GENERIC

 

Genres may or may not be vanishing--I am a believer in the cultural dialectic which would have old genres collide and synthesize into new genres, starting the cycle all over again--but I do find it somewhat intriguing to consider the critic who is somewhat behind the times and yet stays in the argument. Criticism feels the continuity and discontinuity of what consumers are amusing, enlightening, or dulling themselves with; the critic who is slightly out of step is likely to be the one to puncture the more ridiculous claims of the most recent claimants of the spotlight. The older critic, the fogie still operating on values somewhat frayed at the edges, is often the one to think beyond the latest raft of buzz phrases. Genres are likely to remain with us, as humans love to give things names, and something in the spirit of manhood desires those distinctions to be made and claimed. They simply can't be wished away because a New Yorker Official Smart Person thinks they should. 

"History" didn't end, as Francis Fukuyama said it would in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man; his thesis was that with the end of fall of Communism, history as a record of war, strife, and struggle, would end, and as relations between nations relaxed, the world would transcend ideologies and other divisions and create a more harmonies planet motivated by cooperation. The complete triumph of the free market. That never happened, and the world is arguably more problematic than it's ever been. History is still with us, and the concept of genres will remain with us as well. I don't think musicians are thinking about "post-genre" ideas when they make music, as creation is a psychological process as much as a physical one. In such the act of creation, the artist (all kinds of artists) are thinking, I believe, less about what rules they can ignore or what boundaries they can transgress. More about what they can make use of, whatever it may happen to me, however unlike, dissimilar, glaringly awkward the styles, the parts of the creation, may seem to be. 

Their goal is to bring things together, whatever influences them and strikes their fancy. The appropriate it, twist it, change it, synthesize to something new, a work of art is a representation that hadn't existed before. But whatever the result, critically praised or damned, the object remains connected to history and the genres from which it attempted to abandon. This new work gets identified, described, classified, cataloged, it gets a name, it becomes a genre whose particulars are known and yet malleable within each piece the artist creates. It's an old story; in music, musicians have been genre-jumping for decades. One of my first albums was EAST/WEST by the Butterfield Blues Band, in which an inter-racial blues band took on Indian-raga/Modal jazz improvisational methods. The achievement was influenced by another transgressive innovator John Coltrane, who stepped out of his bop lineage to change how jazz was performed. The examples are endless. "Post genre," ironically, seems to be a genre itself.

As long as musicians continue to, by choice, write and record songs that fall into specific categories and subcategories--blues rock, metal, rap-rock, fusion, reggae, ska, country-rock, the whole shooting match. Genres, as we've always understood, are not dead. An obsession filters through the academic and critical universe that likes to announce that some particular form or medium is mortal because times have gotten so strange. Technology is now so pervasive that genre distinctions no longer apply and that we are now free to mix and match our tastes at will. This implies we have been liberated from some horrible tyranny; these kinds of global pronouncements have little to do with what's happening in the trenches, as it seems consumers like their genres --with the implication that there are many genres they happen to enjoy for their differences from other forms of music they happen to like-- and artists, young and otherwise, strive to maintain the various traditions meaningfully and moving while at the same time perverting the stylistic limits of the respective song forms by tweaking it with musical ideas from other areas. This, of course, creates new genres that will have cool names to describe their distinction. Nothing has died. However well specific approaches fare in the marketplace, it's not accurate to maintain we are in some area that has transcended genres. They are, in fact, thriving.

Jack DeJohnette's "Special Edition" (1980)

 Special Edition -Jack DeJohnette (ECM)

Considering the line-up on this disc- -drummer DeJohnette,, alto saxist Arthur Blythe and tenor saxist and bass clarinetist David Murray, and bassist Peter Warren--you would have thought it would have been a significant breakthrough record, one of those legendary sessions that chart new directions in the art. This ensemble, though, had no intentions of blazing any new trails, as the music stays safely within the boundaries of what we’ve heard before. He sustains the confident tone through the wildest stretches of his soloing, an unpredictable style that finds nuance and unexpected inroads in a solo space. 

