How Sergio Leone Made Music an Actor in His Spaghetti Westerns, Creating a Perfect Harmony of Sound & Image

in Film, Music | September 16th, 2019

Near­ly every­one who’s heard music has also received intense feel­ings from music. “We know that music acti­vates parts of the brain that reg­u­late emo­tion, that it can help us con­cen­trate, trig­ger mem­o­ries, make us want to dance,” says Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, in his lat­est video essay. “Music fits so well with the pat­terns of thought, it’s almost as if that lyri­cal qual­i­ty is latent in life, or real­i­ty, or both. In film, no one under­stood this bet­ter than Ser­gio Leone, the Ital­ian direc­tor of oper­at­ic spaghet­ti West­erns.” And though you may not have seen any spaghet­ti West­erns your­self — even Leone’s Clint East­wood-star­ring tril­o­gy of A Fist­ful of Dol­lars, For a Few Dol­lars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — you’ve sure­ly heard their music.

The fame of the spaghet­ti West­ern score owes most­ly to com­pos­er Ennio Mor­ri­cone, whose col­lab­o­ra­tion with Leone “is arguably the most suc­cess­ful in all of cin­e­ma,” thanks to “the deep respect Leone had for Mor­ri­cone’s work, but also his gen­er­al feel­ing for how music should func­tion in film.” Unlike most film­mak­ers, who then, as now, com­mis­sioned a pic­ture’s score only after they com­plet­ed the shoot­ing, and some­times even the edit­ing, Leone would get Mor­ri­cone’s music first, “then design shots around those com­po­si­tions.

The music, for Leone, real­ly was a kind of script.” Using scenes from Once Upon a Time in the West, Puschak shows that music was also an actor, in the sense that Leone brought it to the set so his human actors could react to it dur­ing the shoot. Often the music we hear in the back­ground is also what the actors were hear­ing in the back­ground, and what Leone used to orches­trate their actions and expres­sions.

Puschak calls the result “a per­fect har­mo­ny of sound and image,” whether the visu­al ele­ment may be a soar­ing crane shot or the kind of extend­ed close-up he favored of a human face. Among liv­ing film­mak­ers, the spaghet­ti West­ern-lov­ing Quentin Taran­ti­no has most clear­ly fol­lowed in Leone’s foot­steps, to the point that he incor­po­rat­ed Mor­ri­cone’s music in sev­er­al films before com­mis­sion­ing an orig­i­nal score from the com­pos­er for his own west­ern The Hate­ful Eight. He goes in no more than Leone did for the “temp score,” the stan­dard Hol­ly­wood prac­tice of fill­ing the sound­track of a movie in pro­duc­tion with exist­ing music and then ask­ing a com­pos­er to write replace­ment music that sounds like it — a major cause of all the bland film scores we hear today. To go back to Once Upon a Time in the West, or any oth­er of Leone’s West­erns, is to under­stand once again what role music in film can real­ly play.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghet­ti West­erns

The Music in Quentin Tarantino’s Films: Hear a 5‑Hour, 100-Song Playlist

Hear 5 Hours of Ennio Morricone’s Scores for Clas­sic West­ern Films: From Ser­gio Leone’s Spaghet­ti West­erns to Tarantino’s The Hate­ful Eight

Ukulele Orches­tra Per­forms Ennio Morricone’s Icon­ic West­ern Theme Song, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” And It’s Pret­ty Bril­liant

Watch the Open­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Orig­i­nal, Unused Score

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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John Milton’s Hand Annotated Copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio: A New Discovery by a Cambridge Scholar

in Literature | September 16th, 2019

Per­haps the most well-read writer of his time, Eng­lish poet John Mil­ton “knew the bib­li­cal lan­guages, along with Homer’s Greek and Vergil’s Latin,” notes the NYPL. He like­ly had Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy in mind when he wrote Par­adise Lost. His own Protes­tant epic, if not a the­o­log­i­cal response to the Divine Com­e­dy, had as much lit­er­ary impact on the Eng­lish lan­guage as Dante’s poem did on Ital­ian. Mil­ton would also have as much influ­ence on Eng­lish as Shake­speare, his near con­tem­po­rary, who died eight years after the Par­adise Lost author was born.

