“At first the number of white people interested in this music was not enough to have much effect on the sales of popular music. This portion of the audience probably consisted at first of college and a few high school students who cultivated an ‘R & B cult’ as most of their equivalents earlier (and even then) cultivated a jazz cult.

By a happy coincidence we happen to have some observations of remarkable insight made by the sociologist David Riesman on the popular music audience of this period, which illustrate the character of the specialist audience. In an article, ‘Listening to Popular Music’, Riesman noted that two groups could be identified: the majority audience, which accepted the range of choices offered by the music industry and made its selections from this range without considering anything outside it; and the minority audience, which he described with details which are relevant here.

‘The minority group is small. It comprises the more active listeners, who are less interested in melody or tone than in arrangement or technical virtuosity. It has developed elaborate, even overelaborate, standards of music listening; hence its music listening is combined with much animated discussion of technical points and perhaps occasional references to trade journals such as ‘Metronome’ and ‘Downbeat’. The group tends to dislike name bands, most vocalists (except Negro blues singers) and radio commercials.

The rebelliousness of this minority group might be indicated in some of the following attitudes toward popular music: an insistence on rigorous standards of judgement and taste in a relativist culture,; a preference for the uncommercialized, unadvertised small bands rather than name bands; the development of a private language and then a flight from it when the private language (the same is true of other aspects of private style) is taken over by the majority group; a profound resentment of the commercialization of radio and musicians. Dissident attitudes toward competition and cooperation in our culture might be represented in feelings about improvisation and small ‘combos’; an appreciation for idiosyncrasy of performance goes together with a dislike of ‘star’ performers and an insistence that the improvisation be a group-generated phenomenon.

There are still other ways in which the minority may use popular music to polarize itself from the majority group, and thereby from American popular culture generally: a sympathetic attitude or even preference for Negro musicians; an equalitarian attitude toward the roles, in both love and work, of the two sexes; a more international outlook, with or without awareness, for example, of French interest in American jazz; an identification with disadvantaged groups, not only Negroes, from which jazz springs, with or without a romantic cult of proletarianism; a dislike of romantic pseudo-sexuality in music, even without any articulate awareness of being exploited; similarly a reaction against the stylized body image and limitations of physical self-expression which ‘sweet’ music and its lyrics are felt as conveying; a feeling that music is too important to serve as a backdrop for dancing, small talk, studying, and the like; a diffuse resentment of the image of the teenager presented by the mass media.’

[…]

Riesman’s observation that no matter what the majority chooses, there will be a minority choosing something different explains how popular music continues to change, no matter how good – or bad – the dominant types of music are at any particular period. And because the minority audience defines itself as being radical within the music audience, its taste is likely to favor, consciously or unconsciously, music with some element of social comment or criticism in it.

During the early fifties, young people like those described by Riesman turned in increasing numbers to rhythm and blues music, and to radio stations that broadcast it. If the first listeners were those with relatively sophisticated standards for judging music, those that came later included many whose taste was more instinctive, who liked the dance beat or the thrilling effect of a hard-blown saxophone, people who may have found the rough voices of the singers a bit quaint and appealing as novelties.

It was this second group of listeners who provided the inspiration and audience for Alan Freed, who , with Bill Haley, played a crucial role in popularizing rhythm and blues under the name ‘rock n’ roll’.”

- Charlie Gillett, ‘The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock ‘n Roll’ (Dell, 1972), pp. 19 – 21


Serving Suggestions:

John Lee Hooker – This Is Hip
Frankie Lee Sims – She Likes To Boogie Real Low
TV Slim – Flat Foot Sam
Guitar Junior – Roll Roll Roll
Icky Renrut – The Rooster
Bunker Hill – The Girl Can't Dance

Labels: auto-critique, books, Charlie Gillett, R & B Cults

“When these critics purport to write about a record, they are really writing, ‘Me, me, me… What about ME?!?’ And because they are actually propagating themselves, they resent performers and groups with any personality or character of their own. This competition with the subject is perfectly logical from their perspective. These critics see themselves as artists in their own right; their writing needs a clean slate on which to project, a tabula rosa. Just as a lead guitar player wants a steady backbeat over which to ‘shred,’ the critic celebrates the performers and groups who will provide a clean, tidy soil bed in which their word-seeds can sprout – groups and singers whose personas won’t overpower the writer’s own voice.

Therefore they reward formalistic, inoffensive, dull, pretentiously unpretentious groups who ‘rock’ with a studied indifference, who try too hard to not try too hard, who compose a kind of indefinable muddle sometimes described as ‘indie-rock.’ The groups the critics celebrate, though middle class and usually college educated, are not intellectual or poetic, nor are they threatening in any way. Their style is varsity casual; they’re smart enough to be bland and unassuming, and they are attractive in the sense that they received the right nutrients when they were young during their unremarkable but privileged upbringing.

Their type of music isn’t necessarily ‘bad’. In fact, it might even be ‘good’ in some sort of way. But it is typically unassuming, introverted, unexciting, dealing in mawkish emotionalism better left on daytime television, inscrutable in a manner which betrays cowardice on the part of the ‘artist,’ and is often state-subsidized by the government of its country of origin, whether it be Canada, France or Sweden.”



“Because of the critic’s starring role in the music scene, he or she is concerned with maintaining decorum. If Little Richard were appearing on the scene nowadays, he would arouse the ire of the critics, who would resent his humour, his costumes, his showmanship, and the Dada content of his songs. The Same goes for Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry and The Beatles. The critic would dismiss these as comic or novelty acts, not to be taken seriously, as opposed to, say, the tedious and highly regarded Sigur Ros and Radiohead.

Of course, Little Richard isn’t appearing on the scene now. He is an institutionalized favorite, beloved by critics. Why is he so beloved by them? Because of his ‘otherness’ and his irrelevance. In music, personality is only forgiven if the performer is firmly ensconced in the ‘other’ category, or if they are retired or dead. If he/she is irrelevant or a completely exotic quantity, he/she is granted a right to showmanship, personality, stage name, and even political expression. But that is simply not acceptable for the contemporary domestic artist.”



“The artist is expected to be a silent partner and unannounced extension of faceless authority; one more brand name alongside Stand & Poors, the NASDAQ, the New York Times, Merchant Ivory, Proctor & Gamble, Monsanto and the MoMA. Sting, Bon Iver, and Vampire Weekend fit right in. This policy is propagated via the critic, who feels him or herself trapped by the void. For the official rock critic, the modern group represents ‘fashion’ or ‘art,’ whereas ‘other’ music is ‘costume’ or ‘craft,’ somehow authentic and outside of critique.”



“Another of the critics’ jobs is to have an opinion about things they actually have no regard for or couldn’t care less about. This leads to annoyance on their part with regard to the records and groups they discuss. Their opinions are therefore contrived, conjured up in order to make a statement that addresses the perception of the thing in question, and not the actual thing. Perhaps they will perversely champion that which is unpopular, or vice versa. Or they may try to ‘break’ an unknown. But typically these writers will fastidiously maintain a status quo, an aesthetic which they feel reinforces an aspect of their equally contrived personal ‘identity’.”



“Rock n roll musicians tend to gravitate en masse towards some particular stylistic template. Critics do the same. Though there are many critics, they only have a few voices. The most common one is the ‘omniscient,’ who holds forth as if he/she were a deity on a mountaintop who’d incidentally seen all of humanity’s foibles transpire, including the entire back catalogue of whichever ‘artist’ they are discussing. As an astral being, they affect a tone of chiding condescension. Another is the ‘memoirist,’ who tells you a few incidental comments about the record while you learn oodles about their experience in traffic of their dinner of tikka masala. This is supposed to be refreshingly unpretentious. As opposed to an actual music enthusiast who is invested in the scene, none of these creatures can tell you what kind of music they like or why this does or doesn’t fit into their ideal. To do so would undermine their right to caprice.

