People get notable, even famous, occasionally household words, for all sorts of reasons. More or less everybody knew who Glenn Campbell was when he was alive. People still mostly do. For instance, in order to portray a young, violent, drunken, crooked policeman as anachronistically interesting in the movieWar on Everyone, the writer made him a Glenn Campbell fan. Glenn was in the movies, and had TV shows, and big hit records, and had a genial public persona that lended itself to fitting in most everywhere.
Leon Russell isn’t obscure, exactly. He’s hardly a household word, though. He had some hits with his name on them. Plenty more without his name on them. He wasn’t just a musician. He was a bandleader and composer and arranger and riotmaster. He morphed into a wonderful grampa-style white-bearded griot-cowboy, an image that suited him right to the end. His nickname was the Master of Time and Space, and for good reason.
People who could barely sing or play their instruments used to think they could become pop stars if they wished hard enough. The industry rewarded plenty of these no-talent people possessed of nothing more than the correct haircuts with recording contracts, and hired anonymous people to play their instruments for them while they posed for the album covers. Two of those anonymous people were Glenn Campbell and Leon Russell. They were part of a loose coterie of session musicians in Los Angeles dubbed the Wrecking Crew. There’s an interesting documentary of them made by Tommy Tedesco’s son, I believe, that is worth your time.
Telling you to watch it is much easier than trying to list the hit records they played on. In practical terms, it can’t be done, anyway, because those people played on so many records they couldn’t even remember themselves how many they’d done.
Leon is listed on the Wikiup as having 251 total artist credits on records. These include 77 playing the piano, 23 as the arranger, 20 playing some other kind of keyboard, 17 playing the guitar, 14 playing the organ, 11 playing the electric piano, 11 singing, 10 playing the bass, and 58 other miscellaneous instruments ranging from trumpet to bells. He wrote 282 pieces of music that made it onto vinyl one way or the other. He played on records for Frank Sinatra and The Flying Burrito Brothers , and everyone in between who was worth a damn. He didn’t just write Grammy-winning songs; he wrote songs that made it into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In between all that, he found time to have 6 children.
So maybe you’ll have a pop star career if you’re dissolute and greedy and grabby and shameless enough to shinny up the greasy pole of fame that the music business represents. But you’ll never be a Master of Time and Space, because those people are drawing on a reservoir of iron talent, effort, and experience. They’re just noodling around in that video, and clowning a bit, and hotdamn look at them go.
That’s Bola Sete playing the Spanish guitar with the Vince Guaraldi Trio way back when, in 1963. It’s about as pleasant a half hour as you can spend.
Bola was from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. His real name was Djama de Andrade. The name Bola Sete is a kind of in-joke. It means Seven Ball in Portuguese. The seven ball is the only black ball on the snooker table. People used to have more of a sense of humor way back when.
His family was dirt poor. He had six sisters. Every member of the family played a musical instrument, because music used to be more important in regular life way back when. Bola first learned to play on a Cavaquinho, sort of a cross between a Spanish guitar and a ukulele. He eventually got a real guitar, and learned classical music. He had a heavy duty musical education, despite his straitened circumstances. A well-to-do couple sponsored him at a school in Rio, and then a conservatory in Sao Paolo. People used to look out for each other way back when.
Eventually he started playing samba music in Rio. He toured all around, Italy, various places in South America, Nueva York, and San Francisco, mostly in Sheraton hotels, because there used to be good live music in hotel lounges way back when. Dizzy Gillespie heard him play and invited him to tour with him. People used to catch breaks in recognition of their talent and effort way back when. After a successful stint at the Monterey Jazz Festival, Bola hooked up with Vince Guaraldi.
Of course everyone recognizes Vince Guaraldi from his Charlie Brown Christmas album. He was one of those guys that seemed square, but in reality was very hip indeed. There were a lot of talented, but somewhat overlooked guys like him way back when.
Vince and Bola both died young. Guaraldi died of a heart attack when he was only 47. Bola died of cancer when he was 63. It’s a good thing they had cameras and microphones way back when.
I’m a little late to this party, but I take things as I find them. I’m confused, however, how to “take” an Elvis impersonator who’s built an exact replica of all the original Star Trek teevee show sets in an abandoned dollar store in Ticonderoga, New York, and sort of inhabits them.
