JAMES CARTER AND HERBIE HANCOCK BRING IT

 
JC on the Set by the James Carter Quartet, a stylistically wandering but frequently fused effort from the saxophonist in group. Nice reading of 'Sophisticated Lady'--Carter's phrases are sure and undulate with a blues cadence even as he extends his lines over a sublime melody. In other areas, he sounds tad brackish and barking-- blorts and grunts at times when he really didn't need them, as if to establish some kind of credibility that admirable technique alone cannot. He sometimes grates. Still, his work here is compelling for the most part, and Craig Taborn’s piano work is a handy and deliciously quick-witted foil for Carter: elegantly, giddily fast up tempo, meditative and yearning as he scrolls over the ballads. On a similar note, I just bought and played "Empyrean Isles" by Herbie Hancock on Blue Note, and features Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter and "Anthony" Williams. A terrifically moody album, Hubbard’s' composition are smooth tone investigations--his piano work is focused and at this date, 1964, sculpted tasty figures. Hubbard likewise weaves in and around and through the music with a surety that belies his later brash, flaming attack. And Williams on drums is a wonder, as he always was: this album is fine companion to his own "Spring". Hearing this underscores the loss.

WHY JOHN LENNON?

(from a 1980 issue of Kicks Magazine)

Why John Lennon?

Like most of you, I suppose, I asked myself that question to no resolve as the television news reports rolled in, all those fragments of information forming an ugly scene I didn’t want to hear about. John Lennon, former Beatles lyricist, rhythm guitarist, and vocalist, and a solo artist with a unique integrity and social conscience, was shot down on a chilly Monday night in front of his New York City apartment building. He was later pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital four blocks away.

Why John Lennon?

When I first heard the news of the murder, hazy-headed and staring at the morning San Diego Union with eyes that hardly registered the newsprint, I wasn’t only incredulous, but strangely numb. Later, with the oncoming news reports and the radio stations playing old Beatles’ songs, the dam broke. I began to cry. There was a hollow part in what there was of my soul, and the emptiness hurt as though it had been made with a knife. For myself, a large part of my life passed away with the bullets that passed through John Lennon’s body.

In my ten or so years of writing rock criticism, I’ve tried to perfect what I conceived as a disinterested tone in my prose, a tone that would allow me to do as book, film, and theater critics have done for years: assess artists and their works as analytically as I could manage, probing into the reasons why a particular record was good or not solely on its merit as a work of art. All other considerations were irrelevant to my task of being a reviewer. Likewise, my reactions to the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Duane Allman, Elvis Presley, and others were notably muted compared to those of my friends, many of whom gauged the quality of their own lives by the latest releases of their preferred rock stars. Though saddened by the losses, I usually shrugged and maintained my cool. “Too bad,” I thought. “We’ve lost a good guitarist, we’ve lost an interesting singer/songwriter, but let’s not get bent out of shape. Babies are being napalmed in Vietnam, so why don’t you cry for them?”

For Lennon, though, the tears flowed, and after a series of long phone conversations with fellow-traveler rock pundits, most of whom seemed to be choking on something, the emotional zigzag of my response came together. Something had died, all right, but it wasn’t just part of me; it was part of all of us. An epoch had closed, and those of us who’d succeeded in getting on the other side of the door found ourselves in a long hallway with high ceilings, with the light faint deep in the corridors.

Those of you reading this no doubt recognize the kind of moral self-righteousness in the way I’d qualified my response to the deaths of other rock stars. Mentioning Vietnam or starving Black children in America’s slums was the perfect rejoinder to anyone you were having an argument with, provided you could get the discussion to go your way and you were adept at the quick exit before your adversaries could counterattack. But the atmosphere of the time—the late ’60s and the early ’70s—and all the of-course conventions of the counterculture that many of us still cling to as a value system, was in no small part the result of what John Lennon had done, both with the Beatles and as a solo artist. More than the Rolling Stones, more than Elvis, even more so than Bob Dylan, John Lennon in one manner or another had virtually created the style, the sound, and the attitude that would shape the consciousness of a generation. With and without the Beatles, John Lennon had touched the souls of millions of people, young and old—millions who had never met and most of whom never would meet, millions within what we used to faddishly refer to as The Global Village who now feel a profound loss.

