Network Science and the Effects of Music Preference on Functional Brain Connectivity: Listening to music that is liked or a favorite song affects functional connectivity in regions involved in selfreferential thought and memory encoding, such as the default mode network and the hippocampus. While perhaps everyone intuitively understands the mental experience or feeling when listening to his or her preferred music, whether it is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or Les Miserables, or when listening to their favorite rock song, we show here that this similarity of experience manifests in the brain by engaging the DMN. As the first study to apply network science methods to ‘theory of the mind’, these results provide a glimpse into the neural patterns underlying the emotion-cognitive states associated with listening to preferred and favorite music. Source: www.nature.com
Philip Norman admits in his biography of Paul McCartney that in his earlier biography of the Beatles called “Shout!”, he accepted the cheap stereotype of Paul as a pop trivialist, in comparison with his edgy partner John Lennon. Paul was happy to push the envelope but didn’t support John when he wanted to pose nude on an album cover or insisted that an eight minute sound collage be inserted into a Beatles album. Paul certainly didn’t support John’s heroin addiction. Now Philip Norman sees that Paul McCartney was not only a man of genius but also someone who has handled the madness of fame exceptionally well. Paul is depicted as a caring father and grandfather, a man who made a bad rebound marriage after losing his much loved wife Linda, but who has otherwise spent the past decades entertaining new generations of fans. As Norman shows, McCartney has worked so hard at seeming dismayingly normal that it is easy to miss the least ordinary thing about him: the magnitude of his melodic gift. In 1970, McCartney and the Eastmans launched a lawsuit to break up the Beatles partnership. That became the trigger for John Lennon’s toxic onslaughts against his former partner, feeding all the hostile stereotypes that Norman is now trying, decades later, to remedy.
Seen from the 21st century, the great rupture of early rock and roll looks more ideological than musical, more a matter of attitude and emotion. Every Night by Paul MacCartney sounds like a continuation from Everyday by Buddy Holly and Kiss Me Baby by The Beach Boys. Elvis was The King and all that, but Buddy Holly is more beloved among people who actually know a substantial amount about the history of rock. Holly, along with Chuck Berry, was a real pioneer, playing a chord and hammering the sixth note of that chord on and off in a regular, rhythmic pattern. In the opening pages of Peter Guralnick’s “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll”, Sam Phillips is equated with Walt Whitman, William Faulkner and Mark Twain. Phillips was not a very good businessman. Other independent labels, like Atlantic, managed to keep their artists and to thrive well into the 1960s. But Phillips got out of the business just as the pop-music revolution that he helped make happen was starting to cash out in a big way. Which would have been the destiny of Buddy Holly if he had walked by Sun Records? Using The Beach Boys' memorable song (and Paul McCartney's favorite song ever): God Only Knows.
By 1950, most people listening to local radio stations. And ninety-six per cent of homes in the United States had a radio. Before the 1940s, radio was dominated by national broadcast networks like CBS, NBC, and Mutual. As a consequence of an F.C.C. policy designed to break up this oligopoly, the licensing of local stations increased from around eight hundred in 1940 to more than two thousand in 1949. By 1940, there were close to half a million jukeboxes in the United States. This is why jukebox plays were charted in Billboard: they were market indicators. In an unsympathetic biography of Elvis Presley, published in 1981, Albert Goldman has Phillips referring to “the nigger sound”; Guralnick makes it clear that Sam Phillips didn’t talk or think that way. And Guralnick is confident that Phillips didn’t talk about the music recording in terms of getting rich, either.
Elvis Presley was a walk-in, showing up at the Memphis Recording Service in the summer of 1953, when he was eighteen, to make a record for his mother's birthday. He paid four dollars to record two songs, “My Happiness,” which had been a hit for several artists, including Ella Fitzgerald, and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” an old Ink Spots song. Whether Sam Phillips was in the booth that day or not later became a matter of acrimonious dispute, but someone wrote next to Presley’s name, “Good ballad singer. Hold.” A year later, Phillips invited Presley back to try out a ballad he’d discovered. The song didn’t seem to work, and Phillips had Presley run through all the material he knew. After three hours, Phillips thought of putting Presley together with a couple of country-and-Western musicians—Scotty Moore, an electric guitarist, and Bill Black, who played standup bass. After many takes, they had a record: an up-tempo cover of a bluegrass song called “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and, in July 1954, Elvis Presley’s first single came on the market. In Sun’s promotional campaign, Phillips emphasized the record’s “three-way” appeal: to pop, hillbilly, and rhythm-and-blues listeners. Elvis was a crossover artist. He had “a white voice, a Negro rhythm, and borrows in mood and emphasis from country styles,” a Memphis local paper explained. He finally made it onto the national country-and-Western chart in July, 1955, with “Baby Let’s Play House.” Two months later, Sam Phillips sold Presley’s contract to RCA Victor for thirty-five thousand dollars. Source: www.newyorker.com
Part of Buddy Holly's appeal was the impression he made of being an 'ordinary' fellow, not outlandish like Little Richard or Jerry Lee, or sexy like Elvis or Eddie Cochran. His big glasses and lankiness made him look sort of goofy, and yet he still managed to be cool! His music was deceptively simple (a lesson that Lennon & McCartney benefitted from). Indeed, his lyrics are heartfelt, honest and deep, with a twist of humor. He wrote about experiences and feelings that are common to us all, which is why his music has endured. With his black-framed glasses, sharp suits and tousled hair, Buddy Holly looked like any other earnest young man entering adulthood in the late 1950s. Yet Holly's approach to rock music was anything but conventional. An inspired, fluid, and nimble guitarist, Holly brought velocity to his rockabilly-inspired riffs. Holly's voice could also have a gritty edge (the ragers "Ready Teddy" and "Rave On"), although his gulping vocal delivery and rhythmic contortions made his songs unusual. Holly was a sympathetic and expressive singer: On Everyday a sparse song driven by clapping percussion and a twinkling celesta, he was wistful about the possibility of finding his perfect romantic match. Holly sang about important topics (love, lust and loss) and his tunes favored lyrics full of dramatic declarations. Modern Don Juan lamented miscommunication in romance; (You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care celebrates how opposites attract; Ting-A-Ling didn't shy away from expressing sexual desire; In That'll Be The Day he swears that he'll die from heartbreak if the girl he loves ever leaves him. Buddy Holly opened for Elvis Presley on 15 October 1955 at The Cotton Club, Lubbock, TX.
Holly's first label deal on 26 January 1956 with Decca Records was through his agent Eddie Crandall, who became his first agent after having heard him at the Haley concert. That contract fizzled out after a year and no chart hits. Still, Holly kept plugging away: On February 25, 1957, he recorded "That'll Be The Day," in Clovis, New Mexico, with producer and future manager Norman Petty. A veteran of the Nashville guitar scene, George Gruhn, said “There could be any number of reasons why Holly would have wanted to play a Stratocaster, including its visual aesthetic and chordal intonation.” The Stratocaster guitar featured Leo Fender’s revolutionary six-piece saddle, which allowed for precise intonation of each of the instrument’s strings. In 1958, while living in New York City, Holly did purchase a Magnatone amp for home use, but he typically gigged with Fender amplifiers that suited his Stratocaster and twangy music to a T.
Apparently Sonny Curtis phoned Maria Elena looking for Buddy on the night of the plane crash. Jerry Allison said he tried calling the Surf Ballroom to reach Buddy, but he'd already left. As with La Bamba (with features an aggressive, oversexed Ritchie Valens), The Buddy Holly Story is rife with errors (you can see mountains on the horizon in plain Lubbock!). At the roller rink scene, Buddy plays a Fender "Bronco" guitar. The Bronco was not manufactured by Fender until the early 1970s! Buddy and Maria Elena are shown at a 3D movie date in 1958. These type of movies were popular in 1953 and 1954. No mainstream 3D movies were produced in the '50s after 1954. Also, as the tour bus is towing past the auditorium before Buddy's final concert, the phone number on the side of the tow truck is made up entirely of digits. In 1959, the first two digits of all phone numbers consisted of letters. All-numeric phone numbers didn't begin until the mid-'60s!
