Monday, December 29, 2014

Xanthochroid

Actress Tilda Swinton
According to the Wiktionary, the term xanthocroi was introduced by biologist  T. H. Huxley, from the ancient Greek word ξανθός (ksanthós, “fair,” “yellow,” “golden,” “blond”) + χρώς (khrṓs, “skin”). For Huxley, the term xanthochroi named “a division of the human population having fair skin and wavy blonde hair.” Not a word that is likely to appear in song lyrics, despite songs with titles such as Blondes (Have More Fun)” and Blonde Hair and Blue Eyes,” the word xanthochroid refers to a person with pale skin and yellow hair.

Rather obviously, xanthochroid is an extremely difficult term with which to make a rhyme. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), the protagonist, Longfellow Deeds, who writes greeting-card verse, remarks on the difficulty of finding a rhyme for the proper name, “Buddington.” So, too, is finding a rhyme for the loose cognate of xanthocroid, “yellow.” Not many words rhyme with it. There are songs about yellow roses, yellow moons, yellow roads, yellow submarines and yellow taxis, but only two songs, to my knowledge, that contain words that rhyme with yellow: Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” and Frank Zappa’s “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow.”  There is, however, an album title that is arguably an easy way to remember the meaning of the word xanthochroid: Blonde on Blonde.

A few songs about yellow things:

Yellow - Coldplay
Yellow Man - Randy Newman
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John
Yellow Submarine - The Beatles
Big Yellow Taxi - Joni Mitchell
Yellow Ledbetter - Pearl Jam
Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow - Frank Zappa
Yellow Dog Blues - Johnny Maddox
Yellow Bird - The Mills Brothers
The Yellow Rose of Texas - Mitch Miller
Mellow Yellow - Donovan
Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini - Brian Hyland
Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree - Dawn featuring Tony Orlando
18 Yellow Roses - Bobby Darin
Old Yellow Moon - Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell
The Moon Was Yellow - Frank Sinatra with Nelson Riddle & His Orchestra

Saturday, December 27, 2014

An Obscure Conqueror of Fame

Tara Murtha’s contribution to Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 series on classic albums, Ode to Billie Joe, is something of a sleight of hand. The monograph devotes only three pages to the titular LP. Instead, the primary focus is on the few known facts about Bobbie Gentry prior to her spectacular rise to international fame in 1967, the disputed authorship of “Ode to Billie Joe,” and Gentry’s reclusive life beginning about 1980. Happily, Murtha’s monograph demonstrates the value of impeccable research. The book’s fundamental thesis, how a young woman originally from Mississippi named Roberta Lee Streeter reinvented herself as Bobbie Gentry, is a fascinating read. Although she created an image of herself as a girl from the Mississippi Delta, a regional singer who emerged “out of a swamp fog” suddenly to appear on television (p. 5), Gentry in fact spent most of her life in Southern California, moving there in the mid 1950s at age 13. We are set up to expect an answer to the question, “Where is Bobbie Gentry?”, but we never get it. There is no final revelation, no answer to the question, because Bobbie Gentry has chosen to remain silent. She emerged from the fog, as it were, and then stepped back into it. For despite Murtha’s extensive and impressive research, Bobbie Gentry remains, to quote Joseph Conrad, “an obscure conqueror of fame,” a stubbornly inscrutable figure who in fact wrote no classic albums but one classic song. Actually, two classic songs, the other one being “Fancy,” a 1991 hit for Reba McEntire. But since Gentry had largely vanished from pop history by then, and because Gentry’s best album, Fancy (1970), was long out-of-print, McEntire effectively took possession of the song. Now 72 (Murtha points out that Gentry was born in 1942, not 1944 as is widely published), Gentry spent about fourteen years of her life as a star before retreating into obscurity, spending almost exactly the same time in the spotlight as another famous recluse, Greta Garbo.

