THE BOYS OF SUMMER

 The Eagles: a band I loathe—a troupe of musicians with obvious talents as songwriters, instrumentalists, and vocalists—who try too hard to secure a significant place in rock and roll history. Despite their apparent charms  and conspicuous skills at being tuneful, you can't shake the burdensome feeling that they're  calculated in nearly everything they attempt. Their rock and roll feels sluggish, their ballads dragged out, more a burden than an expression of pathos. And those strained vocals, reaching for that perfect moment when the voice cracks and then swells dramatically—it’s all a bit much. As for the lyrics, especially the weak variations on the gloom and doom of Nathaniel West's downcast novel Day of the Locust found in “Hotel California,” they appear weepy, whiny, and oddly proud of their own low self-esteem. 

They were a defining band of the 70s , the last hurrah for the country-infused rock that dominated SoCal music, but even a period where narcissistic self-regard left an odious trace in too many lyric sheets, The Eagles capacity to feel sorry for themselves was so pronounced and heavy-handed that it became toxic; it made you feel bad not in an exhilarating way that an artist Elvis Costello could achieve (due, perhaps, to Costello's wisdom in making his rhyming ruing of missed chances more compact, not turning them into speeches), but instead in a way that made one want to take a mallet to the stereo that was broadcasting their songs. Not a good thing, yes?

However, there’s an exception: “Boys of Summer.” This solo effort by Don Henley—a singer I never quite warmed to due to his Rod Stewart/Bob Seger/Willie Nelson affectations—stands out. The song is genuinely good, boasting a well-crafted arrangement of guitar textures and an insistent beat. Henley’s singing here seems to draw from a deeper well of inspiration, beyond the usual manager’s playbook. The lyrics are clipped, terse, and vividly convey the sense of a man haunted by memories of lost love—an Eden he cast himself out of. And then there’s the video: one of the most effective I’ve ever seen in capturing the song’s mood. Black-and-white photography, suitably faded to evoke memories slipping away, blends with home videos superimposed over the stark reality of the present. That scene—the man brooding over his glass-top desk while a Super 8 home film flickers on the wall behind him—is nothing short of brilliant. It encapsulates the stream of regret a man feels when he reflects on the imagined perfection of a past life with the woman of his dreams. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CRAP

"Sewage Has It's Say", a poem by Steven Cramer, stinks to the highest reaches of irony, and it's a fine thing too.A monologue in essence, the essence of which is the voice of what we consume processed and reduced to its fouler essences in turn. This is the food we eat and the drinks we imbibe with all the cosmetics of preparation removed, after all the benefits (nutrition, energy) and debits ( obesity, high blood pressure) have been had. Insulted, railed against, invariably used as a pejorative, equated with the foulest intents and deeds a race is capable of, sewage finds it's voice, it talks back to the world that is other wise obliged to consume and make crap and crud an unavoidable consequence; there is hypocrisy here, the fetid mess proclaims, everything winds up in this repulsive stew:

Give me roots prying into the joints

of your main waste line, Charmin

thickening her web first to a nest,

then to a dam, and I'll sluice in reverse,

top the basement tub and spill

into a poem! Damn! I've sunken

to new heights! Will you take

a hint and stomach your disgust?

What does The Thinker look like

he's doing? How come Luther heard

God's thunderclap of justice via faith

whilst sitting on the privy?

Steven Cramer has an especially acute wit to imagine a dark mass taking on a voice one could imagine being intoned by a hammy Shakespearean actor intent on over-emoting the lines, a misunderstood and maligned end product talking shop with a product , Charmin, that's ostensibly dedicated to wiping it out. But wipe as much you can, the stinking sludge maintains, you will become part of this flushed proletariat, these breakdowns of food stuffs, fecal encrusted tissues, diapers, sanitary napkins, condoms, illegal drugs and syringes.

At the heart of the matter is that is we really are what we eat, echoing an otherwise stale counter culture cliché, and regardless of how we gussy up the chambers with spray-can aroma, disinfectants , no matter how much art and artifice we set around our dinner table preparations, regardless to what extreme we pervert language to raise our collective self-image and have our race be at the top of the food chain, we are in the food chain, nonetheless, inseparable, consuming vast amounts of products to keep the mortal body a going concern, producing waste in all varieties, forms.

You know...where love's pitched his mansion, so

don't shower so much. Squeaky clean's

for mice. No soap's got enough tallow

to wash out the mouth mouthing off.

What made you so ... nice? Polite's

kind of like death, isn't it? Okay, not

quite. But consider this, my sweet kin

in excretion: to flies we taste like candy.

Whether it's The Thinker or Theologians considering the feasibility of a personal God, everything resembles the process of taking a dump, a long and ponderous crap, the moment when every idea one has absorbed in passing finally passes through us, if we're lucky enough , leaving only that bit of nutritional purity that has helped us grow, come up with an idea, an invention, a poem that is truly our own. Steven Cramer's personification of an unspeakable and limitless mass of stinking waste as having a voice to raise in it's irony-citing defense is an excellent bit of wit. The literary references are less self-conscious than such citations usually are since his point is to reduce the space between humanity's greatest conceit as an elevated species and the inevitability of it's least appealing biological requirements. Everything is shit, like it or not, all is waste, the finest poems become sludge. One needs to embrace the fact, if not the cistern that contains the messenger.

All reactions:

1Barry Alfonso

My Life and My 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 upfront 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 through, 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 immersion 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 guitarists 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 were among the top bands of the era, one of the top bands in the world, originating in the counter cultural 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 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 on 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 a gratitude for the gift that have 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 cliche, 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 seems 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 note cards 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 and addiction to alcohol through the book’s chapters. Using phrases from the principle writings of Alcoholics Anonymous as well and peppering his text with 12 step mottoes, 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?

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 pay off being an engrossing read blessed with Richard’s hard-won and refreshingly off hand 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 it gets mentioned in passing. Mentioned in passing.Been So Long remains an 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.