Ken at Fifteen Redux

Dudes,

Lately I've been listening to Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" a lot. We own it in two formats in my household--vinyl and CD. I listened to it four times the other day when I was walking around the City.

I guess I'm trying to make up for lost time. I suppose the optimum time for being introduced to "Paranoid" is when you're fifteen, but to be honest, when I was a fifteen year-old hard rocker, I was intimidated by it--too doom-laden and sludgy--despite my friend Hard Rocking John IV's best attempts to convert me. My tastes in the hard rock category (we didn't say "Heavy Metal" or "Metal," to the best of my recollection) tended toward the more heroic and swaggering: Led Zeppelin; Thin Lizzy; Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Ever since those days I always felt a vague sense of guilt that I was not more familiar with the Sabbath canon. Smart people that I respected liked them. Henry Rollins loved them (come to think of it, I was too intimidated to listen to Black Flag back in my "punk" days). Back in the early 80's I thought it was against the new wave rules to like "Dinosaur" rock. I was mighty confused.

Craven coward that I was, I had sold all my Zeppelin albums when I cut my hair short and started buying Clash albums. I was an either/or sort of guy. Later, I traded in the Clash records for bluegrass records, but you've heard that story before.

So anyway, I've spent the past few years buying back all those Thin Lizzy, Zeppelin, Skynyrd and Clash albums.

I also got around to listening to The Stooges about six years ago--yet another band I'd always been afraid of. So why not, finally, Black Sabbath (Ozzy era)?

A couple of years ago I bought "Paranoid" and just tried to inject some bravery into my fifteen year old self as I listened to "War Pigs" and so forth. More recently, I bought a copy of the first Sabbath record--"Black Sabbath"--for two dollars at Green Apple. The young surly lad behind the counter told me that this copy once belonged to Mike Bordin, the drummer from Faith No More. We tried to imagine the traces of body fluids and drugs (and probably teenage desperation)that might be encrusted in the grooves of that platter. Oh, if vinyl could talk, what a tale it would tell! Unfortunately, when I got it home it told no tales--it was absolutely scorched, unplayable, despite the fact that it looked okay (suspiciously okay, as it turned out). Still, it's a nice keepsake.

Not to be deterred,I bought a new vinyl copy of "Black Sabbath" the other day, pressed on very cool looking clear vinyl. I also bought--rebought, I should say--Gang of Four's Solid Gold, which is a kick ass album that I traded in during the bluegrass years. A nice symbolic buy, my hard rock past and my post punk past now happily residing in my ever more democratic record collection.

Don't Do the Crime If You Can't Do the Time

The summer of my eleventh year my mother and stepfather were splitting up. It was ugly and confusing. For various reasons I decided to stay with my stepfather. Sometimes he seemed glad that I was staying with him, sometimes he barely spoke to me.

My mother had moved about a quarter mile down the road, so half the time I ate dinner at her house which was how I avoided getting scurvy. All my stepfather and I seemed to eat was hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches. On the nights he came home late I had to fend for myself. I "cooked" my specialty: spaghetti and hotdogs. An easy dish for an eleven year-old. You boil the noodles until they're almost done, then you throw in the hotdogs.

That may sound like a pathetic, woe-is-me, I was a lonely, abandoned child, type of story, but I actually had a pretty good time by myself. I was sick of both my parents and their bitter fighting. I was perfectly happy to spend my days reading the canon of Edgar Rice Burroughs and devote my nights to watching all the TV shows my mother didn't let me watch because they were on too late during school nights or because they were too violent. So, I got fat on The Rockford Files, SWAT, and most of all, Baretta.

If ERB's Tarzan and John Carter were my literary heroes that summer, Baretta was my true action hero. Little Robert Blake, 5'4", all muscles, mop of black hair, intense dark eyes, motor mouth, broke every rule to pursue his criminal quarry. He had a heart of gold, though. He gave poor suckers a break (they were usually innocent, as it turned out). He lived in a fleabag motel with his cockatoo, Fred. He palled around with an assortment of colorful street characters. In some ways, for its time, it was the most realistic inner city cop show ever aired. Not that it was all that realistic. When Hill Street Blues aired a few years later, it made shows like Baretta and Starsky and Hutch (way more violent and vengeful than Baretta) seem silly.

Anyway, Robert Blake was my hero. As a short person, I admired the tough, cocksure manner that he displayed on Baretta. I was thrilled to learn, from Dynamite magazine, that he had been one of the Little Rascals. "Little Mickey"--one of the most sensitive of the Rascals. I think he was supposed to be a toughie, but he always seemed more worried than anything.

With the popularity of Baretta, various TV stations aired some of Blake's better known films--"In Cold Blood" and "Electra Glide in Blue." Blake dies martyr's deaths in both of those flicks, which suited me just fine that confusing summer.

In addition, that summer, Blake began a several year series of appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, in which he played the roles of rebellious actor, self-pitying soon-to-be ex-husband, and social philosopher. Blake was so entertaining (maybe in a trainwreck sort of way)that Johnny usually let him have two segments, usually bumping the final guest (anyone who was booked last when Blake was on must have been pissed). I wonder if anyone out there has collected Blake's appearances on one tape or DVD?

Well, these are all bittersweet memories. Robert Blake is now a sleazy old convicted killer who still pathetically maintains his innocence. It's the last Little Rascals tragedy, I guess.

I'll just come clean and say that when the Blake trials were going on, there was a part of me that rooted for his acquital. I hoped that somehow, it would be revealed that he truly had nothing to do with his wife's murder. But I never truly believed it. Still, I can't completely give up on my childhood worship of Tony Baretta--a better man than Robert Blake or any of us.

And I Need You More Than Want You

A long time ago I worked in a bookstore that played a so-called "Beautiful Music" station as its in house music. Compared to the brain-dulling Classical-Lite I have to listen to in the place that I currently work, maybe it wasn't so bad, but it was pretty bad. The only treat was that every so often they'd play "Witchita Lineman," which stood out from all the muck like a flower in a pile of manure. I'd stop whatever I was doing and get lost in the 3 minute tale of yearning and think about what a perfect short story it was--as good as anything Raymond Carver ever wrote. And the way Glen Campbell sings it--wowee.

The fact that a beautiful music station had "Witchita Lineman" in its rotation was both a testament to its seductive melody, performance and production, as well as the miscategorization of the work of its composer, Mr. Jimmy Webb. Jimmy Webb, the author of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix"; "Up, Up and Away"; MacArthur Park," among other sixties pop hits, may be dismissed by some for writing non-groovy middle of the road squaresville music, but those people would be wrong. I mean, I'll 'fess up, I probably dismissed those songs at some point in my hard rocking youth or fundamentalist roots music young adulthood, even as I secretly loved them. After all, I'd been humming along to them my entire life.

My friend, Strictly Jon, was the first music, record collector person I met who took these songs and their composer seriously. I didn't realize they were by the same person and that he had a vast body of work. S.J. was a scholar of mature pop music, understood its art and craft. He hipped me to the accomplishments of Jimmy Webb and Brian Wilson long before I sat down and truly appreciated them. Let's say he planted some seeds that took a decade and a half to grow.

My BeachBoys/Brian Wilson obsession of a few years ago made me truly appreciate orchestrated pop music of the sixties (I already dug 50's era Sinatra). Finally, I could just admit to myself how much I loved Burt Bachrach and the classic Glen Campbell hits of the sixties. I love the clash of pop liteness as it confronts the paranoid edge of Arthur Lee in "Forever Changes." I love the sixties Countrypolitan of Roger Miller. I love the chamber art country of Mickey Newbury, not to mention the Acid-Chamber-Art-Country-Concept of the Everly Brothers "Roots" album--a recent purchase. How do I connect all of that music together? Tools of the parents--Strings, Arrangements, Glossy Production (sometimes) utilized by the kids of the rock and roll generation. It's a pretty big country of music I've just jammed into a pretend category, but for me it all shares a preoccupation with the language of adults, much as Philly Soul did in the seventies.

I dunno, this theory is still forming in my mind, but it's just my way of saying how much I've come to love the work of Jimmy Webb. Very high in my musical rotation these days is the Glen Campbell-Jimmy Webb 1974 record, "Reunion," which I picked up in the discount bin at Tower for a mere pittance. Some people think "Rhinestone Cowboy" is Glen Campbell's best record, but I think this one might be better. Campbell is Webb's ideal interpreter. The yearning cry in G.C.'s voice is the perfect vehicle for J.W.'s songs of melancholy, hurt and hope (but mostly melancholy and hurt). J.W.'s themes mainly curb G.C.'s cornball tendencies. One wonders if these two have one more collaboration left in them. They have played some shows together recently, which I'd love to see.

Last week I bought the Jimmy Webb compilation, "Archive," which collects a selection of songs from his seventies albums along with a live show he played in London in '72 (of all things, he does a cover of Frank Zappa's "My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama" in the concert set). I'm digging Webb's Oklahoma (other favorite Oklahomans: Roger Miller; Wayne Coyne; Ralph Ellison) drawl reinterpreting his sixties classics and his more personal, mediatative '70's songs. Joni Mitchell even shows up as a backing vocalist on a couple of songs. Webb's rueful '7o's work deserves a listen by those who dig the artistic singer-songwriters such as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell.

Revisting Age Eleven

When I was eleven years old my mother split up with her second husband. It was ugly. I'll spare you the details. In order to escape the daily stress of watching my parents literally and metaphorically battle with each other, I sought refuge in the usual place: popular culture.

I obsessively read the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, going so far as to visit his headquarters in Tarzana, California, and getting to meet his nephew, Danton. I especially dug Tarzan. There was something about the orphaned outsider apeman trying to find his place in two societies--the jungle, "civilized" society--and not quite fitting in that really got to me. I was also a big fan of the DC comic book adaptions drawn by Joe Kubert. I loved the dynamic sketch-looking style of his lean muscular Tarzan (I also liked the Neal Adams-illustrated covers of the Ballantine editions, but Kubert's Tarzan was the one for me).

I mention all this because I just purchased a very nice hardcover edition of Volume One of Tarzan: The Joe Kubert Years. All those issues of Kubert's Tarzan in lovingly restored beautiful color, published by Dark Horse. Cashing in on childhood nostalgia? You bet!

I've already recently collected the Dark Horse reprints of the Barry Windsor Smith years of the Marvel Conan the Barbarian comics--another favorite of my eleven year-old self.

So, add that to my rewatching of Baretta (yes, another favorite of eleven year-old me), my recent rereading of some Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, repurchasing of old The Who vinyl and, ahem, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and this blankety-blank year-old man is ready to relive eleven years old without the accompanying trauma!

Report from the alphabetical listening project: Songs I Love to Sing! by Helen Humes. Here's a 1950's recording by the Basie "girl" singer, arranged by Marty Paich. A groovy, swinging affair. Featuring Ben Webster and Art Pepper. Humes, at times, sounds like a more bluesy Ella Fitzgerald. You gotta play it at your next retro cocktail party, although the music is as fresh as can be.

I'm just finishing up Richard Price's Freedomland. It got off to a slow start--there's a lot of narrative strands--but it really kicks ass once it gets going. More Richard Price to come, for sure.