. . . Before You Die!
Books of lists are definitely one of my top ten favorite things to read.
Maybe I’m seeing them everywhere lately thanks to the holiday season, when a thoughtfully-chosen book of lists makes a solid gift for an impossibly picky movie-lover, music-aficionado, or world-traveler. There appear to be at least two warring publishing outfits working on the “1,000/1,001 . . . Before You Die” premise of list-making, and while their products seem to spawn more argument and debate than consensus, well, perhaps that’s the whole point of obsessive list-making in the first place.
The first one I ran into several months ago was the bracingly-titled 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, by Patricia Schultz. With a true Okie sense of mild inferiority, I hesitatingly paged toward the “O” section of the chapter of places to see in the United States to check out how the Sooner State was represented. I found a single entry there for our entire state–Cattlemen’s Steakhouse–which proudly sits alongside the Grand Canyon, Mount Kilimanjaro, and Count Dracula’s Castle in Romania on Ms. Schultz’s comprehensive global checklist.
Not long afterwards I ran into Schultz’s more narrowly focused 1,000 Places to See in the USA and Canada Before You Die, a far more realistic prospect given my own meager travel budget and rudimentary command of only a single language. Oklahoma is slightly better represented in this volume, with seven entries for the pathologically ambitious traveler to check off his or her life list.
Schultz’s books are very handy either for a starting point for serious travel research or for idle browsing and daydreaming. She provides contact information and web addresses as well as helpful tips on the best times of year to visit, and her lists encompass some off-the-beaten-path entries as well as the obvious highlights. I especially appreciated her write-ups on Oklahoma City’s own Red Earth Festival and the awesome Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.
The same publisher has also released music critic Tom Moon’s daunting 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, which hops from genre to genre in a straight alphabetical listing that is even more opinionated and arguable than Schultz’s travel volumes. Moon’s approach is thoughtful and impassioned, as he takes the “before you die” aspect of the list especially seriously. He notes in the introduction that he saw the title “as a mandate: Everything here had to have some incandescent life-changing energy inside it.” Thus readers will find The Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin rubbing elbows with Ella Fitzgerald and Flatt & Scruggs, while each entry also features key tracks and suggestions for further listening deeper in the artist’s catalog.
The list-making ante is upped by one in editor Steven Jay Schneider’s “1001″ series, which includes 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (thanks a lot, pal) as well as volumes on classical recordings, popular music, and movies. Schneider’s entries are impressively international in scope, featuring many less-familiar recommendations among foreign films and music and lengthier essays on each entry than the 1,000…Before You Die versions.
The Schneider series goes on to demand you view thousands of paintings, taste thousands of foods, and ogle thousands of buildings before exhaustedly collapsing into the sweet caress of death by sensory exhaustion. For readers who enjoy a good list-driven argument or the fantasy of sampling 1001 wines, it’s easy to enjoy (and overlook the explicit threat in the titles of) these would-be authoritative compilations.
Muddy Waters
The newly released film Cadillac Records documents Chicago’s Chess Records from the 1940s to the 1960s, when hugely influential artists like Chuck Berry, Etta James, and Willie Dixon wrote and recorded many of the groundbreaking songs that would first bring African American music to a national audience.
Perhaps the most important of all Chess’s artists was blues legend Muddy Waters, played in the film by the excellent Jeffrey Wright. Robert Gordon’s 2002 biography of Waters, Can’t Be Satisfied, is now out in paperback, and it is a brilliant study of the man and his incalculable influence on 20th century culture.
Gordon’s story is centered around the events of August 31, 1941, when Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax successfully tracked down the 28-year-old Mississippi Delta sharecropper McKinley Morganfield, already legendary in the music-rich region as “Muddy Waters.” Up to this point Waters’ considerable artistic ambitions left him deeply unsettled amid the crushing drudgery of the Delta cotton fields, and Gordon tells the fascinating tale of how the folklorist first recorded Waters’ powerful voice and guitar.
Gordon’s extensive interviews with Waters’ friends and family reveal a troubled, searching soul whose demons were translated into incandescent songs of hurt and longing. The author interestingly contrasts the communal spirit of gospel music and its focus on the afterlife with the immediate, individual release offered by the blues. Little more than two decades after Waters’ first recordings, his music would be a seminal influence on rock musicians like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones and would vault Waters into the pantheon of legendary 20th century artists.
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards provides an entertaining foreword to Can’t Be Satisfied, describing the unmistakeable influence on the band named after one of Waters’s own best-known songs. “There’s a demon in me,” Richards writes, “I think there’s a demon in everyone, a dark piece in us all. And the blues is a recognition of that and the ability to express it and make fun out of it, have joy out of that dark stuff. When you listen to Muddy Waters, you can hear all of the angst and all of the power and all of the hardship that made that man.”
Can’t Be Satisfied is a brilliantly researched, lovingly written testament to Muddy Waters and his continuing influence on popular culture. In this terrific interview with NPR’s Terri Gross, Gordon talks about his work and also plays some of Waters’ earth-shaking, soul-moving music.
Flaming Lips in Print
In honor of last week’s long-awaited release of the Christmas on Mars DVD, it’s well worth taking a look at Jim DeRogatis’s band biography Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips.
The Christmas on Mars movie is only the latest amazing production from Oklahoma City’s fearless freaks of rock and roll. While their history is so often shrouded in local mythology and urban legend, DeRogatis’s book tells the unvarnished story of this group of true Oklahoma cultural heroes whose influence and fame has spread worldwide.
Noted music journalist DeRogatis first interviewed the band in 1989, and he has kept close tabs on their development and groundbreaking work ever since. His book not only profiles the band’s rise and relates the biographies of its members, but DeRogatis also provides an outsider’s perspective on Oklahoma culture and society from the time band leader Wayne Coyne’s family arrived from Pennsylvania in the early 1960s.
Coyne’s roots in the Classen-Ten-Penn neighborhood of Oklahoma City are well drawn by the author, as is the story of bassist Michael Ivins’s transformation from Classen High School valedictorian to mohawked, skeleton-suited psychedelic rocker. Between their first gig at the Blue Note Lounge to a triumphant New Year’s Eve 2004 appearance at New York’s Madison Square Garden, DeRogatis draws on family photo albums, interviews with old friends and bandmates, and his own thoughtful insight to profile this unpretentiously brilliant group.
Early on DeRogatis notes Oklahoma’s official Latin motto, which translates as “work conquers all.” Coyne tells the writer at one point, “Anybody with as much luck and determination as me could do this,” but as DeRogatis makes clear, the band’s extraordinary work ethic was paired with a genuinely inspired artistic vision. The reader is often reminded of Coyne’s 11 years as a fast-food fry cook on Classen Blvd., during which time he expanded the band’s horizons and craft with constant touring until reaching major-label success in the early 1990s.
Despite his unlimited access and lengthy interviews with the band, DeRogatis isn’t shy about including honest critiques of their body of work. The result is an excellent read both for longtime fans and new acolytes who wonder how the singer in a dapper designer suit ended up surfing across concert crowds in his giant inflatable ball.
Jim DeRogatis’s Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock is a sweeping history of the genre that deeply influenced the Lips and so many other bands. Fascinating portraits of supergroups like Pink Floyd are balanced by obscure tales of artists like Texas’s 13th Floor Elevators and the Andy Warhol associates of the Velvet Underground.
DeRogatis’s excellent, heartbreaking study of the iconic rock writer Lester Bangs, Let It Blurt, tells the amazing story of the real-life character memorably played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film Almost Famous and is one of the most remarkable rock and roll biographies ever written.
