Roy Orbison vs. Linda Ronstadt: "Blue Bayou"

Yuck. I don't like that negativity just hanging there. So let's cleanse our palates a bit. Ladies and gentlemen, here's Roy Orbison, with his 1963 classic "Blue Bayou."

Now the thing about Roy Orbison's Monument records is that they're equal parts schmaltz and genius. The harpsichord, the kitschy harmonica, and those bell-like background vocals (what are they singing anyway?): that's the schmaltz. That valley-of-dry-bones beginning, and of course Orbison's vocals: they're the genius. And the thing is, it's really hard to imagine one without the other. It's a perfect marriage of schmaltz and genius. ...More about that voice. Not only can it make the schmaltziest musical bed sound like the sexiest honeymoon mattress or the barest prison cot... Well, it can do that. That bare quaver, that muscular weepiness: he's crooning from another dimension entirely, about a set of emotions the merely earthbound know in their marrow, and yet can only occasionally summon to conscious articulation.

About that arrangement. The Tanuki's old enough (young enough?) that his first exposure to the song came in Linda Ronstadt's 1977 cover. Her arrangement, despite being pretty California-mellow, is a little more tasteful than Roy's, I always thought. And she can summon a pretty good ache with her voice, too. I don't think anybody can hold a candle to Roy, but she does her honest best, and her version's worth hearing. So here she is in her bloomers, surrounded by muppet frogs, backed by Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.

My #@%*$ Generation

Keith Phipps writes, setting up his reassessment of Easy Rider:

Released on July 14, 1969, between the Stonewall riots and the Apollo 11 moon landing, Easy Rider became an unexpected success and, like Woodstock, a touchstone for a generation. Not my generation, though. Before seeing it, I'd imagined Easy Rider as one of those you-had-to-be-there '60s clichés that so irritated those of us who came of age in the '80s—something to be slipped into that-was-then montages between footage of Vietnam and the '68 Democratic Convention.

Film enthusiasts my age had warned me to expect a film with long, often dull, experimental patches and stoner vagaries. When I finally got around to watching Easy Rider, I discovered those warnings weren't entirely unfounded. But I also discovered a more complex and sour movie than the one I'd imagined. More an elegy for a generation that never got where it wanted to go than a celebration of that generation's superiority, it pits hopefulness against resignation and sets the battle on a lovingly photographed stretch of the United States.

Now that's annoying.

First, if you've ever actually seen the film, you're thinking: duh. That's the whole fucking point of Easy Rider: these guys honestly, deeply love America, and they can't figure out why America doesn't love them back. Why does Phipps sound like he thinks he's the first viewer ever to see that?

Second, he's a self-professed film enthusiast, but not only has he never seen Easy Rider, he seems proud of the fact. Pardon me while I gag myself with a spoon. That's such typical '80s-generation idiocy.

I say this as an '80s kid myself. Graduated from high school in 1987, the first (hardly the last) Summer of Nostalgia for the Summer of Love. First learned of the '60s through the very same self-laudatory Boomer clip montages Phipps did. Luckily, though, my parents sat out the '60s, so I never had any Freudian issues with the art of their generation like so many of my cohort did. Sure I found/find Boomer narcissism annoying, that assumption they tend to make that they invented pop culture, but I didn't have to, you know, kill the father in order to listen to his Doors albums or watch Woodstock.

Which is good, because Boomer narcissism aside, there's a lot of great art to be discovered in the '60s and '70s. As there is - and this is my real point - in any era. I don't take anybody to task for liking the culture of their generation and never moving beyond it, but once you take on yourself the mantle of "film enthusiast," or whatever - once you decide you're interested in art/culture for its own sake, in understanding it and contextualizing it and appreciating it and knowing it (in every sense including, perhaps foremost, the Biblical) - then you have no business allowing Oedipal issues to blind you to the good stuff.

