Archive for November, 2008

Frank Zappa/The Mothers, Fillmore East – June 1971

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” — an annoying, mostly meaningless quotation oft attributed to Frank Zappa

I do not care for this record. In general, I do not care for Frank Zappa. My favorite thing he ever did was telling Tipper Gore and the PMRC to shove it. Such straightforward admissions/dismissals are unpopular in rock criticism because they prevent the critic from maintaining a pose of omni-with-it-ness and complete openness. I suppose that it is easier to find some deficiency within a particular album than it is to admit to yourself that you just simply don’t like some whole thing because you are prudish/self-satisfied/unadventurous. But honestly, I find Zappa’s whole thing to be a bit too vulgar and a bit too pretentious to be worth my time. I like my entendres double or better. Also, I don’t have the ear to get off on the clever little musical gags and compositional elements that supposedly illustrate his greatness.

Actually, I only own this record because someone told me I should really give Zappa a shot and specifically recommended this album as a way to get into Zappa. I think I listened to it twice, pretended to like it, and then crammed it somewhere deep in the depths of the Record Desk until digging it out this morning.

Listening to it again with fresh ears, I’ve determined that this is a fabulously obnoxious, “wacky” record. Despite Zappa’s for-granted “genius,” this album has not provided me with nearly as much joy as the decidedly “ungenius” RamonesMania. Zappa is one of those things (like jazz or Springsteen or the Grateful Dead) that has inspired a whole legion of true-believer-type followers who not only cherish every live bootleg or interview snippet, but actively evangelize. They try to suck you in with their coded in-jokes and promises that if you *JUST* hear this one super-great concert recording you’ll be hooked. I think what makes the Zappa people particularly bad is that Frank was a quotable bastard, and his apostles therefore like to spout his witticisms (or their own versions thereof) as if they are argument enders. You know, “The GREAT ZAP has spoken. So it is written, so let it be done.”

Particularly trying is the Zappa people’s wholesale dismissal of rock criticism or attempts to articulate (in writing) any understanding of pop music and its attendant whathaveyou. Every record review or written opinion is met with something like this…

“Definition of rock journalism: People who can’t write, doing interviews with people who can’t think, in order to prepare articles for people who can’t read” — Zappa on rock criticism

It’s a cute Menkenism, sure – but it doesn’t help anyone get to that little lower layer. Surliness is fine. Heck, your intrepid author here is quite fond of noted crank Hunter S. Thompson. At some point, though, it becomes necessary to drop the act and get down to the business of expression – that is if you’re at all interested in communicating with other people, rather than simply holding court.

Zappa – because he is so quotable and so many of his brain droppings have been recorded – strikes me as a fellow who was quite secure in his “genius” and who felt he was uniquely equipped to tweak the establishment and freak out the squares. And I’m sure we can all agree that the “rock establishment” and their taste-making friends have, from time to time, shown themselves to be trend-hungry, gullible half-wits deserving of at least some ridicule.

Still, Zappa’s (and his acolytes’) very vocal objection to the very business of rock writing seems like – just maybe – it could be driven – just a little bit – by a suspicion that the great composer and satirist was not getting a fair shake from the puny minds who write record reviews and the simple barnyard types who read them.

Take for instance the “Dean of Rock Criticism” Robert Christgau’s take on the Zappa offering being considered –

The Mothers: Fillmore East, June 1971 [Bizarre, 1971]

The sexist adolescent drivel that hooks these moderne mannerisms should dispel any doubts as to where Big Mother finds his market–among adolescents and sexists of every age and gender (bet he gets more adults than females). It must tickle Frank that a couple of ex-Turtles are now doing his dirty work. Probably tickled him too to split the only decent piece of rock and roll (or music) here between two sides. C-

Christgau’s no prude. He’s a known fan of all manner of outsized punk shock. But his take on Zappa, well…let’s say he’s overall not taken in by the great composer’s charms.

Anytime you pick on something or someone with a devoted cult, folks are going to make with the pitchforks and torches. For instance, any criticism of Star Wars as being nothing more than a mishmash of Japanese movies and old film serials (with an increasing emphasis on a ponderous faux-religiosity as the series expanded) will be met with wails of “You bent my wookie!” as you are torn into shreds by hordes of weenies who believe that you’re an “elitist” who “thinks too much.” Surely some of Zappa’s followers fall into this Trekkie camp.

