I have to admit, I'm really surprised I haven't heard a gigantic howl of rage over Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's announcement yesterday that the Department of Defense was going to lift the ban on women serving in ground combat units. Other than reading . . . somewhere . . . a series of Tweets from a former staff member of the McCain/Palin campaign that men fight for women, and how can we expect men to fight with women when they will want to protect them, it's been relatively quiescent.
Which may mean nothing. Or it may mean the howl is just delayed.
In any event, since women already serve in a variety of combat positions, have faced hostile fire, and, as a guest on "Talk Of The Nation" said today, the whole notion of "front line combat units" is losing meaning in contemporary forms of combat, maybe most folks are bowing to the inevitable.
We ask too, almighty, that where our path seems blanketed by thorns of oppression and rippled by pains of despair, we ask for your guidance toward the light of deliverance and that the vision of those who came before us and dreamed of this day, that we recognise that their visions still inspire us. They are a great cloud of witnesses, unseen by the naked eye but all around us, thankful that their living was not in vain. - Myrlie Evers-Williams
Hearing Myrlie Evers-Williams invocation at today's inaugural ceremony, I started to wonder if it is possible that we might yet be America. Her invocation of the image from the Letter to the Hebrews of the great cloud of witnesses, what we profess in the Creed as "the communion of the saints", made me think it is still possible that we could rise above the madness and pettiness of our current moment and really be the place that so many dreamed we could be. That we could the land Ms. Evers-Williams' first husband died trying to achieve. Perhaps, not only his eyes, but those of the men and women, the slaves and Chinese coolies, the Spanish-speaking peasants and Gaelic-tinged Irish immigrants, the original inhabitants of the lands, all those who trudged through the filth of American bigotry and hatred and will to violence never surrendering the belief that America could be what we always say we are - those dreams and hopes, the shattered lives and broken bodies might yet find satisfaction when America becomes.
At first glance, there seems little chance this will happen any time soon. The forces resisting this President are powerful. All the same, the forces resisting even the possibility of an African-American President were powerful before 2008. Indeed, if anyone had asked me as late as 2004 if it was even possible we could have an African-American President in my lifetime, I would have said no.
Now, we celebrate his inauguration for a second term.
Without minimizing the nearly insane vitriol, the almost psychotic reaction among those who oppose the very idea a person such as Barack Obama would presume to be President, I do believe it possible to satisfy the hopes and dreams of those who have gone before us. It will take work, and a refusal to settle for anything less than America being America.
With her words, Ms. Evers-Williams has reminded us that this time, our time, presents us not only the challenges that all historical moments offer. We are reminded that it is not just for us and our posterity that we are to work; the debt we owe to those who have gone before can only be repaid when America tries to be America. Let us accept the grace of Divine Providence to lead us down that narrow, thorny path.
When rock and roll first emerged in the mid-1950's, the excitement it engendered among its teenage fans created mass panic among older people. It was loud, it was boisterous, it was fun, it got people dancing. A rock and roll concert was a time out and away from the rules and omnipresent conformity of the surrounding society; a bunch of white kids could celebrate the joyous music of African-American musicians like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, giving themselves permission, for half an hour or forty-five minutes (the shows were a lot shorter back then), to set aside their inhibitions. The power of the music, all facets of it - including the extra-musical dimensions of race and age - was enough to turn many rock and roll shows in to what appeared to untrained eyes to be mini-riots.
When The Beatles first toured America, and the music was drowned out by the screaming of the fans, many thought there had to be something wrong, perhaps even sinister, about something as silly as electrified and sped-up twelve-bar blues songs played by four well-dressed, polite young Englishmen. It was only when the floodgates opened and other British bands emerged that the relative tameness of The Beatles concert presence was appreciated. The Rolling Stones, mimicking their blues heroes, strutted and postured on stage. The Animals would wail and screech, the rolling organ, particularly in their cover of "House Of The Rising Sun", sounding a bit too much like the music of the brothel the band was singing about. Finally, The Who arrived, and when they premiered on American TV, they ended their performance by destroying not only their instruments, but their equipment as well.
Clearly, something was happening.
Theatricality was hardly something new to pop music. The whole minstrel tradition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was constructed around it. Jazz and pop performers were adept not just at playing music, but putting on a show. In chicken shacks and honkey-tonks across much of rural America, black and white audiences were treated to a variety of performers who added a kind of panache to their performances by dressing in odd costumes, adopting strange stage personas, adding props to their stage sets so the show became just that.
In the 1950's, the blues singer/guitarist Howlin' Wolf would sometimes begin his shows by emerging from a coffin. When Elvis Presley swung his hips on national television, he may not have noticed the sexuality inherent in what he was doing, but millions of parents did, and they didn't like it one bit.
All performers struggle not just to play their music well, presenting it to listeners with integrity as music. When performing, they can lose themselves in a performance, expressing the emotional content of the song through facial features, movements about the stage, and interaction with other band members as well as members of the audience. The rigid, polite-looking way the Beatles performed may have warmed the hearts of parents across America; it was a far cry from Chuck Berry duck-walking across the stage as he played his Gibson, sometimes slinging it between his legs, pointing it at the audience in a gesture that no one would misunderstand.
By the late 1960's, the desire to present not just a musical concert, but a whole experience, goaded many performers to new heights. In 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix famously lit his guitar on fire and continued to play it, making Pete Townshend - who sat in the audience and fumed as he watched Hendrix not just steal The Who's act, but show how it could be done better - wish he had lost a toss of the dice, letting Hendrix go first. The Grateful Dead employed a light show that created a visual representation of the combination of effects of the psychedelics they were taking and the music they were performing.
In 1968, a British band named The Crazy World of Arthur Brown enjoyed a brief moment of success with a psychedelically-tinged song called "Fire" (the band's drummer was a young British student of the American jazz drummer Gene Krupa; his name was Carl Palmer). When they appeared on Top of the Pops, they showed the world what theatricality in pop music might look like:
Not just sets, but make-up, a whole stage-persona that reflected the music! Was it possible that musicians could do this? Was it possible to present music not just as music, but to entertain an audience by making the music an integral part of a much more lavish production?
Why, sure.
In the first half of the next decade, this trend toward theatricality spanned musical styles. Concerts became more than just concerts. They became events. Whether it was Peter Gabriel of Genesis dressing up in costumes and shaving his head in a reverse-Mohawk:
Or funk master George Clinton building a space ship, landing P-Funk in cities across America and tearing it up each and every night:
The idea that a concert was more than about music gripped all sorts of musicians, bands, and performers. There was David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust
Or the absurd extreme of KISS, for whom the concert experience became the sine qua non of the bands existence.
Finally, there was Alice Cooper. Cooper put on a show that left nothing untried. He hung himself. he electrocuted himself. He had himself guillotined. He wore odd makeup. There were non-musical extras, sometimes scantily-clad women. For his performance of "I Love The Dead", he would sometimes use a blow-up doll as a prop.
As the money poured in and the good times rolled through the early and mid-1970's, the idea that a band or individual performing on stage didn't have to just stand in front of a microphone and sing, but create something larger, a whole experience that would leave the fans with the sense they were part of something larger than life, took hold. The music was louder now; sometimes, like with the prog bands, it was intricate, which didn't prevent, for example, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer going out on tour with a stage catapult that launched a grand piano to its destruction. Other times, if the music was simple, clear, and filled with fun, the huge performance - complete with smoke machines, flame pots, and tons of lights - made it seem more than it really was. Not only were musicians experimenting with the music; they were experimenting with performance as well, creating a whole microcosm for the concertgoer, a tiny space-and-time away that wasn't just about the music, but the entire experience.
