Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night

Tonight's the Night

Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night Reprise MS 2221 (1975)

Neil Young was among the most interesting rock artists of the 1970s.  Aside from his landmark After the Gold Rush, and the commercially successful Harvest, he made his so-called “ditch trilogy” (or “doom trilogy” or “gloom trilogy”) of albums: Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night.  Unlike the other two albums, though, Tonight’s the Night is not melancholic or rancorous but ominously morose.  Yet it is also cathartic.  It isn’t music for a sunny day or a party with friends.  It is for solitary, late night introspection.

Young had fired Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten in late 1972 just before a tour, due to drug abuse limiting Whitten’s performance.  Shortly after, Whitten died of an overdose.  Then a few months later former Crosby, Stills Nash & Young roadie Bruce Berry died of an overdose too.  The standard narrative is that Young’s “ditch trilogy” was his reaction to Whitten and Berry’s deaths, and his feelings of responsibility and complicity.  That seems fair enough.  Yet Young’s music of this period is lasting because it captures more than just coping with Whitten and Berry’s deaths.  This music is also about the death of the countercultural project of the 1960s.

Tonight’s the Night has some resemblances to John Lennon and Harry Nilsson‘s infamous “Lost Weekend” escapades.  It has the feel of being caught at daybreak after a full night of partying.  The album stumbles about, a bit angry, disenchanted, heartbroken, unsure, drugged-out.  It is about coming to terms with the “loss” of Whitten and the 60s project, but also getting out all the feelings that engenders and then getting past it all to get ready for something else.  In this way, Young’s reaction to the situation of the early/mid 70s was to not give up on what had happened before, coast into comfortable (and forgettable) soft rock that sort of fit commercial expectations from the sorts of institutions that really crushed the 60s experiment.  Promoter Bill Graham lamented how the old rock scene died when acts became more interested in money than music.  Young cut against all that.

Young has better individual songs elsewhere, but for pure mood Tonight’s the Night is a a killer.  This is a “warts and all” sort of affair.  The songs are sloppy, because Young didn’t want his band to be too familiar with the material prior to recording, and that is a drawback for some.  Still, the reason this matters is that Young stubbornly stuck with 60s idealism even after those forces had, by late 1973 (when most of the album was recorded), conclusively lost, and the era of the Powell Memorandum had begun.  Young didn’t pretend that the 60s project was still alive and well, nor did he capitulate and join the reactionary counter-revolution.  He affirmed what was good all along in the 60s project — and the spirit of what Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry’s lives represented — that sought something outside the established, rigid and oppressive rules of the early post-war period, while grimly accepting its limitations and failures.  William Davies wrote that

“from the Enlightenment through to the present . . . unhappiness becomes a basis to challenge the status quo. Understanding the strains and pains that work, hierarchy, financial pressures and inequality place upon human well-being is a first step to challenging those things. This emancipatory spirit flips swiftly into a conservative one, once the same body of evidence is used as a basis to judge the behavior and mentality of people, rather than the structure of power.”

Neil Young is one of rock music’s shining examples of somebody who resisted the “flip” to the conservative side of all this. He kept tilting against the establishment.  “Roll Another Number (For the Road)” encapsulates that feeling best, with a calm acceptance and determination, soildering on, moving past the escapism of “Mellow My Mind” with a buddy stoner charm, only to have the hopes that “Roll Another Number” implies evaporate with the existential road trip narrative “Albuquerque.”

As reviewer BradL wrote, echoing Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone, “there’s not a touch of self-indulgence on the record because Young is as honest and hard on himself as anyone else. He doesn’t want your pity, nor even your forgiveness[.]”  On “Speakin’ Out” he calls himself a fool, on “World on a String” and “Borrowed Tune” he finds no meaning or significance in being at the top of the music business.  So let’s appreciate Young’s unhappy, depressing music like Tonight’s the Night for all it stands for: an attempt at something better than the status quo.