Any critic, any lover of art, will have loves and hates, or areas of greater and lesser knowledge. But no critic has any business basing his/her judgments on something he/she "imagines" to be true about a piece of art. That's just ignorance. Sure, we all have our blind spots. But we shouldn't be proud of them.

Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

I'm a little late to the party on this one, I know. It's because I almost never read contemporary fiction, non-Japanese. Why? One, because I almost never read contemporary fiction, non-Japanese, so that when I do read a book, I can't properly contextualize it, and I find I have a hard time enjoying art I can't contextualize. So I'm an uptight academic at heart: surprise. Two, because no matter how much I enjoy it (and, to give the lie to that last statement, I enjoyed the bejeezus out of this novel), toward the end I start to feel guilty for not spending this time reading something that might someday contribute to a class, or an article. So I'm an uptight academic at heart: surprise.

But a dear friend recommended this to me, and in such specific terms that I just had to pick it up. Took me a while to get around to it, but.

Well, it is a masterpiece. It succeeds on so many levels, from the exhilarating bilinguality of the narration (I know just enough Spanish to get the frisson of catching some of the asides, and not enough to spoil it by catching them all) to the fascinating composite portrait it provides of, simultaneously, a family of Dominicans, and Dominican society as a whole (a society I freely admit I knew nothing about besides what you'd glean from the Boston media during the age of Manny, Pedro, and Big Papí). Plus, a lot of it takes place in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and by sheer chance I started reading this the day after I got back from a conference there. So I could envision some of the places it talks about...

Two things I want to mention about this book.

It dimly registered while I was reading it that the whole thing's a riff on Hemingway's "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber." It's such a magnificent book that you're almost embarrassed for Hemingway: put Oscar Wao in the ring with Francis Macomber, and Wao wins by a knockout in three. But this works to the book's advantage: you so quickly forget that Wao is an allusive variation on Macomber, you so quickly get immersed in the wondrous specificity of Díaz's achievement, that the inevitable ending may still come as a surprise. It was only when (spoiler alert) Oscar is out in that canefield that I found myself thinking, oh yeah, Mrs. Macomber. I mean, I should've been expecting it. That I wasn't shows that the book really worked for me. As an allusive variation. The Hemingway connection enriched the book for me, without overshadowing it.

Also: as something of a Tolkien aficionado, not to mention a nerd for all reasons, I thoroughly enjoyed Oscar's nerdessence. As a whitekid myself I'm always strangely embarrassed and heartened when I encounter people of color who co-inhabit my canon (I mean: why? but also, why not? but also, and again, why? etc.), so that's part of it. But mainly it's because I was moved, as a Tolkien reader, by Díaz's deep application of Tolkien to Dominica. I mean, us Tolkien apologists can talk about how there's depth there, meaning, significance; Díaz demonstrates it, by showing how Tolkien's imagery can, for one fanboy, capture deep feelings and understandings about a real-world event (the Trujillato). That is to say that, on a very deep level, Oscar Wao is about the power of literature in general, and Tolkien in particular, to help us make sense of life: Tolkien gives Oscar (not just Oscar: Yunior: Díaz) a vocabulary to talk about great evil, about torture, about destiny, about great beauty and strength, about death and violence and love.

Thanks.

Anthologyology: Supertramp

The Tanuki liked Supertramp when he was a kid. He was of that era: Supertramp got played on the FM rock stations (this was in the very early '80s, when there were only rock and top-40 stations - the "rock" stations became "hard rock" sometime around 1983 and stopped playing things like Supertramp), and the Tanuki heard them, and liked them. He didn't know any better.

Paris was the album I had. I still think it's the best way to hear Supertramp: the live energy, and the unavailability of too many electronics on stage, delivers the band of just enough of their tweeness to reveal the strength of their songs (and dig that cover: how many orthodontist's offices had paintings that looked just like that in the '80s?). Paris was also the only album of theirs I had. Much later, in my first bout of nostalgia for the music of my youth, I picked up a greatest-hits disc. But it was woefully incomplete. I knew what I needed to make the perfect Supertramp anthology. But by that time I didn't care enough to complete the acquisition.

