I played it over and over, pressing rewind and play simultaneously. (Remember that? Chipmunks chittering until you hit the blank space between songs?) I wanted to get all the way around that song, to drop it at my feet like a dead pig, my fang marks in its neck. I wanted to learn its secrets, that I might wield such power myself. I wanted to seduce women. I wanted to be the one to wake people up. I had nowhere to put everything the music made me feel. I still don’t.
This insipid breathlessness suggests the differences between how I listened then and how I listen now, twenty years and some joys and many disappointments later. I used to try to listen my way into my skin, but it turned out that listening was my skin. Listening to records was not just something I did, it was who I was. Not a day passed, for years, that I didn’t spend hours sitting in front of my stereo or burrowing into my Walkman, learning my way around a sound—Coltrane’s, Steely Dan’s, the Carter Family’s, Duke Ellington’s, Rakim’s.
* * *
Kafka doesn’t mention a chair, but one is implied: “There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.”
I’m spending a lot of time in my chair as I work my way through the eight hundred tracks contained in The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records 1917–1932, Volume 1—an elaborate $400 box set comprising six “180g vinyl LPs pressed on burled chestnut-colored vinyl with hand-engraved, blind-embossed gold-leaf labels, housed in a laser-etched white birch LP folio,” a flash drive loaded with digital files of songs, a clothbound book, hundreds of advertisements and photos, a “field guide” to the 172 artists represented, all of it housed in a handcrafted oak cabinet. The brass flash drive is a replica of the reproducer-and-stylus assembly of the Wisconsin Chair Company’s Vista Talking Machine (“The Excellence of Its Quality Makes the Price a Surprise”). The package as an overwhelming whole is too obvious even to serve as an object lesson in conspicuous consumption.
But the music refuses the flamboyance of its housing; in raptures it writhes before me. The stars shine bright—Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Blind Blake—but less bright than lesser lights: the Beale Street Sheiks, Sweet Papa Stovepipe, Lovie Austin, the Herwin Ladies Four. On the Sheiks’ “You Shall,” an anticlerical acoustic rap version of “You Shall Be Free,” Frank Stokes croaks like Redd Foxx (“I don’t—’llow my preacher at-my-house-no-more—I don’t LIKE ’em—THEY’ll rob you”) while his and Dan Sane’s guitars sparkle and glint off each other.
“You Shall” and many more tracks on the Paramount set take me back to junior high, when a friend introduced me to Robert Johnson and other early American recording artists. Old-timey music, he called it—a kitchen sink rubric encompassing country blues, Dixieland jazz, field recordings, country gospel, ragtime, shouted sermons, jug-band spoon-and-comb combos, hillbilly fiddles, medicine-show blackface yodels. Our holy grail was Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, more heard of than heard in those early CD days, not yet the over-parsed golden calf it’s become. Like Enid in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, returning the needle to the outside groove of Skip James’s “Devil Got My Woman” again and again, I listened to some songs so many times I stripped them of meaning and continuity, until they contained only a miscellany of notes, moods, finger-squeaks on strings. I played Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues” and “Come On in My Kitchen” until I had memorized the very crackles, clicks, and pops of the shellac 78s from which they were transferred. I listened to the crackles, clicks, and pops as if they were electronic glitch music.
Hearing these records now is to remember hearing them then. I am in those songs, my idiot dreams tangled up in them. I can no longer hear them without interference, just as New Order’s “True Faith” isn’t merely a great song I’ve loved for decades, but the track that dominated my Walkman on the overnight train to Milan when I was twenty-two. It’s waking up on that train to find a pretty girl I’d never seen before asleep with her head on my shoulder, mountains and moon in the window, no idea where I was, certain only that anything might happen. It’s the recognition that I’ve now lived nearly twice as long as I had then, and that I’ll be lucky to live twice as long as I have now. Every song you loved when you were young turns into “Tintern Abbey.”
