Zombies, “Maybe After He’s Gone” (1968)

[listen up!]

The Zombies’ second album, Odessey and Oracle (with one of the most famous misspellings in rock), sputtered out of the gate but eventually became an acclaimed must-hear album of the ‘60s. Its reputation is as a classic of psychedelia (note cover). Multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Rod Argent is likely the most famous member, going on to the band Argent and a top 5 hit with “Hold Your Head Up" in 1972, and then a solo career (as if “Argent” wasn’t already that). He wrote just under half the songs on Odessey, including the album’s one hit, “Time of the Season,” a signature song for the Zombies which reached #3 in 1969. Bass player Chris White wrote the rest of the songs and, while they go many places and are uniformly good, some are not remotely psychedelic. “Maybe After He’s Gone” is one such, pretty much standard unrequited love business on its face. The lyrical frame and song arrangement somehow elevate it to an impossible poignancy. The singer is really into his girlfriend: “She told me she loved me / With words as soft as morning rain.” Unfortunately, she is done with him and has left for another. The singer, in a swelling chorus, finds pathetic solace in unlikely hopes: “Maybe after he’s gone / She’ll come back, love me again.” We have all been there and know how it goes. You almost have to fight yourself not to tell him, or try to tell him. The chances are good he wouldn’t listen anyway. He would probably even hold it against you. “Maybe After He’s Gone” captures an indelible moment of pathos that cannot be faked, is not soon forgotten, and can leave listeners just a little uncomfortable. It’s beautiful.

Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

Memorias del subdesarrollo, Cuba, 97 minutes

Director: Tomas Gutierrez Alea

Writers: Edmundo Desnoes, Tomas Gutierrez Alea

Photography: Ramon F. Suarez

Music: Leo Brouwer

Editor: Nelson Rodriguez

Cast: Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, Eslinda Nunez, Omar Valdes, Rene de la Cruz, Yolanda Farr, Jack Gelber, Ofelia Gonzalez

Memories of Underdevelopment came out in the globally tumultuous year of 1968, chipping in reports from Cuba less than 10 years after the Revolution. Indeed, the novel by Edmundo Desnoes that it is based on was published only in 1965. It bears a curious and interesting point of view in its main character, Sergio Carmona Mendoyo (Sergio Corrieri), a merchant capitalist who ran a “posh” furniture store he inherited from his father which has been destroyed or taken away by the new regime. Sergio is also owner of rental properties and retains an income stream there. The picture is set in 1961 and 1962. The first scenes show Sergio packing his mother and the rest of his family off to the US. He appears to be dubious about long-term prospects for the Revolution. He is staying and may join his family later. The picture is semi-documentary in style, with archival footage, and follows the suddenly aimless Sergio around, dealing with his girlfriend problems (he is divorced) even as he ponders, in voiceover, the finer points of “underdevelopment.”

His first and most problematic girlfriend is an evident example. “I try to live like a European,” he says. “[Elena] makes me feel underdevelopment with every step.” They are in a bookstore where he is purchasing a copy of Lolita. Elena (Daisy Granados) is scheming to force him into marriage, premised on their having sex, or, as they often say around here, “ruining” her. For his part, Sergio denies deceiving her and doesn’t think she was really a virgin, which of course does not help his situation. Eventually she enlists her brutal brother and parents into making a legal case of it. This situation is appallingly beneath a genteel man who would prefer to spend afternoons at the modern art museum. His allegiance to European culture is as bone-deep as Elena’s family’s is to old-world ways of blood honor and such, next stop clitorectomies. They could be closer to that than we would like to think or maybe Sergio and I are paranoid. It’s a real case of underdevelopment.

Silver Apples, “Oscillations” (1968)

[listen up!]

Here’s some early—and choice—pop electronica so far ahead of its time it takes some sorting out to get oriented. But the main point, as with Kraftwerk’s deadpan paeans to the PC, is the goofy pleasure of it. The drumming pattern recalls krautrock practically before there was krautrock. Silver Apples is just two guys alone in the studio with a producer. Dan Taylor beats that drum pattern and sings. Simeon works the oscillators and he sings too. They took their name from an album that came out the previous year by composer and electronics experimenter Morton Subotnick, Silver Apples of the Moon. Their self-titled debut LP opens with this song, as if the first order of business were to master the oscillator and now it is time for worship and celebration. The oscillator, Wikipedia tells me, “is an electronic circuit that produces a periodic, oscillating or alternating current (AC) signal, usually a sine wave, square wave or a triangle wave.” The song wobbles into existence on the angled-off tones, like some moist blind newborn amphibian. The drum pattern puts it in motion, granting it life and propulsion, redolent of a dark, throbbing place. A sound like a steam whistle, as the groove sets, lets us know it’s all in fun. The song trundles directly to your heart. Taylor and Simeon sound hypnotized, chanting, “Oscillations, oscillations / Electronic evocations of sound's reality / Spinning, magnetic fluctuations / Waves of wave configurations / That dance between the poles of sound / And bind my world to soul.” Gary Numan couldn’t have put it any better. Silver Apples was so far ahead of its time their patents still haven’t met yet.

