1974 in Music: January

This year, which covered my Junior/Senior year in high school is a fascinating display of how the popular music field not only began to expand to include ever-more sub-genres of music, but displays the further unraveling of what had been a more-or-less united social/political force representing what had evolved as the 1960s sub-culture. That this unity of vision was definitely as dead as doornails was now patently obvious, and while the various revolutions begun during the long decade that had evolved since 1964 would continue spiraling out to their various logical conclusions, there would cease to be any sort of unifying center of gravity. There was a lot of good - and some great - music made in 1974, and there was a tremendous deal of variety. But the continued corporatization of what had originally begun as a more-or-less grass-roots movement continued apace, which would lead to ghettoization, particularly of American radio stations. FM radio in the U.S. - the former bastion of individuality and experimentation - was by now firmly ensconced as a commercially biased medium, and would become even more tightly manipulated and controlled as the decade(s) unfolded. This phenomenon would not only result in a stricter control of what was played, but would even result in a Top-40 type of system that was even more stringent than its earlier model in terms of what type of music would be deemed "playable" (i.e., proven to be commercially viable). The final outcome of this trend would be a pitiful and sickly path to sameness, as only records would be played that sounded like records that were already successful. In short, the revolution was over - the musicians and music lovers had basically lost.

Once again, this does not mean that there was not a great deal of wonderful music being made, as any overview (other than a review of the sales charts) will quickly reveal. But much of this music was basically invisible, particularly to those listeners who relied primarily on commercial radio stations for their information. Already established artists from the heyday of the 1960s and early 70s would remain in play, but the more adventurous and playful realms of rock suffered in obscurity.

Another curious phenomenon that continued from the early 1960s was a marked stylistic deviation between America and the U.K. While these two markets had never been identical, there had been an extraordinary unanimity in a great deal of what had been musically in favor throughout the 60s. Now, the most obvious deviation was the continuing lack of success of much of the glam rock movement in America which had so overwhelmingly engulfed the British music scene since 1971-2. While David Bowie had finally crossed over across the Atlantic and the increasingly tarty Elton John remained a superstar, such massive British successes as T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, Roxy Music and others remained either obscure or completely unknown in the States. Whether this trend was more dependent upon national taste or upon corporate manipulation (intentional or otherwise) remains an obscure question, it is most evident that it would be a trend that would carry much more hefty weight toward the end of the decade with the coming of punk and the new wave.

While England would continue to enjoy a post-modernist edge at least up until the late 1980s - America would not regain the lead until the 90s grunge movement - other extreme forms of rock would begin to flourish even more fully in their ever-isolated markets. This is particularly true of heavy metal, and it can be argued that progressive rock (at least in its most commercially viable form) was even more successful in America than in Britain. The dominant American trend, however, was towards a kind of "lightened" version of folk-rock which had so many practitioners from both sides of the pond that by the mid 1970s became almost the de facto definition of American pop/rock to millions of listeners. Such artists as the Eagles and Jackson Browne would set the mold for this format, and whatever one wishes to think of them, it must be admitted that their many imitators drove the general quality of what was heard over the airwaves down to depressing levels. The same is equally true for a less-heavy, generic style of "hard rock" that relied on simple hooks and pop formulas. Most of the practitioners of these forms are largely forgotten today, while those musical minds that went against the grain have gradually risen in critical and even popular favor since then. We will see many instances of both trends as we survey the year (and the years immediately following), and though we will purposely exclude the more mediocre material, this dichotomy will become increasingly evident.

One other thing that must be kept in mind as we look at this overview is that from a primarily aesthetic perspective, almost all interest is focuses upon albums rather than singles at this point, making the musical picture of the mid-1970s much different from the previous two decades. Yes, there were enormous hit singles, but most of them existed as a representation of the LP from which they were taken, and the long-playing record continued its trend of being the favorite and preferred format of serious music lovers. If we expanded this overview to include the increasingly isolated singles of Top 40 AM radio, however, we would see a vast entertainment machinery at work, which would hold little relevance (arguably) to the critically historical, lasting works of the period. We would also discover a flair for a kind of mindless pop/soul hybrid that would soon emerge in the ultimately trans-musical phenomenon known as "disco."

I realize that my biases in taste guide my perspectives of history to a large degree, but since my goal is ultimately to help establish a critical consensus of canonicity in popular music rather than to provide a comprehensive overall history, I feel at least partially justified both in my selections and in my overall comments. I do not have the same degree of affection for all the albums that follow in this retrospective, but I have attempted to be as unbiased as possible in representing what is generally perceived (at this point in time at least) to be the best albums that reflect their time, as seen through a wide perspective of critical as well as popular opinion.

I am not - nor do I wish to be - a music critic. (Or any other type of critic, for that matter.) I personally do not see the point in tearing apart the efforts of any artists in any field or genre, and I have never quite understood those who took exceptional pleasure in it. I am more interested in musical history and musical appreciation. If I could pick any word to describe my position as regards to writing about music (or the arts in general), I should like to say that I am an enthusiast. Nevertheless, one cannot escape one’s personal taste, and in my case, I will display the more negative side of my evaluations almost purely through the form of omission. I do not include music that seems to me to be historically and/or aesthetically bereft of continuing value. That may not be fair, but in proposing a canon, one has to draw the line somewhere.

Fortunately for me (and hopefully for many others), there is a wide and diverse selection of musical offerings to choose from - both from 1974 and from the many years up to the present day. 

January 1, 1974

Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark

 

1974 began with one of the most beautiful, evocative and open-hearted masterpieces in the history of popular music. Though many listeners may prefer the sad and insular world of Blue (1971), for me, this is the great Joni Mitchell’s undeniable masterpiece.
 
Perhaps because it covers so much musical as well as emotional ground, this is an album that takes a long time to sink in, but as it inevitably does, it gets its hooks in hard. Mitchell has always had a reputation for expressing her deepest, most contradictory feelings in concrete terms, but here she absolutely outdoes herself. This is an astonishing one-woman-show, with Joni writing, producing, arranging and singing everything, and if one considers "Raised on Robbery" carefully, she even includes the kitchen sink. Even after more than 40 years, I’m not sure that she has been sufficiently given credit for masterfully pulling off one of the most sophisticated and professionally mature albums ever to appear in the "pop/rock" genre. And perhaps that is because the directness of her voice and the tangible sharing of her open raw nerves indelibly connect so deeply with her audience. This is a great artist at the very top of her game.
 
What can one say about the music of Court and Spark? First of all, it’s absolutely singular - there is simply nothing else like it. Mitchell had, arguably, already peaked, and here she would transcend. There’s simply no other word for it. Beginning in the mid-1960s as beret-wearing, hippie-chick folksinger, Mitchell gradually proved omnivorous in her sources. As a young woman with a much older soul, she was already tapping into territory that virtually none of her contemporaries (with the always-exception of Dylan) could even begin to match. And somewhere along the way, she stumbled upon an older and more sophisticated musical form that would allow her to get all the depth and complexities out in the open. Joni discovered jazz.
 
That is not to say (not even imply) that Court and Spark is a "jazz album" or even a "jazz-fusion" album. The truth is that this majestic, floating stellar LP belongs to a genre or category that exists nowhere else other than between its grooves. This is "Joni Mitchell music," pure and simple, the same way "Van Morrison music" is in a class by its own. But I don’t think that we will be making a mistake if we refer to it as "jazz-informed." And the lessons that someone as brilliant and creative as Joni Mitchell could glean from such a broad and wondrous musical universe as jazz could be (and were) enormous.

 

It’s not just that Joni uses jazz chords, horn arrangements and free-floating bebop-infused melody lines to carry her confessional experiences and observations. That might be enough for a truly good or interesting album - and to be honest, Mitchell would later go on make some precisely like that. But this is that special place where discovery and inspiration meet and flower into an extraordinary new synthesis that sounds like nothing less than the greatest profundities of life and love itself. In other words, it’s art of the highest order.

 

I remember this album just used to make me "feel" arty - and not in a pretentious way. No, the sounds and moods of this record just unfolded to such a penetrating and intoxicating degree that I would always put it on and start painting - and I didn’t even paint!

 

The melodies here are astounding, the textures are so varied and rich, and of course Joni Mitchell’s inimitable voice carries the listener on a velvety ride that surpasses even her greatest musical ideas. But of course, in the last analysis, it’s the shocking revelations of the songs themselves that make this an album for the ages. For Mitchell had - for a time - acquired one of the rarest powers that a songwriter can possess, which is not simply the power to make you feel, but the power to make you feel like she feels! And to top it all off, she makes you realize that she is only articulating your own confusions and your own hearts’ desires all the time.

There’s really nothing left to be said about the album without (briefly) discussing each of the individual songs, except to say that, in the great tradition of rock LP programming, each number is not only a world unto itself, but each one also flows into the river of the album as a whole, turning the whole vast vision into one magical heart-rending and soul-enhancing journey. This is an album to live with, one to live out your life with and to, to keep returning for more nourishing goodness, to infuse your inner self with that spark of beauty and youth that will hold you in its life-giving grasp as you journey to old age and even death, not just remembering, but always discovering new and inspirational meaning.

This is the one album I wish I could write about in French.

Track listing
All songs written and composed by Joni Mitchell, except where noted.

Side One

1. "Court and Spark" - This short opening song serves as a kind of prelude and overture to the rest of the album. In a lovely, soft modal melody, Joni is attracted by love in the figure of a wandering troubadour. She is tempted, and there is passion, even fear in her voice in the beautiful bridge. In the end, however, she sums up her dilemma: "I couldn’t let go of LA/City of the fallen angels." This is an album about the contradictory impulses of a complex, sensitive individual. Nothing on here is going to be easy.

2. "Help Me" - Is this Joni Mitchell’s greatest song? I think so. Here she displays her absolute mastery of the fusion of jazz balladry with folk-rock personalism to create a timelessly lush portrait of temporal ecstasy. This is the great love song for the love that one knows is not going to last - but it’s so exquisite while it’s here that it’s ultimately worth it. There’s the breathlessness of free-falling when Joni slides into the celebratory bridge: "You danced with the lady with the hole in her pocket/Didn’t it feel good?" Yes, and it still does. Joni sums up the whole situation in the achingly beautiful refrain: "We love our lovin’/But not like we love our freedom." This is the ultimate anthem for romantics who can’t be tied down. It was Mitchell’s only Top 10 hit of her career and is ranked at No. 288 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It deserves a higher rating.
3. "Free Man in Paris" - The orgasmic beauty of Mitchell’s extraordinary fusion continues, with this breathtaking paean to freedom. Written for David Geffen, this gorgeous, liberating narrative lifts sets us down in the Paris of our dreams and lets us wander "from cafe to cabaret." The complex harmony somehow matches naturally with the free-and-easy feel of the song. The introductory lick is such a smooth send-off, and it follows us all the way through, the heady daydream taking us away - if only momentarily - from the realities and drudgeries of everyday life. "Free Man" is another of Mitchell’s great "if only" songs, and it’s one of the best. It reached the No. 22 spot on the U.S. charts. Rolling Stone rates it at No. 470 on their all-time list. This album certainly gets off to a strong start!
4. "People’s Parties" - Joni comes back down to earth here for this brief, heart-breaking observation of the parade of dysfunctional people she meets at parties. As she strums beautiful jazz chords on her open-tuned 12-string, her lyrics spill out in a rapid-fire string of descriptions, only to return to herself and her confusion, wishing she could be "laughing it all away." As the last refrain lingers, a piano enters, and we are whisked instantly into the next song.
5. "Same Situation" - That song takes us further inside the singer, with a beautiful, piano-based ballad in waltz time. Joni continues spinning out her lyrics as if she has so much to say she has to hurry to get it all out. It must take nerve to depict oneself as nakedly as this, as she finds herself staring in the bathroom mirror of a new lover with all the confusion and longing in her mind and heart. In the bridges, she merges herself with "the millions of the lost and lonely ones who cry out to be found." Her singing is exquisite: close up and personal without being cloying. As she sends up her prayer that won’t be heard: "Send me somebody who’s strong and somewhat sincere," our hearts tingle with the pain of recognition. Subtle strings join in, but the effect is a gentle emphasis with no trace of cheese. She does not wallow in misery - instead she shares the burden that so many of us carry in our "search for love that don’t seem to cease." The song, and the side end on a quietly unresolved chord of permanent impatience.

 

Side Two
 6. "Car on a Hill" - Side two kicks off with another of the album’s masterpieces, as we return with Joni to her teenage years, "sitting up waiting for my sugar to show." Indeed, she has been in the "same situation for so many years." The song swings in a carefree, youthful feel with sexy saxophones and all the anticipation of young love. But where is he? He’s three hours late. Suddenly, after the first verse, a heavy piano theme descends with a wailing guitar, complete with a choir of "older Jonis" wordlessly telling her younger self that this is a dilemma that she’s either going to have to get used to or kick free of. The music is so unexpectedly dramatic that it shocks, then quickly dissipates with quiet woodwinds, as the simple song resumes, and the girl continues to wait for that car that never comes. Mitchell communicates so much complex information so quickly and effortlessly that it is as thrilling and awe-inspiring as it is emotionally wrenching.
7. "Down to You" - Joni returns to adulthood at her piano, cynically observing, "Everything comes and goes/Marked by lovers and styles of clothes." As she continues, she delivers a semi-scolding narrative to once-lover or friend: "Constant stranger/ You’re a kind person/You’re a cold person too." Or is she talking to herself? She trails off into a bridge, half-talking, half-singing about a meaningless nightclub pickup. As the main melody returns the next morning, the song’s subject finds him/herself alone and the verse reaches a climax with multiple, impossibly high overtracks singing, "Love is gone." (Are these the fallen angels? And are they crying or mocking?) All voices cease as an English horn takes up a theme, accompanied by strings, and we have a long instrumental interlude in what almost amounts to a mini-concerto. This highly structured scored section seems designed to say everything that Mitchell cannot deliver with her voice, probably because this is the soundtrack to being alone. She finally returns to deliver one last verse. Whoever she’s singing to - and it’s probably everybody - whatever you are and whatever you want to be: "It all comes down to you."
8. "Just Like This Train" - This is sheer magic, and it comes when it’s needed the most. To that marvelous repeating guitar lick that continually rises into space, Joni is in full adult possession of herself as she boards a train taking her away from yet another failed relationship. She is philosophical here: "Lately I don’t count on nothing, I just let things slide." And why not? Her eyes go out to observe the life buzzing all around her, then "settle(s) down into the clickety-clack" with her bottle of German wine. It’s so comforting to know that one can find amusement and perhaps even self-acceptance even when everything goes wrong. "Oh sour grapes!/I lost my heart." This is simply one of the most healing and luscious songs ever written.
9. "Raised on Robbery" - Suddenly, the album takes an unpredictable and wacky left turn, as Joni delivers this wild-eyed portrait of a clueless drunken flirt pestering a helpless guy trying to watch hockey in a bar. This is balls-out rock ‘n’ roll with screaming saxophones, and Mitchell paints an indelible picture of a crazy broad who just won’t go away or shut up. God, this woman has stories, too. I wonder: Is Mitchell consciously presenting a crazy parody of what part of her thinks she might become, or is she just glad that with all her crazy problems that she’s as sane as she is? Of course, it all could just be a joke, and as quick as it came, it’s gone. This is one of the most unexpected and fun songs on any great album. ("I’m a pretty good cook, sitting on my groceries.")
10. "Trouble Child" - The record returns to the straight and serious world in this slinkingly sad song apparently sung to someone in a mental health facility. What is his problem though? It sounds as though he simply can’t take the strains that modern life demands. ("You can’t live life and you can’t leave it.") Once again, Mitchell seems as if she could be singing to herself, but she has more distance here: "So why does it come as such a shock to know you really have no one/Only a river of changing faces looking for an ocean?" Like most of the songs on Court and Spark, the song can ultimately be seen as being for everyone who listens: anyone who has a mind and a heart. Ultimately, Mitchell concedes there’s not much can be done about the situation: "Trouble child, breaking like the waves at Malibu." It’s all in the nature of being human.
11. "Twisted" (Annie Ross, Wardell Gray) - But Joni’s not going to let the album end on a sombre note. Suddenly, one of the muted trumpets from "Trouble Child" stops and goes into a jazzy improvisation. Mitchell, in a stroke of brilliance, launches full-force into "Twisted," a 1952 vocalese comedy number by Annie Ross, set to a be-bop saxophone solo by Wardell Gray. "My analyst said that I was right out of my head," she sings, parodying not only the sentiments of "Trouble Child" but the ultimate outrageousness of ever taking one’s self and one’s problems too seriously. Mitchell’s extraordinary, fine silky voice, her amazing range and her capricious capacity for expression all get full play here as she tackles all the wild words and complicated notes with a careless ease. (Cheech and Chong actually show up for verbal punctuation!) As she concludes, both the song and the album, she goes into a very appropriate double-track harmony: "Because instead of one head, I’ve got two. (And you know two heads are better than one.)" The doubling is a more-than-appropriate way of ending an album that looks at life’s problems from every possible perspective. Hey, the show’s gotta go on . . . Just genius, all the way through.
 
 Personnel:
Joni Mitchell – vocals, including background; acoustic guitar; piano; clavinet on "Down to You"
John Guerin – drums and percussion
Wilton Felder – bass
Max Bennett – bass on "Trouble Child"
Jim Hughart – bass on "People’s Parties" and "Free Man in Paris"
Milt Holland – chimes on "Court and Spark"
Tom Scott – woodwinds and reeds

Chuck Findley – trumpet on "Twisted" and "Trouble Child"

Joe Sample – electric piano, clavinet on "Raised on Robbery"

David Crosby – background vocals on "Free Man in Paris" and "Down to You"

Graham Nash – background vocals on "Free Man in Paris"

Susan Webb – background vocals on "Down to You"

Larry Carlton – electric guitar

Wayne Perkins – electric guitar on "Car on a Hill"

Dennis Budimir – electric guitar on "Trouble Child"

Robbie Robertson – electric guitar on "Raised on Robbery

José Feliciano – electric guitar on "Free Man in Paris"

Cheech Marin – background voice on "Twisted"

Tommy Chong – background voice on "Twisted"

Joni Mitchell and Henry Lewy - producers

Henry Lewy and Ellis Sorkin - engineers

 

 

 

January 17, 1974

Bob Dylan and the Band: Planet Waves

 

 

I remember not paying too much attention to this album at the time, because it got rather mediocre reviews and most people said it was a disappointment. Listening to Planet Waves now, 40 years later, I am amazed at how fresh and vital the songs are, the level of Dylan’s commitment to the material, and the Band’s astonishing pinpoint-precision playing. In retrospect, I have to conclude that the world was waiting and hoping for too much from this record. (How could it not?) This was the first "proper" Bob Dylan album since 1970’s New Morning, and all the "true believers" were hoping that he’d finally get back on track and deliver another masterpiece. (They only had to be patient - he would do precisely that one year later). The presence of the Band put expectations high as well. After all, this was the same backing group that supported him during his legendary 1966 tour, the last time Dylan had gone out on the road. And of course, since then, The Band had developed into one of the most beloved and respected units in all of rock, releasing at least two masterpieces of their own. Naturally, expectations were unreasonably high, and that’s what made the album sound like a disappointment. Now, as it may not be top-shelf Dylan (and the Band had no songs of their own), this has got to be seen not only as the beginning of something bigger and better for rock’s bard, but one of the most underrated recordings in his catalog. After releasing this album, Dylan went off on a come-back world tour with his old group (which I, happily, got to see), but the only song that they played from this was the obvious stand-out, "Forever Young." But there’s a lot more good music to explore on here, and Planet Waves is an excellent place to go back and rummage around. You might be surprised at what you find there.

 

Track listing
All songs written and composed by Bob Dylan.
Side One
1. "On a Night Like This" - Things get kicked off with this fun but hardly profound little hoe-down. It sounds like something he worked out with the group to get things warmed up, but you can’t help wishing that the record had a bigger kick-off.
2. "Going, Going, Gone" - It certainly doesn’t prepare you for this number, an amazingly sad, drawn out painful ballad that sounds perilously close to a suicide note. Dylan structures his material in a classic manner, drawing from country sources (Hank Williams comes to mind) as well as a wistful gospel feel. His situation sounds bleak and real here, and his wind-up vocal delivery sells everything right down the line. The Band is extraordinary - both ragged and tight, as is their trademark. Robbie Roberton’s tweezy Stratocaster is the perfect counterpoint for Dylan’s rusty voice, and those dual keyboards are just a treat to hear. This is great roots rock, something that everybody who loves that genre really needs to hear (if not have).
3. "Tough Mama" - Now, this is more like it when it comes to a rough-house rock ‘n’ roots jamboree. Both Dylan and the Band sound tough and cocky, the song’s got a funny chord structure, the lyrics are incoherently wild and are sung with a primitive abandon. This has the feel of the Band’s own "Up on Cripple Creek," as well as some of the Basement Tape songs, but it’s got an angry edge that gives it an extra lift. (Experiments like this would result in the glorious "Idiot Wind" the next year.) Garth Hudson turns in a cartwheeling organ solo towards the end.
4. "Hazel" - This drunk-ass sounding love song to a girl with dirty blonde hair is just ragged and right. It’s really astounding how perfectly the Band meshes with Dylan’s vision, even on a somewhat slight number as this, just as it’s obvious that their playing pushes him to add that extra something to his delivery. What a great Saturday-night beer-drinking record this is.
5. "Something There Is About You" - If there is one valid criticism that could be made about Planet Waves it might be that the songs can remind you of other, greater songs. But that doesn’t really matter that much when you have songs this good, and they’re put forward with such gusto. Dylan rides his lyrics high up over the ragged beat of Levon Helms’ drums, and he gets his points across. I particularly like his youthful remembrances and the way the girl reminds him of "something that’s crossed over from another century." You could probably say the same thing about the song.
6. "Forever Young" - Well, here’s the big anthem of the album, and I must say that Dylan and the boys pull it off well. This is a song for Bob’s children, and the performance comes right in that space between raggedness and mawkishness that really drives the sentiment home. Rick Danko’s bass carries the whole thing through, and thank God Dylan let himself really wail here. (I love his old-man’s voice, but I do miss the fact that he could once sing this openly and effectively.)

 Side Two
 7. "Forever Young" - Why? It might have made an interesting outtake, but coming directly after the emotional, definitive version, it just sounds like a sloppy hillbilly mess. Oh well, it’s over fast. (And some people just might like this one better, who knows?)
8. "Dirge"- Probably the best song on the album, "Dirge" certainly stands out from the pack. It’s not really played with the Band - it’s just Dylan on stabbing piano and vocals with some ornamentation from Robbie Robertson on acoustic guitar. It’s also an angry, bitter song: "I hate myself for loving you," is how it begins, then it continues to to tell why for five spite-filled minutes. "Dirge’s" haunting melody and the venom that Dylan carries in his vocal convinces you that these feelings are genuine, and have been interpreted as being directed toward his crumbling marriage. Both the subject and style of the song can be seen as part of the progress toward what will emerge as Blood on the Tracks, but here he has a long way to go before he reaches the balanced equanimity of that personal masterpiece. Still, "Dirge" is heartfelt in its righteous, sustained anger, and it features some of Dylan’s sharpest imagery since his mid-60s heyday. A bad breakup can do that for you.
9. "You Angel You" - Here’s a sharp turn in the other direction, a happy love song that’s probably addressed to no one in particular and therefore comes out as sort of generic, although Dylan starts to sound genuinely enthused on the bridge: "Give me more and more and more!" The Band, as always, sounds incredible.
10. "Never Say Goodbye" - This song fascinates, at least because of its structure: it almost seems to be two songs wedded together - the bridge turns into the verse, which makes verse, when it returns, sound like a bridge. The Band is on fire here, and Dylan howls appropriately. It all ends too soon, however, like they couldn’t figure out where to go from there - it ends up coming off like a great song fragment, an experiment given up on too soon perhaps.
11. "Wedding Song" - The album ends without the Band, just Dylan alone, acoustic and in heart-wrenching pain. The title clues us that this is for his wife, Sara, and here he’s begging for continuation after sorrow. The heart that he wears on his sleeve is somewhat shocking in that he’s displaying such raw, naked feelings in public, but sometimes that’s what artists do. Once again, this seems like part of a trip that will end at Blood on the Tracks, but while he was too angry in "Dirge," he’s too giving here. Then again, it’s probably unfair to compare anything on this album to another one, especially one so special, and "Wedding Song" is a beautiful and moving way to end Planet Waves before he goes out on the road. Once again, this is an album that any Dylan fan should have, and listening to it just might create some new ones.
One more note: The first time I heard "Wedding Song," it struck me that it sounded like someone singing desperately, all alone to himself, making up the words as he went along. I imagined it was a hundred years ago, and I heard something, wandered through some brush, and came across this guy alone, sitting on a railroad bridge, strumming his guitar and howling his guts out over a river. And I thought, hell, that’s worth listening to any day.  

Personnel

Bob Dylan – guitar, harmonica, vocals
Rick Danko – bass guitar, backing vocalist
Levon Helm – drums
Garth Hudson – organ
Richard Manuel – piano, drums
Robbie Robertson – guitars
Technical personnel
Rob Fraboni – production, engineering
David Gahr, Joel Bernstein – photography
Nat Jeffery – assistant engineer
Robbie Robertson – special assistance

 

 

 

Other January releases:

Brian Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets

 

 

This was a bombshell. Though it didn’t create shock waves at the time (it reached No. 26 in the UK, while only touching No. 151 in the States), Roxy Music’s ex-synthesizer wizard’ debut album was practically the postmodernist blueprint for what essentially become everything one thought about when the phrase "New Wave" came into being four or five years later. Eno (who would go on to produce Talking Heads, Devo, U2, among many others) was a true freak. A self-professed "non-musician" his job with Roxy Music was basically to make noise (or "create textures," if you prefer.) After being forced out of the group by frontman Bryan Ferry, Eno got the opportunity to create his own audio pop construction, using basically the rest of the band as backup, among others. The result was one of the most challenging, arresting and completely original records of the decade.

Though still rooted in the glow of glam rock, Here Come the Warm Jets displayed Eno’s strange ironic detachment in place of Ferry’s tortured romanticism whilst grappling with every sort of interesting sonic experiment he could thing of. Being a "non-musician" (Eno’s D.I.Y. approach would be very influential on the punk ethos), Eno basically tapped out simple melodies on the piano, recorded loops of sound, created strange squonks on his synthesizer, and just basically told (or hummed) what he wanted the very talented musicians he employed to play. Then he wrote lyrics that often eschewed meaning for sound (creating some of the most bizarre wordplay since Lewis Carroll) and sang over the whole thing like a pissy drag queen. The result was - and remains - an absolutely mind-blowing deconstruction of what "normal" pop music  was all about.

Here Come the Warm Jets is not only one of the most influential albums made during the 1970s, but one of the most entertaining. It is insane, absurd, yet absolutely committed music, filled with a kind of meaningless passion, or rather, a passion that found its own meaning in itself. Every song is different, filled with multiple ideas and imaginative sounds that can go on being discovered after thousands of listens. The melodies are extraordinary, the lyrics reveal the hidden insanity within modern pop culture, and Eno’s delivery purely classic in its strange, faux-upper-class tartiness. Not only that, but it’s funny as hell. (How do you come up with a line like, "You have to make a choice between the Paw Paw negro blowtorch and me!"? And make it real?!!)

Moods shift constantly from song to song, from the soaring "Needle in the Camel’s Eye," the demented doo-wop of "Cindy Tells Me," the beauteous bliss of "On Some Faraway Beach" to the maniacal violence of "Blank Frank." At the album’s heart and center, however is the astonishing "Baby’s on Fire," one of the most savage rock tracks of all time: a grinning, sarcastic bit of devilry with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp delivering perhaps his most incendiary guitar solo since "21st Century Schizoid Man."

Eno would produce three more solo pop albums in the 1970s - each one marvelously different from the other - before launching into a long-lived career as a composer of ambient music and as a producer. But nothing - not even glam - could prepare a listener for the unhinged, mind-fucking triumph that is Here Come the Warm Jets. An absolute masterpiece, completely essential in every sense of the word, this is an album that must be heard (or owned) by any serious pop/rock music fan. It is one of those rare records that simply changes everything - including how and why we listen.

Rolling Stone ranks Here Come the Warm Jets at No. 436 of their 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Much, much too low.

Track listing
All songs written and composed by Brian Eno, except where noted.

Side One
1. "Needles in the Camel’s Eye" (Eno, Phil Manzanara)

2. "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch"

3. "Baby’s on Fire"

4. "Cindy Tells Me" (Eno, Phil Manzanara)

5. "Driving Me Backwards"

Side Two

6. "On Some Faraway Beach"

7. "Blank Frank" (Eno, Robert Fripp)

8. "Dead Finks Don’t Talk" (Paul Thompson, Busta Jones, Nick Judd, Eno)

9. "Some of Them Are Old"

10. "Here Come the Warm Jets"

Personnel
Brian Eno – vocals, synthesizer, guitar, keyboards, treatments, instrumentation, production, mixing
Chris Spedding – guitar on tracks 1 and 2
Phil Manzanera – guitar on tracks 1, 2 and 4
Simon King – percussion on tracks 1, 3, 5 to 7 and 10
Bill MacCormick – bass guitar on tracks 1 and 7
Marty Simon – percussion on tracks 2 to 4
Busta Jones – bass guitar on 2, 4, 6 and 8
Robert Fripp – guitar on 3, 5, and 7
Paul Rudolph – guitar on tracks 3 and 10, bass guitar on tracks 3, 5 and 10
John Wetton – bass guitar on tracks 3 and 5
Nick Judd – keyboards on tracks 4 and 8
Andy Mackay – keyboards on tracks 6 and 9, saxophone septet on track 9
Sweetfeed – backing vocals on tracks 6 and 7
Nick Kool & the Koolaids – keyboards on track 7
Paul Thompson – percussion on track 8
Lloyd Watson – · slide guitar on track 9
Chris Thomas – extra bass guitar on track 2, mixing
Technical
Derek Chandler –  recording engineering
Denny Bridges – mixing engineering
Phil Chapman – mixing engineering
Paul Hardiman – mixing engineering
Arun Chakraverty – mastering

 

 

 

Gram Parsons: Grievous Angel

 

 

Posthumous albums are always bittersweet, sad affairs, and that is especially true of the final recording by country/rock legend Gram Parsons, who had passed away of a drug overdose at the Joshua Tree Memorial Park in California just a few months earlier. What’s especially sad in listening to the final music of this 26-year-old visionary is of course the tragic sense of waste, but with Parsons, as with artists like Hank Williams, Janis Joplin, and several others before him, it is still possible to hear in his voice a sensitivity and grace that seem to be simply too fragile for this world. I don’t know whether emotional fragility helped fuel this brilliant artists’ drug-and-alcohol lifestyle, nor do I know whether it contributed to his artistry. All I know, is that when hearing him sing those beautiful, sad songs of his, I recognize a sense of a hopelessness that I may be projecting onto him, and I know that it’s ultimately better to simply be thankful for the beautiful music he left behind than to speculate too deeply on an ideal of mythic tragedy.

For those unfamiliar with Parsons, his was a unique vision that blended all types of traditions into a conglomeration he called "Cosmic American Music," and while the end product veered more towards country, it’s most notable that everything great Parsons did was fully imbued with a sense of soul.

 

Parsons first came to public consciousness as a member of the Byrds, being the driving force behind their 1968 masterpiece, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. After leaving the group, Parsons joined with Byrds bass player Chris Hillman to form the ever-eclectic Flying Burrito Brothers. After two albums and two years of touring, Parsons’ erratic lifestyle led to his departure. After spending some time with the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards in France, Parsons returned to California and managed to sign a contract with Warner Brothers’ Reprise label. He had discovered the phenomenal Emmylou Harris in a nightclub and soon formed a singing partnership with her. Finally, in 1973, Parsons recorded and released his first solo album, GP, a classic record featuring the duo singing some of Parson’s greatest songs and backed by Elvis Presley’s band featuring guitarist James Burton. Although it did not chart, it was a huge critical success. Grievous Angel was its follow-up.

 

While not packing the full punch of its predecessor - Parsons was reportedly struggling to write new material - it matches the debut in sheer beauty and sincerity. Both albums together represent a final culmination of the depth of the artist’s creative vision and interpretive power. (As a matter of fact, both GP and Grievous Angel are available together as a 2-fer on a single CD - an absolute must for any serious music fan.)

There are certainly gems here, especially the quasi-title song, the brooding "Brass Buttons," Parson’s and Harris’ gorgeous take on the classic "Love Hurts," and the closing song that became his de facto requiem, "In My Hour of Darkness."

While Gram Parsons is continually hailed to be one of the most important figures in modern music for the development of both "country-rock" as well as "alternative country," it is his special personal gifts, both as a writer and a singer that make him most precious. So instead of shedding tears of regret, it’s much better to put on these records and listen to the gorgeous tones of Gram and Emmylou soaring over some of the most uniquely personal and poignant songs of their time.

Rolling Stone ranks Grievous Angel at No. 429 on their 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Track listing
Side One

1. "Return of the Grievous Angel" (Gram Parsons)

2. "Hearts on Fire" (Walter Egan, Tom Guidera)

3. "I Can’t Dance" (Tom T. Hall)

4. "Brass Buttons (Parsons)

5. "1000 Wedding" (Parsons)

Side Two

6. "Medley Live from Northern Quebec:"

    (a) "Cash on the Barrelhead"

    (b) "Hickory Wind"

7. "Love Hurts" (Boudleaux Bryant)

8. "Ooh Las Vegas" (Parsons)

9. "In My Hour of Darkness" (Parsons, Emmylou Harris)

 

Personnel
Gram Parsons: lead vocals, acoustic guitar
Emmylou Harris: vocals (all songs except "Brass Buttons")

Glen D. Hardin: piano, electric piano on "Brass Buttons"

James Burton: electric lead guitar

Emory Gordy, Jr.: bass

Ronnie Tutt: drums

Herb Pedersen: acoustic rhythm guitar, electric rhythm guitar on "I Can’t Dance" Al Perkins: pedal steel

 

Guests

Bernie Leadon: acoustic guitar on "Return of the Grievous Angel", electric lead guitar on "Hearts on Fire", dobro on "In My Hour of Darkness" Byron Berline: fiddle on "Return of the Grievous Angel", "Medley Live from Northern Quebec" & "In My Hour of Darkness", mandolin on "Medley" N.D. Smart: drums on "Hearts on Fire" and "In My Hour of Darkness"

Steve Snyder: vibes on "Medley Live from Northern Quebec" Linda Ronstadt: harmony vocal on "In My Hour of Darkness"

Kim Fowley, Phil Kaufman, Ed Tickner, Jane & Jon Doe: "Background blah-blah" on "Medley Live from Northern Quebec"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra

2014 in music

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra: Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything (January 20, 2014)

 

I want to be in this band. Or start one just like it. If you’re interested, let me know. They’re from Montreal. I can’t describe it - just listen to it.

 

Track Listing
 1. "Fuck Off Get Free (for the Island of Montreal)"

2. "Austerity Blues"

3. "Take Away These Early Grave Blues"

4. "Little Ones Run"

5. "What We Loved Was Not Enough"

6. "Rains Thru the Roof at Thee Grande Ballroom (For Capitol Steez)"

Personnel
 Thierry Amar: Upright bass, electric bass, plucked piano, vocals

Efrim Menuck: Electric guitar, acoustic guitar, mellotron, vocals

Jessica Moss: Violin, plucked piano, vocals

Sophie Trudeau: Violin, plucked piano, vocals

David Payant: Drums, organ, vocals

 

 

 

The Magic Mountain: Chapter 2

Chapter 2 of The Magic Mountain is very short and contains only two sections, but it is quite important as it provides a basic background for the young Hans Castorp, letting us know precisely who he is and how his values and attitudes were formed.

The Baptismal Bowl / Grandfather in His Two Forms

As a child, Hans Castorp is no stranger to death: by the age of seven both his mother and father have died. (There is that magic number seven again!) After his father’s death, young Hans goes to live with his aged grandfather, a conservative old political man who has retained all of the values of the past, even down to his clothing. As a matter of fact the "true grandfather," in Hans’ mind, is not the old man himself, but a portrait of him in ancient ritual costume that hangs in the parlor.

Senator Hans Lorenz Castorp thus represents the conservatism and implied dignity of young Hans’ traditional German bourgeois background. This is precisely the background that the book’s author, Thomas Mann, was born into, and the relationship that the writer had with his cultural inheritance is quite complex.

Thomas Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), an epic, three-generational story of the gradual decline of a German mercantile family, is essentially a reflection of Mann’s own historical background. In that novel, it can be argued, excessive dedication to "traditional" values at the expense of changing historical times and human needs leads, inevitably, to tragic downfall. Yet, as we shall see, Mann did not wholly reject the values and traditions of the past, nor did he embrace new and radical change.

However, for Hans Castorp, this inundation of the past into a young boy’s uncritical perspective helps to shape him into a basically simple inheritor of "average" German middle-class values. Allegorically, it transforms Hans into a representation of the traditional social, moral and political picture of German itself as it was in the first quarter of the 20th century.

The chief image of this first section is the old family baptismal bowl, which Hans loves for his grandfather to show him after dinners. It was from this ornate golden vessel that Hans himself was baptized as a baby, along with this father and grandfather. A silver tray on which it rests is even older, and inscriptions bearing the names and dates of the baptisms of Hans’ forbears go back seven generations - all the way back to 1650. We have a solid and rich symbol of the great age of traditional Christian bourgeois values that have been symbolically poured upon the boy’s head. Hans loves to hear hear his old grandfather talk about the bowl, at the sound of which "religious feelings got mixed up with a sense of death and history," giving the boy a warm feeling of pleasure.

Hans Castorp’s old grandfather and the baptismal bowl serve to satisfy a function of reassuring stability in what must be seen as a fragmented and uncertain childhood. They would send a "familiar feeling" over the boy:

. . . a strange, half-dreamy, half-scary sense of standing there and yet being tugged away at the same time, a kind of fluctuating permanence, that meant both a return to something, and a dizzying, everlasting sameness . . .

There is, therefore, aside from comfort, also a sense of awe at staring into the past, and this awe is all connected vaguely with vague sensations of religion and death.

I is interesting, and I think a little strange, that The Magic Mountain does not deal directly with the subject of religion at all, at least in the conventional sense. And I think the reason may have to do with the German bourgeois treatment of religion and religious matters with a kind of formal punctiliousness that one can describe as "pious," though hardly "spiritual" in any profound sense. "Religion" for Hans Castorp seems to be translated almost completely into a sense of "solemnity" or even "sentimentality." Perhaps this shallow sense of religious sensibility is how Mann saw faith as embodied in the typical German psyche of the period. At any rate, any spiritual experiences that will be had on the magic mountain will have a much broader source and implication than any simple German Protestant tradition.

Death, as well, seems to represent a kind of sentimentalized sense of solemn dignity for Hans. When his grandfather dies, this is the the third funeral that he will have attended in his young life, and with a child’s innocence, he duly notes the formal, sombre nature of people’s response to death and the dead.

Indeed, at his grandfather’s death, the old man’s corpse is actually displayed wearing the ancient costume that he is depicted in within the formal portrait of him, and which Hans even considers "his true grandfather."

The idea of death, of course, is one of the great themes of the novel, and it is important to note how young Hans Castorp develops his feelings and attitudes towards the subject in his youth, as he will carry this same basic perspective with him up to the magic mountain, where it will be challenged many times over.

As noted before, this boy is quite familiar with death at a very young age. And Mann is very careful to point out that Hans not only a "sympathy" with death, but notes that his perception of the phenomenon is quite noticeably split into two contradictory aspects or attitudes:

. . . there was something religious, gripping, and sadly beautiful, which was to say, spiritual about death and at the same time something that was the direct opposite, something very material, physical, which one could not really describe as beautiful, or gripping, or religious, or even as sad.

This "material, physical" aspect of death, "almost indecent in its base physicality," is represented by the "waxy" appearance of his grandfather’s corpse, the fact that it was "just stuff." Hans even notes that the floral arrangements, which could be seen as richly symbolic, as they are used to try to cover up the actual stench of decay.

This "dual nature" of death - its spiritual and physical aspects, so to speak - will be an ongoing motif and subject for much discussion and contemplation throughout the course of the novel. Mann recognizes that it is very important for Hans to have semi-developed perspective on the subject before his sojourn to the magic mountain, and I believe that one can be fairly certain that the author found this strange yet simplistic view to be predominant among his countrymen.

At the Tienappels’ / Hans Castorp’s Moral State

After his grandfather’s death, Hans is taken in by his great-uncle Consul Tienappel, the owner of a prosperous importing firm in Hamburg, along with his two sons. Hans is raised and schooled in the height of upper-middle-class style, fashion and responsibility. He learns to love to live well, and as his great-uncle informs him that as his inheritance would not support the lifestyle he enjoys, that he must, at adulthood, find some position of work. Although Hans does not particularly enjoy work, he respects it (it is, as the narrator describes, "the absolute of the age"), but is unsure of what to do after he finishes school. Since he had always liked looking at ships as a boy - and had once even painted a water-color of one - it is suggested by a family friend that he train as an engineer and come to work for his firm designing them. This situation seems quite satisfactory to Hans, and so he finishes his education, and with help from his talent in mathematics, he passes his final exams with relative ease.

Being by nature slightly anemic, however, Hans had tired himself during the exertion of his studies, and the family doctor strongly suggests that he spend a few weeks in the alps before he begins his life’s labor. This is a happy coincidence, as Han’s cousin, Joachim Ziemssen is currently under care at the Berghof sanitorium, and he can keep the young man company while on vacation.

Thus, in just a few pages, we are completely brought up to date, and the story may resume where we left it off after the first chapter. Very little is said about Hans and his life growing up, precisely because there is so very little to say. Mann is extremely careful to present us with a typical, unremarkable (though quite pleasant) young man who is quite simply the consummate product of his environment. "Hans Castorp was an honest, unadulterated product of the local soil, superbly at home in it." In short, he is "mediocre." Actually, however, the narrator insists, he should not be called "mediocre," precisely because he himself was aware that he was "lacking" in some fundamental aspect.

"A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries." This statement makes it unambiguously clear that the reader is meant to take Hans Castorp, the "hero" of the novel, as a paradigmatic representative of his entire age, race and class. In short, Hans Castorp is bourgeois, early 20th century Germany, and the choices he faces will ultimately be identical to the ones than Mann’s own nation must grapple with. Hence, the Magic Mountain is clearly meant to be seen, right from the beginning, as existing on an allegorical level - one might even say a mythic level.

Thomas Mann and Joseph Campbell
 - Part 1

 

The great American mythologist, writer and educator Joseph John Campbell (1904-1987) claimed that he was assisted in forming the foundations of his theories through his youthful readings of modernist European literature, particularly the works of James Joyce and Thomas Mann. In Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Campbell saw the progression of Hans Castorp’s education to be a methodical structuring of the stages of rites and initiations through which a human being must pass during his or her life, as enacted through ritual in more traditional societies. In short, Campbell viewed the task that Mann had set for himself to be no less than a spiritual guide to lead his native Germany - and indeed, the entire civilization of Western Europe - to a higher level of consciousness and a deeper level of experience as it exited the bombastic destruction of the First World War.

If this analysis holds good, the author has indeed taken a bold and audacious step in constructing this highly complex and difficult novel. Nevertheless, Campbell, a student both of the history of mythology as well as Western literature, was convinced that in the modern world that the artist would take the traditional place of the shaman or the religious mystic in founding new myths, rituals and codes for his or her society, that it was the artist’s destiny and responsibility to lead modern humanity on its next stage of development as it left the old traditions behind and embarked fully on the scientific and secular age.

This was not only a mighty task, believed Campbell, but it was absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of humankind. Mythology, according to Campbell, was not something that the human race should and will outgrow. It is, rather absolutely fundamental to the health and well-being of the species itself. Without myths, rituals and transcendent codes of behavior, Campbell believed that modern society would crumble, as it had demonstrated itself capable of during World War I. His theories were then exponentially verified by that same society attempting to erect the artificially created secular myths that proliferated to bring about the mind-boggling devastation of World War II.

What kind of mythology did the modern artist seek to erect to help advance his or her culture to survive and grow? This is a very broad question and something that Campbell never ceased asking about in his work. But when he first encountered the works - first of Joyce, then of Mann - in the 1920s, he became convinced that these writers were attempting to mine the rich past through the density of the confusing present day in order to unearth new forms of expression for the eternal verities of humankind. And if Campbell was even partly correct in his assessment of the role played by art in the development of cultural mythology - and he spent decades compiling evidence of that fact throughout all cultures and ages - then the role of the artist is a very important and critical one indeed.

I thought that this would be an excellent opportunity to bring in Joseph Campbell’s voice, not only so that we could look at his extraordinarily insightful and stimulating theories, but also specifically that we could look at what he had to say about Thomas Mann himself, in the hopes that he would throw some much-needed light on some of the themes going on in The Magic Mountain.

I would, therefore, like to present here a section from one of Campbell’s books. It comes from the fourth volume of his great tetrology The Masks of God, subtitled: Creative Mythology. In Part Two: "The Waste Land," Chapter 6, entitled "The Balance" includes several sections on Mann’s life and career, and on The Magic Mountain in particular. To get a better idea of the individual who wrote this extraordinary novel, I think it is both fascinating and informative to read about both the aesthetic and political theories of this giant of modern literature. To that effect, I would like to present the section entitled "The Individual and the State."

Thomas Mann, unlike his great contemporary, James Joyce, was very concerned with political and social affairs. He lived in times of great turbulence and change, and he altered his convictions several times during the course of history in his long life in the challenging first half of the twentieth century. Campbell, I believe, gives us some remarkable insight about the man and his world and allows us to place much of what is contained in The Magic Mountain into a much broader context, where we can begin to interpret its elusive messages with more depth and clarity.

The Individual and the State
by Joseph Campbell

 

Among the most important of those authors of the first half of the present century who, together with James Joyce, transformed the naturalistic nineteenth-century society novel into a secular vehicle of mythological wisdom and symbolic initiations, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was perhaps the most ardently aware of the social and pedagogical relevance, and consequent responsibilities, of his profession. Contrary to the way of Joyce, whose point of conscience was to remain from first to last the artist, with the absolutely impartial binocular vision of an Olympian - nonparticipant as partisan, omniparticipant as viewer and mover - Thomas Mann, throughout his long, productive career was always seriously engaged, either covertly or explicitly, in delivering a sociological, political - and, in his later years, mystagogic - message.

Now I do not wish to compare him in this point to such a socialistic tub-thumper as Bernard Shaw, who himself declared that the very long prefaces to his plays were as much to his purpose as the plays themselves; however, it is a fact that as an essayist, elucidating the philosophical and sociological backgrounds and implications of his own artistic achievements, Thomas Mann is hardly matched in the history of letters. The essays, which are numerous and as sedulously composed as the fictional works themselves, are among the most illuminating and important treatments we possess of the relationships of modern literature to those spheres of experience and symbolic communication that in the past were the province of myth alone. And in relation to the study of mythology itself - its sources, meanings, and moral implications for today - there have been no more sophisticated elucidations.

For it is simply a fact (as I have already remarked in my Prologue to the first volume of this tetrology) that poets and artists, who are dealing every day of their lives with the feeling- as well as thought-values of their own imageries of communication, are endowed with a developed organ for the understanding of myth that is too often lacking in the merely learned, he may be a more dependable guide to the nuclear themes of a given mythic complex, and a much more profound interpreter of their relevance to life, than even the most respected of its specialized academic elucidators. And finally, since Mann, as I have just said, was concerned not simply with the universal psychological and metaphysical implications of his mythological symbols, but also with their practical, moral and political application, he was compelled, during the long and stately course of his career in a period of catastrophic changes in the character of European culture, to commit his art and sympathies first to one extreme, then to the other, of the social-political spectrum, until in the end he found himself in such a whirlabout of reversals that the magnificent ship of his art began to crack and to leak Hermetic water at the seams. Thus the careful student of his interpretations is provided not only with readings of equal perspicacity from more than one point of view, but also what my grandmother would have called "a good object lesson" in the mercurial nature of mythological universals. And in addition, since Mann knew exactly what he was doing - shutting first one eye, then the other - there is in that a further lesson for the student of morality, as well as a corollary, touching the discipline of the parallax, for the student of binocular vision.

Mann’s earliest schematic formulation of the contrasting terms of the problem that he continued to revolve in his mind to the end of his days was presented in a very early short story entitled "Tristan" (1902), which like his later masterpiece, The Magic Mountain (1924), had for its setting a tuberculosis sanatorium, and for its theme the counterplay and dialogue, in that setting, of the will to freedom and peace against the will to life - twenty years before Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. As its date reveals, at the time of the publication of this short story, in which an astonishing number of those themes were announced that in the later novel were to be developed and expanded to the magnitude of a symphony in honor of the Lord-and-Lady Hermes-Aphrodite of the left-hand way to illumination, the author was but twenty-seven years old. His novel Buddenbrooks (1902) had already won renown; and two more short works, "Tonio Kröger" (1903) and the play Fiorenza (1904), were immediately to follow. Those were the critical years of his career, during which his fundamental philosophical stance was being established on a base principally of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, with a touch, as well, of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The principal texts around which his cogitations revolved, besides Goethe’s Faust and Wagner’s operas, were Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Schopenhauer’s speculative essay "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual." These works brought his thinking to focus almost compulsively on the enigma of death and renewal, on the psychological factors contributing to both personal and social disintegration, and on those contrary factors that might be counted on to withstand, or even overcome, the processes of dissolution and death. In a letter "On Marriage," sent to Count Hermann Keyserling in the late nineteen-twenties, Mann declared: "For me the concepts of death and individualism have always coalesced . . . and the concept of life, on the other hand, has united with those of duty, service, social ties, and even worth." However, things were not really quite as simple as that in his mind. For in the course of his long career the various elements of these opposed combinations occasionally separated from their fellows and changed sides. The series of cultural shocks delivered by the cataclysms of his century (during the rapid sequence of which the nation and folk of his first concern, which in his earliest order of alignment had represented duty and service to life, became to him the symbol of ultimate evil) left him finally with no ground on earth on which to stand. In terms of the basic philosophic position that he had made his own by 1902, this should not have greatly surprised or unsettled him. However, he had also in those critical years given his heart, as he declared in his novella "Tonio Kröger," to the normal, usual, fair, and living, happy, and commonplace human beings of this world, and not even the power of his disengaged, sophisticated artist eye and mind could accept with equanimity what they had done.

"I stand between two worlds," his hero, Tonio, had written to a young Russian intellectual, Lisabeta, in that work.
I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me . . . I don’t know which makes me feel worse. The bourgeois are stupid; but you adorers of the beautiful, who call me phlegmatic and without aspirations, you ought to realize that there is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace.

I admire those proud, cold beings who adventure upon the paths of great and daemonic beauty and despise "mankind"; but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my bourgeois love of the human, the living and usual. It is the source of all warmth, goodness, and humor; I even almost think it is itself that love of which it stands written that one may speak with the tongues of men and of angels and yet having it not be as sounding brass and tinkling silver . . .

Do not chide this love, Lisabeta; it is good and fruitful. There is longing in it, and a gentle envy; a touch of contempt and no little innocent bliss.

In his earlier short story "Tristan," the side of prosperous, buoyant life is represented by a lusty, rather peasant-like red-faced big-businessman, Herr Klöterjahn by name, of the firm A.C. Klöterjahn and Co., who arrived at the sanatorium Einfried only to deposit there - with care and tender concern - his exquisitely fragile young wife, who, since giving birth with extreme difficulty to their vigorously blooming baby boy, had been afflicted with a tracheal condition dangerously close to consumption. She had been ordered to Einfried by her doctor to find rest, repose from all agitation, release from duties for a while, and the very best medical attention. While on the other side, the cause of art, beauty, intellect, and the spirit was represented by an odd unsocial little person with very large feet, Detlev Spinell, in his early thirties, yet graying already at the temples, and known to the wits of the sanatorium as the moldy infant. He had once composed a short novel, now in print in a large volume, every single letter of the jacket of which had the look of a Gothic cathedral; and he kept this on a table in his room, where he spent the days writing letters. He was at Einfried, he would say, not for for the cure, but because of the Empire style of the furniture; and on beholding any sudden sight of beauty - two matching colors, mountains tinged by a sunset - "How beautiful!" he would exclaim in a paroxysm of sensibility, pitching his head to one side, lifting his shoulders, spreading out his hands, and distending lips and nostrils. "God! just look! how beautiful!" he would cry and then fling his arms about the neck of any person, male or female, at hand.

Well, to make an elegant short story very short indeed: To everbody’s amazement, for he had never sought company before, this gift of the spirit to Einfried became, as soon as he beheld her, the solicitous humble servant of the lovely Frau Klöterjahn’s exquisite beauty. Then he did two things: he flattered her refinement as too spiritual for this coarse world and for the husband whose coarse name ill befitted her; then he induced her to play again the piano, as she had played it in her childhood, when her father had played the violin. "But the doctors have expressly forbidden it," she said. "They are not here," he answered: "we are free . . . Dear Madam, if you are afraid of doing yourself injury, then let the beauty be dead and still that might have come into being from the touch of your fingers . . ."

She played. And it went from Chopin’s Nocturnes to Wagner’s Tristan: Oh, the boundless, inexhaustible joy of that union eternal beyond the bounds of time, et cetera . . . Two days later there was blood on her handkerchief, and not long thereafter Klöterjahn was summoned to what proved to be her last hours. Spinell wrote him a letter: a personally insulting of his hate-filled case against life; and the sturdy man of the world, in reply, simply walked into the author’s room and told him to his face what he was: an impotent clown, a coward, and a sneak, scared sick of reality, and with beauty on his tongue that was nothing more than hypocrisy and a fool’s grudge against life.

The radical opposition of the two hemispheres of experience and value represented in this story, on one hand by the man of business, healthy and socially at ease in his world of aggressive, unselfcritical, lusty life, and on the other by Spinell in his favorite sanatorium, with its pleasant grounds and gardens, rambling walks, grottoes, bowers, and little rustic pavilions, is matched in the medieval legend by the contrast of the courtly world of King Mark, with its uncritically accepted and forced customs of both courtesy and religious faith, and, on the other hand, the couple in the wilderness and its timeless grotto. There is an oriental analogy also intended; one suggested by the works of Schopenhauer and their reflection in Wagner’s theme: namely of the contrast recognized in India between the two worlds, on the one hand of life in the context of society, bound to the wheel of ignorance, suffering, rebirth, old age, and death, and on the other of life in the forest, in the penitential groves, striving by all means to achieve release from the senseless round. However, in India, in neither of these situations does the problem of individuality arise. For in the social sphere one obeys - one is compelled to obey - the ritual laws and disciplines of one’s caste, without resistance, without question, whereas in the penitential groves the aim is not to realize individuality but to erase it, to eliminate absolutely and forever whatever taint or trace of ego, personal will, and individuality may yet remain to one, even after a lifetime - yes, innumerable lifetimes - of the socially enforced, impersonal disciplines of caste.

In our modern European West, on the other hand, largely as a result of the forthright intransigency of a sufficient number of actually great, courageous individuals, the principle of individuality and an appreciation of the worth of individuality have won through - at least for the present. So that, properly, the forest must have here an altogether different sense from that assigned to it in any Indian code. "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe," declared Joyce’s hero, Stephen Dedalus, "whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church; and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning." That has a very different ring from self-erasure. And so there is a new problem to be faced here: one that for the West and for the coming history and character of civilization is to be decisive, either as solved and integrated socially in our institutions, or as lost - beneath the rising waves of Asia. For it has been in Europe and in the European sphere alone (which includes, for now at least, North America), that this problem of the radical dissociation and collision of individual and group values has emerged as the critical challenge of a maturing humanistic civilization.
But the difficulties posed are great. Chiefly they derive from the fact that the values of both of the opposed hemispheres, the individual and the social, are positive; hence by all the laws both of physics and biology, mutually repellent. That is to say, the partisans of each banner view the values of the other side merely as negative to their own and therefore, in every attempt either to attack or to achieve concord, succeed only in dealing with their own negative projections, giving battle to their own shadows on the walls of their own closed minds - which presents a fine circus of clowns for the laughter of the gods, but for mankind, with increasing danger, a turba philosophorum that is being reflected not in a sealed retort but in the carnage of exploded cities.

Somewhere about midway between the dates of his letter to Count Keyserling on marriage and his youthful composition of "Tristan," Thomas Mann, during the years of the First World War, was revolving, from one viewpoint to another, his thoughts on the counterplay of opposites that at that time was represented to him by the contending ideals of Germany and the Western Allies. And as he had already made things a little difficult for himself by associating individualism with death and submission to the social order with life, so now he added to his philosophical stress by linking radicalism with individualism and conservatism with duty, associating the latter with German culture and the former with the French Revolution, English economic materialism, international class socialism, and the ideas of a money-based luxury civilization. He made a great many statements in his book that he later came to regret, and retracted. However, it is the work out of which The Magic Mountain came: a fearless, really extraordinary work of self-scrutiny and analysis, a night-book of lightning flashes bursting from dark impenetrable clouds; as it is to be read as a diary of such confusion as anyone of good will, condemned by destiny to settle his own mind with respect to the values at stake in a modern war of mighty nations, of which his own was one, might, if he had the courage to do so, force himself to write. The work, first published 1919, and then, abridged, in 1922, bore the title Reflections of a Non-Political Man, and in the following brief selection lets the reader know why.

Politics I hate, and the belief in politics, because it makes people arrogant, doctrinaire, harsh, and inhuman. I do not believe in the formulae of the anthill, the human beehive; do not believe in the republique democratique, sociale et uninverselle; do not believe that mankind was made for what is being called "happiness," or that it even wants this "happiness," - do not believe in "belief," but rather in despair, because it is this that clears the way to deliverance; I believe in humility and work - work on oneself, and the highest, noblest, sternest, and most joyous form of such work seems to me to be art."

In those days Mann identified this kind of work on oneself, humility, integrity, with what he termed at that time the "aristocratic principle," exemplified in Europe pre-eminently, in his view, by the culture ideal and discipline of the Germans, in contrast not only to the highly emotional class revolution of the French with its "Marseillaise" and guillotine, but also to the cold-blooded, utilitarian, economic materialism of the Anglo-Saxon Industrial Revolution, while Marxism he described as but "a fusion of French revolutionary thought and English political economy." "You party politicians," he could at that time write, quoting Strindberg, "are like one-eyed cats. Some of you see only with the left eye, others only with the right, and for that reason you can never see stereoscopically, but only one-sidedly and flat." And again, still quoting the Swedish author: "As a poet, one has a right to play with ideas, to experiment with standpoints, but not bind oneself to anything: for freedom is the life breath of the poet." And the real good of humanity, as he then believed, was served in art, not in manifestoes; for the curse of politics, mass politics, so-called democratic politics, derived from its reduction of all life, art itself, and religion as well, to politics, the marketplace, newspaper thinking. "No experience," he wrote, "is more likely to put politics out of mind, more thoroughly prove it irrelevant, and better teach how to forget it, than the experience, through art, of what is everlasting in man. And at a time when world political events of truly fearful force are involving all that is in us of individual human worth in sympathetic participation, overwhelming it and bearing it away - precisely at such a time it is fitting to stand firm against the megalomaniacs of politics, in defense, namely, of the truth that the essential thing in life, the true humanity of life, never is even touched by political means." "Man is not only a social, but a metaphysical being. In other words, he is not merely a social individual, but also a personality. Consequently, it is wrong to confuse what is above the individual in us with society, to translate it completely into sociology. Doing that, one leaves the metaphysical aspect of the person, what is truly above the individual, out of account; for it is in the personality, not the mass, that the actual subordinated principle is to be found."

So far, so good. No one who has ever understood or experienced anything either of art or of life - anything, that is to say, beyond the sphere of sociology - would have very much to say against all that. However, the author, in addition, had involved himself in this book (in spite of its nonpolitical title) in a political commitment to the idea and cause of German culture, against what he conceived to be the revolutionary internationalism of the bourgeois (French, English, and incidentally American) democracies. Moreover, by 1930, having made that first mistake, he had gone on to the logical second. He had abandoned his earlier distinction between the personal and social spheres and had aligned himself with the latter, in the currently fashionable way of Marxist socialism - even to the point of identifying Marxism, in a manner that was also fashionable at that time, with the progressive ideals of bourgeois liberalism and democracy. But this identification he had already made in his nonpolitical "Reflections"; so that he was now simply shifting allegiance from one pole of his own dichotomy to the other. And to make matters even more confusing, both for himself and for those still striving to admire him, he refused to concede that in turning from the one side of his ledger to the other, he had left the values of the first behind. What he had been calling the "spiritual values" of the "aristocratic principle" - i.e. (as he understood them) the personally responsible, dutiful, form-conserving humanistic ideals of a worthy people’s national heritage - he now simply transferred to the workers’ class revolution, reducing even the existence of God (in orthodox Levantine-Marxist style) to a social occasion:
"The human race dwells on earth in communities," he announced in a talk on "Culture and Socialism," published in the same volume, called The Challenge of the Day (1930), in which the letter to Count Keyserling "On Marriage" appears; "and there is no sort of individual realization or direct relationship to God, to which some form of association - of sociability - does not correspond. The religious ‘I’ become corporative in the parish." [That is the Judas kiss.] "The cultural ‘I’ celebrates its festival in the form and name of the community - which is a word which bears in Germany strong religious and aristocratic associations, setting the holiness of its idea of social life all together apart from the concept of society of the democracies . . . German socialism, the invention of a Jewish social theorist trained in Western Europe, has always been felt by German cultural piety to be alien to the land and contrary to the national heritage, indeed sheer devilry, and has been accordingly despised" - and now comes the crucial gambit and the timely transfer of values:

and with full right; for it does indeed represent the dissolution of the idea of a national culture and community, in the name of an idea of social classes to which that of the nation and community is opposed. However, the fact of the situation is, that this process of dissolution has already progressed to such a degree that the complex of German cultural ideas signified by the terms "nation" and "community" can be today dismissed as mere romanticism; and life itself, with all its meaning for the present and for the future is now, without doubt, on the side of socialism . . . For although the spiritual significance of individualistic idealism derived originally from its connection with the idea of a cultural heritage, whereas the socialistic class concept has never denied its purely economic origin, the latter nevertheless entertains today far friendlier relations with the sphere of the spirit that does its romantically nationalistic middle-class antagonist, the conservatism of which has clearly, for all to see, lost touch and sympathy with the living spirit and its present-day demands.

The author had spoken on other occasions of the discrepancy, which others have also remarked, between the nobility and wisdom of the greatest men of our times and the lag in the public domain of law and international affairs, and he recurs now to this theme, to advance and settle his argument.

I have recently spoken elsewhere, of the unhealthy and dangerous tension that has developed in our world between the state of knowledge already attained and spiritually assimilated by those who represent the summits of our humanity and the material actualities of our present; pointing also to the dangers in this tension. The socialistic class, the working class, shows an unquestionably better and more vital will to overcome this shameful and dangerous discrepancy than does its cultural adversary, whether it be in matters of legislation, the rationalization of public affairs, the international conception of Europe, or what you will. It is indeed true that the socialistic class concept, in contrast to the idea of a national culture, is in its economic theory antagonistic to spiritual values; nevertheless in practice it favors them, and that, as things stand today, is what really counts.

Within a decade of this talk, the world’s supreme model of the economically based but spiritually disposed socialistic class-state joined hands with the nationally based, unspiritual socialistic state, to invade, dismember, and share Poland, and so began the Second World War. Thomas Mann, in due time, took flight, not to socialistic Russia but, by way of nonparticipant Switzerland, first to Princeton, then to Hollywood, whence, from the distant shores of the Pacific, a few hours before Pearl Harbor, he sent off the following radio broadcast to the German people:

German listeners, he who speaks to you today was fortunate enough to do something for the intellectual reputation of Germany in the course of his long life. I am grateful for this, but I have no right to pride myself for it, as it was destiny and did not lie in my hand.
No artist accomplishes his work in order to increase the glory of his country. The source of productivity is individual conscience. You Germans are not allowed to thank me for my work, even if you desired to do so. So be it. It was accomplished not for your sake but from innermost need.

But there is one thing that has been done really for your sake, which has developed from social and not private conscience. With every day I am more and more certain that the time will come, and in fact, is already near at hand, when you will thank me for it and rate it higher than my stories and books. And this is, that I warned you, when it was not yet too late, against the depraved powers under whose yoke you are harnessed today and who lead you through innumerable misdeeds to incredible misery. I knew them. I knew that nothing but catastrophe and misery for Germany and for Europe would grow from their unspeakably base nature while the majority of you were seeing in them the forces of order, beauty, and national dignity - blinded as you were to a degree which today has unquestionably already become incredible to yourselves . . .

Collapse is near. Your troops in Russia lack doctors, nurses, medical supplies. In German hospitals the severely wounded, the old and feeble are killed with poison gas - in one single institution, two to three thousand, a German doctor has said . . . Comparable to the mass poisoning is the compulsory copulation where soldiers on leave are ordered to go like stud horses to the young German girls in order to produce sons of the State for the next war. Can a nation, can youth, sink lower? Can there be a greater blasphemy of humanity? . . . Three hundred thousand Serbs were killed by you Germans at the order of the villainous men who govern you, not during the war, but after the war had ended in that country. Unspeakable are the deeds against the Jews and the Poles. But you do not want to acknowledge the ever-growing gigantic hatred which one day, when the forces of your people finally weaken, is bound to engulf you all.

Yes, it is right to feel the horror of this day. And your leaders know it. They who led you to commit all those horrible deeds tell you that you are chained to them through these deeds and that you must stand by them to the end; otherwise hell will come over you. If you break with them you will still be able to be saved, to gain freedom and peace.
Thus, in the end as in the beginning, under pressure, heat, and horror sufficient to effect a fermentatio, the artist again became separate and rediscovered for himself in old age what both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had taught him in his youth: that between the individual and the multitude, a man’s integrity and his society, the inward and the outer, categorical and contingent worlds of experience and commitment, there is indeed an opposition, as deep as to the ground of being. I have italicized the paragraph that makes this point. It has the ring, a bit, of Detlev Spinell. But in the following sentence we learn of something of which Spinell seems not to have known, namely, a distinction between private and social conscience: and this we now must recognize a posing a profound problem - the problem, I should say - that from the period of the early Tristan poets, when it first seriously emerged in our literature in terms of the tragic tension between minne and ere, love and honor, has remained unresolved in the West to the present.

Mann’s radio address was broadcast, as we have said, but a few hours before the Japanese dawn raid on Pearl Harbor. Soon the prophesied fire and brimstone were purging to rubble the culture-cities of Central Europe: Munich, Dresden, Frankfurt, Marburg, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin. The monstrous empire of Hitler dissolved and the armies of Stalin’s no less monstrous slave state moved supreme across the European heartland, across half the European map. Within a decade, another Asian monster, its Chinese counterpart, was standing back to back with it, also breathing fire - a fire furnished to both, ironically, by the sciences of the West - while the Dutch, Belgian, French, and British world empires meanwhile went to pieces.; so that by 1950 a scientifically enforced Asiatization of world affairs was beginning to be evident, which, as far at least as the politics of the free individual are concerned, is the leading challenge of the present hour. The old Bronze Age world image of an absolutely inexorable, mathematical cosmology of which the social order is but an aspect (which, as we have seen, is at the base of both the Chinese and the Indian world views), now supplemented by an equally inexorable Marxian notion of the logic of history, and implemented in its inhumanity by a modern mechanical technology of equivalent impersonality, in the name of what Nietzsche with disdain prophesied as "the new idol, the State," bodes well, largely with American aid, to represent the future of man of the next millennium. For as Aldous Huxley stated in the 1946 Foreward to his Utopian novel Brave New World: "Without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence."

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But it was in the dozen years or so from 1912 to 1924 that Mann wrote The Magic Mountain. Here, he had not yet embraced socialism, nor had he been horrified by the extremes that a "national culture" could bring about. It is here that he sat, poised and contemplative, "between disasters," so to speak, and discourse with the Olympians on the ultimate virtues of life and death and the ideal values of the state. And that is where we will rejoin him, along with Hans Castorp, when we look at the extraordinary Chapter 3 of The Magic Mountain.

Coming soon!

- petey

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