The Wild Side: Lou Reed vs Frank Zappa

Lou Reed and Frank Zappa (illustration by Chris Grayson) 

It's curious how we recall certain moments only when death intervenes and creates a rent in our day. The sad passing of Lou Reed this past Sunday, at the age of 71, took me immediately to a typical party I attended as a teenager on a Saturday night back in the early Seventies. There's no significant reason to remember this party and I hadn't even thought about it since the night it happened. But that's what death does. It brings dormant moments back to life. On that evening, it was the first time I became aware of Lou Reed and his band, The Velvet Underground. Their debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, just happened to be playing on the turntable and I remember most the nursery rhyme beauty of the opening track, "Sunday Morning," the slashing guitar that droned under the driving beat of "I'm Waiting for the Man," and the pulsating intensity of "Heroin," where John Cale's shrieking violin seemed to create an electric blanket to surround Reed's determined voice and speaking for his heightened nervous system; the sensations brought on by milk-blood flowing in the veins (all of which made Steppenwolf's popular song "The Pusher" seem even sillier and more self-conscious by comparison). I also loved the Celtic melody that underscored "Venus in Furs" while the flattened out timbre of Nico's voice on "All Tomorrow's Parties" made me momentarily forget the party I was attending.

In the Shadow of Sgt. Pepper: We're Only in it for the Money

Last summer, I wrote in Critics at Large about how The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, a lovely, masterful avant-garde pop confection, also represented a magical retreat from a counter-culture that was on the verge of turning dark and violent. Before that darkness fully overshadowed the utopian spirit of that record, though, many of The Beatles' contemporaries made valiant attempts to duplicate the wizardry of Sgt. Pepper, as if they were trying to decode a secret language. In 1968, for instance, The Zombies ("Time of the Season") matched some of Pepper's technical innovations while adding some rich textures of their own on the exquisite Odyssey and Oracle (which was also recorded, like Pepper, at Abbey Road Studios). The Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed (1967) developed precisely in the spirit of Sgt. Pepper. The album, which yielded two hit songs, "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Nights in White Satin," was conceived as a song cycle that spanned an entire day – from sunrise to evening – where every song provided a unique perspective from each member of the group. Days of Future Passed was an evocation of a pastoral mystical innocence worthy of poet William Wordsworth in the age of psychedelia.

The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request

The Rolling Stones, a mere six months after Pepper, would concoct their own psychedelic conceit, Their Satanic Majesties Request, where they abandoned their R&B roots for exotic Indian rhythms, sound collages, and music hall pastiches. But because of their bad boy image, the record felt fake (despite its devious title) with its half-hearted flower power sentiments. There were many other lesser, now forgotten groups, who attempted to capture Sgt. Pepper's lightning in a bottle. One American artist who did respond to the seismic impact of Pepper, but didn't buy into the hippie ethos that blossomed out of The Beatles' landmark recording was Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. This Los Angeles band, who coined themselves "the ugly reminder," may have had long hair but they didn't even come close to resembling the pretty groups sprouting up like flowers in a magical garden.

To paraphrase critic Nik Cohen, The Mothers suggested a band of motorcycle outlaws out to pillage your home and kidnap your daughter – though they were more likely to play her Igor Stravinsky (or maybe "Louie Louie") rather than sexually ravage her. Dan Sullivan in The New York Times once pointed up the significant discrepancy between The Mothers and The Beatles. "The most striking difference between [The Beatles and The Mothers of Invention] is not in their work but in their approach to their work – The Beatles' desire to please an audience versus The Mothers' basic distrust of one." Sgt. Pepper had celebrated the romantic ideal, offering the possibility that love could transcend all of our problems. But Zappa, who had already been railing against the 19th Century Romantic tradition of music, perceived something sinister lurking beneath the flowers, beads, and incense burning. Zappa saw the very concept of flower power evolving into nothing less than a successful fad. So on his 1968 album, We're Only in it for the Money, he decided to go after the fad rather than The Beatles' music. "Sgt. Pepper was okay," Zappa remarked to critic Kurt Loder in 1988. "But the whole aroma of what The Beatles were was something that never caught my fancy. I got the impression from what was going on at the time that they were only in it for the money – and that was a pretty unpopular view to hold."