Even as the punk revolt in Britain seemed to put an end to the pretensions of some musicians to do anything other than stand on stage and play music, some bands held on to the idea that rock performance could be about more than just the sounds, all the while leaving the integrity of the music itself as music untouched. Precisely because the music these underground musicians, particularly in Britain outside the London punk scene, was louder, brasher, more outrageous than anything the punks were doing (except perhaps killing people or themselves), there was this urge, this desire to make the concert experience reflect the weight of the music they were playing.
As the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was being born, it already had all sorts of touchstones from the recent past from which to derive ideas about performing. Integrity and authenticity weren't just about the music, it seemed; integrity and authenticity could also be layered beneath all sorts of props, the adoption of stage personas, communicating with the growing number of fans the reality that the music and the musicians understood each other well enough.
Remember the election? It was in all the papers. President Obama won what turned out to be an easy victory over his Republican rival. In a year in which they were particularly vulnerable, Democratic candidates not only won enough to hold the Democratic majority in the US Senate; they actually increased their majority. While the Republicans continue to maintain their majority in the House of Representatives, Republican candidates received one million fewer votes than Democratic candidates. Altogether, it was a banner election year for the Democratic Party.
And the tide continues to roll on. All major polling on attitudes toward the President, the Congress, and the American people's attitudes toward the two major parties continue to demonstrate a strong swing toward the Democratic Party. Even as the House Majority and Senate Minority try to find ways of slowing or even stopping legislative action from the Democrats, the Republican leadership is held responsible by the American people for lack of action.
Yet, nothing seems to change, does it? One would expect a press corps inured by 30 years of GOP dominance not to take the Democrats or liberal ideas seriously. Still, whether it is the major figures in control of the various parts of the Executive or Legislative branches or our most highly-paid commentators upon our national life, one grows weary looking for a sign the election made any difference whatsoever.
Frustrated myself over the near-hysteria I witness daily, as people carry on about Barack Obama's tyranny, and the various threats to impeach or otherwise curtail efforts by the Executive Branch to work on solutions to our gun violence problem, I realized the answer was both obvious and sitting right in front of me.
As those crazy kids say these days: It's all about the Benjamins.
Nothing made that more clear to me than reading this piece from Rick Perlstein, published this past fall in The Baffler. A marvelous history of the rise of Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, the grand poo-bahs of right-wing fundraising (I remember coming across their names back when I was in college; you could occasionally see Viguerie doing TV spots, voicing various right-wing verities with a practiced smile that reminded me of every con-artist I'd ever seen portrayed on television), Perlstein does a masterful job linking the insane world of the wingnut money machine, a whole network of what he identifies quite correctly as the snake-oil salesmen who sell everything from pyramid schemes to real-life snake-oil to gullible readers of right-wing literature, and the culmination of this whole history of untruth in Mitt Romney Presidential campaign. Perlstein's conclusion is both correct and devastating: Romney's unending dishonesty wasn't a flaw in the system. It was the fruit of a system that has relied, since the misty days after the defeat of Barry Goldwater, on dishonesty as a way to separate people from their pocket change.
We liberals tend to believe that things like good ideas that work, actual evidence from the world in which we all live, and the democratic process giving us elected officials to enact the policies or support the laws they said they would do when they campaigned; we believe these things matter. While the fundamental anti-democratic spirit of the right is both well-known and well-documented, what Perlstein does in this article is make clear how much fundamental dishonesty in the pursuit of money, rather than any real desire to win elections, sway public opinion, or change public policy, lies at the heart of the right-wing political machine. The argument between the left and the right in America doesn't really exist because each side is engaged in completely different activities.
When we read stories that Karl Rove just signed another multi-year contract with FOXNews, after a very public - and quite funny - on-air flame out after his months and years of mendacity caught up with him, viewers of Fox should understand just how much contempt the network has for you. When we read stories that a recently elected Senator has set up a Political Action Committee that raised over $1.6 million, spending only $78,000 actually supporting candidates for elected office, we shouldn't be surprised. Just after the election, having read story after story about a vaunted Romney GOTV effort that failed miserably, we read political autopsies that included quotes from leaders of this alleged vote-getting machine who were surprised that Obama's GOTV organization actually . . . got people to the polls! They couldn't believe the Obama campaign wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme, paying people to produce good soundbites for local and national news organizations.
That's why so many liberal bloggers still get accused of secretly pocketing money from George Soros. On the right, all sorts of entities, organizations, individuals, and even corporations pay a whole lot of money to news aggregators, blogs, and multi-media "personalities", so they just assume folks on the left are doing the same thing. These accusations give up the game, however, demonstrating as they do the fundamental dishonesty of too many right-wing pundits. They are honest enough that they're in it for the money; they assume folks on the left are, too.
If you see and hear claims that the President has a secret plan to confiscate all the weapons in America prior to establishing UN Agenda 21, remember: These claims are birthed not in a careful consideration of the actual evidence from the President's actions or policies. Rather, they are lifted from fundraising letters from the NRA and Glenn Beck's Citadel, who promise either to fight the usurpation of power by a tyrant or a haven of freedom from the creeping authoritarianism. All of it, along with miracle cures for cancer, online get-rich-quick schemes, and the promise of a better tomorrow can be yours, as long as you send these organizations - and far too many more - your money.
In a world of ideas, the idea that no one ever got rich overestimating the intelligence of the American people continues to provide more than a decent living for phony politicians, and the hucksters and snake-oil organizations of the American Conservative movement.
The Second Amendment was not enacted to provide a check on government tyranny; rather, it was written to assure the Southern states that Congress would not undermine the slave system by using its newly acquired constitutional authority over the militia to disarm the state militia and thereby destroy the South's principal instrument of slave control. In effect, the Second Amendment supplemented the slavery compromise made at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and obliquely codified in other constitutional provisions. - Carl T. Bogus
If you click the link, you will be directed to the law review article, "The Hidden History Of The Second Amendment" from the University of California at Davis Law Review 31 (1998): 309. I won't comment on the article itself, offering it only as an antidote to so much of the nonsense out there, such as this:
The primary purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure that the citizenry has a fighting chance to resist tyranny
When people write this, they are exploring the deep recesses of their ass.
I will include the following detail that is left out of most history text books.
This was a no- holds-barred struggle, and the adversaries pressed every available strategic or tactical advantage. The following example gives a sense of the intensity of the struggle. The day after delegates to the Philadelphia Convention signed the proposed new Constitution, Federalists sought to have the Pennsylvania Legislature, which had been meeting upstairs at the Philadelphia State House while the Constitutional Convention was in session downstairs, vote to convene a ratifying convention in Pennsylvania two months hence.[64] Lacking the votes to defeat this proposal, the anti-Federalists sought to block the measure by failing to return after the noon recess, thereby preventing a quorum.[65] The legislative session was due to end the next day, and without a quorum there would be considerable delay before the Pennsylvania Legislature could consider the matter again.[66] The Federalists, capitalizing on the opportunity to create a sense of momentum by having Pennsylvania vote to convene a ratifying convention before the ink had dried on the proposed new Constitution, directed the sergeant of arms to fetch the missing members.[67] The sergeant located two¾ just [Page 325] the number needed to complete a quorum ¾ escorted them against their will back to their seats in the State House, and barred the doors until the assembly voted by a narrow margin to convene a state ratifying convention.
