Two deceased musicians

I recently joined a book club at a nearby library focused on books about music. Each month we're given a theme and we read and report on whatever book we want. The October theme was "deceased musician," The first names that came to me were David Bowie, Prince, and Frank Sinatra, partly because I'd already read books about them in the past. But I settled on two widely different people: Beatles producer George Martin and indie pop singer Elliott Smith. A friend who is as big a Beatles fan as I questioned my choice of Martin as a musician. Well of course he was a musician, I replied; if nothing else, he played keyboards, conducted orchestras and wrote arrangements. A couple of folks in the book group went over their allotted time so I had to rush through my presentation on the books in five minutes. Here, based on my Goodreads reviews, is what I would have said in full:

The first book was Sound Pictures: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin, The Later Years, 1966–2016 by Kenneth Womack. I have over the years read at least 40 and 50 books about the Beatles, collectively and individually, and when I picked up this book, I thought I would not run across anything I didn't already know. But I did, and that's the good thing about this book. Though Martin is the subject of the book, the Beatles are present on almost every page. Womack covers virtually every recording session that Martin did with the Beatles from 1966 (Revolver) to the end of their career (Abbey Road and the initial production on Let It Be which was reworked by Phil Spector). Though I was happy to learn new tidbits, especially about the making of Sgt. Pepper and the White Album, Womack goes into almost too much detail to the point where it starts to feel like a reference book (the kind of thing already done wonderfully by Mark Lewisohn). Martin's post-Beatles years are covered perfunctorily, which may be what they deserve, though a little more about his work with America and Jeff Beck would have been nice. Frankly, Martin never really had post-Beatles years since he continued to work on Beatles projects (the CD reissues, the Anthology project, the Cirque du Soleil Beatles show) for the rest of his professional life. [Pictured below are Martin with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.]

Martin had passed away before this book came out, and it seems as if Womack had no personal contact with Martin. Instead, he relies on lots and lots of quotations from Martin's own books and interviews he did with others, which gives the whole enterprise an almost amateurish feel. Yes, there's a lot of research but it's presented in a very blandly laid-out way, as though still waiting for someone to come along and have a bash at integrating everything in a more interesting fashion. There is also an awful lot of coverage of Beatles material that had little to do with Martin (their relationships with Brian Epstein, the "more popular than Jesus" tour troubles). He also makes a weirdly rookie mistake by twice referring to the Broadway cast recording of The Who's Tommy, which Martin produced, as a "soundtrack." Soundtrack always refers to a movie; a stage show is an original cast recording. That would get him ridiculed and/or kicked out of any number of Facebook groups. I can recommend this as a library read for Beatles fans, but not for purchase.

The second book was Nobody Broke Your Heart: An Intimate Biography of Elliott Smith by Jamie Fisher. Smith’s main claim to fame nowadays is his horrific death in 2003 at the age of 34. I like the music of Elliott Smith, though I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool fan. He sounds like a 90s indie combination of the influences of the Beatles, Elton John, Billy Joel and Paul Simon. I own most of his solo work and I read a biography of him, Torment Saint, that was published ten years after his death (generally considered a suicide, having apparently stabbed himself in the chest, though no official closure has ever come). It was interesting but a bit thin as most of his friends, family members and colleagues still weren't ready to talk about him. Now comes this book, the opposite of the earlier book: thick (in both size and content) and full of people talking about him.

As happens with artists who die in an untimely fashion, I think his reputation has far exceeded what he achieved in his short life, so most fans are "superfans," people who loved him, either in person or just through his music, and won't hear anything bad said about him, or at least his legacy. Many, perhaps most, of his close friends all admit here that he was a deeply flawed person whom they loved in spite of his problems and shortcomings. The first bio had too little, this one has, for me, too much (500+ pages). Fisher, a superfan, was able to interview seemingly all of his living friends, even Jennifer Chiba, the woman who was present when Smith died of two knife wounds to his chest. Since the police investigation has never been closed, there are some who believe the dark rumors that Chiba killed him. She does not come off terribly well in this bio, but Fisher does seem to try to be fair to her.

