John and Paul

                                                            

Generations of those obsessed with the minds of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, both during their time together as the super-charged songwriting duo in the Beatles and afterward, as solo artists, rivals, and “frenemies,” to use an ugly coinage. I know I did during the initial stages of music fandom, obsessing over the psychic lives of John and Paul and any other young music maker one thought elevated rock ‘n’ roll to what many considered High Art. Whether the radio was then populated with melodic masterpieces, an audio art gallery of a sort, is a different discussion. Yet the intense interest in Lennon and McCartney’s relationship continues to intrigue millions, across generations old and new, well into the 21st century.

It’s been estimated that 4,000 books about the Beatles have been written, and other informed sources place the numbers higher—in the hundreds of thousands. In brief, a staggering amount of research, interpretations, analyses, and biographies has been dedicated to scrutinizing every aspect of the Beatles and their music—though as the decades wore on and publications continued to appear, little new was revealed. A confession here: I’ve read about 20 tomes dedicated to the quartet in the half-century since their debut, and the later books seemed like reshufflings of old facts in the timelines, with an intellectual tone that was dry and flat recycling of stale bromides.

Could a rock writer reinvigorate interest in how the Lennon-McCartney songbook came to be? Intriguingly, significant notice is given a recent book, John and Paul: A Love Story Told in Songs, a beguiling history of the growing friendship and collaborative partnership between the titular songwriters, written with verve by non-music writer Ian Leslie. Leslie has written about psychology, culture, technology, and business for The New Statesman, The Economist, The Guardian, and Financial Times, and has authored three previous books on human behavior. His background in psychology combined with intimate and clear prose gives Leslie an edge over the vast array of books on the same subject. The author is effectively liberated from the tangled babble that often made considering the Beatles’ legacy more laborious than it should have been.

While the book doesn’t provide current information or undisclosed facts, Leslie carefully curates a wealth of previous works by other authors, establishing significant dates of meetings, songs, consequential events, and ties these moments to the composition and themes of the Lennon-McCartney oeuvre. John and Paul begins with their first meeting in Liverpool in 1957, bonding over their shared experience of absent mothers—John raised by his maternal aunt Mimi Smith and McCartney losing his mother at age 14—and their mutual love of American rock ‘n’ roll. Both fledgling musicians, the pair initially played covers of other artists’ songs. As their relationship deepened, they began writing songs together, composing “eyeball-to-eyeball,” as described in the book.

In a splendid touch, each chapter of the book is named after a relevant Beatles song, offering poetic commentary on the moments described while reinforcing the central subject: the love story between John and Paul that Leslie’s subtitle announces. Over time, Lennon and McCartney became a constant presence in each other’s lives, growing so comfortable with one another that the songs they wrote became increasingly personal—direct addresses of affection between them. Lennon and McCartney believed the bond would last forever, and in a rush of soulmanship and solidarity agreed to split authorship on all of their songs, regardless of individual contribution. Leslie skillfully weaves facts and interpretations throughout the book, providing the background to the songs while succinctly profiling the artists as they evolved as writers, musicians, and individuals who needed each other to feel whole. Though he doesn’t assert this directly, it might be seen that their agreement to share songwriting credit, regardless of contribution, was akin to a wedding vow. Lennon and McCartney understood each other in ways one might liken to the intimacy between a married couple.

To be clear, Leslie finds no evidence that Lennon and McCartney had a sexual relationship, though he does report a statement from Yoko Ono that John thought about having a physical relationship. However, he maintains that their friendship was a romance of the platonic sort, where the intimacy derived from shared experiences and depths of feeling was dynamic and often volatile.

Leslie builds his case persuasively while going through the documented facts of Beatle songs, interpreting, suggesting, hinting (at times) what influenced the style, and tone of the songs the partnership created, and he does a delicate examination about how the two regarded sweet and bitter facts of their love for each other, As I read further, I kept thinking about Montaigne’s 1580 essay On Friendship, where he argues that a friend is a true and unwavering companion, that it is a unique bond, and that the true bond was nearly exclusive between two men. He considered having multiple friends diluted the quality of the bond and insisted that such a bond was a reserved for males alone, as the souls of women were too weak to main the strength to maintain the friendship bond he described. Well, yes, but remember this was published in 1558, but one can take the basic definition of friendship and apply it to the densely populated dynamics of John and Paul’s lives together and apart.

The bond lasted, but not in ways neither John or Paul expected, as McCartney met Lisa Eastman and Lennon became enamored of artist Yoko Ono. In concise detail as to what happened, what was said and the effects on the Beatles as a whole, Leslie paints a picture of the partners feeling threatened, of being “replaced” as the principal focus of the other. Tension arose with the death of their first manager Brian Epstein, controversy within the group about Paul’s insistence that Alan Klein take over the money and business affairs of the Beatles as a going concern, the wild and willy formation of Apple, a company that would be a record label, an electronics firm, a film studio with nary an idea of how to go about setting up a corporation—much of what was a utopian vision of how Apple and all the enterprises it would sponsor collapsed under the weight of the chaos and lack of direction concerning business matters. Leslie moves through the breakup the Beatles, a result of the members growing apart in what they wanted to engage in and in musical ideas and also chronicles the angry attacks, snide remarks, attack songs by Lennon—the louder, angrier, and more insecure of the two—aimed toward McCartney while Paul remained mostly silent. Leslie talks about the tragedy of John Lennon’s assassination outside the Dakota Apartments in New York City by Mark David Chapman. The reader is aware of Lennon’s sad demise, but in addition to that part of the Beatles story there are events that make you optimistic, that maybe there is actually another way this could have ended. The book hints toward reconciliation, with McCartney showing up at Lennon’s apartment with a guitar, long phone calls, Lennon saying nice things about McCartney’s work as a solo artist, and recalling the joy he had as Paul’s collaborator. The hard facts of what was about to happen remind us of the shock. Soon after the murder, McCartney was swarmed by reporters wanting to get a response. The usually responsive McCartney, exhausted and shocked, could only manage a meager answer, “It’s a drag, isn’t it?”

