Warp & Woof

v.1.3

Welcome to Warp & Woof, a blog from William Sundwick. Its purpose is to share with its readers some ways to navigate the philosophical, moral and aesthetic dimensions of life.

It is not a scholarly blog, but the author hopes that his own life experience and reading can inform his readers’ journeys through such realms.

He wants to share some things that he believes matter, not “fake news,” and he will offer frequent enough doses to motivate you to keep checking in. Comments are welcome. While Blogger requires you to identify yourself via your email address, the author will anonymize any comments before publishing them.

Warp & Woof has a structure. There are five departments of thinking (pages) -- but some entries may be cross-posted in more than one department. These five “realms of deliberation” are:

The Present

    … what matters, for sure!

 

                     The Past

                              … what used to matter       

                                                               

                                                                              

                                             The Future

                                                      … what may matter, who knows?

 

                             Totems

                                    … objects that matter (or mattered)  

                        

Beats

    … sounds that matter, since we never get tired of hearing them! 

Author’s Introduction

Switching to the first person now and translating -- readers can expect entries dealing with health and wellness for seniors (that’s me) in The Present, along with musings on bigger psychological/philosophical issues. This includes a fair dose of writing on child development (I spend some time babysitting my grandchildren).  

The Past will be filled with lots of hopefully knowledgeable meanderings around politics, sociology and history. I’m a liberal arts type, undergraduate major in history, and professional librarian for something like 30 years before imperceptibly transitioning to IT professional. I retired from the Library of Congress in 2015, after 42 years at that institution. History and politics are very big topics for me, despite their vague and uncertain impact on the present or future.

Exciting (to me) developments in science and technology will be found in The Future, along with a healthy dose of fear about things like global warming and other planetary or civilizational catastrophe! Perhaps I have an apocalyptic frame of reference -- most of my thinking about economics and anthropology belongs in The Future. Economics covers consumer behavior and marketing, both interesting fields for me. Anthropology deals with primitive roots of tribal life, which I claim will become more apparent in the future, as more complex social arrangements break down, putting sociology in The Past. The Future is not the place for invective about the status of American politics -- that belongs on the page for The Past!

On the page for Totems, you will find lots of apparently senseless, but exciting for me, information about cars, past, present, and future. I’m a “car guy”, by virtue mostly of my upbringing as a General Motors brat in Flint, Michigan during the fifties and sixties. I’m not a car guy mechanic, however. I never open the hood or crawl under my own vehicle (much less anybody else’s!), but a car guy who was raised in, and by, mid-century American “car culture.”

Finally, on the Beats page, another personal obsession gets its due: rock music, from the origins in the Great Migration, through the British Invasion, hard blues, acid rock, punk, metal, techno. If anybody thinks these genres are still alive, please let me know! I’ve “got my ear down to the ground” to paraphrase Jim Morrison, When the Music’s Over. Yes, there is audio here, via YouTube videos.

That’s been the concept. Version 1.0 of Warp & Woof launched on Ground Hog Day, 2017.  I made some changes to the layout and design recently, for v.1.2 (sounds better than v.1.1).  And, true confessions, this v.1.3 is informed by two-and-a-half years in my Arlington, VA Writers Group. These folks may be my only audience – except when I beg my Facebook friends and relatives to read my posts. I hope my mission statement remains unchanged at least through version 2.0; i.e., helping my readers see the “big picture” more clearly, making the complex simple, and having fun while we expand both our peripheral vision and depth perception!                      

         

Me, at Filene Center, Wolf Trap, 2018

                                                        

What Does My Music Library Say About Me?

A Rebuttal to the Personality Link

William Sundwick

Ever since I can remember, I’ve liked listening to music. My childhood was spent with a father who was a failed violinist in his youth. (He became an engineer.) But, while he never played for me, he was totally dedicated to the classical, mostly 19^th century, orchestral catalogue. He took off from Paganini and didn’t stop until Heifetz. Listening to music was very serious business to him. It was clearly emotional. I inherited the emotional content, if not the literature.

For me, dramatic always trumped soothing. Heavy was generally better than light. I adored Beethoven -- a love shared with my dad. Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms all get honorable mention. I liked the Russians, too – along with my mother – father not so much (no violinists).

Something happened to me culturally, however, when I got to high school, and obtained a driver’s license. With a little help from my friends, I discovered top 40 radio in the car. It became a social thing. My previous group of friends, intellectually precocious New York Jews, with holocaust survivor parents, had aided and abetted my classical predilections up to that point -- although none of us ever played an instrument. Driving around listening to radio in the car became a liberating experience. Independence at last!

Social acceptance changed tone in college. There, the driving force seemed to be “what’s new.” And, then, what would come next. Thus, the avant-garde invaded my mind, with musical, artistic, and theatrical dimensions. Grafted onto that avant-garde sensibility was social awareness of a different world – an underclass world of black people. Blues and avant-garde jazz were, in my mind as a college student, part of the same “movement.” I had already gained an appreciation for the left from my New York Jewish friends in high school – college gave me the chance to integrate all that into an aesthetic that would become my own.

