Downton Abbey (2010)

We caught part of an episode of Downton Abbey on PBS a few weeks ago, and we were hooked, sort of against our wills. (Against my will, I guess. I suppose I still have that American male inbred resistance to PBS's Anglophilia, even though, when it comes right down to it, I love that kind of shit.) Read up on it and learned that PBS was presenting it wrong, so put the DVDs in the queue (lovely Anglophilic word, that). You, O Reader, may wish to do the same. It's good.

Watch any random ten minutes, and you'll probably think, as I did, "gee, this feels like Gosford Park." And you won't be wrong: it's written by the same guy. What leads you to make the association is, undoubtedly, the upstairs-downstairs nature of the story, where we get the traumas of the nobles intertwined with those of the commoners in such a way that neither feels trivialized and each resonates with the other in interesting ways. But whereas Gosford Park crammed it all into a little over two hours, channeled it into a murder mystery, and crossed it with Robert Altman's trademark stylistic obsessions, making it as much about savoring the textures of the scenes as about understanding the world, here it's stretched out over seven episodes, presented in the context of a dynastic succession crisis, and slowed down so that each separate character is given time to develop. The result is a full realization of all the rich insights that Gosford Park mostly just hinted at. (Plus lots of eye candy in terms of settings and costumes, and some wickedly satisfying villains.)

Downton Abbey is also, incidentally, the kind of thing I mean when I say that American TV shows could sometimes benefit from a more limited run, planned into them from the beginning. At seven episodes and somewhere around nine hours, this can develop the storylines and relationship much more than a/the movie, but without drawing them out needlessly as would happen if this were an American series. At the end of the seventh episode, you really feel like things are wrapped up meaningfully, if not to your perfect satisfaction. They're going to make a second series, and I'll watch it, but there's something very aesthetically pleasing about it the way it stands.

The Moody Blues: In Search Of The Lost Chord

The Moody Blues' second album was released in June 1968. It was the band shorn of orchestra: it's all one whether the band decided to do it for themselves, or the orchestra turned back into a pumpkin. Regardless, it turned out they didn't need it. Between them and Sir Mel of Lotron they could play, or fake it on, enough instruments to create virtually (virtually create?) the same lush sound as on their first album.

In Search Of The Lost Chord gets my vote for their best record. Its big hit is only slightly less ubiquitous than those from its predecessor, its concept is not quite as toe-curling, and it has a lower percentage of weak songs than any other. It's the Moody Blues at their most purely musical - which is to say, at their most naive and innocent. Which is odd to say about an album whose primary concern is drugs.

That's not quite right. The primary concern here is the Search - i.e., Man's Search For Meaning. Once again it sounds like they got their concept from one of those BBC deep-thought discussion programs Monty Python were always poking fun at. Then again, risible or not, surely, man, or men, and women too, surely, have been known, or rather observed, or at least suspected, surely, to search, seek, or otherwise grope about, upon occasion, surely, if not rather more frequently, for purpose, transcendence, satisfaction, and/or, not to put too fine a point on it, meaning. It happens, surely. Particularly when you're in your twenties. So why not write a song or two or twelve about it? That is, I mean, if you're not too terribly wedded to the idea of another silly love song - not that there's anything wrong with those, either, mind you... But there's room in the world for more than that, surely?

Okay, I won't call you Shirley again.

*

No orchestra means no outside orchestral composer/arranger means no overture. We cut right to the first bit of doggerel. Which is to say, the record opens with a poem, again. This one, "Departure," isn't quite as mallowy as the ones on the first record. Indeed, it includes a slightly intriguing exploration of synesthesia that suggests they've been thinking about the poetic implications of their recent chemical excursions. Plus, it's short, and blasts right into "Ride My See-Saw."

This time they front-load the John Lodge rocker, and it's almost as much of a classic as "Peak Hour." Maybe not quite as mind-drillingly psychedelic, but just as propulsive, just as freakbeat-tastic. And this one has the distinction of teaching us that Justin Hayward could play a pretty mean electric guitar solo when called upon to do so: there's enough fuzz on here to freak out a peach. It's wicked. You never would've guessed it to look at Hayward, or - more to the point - to hear him sing.

Then it's on to another Ray Thomas children's song, another march around the nursery in tin soldier gear. "Dr. Livingstone, I Presume," it's called. Yeah. The search, dig? Great White Explorer in pith helmet and gaiters, machete-ing his way through Arctic snows, as allegory for the Search for Meaning: that jungle is in your mind, see. So, I guess I'd call this a misstep: too precious for my taste, by half.

