NIGHTCLUB
The Banke, Calgary, Alberta, 1988
CLOTHES
The blazer is thrifted from Salvation Army, all the rest from Value Village.
Shoes: Ferragamo brown leather split toes
Pants: Emporio Armani
Shirt: Jack & Jones
Jacket: Wilkes-Bashford
Above: Details from the blazer I am wearing in the B&W picture at end of section.
Below: Details from the pants I am wearing in the B&W picture at end of section.
Below: Details from the pants I am wearing in the B&W picture at end of section.
|
That's like a dog biscuit pattern. No, it's a Jetsons car! Why any fool can see it's piglets on parade. Oldtimers in barrels going over Niagara Falls. Clearly, that pattern is meant to symbolize gridlock, an aerial shot, and Giorgio Armani is trying to warn us about traffic congestion in the future. Respect.
|
|
The Flores Twins and Me Kevin (to my right) and Brent (smoking) 1988; Quito, Ecuador This photo was taken a few days before I was expelled from the country, and sent to live in foster care in Calgary. I learned of Brent's tragic, premature and entirely unexpected death from his widow, Marisa, who we had also gone to school with. He passed away in Texas in 2003: I never saw him after I was expelled. Brent was kind and gentle, the funniest person I've ever known, and I am sad I never got to talk to him again. The Flores brothers ruled the arcade. Brent would be winning most of the major international video game competitions if he was still alive now. Kevin and I really need to get together. I promise not to wear white jeans. |
|
Muscle Shoals v. The Frankfurt School
It was neither difficult nor intentional, but in February of 1988, just a few months before my high school graduation, I got myself kicked out of school. True to all of their threats over the years, the good Christian men expelled me not just from the school, but from the country as well. Monday, I was getting ready for our senior class trip to the Galapagos Island. Thursday, I arrived in Calgary—just in time for the Winter Olympics. My head wasn’t just spinning, my head was very cold. I arrived wearing the fleece-lined light denim jean jacket pictured above. I had no money, and no mittens. I had nothing. I went into Christian foster care. My parents had not wanted me back in Chile. My relatives in Canada were ill-equipped to take me on. Somehow, I’d acquired a reputation. I’d become a bad kid. The first foster home expelled me after thirty days.
At the next home to have me, the eldest son of the family had just returned from a five-year spell bartending in Perth. It would be difficult to state how awestruck we all were at the very idea of there being a Perth, Australia and of his having been in it. Somehow the religion of his parents had not seemed to take entirely, yes I do think that's fair to say. Whatever residue might have remained, the waters of Western Australia had fully removed.
Larbin (for obviously Larbin was his real name of which he was most proud) was the most urbane man in the entirety of suburban Calgary—I have no evidence to support this, but…wait, maybe I do. Let’s do this in a sort of stream-of-consciousness paragraph meant to mimic a televisual montage, the slyboots way of advancing the story in a hurry. You hum your soundtrack, I'll hum mine.
I was with Larbin the first time I heard Clarence Carter. We were at The Banke[1], a posh club in the converted Bank of Nova Scotia building (a protected Heritage structure) on Calgary’s Stephen Avenue. Apparently, it’s a posh pub now: The Bank & Baron. The building is 1930s art deco. Pretty much whatever you do with it, it’s going to scrub out posh.
Everyone was drunk, but drunk in (mostly) tasteful outfits costing a good deal of money. There were a lot of pro athlete-looking guys in suits standing around. Larbin’s clubbing policy was to keep me company unless and until he’d found someone to go home with, which was every night, at which point his policy was to ditch immediately without whispering a word. He’d bailed on me again. I was barely eighteen. I'd been in the country for maybe six months and Canadians were fucking weird to me. I was too scared to try to talk to anybody. I was not too scared to order a succession of Long Island Ice Teas.
When Clarence Carter’s “Strokin’” came on I was having the best time of my new life in Canada. True, I was about 35 minutes away from passing out, sitting upright on the men’s toilet, with my pants down. Also fact, I was about 90 minutes away from getting carried out of the nightclub by a bouncer, and three girls whose faces I never saw, but who had agreed to drive me home, for no reason that I ever understood (I think I had a tenner in my wallet that they, very correctly in my view, took for gas money). But right then, it was jouissance-time at The Banke, courtesy of Mr. Carter. The club was erupting in an impromptu, roiling call and response to the sound of Clarence’s voice as he asked a series of personal questions:
(Three hundred drunk people with 80s hairdos yelling in unison is not as cool as you might be thinking.)
(Earlier, I had run into a girl from my Grade 12 Biology class. Larbin: “I wouldn’t mind studying her biology.” Larbin laughs at own joke. It is momentarily awkward.)
[1] I remember it as “The Banke.” Online the former night club of this era is spelt both that way, but more commonly as “The Bank.” Maybe it's been both at different times, not sure.
It was neither difficult nor intentional, but in February of 1988, just a few months before my high school graduation, I got myself kicked out of school. True to all of their threats over the years, the good Christian men expelled me not just from the school, but from the country as well. Monday, I was getting ready for our senior class trip to the Galapagos Island. Thursday, I arrived in Calgary—just in time for the Winter Olympics. My head wasn’t just spinning, my head was very cold. I arrived wearing the fleece-lined light denim jean jacket pictured above. I had no money, and no mittens. I had nothing. I went into Christian foster care. My parents had not wanted me back in Chile. My relatives in Canada were ill-equipped to take me on. Somehow, I’d acquired a reputation. I’d become a bad kid. The first foster home expelled me after thirty days.
At the next home to have me, the eldest son of the family had just returned from a five-year spell bartending in Perth. It would be difficult to state how awestruck we all were at the very idea of there being a Perth, Australia and of his having been in it. Somehow the religion of his parents had not seemed to take entirely, yes I do think that's fair to say. Whatever residue might have remained, the waters of Western Australia had fully removed.
Larbin (for obviously Larbin was his real name of which he was most proud) was the most urbane man in the entirety of suburban Calgary—I have no evidence to support this, but…wait, maybe I do. Let’s do this in a sort of stream-of-consciousness paragraph meant to mimic a televisual montage, the slyboots way of advancing the story in a hurry. You hum your soundtrack, I'll hum mine.
- Larbin and I took a bottle of red to the movies. A bottle, two wine glasses, and a cork. Larbin was urbane, but he still loved The Flames. We watched dozens of games in terrible, generic pubs and he could offer concise evaluations of Joe Nieuwendyk as convincingly as he could on Nouveau Beaujolais: just two guys watching hockey in a pub, an expensive bottle of red wine each. After returning from the bar, Larbin prepared meals from scratch: he did not nuke pizza pockets. He seared proteins, made sauces, kneaded dough and seemed as fresh as when the night began. Larbin bought sports cars in California to flip in Alberta. We drove them, with their prestigious plates, until they sold. Larbin had an unhealthy fascination with Hunters & Collectors, the band (Ed.-as opposed to WHAT, prehistoric civilization?). Larbin now owns and operates a restaurant and bar in Gran Cayman. Larbin was not named Larbin.
