Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

And so Nobel laureate Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, one of the great figures of Russian literature, primarily known in the West as a chronicler of Communist atrocities in Russia, died Sunday at the age of 89. That he lived to such an old age is remarkable considering his unusual life, marked with cancer, prison, labor camps, exile, controversy, and, frequently, condemnation. Deported from Russia in 1974 for his insistent criticism of the Soviet government, and subsequently stripped of his Soviet citizenship, Solzhenitsyn lived first in West Germany and then, for a short time, in Switzerland. Eventually he was invited to the United States under the auspices of Stanford University, which enthusiastically vowed to allow him to continue his anti-Soviet writing. He eventually moved to Cavendish, Vermont, where he (ironically, given his years in prison and labor camps) enclosed his property with a fence topped with barbed wire and set up a closed-circuit television system. According to the obituary in the Los Angeles Times, “He once claimed to have made no more than five phone calls from the retreat over 20 years.”

Known in the West for The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes, 1973-78), a scathing indictment of Stalin’s repressive police state, Solzhenitsyn was in fact an excellent novelist, author of novels such as A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), The First Circle (1968), and Cancer Ward (1968). These are all very fine books, concerned with any number of important issues, not simply with (Soviet) politics, but it was his lot—which he apparently came to resent—to be used by the Western media primarily for his functional, propagandistic value as an individual who suffered terribly at the hands of an enemy state--the U.S.S.R. (One of the standard ploys of the propaganda system in the United States is to emphasize the crimes and atrocities of an avowed enemy while minimizing the importance or significance of its own.) While there is no question of Stalin’s brutality—that has been so well documented that I hardly need rehearse it here—Solzhenitsyn’s exclusive value to the United States during the period leading up to the collapse of the Berlin wall was as someone who could document the crimes of a Communist state—too bad, because it diverted attention away from his considerable gifts as a novelist.

Solzhenitsyn enthusiastically returned to Russia in 1994, after spending roughly eighteen years in the United States. He bought a country estate near Moscow—in yet another irony, the retreat once used by Stalinist henchman Lazar Kaganovich—and resumed the reclusive way of life that characterized his years in Vermont. His books on Stalin's gulag were valuable to the West during the years of the Cold War, but it is his novels that now attest to Alexander Solzhenitsyn being one of the great figures of Russian literature, no small feat considering the number of great writers from that country.

Groovy

Although the word “groove” is generally understood as a musical term referring to a song’s rhythm—its groove—the word can refer to a number of issues besides rhythm, among them sex, class, and whether you're "high," that is, on drugs. Although the word is strongly associated with the 1960s—The Young Rascals had a #1 hit in 1967, for instance, with “Groovin’,” and there was also a hit song titled “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)”—the word dates back to the 1930s, if not earlier. A quick search of the word at answers.com indicates that the origin of the word is 1937, but it is highly likely that the word was introduced (first) into jazz vocabulary by Louis Armstrong—who has been credited for coining and popularizing slang words such as “cool,” “cat,” “pops,” and “daddy”—sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s. One can imagine that, for Armstrong, "to be groovy" meant in the mood to make a record (since all records had grooves), or high, since he was admittedly a life-long user of marijuana (referred to as a "joint" in the 60s, marijuana imbibed in the form of a rolled cigarette was, in jazz culture, referred to as a "viper").

The first to be in the groove were African-American jazz musicians, early in the 1930s. They are no longer around to tell us where this groove came from, but scholars have speculated. Maybe it began with that relatively new invention, the phonograph, whose sound came out right when the needle was in the groove; maybe the musicians—virtually all of them men—were creating yet another metaphor for sex.... “The jazz musicians gave no grandstand performances,” wrote an admiring reviewer in 1933, “they simply got a great burn from playing in the groove.”

Apparently the word was defined in 1937 as meaning a “state of mind which is conducive to good playing,” but by the process of metaphorical elaboration, soon most any pleasant or pleasing activity could be “groovy.”

Before long, there were groovy audiences as well as groovy performers, and by the 1940s things in general could be groovy. Love was groovy, skating was groovy, even pitching a no-hit baseball game was groovy.

In the 1950s the word was adopted by the Beats, whose music of choice was jazz; from jazz culture Beat culture borrowed both a vocabulary and a sensibility (for Beat Jack Kerouac, the preferred form of jazz was “bop”). By the mid-60s, the word was adopted by the rock culture, which borrowed a number of styles, including a strong non-conformist posture, from the earlier jazz culture (the Dionysian one descending from Charlie Parker) including drug use, which presumably put you "in the groove," that is, enhanced your musical creativity.

