1953



Bud Powell, Autumn in New York.

Summer is miserable--a guest who, after a joyful arrival, stays far too long, ruining the house, making you antsy. Spring is more hope than reality, crystallizing just long enough to bring out the allergies. Winter beats you down and leaves you flat. But the autumn, the autumn, is perfect.

Anthony at the Hype Machine asked me recently if I missed New York. "Sometime, not all the time," as Dylan once said. But, yes, I miss it greatly in October.

Bud Powell's take on "Autumn in NY" was recorded in New York on August 14, 1953, with George Duvivier (b) and Art Taylor (d). On The Amazing Bud Powell Vol. 2.

1953


"Elmore James has got nothing on this baby"

Elmore James, Please Find My Baby.
Elmore James, Hawaiian Boogie.

A taste of Mr. James in his prime.

As a child, Elmore James, born in 1918 in Richland, Miss., hammered a strand of broom wire to a cabin wall and taught himself to play what he called "the diddley bow". By the 1930s, he was playing the Southern blues circuit, a journey in which he met Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson. For years, James was known throughout the South as the man who took Johnson's "Dust My Broom" and radicalized it--turning Johnson's original riff "into a heavily amplified banshee wail" (Robert Palmer). James finally recorded "Dust My Broom" in 1951, in his first-ever session.

By '53, he was churning out singles. "Please Find My Baby" is a rip-roaring masterpiece, whose vicious guitar sound would be aped for decades by everyone and their mother--Mike Bloomfield, Led Zeppelin, the Allmans, Stevie Ray Vaughan, etc., etc. (Riffs from the actual James recording were dubbed onto Boyd Gilmore's 1952 "All in My Dreams", in a bit of ur-sampling.) James' guitar was recorded loud and raw under primitive conditions in a Jackson, Miss., juke joint--basically, a Modern Records talent scout hooked up a portable Magnacord tape recorder to the bar's PA system.

"Hawaiian Boogie", in which James' slide seems to be not so much imitating a Hawaiian guitar as remaking it in the slide's own image, stalls for a bit while we endure the fairly mediocre solo by tenor saxophonist J.T. Brown, but when James takes over for good, the track cooks.

"Hawaiian" is backed by Johnny Jones (p), Ransom Knowling (b), Odie Payne (d) and J.T. Brown (ts). Recorded in Chicago; released as Flair 1011 in June 1953. "Please Find" features Ike Turner on piano and an unknown rhythm section--it was released as Flair 1022 in December 1953. Both are on the amazing compilation The Sky is Crying.

1953


duded up for trouble

Chet Atkins, Country Gentleman.
Earl Hooker, Guitar Rag.

All hail the electric guitar! Here are two masters from the second generation of players--the country session man genius Chet Atkins, disciple of Merle Travis, and the blues slide guitar legend Earl Hooker, first cousin to John Lee Hooker and protégé of Robert Nighthawk.

Atkins, born in Luttrell, Tennessee, already has been heard a half-dozen times or more on "Locust St." as he played guitar on seemingly every country session of note from @1948 onward. Atkins played fiddle about as often as he did guitar, but the latter instrument made him immortal. Atkins' playing owes a lot to Travis', but with far more sprightliness to his playing--the way "Country Gentleman" just cleanly hums and jumps along. His style would inspire contemporaries like Carl Perkins, and would be a seminal influence on George Harrison, among others (the first five Beatles LPs are riddled with Harrison's Atkins imitations).

"Gentleman" was recorded in New York on March 20, 1953, with Henry Haynes on rhythm guitar, Kenneth Burns (who gets a solo on mandolin) (under the names Homer and Jethro, these two later became a comedy team) and Charles Grean (bass.) Released as Victor 20-5300. On Guitar Legend. This song led to Gibson creating a guitar in Atkins' honor.

Earl Zebedee Hooker was born in Clarksdale, Miss. in 1930 and moved with his family to Chicago as the Depression worsened. In Chicago, Hooker saw the likes of Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy & Robert Nighthawk--the latter mentored Hooker, who in turn was soon able to perfectly imitate Nighthawk's smooth slide guitar playing. Hooker returned South in the early 1950s, playing with Ike Turner and cutting some sides for Sun Records that Sam Phillips never released. Hooker spent much of the decade constantly touring, providing slide guitar on some epochal records like Muddy Waters' "You Shook Me", and only recording a few one-off singles of his own.

"Guitar Rag," possibly recorded in July 1953, is a marvelous display of Hooker's style, though the mix oddly highlights a dire performance on bass by some incompetent who history has blessed with anonymity (check out the massive screw-up around :45 into the track). On Two Bugs and a Roach.

1952



Rosemary Clooney, Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me.
Kay Starr, Wheel of Fortune.

Popular music of the early 1950s, if it is considered at all today, is remembered mainly as a foil for rock and roll; described in turns as dreary, confectionery, cloying and irritating, pop hits of the early fifties have long been sloughed off into oblivion, returning only once in a while in muzak garb on "easy listening" radio stations or whistled by a grandmother in the kitchen.

Certainly, a good deal of it was dreck: Carleton Carpenter & Debbie Reynolds singing “Aba Daba Honeymoon”; Reynolds’ future husband Eddie Fisher inflicting a host of wretched songs upon the airwaves, like “Lady Of Spain”; Patti Page’s “How Much is that Doggie in the Window”, which has become over the years the embodiment of the insipid type of music rock & roll allegedly destroyed.

Yet there was something else to these songs besides their grandiose melodies-- a shared sense of melancholy, a taste for desperate escapism, sometimes undercut by a sort of domestic stoicism. In great part these were songs for women, often performed by women, and whenever such songs are prominent, the period gets written off by (mostly male) writers of future generations as being weak, sappy and requiring rock & roll demolition. The same critical revision happened to the early '60s, when the girl groups ran the show (i.e., rock & roll had "died" and needed resuscitation by the Beatles); it likely is underway right now with regards to the late 1990s, when the charts were dominated by boy bands and former Mouseketeers, crafting songs for teenage girls, diluting and mocking the High Painful Seriousness of the grunge era.

In his marvelous book Sonata for Jukebox, Geoffrey O’Brien describes what it was like to be a child in the '50s hearing these songs, and what they meant to the older women in his house:

“Ruth undertakes her meticulous work of arranging and folding and dusting accompanied by Perry Como and the McGuire Sisters and the Mills Brothers arranging and folding sound, as if to keep the whole enterprise moving forward. It seems that the music has been made for her and if whenever one song happens to suit her even better than the rest of them it’s an occasion for gratitude: a song like that is a token of mutual assistance… Love and Marriage, Cry Me a River, Sentimental Journey, Three Coins in the Fountain, Rags to Riches, Music Music Music: these are pieces of an unending cycle of story poems, an opera without boundaries or fixed roles that has been unfolding since before I was born and will keep playing until I figure out what they are singing about… Now and then an isolated phrase stands out. The turning of Kay Starr’s “Wheel of Fortune” mesmerizes even while its function remains unknown.”

Starr's "Wheel of Fortune" is still mesmerizing, especially the spooky, revolving harmonies in the chorus ("spinning, spinning, SPIN-ning"). Find it here.

The audience for this music was not a typical one-–these were women who had come of age, as my grandmother did, at the height of the Depression, who had spent their prime years during the war, working, fearing for their boyfriends, husbands and brothers, sometimes losing them. It was a generation deprived of its youth, in the postwar sense of the word--whatever carefree moments you had, you earned.

