himself. Certainly he had some form of mania, based on the anecdotes Donald’s friends and acquaintances related. In an email one time he referred to his illness as “the curse” of his existence. But in the 1960s, he became a reasonably good photographer, living for a time in France with Patrick and Mijanou Bauchau, whom he spoke very highly of, and for a short time with Donald and Deborah in Paris, this prior to Donald and Deborah’s break-up late in 1967. As I understand it, his first marriage failed; his second marriage also failed, but a lovely child was born, Karima. Because of his second marriage, he spent the majority of his life in the United States, in and around the Bay Area of San Francisco. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, studying both Arabian culture and the Arabic language; he would later serve as translator of Arabic texts for various scholarly studies.

I first met him in a pub in Berkeley in 1999, accompanied by his brother David, whom I had arranged to meet in San Francisco earlier that day. The night I met him, Diarmid was in fine form. He spoke of his brother Donald’s film career, insisting that Donald should never have given up painting, for which his talents were ideally suited. He talked about staying up all night helping Donald prepare for his first painting exhibition, in London in 1959. He strongly disliked Performance, claiming that the reason the film couldn’t get released was because Mick Jagger couldn’t act, which is why Jagger is in the film for so little of its running time (a controversial thesis, to be sure). He claimed on the first night I met him, and many times after, that he thought Donald’s finest film was Demon Seed, which he greatly admired; he hadn’t seen White of the Eye, and I don’t believe he ever saw it, or Wild Side, either. He spoke fondly of his visits to Los Angeles when he would stay with Donald and China in that little house on the hill on Crescent Drive, saying that he always appreciated the fact that on the occasion of his visits, Donald would always have fine bottles of red French wine available for consumption. But there was an age difference between the two, of eleven years, and Donald’s life took a much different direction than his. I believe the age difference separated him emotionally from his older brothers; brotherly love was there, but they were not extremely close.

Our BPD thesis, as put forth in our biography of Donald, both offended and angered him. As one who—despite his mental illness—believed in good old Cartesian common sense, he found our BPD thesis an instance of what he said was the “liberal disease” and thought that we had utterly no idea what his brother Donald was all about. He demanded that all references to him, and all quotations by him, be removed. But it is important to know that Diarmid was extremely conservative: he was, for instance, the English translator of Jean-Francois Revel’s post-9/11 attack on European complacency in the face of terrorism, Anti-Americanism (2003), a book whose purpose was to defend America against its European detractors. (Revel is famous for authoring many years ago the book Without Marx or Jesus, a positive social critique of the America of the 1960s.) Diarmid became a conservative reactionary in his final years, but then again, according to many individuals we interviewed during the writing of our book, so did his brother Donald.

According to Diarmid’s very good friend, Carol Staswick—a lovely person who wrote us this afternoon with the news of his death—Diarmid realized he had liver problems by the spring of last year and had made a valiant effort to get well. But it may have been too late, and in any case, after some months without alcohol, he went somewhat manic, and that drove him back to the wine, and to developing an alternative theory about his physical condition. He was never quite normal, she said, since some time in September of last year. I found some comfort in Carol’s observation that Diarmid seemed to be at peace with his life, and despite his illness he said he had enjoyed the past year. When she finally called the ambulance, several days ago, things went very fast, which, she said, “was merciful.” Diarmid died this past Friday, February 27, 2009.

She told us, though, that despite his frustration with our BPD thesis, Diarmid read our book and found it quite well done, and had meant to write us praising it, but alas, he never did; nor shall he ever. The last I spoke to him was probably three years ago this month. I feel deeply saddened by the news of his death; as I write these words, I feel like lead. I am thinking of his father’s second book of memoirs, Heart of Scotland (1956), in which he proudly speaks of his son Diarmid’s birth, and his son’s love of all things Scottish. And now I write of his death. I can think only of a paraphrase of the statement made by the Beat comedian Lord Buckley many years ago, that people are the flowers of life. Diarmid Cammell was one of the more unusual, but lovely, flowers I have happened to come across in this, the short stroll in the garden that we call our life. A wonderful photo of Diarmid as a young man can be found here, on his lovely daughter’s, Karima’s, blogspot, a site which I only found today. I’m so glad I did.

