Pulp and the American Century

Historians all agree that the Twentieth Century was dominated by American Culture. What dominated America, taking it over lock, stock and two smoking barrels, was pulp culture. In 1900, the major funding for arts were going to museums for painting and sculpture, or concert halls and opera houses. By 2000, all of those functions were taken over by the state, federal and local funding for 'philanthropic' attempts to support a collapsing culture. How had this happened?

The very term 'pulp' is based on cheap paper, no neutral density, no permanence, capable of being bound into cheap publications. It was the content of these publications, starting with 'Argosy' magazine in 1896, that was important. 'Argosy' and 'All Story' magazine in the beginning were omnibuses, trying to capture all audiences by having something for everyone. The covers were plain and there was an attempt at being all things to all people. As the magazines began using more color and more frank and lurid imagery, the boom in pulp began in earnest.

The cover art of pulp magazines is a genre unto itself; you that can tell much about the society from which it came. While science fiction imagery now seems the most quaint, SF didn't emerge as a force for decades, until after the Second World War. In the beginning, fiction drew on Victorian and French authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G.. Welles and Jules Verne, feeding an appetite for novel adventure in a growing middle class. But it was Western fiction that really soared, a particularly American subject that became popular around the world.

Soon there were magazines devoted just to Western fiction, but it took a while for other genres to catch up. While authors like Jack London had their work serialized to great success, it was Edgar Rice Burroughs who revolutionized the field. Starting in 1912 with 'Under the Moon of Mars', Burroughs became a one-man literary factory,  his success both instantaneous and saturating. More importantly, he was the first author to use copyright on his creations. Every subsequent writer owes him a debt of gratitude.

Burroughs was a perfect pulp author. There was not a hint of  pretension to literary quality, only a very transparent style that was easy to read and full of imagination. Prolific, he constantly wrote in different genres and sold to various magazines, the only way to succeed by not becoming too dependent on one outlet. He was perhaps the first person to cross media platforms, using his iron grip on hot properties like Tarzan to get into comic strips, movies and merchandising in a way that would be very familiar to modern audiences.

While adventure with a hint of sex sold like gangbusters, the pulps soon learned the lesson that only entertainment industries like music and television would adapt decades later; subdivide the market. Soon, railroad and boxing stories, mystery and romance magazines started to appear. The biggest developments happened in the 1920s with the publication of two new magazines, 'The Black Mask' and 'Weird Tales'. Both would change the cultural landscape in profound ways.

'The Black Mask' was quickly a success, specializing in and largely defining what we know know as detective fiction. Dashiell Hammett was the breakout author, although over its long career it also published Raymond Chandler, Earl Stanley Gardner, Cornell Woolrich, and John D. McDonald, all titans in the genre. Hollywood was quick to pick up on the Americanized version of the crime fighter, in contemporary dress and speaking contemporary lingo. For decades after, even to today, all media was inundated with variations of the gumshoe, from 'Peter Gunn' to 'The Rockford Files' right through to today's 'Instinct'.

'Weird Tales' was an entirely different story, spending its entire existence on the brink of financial ruin, paying its most famous authors late or only partially, if at all. Despite this, the magazine provided a vital outlet to a tremendous variety of writers whose work would become influential, although in almost every case decades later. Starting with H. P. Lovecraft, whose character Cthulhu actually managed to get the greatest amount of write in votes during the last presidential election, through Robert E, Howard, Robert Block, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, Theodore Sturgeon, and Richard Matheson, to name but a few, tons of important American authors first were published there. All these authors would have a profound influence of popular culture in the future.

The career of Robert Bloch, perhaps the quintessential 'Weird Tales' writer, demonstrated how the effect of the magazine trickled down over decades. Bloch started in his teens as a letter writer to the publication, proclaiming the genius of H. P. Lovecraft while expressing open hatred of Robert E. Howard's barbarian fiction. Soon, he was contributing his own short stories, reminiscent of Lovecraft but using more modern settings and language. Professionally, however, he was more like Howard, proficient at hitting many major markets at the same time, quickly finding his own voice.