For all of you with, ahem, suspicious minds, I assure you I didn’t make this up:
James Cawley really liked Star Trek. Really really liked Star Trek. By the power of Landru and re-runs, (he’s younger than the show is), he was hooked on a show about bombing around the galaxy and groping green chicks, while listening to logical advice on why you shouldn’t, and doing it anyway. You know, because Shatner.
Cawley has built his own Desilu Xanadu, using mostly his own money, money earned as an Elvis impersonator.
Why would an Elvis impersonator build Star Trek sets? I dunno. You’re asking the wrong guy. I don’t know why an Elvis impersonator would do anything, including impersonating Elvis. I can’t visit that mindset without pharmaceutical help, and a fried banana and peanut butter sandwich. But Cawley knew what he was about. He wanted to make his own Star Trek episodes, and did it:
I suppose I could jest about it, but it does have a million views on YouTube. I was a little kid when Star Trek first came out, and I’m not sure a million people watched an episode back then. Everybody was watching Bewitched or something. Star Trek was “out there” in more ways than one, and not everyone wanted to see a doughy Canadian actor with a Christopher Walken delivery wrestle a guy in a dollar store tyrannosaurus Halloween costume over a patch of unpaved Burbank backlot. But give it its due: it spawned a zillion imitators.
However, sooner or later, the suits come for you. CBS/Paramount at one time looked the other way when people made fan-fiction type stuff, like Cawley’s bargain basement Enterprise enterprise, but eventually they cracked down on the whole scene. It wasn’t Cawley’s fault. He was doing it because he loved it. But others tried to make real coin with Star Trek homages, and they pissed in the whole Gene pool.
But the Elvis gene runs deep. The King don’t quit, until he makes it to the bathroom, anyway. Kirk has any number of Kobayashi Maru tricks up his sleeve. And Cawley is both of them, remember? He figured if he could make deals with Klingons on his show, he could certainly make deals with Gene Roddenberry’s copyright successors. So he did.
After a long lunch with more than a few Romulan Ales, no doubt, the salt vampires in the legal department at CBS/Paramount decided to let Cawley have his fun. In return for a cut of the action, I’m sure. Why not let Space Elvis Cawley give tours of the stomping grounds of Space Elvis Shatner? So they do. And now that real money is involved, real Shatners are involved, too.
It’s a Corbomite Maneuver for money for a lot of people now:
Hey, don’t sleep on Clint Howard, just because captain Kirk is holding court on the bridge with all the high rollers. Howard appeared on The Andy Griffith Show, Star Trek, and Seinfeld. Even Spock couldn’t compete with that, although inventing Uber and driving the Bangles to Liverpool was a strong career move, you have to admit.
Teevee and movies and other media masquerade as entertainment, but there’s a lot more going on there. Half-hour situation comedies like Andy Griffith and Dick van Dyke are closer to Aesop’s Fables than jokes stapled onto depictions of quotidian life. They usually contain little parables, and become a form of guidance for the general audience. They normally contain a morality test of some sort over trivial affairs that the characters work their way through in 24 minutes or so. Homily-length redemption ensues with 6 minutes of soapsuds commercials mixed in. Women start dressing like Laura Petrie and men start acting like Rob Petrie even though they might not be aware they’re doing it. That’s why teevee got so destructive, as the ghouls who make the shows looked for new thrills to peddle. Gilligan found himself in desperate straits, but he didn’t start cooking meth in his hut to get by.
TV shows like Star Trek are a form of replacement for passion plays for a couple of generations who thought the Beach Boys were an improvement on Giuseppe Verdi, and Andy Griffith was John the Baptist. Real passion plays, or pageants (paging Cecil B. DeMille), were:
The Passion Play or Easter pageant is a dramatic presentation depicting the Passion of Jesus Christ: his trial, suffering and death. The viewing of and participation in Passion Plays is a traditional part of Lent in several Christian denominations, particularly in the Catholic and Evangelical traditions; as such Passion Plays are often ecumenical Christian productions.
Passion Plays have had a long and complex history involving faith and devotion, civic pageantry, religious and political censorship, large-scale revival and historical re-enactments.
