“In the rush Cynthia (Lennon) was left behind–she was probably carrying the suitcases while John, empty-handed and thoughtless as ever, made a dash for it. And so the train pulled away and I shall never forget the sight of Cynthia running down the platform shrieking at John to wait. But Peter Brown arranged for Neil Aspinall to drive her to Bangor in his car and she arrived not long after the rest of us.”

(Source: Pattie Boyd, Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me, 2007)

“Magical Mystery Tour was launched by a party whose lavishness held no doubt of Sergeant Pepper-like success. The Beatles specified fancy dress. John Lennon came as a teddy boy, accompanied by Cynthia in Quality Street crinolines. George Martin came as the Duke of Edinburgh, Lulu as Shirley Temple, and Patti (sic), George Harrison’s wife, as an Eastern belly dancer. John, that night, made no secret of powerfully desiring Patti Harrison. He danced with Patti time after time, leaving Cynthia so disconsolate in her crinolines that Lulu was roused to sisterly indignation. The climax of the party was the moment at which a ringleted Shirley Temple, clutching an immense lollipop, confronted the chief Beatle in his greaser outfit and roundly berated him for being so mean to his wife.”

(Source: Phillip Norman, Shout: The Beatles in Their Generation, 1981)

“I was very careful and paranoid because I didn’t want my wife, Cyn, to know that there really was something going on outside of the household. I’d always had some kind of affairs going on, so I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair. But in such a smoke-screen way that you couldn’t tell. But I can’t remember any specific woman it had to do with.”

John Lennon, on the writing of “Norwegian Wood.”

(Source: David Sheff, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 2000)

None of this is news, of course (though I’m reading Boyd’s memoir just now, so that little anecdote was at least new to me).

And I frankly don’t care all that much about the private lives of famous people. Lots of my favorite artists–Lennon included–were less than admirable human beings all around. Just because I would probably want to punch them in the face if I met them for five minutes doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy, or even love, their art.

But I’ve always wondered if Lennon’s intensely slavish fan-boys in the rock press (and for inspiring slavishness among the rock press, even Bob Dylan comes a long way second to “the head Beatle”) admired him in spite of his cruel, whiny, brand of misogyny or because of it?

I mean, I know it wasn’t really the chord changes, so it had to be something….Right?

In the days leading up to the Iraq war nothing made that modern media invention–the conscience-stricken hawk–quite as queasy as the spectre of the “Peter, Paul and Mary liberal” turning the new adventure into “another Viet Nam.”

That kind of insight was, of course, less than brilliant on infinite levels, but there was some justice in the basic underlying unease: the special relationship between music and politics that’s now called to mind by the catch-all phrase “the sixties” was not, after all, just some weird accident.
The stark, unsettling contradictions that boiled to the surface in that generation have been wallowing in the American psyche since the beginning and are with us still, while the notion that musicians and other artists should confront them is, if not quite that old, at least far, far older than the recording industry.

By contrast, a reality where this very confrontation could produce gold records–and the powerful, insidious, ear-worm relevance in modern American life that this generally implies–was entirely modern and called forth very specifically by three earnest folkies who, as if to prove history really does have a sense of humor, were assembled by a quasi-corporate process not all that different from the ones that later produced the Monkees and the Back Street Boys.

Partly for those reasons, the group was something of a punching bag among the hipper-than-thou left–particularly that part of it which gave up on the dream long before Peter, Paul or Mary did–even before their massive success began to haunt bigots and mad bombers alike.

At least some of that was envy, but for art to work as politics the art has to come first and P,P&M had two elements of genius. The first was the magical “other” that is created when the members of any great harmony group blend their voices.

The second was Mary Travers.

It was Travers who gave the group’s sleek sound the gravitas it needed to become a dividing line and a cultural force that went far beyond selling records. A lot of what Peter, Paul and Mary did–children’s songs, stale stage-patter, tiresome renditions of “true” folk songs by way of Merry Olde England–was innocuous or worse and can safely be consigned to the nostalgia bin if not the dust bin.

What’s left are a number of fine performances that include a couple of dozen diamond-pure sides that did what art very, very rarely does–changed things.

Nearly every one of those sides featured Mary Travers as either lead or de facto soloist.