But Garbo remained childless; Gentry did not. Murtha reports that Gentry married singer/comedian Jim Stafford on 15 October 1978. The next year, a son, Tyler, was born to them, and shortly after that, the marriage (her third) broke up. “In 1980,” Murtha writes, “Gentry was a 38-year-old single mother” (p. 125). If one were to venture reasons for Gentry’s decision to end her career, a rather obvious reason is the birth of her son: the end of her career coincides with the birth of her son. Another possible reason is that Las Vegas, where she entertained for most of the 1970s, lost its allure due to the death of Elvis in 1977 (Gentry became friends with Elvis in the 70s and also performed as “the female Elvis” as part of her stage show). As an artist she may have said all she wished to say, and decided, given the circumstances, it was time to move on.

Murtha’s book raises some practical and theoretical questions about the process of canonization, as well as the future direction of the 33 1/3 series that I’d like, briefly, to sketch out:

The practical question is whether the 33 1/3 series will, in the future, publish books on an artist largely famous for one song. With the exception of “Fancy,” Gentry’s subsequent albums included more and more cover versions, rendering them less significant achievements. As I mentioned earlier, the book is something of a sleight of hand, because it’s not about the album, Ode to Billie Joe, per se, but about an enigmatic artist and her one justly famous song (with a brief chapter devoted to the film inspired by it). While you can’t criticize a book for what it didn’t set out to do, one profitable direction might have been the intertextual linkage, pointed out by Greil Marcus, that “Ode to Billie Joe” has with “Long Black Veil”: “The singer [of 'Ode to Billie Joe'] is like the woman who walks the hills in 'Long Black Veil': she knows why Billie Joe went to his death, she knows what they threw into the black water, but . . . she [will] not tell . . . .” (The Old, Weird America, p. 141). The songs are different in that in “Long Black Veil” the dead narrator reveals the crime for which he was found guilty, but most importantly, both songs share the idea of the guilty secret. I mention this only to point out that if you wish to unpack an enigmatic song, intertextual analysis is essential. Murtha does acknowledge, however, the answer song to “Ode to Billie Joe,” Bob Dylan and the Band’s “Answer to ‘Ode’,” released as “Clothesline Saga” on the official Basement Tapes (1975). (See the chapter, “Kill Devil Hills,” in Marcus’s The Old, Weird America.)

Theoretically speaking, the book makes explicit an observation made by Robert Christgau over a decade ago, that the idea of a rock canon is “a complete absurdity.” It has never been completely clear whether at its inception the 33 1/3 book series set out to publish critical analyses of canonical rock albums, or (more likely, in retrospect) sought to engage in journalistic canonization. In any case, the economics of the publishing industry have dictated the series become more democratic in its selection process, publishing studies of albums that are cult classics (Spiderland), are critically acclaimed commercial failures (Song Cycle), and are commercially successful contemporary works (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy). I should add that while economics has a good to deal with it, the title selection also reveals how we live in an age of aphorisms (statements of personal taste) rather than one of axioms (universally accepted truths that are potentially falsifiable). Hence in every instance the author reveals the reasons behind his or her personal attachment to the album under discussion, meaning the author is also a fan as well as a critic. I suspect the series will continue to rely on critical approaches based on the principles of race-, sex-, and gender-based criticism initially developed in the 1970s, but will also rely on Bakhtinian aesthetics (the artifice of social life, the public persona as an invention) in order to rehabilitate the reputation of neglected works and artists, Bobbie Gentry being a perfect illustration.

Still, I admire Tara Murtha’s book and welcome it as an important addition to the series.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Dolan - Dolan - Carless (Hard Meat)


Five years ago, in December 2009, I posted a blog, The Importance of the Name, on Hard Meat, a British trio that released two albums on Warner Bros. in 1970 and then vanished. Recently, Michael Gray, the former manager of the band Big Front Yard featuring the Dolan brothers, kindly wrote to me and provided information on the fate of the Dolan brothers, whom he knew very well. I thank Mr. Gray, author of several important books on Bob Dylan, for taking the time to write. Please visit his blog, www.michaelgray.net.

Here is Mr. Gray's report:

You asked for more information on Hard Meat. On drummer Mick Carless, I have no information, but in their post-Hard Meat days I knew Mike and Steve Dolan very well, so I can tell you a bit about them. Mike Dolan died on August 2nd, 2014, from brain cancer, after having survived the throat cancer he had fought against a few years earlier. Steve, the younger brother, died on May 22, 2000.

