The Mellotron

The Mellotron, a keyboard instrument that was featured in early psychedelic music and later became an essential fixture of “Progressive” bands, was made possible by one of the spoils of World War II—electromagnetic tape. As Michael Jarrett notes in Sound Tracks (1998), "When U.S. troops invaded Radio Luxembourg, they "liberated" a tape machine and shipped it to the Ampex Corporation; further development was financed by Bing Crosby" (214). Technically considered, the Mellotron is a polyphonic, sample-playback keyboard system, the basis of which is a large bank of pre-loaded electromagnetic audio tapes, each of which consists of a pre-recorded sound. Each of the several magnetic tapes has roughly eight seconds of playing time: early user manuals strongly recommended that no key should be held for more than ten seconds. Playback heads underneath each of the keys allowed for the playing of the pre-recorded sounds, hence the reason it is considered a "sample-playback" system. Early Mellotron models, the MK-I and the MK-II, contained two keyboards set side-by-side: the right keyboard consisted of various selectable "instrumental" sounds (e.g., strings, flutes, various brass instruments), while the left keyboard consisted of rhythm tracks. The first Mellotrons--intended for the home, not for the arduous rock concert circuit--were made in Birmingham, England (although the prototype was initially developed in the United States), the reason why the earliest uses of the instrument were by British bands. Musician Mike Pinder (pictured above in the foreground, with the Moody Blues, playing a Mellotron MK-II) worked for Streetly Electronics, the company that manufactured the Mellotron, for about a year and half before joining the Moody Blues in 1967; he and the band are largely responsible for popularizing the Mellotron in popular music. Like the Moog synthesizer, also an electronic instrument, the Mellotron underwent development and refinement. The years of manufacture of the various models of the Mellotron are as follows:

Mellotron Mark-I (1962-63)
Mellotron Mark-II (1964-67)
M-300 (1968-70)
M-400 (1970-86)

The M-400 model, first sold in 1970, become part of the signature sound of the so-called “Progressive” bands of the 1970s. This model included tape banks that could be removed with relative ease and loaded with banks containing different sounds, including percussion loops, sound effects, and other noises. Hence, like pop music itself, the Mellotron is a consequence of electromagnetic tape.

Ten representative rock songs featuring the Mellotron, 1967-1973:

1. The Beatles - “Strawberry Fields Forever” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
2. The Moody Blues - “Nights in White Satin” Days of Future Passed (1967)
3. The Rolling Stones - “2000 Light Years From Home” Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967)
4. The Zombies - “Brief Candles” Odessey & Oracle (1968)
5. Cream - “Badge” Goodbye (1969)
6. David Bowie - “Space Oddity” Space Oddity (1969)
7. King Crimson - “Epitaph” In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)
8. Genesis - “Watcher of the Skies” Foxtrot (1972)
9. Lynyrd Skynyrd - “Tuesday’s Gone” pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd (1973)
10. John Lennon - “Mind Games” Mind Games (1973)

For those interested, a short demonstration from the mid-60s of the Mellotron MK-II, can be found here, while an interesting history of the Mellotron, by Mike Pinder of the Moody Blues, can be found here.

Cheap Thrills and the Wonderful Undead

Previously, in my blog entries of May 16, May 31, and July 1 I have discussed my experiment of trying to listen to all the rock and R&B albums released in the calendar year 1968 in the order in which they were released. I'll refer readers to my earlier blog entries for the explanation for such an unusual project (and all the pitfalls inherent in such an ongoing activity). Since I've already assembled it, I've gone ahead and posted August’s listening schedule. As I’ve stated many times before, I cannot claim my list is infallible, but I continue to work on it and to try and improve it. What I've discovered is that there were many albums released during the months of July and August 1968--more so in terms of numbers of releases in a single month than in any previous month--so as you can see, August’s list is rather long (assuming the information I've come across is accurate). Here's the dozen albums I have put together for August 1968:

The Beach Boys, Stack-O-Tracks
The Bee Gees, Idea
Blue Cheer, Outsideinside
Country Joe & the Fish, Together
Donovan, In Concert
The Everly Brothers, Roots
The 5th Dimension, Stoned Soul Picnic
Fleetwood Mac, Mr. Wonderful
Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, You're All I Need
The Grateful Dead, [Two From the Vault] [8/23-24] [1992]
Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Cheap Thrills
Jeff Beck, Truth
Ten Years After, Undead

