In Hiding: Pearl Jam and The Ghost of Andrew Wood

Old weird guest spot #1

On March 19th, 1990 Andrew Wood, lead singer of the glam/punk band Mother Love Bone, was pronounced dead at Seattle’s Harborview Hospital.  He was 24 years old.  His death was a tragedy that shook the burgeoning Seattle music scene and compelled the members of Mother Love Bone to disband.  Just over a year later his bandmates would replace Wood and embark on a new musical journey as Pearl Jam, a band whose career would go on to span almost 3 decades and sell nearly 60 million records worldwide.  Pearl Jam’s incredible longevity and profound commercial success are owed to a number of factors, not least among them is a series of five records that stand among the most revered in popular music.  One could be forgiven for understanding Pearl Jam and those first five records as a phenomenon separate, if distantly connected, to Andrew Wood and his tragic death.   A closer look suggests, however, that Wood’s posthumous influence guided the trajectory of those albums and ultimately provided a vehicle for the reconciliation of his untimely death.  These first five records document the group’s journey through the seven stages of grief and ultimately provide the foundation for a band that has continued to evolve after nearly thirty years.

Ten 

Pain and Guilt
released: 1991

While it has become fashionable to dismiss Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten as an overly produced record wrought with classic rock bro-centric sensibilities (even members of the band wink at this critique), this denunciation suffers from a bit of revisionist hubris. Certainly, Ten’s production values error on the side of slick, but it’s a mistake to underestimate the impact this record had both on the Seattle sound, as well as a generation of listeners. Ten is generally acknowledged for the dark and brooding tenor that struck such a powerful chord with the disaffected ex-pats of the hair metal ‘80s. But, while the ominous atmospherics lend the record a certain gravitas, Eddie Vedder’s attempt to transfigure pain by an unflinching and bone-raw exposure of it is where the real magic lies. 

The story of Eddie Vedder’s difficult adolescence and the influence it had on Ten has been well documented. While the personal nature of the album’s lyrical approach cannot be discounted, the music is colored by a certain external source of anguish and informed by a parallel, shared sense of pain. In this unnamed, kindred suffering we find the ghost of Andrew Wood. 

In spite of substance abuse issues and a stint in rehab, Wood and Mother Love Bone appeared on the verge of significant commercial success in early 1990. But days before the release of their major label debut album Apple, Wood succumbed to complications of a heroin overdose.  Just fifteen months later and out of the ashes of Wood’s former group, Pearl Jam would release their debut album and become the most recognized band in the world.  Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament (with the help of Mike McCready and Dave Krusen) would finally realize the success that their friend and former front man had so desperately craved. That success, however, rose on the star of Wood’s replacement. In Vedder, Gossard and Ament found the charismatic lead singer they had lost with Wood’s passing, but the match was not a complete one. Vedder appeared to inhabit the spaces left vacant by Andrew Wood’s glam rock silhouette. Together they embodied all that of which a front man is capable, at once brooding and brash, mercurial and ethereal, donned in corduroy as well as in leather. In truth, Eddie Vedder was the dark reflection of Andrew Wood and this refraction was the element that fans and critics alike responded to the most. 

Written in the wake of Andrew Wood’s death, Ten bears the scars of the band’s collective grief and Vedder’s guilt over the circumstances of his ascendance.  While none of the songs on Ten make specific reference to the loss of Wood, the subtext of death, absence, and guilt are unmistakable.  “Evenflow” points a guilty finger at material success, while “Alive” explores personal identity in the shadow of an absent, but unknown predecessor. “Why Go” and “Porch” consider the dread of impending and unexplained loss. In the album’s final track Vedder’s search for catharsis through the expression of pain culminates with a pleading for “Release”. For all of its commercial success and the perversions of MTV and popular radio, Ten is a devastatingly sad record that compels us to experience the depths of its suffering from the inside out.

Vs. 

Anger
Released: 1993

If Ten was an unconscious attempt to heal the pain and guilt brought on by Andrew Wood’s absence, Vs. laid bare the frustration of a losing battle. No longer content to simply express the suffering, Pearl Jam used their sophomore record as weapon to defeat it. Vs. is an album that commands and accuses and rails against not only their grief but also against a music industry that was all too eager to exploit it. In October of 1993, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam did everything in their power to push the music industry away and never were they more embraced. 

Like the sheep on its cover, Vs. bares its teeth in a raging confrontation with the reality of its captivity. At times violent and aggressive, at others pensive and indignant, the band had evolved into the caged animal its album cover depicts. Trapped in an impossible bind between unimagined critical and commercial success and the failure of that success to give meaning to the tragedy that made it possible.  Pearl Jam’s aggression is untethered on songs like “Go”, “Animal” and “Blood”. Instead of pleading for release, “Rearview Mirror” and “Leash” lash out against the invisible and omnipresent void threatening to consume them. Tracks like “Rats”, “Glorified G”, and “W.M.A.” expose the hypocrisies and failings of a broken collective culture that values the expression of suffering and loss only when such emotions can be re-shaped into a marketable commodity. By the end of the record, the struggle against existential injustice and the cold exploitation of the music industry culminate in an exhausted Vedder finding solace only in detached “Indifference”.  

The success of Vs. and the emotional toll it exacted on the band would not signal the end of Pearl Jam’s contentious relationship with the both internal and external forces their second album sought to overcome.  Instead, it would mark the beginning of a new stage in the grieving of Andrew Wood, one in which the band would turn its anger inward and the result would be a disorienting descent into madness and professional self-harm.

Vitalogy 

Depression
released: 1994

Unquestionably the band’s most unconventional record, Vitalogy is a dizzying and bizarre retreat into the self.  On this album, the anger and vitriol of Vs. has metastasized into a self-awareness that borders on derangement. While the musical elements of the record alone alert the listener to an alarming sense of despondence, Vitalogy’s artwork evokes its own troubling realizations. Designed to mimic a turn of the century medical almanac, Vitalogy’s physical imagery conjures up the dark mysticism of early modern medicine. Disease and morality bled together in the self-same portrait of humanity.  The sickness pervasive throughout Vitalogy traces its origins to an internal wellspring of the self, a poisoning from within.  

Musically, Vitalogy is a schizophrenic amalgamation of the band’s first two records and an avant-garde thumbing of the nose to MTV and Top 40 radio. “Spin the Black Circle”, “Not for You”, and “Corduroy” while dark, maintain a familiar, if evolved, sensibility. “Last Exit” and “Whipping” resurrect the unapologetic energy of Vs., while “Betterman” and “Nothingman” are crushing indictments of the human condition in radio friendly disguise.  Peppered throughout, however, are harbingers of self-loathing and dysphoria. “Bugs”, “Tremor Christ”, and the terrifying “Sexymophandlemomma” indicate a search for identity leading down a very dark path. If the album’s title refers to the study of the human essence, of what makes us vital, the conclusions offer little comfort.

 By 1994 Pearl Jam had accrued enough critical praise and material success to make an exploration of disease and madness a commercially viable enterprise. The sands had yet to run out of the Grunge era’s hourglass and, as such, Pearl Jam maintained its to claim rock and roll divinity. It was at this moment, at the peak of their popularity and influence, that Pearl Jam chose to abdicate the throne and take on one of the most powerful forces in the music industry. The Ticketmaster (what a name for a corrupt monopoly, by the way…) saga will be familiar enough to anyone still reading this, but the motivation behind this certainly brave, if professionally reckless, act takes on new meaning when understood in the context Andrew Wood’s death.