He may have had a point. Contrary to the more generous ideals attached to the group, The Beatles' career was more often than not preoccupied by the power of money. By 1968, film critic Pauline Kael even shared some of Zappa's distrust when she reviewed the animated film Yellow Submarine. She felt that the problem of commerce undermined The Beatles' image, which by that time, began to change in the wake of all the promotional marketing tie-ins associated with the movie. "Wasn't all this supposed to be what The Beatles were against?" Kael asked. "There's something depressing about seeing yesterday's outlaw idols of the teenagers become a quartet of Pollyannas for the wholesome family trade." Yet, even as early as 1965, when interviewed by Playboy, John Lennon sarcastically remarked that they were moneymakers first and entertainers second. It was this particular aura that Zappa countered on his record.

Notes From the Dangerous Kitchen

This summer is the 10th Anniversary of the publication of my book Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, a work that (looking back) was written in a danger zone not unlike its title. While fending off neighbours who seemed to love making excessive noise until all hours of the early morning, Dangerous Kitchen was written sometimes one sentence at a time. Often I was interrupted because of some melee in my building (usually someone trying to kill someone else) that I had to attend to. Nevetheless, my publisher ECW Press gave me the freedom to write a 600-page book about American composer Frank Zappa that allowed me to go beyond the misleading perceptions of him as this deranged freak who warned us not to eat the yellow snow. I was able to attempt a fascinating study that tied serialist classical music, blues, R&B doo-wop and rock & roll to an artist who fused all of those elements into a satiric artistic rebellion against the excesses of Romanticism. So in this act of shameless self-promotion, here is an excerpt from Dangerous Kitchen (which has continually gone in and out of print in the decade since its publication) that focuses on Frank Zappa's first LP in 1966 with the Mothers of Invention called Freak Out!

When Edgard Varèse died on November 6, 1965, Frank Zappa seemed bound and determined to pick up his fallen torch. Michael Gray writes in Mother! The Frank Zappa Story that Varèse's death "galvanized Frank into a stronger-than-ever determination that he was not going to just make records, but change the face of music." Freak Out!, a two-record set released in July 1966, didn't exactly change the face of music, but it had an incalculable influence on the pop scene. Until then, the only rock double-album was Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde (which had come out only two months earlier). Yet, unlike Blonde on Blonde, Freak Out! was designed conceptually. The songs weren't randomly gathered in the traditional manner of making an album. There was a strategy at work on this debut. Zappa was presenting a whole new gathering of diverse compositions that hadn't been heard all in one place in American pop.

Strictly Conventional: Alex Winter's Disappointing New Zappa Documentary

Frank Zappa. (Photo: Roelof Kiers/Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

I have been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa's music of late, everything from The MOFO Project/Object: The Making of Freakout! (2006), a double-CD documentary look at his first (1966) album (with The Mothers of Invention) to Make a Jazz Noise Here (1993), highlighting his 1988 band – one of the final discs to come out during his lifetime – the last group he toured with before he was diagnosed with cancer. (He passed away in 1993 at age 52). Most recently, I purchased and thoroughly enjoyed the posthumously released Halloween 81 highlights CD (2020), featuring Zappa at, perhaps, his live best. (The 6-CD box set of three 1981 New York concerts is too pricey, however.) So, being immersed in this genius's oeuvre, I was quite psyched to see Zappa (2020) the latest documentary on the man.

Alex Winter's is actually the second documentary about Frank Zappa to reach our screens in the last five years. But whereas German filmmaker Thorsten Schütte's Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words (2016) was an effective, compelling look inside the world of Zappa, filtered solely through interviews given by Zappa himself, news accounts on him, and various of his musical performances around the world, Winter's Zappa is a more conventional affair that, at best, offers a glancing and superficial view of why Zappa mattered.

Beauty & the Beast: Pauline Butcher's Freak Out! My Life With Frank Zappa

Until recent years, most of the books about the late American composer Frank Zappa, including my own (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa), have been attempts to provide a proper context for his work. Simply put, for many, the name Frank Zappa only conjures up images of a deranged freak who warns us not to eat the yellow snow. What gets lost in that somewhat uniformed view is a much deeper and complex understanding of how Zappa brought to popular music a ferocious desire to break down the boundaries between high and low culture. He created in his work, until his death from prostate cancer in 1993, a unique and sophisticated form of musical comedy.