Lennon’s death marks more than the passing of a pop rock genius. True enough, there will be book upon book wherein critics, musicologists, and historians will deal with the considerable substance of his talent: his nasal, scratchy Liverpool accent that did more to redefine rock singing than anyone since Elvis; his gift for melody; his virtuoso knack for writing lyrics of an amazingly broad array of subject matter that could be poetic while never succumbing to the conceits of the page poet. Lennon’s legacy as an artist will stand the test of history indeed, but that is not the issue that confronts us.

What does confront us is the fact that Lennon’s death has symbolically killed what we thought the Beatles were. Since their breakup in 1970 after the release of Let It Be, their final album, the Beatles became an abstraction, a memory of an ideal time that looked more idyllic now that further history and the unfurling of more intricate realities have carried us from the moment. Beatles records continued to sell well, an international fan club circulated petitions in several countries that pleaded for the Beatles to reform (if only, as one woman put it at the time, to “give the world something positive and meaningful again”), “Give Peace a Chance” became an international peace anthem sung by George McGovern delegates, A Hard Day’s Night and Help! were shown endlessly on TV and in theaters, Beatles songs continued to be recorded, and “I Am the Walrus” even made its way into the nation’s elevators. More than any pop phenomenon at the time, the Beatles were the spirit, the very essence of what millions liked to remember about the 1960s: mind expansion with drugs, new freedom in sexual expression, a new moral criterion that put human life and the need for equality and peace above the dynamics of the capitalist war machine. Though no one could say that the Beatles were directly responsible for any of these things, their music and style at least defined the atmosphere, and as long as the Beatles were around, even in abstract, one could at least feel that the ’60s weren’t a waste of everyone’s time, that at least the decade had provided us with a sense of life that would remain viable through the onslaught of time.

People in my generation, the Vietnam generation, have, however, found the going as rough as a wild river. The American New Left is factionalized among various party lines, all arguing who’ll lead the proletariat to the palace gates. The counterculture has collapsed under its wishful thinking, reduced to holistic health groups and the cant of the “me” generation. Ronald Reagan is in the White House. And John Lennon is gone, taken from us through an act that was contrary to everything he ever sang about. The Beatles are gone, gone with the hopes that they might again reform and again give us something as elusive as hope.

Why John Lennon?

Nothing about this scene makes any sense, but one thing is for sure: it wasn’t just John Lennon getting those bullets. It was all of us.

The following Wednesday afternoon, I had lunch with a woman who told me what it was like in her office the day before. A friend of hers was filling out a job application form when he came upon the affirmative action questions. After filling out whether he was handicapped, a member of a non-Caucasian race, a woman, and other queries, he stopped and grimaced at the question asking if he was a veteran of the Vietnam War.

“That pisses me off,” he said, pointing at the form. “We of the Vietnam era.”

“Yeah,” said another man, standing to the side shuffling papers at a desk, “the era that ended yesterday.”

OZZY OSBOURNE,RIP

 

Ozzy Osbourne has passed away at age 76, and given his  history of consuming suicidal amounts of drugs over the decades, I'm surprised he lived as long as he did. He did, no argument, change the course of rock and roll , he created , with Black Sabbath, a sound and a lifestyle without intending to, he enjoyed what he did for a living, and he was not an intellectual, not a poseur. It was an , but what an act. Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t a force of nature—he was exactly who he was within a system that demanded and rewarded conformity, even among its artists and avant-gardists. His instinct to perform, drink, and embody the worst fears of what the world was becoming wasn’t rebellion—it was just a kid in a rock and roll band who couldn’t bring himself to mouth the party line of what the counterculture was (literally) selling. He felt more at ease singing Geezer Butler’s lyrics—fatalistic, doomsday-cadenced, dark, even malevolent. Ozzy was at home reflecting an attitude shaped by the hard-nosed grit of Birmingham, England. Born John Michael Osbourne in 1948, he grew up in Aston, a working-class district of Birmingham, in a cramped two-bedroom home with five siblings. His early life was marked by poverty, dyslexia, and brushes with the law, including a stint in prison at age 17 for burglary. Industrial towns like Birmingham do that to you—just as Detroit did to the MC5 and the Stooges. His music was a horror show based on already real horrors, even if it was the terror of waking up in a crappy city to get ready to go to a brain dead school program, a job that felt like a long jail sentence, and anticipating the punks on your way to the bus stop who could either slap you on the back or kick you the groin. No wonder the guitars were so loud, all that volume to drown out the screaming. RIP.