Billy Nicholls, “Would You Believe” (1968)

[listen up!]

Some interesting names associated with Billy Nicholls and this luscious confection. The famous and infamous Andrew Loog Oldham hired Nicholls as a staff writer for his Immediate label and gave him an office. Del Shannon was a fan and recorded some of his songs. John Paul Jones plays bass. And the Small Faces are producers, notably with Steve Marriott bawling in the most swirling, dense, and wholly unexpected passages. Financial problems with Oldham’s Immediate label limited the original release and the album was shelved until Nicholls rereleased it on his own in 1998. Amazing that it could stay virtually hidden so long. It starts out barely there, then entertains a soothing lullaby mood by way of the Swingle Singers style, before ultimately exploding with the title line at about 0:45 in a song that runs 2:40. Nicholls’s vocal is clarion, fully aware of its utility as the primary irresistible hook. The title line anchors it from there. The song goes to it frequently, but it’s always good to return to. It might be where you are singing along. This hook does not seem capable of wearing out and they’re not afraid to pummel it. What’s more, the song has an equally beguiling second hook, a gorgeous wheedling violin figure. The rest is clouds of sparkling glitter. Here comes a ... banjo? A tuba? What? Then even more layers: someone calling urgently from a distance (Marriott?). A droning high note that seems to bear the meaning of everything. Finally the song leaves us approximately the way it arrived. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about it is that you can always listen to it again.

Aerial Ballet (1968)

It’s not surprising that Harry Nilsson, the man responsible for the theme songs for the 1960s TV sitcom The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, would serve up a tub of corn syrup on his third LP, where he was well coming into his own as a recording artist. The album is rich and delicious, veering in lounge directions but saved always by the musicality. I don’t know Nilsson that well, at least not until recently. I have tended to think of him as a songwriter chiefly—and he is that, however eccentric—but recent forays into Aerial Ballet have convinced me his real strength is as a singer. His exuberant swoops and scats are only more impressive when you try to sing with them, and he packs his most surprising bolts of feeling into exactly that. Or, as he might put it, “Doo-wack doo-wack doo-wack doo-wacka-doo wacka-doo wacka-doo.” This album is the home of “Everybody’s Talkin’,” his inspired cover of Greenwich Village folkie Fred Neil, and “One,” later covered by Three Dog Night into a #5 hit. Both sound more amazing than ever in the context of this album. The album also includes performative turns of innocence that remind me a little of Jonathan Richman, in all the best ways (and make me wonder what Richman, a dedicated VU fan approximately then, might have thought of Nilsson). I read somewhere, for example, that “Little Cowboy” and its reprise was a lullaby his mother sang to him (I also remember reading that he copyrighted it to her, but that does not appear to be the case). Or, perhaps my favorite, “Good Old Desk,” in which he celebrates his dedicated workspace. “My old desk does an arabesque / In the morning when I first arrive / It's a pleasure to see it's waiting there for me / To keep my hopes alive.” Versioning problems exist with Aerial Ballet, unfortunately. A couple of songs, “Daddy’s Song” and “Bath,” were deleted at the last minute before the original release. Nilsson wrote both but had sold the exclusive rights to the Monkees, who had it removed from the album. The songs are back on streaming versions now but three bonus tracks from a later version have been separated away from the album. “Girlfriend”—adapted for the theme to The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (which I seem to recall did not have a laugh track, but maybe I’m confusing it with Room 222)—“Girlfriend” is there but you have to search for it specifically on my service.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

I’m late to the utilitarian aspect of this novel by Arthur C. Clarke, a companion piece to director and cowriter Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation. Actually, “adaptation” is the wrong word. The project was a years-long collaboration between British countrymen Clarke and Kubrick. The joke is that the screenplay was written by Kubrick with Clarke, and the novel was written by Clarke with Kubrick. They were released the same year. I think I like Clarke—he is more or less the ”sense of wonder” writer in the classic SF with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. He’s well-suited to this particular novelization. It’s arguably little more than that, but it does include lots of useful clarifications for a movie that is often intentionally mystifying. The ending is still cosmically ineffable, but a few things about it are nailed down, which is better than nothing. My favorite new detail is the explanation for why the HAL-9000 computer goes crazy. It makes me think about literature versus cinema and all the bromides about showing, not telling. Sometimes cinema is not delivering all the necessary information needed. Sometimes, perhaps, you need to tell as well as show. Kubrick could have included the HAL explanation in the movie, but it would have required exposition. Kubrick could be mulish on how to make a movie, famously often stranding viewers in not just his 2001 movie. Those who find the movie boring perhaps may not need to apply here. I’ve heard it both ways on this novel, but I think it’s a must if you like the movie or Clarke or both. In many ways it is a fix-up novel, tying together previously published short stories, but it’s better by far as a whole than some of the fix-ups I know, including Clifford Simak’s City and Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. Turning disparate stories into a novel is harder than you might think. I’m not sure whether I like this more as companion to the movie or as a Clarke novel. It is good either way, a heady froth of human evolution, first contact, and rogue robot. The many small differences between novel and movie are also interesting to ponder. Somebody cue Thus Spake Zarathustra.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Music From Big Pink (1968)

