Tuesday, May 12, 2020

You Can’t Always Get What You Need

Imagine a time long ago, before Crawdaddy or Creem or Rolling Stone or Pitchfork, when nobody needed critics, when there were no Beatles scholars or Elvis specialists or authorities on krautrock or punk rock or post-punk or electro-funk, when everything you needed to know was written on the charts that were dutifully listed and updated in Billboard and New Musical Express, when there was no such thing a rock canon or that there was such a thing even conceivable as a rock canon, a long time ago when rock, or rock ‘n’ roll, had no past, when everything existed in the present moment.

What has happened since is that we have developed an historical consciousness. That time seems so distant because there was still breaking news. Now, there are mausoleums such as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Record stores serve as museums, where the artifacts of the past are nicely alphabetized and organized into a daunting number of genres, devised by and for musical archaeologists. Events such as Record Store Day (RSD) serve the collective dream in which all recordings from the past, no matter how famous or obscure, are always available. It is perhaps important to remember that events such as RSD are premised on Rule #1 of niche marketing:
  • There are approximately 3,000 people who are willing to buy anything
Corollary: There is a market for everything. And yet, our mass collective desire of plenitude is threatened by the possibility of shortages: the stark realization that while we can always get what we want (we scoff at the very notion of “out-of-print”), we can’t always get what we need. Case in point: I recently came across a collection edited by Bruno MacDonald, The Greatest Albums You’ll Never Hear: Unreleased Records by the World’s Greatest Musicians (2012). The jacket blurb says it all: “A Pink Floyd album with no instruments. A Sex Pistols record more incendiary than Never Mind The Bollocks. A sci-fi rock opera by Weezer.” (I take it the  self-parody is intentional.) Other such “You’ll Never Hear” lists can be found by doing a web search. If “Classic” album lists are premised on plenitude and the possibility of collection and acquisition, then “You’ll Never Hear” lists are perversely motivated, denying this possibility.

“You'll Never Hear lists do tell us something, though perhaps that meaning is unintended:
  • Greatness cannot be attributed to music we have never heard
  • Distrust any critic presumptive enough to tell you we can

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Echo/Reverb

Premise: Echo is to exteriority as reverberation is to interiority. As Michael Jarrett observes: “Reverb sonically implies the size and shape of imaginary places that hold music” (Sound Tracks, 72). Echo implies the immensity of a large cave or cathedral (a single sound wave reflecting off a distance surface), while reverberation collapses this immensity into the claustrophobic space inhabited by the cell of a cenobitic monk (sound waves reflecting off a nearby surface). Because an echo can be heard by humans only when the distance between the sound source and the reflecting surface is greater than 50 feet, an echo is typically clear and can be easily comprehended because of the distance and time the sound wave travels. Reverberations, on the other hand, do not have enough distance or time to travel, which means the sound waves pile up on each other, challenging our auditory comprehension. Echo implies distance; reverberation implies propinquity.

In his discussion of Martin Hannett’s recording of Joy Division’s music, Simon Reynolds takes up a discussion of musical spaces. He writes, “Hannent dedicated himself to capturing and intensifying Joy Division’s eerie spatiality” (Rip It Up and Start Again, 112). He goes on to say:

“Digital,” Hannett’s first Joy Division production [in 1978], derived its name from his favorite sonic toy, the AMS digital-delay line. Hannett used the AMS and other digital effects coming onto the market in the late seventies to achieve “ambience control”....His most distinctive use of the AMS digital delay...was pretty subtle. He applied a microsecond delay to the drums that was barely audible yet created a sense of enclosed space, a vaulted sound as if the music were recorded in a mausoleum.” (113)

On Unknown Pleasures (1979), Joy Division’s first LP, Hannent used another effects unit, the Marshall Time Modulator, a device that, in the words of band member Stephen Morris, “just made things sound smaller” (114). That is not a positive assessment. What were the aesthetic benefits of making the band’s sound spatially “smaller”? For Reynolds, it gives the band’s music a desolate, alienated feel (113). Or, one could also say, that the music has the uncomfortably claustrophobic feel of acute hermetic isolation, like being enclosed within the bare walls of a monastic cell.

