A Sliding Slope

Playing slide guitar was a secondary evolution in my playing. Simply, it was not crucial to becoming a competent player, unlike learning chords, power chords, and scales. Slide crept through the back door, something that I heard admired players do, often with great skill. Only in spare moments would a bottleneck or metal slide be tried. Only after a quarter century of playing did I take up the slide guitar seriously, and then only as a favor.

Duane Allman, Robby Kreiger, Johnny Winter and Rory Gallagher were among the really great slide players who influenced me way back when. Clapton, Beck and Page really didn't do that much slide, and Hendrix barely touched it. It was a Blues thing mostly, although it could show up in strange places, such as the way Jeff Beck used it to coax weird noises out of his guitar. There was also the matter of how you tuned the instrument; when you only have a guitar or two, they tend to stay in standard tuning.

When I lived in Hickory there was a friend who had a CD store (remember them?); he rented the back to an old hippie who sold guitars. I got to know the guy well enough; when he wound up in the hospital for many months with peritonitis. The owner had a party and everyone pitched in, buying his inventory up so there was some money for his family. He was already a charity case and his wife needed to feed the family.

There was a dobro - technically a resonafonic guitar, with the metal pie plate in the body to really make it clang. It was purchased on a whim, it was a knock off, but it sounds good enough, even if the action is a little brutal. But for that type of guitar, and the really heavy metal slide that you need to use (I swear the thing weighs a pound), high action means you don't hit the frets and get a clicking noise. And once I had the damned thing, I tuned it to open 'E' and started taking slide seriously.

It is a completely different way to approach the guitar, but then any alternate tuning is, even the relatively minor modification of 'dropped D'. You need to really swoop your entire wrist up and down the neck vigorously, and the picking can be just as complex as a banjo player, with even some of the claw hammer licks being the same. It has come in handy, and I've used it around 20 or so times in my recordings, sometimes in straight Blues, sometimes in country settings, sometimes in ways that surprise even me.

Since so many of the songs are traditional Blues or even a few gospel tunes, I haven't created music videos for them. To give you an example of my dobro playing, I have made a special video of the song 'Mystery Train', written by Junior Parker, made most famous by Elvis Presley but covered by many artists. This is my second attempt at the song; the first was, pardon the pun, a train wreck because I tried to get too Avant Garde and instead screwed the pooch. This time around, done in 2014, I play complicated picking patterns somewhere between Blues and Country, keeping the song rootsy, to much better effect.

The real wild card came when I saw a Sears Silvertone 1316 lap steel guitar at the NC state fairgrounds flea market and purchased it as a lark around 2003. It's just a plank of Masonite, slightly odd shaped, with some really gnarly old school electronics. I even did a little research and found out that the guy selling it to me was telling the truth. It WAS a 1948 model, sold by Sears but manufactured by Harmony. There are no frets, just painted lines on a totally smooth and flat plank of processed wood.

I had never even played a lap steel, but I knew that David Gilmour and Steve Howe had used them for color and sometimes even more, so I was intrigued and the price was right. I don't use it that often; like the dobro, I sometimes have to consciously dig it out during a project just to find a place to fit it in. It does, however, make a beautiful sound once you get it under control, which took some practice at the beginning. It truly is not the type of instrument that you play in isolation, like a regular guitar; it needs an application, form following function. A lap steel as primitive as that, with old style pickups that howl like banshees, needs a reason to be used. Even the dobro can be played quite easily for accompaniment.

Once I started recording in 2006, the lap steel quickly became a valuable tool. There was a great deal of experimentation, but the Silvertone showed its best qualities when I used it for a specific purpose, like in the next video. I found a drum beat that was rather like Led Zeppelin's 'When the Levee Breaks', so I created something similar. There was a very early version that had a different guitar part, recorded at work, used in a video. I recorded a better sounding one - all one take, even the stuff that sounds backwards but is not. A year later I put a bass on there, but it's pretty low key. This is another video done specifically for this blog.

I kept finding ways to use the Silvertone, but I can't always remember if I used another electric guitar to do slide on some songs, especially before I kept a detailed diary of my recording sessions around 2010. The following song, 'Whack a Mole', from 2008, definitely has the lap steel, since it is the best instrument to do octave leaps. You can also play way above the top fret since there is no metal at all, just painted lines on the neck. When I first played it, the opening sound of the Looney Tunes song came to mind immediately. They were sold more as Hawaiian guitars that country lap steels, although used for the later application much more often. There is now a collector's market for them, mostly out of nostalgia, although it does sound good when properly amplified.

Here's another song from 2009, 'The Crawl', my very early drumming in the mix, some strange harpsichord and a very aggressive bass. Here you can definitely notice the novelty-a-go-go quality of the instrument; all I'm doing is adding a layer of slide noise over an already finished song. Later, in 2016, I remixed both 'Whack a Mole' and 'The Crawl' as part of 'The Big Addendum', and each was treated very differently. In 'Whack a Mole', I did an underscore, removing the slide entirely, not to replace the original but to highlight the very intricate interplay between the drums, bass, and organ, which I had forgotten about and was impressed with. With 'The Crawl', I mixed out the slide except in the break, where I phased the shit out of it, making it sound like a weird synth.