By infusing the canon of 20th Century music with his scabrous and outrageous wit (influenced by comedian Lenny Bruce and the irreverent clowning of Spike Jones), Zappa presented musical history through the kaleidoscopic lens of social satire turning that history into a wildly theatrical display of Dadaist farce. He poked fun at middle-class conformity (Freak Out!), the Sixties counterculture (We're Only in it For the Money), Seventies disco (Sheik Yerbouti), the corporate rock industry (Tinsel Town Rebellion), and the fundamentalist narcolepsy of the Reagan era (You Are What You Is). Beginning with his band The Mothers of Invention in the Sixties, Zappa built a formidable career in rock & roll by combining a wide range of styles, including serious contemporary music (inspired by Edgard Varese, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern and Charles Ives), jazz (Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus), rhythm & blues (Guitar Slim, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson), doo-wop (The Channels), and social and political parody. His career essentially had its roots in the artistic rebellion against the excesses of Romanticism in the late 19th Century beginning with the absurdism of Erik Satie, and then continuing with the birth of serialism that ushered in the modern era of the 20th Century. 

America Thinks and Goes Home: The 50th Anniversary of Frank Zappa's Absolutely Free

While much of the pop music world today is celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, a few months before that landmark album made its way onto our turntables, Frank Zappa's second album, the rock oratorio Absolutely Free, was already sending up the culture wars with the irreverent verve and zeal of Spike Jones. Of course, it didn't draw anywhere near the attention of Pepper and no one is celebrating its 50th anniversary despite its daring and ribaldry. If Freak Out! (1966) announced the arrival of The Mothers of Invention and their subversive intentions (as well as influencing Sgt. Pepper), Absolutely Free was the fulfillment of those ambitions. On the inside cover of Freak Out!, Frank Zappa listed all those who had an impact on his work. But it’s on Absolutely Free that you can actually hear the presence of Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Lenny Bruce, and Edgard Varèse. Freak Out! was a beautifully designed map for The Mothers’ music, while Absolutely Free actually takes you places. Critic Greil Marcus wrote, in Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, that “on this early effort the wit was liberating, the noise of the band not merely Absurdist but actually absurd. . . .”

Absolutely Free was indeed an oratorio of ridiculous extremes – performed at breakneck speed – with a tangy political satire woven into a musical embroidery. The history of 20th century music, from Stravinsky to The Supremes, happily plays bumper cars and lives up to the title of the record. No genre gets excluded – or not satirized. “We play the new free music – music as absolutely free, unencumbered by American cultural suppression,” Zappa announced. “We are systematically trying to do away with the creative roadblocks that our helpful American educational system has installed to make sure nothing creative leaks through to mass audiences. . . . The same patriotic feeling expressed in songs like ‘The Green Beret’ and ‘Day of Decision’ are embodied in our every performance, only on a more abstract level. . . .We represent the only true patriotism left.” This abstract example of true patriotism barely leaves you time to catch your breath, and the musical quotes just go whizzing past. And the album’s title turns out to be more than apt. All of Zappa’s musical ideas happily and freely collide in the rush hour traffic.

American Composer: Frank Zappa's Understanding America

“It's all one album,” Frank Zappa once told journalist Jerry Hopkins in characterizing his work during an interview for Rolling Stone magazine in 1968. With only three releases to his credit, and long before he'd come to accumulate close to 100 records of satirical rock, orchestral, ballet, electronic and jazz scores, Zappa already fully grasped the “conceptual continuity” of his project/object. “I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order,” he said. “It still would make one piece of music you could listen to.” In 1993, a couple of years before he would die from prostate cancer, Zappa followed through on that suggestion. He took a razor blade to his back catalogue with the purpose of creating a caustic, but passionate musical portrait of the nation that produced him. Understanding America is a two-CD musical anthology unceremoniously put out last fall by Zappa Records through the distribution of Universal (who recently re-released, with huge sonic improvements, his large body of work). But given the little fanfare provided its arrival, you might as well call it The Mystery Disc. The CD comes with a stark 1975 black-and-white photo of the composer on the front cover, a didactic title, no track listing on the back cover, no accounting of the various musicians who play on it, no background notes on the songs (including which year they were recorded and what albums they first appeared on), and scant explanation concerning the context of the new album except for cryptic pronouncements that it's a record about “love, peace, justice and the American way.” (Its very design prompted a friend of mine who saw it to ask: “Is this a bootleg?”)