The price of global celebrity is that millions think they know you better than you know yourself and have harsh standards about how the famous should respond to events and what they should say. Paul McCartney was raked over the coals for a cold, impersonal response and for not showing perceptible emotion. It’s obvious the reporters want to see a melt down to provide for better copy, but McCartney’s grief was real and profound, Leslie points out, and it took a while for the songwriter to offer a fitting tribute to his longtime friend.

Obvious, through the 426 pages, is that the bond between Lennon and McCartney held in the best of times when their friendship was ecstatic and creative, two young men discovering world together and feeling the exhilaration of pushing each other to take greater musical risks; the bond was there when they parted ways and became involved in other ventures. No matter how great the music of either John or Paul was in their solo albums, it was always the case that both were conspicuous by their absence in each other’s live shows. You always wondered what it would be like they were still working together, daring each other to do better. Unexpectedly, Ian Leslie cites Montaigne on page 388, the end of the drama of John and Paul. The writer cites Montaigne’s recollection of his friendship with writer and jurist Etienne de Boetie. At first meeting, Montaigne writes:

We sought each other before we met…from report we had each heard of the other…At our first meeting …we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together, that from that moment on nothing could be as close as we were to one another. 

This is a fine and succinct quote in that it frames Leslie’s nuanced speculation on the psychic connection between the songwriters. It serves to reveal to the world that the songs Lennon and McCartney were more than mostly successful bits of cleverness, an eclecticism for its own sake, but rather that their songs were personal expression, some of them no less than the existential surrealism of Dylan, the poignant Cheeverisms of Paul Simon, or the elegant confessions of Joni Mitchell. John and Paul emerge from these pages magnificently gifted and human, all too human. It’s the history of the Beatles through the inner of a deep relationship that had its magic moments and confounding depths. A romance, in other words, beautifully detailed in an enjoyable and compulsive read.

(Originally printed in the San Diego Troubadour, used with kind permission)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG by Bob Dylan: Book Review

Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, an ironic designation if only because Dylan wasn’t a man of books, but rather a songwriter. The gist of the argument for the musician being awarded the prize was that his lyrics, in a brief span of time, evolved from clever imitations of the folk and blues artists he admired and imitated to become a rich libretto for his age. Surrealist nightmares, black humor, rhapsodic tone poems, acute observations of ingrained varieties of bad faith revealed in personal lives and in the political sphere, songs like “Like a Rolling Stone,” “I Want You,” and “Positively 4th Street” brought a new, serious poetry to the jukebox, leading the way for a generation of other songwriters. It was a common sight in nearly any graduate student’s apartment that Dylan discs like Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde cozily nestled next to the typically dog-eared paperbacks of Pound’s Cantos, One Dimensional Man or a coffee table book about Max Ernst or Diane Arbus.

As the songwriter’s lyrics became darker, more mystical, expressively abstract, the deeper the appreciation of the baffling brilliance of his work became—and soon enough the serious vanguard of modern American poetry—Ginsberg, McClure et al., counted the man from Hibbing as one of their own, a sage who could see beyond the flat appearance of the material world and provide glimpses of what’s behind the veil. Dylan née Zimmerman had a run of genius, the length of which wholly depended on how dedicated one is to the continuity of the songwriter’s brilliance. My interest is more about his earlier career, 1962 (Bob Dylan) through 1969 (Nashville Skyline). In my quizzical estimation, his work has been inconsistent since that time, occasionally animated with outbreaks of energy and verbal intensity (Blood on the Tracks). But Dylan zealots are a bright and well-read part of the listening population, and those who found worth, insight, and inspiration from albums from Street Legal or Empire Burlesque (two random selections from the years I call “the Great In-Between”) defend the later work with energy, solid thinking, and good writing. That’s the Dylan whose work and reputation provokes an alarming amount of cogitation. 

An endless variety of books have been published about Dylan and his songwriting in the six decades since the release of his first album, some purely for pop music fans, others gossipy, and many that are a kind of interpretative analysis that approach the inscrutability of the maestro’s best stanzas. But Dylan, again, is a songwriter, not a writer of books in the main. His catalog of songs abounds with much of the most original, penetrating, and innovative lyrics of the 20th century, and many achieve the status of High Art, genuine and compelling poetry. “Visions of Johanna,” “Desolation Row,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Memphis Blues Again.” “Spanish Harlem Incident,” and the full version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” reveal a man in love with the varieties of idioms available to him; he loved language enough to ignore the formalities in front of him and merge the styles he loved in the simple melodies he often borrowed from others. He could rhyme, and his couplets were adroit and left you saying “oh, wow” as he finished each verse. This virtuosity didn’t carry over to books, as the pair he’s written up to now wind up head scratchers at best.

Tarantula, an experimental prose poetry collection Dylan wrote between 1965 and 1966, wasn’t intended for publication, but its existence became an underground legend, and bootleg editions began to circulate. Tarantula was finally printed in 1971. The book wasn’t a coherent thesis but rather reflected Dylan’s method and influences, which characterized his most baroque and lyrics, similar in style to the “cut up” technique fashioned by William Burroughs in his novels Naked Lunch and The Wild Boys: a major transgression against grammar and punctuation and notions of continuity, rough-hewn character sketches, in jokes, odd conflations of vernaculars that constitute Dylan’s most hallucinogenic writing. It remains a head scratcher even for the most faithful of his flock, although there are some rather striking and evocative tributes to a woman named Aretha, most likely Aretha Franklin. This lane-changing collection of idiomatic invention and deconstruction is, if nothing else, an odd and sometimes exhilarating landmark in on the Dylan bookshelf.

