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.