Blythe, on the other hand, exploits the alto sax for all it's worth, often changing moods from the whimsical and lyrical to the soulfully anguished. DeJohnette plays solidly under their playing, rumbling like Philly Joe Jones one moment, accentuating hard-rock bass·drums another, and continual-ly fragmenting and piecing back together rhythms as the music flow onward. 

Bassist Warren seems the odd man. This isn't to say that this record lacks spark. Special Edition is fresh and lively, highlighting first·rate at the hands of Blythe and Murray. Throughout the disc, their instruments join in a variety of harmonic settings-the fusion-tinged "One For Eric," the rhythm and blues riff of "Zoot Suit," the ethereal texturizing on John Coltrane‘s tone poem "Indian-and at key points branch out to establish their own personalities. Murray, alternating between tenor sax and bass clarinet, offers a strong, out here, maintaining a fairly conservative attitude as he backs the others dutifully, which is to say, with vim, vigor, vitality.

AMANDA GORMAN

Well, Inaugural poet Amanda Gorman for her composition "The Hill We Climb" is preparing a collection of her writing for publication with a major publisher with a tour to follow; she's garnered a deal to work as a fashion model. How is she as a poet? Honestly, it is at least as good as the best work of an advanced poetry writing class. It would be a solid B if the grading criteria were based solely on my admittedly dreadful preferences when it comes to poets. It's okay, merely okay, held back by its many flights of high and hopeful rhetoric that start to chafe as the piece progresses to the end. Yes, it sounds like a graduation speech given by the High School Creative Writing Club president. 

 On another matter entirely, some aged experimentalists have the idea that the Avant guard they grew on and within is where History of all manner ought to have ended. In the meantime, events, and tastes, as anyone can claim to understand them, have evolved, or at least moved on, if in circles, and there remains the idea of the Public Poet and The Poem of the Moment.

Social constructions, perhaps, but people seem to need them and believe in them and find some reason to make the make coffee in the morning because of them and dozen another reassuring albeit banal comforts. "The Hill We Climb" is a Poem of the Moment, not to my liking entirely, and Gorman is a Public Poet by any definition you care to give the term. I suspect she will transcend the Poet appellation and evolve into a (C.Wright) Millsian power player in the guise of Pure Celebrity, an influencer. Or maybe she'll become a decent writer of finely considered prose. We'll see if time allows.

ROYAL PAIN

 

So this sudden mess concerning the estrangement of Harry and Meghan from the  Royal Family, as revealed to our National Confessor Oprah? The needless distraction of the moment,  and it's likely this will find the dustbin of history  by the coming weekend. It's hard to worry about the personal sanity and happiness of exquisitely well people no matter the issues at hand--racism, sexism, tastes in music and high sugar power drinks--when the rest of the world has to go to work in the morning and fret in our off moments about rent, groceries, credit card balances. I have cared nothing about the  Royal Family, a state supported assemblage of symbolically  useless humanity who serve no useful or humane purpose, though it seems both millions of British subjects love these lavished upon wastrels and the UK Press needs them to keep their Fleet Street gossip rags and websites abuzz. Something fouler here , buried perhaps not so deep in  the population psyche, an element far more odious and evil than the simple excuse that national obsession  is simply a way for  citizens to  celebrate an institution uniquely British. The  Royals at the end of any day they live through, are a symbol of what was the British Empire, a long running foulness that had racism, xenophobia and genocide at the base of any high-minded philosophy that was used to justify the centuries old practice of subjugating non white populations. It isn't just a puppet show they're putting on here, it's closer to Civil War reenactment, were the issue of racism was close to the surface, in front of the mind,  a wish deferred for the time being. That this democracy allows this institution to thrive in full knowledge that it represents the worst sins of the Empire to this day is flabbergasting. Was anyone  really outraged, really shocked that the family was stressed as to how dark the forthcoming Archie's skin tone might be?

