Never Travel Far Without a Little Big Star

Rock and Roll is replete with its own mythology   For example, there's the one about the obscure band who made a few albums no one appreciated at the time, but ended up influencing countless others who went on to much greater success.  Big Star stands as one of those bands who laid the groundwork, but received none of the spoils.

From 1972-1975, Big Star made three albums for the Memphis label, Ardent Records. Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, both rising stars in Memphis music scene, formed Big Star in 1971. As a teenager Chilton had been part of The Box Tops who had number of chart topping hits, most famously, "The Letter."  The first Big Star album, #1 Record, featured a splendid assortment of British infused rock owing more to the Beatles than anyone else (apparently in 1972 the Beatles were considered passe). The first track, "Feel," sounds like an outtake from Abbey Road with lyrics full of angst, "feel like I'm dyin/I'm never gonna live again." Thematically, "Feel" set the tone for most of of their music: emotional turmoil, unrequited love, and wounded romanticism.  Bell's, "the Ballad of El Goodo," is a melancholy epic in which he pledges "to fight on against long odds."  The third song, "In the Street," later made famous as the theme to That 70's show, blends Byrds like harmonies with a tinge of Southern soul.  "Thirteen," one of most fragile love songs ever recorded, includes lyrics like "won't you tell your dad to get off my back/tell him what we said about paint in black" displays a tenderness rare in pop songs.  Another highlight, written by bassist Andy Hummell, "The India Song," imagines India as a paradise of indolence, "drinking gin and tonic and playing a grand piano."  Between its Lennon/McCartney harmonies, Byrds riffs, and delightfully inane lyrics, #1 Record stands as a classic reverberating through the decades.

Unfortunately, the Bell-Chilton partnership lasted for only one album.  Resenting Chilton's growing influence on the band, Bell embarked on a solo career.  But Big Star soldiered on as a trio.  Their second album, Radio City, in many ways surpasses the first in terms of scope and ambition. Listening to the first track, "O My Soul," overwhelms the senses with its ramshackle guitar sound evoking frustrated desires with Chilton screaming "dying to see you/i'll knock off your doors."  There's a harsher and less compromising attitude throughout Radio City as if they feel fate closing in on them.  On "Mod Lang" Chilton finds refuge in booze as he declares in slurred speech, "I can't be what you want me to be." Other amazing tracks include "She's a Mover," "September Gurls," and" "Daisy Glaze."

Rock critics loved Big Star, but due to poor distribution and marketing from Ardent they failed to sell albums.  Chilton's refusal to tour didn't help matters.  Nevertheless, he made a follow up to Radio City that's known as both Sister Lovers and Third.  Some debate whether Third qualifies as a Big Star album at all since only Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens played on it.  Third sounds far more experimental.  The lyrics weave between despair and absurdity. Strange juxtapositions occur throughout with the pro-Christian "Jesus Christ" to a cover of Lou Reed's "Femme Fatale." Peter Buck of REM cited Third as one of the chief influences on their music and it has it's own cult following.  Third stands as a bizarre, but fitting, epilogue to Big Star.

For most of the 1980s, Big Star albums were out of print and forgotten by all except a few devoted fans.  Sadly, Chris Bell died in 1978 at age 27 in an auto accident just as he was finishing work on a solo album, which included the magnificent, "I am the Cosmos." Interest in Big Star revived as "alternative bands" like REM, The Replacements, Teenage Fan Club, and many, many others sang their praises to the four guys from Memphis.  Paul Westerberg, in a song entitled "Alex Chilton" declared "he never travels far without a little Big Star." In 1993, the surviving members performed at the University of Missouri and came together for one more album in 2005 properly entitled, In Space.  Chilton and Hummell both passed away in 2010.  Jody Stephens has continued to perform through the years, notably as the drummer for Golden Smog.

In many ways, Big Star foreshadowed the rise of indie or alternative rock way before those terms entered the culture.  Their music favored the underdogs.  It's the type of record that sounds great at full blast on a Saturday afternoon or on low volume at 2am on a Wednesday morning.