I still listened to classical music in college but replaced the 19^th century romantics with baroque and more 20th century artists. I liked Shostakovich and Prokofiev symphonies.

After college, it became clear that the future lay with rock music. It was symbolic of the age, and drew from a fabulous, beautiful history of the great migration from the South to the industrial Midwest. Urban blues became my music. As it transmogrified into Chicago Blues or British Blues, it seemed to be part of an evolving tradition. A working-class artform.

I, too, became a worker. I may have been an intellectual worker, but a worker, nonetheless. Adding to that, I was slow to develop intimate relationships – adolescent “sturm und drang” didn’t disappear from my psyche until my late marriage at 35. By that time, I was dedicated to Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. The revolution was still coming – in the future.

If there is anything at all to the psychological studies which claim to correlate musical tastes with personality, I might confess being a “systemizer” more than an “empathizer” – like my engineer father. This does tend to support the basic genres of music I like best. I prefer complex melodies and rhythms, and intense music.

One parameter for musical taste which is clearly bogus in my case is age. I’m still discovering new musical genres at age 71. I have only recently become a fan of heavy metal and punk/post-punk. It says something to me which is as valid now as it was when I was 20 or 25. I’ve never rejected my roots. Sadly, I never participated in creating music. But I still appreciate it.

Today the only time I listen intently to music is at the gym. This means I associate my music library with biofeedback (cardio) and may even use it for “productivity enhancement” (makes me pedal harder). This is a departure from my youthful serious listening, although that listening mode is still imprinted in my emotional affect. I still like sad songs (blues), especially when linked to social alienation and emancipation. I continue associating avant-garde with class struggle, opposing the mainstream.

When music stays “underground,” it is better than when it is commercially successful. I’ve never liked “soothing” or “easy listening” music of the pop world. I reject overly sentimental music, as it cheapens my own emotions. And, I steadfastly reject music with a conservative social message. Commercial Nashville usually epitomizes that -- although I still enjoy some Rolling Stones anthems like “Ruby Tuesday” or “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (both examples of Keith Richards lapsing into extolling market capitalism’s virtue).

Blues is good. The purity and depth of its sentiment is real. It’s mostly about struggle, as I see it. The world of rock, whether blues-based or more experimental (like heavy metal), strikes me as great when it features virtuoso musicians – vocalists, guitar players, drummers, especially. Harmonica and tenor sax can often give an extra treat to the ear, as well. They contribute a plaintive tone to a song.

But the beat must remain predominant. Even in experimental electronic forms, there must be an underlying regular, repetitive beat. Sometimes the beat gets lost but is heroically rediscovered in the denouement. Zeppelin were masters of this, especially “In My Time of Dying” and “Dazed and Confused”. “Noise rock,”  like Sonic Youth, has tried the same approach – the beat must be at the heart of the song, even if lost in the middle.

Rock anthems continue to have an appeal to me. They seem to be hymns, crying “we shall overcome someday.”  Often, they take the form of a personal story, but sometimes they preach. The underlying emotion is hopefulness, with a dash of triumphalism – arrived at mostly through resistance to malevolent forces. Two of my favorite anthems are from the Rolling Stones: “Gimme Shelter” and “Midnight Rambler.” The former is the preaching style, the latter more bluesy.

The singer-songwriter folk tradition also contributes much to my music library. But always a folk-rock beat and instrumental backup is added. Mumford and Sons made a big impression on me when they entered the scene about ten years ago. Banjo replaces lead guitar on their first two albums, but it’s unmistakably folk rock.

The main reason I can’t buy the link between personality and musical tastes is that my tastes are way too varied to be pigeonholed. Why would I want to define who I am, anyway? Different studies have come up with different dimensions of personality and music – there is an “extroversion” scale where the most outgoing folks like the music I like, but the introverted folks also like some of the music I like. The “neuroticism” dimension in different studies concludes that people who rank high in neuroticism like totally opposite kinds of music. Go figure.

I think it’s not about musical genres, but more the socio-cultural tradition you live in that determines your musical taste. Mine has been developing for 71 years. There’s quite a history behind it. If I share it with nobody else, I don’t care.

Van Slyke Assembly, 1967

Music for the Shop Rat

William Sundwick

It was a lark. Something to do during college term break. I had just returned from a “career-service” internship experience in Washington, D.C. And, frankly, I was curious about what an auto assembly line was like. It was the defining social construct of my hometown -- Flint, Michigan -- but I had never seen one in action.

So, I signed up for a tour of the plant located directly across the street from the new townhouse my parents had just bought. It was their last address before leaving Flint forever, for Florida retirement. Odd, you may think, that this new townhouse development was built across the street from one of Flint’s premier General Motors manufacturing facilities, but there was a tall board-on-board fence separating it from the traffic noise of Van Slyke Road, blocking the view of the acres of factory occupying the equivalent of 20 adjacent city blocks.

