Hamish Kilgour (1957 - 2022)

The Clean were my Ramones. Their album Vehicle, my Rocket to Russia. 13 tracks, only two of which exceed three minutes. The Ramones were from Queens and so was my mom which meant they could never be that cool. I was politically, intellectually, and affectationally internationalist. The Clean were not just from New Zealand, but from the South Island. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sure sounded more alluring than Forest Hills. Sometimes engaging the unfamiliar is the only way to determine what you're about.

 

Vehicle was released in 1990, just as I was settling in to my first real band, playing shows in Chicago and writing, writing, writing songs. I tried to make them sound like Mission of Burma, Alex Chilton, Elvis Costello, Eleventh Dream Day, Lou Reed. And I tried to make them sound like the Clean. The Clean’s were open-hooded affairs. When their motor hummed, you could see the pistons pump and the belts turn. There’s no subterfuge in those songs. They tell you how they work while they work. And work they do. Their strumminess shouldn’t be confused for jangliness. If jangle originates with the Byrds, the kind of strum employed by the Clean started with the Velvets. Pumping downward through layers of silt with purpose: cleansing purpose, constructive purpose.

 

The downward stroke, of course, was provided by Hamish on the snare. He played unconventionally without crossing his hands, left on the hi-hat, right on the snare. He was, in that sense, more open to his audience; open and available. All the obits for Hamish talk about the America bands influenced by the Clean. My band was one of those. We studied those songs. We covered them. They were deceptively simple. But their straight-aheadness wasn’t so straight: a little skip in the rhythm, a crucial creak in the voice, a plaited seventh dropped into an otherwise unperturbed chord. From the Clean we learned how to make the simple not so simple.

 

While Hamish’s brother, David, was a kind of suburban-basement Ray Davies, keening and careening through single-bore melodies, Hamish, as a singer, offered a counterpoint: breezy and vulnerable, sometimes barely there. On the driving “Diamond Shine,” his vocals sound like the echo of someone else’s vocals for some other song. Hamish was handsome, but he still gave off the feeling of someone who’d rather you didn’t notice him. He just wanted to make songs, clean songs; Clean songs. He played in other bands too: most notably the Great Unwashed (get it?) and The Mad Scene. But he’ll forever be remembered for the Clean and what they did for New Zealand music, for American music, for indie music, for kids who just wanted to make songs.

   

Keith Levene (1957 - 2022)

 

Some people have a hard time squaring Keith Levene’s time in Public Image Ltd. with his declaration that Yes was his “absolute godhead band.” Not me. I hear in Levene’s playing a number of lessons learned from Steve Howe, Yes’s guitarist. It’s possible that I hear these things because, like Levene, I was an enormous Yes fan and an ardent student of what Howe did on and with the guitar. And like Levene, I lacked the skill to do ninety-nine percent of what Howe could do. So I did what Levene did, pursuing not Howe’s technical virtuosity, but his approach to the instrument within the context of a band. Levene listened to what Howe did when the music’s emphasis was elsewhere. He listened to how the guitar enters and exits, how dynamics and attack – rather than notes – can determine whether a part adds or subtracts from the whole. Levene took these lessons and applied them to a band which, on the surface, was completely different from Yes. One might go so far as to say that PiL was meant as the antidote to the bloat of Yes and of prog rock more generally. But PiL was prog in their own way. And, despite common (mostly accurate) perceptions, Yes was capable of some pretty punky noise. (The album Relayer offers a number of bracing moments that sound less like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer than they do [if you set aside the singing] like the Monorchid, the Jesus Lizard, or indeed like Levene’s PiL.)

 

On their two great albums (Metal Box/Second Edition and Flowers of Romance), Public Image were an unprecedented proposition. Built on awkward, subterranean rhythms anchored by Jah Wobble’s bass, Levene and his mate, John Lydon, could screed and scream and scrape their way across songs. In this regard, PiL was the antithesis of Yes. Structurally, where Yes were constantly moving forward to new themes, creating an illusion of movement from Point A to Point B (and often Points C, D, and E; occasionally to the far reaches of other real and imagined alphabets), PiL modelled themselves on the skipping record, constantly shunting back to Point A. The tacit claim of their music is that the progress of both progressive rock and of Western culture’s mad dash toward the future – toward bigger, faster, and more sophisticated – is a fool’s errand. Just hold tight. Here is no worse (no better either) than being somewhere else. And if we hang here long enough – even though the world may remain the same – our perceptions of it will shift. A secondary claim then arises: since we are largely a construct of our perceptions of the world, when our perceptions change, we change. Fundamentally. I hear no such claims in Uriah Heep, Greenslade, Focus, or Gentle Giant. (Look into the eyes of the dragon and despair!)

 

Levene’s great innovations in the context of PiL had nothing to do with melody or harmony. His guitar was a great gash; a sandblast abrading and upbraiding the surface of this thing that one might be tempted to call a song. Levene’s guitar was a prybar jammed between the lid and the can, the door and the frame, the present and the future, the right and the wrong. Levene found ways to wrench PiL’s songs into unexpected shapes so that they might careen along trajectories not accounted for by their design. Like Yes, but also like CAN and Lee “Scratch” Perry (the latter two among Lydon’s faves), PiL aspired to the cosmic. Maybe not as overtly. Maybe they wouldn’t cop to it. But their music surely tests the bounds of what earthly music might sound like.