Dylan’s next book Chronicles Volume One, published in 2004, is said to have started as the author’s attempts to write liner notes for his then-forthcoming reissues of Bob Dylan, New Morning, and Oh Mercy. The project grew larger and became what is described as part one of a three-part memoir. While fascinating to read the usually opaque lyricist convene in readable prose, his recollections are limited to some worthy remarks about the making of his first album and then protracted memories of the relatively obscure New Morning and Oh Mercy. Chronicles spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list and was generally well reviewed, though there was disappointment in the matters he chose to talk about and not discuss. Worse, there were rumblings that Dylan had fabricated much of what he did bother to disclose. Clinton Heylin, a thorough Dylan biographer, who has published eight books on the singer in the last 30 years, has been quoted as saying that while he enjoyed reading Dylan’s book as a work of imaginative literature but that “… almost everything in the Oh Mercy section of Chronicles is a work of fiction…”

So, we arrive at Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. It’s a handsome, oversized tome that has Dylan bringing us a stream of brief essays that discuss an odd, seemingly random set of 66 songs that were popular throughout American history. As expected, the songs are a confounding selection of tunes, as he opts not to opine or analyze the landmark music of the last century or so but instead goes for a good many tunes that are painfully obscure and not necessarily worth dwelling on at length. From 2006 to 2009, the singer had Theme Time Radio Hour, a weekly, one hour satellite podcast where each program’s playlist centered around a theme instead of a specific genre. The song choices were unusual in large part—the odd, the quirky, the gorgeous, and the amazingly bucolic varieties of American music played to whatever the mood of the week was, the music on each program peppered with Dylan’s offhand remarks, jokes, anecdotes, historical trivia, and brief biographies of the musicians. The Philosophy of Modern Music appears to take the same strategy and avoids a traceable thesis through the essays where Dylan chats about the songs he’s chosen for elucidation. A fascinating assortment, including songs by the Eagles ("Wichie Woman"), Rosemary Clooney (“Come on a My House”), Johnny Taylor (“Cheaper to Keep Her”), Little Richard (“Tutti Frutti”), Cher (“Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves”), and other songs of far-reaching style, attitude, and subject that are, truthfully, perfectly fine, and often brilliant classics but that have little obvious connection apart from the Nobel Prize winner selected for a book.

The book is hailed in promotion materials as a masterclass in songwriting and refers to the essays, while being nominally about music, as being “meditations and reflections on the human condition.” “Essays” is perhaps too generous a term to describe what Dylan has written for these songs, as their lengths and depth of thought don’t particularly rise above an average blog post. What’s revealed is that Dylan is not really the philosophical sort to take apart concepts and deal with them critically in archly specialized language, and that he wasn’t awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature based on his prose. Anyone desiring weighty and eloquent clarity on the purpose of existence will find the book wanting, but for those who consider Dylan to be a gifted artist with interesting things to say about some musical landmarks that got and kept his attention, The Philosophy of Modern Song is an intriguing, frequently surprising set of remarks and musings from one of the 20th Century’s most enigmatic figures. The individual pieces are remarkably poetic and literate on their terms. What connects this wide swath of tunes is Dylan’s skill at putting himself in the narrative at hand rather than analyze the melody and lyrics for subtler inclinations and nuance or hypothesize how a hymn offers a critique of social relations; Dylan imagines cinematic scenarios, sees archetypes of modern myth negotiating their respective terrains, and finds the souls of errant knight of endless variation questing for a greater glory with what gifts or curses that mark their lives.

The lyricist hasn’t the prose polish of John Updike or James Baldwin, but his language is vivid, colorful, and skillfully emphatic as he delineates the dilemmas and joys each song undertakes to describe in a short expression. A theme does emerge as he runs through a host of the music, the notion of perseverance and persistence even in the face of hardship, heartbreak, and the cold inevitability of a certain fate. A random selection of the essays brings this. Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” has a strong feeling of a classic movie western as Dylan writes of the narrator—a lone cowboy at a border town to meet a challenge he cannot forestall, emphasizes the weight of loneliness of the gunslinger, an existence where every joy is fleeting, and the shadow of death lurks in every unlit corner. “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” was a 1971 hit for Cher, a torrid bit of fanciful exploitation that was considered to be a cardboard pathos at best, but Dylan thought deeper on the matter and found resonance. It stretches credulity, but his insistence on this song makes for reading you can’t draw away from. He uses the pronoun “you” in writing about the title’s tawdry trio, the intended effect being to imagine yourself as a member of this wandering community, the only home being the wagon that carries you at the outskirts of every town. He lays it own a little too thick by essay’s end, with his penchant for stringing three or more adjectives together when one would have been just as effective, but he does what he sets out to do to give you a strong impression of what life at the edge of society would be like. To that end, it reminded me of my time as a carnival worker, going from town to town up the coast, selling chances to win dusty stuffed animals to townies who obviously held the orange shirted show folk in contempt. It was a rush of memory, a chill in the bones, and an adventure I consider myself lucky to eventually walk away from.