The establishment critic is also aware of the role of money. Even on the ‘independent’ level, critical popularity is bought through a form of payola called ‘publicity’. Publicists are like farm league lobbyists. They are ‘connected’ people, usually ex-Conde Nast employees, who are hired to tell their acquaintances who work for periodicals or music blogs to write positive articles about the group which has paid them a fee. They control the way a group is written about too, as they distribute something called a ‘onesheet,’ written by the group’s record company, summarising the new record’s promo campaign with ‘bullet points’. This is why, whenever a group’s record ‘blows up,’ the articles you see written about it are uniformly similar. The Strokes, for example, were said by all press organs to evoke the Ramones and Television, despite no discernible similarity to either group. The extraordinary obedience of the press in following orders from the publicists shows how little many of the writers care, not only about the subjects they write about, but about music itself.

And this is understandable. Because music is not for everyone. Most people, in fact, shouldn’t listen to it. This isn’t meant as an insult to them, or as a way to question their decency or intellectual capacity. People who shouldn’t listen to music are often very competent at their jobs and may also be responsible pet owners. They should not, however, use the groups as a prop for their future career in journalism or as a way to generate ad revenue for their website. Listening to music won’t make one interesting, hip, in-the-know, or better than other people. All of these elitist conceits are common to the enthusiast and are undeniably a factor in listening to music, but ultimately it is music that must liberate one from such concerns.

Unfortunately, it is precisely those who shouldn’t listen to music who constitute the majority of its most influential critics. These people, the snarling dogs who enforce mediocrity through their vehemence, sneering, and know-it-all pretensions, resist music because to them it is an unfathomable, inscrutable riddle. They want to speak about it, hold forth on it, determine its future like a parched schoolteacher who crushes the spirit of the child because he too was crushed so long ago.

This type of critic resents organized sound just as a mole resents sight or the ostrich resents flight. But instead of just turning away, he has been taught that music is integral to a person’s sexuality, to their attractiveness, so he pushes forth in his nonsense elucidations, tracts designed to be read by other confused individuals who need an expert to explain the music to them. Yet music is like food or touch or modern banking – it defies explanation. Explanation or elucidation is an embarrassing redundancy which has no relation to the sensibility borne of the sound itself.”



"Super-Natural Strategies for Making a Rock n’ Roll Group" by Ian F. Svenonious is available now from Akashic Books, or can be found in the ‘popular music / how-to / occult’ section of all good bookshops.

This blog will return to limp on anew on an as-and-when basis, probably paying little heed to Mr. Svenonious’s sage counsel. Keep watching the skies.

Labels: auto-critique, books, Ian Svenonious

#1
Dee Dee Ramone -
Poison Heart:
Surviving The Ramones

(Firefly Publishing, 1997)

“They say that the Chelsea Hotel is haunted. I agree. A dragon fly is flying around my room right now. A ‘she’ dragon. Like Connie, one of my demons from a long time ago.
[…]
It’s the beginning of the 90s now and I am fed up with it all. I am going to fight back. I give the dragon fly a look that could kill, but she shrugs it off. She’s in a frenzy now, flying at me from behind, then changing direction and flying straight at me. Trying to sucker me to look into the light. Fuck that. That ain’t gonna happen.
I am going to send every shitty memory I have of this hotel straight back to hell. I start a fire on the rug and come at her from behind. I set light to her head with another match, then watch her burn. Then I feel normal again. So I start to relax and stare at an unplugged fan, trying to will it to spin. Don’t fuck with me. If you’re experienced, I think you’ll understand.”

I remember once reading an interview with King Buzzo of The Melvins, in which he said something like, “all books about music are shit… except for DeeDee Ramone’s book, which is brilliant”. I think that says it all really.

I wasn’t expecting much from ‘Poison Heart’ when I first borrowed a copy from Leicester library a few years back. I was just bored and didn’t have much money, and I love The Ramones and like hoovering my way through pointless rock biographies, so… y’know, why not?

From the generic “sole audience = uncritical die-hard fans” cover design to the dread co-writing credit, nothing about this book exactly screams “raging outsider anti-literary masterpiece of some kind”, but…. well, that’s what I’m writing this list for, y’know. To let you know. For every hundred middle-aged rockin’ bozos who manage to make a few thousand bucks on a book deal, you only get one DeeDee Ramone. Hundred, did I say? Man, on this whole PLANET, you only get one DeeDee Ramone. That’s kinda the point.

The introduction quoted above was my first clue that this was gonna be something a bit different. (For the sake of brevity, I’ve left out a few additional paragraphs where DeeDee starts reminiscing about his ex-girlfriend Connie trying to kill him with a broken champagne bottle.)

Second clue comes when he opens chapter one, page one with “My mother was a drunken nutjob”, and by page two, when he starts threading his mother’s childhood memories into his own imagined account of what life must have been like for the people of Berlin during the war (“those were terrible times”), I knew this was going to be quite a read.

God only knows what the texts that comprise this book must have looked like before Veronica Kofman compiled/transcribed/edited/whatevered them into shape for publication, but she certainly deserves credit for turning in just about the most UN-ghost written co-authored autobiog ever to hit the shelves. I mean, seriously, it doesn’t read as if she’s done much more than just correct the spelling, as DeeDee poured out his unstoppable, stream of consciousness exegesis. No bland ‘scene-setting’ paragraphs, no fact-checking, no logical framework – this is 100% pure, unfiltered DeeDee experience.

Want to know about The Ramones? Who they were? What they did? How their personalities meshed and how/where/why they recorded their songs? Well, there’s some of that here, but only viewed through the lens of the extent to which DeeDee found the whole thing a continuous hassle. I think the first four albums whiz by in a couple of pages, because they were presumably kinda painless.

Want to know about the best ways to score GI-issue morphine vials in post-war Berlin though, or glam-rock knife-fights and feral drag queens on the streets of New York, or how a six year old feels going to see a double-bill of ‘The Mummy’ and ‘The Ten Commandments’? Step right up!

One of the best things about this book is that DeeDee is pretty ambivalent about The Ramones. He describes the things that struck him about the other members of the band when he met them (referring to them by their full Ramone names at all times, as in “Johnny Ramone always said..” or “the thing about Johnny Ramone was..”). But by the time they get to being a vaguely successful band, his attention drifts. He prefers thinking about other things. It kinda reads like he spent the next fifteen years being thrown on a bus and taken to places where he’d meet odd people and get into situations where it was hard for him to find drugs. Boy, did he ever hate singing “Warthog” though. Yeah, he didn’t like that at all. He makes that perfectly clear.

DeeDee writes plenty here about the ugly, dysfunctional relationships he seems to have kept getting mixed up in, and about the kind of squalor he tended to end up living in. But mainly he writes about taking drugs – that being pretty much what he did, besides being in The Ramones. All drugs, any drugs, it seems. He could never quite decide on a favourite, I guess. By the halfway point in the book, he reaches some kinda hilarious-although-it-really-shouldn’t-be state of mind wherein he seems to have decided that beginning the day with seven joints of his favourite weed and a case of beer is a basic human right, and that anyone asking him to do anything places an unbearable stress upon his fragile equilibrium. What do you mean you can’t get any cocaine in this stupid country? What the hell? But I need it now! And you’re making me sit in this room with just a bunch of alcohol while all these creepy journalists with suspicious eyes ask me questions, and now there are people phoning me in the middle of the DAY, hassling me about playing some bass part on some stupid song I wrote? Can you imagine? It was like living in hell! “And they made me play volleyball. It was a nightmare!”

We shouldn’t laugh really, but the way he writes this stuff just cracks me up – short, clipped sentences and weird non-sequiturs, demanding the reader’s full sympathy and understanding at all times as he basically describes his behaviour as an unmanageable, substance-abusing maniac as if it were the only rational course of action open to him, given the unbearable horrors he was faced with on a day to day basis. Ramones tours or periods of confinement in secure institutions – it all seems much the same to DeeDee, with about the same level of discomfort either way.

Sounds like it could degenerate into yr standard self-pitying rock star stuff, but there is a kind of wide-eyed, manic energy about DeeDee’s recollections of all this stuff that’s impossible to describe if you’ve not read it firsthand. Something about the way that he can barely remember which continent he was in half the time, but he seems to have perfect recall of precisely which clothes people were wearing at different points in time, where they bought their shoes, and which brand of beer he was drinking.