I still play electric slide on regular guitars, and I have tried them all at least once. The Stratocaster has really low action, making slide difficult to play cleanly; you're more than likely to hit the frets and generate unwanted noise. I also tried my Gibson SG, since Derek Truck, one of the most amazing current slide players, uses that model. The Godin semi-acoustic, with a simple and somewhat primitive pickup that can be overdriven easily to get that great slide crunch, has become the guitar of choice. The string action is slightly higher, making it perfect. I play an electric slide song or two on every Blues album that I've done, usually in open tuning, but sometimes I use standard Spanish as well, like Warren Haynes of Gov't Mule.

This last song is a mixture of the Godin, where I can fret with my fingers as well as use a slide, usually a glass one, then switching over to the Silvertone in the free breaks for the dive bombing section. Keeping your notes in tune on the lap steel is tricky, and I often have to go back and fix just a line or two because it's not quite there, but it is a fun instrument to play. This instrumental, 'Kit Shicker', is actually from a rock album. I keep the one section very funky, then explode into radical octave swoops. There is some studio trickery involved, but I really liked the way this one turned out, and I have received good feedback on this particular song.

Even the world of slide guitar, as I interpret it, can accommodate acoustic and electric, as well as a variety of different instruments and an infinite amount of different applications. There is something unique about the sound of an unfretted note that can bend in all kinds of crazy directions. I've used the Silvertone in a jazz version of a Beatles song as the lead instrument, a completely different type of sound, very relaxed and spacey. Sometimes it is added as just a touch of texture. I have tried to get experimental with it, especially in the early days. But most often, it gets used in any of its variations the most in the Blues, and that's all right with me.

Younger Than Yesterday

Larry Young was a jazz organist who worked relentlessly between 1960 and 1978, as a front man but most especially as a sideman. Larry worked for virtually everyone, from Miles Davis to Jimi Hendrix, and he took the Hammond organ into new realms, but he is mostly forgotten today. His story outlines the history of the organ in jazz, somewhat forgotten today. Once the workhorse of the live band, after the fusion wars, the organ was largely forgotten in favor of a drier and more 'traditional' sound by both the musicians and the aging audience.

The organ was useful as a replacement for an orchestra, and with the advent of electricity became smaller and more affordable. Radio used it constantly, and it was still supplying background music for television soap operas at least into the 1970s. Most commonly it could be found in churches, both white and black, and it became a staple of gospel music. From there, it was just a matter of time before it slipped into secular music.

Jazz itself in the post-war period wasn't simply a shift into bop, cool, and post-bop. There was a segregation in the jazz audience between those in bigger cites and smaller cities, and between white and black audiences. It was the Afro-American clubs where rhythm & blues and soul jazz was most popular, a precursor to soul music and later funk. They were the ones who accepted electric instruments like the organ and the amplified guitar, while the white college crowd preferred the straight-ahead sounds of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck, artists who resisted electricity for decades.

I had the supreme pleasure of interviewing Lou Donaldson for a documentary in 2012 and he was by far the most fun interview I ever did in my three decade career as a video producer. Lou knew everybody and had done everything, within reason, but he was a truly humble guy who went out of his way to make me and my tiny crew feel at home both at the club where he sat in for a few songs (so I could get some footage of him playing, and where he insisted on paying our bill) and at his home for many hours the next day. As is typical of these events, his comments after the camera was turned off were even more interesting than when the tape was rolling.

Specifically, Lou talked extensively about the business of being a jazz musician in the 1950s and 1960s. He claimed that he wasn't the best sax player, just the best who wasn't a junkie, a gross underestimation of his talents. He played in 'ghetto clubs', so he and other players at the time developed the soul jazz genre, where he could sneak a little bebop into a dance tune, but it still had to be dance-able. And he welcomed the Hammond, since it could also replace the bass player, making the money split better for each player. Despite his 'no fusion, no confusion' catch phrase, he was fusing the blues and even early funk into his music, as can be seen in the clip below, with great assistance by Dr. Lonnie Smith.

Hammond organists, starting with Jimmy Smith and continuing with Brother Jack McDuff, Richard 'Groove' Holmes, Jimmy McGriff and many others, dominated the soul jazz genre, along with sax players like Lou Donaldson as well as electric guitarists like Kenny Burrell and Grant Green. These guys wanted to sell a lot of records records and play a lot of clubs, and some, like Lou Donaldson, really wanted to make the audiences happy, even singing the blues like Wynonie Harris. This was a groove-oriented jazz, less interested in being esoteric, more concerned with being popular.

One of the many players who circulated through Lou Donaldson's band was Larry Young, straight from playing in R & B outfits in Northern New Jersey. Larry was born in 1940, his father an organist. The organ had been around since the turn of the century and had been used extensively, such as in church services, funeral homes, and accompanying silent movies. Not the most promising instrument for the post-bop world, yet in the hands of someone with a talent like Larry Young, it became something else entirely. He took the organ straight into the rock world and into the hottest fusion music ever created, yet he gets very little credit today.

Larry's first recording date was in 1960, first accompanying Jimmy Forrest, whose 'Night Train' was one of the foundational songs in soul jazz and later covered by James Brown, himself a pretty good Hammond player, as evidenced on the CD 'Soul Pride; the Instruments 1960-1969', where you can literally hear soul jazz morph into funk. He was soon leading his own small groups on a couple of albums in 1960 and 1962 before hooking up with Blue Note Records starting with 'Into Something' in 1964. The earliest stuff was very much in the soul jazz groove, such as 'African Blues.