An interesting connection, since the cover image on the original Sordide Sentimental release of Joy Division’s single, “Atmosphere” (titled “Licht and Blindheit” on the Sordide release), features a solitary, hooded monk, his back turned to the viewer, standing on a rocky hillside gazing out on a landscape consisting of a thick layer of fog filling the valley below the mountains far off in the distance. As Reynolds observes, the cover image “captures the moment when a certain religiosity began to gather around Joy Division” (115). Perhaps so, since the contemplative figure of the monk stands enthralled by the fog and distant mountains, as if it were a moment of spiritual or religious insight.

The cover image seems to be modeled, perhaps unintentionally, on the painting by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1818).
By inviting the viewer to share the point-of-view of the wanderer or hiker, Friedrich is inviting us to share the same subjective experience as the figure in the painting. This applies to the single’s cover art as well, depicting a similar moment of reflection, the fog and far-off, hazy mountains suggesting an unknown future. However, the monk implies the cloister, the contemplative life, while the outdoor setting implies the active life.

Or, the cover picture of Joy Division's single metonymically implies two spaces capable of producing two distinct sonic possibilities: immensity (echo) or monastic cell (reverberation). The unusual spatiality of Joy Division’s music is captured by the contradictions of this single’s cover image. I prefer the trope of the monastic cell, but the suffocating space of the tomb is an unavoidable association, given the photograph by Bernard Pierre Wolff used on the cover of Joy Division’s LP Closer (1980), an image of the Appiani family tomb in Genoa’s Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno.

Friday, May 8, 2020

Restless Wind

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen.” A famous, oft-quoted passage from Raymond Chandler’s short story “Red Wind” (Dime Detective Magazine January, 1938), the Santa Ana winds typically portend the arrival of autumn in southern California. By describing the winds as “red,” Chandler invokes blood (as in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, 1929), violence, and, inevitably I suppose, passion. But “red” can also refer to the atmosphere: the ambient temperature, in this case, hot. In her essay, “The Santa Ana,” published in August, 1967, Joan Didion cites the above passage by Chandler, choosing to elaborate on wind as “atmosphere,” or “mood,” rather than just air in motion:

The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushes through, is a foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best known of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.”

The Santa Ana wind is an inexorable force, unstoppable, merciless, disturbing the atmosphere and consequently the environment, impacting human behavior as well as health and well-being. Both Chandler and Didion resort to mythological thinking (“folk wisdom”) to understand the Santa Ana wind. It is an evil wind, a wind-spirit sent by an illness-causing demon, one of those ancient, malevolent winds that were believed to bring sickness and death. We humans are at its mercy. “[T]he violence and unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” Wind is at the root of all illness and misfortune, capable even of precipitating existential dread. Of the Anemoi, the four wind gods of Greek mythology, Notus (South Wind) would send a wind that rose after midsummer, a scorching wind that would burn the crops and choke men with dust. (Other of the Anemoi were a bit more congenial.)

The wind of song is seldom if ever just air in motion, but Romantically conceived, Romantic in its Coleridgian form: “we receive but what we give,/And in our life alone does Nature live” (Dejection: An Ode). The wind is a positive or negative force based on what we attribute to it. And, alas, when asked a question, the restless wind never answers:

And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth—
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

A Few Songs About the Ever-Changing Wind:
John Anderson – Seminole Wind
The Association – Windy
Billy Bragg & Wilco – Black Wind Blowing
Patsy Cline – The Wayward Wind
King Crimson – I Talk to the Wind
Christopher Cross – Ride Like the Wind
Donovan – Catch the Wind
Steve Goodman – Santa Ana Winds
Jimi Hendrix – The Wind Cries Mary
Elton John – Candle in the Wind
Kansas – Dust in the Wind
The Kingston Trio – They Call the Wind Maria
McCoy Tyner – Fly With the Wind
Peter, Paul & Mary – Blowin’ in the Wind
Chris Rea – Windy Town
Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band – Against the Wind
Rod Stewart – Mandolin Wind
Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention – Any Way the Wind Blows
Warren Zevon – Hasten Down the Wind