 

I have a very distinct memory of dropping my young child off at daycare in those early, bleary days of new parenthood. Across the street from the daycare center was a field and forest cut through by power lines suspended from a series of monumental steel towers. It was autumn in New England, a sharp crack of chill in the air. Needing a little head clearing, a little respite from the incessance of a two year old, I walked the path of the towers. I put on my headphones and Metal Box / Second Edition.(I’ve always preferred to think of it as Metal Box, honoring the band’s original intentions when they packed three LPs into a metal film canister so tightly that to extract them for consumption meant risking their destruction.) This album offers sounds as un-pastoral as any I know. It is the embodiment of the towers and the power lines with the adjoining grass and trees photoshopped out. Indeed, in headphones, this album photoshops out the entire world. What’s left are the pixelated ghosts of guitar-bass-drums; the excoriated echo of a desperate howl emanating from a hole in the canvas.

 

Critics and guitar players of a certain bent sometimes claim that Levene invented what we recognize as postpunk guitar playing. In a song like “Chant” you can hear what they mean. Those wild, dissonant, emaciated streaks refusing to provide a roadmap for the listener’s expectations. Listen in particular to the final thirty-five seconds, when Lydon exits and Levene’s guitar rises to the fore and then melds with surprising seemlessness into a keyboard producing the same incoherence. But there was a lot more buried in Levene’s satchel. On “Memories” (we’re still listening to Metal Box) he offers vaguely middle-eastern figures, passing them through a tightly wound chorus effect that suggests that they are played under water. On “Swan Lake” (known in an alternate incarnation by the more on-the-nose title, “Death Disco”) Levene slathers the song in multiple guitars: one peppers the proceedings with flangey harmonics (a mainstay of Howe’s technique), another introduces a distant melody discharged from the bowels of an enormous metallic tank, a third scrapes gallopingly underneath the erected surfaces, and still another drops low Morricone-twanged punctuations that fall like Google map pins into the rapid and rabid expansions as they taunt disintegration. “Poptones” is in many ways the band’s mission statement. In addition to the guitar, Levene provides the spasmodic drums, overtaken by constant cymbal sibilance, grinding against Wobble’s architectonic bass line which thrusts insistently, even rudely, forward with little regard for anything else in its vicinity. Lydon’s vocals slide across registers: reticent, accusatory, resigned. Meanwhile, Levene’s guitar does something unaccounted for in celebrations of its postpunkiness. He plays a repetitive arpeggio which, if you listen to it in isolation, could be a Steve Howe contribution to one of the codas that Yes often used to close out – and settle down – one of their album-side-length, meandering epics.

 

For keen listeners, Levene provided just as much to chew on as Howe had provided for him. But in Levene’s hands there was no distracting virtuosity to lure unsuspecting, adenoidal guitarists down the garden path of MUSICIANSHIP. Levene recovered the lost, relegated, ignored, aspects of the music he loved and built a genuinely new music of these discarded parts. That’s one of the reasons that PiL at their best sounded like a teapot repaired by the same bull who’d just rampaged through the china shop. No attempt is made at disguising the sharp edges and protruding seams. These are the marks of actuality inflicted on the surface of the music and its creators. They remain, not as badges of honor – there is no honor in suffering the persecutions of reality – rather, they are left visible as evidence of having simply been part of this sometimes harsh and often pitiless world.

 

 

 Jean-Luc Godard (1930 - 2022)

 

“I start to spin the tale / You complain of my diction”: as sung by Tom Verlaine.

 

But it could’ve been Godard. Lord knows his diction was always out of whack. But just as the key word of Verlaine’s plaint is not “tale,” nor even “diction,” but “spin,” the key word here is “whack.” In Godard’s oeuvre the overriding message is that the tale is there for the spinning. Not “spin” in the 24-hour-news-cycle sense of our constantly refreshed revisionist present. Spin as constant motion. Not spun like a carnival wheel to land on some implausible conclusion, but spun to keep on spinning. Like the plates in a different section of the carnival. Such spinning provides a whack: to the side of the head, to the medium, to time itself. Sure, Godard knew all about Brechtian estrangement, whacking the audience out of their complacent passivity, their acceptance of what they are seeing/reading/hearing. It seems to me that disbelief is humanity’s greatest accomplishment. Why the fuck would anyone ever want to suspend it? Godard taught me that.   

 

Godard came of age in tandem with rock and roll. But rock and roll was never his jam. When his films included music, he preferred classical scores. He made a film called "Faut rêver Mozart." But when Godard dubbed the youth of the sixties the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” he was also, maybe inadvertently, describing the particular predicament of rock and roll, of the counterculture, of America. Mayo Thompson, of the Red Krayola once declared – guitar in hand – that “you cannot be a communist and a philosopher at the same time.” (He attributes the thought to Wittgenstein.) What about an adman? A Costco shopper? A guitar hero or a filmmaker? Can you square the circle by dropping your name from the credits and deferring to the collectivity of the Dziga Vertov (or the Spencer Davis) Group?