One of the great abilities of the organ - with the right player - was to 'comp' like no other instrument. 'Comping' is short for accompanying, where a rhythm player could keep the song moving under another soloist, shifting chord patterns or int he case of a bass player doing a walking bass line. Larry became a very in demand session player during the early 1960s, used on many sessions by Grant Green and Kenny Burrell, among many others because of his superior accompanying skills. It also helped that he was based out of the same area as Rudy Van Gelder.

In the history of audio recording, Rudy Van Gelder must hold the record for most sessions as engineer ever, more remarkable as he held a full-time job as an optometrist for the first twelve or so years. From the late 1940s through 2015, he recorded literally tens of thousands of jazz sessions, first in his parent's living room, then after his custom studio was built in 1959, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Rudy is famous for his clean and unobtrusive sound, helped by a stunning array of highly talented musicians who arrived rehearsed and ready to play. In an age when we are used to a band taking three years to release an album, nearly everything done by Van Gelder was recorded in a single day, with amazing results.

It also helped that the volume level of most jazz groups were low, but that doesn't detract from Van Gelder's skill set, which kept increasing over the decades. He was particularly adept at recording the Hammond organ, a notoriously difficult instrument to capture because of the many tones and overtones covering a dizzying spectrum of frequencies. It was easy for visiting musicians to travel over from Manhattan, and Rudy usually had at least one session a day as well as cutting his own lacquers to ensure the sound was transferred right. And Van Gelder worked nearly exclusively with Blue Note, the major soul jazz label.

The Blue Note years were Larry's high point as a leader, with the self-penned standard 'Tyrone' on 'Into Something' (hell, even I covered that song) and the album 'Unity' probably his best know work. Larry was beginning to show a profound influence of John Coltrane in his playing, a common-enough occurrence in the mid-60s, except that he was one of the only organ players in that mode. He also began to be influenced, abet in a subtle way, by the unique stylings of Sun Ra, a man who orbited the jazz world in his own peculiar constellation. Sun Ra had the ability to play what he called 'space chords', and Larry started using them in his comping.

No too many players managed to be influenced by John Coltrane and Sun Ra at the same time, but Larry Young did. At the same time, he started heading into jazz-rock fusion, showing up on Miles Davis' seminal 'Bitch's Brew' double album as well as joining the nastiest of the early fusion bands, the Tony Williams Lifetime. The Lifetime started out as a traditional jazz trio of guitar, organ and drums, but playing at the volume and intensity of Cream or Jimi Hendrix. Jack Bruce, the bass player of Cream, even joined the band in 1970 for a brief period. And somewhere in all this work, Larry found time to record with Jimi Hendrix, a few tracks which were released years after the fact. The following track is a somewhat low-fi but extremely rare live recording of the trio.

Tony William's Lifetime seemed a doom group for the beginning; their first album was recorded carelessly by a jazz engineer (not Rudy Van Gelder) who didn't care for the volume, and it sounds harsh and extra distorted. McLaughlin was using an acoustic guitar with a pickup in the hole, about the worst choice of instrument for music at that roaring intensity. The jazz community rejected it outright, along with a couple of follow ups also featuring Young, but McLaughlin hit financial paydirt with his Mahavishnu Orchestra. Before that, he did record one electric album with Larry on organ as well as Buddy Miles on drums.

Totally committed to fusion, converted to Islam and wearing a sheik's garb on stage, Larry wanted to explore the free jazz / free rock hybrid even more, but the entire music world was retreating to safer pastures. Rock was into more structured progressive and safer boogie, while jazz embraced Lou Donaldson's 'no fusion, no confusion' motto. There was a short lived band called Love Cry Want, utilizing primitive synths on both drums and guitars, that gigged around in 1972, producing what Lester Bangs called 'shronk' that was louder and scarier than anything else I ever heard, but it went nowhere.

When John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana did a joint project, a fusion version of John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme', they used Larry on the organ, both on the album and tour. It would be his last real high profile gig. He tried creating a hybrid jazz/funk outfit called Larry Young's Fuel, but two albums sold horribly. His last appearance on a record was in 1977, a duet album with keyboard player Joe Chambers; Larry's commercial stature was so low that he wasn't even mentions on the cover. He died shortly after suddenly, and the golden age of the jazz organ was officially dead.

Larry was the only guy to play with Miles, Hendrix, McLaughlin, Santana, Kenny Burrell, Grant Green, and a veritable host of other jazz greats. There was a couple of unreleased sessions, including a very good one from 1964 in Paris. While really excellent, with some of the only actual research ever done on his life, it goes back to the safer 'straight-ahead' period, where jazz purists feel comfortable. His later free funk/rock/jazz period is mostly forgotten, but Larry consistently managed to sound like no one else on the planet.

There was an inkling of interest around 2012, when the short-lived group 'Spectrum Road' was formed to celebrate the Tony Williams Lifetime. John Medeski, the only organist who could possibly try and sound like Larry, filled the keyboard, but the inclusion of Jack Bruce, right near the end of his life, skewed the project more towards him and less towards the rest of the group. At least it was something, if too little too late. Admittedly, Larry Young's later material is not for the faint of heart, it is intense and adventurist. You can't help but feel that he was punished for his ever-searching nature instead of treated like the natural treasure that he really was. That's a pity.