Vitalogy’s enormous commercial success (sales topped 900,000 in its opening week alone) provided the band with a unique opportunity to take on the nation’s live music leviathan.  At the time, this decision was heralded as yet another in a long line of public stands against various forms political, social, and economic injustice. Gossard and Ament were even asked to testify before Congress regarding the stranglehold Ticketmaster maintained over the music industry. While Pearl Jam’s crusade against Ticketmaster would ultimately crumble under the weight of corporate capitalism and the realities of the modern music industry, the effort solidified their place as one of the most principled and socially conscious artists of the twentieth century.  

It is the timing, however, and the context in which the band’s good fight was fought that one can find the lingering presence of Andrew Wood. In spite of efforts to seek out alternative venues, taking on Ticketmaster rendered touring on a national scale all but impossible. In this public battle against corruption in the music industry, Pearl Jam was able to don the hair shirt that Vitalogy demanded and offer a self-imposed exile as penance.

If we are to understand Vitalogy as the nadir in the struggle to reconcile the loss of Pearl Jam’s silent muse, perhaps we can find the lone acknowledgement of his absence in the album’s final track. While Vedder has been vague about the inspiration behind “Immortality”, Vitalogy’s release prompted many to speculate that the song was a reference to Kurt Cobain’s recent passing.  While Cobain’s struggles with heroin and untimely death certainly lend this interpretation some credibility, maybe the story of a young life lost to heroin serves to eulogize another tragic death. Perhaps immortality is achieved through a “trap door in the sun”, an occluded void that extinguished the shining star of Andrew Wood.

No Code 

The Upward Turn/Re-Construction
Released: 1996

By 1996, whatever sincere and creative elements of the so-called “grunge” movement had been bombarded by efforts to co-opt it to the point of unrecognizability and the afterbirth of that perversion was drifting slowly from the realms of self-parody into merciful oblivion. What remained were bands for which the grunge aesthetic was an authentic function of environment and not a thinly veiled attempt to cash in on the unanticipated success of the Seattle sound. For Pearl Jam, grunge’s fade into obscurity allowed the band to decouple its identity from the movement it emerged from and evolve as a group of musicians.  This evolution would take the form of quiet introspection and begin the process of healing the wounds of guilt, anger, and depression laid bare on their first three records.

Musically, No Code is a departure from the aggressive and often hostile tone of its first three efforts.  While songs like “Hail, Hail”, “Habit”, and “Lukin” maintain the energy of earlier albums, absent is the underlying anger of previous works.  While the content isn’t breezy musically or lyrically, songs like “In My Tree”, “Red Mosquito” and “Smile” seem to seek an understanding rather than air a grievance. On tracks like “Off He Goes”, “Present Tense”, and “I’m Open” Vedder is practically whispering, singing less to an audience and more to a place somewhere within the self. Like Vitalogy, No Code directs its gaze inward, but this record appears to offer a much more hopeful response.

As with previous Pearl Jam albums, No Code’s physical imagery reveals a great deal.  Released in 1996 before the vinyl resurgence of recent years, NC’s typical physical form was that of a compact disc.  While several different versions of the album cover were released, each took the form of a photo mosaic; disparate images arranged in what initially appears to be no discernable pattern.  When the CD case is unfolded into its full form (roughly the size of a vinyl record), however, the image reveals itself as an eye of providence.  More than an Easter egg for the eagle-eyed Ten-Clubber, No Code offers us a sign of peace in the form of a reassurance. At first glance, the cover is a collection of images that is at best random and at worst, unsettling.  When viewed in context, however, the cover re-affirms the possibility for the existence of an external benevolence (the source of that goodwill, be it god or mankind (or both) I’ll leave for the reader to decide).  The cover suggests that within the sometimes overwhelming and even terrifying milieu of the human experience there is an inherent possibility for hope.  

No Code does not attempt to convince us that everything is okay, but rather encourages the listener to consider the possibility that it could be. Vedder seems to be suggesting that the “transcendental consequences to transcend” are just that- transcend-able.  It is no coincidence that these lines come from a track entitled “Who You Are”.  On this album we witness Vedder begin to understand himself not as a surrogate for the unfulfilled promise of Andrew Wood, but rather as an interconnected piece of a larger identity.  In “I’m Open” he imagines a character brave enough to “dream up a new self, for himself.”  There is no code to solve or battle to be won. In the end there is only the work of acceptance and re-invention.

Yield 

Acceptance
released: 1998

By the late nineties, the grunge movement’s earnest, guitar-driven approach had given way to the glossy hyper-production of boy-band factories, Britney Spears, and third-wave bling-era hip hop. In other words, the landscape of pop music heading into the millennium hardly seemed welcoming territory for a rock record aimed at the more intellectual and mature of Pearl Jam’s legion of fans. However, while Yield sold only a third of what Vs. and Vitalogy did in their opening weeks, the album would go on to sell nearly two million records in the U.S. (even eclipsing the mark set by No Code), further solidifying an almost unheard-of loyalty within their fanbase.

Unlike No Code, the sonic landscape of Yield is louder, brighter, and significantly more robust.  Vedder’s vocals return to the forefront, a departure from the retreating quality of No Code. The reaffirmation of Vedder’s vocal presence is perhaps ironic in light of Yield’s significantly more collaborative recording process. As Vedder relinquished control over the band’s musical direction (a control that had pushed the band to the brink during the recording of No Code), Pearl Jam became at once more evolved and yet somehow more essentially itself. Ten and Yield are miles apart musically, but a certain clarity of purpose and expression inform both records in a way that is absent from the middle three.  It is this sense of clarity that signifies Pearl Jam’s acceptance of Andrew Wood’s passing and his place in the band’s collective identity.

With the notable exception of “Do the Evolution” the album’s first single (and first video since Ten) in which Vedder eviscerates the Clinton era’s betrayal of progressivism in exchange for acquiescence to the new corporate left, the album maintains a positivity not found in its predecessors. “Given to Fly” and “Faithful” offer hope, while “No Way”, “Low Light”, “Brain of J” suggest that the way out of the darkness is forward into the light.  Even Vedder’s lamenting “Wishlist” seems to reconcile bereavement with acceptance by knitting together the alpha and omega of Pearl Jam’s existence into a singular identity. In the acknowledgement of “a sacrifice that somehow lived on”, he is, in essence, granting his own wish by breathing life back into the spirit of Andrew Wood.  Finally, on Yield that alien pulled through Vitalogy’s trapdoor and held captive behind the sun is granted a reprieve. Vedder’s “radio song” is no longer the crushing echo of an unanswered pleading for absolution, but a mutually granted prayer of affirmation and forgiveness. 

On the cover of their first album Pearl Jam’s five original members stand in shadow, hands pointed upward reaching for something seemingly just beyond their grasp. The subject of the photo is skyward, somewhere beyond the image itself. Even the band’s name is obscured by outstretched hands searching for some distant, unobtainable thing. On the cover of “Yield” the focus shifts to the horizon, to the vastness of possibility, to a distant point where the heavens meet the earth. Leading there is a road and an admonition to accept the forward march of time and to “let them wash away, all those yesterdays” with the knowledge that the only escape from grief is the acceptance of it and the only resurrection occurs where the road vanishes between the earth and sky.

Been talkin' to my alter
Say life is what you make it
And if you make it death well then rest your soul away
       -Andrew Wood (Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns)

Special thanks to guest weirdo M. Levanti, a licensed public educator and amateur musicologist with a specialization in American folk and popular music of the 20th century.

Old Weird Jukebox
LCD Soundsystem, “Oh Baby”

“My goal would be that it works as a video for the song and the song works as a good soundtrack of the film. Rather than a video that serves the song.” - James Murphy, from a statement released with the video.

In September 2018, one of the best films of that year was released. It stars David Strathairn and Sissy Spacek, directed by Rian Johnson. It received zero major award consideration. It is approximately six minutes long. Spoilers follow almost immediately. Go watch the video if you haven’t already.