If the proposed audience for Understanding America is the Zappa fan, it might make sense to avoid redundancies by leaving out information that's already been absorbed into the DNA of the initiated. But what will the uninitiated make of this release? Some fans have already panned the album on websites and chat rooms complaining that it uses the old reverb-drenched digital mixes instead of the new cleaner and dryer ones (but what other mixes would he use since Zappa sequenced this release while he was still alive?). They're also arguing about the inclusions of some songs and the omissions of others (as if this were yet another 'greatest hits' package). How about the new listeners to Zappa's music? Since it's unlikely to get reviewed by contemporary pop critics, Understanding America not only doesn't stand a chance of being understood, it likely won't be realized either. And that would be a huge loss. Drawing from a vast and varied selection of Zappa's compositions, Understanding America is a musical jig-saw puzzle piecing together a political heritage embroidered with assassinations, deep racial divisions, religious zealotry, cultural elitism, and witch hunts. (The album traces chronologically – with a couple of detours – the dramatic changes in the political and social landscape from the era of Lyndon Johnson to the end of the first Bush presidency.) It also provides a unified field theory of Zappa's disparate selection of songs. Understanding America gives listeners a perceptively potent framework; one in which to examine the conflicting characteristics of American life, as well as providing a completely new contextual ground in which to experience Frank Zappa's music. One of the great ironies of Understanding America, however, is that the work included on it ended up embraced more by dissidents behind the original Iron Curtain (who even did prison time for embracing it) than by Americans deprived of his music by radio stations who censored it. Understanding America sets out to test the strengths of American democracy, too, by holding the country to the promises held in its founding documents by primarily shedding light on its failings. And because of Zappa's openness to such diverse musical genres, he draws from a huge storehouse of self-expression to do so.

Father and Son: The Zappa Legacy

In the mid-nineties, when American composer Frank Zappa's full catalogue finally became available on CD, it was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it was fulfilling to finally see his vast body of work - at that time including over fifty albums that spanned his rock, jazz and classical material from 1959 to 1994 - available in a digital format. But it was also deeply disappointing that, in his preparation for these releases, he felt compelled to remix and recut albums (Freak Out! Hot Rats), or poorly remaster them (Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Chunga's Revenge, You Are What You Is, Tinsel Town Rebellion). In the case of We're Only in it For the Money (1967) and Cruising with Ruben & the Jets (1968), he even went so far as to erase the original rhythm section and re-record the backing tracks with contemporary musicians. The justified outcry of fans concerning We're Only in it For the Money had some impact in causing Zappa, before his tragic death from prostate cancer in 1993, to re-release the CD from an original vinyl recording. Since apparently there weren't as many fans of Crusing, his marvellous R&B doo-wop hybrid, that album didn't get the same treatment - until now. Thanks to the Zappa family, who have been springing surprises from Frank's vault of tapes for the last number of years, the original recording of Cruising with Ruben & the Jets (along with alternate takes and mixes) is finally available under the new title Greasy Love Songs (just order from Zappa.com).

Outside Looking In: The Seriously Funny Life and Work of George Carlin

“Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” – Dorothy Parker (among others).

“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” – George Burns (on his deathbed).

Having previously penned an excellent reappraisal of the consummately eccentric Frank Zappa, unique American composer and creator of the Mothers of Invention rock band, John Corcelli was perhaps ideally situated to undertake this new tome released by Applause Books in which he skillfully explores the similarly exotic outsider status of renegade comedian George Carlin. In his absolutely perfectly titled Outside Looking In: The Seriously Funny Life and Work of George Carlin, he lifts the curtain on the complexities of our mirth, and most importantly for such a delicate mission behind the front lines of laughter, he is sharp enough to appreciate the complex art of stand-up comedy but clever enough to know that it’s much easier to write about it than it is perform it. He leaves that to the experts, while still conducting a master class in how they do what they do. He did, however, study improv at Second City, thus certifying some of his credentials as a keen-minded participant in truly arcane craft.

Pink Floyd Redux: The Piper at The Gates of Dawn

Pink Floyd (left to right): Nick Mason, Syd Barrett, David Gilmour, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright.

Fifty years ago, Pink Floyd emerged from the underground music scene of London's Soho district and released their debut album, The Piper at The Gates of Dawn (Columbia/EMI). The band played the UFO club (pron. YOU-faux) under the steady guidance of Joe Boyd, the American owner of the venue, who said they “engrossed” the crowd every night, not by playing dance music or pop songs but adding a light show to complement their improvisational sets. It was a band trying to find their sound with a slightly flamboyant front man by the name of Roger “Syd” Barrett.