This is one of the orders of time embraced by popular song. Eric Church’s “Springsteen” is about it—“To this day when I hear that song / I see you standing there on that lawn”—as is Taylor Swift’s “Tim McGraw,” in which the singer hopes a boy will think of her when he hears her favorite song on the radio. This order—call it Springsteenian—is missing from Evan Eisenberg’s catalog of musico-temporal architectures in The Recording Angel. Eisenberg argues that the phonograph, by making just about any music available to anyone at any time, abolished the ritualized structures of time that music coordinated when it was still perforce a social art. But there are also private times music opens onto: even the most devout medieval churchgoer, instead of attending to the higher time accessed by the Passion, might have found herself replaying her earlier experiences of the music.
Still, recorded music obviously makes these private temporalities more likely. For one thing, the recorded song remains the same.I And a record or MP3 opens a wormhole not only to the girl asleep on the train but to the past time of the recording session itself. I am hearing Geeshie Wiley singing, as John Jeremiah Sullivan recounts, “in the spring of 1930, in a damp and dimly lit studio, in a small Wisconsin village on the western shore of Lake Michigan.”14 I am in that damp and dim space, close to that mystery, searching Wiley’s face for signs and revelations. I just sit right here, see her face from the other side.
Live blues in Colorado Springs when I was growing up meant white guys balancing piña coladas on their amps and channeling Mark Knopfler. I learned about the blues from records—and record covers. “Every mode of record listening,” Eisenberg writes, “leaves us with a need for something, if not someone, to see and touch. . . . As records tend to look alike and one doesn’t want to get fingerprints on them, in practice one adores the album cover.”15 One reason I started paying for music again—buying vinyl again—is that digital music files have nothing to “cover,” no sleeve to lose yourself in as you listen. The miniature reproduction of the jacket art that pops up on an iPod or iPhone, smaller than a postage stamp, always depresses me a little (as if CD inserts weren’t diminished enough).
Like most people who grew up in a house full of records, I spent hours staring at these mystic portals into freakish adult dimensions—a rainbow-haired weirdo smashing himself in the head with an ice-cream cone, a topless young girl holding a silver spacecraft in an endless field of green, green grass. And, once my friend had turned me on to him, a black man seen from above, seated in a plain wooden chair, playing a guitar (you can’t see his face; no photographs of Robert Johnson had yet been discovered).
The iconic cover of King of the Delta Blues Singers was my first image of the blues. It was soon joined by the cover of Howlin’ Wolf, semiotically sparer yet somehow more resonant: just an acoustic guitar leaning against a rocking chair. Of course, this is hokey marketing—no acoustic guitar could be heard over the electric snakebite of this record. But the musician’s absence clarified a direct relationship of chair to music that made sense to a kid raised by a cheap pair of headphones.
* * *
How a chair company got into the business of producing, under its Paramount Records subsidiary, some of the finest blues and jazz records ever committed to disc is a matter of simple capitalist logic. In 1913, Wisconsin Chair contracted to manufacture wooden cabinets designed to house Edison phonographs. These cabinets were popular. Paramount Records was originally formed to produce loss-leader accessories for them. But Paramount will be remembered as long as people care about Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See
That My Grave Is Kept Clean”—as long as people have souls, I guess—and Wisconsin Chair shut down in 1959.
It’s always been this way with records: the last shall be first. There is a profoundly boring short film from 1910 called The Stenographer’s Friend, or, What Was Accomplished by an Edison Business Phonograph. Having watched all nine minutes, I can vouch for the Library of Congress description:
It’s a busy day at the office, and the stenographer is exhausted from trying to keep up with the demands on her skills. Even when she stays late, she cannot catch up with all of the work. But then a man comes into the office to demonstrate the many advantages of the Edison System, his company’s new business phonograph.
The stenographer is so pleased with the invention, which allows her to play back her boss’s dictation for transcription, that she smilingly pats the phonograph as if it were a Shih Tzu.