Rosemary Clooney, having grown up during the war, was now off on her own, still keeping the faith although the guy she was waiting for proved to be a waste. "Don't Worry 'Bout Me", a breakup song of amazing grace, humanity and wistfulness, documents resilience in the face of disappointment, provides a cheerful delusion (the singer graciously tells her lover move on to another woman) to cover the loss. Clooney sings the first bars of each verse with strength but then lets the rest of the phrase taper off--she's regretted her words as soon as she's sung them. Found on Everything's Rosie, an odds-and-ends '50s compilation.

By 1952, the great travails were over, the men had returned (even Korea, the miserable coda to WWII, was winding down), the children were coming--for many of these women, their prayers during the hard years had been answered. All that was left now was to grow old--happily for many, dismally for some--while the songs would be always there to remind them of all they had lost. And then, one day, the songs would go too.

(for HBM, 1914-2001.)



Willie Mabon, I Don’t Know.

In the 1952 presidential election, the Republicans retook the White House after two decades of losses, thanks to their choice of Gen. Eisenhower over someone who better represented the soul of the party, the conservative Sen. Taft. (As a sop to the right, Ike chose for his running mate an ambitious Congressman who had cut his teeth red-baiting.) Eisenhower, the sort of ideologically blank candidate that turns up on rare days to the great benefit of his party and occasionally of his country, was the last (to date) of the lineage of great American generals who devolved into mediocre presidents. That said, Eisenhower ran the country like a genial corporate chairman: he mainly left FDR/Truman reforms alone; he pushed to build the interstates and backed up Brown v. Board of Education with federal troops. He was honest, not vindictive and knew a snake (McCarthy, Nixon) when he saw one; he ranks in the top tier of 20th Century presidents, if elevated more by his competitors than by his actions.

He crushed Adlai Stevenson, first in the long line of Democratic presidential candidates considered by voters to be essentially too qualified for the job.

Harry Truman went home to Missouri, hated by a great many of the American public, who, in later, darker years, would remember him with much more fondness (one great aunt of mine told me once, in the '80s, "You know, President Truman wasn't as stupid as he made out to be.")

I think Willie Mabon would have voted for Stevenson. On the Chess Blues-Rock Songbook.



Films of 1952

Lo Sceicco Bianco (The White Sheik). Others may favor Fellini’s extravagant later epics like 8 1/2 but for me his masterpieces are his first two films, this and '53’s I Vitelloni, where his baroque taste for fantasy is tempered by the grime of real life. Funny, heartbreaking and marvelously acted.
Le Plaisir. Soon, the complete run of "Three's Company" will be available on DVD, but not any of Max Ophuls' great films. Plaisir, which starts with one of the most amazing continuous shots ever achieved, is a collection of three vignettes; it achieves perfection with the longest, a story of a group of prostitutes and their madam going on holiday in a small country town.
Singin’ in the Rain. This, along with '53's The Band Wagon, marks the end of the great Hollywood musicals. I mean, come on, who doesn't like "Good Morning"? Or Donald O'Connor's astonishing "Make 'Em Laugh" (which landed him in the hospital for a week after he did it, and then he had to do a re-take)? Or the title song? It's a Russian nesting doll of a movie--a film about actors remaking and redubbing a film (Debbie Reynolds' dubbing work being in turn dubbed by another singer), in the midst of which Kelly imagines another surreal film sequence (the "Gotta Dance"/Cyd Charisse bit, which almost destroys the movie).
Ikiru/Umberto D. The timing of these films’ release (just ten months apart) makes one believe coincidence has some divinity to it. Two studies on death and obsolesence; the Kurosawa film offers release, the De Sica despair.
Jeux interdits.
Outcast of the Islands.
Bend of the River/The Big Sky. Both more satisfying '52 Westerns to me than High Noon, a film I've never liked.
The Bad and the Beautiful. A Hollywood epitaph that reeks of wormwood; it begins with Kirk Douglas paying extras to show up at his father's funeral.
The Lusty Men. Mitchum. Nicholas Ray. Enough said.
Park Row.
Ochazuke no aji (The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice). Minor Ozu, sure, which is like saying “minor Shakespeare.”

Oddities: My Son John. I saw a bit of this film years ago, on a terrible quality VHS bootleg. As many have said, it is to anti-Communism what "Reefer Madness" is to marijuana use. Unbelievably bad but marked with an inadevertant gonzo genius, and a sad depiction of Hollywood's paranoia/cowardice in the face of HUAC.

1952


VLADIMIR: Then the two of them must have been damned. ESTRAGON: And why not?

Hank Williams, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.
Lefty Frizzell, I’m an Old, Old Man (Tryin’ to Live While I Can).

The end, when it came, was ridiculously legendary. Sitting in the back seat of his baby blue Cadillac, a bottle of whiskey by his side, Hank Williams died either on New Year’s Eve 1952 or in the early hours of 1953. Before he had left his hotel in Knoxville, Tennessee, Williams had been shot up full of vitamin B12 and morphine; when his teenage driver Charles Carr stopped for gas in Oak Hill, West Virginia, Williams was already dead.

(The true cause and time of his death remains still a conjecture; some speculate he may have been dying when the porters carried Williams into his car in Knoxville.) Williams' last single released during his life was “I'll Never Get Of This World Alive," recorded in June '52. Find it here.

Williams’ death removed the center of country music, which no one in the years to come could quite replace. You can speculate what would have happened had Williams lived – would he have gone towards rockabilly, trying to get a piece of what Elvis Presley was making? Or would he have entrenched in Nashville, making soporific professional "country pop" records like many of his contemporaries would do? Perhaps he would’ve made some squirrelly novelty records, themes for television shows. Or just fully adopt his "Luke the Drifter" persona and travel around playing revivals or county fairs. At each show someone in the audience would recognize his face--as the years went on, they would be unable to place his name.

There was an heir apparent. When Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams toured together, they would flip a coin each night to see who went on first. Frizzell seemed ready for fame--since 1950, he had begun pumping out hits: “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time”, “I Love You a Thousand Ways”, “Always Late With Your Kisses”. He would buy a Cadillac, drive it until it ran out of oil, and then buy another one. He had an unmistakable voice, inspired by Jimmie Rodgers but flavored with his own stylings (“I get tired of holding high notes for a long time. Instead of straining, I just let it roll down, and it feels good to me,” Frizzell once said).

Yet when Williams died, Frizzell began falling apart— too much booze and pills, some disastrous career moves. By 1954 the hits had stopped, and when Frizzell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1975, it marked the end of a brilliant but ultimately unfulfilled career.

“I’m an Old Old Man”, recorded on October 7, 1952, shows Frizzell already accepting premature fatality. On this compilation.


At long last, 1952 is ending. One big last post coming end of week or early next.

1952


The spoils of the just

Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys, Are You Missing Me?
The Louvin Brothers, The Family Who Prays.

In September 1952, a pair of itinerant musical brothers began recording for Capitol Records, marking the end of the pair’s years in the wilderness. When their first Capitol single, “The Family Who Prays,” actually earned them a substantial royalty check, the brothers were scared to cash it at first, fearing their record company had made an accounting error.

Ira and Charlie Louvin were born under the name Loudermilk, which they changed around 1947 due to the musical public's general inability to spell or pronounce the name. The brothers grew up in Alabama and were inspired by the spate of brother acts dominating the ‘30s country music scene, such as the Monroes, the Blue Sky Boys, the Delmores and the Carlisles. Ira learned to play mandolin and taught his brother on guitar.

Much as when Roger McGuinn and David Crosby stepped out of a movie theater playing A Hard Day's Night set on becoming pop stars, the Louvins saw Roy Acuff’s huge touring car burning down the road (on the way to a show the Louvins could not afford admission to) and determined to make a career in country music.