Beyond this easy dismissal of the terminally nerdy, we do need to grant that Zappa did know what he was doing as a jazz- and pop-influenced composer. He was no dummy. He’s an annoying bastard who made music that alternately bores and grates, but he knew his shit. As a comparison, I offer up Thomas Pynchon. Now I dig Pynchon. I dig the combination of big ideas and puerile nonsense all whipped up by snappy, slangy, breathless language that can be a bit hard to follow (or hard to stomach). V and Gravity’s Rainbow are self-consciously “smart” novels that wear their play on their sleeves.

Despite the obvious good stuff that Pynchon is vending, I’ve recently met two avid readers (one with designs on becoming a real, published novelist himself) who spit on Tom Pynchon. The convoluted, wacky “genius” of Pynchon’s overstuffed novels puts them off their lunch. True, these folks do unironically love them some Stephen King (which I’d be inclined to laugh at except that the late David Foster Wallace numbered The Stand among his very favorite novels). Heck, even my excruciatingly well-read wife found The Crying of Lot 49 to be obnoxiously “po-mo” and “too Sixties.” In short, Pynchon could very well be the Zappa of books.

I guess this all comes down to the trouble with accounting for taste. When you see criticism as mostly an attempt to account for and influence taste, it does seem like a doomed endeavor. But it seems over-simplistic to write critical evaluation of art and entertainment off as merely an attempt to control/influence taste. I think at its best, criticism is a discussion of what one likes and dislikes and what that means. It’s a dialogue about the sorts of cultural things that we devote so much of our time to consuming. There’s a tendency to view rock criticism in particular as simply the task of separating the “rocks” from the “sucks.” This type of criticism might sell/tank records, but I don’t think it satisfies the listeners’ need to understand and talk through the ideas that their listening presents. Good rock criticism is necessary because it provides additional ideas and perspectives that can help you understand how and why you listen to records.

This “what is the role of rock crit” concern was recently handled quite thoughtfully in the Pitchforkmedia.com-affiliated Poptimist blog.

Here’s a choice snippet that I think supports my understanding of the role of rock criticism.

So the role of criticism in the networked, free music era isn’t to act as an authority or arbiter, it’s to be one triangulation point among many so fans can better make their own, highly social, judgements about music. This is a humbler position to be in, for certain, and not an “elitist” one. But it’s important enough that even if fans are more candid about their own networked tastes, “pretending to like” will remain the ultimate critical sin.

So yeah, I don’t really dig this Zappa record. In fact, the best part of the album is hearing Flo and Eddie from the Turtles drop the filthy jabber and launch into “Happy Together” – here a real live pop song all but washes away all of the “smart” stuff Zappa is up to. I can’t pretend to like this record any longer.

Offer below is no longer valid. Album disposed of as of April 2009.

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Contact me (Thirteen Birds) c/o the Record Desk if you have anything interesting that you’d like to trade me for this album. No, I am not interested in a burrito covered in pickle sauce. Maybe we can find an appreciative home for this album.
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The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

All the merry little elves can go hang themselves.
My faith is as cold as can be.
– Bob Dylan, “Huck’s Tune”

I’m sure it comes to no surprise to regular Record Deskers that I’ve been a bit interested in the 2008 presidential contest in general and Barack Obama in particular. Also unsurprising – I’m sure – is my rather ambivalent relationship with “the Sixties.” The odd mash-up of Obama’s neo-JFK addressing the same Grant Park where Daley the First’s shock troops squared off against the Days of Rage put me in a Sixties-flavored place while watching the last bit of election coverage before bedtime. And yet despite all the signs and signifiers, it could very well be that with Obama’s election Tuesday night the doob-scented ghost of 1968 finally dissipated. If all the pundit-time happytalk is true, 2008 could be the year that the Culture Wars went to bed and never woke up again. I think the idea is that the two sides of the Boomer fuck-up scoundrel personality having had their chance, we’ve elected someone who is too young to have a primary source opinion on the “Summer of Love.”

I had initially planned on avoiding the election this week. I’ve been meaning to do a straight review of that Vivian Girls record I recently got. I’ve been wanting to take on the Hold Steady. But here I am, once again trying to wrap my head around things that happened before my parents were old enough to buy beer. Anyway, once I knew that the Sixties were going to hijack this week’s offering, I found myself torn over which Sixties to write about. My gut feel was to take on Let It Bleed and the endtimes vision of “Gimme Shelter.” It felt like the comfortable way to tackle that foul decade of targeted killing and social dissolution. Let It Bleed is an album length sneer. It seemed a sufficiently hateful record that would allow me to vent some generational conflict spleen.

