The Madness to My Method

I've been yacking away on this blog for a while now, so I thought that I'd let you in on how I put these tiny essays together. It's not as simple as pulling it out of my ass; I do research, try to get my facts straight before sending it out. I'm not a historian or an archivists. There are no footnotes or bibliography, although I do site anything that was formative or I borrowed from. Essentially, the opinions are mine, although I have worked to develop them.

Frankly, my methods are old school. Over Thanksgiving, my daughter revved up the Roku, sending me into Netflix land. It was fun; we watched not only the rescued Orson Welles film, 'The Other Side of the Wind', but also the excellent and informative documentary about it. maybe I'll get serious about using it one of these days.

Truth is, I like physical media; it feeds the hoarder living inside me. Nothing nicer than a huge library covering walls, immaculately organized. Having been there to some degree, there are serious problems and drawbacks not easily detected from a distance. Volume needs space, a big collection needs not only shelving but containers, data basing, archiving. Things spiral quickly.

That said, if I write about something, chances are that I own it. For instance, in the eight part series that I did on rock music soundtracks, I owned ninety percent of the movies and the soundtracks discussed and saw the rest unless specified. Same with the series on samurai films. If I like something or someone, the tendency is to collect everything until money runs out or the quality lessens.

The one thing learned in art school has stayed with me to this day; you are entitled to your opinion, but be prepared to defend it. It can't just be what you like or hate. There should be reasoning, maybe a theory, context, connections to other similar works. At least that is what I try to do in this blog. there are a lot of ideas floating around in my brain, but if I can't articulate them coherently, what good are they?

Like everybody, I have my tastes, the things that I'm drawn to, the things I avoid. It drives my wife crazy that, during the boring pauses in a football game, I'll switch over to the Hallmark channel to watch one of their soppy movies. She can't understand that I don't actually like the programming; I'm fascinated at how close they stay to the script, right down to the music cues, yet manage to find micro-variations on the same theme. And it's very successful, too; other channels are copying them.

Despite what I've written here, I'm not a hoarder. In fact, I would argue that my closets and shelves are immaculately ordered in a logical way, enabling me to find anything with a simple cross check to a data base. It comes natural,; I was even the head library much of my senior year in high school due to someone becoming ill and a budget shortage. Jest because I'm a big guy doesn't mean that I don't  love learning and knowledge, culture and art.

Storage became enough of a problem that around five years ago I started an aggressive downsizing project. I already used a double case system for all DVDs, CDs and Blu Rays, cutting my shelf footprint by half. Literally every digital media has at least two discs; the trick is to find a way to put together similar titles. Music is easy, usually the same artist. Movies can be tricky once you get past series like James Bond. I try to group by genre; two samurai flick, two giallo flicks. It gets esoteric, always some oddballs and strays, but clustering them together on shelves helps.

Shelving is another issue; after a while, every wall can seem covered. I had eight custom made cabinets created years ago, when we first moved into our current house. The first six helped cover a long windowless wall on either side of a fireplace. Room for books and pictures on top, space for DVDs on bottom. Later, when our daughter moved out, two shorter ones were added to the bonus room when I claimed her bedroom as the Man Cave. Mostly Blu Rays reside there.

CDs are smaller but have a tendency to proliferate like rabbits. Before you know it, millions seem to be teeming everywhere. The double case system works, but you still need to put them somewhere. Decades ago I bought a slightly flimsy plywood shelving system. This summer, having to take it apart to paint the room, I spent hours reconstructing it. Not sure it could be replaced now that physical media is supposed to be dead.

All this dead physical had a purpose in my life; for the first time in human history, you could own archival quality copies of various art forms that had a life span longer than your own. I don't expect to pass these down to the next generation; my daughter's tastes are her own, closer in movies, farther away in music. But at the time it seemed vital to be able to have ownership; what it was that I was owning, perhaps less important. In retrospect maybe it was a huge marketing ploy.

A digital dinosaur, I don't trust streaming media, the very definition of 'here today, gone tomorrow.' It requires a trust in the corporate state to still honor contracts, to be ethical, to have taste, to be fair: in short, for the media conglomerates to behave opposite to the way they have historically. One day, the internet will be like water or electricity, charged by volume. Streaming will have us by the short and curlies then.

