Mick Brown – “Leonard Cohen: Suffering for Fun and Profit” (1976)
An article written for Sounds magazine, July 3, 1976 – the year before LC came out with his Phil Spector-produced fascinatingly flawed Death of a Ladies’ Man album…
The Return of Leonard Cohen
“I’m too old to die that kind of spectacular
death. For me to commit suicide or O.D. would
be … unbecoming”
I don’t think mankind will be damaged
if I don’t put out a new album or a new book”
The poster outside the Colston Hall, Bristol announced the appearance that evening of ‘The Poet of Rock and Roll.’
Inside a girl takes photographs of the road-crew setting up equipment on stage – for an art-project, she explains. She really wanted to photograph the concert, so she’d scrimped, saved, begged and borrowed enough to buy a couple of tickets. Now she can’t make it on account of the revision she has to do for tomorrow’s exams. She’d sold the tickets to friends in a matter of hours. She’s all of sixteen years old.
Leonard Cohen is clearly bemused by it all. He sits back in his dressing-room, issues a slight smile and says isn’t it amazing that some of these people were only eight years old when he wrote his first song? Cohen is forty-one.
On stage, illuminated by the harsh glare of a single spotlight dividing his face into patches of darkness and light, he looks a curious cross between Lenny Bruce and an Old Testament prophet – the protruding, hawkish nose, the dark eyes, lines etched into his face and forehead.
Backstage he looks strangely vulnerable; a thin, slight figure dressed in pressed slacks and a brown leather jacket, a cigarette burning between his fingers. One has heard that Cohen can be reserved to the point of being difficult. In fact he’s extraordinarily charming, polite, approachable.
It is a rule of the road that he never gives interviews or holds audience before a performance, using those couple of hours before going on stage to summon-up reserves of energy and concentration for the task at hand.
After a performance he will talk, sign photographs and scraps of paper, receive gifts, kisses, handshakes. Gladly. He says he cherishes the attentions of his audience.
In Montreal he lives in an immigrant-worker neighbourhood where he’s kn6wn only as a guy who has two kids and a small house and who never seems to be around very much.
In the small village in Greece where he also spends his “sitting-down time” the people are similarly unconcerned with who he is or what he does. A little bit of attention on the road is, well, reassuring.
Outside his dressing-room young matrons with glasses and wistful expressions hover in droves, thrusting programmes at the road-manager who brings them back signed. In the inner-sanctum Cohen holds court with a tribunal from a local college newspaper, hunched in a chair wreathed in cigarette-smoke, ringed by earnest, enquiring faces; a scatter of papers on the floor – Cohen’s poems, which one of his inquisitors has painstakingly copied by hand.
“What I’d really like to know is why your poetry is so stark, so incredibly blunt – a poem like for instance . . . Cohen takes the proffered sheet, glances at the writing. “Yeah – I like that poem… If it didn’t have the word ‘cunt’ in it I’d probably read it out loud on stage. But I’m not ready to say that word well enough yet. There are some things that are designed to rest on the page and not be spoken…”
“Do you use the same technique then for writing songs and poetry?”
“Yeah – just one word at a time. . .”
“To what extent then should poetry have relevance throughout time, or do you think it should sum up an episode, a moment, and preserve that on paper for forever?”
Cohen blinks at his questioner through the smoke-haze. “I don’t know: forever is a long time…”
Leonard Cohen hasn’t come back. He’s never been away. While other performers tend to move, or even stand still, in a blaze of publicity, Cohen just keeps on toiling away quietly in what he calls his little corner – writing songs, sometimes; poems, sometimes; books, sometimes – all at his own pace.
Travelling . . . He’s always been peripatetic – trace his career from Montreal, to New York, to Nashville, to Greece – but more so in the last six or seven years, “since I could afford the air-fares”. He was in Ethiopia just before the revolution: “I just get to a place, check into a hotel and hit the streets.” The Wandering Jew.
“But to tell you the truth I’m getting a little tired of all that now. A tour’ll cure that for you for a while.” Not that he tours often; he says he needs the nourishment of a private life more than anything touring can give him. But, for whatever reasons, this year he’s been back on the road – a brief round of club dates in the southern American states, and now Europe, where he seems to enjoy a larger and more loyal following than anywhere else.
So far it’s been sold-out houses all the way, and Bristol is no exception – a lot of older faces in the audience, people for whom ‘Songs From A Room’ was no doubt a soundtrack for sorrowful bed-sit dramas all those years ago; a surprisingly large number of younger people who can’t have been aware of Cohen first or second time around, but who’ve tuned into that finely-honed angst somewhere along the way; and a man in elfin boots, long hair and a cloak who stands up in one of those moments of pregnant, reverential silence which punctuate a Cohen performance and shouts out ‘God bless you, Leonard’ to crackle of sympathetic applause from the rest of the audience; an audience which, in short, substantiates the tag ‘The Poet’ more than it does the description ‘Of Rock and Roll…’
The tour publicist says it’s been like this everywhere Cohen has played, and it’ll no doubt be the same tomorrow night when he plays the Albert Hall, even though he’s sure to get negative reviews.
This anticipation of the critical thumbs-down seems strange at first, but thinking about it Cohen has always been more popular with the paying-customer than with the press, who perhaps find the disarming frankness and pessimism of his lyrics and the dark, confidential monotone of his voice too much of an invitation for cynicism to turn down. Actually, says his publicist, it’s more of an inverted snobbery.
The first time Leonard played London the nationals loved him; it’s since he became an institution they changed their minds. And sure enough, the reviews of the Albert Hall concert are marked by a sort of reserve, dwelling on the despairing nature of Cohen’s lyrics and the fact that much of his material was familiar from his albums, not to say previous visits.
Sure enough, it was, but familiarity is an intrinsic part of Cohen’s appeal, and anyway he is hardly the most prolific writer of songs.
His last album, ‘New Skin For The Old Ceremony’ appeared almost two years ago, and free as he is from the normally pressurising demands of a one or two album a year record contract he tends to work at his own pace, which he admits is slow.
“Songs seem to take me a long time,” he says. “I don’t know why; they’re not especially excellent for taking so long. I don’t have any sense or urgency about any of my writing actually. I don’t think mankind will be damaged if I don’t put out a new album or a new book.”
Nonetheless, he has put down five or six tracks for a new album, one of which, ‘Do I Have to Dance All Night’, was hurriedly recorded at Musicland Studios in Munich for release as a single. Cohen says it would be ‘amusing’ to have a hit with it, and the song gets two airings at Bristol – once to close the first half of the show and again during one of the innumerable encores – to help make it happen.
It’s unusually lively for a Cohen song, but it fits the mood of his backing band, who seem to relish the opportunity to rock out – a guitar and pedal-steel player, drums, bass, a keyboards-player with a taste for synthesiser swirls and two strong girl singers who sound mournfully ethereal in all the right places, and who also work slick Lambert/Hendricks/Ross type scat arrangement behind Leonard on ‘I Tried To Leave You’.
Generally, there is not much levity to be found in a Cohen performance, and what there is comes not so much from his songs as his wry, self-mocking introductions and the bitter-sweet poems which he reads over a loose, jazz-tinged instrumental backing.
But levity is not what Cohen’s audience comes for. His concerts tend toward the atmosphere of a public confessional, a knowing, world-weary perambulation around the more painful areas of the human psyche.
Cohen is in the grand tradition of Jewish writers who wear their suffering on their sleeve. Maybe the English, generally tight-assed about their hang-ups, like living it vicariously.
There is certainly a reassurance of sorts to be found in listening to someone who can so clearly and painstakingly articulate the emotional crises we all go through at some time or another. If anybody’s going to make your heart bleed for mankind in general, and for himself in particular, it’s Leonard Cohen. But I for one am happy to thank him for it – at least some of the time.
Cohen agrees that his is very much a relating audience, often as prepared to share their confidence with him as he is with them. “There are some people who come to me for some illumination on their problems,” he says. “I guess they feel I’m writing about some of the things they themselves are going through. But I don’t usually have much help to give – there isn’t much you can say to someone in the midst of their own crises.”
Cohen, one senses, has enough trouble with his own. Not that his personal life is perpetually in shreds. Cohen gives every impression of being quite contented with – or at the very least philosophically resigned to – whatever life has brought his way.
He lives simply enough with his family; he says that because he didn’t taste success until he was in his 30’s he was already too set in his ways to develop expensive tastes. His friends are the guys he grew up with on the same street in Montreal. He smiles more often than you’d expect and seldom frowns.
You get the feeling Cohen has to do more than just wake up in the morning to find all that pathos which permeates his work, and that plumbing the more despondent depths of his soul is a struggle. Some people may say he struggles too hard and that his visions are intimate almost to the point of indecency.
Cohen says he abides by only one maxim in his writing: to always honour the difference between just a cry and a piece of work. “A cry of pain in itself is just that,” he says. “It can affect you or you can turn away from it. But a piece of work that treats the experience that produced the cry of pain is a different matter altogether. The cry is transformed, alchemised, by the work by a certain objectivity which doesn’t surrender the emotion but gives it form. That’s the difference between life and art.”
His books are extensions of the same vision – the gospel of objective self-revelation, autobiographical “because I can only treat the things I know – and I just know a small corner. There are writers who are great visionaries, who can depict huge movements – things like that. They’re the great writers. I’m just the other kind.”
He supposes his writing is therapeutic in the way that any work is. “I feel better when I’m working than when I’m not, but I feel both things – a need to write and a need to quit. The need to write is greater – off and on. Sometimes you get tired of the whole thing; think you’ll get an honest job. Sometimes you know you’re just dealing with the pipes and you think you’d like to get out of the basement. But you recognise your limitations and try to work within them…
He is a perfectionist – his own harshest critic. His first novel ‘The Favourite Game’, went through four drafts before publication. He’s spent the last two years working on another novel, but withdrew it from his publishers at the last moment.
“It isn’t any good,” he says with a faint smile. “But somebody said it’s as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good one, so I guess it’s kept me in shape doing it. In a way it’s too personal; it treats people close to me in a way that is somehow inaccurate, one-sided.”
A cry of pain rather than a piece of work? He laughs. “Yeah – it doesn’t have that objectivity that I think it should have. I try to be truthful in whatever I do in some kind of way – not so much truthful to the fact as truthful to the quality of the experience. The book was true – but it wasn’t fair.”
His publishers wanted it just the same. “They think they can sell it,” says Cohen.
