A Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy, Pt. 1

They say rock ‘n’ roll will never die. If so, then neither will the myths about it. Among the most persistent myths are those that claim during a concert Alice Cooper bit the head off of a chicken and drank its blood, that Michael Jackson once owned the skeletal remains of the “Elephant Man,” and that in 1968 Jimi Hendrix introduced the ring-necked parakeet to the isle of Britain. Recently, I heard a phrase used that I had not heard before: “zombie lie.” A “zombie lie” is a lie that everyone knows to be a lie, but despite it being a lie, it lives on, everyone acting as though it were true. One of these so-called “zombie lies” is that Elvis Presley fathered children outside of marriage. Such rumors first swirled around young actress Dolores Hart, the love interest of Elvis Presley in Loving You (1957), and who appeared with Elvis a second time in King Creole (1958). The gossip mill held that she left the Hollywood spotlight at the height of her career in 1963 after Elvis impregnated her. In fact, she joined the Abbey of Regina Laudis and became a nun, a story that has been well documented.

Now in his early 60s, many years ago a man having the adopted name Phillip Stanic came forward alleging his father was Elvis Presley. As if to proclaim the name of his father, he had his name legally changed to Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr. At issue is the identity of his biological mother, whom he believes to be the actress Angelique Pettyjohn (pictured above, in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion"). His assertion possibly may be true, that she may be his biological mother. I am not saying it is true, I am simply saying it may be possible. I don't know. That is one issue. The other issue is the identity of his biological father, whom he believes, or once believed, or once thought possible, to be Elvis Presley. While I believe Elvis Presley is not his father, and will show why I do not believe it, according to John L. Flynn, Ph.D., author of The Sci-Fi Siren Who Dared Love Elvis and Other Stars (Galactic Books, 2020), Elvis is his father. I will hereafter refer to John L. Flynn, Ph.D. as Dr. Flynn. In his book, Dr. Flynn claims that Elvis Presley is Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr.’s father—or to be clear, that is what his friend and the subject of his book, Angelique Pettyjohn, claims to be true. However, simply because Phillip Stanic changed his name to Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr., does not thereby point to the identity of his biological father. As far as I can tell, his current occupation is that of an Elvis imitator, so I suppose one could argue that the name change was, in a way, justified, given the way he earns his livelihood.

My actual subject is Angelique Pettyjohn, a minor actress who became famous because of an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series titled “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” filmed in October 1967 and which aired on television in January 1968. In his book, Dr. Flynn discusses her troubled life and provides a useful catalogue of the films and TV shows in which she appeared prior to her death in 1992, at the young age of 48. In truth, she was an actress for a very short period time, because Angelique Pettyjohn was primarily a Las Vegas showgirl, a burlesque dancer and stripper, and it was in Las Vegas that she spent much of her life. At issue is not her chosen career as a burlesque dance and stripper, since it is widely known that many current celebrities, both male and female, have been strippers. The issue is whether her claim that she gave birth to Elvis Presley’s son is true. I do not believe her claim is true, and I will present evidence to prove that it cannot be true.

Angelique Pettyjohn was born Dorothy Lee Perrins on March 11, 1943, in Los Angeles. Her father was Richard Lee Young Perrins (1909-1983). Richard Lee Young Perrins’ father, Ross Young (born 1885) died in 1919, and his mother, Rosa Dodson (1890-1979) subsequently remarried. Angelique Pettyjohn's mother, Maia Irene (Enke) Herbert (1921-1973), was a German immigrant, who married Richard Lee Perrins in 1942. Richard Perrins' marriage to Maia Enke was his third marriage. They divorced soon after Dorothy Lee Perrins’ birth in 1943, and Maia Perrins subsequently married Claude Herbert, living the remainder of her life in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the 1950 U. S. census report, Dorothy Perrins is listed as Dorthy [sic] L Herbert, age 7 years. At some point, she chose to take her biological father’s surname, not her adoptive father’s. Her high school yearbooks show that she was active in the drama and dance clubs at West High School in Salt Lake City, where she graduated in 1961.

Dr. Flynn, however, claims—almost certainly based on information given to him by Angelique Pettyjohn—that Dorothy Perrins graduated high school early, but if so, the West High year books do not support this claim. The entire narrative that unfolds about her alleged meeting with Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in 1961 rests on this one critical point, that she graduated high school “early.” Below are pictures of Dorothy Perrins from the 1960 and 1961 West High yearbooks, her junior picture below left and her senior picture below on the right.

