Cult Records

Like any avant-garde movement, rock ‘n’ roll became “popular” because it found a glamorous figure that attracted the interest and attention of outsiders—Elvis Presley. The so-called “rock revolution” of the 1960s did much the same thing, acquiring a key group of figures—a band—around which it could organize and define itself—The Beatles. Most importantly, The Beatles happened to be musically prolific, but also charming, clever, and witty—that is to say, articulate. While not as charming, clever, or witty as The Beatles, the Rolling Stones had what it needed the most, a star, in this case Mick Jagger, an individual provocative and garrulous enough to overcome the band’s basic inarticulateness. Bob Dylan was articulate, too, but he also, as the documentary Dont Look Back (1967) demonstrated, had an additional ingredient—he gave the impression of being a true rebel.

The spectacular careers of the Beatles and of Bob Dylan, among others, serve as illustrations of the effectiveness of thinking not in terms of the single but in terms of the album. The musical failure of Elvis during much of the 60s was the result of mismanagement, of handlers who didn’t really understand the youth of the day and who thought pop songs were novelty tunes for teenagers—singles—around which the films of the 60s were built (“Viva Las Vegas,” “Do the Clam”). The Beatles and Bob Dylan, in contrast, refocused their energies on the long-term, on having a career. And what is a career but a narrative that charts an artistic evolution? Their energies were focused on development, on “growth,” not simply on the individual album.

While so-called “cult” albums have the reputations they do in part because of the manner of their consumption—in the form of the strong attachments and mild obsessions to which they give rise—a cult album is also the sign of a figure or band whose career failed, meaning there is no narrative that can be written that can make sense of the album’s creation. The aura of mystery that surrounds the band and its members is largely due to the lack of any coherent narrative that can explain the band’s artistic development: the album emerges as if “from nowhere,” with no clear antecedent and with no comparable album released afterward. Those albums that have become cult failed to find an audience upon their release; this initial commercial reception is crucial to laying the groundwork for its later recognition as a classic, based on a fundamental myth of rock culture—first established by The Velvet Underground & Nico album, 1967)—that initial neglect guarantees greatness.

11 Cult Albums, 1967—1998:
Tim Buckley – Starsailor
Nick Drake – Bryter Layter
Francoise Hardy – La Question
Penelope Houston – Birdboys
Love – Forever Changes
The Modern Lovers – The Original Modern Lovers
Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Skip Spence – Oar
The United States of America – The United States of America
The Unknowns – The Unknowns
The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground & Nico

That Great Gig in the Sky

There was a painting for sale on eBay a few days ago depicting Elvis, dressed in a white, rhinestone-studded jumpsuit, poised as if he were about to step from a heavenly cloud, his hand extended in welcome to Michael Jackson. Rock and roll heaven, obviously, for which Elvis serves as gatekeeper, the role of St. Peter. Of course, the word kitsch immediately comes to mind, but what interests me more than the relationship between kitsch and mass culture is the link between Elvis and Michael Jackson. The painting seems to answer the fundamental question, did-he-go-to-heaven-or-did-he-go-to-hell? Apparently every rock star, even Jim Morrison, goes to heaven, as he does in the Righteous Brothers’ 1974 hit, “Rock and Roll Heaven”—speaking of kitsch—in which Morrison, Jim Croce, and Bobby Darin are in “a helluva band” along with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Otis Redding. The updated, 1990 version of the song added references to Elvis, Marvin Gaye, Jackie Wilson, Dennis Wilson, John Lennon and Roy Orbison. (So far, the only woman privileged enough to enter rock and roll heaven remains Janis Joplin, otherwise it’s a men’s club.) “Rock and Roll Heaven,” of course, is merely the rock incarnation of Tex Ritter’s 1961 country-corn song, “I Dreamed Of A Hillbilly Heaven,” in which all of the dreamed-of elect were also men.

