Kinks, “Mr. Churchill Says” (1969)

[listen up!]

Out here on the deep cut tip it’s possible this song is enjoyed best in the context of the whole album, Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)—strained concept (in the parenthetical) and all. Concept rock albums were all the rage at the time, of course, but the song reads as ambiguously to me as the LP at large. On the one hand, it seems to be valorizing Winston Churchill and the UK’s World War II effort, an easy piety today and in 1969. But songwriter Ray Davies’s vocal sounds mocking when the song gets to the Churchill quotes, Wikipedia includes it in a list of antiwar songs, and Davies, when questioned in an interview, said, “When the battle's over and you've won, you always look good. But what was achieved by it?” So it looks like a clear case of go figure, perhaps comparable to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” which sounds jingoistic but is actually approximately the opposite. In many ways the 4:43 “Mr. Churchill Says” functions as a novelty—my favorite part is when the air raid sirens start at about 1:35, which never fail to light me up. The guitar-playing shifts into a loose-wristed mode and the band revs up the tempo. The nervous energy somehow suggests the terrors of the German bombing campaign. Eventually there’s a thoughtful guitar solo from Dave Davies. When the singer is back with his yobs they still sound mocking, but it’s not hard to take the propaganda at “keep calm and carry on” face value either: “Mr. Churchill says we've got to hold up our chins / We've got to show some courage and some discipline / We've got to block up the windows and nail up the doors / And keep right on 'til the end of the war.”

Kinks, “King Kong” (1969)

[listen up!]

This Kinks obscurity caught my ear on the CD deluxe edition of their great album Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). I like it because it reminds me of T. Rex, which in 1969 was still the fey Tyrannosaurus Rex. It’s possible the song had some influence on T. Rex honcho Marc Bolan—he probably would have heard it, right? Although he would have had to be a fan. It was released as the b-side of “Plastic Man,” a hippie-like screed about convention and hypocrisy and such (compare the spoken-word interlude on Jimi Hendrix’s “If 6 Was 9,” compare The Graduate). “Plastic Man” fizzled because the BBC had a strict policy they would not play any song that included the word “bum.” “Plastic Man” and “King Kong,” widely considered inferior Kinks songs anyway at a time when the band was verging on moribund, were thus relegated to album homeless status, only appearing later on expanded editions of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur, and elsewhere. Fair enough—“King Kong” qualifies as dum and stoopid in many ways, with a primitive stomping attack, chiming guitars, monotonous bass, and obvious regard for a rampaging movie monster. I happen to have some affection for that movie monster myself (and for T. Rex too), which I guess makes it more of a natural for me. And even when songwriter Ray Davies goes primitive his deepest instincts remain musical. “La-la-la” and “doo-doo-doo” once again sweeten the pot nicely. The opening line, “I’m King Kong and I’m ten feet long,” may be all you need to know, but note that the next line—“Got a big six-gun and everybody is scared”—suggests some unhappiness with the US. Who, in 1969, could blame them (indeed who, in 2026, could blame them?)?

The Band (1969)

I like the second album from the Band (or “The Band”) more than the first. It’s definitely a big-brother album in my life, in this case the big brother of a neighborhood friend. I felt pressure to like it even as I never connected much with it. In the aftermath of 1968, a lot of the counterculture-oriented groups seemed to be seeking a kind of downhome comfort-rock. Sometimes it works. It’s easy enough to just play the album and try to let it come to you, though it’s often boring. Sometimes it hits in spite of my larger misgivings about the project. I have never liked the song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” for example, not by Joan Baez, not by the Band. It was written by Robbie Robertson—within the confines of the copyright disputes among the Bandmates—and always struck me as unattractive pretend-old stoic warbling. I’ve cringed though it so much I can’t even tell you. At one time you could not get away from it. The Baez version went to #3 in 1971 and I’ve had friends and read the critics who are into the whole Bob Dylan / Band industrial complex and made it part of the air we breathe. Yet the last time I played through The Band I found myself singing along with “Dixie.” Go figure. It might mean I’m in denial about liking it or it might mean I sing to cope when I should be just using the skip button. I’m not sure why I have so much resistance to skipping songs when I listen to albums. Somehow it feels like cheating. Anyway, the only song I actively like here is “Up on Cripple Creek” (a #25 hit in 1969), another good singalong, but even then it’s not like I love it. I give it maybe a 7 of 10. “Jawbone” is another song I like enough to notice; specifically I like its deliberateness. But most of the rest of The Band just passes me by like wallpaper. I will say one of the most interesting things about the Band is the range of strong lead vocals, provided on different songs by three of the five players, working and interweaving distinctly but within a range. Only Garth Hudson (my favorite) and Robbie Robertson abstain from singing (or yowling, as the occasion warrants). Last point: In recent years I’ve seen the album referred to as the “Brown Album” (presumably because it’s self-titled in the middle of their career like the Beatles’ White Album or a crayola rainbow of self-titled releases from Weezer). Maybe The Band has always been the Brown Album, but I have never in my life heard anyone refer to it that way. Brown like the loamy earth, I’m going to guess, not brown like shit.