The Great Lost Albums: One

I suspect I’m like most people who, faced with a long road trip, grab a stack of CDs to take along with them in the car. (I've never adopted the habit of taking my iPod; if I listen to an album, I have to first hold the actual material artifact in my hand, a habit acquired from the vinyl LP days, no doubt.) Listening to them in the solitary isolation of the car allows me to focus exclusively on the music, when I'm free of annoying distractions (Roland Barthes observed in Sade/Fourier/Loyola that pleasure is heightened through hermetic isolation, the sealing off of the outside world, which is how a libertine such as Sade can co-exist in a study along with an ascetic such as Loyola). Thus, in preparation for my trip this weekend, I selected five CDs from this month’s listening schedule (see my list of July 1968 albums)—and, at the last minute, a sixth, John Simon’s Album (released ca. February 1970), which has been available on CD for a couple of years now. I purchased the album on CD three or four months ago, but for various reasons I hadn't had the opportunity to listen to it. So, along with a few of the July 1968 albums, I took along John Simon’s Album (39:39), planning to listen to it if time permitted. I had every intention of listening to the Moody Blues’ In Search of the Lost Chord (released forty years ago this week), but I never made my way to it. Instead, I put on the John Simon album, and I’m really glad I did. I liked it so much I never got past it, playing it over and over--so much for In Search of the Lost Chord, unfortunately.

Let me say that I have known about the first solo album by John Simon for thirty-eight years, having learned about it, way back when, through a Warner Brothers Records sampler, one of those various artists anthologies WB started releasing in the late 1960s in order to promote and advertise the pop and rock artists then recording on the Warner Brothers/Reprise label. I first got hooked on WB samplers through a record titled October 10, 1969 (which I purchased for the sum of $1 via mail order), and subsequently started picking up the other samplers then available. If my memory serves, WB Records issued the 3-LP sampler box Looney Tunes - Merry Melodies (3 records for $3) in February or March 1971, which included, on Side 2, John Simon’s “The Song of the Elves” (his picture from the booklet included with that 3-LP set is reproduced above). I very much liked "The Song of the Elves"--Robert Christgau says it is the best song on the album--rightly saying that it is about elves who (falsely) imagine they are very tall, but gives the record a mere “B+”--and had I ever run across the album in the record stores, I most certainly would have bought it. I never did, because I never saw it--it went virtually ignored at the time, and no doubt vanished rather quickly. But recently, when I made the startling discovery that the album was available on CD, I immediately snapped it up. But I hadn’t listened to it . . . until this weekend.

There are many "great lost albums" in the history of rock music--the Beach Boys' Smile, say, or Big Star's #1 Record, for instance, this not including those "lost" records that were never recorded, such as the album Buddy Holly might have made had he heard the Beatles--and John Simon's Album is most certainly one of them. It is an utterly amazing, unaccountably neglected but grand record, an essential piece of Americana. It belongs in the constellation that would include the pre-World World II, pre-Swing Era music favored by Randy Newman, The Band (one of the songs on the album, “Davey’s On The Road Again," was co-written with Robbie Robertson; Simon produced Music From Big Pink and its follow-up, 1969's The Band) and Allen Toussaint (think of Toussaint's, not Glen Campbell's, haunting, evocative, "Southern Nights." Not surprisingly, both Allen Toussaint and John Simon were involved in the Band's landmark 1978 film, The Last Waltz.) As Mark Keresman observes in the CD's liner notes, John Simon's music "does not 'sound like' The Band; rather, it is like The Band," meaning it is a sophisticated amalgam of blues, R&B, country, turn-of-the-century pop music, and, on John Simon's Album, ragtime and early New Orleans jazz. Given his highly successful history as an album producer (in 1968 alone, he produced most of Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends; Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills (albeit unacknowledged), Blood, Sweat, and Tears's Child is Father to the Man; the Band's aforementioned Music From Big Pink; Leonard Cohen's first album; others), he was able to assemble a remarkable group of musicians: Leon Russell and Eddie Hinton on guitar; Alice deBuhr and Jean Millington (Fanny); Harvey Brooks (The Electric Flag); Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson (The Band); John Hall and Wells Kelly (later in Orleans); legendary jazz sessionmen Richard Davis and Grady Tate; Jim Gordon, Bobby Whitlock, and Carl Radle (all three later members of Derek and the Dominos); Delaney Bramlett; and others.

As history would have it, John Simon's Album was released by Warner Brothers within the same three/four month period which saw some albums released strongly favored and endorsed by the critical establishment: Van Morrison's Moondance, James Taylor's Sweet Baby James, and The Small Faces' The First Step. Were these records the reason it went (popularly) ignored at the time? No, but with the rather uninspired title, the fact that John Simon was better known as a producer (assuming he was "known" at all), and the fact that the critical spotlight was focused elsewhere, the album, alas, sank like a stone. It is one of the virtues of the CD Era that great "lost" albums such as this have been rescued from oblivion.