I was with Larbin the first time I heard Clarence Carter. We were at The Banke[1], a posh club in the converted Bank of Nova Scotia building (a protected Heritage structure) on Calgary’s Stephen Avenue. Apparently, it’s a posh pub now: The Bank & Baron. The building is 1930s art deco. Pretty much whatever you do with it, it’s going to scrub out posh.
Everyone was drunk, but drunk in (mostly) tasteful outfits costing a good deal of money. There were a lot of pro athlete-looking guys in suits standing around. Larbin’s clubbing policy was to keep me company unless and until he’d found someone to go home with, which was every night, at which point his policy was to ditch immediately without whispering a word. He’d bailed on me again. I was barely eighteen. I'd been in the country for maybe six months and Canadians were fucking weird to me. I was too scared to try to talk to anybody. I was not too scared to order a succession of Long Island Ice Teas.
When Clarence Carter’s “Strokin’” came on I was having the best time of my new life in Canada. True, I was about 35 minutes away from passing out, sitting upright on the men’s toilet, with my pants down. Also fact, I was about 90 minutes away from getting carried out of the nightclub by a bouncer, and three girls whose faces I never saw, but who had agreed to drive me home, for no reason that I ever understood (I think I had a tenner in my wallet that they, very correctly in my view, took for gas money). But right then, it was jouissance-time at The Banke, courtesy of Mr. Carter. The club was erupting in an impromptu, roiling call and response to the sound of Clarence’s voice as he asked a series of personal questions:
- Question (Clarence Carter): Have you ever made love just before breakfast?
(Three hundred drunk people with 80s hairdos yelling in unison is not as cool as you might be thinking.)
- Question (CC): Have you ever made love while you watched the late, late show?
(Earlier, I had run into a girl from my Grade 12 Biology class. Larbin: “I wouldn’t mind studying her biology.” Larbin laughs at own joke. It is momentarily awkward.)
- Question (CC): Have you ever made love on a couch?
Answer (DC): YES!
(Larbin was making love on a couch already by that point.)
- Question (CC): Have you ever made love on the back seat of a car?
Answer (DC): YES!
(I once walked into the bar underneath a Keg restaurant in Calgary while Larbin was interviewing for a position upstairs. I had never bellied up to a bar in Canada in the middle of an afternoon. It was four middle-aged barflies sucking back bottles of Canadian, a bartender and me. I ordered a Fuzzy Navel.) - IN FULL VOICE TOGETHER, BACCHANALIA BUSTING OUT ALL OVER:
“Stroke it Clarence Carter, but don't stroke so fast
If my stuff ain't tight enough, you can stick it up my' …!”
[1] I remember it as “The Banke.” Online the former night club of this era is spelt both that way, but more commonly as “The Bank.” Maybe it's been both at different times, not sure.
Fuzzy Navel, ordering you during the daytime at a sports bar caused many to question my masculinity. See you in hell. Long Island Iced Tea, I drank you like water and then a bouncer carried me upstairs and my pants may or may not have been all the way up, thanks a lot, solid, I will see you in hell.
|
|
The Single Most Soulful Day of My Life
Country is easy to come by in the interior of B.C. Soul isn’t. I asked the owner of my record store why that was, and he said, “Because no one around here listened to soul?” Which, yes.
I complained to him that my collection was growing disproportionately: I was very happy to have put together credible collections of Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, even though I hadn’t meant to. It had been years since I’d come across any good soul records in the interior.[i]
A few weeks later, he left me a phone message, said I should try to stop by the store. I did. They’d got a soul haul. On the same day, and a per unit price of approximately $7, I acquired: Tighten Up by Archie Bell & The Drells (Atlantic, 1968 ); The Best of Wilson Picket (Atlantic, 1967 ); Al Green by Al Green (bell, 1972); Live In Europe by Otis Redding (Stax/Volt Records,1967). I also got The Best of Clarence Carter that day.
[i] The only vintage records I have bought on eBay came in a lot of four: all Connie Smith. I was in Montreal then, and desperate for country. Each of the Connie Smith records I paid up for I have since come across, multiple times, in the wild thrift west. They definitely weren't worth the cost of shipping.
By any criterion that is not, “Who Is Wearing the Strangest Shirt?” the Clarence Carter record would be ranked last amongst that group.[i]
The Archie Bell cover is clearly the most awesome. Even if I had no idea how much fun it was going to be to listen to (marry me) Archie instruct the various members of his band to “tighten up” over and over again, I would play this record first, strictly on cover quality alone.
If my criterion is, “Which Singer On Front or Back Cover Looks As Cool As Anyone Ever Has In The History Of All Time?” I go with Al Green, always.
If my criterion is “Which Album Contains a Song that I Know the Words to Without Realizing that I Do?” it’s “Mustang Sally” by Wilson Pickett on a Best Of that is almost premature—he’d only been on Atlantic for four years and four records.
I bought the Clarence Carter mostly out of courtesy. When the owner of your record store is saving Otis Redding Live in Europe from hitting the floor and disappearing within minutes, it’s the right thing to do. I filed Clarence Carter, and I left him filed for five years. I did not even give him the cursory single play I give to all other records I buy. I could not stop thinking about him as the guy who wrote one of my least favourite songs. Even though the Best Of is eighteen years before “Strokin’” I knew that somewhere inside Clarence’s brain, uncoiled and ready to strike, lie lines like, “I stroke it to the north/I stroke it to the south/I stroke it everywhere/I even stroke it with my, woo!”
I outsmarted myself.
Al Green may be both more critically important and commercially successful than Clarence Carter. Barack Obama sang a phrase of Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” (1972). Barack Obama never sang the chorus to “Strokin’”. But this Green record is not the Green record anyone should be looking for. There’s a reason it comes around fairly frequently at record stores: it’s average. The problem with Archie Bell (of Houston, Texas) is that whenever the band is not playing “Tighten Up (Part I)” or “Tighten Up (Part II)” you begin to wish they were. Sometimes Wilson Pickett is just so full-on. Stop yelling at me, Wilson!
There is nothing, I repeat, Nothing! wrong with the Otis Redding album. Anyone who doesn’t rate this record highly makes no sense. On it, Redding’s backed by the Stax/Volt house band, no big deal: just Booker T on the organ; Steve Cropper on guitar; Donald Duck Dunn on bass; and Al Jackson Jr. on drums. A lot of people regard that line-up as the best band of all time.[ii] I don’t regret playing Otis Redding first and for a long time. Ask whoever you like to pick between Redding and Carter, and Redding comes up every time. To many the difference between them is not one of degree, but of leagues.
That’s not the way I hear it, and I’m not trying to be obtuse.
