BOOKS

BOOKS

From the cover of Treasure Tunes From the Vault (Chess 1474) a WLS collection of old rock tunes. That’s the legendary Dick Biondi behind the mike.

THE DEEJAYS Arnold Passman McMillan

RECORD RESEARCH Joel Whitburn Whitburn

RHYTHM AND BLUES Lynn McCutcheon Beattie

Lynn McCuthcheon is shocked and horrified by the musical ignorance of the people who play records for a living in the United States. He’s sure that if they hadn’t been so stupid, to say nothing of being prejudiced and deaf, an almost entirely different set of records would have been hits, and you would all nostalgically remember records that only sold a few hundred copies and were never heard of again until Lynn sat down to write about them here.

It’s a tough task, to try to explain in writing what a record sounds like for a reader who never heard it, both for a reviewer of a new record or a historian discussing an old one. Unfortunately, Lynn doesn’t have what it takes to be an evocative writer, and so his book is almost entirely inaccessible, a mass of names and songs and record numbers that never quite functions as the narrative he is aiming for, and becomes a frustrating catalogue of his own collection. Still, for those with patience to pick their way through the book, there’s quite a lot of previously unavailable information On people like the Five Royales, whose, lead singer was not, as Sound of the City would have you believe, the group’s song-writer Lowman Pauling, but a guy called Johnny Tanner. If you’re a vocal group collector, you should certainly, get the book, from P.O. Box 26, Arlington, Virginia 22210, making checks ($2.95) out to R.W. Beatty.

Joel Whitburn’s book supplies the evidence to support or confound Lynn’s contention that the wrong music gets played on the radid. It’s a list of every record that ever made the Billboard Hot 100, organised under the name of the performer. Connie Francis had 55 records on the chart, Buddy Holly only six —' and the Five Royales only two. The Buffalo Springfield made the list five times, the Bhckinghams seven. Find five performers whose only hit was a number one — nothing before, nothing after. Which famous recording artists never ever made the Hot 100? This volume covers November 1955 to December ’69; ‘Maybellene’ was on its way down the chart when the book starts, ‘Thank You Falettin Me’ was just about to come in when it finishes.

In a lot of ways, Billboard’s chart is meaningless, since it is always trying to pretend that there is a national American musical taste. It isn’t interested in the total sales of a record in each week,, so it ignores on the one hand those records which sell very well in a few areas but not everywhere, and on the other hand records that are selling in black neighbourhoods. If Billboard gets report that record A is selling around 10,000 copies in each of the ten regional areas (total sales in the week: 100,000) and a report that record B in the same period has sold 40,000 in each of the three areas (total sales in the week: 120,000), record A is likely to be listed among the top 15 records in the country, while record B may not even get listed in the top 100. For an R & B record to get into Billboard’s Top 10, it has to sell at least twice as many copies as a record by a white singer; Jackie Moore’s ‘Precious Precious’ sold almost' 2 million copies in 1970, yet Billboard never listed it above number 30.

All that has to be kept in mind while looking at Record Research; so does the fact that the lower reaches of the chart are notoriously subject to ‘guesswork’ by the compilers. Records that are listed for one week at number 98 and never heard of again are best thought of as ‘dubious’ sellers & unless they are R & B records. But with all those reservations, the book is still fascinating, and worth $15. Consider the following, and see if it doesn’t whet your appetite; the figures refer to date of entry into the chart, highest position reached, and number of weeks in the chart.

7-12-58. 1.19. Elegants. Little Star. Apt 25005. Make out your checks ($15.00) to Joel Whitburn, 8447 Lloyd Avenue, Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin 53051.

Arnie Passman’s book sits neatly on the shelves between the other two, fully confirming Lynn’s worst suspicions about disc jockeys by revealing the character — such as there is — of the ‘hype priests’ of music, the ‘master baiters’ of America. How long, asks Arnie, will it take the disc jockey to go the way of the horse? That was going to be the title of the book, and it would have given a better indication of what’s inside, because as a title The Deejays sounds much closer to a straightforward narrative or encyclopedia of names than Arnie gives us.

The book’s jacket (which, incidentally, has the best design of any book about music so far) describes the contents as ‘irreverent’, but ‘flippant’ might have been more accurate. Arnie did a hell of a lot of legwork, judging by the number of people he managed to find and interview, but he doesn’t get awed by anybody, so we’re spared the sycophantic narrative than tends to be standard in show biz histories. On the other hand, he sometimes seems unduly impressed by stupid stunts and gimmicks that jockeys and stations get up to in order to draw attention to themselves. Somebody called Barney Pip talks all the time in a falsetto squeak. The idea makes me shiver with horror, but there’s a perverse streak in Arnie that makes him shudder with delight at the (sheer outrageousness of it all. As he says, it’s precisely because most people refuse to take jockeys seriously that ‘makes it all the more fundamental to take a look at what’s been happening.’ So the book documents the gradual evolution of the modern jocks, the automatons on Drake radio and the autonomous on FM, out of the people who started playing records instead of announcing live bands in the thirties. Parallel with them, came the growth of the independent chains of radio stations pioneered by McLendon and Storz.