In some sense, Mil­ton can be called a direct lit­er­ary heir of Shake­speare, though he wrote in a dif­fer­ent medi­um and idiom (almost a dif­fer­ent lan­guage), and with a very dif­fer­ent set of con­cerns.

Milton’s father was a trustee of the Blackfriar’s The­atre, where Shakespeare’s com­pa­ny of actors, the King’s Men, began per­form­ing in 1609, the year after Milton’s birth. And Milton’s first pub­lished poem appeared anony­mous­ly in the 1632 sec­ond folio of Shakespeare’s plays under the title “An Epi­taph on the admirable Dra­mat­icke Poet, W. Shake­speare.”

Now known as “On Shake­speare,” the poem laments the sor­ry state of Shakespeare’s legacy—his mon­u­ment a “weak wit­ness,” his work an “unval­ued book.” It may be dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a time when Shake­speare wasn’t revered, but his rep­u­ta­tion only began to spread beyond the the­ater in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry. Milton’s poem was one of the first to pro­claim Shakespeare’s great­ness, as a poet who should lie “in such pomp” that “kings for such a tomb would wish to die.”

Now, it seems that sig­nif­i­cant fur­ther evi­dence of Milton’s admi­ra­tion, and crit­i­cal appre­ci­a­tion, of Shake­speare has emerged: in the form of Milton’s own, per­son­al copy of the 1623 First Folio edi­tion of Shake­speare’s plays, with anno­ta­tions in Milton’s own hand. More­over, it seems this evi­dence has been sit­ting under scholar’s noses for decades, housed in the pub­lic Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book Depart­ment, one of over 230 extant copies of the First Folio.

In a blog post at the Cen­tre for Mate­r­i­al Texts, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cambridge’s Jason Scott-War­ren makes his case that the anno­tat­ed First Folio is Milton’s own, pri­mar­i­ly, he writes, on the basis of pale­og­ra­phy, or hand­writ­ing analy­sis. “This just looks like Milton’s hand,” he says, then walks through sev­er­al com­par­isons with oth­er known Mil­ton man­u­scripts, such as his com­mon­place book and anno­tat­ed Bible.

There is also the copi­ous evi­dence for dat­ing the book to the time Mil­ton would have owned it, from the many mar­gin­al ref­er­ences to con­tem­po­rary works like Samuel Pur­chas’ 1625 Pil­grimes and John Fletcher’s The Bloody Broth­er. Mil­ton “added mar­gin­al mark­ings to all of the plays except for Hen­ry VI 1–3 and Titus Andron­i­cus,” notes Scott-War­ren. His corrections—from the Quarto—emendations, and “smart cross-ref­er­ences” are “intel­li­gent and assid­u­ous.”

Antic­i­pat­ing blow­back for his Mil­ton the­o­ry, Scott-War­ren asks, “wouldn’t his copy be bristling with cross-ref­er­ences, packed with smart obser­va­tions and angri­ly cen­so­ri­ous com­ments?” It would indeed, and “sev­er­al dis­tin­guished Mil­ton­ists” have agreed with Scott-Warren’s analy­sis, many con­tact­ing him, he writes in a post­script, to say they’re “con­fi­dent that this iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is cor­rect.” He adds that he has “been round­ly rebuked for under­stat­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of the dis­cov­ery.”

This kind of self-report­ed val­i­da­tion isn’t exact­ly peer review, but we don’t have to take his word for it. Said schol­ars have made their approval pub­licly, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly, known on Twit­ter. And Penn State Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish Claire M.L. Bourne has writ­ten a con­grat­u­la­to­ry essay on her blog. It was Bourne who spurred on Scott-Warren’s inves­ti­ga­tion with her own essay “Vide Sup­ple­men­tum: Ear­ly Mod­ern Col­la­tion as Play-Read­ing in the First Folio,” pub­lished just months ear­li­er this year.