'LIVE AT THE BEE HIVE"-- Cifford Brown , Sonny Rollins cook on the band stand

 

Live at the Bee Hive - Clifford Brown and Max Roach (Columbia)

 Live at the Beehive is a wild and wooly document of the excitement of the jam session. Recorded in a Chicago bar in 1955, the audio quality  is not the best, as the sound is muddy and flat, there's an excess of surface noise, and the continual buzz of customers ordering drinks and talking through the best solo moments are sn annoyance. The music from the bandstand easily overcomes and transcends the grouchy ambience. The collective sound is lively, rambunctious and packs the punch of a chain-mail glove.The several extended forays of the late Clifford Brown are especially exciting. Before his sudden death, Brown had established himself as possibly the premier trumpet player on any jazz scene, and this record, especially the workout on Sonny Stitt's "Cherokee," reminds us of his incandescent powers as a soloist. Clifford possessed a big, fat sound, and was alternately lyrically sublime and frenetically rapid in his choice of note. Bee Hive is a handy display case of this man's brilliance. The other players hold their own as well. The searing sax work 'of Sonny Rollins and Nicky Hill, the shimmering guitar of Lou Blevins and the pulsating time kept by pianist Billy Wallace and drummer Max Roach is featured. Audio quality is ragged, which is to  be expected, but these things are remedied and the music proceeds, quickly regain momentum. Live at the Bee Hive exists as an example of superb musicians just flat-out playing their  hearts out.

Capsule reviews from 1980: SHAMING MAHOGONY RUSH, GENTLE GIANT and PETER ALSOP

What's Next-

Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush (Columbia) T

The story goes that a young Frank Marino freaked out on bad acid some years ago. After being given a guitar by his doctors as part of his recovery therapy, he was soon playing exactly like the deceased Jimi Hendrix even though he had previously never touched the instrument. Marino said in early interviews that he believed the spirit of Jimi had entered him during his recovery and that he had been changed from being just another teenage doper into someone who would carry on what Hendrix had begun. So the story goes. What you can say about Marino, whether you swallow' that crock or not, is that he does sound like Hendrix. But instead of "carrying on" the guitar stylistics and advancing the art of electric guitar, Marino's playing is somewhere in the late 60s, fast and furious, full of echo, feedback, and, unlike Hendrix's occasional moments of bluesy lyricism, utterly graceless. The problem is singular: Marino and Mahagony Rush are incapable of writing a decent riff, a failing that results in Marino ejaculating pud-pounding solos over the material like a meat and potatoes slob drowning the most expensive plate at the Top Of The Cove in a comeuppance of ketchup. Although one has to concede Marino's adeptness, his style becomes wearisome. In the end, What's Next, their newest record seems aimed at the audience who've turned Hendrix into a deity and refused to admit that better guitarists have come along. 

_____

Civilian -

 Gentle Giant (Columbia)

Back in the days when classically-derived rock was all the rage among the small enclaves of pop dilettantes, Gentle Giant set themselves apart from the pack with the unusual continuity and rigid formalism. Their playing. In recent years, though, Giant has been changing their sound, gearing it toward a more commercial appeal so that they might attract a larger audience who might otherwise dismiss them as mere technical tricksters.- Unfortunately, what they sound like on Civilian, their latest record, is merely a watered-down rendition of their old self, bordering almost on self-parody. "The material stays safely within the limits of what the average tolerate - there is little risk-taking here - and except for some pleasant ensemble bits here and there, nothing really gels moving. Also, Derek Shulman's singing - a distraught, emasculated whine - has never been my idea of great crooning, and the lyrics, trapped in the apriori existential murk of alienation and all, amount to nothing more than in articulated pout. Words such as these are enough to make one want to give the linger, incessantly mewling about a world he didn't ask to be born into, a good swift kick in the pants. And not necessarily in the seat. 

_____

Draw The Line -Peter Alsop (Flying Fish)

 

If this were 1967, an anti·-war or Civil Rights march, and if I were 17, 'dad in khaki, stoned beyond what's reasonable in public, and still believing we could have world peace through the right mixture of drugs and indiscriminate sex, I would think that folkie Peter Alsop . was a totally bitchen guy. But this is 1980, and though my politics haven't changed all that much, I think most of us learned the lesson that the world won't be a better place through wishful thinking and pamphlet politics. Alsop , though, seems to exist quite happily in an airless vacuum . He 's what used to be called a "topical" songwriter, and though the things he chooses to sing about - the innate greed principal of capitalism, the principle of nuclear energy,  labor songs, feminisms' liberation of males from the breadwinner role - you find him to be so politically "correct" that you'd like to punch him out. Not that I find anything particularly disagreeable with Alsop's worldview. Alsop gets on my nerves because of his expression, which is didactically self-righteous, shallow, and humorous to only an audience of like-minded politico who already knows the punchlines. And as a propagandist, he lacks the needed ability to turn up with the stirring turn of phrase. This man is not Phil Ochs, Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, or Buffy St. Marie. He is Peter Alsop, an insufferable little snit, a profoundly depressing experience. What else can you expect from a man who probably won't play in any state that hasn't ratified the ERA? 