Moved By the Times

Another in my series of British rock groups who never made it in America is the Move, again hugely influential yet largely unknown except to a select few. These were tough guys from Birmingham, the same industrial wasteland that would later spawn Black Sabbath, and there will be a connection. And like the Pretty Things and the Small Faces, the comparison that most immediately comes to mind is the Who, though this time through the live act, which included the Move's own version of auto-destruction. Musically, they were their own animal and pointed the way towards progressive rock while having a significant impact on the 1970s and beyond.

The Move were five local Birmingham all stars who got together to form a new band and move to London, trying for the big time. There were three key players; singer Carl Wayne, guitarist and songwriter Roy Wood, and drummer Bev Bevan. They signed to Tony Secunda's management, and Tony immediately went for a big image, dressing them as gangsters from the 1930s and having them destroy television sets, cars, and effigies of the British prime minister during their stage act. Fortunately, Roy Wood started writing songs that could compete with the heavy posing.

The band hit right at the being of psychedelia and Roy milked it for all it was worth, despite never doing drugs. He said that it was a bottle of whiskey that was the inspiration for songs like 'Night of Fear' and 'I Can Hear the Grass Grow'. The sound was full of vocal harmonies and a very heavy bottom, already a popular feature in bands like the Kinks and the Who. But now it was all huge bass and thumbing toms, and Roy created quite complex pop songs, three minute mini-symphonies.

They were a huge hit in Britain right away, due as much to the constant press for various scandals, such as a single with nude pictures of politicians that was taken to court in a libel suit. But the singles of 1967 were uniformly excellent, if not always the best productions. Sometimes the complicated layered sound had a muddy mix, but the material was relentlessly upbeat and so well crafted that the quality shone through. Like the Beatles and other bands of the era, there was a great effort on the part of Roy Wood to make every song sound different and a progression from the one before.

The Move was also a big hit on the Continent; they spent their first two years playing Europe at a dizzying rate. The BBC loved them as well, and the sessions that are available shows that they retained their Birmingham cover band repertoire, playing the Beach Boys Byrds, and other California bands very well. There was even a live extended play single in early 1968, mostly other people's songs, which was a little strange considering the quality of Roy Wood's material. 1968 was the year of their greatest success, with songs such as 'Fire Brigade', 'Blackberry Way', and 'Curly' dominating the British charts.

There was  a problem with the group, which was a case of too many guys trying to be the lead singer. Carl Wayne had to fight to get any singing time, as everyone but the drummer got a chance to vocalize on nearly every song. The revolving singers made the group seem like an old-fashioned show band more than an underground phenomenon, helping them have a very professional presentation but keeping them from seeming hip. Eventually, the extra guitarist and bass player quit over front time, and a more subdued bass player, Rick Price, joined.

1968 saw the band move more towards a more pop sound as well. 'Fire Brigade' is almost a straight ahead rocker, similar to 'Lady Madonna' and ;Jumping Jack Flash', a return to roots music. 'Blackberry Way' is one of the best Beatles-sounding songs ever produced by a contemporary British band. 'Curly' gave Carl Wayne a chance to sound more like Engelbert Humperdinck than a rocker, a problem that would rear its head in 1969.

That year saw the band try a tour of America, something that the Pretty Things and Small Faces both failed to do during the 1960s. It was funded by Jimi Hendrix, of all people, who had toured with the band (with Pink Floyd on the bill as well!) in late 1967. Jimi had even used a couple of the members of the group as backup singers on the 'Axis; Bold as Love' album. It was very underfunded, and the band had to travel by van from the east coast to California with very little time or very many gigs in between. They finished the tour, and there is an excellent recorded from the Fillmore gigs, but it didn't help them crack the market.

They tried their first coherent album in 1969, 'Shazam', a mixture of hard rock ('Hello Susie'), psychedelia, and progressive rock ('Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited', a personal favorite). It's a curious album, with snippets of conversation with people on the street as well as long jamming sections, but I like it. Carl Wayne, wanting to become more of an all-around entertainer than the guy who wielded a real axe while smashing things up on stage, left soon after. He had a long career on the BBC on television and a radio host.

Needing a replacement to augment the three remaining members (Wood, Bevan and Price), they went to Jeff Lynne, who had played in another Birmingham band called the Idle Race. That band had sounded exactly like the Move and scored a couple of minor hits. Jeff was happy to make the move, mostly playing lead guitar and singing harmony in the beginning. He only contributed one song to the next album, 'Looking In', but he and Roy were very compatible and started cooing up some real schemes, such as the Electric Light Orchestra.

While still releasing a steady stream of excellent singles in 1970, the band made a shift from being a live touring band to being a studio entity exclusively. The recordings became even more complex, if that seemed possible, and Roy Wood started playing an astounding number of instruments such as oboe and cello on songs. 'Do Ya' and 'California Man', among others, kept them in the charts, but Wood and Lynne started to see the Move as outdated and wanted to do a fully functional version of a rock band with a string section, taking the late Beatles music even further while touring with it.