For the purpose of story condensation, Cindy Lou (Buddy's blonde girlfriend played by Amy Johnston), seems an unlikely composite character of Buddy's conventional girlfriend Echo McGuire, Peggy Sue Gerron, plus the 'wild girl from Lubbock' who would be willing to have sex with Buddy in the car backseat. Despite a pretty crappy script, Gary Busey's spirited musical act sort of saves the film by communicating Holly's fierce eccentricity onstage. Norman Petty threatened legal action because he was afraid he would be shown as a shady crook, which would have been right. A film about Buddy Holly, and especially about an era fundamentally wrapped in jouissance and optimism, deserved a more poetic and careful approach. Robert Gittler who wrote the screenplay for The Buddy Holly Story—based loosely on The Buddy Holly Story biography by John Goldrosen—committed suicide two days before the theatrical release of the film (18 May 1978). Still, The Buddy Holly Story holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
As a Buddy Holly fan from Melbourne (Vinyl Man) wrote: "Closing my eyes and imagining myself at a sock-hop dancing with a pretty girl in a poodle skirt was always good for what ailed me. Did anyone leave behind as many classic hits in so short a space of time as Buddy? His music is evergreen and singular. That very idealized image I had of those days was immensely comforting. That brings to mind another thing about Buddy Holly: I can’t remember a time when his story didn’t speak to me in a very powerful way. I’m pretty sure he’s the only of my musical heroes about which I can say that. I could always imagine myself in the happy ending of a fifties movie with his music as the soundtrack, while at the same time I could make the unfortunate but effective analogy of his death to the end of America’s innocence."
In The Theory of Everything (2014) Steven Noble dressed Eddie Redmayne in a classic white-tie, black-tail morning suit that felt “slightly shabby and slightly ill-fitting, which is what I wanted,” Noble said. In his head, the suit had been passed down from Stephen Hawking’s father and grandfather. Since Stephen Hawking came from a bohemian family, he aimed to make Hawking, in his Buddy Holly glasses and ill-fitting hand-me-down, look a little more eccentric than the other Cambridge undergrads of the time. The drama chronicles Stephen and Jane’s great love story, in spite of the unthinkable physical obstacles they faced, and there was one scene in particular that Noble used to telegraph that great romance with clothing—the Cambridge May Ball, which was one of the couple’s first dates.
In the Surf Ballroom lobby, walking through the front, directly to the left, there is a vintage pay phone booth. A placard reads that this is the telephone where Buddy Holly made his final telephone call to his wife, Maria Elena. This call has become embossed in the Holly legend and took on steam in 1978 with the biopic “The Buddy Holly Story.” In the film, Holly has a tender scene where he calls his wife prior to taking the stage of the Surf Ballroom. Maria Elena herself has always maintained that this telephone call happened. In Goldrosen and Beecher’s “Remembering Buddy,” she went into some detail about this final talk with her husband. “He told me what an awful tour it had been. The buses were dirty and cold, and things just weren’t as had been promised. He said everybody on the tour was really disgusted. Then he said that the tour was behind schedule and he had to go on ahead of the others to the next stop to make arrangements for the show. He didn’t tell me that he was going to fly. I said, ‘Why should you go?’ And he said, ‘There’s nobody else to do it.’” An article from the February 4, 1959 copy of the New York Journal American seems to dispute this memory that Holly’s widow maintains. The article featured a black and white photo of Maria Elena captioned “But he didn't call.”
Recalling her memories to Goldrosen many years later about her last call with Buddy Holly, had Maria Elena simply mixed up her dates, mistaking the phone call from Green Bay as being from Clear Lake? Holly had wanted to fly out of Green Bay after the Riverside Ballroom show, so perhaps the content of that call happened just as Maria Elena described it but, after twenty years, her dates were just off by a day. Holly had just been left word via cablegrams from Norman Petty that he was illegally using the group name of the Crickets on this tour. That certainly would have put a damper on his mood when Holly arrived at the Surf Ballroom. Allen Bloom, the GAC man who helped put the Winter Dance Party together had passed away by the time I had started my research, but his son Randy was crucial in helping me direct me to an unused recorded interview. Perhaps through listening to Bloom's recall of memories of GAC’s rock and roll days, I can figure out what exactly went wrong with that Winter Dance Party tour. So, I play the tape and listen to Allen Bloom lay out a diagram for disaster. Allen Bloom: “In the fall of 1958, Buddy Holly split up with the Crickets and was alienated from his family because he married a Hispanic girl, Maria Elena. He was also splitting up with his manager, Norman Petty. Buddy came to us and we were about to sign Buddy up to manage him. Buddy had no money and so in January we arranged for a small tour. We had produced our first Biggest Show of Stars in February of 1956. This show was with Bill Haley and the Comets, Roy Hamilton, Chuck Berry... And everybody in New York, all the agency people, thought that we were going to lose all the money we didn’t have.” All of Buddy Holly’s tours since signing with Coral and Brunswick had been put on by GAC, so it was no surprise that Holly would approach them for a new tour as he was struggling to keep afloat.
According to the new book Buddy Holly: Legacies (2019) by Roddy Jordan, 90% of Maria Elena's recollections are true. In New York Holly had formed a new publishing company called "Maria Music." A new-found surprise is to learn that Aunt Provi Garcia (who erroneusly in the 1978 film is named Mrs. Santiago) did not have any family ties with Maria Elena. Also, just the opposite to the old-fashioned portrait of Maria Elena's Aunt, the real Provi Garcia was a divorced independent woman who had left his family behind in Puerto Rico. The reason why Provi took Maria Elena in her life was due to the friendship shared between the modest Santiago family and the middle-class Garcia clan. Another tremendous finding is that Maria Elena (and most likely Buddy Holly) was being investigated in 1958 by the FBI agents who opened a file on her. Allegedly, Buddy Holly was about to testify in the Payola scandal in the hopes that his songs would play on the radio again. Maria Elena had reportedly dated Jack Negron, a music industry insider who knew the intricacies of the Payola activities. The F.B.I. report is redacted but you can just see part of Jack Negron's name.
On the Apartment tapes, in the background chat, when Maria Elena brings up the name Jack Negron, Buddy seems uncomfortable. Buddy might have a double motive for this reaction, first the stress of giving testimony against the practices of Payola, and second he might be jealous of the past relationship of his wife with Negron. Maria Elena (whose real birth name was simply Elena Santiago), said she had ambitions to go to Broadway, but Buddy discouraged her. "You don't need to do that," she quoted him. When she was all dressed up and ready to go out, Elena Santiago was quite a stunning looking girl, and understandably Holly had motives for his jealousy. Although Buddy Holly was more progressive than most of his fellow rockers, his traditional side resurfaced sometimes. As Buddy's widow, Elena Holly has every right to proceed as she sees it fit. However, it is the way she has disconnected herself from both the Holley family and the Lubbock fans that some people do not like. One has to ask, why has she gone down this pathway? Some detractors have speculated Holly was thinking of filing for divorce. Due, perhaps to his neurotic jealousy? The fact is nobody has found any proof of a divorce petition or file, just hearsay. ―"In Flanders Field: Death and Rebirth of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson" (2017) by Ryan Vandergriff
Elisabeth Moss is essentially Courtney Love in the Rock’n’Roll Drama Her Smell (2019). The film goes beyond the expected trappings of your usual rock drama and successfully manages to capture the convulsive core of musical artistry while suggesting that it’s possible for the individual to break free of its corrosive bonds. In the grand tradition of Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There, and the latest iteration of A Star Is Born, Her Smell proves that using an already-existing musical act as a springboard often feels more authentic than a film about real-life musicians. Because there’s no expectation to faithfully retell an actual living or dead person’s story, Perry is free to draw from the rock ‘n’ roll tropes that are most narratively satisfying.