It was her voice that put Bob Dylan on the charts for the first time (not scraping the charts, incidentally, but “Blowin’ In The Wind” all the way to #2); her voice that brought Pete Seeger back to the top ten after nearly a decade in blacklisted exile–not with Weavers-style balladry but with a political anthem; her voice wailing on the key line in Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” that makes it sound even now like something college kids really would call forth as naturally as breathing when they were being beaten with night-sticks and tossed into paddy wagons at the “liberal” Democratic Convention in 1968.

The paraphrased poetry of “the whole world is watching” was Dylan’s but it was almost certainly Travers who Middle America heard when the fragment echoed across evening news newscasts or turned up in quotes in the morning newspapers, just as it was effectively Travers, almost alone, who first put “protest” music into the proverbial million living rooms where Martin Luther King might as well have been the antichrist.

It wasn’t for nothing that Civil Rights paragon Ossie Davis–as righteous a defender as African-American culture will ever have–called her white-bread folk group “the movement set to music.”

All of that would make her one of the most important voices of the century but she could be even better.

“500 Miles” was recorded in 1962 and, with the tumult still largely in front of her, Travers used that completely artificial confection as a vehicle for collapsing time. Standing on the cusp of a cultural earthquake that would not have been entirely possible without her, she made a commercial folk song sound as if it had always existed and always would, as if everything that was about to happen had already been and gone and she was the only one left to speak of it. Much like the sixties themselves, her version can make you smile behind the eyes or rip your heart out–can be steeped in as much hope or damnation as a listener chooses.

And where “500 Miles” was a pure abstraction–a reach for something that could be grasped but not quite held–“Leaving on a Jet Plane” was utterly prosaic. Travers simply took John Denver’s best song–a fine, if conventional take on that most jealously guarded male prerogative, i.e., the freedom to come and go and have the little woman wait for you to make up your mind–and turned it inside out.

What was left was possibly the strangest hit record of the entire rock and roll era. At once thoroughly radical and profoundly reassuring, recorded just as the women’s movement was taking off, it made no grand statements in the manner of “Respect” or “I Am Woman,” or even “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” but instead simply took for granted everything genuinely useful such a movement might achieve (all the more remarkable since Travers had recorded it in 1966–the same year as the brassy “Boots” and well before the others. Where others proclaimed, Travers simply made the most powerful assumption of all. That the right to make the most profound decisions in a relationship was no more than her–or anyone’s–just due. She called special attention to nothing–and missed nothing. The freedom and attendant responsibility that lay behind her bold assumptions got exactly the weight they deserved and no more, lessons that have been missed by generations of male rock critics and elite “feminist” scholars alike, but were likely not lost on the wave of female singer-songwriters (Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Roberta Flack, et al) who were about to leave their own deep mark.

It was perhaps appropriate for “Jet Plane” to hit number one in the last month of a decade synonymous with tumult. It seems at least possible that after a deluge of assassination and war and riot, the culture simply took that highly symbolic occasion to draw a deep breath and reach back for some sense of itself, for some reminder of the bedrock that would be waiting when the brick and mortar stopped flying. If cultures can do such things–and if ours did such a thing at that moment–it is both supremely ironic and completely unsurprising that it was Travers’ voice (on a by then three-year-old album track) we reached for.

The critic Ralph Gleason once famously called Peter, Paul and Mary “two rabbis and a hooker,” and to be honest that’s one of the funniest things any critic has ever said. But the real joke is that it was the hooker–not the rabbis or the critic–who turned out to have the biblical voice.

Before her, the great voices of American protest music remained in the underground or on the sidelines. Before her, if a “folk” group had a really big hit it was “Good Night Irene” or “Tom Dooley” or, “Michael” (as in row the boat gently and safely ashore). Before her, if Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit,” it could scrape the charts for a week before being banned (and effectively ending the singer’s substantial career as a hit-maker). Before her, there was no way Woody Guthrie singing “Deportee” or Louis Armstrong singing “Black and Blue” or, for that matter, Bob Dylan singing “Blowin’ In The Wind,” could get anywhere near a chart.

After her, there was no way “Turn, Turn, Turn,” or “For What It’s Worth,” or “Fortunate Son,” or “Ohio,” or “A Change Is Gonna’ Come” or “Born In the U.S.A.” or “The World Is a Ghetto,” or “What’s Going On” or “Fight the Power” could miss.

