Kinks, “Lola” (1970)

[listen up!]

EDM artist Moby has earned a reputation in recent years for putting his foot in his mouth—just ask Natalie Portman. The latest came earlier this year when he named this song in an interview with the Guardian, responding to a question about music he can no longer listen to, calling it “gross,” “transphobic,” and “unevolved.” Predictably enough, Kinks main guitar man and occasional songwriter Dave Davies fired back, citing trans entertainer Jayne County’s endorsement of the top 10 hit song’s influence on her. Fair enough, but for context you only have to turn to David Reuben’s bestselling Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (* But Were Afraid to Ask), a middlebrow Q&A sex manual published the year before in 1969 which was tremendously popular—later a Woody Allen movie. Trans issues were so far beyond the horizon at the time that Reuben is basically silent on anything related to gender identity, reducing transsexuality to the rather different transvestism, or cross-dressing, which he argued was practiced mainly by married heterosexual men with families (see the Woody Allen movie for the idea, a strange one). That’s the world the Kinks, of all people, were stepping into on a concept album from 1970. Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One was intended among other things as the band’s return to their hard-rocking bona fides, after several years of turning out albums with twee pop masterpieces (and that, of course, after initially busting down the walls of rock ‘n’ roll and making the world safe for rock with “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of the Night,” “Tired of Waiting for You,” etc., etc.).

I can see it both ways on “Lola” now: it was a thrilling rock song at the time and that side of it holds up well. It’s a Ray Davies song—the guy can write them. But the nuance of the lyrical thrust, such as it is, was basically over my 15-year-old head. They seemed to be playing the scenario for laughs, as a farce, and that’s how I took it, though somewhat uneasily. I understood it was trucking in outrageous taboo sexual themes but I took that more as pose. It feels sleazy, I think that’s the main thing Moby is complaining about, where nowadays respect and dignity are what’s on the menu for the LGBT+ community. But the mysteries of sexuality often make respect and dignity kind of party poopers in the clinch, giving up sexual charge for social acceptance, and who can blame anyone for that? There’s still some sexual charge to “Lola,” but it definitely feels dated, on the wrong side of right behavior. The song now hits as less than liberatory in most ways, though I can believe it could sound that way in 1970 and echoes are still there. And it’s not a bad rocker at all, a worthy addition to the Kinks catalog and a stone classic by any metric. I just don’t put it on very often and it sounds strange in public settings. One last odd detail: I recall at the time that Coca-Cola was incensed by the use of their name in this song and took legal action. It was hastily patched over in the studio as “cherry cola.” The versions on my streaming service now, however, are all once again “Coca-Cola.” I wonder when that happened? P.S. I love the comic book “official music video” on youtube. Worth a look even if you are like Moby and can’t stand to hear the song anymore.

Wanda (1970)

USA, 102 minutes

Director/writer: Barbara Loden

Photography/editor: Nicholas T. Proferes

Cast: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins, Dorothy Shupenes, Peter Shupenes, Jerome Thier

Although director and writer Barbara Loden made two more short films in 1975, The Frontier Experience (25 minutes) and The Boy Who Liked Deer (18 minutes), Wanda was her only feature. She died in 1980 at the age of 48 having spent most of her career as a model or stage and occasional film actress. The filmmaker Elia Kazan was a kind of mentoring figure for her. She appeared in his Splendor in the Grass in 1961, won a Tony Award in 1964 for After the Fall (directed by Kazan), and married Kazan in 1967. Her bleak vision and semi-improvisational film style have earned her comparisons to John Cassavettes. Wanda got some attention at the time it was released, including an International Critics Award from the Venice Film Festival, but for the most part it has lingered in obscurity until more recently, when a resurgence of interest in women’s pictures gave it renewed life. Perhaps the most famous beneficiary of this trend was Chantal Akerman’s long domestic meditation, Jeanne Dielman, which won the most recent Sight & Sound poll and shot up from #85 to #12 in one year on the critical roundup at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Since 2006 Wanda, similarly, has risen from as low as #864 in that survey to its present position at #151.

Wanda is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, birthplace of Joe Biden and home of the US version of The Office. It is punishingly low-budget, opening on a desolate scene of a giant coal mining operation and a house that is absurdly there. The house belongs to Wanda’s sister and brother-in-law. She is crashing there but not particularly welcome. She has a date that day in divorce court, where she appears late and wearing rollers in her hair. Her husband, her two kids, and her husband’s new girlfriend are stuck waiting for her. “She doesn’t care about anything,” the husband tells the judge while they are waiting. “She’s a lousy wife. She’s always bumming around, drinking.” This remark, coming so early in the picture, set up an expectation for me that turns out not to be true at all.