The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

Sayat Nova, USSR, 79 minutes

Director: Sergei Parajanov

Writers: Sayat Nova, Sergei Parajanov

Photography: Suren Shakhbazyan

Music: Tigran Mansuryan

Editors: Sergei Parajanov, Marfa Ponomarenko, Sergei Yutkevich

Cast: Sofiko Chiaureli, Spartak Bagashvili, Gogi Gegechkori, Melkon Alekyan, Medea Japaridze, Vilen Galstyan

This art film curiosity from late-‘60s USSR was intended by director Sergei Parajanov as a kind of intuitive biography of 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova—to be sure, not a literal straightforward bio but more of an “inspired by” type of thing, indulging all poetic impulses however extravagant. Indeed, mimes are involved. The Color of Pomegranates delivers on the implied promise of the title, with vibrant color and often quite strikingly beautiful images. There is almost no dialogue or even that much of a discernible through-line, though keyed in many ways to a bio’s chronology.

Soviet censors worried that it was not literal enough and that it fell far short of a fair biography of anyone. They demanded the original title be changed and all specific reference to Sayat Nova removed. A headnote was added: “This film is not the story of a poet’s life. Instead, the filmmaker has attempted to recreate the world of a poet—the modulation of his soul, his passions, and his torments—broadly utilizing the symbolism and allegories of medieval Armenian troubadors.”

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

I read John Fowles’s third novel (after The Collector and The Magus) in the ‘70s. I might have seen the Oscar-bait movie that came of it too, with Meryl Streep. The only thing I remembered when I was coming back to The French Lieutenant’s Woman recently is that it’s more genteel than the first two, but comes with its own bag of literary stuntwork. Fowles attempts a 19th-century Victorian gothic romance, set in 1867. He gets the stuffy language down reasonably well and manages to keep it readable too (though not as well as Susanna Clarke would do some decades later). The narrative voice—seemingly standard third-person omniscient—often slips the reins, letting us know he is writing a century later, implicitly and even explicitly comparing the eras. A revelation to one character, for example, is likened to a nuclear strike on a city. Eventually, John Fowles himself climbs down off his narrative perch and injects himself into the story, telltale beard and all. It’s done gracefully enough but you have to wonder to what purpose, beyond showing off. The novel is surprisingly effective and absorbing. Both times I read it I didn’t want to put it down. The story is about a governess, Sarah Woodruff, in a seaside port who appears to have been deranged by a failed illicit love affair with, yes, a French lieutenant. He appears to have abandoned her. You have to use the word “appears” a lot with this one because many things are not as they seem. Fowles never entirely escapes his idea that life is better now (that is, in 1967), which is not entirely convincing even though I’m inclined to it myself. A gentleman shows up, with likely a rank to inherit and engaged already, and falls in love with Woodruff. She is fiercely independent, perversely protecting what we now (post-1967) would call her personal agency. The story takes a lot of twists and turns. Fowles has created a complex and interesting character in Woodruff and a good supporting cast with the rest. The ending is a model of ambiguity and a little frustrating for the cold calculations of it. I’m not wild about the trickery—I like my omniscient narrators anonymous and out of the fray. After that it's closer to a romance that’s too close to cheesy. But it’s never cheesy, only close, and it’s always compulsively readable. But here my adventures with Fowles ended. I think I attempted but never finished Daniel Martin and that was it. But now I’ve read both The Magus and this one a couple times each. Has to mean something.

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

8. Quicksilver Messenger Service, Happy Trails (1969)

The only album that matters by Quicksilver Messenger Service offers up a jam band San Francisco ballroom act live in concert(s)—and live in studio, and not above overdubbing either—working over a couple of Bo Diddley numbers, “Who Do You Love” on the first side and “Mona” on the second. There may be a case that Quicksilver is no better with Bo Diddley than the Grateful Dead were with Chuck Berry, but I’m not inclined to it. As a teen I adored the first side of Happy Trails and still do. They work it like jazz on “Who Do You Love,” politely passing around the soloing honors. Like the Allman Brothers they take way too long to wrap it up, but I am generally in a forgiving mood by then. The 25-minute so-called suite is divided into parts, depending on the soloist, even as the Bo Diddley beat carries on. The first, “When You Love,” features Gary Duncan delivering one of the most lyrical electric guitar solos I know with effortless purity, a thing of riveting beauty. It’s the section I always specifically listen for and it remains transcendent. I also liked “Where You Love,” which follows, featuring drummer and singer Greg Elmore, but that was mostly because I was so enamored of live recordings and crowd interactions then. It seems more a slight and somewhat silly interlude now, but “How You Love” picks up the pace again with John Cipollina’s abrupt, snarling electric guitar. David Freiberg follows with a bass solo on “Which Do You Love.” Don’t turn away from me just because I said “bass solo”—I see the expression on your face. This is no self-indulgent morass like too many of them, but an upbeat barn-burner less than two minutes that likely left his wrists sore.