[i] “Patches,” Carter’s 1970 single reached a high of #4 on the Billboard pop charts. He also had a string of hits (most of them on this record) on the R&B charts. Redding’s albums had a consecutive run of five studio albums within the top five of the American R&B charts. Yet he barely left a dent in the American pop charts during his lifetime. In the years since Redding’s death in 1967, Redding makes the Top 10 “Best Soul Singer of All Time” lists. Quite often, he tops the list. Carter isn’t even cracking Top 100 male soul singer lists. Carter’s name, if it appears, appears in the comments where that one boner is like, “No Clarence Carter? I cannot take this list, or you, seriously.” (Rolling Stone, 2011; Digital Dream Door, 2016)
[ii] Taste is tricky, and I explore why through a discussion of the problems inherent in rankings and other hierarchized lists of music (see Al Martino), and about Booker T specifically, even though it was an all-instrumental, backing band, the idea that they may be the best ever American band is not novel or unique to me. Their name is in the mix (Ty, 2016).
The False Divide: Commerce vs. Art
It’s absurd that The Best of Clarence Carter should contain my favourite side in all of 60s soul. It’s equally bizarre that one of the most unforgettable, powerful vocal performances in all of soul comes on a cover version of a pop song intended to exploit the pain of broken relationships for financial benefit. Clarence Carter’s song and the record on which it appears ought to be easily discountable for three distinct reasons:
In theory and in practice (insomuch as I teach this) I support each of these objections. I agree that listening to full (non-collected) studio albums of singers and bands performing their own works produced without commercial consideration maximizes the likelihood of experiencing authentic artistic songs.
I don't think my admiration for The Best of Clarence Carter is ignorant: I collect soul, I obsess over lists. I’m not forgetting Levi Stubbs or Bobby Womack.[iv] Walter Jackson’s version of “My Ship is Coming In” (yet another cover!) was my previous favourite performance by a male soul singer: I don’t remove the title from Walter lightly. I've spent an inordinate amount of time in pubs having conversations exactly like this: whenever music is not available as a topic of conversation I struggle mightily.
It is difficult for me to confront the contradiction between what I think about music and what I feel about it. I cannot square Clarence Carter and Theodor Adorno. I think that I know what good music ought to be; on the other hand, I feel something quite different. Either I must accept that the jouissance I find in Carter disproves much of Horkheimer & Adorno; or I must delegitimize the happiness listening to Dark End gives me.
There’s always a cheap cop-out to this dilemma, and Horkheimer & Adorno themselves take it: there are exceptions to every rule. Except that, once you start adding up the exceptions, it becomes apparent that that’s all there are—exception after exception until the rule is revealed as too porous to survive, less “rule” than wishful thinking. In my class, students describe experiences with the music of One Direction and Taylor Swift and Nickelback[v] that sounds to me no different from how Clarence and Cyndi et al. make me feel. If they’re not experiencing jouissance through this music it’s news to them. If it’s not quite jouissance, it’s still something they experience as good. It’s always perilous, and therefore ill-advised, to attempt to twist the subjectively experienced good into something other. Everyone who takes time to think about the dichotomy Adorno sets up between good music on one hand, and music devalued because produced by industry for profit on the other, can conjure up a list of exceptions weighty enough to tear the whole edifice down.
There’s a list of pre-emptive quibbles against Adorno that are acknowledged even by those who find merit in his work: that he was an elitist, well-educated European who didn’t like Americans or things Americans did. Yes. Even so, there remains in his work a very appealing premise: that capitalism and culture don’t mix well. And it’s in the premise itself that one of the major problems with the theory really lies:
I’m going to “circle back,” as our errant American neighbours like to say, to these questions below. Clarence is getting mad that it’s taking so long to get the dance party started. For now I’ll just say that I’ve been on Team Adorno for a long time. And every time I’ve shown my work to people who lived through the 60s in Canada their response has been the same: That’s not what happened. Cultural Studies has focused on singular moments of social rebellion having attached itself to musical texts (Sex Pistols, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Buffy Saint Marie) for so long and with such intensity that it has rewritten the past. For instance, my neighbor was at UBC in the 60s. He was a grad student fully aware of the counterculture to his south in San Francisco. His assessment of Vancouver in 1968: “there were maybe ten hippies on the entire campus." At McGill, I worked two summers in the archives, mining old yearbooks and newspapers for amusing and forgotten anecdotes from the school’s illustrious past. It was the same thing. The 1960s that British and German theorists had created for me did not seem actually to have happened—not even there, the cradle of Canada’s intellectual counterculture. It was all engineers in skinny ties, their Louie Louie eyes twinkling whooppee cushion.
What’s worse is that I have participated in the rewriting of the musical history of the era of my own youth to suit the thesis that popular music that entertains is less than popular music that agitates (if it can entertain at the same time, bonus). The Smiths were not a popular band in either the Latin America or the Canada of the 1980s and 1990s. If the study of popular music is intended as a consideration of the music of a particular time and place, The Smiths were an odd choice for a suburban Canadian raised in Latin America. There were Smiths fans, for sure—a small subculture has existed around them in every Canadian city in which I’ve lived. But they were never popular. Campus radio and alternative stations in Toronto and Montreal played them. But they were in no meaningful or significant way definitive of the popular culture of any Canadian city. Most Canadians of the 1980s did not know who The Smiths were. Popular music studies is a field where being popular (with the wrong people, for the wrong reasons) tends to get held against you. If we were writing about popular music that was actually popular in Canada, we would have reams of dissertations on Glass Tiger and Lee Aaron and I would have made my name as the world’s pre-eminent, and only, Gino Vanelliologist.
[i] Rick Hall is the legendary producer who helped create “The Muscle Shoals Sound.” “Slip Away,” was Clarence Carter’s second-highest charting single. It reached #6 on the pop charts, and #2 on the R&B charts in 1968.
[ii]“Paint a Vulgar Picture” The Smiths. Morrissey’s 1991 single “Everyday is Like Sunday” has been released on seven or eight (thousand) different albums because apparently when Morrissey wrote “Best of! Most of!/Satiate the need/Slip them into different sleeves!” it wasn’t a philosophical objection to gross commercialization so much as a transcript of him yelling packaging instructions to beleaguered shipping clerks.
[iii] Horkheimer & Adorno argue that components of standardization include “pseudo-individualization” and “part-interchangeability."
[iv] I wanted to list Womack in the footnote about “Fly Me to the Moon.” Until hearing Bennett’s version, Womack’s was by far the best version I’d heard. Except for “Harrie Hippie,” I think this is my favourite Womack recording—again, a cover.
[v] I made that last one up just to see if you’re still with me. No one ever admits to liking Nickelback.
It’s absurd that The Best of Clarence Carter should contain my favourite side in all of 60s soul. It’s equally bizarre that one of the most unforgettable, powerful vocal performances in all of soul comes on a cover version of a pop song intended to exploit the pain of broken relationships for financial benefit. Clarence Carter’s song and the record on which it appears ought to be easily discountable for three distinct reasons:
- Collected hits are artistically less inferior to studio albums. The format is reductive; an abridgement designed for a general audience, not the true connoisseur.