It hasn’t always been like that. Cohen spent his youth in lonely Montreal hotel rooms, struggling to write books which some people liked but nobody would buy. Eventually he started concentrating on writing songs instead, “to pay my grocery bills”. He performed intermittently around Montreal and then moved to New York.
There he met Judy Collins and sang her some of his songs; she recorded one straight off. That led to a meeting with John Hammond – the legendary A&R man who discovered Dylan and Aretha Franklin – and a contract with Columbia Records.
On the way he managed to be duped out of the rights to ‘Suzanne’ and a couple of other songs. “I didn’t really understand American business practises,” he says charitably, “but I heard someone singing ‘Suzanne’ in Corfu not so long ago and it seemed somehow fitting that I didn’t own it.
It was around the time of his first album that he met Janis Joplin, an interlude in his life that prompted a song which is one of the highlights of his stage performance, ‘Chelsea Hotel No.2′. ‘I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel/you were talking so brave and so sweet/giving me head on the unmade bed/while the limousines wait in the street’.
“I was saddened by her death,” he says. “Not because someone dies – that in itself isn’t terrible. But I liked her work so much; she was that good that you feel the body of work she left behind is just too brief.
“There are certain kinds of artist that blaze in a very bright light for a very brief time: the Rimbauds, the Shelleys, Tim Buckley – people like that; and Janice was one of them.
“Then there’s the other kind, like Satre or Bernard Shaw who are careful about themselves and what the risks are. You can’t get too safe, but as you get older you learn something about survival. The game is rough from a lot of points of view; because the prizes are big the defeats are big too.
“The life is rigorous, and the invitations to blowing it are numerous and frequent. Me? I’m careful as I can be without it getting too much of a drag. Anyway, I’m too old to die that kind of spectacular death. For me to commit suicide or O.D. would be…,” he pauses for the appropriate word, “… unbecoming …”
Mick Brown
Zappa – “Zoot Allures” (1976)
This rock-oriented work, credited to just “Zappa,” came out in 1976. Chris Federico examines the album in his e-book “Zappology” (from, I believe, 2002)…
In 1976, just before Halloween, Frank navigated around legal disputes with his former manager Herb Cohen to release this album, which appeared on the regular Warner Bros. label while Frank’s own DiscReet imprint was hung up in the court hassles. Only slightly over a year after wrapping up an unsuccessful lawsuit against London’s Royal Albert Hall over the 200 Motels concert that had been vetoed back in ‘71, Frank had sued Herb for embezzling money with his attorney brother. (The orchestral-piece title “Mo ‘n Herb’s Vacation” refers to Herb spending Frank’s money on his own amusements.) Shortly after the suit was filed in the summer of ‘76, work began on Night of the Iron Sausage at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. It was to be a double album, presumably containing some of the early-to-mid-‘70s material that would eventually be heard on the four records resulting from the fragmentation of Läther.
Frank eventually decided that Night should be a single album called Zoot Allures. When it was finished, the Record Plant wouldn’t let him have the master tapes unless Warner Bros. idemnified the studio against any lawsuit that Herb might decide to file as a byproduct of his battles with Frank. Warner consented to this, but only if Frank idemnified them as well. He threw his hands up and had the album mastered from the half-speed safety copy he’d fortunately brought home.
The album title plays on the French exclamation zut alors! (akin to “goddammit!”). This is a continuation of the trick in the name The Grand Wazoo, which re-spelled the French word for “bird,” oiseau (“Grand Wazoo” = “Big Bird”). Zoot Allures also depicts the first two letters of “Zappa” as the title’s initials. A similar prank will be pulled on the cover of Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch (see that section for more).
Posing on the front cover like a basic rock group — in congruence with the album’s mostly simplex (for Zappa) music — are bassist Patrick O’Hearn, drummer Terry Bozzio, Frank and keyboardist Eddie Jobson. Pat and Eddie are props; they don’t play on the album. They’re probably in the picture because it was taken around the time Frank was getting his late ‘76 touring band together. To fortify the theme of the contrived sexual presentation of oneself (more on this later), Frank’s pants are incredibly tight; on the back cover, he’s the only one who’s really changed his pose, bending outward at both knees to relieve the pressure. “See how ridiculous this sort of fashion is?” is implied. “Later That Night” from the Ruben album is called to mind: “There’s no room to breathe in here!” In “Stuff Up the Cracks” later on that record, the song’s heartbroken character threatened to asphyxiate himself. Gas and the strange ideals attached to modern relationships both arise on Zoot Allures; social restrictions never stop torturing those who don’t consciously resist them.
The cover’s pants-bulges can be considered “zoot allures” themselves. Zoot suits were fashionable with black jazz musicians and their fans in the 1940s. A decade later, the free physical expressions and “primal rhythms” of black entertainers were alluring to sexually repressed teenagers. As Frank wrote in his 1968 essay “The New Rock,” “From the very beginning, the real reason Mr. & Mrs. Clean White America objected to [early rock and roll] was the fact that it was performed by black people. There was always a danger that one night — maybe in the middle of summer, in a little pink party dress — Janey or Suzy might be overwhelmed by the lewd, pulsating jungle rhythms and do something to make their [sic] parents ashamed.” This fits Zoot Allures’ concept of stifled sexuality escaping in odd ways. “Wonderful Wino” even mentions a zoot suit.
Terry’s wearing an Angels shirt, advertising the baseball team; it’s perhaps just a funny coincidence that Punky Meadows, from the rock group Angel, will be jeered in “Punky’s Whips” during the upcoming tour, observing both confused sexuality and bondage accoutrements. The Japanese text on the cover combines word bits to roughly form “Frank Zappa,” although names in Japan aren’t really written by joining phonetics together in such a straightforward manner; they’re of a more pictorial nature. The writing is Hanko in style, a form used for personal signatures.
Frank seems to align the media’s portrayal of ideal sexuality with the unnatural standards (and psychological tactics) of fascist regimes throughout history. While making this album, he certainly couldn’t have been unaware of the implications on it, considering the frequency with which he’d previously compared, for instance, American politicians to Nazis. Two obvious examples are heard in “Plastic People” on Absolutely Free and “The Idiot Bastard Son” on Money. The sexual outlets of this torture that never stops abound in the lyrics; concerning one case, Frank has spoken in interviews about being astounded that consumer demand exists for a blow-job machine that looks like a child’s head (“Ms. Pinky”).
“Wind Up Workin’ in a Gas Station” opens with the line, “This here song might offend you some!”. Along with such lyrics as “Don’t you be Tarot-fied/It’s just a lotta nothin’, so what can it mean?” from “A Token of My Extreme” (Joe’s Garage, Acts II & III), it could just as well serve as an introduction for the relatively new listener to Zappa’s music in general. It also foreshadows the stirring of disturbing impulses coming up on the album. “If it does, it’s because you’re dumb” is the second line, an outright accusation that’s devoid of Frank’s usual sarcasm or “character singing.” People in his own background were offended by direct, truthful language: “That’s the way it is where I come from/If you’ve been there too, lemme see your thumb [give me an affirmative signal]”. The mention of thumbs also refers to auto mechanics (who have “greasy thumbs”), people perceived as inferior to folks who wear suits and ties.
Studio engineer Davey Moire eventually takes over the lead vocals, occasionally harmonizing with himself. His high voice goes well with the energetic music, conveying the image of one child singing to another about their futures. On its outer lyrical layer, the song reprises the jabs at Nixon’s recession in “Can’t Afford No Shoes” from One Size Fits All, proclaiming that a college graduate won’t necessarily get a good job. But Davey’s sardonic, growling line “Pumpin’ the gas every night” is a frightening reminder of the Californian concentration camps that Frank mentioned in the Money libretto notes.
Although the composer surely doesn’t take his liberties for granted, or compare his own experiences to those of Jewish war prisoners during World War II, he seeks to warn about what might transpire if the average American doesn’t smarten up; he wishes to illustrate the dangers of repeating history, and demonstrate that the fascist direction in which we’re headed might well come to its tyrannical, logical conclusion. His 1976 “anthropological studies,” as he’s called them in several interviews, indicate that America’s experiencing a drawn-out, more subtle Holocaust, complete with psychological propaganda; its citizens are being fed a “perfect image” honed by the media. It berates its victims to the point of torture as they fear their own lack of image fulfillment or sexual conquest (“The Torture Never Stops”), and causes them to seek unnatural sexual outlets (“Ms. Pinky”). It makes them develop plans and mind games to get the opposite sex into bed (“Find Her Finer”), get drunk in order to bury one’s disappointment with himself (“Wonderful Wino”), and participate in ludicrous, marketed social trends (“Disco Boy”).
The implied message, should the listener wish for one to fixate on, is: “Don’t buy into it. Be aware of your whims and locate their sources.” Frank’s music constantly opens active ears to their own trained impulses; for instance, the listener’s yanked out of certain songs and into less formulaic music.
“Show me your thumb if you’re really dumb” is pure sarcasm. With “Be a moron and keep your position,” Davey sings Frank’s sardonically stated encouragement to refuse to be a moron who contemplates no alternative to the prescribed way of life (recalling “Be a jerk/Go to work” from “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” on Absolutely Free). The listener’s told that he “oughta know now, all your education won’t help ya no-how.” As Davey repeats the title refrain, we hear Frank’s closer, louder vocal. His deep voice is mixed in front of everything else: “Manny de Camper vants to buy some vite [wants to buy some white].” The German accent furthers the Nazi subtext. One initially thinks of white gas (propane, which portable lamps and stoves run on), but he actually wants some white fish (a Jewish delicacy): Frank’s line is followed by Davey’s falsetto exclamation, “fish!” (at the same time the backing vocals fall on the word “gas,” from the repeated song title). This is a bit spooky when one remembers that Davey has just gotten through snarling sadistically about the prospect of being made to operate gas chambers.
“Black Napkins” was recorded live in Osaka, Japan on 2/3/76 (which perhaps explains the Japanese stuff on the album cover). The wah-wah pedal’s eventually used in tandem with Frank’s uncanny neck-picking to make the guitar sound like an overheated science fiction-movie computer; the sound will return (as bubbles?) in “Ship Ahoy.”