(Originally in The UCSD Daily Guardian)

PHIL SPECTOR IS DEAD AND SO IS LANA CLARKSON

There will be posthumous praise enough for the brilliant but entirely problematic Phil Spector, who recently croaked of Covid complications. He made magic, he changed the way hits were made, the whole shot . Not that anyone's forgetting that he died as a convicted murderer responsible for the death of Lana Clarkson in 2003. That he was alcoholic, a gun nut and a severely paranoid were well known Spector attributes, a bad combination everyone seemed aware of. It seemed inevitable that something as tragic as the death of Clarkson would happen sooner or later. So lets consider the intersection between one's art and how that art is informed by intractable social attitudes . This 1962 song, HE HIT ME (It Felt Like a Kiss), recorded by The Crystals, written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King and produced by Spector , is the recitative of a teen girl telling the tale of being "untrue" to steady beau by kissing another boy, and that the young cuckhold hit her. "He hit me", the chorus goes, " It felt like a kiss", an efficient and disturbing encapsulation of a battered woman's mind set that the blow was a profession of love .

The victim internalizes the blame infers that she deserved to be punched. Yes, Spector didn't write the song and a more exacting examination is due Spector, guns and violence against women as a matter of course, but it's interesting that his production of a song that makes hitting women a natural consequence of a woman betraying the needs of a male for which the female can only blame herself. Let's remember that this is a pathology and that Spector, along with Goffin and King , perpetuated it, a product toxic to its essentials intended to be sold to an audience that one presumes thinks it's expectable to commit violence as a means of expressing how one feels.

DONOVAN THE GOTH

There’s a telling scene in Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s grainy 1967 documentary of Bob Dylan’s stormy 1965 tour of England. Dylan is in a hotel, filled with tour members, local celebs, musicians, and varieties of hangers-on. The Maestro is rifling through a British paper and happens upon an article on Donovan, the Scottish singer-songwriter who’d been gigging around the folk scene in the Isles and had recently scored a sizeable with his song “Catch the Wind.” He was about 19 years old and the influence of Dylan on the younger singer was obvious in the hit with its acoustic guitar and Donovan’s nasal, twangy singing of the especially poetic lyrics. The only article missing on the song was a wheezy, crestfallen harmonica break. The success of the tune led journalists to call him “the new Dylan” or “England’s answer to Bob Dylan.” Dylan was reportedly bemused at how the press seemed to call for younger folkies to knock him from his supposed throne. This is where we find him in Don’t Look Back, staring at Donovan’s picture in the paper. Alan Price, former keyboardist for the Animals, who was along for much of the tour, sits next to Dylan, a bit drunk, and gives the American the lowdown on the man in the newspaper. 

“…He’s a very good guitar player,” says Price as he weaves to and fro. “He’s better than you.” 

“Yeah,” says Dylan. “Right away I hate him.”

It’s not likely Dylan hated Donovan in any sense. Donovan instead became part of the entourage that followed the charismatic Maestro around. Later, a scene has the Scottish minstrel in another crowded hotel room with Dylan. Donovan plays guitar and sings “To Sing for You,” which earns him a round of friendly applause. The guitar winds up in Dylan’s hands, who then gives a snarling version of “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” Eyes are on Dylan and the room is rapt as the harsh surrealism rings from Dylan’s mouth. 