And that was it for me with Happy Trails for a very long time. Friends would remind me the second side is good too, and yeah yeah, but it’s cut from a different cloth. More recently, however, on revisiting the album, I believe I have finally grokked it. The seven-minute cover of “Mona” is one thing, a good showcase for the much-vaunted electric guitar interplay of Duncan and Cipollina, but the drift is increasingly toward outer space and alien planets. “I’m gonna tell you Mona what I want to do” are practically the last words we hear. The singer seems to be losing his train of thought. “Maiden of the Cancer Moon”—is that Mona?—is only three minutes but follows the bent and takes it further. The guitar licks seem to be asking questions and then they are turned to hard labor. Where is this thing going? The 13-minute “Calvary” may or may not have the answers. It has the answers to something anyway. Note, on an elaborately themed western album that finishes off with a Roy Rogers chestnut, that it is “Calvary” and not “Cavalry,” as my brain keeps thinking it should be. This is a hostile landscape we occupy now. I think I can hear Ennio Morricone influence in spots. It has the feel of the harsh spaghetti western desert, but it put me in mind even more of a novel still nearly 20 years away when this was recorded, the desolated landscape of the 1985 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, where Judge Holden and the Kid roamed, the antelope were slaughtered for hearty dinner by gangs of marauders, and all unimaginable things go on. I even hear touches of flamenco like seasoning and a heavenly vocal chorus for texture, but there’s no resolution. They leave us stranded on this strange planet. No wonder they threw on 90 seconds of “Happy Trails” to close. We need the soothing familiarity of Roy and Dale.

9. Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969) – “A Rainbow in Curved Air”

The first side and 19-minute title track on Terry Riley’s third album, A Rainbow in Curved Air, has been another durable bedtime set for me. It may have started from rumors I’d heard that Riley gave “sleep-in” concerts where people attended with blankets and pillows and he played all night. Whether that’s true or not (I couldn’t find anything to confirm it in a cursory internet search), I see where people get the idea. The play, all instrumental, is light and trippy, high-spirited and mellow, full of synthy sound effects and driven by Riley’s noodling, odd rhythms, and drone that comprehends the observable universe. Psychedelia works for me both light and heavy and this one definitely goes the former route, though the drift has no time to waste, restless and relentlessly probing. Amplified keyboards and synthesizers were very much a novelty in vogue in 1969. Riley is credited with playing an “electric organ,” for example (thought they were generally all electrically powered?). If it veers close to the rinky-dink to modern ears now too familiar with classic keyboard textures, it still hits blustery cheerful and wandering, roving in all good ways. The music is soothing but the tempos and most of the playing is zippy, tangling fast, which creates interesting tension. The end is so headlong and abrupt you almost feel yourself crashing through something. Down the line, when the technology allowed, I played it on repeat some nights and found the ending simply propelling me into the piece again, a kind of perfect loop. By my lights it is the best single psychedelic piece suited to that purpose. It can also be nice to wake to after a night of it, though the nervous energies might take some time to adjust from sleep, like waking up after you’ve had too much coffee the day before. So the sleep-in idea works with caveats, for special occasions perhaps, but specifically in the case of “A Rainbow in Curved Air,” it would be tricky to pull off live. Riley plays all instruments here (electric organ, electric harpsichord, Rocksichord, dumbec, and tambourine) with lots of overdubbing. He finally played it in concert for the first time in 2007 with additional musicians. The impacts of “A Rainbow in Curved Air” are seen in unsurprising places: Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Pete Townshend’s keyboards on the Who’s Who’s Next album, many works by fellow minimalist Steve Reich, the prog band Curved Air, etc., etc.

10. Grateful Dead, Live/Dead (1969) – “Dark Star”

[2012 review here]

At one time the second side of the first LP of Live/Dead was my favorite on the classic double live set, cobbled together from different shows early in 1969. Side 2 has longish versions of “St. Stephen” and “The Eleven” (named for its time signature, hence proggy). I can’t say I ever warmed much to Pigpen, who owns the third side with 15 minutes of “Turn On Your Love Light,” and then the fourth side has stark and sometimes interesting fare with feedback, somber moods and such, but somehow I have never listened to it much. “Dark Star” did not hit me for 20 years, at a peculiar passage in my life, living alone again. I flipped for the 23-minute workup, with all its many twists and turns. I played it at night in bed. It felt light, or like light shining, inviting and playful, but also dark and mysterious, suddenly swelling up like The Rite of Spring with great power. I know now those moments are at approximately 8:05 and 12:20. The singing parts are like some Maynard Krebs troubadour stepping off a spaceship, something from a dream. Sometimes I fell asleep to the album side, sometimes I pondered the agonies and victories of the day, with the snarls of Jerry Garcia’s wandering electric guitar and that throbbing bass or gentle organ catching at me. Many years after that, in downloading times, I made a hobby of collecting other versions of “Dark Star,” almost always live of course, with many variations across the years for how they approached playing it. Perhaps not surprisingly, my favorite turned out to be the one I fell in love with originally from this album. But I was amused to discover it was also released as a single, running time of 2:42—basically all the singing parts, and a little more up-tempo. Where a fair amount of the psychedelia I went and still go for is fairly described as space-rock, “Dark Star,” even with all its astronomical features (and even with heady modern physics finally catching up with it in a way)—“Dark Star” does not hit as space-rock for me but as something more interior. With, perhaps, the figurative dimensions of a galaxy—but all inside, more absorbed now over the years of listening to it. The bass fading up and in after a few seconds of silence and then the tones of the electric guitar following it. I am triggered within 20 seconds for all the swoops and shifts, the embarking journey, the rising squalls and peaceful passages, that beatnik (Bob Weir) who keeps showing up to warble verses—almost immediately I’m sent to this place of great comfort, serenity, bliss. Other albums sides+ that can send me this way include Pharoah Sanders’s Karma and the Rascals’ “Peaceful World.” What can I say, I must be an easy mark. But nothing does it like “Dark Star,” all full of Steve Ditko visions.