“Don’t Look Now” (1970)

I was surprised to find this long story by Daphne du Maurier in The Weird, but that could be me more than Jeff & Ann VanderMeer, editors of the essential anthology. I still don’t know exactly what to think about du Maurier. I’ve never read Rebecca, but I read “The Birds” as a kid—it creeped me out so much I was subsequently afraid of the movie, which then scared me badly when I managed to see it a year or two later (against parental approval). As an adult, I read her strange and original time travel novel The House on the Strand from 1969, which is worth looking into. Perhaps because of Rebecca I think of her more as a romance writer—or, OK, maybe gothic. “Don’t Look Now” first appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal magazine, one of my favorite points about it. It has the smooth style of midcentury slick-page women’s magazine fiction too. There is a lot of disorienting cognitive dissonance with this one, at least for me. Nicolas Roeg, director of the impressive movie that came of this story, altered things a little. He made the husband an art restoration expert, whereas in the story he is only someone vaguely affluent on healing vacation with his wife. One confusing moment in the movie, a point I tended to miss, is much sharper here. It is actually the turning point of the story. This is when the husband sees his wife in a boat returning to Venice, when she had left for London earlier that day. She is with the mysterious elderly twins. The “weird” aspect here (I will conjecture, because I don’t always understand the VanderMeers’ critical genre distinctions) lies in the systematic way the couple is manipulated, not by the twins but by some force moving things around like pieces on a game board. It’s all more an elegant and refined type of horror—“restrained horror,” I sometimes call it. And the slick-page magazine tone can be hard to penetrate, with so much glossy surface. What is going on in this story? What are we supposed to make of the 30something couple who recently lost a child? Sympathy, obviously, reflexively. And what of the curious elderly twins, one of whom is blind and psychic? And the ending? It introduces a bizarre, unexpected element just at that point. Is it a cheat? Possibly, yes. But it works even so, as does the movie. Setting it in Venice is inspired and perfect—it works in a women’s magazine, it works as gothic, and it works as a Nicolas Roeg picture too.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Foundations of Fear, ed. David G. Hartwell
Listen to story online.

21. Demon Fuzz, Afreaka! (1970)

I did not catch up with the strange and wonderful Demon Fuzz and their only LP Afreaka! during the classic psychedelic period of 1966 to 1970. They came up for me instead in this century, during the short-lived (too short!) downloading era. But I knew what I had right away—jazz-rock with horns and a potent voodoo drone at the bottom, driving relentlessly. Details online about the band still seem scarce. The members moved to London in the ‘60s from otherwise mostly unspecified “Commonwealth countries,” which I take to be remnants of the UK empire. The band’s name has something to do with police brutality. At least one principal, Paddy Corea (saxes, flute, vibes, congas), is from “the Caribbean.” Indeed, they may all have been from the West Indies originally, but there’s little about the band that sounds like calypso, ska, or reggae. Instead, their self-declared primary influences, from a sort of crossroads trip the band took, come from Morocco. I can also hear strains of an obscure British jazz-rock band I did know circa 1971, named If—that’s mostly in the horn arrangements and the way they are fitted against a rock band. “Another Country” is typical of what Demon Fuzz is selling. It’s over eight minutes long and starts with a bit of horn-driven throat clearing and some verse-chorus sing-songy pastiche (Smokey Adams gets the vocals credit). At about 2:20, it settles into its methodical monster groove of choice. The tempo slows, bassist Sleepy Jack Joseph plays a simple hypnotic figure. Ray Rhoden plays an uninterrupted chord on the organ, quiet but forceful. Corea takes out his sax and cobbles up a solo—it’s jazz, but the droning bottom carries the mood, somber, exalted, alluring, menacing, beatific. On the album opener “Past, Present, and Future” (9:56) they get down to business even more quickly. And they carry on similarly all over—“Hymn to Mother Earth,” “Mercy (Variation No. 1),” “Fuzz Oriental Blues.” Generally the longer songs are the better songs, and you can skip the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins cover. I wouldn’t say they understand the song. Afreaka! is a bit up and down perhaps, dated or conventional in certain ways (their management also handled Mungo Jerry, if that tells us anything). But at its highest points it’s nearly as high as anyone can get.

“The Asian Shore” (1970)

With short stories generally, and with horror stories specifically, it can sometimes seem like a long time between good ones. This long story by Thomas M. Disch is a good one. It appears in The Dark Descent, where editor David G. Hartwell argues for it as horror versus science fiction—it was published originally in a science fiction magazine. Yes, correct. I don’t see how this could remotely be considered SF, but it is a great story of dread and perhaps the best doppelganger story I’ve seen yet. A man whose marriage is ending moves to a remote part of Turkey, at a threshold across a river from the Asian shore. He is there ostensibly to study architecture, but he doesn’t seem to be studying very hard though he is obviously erudite and knowledgeable. He notices a woman following him around when he’s out. She comes to his door in the evenings, knocking on it, tapping the windows, calling the name Yavuz. He often sees her around the city and tries to avoid her. He also sees a young boy in many places, sometimes with the woman. He takes pictures when he is out, he’s there to study architecture, remember, but when he has them developed he is given photos he did not take. The woman and the boy are in them. It appears our academic is somehow being slowly swallowed into another life. It is happening beyond his control, and though he is bewildered he seems to accept it, even to embrace it. The story is well-told, beautiful and mysterious, taking its time but never less than interesting. On the internet I found people articulating theories of science fiction for it—fair enough, focusing on clues about various arbitrary constraints. But I think it is more effectively taken as an unexplainable doppelganger tale, which is mostly a precinct of horror as Hartwell argues. It’s also the best part of the story for me, the sense that our man is somehow being absorbed by his doppelganger. My complaint about many of this type of story—e.g., Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson”—is I don’t entirely understand where the anxieties come from. Someone looks like you or has your name—what of it? Do you know how many Jeff Pikes there are out there? Perhaps my imagination has been stunted in this realm. I don’t particularly feel it. What may be working best for me in this story is the isolated and extremely foreign setting, which Disch leans into hard. Our guy is comfortable with other languages, but not Turkish—he explains why with technical linguistic terms. He had me at Turkish. Already I could feel the isolation and alienation. I have never been anywhere where English is not spoken, partly for fear of being unable to communicate, a key aspect of this story. The appearances and reappearances of the woman and the boy work here. Again, this story is really told well, building to its climax with great skill.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Story not available online.

