Monthly Archives: March 2010

You Had To Ask Me

by John Carvill

You Had To Ask Me Where It Was At: Bob Dylan & the Media

An exploration of Dylan’s media relations, as refracted through Rolling Stone’s anthology of ‘essential’ Dylan interviews and press conference transcripts.

Part One: Who is Mr Jones?


“Dylan’s such a fucking maniac. Y’know, I’ve not said anything specifically, but I hope I’ve done something here to remind how intense he is, and how much that intensity has only been successfully revealed through abstract expressionism in rock’n'roll. I look at him and I don’t see a guy giving out leaflets, holding a banner. I see a machine gun.” 

- Patti Smith


“I and I
In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives.
I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives.”

- Bob Dylan, ‘I and I’

 

 


Bob Dylan has always been a slippery devil. In his erudite, thought-provoking introduction to this chronological collection of interviews, Jonathan Cott provides an insightful exploration of Dylan’s “particulated (some might say self-splitting) nature”, reminding us that Dylan’s ‘chameleonic’ quality was apparent right from the start of his career, when he first began hawking his boho hobo schtick around Greenwich Village. Not only did the picaresque yarns he spun about his personal history keep changing, but Dylan even seemed to be capable of radically altering his physical appearance, like “the Greek sea deity Proteus, who in order to elude his pursuers continually shape-shifted from dragon to lion to fire to flood – uttering prophecies along the way”.

The word ‘sides’ comes up a lot when talking about Bob Dylan. Dylan’s old Woodstock friend Bernard Paturel – to whom Dylan had given a loosely specified job in order to prevent Paturel from having to go and work for IBM – summed up Dylan’s omnifaceted nature better than anyone before or since, with his ineffable aphorism, “There are so many sides to Bob Dylan, he’s round.” Patti Smith recalled how certain people or situations could “bring out that ‘Don’t Look Back’ side of Dylan. Dylan’s got that side still — it’s all stored up — he’s all those people, he’s still that guy, he hasn’t turned beautiful and gentle, he’s a real bastard — but that’s what I think is great, for his art”.

One of the people who could bring out that side of Dylan was fellow folksinger (and former friend) Phil Ochs. Patti Smith recalled the night of the party before Dylan’s Rolling Thunder troupe, which Ochs had pointedly not been invited to join, took to the road: “Bob wouldn’t talk to Phil Ochs. The two of them… it was like there was a noose in the middle of the room and they were circling around, trying to get each other to hang themselves.” Tragically, Ochs actually did eventually hang himself, not long after recording a monologue in which he imagined himself confronting Dylan and telling him, “You used to be a genius, now you’re just dogshit”.

The word ‘sides’ comes up a lot even when talking to Bob Dylan. “I didn’t want to be a political moralist”, Dylan has said, “There were people who just did that. Phil Ochs focused on political things, but there are many sides to us, and I wanted to follow them all. We can feel very generous one day and very selfish the next hour.”

It’s not much of a claim to say, of any artist, that they have a number of sides; in fact it would surely be hard to find a noteworthy artist who could be thought of as one-dimensional. But the word ‘sides’, in such a context, usually means aspects; in Dylan’s case, the word more pertinently connotes ‘sides’ as in warring factions, Dylan’s personality seeming sometimes to be almost entirely composed of contradictions, dualities, and dichotomies. And it’s tempting to speculate that Dylan’s flare-ups with Phil Ochs were intensified by the fact that Ochs himself personified the side of Dylan that a lot of fans wanted Dylan to be all the time: big-hearted and decent and fired up by social conscience and political commitment.

Robert Shelton – still, even after all these years, Dylan’s most credible biographer – recorded how “Dylan’s ambivalence has confounded everyone who has ever been close to him”, and remarked how it sometimes even confused Dylan: “I’m inconsistent, even to myself.” Dylan has ascribed this to his Gemini personality, which “forces me to extremes. I’m never really balanced in the middle.”

Questions of indistinct and conflicted identity permeate Dylan’s art, at a number of levels. In an abstract sense, they manifest themselves in terms of structure – the fragmented, almost cubist approach to narrative, and the sifting of first, second, and third persons in songs such as ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, for instance. But they’re also explicitly addressed in the lyrics. Dylan pointed Shelton to the wording of ‘Where Are You Tonight?’ – “I fought with my twin, that enemy within, ’til both of us fell by the way” – citing this as a nakedly autobiographical depiction of “the mortal battle with his alter ego”, explaining to Shelton that he felt he needed to win his own inner conflicts, in order to be able to take on the world: “If you deal with the enemy within, then no enemy without can stand a chance.”

Leonard Cohen likes to tell the story of Dylan asking him how long it had taken to write ‘Hallelujah’, Cohen saying it took him “the best part of two years.” In return, Cohen asked Dylan how long ‘I and I’ had taken him to write, to which Bob replied, “Oh, 15 minutes.” The customary pinch of salt notwithstanding, there’s a level of plausibility to the claim precisely because the song seems so compellingly bound up with what we know, or think we know, about Dylan.

These dualities and inner conflicts also crop up repeatedly in Dylan’s interviews, perhaps most intriguingly when Dylan is talking to Jonathan Cott, with whom he has an obvious rapport. Cott’s probing questions often bring out Dylan’s philosophical side, leading to fascinating ruminations on dreams, the subconscious, existentialism, and the nature of the self.

Sometimes Dylan backs off:

Didn’t Dylan think that a song like “Changing of the Guards” wakens in us the images of our subconscious? Certainly, I continued, songs such as that and “No Time to Think” suggested the idea of spirits manifesting their destiny as the dramatis personae of our dreams.

Dylan wasn’t too happy with the drift of the discussion and fell silent. “I guess,” I said, “there’s no point in asking a magician how he does his tricks.”

“Exactly!” Dylan responded cheerfully.

But Cott keeps on asking:

Q. A song like “No Time to Think” sounds like it comes from a very deep dream.

A. Maybe, because we’re all dreaming, and these songs come close to getting inside that dream. It’s all a dream anyway.

Q. As in a dream, lines from one song seem to connect with lines from another For example “I couldn’t tell her what my private thoughts were/But she had some way of finding them out” in “Where Are You Tonight?” and “The captain waits above the celebration/Sending his thoughts to a beloved maid” in “Changing of the Guards.”