A curmudgeon, I know, but a valid point. If the political state ever joins with the entertainment industry - it already has, in case you haven't noticed - censorship will be effortless. Simply remove all streams that are contrary to the party line. Imagine a 'Fahrenheit 451' future, with rebels not only clutching books, memorizing the texts like Homer, but also DVDs and Blu Rays, CDs and LPs, even VHS and Betamax. Absurd but possible, the way things have been heading lately.

The digital world has added to the woes of physical media grumps like myself. For instant, back in the day, I owned thousands of LPs. Frankly, I was glad to get rid of them. While beautiful to look at and great for rolling joints, they also scratched easily, were bulky and heavy, a real bitch to move. Over time, I either abandoned them or replaced gleefully with CDs. Sure, first generation compact discs often sounded bad, mastered for records instead of digital, but it took real effort to damage them. They had a significantly longer running time, too.

The invention of music compression was typically both a blessing and a curse. Sound quality suffered, especially in the early days, when file size was an issue, necessitation extreme compression ratios, flattening the sound. Add a pair of ear buds and you have the perfect recipe for horrible audio quality. Yet it has become the dominant music format, convenience over quality.

Not to completely put down the lowly mp3; I've certainly listened to my fair share, not only backing up my entire collection (a daunting task) but having to admit to scarfing up a fair number while it was still possible on the net. I went after new musical genres,; soundtracks, and lounge music primarily

I get why the new generations have reverted back to long players, regardless how many audio engineers explain how vinyl can't reproduce sound as well as, say, uncompressed PCM. A couple of factors are at play, all making it a more active listening experience. Holding the big album cover in your hand, a piece of art if done well, actually being able to read the liner notes. I miss that. More importantly, the physical act of putting the stylus in the groove, the limited listening time required. Twenty minutes lets you actively focus on the sound before drifting off. Too often the sheer length of a CD, up to 80 minutes, makes it background music.

The real joy in my life are 5.1 discs, expensive but fantastic. After being shocked at the prices of most speakers, I purchased an inexpensive but good system from Circuit City as they were closing stores. I go up in audio quality while everybody else goes down, seeming satisfied with mp3. Same with Blu Ray, although I'll pass on 4K.

Books are the older type of communication, and I've loved them all my life. It was tough finding them when I was younger, searching musky stores with odd proprietors. Now you can search Amazon, find anything in minutes, even the stuff they can't get. A world of third party sellers are ready for a deep dive, extracting those really obscure nuggets. Not as much fun, but certainly more thorough.

Books are also heavy and bulky. If you like hardcovers, when available, like I do (not rich enough for first editions), it can get to be a problem. I still managed to weed out at least 500 volumes, mostly titles that would never be read again. Being over sixty, my eye sight struggles navigating some of the small type found in paperbacks, but I keep some anyway. It's authors I value, their stories and thoughts, not the paper.

All this media is supposed to help me have educated opinion, at least in theory. There are plenty of on-line resources, and there are a few that I go to religiously, such as the DVD Savant and Trailers From Hell. As to why I need to have an opinion on all these topics, leave that up to the psychologists. I'm too busy navigating my way through art and culture.

Just letting you know that, while these are my opinions, I just don't shoot from the hip. There are connections behind everything, maybe even a unifying theory. That why I write this blog; the act of changing thoughts to words is hard, but it clarifies ideas. I may be wrong, I may be right, at least I got there honestly.

The War To... Well, You Know

It would be impossible to leave the month of November 2018 without mentioning the 100th anniversary of World War One, except nearly everyone else has ignored it. Not completely true; a three minute segment on a news program seems sufficient for 30,000,000 casualties. It is understandable why people want to forget that particular war; it was the last time that a major conflict was fought for nationalism, or King and Country, on all sides. The next one was fought against nationalism; National Socialism. After this first one, the level of naivety would never be so high.

Another difficulty in explaining the First World War is how it started, almost casually, an assassination, a common enough occurrence at the time, snowballing into a conflict taking in most of the European continent. Untangling treaties and agreements, many based more on marriage than sense, makes the beginnings of this devastating conflict even murkier. It didn't matter; the major powers, France, England and Germany, had been gearing up for this fight since at least the turn of the century. It was the first war based as much on an arms race as on an actual event.