But the album's stunner follows: the epic "Legend Of A Mind." And speaking of things you never would've guessed by looking at or listening to guys: Ray Thomas wrote it. All is forgiven. It's a true rock anthem. From the elegant cleverness of the lyrics ("he'll fly his astral plane") to the melody that matches them (the mellotron delivering tasteful bombing-run whines and drones on command), from the delirious calliope of the main guitar riff to the soulful (!) flute in the middle section, this is epic stuff. It's almost trippy enough to make you believe the Moody Blues actually dropped acid.

Heh.

Unfortunately it's wrapped in a thoroughly mediocre John Lodge number, "House Of Four Doors." The idea is that between them "Doors" and "Legend" make something of a suite (with, just possibly, a pun intended there between the musical suite and the suite of rooms that presumably lies beyond those doors)(nah, I doubt it). That is, Part 1 of "House Of Four Doors" talks about searching through a mystical house, and behind each door is another stage (wouldn't you know) in the evolution of music. This is something they were evidently big on, the Moodys: they'd construct another song about this same concept on a later album. Neither time would it be a highlight; here it's just some noodling on premodern instruments, and then the fourth door opens and, boom: acid rock. The problem is that "House" is just kind of a boring song. A drag, in the parlance of the day.

But as with Days Of Future Passed, the second side is solid enough to redeem any missteps that came before. It's probably no coincidence that once again, this is where the Justin Hayward numbers are.

It opens with "Voices In the Sky," which, in fine Wordsworthian fashion, manages to rhapsodize about tweeting birds in such tones as to suggest heavenly chorales. And it's right about this point when you realize that Hayward has a gift. He was by no means the whole story with the Moody Blues, but he was the biggest part of it. He was the most consistent songwriter among them by far, with a seemingly endless stock of ethereal ballads. Those were his forté, obviously. He could play with a fuzz-box surprisingly well, and as future albums would reveal he could peel off a rocker when he needed to, like a bill off a wad of hundreds, but it's songs like "Voices In The Sky" that are his true achievement. Songs that suggest his soul was not a rocker's at all, but something that would have been equally or perhaps more at home twenty, forty, a hundred years before. And it's just as well: they'll kick you out of the Rock Stars' Union for writing a song with "bluebird" in the lyrics.

And the band is right there with him. That's important to note. Flute recorded so hot that it starts to distort, Indian percussion, Pinder's folly building to a fine crescendo, and the well-rehearsed groove-shift under the climactic line on the refrain: "calling to" (drum-tap) "me."

Pinder's two songs are on the b-side of the album, and they're just as motley a pair as they were on the first album. The first is "Thinking Is The Best Way To Travel." Are we still in the concept, by the way? I guess we are: mind-candy has given way to pure imagination, I suppose. There's something charmingly amateurish about Pinder's compositions, I find: not an adult's fulsome attempt to talk to a child, which is how Thomas's kiddie songs strike me, but genuine boyish enthusiasm. Like, he sounds like the one who had the most fun in the '60s. This number is typical: a trippy acoustic guitar rhythm brought perilously close to funky by backwards-sounding Beatley percussion and Sputnik sounds. A little too shaggy to be a hit single, i.e. to stand on its own, but a nice complement to Hayward's too-commercial-for-his-own-good sensibilities.

"Visions Of Paradise" is another ethereal Hayward ballad, this one co-written with Thomas, and it amps up the Indian elements. Pinder, evidently, wasn't the only one with an Orientalist bone in his body. On this song they do their best to paint an aural portrait of the kind of shimmery, gauzy, Darjeelingy paradise they imagine in the lyrics. In true Moodys fashion it drifts through patches of dramatic melancholy in between sun-struck stretches of contentment.

Are we there yet? I think so - it's clear that Man's Search has led him to some kind of paradise. Time to wrap things up, right? And they will, in such a way as to suggest that this vision is no mirage, but a true testimony of the power of sitars and tablas to create an ecstasy effect. (I think it was Robert Penn Warren who said you shouldn't try to illustrate virtue, only how to approach or avoid it. But that's the difference between music and literature: the Paradiso is a boring read. I'm sure, however, that the soundtrack would have been awesome.)