A. I’m the first person who’ll put it to you and the last person who’ll explain it to you. Those questions can be answered dozens of different ways, and I’m sure they’re all legitimate. Everybody sees in the mirror what he sees — no two people see the same thing.

Q. In a song such as “Like a Rolling Stone,” and now “Where Are You Tonight?” and “No Time to Think,” you seem to tear away and remove the layers of social identity — burn away the “rinds” of received reality — and bring us back to the zero state.

A: That’s right. “Stripped of all virtue as you crawl through the dirt/You can give but you cannot receive.” Well, I said it.

Q: “I’ve seen you tell people who don’t know you that some other person standing nearby is you.”

A: “Well, sure, if some old fluff ball comes wandering in looking for the real Bob Dylan, I’ll direct him down the line, but I can’t be held responsible for that.”

Of course, the trail for ‘the real Bob Dylan’ went cold decades ago. By the time Dylan was finally brought to a (temporary) halt by the locked rear wheel of his Triumph motorcycle on that lonely Woodstock road, he had left scattered behind him the husks of too many ‘Bob Dylans’ for any biographer to track. In a strikingly insightful article for ‘Cheetah’ magazine in 1967, Ellen Willis wrote that in the aftermath of the crash, the confusion surrounding what might or might not have happened “was typical. Not since Rimbaud said ‘I is another’ has an artist been so obsessed with escaping identity”. That famous Rimbaud quotation is everywhere in Dylan studies. Cott proposes it as Dylan’s ‘modus vivendi’, and it’s no coincidence that when Todd Haynes was composing a one-page synopsis seeking Dylan’s approval for his Dylan biopic-of-sorts, ‘I’m Not There’, which pirouettes around the still-disputed motorbike crash, he began with that most Dylanic of Rimbaud quotations.

Willis pointed out that “Dylan’s refusal to be known is not simply a celebrity’s ploy, but a passion which has shaped his work”, noting that “Dylan as an identifiable persona has been disappearing into his songs, which is what he wants. This terrifies his audiences. They could accept a consistent image – roving minstrel, poet of alienation, spokesman for youth – in lieu of the ‘real’ Bob Dylan. But his progressive self-annihilation cannot be contained in a game of let’s pretend, and it conjures up nightmares of madness, mutilation, death.”

No segment of Dylan’s audience was more terrified of this unidentifiability than the media. Right from the start, the tweed-jacket-sporting, briar-pipe-puffing gentlemen of the press exhibited a twitchy ambivalence about the fact that Dylan’s single most distinguishing characteristic was his disinclination to display a single distinguishing characteristic. They routinely remarked upon the astonishing fact that ‘Mr Dylan’ could not be pigeon-holed, but they often seemed determined to try anyway, throwing labels at him in the hope that they might stick. Dylan, of course, always understood that once they get you neatly packed into a box, the next step is to close the lid.

As Dylan’s early press relations took shape, he unveiled an impressive armoury of standard interview tactics: evasion, equivocation, put-ons, half-truths, and outright lies. His flamboyant displays of verbal pugnacity suggested he could have been a great trial lawyer; even more remarkable, though, was the obvious relish he took in semantic gamesmanship – warping perceived meanings, blurring the line between literal and metaphorical, questioning the meaning of questions, and indulging in bouts of disingenuity and rhetorical sophistry that would be the envy of the slipperiest politician.

He’d often alternate, with dizzying speed, between responding to a specific question with an abstract, and answering a general question with something microcosmically particular. Now and again, he’d wheel out the ultimate weapon: spooling off into Dadaist, free-associative rambles. One of this collection’s cornerstones is the inscrutably hilarious interview Dylan gave to Nat Hentoff for Playboy magazine in 1966:

PLAYBOY: Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock-
‘n’-roll route?

DYLAN: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I’m in a card game. Then I’m in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13- year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas “before and after” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy – he ain’t so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I’m in Omaha. It’s so cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

PLAYBOY: And that’s how you became a rock-’n'-roll singer?

DYLAN: No, that’s how I got tuberculosis.

It might be tempting to nominate the Playboy interview for the coveted title of ‘quintessential 1960s Dylan press encounter’; but that honour surely should go to the transcript of the televised KQED San Francisco press conference from 1965. Dylan was in San Francisco to play a short (but spectacular) series of concerts, and had agreed to fly in a day early in order to appear at the press conference which Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph J Gleason had arranged for KQED-TV to broadcast live. Only six months or so after his infamous schism-generating electric performance at Newport, the 24 year old Dylan was beginning to take his final steps away from any semblance of a naturalistic interview persona. Dylan and the media, at that stage, were probably just about equally bemused by each other; throughout the conference, he and the assembled press circle each other like incompatible yet equally haughty families whose children have recently announced their shock engagement.

Many TV viewers were no doubt taken aback by Dylan’s behaviour when it was broadcast, but what seems most striking in retrospect is how the reporters behaved towards Dylan, treating him like a talking dog, or an alien recently beamed down to earth. In retrospect, this seems utterly bizarre, unless you read the transcript as documenting a set of modulating cultural forces. Like someone standing on the headland of the Skagen penninsula in Denmark, watching the crashing together of waves from two opposing seas, attendees of the press conference could witness countervailing historical currents swirling around on the surface of time. This wasn’t a simple case of ‘Dylan meets the Press’ – this was the end of an era.

It’s hard to select a favourite quotation from the KQED transcript, but in terms of its most representative moment, you’d be hard-pressed to pick anything better that this:

Q: “Mr Dylan, I know you dislike labels and probably rightfully so, but for those of us well over thirty, could you label yourself and perhaps tell us what your role is?”

A: “Well, I’d sort of label myself as ‘well under thirty’. And my role is to just, y’know, to just stay here as long as I can.”

This sort of exchange, as well as providing everybody present with a good laugh, became emblematic of the rapidly widening generational gap between those who were determined to prolong an earlier era, and those who were in the process of burying it. Dylan was writing the soundtrack to these historical changes, live, as they were happening; and that soundtrack was, in turn, coiling around on history and altering its course, accelerating its forward momentum, away from anything that mainstream American society could embrace, tolerate, or even recognise.