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Rebirth of a Grand Old Rock 'n' Roller

Guest blogger Eric Roberts reports
PART ONE
THE DREAM LIVES ON
Above: EUC 100C as it appeared recently at the 2016 Rolls-Royce Enthusiast's Club
rally at Burghley House. Below: The Beatles second last photo shoot on April 9, 1969.
A fortnight earlier, the white Phantom V had returned from Amsterdam and John and
Yoko's famous honeymoon/bed-in event.
The understated reappearance in late June of EUC 100C, the famous white Rolls-Royce once owned by John Lennon (see previous post) marks the end of a thirty year period out of the limelight and an epic automotive restoration by anyone's standards.

EUC 100C's current owner, Jody Klein, deserves the gratitude of Beatles fans and classic car lovers world-wide for rescuing this historic luxury limousine from the scrap metal yard. Over the last eight years, Rolls-Royce and Bentley Garages in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, have painstakingly attended to every detail of the fifty year-old car. Both physically and in terms of performance, they have managed to preserve an increasingly rare example of the ultimate in Sixties motoring elegance.

Some of the main restoration work carried out by RR&B Garages included rebuilding the engine and gearbox; steering and suspension;  electrical  system;  air  conditioning;  television  and audio system; stripping and repainting throughout; re-trimming the interior  front  and  rear  compartments;  refurbishing  timber  and metal work -- in short, a full ground up restoration.

Particular attention has been paid to the reconstruction of the rear compartment's entertainment console which Lennon had especially installed soon after he bought EUC 100C, around 1966/67. This audiovisual console replaced the more traditional drinks cabinet -- one of many luxurious refinements which came with every Phantom V. However, the two fold down jump seats on either side of the console were retained by Lennon, presumably so that extra  passengers could be accommodated if need be.
Above: Before Lennon bought EUC 100C it would have had
an exquisitely crafted drinks cabinet like this one in the center
of the partition wall between driver and passenger compartments.
Below: Lennon had the "mini bar" removed and replaced with an
8-track stereo tape player, television, telephone, radio, and public
address system. (Still: ITN News, 1985)
Two similar angles of the rear compartment showing the telephone mounted beside
the audiovisual console. In the bottom left of the top photo the handle of one of the two
pull-down jump seats can be seen. Both front and rear bench seats were fitted with
bespoke white cloth covers, faithfully replicated by RR&B Garages.

As previously reported here, the exceptionally fine work carried out by RR&B Garages' small team of luxury car restoration specialists led by Alan Hobbs was appropriately acknowledged last month at the annual Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts' Club concours d'elegance and rally. There is no higher public honor than the RREC's award of best in class for a classic Rolls-Royce such as EUC 100C. Its reception at its first public appearance in several decades must give Jody Klein cause for much personal satisfaction, and reflection.
Should EUC 100C be permanently parked in a private garage hidden away from the world? Or, like Lennon's other Phantom V which resides in the Royal BC Museum in Canada, should the public be given at least some controlled access to one of the most famous limousines in Rock 'n' Roll history?

Meanwhile, unanswered questions remain about EUC 100C's condition and whereabouts between 1970 – 2008. The little that we do know is roughly as follows.
PART TWO
ROMANCE AND RUST

Thanks to the assistance of one of our readers, Paul Whalley, we know that according to Driver Vehicle and Licensing Agency (DVLA) records, EUC 100C's vehicle tax expired on October 1, 1986. It seems that for many years John Lennon's old white Phantom  V  was  existing  in  a  state  of  limbo,  neither  legally drivable nor written off completely. How did such a prestigious, even notorious vehicle come to such a dolorous impasse?

