Friday, March 29, 2024 Mar 29, 2024
63° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Publications

MUSIC

Listening to AMerica
By David Ritz |

A long time agp, when I had not yet learned that pickles were really cucumbers turned sour, I was under the impression that AM, as in AM radio, meant American Music.

I was right, and made the discovery of just how right I was when, some time last year, I bought a new Chevrolet. I faced the decision with which millions of loyal American consumers must come to terms: whether to buy AM/FM, AM/FM stereo, AM/FM stereo cassette, AM/FM stereo 8-track, just AM, just FM. The choices staggered the imagination: factory brand, Japanese, sound stores, Sears catalogue, electronics discount center and on and on. I knew I wanted something; I knew I wanted a lot; I knew I wanted a mechanism which would be loud and let me listen to what I wanted to hear as I cruised down Central on my way to nowhere. I had already become addicted to tapes, in spite of the fact that years before, when I saw my first cassettes, I swore never to abandon records, objects of my earliest affections. But the convenience of those irresistible little gadgets proved too much and, like a halfhearted vegetarian before a juicy T-bone, I broke down and bit off more than I could chew. Soon small, neat stacks of cassettes, pre-recorded and homemade, were stacking up alongside my turntable at home. Soon I had a tape recorder for the office and spent my white-collar days, in between phone calls and meetings, listening to Tosca and Junior Walker. I rejected 8-tracks out of hand, telling myself that they were the stuff of teenagers and, even more, that they lacked the all-important, the indispensable features of fast forward and rewind. Still, I was only fooling myself. I was trapped, the happy consumer out of control, the living proof of Jonathan Winters’ quip which, first heard as a boy, I have only recently come to understand: that men are boys with bigger toys (an adaptation of Wordsworth’s famous insight that “the Child is father of the Man”).

So I bought a cassette player for the Chevrolet which fit neatly, snugly, securely (so that no thief dare tamper) into the dash. At the time the only radio available in combination with a tape player was FM. I could live without AM, I told myself, and I wouldn’t know the difference. I would have my tapes. I would have WRR-FM. I would have KNOK-FM in living stereo. I would have the best of both worlds. I would avoid the screaming disc jockeys, the uncouth chatter of AM, the cacophony of contest super-duper-teeny-bop-blast-off radio. I would indulge myself as I pleased. Yet, how little I knew! How poorly I misjudged myself! How miserably I missed the point!

In a book that Henry Pleasants published in 1969, Serious Music-and All That Jazz! (Simon and Schuster), there is a warm and moving autobiographical introduction. He tells how he had studied voice, piano and theory at classical academies, how for years he was music critic for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and the central European musical correspondent of The New York Times. His field, as he describes (and capitalizes) it, was Serious Music. Over a long period of time he became disenchanted with the Serious movement, particularly Twentieth century classical music, and concluded that the European high tradition had run into a dead end. He went through a conversion and came out a believer in certain kinds of jazz and pop. He hopped into his car – this is one of the ways he learned about his native music-and drove ten thousand miles, listening to the radio all the way. What he learned, of course, as he admits, was that the basic music of America was country-and-western on the white side and rhythm-and-blues and gospel on the black side. (His trip, I presume, was made in the early fifties.) Jazz was not to be found on the air waves. America was located on his AM radio dial.

Mr. Pleasants is a delightful critic, an open and honest writer, and his new book published this year – The Great American Popular Singers (Simon and Schuster) – is admirable in a great many ways. It is a further extension of his by now long-lived process of conversion. The hope of the musical future, Pleasants argues, is the Afro-American tradition. It is a natural tradition, he contends, and one which is based on a close adherence to common speech. The book itself is more or less a string of informal essays on singers whom he feels are seminal to the tradition. He praises them too easily and solicitously, I think, and often sounds like a man writing a series of fan letters. Having left the old country behind, he is too readily impressed by the New World. (One peculiar result of Pleasant’s disillusionment with Serious singing is an overcompensatory factor. His favorite American vocalists seem to be those who sing softly – Peggy Lee is an example of whom he is almost embarrassingly enamored – and he is quick to scorn those who are more histrionic.) It must also be said that Mr. Pleasants displays an alarming misunderstanding of modern jazz – be-bop and beyond – and that, too, I think is an overreaction to his past. He fears that the elitist jazz players, like the Serious musicians before them, lack a pop sensibility and are too interested in Art. He has a hard time handling soul music and misses the historical significance of Sam Cooke, who had an enormous influence on the successful commercialization of gospel into soul. As for the present, he doesn’t seem to be aware of what exceptional music is being made by Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gave.

What is best about the book, though, is what is best about AM radio: It is wildly diverse and completely American. It is, in the sense which Dante abandoned Latin to write The Divine Comedy in Italian, vulgar. The selection of vocalists Pleasants has chosen to write about is engaging: Al Jolson, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Rodgers, Bing Crosby, Mildred Bailey, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Mahalia Jackson, Nat King Cole, Hank Williams, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, Ethel Merman, Peggy Lee, Barbra Streisand. And if he is too interested in shocking the Serious Music critics or too obsessed with the schism between pop and classical, he is also refreshingly open-minded about whom and what he takes seriously. The book is free of political ideology; Pleasants understands that there has always been, as there is now, an incredible amount of give-and-take between the black and white musical cultures. (I was happy to read in an interview in a recent issue of Down Beat [September 12] that blues/soul singer Bobby Bland names Tony Bennett, Perry Como and Nat King Cole as influences. The interviewer can’t quite believe it and says that he wouldn’t have thought that Perry Como had been an inspiration. Bobby’s answer: “Maybe you don’t hear what I hear.” Similarly, several years ago, B.B. King told an interviewer that among the singers he admired most was Gene Autry.)