In Ljubliana, Yugoslavia on 11/11/75, Frank introduced an early version of “Black Napkins” to the audience by saying, “This is an instrumental song. It’s a tender, slow, moving, ‘ballad’ sort of song that carries with it the implied message that the complete woman must also have an asshole.” In the context of the album, the “perfect woman” for whom men are trained to search isn’t real, and they’ll be let down by the very aspect that should be turning them on (natural humanity, with all its so-called imperfections). This subtext anticipates “You never go doody/That’s what you think” in the album’s closer, “Disco Boy.” In spite of seemingly connecting to these ideas by describing toilet paper, the song’s title wasn’t concocted until later in the month, after that spoken intro. It’s called “Black Napkins” because Frank and his band had Thanksgiving dinner in ‘75 at a venue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that served hardly edible food, clinching the comical atrocity by providing black napkins.
The lyrics in “The Torture Never Stops” are said to have been originally intended as exaggerated ribbings at Captain Beefheart for his somewhat narcissistic mannerisms and his lack of consistent sanitary habits. When the song was first performed in the spring of ‘75 at Claremont College during the Bongo Fury tour, it was called “Why Doesn’t Somebody Get Him a Pepsi?” By the time Frank laid down this Zoot Allures vocal, it had grown to represent much more in terms of some undefined evil entity. One can solidify it as a politician, a music journalist (cf. Thing-Fish) or the embodiment of the real authorities who don’t get on the news, the monsters behind this psychosexual concentration camp. The reek that even makes the stones choke is another reference to poisonous air, not to mention Jewish dietary customs (raw pork). “Guns and the likes of every tool of pain” are included among outlets of displaced sexuality, recalling Frank’s past lyrics about phallic extensions.
Besides a “tiny light from a window hole” (which makes one wonder if “City of Tiny Lites,” a song on Sheik Yerbouti about Los Angeles, might not name the city as a center of this oppression), the atmosphere never gets a break, not a single shaft of sunlight; nor does the Night of the Iron Sausage, the era in which America’s denizens are battered by misleadings that snuff their self-esteem and direct their sexual energies toward machines (cf. Joe’s Garage) and masochism, let up. If the torture were ever to stop, no one would let himself be groomed and shaped, feeding the money machine like a good little Fido — much less act dumb to appear sexually appealing (“Find Her Finer”) or feel the need to get drunk and fervently attend dance clubs (“Wonderful Wino,” “Disco Boy”).
The stanzas before each verse (and prior to the guitar solo) are backed by orgasmic, partially pained female moans and squeals. The torture never stops; even during a guitar solo, the male listener is reminded that these cries sexually frustrate him more than they should. They’re a natural bit of humanity, after all. We can assume that the orgasmic screams of the girls (it’s Gail Zappa and a friend; the first grunt is the friend’s) are included to reveal to the listener how uptight his culture’s made him (or her, for that matter). “Why does this torture you? Isn’t it an attractive sound?” Frank’s asking.
Some of the squeals sound like actual howls of pain; the listener’s also asked why pain and control remind him of sex. Additional sexual/tortured cries from the same “evening’s work” (Frank’s words) in his bedroom will surface as glimpses back to the dungeons of despair in “Rat Tomago” (“tomago” is “egg” in Japanese) on Sheik Yerbouti. The song will come after “Jones Crusher,” and will be followed by “Bobby Brown”: songs about damaged genitals. On the Baby Snakes soundtrack, “Jones Crusher” will immediately precede “Disco Boy.” (Then again, maybe the revisited shrieks in “Rat Tomago” will just be the cries of a girl who discovers that she’s been eating a rat omelette.)
In 1977, Frank will tell Guitar Player’s Steve Rosen that the “thing that sounds like a slide guitar on ‘The Torture Never Stops’ is actually a fretless… It’s different than a regular guitar. You don’t push the strings to bend them; you move them back and forth like violin-type vibrato, which is a funny movement to get used to. But you can play barre chords on it. It’s fun.”
Frank sings an elongated verse at the end, wondering if the victims are “zeroes someone painted.” This recalls Nanook’s frozen cultural wasteland, and the round, frozen beef pie next to which Billy the Mountain’s adversary was born. Frank sums up his eclectic music, conceptual continuity and lyrical attempts at exposing buried truths: “Everything that’s ever been/That’s what’s the deal we’re dealin’ in.”
The girl’s death blow is dealt by her being cloned in artificial form — her own packaged “perfect” image — as “Ms. Pinky” stomps in. Frank parodies Van Morrison’s “Gloria” by spelling out “P-i-n-k-y”; then “K-Y” (Jelly; a lubricating agent) is snuck in there. This is a song about, according to Frank’s words to Barry Miles in 1976, “a lonely-person device. We have this fan in Finland called Eric… [His favorite porn magazine] had ads for lonely-person devices. It was even worse than I had imagined. Not only is it a head, it’s the size of a child’s head. The throat is sponge rubber, and it’s got a vibrator in it with a battery pack and a two-speed motor. Sticking out of its neck is a nozzle with a squeeze-bulb that makes the throat contract.” (The doll really was priced at $69.95, according to Frank in other interviews.) So the original sides 1 and 2 both end with masturbation — the “Disco Boy” goes home alone, engaging in “disco love” with himself — book-ending the record with results of frustration. This album’s a Weeny Sandwich of its own.
Donnie Vliet, who’s credited with blowing the harmonica in “Ms. Pinky” and “Find Her Finer,” is of course Captain Beefheart. “Find Her Finer” opens the album’s second half with remarks about how idiocy has become the accepted norm. The prospective gas attendant at the beginning of the first half is sarcastically being encouraged to fulfill the “dumb” stereotype laid on him. The occasional silent-beat vocals come from Ruben Ladron de Guevara (of the actual Ruben & the Jets, formed long after that Mothers album came out, and whose LP For Real has been produced by Frank). The line “The universe is nowhere to start” vocalizes the difference between the cover concepts of the prior year’s One Size Fits All (the idea having been that the universe can hold everyone comfortably) and Zoot Allures (with its satirical pandering to the consumers of a sexually oriented media). The listener’s sardonically encouraged to “rap like a mummy ‘till you finally unwind her” (“rap” = “wrap,” in the sense of a mummy’s wrapping, which can be unwound — along with the obvious “talk” meaning, of course). “See who designed her” correlates the human woman with the manufactured rubber head in the last song. “Ground mummy” was the name of a nineteenth-century spice, adding a further pun. After Frank admits that he’s probably offended some listeners (similar to how he opened side 1), more wordplay’s heard in “wiser fool,” a comical oxymoron.
Xenochronicity (called “experimental re-synchronization” in the Sheik Yerbouti liner notes) makes its debut in “Friendly Little Finger.” The guitar solo has been recorded in a different time, place and musical context than the other instrumental parts. The brass at the end is playing the traditional gospel song “Bringing in the Sheaves,” recalling the Salvation Army’s attempts at helping alcoholics quit. This leads into “Wonderful Wino,” co-written with Jeff Simmons in 1970. The macho line “Boy, she looked over at me and she raised her thumb” follows up on the opening song’s lyrics. “I stink like a hog” recalls the terrible meal in “The Torture Never Stops.” (Black napkins, indeed.) The dancer expression “Watch me, now!” (taken from the Dave Clark Five’s ’60s hit “Do You Love Me”) is humorously used, as it will be in “Bobby Brown”; it’s curious that the actual lyric has nothing to do with dancing in either case. “Eat the label” will also be sung in “Baby, Take Your Teeth Out,” a song about a gummed blow job on 1984’s Them or Us. (Ms. Pinky’s deeds undoubtedly feel like gum jobs.) “Eat the label” could also be a stealthy Zappa expression about his music; any attempt to brand it is swallowed up. The wino pisses on the front lawn of a woman with her hair up in curlers, like how the black character in Apostrophe (’)’s “Uncle Remus” smashed the racist lawn ornaments displayed by white Beverly Hills residents.
A different studio version of “Wonderful Wino,” recorded in 1973 and featuring Ricky Lancelotti’s hyperactive vocals, contained the same line about the lawn as this rendition; but the even earlier live version from shows with Flo & Eddie had gone, “A roller-headed lady caught me weedling [or wheedling: begging] on her lawn.” The wino could’ve been urinating or loitering.
Originally released by Jeff Simmons on his 1970 solo album Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up on Zappa’s Straight Records, the song was temporarily retitled “Wino Man” when it was performed by the Mothers a year later. The title song from Simmons’ album will also be redone by Frank for Joe’s Garage, Act I. Although prominently depicting a world in which music has been made illegal, that story will concern a character whose life is wrecked in nearly every imaginable way, due to society’s rampant warping of sexuality.
The live instrumental “Zoot Allures,” rumored to have been recorded at the same Japanese concert as “Black Napkins” (although the songs feature different bass players, if one goes by the back-cover credits), incorporates a striking harp part, played by Lu Ann Neil. The original ending will be heard as “Duck Duck Goose” on Läther and “Ship Ahoy” on Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar Some More. A November 1981 performance of “Zoot Allures” will be resynchronized over separately recorded music to render the solo section of “Truck Driver Divorce” on Them or Us.
In 1977, Frank will tell New Music Express that “’Disco Boy’ came about because we were in Denmark and we went to a place there called the Disc Club, and it was really poot. It was so make-believe sophisticated that it was embarrassing. The place was decorated like a playboy-type living room would sort of be like: low-boy chairs and snackettes on the table. And everybody drinks and dances to these robot-beat records…”
The masturbation reference casts a curious light on the line “Find her blinder” in this half’s opener; blindness has been superstition’s reprimand for self-stimulation for ages. We can easily discern “Disco Boy” as being circular, i.e. repetitious like the average pop song. The fur trapper in “Nanook Rubs It” was blinded by the urine-soaked snow that was rubbed into his eyes via a “vigorous circular motion” (female masturbation). Just before the solo, “The Torture Never Stops” contains the echoing “Well…well…” of “Nanook Rubs It.”
Those who watch the movie Baby Snakes will discover Frank singing most of “Disco Boy” to a young girl named Angel, tying into the Zoot Allures front cover, and of course “Punky’s Whips” (not to mention Angel the cross-dresser cited in “Broken Hearts Are for Assholes”).
Chris Federico
Lauri Adverb – “crabcakes”
(cuzza the time john waters got 80 bucks of emergency food stamps and spent it on crabcakes…cuzza the curbstone press anthology ”Poetry like Bread”)
poetry like fucking:
poetry like pubes,
bikini line
2-day stubble
poetry like a single line
of thin hair running
from abdomen
to cock.
poetry like flan,
rice-luxury no family can go w/out
gooey fat oozing outta pan,
like crabcakes on
foodstamps
it’s not a party it’s
survival.
poetry like bread
like crabcakes, like
fucking
is for everyone.