The '40s, however were a rough time--the brothers played the ragged edge of the southern touring circuit, never getting any breaks, and split up a few times, such as when Charlie joined the army in 1945. Yet they began to progress, getting a name for themselves first as songwriters. Because their lyrics and sound were far more traditional than the type of commercial honky—tonk fare then getting radio play, Louvins compositions instead found a home in bluegrass.

The Louvins' “Are You Missing Me?” is here covered by another brother act—Jim and Jesse McReynolds. The McReynolds began their professional career in 1946 and soon decided to cast their lot with bluegrass, adding a five-string banjo to their guitar/mandolin lineup hoping to achieve a similar sound to that of Earl Scruggs. Recorded on June 13, 1952 and released as Capitol 2233.

By contrast, “The Family Who Prays” seems more modern, despite the traditional lyrical sentiment, as it features top Nashville session men like Chet Atkins on guitar and Floyd “Lightning” Chance on bass. Recorded on September 30, 1952 and can be found on this compilation.

1952


the be-bop boy takes five

James Banister, Ain't Gonna Tell You No Lie.
Joe Hill Louis, Dorothy Mae.
L.C. Hubert, Lucy Done Moved.
Willie Nix, Bakershop Boogie.
Woodrow Adams, Train Time.
Elven Parr & the In the Groove Boys, I'm a Good Man.
Walter Horton, Little Walter's Boogie.

Rock & roll, like a medieval cathedral, is the work of anonymous craftsmen spread over the generations. Here is a slab of blues/rock recordings made in Sam Phillips' Memphis studio during 1952--none from any bluesman who made it big in any commercial sense; for most of them, these records were the high-water mark. Most were unreleased, some the product of a whim--a journeyman drummer's desire to sing; someone trying to give their trombone-playing cousin a break; a few traveling players coming together for a day or two, trying to find a sound.

Consider these tracks a substratum of R&B and rock--the fruit of musicians who had a few good songs in them, who put them on tape or acetate disc during a few afternoons in Memphis, and then vanished into the ether. These are their rocking epitaphs.

James Banister, who drummed with the Red Devils, a Chicago R&B unit, cut only one track at Sun: "Ain't Gonna Tell You No Lie", which was recorded on May 3 and never released. Banister allegedly became a minister by decade's end.

L.C. Hubert is a ghost--aside from having appeared on a few Howlin' Wolf sessions and having recorded "Lucy Done Moved" on June 14 (never released), there is nothing else known about the man.

Willie Nix's "Bakershop Boogie", recorded on October 9, was released as Sam Phillips' second single, Sun 179. Nix, a drummer, made a local name for himself and moved up to Chicago in 1953, but returned south in 1958, possibly to face a murder charge (he apparently was either never charged or was acquitted). He died in 1991.

Woodrow Adams, another cipher, recorded "Train Time" on May 24. It was never released.

Joe Hill Louis' "Dorothy Mae", recorded on July 18, was released as Checker 763. The brilliant Louis, born in 1921 in Whitehaven, Tennessee, supported himself doing odd jobs--at work he cut his thumb and died of tetanus in 1957.

Elven Parr's In the Groove Boys hailed from Osceola, Arkansas--Albert King was their singer for a time. On "I'm a Good Man", recorded on April 16 and never released, pianist Eddie Snow sings. Little if anything has been heard from Snow or any other of the Groove Boys since the Eisenhower years.

By contrast to most of these musicians, Walter Horton had a long and vigorous career. Born in 1917, Horton claimed to have recorded for Vocalion in the 1930s, though no evidence has turned up, and by 1952 he was travelling around the South, playing picnics and fishfries. "Little Walter's Boogie" is just one of the brilliant recordings he made for Phillips (and for which Phillips paid him $59 in total). Horton went up to Chicago and eventually played with Muddy Waters and Otis Rush. He died in 1981.

All these tracks can be found on Sun Records: The Blues Years, a fantastic 8-CD set that is now long out of print. Some of them are on this compilation.

1952



Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker Quartet, Lullaby of the Leaves.
Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker Quartet, Soft Shoe.
Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, You Go to My Head.

“Cool” jazz, or "West Coast Jazz", like most subheadings in music histories, is an overly vague and at times inaccurate term--the only things cool jazz musicians had in common is that they recorded on the West Coast in the fifties, usually for the handful of local independent labels (Fantasy, Pacific) that emerged around the same time; they were mostly white; and their music often forsook blues standards and influences and the frenetic pace of bebop, pushing instead for clarity, quiet intensity and melody.

The core cool jazz records were recorded in just a few years, the early to mid-'50s, and the style soon congealed into a cliché. Think of the hep cool jazz band in 1957’s The Sweet Smell of Success, who already seem to be a parody – wearing sunglasses indoors at night, watching only themselves not the audience, immaculately dressed in matching suits, playing moody, spare music tailor-made for someone's quiet breakdown. Cool jazz devolved into music for the LP age, for the archetypal '50s swinging bachelor, with his wet bar, hi-fi set and Playboy subscription.

Still, long before its current incarnation as incidental music for Starbucks barristas, cool jazz was at its peak the hippest thing in the United States. This was music for, if not the future, then at least the present; urban, disaffected sounds--no more renditions of corny stuff like “When It's Sleepy Time Down South," or “Rocking Chair” or warhorses like "After You’ve Gone". It was not frantic music, it was not four-to-the bar, brass-heavy stomp crafted to be heard over the din of a loud dance hall (the dance halls had all closed anyhow)–it was music to be played, as James Baldwin wrote in Another Country, after all the squares had gone home.

Ted Gioia: cool jazz had “an acute sensitivity to instrumental textures; a studied avoidance of the easy licks and empty clichés of bop and swing; in their place, fresh, uncluttered lines, cleanly played. And above all, the band overcame the jazz musician's greatest fear: the fear of silence.”

When the 1950s began, Gerry Mulligan, the baritone saxophonist who had first made his mark with the Miles Davis Nonet in the late '40s, was hitchhiking his way from New York to California. Mulligan found work in Stan Kenton's big band and, when offered a Monday night gig at the Haig, a small restaurant across from the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles, Mulligan formed a quartet of trumpeter Chet Baker, Bob Whitlock and Carson Smith alternating on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums.

Baker has taken some knocks over the years by critics, who have complained his tone and his range were limited, that his singing was even worse, but listeners always flocked to him, whether it was because of his matinee idol looks (he was one of the first jazz musicians who could’ve played himself in a movie of his life) or his ability to almost flawlessly develop a melody and convey a deep sense of mood--at the latter task, no one but Miles Davis could best him.

The Mulligan/Baker quartet began recording in the summer of 1952 at the Laurel Canyon bungalow owned by engineer Phil Turetsky. A session in the bungalow on August 16 yielded “Lullaby of the Leaves” and “Bernie’s Tune”, the quartet's first masterpieces--Richard Bock launched the Pacific Jazz label with a two sided single featuring the songs. The Quartet's sound is shown in full on "Lullaby"--Mulligan makes the bari sax, typically an unwieldly honking horn meant to hold down the bottom, into a graceful dancing giant, while Baker's trumpet darts around him.

By October the quartet was in LA's Gold Star Studios: “Soft Shoe”, a whisper of a track featuring a sublime Mulligan solo that saturates the ear, comes from the first of the sessions, October 15-16. Both tracks can be found here.