I should add that, while important, this history shouldn't drive people to insist the Amendment is either irrelevant or unnecessary. It's important only to make clear that the insistence the Federalists supported armed insurrection, while nonsensical from a logical point of view, isn't supported by the actual historical record. How courts interpret the Amendment today, and how those interpretations impact how we regulate or do not regulate firearms in this country should rely on contemporary jurisprudence, keeping the history only as a touchstone rather than front and center. After all, I don't want our understanding of any of the Constitutional Amendments limited to their meaning at the time of ratification. That leaves no room for growth, change, or for the Amendments themselves to continue to live and breathe in different historical settings.
I do feel sorry for a guy named Bogus, I gotta admit.
Suicides in the U.S. military surged to a record 349 last year, far exceeding American combat deaths in Afghanistan, and some private experts are predicting the dark trend will grow worse this year. (Source) Dobbs responded by claiming that Obama is "so committed to constraining or dismissing outright our Second Amendment rights, it makes you wonder why he's not ridding the Constitution of the First Amendment as well." He later said, "You've got to wonder why the president doesn't double down in his assault on the Constitution, taking on not only the Second, but the First Amendment, the Fourth, the Fourteenth." Dobbs then suggested that the reason Obama has "begun with the Second Amendment" is because "[w]ithout our rights under the Second Amendment, removing the rest of our Bill of Rights would be a lot easier."(Source) The Pentagon has struggled to deal with the suicides, which Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and others have called an epidemic. The problem reflects severe strains on military personnel burdened with more than a decade of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, complicated by anxiety over the prospect of being forced out of a shrinking force. “The White House’s recent announcement they will use executive orders and executive actions to infringe on our constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms is an unconstitutional and unconscionable attack on the very founding principles of this republic,” Stockman said in a statement. “I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment.”(Source)
Military suicides began rising in 2006 and soared to a then-record 310 in 2009 before leveling off for two years. It came as a surprise to many that the numbers resumed an upward climb this year, given that U.S. military involvement in Iraq is over and the Obama administration is taking steps to wind down the war in Afghanistan.
"Now that we're decreasing our troops and they're coming back home, that's when they're really in the danger zone, when they're transitioning back to their families, back to their communities and really finding a sense of purpose for themselves," said Kim Ruocco, whose husband, Marine Maj. John Ruocco, killed himself between Iraq deployments in 2005. She directs a suicide prevention program for a support group, Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS.
“Postponing sequestration doesn’t prevent, it just prolongs the uncertainty for our force and for our military families,” said Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Readiness is what’s now in jeopardy. We’re on the brink of creating a hollow force, the very thing we said we must avoid.”(Source)
“But for the rest of the force, operations, maintenance and training will be gutted. We’ll ground aircraft, return ships to port, and sharply curtail training across the force,” he said. “Within months, we’ll be less prepared. Within a year, we’ll be unprepared.”
“I don’t know what to do,” sighed Gene Rosen. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid?’” Someone posted a photo of his house online. There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the “emotional Jewish guy,” and dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” him as a fraud. One email purporting to be a business inquiry taunted: “How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?”(Source)
And finally, a last dose of reality: Since the Sandy Hook shootings, as of January 15, there have been 919 shooting deaths in the United States. That's around thirty a day.(Source)
As a free people, we always have the choice not to pay attention to matters of public importance. We have the choice to follow the siren song of those who, not having our interests or the public interests at heart, manipulate our feelings on a particular matter, creating a tempest in a piss pot (as a friend of mine wrote recently on Facebook). All the while, matters of very real concern to all of us pass unnoticed. Things about which we should exercise our emotions and our intellect are ignored for the illusions ginned up through fear and lies. A day will come when we will mourn the fact that we ignored the reality in front of us for the fantasies cooked up by powerful interests to further their own purposes. All I can say is, don't say no one told you.
As I wrote yesterday, I'm still trying to come to grips with the whole matter of the suicide of Aaron Swartz. Not because I knew him well, as I also made clear. On the contrary, part of my own sadness is that I didn't even recognize the name, or know even one of the many contributions he made in his too-short life.
In this remembrance, economist John Quiggin mentions Swartz's role in Quiggin's own work debunking something I had no idea existed! Apparently, for a couple decades, there was a concerted effort to create this alternate universe where DDT was a harmless chemical whose use was moving us toward a world without malaria; this near-utopia was foiled by the evil Rachel Carson and her junk science, which resulted in a worldwide ban on the use of DDT, resulting in the deaths of millions of children, particularly in poor countries. Since we all know that liberals are the real racists, it is obvious this was her plan all along - to kill little black and brown babies through the evil machinations of her fake, alleged "science".
Apparently, there's even a web site with a "malaria death clock", with Rachel Carson's image right next to it. Some writers have said she is responsible for more deaths than Hitler (yeah, I always love it when they drag that failed Austrian artist's name into their arguments).
In 2003, Quiggin published a piece on his own website outlining the history of DDT's use and overuse, and the resultant multiple problems that arose. It was a response to an alleged "balanced approach" that did not call out junk science as junk science. Even ten years ago, Quiggin was clear enough that DDT was being phased out even before Carson's Silent Spring was published because its overuse had resulted in a noticeable lack of effectiveness. The other hazards from DDT - the near-extinction of several species of raptors who fed on DDT-infected fish, resulting in weakened egg shells; it correlation with certain cancers when ingested by humans - were only beginning to come to light, and added impetus for the drive to end its use.
Now, all this is history and science, which as most folks know, are things certain quarters of the American Political Right are actively hostile toward. In 2007, Swartz wrote a slightly longer piece, outlining much the same historical facts, as well as the rather loud and boisterous media campaign aiming to brand Rachel Carson as some kind of anti-human criminal. Toward the end, Swartz did something very clever: he showed that he had heard Deep Throat in All The President's Men and had followed the money.
Perhaps the most vocal group spreading this story is Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM). Founded in 2000 by Roger Bate, an economist at various right-wing think tanks, AFM has run a major PR campaign to push the pro-DDT story, publishing scores of op-eds and appearing in dozens of articles each year. Bate and his partner Richard Tren even published a book laying out their alternate history of DDT: When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story.
A funding pitch uncovered by blogger Eli Rabbett shows Bate's thinking when he first started the project. "The environmental movement has been successful in most of its campaigns as it has been 'politically correct,'" he explained (Tobacco Archives, 09/98). What the anti-environmental movement needs is something with "the correct blend of political correctness (...oppressed blacks) and arguments (eco-imperialism [is] undermining their future)." That something, Bate proposed, was DDT.
In an interview, Bate said that his motivation had changed after years of working on the issue of malaria. "I think my position has mellowed, perhaps with age," he told Extra!. "[I have] gone from being probably historically anti-environmental to being very much pro-combating malaria now." He pointed to the work he'd done making sure money to fight malaria was spent properly, including a study he co-authored in the respected medical journal the Lancet(7/15/06) on dishonest accounting at the World Bank. He insisted that he wasn't simply pro-DDT, but instead was willing to support whatever the evidence showed worked. And he flatly denied that AFM had ever received money from tobacco, pharmaceutical or chemical companies.
