Limbo Rock

The shift from the single to the album in the 1950s and 1960s represented a shift from music for dancing to music for listening. As a result, the album, designed for listening, became the basic material artifact of rock culture. (It's no coincidence that the music most strongly associated with the Sixties, psychedelia, was designed for listening on stereo systems.) One consequence of this shift in patterns of music consumption was the rise of the rock critic. Nowadays, of course, rock critics are ubiquitous, but back in those days, there were very few. As an illustration of the rise of rock music criticism, consider the number of journals that were established in the late 1960s:

Crawdaddy! - February 1966

Rolling Stone - November 1967

Creem - February 1969

The problem, though, was that while rock criticism rather quickly became a recognized profession, what was the rock music critic's precise function? Was he simply a means to free promotion and publicity, or did he provide good and true insights into the music? If the latter, what were the criteria for judgement? The rock critic also had an additional problem: If he wanted to be read, he had to have the proper bohemian credentials (a member of the counterculture, or at least sympathetic to it), and therefore to the Left politically. Criticism thus became oppositional, as critics saw their primary function as counteracting commercialism ("hype"), the dominant discourse of the popular press. But how was the critic to go about recognizing The Real Thing? The approach developed at the time was to distinguish the authentic from the commercial, with the idea of authenticity determined negatively, that is, structured by what it was not: for example, Rock was not Pop, Soul was not White. Thus was established the fundamental myth of rock criticism: authenticity vs. commercialism.

That's not all. Like any cultural critic since the time of Matthew Arnold, the critic's authority was premised on his having a keener judgement (in this case, a more discerning ear) than the broader, untrained population. In a way, the critic was the ideal listener, presumably in full position of rock's history: its major figures, moments, themes, contours, its codes, paradigmatic shifts, and its innovators. But how did the critic rescue or recover those albums released prior to the formation of rock criticism in 1966-67? Retroactively, of course, by means of the list, an old Victorian parlor game used to pass the idle hours.

In his Divine Comedy, Dante assigned the virtuous pagans (such as Homer and Virgil) to Limbo, denying them access to salvation because they did not have knowledge of Christ. By way of analogy, we might call Limbo Rock (with all due respect to Chubby Checker) those unaccountably neglected, but nonetheless historically important, albums released prior to the establishment of journals publishing rock criticism such as Rolling Stone in 1967.

Consider Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The list is heavily composed of albums released after 1967 A.C. (After Critics). Of course, a few towering figures make the list, those whose B.C. (Before Critics) musical careers could not be ignored--for instance, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, and James Brown--but also, improbably, Phil Spector, who wasn't known as a musician, and John Coltrane, whose 1964 classic jazz album A Love Supreme is in this context (re)considered as a monumental rock album, revealing how fluid and open-ended the category "rock" actually is. Moreover, several of the putative "albums" appearing on the Rolling Stone All-Time list are really singles compilations, assembled on CD decades after the fact, such as Spector's Back to Mono (1958-1969), released in 1991, and Hank Williams' 40 Greatest Hits, released in 1988.

As an example of a profoundly important album not appearing on this list and hence doomed to exist as Limbo Rock, consider the Butterfield Blues Band's East-West, released in August 1966 B.C. (True, it was released a few months after Paul Williams established Crawdaddy! However, at the time, Crawdaddy! was still in limited circulation to college students in mimeographed format.) I fully recognize that the Rolling Stone list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time includes (at #468) the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's eponymous first album, but it is included for entirely the wrong reasons, among them the utterly facile claim that "white kids got the notion they could play the blues." (Underlying this assertion, of course, is the idea of authenticity, that only black men can play authentic blues. Apparently the editors haven't yet read Chapter 3, "Mastering the Cult of Authenticity: Leonard Chess, Willie Dixon, and the Strange Career of Muddy Waters," in Benjamin Filene's essential critical work published in 2000, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music.) Dave Marsh claims that "East-West can be heard as part of what sparked the West Coast's rock revolution, in which such song structures with extended improvisatory passages became a commonplace." Hence, if importance is measured by influence, as on the Rolling Stone list, then East-West is certainly that. Additionally, according to Mark Naftalin, a member of the Butterfield Blues Band when East-West was recorded, the album's signature piece, "East-West," "was an exploration of music that moved modally, rather than through chord changes." Naftalin goes on to explain:

This song was based, like Indian music, on a drone. In Western musical terms, it "stayed on the one." The song was tethered to a four-beat bass pattern and structured as a series of sections, each with a different mood, mode and color, always underscored by the drummer, who contributed not only the rhythmic feel but much in the way of tonal shading, using mallets as well as sticks on the various drums and the different regions of the cymbals. In addition to playing beautiful solos, Paul [Butterfield] played important, unifying things in the background--chords, melodies, counterpoints, counter-rhythms. This was a group improvisation. In its fullest form it lasted more than an hour."

While the editors of the 500 Greatest Albums list include Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (1959), championing it because Miles Davis turned his back "on standard chord progressions" and for using "modal scales as a starting point for composition and improvisation," they ignore "East-West" for doing the same thing in a rock context. West Coast bands such as Jefferson Airplane are included on the list (Surrealistic Pillow is listed at #146), as is Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's Déja vu (listed at #147). Still, the album which provided the sonic foundation for much of West Coast rock's success is omitted.

For Dante, those in Limbo do not suffer. However, they endure an even worse fate, to "live in desire without hope." So, too, with those works considered Limbo Rock, recognized by some, but without any hope of canonization.

George Jones, 1931 - 2013

George Jones was a great singer for two reasons: he had a great voice, and he knew how to dramatize an idea. But because genre distinctions matter to consumers and marketers, and are therefore bound up with identity categories, George Jones is known primarily as a great country singer. Kris Kristofferson, who knows something about country music, observed that George Jones was the greatest country singer since Hank Williams, perhaps the most accurate assessment of George Jones' stature. Because Hank Williams died so young and so many years ago, it is easy to overlook the fact that George Jones was, almost to the day, just eight years younger than Hank Williams. Born in Texas in 1931, after the end of Prohibition and at the beginning of the Texas oil boom, George Jones grew up knowing well those taverns at the outskirts of large towns where itinerant Southern white laborers, farmers, and truck drivers assembled to drink beer and listen to music, otherwise known as honky tonks. Indeed, as Joli Jensen observes, the honky tonk "figured in the careers of virtually every major country music star of the '50s and '60s" (The Nashville Sound, 23). Of those performers strongly associated with honky-tonk music, among them Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Snow, and Ray Price, George Jones was the last surviving member.