These are songs of perseverance and persistence are again short testimonials that crop up on the radio, in movie soundtracks and music videos of individuals of many origins, backgrounds, and varying degrees of stress, who are determined to stand their ground lest the final remains of what is truly theirs vanishes in self-loathing rituals of compromise and surrender. That seems what has found in 66 songs, wildly disparate in era, style, and sentiment; it’s the one tangible thread I’ve found. He is at his best when he gives vent to the full range of ironies contained in the Who’s 1965 proto punk rock anthem “My Generation,” with its famous line “I hope I die before I get old…” The singer and songwriter who brought us the line, Roger Daltry and Peter Townsend are neither dead and are, in fact, old reflects on the arrogance of youth. The stuttering youth of the song is barely articulate and has no idea of what he wants to do, has no idea about why he’s angry and impatient, and is happy to simply be that way. It’s a grand and immature f**k you of self-assertion, a declaration that shocked and inspired a generation of kids to think that things will get better when they take over after the last wicked adult dies. But Dylan writes that you’re in a wheelchair being pushed around to the places you need to get to—doctor’s offices, the bathroom, the community meal hall; your mind is alert, but the body fails in subtle and significant ways every day. You’re eerily close to whatever dying day will award you, and you hear noise and brash men having their own good clamorous time in the thrall of their youth. You’re annoyed, you’re sleepy, you fall asleep. Dylan’s writing is particularly effective in this essay that should have aged well. At 81, I suppose Bob Dylan hear what the lyrics declaim and vividly recalls being the speedy, in-your-face Dada King, who rarely missed a chance to confound and confront the Old Squares who didn’t get it, a character in full sympathy with the romantic tragedy of a genius poet’s early demise. But his musing takes him to the next thought, which is that he’s far older than he might have expected, his memories are fuller, richer, more far-reaching than he thinks he has any right to, and the songs he’s paid attention to aren’t merely audio postcards of long-ago places but rather a means to remain connected; he intends to live fully and well and on his terms, in his words. Meandering and off the wall and syntactically awkward as it is at times, The Philosophy of Modern Song is wonderful glimpse into how this perennial mystery man thinks.

JAZZ AS A DERANGEMENT OF THE SENSES:

Bop, Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs by Martin Torgott, (Da Capo Press) 

It is a rather large subject, but author Martin Torgott soft-pedals his main thesis: that drugs were an essential ingredient in the creation of the world. Instead of weighing his subject with burdensome clichés, Bop Apocalypse at its best provides is an anecdotal history. A narrative that jumps through time, cutting between jazz musicians and beat writers, in a series of essays and recollections that seek the precise moment when the artists were introduced to drugs. 

Fans of a continuous timeline will find this book to be frustrating, as Torgoff prefers to present his history and argument in a cinematic style, with jump cuts, flashbacks, and fast-forward. He attempts an impressionistic approach to how particular events are linked to creating the mythos that brought about hip culture. It’s a fractured, frustrating, but fascinating narrative. Early in the book, Torgoff covers the details about the federal criminalization of marijuana, an action initiated by Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Needing a visible symbol of the threat to convince the country of the menace drugs posed, they portrayed African-American jazz musicians as deviants, criminals, and moral reprobates due to drug use. These were the perverts aiming to sully American innocence and lure youth into lives of moral degradation. Later, emerging white writers of the Post War Era discovered the same chemicals, many of whom indulged in them as a means of coping with the crushing conformity of the Eisenhower 1950s. Drugs were seen as a way to free poets and painters and playwrights from their inhibitions, allowing them to create bold new work in their place. Anslinger is revealed as the unwitting creator of the modern idea of hip, the aesthetic, the pose, the manner of being that artists have assumed for decades–the idea of artist as outsider, as outlaw, as iconoclast. The American avant-garde now had a hook to hang its bulky coat on.

Readers familiar with Beat aesthetics–their emphasis on spontaneity, improvisation, a Zen mindfulness free of distortion and subterfuge– will be relieved as Turnoff goes lightly on the usual apologies made on the Beats behalf.  Bop Apocalypse works best when the stories are about central personalities in the period at crucial moments in their lives. One of the highlights of the book is the wealth of telling detail, such as those of writer Terry Southern when he discovered pot as a kid, which grew wild on his cousin.

Miles Davis, Hubert Huncke, John Coltrane, Mezz Mezzrow, Billie Holliday, William Burroughs, Lester Young, and others have their tales told, some details well-known and others likely apocryphal, the scenes from their lives revealing a similar scenario, their respective introduction to pot, heroin, and amphetamines as a means of coping with their marginalized existence and of forcing their wits and instincts to the edge. What is obvious through the book is Torgoff’s premise of drugs being critical to the creation of art at the end of the chapter on Jack Kerouac, making the claim that the greatness many have given to Kerouac’s body of work would have remained unwritten had he not taken up the tea habit. As Kerouac remarks, “I need Miss Green to write; can’t whip up interest in anything otherwise.” For myself, I’ve always found Kerouac’s fiction and poetry problematic at best, a writer who often mistook breathlessness for beauty, Torgoff’s association of being stoned with quality sounds more than a little day dreamy, likening the author’s body of work as that which would be considered to be “…likened to Proust’s, Melville’s and Shakespeare’s.”

This brings to mind something I’d read years ago in a Downbeat magazine interview with jazz guitar virtuoso Joe Pass, talking about his drug addiction and eventually getting clean. The interviewer asked if he thought he was actually better and more imaginative when he was high. Pass offered a cautious answer all the same–that while he couldn’t say he definitely played better, he certainly thought he was playing brilliantly while he was high. I kept this in mind while reading this otherwise engaging and well-researched book, and remain convinced that the gift to create music or to write poetry are aspects of a personality that exist separately from drug use. That someone can produce chorus after chorus of hard bop jazz a la Parker or compose a monumental poetic masterwork, such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, has more to do with the talent that’s already in place, not because the drugs aided these artists to their particular style of genius. Torgoff does us the favor, though, of presenting the polemic evenhandedly, although there are times when hyperbole gets the best of him. Raising Kerouac’s literary value to Shakespeare and Proust is an example, as is an incident related in a section about Charlie Parker. An intriguing chapter overall, with the sort of telling details of clubs, cities, characters of interest on the risks they took to pursue an art form on the outskirts of what was considered the American mainstream, Torgoff relates the tale of jazz producer and promoter Norman Granz and his organization of a series of concerts billed as “Jazz at the Philharmonic” in Los Angeles, in 1946. At this period in his brief life, Parker’s behavior was erratic due to the complications of his heroin habit. Parker had barely managed to make it to the West Coast from New York. He quickly disappeared–looking to score drugs in a city where he had no connections–and arrived late for the concert, which had already started. Torgoff writes:

“…having found what he was looking for, he showed up 28 choruses into ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ and stepped on the stage to play a chorus that brought the music to a whole new level and the audience to its feet, then he stayed on to play alongside Lester Young on ‘Oh Lady Be Good’ …Bird’s choruses astounded musicians and jazz fans everywhere. Everything he played that night would become part of the basic syntax of jazz…”

This is the kind of overpraise even the most ardent admirer winces at, as curious readers are given soft-shouldered platitudes and proclamations instead of colorful, clear, and precise explanations of what the artist is up to, an idea of the tradition that a musician is breaking away from and how he’s creating new music based on the traditions he’s learned from. This is a gift of jazz critic Stanley Crouch and Gary Giddens, vividly highlighting artistry and contribution over sensationalism, a subtler approach that Turnoff does not take on. Worse for Bop Apocalypse is the not-so-subtle idea that the artists who matter–the artists who break tradition, create new forms, innovators whose avant-garde experiments command respect and influences generations many decades after they’re deceased–have to be chemically deranged to have that latent genius become activated and find its fullest and fatal expression. It should be noted that not everyone covered died tragically or fell prey to the foul clutches of permanent addiction–as the biographies of Coltrane, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Ginsberg, and Burroughs attest–but Bop Apocalypse provides a constant suggestion that it’s not enough for committed artists to engage their craft to the best of their ability, but that in doing so one must knowingly risk their lives to achieve a genius level of expression the merely sober among us cannot. Torgoff’s underlying premise crystallizes much of what is afoul with the contemporary notion of romanticism, that the kind of lethal idealization of the drug-related deaths of writers and musicians creates an allure that is seductive and wrongheaded. It is, on the face of it, irrational to consider an early and preventable death of an inspired creator as confirmation of their genius. 

Torgoff, though, brings a wealth of research to the subject and, despite the periodic wallowing in cliches and unexamined proclamations, creates an entertaining mosaic through an electric period of American history. What the book lacks in supportable thesis or in establishing how these artists actually influence each other’s work is made up for by Targoff’s storytelling skills. Imagine this as a film by Robert Altman at his best, a diffuse but alluring tour of the rich details of an aspect of our legacy we must continue to engage. One does wish, though, that the author avoided the unintended irony of writing about artists who changed the way we think about the world with old ideas that merely reinforce our worst habits of mind.

Martin Torgoff’s gifts as a storyteller are superb when he remains with the tale; he is cinematic in his ability to set up a scene and follow the action through. It’s unfortunate that his stories, one after the other, are too often hobbled by his pet theory, an idea that cannot be made compelling regardless of how many times it gets repeated.

A Faint Recollection of Fairport Convention

 

It seems to be a reasonable expectation that people of genius with extraordinary lives and stories to relate would be able to tell their tale in a manner as robust as the lives they've lived. A slight sour truth to accept is that not all extraordinary songwriters aren't the best narrators of their journeys. My expectations were raised by the revelatory musings of Rolling Stone guitarist and songwriter Keith Richards' memoir Life, a memoir that was all sex and sizzle and jaw-dropping revelations.  Richard's witty, regaling truth-telling about his life on the edges of rock and roll had me insisting that any future musical remembrance be equally careening and in your face. The demands were cooled considerably by other biographies I read after the vicarious thrill of Richard's enthused embrace of his wild ways. Bob Dylan's book Chronicles, Vol. 1 had the Maestro speaking obliquely about his life, influences, not revealing much that wasn't already in the dedicated fan's knowledge base. That wasn't wholly unexpected since Dylan has been cagey about talking about his personal life.

 When he wasn't making things up, he simply out large chunks of his coming of age.   Similarly, Jorma Kaukonen wrote of his time as lead guitarist for the San Francisco's iconic Jefferson Airplane in Been So Long: My Life and Music, a memoir of his life growing up in the fifties and thriving as an artist in the swirling 60s counterculture. His prose was flat, and his feelings influences, friends, politics, and the free-love spirituality of that pugnacious decade are soft-spoken. The detachment from his history made it seem like he talked about someone else's life and career. Kaukonen, perhaps, would instead have not been charged with writing about them at all.

 I suppose the lesson was that although there's an overabundance of rock stars with stories as horrid, funny, and chaotic as Keith Richard's. Some of the stories are quieter in the telling, deservedly so.

  Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock, and Finding My Voice, 1967–75, a new book by acclaimed Richard Thompson, guitar hero, songwriter, and singer and co-founder of the influential British folk-rock band Fairport Convention Richard Thompson, is appealing, soft-spoken but overly cautious telling of the facts of his life. Not without sin, sizzle, disaster, or tragedies that need to be overcome as eventual success comes to the music and the music maker. His style is reflective, meditative to a degree, choosing his words and descriptions carefully. There's also a tangible air of hesitancy while he recounts his story, a seeming concern to avoid the dramatic, the sensational. Too much caution, however, as there are moments where eloquent rumination on incidents would have given Beeswing greater philosophical heft. To this day, it's one of my low expectations that old guard rock stars have something resembling a pearl of elegant and lengthy wisdom that's formed over their years of music-making on an international scale. Thompson is the soft-spoken sort, it seems, and the soft written as well. Elegant in his brevity and occasionally minimalist prose, he trades not in scandal, gossip, or revenge snark; he goes forth like Joe Friday in Dragnet, just the facts as best he remembers them, told as well as he can manage. The album sold meagerly, but it was a fruitful starting point for the legendary band as they progressed. Sandy Denny, a woman blessed with an ethereal and silver-toned voice, replaced original co-lead singer Judy Dyble, Thompson's girlfriend. The addition of Denny to share lead vocals with singer, guitarist, and songwriter Ian Matthews coincided with Fairport's burgeoning desire to grow conspicuous American influence and instead explored and made use of their own rich of British and Celtic music folk styles. The following three records-- What We Did On Our Holidays, Unhalfbricking, Liege, and Lief—marked a band that had invented a new kind of folk-rock, based on a fascinating combination of blues, jazz, and rock filtered through the gossamer textures of British and Celtic melodic construction and overtone. Fired by the unique sensibilities of Thompson's guitar work, the songwriting collective in this band gave the world that singular thing in pop music history, a distinct body of work.