Dr. Flynn avers (p. 42) that Dorothy Perrins appeared in the school play, Arsenic and Old Lace, in 1960, but cast and performance pictures from the play appear in the 1961 year book, not the 1960 year book. Below is Dorothy Perrins’ cast picture from Arsenic and Old Lace in the 1961 West High year book. In addition, she appears in group pictures of both the drama club and the dance club in the same 1961 year book.

If we are to accept the narrative offered by Dr. Flynn, Dorothy Perrins graduated high school early (December 1960, presumably? We are not told) at age 17. Eager to get away from home and start a career, she immediately moved to Las Vegas, presumably in January or February of 1961, since she allegedly met Elvis Presley there in March. According to Dorothy Perrins’ account, as told to Dr. Flynn, she met Elvis Presley shortly after her 18th birthday, that is, sometime after March 11, 1961, and became pregnant with his child. She was selected by him from among lots of pretty Las Vegas showgirls, apparently because she was young, just 18, and a virgin: 

I think he [Elvis] singled me out from all the other girls because I was so young—I had just turned eighteen only a few days before—when most of the other showgirls were in their twenties and thirties. . . . Later, when I told him Iwas [sic] still a virgin, which most people find pretty hard to believe when you’re a showgirl, it just blew his mind. I thought it would be great to have him as my first lover. (pp. 57-58)

There are a number of problems with her account. One is that Elvis was not in Las Vegas at the time. Another is her assumption that Elvis was sexually attracted to her because she was a virgin: this is merely conjecture. Marty Lacker, one of Elvis’s bodyguards and a member of the so-called “Memphis Mafia,” said, “Elvis didn’t think virginity was really all that important” (Alanna Nash, Elvis and the Memphis Mafia, p. 170 [UK edition]). And, according to Lamar Ficke, “When it comes to sex, you've got to remember that Elvis was more interested in titillation than anything else. He didn’t like penetration that much because he was uncircumcised, and sometimes intercourse tore his foreskin and he'd bleed. But he was a stone freak, and don’t ever think different. He had every fetish there was” (Elvis and the Memphis Mafia, p. 170). In Dr. Flynn’s account, we are also told that on the evening she confessed her virginity, the chivalric Elvis volunteered to walk her back to her (shared) apartment at the Flamingo Hotel. If so, presuming they met at the Sahara Hotel (Milton Prell, its owner, was a friend of the Colonel's, and Elvis usually stayed there in the early Sixties) the distance between the Sahara Hotel and the Flamingo Hotel would have been a walking distance down the Las Vegas Strip of about 2.5 miles (one-way). Moreover, we're also supposed to believe that as the two of them strolled leisurely hand in hand for over two miles, they were unaccompanied by any of Elvis’s bodyguards. There is no mention in her account of meeting Elvis that his bodyguards were anywhere near. This is highly improbable, as Elvis didn't even go to the bathroom in a public place without at least two of his bodyguards accompanying him (see Elvis and the Memphis Mafia).

I will return to my central question: Is there any evidence that Elvis was in Las Vegas during the time period from March 11 to March 20, 1961? No. There is no evidence to support this claim. One reason is that on March 12 and 13, 1961, Elvis was in Nashville, recording several tracks at RCA Studio B. These tracks would soon be included on the album, Something For Everybody, released in May 1961. Once these recording sessions were finished, Elvis returned to Memphis. From there, according to the chronology published in Inside Blue Hawaii (Elvis Unlimited Productions, 2009), Elvis boarded a plane for Los Angeles on Saturday, March 18, and had a layover in Chicago, where he stayed at the O'Hare Inn (p. 18). The next day, March 19, he stayed at his home on 525 Perugia Way in Bel Air. On Monday, March 20, he had a preproduction meeting at Paramount Studios. According to Dr. Flynn's account, Elvis left Las Vegas for Los Angeles on Saturday, March 18 (p. 58), which contradicts the known facts. As one might expect, he provides no source or sources for this piece of information. Dr. Flynn gets many other details wrong as well. For instance, he writes, "On Monday, March 20, 1961, Elvis Presley began work on Blue Hawaii, splitting his time between the location filming and at the recording studio, doing the film’s soundtrack” (p. 59). (We are told this because during his down time, Elvis was calling Dorothy Perrins in Las Vegas. We're not told when, precisely, she gave him a slip of paper with her name and phone number.) The Blue Hawaii recording sessions took place March 21 through March 23 in Los Angeles, not in Hawaii (the "location"), and Elvis did not begin location shooting until March 27. He also states that Elvis, the Colonel and the members of the so-called “Memphis Mafia” flew from Los Angeles to Kauai and stayed at the Coco Palms Hotel, where they were “mobbed” by eager fans. This assertion also contradicts the known facts: Elvis landed at the Honolulu International Airport on March 25, 1961. Here is a detailed account of Elvis’s arrival:

 

The morning of March 25, 1961, Elvis boarded a Pan American Airways jet in Los Angeles to start what he knew would be a long, tiring day for him. Even before the plane took off from LA, an estimated crowd of 3,000 began gathering at Honolulu International Airport to greet Elvis on his arrival. At 12:15 p.m. the plane carrying Presley touched down in Honolulu, and at 12:27 Elvis, wearing a black suit and a ruffled white shirt, appeared at the rear door. “For 10 minutes the handsome lad with the baby blue eyes passed in review,” reported a local newspaper, “just like they do in the Army--up and down before the crowd with the wire screen and a cordon of Honolulu and military police between him and the fans. Some of them looked as though they were ready to tear him limb for limb, and take home the pieces for souvenirs....  Then Elvis jumped into a waiting car and was escorted by police to the Hawaiian Village Hotel, where he would stay for three weeks while filming Blue Hawaii. (Source: http://www.elvis-history-blog.com/elvis-uss-arizona.html)

 

The Coco Palms Resort [to refer to it by its proper designation], to which Dr. Flynn refers, is indeed on the island of Kauai, but the Coco Palms Resort is where Elvis and Joan Blackman’s characters are married in Blue Hawaii. It is also the site of other key scenes in the movie, including the final scene in which Elvis sings the “Hawaiian Wedding Song” and holds Joan Blackman’s hand while they board a raft to cross the lagoon. While it is true and well documented that Elvis and his entourage would party in Las Vegas for a few days, the partying occurred almost always after a movie had been completed, not before it was made. Blue Hawaii wrapped on May 23, 1961. I have not taken the time to find out whether Elvis and his buddies did, in fact, stop in Las Vegas on the long way back to Memphis. Did he take time for a clandestine liaison with Dorothy, his latest flame? No, Dr. Flynn tells us, because “by then, the romance had started to cool down" (p. 60). By the end of May, however, she would have been two months pregnant, at least according the narrative we are asked to believe.

However, Dorothy Perrins would indeed meet Elvis Presley, that much is true. She would also have a role in one of his films; that is also true. But that was six years later, and the movie was not Blue Hawaii, but Clambake, released in 1967.

To be continued...

Sweet Songs

“Who can take tomorrow / Dip it in a dream / Separate the sorrow / And collect up all the cream?”, asks Bill, the candy store proprietor (played by Aubrey Woods) in “The Candy Man,” the famous song from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). Like the children who fill his store as he sings, we know the answer: “The candy man can cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good.” Here, the candy man is represented as a benign figure from an imaginary land of plenitude, where our wishes for endless bounty come true, and the idea of scarcity is unknown, a place of luxury and ease and comfort, without sorrow. He comes from an idyllic place which might well be nestled in “The Big Rock Candy Mountains”: 

There’s a land that’s fair and bright,

Where the handouts grow on bushes

And you sleep out every night

Where the boxcars all are empty

And the sun shines every day

On the birds and the bees

And the cigarette trees

The lemonade springs

Where the bluebird sings

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

 

But there’s another kind of candy man, the one who we can hear in the materialistic world of Roy Orbison’s “Candy Man”: “C’mon baby, let me take you by the hand / C’mon sugar, let me take you by the hand,” ‘cause he wants to be her candy man—an appeal to her avarice. “I met him at the candy store,” sing the Shangri-Las in their quaint 1964 hit, “Leader of the Pack,” the band named after an imaginary paradise, not unlike the one to be found in the Big Rock Candy Mountains. The candy store is a site of innocence, just as it is in Johnny Cash’s fable, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” (1958), a song about a beauty queen who “loved the boy next door who worked at the candy store.” Not so in “Leader of the Pack”: the father does not approve of his daughter hanging out with a juvenile delinquent, the leader of a pack of motorcycle-riding hoodlums. And why wouldn’t the father be suspicious, for isn’t there a hint of danger in a figure who hangs out in a candy store, tempting innocent young women with sweets?

