Man
oh man, what a band. They were a band of technically competent
musicians who came up with one good production, their inspired
production of "You Keep Me Hanging On". It was an inspired move to slow
down the Supremes' most jacked-up hit . Instead of the ringing
-telephone shrillness of the original, this became instead a mock-fugue,
building tension and releasing it effectively erotic explosions.
Sometimes I still thrash around the living room with this song in my
head, miming Vince Martel's clanging power chords with broad sweeps of
my hand. VF's arrangement of this song became the standard approach for
the most part; Rod Stewart did a credible take of his that borrowed
heavily from the Fudge's initial recasting. Sadly, though, the band
relied too much on that one idea, too often.
Their songs, original or
reinterpretations, tended to be dirge like and down right pompous,
dullsville, a drag. And their album "The Beat Goes On" beat Yes to the
punch , producing the single most pretentious and bombastic concept
album years before the British band mustered up that three disc
Hindenburg they titled "Tales from Topographic Ocean." Vanilla Fudge has
a mixed legacy, but the one thing they did well, the storm and thunder
that comprises their version of "You Keep Me Hanging On", they did
brilliantly. It is a thing forever and so few of us accomplish that even
in our most inflated fantasies.
Purchased for a buck at a garage sale, an over-busy if an often inspired bit of Sixties art-pop. The ambition is the attempted embrace of the width and breadth of American popular music, and though Parks fails to accomplish this, the disc is admirable, with the embrace of Gershwin, ragtime, and Charles Ives being nicely enveloped within a semi-scored album where the "concept" album achieves what other rock art music fails to get; the concept meets up with continuity. Always interesting, though Parks' voice is nasal and over-enunciated. His lyrics have been described as "esoteric Rod McKuen", which is fine if that's all you can think of when poetry comes to mind. It reads more like if James Merrill rhymed consistently in his elongated stanzas. Fantastic job on Randy Newman's "Vine Street". "...But, in truth, more often I just reach for Harry Nilsson...." is what critic Miles Milo said in an online forum when the chatter dwelled on this disc for a few postings. Point taken, in as much as Nilsson was as hooky as he was the musically brilliant; he was as much a wise guy as a whiz kid. That said, I am getting more into Song Cycle the third and second time I gave it spin today, and for all the obvious trappings of Sixties simulacra when it comes to replicating older regional styles, ala Sgt. Pepper (a curse a few survived when they tried the album-as-art business), this particular disc has integrity and some guts under the esoterica. Parks' version of this exotica is lusher, more loving, and akin to what E.L. Doctorow had done in his period novels Ragtime and World's Fair: the resplendent vision of a more elegant and simple time is made odd and unfamiliar as contemporary psychological crises emerge from the tasseled finery. His perversions, his dissonances are delightfully bracing, if such a thing can be; the smart move is that he goes after Ives and molds the orchestrated and grandiose Americanism into something large, a little insane but not evil by any means. The ideas work as a unified whole. His grasp of orchestration and classical composition exceeds what Frank Zappa brought to the public. Plus, "Vine Street" is simply one of the best covers of a Randy Newman tune I've come across in my years. An additional plus is his deconstruction of "Donovan's Colours"; the original melody is all but obscured and obliterated outright by Park's inspiring pile-ups of sound and overt virtuosity.