There are also numerous instances here where his writing just goes completely over the edge when you least expect it, opening up surreal vistas of what I can only describe as ‘cosmic horror’, filling late night readers’ heads with images of an apocalyptic swamp inferno / alligator attack that transpired when he and Marc Bell hitched a lift to a Florida gig with some mysterious character known only as ‘Zippy’ (“Yes, yes, yes, even Zippy needs a little vacation now and then”, DeeDee records him as saying, in a brilliant example of the kind of unlikely, garbled dialogue he attributes to other people throughout the book), or with shuddersome memories of tour manager Monte Melnick terrifying him into submission using hideous, inhuman ‘lamb noises’.

(Did you know that, shortly before his death, DeeDee published a ‘horror novel’ entitled “Chelsea Hotel Horror”, in which he himself was the central character, fighting his way through said hotel pursued by the undead spectres of all his dead punk rock comrades..? Sounds like some pretty grim business, but nonetheless, do any publishers out there KNOW how much I want to read this book..? Trying to find a copy from the original print run has proved a dead-end, so please, whoever holds the rights these days – make it happen. If you’re worried about sales, I’ll personally guarantee, say, 50% of the print-run.)

One of the things you’ve got to love about DeeDee is that although he essentially lived the life of an archetypal ‘self-destructive punk dude’, he never contrived to become that character, however much he might have traded off it in his later years. Throughout this book, he wishes he could walk away from the whole thing. All he wants to do is walk around on a sunny day with a smile on his face, looking at things, talking to people, being normal. He fantasises about the life he might have had as a guy who delivers bread to a supermarket, looking wistfully at these ‘regular’, everyday activities as if they were part of a glamorous, alien world that he’ll never be a part of. I guess they offer a glimpse of the order and safety that might have been his, if his life hadn’t been an ugly mess of chaos from day one.

The mantle of the ‘punk dude’, the ‘druggy outsider rock star guy’, has been picked up so many times over the years by so, so many healthy, well-adjusted people that it means nothing. What DeeDee spent his life clumsily trying to make us understand is that, for him, it was never a decision. When you’re a dumb, bullied kid living in poverty with a violent alcoholic mother, things like this are not really ‘decisions’, any more than the feeling you get when you listen to a Stooges record is a ‘decision’, or being driven to hang out with other misfits who like The Stooges because there’s nobody else who’ll talk to you, and trying to fit in by starting a band with them, is a ‘decision’.

If life had allowed him a shot at it, maybe DeeDee would have been a supermarket delivery guy, or a baker, or whatever. Would he have been a totally kick-ass, legendary baker? Probably not, he’s a bit too all-over-the-place and irresponsible for that, but he would’ve done ok. He probably wouldn’t have written amazing songs like ‘Poison Heart’ and ‘53rd & 3rd’, and he probably wouldn’t have written this astounding book. But then, he also probably wouldn’t have got stabbed or passed out in public places quite so much, probably wouldn’t have been committed to so many mental institutions, wouldn’t have sold his ass on the street for dope money*, and wouldn’t have died of an overdose at the age of 50.

So… I guess what I’m saying is, that’s something for all you ‘punks’ to think about before you put on the leather jacket and take the path of most resistance. At the heart of your record collection, there’re some guys like Douglas Colvin who didn’t select this from a list of options. Rejecting the kind of grounded normality that they never even had a chance to touch is… fine if you wanna, but just remember that you’re basically just doing a Live Action Role Play of the people who weren’t given a choice in the matter.

Jesus, what the hell am I talking about? How did I end up going off on that particular tangent? Anyway, I think we’ve temporarily lost sight of the fact that, above all, this book is A HOOT. It’s hilarious, it’s action-packed, it’s incredibly weird, you can read it again and again and still find new stuff to marvel at. Get it. Get all these books in fact. Learn from them, and stare contentedly at their spines on the shelf. They will make you better at liking music.

*Allegedly. Not something he chooses to tell us about in this book, which is fair enough. ‘Please Kill Me’ has the dirt if yr particularly interested.

Labels: books, Dee Dee Ramone, The Ramones

#2
John Fahey –
How Bluegrass Music Destroyed my Life
(Drag City Press, 2000)

Put simply: if John Fahey had never played a note of music in his life, then written this book, he’d still be a genius.

Writing these posts over the past few weeks, I’ve come to realise that I’m actually quite bad at communicating the spirit of these great books without lapsing into the same bunch of overblown clichés each time.

As this one is actually one of my favourite books – music-related or otherwise – and is furthermore one that conveys a perspective on the world that is anything but overblown or clichéd, I’ll try to spare Fahey that ignoble fate, and do my best to stick to the facts.

I first became aware of John Fahey’s writing via the voluminous sleevenotes that accompany most of his early Takoma albums. Sadly I no longer have copies of these, because I got the CDs out of the library or borrowed them off friends, but I remember them as being absolutely superb - an inspired mixture of fake blues scholarship, wild poetical imaginings and vicious satirical humour that I wish someone (Drag City? Whatever’s left of Takoma these days?) would issue in book form, because I’d love to read them again one day.

It was through these sleevenotes, and Fahey’s similarly inspired song titles, that I first learned of the worship of the Great Koonaklaster and his totem animal the turtle, of the ways of the Cat People of Sligo Creek, and of the other bedrocks of Fahey’s personal mythology, all of which attain a significance beyond the level of mere obtuse injokes during the course of ‘How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life’.

In classic style, this volume was apparently compiled from a box of “sticky and suspiciously stained papers, covered edge to edge with intense and feverish prose”, provided by Fahey after Jim O’Rourke and other Drag City associates persuaded him to hand over some of his writing. Rather than the rambling madness you might expect however, Fahey’s manuscripts feel very much like the carefully managed result of years of careful refinement. Still unhinged, meandering and grouchy enough to beat the band of course (he's got a reputation to keep up, after all), but also a clear summation of the most important things he has learned and perceived in the course of many years of thinking, feeling and doing.

As well as having a lot of extremely interesting things to say, Fahey also wrote excellent prose, with a rare feel for language and rhythm. If he’d made the effort to get a volume or two of this kind of writing published during his lifetime, in a format that wasn’t viewed merely as the memoirs of an obscure, cultish musician, I have little doubt that he could have become a significant literary figure – hailed as a natural heir to the legacy of Brautigan and Vonnegut and etc etc etc, but with a far darker, more isolationist undercurrent than either.

Thinking further though, the whole notion of Fahey playing any role whatsoever in the fatuous, self-important world of American ‘letters’ seems supremely unlikely. Had any prospective publishers or writerly colleagues come calling, it’s likely he would have greeted them with the same disdain and disgust he seemingly reserved for a good 90% of the adult world. Beyond the shining lights of the few individuals he considered friends and ‘genuine’ people, Fahey seems to have considered even most of the residents of his own strange, small backwater of the music world with supreme suspicion, and his book goes someway towards explaining why.

As I say, I’m not going to go into it all here - I’m simply going to try to convince you to read it. And if you’re at all fond of reading books written by American people in the 20th century then I think you SHOULD read it, regardless of whether or not you give a hoot about John Fahey, or even know who he was.

Contrary to the title, this isn’t really a music book. Certainly, there is a lot of talk about music in it, and a lot of appearances by notable musicians, but that’s simply because that was the world Fahey inhabited. It’s not really a book about music, so much as it a book about Fahey’s unique and humane, but sometimes frighteningly extreme, philosophy of life, and the experiences (‘real’ or otherwise) that helped form it.

Of course, there are anecdotes. Mighty, wonderful anecdotes, about how he punched Michael Antonioni in the face, and saw a desperate and drunken Hank Williams play a secret concert on a riverboat shortly before his death. About how he and his accomplices hunted down Skip James in the depths of Louisiana and learned the dark secrets of the ‘Sphinx Chords’. About how he unlocked a vault of repressed childhood memories whilst fighting a monstrous ‘alligator gar fish’ on a fishing expedition with Bukka White. About how he fell in love with a witch, and played his guitar all night at the dance of the cat people and… wait, hang on a minute.

Well, as Damian Rogers says in his introduction, Fahey “..travels between worlds with the same nonchalance most of us feel catching a bus to work”. Who are we to judge which of his worlds are more or less ‘valid’, as movie directors and rock stars prattle their obscene fancies across the shelves in every airport and train station in the world, whilst this beautiful and visionary volume languishes remotely in a few hundred record collector lairs, gathering dust behind armoured miles of shellac..?

