Monthly Archives: April 2012

THE THREAT….CROSSOVER ELVIS (Part One)

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“Some Negroes are unable to forget that Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, hometown of the foremost Dixie race baiter, former Congressman Jim Rankin. Others believe a rumored crack by Elvis during a Boston appearance in which he is alleged to have said: ‘The only thing Negroes can do for me is shine my shoes and buy my records’.”

(Sepia magazine, 1957. Note: Elvis had never been to Boston. Full background here.)

“Elvis was a hero to most

But he never meant shit to me you see

Straight up racist that sucker was

Simple and plain”

“Fight the Power” Public Enemy (1989)

“I prayed about it, because I knew Elvis was a racist.”

Mary J. Blige (2002, after being criticized for singing “Blue Suede Shoes” on a VH1 special)

Back in 2010, Ta-Nehisi Coates hosted an interesting discussion about white musicians who have been “accepted” by black audiences. The occasion was the death of Teena Marie and some other names came up, most particularly Johnny Otis. (The whole thing is here and highly recommended.)

Coates runs a civil site so the discussion is serious-minded, in-depth and nuanced.

But the elephant in the room occupies roughly the same place he does in dozens of other less elegant chats one can find across the net–backgrounded, neutralized, referred to in passing, not to be taken too seriously (though, for once, the quotes above are not referenced).

There’s actually an objective measure of this particular “white-artist-black-audience” phenomenon, one which I have to assume is very infrequently referenced.

I say “infrequently” because “never” is hard to prove, though I can say I’ve failed to happen across it even once in conjunction with the subject at hand. And researching that subject–looking for takes everywhere from the highest academia to the lowest gutter chat-rooms–has been a perpetual hobby of mine for about twenty-five years.

In the last six decades of the twentieth century, this “objective” measure appeared in Billboard magazine under the following names:

“Harlem Hit Parade” (10/24/42–2/10/45)

“Race Records” (2/17/45–6/18/49)

“Rhythm & Blues Records” (6/25/49–10/13/58)

“Hot R&B Sides” (10/20/58–11/23/63)

NO CHART (11/30/63–1/23/65)

“Hot Rhythm and Blues Singles” (1/30/65–8/16/69)

“Best Selling Soul Singles” (8/23/69–7/7/73)

“Hot Soul Singles” (7/14/73–6/19/82)

“Hot Black Singles” (6/26/82–10/20/90)

“Hot R&B Singles” (10/27/90–12/4/99)

“Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles and Tracks (12/11/99–12/31/99)

There’s a lot to parse there, especially regarding the need to change the name of the principal black music chart so constantly. (For the other two major charts, Billboard settled on “Hot Country Singles” in 1962 and didn’t feel the need to change it until 1990 when digital technology forced them to come up with “Hot Country Singles and Tracks.”  The principal pop music chart became the “Hot 100″ on August 4, 1958 and remained so for the rest of the century.)

And why, for one rather significant stretch there was no chart at all.

I’ll save all that for another day and stick to the elephant in the room.

First a point of clarity:

I’m well aware that music charts–black and otherwise–are not entirely objective. But they are the one semi-objective measure we have for this sort of thing and it might be worth asking why they have been so routinely ignored at every level of this particular discussion when they are so often cited as purely objective evidence elsewhere. (If one wished, for instance, to “prove” that the Beatles were the most popular and influential band in rock and roll history, mentioning their record twenty #1 hits on Billboard’s “Hot 100″ would almost certainly–and justifiably–be used as hard evidence.)

The answer to this little conundrum is actually pretty simple.

The only objective evidence available in this case has been ignored for the same reason objective evidence is ignored in any other human endeavor.

Because it leads to the wrong conclusion.

Which is….?

At the back of his industry-standard Billboard chart books Joel Whitburn conveniently lists the “Top 25 Artists of Each Decade.” For the latest volume of Top R&B Singles I have, which runs through 1995, there are six decades represented.

That’s six decades times 25 artists per decade.

150 spots.

Objectively speaking.

And how many of those spots are occupied by white artists?

Two.

Here are their listings, under “Fifties,” with their accumulated chart points:

12. Johnny Otis………..1,465

2.   Elvis Presley………2,193

Let me just repeat for emphasis:

For the decades covered, from the forties through the nineties, this is the entire “objective” evidence for white artists so thoroughly accepted by black audiences that they appeared on the black music charts–the charts that were designed, however imperfectly, to track air play on black radio, sales in black record stores and juke box play in black neighborhoods–in sufficient strength to rate in the top 25 R&B acts of any given decade!

Now let’s take a moment to say that referring to Johnny Otis as a “white act” is a little dubious.

Otis himself was indeed white, the son of Greek immigrants. He was also a wonderful bandleader. Those bands were black. When singers were hired to front those bands–as was common practice in those days–the singers were black. Otis did take a few lead vocals himself, most notably on his one big rock and roll hit “Willie and the Hand Jive.”

Safe to say, his own vocal and instrumental contributions to the records released under his name would not have put him anywhere near the top 25 R&B acts of the fifties.

So while he was certainly a race pioneer, a wonderful musician and, by all accounts, an interesting guy, it’s fair to say Johnny Otis won his allegiance from a black audience in a very different manner from Elvis Presley.

In the case of Johnny Otis, he came to black people–by hiring actual black people to do most of the singing and playing on his records.

Admirable that. (More admirable if he paid his musicians and singers what they were worth, on which subject I have no information one way or the other, though Otis’ reputation as a hustler’s hustler does not exactly inspire confidence.)

But it does leave him to one side and lead us back to the elephant in the room–to the one instance in the history of the black music charts, where a white artist who did his own singing–backed by mostly white musicians, singing songs written mostly by white songwriters–had the black audience come all the way to him.

