Punk It Up

On this day in 1977 The Clash released their first album (pictured). Hence it is somewhat serendipitous that Malcolm McLaren died today, at age 64, of cancer, on the thirty-third anniversary of the release of this revered British “punk” album—not an album, of course, by the famous band McLaren packaged, The Sex Pistols, but a band that represented the British punk movement nonetheless. When McLaren was sued for “appropriating” others’ music to make his own album, Duck Rock (1983), he said: “All I can say is that accusations of plagiarism don’t bother me. As far as I’m concerned it’s all I’m useful for” (qtd. in Paul Taylor, “The Impresarios of Do-It-Yourself,” in Impresario: Malcolm McLaren and the British New Wave, p. 16). McLaren’s old adversary, John Lydon (no doubt deliberately adopting his former stage name for the occasion), posted on his website today the statement, “For me Malc was always entertaining, and I hope you remember that. Above all else he was an entertainer and I will miss him, and so should you.” The L. A. Times obituary is available here.

Domestication

Today I screened for my students Elvis ’56, a documentary about Elvis’s emergence as a national figure in 1956. While I was aware of how quickly Elvis became a controversial figure, I hadn’t realized until watching the film today how swiftly Elvis was domesticated, by which I mean how swiftly his “wildness” was controlled, overcome, tamed, made tractable, “hemmed in.” Humiliation was a key strategy in Elvis’s domestication, as revealed when, properly attired in a nicely-fitted tuxedo, he sang “Hound Dog” to a basset hound on The Steve Allen Show on 1 July 1956. It was Jacques Ellul who introduced the concept of the “propaganda of integration” in his book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. By integrative propaganda, Ellul means the sort of propaganda that promotes acceptance of the status quo, conformity, and passivity, and by the use of the word domestication in this context I mean to invoke the idea of integrative propaganda, that is, made to conform and the diminishment of a threat. Elvis’s national humiliation—being required to sing “Hound Dog” to a dog on the nationally-televised Steve Allen Show on 1 July—took place a mere five months and three days after his first appearance—his first exposure to a national audience—on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show on 28 January. It is often claimed that Elvis’s crucial period took place from January 1956 through September 1958 (not even three years), but arguably it was a much shorter period than is commonly understood. According to Elvis.com, Elvis appeared on American national television in 1956 on the following dates. His performance of the ballad, “Love Me Tender,” and the gospel tune, “Peace in the Valley,” represent further stages of his domestication, the final step being his military career. After the following dates, he would appear on television just three more times during his lifetime.

·      1.28 Stage Show

·      2.4 Stage Show

·      2.11 Stage Show

·      2.18 Stage Show

·      3.17 Stage Show

·      3.24 Stage Show

·      4.3 Milton Berle Show

·      6.5 Milton Berle Show

·      7.1 Steve Allen Show

·      9.9 Ed Sullivan Show (“Love Me Tender”)

·      10.28 Ed Sullivan Show

·      1.6.57 Ed Sullivan Show (“Peace in the Valley”)

Elvis On Tour . . . At Last!

I suspect many Elvis fans are delighted with today’s eagerly-awaited announcement by Warner Home Video that it has finally scheduled the release of Elvis on Tour, the award-winning documentary that followed Elvis on a tour of the United States in 1972. The much-anticipated documentary, long OOP on VHS and laser disc, will debut on August 3 in newly-restored and remastered Blu-ray and DVD versions. Happily, WHV is issuing the film in digital format as part of its 75th birthday celebration of the King. Elvis on Tour is considered to be Presley's last film before his death in 1977, and was described by Variety in its review as “a bright, entertaining pop music documentary detailing episodes in the later professional life of Elvis Presley . . . .” Written and directed by Robert Abel and Pierre Adidge, Sam Peckinpah fans should note that the film's cinematographer was Lucien Ballard (The Wild Bunch). Songs include “Proud Mary,” “Burning Love,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Hound Dog,” “Can't Help Falling in Love with You,” “Love Me Tender,” “All Shook Up,” “Suspicious Minds,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” among others. Warner has also indicated that Martin Scorsese is participating the creation of one of the disc's supplements. According the WHV press release, the highlights of the BD and DVD versions are as follows:

• Remastered in High Definition with 16 x 9 2.40 letterboxed image, as seen in the theatrical release.
• Blu-ray audio will be DTS-HD Master Audio (5.1 Surround); DVD audio will be Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround.
• Packaged as a Blu-ray book filled with Elvis photos, quotes, trivia, a tour itinerary, set lists, costumes, and background information about the filming techniques used.
• 25 musical numbers spotlight Elvis Presley’s talent, range and showmanship in captivating on-stage performances and intimate backstage rehearsals with his band.
• Contains Elvis’ first performance of “Burning Love,” which was so new, Elvis referred to the lyric sheet during his performance.
• Elvis’ Ed Sullivan Show performance is included, in which the charm, personality and musical ability that made him an icon is so evident.
• Montage sequences (supervised by Martin Scorsese) showcasing Elvis’ early career and movies.

Rock Pile

As a consequence of writing my previous blog entry on The T.A.M.I. Show (1964) a couple of days ago, I’ve been preoccupied by various issues raised by the so-called “rock ‘n’ roll film,” hardly the most promising of film genres upon which to base theoretical arguments. In my previous post, I argued that it’s a stretch to view The T.A.M.I. Show as anything but a long, American Bandstand-like episode put on film (it was actually filmed on video and then transferred to film), and that aesthetically speaking it shares more with the TV variety show than the rock documentary pioneered by D. A. Pennebaker and others with films such as Monterey Pop (1968). I observed that what we typically refer to as the “rock documentary” is defined as much by the technology used to record the event as it is by its cinéma vérité style, but I think now this observation is incorrect, for the style is actually dictated by the technology, not the other way around. In the same way the heavy, ponderous video cameras demanded the studio-bound setting used for the filming of The T.A.M.I. Show, the lightweight, portable hand-held 16mm cameras used by Pennebaker and crew to record Monterey Pop encouraged the freewheeling approach to the rock concert typical of documentaries in general. The time restriction of the film roll in each camera required the use of multiple cameras, because the amount of film contained in an individual camera could not record the complete performance of an individual musician or band. The use of low angles and extreme close-ups was enabled because the lightweight camera allowed the camera operator to move easily about the stage, crouching down when necessary for the proper angle. In the same way early Hollywood musicals often employed the features of a Broadway theatrical revue, early rock ‘n’ roll movies employed the jukebox formula used in youth-oriented television programs such as American Bandstand. The other night while watching the rock film featuring Alan Freed, Rock, Rock, Rock (1956)—I’d never seen it before—I was struck by the way the narrative (as utterly banal and inconsequential as it is) was interrupted (stopped) in order for the Tuesday Weld character to sit down and watch TV, on which were appearing several rock acts introduced by DJ Alan Freed. I wonder if it is for this reason so many of the early rock films have dated badly, not only because of the déclassé musical forms (e.g., doo-wop) featured in them, but the unimaginative aesthetics that governed their production. In the case of Rock, Rock, Rock, the banal, unambitious narrative, concerning the teenage Tuesday Weld character’s desire to earn enough money to buy a dress for a school dance, is also another reason these early films hold so little interest except of a historical nature. Even the power of nostalgia, which typically overvaluates the past, can scarcely redeem a film such as this one.