Well, so much for ‘just the facts’. Best make this all I’m going to say on the matter. Just read this book, for Great K’s sake.

Labels: books, John Fahey

#3
Charles Mingus –
Beneath the Underdog
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1971 / Canongate Books, 1995)

“ ‘Don’t bullschitt me. You’re a good man Charles, but there’s a lot of fabrication and fantasy in what you say. For instance, no man could have as much intercourse in one night as you claim to have had.’
‘The hell he couldn’t! Maybe I did exaggerate some things like the weight-lifting and all that ‘cause I didn’t really know how much those bar bells weighted but only two other guys could pick ‘em up and their feet sank into the ground!’
‘You’re changing the subject, my friend. I was asking about the Mexican girls. Why is it you’re obsessed with proving you’re a man? Is it because you cry?’”


Most people will know Charles Mingus for his work as a composer, bandleader and bassist, and as the creator of some of the most consistently inspired, challenging and popular music to emerge from mid 20th century American jazz.

Anyone who’s read ‘Beneath the Underdog’ though will of course be aware that Charles Mingus was actually a champion bodybuilder, sexual athlete, psychic warrior, kung-fu master, black power revolutionary, millionaire pimp, doomed romantic, notorious lunatic and spiritual visionary, who occasionally found a spare moment to bang out some tunes.

An all-time classic of the “fuck the truth baby, this is ME” school of autobiography, ‘..Underdog’ is probably by far the best-known book on this list, having been an underground hit and perennial ‘oh man, you gotta read this’ volume ever since its first publication. Anyone who ever met him will wax lyrical about what a fiery and idiosyncratic personality Mingus was, but I’m guessing that few fans quite realised what a thoroughly twisted, king freak genius he actually was until this book appeared.

Somehow managing to be both grotesquely self-aggrandising and coruscatingly humble at all times, ‘..Underdog’ takes something of an out-of-control steamroller approach to recounting numerous obstacles Mingus faced up to in his life, and the very American methods in which he chose to overcome them, through excess, violence, chest-beating psychodrama, financial intimidation and all-purpose destructive psychosis. Seems to have worked ok, all things considered.

Beginning (after the above-quoted introduction which recounts Ming arguing with his therapist) with the decidedly unnerving conception of his birth, Mingus initially introduces himself as a kind of free-roaming, incorporeal intelligence that one day finds itself watching over the progress of a poor, mixed race LA family. When their two year old son smashes his head open on what’s described as “a Goodwill store old-fashioned second hand-me-down white folks’ bedroom-set dresser” and is rushed to the emergency room, this nameless intelligence enters the body of the dying toddler, instigating a miraculous last minute ‘recovery’, and thereafter assuming the identity of ‘Charles Mingus’, directing the activities and observing the emotions of the human body assigned that name from a kind of detached, third person point of view.

Proceeding to outline the childhood of ‘Charles Mingus’, this nameless observational spirit subsequently launches what is actually a very straightforward and affecting account of a troubled kid growing up in Watts in the ‘20s and ‘30s. The central obsessions that came to dominate his adult life are already strongly in evidence, but by and large it’s solid memoir type business. It’s only when we get to the grown up portion of the book that things start to get weird. And, communicated with Mingus’s breathless, almost violent need to unload and exaggerate, they get pretty weird pretty quickly.

In short, there’s no way to easily encapsulate what follows. As bilious and impossible to unpack as its author’s most confrontational music, and it’s too heavy for me to dive back into just for the sake of this post, but needless to say, it’s a hell of a read, full of hilarious anecdotes and wild gonzo imaginings that seem to frame his life as an ever-escalating landslide of decadence and turmoil.

I think the highlight of the book for me probably comes when Mingus reportedly finds himself chilling at the piano in his penthouse apartment, trying to compose an ode of deep spiritual love, but constantly finding himself interrupted by the three beautiful ladies who are violently competing for his attention – shrieking and tearing each others clothes, sprawling across his keyboard, pulling at his arms and the like. Tiring of this distraction, he immediately sets out to buy some easels and other art supplies, declaring that the women should all paint his portrait, and that the one whom he deems to have produced the most worthwhile work of art and captured his inner being most convincingly, he will put aside the time to sleep with.

You wouldn’t think a guy who rolls like that would find so much in life to complain about, but the tempestuous mixture of materialism, vanity and spirituality revealed in such stories seems to lie at the heart of Mingus’s view of the world, and any chuckles that may arise are undercut by a thorough ringing out of the racial identity crises, endless paranoia and deep-rooted sense of inadequacy that plagued Mingus throughout his life – issues that form the central pillar around which this ridiculous, psychotic, wonderful excuse for a memoir revolves, his basic plea for a post-racial, post-classist society in which individuals may be judged solely upon their achievements sounding out more reasonable and obvious than ever, for all the braggadocio and neurosis he surrounds it with.

Labels: books, Charles Mingus, jazz

#4
Ray Davies – X-Ray
(Penguin, 1995)

“My name is of no importance. In fact it is of no concern to anyone except those who have loved and befriended me during my somewhat limited tenancy on this earth. It is a matter between me and my employers. Suffice to say that I am nineteen years of age and about to embark on my first major journalistic enterprise, for a Corporation that has paid for my education ever since I became an orphan and was taken into its care. I know nothing of my life before the Corporation took me in, and everything I am is a result of its care and protection.

I am a product of a century which started at the height of class-conscious imperialism and ended with a society so reduced to totalitarian commonness that in my final year at college the phrase ‘mediocrity rises’ proliferated. I am an example of a society which encourages ordinariness, a product of a vast empire of companies that has now splintered off into many separate corporations, each with its own autonomous control. I am one of the faceless thousands manufactured by this corporate society, with just enough education to serve my masters, and the right haircut and fashion conscious attire to fit in with my contemporaries. The only individualism in me lurks somewhere so deep inside my desolate soul that it may never emerge to my human exterior, which was bred with the sole purpose to conform.”

- thus Ray Davies begins what was sold as the long-awaited, tell-all memoir of his time in The Kinks.

For the first few pages, I assumed the authorial voice here was Ray himself, outlining some strange, paranoid schema within which his own life could be framed. It soon becomes clear though that this is in fact ‘the future’, and that what we’re reading is actually a kind of vague, Orwellian science fiction. Our first person narrator is not Ray Davies, but an anonymous young man who, according to some Byzantine whim of the totalitarian educational regime to which he is subject, has been charged with gathering information and eventually filing a report on the potentially subversive activities of a forgotten, aging musician, once rich and famous but now holed up in dusty seclusion in his heavily fortified North London studio.

When our protagonist eventually makes his way through the elaborate security mechanisms surrounding Konk studios, he finds Ray a broken man – a disgusting, senile old derelict, completely disconnected from the world around him, mumbling his disjointed memories over endless lukewarm cups of tea.

As the narrator begins to transcribe the old man’s mutterings, the book begrudgingly begins to assume the form of a more traditional rock memoir, if admittedly a pretty fascinating and twisted one, with Davies’s peculiar and distinctive tone – both acerbic and sentimental, woefully self-deprecating and bitterly accusatory – helping to expose an unsettling undercurrent lurking behind even the most seemingly flippant anecdotes and fact-checks.

From a casual listen to Ray’s best-known songs, one could get the impression he’s a pretty easy-going, good-humoured kinda guy, but as anyone who’s spent a significant amount of time delving in the darker recesses of The Kinks back catalogue will tell you, nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout his life, Ray Davies has been an anxious, obsessive, habitually paranoid individual with an inbuilt distrust of… just about everything really, and, as the paragraphs quoted above perhaps make clear, the issues of social control, conformity and class privilege lurking in the background of such jaunty numbers as ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, ‘Well-Respected Man’ or ‘Sunday Afternoon’ were very big issues indeed to him.

Although he seems to have mellowed out a bit and accepted his lot in recent years, ‘X-Ray’ catches him at the very height of his lifelong disgruntlement, and it’s a mighty thing to behold. He was ‘born to prove a point’ he claims, and to some extent the page upon page of unhinged, sordid, one-sided show-biz reminiscence presented here seem to have been a bit of a personal exorcism for him, an attempt to try and find that ‘point’.