“Her Smell” is set in the indie rock scene of the 1990s. The story follows the decline, flame-out, rehab and return of a Courtney Love-like star played by Elisabeth Moss. The film has its strengths, especially in Moss’ high-octane performance, Sean Price Williams’ terrific cinematography and some very creative sound design. Perry is, at his best, a deft, trenchant artist who sees in modernity selfishness, sadness, treachery, the maladies of subcultures, a cornucopia of self-perpetuating afflictions, lies, and the liars that tell them. “I think that self-destructiveness can also mean self-reflection, it can mean poetic sensibility,” Courtney Love said in her Spin interview in 1998. “You were horrible but it never made me not love you,” Marielle Hell (Agyness Deyn) tells Becky when they reunite years later. Limited release beginning April 12th. Source: consequenceofsound.net
Romantic composers modified the formalism of classical music, and aimed at lyric expression and emotion. Many composers gave their works a nationalistic character by using folk songs as themes. Romantic composers include Franz Schubert of Austria; Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, and Frederic Chopin. Program music aimed to absorb and transmit the imagined subject matter in such a way that the resulting work transcends the subject matter it seeks to represent. Instrumental music thus became a vehicle for the utterance of thoughts which, although first hinted in words, may ultimately be beyond the power of words to fully express. Practically every composer of the Romantic era was, to some degree, writing program music. One reason it was easy for listeners to connect a poem or a story with a piece of Romantic music is that often the composer himself, perhaps unconsciously, was working from some such ideas. Writers on music projected their own conceptions of the expressive functions of music into the past, and read Romantic programs into the instrumental works not only of Beethoven, but also the likes of Mozart, Haydn, and Bach. The diffused scenic effects in the music of such composers as Mendelssohn and Schumann seem pale when compared to the feverish, and detailed drama that constitutes the story of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (1830).
Because his imagination always seemed to run in parallel literary and musical channels, Berlioz once subtitled his work "Episode in the Life of an Artist", and provided a program for it which was in effect a piece of Romantic autobiography. The foremost composer of program music after Berlioz was Franz Liszt, twelve of whose symphonic poems were written between 1848 and 1858. The name symphonic poem is significant: these pieces are symphonic, but Liszt did not call them symphonies, presumably because or their short length, and the fact that they are not divided up into movements. Instead, each is a continuous form with various sections, more or less varied in tempo and character, and a few themes that are varied, developed, or repeated within the design of the work. Les Preludes, the only one that is still played much today, is melodious and efficiently scored. However, its idiom causes it to be rhetorical in a sense. It forces today's listeners to lavish excessive emotion on ideas that do not seem sufficiently important for such a display of feeling. Liszt attempted to sum up the ideas of Romantic music in these words: "Music embodies feeling without forcing it - as it is forced in its other manifestations, in most arts and especially in the art of words - it is the embodied and intelligent essence of feeling; capable of being apprehended by our senses, it permeates them like a dart, like a ray, like a dew, like a spirit, and fills our soul." Source: studyworld.com
Jeff Tweedy: "I think art is a consolation regardless of its content. It has the power to move and make you feel like you're not alone. And ultimately that's what everybody wants to know." “Since Uncle Tupelo, I’ve been trained that you put out a record and people buy it five years later,” said Tweedy, leader man of Wilco, to Sam Jones, director of the band's documentary "I'm Trying to Break Your Heart" (2002). On top of it all, the cruel logic of major-label math meant Wilco’s royalties for both Mermaid Avenue albums were less than $1,000 despite their combined sales of about 400,000. Tweedy had long ago figured out that making records isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart is first and foremost about the art and joy of making music, in various stages of development and deconstruction. Stripped of the layers of discord that alienated Reprise executives, the opening track becomes a lovely acoustic folk song; with dual electric guitars, "Kamera" sounds more like a raucous outtake from 1995's A.M. than the plaintive version on the finished album. Above all, the documentary is a reminder that the small miracles of a great record come from artistic devotion and agonizing rigor, even if the sum ultimately fell on tin ears. Source: www.avclub.com
Tweedy traces his life from his childhood in Belleville, a town he describes as "depressing and depressed in all of the familiar ways common to dying Midwestern manufacturing hubs." He took to music early, listening in his family's attic to the Replacements, discovering "a secret self. A better self than the one I was stuck with." It was in high school where Tweedy made a friend who would change his life. He and his classmate Jay Farrar bonded over their shared love of music, and soon formed the band Uncle Tupelo. The group released just four albums before breaking up acrimoniously; their record No Depression would lend its name to an alternative-country fanzine, and later, to the genre itself. Not unlike Kurt Cobain, Jeff Tweedy actively demythologized the figure of the rock-’n’-roll hero. Instead of painting a self-indulgent portrait of bravado, Tweedy related tales of social awkwardness and panic attacks overcome by hard work, claiming vulnerability as his defining artistic trait.
Jettisoning the hackneyed image of the womanizing rock star, Tweedy defied that archetype, recounting an anguished story about a sexual encounter with a female friend named Leslie (25) when he was just 14. After Farrar left Uncle Tupelo after a bitter quarrel over Farrar's girlfriend Monica, Tweedy and his remaining bandmates formed Wilco, whose sophomore album Being There gained critical acclaim. Tweedy met his future wife Sue Miller in 1991 at the Chicago club Lounge Ax and they were married on August 9, 1995. In 2001 Tweedy would fire Jay Bennett from the band. Tweedy suggests that he and Bennett were enabling each other's addiction to painkillers, writing, "I fired Bennett from Wilco because I knew if I didn't, I would probably die." Tweedy's music has never shied away from darkness, but he's also never been afraid to celebrate joy. His personality, like his music, has been alternately sorrowful and triumphant. Source: npr.org
JEFF TWEEDY: From the very beginning, Jay Farrar had a tough time reciprocating warmth. I learned that you didn’t express too much emotion around him. But I wanted to be friends with Jay, if only because I was so amazed that somebody else existed—someone my age, who lived in Belleville and went to my school—who felt the same way about this music that I did. We were the guys who would take records to parties and then inevitably end up in a room by ourselves listening to those records. The musical tastes of our classmates were predominantly classic rock—If you wore a Stray Cats T-shirt, you’d get pizza thrown at you, and you’d be called a faggot. There was a jukebox in our cafeteria, and if you played anything other than the 1978 Trooper song “Raise a Little Hell,” somebody would walk over and kick the jukebox repeatedly until it stopped. And then they’d call you a faggot. Becoming friends with Jay Farrar meant upping my game. I needed to find records that Jay and his brothers didn’t know about yet. So it was a healthy competition. We made trips to St. Louis to buy records. We discovered record stores like Vintage Vinyl and Euclid Records, the latter of which I’d be working at as a clerk for a while.
I had a girlfriend in high school who dragged me to big arena rock shows. I went to see Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar, and the Who’s first “farewell” tour in 1982 at the Ralston Purina Checkerdome in St. Louis. It all sounded so bad to me. I wasn’t just bored, I hated those shows. And I felt sad afterward. Nothing about the experience was exciting to me. Something always seemed overly macho about how bands postured themselves on those enormous stages. I’m not sure why the macho-ness bothered me. I loved Black Flag, and there was nothing more macho than Henry Rollins at that time. Actually, that was my least favorite part of Black Flag, but it was a different type of macho, or at least it was to me. I was learning to play the guitar, I still couldn’t make an E minor chord if my life depended on it. I looked at the chord book and fumbled my way through learning a few basic chords. I made steady progress and showed enough sustained interest, so for Christmas my parents bought me a white Peavey T-60 electric guitar, which weighed about seven hundred pounds. The strings would pop off the bridge with the slightest strum. It was unplayable.
I bought a brand-new black-and-white Fender Telecaster. I remember when I figured out how to do the standard da-da-dada Chuck Berry riff, it was like I’d split the atom. I couldn’t listen to the Beatles or Bob Dylan, sit back and think, “Well, maybe if I play an A-major scale enough times, I’ll get there someday.” It was more like “I want to write a song right the fuck now.” Jay Farrar asked me to join the Plebes, not because I was so clearly a guitar virtuoso but because they needed one more high-school-age member to qualify for the 'Battle of the Bands' competition. I remembered vaguely Buddy Holly starting in one of those high-school contests. Jay Farrar and me formed Uncle Tupelo, as a nod to Elvis’s hometown in Mississippi. Uncle Tupelo opened for Johnny Cash at a club in Santa Ana, California, in 1993. We didn’t meet Johnny Cash and June Carter before the show, but we could hear them during our set, watching through the curtains on either side of the stage and shouting, “Woo-hoo,” between songs. It was startling.