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)

ANOTHER SONG SHOWING THE BYRDS WERE ONE OF THE TRULY GREAT BANDS OF ALL TIME

 

The Byrds were an early obsession of mine when Dylan and folk rock came into being, and this song, cowritten by band leader Roger (nee Jim) McGuinn and Harvey Gerst, is jangle guitar in its greatest expression. The twelve-string
intro pours down like a hard rain and the harmonies are a kind of perfection, not choir boy ethereal, more like a chorus of sensitive people, male or female, who yearn for a partner, someone to complete their sense of self. The guitars and harmonies tend toward the strident, edging on atonality, and makes you imagine someone under mental duress trying to walk the straight line, to remain in the center of an eroding calm. And it's under two minutes. So much angst, yearning, melodrama in such a compact space of time. These were the days when short tunes had real heft.

Barry Afonso chimes in: One interesting thing about the Byrds is that Roger McGuinn dominated and directed the band but did not project a distinctive personality as a front man. He wasn't quite colorless, but his personality and persona were elusive and protean. McGuinn lacked the swagger or flash of a rock band leader. But he was the indisputably the Master-Byrd -- others came and went, but he was the indispensable member. How how would you describe the character McGuinn projected when he fronted the Byrds? Who WAS he, anyway?

Burke (clearning his throat pretentiously):  I can only guess that his experience in the folk scene with the Limelighters, the Chad Mitchell Trio and his stint with Bobby Darin formed the personality he brought to the Byrds, just play the music, serve the song, don't be egocentric or showy. McGuinn was not publicly political and kept his views close the vest and objected to David Crosby's political and conspiratorial rantings from the stage. He might have been something of a control freak. It's been said that while he radiated a sense of calm from the stage, he was aggressive in dealings behind the scenes in matters of music and how the band was perceived. I thoroughly enjoyed the work he did with the Byrds with the early albums (up to Notorious Byrds Brothers), but he was a cipher.

The view from 1975: BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

 

(This originally appeared in a another version in  the San Diego Reader, 1975).