Honestly, Smith was so messed up, I don't think he ever had a chance at a long and "normal" life. He was physically abused by his stepfather, which the man admits to, and Smith came to believe that the stepfather had also sexually abused him, though the man insists he didn't. This belief seems to have come out of almost nowhere later in his life, as though he needed some "original sin" moment to account for his perceived failings and feelings of deep depression which were always with him. He threatened for years to start using hard drugs, and when he did, he remained an addict for the rest of his life, despite multiple interventions and stints in rehab (in two of which he had Rick James as a roommate!). Many, maybe most, of his lyrics reflected these feelings though his melodies (often reminiscent of Paul McCartney or Elton John, though I think the Beatle he conjures up the most in general is John Lennon) are more often upbeat and energetic.

Fisher commits the modern-day sin I find most irritating in biographers: because she, very admirably, did lots of research and talked to many people, she feels the need to include almost all of it in her book. After the halfway point, I just became numb to all the depressing details of Smith's life, and to the expressed joy and hurt of his loved ones. Even Fisher, at some point in the last hundred pages, refers to being "exhausted" by the doom and gloom of people's memories. He seems to have failed most of his loved ones at some point, though most continued to see him positively. She assumes that all her readers are as familiar with not only Smith's music but the music that inspired him as she is, and she frequently fails to clearly identify much of it, mentioning titles but not artists. I left the book feeling that Smith wasn't really worth all the work she put into this—I'm not judging him as a person but as an artist and as a biography subject. Still, I'm not sorry to have read this, because it has sent me back to listen to his albums after many years away from them. (My favorites are X/O and his posthumous album From a Basement on the Hill.) If the book leads to a resurgence of mainstream pop culture interest in him, I guess it was worth it. 

Many people tried to help Smith throughout his life, both through formal interventions and more personal urgings, and he usually pushed them away. Perhaps the most profound thing I got from this book is a paraphrase by Fisher of an observation by a friend of his, Garrick Duckler: "There's nothing lonelier than the loneliness of someone who's sympathetic to the defeated helpers all around him."

Thinking about AI & the arts

I'm writing this largely to try and figure out what I think about the controversies over generative AI and its use in the creation of entertainment, arts, literature, essays, and job-related writing. I should start by making two things clear: 1) I have never used AI to create anything except once when, for a lark, I let Gmail's AI write a two-sentence email reply to a friend, and it wrote exactly what I would have; 2) I'm currently something of an agnostic about AI; I understand the concerns about its use but I also understand that it could be useful in some areas.

1. AI is wrong, a lot! I encounter AI quite a bit on social media. It seems to be being used as a prime engine for creation of content on some Facebook groups. For example, some groups about movie and theater history are sustained mostly by what I suspect are AI articles. Though on the surface, these short articles are readable enough, they have no real authorial style to them and sometimes leave out important information or get things wrong—one mentioned a musical stage show with Lucille Ball that never existed; an AI hallucination, I guess. I've also seen it get people's birth dates and death dates wrong, and it claimed that reporter and author Mark Harris, who is plenty alive and kicking, was dead, perhaps mixing him up with the Mark Harris who wrote Bang the Drum Slowly. Many cases of AI providing fictional source citations in academic documents add to the argument that AI is bad at generating nonfiction.

2. As a former teacher, I have great sympathy with teachers who are currently struggling with students using AI to write papers. Not only is AI not going away, but colleges are largely welcoming it. When I was teaching college English many years ago, I struggled with use of the Internet; first, with coaxing students to use it for sources, and later to put on some brakes and to be mindful of the authoritativeness of such sources. Teaching students how to use AI effectively and honestly (which can be done) is probably a current goal of many teachers. Because AI is often wrong, it can be problematic to use it heavily in research; in terms of writing a paper, it has been shown that students who do this are not only not learning to write (i.e. communicate clearly with an audience) but they are also falling behind in learning how to think: about topics, about argumentation, about research, about the ability to pick and choose the elements of an individual writing style.