Deliverance (1970)

Poet and novelist James Dickey’s first novel was much better than I expected—and from its reputation I expected it to be pretty good. It is first and foremost a great story of outdoor adventure. It is full of description, but its thriller-like plot keeps it clipping along. The first-person narrator Ed Gentry is a middle-aged guy who runs a small ad agency in Atlanta with a partner. His best friend is Lewis, a back-to-nature guy in the survivalist mode. Lewis develops skills like bow-and-arrow hunting. It is his idea to take a weekend canoe trip with Ed and two others down an isolated stretch of river thick with rapids, falls, and danger. One of Dickey’s themes—which seems positively prescient now—is the contrast between urban and rural lives and lifestyles. Both are represented here and neither comes off well. The city dudes are shallow users, crass usurpers of culture and intruders in the wilderness, with their slick fast-talking ways. But the backwoods characters are worse, ignorant, suspicious, and prone to brutality of a notably bizarre type that plays to big-city judgments. You know what I’m talking about, maybe like me exposed to this story originally in the film version by director John Boorman (from Dickey’s screenplay)—the rape of one of the city dudes by a backwoodsman. He’s perfectly anonymous, a monster out of our interbreeding fantasies of them, only perhaps based in part on reality. It’s pretty strong stuff in the movie—I basically watched the rest of it in a semi-traumatized daze. It’s not the punch in the face in the book that it was in the movie, but I’m not sure whether that’s because it’s handled differently or because I was braced for it. Again, what impresses me most about this novel is the way it moves through nature and uses it. Scenes in the gorge of the river are insanely vivid. It may be sort of corny to say you feel like you are there, but you feel like you are there. Deliverance feels like a missing link between Faulkner’s “The Bear” and Cormac McCarthy. It’s full of the blood and gore that appeals to contemporary sensibilities but it’s all in the service of these various meditations on so-called civilized humanity. I should note women are here barely at all, which is good considering they get a kind of distasteful, leering Playboy treatment when they are. Like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, Deliverance is best when it’s on the river.

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

If Walls Could Talk (1970)

Someone somewhere praised this album by Little Milton (his fourth) so highly and so ardently, with words to the effect it saved their life or some such, that I didn’t hesitate to add it to my get-to list, assuming it was some blues masterpiece from the ‘60s/’70s period and I would learn more about its claim to fame when I got to it. But now that I’m here the album seems to be remarkably obscure and I have no idea who wrote that piece. If Walls Could Talk does not yet rate its own Wikipedia article, and when I turned to Discogs I found out not even a lot of the session players are known. The cover design varies across releases, though generally based on the same few images. On at least one of those covers Gene Barge gets high-profile credit for “orchestra arranged and conducted by.” To me, “orchestra” means strings, which I don’t hear, so I’m assuming Barge did the horn charts and directed these mostly unnamed session players. Even the track sequencing at Napster is scrambled from the vinyl version shown at Discogs. Whatever is going on here, whoever is responsible beyond singer and guitar-player Little Milton, it is good stuff—really good. The band assembled is on the sunny side of perfect, both for Little Milton and for the material. Barge’s work pulls it all together seamlessly. Little Milton is a great guitar player, fitting in neatly with the horns and cutting loose with tidy rave-ups and solos. One of the few sidemen named is Donny Hathaway, who sits in on “Let’s Get Together,” an ode and plea to an ex written by Morris Dollison that is at once pathetic, touching, and creepy. “Blues Get Off My Shoulder,” a Bobby Parker song and another high point, is bruised and moody and so good. The title song by Bobby Miller is a pretty good choogle, with some nice organ lines from Barge’s anonymous player. “Kansas City” has become an R&B standard, here rendered proficiently with an Otis Redding gloss. I’m no expert on the blues but I can see where Little Milton may be accounted second-tier—arguably, Bobby Bland or Redding is the better singer in this soul-tinged style and Little Milton is only one of many contemporary blues guitarists. On the other hand, this is another album that keeps sounding better the more I play it. If I stick with it long enough it might save my life. In short, recommended.