Bourne was one of the first few schol­ars to thor­ough­ly exam­ine the Free Library of Philadelphia’s copy of the First Folio. But, she admits, she com­plete­ly missed the Mil­ton con­nec­tion. “You can work for a decade,” she writes rue­ful­ly, “as I did, on a sin­gle book… and still be left with gap­ing holes in the nar­ra­tive.” This new schol­ar­ship may not only have filled in the mys­tery of the book’s first own­er and anno­ta­tor; it may also show the full degree to which Mil­ton engaged with Shake­speare, and give Mil­ton schol­ars “a new and sig­nif­i­cant field of ref­er­ence” for read­ing his work.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

3,000 Illus­tra­tions of Shakespeare’s Com­plete Works from Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land, Neat­ly Pre­sent­ed in a New Dig­i­tal Archive

Spenser and Mil­ton (Free Course) 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Imagined Medieval Comics Illuminate the Absurdities of Modern Life

in Art, Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, Fashion, History, Museums | September 16th, 2019

In 2005, the U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture revised its famous food pyra­mid, jet­ti­son­ing the famil­iar hier­ar­chi­cal graph­ic in favor of ver­ti­cal rain­bow stripes rep­re­sent­ing the var­i­ous nutri­tion­al groups. A stick fig­ure bound­ed up a stair­case built into one side, to rein­force the idea of adding reg­u­lar phys­i­cal activ­i­ty to all those whole grains and veg­gies.

The dietary infor­ma­tion it pro­mot­ed was an improve­ment on the orig­i­nal, but nutri­tion­al sci­en­tists were skep­ti­cal that the pub­lic would be able to parse the con­fus­ing graph­ic, and by and large this proved to be the case.

Artist Tyler Gun­ther, how­ev­er, was inspired:

I start­ed think­ing about the mes­sag­ing school chil­dren in 1308 were force fed to believe was part of a heart healthy diet, only to have the rug pulled out from under them 15 years lat­er when some monk rearranged the whole thing.

In oth­er words, you’d bet­ter dig into that annu­al goose pie, kids, while you’ve still got 6 glass­es of ale to wash it down.

The imag­ined over­lap between the mod­ern and the medieval is a fer­tile vein for Gunter, whose MFA in Cos­tume Design is often put to good use in his hilar­i­ous his­tor­i­cal comics:

Mod­ern men’s fash­ion is so incred­i­bly bor­ing. A guy wears a pat­tered shirt with a suit and he gets laud­ed as though he won the super bowl of fash­ion. But back in the Mid­dle Ages men made bold, brave fash­ion choic­es and I admire them great­ly for this. It’s so excit­ing to me to think of these inven­tive, strange, fan­tas­tic cre­ations being a part of the every­day mas­cu­line aes­thet­ic.

The shapes and struc­tures of women’s head­wear in the dark ages are tru­ly inspir­ing. Where were these milliners draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from? How were they engi­neered? How com­fort­able were they to wear? How did they fit through the major­i­ty of door­ways? What was it like to sit behind a par­tic­u­lar­ly large one in church? I’m still scrolling through many an inter­net his­to­ry blog to find the answers. 

Kathryn Warner’s Edward II blog has proved a help­ful resource, as has Anne H. van Buren’s book Illu­mi­nat­ing Fash­ion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Nether­lands.

The Brook­lyn-based, Arkansas-born artist also makes peri­od­ic pil­grim­ages to the Clois­ters, where the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um hous­es a vast num­ber illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, pan­el paint­ings, altar pieces, and the famed Uni­corn Tapes­tries:

On my first trip to The Clois­ters I saw a paint­ing of St. Michael and the dev­il almost imme­di­ate­ly. I don’t think my life or art has been the same since. None of us know what the dev­il looks like. But you wouldn’t know that based on how con­fi­dent­ly this artist por­trays his like­ness. After gaz­ing at this paint­ing for an extend­ed peri­od of time I want­ed so bad­ly to under­stand the imag­i­na­tion of who­ev­er could imag­ine an alli­ga­tor arms/face crotch/dragon pony­tail com­bo. I don’t think I’ve come close to scratch­ing the sur­face.

Every time I go to that muse­um I think, “Wow it’s like I’m on Game of Thrones” and then I have to remind myself kind­ly that this was real life. Almost every­thing there was an object that peo­ple inter­act­ed with as part of their aver­age dai­ly life and that fas­ci­nates me as some­one who lives in a world filled with mass pro­duced, plas­tic objects. 