In 1967 Flint was reaching peak “civilization,” still proud of its GM connections (indeed, General Motors was founded there in 1908). To see the lifeblood of my city close-up seemed an obligation, since I had already been talking up Flint with college friends in Kalamazoo.

I found myself overwhelmed by what I saw – and heard – inside, during the two-hour tour. It was a choreographed musical!

I had not been brought up with popular music. All music heard in my parents’ house was classical, especially violin and string orchestra. That was my father’s requirement. He was a failed violinist in his youth. Now he was an engineer, the head of process engineering at another GM plant in town.

It was perhaps that violinist’s artistic sensibility, combined with the process engineer’s dedication to efficient production methods, that led me to my profound aesthetic awakening after visiting that mammoth industrial facility.

I attribute my lifelong love of hard blues/rock music to the experience. Truly, this is the only style of music that fits the gritty, monotonous, obsessive life of the shop rat. I do not mean to imply that all assembly line workers loved that music – but, to me, the genre perfectly captures the spirit of the line. And, when done well, provides the seeds of an uplifting release from the grim drudgery of any job.

Those brightly colored Chevrolet Impalas marched down the assembly line in precisely timed formation, randomly distributed body styles and trims, based on an unseen production manifest. The shop rats’ responsibility was to put those cars together, unceasingly over an eight-hour shift, five days a week, each having a strictly defined small piece of the job.

And with the crashing noise of the stamping presses precisely timed, there was an unmistakable rhythm to the spectacle. Watching hundreds of workers below us, from an observation deck, all doing their repetitive ballet – it was real artistry. And, incredibly taxing, physically and mentally. When their shift was over, the urge to escape would be overpowering. At home, or at a local bar, as Ben Hamper relates in his seminal memoir of life on the assembly line, Rivethead. (Hamper worked in the same Van Slyke assembly plant in the ‘70s and ‘80s, then part of GM’s Truck and Bus Division). To a shop rat, music was likely an important part of that escape. As it was for me – but, the release I sought was from a different sort of stress.

Hamper had a dysfunctional psychological sense of destiny – he was a third generation Flint (and GM) shop rat, literally following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. I was first generation Flint and would never rely on an hourly rate factory job for income. I think I knew this, rationally, even in 1967. Yet, that tour of the Van Slyke plant showed me a world that I must have felt inside me. At each job station along the line, the task was to rivet, weld, or lift, one part of the overall vehicle, and only that one part. I feared It was the same as most jobs in life.

I had resolved at this point in my college career to be a history major, with English minor. Teaching was my chosen field – but I was uncertain whether I could advance directly to grad school. Draft deferments did not extend to graduate work. It was 1967.

Would I ever be able to do more? How much responsibility could I really handle?

So, I felt a great deal of stress about my future. It was something I could not control. But I had music. Not the classical music of my childhood, but angry, revolutionary music. The music of marginalized people who had no control over their futures. People like Ben Hamper, the “Rivethead.”

I had already collected some LPs since I had been at Kalamazoo College. Mostly Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and the like. My favorite album at the time was Aftermath by the Stones. It seemed dark to me. Paint It Black was perhaps my favorite song. But, on the album, not featured as a single, no air play, was another: Going Home. This song may have captured the beat of the assembly line better than any I knew then.

The cars are no longer made in Flint. Music was never made there. Detroit, on the other hand, did produce music! As far back as the 1940s, long before Motown, John Lee Hooker landed in that city during the Great Migration from Mississippi. He personified “Detroit Blues,” invented while he worked in a Ford plant. Music never left Detroit. Iggy Pop came from nearby Ann Arbor in the 1960s, same era as MC5.  Even as late as the 1990s, Detroit was still producing artists like Jack White. I didn’t know these musicians in 1967, but there were the Stones (and other early “British Blues”), seemingly representing a similar industrial culture.

Throughout my life, I’ve been compelled to return to the anxiety, and bitterness, of the 19-year-old on that plant tour. It was important. More music, along the same lines as the styles I liked then, has come into my life since, but with modifications and improvements, much like cars have changed and improved over a similar time span.

Those Chevy Impalas, and the trucks that Ben Hamper assembled, were for the people. The music was as well. Workers were drawn to the assembly line because of good pay and benefits. Rock musicians were drawn to their calling because of its demand pricing. Fewer opportunities were available to either than to the privileged who could get an education and move away from places like Flint. Here there were majestic and powerful machines, like those rock drum riffs. The leitmotiv of amplified lead guitar was like the “dumpster hockey” Hamper and his colleagues wasted time playing when the line slowed or stopped. The angry lyrics of the front man were the profanity-laced banter of the shop rats.

The psychic need to escape, without the means. Hamper ultimately departed the shop only due to disability – he went directly from the rivet line at Van Slyke to a mental outpatient facility, permanently laid off, found shooting hoops in a cameo in Michael Moore’s film, “Roger and Me.”

