THE CDS: The Band

The Band -- Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson -- were a major musical entity of the ‘60s and early ‘70s that it took me awhile to get around to really listening to. I knew them as the guys who did the original version of 'The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down' which sometimes got airplay, but more often Joan Baez’s cover of it was heard. The first song of theirs I remember on Top 40 was 'Life is a Carnival,' and for awhile, when I was about 12, I contemplated getting the album (Cahoots, 1971, their fourth) because they covered a Dylan song, 'When I Paint My Masterpiece.' In fact, the main claim to fame of The Band was as the guys who backed Dylan on his legendary 'Dylan goes electric' tour. But them days was long gone. Until...

1974, and Dylan was on the road again, with The Band. This still didn’t make me a fan of theirs; I begrudged them their space on Before the Flood, the live album from the tour. Their music struck me at the time as a throwback to rockabilly, a version of Americana I had no real interest -- Brit Invasion brat that I was -- in embracing. My Dylan was the hipster Dylan of the ‘65-‘66 period, not the old folky. And whatever that legendary early tour (in ‘66) with Dylan sounded like (still hadn’t heard the bootlegs at this point), the revamped Dylan/The Band alliance gave us a Dylan ready to do some hog-calling, caterwauling all over the place. It took some getting used to.

Then came that phase, as high school began to come to an end, and as the forces of the ‘70s -- funk and disco, namely -- began to suck my will to live, and glam and prog were mostly kaput, when the only thing to do was return to the ‘60s. So I did, even reading a friend’s old copies of Rolling Stone from those fabled days. And there was Ralph Gleason touting the wonders of those first two albums by The Band, Music from Big Pink (1968) and The Band (1969), which I dutifully acquired and gradually began to enjoy. Already, in 1975, the long bootlegged collaborations of Dylan and The Band, set in the house known as Big Pink, had been partially released, cleaned-up and almost commercial quality, as The Basement Tapes. The capper to this incremental interest was Martin Scorsese’s rousing film of The Band’s farewell concert, The Last Waltz, on Thanksgiving, 1977, released to theaters in 1978.

Seeing The Band play live on the big screen confirmed a few things: they weren’t glamour boys, to be sure, but they were extremely able musicians whose interplay was simply great fun as music. This important element of their music had been somewhat lost, I felt, in their studio recordings. The sound of those first two albums already sounded dated and inadequate by the late ‘70s (after all those pristine prog recordings, and in comparison to the likes of Steely Dan where mulit-tracking of perfect studio performances was the ne plus ultra), but it was also the fact that The Band were just better when playing live. This is what gave so much charm to The Basement Tapes, the loose, ‘sit-in and see what happens’ feel to it all. The Band are better the more ramschackle it is.

Of course, in The Last Waltz, they’re all on their best behavior and there are many definitive deliveries on view: 'Stage Fright,' 'The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down,' 'Up on Cripple Creek,' 'It Makes No Difference.' But I still don’t have that on CD. What I do have instead is the double CD release of what had been a double album in ‘72: Rock of Ages. The CD has extra tracks, including four songs with Dylan who showed up to cap the encore of the second night’s show, New Year's Eve, as 1971 became 1972, at Madison Square Garden.

Rock of Ages may be the best album by The Band; they were at their peak during that two night stand, and you can find there all the manifest qualities that made the sound of The Band unmistakable: Levon’s throaty delivery, always so full of vitality, and his crisp, precise drumming; Danko’s tremulous warble, so vulnerable and comical, and his floppy bass lines; Robbie’s needle-like lead guitar punctuations; Garth’s roomy, cathedral-like organ tones; Manuel’s piercing falsetto on 'I Shall Be Released' and his barroom-swagger baritone on 'The Shape I’m In' with his honkytonkin’ electric piano.

Having achieved an Americana -- interesting, considering that all but Helm are from Canada -- that is unique, their music seems more and more to exist in a timeless realm of its own. Sure, it’s the great era of the ‘60s/’70s when rock’n’roll still existed and when it was about musicians making music together more than anything else, but the themes and sounds of their best songs inhabit a world that was already old by then, what the music critic Greil Marcus calls 'Old Weird America,' that time when there was a real culture of the land, when town life wasn’t so homogenized, where idiosyncracies of place abounded. A song like 'The Weight,' maybe their best-known song, captures it all: the play-it-close-to-the-chest utterances of folk wisdom, with about equal measures of wit and dread.