Donovan didn’t fall prey to the fate of many other “new Dylans” who wound up in relative obscurity after an initial flash of attention. In short order, over the next couple of years, he shed his emulation of the Man from Hibbing and evolved into a diverse artist. His lyrics remained on the poetic side but gone were the feigned mannerism of rural expression. Rather than pretend he was from the back woods, he became more urbane, worldly. His voice matured, becoming more supple, melodic, versatile, and expressive in the wide swath of styles in the eclecticism that became his calling card. His songwriting came to us elements of jazz, pop, blues, a distinct form of acid-rock, and alluring takes on what soon would be called world music. Fans and pundits stopped comparing him to Dylan as Donovan’s personality and broad style came into their own There was a time in the artist’s career when I and other local pop music snobs thought Donovan had jumped the shark a bit with his 1967 release From a Flower to a Garden, notable, among other things, for being rock’s first double studio album. The two discs, though, stressed the nerve endings of too-serious teens like yours truly who wanted it grim, dark, and bleakly existential. Donovan had caught the Summer of Love virus with this release, appearing to go off the rails. He was now the Uber Hippie, transcendental in all matters in the Age of Aquarius. Flowing robes that dragged along the floor, an overkill of love beads, an equal overkill of fresh-cut flowers, bare feet, a haircut that made it looked like the man had combed his mane with an eggbeater—all this plus an expensive acoustic guitar are clues to someone of considerable talent who had started to take himself too seriously. 

Our hero, though, is remarkable for his capacity to change styles and become interested in diverse ways of writing and singing about the world and the larger spiritual universe. And there is, to be sure, a refreshing strain of skepticism, aesthetic distance, and a firm grasp of irony in much of his songwriting that has gone overlooked. The image of Donovan, the-counterculture seer, still tends to cloud much of the public reception when we approach his songwriting craft. His oeuvre needs a major reappraisal by professional critics and high-minded fans, as there are wonderfully made and even sardonic masterpieces among the glitzy paraphernalia of the Youth Quake. Let’s take a look at three songs: “Sunny Goodge Street” (from his second album’s1965 Fairytale), “Epistle to Dippy” (a single released in 1967), and “Young Girl Blues” (from the Mellow Yellow disc in 1966) are quite a bit more cynical and knowing than his later reputation suggests. 

“Sunny Goodge Street” is a panorama of a particular urban hip scene so commonly portrayed in flashy and groovy terms in the ’60s, but Donovan’s version of it makes it seem unpredictable, violent, paranoid, and incoherent. It is closer to William Burroughs than to Scott McKenzie’s version of John Phillip’s saccharine paean to hippiedom, “If You’re Going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair).” As with Burroughs, the air appears to depict a drugged-out state on its own terms. Donovan seemed to understand that the counterculture was as much a creep scene as it was a gathering moment for truth seekers, poets, and sensualists who desired both sex and innocence. While the cost of reaching all sorts of forbidden knowledge, drugs and the attending hype was unknown, and Donovan had a foreboding rarely expressed by a generation of musicians that was self-infatuated. It has a jazz-ballad feel—slow, swaying, almost precariously—the lyrics suggesting a denizen who’s smoked too much trying to stay awake until he finishes saying what he’s determined to get out. 

On the firefly platform on Sunny Goodge Street

Violent hash smokers shook a chocolate machine

Involved in an eating scene 

Smashing into neon streets in their stonedness

Smearing their eyes on the crazy Kali goddess

Listenin’ to sounds of Mingus mellow fantastic 

My, my, they sighMy, my, they sigh 

In dollhouse rooms with colored lights swingin’

Strange music boxes sadly tinklin’

Drink in the sun, shining all around you 

My, my, they sigh

My, my, they sigh 

The magician, he sparkles in satin and velvet

You gaze at his splendour with eyes you’ve not used ye

I tell you his name is love, love, love 

My, my, they sigh

My, my, they sigh 

Nothing specific, profound, or stirring uttered, though, as each sentence chops off the sentence that came before, one idea and detail of the street canceling out the other, the details are blurred rather than vivid impression of the neighborhood. It’s probable that this is what Donovan meant, preferring to give us an indefinite scenario rather than words extolling drug use or hippie culture. We find here that Donovan has mastered the Great Poet’s super power, as did Eliot and Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop, which is to rise to the challenge of not making literal sense in the subject matter and yet still giving us a sense of what the experience was like. No lecture, no propaganda, an accord shattered and pieced back together. Under the sweet music of the lyrics lurks a dead zone of imagination; it is among the more disturbing I remember from ’60s FM radio. 