But the Moody Blues, for all their pretensions to pop art, are also pop artists, and canny when they need to be: they also have, they think, another blockbuster Hayward ballad on their hands, and where better to put it than right at the climax of the second side? This is "The Actor," which has precisely nothing to do with the album's concept, as far as I can tell. But it is a breathtaking composition, a worthy successor to "Nights In White Satin," even though it was never, for some reason, released as a single. Masterful in its progression of musical moods, from the barely-reined-in triplets of the instrumental intro to the soft-shoe stride of the verse to the wistful spiraling kneel that ends it to the determined canter of the refrain.

I've said it before: I don't know if the Moody Blues were prog. I haven't yet figured out what I even mean by "prog." But they did display a certain textual and formal ambition - their concept albums, their pop-song suites. And if they weren't virtuosi at their instruments they were nevertheless a very musical band, always opting to make their point through careful arrangement and graceful playing rather than forceful riffing or, gasp, mere volume. They understood dynamics, restraint, and musical color.

Musical color: that's synesthesia, by the way. Which is what they return to with the benedictory poem, "The Word" - we're back to the concept, and it's time to wrap things up with a nice dose of inappropriate Logocentrism. No matter: once again it throws us headlong into a song.

Which happens to be Mike Pinder's other song, "Om." Yes, in 1968 the Moody Blues wrote a song called "Om." Part of the chorus ran "hea-ea-ven." More Instant Raga - almost insufferable, except those Anglican vocal harmonies are entrancing.

That's it. Eureka. The Moody Blues were psychedelic choirboys: fuzz-boxes and ashrams and acid adventures as imagined by rosy-cheeked boys up in the loft after the service has ended. Lysergy as liturgy, and vice-versa.

The Moody Blues: Days Of Future Passed (1967)

I think I'm on record, somewhere on this blog, as saying that I have no guilty pleasures, because I refuse to feel guilty about art that honestly gives me pleasure. I may have spoken too soon. At the end of last year I suddenly decided to pick up some discs by a band (like PP&M) of whom, back in my vinyl and cassette days, I used to have everything, but had neglected to replace on compact disc. This would be the Moody Blues. At one point I had all their Main 7, and a few of their '80s albums as well; I can remember listening to them a lot in high school and college. A lot.

And so I bought Days Of Future Passed, their debut, and popped it in the stereo one bleak December day, and closed my eyes and really enjoyed it...until I looked up and saw Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki giggling into her sleeve.

You've got to understand: she generally likes whatever I bring into the house. She wasn't really into music much before we started going out, just whatever was on the radio, but she has displayed remarkable patience not only with my collecting obsessions but with my nerdathon discussions of them. And I guess some of it has rubbed off - because her tastes have become pronounced enough to find the Moody Blues ridiculous. And not just ridiculous, but ridiculous in the context of what she knows about my musical tastes: as in, you like this? Like, with every new mellotron chord she was visibly losing faith in my discernment.

How embarrassing.

But here we are.

*

There was a band called the Moody Blues in Birmingham, England, in the mid-'60s. They were part of the British Beat Boom, and they played r&b. Pretty typical of their time and place, actually. They had one big hit in late 1964 with "Go Now," a cover of an American soul number. At the time, one hit single was, evidently, good enough for a couple of years' worth of bookings, and the Moody Blues toured on it until the summer of 1966, while all their attempts at a follow up (they recorded about an album's worth of material) stiffed. At this point it was apparent that the group had run its course, and two key members left: lead singer and guitarist Denny Laine (who would go on to join Wings) and bassist Clint Warwick.

The other three - keyboardist/vocalist Mike Pinder, vocalist/utility man Ray Thomas, and drummer Graeme Edge - decided to stay together, and they recruited a new singer/guitarist, Justin Hayward, and a new bassist/vocalist, John Lodge, to round out the quintet.

This was a new band. What they played had very little in common with what the old band had played. The new band went on to infinitely greater commercial success than the old band, and a great deal of that success was due to the contributions of the two new members. In retrospect, in other words, a name change would have been in order. But at the time, this would have involved discarding whatever commercial value was left in the Moody Blues name, and essentially starting from scratch. You can see why they decided not to make the change: they must have felt they needed every leg up they could get.

But as a result of that decision, if decision it was, every subsequent history of the Moody Blues (like this one) has started by mentioning the Denny Laine band and their hit "Go Now," as if it had anything whatsoever to do with the group that wrote and recorded Days Of Future Passed.

It didn't.

*

So, yeah, I've been thinking a bit lately about the idea of the middlebrow, and whether it has any meaning beyond the derogatory. If it does, it probably fits Days Of Future Passed.