Moving in political speech writing got Bloch a foot into radio work, and while still providing many short stories and novels, he also became involved television screenplays. Alfred Hitchcock used his work constantly in the 1950s, both in his monthly mystery magazine and in his television show. Adapting Bloch's novel 'Psycho' was both a major turning point in modern cinema and in Bloch's life. He was one of the few 'Weird Tales' writers to benefit from his work in his lifetime, but his great powers as a storyteller and decades of disciplined hard work also helped. Here, Bloch is even treated as an equal to producer William Castle and screen legend Joan Crawford:

Robert Bloch was the first writer, as far as I can tell, to focus in on the fascination that the modern public has with serial killers. He moved from supernatural and imaginary horrors to those found in the real world. As our society, through Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dalmer, and so many others moved into a more terrifying space, Bloch was there waiting for us. He also wrote about Jack the Ripper and H. H. Holmes, and his influence, particularly in horror films world wide, was seminal.

Sword & Sorcery fiction also emerged from 'Weird Tales', although the route was rather torturous. Robert E. Howard borrowed parts of Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as Talbot Mundy's 'Tros of Samothrace' series, trying this formula on a number of characters before hitting paydirt with Conan the Barbarian. Immediately and immensely popular, Howard committed suicide before any of his work ever made it out of the pulps. His horror fiction was put into hardback first, but Conan roared back into life when Lancer Books started publishing them with Frank Frazetta covers.

While Conan was a perfect anti-hero for the modern era, it was Fritz Leiber, who took elements of Howard's approach and crossed it with his Shakespeare background as an actor in his father's touring company, to created the template. 'Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser', created by Leiber, written from the 1930s through the 1980s, was the basis of Dungeons and Dragons. Without the widespread popularity of that game, modern media phenomenon such as 'Game of Thrones' would be unimaginable.

The Great Depression stopped the proliferation of magazines, but the best ones survived. During World War II, the US military spread the use of paperback books among the armed forces, and soon after the war, paperbacks, along with television and comic books, eroded the pulp magazines' readership base. I'm not even going to go into the relationship between pulp subject matter and comic books, since it seems so self-evident. All but the mystery and science fiction publications dried up, but the better writers found new homes, often writing for the small screen or any of the new 'men's' magazines that sprung up in the new era.

Pulp culture didn't end, it simply proliferated to other media. Most immediately, it could be seen in the paperback and magazine boom of the 1950s and 1960s. It also creeped into television through 'Thriller', 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents', 'Twilight Zone' and 'Outer Limits' and all the private detective shows, not to mention westerns. Charles Beaumont wrote one of the earliest appreciations of pulp culture for Playboy in 1962, and a decade later Hollywood made the first movie with 'Pulp' in the title, starring Michael Caine. People instinctively knew what the word meant without a definition ever having been made.

It was 'Star Wars', leftover Buck Rogers with a touch of samurai, and 'Indiana Jones',a mash up of all pulp with a dash of horror, that signified the wholesale adoption of pulp values by the media establishment. Interestingly, actual pulp characters haven't done well in the new cultural landscape, often being too politically incorrect to survive into the new millennium with the same impact and popularity. Tarzan, John Carter of Mars and the Lone Ranger have all failed at the box office in the last few years.

We are truly living in a pulp cultural landscape. What had been considered high art (classical forms such as painting, opera and poetry) are now funded by governments and special groups to prevent them from disappearing. The huge money is in the more common entertainment, all with roots at least once removed from pulp. It has become a worldwide avalanche, spreading to every culture around the globe. True cultural imperialism did not occur through use of force, but by the forces of entertainment. That is true subversion on the grandest scale imaginable.

Away With Words

The difference between a musician and a songwriter are lyrics. i consider myself a musician, but when discovering home recording, it became evident that there was a hierarchy of sound that had to be dealt with. If examined, certain frequencies and types of sound stick out from the mix more, drawing the ear towards them, no matter how they are buried or how badly they are played. This will make a difference in what you create and the choice of instrumentation.

At the bottom of the list would be bass tones and most drums. They can of course be lead instruments, but in Western music at least you will have a hard time keeping a listener's attention. The world's greatest bass players and drummers do not do solo albums of just their instrument in isolation. Instead, those types of tones are foundational to the overall song.