I’ve always found the Band generally overrated (usually by boomers) and a little pretentious too—start with the name, where a lot of people feel constrained to capitalize “The.” Don’t do it, I beg you. It feels like a majority of the songs on this tiresome debut album are from Bob Dylan bootlegs circulating in the late ‘60s, notably one called Great White Wonder, later collected for the official 1975 release The Basement Tapes (and then on a 2014 box, The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete. Note that all Bootleg Series releases are legitimate Columbia label products). It’s actually only three of the 11 songs on this album, all written or cowritten with Dylan, but they’re in the important sequencing positions at the start and end: “Tears of Rage” (a terrible start to the album, my notes say), “This Wheel’s on Fire” (also weak), and, last (literally last on the album), “I Shall Be Released,” a song about not wanting to be a bootleg, and which, again according to my notes, should not work but does. So you can see I don’t hate this stuff, it just seems underwhelming after all the hype. The Rick Danko song “Caledonia Mission” strikes me as generic Band, with the shambolics and help-me-keep-up vocals and harmonies. If it tickles your fancy, there’s 10 more songs here for you. I do have to agree with the consensus that “The Weight,” by Rick Danko and Levon Helm, is an undeniable, bone-shivering classic from the opening line on: “I pulled into Nazareth, was feeling ‘bout half past dead” (am I the only one who hears this as “half past 10,” like he’s making a corporate staff meeting?). I’ve heard a lot of covers of “The Weight” and they always work and so does the original, absolutely. The other song I like is not really typical of the album, which puts me in a place that feels awkward. It’s like calling “Moral Kiosk” the best song on Murmur. But “Chest Fever,” written by Robbie Robertson, hits with a fancy heavy-rolling organ keyboard attack (Garth Hudson doin’ it!) that feels like something from the Phantom of the Opera story accompanied by tornado warnings. It loses focus when the singing starts and then it goes to familiar Band places, but you can’t have everything and eventually the majesty makes a brief return. Last, I don’t mean to be gratuitous, but “Long Black Veil” is one of the worst versions of that lovely and truly haunting song I’ve ever heard. For god’s sake cut the yowling for once. I recommend Bobby Bare on this one, which I understand might be telling on myself somehow to country aficionados. I am merely a dilettante in the realm, but I think it’s fair to wonder whether the Band might be too. Cover art by Bob Dylan.

1. Jimi Hendrix Experience, Electric Ladyland (1968)

[2010 review here, 2011 review of “All Along the Watchtower” here, 2011 review of “Rainy Day, Dream Away” here]

Jimi Hendrix never reached full musical maturity, with scads of impressive flashes of brilliance but still showing streaks of goofy amateur playfulness, based on intuition and/or being stoned, that did not come off. It’s serve-to-taste with a lot of his posthumous material. I don’t care for swaths of it, but I love what I love very much. I was interested to learn in Wikipedia that Electric Ladyland was considered a failure by many contemporary critics. Robert Christgau was all over it, in Stereo Review, but both Melody Maker in the UK and Rolling Stone in the US found it flawed, if not exactly fatally so. I admit I had to circle this album for many years before it became as important to me as it has. It’s the second-best rock album by my lights after only Highway 61 Revisited. It is obviously well within the vinyl era, which I claim as explanation for my persistent orientation to it, interpreting it by sides. My now irrelevant view was / is that any good to great album—especially a multi-LP package—must have at least one side that is perfect or close to it. Electric Ladyland has that—side 3—but it also has a sequencing dialogue going on between the various sides that is intuitively suggestive if never quite articulate.

Side 4 presents a suite that responds to one song each from the other sides, and for good measure throws in a hit song, “All Along the Watchtower.” that is arguably the greatest Bob Dylan cover ever recorded. The 15-minute “Voodoo Chile” on side 1 is answered by the five-minute “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” (The copy editor in me winces at spelling it like the South American country the first time and then just spelling it straight from the dictionary the second. If you’re going for dialect, have you ever heard of an apostrophe?! Chalk it up to the freewheeling.) “Rainy Day, Dream Away”—the sordid tale on side 3 of life in the Pacific Northwest—is answered by “Still Raining, Still Dreaming.” And—I know this is a stretcher—“Burning of the Midnight Lamp” on side 2 is answered by “House Burning Down.” (As an interesting and pointless aside, even a year ago most versions of Electric Ladyland on youtube omitted “House Burning Down”—algorithms, apparently, disapproving of arson.) All three of these tracks on side 4 are even better and more amazing than the tracks they respond to. Side 4, thus, is eccentric but also near perfect.