I never got to meet poet Shann Palmer , who passed away yesterday , but I did get to know her at Slate's now defunct reader forum, Poems Fray. There was a loyal group of us who, as forums tend to be, were passionate , insightful, sometimes angry and excitable to varying degrees, and we opined at length on matters of poetry, poets, poetics and ,yes , poetry again. Many of us were poets on the forum and a few of us were actually good. Shann, though, was not "actually good" at writing poetry; she was bloody superb and had a way with building a series of sentences that formed perfectly etched stanzas, the stanzas in turn following a thought through its permutations in the real world, remembered and current, and her conclusions were nearly always the perfect summations of a poet, a person who , though perhaps cranky, tired, in love, angry or joyous, knew what she didn't know and looked forward to investigating the next incident, the next adventure. Her images were clear and uncluttered, beautifully spare, her voice was the plain speaking but literate combination of someone thinking out loud and telling you what there is in her world . She was one of the most intimate poets I have read--in my readings there nearly always seems to be a confidant, a husband, another person being spoken to, or rather , spoken with. Shann's gift, her gift to us, was that hers was not a poetry of conclusions, summaries or getting things nailed into place. It seemed more like a conversation she was having, in progress. Her passing brings me sadness because there is not just one less friend, of a sort, in my life, but one less significant poet in the world to inspire me to write another poem, to fill another page. God speed, Shann.
Two poems by Shann Palmer, originally published by electica.org:
fat-bottomed
girls you make the rocking world go round
how much is
too much? how much cake and condiments chocolate decadence crushed
nuts on whipped cream dreams sugar wafers extra sugar salad on the
side hell on both sides cointreau soaked fresh fruit panne bread
garlic butter spread all the way to the edge of the toast cinnamon and
sugar coffee latte mint cookie not to mention entrees wellington well
done spanakopita shepherd's pie en crustade layered lasagna
mozarella moshed ricotta enough to make an angel weep kate smith sing
another song liz let out another inch shelley bed another star-struck
boy rosie bite a dog vanessa stop watching a Boston
ballerina dies for want of bone Paris models with sunken eyes shoot
horses in a world where children starve there are no easy menus no
compassionate cuisine only secrets in every house in every kitchen in
every heavy heart.
You can't
spit
around here
without hitting a poet or novelist these days dime a dozen like my
daddy's cheap detective magazines back in the fifties as if any of 'em
know what the hell I'm talking about. we used to
have integrity once or twice a month shit I knew I would never be left
alone or without a drink there was always something jumpin' somebody
laying low someone to sleep with course that had another set of
problems there was that woman in Tucson used to say her crabs had the
clap she was telling the truth too. we'd put on
the Doors or the White album smoke weed until we were comatose
watching the candle dance on the adobe as if it meant something maybe
Gilman would have some sweet hash there was that time Pfieffer jumped
the train with a couple of Black Panthers on the run standing out on
the porch watching the stoplight change talking about the whole
goddamn universe being a celluloid moebius strip slept on the floor
landlady came by the next morning said we were all pigs but didn't throw
us out we were fine buncha crappa always paid on time in spite of our
intense recreational illegal activities we weren't dopers we were
intellectuals. reading poems
with gravity Jim would blow smoke in my face but I never cracked if Steve
wasn't there he'd try other things that sometimes worked but that's better
left unsaid my words transcended thought he told me I'd tell him the future
none of it came true except we never married and I'm still writing poetry
pulling lint out of my navel and calling it art.
Greatest American novel is a subject that exists along side such topics
YouTube topics who the fastest guitarist is , or the fan boy delights of
slinging invective at each in the course of ruminating on the image of
Superman v The Hulk. The fun in all that is that it inspires everyone to
put on their Expert Pants and invent conditions, causes and criteria
for their favorite --guitarist, Super Hero, novel--and use them as
bludgeons against a legion of other equally engorged enthusiasts who, in
turn, have their individual favorite and wield rhetoric devices no less
bludgeoning.
Even Norman Mailer, who was honest enough to admit that he
actually wanted to write something called the Great American Novel
admitted , after decades of brilliant books, that such a thing, a single
entity,does not and cannot exist. The American Experience, or any
historically collected National Experience, is too complex and changing
too fast for one set of qualifications to set permanently. The greatest
American novel, I think, will only be decided, finally ,when we are
extinct and someone else , something else assumes the job of figuring
out who we were, what we did, and what of that is worth a damn thing.
