We're often very prescriptive about love: horror film book, John Clare, Kinks, Cecil Taylor, Carl Hubbell, Gene Vincent, Buster Keaton, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Judy Garland, Bob Dylan, Zombies

Sunday 7/5/26

The people who say, "Does anyone know any book similar to this [great work]," and "Does anyone know any music like this [great album]," and so forth, are really missing the point, or one of them, anyway.

A great Poverty Row horror or noir film is similar to a rough-and-tumble audience recording of some band's remarkable gig you wouldn't have heard otherwise. You have this sense of discovery and feeling of good fortune that the thing managed to exist (and got helped along). Rewatched 1945's The Vampire's Ghost for the horror film book. It's akin to the Poverty Row version of a tape like the Yardbirds at LA's Shrine Auditorium in 1968 or Clifford Brown at Chicago's Bee Hive in 1955.

The Kinks' Face to Face LP from 1966, so mature, smart, witty, and self aware. Both highly English and also general and timely, for such was Ray Davies' songwriting gifts. It simultaneously takes you away while clearing your brain of the fog that the modern world then, and the modern world even more so now, endeavors to keep there. A precursor to Village Green Preservation Society, but with the Kinks' mid-1960s scraping guitar sound. Transitional and timeless.

A poem that everyone should read, which takes all of five minutes to find and read, if that: John Clare's "I Am," written in either 1844 or 1845. The so-called peasant poet, Clare loved nature and wrote about it as no other poet ever has. Once celebrated, his life became difficult to endure. There is no nature in "I Am," a metaphysical yowl from within the abyss that's nonetheless charged with life. As I always say: The value of a work of art is directly proportional to the amount of life it contains. Read this poem and be changed. Read it again. Read it on a different day henceforth.

It's neat how Dylan can play a show one night, and then the next day, not only is there a tape circulating of that show, but a remaster version of that tape. This happened the other day with a tape of his performance from 6/29/26 in Austin, which I snagged, and then again with his 7/2 Thackerville, Oklahoma, which I've been hearing some good things about, so I'm keen to check it out. Also got a ticket to see him here in Boston on 7/16.

I like that Gene Vincent's band the Blue Caps would rock so hard that their caps would fly right off. It's akin to the rock and roll version of Pete Rose on the base paths. Vincent always had great backing bands and was such a brilliant singer. His Saturday Club material from March 1960--introduced by Brian Matthew no less, later a fixture of so many Beatles BBC sessions--is some of the best live rock and roll that hardly anyone has ever heard.

British bands would rise to the challenge of backing these American rock and roll heroes and play some of the best music of their lives. For example, the Nashville Teens with Jerry Lee Lewis. You listen to them on the Star Club recording and at the BBC and you're apt to think they were legends in their own right. Vincent was backed by the Wildcats on that aforementioned BBC material. They were normally Marty Wilde's backing band. They play that Vincent material so well.

This was Vincent's trip to England when he and Eddie Cochran had that awful car crash the next month, which killed Cochran. Sometimes people think that's why Vincent walked with a limp, but that injury was a result of a motorcycle crash back on July 4, 1955. That is, before his career really got going with "Be-Bop-A-Lula." Vincent wore a brace for the rest of his life. The limp/his onstage posture actually became a part of his image, you could say. The rebellious, straight-up rock and roll figure that he cut.

Compelled to make a choice as to the greatest American film, Buster Keaton's The General (1926) could well be my answer. Would have been Orson Welles's. We're often very prescriptive about love. It has to look a kind of way and be directed to proper channels. This film isn't like that. It's about a unique love and way of loving. Of course, given that Keaton's character is a Confederate soldier, people who haven't seen the film would seek to "cancel" this work that can help to improve all of us.

Things I listened to on Friday: Duke Ellington's first radio broadcast from 1932, the radio broadcast of the 1934 All-Star Game (good day for Carl Hubbell), and the longest available version yet of John Lennon singing "Puttin' on the Style" with his fellow Quarrymen at the Woolton Garden Fete on 6 July 1957 shortly before he met Paul McCartney that same day.

When did I first learn of Carl Hubbell's feat of striking out five future Hall of Famers (Al Simmons, Joe Cronin, Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth...oh, is that it?) in a row? This from a time when strikeouts weren't nearly so frequent. Third grade. You see, that's what I long regarded as basic baseball history stuff. The baseball version of knowing the Beatles came from Liverpool, say.

And you know what? It's nothing anyone knows, because basically no one knows anything. When you know a few basic things, you're an expert compared to everyone else. That's how easy it is. This isn't what I do. I know everything about the things I know. But I'm saying you could pick up something today and know more than almost anyone in the world on that thing before you wake up tomorrow.

I also mention this Friday listening session because I was talking yesterday with someone about how so much is at our fingertips now, and yet, we are such that we learn nothing. We don't seek knowledge. We instead use the devices in our hands and on our desks to become stupider, think less, glaze our brains over with paste so that nothing may enter them and they go into this state of traction. I theorized about what one would have to do in times past to experience these three things.

With the pre-Beatles recording--and it's pretty close to a miracle that there's a tape from that day--that I wrote about for the Daily Beast and which features in Just Like Them: A Piece by Piece Guide to Becoming the Ultimate Thinking Person's Beatles Fan, you'd have little to no shot. Work at the auction house the tape came through, I guess. Let's say it leaked out to bootlegs before the internet era. That meant finding that bootleg in the flesh. You needed to get yourself to a record store that sold that kind of thing, which wasn't legal. The bootleg stock that they had would be random. It wasn't like every store that sold these black market recordings got the same shipments to put out on the shelves. A lot of luck was involved. Effort on your part. Trips. Long trips sometimes.

As for the Ellington recording...that probably would have been in the hands of some private collector. You'd need to know them. How would you even know who had such a thing? What would prompt you think such a thing existed and that you should try and track it down? When I was growing up, a father of one of my friends was a coin collector. He introduced me to that, showed me things, shared his knowledge.

With something like this Duke Ellington radio broadcast example, I feel like you'd need to know of someone who lived near you who used to record jazz airshots off the radio, meaning in this case you'd be talking someone born not long after the turn of the century, or who inherited such a collection of recordings. Put another way: chances are nil that you'd ever get to hear such a treasure.

Regarding the radio broadcast of the second All-Star Game...the basement archives of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown? So you're off to New York for your vacation on a research pilgrimage after you reached out to them via mail asking if they had such a thing in their holdings and could you access it? Of course, you couldn't make a copy. But maybe they'd let you sit there for a few hours and listen to it. Then you'd have your memories of what you heard.

And here we are in 2026, and these things could be accessed--all three of them in total--in thirty seconds. You can do that with a seemingly unlimited amount of amazing things to grow your mind. But basically no one does it. They'll watch those TikTok videos, though, and get on sports subreddits and say, "That's just cope!" and "Have some more copium!" and post photo after photo after photo of themselves and nothing more, because they're too stupid, too vain, too dead inside, not only to have any interests, thoughts, passions, ideas or attraction to ideas, but to even have the barest inkling what those things are.

Every day I use the internet as a portal to art and all these fantastic creations. A quick clicking of the keys and I'm looking at a review of a Grateful Dead show from 1970, or listening to T.S. Eliot talk about and read his poetry to a group of people, or hearing the Who performing Tommy live in 1969 with a tape that sounds better than ever because of the work of a dedicated audio historian who used his time, energy, skills, and the newly available tools to get it that way.

Bram Stoker presided over the making of an abridged version of Dracula, which makes for an interesting contrast with the original version of the novel and sets up an intriguing debate as to whether the work is better with less of it, if you will, and there it is. What's that poem that isn't quite coming to mind...type in a few words, and there it is. Have a cold and can't go anywhere, so you locate a copy of Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game online and watch that while you sip your tea and it's a movie unlike any other. You just had a bona fide life experience. When you were too sick to do anything on one of those days we're you're tapped out and you chalk it up to basically a non-day.

It's easier than ever to learn and become more knowledgeable every single day, and to learn so much every single day. And yet, we've never learned less in the history of humans. We cluster--maybe I should say, we mass--around the same three or four rote pillars of crap and mindlessness.

Think of how much one can learn simply by coming here to this journal. Or only coming here.

Cecil Taylor's debut LP, Jazz Advance, cut in Boston in mid-September 1956, is perhaps the earliest pure expression of what became known as Free Jazz. I recommend it as an LP for one getting started in listening to more abstract and complicated forms of music. Taylor could be like a Cubist variant on Thelonious Monk, with elements of rhythm and blues having gone into his Modernist mixer. This was Free Jazz that swung, but indirectly, as if via an implied pulse, rather than axiomatic beat or rhythm. Exploratory and expansive, but also inclusive, bordering on warm. I think it's cool that he cut it here. Boston hasn't produced a ton of canonical studio jazz.

In terms of horror film batting average--the number of pictures they were good in divided by the number of pictures they were in--Boris Karloff and Vincent Price are the Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby of terror cinema. You have to work to find something not-so-hot. Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher (1945) could well be Karloff's finest performance. It's already been entered in my notes to have something on it for the horror film book.

Watched Dark Water (2002) and Ringu (1998) with a view towards including them in said book. Had been thinking about both featuring in a part about horror films and rain, but am now likely only to include Dark Water in that discussion. I want to make sure to have films from Japan, Mexico, Germany, France. Viy (1967) could work as a Russian film and Lake of the Dead (1958) as a Norwegian film. Also thinking about including Keaton's The Haunted House (1921). I need to write an introduction to the book.

Elsewhere I've been sharing what I call daily musical recommendations. A couple examples:

The Zombies' "Walking in the Sun" from 1965, though it wouldn't be released until 1997's Zombie Heaven box set, which is essential for any music collection. The Zombies only had strong songs and performances (and production too, for that matter). I wanted to highlight this number because of drummer Hugh Grundy. You won't see him discussed anywhere, but he was one of the great rock drummers, specializing in symphonic grandeur done intimately.

Judy Garland singing "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart" on the The Shell Chateau Hour on 11/16/35. Her father was gravely ill when she went on the air. A radio was placed by his hospital bed so that he could hear his daughter sing what turned out to be a final time. Knowing that this could be the case, Garland sang to him. He died the next day. It is the greatest vocal performance I've ever heard in terms of technique, emotion, innovation. She was thirteen.