To the one white artist who stands alone in terms of his measurable popularity with a black audience.

That artist was Elvis Presley in the nineteen-fifties.

I’ll throw more numbers at you over the next week or so.

After the numbers are in, I’ll speculate–very subjectively–on how we got from there (Elvis as the number two R&B act of the entire nineteen-fifties) to here (where the quotes above represent a wide swath of opinion and are regularly taken as gospel by a great many people who should know better.)

Should be fun.

STUPID STUFF PEOPLE SAY ABOUT ELVIS (Quote the Fifth)

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“And, further, when he went to Memphis in 1968 to record with a fine musical wrecking crew of accomplished studio musicians, he sounded, once again, as though he was actually interested in what he was singing. And, even better, on some of the early songs he recorded there, he performed with a touch of laryngitis–which not only curbed some of his post-gospel excesses (that heavy and throaty vibrato and sometimes shmaltzy sustain of certain pointlessly held notes) but which made him, if only briefly, into a near-pure, hoarse-souled blues singer of deep southern resonance.”

(Allen Lowe “Ten Things You Probably Don’t Know About Mississippi Blues Musicians” Oxford American Issue 75: 13th Annual Southern Music Issue, 2011)

In case you missed the key nugget in there–and I can understand how the eyes might glaze–Elvis produced the greatest vocal recordings of the twentieth century because he was lucky enough to get laryngitis at the beginning of the sessions.

Here’s a nice experiment: Sit down with any of the numerous editions of Elvis’ late-sixties Memphis sessions (say the Legacy Edition of From Elvis In Memphis). Then close your eyes and try to guess which vocals were performed with and without “laryngitis.”

Should you need a little mantra to keep you sane during this process, here’s one that works for me: “For ye have the maroons with you always.”

Rinse and repeat as necessary.

Elvis Presley “After Loving You” (studio)

 

ELVIS PRESLEY IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW…

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First a list:

1935: Jesse Garon Presley (twin brother–stillborn–Tupelo, Mississippi)

1953: Hank Williams, Sr. (29) (role model–”insufficiency of the right ventricle of the heart” likely resulting from acute alcohol and drug abuse–Oak Hill, West Virginia)

1954: R.W. Blackwood (32), Bill Lyles (33) (role models–plane crash–Clanton, Alabama)

1955: James Dean (24) (role model–car crash–Cholame, California)

1958: Gladys Presley (46) (mother–heart failure–Memphis, Tennessee)

1959: Buddy Holly (22), Ritchie Valens (17), J.P. Richardson, Jr. (28) (contemporaries–plane crash–Clear Lake, Iowa)

1960: Eddie Cochran (21) (contemporary–car crash–Chippenham, England)

1960: Johnny Horton (35) (contemporary–car crash–Milano, Texas)

1962: Marilyn Monroe (36) (contemporary–probable suicide by “acute barbiturate poisoning”–Los Angeles, California)

1963: John F. Kennedy (46) (U.S. president–assassination by gunshot–Dallas, Texas)

1964: Johnny Burnette (30) (contemporary–boat accident–Clear Lake, California)

1964: Sam Cooke (33) (contemporary–”justifiable homicide” by gunshot–Los Angeles, California)

1965: Bill Black (39) (original Elvis band member–brain tumor, likely resulting from alcohol abuse–Memphis, Tennessee)

1966: Bobby Fuller (23) (contemporary–found dead in car, “accident” and “suicide” both checked as cause of death by coroner–Los Angeles, California)

1967: Otis Redding (26) (contemporary–plane crash–Madison, Wisconsin)

1968: Martin Luther King, Jr. (39) (civil rights leader–assassination by gunshot–Memphis, Tennessee)

1968: Little Willie John (30) (contemporary–heart attack while imprisoned for manslaughter–cause disputed–Walla Walla, Washington)

1968: Robert Kennedy (42) (U.S. presidential candidate–assassination by gunshot–Los Angeles, California)

1969: Wynonie Harris (53) (role model–esophageal cancer–Los Angeles, California)

1970: Janis Joplin (27) (contemporary–heroin overdose–Los Angeles, California)

1970: Jimi Hendrix (27) (contemporary–”asphyxiation”–London, England)

1971: Jim Morrison (27) (contemporary–”cause undetermined”–Paris, France)

1971: Gene Vincent (36) (contemporary–ruptured ulcer, likely resulting from alcohol and drug abuse–Los Angeles, California)

1972: Clyde McPhatter (39) (contemporary–heart, liver and kidney disease, likely resulting from alcohol abuse –Teaneck, New Jersey)

1973: Bobby Darin (37) (contemporary–complications from heart surgery–Los Angeles, California)

1973: Gram Parsons (26) (contemporary–morphine and alcohol overdose–Joshua Tree, California)

1975: Al Jackson, Jr. (39) (contemporary–shot at home by intruders–Memphis, Tennessee)

1975: Jackie Wilson (contemporary–entered coma after heart attack on stage–died 1984 at age 49 without ever fully recovering–Mt. Holly, New Jersey)

1975: Lefty Frizzell (47) (role model–stroke, likely resulting from alcohol abuse–Goodlettsville, Tennessee)

1976: Sal Mineo (37) (contemporary–murdered by stabbing–Los Angeles, California)

1977: Elvis Presley (42) (heart failure, officially caused by “polypharmacy”–Memphis, Tennessee)

Then a question:

How exactly does an existential loner get so….connected?

Patterns observable–messages received:

Speed kills. Drugs kill. Alcohol kills. Guns kill. Loneliness kills.

The road kills. Clear Lake, Iowa. Madison, Wisconsin. Chippenham, England. Clanton, Alabama. Anywhere you go–the reaper’s waiting.

Home?

Los Angeles? Memphis?