Think of Charles Mingus, who created great jazz structures. His bass playing was not the central feature on most of the material he wrote. The same with Paul McCartney or Jack Bruce in rock, Willie Dixon in the Blues; the bass was the foundation on which the song was built, not the end-all. The situation is even worse for drummers. While there are a few examples of drum-forward albums, they are few and far between, never bothering the charts.

In this hierarchy of sound, above the foundational instruments are most of the sounds that can be successfully made on a relatively cheap synthesizer, such as a Casio. Orchestra strings, both separate and grouped together, as well as horn sections belong here. Organ sounds can be grouped here, as well as piano, but they can elevate above it. It also depends on the volume of the backing; the acoustic guitar usually falls into this category, although not the electric.

Take for instance the Who song 'Magic Bus'. Released in 1968, this is one of the first hard rock songs to emphasize an acoustic guitar. When Pete Townshend is strumming the acoustic, to be heard in the mix he needs the bass to be reduced to a single note throb and the drummer to play softer percussion, such as wood blocks. As soon as Keith Moon comes in with a full kit, the guitar switches to electric to compete in the sound field.

Lead instrumentation comes above this level. Single horns such as saxophones and trumpets have the sonic punch to rise above a rhythm section, as does the electric guitar. During the 1960s, there was a revolution in sound amplification, and this shifted the hierarchy of sound. In the early days of rock 'n roll, the saxophone was likely to be the lead instrument. Suddenly, with amplified bass guitars instead of stand-ups and the use of bigger kits and more ride cymbals, electric guitar was about the only thing that could be heard above the background noise.

Keyboard players were affected by this. The piano, which was a dominating instrument in an acoustic jazz combo, almost became lost in the din. The organ was slightly better; it wasn't until Keith Emerson and Jon Lord figured out how to amplify and add the type of distortion used on guitars that they could become equal or even dominant players. Synthesizers, first with the Moog and later a plethora of brands, also could rise above the background.

Not much need be said about the electric guitar; once amplification was added in a scientifically engineered way by Les Paul in the late 1940s, it only took ten to fifteen years for the new instrument to become the dominant sound. The British Invasion bands, especially the Yardbirds and the Who, started adding more powerful amps to their sound re-enforcement, and things quickly spiraled out of control. By late 1966, you had the twin behemoths of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience playing at unheard of volumes (literally - you were destined to go deaf).

Yet for all this jockeying for first place amongst the sonic landscape, none of these could compete with the once and future King and Queen, the human voice. No matter how faint, how out of tune, or how minimal to the overall impact of a piece of music, the human voice dominates. It is probably instinctual, burned into our DNA, from babies crying and mothers singing lullabies to war chants. Like they say, it ain't over until the fat lady sings.

Musically, I would be quite happy to stay in the realm of instrumentals, but after a couple of years recording I noticed the hierarchy of sound. The temptation to play with it was too great to resist, even though that meant that I had to sing. And I sincerely do not want to be a singer, because, unless all you do is cover songs, you have to have words to sing, except if you want to just make sound with your mouth. Words have meaning, and that is where things get messy.

The first song that I wrote that had words were made up on the spot, and I had such dim prospects of success that I recorded my voice on the same microphone at the same time as the acoustic rhythm guitar. It still came out fine in the mix, even though it was one step above total gibberish. I was both stuck and hooked, starting to cover songs that I thought my vocal range could handle. I also started writing lyrics, sometimes with less than great success.

The song above is a very early attempt at stringing words together, except that I am playing with having no obvious meaning. My problem was that there were no important messages burning inside of me that needed to be expressed with words. Musically the song is strong, but, as was often the case in the early days (even on some cover songs), I run out of steam as a vocalist. Singing is as much about approaching the material with the right attitude as it is about hitting the right notes.

Of all the songs that I have bothered to create music videos for, that may be my least favorite, or at least in the bottom three. It was more an experiment with throwing random words on the screen as well as singing almost nonsensical words. As I said, the music was good, even my early attempt at funk drumming, so there are some redeeming elements. But lyric writing was a slippery slope, and I proceeded cautiously.

Not all of my early attempts were as dismal as 'Lather Rinse Repeat.' An even earlier song, 'Apres le Deluge', was better at having no direct story line yet managing to convey an atmosphere of impending apocalyptic doom. Musically, it was heavy psych metal, a genre that I am very comfortable in. Vocally, I was able to sell it this time, despite my lack of experience. Win some, lose some.