The T.A.M.I. Show

I finally managed to sit down and watch Shout! Factory’s DVD issue of The T.A.M.I. Show (1964, 112m 25s), which received a heavily-hyped release earlier this month. Considered a legendary rock ‘n’ roll concert film, this is the movie’s first release on DVD, and in fact the film’s first issue on home video ever, although parts of the film were cut together with its follow-up, 1966’s The Big T.N.T. Show, for a VHS issue in 1984 titled That Was Rock. The back cover blurb on the DVD says The T.A.M.I. Show was filmed “just eight months after The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show”—true, but also misleading, because more significantly, it was filmed slightly over two months after the U. S. release of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (released on 11 August 1964), still doing great boffo when The T.A.M.I. Show (an acronym for “Teenage Awards Music International”) was being filmed in late October at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Moreover, considering the kind of libidinal excitement The Beatles could generate during a live performance, a “live concert” film was ripe for exploitation. Given the road-to-discovery-and-fame plots of previous films featuring rock stars, such as Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Don’t Knock the Rock (1956), they could only feature two or three acts: the latter movie, for instance, had featured Bill Haley and His Comets, Little Richard, and a couple of lesser-known acts, The Treniers and Dave Appell and the Applejacks. In contrast, The T.A.M.I. Show featured twelve different acts, including Lesley Gore, The Rolling Stones, James Brown and The Famous Flames, Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, The Supremes, and “British Invasion” acts such as Gerry and the Pacemakers—the latter given an inordinate amount of screen time it seems to me, as was Lesley Gore, but then she was, at least, in terms of the number of hits, the biggest star attraction at the time the film was made.

Filmed in “Electronovision,” the early 60s equivalent of today’s high definition video, the videotape was then transferred to 35mm film. Hence, as David Ehrenstein and Bill Reed suggest in Rock on Film (1982), “there is a case to be made for taking exception to dubbing The T.A.M.I. Show a movie at all. It looks and acts just a [black & white] television special, replete with moderne simplistic décor, chiaroscuro lighting, and a troupe of go-go dancers wildly frugging away on and around background scaffolding a la TV’s Shindig” (77). They are right: given the large, heavy, clunky, and studio-bound cameras used to record the event, The T.A.M.I. Show easily could have been filmed in a television studio (the large, 3,000-member audience would have been lost as a consequence, however). Moreover, according to Don Waller in his interesting and valuable liner notes included in the booklet accompanying the DVD, the featured performers, including dancers, spent two days rehearsing prior to the actual filming. Filmed over two nights, on October 28 and 29, 1964, according to Waller “the footage that makes up [the 112 minutes of] The T.A.M.I. Show was taken exclusively from the second night’s concert, which took five hours to film” (12). Thus for those expecting The T.A.M.I. Show to have the immediacy and spontaneity of the rock documentaries made after, it does not—the Monterey International Pop Festival, held June 1967, filmed by D. A. Pennebaker using lightweight, portable 16mm color cameras equipped to record synchronized sound, was still over two years away. What we typically refer to as the “rock documentary” is defined as much by the technology used to record it as it is by its free-wheeling cinéma vérité style, not usually by the TV variety show aesthetic that governed The T.A.M.I. Show.

Which isn’t to say The T.A.M.I. Show is without charm. Considered in historical terms, and as something other than a nostalgic “time capsule” as it is currently being pitched by Public Television fund-raising campaigns using the DVD as a reward to contributors, the film reveals not only a change in American social consciousness but also the discovery of an emerging, substantial economic market. For one thing, the African American performers featured in the film (primarily from Motown; Memphis’s Stax/Volt goes unrepresented until Monterey Pop, primarily in the figure of Otis Redding) were among the true beneficiaries of Civil Rights Era America. The film’s producers seemed to have intuited the white fascination with blackness, and hence five, or almost half, of the featured acts were black. As a consequence of his justly historic performance in The T.A.M.I. Show, James Brown, for instance, would appear in AIP’s Ski Party, released a few months later, in the summer of 1965. (White envy of blackness would take the form of the Rolling Stones’ reluctance to follow James Brown, although they acquitted themselves pretty well by their performance, perhaps because they did have to follow Brown, and so tried a little harder.) The aforementioned Ehrenstein and Reed, in Rock on Film, believe the most important thing The T.A.M.I. Show revealed was that “rock as mere music (and live performance as just a show) is about to change drastically” (77). In other words, the film shows rock music on the verge of redefining itself: no longer was it to be a consequence of cold calculation and commerce, but also changing social consciousness. For there’s a vast gulf between D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (1968) and The T.A.M.I. Show, a consequence of something other than aesthetics.