Another girlfriend had gone away to college as I started my senior year in high school. She left Belleville to attend SIU–Carbondale, a two-hour drive southeast. She met a guy there during her first semester away and started seeing him while she and I were still technically dating. I was devastated. I’d experienced rejection before, but not that world-shattering feeling of betrayal. That feeling marked the beginning of the first identifiable pattern of depression in my life. When you’re prone to depression, this is the kind of catalyst that can bring it on and turn something upsetting into something debilitating and seemingly insurmountable. I drove down to Carbondale to see her, and I found her walking hand in hand with a guy toward her dorm room. They went inside, and I waited outside for a few minutes, wondering what I should do, and then I knocked the door. They were already in bed. God, it was a full-on catastrophe. It was almost comically hurtful. And as inconsequential as it would be in the grand scheme of things, at that moment I couldn’t see it as anything less than the end of my life.
I wrote “Gun” a little while after that. So I was grateful all that pain hadn’t gone to waste. “It hurt much worse when you gave up/which way I oughta run/Crawling back to you now/I sold my guitar to the girl next door/She asked me if I knew how/I told her, I don’t think so anymore.” That was probably the most honest and direct I’d ever been in a song up to that point. Telling the world that I’d sold my guitar wasn’t saying I’ll kill myself, but it was close. To me, it was almost the equivalent of killing myself at that point. I was in so much pain; I was willing to give up the one thing in the world that was sustaining to me, the only thing that mattered. That might seem like a martyrdom fantasy—“If I can’t have what I want, I don’t want anything!” It is grandiose, but I also think I meant it, I was serious about it. The feeling that “anything is better than this,” even giving up the only thing you love if it would just make it go away, is real. I can still identify with that. When I play Gun, that’s what hooks me in. It’s not about remembering that act of betrayal, but the memory of being gripped by so much despair and helplessness that I didn’t even care if I ever touched a guitar again. I felt that exact way years later when I went into rehab. “I don’t care if I ever write another song again, I just want to feel better.” That’s why I can still sing “Gun” and not feel silly. It’s about that feeling of despair and being willing to do anything to make it go away.
Not that I think suffering is necessary to create worthwhile art. Because I think that artists create in spite of suffering, not because of suffering. I think that may be the highest purpose of any work of art, to inspire someone else to save themselves through art. “We've been practicing in Belleville all week. So this is our first show.” That’s how I introduced Wilco to the world, on November 17, 1994, at Cicero’s in St. Louis. Wilco was me on guitar, John Stirratt on bass, Max Johnston on banjo and fiddle, and Ken Coomer on drums. The only new guy onstage with us was Jay Bennett (who came from a suburb of Chicago). It was basically Uncle Tupelo minus Jay Farrar. Jay Bennett was smart and funny, but he was also a pain in the ass. I think most people who were friends with Jay will tell you that. Jay would laugh at my protests like he thought I was joking, but I was sincerely concerned. Only at the very end of his time in the band did his difficulties start to outweigh his virtues. Jay was burdened with the kind of issues that show no regard for intelligence or social status. Maladies that destroy without taking into account what one has to offer the world, like all diseases.
On a musical level, Jay Bennett was a great match for me and the rest of the guys. Like everyone else in Wilco, Jay could slip in and out of styles pretty effortlessly. He was also willing to dig in with me to find ways to subvert classic song structures. Sometimes he would put pen to paper to show me why a chord change shouldn’t work, but only in service of showing me how cool it was to be so wrong. It was similar to some of the dynamics Jay Farrar and I had going on. Once a song goes out into the world, that’s when it can get ruined. Other people get to listen to it and make it worse, by misreading intentions, judging and weighing in with opinions. Not just my songs, but all songs. I guess people ruin everything. I am right there with them. My songs are never as good as they were in my head when they had limitless forms and belonged only to me. I think songs are ruled by melody. I believe that melody, more than lyrics, is what does all the heavy lifting emotionally.
If you grew up wanting to be a part of the indie rock scene, you were expected to at least give the appearance of not caring and giving the least possible amount of effort. Of course, it’s a lie. Does anyone think The Velvet Underground just happened with minimum effort? Sonic Youth? Pavement? David Kahne, the head of A&R at Reprise, told us they needed something more obviously pop that they could release as a single. That made no sense to me. I was sure Summerteeth was full of pop music. I was fed up. The process made me more cynical. The music industry depends on artists being insecure and needy. If you’re not willing to walk away from a deal, and the other side knows it, you are screwed. For some reason I’ve always been stupid or arrogant enough to walk away from negotiations when they start to feel gross or insulting. It looks like it’d take a lot of confidence to do that, but I don’t feel like an exceedingly confident person. I think I’m just stubborn. And I hate feeling greedy. “No record deal? Okay, welp, it’s back to small budget for me.” And I’m stubborn because there’s only so much I’m willing to compromise artistically. Allowing something you’ve created to be undermined to a point where you can no longer believe in it or stand behind it feels suicidal to me.
While Sam Jones's "I am trying to break your heart" documentary progressed, Jay Bennett started pitting people against one another, whispering rumors and stoking paranoia. If you weren’t in the room, there was a good chance he was talking behind your back or diminishing your contributions. I heard about all the nasty things he’d been saying about me when I wasn’t around—I guess it never occurred to him that the rest of the guys in Wilco would compare notes—and when it was just Jay Bennett and me alone in the studio, he said the rest of Wilco wasn’t pulling their weight. I suggested trying to create sounds that didn’t involve us, like an organ with some keys taped down, or a tape echo feeding back on itself, or an electric fan strumming a guitar. The plan was to come back the next morning, turn all of our self-playing instruments back on, and hit record. But when I got to the Loft, Jay Bennett was already there, walking the camera crew and talking about how he’d put it all together. He had all of the instruments going, the whole room was buzzing, and he was fielding questions from Sam Jones about 'his' sonic experiments. I didn’t say anything—I knew that was petty and I didn’t want to get into another fight in front of the cameras—but I was furious. That was a group idea and I’d suggested it. There were many reasons I didn’t want to make music with Jay Bennett anymore. For one thing, it wasn’t a healthy situation for either of us. There were lots of prescription medications being consumed at the Loft. But Jay Bennett wasn’t close to even being ready to admit there was a problem. I was scared for him, but I was even more terrified for myself because I was just learning how much danger I was in and how hard it was going to be to stay healthy.
So it was a self-preservation move. I fired Jay Bennett from Wilco because I knew if I didn’t, I would probably die. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it’s really not. I told him I knew what was going on. That’s one of the first things I said to him. “You’ve been getting FedEx packages full of pills.” The guy who was running the Loft for us would see him there in the mornings, counting his pills on a desk in the back. I told Bennett we would help him. If he wanted to find somebody to talk to about addiction and maybe get into a program, we would pay for everything. But he was incredulous, saying: “If I had a problem I would admit it.” Some fans thought I should have stayed with Jay as a sign of loyalty for the band. But I think that kind of devotion, to something entirely made up like a “band,” is silly and even dangerous. There are only three people I’ve committed myself to completely for the rest of my life: my wife Susie, and my sons Spencer and Sammy. My actual family. I had to confront my Vicodin addiction in rehab. My thoughts were: “I’m not some junkie who wants to disappear. I have real migraines. I have real panic attacks. And I’m only being responsible by finding a way to control them so I can keep doing my job.”
In November of 2003, we went to New York to record with Jim O’Rourke. John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Leroy Bach (a multi-instrumentalist who’d been with us since Summerteeth), Mikael Jorgensen and myself were going to start work on A Ghost Is Born. It’s also where I was pretty sure I was going to die. I mean that in all seriousness. I thought I was going to die. Every song we recorded seemed likely to be my last. Every note felt final. But like my father, I was always able to maintain a work ethic and I managed to keep creating. I didn’t cancel any gigs. The worst of it happened when I was alone in my hotel room having panic attacks, taking too many pills and then panicking because I’d taken too many pills. Every night I’d lie in bed—or just as often, in the tub until the bathwater would get cold—telling myself, “If I fall asleep right now, there’s a pretty good chance I’m not waking up. People die in this situation all the time.”