3. The use of AI in creating art and writing literature is quite controversial. Obviously creators who make their livings on their own without AI are worried about losing readership and jobs to those who create using AI, like Coral Hart, the romance writer interviewed by the New York Times a while back who published 200 romance novels in the space of one year using AI. As she put it, none of the books has become a bestseller, but the sheer amount of content produced keeps dollars rolling in. Lots of readers assume they would know and not like fiction produced by AI, but what happens when AI gets better at it and people actually start liking it, not just the easy-to-please romance readers? I don't mean to dis romance fans; I read mysteries and given the general sameness of a lot of mystery types (cozy, gay, hard-boiled), I'm not sure I could necessarily smoke out an AI mystery if I read one.

The recent skirmishes over AI fiction published by large mainstream houses sharpens the focus on an important point: if people like the fiction, does it matter that it was generated (completely or partially) by AI? The recent book "It Was Either That or Die" by Thelyson Orelien was in line for a major literary prize in France until AI detection programs determined that the book was written at least in part using generative AI. Honestly, if critics loved the book two months ago, does it matter that much if the author used AI? Isn't it still (apparently) a very good novel that Orelien had some hand in authoring? This problem goes back to the issue of "authenticity." In literature and music in particular, we are supposed to value that work came from an artist's heart or soul and not from whole cloth. In fact, life experiences probably do make an artist's output richer, but that hardly negates work that is not based on the artist's life. Joni Mitchell didn't make it to Woodstock, but she wrote a song about it that has come to be considered the music festival's theme. Many singers record songs they did not write; Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra weren’t songwriters, but interpreters of other people’s songs, and no one docked them any talent points for that. Edgar Rice Burroughs never went to Africa but that didn’t stop his Tarzan novels from becoming wildly successful. We haven't had a major fuss over AI-generated songs but just wait—it will happen.

One of the problems here is the use of AI detectors. No one claims that they are incapable of error; they can and have misidentified human writing as AI. In the case of Mr. Orelien, the book does appear to spring from his life experiences and interests. I assume that virtually all AI creation still involves a human being at some point: providing prompts and guidance, editing, rewriting, etc. My musings here are not the thoughts of a person whose living is threatened by AI, so some may find that they don't have much power. I still don't quite know where I stand on these issues. The use of AI in areas with real-life consequences, like science or the law or nonfiction writing, seems much less ambiguous to me. In these cases, AI should only be used as a tool and should always be checked and double-checked. In the arts, I’m not sure where the boundaries lie.

By the way, the illustration at the top of my post comes from a post on Medium by Robert Henahan who writes about using AI as "a reading partner, not a replacement," using it to discover and to think about literature. Most of what he says makes sense, though he's not really talking about using it to create art. 

The Golden Bowl

Adam is a rich American living in England with his daughter Maggie. Prince Amerigo is a penniless nobleman who marries Maggie, egged on by Adam and by a friend, Fanny Assingham (and if you think that this old man didn't giggle frequently at that name, think again). But just before the wedding, Amerigo is thrown together with Charlotte, a woman from his past; they loved each other but considered themselves too poor to make a married life together. Charlotte was a close friend of Maggie's and is in town for the wedding. At some point (it's not clear, as much in this book is not clear), Charlotte and the Prince begin an affair, made possible in part by the fact that Adam and Maggie spend so much time together. To some degree, a hothouse foursome develops.

I like Henry James and his long sentences and his ambiguous plot points. I did not like the experience of reading this, his last completed novel. In some ways, it feels like self-parody. In his previous books, he had sentences that went on for a paragraph, and paragraphs that went on for pages. But he always came back to ground. Here, it seems sometimes like all he gives us is chapter-long paragraphs during which nothing happens except characters (through the words of the narrator) think about things that have happened but which we have not seen happen--a kind of early version of stream of consciousness, I guess. I admit I skimmed many of these paragraphs and even chapters.