Americanarama: July 6, 2013: One for the Ages

When the Americanarama Festival of Music tour was announced last spring I knew it would be a special show since it would feature some truly special and historically relevant acts like My Morning Jacket, Wilco, and Bob Dylan.  And they did not disappoint. 

My Morning Jacket performed an ecstatic set of tunes ranging from hard rock to spaced out psychedelia.  Like a good opening act they raised a high bar for the others on the bill.  In one of the night's most memorable moments, Wilco joined MMJ onstage to perform George Harrison's "Isn't it a Pity" from All Things Must Pass.

Ever Since Wilco's modest beginnings they have gained a loyal following through non-stop touring and the versatile songwriting of Jeff Tweedy.  In 2013, Wilco stands as one of the best American bands currently recording. Their live sets display an excellent musicianship and an array of musical styles within the classic rock tradition.  Their collaboration with English folk rocker Billy Bragg of unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs revived the folk tradition for the Gen X crowd.

In their 14 song set list Wilco mixed the old with the new.  They opened with the subdued "Either Way" from Sky Blue Sky.  Two tracks from the Mermaid Avenue sessions "When the Roses Bloom Again," and "California Stars" tapped into their Americana roots.  Richard Thompson joined them for a cover of his 1970 Fairpoint Convention song, "Sloth."  Their alt-country roots were displayed with "Forget the Flowers" from Being There.  Another standout was a lush version of "How to Fight Loneliness" from Summerteeth.  In their 90 minutes on stage, Wilco delivered a nice slice of their recording history.

Dylan, now in the 25th year of his "Never ending Tour," took the stage wearing a white jacket and a fully pressed suit looking like he just stepped off a riverboat.  He stared into the audience like a figure from a Sergio Leone film.  As darkness descended on the Pavilion, Dylan kicked things off with his Oscar winning song, "Things Have Changed," in an almost unrecognizable Tex-Mex beat.  Next came a blistering version of "Love Sick" from Time Out of Mind with Dylan emphasizing the line, "I wish I never met you."  The moodiness continued with "High Water (for Charley Patton)" from "Love and Theft" with its irreverent blend of erotic and apocalyptic imagery, "don't reach out for me/ she said/can't you see I'm drowning to."

Three songs from Dylan's most recent album Tempest were played.  "Soon After Midnight" recalls the tender 1950s doo-wop sound with Dylan reminiscing about an old lover while considering wiping out one of her new suitors, "I'll drag his corpse through the mud." Another new song "Duquesne Whistle" evokes a vanishing America existing only in memory, "I wonder if that old oak tree is still standing/ that old oak tree/the one we used to climb."  The bluesy "Early Roman Kings" backed by a Muddy Waters riff continues Dylan's one man war against mortality - a dominant theme in his 21st century recordings.

Classics from Dylan's back pages highlighted the second half of his performance   Hearing Dylan sing the lyrics to "A Hard Rain's a gonna fall" never fails to lose its power.  And then came "Blind Willie McTell" , an outtake from Dylan's 1983 album Infidels; a song many consider one of his best.  Never released until 1989, "Blind Willie" is a tribute to a blues legend, while confronting America's history with slavery. Dylan closed the evening with a restrained version of "All Along the Watchtower" and "Ballad of a Thin Man."

At age 72, many wonder what motivates Dylan to keep up his heavy touring schedule. In a revealing 2002 interview with Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes, Dylan explained he was upholding a tradition and honoring a pact he made "a long time ago."  The "Neverending Tour" makes me think of an anecdote I once heard about baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. When asked by a friend why he continued playing so hard in the latter stages of his career "Joltin" Joe replied:  "Because there might be somebody out there who's never seen me play before." Dylan knows his music means many things to lots of different people and the concerts allow him to share the gift of his art to all who have been touched by his amazing gift.

Wild Palms: TV Takes a Surreal Look into the Future

Twenty years ago ABC aired am original and challenging mini-series - Wild Palms. With Oliver Stone as executive producer, the five-part series attempted to speculate on the future of media.  If you combine the elements of the Bible, Jacobin revenge plays,Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Phillip K Dick's psychedelia,. film noir, William Gibson's cyperpunk all set to a rocking 60s soundtrack and you get Wild Palms.  
By exploring themes of virtual reality, mass media manipulation, drugs, polarized politics, and technology, the series put coherence aside in favor of a disjointed narrative.  As the series progresses each episode delves deeper into retro future world.   Kathryn Bigelow directed an episode ending with a dizzying, Peckinpah inspired shootout set to "House of the Rising Sun."  The costume motifs envision a future where every style's is retro.  Based on comic book series by Bruce Wagner, Wild Palms stands alongside The Prisoner for its willingness to question modern notions of politics, technology, drugs, and reality.