I never experienced that sort of release with music, but in some ways, when listening to my iTunes playlists while working out at my gym, I feel like the Rivethead at that mental health clinic. Perhaps there never was an escape from Flint?

Warp & Woof

v.1.2

Welcome to Warp & Woof, a blog from William Sundwick. Its purpose is to share with its readers some ways to navigate the philosophical, moral and aesthetic dimensions of life.

It is not a scholarly blog, but the author hopes that his own life experience and reading can inform his readers’ journeys through these realms.

He wants to share some of the things that he believes matter, not “fake news,” and he will offer a frequent enough dose to motivate you to keep checking in. Comments are welcome. While Blogger requires you to identify yourself via your email address, the author will anonymize any comments before publishing them.

It has a structure. There are five departments of thinking (pages) … but, some entries may be cross-posted in more than one department. These five “realms of deliberation” are:

The Present

    … what matters, for sure! 

 The Past

       … what used to matter     

  

                                                               

                                                                            

                                                   The Future

                                                       … what may matter, who knows?

                                                    Totems

     … objects that matter (or mattered)  

                         

Beats

    … sounds that matter, since we never get tired of hearing them! 

Author’s Introduction

Switching to the first person now and translating -- readers can expect entries dealing with health and wellness for seniors (that’s me) in The Present, along with musings on bigger psychological/philosophical issues. This includes a fair dose of writing on child development (I spend much time babysitting my grandchildren).  

The Past will be filled with lots of hopefully knowledgeable meanderings around politics, sociology and history. I’m a liberal arts type, undergraduate major in history, and professional librarian for something like 30 years before imperceptibly transitioning to IT professional. I retired from the Library of Congress in 2015, after 42 years at that institution.

Exciting (to me) developments in science and technology will be found in The Future, along with a healthy dose of fear about things like global warming and other planetary or civilizational catastrophe! Perhaps that is my apocalyptic frame of reference -- and includes most of my thinking about economics and anthropology. Economics, in turn, covers consumer behavior and marketing, both interesting fields for me. But, The Future is not the place for invective about the current state of American politics -- those things belong on the page for The Past!

On the page for Totems, you will find lots of apparently senseless information about cars, past, present, and future. I’m a “car guy”, by virtue mostly of my upbringing as a General Motors brat in Flint, Michigan during the fifties and sixties. I’m not a car guy mechanic, however. I never open the hood or crawl under my own vehicle (much less anybody else’s!), but a car guy who was raised in, and by, mid-century American “car culture.”

Finally, on the Beats page, another personal obsession gets its due: rock music, from the origins in the Great Migration, through the British Invasion, hard blues, acid rock, punk, metal, techno. If anybody thinks this genre is still alive, please let me know! I’ve “got my ear down to the ground” to paraphrase Jim Morrison, When the Music’s Over. Yes, there is audio here, via YouTube videos.

That’s been the concept. Version 1.0 of Warp & Woof launched on Ground Hog Day, 2017.  I’ve made some changes to the layout and design recently, for a v.1.2 (sounds better than v.1.1).  I hope my mission statement remains unchanged at least through version 2.0; i.e., helping my readers see the “big picture” more clearly, making the complex simple, and having fun while we expand both our peripheral vision and depth perception!                     

                                                      Me, with grandson Owen (Oct. 2017) 

                       

Boogie Til You Drop

John Lee Hooker and Roots Music

William Sundwick

Nobody knows for sure when or where he was born. We know it was somewhere near Clarksdale, Mississippi, probably in 1917, but it could have been 1912, or even 1920. Poor, illiterate, black sharecropper births often didn’t get recorded with birth certificates. But, we do know when and where John Lee Hooker died: peacefully in his sleep, in his 80s, on June 21, 2001 in Los Altos, California. By then, he had spent nearly sixty years performing and recording countless original blues songs based on a primitive, minimalist boogie beat, varying only in tempo and minor rearrangement of chords and lyrics. He also impressed audiences with traditional 12-bar blues renditions, featuring simple, skillful guitar riffs and a deep, rugged Mississippi hill country voice.

He apparently learned guitar from his stepfather, Will Moore, a Mississippi blues performer in the twenties. And, perhaps more significantly, he learned from his sister’s boyfriend, also a blues musician, who gave him his first guitar. All this occurred in childhood – he left his rural Mississippi home at 14.

He journeyed first to Memphis, working as an usher at the Daisy Theater on Beale Street. It’s likely that here he got the idea performing blues might just be a living. He hadn’t launched his career yet, however, when he migrated to Cincinnati, then Detroit, in the 1930s. In Detroit, he began working at Ford, doing janitorial service during WWII.