The nonconformist outlook reflected in Dylan’s early lyrics, coupled with his relentlessly irreverent demeanour, delivered a colossal thunderbolt of culture-shock to a mainstream media, and an American society, still heavily mired in the straight-laced, rigidly conservative mindset of the 1950′s. The stultifying inertia of the 50s was perfectly captured by novelist Thomas Pynchon – one of the very few countercultural figures with an even more prickly and pessimistic attitude to the press than Dylan – in the introduction to his short story collection ‘Slow Learner’:

“One year of those times was much like another. One of the most pernicious effects of the 50′s was to convince the people growing up during them that it would last forever. Until John Kennedy, then perceived as a congressional upstart with a strange haircut, began to get some attention, there was a lot of aimlessness going around.”

Depending on which side of that socio-cultural divide you were standing, Dylan could seem either dangerous or endangered, threatening or fragile, something like the James Dean and Marlon Brando figures he had idolised and identified with in his Minnesota youth. Pynchon and Dylan’s mutual friend Richard Farina – writer, singer, and husband to Joan Baez’s alluring younger sister Mimi – summed up this sense of vulnerability in an article for ‘Mademoiselle’ magazine in 1964, when he depicted a Berkeley concert audience anxiously awaiting Dylan’s arrival:

“They seemed, occasionally, to believe he might not actually come, that some malevolent force or organization would get in the way.” Not content with burning the candle at both ends, Dylan was “using a blowtorch on the middle,” and might not be around too much longer. “Catch him now, was the idea. Tomorrow he might be mangled on a motorcycle.”

At the KQED press conference, Dylan is asked what he thinks about Phil Ochs’s statement in a recent ‘Broadside’ magazine article, that “you have twisted so many people’s wigs that he feels it becomes increasingly dangerous for you to perform in public,” and Farina quotes Robert Shelton as warning that Dylan is “a moving target, and he’ll fascinate the people who try to shoot him down.” In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, which ramped up the paranoia levels of anyone already susceptible, Pynchon and Dylan included, Esquire magazine’s 1965 magazine cover – featuring an image of a hybrid human head, constructed using a quarter each of the faces of JFK, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, and Bob Dylan. Cheekily suggesting the crosshairs of a sniper rifle, the image only served to reinforce the idea that someone might literally shoot Dylan.

In any case, plenty of media figures were certainly out to metaphorically gun Dylan down. If press profiles of the 1960′s tended to alternate between two reductively extreme views of Dylan – he was either a prophet or a phoney – then Newsweek’s vicious 1963 ‘expose’ was definitely in the latter category. Newsweek gloatingly revealed that Dylan wasn’t the orphaned boxcar-rider he’d made out, but was, in shocking fact, a nice middle-class Midwestern Jewish boy named Zimmerman. Ridiculing Dylan’s lyrics as “simple words that pounce upon the obvious,” the article also implied that Dylan had not even written those simple words, gleefully repeating long-discredited rumours that he had purchased the lyrics to ‘Blowin in the Wind’ from a college classmate. On first reading the Newsweek article, Dylan reportedly exclaimed, “Man, they’re out to kill me!”

Dylan made his incendiary anger about this sort of thing explicit in a number of ways, from the reference to “the dirt of gossip” in ‘Restless Farewell’, to the dismissal of the media in ’11 outlined Epitaphs’: “your questions’re ridiculous, an’ most of your magizines’re also ridiculous”. And the side of Dylan Patti Smith was referring to – caustic, rebarbative, and snide – was on full display in a scene which became, for many, the defining image of the Dylan interview experience: the harangue he unleashes on hapless Time Magazine reporter Horace Judson in DA Pennebaker’s cinema verite masterpiece, ‘Don’t Look back’. Like the heads on spikes once displayed on the Gate House of London Bridge as a warning to other criminals, Dylan’s casual, even gratuitous evisceration of the ‘Time’ magazine stringer casts a baleful shadow over all subsequent press encounters.

It’s often seen as simply an ill-tempered rant, Dylan barely managing to keep a grip on himself as he informs the astonished hack that truth is “…a plain picture of, let’s say, a tramp vomiting, man, into the sewer”, and you can almost see the hair on Judson’s head being blown back by the gale force of Dylan’s vituperative outburst. But looked at dispassionately, behind the surreal vitriol there’s more than a grain of truth to what Dylan says, and who can argue with his assessment of the tenuous relationship between ‘Time’ magazine and the truth:

“If I want to find out anything I’m not going to read ‘Time’ magazine. I’m not gonna read ‘Newsweek’. I’m not gonna read any of these magazines, I mean, ’cause they just got too much to lose by printing the truth, you know that.”

That “you know that” is crucial. Pre-eminent Dylan critic Michael Gray has suggested, quite reasonably, that Dylan’s reaction to Judson is “in context, restrained,” and praised Dylan’s “earnest honesty”, asserting that Dylan’s treatment of Judson went “beyond dismissal and became a reaching out to the person inside the journalist: became Dylan trying to teach them something true.” Which would amount to a remarkable act of spiritual generosity on Dylan’s part, given that ‘Time’ had once described him as “a dime-store philosopher, a drugstore cowboy, a men’s room conversationalist”, and “the newest hero of an art which has made a fetish out of authenticity”. As if authenticity ought to be something for artists to shy away from.

If Dylan very quickly developed a skittish, mistrustful attitude to the media, albeit one tempered by the inevitable Dylan ambivalence, the press were even more suspicious and conflicted about him. It was painfully ironic that, in so spectacularly failing to understand him, the press often exhibited a bipolar attitude to Dylan, which in a sense mirrored Dylan’s own propensity for flipping from one extreme to another. The media seemed torrn between being awed by Dylan and condescending towards him; they mocked the idea that Dylan might have anything worthwhile to say, yet they expected him, even in casual conversation, to spontaneously Oraculate; and they were often convinced that there must be even more to Dylan than met their uncomprehending eye, some ‘philosophy’ or ‘meaning’ over and above what was presented to them on the surface. They didn’t know what to make of him, basically, and panic set in.

Thomas Pynchon recalled a similar sense of panic, suffered by those caught on the wrong side of the cultural ‘transition point’ which marked the arrival of Elvis Presley, who, prior to Dylan, had seemed the most alien and inexplicable figure ever to have coalesced out of the cultural ether: “‘What’s his message?’ they’d interrogate anxiously, ‘What does he want?’” The idea that Dylan must have some sort of ‘message’ was one on which the press seemed ineluctably fixated during the 1960s, and it’s significant that Dylan lays such disdainful emphasis on the ‘M’ word when he tells Horace Judson, “there’s no great ‘message’”.