Groovy was in the air everywhere in the hip, laid-back counterculture of the 1960s, when feeling groovy was the ultimate ambition and praise, as well as the title of a hit song. To groove was “to have fun.” “Life as it is really grooves,” declares a fictional letter from a group of groovy young dropouts in a 1969 short story by John Updike.

By the mid to late 1970s, however, “groovy,” as an indication of approbation, had fallen out of favor. “In the groove” could still refer to musical rhythm (or a great sex life), but no one who wanted to be perceived as “cool” dared use the word “groovy.” Hippies were no longer hip, and if you were “feelin’ groovy” it meant you were decidedly un-hip, an anachronism, déclassé. I suspect that no one born, say, after 1970 ever considers using the word "groovy," although it does crop up occasionally, in pastiches of the 1960s (Austin Powers), for instance, or when used by nerdy protagonists (such as Ash in the Evil Dead films).

Videos
The Groove Tube (1974)
Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987)
Army of Darkness (1992)
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)
The Emperor's New Groove (2000)

ElectroComp 101

Electronic Music Laboratories, builder of the ElectroComp Synthesizer Model 101 (or just the EML synthesizer, pictured), started business in 1968, building some simple modular synthesizers the purpose of which was educational: to teach schoolchildren about electronic music. According to Mark Vail’s book Vintage Synthesizers, the first machines—referred to at the time as “black monsters” because they had to have a 200-pound weight requirement in order to discourage students from stealing them—were sponsored by the Department of Education of the State of Connecticut. After undertaking the synth-building venture, however,

The EML founders soon discovered who they were competing with. “Moog was one step ahead of us,” says Murray. “We were following closely at Moog’s heels, but using different techniques. Most of Bob Moog’s early equipment used discrete transistors, which tended to drift. You had to continuously tune the components. We used a slightly different approach: Linear integrated circuits called op amps were becoming feasible for consumer-type equipment at about the time we got involved with this business, so we relied heavily on those to get better performance from our circuitry. We earned a reputation of making equipment that was rock-solid and dependable.” (136)

Apparently the EML synthesizers were quite dependable. According to Allen Ravenstine of Pere Ubu, interviewed by Michael Jarrett,

[The educational synth] had to have certain properties. It had to be very simple, and it had to be virtually indestructible. It also was designed in such a way that, while it had various elements of a synthesizer in it (oscillators that made sine waves, triangle waves, and square waves; filters, high-pass and low-pass; and an enveloper to change timbre), all of these elements had to be in the box—the same box—but none of them should be connected internally.... One of the synthesizers I bought has a serial number of one hundred and something. Whenever I had a question, I’d talk to the guy who built it. I was the first guy that ever tried to use these things in a rock ‘n’ roll environment. I never played the keyboard like a keyboard. I can’t play a tune on a keyboard. I used the keys as triggers. (107)

Some Artists Who Have Used the EML Model 101:
Brian Kehew and Roger Manning, The Moog Cookbook
Tommy Mars and Peter Wolf, with Frank Zappa
Allen Ravenstine, Pere Ubu

Some Representative Recordings:
Pere Ubu:
The Modern Dance (1978)
Dub Housing (1978)
New Picnic Time (1979)
The Art of Walking (1980)
390° of Simulated Stereo (1981)

The Moog Cookbook:
The Moog Cookbook (1996)
Ye Olde Space Band (1997)

Frank Zappa:
Joe's Garage, Acts I, II, & III (1979)

The Ultimate Oldies But Goodies

Back in March, I posted an entry on Art Laboe’s first Oldies But Goodies compilation, issued in the fall of 1959 on Laboe’s Original Sound Record Co. label. Peaking at #12 on 28 September 1959, Oldies But Goodies would remain on the charts—according to The Billboard Book of Top 40 Albums—for a total of 61 weeks, that is, well over a year. I noted that Laboe, by issuing the Oldies But Goodies album, accomplished two culturally significant things: one was that he was the first to historicize rock ‘n’ roll, to lend it the dignity and distinction of a “classic” or “golden” era—the album cover boasts the LP contains “The Original Recordings of the Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Hits Of All Time.” The other was that he altered the cultural consumption of rock 'n' roll music in the sense that he demonstrated compilation albums could sell: think of the sheer number of compilation albums released the past fifty years.