By now in his mid-twenties, he had not recorded a single song. But he did perform in local Detroit clubs as an amateur. He was “discovered” in Detroit by a record store owner who introduced him to music producer Bernard Besman, who recorded him, then leased the recordings to an LA-based record label, Modern Records. His first song, “Boogie Chillen,” was released on the Modern label in 1948. It was not a complicated song, and featured the same primitive, repetitive beat that would become Hooker’s trademark. It was perhaps the first commercial success for something calling itself “boogie” played on a guitar – previous “boogie woogie” music was always associated with piano.

The audience for his kind of music was still limited in the late ‘40s. Very little radio promotion was available. Few stations (primarily in cities with large African American populations) ever played it. Hooker used a device in this first song, and many that followed, known as “talking blues.” The form had been in existence since the 1920s in folk, or “roots,” music from the South. It may not have been black, originally, but was certainly country. The vocals would be spoken, not sung, with attention given to the beat and the sound of the lyrics, not the notes. A mixture of spoken word and singing characterized much of “the Hook’s” work. Always, he relied on the force of the repetitive beat, his choice of words, and inflection as he spoke, sang, or chanted them. Overall, they create a feeling of dynamic, primitive energy.

Two hits in the 1950s began to establish Hooker’s reputation nationally, at least in the Rhythm and Blues community. They were “I’m in the Mood” (1951) and “Dimples” (1956). There was still a wall between R&B music (primarily a black audience) and emerging Rock-and-Roll. Hooker was clearly on the R&B side of the wall. Yet, these two songs have contributed single lines to many rock, especially “roots rock” lyrics – from I’m in the Mood, we’ve gotten “the night time is the right time” and from Dimples has come “I’ve got my eyes on you”  -- e.g., Robert Plant’s 1990 “Hurting Kind (I’ve Got My Eyes on You).”

In the early sixties, Hooker travelled to Great Britain, where he seems to have influenced  some rising British blues artists, soon to emerge as worldwide sensations – like Keith Richards. This seemed to build confidence in the now middle-aged Hooker, as he saw his appeal spread to a much wider audience. More hits were forthcoming, “Boom Boom” in 1962 and “One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer” in 1966. With the star power of the British invasion on his side (not just the Rolling Stones, but the Animals and Yardbirds), many “roots rock” bands were suddenly eager to claim inspiration from Hooker. George Thorogood made considerable alterations to One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer in the ‘70s, mashing it up with another Hooker song, “House Rent Blues” – while still giving John Lee Hooker full credit, because that sold records for Thorogood and his band, The Destroyers.

When the big budget Hollywood film The Blues Brothers was released in 1980, Hooker played himself, performing “Boom Boom.” Indeed, he was just reaching the peak of his career – which lasted throughout his seventies! And, he was now immersed in California, and Hollywood culture. 

Bonnie Raitt recorded a duet with him in 1989’s version of “I’m in the Mood” on his The Healer album, winning a Grammy for them both.  He “changed the way I thought” about men in their 70s and 80s, she said. By the mid-1990s, Hooker announced he was scaling back his live performances, yet on the last Saturday night before he died, he performed at a sold-out concert in the Luther Burbank Center, Santa Rosa, CA.

While that simple, minimalist boogie style of blues is “The Hook’s” trademark, and is easily identifiable in all his hits, he did write many softer, sadder blues tunes during his career. Two of my favorites are 1960’s “I Hate the Day I Was Born” and “Feel So Bad” from 1969. These two songs are traditional delta blues, and leave an impression of a man not only down on his luck, but clearly morose. They both feature an almost funereal cadence. “I Hate the Day I Was Born” seems to have a biblical source (Jeremiah 20:14), and alludes to a classic blues symbol of being “born under a bad sign” (see: song of same name recorded for Albert King in 1967, then redone by Cream in 1968). “Feel So Bad” explores childhood trauma, possibly autobiographical -- John Lee, the youngest of 11 children, was reputed never to have seen his mother after leaving home at age 14. These songs express real emotional depth, it seems to me.

Another favorite of mine is “Shake It Baby” (1962).  Though it falls into the standard John Lee Hooker boogie genre, it still displays an unusually energetic libido! It reminds me of my own youth, and songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Going Home” (1966) -- or, as recently as 2010, Jack White and Dead Weather doing “Blue Blood Blues.”

Jack White has recently become interested in roots music, and participated in the American Epic documentary series on PBS. He and filmmakers, determined to recapture delta blues and hillbilly music, fabricated their own wax-grinding lathe to record without electricity, the same methods used in the rural South in the 1920s and 1930s. John Lee Hooker, on the other hand, became an icon of roots music a generation ago at the cost of leaving his own roots and adopting “Hollywood” as home. Fortunately, he kept his music genuine by forcing his producers to work on his terms, and inspiring an audience, both via recordings and live performance, who were hungry for those lost roots.

It seems to have been a strategy that paid off. Even contemporary pop rock bands like Queens of the Stone Age have recently released clearly identifiable boogie beats in their hit songs – check out the bass line in QOTSA’s “The Way You Used to Do” (2017).