12. Pink Floyd, Ummagumma (1969) – Live LP

[2016 review here]

By my lights you can altogether dispense with the studio LP on Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma double-album package. Too much empty noodling from solo Floyds unbound. But the live LP stands as a certain template for how it was getting done in the psychedelic era proper: choice live cuts from different shows, four songs total, two per side, all coming in long (8:25, 8:47, 9:21, 12:51), and all recorded with faces figuratively turned to the night sky. I heard it first as a 15-year-old and consider it still my introduction to space-rock. Only two of the four openly evoke outer space (or the travels therof in the mind)—Syd Barrett’s “Astronomy Domine” (from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, an album generally more favored as a Floyd psychedelic peak) and Roger Waters’s “Set the Control for the Heart of the Sun” from their second album. It was the Waters song that caught me. The comically somber tone establishes the levels of heavy at 11, and the wandering, systematic build-up unfolds from splashy cymbals and a pattern on the toms to a doleful bass line and eerie space-wind keyboards. Ultimately the vocals come crawling in: muttered, semi-audible. They are worried about something, or they have been hypnotized and overtaken by a strange alien race. They seem to be piloting a vessel. “Set the controls for the heart of the sun,” one tells another in a calibrated emotionless tone. Does that sound like a good idea? What is happening out here in the solar system? There are similar unsettling notes in “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” which started as the B-side of a single that basically went nowhere (“Point Me at the Sky”). The title is jokey (like who’s Eugene, brother?), and the music at first seems intended as a kind of gentle mountain meadow for the mind. Then they insert a few minutes of a horror movie into the middle. “Careful with that axe, Eugene,” someone says emerging from the layers, which is followed by wanton titanic screaming folded into and flailing out of the mix for a minute or more before we are returned to normally scheduled programming, the whole attack amplified and intensified for the meditative finish. It reminds me of the great “One of These Days” on the Meddle album, which is mostly an instrumental but someone wanted to add, “One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces.” Where does Pink Floyd get these terrifying ideas? They are like the bruises that make fruit almost too sweet. I’m going to guess Waters, whose dour and rancid views would come to dominate the band over the years, but I can’t say for sure. “Astronomy Domine” kicks it all off nice and hard with another nod to erstwhile mate Barrett. It’s a real rouser and a good start. The last piece, “A Saucerful of Secrets,” is broken down into four parts: “I. Something Else,” “II. Syncopated Pandemonium,” etc. Beware of long tracks broken down this way. Yes, it can work, e.g., Yes, “Close to the Edge,” but more often, as here, it does not. It’s nearly 13 minutes but I’m willing to call it the only flaw in this mighty majestic set, now unfortunately derided per Wikipedia by the band and others. Lighten up, folks. This is the good stuff.

19. Isaac Hayes, Hot Buttered Soul (1969) – “Walk On By”

Isaac Hayes came up originally in the ‘60s as an influential songwriter at the Memphis-based Stax label, cowriting “Soul Man” which became a hit for Sam & Dave in 1967. Later he struck big with the score for the 1971 blaxploitation picture Shaft. In between his soul was psychedelicized and he delivered up a stone classic in Hot Buttered Soul, which he followed with two more albums similar in intent and strategy (The Isaac Hayes Movement and ... To Be Continued)—that is, approximately two songs per albums side, covers of well-known pop songs, and running times that approached and often sailed by the double-digit minutes mark. “Walk On By” is the place to start—it's conveniently first on the LP too. For the most part it’s the place I’ve stayed. This mighty 12-minute cover of the Bacharach-David standard, originally recorded by Dionne Warwick. takes your heart away and explodes with delicious noise. From the opening it’s easy to see the plan—the notes are longer, the tempo slower, there appears to be a sawing orchestra on hand swelling up at the big moments. Guesting Funkadelic alum Harold Beane and his vicious fuzz-toned guitar lead a march to the glorious entry of Hayes’s vocal, a rumbling mumble sorely beset by the vicissitudes and pompatus of love. It goes way down deep as he opens up every bit of the agony. It’s your beloved one and all you can do is hope they will just pretend they don’t know you. “You put the hurt on me,” he moans, getting to the point. (“when you said it,” the chick singers sing) “You socked it to me, mama. When you said goodbye.” (wail wail) Warwick made it work dramatically, even though the production on her more upbeat version is buoyed by gently puffing horns and sweet strings. Hayes takes it another direction and I have never heard the song again in the same way, however indelible Warwick’s version is (and it is—it is Hayes’s genius to recognize that it is). On the flip side of Hot Buttered Soul Hayes tries repeating the trick: Jimmy Webb’s beautiful “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” here clocking in at 18 minutes. I swear Hayes holds down a single uninterrupted organ chord for the first half of it, and the subsequent release and finally getting into something like a song is liberating and revelatory, a brilliant moment. But 18 minutes is a little long for that payoff. The rest of Hot Buttered Soul— a tender ballad, “One Woman,” and the playful "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" riffing on Mary Poppins syllables—can be taken or dispensed with at will.