This is the sort of use Edison envisioned for his creation—business correspondence. It didn’t occur to him that anyone might listen to music on the thing.II This has always seemed as remarkable to me as if he’d invented the chair and supposed that folks might use it mainly as a stepladder. I would have immediately thought of recording Verdi’s “Ah, fors’ è lui” or hillbilly tunes in central Kentucky.
Except I wouldn’t have, because we’re historical sedimentation and root architecture, and I wouldn’t be the particular I I am if the record player didn’t exist. If I look at a talking box and think music, it’s because I’ve spent my life playing music on talking boxes. That might seem obvious, but it’s not. In a material sense, anyone could have built a phonograph centuries before Edison—you just need a stylus, some foil, and copper. But as Friedrich Kittler argues, you also need “the historical a priori of sound recording,” the “immaterials of scientific origin, which are not so easy to come by and have to be supplied by a science of the soul.”16 In 1806, the English naturalist Thomas Young figured out how to record the vibrations of a tuning fork on a wax-covered rotating drum; in 1857, a French bookseller named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville modified Young’s device. His “phonautograph” transcribed the human voice into squiggles. But it didn’t occur to either man to try to play these recordings back. Why not?III Edison himself didn’t even mean to invent the phonograph; he was experimenting with ways to record telegraphic and telephonic messages—trying to create voice mail, basically.
Kittler claims that both scientific ideology (an emphasis on acoustic frequencies rather than musical intervals) and technical limitations (music would really come into its own with the advent of electrical recording) prevented Edison from thinking of the phonograph as a contribution to the history of music. It’s true that Edison appears to have been especially doltish where music was concerned. But he had to fail to foresee just how his invention would revolutionize human experience. He was simply embedded in history. Like us.
Early on, as is apparent from the word itself, phonography was conceived as a form of writing, as photography had been—but a form that couldn’t be “read”: Edison spent hours trying to find the letter a in the grooves of a record. An analogy was drawn between phonographic inscription and hieroglyphics, which resisted legibility for centuries.17 It feels right, then, that phonography should begin in missed connections and secretarial dreams. In a lovely conceit, the poet Jack Gilbert resists the historical a priori of writing’s similar birth as transactional notation:
When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Is human mundanity ever far from any source of the marvelous?
* * *
Edison’s phonograph becomes Berliner’s gramophone; a chair company wants to sell cabinets; record scouts fan out across the South. Popular music is a commodity.
This circumstance, Elijah Wald argues in Escaping the Delta, shapes and distorts our perceptions of the recording era—makes marvelous the mundane. No one bought the handful of sides Son House cut for Paramount, so he recorded no more in his prime, and we’re left with an American lacuna on the order of Archilochos’s lost poems. Juke joints in prewar Clarksdale played the latest hits, including Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby, not the hellhound howls of the fabled Delta blues. Robert Johnson didn’t sell his soul, he listened to records. No one even thought he sold his soul, that was a joke, a way of saying that cat could play. Wald would hear the blues unalloyed, without “the filter of rock ’n’ roll and our own modern tastes.”18 He’s like someone explaining a magic trick—you’re supposed to come away from his research with a chastened appreciation of Johnson’s music.
But the explanations have the effect of redoubling your astonishment—how did Johnson get that from this? I feel like a class traitor for saying so, but the most scrupulous historicism leaves a remainder in the highest art—a residue we used to attribute to “genius” or “soul.” And Wald just isn’t the writer to get at that residue. He reduces “Hellhound on My Trail” to a pile of clichés: “It is the cry of an ancient mariner, cursed by his fates and doomed to range eternally through the world without hope of port or savior.”19 Compare Greil Marcus, tracing Johnson’s shadow to America’s Puritan dawn: “Because of our faith in promises, the true terror of doom is in the American’s natural inability to believe doom is real, even when he knows it has taken over his life. When there is no way to speak of terror and no one to listen if there were, Johnson’s songs matter.”20
Wald’s guff about ancient mariners is exactly the wrong image for Johnson’s sound, which Marcus rightly locates in the land. While both critics hear doom in the music, only Marcus has specified an emotional reality. Wald sounds like someone trying to find high-flown words for a generic experience; Marcus has listened to the songs, and is troubled by the conclusions he’s been forced to draw.