Obviously, I couldn’t do it.

My father – being of a certain age – still maintains a certain boyish belief that the Sixties were a time of unimaginable promise that would have put a rainbow in every stewpot had the hopes of America not been shot in the street by that nefarious “them” that murdered King and the Kennedys. To hear my dad tell it, any hope of change for the better was eventually stomped dead by the tin soldiers of Nixon’s “Ohio.” What followed was an endless parade of horrors and small-time opportunities for selling one’s sole for pennies on the dollar.

I think the story ends with Reagan seizing power and swallowing the whole world whole as George H. W. Bush stood in the shadows sharpening his knives.

Of course, my own personal dad is not the only one to feel the Sixties as something special that got away, leaving nothing by salt and scrabbly, pointy subsistence in its wake. Hell, I’m sure part of my own ambivalence about the Sixties is subconsciously driven by a sense that I missed out on something transformative that will never quite come again. Even when Arthur returns, it’s not like he can reinstate the same unexpected, exciting Camelot that hooked everyone in the first place.

The Record Desk’s patron saint Hunter S. Thompson describes the Sixties thusly in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas –

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

That’s what haunts me about the Sixties, the sense that “history” quite recently happened and I missed it. I’m reminded of one of the Dylan interviews in Scorsese’s No Direction Home where he talks about his youth and how he imagined himself fighting and dying in some glorious battle, but it seemed like those sorts of battles no longer existed. I suppose it’s that same sort of bittersweet, egotistical yearning to be a part of history that finds me rummaging through the Sixties’ unopened junkmail for clues.

Maybe that’s part of Obama’s appeal for me. His speeches find him obviously riffing on Martin Luther King Jr. Since he emerged as a presidential contender, he has surrounded himself with Kennedys. His eloquence and charisma suggest Jack. His moralizing tone and seriousness suggest Bobby. He’s obviously going for a “new frontier” “ask not what your country can do for you” sort of thing. I mean, compare this –

We stand at the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.

To this –

“We cannot walk alone,” the preacher cried. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Obama does not strike me as using the Sixties as a mere “Remember the Alamo!” sort of progressive rallying point. He seems to use it as an example of what is possible when optimism and energy let loose across the land.

I’m suspicious of this optimism. It doesn’t come naturally to me. I am very used to feeling doomed. And George W. Bush’s America has only made me more skeptical. Not to be over-dramatic, but living in the Nixonian nightmare world of W.’s America has felt like being kicked in the spiritual goodies on a fairly regular basis. The reign of Bush II has been a very “Beatings will continue until morale improves” presidency. As such, I’m not sure if I am capable of actually really hoping for some kind of better living through Obama. And I sure as hell don’t have the energy to be disappointed when it turns out that he must be sacrificed because the crops have failed when he could not make it rain.

I am much too tired to be fooled again.

From what I can tell, Obama has the power to really inspire. I got actual, typically-reserved-only-for-really-great-rock-bands goosebumps while watching his Grant Park victory speech on Tuesday. I felt dumb for doing so because it was a sign that I actually got my hopes up. If Obama Carters-up real bad, I’m going to know that I was a big, fat sucker who bought all the pretty talk and recycled platitudes.

So I feel like my authenticity is on the line here. Even if I just kept mum and pretended like I *knew* that Obama guy was a dink when he eventually tanks, I’d know that I for an unguarded second physically felt like things might change for the better.

So I’m taking refuge in the Beatles now – not the worldly, in-fighting, bearded Beatles whose collapse coincided with Let It Bleed and the end of the Sixties. I’ve gone back to the finest achievement of Beatlemania – A Hard Day’s Night. Even know how the whole Beatle thing turned out – John and Paul’s divorce, the lousy solo albums, the rampant commercialism, the fact that there are only two Beatles left – A Hard Day’s Night is the Beatle artifact that allows me to feel like it wasn’t all a dirty trick. The energy feels real. The Fabs really do seem like these cool, funny regular blokes who tell jokes and sing songs and run around like idiots for the sheer fun of it. That singular, clanging chord that kicks off the album and the movie’s breathless opening chase scene sounds like the beginning of existence itself. It’s the big bang and the universe is nothing but endless potential.

I guess that’s what I’m telling myself right now – it’s alright to hope a little. This could be the beginning of something fun and energizing and really worth caring about. Maybe, just maybe, it’s alright to run around like an idiot for a while and enjoy the potential – even if you know that it will end badly.

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

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