I met Bob Dylan when Wilco played a College Media Journal showcase in New York City in 2006. “Hey, Jeff, how’s it going, man? Good to see you!” Bob had spoken to me! Without breaking stride. And I was left in his wake trying to play it cool, but I could feel all of the other folks around us looking at me. It was impossible to play it cool. “Dylan talked to me. Did you guys see that?!” I immediately undid any credibility I had just accrued by being visibly rattled. I had to sit down. Later, when I had collected myself, I called Susie to let her know Bob and I were already best friends (just exaggerating a bit). We were invited to the Grammy Awards in 2012 and Wilco was treated as a lowly posse of interlopers, so we felt both thankful and annoyed. It was annoying that Jack Black introduced Foo Fighters as the only band retaining their “indie cred”, especially when Wilco is literally indie. Playing alongside Daniel Johnston was one of the top 10 musical thrills of my life. But none of it really matters. My highlight that night was when, attending a Grammys afterparty, Sir Paul McCartney whispered to John Stirratt that he had loved watching Wilco play live on the Austin City Limits Festival (on September 16, 2011). Paul McCartney is a Wilco fan! Stirratt told us Paul Mccartney thought Wilco was the band closer to the sound the Beatles would have if they were an indie band. That was insane, and I think more meaningful than winning a Grammy Award.
As I am recounting my youth, I’m realizing that growing up in an old midwestern industrial town in the seventies has made my memories sound like they were filmed on the set of some fifties sitcom. Soda fountains?! Penny candy?! I promise I didn’t make any of this up or fill in the gaps in my Vicodin-dimmed memory by watching reruns of Andy Griffith. Nowadays, I've stopped worrying about whether I have anything important to say. Also remember that even if everything's been said before, not everyone has said it. Music is magic.
Lyrics from the song Bombs Above from Jeff Tweedy's solo acoustic album "Warm" (2019): "All my life I've played a part/I'm taking a moment to apologize/I should have done more to stop the war/I leave behind a trail of songs/From the darkest gloom to the brightest sun/I've lost my way but it's hard to say/What I've been through should matter to you/A man so drunk he could hardly stand/Told me once holding my hand/Suffering is the same for everyone/He was right but I was wrong to agree." —"A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco"(2018) by Jeff Tweedy
Eileen Barton – Everybody's Buddy (Epic Records) – arranged by Marion Evans Orchestra (1957), written by Moose Charlap (Broadway composer best known for Peter Pan, 1954), with lyrics by Lee Adams.
Aesthetically, Buddy Holly might have been the most unlikely looking rock 'n' roll star of the 1950s. But he was, after Elvis Presley, unquestionably the most influential. In the fifties, Eisenhower was in the White House, Ricky loved Lucy, Pepsodent toothpaste erased the yellow teeth stains, and $10 in 1950 was equivalent in purchasing power to $104.44 in 2019. To be sure, in the whole VistaVision expanse of progress, stability, enlightenment, and shiny chromium plating, this new thing called rock 'n' roll was toiling to survive. Those three-chord tremolo rockabilly love ballads had a balm effect to counter the atomic bomb fears. Dave Laing's essay The Sound of Our Time (1969) implicitly promotes the idea of rock and roll in general, and Buddy Holly's music in particular, as an avant-garde art. In The Marxist Theory of Art (1978) Laing presents Julia Kristeva's account of the challenge the 'poetic language' of the literary avant-garde poses to Western culture. This challenge results from the way it contests the dominance of symbolic language, instead privileging semiotic communication, 'in the form of rhythms, intonations, lexical and rhetorical transformations'. Dave Laing had earlier noted the challenge posed by rock music to traditional Western song, specifically to the ballad, which until after the Second World War was the 'mainstay of popular song'. This ancient art form derived from the 'Courtly Code of Love' was formulated in mediaeval Western Europe. More specifically, Laing argues that Holly's distinctive vocal techniques undermine the coherence of the singing tone, on which the traditional ballad depends. 'Holly's approach was entirely new. The straight singing of a lyric is continually punctuated by exclamatory effects of various kinds. The voice suddenly swoops upwards or downwards, syllables are lengthened to cover three or more notes (as in 'ba-ay-by'), and sometimes phrases are spoken during instrumental solos'. In his analysis of Buddy Holly's vocal tecniques, Laing directly contrasts the traditional singer, who seeks 'to hold a note with maximum emotional effect', with Holly, who does not seem to seek that effect.
Few notes are held for more than one or two beats in Holly's records, so they avoid the overpowering emotion of the ballads typical of that period. Holly's listeners are not necessarily overwhelmed, as they used to feel by listening to a traditional ballad, but they have their attention redirected by the frequent changes of tone, pitch, and phrasing. For Laing, Holly's wide variety of vocal techniques is radical in that it precludes the sustained unity necessary for the representation of a homogeneous emotion. It is true that in ordinary usage an emotion, such as 'grief' or 'love', has to endure in time, unlike a sensation such as 'pain', which may be momentary (see Wittgenstein, 1968). Laing is in part justified in arguing that if Holly's style consistently avoids sustained notes, this constitutes a refusal of traditional sentimentality, since 'some of the vocal techniques Holly employs cannot be said to have emotional correlates in real life.' A transcendent type of idealisation of a woman is, in Laing's account, the prototype for the muses romantically celebrated throughout the traditional Western ballad. However, rock and roll music, too, conjures up idealisations of women, which become transcendent objects of veneration. Famous among them is Buddy Holly's 'Peggy Sue'. As Jonathan Cott says, Peggy Sue is "mysterious, hardly there," but she's revived and recreated in a succession of other songs: by Holly (in Peggy Sue Got Married), and subsequently by Bobby Darin, Ritchie Valens and the Beatles.
Holly's famous 'hiccup' signature, or in the sudden glides from deep bass to falsetto (and back again), reveals the child inside the man, and the man inside the child. Up to this point, the lyrics in "Peggy Sue" have performed a step-by-step narrative transformation, as follows: verse 1 boy talks to boy about his loneliness; verse 2 man expresses desire for woman in quasi-religious terms; verse 3 a father figure talks affectionately to an infantilized girl; verse 4 young man uncertainly confesses true love to a girl. In a sense, defences are progressively stripped away as the narrative approaches an actual encounter. He is excitedly anticipating the transition from talking about 'My Peggy Sue' to calling her that to her face. The same happens in bars 6-7 of verse 2, where the phrase is similarly ambiguous in facilitating a transition from addressing Peggy Sue as absent in the verse, to addressing her as present in the refrain. Here the excitement is increased by the further off-beat 'P'heggy' in the preceding phrase (the 'Oh P'heggy' of bars 4-5). But after bar 6 of verse 2, the off-beat 'P' never reappears.
Musically, the syncopation is here left unresolved, making 'Peggy Sue' sound like a question, or a call expecting a response. It is tempting to see the association of 'Sue', 'gal' and 'love' as indicating the femininity of the syncopated rhythms, with 'yes' being Sue's verbal response to the singer. Laing praises Holly for breaking with the transcendentalism of the traditional ballad, modelled on a Virgin Mary like figure. In Peggy Sue, Holly omits all descriptions of the character of his heroine, while he seems to grow from stuttering boy (verse 1) through eager anticipation (verse 3) to self-confident man (verse 6). --"Pity Peggy Sue" (1984) by Barbara Bradby & Brian Torode
There is some controversy associated with Peggy Sue Gerron's book because it is unauthorized. Buddy Holly's wife disavowed the book and the Buddy Holly Center refuses to sell it (mostly because of an arrangement with his estate). Despite those puritanical values, sex actually surpassed drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and revolutionary politics as the leading obsession of the fifties, and sexual implications were perceived even where none existed. Peggy Sue Gerron details the era when young women were expected to keep an image of virtue, a façade that served mostly for social decorum; however she describes her adventurous spirit (she was a bit of a wild gal) and seems constantly jealous of Maria Elena's innate sophistication. As a reader comments of Ms Gerron's book: It's hard to know where to begin with this 'memoir'. I'd love to sit down with Jerry Allison or some relatives of the Holley family. Especially Maria Elena Holly. 'Pretty' Peggy Sue, she is not. I've never seen such a plain Jane so full of herself. She claims she turned on Buddy and Jerry to R&B. There hardly were white teenagers in Lubbock in the 1950's buying records by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. They were considered 'dirty music' and I even doubt the record stores in Lubbock stocked these. She is naïve in one paragraph, and worldly in the next. She is sent to Catholic girls school in California because 'her parents are fighting and it's upsetting her.' When girls in the 50's and 60's got sent to Catholic school--it was because they were wild or contemptuous of their parents. Peggy Sue smoked Viceroys (she seems proud of smoking such a harsh cigarette) and she drank often. Figure it out again--no one was sent off from Lubbock to California out of her hometown high school because she was a good girl.