The lines between Dylan the artist, and Dylan the interviewee, began to blur. To claim that Dylan revolutionised the ‘art’ of the celebrity interview in the same way as he tore apart the conventions of popular song craft, might be too simplistic a view to bear much analysis; but there’s no denying that Dylan turned his press encounters into acts of surreal performance art. This cut both ways: once Dylan began to be engulfed in fame and music industry machinations, Dylan the interviewee began to influence Dylan the artist, a process which reached its apotheosis when Dylan began including, in his songs, commentaries on fame and the other ostensibly unwelcome accoutrements of his success.

His mockery of the media and their quixotic quests for hidden meanings culminated in ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, in which Dylan distilled the essence of his every negative media experience into one of his most exquisite character sketches, the perennially baffled figure of ‘Mr Jones’, whose name would forever stand as a metonym for journalistic cluelessness.

As if to prove Dylan’s point for him, every now and then a reporter would actually ask him right out, “Who is Mr Jones?” But for all Dylan’s legendary froideur towards pressmen and their inanities, he never has had the heart to give them the obvious, brutally truthful answer: “Ask not for whom ‘Mr Jones’ was written, my journalist friend; he was written for thee.”

 

>> Go to Part Two: Poets Drown in Lakes

Sex and Politics in Annie Hall

by John Carvill

Sex and Politics in Annie Hall: Not Essentially a Political Comedy at All

by John Carvill

Annie Hall is densely packed with references and cultural allusions. The scope is wide, taking in literature, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, drugs, religion, cinema, art, academia, and more. Right at the start of the film, we’re straight into a discussion of Sigmund Freud’s ‘Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious’. Not standard romantic comedy material. This fast-paced and wide-ranging use of references is itself signposted when Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) tells comedian Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), after he’s played a college stand-up gig, how much she enjoyed the show and that, “I think I’m starting to get more of the references, too.” The film also represents a continuation of a number of themes that don’t so much recur in Allen’s films, as run like veins through his whole body of work. Anyone reasonably familiar with Allen’s oeuvre could doubtless very easily fire off a list of common Allen preoccupations which show up in this film, some of the most obvious being: New York (in general, and as opposed to Los Angeles), neurosis, sex, the travails of the nebbish, modern-day male-female relationships, death, existential angst, city versus country, paranoia, the role of the artist, the meaning of life, or lack thereof, etc.

Arguably, the most prevalent theme in Allen’s work in general, and in Annie Hall in particular, is that of Jewish identity. If this is subtly alluded to in the very first lines of Alvy’s opening monologue – the combination of ‘old joke’ and ‘Catskill mountain resort’ clearly signalling Jewishness – a more obvious early instance occurs in the film’s opening scene proper, in which Alvy and his best friend Rob (Tony Roberts) are seen approaching out of the far distance, discussing Alvy’s propensity to “pick up on” nuances of everyday speech which he interprets as making derogatory reference to his Jewish roots:

“You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said, ‘Did you eat yet or what?’, and Tom Christie said, ‘No, JEW?’. Not ‘Did you?’, JEW eat? JEW? No, not ‘Did you eat’, but JEW eat, JEW, you get it? JEW eat…”

Later, when Alvy and Annie are shown meeting for the first time, Alvy nervously accepts Annie’s invitation to come up to her apartment for a glass of wine – despite being “all perspired” – and they make awkward conversation on Annie’s rooftop terrace. Totally oblivious to Alvy’s sensitivities, Annie’s opening gambit proves difficult for him to swallow:

Annie: “You’re what Grammy Hall would call a real Jew!”

Alvy: “Thank you.”

Whole books have probably been written about this theme in Allen’s work, but another topic which has received a lot less attention, certainly in as much as it might be present in Annie Hall, is politics. During a key scene in the film, Alvy tells the audience at a 1960s political rally that he doesn’t know why he’s been invited because he’s “not essentially a political comedian at all.” Similarly, Allen’s films are not often thought of as being very political, and certainly not Annie Hall which is ostensibly a ‘Romantic Comedy’, albeit one far, far removed from the cloying, vacant sludge served up under that faded banner nowadays. Of course, Alvy’s disavowal needs to be taken with a pinch of salt – he is after all addressing a rally in support of Democratic Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, in his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to win the Democratic nomination that would eventually go to JFK.

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Redefining Folk

by Joe Allonby

Redefining Folk Music: Dan Zanes was Right

by Joe Allonby

I was chuckling to myself while watching the broadcast of this year’s Grammy Awards. I usually find this awards show ridiculous. It glorifies the safe and staid. The furor over Adam Lambert’s “shocking” performance was laughable. Twenty years ago, Lux Interior would have been just warming up. The real punch line for me though came when one of my favorite records of the year won a Grammy. Steve Earle (a Country singer-songwriter) recorded an album of songs by the late Townes Van Zandt (a Country singer-songwriter). In its category, it bested an album by Lucinda Williams who is of course a Country singer-songwriter. It did not win for best Country record. That category belongs to cute teenagers who sing about cheerleaders. Steve Earle is now considered a folk singer.

Let’s put aside for a moment the obvious question of “What the fuck then is Country music?”. A better question is “What are you calling Folk music and why?” The music industry, on its deathbed, may be starting to get it right.

In the mid-eighties, the gritty rock band The Del Fuegos performed in an infamous television commercial for Miller High Life beer. In the commercial, singer Dan Zanes stated “We consider Rock ‘n’ Roll Folk music because it’s for….folks.” He was castigated from all sides. How dare he say that about Folk? How dare he say that about Rock? How dare he take money for a beer commercial? How dare he endorse a bad beer?

Dan was right then and he’s right now.

The music that The Del Fuegos played on their records bore a strong resemblance to the stuff that I played as a young teenager in basements with my friends. We played songs we learned from each other. We played songs we learned from older guys. We copied songs off of records. We played Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly songs. Bob Dylan got thrown into the mix. Remember him? Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker turned up too. Johnny Cash. Then we started altering them. Soon, we were stealing licks and pastiching together our own little collages and calling those songs too. We were making grassroots music from a learned tradition with rules and conventions and expanding on it. We were doing it ourselves for ourselves. Several years later, people started calling this thunderous mongrel noise Punk Rock. I’ll call it what it is: Folk music. And I’m damned proud of it. It’s part of my heritage as an American and I’ll swing a vintage ash-bodied Fender Telecaster at the head of any snob who says otherwise.

You knew I’d get back to Bob Dylan, didn’t you? The Folk singer? The protest singer who knew every single one of the other one-hundred and forty two protest singers in the world personally? Purists booed when he brought The Band on tour in England in 1965. Judas! He committed sacrilege by bringing an electric guitar on stage in Newport. I don’t believe them. They’re liars. Dylan idolized Elvis Presley almost as much as he did Woody Guthrie. Newport was certainly not the first time he played an electric guitar. It wasn’t even the first electric guitar on that stage on that day. What was the problem? Heaven forbid that he should sully Folk music with something as plebian and blue-collar as a Fender without being a black guy from Chicago or the Mississippi Delta. The music he was making had more to do with the true American experience than any college kid with an acoustic guitar whining about Appalachian experiences that she never had and never would. The turncoat protest singer wrote some of the most beautiful love songs in any tradition. Call it Pop. Call it Rock. Call it what you will. I think you know what I’m going to call it.

I heard a lot of that righteous Dylanesque pride and anger when I first heard Public Enemy and later NWA. Horrors! Infectious rhythms and clever word play used to suck you in and then smack you in the face with a message that you might not be willing to listen to otherwise! And kids are listening to it! Right on! In fact, that music has some of the same rebellious spirit as Irish rebel songs. Wouldn’t you rather have kids listening to that than the latest self-satisfied pabulum from Tracy Chapman?

Rap music can still be dangerous and that’s what’s good about it. All over the world, kids are in basements with laptops and microphones stealing samples, mishmashing their own rhythms with improvised lyrics that speak of their own experience. I spoke with up and coming rapper DoShiNe (aka Keith Walker) about how he got started in Gastonia, North Carolina.

“Well, Joe. I started rapping at the age of 12. Just freestyling on the corner. There is no one rapper who inspired me. Therefore I was inspired by a lot of different artists. Anyway, I use my music to get away at times. To express myself. To escape. To get it out. Sometimes people may get the wrong message. But if they relate to it. Know the same story. That’s good. I can reach someone in the process of expressing my pain, my joy, my experience.”

Let’s see. Spontaneous creation of music. Check. Independence from corporate music industry structure. Check. Geographical separation from commercial music industry. Check. Expression of shared cultural experience. Big fucking check. Does this music come from a shared cultural tradition that’s passed down and expanded upon? Chuck D and KRS-One are probably writing books on that subject right now, so I’ll give it a check.

People are making music like this on their own all over the globe. It spreads from hand to hand in underground mix tapes and demos. It’s sold in subway stations and on street corners. It spreads like wildfire over an internet that acts like a Pynchonian W.A.S.T.E. system that The Man can’t control. People carry it around in their pockets on little machines that are like concealed weapons of musical guerilla warfare. The people have taken control. Rap. Hardcore Metal. Irish fiddle tunes played in the corners of urban pubs. Punk rock. Country music that has nothing to do with the Nashville machine. I’m sure that you can see this point coming like a runaway train. It’s all Folk music. As such, these forms deserve the respect that is long overdue them.

Music radio is dead. The music industry is moribund and starting to draw flies. Long live the Music of the People. Now go down to your basement and make some of it.

Joe Allonby and his vintage ash-bodied Fender Telecaster make thunderous Folk Noise in Boston Massachusetts where he lives with his beautiful patient girlfriend.

Joe Tex

by Steve Mainprize

“Grass and Trees and Cars, Fish and Steaks, Potatoes” – The Total and Utter Genius of Joe Tex

by Steve Mainprize

Listening to Joe Tex’s history, it’s hard to escape the thought that there really ought to be a Joe Tex biopic, to sit alongside “Walk The Line”, “Ray”, “What’s Love Got To Do With It” and all the rest of the baby boomer heritage pop movies. Just like Johnny, Ray and Tina, Joe Tex was a formative influence in the history of black music, but his career was full of false starts and stylistic cul-de-sacs, and he never quite achieved the momentum necessary to get the popular recognition that he deserved.

Here are some of the scenes from the imaginary film of his life that’s playing in my head.

Scene 1: We’re outside a Texas honky-tonk, some time in the late 1950′s. As we track through the car park, past chrome and fins and pick-up trucks, we hear the muffled, galloping sound of a country-and-western group. The music becomes clearer and louder as we push through the door, and across the crowded, darkened room we see the band on a tiny stage, fronted by a powerful figure in a purple cowboy outfit and an enormous white ten-gallon hat. The singer lifts his head, and we see his face for the first time. It’s Joe Tex, and he’s the only black man in the place. From the side of the stage, a man in a suit – the joint’s owner – is screaming at the top of his voice: “Get him off the stage, he ain’t country! He ain’t white, he can’t be country!” Joe grins at him, and the band plays on.

Scene 2: Muscle Shoals recording studio in Alabama. Joe and his producer, Buddy Killen, can’t agree on anything; their working relationship has been showing cracks, Joe’s fledgling career is on the line if he can’t get a hit, and the last of their studio time is nearly up. They’ve worked through the night and it’s starting to get light outside. Joe’s voice is almost shot. “Joe,” says the weary producer, “this number isn’t working. Let’s try a new song.” The band gets set up one last time, and they start to play “Hold What You’ve Got”. And it’s magic. Joe’s vocal isn’t technically perfect, but the hours of singing have left him with just the right degree of weariness and hoarseness for the tune. He’s on his way.

Scene 3: Joe’s on stage again: he’s ripping through a Southern soul number, opening for James Brown. Joe openly mocks Brown – a man, let’s face it, not known for his enjoyment of a good joke – by wrapping himself in a cape and dropping to his knees in fake anguish, hollering “Please! Please! Please! Please … get me out of this cape!” The audience thinks it’s hilarious, but later, a furious Godfather of Soul confronts Joe in a nightclub with a shotgun. Joe dives through the exit, as Brown opens fire: Joe’s unscathed, but several of the club’s customers are wounded and have to be paid off.

The James Brown shotgun incident was the culmination of a series of disagreements between the two men, not the least of which was that Brown had taken up with Bea Ford, Tex’s ex-wife. Joe also held the opinion that Brown had copied his act – hence the cape gag – and there’s no denying the strong similarity between the two men’s dance moves. Joe Tex was a total showman (or show-off – take your pick), whether he was juggling his tambourine, hurling his mic stand around, or dropping to the floor in a perfect splits. Little Richard used to say that James Brown picked up a good deal of his act from watching Joe Tex.

It was typical of Joe Tex that his instinct was to face misfortune and arguments with humour. Apart from the cape routine, he also wrote the song “You Keep Her”, which riffed on Brown’s own “Baby Don’t You Weep”, about Bea taking up with Brown. How much he could really complain about Brown lifting his moves is questionable, because his own early records were really only notable for their resemblance to the works of other artists. In those early days, up until about 1965, his recordings sounded like Little Richard, Sam Cooke or Fats Domino, and he never seemed to find his own voice.

In the end, it was James Brown who became the superstar because he took it all very seriously. With Joe Tex, though, you always got the idea that he was on the verge of cracking a joke. Take one of his best records, “The Love You Save (May Be Your Own)”, possibly the grimmest thing he ever wrote. The chorus is about the importance of working out your romantic relationships, but the verses are a social commentary, of the type that would later turn up in the protest movement, on the black experience in the American South in the fifties and early sixties, something Joe would have known all about:

I’ve been pushed around
I’ve been lost and found
I’ve been given til sundown to get out of town
I’ve been taken outside
And I’ve been brutalized
And I’ve had to always be the one to smile and apologize

But watch him perform the song on YouTube and you kind of think, well, he means it – but on the other hand there’s a lightness of touch there too. It’s almost the same humour that you find in early Morrissey lyrics, but without the self-pity.

Like so many of his contemporaries, he was heavily influenced by the gospel music of his childhood. In small town Texas, though, where Joe was born and brought up, country-and-western was also popular, and although society was heavily segregated, young Joe experienced enough country music for its rhythms and outlook to have an effect on him too.

This led to the ill-advised scattergun approach of his early records, when he was releasing seven or eight singles a year, but without a strong identity. He’d make a rock and roll record, then a country record, then a soul record, then a novelty record about a pig. Part of the problem is that in those days it was – and still is, I guess – assumed that you had to fit a particular role. You couldn’t be a comedian and a soul man and a country singer. Make no mistake, Joe Tex was great in all three of those roles, but if he’d been world class in just one, or even just stuck to one, perhaps he’d be more well-known today.

But then, of course, he wouldn’t have been Joe Tex.

In his early career, he was in demand from other artists, including Little Richard and James Booker, to sing on their records, but had little success on his own. He moved regularly from one record company to the next, each label failing to find the exact combination of song and backing to turn him into a star. You can’t knock the labels’ faith in him, or their persistence, though: he released over 30 singles on various labels before he and his producer Buddy Killen, who had set up Dial Records specifically to get Joe’s records out, finally hit on the right formula and “Hold What You’ve Got” became a hit in 1965. He finally got to release an album, the similarly titled “Hold On To What You’ve Got”, and wrote every track on the record – an almost unheard of honour at the time for a soul singer.

What followed was a career in which Joe Tex, casually and almost unnoticed, sowed the seeds for all kinds of developments in black music. One of his trademarks that he returned to continually was the trick of speaking his verses, then singing the refrains: he coined the term “rap” to describe the spoken word passages, and the ribald humour of songs like “Skinny Legs And All” and “You Said A Bad Word” is right there in hip-hop. He sang about social issues before Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, and was the first soul singer to have a hit about the Vietnam War (“I Believe I’m Gonna Make It”).

The style that brought him success was more rustic than that of other soul singers of the period. He loved to take some folksy colloquialism that he’d overheard and build a song around it, like “Buying A Book” or the magnificent “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show”. One of his favourite themes was the battle of the sexes, in which he’d offer home-spun philosophy on a man’s responsibility to his woman and his family. He was particularly fond of morality fables; anyone, man or woman, guilty of messing their partner around in the first verse of a Joe Tex song was bound to have the tables turned on them by the end of the second verse.

There’s roughly a metric truckload of Joe Tex compilation albums. (One of the best available ones is 1988′s “The Very Best Of Joe Tex”, on Charly Records.) The glut is partly due to the fact that he recorded for lots of different labels before he got successful, and partly because he managed to sign himself – not entirely ethically – to more than one simultaneous contract while he was with Buddy Killen. Consequently the rights got passed around and around, and the legal side of Joe Tex’s back-catalogue goes a little murky, but I don’t think he would have worried about that too much. As previously mentioned, who owned what and who did what first weren’t questions that particularly bothered him anyway. He did claim to have written the pop standard “Fever”, a hit for Little Willie John and Peggy Lee, and recorded by dozens of other artists, but to have sold the rights to the song because he needed the money. (The usually-credited writer, Otis Blackwell, denies this.) Joe then went and wrote “Pneumonia”, a pastiche of “Fever” so cheeky that you hoped he had indeed penned “Fever”, otherwise he was really going to need a good lawyer.

Joe Tex had one hit single in the UK. One. And it was the 1977 novelty disco hit “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)”. Lyrically it’s very much in Joe’s usual cheerful battle-of-the-sexes territory, but it would have been great to hear it with his more usual funk backing in place of the shimmery disco polish. The unfortunate upshot of that is that the man who invented rap music, who first fused soul and country, and who ought to be mentioned in the same breath as Ray Charles, James Brown and Johnny Cash, is more likely to be associated with The Weather Girls and Rick Dees & His Cast Of Idiots.

After “I Ain’t Gonna Bump No More”, Joe Tex went into semi-retirement on his farm in Texas. Throughout his career he’d taken care of himself, almost entirely avoiding alcohol and drugs, but according to Buddy Killen, “during his last four years, he staged a marathon of self-abuse. It was as if he was trying to make up for lost time.” Joe Tex died of a heart attack in 1982 at the age of 49.

That would be a sad way to leave the Joe Tex story, which is otherwise jam-packed with fun and joy. So I prefer to finish with this quote from the man himself, in an interview towards the end of his life.

“It’s been nice here, man,” he said, “A lot of ups and downs, the way life is, but I’ve enjoyed this life. I was glad that I was able to come up out of creation and look all around and see a little bit, grass and trees and cars, fish and steaks, potatoes…And I thank God for that. I’m thankful that he let me get up and walk around and take a look around here. ‘Cause this is nice.”
Oomska’s Joe Tex Spotify Playlist: http://open.spotify.com/user/mainy/playlist/5k7xkvf08fxOoo7dTOtcsW

It’s Just the Pynchon in Me

by Vince Carducci

I first became aware of Thomas Pynchon my senior year at Michigan State. One of my housemates, whom we called Bopper (and still do, actually), was reading Gravity’s Rainbow, which at the time had just come out in paperback. One of the first things that caught my eye was the book’s dedication to Richard Farina, the author’s close friend and classmate at Cornell, who had died too young in a motorcycle accident in 1966.

Farina’s name was familiar, as part of a 1960s folk duo whose other half, Mimi, also happened to be Joan Baez’s sister. But for me it had greater significance as Farina was the author of a single novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. For years, Farina’s tale of hipster Gnossos Papadopoulis was part of my back-to-school ritual, the last thing I would read before heading back to campus each fall.

I started reading Pynchon with V., however. And I was immediately taken with the crazed plot lines, the even more crazed characters, and the alternate reality in which they existed. It was even cooler than Kerouac, I thought, the same level of delirium but with more erudition. I dug the yo-yos who aimlessly rode the subway from one end of New York City to the other, and also McClintic Sphere, whom I identified as based on free-jazz master Ornette Coleman. An art student, I endeavored to execute a performance piece modeled on the character Herbert Stencil in which I vowed to speak of myself in the third person for the rest of my days. (Alas, life imitated art for only a week and a half before I abandoned the project.)

Gravity’s Rainbow came later when I was out of school and working an entry-level office job where my responsibilities were such that I could spend half the day reading. The intertextual relationship of V. and Gravity’s Rainbow was of course amusing, not to mention self-gratifying in the pleasure gained from knowing winks on the author’s part to the cognizant reader. Also engaging were the things that were seemingly bizarre yet based on reality, for example, the covert operation of parapsychologists, gathered under the code-name PISCES, who really did work for British intelligence to undermine the Nazi war effort by counter-posing ‘white’ magic to German occult practices. I was dabbling in the hermetic tradition myself as a source for making art and thus found entry into the book’s deeper meaning through that channel.

I re-read Gravity’s Rainbow a little more than a decade later when my stepdaughter gave me Steven Weisenberger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion for Christmas, still arguably the best aid to negotiating Pynchon’s labyrinthine opus. (Although there is an error that to my knowledge has never been corrected, namely, on page 152 where Weisenberger notes the numerological symbolism of tetragrammaton as signifying the eight-lettered name of God in Judaism when the prefix ‘tetra’ means four in Greek and refers to the four Hebrew letters Yod-He-Vau-He from which the Old Testament word Yahweh is derived.) But it was on the third time through just a few years ago that I believe I uncovered some heretofore-unnoticed elements of my own.

Two of them relate to Gravity’s Rainbow’s major theme of what sociologist Max Weber terms the ‘disenchantment of the world’ by modernity, the supplanting of religious cosmological systems by technological apparatus under the rule of rationalism. These are revealed when the episodes are arranged in cumulative order.

The first is the eleventh episode of Part Three, which cumulatively is the fortieth episode. Placed at the center of the book, the apogee of its trajectory, it is also the longest. While the episode opens on or about July 9, 1945, much of the narrative is a genealogy of the German rocket program back to its origins in the Society for Space Travel. But, the episode is more importantly an allegory, which doubles the narrative onto American history a generation later.

In Judeo-Christian symbolism, the number 40 is one of fulfillment: The Great Flood lasted for forty days and forty nights, the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years after escaping Egypt, and Christ’s temptation lasted for forty days. And so it is that Episode 40 of Gravity’s Rainbow is also one of fulfillment–of the landing on the moon by Apollo 11 in July 1969 in fulfillment of the dream of the Society for Space Travel. In explaining the dream to his daughter, Ilse, the rocket scientist Franz Pokler uses a map of the moon to help her visualize it. Ilse chooses a spot in the Sea of Tranquility where she would like to live when people are able to go to the moon. And it was a spot near the crater Maskelyne B in the Sea of Tranquility where the Lunar Expeditionary Module set down when Neil Armstrong took his historic ‘giant leap for mankind’. (It’s also significant to note, as Weisenberger does, that the author of the Gravity’s Rainbow’s opening epigraph, Werner von Braun, directed both the Apollo 11 project and the German rocket works at Peenemunde where Pokler is stationed.)

The other episode that gains resonance in this manner is Episode 21 of Part Three, cumulatively Episode 50. Fifty is the number of days after Easter that the Holy Spirit descended upon Christ’s disciples. The Pentecost, also known as “whitsunday” or White Sunday, is an important date to Gravity’s Rainbow’s narrative. In 1945, Pentecost fell on May 8, which was V-E Day, and also the birthdays of occulist Madame Blavatsky and US President Harry S. Truman. It was Pynchon’s own eighth birthday as well. Thus, the date is an harmonic convergence of narrative trajectories: the end of the war in Europe, the occultic other of Judeo-Christianity, the opening of the door to the Atomic Age, and the author who would tie it all together.

But, the fiftieth episode is also a kind of worldly Pentecost for the character Enzian the Herero. In the spirit of the giving of tongues, Pynchon writes: ‘There doesn’t exactly dawn, no but there breaks, as that light you’re afraid will break some night at too deep an hour to explain away–there floods on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding.’ In the pages that follow, Enzian articulates the grammar of War and Technology, which are the lingua franca of global capital unto the present day.

While these two examples show how a cumulative reading of the episodes can amplify an existing understanding of Gravity’s Rainbow, there’s another trope that flows through the text to which I believe the novel’s dedication provides a clue.

Weisenberger takes note of the importance of the number 9 to Gravity’s Rainbow’s narrative development, in particular as a number of incompletion–the interrupted countdown of the rocket launch, the lack of closure of the book’s nine-month-long narrative, etc. In addition to setting the time span in months of the narrative overall, nine is the number of days that transpire during the novel’s first part. The first nine episodes are a unit when the structure of Episodes 1 and 9 are compared: Both episodes begin with their main characters dreaming. Both begin and end with rocket attacks. Their openings are similar in terms of meter and have virtually the same number of syllables. This Gnostic cosmology of world inside world, like the layers of an onion, inaugurates a narrative thread that unfolds in Gravity’s Rainbow through factors of the number 9, beginning with the tenth episode.

The tenth episode seems to come out of nowhere. To be sure, Weisenberger refers the time of Episode 10 as ‘unspecified’ and characterizes it as ‘grossly surreal’. However, a trope is introduced in Episode 10 that carries throughout the book and constitutes an essential subtext to the novel. To see this, we must go outside the text, but not very far. As noted earlier, Gravity’s Rainbow is dedicated to Pynchon’s friend from his college days. And I would argue that the reference is as much an elegy for the unfulfilled spirit of 1960s counterculture as it is for the bright young man who tragically died before his time during that decade.

In Episode 10, the Dionysian impulse of the 1960s, a charismatic eruption against the Apollonian demiurge of rationalist society, is unleashed. In the episode, Tyrone Slothrop journeys down a toilet in search of a lost harmonica. In the 1960s, soldiers in Vietnam referred to the battlefield as being ‘in the shit’. The 1960s are further personified in the figures of Malcom X (the bathroom attendant, Red, encountered by Slothrop) and JFK (referred to as ‘Jack Kennedy, the ambassador’s son’), both of whom were assassinated in the 1960s. This eruption of the carnivalesque, the counterculture of the 1960s, was very much a factor in the political and cultural landscape of the time of Gravity’s Rainbow’s writing, ultimately leading to what Pynchon elsewhere terms the ‘Nixonian repression’. This theme runs through Pynchon’s later, much-underappreciated novel, Vineland, where speaking of the character Brock Vond he writes: ‘Any sudden attempt to change things would be answered by an immediate misoneistic backlash not only from the State but from the people themselves–Nixon’s election in ’68 seeming to Brock a perfect example of this.’

Episode 10 also begins a mathematical formula that ties seemingly unrelated episodes of Gravity’s Rainbow together. This can be expressed in the formula, ‘E = N x 9 + 1’ with ‘N’ functioning as a geometric progression. (10 = 1 x 9 +1, adding an ‘isotrope’, as it were, to the molecular structure of incompletion.)

The next episode to pick up the trope is Episode 19 in Part One (19 = 2 x 9 + 1). Set in pre-Hitler Berlin, the episode is ostensibly concerned with Franz and Leni Pokler’s discussion of Western science. The narrative’s focus is more on Leni, making the second expression of the trope feminine. (In numerology, the number 2 is feminine.) This episode is permeated with language of the 1960s and early 1970s, which is anachronistic in the context of a narrative that until then has been consciously periodized. (The extensive research Pynchon undertook into period slang and colloquial usage of the 1940s in writing Gravity’s Rainbow is well documented.)

The first is the term ‘détente’, which began to be used during the Nixon administration to describe its policy toward the Soviet Union. Next is the reference to a fictional leftist magazine, Die Faust Hoch (‘the raised fist’), a reference to the controversial incident in the 1972 Munich Olympics in which American athletes were stripped of their medals for raising their black-gloved fists in salute to Black Power during the award ceremonies. There is reference to the ‘Revolution’ and the fact that ‘AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN’. The ‘President’ is quoted as saying, ‘I’m sending all the soldiers home’, which was Nixon’s second-term campaign pledge. Finally, the utopian image of the 1960s Dionysian release is set against the vision of ‘a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority’.

The trope is again picked up in Part Three, Episode 8, or Episode 37 (37 = 4 x 9 + 1). This episode also appears to interrupt the narrative flow and concerns a group of Argentine anarchists who plan to make a film of the epic poem Martin Fierro. The scene takes place in a harmonica factory, recalling the action of Episode 10. There is a western film being shown, and in the film, the horse Snake appears, the same mount of Crutchfield the Westerner who also first appeared in Episode 10. Pynchon mentions a character, Shetzline, which refers to David Shetlzine, a contemporary American novelist and friend of Pynchon and Farina from Cornell. In the epic of Martin Fierro, the protagonist gaucho initially resists colonial control of the pampas but ultimately sells out, a metaphor of the demotic thrust of the 1960s counterculture, which even by the time of Gravity’s Rainbow was being commercially co-opted. But, the most compelling reference closes the episode: ‘It took the Dreyfus Affair to get the Zionists out and doing, finally: what will it take to drive you out of your soup kettle?’ By the time of Gravity’s Rainbow’s publication, The New York Times had published the Pentagon papers and The Washington Post had broken the Watergate scandal, which eventually concluded with the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

The trope culminates along with the novel in Part Four, Episode 12, or Episode 73 by the cumulative measure (73 = 8 x 9 + 1). Contemporaneous references include the cryptic statement in Weissman’s Tarot: ‘If you’re wondering where he’s gone, look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisors, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. Look high, not low’, an obvious allusion to then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The figure of Nixon is again evoked, this time by the character Richard M. Zhlubb, ‘fiftyish and jowled, with a permanent five-o’clock shadow (the worst by far of all the Hourly Shadows) and a habit of throwing his arms up into an inverted “peace sign”’.

When set against the circular structure Weisenberger erects for Gravity’s Rainbow’s plot line, the cyclical time of the ancients, the formula of countercultural references can be seen as a offering up a cautionary tale of resistance to modernity in general, which though defeated for the time being might hold out the hope of eternal return. The notion of progress shatters in Gravity’s Rainbow as the narrative splinters into fragments, an index of the differentiation of social forms in rational society as understood by Weber, fellow sociologist Emile Durkheim, and others. Like a rocket it explodes in a charismatic festival to revert to the cycle of time immemorial (the multiplier 8 of the last episode in the formula is the numerological sign of eternity). Weissman’s Tarot presents The World as his future card; the number of The World in the Major Arcana is 21, which is the number episodes in Part One of Gravity’s Rainbow, bringing the end back to the beginning.

Hence another thread of meaning is woven into the fabric of Gravity’s Rainbow. Or is Carducci just being paranoid?

Vince Carducci has written on art and culture for many publications, including Artforum, Art in America, Eye, Logos, PopMatters, and Radical Society. Contact: cultureindustries@yahoo.com