The reaper’s still waiting. Check the list.

Fame kills.

Elvis Presley?

Surrounded by all of the above. Within and without. Always. From 1954 onward–the nightmare was in permanent lock-step with the dream.

Just like the preacher said it would be.

Then go on….to another pattern….but of course:

Start anywhere.

Anywhere?

Sure, why not. Since we’re going all modernist.

I’ll start here:

In 1971, Vincent Eugene Craddock died in Southern California from a ruptured stomach ulcer at the age of 36. His general health had deteriorated over the previous decade due to several factors, including, most prominently, alcoholism and complications from an automobile accident he had suffered in 1960, which, along with broken ribs and collarbone, had further damaged a leg weakened by a motorcycle accident he had suffered in 1955–the same year Indiana native James Dean died in a car crash a couple of California counties up the road from where Virginia native Craddock would be buried.

Now follow the lines outward….and backward….and then forward again:

The motorcycle accident turned Craddock away from a planned career in the Navy (he had joined at 17, been deployed to Korea, and later named his legendary band the Blue Caps in homage to the sailors around the Norfolk Naval Station where he played his early gigs)–and toward the new music.

In 1956, as Gene Vincent, he wrote and recorded “Be-Bop-A-Lula.”

It was enough of a straight Elvis-rip that Presley’s band members at first angrily assumed he had recorded it behind their backs and Vincent himself felt a need to apologize the first time he met Elvis–who, not surprisingly, required no apology. He had loved the record.

It was also enough of a stone cold classic that when John Fogerty gave Vincent’s induction speech for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (in 1998) he simply walked up to the mike and started singing it a cappella, thus instantly rendering the rest of his lovely speech–not to mention Steve Allen’s long ago attempt to mock the song by reading it as poetry (his other great claim to rock and roll villainy had, of course, been having Elvis sing “Hound Dog” to a basset hound) –superfluous.

And keep following them:

Problems with the taxman and the musicians’ union, eventually led Vincent to a stretch of touring in England. There, in 1960, he was riding in a taxi through Chippenham, with fellow rockabilly star Eddie Cochran and Cochran’s girlfriend Sharon Sheeley, when the speeding taxi blew a tire, spun out of control and crashed into a lamp post.

Vincent’s subsequent fate you know.

So follow another line:

Cochran suffered massive brain injuries and died in a hospital in nearby Bath the following day.

According to some reports, Cochran–the first artist to record a Buddy Holly tribute–had thrown himself over Sheeley to protect her, and was subsequently flung clear when the car door flew open.

Sheeley–who had previously been the youngest (and by some accounts first solo) woman to write a number one hit for the Billboard pop charts (Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool”–she sold it to him by stalling her car in front of his house and then fooling him into thinking it had been written specifically for Elvis)–suffered a broken pelvis but eventually recovered and returned to her home in California. There she was ultimately brought out of a period of reclusive hibernation by her future husband, Los Angeles radio and TV personality Jimmy O’Neil (later the host of Shindig!), when he hooked her up with another singer-songwriter named Jackie DeShannon. Sheeley and DeShannon went on to become the first major all-female songwriting team in American music. DeShannon also became very likely the first rock and roll performer to champion Bob Dylan (she tried to record an entire album of his songs in 1963, when it would have been novel even for a folk act–her record company scotched the idea) and, in 1964, she became a key behind-the-scenes champion of a new band playing the Sunset Strip who eventually called themselves the Byrds.

The Byrds–who would very specifically repay DeShannon by recording a shine-forever version of her “Don’t Doubt Yourself Babe” for their epic first album (the album that kick-started the most important American response to the British Invasion and sealed Bob Dylan’s decision to go electric)–were led by a young man named Jim (later Roger) McGuinn–himself a long-ago Elvis fan who had turned to folk because he thought rock and roll had lost its vitality.

Before coming to Los Angeles, McGuinn’s major gig had been playing backup for Bobby Darin, who had been signed to the New York-based R&B giant Atlantic Records because they were looking for a white boy after they lost out on their bid to sign….Elvis Presley.

Of course, McGuinn’s band would become famous for being the progenitors of “folk-rock” and their signature sound was touted as a cross between Dylan and the Beatles.

A cross, that is, between the music of Robert Zimmerman, former Elvis-wannabe of Hibbing, Minnesota and the music of a band led by former Elvis-wannabes Paul McCartney and John “Before-Elvis-there-was-nothing” Lennon of Liverpool, England.

I could take nearly any person on the list above and draw some similar set of patterns. I could take every single person on that list and write a fairly long essay on why Elvis Presley may have felt–very justifiably–some intensely personal connection even to those he never met.

From 1954 until he died in 1977, nearly every rock and roll road–and quite a few others–led back to Elvis, usually several times over.

And right from the beginning, those roads were paved with corpses.

Elvis was not born into a world where the destruction of celebrities–by  fate, themselves or others–was counted ordinary.

He died in one where such wreckage was so common and complete that it could hardly have failed to affect him even if he had been as persistently wasted and “out of it” as various self-interested narratives have always insisted–and even if he could have made himself believe he had no responsibility for having wrought some vital part of the change himself.

It could hardly have failed to affect him even if he hadn’t been raised a Pentecostal in the American South–the place where Calvinism has left its deepest stamp anywhere in the modern world and a place where doom and release are in a constant state of palpable, mind-altering tension which the believer can actually make peace with somewhat more readily than the half-believer.

From the outside it surely looks like pure craziness. I can perceive this–and I’m sure I’ve transcended my usual paranoia in this matter–in everything from super-serious lit-mag reviews of Faulkner and Williams to the way the Village Voice tends to cover country music to the expressions on the faces of beltway reporters whenever some fresh madness forces their attention southward.