The Gospel Elvis

There’s a fine essay by Charles Wolfe, titled “Presley and the Gospel Tradition,” in the now somewhat aged but excellent book edited by Kevin Quain, The Elvis Reader (1992). A typical discussion of Elvis’s music inevitably, and certainly correctly, cites country and blues influences, but as Wolfe points out, “these sources . . . account for only a part of his music” (13). Indeed, it was primarily only the 50s in which Elvis was a rock singer. In the 1960s and 70s, Elvis would surpass his narrow classification as a rock singer and became one of the central figures of American popular music. In my own estimation, From Elvis in Memphis (1969), recorded more than a decade after his first singles for RCA in 1956, is not only one of Elvis’s greatest records, but one of the greatest records of American popular music. But it's not a rock album. Wolfe is no doubt correct when he observes that one of the reasons why the influence of white gospel music on Elvis has been unaccountably neglected is because there is so little research on the subject. He writes (this in 1992, remember):

No one has yet written a serious history of the genre, and most of the information currently available has to be drawn from original research or from various self-serving press releases and fan newspapers. Numerous gospel performers, such as the Blackwood Brothers, the Speer Family, and Jimmy Swaggert, have written “biographies,” and while these are useful to an extent, they are more often than not designed as “inspirational” reading rather than factual accounts. The very term gospel music has become confusing to the average reader; in recent years the term (which originated in white “revivalist” hymns of the 1890s) has been appropriated by scholars to describe black religious singing, though it is still generally used by the public (and the musicians) to refer to white singing. (14)

Elvis’s discography, of course, contains some excellent gospel records, even if those records were never among his biggest sellers. The LP, His Hand in Mine (1960), was the follow-up to the Peace in the Valley EP (1957). How Great Thou Art (1967) appeared a few years later, and the gospel album that won Elvis a second Grammy, He Touched Me, appeared in 1972. Peter Guralnick (Last Train to Memphis) observes that Gladys Presley’s favorite quartet was the Blackwood Brothers; according to Wolfe, the Blackwood Brothers were “the most highly visible and exciting musical group in the Memphis area” before and after Elvis moved to that city (16). Elvis was a fan of the Blackwoods in the years prior to his own rise to fame; he would ask the Blackwood Brothers to sing at his mother’s funeral in 1958. Moreover, during the twenty-one years that Elvis was a national figure, he used three different gospel groups as back-up singers: the Jordanaires (1956-67), who were providing back-up vocals for him when he sang “Peace in the Valley” during his 6 January 1957 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show; the Imperials (1969-71)—they appeared in 1970’s That’s the Way It Is and backed him on 72’s He Touched Me; and J. D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet (1972-77)—Elvis had known J. D. Sumner since he’d joined the Blackwood Brothers after the disastrous plane crash that killed the group’s original bass singer in late June 1954.

Perhaps the more important issue regarding Elvis and gospel music, though, is to identify the precise nature of the genre’s influence. Charles Wolfe argues that the influence “was not in the content of his songs,” but rather “in Presley’s singing style and performing style” (25). I’ve blogged previously about the influence of Dean Martin on Elvis’s vocal style, but Wolfe, citing Jerry Hopkins’ Elvis: A Biography, argues for recognition of the important influence of Jake Hess of the Statesmen Quartet. Hopkins cites Johnny Rivers, who revealingly said, “If you’ll listen to some of their [the Statesmen Quartet’s] recordings, you’ll hear some of that style that is now Elvis Presley’s style, especially in his ballad singing style. He was playing some of their records one day and he said, ‘Now you know where I got my style from. Caught—a hundred million records too late.’ It was really funny. I think he idolized Jake. Jake and the Statesmen and the Blackwoods” (qtd. in Wolfe 26).

I’m not entirely happy with the following juxtapositions, but this video, identified as being from a 1950s airing of the Nabisco TV show, contains a lively performance by the Statesmen (with Jake Hess in the lead), singing “Move That Mountain,” a song Elvis would have certainly liked. This second video is Elvis singing “By And By,” a song in the same vein. In the years since Wolfe published his article, more emphasis has been placed on Elvis’s gospel recordings, such as the He Touched Me set, available here. In any case, I strongly recommend Charles Wolfe's fine article to anyone interested in this dimension of Elvis’s music.