Wild Palms is set in a futuristic Los Angeles, and its not the dying metropolis of Blade Runner, but a sunny utopia.  Two shadowy groups known as "the fathers" and "the friends" are in a covert war over the proper use of technology.   Although Wild Palms did not anticipate the internet, it did foresee a society under increasing media consolidation. The "fathers" are corporate elitists

using technology as a means of mass mind control, while the Friends are an underground movement trying to free humanity from its reliance on technology. While politics are one of the many themes in the series - it's interesting to compare with the present.  By my understanding, libertarians oppose the government, but not corporate power.  Occupy Wall Street's critique of the financial system, at least in their moderate expression, advocates for more government regulation. The "Friends" oppose any kind of tyranny.  In Wild Palms, the "friends" use poetry as their mantra, primarily Whitman's "My Captain, My Captain."  The fight is to keep humanism alive.

Jim Belushi gives the performance of his life as Harry Wyckoff, a corporate lawyer living an average upper middle class life with his wife Grace (Dana Delaney) and their two kids.  His life changes after a politician-media mogul Anton Kruetzer, played by Robert Loggia, in an over the top performance, offers Harry the chance to run a TV network.  That's the basic plot.  Through the course of the series Harry gradually finds out most of his reality is fiction. Harry's character arc has a strange trajectory from an everyman hero to a new age media prophet.

There's a lot going on.  Unlike modern television which uses linear storytelling (with exceptions of course), Wild Palms still looks (and feels) subversive with its use of vivid imagery and psychotropic narrative. 

2019 note - A part of the plot involves letting viewers control the story of their favorite TV shows, something Black Mirror attempted with "Bandersnatch." With fans petitioning for new endings to their beloved shows - Wild Palms might've been on to something. Still in our time of "Peak TV" Wild Palms in all its messy glory offers an alternative to the rigid structure of a Netflix series.

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"I read the news today oh boy"

Forty-six years ago today the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Rock critics love to dismiss it's candy colored ideals.  Even the Beatles themselves had their misgivings over the years.  George Harrison openly scorned the idea of a "concept" album ( not to mention his secondary role throughout its genesis.)  John openly admitted Sgt. Pepper was mostly Paul's idea, and that he, under the haze of LSD, just went along for the ride.  Ringo recalls learning chess during the recordings.  Their previous album, Revolver seems more adventurous.  And The White Album continues to overwhelm all who encounter it.  Or maybe there's a Paul backlash going on?  McCartney developed the Sgt. Pepper concept and his voice appears on most of the tracks.  Some of the best moments are Paul's sweet songs about stalking meter maids or digging holes in the garden or fixing holes in the roof.  Paul's contribution to "A Day in the Life" adds a comforting contrast to John's dark surrealism.  Others find Paul's optimism tiresome.  Or maybe it's the album everyone outgrows as adult life locks it's hold upon you.  John parodied Sgt. Pepper on "How Do You Sleep," as a fluke - the song set the narrative for all who attack McCartney.  Or maybe it's the pop art cover which celebrates all those cult heroes ranging from the occultist Aleister Crowley to the 60s hipster Terry Southern.  They out Warholed Warhol.  Or maybe it's the music itself?  Cultured music theorists praise the arrangements on "She's Leaving Home," as something worthy of Schubert.  And "Within You, Without You", besides it's enchanting music, is a hynotic sermon against the ego (I totally see where you're coming from George!).  But melancholy undercurrents always accompany the masterful arrangements: the characters we meet are all sad and lonesome and looking for outlets to escape the pre-determined fates of Father McKenzie and Eleanor Rigby - even the Sgt. Pepper band laments going home on the reprise.  Or maybe it's the idea that piece of art can reach many people and bring about positive change simply by putting out some good vibes. Or maybe Sgt. Pepper still reverberates through the decades as a reassuring beacon saying: "hey, we know it can be rough sometimes, but it's ok , just keep going."