All famous people forge their own spectacularly perverse form of cultural weirdness. Elvis has been perhaps exemplary in this regard, a true cultural obsession. In Dead Elvis (1991), Greil Marcus explores this cultural obsession, the “second life” of Elvis as revealed through “songs, art works, books, movies, dreams . . . advertisements, tabloid headlines, bestsellers, urban legends, [and] nightclub japes.” (One example of Elvis in the popular imagination is his depiction on the Bill Barminski cover for the 12” EP by Death Ride ’69, Elvis Christ [1988], shown above.) And now Michael Jackson, too, has begun his second life, his life after death, having joined Elvis in heaven for a great gig in the sky. The painting I saw for sale on eBay demonstrates as much, that Michael Jackson has entered a new phase, an image detached from his body, during which his image floats around to be attached to all sorts of cultural artifacts. This new, disembodied phase might well be called, Michael: The Ashtray.

Blog Days

Since we’re in the dog days, I thought I’d reflect on my blog these days. In an earlier post, in January of this year, I said I anticipated that I would not be able to stay on par with the number of posts I made last year, and this projection has proved to be true. On this date last year I’d posted 126 times; not counting today’s post, this year I’ve posted only 96 times—that’s thirty fewer posts over the course of seven months, or roughly four per month. The drop-off is slightly more than I thought it would be, but it’s not a huge drop in any case. Perhaps I’ll be able to make some of them up by the end of the year; we’ll see. I’ve found that blogging keeps the old writing muscle in good shape, and I think forcing myself to write regularly has actually enabled me to write both faster and with more accuracy. That’s a subjective impression, of course, but in any case I think despite the time it takes away from other activities, blogging has been good for me, and while the number of posts has dropped slightly this year, hopefully the quality has not. I’m quickly closing in on 40,000 page views, meaning that the past few months have seen a rather sharp increase in hits. So although in terms of numbers my posts are down from last year, the number of hits is up considerably.

By far, the most positive outcome of the blogging experience has been that I’ve discovered things I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. In that regard I’ve managed to adhere to one rule I set for myself, not to approach the blog with a predetermined agenda or set of issues. Yesterday’s blog entry is a good example: I had only a vague approximation of what I wanted to write about, namely the subject of the rock ‘n’ roll movie, having seen Rock Around the Clock a couple of months ago. Beyond that general topic I had no idea what I wanted to say. I pulled a couple of books on the subject off the shelf— Thomas Doherty’s Teenagers and Teenpics, first issued in the late 1980s and revised and reissued in 2002, and also David Ehrenstein and Bill Reed’s Rock on Film, published in 1982 and badly in need of updating. The books provided me the gist of my blog on the rock movie, but ironically, by what they did not choose to talk about. As I paged through these books, I found myself forming a question, namely that of how the cinema relied on myths of African Americans to shape the fundamental narratives and ideologies of rock ‘n’ roll movies. I think that’s a legitimate question, especially since the so-called “rock ‘n’ roll movie” was one effect of the rock revolution created by Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and others. Admittedly, my question was formed by skimming two books on the subject, hardly a scholarly approach—but this is a blog, after all, not a scholarly journal. Moreover, my underlying motive is to teach myself something, however modest the insight, not to revolutionize the field of rock studies. I strongly suspect that I’m not the only one to have asked this specific question about the rock movie—in fact, although I have not thoroughly researched the subject, I’m quite sure I’m not. But the more important point is that had I not sat down to write on the subject, I never would have thought seriously about the issue, and that’s the whole point of this blog in the first place. There are days when I feel like throwing in the towel and tearing it all down—I’ve never spoken to a blogger who didn’t have the same inclination—but for now, as long as I’m learning something, I’m content to continue writing. I hope you will stick with me, if for no other reason than the odd pleasure of not knowing where you’re going. Neither do I.

Rock On Film

According to Thomas Doherty, in his book Teenagers and Teenpics, it was the use of “Rock Around the Clock” over the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle—released March 1955—that revealed to Hollywood producers rock music could heighten the appeal of a movie (p. 76). However, early on, movies featuring rock music and rock musicians are largely an undistinguished lot, and command little interest anymore, except that of an historic kind. I recently tried to watch the Sam Katzman produced Rock Around the Clock (released in March 1956 according to the IMDB, that is, precisely a year after Blackboard Jungle), featuring Bill Haley and His Comets as well as Alan Freed, and found myself dozing off after the first thirty minutes. Its most interesting feature was the way it demonstrated how the jive talk of jazz culture was quickly imitated by early rock ‘n’ rollers—the word “bebop,” for instance, was used early on to refer to rock music. This feature is revealing because it shows how early (white) rockers tried to manage their relationship to black (masculine) culture.