Yakety Yak

As a form of popular music, 1950s doo-wop was characterized by its playful use of nonsense syllables (take, for instance, the hyphenate “doo-wop” itself) repeated in order to create elaborate harmonic and rhythmic effects. Hence the paradigmatic example of doo-wop is probably the Coasters’ hit “Yakety Yak” (1958), a song written and produced by Leiber and Stoller. For the word yak—like the words ibis, vole, x-ray fish, and umbrella bird—is an invention, existing for the sake of completing the English alphabet in children’s books. Nonetheless, while an invented word, yak refers both to a mythical creature in the books of Dr. Seuss and to meaningless chatter, authoritarian speech that is to be ignored as an act of defiance. Hence the lyrics to “Yakety Yak” describe the recalcitrant response to the household chores a kid (presumably a teenager) has to perform on order of his parents. Stoller has referred to these songs as “playlets,” mini-dramas or character contests created by the songwriters to capture stereotypical teenage life. Another term for these “playlets” might be “whimseys,” a form of nineteenth-century parlor game that transformed any given piece of pre-existing prose into a poem. Thus, from the BBC News this morning:

US Republicans
Have broadly welcomed
President Barack Obama’s
Plan to withdraw
Most troops
From Iraq
By 2010.

In the same way, “Yakety Yak” pulls snippets or quotes from common colloquialisms:

You just put on your coat and hat
And walk yourself to the laundromat
And when you finish doing that
Bring in the dog and put out the cat
Yakety yak
Don’t talk back

Rock music has always seemed particularly amenable to the invented word and the nonsense syllable, from Little Richard’s refrain in “Tutti Frutti,” “Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom,” to Roy Orbison’s “Ooby Dooby,” to Manfred Mann’s “Doo Wah Diddy,” to Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” to the refrain of David Seville’s “Witch Doctor,” also from 1958:

Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang
Walla walla, bing bang
Ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla bing bang
Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang
Walla walla, bing bang
Ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang
Walla walla bing bang

Although by no means a rock song, the Sherman Brothers’ “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” from Disney’s MARY POPPINS (1964), suggests the close association of nonsense or invented words, children’s books, kid songs, and the appeal the lyrics to rock songs have for adolescents, and, no doubt, why certain rock songs are so popular at frat parties.

Goodbye, New Yorker Films

I am saddened by today's news, as reported by IndieWIRE, that the decades-old distributor of European and arthouse cinema in North America, New Yorker Films, has announced it is shutting down. As a film student in the 1970s, thanks to New Yorker Films, I was able to see the work of a great many filmmakers that I would not have been able to see otherwise. I can’t begin to count the number of times I sat in a darkening theater when the “New Yorker Films” logo would appear on the screen; I saw it so often, it was like a fact of nature. For me the logo was synonymous with European arthouse films, films that for me formed my cinematic consciousness. I am very saddened by this news. According to the report, among the filmmakers whose films were distributed in this country were: Ackerman, Bertolucci, Bresson, Chabrol, Fassbinder, Fellini, Godard, Herzog, Kieslowski, Malle, Rohmer, Rossellini, Sembene, Wenders, Schlondorff, and many others. The full story can be found here. It is a sad day indeed.

Pop Aphorisms: XII

1. Record Collecting—A pseudo-scientific activity motivated by the same obsessive narrowness of focus that characterizes the autistic mind.

2. If Coldplay would realize how terrible it was, and were able to ironize that terribleness, it could be U2.

3. As a guitarist, Eric Clapton is to B. B. King what Gene Kelly is to Fred Astaire—what virtuosity is to grace.

4. Mallarmé’s advice to poets, “Yield the initiative to words,” finds its analogy in the lesson of Elvis, who understood rock music differed from classic pop by yielding the initiative to sound.

5. So many “important” albums have been named in the history of rock that the word “important” is no longer meaningful: the word is simply a ruse used to cloak individualized taste.