“Epistle to Dippy” is nothing less than a direct address of a try-anything scene maker who dashes from drug to scene to fad in an irrational attempt to out run their own vacuity, their utter lack of soul or genuine sensibility. In his liner notes for a Donovan box-set Troubadour, writer Brian Hogg relates the song, written in letter form to a friend, which abounds with a strong pacifist message while teeming with psychedelic imagery. Hogg further writes that the actual subject of the song, who was serving in the British military, soon resigned from the service after hearing Donovan’s words that convey a strong extolling of pacifist philosophy. That is the story behind the headline, but I felt something darker into the song since my first listen decades ago. This is a cutting critique, more potent than the Beatles’ polite poo-poohing tune along the same theme, “Nowhere Man.” 

Look on yonder misty mountain

See the young monk meditating rhododendron forest

Over dusty years, I ask you

What’s it’s been like being you?

Through all levels you’ve been changing

Getting a little bit better, no doubt

The doctor bit was so far out

Looking through crystal spectacles

I can see I had your fun

Doing us paperback reader

Made the teacher suspicious about insanity

Fingers always touching girl

Through all levels you’ve been changing

Getting a little bit better, no doubt

The doctor bit was so far out

Looking through all kinds of windows

I can see I had your fun

Looking through all kinds of windows

I can see I had your fun

Looking through crystal spectacles

I can see I had your fun

Looking through crystal spectacles

I can see I had your fun

Rebelling against society,

Such a tiny speculating whether to be a hip or

Skip along quite merrily

Through all levels you’ve been changing

Elevator in the brain hotel

Broken down but just as well-a

Looking through crystal spectacles,

I can see you’ve had your fun…

“Young Girl Blues” is a doleful, world-weary observation, a bittersweet recollection of an ingenue who had gotten tired of her own hipness and the chronic scene-making. The details are spare, bone tired. They create a bleak view of such an noisy and hip scene of the fever-pitched Sixties. Donovan senses the isolation—none of the scene makers can break away from or cure with brand names, loud music, and chemicals. There is. through it all. an implied yet emphatic sense that youth and beauty fade and that the impulsiveness and egocentricity of being young must evolve into maturity lest someone young girl or young man, remain stunted, incomplete in their humanity.

It’s Saturday night

It feels like a Sunday in some ways

If you had any sense

You’d maybe go ‘way for a few days

Be that as it may

You can only say you were lonely

You are but a young girl

Working your way through the phonies

Coffee on, milk gone

Such a sad light unfading

Yourself you touch

But not too much

You hear it’s degrading

The flowers on your stockings

Wilting away in the midnight

The book you are reading

Is one man’s opinion of moonlight

Your skin is so white

You’d like maybe to go to bed soon

Just closing your eyes

If you’re to rise up before noon

High heels, car wheels

All the losers are grooving

Your dream, strange scene

Images are moving

Donovan is a perceptive witness to what unfolded. He skillfully sets a scene with telling details, artfully establishes the mood of the era, and is not reluctant to examine the emotional and psychic dead ends that fester under the utopian hoopla. Donovan realized he was observing a generation waste its potential on trivial frolics. “Young Girl Blues” crystalizes the unwelcome truth that beauty and youth fade and the weight and of existence must be faced. This is The Bard’s way of letting listeners know that one can grow up or grow old. He has the skill to insinuate an anonymous narrator, privy to and sympathetic with the character’s internal struggles, and adroitly outline a small cataclysm as the protagonist journeys from self-delusion to an inevitable, rueful clarity. Donovan is a master of compressed tragedy. 