I only just did. For the record, that means I picked up Paris and also "...famous last words..." This last one because their anthologies never include "Crazy" and Waiting So Long," which are worth having. Throw those three albums together and the Tanuki finally has all the Supertramp he really needs.

And now the question he asks himself is: does he really need any Supertramp at all? At this point in his musical education he can plainly hear all the ways in which the 'tramps are derivative of earlier, better artists, artists the Tanuki now loves but which he didn't discover until later. Viz: if you imagine a really accessible version of '70s Yes, add to that the Kinks at their early-'70s gayest and most melancholy, and cut this with liberal doses of Elton John, you get Supertramp. In the ensuing years the Tanuki has developed an undying fascination with Yes, a rapt love for the Kinks in all their permutations, and a healthy appreciation for Reg. So what use does he have for Supertramp?

None, maybe. I'm not finding myself enthralled by Paris the way I was when I was thirteen. That said, I have to admit that, derivative or not, Davies and Hodgson had the goods. "Give A Little Bit" is a bona fide classic, but they had another dozen or so songs just as good. Solid songs, interestingly arranged and well performed, consistently hitting that '70s sweet spot of post-Beatles pop/rock, reasonably sophisticated and experimental, before AOR channeled all such impulses into strict subgenre conventions.

For what it's worth, here's what the Tanuki came up with as an anthology. An inveterate anthologizer, is the Tanuki. Disc One: School (live); Crazy; Ain't Nobody But Me (live); The Logical Song; Bloody Well Right; Dreamer; You Started Laughing (live); Hide In Your Shell; From Now On (live); It's Raining Again; Goodbye Stranger. Disc Two: Take The Long Way Home; Give A Little Bit; Rudy; A Soapbox Opera (live); Asylum (live); Breakfast In America; Waiting So Long; Fool's Overture (live); Two Of Us (live); Crime Of The Century (live).

I am such a geek.

Great Society: Born To Be Burned, Collector's Item

So A Serious Man caught me in the midst of a Jefferson Airplane phase. Been listening to a lot of them recently, and that includes their all-important feeder group, the Great Society. They existed in 1965 and 1966, for about a year, and centered around the sometime menage-a-trois of Grace Slick, her husband Jerry, and his brother Darby. The group broke up when Grace joined Jefferson Airplane as a replacement for their original girl singer, Signe Toly Anderson.

Which means, of course, that the Great Society are primarily remembered today for what they contributed to the Airplane: Grace, of course, plus the Airplane's only two real hits, Darby's "Somebody To Love" and Grace's "White Rabbit." Without the Great Society, the Airplane maybe goes nowhere; without the Airplane, though, does Great Society make it?

Doubtful. Great Society's version of "Somebody To Love" is excellent in its own way - that's the single version of it; the live version is better. But it doesn't have the virtues the Airplane's version does: the pop savvy, the breakneck force of the speed. It doesn't have Jorma. Great Society would never have had a hit with it.

And "White Rabbit"? Well, Great Society's version is eminently worth savoring. It's so different from the Airplane's as to be virtually another song; and I don't think it's actually worse. The soprano-sax-led jam the Great Society append as a prologue really goes places, and the more conventional rock arrangement of the song portion (not the bolero of the Airplane's arrangement) cooks nicely, too. But again, this could never have been a hit.

I say that with the conviction that it matters. I'm enough of a poptimist to appreciate that the discipline and craft involved in making a good pop record can actually improve a song, focus its musical energy. That's certainly what happened with these two songs, transforming them from typically shaggy early San Francisco jams into anthems.

That said, I also like shaggy early San Francisco jams, and I love the Great Society for their own, very considerable virtues.