Pleasants is convinced that the microphone changed the course of our vocal music. He argues that American singers in this century have returned to the sweet and natural strains we associate with bel canto and the early developmental days of Italian opera. Because of the mike’s sensitivity, singing could be more personalized, more intimate, more spoken, less projected and forced. It is interesting that it is this sense of voice which so attracts us to (and at the same time repels us from) the AM air waves. It is this same sense of intimacy which 1 miss when AM is neglected for too long. (A friend recently returned from Spain where he has lived for the last 18 months. He is no lover of pop music, but he is a poet, and he confessed that just listening to our garrulous disc jockeys was music to his ears.) Radio has no face; it lacks those very pictures – images on a tv screen – on which we have been raised; the absence of face intensifies the presence of voice.

So why is it, then, that we cannot do without AM, that we return to it like a bad habit? Having eaten the first pretzel, we fully intend to put the box away, show restraint and control our appetite. Yet we lose the struggle, attack the box as though it were an enemy, devour each pretzel until there are no more and even eat the salt which remains at the bottom. In that sense, my mistake in thinking that I could do without AM was fundamental, the same sort of basic error, for example, that the people at KNUS-FM made when they thought that an alternative low-key underground approach would attract a large market. They were wrong; that audience was limited and, in order to attract advertisers, they had to reverse themselves and – FM or no FM – return to the Top Forty format. As soon-as the old chatter was back on the air, ratings started climbing. (I attach little importance to the “beautiful music” stations. They seem to be one step above or below Muzak, and meant for people who must essentially hear music in the background. It is white noise sugarcoated with melody.) AM is the foul but necessary coffee in the morning: slightly sickening, slightly sweet, but, for better or worse, the essential juice. We need it. Somehow it is in tune with our style of living and talking and breathing in a way which is simply not true, say, of all-classical stations. The fact is that, despite ourselves, despite our better instincts, we like the stuff and we keep returning to those addictive sounds.

There are the magical moments of AM radio, the moments which could only be produced by a car culture, particularly the sort of culture Dallas provides. Those moments, of course, are sexual, nostalgic, light, ecstatic. AM radio catches the one vulgar melodic phrase, the absolute obviousness of the tune. The song itself is played literally until the point of exhaustion. We all remember songs, and presumably still have current favorites, which we must hear endlessly. We fall for the tune like we fall for a lover. (I remember, as strange as it seemed, how I fell for Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman;” I could not hear it enough; there appeared to be no saturation point.) Such is the nature of AM and, I am tempted to say, the nature of pop culture itself. It is beauty pushed to the point of obnox-iousness. On the high side it is original and brilliant and divergent; on the low side it is, like driving down Lemmon Avenue, crass and commercial and unrefined. Either way, it is unrelenting.

There was something of that sense of crudeness in the movie That’s Entertainment, a collage of the greatest and gaudiest moments in MGM musicals. I went to see it twice, and both times sat spellbound. There, too, was everything right and wrong, strong and weak about our songs and our singers. The light shines through the sound stages, the sets, the cardboard. Judy Garland, uneven as she is, somewhere between swing and jazz and slop, unnerves us in a way that can be frightening. The experience of popular singing (and popular entertainment) is almost a mystical one. We are being touched by someone who sings, who speaks our language. In that experience is a sort of elemental grace – Gene Kelly singing and dancing in the rain – which, to my mind, is overwhelming.

There is a Lightning Hopkins song called “Mr. Charlie” of which I am particularly fond: It is about a stutterer. Lightning talks the first part of the song and, like Tina Turner’s spoken introduction to “Proud Mary,” the talking is extremely lyrical. Mr. Charlie has hired a kid who stutters to watch his rolling mill. The mill catches fire and the child rushes to tell Mr. Charlie, but he can’t get the words out. In response, Mr. Charlie says, “Boy, if you can’t say it, sing it,” and at that moment the storytelling ends and Lightning breaks into an earth-shattering 12-bar blues. What is most lovely, though, is the fact of liberation from speech to song. There is a remarkable tension and, conversely, a dramatic release and sense of relaxation at that precise moment when talking ends and singing begins. We talk, but we can also sing. We walk, but we can also dance. The contrast, the move up, is elevating, and so much more so when the talking and walking is our kind of speech and our kind of strut. Common speech is transformed into common song.

I am grateful, of course, for reliefand variety. KERA-FM’s jazz dayback in late July seemed to me a totaltriumph. It was wonderful, early on aSaturday morning, to hear BillieHoliday and later, driving tofurniture stores and the A&P, to listen to Charlie Parker and CliffordBrown. I am grateful, too, as a listener, for Jean Fugett’s show “FlightTime” which offers music, at exactlythe right time (from ten to midnight),which otherwise I might never hear.That program, though, is somethingelse. The real mystery of our cultureresides in the confusion, in the chatter, on the stations with the largestnumbers of listeners. It is there thatwe have developed what we are; it isthere where we hear who we are.America is still to be found in the firsttwo letters of its name.

Related Articles

A packed tray of barbecue (ribs, links, beans, mac, slaw, bread) from Goldee's Barbecue
Recipes

How to Make Goldee’s Barbecue’s Irresistible Smoked Pork Belly And Peach Glaze at Home

House of Plates, a DFW-based food and music outlet, has paired up with chefs all over North Texas for their favorite recipes.
Local News

Leading Off (3/29/24)

Looks like we have a beautiful Easter weekend ahead.
Image
Business

Alternative Wealth Partners Launches $150 Million Investment Fund

Plus: Parking software and solutions company ParkHub merges with U.K.-based JustPark, Spark Spot acquires land for EV charging station in Carrollton, and more.
Advertisement