There are plenty of bluesy classic rock riffs.  The second half has more conventionally catchy classic rock.  But, hell, even the archival live performance from 1970 with Whitten (adding vocals) on side one, “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” manages to be a rousing affirmation of what the entire album sets out to do.  Still, in spite of the anthemic charge of many of the melodies, the band is loose, imprecise.

“Tonight’s the night [duh-da–dah—duh___]

Tonight’s the night”

The significance of chanting these vacant lines on the first version of the title song, traded against some briefly tinkling piano and a bass line that rises and then suddenly falls, are a challenge: to figure out what tonight is the night for.  It is the struggle for meaning that gives this music its power.  If the 60s project failed, and Whitten and Berry died, how can Young, or anybody else, carry on the core ideals of what it and they proposed without failing, without being snuffed out?  What makes Tonight’s the Night one of Young’s finest moments, is that it denies any sort of assurance that there is an answer to that question.  No one knows — sure as hell not Young.  But he rattles the cage of his own mind, and puts that on record for the world to hear, trying to take some kind of step forward on terms that he himself sets.

Ciao! Manhattan

Ciao! Manhattan

Ciao! Manhattan (1972)

Maron Films

Directors: David Weisman, John Palmer

Main Cast: Edie Sedgwick, Wesley Hayes, Isabel Jewell

The mysterious, tragic and often disturbing world of Edie Sedgwick is plastered across the screen in John Palmer and David Weisman’s Ciao! Manhattan, a film almost as mysterious and tragic as Edie herself. The great Jonas Mekas called it “the Citizen Kane of the drug generation.” Even more so it’s the Lola Montès of the drug generation. Opinions of the film vary for an understandable reason. There remains a fundamental, unresolved conflict at the bottom of the film: Edie Sedgwick.

Who was Edie Sedgwick? She came from an extremely wealthy family in California and as a model landed amidst Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd in the mid-Sixties. She was, to put it bluntly, a dazzlingly gorgeous icon of that era. But her moment in the sun didn’t last. Edie’s lifestyle was combustible. She died shortly before the film was ready for release.

Edie inspired many artistic creations. “Femme Fatale” is the Velvet Underground song about Edie written by Lou Reed at Andy Warhol’s suggestion. On the 1969 Velvet Underground Live With Lou Reed the song is introduced by Reed saying: “This is a song called ‘Femme Fatale,’ which we wrote about someone who was one. . . And will one day maybe open up a school to train others.” On the Velvet’s Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes, Reed comments that maybe the Warhol Factory environment had nothing to do with Edie’s condition. It is also rumored that Bob Dylan wrote “Just Like a Woman” for her. In Warhol’s a: A Novel, Edie is “Taxine.” A common sense of Edie emerges. She had immense power over people to get what she wanted by creating hope—a tangible, real hope — that seems to have drawn people to her. In the end, these manipulations worked too well. Edie was guilty of having innocent dreams, too grand and too destructive to ever last.

Weisman calls Edie “Icarus” and the Central Park “Be-In” on Easter Sunday of 1967 was when she came too close to the sun, melted her wings and began to fall. That began a long period when Edie shuffled from hospital to hospital, eventually returning to California to get much the same treatment. It was years after filming began that Edie was again available to finish the film. Her fall was no ordinary one. She was all alone in her own personal world. The Warhol Factory, with which Edie had been associated, was kind of a ward for talented but unstable personalities. Warhol took in an array of people, then used them in his artistic endeavors while providing those people opportunities to establish themselves. Edie was cast from that shelter after a while. Warhol once remarked on that topic that he thought Edie didn’t want to change her self-destructive ways. In any case, the soaring heights she reached lead to a long fall, eventually ending a life urged on by what it was seemingly missing something from the start.

Edie’s life questioned emptiness. She seemed to want to find a new life beyond herself by destroying her old one. Her methods were extreme and violent but also affecting and, in a strange way, effective on whomever they reached. The lawyer in Albert Camus’ The Fall engaged in “debauchery, a substitute for love, which quiets the laughter, restores silence, and above all, confers immortality.” But more than a mere escapist substitute, Edie’s ways seemed to have purpose. Antonin Artaud, in his life, took up the task of the “general devaluation of values.” What remains of values in Edie’s story? She left no value in illusions. Maybe Edie found at hand only cheap and superficial emotions, but she seems to know and lament that fact. At least on film this seems the case.