This historic hindsight allows us to see that a fundamental problem of early movies about rock music was how to handle the complex negotiation of white forays into black culture. Certainly this problem was often displaced, as it is, for instance, in Rock Around the Clock, in which the underlying dynamic is between competing forms of music. Little Richard and Chuck Berry each appeared in a film in 1956 (Don’t Knock the Rock and Rock, Rock, Rock, respectively) but the figure—the transitional object—that eventually allowed such white forays was, of course, Elvis Presley, who burst onto the national stage in 1956. And yet, with few exceptions, Elvis’s channeling of black male sexuality was largely confined to his stage performance, and virtually absent from his cinematic performances, revealing how rock culture and cinematic culture had radically distinct racial orientations. This disparate orientation explains, I think, why virtually no rock films of this era now have little intrinsic interest beyond their historic (documentary) value. Elvis’s rise to fame coincided with the huge increase in the number of televisions in American homes; the estimated number of viewers who saw Elvis on television in 1956 reveals as much about the sheer number of TV sets in America at the time as it does Elvis’s dynamic stage presence. However, the key point is that what was perceived as so threatening in Elvis’s TV performances is largely absent in his cinematic performances; the same disjunction explains why so many early rock films are so lifeless.

Mirror, Mirror

In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein’s creation—the “monster”—eventually sees his reflection in the water, and is shocked by it, understanding at that moment why others find him so hideous. There’s a similar moment in SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939) too, when the monster (Boris Karloff, in his last appearance as the monster in a feature film) sees his reflection, and has a similar reaction. It’s a great moment, one that hearkens back to Shelley’s source novel. In the horror film, as in Gothic literature, the mirror is an instrument of truth—it cannot lie, and therefore can only reveal to us the terrible truth. The mirror shows us the real, and it is for this reason why so few of us wish to gaze too long at our reflection in it. Jean Cocteau said, “We watch ourselves grow old in mirrors. They bring us closer to death,” by which he meant, mirrors do not lie, and serve as constant reminders of our mortality.

The mirror figures in blues great Robert Pete Williams’ song, I’ve Grown So Ugly, included on the album Free Again (1961), recorded soon after Williams had been released from Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he’d spent the previous several years of his life. The years in prison have been hard and long, and Williams sings about a moment of (mis-)recognition similar to that of the Frankenstein monster in Shelley’s novel. He sees himself in the mirror, but doesn’t know himself anymore: “Oh baby, baby this ain’t me. I’ve got so ugly I don’t even know myself.” Years have gone by, and he has grown old while locked away in prison, and can no longer recognize himself.

Captain Beefheart covered “I’ve Grown So Ugly” on the album Safe As Milk (1967), as Grown So Ugly. His electrified version of the song, interpreted as if it were being sung by Howlin’ Wolf, is perhaps most significant because it allows us to decipher the role of the mirror in Beefheart’s music. There is, of course, the album Mirror Man, belatedly released in 1971, but there’s also “Son of Mirror Man—Mere Man,” on Strictly Personal (1968). The homonymy of mirror/mere reminds us of Cocteau’s insight, the link between the mirror and mortality (“mere man”), but “Son of Mirror Man” also happens to be an enticing link to SON OF FRANKENSTEIN. Surely your imagination is not so impoverished as to think that “Son of Mirror Man” refers only to one particular “take” or version of the song. The link explains why Beefheart's music has often been characterized as “gothic blues.”