“Oh Baby” is the opening track from LCD Soundsystem’s 2017 album, American Dream. Even without the video, the song is a stunner, a hidden chunk of mid-80s fuzzy synth pop. It shares some DNA with Suicide’s “Dream baby Dream,” but just enough to make you swear you’d heard it before, somehow familiar, but decidedly different. The lyrics are weird, spare and dark. On their own, they work to conjure a kind of sinister magic. It was the third single, released more than a year after the album.

And the video is decidedly non-traditional. Muted, it makes a devastating silent film. Strathairn’s brows and Spacek’s eyes convey more than any dialogue ever could. And Johnson’s direction is ruthlessly efficient. By relying on nearly-clichéd visuals (close-ups on handwritten mathematical formulas, the gauzy soft-focus celebration with the champagne), a very detailed story can be followed very easily. It is also almost comically ripe with meaning. Especially the doorframes, labeled “HERE” and “THERE” and set prominently in the camera’s frame. Just like the visual language of the video as a whole, the labels on the doorways seem both honest and ironic, simultaneously. 

James Murphy has spent much of his career examining transitions – LCD Soundsystem’s first single “Losing My Edge” is all about the transitory nature of ‘cool’ and the inevitable rise of whoever’s coming next. “All My Friends” is about the challenges of aging, even when that aging brings success. “Someone Great” is about moving on after a devastating loss. Etcetera.

Transitional spaces play an enormous role in our lives – in cultural and social anthropology, these are called liminal spaces. Liminal comes from a Latin word limina meaning “on the threshold,” and while it seems like a hippie-dippie woowoo concept, just think back to that the specific magic you felt during summer vacations, between school years. No longer a fourth grader, but not yet a fifth grader? Liminality. It’s also present in every major religion – literally and figuratively in most cases. Purgatory and the confession booth are both liminal spaces in their own ways. Rosh Hashanah in Judaism. Bardo in Buddhism. Mazes are liminal spaces in Greek mythology, as are forests in Northern European fairy tales. Think of the importance given to twilight and dawn. Or the crossroads – not quite one road, not quite the other. Neither here nor there. It’s where the magic happens.

In many pre-industrial societies, the shaman or medicine man – whoever navigated the unknown on behalf of the group – would live on the outskirts of the village, a kind of physical liminality that mirrored their psycho-social work. With this context, Spacek and Strathairn’s move to the “middle of nowhere” to work on the mysteries inherent in two doorways labeled HERE and THERE becomes a kind of quasi-mythic endeavor, beyond just a science experiment.

But remember that the doorways operate in one direction only. The red ball rolled to Strathairn through the portal must be thrown back to Spacek “in the real world.” At the end, when the robbers shoot Spacek, and Strathairn rushes her to the garage, he knows there is no hope of reversing the tragedy. His only hope is the unknown – the liminal space between here and there. He loves her with such intensity and honesty, that he would rather be lost to eternity with her, than stuck on earth without her. Strathairn knows that he has not cheated death. Instead, he’s found a way to engage with it on his terms. 

 “There’s always a side door into the dark.”

Old Weird Canon Volume 7, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart

How a deceptively mild-mannered accountant goofed-off at work and invented alternative comedy.

It is difficult to overstate just how different stand-up comedy was in 1960. Especially now, in a post-Richard Pryor, post-Seinfeld-the-show, with Netflix and HBO and Showtime all releasing hour-long specials as fast as they can produce them. But in the 1950s, stand-up comedy was still one-liners and canned anecdotes, vestiges of vaudeville – think Bob Hope and Milton Berle, Sid Caesar’s The Show of Shows– Borscht-Belt shtick, literally.

But then, in one of the four true contributions that the United States has made to world culture*, comedians like Dick Gregory, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart (and many, many more) invented what we know as modern stand-up comedy. 

Dick Gregory and Lenny Bruce inspired comics like Richard Pryor and George Carlin, who largely created the modern image of the stand-up comic – lone, angry, stalking the stage, telling the capital-t Truth when everyone else is too afraid to do so. At their best, this is true. At their worst, it’s a re-hash of that same Borscht-belt schtick. May and Nichols, using theatrical improv training, helped usher in the era of sketch comedy that birthed SNL, Kids in the Hall, The State, Upright Citizen’s Brigade, and so many others. Mort Sahl begat the political satirists, with Jon Stewart being the most recent, most talented acolyte. 

But what about the true weirdos? The absurdist stylings of Steve Martin, or Maria Bamford. The reveling in quotidian absurdity that propelled (each in very different ways) Conan O’Brien and Jerry Seinfeld? John Mulaney’s entire stage persona (formalwear exterior/madcap interior) feels at least partly inspired by a fellow Chicagoan. 

By his own admission, Bob Newhart was a terrible accountant, balancing small petty cash imbalances out of his own pocket rather than chasing down errant dimes and nickels – he claims that his personal motto at the time was “That’s close enough.” He dropped out of Loyola Law School after he was asked to behave unethically during an internship. Faced with the pretentions and overinflated self-importance of the modern business world, he did what generations of Midwesterners had done. He mocked, gently. First on the phone with his friend, passing time at work, then by himself when his friend moved to New York and got a job with less free time. And then on a recording, made by a disk jockey friend. The recording was heard by an executive at the new-and-struggling Warner Brothers Records. The executive wanted to record Newhart at his next nightclub gig. The problem? Newhart had never performed in public. And it took five months before any club in the United States would book him, finally getting a three-night spot in Houston, at the Tidelands Motor Inn.

The result was “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” released on April Fool’s Day, 1960. By mid-summer, it was at #1 on the album charts. At the Grammy’s that year, Newhart would win Album of the Year (beating Frank Sinatra, who was allegedly pissed), and Best New Artist. This was the only time a comedian would win Best New Artist, and it makes Newhart one of only four people to win both awards in the same year (Lauryn Hill, Norah Jones, and Christopher Cross are the other three).

The album would eventually spend 14 weeks at the top spot, joined by Newhart’s follow up The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! Newhart would hold the record for a single artist holding the #1 & #2 spots for 35 years – until it was broken in 1992 by Guns & Roses’ Use Your Illusion #1and #2. (His response? “You hate to lose a record, especially one you just found out about. But at least it went to a friend.”)

‘Button-down’ was in reference to the type of shirt popular in the ad industry, and Newhart’s preference was relegated to sub-title: “The Most Celebrated Comedian Since Atilla the Hun,” which is quite a bit more accurate for a man who spent nearly half a year trying to get a nightclub booking. Newhart didn’t have “the button-down mind,” if anything, he had the opposite. He was skewering the self-importance and pomposity of the ad industry – taking on the petty tyrants of everyday life.

How many little subversives were brought into the world, laying on the living room floor in front of the record player, laughing along with their parents to this “balding ex-accountant who specializes in low-key humor,” as Newhart described himself. The sharply subversive nature of this work is utterly disarmed by Newhart’s stammering delivery and frankness about what he’s doing. He prefaces many of his bits with a short set-up, not another joke but an honest statement to the audience. Before “Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue,” probably his most famous joke, Newhart starts with a bit of prologue:

“Many of you may have read The Hidden Persuaders. It’s about advertising. And one of the points that the book made was that the real danger of the public relations man – or the advertising man – was that they were creating images …  Supposing this science were as far advanced during the civil war as it is today. This is a telephone conversation between Abe and his press agent just before Gettysburg.”

