Band names come to light as well. Who the hell are “The Trews”? Who cares? “The Who” kicks ass! “The Guess Who” does not, and did little service to the great compositions of Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings. I would have thought to name them “Guess.” Then we have the literate British bands. “Pink Floyd,” “Jethro Tull,” “Led Zeppelin” on up to “Dire Straits” and “The Clash.” “The Beatles” is a name that doesn’t serve the great nature and growth of the seminal band from Northern England.
Sports teams? This is where it gets racy, (if not racist) to some. “Cleveland Indians.” “Washington Redskins.” “Edmonton Eskimos.” “Atlanta Braves” (though I’m sure there are brave white men in Atlanta). And the coolest names like “Utah Jazz,” “Miami Heat,” “Orlando Magic” and “Phoenix Sun.” And the mediocre ones like “Blue Jays” (what a threat!), “Diamondbacks” and “Padres.” Two of the best are “New York Yankees” and “The Montreal Canadiens” with the ‘e’ instead of the Anglo ‘a’. Truly a hometown team by cultural and geographical intent, as are “The New York Yankees.” As for logos (visual titles) “The Detroit Redwings” (winged wheel) though it is meant to symbolize the motor city, brings a sense of classical mythology by its use of a wing and wheel as in chariots and Pegasus and Mercury. This is all by suggestion.
“The Edmonton Oilers,” having produced one of the greatest hockey players (Wayne Gretzky), is a fairly ho-hum title even though it identifies that the team is from Alberta. A glance back at the titles above sure says the National Basketball Association is ahead of the pack in the name and title game.
Then there are names given to products. “Mr. Clean” seems right enough. But what is “Viagra” supposed to mean? “Pepsodent” was clear but “Colgate” sounds like you are about to do something heavy and nuclear to your teeth. “Dentyne” is cool with the “y” but “Trident” sounds like you could end up resembling a walrus with tusks if you used it. It also suggests you may only have three teeth trolling the depths of the sea.
NASA had great names from the sixties onwards. Mercury, Apollo, Jupiter, Columbia and Challenger until it crossed the line with a space shuttle named “Enterprise,” drawing from the Star Trek TV series. “The Wrath of Khan” however is a super and loaded title. You get John Steinbeck and Genghis Khan in the same breath.
The significance of titles and names fills out our plumes. We puff up when called by them and allow words to define (as best we can) the five senses’ need for allusion and indication. Everything doesn’t need to be called something but we need to call it something. We can’t hang out with a preposition. What was IT, speaking of products? Something that whitened nurses’ shoes and tennis sneakers. Prepositions for the most part don’t make good names or titles. Then the other extreme. The gangsters of America. Lucky, Pretty-Boy, Baby-Face, Scarface, Bugsy. FBI identifiers. The noun and adjective arrive together here. And certainly Disney’s “Seven Dwarfs” (not Dwarves) indicated an aspect of psychology as if the seven names given them suggest the luckiest number on the face of thrown dice. Why seven? Was Walt a gambler and coming with seven, waking up from an all-nighter?
Back to musical acts for a moment. Would Garfunkel and Simon have worked? Don’t think so. Sounds like possibly piano or carpet repairmen or sellers. And then again, The Who with its collection of best songs titled Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy — the sexual suggestion outweighed by the four members of the band looking street and rowdy to match their elaborate power chords. Then there are the one name acts. Donovan. That works. Jewel doesn’t. Too precious. But then after the unfortunate deaths of some of rock & roll’s best, we had Janis, Jim, Jimi, all on a first name basis. And Elvis? The name is unusual enough. Well, certainly was to the American northeast, including New York City. But when you say Elvis ‘Presley’, somehow there’s church music from small town America in it. Then there’s John Mellencamp. Great, almost football name. Had to start out as Johnny Cougar, then managed to get it to John Cougar Mellencamp. Then managed to get rid of his manager and write some of the best Americana of the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s.