The candy man is a culturally ambivalent figure. The candy man makes his candies with love and makes the world taste good, but isn’t Willy Wonka also a vaguely sinister figure, luring children to his factory with a Golden Ticket that promises the lucky winner with a lifetime supply of chocolate? It is not clear that the odd and mercurial Wonka actually likes children, even though, paradoxically, he makes “scrumdidilyumptious” candy bars. The mystery that surrounds Willy Wonka fits a larger tradition of works such as Edward Fenton’s Penny Candy (illustrated by Edward Gorey, 1970), with its uncomfortably strange candy shop owner.

The candy man can remove the sorrow from tomorrow, and make his candy with love, but he also seeks to control us through our gastër, our ravenous stomach, our gluttony. The candy man’s shadow self is the witch from “Hansel and Gretel,” who lures the unsuspecting children by appealing to their infantile, insatiable appetites for candy and sweets. Here is a passage from Robert Coover’s revision of “Hansel and Gretel” titled “The Gingerbread House” (Pricksongs & Descants, 1969), a tour de force of the image of gluttony. The “black rags flapping” is, of course, a metonymy for the witch:

The children approach the gingerbread house through a garden of candied fruits and all-day suckers, hopping along on flagstones of variegated wafers. They sample the gingerbread weatherboarding with its caramel coating, lick at the meringue on the windowsills, kiss each other's sweetened lips. The boy climbs up on the chocolate roof to break off a peppermint-stick chimney, comes sliding down into a rain barrel full of vanilla pudding. The girl, reaching out to catch him in his fall, slips on a sugarplum and tumbles into a sticky rock garden of candied chestnuts. Laughing gaily, they lick each other clean. And how grand is the red-and-white chimney the boy holds up for her! how bright! how sweet! But the door: here they pause and catch their breath. It is heart-shaped and bloodstone-red, its burnished surface gleaming in the sunlight. Oh, what a thing is that door! Shining like a ruby, like hard cherry candy, and pulsing softly, radiantly. Yes, marvelous! delicious! insuperable! but beyond: what is that sound of black rags flapping?

The difference between plenitude and gluttony, need as opposed to excess, is a very fine line.

 

Here is a big box of sweet songs:

 

Harry McClintock – The Big Rock Candy Mountains (1928) (Frank Luther recorded a version at about the same time under the title, “That Big Rock Candy Mountain,” released on the Banner label)

Haywire Mac – The Big Rock Candy Mountains (1939) (as “Haywire Mac,” Harry McClintock apparently re-recorded “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” for Decca in 1939; the song went to #1 on the “Hillbilly” charts and helped to popularize the song; this is possibly the 1928 recording reissued on Decca)

Harry McClintock with Hal Borne & His Orchestra – The Big Rock Candy Mountains (1942) (McClintock re-recorded the song yet again, in 1942, with modified “swing era” lyrics, for RCM Productions’ “Soundies” series; “Soundies” were musical shorts capable of being viewed on “Panorams,” coin-operated, 16mm rear-projection machines—not “jukeboxes”)

Burl Ives – Big Rock Candy Mountain (1945) (Burl Ives’ version, recorded in March 1945 for Decca, with bowdlerized lyrics, widely popularized the song in the years after the war; the “mountains” of Harry McClintock’s version, where plentitude can be found, has become a singular “mountain,” which is how the song is popularly known now—even the Grammy Award-winning soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) removes the definite article and uses the singular “mountain” in the title, as if the song refers not to a paradisiacal land to be found hidden within the mountains, but a big, candy-colored free-standing mountain)

The Chordettes – Lollipop (1958) (also a hit by Ronald & Ruby the same year)

Dorsey Burnette – Big Rock Candy Mountain (1960) (an audible expression of what Lawrence Grossberg calls “sentimental inauthenticity”)

Roy Orbison – Candy Man (1961)

The Drifters – Sweets for My Sweet (1961) (one should listen to this song every day)

The Searchers – Sweets for My Sweet (1963) (please see my blog post on Timbre below, and then decide which version of “Sweets for My Sweet” you prefer; I prefer The Drifters’ version)