Most of what I remember about the origins of the war comes from 'The Guns of August' by Barbara W. Tuchman, which I read as a youth. I remember it as an excellent book, but the entire volume was devoted to explaining just one month in 1914. The alliances were incredibly complicated, made worse by history, particularly the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Here, the French got their ass kicked by a unified Germany only sixty years after Napoleon had nearly conquered all of Europe.

Once the actual war started, things bogged down immediately. In fact, the most permanent image of this conflict is that of trench warfare.  It wasn't new; both the American Civil War and the Siege of Paris had elements of dug-in lines, impossible to move. What was new was the technology, or more specifically the progress made inflicting damage to the human body.

It was appalling, but it was inevitable, if one buys the argument that the pinnacle of human innovation is warfare. The humanist in me would disagree, but the evidence points elsewhere. During the time of Napoleon, major battles were fought in open spaces. Grand armies had room to maneuver, tactics could be utilized. The concept we know now as Total War started deliberately in the American Civil War, with Sherman's March to the Sea, destroying everything in it's path; crops, infrastructure, cities.

Still, civilian casualties were minimal because of the range of the weaponry. It was still necessary to get soldiers into the town targeted, and soldiers wanted to kill other soldiers, not women and children, unless there was an ethnic cleansing. There might be some rape and pillaging, common from ancient times, but modern armies prided themselves on discipline, trying to keep such incidents to a minimum. At least that is what the official reports of the time say.

With the advances in military hardware in places like the Krupp Arms Works, not to mention Noble's advancement in explosives, World War One had a whole new basket of toys for the generals to play with. Guns could fire over 70 miles, deep into enemy territory. They experimented with the new bi-plane dropping bombs, although it was mostly done by hand. Best of all, you didn't see your target. Death could be delivered without recognizing the humanity being destroyed, a brand new philosophical development in warfare, one that still resonates today.

That became, in retrospect, the theme of the First World War; technological advancement exponentially increasing man's inhumanity to man. It was a major part of much of the literature resultant of the war, such as 'All Quiet on the Western Front'. It is interesting, that book being written from the perspective of a German soldier. I guess you needed to be defeated to realized the futility of trying to survive such as devastating event.

It was devastating, especially trench warfare, a condition some soldiers had to live under for ungodly lengths of time. They tried to make the best of it, finding humor in the situation. There was nothing funny about it, living in mud and water. The concept of 'No Man's Land'  was invented to explain the space between the trenches, a place where no living creature could exist. Every leaf, branch and speck of bark would be blasted from every plant. The smart creatures, humans excepted, fled the area.

There were attempts by the soldiers, finding themselves in such deplorable and deadly conditions, to maintains some semblance of humanity. Most notable was the Christmas Truce of 1914, when everyone on the front, both sides, decided to stop being at war for one day. Groups walked across No Man's Land, sharing food and drink, recognizing each other's humanity, even if for the briefest moment. High Command put an end to that shit right away.

Similarly, chivalry still existed in the newer, more mechanized combat. Fighter pilots treated each other like knights riding into battle, a social class apart from the grunts on the ground. U boats would often signal an enemy vessel before sinking it, giving the crew a chance to abandon ship before sinking it with a torpedo. Such acts of gallantry would not proceed into the future.

Instead, the powers upped the inhumanity, introducing guns that shot more bullets per minute. The ultimate weapon for the First World War was the gas attack, virtually the only dependable method to get enemy combatants out of an entrenched areas. Everybody used it, but it was so heinous that to this day it remains banned world wide. Watch the news for reports of gas attacks in Syria or Iraq to see how closely it remains monitored and condemned to imagine how horrifying it must have been for unprepared soldiers on the front lines.

Maps were different during that war, with the now-obscure Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Empire winding up on the wrong end of victory. They were shattered as a result, as was the Russian Empire, who couldn't hang on long enough to enjoy victory. falling to the Bolsheviks. Italy was with France and England, not against, as in the next big war. In fact, one interesting fact that I learned in Venice on Armistice Day was that Italy ended the war a week earlier, on November 4th, 1918, after the battle of Vittorio Veneto, which was dangerous close to that city. Italy won, and left it at that.