Let's observe, before we go any farther, that much like the Airplane itself, the short-lived Great Society had personnel continuity issues. Their first lineup was Slick, Slick, and Slick, plus bassist Bard Dupont and guitarist/vocalist David Miner. They recorded almost an album's worth of demos in 1965, and released one single that year: "Somebody To Love" (as "Someone To Love") and "Free Advice." All these can now be found on the 1995 archival release Born To Be Burned. "Free Advice" is now more famous than the studio version of "Someone To Love," because it showed up on the Airplane's 1992 box set, and the Rhino Summer of Love box Love Is The Song We Sing. I love this song: everything about it, from the Cossack march of the rhythm section to Grace's wordless improv, is sui generis, and very effective.

Dupont was replaced by Peter Vandergelder, who played sax as well as bass, and this lineup was captured on tape live at the Matrix; two albums were released in 1968, and combined into one in 1971; they're now available on CD as Collector's Item From The San Francisco Scene.

Aside from "Free Advice," the studio disc isn't very interesting. The live disc, however, is a classic. Aside from the numbers already linked to above it includes a wealth of intriguing jams. The Slicks were all pretty good on guitar by this point, and were sounding, by the way, very typically San Francisco in their tone and attack. Peter brought, as we've already heard, some jazzy saxophone into the mix, while on stage Grace was allowed to play some Doorsy organ and also recorder. (Even in the Airplane Grace was always underrated as a musician. Her beauty, and her vocal charisma, tended to obscure the fact that she was in many ways the most talented member of the scene.)

Check out, for example, their moody breakdown of the girl group classic (the Jaynetts) "Sally Go Round The Roses." Or their brave take on the standard "Nature Boy." Or this sultry original, "Grimly Forming." (Now that one mighta coulda been a hit. Great underwater guitar work, great bass/drums figure.)

They were a serious band, and at least as accomplished as the Airplane or the Dead were at this point.

Ken Kesey: Sometimes A Great Notion (1964)

A month after I wrote this, I finally finish this book. Got through the last hundred or so pages on a flight out of Eugene, and on a train and in a hotel restaurant in New Jersey. That is, I started this quintessential Oregon book just after arriving in the state, and only finish it once I've left (although the leaving is only for a weekend).

I'm not sure if I have much to add to what I wrote last time. Or even to Charles Bowden's formulation in the introduction: "The choice presented is between a brutal individualism that we all secretly love, but can no longer afford, and a dreary collectivism that stills our heart when we even think about it." Chew on that for a while.

It is, among other things, a Labor Movement novel. And, specifically, a Western labor movement novel. Reminded me of Wallace Stegner's great Joe Hill in that regard. It centers around the Stamper clan in the fictional town of Wakonda Auga on the Oregon coast. The whole region is (in the novel) dependent on logging, and the Stampers are in it, too, running their own outfit. The rest of the town goes on strike, but the Stampers (who only hire relatives, and keep them non-unionized) refuse to join, instead seizing all the lumber company contracts and monopolizing their business. So the town hates the Stampers, who are making the strike ineffectual, and therefore keeping the town out of work. And the Stampers - well, they just don't give a damn.

Onto this individual vs. collective struggle we have grafted an almost Biblical struggle between two half-brothers in the Stamper clan: Hank, the young virile tough head of the family business, and Lee (Leland Stanford Stamper: awesome name), the bookish alienated son of Hank's father Henry's second wife. Hank had a sexual relationship with Lee's mother; Lee knew about it, and it destroyed his childhood; now, in the wake of a failed suicide attempt, he drops out of grad school at Yale and comes back to help Hank fulfill the lumber contract and, oh yes, to get revenge on Hank somehow.

Hank, then, is the novel's big representative of romantic, heroic, doomed, destructive individualism - although his old father Henry is still around, and he's even scarier. And Hank's scary physicality is set out in opposition to Lee - but Lee hardly represents the community side. In fact, we gradually come to realize that Lee's intellectualism is just as bullying, just as exploitative, as Hank's physicality, and that he's just as driven by his own desires, and blind to the welfare of those about him, as is Hank. They're both egotists.