Dave Brubeck, who would become the public face of West Coast jazz in 1954, when he was featured on the cover of Time magazine, studied under composer Darius Milhaud at Mills College and formed an octet, a piano trio and at last a quartet in which he first worked with his greatest collaborator, Paul Desmond. Brubeck played loud, dense and heavy chords and favored rhythmically complex works, yet at the same time had a great pop sensibility, covering everything from “The Trolley Song” to various Disney movie numbers; Desmond was far lighter, more lyrical and moody, calling himself “the world’s slowest alto player”, yet his tastes were more rarified than Brubeck's.

"You Go to My Head" is just Brubeck and Desmond, quietly conversing, years before the accolades, campus tours and "Take Five", playing in October 1952 at the Boston club Storyville. Find it here.

Top painting: Marc Chagall's The Green Night.

1952


Mighty Lata

Lata Mangeshkar, Vande Matararam.

"Vande Mataram" (which translates roughly into "Hail, Mother" ) has existed, in some form, for about 125 years. An Indian equivalent to "La Marseillaise", a version was first composed by Bankimchandra Chatterjee in 1875 as a response to heightened British attempts to force "God Save the Queen" upon the Empire's Indian subjects as their national song. Included in Chatterjee's 1882 novel Anandmath, a recounting of an 18th Century Hindu rebellion, the song soon became entwined with the nascent Indian independence movement, sung by Rabindranath Tagore at the Indian National Congress of 1896, and soon banned by British authorities, who at times destroyed early recordings of the song.

From 1900 until 1950, the song, originally written in "Sanskritized" Bengali, roved throughout the subcontinent, its lyrics altering as it travelled in dozens of tongues, its tune radically changing as well--composers set "Vande Mataram" from everything to marches to Vedic chants and ragas. More than a hundred recordings were made.

One of the best is a full-force Bollywood rendition by Lata Mangeshkar. Mangeshkar,who may have recorded 40,000 songs in her career, made this track of "Vande Mataram" for a 1952 film version of Chatterjee's Anandmath, of which I know absolutely nothing. The song is a marvel, though, a fusion of pop and raga, in which Lata begins each of three verses with a different, spiralling melody; in the first two verses (the second verse is especially beautiful), she is cut off by a chanted mantra-like chorus, in the third, she gets to dance a bit longer.

(The chorus, which sticks in your head after a listen, actually saved my sanity once--I chanted it silently one afternoon upon being stuck on a crowded N train between stations for over an hour.) My copy is from a cassette a friend gave me years ago--I'm not sure where you can buy it on CD, but it apparently is on iTunes.

Suresh Chandvankar: "No other song in Independent India has received so much attention. This is probably because we Indians do not consider this as the national song or Anthem. We treat it as the song of our culture, a ‘Prateek’ or living symbol. In Hindu culture, the mother is considered a God, and worshipping the mother through songs is an age-old tradition...That is why the song keeps reappearing again and again in different forms. It will be no great wonder if it gets set to an assortment of new musical idioms - even jazz, rock, rap or metal - in the 21st century."

When a heavy metal version does appear, please let me know.

There is some controversy about whether "Vande Mataram" should be made an obligatory Indian national song.

1952



Slim Whitman, Bandera Waltz.

Our very lethargic stroll through '52 continues.

Otis Dewey “Slim” Whitman hailed from Tampa, Florida (he never was fond of his nickname, bestowed upon him by his record company). Born in 1924, Whitman was considered the last of the singing cowboys, noted for hits like "Indian Love Call" and "Secret Love." A purist of sorts, Whitman recorded mainly cowboy songs and ballads, never novelties or honky-tonk numbers.

Whitman, after getting married to a preacher’s daughter at age seventeen, worked as a meat packer until he severed two of his fingers. When the war began, Whitman joined the Navy, where he learned to play the guitar (left-handed, due to his maiming). After being decommissioned in 1946, he worked in a shipyard and played minor league baseball. At last, in 1948 he began playing music professionally and soon caught the eye of the infamous Col. Tom Parker, though Whitman still worked as a mailman part-time to support his family.

Whitman, oddly enough, became much more of a success in Europe and Australia than he ever did in the U.S. While a few of his hits in the early '50s crossed over into the U.S. pop charts as well as topping the country charts, he was mainly considered a minor-league country performer in the U.S., while in the UK, by contrast, he played the London Palladium, the first country singer to ever do so, and his songs dominated European radio throughout the decade.

"Bandera Waltz", marked by a glorious vocal by Whitman matched by Hoot Rains' soaring steel guitar, was recorded in Shreveport, Louisiana, in May 1952, with Curley Herndon (lead guitar), Curley Harris (b), Sonny Harville (p). Released as Imperial 8144 and can be found here.

Chords to Bandera.

1952



Howlin’ Wolf, Oh Red!
Howlin’ Wolf, Highway Man.

“When I heard him, I said, ‘this is where the soul of man never dies ’…and I tell you the greatest show you could see today would be Chester Burnett doing one of those sessions in my studio. His eyes would light up and you’d see the veins on his neck, and buddy, there was nothing on his mind but that song. He sang with his damn soul.” Sam Phillips.

Chester Arthur Burnett, born in June 1910 in Clay County, Mississippi, was first called Bull Cow and Bigfoot due to his enormous frame, until his singing style earned him the name he’d keep until death – the Howlin’ Wolf. Taught on the guitar by Charley Patton and on the harmonica by his brother in law, Rice “Sonny Boy Williamson” Miller, Howlin’ Wolf began playing professionally in the late 1940s. By 1951, the Wolf had become a DJ and advertising man in addition to playing local Memphis clubs.

Sam Phillips began recording Wolf in 1951, passing on most of the sides to Chicago’s Chess records. By 1952, Wolf was signed exclusively to Chess, who leaned on him to move up to Chicago and leave Memphis behind. He did, but before going waxed some of his finest works in the small studio on Union Ave.

Here are two of the best. “Oh Red!” is pretty atypical, as it’s heavily arranged as early Wolf tracks go, and even features a wild tenor sax solo by Charles Taylor. It’s perhaps the closest Wolf ever came to Louis Jordan–inspired jump blues, and it swings. “Highway Man” is a more basic electric blues, featuring a genius raspy vocal by Wolf; the brilliant Willie Johnson provides some brutal, sharp guitar lines.

“Highway Man” was recorded on January 23, 1952 with LC Hubert on piano, Johnson (g), Willie Steel (d); “Oh Red!” was recorded on October 7, with Walter “Tang” Smith on trombone, Taylor on tenor sax, and possibly Bill Johnson on piano. Released as Chess 1528 and available here.

1952



Reno and Smiley, I’m Using My Bible For a Roadmap.

In the days before Southern religious fundamentalism became just another political interest group, it was capable of inspiring some beautiful, pure pieces of art.

The sublime “I'm Using My Bible For a Roadmap” was written by Don Reno, from Spartansburg, South Carolina, an excellent banjo player who performed with Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith on “Mocking Banjoes,” a track which inspired the infamous “Dueling Banjos” used in the film Deliverance. He also played with Bill Monroe as a brief replacement for Earl Scruggs, and then joined Red Smiley in 1949 to form a bluegrass band, the Tennessee Cut-Ups .

Smiley, who hailed from Asheville, North Carolina, was a fine complement to Reno, providing smooth continuous runs on his Martin guitar to balance Reno’s banjo picking, and harmonies for Reno’s tenor.

Recorded in Cincinnati on January 15, 1952, with Gopher Addis on fiddle, Chuck Haney on mandolin, Jay Haney on bass. Released as King 1045 and found here.

1952



Thelonious Monk, Little Rootie Tootie.