The honky tonk bar is, of course, one of the many mythic sites of origin for country music, along with the front porch, the country barn dance, and the hills of home (the recording studio is often elided in the list of such origins). Hence honky-tonk is an urban music, the symbol of which is wet asphalt and the neon sign. In "Honky Tonk Blues," Hank Williams sings:

Well, I stopped into every place in town
This city life has really got me down
I got the honky tonk blues
Hey, the honky tonk blues

Lyrics such as these lead Joli Jensen to argue that the structuring absence of honky-tonk music is "the mythological hills of home," "the absence of the hills and hollers," the loss of Eden. The honky-tonk music genre "is about living in a city, cut off from the solace of home" (The Nashville Sound, 24). Hence, although considered "country music," honky-tonk music has nothing to with the hills, porches, and barns of home, but rather is about the risks and temptations of urban night life: drinking, cheating, and getting hurt (either physically or emotionally). The steel guitar became essential to honky tonk music as a sonic equivalent to boozy self-pity (memories) and self-indulgence (another drink).

George Jones became George Jones the great country singer only after his voice matured into a mellow baritone, perfectly suited to the world-weary experience of the persona he adopted to convey the anguish of his best songs. For the best songs by George Jones are about the traumatic loss of home, symbolically about the loss of Eden. We live in a curious age, in which excess of whatever kind (for example, drugs, alcohol, spending money) is considered a form of authenticity. Strangely, during his years of drug use and heavy drinking, Jones himself (as opposed to the person who earned his living as a singer) was lost and inauthentic. Despite his legendary drinking and drug-taking, George Jones always seemed most comfortable not in the big concert halls, but in small venues in the South; he never seemed comfortable in "the big city." (Remember that one of the better duets he recorded with his one time wife Tammy Wynette was, "(We're Not) The Jet Set," and I think Jones, at least, meant it.) The one time I saw George Jones in concert, in 1991 and by which time his past exploits had become installed as part of his legend ("No Show Jones"), it was in a relatively small theater in Branson, Missouri, and he was in fine form. His was one of the finest concerts I've ever attended, not only because of his exuberant, enthusiastic performance (Becky and I were fortunate enough to be in the front row) and great band, but because he seemed perfectly relaxed, comfortable, "at home." Certain of his songs employed standard honky-tonk themes, such "Tennessee Whiskey," in which the special virtues of his woman are likened to the pleasures of drinking good whiskey. Better songs, though, are "The Window Up Above" (written by Jones), "A Picture of Me (Without You)," and "The Grand Tour," precisely because of his heartfelt performance of what it means to lose Eden. He returned to this theme in one of his last great recordings, "Where the Tall Grass Grows" (on the album, And Along Came Jones, recorded in 1991 after leaving Epic and also producer Billy Sherrill, with whom he recorded many of his best-known songs). If you can't appreciate songs like these, you'll never understand the special power of George Jones, and why he was so widely admired. I really can't deny the fact that "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is quintessential George Jones, widely touted as "the greatest country song of all time" (Jones, however, after having finished recording the song, allegedly referred to it as a "morbid son of a bitch"). "Best of" lists, are, of course, an old Victorian parlor game, a pleasant form of diversion, a way to pass the time. However, assuming for the sake of argument that "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is indeed "the greatest country song of all time," it holds that distinction not because of the song, but because of the singer. Had a singer of lesser talent recorded it, it would indeed have remained only a morbid son of a bitch.

Pop Aphorisms XIII

It has been four years since my last list of pop aphorisms. I thought it was high time for another.

1. The discovery of the teen idol was to pop music what the discovery of the star system was to Hollywood.

2. Brill Building composers are to the Sixties teenager what filmmaker John Hughes is to the Eighties teenager.

3. Improvisation is the name for privileging performance over composition, while pretension may be understood as the name for uninspired improvisation. No drum solo ever heard on a rock album must be considered as improvisation.

4. The rock drum solo is simply a form of Modernist bluster.

5. "Noise" must be understood as simply another category of taste.

6. If fans of rock music hadn't routinely violated the dictum, "don't judge a book by its cover," records in cut-out bins never would have been purchased.

7. Rock culture's most pernicious myth: initial failure is a sign of greatness.

8. One unanticipated consequence of the Beatles' success was the Sixties garage band, while an unanticipated consequence of the garage band was the groupie.

9. Rock critics' greatest theoretical challenge: how to explain why the worst records they've ever heard have perhaps ten or fifteen wonderful minutes, while the best records they've ever heard have perhaps ten or fifteen wonderful minutes.

10. Rock critics' second greatest theoretical challenge: how to distinguish between the music of fans trying to be artists from the music of artists trying to be fans.

Knockin' On Heaven's Gate

The forthcoming Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD release of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980/81) has, predictably, prompted a fair amount of revisionism. Once a film that Vincent Canby claimed was nothing less than “an unqualified disaster,” now at least one website hails it as a “masterpiece.” A recent screening of the restored (original) version of the film at the Venice Film Festival received a standing ovation. Strangely, like many of the “New” Hollywood films released during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the film has conspicuously polarized its viewing audience, eliciting strong responses from both sides, revealing that the issue is not really about the film itself, but about the film and its audience. Once reviled, now celebrated, the film’s curious afterlife should remind us of an insight offered by the great cynic Diogenes, who, legend has it, asked to be buried standing on his head, because, so he thought, one day down would be up, and up would be down.

Touted on the Criterion Collection website as a film that is “among Hollywood’s most ambitious and unorthodox epics,” I think Dennis Lim, writing in the New York Times, offers a more accurate insight into the film absent the promotional spin: Heaven’s Gate “plays more than ever like a fittingly bleak apotheosis of the New Hollywood, an eccentric yet elegiac rethinking of the myths of the West and the western, with an uncommonly blunt take on class in America. . . .” Mr. Lim goes on to say that by the time Heaven’s Gate was released, late in 1980, it was an anachronism, in large part explaining its failure. While the popular and critical success of The Deer Hunter demonstrated that Michael Cimino had been able to address historical events by employing a traditional, Classic Hollywood form (The Best Years of Our Lives set in the post-Vietnam era), Heaven’s Gate was far more radical, having a counterculture sensibility that more properly belonged to what Robert B. Ray calls the “Left and Right cycle” of the late 60s and early 70s (A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980, p. 296 and following.) Many of the comments that follow are extrapolated from arguments made in his excellent book.