America's participation was a major change in the way we, as a nation, saw ourselves. Despite the Boxer Rebellion, this was the first time the United States ventured out of the Western Hemisphere to become involved in world political conflicts, beyond simply defending out people and property. We had been aggressive in out own area of influence, invading Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean on any pretense. Now we were shoulder to shoulder with allies against a common enemy, the heroic rescuers, a role we would act again in the next World War.

Even entering the war was not without controversy. Good and bad was not so defined, despite British propaganda. America was split along class lines, the older settlers for England, the newer Eastern European immigrants often backing Germany, neutralists and pacifists in between. When the Lusitania sank, there had been fair warning from the Germans. Even the Zimmerman letters are dubious, possibly faked by Great Britain, an act of provocation and deception. In the end, it didn't matter; we were going 'over there'.

It was the first modern conscription and call up in American history; before, if you were a politician or enough money to outfit and feed a regimen, you could be the officer in charge, explaining incompetents like Daniel Sickles. Now the military had a strict hierarchy, not cutting to the front of the line. Basic training was still brutally short and mostly useless, six weeks, just enough time to teach you to pray when you lay dying. Units came from all over, mixed up geographically.

The Influenza Outbreak made things worse, the last great pandemic in American history. Troop movement and barracks life were perfect incubators, helping to spread the disease rapidly from coast to coast. Troop ships were the worse; the brass simply sent 1/3rd more than needed, knowing how many would die during the voyage. Doughboys were sent to the front completely unprepared for what they were about to face.

The war had stretched for years without front lines moving noticeably despite appalling losses on all sides. American troops were used simply as cannon fodder, too unexperienced to avoid getting killed in record numbers. It worked overwhelming the Germans, who were losing their allies anyway. The Kaiser tried to surrender with dignity, but France and Britain squashed that. Their short term gains laid the foundation for the next disaster.

I've avoided talking about the Second World War, but after the callous profiteering on all sides, it was inevitable. The sequel was all speed; dive bombers, blitzkriegs, tank columns. New scenery, tropical lushness turned into hellscapes, not just temperate meadows. Heroes and villains, goods guys and bad guys, color coded, all wearing uniforms. Ending with a mushroom cloud. Can't top Armageddon for a closer, can you?

Try to explain 'The War to End all Wars' to a young person and watch the sarcasm bubble up spontaneously. It was an exercise in futility, trying to find any lasting peace. Humans simply do not function like that; between greed, natural disasters, and prejudice, conflict is a given. We toned down the rhetoric for later. 'Making the World Safe for Democracy'. Eventually 'Peace with Honor'.

I don't even know if any of my grandfathers, or even my wife's, fought in the First World War. The call up was short for America, as was the time at the front. Unlike the next one, it didn't hit every American family quite as hard. I do have one connection to World War One, my legendary Uncle Rene.

Ren Richards was born in Alsace - Lorraine, forced to serve in both the French and German military for at two years. Instead, he emigrate to the States, winding up in the service around 1910. During General Pershing's skirmish with Poncho Villa, he was in Mexico. As the Great War progressed overseas, he was made aide-de-camp, speaking all required language fluently. I have no reports of what he did following 'Black Jack' Pershing around, but he secured with a lifetime job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan afterwards despite not finishing his education. I am sure it was scant reward for what he did.

I have no photos of my Uncle Rene, nor any stories about his exploits, He married my Grandmother's sister on my father's side, Aunt Flo. They never had any children; too bad, he would have vastly improved the gene pool. Dying before I was ten, I have only vague memories of a walk up apartment, dumbwaiters, sitting at a table for the holidays.

My mother adored him, said he was the best cook ever, understandable since he cooked all the family get togethers. After he died, that became her burden. My father kept his foot locker, which had traveled around the world. I have it now, sitting in the sun room. I try to keep flowers on it.

There was a short written memoir, mostly about chasing Villa in Mexico. My father's family was prone to division, brothers and sisters getting into arguments, picking sides. There were uncles and aunts who could have told me about Uncle Rene, the amazing things he did, but fighting got in the way. Sort of like World War One, if you think about it.