To some extent, the paradox that bothers Lynn McCutcheon is revealed as being unavoidable. A disc jockey’s life is a career, measured in ratings and income, and not a commitment to music. Jockeys, and entire stations, change character overnight as they switch policies, audiences, musical formats, and the music just gets fitted in where it’s convenient. So, especially because Fve only heard limited amounts of American radio, the book is sometimes confusing as jockey names and station call-signs come and go with little reference to the records they jplayed; I would have liked to have known more records that various jockeys ‘broke.’ But if that isn’t what primarily interested them, Arnie was right not to worry. The only serious flaw that I can see is that he didn’t spend any time in the South, investigating WLAC-Nashville, whose jockeys ‘Hoss’ Allen, Gene Nobles, and John ‘John R’ Richbourg were hosts on the incredibly infuential ‘Randy’s Record Store’ program through the, rock ‘n’ roll era and on up to today. Dewey Phillips on WDIA-Memphis, and ‘Jack the Cat’ in New Orleans also deserved more than a casual reference — whatsa matter, Arnie, scared to go South, were ya?

This book isn’t the last word on disc jockeys — we need to know more about the distinctions between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ markets and what make program directors decide to put records on their play lists, and something about the promo men who try in various ways to get their records played; there’s nothing substantial here about the various ways disc jockeys ‘double their money,’ getting credits as song-writers, collecting the publishing rights to songs in, return for playing them, or managing record stores which could use, and often get, free records from the local distributor, which of course sell faster if the jockey happens to plug ’em on his show. But as an enquiry into a part of the entertainment business that most people could hardly bear to even glance at, The Deejays is a very useful book. Now who’s gonna do one on juke box operators?

Charlie Gillett

MAXIMUM SECURITY: LETTERS FROM PRISON Edited by Eve Pell Dutton

This is one of the most inspiring, informative volumes I have read in years. Maximum Security is a collection of letters from persons incarcerated in California prisons. All of the letters refer to events which have actually occurred. Some of them have even been widely publicized.

Yet, this book finally attacks you like some demented concoction of Kafka and Dante; the reader leaves it /stunned, appalled, staggered that in the second largest state in the nation such atrocities and brutalities go on at all, let alone that such actions are sanctioned and requisitioned by the government.

California’s prison system is made a paradigm by the barbarous indeterminate sentence law: instead of a sentence of say, five years, of fifteen years, or one year, the “offender” is given “one to life,” “six months to life,” “one to fifteen,” etc. George Jackson did eleven years (the sentence was commuted by bullet last August) behind this kind of sentence for a $60 gas station robbery. Most of the prisoners in this book are doing similar stretches for similarly relatively innocous crimes.

“Under the California Penal System,” Alfred Hassan says, “a prisoner has no idea at all as to when he will be released to parole supervision. He can only guess. And this guessing game only infuriates him and increases his distrust of the penal system. Each time he is denied parole, his wife arid children and parents are also denied. Perhaps if he knew the exact date of his release from prison, his wife and family would have something concrete to look forward to, not to mention the fact that he would be less inclined to do, anything that might cause him to get his release date taken away from him . . .

“They say that it is bad business to blame others for your misgivings. But I say fuck this specious reasoning. I blame the A.A. (The Adult Authority: the panel which doles out parole dates ... or more frequently, doesn’t set them.) I blame them because they are the cause of much suffering and agony. I blame them because they are misusing and abusing their power. I blame them because their crimes against humanity are far greater than our petty crimes. They have the power to destroy! And this is wrong. No such power should be in the hands of a few men.”

If a prisoner refuses to be broken, if he is not the ideal prisoner (described, again by Hassan, as “one who feels that he is absolutely dependent, one who senses (or thinks) he is inferior . . . ”) he is sent to Maximum Security, the pit, the hole' This is where George Jackson lived out his days, where Ruchell Magee and John Clutchette and/Feleta Drumgo and every other man in this book lives out his days.

Writing in his own brilliant book* Soledad Brother, George Jackson described Max Row in Soledad: “When a white con leaves here he’s ruined for life. No black leaves Max Row walking. Either he leaves on the meat wagon or he leaves crawling, licking at the pig’s feet.