Still, AFM has very much followed the plan Bate laid out in his original funding pitch to corporations: First, create "the intellectual arguments to make our case," then "disseminate these arguments to people in [developing countries]" who can make convincing spokespeople, and then "promote these arguments ... in the West." The penultimate page gives another hint that stopping malaria isn't the primary goal: "Is the DDT problem still relevant?" is listed as an "intellectual issue to be resolved"--once they got funding. (When asked for comment on this, Bate became upset and changed the subject.)
Quiggin, who is both clever and tenacious, published a piece in the Prospect with co-author Tim Lambert the next year. As he makes clear in his remembrance written over the weekend, it was Swartz who brought to his attention this link between the junk-science of the pro-DDT crowd and the tobacco lobby, in particular Roger Bates.
By 1990, it seemed that the public health issues surrounding DDT had been largely resolved. In developed countries, DDT had been replaced by less environmentally damaging alternatives. But soon the situation changed radically. The tobacco industry, faced with the prospect of bans on smoking in public places, sought to cast doubt on the science behind the mooted ban. But a campaign focused on tobacco alone was doomed to failure. So the industry tried a different tack, an across-the-board attack on what it called “junk science.” Its primary vehicle was the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a body set up by PR firm APCO in the early 1990s and secretly funded by Philip Morris. . . .
Tobacco companies created a European version of TASSC, the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), led by Roger Bate, another tobacco lobbyist. In the late 1990s, Bate established “Africa Fighting Malaria,” a so-called “astroturf” organisation based in Washington DC. His aim was to drive a wedge between public health and the environment by suggesting that by banning DDT to protect birds, environmentalists were causing many people to die from malaria. Between them, Milloy’s TASSC and Bate’s Africa Fighting Malaria convinced many that DDT was a panacea for malaria, denied to the third world by the machinations of rich environmentalists.
Bate implies that all he did for tobacco interests was a little consulting on “international health” and that the money did not influence his opinions because it was paid after he wrote the two articles and because Philip Morris approached him. Unfortunately for Bate, the Tobacco Documents are available online, and Bate and the ESEF feature in many of them.
What follows is an extensive citation list from the online Tobacco archive, demonstrating that Bate's role in the pro-DDT business was in fact part of a far larger public relations campaign to discredit anti-tobacco science to prevent regulation. The whole thing is worth a look, if for no other reason than to demonstrate two things I find fascinating in our digital age: First, don't misrepresent yourself online, because it's just way too easy to find out just how disingenuous you are; second, the sheer quantity of information available online does make it difficult to find a place to land if one is trying to do research. Lambert does an excellent job culling through the thousands of pages of documents to demonstrate just how intertwined Bate was with the tobacco companies.
Lambert's second reply deals specifically with the ways Bate has misrepresented the history of DDT. Again - don't lie online! It's just way too easy for someone to find it out.
Now, this little bit of internet history may seem marginal. In fact, however, it is not. First, and most important, it demonstrates the way nonsense can go viral on the internet. As Swartz's 2007 piece demonstrated, the claims against Carson were getting wide play in mainstream publications, without the reporters making clear how wrong they were. Second, it demonstrates the way the "war on science" is actually an attempt by large corporations to protect their financial interests by creating a climate of doubt in a public that is just way too willing to pretend there might be another side to any story. The pro-DDT campaign wasn't important for the tobacco company in and for itself; it was a way for them to test the effectiveness of a media campaign waged against public health organizations on what was thought to be long-settled public policy and well-documented science. That there are still right-bloggers out there who push nonsense like this is irrelevant; that they have no idea how they've been used by large corporations to push an entirely different agenda is kind of sad.
Finally, Swartz's role in this whole story is important because he was central in pointing out the role large corporations were playing in our seemingly never-ending fight to remind people that science is a legitimate enterprise. This is a big deal. Using online sources to point people in the direction of generous contributions from corporate entities to groups doing particular lobbying and PR campaigns can be daunting; Swartz did it easily, and presented his case clearly.
Remember this. He did this at 21. Imagine, given support and time, rather than harassment, indictment, and suicide, what else Aaron Swartz could have helped uncover. Cracking the shell around right-wing Crazy Town is always commendable; doing it in a way that exposes the role of corporate money in manipulating both the public and policy makers is an enormous contribution to our common life. The guy deserved a medal instead of prosecution.
Do you use an RSS feed? Are you on Reddit? Are you among those - myself included - who set to one side the legalize surrounding what is and is not permissible, downloading material from the internet without a thought or care?
If any of these things are true, then the death of Aaron Swartz yesterday should mean something to you. Taking his own life at the very young age of 26, Swartz had already managed to invent the RSS feed, as well as get in on the ground floor of the social networking site Reddit. At 19, he heard about independent researcher Rick Perlstein and created a website for Perlstein free of charge.
In July, Swartz was indicted by federal prosecutors in Massachusetts for allegedly illegally downloading millions of documents from the online scholarly journal archive JSTOR. Defending himself against the charges would have exhausted what resources he had managed to accumulate in his short life. If convicted, he faced over thirty years in federal prison.
As Charlie Pierce noted in a comment on one thread somewhere discussing Swartz's suicide, perhaps if Swartz had been laundering billions of dollars of drug and terrorist money, he would be OK. Heck, if he had imploded his company and nearly collapsed the world economy, he could sue he US government, like AIG! Instead, Swartz, acting out of the conviction that intellectual property - in particular intellectual property that was created with public money - is not something from which anyone should derive profit, but rather the property of all people, downloaded millions of pages of documents from JSTOR. For this, the US Attorney's office in Massachusetts unleashed the hounds on this young man.
Of course, it should also be noted that Swartz was a chronic depressive. Rick Perlstein notes that Swartz wrote extensively of his identification with the late author David Foster Wallace after Wallace killed himself. Perlstein, the one among the many who've written about Swartz over the past twenty-four hours who seems to have been most deeply effected by the young man's death, was blunt yesterday: He places the blame for Swartz's death squarely on the federal government for hounding this young man to death.
In response, some have noted that, as a chronic depressive, eliminating personal responsibility in such a fashion removes any agency Swartz himself should have.
Knowing little other than what I've read, I find these arguments of little value (except perhaps to reveal much about those who make them). What I do know for certain is this: Even though I couldn't have named him before yesterday morning, what I've read in just 24 hours convinces me that all of us have lost, and lost dearly, with this young man's passing. Whether a tragedy or a crime, his suicide has robbed us of a tremendous human being, a young man who packed more living in his short life than many twice his age. He gave to man freely; he offered the world the fruits of his intellectual labor not for his own aggrandizement but to make the world a little bit better place. He was a firm believer in the power of knowledge, that the world runs not on "information" but understanding, and put his tremendous resources of intellect and passion behind those persons and institutions and causes that furthered as broad a dissemination of real understanding as possible. Reading the many, many things this young man has done made me wonder about the old metaphor about pulling a single thread, then watching the whole piece of stitching unravel. Swartz's participation in so much of our contemporary wired intellectual life was such that, losing him, we lose a component that holds so much of it together.
We are all the less, whether we knew his name or not, for the death of Aaron Swartz. Over the next few days, as I digest just some of the amazing things he did, I may revisit not only his accomplishments, but be a tiny part of a growing number of people trying to shine a light on what seems an over-the-top prosecution. Did this contribute to Swartz's decision to kill himself? Is he solely responsible for his death, perhaps mitigated by a struggle with depression? These are questions that, absent clear evidence one way or another, I believe are probably in the realm of unanswerable. The least service I can provide, I hope, is to make clear all Swartz has done, the good things for which he worked and fought, and the many ways he has made our lives better.
