Today I Learned a Word: “Luthier”

By Art Bromage from Seattle – Anthony Jackson in Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

A few nights ago I awoke, as I am wont to do, for no reason at all and found myself unable to get back to sleep. For some reason, the song “For the Love of Money” was echoing in my head. You know the one. It goes “Money money money money money money money…MUUUN-NAY!”

It is, of course, by the great R&B band The O’Jays, but I couldn’t recall that fact at that moment, trapped as I was in a sleep-deprived stupor. So I did what any red-blooded nerd would do: I grabbed my tablet and Googled it. This led me to the Wikipedia page for the song, where I learned that the famous bass guitar riff was played by a session musician named Anthony Jackson. 

Then, from his Wikipedia page, I learned that Jackson is something of legend in guitar circles, described as “a master of the instrument” by AllMusic. Like many musical masters (including Eddie Van Halen), Jackson has designed his own guitars, and employed a famous luthier named Carl Thomson to craft a special instrument that he, Jackson, had conceived. Called a “contrabass guitar,” it’s a bass with six strings, which seems bizarre. (Even a music idiot like me knows that a bass only has four strings.) But, like all bass guitars, the contrabass is tuned much lower than rhythm guitars. 

So, thanks to that one bout of insomnia (and thanks to Wikipedia), I learned that some bass guitars have six strings, and that a craftsman who builds guitars is called a luthier. 

So, there’s that. Will I ever use this bit of information? Maybe, maybe not. But I feel better for having learned it. That’s just me, I guess—a nerd who likes being a nerd.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “What is Love”

Once again, I’m stretching the definition of “rock” on this one. But the other night my wife and I were watching Disney+’s excellent new TV adaptation of “Percy Jackson and The Olympians” and the episode featured a great dance hit from 1990’s. It’s “What is Love” by German singer Haddaway. In fact, it’s one of those producer-manufactured songs, the brainchild of music wizards Dee Dee Halligan and Junior Torello, who hired Haddaway to sing it. Further evidence of its “manufactured” quality is the fact that the wonderful female vocals in the background are uncredited (apparently they were taken from a sample library).

To me, this song is proof that art doesn’t have to be “pure” to be wonderful. It doesn’t have to be the concept from a lone genius. A pair of producers wrote and designed this song, and then Haddaway put his own interpretation on it (at odds with the producer’s original vision). The result is history.

Rock on…

Perfect Films: “Altered States”

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I did not grow up in the 1960s, and I can’t claim any special knowledge of the magical and tumultuous period of American culture. However, I did grow up in the 1970s, when there was still just a faint afterglow of that glorious time. I vividly remember that day in 1975 when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army, and thus ended the most divisive and catastrophic the U.S. has ever fought. I also remember the election of Ronald Reagan, which finished, once for all, the last vestiges of what was once called the counterculture—that semi-revolutionary, underground movement characterized by sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. (Especially the drugs.)

I remember, in fact, some of my parents’ friends, who were obviously adherents to this so-called counterculture. They wore cool clothes (lots of paisley), drank run-and-cokes, and laughed at everything, as if they were seeing a different world through their bloodshot, dilated eyes. (I am pretty sure some mind-altering substances were involved.)

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Friday Night Rock-Out: “Red Skies”

The Fixx was one of those cool 1980s bands that seemed to have their finger on the pulse of (then) modern American culture, never mind the fact that they were a bunch of Brits. I saw them one Halloween night at the University of Florida Bandshell, where the student government used to host all kinds of music. The Fixx seemed really wiped out that night (Gainesville was, no doubt, a little venue that they management had squeezed in between bigger gigs). Still, they rocked.

Today I Learned a Word: “Googie”

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I was born in the 1960s, which means I am among the first generation to grow up with color TV. This also means I am also among the first Americans who are able to see their past in color. Or, at least, the urban landscape of our past. Maybe that’s why I love old TV shows like The Rockford Files—shows with a lot of exterior shots of working class cities and suburbs from back then. Once in a while, Rockford will race through Los Angeles and there, flashing by in the background, a McDonald’s from 1976 will appear. Or maybe a Woolworth’s or a Wash King.  (Yes, I do realize that most people have never heard of Woolworth’s or Wash King.)

These were the places I would visit with my parents when I was a kid, and it’s kind of neat to see them again, if only on a TV screen. Seeing them today, forty years later, I am often struck by how different the architecture was back then, especially the fast-food joints and coffee shops, many of which were getting on even when Rockford was in his prime. These vintage buildings from the 50s and 60s often had weird, playful curves and tilted walls, all of it stitched together at crazy angles. I remember one restaurant in particular that my mom used to take me to every weekend. It had plastic booths nestled under a rocket-red awning with trippy lights hanging down. It looked like something straight out of The Jetsons.

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“Wide Sargasso Sea” — Part 2 of 2!!!

