Ephemeral Firmament

Rubberneckin' in 1969

They were playing the Elvis channel at the dentist the other day, and I got infected by a Nancy Sinatra-sounding cut I probably should have heard before but hadn't: "Rubberneckin'." (I still can't get it out of my head.) And when I tracked it down later, it turned out to have come from Elvis's last movie (though it was recorded for his '68 comeback album), Change of Habit, a 1969 Mary Tyler Moore vehicle (until Elvis came on board) about three nuns who work as civilians in a South Bronx clinic. One of them (MTM) falls for the clinic doctor, a streetwise sometime-singer from Shelby County, Tenn., and then has to choose (quite literally) between Jesus Christ and Elvis Presley (playing a character named Dr. John--wait for it--Carpenter: maybe it's not a choice at all!).

Streamable on Netflix? Check. How could I not make it (or at least the first half-hour) my lunchtime entertainment? But what a thrillingly weird cultural document it turned out to be: on one hand a cheesily implausible Elvis showcase, including an upstairs house party performance of "Rubberneckin'" (see below), on the other a "gritty" social drama, played mostly straight, that could have been made at no other time than those hopeful and freaked-out years when the '60s ended and the '70s began. Autism, Vatican II, urban poverty, predatory pricing, abortion and rape jokes, ... and "Rubberneckin'"! It's like The Love Boat deciding to dock for an episode at Port-au-Prince instead of Puerto Vallarta.

Not that anyone needs me at this late date to point to the depths of pop culture, but to call it merely cheesy does it a disservice (or is a reminder of the complex flavors and varieties of cheese). It's complexities are not the same as, say, "Benito Cereno," but a work like this is such a tangle of culture that you feel like you could pull on any strand (say, when Elvis says to Barbara McNair, "I've been all of those things except black") and eventually yank out almost all of 20th-century America. I'm starting to imagine a tasty course syllabus: Change of Habit, Midnight Cowboy (a studio exec apparently wrote to John Schlesinger, "If we could clean this up and add a few songs, it could be a great vehicle for Elvis Presley"), Sesame Street, Sweet Charity, Putney Swope, The Exorcist...

Here are the first 10 minutes, including a nun striptease during the credits and the great "Rubberneckin'," which is our first glimpse of Dr. Carpenter, although if you want to go straight to the song start here.

Am I right in guessing it wasn't intentional to cut between Elvis's anthem to checkin' out the ladies and the nuns getting harassed by the locals on Washington Street?

Fortnightly Firmament #3: Best Last Songs on the Record

Has the last song on a record ever been the best song on the record? The answer is yes, but just barely. You might think that in the heyday of LP construction more bands would have wanted to close strong, like a Broadway musical (or one of their own concerts), with a memorable finale that brought the album to a rousing finish and made you want to flip the record over (or rewind it) and play it again. But a while back I started realizing how many dud closers there are, even on great records: for every "Free Bird" and "Love Train," there are a dozen "Lady in My Life"s and "West of the Fields." It's clear that most bands (or producers or label execs) thought of an album lineup more like a baseball one, which you frontload for maximum efficiency, than a novel or a concert, which you might also orchestrate for a powerful final effect. I don't quite understand why. Don't you want to leave them wanting more?

Not everyone has shirked that opportunity, though, and in honor of the ongoing death of the album, I'd like to suggest ten final cuts that carry the weight they should. They may not all be the best songs on their respective records (though most of them are), but they all bring it on home in style, summing things up, or, even better, raising the stakes or shifting the tone just when you think you're done. As always, my ten are limited by my own idiosyncrasies (and record collection), and further suggestions are welcomed (if not necessarily agreed with).