How to explain the "lost" records that fell through the cracks (without succumbing to what Robert Ray calls "the myth of the avant-garde," that is, that the initial neglect and failure of a record suggests its brilliance?) It is true that popular music, rather like the Darwinian "state of nature," is a hopelessly over-crowded, over-populated field, but can that explanation alone account for why a great album virtually ignored upon its release? Yes . . . in the sense that at any given time there are many, many albums out there, and some are bound to be overlooked because of sheer numbers. No . . . in the sense that some records are, frankly, "harder to sell" than others, more difficult to assimilate--the problem of the avant-garde. Remember that singer-songwriters immersed in Americana, such as Randy Newman, achieved some degree of success because his songs were successfully merged with the mainstream, meaning they were interpreted by others: the Three Dog Night had a big hit with "Mama (Told Me Not to Come)," for instance, and Harry Nilsson did an entire album of Newman covers (Nilsson Sings Newman, 1970). Of course, John Simon wasn't as prolific a songwriter as Randy Newman, it is true, perhaps another reason John Simon's Album is one of those "lost" records. On the other hand, despite its strong critical endorsement, and lingering reputation, Randy Newman's 12 Songs (1970) has never earned massive popular acclaim, in the sense of sales.

But no matter: John Simon's Album has earned the endorsement of Time, reminding us that greatness is not merely sales, but durability. It's that sense of durability that allowed me, finally, to hear it. I'm very sorry, John Simon, to be so late (the critic's worst nightmare): it took me 38 years to find it, but I finally did, and it is remarkable.

Psychodramas and Traumas

The decades-old debate over the meaning of The Association’s first big hit, “Along Comes Mary,” is due to the basic slipperiness of its lyrics. Who, or what, is “Mary”? A standard interpretation is that “Mary” is short for “Mary Jane,” a coded reference to marijuana. If so, there’s nothing regarding that particular drug, lyrically speaking, that makes it the least bit desirable or attractive (“does she want to see the stains the dead remains of all the pains/She left the night before”). Indeed, if Mary were a female character in a movie, she’d be a femme fatale. I reproduce below what I believe to be the accurate set of lyrics:

Every time I think that I’m the only one who’s lonely
Someone calls on me
And every now and then I spend my time in rhyme and verse
And curse those faults in me

And then along comes Mary
And does she want to give me kicks and be my steady chick
And give me pick of memories
Or maybe rather gather tales of all the trials and tribulations
No one ever sees

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

When vague desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks
Whose sickness is the games they play
And when the masquerade is played and neighbor folks make jokes
As who is most to blame today

And then along comes Mary
And does she want to set them free and let them see reality
From where she got her name
And will they struggle much when told that such a tender touch as hers
Will make them not the same

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

And when the morning of the warning’s passed, the gassed
And flaccid kids are flung across the stars
The psychodramas and the traumas gone
The songs are left unsung and hung upon the scars

And then along comes Mary
And does she want to see the stains the dead remains of all the pains
She left the night before
Or will their waking eyes reflect the lies and make them
Realize their urgent cry for sight no more

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

While “Along Comes Mary” is more redolent of meaning than it is explicitly meaningful, I think the proper noun “Mary” functions as an empty signifier, a placeholder in the phrase, “And then along comes ________, meaning the next “craze,” the next fad, the next “Big Thing"--the latest way to get your "kicks." As a signifier, it substitutes for any popular social or cultural practice that promises individuals a transcendent experience (“And does she want to set them free and let them see reality/ From where she got her name”), but one that is ultimately empty and without value ("Will their waking eyes reflect the lies and make them/Realize their urgent cry for sight no more"). In this sense, “Mary” may not be necessarily short for “Mary Jane” (although perhaps intended to invoke it), but might represent the drug culture’s endorsement of LSD as the preferred drug of choice: “sweet as the punch” is perhaps an oblique reference to LSD-laced sugar cubes or Kool-Aid. “My empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch” strikes me as another way of saying, “I’ve got plenty of nothing" (if the line said, "My cup tastes as sweet as the punch" it would mean something else entirely. The fact that the cup is empty makes all the difference.) The irony is that the song is often perceived as advocating drug use (at least marijuana use), but in fact it would seem to be doing just the opposite, a song that was reactionary in nature, one that, at the time, would now be called an “anti-drug” song. “And does she want to set them free and let them see reality/ From where she got her name”: one wonders whether there might be a subtle joke embedded in this lyric. Is "her name" . . . dope?

Thanks to fred for his welcome correction to my original set of lyrics (see comment).