Hats off to The Band!

WHATCHA READIN?, 6

10. The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke (German; 1923; trans. A. Poulin, Jr., 1977)

It was May of 1978 and I’d never heard of Rilke but for references to him in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow where he is the favorite reading of a German military man, Lt. Weissmann, aka Captain Blicero -- bisexual, sadistic, highly romantic, Wagnerian even. I was in New York for the day and browsing a book store. Seeing the name, I picked it up and started skimming. It was one of those ‘something clicked’ moments, an ‘interpellation.’ Suddenly, I just had to read this because this was for me.

What I saw, it seems to me now, was a glimpse of the full flower of romanticism, but not in the form with which I was previously familiar. I’d carried around in high school The Mentor Book of Major British Poets, including everyone you’d ever need from Wm. Blake to Dylan Thomas, and not long after my Rilke encounter, I would pick up Willis Barnstone’s Modern European Poetry, comprised of translations from major poets writing in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Greek. A bit later, it would be The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann, stretching from Whitman to James Tate. Yes, friends, I read it cover to cover in 1980-81.

But Rilke, even against the backdrop of all those various poets, is a unique read. And the point at which I found him was fateful. There I was, eighteen and never been kissed, and here was a poetry of desire as metaphysical longing. Of ecstasy as transcendence. This was the ‘sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll’ era, and I’d had plenty of the latter, my share of the former, but none of the initial term. Rock made sex banal -- the music’s predominant modes were either horniness or bitching and moaning about the fact that it didn’t work out (generally called the blues). Sure, Dylan was different, and I spent a lot of time with his work, even picking up his Writings and Drawings in 1973, but there was still lacking the imperative to romance. One could think: oh, if only I could meet a girl like the ones in Dylan songs, then we’d see . . .

What did Rilke have to do with any of that? It was the timing, pure and simple. It was time to find a girlfriend (being out of school meant being ‘mature’ or something), but Rilke gave that quest an existential coloring: the pursuit of a romantic Other, in other words, could be a personally defining moment, a moment of Being!

I’d been filling notebooks with verse since I was twelve. There had eventually come a hiatus around seventeen. ‘Youth here has end’ and all that. So certainly I already knew about romantic longing, but never was it focused on the here-and-now of my own life. I was not a teenager writing about being a teenager as a day-to-day reality, or writing fantasy exploits or sci-fi escapades. I was putting into words an internal logic -- a ‘romance with the self’ was no doubt how I understood it. And if that sounds a bit masturbatory, well, sure. But that outlet is true of almost anyone; what’s not so often true is the lyrical outpouring of solitary adolescence. Of course I was enamoured of Hesse and German romanticism, and of course Rilke would arrive as the crown upon that throne.

I fell in love with this book, one of those ‘and that has made all the difference’ choices. Being in love with it colored rather drastically what falling in love with a person would be like when it happened. It happened that summer, 1978; I had two females in mind as I read Rilke at the beach that year. I ended up falling in love with both of them, at first kind of simultaneously, then in succession. But that’s another story.

Why is a sequence of elegies the poem of my late-teen romance? Doesn’t that tell you something right there? I could’ve believed that Rilke was under thirty when he wrote these, when I first read them; when I realized they date from his late thirties to late forties, completed only a few years before his death, I could see them as a great summation from one who could shuffle off this mortal coil only after giving us immortal songs of praise and grief, of what it means to be in love with this world and with what Keats calls ‘beauty that must die.’