As our narrator records these outpourings, he seems to realise that Davies is not in fact just a senile old goat but an important and dangerous individual, and an active threat to the Corporation who have sent him to spy on him. Indeed, he feels his own lifelong brainwashing starting to weaken in the face of these strange tales of beat group debauchery and Denmark Street disappointments, ending the book a changed man, ready to fight for… well, who knows what, but as a natural born refusenik, Ray certainly knows what he’s fighting *against* - namely, EVERY-BLOODY-THING except tea, beer, sex, seaside towns, electric guitars and the love of one’s family.

So… there ya go. Almost as rewarding/enlightening as listening to ‘Muswell Hillbillies’ whilst smashed out of yr head on brandy (and believe me, that’s pretty rewarding/enlightening), ‘X-Ray’ awaits a place on your bookshelf. Make it happen.

(I never did get around to doing that post about how much I love ‘Muswell Hillbillies’, did I..?)

Labels: books, Ray Davies, The Kinks

#5
Really The Blues
by Mezz Mezzrow & Bernard Wolfe
(Random House, 1946 / Signet, 1964)


“To all hipsters, hustlers and fly cats tipping along The Stroll.
(Keep scuffling.)
To all the cons in all the houses of many slammers, wrestling with chinches.
(Short Time, boys.)
To all the junkies and lushheads in two-bit scratchpads, and the hophouse grads in morgue iceboxes.
(R.I.P.)
To all the sweettalkers, the gumbeaters, the highjivers, out of the gallion of good and never going to take it low again.
(You got to make it, daddy.)
To Bessie Smith, Jimmy Noone, King Oliver, Louise Armstrong, Zutty Singleton, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet and Tommy Ladnier.
(Grab a taste of the millennium, gate.)”

Talk about the birth of cool – Milton ‘Mezz’ Mezzrow was there and saw it happen - as music and life-styles began to drift across previously impassable race barriers, and the roots of everything we think of as ‘hip’ 20th century culture was first took shape in America. An incredibly important bit of cultural history and a ferocious, free-wheeling piece of writing that had no less a personage than Henry Miller singing its praises when it first appeared (he actually holds copyright on this revised ’64 edition), ‘Really The Blues’ is in some ways a bit too much of an ‘important’, ‘landmark’ type book for inclusion on this daft list, but the sheer eccentricity of Mezzrow’s rambling muse definitely puts it in the right ballpark, I feel.

Mezz first encountered the blues in a juvenile reform institute in about 1915, when he overheard black prisoners harmonising with each other between cells during the night. And after an enlightened music teacher allowed him to spend some after-class time covertly trading licks with some cats from New Orleans, there was no going back. Out on the streets of Chicago, he found himself packing crates of bootleg liqour for Al Capone, later getting one of his first paying music gigs at a club owned by Detroit’s notorious Purple Gang and (as his own account has it) having to flee to the sticks when Capone’s chief lady took a fancy to him. Subsequently, he played a pivotal role in the creation of one of the first ever artistically valid white jazz scenes, his version of the story describing how he painstakingly schooled his Chicago buddies (including such Trad luminaries as Gene Krupa, Eddie Condon and Frank Teschemacher) in the ways of Dixieland, bringing the joys of ‘hot’ jazz and reefer smoke to the uninitiated wherever he trod.

After a move to New York, the frustrations he encountered in trying to realise his dream of a mixed race band led him to concentrate more on his equally pioneering leisure time activities, becoming the first white dope-dealer in Harlem, with a garbled, proto-beatnik lexicon and wardrobe to match. What follows includes a close friendship with Louis Armstrong, descent into opium addiction (this being before heroin was even refined), a long prison stretch and rebirth as a kind of all-purpose crusader for the power of music (if, admittedly, a very specific TYPE of music) in healing the racial rifts in American society and creating a kind of flawlessly hip super-culture, or somesuch.

Considering ‘Really The Blues’ first appeared in 1946, Mezzrow’s digressive, conversational style and, uh, ‘frank’ approach to his subject matter is really something else, and the way-out lingo he casually throw in throughout – a beautiful kind of hipster patter coined long, long before such beat jive was established as an instant cliché, and otherwise lost to history – is a total joy.

“In those days,” he begins a paragraph, “if you plied the lid off my skull with a can-opener, you might have spotted some weird eels snaking through the whirlpool I lugged around under my hat”. At another point he talks about how his buddies PeeWee Russell and Bix Beiderbecke used to live in a filthy shack, letting piles of unopened milk bottles go rotten on the doorstep because they were too busy sitting around the piano composing. “Looks like no one thought to put a nix on the moo-juice”, he notes, and a whole universe of beatnik splendour is born.

Like most musicians who write great books, Mezzrow is cranky and egocentric as they come, and as the book goes on he unfortunately becomes prone to outbursts of musical conservatism that, though undoubtedly heartfelt, will seem absolutely mystifying to the modern reader. From dismissing his former friends again and again for the dread crime of incorporating ‘modernist’ elements into their music, to a lengthy passage in which he decries the introduction of the hi-hat as signalling the death of all legitimate drumming, his insistence that the New Orleans gospel be observed at all times is stubborn to the point of obsession. God only knows what he must’ve thought when Bird and Miles started to make the scene just as he was bowing out, but thankfully his views on the matter remain unrecorded here, and such grumpery is easy to put aside once you get into the swing of his prose, with his account of the epiphany he experienced leading his prison marching band across an open-field, literally walking over the graves of prisoners they’d helped bury, is simply one of the most moving accounts of the power of music ever set on paper.

When the New York Herald Tribune deemed this a “WALLOPING HUMAN DOCUMENT” is capital letters, they weren’t pissing around.

Labels: books, jazz, Mezz Mezzrow

Five Music Biogs Actually Worth Reading:
Introduction.

This is a post I’ve been meaning to get around to writing for a long time, and, as there’s nothing particularly pressing going on here at the moment beyond lounging around in the newly-stifling heat playing Peaking Lights and Miles Davis records again and again, now seems as good a time as any.

So: music books! I read fucking loads of them, I’m afraid. A more artistically benighted corner of the publishing industry you’d be hard-pressed to find (well, I guess they’ve at least got one up on cookbooks or exercise books or something), but nonetheless, I’ll plough through just about any of ‘em. I guess that for me music books fulfil the same function that other readers assign to fantasy sagas or police procedural crime books or whatever: low effort, time-filling comfort reading. Motor through the words, harvest the relevant info and anecdotes, stick it on the shelf.

Some of them are better than others of course – at least some journalists and rock-writers have risen to the challenge of the full length book over the years with fine results, and well-researched biogs telling the genuinely incredible, culturally resonant stories of bands like, say, The Beach Boys or The 13th Floor Elevators, are deserving of a place on anyone’s bookshelves. By and large though, music books are pretty weak tea from any kind of literary POV.

Which makes it all the more thrilling when, occasionally, you happen to stumble across a certain, specific kind of music book which is little short of flat-out genius.

These books tend to be late-career autobiographies written by successful/iconic musicians who would almost certainly have never written a sentence intended for publication in their lives, had not their musical career given them a financially viable excuse to do so.

I don’t want to try to impose a half-baked, catch-all term upon these books, but they’re a very specific, almost accidental thing – less like bland, ‘people and places’ industry memoirs, and more like what might happen if you started dragging troubled, inspired people of one kind or another off the street, forcing them to write about their lives, and waiting until you struck gold.

Over the next week or two, I’m going to attempt to do a series of short posts running down my five favourite examples of this particular, nameless literary sub-genre. I hope you’ll enjoy the results, and if I succeed in drawing some attention to these volumes then, well.. good.

Labels: books

Brendan Mullen, The Masque and LA Punk ‘77

A few weeks ago, I happened to pop into that shop on Charing Cross Road that sells fancy art books for knock-down prices, and was delighted to find a copy of Live at the Masque: Nightmare on Punk Alley, a huge hardback tome showcasing photographs and ephemera from the heyday of seminal LA punk club The Masque circa ’77-’79 that’s been on my xmas list since I learned of it, for about one third of the RRP.

