Monthly Archives: March 2017

Lenny Bruce (YGtCTO #135)

Comedian

How many stages of knowing Lenny Bruce are there? I count three.

First comes fawning, when you know just enough to be dangerous to yourself and others. The name carries so much weight that a person can be overwhelmed by the legend. His routines are far less available than Richard Pryor or George Carlin. If you start digging around in their careers, then you suddenly find yourself looking into the history of stand-up comedy. And there looms Lenny Bruce, the avatar of rebellious brilliance. A few snippets about his obscenity arrests, marriage to a stripper, and tragic death make him the perfect choice for a tattoo. At this stage, the fan has not ever heard Lenny Bruce.

Second comes disillusion. You listen to some old recordings. Is this the reason this guy is so important? What have people been telling me? I mean, it’s hard enough to follow most of those old comics, but this guy is boring. Are these jokes? Isn’t he supposed to be angry? I thought he started social commentary and stuff. I don’t know what mohair is and some of this sounds wrong. Time to visit the dermatologist about doing something with that tattoo. At this stage, Lenny Bruce fades into the deeper recesses of consciousness.

The third stage doesn’t happen for a while. Time has passed, but the name can still set off a little frisson. Someone near at hand has gotten hold of some Lenny Bruce. They want to hear it. You’ve been there. You don’t really want to see that crestfallen look on someone else’s face. On the other hand, it shouldn’t take too much of your time. After all, stage two lasted about five minutes for you.

Lenny Bruce

But wait.

This is funny. A little more life experience and little less longing allow the story to build for you, as was the comic’s intention. There’s the anger and social commentary. There’s the context.

Perhaps I’m extrapolating from personal experience. Except for the tattoo.

Lenny Bruce was funny. He was intelligent. I don’t know how much of his glow arises from half of society telling the other half that he was out of bounds. The problem arises when that becomes the context. Do we flock to the illicit because it is denied to us? Of course, we do. If the artist intended that as the end in itself, then we call them shock artists. I don’t believe Bruce intended to be a shock artist- he tried to communicate the best way that he could.

There’s the rub. We don’t forgive shock artists for a lack of substance. But we rarely defend those artists who cross the line at an inopportune moment. Later, we forgive ourselves our ignorance and make pilgrimages to their grave-site.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 165 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.

Paul Bowles (YGtCTO Words #45)

Their Heads are Green and Their Hands Are Blue

Book written by Paul Bowles

I can’t imagine what I would have made of Paul Bowles if I had stumbled upon him when I was younger. While it has been a couple decades since I first read this collection of travel writing, I don’t know that I was prepared for The Sheltering Sky or his amazing short stories earlier than that.

Bowles, like Patricia Highsmith, has this amazing ability to clear the opaque and take us across thresholds that we never expected to pass. I’ve always found appealing authors able to do so, but you never crack a book of theirs without some trepidation. Some, like Flannery O’Connor, continue to make me wary. (I sit on her porch, drinking lemonade, still waiting for the right moment.)

The counterweight to the apprehension is that I tend to read books by writers with whom I want to spend my time. That’s probably not unusual. Movie stars exist because they appeal to our desire to hang out with “cool” people for a couple hours and indulge in mutual fantasies. Of course, the shared experience is a fantasy in its own right. I don’t know that any of us would really enjoy sitting with Tom Hanks or Demi Moore in our living room. I envision a lot of awkward pauses.

But authors… the illusion is that more of an author is in the art. We don’t expect our mystery writers to actually be criminals, but we do feel like we know them after peeking inside their brains for ten or twenty hours. So, yes, I’d like to have a drink with Paul Bowles. He’d be quite the raconteur.

Paul Bowles

That’s the thing, though, isn’t it?
He’d have stories to tell and I would expect him to be a part of the stories. In some weird way, I believe that he is present in his words.

People who know me are aware of my fondness for Isaac Asimov, the prolific and brilliant writer of science fiction, mystery, non-fiction,… I’m probably missing something. I can happily spend time with his work. But I don;t necessarily feel like I know him in the same way that I feel like I know Paul Bowles.

I realize that I doubtless know neither, but why do I feel this way?

The nature of Bowles’ fiction feels grounded in personal experience, though I think that is true of Asimov also. Bowles does deal with places that I feel like I can touch through his words, but I can sit with Asimov’s people, too. So, is it the travel memoirs? Bowles’ writing is often entwined with personal experience. His opinions of real people are scattered through his non-fiction and fiction alike.

Then, weirdness enters the picture. As unusual as Asimov’s subjects can be, Bowles is putting his freak flag out on display with every paragraph. I’m not sure that Bowles in person can be much stranger than Bowles on the printed page. Really, it’s those hidden parts of ourselves that we’re talking about when we say that an artist is putting themselves on display.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 166 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.

Huey Lewis and the News (YGtCTO Music #45)

Do You Believe in Love

Song written by Robert John “Mutt” Lange and performed by Huey Lewis and the News

I got to Ohio University in March or April of 1982. Pretty soon after that, I started working at the tiny radio station that some students had created. We had been gifted a couple spare rooms in one of the dormitories as well as a small budget for buying records. Someone had managed to make us a sanctioned club, so we had officers. I was a young freshman, so I watched and learned. A willingness to keep awful hours meant I had some undesirable shift spinning records soon enough.

The records bought by the station were selected by the Program Manager, who then marked up an attached sheet with suggested cuts. As a DJ, we kept a log of everything we played. Nothing really happened if you completely ignored the suggestions. For that matter, we were welcome to bring in our own records and play those. (As I discovered, the only limits were on music deemed to be in poor taste. In my case, that turned out to be King Herod’s Song from Jesus Christ Superstar, which did not sit well with some kitchen staff who had tuned in. Without any context, it might be a little challenging.)

Huey Lewis News

The music that the station
acquired fell into two categories- recent hits and classics. Our genre was album-oriented rock. I had older brothers, one of who was working for MCA at the time, so I was in my element. But, I had little patience for doing as directed and was usually trying to find something better. That wasn’t easy, except that those sheets attached to each record had little places for marking “radio plays” beside each song.

So, you could look for the stuff everybody else liked and ignore it if you were a contrarian. For the most part, tastes ran to classic rock and new stuff that people had heard on visits home. Rare was a pop rock record that had not been overplayed. So, Picture This by Huey Lewis and the News was an oddity at the station. From the looks of it, even the Program Manager hadn’t known what to make of it. Occasionally, record companies sent records to the station because they thought we were bigger than we were. Usually, that was a kiss of death, because the companies seemed to think we played any old crap. Perhaps that’s what had happened with Picture This and everyone ignored it.

I liked pretty much the entire album and started playing it a lot. The songs fit in with everything else, I thought. Even better, I knew that I was breaking somebody that was going to be great. Naturally, I went home a month or two later and Huey Lewis and the Lewis were all over MTV. Well, for an hour or two in the middle of the night that spring, I was their one and only fan, as far as I knew. We’ll always have Athens.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 167 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.