About three weeks after posting that initial blog on the Oldies But Goodies LP, I received an email from Joe Sasfy, who created Time-Life’s 50-album, 1, 100 song, Rock ‘n’ Roll Era series some years ago. As I noted in my subsequent blog, I’m very sure Time-Life’s Rock 'n' Roll Era series is the biggest and biggest-selling oldies series of all time. I reported at the time that Time-Life had just inked a deal with Art Laboe for the purposes of issuing a new, 10-CD collection titled The Ultimate Oldies But Goodies Collection, to be sold primarily as an infomercial. The host of the infomercial was to be Bowzer (stage name of Jon Bauman), former member of the group Sha Na Na.

I’m happy to report that a couple of days ago Joe contacted me regarding The Ultimate Oldies But Goodies Collection, telling me that the infomercial, hosted by Bowzer, is now on the air and that the collection is available at Timelife.com (shipping around the third week of August according to the website). Joe was pleased to report that the infomercial is “hugely entertaining thanks to Bowzer’s ‘charm’ and lots of great vintage footage.” All signs indicate The Ultimate Oldies But Goodies Collection will be a big success, evidence, according to Joe, “that the original audience for 50s rock ‘n’ roll music remains faithful even as the music recedes in pop history.”

I wrote Joe a congratulatory note on the release of the new collection, telling him that the vintage footage used in the infomercial sounds great, and asking him if he’d give some thought to putting together a DVD collection of this material. As someone who’s interested in this vintage footage, I told him there's no easy way to gather together this sort of material: some of it is impossible to get (or extremely expensive should you try), is scattered all over the place, and much of it consists of poor, first or second generation dupes. I asked Joe if it were possible to put together an "Oldies But Goodies Video Collection," but alas, he wrote back telling me that it is very difficult to work through all the licensing issues related to compiling this kind of footage, especially when licensing from different sources. “Sometimes it is feasible—for example, I compiled 8 DVDs of live country performances from Grand Ole Opry TV shows of the 50s, 60s and 70s that is selling very well. We are always trying.” I wrote him back, insisting that a DVD collection would be the ticket, but who knows what success I had persuading him. I’ve found that when I watch infomercials advertising old hits—such as Time-Life's “Flower Power” collection of 60s material hosted by Peter Fonda—I’m always more interested in the video footage included in the presentation, since I already have virtually every song in the collection, on vinyl or CD. My personal view is that DVD compilations are the way to go, but then I don’t have to face the daunting licensing issues Joe speaks about.

At any rate, if you are interested (as I am), Joe tells me the infomercial for The Ultimate Oldies But Goodies Collection will run on CNBC this Saturday (August 2) at 5:30 PM (ET). Apparently Bowzer ends the infomercial with his “Grease For Peace” mantra that he used at the end of every Sha Na Na TV show episode. I’m looking forward to seeing him do that, as I haven’t seen him do so in many years. Come to think about it, Sha Na Na, once an “oldies” act, is now itself an oldies act.

__________

On an entirely different note, I invite everyone to take a look at Bent Sørensen's comment on my previous blog entry, "Automo-bubbling." Bent discusses a paper he's written and about to deliver on the culturally symbolic capital of the American automobile, in particular the Cadillac. Besides taking a look at Bent's sources, I'd also recommend Greil Marcus's essay, "Elvis: Presliad," in Mystery Train, on the meaning of Elvis's pink Cadillac. Additionally, I thank Bent for his ongoing interest in my blog.