From a contemporary review in the Saturday Evening Post: “He pricks bombastic balloons, disembowels stuffed shirts … He performs the operation so deftly the pompous are unaware they’re being eviscerated.” While Bruce and Pryor and Carlin would scream and rail against the injustices perpetrated by the fat-cat capitalists, Bob Newhart was attaching “Kick Me” signs as he patted them on their backs. His most famous bits have a special kind of magic –as Conan O’Brien said about his personal favorite bit called “No One Will Ever Play Baseball” – 

“All that Bob Newhart is doing is explaining the rules of baseball. It’s someone hearing how baseball was played for the first time, over the phone, hearing it from Abner Doubleday and repeating it … He’s explaining how baseball really works, and it’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard … When you can sustain laughs like that, and you’re not doing anything but telling the exact truth, that’s brilliant.”

* Jazz, comic books, and blue jeans are the other three. Prove me wrong.

Old Weird Jukebox:
The Band, “Atlantic City”

Remember, it’s the grit that makes the pearl.

Even a devoted Springsteen fan might not know about this cover version, from the Band’s 1993 Jericho album. Recorded nearly a decade after the departure of Robbie Robertson and the death of Richard Manuel, this is not the rollicking, expansive, gorgeous version of The Band that ended with The Last Waltz. This is the festival small-stage, grind-out-a-living phase of the classic North American roots rockers. Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and seventeen other guys (not a single woman) cover a grab-bag of classic rock and blues covers, a few obscurities, and a handful of forgettable originals. The nostalgia pandering starts with the album’s cover, a Peter Max painting of the classic ‘Big Pink’ house in West Saugerties. “Atlantic City” is the lone standout.

“Well they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night
Blew up his house too.” 

Springsteen’s youth and vocal range give the original song a haunting quality, something ethereal drifting just out of reach. The menace, hope, longing, all imbued with an immediacy, almost panic. He’s inside the action, telling his girlfriend in real time to pack her things and meet him in Atlantic City. Sung from the liminal space between action and consequence, it’s a young man’s dirge for a life he knows is about to change irrevocably. The deed’s been done, but payment hasn’t come due.

Helm is singing from the other side of things, with a full accounting of what he lost along the way. He sounds tired, like he’s been singing the goddamn song for years, and he knows he’ll keep singing it until he can’t drag himself on stage anymore. Contemporary reviewers called it out at the time – they sound like a bar band, and the album plays like their standard set. But in that exhaustion, Helm finds a deeper truth in the song. A truth that wasn’t available to Springsteen, who wrote the song in his early 30s. When he sings the chorus in the original, there is a glimmer of childish hope in that second line. 

Everything dies, baby that’s a fact 
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back

Helm knows it’s bullshit, but he has to sing it anyway. There’s reassurance in his workmanlike delivery, something solid that anchors the listener in a way Springsteen didn’t. Helm knows that when people are gone, they’re gone. And things will change and you’ll end up playing music with seventeen new guys to replace the two you lost. But you’ll keep playing music, even if it’s not like you thought it would be. Even if it’s the same set every night, you keep playing.

The Old Weird Canon Volume 6, The Remains of the Day

kazuo ishiguro writes about an elderly butler on a road trip,
and it might just change your life, worldview, and emotional center.

Kazuo Ishiguro published Remains of the Day in 1989, at the relatively young age of 35. It was his third novel, and his first set in Britain. He was born in Japan, but raised in Britain by parents who spoke Japanese at home, always intending to return to Japan. But they stayed, and so did their son, who lived a kind of dual existence, British in public, Japanese in private. In his Nobel Lecture, he describes his parents’ outlook as “that of visitors, not of immigrants,” and it is obvious that Ishiguro himself shares their perspective. He is able to see things about Britain, its history and its class system, that a ‘native’ Brit would not have noticed, or been able to articulate so clearly. 

Quite simply, the book is a masterpiece. Awarded the Man Booker Prize upon publication in 1989, its reputation has only grown in the intervening years. There was a successful 1993 film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, nominated for 8 Academy Awards. Then, in 2017, the Nobel Committee lauded Ishiguro, “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” 

 But at first glance, the book might not seem like much. 

Remains of the Day is relatively short, and the premise is almost comically underwhelming. An aging butler named Stevens takes a road trip in his employer’s vintage Ford, to see a former colleague, Mrs. Benn, in a nearby town. The story is told in a series of labeled journal entries that correspond to the days of his trip. Aside from running out of gas at one point, there is little drama generated in the adventure, and instead features scenes of Stevens staring quietly at small ponds, stopping to let a chicken cross the road, and having tea in village shops. But the book is never dull, never boring, and often funny. Early in his journey, Stevens reflects on the landscape, and comes to the following conclusion: 

“I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and America, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.”

Ishiguro wants us to laugh to Stevens’ stuffiness, his unwavering Britishness, and while it is an unwitting joke, it helps begin to humanize him. As Stevens opens up in each journal entry, the reader gets a picture of a man whose life never had much time for quiet reflection. Each entry quickly transforms from a daily accounting of activities into a deeply reflective reminiscence. Mrs. Benn was once Miss Kenton, and Stevens remembers her most recent letter, quick to note that it was “her first in almost seven years if one discounts the Christmas cards.” He quotes passages from memory, and is sure that her expressed unhappiness in her marriage means that she wants to return to her post at Darlington Hall, and by extension, return to Stevens. 

It is quickly clear to the reader that Stevens is deeply in love with Miss Kenton. But Ishiguro writes something akin to a magic trick when it takes the entire book for Stevens to learn that for himself. The reader watches a man reviewing the footage of his life, going over what he thinks of his as the greatest hits of his butlering career. Especially difficult guests, dealt with smoothly. Impromptu dinner parties, carried off flawlessly. Grand conferences of foreign dignitaries, hosted without problem. 

But the memory of each success brings with it something else, a deeply personal revelation, regrets compounding on regrets. He remembers harping on details when Miss Kenton brings him flowers to freshen up his room. And that while he was dealing with the difficult guest, Mr. Stevens’ father was dying upstairs. That the grand conference of foreign dignitaries was a chance for his pro-German boss, Lord Darlington, to convince other Brits that the Nazis weren’t so bad.

Stevens has been described as an “unwitting narrator,” which splits the difference between reliable and unreliable just perfectly. He is never lying, even to himself. Simply trying to remember his life in the best possible light. But reality always intrudes on Stevens’ remembrances, forcing him to confront a lifetime of love, and loss, and of choices made (or unmade, even more tragically).  He recounts these events, in heartwrenching, bland detail, oblivious to their collective meaning until nearly the end of the novel. 

“Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one’s relationship with Miss Kenton … There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”

There are tiny moments of heartbreak scattered like jewels throughout the book. Short sentences, remembered utterances, even the titles of Stevens’ diary entries display emotional turmoil. He is fastidious about journaling, starting on the first evening of his trip. There are two entries apiece for days two and three. One entry on day four – the eve of his meeting with Miss Kenton (written at night because he got an early start) – and then nothing until the evening of the sixth day, a full day and a half after tea with Miss Kenton. We catch up to him on the pleasure pier at Weymouth, waiting for the evening lights to be turned on at dusk. Even here, Ishiguro buries treasure for the attentive reader. Weymouth was the main launching points for the invasion of Normandy in 1944. When Stevens is looking out over the water, thinking about his life in service to Lord Darlington, he is seeing the same view as the Allied troops on their way to the D-Day landings. 

Unmentioned. Utterly devastating.

The Old Weird Canon Volume 5: John Prine

How a 25 year old mailman/army vet became the voice of the everyman in modern america.

John Prine is the living breathing embodiment of that famous backhanded compliment: Your favorite musician’s favorite musician. Even if you’ve never heard him, you’ve probably heard him. Bonnie Raitt’s classic “Angel from Montgomery”? John Prine. He’s been covered by everyone from Bette Midler, Carly Simon, Johnny Cash, John Denver, Swamp Dogg, 10,000 Maniacs, and literally dozens upon dozens more. “Twenty-four years old and writes like he’s two-hundred and twenty,” Kris Kristofferson wrote in the liner notes to Prine’s eponymous 1971 debut album. Bob Dylan called Prine’s music “pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree.” Which seems like exactly the kind of thing that Bob Dylan would say, almost to the point of parody. 