 

Godard did once turn his attention (and his camera) to rock and roll. 1968’s One Plus One is a confounding film for anyone who comes for the Rolling Stones. Footage of the Stones working on preliminary arrangements of the song, “Sympathy for the Devil,” alternates with staged tableaux vivants related to the socio-political events of the late-60s. A group of Black men loiter in an automobile junkyard in London’s Battersea neighborhood, reciting revolutionary texts by African American activists including LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Eldridge Cleaver, distributing rifles, assaulting and murdering a trio of White flower-child women dressed in flowing white gowns. In a paperback bookstore, the proprietor reads aloud from Mein Kampf, while patrons pay for their purchases with Nazi salutes and by slapping the faces of two teenage hippie-boy hostages who spout Maoist and Marxist slogans. A three man film crew – with camera and microphone – traipse through the forest at the heels of an interviewer lobbing political and philosophical questions at a young woman named Eve Democracy (played by Godard’s then-wife Anne Wiazemsky).

 

When the film premiered at the 1968 London Film Festival, the producers had retitled it “Sympathy for the Devil,” to match the title of the Stones’ song and the film had been re-edited – against Godard’s wishes – to include a finished version of the song. Godard responded by joining producer Iain Quarrier on stage as he introduced the film, only to punch Quarrier out and invite the audience to join him outside for a screening of his own cut under a bridge on the banks of the Thames. (This was nine years before the Sex Pistols rented a boat to sail the same river playing “God Save The Queen” during Elizabeth’s silver jubilee.)

 

Godard engaged rock and roll, through the personages and prism of the Rolling Stones, in order to do to it what he did to everything. He tore the wires from the circuit boards, held the mechanism to the bright light of skepticism, and spit into its bowels. When One Plus One cuts from the Stones in a state-of-the-art London studio, to the Black radicals reading Baraka and Cleaver, he is holding the one to the other in order to melt them down. In the glare of Baraka who wrote of “Myddle class white boys” stealing Black culture and black life, the Stones go blind. Or truer yet, we go blind watching the Stones. They can no longer make the image that they always are. They dissolve into pastiche imposters at scant remove from their minstrel forebears. But the genius of Godard – really the complication of Godard (and of Marx and Coca Cola) – is the fact that the Stones throw light and heat back at Baraka and Cleaver. The casting and the scripting that are also ideology, politics, identity, emerge as inescapable conditions of both movies and life. That is why Godard was fond of saying that life is a subset of cinema and not the other way around.

 

Other filmmakers have turned their cameras to rock and roll – Scorcese, Jarmusch, Todd Haynes – but almost inevitably they do so as an act of veneration. (I would point to Penelope Spheeris as a director who allowed contradiction and ambiguity into her rock and roll documentaries.) Godard’s One Plus One is of a piece not with these other rockumentaries, but with his own body of work, his own critical sensibility. Just as he’ll suddenly drop the diegetic sound from a scene to reveal the constructed nature of the mise en scene, introduce a section as “slow motion” to draw our attention to the stilted use of that effect, or splatter cinematically miscolored blood across the hoods of cars and the actors’ shirtfronts for no specifically narrative reason, he’ll push against the Stones, against Black nationalism, against his own Maoism, in order to force us to see it more clearly, to feel it, to discern its shape and meaning. In this context, the Stones are hardly rock gods. (The only god in Godard’s work is the one in his name, and maybe cinema itself.) Instead, the Stones are products of their time, of the burgeoning rock and roll industry, of fashion and technologies, of capitalism itself. As such, they must be pushed against. They must be torn apart. And, if you watch One Plus One a certain way (not necessarily the “right” way), they are indeed torn limb from flouncy-blouse-sleeved limb.

 

Jean-Luc Godard was of his time too. And this tearing of limbs from limbs was the modus operandi of the times. In France, where rock and roll didn’t take root as it did in the U.S. and the U.K., Godard and his Nouvelle Vague comrades used cinema as their chainsaw.  

 

Godard’s diction was out of whack because the times were out of whack. So he spun his tales without regard for complaints. The diction had to be reinvented. Not just so new tales could be told. That is what many of the other Nouvelle Vaguers were after. It had to be reinvented in Godard’s films so that tales could recede into the work as one element among others – images, sound, and the diction, grammar, and syntax of cinema and of life. Tom Verlaine sings it, “I start to spin the tale / You complain of my diction,” followed by,  “You give me friction / But I dig friction.” Godard dug friction too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Never Mind The Sex Pistols, Here’s The Bollocks

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. How one goes about it, though, can change the meaning of the cat: who it was, how it arrived at the moment of its skinning, even whether or not it was, in fact, a cat that got skinned. Here, kitty, kitty.

In critical parlance, we don’t call it “skinning,” but “interpretation.” Interpretation happens, just like shit. It happens, of course, in the hands of critics. But it also happens in the hands of biographers, journalists, filmmakers, and the cats themselves. Sometimes interpretation buries the truth, just like shit, conceals its odor beneath a layer of store-bought schist, packaged and sold as a chaperone for the shit on its way to the dustbin. Which brings me to Danny Boyle’s Pistol, the six-part series on FX.