To which I can only say: Brother, you should see it from the inside.

Never fear. I haven’t forgotten that this is a pop culture blog. I’m not going to wander off into some sort of cost-benefit analysis of the differences and similarities between Old Testament Pentecostalism and New Testament Evangelicalism.

I’m not going to preach at you. Really I’m not.

But you may want to remember all this whenever I write about Elvis Presley or his music.

You may even want to remember some of it when you listen to that music yourself.

Now that doesn’t mean you should worry any.

We’re gonna have fun.

We’re gonna have lots of fun.

But just…remember this list. Remember those patterns.

Try to think about the man at the center of this particular web of what he would have been bound to suspect–because he could certainly never truly avoid such suspicion–were unbreakable strands of pre-destined fate, as a fellow human being.

Remember what it must be like to get the news, year after year–that, whilst you yet live, those who died clearing the path for you, are being followed in an increasingly headlong rush by those who are now chasing you.

That guy in your band whose funeral you couldn’t even attend because of the craziness your presence would unleash.

That kid you met once backstage in the early days and didn’t remember meeting when you wrote a condolence letter to his parents a few years later–didn’t remember because although you were already “Elvis Presley” he wasn’t yet “Buddy Holly.”

That guy who stopped by your house to borrow gas money so he could make it to the recording session that would make him a star.

That guy you will end up sharing a biographer with.

That other guy who you will share a biographer with because he told the guy who would end up writing his biography that the book he really wanted to read was the one about you.

That chum you swiped a move or two from in Vegas and whose medical bills you ended up footing when he beat you to a coma but not a grave.

That projects-neighbor from Lauderdale Courts who never could quite believe you made it bigger than he did.

That guitar player who may or may not have been conjuring up the memory of watching you have everyone rise for the national anthem before tearing into “Hound Dog” when it came time for him to reinvent the actual national anthem at Woodstock.

That home-town drummer whose backbeat kept the juke-box grooving at Graceland.

That boy-no-longer whose “Rebel Without A Cause”-dialogue you had memorized (along with everyone else’s) back when you–and everyone else–were safe in assuming that being a movie star would always be the coolest thing in the world.

That young woman who was nobody’s idea of a star in any world except the one you made possible–the one where rock stars were the coolest thing in the world–and who said “Elvis is my man.”

That other about-to-be-no-longer-young woman who was everybody’s idea of a star and provided the death scene that was bound to have made you think, “That’s the one. That’s the demon that will be coming for me.” Unless of course it made you extra careful not to think at all.

Those political leaders who started dropping like flies and kept right on dropping until you couldn’t quite escape the notion you might be next. (Note to reader: See December 8, 1980, for affirmation of just how crazy and paranoid that particular delusion of messianic grandeur actually was.)

All those and more. All those people. Gone to ghosts.

Like your mother.

Like your twin.

On and on.

There’s no call to even start on the bodies up at Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon–where your hairdresser/guru’s old boss (who had been recommended to you as well, albeit only as a hairdresser, not as a guru) was found lying on the floor of Sharon Tate’s house–tied at the neck to her body which had been stabbed sixteen times–with seven bullets in him and a face full of broken bones courtesy of Tex Watson’s boot, delivered prior to Tate’s own murder because your hairdresser/guru’s old boss had the temerity to plead for her life.

Whose house again?

That would be Sharon Tate–doubtless prevented from being one of your co-stars only by her chance appeal to a famous film director who could take her away from all that and by whom she was subsequently eight-months pregnant when she died, and who, when he finally did have a son oh-so-many years later, would name him after you….

As I say. No call to even start.

Just….don’t forget.

I meant it when I said we’ll have fun.

Elvis may have suffered a tragic death but he didn’t lead a pathetic life. Not by a long shot. Hey, he lived! He let the good times roll. He got through the best he could–Calvinist predestination or no Calvinist predestination.

No reason we shouldn’t do the same.

We really don’t need to get to where he didn’t, a decade further along, into “The Valley in the Shadow of Elvis Presley…”–where Ronnie Van Zant, Dorsey Burnette, John Lennon, Bill Haley, Natalie Wood, Marvin Gaye, Rick Nelson and Roy Orbison fetched up. (That’s “plane crash,” “heart attack,” “assassination by gunshot,” “heart attack,” “accidental drowning,” “justifiable homicide by gunshot,” “plane crash,” “heart attack”–in case anyone might be inclined to keep stats or wonder if anything sounds vaguely familiar. No need for fully cataloging the rest. Let’s just say the locations are mostly familiar, too, and Haley–who made 55–was the senior citizen of the bunch.)

And we certainly don’t need to get all the way down the road apiece where his daughter’s ex (52) and his backup singer’s little girl (48) followed suit, with headlines almost as big–and death causes almost as mysteriously banal–as his own.

Let’s leave any additional gruesome details for the tabloids and CNN, if anyone can still tell the difference.

Oh, we might get philosophical for a moment. Might speculate on how fame broadens the circle. How other famous people might have a similar list. (“They might be your fucking icons,” Pete Townshend says in a film clip that, for all I know, may still be running in a continuous loop at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “But they’re my fucking friends! And they’re dead!”)

Yes, others might have very definitely had it as bad–existentially speaking.

Personally speaking, some had it far, far worse.

Hell, Jackie Wilson lost four children and his heart attack left him crippled, trapped in his own once-glorious shell for nine years, after which it took three more years to mark his grave with a headstone because you weren’t there to buy it. At least the heart attack that came for you while he was waiting in limbo had the decency to kill you straight–and with money in the bank.

Yes, personally speaking, some had it worse.

But as far as combining the existential and the personal?

Well, that’s another story.

None of those others had to look at their list–a list like the one that I’ve kept to a conservative minimum above–and ask themselves:

“Did I do this?”