6. The problem of referring to a certain album as an example of a certain school of music (e.g., “punk,” “alternative”) is critically irresponsible, because it suggests that a particular school of music is more coherent than it actually is.

7. There is a crucial difference between a movie star and a rock star: the latter is seldom, if ever, able to stage a “comeback.” The “oldies” circuit is rock’s equivalent of country music’s Branson, Missouri—just a waiting room to hillbilly heaven.

8. To become art, rock music had to elevate the guitar to its primary expressive instrument, just as jazz since bebop elevated the saxophone. Unfortunately, it fell prey to the same pitfall: virtuosity too easily became pretension.

9. Country Pop—the last refuge of a failed rock ‘n’ roller.

10. In the era of Madonna, the need for publicity is obvious; in more honest days, though, they called it “payola.”

Importance

According to John Tobler’s This Day In Rock (Carroll & Graf, 1993), on this day in 1977, Fleetwood Mac released one of the biggest-selling rock albums of all time, RUMOURS. The album is still in the Top Ten of the Top Selling Records of All Time despite being surpassed in recent years by Garth Brooks and Shania Twain, having sold to date 19 million copies, more or less the same number as The Beatles’ “white album.” It is astonishing that the album nonetheless has sold ten million fewer copies than The Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, the all-time sales leader. While lists—lists being a form of indexing—of best sellers are no doubt interesting as well as provocative, such lists also make it difficult to determine the historical importance of an album, if by importance we mean significance. Although RUMOURS sold more in terms of copies than Fleetwood Mac’s previous, eponymously titled album, and more copies than the band’s subsequent album, TUSK, is it historically more important than either of these two other albums?

Perhaps it is time to explore the importance of “importance.” For “importance” is the word normally invoked whenever popular music becomes an object of academic study. Many articles and books have been written on so-called “important” albums and musicians, in which the critic, by necessity, makes the assertion that such-and-such is “important.” And yet inevitably, as Simon Frith has observed, whenever a particular album (or musician) is deemed “important,” a study of ideological effects ensues, following conventionalized, highly predictable routes (see the first twenty pages of Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, Harvard University Press, 1996). If the determination of “importance” allows us to designate the significance of a particular album or musician, what sorts of information does the designation also happen to repress? The problem with “importance,” as a designation of significance, is that it leads to an uncritical identification with a particular album or musician, which is why analyses seeking to establish importance inevitably follow the predictable path of ideology. The trick is to establish significance while still remaining critically aloof, if not disinterested, in the object of study, not because the object is analogous to a specimen under a microscope, but to avoid predictability and redundancy, or pleonasm.

And Then There Were 170

Frequent visitors to this blog know that I submitted a proposal, on Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, to Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series of books on significant rock albums of the past forty years (or so). This past Sunday evening, the series’ editor, David Barker, posted the (long) shortlist of proposals still under serious consideration, trimming the number of proposals from 597 to 170. I’m very happy to report that my proposal made the initial cut and is still under consideration, as is my friend Tim Lucas’s, on Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation. Tim sent me a congratulatory note today, to which I responded reciprocally. I sincerely hope we both make it—I would very much like to see our work appearing in the same series— although I don’t wish to calculate the odds of that probability. But we shall see.

While reader comments (available on a pop-up window) on the short list are widely varied, by and large the comments by those authors whose proposals were rejected the first round are congenial and supportive of those who made the initial cut. Believe me, I know what it’s like to receive a rejection, as I didn’t make the cut the last time there was an invitation for proposals, nor did Tim. While of course I would love to contribute a book to the series, there are a good many albums on the short list I would love to read a book about. Congratulations to all who have made it so far. I wish you all the best, and please do likewise.