But Dylan is not wrong. Prine is a Midwesterner, through and through. Born and raised outside of Chicago in a town called Maywood, he spent his summers in Paradise, Kentucky where his father grew up. Drafted into the Army in 1966, he was sent to West Germany instead of Vietnam, and worked as a mechanic. After his stint in the Army, Prine went back to Maywood, walking a postal route during the day and playing in the Chicago folk clubs at night. There’s so much about Prine’s start that seems mythologized – how his first review was written by a young man named Roger Ebert. “I wasn’t the music critic for the Sun-Times, but I went to the office and wrote an article.” How he was ‘discovered’ by Kristofferson, who joked that Prine was so good they’d have to break his fingers. How the morning after his first New York show, he was offered a contract from Atlantic records. How Prine found himself at a party, weeks before his debut album was to be released, and was talked into playing a few songs. Bob Dylan, another party attendee, started singing along. He’d been given an advance copy by Atlantic Records, and was a fan from the jump.

It’s not difficult to see why Dylan would have been a fan. While other folkies (cough Donovan cough cough) were doing Dylan impressions, Prine was calling back to the shared influences, writing songs in the vein of the old, weird American music of the 1920s and 1930s. Songs about misfits and losers, yes, but misfits and losers who are just as deserving of love and happiness as the rest of us. There is more empathy in this one album than most musicians have in their entire catalogues. Prine sings about the modern (at the time) world, in an old style. His “heroes” are lowly Army privates, vets returned with unglamourous shrapnel wounds, waitresses past their prime. There may be humor to be found in their situation, but never at their expense. Prine understands how difficult it is to make a living, day to day, and never mocks them. There is a deep care for the individual in these songs, an understanding that any of us could be the next victim of the uncaring bureaucracies that run our modern world. 

On paper, it’s a straightforward folk album – if Prine hailed from a hundred miles south of Chicago, he’d have been an acoustic bluegrass folkie like Townes Van Zandt or Guy Clark. But Prine is from Chicago, and that makes things different. Listening to John Prine, it’s clear why so many people loved this nasal little smart alec. His songs are exactly as Dylan described – “mindtrips to the nth degree.” The songs sound easy, lackadaisical as he gentrly strums and fingerpicks his acoustic guitar. And the lyrics slip right in, turns of phrase devastating as you realize what you’ve just heard. There is no better example on the album than the song “Sam Stone,” about a Vietnam vet who’s returned home with shrapnel in his knee and an addiction to morphine. The verses details Sam’s return to the US, and descent into addiction, which is sad enough. But the chorus is a stiletto between the ribs. 

“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes
Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.”

(Fun fact, when Johnny Cash covered this song, he insisted on changing the second line to “Daddy must have hurt a lot back then, I suppose.” Prine was sanguine about the whole thing: “I figured, it’s Johnny Cash. All I know is he’s singing my song.”)

 Prine handles some heavy topics on the album – in addition to “Sam Stone,” there are “Hello in There,” and “Angel from Montgomery,” both about the indignities of aging. “Paradise,” arguably the first popular song with an environmental message, about the horrifying effects of strip mining on his father’s hometown of Paradise, Kentucky. But it’s not all doom and gloom. He works just as much humor into things. “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” about false patriotism (the couplet completes with “it’s already overcrowded from your dirty little war.”) and “Spanish Pipedream,” about learning the secret to life from a topless lady, “with something up her sleeve.” “Donald and Lydia,” a song about masturbation, sure, but also a song about loneliness and the desperate need for connection. 

“They made love in the mountains, they made love in the streams
They made love in the valleys, they made love in their dreams.
But when they were finished there was nothing to say,
‘cause mostly they made love from ten miles away.”

These keenly felt observations have become a hallmark of Prine’s work over his fifty-year career, and so many of these songs have entered the canon of American standards that it’s easy to forget just how earthshaking this little album really is. Not even forty-five minutes of music, and a once-in-a-generation talent burst forth, just about fully formed. His “Midwestern mindtrips” have just enough silliness, weird surreality that takes some of the edge off of his razor-sharp lyrics. He’s not a pessimist, he’s a realist. Not mad, just disappointed. But he’s not willing to let that get him down.

Old Weird Canon Volume 4: In The Mecca

Gwendolyn brooks writes the only poem intense enough to be a stand-alone episode of “the Wire.”

Gwendolyn Brooks is a bad ass. A published poet at age 13, she didn’t bother going to college beyond an Associate’s degree. She knew she was going to be a writer, so why delay the inevitable? Her mother wanted her to be the next Paul Laurence Dunbar, but instead she became something even better. She became the first Gwendolyn Brooks. 

She published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945. In 1946, she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1947, she was awarded another. Her second book of poetry, Annie Allen, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 (She was the first African-American to win a Pulitzer). She would later be the United States Poet Laureate from 1985-1986, and she was the poet laureate of Illinois from 1968 until her death in 2000.

She was kind of a big deal. 

But in 1968, she was a poet who hadn’t written anything in several years. Her early work had won her acclaim and critical recognition, and towards the end of the 1960s, she was looking for new energy, a shift in perspective. She attended the Second Black Writer’s Conference at Fisk University in Nashville in 1967, and was exposed to new ideas and attitudes about black identity and black cultural nationalism by poets like Amiri Baraka (known as Leroi Jones until 1965) and Don Lee (now known as Haki R. Madhubuti). After the conference, with the help of Don Lee, Brooks started working with a group of aspiring writers from the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago street gang. This exposure to a new generation of writers and ideas had a deep and lasting impact on Brooks and her writing, which is seen as a connector between the academic American poetry of the 1940s-50s and the emotive, protest poetry of the 1960s-70s. The first work to reflect these influences was the long poem In the Mecca.

In the Mecca starts with an echo of ancient sagas, with the first line mirroring the book of Matthew. “Now the way of the Mecca was on this wise” (‘On this wise’ meaning ‘came about’ or ‘was as follows’). The poem continues:

Sit where the light corrupts your face.
Mies Van der Rohe retires from grace. 
And the fair fables fall.

This will not be a happy poem. That much is clear. But more than that, these first lines place the poem in the tradition of the ancient epic poems. Brooks wants the reader to know that the odyssey contained within her lines is just as valid, just as valuable, as the classical poetry of any other culture at any other time and place. 

The poem begins through the eyes of Mrs. Sallie Smith, headed home to The Mecca after a long day’s work. Her journey up the four floors to her apartment gives the reader a tour of the building, introducing the other residents as she passes. Despite the faded glory, this building is still a community, with Mrs. Smith greeting friends and neighbors on her walk upstairs. She returns home, starts making dinner – all indications of a poem that will celebrate the working-class life of Chicago. But even at this early point, hints of violence sneak in. Mrs. Smith’s eldest daughter Yvonne is called The Undaunted, and the reader is given this disturbing, parenthetical explanation: “she who once pushed her thumbs into the eyes of a Thief.” The other children are named and portrayed, each struggling with aspects of growing up in the block-long tenement building. But when she gets to number nine, Mrs. Smith realizes that her youngest, Pepita, is missing. The rest of the poem follows the increasingly frantic search to find her daughter. When pressed, the children respond in a sort of sing-song refrain, on the page first in italics to denote dialogue, then recreated in the narration of the poem as a kind of summoning chant. 