So if anyone wants to go down that path, have at it.

That sort of thing can be its own sort of fun no doubt.

But we’re gonna have some real fun, too.

Life’s a bowl of cherries, even for us New Testament Evangelicals with our brows only semi-permanently furrowed by concern for our fellow sinners–and we’re gonna keep it light-hearted.

None of that all-the-way gloomy Old Testament stuff.

Not here.

All I ask you to bear in mind is that you might have to risk finding out how crazy it is in here.

While we’re making lists and having fun.

STUPID STUFF PEOPLE SAY ABOUT ELVIS (Quote the Fourth)

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“Is it a sausage? It is certainly smooth and damp looking, but who ever heard of a 172-lb sausage 6 ft. tall? Is it a Walt Disney goldfish? It has the same sort of big, soft, beautiful eyes and long, curly lashes, but who ever heard of a goldfish with sideburns? Is it a corpse? The face just hangs there, limp and white with its little drop-seat mouth, rather like Lord Byron in the wax museum. But suddenly the figure comes to life. The lips part, the eyes half close, the clutched guitar begins to undulate back and forth in an uncomfortably suggestive manner. And wham! The mid-section of the body jolts forward to bump and grind and beat out a low-down rhythm that takes its pace from boogie and hillbilly, rock ’n’ roll and something known only to Elvis and his Pelvis. As the belly dance gets wilder, a peculiar sound emerges. A rusty foghorn? A voice? Or merely a noise produced, like the voice of a cricket, by the violent stridulation of the legs? Words occasionally can be made out, like raisins in cornmeal mush. ‘Goan…git…luhhv…’ And then all at once everything stops, and a big tender trembly half smile, half sneer smears slowly across the Cinemascope screen. The message that millions of U.S. teen-age girls love to receive has just been delivered.”

(Time magazine review of Love Me Tender, 1956. Reprinted in Elvis: The Biography, Jerry Hopkins, 1971 and Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock and Roll, Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, 1988)

And there are those who,even now, think Pravda lacked subtlety.

THE THINGS THAT SHOULD CHANGE SO RARELY DO….(Levon Helm and Poly Styrene R.I.P.)

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The Band “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (studio)

X-Ray Spex “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” (studio)

Searching for information on the death of Levon Helm (drummer and foremost lead singer of the Band) I found one of those “this time a year ago” links to the April, 2011 passing of Poly Styrene (principal writer and lead singer of X-Ray Spex).

Before this accidental mash-up I don’t think much ever linked these respective cults in my brain or anyone else’s.

Even the size of the cults was substantially different. The Band got gold records in their heyday. That’s how far rock had got by then. A very few years later, punk of the sort Styrene epitomized helped change all that. It was the hammer that–for better and worse–eventually smashed the rock world the Band personified into atoms.

And any linkage that exists now, in this everybody’s-internet-my-brain moment, will undoubtedly fade within days or weeks, as it surely deserves to.

But one thing that sticks in my mind right now and might stay stuck there for a while is the utter absence of even the slightest hint of flash or style or wit from the numerous tributes the atomized culture tossed up to either artist in their first hours on the other side of the greatest divide.

In an hour or so of dispirited searching, I found nothing in April, 2011 or April, 2012 that suggested the best music made by either Helm or Styrene left even the slightest alteration in the numb voices that are hired to provide contextual gauze on such occasions. Thus, a year ago, we got  “her simple but powerful message was that it was OK to be different because everyone is special.”  (From Dave Simpson at The Guardian), or, last night, “Watching him, it was easy to believe his mighty groove and massive grin could burn off any disease. For a while, it seemed, it did.” (From Will Hermes at NPR).

Switch a pronoun or two and one tribute could be substituted for the other.

Perfectly representational statements. Perfectly sincere and perfectly hollow.

I never got close to Poly Styrene’s music, but the message of “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” was anything but simple and in no way reducible to a simple declarative statement of any kind–not even to suggesting that anyone who caught thinking of it’s “okay to be different because everyone is special” as any sort of actual message is just the sort of hopeless maroon who deserves a beat on the obit-desk in this world Germfree Adolescents failed to change nearly enough.

Wherever Poly Styrene is, I hope she’s not amused.

As for Helm–well, all I can say is that every time I heard or saw him in the last ten years, he looked and sounded like he was at death’s door, a very long way from being a threat to “burn off any disease.” And–for this non-Yankee at least–his long-held “professional Southerner” pose didn’t wear any better in his creaking, twilight years than it did in the three or four or five decades prior.

That doesn’t take away from his real accomplishments, which ranged from being the sort of drummer who could actually keep the sprawling elements of the Band’s best music strung together in some sort of cohesion to the only man alive who could ever have made “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” bite all the way into the bone back in ’sixty-nine to the only artist on last year’s fine Hank Williams tribute who could keep up with Patty Loveless (that is to say, the only artist who did more than could be expected–sometimes, being at death’s door has its advantages).

The idea that Helm or Styrene might have been in any way complicated, failed, possibly unblessed–either as artists or people–seems to have been completely submerged long before either passed away and it’s probably unrealistic to expect their deaths to be an occasion for reassessment. It seems sacrilege now (especially among the nonreligious) to suggest that their rare moments of brilliance got their very sting and might from their proximity to failure–from being measured as they were against all those vast, becalmed stretches of non-stinging, non-mighty, not-brilliance.

From being, in other words, one vital part of the essence of what rock and roll has always meant to so many who were born to be kicked.

I may or may not ever write at length about “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” or “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”–but they’re the sort of records I started this blog to celebrate. Idiosyncratic, revelatory, disturbing, surprising, potentially life-changing. Not foreseeable until their existence made them seem inevitable. All that sort of thing. And I know there are probably lonely voices on the internet right now celebrating Helm and Styrene as they deserve to be celebrated–as the sticky wickets they actually were.

