While I prepare my next column, I’ll direct you to two new interviews with Philip Roth on the subject of his new novel Exit Ghost. While Roth sits closer to Salinger than Mailer on the axis of literary self-promotion, a few carefully chosen interviews normally emerge around the time of each publication. He is, contrary to reputation, a charming and generous subject.
Dusty In Memphis by Warren Zanes (Continuum, 2003)
“How am I to endure the ache of whatever it is that is lost without a dream of a pristine age, tinged perhaps with the violet of melancholy, and a myth of expulsion to interpret the ache in me?” – J. M. Coetzee
For the inaugural title in the now expansive 33 1/3 series of books on rock LPs, Warren Zanes uses Dusty Springfield’s Dusty In Memphis, recorded in the American autumn of 1968, as the starting point for an exploration of the “imagined South” in his own life and in Western culture. He writes that “we go to these places to act out the possibilities within us that might otherwise lie dormant, untapped.”
Springfield was one of many British pop stars of the 1960s who journeyed into the musical and mythical landscape of the American South. Her Memphis album features the killer American Studios house band – Reggie Young (guitar), Bobby Wood (piano), Bobby Emmons (keyboards), Tommy Cogbill (bass), Gene Chrisman (drums) and Mike Leach (percussion). The Sweet Inspirations sing, the Memphis Horns play against the lush strings. This is essentially the same band that Elvis Presley used for his own great From Elvis In Memphis album of 1969. But perhaps the chief credit for Dusty In Memphis should go to the production team of Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin (also arrangements) and Tom Dowd (also arrangements and engineering).
Zanes has a fascinating reminiscence of how his boyhood in New Hampshire helped form his mythical conception of the South. “The Penthouse mythology of sexual possibility” coalesced with imagery from Hee Haw, Deliverance, The Dukes of Hazzard, Easy Rider and the plays of Tennessee Williams. An episode of neighbourhood voyeurism was all that was needed “to alchemically change myth into fact. One fragment of information, in this case one nude body, can be used to support a legion of unruly hypotheses.” Dusty in Memphis, found by Zanes in a used record store in 1985, was seized on as an artefact from that imaginary landscape and also “an inroad to that place, a way for me to visit the interior.”
The South was for producer Jerry Wexler as much of a “fantastic elsewhere” as it was for Springfield. Zanes considers the extent to which Wexler dealt in exploitation by recording music that, in a phrase attributed to Sam Philips, “sounds so good it doesn’t sound paid for.” Ultimately Wexler emerges as a likeable, charismatic figure. Zanes judges Dusty In Memphis as an example of what Robert Cantwell calls “social theatre”, the need to indulge in role-playing and costume as an engagement with mythology. Dusty in Memphis is one of the finest examples of ‘social theatre’ because, unlike the pseudo-realist high-mindedness of an Alan Lomax or Pete Seeger or Bruce Springsteen out in search of authenticity, Dusty In Memphis “demonstrates there is no trip down South that is not a trip into the imagination”.
The book has little to say on the music itself. Beyond the voice of Springfield – soulful, sometimes ethereal, always knowing – it is the colourful arrangements of Mardin and Dowd that draw me back to the album. Most of the time the arrangements are dense. One exception is the well-known ‘Son of A Preacher Man,’ a study in orchestrated space. The stereo mix keeps the blasting horns unnaturally quiet in the right channel and Reggie Young’s gentle guitar licks loud in the left. ‘I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore’ uses a lovely long oboe line. ‘In The Land of Make Believe’ is characteristic sixties Bacharach/David, that combination of cool musical sophistication and really dogged romantic failure that turns up in so many Dionne Warwick songs. This arrangement puts sitars and strings in a dialogue. I like the pensive final string tremelo.
Zanes makes a good argument for the inclusion of the two unlikely candidates on this otherwise R&B album – ‘In The Land of Make Believe’ and Michel Le Grand’s ‘Windmills of Your Mind’ from The Thomas Crown Affair. “I now find myself celebrating them as songs that explain this deep record,” writes Zanes. The psychedelic ‘Windmills,’ turned here into a bossa nova, is of a piece because even ‘Son of a Preacher Man’, “so full of southern sound and image, is psychedelica at its purest, a foray into the maddest reaches of imagination. Because that’s where the South can be found.”