In the waning days of 1974, as the hoi polloi queued for Led Zeppelin’s latest eruption of amplified bravado, the rock critics, their brows knitted in a familiar fret, awaited Bob Dylan’s *Blood on the Tracks* with the hushed anticipation of cloistered scholars. The masses could revel in their sonic bacchanals, all sweat and decibels; the critics, those fastidious sentinels of taste, craved something weightier, a voice to parse the nation’s disquiet. Dylan was no mere troubadour—he was a chameleon, a poet of the asphalt and the soul, whose nasal hymns had once seemed to reorder the stars. His pronouncements demanded attention; symposia were convened, pens poised for annotation. Perhaps this exaggerates the fervor, but for years, the press had swaddled him in a cocoon of expectation, their adulation both tribute and burden. Now, rumor held that *Blood* was his homecoming, a retreat from the facile mysticism and barroom bonhomie of recent years. I settled into my chair, skeptical, curious for the inevitable sleight of hand. The critics, it appeared, had already uncorked their champagne. *Blood on the Tracks* is Dylan as his acolytes remember him: the harmonica’s thin, asthmatic wail, like a wind skittering through a deserted alley; a voice that stumbles and gasps, tethered to no rhythm save its own caprice; lyrics that cascade in a torrent of images, defying meter yet thick with private meaning. It is the Dylan of yore, the Greenwich Village bard reborn, and the critics greeted him with open arms. The counter culture's tip sheet *Rolling Stone*, in high ceremony, banished its usual reviews to make room for a pair of ponderous essays—Jonathan Cott and Jon Landau, high priests of the moment, flanked by a chorus of eminent voices, with only Dave Marsh’s dissent piercing the hosannas. The verdict was near-unanimous: a triumph, a poet’s return, a tapestry of genius. Familiar praises, repolished to a gleam. Yet what unsettles is the ardor itself, a kind of collective yearning. From my modest perch in Clairemont, far from San Francisco’s bohemian haze—where rock stars seem to embody the fan’s unspoken longings—*Blood* feels less like a revelation than a simulacrum, a deftly crafted echo of a voice grown faint. Dylan sounds detached, a performer playing himself for an audience he no longer trusts. It is as if, wearied by the chase, he has lain down in the snow, offering his bones to the circling pack. The image is not a kind one. Once, I too fell under Dylan’s spell. In the acne-scarred fervor of junior high, his sneer was a talisman, his mystique a lantern in the suburban dusk. He was untouchable—defiant, electric, a man who spurned the world’s judgment with a curl of his lip. His life was a mosaic of excess: the endless road, glimpsed in the flickering frames of D.A. Pennebaker’s grainy verite *Don’t Look Back*; the rumored pharmacopoeia—amphetamines, perhaps heroin, a brush with acid; whispers of liaisons with Allen Ginsberg, apocryphal or not, that lent him the sheen of a Byronic rogue. He was a poet of America’s underbelly, his songs spilling forth like dispatches from a frontier aflame. *Highway 61 Revisited*, *Bringing It All Back Home*, *Blonde on Blonde*—these were his gospel, a sound sui generis, jagged and alive. His early folk forays were a young man’s masquerade, aping the ghosts of blues and hillbilly bards; what followed *Blonde* was a retreat into domesticity, a softening that drained his fire. *John Wesley Harding* offered glimmers—parables refracted through a biblical lens—but it lacked urgency. *Nashville Skyline*? A friend, now estranged, once claimed it taught him “rednecks are human too.” I swallowed a grimace. To hear *Blood on the Tracks* is to confront the ghost of the Dylan devotee. In 1966-67, he was our mirror, our savior, singing for the awkward, the inward, the boys scribbling verse in lamplit bedrooms, haunted by the draft and the weight of their own inertia. Life was a cocktail of dread and ennui, the suburbs a velvet cage. Dylan’s tangled curls, his reedy defiance, his “go to hell” lyrics—they were a dream of escape, a way to defy the cul-de-sacs without stepping beyond the lawn. He carried our burdens, a scapegoat for a generation too cosseted to follow Kerouac’s dusty road. Time dulled that enchantment. I turned to rawer sounds—Grand Funk’s blunt force over the Moody Blues’ ethereal drift—seeking not insight but obliteration. Dylan, stung by the tepid sales of *Planet Waves* and *Before the Flood*, chose to appease his flock. *Blood* is the result, but it is a warped mirror, reflecting a past that no longer breathes. If *Blood* is a feint, it is also a confession. Dylan abandoned his speed-freak persona for survival’s sake—such fires consume their keepers. To demand that old ferocity is to court a corpse. Recapturing *Highway 61* is like bottling a storm. So, with coffee cooling and cigarette ash lengthening, I watch the record turn. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome” begins—Dylan’s voice nasal, laced with a theatrical sincerity, as if Elvis were crooning for a supper club. The guitars plod, the harmonica sputters like a failing engine, a nod to Gerdes Folk City for those who missed the myth’s first act. He veers off-pitch, scatters references to Rimbaud and Delacroix, teasing the annotators. Who is this for? “Tangled Up in Blue” fares better, its voice truer, but it lacks revelation. “Simple Twist of Fate” stumbles. “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” reaches for *Highway 61*’s surreal shimmer but collapses into cliché, a tale told too often. The platitudes gather like dust, stifling the air. My cigarette burns to its nub; I resist the urge to halt the needle. This is a bitter pill from a man who once seemed to hold the cosmos in his throat. Yet I gleaned my Dylan truths long ago—I should not mourn. New voices beckon: Little Feat’s earthy pulse, Roxy Music’s urbane glitter, Harvey Mandel’s sinuous lines, perhaps Queen’s baroque audacity. The band lumbers on, Dylan mimicking himself with a faint, knowing smile, as if he sees through his own charade. The parade has passed, its banners faded. The record ends, the arm lifts. I turn on the radio, and Led Zeppelin’s primal wail floods the room—a coarser, truer song.

I AM TIRED OF DRYING THE CAT BY HAND --a chat with Barry Alfonso and Ted Burke

Barry Alfonso

Time for Jamul to re-load?

Ted Burke

THE HAIRY EYEBALL ogles a moist towelette.

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Barry Alfonso

Skinplate had some OJ you wouldn't believe.

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Ted Burke

THE geek detector runs on Duracel

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Barry Alfonso

Where are you now, Jake...and where are my bitcoins?

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Barry Alfonso

In Santee, "drying the cat by hand" means taking a single woman out to dinner, saying flattering things to her, picking up the check and then giving her the phone number of your brother-in-law, I understand.

Ted Burke

It has been said that "drying the cat" means mispronouncing the names of jazz musicians like Theolonious Monk and Ornette Coleman in an Telegraph Avenue methadone clinic. "Drying the Cat By Hand" is a variation heard in the Tenderloin and up to North Beach, meaning that you announce to Amiri Baraka that Boots Randolph played better sax than Coltrane or Shorter.