Band of Gypsys (1970)

The fourth and last album from Jimi Hendrix while he was alive is also the first and only without the Experience. Hendrix had been criticized for using the white Brits as his backing band on the studio albums—bass player Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell—and more generally for a lack of political relevance, a charge that could be common at the time. So he turned to bass player Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles. Miles is on parts of Electric Ladyland and Cox, an Army buddy, played with Hendrix at Woodstock. The Band of Gypsys tracks were recorded live at the Fillmore East on January 1, 1970. The album got a lot of mixed reviews, both in the press and by way of word of mouth in my high school circles. I never knew anyone who owned it and loved it enough to play it for me with regularity, so it took me some time. But I have to say I wonder what was the holdup. It sounded great when I finally really got to it recently. It features two long, ambling jams, “Who Knows” and “Machine Gun,” which did take some time to cohere but now are more unfolding every time I play them. Both are powered most by Hendrix’s guitar, but “Who Knows” has an insane earworm riff that the band rolls into like thunder, at the same time leaving large open spaces suitable for utterly expressive guitar and passages of scat singing from Miles. The Vietnam-focused “Machine Gun” is the obvious play for political relevance here, although really Hendrix had answered those questions by then at Woodstock with his inspired “Star-Spangled Banner” performance. I see many consider “Machine Gun” a rival to it, at least in terms of instrumental sound effects for helicopters, bombs, firefights, etc. Hey, sure, I can get with that—the Woodstock “Star-Spangled Banner” is the most original and trenchant, but my problem there is that I just don’t like the song, which means I don’t listen to Hendrix’s brilliant version often. The “bombs bursting in air” and such tend to work more like novelty stuff for me—clever before it is expressive. “Machine Gun” has some of that, but it’s a better song, and then some of this guitar play is nothing less than sublime. The more I listen to Band of Gypsys the more I wonder how any criticisms could outweigh the high points here, which are frequent and frequently very high. Sometimes it’s a matter of a single sustained note. The guy could do it. I can see part of the problem might have been it’s a bit of a one-sided album. The long songs on side 1 of the LP—9:39 and 12:41, respectively—somehow make the four 5-minute songs on side 2 less appealing. I assure you they have their merits, but in LP style I likely would stick to the first side myself too. The live aspect of the recording is nicely underplayed, with minimal crowd noise and vamping. It’s just a gifted band jamming it out on stage, feeling their way through, knowing it was being recorded, of course, but still loose and capable of surprises everywhere. Within the year, as Sonic Youth would later say of other things in a different context, confusion is next. Over the decades that followed (and still, I believe) the recorded archives are being mined diligently. I like Band of Gypsys, like I like the three before it, because I like that Jimi Hendrix was the one basically overseeing them.

A Slipping-Down Life (1970)

In some ways it's hard to recognize Anne Tyler's third novel as an Anne Tyler novel. It's not set in Baltimore, perhaps most notably, but North Carolina, where Tyler went to college. There's a Black maid here who comes awfully close to a certain sassy stereotype, which surprised me coming from Tyler. This short novel is just weird in lots of ways, though Tyler's preoccupations with love among the repressed and/or introspective are at least discernible. But her understanding of rock music verges on bizarre, for one thing, although it also unexpectedly delivers some of the vibe of the Carpenters' "Superstar," which came out in 1971. Our semi-demi-hero, Bertram "Drumstrings" Casey, has a kind of loud troubadour act he puts on at the roadhouse. What sets him apart is his spontaneous "speaking out," which sounds closer to Elvis Presley interludes than between-songs banter or political screeds. He's a lost soul and spoiler not really found. Meanwhile, the real hero is Evie Decker, who is overweight and an outcast in her school social system. She has one friend, also overweight—it's Tyler's detail but didn't strike me as fat-shaming or unlikely. They are intrigued by Drum Casey and go out to see him. For reasons unclear—this is where the novel starts being unlikely—Evie uses nail scissors to carve the name "Casey" in her forehead backwards (as she's using a mirror in the bathroom at the club). This is not treated with any of the perfectly appropriate alarm it would be given nowadays. It bears some of the extremity of the fan / celebrity dynamic as we know it now, but it's also treated as vaguely comical, with the backwards carving. It's too much. Even 50 years later we haven't seen much face work like this, have we? Maybe a couple upside-down crosses and Post Malone's face tattoos? I must be forgetting something. Anyway, thus begins the strange and often strangely unnatural and ultimately pointless relationship of Drum Casey, 19, and Evie Decker, 17. Tyler was 27 or so when she wrote it and already it's her third novel, but it's hard to see what she was aiming for. In many ways it feels almost willfully misunderstanding of rock music or anything about it in 1970—much, indeed, like the Carpenters song, which is nonetheless somehow more haunting than this often strained little novel.

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

The Aesthetics of Rock (1970)

