Take Five: A fab edition with bonus content!
Yes, I'm the umpteenth person to weigh in on the new Beatles documentary, but you also get Olivia Tremor Control, Camille Dungy, Lawrence Block, and Bill Fox
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.
This is a long one because the fifth item is really five items itself. I couldn’t limit myself to one observation about the new Beatles documentary, so you get some extra content, a sort of Revolution 9, if you will.
1. Olivia Tremor Control - ‘Garden of Light’ and ‘The Same Place’
It was a bittersweet Friday last week. An unexpected single from the band Olivia Tremor Control was released that morning, while word of the passing of the band’s Will Cullen Hart came that afternoon. The band was part of the Elephant 6 collective based in Athens, Georgia, playing Dadaesque psychedelic pop alongside compatriots like Neutral Milk Hotel and Apples in Stereo, among others. Hart’s chief collaborator in the group, Bill Doss, died in 2012, but had recorded music meant for a new OTC project before his passing A recent documentary about the movement included footage of Hart working on new music as well, so there was hope something would eventually surface. These two songs are part of the better-late-than-never soundtrack for that film, and stand as a fitting epitaph for Doss and Hart. Doss’s contributions to the band were always catchy, a contrast to Hart’s more challenging, musique concrète offerings. That split fits a bit here. “Garden of Light,” a Doss-driven track, is typically sunny and hook laden, while “The Same Place,” which leans more in Hart’s direction, makes one work a bit more to uncover the hooks, but this is a relatively straightforward song that shows Hart’s strong pop instincts. Neither would be out of place on the band’s masterwork, 1996’s Music From The Unrealized Film Script: Dusk At Cubist Castle. One hopes there is more in the vault that will reach our ears someday.
2. Camille Dungy on honoring what came before
I suppose it's a function of aging, but I think a lot these days about lineage and legacy. I had the pleasure of spending some time with the poet and essayist Camille Dungy a few weeks back when the City of Literature brought her to town to present her with the Paul Engle Prize. That exposure has sent me back to her work, and every time I turn a page I seem to find something I want to jot down. This, from her essay "Body of Evidence" in the collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, addresses the idea of being cognizant of the hardships faced by those who came before when doing your own work.
When I say I feel guilty when I could be writing and I am not writing, it is with this background in the foreground. If I am wasting time, it is not my time alone I have squandered. I don't feel selfish when I focus my attention on writing because, when I am writing well, I am never writing my story alone.
3. Bill Fox - Shelter From the Smoke
It doesn’t help the general state of clutter that is the room where I keep my music-related collections — albums, CDs, books and other assorted ephemera — but sometimes I’m glad when I pick up a second copy of something. In this case it was Shelter from the Smoke, the solo debut of Ohio musician Bill Fox. Fox led the little known poppy punk band The Mice in the ’80s, and then resurfaced in the late ’90s as a more folk-pop solo act. Shelter from the Smoke was released on a tiny label in 1997, and then reissued a year later on a slightly less tiny label. That’s when I picked it up on CD. I liked it, but didn’t fall in love. I did keep up with his subsequent work, but always admired it more than I wanted to listen. Another reissue came from Scat Records (who have a lot of my money thanks to many Guided by Voices releases over the years) in 2021. That label needed some capital to fund a new project, and a sale last month meant to bring in some cash caught my eye. I scooped up this new version on vinyl, which promised songs from both earlier editions of the album. Listening this week — which is in contrast to having it on while doing other things — made me appreciate what is really a masterpiece of lo-fi pop. A highlight was a song left off of the version I had before, “Andnowagain,” linked above, which has such a strong vocal hook that one hardly notices the song itself is little more than a strummed acoustic guitar with a bit of bass and a late-appearing lead. Listening to vinyl for me means sitting on the couch, reading the liner notes and actively listening, which is increasingly rare. As such, this duplicate purchase was a worthy expenditure.