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica (2007)

I was sad to find out the author of this entry in the 33-1/3 series, Kevin Courrier, died in 2018. His book on a very difficult album stands up a good defense for it, explodes various myths and misinformation about it, and continually extends sympathies toward the haters, who are legion. For many, it’s an album that exists as the very epitome of terrible, unlistenable music. Courrier met his share of them along the way, even before he was working on the book. He came to the album a few years after its release and the anecdote about that, from his time working as a youth counselor in a crisis center, sets a nice, slightly comical tone about the project of taking on the album. I knew Trout Mask Replica myself in about the same timeframe, when I was in high school, at which time I defended it with “you have to listen to it a few times.” I might have added, “also, you have to want to like it.” I still have to remind myself to “listen to it a few times” every time I think to come back to it. Among other things, Courrier does a good job of charting its respectably big influence. The main part I appreciated was Courrier’s thoughtful history of the troubled relationship between Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) and nominal producer Frank Zappa. Their friendship started in the ‘50s when they were schoolmates in a California junior high. Courrier is also good on some of the mistaken ideas around how the music was conceived. Legend has it that Van Vliet went to each member for each song and literally told them exactly what to play. Courrier says the reality is that the drummer, Drumbo (John French—everyone in the band gets a funny alias), was more the mediary between the band and Van Vliet, who didn’t always have the vocabulary to explain what he wanted. Courrier has some fun with Van Vliet’s disappointment about the lack of commercial success, which Van Vliet believed was the fault of Zappa and others. For his explanation, Courrier wryly pivots to the avant-garde, often atonal music itself—I think he has that right. People are driven from rooms by this album. The approach of many of these 33-1/3 books, I’ve learned, is a history of the band or artist to the point of the specific album under consideration, then a track-by-track rundown. Courrier’s rundown may be a bit rushed—hey, it’s a double LP with lots of tracks—but his history of Van Vliet, Zappa, and the Magic Band (they stopped being “His” eventually) is quite good. It cleared up a lot of points for me on how this vexing album came to be. Courrier, a Canadian, also wrote books about Zappa and Randy Newman and, from 1990 until his death, was a film critic for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). If you care anything about Trout Mask Replica—love it, hate it, or meh—Courrier’s book is probably a useful stop.

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

“The Man Who Spoke in Rhyme” (1969)

This story by Ray Russell has a bit of a tangled history, at least in terms of its title. ISFDB is adamant that it is “The Man Who Spoke in Rhyme,” the title as it was originally published in Ellery Queen magazine—a strange place to find it in the first place. However, the preference of Russell, who died in 1999, appears to be “The Vendetta.” He may have even made some revisions toward that end after the original publication. (For whatever reason, the storytellers at youtube call it just “Vendetta.”) The Penguin collection Haunted Castles, with a foreword by Guillermo del Toro (!), came out circa 2013 and has the title Russell’s way. But I have to admit I’m a fan of the original title too, because I like that aspect of the story and think it’s worth calling attention to. It turns out the man is a very bad man, and he does speak in rhyme—doggerel, really. “But pray go on, although it chill your marrow—a half-told tale’s a bow without an arrow,” etc. A rhyming man is typical of Russell’s many flourishes. He wrote in the latter half of the 20th century but imagined some gothic, infinitely sophisticated past he often attempted to recreate. This story is in the form of a letter—the epistolary form—written “probably in 1876 or 1877” and detailing an incident many years older than that. Layers of distancing shove it ever further into the past. As always, Russell’s language is witty and to the point. The letter writer is in Venice (of course), shuddering at the advent of telephones, which he puts in scare quotes (“telephones”). It proceeds like a letter in a regular correspondence, with news of the weather and reference to other letters. And, finally, to the story at hand. There is the Count, the man who speaks in rhyme, and his beautiful sister of marrying age. And there is an artist, a Spaniard, who shows up at the Count’s castle and wants to paint the sister as Eve before the Fall. The Count is weird about his sister, jealous and possessive, but for some reason he feels OK about this artist. Then it turns out the artist and the Count’s sister are using their modeling and painting time for making love behind closed doors. Eventually the Count catches them in flagrante (my term). They’re both naked. There’s no point denying anything. They marry. She becomes pregnant. At this point the story becomes complicated, although Russell has set it up well. But the twist involves a lot of explanation which is there to be discovered. Now that I think about it, I guess another argument for the original title is that in many ways “The Vendetta” gives away the twist—that this is a revenge story, in approximately the same way the movie Oldboy is a revenge story. The vengeance is admirably thought through, patiently anticipated, and instantly devastating. Then the letter closes cheerfully, as letters do. It’s classic Russell.

Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories
Listen to story online.

“The Swords” (1969)