- “Making Love (At the Dark End of the Street)” is a cover version. Carter’s version is more oddity than authoritative. The songwriters gave the song first to James Carr whose version reached a high of #8 on the “Black Singles Chart” of 1966. For twenty years, I thought Percy Sledge wrote it. I’d picked up a random budget-priced Percy Sledge CD which had “Dark End” on it, and I sang along with Percy 600 times. It’s a good version. Even if it wasn’t the only version, conventional wisdom flattered me that I’d found the best one. “There's never been a bad version, but Percy Sledge's, recorded a year after Carr's original, is among the very best. Sledge was ideally suited for the tale of star-crossed lovers: When he sings, it's clear that he feels the weight of this stolen romance. But no matter how much it pains him, there's nothing he can do to bring his affair out into the light” (Erlewine, 2015). Carter’s version was never released as a single. It was a b-side to a so-so 1969 single called “Snatching it Back.” Not only is it a cover, but it’s not a cover rated highly. It doesn’t even make the Wikipedia list of cover versions (The dark end of the street, n.d.). It’s not that it has a bad reputation. It’s that it has no reputation.
- “Making Love (At the Dark End of the Street)” was written by professional songwriters-a sessional guitarist and a producer, as way of killing time while playing hooky from a DJ convention in Memphis. Holed up in a hotel room, Dan Penn and Chips Moman thought they may as well knock out a hit—almost as a dare, on a specific topic: “We were always wanting to come up with the best cheatin’ song,” said Penn. “Ever. Me and Rick Hall began looking for the best cheatin’ song years before ‘Steal Away.’ I don’t know why ‘Dark End’ is so great. I guess it’s the word ‘street’” (Gordon, 1995/2001, p. 162).[i] Songs written by professional songwriters and intended to be sold to other performers lack the authenticity of songs written to express the singular sentiment of the singer and performer.
In theory and in practice (insomuch as I teach this) I support each of these objections. I agree that listening to full (non-collected) studio albums of singers and bands performing their own works produced without commercial consideration maximizes the likelihood of experiencing authentic artistic songs.
I don't think my admiration for The Best of Clarence Carter is ignorant: I collect soul, I obsess over lists. I’m not forgetting Levi Stubbs or Bobby Womack.[iv] Walter Jackson’s version of “My Ship is Coming In” (yet another cover!) was my previous favourite performance by a male soul singer: I don’t remove the title from Walter lightly. I've spent an inordinate amount of time in pubs having conversations exactly like this: whenever music is not available as a topic of conversation I struggle mightily.
It is difficult for me to confront the contradiction between what I think about music and what I feel about it. I cannot square Clarence Carter and Theodor Adorno. I think that I know what good music ought to be; on the other hand, I feel something quite different. Either I must accept that the jouissance I find in Carter disproves much of Horkheimer & Adorno; or I must delegitimize the happiness listening to Dark End gives me.
There’s always a cheap cop-out to this dilemma, and Horkheimer & Adorno themselves take it: there are exceptions to every rule. Except that, once you start adding up the exceptions, it becomes apparent that that’s all there are—exception after exception until the rule is revealed as too porous to survive, less “rule” than wishful thinking. In my class, students describe experiences with the music of One Direction and Taylor Swift and Nickelback[v] that sounds to me no different from how Clarence and Cyndi et al. make me feel. If they’re not experiencing jouissance through this music it’s news to them. If it’s not quite jouissance, it’s still something they experience as good. It’s always perilous, and therefore ill-advised, to attempt to twist the subjectively experienced good into something other. Everyone who takes time to think about the dichotomy Adorno sets up between good music on one hand, and music devalued because produced by industry for profit on the other, can conjure up a list of exceptions weighty enough to tear the whole edifice down.
There’s a list of pre-emptive quibbles against Adorno that are acknowledged even by those who find merit in his work: that he was an elitist, well-educated European who didn’t like Americans or things Americans did. Yes. Even so, there remains in his work a very appealing premise: that capitalism and culture don’t mix well. And it’s in the premise itself that one of the major problems with the theory really lies:
- Horkheimer & Adorno establish in the foundation of popular music studies a fallacy: that the purpose of music, if it is art, must be critical. If it isn’t critical of society it’s affirmative of it. No individual artistic affirmation of a corrupt society can be good.
- Horkheimer & Adorno argue that the nature of production is the only true meaning of commercialized culture. Anything dumbed down to sell to the masses must be as dumb as the intended audience.
I’m going to “circle back,” as our errant American neighbours like to say, to these questions below. Clarence is getting mad that it’s taking so long to get the dance party started. For now I’ll just say that I’ve been on Team Adorno for a long time. And every time I’ve shown my work to people who lived through the 60s in Canada their response has been the same: That’s not what happened. Cultural Studies has focused on singular moments of social rebellion having attached itself to musical texts (Sex Pistols, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Buffy Saint Marie) for so long and with such intensity that it has rewritten the past. For instance, my neighbor was at UBC in the 60s. He was a grad student fully aware of the counterculture to his south in San Francisco. His assessment of Vancouver in 1968: “there were maybe ten hippies on the entire campus." At McGill, I worked two summers in the archives, mining old yearbooks and newspapers for amusing and forgotten anecdotes from the school’s illustrious past. It was the same thing. The 1960s that British and German theorists had created for me did not seem actually to have happened—not even there, the cradle of Canada’s intellectual counterculture. It was all engineers in skinny ties, their Louie Louie eyes twinkling whooppee cushion.
What’s worse is that I have participated in the rewriting of the musical history of the era of my own youth to suit the thesis that popular music that entertains is less than popular music that agitates (if it can entertain at the same time, bonus). The Smiths were not a popular band in either the Latin America or the Canada of the 1980s and 1990s. If the study of popular music is intended as a consideration of the music of a particular time and place, The Smiths were an odd choice for a suburban Canadian raised in Latin America. There were Smiths fans, for sure—a small subculture has existed around them in every Canadian city in which I’ve lived. But they were never popular. Campus radio and alternative stations in Toronto and Montreal played them. But they were in no meaningful or significant way definitive of the popular culture of any Canadian city. Most Canadians of the 1980s did not know who The Smiths were. Popular music studies is a field where being popular (with the wrong people, for the wrong reasons) tends to get held against you. If we were writing about popular music that was actually popular in Canada, we would have reams of dissertations on Glass Tiger and Lee Aaron and I would have made my name as the world’s pre-eminent, and only, Gino Vanelliologist.
[i] Rick Hall is the legendary producer who helped create “The Muscle Shoals Sound.” “Slip Away,” was Clarence Carter’s second-highest charting single. It reached #6 on the pop charts, and #2 on the R&B charts in 1968.
[ii]“Paint a Vulgar Picture” The Smiths. Morrissey’s 1991 single “Everyday is Like Sunday” has been released on seven or eight (thousand) different albums because apparently when Morrissey wrote “Best of! Most of!/Satiate the need/Slip them into different sleeves!” it wasn’t a philosophical objection to gross commercialization so much as a transcript of him yelling packaging instructions to beleaguered shipping clerks.
[iii] Horkheimer & Adorno argue that components of standardization include “pseudo-individualization” and “part-interchangeability."
[iv] I wanted to list Womack in the footnote about “Fly Me to the Moon.” Until hearing Bennett’s version, Womack’s was by far the best version I’d heard. Except for “Harrie Hippie,” I think this is my favourite Womack recording—again, a cover.
[v] I made that last one up just to see if you’re still with me. No one ever admits to liking Nickelback.