As Steven Bach pointed out in Final Cut (1985), his best-selling account of the production of the film, Heaven’s Gate was originally titled The Johnson County War and was based on a script that Cimino had written several years earlier, perhaps around 1971 or 1972, in other words, at the height of the Left and Right cycle that characterized the so-called “New” Hollywood of the period. Ray observes that following the 1967 success of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, “the industry followed with a series of movies intended to appeal to the counterculture’s most visible elements. Nixon’s election, and the surprising popularity of the old-fashioned Airport (1970), however, demonstrated the existence of a large conservative audience and set off a wave of right-wing films” (298). In addition to The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, other Left films included Cool Hand Luke (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Little Big Man (1970), and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). Among the Right films are Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Dirty Harry (1971), Walking Tall (1973), and Death Wish (1974). What this list of Left and Right films had in common was the motif of the frontier and its ideological value in American life. “Politically,” Ray writes, “the willingness to concede the frontier’s closing became the bedrock issue dividing the Left and Right” (301). The Johnson County War/Heaven’s Gate was created during this period.

Obviously, the explicit treatment of this theme was in the Western, and the Left movies of this period rather uniformly concluded that the American frontier had closed. So, too, does Heaven’s Gate, except it did so long after the Left and Right cycle had come to a close, supporting Dennis Lim’s argument that the film’s failure was due in large part to being released too late, after the political divisiveness of the 1960s had subsided. Moreover, Heaven’s Gate was released after what Robert Ray calls “corrected” genre pictures such as The Godfather (1972) and Taxi Driver (1976), two films premised on an ideological ambivalence, meaning they could be read two ways, appealing to both Left and Right. (Actually, the first film I remember working this way was Patton [1970], which had adherents on both sides of the ideological divide cheering: Patton as psychopath, Patton as hero. Think Travis Bickle.) Essentially, these “corrected” genre pictures had brought the Left and Right cycle to a close, years before the release of Heaven’s Gate.

Given that Criterion has chosen to champion Heaven’s Gate thirty-two years after its initial release, it’s now possible to see the film for what it was originally intended to be, a film made for what Robert Ray calls “ironic filmgoers,” film buffs who are “bored with conventional movies” and who champion “art films and revisionist reworkings of Classic Hollywood formulas,” precisely the sort of filmgoer for which Criterion was established. Certainly, this sort of viewer has steadily grown since the early 1980s, but one must remember that the sort of films that set out to frustrate viewer expectations promoted by their genres almost always fail at the box office. As Ray points out, none of the seventies movies now greatly admired by ironic filmgoers, films such as Badlands, New York, New York, The Conversation, Mean Streets, and Nashville, made the Top Twenty lists. As Ray observes, these films’ “lack of success reconfirmed the audience’s fundamental conservatism” (328).

Seen in the context of the late 60s and early 70s Left and Right cycle, however, what seems most obvious about Heaven’s Gate is not its singularity, but its ordinariness. Formally and thematically, it shares a startling number of features with films of the Left and Right cycle. Formally, like all Left films, such as those made by Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman, for instance, Heaven’s Gate foregrounds its artiness (for many Left films made in the sixties and seventies, a heavy borrowing of stylistic devices borrowed from the French New Wave), leading to the charge made by its opponents that the film is too “artsy.” Right films were never “artsy.” On the contrary, they sought to be anything but “artsy,” employing a traditional or Classic Hollywood style that sought to make its narrative strategies “invisible.” Heaven’s Gate’s much-ballyhooed budget overrun is really just an underhanded form of mockery, a way of condemning the film for being too pretentiously “artsy.”

For the film’s thematic adherence to the films of the Left and Right cycle, a few examples will suffice.

The Villains. Left movies of the late 60s and early 70s period typically had villains whose cold impersonality, according to Ray, “seemed to stand for an historical process” (303). Outside of the head of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, Frank Canton, Heaven’s Gate’s villains, an army of thugs, is largely anonymous and impersonal, a mass. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association functions rather like the mysterious “Corporation” of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, representing the inexorable advance of modernity. The icy cold and imperturbable “Man with No Eyes” of Cool Hand Luke is an another obvious example of the impersonality Ray is talking about, but so, too, is the line from 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “Who are those guys?,” referring to the Pinkerton men pursuing the outlaw heroes. (Pinkerton men as avatars of the closing of the frontier also appeared in Philip Kaufman’s 1972 Left film, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid.) Indeed, the question, “Who are those guys?,” caught on in the counterculture, and is a line that Ray avers “summed up the Left’s anxiety about the Europeanizing of America” (303). The “Europeanizing of America” is what Heaven’s Gate is all about.

The Setting. Although set in frontier Wyoming, Cimino’s West is Breughelian, already crowded and claustrophobic, suggesting the closing of the frontier is all but over. The closing of the frontier appears in The Wild Bunch (1969), for instance, and is associated with the dawn of a new, technological age represented by automobiles, machine guns, and German military advisors. Ironically, the giant roller skating rink that supplies Heaven’s Gate with its title is a symbol of the closing of the frontier, since its financial existence is premised on large numbers of customers, or, in this case, settlers. The film’s title is thus ironic, irony being a standard feature of many late sixties and seventies films of the Left and Right cycle. The film’s concluding sequence, showing James Averill having returned East, implies the West has run out of room.

The Hero. Like other Left films such as The Wild Bunch, Heaven’s Gate suggests that individualism is outdated, an outmoded lifestyle. (The Wild Bunch’s tagline was, “Unchanged men in a changing land.”) As a consequence, Bonnie and Clyde, the Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Heaven’s Gate’s James Averill seem, to borrow a phrase from Robert Ray, “to exist in worlds mysteriously emptied of alternatives” (311). I think the frustration expressed by the critics when the film was first released in 1980 can be boiled down to one critical issue: the audience’s identification with the hero. James Averill’s moral choice amounts to nothing more than choosing sides. No middle ground exists. Perhaps Cimino should have been told about Robert Warshow’s observation, that Hollywood has “always been uneasy with a situation that cannot be solved by personal virtue.” We know Averill is the hero because any character he meets with an opposed point of view is almost always repulsive. And, like other protagonists of Left films during the period in which Heaven’s Gate was first written, the hero’s individualism was suggested by his non-adherence to the standards of genteel morality—like the Wild Bunch, Easy Rider’s Billy and Wyatt, and John McCabe, Averill prefers whores. It may be that the closest analogue to James Averill is John McCabe, of McCabe and Mrs. Miller (the two films also share the same cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond). In Altman’s film, as part of what we can call its pattern of intention, we slowly come to realize, or at least strongly suspect, that McCabe has created a fraudulent image of himself, that he is a fake. But Heaven’s Gate has no similar pattern of intention. Are we to believe that James Averill, like some of the other protagonists of the Left films (e.g., the aforementioned John McCabe, Easy Rider’s Billy, Midnight Cowboy’s Joe Buck), has self-consciously derived his sense of self from ready-made Western myths? If not, where does his sense of self come from? After all, he’s hardly a “natural man,” since he graduated back East, at Harvard. Unlike McCabe, however, he isn’t murdered by the agents of some pernicious “Corporation,” but instead, in the film’s final sequence, is shown to have acquired all the external signs (wife, yacht) of bourgeois respectability. To the film’s detriment, what David Denby said about McCabe can also be applied, for the worse, to James Averill: he is a man “who adopts the manner of some famous or legendary character of the Old West, but who actually has the imagination and humor of a second-rate traveling salesman.”