Listening again to this album I’m struck by its enthusiasm and promise, but it’s difficult to ignore the simple fact that this handsome lad from Cambridge, Barrett, who had taken his first LSD trip in 1965, eventually got lost in the shuffle because of his addiction. By the end of 1967, he was persona non grata in Pink Floyd since his habit made him too unreliable to the other members of the band. As Boyd reports in his autobiography, “One evening in May [1967] I ran into Syd and his girlfriend in Cambridge Circus . . . [He] was sprawled on the [curb], his velvet trousers torn and dirty, his eyes crazed. Lindsey told me he’d been taking acid for a week.” When the album was released and Pink Floyd had a gig at UFO, Boyd saw the band just before they went on stage: “Syd’s sparkling eyes had always been his most attractive feature but that night they were vacant, as if someone had reached inside his head and turned off a switch.”

The Wonders of Ruth

One of the most vibrant and skilled percussionists in Frank Zappa's early '70s version of the Mothers of Invention was Ruth Underwood. Ruth had auditioned for Zappa in the late '60s after seeing the Mothers play their Absolutely Free revue at the Garrick Theatre in New York. "Sometimes there were more people on stage than there were in the audience," she told the BBC. "And because of that Frank even got to know some of us by name…there were so few hard core Mothers freaks back then that we were all very noticeable to him...I remember droning music going on for ages. It shocked me… how such beautiful music could come out of such strange looking people.”

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XVII

It's not a surprising irony in the late Sixties and early Seventies, just as many Americans were feeling like unwitting spiritual exiles and no longer wishing to be part of their own country, that many movie-makers began impassioned quests to find it. The results could be as powerfully masochistic as Easy Rider (1969) with its strain of pop religiosity which featured its hippie heroes romantically doomed to crucifixion by the power structure. The outcome could be as ambivalent as John Schlesinger's 1969 Midnight Cowboy (which loved its lost heroes but strangely shared no empathy for the country that produced them). The sojourn could also have the operatic sweep and depth of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) which embraced the tidal pull of the nation along with the very elements that would come to corrupt it. Regardless of the quality of films – from Alice's Restaurant to Nashville – movies were committed to taking the pulse of a country in decline and in distress. 

In the epic striving of Jan Troell's The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), recently released by the Criterion Collection in their full Swedish versions and immaculately restored on Blu-ray, the director takes in America as an untested promise, or a fever dream that brings forth deliverance. Based on Vilhelm Moberg's epic four-volume novels which account the long journey of Swedish farming families to settlements in Minnesota in 1850, Troell captures in a largely naturalistic style for over six hours both the cost and renewal of that promise without embellishing the hopes of those making the quest, or romanticizing the claims of the new land (which the farmers discover is stolen land from the Sioux). Troell, who shoots, edits and directs his own movies, removes our awareness of film language as if the camera were a portal in which to comprehend a lost period of realism. When he focuses on the life and marriage of Karl Oskar (Max Von Sydow) and Kristina (Liv Ullmann), featuring two actors whose iconic definitions through their work with Ingmar Bergman couldn't be more recognizable, Troell clears a path for both performers to shed that skin and to embellish their work with fresh character etchings. Those nuances not only reveal how the arduous journey tests that marriage, but also the many ways it fulfills it. The marriage between the settlers and their environment, where nature is both unforgiving and inviting, is equally a test of endurance and purpose. That Jan Troell has been an invisible giant on the cinematic landscape – despite the enduring depth of later works like Flight of the Eagle (1982), Hamsun (1996), As White as in Snow (2001) and Everlasting Moments (2008) – may well be due to his gift of letting the story dictate the style rather than imposing his style on it.

Zappa for President: Frank Zappa’s Political Legacy

Now that the 2016 American election is over, pending a recount in Wisconsin, we turn our thoughts to the political pundits of days gone by. Mark Twain often advised potential candidates running for public office, “You should always tell the truth because it’s easier to remember.” Essayist Gore Vidal also commented on the poor slate of candidates for President when he quipped that “the United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.” And it comes as no surprise that Frank Zappa’s comment, “When God created Republicans, he gave up on everything else” (to Alan Thicke, in a 1984 appearance on the short-lived Thicke of the Night), is an equally appropriate remark in 2016.