Ain seen er I ain seen er I ain seen er
Ain seen er I ain seen er I ain seen er

The neighbors are revealed in quick glances, Great-great gram remembering the dirt floor of a long-gone slave cabin of her childhood. Loam Norton, the holocaust survivor. Aunt Dill, who comes bearing unhelpful, horrible stories of other children murdered. Alfred, who “might have been an architect,” but is suggested to be a poet instead. Prophet Williams and his numbers game. Each in their own world, everyone in The Mecca. 
Finally, the police are summoned – Brooks coldly notes that:

the Law arrives – and does not quickly go
to fetch a Female of the Negro Race. 

The police leave, and then return, knocking on doors throughout the building, and then comes the penultimate paragraph, led with this ominious couplet:

Hateful things sometimes befall the hateful
but the hateful are not rendered lovable thereby.

Jamaican Edward is interviewed by the police – he “denies and thrice denies” having anything to do with Pepita’s disappearance. Brooks dispatches with his claimed innocence in cutting, chilling fashion: 

Beneath his cot 
a little woman lies in dust with roaches
She never went to kindergarten.
She never learned that black is not beloved.

Brooks changes one word – a girl is now “a little woman,” and the horrible truth of Jamaican Edward’s crime is revealed. But Brooks saves her most powerful stuff for the last few lines. In a sudden, un-remarked shift in narrative perspective, the reader is now seeing Pepita’s last moments through the murderer’s eyes.

She whose little stomach fought the world had
wriggled, like a robin!
Odd were the little wrigglings            
and the chopped chirpings oddly rising.

This poem, to use a tired cliché, works on a lot of levels. Gwendolyn Brooks wasn’t the poet laureate as a favor. She’s got serious chops, and there’s a lot of meaning in these 800-or-so-lines. 

Poetry is, roughly speaking, the art of saying as much as possible in as few words as possible. Through the poem, the reader is seeing things through Mrs. Smith’s eyes, or the eyes of her neighbor Alfred, or one of the Smith children. We-as-reader are caught up in the panic and fear as Pepita remains missing. We identify with them when we see the action unspool through their eyes. The abrupt shift in viewpoint in the last stanza is jarring, disconcerting. If we are the victim, we are also the victimizer. All are culpable in this tragedy. Everyone who turned a blind or indifferent eye to the sufferings in The Mecca, all those who continue to allow for the warehousing of poverty, all are culpable in the death of Pepita. 

 “I wrote about what I saw and heard on the street,” Ms. Brooks once said. “I lived in a small second-floor apartment on the corner and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material.”

Gwendolyn Brooks is-and-was, just as much as Carl Sandburg, THE Chicago poet. She was blunt, unafraid to look her city in the eye and process with unblinking clarity, the horrors and their impacts. She spent her entire career working to bring poetry to inner-city schools, prisons, hospitals, mental institutions. She knew that poetry could bring a voice to the voiceless, and that the life she saw around her was just as valid as subject for poetry as anything else. 

In the summer of 2018, maintenance workers on Chicago’s Institute of Technology campus uncovered some of the painted floor tiles from the basement of the Mecca Building, long-demolished. Certain things will not stay buried.

The Old Weird Canon Volume 3: The Man With The Golden Arm

Nelson Algren invents modern drug literature, creates the AMerican counterculture, and gets no recognition for it.

Note: You cannot watch the movie as a substitute for the book. The movie has its own merits and problems, but it is profoundly different from the book. Also, Nelson Algren hated it. 

There will never be another writer like Nelson Algren, and there will never be another book like The Man with the Golden Arm. Published in 1949 to great acclaim and tremendous controversy, Algren was forged by the Great Depression and World War II, and wrote about things that most Americans of the 1940s and 50s would never consider, let alone experience. He undercut the myth of post-war universal prosperity with characters who were not just down, but out, hustling along the fringes of bourgeois society. The French call this world the demimonde– the half-world – the world of prostitutes and card dealers and dog-thieves and heroin dealers. American literature has always preferred stories with brief stopovers in this landscape, not residence. 

The book follows a backroom card dealer and aspiring jazz drummer named Francis Majcinek who goes by the name Frankie Machine. He came back from WWII with shrapnel in his liver and an addiction to morphine. He’s married to a wife he avoids, and tries to hide his growing addiction from his one friend, a pathetically small-time thief named Sparrow. One night in the alley, he accidentally kills his dealer and ropes in Sparrow to help him hide the body. The dealer is politically connected and solving the murder is a priority in the neighborhood. The cops pick up Sparrow and drive him from precinct to precinct, never staying in one place long enough for Sparrow to be booked and processed. Exhausted, he finally breaks down and tells the cops where to find Frankie. On the run, Frankie makes a series of questionable choices, kicks his drug habit, has an affair with his childhood sweetheart, and then ultimately finds himself cornered and out of time. The book ends with a coroner’s report, revealing that Frankie hanged himself on April Fools’ Day. 

 Yikes. Dark. But the book is peppered with tiny fragments of beauty, Algren able to make poetry from a dank Chicago window scene.

“Tonight, just as the wan winter-evening light fanned out into all the colors of the hustlers’ night, God tossed a handful of city rain across the green and red tavern legends like tossing a handful of red and green confetti. Overhead the wavering warning lamps of the El began casting a blood-colored light down the rails to guide the empty cars of evening down all the nameless tunnels of the night.”

The alliteration, the repeated phrasings, the internal rhymes. There is true poetry in Algren’s writing, above and beyond natural phrasing. He was a writer who worked hard, liked to show off, and wasn’t afraid of tenderness in the face of hardship. Even when Frankie is feeling the stomach churning twinges of addiction, Algren writes with savage beauty.

“To Frankie Machine it sounded more like a man trying to cough with a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back. One breath to the second, no more and no less, as the hairy little paws tightened about his shoulders to get set for just one more ride. Under the shoulders, deep in the stomach’s pit, some tiny muscle like a small cold claw probed upward toward his heart, didn’t quite reach it and contracted again, leaving the heart fluttering with anxiety for the whole stomach to turn over: he retched, wanted to vomit and had nothing to vomit at all. That small cold claw would reach again, in its own good time, as mechanically as he himself could shuffle a cold deck at will. It would reach. It would get there and he’d fight it down.
It was just so damned hard to fight alone, that was all, with so little to fight for.”

No one wrote like Algren. Hubert Selby is thematically linked, but Selby’s brutality and choppy style are light years away from the I’m-not-mad-just-disappointed humanism of Nelson Algren. Brutally honest, but never unnecessarily cruel. Algren created characters with a kind of depth and authenticity that came from a place of true understanding, one that includes compassion, but is never overtaken by it. He was trained as a journalist, graduating from the University of Illinois in 1931. He spent five months in prison in Alpine, Texas after the failed theft of a typewriter. He was drafted in 1943, denied access to officer candidate school, despite his college degree. He identified with the underdog and wrote about the world that he knew, the “white ethnic” neighborhoods of the Northwest side of Chicago. And he wrote about them honestly.

This honesty won him few friends (both in his hometown and in the literary set) and Algren was dismissed by many as a throwback to the Depression-era fiction of authors like John Steinbeck. Many reviews at the time accused him of idealizing skid row over white picket fences, for being sentimental about his subjects. But these critics mistake perspective for preference. Algren writes Frankie Machine and those around him as real people who make choices – sometimes good and sometimes bad – who then have to live with the consequences. But Algren knew that it wasn’t just pluck and perseverance that defined a person’s fate. He had seen, up close, the impact that the churning institutions of the modern world had on these people at the fringes. Frankie Machine isn’t a war hero. He’s just another vet, chewed up and spit out by the Army and the war. He’s both a victim and victimizer, stuck in something he didn’t choose. Similarly, when Sparrow is taken from station to station to skip around habeas corpus, Algren refuses to take the easy out and blame rogue cops or a bad captain. He explains, in a bit of dry technical detail, the official policies of the “fictional” Chicago police department that allows all cops to void these constitutional rights. This isn’t giving preference, it’s a commitment to honesty. To try and explain to people who had never walked those neighborhoods, a little bit of what it was like to live there. He’s not letting these people off the hook. He’s just trying to make people understand each other a little better. Kurt Vonnegut, in the amazing introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Man with the Golden Arm said it best:

“He broke new ground by depicting persons said to be dehumanized by poverty and ignorance and injustice as being genuinely dehumanized, and dehumanized quite permanently … As I understand him, he would be satisfied were we to agree with him that persons unlucky and poor and not very bright are to be respected for surviving, although they often have no choice but to do so in ways unattractive and blameworthy to those who are a lot better off.”