If you’ve been watching Pistol, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the skinned cat for a possum with rickets or a discarded mophead. Boyle and creator/writer Craig Pearce dissect the Sex Pistols with all the precision of rusty hedge trimmers. Their model for the series – and it seems for their understanding of the Pistols – is the music biopic schematic in which the childhood-trauma-bone is connected to the ambition-bone is connected to the won’t-take-no-for-an-answer-bone is connected to the fame-bone is connected to the drugs-bone and the sex-bone. In fact, Pistol devotes so much attention to boning that you’d think that sex was the Pistols claim to fame. I suppose some of this can be chalked up to Pearce’s curriculum vitae which traces a shallow line from Australian soap operas to work with Baz Luhrmann on boilerplate that-kid’s-got-moxie! schtick like Strictly Ballroom and Elvis. (O the ignominy of being fêted by hacks!)

At first, I took Pistol as something like Punk for Dummies. But by episode two I realized it was closer to Punk by Dummies. The interpretation on display – the skinning – is based on a near-total misapprehension of why such a series ought to be made in the first place (assuming that it ought). Pistol is based on guitarist Steve Jones’ memoir, Lonely Boy, and revolves largely around Jones’ wayward ramble from deprived child to depraved manchild. Perhaps this is the root cause of the waywardness of the series’ interpretation. Pistol is a hamfisted bildungsroman, balanced on the hackneyed fictional devices of armchair developmental psychology and White-male-individualist-heroism. The show makes the unconscionable interpretive mistake of understanding the Sex Pistols’ trajectory – and more specifically, Jones’ – as a rags to riches story. The problem with this is three-fold. First, and most obviously, there are no riches at the end of this story. Ikea furniture with the last piece missing; a tabl. Second, the model for this kind of story necessarily places personal ambition, talent, and success at its center. Stories like this end with self-realization – in both senses: the main figure comes to realize things about himself while also realizing his inner (often god-given) potential. But for those acquainted with the Pistols’ legend and with Steve Jones’ part in the drama, it is clear that his memoir could have just as easily (and perhaps more appropriately) been called Lucky Boy because he fell into the Sex Pistols and was just barely capable enough to hang on to the tailpipe of the careening vehicle as it fishtailed through the narrow streets of 70s British culture. Jones’ post-Pistols career has been inflated and kept (just barely) aloft by the exhaust from that tailpipe emitted over a twenty-six month period some forty-five years ago. Thirdly, and most importantly, the kind of story that Boyle and Pearce try to tell – focused on the qualities of an individual as he overcomes social and societal challenges to achieve his dream – must, by design, ignore the historical and material conditions that allow, or even necessitate, the confrontations and transformations that are central to the Sex Pistols’ importance.

Hear me, o idolaters, individualists, bootstrappers, entrepreneurs: The story of the Sex Pistols is not a story of individual accomplishment. Let us not wallow in the “genius” of Jones or Lydon or McLaren. Theirs is a story of their place and time. Theirs is a story of how various lines of history, politics, class, generations, and sensibility converged in a particular place and time; how a particular phenomenon emerged from this convergence and offered a glimpse of the alternative that according to Maggie Thatcher did not exist. What makes Pistol’s interpretation all the more bewildering is that the truer telling of the Sex Pistols’ story already exists in the form of Julien Temple’s 2000 documentary, The Filth and the Fury, which is to Pistol as cliff diving in Acapulco is to stepping off the Oxford Street pavement into a puddle of day-old dog piss. (Gee, I’m really winning here. I’m really winning. I hope I don’t get overcome with power.) Boyle is clearly familiar with Temple’s film. He pilfers clips that appear in The Filth and the Fury, implicitly acknowledging that Temple’s film is part of the historical record, part of the story. He uses these filched clips to tap into what can now be taken for reality, for truth. And he uses these clips as a way of delegating responsibility for the historical, the political, the economic, the societal, to Temple’s documentary. It’s as if the entirety of Pistol is followed by a footnote:

* cf. Temple, Julien. The Filth and the Fury (2000), passim.

As told – as interpreted, as skinned – by Temple’s documentary, the Sex Pistols’ story is one of worlds (old and new) colliding. The film juxtaposes footage of the aristocracy imbibing cocktails, privilege, and ideology, with piles of garbage in London’s streets, of kids trapped in council estates (public housing) as if in prison. Scenes of a young White man rushing an older White man (the racial identifications are crucial to the scenes), ripping a Union Jack from his hands and proceeding to beat him with the flag pole; of a Black woman, her face torqued with anger, delivering a looping right hand to the left ear of a White, helmeted English policeman, sending him reeling; of a bearded White man in glasses brandishing a piece of lumber as photographers document the arc of his terrified swings: the so-called “Battle of Lewisham,” a conflict  instigated by the racist National Front marching in a majority-Black, south London neighborhood on August 13, 1977.

Elsewhere in the film, John Lydon recounts the construction of his Johnny Rotten persona and performance style. Among others, he cites Olivier’s Richard III alongside comedian Ken Dodd. The tragic, the grotesque, the comic. From a constellation of British stars, Lydon cobbles a single burning sun, not of York, but of the English unconscious; a figure designed to peel away the floral wallpaper concealing the rot and mildew – the “damp” as the British call it – eating away at everything: from the walls of their terraced flats, to time-honored traditions, to the Empire’s august institutions, to the very entitlements of the Empire itself.