The sequencing of the album has always intrigued me. Two Goffin-King songs – ‘No Easy Way Down’ (a waltz) and ‘I Can’t Make It Alone’ – come at the end of the album, and each seem to be an entirely satisfactory closing number on its own. They each build to a full-band finale. Lyrically, they’re both resigned to the realities of romance. Try flipping the order – the emotional arc of the album is unchanged:
‘No Easy Way Down’
‘I Just Can’t Make It Alone’
The 33 1/3 book is a nice complement to another book on my shelf, David Toop’s Exotica (Serpent’s Tale, 1999), which also examines music’s role in the conjuring of imaginary landscapes.
Dr Johnson wrote that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money” but, as money dribbles in a bit slowly in contemporary Australian letters, I’ve decided to indulge my need for self-expression and join the blockheads clogging the blogosphere. So here I am – online, for free.
Speaking of blockheads, this week in Sydney we’ve endured the massively inconvenient presence of Presidents Bush, Putin, Jintao – those friends of democracy – at the APEC summit. In a hysterical gesture, a five kilometre steel and concrete fence was installed around a chunk of the CBD to keep out violent protesters/terrorists.
The cops have been confiscating digital cameras from tourists and erasing their photos, arresting people for jaywalking. We had snipers on the Opera House! The Chaser boys endearingly got themselves arrested for driving a fake motorcade through the no-go zone. A little bit of satire in a very humourless city. The Saturday protest – a few thousand marching peacefully against the architects of the Iraq War – was met by the biggest police operation in NSW history.
Yes, this blog is going to be about life in Sydney but it won’t be a journal of my daily meals or commuter frustrations. I’m going to write this blog as I would a weekly newspaper column on culture. You can be sure I’ll be writing about books, politics, music and movies.
Today I’m going to mention The Dick Cavett Show. I recently had an impulse to watch intelligent television, so bought a bundle of Cavett shows from the late 60s and early 70s. Thirty seven hours’ worth, in fact, on 11 DVDs. The shows are divided into themed sets – Hollywood Greats, Comic Legends, Rock Icons. Cavett has filmed new introductions to each episode. We get hour-long interviews with people like Orson Welles, Hitchcock, John Huston, Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Brando, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, George Harrison and Anthony Burgess. There is a fascinating panel discussion with directors Mel Brooks, Frank Capra, Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich. This sort of television no longer exists.
Clive James has an appreciation of Cavett at Slate.
What is Cavett’s appeal? He is unlike every other American talk show host. The standard explanation is that he is intelligent, learned and witty. His extended interviews give the guests a rare chance to be themselves on air. And the guests invariably like Cavett a great deal, as does the audience. I enjoyed the shows a lot, but with reservations.
Cavett is not really much of an interviewer – genuinely modest, slightly awkward, often flustered and usually in awe of his guests. Most of the time those characteristics are endearing. The Welles episode is a good example. Welles likes Cavett and does not want to do anything but entertain (Welles is never anything less than brilliantly entertaining). But the Brando interview, something of a scoop at the time, is a failure in Cavett’s hands. Brando is charismatic but unwilling to talk about acting or movies (he only agreed to go on the show if a panel of Native American activists could join him for the second part). Cavett’s attempts to draw him out are pretty amateurish. The Hitchcock interview is a disappointment because Cavett is satisfied with prompting the familiar anecdotes (“how did you achieve that effect?”) and macabre jokes. Groucho Marx is funny the first time, but his interviews become repetitious because Cavett insists on prompting the same stories. And for some inexplicable reason it was decided to bring Groucho, Truman Capote and a sloth (a little furry animal) on stage together. It is not very entertaining. Cavett doesn’t manage to bring much coherence to the proceedings.
However, these DVD sets are probably quite unrepresentative. Cavett ran the show nightly for many years and wasn’t always interviewing celebrities. It would be interesting to see different kinds of episodes in future DVD releases.
I’d also like to see more of his interviews with writers. Here is a YouTube clip of the notorious Mailer v. Vidal episode:
A few exciting things are to happen in the coming months – the return of Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, Philip Roth’s new novel Exit Ghost in October, and a series of 1960s Godard films on DVD in Region 4 (Australia). Stay tuned.
Posted by matthewasprey 
Posted by matthewasprey 
Posted by matthewasprey 