Brundlefly

A few days ago, over at the 33 1/3 blogspot, John Mark posted a link to an article about performance artist Genesis P-Orridge (second from left on the TG album cover), once and present member of the band Throbbing Gristle, and, in the 1980s, the co-founder of Psychic TV. While the article makes rather explicit the masochistic aspects of P-Orridge’s being, his tale is thoroughly Gnostic in its underpinnings (e.g., the conviction of an incomplete and/or inadequate Self that can be overcome by the union with one’s “lost” half or twin; the fundamental distrust of the material world; body hatred; and so on). His quest for identicalness can be understood, in one way, as an attempt to reassure one’s unstable sense of identity through the display of that self-image in the identical image of an Other. But as I read his story, I also found myself thinking of the Frankenstein myth of a body cobbled together with incongruous parts, but also a modern revision of that puissant myth, Pierre Jeunet’s ALIEN: RESURRECTION and the image of the cloned but strangely androgynous body of Ripley, the successfully manufactured eighth clone in a series of failed attempts.

Only one filmmaker could possibly translate the strange story recounted in that article into a film: David Cronenberg. Think of Cronenberg’s films such as DEAD RINGERS (the perverse relationship between the identical twins Beverly and Elliot Mantle, which culminates in their catastrophic re-imagining of themselves as Siamese Twins), THE FLY (the Brundlefly hybrid), CRASH (the masochistically linked couple immersed in the delirium of a Folie à deux), and M. BUTTERFLY (a revision of Balzac’s Sarrasine with its focus on the highly ambiguous gender identity of Song Lilling, as s/he vacillates precariously between female masquerade and femininity). In DEAD RINGERS, the Mantle twins’ desire to merge into one another is similar Seth Brundle’s aspiration at the conclusion of THE FLY, to splice his genetic material with the DNA of Veronica and their unborn child in order to create a male/female/fly/offspring hybrid—“Brundlefly.” This same aspiration for a hybrid form is referred to in the article, and in P-Orridge’ s writings, by the neologism pandrogeny—“There is no reason to accept anymore what was once a God-given form. People can now choose to be even more fictional,” writes Genesis P-Orridge in an article available here. What is fascinating in his remarks is his reconceptualization of what, in Jungian psychology, is called the quest for individuation (psychological differentiation, the development of the individual personality). Normally individuation involves a subject striving for a life that is meaningful, complete, noble, good, and so on. But in the aforementioned essay and elsewhere (a lengthy interview, in parts, with P-Orridge on these topics is available on youtube here), he recasts individuation as the biological transformations enabled by or through technology—as does Seth Brundle, as well as many of the protagonists in Cronenberg's male melodramas.

I’m Singing With My Laptop

Slightly over a week ago, in my February 1st entry, I observed that it is possible now to make a record simply by recombining fragments of sounds sampled by other records—you don’t even need to know how to play an instrument. In the context of that argument, I cited Public Enemy’s Hank Shocklee, who said almost twenty years ago:

We don’t like musicians. We don’t respect musicians…. In dealing with rap, you have to be innocent and ignorant of music. Trained musicians are not ignorant of music, and they cannot be innocent to it. They understand it, and that’s what keeps them from dealing with things out of the ordinary…. [Public Enemy is] a musician’s nightmare. (Keyboard, September 1990, pp. 82-83).

Perhaps instead of citing Hank Shocklee, however, I should have simply included the following commercial advertisement for Microsoft’s Songsmith as proof enough of my claim. Clicking on the link also brings up on the sidebar examples of what is fast becoming a new cottage industry, twisted versions of pop songs (re)made with Microsoft’s Songsmith. Among the most byzantine of these new songs are versions of the Police’s “Roxanne” and Billy Idol’s “White Wedding.” Anyone yet tried "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"? In the words of Hank Shocklee, Songsmith is a musician’s nightmare, and even more evidence that rock music has received a silicon termination notice.

Dewey Martin, 1940—2009

The local paper reported this morning that DEWEY MARTIN (second from left), the former drummer and singer for Buffalo Springfield, has died at the age of 68. Apparently he died over a week ago (accounts vary whether it was on Saturday, January 31 or Sunday, February 1), but this was the first I heard about it. According to this report, Martin was found dead in his Van Nuys apartment; a friend indicated that he’d health problems the past few years, and believed he died of natural causes. Born September 30, 1940 as Walter Dwayne Midkiff, Dewey Martin was one of three Canadians in Buffalo Springfield (the others being Bruce Palmer and Neil Young). At the time he joined the band, he had already been on the road with Patsy Cline, Faron Young and Roy Orbison. Jimmy McDonough, author of Shakey, the biography of Neil Young, wrote:

A few years older than the rest of the Springfield, Martin was perhaps the most incongruous addition to a band full of mutual misfits. Cocky, aggressive and sporting mod attire, he behaved more like an extra from a cop show than some folk-rocker. Dewey liked showbiz: He’d be the only Buffalo to appear as a contestant on The Dating Game. (157)

A short-lived band that stayed together only slightly more than two years, after Martin left Buffalo Springfield his career became rather elusive, but an excellent article on Martin’s post-Buffalo career can be found here. Yesterday, Neil Young, Stephen Stills, and Richie Furay issued a statement on Dewey Martin that can be found over here. Bruce Palmer, a fellow Canadian and founding member of Buffalo Springfield, died in 2004.

The Virtues of Misreading

In literature classes in our high schools and colleges, the preferred method of study is hermeneutically driven and formally conservative: it favors interpretation and encourages fidelity to the text—to established methods of (re)production through interpretation. There’s a perfectly defensible reason for this method: the acquisition of rereading skills, and the inculcation of the virtue of fidelity, leads to scholarship.

But as literary critic Harold Bloom has argued, creativity (as opposed to scholarly endeavor) must be understood not as a rereading, but as a misreading, of the inherited tradition. Applying Bloom’s insight to rock culture, those artists we perceive to be innovative and influential have actively misread the music that has come before. As Michael Jarrett writes:

Steering a course between repetition (redundancy) and incomprehensibility (entropy), he or she parlays an aberrant or perverse reading of the past into an authorized reading for the present. Elvis Presley’s “misreading” of Dean Martin (a conventionalized version of the saloon singer) offers a good example of this. (196)

Chris Spedding has an excellent article on exactly this idea, “Elvis & Dino,” in which he explores just how Elvis misread Dean Martin. Spedding recounts the anecdote told by Marion Keisker, the office manager of Sam Phillips’ Sun Records studio in Memphis:

. . . Marion Keisker . . . tells of a not entirely successful first audition Presley had with Phillips. According to Marion, Sam asked Elvis to run through some of his repertoire, which seemed to lean so heavily on Dean Martin stuff, she thought Elvis had decided “. . . if he was going to sound like anybody, it was going to be Dean Martin.”

Spedding argues that by looking at Elvis’s early career in this way, “we can see how many of those actions previously dismissed (or considered perverse when they could not be conveniently ignored) now fall into place. . . . Elvis was naturally fair-haired. He dyed his hair black. . . . Filmed later in Technicolor, Elvis’s obsidian do had that same almost blue-black sheen you can see in Dean Martin’s movies.” Comparing Martin’s [1955] hit, “Memories Are Made Of This,” with “the song that Elvis always claimed was his favorite cut, “Don’t Be Cruel,” a hit in the summer of the following year,” Spedding observes:

Now, apart from the fact that Elvis borrowed that descending-bass-run-followed-by-guitar-chord ending from the arrangement on Martin’s record, other common elements are that sexy, wobbly, almost hiccuping baritone vocal not yet identifiably “rock” until Elvis made it so and Martin’s novel use of a four-piece male gospel-type vocal group which we may assume helped inspire Elvis, steeped as he was in traditional gospel music, to introduce the Jordanaires on his cut, effectively integrating them into a unique blend with his own lead vocal, thus establishing another rock archetype. Another obvious nod in Martin’s direction, released when Elvis was well established as a pop mega-star in the summer of 1959, was Elvis’s “My Wish Came True,” which had an opening four-note motif identical to Martin’s “Return To Me,” (both titles having four syllables!) released in April 1958. Even the key is the same.

Thus, through his misreading of Dean Martin, Elvis created an individual style and helped both to popularize and to institutionalize rock ‘n’ roll. There are other examples of such perverse misreading contributing to the reinvention of rock, of course: the perversity of Dylan performing American folk with a rock band (“going electric,” Newport, 1965), for instance, or the Sex Pistols’ burlesque of 1960s and early 1970s American pop records (1976-77).