It isn't enough, I know. But I hope it might be possible to take that thread and, if not reconstruct the whole piece of cloth, at the very least show how it fit in the larger work.
Imagine yourself, as you are now, suddenly finding yourself waking up in the mid-1970's. Apart from all the superficial differences - gas costs what?!?! don't they sell bras for young women? - if you're a music fan, you will find yourself bewildered by the labels fixed to various music*. There will be bands of which you might have heard, like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Some of the biggest acts are bands who, by the middle of the decade, are running out of ideas and starting to sound either tired or pompous and in any case boring.
If you peruse magazines covering the music industry like Rolling Stone and Creem, you will probably find yourself bewildered by the far-too-cavalier assignment of the label "heavy metal" to certain bands and music. Even more odd, those bands that you, a refugee from forty years later, are credited with creating this particular style, are upset over the label and refuse to wear it!
You turn on the radio or flip through the pages of a magazine and you'll find the label used to describe the American power trio Grand Funk Railroad.
While you might not hear it on the radio, you'll hear the label used to describe King Crimson.
In short, the label seemed tossed about without reference to much of anything other than a dedication to playing the electric guitar really loudly. The record companies, always on the lookout for the next big thing, signed bands with reckless abandon. The times were flush enough that they could support a pop music centered on navel-gazing singer/songwriters like James Taylor and Paul Simon, while more traditional rock bands like The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead, continued to produce music, sometimes the finest of their careers, by-and-large under the radar of the mainstream. Music dumped in various categories - progressive, heavy metal, hard rock - was treated either with disdain or adoration, depending upon whether one was a critic or fan, yet the fans, far more than the critics, were wary of such labeling, at least at the time.
In sum, by the middle of the decade, much of the creative flourish of the turn of the decade was wearing itself out, with copycats and third-tier musicians and bands filling up the space needed on radio playlists. Heavy metal, while birthed by many and was yet to flower completely, was either dismissed as noise for noise's sake, or even (on more than one occasion) declared dead. Yet, "dead" was far more descriptive of the creative energies that had fueled the rise of so many different bands, looking and sounding distinct. Mass marketing, the pressure to surpass each previous recording, and the desire to keep doing something new had drained many musicians and bands to the point where moving forward seemed impossible (indeed, in 1974, Robert Fripp would break up King Crimson and retire from performing rock music for five years; the bands posthumous release, Red, was perhaps the clearest indication why that was a smart move).
The repeated declarations of the death of rock and roll, like the epitaphs for jazz or the blues, ignored the fact that while the biggest bands might be running out of new ideas, there is, as there has always been, a fresh stream of younger musicians who want to take what they've heard and apply their own imprimatur upon it. Indeed, before the decade was out, as Britain in particular was gripped by the shooting star of punk, then post-punk, and the major record labels scrambled playing catch-up, several bands were listening to the heavy metal being played on the radio and thinking, "I can do this better." One such group, formed in Black Sabbath's hometown of Birmingham, was, like Sabbath, rooted in the blues. Their visual style borrowed heavily from the American west, with their lead singer, Rob Halford, often appearing on stage wrapped in fringed suede and cowboy boots and the two lead guitarists, K. K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, wearing cowboy hats. While Halford and Tipton were late additions to the band - it had originally formed in 1970, and Halford and Tipton would be added in 1973 and 1974 respectively - it had already been touring heavily in England and, in 1974, managed to snag a record contract after a heavy tour of Scandinavia. Their first record, Rocka Rolla, was released to almost universal silence. It makes sense, as there was little to distinguish the record from hundreds of other recordings flooding the market at the time. A careful listener, however, might hear shades of something different, an attempt to take the music someplace different.
As with many other types of music, making a particular sound takes time. It takes effort. It takes a willingness to embrace some things while letting other things fall by the wayside. Finally, it includes a willingness to take risks, and there is one more element from the early- to mid-1970's where "risk" was presented in huge splashes of light and theatrics, risks that would pay off for decades to come in ways that few would realize at the time.
*I think it's also important to note the role the record companies played both in insisting on labeling music using different categories. There is also the problem of musical segregation, as well as stylistic segregation. As a child growing up in the 1970's, I listened to and enjoyed funk and soul music, but was bewildered by the fact it just wasn't played on the radio in my little corner of rural, upstate New York. The impact of social and economic changes is an important part of the story, and one to which I shall repair at some point, but I just wanted to note that it is in my mind even if I don't make it explicit.
It would be nice to admit that I haven't been posting as regularly because I'm just so darn busy. I really do want to continue telling the story of heavy metal in the way I'm telling it, but every time I sit down to do so, other stuff crowds it out. The last thing I want to do, the last thing I've ever wanted, is to be just one more voice in the shrill chorus, repeating the bleatings of, well, pretty much anyone. The gun issue, which all should have known would descend to the depths once Wayne LaPierre walked away from the microphone at his press conference a week after the Sandy Hook shooting, has become ubiquitous. By and large, as a friend complained quite cogently and eloquently yesterday on Facebook, it has been dominated by idiocy, nonsense, lies, and a kind of spittle-flecked hysteria that doesn't make it possible to talk about what is "really" going on because far too many people are aping Matt Drudge and screeching "Hitler! Stalin! TYRANNY!!!"
First of all, Hitler never said the things all those stupid Instagrams claim he said. He didn't confiscate any weapons, or pass draconian gun control laws. As for Stalin . . . I'm not even sure where to begin with that one.
Furthermore, consider the mindset here. On one side are folks who are saying something fairly reasonable: ten to twelve thousand Americans - our fellow citizens - are killed every year by firearms. Owning a firearm is far more likely to result in it being used to injure or kill a family member or friend - anywhere from four to twelve times, depending upon the study cited - than to defend against criminal home invasion. What's being proposed, at least to my mind, are a series of largely cosmetic controls - limiting the number of rounds a magazine can hold; banning the future sale of "assault weapons" which, as many on the right point out correctly, is a media phrase that refers to no real thing (kind of like "partial birth abortion", but I digress) - that do not address the fundamental issue of rampant gun violence. I also consider the matter of mental health to be a red herring; most of the people who use firearms in criminal activity are neither clinically mentally ill, or were prior to some pivotal event perhaps bringing on a severe depression or other mitigating factor that causes them to threaten or injure or kill. Far more prevalent is the kind of rampant insecurity among American men that gets reassurance like the kind offered by Bushmaster in its add for the weapon used at Sandy Hook Elementary School. If you're a man who needs a gun to feel like a man, you might want to put the gun away and get some help. Like I said a while back - take off your clothes and look down. If there's something down there, then you're a man, and you don't need a piece of metal that goes boom to demonstrate that to the world.
Then, consider the whole, "Gun control doesn't work!" nonsense. Of course it does. It's worked here in the United States. It's worked fabulously well in Australia and Scotland. It takes all of ten seconds to find this information - real information about the real world where real people live - that makes that statement a lie. If you know it's out there and you repeat it anyway, then you're lying. If you don't know about it, and someone tells you, and you either refuse to check it out, or don't want to, then you're either lazy, or so far inside the bubble that you can't tell reality from whatever fantasy the gun industry has created for you.