Pistol is an inadvertent tragedy. It’s there in the title: Pistol, singular, despite the story being truly collective, truly historical, truly social.  It transforms a story about collective energies into one about individual aspiration. It ignores the relation of cultural production – as both output and input – to unfolding historical pressures. The story that Pistol tells is false. It is false because it places Steve Jones at its center. In truth this is a centerless story. But even so, the main bodies in orbit around the vacuum do not include Jones. It is false because it emphasizes the inconsequential, and treats the actually consequential as a mere backdrop for the heroics of its doughty, lonely boy. It is false because, at its core – in all its true significance – the Pistols’ story is an historical story; a story of how energy wells up in culture like water behind a dam. It is a story of how the dam, seemingly eternal, will someday crack and buckle, revealing the contingency of its power and its purpose. It’s also a story of how the dam gets rebuilt, the energy returned to harness; how convention is a recalcitrant bastard and most of the time gets its way. That’s a story worth telling. Thankfully, we’ve still got Temple’s The Filth and the Fury.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dan Graham

Like water in a pot on the stovetop below deck on a trawler buffeted by a roiling storm, Dan Graham sloshed and sluiced. He wouldn’t (or couldn’t) obey the edicts of the pot’s boundaries. He answered instead to the forces of nature. To wind and gravity and barometric pressure. It’s for this reason that those mirrored pavilions never seemed to me the real Dan Graham. Sure there’s all the tricks and trippiness that implore us to pair mirrors with smoke. But the sturdy permanence of those pavilions are nearly the antithesis of my image of Graham.

I prefer to think of his slinking, sly self in his writings on rock music or postwar domestic architecture. I prefer to think of his now-you-see-me/now-you-see-yourself coquettishness in performance. I prefer to think of the inconstance of his astute rationality offset by his insistence on astrology.

This unbalancing act of his is on stark display in one of his masterworks, the early-80s video Rock My Religion. As soon as you start to describe it, you come up against its constitutive contradictions. It’s a documentary. And it’s not. It’s a thesis on rock and roll in American culture. But not really. It’s a portrait of Patti Smith. Except it’s not. It’s a montage of rock and roll in the wake of punk that reconnects the form’s originary impulses to its current manifestation. That seems pretty close, but it still badly misrepresents the logic and phenomenology of the video.

Rock My Religion presents – again, maybe the wrong word, it performs – the fractious ennui of middle-American, middle-class stultification. It’s as if the houses in Graham’s mid-60s Homes for America came to life as angsty, antsy teenagers, flinging themselves about revival tents, into rock clubs, off causeless rebel cliffs. Graham portrays a developmental view of American agitation. Chafing against religious disenfranchisement, the Puritans and the Shakers willed themselves into ecstasy. They tipped and turvied, like exotic dervishes, like listing schooners. Their tongues turned somersaults, transforming the rational dictates of spoken English into feral caterwauls of yaw and yearning. Graham connects this, on the one hand, to the ghost dance of the Paiute and the Lakota, and, on the other, to James Dean’s embodiment of generational abhorrence. Out of this primordial fret emerges rock and roll: spurn as style, dissidence as commodity.

Rock My Religion followed on from Graham’s early work as a rock critic. He wrote with knowledge and giddy devotion about the British invasion, reserving special affection for the Kinks. Graham’s treatise careens from Buddy Holly to Sonic Youth alighting here on Henry Rollins, there on Mark E. Smith. Graham would also make a straighter concert film of D.C.’s straightedge lords, Minor Threat. Inexplicably, there is practically no acknowledgment of the fundamental African and African American contributions to rock and roll. Granted this is not a scholarly work, but the art leaks out of its articulateness through this breach. The video eventually sets down on the figure of Patti Smith, rock and roll’s Ann Lee (the founding leader of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, or the Shakers). The Shakers had a severe exit strategy: procreation was forbidden. La-la-la live for today! Patti Smith is in it for what can’t be gotten blithely. One must grit one’s teeth and plunge headlong into the corroded depths of the psycho-commodified banality of  cultural consensus. Battered by indifference the pilgrim, the seeker, suffers slings, arrows, and gobs of spit to touch down revivified on the earth: mother, brother, other.

Graham talked the walk. Witness Performer/Audience/Mirror. He’s being us, asks us to be him. I is another. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. Mother, brother, other. Goo goo g’joob.

Dan Graham has been called a conceptual artist. Conceptual art has been called cool, heady, unemotional, bathetic, calculated. It’s tough to square this circle because Graham was capricious, wayward, inconstant, flighty, whimsical, wooly in more ways than one. Lester Bangs once wrote of the Stooges that they work with ideas that “may not be highly sophisticated (God forbid) but are certainly advanced.” Like the Stooges, Dan Graham wallowed in the folly of bothering to do something, to make something, knowing that time will swallow the lot. Can’t go on, must… etc. The ornate is a liar; the tidy a false god. The seamless is unseemly. Graham preferred laughter and flailing and pogoing into the abyss. That’s why – all other gods impervious and those pavilions notwithstanding – rock was his religion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Terrible Abundance

 

We live in an age of terrible abundance. In the course of just a couple of months, we’ve been able to lower our temporal periscopes into the depths, to peer into rooms now fifty years gone; at people now either fifty years older or, unable to traverse time to join us here, dead. Our ears prick at distant signals beaming back in like heterohemispheric transmissions from some vaguely imagined East or South. Nothing is as simultaneously exotic and reassuring as the past. We know it like the backs of our hands. It lives on in who we are and how we live, what we understand and why we value what we value. Re-engaging the past in the form of remixes, mashups, reissues, crate-dug minerals recovered and set beneath the microscope for reinvigorated appreciation, is the safest and most immediately rewarding form of exploration. Rediscovering the already-discovered. The new world in the old world, or the old in the new. Such discoveries are always bubble-wrapped, their sharp edges and pointy corners dulled or safely blanketed like the furniture in the baby’s room.