There are more dramatic Monk recordings, those more influential, more disturbing, more historically significant. But I don’t think there are any more fun than this one. Ira Gitler called it “a sort of train song, with Monk even punctuating to represent the whistle.”

“Rootie Tootie” comes from a brief interval in Monk’s career, between the Blue Note recordings that established his name among musicians and the Riverside albums that did the same among listeners—in 1952 and 1954, Monk recorded a handful of excellent trio sessions, in which he debuted a number of compositions, including "Blue Monk" and "Bemsha Swing." Here he is joined by Gary Mapp on bass and one of his finest accompanists, the drummer Art Blakey.

Romp or no, "Rootie Tootie" is still Monk, so the piece's hook is three dissonant chords pounded out at the end of alternating bars, and Monk leads into the final chorus with a charming and silly rampage up and down the keyboard.

Recorded in New York City on October 15, 1952, along with “Sweet and Lovely”, "Bye-ya”, and "Monk’s Dream." Available on Thelonious Monk Trio, which collects the 1952 trio sessions as well as a solo Monk performance.

1952


the revolution will wear plaid

Bill Haley and his Comets, Rock the Joint.
Bill Haley and his Comets, Real Rock Drive.

In most standard histories of rock & roll, Bill Haley is an early entry, depicted solely as the Guy Who Had the First Rock and Roll Hit and who then trundled off to obscurity. He seems to hail from a prehistoric era--photos of Haley show a moon-faced guy with a cowlick wearing a plaid jacket and bowtie that makes him look like a coat checker at Sardi's, while his Comets often appear a bit goofy, rocking out with, at various times, a steel guitar, accordion, or baritone saxophone.

But there's much more to Haley and the Comets, if you consider as them a vital link between late-generation Western swing and rock & roll. After all, Haley began as a pure country artist, though he lived in Pennsylvania. For a while, he billed himself as "The Rambling Yodeler,"wearing a full bright-red cowboy suit to gigs in bands like the Downhomers and Range Drifters. And the first band Haley led was the Four Aces of Western Swing (later the Saddlemen).

However, by 1951 popular tastes were changing, and wearing cowboy suits to shows in New Jersey was looking a bit ridiculous. So when Dave Miller, who owned the indie label Essex, suggested that Haley cover a current R&B smash, Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88", Haley went for it.

Haley sometimes unfairly gets lumped in with the whitebread carpetbaggers of the 1950s, the Pat Boones who took songs by black musicians and bled the life out of them. And, true, Haley's take on"Shake Rattle and Roll", for instance, sounds like a weak echo of the mighty Big Joe Turner original. But early on, Haley's versions held their own with the originals, sometimes even bettering them--kicking up the beat, making a harsher, sharper sound.



In 1952, Haley's band had begun to catch fire--by year's end they had changed their name to the Comets and had ditched the Western duds. One of their first regional hits was with another R&B reworking, Jimmy Preston's "Rock the Joint". Preston's 1949 original (listen to sample here) is wild, dense and fantastic, but Hale's version rocks about as hard and is blessed by a fine guitar solo by Danny Cedrone.

But the real gem for me is Haley's own "Real Rock Drive", a perfect fusion of Bob Wills and nascent rock music, driven by the insistent riff doubled on Billy Williamson's steel and Cedrone's electric guitar.

"Rock the Joint" was released as Essex 303 in April 1952, "Real Rock Drive" as Essex 310 in November '52. Besides the musicians previously mentioned, the Comets were Johnny Grande (p), Marshall Lytle (double bass) and Billy Gussak (d). Both tracks can be found on this excellent compilation. More Haley merchandise here. Fantastic Haley discography here.

7 Deadly Sins: Pride


"All is not lost; the unconquerable Will.../That Glory never shall his wrath or might/Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace/With suppliant knee, and deify his power."

Ringo Starr, I'm the Greatest.
The Human Beinz, Nobody but Me.
Marvin Gaye, Ego Tripping Out.
Elton John, Ego.
Mose Allison, I'm the Wild Man.
Bob Dylan, Foot of Pride.
Muddy Waters, I Love the Life I Live (I Live the Life I Love).
Merle Haggard, I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am.

Pride is the prodigal sin. It began as the sin of sins, the foulest, the first, primal sin--that of Satan, of Adam and Eve, of Oedipus and Agamemnon. But today it has been domesticated; pride is encouraged in self-help manuals, serves as the rallying cry of various minorities, and is regarded as a common reservoir of good. "I'm proud to be an American," begins the chorus of "God Bless the USA", a song that might one day become the new national anthem.

Pride has become our birthright, regardless of whichever wing of the country you are raised in. I was born in the early 1970s and went for a year to an "alternative" K-12 school: a large, cluttered house run by a group of hippies who may have been intermarried or related--I never found out. You were free to wander from room to room, absorbing whatever was being taught--so in the course of a year I finger-painted, attempted fractions and decimals before I grasped the concept of adding (something that likely contributed to my abysmal math skills), listened to one of the hippies pick out songs from "Free to Be You and Me" on guitar. The governing mantras of the school were "I'm proud of you!" and "You should be proud of yourself!"--bestowed upon any remote achievement by a child.

Pride has become so enculturated that I imagine some would be surprised it was ever once considered blasphemous. You can find the gilt of pride anywhere that you look--military recruitment ads ("Be all you can be" or "The Few, The Proud, The Marines"); "Don't dream it--be it!", from the Rocky Horror Picture Show; "Keep reaching for the stars," Casey Kasem's old sign-off phrase; every sports team's boast of being number one. Etc., etc.



"I was in the greatest show on earth/for what it was worth." So goes Ringo Starr's boast, written by John Lennon; the song's lofty claims are undercut by the fact that Ringo was always the humblest of the Beatles, the one who knew the extent of his good fortune and kept his sense of humor. On 1973's Ringo, my candidate for the best solo Beatles album, a sort of secret Beatles reunion.

Or take the dancing braggart of the Human Beinz's "Nobody But Me", from 1967, whose pride would shatter if it turned out that you could do the boogaloo better than him. (On Nuggets.)

Rising in rank

The sin of pride, at its core, is not knowing, or not accepting, your place in the scheme of things. First Satan, then man, challenged God in His supremacy--the result always ends in a fall. Man is denied access to certain knowledge ("for my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways" Isaiah 55:8), and if he keeps pushing for it, disaster always follows. It's a fate that transcends religions and time, from Prometheus, chained to a rock and his innards gnawed by eagles for giving man the gifts of fire and art, to Icarus, tumbling ablaze into the sea, to Shelley's Ozymandias, whose arrogant visage lies in ruins in the desert wastes.

Or Dr. Faustus, the Renaissance's favorite prideful sinner, who sells his soul in exchange for knowledge. Christopher Marlowe's Faustus meets Pride, in the course of being introduced to the sins: Pride comes first among the seven, naturally. "I am Pride. I disdain to have any parents. I am like to Ovid's flea; I can creep into every corner of a wench." After a bit, Pride no longer deigns to speak, "unless the ground be perfumed, and covered with cloth of arras."



"Pride isolates and alienates from both God and society; it is a form of self-satisified and self-sufficient withdrawal," (Henry Fairlie). Pope Gregory the Great assigned pride the top rank of the seven--for Gregory, pride was the well from which all other sins were drawn, the alpha of damnation. (It also made political sense, as the medieval church found pride all too evident in the kings and nobles with which it constantly was battling for power.)