A final point. The film’s problematic hero reveals how Heaven’s Gate is unlike a standard Left movie, for by refusing to glorify its hero (violence does not lead to regeneration), it reveals his individualism as woefully obsolete. He seems overwhelmed by the complexity of the emerging modern world, fails to protect his friends, and inevitably succumbs to the inexorable forces of modernity.

When Did Allen Klein Buy John Lennon's White Rolls-Royce?

John and Yoko with Allen Klein in happier times, probably in the early 1970s

Guest blogger Eric Roberts reports:

One primary aim of this research blog has been achieved. We now know that John Lennon's white 1965 Rolls-Royce, last seen in public in the mid 1980s, still remains the property of the Klein family and is currently being restored in England. However, two salient points remain unanswered: when exactly did Lennon purchase this second-hand Phantom V Rolls-Royce, and when did he sell it?

In answer to the first question, we have established that he bought the ex-hire car in 1966, the same year that it appeared in the film, Georgy Girl. What we don't know is the precise date. Based on circumstantial evidence, we strongly suspect that Lennon felt the need for for a second Phantom V after his first encounter with Yoko Ono at the Indica Gallery in London on 9 November 1966. It is on record that soon after purchasing it, Lennon gave instructions for the entire car to be made white, both inside and out. Surely, this could only be a kind of homage to Yoko Ono, since white was her signature color.

As for the date that John Lennon sold the white Phantom, elsewhere in this blog it has been suggested that perhaps ownership transferred to Allen Klein in 1977, when Yoko Ono negotiated a deal with Klein which put an end to several years of litigation. Recently, though, new information has emerged that contradicts this assumption.

We owe Bob Lange of KarKix our thanks for alerting us to the fact that Allen Klein's former chauffeur, Alf Weaver, asserts in his autobiography that sometime in late 1969, Klein acquired John and Yoko's famous limo. The relevant paragraph in Weaver's book is worth quoting verbatim. On page 93 we read:

My job during 1969 also now included keeping close to Klein, but he was only in the UK about one week in every eight. He was mostly based at his glass tower in New York, the ABKCO offices, on Broadway. A bit later in the year, Allen asked me to pick up his new car. Actually, it was John's old car, his Rolls-Royce Phantom V limousine, EUC 100C. Lennon had bought it in 1966 and completely resprayed it (white) and refitted its interior (white shag and white seats). John liked white. Lennon and Klein sealed the deal. $50,000, I think. Good price, John. I picked the car up at Hoopers in Kilburn and ended up driving it for the next decade, on and off.

(Quoted from The First Rock 'n' Roll Bodyguard, Alf Weaver and Robert Ashton. London: Sanctuary Publishing, 2001. ISBN: 1-86074-328-5.)

We are inclined to believe Alf Weaver's claim, despite Tony King's recollection that the car remained in the garage at Tittenhurst after Ringo bought John and Yoko's mansion in 1973. After all, if anyone is in a position to know when Allen Klein bought EUC 100C, it's Klein's driver.

Alf Weaver and friend on the bonnet of Allen Klein's Phantom V in 1976, ten years after John Lennon bought it

So with what make and model of car did John replace his '65 white Rolls-Royce Phantom V? In 1970 he bought a white Mercedes-Benz 600 Pullman, which you can read about here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/4749300/Baby-you-can-buy-my-car.html

Young and Old

Tuesday night's History Detectives program focused exclusively on rock music collectables, the dramatic intrigue hinging on determinations of whether certain rock culture artifacts were the Real Thing, or fakes. After having spent the past couple of years trying to find the whereabouts of John Lennon's white Rolls-Royce (5VD63), and in the process of doing so encountering several fakes, the roughly seventeen minute sequence of Tuesday night's show devoted to authenticating the electric guitar Bob Dylan played at the Newport Folk Festival on 25 July 1965 seemed strangely familiar.

Of the many foundational myths of rock culture, the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is perhaps one of the most heavily mythologized, having been repeatedly subjected over the years to a number of misrepresentations, distortions, and false claims. For many years, the predominant myth surrounding Dylan's Sunday night appearance at the festival was that Dylan was booed by an irate crowd because he had “betrayed” folk music by playing rock & roll. Recent revisions have attempted to redress this inaccuracy, but there are still widespread misperceptions. To name just a few: First, Dylan had already “gone electric" before that night, otherwise he wouldn't have had a Fender Stratocaster to play. Second, earlier, on 26 March 1965, he had already appeared on stage with The Byrds at Ciro's Le Disc nightclub on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, this just prior to the release (on Columbia Records) of The Byrds' cover single of “Mr. Tambourine Man” on 12 April 1965, over three months before the Festival. In a sense, the “electrification” of Dylan had already occurred prior to the Newport Folk Festival, with the release of The Byrds' cover version of Dylan's song. Just so the point cannot be conveniently neglected, The Byrds sold more records for Columbia during the mid-1960s than Dylan. Third, Dylan had already recorded “Like a Rolling Stone” prior to the Newport Folk Festival, the single being released about five days before he appeared at the Newport Festival. The assertion that Dylan was “transformed” that night “from a protest folkie to a rebel genius” is an example of what Robert Ray calls “critical senility,” an over-emphasis on the careers of aging Sixties stars that is at least one consequence of the utter lack of interest in the work being done by younger, contemporary artists. Moreover, only someone biased against folk music would make such a claim anyway -- note the condescending tone suggested by the use of the word “folkie.” At the very least, Dylan's popularity increased as a result of The Byrds' success, whose cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man” reached No. 1 on the pop music charts weeks before the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

To be true to Dylan's “rebel” nature, one ought to feel free to ask improper questions. For me, the far more interesting question, one that wasn't addressed during Tuesday night's History Detectives program, is why Dylan chose to play a Fender guitar. Why didn't he choose to play a Gibson, or Gretsch, or Rickenbacker? Famously, a Rickenbacker was played by The Byrds' Roger McGuinn. Guitars made by these manufacturers were popular among electric guitarists at the time, so why did Dylan choose to play a Fender? According to L.A. Times journalist Randy Lewis, citing electric guitar specialist Andy Babiuk, in January 1965 -- seven months before the Newport Folk Festival -- Leo Fender “sold his company to CBS for the then-king’s ransom price of $13 million.” According to Lewis, it is highly probable that CBS encouraged artists on its Columbia Records label “to use and promote the instruments coming out of what was then the largest music instrument and equipment manufacturing operation in the world.” Lewis goes on to write:

In his definitive 1995 book about the history of Fender, Fender: The Sound Heard Round the World, Richard Smith highlighted these ads and wrote, “One almost surreal  endorsement for the Jazz Bass came from Bob Dylan. He was to jazz what Lionel Hampton was to protest music.” I checked with Smith this week to find out whether there was an active campaign in the CBS era of Fender (the company was sold by CBS to a group of private investors in the 1980s) to cross-promote the products among musicians signed to CBS labels and he said, simply, “Yes.”