The Old Weird Canon Volume 2:
Songs in the Key of Life

Stevie Wonder explains life, death, and everything else.

“I love gettin’ into just as much weird shit as possible.”
-Stevie Wonder, interviewed for the April 26, 1973 issue of Rolling Stone

On Tuesday, September 7th, 1976, reporters and special guests were flown from New York City to Worchester, MA, then transferred to school buses and driven into the countryside to a farm in North Brookfield. There, Stevie Wonder, the 26-year old, 14-year Motown veteran, greeted them in a faux-cowboy outfit complete with gun belt that read “Number One with A Bullet.” Everyone was there to hear Wonder’s new album, Songs in the Key of Life. It had been more than two years since his last release, after a blistering pace of more than an album a year from 1966 to 1974. 

By 1975, after the release of Fulfillingness First Finale, Stevie Wonder was talking seriously about quitting the music business, and moving to Ghana. He’d been a professional musician since he was eleven years old, signing his first Motown contract in 1961. By 25, he’d released 19 albums, nominated for nearly twenty Grammys – winning eight, including back-to-back Album of the Year awards for Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale. A huge career for anyone.

And then he made everybody wait. For two years, Wonder stayed in the studio, fine tuning up the very last minute. But when it was time to play the record, he simply said:

“Let’s pop what’s poppin’.”

He did not disappoint. To start, the album was enormous. A double album with an additional four-song EP, nearly two hours of music in total. It covers everything from birth, death, to the afterlife and beyond, sometimes literally. “Isn’t She Lovely,” a song about his daughter Aisha, mixes in the sounds of her fussing and laughing, and splashing around at bathtime. “Saturn,” a song renamed after a mis-hearing of the original title “Saginaw” is a sweet, sprawling song about a place without war or strife, where “people live to be two-hundred and five.” He travels the world of music – he sings in English, Spanish and Swahili on “Ngiculela – Es Una Historia – I am Singling.” “Contusion” is four minutes of tight jazz-fusion, “As” is seven minutes of lush pop arrangement. “Sir Duke” and “I Wish” pay homage to the past, both personal and professional, pushing the bounds of jazz, pop and funk. “Pastime Paradise” and “Village Ghetto Land” are social commentary songs, refutations of poverty-tourism like Elvis’ ersatz “In the Ghetto.” “Pastime Paradise” will be most familiar as the basis of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” right down to the cheesy 70s synth-strings. The album is all over the place, bouncing between idealism and the harsh realities of life, flitting from concept to concept – love, happiness, poverty, home, life, death. But as Wonder said: “Its title came from a dream I had where I was asking, ‘How many songs are there in the key of life?” 

While the summation of life itself might be a bold goal for an LP, Wonder certainly tried. More than 120 musicians contributed, jazz greats like Herbie Hancock and George Benson, harpist Dorothy Thompon, Minnie Riperton (famous for her 1975 hit “Lovin You”), Michael Sembello (longtime Wonder collaborator, famous in his own right for “She’s a Maniac”), and so many more. The album debuted at number one, and was a gold record on release, boasting four charting singles (“I Wish,” “Another Star,” “As”, and “Sir Duke”) in addition to “Isn’t She Lovely,” which was given to DJs for radio play, but wasn’t released as a single because Wonder didn’t want to commercialize his daughter. While “Sir Duke” and “Isn’t She Lovely” are the representative radio tracks, “I Wish” is the (relatively speaking) hidden gem. With the exception of the bass guitar and a four-part horn section, Wonder plays every other instrument – a Fender Rhodes electric piano, drums, vocoder, and an ARP 2600 synthesizer. On the surface, it’s a song about innocence, about returning to untroubled youth.    

I wish those days could come back once more/Why did those days ever have to go?

In the hands of a lesser artist, it’s a standard set up for a saccharine trip into an idyllic childhood. But Stevie Wonder is not a lesser artist. His memories of a longed-for past include: trying to fake cry to get your mom to stop “woopin your behind,” hanging out with his hoodlum friends, buying candy with money intended for the Sunday school collection plate, “smoking cigarettes and writing something nasty on the wall,” along with a few others. There’s an informed idealism to his lyrics. He wants to revel in the past, but he’s honest about what was fun to a “little nappy headed boy.” He wants the good old days for all the wrong reasons. It’s that tension between the bounce-your-feet funk, the sweet refrain, and then the remembrance of a troublemaking past that drives the song, and makes it more than just another hazy-eyed view of youth.

Even now, more than 40 years after its release, the album still feels fresh and somehow timely. It’s showing its age, to be sure, with the at-the-time groundbreaking synthesizers especially feeling of a time. But that same stuck-in-the-70s synth vibe is a large part of the album’s charm. It is a statement, of time and place and artistic expression. Wonder, armed with a state-of-the-art studio, and protected by a Motown contract that guaranteed him as close to artistic freedom as Berry Gordy would allow, chose to innovate, to strive for something greater than himself. It’s nowhere near perfect, the lyrics sometimes contort unnaturally for the sake of a rhyme, and there is a case to be made for a less-is-more school of thought. But these flaws add to the allure. It’s not a perfect album, but when the subject is life, striving for perfection would be inauthentic.

Songs in the Key of Life is, in retrospect, something of a high-water mark for Stevie Wonder. It comes at the end of a positively legendary string of albums (Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, and Songs) in which Wonder does more than just explore the far reaches of popular music. He seems to put a pin in the time, accessing the zeitgeist, or collective consciousness (or whatever) and giving voice to a hundred thousand complementary, contradictory thoughts and feelings. In a way, he becomes the 1970s in America, never more directly than on Songs in the Key of Life. Released in 1976, under the shadow of the nation’s bicentennial celebrations, it is very much a statement of principles, a summation of a life, at least when viewed in retrospect. He wouldn’t release another album until 1979’s Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, the symphonic soundtrack to a barely-released pseudo-scientific documentary about the emotional intelligence of plants. After that, he would release only seven more albums between 1980’s Hotter than July and 2005’s A Time to Love. 

But for those who criticize post-Songs Stevie Wonder as a shadow of his former self, please see Joseph Heller’s response to critics who remind him that he hasn’t written anything as good as Catch-22.

“Who has?”

Songs in the Key of Life is probably the greatest album of the 20th century. This isn’t just bullshit hyperbole. Prince thought it was the greatest album ever made. Elton John says that he carries a copy with him wherever he goes. Everything that came afterwards was influenced by it. Disco and funk and hip-hop and any other genre you can name -  Stevie Did It First. In 2005, the album was added to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress, citing the album’s impact and importance. Possibly even more noteworthy in 2005, Kanye West said this:

“I’m not trying to compete with what’s out there now. I’m trying to compete with Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. It sounds musically blasphemous to say something like that, but why not set that as your bar?”

Old Weird Canon Volume 1: They Live

How John Carpenter made the last great B-movie
and presaged the modern era.

            Caution: Spoilers for a twenty-year old movie follow. 