Pale Gray for Guilt (1968)

I wanted to revisit a Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald partly to test myself. Admittedly, MacDonald is a good mystery writer in the hard-boiled vein and McGee is a certain classic. I read a half-dozen or so of them some years ago but finally had to give them up. They almost always included scenes that triggered me, usually women being mistreated or assaulted in ways that left me sick. I had the impression MacDonald enjoyed writing them. Someone once described his style as rabbit-punching and that clarified it for me. But the people blurbing and praising him remain big names: Lee Child (who wrote an introduction for my 2012 edition), Donald Westlake, Roger Ebert, Sue Grafton, etc., etc. As it turns out, I can say “almost always” because—happily—no such scene occurs here. It has all the stuff I remembered: a senseless title that is there to name a color, the brooding loner on a Florida houseboat Travis McGee, a revenge story, a sting, various beautiful women, and me thinking her? Is she the one who gets it? But nothing, or very little. I’m going to try another and see how it goes. I picked this from a generic google search (“best travis mcgee novels”). Later I found it at #13 on a ranked list of all 21 and nowhere near any rando top 5. What up, google? Maybe people like those terrible scenes? As usual, damsels in distress are all over Pale Gray for Guilt, as well as many shades of gray (literal, not figurative). But MacDonald is just good at pulling you into his crazy storylines. Here a friend of McGee’s is murdered, which isn’t clear at first because it was elaborately staged as a grotesque suicide. That leaves behind a widow in distress and a thirst for cold as you can stand it revenge in McGee. It all comes to revolve around a stock swindle, which gets complicated and I got lost. But you can see it works by the way the bad guys yelp and carry on and somehow MacDonald makes even that satisfying. Pale Gray for Guilt (ninth in the series btw, which don’t really need to be read in order) also has a poignant love story that runs parallel to the main mystery story, with an affecting, bittersweet ending. Still, there’s always a little more Hugh Hefner than I like in MacDonald. A lot of things about Travis McGee have not aged well—but all the bigs love him.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

25. Iron Butterfly, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1968) – “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”

[2011 review here]

As a convenience to myself now, in 2024, I wrote this album up in 2011, declaring myself a nostalgist yet perhaps more skeptical than I am now of Iron Butterfly’s wonderful bombastic ode to the Garden of Eden. That write-up basically says all I have to say, except now I think I like the long song more. I am back on board with it, like when I was 14, as an example of psychedelic music that thrilled and scared at once and in effect showed the way. I would call up the local underground FM station late at night to request it (“long version!”), no doubt another dopey kid to the DJs. My favorite, always (because I slept with the radio on all night despite my parents’ efforts to stop this terrible habit), was waking up to it or something like it (say, Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused”). One time I woke up just as the weird scraping noises of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” circa 11:00, had started, for a certain peak psychedelic experience in my dark bedroom in the middle of the night. I thought I said I wasn’t a nostalgist anymore?

“The Unsettled Dust” (1968)

What’s most enjoyable for me about Robert Aickman at this point is that I’m still discovering how good he is, still finding these above-average “strange” stories, and they still surprise me a lot. His floor is higher than the ceilings of many who are better known. The first-person narrator in this one is a corporate officer of the Historic Structures Fund, an organization dedicated to preserving buildings of interest. He’s telling the story of a past experience by way of contributing to the work of a new group within the Fund, the Psychic and Occult Research Committee, whose mission is to investigate reports of hauntings. The haunted house in this story is one of the Fund’s properties, where the narrator stayed while he was working on another project in the region. The former owners of the house, and the last remaining heirs of the family who originally built it, still live there—two sisters, Agnes and Olive. They are required to put him up because the Fund now owns their home. They are reasonably cordial. “The Unsettled Dust” has lots of Aickman touches, perhaps most notably the dust. It covers everything and no one does anything about it—no one can do anything about it. Even the dining table where they eat is dusty. Rings created by glasses and plates are covered again by dust by meal’s end. No one really knows where it comes from, but they take it as a given, with their own theories—wind, unpaved roads, high country, etc. The narrator thinks there must be a cement factory nearby. The expectation for the sisters is that they will be old, crotchety types, and Agnes certainly is. But the narrator finds himself strangely attracted to Olive. He also sees a ghost, a man he finds in his bedroom one afternoon who says nothing to him and eventually leaves. The housekeeper (“the grey Elizabeth”) assures him he will only see it that once—everyone sees it only once—and that turns out to be true. I like the dust in this story, it’s a very strong and, yes, unsettling element. It makes the narrator’s hands visibly dirty just living there day to day, and the thought of eating at that dining table makes me a little sick. I also like the narrator’s attraction to Olive, who is eerie, ethereal and a little indeterminate even within the story, but also indeed somehow attractive. She plays the piano and bears an air of melancholy. The narrator’s infatuation is wrapped into his stiff manner, but it’s quite evident. Through him, Olive becomes attractive to the reader as well. Neil Gaiman: “Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully.”

Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust
Listen to story online.