Who Do You Love? Bo Diddley’s Masterpiece

William Sundwick

On Chicago’s South Side, in the 1940s, a rich culture of recently arrived African-Americans from the rural South made for an enduring musical legacy. While not the sole birthplace of what we came to know as “Rock-and-Roll,” the neighborhood contributed a disproportionately large share of the artists who would ultimately spawn that new musical form. One of them was Ellas McDaniel. He was only six years old when his family moved from Mississippi to the South Side, and his early musical talent was fostered by playing in his school orchestra (violin and trombone). 

Sometime in his teens, he heard a performance by great bluesman John Lee Hooker. He was impressed and inspired. So, he formed a band of his own with school friends. After playing on street corners, they soon found gigs in neighborhood venues, before Ellas was even out of high school. He had taught himself guitar, and was heavily influenced by the rhythmic cadence of music heard in his Pentecostal church. 

His band kept playing. By 1955, at age 26, Chess Records finally discovered him. In one account, Leonard Chess decided that, since McDaniel’s first recording for them was a song entitled “Bo Diddley,” he would give the unknown artist the same name. Other accounts of the origins of the stage name credit it to McDaniel, his fellow band members, or unknown origin, but referencing the crude handmade single-string instrument from Mississippi called the “Diddly Bow.”

Chess was taking a risk releasing recordings from such non-entities, but some of them achieved great success. Bo Diddley would, too, but it was slow coming, by record industry standards. In 1956, when he first recorded “Who Do You Love?”, Chess was already skeptical. This may have partly been because McDaniel was banned from the Ed Sullivan show the previous year, after misunderstanding his cue card, reading “Bo Diddley,” to mean he should play his song by that name – rather than “Sixteen Tons,” as the script had directed! 

In the late fifties, McDaniel (by then well known in Rhythm and Blues circles as Bo Diddley), moved to Washington, D.C. He was prosperous enough to have his own basement recording studio on Rhode Island Avenue, N.E. Here he recorded his album “Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger” and discovered some local artists -- including Marvin Gaye, his valet, who sang in a Doo Wop group called The Marquees.

Part of the early Chess Records promotional campaign for McDaniel was to christen his unique syncopated R & B style the “Bo Diddley Beat.” This can be loosely described as a certain five accent clave. That first single, “Bo Diddley,” is a good example. But, in fact, McDaniel did not invent it – it was a previously recorded Afro-Cuban rhythm heard, among other places, in the Andrews Sisters’ “Rum and Coca Cola” (1944). Leonard Chess did encourage McDaniel to claim credit, however, as part of the general promotion of his name. 

Since the original version of “Who Do You Love” did not even feature that “Bo Diddley Beat” (it was closer in style to Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline”), there must be something else about the song that caused it to become the best-known of all Bo Diddley works –  based on the number of covers it’s received by different musicians.

Could it be the bizarre lyrics that make it such a masterpiece?  They were, according to the songwriter himself, based on children’s schoolyard bragging in Kansas City, animated by a rhythmic body language. We don’t know why McDaniel had been in K.C., or that schoolyard! But, the lyrics clearly have some strong Voodoo overtones (or, “hoodoo,” the Mississippi/Louisiana variant) – rather dark and threatening, describing a harrowing journey through barbed wire, wearing a cobra snake for a necktie, living in a house made of rattlesnake hide with a chimney “made out of a human skull.” Fearless, he is “just 22 and I don’t mind dying” – harsh to his girlfriend, Arlene, “don’t give me no lip”” – and the scene filled with cognitive dissonance: “the night was dark, but the sky was blue” and “you should have heard just what I seen.”

The original song also is easily adaptable, not only to the classic “Bo Diddley Beat,” but also to many different styles of rock music that developed through the sixties and seventies. It was a particularly popular cover for some of the California “psychedelic” bands. Perhaps this is attributable to the vaguely Southwestern imagery of rattlesnakes and barbed wire in the lyrics.

 The California connection for Who Do You Love was contemporaneous with another by a New England coffee house folk singer, Tom Rush. Rush recorded an early cover in 1966. His Who Do You Love had some of his smoother folk attributes. But, when recorded by Elektra Records, Rush’s version was transformed into a Rock-and-Roll staple, with that “Bo Diddley Beat.” This was the first version of the song I ever heard, played on WHFS-FM radio. Rush adopted a low-pitched growl for his vocal rendition, which captured both the blues culture and the dark Voodoo lyrics perfectly. It ultimately led to my wanting to learn more about the song, and about Bo Diddley.

At about the same time, Bo Diddley was becoming a cult on the Left Coast. One of the prime examples of the San Francisco psychedelic scene in the sixties was Quicksilver Messenger Service. Their second album, “Happy Trails,” features the entire first side dedicated to an extended jam on Who Do You Love, in six parts. Most of it is inspired more by Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead than by Bo Diddley, but if you listen carefully, through the haze, you can just barely make out the Bo Diddley Beat in parts, and the lyrics are faithfully reproduced – in between the extended guitar riffs. The great flexibility of the song to differing interpretations is on display in Quicksilver’s performance at Fillmore East in 1968.