Only one of these people is named Gino Vanelli.
The first fallacy invites the second. By insisting that the function of music is what it isn’t, it forces scholars to squeeze texts into a false taxonomy. It prevents us from observing what music is, and experiencing what music actually does. It transforms music from something physical into something intellectual, even socio-political. It forces all music to conform to a purpose that only a minority of musical texts have ever had. It tries to make me feel guilty for dancing to a song about humping where you shouldn’t be humping.
Which I simply refuse to do.
I get that Clarence Carter could be dismissed as a professional horndog: thematically, infidelity seems to define Carter’s entire oeuvre. I struggle to think who else has focused on this particular topic with such intense singularity. Maybe Conway has one up on Clarence? The only album I own that is more about horny men intent on wrecking homes is Conway Twitty’s very onanastically titled I’ve Already Loved You in My Mind (1977). TMI, Conway, TMI.
Of the twelve songs on “Best Of” a full nine of them are about cheating. Sometimes, Clarence offers remorse. Often he offers understanding about the human condition, its frailty. But mostly Clarence is bragging. Clarence has tried fidelity, and he has tried promiscuity and there is no doubt which of the two lifestyles has made him happiest. Clarence is championing infidelity. He is its greatest and most unapologetic advocate.[1] Strokin’ is not an aberration: Clarence Carter’s entire career has been an ode to hedonism. He is one of pop music’s greatest voluptuaries.
On the first track “Slip Away,” Clarence is shameless: “Oh love oh love, how sweet it is/ When you steal it, darling/ Let me tell you how sweet it is.” On “You Can’t Miss What You Can’t Measure,” Carter offers what amounts to a metaphysical defense: “Brother you won't miss/ What you can't measure/ Go on, and have a little pleasure.” Love cannot be quantified. Love for one does not dissipate in the love of another. Love is not naturally confined or restricted. The imperatives of the flesh are natural and good: the institution that attempts to persuade you otherwise reveals itself as neither natural nor good. Carter isn’t any hornier than the rest of us. He’s just more honest about what it is to be human. He’s also arguing, generally, in harmony with Foucault and Althusser. The voluntary subjugation of sexuality to suit prevailing social standards is an interpellation each of us is expected to make. Carter won’t have it. The body is the only place we remain free. Until we choose not to be.
What makes Carter’s version of “Making Love (At the Dark End of the Street)” soar is its interpretation through this perspective. Percy Sledge is sad about his troublesome loins. He offers in his rendition the tearful, soul-destroying remorse you’re expected to perform when you’ve been caught. Percy seeks rehabilitation. He wants the kids to know how wrong he was. Don’t do what old Percy done! Carter doesn’t care about getting caught. Carter is defiant in the face of the fate which awaits him. He knows he’s going to regret it later. He figures later should worry about later. For now, he has business to attend to.
The cover is really two songs fused together, the first half a semi-spoken word intro which seems also to serve as a sort of Clarence Carter manifesto. After walking us through the birds and the bees (thanks to Clarence I know now that mosquitoes make love), Clarence explains what “lovemaking” is to him, and to people like him. It’s the greatest, and most precious, part of being human.
Oh, but children, there are those of us
Who ain't never had nothin'
Ain't got nothin' now
And don't ever expect to get a doggone thing
So what we like to do
We like to get ourselves
about 50 cent worth of gas
And we like to drive way down a country road
somewhere
Oh, and children we like to make love
On the backseat of a car, children
In “Ain’t Got No—got my life” (1968) Nina Simone lists both “my boobies” and “my sex” as two parts of her bodies that keep her free, that are an integral part of life. In The Smiths’ “I Want the One I Got Have” (1985) Morrissey tells us that, “a double bed/ and a stalwart lover, for sure/ these are the riches of the poor.” Lose all your money, and your position. Lose you freedom. Through the body a certain freedom remains. You’ve still got your body; and, unless you allow yourself to be told otherwise, it in itself can raise you out of misery, and into happiness. The moral panic that persists over a host of issues surrounding North American sexuality is neither natural nor traditional. The willingness of presumably intelligent, good-faith actors to engage in extra-judicial, instantaneous electronic social shaming of the mutually consensual activities of others is a manifestation of internalized state power, often by those who, by training, ought to remain keenly on guard against the very thing: Michel Foucault argues that the disciplinary power of the modern state is maintained discreetly by its diffusion through the social body, where each constitutive individual is equally encharged with enforcing cohesion—both on the self and by socially disciplining non-compliant others (Foucault, 1986, p, 106).
[1] Except maybe Larbin.
Which I simply refuse to do.
I get that Clarence Carter could be dismissed as a professional horndog: thematically, infidelity seems to define Carter’s entire oeuvre. I struggle to think who else has focused on this particular topic with such intense singularity. Maybe Conway has one up on Clarence? The only album I own that is more about horny men intent on wrecking homes is Conway Twitty’s very onanastically titled I’ve Already Loved You in My Mind (1977). TMI, Conway, TMI.
Of the twelve songs on “Best Of” a full nine of them are about cheating. Sometimes, Clarence offers remorse. Often he offers understanding about the human condition, its frailty. But mostly Clarence is bragging. Clarence has tried fidelity, and he has tried promiscuity and there is no doubt which of the two lifestyles has made him happiest. Clarence is championing infidelity. He is its greatest and most unapologetic advocate.[1] Strokin’ is not an aberration: Clarence Carter’s entire career has been an ode to hedonism. He is one of pop music’s greatest voluptuaries.
On the first track “Slip Away,” Clarence is shameless: “Oh love oh love, how sweet it is/ When you steal it, darling/ Let me tell you how sweet it is.” On “You Can’t Miss What You Can’t Measure,” Carter offers what amounts to a metaphysical defense: “Brother you won't miss/ What you can't measure/ Go on, and have a little pleasure.” Love cannot be quantified. Love for one does not dissipate in the love of another. Love is not naturally confined or restricted. The imperatives of the flesh are natural and good: the institution that attempts to persuade you otherwise reveals itself as neither natural nor good. Carter isn’t any hornier than the rest of us. He’s just more honest about what it is to be human. He’s also arguing, generally, in harmony with Foucault and Althusser. The voluntary subjugation of sexuality to suit prevailing social standards is an interpellation each of us is expected to make. Carter won’t have it. The body is the only place we remain free. Until we choose not to be.
What makes Carter’s version of “Making Love (At the Dark End of the Street)” soar is its interpretation through this perspective. Percy Sledge is sad about his troublesome loins. He offers in his rendition the tearful, soul-destroying remorse you’re expected to perform when you’ve been caught. Percy seeks rehabilitation. He wants the kids to know how wrong he was. Don’t do what old Percy done! Carter doesn’t care about getting caught. Carter is defiant in the face of the fate which awaits him. He knows he’s going to regret it later. He figures later should worry about later. For now, he has business to attend to.
The cover is really two songs fused together, the first half a semi-spoken word intro which seems also to serve as a sort of Clarence Carter manifesto. After walking us through the birds and the bees (thanks to Clarence I know now that mosquitoes make love), Clarence explains what “lovemaking” is to him, and to people like him. It’s the greatest, and most precious, part of being human.