American Splendor: Review

Harvey Pekar (1939-2010) lived the life of a real working class hero.  Most know about his life and work through the 2003 film American Splendor. In 2005, he published his own account of how the film changed (and didn't) change his life.  The comic is totally honest as usual with Harvey finally getting some recognition for his work while he struggled through depression, anxiety, and cancer.  Since the 1980s, Hollywood had expressed interest in making a movie based on his comics.  Eventually in 2001 pre-production began on the film which starred Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis.  American Splendor proved a critical and commercial success with its innovative approach to a formulaic genre, the biographical film.  By blending comic book storytelling, cinematic recreations, documentary interviews, American Splendor stands as a classic.

Pekar produced groundbreaking comics while holding a day job at the VA hospital in Cleveland.  In the 1960s he befriended Robert Crumb, who brought a counter-cultural edge to underground comics, and encouraged Pekar to start writing on his own.  He believed the life of a flunkie (his words) file clerk still had the makings of great drama and possibilities for narrative storytelling.  He knew lots of interesting people, saw comical things happen everyday that rivaled anything in a Hollywood movie.

In "Our Movie Year" our man not only chronicles his year as a movie star, but also his influences as a comic writer: jazz music, realistic literature, and politically aware artists.  We also meet some of Harvey's close friends in comics Robert Crumb, Alan Moore, and many others.  In addition, Pekar provides a travelogue with his travels to Sundance, Cannes, Japan, and Australia.  

A recurring theme throughout Pekar's career is how comics remain a largely untapped resource.  Superhero films have ruled the box office for the past decade;  DC and Marvel still dominate the industry.  He believed the narrative power of comics had infinite possibility to inform people on important issues like political repression, censorship, issues of race and class, and the struggles of everyday people.  

Infinite Jest: The Future is Now

Infinite Jest brings to mind the Irish saying, "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan?"  No novel published in the past 20 years has attracted more analysis than David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.  As I spent the past two months reading the 1000+ book, I've listened to several interviews with Wallace.  He's always so self deprecating, polite, and interested in what the interviewer has to say. He was a master of deflecting questions by always relating them to his own experience without ever really addressing the question directly.  Wallace saw and processed so much in a world where people are so strange, sad, isolated, hilarious, heroic, petty, and full of so much curiosity, loss, and regret over history.  Yes, reading Infinite Jest feels like victory; albeit, a victory more akin to Austerlitz than Waterloo.

Honestly, I believe the novel is at least four scrunched into one.  All the plot lines do intersect at the end - or so I've been told The ending lacks the satisfaction one finds in Ulysses or most literature, but maybe that's the point.  In a first reading I won't even try to venture a theory.  I will say the final 150 pages the descends into one anti-climax after another.  Wallace takes the reader into the darkness of an imagination thriving on the banality of existence in modern America.  

Addiction and entertainment. In a narrow those are the penultimate themes in the novel.  Set at some point in an early 21st century where everyone lives for getting the entertainment.  Most of Infinite Jest takes place at various locations in Boston. One is a tennis academy for prodigies.  The other is a halfway house for recovering addicts.  Life at both places is highly structured to provide assurance for people in highly sensitive situations.  Hal Incandenza is the protagonist, the seventeen year old son of the deceased founder of the academy, who is in a constant state of anxiety.  Hal carries the world on his shoulders and smokes large quantities of pot.  At the halfway house the patients have every part of their daily routine under surveillance as they struggle to imagine life without drugs. The halfway house is the place where the American dream is not only broken, but squashed into goo.  Wallace writes about addiction in such a terrifyingly realistic way and with such virtuosity that one gets a visceral sense of its corrosive aftermath.  But the writing goes beyond mere accounting of addiction and into insights on the human condition, namely, the conflict within the human heart.  What happens when our pleasure outlets no longer satisfy?  How much do we need to escape from reality?  The void awaits . . .   Sometimes these dilemmas, as Wallace presents them, feel insurmountable. And then maybe there lies a faint hope.