The first Electric Light Orchestra is a Move album in everything but name only and was a success, but Roy Wood opted out of any further involvement, a curious phenomenon. In fact, Roy Wood's post-Move career is bizarre by American standards; he went back to 50s rock & roll while where more makeup than Emmitt Kelly. Eventually, Roy became something of a hermit and could only occasionally be coaxed back out in public. His songwriting in the Move was among the best of the entire 1966 to 1972 era and deserves to be heard and remembered.

Jeff Lynne, along with Bev Bevan, took the Electric Light Orchestra to massive worldwide success, even starring in the 1980 movie 'Xanadu' with Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly. Jeff had many chart toppers all over the world and took ELO right into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame. Probably his greatest achievement was producing the last two Beatle songs, 'Free as a Bird' and 'Real Love', besides providing production duties for George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Tom Petty.

Bev Bevan wound up touring with Black Sabbath in 1983, a last minute replacement for Bill Ward, who was having drug issues and didn't want the temptations of the road. This was the Ian Gillian version of the band, and the addition of Bevan set off a firestorm of criticism. Metal heads seemed to have forgotten that the Move had been from the same group of musicians that also spawned Sabbath as well as John Bonham of Led Zeppelin; all specialized in a bass-heavy sound that morphed into heavy metal. From the evidence of the radio broadcasts of that version of Sabbath, Bev had no trouble playing the drum parts.

The Move is somewhat forgotten, overshadowed by the titanic legacy of ELO. Bu that later band, sounding so Beatle-ish, could not have existed had it not been for the Move. And the legacy goes way beyond that; the Move, perhaps more than some of the more quoted groups such as Procul Harum or the Nice, paved the way for progressive rock with their tightly structured singles full of classical references, tempo changes, and multi-layered harmonies. Roy Wood created the template, and Jeff Lynne came along later to perfect the formula, turning it into pop gold. But the Move was there first, and deserve to be remembered as one of the great 1960s British bands.

The one American band that were deeply influenced by the Move were Cheap Trick, who over the years have covered a number of Roy Wood songs and even had him as a guest at concerts. That's nice and well deserved, but Roy Wood created a huge body of work in many different styles during his time in the Move and it was uniformly excellent. He is the bridge between psychedelia and progressive rock, but he never worked in a straight line. And he constantly surrounded himself with an excellent band, with his ideas spawning massive success in the 1970s and 1980s, even if he didn't want to participate.

Programmed For Confusion

The 1973 film 'The Final Programme', made in England just as that country's film industry was at an all-time nadir, is simultaneously provocative, audacious, and unique while also being frustrating, short sighted, and ultimately a disaster for nearly everyone involved. A rare attempt to film a relatively new speculative fiction cutting edge book, there is plenty of style of display, but ultimately it comes up short at a couple of important junctures. Unlike 'Zardoz', a similar and contemporary movie that takes huge artistic chances, in the end 'The Final Programme' is a failure and largely forgotten except by a very small group of cult film fans. What the hell happened?

The movie is based on a novel by Michael Moorcock, a prolific English author and editor, and was one of his earliest works. Moorcock came of age in the 1960s, and his work form that period reflects not only a rock 'n roll sensibility, but goes even further in both hippie culture and psychedelia. His greatest success came in the form of the Elric novels that he wrote, completely counter sword & sorcery to anything that Robert E. Howard ever had in mind. Elric is a sickly albino prince who relies on black magic and drugs to survive, bringing a Byronic element back into fantasy fiction. Moorcock was also the editor of 'New Worlds' magazine, a job he handled very well, creating a counter-culture forum for such writers ad J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss, among many others.

Just as Moorcock did not write standard sword & sorcery but instead turned the conventions of the genre on its head, he did the same with science fiction. Almost single handedly he ushered in the era of speculative fiction in Great Britain, opening up science fiction to more art-oriented, cutting edge writing and subject matter. His 1969 novel 'Behold the Man' ranks with the best and most controversial books published in the 1960s. He wrote essays critical of Tolkien and Heinlein, working frequently with rock groups such as Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult. The second major character that he created was Jerry Cornelius, a sort-of parody of James Bond, and the first Jerry Cornelius book was 'The Final Programme'.

The book first appeared as a series of short stories in 'New Worlds' magazine, then was re-polished into a short novel. It is a hip 1960s take on spy stuff, wildly popular at the time, as well as various science fiction elements thrown into the mix. There are also transparent and deliberate rewrites of plot points from the Elric series, such as the condition of Jerry's sister and relationship with his brother. Moorcock is perhaps the most self-referential writer that I have ever come across. He has written dozens of series and they all refer to each other; all seem to be part of a grand 'Eternal Champion' series. I must confess that I lost interest in all this sometime in the early 1980s, but there is a tremendous fan base out there who has not.

The British film industry was in a woeful state by 1970, heavily dependent on Hollywood for support funding. Part of the problem was the David Lean effect; film makers who wanted to spend years on projects, creating epic movies. When the studio system in America collapsed in the mid 1960s, the English talent either fled to Hollywood to feed like dinosaurs on a shrinking pool of capital in a financial desert, or they went into low budget stuff. Without the breakout success of the British music industry, spearheaded by the Beatles and then followed by innumerable groups, the situation would have been much worse.