I met the Dolans in 1973 when we all lived in West Malvern, Worcestershire. They played a few local gigs with a changing assortment of other local musicians; I met them by going to one or two of these gigs.

At some point in 1974 they became Big Front Yard (another bad name? – anyway, taken from a SF short story Mike admired) and I became their manager. They got nowhere.

When exactly they became Big Front Yard I’m not sure, but it only became a fixture after Mike and Sue went to London, supposedly for a week, while he rehearsed with, and joined, a group named Forsyth… and came home a few days later, Forsyth having broken up. They paid Mike off with £30. This was in March 1974.

£30 was about the amount Big Front Yard were being paid for some of their gigs: £30 to be shared between the band, roadie Phil, me and the petrol. They played gigs all around the Birmingham area in the mid-1970s. It was that weary period punk soon abolished, when groups had to be fine musicians with loads of heavy-maintenance equipment and one gas-guzzling old van after another to transport all that gear and themselves, just to be able to play in a pub for next to nothing.

Mike was the leader of the group, lead guitarist and lead vocalist. He lived down a winding hill just outside West Malvern, in a cottage that had once been a country pub and was still called The Bell, with his wife Sue (whose sister lived in the Napa Valley in California) and Jesse, their very Just-William little boy. (Sue and Jesse both live in California now.) The others in the group all lived around town.

The first drummer, I believe, was Alan Mennie, always known as Min, and he was older. If he’s still alive, he’ll be 73 now. My then-wife and I had a house on a hill, with two stories at the front but four at the back, and these extra layers were flats we rented out. In 1974 Min and girlfriend Dot had one of them. Min and I played chess together from time to time. I can’t remember when Min quit the group, but it must have been at some point soon after February 1975, when he was playing on the recording session they did at Birmingham’s commercial radio station BRMB (which are on YouTube). Min gets credits on albums by King Crimson and Pete Sinfield, and was always somewhat jazz-oriented. Many years later – in the early 1990s – he and Dot co-owned a house in a little village in Turkey with Mike Dolan and his girlfriend Glenn, and I remember calling in there once and seeing Mike emerging from the sea with his surfboard, looking far healthier than he’d ever looked in the 1970s of his youth.

Min seems to have disappeared without trace now, along with Dot and the son they had called Jamie. We’ve googled till we’re blue in the face but cannot find them.

There were a couple of drummers after Min – one whose name I’ve forgotten and one called Keith Baker, who was a local postman, and who in 1976 also became a tenant of a flat at our house. At one point early on, the band also included an organ player, and he’s to be heard to good effect on "Mad John’s Dream," the B-side of their one single. The A-side was "Money-Go-Round," a Dolan composition. It was recorded in a nearby barn, and issued on Rampant Records, a label formed by my then-wife and I specially to release their record. At some point around the end of 1974 they added a second guitarist, Sam Sun (Keith Sampson, I think), who is on the BRMB sessions and the single and was a long-time stalwart of their gigs. He’s dead now too. I believe he killed himself.

Live and on record, Big Front Yard sounded pretty much like Hard Meat – which, impressively, the Dolans rarely mentioned in BFY days. Big Front Yard played a couple of London gigs (Newlands Tavern, Peckham, Feb 19, 1975: fee £20) they hoped A & R men would come to, but nothing. They sent a demo cassette to John Peel. Nothing.

Mike also had a little home studio at The Bell, and there produced, and played guitar on, a couple of tracks by childhood friend of mine, Peter Harrison – whose splendidly politically incorrect stage name was Huge Black Gussie Watson – which I have on a home-made CD. Peter died in 2007. Steve played bass on an unissued track by Edwin Dude which I produced in 1981 and have yet to give up on…

I last spoke to Mike on the telephone when he was living in Cornwall in another relationship that broke up subsequently. In his last two or three years he spent half his time in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, with his final partner Jackie, and half his time, also with her, in another little village house in Turkey, having quarreled irretrievably with Min and Dot over their previous shared Turkey house.

Yours sincerely,
Michael Gray
www.michaelgray.net

As Michael Gray indicates, several recordings of Big Front Yard are available on YouTube.