The point is that Wald’s fidelity to historical fact leaves little room for aesthetic truth. Popular music is a commodity that is not identical with itself, riven by contradiction. Thus Marcus’s answer to Wald’s objections, almost thirty years before he made them:
What Robert Johnson had to do with other bluesmen of his time is interesting to me, but not nearly so interesting as what Johnson has to do with those discovering him now, without warning and on their own. The original context of Johnson’s story is important, and it is where his story is usually placed; but a critic’s job is not only to define the context of an artist’s work but to expand that context, and it seems more important to me that Johnson’s music is vital enough to enter other contexts and create all over again.21
Both writers are sensitive to the ways records create their own contexts, unmoored from their conditions of production. Only Marcus is interested in the teenaged me, spinning a sound I can’t reach the bottom of on my dad’s JVC turntable.
* * *
I listened differently in those days, of course. So did you, if you’ve ever been sixteen (some people, I noticed then, skip right from puberty to adulthood). I listened for clues to who I was. I found them, or I didn’t, or not finding them was the clue I needed. I thought that if I could say, with Johnson on “Me and the Devil Blues,” “Baby, I don’t care where you bury my body when I’m dead and gone,” I would be free—of what, I didn’t know.
The music I heard on turntables and CD players and tape decks made me believe that anything was possible, that the quintessential American sentence could be finished, that I could finish it: “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—”
Well, that’s a hell of a thing for any invention to make a body believe, much less one that was meant to improve business efficiency. And it’s a
silly thing to believe, based in misreadings. But it’s true that now all I get from music is music—a way of thinking and feeling, sure, but not a way of living. Records are useful equipment for living, provided you don’t expect more from them than they contain. I sit here in my chair listening on my headphones to old Paramount sides, or the country gospel of the Reverend Gary Davis, and I’m still transmitted to the past, seeing the faces from the other side. But the future’s no longer part of the picture, and every sentence ends in an em dash.
Which, of course, is the point. Other gifts have followed.
* * *
And yet records aren’t the whole story. Dom Gregory Dix, in his classic The Shape of the Liturgy, lamented the decline of the corporate worship of the Eucharist “into a mere focus for the subjective devotion of each separate worshipper in the isolation of his own mind.”22 Sometimes I need an order larger than the self in its chair, sealed off from the broader church. Of course, this now gets mediated in weird ways. John Jeremiah Sullivan writes of Michael Jackson’s lip-synched performance of “Billie Jean” on NBC’s Motown 25 that it was “possibly the most captivating thing a person’s ever been captured doing onstage.”23 I remember seeing that performance in 1983, feeling that I was somehow connected to my schoolmates watching in their homes, imagining what we’d say about it in the halls the next day.
In 2014, I was half watching the Grammys on television, skimming through my Twitter feed. Taylor Swift came out to perform “All Too Well,” and I put down my laptop to check her out. It was—well, cards on the table, I think it was transcendent. Someone forgot to tell her the Grammys are a joke. She got her Stevie Nicks on, banging her locks and singing pretty much in key, hunched over the piano like a velociraptor and tearing the meat off its bones. On record, the song is one of her best, but on that night, on my television screen, for as long as it lasted, it was the best song I’d ever heard. After, as the applause swelled, she cast a stony lizard gaze on the assembled royalty as if she’d forgotten who they were. As if she was sure they hadn’t learned a thing. I couldn’t believe what I’d just witnessed, and, turning back to Twitter, I saw that no one else could either.
Equipment for Living Page 2