More than a decade later, in graduate school, talking over Rilke with the German scholar Stanley Corngold, who thanked me for doing the whole Rilkean ‘when a happy thing falls’ number in class (he didn’t feel up to it anymore, he said), Poulin’s translation came up and Stanley belittled it as ‘too Californian new-agey.’ I saw at once that he was right, but that in itself was part of the fatefulness. I was, in ‘78, about as Californian as I would ever be. The previous September I’d heard the Dead play live for the first time -- at Englishtown Raceway in NJ -- and a few months before acquiring Poulin’s Rilke was present at a memorable Jerry Garcia Band show at the Tower in Philly where the vibes were -- to quote Shelley Duvall in Annie Hall -- transplendent. So, yeah, a happy thing falls, the dead are grateful, times are high, and romance is a way of life -- just ask the angels.

CRITIC AT LARGE

I will get back to my 'blogocentrism exclusives' shortly, promise. But, as Bonnie Parker would say, 'if you're still in need / of something to read,' you can check out two recent articles by me in The New Haven Advocate this week: one on the Polish theater troupe Theater of the Eighth Day's recent New Haven production of their play Wormwood (1985), the other on Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer-winning book of poems Native Guard (2007).

JUST LIKE JACK FROST'S YULE

Yes, it's true, Bob Dylan has released an album of Christmas tunes. You can read my take on it here. As if you deserved it, you old humbug.

WHATCHA READIN?, 5

9. Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (American, 1973)

An English teacher in my high school, who later became a friend and was known for being something of ‘a freak,’ hearing I’d read a bunch of Vonnegut and had recently made it halfway through Ulysses, told me about a crazy book, published a few years before and deemed ‘unreadable’ by the Pulitzer committee, that featured a character who goes down a toilet bowl. He offered it as perhaps the most challenging work of recent fiction.

Not much later, I accepted the challenge. The trip down the toilet didn’t put me off, but I do remember one morning in homeroom reading the infamous Brigadier Pudding shit-eating masochism scene and feeling a bit peculiar in my first few classes that day. I kinda let my reading of the book drift a bit after that, which was spring of 1977. The next time I remember reading the book at length was at the beach in June of 1978. That return was in part inspired by picking up a copy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in May of ‘78 (see 'Whatcha Readin? 6'). But even then I didn’t get through GR.

It wasn’t until September 1980 that I finally got through the final third of the book: the end of 'In the Zone' and 'The Counterforce,' and it was then, living in Philadelphia, that I got to know other readers of the book. And every time I crossed paths with someone who had “been there,” who could recall some improbable, baffling, hilarious, inspired, mind-expanding scene in Gravity’s Rainbow, there was a starry-eyed high, a contagious elation. Yes, it’s true, it’s really there because someone else has read it too!

Given my feelings about literature as a field of study (as expressed via Rimbaud in 'Whatcha Readin? 4'), I must’ve needed to find a living literary hero I could believe in. And Pynchon, in his weirdly insular refusal to be a public person, to be, basically, unseen and unheard of since sending a comedian to accept the National Book award for him in 1974, was the ideal figure. In addition to Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, a book I was in love with in those closing months of high school was Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). The deregulation of the senses, capiche? Pynchon’s novel, like nothing else I’d ever seen, felt like the wild imaginings of someone completely outside or beyond the rational norms, the parameters of conventional thought -- whether of history or of narrative or of literature or of myth. The book was paranoid and psychotic, but absurdly so, pushed to the point of clairvoyant vision, or to where that vision must break down before the unprincipled rationales by which the world is run and governed.

Pynchon wasn’t a person. I couldn’t care less about what the guy who perpetrated this did with his days and nights or how he had gotten this incredible thing produced and published. Pynchon was prose, or, even more, 'Pynchon' was the name given to what was going on in my mind while reading this prose. Then I read his previous two novels and saw something else: it’s not 'Pynchon,' because that author has written two other books that, no matter their merits, don’t do what GR does. So, it was the narrator of GR, that unique and unrepeatable performance itself, that was the mainline. And the only place to find that was in GR.

