Saturday, December 31, 2011

Lennon's Lost Rolls Royce: End of Year Review

Photo credit: http://kenwoodlennon.blogspot.com
Guest blogger Eric Roberts provides a year-end update on the search for John Lennon's white Rolls Royce.

It's been 18 months since we began researching the whereabouts of John Lennon's white Rolls Royce, registration EUC 100C, chassis 5VD63. Sifting fact from fiction, myth from misinformation, gradually the untold story of Lennon's second 1965 Phantom V, which came to epitomize his public love affair and social activism with Yoko Ono, began to emerge.

However, despite our best efforts, we have been unable to discover who currently owns EUC 100C and where it is located. Indeed, to the best or our knowledge, it has not been seen in public since 1985, when it was withdrawn from a charity auction at Christies in London.

The only clues we have to go on are as follows. According to a New York Times article in 1999, it was once owned by Alan Klein, possibly a part of the financial settlement when he successfully sued the Beatles in the early 1970s. Second, if we are to believe Alan Hobbs - who left a brief but tantalizing comment on this blog nearly 12 months ago - EUC 100C is still residing somewhere in England. Frustratingly, for the time being, the owner wishes to remain anonymous.

The fate of John and Yoko's famous white Rolls Royce could not be more different to that of his original black Phantom V, registration FJB 111C, chassis 5VD73. At one time “the most expensive car in the world”, today Lennon's so-called “psychedelic Rolls Royce” is proudly displayed in the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Canada. Given the anonymity and secrecy surrounding its present ownership and location, it is possible that we shall never know what became of EUC 100C. The information we have gathered below represents only fragments from the “life” of one of the most historically significant automobiles ever built. We can only hope that the world will not continue to be denied closure to the narrative of EUC 100C and that it may one day be put on permanent public display, like its twin in Canada.

In the meantime, no one should be taken in by false claims that Lennon's white Rolls Royce is on view in the town of Pensacola, Florida, or that it is part of the Tebo Auto Collection in Colorado. Both of these look-alikes are left hand drive, and there is no record to our knowledge of EUC 100C ever having been shipped to the United States.

We would welcome your contributions to this on-going research. Any reader's recollections or inside information, no matter how incidental, will be gratefully received and published. The same applies to any photographs of John Lennon's white Phantom V that you may have at your disposal.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Playing Tribute

The "ever popular tortured artist effect" is one of the foundational myths of modern celebrity journalism. Presumably, shiny, "happy" people don't produce art, because art must come from sickness and deprivation. The obituary notices and tributes that follow the death of a celebrity are always and inevitably premised on a Jekyll-Hyde split between the (public) artist and the "private" person. Always, genius is imagined as an autonomous power, something beyond the person's control, a gift but also a curse. Crucially, the appeal to genius serves as the alibi, the explanation (in the sense of apology) for the  "private" person's excesses. It's thoroughly Romantic in its origins, a variation of the powerful myth of the Byronic hero, the isolated, solitary figure who stands outside genteel culture but is nonetheless admired by it. This is the reason why celebrity obituaries and other forms of post-mortem hyperbole are always extraordinarily partisan, pleading the artist's case and making extravagant claims about the immensity of the artist's talent.

I've always imagined what it must have been like inside the Elvis Presley compound the last ninety days of the star's life. Surely everyone -- not only those closest to him -- knew the wheels were about to come off the gravy train. Why didn't someone do something? Why didn't someone try to help him? Perhaps the issue isn't that no one could do anything, but rather, no one wanted to do anything. Surely the issue of drug dependency was the proverbial "elephant in the room," which explains why it was ignored. By way of explanation, I turn to Montaigne's Apology for Raimond Sebond and his discussion of the relationship between the whale and the sea gudgeon:

It is said that the whale never goes abroad without being preceded by a small fish resembling the sea-gudgeon, which is for that reason called the Guide. The whale follows it, allowing itself to be turned and led as easily as a vessel is turned by its rudder; and in return for this service, whilst every other thing, whether animal or vessel, that enters the awful chasm of this monster's mouth is forthwith engulfed and lost, this little fish retires into in all security, and sleeps there. During its sleep the whale never stirs, but as soon as it issues forth, starts and follows it unceasingly; and if by chance the guide goes astray, the whale will go wandering about hither and thither, often knocking itself against the rocks, like ship without a rudder. (Montaigne, Essays, 1927)

The relationship between the guide fish and the whale is analogous to modern celebrity and the institutional apparatus that supports her (the handlers, the agents and secretaries, publicists, the bodyguards and their wives and children, the hangers-on, the sycophants, and so on). The trick is not to mistake the whale for the artist, for in fact the artist is the small guide fish leading the whale around, while the massive whale represents all those whose livelihoods depend upon the artist. The whale's dependency explains why it does nothing but allow the guide fish to do as it wants, even pursue a deadly course. Of course, once the guide fish goes astray, the whale is lost, but the whale is all too aware of its dependency, and therefore does nothing, hoping to stave off the inevitable.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Larry "Wild Man" Fischer, 1944-2011

Larry "Wild Man" Fischer, who died at age 66 of a heart ailment a little over a week ago, on Thursday, June 16, was an eccentric figure in the late-Sixties L. A. rock scene. A formal mental patient who apparently suffered from both manic depression and paranoid schizophrenia (according to his obituary in the L. A. Times), he spent much of his life living on the streets and in the low-rent motels of Los Angeles, eventually becoming a fixture of the growing hippie scene on the Sunset Strip, UCLA and Venice, offering to sing songs for a dime. If you took him up on his offer, you were rewarded with his pathetic songs, unintentional burlesques of the top hits of the day played on his broken guitar. Never especially subtle in his humor, and frequently unfunny as a consequence, Frank Zappa chose to record Wild Man Fischer in the late Sixties, issuing an album on Bizarre/Reprise titled An Evening With Wild Man Fisher (1969, not 1968 as is widely reported). It was a cruel joke on Larry Fischer. I tend to agree with Dave Marsh, who characterized An Evening With Wild Man Fischer as "a particularly vicious example of Zappa's penchant for sadistic social commentary." History has shown, however, that not everyone got the jape. Marsh would write about the album, "The results are brutal, not funny except to the emotionally immature and the socially callous, and would constitute a deleted embarrassment in recorded history if the record industry had any shame" (The Rolling Stone Record Guide, 1979). In other words, what impulse leads us to portray the otherness of the insane? If you think Marsh too harsh, remember that the attribution of "genius" is simply a marketing tool, and that music is a product like any other, manufactured, packaged, and sold. The mistake is to assume that madness is somehow a more "authentic" form of existence than the quotidian reality the rest of us normally inhabit. I should point out that the insane are marked as outsiders not through their music, but through their visual representation, as the album cover pictured above reveals.

I first heard "Merry-Go-Round," the opening track on An Evening With Wild Man Fischer, early in 1970 on Zappéd, a sampler issued on Bizarre of acts on the Bizarre and Straight labels. A year or so later, during a trip to Kansas City, I picked up in a record store a copy of An Evening With . . . in the cut-out bin for 44 cents. As I remember, I could have bought four or five copies for that price at the time. I should have bought them all, for now the album is rather expensive to purchase on eBay. Now primarily a nostalgic artifact, it is of interest to Zappa collectors and students of the outré. Copies on eBay are frequently advertised as mint or mint-, I suspect because those who have owned it seldom have played it (rather like the GTOs' album Permanent Damage, also issued by Zappa in 1969). Of interest only to the socially callous and those unfamiliar with living with those cursed with mental illness, the lesson of Wild Man Fischer is that albums may be consumed, but they are not nutritious.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Days Of Future Past