The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers (2007)

It was weird to be reading this 33-1/3 volume by Ric Menck at the beginning of this year when David Crosby died. The Byrds have mostly been a blind spot for me, though I’ve come to like all the hits quite a bit over the years: “To everything there is a season.” Menck’s book is practically a template for how these things are done: the first half sets the context with a history of the artist to that point, and the second half takes up the album track by track. For me it was the history that was most useful. It’s concise and to the point, although it may be less useful for fans who already know it. But I learned a lot that was still resonating when Crosby died. The Notorious Byrd Brothers had no hits and it was virtually all new to me when I started listening to it while reading. I had a hard time finding anything in the album to hold onto, but Menck ranks it very highly, comparing it favorably to Blonde on Blonde and Revolver. A musician himself, associated with Velvet Crush and the Springfields among others, Menck is clearly the right person for this job. I’m not sure I agree with him that NBB is anywhere near the Dylan or Beatles albums but the enthusiasm is infectious. I like the way Menck sprinkles in personal details of his record-buying and listening history, which are relatable. I can listen closely to the NBB tracks under his direction—a few were already standing out even before I got to Menck’s track-by-track rundown. So it’s a perfectly competent entry in the 33-1/3 series (though with more than the usual number of typos I’ve seen in these things). But it also suggests that “perfectly competent” on another level may mean “for fans only.” Or maybe my resistance to the Byrds just runs that deep. The best audience for this book might be someone already onboard with them but maybe dubious about this album. Maybe they haven’t got to it yet. It could be a book that opens up the whole album for someone. Odd point: So far it’s the only Byrds album in the 33-1/3 series, which surprised me, all things considered. It’s not really their most emblematic, is it? Anyway, n.b., for fans only.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“The Houses of the Russians” (1968)

I’m not sure yet what the consensus is on Robert Aickman, I’m just going with the ones that seem to really reach me. They all seem to reach me. This is another good one from probably his best period, the late ‘60s. I was slowed down a little by all the description of unusual landscapes, where land and water meet with many islands in remote Finland. This story might be ripe for graphic adaptation because I can see you could really lay it out in comic book panels with the right artist. It’s also a story with indeterminate borders in other ways: between the political entities of postwar Finland and the USSR, for example. Because of these geographical and political factors there is necessarily some sense of this story as travel writing. The island with the mysterious vacation homes, once we finally get there, is the kind of stuff that I think only Aickman can do. As usual, it is accompanied with an unsettling sense of the experience of dreaming. These houses are at once peculiar and bear a bland malevolence that comes through well, though it is hard to explain. Another border is one of time and history, with the Russian experiment with communism approximately at midcentury, and memories still alive of time before the Revolution. This theme may even have been Aickman’s most intentional in 1968. Or not—certainly the landscape also reflects the preoccupation of his day job and other life, as the protector of waterways. It’s a frame story, told by a mysterious old man. I like the way the houses veer from totally abandoned to alive with parties in progress. I love that our main guy, the storyteller, ends up at one. I like the imposing, massive figure in black he takes for a priest. The old man’s idea, at least at the time of his visit to this strange region, was that he was presumably Eastern Orthodox or something, which perhaps evokes Soviet persecution of organized religion. I looked at a cheesy paranormal reenactments show called True Horror the other day. It was a story about a woman in England in the 2000s who bought a house that used to be a “witches prison” and was now haunted. By coincidence, one of the ghosts as depicted looks like the black figure in this story. Funny coincidence, but also emphasizes how Aickman is able to slip his ghosts in so effectively. This one is working on a lot of levels and takes some time to sink in.

Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust
Story not available online.

“Don’t You Dare” (1968)

This story by John Burke is not that good but it does bear interest as a barometer of the homicidal spouse story circa the late ‘60s. I did not know the publication date as I was reading it, but was struck by the rancidly bad marriage, which are generally milder in ‘40s and even ‘50s fare. Murderous marriages seem to be largely a postwar phenomenon that waned in about the ‘80s. The first wife here is a dominating, belittling terror who openly carries on with other men. Maybe there’s some Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in here too. That would make sense. The second wife starts out like a regular old helpmeet, bad enough of course, but then is apparently possessed by the spirit of the first. The first was drowned in an accident, swimming across the river to see a lover. Swimming across the river, as one does. There is a possibility that our meek and mild husband killed her in a rage and threw her in the river. But she was also known to enjoy the challenge of swimming near a dangerous junction, called a weir, where the current ran high. I learned that a weir is a kind of dam. Maybe it’s some British deal, but a lot of things are generally murky in this story—it often feels a little rushed. The marriage to the second wife is an example. Suddenly she is there and they are married. I should say, if I have to, that marriage is not a good thing in this story. That’s a given. The first wife is a terrible person, the second wife soon becomes one, and the husband turns into a homicidal maniac. The ghost story / supernatural side is just a plot convenience or there for the atmosphere. It’s also murky. The one thing that’s plain is the murder at the end, which is surprisingly brutal. It’s useful to remember the story is from 1968. Besides Burke’s busy novelization work in the ‘60s (Look Back in Anger, A Hard Day’s Night, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, etc.), he edited a series of anthologies and was also a regular in many others with his own stories. Maybe he’s better elsewhere. As for the homicidal spouse plot line, well, next stop is probably something like Texas Chain Saw Massacre, if that had a bad marriage in it. Now that I think of it, maybe it did.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.