 

In March of last year, the Beatles documentary, Get Back, was released to great global fanfare. The film  depicts the Beatles over a three-week period in 1969. And three days ago (as of this writing) on January 17, 2022, a video surfaced on YouTube of the band, Television, performing at NYC’s legendary Café Wha? in 1974. The differences between these two releases go way beyond the scale of their reception (to date, the Television clip has been viewed 2,922 times). The Beatles doc weighs in at nearly eight hours, while the featherweight Television clip is a mere three minutes and forty one seconds. Yet both exist and operate in the space of nostalgic yearning. To click “play” is to force the tip of the pry bar between the lid and the fuselage of Tut’s sarcophagus. The YouTube description accompanying the Television clip refers to it as “recently unearthed footage.” It is purportedly the only existing video of the band’s original lineup with Richard Hell on bass performing live before an audience in a club.

 

I’m a rock and roll dissident in that I understand the Beatles as a counterrevolutionary force who blunted the most radical aspects of rock and roll. The “Fab Four” – branded from the get-go – almost single-handedly invented all the benign and boring forms of rock that ascended to prominence in the 1970s. At the same time, they willingly accepted the trappings of commodity, moving through a series of product re-inventions which presage the planned obsolescence of operating systems and the techno-style upgrade logic of the iPhone. Yet, I’m always inclined to think that our reception – both individual and collective – of the materials of culture say at least as much about us as they do about the materials themselves. Apparently we wanted a safe vehicle to ride from besuited and bleached mid-60s rock and roll to anodyne late-60s psychedelia, holding both hallucinogenic drugs and non-Western musical elements at arm’s length from suburban infiltration or parental prohibition. Everybody I know is surprised to learn that I watched Get Back in its entirety. Some take this to mean that I’ve secretly liked the Beatles all along. Others assume that I am experiencing a rather inevitable mid-life conversion, finally seeing the light. I can assure you that neither of these things is true. Watching the film only confirmed my sincere, gut-level distaste for much of the Beatles’ music. But I write and teach about sound, music, and rock and roll. So I have some professional responsibility to keep up with these fields. And there is no doubt that the release of Get Back is understood to be a significant cultural event. I learned a lot about John, Paul, George, and Ringo in their final stages as a band. And – in keeping with my understanding about the dynamics of reception – I learned a lot about my own disdain for the Beatles.

 

Two things drew me to the commitment of watching the whole documentary. In previews I was taken with the quality of the footage. It reminded me of One Plus One, Jean-Luc Godard’s beautiful, perverse, confounding film about the Rolling Stones, shot just a year earlier, also in London. My own susceptibility to nostalgic indulgence knows no temptation so strong as 35 millimeter film of musicians in ochre- and chartreuse-paneled studios festooned with suspended Neumann microphones, sound-separating baffles, valve amplifiers, and champagne sparkle 3- or 4-piece drumkits. I wanted to feast on these images of process in the form’s (and the industry’s) adolescence. Secondly, I’d spotted, in those same previews, footage of Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney that suggested that maybe they played sizable roles in the film and in the goings-on depicted by it. I’ve always chafed against the misogynism of the “Yoko broke up the Beatles” bullshit. My take – as a non-believer – has always been that the true casualty of John and Yoko’s conjoining was Yoko’s artistic practice. Prior to meeting Lennon, Yoko had been a daring experimental artist whose work tested some of the most untested presumptions about ourselves and our cultural values. For one bracing example see her Cut Piece from the same year that the Beatles played New York’s Shea Stadium (1964). I ask my students to consider what it would mean to assert that the Beatles broke up Yoko. So I wanted to see for myself the dynamics of Yoko and Linda in the studio with the band. I wanted to learn more about these two accomplished women as they integrated themselves into the world of the planet’s most popular band.