Lauri Adverb
Public Image Ltd. – “Metal Box” (1979)
Awhile back, I posted a review by Kris Needs of this brilliant, innovative album, that was written in 2004. Here’s a review from the time the album was still brand new and confusing many fans and critics. Written by Angus MacKinnon for the New Musical Express, Nov. 24, 1979…
Open the Box, Take the Money
People say that Public Image Ltd. should play live more often. People say that PiL aren’t interested in their (or any) audience, that they’re selfish and irresponsible, that they abuse their privileges, that they only want to alienate. People say too much and think too little.
So PiL prefer to spend their time in studios rather than on stages, so the PiL creative process and ensuing recorded noise have no cozy accommodating antecedents, so PiL are not what they were expected to be – s0 what? Did you really expect a repeat performance? Do you really want John Lydon’s head on a plate? I didn’t and I don’t. But even as we drift towards the bitter end of 1979 and the 1970s, pundit persons are compiling retrospectives of the dying decade like there was no today, let alone no Friday week. Maybe Doomsday is ahead of schedule, but they’re welcome to their insights, hindsights and overviews, the huffing old windbags.
Past is passed, and I feel moved to say about matters punk and post-punk is that I’m glad John Lydon is no longer Johnny Rotten, that he’s somehow managed to crawl from the pathetic wreckage of the Pistols with his dignity if not his self-respect intact, and that I admire the man for displaying a sight more sheer bloody minded integrity during the whole pitiful parade than almost any of his peers or partners in iconoclastic crime.
Just what is the problem with PiL though? I can’t see it myself. Lydon never promised anyone an easy ring around the rose garden. You can take PiL or leave them – just don’t say they haven’t given fair warning. If you haven’t enjoyed the story so far, then you won’t even want to glance at these chapter headings. . Mind you, I always found the Pistols unbearable except in tiny doses, but then there’s no accounting for my taste. The PiL noise is certainly ‘different’, but hardly ‘difficult’. Such flags are subjective and relative, of course, but try and keep the mounting preconceptions arms’ length, OK? It might help.
The PiL noise is John Lydon (vocals), Keith Levene (guitar, drums) and Wobble (bass, drums), everybody trebling on electronics, effects and synthesizers.
The PiL noise is a three-way street, a most democratic a co-operative animal that uses the studio as it sees fit, as an additional instrument mostly, that assesses where the limits of the recording technology lie and tends to break beyond them.”
PiL produce the most aggressively – and sometimes oppressively – physical sound on record since Can made Monster Movie or Tago Mago. Drawing rigid, restrictive parallels between the two bands is probably pointless, but it’s interesting to compare their respective attitudes to music-making.
Part of the point about early Can sound was that it was enthusiastically, guilelessly manufactured by five men whose collective experience of rock was at best minimal. The object of the exercise was simply to proceed with open ears, to somehow un-learn and then learn afresh. Can were playing at being primitivists, scratching the skin off every bone, and they got away with it, only letting their various, very formal musical pasts (Stockhausen, etc.) intrude at odd; unexpected angles.
The resuIts – those two albums in the main – were extraordinary. And yet it all seemed so natural, so uncontrived, so naked, so absolute – PiL seem equally reluctant to make correct, polite gestures, to make music that does all the right things in all the right places. Beginnings and endings seem pretty arbitrary throughout Metal Box; shapes and sizes seem pretty optional.
The gist of the PiL drift is, I suspect, extremely Cannish. The band are forgetting things, mislaying things, stumbling with things, stumbling on things and then, abruptly, it all clicks, clicks, holds. Don’t matter a tawny owl’s hoot whether any of this album is accidental or intentional; such distinctions are much too ‘nice’ to survive in these territories.’ Flotsam and jetsam of past endeavours and enthusiasms (Wobble’s fondness for the work of producers Lee Perry and Dennis Bovell, for instance) surface from time to time, but they’re small fry; sub-atomic particles in a huge, accelerating whole. And yet it all seems so natural, so instinctive, so honest, so absolute.
But time is tight and Metal Box is the second PiL ‘album’. It comes in a plain silver can with the PiL logo stamped in relief on its lid. It’s a tracklist and 60 minutes 34 seconds of sound pressed with enviable clarity onto three 12-inch 45s slipped. between four white paper discs (PiL wanted more protective inner packaging, but Virgin said no. It retails at £7.45, a sum that’s not nearly as extortionate as it first seems.
And Metal Box goes like this…
‘Albatross’: Wobble’s mega bass rumbles massively in the mix. Levene’s guitar stutters into earshot, a crabbed neural scratch. Rhythm and drums are relentless. Lydon drawls lugubriously about “Slow motion / Slow motion / Getting rid of the albatross / Sowing the seeds of discontent.” The syllables are dragged out; Rotten slurs, seems to move through the songlike a deep-sea diver. The final, manic shriek of “Only the lonely” is chilling. A doom dance about responsibility, accounting and atoning (but to or for what or whom?).
‘Memories’: an electric glide in grey, remixed, bass frequencies diminished and then suddenly pushed right into the red. Levene’s guitar is a gliding scale, at times a doppelganger for Michael Karoli of Can’s. Another public or private address from, Lydon: “It could be worse / You’re losing all the time / I let you stay too long / I could be wrong / It could be worse”. It Could? And just who is “you”? The question begs on empty.
‘Swanlake’: ‘Death Disco’ remixed. A maelstrom, Levene’s Tchaikovsky chords more prominent, more perverse than before. Lydon is almost hysterical: “Watch her slowly die / Saw it in her eyes / Choking on a bed / Flowers rotting dead”. I hope this is an exorcism, but can’t help but find it unnervingly guilt-ridden. “Words cannot express the vocal trails away, helplessly. The jump on the fade is deliberate.
‘Poptones’: PiL in King Crimson’s clothing, looser and slacker than Crimson’s Red album, Lyrics? Check ‘em out in your own time. They seem to run very scared; Lydon’s vocal, especially the “I don’t like hiding in this foliage and peat… ” verse,is droll to say the least. Lydon as haunted, hunted fool? Other memories for a man with too much on his mind.’
‘Careering’: extreme; Discotic, washed with malevolent synthesizing and shattered by electronic gunfire. Lydon’s voice constantly mixes sense, sound and metaphor: A face is raining / Across the border / The pride of history / The same as murder…” The references to “the border”, “both’ sides of the river” and the “military” all suggests ” Northern lreland as the song’s locale. Later, Lydon identifies with the central character, whose role escapes, me utterly: a gunman, a soldier, a civilian or what? I wouldn’t know. Despairing depths, these, mirrored remorselessly by their soundtrack. X-traordinary.
‘No Birds’: another alternative mix or take.
Guitars are everywhere, scrawling mayhem, vicious graffiti, as Lydon squirms through a tunnel of sound: a full-frontal assault on surburban standards.
‘Graveyard’: a spooky, scratchy instrumental. Mercifully brief. Levene’s chords clamber up a metal ladder to the moon. ‘
‘The Suit’: Wobble’s bass hum-drums over a spartan rhythm track. Lydon’s put-down of a “society boy on social security” is bitter as myrrh. Sheer spleen. Blackest bile. Hope he never hears it.
‘Bad Baby’: the PiL engine idling nervously. New drummer Martin Atkins hits a hi-hat, does well for himself. Lydon, almost cracking into falsetto, tells a tale of the times: “Someone left a baby / In the car park / Never any reason… Ignore it and it will go away”. Inner city anxieties. Anti-social comment.
‘Socialist’: Telex and / or Kraftwerk spin-dried. Stuttering drums gibbering mini-moogs. The title’s significance (if any) eludes me.
‘Chant’: roughshod and raucous. I think the chant ,goes like this “mob… war… feel… hate”. Lydon affects a petulant whine – “It’s not important / It’s not worth a mention in The Guardian”- but again he’s playing hard to get, attitude-dancing as coyly as ever. An ironic idiots’ anthem, yes?
‘Radio 4′: a soft, deep-piled rug of neo-classical synth orchestration. A groaning parody of BBC boredom. Levene’s idea apparently, and funny as in ha, ha. Very.
Conclusions: Metal Box is more complete, more convincing than the first album. As indicated above, Lydon is still the crustacean, all pink and squiggling flesh beneath the outer shell. But for one obvious reason and another, that’s his prerogative – for the time being at least. Nerves and tendons and frayed and twisted more often too; Lydon, Levene and Wobble all seem more … concerned, confident. In terms of impact and effect, Metal Box is pulverising; incredibly exactly. All this forward flow in twelve months – it’s almost frightening. PiL are miles out and miles ahead. Follow with care.
Angus MacKinnon
Kenneth Rexroth – “Jazz Poetry” (Article 4) (1960)
Final article by Kenneth Rexroth on the subject of “jazz poetry” that appeared on the back cover of the LP Kenneth Rexroth: Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk (Fantasy Records, 1960)…
Over a hundred years ago the French poet, Charles Cros, the man who invented the phonograph, recited his poetry to the hot music of a bal musette band. Some of his pieces, especially the very funny “The Dry Herring,” are still in the repertory of café entertainers over there. In the twenties Langston Hughes, Maxwell Bodenheim and myself recited poetry to the jazz of the time. A few years back, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Lipton and I revived it in California. For a while it was a fad. The Beatniks took it up. Some pretty awful stuff was committed in joints around the country. Now the fad has died away and the permanent, solid achievements remain. The form is not going to revolutionize either jazz or poetry, but it is going to stay with us, and both jazz and poetry are going to have one new way of expressing themselves, and so are going to be just a little richer. This is as it should be, because jazz poetry is fun to listen to, and it is even greater fun to do.
During the past four years I have worked around the country with all kinds of top-notch bands. Every one of these dates has been a sheer joy. But always at last I have come home to San Francisco and “my” band. Somehow we seem to go together like ham and eggs. We know each other thoroughly. We are always with it. It’s not just that nobody gets lost too far out. We know perfectly how to bring out each other’s best points. We know what we are doing.