Oh, but children, there are those of us
Who ain't never had nothin'
Ain't got nothin' now
And don't ever expect to get a doggone thing
So what we like to do
We like to get ourselves
about 50 cent worth of gas
And we like to drive way down a country road
somewhere
Oh, and children we like to make love
On the backseat of a car, children
In “Ain’t Got No—got my life” (1968) Nina Simone lists both “my boobies” and “my sex” as two parts of her bodies that keep her free, that are an integral part of life. In The Smiths’ “I Want the One I Got Have” (1985) Morrissey tells us that, “a double bed/ and a stalwart lover, for sure/ these are the riches of the poor.” Lose all your money, and your position. Lose you freedom. Through the body a certain freedom remains. You’ve still got your body; and, unless you allow yourself to be told otherwise, it in itself can raise you out of misery, and into happiness. The moral panic that persists over a host of issues surrounding North American sexuality is neither natural nor traditional. The willingness of presumably intelligent, good-faith actors to engage in extra-judicial, instantaneous electronic social shaming of the mutually consensual activities of others is a manifestation of internalized state power, often by those who, by training, ought to remain keenly on guard against the very thing: Michel Foucault argues that the disciplinary power of the modern state is maintained discreetly by its diffusion through the social body, where each constitutive individual is equally encharged with enforcing cohesion—both on the self and by socially disciplining non-compliant others (Foucault, 1986, p, 106).
[1] Except maybe Larbin.
This convergence of the academy’s left with the religious right in itself ought to have served as the canary in the coal mine. It hasn’t. But, since I’ve already committed to using coal mine as metaphor, let’s keep it going and draw from a novel set in actual coal mines. Here’s Emile Zola in his most famous novel, Germinal, describing very poor French miners’ approach to the sexuality of their young:
Clarence is coming from the same place: the most natural impulse in the world cannot be wrong. Those who say it is are themselves wrong.
Clarence’s baritone rumbles to life when he finally hits the familiar words “At the Dark End…” It sounds like a declaration of war, a Clarence Carter call to arms. His voice reaches a pitch that is pure bliss and pure pain, both at the same time—the perfectly captured expression of the human predicament: the things that make us happy naturally are the things that social institutions want to regulate.
I don’t know how much more subversive you could be.
In all other versions of Dark End[1] the artists seem to work within the narrative of the song. They’re interpreting a story written by Penn and Moman. Carter though has built up such a head of steam through his four-minute preamble that by the time he hits the first “At the Dark End…” he crashes through it like an intersection whose stop sign he didn’t see. Clarence Carter is not, I repeat not, working within the container provided.
Clarence Carter demolishes the song, he obliterates it. You can tell it’s not the same song because Clarence isn’t apologizing for any goddammn thing. What makes this song so unforgettable is realizing that Clarence is recommending the dark end of the street—good place to go to get the motherfucking, panopticon eyes of a nosey, judgmental society off of you. His intent is signaled expertly by Muscle Shoals guitar, which adds an urgency and an arrogance not present in any other version. Clarence has not broken out of the container only to leave all of his bandmates behind. No, the entire Muscle Shoals band has followed Clarence to freedom and everyone is adding nuance, if not outright contradiction, to the lyrics and original arrangement. Clarence is not contrite. Clarence wants what’s wrong. Clarence is not yours to punish and shame. This performance is so much more than entertainment. Clarence isn’t really even singing. His “Dark End” doesn’t really sound like a song. It’s an agonized yowl, like the final cry of the last free man on earth.
[1] Carr and Sledge, for sure. Gram Parsons’ version with the Flying Burrito Brothers, an oddly satisfying country take, is really good.
- And so it was that old Mouque was spending his declining years surrounded by lovemaking. […] Every time he came from or went to Le Voreux, every time he left his corner, he couldn’t take so much as a step without stumbling over a couple in the grass […] [H]e would see the greedy noses of all the girls of Montsou pop up, and he had to be careful not to trip over the legs stretched across the paths. But gradually these encounters had come to embarrass nobody, neither Old Mouque, who simply took care not to fall, nor the girls, whom he let go about their business while he discreetly turned away like a good fellow undisturbed by the workings of nature. […] Ah, these young people, how they enjoyed themselves, how they went at it! (Zola, 1885/1970, pp.102-103).
Clarence is coming from the same place: the most natural impulse in the world cannot be wrong. Those who say it is are themselves wrong.
Clarence’s baritone rumbles to life when he finally hits the familiar words “At the Dark End…” It sounds like a declaration of war, a Clarence Carter call to arms. His voice reaches a pitch that is pure bliss and pure pain, both at the same time—the perfectly captured expression of the human predicament: the things that make us happy naturally are the things that social institutions want to regulate.
I don’t know how much more subversive you could be.
In all other versions of Dark End[1] the artists seem to work within the narrative of the song. They’re interpreting a story written by Penn and Moman. Carter though has built up such a head of steam through his four-minute preamble that by the time he hits the first “At the Dark End…” he crashes through it like an intersection whose stop sign he didn’t see. Clarence Carter is not, I repeat not, working within the container provided.
Clarence Carter demolishes the song, he obliterates it. You can tell it’s not the same song because Clarence isn’t apologizing for any goddammn thing. What makes this song so unforgettable is realizing that Clarence is recommending the dark end of the street—good place to go to get the motherfucking, panopticon eyes of a nosey, judgmental society off of you. His intent is signaled expertly by Muscle Shoals guitar, which adds an urgency and an arrogance not present in any other version. Clarence has not broken out of the container only to leave all of his bandmates behind. No, the entire Muscle Shoals band has followed Clarence to freedom and everyone is adding nuance, if not outright contradiction, to the lyrics and original arrangement. Clarence is not contrite. Clarence wants what’s wrong. Clarence is not yours to punish and shame. This performance is so much more than entertainment. Clarence isn’t really even singing. His “Dark End” doesn’t really sound like a song. It’s an agonized yowl, like the final cry of the last free man on earth.
[1] Carr and Sledge, for sure. Gram Parsons’ version with the Flying Burrito Brothers, an oddly satisfying country take, is really good.
|
(covers from Flammarion's 1935 edition)
|
|
We had a nearly impossible time showing the details on the pants, jacket and shirt all at once. There's a lot of darkness, and unless you're right up in it, everything just looks black on black on black.
Jack Kerouac Dances with Italians
That night at The Banke was my last night there, and it was the last time I ever frequented a club with a dress code, where most of the boys had started off the night with a blazer, and all the women were dressed to kill. Larbin applied cologne before going out. He kept a respectable five bottle rotation. It didn’t matter how heavily he applied. It was lost as soon as we entered. All scents rushed the dance floor, mingled with smoke clouds. All that sweat soaked through the crispness, saturated the silkiness until the whole night was this unisex perfumed animal energy, utterly rank probably, but thick in ways that comes only with full sensory engagement—the olfactory organ working as hard as the optic and the auditory, the sensuousness of rubbing up against strangers constantly. The club was thick with people, the bodies of strangers present in every way.