Gunther’s draw­ings and comics are cre­at­ed (and aged) on that most mod­ern of conveniences—the iPad.

The British monar­chy and the First Ladies are also sources of fas­ci­na­tion, but the mid­dle ages are his pri­ma­ry pas­sion, to the point where he recent­ly cos­tumed him­self as a page to tell the sto­ry of Piers Gave­ston, 1st Earl of Corn­wall and Edward II’s dar­ling, aid­ed by a gar­ment rack he’d retooled as a medieval pageant cart-cum-pup­pet the­ater.

See the rest of Tyler Gunther’s Medieval Comics on his web­site and don’t for­get to sur­prise your favorite hygien­ist or oral sur­geon with his Medieval Den­tist print this hol­i­day sea­son.

All images used with per­mis­sion of artist Tyler Gun­ther

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Make a Medieval Man­u­script: An Intro­duc­tion in 7 Videos

Medieval Monks Com­plained About Con­stant Dis­trac­tions: Learn How They Worked to Over­come Them

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Octo­ber 7 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domaincel­e­brates the art of Aubrey Beard­s­ley, with a spe­cial appear­ance by Tyler Gun­ther. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Bob Moog Demonstrates His Revolutionary Moog Model D Synthesizer

in Music | September 13th, 2019

There are far bet­ter play­ers of Bob Moog’s won­der­ous ana­log syn­the­siz­ers than Bob Moog himself–from Wendy Car­los, who rein­ter­pret­ed Bach for the new­fan­gled instru­ment in the 60s to Rick Wake­man and Richard Wright to Gior­gio Moroder to Gary Numan, to vir­tu­al­ly any­one who has ever record­ed music with a Moog. Bob Moog was not a musi­cian, he was an engi­neer who took piano lessons before earn­ing his B.A. in physics, M.A. in elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing, and Ph.D. in engi­neer­ing physics from Cor­nell.

Aca­d­e­m­ic cre­den­tials have no bear­ing on what moves us musi­cal­ly, but it’s always worth not­ing that the Moog synthesizers—which did more to change the sound of mod­ern music than per­haps any instru­ment since the elec­tric guitar—came out of decades of dogged sci­en­tif­ic research, begin­ning when Moog was only 14 years old and built a home­made Theremin from plans he found print­ed in the mag­a­zine Elec­tron­ics World. That was 1949. Almost thir­ty years lat­er, the Min­i­moog Mod­el D appeared, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary portable ver­sion of stu­dio-sized machine Car­los used to reimag­ine clas­si­cal music in the late 60s.

“It’s an ana­logue mono­phon­ic syn­the­siz­er,” says Moog in the video above. “That means it makes the wave­forms by elec­tron­ic means and it plays one note at a time.” Sounds rather prim­i­tive by our stan­dards, but watch the demon­stra­tion below by Marc Doty, who walks us through the sweep­ing range of func­tions in the com­pact machine, made between 1970 and 1981 (and reis­sued for a lim­it­ed run in 2016). Its banks of wave­form selec­tors, oscil­la­tors, fil­ters, and envelopes pro­duce “some­thing sweet­er,” says Doty, than your aver­age syn­thet­ic sounds, though he can’t quite put his fin­ger on what it is.

We’ve all heard the dif­fer­ence, whether we know it or not, and dis­crim­i­nat­ing ears can pick a Min­i­moog out of any line­up of ana­logue synths. It is, Doty declares in the descrip­tion for his video, “per­haps the most beau­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful sound­ing, and func­tion­al syn­the­siz­er ever pro­duced.” Called the Mod­el D because it was the fourth iter­a­tion of pre­vi­ous ver­sions made in-house between 1969–70, it was tru­ly, says author and com­pos­er Albert Glin­sky, “the first portable syn­the­siz­er where every­thing is con­tained in one unit. It real­ly is the pro­to­type, the ances­tor, of every portable key­board in every music shop today.”