Among the immensely popular songwriters who emerged from the Sixties revolution Donovan has been given the short shrift. Hardly ignored, of course, but it’s a mystery that there hasn’t been much in the way of broadly circulated critical reappraisals of his music and lyrics considering his extraordinary evolution as an artist. The work has varied in quality over the decades, but what good musician’s work hasn’t run hot and cold in a career that lasted five and a half decades? Donovan very much merits another visit. A closer look, another listen, a reacquaintance of this man’s remarkable oeuvre will bring more masterpieces to the fore, a better sense of what a bright young talent comprehended during a complicated era. It’s my hope that his best and most interesting music, created through fad and fancy of a great many years, finds a broader listenership. The songwriter’s best work holds up, and it holds up for the same reason Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night or Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test hold up against the withering churn of decades; each is an exquisitely etched portraits of the Sixties that bypassed the mass-mediated brainwashing fostered by Time and Life magazines, which spoke of Youth Culture and revolution that was as problematic as the Establishment activists and idealists said needing radical changing.

SUDDENLY REALIZATION

I had for some time refused to get a cell phone and preferred rather to rage at the yakking philistines who couldn't stand silence in public places like bus stops or airline terminals , nor be bothered to bring a book or a magazine with them if they knew they might be alone at some period in the day, between stations, with no one to confirm how goddamned bitchen they were. It was a satisfying arrangement; overworked and underpaid and yet with so much unfulfilled promise that I could bare speak when my anger welled up like some dystopian stew blowing off the oppressive lid, my contempt for cell phones and the tech-addicted jerks who diluted the language with the odious devices was just the thing one needed to get a psychic leg up in the world. I was smarter, I was old school, I revered books and the words printed on them by great writers who took their mission seriously, I cherished meditative quiet and loathed boorishness, I was a man of the ages (or at least the Seventies), I was an arrogant jerk. Arrogant and a jerk, yes, but it fed my ego, made up for whatever perceived failures I might have brooded over and over as the years wore on. In the meantime, a mixed clutch of exchange students drifted toward the curb as the wayward bus finally emerged in the horizon and now approached the red painted curb, every other one of them rambling with a dead pan earnestness in the narrative tongue into cell phones wedged between shoulder and tilted head while they fumbled for bus passes or exact change. Doubtless who ever these folks were talking to knew when their phone mates would arrive, and how to reach their party if they didn't show.

LESLIE WEST RIP. ONLY THE RIGHT NOTES

 Leslie West, guitarist for Mountain , has passed away, age 75. The musician  was at the center of the  since my high school senior year, circa  1971 , which makes this especially sad.  His playing on the song Dreams of Milk and Honey, the live version from  their  ' 71 Flowers of  Evil album, was a I track I    listened to obsessively , all  20 or so minutes of it, for years to come.  Suffice to say that I  pretty well had the performance memorized, every note, every phrase, every transition from one  theme and variation to another, each change in tempo, each down beat and  uptick in volume. Or so it seemed at times as I remember miming West's guitar work in the dresser mirror while the song blared . It seemed I could write a bit of memoir, autobiography let us  say, to each five minute segment of this track and have enough writing to fill a book. I thought I would reprint this here, an appreciation of what I thought the song sounded like to me, something entirely subjective. Leslie West could play guitar.    

What song is going through my head? An old one, old, "Dreams of Milk and Honey" by Leslie West and Mountain, from the second side of their album Flowers of Evil, recorded at the Fillmore East in NYC in 1971. It is one of the great moments of Hard Rock guitar, with a great, lumbering riff that distorts and buzzes on the low strings with crushing bends and harmonics squealing at some raging pitch that might make one think of natural calamity, a force no power could withstand. West, never the most fluid guitarist, had, all the same, a touch, a feel, a sense of how to mix the sweet obbligato figures he specialized in with the more brutal affront of power chords and critically rude riff slinging. The smarter among us can theorize about the virtues of amplified instrumentation attaining a threshold of sweetness after the sheer volume wraps you in a numbing cacophony, but for purposes here it suffices to say, with a wink, that is a kind of music you get and accept on its own truncated terms or ignore outright. His guitar work was a brick wall you smashed into at an unheard number of miles an hour and, staring up at the sky, you noticed the bloom of a lone flower, not to mention a halo of tweeting birds and la-la music. 

