Thelonious Monk: "Always know! All ways know!"

Thelonious Monk is one of the enigmatic figures of jazz: the more one admires his playing, his composition, and his recorded work, the more puzzling and elusive the man himself becomes. At a time when the popularity of jazz was at its height in mid-century America, he made its success a springboard into a form of personal expression few had ever imagined possible. Then, just as his music was being discovered by a new generation of fans in the 1970s, he gave up recording and composing altogether. Monk died of a stroke on February 17, 1982 at the age of 64.

The mysterious nature of Monk's genius, it turns out, has its roots in a North Carolina boyhood and a family life that surprisingly seems very normal in many ways. Robin D.G. Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original (Free Press, 2009) removes layers of myth-making and tale-spinning that seem to surround the monumental figure of the musician, whose life and aloof personality became a signpost for the difficult and cerebral form of jazz called bebop.

 

This was not a term the musicians themselves favored, but which became a convenient tag by which the public could identify the players. It was as though they were members on a team, rather than being seen as individuals; for this musical style of ensemble playing and stellar, one-of-a-kind solos, the idea must have seemed a supreme irony and one that Monk might have appreciated:

"He got a kick out of fooling people, particularly those whom he thought were too lazy or afraid to think for themselves. One of his favorite pranks was to stare intensely at a spot on the ceiling or in the sky, either in a crowded room or on a street corner. Invariably, several people would look up with him, searching for whatever elusive object apparently fascinated him. It was an experiment in mass psychology that brought him great amusement."

As Monk's life takes on the familiar contours of a young student, husband to Nellie, and a father to their two children "Toot" (Thelonious Jr.) and "BooBoo" (Barbara), there are the intriguing glimpses into life with Monk that seem in no way typical. Kelley delights in family stories that reveal the "almost carnivalesque" aspects of this very unique life with father. Monk's niece, Benetta, nicknamed Teeny, got told not to bang on the piano and later gets her sly revenge on Monk, the one-time Julliard student, as he tries to show off:

"Monk's piano was notorious for its clutter. It occupied a significant portion of the kitchen and extended into the front room. The lid remained closed, since it doubled as a temporary storage space for music, miscellaneous papers, magazines, folded laundry, dishes, and any number of stray kitchen items.

 

Teeny thumbed through the pages of the Chopin book, then turned to her uncle and asked, 'What are you doing with that on the piano? I thought you couldn't read music? You can read that?' The challenge was on. In response, Monk sat down at the piano, turned to a very difficult piece, and started playing it at breakneck speed.

'His hands were a blur,' she recalled decades later. 'Then after he was through, he jumped up from the piano and just started grinning. So then I said, 'You didn't play that right.'

 

'Whaaaa? What are you talking about? I played it ten times faster than anyone could!'

 

Teeny sassed back, 'It is supposed to be played adagio and you played it allegro.'"

In the hot-house environment of New York's jazz scene Monk was a stand-out, not only for his music but for his uninhibited performance. The music seemed cerebral, difficult and almost mathematical, yet Monk was sincerely interested in reaching an audience, even if it turned out to be an audience of one. He performed popular tunes with the same force of personality as his original compositions. As his music gained exposure and his compositions deepened into their angular and singular forms, Monk's personal life becomes a retreat from the public and its very perception of him.

He himself seemed to create the myth, just as he professed to be disinterested in living up to an image -- and then, on February 28, 1964, he was featured in a Time cover story, and suddenly his was the face of jazz for a majority of Americans, who found the "new" jazz music mysterious and almost beyond comprehension; the Beatles had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, three weeks earlier.

Kelley's book is not a critical biography of Monk's music, but it is an intensely personal look at how life and art intersect. Monk's wife Nellie becomes a central character to her increasingly insular husband, lovingly keeping Thelonious away from distraction or being taken advantage of by managers and booking agents. In his later life, as Monk inexplicably gives up performance and composing altogether, Nellie seems a force of nature herself for having been a lifelong companion to the puzzling nature of Monk's genius.

"One of his favorite mantras was 'Always Know,' adding that the word 'Know' was Monk spelled backward with the 'W' inverted. He often illustrated the point with a huge custom-made ring that had 'MONK' emblazoned across the top in diamonds, turning it upside down in case you didn't get it. 'Always Know!" All Ways Know!'"

Monk's seventy compositions have titles describing the familiar ("BooBoo's Birthday," "'Round Midnight") and the oblique ("Epistrophy," "Rhythm-a-ning") and are among the most recorded in jazz. His music is always there for those with an ear to discover for themselves. Like his music, Monk's life is still a mystery that may not need explaining -- one of his albums took as its title one of his compositions, "Misterioso" -- and so he remains. In Monk's biography, Kelley does a great service by demonstrating that the force of creativity itself may, ultimately, be beyond knowing.

"To Be, or Not ... to Bop" (1979): Dizzy Gillespie, present at the creation

Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) was the jazz Gabriel with the bent horn and horn-rimmed glasses who started a musical revolution. He was born in South Carolina, staking a case for the Carolina Piedmont as the birthplace of bop: the one-and-only Thelonious Monk was born in Rocky Mount, NC eleven days earlier.

 

His own book, To Be or Not ... to Bop was published by Doubleday in 1979, a rollicking and roughhouse story of jazz at it was lived in the TOBA circuit: "Tough on Black Artists" was the name given to the management style that required three-to-five shows a day. John Birks Gillespie, with a growing reputation for eccentric dancing on the bandstand, became a stand-out. "Where's that dizzy cat?" the musicians (and fans) began to ask, and the nickname stuck.

The book is told in the self-effacing style of one who is present at the creation, and who enjoys the stories and camaraderie of life on the road, as well as off the record. There are also reminiscences by companions and players who shared stages with Gillespie, recalling the times with genuine fondness and not a little awe. Here's drummer Kenny Clarke, remembering the hot-house moments of the New York jazz scene as it developed in the 1940s and '50's around Diz and Charlie Parker:

"I used to follow Diz around to all the jam sessions and hear him blow against other trumpet players. He was young and he was blowing. Everybody was asking me, 'What is Dizzy playing?' I was just telling them to 'Listen....' We were with Teddy Hill's band together, Ella Fitzgerald, Claude Hopkins, so we've been barnstorming, early, you know.

I noticed something unique about Dizzy's playing, that's why I was hanging out with him. His approach to modern harmonies, but rhythms mostly. He could take care of all that harmony, but his rhythms interested me real profoundly, and I just had to find out about that gift he had hidden in him, the gift of rhythm. It wasn't only his trumpet playing, he was doing a lotta other things that some people didn't see, but I saw the rhythmic aspect of it. The way he played and the way he would hum time and things like that. I knew it was avant-garde, ahead of time, so I just fell in line with what was going on ....

The most important characteristic of this new style of playing was camaraderie, that was first because everybody, each musician, just loved the other one, just loved them so much they just exchanged ideas and would do everything together. That's one characteristic about it I liked very much. Another word for that isunity. That's right, and I think that era of jazz had more enemies than any phase of jazz.

It was sort of esoteric from the beginning. Only a few people understood what was going on. Everybody knew it was good, but they couldn't figure out what it was. And when somebody doesn't understand a thing, he has a tendency to dislike. But I mean the music has been so strong and was strong, and is strong now .

 

Whew! Oh, yeah, we used to discuss it on the bandstand sometimes and write out little things. I would say, 'Hey, Diz, whaddayou think of this?', you know. I think when we left Teddy Hill, we definitely knew that was going to happen. We were pretty sure of it, and everybody worked toward the same goal. That's what made it happen."

(Photos of Dizzy Gillespie at a Washington, DC elementary school by Donna Wilcox, 1965. From theJazzWax website.)

"The Rest is Noise": starting from scratch

 

 

"Once musicians obtained everything they had imagined in their most daring dreams, they started again from scratch."
(Kurt Weill, 1928)

Battle-lines are still being drawn over the meaning of much twentieth-century music. Often, the music is (still) overlooked in performance as too challenging, too difficult for audiences, trying the patience as well as the comprehension of most listeners who prefer the sounds of Strauss over Stravinsky. Alex Ross, of The New Yorker magazine, tries in his brief if too broad overview The Rest is Noise to put the musical daring of Stravinsky and Sibelius, Cage and Glass, Ellington and even Coltrane (as well as many others, mostly from Europe) in context with the times.

Understandably, two world wars, totalitarian regimes, and economic upheaval produced many fractured forms, and no single view of the century's music can explain it all. But Ross writes entertaining history, even if the reader may be familiar only with the names of many composers. And just when the book begins to take on the brisk, breezy approach of a survey course in modern music, he devotes 35 pages to the rise of Nazism in Germany and its effects on composition, as well as another 45 pages to the smothering effects of Communism.

Even Richard Strauss, whose music had once been a favorite of Hitler's (and whose premiere of Salome, in 1906, marks the opening chapter of the book) eventually becomes an object of ridicule from the German high command. Strauss suffered what Ross writes as "a public breakdown" as a result of a series of psychological games by Joseph Goebbels, the Reich's propaganda minister. "He is unpolitical, like a child," Goebbels wrote in his diary about Strauss, who sought assurances for his family's safety. A witness recounted Strauss' public humiliation in front of a large assembly:

"'Lehar has the masses, you do not!' the minister screamed. 'Stop once and for all your chatter about the significance of "serious music"! You are not helping your case! The art of tomorrow is different from the art of yesterday! You, Herr Strauss, are yesterday!'"

Ironically, the effects of this creative chill in Germany and Russia helped to spread the ideas of exiled musicians, who moved anywhere there was freedom to write and perform. (Hollywood became the surprising home to a number of emigre composers, who wrote film scores.) Ross does a good job illustrating how the many threads of modern music that subsequently developed -- serialism, minimalism, atonality -- have become part of a common musical vocabulary familiar to most listeners of popular music, even as "serious music" appears to draw futher from the mainstream.

His book also dispels the notion of a singular, dramatic arc to twentieth-century music -- the conservative notion of modern art as acts only of mere shock, and a dislocation of values. Some of the chapters deserve books of their own (the Russian chapter, although lengthy, still seems just an introduction). Certainly as the perspective on the century lengthens Ross could revisit some of the later themes, which seem slightly rushed. The book's critics claim Ross's leftward leaning politics are clearly in view, but it's hard to argue with his main thesis: that composers spent most of the twentieth century demolishing the romantic forms of the century before it.

But not completely. He begins the book with Strauss's opera Salome -- based not just on the Biblical story of a jealous wife and wanton daughter, but also drawn from a scandalous play written in 1891 by Oscar Wilde. In the audience sat Gustav Mahler, the young Arnold Schoenberg, and Puccini,"the composer of Tosca and La Boheme, who arrived to see what 'terribly cacophanous thing' his German rival had concocted."


The outrage ought to have been complete; Ross writes that Strauss's opera retells the story "in which the princess eroticizes the body of John the Baptist and indulges in a bit of necrophilia at the end." Instead, the Vienna audience erupted in applause and Strauss emerged in triumph, although Mahler later admitted he was "bewildered" by the opera's popularity. Also in the theater that night, with money borrowed from his mother to make the trip, was seventeen-year-old Adolph Hitler; Salome became one of his favorite Strauss works. By the 1940s, Salome was on the list of "degenerate" Jewish music, although Hitler continued to insist versions of it be performed -- the echoes of the nineteenth century, it seemed, would give birth to more things inexplicable than mere music in the twentieth.


The Rest is Noise is a brief, sometimes confounding introduction to the complexities of modern music. John Adams' Nixon in China (1987) and the beautiful, haunting music and movement of his 2005 opera Doctor Atomic about the life of Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb, move contemporary music even further into new fields of politics and history. In a final chapter Ross careens from Boulez to Terry Riley, from Ligeti to the cool mathematics of Iannis Xenakis; his survey ends in a bit of a spin trying to name-check a multitude of composers for whom music can be a beautiful noise, and vice versa. 

Is it music, or just noise? In his preface Ross tries to prepare the reader for the journey ahead by quoting John Cage, whose 1952 piece 4'33" is divided into three movements yet involves only the sounds of the audience: "Wherever we are ... what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating."

"Who runs may read": Brion Gysin and The Thousand and One Nights, 1954

 

Who runs may read but few run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you right now. What are we here for? We are here to go! (Brion Gysin)

In 1954 Brion Gysin operated The Thousand and One Nights, a Tangier restaurant, "in order to hear the musicians of Jajouka every night for the rest of my life." That bond remained even as Gysin went on to other things; eventually, in 1968, Gysin himself would introduce Brian Jones to the musicians and be involved in the recording of The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka, released in 1971 by the Rolling Stones.

 

According to a note from Paul Bowles included in One Night @ the 1001 he recalls bringing a tape recorder and capturing performances by the master musicians. Bowles writes: "Brion was wildly enthusiastic about the music, but he was not sure about my recording it" -- ironic, considering Gysin's later sound experiments and ever-present Uher tape-recorder. He must have had a change of heart: Ramuntcho Matta, the disc's producer writes in the liner notes that 'Brion gave me 23 reel-to-reel tapes that he recorded himself" before Gysin died in 1986.

 

Gysin's nature as an artist was quicksilver: he tried his hand at so many arts, and loved to cross disciplines, that he remained an elusive figure throughout his life. This two-disc set presents two aspects of Gysin's Tangier stay. The first disc is an edited hour-long recording of the master musicians. The performance is intimate and energetic, almost sounding like wild chamber-music for Tangier's international set.

 

This is not the 24-hour-long pipes of Pan -- but it is mysterious, sometimes frantic, and otherworldly, qualities enhanced by the obvious on-site recording. Presented here without titles or text, translation or lyrics, the music remains as inscrutable as Gysin would have wished, and just as mesmerizing.

 

"Dilaloo," Gysin's 1955 recitation inspired by the rites of Pan, is on the second disc. It is included here with an added, improvised musical accompaniment by producer Ramuntcho Matta. Gysin's poem recreates the ritual of initiation and transformation in the village of Jajouka.

 

His reading has moments of force and power, an incantation that mirrors the swirling rhythms on the first disc. It's also a fascinating attempt at putting the ineffable into words. While the music of Jajouka speaks for itself, on their own Gysin's words are as much an explanation as the listener could ask of this strange and powerful music.

 

The "Dilaloo" lyrics -- incantations, really -- are included in the CD, and are also printed in full in Back in No Time: A Brion Gysin Reader, a 2002 anthology edited by Jason Weiss.

 

Like Gysin's novels, this re-issued CD set has slipped in-and-out-of-print over the years, a result of the artist's multifaceted legacy as a writer, performer, and artist. In a twist on the increasing popularity of other artists associated with the beat generation, Gysin's reputation remains as elusive as ever.

Ultra Violet and the Warhol set: "You Are Who You Eat"

Ultra Violet is gone, Lou Reed is gone, Nico is gone, Andy Warhol himself is gone, and photographer Billy Name died this year on July 18. Many of the mainstays and scene-makers that entertained a post-Woodstock, club-centric, drug-fueled New York downtown scene are disappearing in the rear-view mirror.

 

Isabelle Collin Dufresene [aka "Ultra Violet"] was a Warhol creation as much as her own -- artist, playwright, and Warhol superstar who in 1980 wrote the autobiographical play "You Are Who You Eat." As early as 1988 she published her memoirs Famous For Fifteen Minutes, My Years With Andy Warhol. It received the Frankfurt Library Award and has been  published in 12 languages.

 

Every generation makes its own icons to suit itself, but in the hazy days of the mid- to late sixties, Warhol's Factory and the Velvet Underground upped the ante considerably in the battle of the generations. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, first under the aegis of Andy Warhol, re-wrote the book of love to include obsessions of dirt and noise and sheer panic.

 



The Velvet Underground's third album

(photo by Billy Name)

 

That panic and noise came out of New York City, a far distance from the peace-and-love message emanating from San Francisco and the general good-vibes rock generated by Woodstock. The Velvets were more art than rock, more an experiment in tension than release. By the time they came to Warhol's attention the band had already been through some permutations of what is usually called "creative differences." There were more to come.

 

With that kind of tension it was obvious the band couldn't last, and each of the Velvets' four official studio albums reflected a different side of the creative battles within the group. That the band succeeded in recording at all beyond the marquee patronage of Warhol is a story of record-company insecurities as much as the band's own personal dramas. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (re-issued by Omnibus in 2003) is a relatively concise oral biography that details the trajectory of the Velvet Underground month-by-month, year-by-year, until the group finally splinters for good.

Out-of-focus Lou, with Sterling Morrison, Nico, Maureen Tucker,

and John Cale: The Velvets, 1966 (photo from The Daily Beast)

By now it's an often-told, backbiting and bitchy story. The group evolves from Lou Reed's pop-rock roots to Andy Warhol patronage and art-rock noise, through a subdued, confessional third album and finally, "despite all the amputations," to rock'n'roll. Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga have assembled a witty, detailed, mostly-oral version with first-person accounts, full of the band's personal turmoil, drug use, and ego-fueled confrontations.

The interviews illuminate the art of the music and the band's struggle for commercial success in equal measure, two opposing goals that lead to the inevitable end of the band with centrifugal force. In the main, Up-Tight is rock's original cautionary tale of too much, too soon somehow not being enough: a template that survives, on a much different scale, with every 21st century pop sensation.

 

Bockris' and Malanga's collection of great black-and-white photographs capture a band as interested in its own look as in its music. This is much more than a fan's book, and the Velvets' highwire act performed without a net ought to dispel any notion of the monolithic "peace and love" image of Sixties' music.

"The High & Lonesome Sound" [Russell Brakefield]

"The High & Lonesome Sound"

(Russell Brakefield)

Earl Scruggs’ right hand fans affront that calve skin oval like a phantasm

on an onion, a shadow show, a misshapen eclipse— every sleeping  soul

awakened at the run of his fingertips. Five little men bend together

as in prayer or like a steady fleet rowing across a calm sheet of water. Let men

buy back beauty in this way, in antenna & wire, wearing down the carpet

in front of the dials. As a child, let geography mean the sudden burst

of an octave harmony, a high G string drowning out the sound of shaking

herds laying down against the dying grass. Nashville, Montgomery, Jackson,

St. Louis— movement opens in the recesses of the body like an uprooted bulb,

alien & dirty, shoots moving out from its center towards the cracked sky.

Let this music fill the hills with desire like the poisons of the body fill graves,

like a sweet but final embrace. At night between trains, let it replace want

with something gentler, let it cover the tracks like blackness, seep across

the ties until even the crickets are pinned down & quiet, flush with the rocks,

intimate with movement, at odds with every aspect of resistance

"The High & Lonesome Sound" by Russell Brakefield appears online at Bluegrass Today. Brakefield teaches writing at the University of Michigan and is also a serious bluegrass enthusiast: "My true talents lie with the written word, though, and I wanted to attempt to elegize the bluegrass genre, as well as help bring the conversation of bluegrass and folk music into the literary landscape. Traditional musics have a tendency to be marginalized by academic writing circles in favor or more classical tastes, and I wanted to attempt to write something that would change that."

Bob Dylan, born May 24 1941

From Chronicles Vol 1:

On the corner I put the dime in the slot and dialed the operator for long distance, called collect and the call went right through. I wanted everyone to know I was all right. My mother would usually give me the latest run of the mill stuff. My father had his own way of looking at things. To him life was hard work. He’d come from a generation of different values, heroes and music, and wasn’t so sure that the truth would set anybody free. He was pragmatic and always had a word of cryptic advice. “Remember, Robert, in life anything can happen. Even if you don’t have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don’t have that you don’t want.” My education was important to him. He would have wanted me to become a mechanical engineer. But in school, I had to struggle to get even decent grades. I was not a natural student. My mom, bless her, who had always stood up for me and was firmly on my side in just about anything and everything, was more concerned about “a lot of monkey business out there in the world,” and would add, “Bobby, don’t forget you have relatives in New Jersey.” I’d already been to Jersey but not to visit relatives.

Lou snapped the big tape machine off after listening hard to one of my original songs. “Woody Guthrie, eh? That’s interesting. What made you want to write a song about him? I used to see him and his partner, Leadbelly-they used to play at the Garment Workers Hall over on Lexington Avenue. You ever heard ‘You Can’t Scare Me, I’m Sticking to the Union’?” Sure I’d heard it.

“Whatever happened to him, anyway?”

“Oh, he’s over in Jersey. He’s in the hospital there.”

Lou chomped away. “Nothing serious I hope. What other songs do you have? Let’s put ‘em all down.”

Sun Ra, born May 22, 1914

"I was busy studying my psychic things, trying to find out what makes this planet tick, and why is everything going wrong, and why people are headed toward nuclear annihilation. So I was busy trying to find out, where does God stand; why doesn't he do something? I had to find out: why? And that's what I was doing; I was researching."

Sun Ra

[Herman Poole Blount]

May 22, 1914 - May 30, 1993

What hath Warhol wrought: "The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" [Cory Doctorow] discusses creative appropriation

Andy, seriously clowning around

These days it is difficult to see an advertisement, surf the web, listen to pop music or watch any media without some form of artistic "appropriation." Whether it's called sampling or theft or even genius, the intentional use and layering of others' ideas is a common thread to our shared culture.

In the 1960s Andy Warhol's appropriation of Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cans as subjects for art elevated America's advertising to a level of consideration that shocked some and amused others. He was the first to suggest that the nation's disposable post-war culture was something more about form than function, that America was a nation filled with everyday objects fit equally for artistic appreciation as to throw away.

It was the ultimate extension of the old saying about one man's trash -- and, for many, a new gloss on the idea of kitsch. The fact that his iconic and appropriated images continue to contain an appraised value as well as artistic worth -- although some would argue otherwise -- is, at bottom, the economic heart of current discussions about internet rights, copyright, musical sampling, and intellectual property. Cory Doctorow takes up the argument in his essay The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow that there is a fundamental disparity between proposed changes in copyright law and the creative freedom of the artist with 21st century tools.

The past, in this case, seems no guide to the future: recent print copyright changes that extend legal ownership to 75 years and beyond clash with other media decisions: the music industry is just facing up to a 1976 law that reverts ownership rights to songwriters after 35 years -- in time for the age of digital music on the internet, unforeseen all those years ago.

The projected loss of corporate revenue is one factor in the current debate, but the rights of the individual are an even more important one. The ultimate legal argument about intellectual property, of course, will hinge on financial issues: can corporate entities make a profit in the uncharted future? The artist's right to expression, if it's even considered, will pose a thornier path.

Here's an excerpt from Doctorow's essay, condensed from his address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention, which is available both in print and -- tellingly -- available as a free download. As Doctorow points out, the decision is one in which -- perhaps for the first time -- the artist can have an activist role:

... we're all of us trying to influence the future, or the present, or our view of the past. Writing about humanity's relationship with technology is an activist pursuit, because it requires that you take a stand on how things really are, or ought to be. We live in a technological society, and it is impossible to write about technological change without writing about social change.

... If you swipe a DVD from a shop you get a small fine, or if you’ve done it hundreds of times maybe you get some community service—but we don’t come to your house and say, OK, we’re going to cut you off from all the services that deliver freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, access to tools, communities, and ideas, access to education, and civic engagement.

This not a principle we think of as belonging in the justice systems of enlightened countries. People like me fight for copyright reform not because we’re cheap and we want DVDs for free but because, in the name of preventing piracy, corporations and governments are attacking fundamentals like the right to assemble, the right to free speech, the right to operate a free press and the right to organize and work together. Information doesn’t want to be free, people do! Artists need to transcend the self-serving, terrorized, crappy narrative that’s been fed to us by the copyright industries and recognize that the collateral damage from this doomed effort to reduce copying includes the free society that we all cherish.

And there are organizations that will help us. In Australia there’s Electronic Frontiers Australia; worldwide there’s Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Creative Commons, and many other organizations that work for a balanced copyright regime that respects all the civil liberties that are part of a free society and also tries to insure that artists can go on earning their livings as well. ...

Warhol, the media outsider, was eventually subsumed by a culture that said "yes! of course!" to his vision as a single artist. The struggle these days seems to be how intellectual property can still be maintained in a multimedia universe that makes accesibility free, to millions, at the click of a mouse. The jury's still out about intellectual property rights, even as all sides -- individuals and corporations -- continue to deliberate furiously with a Supreme Court battle looming somewhere ahead in the uncertain future.

"Up-Tight": she couldn't believe what she heard at all ....

Every generation makes its own icons to suit itself, but in the hazy days of the late sixties, the Velvet Underground upped the ante considerably in the battle of the generations. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, first under the aegis of Andy Warhol, re-wrote the book of love to include obsessions of dirt and noise and sheer panic.

That panic and noise came out of New York City, a far way from the peace-and-love message emanating from San Francisco and the general good-vibes rock generated by Woodstock Nation. The Velvets were more art than rock, more an experiment in tension than release. By the time they came to Warhol's attention the band had already been through some permutations of what is usually called "creative differences." There were more to come.

With that kind of tension it was obvious the band couldn't last, and each of the Velvets' four official studio albums reflected a different side of the creative battles within the group. That the band succeeded in recording at all beyond the marquee patronage of Warhol is a story of record-company insecurities as much as the band's own personal dramas. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (re-issued by Omnibus in 2003) is a relatively concise, interview-and-comment biography edited by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga tracing the trajectory of the Velvet Underground month-by-month, year-by-year, until the group finally splinters for good.

Out-of-focus Lou: The Velvets, 1966 (photo from The Daily Beast)

By now it's an often-told, backbiting and bitchy story. The group evolves from Lou Reed's pop-rock roots to Andy Warhol patronage and art-rock noise, through a subdued, confessional third album and finally, "despite all the amputations," to rock'n'roll. Bockris and Malanga have assembled a witty, detailed, mostly-oral version with first-person accounts, full of the band's personal turmoil, drug use, and ego-fueled confrontations.

The interviews illuminate the art of the music and the band's struggle for commercial success in equal measure, two opposing goals that lead to the inevitable end of the band with centrifugal force. In the main, Up-Tight is rock's original cautionary tale of too much, too soon somehow not being enough: a template that survives, on a much different scale, with every 21st century pop sensation.

Great black-and-white photographs capture a band as interested in its own look as in its music. This is much more than a fan's book, and an electric introduction to the Velvets' highwire act performed without a net. The New York yawp evident on every page of the band's history ought to dispel any notion of the monolithic "peace and love" image of Sixties' music.

Un-earthed: "Man on the Moon," the lost-in-space 1975 musical by John Phillips & Andy Warhol

Un-earthed (there's no better word for a musical about space, is there?) from the vaults of musician John Phillips, Man on the Moon (Varese Sarabande) is one of those legendary 1970s projects that benefits from its dusting of superstar glitter, even if the effect of the project as a whole seems to totter on its own silver platform-soled spaceboots.

Just consider the title itself. Andy Warhol Presents Man on the Moon: the John Phillips Space Musical. There's a sense of whole creative universes colliding -- layers of west coast rock and downtown art, the message of peace and love in man-made stage space, a singing astronaut, a bomb on the moon, and heavenly aliens who save mankind from itself. ("I built the V1 and I built the V2 / I worked for the Fuhrer / now I work for you" is, perhaps, the most unsettling opening number in a musical ever written.)

But the lyrics also ran deeper and into more personal terrain. After the end of The Mamas and the Papas, Phillips -- into worsening addiction -- wrote a short song cycle in the early 70s that sounded notes of his own alienation and drug-fueled confusion. These lyrics are included here too, as in the achingly sweet "There Is a Place": 

"There is a place between two stars / Somewhere in space that's ours, that's yours / we watch the worlds roll by / and never think of dying / there's a place in space that's ours ... / People everywhere are inclined to stare / I have a need for privacy, dear / feel like a sardine and / I don't feel very clean / I'd like a star of my own / There is a place in space for stars ... "

Phillips kept writing more songs, securing funding, rewriting the script. It was the seventies, after all, with Bowie's space oddity Ziggy Stardust a cult hit LP and Transylvanians like Rocky Horror a surprising off-Broadway curiosity. Brian de Palma's rock-n-roll film version of Faust, Phantom of the Paradise, featured a stitched-together rock star and his gothic back-up singers. An intergalactic peace-and-love rock musical seemed right, even one with a bomb that threatens the universe.

Unfortunately, over time the musical became a classic case of too much and never enough. Fact and fiction flew (Elvis was approached to play the role of the astronaut; Nicholson was interested; George Lucas might be involved, then stole ideas for Star Wars, Phillps claimed). Lavish costumes reflecting beams of light like disco balls were designed and created. One draft called for a scene to be played by  actors in mid-air. Phillips and Genevieve Waite, his third wife, moved from Bel Air to New York, in part to promote her recording career.

By this point the project had taken five years, and untold amounts of money. Phillips's drugged paranoia became too much to deal with. Director Michael Bennett abruptly quit, saying he couldn't work with Phillips any longer; he went on to direct A Chorus Line. The producer Michael Butler, who had a surprising hit with Hair, then followed suit. (John's temperment, rather than creative tension, he said, was the reason).

Eventually the musical's sheer excess and constant changes sank the production. Genevieve, as a last effort, approached Warhol to help out. Whether Andy did it as a favor or as a sincere creative move, he must have been fully aware of the backstage drama. Produced at last by Warhol and directed off-Broadway by Paul Morrisey, "Man on the Moon" closed in less than five days. In the CD's bonus tracks he can be heard on the play's opening night. Warhol's live stage recordings from the first night audience are provided from the Warhol tape archives, available here for the first time.

What survives in the form of the original song cycle are tunes recorded by Phillips in the studio, songs by Genevieve as Angel and also included in the play, performances by the cast including Denny Doherty, and a few out-takes --"The Elephants and the Donkeys" is ready to be anyone's protest chant. 

The resulting whole is bare-bones music that is charming and warm and obviously autobiographical, if a little oddball for either a rock or a Broadway audience. Here's the astronaut, slyly named Andy, describing his Marine father: this isn't The Mamas and The Papas by any stretch, as Phillips describes his own family memory.
"Well the service finally cashed my daddy out / they say his heart blew a fuse / so he spent the next twenty years living down in the basement / drinking booze. / He was singing / he had his dogs with him / had a hell of a time ..."

This contrasts with other songs, as Chris Campion describes in greater detail, where Phillips sounds like a space-age Cole Porter. Here he's wistful and bittersweet, "questing after love in other realms" -- "Penthouse of Your Mind," "Yesterday I Left the Earth," "A Myth Amongst the Family of Man" (" ... that there is something higher than themselves."). Whether any of these tunes would have left the audience whistling as they left the theater is, well, left for another Broadway backer to discover.

The enhanced CD and liner notes collect lots of memorabilia associated with the musical; a full early script, interviews and reviews, black-and-white video footage from rehearsals drawn from the Andy Warhol archives, and cast and party photos from the show's brief run. Mick, Yoko, Andy, and Warren are there. Mackenzie is at the opening-night party seated next to Genevieve, looking wide-eyed.

What remains of Man on the Moon certainly seems like one of those by-gone eras, as they used to write, of a golden age. At the very least, it makes those old enough to remember those glittery days feel quite a bit older. Is Man on the Moon a lost classic? Not quite. But it's like hearing new stories about a great party you missed: you know you should have been there.

From the show's closing number, "Stepping Through the Stars": 

"Take my hand and I'll show you / a dance that's really new / way back home at the Hippodrome / it's the one the sheiks all do / No one can resist the rhythm / it's like driving racing cars / He will love you when you're with him / steppin' through the stars / when you're steppin' through the stars."