Palmer and Weisman were part of a splinter faction of the Warhol Factory crowd. Edie herself was sort-of cast off by Warhol. So Ciao! Manhattan looks back inside that scene from the outside. As a splinter faction, Palmer & Weisman moved away from true underground filmmaking as they distanced themselves from the Warhol crowd. In a sense, they abandon the Warhol underground filmmaking style. In The Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol comments, “I’ve hated David Weisman ever since Ciao! Manhattan.”

Rambling along, this film finds purpose only as it keeps moving. The line between documentary and fiction is blurry. It was like finding manipulations of reality and then finding a way to recreate and capture some of those manipulations.

Cio! Manhattan took many risks with experimental techniques in order to pull the film together. A voyeuristic billionaire drug baron Mr. Verdecchio (Jean Margouleff) looks on through an elaborate video surveillance system. Having the characters separated but still linked through very artificial interaction forms perhaps the only continuous thread through the film. At the time the film was made, however, there was no such thing as video like we know today. When the filmmakers show multiple television screens showing different images, much like Abel Gance’s polyvision, this was before the technology for such things was actually available. This even predates related techniques used in Godard & Miéville’s Numero Deux.

Those portions in black & white are quite beautiful. The people seem pristine and untouched. Edie seems the epitome of grace. The color segments have different, though still distinguished, good looks. These color portions were filmed after Edie’s period of multiple hospitalizations, and she is more of a ravaged beauty. Still stunning and graceful, she seems to carry more burdens, more weight (not the least of which were her breast implants, shown off through most of the film). What brought about that ravaged state is a difficult question. Though partially answering that is the fact that the drugs Geoffrey (Geoff Briggs) brings out on a tray were Edie’s actual prescriptions. In their commentary, the filmmakers make a point to say Edie was a willing participant in the film rather than a forced victim of exploitation. Of course, it is still debatable whether Edie’s vulnerable willingness to self-destruct was precisely what was exploited.

Only one professional actor was in the cast, Isabel Jewell. This allowed the film to overflow with startling cameos from a few of the most interesting personalities of Sixties underground culture. Guru Bhavananda (a/k/a Charlie Bacis) portrays real-life preventative medicine “vitamin doctor” Dr. Robert, about whom John Lennon wrote a song for The Beatles’ Revolver. Viva (a/k/a Susan Hoffman) plays Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. Tom Flye, the drummer from the theremin-oriented band Lothar and the Hand People, is present as Mr. Verdecchio’s driver. Brigid Berlin appears as Brigid Polk. Brigid, after perfecting an Edie impersonation, also did many of Edie’s voice-overs after Edie’s death. Also appearing are Uma Thurman’s lovely mother Nena and a sometimes-naked Allen Ginsberg.

On the DVD of the film are some great little interviews — none too long but all still varied and interesting. These include costume designer Betsey Johnson, from the boutique Paraphernalia, as well as Wesley Hayes, George Plimpton, and Weisman. The DVD also has a still gallery and selected black & white outtakes that showcase some nice footage not in the film. The feature commentary track is interesting and, along with the interviews, helps sort out the action in the film via the back story on the people and places who inspired and contributed to the film.

Ciao! Manhattan is not a definitive film in any way. It presents varied, ambiguous insight. That is precisely its strength. It wanders from the Silver Sixties to the aftermath of that era. Along the way, the film is a postmodern dream of people trying to find the means to hold on to something real. But what is real? Watching the film it’s impossible to eliminate all the distance that separates us from Edie. We can only get as close as Mr. Verdecchio and look in from outside. Maybe in that respect this film is a distinctly postmodern biopic.

So here’s to you Edie, for not being immortal but still trying to go on making your great mistakes indefinitely.

Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy Roc-a-Fella B0014695-02 (2010)

Let’s take the title of Kanye’s album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy at face value.  This isn’t the kind of fantasy that involves wizards, leprechauns, fairies and ogres.  It references the sort of real-world arena of desires that drive human beings in one direction or another.  Psychology tells us that pleasure often comes from transgressing rules and boundaries.  So the question then becomes one of what transgressions we desire, and how we engage in those transgressions.  This is what makes Kanye’s album so interesting.  The song “Runaway” is sort of a centerpiece of the album.  Opening with a stark, rhythmic melody played with single notes on a piano, it then bursts out with groovy hip-hop drums and sustained synthesizer chords that imply a forward movement.  Then Kanye starts rapping.  There is sort of a tipping point here.  Look at this from the standpoint of the searing return of morality.  The political landscape of 2010 was pretty bleak in the Western world.  There was a financial crash and a “jobless” recovery that only benefited a few elites — there are graphs that show the rich cannibalizing the wealth of the poor in this period.  But then, people had enough.  Just a few weeks after My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was released the Arab Spring happened in Egypt. Is Kanye’s “Runaway” a condemnation of any of this?  No.  It is a confessional song.  He describes womanizing, and conveys that he is a douchebag, an asshole, scumbag, jerkoff.  But, but, but, that isn’t all he’s doing.  In one of the most memorable choruses of the era, he raps:

“Let’s have a toast for the douchebags,
Let’s have a toast for the assholes,
Let’s have a toast for the scumbags,
Every one of them that I know
Let’s have a toast to the jerkoffs
That’ll never take work off
Baby, I got a plan
Run away fast as you can”

These lowlifes still get a toast.  If you agree, as the song invites you to do, this means there must be compassion for even the worst.  This is the sort of thing that religions like christianity have been preaching — with varying success — for millennia.  It implies a sense of solidarity, that everybody matters, not just the folks who work all the time to “gain wealth, forgetting all but self” as the Lowell Mills Girls used to say at the dawn of the second industrial revolution.  This “dark twisted fantasy” is dark and twisted from the sort of view that it is a refusal to obey and accept a “proper” place in society.  And yet, at the same time, “Runaway” is a plea from someone else to “run away” as the narrator sort of can’t completely break away.  This is really the brilliance of Kanye.  Bringing in a race relations component — as is appropriate — he kind of asserts the post-racial concept that a black man has the same right as a person of any privileged race to be a douchebag, asshole, etc., even as he acknowledges how those qualities are evil, in a way.  This, really, deserves a toast!

“Power” is another great one.  The lyrics “I was drinking earlier, now I’m driving” epitomize the recklessly gradiose vision of what happens across the entire album.  One reviewer wrote about Kanye’s style of self-important self-aggrandizing that “It’s like being in a bar stuck in a conversation with a stockbroker who tells you how much money he earns and tells you about his new Porsche and shows you a picture of his wife and kids and then suggests you go on to a Gentleman’s Club that he knows.”  Kanye’s use of such an attitude is commentary on the privileges of celebrity status, how it seems to objectively require this kind of self-aggrandizement, and yet the dude is kind of mocking it all at the same time.  Kanye is at his best implying these things, hitting them obliquely rather than talking about these issues explicitly.  His approach is to cartoonishly debase the role he’s in, drawing unsentimental connections to the structural underpinnings of how somebody becomes a “successful” musical star, and, crucially, refusing to create a separate context for celebrity as something that is beyond the “thug life” that in hip-hop is often portrayed as a way of paying dues in a system that allows its stars to escape that life.  Kanye paints them as inseparably part of the same system, without really coming out and crassly lecturing his listeners on that point.

But Kanye isn’t just about debasement.  “All of the Lights” is basically the pinnacle of all the big business manufactured pop that shows up on television-promoted “talent shows” and top 40 radio.  It has a minimalist melody — with an emphasis on melody more than what hip-hop is traditionally about.  But it is elusive.  The song lacks a clear interpersonal dynamics narrative like most of these songs.  It blurs the lines between ghetto life and stardom.  But it does so while beating the pop market at its own game, having as catchy and hummable a hook as anything in contemporary pop.  If he didn’t pull off catchy pop hooks like on “All of the Lights” it would be all too easy to dismiss everything else on the album.  Kanye doesn’t stand apart from that aspect of the music industry.  He wrestles with it as he also heads in other directions.