Thus, it can now claim the honour of being the one fancy hardback photograph book that I own. And well worth owning it is too. For all of its legendary baggage, LA punk has kept a surprisingly low profile within popular culture, and as such practically every page of the book is dynamite from both an informational and aesthetic point of view, an absolute motherlode for anyone who shares an interest in the history of punk, rock n’ roll and American youth culture.

It wasn’t until this week however that I learned that Brendan Mullen, founder and manager of The Masque who edited and provided the text for the book, died of a heart attack earlier this month at the age of sixty.

I’d been vaguely meaning to do a blogpost based on the book, with some scanned pictures and mp3s etc, but in tribute to Mullen I thought I’d move that intention way up my priority list for a combined deathblog/photos/music tribute post.


By all accounts Mullen was far, far more than just a club manager – he was an instigator of, participant in and spokesperson for the punk scene, and The Masque stands out as the definitive early example of a DIY “by the fans, for the fans” music venue/rehearsal room/community space of the kind that’s become such a vital part of the American music scene in recent years (far less so in the UK sadly, but thems the breaks), and Mullen, rather than some impresario looking to turn a quick buck, was a late-twenties punk fan himself at the time – just one with the drive and know-how to find a space and make it happen.

Subsequently, he has authored two books on LA punk, We Got The Neutron Bomb (about the scene in general) and Lexicon Devil (about The Germs), both of which are sure to be great reads, if the smart and charismatic prose he contributed to the photo book is any indication.


One of the things I’ve found most remarkable about reading/looking at “Live at the Masque” is the drastically different picture of the time/place it paints to my other major source of LA punk documentation, Penelope Spheeris’ film “The Decline of Western Civilisation” (which you can watch in a series of handy chunks on Youtube, beginning here).

Whilst “Decline..” (which opens with an interview with Mullen) is an amazing and exhilarating documentary, capturing a cultural milieu that might otherwise have come and gone leaving little in the way of visual evidence, I’ve always been irked by the feeling that Spheeris was chasing controversy when putting it together, deliberately choosing the most violent concert footage, interviewing the most troubled/fucked up fans and musicians etc…. not to mention ending the film with an absolutely torturous sequence on the aptly named Fear, whose ugly, audience-baiting jibes and homophobic/sexist bullying closes proceedings on a colossal downer – enough to put the casual viewer off investigating punk rock for life. In short, I get the impression that Spheeris came up with her apocalyptic concept first and set about assembling footage to justify it.

“Live At The Masque” manages to tell a completely different story, presenting evidence of a far more positive and cohesive underground community. The self-made mythology of ‘70s punk may centre on tales of drugs, squalor, nihilism and bodily abuse, but the kids in the crowd (and in the bands) here just look happy and friendly and excitable, each trying to outdo each other with their kick-ass NY/London influenced sartorial style. Flyers, newsletters and notes pinned to the doors are funny and self-deprecating to a fault, full of scene in-jokes, breathless announcements of which bands “might be playing, if they can get it together”, and hand-written summaries of local and international ‘punk news’. Even the graffiti that covers every surface is largely pretty good natured.


The negative vibes chronicled by Spheeris are hard to find anywhere in these photos, and even the self-destructive ‘no future’ ethos that goes hand-in-hand with early punk is undermined by the presence on the scene of cats like Greg Shaw, Kristine McKenna, John Doe, Exene Cervenka and Mullen himself, all providing the kids with serviceable models for how to grow up punk without fading away or selling out. Photos of some of the lesser known bands on the scene reveal a healthy compliment of women and non-whites taking a creative role in proceedings, and, in short, it’s difficult to flick through the book without feeling a pang of regret that you weren’t there to take part in such an awesome explosion of teenage creativity and self-definition.

In fairness, “Decline..” was filmed a couple of years after the heyday of The Masque, when the action seemed to have shifted to bigger, more barn-like venues with cynical managers and security guards, and when the native suburban hardcore pioneered by Black Flag and The Circlejerks was in the ascendant, as opposed to the more urban, relatively arty Pistols/Heartbreakers influenced combos that characterized the Masque scene. But still, the discrepancy between the book and the film is startling. As usual with these things, I guess the truth probably lies somewhere between the two.



Obviously the more artistically striking bands associated with The Masque – Screamers, Germs, X, Flesh Eaters, Dickies, The Dils and the much-underrated Bags – are the stuff of legend, and both The Weirdos, Plugz and my favourite ever Californian punks The Zeros (who played a coupla times) have achieved cult immortality by infusing their racket with a razor-sharp pop sensibility. Late period scene upstarts like The Go Gos and Holly & The Italians may have gone on to varying degree of Hollywood New Wave fame, and the book also has great pictures of awesome out-of-town headliners like Crime, The Cramps, Dead Boys, Avengers etc., but much of the fun of flicking through “Live At The Masque” comes from checking out the legions of less distinguished and/or completely forgotten groups.

The Skulls, Controllers, Flyboys, Backstage Pass, The Eyes, Simpletones, The LA Shakers, Deadbeats, Alleycats, Mutants, Schizos, F-Word, The Nuns…? Oh, if only these photos came with in-built sound.




So without further ado, here’s some choice mp3s, some from the “Live at the Masque ‘77” benefit LP, some from elsewhere, presented in tribute to Brenden Mullen, who saw these people and this culture sprouting up from nowhere around him, and did what it took to put the pieces together.

The Weirdos – Life of Crime
The Zeros – Cosmetic Couple

The Bags – Violent Girl (live)
The Germs – Let’s Pretend (live)

X- Los Angeles
Screamers - In a Better World

Labels: books, deathblog, Germs, LA, photos, punk, punk rock, Screamers, The Bags, The Zeros, Weirdos, X

MASTER OF REALITY
A book review / extract.

“I don’t know what’s happening
My head’s all torn inside
People say I’m heavy
They don’t know what I hide”

- Black Sabbath, ‘Cornucopia’

I.

Let’s begin with what (appropriately enough, given the lapsed Catholic foundation of the band’s work) amounts to a confession: I can *really relate* to Black Sabbath songs. I mean, when I put on ‘Master Of Reality’ or ‘Volume 4’ (my personal favourite), I don’t think to myself “wow, this is some awesome, imaginative heavy metal with crazy OTT lyrics”, I think “fuck yeah, they’ve NAILED IT”.

What ‘it’ is, I’m not sure – the apocalyptic, melodramatic feeling in the back of the mind of every weirdo adolescent male perhaps? – but it’s something ‘Sabbath manage to communicate through the very bones of their music, whether they’re singing about religion, deep space or some weird robot stomping people in boots of lead. And, as a grown up with a job and a certain amount of education and a fairly sedate existence, I feel like I shouldn’t really be going so far as to share ‘it’ with them, even as I, like all people of taste, enjoy their incredible music. ‘It’ is not there for me. I should be getting my jollies listening to some dreary alt-country loser crafting thoughtful songs expressing mature concerns, or something.

Well, maybe it’s just another obvious signpost of emotional immaturity, but fuck that. At the end of a crappy, uninspiring day as I trundle on toward my late ‘20s, it’s still ‘Sabbath who’ve got my number.

Strangely, I never got into Black Sabbath when I actually WAS a confused, miserable teenager. I didn’t really discover them until I was nineteen or twenty and beginning to take my by then well-established musical tastes on a forced march back through the ‘60s and ‘70s in order to break away from punk and indie-rock and take in the near endless catalogue of earlier wild sounds awaiting appreciation.

It’s probably just as well I waited actually. As a thirteen year old, idly picking over the bones of grunge and hair metal in search of traces of GNARLY LYRICS and BIG RIFFS, I’m sure one listen to Iron Man would have killed me – I mean, flat out heart-attack-on-the-spot dead.

And a few years after that of course, it was The Ramones rather than Sabbath – and by extension, punk rather than metal – that anchored my darkest teenage years. Thinking about it, the two bands actually have a LOT in common. They definitely provide each other’s analogues in their respective genres, both in terms of making simple, powerful, timeless music, but also by means of helping to create a unifying identity and instant aural comfort zone for disaffected, suburban kids across the decades and across the globe.