The story behind the album, as it's always been told, sounds too good to be true. Decca/Deram has a new recording technology, and to sell it to the public they decide to have one of their pop groups collaborate with a symphony on some sort of hybrid work. So far it makes a certain amount of sense, I guess. What doesn't, really, is why they'd pick the Moody Blues - a washed-up R&B outfit now missing their most recognizable member - to invest in like this. Maybe they figured nobody else would be desperate enough to risk their youth-culture cred on such an idea?

What they probably hadn't been counting on was the fact that youth culture, that is the generation of listeners who had cut their teeth on the Beatles, was growing up. (Or maybe the Deram suits did know this, and it was all a brilliant plan based on a keen understanding of the marketplace. Could be.) The album's timing was perfect. It appeared in November of 1967, after Sgt. Pepper's had turned the world on to concept albums (it was one, and that's nothing to be ashamed of) - to ambitious art statements in a rock context - to unusual sounds wedded to beat-pop - to psychedelia. That opus had ended with an astounding mini-suite called "A Day In The Life."

Surely somebody else has remarked that Days Of Future Passed is an attempt to make an entire album on the theme of that song?

But whereas the Beatles were a bit cagey about who it was a day in the life of - a normal working stiff or a closet stoner? (okay, not that cagey) - the Moody Blues made it explicit: "the Moodys," read the liner notes, "have chosen to paint their picture of everyman's day, which takes nothing from the nostalgia for the past - and adds nothing to the probabilities of the future."

I'd argue that the particular mixture of high-concept ambition and near-patronizing embrace of mundanity marks the work as middlebrow. Even, or perhaps almost, self-consciously middlebrow. But to be fair, you have to ask: is this the Moodys or the shamefaced Deram suits talking?

According to the liner notes in the 2008 reissue (the one worth getting), the band was already playing all the songs in their live set, and assuming they didn't rewrite the lyrics in the studio, that must mean they had been toying with the idea of a "day in the life" sort of project. But then the gorgeously schlocky poem that begins and ends the record was written after the songs had been cut and the orchestral parts worked out - and that poem, as much as anything, ties the concept together. (That poem, separated into "Morning Glory" and "Late Lament," is a perfect example of 1967 middlebrow, by the way: poetry as imagined by somebody who had read the Romantics in school, and probably no poetry written by anyone living. It addresses "Brave Helios," ferchrissake.)

So: the Moodys have a set of songs that loosely move you through the moods of a working day. They've been given a chance to make a record out of those songs (the tale that they were first ordered to make a rock version of the New World Symphony is, supposedly, a myth), on condition that they use an orchestra, to fully demonstrate the potentialities of Deram's new recording technology. So they work with arranger Peter Knight and a pickup orchestra.

This is another key to the middlebrow nature of the record. Peter Knight was a TV composer and conductor. Doesn't that make perfect sense? Listen to the orchestral parts on the album. They're lush, visual, harps and bells and whatnot everywhere, all triumphal flourishes and heart-rending swoops and sweeps. Extremely romantic, in a '60s TV sort of mode. It's like the poetry: classical music as heard through that most middlebrow (to be charitable) of media, television.

The thing is, it all fits together pretty perfectly. The orchestral parts, the poetry, the songs: they're all on the same wavelength. From the first invocation of that "cold-hearted orb" to the three question marks following "which is an illusion," it's a seamless whole. You either dig it or you don't.

I dig it - though not without some reservations. I don't pretend those reservations make me cool...

*

Unfortunately, it turns out the Moodys only had eight songs ready for the Day In The Life concept - not including the poems. By the time all the orchestral interludes are included the album comes out to standard length for the time, but it is true that the band itself is only supplying a little over half the music on the record. And not all of what they do provide is up there with their best work.

Most of the first side is pretty weak, actually. It starts off with an orchestral overture, setting the stage for the album and introducing the musical themes (srsly, it does), then we get the poem, then we get a little more orchestra. In all we're a third of the way through the side before we hear the Moody Blues playing.

And when the band does kick in it's with a curiously mopey Mike Pinder ballad, sung by Justin Hayward. "Dawn Is A Feeling;" and I guess it takes brass for them to introduce themselves, and the Day, with such an anticlimactic number. It has some nice vocal lines in it, but it can't hold a candle to the balladry to come... And this is followed, inauspiciously enough, by one of Ray Thomas's most cloying numbers. He'd develop quite a line in children's songs by the time the band was through; sometimes they'd work, but this one, "Another Morning," just doesn't have a lot to offer...