At the time, I didn’t find it pleasant, no. I kind of had a Charlie Brooker reaction: “Sticky things! Gross bodily goobers! My mom said never let anyone touch me where my underwear covers!”
Except now I’m not so sure. I think all those kids were trying to say with their bodies and their smoking and their Calvin Klein Obsession and their drinking all the same things that Clarence was saying: they just all wanted to be free in the last way and the last public space where actual freedom is allowed.
With this outfit, I tried to re-create a modern version of what I might have worn to a contemporary Banke-style nightclub. The pants I’m wearing are from a vintage late 1980s/early 1990s Emporio Armani suit. I purchased the suit at Value Village for about twenty dollars. They were like clown pants when I bought them. Like Hammer pants before Hammer pants put on weight. The blazer (see the "Old New" section) fit perfectly, and the fabric draped across my frame almost exactly the way everything I’d ever read about the Armani fit had suggested it would. Of all the suits and blazers I’ve acquired as I’ve been researching this book, not a single one has fitted me quite this way. I do not feel it when I wear it. It never moves in a way that my body is not already moving. The synthesis between the fabric and my skin is like nothing I’ve experienced. It is still a fashion suit, not a tailor's suit. The EA line of suits is made for men who want to look and feel good and do not care whatsoever about the corners cut to make that happen at a price that is ostentatious yet within reach. Emporio Armani suits, although regarded as the entry level Armani menswear line, are nonetheless made in Italy, where the labour is skilled and well-compensated. The EA suits are fused and not canvassed, a process with two knocks against it:
- If/when the glue used to fuse a blazer comes undone or bubbles, the blazer loses its shape and cannot regain it. Fused fabric is usually discarded long before its begun to show wear.
- Fusion construction is more mechanizable than canvassing, which is done by skilled tailors. The process is designed to cost less by making human labour unskilled, subordinate to machine process; and to employ less people.
I decided to fix the pants mostly on account of I was keeping the blazer anyway. I took the pants to my local tailor. It took two fittings, three weeks, and one hundred dollars. But the pants I have now are mine, and mine alone. I sincerely doubt that anyone I will ever meet has taken time to save such a woefully outdated style of trousers. Which is a shame. Because these pants, which were essentially handmade by two people in a mall, are the nicest of any I own. I saved fabric from a landfill or a bale bound for Africa. I supported a local business. I paid no more than I would have a pair of shit-ass Calvin Klein mall pants made by slaves that make you look like every other sad-ass office guy off to while away your (8) hours.
Bricolage. I’m going to say some really nice things about it later, probably a couple of times, but for now let’s make fun of it some more. I am wearing a Blackwatch Scottish Tartan “work shirt” made by Jack & Jones. What right have I? Symbolically, none. I am English-Canadian. My parents were the kind of English-Canadians who made sure I knew that I was English and not Scottish or a mix and that this was both a privilege and a burden. My parents bragged constantly that we were listed in The Peerage, but insisted we were far too poor to ever order our own Debrett's. I have no right to a tartan with any connection to Scottish history. I’m also not much of a military guy. My step-grandfather, an Aucklander named John Mayhead, flew Corsairs off the HMS Victorious during WWII. I got gung-ho as a kid. Too gung-ho for my parents’ liking. They asked John to have a word. He wrote me a letter and said, “Colin, don’t be in such a hurry to join the army.” Which was good advice. For me, especially because I am and always will remain a one pull-up kind of guy. Which is also why I don’t know why I’m wearing a work shirt. The kind of work you need a shirt like this for is the kind of work I have never done. I’ve never been employed for my physical capabilities. I have so few. The fetishization of blue collar work wear, by white collar workers, is as ridiculous as weekend Harley Davidson leather warriors.
The Ferragamo shoes [Which are not shown in this section, but are pictured in JACKSON BROWNE: I didn't intend to use these shoes twice, but I really had said about all I wanted to say about shoes, so maybe I did, who knows, maybe shoes confuse me] are the same story as Armani. The best things in the world are used to make things for the rich, typically the people who will appreciate them the least. These leather saddle shoes cost me $12, and are the most comfortable shoes I’ve worn. I assume any self-respecting Beat would prefer Ferragamos at $12 CDN over a pair of brand new Weejuns, (Marketed to Beats by Heart, Capitalists by Trade) for $110, but judging by how thoroughly the image of Jack Kerouac—also, definitive of a certain sort of San Francisco style—has been commodified, I shouldn’t be. “Weejuns,” the most famous name of loafers are so named as a corruption of “Norwegian,” the original country of design and manufacture of slip-on shoes. Americans in Paris after the war—the so-called “Lost Generation”—wore them because they were cheap and easy to wear. The G.H. Bass Shoe Company of Maine noticed a preponderance of angry and/or bright young men and women returning Stateside with these cheap, Norwegian-made fishers’ shoes (Schneider, 2015). The company did not think, “Kill All Bolsheviks!” upon the return of a nation’s discontented youth. It thought, “I bet we can make a killing selling non-conformity one pair of Goodyear-welted slip-ons at a time.”
Bass’s first commercial American-made version—intended for those who wanted the look of a soul-searching post-Great War expat dreamer without, you know, having to go to all the trouble of becoming an expat, or of dreaming—was brought to market in 1936 (Schneider, 2015). The loafer is now a business shoe.
Jack Kerouac, who might once have worn a black watch work shirt, exists now as the icon for every pseudo-something or other of the past seventy years. The name Jack Kerouac sells more clothes than books, I’d wager. “What would Jack Kerouac Wear Today?” inquires Esquire (Jannuzzi, 2011). Left Field Denim of New York City offers its chinos in a Kerouac cut which “has a very slim thigh and knee, narrow leg opening with a medium rise.” (Left Field NYC, n.d.) Esquire (which really works the Kerouac mythos) thought it was paying Kerouac et al the hugest compliment when it wrote in The Beats’ honour:
- We still drape ourselves in denim and chambray. We still wear tweed sport coats and throw billowy plaid scarves around our necks. We still go to bars in chinos and relaxed cotton oxfords. We still own wayfarers and corduroys and dark rimmed glasses and cocked back beanies and boxy sweaters and bold, thick, plaid shirts that feel better than almost anything else on any given evening.
And most of us, most days, still want to quit our jobs and drive all night, just to see where we end up. Happy birthday, On The Road. Thanks for all you taught us (Hendrickson, 2014).
So the Beats taught the middle classes to dress in stylistic stereotyped masculine conformity, to don the uniform of our era and peers, while accepting as normal a dystopia even worse than any of The Beats could have envisioned, but which they nonetheless tried desperately to prevent? But hey, we dream of quitting our jobs! Never gonna happen, but on weekends I can loaf like a rebel, so that’s something.