One of its inno­va­tions, the pitch wheel, now stan­dard issue on almost all of those mass-pro­duced suc­ces­sors of the Min­i­moog, was the first of its kind. If Moog “had patent­ed [the pitch wheel],” says David Bor­den, one of the first musi­cians to play the Min­i­moog live, “he would have been an extreme­ly wealthy man.” Oth­ers have made sim­i­lar obser­va­tions about Moog’s pio­neer­ing sound-shap­ing tech­nolo­gies, but as Richard Leon points out at Sound on Sound, it’s a good thing for us all that the inven­tor wasn’t moti­vat­ed by prof­it.

Com­pe­ti­tion near­ly buried the com­pa­ny Moog sold in the mid-70s (only reac­quir­ing rights to his own name in 2002), but had Moog “tried to cre­ate a monop­oly on these fun­da­men­tals,” Leon writes, “it’s like­ly the synth indus­try as we know it today would nev­er have hap­pened.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the Moog Syn­the­siz­er and Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach, the “Record of the Decade” (1968)

A 10-Hour Playlist of Music Inspired by Robert Moog’s Icon­ic Syn­the­siz­er: Hear Elec­tron­ic Works by Kraftwerk, Devo, Ste­vie Won­der, Rick Wake­man & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig Taking Batting Practice in Strikingly Restored Footage (1931)

in Film, History, Sports | September 13th, 2019

How would Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and oth­er famous ballplay­ers of bygone eras fare if put on the dia­mond today? Vari­a­tions on that ques­tion tend to come up in con­ver­sa­tion among enthu­si­asts of base­ball and its his­to­ry, and dif­fer­ent peo­ple bring dif­fer­ent kinds of evi­dence to bear in search of an answer: sta­tis­tics, eye­wit­ness accounts, analo­gies between par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal play­ers and cur­rent ones. But the fact remains that none of us have ever actu­al­ly seen the likes of Ruth, who played his last pro­fes­sion­al game in 1935, and Gehrig, who did so in 1939, in their prime. But now we can at least get a lit­tle clos­er by watch­ing the film clip above, which shows both of the titan­ic Yan­kees at bat­ting prac­tice on April 11, 1931.

What’s more, it shows them mov­ing at real-life speed. “Fox Movi­etone sound cam­eras made slow-motion cap­tures of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at bat­ting prac­tice dur­ing an exhi­bi­tion prac­tice in Brook­lyn, New York,” writes uploader Guy Jones (whose oth­er base­ball videos include Ruth hit­ting a home run on open­ing day the same year and Ruth’s last appear­ance at bat a decade lat­er). “With mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy, we can wit­ness this footage adjust­ed to a nor­mal speed which results in a very high fram­er­ate.”

In oth­er words, the film shows Ruth and Gehrig not just mov­ing in the very same way they did in real life, but cap­tured with a smooth­ness uncom­mon in news­reel footage from the 1930s. For com­par­i­son, Jones includes at the end of the video “more footage of the prac­tice (shot at typ­i­cal fps) and the orig­i­nal un-edit­ed slow-mo cap­tures.”

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, what this film reveals does­n’t impress observers of mod­ern base­ball. “Ruth and Gehrig in no way look like a mod­ern ballplay­er,” writes The Big Lead­’s Kyle Koster. “Ruth is off-bal­ance, falling into his swing. Gehrig rou­tine­ly lifts his back foot off the ground. Again, it’s bat­ting prac­tice so the com­pet­i­tive juices weren’t flow­ing. But even by that stan­dard, the whole exer­cise looks slop­py and inef­fi­cient.” Cut4’s Jake Mintz gets harsh­er, as well as more tech­ni­cal: “Tell me Ruth’s cocka­mamie swing mechan­ics would enable him to hit a 98-mph heater.” As for the Iron Horse, his “hack is a lit­tle bet­ter,” but still “absurd­ly low” by today’s stan­dards. It goes to show, Mintz writes, that “these two leg­ends, while unde­ni­ably tran­scen­dent in their time, would be good Double‑A hit­ters at best if they played today.” We evolve, our tech­nolo­gies evolve, and so, it seems, do the games we play.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Home Movies of Duke Elling­ton Play­ing Base­ball (And How Base­ball Coined the Word “Jazz”)