I’ve been revisiting and looking further into horror stories for a few years now. Partly it has been to get perspective on what I was reading of horror that affected me so much when I was a kid, how those stories shaped me. Now I have a better understanding of the sectors of horror I did and didn’t know then and how they fit in the larger history. I have many gaps I still have some interest in filling, particularly in the ‘70s and beyond, when I mostly stopped reading it. Robert Aickman is one such gap. Basically, I had never heard of the guy and his self-designated “strange” stories before, missed him completely in his time. Now I think he’s one of the best horror story writers of the ‘60s and ‘70s (he died in 1981 at the age of 66), if not the one best, and he wrote some good ones in the ‘50s as well. He worked a day job as a conservationist, cofounding the Inland Waterways Association in the UK, which works to preserve England’s canal system. Not all his stories are as stellar as this one and others, but they nearly always at least contain great fragments. And a surprisingly high number of them are pure little masterpieces, such as “The Swords.” Everything about this story—its plot, its characters, its symbols, its setting, the very title—suggest it is about sexual awakening and initiation. It blatantly trucks in horror cliches, notably the carnival setting, yet makes them work and even vitalizes them. A lonely traveling salesman (yes!) finds himself in an unpleasant hotel in a strange English city. He goes out walking to tire himself and help sleep. He finds a tiny, shabby street carnival, set up between two apparently abandoned factories in a vacant lot strewn with rubble. It has one ride, a merry-go-round operated by a disquieting woman, and not even a dozen stalls altogether. It is indeed a sinister carnival. And where does our traveling salesman go? To the sideshow, of course, which is marked “The Swords.” Here he finds seven other men sitting on rickety chairs, all singles, no one together. On the stage is a young woman who is thin and doesn’t appear to be that healthy, sprawled in a chair, wearing green makeup and a costume. The MC is wearing navy blue and our man begins referring to him as “the seaman” (yes). And then, the show. It all gets to be so ham-handedly phallic it’s practically comical. Aickman’s accomplishment is that what he describes in the show is impossible. In fact, the narrator doesn’t believe it and takes it as some sort of stage magic trick. We probably would too if we were seeing it for ourselves. And that’s what it might be, somehow. But somehow it feels fantastically, irrationally real—among other things, Aickman is uncanny at evoking dream senses. The narrator is fascinated and repulsed and flees before he is forced to take part as a volunteer. But there is still one more encounter for him with the woman wearing green makeup. You come away feeling almost infected or consumed by the events, which Aickman was capable of doing often in his stories.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine
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A Salty Dog (1969)

Avast! Welcome aboard to 40 minutes of high hippie experimentalism on the third album by that strange British ‘60s band, Procol Harum, featuring: an orchestra. And check the further musical credits, e.g., Gary Brooker: lead vocals, celeste, three-stringed guitar, bells, harmonica, wood recorder, and orchestral arrangements. Or Matthew Fisher: organ, lead vocals, marimba, rhythm and acoustic guitars, piano, recorder, and orchestral arrangements. They handed the sleigh tambourine to Robin Trower, whatever that is exactly—apparently a tambourine fitted out with sleigh bells? Trower is otherwise trying to drag the band into his own favored blues workups. He has the lead vocals on the bluesiest song here, “Crucifiction Lane,” and may or may not have disapproved of the rest. I know I was disappointed that “Pilgrim’s Progress” sounds too much like “Whiter Shade of Pale.” Put the pipe down and quit writing soundalikes, mateys! A Salty Dog somehow came to my attention well after its time, in the downloading era when I seemed to see it around a lot and finally grabbed it thinking it was going to be sea chanties, or maybe because rock critic Robert Christgau gave it an A+ (later amended to typo probably intended to be B+, which does sound like the right grade). Finally giving this album the attention in recent days that it more or less deserves, I realized it might have been one I would have liked playing back in the day along with Jethro Tull’s Benefit, the Beatles’ Hey Jude, and the Guess Who’s American Woman, if someone had similarly put it in my way. Aside from “Pilgrim’s Progress,” in fact, A Salty Dog is an interesting and reasonably entertaining batch of studio play even if there were tensions with Trower at the time. Better than the Moody Blues, I would have to say, freely admitting I have still never made my peace with the kings of college dorm orchestral mystifications. Still, if I can find room in my heart for Procol Harum (beyond “Whiter Shade of Pale,” which has always been essential) I may yet find room for the Moody Blues too (beyond “Tuesday Afternoon,” also essential). There is always hope. Meanwhile, listen up: “Boredom” features a flute, “Wreck of the Hesperus” an orchestra, and the whole Salty Dog project has a nice warm air—not necessarily of being at sea, but more like buoyed by long stoner afternoons of consecutive hours at playing albums.

My Night at Maud’s (1969)

Ma nuit chez Maud, France, 111 minutes

Director/writer: Eric Rohmer

Photography: Nestor Almendros

Editor: Cecile Decugis

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Francoise Fabian, Marie-Christine Barrault, Antoine Vitez

I was surprised to find My Night at Maud’s sitting highest among movies by director and writer Eric Rohmer on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? It reminded me of the case of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul topping the aggregated critical roundup for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. They aren’t the first movies I associate with either of those directors, but fair enough. For that matter, Rohmer seems to me to be coming in a little low with Maud’s at #266 nor is he that well represented in the top 1,000 with only three titles (also The Green Ray and Claire’s Knee). On the other hand, I’m not sure what if anything should come before it—Pauline at the Beach? For one thing, I think of the look of Rohmer pictures as vibrant color flooded with light. My Night at Maud’s, in contrast, is a dreary black and white in a year when color was more the norm, even for low-budget affairs.