In this episode, Ash and Margaret finish-off Jean Rhys’s classic 1967 novel, “Wide Sargasso Sea.” Also, Margaret explains the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope to Ash, while Ash considers how “Wide Sargasso Sea” might have been improved if the main character had known Kung Fu.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Baba O’Riley”

Back in the 1980s, there was no worse gaffe that a nerdy, trying-to-be-cool high school boy could commit than referring to The Who’s greatest song as “Teenage Wasteland.” (Yeah, I did it.) Never mind the fact that “Teenage Wasteland” is the chorus of the song, and it’s most powerful lyric. That’s not the name of the song, dammit.

It is, of course, “Baba O’Riley,” and while we may have gotten the name wrong, we knew it was just about the coolest song ever. That is, it was the coolest song ever until Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” came along. And in the decades since, I have come to realize how similar those two musical masterpieces are. Both are operatic, not just in the rock arias executed by their similarly powerful lead singers (Roger Daltrey and Freddie Mercury, respectively) but by the amount of sonic ground each covers. Each is divided into discernable “acts” with a different theme and style, and by the time each is finished, the listener feels a combination of elation and overwhelm. You have, quite literary, heard more than you can handle. 

One thing that might be lost on modern listeners is how innovative “Baba O’Riley” was when it came out in 1971 (and, indeed, how innovative it remains today). I first heard it about a decade after its release, and even then I found myself wondering how the hell the electronic ostinato was performed. That is, how the hell had they gotten a synthesizer back in 1971, and who was playing, and how the hell did they play it so fast? The answers were, as I learned a few years ago, that the sequence was 1.) created on a Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 organ, 2.) by Pete Townsend himself, and 3.) that he didn’t play it, he programmed it. 

But what I really love about the song is Roger Daltrey’s voice, and the power of his delivery. When Freddie Mercury appeared on the world stage, people sort of forgot how incredible a singer Daltrey is (I think he’s tied with Mercury as the best rock singer ever). Who cares that the lyrics don’t make sense—they have a poetic power all their own. 

“Let’s get together before we get much older…” Oh, yes. Definitely. 

Oh, and I also love the gypsy fiddle rave at the song’s end.

Enjoy…

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

Most of the art I’ve included in my on-going Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series has been from the 1970s and 1980s. Two golden ages of sci-fi, surely, which, more importantly, marked my golden age of sci-fi—my middle- and high-school years when I devoured all kinds of science fiction novels from the previous decades. 

And so it is with some surprise that I submit this episode’s sci-fi cover, which is only from 1998. But it’s still a classic. An instant classic, actually, and not just because it was done for one of the most influential sci-fi novels of all time, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Calling PKD a science fiction writer makes a bit more sense that calling Kurt Vonnegut a science fiction writer, or Franz Kafka a science fiction writer, but not much. Like Vonnegut and Kafka, Dick wrote surreal, even psychedelic novels that deal with issues of compassion, violence, identity, sanity. Most of all, they describe the problem of discerning reality from the fake. (The “ersatz,” as Dick likes to call it in his typical Germanophilic style). 

Do Androids Believe in Electric Sheep is Dick’s most famous book, in part because it inspired Blade Runner but also because it’s just a fine, complex, and vivid novel. Rick Deckert, the protagonist, is a bounty hunter who finds and kills runaway androids (called replicants in the film, these are flesh-based artificial people who look and act like human beings, only crueler.) 

The book was published in 1968 and has gone through dozens of editions and covers. But this cover, created by commercial artist Bruce Jensen, is my favorite. It depicts a male figure who might be a Greek statue, or a wax dummy (or an android), and yet whose expression conveys a sense of pathos that the viewer can’t quite look away from. This sense of pathos is amplified by the fact that lying between the viewer and the figure is a grid of what seems to be hog-wire, evoking a plot point in the book. Deckert, like many people in his dystopian future, keeps a farm animal as a pet—in his case, a sheep. But the wire also has echoes of the Holocaust, which is especially interesting since Dick’s inspiration for the book came after reading the diary of an S.S. Officer guarding a concentration camp. The figure is, we sense, a prisoner, although we don’t know what of. (Spoiler: it’s modern civilization.)

And then there is the sheep itself, rendered in a hallucinogenic little box over the male figure’s left eye. The only point of color in the work, the sheep draws the viewer’s attention the same way Deckert’s sheep draws out his latent humanity—it represents nature, vitality, warmth. Most importantly, it serves as something to love. 

Love, as it turns out, is the last human quality that the androids learn (and most never do). It is also, Dick strongly suggests, the defining aspect of living things.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Bitter Sweet Symphony”

When The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” hit the airwaves (yes, we still had radio back then) in 1997, it became an instant classic, and no one knew why. A rock song with an orchestra and virtually no electric guitar, it sounded utterly different from anything else in the rock world at that time. In fact, it was based on a sample from a Rolling Stones from 1965. I would argue that part of the song’s hypnotic appeal has roots in a much, much older genre: the march. 

A march is a piece of music with a very clean rhythm and slow time-signature, intended for people (often marching bands) to…well…march to. “Bitter Sweet Symphony” is a kind of post-modern, existentialist march, a gesture of defiance against a cold, dehumanizing world. This march-like quality was brilliantly exploited by director Walter Stern in the song’s video, which is one of the best music videos ever made.

Enjoy, and rock-on…