Pride is also exaggerated self-worth, vanity, egoism without check, the self prized above all others. For the proud person, according to some wonderful lines from Spinoza, "the things he has done himself, even when they are mistaken, alone please him...he favors himself in his thought; and when he think he surpasses others in all things, he walks with himself along the broad spaces of his own thoughts and silently utters his own phrases." As punishment, in Dante's Purgatorio, the proud are forced to bear enormous rocks on their backs.

The greatest flowering of pure egoism since the court of Louis XIV occurred in the 1970s. By 1974--the year the first issue of People came out--modern celebrity, crowned with obscene wealth and numbed by copious drug use, had created a strain of pride so virulent that it often destroyed its hosts.

The most brutally honest products of this period didn't find many listeners (and those that did become hits, like Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good", played it for laughs). Marvin Gaye's "Ego Tripping Out", a muddy, slurred lament to having lost all sense of scope, was released in 1979. It was meant to be the leadoff single to Gaye's Lover Man, but it flopped so hard that the album was never released. On The Very Best.



And Elton John's "Ego", another failed single (from 1978), features grasping celebrity vanity at its most naked. (For much more on "Ego", read Paul Shrug's wonderful post on this song). Bernie Taupin's lyrics are oddly straightforward for much of it, and John sings the hell out of them. (That said, "foolish/before-schoolish/amateurish/lose-your-cool-ish" is possibly the worst rhyming in the history of the English language.) The only way to get "Ego" officially is to buy the terrible album A Single Man.

Yes, master



Sometimes a pure egoist is wonderful to watch, especially one with a sense of his own ridiculousness. Take Reggie Jackson: "I represent both the underdog and the overdog in our society"; "I have to deal with the magnitude of me"; "I didn't come to New York to be a star, I brought my star with me.; "I'm the straw that stirs the drink". His teammate, Catfish Hunter, responded with some quips of his own: "[Reggie] would give you the shirt off his back. Of course he'd call a press conference to announce it." "When you unwrap a Reggie bar, it tells you how good it is."

Or take Mose Allison's wild man, who ate breakfast with a tiger and danced with Satan's grandmother. From 1964. (On the collection Allison Wonderland.)

It's all well until someone else's pride runs headlong into yours. From Austen's Pride and Prejudice:

"His pride does not offend me so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, every thing in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a right to be proud."

"That is very true," replied Elizabeth, "and I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine."

National pride



Can patriotism be considered a sin? Are the people who chant "USA! USA!", as if the country were a top-ranked college football team, violating a core tenet of Western civilization?

The need to reclaim national pride after the Vietnam debacle became an obsession (for some) for 15 long years, until the luster allegedly was restored with the First Gulf War. Perhaps it was true. “Every troop I encountered during the Gulf War swelled with pride knowing about the support they had in the U.S...Vietnam vets [in Desert Storm] wept," one veteran said.

But even George Will, at the time of the First Gulf War, saw something troubling in the spectacle. "A peculiar kind of patriot says that by this war America "will get its pride back"...since when has American pride derived primarily from military episodes? A nation that constantly worries about its pride should worry. It is apt to confect military occasions for bucking itself up, using foreign policy for psychotherapy."

However, the American need to build up pride via fighting has had a long pedigree, especially the Scots/Irish who emigrated in the 18th and 19th centuries, and who populated Appalachia, the lower South and Texas.

David Hackett Fischer: "The rearing of male children in the back settlements was to foster fierce pride, stubborn independence and a warrior's courage in the young. An unintended effect was to creat a society of autonomous individuals who were unable to endure external control and incapable of restraining their rage against anyone who stood in their way." Their most notable representatives, in the years to come, would be Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, Sgt. York and George Patton, none strangers to pride.

Or as one backcountry man once said, "Lord, grant that I may always be right, for thou knowest I am hard to turn."



In 1983, Bob Dylan recorded a jeremiad called "Foot of Pride." In it, Dylan wanders a blasted landscape plagued by the proud and the damned, the walking dead, half-men, Philistines, concert promoters--a world Dylan and Larry Charles attempted to recreate two decades later in the bizarre film Masked and Anonymous. (The phrase "foot of pride" comes from Psalms 36:11 ("let not the foot of pride come against me, and let not the hand of the wicked remove me."))

A character who would prosper in such a world is Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden, in Blood Meridian, a soulless, brilliant murderer who believes war is the ultimate human achievement--the test of will against will. "Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?...[Man's] meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes."

(After recording this and its sister masterpiece "Blind Willie McTell" for 1983's Infidels, Dylan replaced them at the last minute with vastly inferior songs, hobbling the album. "Foot of Pride" was finally released a decade later on the Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3.)

Keeping pride

But let's not go out so apocalyptically. Pride's current place as a societal good has been a benefit for a great many people--especially for those who society has long taught to feel inferior. The history of African-American music in the 20th Century, in a way, is an establishment of and a joy in racial pride, from Ellington's "Black Beauty" to James Brown's "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)". Or Muddy Waters, who loves the life he leads, and makes no bones about it. (From 1956; you can find it on Anthology.)

The emperor Marcus Aurelius said, "This may help keep you from vainglory...If you have truly seen what the facts are, never mind what others think of you, and be content to live the rest of your life as nature wills." Or listen to Merle Haggard, who shares the same sentiments. "I Take a Lot of Pride In What I Am" is one of my favorite songs ever, sung with amazing dignity and power by Haggard (from 1968, found on Capitol Collectors Series.)

End credits

Adios, sins. I am indebted to (aka I ransacked for good bits) the following: Fairlie's the Seven Deadly Sins Today; Solomon Schimmel's The Seven Deadly Sins; and the collection Wicked Pleasures (esp. James Ogilvy's essay on greed, and Wm. Gass' on lust). The recent series of mini-books on the Sins is hit or miss--Pride isn't published yet, Wendy Wasserstein's Sloth is close to unreadable, an awful elephantine failed joke, and Robert Thurman's Anger starts well but ends as a sort of bikram yoga manual. The rest range from good (Joseph Epstein's Envy, Phyllis Tickle's Greed) to excellent (Francine Prose's Gluttony) to brilliant (Simon Blackburn's Lust.)

....and on the seventh sin, I rest. On vacation for a while. Enjoy yourselves. Please visit the blogs in the links column, all highly recommended.

7 Deadly Sins: Anger


"Patience wavers just so much as/Mortal grief compels, while touches/Quick and hot, of anger, rise/To smitten cheek and weary eyes."

Samuel L. Jackson, Ezekiel 25:17.
Cat Stevens, I'm Gonna Get Me a Gun.
Mission of Burma, That's When I Reach For My Revolver.
The Clash, Hate and War.
Lizzie Miles, I Hate a Man Like You.
Eleventh Dream Day, Murder.
Marvin Gaye, Anger.
Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth, Anger in the Nation.

This is a sadly appropriate choice of sin for this morning. My prayers and condolences to the people of the UK.

Anger is everywhere--the salt in the blood. Anger, in its time, has conquered every nation, every province, seemingly every house. Envy and pride's fervid ambassador, anger spurs the stupid drunken fight at the corner bar, the terrorist detonating a bomb, the gunman in the office, the loud, crude voice behind you at the stop sign. Its victims are innumerable--the child who flinches when her father gets up from the table, the cringing dog, the toe-tagged corpse.

A popular modern incarnation of anger is the (usually American) sport of someone grabbing a gun and taking out his petty grievances and disappointments by shooting random people. Cat Stevens' "I'm Gonna Get Me A Gun" sums the mindset up: "You'll see the best of me," our merry psychotic tells us. "When I...have got...a gun!" ("Get Me a Gun", Stevens' 1967 follow-up to "I Love My Dog", is one of the strangest pop songs of the 1960s--a happy kid singing about murder, set to a jaunty arrangement out of a Disney movie score. (On Matthew and Son.))