A thick dust layer of James's words seems to stand in the way of total comprehension of the plot and of character motivations. Those words are often lovely but still frustrating. Most critiques of the novel say that the important theme is knowledge: who knows what about what's going on, when do they know it, and how does it affect the power they hold over others. I can buy that. But even on the last page (page 443, for heaven's sake) I don't think I know what has happened and who has come out on top. I have since watched the movie (from 2000) in which things are simplified, but I'm not sure that James would agree that Merchant and Ivory have interpreted him correctly.

Of course, I'm not in school, as a student or a teacher, so I don't need to come up with definitive answers for an essay test. Honestly, I don't feel too bad about the ambiguity I was left in by the end. Despite the adulterous behavior of Amerigo and Charlotte, I can't help but think of Maggie and Adam as the "bad guys," to put it far too simply. But I'm not sure that's how James wanted me to think. As much of a chore as it felt at times to read this, I am inclined to revisit it some time in the future, and certain passages have stuck with me. In particular, there is a delicious chapter in which Fanny and her husband are trying to communicate about the central situation and completely fail to understand each other. I was laughing out loud (would James have approved?). If you've never read James, for God's sake don't start with this one. Only for hardcore fans.

WCOL Hit Line, June 16, 1969

 

Here's another WCOL chart from the summer of 1969. It's only two weeks after the first one I posted so there's not a lot of interesting chart info. It is notable that Zager and Evans' only hit, "In the Year 2525," in just its second week on the chart, is already in the top 10; it would hit #1 the very next week. It wasn't even on the national Billboard chart yet, though it would eventually hold the #1 spot on the Hot 100 for six weeks. One of my favorite songs of that summer, "Spinning Wheel" by Blood Sweat and Tears, is #10; when I bought that single, I brought it home, popped it on the stereo and played it like 10 times in a row.  I bought "Black Pearl" by Sonny Charles the same day and also gave it multiple spins. 

My first experience with understanding the difference between short (45 single) versions and long (album cut) versions of songs occurred with "Let Me" by Paul Revere and the Raiders. I bought the 45, then must have heard the longer version--sometimes WCOL would play album cuts after dark. I bought the album, Alias Pink Puzz, just to have that version. Listening now, I actually prefer the single--the main difference is that the LP version takes longer to fade out. Also on the chart: "Moonflight" by Vik Venus (not Vic as misprinted on the list), my first experience with the "break-in" song, in which a voice would interview someone and the answers would be short snatches of songs, in this case all songs that had been hits on Buddah Records. On this one, the interviewer is talking to astronauts  (the moon landing would happen a month later). For example, the question, "How do like your food?" is answered "Yummy, yummy, yummy, I've got love in my tummy"--from a hit the previous year by the 1910 Fruitgum Company.

The perils and pleasures of re-reading

I've been a voracious reader all my life but I have never gone in much for re-reading. Until last year (not counting books I re-read books for school, as a student and as a teacher), I'd hardly ever re-read books for pleasure: The Great Gatsby, Mrs. Dalloway, some Ray Bradbury, some Ernest Hemingway, some Henry James. But in my retirement, in addition to catching up on books that have been piling up in the basement over the years, I have been doing some re-reading. I've probably read Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes four or five times, but a new attempt last year left me cold. It threatened to spoil my lovely memories of the book so I quit. Oddly, with one of the major characters, the dad, being an old man figure a bit like me, I thought I would find new resonances in the book, but the opposite happened--I found myself bored by the father and by the philosophizing. I will keep my Bantam paperback, bought in 1967, with me forever but I probably won't be tempted to read it again. I'll let my memories remain unsullied.