It’s just too bad–all these years down the road, with plenty of examples to guide us–that such voices still can’t quite seem to reach the middle of the stream.

TIME COMES FOR US ALL…(Dick Clark R.I.P.)

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I don’t have any really deep personal memories of Dick Clark. He was one of those people like Walter Cronkite or Johnny Carson who was always there and seemed, at some point, a bit more institution than man. There are plenty of dyed-in-the-wool rock and rollers who held him in something less than esteem, insisting that he merely played Pat Boone to Alan Freed’s Jerry Lee Lewis.

The truth was way more complicated than that and I highly recommend John A. Jackson’s definitive bio-histories of both Clark (American Bandstand) and Freed (Big Beat Heat) for an enlightening and nuanced view of the men, their times and the birth of rock and roll media generally.

I also don’t agree with those who think early rock and roll needed Clark more than he needed it. I’ve met too many people who bonded with their moms listening to Elvis and Chuck Berry on the radio after school I guess, to assume Bandstand saved the day.

All that being said “it’s got a beat and you can dance to it” is a greater legacy than any post WWII American president can lay claim to.

And the world was certainly better for his having helped make–and maintain–room for certain things:

The Go-Gos on American Bandstand-1982

 

 

 

HOW MUCH CAN ONE RECORD MEAN…VOLUME FOUR

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watch?v=YTTVx–i3m0&feature=player_detailpage

 

“Bad Blood”

Recorded: 1975

Writers: Neil Sedaka, Phil Cody

Artist: Neil Sedaka

OR….

Why punk led me not into temptation even though I was an appropriately angst-ridden child of the seventies: Short theory

If you’re gonna start a revolution, you better be able to kick Neil Sedaka’s ass at least once.

HOW MUCH CAN ONE RECORD MEAN…VOLUME THREE

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watch?v=vz-ewT8-CAM&feature=fvsr

“Then Came You”

Recorded: 1974

Writers: Sherman Marshall, Philip Pugh

Artist: Dionne Warwicke and Spinners

OR…

Why punk led me not into temptation even though I was an appropriately angst-ridden child of the seventies: Long Theory

At the recording sessions for “Then Came You,” which took place on March 26, 1974, at the Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia, Dionne Warwick voiced her displeasure with the proceedings to producer Thom Bell. Whether her problem was with the song, the manner of recording it or life in general has varied over the years depending on who does the telling. What everyone agrees on is that Bell bet Warwick a dollar that the record would reach number one. Then they each took half of a torn dollar bill and promised whoever lost the bet would mail their half to the other.

Warwick mailed her half of the dollar bill to Thom Bell shortly after October 26, 1974, which was the date “Then Came You” became the first number one pop hit for both her and Spinners.

About midway between those momentous occasions, my family moved from Central Florida to North Florida so that my father–already an ordained minister–could attend a bible college with an eye toward entering the ministry full time.

This turned out to be more than a little like moving from Southern California to Southern Alabama.

Momentous enough for me in other words.

I was a week late for the start of the ninth grade so any chance that my arrival would pass blessedly under the radar was doomed from the start. If you were ever in the ninth grade, you probably know what I mean. If you were ever the new kid in the ninth grade and arrived a week after school started–in the middle of second period–you definitely know what I mean.

It turned out in the long run that I took a liking to this part of the state and have lived here ever since. But during that first week the only thing that connected me to home–or any recognizable reality–was Sunday School.

Oh, I don’t mean my new church’s Sunday School looked or sounded or felt anything like my old church’s Sunday School.

Far from it.

For one thing, that first Sunday, there was no teacher. The regular was out sick that week. There was no replacement. Let’s just say that leaving the high schoolers to fend for themselves was not the way they did things where I came from!

No, the only thing that was really familiar was the girls’ skirts. Five girls, five skirts. Three minis–evidently the rough average for high school girls in Baptist Sunday Schools all over the state in 1974. So there was at least one thing that truly bound us together as a people in those halcyon days just before the latest aftershock of the enduring Fundamentalist-Enlightenment divide–which, along with the various issues troubling the rest of Western Civilization, had been rumbling underneath us for a decade or more–arrived to once more split us apart.

I wasn’t too worried about the history or future of Evangelical Protestantism that day. I was the new kid, a lone thirteen-year-old boy thrown into a teacherless room with five improbably attractive girls who, unlike the several improbably attractive girls who had attended my old church, I had not known my entire life.

Unless you’re a born Romeo–which I was about as far away from being as humanly possible–then the only thing your thirteen-year-old self is really thinking about in a situation like that is how to survive long enough for the golf balls to dissolve in your throat and the squirrels to lay down in your stomach so you can relearn the noble art of breathing.

You don’t care much about storing memories.

You do store them. And maybe–just maybe–a day or a week or thirty years later you’re even glad that you did.

But in the heady brew of the moment you don’t think about such things. So I was rather proud of myself for sufficiently overcoming the shock to my various systems–cultural, societal, hormonal–to glean some intelligence for later recall, and therefore discover I was just cognizant enough to conduct at least a pale imitation of what an actual Romeo would have called research.

So…

Along with the five skirts and three minis, the overall picture shaped up thusly:

A long, folding table, which for most of the next hour-that-seemed-like-ten had one set of forearms and an assortment of open purses and closed bibles on it.

I swear I did not drop anything that forced me to duck under the table. I can’t swear I didn’t think about it, only that I didn’t do it. I did not sink to perversion my first day in the new Sunday School.

I kept those forearms squarely in place.

Above the table then…

A senior, a junior, two sophomores and an eighth-grader.

Three blondes and two brunettes.