Double Your Pleasure Part One

There are a couple of big anniversaries happening in music right now. Perhaps the most obscure is the 50th anniversary of buying my first album. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas 1968, a not quite twelve version of myself went out and bought 'The White Album'. Being a double platter by the most popular group on the planet at the time, I remember it being rather expensive, perhaps eight to ten dollars. I loved it immediately.

Interesting, I didn't buy the other monumentally groundbreaking double album released just a month earlier, 'Electric Ladyland'. At that age, I wasn't a Hendrix fan; his music was too harsh, strange, atonal. Later, I became a huge admirer. Even later, learning to play the guitar, I began to understand the truly unique nature of the noise he made, trying to replicate some of the sounds and patterns, finding out just how experimental and groundbreaking he was.

Both double album now come in fancy deluxe editions, both must-haves for an old school music geek like myself. I bought the Hendrix first, simply because it is smaller and less expensive. Sooner or later I will manage the scratch for 'The White Album' box; it's too dear to my heart to pass by, and for the amount of material it's not grossly overpriced, like last year's 'St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'. The whole phenomenon has me thinking about the importance and place of the double album in rock history.

 

Let's define terms; I'm talking about double albums that are studio only, or in the rare case including significant live material debuted for the first time. I'm not talking about double live albums, although at some point I may return to that subject because it does contain may significant pieces of work, or greatest hits packages, even if there are unique songs included. This is a discussion of double albums created in the studio, longer continuous pieces spread over two long players.

The LP was only a dozen years old when both Bob Dylan and the Mothers issued double albums in 1966. The Dylan one came out first, but the Mothers was actually recorded first, in late 1965. They are both milestones , classic in their very different ways. Yet there is one big similarity; they are really three sided albums with a very loose fourth part.

Dylan has never sounded better than on 'Blonde on Blonde'. With two electric albums under his belt, he was past some of the earlier timing issues. Moving to Nashville to work with Bob Johnson for the first time, the first thirteen songs are all very strong, nearly every one a classic. It's only at the end, with 'Sad Eyes Lady of the Lowlands', that things stretch too much. It was a continuation of his folk ballad heritage, but it sounded like mud compared to the supercharged rock of the previous songs.

Dylan would do another double album a few years later, 'Self Portrait' in 1970. While it does have a few live tracks, I'll include it here, if for no other reason to show how lost Bob was during this period of time. The album is truly wretched; worse, the Bootleg series with tracks from this period that weren't used shows a complete lack of judgement of Dylan's part. There was plenty of good material, not to mention full sessions with Johnny Cash and George Harrison that could have made this a very good piece of work. Instead, he included too much middle of the road pop crap, truly uninspired.

Technically, there was another double studio album in 1975, 'The Basement Tapes'. While it has its merits, the inclusion of tracks by the Band alone makes the whole project confusing. If Dylan's management was trying to stop bootleggers, and the Basement Tapes were famously bootlegged for decades, the strange inclusions and exclusions on these two discs only added fuel to the bootlegging fire. Still, taken on its own merits, its a fine if unspectacular collection. Again, The Bootleg series decades later finally revealed just how powerful and strange these sessions really were.

The Mothers' album was a entirely different thing, the first real flowering of the genius that was Frank Zappa. Frank had done a bit of everything, from writing classical music to scoring low budget films. He had written doo wop and surf music, producing or writing a few minor hits. Eventually he purchased a studio, learning to engineer sound, but ran afoul of the local police. Running for the anonymity of Los Angeles, he fell in with the motley Mothers, a bar band.

Always filled with genuine plans for world domination, Zappa quickly turned the Mothers into his own freak laboratory. While abstaining from drugs of any sort except coffee and cigarettes,
Frank became a senior member of the Los Angeles burgeoning hippie scene, making friends with everyone from Jim Morrison to Brian Wilson. The band scuffled; the Mothers were always teetering on bankruptcy, not helped by Zappa's ever expanding group membership. Fortunately, they were seen by Tom Wilson, Bob Dylan's old producer, who had just moved to a new label and was looking for talent.