As we head into an age when the party of “limited” government (which, laughably, still goes by the name Republican) has laid the groundwork for an assumption of draconian federal powers which the old House Un-American Activities Committee that hounded Pete Seeger would never have dreamed possible, the American music charts are, in most ways, as free of pointed, topical relevance as they were in 1961 and every year prior. These days even so-called “hardcore” rappers and punks confine their protests to their albums. Few others bother with even that much.
I’d like to think that the moment is always right for some new version of Mary Travers to stick a fingernail in the side of today’s newer, tougher version of plastic culture and slit a seam that will allow for a new blast of fresh air.

I’ll keep on hoping for it, but I won’t-if you’ll pardon the expression–be holding my breath.

Truth is, the blonde chick in Peter, Paul and Mary has gone to her reward and I have a funny feeling they only made one of her.

Mary Travers “Leaving on a Jet Plane” (Live on Television, 1982 Kingston Trio and Friends Reunion Special)

It’s also NBA Championship time, so during commercial breaks and rain delays this week, I’ve occasionally cruised through the ESPN talk shows. Of course, the quality of the discourse often reaches (or stoops to) levels that are liable to induce actual physical pain among any bits of living brain tissue that get within earshot (though I have to admit it still can’t challenge the average level of commentary during an ESPN tennis match).

Today, though, was a real winner.

In the process of defending Tim Duncan from one of Bayless’ frequent forays into absurdism-ad-nauseum–in this case the notion that Duncan needs to win the upcoming series and deliver an MVP-caliber performance in order to “keep” his place in the NBA’s all time top ten–Smith actually blamed the relative lack of success by the Spurs in the playoffs since 2007 on…wait for it…

Eva Longoria!

I believe his exact quote was:

“Because we all know the power of women!”

Longoria was engaged to Spurs point guard Tony Parker in 2006–by which point they had been dating for two years–and married to him from 2007 to 2010.

Smith kept rambling on about the “distractions” which had caused the Spurs to lose in early rounds in recent years. He got Longoria’s name in there several times.

He did not, of course, mention that Longoria was dating Parker (in what was probably the most high profile romance in sports at the time) in 2005 and engaged to him in 2007. Those were two years when–despite the “distractions”–San Antonio won the NBA title.

In 2007, Parker, set to marry Longoria the following month, was so thrown off his game by “the power of women” that he managed to win the Finals MVP.

And, of course, when the real supposed “distraction” of divorce occurred in 2010, it was because Longoria caught Parker serially cheating on her–in the last case with the wife of one of Parker’s ex-teammates.

Look, the San Antonio Spurs won championships–when they did–because they played the best basketball.

When they didn’t win championships, it was because they didn’t play the best basketball.

One could parse all the reasons they won in any given year and all the reasons they lost in any given year and come up with a list reaching to the hundreds in each case.

Not one of those reasons involved Eva Longoria getting duped and shafted by Tony Parker.

The leadership of the DBCCB’s Sports Division is never truly stable. Smith…Bayless…Mike Greenberg…Colin Cowherd…Anybody working for Fox Sports Radio any second of any day.

The list is endless, the competition brutal and relentless.

But, for this week at least, Stephen A. Smith sits on the brass toilet alone.

(Incidentally, in Smith’s rant on Duncan’s secure place among the all time greats of the game, he listed exactly none of Duncan’s actual spectacular and highly improbable achievements–instead relying on statistics, the least impressive aspect of Duncan’s game. For the genuinely relevant info and talking points, you can scroll down a bit here and read my post of a few days back. That’s another enduring quality of the DBCCB. Even when they’re right, they can only be trusted about as far as you would trust Tony Parker with your hot wife….And, oh yeah, before I forget. Go Spurs!)

Popular fiction, modern division. Ah, what would we do without Nazis? (Per Dietrich, who has them time-jumping between 1930′s Tibet and modern day Seattle,)

Invent quasi-Nazis of course! (Per Conroy, who has a fundamentally Nazi-like Kaiser Wilhelm invading the United States in 1901.)

It all goes down easy enough, especially the Conroy.

Just don’t go looking for style.

Patrol (Philip MacDonald 1927)

Popular fiction, between-the-wars-when-people-with-educations-could-still-write division.

MacDonald was the sort of unpretentious middlebrow writer Western Culture used to produce across the board and no longer produces at all. Nowadays, anyone with any skill at all aspires to genius (with predictably dire results).

Patrol, the story of a British WWI unit waylaid in the Mesopotamian Desert and being picked off one by one by unseen attackers, was likely his signature work. It was certainly his most influential and, in that regard, probably as archetypal as any novel of the last century. After John Ford adapted it as The Lost Patrol, one of his early sound-era masterpieces, it became the ongoing template for literally hundreds of similar stories spread across virtually every action-related genre: war, adventure, westerns, science fiction, horror, you-name-it.