Hammer horror did okay for awhile, but by 1970 even that studio was having trouble finding distribution. English censorship laws didn't help, and three British films in 1971 ran into trouble; 'A Clockwork Orange', 'Straw Dogs' , and 'The Devils', coincidentally three of the biggest hits. Even the mighty James Bond franchise, seemingly British to the core, was produced by Canadian Harry Saltzman and American Cubby Broccoli. One actor who they were very interested in filling the role of James Bond in 1973, after Sean Connery left the series was Jon Finch.

Finch, a fan of Moorcock's fiction, must have found the part of square James Bond, with his tuxedo and martini, entirely too boring and instead chose to star in 'The Final Programme' as Jerry Cornelius. He is rather good in the part, looking more like a rock star than a super spy, quite willing to indulge in all the sex and drugs that the script requires. He was an up-and-coming star, having just appeared in the lead for Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski films. Had he chosen instead to be James Bond, blocking Roger Moore, that series might have taken a radically different turn. We will never know.

For a director, Robert Fuest was chosen, hot off the success of two Dr. Phibes movies starring Vincent Price. As Hammer movies were sinking into oblivion, Fuest had managed to find a way to make stylish but low budget horror films with a wonderfully campy and self-mocking tone. The Dr. Phibes movies are as funny as they are scary, and the set designs, emphasizing art deco, often steal the show. The combination of Finch and Fuest should have been a ticket to success.

Moorcock wasn't so sure from the beginning; he wanted his pals from Hawkwind to provide the soundtrack but Fuest used a breezy jazz theme, circus-like, instead. Hawkwind and Moorcock were confined to a non-musical cameo. Still, the plot follows the book in most ways and the tone is cheerfully post-apocalyptic, a cross between 'A Clockwork Orange' and Ken Russell's 'Tommy' from a few years later. Moorcock claims that he had to let the actors know that the movie was a comedy but I doubt that; anyone who had seen his previous two Dr. Phibes films would see that Fuest loved to push the absurd and humorous. Despite a very low budget and a plot that carries the deficiencies of Moorcock's novel (too little action on Jerry's part, unmotivated action), the first eighty minutes of the movie do work pretty well.

There is a ton of style on display; the casual sex and destructive attitude that characterized Britain in the early 1970s - the same attitude that gave rise to punk in 1976, revolting against everything including the commercialized revolt of the rock industry - is perfect. Unfortunately, the plot, which was fine as a series of connected short stories or in a short novel, has trouble getting condensed into a film. Random weird shit happens all the time and the viewer is expected to keep up, when the basic information needed to understand what is happening is not there. Still, I do find the movie an enjoyable and very rare look at a disturbing time in modern British history.

There are a lot of good things happening in the movie, most especially in the character of Miss Brunner, played by Jenny Runacre. I remember first seeing the movie on HBO in the very earliest days of cable television in the mid 1970s. The casual lesbianism was even more interesting than the casual nudity, and the way that Miss Brunner absorbed the bodies of her lovers of both sex was startling. Also, the fact that Jerry Cornelius was a terrible spy and always messing up everything he was trying to do, including accidentally killing his own sister, was very daring.

Two things absolutely killed the film dead when it came out; the ending as changed by the writers and/or director, and the studio had no clue what they were selling or who they were selling it to. The ending is awful, reducing the entire movie to a shaggy dog story, and it is rightfully remembered as one of the worse ways to end the plot. Needless to say, Moorcock hated it, and it is the polar opposite of the book. Even if they had been faithful to the ending, the studio and distributors were so confused by the tone of the movie, as can be seen by all the alternate titles ('Last Days of Man on Earth') and completely strange posters that this project would have been in trouble.

The above poster is by far the worse, making the movie seem like it belongs in the 'Planet of the Apes' series while giving the ending away. 'Zardoz' has a similar weird ending, but that one is in keeping with the general audacity of the entire project. 'The Final Programme' ends on a cheap Borsht Belt joke that kills the movie's atmosphere dead and renders any viewer horrified for the wrong reason. It also seems to have killed the career of anyone associated with the film, which was a huge flop. Jon Finch was never a leading man again. Robert Fuest never got to direct anything except the schlock horror 'Devil's Rain'. Nothing by Michael Moorcock has ever threatened to be filmed since this movie, now 45 years old.

It's a shame, really; there is a lot to like if you are interested in either speculative fiction or British culture of that period. However, like Punk which emerged like the creature created by the final programme of the title, it all seems so self-destructing, not made to last or be sequelized, unlike nearly everything Michael Moorcock has written. All we are left with is this strange artifact, something that almost could have been good but failed through a clash of a writer's vision and a film maker's sensibilities. If you ever see it, try to enjoy 'The Final Programme' for what it is, a noble failure.

New Worlds For Old

H.P. Lovecraft was. without a doubt, the sorriest excuse for a professional writer in the 20th century. He had opportunities to be an editor of 'Weird Tales' but turned it down because he couldn't stand the idea of being away from his 'beloved Providence'. Yet he managed to nurture an amazing array of next generation writers, including a few giants to emerge in the post-war years, especially Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber. When 'Weird Tales' stopped publishing his work because it became too wordy and detailed, followers typed it up and sent it to science fiction magazines, where it was eagerly purchased.