“Hell of a Life” raps to the melody of Black Sabbath‘s “Iron Man.”  Like a lot of the songs (“Blame Game” etc.) there are elements of misogyny and room to question why that is a part of what the protagonist is doing.  Kanye may be no feminist, but he lets the listener wonder why he isn’t.

Of course, the other thing about My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is that it sounds fantastic.  It is the absolute state-of-the-art of what hip-hop and pop music can do with modern recording technology.  And despite the bloat of an album that seems much longer than it needs to be, it hardly ever wavers and never seems to run out of material the way albums over 70 minutes usually do.  If Bob Dylan needed a huge ego to do what he did in the 1960s, and David Bowie succeeded precisely because of the pomposity of his glam rock pretensions in the early 1970s, then Kanye taps into some of that here for a new era.  This is a spectacle, a captivating one, and Kayne makes the most of capturing the audience’s attention to actually raise some worthwhile questions while you can’t seem to tear away.  So if you leave wondering why you bother being stuck listening to someone who sounds like an annoying stockbroker, that seems to be the point — to dissolve the specter of meaning of celebrity from the inside, dismantling the very frame of reference that intimately links celebrity status to all the off-putting “stockbroker” qualities.

Matt Peppe – Media Uncritical of Justifications for Shooting Escaped Convict

Link to an article by Matt Peppe:

“Media Uncritical of Justifications for Shooting Escaped Convict”

Bonus link: “Outlaws in the Eyes of Amerika” (“The author . . . tends to assume the moral correctness of the system and its police forces, accepts their version of the events he describes, despite a historical record that proves not only that the government had its own questionably moral agenda, but that it was more than willing to violate the laws it was supposedly upholding to destroy these groups and terminate not only their activities but their politics.”)

The Rolling Stones – It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll

It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

The Rolling Stones – It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Rolling Stones Records COC 59103 (1974)

A step up from Goats Head Soup, but still well short of the best Stones albums.  The title track is great, and some of the later throwaway songs (“Time Waits for No One,” “Luxury,” “Dance Little Sister”) still have a catchy quality to them.  But on the minus side, some forced and vapid songwriting (“Till the Next Goodbye,” “If You Really Want to Be My Friend,” “Fingerprint File”) can really drag.  There is a dull cover of a great Temptations song (“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”).  In a way, this could be seen as the Stones following the pattern of their early-60s albums just updated with mid-70s studio gimmickry.

Sun Ra – The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 2

The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 2

Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra – The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 2 ESP-Disk ESP 1017 (1966)

The best of the Heliocentric Wolds Sun Ra albums.  This album may be conclusive proof that the “genre” of “Free Improvisation” (which, incidentally, does not exist) is simply a racist and wrongheaded attempt at revisionist history, nothing more than a power play to shift interest and attention from African-American musical innovators to white hangers-on while simultaneously attempting to create false credibility in the cheap knock-off stuff.  The magazine The Wire had a “free improv” section and readers would regularly write in suggesting that the term be abandoned as not being distinct from “jazz”.  In response, the magazine’s editor has noted the term’s “political” connotations.  Pay attention:  why is it that advocates of “free improv” are ALWAYS white (and also generally white males)?  And why is it that the strongest musician advocates of “free improv” arrive with no credentials in the jazz realm?  And why did one of the originators of “free improv”, Trevor Watts, in essence repudiate the concept?  And why don’t practitioners of “free improv” that meld Euro-classical and jazz forms and techniques simply use the term “Third Stream”, which already existed?  And why did the term “free improv” originate at the same time “British Invasion” rock groups were taking songwriting credit for blues songs actually written by African Americans?  And why do advocates of the term meaning something outside of “free jazz” tend to always have a vested interest in differentiating themselves from practitioners of “free jazz”?  There are answers to ALL of these questions.