Similarly, saying, "Gun laws don't work because criminals don't follow the law," isn't an argument against gun control per se. It's an argument against all laws, because people who break the law . . . don't care about laws. When I'm driving down the road at ten or fifteen miles an hour over the posted speed limit - I don't care about the law! Does that mean there shouldn't be speed limits?
While we're on the topic of ridiculous things - the Second Amendment to the Constitution has absolutely nothing to do with keeping people armed as a check against government power. First of all, the text of the Amendment makes that a lie. Second, the actual debates during the first Congress about the Amendment make it a lie; the Amendment is about preventing the creation of a standing army, which many of the founders considered a threat to republican-style government. And, really, think about it. If there were a real military coup in the United States and some yahoo somewhere started taking potshots at the soldiers enforcing some dystopian martial law, trust me when I tell you that would last for about ten seconds. The US military has much bigger things that go boom, so put your Red Dawn fantasies back in the box.
Finally - no one is suggesting confiscating weapons. No one. There is no secret agenda afoot to use this as a way to force people to surrender their guns to the government so Obama can become dictator for life, or whatever the nonsense swirling around is. Your twelve-gauge shotgun, your standard .22-caliber hunting rifle, or even a larger, say .30-.06 or .30-.30 - they're safe. No one anywhere - not even folks who want far stricter gun control measures than are being offered (like me) - thinks such a thing would either be workable or even legal.
Really, I just wanted to get this off my chest. I realize the frothing and shouts of "Agenda 21! Freedom!" will continue. I realize "reasonable" has, somehow, disappeared from our national dialogue. Not just when it comes to guns, but anything. I've now responded to the weeks and weeks of nonsense, and while it won't even slow it down, at the very least, I've tried to make clear that there is hysteria afoot.
It just isn't coming from folks talking about gun control.
It's been a lousy day, made worse by reading that AIG is so grateful to the federal government for keeping its doors open it is suing, claiming the terms of the bailout violated the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. There are times I wish public flogging were still legal.
Rather than dwell on something that makes me wish pain and suffering on others, I want to celebrate something wonderful. First, a photo:
This is Myrlie Evers-Williams. For those who may not know, her first husband, Medgar Evers, was murdered in his driveway, shot in the back by a man named Byron De La Beckwith. It took decades for De La Beckwith to be convicted of the crime. We as a people are still dealing with the horrible creatures that raged unfettered upon our national life when our African-American brothers and sisters demanded they no longer be treated like non-citizens, and therefore non-persons.
Pres. Obama has invited Ms. Evers-Williams to give the invocation as his Inauguration on the 20th. Four years ago, I was outraged that he picked con-artist Rick Warren to do the same thing. With this pick, Mr. Obama is demonstrating his understanding of the debt he - and by extension all of us - owe to Ms. Evers-Williams and her martyred husband.
The best prayers don't come from preachers who console us, telling us that God is on our side and we can find the proof if we just find our purpose. The best prayers come from those who cry out for justice, whose rage at our all-too-human systems of injustice, white supremacy, and state-sponsored terrorism do not settle for easy answers. The best prayers come from those who know the road to real justice runs straight through the hell of violence and hatred and death that some are all too willing to unleash upon those who are willing to risk their lives for it.
So, thank you, Mr. President, for giving us a few moments to hear the voice of one who understands.
Eric Clapton was admired among British rock fans for his devotion to a kind of authenticity. He'd quit two successful bands at the peak of their success because they just weren't bluesy enough. In the years he'd been around, he became the premiere lead guitar player, surpassing Keith Richards in popularity. Among the musicians who admired him was drummer Ginger Baker. Baker was older than Clapton, a Londoner whose roots lay in what the Brits called "trad jazz". After leaving The Yardbirds, Clapton and Baker would get together and jam and talk about putting a band together. They wanted just one more person, a bass player and singer (Clapton was still unsure about his ability to sing lead), and there was one person they agreed they did not want: Jack Bruce.
They ended up hiring Jack Bruce. They called themselves Cream.
The tensions in the trio were heavy. The music they played was unlike anything aimed at a mass audience; songs rooted in augmented blues harmonics, or alternately simple, repeated musical phrases or "riffs"; it was clear from the beginning that "songs" mattered far less to these three than the simple desire to play. Live in concert, they would leave the songs behind as quickly as they could, each musician taking off without caring if the other two were following along. The three-minute pop song was little more than a key opening a door for a kind of musical adventure. Blues and jazz musicians understood what they were up to; to the general public, however, this was new, this was strange, this was powerful.
It was also not meant to last. It took only a couple years for Baker and Clapton to become so disgusted with Bruce, who was more interested in popularity and success than a kind of earnest authenticity that came from playing, the band decided to toss in the towel. Their final show was at the Royal Albert Hall in 1968, a couple years after the three of them got together (trivia point: the opening band for Cream's farewell concert was London's hottest new band, an outfit with a residency at the premiere rock club, The Marquee; they were called Yes and would go on to some success of their own). Despite the voice over at the beginning, when Clapton introduces "Sunshine Of Your Love", you can hear his frustration at having to play that song again:
Another reason Clapton was giving up on Cream was the emergence the previous year of a young American ex-pat guitar player. The guy had been a side man for years, playing for Little Richard among other performers. He'd come to Britain in 1966 because he'd heard there was an audience for electric blues that didn't exist in America. Former Animals bass player Chas Chandler heard him at a club and decided to manage him. He went up to the young African-American Army vet and told him that, if he allowed Chandler to find two musicians to play with him, the guitar player could be a star. They shook hands and the Jimi Hendrix Experience was born.
When the band debuted, there were quite a few well-known names and faces in the crowd. Musicians had been trading pirated tapes of gigs in London for a while, and some - including Clapton and The Who's Pete Townshend - refused to believe the young man could make his guitar do the kinds of things it sounded like on the tapes. From the first notes, however, both men fell in to deep funk, realizing they were hearing the future of guitar playing and were well behind the curve:
The lesson from these two hugely successful bands was simple: All it took to make a band were three musicians who could play more than tolerably well, and a whole lot of amplification. One of the people who learned this lesson was the producer of Cream's second album, Disraeli Gears. Felix Pappilardi was a bass player as well as record producer, and with Cream's demise, he started thinking of using Cream's formula for a band of his own. He hooked up with American guitarist Leslie West and Canadian drummer Corky Laing and formed Mountain. The results made sense when the volume was turned up:
As the 1960's sunset in to the 1970's, another lesson being learned in the vast underground was it didn't take a whole lot of musicians to make a whole lot of sound. These groups became known as "power trios"; and none demonstrated more dedication to power defined as volume, distortion, and barely-controlled chaos more than the Bay Area band Blue Cheer. More than each of the above, their cover of the Eddie Cochran hit "Summertime Blues" is often credited as the first true heavy metal song.
Unlike the above bands, the members of Blue Cheer weren't particularly good musicians. In order to keep the beat, the drummer, bass player, and guitarist all had to be rhythm instruments, making sure they all knew where the beat was. While playing in a music scene where experimenting with feedback and other noise was accepted, unlike Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Jefferson Airplane, or The Grateful Dead, Blue Cheer stripped everything excessive from their music, reducing it to rhythm and volume as substitutes for a more finessed approach.