I know it’s a bullshit tourist move, but I go to Sam Spade’s office when I go to San Francisco. I like San Francisco’s financial district because I didn’t expect it. So many very well-dressed people, gorgeous architecture. In the cultural imaginary, San Francisco exists as a beacon of countercultural hope—one of the spaces that has kept alive bohemianism more than any other. Yet, parallel to all of this San Francisco remained a center of finance, of political influence. The blazer I’m wearing (pictured in B&W at bottom of section, and in detail at top of section) is from one of the greatest ever American men’s clothiers Wilkes Bashford of San Francisco. The jacket is equipped with so many efficient, hidden interior storage pockets that it functions as a portable wallet. It’s cut is superb and the cloth gorgeous. I purchased it at Value Village for about twenty dollars.
Bashford learned menswear and retail at San Francisco’s White House department store (built in 1909), which was one of two great San Francisco versions of the Great Parisian department store (Bak, 2012). [1] Bashford’s clientele was not limited to the rich and famous. As he observes, haute couture grew in tandem with the city’s subculture. Bashford introduced menswear from unknown designers who were already then beginning to explore the commodification of vanishing working culture (Ralph Lauren) or of subculture (Gianni Versace). There is no story of subcultural fashion that does not include its subsequent commercialization.
“It was the late ‘60s, early ‘70s—a period of flower children and hippies—no one was really doing what we were doing in the store,” Bashford recounts, explaining the fortuitous timing of opening a store at the same time that high-end designers were beginning to launch [menswear] lines. “Our businesses grew up together” (Borman, 2015, p.209).
You try and square it with what you know—can traditional men’s fashion co-exist with peace-loving, sex exploring hippies? The dichotomy on which so much of Cultural Studies remains poised is now, for sure, false. But was it ever really a dichotomy? What is the rule that disallows peace-loving, sexually inquisitive humans from pursuing their project in sartorial splendor? Indeed, San Francisco is, arguably, the spiritual home of the well-dressed rebel. Oscar Wilde is said to have commented upon his visit to the city’s famed Bohemian Club, “I've never seen so many well‐dressed, well‐fed, business‐like looking Bohemians in the whole course of my life” (Kramer, 1977). In Jubilee Hitchhiker, the biography of San Francisco-based poet Richard Brautigan, we learn that on milder days Brautigan “wore his pinback-studded vest and a turtleneck shirt, sometimes adding a secondhand suit jacket. ‘Like Baudelaire, Richard is a refined dandy,” write [Michael] McClure, “The impoverished Dandy dresses in the most carefully chosen rags of no-style” (Hjorsberg, 2012, p. 262). Brautigan viewed his clothing decisions as “an attempt to achieve ‘the exact style of ourselves’” (p.262).
[1] The White House’s rival made very sure its Parisian invocations would not go unnoticed: it called itself The City of Paris. The City of Paris’s demolition in 1981 remains a civic sore spot (Goldberger, 1983).
|
Cool Hats Club, San Francisco Chapter: Bogart as Spade, 1941; Jack Kerouac, 1960; Richard Brautigan, who is clearly holding his requisite cigarette behind his back, 1970.
|
|
Here’s another super stylish person who should not be from San Francisco, but is: Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. The once Mr. Marilyn Monroe was not just a sort of ok dresser—you know, for a jock. Throughout his lifetime he was considered one of the best-dressed, and most stylish, men in the United States. “When Joe walked into the locker room, it was like the lights came on, as if a voice on the PA had announced: the team is here. Of course he was impeccable: not just in a suit and tie, but the best suit and tie in America” (Cramer, 2000/2001, p. 232). Paul Simon knows this. When he sings “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” he’s not talking about the disappearance of a singular person. This is a 1960s lament (from the counterculture!) for the vanishing world of style, for elegant masculinity. Even then already, it was clear that it wasn’t just the clothes disappearing, it was an entire way of life…
…an entire way of life that I did not associate with either San Francisco, or with Joe Di Maggio! Like, I just couldn’t get that Joe DiMaggio could have come from there. In my head, I had him down as a born and bred New Yorker. Jack Kerouac, yes. Joe DiMaggio no. For some reason when I walked through Joe DiMaggio’s park in North Beach it was like I still didn’t believe it. I didn’t want him to be from San Francisco: it just confused the contours of a mental map I had no intention of redrawing. “‘He became New York City's face,’ old pal Don Russo said. ‘But I don't think there was ever any doubt. He never thought of himself as anything but pure San Francisco” (Adams, 2009).
In Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, set during the Second World War, Shaw shows an American soldier in Europe having the same sort of disconnect upon running into a Canadian soldier. Shaw describes the Canadian as “a small, dark Italian-looking man.” But Canadians, to Americans of Shaw’s vintage, are synonymous with Brits still. Shaw can’t quite understand why this guy talking to him doesn’t sound British. He sounds, to Shaw, like an Italian-New Yorker.
“Sure, there’s mines,” the Canadian said aggressively. “Why shouldn’t there be mines? Where do you think you are, Yankee Stadium?” He had an accent that would have sounded natural in Brooklyn.
Where you from soldier?” Pavone asked.
“Toronto,” said the soldier. “The next man that tries to get me out of Toronto is going to get a Ford axle across his ears.”
(Shaw, 1948/2000, 491)
…an entire way of life that I did not associate with either San Francisco, or with Joe Di Maggio! Like, I just couldn’t get that Joe DiMaggio could have come from there. In my head, I had him down as a born and bred New Yorker. Jack Kerouac, yes. Joe DiMaggio no. For some reason when I walked through Joe DiMaggio’s park in North Beach it was like I still didn’t believe it. I didn’t want him to be from San Francisco: it just confused the contours of a mental map I had no intention of redrawing. “‘He became New York City's face,’ old pal Don Russo said. ‘But I don't think there was ever any doubt. He never thought of himself as anything but pure San Francisco” (Adams, 2009).
In Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, set during the Second World War, Shaw shows an American soldier in Europe having the same sort of disconnect upon running into a Canadian soldier. Shaw describes the Canadian as “a small, dark Italian-looking man.” But Canadians, to Americans of Shaw’s vintage, are synonymous with Brits still. Shaw can’t quite understand why this guy talking to him doesn’t sound British. He sounds, to Shaw, like an Italian-New Yorker.
“Sure, there’s mines,” the Canadian said aggressively. “Why shouldn’t there be mines? Where do you think you are, Yankee Stadium?” He had an accent that would have sounded natural in Brooklyn.
Where you from soldier?” Pavone asked.
“Toronto,” said the soldier. “The next man that tries to get me out of Toronto is going to get a Ford axle across his ears.”
(Shaw, 1948/2000, 491)
- Canadians that sound Italian are from New York. Americans with Italian-sounding names come from New York. Much of life is spent measuring actual experience against all the things a society created through mass communication has told us, and finding the latter to be nonsense. So much of what we learn turns out to be completely wrong. In such a world, you can’t really blame Clarence Carter for trusting his senses over society.
Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio: "Of course he was impeccable: not just in a suit and tie, but the best suit and tie in America” (Cramer, 2000/2001, p. 232).
"Fuck Hate," is to do with Charles Bukowski and I bought it at the Beat Museum gift shop in San Francisco where he might have been surprised he ended up since although he was around Beats, it's not clear that he thought of himself as one. Bukowski's personal style was to drink beer while writing on the toilet. Dance Craze: Hawaiian Extra Cheese |
|