Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Irwin Chusid
Read between
December 18 - December 27, 2021
Charles Ives received a Pulitzer Prize after the debut performance of his Third Symphony in 1947—43 years after he’d completed the work, and a quarter-century after he’d stopped composing. Ives rarely consorted with other musicians, and composed largely in isolation.
What these often self-taught artists lack in conventional tunefulness they compensate for with earnestness and heartfelt passion. Harbor no doubts about their sincerity—they mean it.
Terry Adams, longtime keyboardist with the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet (also known as NRBQ), is a connoisseur of dodgy styles. Adams admits, “When music gets too perfect, I don’t want to hear it. When everybody’s in tune and the rhythm is perfect and there’s no mistakes, I find myself not really interested.”
Segregation may have divided America, but you wouldn’t know it from scanning the pop charts.
fremont, New Hampshire, in the late 1960s was a remote, culturally disconnected backwater. According to one visitor at the time, the town’s citizens all looked vaguely related.
After the troubadour’s death, J. R. Taylor wrote the following haiku in the New York Press: God, why Tiny Tim? He could still hit the high notes Unlike Robert Plant
A story in the Morning World about the Cherrys, then touring the Midwest, caught Hammerstein’s eye. They were described as “so grim and so serious that audiences were rolling in the aisles with laughter.” Oscar mulled the possibilities. “I’ve been putting on the best talent, and it hasn’t gone over,” he acknowledged. “I’m going to try the worst.”
“Back when college radio was fun, there were two main camps: those who thought that Jandek was a true genius on the level of Monk or [Hasil] Adkins, and those who thought that we were just looking for something so totally obscure, so unlistenable, that we would just out-hip everybody.
“[Years later]… Jandek is still here … And his detractors, well, they all work for Sony now, don’t they?” —C. KOON, YET ANOTHER FANZINE
Aside from these deficiencies, he’s exactly like the Fab Four. Or maybe the Velvet Underground after taxes.
They found the Unabomber, but Jandek remains at large.
Did someone say “rock and roll”? Jandek’s neither “rock” nor “roll.” He’s not even “and.”
You have to admire the man’s determination and his sincere intent. He’s loyal to his muse. You don’t release over two dozen full-length albums—for almost no audience—without a strong artistic commitment. Jandek is the musical equivalent of a tree that’s fallen in the forest—28 times.
Arty types otherwise repelled by Christian zeal allow a measure of tolerance for Daniel’s spirituality. “Fuck Jimmy Swaggart. Fuck the Bakkers,” wrote Art Black in Psychotronic. “The Lord’s got Daniel Johnston on his side.”
harry Partch made a career move at age 29 that more smart young composers and songwriters might consider: he collected all the music manuscripts he’d written—14 years’ worth of quartets, piano concertos, and symphonic poems—crammed everything in a pot-bellied stove, and torched the lot.
“I see a problem in that Kronos does everything so beautifully and with such control,” opined Blackburn. “Harry was kind of a messy guy. He wanted you to rape the instrument, or caress it, or fall on it, or miss the correct note as long as you did it with the right physicality and intent. But Kronos made it a pure-sounding kind of chamber piece. They took the teeth out of it a little bit, removed its bite.”
Tom Waits recorded Swordfishtrombones under Harry’s spell. “Hovering phantom-like over the whole album is the spirit of composer and hobo Harry Partch,” wrote Waits biographer Patrick Humphries. “[Harry] dismantled and rebuilt his own version of the whole concept of music and its purpose,” said Waits, “but I just like the sounds he makes.” Waits also told Playboy, “Partch was an innovator. It’s a little arrogant to say I see a relationship between his stuff and mine. I’m very crude, but I use things we hear around us all the time, built and found instruments.”
“Maybe it’s an American tenet or something,” mulled Blackburn. “If you persist in your crankiness long enough, you become a guru or hero.”
The standard practice for multitrack recording is to first tape bass and drum tracks—to lay a foundation—before overdubbing vocals and lead instruments. Barrett’s producers reversed this process. They first captured Syd’s vocals and guitar parts, then added the rhythm section. They probably feared that the Madcap would waste valuable studio time trying to synchronize with a live band. Barrett had difficulty staying in beat, resulting in all manner of odd, haphazard meters.