White Light / White Heat (1968)

Of all the major Velvet Underground releases—The Velvet Underground & Nico, White Light / White Heat, The Velvet Underground, 1969, Loaded, and VU—everyone has to have a least favorite. This one is mine—yes, and "Sister Ray" notwithstanding. It's not that I don't like the album in a general sort of way, their second ("sophomore effort," as we say) and the first after sidelining Andy Warhol and Nico. In fact, when I came back to White Light / White Heat recently I thought it was better than I remembered, even "The Gift," which has always been my primary article of evidence for not listening to the album more. That track lasts more than eight minutes, with John Cale reading a Lou Reed short story that is trying hard to be bizarre. If you want to stretch a point it might even be a kind of very dry marker for splatterpunk horror. Tensions between Cale and Reed were coming to a head generally during the recording of this album. I can hear it—or think I can—specifically in the production of "Lady Godiva's Operation," based on another Reed short story, this one apparently about trans surgery. Reed has a backing vocal where he comes in for a part of a line at a time, but he's mixed unusually high. It feels like a personality conflict, Reed asserting himself for the sake of his ego not the song. It adds an interesting tension, but it's also an uncomfortable tension. As for the 17-minute "Sister Ray" (or the "White Whale"), yeah sure, stone rock rave-up classic. The raw groove bludgeons. Distortion and fuzz dominate. Pounding monotony is a good thing in this case. Now Reed is mixed way down, as if the vocal can barely keep up, riding the current, under the assault of the band. Halfway in it is hypnotic like a factory machine. Heavy drug references and loopy sexual references abound. At 16:00 it's a horse race with the avant-garde rock equivalent of a photo finish. "Sister Ray" is much revered and perhaps deservedly so. But it has long verged on homework for me, and I've never fully connected with it. Thinking the length of it might be the appeal, I turned to the 38-minute version from the Quine Tapes box set, recorded in San Francisco. It's more slow-paced and methodical and in the style of the 1969 double-live (not surprising as both were drawn from some of the same shows in 1969). Moe Tucker hits and hits. The rhythm guitar strums and strums. Someone's noodling on a guitar. It goes through some changes, which sound at least semi-rehearsed. At one point, from about 8:30 to 15:00, it sounds a little like they're attempting to emulate "Dark Star." Where is Jerry Garcia when you need him? They were right there in San Francisco. The White Light / White Heat version altogether comes off better, much closer to the controlled chaos they appeared to be going for, the formal and conscious antithesis of West Coast side-long tracks like "Dark Star." Someone somewhere once observed that all of the Velvet Underground starts and ends with "Sister Ray," and anyone who claims to be a fan but is indifferent to "Sister Ray" is ... something judgmental. Guilty. But like I say, we all have to have a least favorite, even among the most loved sets of things. You probably already know exactly what you think of White Light / White Heat. But I will still say: Approach with caution.

A Fan's Notes (1968)

Frederick Exley asks us to judge his first novel as fiction because it's clearly closer to autofiction, if not outright memoir. Parts of it, to make his case, are thus painfully obviously made up, like the marriage of the first-person main character ("Fred") and the unlikely sons that come of it. The rest is ripped straight out of Exley's strange alcoholic storytelling way of life. I read this in the '70s and love-loved it, mostly for its rambling rolling voice, which shuffles the deck of time in episodes that range across the 1950s. He teaches. He writes. He works PR. He drinks a lot. He moves around a lot. He has periods living on the couches of friends, periods at home with his mother. He even goes in and out of mental institutions—hmm, seems like I read a lot of novels in the '70s by people who spent time in mental hospitals. Fred also has a king-size obsession with New York Giants football star Frank Gifford, which is where A Fan's Notes really feels old-school now but it's also basically the heart of the book. Gifford was Fred's age, and this obsession started when they went to USC at the same time. Fred reports relationships but most of them don't feel real. He betrays his literary ambitions by meditations on Edmund Wilson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway, and other usual suspects. More than anything he is a raconteur—a silver-tongued devil who loves to spin yarn, use big words, and write long lively sentences. He's fun but he's a hot mess hit and miss. I certainly don't know if I'd want to be friends with him. It's fair to call him pre-feminist here, but I note that predictably he was hostile to feminism in the sequel to A Fan's Notes and second "novel" in a trilogy, Pages From a Cold Island, published in 1975 and featuring an encounter with Gloria Steinem. I liked the Gifford worship in A Fan's Notes, or whatever it was, because it really is a kind of practical demonstration of pure fan behavior. The drinking and the institutionalizations—three separate trips in and out of the same facility—struck me as more alarming than entertaining, but that's how I usually am with drunks and their stories. A recent reread went slower than I expected. It might be one of those things that's only amazing once. I couldn't help noticing all the backwards and cockeyed ideas this time, mostly about women but occasionally on race. He's riding the crests of white man supremacy without even knowing it, of course, which practically goes without saying, all things considered. He's terrible on women, needy and conflicted with no sense of self-awareness. But A Fan's Notes is entertaining on its own terms and a kind of time capsule too. I still love his voice, a barbaric yawping thing, carefully crafted.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Secret Life of Harpers Bizarre (1968)