Read Online Haru­ki Murakami’s New Essay on How a Base­ball Game Launched His Writ­ing Career

Fritz Lang’s M: The Restored Ver­sion of the Clas­sic 1931 Film

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Eric Clapton Created the Classic Song “Layla”

in Music | September 13th, 2019

The sto­ry of Eric Clap­ton and “Lay­la” has always both­ered me because to under­stand it is to under­stand how fal­li­ble and crazed any of us can be when it comes to love. We under­stand that our rock gods are human, but there’s some­thing about Clap­ton falling in love with the wife (Pat­tie Boyd) of one of his best mates (George Har­ri­son, a freakin’ Bea­t­le, man!) and then writ­ing a whole album about it, that is just unset­tling. Is this some­thing tawdry writ epic? Or is this some­thing epic that has the waft­ing aro­ma of taw­dri­ness?

Poly­phon­ic takes on the behind the scenes sto­ry of this rock mas­ter­piece and rewinds sev­er­al cen­turies to the source of Layla’s name: “Lay­la and Maj­nun,” a roman­tic poem from 12th cen­tu­ry Per­sian poet Niẓā­mi Gan­javi based on an actu­al woman from the 6th Cen­tu­ry who drove her poet para­mour mad. Lord Byron called the trag­ic poem “The Romeo and Juli­et of the East,” as unre­quit­ed love leaves both Maj­nun and Lay­la dead after the latter’s father for­bids her to be with the poet.

Eric Clap­ton heard of the poem from his Sufi friend Abdalqadir as-Sufi (for­mer­ly Ian Dal­las), and so when he wrote a slow bal­lad about his unre­quit­ed love for Pat­ti, “Lay­la” made per­fect sense as a name.

The song might have stayed a ballad–think of Clapton’s slowed down ver­sion from his MTV “Unplugged” special–if it wasn’t for Duane All­man of the All­man Broth­ers. The two had yet to meet, but were aware of each oth­er. All­man had grabbed Clapton’s atten­tion with his fiery solo work at the end of Wil­son Pickett’s cov­er of “Hey Jude”:

When Clap­ton and All­man did meet, the two set to jam­ming and All­man made the his­to­ry-chang­ing deci­sion to speed up Clapton’s bal­lad and use a riff tak­en from Albert King. “Lay­la” was born. Allman’s bot­tle­neck slide style met Clapton’s string bend­ing, and the track is a con­ver­sa­tion between the two, where no words are need­ed.

“It’s in the tip of their fin­gers,” says engi­neer Tom Dowd, lis­ten­ing to the iso­lat­ed tracks in the video below. “It’s not in a knob, it’s not in how loud they play, it’s touch.”

Over this, Clap­ton deliv­ers his des­per­ate lyrics, sung by a man at his wits end, much like Maj­nun of the poem.

And then, that coda, which takes up half the song. Drum­mer Jim Gor­don was work­ing on the piano piece for a solo album in secret. When Clap­ton dis­cov­ered Gor­don was record­ing on the sly, he wasn’t angry. Instead he insist­ed it be added to the end of the rock­ing first half. The song is a per­fect bal­ance between fran­tic rock and roman­tic bal­lad.

But in the real world, “Lay­la” didn’t do the job. Clap­ton played the album for Pat­tie Boyd three weeks lat­er, and though she under­stood its beau­ty, Boyd was embar­rassed by its mes­sage.

“I couldn’t believe I was the inspi­ra­tion for putting this togeth­er,” she said in an inter­view. “I didn’t want this to hap­pen.” She was also mor­ti­fied think­ing that every­body would know exact­ly who “Lay­la” was about.

“It didn’t work,” Clap­ton recalled. “It was all for noth­ing.”

The song was a flop in the charts, espe­cial­ly as it was cut in half for the sin­gle. It would find its audi­ence three years lat­er when the full ver­sion appeared on both a Clap­ton anthol­o­gy and a best of col­lec­tion of Duane Allman’s work. Final­ly it rock­et­ed up the charts, and it’s kind of stayed in clas­sic rock playlists ever since.