Thompson doesn't belabor song meanings or origins nor deep dive into the tricks and techniques of his laudable guitar skills, preferring to limn lightly through the scuffling days of the years 1967 through 1975. Again, there isn't much in the way of sordid detail, strong opinion, or linguistic scene-chewing, but the book does provide a breezy, montage-like feel of Fairport and the bands they knew gigged in the same towns at the same clubs, pubs, and meeting halls. The elements of low paying gigs, the band's eventual adapting an abandoned, unheated pub as band living quarters and rehearsal space, creative tensions in the band, and having a singer in Sandy Denny who was as strong-willed and undisciplined as she was brilliant, and alluring are the ingredients of a rich tale that here seems told only by a third. Beeswing has concise and breezy pacing that the book gives off the feeling of being a treatment for a motion picture music biopic. The chronology of events has the air of a "greatest hits" list with the details scantily fleshed out to satisfy the requirements of a screen screenwriter who can squeeze everything into an entertaining and pat 120 feature. After reading, you're left wanting to know more and can't but feel a bit cheated. 

What might deeper feelings there have been within Thompson when he had to fire Denny from the band? He makes a note of the difficulty in weighing Denny's great talent against her insecurity and hard-drinking. At this point in a much-detailed story, we witness a conflicted choice to make sure that the band he co-founded remains a stable entity for the sake of his free expression and reason to exist. It's apparent that as much as he loved Denny and cherished her talent, he felt it better that he and the rest of Fairport move ahead without her. Thompson writes of this deftly but is sketchy on the emotional details. 

The book is full of matters that cry for a fuller accounting, episodes such as Thompson's eventual conversion to Sufism, meeting his eventual wife and songwriting-performing partner, encounters, and music with John Lee Hooker and Van Dyke Parks, and Linda Ronstadt. Incidents get mentioned, briefly described, sometimes with significant poetic effect, but too often being a glancing overview of a crowded with meaningful encounters and musical landmarks. In the end, the style and amount of details are suitable for a making-of-the-band movie or an outline for a limited series for a streaming service. As a book, though, it's a slight effort often poetically expressed. Thompson has a reputation as a potent lyricist who condenses emotional states and situations to brief, evocative epiphanies. It may be the case that his habit of compositional mind influenced his decision to avoid revealing too much of his inner life.  The subtitle of Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock, and Finding My Voice, 1967–75, tells us that the book covers only eight years of the author's career, hinting that there's another part of the story to be told, another volume forthcoming. With one book done, it would be a sweet deal if Thompson warms up to the idea that he's now a writer and composes the next volume fearlessly, with verve, detail, and nuance.  Thompson is a magnificent talent, and the world needs him to tell his tale of a critical and endlessly enthralling time in popular music history with the vividness it deserves. 

(Originally published in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with permission).

 

 

 

YOUR YOUNGER SIBLINGS HATE YOUR MUSIC

I gave up hope for rock criticism developing into a respectable form of criticism when I realized that it was, for the most part, a pissing contest for most of the guys who decided to try their hand at it. For every Bangs and Young there were dozens of lesser lights who proved, at length, that they could make noise aplenty but offer little or no light on the subject. Much of it has to do with how well the current state of the music happens to be, of course, but pop music criticism did come to the point where everyone was recycling what everyone had already written, and the two trajectories being offered readers by the end of the seventies was incomprehensible Greil Marcus/Dave Marsh obscurantism, which insisted that the music they listened to in college dorms was the Spenglarian peak of civilization and that every note played afterwards was an inferior facsimile of the authentic , or the knee jerk Bangs imitations where wave after wave of typing nitwits missed out on Lester’s capacity for feeling deep emotion and his brand of self-criticism and instead freight us with jabbering sarcasm by the car load. Jim DeRogatis , rock critic for various outlets , author of the Lester Bangs biography Let It Blurt, rounded up a slew of younger, Generation X pop writers and invited them to select a classic rock album considered to be Canonical and there for unarguably great and then to debunk an older generation of critics’ claim for the lasting greatness of those records. It’s an interesting idea, I admit, but the result, an anthology called Kill Your Idols is a miserably strident , one note mass of pages dedicated to puerile dismissals of a lot of good, honest music. “Snotty” doesn’t do that particular disaster justice.

The problem with the generation of rock critics who followed the late Lester Bangs was that too many of them were attempting to duplicate Bangs’ signature and singular ability to write movingly about why rock and roll stars make terrible heroes. Like many of us, Bangs became disillusioned with rock and roll when he discovered that those he admired and was obsessed by — Lou Reed, Miles Davis, and Black Sabbath — were not saints. The discovery of their clay feet, their egos and the realization that rock and roll culture was a thick cluster of bullshit and pretentiousness didn’t stymie Bangs’ writing. It, in fact, was the basis of Bangs transcending his own limits and finding something new to consider in this. Sadly, he died before he could enter another great period of prose writing. Kill Your Idols, edited by Jim DeRogatis, is an anthology that is intended, I suspect to be the Ant- Stranded, the Greil Marcus edited collection where he commissioned a number of leading pop music writers and asked them to write at length about what one rock and roll album they would want to be left on a desert island with; it’s not a perfect record — then New York Times rock critic John Rockwell chose Back in the USA by Linda Ronstadt and couldn’t mount a persuasive defense of the disc — but it did contain a masterpiece by Bangs, his write up of Van Morrison’s album Astral Weeks. His reading of the tune “Madame George” is a staggering example of lyric empathy, a truly heroic form of criticism. Kill Your Idols”, in reverse emulation, assigns a group of younger reviewers who are tasked with debunking the sacred cows of the rock and roll generation before them; we have, in effect, pages full of deadening sarcasm from a crew who show none of the humor or sympathy that were Bangs best qualities. Bangs, of course, was smart enough not to take himself too seriously; he knew he was as absurd as the musicians he scrutinized.