Although Peggy Sue remembers Buddy Holly fondly, I feel sorry for Jerry Allison. She denigrates him and admits she used him to get out of her home and into his group (The Crickets), maybe hoping for a music business career. She says over and over 'our music', like she had contributed to the Clovis sessions. None of her so-called private conversations with Buddy Holly can be documented or verified. It's all hearsay. Why would Holly have about 30 minutes of conversation with Peggy Sue and then fall in love with her? Let's not forget Peggy Sue was his drummer friend's wife. Holly never contacted Peggy Sue back after the so-called elevator speech (when he allegedly tells her along the lines he's going to take care of her). She's clearly making all this up to enhance her story--which she's told so long it's become real to her. Why did she elope with Jerry Allison? Good girls didn't elope. Why did she stay with Allison although she couldn't stand him? It's because Peggy Sue Gerron was probably a user and a hanger on. I truly doubt Buddy Holly even paid attention to her except to be polite. After the wedding night in Acapulco, Maria Elena provokes again Peggy Sue's envy when she implies how 'considerate' and 'passionate' Buddy was under the sheets. It's also well documented by Joe B. and Larry Holley that the song was originally Cindy Lou for Buddy's niece, but Buddy changed it on Allison's request. It could have been Mary Lou or Betty Sue. Gerron was fortunate it was Peggy Sue. I'd love to see her so-called journals. She dishes on people who cannot comment back, she praises and loves Norman & Vi Petty, who cheated Buddy out of millions. Source: www.amazon.com
Johnnie Walker’s BBC Radio 2 – 8 July 2018, in Harrow (UK). This is a transcript of part of the conversation, that ran throughout the show, between Johnnie Walker (JW) and his guest Chris Difford (CD). CD: I’ve been running songwriter workshops for 26 years, and just recently I did one a couple of weeks back, supported by the Buddy Holly Foundation. JW: And what great people are involved with the Buddy Holly Foundation? CD: Well, they are amazing. They are raising tons of money for research of cancer. And just recently Peter Bradley, who runs the Buddy Holly Foundation, was in Dallas, Texas, and Maria Elena, Buddy’s widow, went to the cupboard and brought out a box and said, ‘You may as well have these,’ and revealed six reel-to-reel tapes. Three of them were demos of Buddy Holly, which I think no one has ever heard, and other recordings of him at the Palladium, which the BBC archives do not own. I’ve listened some demos and they are the most extraordinary thing. The unpublished demos probably contain Buddy’s version of Stay Close To Me, Ah-Ha, Drown in my own tears, Cindy Lou (calypso version), Gotta Travel On, his 1959 concert of Eau Claire Wisconsin, and an acoustic version of True Love Ways.
There are many ways to interpret Jordan Peele’s Us and the scissor-wielding doppelgängers who dwell within it. The subterranean shadow people relegated to living in America’s collective basement can be viewed as the “lower” class that has historically been ignored in this country. The most immediate, obvious take on Us, and one that is completely valid, is to view it through that lens, as a statement on the insidiousness of oppression. The Reds may represent the failure of all of us to lift each other up. But the disturbing beauty of Peele’s second big-screen horror project is that it’s possible to glean more than one meaning from it. Which is why I also view it as a commentary on Generation X, a marginalized group that’s long realized the promises made during its youth will never be fulfilled. The Generation X has been overlooked by the Millenials, who, according to a new study in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, those born in the 1990s are more than twice as likely to be sexually inactive in their early 20s as Gen Xers were. Compared with baby boomers, millennials look like nuns and priests. The proffered reasons for millennial abstinence? A culture of overwork and an obsession with career status, an online-dating milieu, and above all, an uptick in the use of libido-busting antidepressants and anxieties surrounding sexual consent.
Adelaide’s dad wins her a prize: a Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” T-shirt, featuring an image from the King of Pop’s groundbreaking video. First, the ‘50s horror movie within the video, when he comes out as a werewolf (“I’m not like other guys”), and later, when he reveals himself to be a zombie with killer dance moves. The fact that, as Leaving Neverland has recently driven home, real-life Jackson may have had another monstrous alter ego adds another, likely unintended, layer to Peele’s decision to clothe his heroine in “Thriller” at the moment when her mischievous other, the so-called “Red,” succeeds in taking over her identity. Jackson's personality split between the public angel and the private devil suggests he had a dark side which he kept hidden. What the hell did Hands Across America have to do with anything? That event, a fund-raiser for America’s hungry and homeless organized by the USA for Africa organization, took a total of 15 minutes to unfold. Fifteen minutes: The same amount of time it took for young Adelaide to go missing, the number of minutes it was supposed to take the police to get to the Wilsons’ house, an amount very close to the run time of Michael Jackson’s video for “Thriller,” and how long it took in May 1986 to, allegedly, make the world better for the less fortunate.
But then Adelaide got older and she realized that life wasn’t improving, she was just stuck. She had been forgotten, left out, quite literally replaced, and the world kept moving on without her as if she did not exist. Certainly that captures the sentiments of many in the lower and middle classes in this country. But if it doesn’t also describe the feelings of the perpetually overlooked Gen Xers I don’t know what does. Generation X has a reputation for being cynical. Certainly the part of Adelaide’s plan that involves mass murder qualifies as cynical and dark. But there’s part of her that’s still fixated on the idea of Hands Across America and finally seeing it happen. The closing shots of the film, when we see all those red jumpsuited doppelgängers holding hands as far as the eye can see, suggests the second part of her mission was accomplished. Unfortunately, the original Adelaide isn’t able to kill the original Red and claim the spot that should have been hers. Red holds on to her role as Adelaide. And that feels right for a film that, on one of its many levels, functions as an allegory for the Generation X experience. The real Adelaide, our Gen Xer heroine, has been edged out of American life. Source: www.vulture.com
Danny Goldberg knew Kurt Cobain for only the final few years of Cobain’s short life, but as Nirvana’s manager—and something of a father figure—Goldberg had a rare vantage point from which to experience Cobain’s rapid ascent and tragically blunt end. So, by necessity, Goldberg’s Serving The Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain blurs the line between biography and memoir. In Serving The Servant, Goldberg manages to both give Cobain the credit he deserves for a seismic pop culture shift and to portray him as a regular human being. He admits as much when he claims not to have been as aware of Cobain’s drug use as others in their inner circle were, focusing instead on the intricacies of recording and promotion. Goldberg doesn’t let Cobain off the hook completely. At one point, he refers to Cobain as exuding “an odious junkie smugness.” In March of 1994, Cobain overdosed and went into a coma; Goldberg foolishly hoped it might be a wake-up call. By early April, Cobain was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Serving The Servant arrives 25 years later, almost to the day. Goldberg spoke at Cobain’s funeral, and was mocked by naysayers for treating him too reverently—apparently pouring your heart out isn’t punk. Goldberg clearly loved Cobain, and he humanizes him with the kind of small stories that wouldn’t necessarily make sense for a more sweeping biography, like the fact that Cobain cherished The Chipmunks Sing The Beatles so much that he owned four copies. Goldberg knew Cobain intimately, but admits, too, that “Sometimes I felt as close to him as a brother and other times he seemed a galaxy removed, barely perceptible.” Goldberg conveys that split nicely—and, perhaps more importantly, humanely—in his telling of the Cobain story. Source: avclub.com
Rock history usually accepts that Grunge started in Seattle with the record label Sub Pop, or at least that Sub Pop was a major player in the growth of the scene. Sub Pop was founded in 1988 by Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman. The first Sub Pop releases included Soundgarden, Mudhoney (whose lead singer, Mark Arm, is credited with first applying the term 'grunge' to his band’s music) and Green River (a forerunner of Pearl Jam). In 1988, Subpop released the first Nirvana album, Bleach, before the band signed to a major label. In 1991, Nirvana signed to the David Geffen Company who initially pressed only 40,000 copies of Nevermind and expected it to be a minor indie success. Instead it sold millions of copies and replaced Michael Jackson at number one on the Billboard charts six weeks after its release, an event that has been given symbolic meaning in terms of the replacement of the ‘old guard’ of music and the arrival of grunge in the mainstream. Overwhelmingly, the main themes of the grunge songs are alienation and depression, but with an ironic sneer–‘just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you,’ Cobain sings on ‘Territorial Pissings’.