By the mid-1980s, EUC 100C's condition had badly deteriorated. After twenty years of service, apart from normal wear and tear, it is reasonable to speculate that more serious problems lay hidden underneath the body of the car.

Still to this day county councils in the UK spend millions of pounds on gritting motorways with road salt during the winter. It is common knowledge that deicing roads with salt to improve transport safety also increases the incidence of vehicle damage due to rust.

Here is not the place to delve into the complex science and mechanics of the effects of road salt on steel and aluminium components. However, it is useful to know that there are three main categories of road salt corrosion found in motor vehicles; these are functional, structural and cosmetic:


Functional and structural damage occur when corrosion causes loss of operating performance or structural integrity. Examples include perforation of body panels, corrosion of brake linings and deterioration of the frame and bumper support systems. Cosmetic corrosion affects only the appearance of the vehicle. Examples include rust staining of painted body panels and discoloration and pitting of trim metals. Special Report 235, Highway Deicing - Comparing Salt and Calcium  Magnesium  Acetate, Transportation Research Board National Research Council, Washington, D.C., 1991.

Contemporary footage exists of EUC 100C in early December 1969 as it cruises along snow-covered country roads, taking Mr. and Mrs. Lennon from a studio in London to the village of Lavenham, Suffolk. Their purpose was to capture on film the snow-blanketed rural landscape at sunset from a hot air balloon for an art film called Apotheosis2. A BBC television crew accompanied the couple over five days for the making of  24 Hours: The World of John and Yoko. (See video links below.)
John and Yoko on the road to Lavenham in the first week of December, 1969.
Corrosive liquid salt sprays off the tires and up into the countless surfaces and
recesses of the car's hidden substructure. The dangers of spreading salt on snow-
covered roads were not as well understood in the Sixties as they are today. Preventative
measures were not observed.
In contrast to the impressive spectacle of a white Rolls-Royce driving in a white landscape, it is evident from the footage that only one headlight is working. With so much else going on inside and around him, it would not be surprising if Lennon's second Rolls-Royce  was less than perfectly  maintained. After  having made at least two trips to the Continent that we know of, by the end of the Sixties, EUC 100C may have been starting to look a little second hand. Also, given  that the white Rolls-Royce had come to be publicly associated with The Beatles as a whole, the fact that Lennon had wanted to leave the group as early as October 1969, may have contributed to its redundancy in his life with Ono.

So it was that towards the end of 1969 ownership of EUC 100C was transferred from John Lennon to Allen Klein, founder of ABKCO Music and Records and, for a while, business manager of the Beatles' joint enterprise, Apple Records Ltd. Meanwhile, during the last days of the 1960s, Lennon placed an order with Daimler-Benz in Stuttgart for a new Mercedes Pullman 600.
More expensive, more up-to-date and half a foot longer than the Phantom V,
Lennon's new white Mercedes 600 was delivered to his home in Ascot in early
February 1970.
PART THREE
ALLEN KLEIN

According to Allen Klein's driver and body guard, Alf Weaver:

My  job  during  1969  also  now  included  keeping  close  to Klein, but he was only in the UK about one week in every eight. He was mostly based at his glass tower in New York, the ABKCO offices, on Broadway. A bit later in the year, Allen asked me to pick up his new car. Actually, it was John's old car, his Rolls-Royce Phantom V limousine, EUC 100C. Lennon had bought it in 1966 and completely resprayed it (white) and refitted its interior (white shag and white seats). John liked white. Lennon and Klein sealed the deal. $50,000, I think. Good price, John. I picked the car up at Hoopers in Kilburn and ended up driving it for the next decade, on and off. (The First Rock 'n' Roll Bodyguard, Alf Weaver and Robert Ashton. London: Sanctuary Publishing, 2001)

Interestingly, Weaver states unambiguously that Lennon acquired EUC 100C in 1966. This is supported by an ITN news report produced in December 1985. His reference to “Hoopers” is also revealing. Hooper Motor Services specialized in the maintenance, coachwork repair and bespoke conversion of deluxe motor cars for the rich and famous. When Allen Klein bought the white Phantom from Lennon it must have needed expert attention to restore its original aura of exclusivity and indisputable elegance.