The ingredients for what would become, in ensuing decades, an enormous genre of rock music, with enough sub-genres that it makes it difficult not to believe it is its own thing, were there. A singular dedication to making music as loud as possible. Using that noise as a vehicle of a different kind of protest. Taking a crowd by the throat and shaking it with the physical force of the sound. Thinking creatively about the use of what was thought to be mistakes such as distortion. The Beatles were gone; the Rolling Stones were losing themselves in drugs, moving in a very different musical direction. Pop music was becoming dominated by sweet-sounding singer-songwriters whose narcissism would be the perfect soundtrack for the troubled dominant class of the next decade. Underneath all that, however, were a small group of bands who would, over the course of a decade and a half, change everything about rock music.
Run here, my towhead granchillen, and let this geezer dandle you upon his knee. While you still recognize me, you little maniacs. You know the gong has tolled, it's that time again. Now let me set my old brain a-ruminatin'; ah, what upbuilding tale from days of yore shall I relate today?
"What's all this shit about the Yardbirds?" - Lester Bangs, "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung", in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, p.5.
Several of the English psychedelic bands that followed in the wake of Sergeant Pepper drew upon specific characteristics of the band's music most closely associated with classical music, and developed these elements more single-mindedly than either the Beatles or contemporaneous West Coast psychedelic bands the exhibited certain stylistic affinities (especially the Doors and Jefferson Airplane) were wont to. The Moody Blues, recording their influential Days of Future Passed album with the London Festival Orchestra in late 1967, almost singlehandedly established the concept of "symphonic rock." - Edward Macan, Rocking The Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture, p.21.
We can't all have good taste. - Marie (Carrie Fisher), When Harry Met Sally
Even as the Beatles and Rolling Stones dominated British rock music, at least from the outside, bands like The Yardbirds, John Mayall's Blues Breakers, and later Cream were hugely successful in their home country. While The Moody Blues had begun as a Mercy-Beat band out of Liverpool, once original guitarist and songwriter Denny Laine left, the band's sound changed, becoming far more ambitious (Laine would be remembered by fellow Liverpudlian Paul McCartney and land a gig as guitarist in Wings). 1967 produced several seminal works by British rock bands that would influence everything that came after. Obviously, The Beatles Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but recorded at the same studio at the very same time was Pink Floyd's debut, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Finally, later in the year, the Moody Blues released Days of Future Passed, recorded with an orchestra. Everything that emerged from British music over the next five or so years would be a product of musicians absorbing the lessons from these records.
In 1968, Richie Blackmore, Rod Evans, Jon Lord, Nick Simper, and Ian Paice got together as a backing band for Chris Curtis, the former drummer from another Liverpool band, The Searchers. They managed to record their first record, Shades of Deep Purple, and even land a hit with a cover of Joe South's "Hush".
What jumps out at the listener is Jon Lord's organ. Lord, along with Nice keyboard player Keith Emerson, were experimenting with the Hammond organ sound, overdriving it, then running it through the spinning Leslie amplifier. Blackmore's guitar is less prominent in this song, playing call and response with lead singer Rod Evans while Lord carries the song along, even getting a wonderful solo that features a nice build-up of tension. Musically, the band was being pushed further and further by Lord, whose classical training drove the band to finally record with a symphony orchestra just a year and a half later. While the band did release some radio hits, including a cover of the Neil Diamond song "Kentucky Woman", the band had its collective eyes on bigger things.
The commercial and critical failure of Concerto for Group and Orchestra pushed Blackmore to take the reins, musically. They released more traditional rock albums over the next couple years until 1972, when they released Machine Head, an album that included "Highway Star", "Space Truckin'", and the anthemic "Smoke On The Water". While Lord's organ was still prominent, Blackmore's guitar was further forward in the mix. They had replaced their bass player and singer in the intervening years, and Ian Gillain's distinct vocal style and Roger Glover's bass, doing the work a bass guitar is supposed to do, gave Deep Purple's sound something distinctive but not unique.
That big, rolling organ sound played by Deep Purple and The Nice (and later ELP), was picked up by another British band. Unlike either the Nice or ELP, Deep Purple showed how powerful keeping both the organ and a heavily distorted and highly amplified guitar could be, provided the lead singer had the ability to cut through the noise in those days of poor amplification. One such singer was David Byron, who along with guitarist Mick Box, formed Uriah Heep around the same Deep Purple came together. When they added keyboardist Ken Hensley (who wrote the best liner notes I've ever read on a rock album), they sounded similar to Deep Purple, yet not quite the same. For one thing, unlike Deep Purple, who stripped away the pretense and went for simple chord progressions, staple to the point of cliche lyrics, and both a recorded and on-stage presence that relied far more on free-wheeling blues-inspired improvisation than meticulous arranging, Uriah Heep wasn't afraid of taking musical risks, all the while keeping the beat steady, the volume turned way up, and letting the songs grow.
In 1968, some musicians living in a commune in Germany recorded a day-long jam session. Rather than go through the hassle, they released snippets and portions over the years under the name Amon Duul. Some of the commune members, however, expressing more ambition, started to mix their jamming with actual song-writing. Continuing their hippy preference to keep conflict at a minimum, they called themselves Amon Duul II. By 1972, while not making any commercial headway, they were an underground success both in their native West Germany as well as in other countries, in particular Great Britain. While one can hear the noodling, one can also hear the fusing of ideas in the midst of very loud, very distorted guitars and bass.
While often credited as the basis for what became known through the decade of the 1970's as Krautrock, in fact both in sound and attitude Amon Duul would have a far bigger impact both on British Heavy Metal and the development of later metal styles, most especially what's been called "Stoner Metal".
In the cacophony of musical sounds that typified the end of the 1960's and beginning of the 1970's, hearing in all these disparate styles, in the midst of all the noise and distortion, the experimentation and reliance on tradition, a few bands were beginning to make a name for being very loud; for taking risks in composition and arrangement; for experimenting with timbres that might seem uncomfortable; and for taking lyrical risks by moving away from the "Boy Meets Girl" subject matter even of mid-1960's rock and explore everything from questions of life and death to letting their fancies take flight. The only thing that seemed to link them together was a dedication to volume. Yet, without even wanting to do so, and without their permission, it seemed pretty clear by the second or third year of the 1970's that something new was being born.
Someone called it "Heavy Metal", after a line in a Steppenwolf song referring to the roar of motorcycle engines, and the name, for better and worse, stuck.
It has been a long time now, and not many remember how it was in the old days, not really. Not even those who were there to see and hear as it happened, who were pressed in the crowds beneath the dim rosy lights of the bar in the smoke-veiled room, and who shared, night after night, the mysterious spell created by the talk the laughter, grease paint, powder, perfume, sweat, alcohol and food - all blended and simmering, like a stew on the restaurant range, and brought to a sustained moment of elusive meaning by the timbres and accents of musical instruments locked in passionate recitative. It has been too long now, some seventeen years. - Ralph Ellison, The Golden Age, Time Past, in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, p.237.
Even this cursory survey would suggest that the single label 'heavy metal' is inadequate with respect to style. If Chambers's placing of this music in the mainstream of rock culture is correct, there are both room and cause for a great deal of research. Two particular questions would seem worthy of further exploration. First, to what extent do the subtle differences between difference brands of 'metal' (about which fanatics make great play) equate to difference of musical style; and second, to what extent are such differences accompanied by similar differences in the use to which the music is put, and hence its significance for the style's respective audiences? - Allan F. Moore, Rock, The Primary Text: Toward A Musicology of Rock, p. 151.