Luckily, the side closes with a winner. The listener has noted that the songs, properly speaking, are intro'd and outro'd by orchestral sections; for the most part they sound like connectors, either foreshadowing or echoing the melodies of the songs. But the final band track on the first side is preceded by a truly groovy orchestral piece called "Lunch Hour": it sounds like it was composed as the music for some kind of City of the Future documentary circa 1957. And it blasts us straight into "Peak Hour," John Lodge's second-finest moment (his finest being the last track on their seventh album). With this song, suddenly, abruptly, the album comes to life.

It's a forgotten classic of psychedelia, and really should have been a hit single. It has it all: agile, radio-friendly rhythm work, Ready-Steady-Go-ready guitar lines, trippy vocal harmonies, a stop-in-your-tracks-then-accelerate instrumental break, a mind-warping mellotron solo. It explodes off your portable turntable and sets off fireworks behind your eyes, kiddies. It's the real deal.

And it makes the second side a little bit less of a surprise. Here we have five real, actual songs, and -

And this is where I'm going to embarrass myself. I've shown, I think, a dignified disdain for the loopy numbers on the first side, and only waxed enthusiastic about the proper psychedelic track, which is, after all, a relatively safe position to take. But on Side 2 we have romantic tragedy galore, high queenly drama, knights in armor, not to mention a side-trip into full-bore cast-of-thousands orientalism. There's nothing dignified on the second side of this record, nothing you can hold your head up in sophisticated company and admit to being moved by. God help me, I love it.

So we start out - lunch being concluded - with "Tuesday Afternoon," or, to give it the proper album title, "Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)." Lyrically, it's a typical bit of autumn-of-love psychedelia: simultaneously whimsical and contemplative, somehow winning in its jejune thoughtfulness. Youth incarnate. But Justin Hayward's particular genius is to wed these lyrics, not to some mind-blowing piece of far-outitude, but to a melody of sublime melancholy that also happens to be a sturdily-crafted pop song. Dig the way the tension of the verse swings gently into the long-legged easy stride of the bridge. The arrangement is perfect, by the way: comfortable piano and acoustic guitar tastefully deployed to set off the focal mellotron lines.

The mellotron. The Moodys deserve respect for their pioneering use of the mellotron, if for nothing else. (It was Pinder who, according to reports, turned the Beatles on to the instrument: he used to work for the company that made them.) On "Tuesday Afternoon" its sounds provide a ghostly focal point for the song: it's a commanding sound, yet somehow elusive, compelling like a siren's song but just as hard to grasp.

Everything works here, even the orchestral outro, which subtly takes over from the beat-group and repeats, then varies, the melody, finally bringing it to a glorious climax. Is it silly? Yeah, I guess so. But it's extremely...effective silliness?

The next three songs are apt to be overlooked in the rush to the closer, but they're worth remarking on. "Time To Get Away" shows another side of John Lodge's songwriting, the side that seems to want to be Justin Hayward. More melancholy, in other words. The band already had one Justin Hayward, and rather than another, what it always needed was more rockers like "Peak Hour." Still, this is probably Lodge's strongest Haywardesque number, and it works well in this position: after the daydreams of afternoon, the hush of evening.

"The Sun Set" is the first of a good many puzzlers by Mike Pinder. He's chosen to depict a sunset as Delacroix might have, if he were a pop musician instead of a painter. We have here the musical equivalent of minarets and odalisques: sitars, tamburas, snake-charmer flourishes, sunset-prayer cantillations. It should be embarrassing - and, okay, it is. But it's not hard to appreciate that, underneath all that - worse, within it - is a nice melody, a careful and effective arrangement, and some excellent playing. In the romantic, dreamy context of the album, it works.

"Twilight Time" is the other side of Ray Thomas's talent (all the songwriters took care, it seems, to contribute two mostly divergent numbers to this album, interestingly). Onto a pounding r&b basis it builds a space-rock superstructure with soaring vocals. It works almost as well as it sounds like it might.

And that brings us to the masterpiece that culminates this album, and indeed, Everyman's Day. If you will. "Nights In White Satin." If "Tuesday Afternoon" was sublime melancholy, I guess this is sublime hysteria: melancholy raised to a pitch of delirium. It's velvet sturm and drang, it's every tortured fifteen-year-old's unsent love letter and the armored horsemen who he fantasizes delivering it, it's glorious death by mellotronic martyrdom and flights of angels scream thee to thy rest.