What are we doing? Nothing freakish. Nothing outrageous. Nothing really new. Not just the people I mentioned before, but the “talking blues,” recitations of poetry as part of the service in storefront churches, highbrow music like Stravinsky’s Persephone and Walton’s Facade, there is nothing strange about the form, it has a long history in both jazz, spirituals and classical music. It is not singing or chanting. It is not matched to the notes in the strict way a song is. The point is that is gives a freer relationship, one which gives the musicians more chance for invention, for individual expression and development. Again, modern jazz is much better stuff than many of the popular lyrics that go with the tunes on which it is based. Some of these are pretty silly. We think that good poetry gives jazz words that match its own importance. Then, too, the combination of poetry and jazz, with the poet reciting, gives the poet a new kind of audience. Not necessarily a bigger one, but a more normal one — ordinary people out for the evening, looking for civilized entertainment. It takes the poet out of the bookish, academic world and forces him to compete with “acrobats, trained dogs, and Singer’s Midgets” as they used to say in the days of vaudeville. Is this bad? I think not. Precisely what is wrong with the modern poet is the lack of a living, flesh and blood connection with his audiences. Only in modern times has poetry become a bookish art. In its best days Homer and the Troubadours recited their poetry to music in just this way.
How do we do it? We certainly don’t just spontaneously blow off the top of our heads. Most of these pieces are standard tunes, carefully rehearsed many times with the poet until we’ve got a good clear rich head arrangement. We don’t write it down, because we want to keep as much spontaneity and invention as possible, but at the same time we want plenty of substance to the music, and, of course, we want poet and band to “go together.” I have chosen poems which are about the same things as most popular songs and blues and which are simple enough so that they can be put across to the average audience in a jazz room. Maybe now that the medium has caught on, as it certainly has, we can go on and try “deeper,” more complicated poetry. I use poetry from all times and places, again to show that nothing is foreign to jazz treatment. Poets of all times and places have always sung, “I loved him but he went away.” “Come to my arms, we ain’t a gonna live forever.” “I wish I’d never met you.”
Why do we do it? No theories. We do it because we like to. It’s fun.
Kenneth Rexroth
Victor C. Mucci – “34 Months in a Soldier’s Life”
Another article that my grandfather, Cpl. Victor C. Mucci, wrote for a massive war scrapbook that he put together several years ago (which is probably when this was written). At the end of this story he wrote, “I hope my grandchildren will find this book helpful in knowing their America,” which in his eyes had turned into a much different place then the one he grew up living and believing in. He was a conservative man with conservative values, but he taught me alot over the years and these stories made me realize the sacrifices he (and thousands of others) made for all of us.
I believe these stories should not be forgotten in the years and decades to come. Kids growing up should know their history and what was done to protect the freedoms we all take for granted.
The other article of his on this site (link below) has some overlap with this one, as part of that article (published in the local newspaper) is taken from this earlier one…
I was one of the millions of young men who answered the call. There were many times when I had second thoughts about what I was doing thousands of miles from home on that God-forsaken island of New Guinea and the mountains and valleys of the Philippine Islands. New Guinea was a Hell Hole; putrid, oppressive, with stinky swamps, slimy mud, filthy rivers and torrential rains. It was an invitation to fevers and infections. No one escaped that dreaded malaria and jungle rot. I contacted a severe case of malaria while I was on that island, but I got it under control by taking Atabrine. When I returned home and stopped taking those pills, the malaria took over again. I was under doctor’s care and after three years the malaria got out of my system.
After mop-up in New Guinea was over, our next move was the Philippine Islands. It didn’t get much better there. The terrain was much better, but the enemy was very determined to see that we would not be coming home. We were not the same caliber of soldier that the enemy was, but with our limited training we were determined that there was no turning back. Of the one hundred and twenty-five men in my company, I was about the oldest of the enlisted men (I was 26). The rest were seventeen or eighteen year old boys, barely out of high school; also boys from the farms who could barely write their names. Just a bunch of lonely homesick looking up to me to be their big brother. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart, always looking at the brighter side of life. I was always by their side when they needed me. They were slowly adapting to army life; they went through Basic Training with flying colors. We were slowly becoming soldiers. They were my boys.
However, I was carrying a heavy burden. I never showed it, but it was only months that I last saw my wife and new son. He was only months old, and here I am over five thousand miles from home, not knowing if that was the last time I would see them. It was a scary feeling. However, I always had strength to put that in the back of my mind. After twenty months over seas, one cannot describe the feeling of the soldiers coming home at last. Our families were anxiously waiting for us. We were coming home to the greatest country in the world. Everything was so beautiful. Our jobs we left behind were waiting for us. We met up with the friends we left when we were all separated and scattered all over the world. We never knew where they served or what branch of service they were in. We seldom exchanged our experiences with each other. We simply left the war behind us. We were not bitter toward our country for sending us to those faraway places. Our people back home were just happy it was all over. Church bells were ringing all over the land and America prayed and offered thanks for the safe return of their loved ones.
I have a brother who served in the infantry. We seldom talked about our war escapades. This is the story my family related to me. While I was on a ship headed for New Guinea, he was on a ship headed for home. He was wounded in Anzio and Salerno in Italy. I received mail from him saying he was wounded and the Nazis were throwing everything at them but the kitchen sink, on the beaches. After he was dismissed from the hospital he wrote that he would arrive home on a certain day. Meanwhile, while my family was anxiously waiting for him to arrive, my mother feared the worst. He has lost a leg; the family was not telling her what really happened. After gaining her composure, she accepted him losing a leg. At least he was coming home. As they looked out the window they saw him coming down the street. My mother let out a cry and said, “Look, he has two legs! Thank God he’s come home a ‘Whole Man.’” That was the scene that was repeated thousands of times across the homes of America. It was an afterthought, as my mother would say. “I have gotten one son back safely but my other son is still thousands of miles across the large ocean. When will he be coming home?”
Yes, we both made it home, but thousands of mothers who were waiting and looking out every window for the return of their loved ones weren’t so lucky. Thousands of wives never saw their husbands again. The end of the war was the happiest and sweetest day for the American Family. It was also the proudest years of the Family. They joined the war effort and worked all hours building planes, tanks, ships, and turned out all kinds of guns and ammunition, as they worked all kinds of shifts in factories. Without them, their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers could not come home victorious. America was at its finest hour. History has labeled the men and women as The Greatest Generation. There will never be another generation as the one we were fortunate enough to have lived in. But our generation is slowly fading away.
Victor C. Mucci
http://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/victor-c-mucci-my-days-as-a-tank-gunner-2004/
Kenneth Rexroth – “The Beat Era” (1975)
Rexroth article on the Beats from April 1975. This is either taken from San Francisco magazine - a regular column he wrote called Rexroth’s San Francisco…
Last time I ended my vest-pocket history of San Francisco’s Renaissance with the arrival of Ginsberg and Kerouac. The next five years or so were known as “The Beat Generation,” which was alleged to be a San Francisco product. It was almost entirely the construction of Time and Life magazines. All the cultural activities of the San Francisco Renaissance were already well under way, and none of the writers or artists, many of whom had already gained considerable fame, could be considered “beat.”
The poet Walter Lowenfels, an old friend of mine from the great days of American Paris between the Wars, showed up in San Francisco (he is Jabberwohl Cronstadt in Henry Miller’s Black Spring). Walter was indicted under the Smith Act as a Communist and was touring the country speaking in his own defense (he was subsequently acquitted). I asked him if he would like to give a poetry reading. He was a leader of the older generation of Modernists, then unknown to young writers and readers, and has since undergone a literary rebirth. He agreed, and I tried to find a place. No one, including the San Francisco Poetry Center, would touch him. I called the Six Gallery, a cooperative of six painters who are now leading artists and members of the New Establishment themselves. Far from Communists, indeed, they nevertheless agreed enthusiastically. Lowenfels packed the place — to the amazement of the local Red bureaucrats. One of whom, an aged anachronism of pseudo-proletarian literature, said to me in awe, “My God, he has the youth!” “You bet,” I said.
A couple of weeks later the Six Gallery asked me to arrange another reading. Most of the poets of the already well established San Francisco Renaissance read. Ginsberg read Howl, and left a stunned audience, who realized they had witnessed a drastic breakthrough of the crust of custom and the launching of a literary epoch.
Ginsberg had been a conventional, witty poet; Kerouac, the author of a very conventional first novel. Gregory Corso had published a book financed by the smart alecks of the Harvard Advocate, who were under the impression that they were committing a hoax. Bob Kaufman had just arrived in San Francisco. William Burroughs was decaying somewhere south of the border. This is all the Beat Generation of writers there ever was, and none of them were San Franciscans or had ever lived in the City for more than a few months. Nevertheless, because they fitted exactly the Luce publications’ stereotyped image of révoltés and Bohemians, they were turned into celebrities overnight, and within the year had become national and eventually international cult figures. Soon, all the high school ice-cream parlors in Keokuk, Ocanomowoc and Cle Ellum were emptied of their problem children, who had thumbed their way to North Beach and started crops of sparse pubescent whiskers or clad their recently virginal thighs in black stockings. They swarmed like bees or herring for perhaps two years, and then they were gone. Herb Caen named them “beatniks” and soon flourishing crops of them were appearing in London, Berlin (where they were called Gammler), Tokyo and Moscow (where they were called stilyagi) where, to this day, youngsters can be found reading translations of Kerouac’s On the Road under the impression that it is still a New Testament.
Now the curious thing about all this furor is that, after the first five writers, it produced nothing. Nothing at all in literature or the arts or anything else. The far-out cultural developments of the period were quite independent, for the obvious reason that any of the arts requires work, and being a beatnik takes up all your time. The hippies and their leaders and spokesmen in poetry, song and music did produce, but that’s a later story.
Meanwhile San Francisco’s own culture continued to mature and consolidate itself. This growth extended from establishment to avant-garde activities: the San Francisco Ballet, the Opera and the Actors’ Workshop (but not, alas, the Symphony), a series of extremely creative little theaters (the best of which was the Playhouse under the direction of Kermit Sheets), dozens of little magazines, the Tape Music Center, considerable activity in films (although the leading abstract filmmakers remained the Whitney brothers and the leading representational fantasy artist the poet James Broughton), the revival of poetry and jazz, and even a new kind of show business in the hungry i — what Variety called “The Freak Gig, Frisco Style,” which they applied to me and even to Peter, Paul and Mary when they first appeared.