"What is that unforgettable line?” ― Samuel Beckett Existentialism is when I discover that I'm the private joke .I
think Beckett would appreciate those who can pierce through that
psychic prophylactic against comprehension and grasp the humor he observed and
recorded. I have the idea that Beckett permeated the membrane that divides
this reality from the metaphysical one, in Plato's sense of the term (and
Wallace Stevens as well with his theories about the Supreme Fiction) and
instead of finding Ideal Types as promised, he found an empty room.This can be a
comedy Kierkegaard and Bergman can also get behind, a God who is silent and
likely engrossed in anything apart from what's going on in the human situation.
People, his creations, are pretty much treated as laundry or broken toys or
anything else he refuses to deal with, repair or restore. I always found it
comic that the Idiot God we think is wise and all knowing is something human
personalities entreat with prayer, mythology, art, poetry to give the
world a sense of order, albeit an invisible one, and that there is meaningand purpose to the mostly terrible and
tedious events and fates that befall us; the punchline is that we modify the dynamics
of the imagined , purpose-giving narrative we think we assign the world as a
means of making it seem as if there is reason and a greater purpose served no matter how ugly, inane and repetitiously tragic like actually turns
out to be. Our conversations and our actions become bizarre and baroque,
symbolic of nothing in particular. Man continues to entreat God for wisdom, and
God keeps playing with the remote control for something else to distract Him. Meanwhile , some of us would insist that there is indeed something arguably in place and permanent in a universe that that adheres to the 20th century paradigm of expanding attention-deficit randomness, love, and music. Those two items are permanent items in the storage closet of words and the things they represent that have been dedicated to tripping us up and making us step on the rake yet again. But permanent in what sense? Like everything else already touched on in this compacted rant, it depends on who you talk to and whose theoretical alibi you're willing to suspend disbelief for. Yet let's cut to the quick, slowly: Love and music are not perfections of any sort, but rather, at their
best, a brilliant crafting, or blend, of imperfect motives and tenuously
played sounds. They are processes, albeit enjoyable ones. Perfect things are "done" and advance no further, and are dead. Perhaps we should not settle for the cover letter that comes with our world and choose rather to live as long as we can do so, creatively, fruitfully, happy as we can make ourselves.
Mailer once remarked that his intention with writing Ancient Evenings was to compose a long sequence of novels telling the history of the Jewish people through the experience of one family, beginning in Ancient Egypt before the arrival of Christ, onward through time past various diasporas , persecutions, genocides, successes and setbacks, with the concluding edition of this fictional saga being somewhere in the future , in outer space, with the eyes of the protagonist trained outwards still. As it happens, Mailer was so engrossed in the profound mysteries of Egyptian religious ritual, culture and mythology that he never made past the river Nile. All the same, this is a breathtaking read, generations of magic, politics, reincarnations and aggressively ambiguous sexual engorgement roiling through centuries of particularized vanity. This is ,as others have correctly asserted, an overlong book , and one suspects that had Mailer been less known and an good editor had applied the blue pencil on those passages that were merely lugubrious , we would have had a tighter, punchier novel. But Ancient Evenings is one of those exotic expressions of unexpected genius that the passages that threaten to sink under the weight of all that sexual energy being put forth don't become tedium, but rather the texture of a fantastically realized fever dream; there are fantastic battles, eroticism beyond gender, magic in the ancient ways as men and women seek power and dominion over their own soles against mysterious and powerful forces that have placed them in impossible states of yearning. This is a brilliant novel by a writer who , I believed, is one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. That last assertion is a debate that won't be resolved here, but I do encourage anyone with a taste for ambitious historical fiction with a skewed sense of the supernatural to read this book.