Elvis Presley - Cotton Candy Land (1963) (covered by Stevie Nicks & Chris Isaak, 2022)

Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons – Candy Girl (1963)

Lesley Gore – Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows (1963) (an example of what is called “affective inflation”)

The Strangeloves – I Want Candy (1965) (covered by Bow Wow Wow 1982) (an example of appellatization, when a proper noun, Candy, is confused with a common noun, candy; think: Kleenex)

Roy Orbison – Sugar and Honey (1965)

The Strawberry Alarm Clock – Incense and Peppermints (1967)

The Archies – Sugar, Sugar (1969)

The Clique – Sugar on Sunday (1969)

The Ides of March – Vehicle (1970)

Aubrey Woods – The Candy Man (1971) (from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, lyrics and music by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley)

The Rolling Stones – Brown Sugar (1971) 

Sammy Davis, Jr. with the Mike Curb Congregation – The Candy Man (1972) 

Montrose – Rock Candy (1973)

Barry White – Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe (1974) (included here because it easily could be about candy, simultaneously invoking hunger, insatiable appetite, and oral gratification)

Ohio Players – Sweet Sticky Thing (1975)

Led Zeppelin – Candy Store Rock (1976)

The Cars – Candy-O (1979)

Mary Jane Girls – Candy Man (1983)

Sheena Easton – Sugar Walls (1984) (written by Prince—enough said)

Def Leppard – Pour Some Sugar on Me (1987) (the lyric, “I’m hot, sticky sweet,” suggests this song’s likely inspiration was Montrose’s hard-rocking “Rock Candy”)

Counting Crows – Hard Candy (2002)

50 Cent – Candy Shop (2005)

Rihanna – Sell Me Candy (2007)

Madonna – Candy Shop (2008) (impossible to miss the many similes for insatiable appetite in the lyrics for this one)

Assay Office

Assay office [from Wikipedia]: “Institutions set up to assay (test the purity of) precious metals . . . . often done to protect consumers from buying fake items.”

Music critics are motivated by opposing, mutually exclusive, desires. On the one hand, they strive to identify and distinguish the very best albums currently being marketed to mass audiences. On the other, they seek to shelter those same albums from mass consumption—from a homogenizing process that consists of assimilation or “popularization.” The critic’s sorting process is predicated on an epistemology that makes real/fake distinctions, its aim to vilify the counterfeit and praise the genuine item. Because of the critic’s status as an expert in the field, the critic’s discourse, merely descriptive or impressionistic, has the rhetorical force of science (applicable to critics of the arts in general, in fact).

Fortunately, the authenticating discourse of the critic can be subject to parody, undermining the critic’s epistemological certainty. Jazz critics have been especially subject to parody, and rightly so. Steve Allen’s spoken-word recordings, “Cinderella” and “Crazy Red Riding Hood,” issued on record in 1953 prior to the publication of his collection Bop Fables (1955), satirize hipster bop talk. Marshall Brickman’s hilarious “What, Another Legend?” (1973), mocks the jazzographer’s tendency to erect a jazz hall of fame. Perhaps the best parody of critics’ attempts to transform jazz into language is Donald Barthelme’s short story “The King of Jazz.” In Barthelme’s humorous story, a jazz fan responds to a question about how to describe the peerless sound of trombonist Hokie Mokie, the current king of jazz:

“You mean that sound that sounds like the cutting edge of life? That sounds like polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans? That sounds like a herd of musk ox in full flight? That sounds like male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea? That sounds like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt. Katmai? That sounds like the wild turkey walking through the deep, soft forest? That sounds like beavers chewing trees in an Appalachian marsh? That sounds like an oyster fungus growing on an aspen trunk? That sounds like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada? That sounds like prairie dogs kissing? That sounds like witchgrass tumbling or a river meandering? That sounds like manatees munching seaweed at Cape Sable? That sounds like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas? That sounds like—“

Barthelme’s metaphorical feat, in fact, illustrates “the normal practice of music criticism,” translating “a work (or its performance) . . . into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective" (Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, p. 179). 