There are all sorts of legends about the poetry and jazz revival. The facts are these: Langston Hughes, Maxwell Bodenheim and I had recited poetry to jazz at the Green Mask in Chicago in the ’20s, and the band had included people like Teschemaker, Dave Tough, Bix Beiderbecke and others later to become world famous. I had suggested reciting to Dave Brubeck, but the trouble with a successful group is that they never stay still. They’re traveling all the time, and poetry and jazz, to be any good (contrary to popular opinion), requires a great deal of rehearsal. You have to have a house band. The Cellar in North Beach was owned by two jazz musicians, so it was possible to work with a permanent, resident group, and Ferlinghetti and I inaugurated a series of jazz-poetry concerts. Soon, everybody was doing it. We were celebrities, with our pictures in Life, and agents, and were “on the road” separately making a great deal of money, playing to packed audiences, and were in great danger of becoming cult figures. At the same time Kenneth Patchen, then living in Palo Alto, was working with a group of his own who played a rather Brubeck-y type of jazz full of classical reminiscences. It was very polished and competent and except for Modesto, a great baritone sax player, very far from funky.
Being an entertainer is terribly hard work, and with the exception of about five jazz rooms around the country in those days, night club owners were a very low breed indeed — the off-scourings of the Mafia. I got out of it and so did Ferlinghetti at about the time jazz-poetry became a craze. By that time, every petty imitation beatnik was “blowing words” to pawn shop saxophones mended with scotch tape — blowing weird, mistaken cross-fingerings through blubbered embouchures in every Greenwich Village joint for nothing or at best a glass of wine. And of course, the enthusiastic availability of the still swarming black-stockinged high-school dropouts. The days of a grand a gig were gone. It was time to quit. The curious thing is that abroad, poetry and jazz is still popular and I could make a very good living at it.
Kenneth Rexroth
Stanley Turrentine – “Papa Wings” (1977)
Another song sampled on Common’s “They Say” from his 2005 album Be, comes this piece by jazz tenor sax player Stanley Turrentine off his Nightwings album, that is equal parts funk, blues & jazz, with slight elements of the prevailing disco sound of the time.
Note: song gets cut off right at the end…sorry.
Ben Edmonds – “Dennis Wilson: The Lonely Sea” (2002)
This retrospective on Dennis Wilson comes from Ben Edmonds in the November 2002 issue of Mojo magazine…
With time to kill before sound check on a windy New York afternoon in 1971, the drummer of The Beach Boys had decided, on a whim, to scale a building that, though not yet complete, was already the tallest structure ever erected by man: The World Trade Centre.
The bottom half of the first Tower was already occupied, and Dennis and his pal Gregg Jakobson went as far as they could and then switched to the construction elevator. In their jeans and T-shirts, the Californians blended with the workmen, and ascended unchallenged. Higher and higher they rode, past the welders, riveters and electricians, until they reached the 110th floor, which at this point consisted of nothing but skeletal beams. Dennis whooped with joy and triumph as he danced around all four corners, oblivious to the vicious winds whipping through non-existent walls, determined to admire the spectacular view from every angle.
This was Dennis Wilson: fearless, foolish, and willing to do almost anything to wring every last molecule of experience out of whatever the world gave him. No vertigo. As the member of The Beach Boys who defined the band’s image and embodied the California culture that produced them, he was given much. He attacked every moment with such gusto and abandon that his excesses might dwarf even major league drum lunatics like Keith Moon and John Bonham. But Dennis Wilson was also an artist – and his talent ran as deep as the ocean.
Dennis Wilson had no time for music. And music was the only thing that kept 3701 West 119th Street in Hawthorne, California from being a full-time house of horrors. At the head of this household was an over-bearing cyclops named Murry Wilson, psychologically cruel and physically abusive, whose administration of “tough love” could be diverted only by the sound of his wife Audree and their three sons harmonising around the family piano. A bitter tyrant who’d experienced the barest of brushes with music business success as a songsmith – proto-muzak bandleader Lawrence Welk had once performed one of Murry’s cornball concoctions – he took out his frustration on the four captives of the house.
Dennis would have none of this, neither the beatings nor the harmonies. The only time the middle son (born 1944) would sing was when he was trapped in the back seat of the family car between big brother Brian and pudgy younger brother Carl. The earliest memory many have is of a little towheaded terror with his face pushed against the screen door, itching to be part of whatever was happening on the other side. Or maybe it was just the desire to get away. Let loose, he ran as far as his legs would carry him, wreaking so much mischief in the neighbourhood that he was called ‘Dennis the Menace’, a nickname that never stopped being appropriate.
Dennis had to be tough. “He told me that practically his earliest memory was of having his father punch him full force in the solar plexus,” says long-time friend Ed Roach. “Murry had made him stand nose-to-nose and stare into his empty eye socket [the result of an industrial accident]. Dennis said he flinched once out of fear, and his father knocked him across the room and into the wall. He began to cry, which caused Murry to be on him like a bat out of hell, just whacking the shit out of him, screaming, ‘Stop your fucking crying – stop being a baby’ After that beating, Dennis swore he’d never cry in front of his father again. No matter how much it hurt, and how much more it hurt not to cry, he was never going to give Murry the satisfaction of thinking he’d broken him down.”
Behind the wheel of automobiles, which he began “borrowing” long before he was old enough for a licence, he discovered his ultimate destination, five miles south-west of Hawthorne: the beach. When Dennis Wilson beheld the infinite sweep of the Pacific Ocean he felt at once truly at home and completely free. In surfing Dennis found the release that the rest of his family found in music. In the other surfers, and the beach bunnies who ministered to their needs, he found his own family, his first band. The ocean was his rock’n'roll.
Some surmise from the boy’s inability to sit still a case of Attention Deficit Disorder. “Dennis was classic ADD,” asserts his friend and frequent co-writer Gregg Jakobson. “He may even have had ADHD, the hyper form of it. It’s like your brain is wired to pay attention to everything. You’re constantly being fed too much information. I was diagnosed with it myself in the early ’80s. That may help explain my compatibility with Dennis. ADD people make lousy farmers but great hunters.”
Being the drummer of a touring rock’n'roll band would probably be another perfect occupation for such a person. Dennis got the job only because his mother insisted that room be made for him in the musical group consisting of brothers Brian (bass) and Carl (guitar), cousin Mike Love (vocals) and schoolmate Alan Jardine (guitar). An alien within his own family, he was the outsider of the band before he’d played a note. It was the position he’d occupy in the family business for the rest of his life. But without knowing it, his disgruntled and sceptical band-members had acquired one of their most valuable assets as well as a royal pain the ass. It wasn’t simply that surfer Dennis suggested the subject of the song that launched their career. When they became The Beach Boys upon release of that single ‘Surfin” he gave them their entire identity. He was what the band was singing about, what the rest of them were only pretending to be. He was the only Beach Boy who surfed, leaving Brian at home to write songs about it. When the group was singing about cars, it was Dennis who was out racing them. Sometimes, as with ‘Fun Fun Fun’, his exploits inspired songs, his life was a movie and The Beach Boys were recording its soundtrack.
At first Dennis Wilson seemed to be all image – the handsome, fun-loving, sun-smacked, God-favoured California boy whose main function, according to one Beach Boys associate, was to “look good and attract the chicks”. He found that he loved performing, where he could ride a crowd’s energy like a surfboard, sometimes even controlling the waves.
“In the beginning he was easily the most popular guy in the group,” Al Jardine says. “On-stage, all he had to do was stand up to stretch and the crowd would go nuts. Mike would be trying to sing, and he’d have to turn around to find out what was going on. Oh, that used to piss Mr Love off so much. It was a little disconcerting, because there’d be these sudden eruptions that weren’t tied to the music. It was for Dennis. He was a star without even trying.”
Still, if there was any substance to this heart-throb it wasn’t apparent. Dennis seemed to do his best to ensure that nobody would look beneath the surface. Initially, he drummed like a guy whose mom got him the job, and the group frequently resorted to studio musicians. The songs he was given to sing on the early albums are throwaways, a sop to the member all the girls screamed for, and his vocal performances didn’t suggest he was worthy of too much more. Musically, he was the equivalent of a dumb blonde.
The first hint that there might be more was buried on side two of the 1965 album The Beach Boys Today! ‘In The Back of My Mind’ offered the most intimate glimpse of Brian Wilson’s fearful psyche, dressed up in orchestration that foreshadowed his musical maturity, and he chose the somewhat ragged emotionally right voice of Dennis to deliver it. Denny backed his big brother unconditionally in the fight to fuck with the Beach Boy formula over the next two years, though with genius auteur Brian directing and dominating vocally as time went on, there was even less for Dennis to do than there had been before. But when Brian, having circled the sun with Pet Sounds, crashed and burned under the weight of the unfinished masterpiece he called Smile, the other Beach Boys suddenly found themselves with unaccustomed creative slack to pick up. And nobody expected the tour drummer to make much of a contribution. So fans, family and bandmates alike were shocked when two songs Dennis had written with poet Steve Kalinich, ‘Little Bird’ and ‘Be Still’, not only made the 1968 album Friends, but were actually among the highlights. The discovery of an artistic voice may have surprised Dennis as much as it did everyone else.
“It was not our intention to write songs when we first got together,” explains Kalinich, “and I don’t think he could even see himself as a creative entity apart from the band. But we sparked each other personally, and then creatively. I left the words to ‘Little Bird’ sitting on his piano one night, and the next day he had the music. Dennis had an amazing talent; I could read him a poem once, and he’d then play it back to me as a musical melody. It was unschooled and unedited – he was in awe as this music came pouring out of him. Dennis was all passion. But having made this incredible personal breakthrough, his first impulse was to try and set me up to write with Brian. That was Dennis: generous even when it might not be to his advantage.”
Everyone, from brother Brian to guys he’d known for five minutes, all said the same thing: “Dennis had a big heart.” Debbie Holtsclaw knows this. She was 17 and fresh off the bus from Kansas when The Beach Boys hired her to answer fan mail. “One of the managers sent me out on an errand in his car,” she remembers. “Well, I cut a corner and bashed in one of the doors. I had no way of paying for the repairs, so I was actually making arrangements to go back with my parents while I raised the money. When Dennis heard this, he took me to the manager, who confirmed the amount I owed him. Dennis said OK, took a big wad of cash out of his jeans and threw it across the desk. ‘Is this enough to take care of it?’ When I worried how I was going to pay him back, he said, ‘Your eyes light up when you do something for us, that’s payment enough.’ I’ve treasured every one of those words, but that’s only one of 10,000 good-hearted Dennis Wilson stories. He was open to everybody, but I guess Charles Manson proved you can go too far with that.”