Automo-bubbling

According to Ronald Primeau, in his study of the literature of the American highway, Romance of the Road, the “American road genre”—popularly expressed in novels, short stories, poems, songs, movies and video—emerged out of a literary form known as the Bildungsroman, or the novel of education (psychoanalytically considered, a story of “individuation”). The lure of the highway has always been its freedom, the opportunity for the individual “to explore or redefine” himself. Part of the appeal of the road, Primeau argues, is “the road’s carnivalesque disruption of the ordinary,” the opportunity for an individual to seek something “beyond the mundane” (15). Most certainly popular musicians have exploited these promises of the open road, but in America, at least, the technological means of obtaining the highly prized escape from the quotidian or banal was the automobile.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the automobile craze enabled the creation of an entirely new genre of popular song, one extolling the virtues of life on “the open road" but also fetishizing the machine that enabled one to access it. Perhaps the most popular of the early twentieth century songs about the automobile was Billy Murray’s In My Merry Oldsmobile, recorded in 1905. Billy Murray (1877-1954), nicknamed “The Denver Nightingale,” was perhaps the most popular (white) entertainer in America from roughly 1905 to 1920 (supplanted in the 20s by Al Jolson). Considered the foremost interpreter of his era of the songs of George M. Cohan, Murray had huge hits with “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” “The Grand Old Rag,” and “Harrigan” (“H-A-double R-I-G-A-N spells Harrigan, that’s me”). According to Frank W. Hoffmann, in his liner notes to the Billy Murray Anthology: The Denver Nightingale, Recordings 1903-1940, Murray’s 1905 releases of “In My Merry Oldsmobile” and “Everybody Works but Father” “remained in record catalogues for 15 years,” suggesting “they were phenomenal sellers.” Indeed, Billy Murray’s 1910 recording, made with the American Quartet, of “Casey Jones”—not the Grateful Dead’s version, obviously, but prompted by the same famous 1900 railroad crash—may well have been the biggest hit of his career; it is estimated it sold well over two million copies.

So, in a sense, we have Billy Murray to thank for the vast popularity of the “car song,” of which there are no doubt hundreds, perhaps thousands, of instances in American popular music. Although the automobile is widely associated with “cruising” in the 1950s and 60s, even in Billy Murray’s day the automobile was associated with the courtship ritual—so apparently we have him to thank for that motif as well.

Come away with me Lucille
In my merry Oldsmobile
Down the road of life we’ll fly
Automo-bubbling you and I
To the church we’ll swiftly steal
Then our wedding bells will peal
You can go as far you like with me
In my merry Oldsmobile

Although there are numerous rock and pop songs in which cars are mentioned (e.g., explicitly, such as “Baby You Can Drive My Car,” "Little Deuce Coupe," or through synecdochal reduction, as in “Radar Love”), few name the actual make or model of the car in the actual title, so I thought I’d list a few representative songs in which such information is presented, allowing us to discern the associations the culture has built up with various makes of cars (e.g., "Little Red Corvette"). I'm well aware there are many, many other examples of songs in which the name of a particular make of automobile is mentioned in the lyrics (e.g., Johnny Cash’s “One Piece at a Time,” Don Maclean’s “American Pie”). But in the list below, however, as a sort of homage to Billy Murray who popularized the genre, I’ve confined myself to a baker’s dozen of songs in which the specific make or model of the automobile is fetishized in the title. Why not?

Billy Murray, In My Merry Oldsmobile (1905)
Jimmy Liggins, Cadillac Boogie (1947)
Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats [Ike Turner], Rocket 88 (1951)
Ronny and the Daytonas, G.T.O. (1964)
Bob Dylan, From a Buick 6 (1965)
Wilson Pickett, Mustang Sally (1966)
Janis Joplin, Mercedes Benz (1971)
Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, Hot Rod Lincoln (1971)
Sammy Johns, Chevy Van (1974)
Rush, Red Barchetta (1981)
Prince, Little Red Corvette (1982)
Bruce Springsteen, Pink Cadillac (1984)
Ween, El Camino (1990)

Audio/Vision: Addendum

Serendipitously, just a couple of minutes after posting today's blog entry, “Audio/Vison,” I checked my email to find that I’d received the Sunday e-issue of The Los Angeles Times, which had a review of a new book (cover is pictured to the left) entitled The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, Ed. David W. Bernstein (U of California Press/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), an account of the pioneering electronic music center in San Francisco. Since a number of issues explored in the book are relevant to my previous blog on ambient music—particularly the role of technology and the recording studio—I thought I’d provide readers with a link to the review. Click on the book title above to go the University of California website for further information about the new title. List price of the book is $65.00, but may be substantially discounted at certain on-line vendors.