Richard Meltzer's notorious first book, a stone classic in the rock critic canon, is not particularly easy to read, marked as it is by a semi-lampoon of academic writing (division of philosophy, no less), which is actually often quite funny. But the book eschews most typical gestures of textual relief such as organization into sections and chapters. It's one long blurt. It could have been typed on the blank side of the manuscript roll Jack Kerouac used for On the Road. It's slippery and maddening even as it verges on exhilarating. It grinds against immovable objects and then it darts down rabbit holes that are baffling, such as a discussion of "tongue," a quality of music Meltzer identifies, knows for a certainty when he hears it, yet struggles to define with any clarity. He admits it is hard for people to recognize tongue even when he sits with them as songs play and he points it out. Getting it across this way was never going to be easy. Mostly The Aesthetics of Rock reads to me like someone who has read a lot and now his head is exploding, which fits what we know of how it was put together, written when he was in college as an undergraduate and graduate student (in philosophy), and published after he left school. You could probably form a reading group and spend months and years going through it page by page. That has probably already happened, in fact, and those groups may not even have reached the Epilogue yet (never mind, spoiler alert, it's just a bunch of transcribed notebook writing, mostly about the Byrds). I was struck by a similarity between Aesthetics and Nik Cohn's Rock From the Beginning, at least in terms of their age because they are very different books. But both teeter on irrelevance now simply by being so far behind. In neither book have the Beatles even broken up yet, let alone Malcolm McLaren dubbed John Lydon Rotten. Meltzer is deeply conversant with '60s pop music development, and can discuss the Trashmen, Lou Christie, and the 4 Seasons with as much authority as he can't, say, Iggy Pop, because Iggy Pop is still in this book's unknown future. In many ways Meltzer hangs it all on "Surfin' Bird," which admittedly is a pretty good place on which to hang it all. Greil Marcus points out in a late-'80s introduction to the Da Capo edition that Meltzer is a certified Beatles maniac. It's a little surprising because, from the attitude Meltzer evinces, his heart would appear to lie more in the precincts of the Stones and proto-punk revanchists. Here again, though, all informed discussion ends at approximately Magical Mystery Tour and maybe a few glancing mentions of songs from the White Album. No Abbey Road. No Let It Be. No Macca. Strange, and on some level plainly a deliberate choice as the book was not published until 1970 and the Da Capo edition followed after almost 20 years. I suppose everyone with rock critic ambitions should look at it. I think this was my third try and finally a winner. Take it as art. Let me know if you figure out the tongue thing.

In case it's not at the library.

Stage Fright (1970)

As an oldest brother myself, I might have missed out on more of the older-brother influence in music than many, though I did have friends with older brothers who made their impacts (as I doubtless made my own ... certainly I tried!). Stage Fright, the Band's third album and widely considered a drop-off from the first two, is one example. The Band has to stand as classic older-brother music. The critics in Rolling Stone went apeshit for them, which sounded to me, after I heard them, like merely falling for the pretensions of a rock band that called itself "the Band" or, more likely, falling for the broader legend of Bob Dylan even after 1966. As it happens, I seem to be mostly immune to the collaboration—I certainly don't consider the 1974 double-live Before the Flood even that good, for example, let alone one of the greatest live albums ever made, and Greil Marcus's chapter about them in Mystery Train seems more embarrassingly insistent to me now than insightful. Dare I say, re: the Band, OK boomer? No, I better not. I'm aware Stage Fright is the wrong Band album to like best, but it's the one I heard the most at the time, with my friend's older brother often blasting the second side from behind his closed door (alternating with either side or all of Bridge Over Troubled Water). It probably makes more sense when you count in that I don't really like the Band that much. Stage Fright came out just before I started 10th grade and high school and I had a kind of gut response to the title song, buried toward the back of side 2 but played on hippie radio, as it spoke to my feelings in that moment about what lay ahead. See the man, gathering up all his might. First verse: "Deep in the heart of a suffering kid / Who suffered so much for what he did / They gave this plowboy his fortune and fame / Since that day he ain't been the same." Those first two lines speak directly to my life experience and the next two directly to my problem with the Band. Like, plowboy? Who's a plowboy? It's possible Robbie Robertson, who wrote the song, may have met plowboys but I don't think he ever was one. It reads to me as more of the Band's bent toward co-opting older American country and folk music, admittedly often in surprisingly resonant ways. Neil Young, another Canadian (four of the five members of the Band are Canadian), can also be really good at it. On songs like "Stage Fright" or "Katie's Been Gone" on The Basement Tapes the Band are capable of big warm emotional moments. I understand their first two albums are better as American folk music in many ways, and I've come to appreciate them in moderation. But Stage Fright is what I like to play—with highlights beyond the title song that include "The Shape I'm In," "Time to Kill," and that lovely organ bit on "All La Glory"—for those unusual occasions when I'm in the mood for the Band. Oh hell, these days I can just put together a playlist. D'oh!

Murder at the Savoy (1970)

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö conceived the Martin Beck series of police procedurals as a single 10-part piece called The Story of Crime. The individual novels are short but that still adds up to over 2,000 pages—ambitious. The Story of Crime is not so much about the crime plots or the characters we come to know, but more an analysis or even critique of a system of justice in what was then (and remains) Sweden's fragile democratic welfare state. Here at the halfway point of the series we know many of the characters pretty well, especially the police detective Beck, who has left his wife with this one. But the personal stories remain decidedly to the side in this series. The primary focus is always on the case at hand, which happens to be emblematic of various social ills, at the rate of approximately one per book. This time it's the murder or assassination of a wealthy and dynamic businessman, and the issue, in today's parlance, is income inequality. The series was reissued about 10 years ago with all-new introductions by various writers. This one is by a Swedish crime novelist of the next generation, Arne Dahl (aka Jan Arnold, born 1963), and I was particularly interested in his take. He feels Murder at the Savoy is a little too leftist and classifies the crime as a "1968" type. It's true that all the rich people here are portrayed as shallow reprobates, you might even say Donald Trump types, scamming everyone in sight and oblivious to everything else. In fact, that's baked into the resolution of the crime itself. Dahl wrote his introduction in 2009, before income inequality became topical again with the coming of the Occupy movement, which had worldwide impacts in terms of understanding the issue. I wonder if he feels differently now. Murder at the Savoy did not seem at all unreasonable to me. Certainly the way things go for poor people here fits into everything I've ever heard or seen for myself. People get trapped economically in all kinds of ways: unemployment due to factory closures, rents uncontrollable and destabilizing, real estate out of reach, alcoholism, domestic violence, despair. The only lever they have is the state, however unwieldy and incompetent. At the same time, and best of all (or most satisfying), Murder at the Savoy is also a great procedural, showing how a case is "solved" with systematic approaches doggedly applied. There's also a nice detail here that one of the suspects is reading an Ed McBain novel (and a specific one—'Til Death). Sjöwall and Wahlöö don't often indulge such impulses, except for McBain here and there. Instead, they were trying to work out a really big picture about society and right and wrong.