Lovecraft managed the unique trick of being simultaneously both a woeful relic of the past while stunningly ahead of his time. He had quaint and ultimately lethal ideas about being a gentleman of letters despite being the sole heir to a fortune long gone. He hated the idea of writing for money; even editing and re-writing, which he was very good at as well, was too tainted by common commerce. The great irony is that his initial reputation came from the pulps, the landscape of which was littered with hack writers and even the good ones had to hunt for new markets like bloodhounds. He was neither, and he was a misfit even among that motley crew.

'Weird Tales' was a weird magazine in more than one way. Most of the material printed in its pages was crap; the most popular author, Seabury Quinn, was a mortuary lawyer who did Sherlock Holmes knock-offs for the magazine. Wildly popular in their day, they have only been preserved because August Derleth, who eventually became the torch bearer for Lovecraft, was also a writer of Holmes knock-offs and needed another author to justify 'Mycroft & Moran' Press. The stuff, both Quinn's and Derleth's, is awful.

Mostly due to Lovecraft, as well as Clark Ashton Smith, a poet from California who needed to generate money for his parent's medical care while crafting a wonderful collection of exquisite fantasy and horror yarns, and Robert E. Howard, a hard charging Texan who wrote with amazing speed and creativity in a single-minded effort to become a professional writer, 'Weird Tales' became only one of two pulp magazines to have a reputation that extends to this current age. Young fledgling authors ate it up and started correspondences with the authors, especially Lovecraft. As a mentor, HP was excellent; he knew how to encourage someone, even re-writing a story, without profiting himself or being too harsh.

'Weird Tales' really flourished between 1928, with the publication of 'The Call of Cthulhu', until 1938, when Lovecraft and Howard were dead and Smith stopped writing largely due to late payment by the editor. It kept going for another fourteen years, which included the early flowering of Ray Bradbury among many others. But starting in 1939, when John C. Campbell took over the editing of the pulp 'Astounding Stories', and especially after the Second World War and the concluding atomic bomb, science fiction became the dominant genre in the fantastic. Most of the 'Weird Tales' writers simply shifted allegiances to better paying markets.

Lovecraft died of stomach cancer in 1937; it is quite probable that he starved himself to afford the stamps for his ridiculously prolific letter writing. It was those correspondences that formed both the bonding between authors and the nurturing of the next generation. He appointed as his literary executor Robert Barlow, a friend from Florida who was only nineteen years old at the time. Barlow was a gay child prodigy whose family had two long visits from Lovecraft down in Florida. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei had other ideas.

Both Derleth and Wandrei were working pulp authors, Derleth in particular very prolific and popular, and both lived near each other in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Derleth was a powerhouse with a tremendous work ethic, and while his efforts concerning Lovecraft were a mixed bag, without his work, Lovecraft would have soon been forgotten. The two set up a publishing firm, 'Arkham House', for the express purpose of preserving HP's fiction, and they succeeded beyond anyone's dreams.

Barlow was a casualty of this literary takeover, and the budding young fiction writer was effectively blackballed by the two from the fantasy community. In a strange twist of fate, he turned his considerable talents to Mexican anthropology, and is now considered the first great expert on Mayan culture. By sheer coincidence, when he committed suicide in 1951, one of his students at the time was a young William Burroughs, on the lam from a drug bust in New Orleans, who mentioned it in passing in a letter to Allan Ginsberg, the great American Poet. More about Barlow's strange life and career can be found in an excellent New Yorker article by Paul La Farge, 'The Complicated Friendship of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, One of His Biggest Fans'.

Robert E. Howard, plagued by late payments and in despair over his mother's death, blew his brains out in 1936. His suicide has often been considered a contributing factor to Lovecraft's death, since despite their opposing temperaments they were great pen pals. Howard wrote prolifically and created a massive amount of work in just ten short years, including creating such memorable character as Conan the Barbarian, King Kull, and Solomon Kane. At his best, especially when writing with broad strokes, Howard propels you along through the action in a cinematic manner, although little could be considered literature. He is now firmly ensconced in popular culture alongside Lovecraft as a master of the pulps, one of the few writers who could transcend genres.

Clark Ashton Smith was the best writer of the three key 'Weird Tales' authors, although he will never become common currency in popular culture the way Lovecraft and Howard have managed. Smith achieved some fame very early in life in the San Francisco area, becoming a known poet to the likes of Ambrose Bierce and Jack London, and participating in Bohemian Grove tomfoolery with George Sterling. Being terminally shy and sickly, he quickly retreated to his aged parents farm in Auburn, California, where he crafted much poetry and a little prose. A correspondent of Lovecraft since 1922,  it was HP who suggested that he start writing for 'Weird Tales'.

It is hard to recommend Smith's fantasy; it is too unique and specialized, particularly in the use of language. There is no other writer even published in the pulps who has less pulp in his style than Smith, yet he was very popular and was printed in dozens of magazines. He considered himself a poet and kept a low profile in Auburn, conducting a string of affairs with married women. I guess poetry is a good way to get laid, just not to get paid.

The irony is that all three of these writers now have posthumous careers because of 'Weird Tales' and yet they were all unlikely contributors, each with such unique talents that finding any home for their writings was a miracle. Lovecraft wrote as a complete disciple of Poe's concept of every word working to create one single effect in a story. Howard used the widest brushes possible and worked in a dizzying array of genres - westerns, spicy stories, boxing yarns - but his best stuff seemed to be historical fiction, such as 'The Sowers of the Thunder'. Smith actually got to see his work published in hard cover but lived a poverty-stricken life.