My Night at Maud’s struck me as dreary in other ways beyond the gray color palette. It exists somewhere between the heartbeats of the birth control pill and the next wave of feminism and features college dorm types of discussions about religion among Protestants, Catholics, and atheists in their 30s—not entirely convincing to me. Bachelors and marriage and divorce are well chewed over. The ‘60s are raging outside but you wouldn’t necessarily know as men’s needs are reduced to preferences of body types and everyone has an opinion about Pascal. Our guy, Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is 34 and a practicing Catholic, apparently successful in his work, comfortably middle-class or better. He doesn’t know it about himself yet but, as everyone else around him does know, he prefers blondes, which turns out to be true across the length of the movie.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

USA / Mexico, 110 minutes

Director: George Roy Hill

Writer: William Goldman

Photography: Conrad L. Hall

Music: Burt Bacharach

Editors: John C. Howard, Richard C. Meyer

Cast: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross, Strother Martin, Ted Cassidy, Kenneth Mars, Henry Jones, Jeff Corey, Cloris Leachman, Sam Elliott, George Furth

Here's a Western that is overtly sentimental about the closing of the Western frontier and the end of the 19th century and the Old West. The Spanish-American War stands in as vivid time marker. It's 1898, no later than 1899. As a movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is all dressed up in the garb of late-'60s New Hollywood— chests are bared, people swear, they have sex, they crack wise, etc.—but really the picture sets its eyes squarely on old-school movie gloss confection. It's a buddy movie where the buddies make jokes and bicker all the way until the moment of their deaths and there's always time for one more musical interlude. You say you've got the Swingle Singers out there in the hall? Bring 'em in!

It's fair to say Burt Bacharach is responsible for the worst parts of this movie, and the bicycle-riding "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on Head" montage is the worst of that, the nadir of the whole picture (not to mention possibly entire sections of movie history). Another musical interlude that accompanies sepia-toned photographs of a journey to Bolivia is better but still pure sentiment. The Swingle Singers boppin' around over the good times in Bolivia is nearly pure 1969—dated ("Pepsi," rock critic Nik Cohn would call it). But this is a movie looking to make money and win awards, which it did, and somehow it is now considered among the 500 greatest movies ever made.

Clear (1969)

An early expedition into fractured fickle completism on my part ended here—as I recall, I bought Clear as a used record the same day I bought the first Spirit album (also used), and I effectively bailed on Spirit here, their third album and the last produced by Lou Adler. I never got to know Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, an album I often see hailed as a high point of Spirit's catalog. OK fine, there are still some Spooky Tooth and Wishbone Ash albums I'm hoping to get to too. I finally gave Twelve Dreams a listen a few days ago and didn't find it much better than Clear, so now as then this is my proximate stopping point with Spirit. Maybe I should have tried harder. In fact, I don't think I listened to Clear much at all even back then, because it was mostly unfamiliar to me when I got to it whereas I recognized the first two quite readily—used to play them a lot. To get to the point, Clear strikes me as very generic 1969 rock. It might be better than the first three Grand Funk Railroad records but sadly not by that much. Another touchpoint might be the Savoy Brown album Looking In (which might overall be better). I like a lot of this stuff but even so these are not high compliments, and so it must be said about Spirit and Clear. It kicks off with "Dark-eyed woman on a hot summer's night" accompanied by heavy riffing and that's about where it stops too. The songwriting is just not there. It's uninspired and feels labored and obvious. They're hacking up lungs trying to pull it together. "Ground Hog," especially when it gets into its "old man winter" jive, is verging on Spinal Tap for ludicrous self-parody. "I'm Truckin'" speaks for itself. For once the extras deliver up the prize: a 1969 radio ad for the album tacked on to the end of the track "Coral." It starts with an eerily prescient (I admit) voice montage of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Then the hip doleful voice guy enters: "Many sounds don't make sense," he intones. "But one thing is clear: Spirit." Sound of belabored rock song stirring to half-life. This message approved, no doubt, by Lou Adler.

Rock From the Beginning (1969)

I'm not going to attempt the convoluted publishing history of Nik Cohn's story of rock 'n' roll and, implicitly—shot from the hip as it is—early and influential essay at the rock critic enterprise. It has been sold under the titles Pop From the Beginning, Rock From the Beginning, and, most evocatively, AWOPBOPALOOBOP ALOPBAMBOOM (for Little Richard, of course). Editorial revisions appear to have gone on with every edition. The little mass market paperback with the illustration of Jimi Hendrix on the cover, called Rock From the Beginning, is the one I read in 1970. Written (mostly) in 1968 when Cohn was a jaded seen-it-all 22-year-old, its assessments are more often wildly wrong, or at least out of step with later rock critical canon (not least because so impossibly early). Nevertheless, it lit me up in the summer when I was 15 and instilled a certain set of long-lived prejudices, a tendency toward instinctive contrarianism that lives on yet, for better or worse (I'm honestly not sure which it is). Certainly Cohn's language no longer seems the freewheeling specimen of New Journalism it once did. But the orientation of swiftly moving fickle taste and self-contradiction set in deep, and I still find a likely source for fundamental preferences here. He singles out Eddie Cochran and Little Richard in the early bunch, for example, makes a lot out of the Coasters, and characterizes the Brill Building approach as "highschool." On the other hand, P.J. Proby gets his own chapter along with the Beatles and Rolling Stones (each), and the chapter on Bob Dylan is spent mostly sniffing at him with a superior air. In the end (remember, 1968) Cohn sees Pete Townshend as the single most important figure going. (There's a great anecdote about Townshend writing "Pinball Wizard" under Cohn's influence—Cohn hadn't liked much of what he heard of Tommy, still in production, and did happen to be a pinball maniac.)