The similarity even extends to the roles and personalities of the bands’ members. Think about it: a really strange looking singer who "can’t sing" and has no conventional stage charisma, but who is nonetheless clearly THE MOST AWESOME GUY IN THE WORLD in the eyes of fans; a taciturn, workman-like guitarist with a style so singularly brutish and uncompromising that it went on to define the entire future of heavy music, leaving a rainbow of entirely new sub-genres in its wake; an eccentric, wildman bass player with a killer groove who wrote loads of the lyrics….. I guess the similarity breaks down when we get to the drummers though, in that Bill Ward’s jazz-inflected swing (a vital ingredient that stops ‘Sabbath from ever slipping into the kind of trudging heavy blues sludge that idiots and detractors often deride them as) doesn’t really bear much comparison to Tommy & Marky’s relentless 4/4 perfection…

…but I’m getting off the point here. What was the point again? – Oh yeah…

Black Sabbath rule. That was it. To anyone who is still apt to consider them foremost as a corny millionaire heavy metal band rather than as authentic avatars of youthful defiance, watch this video of them performing ‘Paranoid’ on Belgium TV in the first flush of their fame. The sheer, singleminded *otherness* of the band hits me every time. It’s a wonder the British establishment let these guys *walk the streets* in 1970, let alone ok’d them for international TV appearances. The look in Ozzy’s eyes alone must have been enough to see elderly uncles crashing to the ground before they could choke out “god help us if there’s a war”. But how many frustrated teenagers must seen this and witnessed their own position in the world reflected straight back at them for the first time?



II.

I’ve always kept the 33 1/3 series of books at a distance. The concept behind them has always seemed a thinly veiled excuse for writers and readers alike to indulge in the worst kind of reverential music geek blather. Not that there’s anything wrong with that once in a while, but trust me, I really, really, really don’t need another excuse to spend yet more of my time consuming trivial facts and observations regarding the genius of ‘Village Green Preservation Society’ or ‘Exile On Main Street’ or whatever.

But then, it seems the editors of the series have been doing some good work recently – getting some good writers in, commissioning some daring (by the conservative standards of music book publishing anyway) pieces of writing on some interesting records.

Chief among these for me, needless to say, is John Darnielle’s book on Black Sabbath’s ‘Master Of Reality’.



Wisely, Darnielle has realised that a wry re-evaluation of the merits of Black Sabbath by a learned, grown up music critic would, in a very profound sense, be missing the point.

Instead, he has decided the best course of action is to take us straight into the mind of one of the people Black Sabbath were REALLY speaking to, someone for whom their music – forever veiled in a distant layer of irony for so many of our culturally complacent indie brethren – meant fucking everything.

So, the book introduces us to Roger. It’s 1985, it’s California, he’s fifteen years old, and his parents have just had him forcibly committed to a secure adolescent psychiatric unit. Roger has been denied access to his walkman and his tapes, and, in a series of increasingly lengthy journal entries directed at his uncaring counsellor, he begins to try to explain, step by step, why he needs them back, beginning with his favourite, ‘Master Of Reality’.

In ditching rock-write expectations entirely and turning in a work of straight-up fiction, Darnielle has succeeded not only in telling us more about the cultural importance of the record than a more conventional treatment ever could, but also in producing one of the most emotionally effective pieces of writing I’ve read in recent years.

Drawing heavily on both Darnielle’s empathy for the fate of underdogs, outsiders and misfit teenagers, as extensively chronicled in his songwriting for The Mountain Goats, and also his own experiences working as a psychiatric nurse, the book’s narrative rings true as a bell, cutting straight to the heart of precisely how much music can mean to people as they’re growing up, of how deep the strange imagery, fantastical words and overpowering sound of rock n’ roll can penetrate our being, of how much we can build ourselves around it, finding strength amid the most shattered and dismal wreckage.

Recalling, and indeed standing alongside, Dennis Hopper’s masterpiece Out Of The Blue as an exploration of those issues, it is, needless to say, essential reading.

Oh, and it’s pretty funny in places too, and tells you loads of stuff about Black Sabbath and ‘Master Of Reality’, so don’t be scared.

III.

Rather than explaining further, I am instead going to spend the rest of this post quoting a couple of extracts from the book. I hope nobody minds. (My email is at the top of the page if you do.) I think they help to express the essence of ‘Sabbath far better than I ever could.

In entries dated October 24th and 25th, Roger tries to get to grips with the appeal of ‘Sweet Leaf’;

To be honest I don’t even know why ‘Sweet Leaf’ is on the album because it does not really belong. Soon when I talk about the other songs on the album, if you go back to ‘Sweet Leaf’, you will have to agree. On the album Paranoid or even on that first album all the songs seem to go together, all the things Ozzy is singing about are like pieces of the same puzzle. But ‘Sweet Leaf’ is just this song about how Ozzy really likes weed. My theory is, there’s no way they could keep the guitar riff hidden from the world, so Tony Iommi wrote it and gave it to Ozzy, and Ozzy was maybe high that day so he wrote about what was going on in his mind and the whole band was like “That’s what it is then.” If I was Ozzy I think I would have wrote the words differently and maybe made a song about living naked in a cave or being afraid that the house is haunted. But I am not Ozzy so I have to respect his decision!

[…]

But this is the thing about you guys and music here. You think that all we are doing when we listen to our music is either looking at the words like they were a bible for us, or looking at pictures of the singers like they were Jesus. It is not like that at all. When you guys talk like that, that is how we know that you are stupid and growing old has made you crazy. Because: music is like a whole world, and there are words and pictures and sounds and textures and smells probably, OK I didn’t actually mean that I just got carried away. Albums do have a special smell though. Old ones smell different from new ones. Anyway you gotta know what I mean about this! It’s like, when you sing “Row row row your boat,” do you really only focus on the boat and the rowing it? And think “Wow this is a song about some guys rowing a boat, fucken awesome!” No of course not. Only if you are totally weird do you think like that. When you are singing, you hear the song, the part that is more than the words, and is also the feeling of just the notes in the air, especially if you are singing it in a round with a bunch of other people. We used to do that in my Kindergarten. You hear a mood which is way higher (not “high” like that, come on) than the words, it is sort of always floating above the words. And that is why bands like The Beatles can be popular everywhere, even where people do not speak English, where to them The Beatles probably sound like trained monkeys trying to talk.

Well OK now that you got that check it out. In “Sweet Leaf,” if you can’t hear the mood that just the guitar and the bass and the drums make without anything to do with weed, you are prejudiced or you are not listening. Imagine that you are a man from space! And you don’t speak English and you never heard of weed, and you landed in California and the first person you met up with took you to his house and said “Hey check out this band.” And then he played you “Sweet Leaf.” In my opinion, the man from space would hear that song, just the crunchy guitar sound and those bass notes, Geezer Butler is the best bassist it sounds like his strings are made of lime jello salad, and he would start banging his head! Because the riff on “Sweet Leaf,” that is something anybody can understand. ANYBODY. It doesn’t really have anything to do with what Ozzy is singing about. The lyrics, that is just what Ozzy thinks of when he feels this groove. But it doesn’t have to mean that to everybody, and it means more no matter what, because it’s like a physical thing. So when I told you yesterday, that I don’t know how “Sweet Leaf” fits on Master of Reality, I think now I understand. It’s there because the mood is right, even if the words are weird. And the mood comes first. This whole album is just about that mood. That feeling.

Mp3> Black Sabbath – Sweet Leaf

IV.

The second half of Darnielle’s book rejoins Roger ten years later, as he tries to come to terms with his years of unnecessary incarceration and, rediscovering his old Black Sabbath tapes, tries to keep his head above water by tracking down his old counsellor’s new address and continuing his unfinished exegesis;

Pretty soon we learn that all the people we’re supposed to look to for guidance think we’re stupid, or dangerous, or “confused,” which is really insulting. And at that point we’re all out of role models, because any other possible role models are out there in the real world, which we can only visit when we get a daypass. The people we see every day seem to have been made from different parts.