In case it's not at the library.

Led Zeppelin III (1970)

As it happens, Led Zeppelin III is the only album by the band I never did own, which makes it slightly exotic (a friend had a copy so I had played with the turn-a-wheel cover design). Of course I know the one hit it spawned, the gloriously ridiculous "Immigrant Song," which peaked at #16 late in 1970. In case you were wondering, the subject of the song is not the immigrants that Donald Trump's ponyboys and ponygirls whinny about. No, they're white. They come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow. Among other things, more than 30 years later, "Immigrant Song" was the lunch theme when I worked with a notably rambunctious office crew. We piled into the car and snapped it on. Ahh-ahh AHHHHH-HHH ah! The Clash's "Know Your Rights" was the other mainstay staple of those lunch trips. Heads wildly bobbing to be sure. We were way too old for such behavior, but we were temps of a certain age. More recently, in an impossibly gorgeous song by Craig Finn, "God in Chicago," the soundtrack for a road trip is given as Prince's 1999 and Led Zeppelin III (on a wobbly tape deck). That also sounds about right. So, giving III some badly needed attention nigh 50 years on, I find it's a great companion, warm, rolling, easygoing, like a boat rocking down the slow river. In 1970, Rolling Stone magazine still did not like Led Zeppelin. This is back when things like "selling out" mattered like poison for RS, so they could and did shrug at leviathan sales. It's a little different now. This isn't your father's Perry Como Republican Party. Only Bridge Over Troubled Waters sold better than Led Zeppelin II in 1970. Lester Bangs got the honors for the takedown this time. He wanted to like them, yes, really wanted to like them, and even did like one song on III very much ("That's the Way"). But more generally he found the band "doesn't challenge anybody's intelligence or sensibilities." I would suggest that, in 1968 and even still, "Dazed and Confused," for one, poses challenges to intelligence and sensibilities. In fairness to Bangs and other contemporary naysayers, another big player at that moment (though sales did not match Zepp's) was Grand Funk Railroad with a I-II-III of On Time, Grand Funk, and Closer to Home. If you squint, it might look like all the same thing.

And I do think this is the weakest of Led Zeppelin's first three albums. It's not the one for newcomers—just slightly lazy, it presumes on previous good will to some extent. "Immigrant Song," for all its charm, does not match "Whole Lotta Love" or the aforementioned "Dazed and Confused" (or "Stairway to Heaven" or "Kashmir") as an album tent pole. But Led Zeppelin III is also a place where Robert Plant takes his shtick up another notch as a tireless unself-conscous imp and Jimmy Page gets to show off guitar chops maybe even more than purloined hooks. I just go by the numbers and tend to gravitate most to "Since I've Been Loving You" because it's the longest, at 7:25, an all-night slow burner for sure. Page's playing is lyrical in the showcase portion (the greatest guitar solo of all time, some on the internet will tell you), and then, finally, it wilts into a tender weeping number. And Bangs is right about "That's the Way"—also quite beautiful. Yes, it's a certain apotheosis of cock rock, but as an aural object it does not necessarily have to be toxic (aside from the personalities of band members, if they can be separated, which maybe they can't, I know). See again the Craig Finn song. And think of the Vikings. "Always sweep with, with threshing oar / Our only goal will be the western shore." Ahh-ahh AHHHHH-HHH ah!

Mind Blower (1970)

Are people still attempting to make something culturally significant out of selected instances of pornography? It looked like such a natural for a minute there, notably those movies by Gerard Damiano (Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones). Marco Vassi, who took the first name of his pseudonym from Polo, the explorer, hails from Damiano's era (he died in 1989 from complications of AIDS). His fans included Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Kate Millett, and Gore Vidal. As literature, Mind Blower is not bad—I found out about it in a list by rock critic Robert Christgau of his 10 favorite genre novels. Vassi acknowledges both John Fowles and J. Krishnamurti as formative influences, which I guess would be good influences for literary porn. As porn—well, maybe. Different strokes for different folks, you know. I've been mostly immune to written word porn myself for a long time, so it's hard to tell. The story in Mind Blower is about a place called the Institute for Sexual Metatheater (ISM) where there is a lot of fucking going on. The narrator shows up at ISM, has oodles of sex, and learns interesting life lessons under the guidance of the ISM director, one Dr. Tocco. The novel works hard on the edges of taboo and sometimes, plainly, crosses over. It has gay sex early and often, which comports with the popular notions of bisexuality of its time. It has sex with children. Sex with children! That scene would be excised today surely—as a taboo, it has only become more dangerous, and Mind Blower piles on further with odd constraints around its sex with children, which only make it all more strange and disgusting. It taints the novel. More than anything this book is a historical curiosity, an artifact of the 1960s, enabling us to gauge how much things have changed since then. For the most part I think it has its politics right, including gender and gay politics, and race too, but it still feels dated. Not that we won't get back to its open and experimental sexual ideas someday. We're just not there now and probably won't be for some time, and it won't look like this. I admit I got tired of the sex scenes here even though it's a short book with a lot of variety. That's probably the main problem with porn generally. From intoxicatingly fascinating to can't turn away fast enough within a remarkably short span, and extremely difficult to gauge where the line of boredom will come. Sad! Vassi has written several more books, including a memoir called The Stoned Apocalypse, but I'm probably stopping here.