Ah, Charlie, there was no greater illustration of Denny’s accessibility, bottomless generosity, and the destructive lengths to which he’d permit people to take advantage of him, than his celebrated involvement with the murderous ‘Family’ of Charles Manson. By all accounts these murderous leeches in love beads took Dennis for $100,000 worth of clothes, cars, food and lodging, not to mention doctor’s bills for the Family gonorrhoea. All Dennis got out of it was a plentiful supply of diseased pussy and the mediocre Manson lyric ‘Cease to Exist’, which he rewrote, to Charlie’s eternal displeasure, as the Beach Boy track ‘Never Learn Not to Love’. But, as he told the district attorney, “At least all I lost was my money.”
He had also been the first in his group to join The Beatles in embracing transcendental meditation (the first to drop it, too, though Mike and Al stuck with it). What little hip credibility The Beach Boys had left after their disastrous 1968 tour with the Maharishi, whom The Beatles had already publicly repudiated, was completely wiped out by the waves of paranoia in the aftermath of Manson’s arrest. It was as if The Beach Boys were somehow to blame for this unmasking of the dark side to the sunny California myth. In 1969, with Brian Wilson headed for total retreat, The Beach Boys hit what may be the lowest point of their 40 year rollercoaster career.
Consigned to the pop culture scrap-heap, the group was forced to reinvent itself, and this is where the dumb blond drummer really began to shine. All the other members stepped forward creatively, struggling to compensate for the absence of Brian. Dennis – the perennial outsider of whom little was expected – was free to create his own music without this burden. What emerged was something more than simply a unique voice within The Beach Boys. Most of his favoured collaborators in this process – Gregg Jakobson, Steve Kalinich, Stan Shapiro – were word guys. But Dennis and Daryl Dragon, the classically trained pianist and Beach Boy sideman, were like the odd couple – the most accomplished musician in the band’s organisation, and the least.
“I was sitting out in the bleachers during a soundcheck when I heard these amazing piano chords coming from the stage,” said Dragon, whose band nickname was ‘Captain Keyboard’ and who would later find his own fame in The Captain & Tennille. “I looked up and it was Dennis, which kind of shocked me. I only knew him as [this] wildman drummer. I didn’t even know he played piano! When I asked him who’d composed the gorgeous music he was playing, he said, ‘I did.’ I was floored. Dennis had none of the formal training I’d had, but these were chords my instructors would’ve killed for. He didn’t know the names of notes, nothing. He just played around until he found the notes that matched what he was hearing in his head. The richness and instinctive innovation of his chords reminded me of Richard Wagner, whom Dennis had never heard of.
“My real function with Dennis was to give him encouragement. The band didn’t see the value in his writing because they didn’t see it as commercial. They were looking for the next hit, because this [1969-72] was when the hits had stopped coming. Dennis didn’t think on those terms. My contribution to his songs has been somewhat overstated, to be frank. My relationship with him was more like Salieri’s with Mozart. I’d sit there and try and write down what was coming out of his head. There was never any thought but that we were shaping his musical inspiration. If I did anything, it was really just to help him commit to his ideas, which was not always easy for a guy with his constant energy overload.”
The peak of Dennis’s creative contribution to The Beach Boys was the 1970 album Sunflower. In the absence of Brian, Dennis carried the record. ‘Slip On Through’ and ‘It’s About Time’ were not only his best rock songs, they were maybe the last real rock the band can lay claim to. Though never a hit, the gorgeous ‘Forever’ has become a perennial, its ballad form and romantic sentiments were the artistic territory he staked out for himself in the coming years.
But instead of being the beginning of a new respect and equality within The Beach Boys, it turned out to be Wilson’s high-water mark with the band. On the group’s 1971 “comeback” Surf’s Up he had no songs at all. As the ’70s progressed he’d be indulged for a track or two per LP, but despite the quality of material like ‘Cuddle Up’ and ‘Only With You’, they were really nothing more than the bones he was thrown on the band’s earliest albums. Because he wasn’t writing to formula – and the formula was now to reference the group’s own history – he was invisible. (Except, of course, when he was making trouble, and these things are not unrelated.)
Weighing the band’s cold shoulder against the stockpile of songs Dennis was composing has led to the conventional wisdom that the drummer was already plotting a solo breakaway. Not so, according to Daryl Dragon, who says that the songs they worked on together were always envisioned as gifts to his group – even ‘Sound of Free’, which saw limited release in 1970 credited to Dennis Wilson & Rumbo and which Rumbo (Dragon) says he can barely recall. At this point he paints Dennis as pathologically incapable of seeing himself as anything but a Beach Boy, a fundamental frame-work for his scattered life. If so, this makes the band’s indifference to his offerings all the more egregious. “He was not only under-appreciated in the rock world,” Al Jardine says today, somewhat ruefully, “he was under-appreciated in our band. We didn’t know what we had.”
A game of pinball would tell you all you needed to know about Dennis Wilson. The guy attacked the machine, alternately caressing and banging it, all exaggerated body English as if his physical exhortations could will the direction of the ball, convince the machine to do his bidding. He was also the sort who changed the rules as the game went along, but it was so much fun that you didn’t really mind. I had the pleasure of losing a few such pinball matches to Dennis on the machine at Brother Studio, and being made to pay up with a couple of late-afternoon breakfasts. In the mid-’70s I was working for The Beach Boys’ former label, Capitol Records, in Los Angeles, and with a group called Crane, who happened to be recording at the band’s Santa Monica studio. Though my contact with Dennis was fleeting, it was enough to understand his profound gift for making each person he encountered feel they were the centre of his universe.
On one of our meal breaks, he stopped to talk with a homeless man and gave him everything that was in his pocket. “I like to spread the wealth around,” he said. As we ate he rhapsodised. He was thrilled to be making a record at the behest of James Guercio’s Caribou Records, obviously proud that of all The Beach Boys it was the fucked-up drummer who was cutting the first solo album. He was over the moon about a boat called Harmony he was restoring, expressing a desire to permanently live on the water. He was also one of those who could check out the female action in the room without diverting any attention from his conversation, chortling about the cum stains he made a point of depositing regularly in the studio’s “meditation room” – a gift for the group’s TM contingent. When we passed another homeless person on our way back to the studio, he made me empty my pockets of cash. “Cough it up!” he barked. “You work for Capitol, don’t you? Well, I helped build your fucking office.”
The time he spent recording Pacific Ocean Blue was perhaps the most satisfying of his life as a musician. “This was when he fully accepted himself as an artist,” reckons Gregg Jakobson, whom Dennis drafted as co-producer. “Brian had shown him chords on the piano, but as he’d become more proficient the music that came forth was not derivative of that. Having his own studio helped tremendously. With a little encouragement, and the right tools, Dennis took off.”
“He didn’t talk much about what he wanted to do, he just did it,” says John Hanlon, a studio technician who made the leap to engineer – and a career that would include work with Neil Young and R.E.M. – on these sessions. “He needed an engineer, pointed at me and said, ‘You’re it.’ When he wanted to record, it was right that very second. Spontaneous. You had one chance, and you better get it. He was very much like Neil Young in that way.”
The album was considered complete and its running order set when Otto Hinsche died suddenly. The father of extended Beach Boy family member Billy Hinsche, he had provided Dennis with lifesaving emotional support following Murry’s death. “Dennis came in and announced that the album might not be finished,” Hanlon remembers. “He began fooling around on the piano until this wonderful melody emerged. I’ve never seen Dennis so focused. We recorded it right then. ‘Farewell, My Friend’ is his send-off for Billy’s dad.
“There’s some sadness, but what you feel more is how much Dennis loved this man, celebrated his life. Dennis had the ability to go right to the heart of the matter and then put that feeling on tape.”
Not only does Dennis Wilson’s album sound almost nothing like The Beach Boys – though the rock gospel of ‘River Song’ is what the band could’ve sounded like had it not been so concerned with chasing its historic tail – Pacific Ocean Blue seems to have very few overt musical influences of any sort. This is music that flows from its own source. Unlike Brian, who usually had things pretty well plotted in his head, Denny’s recordings almost sound unfinished, music captured in the act of exploring itself. The instrumentation changes from track to track, but you always come away with the seductive effect of the artist’s weatherbeaten, lived-in voice – the aural equivalent of the bearded, shaggy-haired visage that gazed out from the cover – as close as pillow talk.
Upon its release in 1977, Pacific Ocean Blue surprised everyone by selling a quarter-of-a-million copies in America, better than most Beach Boys albums of the period, reportedly causing as much irritation as pride within the band. It had been bad enough when fuck-up Dennis landed a starring role in the 1971 movie Two-Lane Blacktop. Now the fuck-up had a solo album success. “The Beach Boys were scared, intimidated by it,” Mike Love’s brother Stan told Steven Gaines. Though it contained no hits, POB demonstrated the affection with which a sizeable audience still regarded their fair-haired boy, a strong foundation upon which to build a solo career. Dennis kept right on recording, like he intended his life to be one long album, the next installment of which he was already calling Bamboo.
Despite their endless attempts at exorcism by any and all means available, the Wilson boys were haunted men. As The Beach Boys limped into the ’80s on atrophied creative legs, a group intimate relates a scene he witnessed. Brian had ballooned to 300 pounds. Dennis was visiting, trying to get his brother to make music with him. He’d try anything – drugs, alcohol, junk food – to lure Brian to the piano. The truth was that Dennis was in no better shape than his brother, but he still clung to the belief that there was a melody hidden somewhere in the piano that might save them.
“Dennis was pounding away at the piano,” the associate recalled, “while Brian wandered around the living room with this thick leather dog leash, slapping it loudly against his hand, saying, ‘Remember this sound, Dennis?’ His brother looked over, quietly said, ‘Yes, Brian, I remember,’ and went back to the piano. Brian started slapping himself harder and harder, saying, ‘My dad used to make all three of us line up against the bathtub with our naked asses up in the air. He took a strap like this and started hitting us like this.’ Whack! Whack! Brian was really beating the shit out of the furniture, working himself up to do some real damage. His nurse came running in with medication, but Brian just kept yelling at his brother. ‘Remember, Dennis? Remember?’”
If Dennis Wilson was scarred any less deeply, it was only because he got out earlier. His was the most volatile relationship with Murry – they had a similar volcanic temper – and it seemed they could do nothing but rub each other raw. Yet in the old man’s final days, Dennis was the only one of his sons who’d make the trek out to see him. Divorced from Audree, he lived in a large house in Whittier, where he’d created a huge music room for his sons, outfitted with a full complement of instruments and sound equipment. It had never been used.