1. "A Day in the Life," The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Ah, it's annoying to put this titan at the top, but what can you do? This is it: the template, the outlier, the exception that proves the rule. Easily the best song on, in theory if not in fact, the Greatest Record of All Time, "A Day in the Life" provides a rare hybrid of the Lennon-McCartney yin-yang as well as the archetypal chaotic-freakout ending, although it's just a tease before the second half of the song and the endless final chord, which harbors a vibrating chaos of its own. Unsurprisingly, the Fabs had a strong enough sense of the dramatic moment (or just had such a deep catalogue) that they came through with great finales more often then not, from "Tomorrow Never Knows" to "Her Majesty" to "Get Back," the last and best song on their last record.
2. "Built Too Long, (Parts 1, 2 and 3)," Built to Spill, Ultimate Alternative Wavers. Nine-plus minutes of chaotic-freakout ending, with the fattest, furriest licks this side of "Shake Your Rump," this is the final pinnacle of a record that is never out of my all-time top five. It took a bold band of Idahoans to throw in a Chuck D./Flavor Flav "Bring that beat back" sample at the end of their debut record, but it is fully earned. Not every one agrees, however: the only time I ever had the pleasure of coming across this one on the radio (back when KEXP was still KCMU), I was at first too blissed out to notice that my future wife, in the just-parked car with me, was being driven into a furious agony by the assault on her ears. She left the car and I stayed for all nine minutes; somehow we still got married.
3. "After Hours," Velvet Underground, Velvet Underground. The Velvets went to both extremes with their endings, from the endless drone of "Sister Ray" to this sweet and sad lullaby, which Lou Reed brilliantly gave to Mo Tucker to sing. "Looking gray in the rain as they stand disarrayed" may be the loveliest phrase in recorded music, and "After Hours" is the finest example of the sweet ditty finale, with other examples like "Her Majesty," "I'm in Love with a Girl" on Big Star's Radio City, and "My Little Corner of the World," on Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. (As true VU acolytes, Yo La tends to alternate their finales between 10-plus-minute freakouts and little Georgia Hubley numbers like this one.)
4. "Shattered," Rolling Stones, Some Girls. What is there to say? It's "Shattered," the great NYC song (hmm, second straight great NYC song on this list) at the end of a great NYC record.
5. "Fight the Power," Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet. The perfect match of beat and delivery, though I considered docking it a little because it had already appeared, as the opening cut, on the Do the Right Thing soundtrack. It may have seemed a bit of an afterthought to still be shouting "1989!" when Black Planet came out in 1990, but still, it's hard to match the feeling when you near the end of the record, having almost forgotten what's still in store, and you hear the revs and then the beats that kick off the most thrilling track of them all.
6. "Wall of Death," Richard and Linda Thompson, Shoot Out the Lights. Thematically and musically closes this haunted record. A favorite of mine for years, but what elevates it for me, really, are just two little bits of picking (at 1:48 and 2:40 on the album, though they aren't as noticeable in the live version linked above) that somehow give this otherwise-dirgey song the headlong momentum the Thompsons are singing about.
7. "Superfly," Curtis Mayfield, Superfly. It takes confidence to hold out until the end of the soundtrack to bring out the title song (is that when it appears in the movie too?), especially one this fabulous. "Freddie's Dead" and "Pusherman" may get respect for their storytelling, but they can't match the way that baseline strums in as the title song begins.
8. "I Had a Dream," The Long Ryders, Native Sons. I was a bit of a wide-eyed Long Ryders fan back when every road led from R.E.M., and I remember trying to talk up Native Sons to my friend Josh, who--light years more sophisticated about music than I--thought the Ryders were a little silly. But he did confess that when he and an equally sophisticated pal from his band got to the moment at the end of the record when someone from the band declares "That was tight" after the revved-up jam that closes "I Had a Dream," they had to admit that, much as they wanted to make fun of them, it was indeed tight. And dammit, 25 years later, it still is. (The video linked above and embedded below, which does include those final three words, is an embarrassing and incomprehensible '80s timepiece, but I have to say, unlike almost every other public figure from that decade, the band's haircuts hold up pretty well!)
9. "Both Sides Now," Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Will the Circle Be Unbroken. I really do want everyone to get along. I get awfully sentimental when this little instrumental comes on at the end of disc two of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, just after the rousing group version of the title number. Lovely in its own right, it also hits the record's anti-Townshend 1972 themes of cross-generational reconciliation right on the nose, with a traditional setting of Joni Mitchell's anthem of hippie ambivalence, played by Randy Scruggs, teenage son of the bluegrass legend Earl. (The link is to one of the many YouTube covers, not Mr. Scruggs himself.)
10. "Bonnie and Clyde," Luna, Penthouse. The tenth spot should really go to "Her Majesty" (and the brilliant Abbey Road medley it closes), but I've said enough about the Beatles, and I want to give a nod to the lightly populated genre of the unlisted final track, which includes the superb examples of London Calling's "Train in Vain" (which, irresistible though it is, always seemed too much of a little pop song to fit on that snarling record) and "Superman" from Lifes Rich Pageant, as well as this Gainsbourg cover duet with Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier (that's not her in the live video linked above) that's a perfect fit for Dean Wareham's drowsily jaded worldliness.