Iconicity

Bent Sørensen of Aalberg University (Denmark) left a comment in connection with my blog entry yesterday on Susan Atkins. I encourage everyone to read the complete text of his post, but I must say I was struck by his speculation, “One wonders whether she [Atkins] does not continue after all these years to be a victim, first of Manson’s manipulations, now of the continued hatred and fear of this dark American icon.” Actually, the same thought had occurred to me as one of the reasons why a virtually helpless woman would not be released from prison simply in order to die, but I chose not to include it in yesterday’s blog, so I thank Bent for giving expression to the idea. As familiar an icon in American popular culture as Darth Vader and Nazi SS troopers, Charles Manson (whose stylized icon is pictured) has become a conventional symbol of evil (perhaps as well-known as the image of the Devil with horns and tail), even by those who know next to nothing about him or the crimes for which he is infamous. (If you don't think so, click the link to the Los Angeles Times news article I made available on yesterday's blog and look closely at the nature of the responses and comments to Susan Atkins' petition for compassionate release.)

I encourage those interested to read Bent's fascinating discussion of Charles Manson as an icon of transgression, which is available on his lectures page at his university website. I've also included a link on the list on the right to Bent's Rarerarefind blogspot.

The Quality of Mercy

Those who follow my blog will remember that this past May, in a series of entries, I followed the forensic excavation that took place at the Barker Ranch in Death Valley, California, where Charles Manson and his followers purportedly buried up to three murder victims in 1968 or 1969 (no bodies were found). The latest development in the ongoing Manson saga occurred yesterday, in Sacramento, where the parole board heard the plea for compassionate release for terminally ill former Manson family member Susan Atkins. The 12-member California Board of Parole voted unanimously to deny her request for compassionate release, which would have allowed her to die outside of prison. With the petition denied, the process that would have allowed her to do that is over, meaning that she will surely die behind bars, in what doctors say will be the next few months.

Surely it is well known that Atkins (now 60) played a central role in the Tate-LaBianca murders in a violent two-night rampage in the Los Angeles area in August 1969. Convicted of murder, she has served 37 years in prison. Now ill with brain cancer, with one leg amputated and the other paralyzed, doctors report Atkins has only a few months to live. According to an article posted on the Los Angeles Times website yesterday,

The initial request for release consideration was made by doctors and prison officials after it was determined that Atkins had less than six months to live. Officials at her prison in Chino approved her release, as did officials at corrections headquarters in Sacramento. “She can't care for herself, she can’t feed herself or even sit up in bed by herself,” said her attorney, Eric P. Lampel. In addition to the cancer, Atkins had her leg amputated. “The reality is, even if she gets this compassionate release, she won’t leave her hospital room.”

The reports indicate that Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (and author of Helter Skelter) supported Atkins' release largely because of her failing health. According to yesterday’s report,

In an e-mail to Atkins’ attorney in support of her release, he [Bugliosi] wrote that the notion that “just because Susan Atkins showed no mercy to her victims, we therefore are duty-bound to follow her inhumanity and show no mercy to her” was wrong, Bugliosi said.

I strongly agree with Bugliosi: mercy is an essential part of our very humanity. (Perhaps Bugliosi had in mind Nietzsche's insight, that if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.) Vengeance is sweet, but it is not justice. Justice is not the issue here. Justice, in the sense of punishment, already has been enacted by the State. Atkins' petition should ask us not simply to rehearse the heinousness of her crimes: they have been endlessly reiterated in sensation-mongering documentaries and true crime books, so there's little need for me to review them yet again. Rather, her situation requires us to listen to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." If vengeance is sweet, mercy is sweeter, as Portia said in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d [constrained=forced]
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice . . . .
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

As Shakespeare reminds us, when we ourselves ask for mercy, we hope and pray to receive it. Why is it so easy to withhold it from another? Are there those among us so accursed that they are beyond the act of mercy? Is there no shred of humanity in them? To paraphrase Bugliosi: Just because she showed no mercy doesn't require or demand us to act likewise. Moreover, I think Shakespeare anticipates an insight that Dostoevsky made in Crime and Punishment, and one we are well to remember: there is no justice in this world ("in the course of justice, none of us/Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy"). If we all got what we deserved--if we all got what's really coming to us--none of us would be saved. Most certainly this understanding is essential to the Christian message: Christ tempers justice with mercy, and if you don't hold to that, then you're not a Christian. Make no mistake, dear reader: all our sins shall be remembered--yours as well as mine.

Soon, in so many days, she shall be no more. And perhaps you shall imagine, then, that justice has been done. But if you hold any sort of religious belief, then she shall be judged--in a method and manner that you and I cannot conceive: the wind bloweth where it listeth. The act of grace is beyond you and me. But mercy is not, and that's the real issue: these events reflect on you, the disposition of your own self, not on one who has already inherited the accursed share.