According to the OED, the word anthem is a corruption of the Old English word antefn, derived from the Greek word antiphon, meaning “A composition, in prose or verse, sung antiphonally, or by two voices or choirs, responsively.” Most current definitions of “anthem” say that an anthem is a song of celebration or praise, any song of devotion, praise, or patriotism, often used in English in the context of “national anthem.” But a national anthem, technically, is a hymn, or a song of praise and devotion. So what, precisely, is an anthem? The question becomes even more complicated when one allows for the so-called “rock anthem,” defined here as “a powerful, celebratory rock song with arena-rock sound often with lyrics celebrating rock music itself and simple sing-a-long choruses, chants, or hooks.” Thus the rock anthem is a song celebrating a way of life (or behavior), as national anthems also do. However, in this context, anthem again simply means hymn.

My wife Becky and I were discussing this question the other day, trying to arrive at a meaning of “anthem” that doesn't simply render it as a synonym for “hymn.” Interestingly, she suggested that an anthem should be considered as any song (or poem) that presents history as prophecy. What she means is that an event that has already occurred is presented in the context of the song or poem as something that is going to happen--the song informs our understanding of the future. It's prophetic in the sense that it uses history as a way to inform the future, but as prophecies often are, it is also often apocalyptic. While the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is hardly apocalyptic, the history it recounts informs our understanding of the future: the nation will go on forever, continuously. A good example of what she means is The Original Caste's song “One Tin Soldier” (later covered perhaps more famously by the band Coven). In “One Tin Soldier,” the narrative is presented as a story that happened “long ago,” but obviously its purpose is to inform our understanding of the future (“Listen, children, to a story that was written long ago...”). The song rather explicitly serves as a moral imperative for the future: although the events happened in the past, they are nonetheless prophetic because, in parabolic fashion, they foretell what will happen (now/ future) if greed isn't held in check. I tend to think that songs such as Neil Young's “Southern Man” also serve as anthems as I've defined them here, because on the one hand, there are images drawn from the antebellum period (the “bullwhip cracking”), while on the other hand there are images drawn from the Reconstruction period and the Ku Klux Klan (“now your crosses are burning fast”). However, the lyric, “Southern change is gonna come at last,” invokes the Civil Rights-era South. This liquid exchange of past and future prompted Lynyrd Skynyrd, as revealed in “Sweet Home Alabama” for instance, to read the song as a condemnation of the present-day South, although Young's song would seem to be set in the frozen, remote past. In contrast, “Sweet Home Alabama” is not an anthem (although it is often referred to as such), but a defense of a way of life, that is to say, a hymn. No Southern man needs him, ol' NY, comin' round or about.

Perhaps because of the nuclear threat of the period as well as the impending ecological catastrophe Rachel Carson  had warned of in Silent Spring (1962), the poets and singers of the 1960s began to engage in apocalyptic expressions as anthems to brave new worlds to come. Just as movies of the early 1960s contained apocalyptic themes (The Seventh Seal, 1957; Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1962; The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, 1962; Behold a Pale Horse, 1964) so, too, did the music. Harold Bloom once observed that Americans are obsessed with prophecies and omens because they are actually Gnostics without realizing it, and his insight is certainly true of the folk song when it became a form of prophesying. In the Sixties, musical prophesying caught on. However, perhaps it's well to remember Walter Benjamin's observation about allegory, "Any person, any thing, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else."