Two preacher’s daughters (sisters).

One visitor (guest of the preacher’s older daughter).

Three shag haircuts (one frosted–I tell you friend, it was a Golden Age, the likes of which we will not see again before the Last Days).

And one girl–the frosted-shag sophomore visitor wearing one of the minis–singing the chorus to “Then Came You” under her breath from time to time during the occasional awkward silences that are bound to occur when there’s a new boy and no teacher.

Good reconnaissance that.

Of course, it got me nowhere.

In those days I rarely listened to the radio. I didn’t know who sang “Then Came You”–had no clue it was a collaboration between the era’s greatest record man (producer-arranger Thom Bell), its greatest vocal group and one of the century’s most transcendent popular singers (born Dionne Warrick, by then so long famous as Dionne Warwick–the spelling variation supplied by a printing error on her first hit’s record label in 1962–that even I had heard of her, she added the extra “e” from 1971 to 1975 for reasons known only to her before reverting, for reasons also known only to her, to “Warwick”).

There was a lot more I didn’t know.

No way I knew what Thom Bell evidently knew–that, however she was spelling her name that year, if you wanted to pair a vocal group with Dionne Warwick in full flight, you’d better have at least two genuinely great lead singers on hand and one of them better be as close to a co-equal genius as Philippe Wynne.

I didn’t know that the record the sophomore in the mini-skirt kept singing and humming to herself was a work of genius, the pinnacle of Bell’s signature blend of the rhythmic and the harmonic, the grand statement and the incisive gesture, the conservatory and the street.

I didn’t know there was such a thing as symphonic intimacy, or that it could sometimes be heard on the radio.

I didn’t know “Sigma Sound” was a euphemism for a temple.

I didn’t know that America’s ever-derided “other”–blacks, women, immigrants, hillbillies–were on the verge of snatching back the rock and roll revolution that had been slid out from beneath them a decade earlier by something called the British Invasion. (Or, more properly, by white, suburban America’s specific and desperate embrace of the Beatles–an embrace that basically stretched from the average ten-year-old’s Dansette to the nether regions of academia and said, with one mighty voice, “please, please rescue us from these…other people“–and has distorted the way rock history is written and received ever since. And, no, that doesn’t mean the Beatles and the other great British acts weren’t all that. This stuff is never uncomplicated.) I didn’t know that, this time around–with only, say, Elton John and the Bee Gees to ride to the rescue–white, suburban America would eventually decide to pick up its marbles and go home.

There at the very first moment in the nation’s history when it seemed just barely possible for the foundational demons to be finally laid to rest, I blessedly did not know the lengths to which we-the-people would go to re-divide ourselves–nor did I understand the extent of the means available to the empire’s handlers to help us along the path to perdition because, as a faithful product of the public school system, I did not even suspect the empire’s existence.

Ignorance was bliss.

I didn’t know all those glorious sounds coming out of the radio in the mid-seventies, of which “Then Came You” was an absolute peak, were already driving the two white-boy demographics most likely to treat each other as dog and cat–punks and hard-hats–so crazy that for one dark, fleeting moment they would reach solidarity and agree that, at the very least, disco sucked.

“How did I live without you?” indeed.

I didn’t know that there would be a day when I actually did know such things.

There was a world of things, in other words–besides how to talk to long-legged, shag-haired sophomores in short skirts–that I didn’t know at the end of August in 1974.

But it didn’t surprise me later–when my family’s move to a distant land three hundred physical miles and a psychic galaxy from what I called home led me to seek increasing levels of solace in the bosom of Top 40 radio–to discover that “Then Came You, ” however encountered, was my idea of spiritual music.

This discovery was not exactly uncomplicated.

The next time I saw the long-legged sophomore (did I mention that she, like every other girl in my new Sunday School, was improbably attractive?–that I had moved to the actual south and that the actual south wasn’t lying when it bragged about its women?)–was a couple of days later. She was wearing a peasant blouse and blue jeans by then and she was walking in the middle of a crowd that was headed one direction in my new high school’s hallway while I was in the middle of a crowd that was moving in the other.

Just as she came opposite me, her face lit up and she said “Oh, hey!” to someone. A few crucial seconds later, after she had been swept out the door making a vaguely disgusted noise that I was just socially sophisticated enough to know was the standard civilized response to rudeness, I realized she had been talking to me.

Talk about improbable.

Look, I prefer to think I wasn’t the reason she never came back to Sunday School. I certainly never blamed her for not speaking to me again (not that there were many opportunities).

Tell the truth, I never got to know much about her, then or later.

I do know she stayed friends with the preacher’s older daughter.

I know that much because the preacher’s older daughter moved away about a year and a half later–by which time she was dating my nephew. It was pretty serious–as to both dating and general social linkage between our families. Her stoner brother stayed behind with us when the family moved away (he stayed until it became obvious that staying behind had not been the answer to his problems–I don’t know how it stands these days but, back then, the overlap between preacher’s sons and stoner brothers was substantial). She sent back actual tear-stained letters which I’m pretty sure my nephew was not supposed to be sharing with the likes of me and I know he was not supposed to be sharing with his grandmother.

Eventually…

The letters stopped. The stoner brother moved out. My nephew stopped getting letters–or at least stopped sharing them–and got married to someone else (all this within about a year or so–so I guess really not all that eventually, though time certainly seemed to move slower then).

The long-legged sophomore may or may not have become a junior. I never saw her at school after a certain point. She saw me once at a baseball game. I was fifteen then, the last year I played. I was sitting in the dugout during an exhibition game for a summer league I never actually played in because my family had to go back south for the summer to earn the money to stay in bible school another year. She came over and asked her cousin (who had gone out to meet her behind the dugout–if there was a signal I didn’t see it) who I was.

I heard that much.