“The rest of the family wouldn’t have anything to do with him,” says Ed Roach, “but Dennis reached out. It started with phone calls. They remembered how they used to love watching the Monday night boxing matches together. They started doing that again, drinking and smoking and watching the fights. It developed into a warm friendship, which was good for both of them.” They were able to bury the hatchet only because the past was never brought up. Dennis began to understand that part of his father’s behaviour had been from a genuine, if twisted, sense of protectiveness. But when Murry died in 1973 just as his reconciliation with his wayward son was settling in, only Carl showed up for the funeral. Brian fled to New York. Dennis fled even further, to Paris, accompanied by the wife of a Beach Boys employee, destroying two marriages with one stroke, his and hers. “Smooth move, son,” as Murry chided his middle child, “smooth move.”
Almost as soon as the reception of Pacific Ocean Blue suggested that Dennis might have a meaningful life outside The Beach Boys, it all started to fall apart. In the carefree pre-Manson days, Denny and his pals Gregg Jakobson and Terry Melcher had a self-explantory boys club they called The Golden Penetrators, complete with gold-painted car parked on the Wilson property. And these were married men. Dennis was the cliched male who thought with his cock, and whatever advice it gave he accepted unquestioningly. But as ’60s consciousness exploration and freedom were corrupted by ’70s chemical abuse and indulgence, things took on an increasingly ugly edge. Ed Roach remembers coming to blows with Dennis at Christine McVie’s home when she and The Beach Boy were involved. “It was over a woman,” he admits somewhat sheepishly. “A ridiculous fight all over the house, while Fleetwood Mac were out on the road. Christine had bought an antique piano bench from Tallulah Bankhead, worth $10,000, and Dennis cracked it over my back. I jumped and grabbed the crystal chandelier to kick him like Errol Flynn and the whole thing came crashing down. It was crazy, and the excess fuel in our systems didn’t help.” And, it must be pointed out, the woman they were brawling over was neither Dennis’s girlfriend nor Ed’s domestic partner, but the wife of another Mac member. As the ’70s progressed, the penetrations were no longer so golden.
But the Dennis Wilson who burned Christine McVie’s pool house to the ground – prompting her pointedly dry remark to Gregg Jakobson, “A bit excessive, your friend Dennis, isn’t he?” – was also the same manchild who had a large heart composed of red and white flowers planted in McVie’s garden, where he serenaded her backed by a string quartet. (That Chris ultimately wound up with the bill in no way diminishes the gesture of a man who, when he had it, happily gave away everything he had.)
A decade earlier he had confided to a friend, “I could probably never be happier in my life, could never make things better than I have them right now, yet I know I’m gonna fuck it up. It’s not that I think that, I know it. I have to fuck it up. I don’t know why. It’s just too perfect, so I’ve gotta fuck it up.”
Which is maybe all that had ever been expected of Dennis Wilson. Storm clouds had been gathering from the day he was born, but now they intensified. At the time I was playing pinball with what I perceived was a happy-go-lucky Dennis, Chuck Kirkpatrick was experiencing a very different Dennis. This one started out sweetly, showing off new songs on the Brother studio piano. “He’d come into our session and play me some heartbreakingly beautiful songs,” the leader of the group Crane recalled. “But he was also drinking constantly, and as the alcohol took effect he’d get louder and wilder and incoherent. The hands playing haunting chords turned into clenched fists pounding the ivories, punctuated by Dennis yelling ‘cunt’ and ‘death’. It was like you were watching him destroy the beauty he’d just created. He didn’t know when, or how, to stop.” After these liquor-fuelled revels, Dennis would sheepishly tear up the invoice for the band’s session, saying, ‘This one’s on me.’”
Booze was the main culprit. In the aftermath of Manson, both grass and LSD made him paranoid. The problem seems to have begun in the early ’70s when Dennis broke his hand and had to relinquish his drum chair, leaving his hyperactive self with too much free time. When cocaine excess came rolling through the ’70s, it made a beeline for Dennis Wilson. “There must be something genetic that pushes the Wilsons toward addiction,” Al Jardine speculates. “Because they all got caught in that trap, even Carl. We tried to get Dennis to meditate, but he always had something else he had to do.”
The last time I saw Dennis Wilson was in a Hollywood restaurant. He was with Christine McVie, whom I actually knew much better. She waved me over and asked if I’d met Dennis. When I reminded him of our previous encounters, he responded with such enthusiastic affirmation that it was obvious he didn’t really remember them at all. You didn’t feel inclined to take this personally, because Dennis was so fully in the moment, and (usually) so much fun to be around, that people simply treasured their time with him and forgot the rest. But was he really “in the moment”? For with all his manic embrace of experience, in every moment he inhabited he was already restlessly reaching for the next one. His inexhaustible reserves of energy would never allow him to alight in any one place for very long. And woe to those who tried to hang on; his personal highway was littered with the wrecks of five marriages and countless relationships. It was as if he thought that if he kept running as fast as he could he might somehow arrive at a place where he and the world would finally be in sync. He never did. No one could keep up. Beneath that tidal wave of charm, fellowship and good cheer, he just might have been one of the loneliest men alive.
The final few of years of Dennis Wilson’s life are a story that begs not to be told. Most people are visibly saddened when asked to recall the unstoppable deterioration of what had once been such a vital and beautiful presence, who now appeared virtually indistinguishable from the homeless he had always gone out of his way to help. “I literally had no idea who he was,” recalls Daryl Dragon of the man who’d once been his creative partner. “He was bloated, dishevelled, unrecognisable. He had to grab my arm and say, ‘It’s Dennis.’ I was shocked, and I know he could see it in my face.” Steve Kalinich recalls Brian making him get up and drive him to the marina out of concern for his brother’s condition. When Brian Wilson is worried about the shape you’re in…
He could give it all away to others, but he could never spare any for Dennis. So now everything was gone: the money, the cars, the houses, the girls. The band, fed up with the drama that accompanied his deterioration and his inability – or unwillingness – to accept help with his addictions, had done the unthinkable: they’d washed their hands of him for good. Some members grieved, and hoped that this wake-up call might be the one to get through; other members were openly relieved. For Mike Love this was the ultimate victory over his irresponsible cousin. In 1980 Nick Kent reported Love’s description of Dennis as “a drugged-out no-talent parasite who we’ve sacked”. It was a consciously cruel mischaracterisation, but one which Dennis was, sadly, struggling to live down to. (But, as he often did, Dennis got in the last shot. In perhaps the sickest twist in their lifelong pissing contest, he would impregnate and marry Mike’s illegitimate daughter Shawn.)
He’d been forced to sell Brother Studios, which he and Carl had taken over from the band. “Whatever else may have been happening in his life,” says writing partner Kalinich, “when it came to the music he was a disciple. That’s where his purity always came through.” Now that was gone too. The album to have been called Bamboo had gotten off to a roaring start, with more uptempo material than he’d produced since Sunflower. But with his personal and professional life in disarray, recording sputtered to a halt. Dennis made sporadic attempts to record, but his primary instrument had fled. The voice that launched a thousand intimacies, once endearingly ragged, was now ruined.
Worst of all, his beloved boat, Harmony, had been seized and sold for less than half of what Dennis had put into it. Without the three things Dennis valued most – his family (for the band was ultimately his real family), his home (Harmony was more home than any of the palaces he’d occupied), and his work (the studio was his creative security blanket) – what was left?
“I’ve got one last Dennis story, and I’ll try to get through this…” Chip Rachlin told me haltingly. The agent who had helped mastermind The Beach Boys’ ’70s resurgence had become especially close to the drummer. “I stopped working with the group in 1978. In ‘83 I was working for MTV, and my ex-wife and I were in England. I woke up this one morning, and told her about this dream I’d had. It was one of those vivid ones that stay with you. In my dream there was a stadium, and it was when The Beach Boys had that elaborate stage set that looked like a ship, remember? I told her that this show had gotten rained out, that the stadium had flooded. She came back later that day, and…told me my friend Dennis had drowned…”
On December 28, 1983, Dennis went diving off a friend’s boat next to the slip where the Harmony had been docked. Having found trinkets from his past life on the murky marina floor, he went back down for a sunken chest he was convinced contained treasure. He never came up. From the top of the world to the bottom of the ocean, and only 39 years old. The following January, Dennis Carl Wilson was given a burial at sea. This was as it should be. The sea had always had him. But everyone who’d ever come into contact with this beautiful, broken angel felt that they had a little bit of him too. The connection Dennis Wilson made with people was deep and lasting, and not of the sort a little thing like death is likely to mess with.
Trisha Campo was a friend before she worked with Dennis at Brother Studios, and maintained a devoted friendship until the bitter end, and maybe beyond. “It was the day after he died,” she explains. “His wife Shawn had gone to identify the body. I turned around, and there was Dennis standing in the middle of the room. I looked at him, and he had this confused look, like he didn’t understand what had happened. A while later I was in my own place, and a girlfriend was spending the night. She didn’t know anything about The Beach Boys or that part of my life. She asked if I knew a guy, and then described him. I said, ‘Yeah, but he’s dead. Why do you ask?’ Well, she said, he’s standing right there. My daughter also saw him in her room. This started happening regularly, until one day I got really angry and shouted, ‘What do you want? Tell me or get the fuck out of here.’ After that the visits stopped. I think he was trying to tell us that something wasn’t right.”
What was it Dennis wanted? Peace, certainly. For his music to be heard, probably, especially when it is received in the spirit of love and wonder in which it was made. (Plans are now afoot to finally reissue Pacific Ocean Blue and the collected fragments of Bamboo.) But what Dennis probably would’ve wanted more than anything, was just one more minute. One more minute of life. Like most who were fortunate enough to have made his acquaintance, or just fell in love with him through his music, I remember a different Dennis than the one the world saw at the end. In my mind’s eye he’s standing on a stage, waving to an audience he loves every bit as much as they love him. What I hear are the words Dennis used at the end of the very last show he would ever play as a Beach Boy. It was a nothing State Fair gig somewhere in New York state, though to Dennis there was no such thing as an unimportant show. As was so often the case, the drummer was the last Beach Boy to leave the stage, lingering to bask in the afterglow.
“Thank you very much,” he called out, “for everything I’ve ever dreamed of…”
Ben Edmonds
The White Stripes – “Death Letter” (Live)
A cover of the old Son House classic — I’m not sure of the date or location of this performance.