And it’s worthy of endless imitation. Straightforward and unsentimental, Mac
Donald was hardly adding anything new to the fiction writer’s style book, and the pulp format precluded any but the most rudimentary development of character. But the atmospherics–especially the heavily accented, vulgarity laced soldier-speak of the era–are terrific.

I confess I probably never would have tracked down the book and read it without my interest in Ford (whose adaptation is terrific and faithful to the source in tone, if not in the final specifics).

But I’m glad I did. It was well worth the effort and the “collectibles” price.

This week the San Antonio Spurs reached their fifth NBA finals of the “Tim Duncan Era.” The Dead Brain Cell Count Brigade (that’s DBCCB for short if you’re a newcomer here) at ESPN and the other usual outlets are suddenly doing things like wondering if Duncan is the equal of, say, Kobe Bryant!

I didn’t stick around for the debate between whatever intellectual titans actually engaged in this particular argument, just caught the teaser. Somehow, I doubt they called it the no-brainer it is.

Tim Duncan is the best player of the post-Jordan era and a top-ten all time.

He’s also probably the most underrated player in the history of American sports (off hand the only competition that comes to mind is Chris Evert but that’s another topic for another day–in any case the list is very, very short.)

Consider this:

In the history of the modern NBA, which effectively began when Bill Russell arrived in Boston in 1957 and ushered in the recognizably modern game, NBA titles have been won by “small market” teams exactly seven times. That’s seven times in fifty-six years.

Four of those seven titles were won by the San Antonio Spurs (currently the 24th largest market in a 30-team league). For the record, the others were the Milwaukee Bucks in 1971, the Portland Trailblazers in 1977 and the Seattle Supersonics in 1979 (ah, the seventies!).

So to put it yet another way, since the beginning of the truly modern NBA (which began with the twin arrivals of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird–to major markets of course–in 1980), only four championships have been won by small market teams (four in thirty-three years) and the Spurs won all four.

Duncan led every one of those San Antonio teams–each of whom had the deck stacked even more thoroughly against them than the teams that won in the seventies–in both scoring and rebounding. The only other player who led four championship teams in the two most important statistical categories was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. (As Lew Alcindor, he led the Bucks to their title, then repeated the feat for three of his five championships with the Los Angeles Lakers.**)

(Just as an aside, Duncan and Jabbar also led their teams in blocked shots each of those four years–to my mind a more important, game-controlling statistic than the more popular “assists” category, which is rather randomly applied in any case.)

In addition to all that, Duncan never once played alongside a fellow twenty-point a game scorer in any of those championship runs. (Tony Parker had the best scoring season of any of his teammates when he averaged 18.6 in 2007–Parker also edged the now thirty-seven-year old Duncan as the team’s best scorer this year, so Duncan will not be in a position to break his tie with Jabbar when the championship series starts next week.)

Just to put that in perspective, [and granting that team scoring totals have come down somewhat over the years] Jabbar only failed to play beside at least one twenty-point a game scorer on one of his championship teams (and even then, he was abetted by Oscar Robertson and Bobby Dandridge who averaged 19.4 and 18.4 respectively–in other words, in the season when he had the least big-time scoring support, he still had two scorers as effective as the 2007 Tony Parker, the closest thing to a consistent big-time scorer Duncan played with during any of his championship runs.)

Bear in mind that Duncan did all this while routinely playing for something like half his market value–thus providing the only means by which his franchise could possibly pay the competitive salaries to other players that have allowed them to compete.

All of this has been accomplished so quietly that Duncan has rarely been mentioned as a truly era-defining player. Journalists–and not only the DBCCB membership–tend to be impressed by flash and stats. Duncan has never been big on either. Yes, he can fill a stat sheet, as evidenced above. But his career numbers aren’t eye-popping by any stretch and the myriad ways in which he effects and controls games are rarely if ever pointed out by commentators or morning-after talking heads. Whether they don’t know the value of making percentage plays that don’t show up in box scores more consistently than anyone who has played in the last forty years (the time period I’m qualified to pass judgement on–I missed Bill Russell sad to say) or simply think it’s not worth talking about–i.e. “too boring”–I don’t know.