A Few Notable Anthems From The Sixties:
Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (1962)
Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin' (1963)
Barry McGuire - Eve of Destruction (1965)
The 5th Dimension - Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In (1969)
The Original Caste - One Tin Soldier (1969)
Neil Young - After the Gold Rush (1970)
Neil Young - Southern Man (1970)

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Olfactory

The so-called "Generation Gap" of the 1960s distinguished the new from the old not so much by ideological difference as by patterns of symbolic consumption, a polarization of taste by means of music, fashion, goods and services. What Thorstein Veblen identified at the end of the nineteenth century as "conspicuous consumption" had by the 1960s long permeated every aspect of American life, mass consumption playing an essential social and economic role in every dimension of the culture. It so happened there was a widespread presumption in the Sixties and Seventies that hippies wore patchouli oil to hide the smell of marijuana, based on the stereotype that all hippies smoked dope. It's true that hippies marked themselves as socially different through dramatic bodily display, but difference didn't consist only of the manipulation of hairstyle and clothing. Perfumes and aromatic oils are also forms of fashion, which is to say a means of symbolic consumption. Patchouli oil signified rebellion against social norms and class tastes: you couldn't buy it at Neiman Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue. It was alien and strange at least so far as most Americans were concerned, Eastern as opposed to European in origin, and was derived from a plant as opposed to an animal. Its use identified one as bohemian in taste and temperament (and artistic hobbies), in contrast, say, to Old Spice cologne, which at the time identified one as hopelessly middle-class in taste (or perhaps tastelessness) and class adherence. The disposition of the body did play a symbolic role in denoting ideological adherence, of course, through notions of masculinity and femininity (with hippies coded as "feminine," patriots as "masculine") and also through metaphors of filth and cleanliness. In October 1969, for instance, General Earle Wheeler, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred to Vietnam War protesters as "vocal youngsters, strangers alike to soap and reason," the implication being that one could determine ideological adherence through the chemical senses: if they smell funny, don't trust 'em. Perhaps it's well to remember Kant's observation that smell is "taste at a distance" and is the means by which filth induces nausea, which "is even more intimate than through the absorptive vessels of mouth or gullet."

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Pictures From Life's Other Side

The standard view of Hank Williams' Luke the Drifter recordings can be found in Barbara Ching's Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (Oxford UP, 2001), in which she claims that Luke the Drifter is Williams' "alter ego," an alias used to distinguish records that were "hellfire" from those that were "hell-raising" (p. 55). Since jukebox operators preferred the hard-drinking Williams with the "bad reputation" rather than the Williams who engaged in moralistic recitations and sanctimonious rebukes, Williams was urged to create the alter ego, a shadow self representing the fundamentalist side to his normal, hedonistic, pleasure-seeking self. But why would he adopt the alias in 1950 (the year of the first Luke the Drifter recordings) at the very height of his fame, by which time he had become the central figure in country music?

What if it's really the other way around, Luke the Drifter being the real "Hank Williams" while the one singing "Jambalaya" and "Kaw-Liga" is in fact wearing the mask? From this perspective, songs such as "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and "Lost Highway" represent moments when the mask slips, when the real "Hank Williams" reveals himself, especially so since he is singing for a community to which he could never belong. As Greil Marcus observes, "Beneath the surface of his forced smiles and his light, easy sound, Hank Williams was kin to Robert Johnson in a way that the new black singers of his day were not" (Mystery Train, Third Revised Edition, p. 131). The Luke the Drifter records only make sense considered as an aggregate rather than individually; the mistake is to single out any particular one as "typical." It is true that the songs are moralistic in a way easily assimilable to the community, but that's beside the point. They are actually songs of loss, exclusion, and tragedy bordering on the nihilistic (hence Marcus's allusion to Robert Johnson), songs about abject figures who've inherited life's accursed share, too different or too grotesque or too scorned to fit in. "Drifter" is simply another name for someone without a home, without a community, and that is what the songs are about. (In the 1970s "drifter" was replaced by "outlaw," a key figure being Hank Williams, Jr.). "Hank Williams was a poet of limits, fear, and failure," writes Greil Marcus in Mystery Train (131), an important aspect of the country world to be sure. By the time of Hank Williams' death, though, the style had become so pervasive "that it had closed off the possibilities of breaking loose." The other side of the country world, the one consisting of "excitement, rage, fantasy, delight," emerged soon after in the music of Elvis Presley -- in the music known as "rockabilly" rather than "hillbilly."