The group performs with all the restraint and sophistication of four Cro-Magnon hunters who've stumbled upon a rock band's equipment after a bad day chasing meat. - Paul Battiste, Creem Magazine, 1971, quoted in Bad Music: The Music We Love To Hate, p.228
Writing about the past creates a host of difficulties, not least because we know what comes next. Whether it's the French Revolution, the American space program, or the history of a musical style, how is it possible, so many years after the fact, even to attempt to capture the contingency and confusion of a moment and time, seeing what was in fact all confusion and questioning, and extract what "really" happened, rather than what we wish had happened, or what we are told, over and over again, really did happen? For that very reason, even the best histories are false, partial tales told to create beginnings that never existed so all, both writer and reader, can reach the conclusion we all know is: the present.
It is an impossible task. Each day, each moment of time is a seething mass of possibility, of passing away and coming to be, and no one, despite wisdom and understanding and insight, really knows which is which. Who could really know that a bunch of kids sitting in a garage in California in the 1970's would, quite literally, change the way we human beings do everything from talk on the phone to defend ourselves from military threats to ring up purchases at the grocery store? Had you been standing there, a silent witness to their efforts, wouldn't your real thought be, "Wow. What a bunch of nerds"?
Despite this inherent impossibility, we are pushed to try. So, take what follows with a grain of salt.
As 1969 faded to 1970, at least in the British music scene, there was confusion, mixed with possibility, mixed with utter chaos. The Beatles, who for better and worse had dominated popular music for the last half of the decade, were gone. The Rolling Stones, retreating from the horror at Altamont in December, 1969, were licking their self-inflicted wounds, all the while both sinking further in to various dissipations and on the verge of creating their greatest music ever. The Who, arguably at a level just below these juggernauts, were trying to wrap up endless performances of Tommy, while Pete Townshend started to picture another, even more elaborate and visionary project he was calling "Lighthouse".
What had been, for a time a few years before, "Swinging London", had fractured. There were still models and actresses mingling with musicians and artists; the biggest of each, however, had peeled off and paired up, while those left, some of them most definitely second-tier on any number of levels, struggled in the midst of the confusion, to take what had been before and turn it all around. In the summer of 1969, before heading to America and the tour that would end so violently at a race track in California, the Rolling Stones held a free concert in London's Hyde Park. Trying to fill out a day's worth of music, one of the bands they picked to open the show had been making a name for itself in and around Britain, including doing time at the famed Marquee Club. King Crimson took the stage before half a million stoned and happy Londoners and offered a very different version of power that had no flowers in it at all.
At the same time, a blues band from Birmingham was having trouble gigging. Calling themselves Earth, they didn't discover for a while they were getting bookings because there was a pop band by the same name; folks showed up to hear horn-inflected pop, and were receiving heavy doses of low-end amplified blues. Struggling both for a name and an identity that suited the music they were trying to make, bass player Terry Butler, whose nickname "Geezer" was a cockney slang term similar to the American "dude" or "guy", thought it might be fun to use Hammer Studios as an influence. Like many young men at the time, they loved the horror films the British movie studio was turning out. Butler also had an interest in the occult, a British habit that struggled on despite the waning of the Empire. He told the band a story about something that happened to him after buying a grimoire, and showed them some partial lyrics to a poem he'd written about the event.
Messing around with alternate tunings and chord changes, not least because he was still re-learning to play the guitar after losing the tips of two fingers from his right hand, Tony Iommi played three chords at odd intervals. Three simple notes. Singer John "Ozzy" Osbourne, a boy who had been a target of a younger, bullying Iommi's at school, toned down the blues shouting, doing more of a singing-recitative approach, staying within the alternate chord changes Iommi had come up with.
In about an hour, all but the bridge - a section in which the basic structure of the song remained, only speeded up much faster - had been worked out, and the band decided not only to use the title on the movie marquee across the street as the title to the song; they thought it would most definitely get them attention as a band, as well.
Heaviness was in the air. The biggest band to emerge from the wreckage of so much of what had been a successful London-based British music scene in the late 1960's was led by former session guitarist Jimmy Page. He had tried to revive the Yardbirds name, but after a couple shows it was clear the band he put together had nothing to do with the hugely popular late-60's blues-based rock band. Pete Townshend, after hearing them live, told Page and lead singer Robert Plant the band was a failure, and would go over like a lead zeppelin. Thus, when he needed a new name to book his band, Page tossed a middle finger at Townshend, naming the band after the insult.
On their debut LP, released in 1969, Led Zeppelin included a song, "Dazed and Confused", an unacknowledged cover of a song released two years previously by British folk-rock performer Jake Holmes. Robert Plant changed all but the title, and the band not only slowed the song down considerably; they turned the volume on their amplifiers way up. The result, in particular the breaks when the band switches from a mezzo-piano statement of the basic melodic/harmonic components to a fortissimo crash of distorted guitar and bass while the drummer, John Bonham, demonstrates that for the next decade he will not be known for subtlety, was both odd and electrifying. Musically, the song seems an exercise not only in playing with guitar sounds, with Page and Plant playing call and response, but also dynamics; as the song switches between almost too soft to be heard to almost too loud to bear. While the band was panned by critics, there is little doubt musicians and fans were listening.
In many ways, these two songs are far more similar than many (including the performers themselves). Both bands claimed roots in American blues, although in many ways Black Sabbath would demonstrate far more fealty to basic blues harmonies than the alleged traditionalists in Led Zeppelin. Both songs begin slowly, almost glacially. The lyrics, at least initially, float above non-existent melodic lines, the instruments far more concerned with the chord changes, anchoring the vocal melody rather than doubling it or harmonizing with it. Finally, the bridges and breaks of both songs are both far louder and far faster than what went before. Listening to them side by side, one can hear the similarities.
To say, however, that Black Sabbath would emerge with their first LP in March 1970 as the creators of a new style of music ignores the milieu in which they played, and from which they emerged. The opening sound effects on "Schizoid Man" are far too similar to those on "Black Sabbath"; the song structures of "Black Sabbath" and "Dazed and Confused" are far too similar to be set to one side ex post facto. None of this is to say the bands were ripping one another off in any way; neither is it to say there was some weird "heavy" vibe in the air the bands were tapping in to, as if by magic. Rather, it is to suggest that the bands, posed with the singular question any group of young musicians face - how do we sound different? How do we sound like us? - were using similar tools and techniques, solving various problems of composition, arrangement, and performance, in ways that were both unique to each band, yet similar in approach.
At the time, the band most fans and critics figured would go on to fame and fortune was King Crimson; before 1969 was over, however, the band had collapsed, with guitarist Robert Fripp managing to hold on long enough to get a second LP out of the original line-up before they went their separate ways. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath moved down very different musical paths, each to success of a kind, yet never enjoying (at least until many years later) the kind of critical acknowledgement that, while never overriding, is still important to any performer. For all that would follow in the years to come, 1970 offered these - along with many other heavy bands, whether the American Grand Funk Railroad and Blue Cheer or the British bands Vanilla Fudge and Jethro Tull - in a swirling mass of sound from which it was literally impossible to discern any trend other than LOUD.
Which is only to say that what happened subsequently would only be understood retrospectively. In the beginning there may well have been "Black Sabbath" - band, song, LP - yet at the time there was so much else, distinguishing one sound in the cacophony took repeated listenings, a discerning ear, and the desire to hear more in what is offered at the present than even the performers themselves understand.