Whistling A Different Tune

Several years ago, I published a blog post on songs that feature whistling. At the time, I wrote about the many significations of whistling: contentment (“Don't Worry, Be Happy”), solitary, melancholy contemplation (“(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay”), self-absorbed autoeroticism (“Centerfold”), pleasant, relaxing idleness (the theme from The Andy Griffith Show), or simply to pass the time, to avoid monotony when speech is either impossible or forbidden (“Colonel Bogey March”; “Whistle While You Work” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). Whistling can also simply represent an individual’s joie de vivre ("Daydream").

But there's another aspect of whistling that I ignored when I wrote the earlier post, that whistling can bring bad luck. A popular superstition holds that whistling at night is dangerous and may bring unwanted attention from creatures that stalk the night, or perhaps may attract evil spirits. There are some world cultures that believe whistling is a means to summon supernatural beings.

Perhaps because of the association of whistling with certain morbid superstitions, movies have used whistling as means to establish an ominous mood or atmosphere. Each of  the films in Columbia's 8-film Whistler series (1944-1948) begins with the slightly sinister narrator whistling an eerie tune, soon to introduce himself as The Whistler: “I am the Whistler and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak.” A few years prior to the debut of the Whistler series, in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), throughout the film the child murderer, Hans Beckert, identifies himself off-screen by whistling Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” An inspired cinematic use of whistling is Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score for the psycho-thriller Twisted Nerve (1968), widely known as the “Kill Bill whistle song,” having been appropriated by Quentin Tarantino for a sequence in Kill Bill Vol. I (2003). Tarantino follows Fritz Lang’s lead in having the whistler introduced off-screen prior to the character’s actual appearance. The “whistle song” was again used by Tarantino as a phone’s ringtone in Death Proof (2007).

I find Herrmann’s melodic theme for Twisted Nerve powerful and haunting because, to use a linguistic analogy, it is like an antonym: it is both tranquil and foreboding at the same time. It is the sonic equivalent of M’s Hans Beckert, whose jolly smile and jaunty whistle cloaks his murderous intent. I hear Twisted Nerve’s whistle in many songs that use whistling but are musically much different. I hear it in Roy Orbison’s “Here Comes the Rain, Baby,” the beginning of Billy Joel’s “The Stranger” (1977), the whistling that closes Peter Gabriel's masterful “Intruder,” Roxy Music's cover of “Jealous Guy,” and Scorpions’ “Wind of Change," among others. 

Here are a few songs to listen to and think about in the way they use whistling:

 

A Fistful of Dollars (Main Title) – Ennio Morricone (1964) (Alessandro Alessandroni, whistler)

Here Comes The Rain, Baby – Roy Orbison (1967) (Mickey Newbury)

One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong – Leonard Cohen (1967) (Features Cohen using a hand whistle)

Twisted Nerve (Main Title) – Bernard Herrmann (1968) (Gareth Williams, whistler)

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life – Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) (Eric Idle)

Intruder – Peter Gabriel (1980)

Generals and Majors – XTC (1980)

Roxy Music – Jealous Guy (1981) (John Lennon tribute)

Patience – Guns N' Roses (1988) 

Wind of Change – Scorpions (1990)

The Big Bang – Rock Mafia featuring Miley Cyrus (Video, 2010)

The New School

How many critics—of the theater, movies, music, contemporary fine arts—wake up each morning with the uncomfortable feeling that someday they will be wrong in their critical judgment? After all, what is a critic’s deepest fear? To have erred in judgment, to have made the wrong call, to have missed the boat. Certainly, no movie critic wants to miss the boat—to have critically underestimated, or what’s worse, to have dismissed the next Citizen Kane (1941), for instance—so in order to avoid making such an unwitting mistake, the critic engages in what Robert Ray, employing a term taken from Max Ernst, calls critical overcomprehension (How a Film Theory Got Lost, Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 82). Ray writes:

 Aware of previous mistakes, reviewers become increasingly afraid to condemn anything....Hence ... [one] ... of modern criticism’s ... great dangers, what Max Ernst called “overcomprehension” or “the waning of indignation”.... (82)

 

No critic, of course, can see beyond the curtain of Time. Time is the ultimate critic, and the critic’s limited perspective doesn’t allow him to see beyond his own pitifully narrow moment in history. Critical overcomprehension—the act of giving every new movie an equally glowing reception—is a result of the critic’s deep fear that history may prove him wrong. No one wants to be, for instance, television critic Jack Gould, who reviewed The Milton Berle Show appearance of Elvis Presley for the New York Times in 1956:

 

Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. His specialty is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub. For the ear, he is an unutterable bore, not nearly so talented as Frank Sinatra back in the latter's rather hysterical days at the Paramount Theater. (qtd. in Robert Ray, 80)

 

However, as Ray points out, Gould’s kind of critical misjudgment has its own unintended consequences: such gross critical mistakes have led to “rejection and incomprehensibility as promises of ultimate value” (82). For instance, if a record album sold poorly, or the artist who recorded it was given little or no attention—or worse, completely neglected in his or her own time, the record must therefore be great, perhaps even a masterwork. The initial neglect of 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico serves as a useful example. Ignored upon release, it is now considered a classic. Initial neglect as a sign of greatness is a powerful myth and governs much of modern criticism of the arts.

 

According to Self-Styled Siren (critic and film historian Farran Smith Nehme), whose knowledge of silent era Hollywood is nothing short of encyclopedic, the practice of critical overcomprehension is currently being applied to Babylon (2022), a box-office failure upon release last year that also divided critics (“Bye, bye Babylon,” August 23, 2023). While the Siren believes it is a “lousy movie,” nonetheless she has noticed that there are “ongoing attempts to enshrine last year's Babylon as some kind of masterwork,” which is to say, for some, the movie's initial rejection is a surefire guarantee of its ultimate value. The myth serves to shield such movies from negative reviews.

In addition, the Siren refers to a recent New York Times article about the new phenomenon of “MovieTok” influencers. The Times calls them “the new school of film critic,” observing that “some tenets of the profession—such as rendering judgments or making claims that go beyond one’s personal taste—are now considered antiquated and objectionable.” Critics of the new school are never going to make an egregious mistake like Jack Gould made with Elvis Presley. More than that, by insisting that the tenets of a previous generation of critics have become antiquated—meaning they are too old to get what’s really going on—the new school of film critics seeks to shield itself, not simply certain films, but from criticism as well. The new school influencers have little concern for the movie itself. Instead, they are far more interested in the multiple ways they can attribute significance to the movie, e.g., “outrageous,” “extravagant,” “over the top,” “mind-blowing,” “thought-provoking,” on and on. Criticism is simply a form of publicity, and the film itself a commodity.

Timbre

According to Wikipedia, there are well over a thousand cover versions of “Louie Louie.” Question: Given the many hundreds of versions available, why is it that the Kingsmen’s cover version the one most widely known? As we all know, Paul Revere & the Raiders recorded the song a week or two after the Kingsmen, but the Raiders’ version failed to become a hit. Why did the Kingsmen’s version succeed and the Raiders’ version fail? After all, it’s the same song. Or is it?

In Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, Theodore Gracyk asks a relevant question: Why  do rock fans “listen again and again to the same records”? Why did a student that Gracyk knew wear out “a new Neil Young cassette in a month”? In answer to these questions, Gracyk writes:

What is needed is a plausible account of how “Louie Louie” can retain its impact when the record is played over and over. The answer must be that song structure is often an incidental framing device for something further; a “coathanger,” as John Sheperd puts it, upon which other qualities and “significant personal statements” are hung. Alan Durant proposes that recording shapes listening by locating the corresponding pleasure in “precise recollection and anticipation: knowing sounds, movements, and instrumental textures by memory and familiarity, rather than by extrapolation from perceived patterns, symmetries and learned musical structures.” But why should this anticipation please us? (58)

The short answer to this question, Gracyk says, is timbre (“what makes a particular musical instrument or human voice have a different sound from another, even when they play or sing the same note”). The problem is that timbres “fade” after a short period of time, “becoming more imprecise with the passage of time” (60). In other words, our auditory memories, when it comes to musical timbres, are poor. We can’t remember a song’s timbres precisely, so we want to hear it again (and again). So why is the Kingmen’s version of “Louie Louie” the one that became the most widely known? The short answer is the song's timbres.

In film studies, the closest analogy to timbre is mise-en-scéne, that magical dimension of a movie that is generated by the gap between a director’s (auteur’s) intentions and the camera’s automatism (André Bazin). When discussing the role of the music producer in the creation of a record, music critic Michael Jarrett writes:

When Owen Bradley produces Patsy Cline’s massive hits, he records a sonic concept just as much as he records an artist. In the vocabulary of film studies, the producer’s purview is the mise-en-scéne, in all of that term’s mystery. (Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings, 37).