What you go in for is seldom what you come out with. After subjecting/indulging for the nearly eight hours of Peter Jackson’s reassemblage, I came away with a few fairly minor realizations. The songs, by and large (exceptions admitted), fall into two categories. Scattered throughout the film, there are covers of old rock and roll songs, the stuff upon which the early Liverpool/ Hamburg outfit cut their teeth. The influence of these songs by Ray Charles, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, et al., carries over into one of the two categories: rock and roll for rock and roll’s sake. We can find examples of these songs throughout the Beatles’ catalogue, but, here, at the end, they seem to want to go back to that safe, innocent space. So, as we witness the band working on the titular “Get Back,” the song’s rock and roll roots are more clearly exposed, the opening riff being a kind of distilled and then watered-down version of Chuck Berry’s signature innovations. We also get a glimpse of what “Get Back” might have been when the band briefly works on a set of lyrics that didn’t make the final cut. This version, known in Beatles lore as “No Pakistanis,” is a satire of the anti-immigrant sentiments in late-60s Britain. Apparently fearing that the satire could be taken literally (always a risk for satire – just ask Jonathan Swift or Sacha Baron Cohen) the Beatles replaced “Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs” with “Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona for some California grass.” This lyrical road not taken is telling. There were forms and contents which the Beatles could not abide, that didn’t suit their sensibilities or their image. The second category under which their songs comfortably reside is the semi-narrative, British music hall tradition; a kind of one-act musical in which characters are brought to life, conflicts are faced, and resolutions (of one sort or another) are achieved. These songs allow the band to indulge the composerly predilections of (usually) McCartney and the baroqueisms of George Martin. Such songs sound like outtakes from Broadway productions, decidedly more tin pan alley than the mythical crossroads of the Delta blues. By 1969 when – for better and for worse – bands in the UK, America, and elsewhere, were forging ahead, inventing new forms, demanding that rock and roll mutate, evolve, expand, the Beatles were still leaning back into the past, into familiar modes. One is hard pressed to square the music of Get Back with what bands such as the Velvet Underground or Can were doing at the same time. The Beatles sound similarly out of step with what Dylan, Hendrix, or the Jefferson Airplane were doing some three or four years earlier.

 

Here’s a little game. Match the director with the band about whom they made a film:

 

Todd Haynes                           The Stooges

Jim Jarmusch                          The Velvet Underground

Peter Jackson                          Bob Dylan

Martin Scorcese                      The Beatles

 

Now, play the same game with the directors’ non-rock movies:

 

Todd Haynes                           Taxi Driver

Jim Jarmusch                          Stranger Than Paradise

Peter Jackson                          Safe

Martin Scorcese                      The Hobbit

           

Now tally the points by matching the directors’ rock and non-rock movies. The correct answers are:

 

Taxi Driver – Dylan

Stranger Than Paradise – The Stooges

Safe – Dylan and The Velvets

The Hobbit – The Beatles

 

Admittedly, this is a kind of shitty, unfair game. But not entirely so. Reception as a product of receivers. Meaning as a product of association. Get back, Bilbo!

 

Still, it is fascinating to watch a band at the height of their commercial (if not, arguably, their artistic) power working together. Throughout the film, the band entertain a series of ideas for an event: either a tv broadcast, a live concert (their first in years), or some combination of the two. They seriously consider performing in the ruins of Sabratha, an ancient Roman city in Libya. Wanting to perform their new songs live, but imagining multiple guitar parts and a piano, they toy with the idea of adding a fifth member. They discuss getting Eric Clapton to join. Never mind that while the Beatles are mocking the views of rightwing shithead MP, Enoch Powell for his anti-immigration racism, Clapton would go on to publicly support Powell. Get back, Aeneas! But also, imagine the not-entirely-misplaced hubris of a band so powerful that they could decide on a new member the way that teenagers compile fantasy bands on the inside covers of their school notebooks: “I’ll have Eric Clapton on guitar, John Bonham on drums, John Entwhistle on bass, Elton John on piano…”

 

It’s about this time that Billy Preston arrives. And of everything one might glean about the Beatles of 1969 and their world, Preston’s arrival most transparently gives away the game. At the age of twelve, Preston, a Black American pianist and organist, had portrayed the great Memphis (by way of Alabama) composer and bandleader W.C. Handy, as a young man in a 1958 biopic. (Nat King Cole played the part of the adult Handy.) Preston later joined Little Richard’s band, then Sam Cooke’s, and Ray Charles’. He was a living bridge to the Beatles’ forebears. Preston drops in on the Beatles’ session and they ask him to sit in on some of the recordings. Before long, Preston has transformed the songs, lending them the boogie, funk, and grease they had lacked (as evidenced here). And while a lot of what I’ve read about Preston’s presence on the sessions and in the film dwells on his transformative musical contributions, I haven’t seen much attention paid to the social contributions he appears to make.

 

Throughout the film, the Beatles as a four-person collaborative, are hanging by tenuous threads. Of course, we all now know that we are spying on their denouement. But the film allows us to see the tensions swirling up like dust from beneath the baseboards. At one point, Harrison quits. Ono’s presence in the studio, often within sniffing distance of Lennon – even as they record tracks – is unsettling. Does she have to be that close?! But one gets the sense that Lennon and Ono are in the midst of inventing a new kind of love, a symbiosis that drives down into genetics, desire, and soul. She’s that close almost precisely because she’s not supposed to be. In this moment they’re saying “fuck off” to all the supposed-to-bes. I’ve seen fewer mentions of all of George’s hare Krishna friends who are sitting on the floor at the outskirts of the studio, in their turmeric robes, fondling prayer beads. If we feel entitled to ask what Yoko’s doing there, we ought to feel equally entitled to question the presense of the krishnas. (Just another “fuck off”?) Nevertheless, despite all this interloping, the four Beatles are losing track of their bonds, their affinities. They each have external ambitions – films, other recording projects, politics, lives with their families. You can smell their suspicion of each other. It may not be personal – each of them has felt the pull of other interests – commercial, aesthetic, spiritual, familial – they know that the others are equally in the thrall of these forces. They're being pulled apart by the success they built together. You get the sense that they get it, but are still powerless to slow it. Billy Preston provides a crucial element that allows them to divert, if only temporarily, their suspicions and ambitions. Preston reinvigorates the band musically, but just as importantly, as a working member of the musical collaboration, he performs the role of the analyst. In the therapist’s office, the family can’t get away with their usual shit. Even as dad begins to blame the kids, he hears himself through the ears of the analyst and is instantly, freshly aware of the defenses and aggressions, all the crap he’s been getting away with in his family’s experience and in his own. Under certain circumstances, we become receivers of our own transmissions. The routinized bad behavior, the constructed justifications, collapse when triangulated through the ear of the other. Willfully or not, Preston’s ear is this other. That it is also an ear that has engaged in call and response with Little Richard and Ray Charles only makes its excavatory power that much stronger.