Wilson thought that he had landed a blues band, sort of like Canned Heat. Henry Vestine, guitarist in the Mothers at the time, later became the long time-lead guitarist for Canned Heat, in between prison sentences. Zappa walked into the studio on the first day with complete scores for the Wrecking Crew, L.A.'s famous studio musicians, much to the amazement of all concerned. Typical of FZ, he was playing to the bandstand, and they immediately respected his talent.

The album is straighter than anything else Zappa did, but still pretty diverse, containing enough weirdness to hint at music to come. There are doo wop parodies and ironic love songs, as well as large does of pachuco humor, something that took me, an East Coast guy, years to understand. The album is a clarion call for all disaffected youth right from the opening track, 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy.' 'Who Are the Brain Police' still remains incredibly odd after more than fifty years.

Nearly all the relatively normal song structures are on the first two sides, leaving the second platter for the really far out material. 'Trouble Every Day' is a tough, nasty blues equal to anything by the Rolling Stones or Yardbirds, topical lyrics attacking white privilege even back then. 'It Can't Happen Here'  and 'Help, I'm a Rock' shows how Frank rehearsed his band within an inch of their lives, being able to improvise in sync even on a vocal number. Each of these songs gets a chance to stretch out beyond the normal boundaries of the era.

The last side is where things get most experimental; Zappa rented a mountain of percussion instruments, inviting all the freaks into the studio late one night, conducting the unwashed mass as best he could. The result is somewhere between Varese and exactly what every parent in America warned their children about. Zappa managed to capture the moment before the hippie ethos became commercialized perfectly. He would never be so in vogue again.

Both the Mothers and Zappa later would release many more double and even triple album sets. The only other artist close to be as prolific as Frank was Prince, also quickly outstripping the record company's allotment for new product on a regular basis. "Uncle Meat' from 1968 was undoubtedly the Mother's finest moment. Typically breaking every mold, there are live cuts, but of new songs. One continuous mostly instrumental collage of classical electronic music, it still remains largely ahead of it's time.

'200 Motels' in 1972 went even farther, all new music, recorded live, much of it with a symphony orchestra. It would set a pattern for much of Zappa's career, using live albums to reduce the glut of new material. 'Roxy & Elsewhere' fro 1975 was typical, two discs of mostly new material, an old song or two in a radical new arrangement mixed in. As always, FZ was breaking more rules than he was keeping.

After getting his three (of maybe four ) disc set 'Läther' rejected in 1977 by the record company, Zappa sued, as always. He won, as always, but was forced to become his own record distribution, probably the best decision for all involved. A steady stream of totally new live or studio multi album sets emerged, even past when he died in 1993. The pool of unreleased material at times seems endless, even if the Zappa estate is in disarray right now, the children fighting each other over the debts Frank's widow left behind after her death.

No other artist left behind as large a catalogue in such a short time, in as many different genres, including a few that didn't exist and still don't outside the Zappa universe. His artistic life was an attempt to record everything that affected him, with only his own experience as a reference. It can be hard to follow, difficult to digest. Many find it not worth the effort. I think Frank Zappa was a genius, only comparable to Sun Ra and Prince in terms of the scope of his achievement.

Dylan is still around, teetering between self-parody and legend, touring forever like Willie Nelson. The spark seems to have finally left. I don't blame him; it's been a long, sometimes tough job, being the spokes person for a generation. I certainly wouldn't want the position. Robert Zimmerman seems a fundamentally private person who has been forced to hide behind the façade of Bob Dylan to survive and function. There is a lot of great music out there, and more than a few mistakes.

Zappa can't be judged the same way. In fact, he can't be judged at all, everything being too abstract and personal to put into perspective, except the very earliest material. That applies the most to 'Freak Out', a brilliant take on a culture that most of the world didn't even know existed. Frank always said that he was an anthropologist first; what he failed to mention was that the study was of his life and times, his experiences and influences. Make of it what you will, or ignore it. The choice is yours.

Between these two mighty artists, the double album, warts and all, was born.  It is an excess, a chance for an artist to clear the closet, let off steam, do weird things, expand the sonic horizon. The form remains controversial to this day, creating many of the most important landmark albums but also considered an artistic indulgent by many. I confess to loving them, a direct result of my first purchase back in 1968.