Some of this might end up being discussed further if Duncan’s team manages to win a fifth championship in the next few weeks–especially if it comes at the expense of LeBron James and the Miami Heat. There are some who are saying that Duncan might, in effect, “take the leap” into the land of players who define the history of the NBA.

That’s nonsense. He took that leap long ago. Nothing has changed just because the people who get paid to pay attention to such things have finally decided to do their jobs. And I’ll put very long odds on ever seeing his like again.

[**NOTE: George Mikan led the Minneapolis Lakers to five titles in the pre-Russell era and he almost certainly led his team in both scoring and rebounding all five years. But rebounding totals were not kept as an official statistic during his first two title seasons. The only other players to lead championship teams in scoring and rebounding more than once were Shaquille O’Neal, who accomplished it three times with Los Angeles, Hakeem Olojuawan, who did it twice with the Houston Rockets, and Larry Bird, who, remarkably since he was not only a small forward, but playing on teams with Hall of Famers at center and power forward--the traditional positions for rebounding leaders--did it twice with Boston. As with Jabbar, O’Neal and Bird were, in all cases, assisted by more accomplished scorers than Duncan ever had. Olojuwan did do it once with less, or similar, support (the second time he had Clyde Drexler averaging over 20 a game).

Michael Jordan, of course, led six teams to championships in a large market (Chicago). It’s difficult to compare a swing man to a post player in terms of impact since he isn’t likely to lead a team in rebounding or blocks. But it’s worth noting that Jordan certainly had more scoring support. His number two man, Scottie Pippen, met or exceeded Parker’s 2007 scoring average in five of Chicago’s six championship seasons (and was only a fraction below it the other year). And no, that doesn’t make Duncan “better than” or necessarily even as good as Jordan or any of the others. But it does mean that whatever belated consideration he is getting when it comes to being mentioned in their company is long overdue.]

“It was while overseas that Elvis also met a nymphet named Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he would make the mistake of marrying in 1967 (a mistake because Elvis never wanted to behave as anything but a bachelor).”

James Wolcott (Source: “King of Kings” Vanity Fair, November, 2001)

Then, for comparison’s sake:

“No one had more freedom than Mackenzie Phillips, now 42, sober and acting again. At 13, after running away from her mother’s house, she showed up at her father’s Bel Air mansion, where he was living with his third wife, Genevieve. In step with the latest trends, John Phillips answered the door wearing a floor-length, tie-dyed Indian caftan and a Jesus beard and smoking a joint.

“‘Dad, I’m moving in–could you pay for the taxi?’ Mackenzie remembers saying

“‘Sure kid, come on in.’

“‘What are the rules?’ Mackenzie asked.

“‘Well, let me see,’ he said. After a moment of heavy contemplation, John replied, ‘You have to come home at least once a week. And if you come home from going out the night before and it’s light out, always bring a change of clothing, because a lady is never seen during daylight hours wearing evening clothing.’

“She walked in to say hi to Dad’s friends–Gram Parsons, Keith Richards, Donovan, and Mick Jagger, most of whom she wanted to have sex with. Her little girl’s dream came true, when, at the age of 18, she found herself over at Mick’s place making tuna sandwiches with her father. John left to go get mayonaisse, and ‘Mick turned around and locked the door, and looked at me, and said, “I’ve been waiting to do this since you were ten years old,”’ Mackenzie recalls. ‘My dad is banging on the door, “Mick, be nice to her! Don’t hurt her.” And I’m going, “Dad, leave us alone. It’s fine.” And we slept together.’ The next morning Jagger gave her a beautiful robe and fed her tea, toast and fresh strawberries.”

Evegenia Peretz (Source: “Born to be Wild” Vanity Fair, November, 2001)

Laying aside whether James Wolcott (or anyone) could know how Elvis Presley (or anyone) “never wanted” to behave, I do think it’s kinda’ creepy to say anybody else’s marriage is a “mistake” unless they themselves say it first (which I don’t believe either Elvis or his “nymphet” ever did).

I mean, I wouldn’t even say that about the multiple marriages of John Phillips or Mick Jagger, neither of whom–in keeping with a rather normal, albeit distasteful, standard for celebrity males which Elvis hardly challenged, let alone exceeded–ever gave any convincing impression of wanting to go about “behaving as anything but a bachelor” (at least not until age or infirmity slowed them down).