Chess Game

Cadillac Records (2008) probably should have been a TV mini-series, which would have allowed the filmmakers to sort out what is now essentially a jumbled mess. There is a great film in here somewhere, but not in the form it currently exists (why no extended “director’s cut” of a film that desperately needs it?). Although titled Cadillac Records, the film is, more accurately, about the rise of Chicago-based Chess Records and its founder, Leonard Chess (Adrian Brody), who founded the blues label in the early 1950s along with his brother Phil (what happened to his character in the movie?). (The title is inspired by Chess’s habit of paying his artists with Cadillacs.) The film also features Chess Records’ first major recording artist, Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), as well as other artists who began or established their careers at Chess, including Little Walter (Columbus Short), Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker), Chuck Berry (Mos Def), and Etta James (Beyonce Knowles). The ensemble cast gives fine performances (Beyonce gives a notable performance as Etta James), but we get only brief glimpses into their individual lives, and, astonishingly, by the film’s end it remains unclear why Chess Records should be the subject of a film in the first place. Apparently biopics of the individual artists represented are not a viable option.

Of course, the soundtrack has good music, but then again, it should. But outside of some Number One hits on the R&B charts and the occasional cross-over hit, though, we learn very little about these artists’ contributions to American music or about the importance of the individual albums released on the Chess label in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Nor do we learn much about so-called “Chicago Blues” or “electrified blues,” and why the sound was, and has been, found so compelling by so many blues enthusiasts. At one point, the Rolling Stones show up and give proper obeisance to their idol, Muddy Waters, although historically one of the songs they recorded while at Chess in 1964 was the Willie Dixon-penned “The Red Rooster” (issued by the Stones as “Little Red Rooster”), first recorded by Waters’ rival, Howlin’ Wolf, on his famous and highly influential second album, Howlin’ Wolf (1962), often referred to as “The Rockin’ Chair Album.” Howlin’ Wolf’s album includes many songs that helped shape rock ‘n’ roll in the Sixties and after. In addition to “The Red Rooster,” it includes “Wang Dang Doodle” (recorded by Savoy Brown, The Grateful Dead, Charlie Watts, and others), “Spoonful” (Cream, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Ten Years After, and others), and “Back Door Man” (The Doors; others). It’s very easy for me to say what the movie “should have done,” of course, but I would have liked to see the movie explore the motives for amplification in greater detail (touched on in the opening moments, and in the early key sequences featuring Little Walter), and why Leonard Chess pushed the music in that direction. (He was obviously aware of what Sam Phillips was doing in Memphis; it was Sam Phillips who recommended Howlin’ Wolf to Leonard Chess.) The film’s contention that the (white) music industry exploited black people is a valid point—of course. While the fact is undeniably true, the film nonetheless works a rather tired idea, namely the antithesis between “authentic” music (the outpouring of real feeling, authenticity as understood as the proximity to the blues) and “commercial” music (rock ‘n’ roll in this case). The fact is,“authentic” African-American music was an effect of industrialization (by which I mean it was supported and marketed by institutions such as radio, authorized by music publishing and licensing, and affected by developments in recording technology). Chicago blues helped shape the direction of rock ‘n’ roll, to be sure, but the idea that rock ‘n’ roll is the “commercial” imitation of some Real Thing (commercialization as corruption) is simply a myth, the result of a confusion, as Simon Frith has pointed out, “that music is the starting point of the industrial process—the raw material over which everyone fights—when it is, in fact, the final product.”

I was slightly perturbed by the way the film distorts history (and does so on several occasions), but perhaps the most egregious is the way it suggests, falsely, that Elvis had a hit from Little Walter’s “My Babe” early in his career. Most any detailed Elvis discography will show that Elvis didn’t record “My Babe” until August 1969, during one of his Las Vegas shows, by which time Little Walter had been dead for almost a year and a half (Little Walter died in February 1968), and—who knows—perhaps Elvis performed the song as an homage (it was not a song he performed often, suggesting this may be possible). The film also portrays Little Walter’s death as occurring before Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon travel to England in 1967 rather than after, and also suggests that Muddy Waters was slightly surprised by the reception of blues music in England in 1967, but in fact he’d toured there previously in 1958. Beyonce Knowles’ performance as Etta James is quite good; it’s unfortunate that the film has little else to recommend it. Would that I could say otherwise.