The music video was also interesting, trying to cram the history of the world into one five and a half segment. There is no direct message but the intent comes through, and the music matches it, including great use of strings in the background. That is the original mix from 2008, not the remix from 2016. I even got that right.

The last video for this blog was done just this week, for a song that I wrote in 2016 and recorded last year. I try my best to stay away from politics, but that has become virtually impossible in today's world. The song was a way to release emotion during a very turbulent time. I had real trouble singing it; every time, I told myself to be calm, and every time I would wind up screaming at the top of my lungs after a verse or two.

I knew the song would make a powerful video if I could find the right images. Trolling through the Prelinger Archive, after much searching I found some old civil defense material. Mixing up the visuals from three separate films, I feel like I got the mood of the times about right on this one. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, but some poor chump actually has to provide what a the time of writing feels like a literal thousand words, even if the count is, in reality, much less.

For once, there is a very definite meaning, and if not an actual story, something that is both literal and lateral. By now, after a decade's practice, I can write lyrics without feeling a fool. There are even love songs starting to appear slowly, a genre I never thought myself capable of  creating. The 2017 project had around a dozen songs with lyrics, even if not all were used. But meaning will always remain a problem, a situation to be avoided more often than not. The message, like beauty, should be in the eye of the beholder.

Real Pretty

I'd like to start focusing on groups who never quite made it to the top but still had an impact on music, particularly English groups who somehow seemed to miss the gold rush that was the British Invasion. The first one I'll focus on are The Pretty Things, who have been together since 1963 and just officially retired this year. Formed in the shadow of the Rolling Stones, they had early hits, a crazy drummer, created one of the best psychedelic albums ever, followed that up with Rolling Stone Magazine Album of the Year in 1970, were signed to Led Zeppelin's label, and later regained ownership of all their masters. Yet 99% of American know nothing about them.

Dick Taylor, original lead guitarist and long-time member, formed a band with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1961. When new kid Brian Jones tried to force Dick over to bass, he left, grabbing Phil May from the year behind Mick Jagger at the same secondary school and forming his own band. Phil and Dick have mostly been the mainstays of the band as it moved through the decades. They were, from the very beginning, a rougher and nastier version of the Stones.

When drummer Viv Prince finally joined the band in 1964, they were off and running, scoring two early hits with 'Rosalyn' and 'Don't Bring Me Down'. But things dried up and no tour of America materialized. An even bigger problem was Viv Prince, who set the template for insane drummers, both in performance and in personality, that Keith Moon later made famous. Viv's behavior got so out of hand in New Zealand that he got the band expelled from the country.

The band sounded sloppy and loose with Viv behind the drums, at their best incredibly exciting, at their worse like five guys in search of an arrangement. The Pretty Things have always remained an very popular band in France, Germany and Holland, and this has kept them employed to this day. But the first of many personnel changes came when Viv was ousted from the group. He had picked a fight with the heavyweight boxing champion of Europe and things did not go well for him.

Skip Alan proved to be an excellent replacement, and the band soldiered on, creating some great singles like 'Midnight to Six Man' and 'Buzz the Jerk' that unfortunately didn't sell. Here's a sample of their early sound on the controversial 'LSD', possibly the first drug song released by a rock group.

Their label forced them to record a terrible album, 'Emotions', that lacked any of the elements that made them exciting, instead sounding like a bad imitation of the Beach Boys. It was loaded with orchestral overdubs. Avoid at all costs. Then they dropped them when it didn't sell.

More personnel turnovers were for the better, as they picked up a new bass player, Wally Waller, who was also an excellent singer and songwriter, as well as keyboard player Jon Povey. Then they dived straight into psychedelia head first when signed to EMI, recording in Abbey Road studios next to the Beatles and Pink Floyd, sharing Norman Smith with the Floyd as their producer. After two great singles they produced the classic album 'SF Sorrow', a rock opera released a year before the Who's 'Tommy'. Not that it helped them, as despite the incredible quality of the album, it failed to sell. Maybe it was the horrible miming

The next clip gives a better idea of how good the album really was. This is the point where psychedelic music turns slowly progressive, and the album ranks with the best ever done. "SF Sorrow' should have been a breakthrough, but it became instead the start of slowly diminishing returns.