But then again, I doubt James Wolcott would say such things about Phillips or Jagger either. There’s no way to prove that, of course, but I’ve certainly never seen the slightest bit of evidence that he finds them to be what he clearly considered the un-marriage-worthy Elvis–namely, the wrong sort of people–or that he could continue being published in any periodical as swank as Vanity Fair if he did.

No need to speculate either, about what Elvis himself might have done if he had lived a bit longer and somehow found himself in a situation where Mick Jagger (or anyone) was jumping Lisa Marie’s eighteen-year-old bones on the other side of a locked door, though I’m guessing he wouldn’t have plaintively begged Mick not to hurt her and then doped and raped her and forced a ten-year incestuous affair on her, as Mackenzie would later reveal (or, if you prefer, claim) her own father had done, beginning a year or so after the charming incident related above.

For that you need the right kind of people.

On that cheery note, I’ll leave you with the old Japanese proverb, which is one thing that applies equally to even the crit-illuminati‘s definition of wrong and right sorts of people

“In the beginning the man takes the drugs. In the end, the drugs take the man.”

And proof of how far the fall can be, even for the right sort:

The Mamas and the Papas “Safe In My Garden” (Studio recording with appropriately haunting photo montage…from the moment before the drugs took John Phillips for good)

…Thanks, as usual, to April Lane’s definitive Ford site Directed by John Ford for making this readily availabe.

Robby Krieger (Posting immediately after the announcement of Ray Manzarek’s death).

My mother passed away in 1987. For reasons that aren’t relevant to this little story, I waited five years to visit her grave. On the lazy spring Saturday afternoon I finally decided to drive over, I bought a basket of her favorite flowers (daisies) and, instead of the hop, skip and jump on the interstate, took the long, casual route through the Florida Panhandle on Highway 90 (from Tallahassee, one of the college towns Jim Morrison happened to pass through on his way to meeting up with Fate in Los Angeles, to Campbellton, which is just west of Faye Dunaway’s old childhood haunts in Two Egg and a little bit north of Cottondale, where Dionne Warwick used to grab a headline whenever she visited her grandmother–it really is a small country in some ways).

In those days, like a lot of days prior and more than a few since, the AC on my car wasn’t working (record collectors with modest incomes understand why, at least in youth, certain things are luxuries, even air conditioning in Florida) so I drove with the windows rolled down and the radio on.

It happened that as I pulled up to the stop light directly in front of the Florida state mental hospital, which we really do keep in a place called Chattahoochee, a rough-looking (by which I mean a bit unkempt, not threatening) teenage boy was humping it along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the road, hunch-shouldered, head down, sneakers and a long-sleeved jacket in 85-degree weather, generally doing the James Dean thing.

The breeze must have been blowing in his direction, because, on hearing the music from my radio, he slowed down and then came to a complete stop.

He looked both ways for a bit, as if trying to determine that we were alone.

And then straight at me.

Then he smiled and began nodding his head.

So there, with the sun just beginning to turn to late afternoon gold and the radio playing and me trying to keep the box holding my mother’s basket of daisies from slipping into the floorboard, I found myself suddenly confronting one of those situations that remain indelible ever after because they are occasions for recognizing one of life’s little truisms.

In particular, this:

From about 1967 until some future date yet to be determined, if some rough-looking teenage kid walking in front of a mental hospital doing his James Dean thing suddenly stops and looks both ways and then straight at you and then starts bobbing his head and smiling and knows he doesn’t need to say a word, then the Doors must be playing.

It happened that, at this particular self-defining moment, the song was “Riders on the Storm,” but it probably could have been anything the band ever did.

That’s how it operates in those moments when the Doors–and only the Doors–must be on the radio.

* * * *

To tell the plain truth, I came to the Doors late. I never had a lot of James Dean–and certainly not a lot of Jim Morrison–in me.

If I’m gonna’ be a rebel, I’m gonna’ need a cause.

And, that being the case, I probably did have a little Ray Manzarek in me. I’m still kinda’, sorta’ looking for my cause. He found his when he met Morrison at UCLA in the mid-sixties and it’s very likely that no one else could have synched up with the future Lizard King so thoroughly that great, rough, mind-expanding, era-challenging records would be bound to result.

I like that image from Robby Krieger about others seeing Morrison as a phony and Manzarek’s ability to see through to the core being a genuine gift. Because Jim Morrison was a lot of things but phony wasn’t one of them. (Poseur? Of course, he was that–but, at least the way Jim Morrison played it, that’s a very different thing, because the way Jim Morrison–the one true Rock God who shared full credit and full profits with his bandmates–played it, it just meant that he was kicking the world before it could kick him.)