It was August Derleth who gave us the Cthulhu Mythos, not Lovecraft, just as it was L. Sprague de Camp who gave us the chronology of Conan, not Howard. The creations of these writers turned into big business in the 1960s and beyond, especially when Lancer/Ace books started putting Frank Frazetta covers on Conan. The temptation to pad things out, generating more volumes, was too tempting, and both Derleth and de Camp finished manuscripts while encouraging others to write stories. Eventually, in the 1980s, there was a backlash against this, resulting in a move back to the original manuscripts and authors.

L. Sprague de Camp did an even greater injustice by publishing the first serious biography of Lovecraft in 1977. While factually correct, it also focuses on the most salacious facts while emphasizing HP's early racist rantings. It can only be compared to contemporary biographies of Jim Morrison or Led Zeppelin, heavy on scandal, more interested in the myths than the facts. No doubt Lovecraft was racist, but he also hated himself right down to his own DNA, as seen in such stories as 'Arthur Jermyn' and 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'. HP seemed afraid of everything, right down to the very knowledge that he craved. The secret is that he turned that universal loathing into great art.

Lovecraft married a Jewish woman and entrusted his literary estate into the hands of a man that he knew to be homosexual. HP grew as a person as he got older, and his earlier views modified over time. There is endless speculation about Lovecraft's sexual preferences, but they say more about the people making them than about the man himself. As a true Victorian, Lovecraft was taught to despise his body and his sexuality in whatever form it took. That was the engine that drove his literary output.

Howard gets backhanded compliments as a writer, if he gets any love at all. He was the consummate pulp writer, but that is seen as an insult. His sales over the decades have been enormous, but it is his imagination, as a kid from Bumfuck, Texas who absorbed every adventure story he could before the age of eighteen and then spit them back out over the next dozen years in endlessly new and imaginative ways, is the key to his remarkable talent. Of course he creates wish fulfillment fantasies; he simply does them better than any other writer in American history, on a grander scale.

Clark Ashton Smith escaped having his legacy shat upon by editors adding to his canon, perhaps the only advantage of being more obscure. It wasn't for lack of trying; by pure accident, I grew up in Bellerose Terrace on Long Island and noticed that Lin Carter, another writer and editor who specialized in pure fantasy, used the byline of Hollis, the town literally on the other side of the railroad tracks. At the tender age of fourteen I took my six foot tall bulk over to his house and knocked on the door. He answered, a small, slim man with a goatee, and welcomed me inside. We chatted a few times over the next eighteen months, and he tried to guide my taste in literature.

I had probably read the first book of the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy and some of the Conan Lancer editions; naturally, I thought that I was an expert on all thing fantasy. Lin schooled me quickly but gently, and since he was in the middle of editing the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, as well as the author of the first scholarly book about Tolkien, information flowed quicker than I could absorb. There were bits of gossip that I didn't quite understand at the time, such as de Camp's general dislike of sword & sorcery in general and Howard in particular, but Lin said it was simply a paycheck. Mostly it was long discussions about the history of fantasy, connecting the myths and legends of the past to the literature of today.

Lin Carter also introduced me to the work of Clark Ashton Smith, recommending his writing to me in the strongest terms. A few volumes were appearing in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series; I bought them and devoured them, absolutely delighted with the contents. Carter had a great knowledge of the classics, and was very good at finding references or echoes of classical themes in more modern work. As an editor he was without peer for his time, and single-handedly brought some type of scholarship not only to what he termed 'adult fantasy' but to the pulps as well. It didn't really matter that his fiction was second rate and derivative; his true worth lay elsewhere.

Not everything Lin recommended stuck, such as James Branch Cabell, whom I still find boring, but I did appreciate Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, and William Hope Hodgson. He also had a pretty complete collection of 'Weird Tales' and would talk about the more obscure writers published there. Perhaps the best thing he ever did was connect my last name, Nestor, a common Irish surname from Galway, to 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey'. I still use that line of bullshit to this day when someone tries to use the 'who's your daddy' argument with me, very common to this day down south. You should see the look on on their face when I trace my lineage back well over three thousand years! Thank you eternally, Lin!

Carter did try, unsuccessfully, to duplicate the success of Howard and Lovecraft with Clark Ashton Smith, writing new stories set in the imaginary universes of his favorite writer. He also wrote pastiches of Howard, Lovecraft and Dunsany, and much of his fiction is very much in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He was unfailingly polite and patient with me; we never talked for less than hour and he only hustled me out the door once because of a meeting with a publisher. I lost touch with him in late 1972 when my family moved to York, PA, but I will impulsively buy any edition of a Ballantine Adult Fantasy that I find in a used book store to this day.

 Carter moved on the the 'Flashing Swords' series, focusing more on living writers, although some of the Ballantine Adult fantasy series had done that as well. He always seemed to realize that there was a limited window to present these stories by other authors to the public, and his choices were always superb. People complain that he included his own stories too often, but it is obvious that he never profited in any substantial way from his editorial work. It was purely a labor of love. Every time you go into a bookstore an d see a massive three volume (or more) modern fantasy series, or watch some CGI fantasy spectacular, you have Lin Carter and his hard work from fifty years ago to thank.