The only reference to EUC 100C in Fred Goodman's recent biography of Allen Klein is in connection with the film The Greek Tycoon, produced by Klein in 1978, starring Anthony Quinn and Jacqueline Bisset:

When they needed a Rolls-Royce for a scene, Klein didn't want to rent one and instead insisted on using the white Rolls he'd bought from John Lennon and kept in London. He had his English driver, Alf Weaver, bring it to Greece. (Fred Goodman, Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out The Beatles, Made The Stones and Transformed Rock 'n' Roll, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, NY, 2015: 247.)

Goodman's book tells us next to nothing about Allen Klein's activities in England after The Beatles disbanded, but we can assume  that EUC 100C rarely left its garage throughout  the 1970s. At this point in our investigation, exactly why Klein suddenly decided to sell his white Phantom V remains a mystery.

On the 19th of December 1985, Christie's London held their first Rock and Pop Memorabilia auction. The proceeds, at least in part, were to go to the Samaritans. By far the most expensive item in the auction catalogue was Klein's white Rolls-Royce. On the day, however, the bidding was not as brisk as anticipated and the Phantom V was passed on unsold. The following year EUC 100C was deregistered and taken off the road.


Klein's white Rolls-Royce outside Christies' busy London sales room in Old Brompton
Road, South Kensington in December 1985.
We don't know exactly where EUC 100C was and what happened to it over the course of the following two decades. There is some suggestion that for a while the car was sent to a garage in Wales for repairs and restoration. Lance McCormack of “Romance of Rust” fame is rumoured to have done some work on EUC 100C during the mid-nineties. Then, towards  the  end  of  the  1990s, Klein's  white  Phantom V received  a  full  body  respray  before being  placed in storage in a garage somewhere in the Luton area.

Fortunately, the next port of call was Rolls-Royce and Bentley Garages in Bromsgrove in 2008. Eight years later, under the direction of Allen Klein's son, Jody, EUC 100C has been reborn. Those who have seen it first hand say that it not only looks like a brand new car, it drives like one as well.

The restoration of EUC 100C is a testament to the vision and determination of Jody Klein, and a triumph for Alan Hobbs and RR&B's team of dedicated mechanics. May it long be a source of inspiration and wonder for car enthusiasts all around the world.

John Lennon's White 1965 Rolls-Royce Phantom V:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_9NdeIattY

John  and  Yoko: Apotheosis  filming  report - The  One  Show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYgpwLEn8y0

John Lennon & Yoko Ono 24 Hours "The World of John & Yoko" Part 2/2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kznlrFLpebE

Alan Hobbs at the wheel of EUC 100C on a victory lap having just won first prize for
best in its class at the 2016 Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts' Club Annual Rally at Burghley.
(Photo courtesy Thomas Barry)

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Ain't It Marvellous!


EUC 100C – John Lennon's "Lost" White 1965 Phantom V Comes Out Of Hiding To Receive Honors From The International Rolls-Royce Community!
Guest blogger Eric Roberts reports
EUC 100C parked outside the Madingley Club, Twickenham, April 9, 1969
EUC 100C in the grounds of Burghley House, Stamford. Jody Klein
with Alan Hobbs and Johan Vanden Bergh, chairman of the RREC.
26 June 2016
Click on photos to enlarge

At last, after an absence of three decades, one of Rock 'n' Roll's most famous limousines has been immaculately and expensively restored by its current owner, Jody Klein, head of ABKCO Music and Records.