Barry Alfonso

I've also heard that it is a derivation of the old blues expression "shave 'em dry," meaning to cut off the head of a glass of beer with a straight razor before attacking someone in the solar plexus over a Stetson hat.

Ted Burke

I've heard tell of that as well and it makes me wonder if that is related to the practice of ordering a shot and beer and dry towel twisted into a rat tail and snapped cruelly to the back of the drinker's bare neck by everyone in the bar named either "Earl" or "Ondine".

Barry Alfonso

A lot of this has been lost and confused over the years, I suspect -- a "dry cat" used to be slang for a guy with a flat top and bad dandruff. It was a custom to rub scalps like that for luck before a dice game or before rubbing spices into a jerk chic…

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Ted Burke

There was the habit among dairy farmers of rubbing their bovines with mewing kittens for no real reason; "drying the cow" became "drying the cat" over time, an understandable conflation, and the implication of the phrase is that one is standing around irritating another living creature for no good reason. But since when does anyone need a good reason to irritate someone?

Barry Alfonso

That's right! Now I remember. Will Rogers did a bit about this and in fact got arrested in Tulsa for demonstrating how it was done. There's a famous photo of Junior Samples from Hee Haw "drying the cat by hand" behind Stringbean's back when he thought the cameras were off.

Ted Burke

*Absolutely! This in turn inspired Pynchon's famous opening line of his magnum opus 'The Crying of Litter Box 29". "A dry cat came screamng across the sky..."

Barry Alfonso

Right, that was a literary in-joke for many years standing. Hemingway took a swing at Frank Yerby after he wrote that Papa had been drying the cat with both hands for years...

Ted Burke

On a related note, Norman Mailer misunderstood Russell Kirk when he announced that what really wanted was a "cat dried by hand". Mailer took this to be a translation of Parsian street slang used among working girls meaning that the person who uttered the phrase was in desperate need of being buggered, but that lacked the needed ticket for admission.Mailer told Kirk that he had his ticket "right here" and demanded Kirk "give up the cat." William Buckley was amused by the whole thing and had Mailer on his tv show several times.

Barry Alfonso

Well, I do remember Gore Vidal giving Buckley the hairy eyeball on TV during the '68 Democratic convention and saying, "You really are drying the cat by hand a little hard tonight, old boy" while Buckley let something moist and shiny collect above his upper lip.

THE STOOGES IN THEIR ELEMENT

 

Iggy Pop was a drummer in blues bands before he and his fellows formed the Stooges in the 60s, and as this song demonstrates, the experience wasn't wasted. Iggy and his mates understood, that is to say, felt the vaguely described but conspicuous force that blues had, simple, sonic, repetitive and impolite to any standard measure of tempo. This was the kind of music that was the blend of instinct and wits, a boxer's set of reflexes to things that get in your way. Guitar, drums and are a distorted grind and the tempo of nails hammered.

The Ashtons smashed mightily. Iggy, of course, was the man alone, a three-semester course of unreconstructed Id that inhabiting the center of every ganglion of nerves the brain tried to lay claim to; the superego to twitch and become more reptilian by the second. He was that kid in drainpipe jeans who carried a sharp stick with a brown, mung encrusted nail through it, waiting on the corner for someone as yet unknown to walk by and get poked with it. There was no fun, so you made your own, just to see what happens. These were Mailer's White Negros for a fact, except they shivved me a man who was tailing them and talking too much in the other muse mute streets of two-story burn pads and deserted storefronts that had their front windows sealed with concrete and layers of old concert posters and spray paint exclaiming gang signs and Jesus. Anyone daring to talk past this kid deserved to be whacked with the rusty nail. It was cruel and pointless until something genuine happened to change everything; the bit that everyone knows in the world of the Stooges is that transcendence is not on the agenda, ever.

No band embraced nihilism with more profound off-handedness than The Stooges. Part of their genius lies in t their lyrics, hardly cliché but not conventionally poetic, these were rhymes that were spare and simple, and powerfully to the point, talking about the small matters of frustration that send the young mind into paroxysms of rage and self-recrimination. Ever say something or overheard a phrase from someone else uttered in exasperation or another kind of brain locking state where what is said is so starkly simple and clear and unadorned by apology or other sorts of mental equivocation that it resembles brilliance? That’s my take on the collective lyrics of the Stooges, words as an instinctive reflex, Nor was their music dependent on the trivial concern of instrumental virtuosity.