Coupled with the fact that “Like a Rolling Stone” was released by Columbia Records on 20 July 1965 -- coinciding almost to the day with Dylan's appearance at the Newport Folk Festival -- in retrospect Dylan's appearance at the Festival playing a Fender guitar and performing, among other songs, “Like a Rolling Stone,” is not so much a transformative event as it was a shrewd act of promotion by CBS and Columbia Records.

Bob Dylan did not transform himself into a “rebel genius” at Newport. To understand why not, I recommend that readers refer to my earlier entry on prophetic cool, a form of cool, following Michael Jarrett, “characterized by barely harnessed rage.” Exemplary figures of prophetic cool are the young Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Ice-T. In contrast, figures such as Jack Kerouac epitomized “philosophical cool,” which might also be called existential cool -- the self as an effect of performance. In addition to Kerouac, exemplary figures epitomizing existential cool are Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Keith Richards, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and the old Bob Dylan. The Bob Dylan that appeared at Newport on 25 July 1965 playing an electric guitar remained as he had been before that night: a model of prophetic cool.

John Lennon's White Rolls-Royce . . . And Its Phantom Double

Having established in our last entry that for nearly four decades John Lennon's white 1965 Phantom V Rolls-Royce, chassis No. 5VD63, has been in the possession of the Klein family and is currently being faithfully restored, it remains for us to dispel some of the confusion concerning the real identity and history of a notable impostor.

In January this year, self-made multi-millionaire and real estate developer, Stephen Tebo made international headlines when he acquired the historic Cadillac hearse that transported President Kennedy's body from Dallas Parkland Memorial Hospital to the airport in November 1963. Virually every news item that reported this latest addition to the Tebo Auto Collection also made mention of “a 1965 Rolls-Royce custom made for John Lennon” that resides among the 400 other cars in his collection. When and wherever the Tebo Rolls is put on show, a well known photo of The Beatles in 1969 beside Lennon's genuine Phantom V is proudly displayed.

The juxtaposition of the sign with the impressive  white limousine is intended to convince the spectator that this is indeed the same car as the one in the “Ballad of John & Yoko” video. Visitors to the Tebo Auto Collection are left with no doubt that they have seen at close quarters the very car that John Lennon and Yoko Ono travelled everywhere in during the late 1960s.
Leaving aside the fact that we know for sure that the authentic John Lennon white Phantom V, chassis No. 5VD63, has never left England and that it has been in the Klein family at least the last 35 years, let's take a closer look at Tebo's Rolls-Royce.

The most obvious difference between the two Phantoms is the steering. The genuine Lennon/Klein Rolls-Royce is right-hand drive (RHD), whereas the car in Tebo's collection is left-hand drive (LHD) and was built for the American market. (Click on images to enlarge.)

LHD Tebo Phantom (left), RHD Lennon Phantom (right)

The next most apparent difference is the interior upholstery and carpeting. Immediately after purchasing 5VD63 in 1966, John Lennon spent a small fortune by totally transforming the exterior from black to white and replacing the interior furnishings with white carpets and fabric. In addition, tinted polarized glass windows, mobile telephone and 8-track stereo system were installed. A glance inside Tebo's Rolls-Royce tells you that either someone has stripped all of Lennon's custom modifications or that this is not the same car.

Front interior Tebo Phantom (left), Lennon Phantom (right)

The interior of Tebo's Rolls-Royce is beige. In contrast, Lennon's Phantom V has white carpet and fabric front and back.

Interior Tebo (left), Lennon (right)

And where has the distinctive antenna on the roof of the real white Phantom V gone? The Tebo Auto Collection Rolls appears to have only a standard radio aerial behind the right side wing mirror.

Tebo Phantom V (left), Lennon Phantom V (right)

As is clear, the antenna on Lennon's Rolls (right) is missing on Tebo's car. Another obvious difference is the size of the two air vents at the front of both vehicles. Stephen Tebo's Phantom has narrow, standard air inlets whereas, in the late 1960s, Lennon added a pair of large intakes directly beneath the quad headlamps.

Tebo Phantom V (left), Lennon Phantom V (right)

Tebo's car lacks the custom air intakes on Lennon's Rolls (right).

One of the rarest features of Lennon's 5VD63 is the white steering wheel. It is probably the only Phantom V which has one, the rest would have been black.

The Tebo Rolls-Royce (left) has a standard black steering wheel. Somewhat eccentrically, Lennon insisted that his Phantom V was fitted with a custom white steering wheel (right). Then there is the fact that someone has painted John Lennon's signature on the driver's side door of the Tebo Auto Collection's Phantom V.

Why would anyone feel the necessity do this, unless it is meant to further convince the public that this was Lennon's car? Isn't this a bit like an art forger copying the signature of an old master?

The most important distinctions between Tebo's Rolls-Royce and the original white Rolls owned by the Klein family are not visible without a detailed inspection. These are the manufacturer's ID numbers for the chassis, the engine and the body. The serial numbers for John Lennon's white 1965 Phantom V are: Chassis No. 5VD63; Engine No. D31PV; Body No. V.327/20076. Our research convinces us that the serial numbers for the Phantom V in the Tebo Auto Collection are: Chassis No. 5LVD15; Engine No. D7PV; Body No. 20062. The coachwork of both vehicles was made by Mulliner Park Ward, Design No. 2003.

The Rolls-Royce in the Tebo Auto Collection was completed in June 1964, not 1965 as is always stated. One can only assume that this confusion is intentional, as it is public knowledge that the black Phantom V that John Lennon bought second-hand in 1966 was first delivered to Patrick Barthropp Ltd. in May 1965. 