This is where the story gets really weird. The Pretty Things, desperate for money, recorded a couple of albums for the DeWolfe music for use in films (if you paid the stiff licensing fee) as well as showing up in a couple of horrible low budget films. The music was still great, but it wasn't getting released under their own name. They even did a vanity album for a French friend called Phillippe DeBarge. Again, the quality of this stuff was way better than it should have been. Most of it was released decades later under the 'Electric Banana' moniker.

They were signed to Motown Records for their white group subsidiary (I can''t make stuff up this weird, it's true) called Rare Earth. Motown never even tried to sell them in America, even though their next album was selected as Album of the Year by Rolling Stone magazine in 1970, when things like that really mattered. Dick Taylor left to get into production, doing the first ever Hawkwind album. Wally Waller left about a year later. They were still a great live band, though.

The 1970s saw the band coasting a bit, seeming to go from record company advance to record company advance, which was common practice in those flush days. They eventually signed to Swan Song at Jimmy Page's request and released two albums. They also started touring America, but it was too late. By 1976, the band split up.

The surprise was that they got together again and released a new album in 1980, a punk rock blast that reunited Dick Taylor and Wally Waller with the group. Everybody had a day job now except Phil May, who had married into the English aristocracy. While the album was pretty good, it didn't stop the band from dissolving once again. But Phil and Dick formed a bond and continued to work together on a number of projects over the years.

They managed a German version of the band and released an album in 1987, but the best thing that happened was finally getting reasonable management in 1988 in the name of the very determined Mark St. John, who stuck with them and guided them for the next thirty years. It took a while and it needed some help from Peter Grant, the dreaded heavyweight manager of Led Zeppelin, but the band went to court and sued everybody, getting all the rights to their old music, if not any actual money.

There was a reunion of the 'SF Sorrow' version of the band and a new single and album, as well as a live stream performance of the rock opera with David Gilmour guesting on guitar in 1997. For the last twenty years, the Pretty Things did manage to achieve some degree of success in Europe and even touring the US a couple of times. Phil May, Dick Taylor, Skip Alan, Wally Waller and Jon Povey kept it together until old age and illness starting picking off members one at a time, requiring retirement and replacement.

Phil and Dick kept it together, but finally in April of this year declared an official retirement. The music business wasn't there any more; live venues didn't exist any more and music sales were unfeasibly low. It's the end of an era when a band that could survive all the insanity of the 1960s and 1970s could not make a living in our Brave New World. I prefer to remember the good old days, and sign off this post with a clip from the German television show Beat Club, the Pretty Things doing 'Sickle Clowns' in 1971.

Devil at My Heels

Here we go - another white guy making a confession about the Blues. It is sincere, yet another suburban spud telling you how the Blues saved his life. Well, maybe not that extreme; I wasn't on the edge ready to jump off when I first heard Blind Lemon Pie. But the Blues definitely changed my outlook on life. And I am here to tell you about it - sorry.

I didn't grow up with the Blues; my first experience might have been something as both mundane and sublime as 'Porgy & Bess', then 'House of the Rising Sun' by the Animals. It was groups like the Rolling Stones and individuals like Eric Clapton who introduced me to the Blues, white guys teaching a white guy. But it wasn't that simple. There was also this jazz thing, creeping along the fringes, where you could hear an obvious overlap between the styles. Blues doesn't have to be served straight up; it can be a spice added to some other genre and have just as much of an effect.

Some people think that the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and all the other white people who appropriated the Blues harmed the genre. I think that they saved it, pure and simple. The African-American community had largely moved on to Soul and R & B, and it was the younger generation of kids outside the entire Black experience who, for whatever reason, embraced it and made it their own. And the good ones did two things; first, they always acknowledged where the songs came from (I'm looking at you, Led Zeppelin, the group most notorious from ripping off others, black or white, of musical ideas), and they realized the the Blues is really about singing the song, not playing the guitar.