And so we look up to Black Sabbath – to what we remember of them, in my case. Even after we’ve grown up, we do. Always. Because looking at Black Sabbath – at their album covers, at their handmade costumes, at their lyrics sheets, at the dumb faces they make in their videos now – we can see people like us. It’s nice. I don’t do sports, but with Ozzy I feel like I can understand the concept of the home team crowd. It’s like, I know that dude. That’s the guy that used to break into people’s houses. Now he’s making money and the whole block is safe. Good for him. Maybe every other band in the world has more brains and deeper meaning, but only Black Sabbath sounds exactly like what my friends and I might have done if we’d had the equipment.

Which, by the way, is the actual story of how Black Sabbath got started, although I can hardly stand to think about it now, because it’s dangerous to think about how things might have been different. Still. When Ozzy Osbourne was a teenager, he lived in Birmingham, England. When I was in treatment, I used to try to imagine Birmingham, but all I knew about England was the Queen and Buckingham Palace guards, really. And Shakespeare. Birmingham isn’t like that, I found out later. It’s a town that manufactured a lot of guns in the nineteenth century, and then tyres in the twentieth, and then it got the crap bombed out of it during the second world war. Ozzy Osbourne was born in the late ‘40s, so he probably grew up looking at a lot of bomb craters. I grew up in Southern California, so what I grew up looking at was a lot of strip malls. Same basic idea. The only difference is that my neighbourhood looked like it was waiting to get bombed instead of recovering from the bombing.

[…]

If Ozzy had come from California he would have been sent to treatment, and that would have been the end of that. Instead his dad bought him a P.A. system to keep him out of trouble, and he started forming bands: Rare Breed; The Polka Tulk Blues Company; Earth. Different guys who were also losers started to join up, and then they became Black Sabbath. And instead of trying to make important records that made a big statement, the band decided to stay exactly the same as they were when they’d just been angry young people getting hammered in bars.

This makes them role models. Real ones. Not unreachable dicks like Bon Jovi, who you know got into music with a business plan, and had a bank account under the band’s name before they played their first show. And not like Poison or any of those other bands they have now. When you listen to early Black Sabbath you know the main difference between them & you is that somebody bought them guitars and microphones. They’re not smarter than you; they’re not deeper than you; they’re a fuck of a lot richer than you, but other than that it’s like listening to the inside of your own mind. So when they write songs, they sing about wizards. And witches. And robots. When they try to write a love song, it always ends up being about getting rejected before anything really got started. And they sing about war too, like everyone else who’s making records at that time, but they don’t really have anything special to say about it, except that it sucks. They say they figure things would probably be better if we did not have wars. And they say how the world’s going to end, but we should all be friends.

By the time they make Master of Reality, they’re pretty famous, but anyone who says he can hear a difference between the Ozzy who wrote the song “Black Sabbath”, and the Ozzy who sings “Children Of The Grave” is a liar. It’s the same guy. Same dumb poor kid from a bombed out town in the middle of nowhere. That’s why Black Sabbath are special. They aren’t rags to riches. They’re just rags. All they have is themselves, and that’s turned out to be enough. For them.

Mp3>Black Sabbath – Into the Void

V.

Buy 33 1/3: Master of Reality from Amazon.

Read more stuff by John Darnielle at Last Plane To Jakarta.

Keep up to date with the rest of the 33 1/3 series (wow, check out that Alex Chilton interview stuff from the ‘Radio City’ book!).

Listen to Black Sabbath.

Labels: Black Sabbath, books, John Darnielle, METAL

HOW TO RELAX WITH YOUR VAMPIRE FRIENDS AT PARTIES

I’m currently reading Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel “I Am Legend”. You know, it’s the one about an everyday joe (read as “lantern-jawed survivalist tough guy”) who is the last surviving man on earth after all the other people have rather unhappily turned into vampires. So by day he drives around an eerie, abandoned LA scavenging for useful stuff, and by night he hunkers down in his heavily fortified suburban homestead, fighting the unstoppable armies of the undead. It’s pretty good post-apocalyptic fun, as you might expect, though nothing earth-shattering.

The most interesting bits are the occasional moments where our protagonist appears to doubt the reality of his situation, perceiving for a second that he is actually playing a role in some pulpy, not-entirely-sensible fiction;

“Driving slowly to Sears, he tried to forget by wondering why it was only wooden stakes that should work.
He frowned as he drove along the empty boulevard, the only sound the muted growling of the motor of his car. It seems fantastic that it had taken him five months to start wondering about it.
Which brought another question to mind. How was it that he always managed to hit the heart? It had to be the heart; Dr. Busch had said so. Yet he, Neville, had no anatomical knowledge.
His brow furrowed. It irritated him that he should have gone through this hideous process so long without stopping once to question it.
[….]
Robert Neville compressed his lips suddenly. Forget it, he told himself; you’re not ready yet. The time would come when he’d take a crack at it, detail for detail, but the time wasn’t now. There were enough things to worry about now.

After lunch, he went from house to house and used up all his stakes. He had forty seven stakes.”

Maybe it’s a sign of how far “I Am Legend”s somewhat… blunt… writing style differs from the rather more ‘proper’ literature I’ve been reading in recent years that that last paragraph made me laugh so hard on the train home from work I attracted funny looks from fellow passengers. “He had forty seven stakes” – genius!

Also of note in the book is that classic motif of sci-fi / horror fiction… barely concealed real world anguish masquerading as metaphorical monster-threat! Take for example this little rumination from thinkin’ man Robert Neville;

“Really now, search your soul – is the vampire so bad?
All he does is drink blood. Why, then, this unkind prejudice? Why cannot the vampire live where he chooses? Why must he seek out hiding places where none can find him out? Why do you wish him destroyed? Ah, see, you have turned the poor guileless innocent into a hunted animal. He has no means of support, no measures for proper education, he has not the voting franchise. No wonder he is compelled to seek out a predatory nocturnal existence.
Robert Neville grunted a surly grunt. Sure, sure, he thought, but would you let your sister marry one?
He shrugged. You got me there, buddy, you got me there.”

Nervous, pre-Civil Rights Movement laughter all round. All in good fun until a few pages later when Neville is again feeling the heat of the vampire onslaught;

“He sank down on the couch and sat there, shaking his head slowly. It was no use; they’d beaten him! The black bastards had beaten him!”

Oh dear.

Linguistic subtlety isn’t Richard Matheson’s strong suit, that’s for sure.

Some interesting choices of words here, as a drunken and desperate Neville tries to ignore the lures of the vampire ladies outside his door;

“The women, the lustful, blood-thirsty, naked, wanton women flaunting their hot bodies at him! No, not hot.
A shuddering whine wrenched up through his chest and throat. Goddamn them, what were they waiting for? Did they think he was going to come out and hand himself over?
Maybe I am, maybe I am. He actually found himself jerking off the crossbar from the door. Coming, girls, I’m coming!”

Blimey.

I should point out that I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about Richard Matheson’s personality and lifestyle, and as such, he could well have been a cool cat testing the limits of what his editor would let him get away with and poking fun at the hang-ups of uptight skiffy fans. But it’s also easy to picture him sitting alone at home in Compton back in 1954, banging out his vampire sci-fi masterwork, grinding his teeth in sexual frustration and stealing frightened glances at the coloured folks moving in next door. Possibly pausing to “grunt a surly grunt”.

We shouldn’t mock though. Such raving neuroses and purple prose are of course the very bedrock of macabre fiction, as aptly demonstrated by the work of the master himself, H.P. Lovecraft. It is often my contention when discussing such things that effective horror stories/movies/music are rarely produced by reasonable, happy people, and despite it’s crude prose style, “I Am Legend” certainly succeeds as a ripping good yarn, and one which eventually spends far more time examining the psychosis, loneliness and alcoholism of it’s protagonist in a relentlessly hard-boiled pre-Bukowski/Selby Jr fashion than it does on hair-raising vampire shenanigans.

As you may be aware, the book was used very loosely as the basis for the 1971 movie “The Omega Man”, which ditched the vampires and instead concentrated on Charlton Heston wondering around picking fights with some radioactive mutants, or something. Nice one Hollywood. It has also come to my attention that a new adaptation of the book, using the original title, is due for release next year, starring…. Will Smith. Well fancy that.

Labels: books, I Am Legend, Richard Matheson