My two favorite Who Do You Love covers are both by iconic figures from California. The Doors picked it up for a series of live performances in 1970. By this time in their career, Jim Morrison was drunk at many concerts, and the backup band – especially John Densmore (drums) and Robby Krieger (lead guitar) – often had to rescue him. Who Do You Love made that role easy. Morrison’s slurred speech fit the surreal lyrics well, with Densmore and Krieger were masterful in multiple recordings of the band doing the song on tour. The Bo Diddley Beat is unmistakable. As is the inherent raw power of the song.

By the late seventies, the blues revival was nearing its end – Led Zeppelin was on the verge of breaking up – but one California artist was having some success keeping it going. That was George Thorogood, with his band, The Destroyers. His second album, “Move It On Over,” contained many great blues numbers, often mashups of different Chicago blues classics, with altered lyrics, and transition chords created by Thorogood. “Who Do You Love,” one of his most enduring numbers was also here – Thorogood’s version adds a line to the lyrics: “good time music with a Bo Diddley Beat,” and a couple other minor changes – they fit perfectly, and the beat itself is adapted seamlessly. Thorogood’s “Who Do You Love” is a masterpiece all by itself. He may have been the best of the California R & B revival artists – maybe the last authentic “Who Do You Love” cover?

So, where are they today? Yes, we’ve seen blues guitarists more recently – notably Jack White – but, I’m not aware of any recent R & B or rock covers of Bo Diddley. The Proto-Punk, Punk, and Metal trends in rock seem to have passed him by. Who Do You Love would be eminently adaptable to any of these later styles, I could have seen Motorhead doing a cover of it, for example. 

But, alas, though such attempts may have been made, they were never released. Is it time for another revival? Surely, George Thorogood can’t be the last in a line … maybe another musical style would work better? How about jettisoning the “Bo Diddley Beat” altogether, like Elise LeGrow is doing? Not rock-and-roll, but …

The Velvet Underground – Or, Perils of Selling Avant Garde as Pop

William Sundwick

Lou Reed was a middle-class Jewish kid growing up on 1950s Long Island. He was always interested in pop music – especially doo wop -- and taught himself to play guitar from the radio. In high school he apparently experimented with illegal drugs; and, he became sullen, depressed, and anti-social, perhaps due to the notorious gangs of his school. Nevertheless, according to his sister, he was a “genius,” and was sent off to Syracuse University in 1960, where he was mentored by poet Delmore Schwartz, who taught creative writing there.

At Syracuse, he also became acquainted with a classically-trained Welsh experimental musician, John Cale, and another guitar player, Sterling Morrison. They jammed together, forming a band which they informally named “The Primitives.” By graduation in 1964, they were playing gigs in New York City (East Village), and had changed their name to “The Velvet Underground” (after a popular college novel about a secret sexual society). 

Another acquaintance had a younger sister who really loved drums! Maureen Tucker, known as “Mo,” was invited to join the band --over Cale’s objections to having a female drummer.

This was the origin of the “Velvets.” They lasted until 1973, but in their relatively brief lifespan they became one of the most influential rock bands in the history of the art form, says Rolling Stone and other critics. Yet, they were never commercially successful, measured by the sales numbers or charts of the day.

Why? Because you can’t sell experimental, avant garde art to the masses. And, from the outset, this was clearly the preferred path for Reed and Cale.

Yet, their raw and experimental repertoire of social realism was what gave them their first break – Andy Warhol heard them perform in the East Village, and recruited them as the house band for his studio, called the “Factory,” and his upcoming planned tour, “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” (For an immersive experience, visit the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It dedicates an entire soundproof room on the third floor to EPI!)

Warhol also brought a German chanteuse, Nico, into the mix. She added her name to their debut album -- “The Velvet Underground and Nico” – since she contributed lead vocals on three tracks (and backup vocals on a fourth). Nico severed her connections with the band after the release of that one album, to pursue her own career.

The artistic thrust of that first album was dominated by Cale’s fascination with avant garde music. He played an electrically amplified viola on many tracks, and is credited with its creative direction, generally called “producing” in the record business, despite Warhol’s official title as “producer.” The songs, however, were written by Reed, showing his fascination with morbid sexuality and the underworld of drugs and transsexual behavior (“drag queens” in those days). Sterling Morrison was the main force keeping the tracks sounding like rock ‘n roll, aided by Mo Tucker and her simple, yet exotic, drum riffs.

Highlights from that first album are:

•        The opening track, “Sunday Morning,” about paranoia (common in illicit drug users) –Reed was vocal front man, with Nico doing backup.  
•        “Venus in Furs,” based on the novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, about what we now know as BDSM (he lent his name to the sexual deviation “masochism”), lots of John Cale and Mo Tucker exotica in this one.
•        “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” a Nico masterpiece and Andy Warhol’s favorite track on the entire album.
•        And the final track, “European Son,” dedicated to Reed’s mentor Delmore Schwartz, who died before the album was released. 