In a very real way, the entertainment biz replaced all forms of religion in American life. Newspapers, a form of entertainment, killed the Catholic church dead, for instance. And remember, the government is just showbiz for ugly people. It wasn’t a unanimous move into another thing, of course. There’s some overlap, but there’s a definable Star Trek sect, with schismatics taking their hyperdrive schematics and forming a Star Wars splinter denomination. In old-fangled passion plays, Jesus has to work through some things in Gethsemane. If you boldly go where no man has gone before, you have to be tempted by a hot galactic strumpet with a bouffant and a Reynolds Wrap bikini before you get down to brass tacks and dilithium transubstantiation and kick some Klingon ass. But it’s all wrapped up in an hour, and everyone goes home blessed.
So I guess it’s not all that odd that a prophet in a spangled jumpsuit and pompadour would appear out of the wilderness of upstate New York to become the patriarch, an interstellar Billy Sunday, for the one true religion that America has produced: Elvis in Space.
That’s the Kinks, from 1966. They’re an odd and wonderful outfit. In some ways, they’re the proto-Steely Dan. Don’t get me wrong; the music they’re making has nothing much in common with Fagen and Becker, but they had the same knack for composing lyrics that had never been heard before, and would never be uttered by anyone else afterward. Delightfully misanthropic and wry.
First, let’s get one thing out of the way. I’m not talking about Postmodern philosophy. I know all about Derrida and deconstruction. The world will be a happier place when people like Jacques are once again sitting at card tables outside sketchy bookstores handing out mimeographed flyers, instead of running all the ivy league schools and government think tanks. All second rate thinkers think that because Einstein said time is relative, everything is. They figure there can be no abstract ideas of right or wrong. That’s a convenient worldview if you’re planning on tapdancing on the Ten Commandments, for instance. It’s the intellectual version of hiding in the bathroom when the check comes while the people you invited to dinner pay it. We’re not into that sort of cosmology here at the cottage. To quote the philosopher Sobchak, This is not ‘nam. There are rules.
Postmodern art and architecture and writing and whatall are ostensibly a reaction to hidebound authority, but they’re really a reaction to the destruction of all traditions that the moderns already accomplished. Postmodernists still want to kill traditions, but they want to wear their skin as a suit if they feel like it. They want to use what they couldn’t make themselves without following the rules that made their production possible. They’re born experts at everything. Just ask them, they’ll tell you so.
So let’s run down a list of attributes from postmodern architecture, movies, fashion, and the general zietgeist, so we know what we’re talking about. We’ll refer to the descriptions from a few earlier posts about postmodern stuff, because I’m lazy.
Disorganized, almost random agglomerations of thoughts, speech, sounds, behavior, etc.
A rejection of certainty in thought, leading to an inability to grasp the difference between right and wrong, or beautiful and ugly, etc.
Multiple, incompatible, often contradictory, ad hoc, fragmented, and ambivalent meanings for even the most mundane of objects or concepts
A penchant for jargon that only a select few can understand or share
A feeling that real life and objects can be reproduced so closely that the reproductions can take the place of the original items, or even people
An inability to understand the difference, or even care about, the difference between the past, the present, and the future. Everything only matters in the present
A rejection of any form of linear timeline in a story. People might do things, things might happen, but the causal connection between actions and results is unimportant, or even completely missing
Imagining you’ve been systematically excluded from regular life by unseen but all-powerful forces
A complete rejection of manners and proscribed behaviors in public discourse, appearance, the workplace, and the home.
Oh, I’m sorry. I apologize unreservedly. I have too many tabs open, and while I was trying to describe the worldview of the typical postmodern person, I accidentally listed all the attributes of someone suffering from schizophrenia. My bad.
Everybody sing along! It’s fun to stay at the YMCA!
Oh, yeah, I guess I forgot to mention hallucinations and hearing voices. Sorry.
When I was young, someone once told me a very valuable thing. They said, “If you don’t have good manners, act like you do, it’s the same thing.” Words of wisdom, there. Since that little nugget of horse sense is already taken, I’ll have to coin something new: “If you’re not born with schizophrenia, act postmodern, it’s the same thing.”
[Update: Many thanks go out to Emil, and an anonymous donor, for their recent generous hits on our tip jar. I greatly appreciate it!]
Month: February 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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