4. Lawrence Block — A Writer Prepares
I read my first Lawrence Block novel at the beginning of 1993. I was working as a reporter in Ottumwa, Iowa, fresh out of college and in a town where I knew hardly anyone. I think it was a review in Entertainment Weekly that led me to Block. It was probably for A Walk Among the Tombstones,which was fairly new at the time, but the one available on the shelf at the Ottumwa Public Library was A Ticket to the Boneyard, so that's what I read. I loved it, and read the rest of what they had of his on the shelves, which was maybe four or five other titles. I moved back to Iowa City later that fall and picked up from there, reading 13 of his books before the year was out. Since then, I have read at least one Block book each year, and often several more. He was wildly prolific, writing a book a month for the pulps — first erotica, then crime — in his earliest days, and still publishing about a book a year from the ’80s until recently. The bibliography on his website has 16 different categories, so we’re talking somewhere between 100 and 200 books. Knowing there won’t be much more new from the 84 year old, I had been trying to save one of his final books, A Writer Prepares, a memoir that covers his formative years as a writer, but finally caved in and read it. It's not a how to; rather a "just do," as in "just do the work and I'll leave it to you to figure out how to turn that into a career.” And work he did, cranking out books that, for the most part, still hold up half a century later.1
5. Some interesting moments in "Beatles '64"
And here is where one of five becomes five itself, rendering this whole thing a sort of Revolution 9, if you will.
The trope that America embraced the Beatles to get over the assassination of President Kennedy runs through the new documentary, "Beatles '64" on Disney+, of course, but amid that usual fare is plenty of context that helps to frame the endlessly dissected pop group. These smaller moments are illuminating, as they explore the way the Beatles subverted ideas of masculinity, pointed up the racism in popular culture, discussed their place in post-war Britain, acknowledged that it was the outside world that was crazy, not the band; and dismissed the idea at that early stage that what the band was doing could be considered "culture."
-John Lennon, in conversation with media theorist Marshall McLuhan about how pop music is driven by frustration, counters that the Beatles music was instead a product of contentment: "We get rid of frustration through the music, obviously… The Beatles and their ilk were created by the vacuum of non-conscription for the army… When I was still 16, I was looking forward to hiding in Ireland because they still had conscription. And then it was all over. I just missed it in 1940. And from then on, the whole music thing burst out, and we just knew we were the army that never was. We were the generation that were allowed to live, and the music came out of that."
-Feminist author Betty Friedan is shown talking about the new crop of long-haired boys. Whether she is specifically discussing the Beatles or not, she does identify the shift in masculinity they represented: "Those boys who are wearing their hair long are saying 'no' to the masculine mystique, they are saying saying no to that brutal, sadistic, tight-lipped, crew cut, Prussian, big muscle, Ernest Hemingway, kill bears when there are no bears to kill and napalm all the children in Vietnam and Cambodia to prove I'm a man, and be dominant and superior to anyone concerned and never show any softness… that man who is strong enough to be gentle, that is a new man."
-George Harrison, asked if things were crazy back in those days of the band, says, "Not within the band. I think the craziness was going on in the world. And in the band it was kind of… we were kind of normal and the rest of the world was crazy. That's how it looked to me."
-Ron Isley of the Isley Brothers, talks about the Beatles making a hit of his group's song, "Twist and Shout," and about the questions that raised about why more black artists weren't given the same level of exposure: "We were glad. We were so glad. It was great for us that they did our songs. Paul McCartney would often say, 'If it wasn't for the Isley Brothers, we would still be in Liverpool.' We were kind of wondering why couldn't we be on some of the shows they were on. We should have been on the Ed Sullivan Show."
-Paul McCartney, being interviewed on a train, is asked, "What place do you think this story of the Beatles is going to have in Western culture?" McCartney says, "Western culture?" and then laughs. "I don't know. You must be kidding with that question. Culture? It's not culture." "What is it?" he is asked. He responds, "That's a good laugh."
Block references the bibliography of his work, A Trawl Among the Shelves, assembled by Terry Zobeck, that offers information about every known publication of his career. Yes, that requires a book, and it’s one that makes clear I'll never read every word the man wrote, despite having a tremendous head start. One thing I had completely forgotten was that I myself published Block. Right there in A Trawl was a listing for the first issue of Grift, a crime fiction magazine I edited and published back in 2012. Block graciously contributed an essay. (copies still available!)