I always thought Dionne Warwick was a vocal original. The going tradition for black pop and soul singers had been a very gospel, shout to the rafters approach that required range and training. Warwick had the training, obviously, but not the vocal range, and managed to work spectacularly well within her limits. She had an interesting, offbeat sense of when to sing a lyric, a subtle tone of sadness in the lower register; there was a magical sense of her speaking to you directly, softly, after a good cry. This is shown in the video of Walk on By, a song that begins with the pacing of someone trying to hurry down a street, trying to avoid eye contact with a former lover they can't bring themselves to see, a perfect mood, at the edge of the frantic, as Warwick movingly, slowly sings the opening words of her imagined speech to her ex-paramour :
If you see me walkin' down the street
And I start to cry each time we meet
Walk on by, walk on by
Make believe that you don't see the tears
Just let me grieve in private 'cause each time I see
I break down and cry, I cry
Walk on by, don't stop
Walk on by, don't stop
Walk on by
This is one of the great heartbreak songs of the era, and it shows Warwick's particular genius for softly dramatizing a lyric by underplaying the emotion. Leslie Gore, Patty Duke, and a myriad other pop proto-divas would have raised the roof beams with this song, but Ms. Dionne finds the right pitch. The sorrow, self-pity, and resignation are all there, but the quality of Warwick's singing places her not in a sort of hysterical moment of solipsistic self-pity. Still, someone, actually, is more the Hemingway stoic, shouldering the pain and the grief and dealing with what everyday life demands. Of course, there is that sweetly sad piano figure in the chorus that presents an effective change in tempo and mood, a circling keyboard figure that halts the forward motion of the narrative and stops the narrator, our singer Dionne, dead in her tracks, briefly and sharply remembering the pain of breaking up.
These are rare and beautiful attributes in a singer, the capacity to emote on such a small scale; she was the exact opposite of the late Gene Pitney, who turned every sad song into an aria of teen heartache. Both singers, incidentally, were blessed to have sung many songs by the Bacharach/David team, two men who knew how to write songs for a singer's vocal strengths.
Bear in mind, I was a big fan of Pitney's. For comparison, above is Pitney singing "I'm Gonna Be Strong," written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (later covered by Cyndi Lauper in her early band Blue Ash). An extreme bit of heartache here, with the perfect singer for the sad tale. The tempo is the same throughout, but as it progresses, subtly but quickly, Pitney's voice is stronger, filled with more self-aggrandizing emotion, a man turning in his sleep and trying to burn his way through his loss with nothing but stoicism, but who, in the final hour, alone, will just weep as hard and as loud as he is able. The way Pitney's voice climbs to his highest register is chilling, equaling the grandiose swell of the orchestration.
Tortured high notes were precisely what Pitney's music was about, observable in the operatic, compressed, grandiose, and florid teen angst songs he sang with a voice that could start out low, smooth, slightly scratchy with restraint, and then in the sudden turn in tempo and a light flourish of horns or sweeping, storm-bringing violins, slide up the banister to the next landing and again defy gravity to the yet the next level as he his voice climbed in register, piercing the heart with melodrama and perfect pitch as the banalest love stories became the raging of simultaneous tempests. It was corny on the face of it, but Pitney had the voice, and he had the songs to pull it off and make records that still have that stirring hard-hitting effect; "Town Without Pity," "It Hurts To Be In Love," "Twenty Four Hours to Tulsa," "I'm Gonna Be Strong." A substantial string of other hits ( 16 top twenty hits between 1961 and 1968) took the tearjerker to the next level. As mentioned by someone the other day in the British press commemorating his music, his tunes weren't loved songs; they were suicide notes. Pitney's multi-octave sobbing qualified as Johnny Ray turning into the Hulk, wherein the sadder he was made, the stronger his voice became. All this was enough for me to buy his records in the early Sixties when I was just making my way to developing my own tastes in musicians and their sounds. Most of the early stuff I liked--The Four Seasons, Peter Paul, and Mary--I dismiss as charming indulgences of a young boy who hadn't yet become a snob, but Pitney? I kept a soft spot for his recordings in my heart and defended him in recent years when those verbal battles about musical tastes found his name impugned in my presence. The Prince of Perfect Pitch deserves respect for turning the roiling moodiness of teenage love into sublime expressions of virtuoso emotionalism.