The plot of Infinite Jest revolves around entertainment discs ( a precursor to DVD's) where any sort of film is available on demand. One such film causes so much pleasure for the viewer it will literally kill them. Today millions of people are addicted to the internet and its endless opportunities for pleasure.  What does it all mean? Where do we go from here?  Wallace was obsessed with boredom in a world where so many luxuries are available while the need for anti-depressants keeps rising at time when so much entertainment is available.  

The geopolitical situation of Wallace's 21st century plays like a comic tragedy.   America has formed a union with Canada and Mexico, most of New York state is a landfill and angry Canadians plot war with the United States.  Vague references are made to massive population shifts, civil unrest, and economic catastrophe.  A renegade group of Quebec terrorists plan on using the film to alter the geopolitical balance.  The American president, Johnny Gentle, is combination of Ronald Reagan, Howard Hughes, and other oddities in the landscape of American celebrity.  

At the forefront of, is the saga of the Incandenza family.  Hal, the tennis prodigy, is the youngest son of James Incandenza, an avant guard filmmaker  (the footnotes contain a ten page filmography).  Hal has two older brothers as well: Orin and Mario.  Orin is a punter in the NFL who has an obsession with insects and single moms.  Mario is kindly, eternally optimistic, and Hal's conscience.  Their mysterious mother is headmaster the tennis academy.  All are in various stages of grief after the patriarch James took his own life; they are also in need of something they cannot quite define.  Themes of longing are juxtaposed with wrenching passages on the dread of loneliness:

Even when alone, able to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can't even bring himself for hours to think how he'll get through the day.  These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's uncertainty that the day will not have to be traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer (p.46). 

Struggles to make connections haunt all the characters as they ricochet like atoms off each other.  In Wallace's dialogue the characters tend to talk not at, but, past each other. 

The novel is made accessible with all the its pop culture references. The 1980s TV shows Cheers and Hill Street Blues are reassessed among other things.  One character devotes his entire life to watching reruns of MASH.  Relationships with media, TV shows specifically, can, for many, be more meaningful than real world relationships.  That's a conflict any American living in the 21st century must face whether they are aware or not.  All are in danger of being trapped in Plato's cave, only now it's in the form of screens representing reality.  But back to my first point, some predict the end of literature as an art form in the digital age.  However,  If good books are written - people will read them. 

What did I get from reading Infinite Jest?  For starters, I know it's made me a better reader.  It took me about 200 pages to get comfortable with Wallace's writing style.  After a while I felt like I was absorbing the prose instead of reading it.  The effect is cinematic because the text overwhelms

with so many images, almost like a collage at times, that it felt akin to watching a fast paced action film on another level entirely   Paragraphs come in large clumps going on for multiple pages.  My favorite section is about a role playing game called Eschaton;  a game simulating nuclear war on a tennis court. The book also triggered an interest in math (my least favorite subject) and the idea of it being a secret language and a skeleton key into philosophical thought.  Mathematics is the antithesis of the fragmented mindset perpetuated by a mass media driven age.  And the book demands rereading after rereading because despite all its intricate wording, fractured plotting, and shifting perspective Infinite Jest is an immensely entertaining and consistently thought provoking read.  Wallace delivers a rhetorical beating to the reader, not as a disavowal, but a plea to wake up and try to see hope within the white noise of the 21st century.  

Midcult and the 21st century

 Post-war USA saw the predominance of mass culture with the rise of television, rock and roll, bestselling books, self-conscious consumerism, pop heroes, pop art, and pop stars.  Mass culture, designed as a one size fits all entertainment to reach the widest possible audience.  Elite culture went into retreat.  I read Dwight MacDonald's seminal essay, "Masscult and Midcult." The essay, which appeared in 1960 in the New Yorker, lashed out at middlebrow art. While low art always existed throughout Western history in the form of folk art; the new midcults took high art and transmogrified it in a way to reach the masses.  Basically, MacDonald argued midcult cheated its audience.  For example instead of reading Romeo and Juliet, one could watch a massively popular Broadway show like West Side Story.  For MacDonald, such artistic endeavors cheapened literature because it had the pretension to masquerade as high culture.  Yes, I suppose it's fair to call to MacDonald a snobbish elitist, but his ideas are are an intriguing mix of stodginess and prophecy.

