F. Scott Fitzgerald/James Joyce/Wallace Stevens recordings, the Music Machine shoots straight, Clement Greenberg doesn't, film pieces written, fall/Christmas shows, underrated Johnny Griffin, Vampires

Wednesday 6/17/26

The people who make you listen to their music because they’re too rude and entitled to use headphones are never listening to Miles Davis at the Plugged Nickel, are they?

Back in the 1990s, I'd share recordings sometimes with people of F. Scott Fitzgerald reading bits of Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," lines from Shakespeare's "Othello," and John Masefield's "On Growing Old," hosted by a University of South Carolina web page. That page is gone, but the recordings have been moved to a different there, so I finally downloaded them myself.

They come from 1940, the final year of his life. Fitzgerald was only forty-four when he died. I'd say, though, that mortality was on his mind. He died of heart failure. It's unlikely for a man in his forties to think that he's on his way out soon because of heart failure, without a doctor (and probably subsequent doctors) having informed him about what would be a condition. I think, often, about artists who had it hard but nowhere near as hard as I do.

As I've said, Van Gogh lived in houses, despite never having made any money from his painting. They don't get past their forties. Because you aren't meant to hurt this much and be able to keep living. You die. You're taken away from it. I'm in this horrible situation where I can last. Which sounds like a strange remark. But if I'm eighty-three and it never changed save to continue to get worse? There's no precedent for that. And someone like Fitzgerald had it so much easier and was rich at one point.

He could have remained rich if he wasn't so profligate and, of course, took better care of himself. But not taking care of himself didn't stop him from being productive. He'd lock himself in a room for two or three days and write more than the frauds of the publishing system do in many months, if not years and decades. And that was before they stopped writing any of their own work, because now everything that is published by the frauds of the system is written by AI.

I've also been listening to recordings made by James Joyce in 1924 and 1929, the first being from the "Aeolus" episode of Ulysses and the second from the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" section of Finnegans Wake, as well as Wallace Stevens reading in Boston in a studio in Copley Square in autumn 1954.

This would have been right next to where Ring Lardner wrote a number of his surviving letters. I'm sure I'm the only person in the world who knows both things such that we could be walking down Boylston and I could say, "And there was where Wallace Stevens recorded blah blah blah," and "There is where Ring Lardner stayed when he was in town." Hell, I might be the only person alive right now who even knows both names. Isn't that just so depressing?

I like and respect the candid aspect of the Music Machine's great 1966 garage hit, "Talk Talk": "Here's the situation and how it really stands..." It's like you're being leveled with. When was the last time you thought someone was truly leveling with you? No barriers, no artifice, no trace of agenda? A song, too, in which we encounter the verb "subsides" followed by a rhyme of "dud" and "mud." One of the three or four pieces of music in my life that shocked me the first time I heard it.

Prior to Clement Greenberg’s 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” there was only one documented usage of that word “kitsch” in an English language text. Greenberg really was such a faker, though. He learned all these side things--touches of rhetoric, generalities, vaguely true-ish but way-too-generalized ideas of historical trends, tropes of academic literary criticism--to put to use to make it seem like he knew what he was talking about with his main thing--painting. (Richard Brody of The New Yorker is like this. He doesn't know jazz. He's pasting it together with things from elsewhere. Same technique.)

He'd fly them in and deploy them authoritatively but he wasn't actually dealing with the subject at hand. This was his work around, his cover up for what he didn't know and wasn't qualified for, which he knew was the truth. Conversely, the reader wasn't dealing with the things he'd flown in directly because they just presumed that because this was an art critic talking about art there was no indirection and nothing had been adopted from secondary markets, so to speak.

Then it was just about being unflinching in the pose. Bluster without let up. Poker face. An arrogant version. Maintained. The methodology of a fundamentally insecure man who wants to be thought of as something intellectually that he isn't. Or feels a need to be. Or understands he won't have the career he desires otherwise. Combo.

I have located a copy of Link Wray's 1964 Swan demos. Also downloaded copies of various Strokes bootlegs from 2000 to 2003 (I have little interest in them after the time period of their first two albums), the Vines' 2002 Glastonbury set, a Spoon bootleg from 2014, Chano Pozo's El Tambor De Cuba (Life and Music of the Legendary Cuban Conga Drummer).

Also found all the episodes of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, grabbed his 6/7/26 Woodville show, his 6/14/26 Berkeley show (keeping an eye out for the tape of his performance from the night before, which featured "Trying to Get to Heaven" and "I Shall Be Released"; it'll resurface again), and a soundboard tape of his 6/13/2017 Capitol Theatre show.

And, finally, the Sixteen's Christmas Collection, which rounds up their three Christmas albums in one place. I had a perfectly nice time chatting with Harry Christophers in the Back Bay on a sunny morning for whoever I was doing that feature some years back.

Got tickets for two Blue Heron performances later in the year--Divine Songs: Secular chansons and Sacred Transformations on 10/24 and Christmas in Medieval England on 12/19--and three Boston Camerata performances--Free America! Early Songs of Resistance and Rebellion on 10/25, Sing We Noel: Christmas in New England and Early America on 12/6, and La Estrella: A Hispanic Christmas on 12/21. These are at First Church in Cambridge, with the exception of the Free America performance, which is at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard and Sing We Noel which takes place like last year in Old South Church's Gordon Chapel.

You hear so much about the cost of tickets and the amount of money people pay hundreds of dollars to attend performances by acts who, frankly, that aren't good at making music or haven't been in many decades. This is because people can't tell what things are. They don't know if someone they're watching and listening to is any good or not. They mostly just want to drink, sing along, say they were there, and likely post about being there. They aren't discerning. The cost to attend these five performances, which are certain to be excellent, was very little.

Wrote pieces on 2022's The Coffee Table and 1972's Frogs, both excellent and both for the horror film book. They totaled about 2000 words.

Saw a comment from someone about how much they enjoyed listening to tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin's debut LP as a leader, Introducing Johnny Griffin, issued by Blue Note in 1957, saying that they'd rather listen to this than John Coltrane's Giant Steps.

I think many people would feel that way if they were being honest or listened honestly. Coltrane is like Dostoevsky for readers. The name you go with because you want to look a certain way. And also because people aren't good at finding things worth their time and attention on their own. Thus, they're dependent on what everything and everyone else has clustered around, and who and what that is rarely has anything to do with how great it or they are.

If John Coltrane was named Bill Smith, there'd be no hullabaloo about him. I'm serious. People want to be casually use the term "Trane." You have the train type of pun. It sounds good. Sounds like it and you have intellectual cachet. It's the type of thing that someone who wants to be perceived a certain way is going to say they like. Whereas, I'd suggest that Coltrane is something you need to work up to. Not the Coltrane with Miles Davis in 1956 when he was a sideman.

Coltrane the "visionary" figure, that whole concept and Messianic deal, had a lot of slick PR behind it, helped by a lot of lazy thinking. Or non-thinking. Parroting. Dabbling. Being in thrall to the dashboard. Look-at-me-ism. When people don't think, when people don't explore, when people don't challenge, when people don't think critically, when people take their cues from expectations, the PR machine can shut down, and whatever was established earlier just keeps rolling on and, in a sense, growing, because it's being added to by the words of people who aren't sincere but who are saying the words regardless.

Coltrane's highest point, post-Davis, was reached at the Village Vanguard in November 1961. But don't underestimate how much Eric Dolphy meant to those sessions and his impact on Coltrane. Eric Dolphy always seemed to know more than anyone else. If you wanted to know which way the wind was headed, you were best served at the time asking Eric Dolphy. And were we to assign elemental roles to jazz musicians, I'm entirely confident saying that Dolphy would be the wind.

Griffin was closer in spirit to, say, a Hank Mobley, or, if we branch out to other instruments, a Cannonball Adderley or a Jimmy Smith. Paul Gonsalves is another good comparison in terms of the tenor sax, but Griffin had more chops than Gonsalves, who was a strong player, but in a workmanlike vein. Griffin was a sideman who could be a leader. He wasn't a visionary necessarily. But he was a damn good player. A player with feel. A sock it to you type of player. A warm you up type of player. A put some bounce in your step type of player. Serious value in that.

People want the name drop effect though that reflects back on them. But I'll tell you--if you listen to Johnny Griffin, you know what he's about, when he was at his best, what contexts served him best, I'm going to think you're someone who knows your jazz stuff far more than the person who name drops A Love Supreme, because chances are, he doesn't know jack. This is being said by the person who wrote the best thing thing there is on Coltrane's Ascension.

I watched 1979's Vampires, which was an installment in the BBC's excellent Play for Today series which ran from 1970 to 1984. It has a quality you wouldn't encounter on television now. Or streaming services. This television play was about a boy who watches 1966's Dracula, Prince of Darkness (this was Christopher Lee's second time playing the count in Hammer's Dracula series; I always find it a bit surprising that it took eight years for him to return to the role) with his younger brother and some friends. The brothers are being raised by a single mother. They don't have much, but they're typical in that sense. The mother dates but nothing works out. You can tell she pins her hopes on something more romantically solid, but the men don't stay.

The older brother bunks off school. He cadges some money from an "ex" uncle in a fish shop, and buys some plastic vampire fangs and plays at being Dracula in a cemetery where he sees someone he becomes convinced is really a vampire. The kids hang out there, makes pests of themselves, accuse the man who is, of course, a cemetery employee. When the boy does return to school, the English teacher dies. The boy reads a paper in front of his classmates, attributing her death--which was officially heart failure--to the vampire in their midst. The paper this kid reads is so much better than anything you will see i a literary journal now or coming out of FSG. Not that it's amazing. But it's something. It has some genuineness to it.