B-Sides, Undercurrents and Overtones: Peripheries to Popular in Music, 1960 to the Present
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B-Sides, Undercurrents and Overtones: Peripheries to Popular in Music, 1960 to the Present George Plasketes B-SIDES, UNDERCURRENTS AND OVERTONES: PERIPHERIES TO POPULAR IN MUSIC, 1960 TO THE PRESENT for Julie, Anaïs, and Rivers, heArt and soul B-Sides, Undercurrents and Overtones: Peripheries to Popular in Music, 1960 to the Present GEORGE PLASKETES Auburn University, USA © George Plasketes 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. George Plasketes has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-4405 Surrey GU9 7PT USA England www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Plasketes, George B-sides, undercurrents and overtones : peripheries to popular in music, 1960 to the present. – (Ashgate popular and folk music series) 1. Popular music – United States – History and criticism I. Title 781.6’4’0973 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plasketes, George. B-sides, undercurrents and overtones : peripheries to popular in music, 1960 to the present / George Plasketes. p. cm.—(Ashgate popular and folk music series) ISBN 978-0-7546-6561-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Popular music—United States—History and criticism. I. Title. ML3477.P63 2009 781.640973’09045–dc22 2008046196 ISBN 978-0-7546-6561-8 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-7546-9382-6 (ebk.V) Contents General Editor’s Preface vii Preface: My Back Pages ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction: The Flip Side: Let It B 1 1 Get Your 45s On: Terry Melcher, Lost in the Surf and Sun of the 1960s Sound Waves 13 2 How the Midwest Was Won: The Chicago Suburbs Seven, a Mid-1960s Regional Rotation 25 3 Covering Outside the Lines: Hans Fenger and the Langley Schools Music Project 35 4 Geffen Records v. Neil Young: The Battle of the Brands 51 5 Music and Movie Mutuality: Ry Cooder, the Involved Bystander 69 6 World Music Missionaries: Cross Cultural Convergences 85 7 The Vital Visual Voice of the Videotape Editor: Seamlessly Sculpting Graceland: The African Concert 101 8 Rock Around the Cop: Bochco’s Broadway Blue Print as Television Musical Muse and Martyr 119 9 Must Sing TV: Pop Rock Sitcom Cameo Obscuras 135 10 Umbilical Musical Chords: Lineage, Legacy and Mom and Pop Pedigree 153 11 Die Another Day: Warren Zevon’s Desperado “Deteriorata” 173 Bibliography 195 Index 203 This page has been left blank intentionally General Editor’s Preface The upheaval that occurred in musicology during the last two decades of the twentieth century has created a new urgency for the study of popular music alongside the development of new critical and theoretical models. A relativistic outlook has replaced the universal perspective of modernism (the international ambitions of the 12-note style); the grand narrative of the evolution and dissolution of tonality has been challenged, and emphasis has shifted to cultural context, reception and subject position. Together, these have conspired to eat away at the status of canonical composers and categories of high and low in music. A need has arisen, also, to recognize and address the emergence of crossovers, mixed and new genres, to engage in debates concerning the vexed problem of what constitutes authenticity in music and to offer a critique of musical practice as the product of free, individual expression. Popular musicology is now a vital and exciting area of scholarship, and the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series presents some of the best research in the field.Authors are concerned with locating musical practices, values and meanings in cultural context, and may draw upon methodologies and theories developed in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology and sociology. The series focuses on popular musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is designed to embrace the world’s popular musics from Acid Jazz to Zydeco, whether high tech or low tech, commercial or non-commercial, contemporary or traditional. Derek B. Scott Professor of Critical Musicology University of Leeds, UK This page has been left blank intentionally Preface My Back Pages B-Side Baptism: The Bee (Geez), Busted and Bail The backbeat and spirit between the lines on these pages is rooted in and inspired by my 45 r.p.m. experience beginning in the 1960s. Mid decade. On the first “eveof destruction,” on the verge of the Wonder Years, in the midst of the ongoing British Invasion. The world seemed to be spinning at 45 revolutions per minute. Something in the air, and on