Some things I've re-read with success, finding even more to enjoy in them now. Julian, Gore Vidal's historical novel about the last pagan emperor of Rome, first read in my 20s, was one of my favorite novels and I worried that revisiting it would be disappointing (I had tried about 20 years ago and didn't get very far) but my older vantage point was actually an asset as I understood more, about the history and the philosophy, than I did back then. The same thing happened with A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. It's a post-apocalyptic story told in three parts, covering three different and widely separated time periods. A nuclear war destroys civilization as we know it, but humanity, along with religion and science, claws its way back, and soon we have an even more advanced technology that we had in the 20th century. But have we learned enough to avoid our old mistakes? I read it in college (mid-1970s) and have fond and vivid memories of stretching out on a couch in the student union building and reading it, but when I picked it up now, I remembered almost nothing about it. This time around, I liked the first and third sections very much, but the middle chunk was tedious and I almost gave up on the re-read. I'm glad I didn't. I think the first and third parts felt more like science fiction than the middle part; they also have more "world-building" going on. I'm a little surprised that it hasn't been adapted for streaming television.

I got an even bigger jolt when I re-read The Carnivorous Lamb by Agustin Gomez-Arcos. In 1984, it was a highly esteemed literary gay novel about two brothers in 1950's Spain who have a lifelong sexual relationship. In 1984, the book felt like a fever dream and I raced through it in two or three sittings. It's erotic but also political, with the fall of the Republicans and the rise of Franco after the Spanish Civil War affecting all the characters. This time, the writing style felt awkward, with a stop-and-start flow that bothered me. The erotic feel was still there, but I was surprised how little sexual description there was--it doesn't come close to being pornographic. Overall I was a little disappointed, but I was glad that the last 30 pages or so were still a bit "feverish." I've been thinking of re-reading Garcia Gabriel Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, another book I remember as dreamlike, but I'd hate to be disappointed. Hence the perils and pleasures of the act of re-reading. If I could somehow clear my memories of the first read out of my head, I might be less worried about it. But the past and present experiences will always, I think, be in contention.  So I'll keep going with this project but I'll allow myself to give up on a re-read if it feels like it is spoiling the past experience too much.

My first Top 40 summer

In Columbus, Ohio in June of 1969 when I was 12, I became hooked on top 40 radio. Though I was well versed in the Beatles from the tender age of 7, having watched them on Ed Sullivan in 1964, I didn't much listen to current pop music until a few years later. Between 1964 and 1968, if I owned records, aside from Beatles albums, they would have been Broadway cast albums or soundtracks--yes, I was a theater kid that early on. But somehow by 1968, I was listening casually to pop radio. The first non-Beatles 45 RPM singles I bought were Daydream Believer by the Monkees, Chewy Chewy by the Ohio Express, Those Were the Days by Mary Hopkin, and Bang-Shang-A-Lang by the Archies. By the summer of 1969, I had a transistor radio which was tuned permanently to WCOL-AM, 1230 on the dial. I was earning an allowance by doing dishes and I would prop my radio up near the sink and listen; soon I was putting it under my pillow and listening at night. This was also the age when I started going downtown on the bus all by myself, and I would spend much of my allowance at the Lazarus department store on singles. Below is the very first WCOL "hit line" list that I ever brought home--they were free in the record department.

Columbus was a fairly vibrant top 40 market back then. WCOL was the biggest youth oriented station at the time, aside from WVKO which played "soul music", the genre name for Black R&B music, and at the far end of the dial, it was sometimes difficult to tune in. WCOL would often break records before they became national hits. For example, the week of June 2, "Good Morning Starshine" by Oliver was #1 in Columbus, but only #57 on the Billboard Hot 100. It would eventually make the Billboard top 5 in mid-July. Other top 10 hits on WCOL that week that were just getting going nationally include "Israelites," "Medicine Man," and "I Can't Quit Her." "Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town: by Kenny Rogers, #10 in Columbus, didn't even appear on the Hot 100 until a week later, down at #98, though it would eventually hit #6 weeks later.