One might not immediately think of Frank Zappa as even having a political legacy, but it’s easy to find. The first stop is his debut record Freak Out!, which was released in 1966 by Verve. The key track: “Trouble Every Day,” about the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Frank takes a stand and is bold enough to admit that he, as a white guy, bore some of the responsibility. As he states in the middle of the song:

Hey, you know something, people?
I’m not black
But there’s a whole lots a times
I wish I could say I’m not white

It was a bold thing to say fifty years ago that still has relevance today. Zappa was putting himself on record (literally) regarding his politics. It was his sense of the changing political and cultural scene that fueled his ideas. Freak Out! was more than just another rock ‘n’ roll album. Zappa gave himself permission to express his political views, which was pretty common during the Vietnam War, and while Zappa wasn’t going to march in the streets for peace, he certainly wasn’t going to sit back and ignore the violent changes around him.

Artificial Paradise: How the End of the Beginning Sounded

The lads, from The Beatles’ last photo session, in August 1969. (Photo: Ethan Russell)

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

– Lennon/McCartney, “The End” (1969)

“Making love with his ego, Ziggy sucked up into his mind
Like a leper messiah. When the kids had killed the man
I had to break up the band.”

– David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust (1972)

When The Beatles released the last great pop masterpiece of the 1960’s, they were bringing to a close a remarkable collective waking dream. If only they had allowed their Abbey Road album, possibly one of their three best recordings, to be the band’s final release instead of returning to an earlier fraught effort and letting it out of the studio vault. The self-produced and then Phil Spector-mutilated Let It Be was a mess mostly due to the absence of George Martin, their brilliant guiding light for eight astonishing years together, while Abbey Road had glistened due to his return to the fold as their producer. It also signaled the arrival of a new kind of recording technology, with EMI’s advanced solid-state transistor mixing desk, which would usher in a kind of immediacy the following musical decade would eventually take for granted.

To Have and to Hold: The Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 50th Anniversary Edition

Dreaming Pepper: The Beatles in costume.

                                                                          I.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in North America exactly 50 years ago today. Among the many things that were possible then and are impossible now is the unanimity that welcomed The Beatles’ eighth album as a culminating event in cultural history – if not History. “The closest that Western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815,” critic Langdon Winner famously wrote at the time, “was the week that the Sgt. Pepper album was released.” An assertion so sweeping wouldn’t survive an hour in the social-media wind tunnel of today: experts both bona fide and instant would descend on it with annotated lists of other, far more unifying events. (Thus missing, as experts often do, the rhetorical value of overstatement: there’s a reason those words are still being quoted today.) But one unity Sgt. Pepper undoubtedly did effect was a new fusion of High and Low, of marketplace and ivory tower. It was embraced not only by pop fans, who kept it at #1 throughout the Summer of Love, but also highbrows previously dismissive of popular taste. Composer Ned Rorem believed the album announced “a new and glorious renaissance of song,” while literary scholar Richard Poirier called it “an eruption … for which no one could have been wholly prepared.” Wagner and Eliot, Monteverdi and Joyce were invoked for comparison.

Critic's Notes & Frames, Vol. IX

A couple of years ago, I started included a few samplings from my Facebook page, which I've been treating as an ongoing dialogue with various critics, performers, writers and friends about social and cultural matters. (Some have described it as a salon.) Here is even more of the same. As before, it includes borrowings of songs and photos that sometimes others have posted and that I've commented on:

Un-American: The Ed Palermo Big Band

The Ed Palermo Big Band, with Ed Palermo (centre). (Photo: Chris Dukker)

Over the last 25 years or so, pop songs have entered the jazz world with abundance as a younger generation of musicians seeks out new music to arrange and perform. Though the so-called American Songbook, featuring standards that have stood the proverbial test of time, is still played with gusto at the educational level, the age of the music has shifted from the thirties and forties to the eighties and nineties. While original compositions abound for the current generation of arrangers, the challenges of rethinking a standard like Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” don’t necessarily have the appeal of, say, those of rethinking “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” by Tears For Fears. Generally speaking pop songs offer a creative chance for a new arrangement or a way of pushing the music beyond the three chords of the original. One of the best at stretching the limits of pop is Ed Palermo. His current release on Cuneiform Records, called The Great Un-American Songbook, Volume 1 & 2, is an ambitious 2-CD set of 21 pop songs arranged for his big band. The musical results are lively, passionate and just outside enough to engage the most experienced listener.