The biggest hit these California songbirds, Harpers Bizarre, purveyors of sunshine pop, ever scored was a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Feelin' Groovy" that went top 20. It's a song I have not needed to hear for some time because oldies radio etched it into my brain as a permanent earworm. (My cats can verify as they have heard me querying them for years, "Hello lamppost, whatcha knowin'? / I come to watch your flowers growin'.") (they're the lamppost) That song is not on this album, but songs by Randy Newman, Bacharach/David, Frank Loesser, and others are, including a cover of "Battle of New Orleans." I had a hard time getting a bead on The Secret Life. It came to my attention originally on the downloading circuit and yet it is so charged up with super-sweet mainstream Broadway showtune glitz, which I normally resist, and often do here too, to tell you the truth. It's a case of cognitive dissonance all up and down the 17+ tracks. The Bacharach/David number, "Me, Japanese Boy," is one for the dustbin of history for self-evident reasons, yet it can be quite affecting. "Battle of New Orleans" was a goofy novelty hit for Johnny Horton, so Harpers Bizarre turns it into ... a Broadway showtune? In no way is "When I Was a Cowboy" a song about cowboys. These paradoxes go on and on. In my YouTube wanderings this past month I stumbled on a 1966 Andy Williams Christmas special, and suddenly this 1968 album made more sense. People used to love this corn syrup. I should also note it's somewhat spoiled by the streaming experience now, as it is another suite of songs that are supposed to flow together seamlessly but which streaming services insist on inserting silence between. The interlude pieces here are generally less than one minute, often less than 30 seconds, with lovely and surprising little turns, for example repeating a single musical figure of some kind from another song for emphasis. Alas, in the end it is all too Broadway showtune for me, in spite of favorites like "Me, Japanese Boy" and "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat" (the Loessor song). YMMV. The people who loved it on the DL circuit really, really loved it.

The Family That Plays Together (1968)

The second album by Spirit is actually the first one I purchased (circa 1971, used from the Wax Museum on Lake Street in Minneapolis for $1.90) so it's the one album of theirs that still has the most sentimental attractions for me. It also has their one and only top 40 hit in the album opener, "I Got a Line on You," which made it to #25 in March 1969. I don't remember ever hearing it on the radio, but among other things it's a big showcase for guitarist Randy California and the ongoing purity of his tone, describing the abstracted geometrical two-dimensional line they got on you. It's probably their best song. I understand now that California's instantly identifiable tone may have been an effect of double-tracking. Streaming does a disservice to the first four songs on the album, which connected seamlessly on the original vinyl but are separated on streaming like ordinary tracks with brief silences, which destroys the effect. Spirit fans should not feel singled out because even the second-side suite of Abbey Road suffers the same problem. These first four songs—"I Got a Line on You," "It Shall Be," "Poor Richard," and "Silky Sam"—seem intended to show off their musical range across a fancy 13-minute suite, with '60s three-minute pop, jazz, and "hard rock" too. Lou Adler is producing again. "Poor Richard" and "Silky Sam" are closer to precious whimsy, recalling songs (the Beatles again) like "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Rocky Raccoon." In fairness to Spirit, The Family That Plays Together came out well before Abbey Road and was coincident with the White Album. The title comes from the peculiar setup of the band—drummer Ed Cassidy (45 in 1968 and way past the legal hippie age limit of 30) was Randy California's stepfather. No word on allowance or disciplinary arrangements. The band also mostly lived together family style in a shared house in Topanga Canyon with Dr. Demento, who produced their first demos. Two other members of the original Spirit lineup—singer Jay Ferguson and bassist Mark Andes—are also significant because they broke away in the early '70s to form Jo Jo Gunne, which was more of a straightforward rock act with intimations of glam and looking forward to the coming of pub-rock. In terms of songwriting, lead singer Ferguson was always fully coequal with California, both of them writing separately with contributions on some songs from other members. Although I have my nostalgic attachments to it there is some dreadful stuff on this album, like "Drunkard," which appears to be their "Eleanor Rigby" bid (again the Beatles), and "Darlin' If," which may be prescient but only for doleful rock balladry by way of John Sebastian, not really a great development. "Jewish" is so weird I don't even know what to say about it. I don't think you can call it klezmer but it does have recognizable Jewish musical stylings. It was written by California who was Jewish. I'm not sure whether he's keeping the faith or reaching for exotic novelty sounds (perhaps under influence of Demento) but it's certainly off the beaten track.

Spirit (1968)

Lou Adler was a fixture of 1960s Southern California pop music shading into rock, represented loosely (and only in part) by John Turturro's Joel Milner in the movie Grace of My Heart. He worked as a manager for Jan & Dean before founding the Dunhill label, then became a producer and occasional songwriter for the Grass Roots and the Mamas & the Papas, largely presiding over their runs of hits. In 1967 he sold Dunhill and founded Ode, which is approximately where Spirit enters the picture, along with Carole King (Adler produced Tapestry), Cheech & Chong, Scott McKenzie, and the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. I mention this as context for Spirit's odd appeal. Like the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, it was a band still working basically in the mode of 12 three-minute songs per album and focused on making it into the charts. But also, the times they were a-changin'. Coming in that strange golden period between Revolver and Let It Be a lot of rules were uniformly disregarded, e.g., Make one song real heavy and longer than seven minutes. Think about jazz. Don't forget production stunts. Wail, guitar man, wail! And so on. Albums could do well with no real singles action. Spirit made it to #31 on the Billboard albums chart with virtually no singles support. Five of the 11 tracks on this album are under three minutes, but there's also an 11-minute jazzy "Elijah" to finish it off.