Or take the Mission Of Burma's "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," where the singer's world has gone to smash, and a gun's all that's left for him to talk with. On 1981's Signals, Calls and Marches.

Righteous rage

Anger is the only sin of the seven that usually gets a pass--it has been enlisted, since human civilization began, on the side of the powerful and the righteous. It is akin to fire--it warms, it's essential for life, it burns and kills. It has always been on our side, and on the gods'. The first word in the Iliad, Western civilization's opening line, is Μηνιν ("mēnin"), wrath.

"Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilleus
And its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the
Achaians…[who] gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
Of dogs, of all birds..”

And then there is Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, perhaps the angriest, most frustrated and vengeful god in the cosmos. Yahweh seems permanently pissed off throughout the early books of the Bible--throwing Adam and Eve out of paradise and condemning them to pain, age and death; knocking down the Tower of Babel; destroying Sodom and Gomorrah; at last growing weary of the entire human race and drowning the whole world but for one favored family.

And He is given to blood-curdling threats via His prophets. “Therefore will I also deal in fury: mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity; and though they cry in mine ears with a loud voice, yet I will not hear them” (Ezekiel 8:18); “I will tread them in mine anger, and will trample them in my fury" (Isaiah 63:3); “Who knoweth the power of thine anger? Even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath (Psalm 90:11). Samuel Jackson's killer Jules, in Pulp Fiction, offers his own take on an Ezekiel verse (ghost-written by Quentin Tarantino) as a preamble to executing someone.



After centuries of retirement, when his gentler son took over the family business, the Old Testament God returned with a vengeance during the settlement of North America as the Puritans, confronted with a fearsome wilderness whose native peoples were seen as, alternately, threats or obstacles, found more need for the smiting Yahweh of the Old Testament than the forgiving, embracing Christ of the New.

The Reverend Jonathan Edwards, in his Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, describes a deity who has simply had it with we pathetic fallen humans, to the point of bloodlust. “He will crush you under His feet without mercy; He will crush out your blood, and make it fly and it shall be sprinkled on His garments, so as to stain all His raiment. He will not only hate you, but He will have you in the utmost contempt: no place shall be thought fit for you, but under His feet to be trodden down as the mire of the streets.”



In another passage Edwards says the bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow is on the string, aimed right at you, “and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God…that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.” (In a sad unconscious parody of these sentiments, Oliver North was at the Kuwaiti border on the first day of the Iraq invasion, telling Fox News “The sword…is unsheathed. The blade…stands ready.”)

And in the Civil War anthem, Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Lord is leading a regiment marching through the South; in one of the lesser-known verses, Christ finally turns up, “in the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea", so not only was Christ apparently absent from the United States' founding, but he’s peacefully sitting amongst the flowers while his father goes about setting things to right.

Centuries of this sort of thing makes for a grim little world. In 1977, the Clash surveyed the landscape and recorded "Hate and War". The punk in this song is just floating with the current. ("And if I get aggression/I give 'em two time back"). On The Clash.

Kinder murders

Like envy, anger flourishes at home. You can hear it in Lizzie Miles' voice, confronting her no-good man with the sort of weariness that anger can kindle into blood rage. The man had better watch himself--it reminds me of the narrator of the Persuaders' "Thin Line Between Love and Hate", who cats around on his woman until one day he wakes up in a hospital bed, "bandaged from feet to head." (Miles' 1929 song, written by Jelly Roll Morton, is on this compilation.)

Or in "Murder", in which a couple's relationship has clarified into a sort of communal anger that isn't going to end well for either party. Eleventh Dream Day is one of my favorite bands of the 1990s--this is off one of their best records, 1993's El Moodio (out of print, but easily available.)



Here's a bonus bit of familial rage, "I Hate Your Kid", found on Hammell on Trial's website.

Bad for the heart



Have you ever seen pure anger? Walking down 22nd St. one night, I stumbled into a brutal bar fight in which one drunk lout had decided to take on two waiters. The waiters, their smocks stained with blood from their shattered noses, were trying to get at the lout, while his desperate friends were trying to him pull away from the fray. The lout's face was blood-smeared, fevered, glassy eyed, his features were twisted in rage (he looked like a gored bull)--it was terrifying. If he had had a gun, he'd have used it.

(This sort of thing is why I stopped going to baseball games at Yankee Stadium--it seemed like whenever I went, wherever I sat, some drunken fight broke out near me..)

In "Anger", Marvin Gaye sings of rage's toxicity: Anger ages you, makes you ill, destroys your soul. "Up and down my back, my spine, in my brain..It injures me." On Marvin's bitter divorce album, 1978's Here My Dear.

The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote one of the finest works on anger, in which he disputes the notion that people simply lose control and submit to a sort of mindless devil anger inside them. Rather, he says anger “undertakes nothing on its own, but only with the mind’s approval. To receive an impression of wrong done to one, to lust for retribution, to put together the two propositions that the damage ought not to have been done and that punishment ought to be inflicted, is not the work of a mere involuntary impulse.”



In perhaps the finest passage in the essay, Seneca laments anger’s ruinous cost: “ No plague has cost the human race more…cities of greatest renown, their very foundations now scarcely discernible--anger has cast them down; deserts, mile after mile without inhabitant–anger emptied them.” As for the leaders who profited from anger in the short term, their fates are all the same: “anger made one the bleeding victim of his parricide son, told another to expose his royal throat to the hand of the slave…look upon gathered throngs put to the sword, on the military sent in to butcher the populace en masse.”

Fire this time

Anger is neccessary, of course, even vital at times. Much of the great changes of the modern world--the civil rights movements, the abolition of slavery, the rise of democracies--were owed to the work of seriously angry people.

And who would begrudge anger to people who truly deserve to use it? In the early 1960s, James Baldwin and some friends were at a bar in O'Hare Airport, "all of us well past thirty, and looking it." The racist bartender refuses to serve them because, he says, the men look "too young." "It took a vast amount of patience not to strangle him...when it was over, the three of us stood at the bar trembling with rage and frustration." (From The Fire Next Time.)



Aristotle mapped out five conditions for anger: the right person, right degree, right time, right purpose, right way. And here, Pete Rock tackles the problem his own way, in "Anger in the Nation." On 1992's Mecca and the Soul Brother.

7 Deadly Sins: Envy


"Deformed Persons, and Eunuches, and Old Men, and Bastards, are Envious: For He that cannot possibly mende his owne case, will doe what He can to impaire anothers."

Rick Springfield, Jessie's Girl.
Dorothy Fourbister, Ethel Findlater & John Strachan, The Twa Sisters.
The Kinks, Two Sisters.
The Brunettes, Best Friend Envy.
The Stoneage Hearts, Green with Envy.
Them, Richard Cory.
The Kinks, David Watts.
The Temptations, Don't Let the Joneses Get You Down.

Henry Fairlie once wrote there were no songs about envy, a claim the above list refutes (hopefully). Still, Fairlie was on to something--envy is the least appealing of the sins, the most secretive, the one to which the fewest among us will publicly admit. It's hard to locate a vein of pure envy in popular music--you have to sift through decades just to find a good prospect.