Radio Daze: Fond Memories of an Aggravating Angel

Photo by John Marsonet.

“To deal with the history of cultures means to abandon oneself to potential chaos and yet to retain a deep belief in the basic ordination and meaning of things. It is a very serious task. One requiring a great lightness of spirit.” – Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi

I definitely miss being on a weekly radio program. From about 1988 until the end of the 20th century, I was the visual art critic for CJRT-FM in Toronto, a wonderful community-based station with an eclectic mix of programming and hosts covering every aspect of popular culture, from classical music, folk and jazz, to BBC-imported Goon Shows and compelling ideas-based documentaries. The program on which I appeared every Wednesday to review an exhibition, interview an artist, curator or museum official, discuss an architectural design site and occasionally assess art books of mainstream interest, was appropriately called On the Arts, and that’s exactly what it was, with a day each week exclusively devoted to music, films, theatre, art, design, books and art politics.  It just now seems so perfectly 20th-century, in fact, that kind of diversity of interests, since independent public radio (and television for that matter) has become such a rare thing to behold or behear. (Critics At Large has been sharing excerpts of the program as podcasts.)

One of the other joys of my radio days was the fact that it was through this medium that I was able to cross paths with a delightful friend of over thirty years, the late, great Kevin Courrier, who passed away (or went to spirit, as he would have called it) in mid-October of this year. The path to Kevin, however, first led me to encounter the irascible, sardonic, sarcastic, infuriating and brilliant Tom Fulton, Kevin’s co-host at CJRT-FM and his mentor of many years: the man who Kevin said helped him “find his voice.” Kevin in turn helped me find my own voice, guiding me through the odd vagaries and quirks of the radio broadcast medium of expression.

Incongruous Encounter: Frank Sinatra Meets Randy Newman

There have been some naturally skeptical reactions to the notion of Bob Dylan doing a cover album of songs associated with Frank Sinatra. With a voice that is more a rough in the diamond than the reverse, his about to be released Shadows in the Night stands to prove an interesting challenge that hopefully will yield better results than his crooning of Christmas carols a few years back. But Shadows in the Night got me thinking about another incongruous encounter between Sinatra and another unlikely performer long before he died.

I think it's safe to assume that when Frank Sinatra created Reprise Records in 1960, he didn't envision a line-up that would eventually include Tiny Tim, Jimi Hendrix, The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Neil Young, The Fugs and Randy Newman. However, by 1970, there they were, not to mention a host of others just like them – and here was Frank Sinatra situated among them. Curiously, at the time, Sinatra was also in need of a hit song. So he turned to an unlikely collaborator from his label: Randy Newman.

Frank Sinatra has been a best-selling artist for Capitol Records since 1953 after a long string of sensational albums. Sinatra possessed the kind of dreamy, forlorn voice that could reach down to the very essence of tenderness in a sad song. When he interpreted such indelibly sorrowful tunes as "I Can't Get Started," on No One Cares (1959), or "Willow Weep for Me," on Frank Sinatra Sings Only for the Lonely (1958), he would embody the song's anguish so effortlessly it was if the compositions were singing him. Sinatra had perfected a distinctly romantic style, a sexiness born of both heartbreak and despair. He played out the role of the lonely guy at the bar, nursing his glass of scotch, then imparting a lasting story of regret to you alone. In doing so, Sinatra could keep alive a slight flicker of romantic desire, hushed yearning or grievous moment that became more deeply intoxicating with every line he sang.

Too Serious: Zappa and Jazz by Geoff Wills

Frank Zappa and George Duke, backstage, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the mid 1970s. (Photo by Herb Nolan)

In 1973 Frank Zappa delivered one of his many humorous statements when he said, “Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny” on his album Roxy & Elsewhere. Zappa’s sarcastic quip had a certain resonance. By the early seventies jazz music was transforming into a blend between the electric sounds of rock and the confluence of funk. Fusion, as it came to be called, was inspiring a new generation of musicians (Jaco Pastorius, Al Di Meola et al) and testing the mettle of the “purists” who preferred the acoustic sounds of Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk. For author, musician and psychologist Geoff Wills, Zappa’s comment didn’t make sense because the composer regularly worked with highly skilled musicians who played jazz or came from that school. In his autobiography, Zappa declared jazz to be “the music of unemployment” – further feeding Wills' need to “clarify the often confusing nature of [Zappa's] relationship with” the genre.