Jeering Amazon reviewers are all over Cohn and this book for being so wrong about so many things. But I recognize and appreciate his skepticism about the evolving conventional wisdom, which was then deifying Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and other now-usual suspects, while artists like Larry Williams and Del Shannon were slipping down the memory hole. I read this book a few times when I was 15 and 16 and absorbed much of it at cellular level. Coming back to it decades later in my 40s it more annoyed me and I was embarrassed not only for it but for myself for ever liking it. Now I've reached a kind of Baby Bear middle. There's no sense to make of Cohn's taste. It is all pure response, contradictions bursting out like time-lapse flowers popping into bloom. One minute the Beatles are brilliant and historical, the next they're not all that, and then back again. He dismisses Rubber Soul and Revolver. He judges Sgt. Pepper's their best. The White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be came out later—they were freaking still together when he was writing! Cohn struggles for consistency even as he rails against it, grappling with these strange mysteries—why do some things sound good once and then never again, why do the opinions of others matter so much, why does everybody like something I can't stand, why can't I like it if everybody else does, and other conundrums about life and pop music. Really Cohn might have had it right with the title Pop From the Beginning. The book is not just about pop (from the beginning of the rock era anyway) but it is also '60s-style pop itself in its approach and attitude, caught in the flickering intense ecstasies of right now. And notwithstanding the later marketing ploys of Jimi Hendrix on the cover and appropriation of the word "rock," which by 1969 had achieved ascendancy over rock 'n' roll itself, not to mention pop. As if to prove the point, here is Cohn getting Hendrix wrong but also right in a way, simply by focusing so intently, elliptically, and self-consciously: "[Hendrix] was a conman, a black cliché, but it finally didn't matter much; he freaked out regardless, and he was real excitement." I'm going to start using "real excitement" as praise as soon as I possibly can, because he packs everything into that.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

For better or worse, Portnoy's Complaint is one more artifact from the 20th century that can trace its existence back in essential ways to Hugh Hefner, with certain strains of sexism—and plain ignorance—that never did find a way to accommodate feminism (let alone LGBTQ). "Portnoy's complaint," presented comically as a medical diagnosis to open the novel, is what we would consider today just one more type of compulsive sexual disorder, among those still considered relatively minor (and so of course comically humiliating) only because they don't usually lead to active criminal behavior, and people don't end up required to register as sex offenders everywhere they go for the rest of their lives. I'm not saying the novel isn't funny—it often is and it's always fun to read—but it is already painfully dated, in many ways: its understanding of masturbation disorders, its cheap and obvious turns to Freud and psychotherapy, its juvenile preoccupation with sex, and its aggressive sexism. Philip Roth's barbaric yawp of a career break is best taken as a ride on a roaring and unhinged ranting voice, held in check only for the sake of clarity, which is scrupulously maintained. It's a bravura performance, if you can get past the conceits. It's formally about sexual frustration but also about the frustration of being culturally uprooted in the world, as a Jew. It's also a formal complaint about the human condition, notably mothers (castrating, of course). "THE MOST UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTER I'VE MET," is the name of the first chapter, meaning himself, Alexander Portnoy the narrator. (Portnoy's father is pretty unforgettable too, plagued by chronic constipation and his tedious career as an insurance salesman.) Portnoy's Complaint is a pure distillation of Roth's silken, pulsing voice, which only got better, modulated for better effect, as the march of his novels went steadily forward over the decades. It was the flashpoint for his career, and as with other celebrities at the time—the Beatles, say, or Mia Farrow—he struggled for many years to escape his own long shadow. For most of the '70s he was little more than the guy who wrote the sensational book about some schmuck who masturbated all the time. Over at Modern Library, in 1998, they seemed to think it's the best thing he ever did, but actually, persistence paid off for Roth and he went on to write much greater novels than this odd and only semi-charming novelty. So don't believe the hype, start with American Pastoral—in memory, Sabbath's Theater is my favorite, but I still mean to get back to it as I recall it as devastating too—and if you come to Portnoy's Complaint with low expectations you might even have a nice surprise in store.

In case it's not at the library.

The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969)

The fifth Martin Beck novel in the Story of Crime series by Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö uses a fairly spectacular crime as its focus, though much of the narrative is spent developing the sideline characters supporting police investigator Beck. Lennart Kollberg, in particular, gets a lot of attention here, as well as Gunvald Larsson. Both are large men with tempers, often unlikable (especially Kollberg). But they are still good at their jobs. The case at hand involves an arson of a fourplex apartment building that results in three deaths. I thought the crime was unnecessarily busy with detail—among other things, one of the victims actually committed suicide the night of the arson, which complicates the picture. In fact, the fire is not even considered arson at first, and there's some business about authorities going to a misreported address on the night of the blaze. It all hangs together more or less by story's end but by that point also seems extraneous. Typically enough, for reasons of its fiction market or maybe the times, it can mire down some with obligatory-feeling subplots of the ongoing sexual liberation of the time and place, Sweden in the '60s. The dry straightforward style occasionally verges on the merely uninteresting. And it's not always clear what these characters are doing as they work the case. Who is this Kollberg and why does he rage so much and make himself so unpleasant? It's useful to remember, again, that this is classic police procedural storytelling written in the '60s by a poet and a journalist who are involved with one another. While it doesn't really explain the attraction to police and crime fiction in the first place, it does explain much else: the precision of the language (even in translation), the continuing reliance on irreducible facts, and the way sex, love, and social pressures complicate and drive crime—indeed most human behavior. In the larger series, with The Fire Engine That Disappeared, an increasingly critical eye is turned on police bureaucracy and politics even as '60s turmoil seems to increase exponentially with each passing year. With its episodic focus on crime and law enforcement in Stockholm, The Story of Crime will turn out to be even more the story of an era.

In case it's not at the library.