Like "Tuesday Afternoon," this one is best heard in full: with the orchestral intro and outro. Peter Knight is really on Hayward's wavelength on Side 2, writing links that amplify and complete his ideas. The song isn't over until the low brass has blatted.

After all that, the poem almost makes sense.

*

The album finishes so strongly that it almost sells the concept, and the collaboration. The unevenness of the first side, a function both of the overwhelming schlockiness of the orchestration and the overall weakness of the band's material, is redeemed by the stellar second side. I don't think it's the Moodys' best album, but it's unquestionably their most influential. Not only does it include their two biggest hits, but it functions, I think, as a real and valid extension of what the Beatles, everybody's gurus, were doing a few months earlier. I'm not sure if the Moody Blues should be considered prog rock or not, but I do think Days Of Future Passed is how you get from Sgt. Pepper's to In The Court Of The Crimson King.

The King's Speech (2010)

David Edelstein calls The King's Speech a "middlebrow masterpiece." That phrase, which comes at the beginning of what seems like a fairly positive review (might just be snark), really bothered - after I'd seen the movie and liked it. That is, I knew exactly what he meant, and felt myself safely remote from it, until suddenly I found myself tarred with that middlebrow brush (middle browbrush?). Then - ouch.

But hey: Madame Bovary, she's me, eh? That is, I still know (I think) exactly what he meant, and I think (I know, I know) I agree. The film is middlebrow because, thematically, contentually, it's not challenging, subversive, or otherwise difficult enough to make it highbrow: it is, in movie jargon, a feel-good movie, which usually doesn't make for art. At the same time it's clearly more serious, thoughtful, and in every way grown up than yer average blockbuster, aimed at yer average teen, which is to say, it isn't lowbrow. Stylistically you can say the same: it's too carefully made - too many off-center compositions, stifling but meaningful closeups, contemplative pauses - to be lowbrow, but certainly not experimental enough to be highbrow. So: middlebrow. I admit it.

And: masterpiece? Well, it's pretty impeccable. It's not experimental, stylistically, but it is extremely effective. The camerawork, for example: it crowds you right up in the king's face, or against his back, very obtrusively, but very effectively, because it forces you to confront what he's confronting (and not confronting): his fears, his block.

Other aspects of the film are just as good. Primary among them, of course, is the acting. It's mostly a two-man show: Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth. They're perfectly balanced, each performance perfectly attuned to the other. Rush, as the unconventional, Australian, slightly disheveled but dashing Logue brings in just a devilish hint of Barbossa. Firth, who specializes in trapped, frozen, suffering decency (his Mr. Darcy is the template, but his turn in A Single Man was the true heartbreaker), brings us that here, but with the slight variation of an unpredictable rage that lends the character complexity.

And the feel-good-iness. It's there. I mean, it did it, for the wife and myself. Maybe a fully historically accurate dissection of George VI, like what Christopher Hitchens desires, would have been equally engrossing. Now that I've seen this film, I'd see that one, if it got made. But does being aware of the potential for that one mean we can't have this one? Maybe I don't take history seriously enough...

Syd Hoff/A. Redfield

This has been pinging around what passes for the left wing of the blogosphere the last few days. Seems famed New Yorker cartoonist and children's-book author Syd Hoff also worked under the name A. Redfield, cartooning for The Daily Worker. He did a series called "The Ruling Clawss."

I'm including one cartoon as a taster. There's background and more cartoons here, and more cartoons and some 2011 context here.

I have to say, these are pretty refreshing. They come out of a time when the Left in America actually stood for something - when there really was a Left in America.

Obviously, I'm pretty excited by what's going on in Wisconsin. Has anything like this happened in my lifetime?

Peter, Paul & Mary: See What Tomorrow Brings (1965)

1965's See What Tomorrow Brings was PP&M's last all-acoustic album. The last of their folk-revival albums: the following year they'd get with the program, as it were, and grow a band (largely people who had recorded with Dylan). They'd use ee-leck-triss-itty. They'd be playing, to quote a phrase, folk-rock.

Did they already know that's what they were going to do? Did they see mene mene tekel upharsin written on the studio wall, as Paul Simon sang? Is that what the title of this record means - and perhaps the cover, with a curiously isolated-looking trio walking hand-in-hand against the elements, preparing to brave a new world of pop music?