In case it's not at the library.

Jigsaw (1970)

I have the impression that Ed McBain (Evan Hunter, which was not his real name either) was one of those folks who takes pride in being "politically incorrect"—that is, offensive to certain sensitivities without really caring. I say this after reading a lot of his stuff and also because I have an uneasy feeling about the evolution of this entry in the 87th Precinct series. It's pure speculation, and you'll have to bear with me a bit. Jigsaw is one of the shortest novels in the series—I've got it at 175 pages—and focused on just one case. Six years earlier, a bank was knocked off to the tune of $750,000. The robbers were chased down and killed, but the money was never recovered. Now a photograph of where the money was hidden is surfacing. That photo was cut into eight pieces that are in the shape of jigsaw puzzle pieces (which had to be hell with the scissors, note). Those pieces were distributed to eight various parties who are now starting to turn up dead. A handy insurance investigator arrives to fill the detectives in on the details and even take a turn as a suspect. But this case, as happens now and then in the series, is weak mystery writing. It's less the point here, and feels like it's just going through the motions. What's really different is that the main detective is Arthur Brown, though Steve Carella is his partner on the case (Meyer Meyer and Cotton Hawes get a few lines too, working the case). Arthur Brown is McBain's superbad African American detective who rarely gets more attention than scenery, let alone the main role, which usually falls to Carella. In fact, this is actually Brown's only starring role in the whole series. And it is indeed a racialized narrative. My kindle version bizarrely has a copyright date of 1963, but this story is no earlier than 1967, and all other sources agree on 1970, which feels about right for the raised consciousness on display here. Brown is big like a boulder so people have to respect him. They constantly test him to see how far they can go, calling him a spade and such. A white woman throws herself at him for sex. Brown even gets to do a scene where he plays a corrupt Northern hustler to another white woman, this one from the South, who is so frightened she tells him everything he wants to know in minutes. All right, OK, different times, heart in the right place, etc. But then I started thinking about the tedium of this case, and I'm talking about tedium in a mere 175 pages, with this endless search for photo fragments. And then I started thinking about the title. Could it be? Yes, I'm afraid I think so. Here's how I've got it doped out. First came the idea to feature Arthur Brown in one of these novels. For the times, that would make it "relevant." Then came the title—McBain didn't know yet what he was going to do with it, but his daring politically incorrect instincts could not let go of it. Then he packed foofaraw around it: a photograph, a photograph cut into pieces in a ridiculous way, a photograph whose image is the only way to solve the crime. No way in hell has anything like this ever happened, not even in comic books.

In case it's not at the library.

The Conformist (1970)

Il conformista, Italy / France / West Germany, 111 minutes
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Writers: Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci
Photography: Vittorio Storaro
Music: Georges Delerue
Editor: Franco Arcalli
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Enzo Tarascio, Dominique Sanda, Pierre Clementi

I know there's no time like the present for meditations on the sources of 20th-century fascism, what it looked like and how it behaved, yet for the most part The Conformist usually leaves me cold. Or maybe that's the director and screenwriter, Bernardo Bertolucci, who sometimes seems a bit of a Continental Ridley Scott, all outsize reputation and promise, rarely fulfilled, though many films are released. There is so much flash and sizzle to the way The Conformist is constructed that it's easy to be dazzled by its style and lose track of the story and its themes. That might be part of its point, all those glossy seductions of fascism, but the picture is also mired in a certain grainy technicolor look and restless camera and editing of the late '60s and early '70s, which itself seems a little dated and artificial. I can't always follow it, or don't want to. Maybe I just haven't been in the mood—Midnight Cowboy or Once Upon a Time in the West also have many of these trappings and I think they're fine.

In 1938, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a young man of dissolute middle-class background (father institutionalized for insanity, mother a degraded morphine addict) attempting to make a government career under the Mussolini regime in Italy. His psychology is often transparent. He is mild-mannered and dresses well. He is engaged to a silly woman of wealth, Guilia (Stefania Sandrelli), and has the kind of empty friendships and connections that lead to success. By that time in history, for some context, Mussolini had been in power over 15 years, Italy and Germany had formed a powerful strategic alliance, and, with developments in Russia, it was possible to make the argument that democracy was an idea that belonged to the past (again, shades of our own time). Clerici plans to travel to Paris for his honeymoon. His superiors pull him aside and have a mission for him on his trip: look up and reconnect with an old professor of his who fled fascist Italy many years before. This assignment is accompanied with a sidearm (with silencer) and a deeply cynical handler, Manganiello (Gastone Moschin), which clarifies its real nature.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1970)