the air. At the time, AM radio. In the Chicago vicinity and well beyond, the source was the legendary station, WLS, 890 on the dial. An audio umbilical chord, a simultaneous soundtrack and wish list. My g-g-generations’ version of the contemporary Now! and Totally Hits single compilations in the good old daze, before Napster Nation, iPod people, and burn, baby, burn. The hit single sounds emanating from the airwaves translated into artifact and ritual, baptizing a passionate record relationship and vinylogical time line. The little black discs began to accumulate, a complementary collection to baseball cards. Prized possessions. And they cost less than a dollar. One lawn mowed in the summer, a yard of leaves raked in the fall, and a driveway or sidewalk of shoveled snow in the winter each were worth about six stackable singles for the turn, turn turntable. A decent B-side made the black 7-inch cylinder a two-for-one bonus. Though a bargain, I nonetheless attempted to exit a store without paying for a 45 record (a.k.a. “shoplifting”) one sunny Saturday afternoon at E.J. Korvette’s department store, on the suburb border between North Riverside and Berwyn, fifteen minutes west of the city. The record was the Bee Gees, “New York Mining Disaster, 1941,” a decade before they went disco. Of all the great music circulating at the time, my choice of a song to be a part of my permanent record rather than my record collection was a bit conspicuous. Getting busted for under a buck was bad enough. But having the brothers Gibb as partners in crime rather than Lennon-McCartney, Jagger-Richards, local colors such as the Ides of March or New Colony Six, or any number of one hit wonders of the era, softened the edge-worthiness of the transgression, and compounded the embarrassment. My indiscretion left a dumb as(s)terisk on my juvenile rap sheet, as well as a secretly stupid scar on the soul of my soundtrack. Over the years, I affectionately refer my adolescent act and attraction to the Bee Gees song as a “miner offense,” one that was subconsciously and cosmically connected to my Father’s family’s West Virginia coal mining roots. The happening proved to be a moment of B-side affirmation within my formative 45 experience. When the store detective asked “why?”—that is, why I lifted the record, not why I chose a Bee Gees single—I managed to mutter an x B-SId ES, UNd ERCURRENTS ANd Ov ertones octave, each word slightly climbing the sentence scale to a concluding question: “Well, the song sounds like a Beatles B-side?” My record review reply may have sounded insecurely sarcastic, but I was serious; my seventh grade, hit single savvy in full display. Having flipped enough singles in my youthful record ritual to uncover the beauty of a bonus on its backside, I had experienced a B-side baptism. Perhaps confounded by my peculiar, yet remorseful rationale, the store detective granted me a “Get out of jail” card, letting me slide with a warning. B-side bail. (With a Hail Mary marathon the penance prescribed by the parish priest one week later.) As I stood to leave, resisting the urge to ask if I could buy the 45 on the way out, the song’s lyric about “knowing what it’s like on the outside” cued and played in my head like closing credits, providing soft, mocking accompaniment for my exit from the solitary security space. The scene of the crime, E.J. Korvette’s, is long gone from its Harlem and Cermak corner, but its landmark will always remain within. The escalator to the second floorwas a stairway to heaven ascending to a sacred soundtrack site of my earliest record store ritual, beginnings with 45s and B-sides, and growing into the album age and the larger, more difficultto smuggle, long play 33⅓ album format. Some of my fondest, most vivid youth years memories, in monaural and stereo, are those Sundays in the record department, “The Fabulous All Label Sale!,” shopping with my Father, who never did findout about my felonious 45 Bee Gees blunder, as far as I know. It was my Father, Charles Plasketes, who instilled the virtues of vinyl and fostered my music appreciation, from 45s to LPs, listen-up lessons that have been passed on to our daughter, Anaïs, and son, Rivers, and their downloads and iPods. The permanence of records, the affection for and appreciation of the B-side. george plasketes Sweet Home Alabama Acknowledgements B-Sides might have lingered in Proposal Purgatory, between a rock and marketplace outside Publication Paradise, were it not for Commissioning Editor, Heidi Bishop, and Music Series Editor, Professor Derek Scott. From the beginning, Heidi and Derek were very in tune with my “peripheral vision” of B-Sides.