Clapton learned this lesson in a particularly painful way. As early as 1966 the audiences were declaring him 'God', yet no matter how esteemed a guitarist that he was, he always seemed hollow. During the 70's and 80's he learned to sing like a Bluesman, and it showed in his music. He developed a set of lungs and could really deliver beyond the reedy squeak that he managed in 'Crossroads' decades earlier in Cream. His music, IMHO, on albums like 'From the Cradle' was much more convincing and better for it.

So perversely, I am going to feature three Blues instrumentals in this blog posting. There is a simple reason for that; I am reluctant to create or post any music videos of songs written by other people. I am sensitive to copy-write infringement, although I have posted one Blues cover earlier, 'Mother Earth'. It took me a while to write lyrics to Blues songs. Instead, I did strange instrumentals pushing the definition of the Blues. Those are featured here.

When I finished my first solo recording project back in 2006, the thing that struck me the most was how jazzy the whole thing sounded. Not necessarily jazz, but in the genre blending and sampling that I did, largely improvisational and loose, traits that I associate with the jazz idiom.  When I took over the drum duties as well, making my music completely self-sufficient, I immediately started doing more Blues-based material, as much to steady my beat and for the discipline. Trust me, the Blues are definitely a discipline, more so the looser you get. It is the dichotomy that makes it art.

I almost did a Blues album in 2009, 'Sloppy Seconds', a strange hybrid album carrying over some earlier songs with nine new pieces that were mostly up-tempo. In 2011, by which time I was singing a great deal more, the first of five Blues albums came out, 'Blues Askew'. My vocals were another reason to head to that genre, as it was a good place to learn how to have the right attitude when singing. I am a reluctant vocalist, and I will write about that later, but the human voice is and always will be the greatest instrument, simply because of the emotional response it triggers at a deeply psychological level, similar to hearing a baby cry.

Blues albums are different in another way, as they are likely to be full of cover songs. There are thousands of great songs to choose from, and I have made more than one playlist of potential candidates. Originals don't show up as often, although two of my songs, both with lyrics, have been featured on this blog; 'MIA in Miami' and 'Kelly Devine'. While both could be considered rock, they show how my Blues album constantly stretch the boundaries of that genre.

"Backdoor' was from that first blues album, and it is an unusual sleazy instrumental with lots of sliding chords and choppy riffs. Obviously, this is the jazzy side of things, but keep in mind how Miles Davis' best selling album was 'Kind of Blue', which mined similar territory. I had just purchased a semi-acoustic f-hole Godin guitar with a beautiful black satin finish. It had a funky plunky sound, and this piece came out of fooling around with it. The organ works as a support instrument, and unusually I am playing acoustic drums here. Using brushes even, not my normal style but for whatever reason I am more comfortable as a jazz drummer - more instinctual - than as a rock drummer banging away a 4/4 beat.

For whatever reason, I found myself gravitating towards f-hole style guitars in the last decade. I only buy guitars that I want to use, not being a collector, and I always wanted something that could get a decent acoustic sound yet had a pickup, while also being able to be plugged in and get a nasty primitive overdrive sound. That instrument was perfect, and the song was built around it, as have a handful of other pieces since. I will also tune the guitar to open 'E" and use it for slide, since the sound goes well with that style.

The next example of a Blues instrumental is very different. This was a hard number done in 7/4 time, hence the title 'Raging Sevens'. It was an exercise for my drumming and bass playing as much as the wailing guitar solo that I build to various climaxes. By now my drumming was getting flexible enough to not sound stilted even in a challenging time signature, so there is a decent groove going on here. It is obviously my Stratocaster that I am ripping away on, and much fun is had playing with the effects pedal board.

While most of the videos that accompany these songs are quite secondary to the actual music, this particular one is different, having an interesting back story. We were on a vacation on the Riviera Maya as the guests of another couple. The first morning, while everyone else slept late from the travel, I got up first and went outside to look around. There was a triathlon happening on the grounds, which were very nice and included three rivers coming out of the ground and meeting at a spot in the Caribbean.

 I tried rousing the others but they could not be bothered. So I grabbed my little video camera and ran out, following the crowds and contestants, getting some good footage. In particular, there was a stone jetty, and the athletes were swimming along side to get up the river and begin the next stage of the race. This formed the basis for the video that accompanied the song, which was a good thing, since a hard drive melt down a couple of years later made that footage go away. I also created another couple of videos from that vacation and named a song in honor of the beautiful resort that we stayed at, 'Tres Rios', but not being a Blues, I'll leave that for another day.