Tolerance of racial differences and support of women were dominant themes in the politics of grunge. Along with this tolerance of difference came a mistrust of authority, and a deep cynicism towards big corporations. By asking questions about equality and wealth within society, issues of power became central to grunge. While some believe grunge lasted until the demise of Soundgarden in 1997, regardless of the exact timing, grunge is generally considered to have been over by the late 1990s. Cobain displayed what Allan Moore (2002) called ‘third person’ authenticity, having been praised for being able to ‘speak the truth of his own culture’. The way that Cobain has often been referred to as the ‘spokesperson for his generation’ is an indicator of this claim. This can be connected to what Weisethaunet and Lindberg (2010) describe as ‘Folkloric Authenticity.’ Edward Larsen (Selling out: Grunge and Globalization) argues that the contradictions contained in grunge reflect the contradictions being experienced in Western capitalist societies at this time. Pearl Jam (with their supposed feud with Nirvana in 1992) were denigrated for a perceived "lack of authenticity" by NME: "Nirvana’s rise was a beautiful, unpremeditated explosion. Geffen expected Nevermind to shift a few thousand units, and it shifts a few million. But Pearl Jam’s meteoric triumph… What you get is solid AOR, circa 1974 – nothing new."
Seattle was considered the headquarters of the grunge scene. But one revealing article at this time took a critical view of the most successful grunge artists, namely Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam and Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins. Their ‘honesty’, previously praised, had become ‘whining’; their newest albums were ‘diaries’ and therefore were ‘not art’; their authenticity was questioned (Sutherland, 1993). A week after Cobain’s death was reported, a Soundgarden live review said: ‘Before the initial shockwaves from Cobain’s death abated, pundits were debating whether the death also symbolised a funeral wreath for the Seattle scene in general’ (Lewis, 1994). Uncut magazine concluded his suicide wasn't abnormal, that ‘it all pointed to a bad end – his family history, his initial free spirit suppressed by Ritalin, leaving him a profoundly disaffected, morbidly weird, that is, not one of us’ (Stubbs, 2004). He was portrayed as a moody ‘artist’: ‘you could be sitting next to him, but he still seemed a million miles away’ (Lamacq, 2004). Cobain's suicide was portrayed as an image of all that was wrong with ‘Generation X’, and was used by the media to try to explain that generation, which they mostly were not a part of.
It has been argued by some academics that since its inception in the early 1990s the Riot Grrrls movement suffered the same fate of commercial incorporation as grunge. The appropriation of the message of Riot Grrrls by ‘mainstream’ performers such as Alanis Morissette took away the original DIY alternative message of the movement. As Schilt (2003) notes: ‘It was a realistic assumption that girls inspired by Bikini Kill would start their own bands. But how realistic was it for girls to aspire to be the next Alanis Morissette?’ In 2004, Spin’s ‘20 Greatest Grunge Albums of All Time’ places Hole (Live Through This) at number 7, L7 (Bricks are Heavy) at number 11 and Babes In Toyland (Spanking Machine) at number 16. One woman from the grunge movement who has not been forgotten is Courtney Love. Some journalists recognized parallels between her and rock’s other infamous widow, Yoko Ono (or even rock’s other destructive blonde stereotype, Nancy Spungen).
Most references to Hole and Courtney Love in the NME were universally flattering. She was hailed as a groundbreaking musician and her strong personality and forceful opinions praised (see Walsh, 1991). But after Cobain's death, a number of bands released songs reportedly aimed at Love – for example, Nine Inch Nail’s ‘Starfuckers Inc’, or Tori Amos’ ‘Professional Widow’ (including the line ‘Starfucker just like my daddy’). As regards the Nine Inch Nails song, this was apparently the result of a sexual encounter between Courtney Love and Trent Reznor. Love’s comeback to Reznor’s subsequent attacks on her was to suggest that ‘Three Inch Nails’ would be a more appropriate name for his band. Douglas Kellner (1998) describes Generation X as excessively exposed to mass media's influence, where ‘life is rendered simply devoid of value, as impoverished social conditions breed anger, apathy and violence’. Brabazon (2005) believes that the most persistent portrayal of Generation X has been ‘as bored, lethargic, over-educated, underemployed sophisticates.’
For example, in Serving the servants: An analysis of the music of Kurt Cobain (1995), Duane Fish examines the artistry of Cobain’s work through his lyrics, and concludes that Cobain failed in his attempt to create his own form of art by being absorbed into the corporate mainstream, and that this failure led to his suicide. Sherry Ortner also notes in Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World (1998), that members of other ethnic groups did not feel connected to the idea of Generation X. Ortner argues that ‘both the source and the target of the Generation X imagery is the white middle class.’ Ultimately, grunge was colonized and incorporated into the larger field of popular music, but its ‘downfall’ was connected to condemnation from a hypocritical press. The 90s’ (and grunge in particular) were portrayed as a revisiting of 1960s ideals, but in a disillusioned and cynical way that turned the focus onto the self, wary of seeking a societal change. Grunge is not remembered today as something that changed the world because it was never framed by the media in a way that would have allowed this idea to take hold. Its association in the media with an allegedly slack, apathetic Generation X and with the tragic figure of Cobain created a negative context for its ultimate evaluation. —"Grunge: Music and Memory" (2016) by Catherine Strong
The United States was the most influential economic power in the world after World War II under the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Inflation was moderate during the decade of the 1950s. The first few months had a deflationary hangover from the 1940s but the first full year ended with annual inflation rates ranging from 8% to 9%. By 1952 inflation subsided. 1954 and 1955 flirted with deflation again but the remainder of the decade had moderate inflation ranging from 1% to 3.7%. The average annual inflation for the entire decade was only 2.04%. The fifties has been heralded as the decade of a great social comfort and widespread cultural consensus. The fifties was also the decade when rock and roll officially broke out. The interaction of country music with jazz and R&B was especially important in the creation of rock and roll, but though western swing influence—country music’s string-powered response to big-band jazz—has been recently researched, the “hillbilly boogie,” which bridged the gap between western swing and the rockabilly genre, has been virtually ignored.
Hollywood musicals and animated cartoons helped popularize swing, and western films created a national audience for country music. “Blueberry Hill” became a rock classic at the hands of Fats Domino in 1956, but the song, which had been a No. 1 pop hit for Glenn Miller in 1940, was also sung by Gene Autry in 1941, and recorded in 1949 by Louis Armstrong. For the most part, the blues found its way into rock music through jazz, which had long incorporated blues in the early 1920s. With rare exceptions, the Delta blues had little impact on rock ’n’ roll before the British Invasion of the mid-1960s regarded it as influential. During the swing era, big bands such as Count Basie’s, Benny Goodman’s, and Tommy Dorsey’s had picked up the boogie-woogie sound, while blues and country music took on a jazzy feel. The roots of rock run through mainstream pop as well, from Irving Berlin’s vaudeville songs to the Andrews Sisters’ harmonized boogie-woogies, and the R&B-flavored crooning of Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray. The nascent sound of rock ’n’ roll could be heard as early as the 1920s in a number of piano boogies, and jazz-band arrangements.
Before Elvis Presley or Bill Haley had a hit, the pop singer Kay Starr made the Top 20 with her cover version of the Clovers’ 1951 rhythm-and-blues chart-topper “Fool, Fool, Fool.” Before Little Richard turned it into a rock ’n’ roll anthem in 1957, “Keep A Knockin’” was recorded by James Wiggins and by Bert Mays in 1928, by Lil Johnson in 1935, by Milton Brown in 1936, by Louis Jordan and by Jimmy Dorsey in 1939, and by Jimmy Yancey in 1950, among others. Most official rock ’n’ roll timelines begin with the late 1940s or early 1950s. Only a few historians, such as Ed Ward (The History of Rock & Roll: 1920-1963), Geoffrey Stokes (Star-Making Machinery: Inside the Business of Rock and Roll), or Robert Palmer (Rock & Roll: An Unruly History), dare to trace the rock and roll origins as early as the 1930s. Perhaps the best explanation of the origins of rock is still to be found in Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City (first published in 1970), one of the only books to recognize the link between big-band swing and rock ’n’ roll. Another writer who has traced some of the various musical strains that found their way into rock ’n’ roll is Nick Tosches (Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll: The Birth Of Rock In The Wild Years Before Elvis).