 

When the Television clip emerged on YouTube a few days ago, I clicked with excitement. Clearly, I wasn’t expecting the kinds of revelation promised by Get Back, but firm in the knowledge that no eight hour Televisionist exegesis is forthcoming, I take what I can get. What I wanted to see, to lay upon with mine own eyes, was the sight of Richard Hell playing bass in the four piece before his departure to form the Voidoids. The clip dates from 1974. It may seem like a genre’s lifetime away from the Get Back sessions. But it’s just a half-decade later. The legend of Television is just as romantic as that of the Beatles – if far less well-known. Richard Hell (née Meyers) and his pal, Tom Verlaine (née Miller) escaped their Delaware boarding school to move to New York City and pursue their bohemian passion of poetry and rock and roll (thus their Rimbaud-adjacent noms-de-guerre). They formed, first, The Neon Boys, then Television with Richard Lloyd on guitar and Billy Ficca on drums. But both Hell and Verlaine imagined themselves auteurs and frontmen and, unlike, say, Lennon and McCartney, were unwilling to stand even temporarily in each other’s shadow. So the Hell-era Television was a short-lived proposition and Hell was soon replaced by Fred Smith (not to be confused with the MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith, aka Mr. Patti Smith).

 

The Television clip originally aired on a New York public access tv show called The Underground Tonight Show. The band is introduced, ”we could think of no better group to be picked to be on this show” because “this is a television show.” Such was the self-evident logic of the times. Verlaine announces, “We’re gonna do a little political number now. Some 70s politics. Something called ‘Hard On Love.’” The double-entendre is clumsy and over-obvious. It predicts Hell and the Voidoids’ “Love Comes in Spurts” from their debut three years later. The song starts with Hell’s crummy-sounding bass, like rubber bands wrapped around a Kleenex box. One wonders if the crumminess is intentional or not. Just another “fuck off” to all the supposed-to-bes? Or is this an indication of the band’s greenness, the rarified pretention of not giving a shit  about not knowing what the fuck you’re doing or how to do it. As it happens, one John Lennon, having relocated to New York by 1974, was watching that night. And our peeping across years, miles, mentalities even delivers his thoughts on what he’d seen and heard as reported in the pages of the Melody Maker):

 

On TV next came a group called TELEVISION, and Lennon sat fairly transfixed. Television are so bad they're good. They can barely play their instruments and they are very short of money; they're young and dressed in rags. But they have a spirit that's irresistible, and John immediately identified them as a parallel with The Beatles in their Hamburg days. "Yeah, I can relate to them, they're exactly as we were. Skint and loving every minute. They sound terrible but they're OK!' He liked their name too.

 

But they’re not exactly as they were. The times had changed and the ambitions of ex-pat Liverpudlians in Hamburg could not rightly be compared to those of displaced Delawareans in Manhattan. In the decade since the Beatles had become THE BEATLES rock and roll had transmogrified. Riding its incipient wave to a fame that was also the music’s fame was no longer a glinting possibility glancing off the blade of the Arthurian weapons of rockgodliness to spark the eye of Knights errand with dreams beyond their humble station. No. Television knew that they were destined for the underground. Another reason that there was no better group to be picked to be on The Underground Tonight Show. Such was the logic of the times, perhaps not so self-evident.

 

Are we blessed with this terrible abundance? Who knows? On the one hand, I’ve internalized (and now externalized) over 3000 words-worth of thoughts and questions thanks to these two archival exposures. For me, no mystique has peeled off the veneer of the Beatles because, for me, there was none. But I imagine others have had different experiences. Perhaps they were better off not knowing that Paul wasn’t just “the cute one,” but was also a bit of a workaholic, haranguing chief operating officer. Perhaps, they didn’t want to see John checked out and crawling, serpent-like up the passages of his own self-lubricated kundalini. And maybe George’s reputation as the irreproachable seeker takes a hit when we witness him hissy-fitting his way out of the band (and right back in) for not being allowed to do his thing. Ringo, as ever, is Ringo.

 

For me, no mystique has peeled off the veneer of Television either, because – not just for me – there was none. Ok, maybe a little. But the 1974 footage only confirms the anti-myth myth of Verlaine and Hell, two skint punks inventing punk in the post-Beatles wasteland (sorry, wrong poet) of Western culture. Shitty sounding bass. Puerile innuendos. Crowding each other on the stage as surely they crowded each other in real life, as surely as their consciousnesses were crowded in the squalid, claustrophobic underground of New York in the 70s. I’m pretty sure I didn’t need to see this three minutes and twenty one seconds-worth of Hell-era Television. I already knew.