The majestic 1965 Phantom V, chassis number 5VD63, was revealed and much admired at this year's Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts' Club Annual Rally and Concours d'Elegance in the spectacular grounds of Burghley House in Lincolnshire over the weekend of June 24-26. The event is the largest and most prestigious gathering of Rolls-Royce and Bentley automobiles anywhere in the world. There could be no more suitable setting for the return of EUC 100C. 

Visitors to the marquee occupied by independent luxury car specialists, Rolls-Royce & Bentley Garages, were given a privileged, close-up viewing of a car that has had a long association with the film and music business. Established in 1984, RR&B Garages is one of only 30 accredited members of the exclusive Rolls-Royce and Bentley Specialists Association. Having garnered numerous awards for their concours restorations over the years, in 2008 the company based in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire was tasked with giving Jody Klein's white Phantom V a full ground up restoration. Under the leadership of senior technician, Alan Hobbs, and founder/managing director of RR&B, Ian Pinder, EUC 100C has been brought back to mint condition in every detail. 

On the last day of the rally at Burghley it was judged best in its category - the S type Cloud class, 1955-66. This was a fitting reward for the owner and his chosen team of automotive experts for their unstinting commitment to saving this historic limousine for posterity.

 
Alan Hobbs at the wheel of EUC 100C after receiving a Best in Class
and red rosette and trophy.
A whiter shade of pale. No expense was spared in recreating EUC 100C's
unique all white interior as originally specified by John Lennon.
The two chrome grills beneath the quad headlamps conceal twin speakers
linked to a PA system operated from the rear compartment.

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Dumb and Dumber

Making a list was a Victorian-era parlor game, a way to fill the empty hours, a way to ward off boredom. As I’ve discussed before, there is a Puritanical motive for the making of lists, for the mental activity that determines the selection of a list is perversity (resistance, obstinacy). In other words, when faced with the choice of having something or nothing (even if that something is “just a little,” i.e., the Reality Principle), desire chooses something: perversely--out of necessity--it selects a single object of pleasure out of a vast number of possibilities: the rarified, fetishized object--one object charged with wondrous, excessive meaning. Each element of the set (the list) is like a game piece one must select before the game starts, the game being how to negotiate the operation of pleasure within a highly restricted economy premised on lack. (See the film A Christmas Story.)

If memory serves, lists used to be short. Now, lists are very long and hence have become dumber and dumber: instead of 10 items, for example, one can--perversely--list 11 (apparently some missed the joke in This is Spinal Tap) by using the alibi of the “tie”: two (presumably) rare and singular objects cannot, paradoxically, be sufficiently distinguished. Or, alternatively, you can choose to do what Rolling Stone magazine recently did with its list of the 50 Best Albums of 2015. Since critics do not want time--the final judge--to prove them wrong, their “Best Of” lists get longer and longer as a way to hedge their bets. The “50 Best” list also reveals the extent to which Rolling Stone has developed what might be called a homogeneous “house style,” because while no authorship is attributed to the piece and no single author could have possibly written all 50 entries, the style remains consistent throughout. So much for the critical acumen and perspective of an original, distinctive critic--this is a list by committee. Perhaps this list by committee suggests that with a large stable of writers, you have to keep them all busy, so the solution by the management is to order the list to be very long in order to give them all something to do. Of course, Rolling Stone is no different than any of the other powerful media institutions, which all feel compelled at this time of year to engage in some sort of tremendously dumb historical rundown.


Hence, one cannot avoid the connection between language and power. As Robert Christgau observed about 15 years ago, the idea of a rock canon is a complete absurdity. Still, the notion of a rock canon hangs on, a consequence of the powerful connection between music and memory. As he says, “Canonization is institutional. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a canonizing institution.” What was once a game played by the idle rich has become an instrument of institutional power, and as Christgau indicates, Rolling Stones uses its economic power to enforce a canon—as perverse as it is ludicrous. Once more, all the “Best of” lists being issued this time of year reveal how we live not in an age of axioms (universally accepted truths that are potentially falsifiable), but in an age of aphorisms (statements of personal taste).