Also on this album was the very Lou Reedian “Heroin” – anticipating one of Reed’s recurring themes, even in his later solo career, nihilism! I’ve always felt that Heroin is the best track on the album to show the synergy between Reed’s nihilistic lyrics, Cale’s screeching viola, and Tucker’s primitive, pulsating drum kit. It also features a Lou Reed invention – “ostrich” guitar tuning, where all strings are tuned to the same note. This early Lou Reed song, with the ostrich tuning, had impressed Cale as unique enough to spur their collaboration. Reed had written the song before the idea of the band emerged.

If you listen to more than one or two of the songs linked above, you’ll understand why the album was never commercially successful. It was much too dark, much too avant garde, too naughty for the teenagers and young adults who were buying records in the sixties. But, as experimental musician Brian Eno famously remarked, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” It was later lauded as one of the most influential rock albums ever. It was bought by artists … not by kids who wanted dance music!

For their second album, White Light/White Heat, it was time to try something different. Cale continued to exert creative direction. Reed had fired Warhol, despite his having an extremely laissez-faire attitude, which Reed appreciated. His style left the musicians to experiment as they wished, but Reed may have felt Warhol hampered the band’s potential commercial success. 

The sound changed in White Light. Instead of Cale’s electric viola, more tracks featured Mo Tucker and her primal beat, and much more guitar droning. Tracks tended to be very long, and very loud. Blowing out the amps substituted for Cale’s more exotic forays. The recording quality was intentionally distorted, unpolished and raw, compared to the first album. It was “anti-beauty,” according to one reviewer – paving the way for later proto-punk, and punk, bands.

Cale continued with the band, but became more cynical. When the recording sessions, and a round of live performances, were finished, he left – to produce Iggy Pop’s band, The Stooges. He and Reed were often at loggerheads, creatively. But, while the sound may have been more conventional, Reed’s songs were still way out there – like the homosexual orgy in “Sister Ray,” which relates a story of mass drug use, and a sailor being shot and killed, left to bleed on the carpet. Or, the frenetic world of meth addicts described in the title track. 

The amazing spoken word recording, “The Gift”, features Cale’s Welsh brogue sounding rather charming as he reads a short story, to heavy rock background.

Also included in the deluxe boxed set is a vintage recording jam which is ALL Reed, “Temptation Inside Your Heart” – a sign of things to come in his solo career.

White Light/White Heat, alas, was no more successful than The Velvet Underground & Nico. Verve Records dropped the band, along with many others thought to “glorify” use of illegal drugs. Reed believed that the real reason was: they just didn’t sell. Even nearly fifty years later, when HBO produced its series “Vinyl” in 2015, with music producer Mick Jagger, a “White Light/White Heat” cover was played, by a band portraying a fictitious Velvet Underground gig, shown in flashback. It was the high point of episode 5 … but, HBO would not renew for a second season!

New record labels were found, and The Velvet Underground soldiered on for two more studio albums and a live album, then the posthumously released VU Another View. Now Lou Reed was in total control, with his backup stalwarts Morrison and Tucker. Doug Yule was added. Reed was convinced he needed to move more into the pop mainstream, his song lyrics would now be only slightly unbalanced, and the sound mostly inoffensive. An example from 1970’s Loaded album is “Rock and Roll”. The difference from the first two albums is stark. Reed managed to return to his rock ‘n roll roots, and the lyrics are generally happy, upbeat. The darker side would return later, in his solo career.

That solo career lasted nearly 40 years, until his death. And, it finally propelled him to the commercial success he had always sought, but never achieved, with the Velvets. It began in 1972, with his album Transformer, produced by disciple David Bowie. “Walk on the Wild Side” did the trick, and without toning down the content of his lyrics an iota! Perhaps the times had finally caught up with Lou Reed.

He died in 2013, after a liver transplant, but managed to outlive Andy Warhol, Nico, and Sterling Morrison. Cale and Mo Tucker are still alive (but retired from music?). Rolling Stone’s obit for Lou Reed ranks The Velvet Underground & Nico on an artistic par with two other contemporary classics: the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers … and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. And, summarizing the oevre of the Velvets, calls them “the most influential American rock band of all time.” 

It’s been fifty years since the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico LP. I purchased my copy in Paris, during my college study abroad. It was my favorite on my little portable turntable in the dorm room at L’Universite de Strasbourg. Although, the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesty’s Request was a close second. Fifty years … that’s a long time, even in a 70-year-old’s life. I’ve always been drawn to the avant garde. Despite my rather conventional life, it symbolizes an excitement never quite attainable, for fear of reaching too far outside my comfort zone. Artists CAN get there, however!

That twenty-year-old’s spirit of adventure is still approachable, if only by listening to Velvet Underground songs on my iPod … while working out at the gym!