Building upon the work of the Frankfurt School's Marxist critque of the show business industry, MacDonald used Ernest Hemingway's career as a case study.  In his early writings, Hemingway mastered the short story while living as an ex-patriot in Paris under the strong influence of modernists Gertrude Stein and James Joyce.  MacDonald cited "The Defeated" as a masterful examination of mortality with the story's painstaking attention to character development through detailed descriptions of mood.  In 1953, Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea and later the Nobel Prize.  MacDonald crticized the novel as a sellout to the middlebrows with its "pseudo-biblical" language and overtly broad characterizations.  The nuance of Hemingway's early work gave way to a need to write something the "masses" would read and consider literature.  Thornton Wilder's Our Town is another target.  Wilder, who's play is about the passing of time in small town America with all its folksy wisdom.  Once again, instead taking on issues of mortality and the real problem of economic equality, Our Town, side steps the issues in favor of bland sentimentality.

High and Low Culture Merge

Ideas raised in "Midcult" seem partly from another era, but strangely prophetic.  By the late 1960s, the whole "middlebrow" system broke down.  Intellectuals started taking rock music seriously. The London Times declared the release of Sgt. Pepper Lonely Heart's Club Band  a decisive moment in Western Civilization. College kids couldn't get enough of Marvel Comics brand of complex superheroes the Fantastic Four and Spiderman (one fan was Italian filmmaker Fellini once visited Marvel headquarters).  Pop culture began to envelop high culture.  MacDonald insisted a democracy must insist on the highest standards of art and never settle for quick, easy solutions.  By essay's end he envisions a revolt of the artists who aspire to high art will find their esprit de corps and set themselves off from society.

 Mad Men, which many consider the finest fiction writing anywhere these days, shows the possibilities of good TV.  Long running dramas like The Sopranos unfolded like a novel with complex character developments, subplots, and ambitious themes.  Mad Men is set in the 1960s; a time when mass media exploded on television.  In a brilliant fifth season episode, ad man Don Draper and colleague attend a Rolling Stones concert and witness the powerful combination of rock and roll and youth culture; a young fan tells Draper, "you guys are jealous because you never had any fun."  Both are enthralled with the energy or the Stones, but also see them as a marketing tool.  The irony, however, is Madison Avenue now uses anything considered hip and revolutionary as a marketing tool.  Outbursts of personal expression fall under the spell of mass media.  One time revolutionary bands of the past now sell their songs to monolithic corporations. A recurring theme in Mad Men is the struggle for individual identity in an increasingly homogenized world. I would speculate that Macdonald would be a fan of Mad Men because of its realistic engagement with 20th century America.

MacDonald predicted the fragmentation of culture in his essay. As audience tastes become more and more diverse he hoped the middlebrow impulse would go away, and he predicted, "perhaps one would rather pay for bread than get stones for nothing."  But today, with so much entertainment out there; consumers know some of is good for them and some serves as time filler.  Currently, I'm in the process of reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The addictive nature of mass media is central to the novel.  In the bleak 21st century of of Infinite Jest, the West is controlled by corporations (corporate sponsorship replaces the Gregorian calendar), people thirst for non-stop entertainment available at a moment's notice.  The catchphrase, "getting the entertainment"  takes on many meanings in the Jest.  Personal relationships are dissonant.  Is isolation the price we pay? Champions of middlebrow maintain art aimed at the masses can have a transcending (or cosmic) effect.  MacDonald scoffed at the notion; he imagines great art usually comes from alienation and isolation.  Are such distinctions still necessary?  Does the question still matter?  


The passing of Roger Ebert is significant here as well.  Ebert wrote about every type of movie. Campy classics or obscure b-movies had a place beside the films of Antonioni or Bergman.  Ebert's Midwestern background had a strain of anti-elitism combined with an open mindedness towards art films made to challenge or even provoke its audience.  MacDonald himself wrote film criticism in a recognition of film's ability to weave between levels of expression.  Nevertheless, over 50 years later the idea of Midcult still has an edge and a point of view to ponder.