This was the sticking point with many critics at the time when their first album, The Stooges, was released in 1969. In a counter-culture that was ironically putting premiums on the extreme professionalism of well-trained musicians who could hit notes precisely and improvise at length over increasingly tricky time signatures, the Stooges were the textbook example of the anathema, an insult to the taste-maker elite. Reviews were generally insulting to the band’s repetitive slam and clang approach, and it is one of the wonders of staying alive long enough to see a groundbreaking band, unfiltered from the start, outlast the negativity and change the critical consensus. The intelligentsia had to catch up with them. The Stooges rejected formal instruction on their musicianship and, in turn, weren’t about to suffer the instructions the snoots and snobs demanded they follow.

What’s ironic is that Rolling Stone, the arbiter of quality in matters of the New Rock, still had integrity in their record reviews at the time and allowed one of their original rock critics, Ed Ward, to let the air out of the inflated importance of over-serious rock music and the earnest critiques they inspired by his review of the album. The first two paragraphs have Ward offering a thumbnail sketch of the band’s background, quickly followed the expected litany of sins, that Iggy is a bad Jim Morrison imitator, the lyrics are sub-literate, the guitar and drum work is lifeless and lacking even the dignity of being mechanical. The something wonderful happened halfway through. He summarized his feelings thusly “Their music is loud, boring, tasteless, unimaginative and childish.” Then something remarkable happened.

With the grievances listed, and the verdict delivered,Ward added, in a single sentence, standing alone , unencumbered by other sentences, “I kind of like it”, Ward performed an endearing bit of proto-deconstruction, using the aforementioned deficiencies in the music as examples of virtue, value, honesty, artistic vision. It was one of the great pieces of rock criticism because here Ward created the basis of real aesthetic argument that maintained, essentially, that the Stooges were the true face and sound of a rock and roll that was relevant to life as it was being lived by millions, a voice, sound, and poetry from the curb, alley and shuttered doorway that wanted nothing to do with millionaire musicians with long hair striving to achieve legitimacy by mimicking and misreading the most superficial elements of High Culture. Ed Ward established the concerns that Lester Bangs soon picked up and turned into a masterful argument with the dying of the light. We can thank Ed Ward and the Stooges for that relief.

This was a band that went in the other direction when they began their quest to find what lay beyond avant-garde posturing in Music during the 60s away from trudging drum solos and long-form guitar essays. Iggy and the Stooges were primitive, out of tune, irritated and irritating in turn. It was a matter where the band and their frontman, Iggy Pop (nee Stooge) blended perfectly, given their ability to turn something that sounds horrible and repetitive into a crashing, sustained drone of attitude, and Iggy's serpentine stage presence and clipped verbal dexterity. He was the guy who couldn't sit stand and would stand for nothing less than what he wanted in full, and they were the grind of the city turned into a droning inner voice prodding him to smash down whatever walls came before him. It wasn’t that he was a bad boy going contrarily to the niceties of all things middle class and calcified, it wasn’t that he as a sentient being had identified an artifice he disliked and defined himself in opposition to it; it was more like Iggy Stooge was unaware of the feelings of others, greater ramifications of dangerous self-gratification, or any code of behavior the rest of us depend on keep drivers and pedestrians, for example, on the streets and the sidewalks, respectively. He was the unadulterated id, a squirming mass of impulse that transgressed boundaries, mashed together poetry and porn, and displayed no interest in theorizing about what he had done or about what he was thinking of doing. His was the case of living in the present tense solely, and whatever sensation presently was utmost.

Let us not be mistaken about this, as Iggy Stooge’s persona and psyche had the virtue of being monochromatic; his immediate impulse was not the only thing that mattered. There simply wasn’t anything else. All this play against the quarrelsome insomniac raunch of Ron Ashton’s guitar work, elementary, rudimentary, undeniable effective, endlessly influential. What he lacked in technique he made up for in essence, a counterpoint to the corrosive thrills of Iggy’s distilled juvenile delinquency; his guitar work might be politely described as “steady”, but this a dodge against the annoyance factor this band turned into a new aesthetic. “Persistent” is more apt, like a dislodged bit of a fender dragging along the highway, kicking up sparks near the gas tank, or a door slamming for hours in a strong wind, or jackhammers at night carving up your street at precisely the moment your brain demands you sleep or die inanely. Obnoxious, profound without knowing. We should all be grateful these guys wielded musical instruments, not guns. Or worse.