Which means the community side doesn't get a particularly charismatic spokesman. But of course that's the point. Community isn't romantic. It's deadly dull to the romantic individualist. It's spiritual death. So those who are in the right position to speak for it (union organizer Draeger, local union rep Floyd Evenwrite) are pretty dull men.

But they're not set out as mirror images or opposites to Hank. Instead, and appropriately enough, Kesey gives us, as representatives of community, the whole damn community. Part of what makes this book so long and such a slog is that Kesey has committed himself to following the stories (in an up-close, stream-of-consciousness way) not only of the main Stampers, but of what feels like a couple dozen townspeople. Everyone from, literally, preachers to prostitutes. All walks of life. We get inside all their heads, sometimes following one of these minor characters for pages at a time, sometimes getting a whirlwind tour of what all of them are up to at any given moment. It's a very effective group portrait of this town. You come out of the book feeling like you know it as well as you can know any place in modern American fiction. (Is this modern? In important ways, it's not: all to the good.)

But that's not the true beauty of this novel, which is that above and beyond the rich themes, the vividly realized characters, and the (eventually, sort of) gripping story, we get a lot of very poetic evocations of nature. Ken Kesey could write like an angel when he wanted to, and he frequently wanted to while writing this book, if passages like this are any indication:

"And in the tops of the huge trees, the very rain seemed to work at fixing the trees standing, threading the million green needles in an attempt to stitch the trees upright against the sky" (p. 567).

An essential book.

A Serious Man, cont'd

So in "Somebody To Love," Grace Slick clearly, indelibly, sings, "When the truth is found to be lies / and all the joy within you dies." But the Third Rabbi in the film quotes the lines this way: "When the truth is found to be lies / and all the hope within you dies."

I have complete faith in the Coen Brothers' attention to musical detail. O Brother inspired it. I'm not willing to believe this was a mistake, anymore than I'm willing to overlook the fact that the first rabbi's calendar says 1967 (supposedly - I didn't notice the detail, but others did), but the Columbia Record Club guy is talking about Abraxas, which came out in 1970. I don't know what that last detail means - is Dutton calling from the future? is the film actually set in 1970 and the first rabbi just forgot to update his calendar? is this somewhat sheltered Jewish enclave symbolically living in the past, at a moment when the present is going to come crashing in?

I don't have an answer to the Abraxas conundrum, and I'm not even sure where pondering it could lead us. But the hope/joy one seems just bursting with meaning. Larry Gopnik is in crisis, sure enough: a crisis of what? Faith? Hope? Charity, even? I know that's a New Testament formulation, and thus inappropriate, but it's not out of step with the Second Rabbi's advice to help other people. ...I don't know if he is in a crisis of hope, actually: the thing about Larry, like Job, is that he keeps expecting that life will do him right. Hope is the one thing he does have. He's not giving up. Although that x-ray tornado might just do the trick...

But joy? He doesn't seem to have much of that - and when the first rabbi tells him to appreciate the simple things in life (i.e., to embrace joy?), his example - a parking lot - is so joyless by its very nature that we, along with Larry, can only go, huh?

Larry's hope is in danger of dying. But his joy? Was it ever there to begin with? Or is it something that was never given place in his life, but is seeping in from without, in the "new freedoms" of sex and drugs and rock and roll? Maybe Abraxas is indeed signalling a time lag:
maybe the '60s, like "modernity," didn't arrive at the same time everywhere. Maybe the 1967 that San Francisco hipsters experienced, that Summer of Love, didn't arrive elsewhere until 1970...

Maybe Larry will never discover joy. But his son might - maybe it'll come seeping up from the deepest recesses of his mind like the camera and Grace's voice in that opening (post-dybbuk parable) sequence. Maybe - if he survives the tornado.