 There is an aesthetic at work here, but it might as well come to saying that you had to be me, at my age, in 1971 when I was struck by this performance to understand a little of why I haven't tossed the disc into the dustbin. He is in absolute control of his Les Paul Jr., and here he combines with bassist Felix Pappalardi and drummer Corky Laing in some theme and variation that accomplishes what critic Robert Christgau has suggested is the secret of great rock and roll music, repetition without tedium. There are no thousand-note blitzkriegs, no tricky time signatures, just tight playing, a riffy, catchy, power-chording wonder of rock guitar essential-ism. I've been listening to this track on and off since I graduated from high school, and it cracks me up that my obsession with this masterpiece of rock guitar minimalism caused a few my friends to refer to me listening yet again to my personal "national anthem." This is the melodic, repetitive grind I wished life always were, endlessly elegant and stagnant, shall we say, in perfect formation of the senses, hearing, smell, taste, the arousal of dormant genitalia, all big and large and grinding at the gears that sing sweet mechanical song of intense love heavier than any metal beam you might care to bite into.  The combination of Felix Papalardi's whiny voice singing his wife's bullshit lyrics can ruin any buzz you have going for you. It's the live material that kicks it, with lots of fat, snarling Leslie West guitar work twisting around a punchy set of slow, grinding, distorted hard rock. Yes, arrangements do count, even in rock and roI might have even lit a Bic lighter for this tune. is something beautiful in that as well but, alas, the end result of that is the end waxing poetic. Alas. Sing it, Leslie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHO WAS HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ?

 

Mank, the new David Fincher directed feature film on Netflix, answers a question for many fans of the Orson Wells masterpiece Citizen Kane, who exactly was Herman Mankiewicz, the screenwriter? Effectively portrayed by Gary Oldman, managing to be both flamboyant, folksy and occasionally enigmatic , the film lays out in flashbacks and fast-forwards the tale of a gifted alcoholic playwright and screenwriter who, in financial arrears, agrees to write a screenplay for Wells  and take no screen credit for the writing. All told, I thought it was a fine motion picture, with sharp writing, a well-selected cast who perform admirably, and solid direction from Fincher who, I believe, knows exactly how long to linger and when to leave a scene for another piece of the story. From my recollection of other of his works--Fight Club, Zodiac, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl-- the man has a superb sense of how to pace a film drama. And, as with the case of Gone Girl, he is especially effective with the ever problematic flashback ploy; it's my view that he was seamless in the transitions between the present-day storyline and past events in Mank's life without losing coherence. And the film is visually gorgeous, a beautiful black and white composition that provides a well-shaded, dreamy quality without lapsing into over-stylized unreality. And I don't particularly mind that there is not a particularly heavy dramatic arc the lend this film a contrived gravitas. Mankiewicz is an interesting personage involved with the creation of what's considered one of the finest movies ever made, and partially fictionalized or not, the level of attention brought to his personality serves the subject splendidly. This is , to be sure, the kind of movie engineered, however artfully, to allow the leading man to chew up the scenery with a bravura performance, but it is a relief that Gary Oldman's portrayal of Mankiewicz is steady and consistent, the quirks and mannerisms fluid and understated. There is a wonderful cohesion between all the movie parts. I thought Mank was a satisfying watch.

The trailer makes it seem that there is something more sinister afoot, but what we actually have is splendid and finely written portrait of a gifted man limited in his work and production by an alcoholic ennui and cynicism  ; Mankiewicz .  a presence that is droll, melancholic, ironic, erudite, truth-telling, is seen in the Fincher film ( interestingly, the screenplay is by David Fincher's late father Jack Fincher, who wrote the script about fifteen years ago) who views himself as an artist dedicated to truth, beauty, and authenticity and yet finds himself making deals and compromising his idealism in order to scrape by financially. Oldman brings he is the best set of talents to creating the intellectual shambles that is this screen version of Mankiewicz, and it is rather a pleasure to see recreations of L.B.Mayer, William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davis, and John Houseman, names from the film and California history books brought to the screen dramatically but not cartoonish. Fincher, the director effectively creates the period and mimics the baroque style of Wells from Citizen Kane--lots of deep focus, a black and white style with any manner of shadings that make this whole thing seem otherworldly. The center of this story, though, is Mankiewicz,  Mank,  an interesting character whose story  is of a man who ought to have achieved far greater fame and renown by dent of his talent, but who seemed intent on sabotaging his future with drunk escapades and a compulsion to speak of things political and ethical that didn't sit well with his higher-ups.