The autumn is coming, or is here. There is no way to know. The farmer rushes, for he knows in his bones what is to come, as do we all. His daily efforts — never mighty, always steady — will yield their dividends if the cold dead hand of fortune does not intervene. One doesn’t dwell on such things, except on the Sabbath, when you are not among them.
The fall is bittersweet for any man. The year is old enough to provide, but the reminder of the fresh strong exertions of spring, gone forever into the ground, are arrayed all around. The exhortation: “You will never see its like again” is the beginning of something, too.
Isaac Hayes passed away. I never really cared for Isaac Hayes. But I loved Isaac Hayes, too. Just not the guy you’re thinking of. This is Isaac Hayes, for instance. Hint: he’s not on the screen.
That’s The Astors. I don’t imagine they’re related to John Jacob. They look shell-shocked to be popular, but they shouldn’t have worried — it wouldn’t last long enough to present a problem for them. The songwriter was never going away. Hayes. The media goes overboard when a celebrity dies now. Everybody gets their Princess Di moment, the special guest star at the funeral, who can’t defend themselves anymore and so serves as a big broad brush for critics to talk about themselves.
That’s why they’re talking about Southpark and Hot Buttered Soul and Shaft. Isaac Hayes as the prototypical Mr.T clown, outrageous in dress and baritone of voice. I looked at Southpark once. Children swearing is funny — for around twenty seconds. I’m informed that the show ran for more than twenty seconds — thus, a failure.
Shaft was a bad movie and a lame soundtrack, mistaken for a bad movie and a good soundtrack. Trouble Man was a lame movie with a great soundtrack. Superfly was a bad movie with a great soundtrack. Across 110th Street was a bad movie with a great soundtrack. Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and Bobby Womack did a lot more with their opportunity than mumble over another guy stomping on a wah-wah pedal while scratching his guitar, all the while fighting with a lounge-act horn arrangement for attention while wearing a towtruck chain. Shaft was a joke, and when you break out laughing watching Bart and Lisa Simpson sing it at karaoke, it’s funny because it’s lame and lovable and incongruous,not because it was any good in the first place.
But I told you I loved Isaac Hayes, and it’s true. He was my favorite kind of artist: He was talented, cultivated that talent, and he worked all the time. When I was a young man, and I wanted to play music, I started mining old music to play. I discovered the glittering mine that is Stax/Volt records, and I’ve never seen its like since.
Stax/Volt was like the Warner Brothers cartoons to Motown’s Disney. It was hipper and edgier and funkier and sounded more like a few guys banging on instruments and singing than the posh Motown sound. Isaac Hayes was fixture at Stax, one of those guys that the public would never hear about until he shaved his head and put on a chain and acted the clown to get attention. Can’t blame him; setting yourself on fire and standing out front pays better. Diana Ross is still cashing checks, after all, and James Jamerson sleeps in a pauper’s grave.
The Blues Brothers discovered Stax, and made a good-natured mess of liking it. It said Hayes on tons of those 45s under the title of the songs. Sam and Dave. Carla Thomas. People like that. The house band for Stax was Booker T. and the MGs, and I always think of Steve Cropper, the MGs guitarist, in the same way as Isaac Hayes. That’s Steve’s name on Dock of the Bay, for instance.
If you don’t like Green Onions, you’re not an American in your heart and should leave now.
That’s Stax, and Isaac Hayes was one of a hearty handful of interesting people that made it go. Isaac Hayes was talented, he worked hard, he had a hard time of it here and there, got up off the floor when his circumstances put him there, acted the clown when it was required of him –his version of the clown was to be very serious-looking, of course–and practiced his craft. He’s gone now, but his little reverberations will echo pleasantly around the place for a good, long while.
If you have any deficiencies, deformities, or infirimities, lay the offending limb on the electrographic machinery and the Soul Power will cure it. Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.
I love the Steampunk kids. There is an implicit understanding in their brass and iron fetishes that Victorians integrated all sorts of technological breakthroughs immediately into their lives with an enormous amount of panache — much more so than we’ve been managing it since. It’s easy to think we live in fast-moving times, but we’ve got nothing on the Victorians.