In 1988, just four days before the US presidential election, John Carpenter released They Live, a deeply weird film. Starring “Rowdy” Roddy Piper as a nameless drifter (“John Nada” only in the credits) who stumbles upon a vast conspiracy of aliens, controlling the world’s human population through subliminal messaging. Piper finds sunglasses, manufactured by the human resistance, that allow him to see the hidden messages. The scenes are quick, the effects are cheesy, and in the film’s final minutes, Piper flips off the alien invaders and destroys their signal transmission tower. It’s utterly insane, and by all accounts, it’s insane on purpose.

While the aliens make the movie science fiction, the set-up of They Live is all western. Carpenter has never been shy about combining and re-contextualizing, and Nada is literally the man with no name, a drifter who comes to town and exposes the rotten underbelly, sacrificing himself for the good of the people (Shane, Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, etc.). And while the story may be predictable, the film never is, with Carpenter undermining audience expectations from the very beginning. 

The opening credits are shot in a cinema-verite style – a train rolling through the yard, long shots of homeless people on the streets of Los Angeles. According to Piper and Carpenter in the director’s commentary, these were not extras. These were actual homeless people, signed up, fed, and paid for a day’s work. And through all this reality strides ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper, intensely recognizable to a huge swath of the intended audience for this film. Through much of the 1980s, Piper played the wrestling heel to Hulk Hogan’s all-American heroics, and with his beefcake physique, feathered hair and dramatic flair, he is utterly unbelievable as a drifting day-laborer.  

But there’s no stunt casting in Piper. Unlike Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride, or Hulk Hogan in everything he’s ever done, Piper isn’t playing himself, or some bizarro-world version of himself. Carpenter said in a 2012 interview that he cast Piper because he “…needed an everyman. I needed a working-poor guy who was not upper-middle class, he was not middle class. He was somebody almost down and out. And Roddy was perfect for that.” And in a very unsettling way, Piper is perfect in the role. Another actor, another director, would have played the character as someone trying to blend in, or with a smirking sense of irony. But Piper plays it perfectly broad, and perfectly straight. Striding into a bank halfway through the film, wearing his magic sunglasses and carrying a shotgun, he calmly announces to the crowd: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum,” before lowering the shotgun and dispatching one of the aliens. This is not the behavior of a guerrilla fighter, it’s the behavior of a professional wrestler. But he never cracks a smile, never winks at the camera. And it works. 

It’s all part of the aura of unreality that Carpenter infuses into the film, enough that some of it oozes off the screen. He wrote the script, but used a pseudonym – Frank Armitage – which is also the name of Keith David’s character in the film. It is never mentioned, but it leaves the attentive viewer wondering about the connection. Where does the movie end, and where does real life begin? 

The tension between what’s real and what’s not powers the film, for the characters as well as the audience. When Piper investigates the church near the homeless camp where he’s living, the sounds of a choir are pre-recorded on reel-to-reel. A false wall reveals boxes of sunglasses, knock-off Ray Ban Wayfarers, just a few years after Tom Cruise made them trendy again in Risky Business (the posters for the two movies are nearly identical).When Piper puts the glasses on, they reveal subliminal messages underneath billboards (MARRY AND REPRODUCE), product labels (OBEY AND CONFORM), magazine covers (STAY ASLEEP) and even money (THIS IS YOUR GOD). The billboards themselves are real, shot by Carpenter in downtown Los Angeles. But the subliminal messages – the film’s “reality” - are matte paintings, done by an extremely talented painter named Jim Danforth. Even when the effects are too fast for the audience to notice, Carpenter is forcing an engagement with the tension between reality and unreality.

“When you put the glasses on, you see the dictatorship within democracy. It is the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.” – Slavoj Žižek,The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

Slavoj Žižek loves They Live. Who is Slavoj Žižek (roughly pronounced Sla-voh Zhee-zhek)? He’s a controversial Slovenian philosopher/theorist/shit-stirrer who marries Marxist theory with Lacanian psychoanalysis*. He called They Live “one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left.”  At the heart of much of his work is the idea that we are slaves to our desires, and our desires are manipulated by the ruling power structures (This is a terrible, incomplete explanation, but it’ll have to do). So when we choose (or are forced) to see the true intention of the power structure, the truth behind the lies, so to speak, it is a painful transition. The lies are nice and pleasant. The truth is harsh and glaring. Which brings us to the greatest fight scene ever set to celluloid. 

            “I’m giving you a choice. Either put on these glasses, or start eating that trash can.”

 With these words, Roddy Piper and Keith David commence a five-and-a-half minute donnybrook in a dirty alley. Despite the presence of a professional wrestler, the fight is admirably realistic. Punches land, they knock each other down, impromptu weapons are fashioned from trash at hand. There is no jumping off the top rope, and only one suplex (Okay, there’s a choke slam too). They beat the shit out of each other in a captivatingly real way. And yet, it’s surprisingly tender. This is a fight between two friends. And just when it starts to get out of hand, Piper/Nada laughs at David/Armitage, and the tension is taken out of things. The fight continues, Nada finally gets the upper hand, and forces the glasses on Armitage. And then it’s over, and they’re comrades-in-arms, tending each other’s wounds in a by-the-hour motel room, ready to take on the alien menace together.

Despite the insane set up, Carpenter takes every opportunity to undercut the alien rulers (‘ghouls’ in the parlance of the film), portraying them as dull, bland, and boring. They’re reading magazines at a sidewalk stand, grocery shopping, working in a bank. Near the end, when stolen alien technology (disguised as a wristwatch) allows Nada and Armitage access to secret underground bunkers and tunnels, they are treated to a sedate, celebratory banquet in what looks like the basement ballroom of a mid-level hotel. There is no flash, no grand reveal of a master plan. The ghoul at the lectern drones on like an executive at a board meeting. When they’re noticed at the meeting by another drifter from the camp (named as “Drifter” in the credits and played by B-movie legend George Buck Flower), they have this exchange:

Drifter: What is wrong with having it good for a change? Now they're gonna let us have it good if we just help 'em. They're gonna leave us alone, let us make some money. You can have a little taste of that good life too. Now, I know you want it. Hell, everybody does.

Frank: You'd do it to your own kind?

Drifter: What's the threat? We all sell out every day. Might as well be on the winning team.

“We all sell out every day.” According to Carpenter, he heard a studio executive say this line, word-for-word, and he knew he had to use it in the script. The real menace, in Carpenter’s view, are the human collaborators. From the cops who try to bring Piper in (he shoots the alien, spares the human), to the femme fatale who betrays him, whenever Piper is undone, it’s at the hands of other humans. In this view, even the fight scene is recast – they’re wasting time and energy fighting each other when the real threat is walking down the street, unnoticed. 

Despite reaching #1 at the box office in its first week, They Live quickly fell into obscurity, before finding renewed relevance as a cult film (like so much of Carpenter’s work). While the film would recover its reputation, Carpenter arguably would not. He made Memoirs of an Invisible Man with Chevy Chase in 1992, In the Mouths of Madness in 1994, and Village of the Damned in 1995, and then Escape from LA in 1996. None of these films were financial or critical successes, and after Vampires in 1998, Carpenter has made just two films in the intervening 20 years.

But the film lives on. The fight scene was re-done (shot for shot) in South Park, and Piper’s “bubblegum” line has been parodied in everything from King of the Hill, The IT Crowd, Dazed and Confused, Anchorman, and so many more. But the biggest legacy of the film came in 2008, when street artist Shepard Fairey created a poster for a long-shot presidential candidate named Barack Obama. Fairey had previously co-opted the “OBEY” message from the film for a series of stickers and other works, but the stylized stencil of Obama, over the single word “HOPE” brought the concept of subtext-made-text into the 21st century. 

*Baffled? So is everybody else. Žižek is a for-real genius who confounds and confuses other for-real geniuses. If any of this sounds even remotely interesting, there are a number of documentaries that feature Žižek expounding on his theories, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology being the most accessible.