Thus began a love affair that lasted for another four years, or until Slow Learner’s Intro (1984) introduced a guy named Thomas Pynchon who was a writer and who had the proprietary rights to GR (even though he said nothing about that book in the SL intro). And this Pynchon was going to go on with his career, write blurbs and reviews and produce more novels. Fine. But that guy isn’t the narrator of GR. To be a fan of GR was like, oh pick your own example, being a fan of Blonde on Blonde and having someone put one of Dylan’s ‘80s albums on... or of 'You Never Give Me Your Money' and someone puts on 'Silly Love Songs.' Or Kind of Blue, Miles with Coltrane, and now you’re hearing Miles with Chick Corea. There’s a wide difference, not just a difference in the perpetrator of these things, but in the times themselves, in what was possible or imaginable.

It’s here, perhaps, that the point of this exercise of '15 Books That Stayed With You' becomes clearest to me. Because Pynchon is the first person on this list who still has an ongoing career, and so he becomes the best example for how definitive it is, that moment in which a book finds you -- in your own life (I’m insisting on pre-30) -- and in its life. GR found me in the first decade after its publication when it simply made every other work of fiction published in that period feel like an also-ran, written by someone who had largely missed the point of what the decade previous to its publication -- from the assassination of JFK to the impeachment of Nixon essentially -- was 'like.'

Pynchon got it, and he translated that feel into a vast cinematic retrospect on the era --World War II -- he was a child in, and which we all, post-WWII brats, grew up teething on. In other words, it was as timely and as necessary, to my conception of things, as any work of fiction could be. It has been hard for me to imagine ever since how any mere novel could beat its time.

The CDs: Badfinger

Take a look at these guys: the carefully coiffed hair of the post-Beatles pop-rock band. Badfinger were under the wing of the former mop tops from the get-go. Their first hit was a McCartney composition: ‘Come and Get It.’ And they were signed to Apple Records. On the only album of theirs I own, 1972's Straight Up, George Harrison produces 4 of the 12 tracks and adds his trademark All Things Must Pass era slide to the hit single ‘Day After Day.’ Harrison was supposed to do the whole thing but had to split to help save Bangla Desh, so in the end early ‘70s hit-meister Todd Rundgren took the helm. On the re-mastered CD, six of the tracks are also presented in versions produced by The Beatles’ sound engineer Geoff Emerick.

So, yeah, the sound of Badfinger on Staight Up is as close to The Beatles as you can get at the time. At times, particularly with some of the vocals sporting the husky tone of McCartney’s singing in the later Beatles’ releases, and with the harmonies modelled on the Fab Four, you can almost believe you’re hearing demos of unreleased Beatles material.

Why demos? Because Badfinger never manages the full panoply of The Beatles sound; if you compare this record to Abbey Road, Straight Up is a bit thin. There’s none of the heaviness that The Beatles, largely due to Lennon, mustered for every album. The musical ideas here are serviceable, and what they did rather well, in 1972, is sound just reminiscent enough to give an extra poignancy to radio songs like ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘Day After Day,’ 45s that were part of my transition to early ‘teens. The songs have a certain melancholy grandeur I always liked, and still do: ‘looking out of my lonely room / day after day.’ It’s in the ringing sound of the voices and bright guitars chiming so well together.

Hearing the hits in situ with the other tracks, when I first got this CD a few years back (in the beginning of my ‘relive the ‘70s period'), was a bit revelatory. The whole record is satisfyingly listenable, even if --- to sustain my listening -- I have to accept the CD as an album of the period, in a way I don’t for those albums of earlier eras that manage to convince of their intrinsic worth decade after decade. A song like ‘Name of the Game’ is an exceptionable track, standing out because of its anthemic tone. But too much of the stuff tends to blend into a vaguely Beatlesque sound that, one feels, the band simply congratulated themselves on attaining.

After all, this was the early period after The Beatles went their separate ways, and many were still pining for some type of musical reunion. Badfinger, of course, didn’t have the skills to be heir apparents, but they did have enough of the sound to make them, briefly, ‘the poor man’s version.’ At some of the stronger moments on this record, one might believe they could emerge from that founding shadow, but if they dropped the Beatleisms, what would they be? The Joey Molland tunes, as opposed to those by Beatlesque Pete Ham, suggest a kind of lighter Bad Company. And who needs that?

In any case, there they remain: remembrancers of that time when everyone wanted to be The Beatles, except The Beatles themselves.