Envy is the palsied runt of the seven sins--pale, emaciated, but ever-wakeful, ever-insistent. "The vampire vice," (Don Herzog); "a stubborn weed of the mind," (Dr. Johnson); "unhappy self-satisfaction" (Kierkegaard). Its greatest exemplars are Cain, the first murderer, who slaughters his brother after God announces Abel's gift to him is more pleasing; Claggart in Billy Budd; Uriah Heep, in David Copperfield--cringing, covetous, bile-hearted ("You were always a puppy with a proud stomach, from your first coming here; and you envy me my rise, do you?"); the brilliant destroyer Iago, and "lean and hungry" Cassius.



Envy is a more precise sin than common use recognizes--it is quite separate from jealousy, for one. You are jealous of things you already possess (spouse, job status, etc.), but you are envious of things that others possess. The OED: envy is "the feeling of mortification and ill will caused by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another."

Envy is unique among the seven capital sins in that it needs another person's life to feed upon--it is the parasite of the seven. You can be slothful all alone, and even satisfy your lust by yourself, but envy requires the other--to hate, to obsess over, to covet. David Hume: "[men] always judge more of objects by comparison than from their intrinsic worth and value."

Further, envy is found everywhere--it is the dirt under the fingernails, the cursing driver on the highway, the desperate whisper keeping you from sleeping at night. As Dr. Johnson says: "Envy is the only vice which is practicable at all times, and in every place; the only passion which can never lie quiet for want of irritation; its effects therefore are every where discoverable, and its attempts always to be dreaded."

I want the one I can't have



There is a medieval legend about St. Martin, who comes upon an envious man and a greedy man. St. Martin, for kicks, decides to grant the men whatever each requests. The greedy man demands that he get twice as much of whatever the envious man asks for. So the envious man has to make his request first, and is tormented by the knowledge that the greedy man will get a better prize--finally, he comes upon a solution. The envious man asks St. Martin to rip out one of his eyes, so that the greedy man will be fully blinded.

A key ingredient of envy is that the envious person is convinced that the one he is envying is inferior--that the good fortune the envied person enjoys is somehow undeserved.

Nowhere is envy more honest than in adolescence--envy spends much of its time in the shadow, but here it comes out into the sun and lets its naked face be seen. In Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl", the problem isn't solely one of the singer coveting his friend's girl, but the fact that the girl chose Jessie instead of the singer, who thinks he deserved her more. "I've been looking in the mirror all the time," he confides. "Wondering what she don't see in me." The singer is convinced it is a cosmic wrong that the girl somehow wound up with Jessie, who, it must be said, the girlfriend seems to adore. "She's loving him with that body--I JUST KNOW IT!" Springfield came from a time when teen idols could rock pretty convincingly--on 1981's Working Class Dog.

Close enemies

Envy ripens upon familiarity. Take Brad Pitt--you might envy him in the abstract for being handsome and rich, but I doubt Pitt's success really consumes much of your thoughts. But imagine being Brad Pitt's childhood friend, or, worse, his sibling--then the envy might chafe.

Here is Hume again: "A mountain neither magnifies nor diminishes a horse in our eyes; but when a Flemish and a Welsh horse are seen together, the one appears greater and the other less, than when view'd apart."



I made the error, when I was a younger, stupider man, of being oblivious to sibling envy, one of envy's most vicious strains. A friend invited her sister, who I had never met, to dinner. Her sister arrived and turned out to be beautiful, funny and charming. After she left, I turned to my friend and, a bit wine-addled, said something like "Wow, your sister is pretty." Had there still been a knife on the table, I think she would have speared me through the throat.

"The Twa Sisters" is Child Ballad No. 10 (here's one variation of the lyric; here are tons more.) It is an ancient ballad, from Scotland or England, and the core concept is familiar to anyone's who seen Cinderella--a handsome suitor favors the prettier, but younger and poorer, of a pair of sisters. In the ballad, this leads, inevitably, to the envious elder sister killing the younger--the variations devise a number of methods; in this version, it's by drowning. Performed a cappella by Dorothy Fourbister, Ethel Findlater (from the Orkney isles) and John Strachan (from Aberdeenshire) on a field recording made in the early 1950s by Alan Lomax. Available here.

The Kinks' "Two Sisters," from 1967, is a bit less fatal. It's been speculated that this song is really about two brothers--that is, Ray and Dave Davies, with Ray casting himself in the dowdy sibling role, staying home writing concept albums while his more handsome and glamorous brother goes out to clubs all night. On the majestic Something Else, a very envy-laden album (see below).

Friendship is also a prime breeding ground for envy. (Gore Vidal: "Whenever a friend succeeds a little something in me dies.") In the Brunettes' "Best Friend Envy," the singer seethes about her friend's blessings while the friend herself seems oblivious. On 2004's Mars Loves Venus, which I wish would get released in the U.S. one of these days. More on the Brunettes, a great pop band from New Zealand, here.

Everything's gone green

Envy is also distinguished among the seven deadlies by having its trademark color. The origins of "being green with envy" are lost to antiquity, though it most likely came from the Greeks. Sappho uses a word that could either mean green or pale to describe how a stricken lover looks; and "calliste green", for example, is a reference to kalliste, Greek for fairest, from the color of the apple thrown by Eris, goddess of discord, into a wedding ceremony attended by the other goddesses. The goddesses Hera, Aphrodite and Athena all claim the apple, inscribed as being "to the fairest"; competition ensues; Trojan War results.

The poets took the color and painted with it. Ovid describes the goddess of envy: "a hoard of gall her inward parts possess'd./And spread a greenness over her cankered breast." And Iago, of course, contributes:

"O! beware my lord, of Jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on."

Here's the most recent contribution to the lineage: Australia's Stoneage Hearts' "Green with Envy" is on Guilty as Sin. Visit their home page, where you can find this song and a few others.

Class envy



All of the sins I've written about so far have had their proponents, but can you make the case for envy? There is the concept of positive envy, in which a person's good qualities are so inspiring that lesser mortals attempt to emulate them. And envy can lead to general societal improvements, the way American automakers finally improved their cars' quality after years of getting their clocks cleaned by the Japanese.

(Not all professional envy is as inspiring. Take Paul Simon's "A Simple Desultory Philippic", probably the worst thing Simon ever wrote. Meant to be a parody of Bob Dylan, and other folk-rockers, it winds up instead exposing Simon's naked envy of Dylan. After all, the two were roughly the same age, were both middle-class and Jewish, both folk singers with rock & roll roots--but by 1965, Dylan was world-famous, dating Joan Baez and Edie Sedgwick, hailed as the voice of a generation, while Simon was an unknown folkie whose first record had flopped and whose second didn't even get released in the U.S. So when Simon sneers "He's so unhip--when you say Dylan, he thinks you're talking about Dylan Thomas...whoever he was", the joke dies in his throat, and pure bilious envy comes out.)

Is class envy ever a force for good? One of its storied examples is Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Richard Cory", one of those poems forcibly fed to generations of middle-school students, and turned into a pop song by Paul Simon, in which the masses envy the effortless, happy life of the town's rich scion, until he goes home and offs himself. (This version is by Van Morrison's first group, Them, from 1966. On The Story of Them.)



Or in the Kinks' "David Watts," in which the 'dull and simple' narrator is lying in bed at night craving the golden boy David Watts' entire life, even a crumb of it. You don't get the sense that David Watts is going to inspire the desperate singer to improve his life, however; the singer might as well be wishing that he had wings. Also found on Something Else.


an envious afterlife

So it seems envy will always be with us. The Temptations try to argue otherwise in 1969's "Don't Let the Joneses Get You Down": "The Joneses got a new car today/here's what you should say:/Hooray! for the Joneses!" (On Anthology). But even the Tempts soon concede defeat: "Instead you worry till your whole head turns grey..."