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE TEBO AUTO COLLECTION ROLLS-ROYCE  

Tebo Auto Collection Phantom V with original paint, as shown in Sotheby's 1984 sale catalogue 

The original owner of Mr. Tebo's 1964 Phantom was Ben B. Bodne. Proprietor of one of New York's most prestigious old hotels, The Algonquin, Bodne took possession of his left-hand drive, latest model Rolls-Royce Phantom V (pictured above) in 1964. Its original color was sable brown with matching interior. Until the late-1970s, Bodne's giant Phantom would have been a familiar sight cruising through New York's theatre district, or parked outside the entrance to the Algonquin. Exactly when and how its next owner acquired it has not yet been established, but Yoko Ono presumably bought Bodne's brown Phantom some time after John Lennon's assassination, probably around 1981-82.

As executor of her deceased husband's estate, Yoko decided to auction over 100 items in her possession though Sotheby's in New York on June 23, 1984. (Click on the link to see "For Sale: John and Yoko," Evening Independent (Ann Kolson) 26 June 1984. Go to page 4). The last lot to be sold was her beautiful sable brown Rolls-Royce. An unidentified woman and a phone bidder pushed the auction price past the reserve of $100,000 to $184,250, the proceeds going to Yoko Ono's children's charity, The Spirit Foundation. It must be said that she did nothing to correct news reports before and after the sale that her brown Phantom V was a “1965” model and that it had belonged, not just to her, but to “John and Yoko.” The long distance telephone buyer who outbid all other rivals was a shopping mall developer based in Pensacola, Florida. A long-time Beatles fan with an impressive collection Napoleonic memorabilia, Wallace C. Yost was nothing if not ambitious. At the height of his career he employed over 200 people and owned Mariner Mall shopping centers in Pensacola, Fort Walton Beach, Crestview and Panama City, with a luxurious home in Gulf Breeze. 

At some point, perhaps in the late 1980s, Yost ordered his sable brown Rolls-Royce to be re-painted and re-upholstered to resemble John Lennon's famous limo. For a year or two, his imitation Lennon Rolls was put on display in the Mariner Mall as a public attraction until, that is, he went into hiding owing his creditors over $44 million. As FBI agents began a six-year hunt for the absconder, his re-painted Rolls-Royce was acquired by the banks and promptly auctioned off.

In 1997, Wallace Yost was captured and sentenced to 18 months jail. After having passed through several auction houses, his now white Phantom V went under the hammer at a Barrett-Jackson auction in January 1999 for $118,000. The buyer was Stephen Tebo. Though advertised by Barrett-Jackson as coming with all the necessary documentation, in fact there was no actual provenance proving that the car had once belonged to John Lennon, as the catalogue implied. The honest Mr. Tebo had made an honest mistake and found himself the owner of a convincing fake. While it gives us no pleasure whatsoever to debunk Mr. Tebo's claim to be the owner of one of the most famous limousines in rock music history, we believe we have a public duty to do so. John Lennon gave the world so much of himself through his music and his  public anti-war demonstrations--for which he paid the ultimate price--that any form of counterfeit activity involving his name and image is simply wrong.

Should Mr. Tebo or anyone else wish to provide proof that any the assertions published in this blog are inaccurate, we would be only too willing to correct our research and publish a sincere apology.

Finding John Lennon's Lost Rolls-Royce

“We can confirm that the White Rolls Royce is owned by the Klein family and is undergoing a full restoration.”

--From an email from Valerie Collin, ABKCO Music & Records, New York, 21 June 2012

Guest blogger and relentless researcher Eric Roberts provides the anxiously awaited update on the search for John Lennon's white Rolls Royce!

After almost two years of searching for an answer to the  question, “Who owns John Lennon's white Rolls Royce?,” the single sentence above from Valerie Collin puts an end to any further speculation.

Finally, we can confidently state that Lennon's “lost” 1965 Phantom V Rolls-Royce, chassis No. 5VD63, is in the safe keeping of Jody Klein, son of former Beatles manager, the late Allen Klein. What is more, we are reliably informed that this icon of late 1960s music culture is currently being fully restored back to its original perfection. After having disappeared from the media spotlight in late 1985, once its restoration is complete, the happy prospect that Lennon's second Rolls-Royce may finally become accessible to the public now seems a distinct possibility. The first and more famous of his two '65 Phantom fives--the one covered in colorful hand-painted gypsy arabesques--has been a star attraction at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Canada since 1993. Similarly, if the white Rolls-Royce was to be put on show any where in the world today, there can be little doubt that it would also attract large crowds of admirers. Although it lacks the fabulous eccentricity of Lennon's so-called “psychedelic” limousine, 5VD63 is closely associated with John and Yoko's political activism during the late 1960s. Indeed, it could be construed as one of their most public art works--a symbol of renewal in the aftermath of flower power and the “Summer of Love.”

To have come this far in our quest to trace the history of 5VD63, registration No. EUC 100C, and track down its current ownership and whereabouts, is a testament to the power of blogging. Collaboration is the very essence of the research blog, and the timely assistance of readers who possess otherwise unobtainable pieces of the puzzle one is attempting to solve, is an integral part of the process.

A number of readers of this blog have been generous enough to contribute their insights into the matter of the missing Rolls-Royce and are entitled to a share of the credit in the final solution to the mystery. Author and feature writer for the London Telegraph, Mick Brown, told us about his meetings with Phil Spector in 2003, putting paid to the notion that Spector's white Rolls once belonged to his friend, John Lennon, as claimed by Alan White. Mick was also good enough to ask former Apple executive and music publicist, Tony King, for his recollections of the white Rolls-Royce and what became of it. King recalled that it was left behind at Tittenhurst Park in the early 1970s in the care of Ringo Starr when John and Yoko relocated to New York. 

Leading us deeper into the labyrinth, in January 2011 we received several short emails from someone claiming (a) to know where the white Rolls-Royce currently is, and (b) to be responsible for its on-going restoration. This person, who must remain anonymous for professional reasons, was adamant that EUC 100C had never left the United Kingdom. A little further detective work revealed exactly where the authentic white Rolls-Royce is currently garaged. However, we were still completely in the dark as to the name of the current owner. Well, not quite.

A few weeks prior to receiving advice from our informant in the UK, an email arrived from Stephen Tebo, owner of the world renowned Tebo Auto Collection in Colorado, USA. The message simply stated: I purchased the car on January 24, 1999 at the Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was lot #694. Hope this helps. Now, unfortunately, the beautiful white Phantom V in Tebo's collection is left-hand drive (LHD). Perhaps it did have some association with John Lennon, but it was definitely not 5VD63. This was confirmed by an article in the New York Times (see the earlier entry “Clues and Contradictions” on this blog) which reported on the results of the auction to which Stephen Tebo referred. The article contained a footnote stating that the white LHD Phantom V bought by Tebo was not the same Rolls-Royce (EUC 100C) associated with the Beatles during the late 1960s. The NY Times informed its readers that the current (1999) owner of John Lennon's white Rolls-Royce was in fact Allen Klein. At this point, we were getting tantalizingly close to the answer we were seeking, but at the same time we were frustratingly unable to confirm if 5VD63 has remained the property of the Klein family to this day. 