I heard him tell her my name.

“Is he any good?” she said.

He assured her I was. (He was batting third, I was hitting cleanup.)

She made a noise that seemed to express both surprise and disappointment. Maybe even a little disbelief.

Then she turned around and left.

Never saw her again.

Never had that chance to explain that I had always assumed was bound to come some day in such a small town.

Where I had come from, I routinely passed people in the hallways at school who I had known my entire life without anybody even thinking about speaking to anybody. There was no rule about it. That’s just the way it was.

With me and with everybody else.

So it might as well have been a rule.

There were might-as-well-have-been-rules in the new place, too, but it took me a long time to get used to them. I’m not even sure I had really fully absorbed them nearly two years later, sitting there in that dugout, feeling like a heel all over again.

Funny the things that you learn from. Little, hidden mistakes mostly.

I think the reason I always regretted the misunderstanding so deeply, though, was rooted in that Sunday morning.

In her choice of music to hum–a choice she had no doubt long forgotten by then.

You see, when the storms came–in the world at large, in my church, in my country, in my own mixed-up head–and some sort of stance had to be taken internally even if I never announced it to the world, I was like everybody else.

Subject to my experiences.

On the surface, I should have been easy pickings for the coming punk bohemian ethos. Brother did I have the deep-seated self-loathing for it.

But I kept noticing that if they really meant what they said, these new messiahs, then they really were rejecting everything. That without that extremism, there was no there there.

And I kept thinking that if rejecting everything included, among many, many other good things, Dionne Warwick and Thom Bell and Spinners and Sigma Sound and girls who said “hey” to people they had only met once, then it wasn’t for me.

Oh, I know none of that was included, officially. Who didn’t think Philly Soul was cool? Who didn’t think Thom Bell was cool (he wasn’t really “disco” after all–just a bridge to it)? For that matter, who didn’t think girls who said “hey” were cool?

Nobody probably.

Problem was–and is–that ducked the issue.

Either Johnny Rotten meant what he said–or he didn’t. Either nothing mattered…or some things did.

And either way, I knew I was rejected too.

Mind you, none of that kept me from having my feet lifted off the ground by the Clash’s first album. I was made wary, not stupid.

It just meant I kept a weather eye, even on them.

Looking back, that was the right approach for me.

Other people had their lives saved by embracing punk and more power to them. I don’t begrudge anybody their taste, let alone their life. I certainly never saw punk as the enemy.

But I stayed alive by keeping it at arm’s length.

“Then Came You” wasn’t the whole reason for the stiff-arm–there were Sunday mornings and watching my parents become missionaries when they were pushing sixty and learning that stoner brothers needed prayer just like everybody else and finding out I really could adapt to small town life and not making the major leagues (or even my high school team) and realizing that the possibilities for a new Great Awakening that had once seemed so imminent had not only died on the vine but been perverted into the bitterest fruit imaginable and smashing rulers to the beat of  “Death or Glory” and four or five thousand other life lessons that I didn’t know were saving me until they did–but it was part of the reason.

And it was probably somewhere very near the core.

Quite possibly even the one irreducible moment that can’t be changed without changing everything else.

Or not.

I lean towards the Enlightenment myself.

Never was much of a strict Calvinist.

But if somebody gave me the chance to do it all over again and said the only thing different would be that the long-legged sophomore in Sunday School would be humming some other tune….I wouldn’t take them up on it.

Thus ends the Long Theory….Short Theory tomorrow!

 

STUPID STUFF PEOPLE SAY ABOUT ELVIS (Quote the Third)

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“I never went to a single Presley movie and I never, not even once, not even for “Hound Dog,” bought a single Presley record. Even then I knew Julie London had a better voice.”

(Roger Ebert. Source: Review of Easy Come, Easy Go, 1967)

I’ll put my vinyl-diving credentials up against Roger Ebert’s any day. And speaking as one of the world’s more devoted Julie London fans, I can’t really add anything to this. If I started, I’d have to rearrange all the previously accepted boundaries of surrealism in order to actually arrive at a conclusion.

It doesn’t seem worth the effort somehow.

 

NOT SO LONG AGO AND NOT SO FAR AWAY….MICHIGAN, 1967

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The year I finished the first grade actually:

“Attempting to soften any reaction…emcee Ralph Emery stressed Pride’s Mississippi heritage and country credentials in his intro. This initially drew boisterous applause, since the single ‘Just Between You and Me’ was riding high on the charts. But, Pride recalled in his autobiography, once he stepped onstage, ‘As suddenly as it had begun, the applause faded. It didn’t stop–just dropped like volume being turned down on a radio. It settled to a low murmur.’ He stepped to the mike and turned the tension into a laugh. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he declared, ‘I realize this is a little unique…me coming out here on a country music show wearing this permanent tan.’ By putting the best possible spin on the crowd’s mood, he had deftly defused any potential controversy. In 10 minutes, he sang his three singles and a couple of Hank Williams tunes, a Pride specialty. The crowd wanted more.”

John Morthland describing the reaction to Charley Pride’s first public appearance as a country star, which took place at the Olympia Theater in Detroit. Pride’s managment and record label had avoided announcing that Pride was black until he was established on the radio. The year was 1967.

(Liner Notes: Charley Pride: Legendary Country Singers Time-Life 1996)

NOTE: Pride went on to notch thirty-nine #1 Country hits. The first came in 1969. He followed Louis Jordan, the first African-American to have a #1 Country record (albeit when it was still strictly a juke-box chart and not nearly as subject to Nashville’s direct control), and “Nat King” Cole, the second, by twenty-five years. He beat Darius Rucker–the fourth African-American to have a #1 Country record, and the first to do so without being a genius–by thirty-nine years.

Hey, at least I lived to see it.