The last video that I will feature is from my latest Blues album, 'Down in the Bottom' from 2017. After three straight years with an album in that genre, I stopped in 2013, waiting four years to go back. It was simply getting too easy, and I always want to think of fresh ways to approach the genre. Surprisingly, the year that I did sixty songs, while there was a fair amount of rock, only one song could be considered a Blues, and that was rather Avant Garde jazz as well. Maybe I should do a video of that; it would be weird.

'Down in the Bottom' from 2017 was mostly cover songs done in a British Blues Invasion style (a year before Joe Bonamassa's new album, mind you). There were a couple of originals, one of which, 'MIA in Miami', I have talked about and posted on this blog previously. There was one instrumental, just to shake things up, and it was a particularly good one, called 'Devil at My Heels.' Like much of the album, it was uptempo, almost frantic, and a bit non-stop. By coincidence it was also done of the Godin, which my wife named 'Blackie'.

The concept was simple; how about doing a Blues in dropped 'D' tuning. Guitarists will know that just slightly changing the tuning of one string can significantly alter the way to approach chords, and I wanted something that was going to hit the low strings hard. Another goal was to give enough space for both the drums and bass to get a little attention, and that worked. I borrowed some patterns from slide and translated into the tuning, added some riffs, and a monster song emerged, one of my best surprises of the 2017 project.

The video uses a couple of old train promos from the Prelinger Archives because, well, trains just seem to go with both the Blues as well as the constant feeling of motion in this song. I just piled up the visuals until I got a nice sense of overload. The music on this one is powerful enough, and unique enough, to carry the piece to the finish. That's why I love the Blues; it is a seemingly simple form that can be manipulated to express the individual's personality. That one has a big hunk of me in it.

Vortex in the Cortex

'Zardoz' was a 1974 science fiction movie that spectacularly divides audiences. About 3/4th s of  viewers feel it is complete garbage while the remainder see it as a visionary masterpiece. I fall into the later category. I saw it as a teenager, gobbling up as much fantasy and science fiction as I could, and found the movie thought provoking. Over forty years later, my opinion hasn't changed, but my thoughts on the movie have.

Looking on-line, one can't help but be struck by the number of people who rank 'Zardoz' among the worse films ever made, or at the very least the most startling inane pieces of celluloid ever put together. It was made in that brief period between '2001 A Space Odyssey' and 'Star Wars', when many similarly provocative films were made. Typically, they were big on ideas but a little short on budget. The 21st century opinion of 'Zardoz' as a cinematic travesty says more about the dumbing down of our modern world than it does about the actual quality of the film.

Director John Boorman had managed a couple of big hits as well as a few flops, but hadn't done anything in a similar genre. He had hoped to launch a version of 'Lord of the Rings' but couldn't find financing, so instead he turned to a science fiction concept of his own devising. Instead of going galactic, like 'Silent Running', he went speculative. But it wasn't a dystopian future, like 'Soylant Green' and so many others, but a world where, for at least some, it seemed a paradise.

The movie starts out on a strange note and just gets stranger; a floating head with a theatrically fake beard hovers int he air, spouting plot points that will make no sense for the first half of the movie. Then we get to the famous 'The gun is good - the penis is bad' scene, with a giant floating head barfing out automatic weapons to some rough looking guys. Sean Connery shows up in his notorious red diaper, and fires a gun right at the audience. Right away the film announces that it is going to assault the audience and its expectations.

So far we have seen a nightmare future, and the guy with the fake beard soon shows up with Connery inside the floating head. Connery shots him and he slowly floats away. By now, it should be apparent that reality is not a major concern of this story. Connery floats down to a beautiful community full of rather unisex people,running around, contacting fellow marauders before being captured by some vague mind power.

If you thought things were challenging before, with the introduction of the hippie community things do get a little bonkers. Lots of backstory is fed into our cortex in strange ways, often by the two female protagonists using mysterious 'science'. We find out about the exterminators, eternals and brutals in images that are a mix between 'No Blade of Grass' and 'A Clockwork Orange'. Weird rituals that do seem a little laughable happen and we tour the Utopian community, only to find both old people and some residents devoid of emotion.