Here are those Ryders, by the way, in all their period finery:

Enchantment Can Really Happen When Your Muse Is Freddy Mercury

For a long time, ever since I took over a little closet/office upstairs in our house, I had an idle plan to raise there a trio of Soviet-style banners with the faces of my literary heroes at the time: Kafka, Kleist, and Nathanael West. (The current icons, I guess, though the original three have hardly been overturned, would be Hughes, Hazzard, and Spark.) And then that idea sort of morphed into flags of three non-literary figures I admire from the '70s, who would, the thinking went, inspire me to stretch myself into capacities I don't generally assume I possess: Jimmy Connors (chip-on-his-shoulder perseverance), Bob Fosse (self-destroying commitment--at least as portrayed by Roy Scheider!--to art I don't find all that appealing), and Freddy Mercury (glorious flamboyance, natch).

I'm not the only person for whom Mr. Mercury has served as a muse. In response to my diary entry about dancing around the kitchen to "Flash," my friend Dallas Crow sent along a poem he published in Cairn, called "Frank O'Hara in Iowa, 1980." It starts "In their bedrooms teen boys prance / a la Freddy Mercury" and it ends "you only see some of what you see," and it's fantastic. He's just posted it on his blog as well, so I would have something to link to.

And Dallas's poem reminded me of God Save My Queen, in which Daniel Nester wrote a poem for each song on Queen's first ten records, and pulled it off. I reviewed it for the Stranger back in '04, and here's part of what I said (in comparing it to a long poem about All About Eve that I didn't like as much):

For Nester, the slippage between art and life comes from the fan's perspective, in which your love for the art is what seems to bring that art into being. As confessional as Phoebe is, it never captures the intense identification of a drag queen or a kid in his bedroom the way that Nester does in "Bohemian Rhapsody," when he describes his adolescent ceremony of laying out all the Queen records in order on his floor, 45s neatly stacked on top of each album: "I would then stand in front of this, drinking a wine cooler, as if I were Noah in / the Ten Commandments movie, congratulating myself, clasping my arms behind / my back, as if this was my ark, my own creation." A decade or so later, he's still doing the same thing, lining up all the songs in order and making them his own, refusing to trade in that earnest teen yearning for a more ironic stance. As he writes, in response to the hipster derision that he imagines greeting an amateurish, wonderful drag show (no doubt similar to the contempt faced by any lifelong Queen fan): "Let's say, finally, that enchantment can really happen."

Meanwhile, this has nothing to do with Queen, but I just have to say I was so thoroughly pleased to read today's Paris Review Daily post--about old pop music, there's your connection--by the admirable John Jeremiah Sullivan, in which he calls a song I've loved for a long time but have never heard anyone else talk about "the song I hope to keep if the people in charge of the survival pod say you can keep only one." The song is "I'm Going to Run to Jesus for Refuge," by Charles Barnett, as recorded by Alan Lomax in the 50s and included on one of my all-time favorite records (likely to appear on a future Firmament, as well as this old one), Velvet Voices, volume 8 of the Southern Journey series of Lomax recordings. The song speaks for itself, but I just want to mention that the overturned washtub Barnett apparently is percussing sounds just like the furnace at my childhood home would sound like when you knocked it.