The way I came to see it finally, when I did come around to the Doors, is that in the Summer of Love, when a whole lot of people saw perpetual grooviness extending into a bright, trippy future and professional cynics like Frank Zappa thought themselves exceptionally clever because they saw new wine in old bottles, Jim Morrison was the one who looked down the long, black tunnel of The Future and saw Charlie Manson and Ted Bundy waiting.

Little wonder he ended the way he did.

Wouldn’t you, if you were him?

The miracle is that he got the chance to put those visions on record at all, and Ray Manzarek was probably more responsible for that than anyone, including perhaps Morrison himself.

And, of course, being a congenial guy, who saw talent–genius even–where others saw fool, wouldn’t have mattered in the least if Manzarek hadn’t also been a wizard on the keys, as the distance between the organ and piano parts below should suffice to demonstrate:

The beginning…

The Doors “Light My Fire” (Live on the Ed Sullivan Show, from which the group were banned because Morrison sang the line “Our love is like a funeral pyre,” after, er, being told not to)

and the end.

The Doors “Riders on the Storm” (Live/Video edit)

(And all this moody reflection does leave me wondering whether the several downtown apartment complexes who claimed they were the place JIm Morrison stayed when he went to FSU are still using it to bump the rent!)

…I’ll be back to my series on The Searchers soon. Really had to get this out of the way and figure out exactly what went wrong before I could contemplate any more photo essays (cause I sure don’t want to have to go through this again!)

So here in the last week or two I’ve been pulling vinyl like mad, acquainting and re-acquainting myself as it were.

And sometime Saturday in the very early a.m., I was sure I had found the “new” acquaintance of the week/month/year when I discovered Flatt–on an old double-LP titled Bean Blossom (a live recording from Indiana’s Bean Blossom bluegrass festival in 1973 which I’ve had for years but have rarely played and never really paid strict attention to before)–turning “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” aka “The Theme From the Beverly Hillbillies” into a laconic, world-weary, working man’s blues.

Flatt’s studio version was already far dryer and a good deal more cautionary than the chipper version that resides in the national subconcious via endless re-runs, but here, he made lines like “poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,” sound like they were being sung from the bottom of a mine.

So that had to be it, right? The new thing most likely to expand my consciousness here in the latter stages of my recovery phase?

Really, I should know better.

No matter how tired I get, I should never forget that rock and roll is bottomless.

Not twenty-four hours later, I’m in my car listening to the final album in a stark-raving incredible five album set from the Isley Brothers which, in amongst the hardcore funk-rock and straight soul, features lots and lots of covers of White America’s AM Gold playlist circa the early seventies, nearly every one of which they transformed.

Seriously: “Ohio” to “Summer Breeze” to “Listen to the Music” to “Love the One You’re With” to “Fire and Rain.” Good records, great records, trash records. It would be easy to think it was just catch-as-catch-can, trying to keep up with the era’s insane recording schedules–easy except Ronnie Isley kept finding ways to make everything personal.

“Just yesterday morning,” he sings “they let me know you were gone.” And suddenly it hurts. There’s no distance, no comfort, no displacement, no opacity, no self-pity, just real fear and real transcendence. As if somebody or something is really and truly gone.

Same with “four dead in O-hi-o.” Same with “There’s a rose in the fisted glove.”

And so on and so forth.

But even with all that coming at me during my drive times this week, I wasn’t any way prepared for Ronnie to take on Jonathan Edwards’ consummately fey (and consummately catchy) “Sunshine,” which, I confess, I never knew meant anything at all after hearing Edwards sing it a few hundred times on the oldies’ stations of yesteryear (most often with me shouting right along, incidentally).

Here, it starts out sounding like a man who is standing next to Lester Flatt in that imaginary mine, shouting up–”Sunshine go away today, I don’t feel much like dancing”–and then follows along as he proceeds to lift himself up inch-by-inch until he can just about see the light.

But don’t take my word for it…go have a listen–as “He’s got cards he ain’t showing,” takes on new meaning in the mouth of a black man negotiating the fall-out of post Civil Rights America as the New Jim Crow began to meet the Old Jim Crow and he helps you ponder the paths not taken–bear in mind Ronnie’s own maxim that rock and roll was the only music that let everything in:

The Isley Brothers “Sunshine (Go Away Today)” (Studio recording)