Sean seems to be upsetting the balance in a major way, and it is obvious that he has a plan to try and get his fellow outsiders access for a little rape, pillage, and plunder. Meanwhile, we are treated to increasingly bizarre visuals, all done in camera, some of which work and some of which don't. And should I mention the rampart nudity?

By an hour into the movie, we are in unique territory. Amongst the most famous scenes are the interrogation of Zed, the Sean Connery character. Charlotte Rampling, looking unbelievably cold and beautiful here, tries to force an erection but Zed is able to resist, the first hint that perhaps he has intelligence and power greater than they think. Done in such a blunt way, it is still shocking.

The plot moves at a very fast gallop, throwing everything as well as a couple of kitchen sinks your way, not waiting for you to catch up. For a first time viewer it can be overwhelming, but it is a movie that is worth repeating to get the subtleties. There are crazy graphics, odd images, an orgy, and it all ends on an apocalyptic note. In other words, it hits all the right places for a science fiction movie of its time.

That many in the modern world see it as baffling only demonstrates how audiences seem to only view movies in a spoon-fed way. You need to make sense of 'Zardoz' yourself; it doesn't bother to do so. There is so much casual weirdness on display in nearly every scene that your defenses can easily get the better of you. But what is there is a sincere attempt to do something profound.

Exactly what is being said remains the greatest mystery. I have spent decades trying to unravel it and have gotten no closer. I found the paperback, straight from John Boorman's notes, and I don't recall any great revelations. Buying the DVD, it had a director's commentary that seem to sidestep the entire issue of meaning. Was there a pattern here?

Perhaps the entire meaning of the movie is misunderstood. Take Sean Connery, forever mocked for wearing what is nearly universally described as a 'red diaper'. In truth, Connery was doing something similar, if a little less extreme, than what John Lennon had done; trying to kill the 60's image of himself and be re-invented for the new decade. His hairy body, on display in nearly every frame of the movie, is the exact opposite of the other hairless and sexless people, either in the commune or the wretched brutals slogging through the mud. Sean shows a complete disregard for his image as a sex symbol, and if there is a point, that was his.

Director Boorman had never done anything fantastic before, and his plot has less to do with the future and more to do with the recent past. The film seems to have more to do with hippie and New Age culture, communes and retreating from society. The highly involved people try and wall them selves off from the troubles outside, creating what is essentially a matriarchy, but dissension and most especially boredom creates their destruction. The hippies were more complicated than the Time-Life images of dancing, Altamont and Charles Manson. They were rejecting a society that had hardened into a killing machine, but they never did find a way to stop it, only hide.

By the end, 'Zardoz' is an apocalyptic movie that wrestles, not entirely successfully, with huge ideas. You could still do that back in 1974, before 'Star Wars' dumbed down science fiction to cheap thrills and quasi-mystic mumbo jumbo. In fact, the message behind 'Zardoz' is no more obscure than '2001' or 'Star Wars', both films with notoriously vague messages. The problem is in the confrontational and direct way in which these issues are handled, in the use of gender and sex, still taboo subjects today. 'Zardoz' was designed to make you feel uneasy, and it succeeds.

Any film should be evaluated at three levels; the text, the context, and the subtext. The text was a mid-budget science fiction movie filmed in Ireland, full of nudity and violence. The context was the aftermath of the counter-culture, the free fall of the 1970s before the Reagan years clamped down on all that nonsense. It is the subtext of 'Zardoz' that makes it so special, an open-ended, up-for-interpretation gender bender with enough trippy visuals to suck in an intelligent viewer.

'Zardoz' is a great film to re-interpret. In today's cultural environment, it is hard not to see the Eternals as the one percent, building a wall around all that they have inherited, with Zardoz as our esteemed Great Orange Oz. Of course, like the movie, I could be taking the entire thing entirely too seriously. Perhaps the best thing that I ever heard related to this movie is that some genius actually went to a 'Burning Man' type event and constructed a Zardoz head in the desert. I doubt that any of the new millennium hippies realized the monster that they had allowed in their midst.