And as for Boyd, she actu­al­ly did leave George Har­ri­son in 1974 to mar­ry Clap­ton in 1979, a mar­riage that last­ed 10 years. Not all mar­riages last. The orig­i­nal flame dies out. It’s just that, in “Lay­la“ ‘s case, the flame is there every time the nee­dle drops into the groove.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

23-Year-Old Eric Clap­ton Demon­strates the Ele­ments of His Gui­tar Sound (1968)

Hear Eric Clapton’s Iso­lat­ed Gui­tar Track From the Bea­t­les’ ‘While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps’ (1968)

Eric Clap­ton Tries Out Gui­tars at Home and Talks About the Bea­t­les, Cream, and His Musi­cal Roots

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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How E.E. Cummings Writes a Poem

in Poetry | September 12th, 2019

Most of us encounter E.E. Cum­mings at an ear­ly age; his poems for adults reg­u­lar­ly appear in poet­ry antholo­gies for chil­dren. We derive great plea­sure from his brazen mis­spellings, port­man­teaus, neol­o­gisms, and “typo­graph­i­cal high jinks,” as Paul Mul­doon writes at The New York­er. Look at this famous writer break­ing all the rules, and there­by giv­ing us occa­sion to talk about the rules, about how poet­ry is dif­fer­ent, about how, among poets, E.E. Cum­mings stands alone.

Only some­one with a keen facil­i­ty for lan­guage can bend it to their indi­vid­ual will, some­thing we may rec­og­nize when read­ing Cum­mings in high school, when we also rec­og­nize the irony and grim satire in his poems. The inven­tive whim­sy had veiled some­thing dark­er. In 1960, then-high-school stu­dent Peter Carl­ton got the chance to inter­view Cum­mings about his poem “Human­i­ty, I love you,” then post­ed the exchange online 37 years lat­er. “I, for one, do not love human­i­ty,” the poet told him, “I feel that human­i­ty itself is cru­el and unjust.”

A com­mon sen­ti­ment among mod­ernists, espe­cial­ly those, like Cum­mings, who had served in World War I. But few of his con­tem­po­raries, who includ­ed James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, had his abil­i­ty to speak to so many dif­fer­ent audi­ences. It’s almost shock­ing to see the shift in voice between Cum­mings’ inter­view with young Carl­ton and a let­ter he wrote to Pound 20 years ear­li­er, full of the usu­al Cum­mings coinages (“innul­luxu­ls”) and vicious lit­er­ary barbs (Archibald MacLeish becomes “the macarchibald maclap­dog macleash”).

Was Cum­mings a rad­i­cal? A roman­tic? A lit­er­ary naïf? An out­sider? A savvy, cyn­i­cal play­er of the game? He con­tained mul­ti­tudes. From Eliot he “learned to dis­trust the hier­ar­chi­cal in every aspect of life,” writes Mul­doon, “begin­ning with his own being. In his poet­ry, ‘I’ becomes ‘i.’” What­ev­er atti­tudes he express­es, Cum­mings always forces us to wres­tle with language—its dura­bil­i­ty and mal­leabil­i­ty, its famil­iar strangenesses—first.

In his most acces­si­ble poem, “i car­ry your heart with me (i car­ry it in,” Cum­mings draws our atten­tion to the sim­plic­i­ty of his arche­typ­al images, as if to smirk­ing­ly announce, “this is a uni­ver­sal love poem.” Stan­dard fare. But such obvi­ous mir­ror­ing of form and con­tent does not dimin­ish the poem’s accom­plish­ment, argues Evan Puschak, the Nerd­writer, in the video above. On the con­trary, sim­ple rep­e­ti­tions lead us into far more com­pli­cat­ed recur­sions inside the poem.

Puschak quotes lines from Yeats to illus­trate the deft­ness of Cum­mings’ decep­tive sim­plic­i­ty: “A line will take us hours maybe; / yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitch­ing and unstitch­ing has been naught.” While many a poet has made the art seem easy, few have made it seem so play­ful or irrev­er­ent as Cum­mings, or have delight­ed so many peo­ple of so many ages and walks of life—so few of whom may sus­pect the con­cep­tu­al heft and rig­or that went into his work.