“Kill Your Idols” seemed like a good idea when I bought the book, offering up the chance for a younger set of rock critics to give a counter argument to the well made assertions of the essayists from the early Rolling Stone/Crawdaddy/Village Voice days who’s finely tuned critiques gave us what we consider now to be the Rock Canon. The problem, though, is that editor Jim DeRogatis didn’t have that in mind when he gathered up this assortment of Angry Young Critics and changed them with disassembling the likes of Pink Floyd, The Beatles, the MC5; countering a well phrased and keenly argued position requires an equally well phrased alternative view and one may go so far as to suggest the fresher view point needs to be keener, finer, sharper. DeRogatis, pop and rock music critic for the Chicago Sun Times, author of the estimable Lester Bangs biography Let It Blurt, had worked years ago as record review editor of Rolling Stone and found himself getting fired when he couldn’t abide by publisher Jan Wenner’s policy of not giving unfavorable reviews to his favorite musicians.

His resentment toward Wenner and Rolling Stone’s institutional claims of being a power broker as far as rock band reputations were concerned is understandable, but his motivation is more payback than substantial refutation of conventional wisdom. The Angry Young Critics were too fast out of the starting gate and in a collective haste to bring down the walls of the Rock Establishment wind up being less the Buckley or the Vidal piercing pomposity and pretension than , say, a pack of small yapping dogs barking at anything passing by the back yard fence. The likes of Christgau, Marcus and Marsh provoke you easily enough to formulate responses of your own, but none of the reviews have the makings of being set aside as a classic of a landmark debunking; there is not a choice paragraph or phrase one comes away with.Even on albums that I think are over-rated, such as John Lennon’s Double Fantasy, you think they’re hedging their bets; a writer wanting to bring Lennon’s post-Beatles reputation down a notch would have selected the iconic primal scream album Plastic Ono Band (to slice and dice. But the writers here never bite off more than they can chew; sarcasm, confessions of boredom and flagging attempts at devil’s advocacy make this a noisy, nit picky book whose conceit at offering another view of Rock and Roll legacy contains the sort of hubris these guys and gals claim sickens them. This is collection of useless nastiness, a knee jerk contrarianism of the sort that one over hears in bookstores between knuckle dragging dilettantes who cannot stand being alive if they can’t hear themselves bray. Yes, Kill Your Idols is that annoying,  an intriguing project that succeeds in being a smug irritation.

A RETICENT RECOLLECTION

BEEN SO LONG:
My Life and Music
By Jorma Kaukonen

There's an old joke that goes "If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there." Those 60 and over go ha-ha, ho-ho, I get it, too many flashbacks, too many bong hits, far too many uppers to balance all those downers, and, too many long drum solos. The conceit was that there was too much experience crammed into too-few years; many of us who thrived and jived on the wide, permissive mores of the Sixties ought to still be overwhelmed, asking ourselves what happened. Who among us might recollect that glorious experiment in living? Jorma Kaukonen, founding member of and lead guitarist for the definitive 60s/San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane, remembers and brings his recollections together in a new memoir Been So Long: My Life and Music. It's worth noting up front that the musician, a stalwart figure who preferred to remain in the background, quiet though attentive while fellow JA members Grace Slick and Paul Kanter did the many media interviews admits early on that the book is composed of his recollections of how he remembers events transpired, but that some of what he's recounting might be vague or incomplete in the telling. He offers a disclaimer in the introduction mentioning his imperfect recollection: "...this is my story as I remember it as seen through the prism of my mind's eye. I can do no better than that."

However reticent Kaukonen was to speak with the press at the peak of his fame with the Airplane (and later with Hot Tuna, his long-term folk and electric blues project with JA bassist Jack Casady), the author’s memory seems to serve him well in these pages. A second generation American of Finnish descent born in Washington DC in 1940, young Kaukonen had already seen much of the world, particularly Philippines and Pakistan courtesy of his father’s diplomatic corps assignments. His early years seemed a case of accidental wanderlust, his family from moving city to city, country to country, with Kaukonen, easily making friends in each new home though, it seems, shared interests in music, cars (“gearheads” as they called themselves) and, to be sure, girls. While in Washington he acquired a guitar and began learning traditional folk songs, learned the advantages of keeping his guitar tuned, and made a lifelong friendship with future JA bassist Jack Casady. What Kaukonen realized was that playing music was pretty much what he wanted to do, and muses that music seemed the elixir that made brought a dimension to his life than just merely existing and putting with boring jobs and mean people. Laconically and tersely, he concludes “Music seemed to me to be the reward for being alive.”

The first half of the book is full of reminisces about his family, his two sets of grandparents from Europe in the quest for the opportunities migrations to America promised, and he speaks fondly, lovingly of his parents, aunts and uncles and shares what he recalls of their expectations of a new life in the promised land. Most tellingly, though, was Kaukonen’s seemingly slow but eventual emersion into music. We see in negotiation with his father for a guitar, his playing DC clubs with Casady, with fake IDs, when Casady was playing lead guitar and Kaukonen played rhythm. And we see his growing interest in folk music styles that would become the defining essence of what would become his electric guitar style with Jefferson Airplane. Developing into a fine finger picker and with an affinity for the simple and elegantly articulated patterns of folk-blues, Kaukonen incorporated these techniques into his eventual electric work for the Airplane, giving them a rattling guitar sound unique in an era where every other guitarist fashioned Clapton impersonations. Kaukonen’s style slid and slithered, his leads full of peculiar tunings, odd emphasis on blues bends, and a jarring vibrato that made teeth chatter and nerve endings fire up. It was a style that informed the Airplane’s best songs— “Lather”, “White Rabbit”, “Greasy Heart”—and which was a sound that was an essential part of the complex and wonderful weave that characterized this band’s best albums, from Jefferson Airplane Takes Off through Volunteers.