I think I'd be a little surprised to hear anyone name this as a favorite Philip K. Dick novel, but it's serviceable enough, with lots of familiar Dick touches: drugs, anomie, near-future totalitarianism, and reality marked as much as anything by its elasticity and fungibility. It involves a celebrity performer, a singer and TV talk-show host who inevitably put me in mind of Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin. He is fabulously wealthy and much beloved, not to mention "a six," which apparently makes him a type of superhuman. Merv Griffin as the model of a superman is likely a stretch to all (save Griffin and the fictional Cosmo Kramer) but never mind. After suffering an attack by an ex-girlfriend, our hero Jason Taverner comes to in a world that has never heard of him. What's more, he has no personal identification documents, and that makes him illegal. Getting to the bottom of this vexing mix-up provides the narrative arc. Not surprisingly, the resolution involves parallel realities accessed via experimental new drugs. A lot of the Dick novels I've been reading and writing about likely make good starting points, I think, and this is probably another. It's weird, it's mind-bending enough, and it's delivered in a deadpan American idiom that is at once homey and dissociative. He's reliable for that. He's best on drugs and mental illness, somehow getting inside the head of strange ways of perceiving, and thinking, and then, even more remarkably, smuggling that sense into the reader's head. "Trippy" really covers it. He's less good on sex—on the one hand that's good, because he's not inclined to pro forma steamy sex scenes that have cluttered up so many things the past 50 years or so. On the other hand, he's bad on sex. There's a notably repugnant incest thread in this one, made worse by strains of BDSM stereotyping, with "leather" and "bondage" and stuff. I found it off-putting, but I was also listening to Frank Zappa albums at the time for another project, a bad combination. Dick is not good on relationships either. But he's very good on loneliness, dysthymia, alienation, and the yearning to escape. He thinks of places to escape that no one before him ever had, and sometimes it seems now that's all we can think of. Read enough of his stuff and you start to understand what a stamp he made.

In case it's not at the library.

Edwin Starr, "War" (1970)

July 25, 1970, #1 (3 wks.)
(listen)

Easy enough to make fun of this now as a type of buffoonery, the Motown label making its way in an era of mandatory relevance. My own favorite joke comes from Seinfeld, when Jerry tricked Elaine into thinking that Leo Tolstoy originally wanted War, What Is it Good For? to be the title for War and Peace. Setting aside the peacenik impulses of the time, and the times themselves for that matter, full of Vietnam, injustice, and frustration—there's no good in going there at this point, except to remind people that's the way it was. But I have to say I have often been impressed all over again by the titanic force of this little decaying time capsule. The song was written by Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield, and the production is full-on Whitfield Motown psychedelia. I have loved it in its time, later on oldies radio (to which I know I listened too much), and finally most recently for this little exercise. If "War" and Edwin Starr's too-close veering toward a cartoon Scooby Doo persona in the vocal can quickly stale, it never quite stops sounding fresh either. The attack positively clobbers, opening on the chorus big after the feint of a prolonged drum roll. And I mean BIG. It is immediately all over it. ALL. OVER. IT. Yes, arguably it settles too soon into the chug-a-chug of the main body of the song, and yes, the glories of the chorus wear thin from prolonged exposure. But this song always retains its power to please again. If you don't like it now, try it again in another six months. It's going to get you one of these times. Play loud.

Norman Greenbaum, "Spirit in the Sky" (1970)

March 7, 1970, #3
(listen)

If it's possible, I love this song now more than I did in 1970. Actually, it's quite possible, because I took it so much for granted back then. Notwithstanding, it was always mysterious. Who was Norman Greenbaum and why was he saying these things? I explained the religious bent to myself by assuming he was a Jesus freak, as we said, for which I forgave him (my more generous years). But it never stopped seeming strange sitting there in the middle of the radio, the impeccable rock 'n' roll instincts marshalled up against words about dying and a friend in Jesus and such, with handclaps, and all with no evident hint of worry about anything (and no irony either). Always, always irresistible and best played loud. With Wikipedia to help, we find out that songwriter and performer Norman Greenbaum, with connections to the Lovin' Spoonful and Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band (not to be confused with Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show), saw Porter Wagoner on TV and decided he wanted to write a gospel song, a thought experiment on his part about what went into one. Obviously he took liberties because you don't usually hear that kind of raw fuzz on a gospel recording, but that's exactly what makes it. It sounds so blasted powerful, vibrating and wrapping itself around your head and his voice with a sound as big as outer space. No wonder I took it for granted he'd had a vision. In a way, he did. We need more visions of that kind too, the kind which result in raw fuzz tone guitars. Also: needle drop in the YouTube video.

Fun House (1970)

(Previous "Complete Sessions" review here, sufficient preamble.)

I was vaguely aware of the Stooges in high school, but my general understanding at the time, from hippie contemporaries, was that they were very bad and scary music that only demented people would be interested in. Already the legends of Iggy suffering injuries in performance were circulating. Naturally I accepted the solemn word of mouth. So I did not actually catch up to the Stooges proper until many years later, in the late '70s, backtracking from an infatuation with Iggy Pop caught in the reflection of David Bowie. At first I thought The Stooges was the better album of the two (with Raw Power crowding both hard) because the sound seemed simpler and more direct and because the year song ("1969" vs. "1970") was so much stronger and anthemic. Come to find out how wrong I was about this assessment during a crucial period in the early '80s.