Then, a month ago, we received a quick succession of emails from a Rolls-Royce owner-enthusiast who, besides having a lifetime of acquired knowledge about all things Rolls-Royce, was also a Liverpudlian with an exceptional grasp of the details of John Lennon's life. He informed us:

5VD63 is a Phantom V seven seat limousine. Its engine number is D31PV. The coachbuilder is HJ Mulliner Park Ward and the body number is V327/20076. The HJ Mulliner Park Ward design number is 2003. As you note, the first owner was Patrick Barthropp Ltd. (UK), the car being delivered in May 1965.

Our helpful expert adviser confirmed that in the same year that Lennon purchased 5VD63 (1966) it had appeared prominently in the film Georgy Girl (see the earlier “Ballad of EUC 100C” entry in this blog). He then went on to tell us that he had referred the matter of the car's current ownership and location to an international authority who is very well known and respected in the RR world and stands among the “Rolls-Royce Gods” such as Martin Bennett in Australia who authored the “Bible” on the RR Phantoms.

The immediate reply from the expert's expert stated that he (Lennon) bought 5VD63 second hand (was black, then white). Car still owned by music producer Jody Klein. Currently in restoration.

So there we had it. To be absolutely certain, we wrote to Jody Klein in New York and, as we have seen, his assistant gave us the confirmation we needed.

We now call on any owners of white Rolls-Royces--we know of two in Pensacola, Florida, and one in Longmont, Colorado--who continue to perpetrate the cruel hoax on the unsuspecting public that they are the owners of John Lennon's famous Phantom V, 5VD63 to put an end to the charade. One of the three vehicles we refer to is not even a Phantom V, but is actually a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III. All three are LHD and so are fraudulently being exhibited as John Lennon's white Rolls.

Click on image to enlarge

In our next blog, we will contrast the histories of the two identical 1965 Rolls-Royces that John Lennon owned and consider their different private and social functions.

Lennon's Lost Rolls Royce: End of Year Review

Photo credit: http://kenwoodlennon.blogspot.com

Guest blogger Eric Roberts provides a year-end update on the search for John Lennon's white Rolls Royce.

It's been 18 months since we began researching the whereabouts of John Lennon's white Rolls Royce, registration EUC 100C, chassis 5VD63. Sifting fact from fiction, myth from misinformation, gradually the untold story of Lennon's second 1965 Phantom V, which came to epitomize his public love affair and social activism with Yoko Ono, began to emerge.

However, despite our best efforts, we have been unable to discover who currently owns EUC 100C and where it is located. Indeed, to the best or our knowledge, it has not been seen in public since 1985, when it was withdrawn from a charity auction at Christies in London.

The only clues we have to go on are as follows. According to a New York Times article in 1999, it was once owned by Alan Klein, possibly a part of the financial settlement when he successfully sued the Beatles in the early 1970s. Second, if we are to believe Alan Hobbs - who left a brief but tantalizing comment on this blog nearly 12 months ago - EUC 100C is still residing somewhere in England. Frustratingly, for the time being, the owner wishes to remain anonymous.

The fate of John and Yoko's famous white Rolls Royce could not be more different to that of his original black Phantom V, registration FJB 111C, chassis 5VD73. At one time “the most expensive car in the world”, today Lennon's so-called “psychedelic Rolls Royce” is proudly displayed in the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Canada. Given the anonymity and secrecy surrounding its present ownership and location, it is possible that we shall never know what became of EUC 100C. The information we have gathered below represents only fragments from the “life” of one of the most historically significant automobiles ever built. We can only hope that the world will not continue to be denied closure to the narrative of EUC 100C and that it may one day be put on permanent public display, like its twin in Canada.

In the meantime, no one should be taken in by false claims that Lennon's white Rolls Royce is on view in the town of Pensacola, Florida, or that it is part of the Tebo Auto Collection in Colorado. Both of these look-alikes are left hand drive, and there is no record to our knowledge of EUC 100C ever having been shipped to the United States.

We would welcome your contributions to this on-going research. Any reader's recollections or inside information, no matter how incidental, will be gratefully received and published. The same applies to any photographs of John Lennon's white Phantom V that you may have at your disposal.

Playing Tribute

The "ever popular tortured artist effect" is one of the foundational myths of modern celebrity journalism. Presumably, shiny, "happy" people don't produce art, because art must come from sickness and deprivation. The obituary notices and tributes that follow the death of a celebrity are always and inevitably premised on a Jekyll-Hyde split between the (public) artist and the "private" person. Always, genius is imagined as an autonomous power, something beyond the person's control, a gift but also a curse. Crucially, the appeal to genius serves as the alibi, the explanation (in the sense of apology) for the  "private" person's excesses. It's thoroughly Romantic in its origins, a variation of the powerful myth of the Byronic hero, the isolated, solitary figure who stands outside genteel culture but is nonetheless admired by it. This is the reason why celebrity obituaries and other forms of post-mortem hyperbole are always extraordinarily partisan, pleading the artist's case and making extravagant claims about the immensity of the artist's talent.

I've always imagined what it must have been like inside the Elvis Presley compound the last ninety days of the star's life. Surely everyone -- not only those closest to him -- knew the wheels were about to come off the gravy train. Why didn't someone do something? Why didn't someone try to help him? Perhaps the issue isn't that no one could do anything, but rather, no one wanted to do anything. Surely the issue of drug dependency was the proverbial "elephant in the room," which explains why it was ignored. By way of explanation, I turn to Montaigne's Apology for Raimond Sebond and his discussion of the relationship between the whale and the sea gudgeon:

It is said that the whale never goes abroad without being preceded by a small fish resembling the sea-gudgeon, which is for that reason called the Guide. The whale follows it, allowing itself to be turned and led as easily as a vessel is turned by its rudder; and in return for this service, whilst every other thing, whether animal or vessel, that enters the awful chasm of this monster's mouth is forthwith engulfed and lost, this little fish retires into in all security, and sleeps there. During its sleep the whale never stirs, but as soon as it issues forth, starts and follows it unceasingly; and if by chance the guide goes astray, the whale will go wandering about hither and thither, often knocking itself against the rocks, like ship without a rudder. (Montaigne, Essays, 1927)

The relationship between the guide fish and the whale is analogous to modern celebrity and the institutional apparatus that supports her (the handlers, the agents and secretaries, publicists, the bodyguards and their wives and children, the hangers-on, the sycophants, and so on). The trick is not to mistake the whale for the artist, for in fact the artist is the small guide fish leading the whale around, while the massive whale represents all those whose livelihoods depend upon the artist. The whale's dependency explains why it does nothing but allow the guide fish to do as it wants, even pursue a deadly course. Of course, once the guide fish goes astray, the whale is lost, but the whale is all too aware of its dependency, and therefore does nothing, hoping to stave off the inevitable.

Larry "Wild Man" Fischer, 1944-2011

Larry "Wild Man" Fischer, who died at age 66 of a heart ailment a little over a week ago, on Thursday, June 16, was an eccentric figure in the late-Sixties L. A. rock scene. A formal mental patient who apparently suffered from both manic depression and paranoid schizophrenia (according to his obituary in the L. A. Times), he spent much of his life living on the streets and in the low-rent motels of Los Angeles, eventually becoming a fixture of the growing hippie scene on the Sunset Strip, UCLA and Venice, offering to sing songs for a dime. If you took him up on his offer, you were rewarded with his pathetic songs, unintentional burlesques of the top hits of the day played on his broken guitar. Never especially subtle in his humor, and frequently unfunny as a consequence, Frank Zappa chose to record Wild Man Fischer in the late Sixties, issuing an album on Bizarre/Reprise titled An Evening With Wild Man Fisher (1969, not 1968 as is widely reported). It was a cruel joke on Larry Fischer. I tend to agree with Dave Marsh, who characterized An Evening With Wild Man Fischer as "a particularly vicious example of Zappa's penchant for sadistic social commentary." History has shown, however, that not everyone got the jape. Marsh would write about the album, "The results are brutal, not funny except to the emotionally immature and the socially callous, and would constitute a deleted embarrassment in recorded history if the record industry had any shame" (The Rolling Stone Record Guide, 1979). In other words, what impulse leads us to portray the otherness of the insane? If you think Marsh too harsh, remember that the attribution of "genius" is simply a marketing tool, and that music is a product like any other, manufactured, packaged, and sold. The mistake is to assume that madness is somehow a more "authentic" form of existence than the quotidian reality the rest of us normally inhabit. I should point out that the insane are marked as outsiders not through their music, but through their visual representation, as the album cover pictured above reveals.

I first heard "Merry-Go-Round," the opening track on An Evening With Wild Man Fischer, early in 1970 on Zappéd, a sampler issued on Bizarre of acts on the Bizarre and Straight labels. A year or so later, during a trip to Kansas City, I picked up in a record store a copy of An Evening With . . . in the cut-out bin for 44 cents. As I remember, I could have bought four or five copies for that price at the time. I should have bought them all, for now the album is rather expensive to purchase on eBay. Now primarily a nostalgic artifact, it is of interest to Zappa collectors and students of the outré. Copies on eBay are frequently advertised as mint or mint-, I suspect because those who have owned it seldom have played it (rather like the GTOs' album Permanent Damage, also issued by Zappa in 1969). Of interest only to the socially callous and those unfamiliar with living with those cursed with mental illness, the lesson of Wild Man Fischer is that albums may be consumed, but they are not nutritious.

Days Of Future Past

According to the OED, the word anthem is a corruption of the Old English word antefn, derived from the Greek word antiphon, meaning “A composition, in prose or verse, sung antiphonally, or by two voices or choirs, responsively.” Most current definitions of “anthem” say that an anthem is a song of celebration or praise, any song of devotion, praise, or patriotism, often used in English in the context of “national anthem.” But a national anthem, technically, is a hymn, or a song of praise and devotion. So what, precisely, is an anthem? The question becomes even more complicated when one allows for the so-called “rock anthem,” defined here as “a powerful, celebratory rock song with arena-rock sound often with lyrics celebrating rock music itself and simple sing-a-long choruses, chants, or hooks.” Thus the rock anthem is a song celebrating a way of life (or behavior), as national anthems also do. However, in this context, anthem again simply means hymn.

My wife Becky and I were discussing this question the other day, trying to arrive at a meaning of “anthem” that doesn't simply render it as a synonym for “hymn.” Interestingly, she suggested that an anthem should be considered as any song (or poem) that presents history as prophecy. What she means is that an event that has already occurred is presented in the context of the song or poem as something that is going to happen--the song informs our understanding of the future. It's prophetic in the sense that it uses history as a way to inform the future, but as prophecies often are, it is also often apocalyptic. While the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is hardly apocalyptic, the history it recounts informs our understanding of the future: the nation will go on forever, continuously. A good example of what she means is The Original Caste's song “One Tin Soldier” (later covered perhaps more famously by the band Coven). In “One Tin Soldier,” the narrative is presented as a story that happened “long ago,” but obviously its purpose is to inform our understanding of the future (“Listen, children, to a story that was written long ago...”). The song rather explicitly serves as a moral imperative for the future: although the events happened in the past, they are nonetheless prophetic because, in parabolic fashion, they foretell what will happen (now/ future) if greed isn't held in check. I tend to think that songs such as Neil Young's “Southern Man” also serve as anthems as I've defined them here, because on the one hand, there are images drawn from the antebellum period (the “bullwhip cracking”), while on the other hand there are images drawn from the Reconstruction period and the Ku Klux Klan (“now your crosses are burning fast”). However, the lyric, “Southern change is gonna come at last,” invokes the Civil Rights-era South. This liquid exchange of past and future prompted Lynyrd Skynyrd, as revealed in “Sweet Home Alabama” for instance, to read the song as a condemnation of the present-day South, although Young's song would seem to be set in the frozen, remote past. In contrast, “Sweet Home Alabama” is not an anthem (although it is often referred to as such), but a defense of a way of life, that is to say, a hymn. No Southern man needs him, ol' NY, comin' round or about.

Perhaps because of the nuclear threat of the period as well as the impending ecological catastrophe Rachel Carson  had warned of in Silent Spring (1962), the poets and singers of the 1960s began to engage in apocalyptic expressions as anthems to brave new worlds to come. Just as movies of the early 1960s contained apocalyptic themes (The Seventh Seal, 1957; Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1962; The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, 1962; Behold a Pale Horse, 1964) so, too, did the music. Harold Bloom once observed that Americans are obsessed with prophecies and omens because they are actually Gnostics without realizing it, and his insight is certainly true of the folk song when it became a form of prophesying. In the Sixties, musical prophesying caught on. However, perhaps it's well to remember Walter Benjamin's observation about allegory, "Any person, any thing, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else."

A Few Notable Anthems From The Sixties:
Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (1962)
Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin' (1963)
Barry McGuire - Eve of Destruction (1965)
The 5th Dimension - Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In (1969)
The Original Caste - One Tin Soldier (1969)
Neil Young - After the Gold Rush (1970)
Neil Young - Southern Man (1970)