At a point, Jefferson Airplane was among the top bands of the era, one of the top bands in the world, originating in the countercultural environs of San Francisco and adventuring beyond those city blocks to perform historical rock gigs such as the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. It was something of a charmed life, Kaukonen was earning a good amount of money. He was, he admits, willing to start spending it, buying homes, new cars, new equipment. The band was at the top of their game, and on a Dick Cavett, Show following the last night of the Woodstock Art and Music Festival, a myriad of performers—David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, the Airplane, Steve Stills among them—sat around a rather casual set for the program and bantered breathlessly about the monumental experience they’d all just been through. In the afterglow, at that moment, it seemed as though Ralph Gleason’s mid-Sixties prediction in Rolling Stone that the Sixties Youth, spearheaded by the music, musicians, troubadours, and poets of the time, would change America profoundly, enact a revolution without bloodshed or bombs. The music would set you free. Believe me, I was there, watching the Cavett show at least in my parent’s basement TV, as well as reading the newspaper and 6pm news reports on the massive concert. For a few minutes, just a few, it all seemed possible, especially when watching the beautiful and brilliant Grace Slick and the Teutonically authoritative Paul Kanter lay it out what many took to be a forecast of the American future. Kaukonen was on the set as well, in the background, sitting with his guitar. He was happy to let Slick and Kanter do the talking; as reiterates through the narrative that he was happy to play his guitar and let others be the prophets.

There is much ground Kaukonen tries to cover in Been So Long, but there is a lack of urgency on the author’s part to offer detail, specifics, characteristics or insights connected to the material progression of his story. He is an able writer that conveys a personality that’s sufficiently humble after the long, strange trip he’s been on. He has gratitude for the gift that has been bestowed upon him and humble in the face of the hard times and deviltries he’s survived.  But there is a kind of cracker-barrel philosophy in tone, a succession of incidents, occasions, fetes, celebrations and disappointments in his life, told in sketchy detail summarized with a cornball summation, a reworked cliché, a platitude passing as hindsight. He mentions family, wives, children, famous musicians in a continual flow of circumstances, but does not actually say much beyond the convenient sentiment when you expect him to give a hard-won perspective of his adventures before and after the Rock and Roll Life. Despite having a life’s story that might otherwise seem impossible to tell in a dull manner, Kaukonen is intent on doing just that.

He does not tell tales out of school, he doesn’t reveal the quirks of his friends.  what he might consider the essence of their genius; structurally the book reads as if it were compiled from notecards and handwritten journals, arranged in order (more or less), assembled for a rapid walk- through rather a revelation of what drew an artistic temperament to this kind of life at all. Kaukonen’s reticence to write more deeply prevents a fascinating and unique tale on the face of it from being more compelling.  It’s as if he’s talking about things he would rather not disclose; the half-measured commitment shows up when he mentions his increasing reliance upon an addiction to alcohol through the book’s chapters. Using phrases from the principal writings of Alcoholics Anonymous as well and peppering his text with 12 step mottos, it’s apparent from those in recovery where the musician got help for this alcoholism. A large part of the A.A. program is for members to find a God of their understanding, a power greater than oneself which can help them with their problem. For those who have a “God Problem”, the fellowship also refers generically to “a power greater than oneself”. A god of one’s own understanding? Fair enough, but Kaukonen here takes to writing God as “G-d” for reasons that remain explained. It’s one thing to not demand that others have the have the same theology as yourself, but it’s another to routinely omit an offending “O” when the world God comes into expressive play. Being more forthcoming on this quirk, offering a reason for the eccentric use, would have offered more light on the outline Kaukonen offers. It is a small mystery, an annoying one, a recurring bump in the road that stops the reader; what is Kaukonen not telling us?

Perhaps an as-told-to memoir like Keith Richard’s memoir Life would have eased more nuance and insight and crucial detail from the hesitant Kaukonen. Richards, speaking at length and on-the-record with collaborator James Fox, the Rolling Stones guitarist speaks frankly and at length about the highlights and low spots of his life in music; free to speak as he pleased to Fox’s probing questions and not having to worry about censoring himself while at the typewriter or with pen-in-hand, Life is a witty, harrowing, bristling account of one remarkable musician’s life. On the surface, Kaukonen’s tale is as full and intriguing as a rock and roll biography requires— worldly as a young man, ROTC, a lover of music and cars, a founding member of one of the most significant bands of the Sixties in the midst of a major cultural revolution, drugs, money, fame, glory, flaming out, regrouping—the outline is here, yet Kaukonen does little to flesh it out or reveal the sex, sizzle, and drama under the facts and their note-card descriptions. Richard’s work with a collaborator allowed his mouth to run as long as it needed to tell the best story he had, his own, the final payoff is an engrossing read blessed with Richard’s hard-won and refreshingly offhand wisdom. The Jefferson Airplane guitarist is not so garrulous, is reflectively taciturn and terse, in fact. One needs to respect his right to tell his story as he sees appropriate; the shame is that what is likely a great story doesn’t so much get told as mentioned in passing.

Been So Long remains a fascinating read and is an interesting addition of first-hand accounts of the psychedelic revolution in the 60s from a key player. The irony here is that Kaukonen does indeed remember the decade—he just doesn’t see the need to get into the weeds, dig in the dirt and relate something fuller, an account of a life fully lived.

(This first appeared in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission)