An Only Child

Besides that five-string open-G tuning everybody brings up, nine things that I learned from Keith Richards' memoir, Life:

1. His mother was from a family of seven daughters, and if you've ever wondered about the hardiness of Keith's constitution, you should know that most of his aunts are still alive.

2. London streets used to be full of animals. Keith: "When I was growing up, it was heavy fog almost all winter, and if you've got two or three miles to walk to get back home, it was the dogs that led you. Suddenly old Dodger would show up with a patch on his eye, and you could basically guide your way home by that. Sometimes the fog was so thick you couldn't see a thing. And old Dodger would take you up and hand you over to some Labrador. Animals were in the street, something that's disappeared. I would have got lost and died without some help from my canine friends." (The roughly 60 pages of childhood stuff is probably the book's high point. Effortlessly evocative, it reads at times like some long-lost Dickens narrative, with asylum escapees on the heath, army deserters hiding in the woods by the Thames, a dead tramp found covered in bluebottles, street bullies, even a fatal explosion at a fireworks factory.)

3. The winter that Keith, Mick, and Brian Jones shared a flat was London's coldest since 1740. They had a pay heater—had to keep feeding it coins.

4. Keith not only wrote the bulk of the music for most of their best songs; he often came up with the lyrical angle as well: "Satisfaction," "Gimme Shelter," "Wild Horses" (I could go on) are all concepts that Jagger simply—albeit brilliantly—expanded on.

5. While Mick was fooling around with Anita Pallenberg on the set of Performance, Keith had revenge sex with Marianne Faithfull (and fled through a window when Mick came home). I've thought of Mick and Keith's friendship as fairly up and down, but the best way to describe it, for thirty years now, would be simply nonexistent. Interestingly, there are more entries in the index for Mick Jagger than there are for Keith himself. (My favorite: "Jagger, Mick and giant inflatable cock, 12-13, 485").

6. In the late '60s in the UK, if your physician registered you with National Health as a junkie, you could receive heroin pills plus an equal amount of cocaine (the idea being that the coke would counteract the opiate effect of the heroin). This was the purest heroin and the purest, May & Baker pharmaceutical cocaine. Definitely no "MSS" (Mexican shoe scrapings—Gram Parsons' term for low-grade smack).

7. Injuries sustained: finger squashed by a dropped flagstone, earring ripped from his ear as he slept, passing out after nine days without sleep and falling headfirst into an amplifier, finger burned to the bone by stray lump of phosphorous from stage pyro, punctured lung (falling off ladder), cracked skull (falling from tree).

8. When I was fourteen I found an old copy of Oui magazine in, of all places, a deer blind in the hill country of Texas. ("For the man of the world"—yeah, that was me all right.) One of the models was a dark-haired German who, in one memorable shot, drank water from a see-through garden hose. And now, all these years later I find out her name is Uschi Obermaier, a long-standing crush of Keith's. When he learned of Gram Parsons' death in '73 he was in Innsbruck; on a mad impulse he drove to Munich in the middle of the night to hunt Uschi down, although he barely knew her. He miraculously found her, woke her up, broke the news, got a single sleepy kiss for his trouble, and left. 

9. Towards the end, the book starts to simply mark time—this is his manager, this is his guitar technician, these are his neighbors in Jamaica, this is the snapping turtle Keith caught in the pond at his house in Connecticut, etc.—and it begins to sound like an acceptance speech at the Grammys. The lesson is that everybody's life eventually winds down into routine, even for an outlaw like Keith Richards. And so this is the ninth thing I learned:

When you're cooking bangers and mash, you've got to use a cold pan, no preheating. 

Idaho via Coventry

"American Without Tears No. 2 (Twilight Version)" is an odd little number by Elvis Costello that's been hanging around lately. The alternate version of a King of America song and B-side to "Blue Chair," this thing stars an American vet who marries an English girl and does not turn out to be a catch. Squeeze sang about a very similar setup, and far more lucidly, in "Labelled with Love," from their Costello-produced East Side Story (1981). No one is where they belong in such stories; everyone is pining for somewhere else. The main character for some obscure reason shares several biographical details with Hemingway, from the war experience and impulsive marriages to the Havana, Florida, even Idaho settings, although the events take place just after Hemingway's lifetime and the heartbreaker in this song is absurdly identified as one Arnie LaFlamme. In the end, the atmosphere is more Graham Greene than Hemingway, but the lyric is really an excuse for trying out a few tropes, with as many shifts in viewpoint and setting as "Tangled Up in Blue." The designation of a "twilight" rendition seems as arbitrary as everything else in a song so whimsical that even Elvis calls its bluff, abruptly ending the last verse with a hasty "It would never work out," like an artist wadding up his drawing and tossing it in the wastebasket. (Damn thing isn't even on youtube. You have to go to 5:11 in this clip to hear a fuzzy live version.)


And yet, for all its flakiness, I've always liked this song. The recording has great drive, and Elvis has a lot of fun with this busker's arrangement, especially on the Sammy Davis Jr. line and in the switch-up in the final verse ("Just like me she found out..."). While tabs for the more placid King of America version of the song are easy to find, I haven't been able to locate a single set of chords for this alternate version anywhere on God's green Internet. And you know what that means...


American Without Tears No. 2 (Twilight Version)
(Elvis Costello)

G               C    G
December 1965 in Caracas
G                     A                 D
When Arnie LaFlamme took his piece of the pie
G                         C               G
When he packed up the casino chips, the IOU and the abacus
G                             D           G
And switched off the jukebox in a "A Fool Such As I"

G                                 C           G
He was a leg man who was open to offers
G                           A                 D
But he couldn't get her off his mind as he passed the tourist office
G                 C              G
And as he entertained himself singing just like Sammy Davis Junior
G           D         G
He toyed with a trip to Miami

    C
For money like that
G
He could have sweet talk in your ear
Em
Now they don't speak any English
C G    C           G
Just American without tears, just American without tears

G C G D G

It was an idea that he dandled on his knee and nursed it like his coffee cup
When he couldn't find any other way
It always seemed to come to him while the day was dipping down
And the sun was like a light bulb being swallowed by a clown

He took her for everything, he took her for his only one
He took her out of Coventry and over to Idaho
But the war wound that he carried home wasn't really visible
When the bullets were forgotten
She looked dowdy, down, and miserable

And she seemed to be crying for year after year
And said, "You don't speak any English
Just American between tears."

A  D A
"Arnie," she said to me, "will you turn down the radio?
    A      B    E
You haven't slept a wink since we came to Havana
A      D A
When're you gonna get the strength to go over to Florida?
E         A
All you ever listen to is 'The Voice of America'"

A                          D                      A
It was a story of a young English poppet
A                                                       B                            E
Who took up with a soldier boy and thought she would profit
A             F#m            E                   D
Just like me she found out what true love is about
A E                 A
Anyway she's in New Orleans, it would never work out
D A
Oh she seemed to be crying for year after year
                 F#m
Now you don't speak any English
          D                         A   D                     A
Just American between tears, just American without tears

For you seem to be crying for year after year
Now you don't speak any English
Just American without tears
Just American without tears

L.A. Grise

So one day in, what, 1948 or 1949, one of the studios sends a film crew out to shoot some rear-projection footage in downtown LA. Somebody had to shoot all that scenery passing by the car windows in those scenes in which some character gets behind the wheel. Encumbered by a phoniness we can no longer forgive, these scenes went extinct nearly half a century ago. Now we demand that our actors really drive, in the same way we're starting to demand that they really play an instrument (like Adrian Brody in The Pianist, or even Brad Pitt laying into Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in Tree of Life—it will no longer do for someone to simply peer over a piano at us and move his shoulders around).

But this clip. A relaxed, very un-fussy shoot—to the small crew, I guess it could not have felt more ordinary—but of course what we have here, some 65 years later, is several minutes of unposed, unaware late-40s Los Angeles going about its business. We see how people walked, how they drove (fewer cars but already plenty of smog), how they inhabited the space. And we see many homes in the Bunker Hill area that have since been demolished. (Found this comment on a blog: "all those Victorian homes bulldozed in the 60s/70s. Now Disney Hall, Chandler Pavilion, and rows of condos.") While I can understand how an East Coaster would have found this LA impossibly bare and without style, in hindsight the simplicity strikes me as serenely civilized. Already then, by the way, LA was a plenty industry-literate town: at 3:44 there is a guy with the presence of mind to wave at the camera.

A somewhat fuller account of this footage can be found on the blog of the Atlantic's rather gothically-named associate editor Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg.

Annotated edition of latest spam

An email I received over the weekend presents such challenges to the reader that I thought I should append a section of explanatory notes.

Subject: EMPLOYMENT 

We[1] are offering a temporary job which really do not require any professional skills. You really don't have to have any professional skills for this. All we are looking for right now is USA based individual[2] to handle paper work, file documents and handle payroll administration to our clients in USA. What will be required from you is few hours a day and also to pay very close attention to all instructions given to you. Your Job will be; Handling all applications with regards to new client that will like to register a company in USA and what you will be doing is Filing all papers from these individual companies which will be sent over to you under that companies name.[3] Salary terms; $200per job> Get back to us through the email address. All replies should be sent to this e-mail.vonmicheal@aol.com[4]  

Regards

MR MICHEAL VAUNGH[5] 

NOTES

1. No real indication of who "we" might be, although feasible candidates would include the Money Launderers Association of Lagos, the Pyongyang Internet Cafe, or the Alternative-Universe Chamber of Commerce.

2. Just the sort of job to make you feel special. It requires no special skills (let us repeat that: the job requires no special skills), and your chief qualification appears to be something you share with 300 million people.

3. First assignment: translating this sentence into English or, failing that, just any language indigenous to the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way. That is close enough.

4. The author spends part of his year as a German baron.

5. Most people should be able to spell the relatively common name Vaughn, particularly people who are named Vaughn.

Meeting of the Ukrainian Flag Development Committee upon Completion of the Project

Meeting Minutes

Present: Chairman Adamovich; committee members Slivka, Bortnick, Petrovich, Wayda, Stupak; flag designers Shevchenko and Olejnik; Madame Olchansky

Proceedings: Meeting called by Chairman Adamovich to view newly designed national flag. Once Mr. Shevchenko and Mr. Olejnik unveiled their design there was some confusion over the flag itself, some of the committee members thinking it must be a second veil and that the actual flag still lay underneath it. When Shevchenko explained that this was it, a murmur went around the room. Madame Olchansky put her hand to her throat and a glass of water was called for.

Chairman Adamovich asked the pair if this was some kind of joke. When Shevchenko expressed surprise, the chairman told him that, after six months and a million hryvnia, he and his partner had "a lot of nerve" to show up with two stripes.

Shevchenko explained to the chairman that "those two stripes" held great emblematic significance: the yellow band represents the fields of wheat that are the foundation of Ukrainian life; above this is a blue band of sky.

After a long silence, board member Slivka asked if this was all the designers had come up with? Mr. Olejnik stepped up and said there was one other version. When asked what it looked like, Olejnik looked nervously at Mr. Shevchenko and explained that it had the yellow stripe on the top and the blue on the bottom. Mr. Olejnik made a strange gesture as he explained this arrangement, not unlike someone demonstrating how to use a Slinky.

Board member Bortnik expressed admiration for the flag of Moldova, which, apart from having three stripes, also has an eagle holding a shield, on the face of which is an auroch. The current flag of the Ukraine, on the other hand, could "use a little something."

At this point Mr. Shevchenko asked what an auroch was.

Philip Roth's "On the Air"

In the current Esquire's profile of Philip Roth the author revisits his old turf in Newark. It's an interesting read because the usually thorny Roth is uncharacteristically, almost bizarrely, benevolent. It's not a stretch to say the reporter, Scott Raab, was probably relieved by Roth's good mood. He'd even come to the interview armed with a gift to soften up the old writer—a rare copy of New American Review #10 (1970), the home of Roth's notorious, and never-collected, "On the Air." Roth's happy to get the little quarterly, but he admits to Raab, "I hate that story." Raab confesses he isn't so crazy about it himself—in fact, he says, it's probably the worst thing Roth's ever written.

While "On the Air" doesn't have quite the mystique of, say, Salinger's also-uncollected "Hapworth 16, 1924," it is nearly impossible to find and, moreover, was published in what was a vintage time for Roth, so it does have a certain luster. When asked why he had never included it in any of his books, Roth said it was "too gross"—an impressive distinction coming from a writer who felt the scene in which Alex Portnoy sexually violates a piece of meat meant for the family dinner isn't. Roth went on to explain that the story was an extension of the id-informed, ferociously uncompromising comedy he had created in Portnoy—only that in the later story, rather than blossoming further, the style had grown a little rancid.

Back in the '80s, I found a copy of New American Review #10 in a used bookstore in Austin, and I can confirm that "On the Air" is not very good. To a certain extent this doesn't matter. The story is rare, its author is canonical, the thing demands attention. (The same is true of the elusive Salinger story, which might, by the way, be his worst.)

I hate reviewers who feel they have to synopsize every plot, but in the case of this unobtainable story—the reading of which almost amounts to a "sighting"—I guess I have no choice. So all right, then: Shoe salesman, and part-time manager of "mostly colored" showbiz acts, Milton Lippman fires off several letters to Albert Einstein pitching a quiz show idea in which contestants would try to stump the great genius. Certainly Einstein could do a better job than that goy on the radio, that "schmuck from Fort Wayne," the Answer Man. Lippman gets no response, so he throws his wife and son in the car and drives up to Princeton. "How can you annoy him, one letter after another," his wife asks him, "and then because he doesn't so much as give a single reply—drop in! On Einstein!"

The Lippmans never make it to Princeton. They pull over for ice cream, and inside this tavern, this saloon, the family is confronted with the goyim of their worst dreams: it's all whiskey and sawdust, the heads of dead animals hanging on the walls, Kate Smith singing "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain." The soda jerk, who has an ice-cream-scoop prosthetic hand, asks which kind of cone the Lippmans' son would like, and one of the choices is wool. A woolen ice cream cone. These are rugged people!

I find most of this funny enough; and honestly, the story's opening pages, which at turns resemble both Portnoy and the Nixon satires that Roth collected in Our Gang, aren't bad. Roth satirizes the way Jews fear Christians, the way Christians fear Jews, and, if not necessarily great art, the piece is vigorous and pretty smart. After awhile, though, this highly stylized story goes from broadness to all-out phantasmagoria, as surreal and menacing as Bloom's trip to Nighttown, and Roth loses his grip on it. The problem is not simply that the story is "gross" (at one point Jew and Gentile strip down and weigh their testicles on a kitchen scale, while the finale offers that old standby, a bleeding rectum, and the threat of coprophagy). And it's not just that the rampant postmodern streak takes over (e.g., the story is "interrupted" by a news bulletins and contest announcements—tropes that not only date the story but which aren't funny to begin with). The problem is that the story becomes incoherent and, for all its manic action, quite dull. Roth was in a fury of emancipation in those days, ready to take down every ruler and servant in his path—and more power to him, I say—but "On the Air" is just too raw, as unprocessed as a dream.

I find myself kind of reluctant to leave good old New American Review #10, which I've been carrying around with me all week. There are poems about Kennedy and Sinatra, another about soup. There's a report on a visit paid by Jorge Luis Borges (still alive in 1970) to Columbia University. There's a story by Russell Banks, who was still a nobody at the time. Everything is still very New York-centric. And earnest: this issue includes a "symposium," in which people like Allen Ginsberg, Wilfrid Sheed, Robert Creeley are asked all kinds of serious questions (why do you write? should politics should be kept apart from art? have we entered a "post-modern era"?), and an open letter from editor Ted Solotaroff pleading for subscribers (one year: five bucks). Nearly everyone in the magazine is Jewish or lives in New York, or both; and nearly everyone is dead now. 1970 was a long, long time ago.

Hey everybody, meet my new friend--Decy

Email I received earlier today...

SUBJECT: Your new friend

Hello Dear,
I am Miss Decy Jopel. I wish to contact you through this medium so that we can get to know each other better for a serious and stable relationship. I appreciate people who can express their emotions in sincere way because i have important things to share with you, hence would appreciated your quick response [link] to enable us to communicate better. Looking forward to your quick response .Decy

Another electric lunch in central Virginia

Restaurant I was in today had the radio tuned to WWWV Classic Rock. Some highlights:

—This is Sherry with the Electric Lunch on 3WV, and who am I talking to?
—This is Dwayne.
—Hey, Dwayne. What are you doing today?
—I'm just at work.
—Sounds good. So what do you do?
—Eh, it's kind of hard to explain. I work at this shirt place, and I stand at the bottom of this thing and wait for them to drop the shirts down, and then I stack them, like, whether they're extra-large or large or whatever.
—Oh, OK, I get it. So it's like a chute!
—Yeah, kind of.
—Cool. So what do you want to hear for lunch today, Dwayne?
—Could you play some Nirvana?
—Absolutely.
(Cue "Smells Like Teen Spirit")

—This is Sherry with the Electric Lunch on 3WV, and who am I talking to?
—Eric.
—Hey, Eric. What can I do for you today?
—Hey. I was wondering if you could play a little Ted Nugent.
—I think I can do that. What's going on out there, Eric?
—Oh. Well, we're just trying to get rid of this groundhog that's living under this guy's garage.
—Wow! So, when you get the groundhog what are you going to do with him?
—We're gonna get rid of him.
—I know, but what does that mean exactly?
—We're going to dispatch him.
—So, Eric, does "dispatch him" mean that you're going to knock his head in?
—Pretty much, yeah.
—I'm kind of sorry I asked.
(Cue "Free For All")

How Can I Be Sure Of You

Harry Nilsson just might win the pure-talent sweepstakes, and there's evidence that this would-be Sunday child was even a hard worker (at sixteen he was already writing songs and supporting himself with a bank job). His catalog offers a trove of impeccably crafted works; but, perhaps due to a restlessness that was manifested most famously by a weakness for months-long binges with depressed ex-Beatles, he only achieved a sustained perfection once in his career—on his lone great album, Nilsson Schmilsson. One of the finest records of the '70s, it's tougher than Nilsson's earlier, occasionally somewhat twee, albums, but it has a drive and a sense of fun that his later albums mostly lacked (issued, as they were, during his long and sorrily inevitable decline). I'm not trying to write an all-encompassing Nilsson piece here, so you'll have to go elsewhere to read about his childhood or the Lost Weekend or his cursed London apartment. I'm just going to write about one song.

Nilsson's label, RCA, was not always supportive of him while he was alive, but they've been nicer about him since he's been dead. When they got around to reissuing Schmilsson in 2004, they unforgivably relocated the photograph of the inside of Harry's refrigerator—possibly the best back-cover-art in the history of pop records—to the inner booklet, but otherwise they got it right: the new edition of Schmilsson, in addition to improved sound and some good notes, has valuable bonus material, including an unused track from the Schmilsson sessions that I've become a little obsessed with: "How Can I Be Sure of You." I feel that it's a top-shelf, vintage Nilsson ballad (go ahead, listen to it), and yet, somehow, I'm the only person in the world who knows about it—a situation I kind of enjoy but feel I must correct.

While it has crossed my mind that the song is addressed to Dylan, who in 1971 was in the middle of a creative free-fall that was almost as traumatic for the rock masses as the Beatles' recent breakup—and, after all, it was Bob who broke the news about the sun not being yellow ("it's chicken")—I suspect the lyric isn't so much a veiled message as simply a bit sketchy, which may be why such a gorgeous song failed to make the album. Another reason the song went onto the scrap heap may simply be that it uses a C/Cadd9 intro and Nilsson had already deployed those chords in the opening to "The Moonbeam Song." The intro to his cover of "Without You" uses a similar device (albeit in the key of E rather than C). So "How Can I Be Sure" might have been deemed one song too many with a "major chord plus its add9" introduction for one album.

As the keeper of this excellent Nilsson site pointed out to me, Harry eventually returned to the song, reworking it into "Good for God," which appeared on his 1975 album Duit on Mon Dei. Take a listen and you'll see that the earlier lyric's verses have been turned into a god-is-dead dialogue, and the "always changing" chorus has been completely jettisoned in favor of a rather stock singalong section. The performance is rushed and ragged, and, despite the delirious atmosphere, not particularly fun. What I'm saying here is, he ruined the song. These things happen. It's not the first time I was excited by a great early draft, only to be deflated by the final product.

When I said I'm the only guy in the world who even knows "How Can I Be Sure of You," I was of course exaggerating: Nilsson fans are utter diehards, and I'm sure they all turned this particular stone over long ago. But my impression of its being undiscovered isn't based on just nothing. If you Google it, information on the song is almost nonexistent; and while you'll naturally find its lyric in a few places, there isn't a single set of tabs, chords, what-have-you for the song to be had, anywhere. I have now corrected this.

The transcription below is for guitar, although this is really more of a piano number, but the chords are correct, the pianists out there can easily adapt, and this is the only place on the entire Internet where you can learn this thing. Get it now, before RCA—or Saruman the Gray or Steamboat Willie or whoever owns the rights to Nilsson's songs these days—comes after me with a cease and desist order.

How Can I Be Sure Of You
(H. Nilsson)

Intro: C / Cadd9 / C / Cadd9 / C / Cadd9

C-----------G---------------C
The other day a friend of mine said
---------------Fm---------------G#
He said, the sun's not really yellow
--------------G-------------C
He said the sun is really red

C-----------G---------------------C
I said, My friend what do you mean?
----------------Fm-------------G#
You read that in some magazine
--------------------G--------------------C
Next thing you'll say the earth's not green

e -----------------
b ----------------
g ----------------
d ----------0-1--
a -- 0-2-3------
e 3--------------

[notes above]----------E-------E7
How can I be sure of you any more
----------------------------F
In a world that's always changing
--------Bb
Re - arranging
---------F-----------Bb
Always changing, changing

e 3-1-0----
b ------3-1
g ----------
d ----------
a ----------
e ----------
[landing on intro's C chord]

I said, My friend how do you do
And what you're saying isn't true
Next thing you'll say the earth is blue

He said, My friend you're in a dream
And things are never what they seem
No, things are never what they seem

Repeat chorus (How can I be...)

END