“Ironic, because one cannot get a parole to the outside prison directly from O Wing, Max Row. (This is the name for Soledad’s Maximum Security section.) The parole board won’t even consider the Max Row cdse. So a man licks at the feet of the pig not for a release to the outside world, but for the privilege of going upstairs to O Wing adjustment center. There the licking process must continue if parole is the object. You can count on one hand the number of people who have been paroled to the streets from O Wing proper in all jthe years that the prison has existed. No one goes from O Wing, -Max Row straight to the general prison population. To go from here to the outside world is unthinkable ....

“One can understand the depression felt by an inmate on Max Row. He’s fallen as far as he can into the social trap, relief is so distant that it is very easy for him to lose his holds. In two weeks that little average man who may have ended up on Max Row for suspicion of attempted escape is so brutalized, so completely without holds, that he will never heal again. It’s worse than Vietnam.”

This depression is accomplished' by means Jackson calls terrorism. Hassan describes them: “If a man has done something so bad that we can’t stand to look at him* then shoot him. But don’t tamper with his soul. If he is a tyrant relieve him of his misery with a bullet in his brain. But don’t whip his mind. Don’t lie to him when he knows you are lying. Don’t hand him that shit about rehabilitation. Don’t make promises you’ll never keep. A man can stand so much. You can beat the flesh but it will soon become accustomed to the pain. But the mind is very very tender. It can stand so much. And once the mind is gone, what do you do with the body. You put the body out in the Yard. Yeah, that’s it. Walking down long corridors, in small rooms, across the neatly trimmed grass. I’m talking about the convicts who are in the Pit forever.”

What is amazing, then, about Maximum Security is that these men are not defeated. They are occasionally despairing and they have a right to be: a description can be found here of almost any medieval torture you care to name. Men watching their best friends shot down, unable to defend either the friend or themselves, men shit and pissed (literally!) upon, beaten and tortured, drugged and in general dehumanized in every manner conceivable.

Yet these men survive. More than survive, they tell the tale, they scream — not for revenge, perhaps, but at least for justice.

The men who wrote these letters are not, all of them,, articulate in a grammatical, literate sense. That is one of the things they are being brutalized for, in a way. But each of them shines through his own brutalization, and the brutalization of others that he has to see every day on the most bestial level possible, with a stronger sense of his own and his fellows’ humanity. Each prisoner understands his own necessity, and that of his fellow-prisoners, each of them is attempting. to deal with it, without being broken in two by his brutalizers.

Only fifty men you say? Only fifty out of so many thousands in California prisons alone? Read Maximum Security and you will understand that the fact that these few men, and they not alone,

MUSIC AND POLITICS John Sinclair and Robert Levin World Publishing Company

“Can you believe this crowd, Sheila? It gets bigger every week . . . we’ve got so much high energy here we’ll be taking over and no pigs gonna stop us.”

Yeah, well Right on, brothers and sisters, if you can relate to that, and self-determination and off the honko pig culture and all that good stuff,, and by the way that opening quote is from Jay Kinney and Ned Sonntag’s “Armed Love” story in the Young Lust #2 comix, but it might just as well be from John Sinclair’s half of Music and Politics.

Sinclair has been to prison for his beliefs and that makes him a better man than most of the rest of us to start with; but that doesn’t alter the fact that, when it comes to penning pieces about these two subjects, about music and politics, he’s a naive (almost childish) theorist and a plain old-fashioned bad writer. In addition to which these pieces (originally written for Jazz and Pop Magazine) are only marginally about music and politics anyway.

The Sinclair style of criticism may be abbreviated thus: “This is good music and if you listen you’ll see why”. His social philosophy, similarly, runs along the lines of “This is true and if you’re not ready to accept it yet, then you’ve have survived these tortures alone is the strongest testimonial possible to the strength of the human spirit. We deal here not with saints but with ordinary men; yet they have responded to the most devious tortures — I mean this literally — by rising above them, consistently.

Thomas K. Clark, in the book’s final letter, sums up their spirit:

“The child is called RESISTANCE.

“The birth of this child is reason for optimism, but even that must be guarded; the child is yet an infant and must undergo much growth before he becomes relevant to the aims and aspirations, goals and hopes of those who labored with the pain of pregnancy which gave him life. From birth to maturity is a long way to travel. Wishing the child to hurry up is of no more consequence than wishing a human child born tomorrow to become an adult the following day. Nature and her processes of evolution, much of which remains a mystery to us, is not sympathetic to our impatience.

“It is wise of the parents to neglect the wish of a speedy growth and concentrate that and all other energy on the proper education of the child. In him must be placed a higher purpose that that which was inherited by his parents, it must be taught a sensitivity greater in dimension than what was taught to those who now hope for him to right the wrongs created by his parent insensitivity; in short, he must be much more courageous in his convictions, stronger in defense of just principles, wiser in his ability to discern between the right and the conventional, and braver about standing up for these things than the parents now who raise him. This is not an easy task, nor is it one which can be accomplished quickly.