Almost all the songs on that chart are still ones I can conjure up over fifty years later; I don't remember "Medicine Man" by the Buchanan Brothers or "Marley Purt Drive" by Jose Feliciano. But I was the kind of listener who would turn off the radio or switch to another station if I didn't like the song that was on the air. With car radios, I was a constant button-pusher, jumping from station to station, something I do to this very day when I listen to Sirius XM. I try to resist the temptation to be a boomer who claims that his music from back then is better than the music of today; I know that tastes change, and today's music isn't being made for this 69-year-old. But the music of the late 60s and early 70s will always have a special place in my ears, my head, and my heart. I plan on posting and briefly commenting on other WCOL charts from those early years frequently on my blog.

All That Glitters Is Not Gold: Notes on Theo of Golden

Theo of Golden by Allen Levi was originally self-published, became an underground hit, was taken up by a major publisher (Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster), and now sits near the top of the New York Times bestseller list. A friend who normally doesn't read mainstream fiction recommended it to me so I bought a copy and read it. I was left feeling, as my late mother would have said, comme ci, comme ca about it. I'm a bit baffled by this novel's popularity but I'm also baffled by those who intensely dislike it, and if Goodreads is any indication, many do. 

A mysterious old man comes to a small town in Georgia, discovers a coffeehouse that displays portraits of town citizens done by a local artist, buys the pictures, and gives them to the subjects of the portraits in little rituals he calls bestowals, enriching their lives with his compassion and insight as he chats with them, and in some cases, becomes involved in their lives. That's about it. It's a nice idea, feeling to me like a Hallmark Christmas movie directed by Frank Capra (though Christmas only makes a cameo appearance). The author has disowned the label "Christian fiction" for this, though on some level, it is, even as the religious aspects are for the most part downplayed or sugarcoated. Readers who label this "literary fiction" are wrong--this is written in a clear mainstream style, which is not the same thing as a "literary" style.

What I liked about it: the concept is interesting and Theo comes off as a genuinely nice guy, though his rationale for doing this is kept secret until the end; several of the characters are well-drawn and memorable (Asher the artist, Simone the cello player, Tony the bookseller); it's generally a good-hearted read that stresses the importance of human connection and compassion. 

What I liked less: most of the writing is clear and simple, which makes it easy to read, but there were sentences and word choices and plotpoints that felt wrong (I don't know how much extra editing was done for the Atria edition, but a little more would have been nice); at 400 pages, it's far too long and drags out the mystery of the title character too much; the explanations, when given, are tediously presented, and I agree with some readers who think that Theo's strategies for remaining mysterious are ultimately hurtful to some of the characters. It's all quite predictable, except perhaps for the climax which seemed awfully out of the blue. Readers who really dislike the book say it's for lack of narrative, though I think there eventually is one: it winds up being the story of Theo. Others bitterly resent it winding up as a Christian book in disguise, but it's pretty clear it's headed that way from early on. To its credit, it never gets ponderous or proselytizing. [Below is the author, Allen Levi.]

Some have speculated that its popularity shows how much kindness and connection and true Christian behavior are missing in our culture today, which is true. But the whole thing ultimately feels like a fantasy (a little Capraesque as I noted above) about how rich people should behave--Theo could not have done what he did without a lot of money. Another fantasy element is that all the major characters are likable (two minor characters are not and are mostly ignored). There is really no villain, though a bad thing happens at the climax. I found Ellen, the homeless woman, kind of irritating, partly because it's obvious that Levi almost desperately wants us to like her. I had the same feeling, to a lesser degree, with Mrs. Gidley, the cold woman who predictably warms up by the end. I admit to tearing up a bit in one scene (a cello recital), but the melodramatic and manipulative events at the end left me cold. I'm not sorry I read it but I remain at a loss as to why it's a top 10 bestseller.