On Madcap and Barrett, Syd is emotionally dissipated, occasionally just going through the motions. The talent is still evident, the voice is as distinctive and disarming as ever, but he’s basically a human crater. “There’s no way to avoid feeling,” wrote Kris DiLorenzo, “that the two albums are the portrait of a breakdown.” The party was over, but no one was left to clean up the mess.
She recalls that at age two, while reaching for a fresh-baked cookie on a hot stove, her fingers melted together. The injured child was whisked to a doctor who, she attests, “used a knife to slice my melted hands into 10 fingers. He didn’t give me any thumbs, so it made me a better piano player.”
Into Outer Space remains, so far, the only commercially released project recorded on lunar terrain. Lucia explains, however, that in “real life” she doesn’t sound the same as she does on the record because “the air is different up there, you know.” She also visited Venus, but found the recording environment less to her liking.
Beefheart had no musical training and couldn’t read or write notation. He heard strange things in his head, which he demanded his Magic Band mates express instrumentally. He taught parts by hamfistedly pounding passages on a de-tuned piano, or whistling. (Years before Beefheart, this technique had been employed with perhaps greater degrees of sophistication by Raymond Scott and Sun Ra.) Zappa declared that the blues-fugitive had “trouble staying on a beat. Captain Beefheart has no natural rhythm.”
“When I first joined the group, Don was going to the library looking up books on how to control people, and literally how to brainwash these young kids. We’re talking sleep deprivation, food deprivation.” Drummer French told Beefheart biographer Mike Barnes that during the Trout Mask retreat, “I remember once going for a month and all we had to eat every day was one four-ounce cup of soya beans.”
Like the Beatles, Captain Beefheart will only “regroup” in one place. And it’s unlikely he’ll sing in unison with any heavenly choir.
The dizzy diva was accompanied for years by McMoon, who, the story goes, was the only one of 20 auditioned pianists who could play along with Jenkins and keep a straight face.
The Ledge puts it all in perspective: “Music critics and record reviewers the world over have written about me: that I can’t sing, that I can’t play the guitar, that I don’t know how to carry a tune. Well, neither can Kenny Rogers nor Mick Jagger. All of us are in the same boat.”
Snowden, in her mid-40s, is optimistic despite her current unemployment. In mid-1998, she was laid off from her music teaching job in Boston. “Every year they called me back. But this year, they didn’t,” she lamented. “I called about any openings, but the lady said, ‘We’re not gonna hire you this year, because the principal didn’t want to recommend you.’ I called the principal, and she said, ‘Everybody’s proven themselves except you.’ So I got laid off.” She wasn’t qualified to teach little children about music, but here she is in New York City being produced by Fred Schneider and surrounded
...more
At Venus, Snowden’s crude-looking, unheard demo was relegated to an Everest of unsolicited “mystery” cassettes that would be plastic-bagged and sold five-for-a-buck. One day, the curious Ratboy noted the ingenuous, disarming black-and-white cover photo of B. J. and said, “We gotta listen to this.” Bob Giordano, a fellow sales clerk, recalled, “Ratboy put it on and everybody was mesmerized. People in the store would stop and say, ‘What the hell is that?’ They’d never heard anything like it.” Venus patrons are among the planet’s most ennuyé; they’ve heard, read, seen it all. How did B. J.’s tape
...more
“I know a band who’ve been signed and dropped by two major labels,” said Giordano. “They wanted so bad to be rock stars immediately, to live the high life. Then there’s people like B. J. who don’t crave the limelight. They play out of genuine love of music. You can’t fake sincerity. She’s very joyful and she’s not spoiled. It’s inspiring to be involved with someone who gets such a thrill from making music. Hopefully in a few years she’ll still feel that way. She’s sweet, and I value that.”
Autonomy is often the prevailing modus, the process intensely solipsistic. Outsider efforts thus reflect greater individual control over the final creative contour. This is partly attributable to the low-budget operations of many outsiders, and in some cases to their inability or unwillingness to cooperate with or trust anyone but themselves. It’s ironic that the less corporate money at an artist’s disposal, the more singular the vision. In this, the outsider represents greater creative purity, something closer to a natural state.
To the mainstream artist, the question is: “Where do you get your ideas?” The artist may have an answer, or may not. As regards the outsider, the question—never asked directly, but always to a third party—is: “What were they thinking?”