And then back to poetry. The finest of American contemporary poetry came from John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in reference to Giotto, the Renaissance painter renowned for drawing the perfect free-hand circle. And Howl by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg! How hard to beat is that?! And Bomb from Gregory Corso in reaction to nuclear bomb escalation during the Cold War.
And so titles and names run the gamut. Good. Bad. Too long. Too short. Too lingering and double-entendrish to a fault. Clever by a half. Racist. Derogatory. Emancipating. Enlightening. Evocative. Sexy. Drab. Foreign. Ill-grammar-ed (in a good way). Bad-grammar-ed in a subtle way and good-grammar-ed in a terrible, monotonous manner. And that’s without seeing a piece of artwork or hearing the tune or reading the verse or prose or getting to the ballpark or rink and living past your birth name. Filling out the name’s possibility. A title is like a name you give your kid with hope. Vanity too. But a title or name isn’t as clear as a birthmark. Regardless, happy birthday to all! Whether there are many candles or few and your name gets spelled “write” on the bakery product!
IN MEMORIAM
(Full Moon Lou)
I
t’s a full moon and there ain’t no Lou. It’s been forty-some years and there ain’t no Jim. New York. L.A. Baseball’s done for the year and hockey’s pushing a quarter of the way in. Concussions abound and bullies continue to win. The sky’s missing colour. The night sky, that is. The sky when you walk the downtown and look for and feel for that extra dimension. That song that you wake with in the middle of the night or a dream that tells you something somewhere is alive beyond these hanging tree limbs and neons selling it all always.
My first real Lou was ‘89. The New York CD. On a Dutch yacht in Georgian Bay and the crescent stillness of the boat swinging back and forth in the summer full moonlight. My film-maker friend, Bill, had just scored a small fortune doing the first exposé on the Soviet space program post-empire. And he bought a yacht. But first he bought a Mercedes. “You wanna have lunch?” he called one cold-ass February morning. “Yeah sure. Let’s get out otherwise we die doing nothing on these freezer-from-hell days,” I responded.
So Bill came by and said: “You heard this?” as he slipped a CD into his new-fan-dangled sound-system. LIGHT MY FIRE — LIGHT MY FIRE — LIGHT MY FIRE — YEAH YEAH! LIGHT MY FIRE — LIGHT MY FIRE — LIGHT MY FIREYAH — YEAAHHHH — UUUUUH! “Where you wanna eat?’ Bill asked. “I don’t know — maybe Mars?” I suggested. But the food didn’t matter. Just getting out on a day of dark drizzle did. Proved there was life. And it had been years since Coppola’s Apocalypse Now with that poster of Brando’s face and a dragonfly moon helicopter riding the sky above it. And if the napalm fire wasn’t enough you had ‘The End’ at the beginning. Genius and high metaphor at work. No Godfather in-jokes. We’re talkin’ real American shit here! The drudge and drag of a screwed-up war!
The aftermath left for film-makers and artists to give some sense to through an image here and an image there. The senselessness and madness — and Jim saw it all real young. From the 1966 “If You Go Out in the Woods Tonight”-like eerieness of People are Strange to his Kinks-like Hello I Love You, Jim lit it up early and exhaled all the Rimbaud a rock poet could muster up. Then, on a road crew in the middle of country-road-nowhere dusk one summer, with the red tail-lights of cars and trucks in the dimming distance, what comes out of the radio but “There’s a killer on the road . . .” with the piano like rain and the sizzle of cooling just-laid asphalt filling the air. My impression at the time was — “@#$% — it’s scary out there beyond making a buck to pay for university fees. This ain’t merely about pop music and Sergeant Pepper and Beach Boy steals of Chuck Berry riffs. This is serious @#$#!” And it felt like Jim wanted to live but not at the cost of not dying if that’s what it took to make life worth living.
And Lou. Mister full moon shining his face in the corners where you don’t
sleep. Or do in what seems like comfort, and think the bad bad world is far away. Given the present day context of pre-meditated vulgarity chefs, steroid-clad baseballers and film celebrities with yellow journalists following them, and looking back, Lou kicked more than ass at the un-hip underbelly within American culture in his time. He kicked his own soul around New York and made New York feel like it was no further than a turn-table’s spin away. And the calm! — Walk On the Wild Side’s most intriguing aspect is the non-panic vocal. Like it all goes down cool. And though the voice suggests a hint of judgment, it isn’t judgment as much as assessing and giving authoritative perspective from the inside to those who are outside it all.
On the other hand — it’s a whisper to insiders (one of which you oddly feel like) about what New York feels at night. It’s that whisp-er. Not a saxophone and not a clarinet. Maybe a bit more akin to subtle jazz brushes on a soft snare shuffling through the streets. That’s Lou’s voice. And it’s in that “Doo-doo doo — doo doo doo doo doo . . .” telegraph signal of his vocal chords! And The Sword of Damocles from Magic and Loss — like this guy was smarter than your classical mythology professor. And that sword dangling above your head — telling you a little something about greed and destiny and the power and pains of being either a poor man or a king. This is something Iggy and Bowie didn’t do. Re-deliver ancient truths within rock & roll’s modalities. Stretch rock & roll to its literary limits. If in fact, there are any limits.
A music Artists and Repertoire friend once compared rock & roll bands to Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. He said: “You listen to that stuff and you can change folks around — like Jimi Hendrix coulda been in Cream and Hank Williams coulda been in the Eagles and so on . . . just mix ‘em all around.” “What’s the Pirandello part?” I asked intrigued. “You know — if you’re like a mogul like Geffen — well look what he did with Crosby, Still Nash and Young?” “Yeah but the characters revolt some in Pirandello — don’t like their roles. Seems to me CSNY were kind of copasetic — no?” “Yeah, yeah, but to make it work at the bank, for me, you gotta have the power to move them around. But there’s two guys I couldn’t move with a bulldozer.” “Who? I asked. “Lou. You can’t move Lou and you can’t move Jim.”
And to paraphrase that abundantly beat and lonesome traveller Kerouac Jack, from days-gone-by to this age-gone-dog, if he were alive today, and dug some Underground and Doors:
So in this Hemisphere when the moon goes down, I sit at one of those urban all night-into-the-morning cafes, watching short short skies below the skyscrapers and low-rises and sense the big turntables turning and the roadies setting up from stadium to stadium from L.A. to New York and all north and south and east and west and in between. And I know there must be a lot of kids who aren’t sleeping. Listening to their muse — iPadding and YouTubing where G(god) ain’t no Pooh Bear (or Poobah) and the final shore ain’t a shore at all but a long ether cable cyberspacing us together — and I think of Lou and Jim, cutting the continent in half and going to Paris and Berlin — I think of Jim and Lou. I think of Lou and Jim.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Maviglia is a singer-songwriter, poet and essayist whose work has appeared in journals and media across North America and Europe. His tribute poem jazz dharma was commissioned by CBC’s The Sunday Edition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Alan Ginsberg’s iconic poem Howl. His latest CD is Angel in the Rain, and his song Father, It’s Time appeared on the Juno Award-winning compilation The Gathering. His composition, Calabresella/Sooner or Later, is featured in the film The Resurrection of Tony Gitone. A selection of his poetry will be published in Italy in the anthology A Nord del Sogno (North of the Dream). A collection of his poetry, A God Hangs Upside Down, was published by Guernica. He is presently working on a new collection of songs for a soon-to-be released CD.
Copyright © 2014, Joseph Maviglia and Guernica Editions Inc.
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Maviglia, Joseph, 1953-, author
Critics who know Jack : urban myths, media and rock & roll [electronic resource] / Joseph Maviglia.
(Essential essays series ; 62)
Essays.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55071-837-9 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-55071-838-6 (epub).--
ISBN 978-1-55071-839-3 (mobi)
I. Title. II. Series: Essential essays series (Toronto, Ont.) ; 62
PS8576.A8576C75 2014 C814'.54 C2013-907533-X C2013-907534-8
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