Audio/Vison

Ambient music is generally defined as music in which the sounds are as equally important as the notes, its purpose being to invoke an “atmosphere” or to enhance an “environment.” It was Brian Eno who named this kind of music ambient (from the Latin ambire, "to go around") saying it consisted of sounds poised on “the cusp between melody and texture.” While there are any number of artists one could name who contributed to the development of ambient music (what Erik Satie in an earlier age called musique d’ameublement, “furniture music”), for Eno the major contributor to the development of ambient music is that “grand new musical instrument, the recording studio” (30). Eric Tamm, in Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound, writes:

Eno has singled out a number of musicians who . . . consciously tried to realize the potential of . . . the recording studio: Glenn Gould (whose technique of recording many performances and editing them together Eno greatly admired); Jimi Hendrix (who would fill as many as twenty-six separate tracks on a thirty-two-track tape recorder with guitar solos, then begin the real creative process of blending, mixing, and deleting); Phil Spector (who “understood better than anybody that a recording could do things that could never actually happen”); the Beach Boys, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Byrds (whose experimental and psychedelic approach Eno appreciated); the Beatles (whose 1966 album Revolver, recorded on four-track with George Martin at the controls, Eno described as “my favourite Beatles album”); and Simon and Garfunkel (“The song ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ [1970] is perfection in its way. I’m told it took 370 hours of studio time to record—that’s longer than most albums, but it is such an incredible tour de force....” (30-31)

Eno’s remark about Phil Spector—he “understood better than anybody that a recording could do things that could never actually happen”—is an insight shared by the very best filmmakers, those who will sacrifice narrative logic for the sake of a powerful image (e.g., Andrei Tarkovsky, pictured) and also invent not mere sound tracks, but audio tracks (e.g., David Lynch), that is, use the grand musical instrument of the recording studio to the same degree as the motion picture camera.

Representative Films Featuring Masterful Audio/Vision:
Chris Marker/Trevor Duncan, La Jetée (1962)
Michelangelo Antonioni/Giovanni Fusco and Vittorio Gelmetti, Red Desert (1964)
Stanley Kubrick/H.L. Bird and Winston Ryder, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
George Lucas/Walter Murch, American Graffiti (1973)
Terrence Malick/George Tipton, Badlands (1973)
David Lynch/Alan R. Splet, Eraserhead (1977)
Andrei Tarkovsky/Eduard Artemev, Stalker (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola/Walter Murch and Carmine Coppola, Apocalypse Now (1979)
Brian Eno, Thursday Afternoon (1984)
Michael Mann/Elliot Goldenthal, Heat (1995)
Terrence Malick/Craig Berkey and James Horner, The New World (2005)

Wah

Although initially invented in response to a request by trumpet player Clyde McCoy, who'd asked the Vox corporation for an electronic device that could simulate the sound of a muted trumpet for use with a keyboard, the wah-wah pedal was quickly appropriated in the late 1960s by rock guitarists. In doing so, they defined both a musical period and instituted an aesthetic, one that, when realized through guitar virtuosos such as Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Hazel of Funkadelic, has been referred to as "psychedelic soul." According to Art Thompson, in an article published in Guitar Player Magazine titled "Wah: The Pedal That Wouldn't Die" (May 1992; my source for the article can be found here), Vox was the first company to have success with the wah-wah pedal. Thompson writes: "Vox's entry into the wah-wah pedal business came about thanks to Brad Plunkett, a twenty five year old engineer at Thomas Organ. Around '66 Plunkett was working on a circuit to replace the 3-position MRB, or voicing switch, with a less expensive potentiometer.... To test the idea, a guitar was plugged in and, as Plunkett describes 'all of a sudden people came running in to see what was making this sound--they just freaked out on it.'" Thompson continues:

Apparently Vox management saw lots of potential in this new gizmo, and it was subsequently introduced as the Clyde McCoy wah-wah pedal.... These early pedals were manufactured in Italy and have a picture of Clyde on the bottom. They were distributed in the U.S. by the Thomas Organ Company.... Vox also offered a non-signature model around this time that simply said "Wah" on the bottom plate; it was also made in Italy.

About the wah-wah pedal's subsequent development, Thompson writes:

The introduction of the Vox Cry Baby pedal around 1968 came about because the U.S. distributor, Thomas Organ, and the European distributor, JMI, both wanted to sell the wah-wah but neither wanted the other to have the same pedal. Vox solved this by slapping the Cry Baby name on the same model for the American market. The story goes that when Vox needed a new name for the pedal, they asked one of their distributors to describe the wah's sound. The response was "it sounds like a baby crying." Also at this time, Vox and Thomas Organ introduced a new model designated V846 that used a Japanese inductor made by TDK instead of the Italian made inductor. Most purists agree that this change degraded the sound of these pedals, but in the informal tests we conducted, our favorite (because of its almost human vocal quality and vomiting sounds) was an excellent sounding V846....The next major change ocurred when Vox came out with the King Wah, the first unit made completely in the United States.... Many of these devices offered extra sounds like fuzz, sirens, surf, tornado, and God knows what else.... As the late '70s approached, the wah effect was becoming unhip, and the number of manufacturers dropped accordingly.