Many people always point to Apple as the modern version of sleek design, but I can’t help thinking it’s all just regurgitated West German appliance design from the 1960s. The Victorians made everything interesting to look at, right away, and kept on riffing.
Of course Jules Verne is the Steampunk Kids deity, but Hector Guimard needs to go in the Pantheon somewhere as a sort of latter day saint. Art Nouveau is more-or-less post-Victorian, but I really think it’s more like Victorian on steroids, acid, and speed. Wait a minute. That’s not elegant –“steroids, acid, and speed.” In keeping with the Victorian vibe, let’s change it to: laudanum, absinthe, coca, and roast beef.
[Another one written two years ago. It’s funny to think that no one now cares about what the Dixie Chicks think about anything, same as me. Today Paris Hilton is the intelligentsia’s go-to… um… guy for…er… her penetrating insights on the political scene. Intellectuals are not serious people.]
I don’t care what the Dixie Chicks think about George Bush. But then again, I don’t care what the Dixie Chicks think about much of anything, now that you mention it. Let’s take it to the limit, and mention I don’t care what the Dixie Chicks think about the Dixie Chicks themselves, or music in general.
My only point is: people like them are no more likely to have a useful opinion than anybody you find in the phonebook; and if my experience with musicians is anything to go by, their opinion is much more likely to be worthless than that held by your average stevedore. People who have their M&Ms sorted aren’t living in anything like the real world. They think they were made wealthy because they are wonderful — not odd, or weird, or unusual, or simply pushier than most — and think that wonderfulness seeps into all matters.
I’ve singled out the Dixie Chicks for calumny only because they’re most prominent in my mind right now for shooting their mouths off over things they know little about. You could insert almost any celebrity in there and say the same thing. But if you wade past their wild ideas about politics and how the average person should order their affairs, the part that really makes you laugh is how little they know about their own craft. I swear the reason they talk about genocide in Darfur at the drop of a hat–it’s really bad, you know, and they’re really against small children being chopped up with machetes willy-nilly– is that they really have little to offer on the walk of life they inhabit, and try to play sleight of hand with opinions to throw you off the scent.
Steely Dan is a favorite around the Cottage, and has been for thirty years or more. And I’m very interested in hearing about how they assemble the music they make. So this video finds me fascinated.
I’m a half-assed musician. I have no pretensions. I was as successful as I cared to be, and never aspired to be interviewed in Rolling Stone about how crummy Darfur is. I don’t wish that I was the guys in the video playing in Steely Dan. I wish to be the guy watching this video. [My brother is as good as any of them, BTW; their kind is not strange and remote to me]
Those fellows are professional musicians, like a sort of hired assassin, and have devoted their lives to learning their craft and cultivating relationships with influential musical people. They have talent, and they have cultivated that talent in a very organized and doggedly persistent way. They deserve a certain amount of respect that some that are more famous for more trivial reasons do not. These are not a collection of haircuts. They do not appear on magazine covers naked to gain notoriety. They are musicians and scholars, not solely attention mongers.
Steely Dan is essentially Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the two fellows you see sitting at the mixing board, and a revolving bunch of studio musicians. I’d be hard pressed to point to two other people that did whatever the hell they felt like in popular music, as they did, and were successful over the long haul. Most pop artists minutely gauge the public’s taste and pander to it. It apparently dawned on Becker and Fagen that they could never pander to anybody’s taste anyway; might as well be strange — and wonderful.
I have a feeling that in a few decades, no one will remember people like the Dixie Chicks or anyone else you could name in pop music much, or their opinions, but combos in lounges will still open up whatever wonderful version of music books they have in the future, and play Josie, or Green Earrings, or Peg, or Aja, or any one of a number of sublime and interesting songs that Steely Dan wrote.
For a change, people who know what they are talking about, talk about what they know, with a camera pointed at them.
Month: August 2008
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
The autumn is coming, or is here. There is no way to know. The farmer rushes, for he knows in his bones what is to come, as do we all. His daily efforts — never mighty, always steady — will yield their dividends if the cold dead hand of fortune does not intervene. One doesn’t dwell on such things, except on the Sabbath, when you are not among them.
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