“Take your time, Comrade, and your revolutionary child will not have to raise his child for the same reasons you now raise yours.”

Since Attica, numerous prison reform projects have been formed. These are vital, because they alleviate the immediate pressure on the prisoners in this book, as well as others, elsewhere.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that these are the only measures to be taken. An excellent first step, one which might be highly recommended, is to read Maximum Security. The life of the child demands it.

Dave Marsh

got a long way to go.” In both cases, there’s a strong temptation to say Sure, John. Now prove it. Which he’s apparently unwilling (or unable) to do.

There’s an interesting kind of classarrogance operating here — a tapper* than-thou or more-underground-thanthou or maybe more-romantically-radical-than-thou attitude that would be mildly amusing were it not so tragically irresponsible in light of the vital importance of the matters Sinclair almost deals with. His prose abounds with bold statements, well-known names, violent denunciations and enthusiastic praise. But nothing is put together, nothing is convincingly connected, nothing is explained or justified. All the right things are said, in other words, but they’re said in a way that pre-supposes empathy and understanding and close agreement. Sinclair isn’t writing for the people (though that’s doubtless his conceit); he’s writing for his people, which makes him a lousy propagandist and something of an elitist as well.

How is he serving the revolution (or the music) when he writes, in review of a Chick Corean album and presumably with a straight face, “This is some highenergy music, and these brothers really kick out the jams, as we used to say in Detroit”? (Really an incisive critical judgement, huh?) And what is served by calling a lot of people “brothers and sisters” and by putting down “the plastic honko death society of Pat Boone, Dinah Shore, and Spiro T. Agnew and their ilk”? (Surely there are more dangerous, less obvious targets than that.)

There are little things — Sinclair did not hear Jack de Johnette on “filles de Kilimanjaro” ’cause he isn’t there, for instance — but there are some rather broader questions raised by these pieces, too. The whole question of markets, for example, of record companies and concert halls and clubs. It’s commonly held that the formalization, the institutionalization of the presentation of music takes it away from the people, robs the people of an art that they, in fact, created. There’s a point there, but it only works on the simplest, most immediate level. Like it or not, the Clive Davises and Bill Grahams and Doug Westons of the world bring music to thousands of times more people than would ever hear it in free concerts and back-room jam sessions. Maybe the artists aren’t as free, aren’t as potentially powerful on one level once they’ve embraced these markets (though that hasn’t stopped “people’s bands” like the MC-5 and Wilderness Road from doing just that); but then one has to ask at what point (in the real world, now) revolutionary “purity” becomes more important than revolutionary efficacy, at what point imperfect action overtakes untarnished ideology.

Finally, and part and parcel of this, is the sad fact that most “revolutionary art” is not art “of the people” simply because it is not accessible to the people. Try playing the MC-5 (or even Archie Shepp) in a migrant worker’s shack in Fresno or a tenement in Roxbury, Mass, or a steel mill in Pittsburgh if you don’t believe me. I mean, Godard is a hell of a filmmaker but it’s the guys that make the Alka-Seltzer commercials who reach the people. And James Brown has done — and will continue to do — far more for changing values and raising consciousnesses than Marion Brown and Elaine Brown put together. That may not be as it should be, but it’s most definitely, as they say, what it is.

Robert Levin’s articles, also from Jazz and Pop, make up the second half of Music and Politics, and they’re something else again. He’s a quietly brilliant writer (not flashy but subtly dazzling) who knows jazz extremely well and who knows how to let us know what he knows. “Going Outside,” as told to Levin by Sonny Murray (which begins “For a while there were a lot of people trying to kill me”) says more about the birth of the New Jazz than most writers could say in a volume; the Anthony Braxton interview is one of the freshest, most reassuring articles on the future of music (of the arts in general) that I’ve ever read; his “found critique” of “Space” by the MJQ, which contrasts Murray’s thoughts on music at the White House with President Nixon’s introduction of the MJQ in that very place, is brilliant; his piece on the unfortunate evolution of Willis Jackson (“Soul Night Live is black Muzak — as tragic a phenomenon as is the Negro policeman”) is a minor masterpiece; and he’s lucid and painful and thoroughly correct when he writes that “What is meant by ‘every man has his price’ is that every man has his uncertainty about the validity and sanity of his perception of the truth. To ‘sell out’ is to capitulate to that uncertainty”.

There are some nice photos in Music and Politics, including Philippe Gras’ splendidly quixotic shot of Anthony Braxton, and there’s also one absolute howler that shows the Up, of Ann Arbor fame, striding through the snow garbed in assorted trendy vestments and carrying knives and automatic rifles and even a guitar. We’ll be taking over and no pigs gonna stop us, right?

Colman Andrews