Maybe.

*

The title is also a line from their version of the classic shoot-'em-up "Betty & Dupree," a song that debates the possibility that tomorrow could bring a diamond ring. Or sunshine. Or a double cop-murder and prison. Or a taxi to Baltimore. Or a note from your baby. Or nothing at all.

It's the strongest thing on the record, and it's a good chance to explore just what PP&M could do, and where they fit. I wish I knew a little more about this song. It seems to be one of those Af-Am folk archetype things, like Stagger Lee (man shoots man over unforgivable wrong, and/or because he's a badass mofo) and Frankie & Johnnie/Albert (woman shoots man because he's been doin' her wrong). Here man gets in trouble because woman wants a diamond ring. Not money, not commitment, not per se: it's the specificity of the diamond ring that seems to be common across all versions, and not just because it makes a nice rhyme.

Where did PP&M learn it? I don't know. A lot of people were singing it in the late '50s and early '60s, both in and out of the folk revival. Given his importance to participants in the Folk Revival (he's one of those names you always run into in accounts of the period), I have no doubt they knew Josh White's version. He goes into great detail about the crime, the arrest, the trial - all things that appear in PP&M's version, although they compress things quite a bit. They may also have known Chuck Willis's version, an R&B hit; Willis's version, as was common practice at the time, left out the crime, but not the diamond ring, so as to make it a Top-40 friendly picture of gettin' engaged. Which makes it a classic example of the double-tongued speech that was happening in R&B in the '50s: listeners who knew the song (African-American listeners, particularly older ones, and a few white hipsters) knew very well what it was about without Willis having to finish the tale, while listeners who didn't know the song would have had no clue. Which raises the question: what is he really singing about? Who can say?

PP&M's version is full of crime and punishment, but departs from both those precedents by being quite upbeat. Up-tempo, that is: fast and rhythmic and good-timey, which makes the lovers' vows of faithfulness - both before and after the crime - really come across, really stick in the memory. But they don't expurgate the violence: they remain true to the story, such as they have it. Which creates a knowing irony - Dupree is still a man bound for jail or the chair, Betty is still a woman bound for loneliness and misery - but lie down, see what tomorrow brings... I think it shows just how smart and careful PP&M were: there's real complexity in the stance of narrator/singer toward the story here, in the gaps between the events and the mood of the telling. And a real unforgettable musical energy here. It's darn close to being my favorite version of the song.

For that dubious honor, it's tied with the Grateful Dead's adaptation of it, "Dupree's Diamond Blues."

The Dead, most of them, were old folkies. Garcia, Weir, and McKernan had all come up through the college/club folk scene of SF, Palo Alto, Berkeley. This fact can never be stressed enough, because it explains just too much about the underpinnings of Grateful Dead music, about the values, both concrete/musical and abstract/intellectual, that ruled their thirty-year project. It was a three-decade engagement with The Tradition: with history itself. (Among other things.)

In the early days, the five-man garage-rock Grateful Dead played "Betty & Dupree." You can hear the best surviving rendition of it here. (And dig that intro: "and beatniks! More beatniks than you can count on two hands." This is why we love the Grateful Dead.) I happen to love this performance: it's early Jerry at his most passionate, really nailing a ballad, with the underwater guitar and the wailing vocals. The band behind him is no quartet of slouches either, setting up a gently-swaying groove that compared nicely, for a bunch of semi-pros, with what Chuck Willis had mustered for his version.

And it's clearly Willis's version that the Dead are thinking of here. Not just because their arrangement (and particularly their tempo) approximates his, but because they truncate the lyric in the same way. No rooty-toot-toot of the pistols. But again, what is Jerry really singing about? I find it hard to imagine that he didn't know the PP&M version, released just the previous year; he likely knew Josh White's as well. And his audience, that night in the Matrix - were they ignorant teeny-boppers, or, as he suggests, beatniks - did they know what happened after the promise of the diamond ring?

Less than a year later, the Dead would be joined by Jerry's former singing partner, Robert Hunter, an old folkie himself; Hunter would take over lyric-writing for the band. And in 1969 he produced a rewrite of the "Betty & Dupree" story that would show up on the Dead's third album, Aoxomoxoa. In the intervening years, of course, the Dead had pulled away from their electric jug-band roots and become fearless explorers of intrastellar space, a side of themselves that this third album was meant to confirm. And yet even at their most spaciest, it seemed they couldn't entirely disentangle themselves from the knotty roots of their music, and so Hunter gave them "Dupree's Diamond Blues," and they played and sang it right, complete with banjo.