Both Sam Phillips and Marion Keisker heatedly denied Phillips' alleged remark as Albert Goldman quoted it in his 1981 biography of Elvis Presley: “If I could find a white boy who could sing like a nigger, I could make a million dollars.” In 1957, Presley recorded “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” as the flip side of “All Shook Up,” with the Jordanaires adding vocal harmonies. Listening to these earliest Elvis recordings today, it is nearly impossible to understand the apocryphal Sam Phillips quote: the eighteen-year-old Presley does not sound black at all. Peter Guralnick (Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley) compares the voice of Elvis on his early demos to “a sentimental Irish tenor,” adding that “there could have been nothing less overtly African-American-sounding than this particular acetate or this particular song.” Presley evidently aspired to be a country-pop crooner, and though he earned the title King of Rock ’n’ Roll with up-tempo rockers such as “Hound Dog” and “All Shook Up,” he continued to sing and record ballads throughout his career. Published reports that Presley frequented blues clubs on Beale Street in Memphis while still in high school were also debunked by Peter Guralnick.
Presley’s early exposure to live music came mainly through shows by white gospel quartets such as the Blackwood Brothers and the Statesmen. Radio was Presley’s primary source of musical inspiration, but though he surely tuned in to the pioneering Memphis rhythm-and-blues station WDIA, his repertoire was largely drawn from pop singers such as Teresa Brewer, Jo Stafford, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Eddie Fisher, and Perry Como, as well as country singers such as Hank Williams, Eddie Arnold, and Hank Snow. John Lennon, in his final 1980 interview, told David Sheff that “Rock Around the Clock” had inspired him to pursue a musical career. “I really enjoyed Bill Haley, but I wasn’t overwhelmed by him,” Lennon added. “It wasn’t until ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ that I really got into it.” It was Lennon who is said to have stated, “Before Elvis, there was nothing,” although this widely circulated quotation appears to be apocryphal. By the early 1950s, hillbilly boogies were no longer novel. Boogie-woogie fever had swept America in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Western swing, country music’s fiddle-driven answer to big-band jazz, followed suit. The roots of rock are audible on “Boogie Woogie,” which Count Basie recorded with a small combo in 1936 and with his big band in 1937 (both versions featuring singer Jimmy Rushing), and which Tommy Dorsey recorded as an instrumental in 1938. Boogie-woogie fever peaked with “Beat Me Daddy,” a big hit for the Andrews Sisters in 1940, the same year that Frank Sinatra made his first records with Tommy Dorsey.
Duke Ellington took a more inclusive view in an article for Music Journal in 1962. “Rock ’n’ Roll is the most raucous form of jazz, beyond a doubt,” he wrote. “It maintains a link with the folk origins, and I believe that no other form of jazz has ever been accepted so enthusiastically by so many.” “Lovesick Blues,” a Tin Pan Alley song written by Irving Mills and Cliff Friend, was first recorded in 1922 by the vaudeville singer Elsie Clark. In 1928, Emmett Miller rerecorded “Lovesick Blues” in New York with a group of jazz musicians including trombonist Tommy Dorsey, saxophonist Jimmy Dorsey, and guitarist Eddie Lang. Rex Griffin’s 1939 cover of Miller’s “Lovesick Blues” is the basis for Hank Williams’s 1949 version, the biggest hit of Williams’s career. According to Peter Guralnick, Elvis Presley “sang quite a few of Kay Starr’s songs” while still in high school, but these were probably ballads. “Fool, Fool, Fool”/“Kay’s Lament” has been overlooked by compilers of the first rock ’n’ roll records, and though the Oklahoma-born Starr was a “white” southerner who scored pop hits mixing rhythm-and-blues in an authentic style before Bill Haley, she has so far escaped consideration as the first rock ’n’ roll singer (as has Anita O’Day). One of Decca’s first post-band recordings was of Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters’ version of “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” a country, pop, and R&B hit. “Pistol Packin’ Mama” was covered by artists ranging from the Pied Pipers (a white vocal group featuring Jo Stafford) to the Hurricanes (a black doo-wop group) to Gene Vincent, whose rockabilly rendition, recorded in London, was arranged by Eddie Cochran.
Although Elvis Presley adapted some of his music directly from rhythm-and-blues and claimed that genre as the source of his style, it’s clear from his recording of “Milkcow Blues Boogie” that he was acquainted with western swing, and it’s hardly credible that he was less than familiar with the hillbilly boogie. Bill Haley’s roots in western swing and hillbilly boogie are well documented, and the melody of “Rock Around the Clock,” originally published by the African American bandleader Richard M. Jones, can be heard in a number of 1940s country songs. By the early 1950s, if not sooner, country artists were recording in an idiom recognizable as rockabilly or rock ’n’ roll, terms that would not be used to characterize the genre until a few years later. Swept up in the wave of enthusiasm that accompanied rock ’n’ roll’s breakthrough into the popular mainstream, Haley and Presley were hailed as musical pioneers, but they just were following a well-worn stylistic path. “Rock Around the Clock” was not the first rock and roll song, despite its shuffling rhythm, boogie-ish bass line, and twelve-bar verse-and-refrain structure. Although many 1950s rock songs feature one or more of these characteristics, many do not. Others, such as “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Jailhouse Rock,” have a sixteen-bar verse-and-refrain structure; “Great Balls of Fire” follows the thirty-two bar AABA pattern typical of ballads, complete with bridge.
Upon its emergence, rock ’n’ roll encountered a firestorm of criticism. “From 1958 to 1960 rock and roll lost much of its early drive and impetus, due largely to anti-rock pressures. From 1960 to 1962 rock and roll was toned down,” write Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave in Anti-Rock: Opposition to Rock and Roll. The songwriters headquartered in Manhattan’s Brill Building put their own distinctive stamp, a kind of pop-rock update on Tin Pan Alley, while the surf music of southern California brought guitar instrumentals to the forefront. The demise of rock ’n’ roll has been proclaimed at least since Don McLean’s 1971 hit “American Pie” lamented the passing of Buddy Holly on “the day the music died.” Nevertheless, rock lives on, however feebly, having shown relatively little creative spark since the grunge era. The remaining rock scene splintered into subgenres: power pop, psychobilly, post-punk, grunge, lo-fi, and Americana. Paralleling the development of jazz, rock music has grown so distant from its original sound that modern rock hardly seems to belong to the same genre as vintage rock ’n’ roll. Only the backbeat and amplified guitar-bass-and-drums instrumentation have endured. Rock ’n’ roll showed its greatest verve in the mid-1950s, being revived several times, spiking during the folk-rock and psychedelic rock of the 60s, the 70s glam/punk, the 80s new wave and the 90s grunge/avant-garde. What genuine inventiveness persists is mostly relegated to the fringes of the mainstream scene. Today’s rock musicians seem to have little or no familiarity with old-school rock ’n’ roll—regrettably, since reconnecting with the music’s roots might help restore its vigor. —"Before Elvis: the prehistory of rock 'n' roll" (2013) by Larry Birnbaum
Tom Hanks is in negotiations to play Elvis Presley’s iconic manager Colonel Tom Parker in Baz Luhrmann’s untitled Warner Bros. biopic about the legendary musician. Luhrmann will direct the movie. He also penned the script with Craig Pearce. Parker discovered Presley when he was just an unknown and quickly moved in as his lone representation. Parker was responsible for various milestones, including Presley’s record deal with RCA and his successful acting career. While Luhrmann always envisioned a star for Parker’s part, he wants a newcomer for the role of Elvis Presley. The director has begun meeting with talent for the part. Insiders say a budget is still being ironed out, but Hanks’ commitment will urge the studio to push the project forward. Luhrmann hopes to get the picture into production sometime this year. Source: variety.com