There are actually a lot of moving parts in Spirit, so I'll start with what drew me into what turned out to be one of my first projects as a consumer of used records in the early '70s. The guitar man in this case was a guy who went by the name of Randy California, dubbed thus by Jimi Hendrix. He was playing in New York as part of Hendrix's Jimmy James & the Blue Flames and there was another Randy in the band Hendrix called Randy Texas. Again like the Doors or Jefferson Airplane, or Hendrix, Spirit (and producer Adler) threaded the needle between pop song formalities and gestures of unrestrained hippie bacchanalia. I loved California for the purity of his tone, a clean tubular sound that was probably achieved in some simple technical way, like maybe plugging the guitar directly into the soundboard. His real showcase here for me is the five-minute "Mechanical World," the only single (amazed it wasn't "Fresh Garbage" but maybe taste makers had a problem with that title?). "Mechanical World" is the corollary of course to Hendrix's "White-collared conservative flashing down the street, / Pointing their plastic finger at me." The song has an odd stilted quality, like many Spirit songs, but California's solos in the breaks are simple and effective, consisting largely of holding single beautiful notes for a long time, even as Adler sends coteries of string-players in to sneak behind him and sweeten it up. Good, good stuff. Note that the song was written by singer Jay Ferguson (the band's most prolific songwriter) with bassist Mark Andes. These two would later break away from Spirit and form Jo Jo Gunne.

Randy California's guitar legend may be most attached now to "Taurus," which he wrote, and which sounds suspiciously enough in part like Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" to produce lawsuits against our favorite hapless plagiarists Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. California died in a drowning accident in 1997 but his estate was still pursuing legal action as recently as just last year. I'm agnostic on this one—"Taurus" is more an example to me of Adler's overproduction and over-sweetening here, a mostly uninteresting instrumental (with harpsichord even). But yes, it's not hard to hear the similarity to the Zepp classic, plus Spirit toured with Led Zeppelin so Page and Plant knew the material. Spirit is probably the one album to hear by Spirit as their albums tend toward diminishing returns and even this one has ups and downs. But it has more good songs than any other and there's an interesting tension for me in Adler's pop instincts as they collide with jazzbo rock band instincts in the era of—as Frank Zappa put it—"I will love everyone / ... I will go to a house / That's – that's what I will do / I will go to a house / Where there's a rock and roll band / Because the groups all live together."

In Watermelon Sugar (1968)

Richard Brautigan was one of my literary infatuations in the '70s out of high school. By the time he died in 1984, taking his own life, I was sad to hear it but already had misgivings about reading him again and didn't. I'm not surprised to find, all these years later, that In Watermelon Sugar seems meager now. Maybe I should have tried his more famous Trout Fishing in America first, but In Watermelon Sugar was my favorite when I was reading all his stories and poems. It has bobbed up and down in vogue due to a Harry Styles hit song last year, "Watermelon Sugar," which was indeed inspired by this novel. There's also a 2006 Neko Case song inspired by it, "Margaret vs. Pauline." Brautigan, like Neko Case but not Harry Styles, was a native of Tacoma, Washington. He was born in 1935 and his folks fought a lot and roamed the Pacific Northwest with him growing up in impoverished and unstable circumstances. In the '60s he showed up in the Bay Area and created a literary niche for himself as a winsome elfin bard inside the hippie ecosystem. His stuff is marked by surreal not to say nonsensical whimsy, which is gentle as a general rule but sometimes it's off and often there's decidedly a dated sexual politics. His girlfriends and his kinda-sorta girlfriends were often on the covers of his books. The novel is easy and quick to read because everything is short, with lots of white space on the pages. It barely breaks 100 pages. The far future depicted is closer to fantasy than science fiction but even closer to daffy hippie undulations that too often verge on insipid. His metaphors and analogies seem more trite now where they once seemed inspired. Everything in this world is made of watermelon sugar, pine boards, stone, and trout oil. I know for certain what two of those things are. The sun shines a different color every day, and the watermelon sugar reflects the color of the day it was harvested, or planted, or something. One day of the week the sun is black and there is no sound; ditto the products made with those watermelon sugars. I don't know what watermelon sugar is but the place sounds pleasant anyway. The narrator has two girlfriends: Pauline and Margaret. The scene is either polyamory or the narrator is a creep or both. Pauline is basically wonderful and Margaret is not, though it's not clear why for either. It looks a lot like stark old-fashioned midcentury male chauvinism and this narrator now looks dunderheaded at best, sadly. There are some silly villains as well but the novel is hamstrung by the fatuous narrator, who never gets better. The whimsy never says die, I will say that for it. The whimsy never says die.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.