Hunter, of course, knew what the song was about, and he foregrounds it in his version. He tells it from Dupree's point of view, and pulls no punches: Dupree's baby wants that diamond ring more than any old thing, Dupree goes shoots the jewelry man and has to have that talk with the judge. Everything hidden in Willis's version is out in the open here: the crime, the punishment. And more: it's not quite love, but sheer need for jelly roll (if you have to ask...), that drives Dupree to armed robbery. And even more: Hunter quite cynically reverses the love-pledging found in all the earlier versions (including Garcia's own), by revealing that Betty was never faithful to Dupree - the judge knows her well. The law's corrupt, and so are wimmen. But still we needs us that jelly roll...

If it weren't for the fact that there are also faithful women (and even a few faithful men) in Hunter's rogues' gallery, this might be inexcusable. As is, I don't think it's meant to stand as a judgment upon all relations between the sexes so much as it is offered as an interpretation of the story being told in all those earlier versions - a cynical take, but not by any means one unjustified by other strands in the traditional tapestry. More than most songwriters of his generation, I think Hunter was (at times) striving to really fit into the folk process, add his two cents but make sure they had been properly earned, and that they were coin from the right realm.

For the record, I think the Dead's latter-day renditions of this song (such as the 1990 take on Dozin' At The Knick) were better than the earlier ones. I dig the psychedelic banjo on the studio take, and the Cheshire-cat grooviness of the psychedelic-cowboy version, but, like Dylan, I think Jerry as he got older achieved a kind of age-and-experience-related stature, a vocal soulfulness but also an authority, that allowed him to sing this kind of folk-derived material more convincingly than he could when he was a young whippersnapper.

*

But anyway, I do feel a restlessness on this last folk record of PP&M's, a desire to see what tomorrow might bring if only they walk out to meet it, and an attendant willingness to shake up their formula, if only in small ways. They start with a ballad, for example, rather than a rousing gospel number. They do no Dylan. They continue the Irish-music experiments they'd started on the previous record. They do more contemporary songs (another Gordon Lightfoot, a Travis Edmonson, a Tom Paxton, one by Ewan MacColl). They adapt a piece by Bach. They add drums to one number...

As an album it doesn't really jell as well as previous outings, but song for song it's as strong as anything after their second. It has many pleasures on offer...

And it would be their last album of their first run together that I would consider in any way folk. It's not just a matter of plugging in: there's also some dropping out happening with them in 1966. They disengage from the tradition: from their next album on it was all contemporary songwriters, or originals. No more were their albums opportunities to spelunk in the twisty tunnels of musical and lyrical exchange.

No more Bettys and Duprees. That's what tomorrow brought.

Ugly Betty

We finished watching Ugly Betty the other night. We only caught a few episodes during its broadcast run, and some of those were out of order, but they were enough to interest us in watching it on DVD.

Ugly Betty (and this is the US version we're talking about: I haven't seen the original) is a great argument for the usual Japanese and British approach to TV dramas, which is to wrap things up in one season. In the US every new series wants to be the next twenty-year wonder, but not every story can be sustained that long, at least not credibly. In the case of Ugly Betty, the series really could have ended at the end of the first season. The first season was, I thought, brilliant, but the quality dropped off at a steady rate over the next three seasons. Basically they had said everything they had to say in the first couple dozen episodes, and after that it was just repetition and variation.

So while I found episodes in every season that I loved - my favorite episode of all might have been the second-to-last of the whole show, when Betty's nephew comes out to his family - I can't help wistfully imagining what it would have been like had the producers just ended it after season 1 - had they planned it to end then, not on a cliffhanger but on a final note. I'm sure it would have been much more artistically satisfying.

Quibbles. For a while there it was the best thing on, I think. In some ways it was mining tried-and-true themes - uptown vs. downtown, working class vs. upper class, innocence vs. experience. And in some ways it was cashing in on the zeitgeist (it was Devil Wears Prada meets Sex in the City, right?). But to all of this it added storylines that I thought it took cast-iron balls to bring into network TV in America in the '00s: Betty's father's immigration status, the exploitative behavior of his caseworker, not to mention Betty's nephew's sexuality, Daniel's brother's transsexuality, and of course the whole question of Betty's appearance. And it pulled it off with ace casting, true performances, and crack writing.