Unlike the synthesizer, which has continued to undergo continual development well into the digital age, the sound of the wah-wah pedal is what it always has been, and hence has remained stuck in time, indelibly associated with a narrow period of rock history.

Early Recordings Featuring the wah-wah pedal

Cream - “White Room” Wheels of Fire (1968)
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” Electric Ladyland (1968)
The Temptations - “Cloud Nine” Cloud Nine (1968)
Tommy James and the Shondells - “Crimson & Clover” Crimson & Clover (1968)
Sly and the Family Stone - “Sex Machine” Stand! (1969)
Blind Faith - “Presence of the Lord” Blind Faith (1969)
Chicago - “25 or 6 to 4” Chicago II (1970)
Santana - “Samba Pa Ti” Abraxas (1970)
Funkadelic - “Maggot Brain” Maggot Brain (1971)
Isaac Hayes - “Theme From Shaft” Shaft (Soundtrack) (1971)

In 1972, Isaac Hayes' "Theme from Shaft" won an Academy Award for "Best Original Song," thus making it the first rock song featuring a wah-wah pedal to be honored with a major award.

Border Blasters

“Border blasters” is the phrase broadcasters use to refer to the so-called “X stations”—Mexican radio stations—because the call letters of every Mexican radio station begins with an X. Otherwise known as border radio, perhaps the best known of the border blasters was station XERB, the model for the station featured in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973). Peculiar to the United States, border radio inspired countless rock and pop musicians, as the Mexican stations largely played music suppressed by the corporate owned, commercially oriented radio stations in the United States: not only were countless teenagers able to hear country and western, played by the likes of the Carter Family (pictured on the CD cover of Vol. 3 of the XET recordings) and Hank Williams, but blues musicians such as Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. George Lucas, born in 1944 and raised in Modesto, California, grew up listening to the Xs, many of which featured eccentric disc jockeys such as Wolfman Jack, who would eventually make an appearance in American Graffiti. Lucas was one of those kids who listened to “50,000 watts out of Mexico,” as the Blasters sing in “Border Radio.”

As Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford point out in their book Border Radio, Mexican radio stations developed in the late 1920s as a response to monopolistic American and Canadian corporations carving up the frequencies—in doing so, shutting out Mexico—and, subsequently, in the 1930s, to federal regulations that required standardization of the format and proscription of the content. Station XED, in Reynosa, began transmitting in 1930. Fowler and Crawford write:

The men who first moved to the border began their broadcasting careers when the federal regulatory agency was but a twinkle in Herbert Hoover’s eye. These media trailblazers deeply resented the monopolistic power of the networks and the increasing government interference in their activities. They traveled from the hinterlands of Iowa, Kansas, and Brooklyn to a territory beyond the pale of American law, a sparsely populated land of ocotillo, grapefruit, and Angora goats—la frontera, the border.

Border radio operators came up with a unique method of sidestepping U.S. broadcasting restrictions: They built their stations just across the border, in Mexican territory, and worked out special licensing arrangements with the broadcasting authorities in Mexico City, whom they found to be much more agreeable than the stuffed shirts at the Federal Radio Commission. Like all radio stations licensed in Mexico, the border stations were given call letters beginning with XE, a brand that added to their mystique. To compete with the wide coverage of the established multistation networks, these operators created what were essentially single-station networks, stations with such extraordinary power that their signals could cover much of the United States and, in some cases, most of the world. Border radio operators accomplished this feat by hiring expert engineers to build special transmitters. While most radio outlets in the United States broadcast over transmitters with about 1,000 watts of power, border stations boomed their programming across America with transmitters humming at as much as 1,000,000 watts [station XERA].

Essential Recordings (with thanks to Mike Jarrett)
ZZ Top, “Heard It on the X” Fandango (Warner Bros., 1975)
Warren Zevon, “Carmelita” Warren Zevon (Asylum, 1976)
The Blasters, “Border Radio” The Blasters (Slash, 1981)
Wall of Voodoo, “Mexican Radio” Call of the West (I.R.S., 1982)
Dave Alvin, “Border Radio” King of California (Hightone, 1994)

Essential Viewing
American Graffiti (1973)
Border Radio (1987)
Pump Up the Volume (1990)
Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (Ken Burns, 1991)

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.