To read Cum­mings’ poet­ry your­self, pick up a copy of his com­plete poems.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Child­hood Draw­ings from Poet E.E. Cum­mings Show the Young Artist’s Play­ful Seri­ous­ness

Cel­e­brate Valentine’s Day with a Charm­ing Stop Motion Ani­ma­tion of an E.E. Cum­mings’ Love Poem

E.E. Cum­mings Recites ‘Any­one Lived in a Pret­ty How Town,’ 1953

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Charles Bukowski Explains What Good Writing and the Good Life Have in Common

in Writing | September 12th, 2019

I have no pol­i­tics, I observe. I have no sides except the side of the human spir­it, which after all does sound rather shal­low, like a pitch­man, but which means most­ly my spir­it, which means yours too, for if I am not tru­ly alive, how can I see you?

—Charles Bukows­ki, Notes of. Dirty Old Man

In Notes of a Dirty Old Man, his week­ly col­umn for the under­ground L.A. news­pa­per Open City, Charles Bukows­ki became the com­mon man’s philoso­pher, issu­ing pro­fun­di­ties amidst wild vul­gar­i­ties and prov­ing that he did, in fact, have a pol­i­tics, as much as he had the­o­ries and con­trar­i­an half-thoughts and opin­ions aplen­ty. He took sides when it came to lit­er­a­ture, at least—the side of Celine, Dos­to­evsky, and Camus, for exam­ple, against Faulkn­er, Shake­speare, and George Bernard Shaw (“the most overblown fan­ta­sy of the Ages”).

Bukows­ki had no room for cool appre­ci­a­tion or mild pref­er­ence. With him, as with Cat­ul­lus, life was love and hate. Get him talk­ing on any sub­ject and those loves and hates would emerge, as would his ideas about mat­ters of most con­se­quence: life, death, drink­ing, sex, and, of course, writ­ing. In the inter­view clip above, for exam­ple, Bukows­ki is asked if he fears death. He answers, “No, in fact, I almost feel good at the approach of death.” This becomes a med­i­ta­tion on rep­e­ti­tion and dull­ness, and on the “juice” that a good life—and good writing—requires.

…. You see, as you live many years, things take on a repeat…. You under­stand? You keep see­ing the same thing over and over again… so you get a lit­tle bit tired of life. So as death comes, you almost say, okay, baby, it’s time, it’s good.

The answer puts the inter­view­er in mind of Mal­colm Lowry’s Under the Vol­cano, which sends Bukows­ki on one of his sig­na­ture cranky cri­tiques, also an intro­duc­tion to his the­o­ry of prose, which can be summed up in just three syl­la­bles, “BIM BIM BIM!”—the sound he makes to show the “quick­ness” of a well-writ­ten line. Good writ­ing needs “pace,” “life,” and “sun­light.” “Each line,” he says, “must be full of a deli­cious lit­tle juice, they must be full of pow­er, they must make you like to turn a page, bim bim bim!” Writ­ing like Lowry’s, he says, is “too leisure­ly.” There’s too much set­up, too lit­tle pay­off.

He may seem unfair to Lowry, but most writ­ers bore Bukows­ki. After pages of tedious buildup, “when they get to the grand emo­tion, there isn’t any,” he says. Bukows­ki has nev­er been one for sub­tle­ty, but no one can say his writ­ing lacks  “juice” or grand emo­tion. On the con­trary, he endears him­self to so many aspir­ing writ­ers (or aspir­ing male writ­ers, in any case) because his poet­ry and prose are so elec­tri­fy­ing­ly alive. He had a lim­it­ed range of sub­jects, most­ly con­fined to his own thoughts, feel­ings, and drunk­en mis­ad­ven­tures. Yet the voice that car­ries us through his vio­lent­ly fun­ny tales and rever­ies, wicked and maudlin and ten­der by turns, seems capa­ble of lim­it­less inven­tion.

“Writ­ing must nev­er be bor­ing,” says Bukows­ki. He set a high bar, and he met it. As writ­ers, we need not live his life to do the same. But we must each be “tru­ly alive” in our own way to make our lines go bim bim bim. “Each line,” he says, “must be an enti­ty unto itself.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inspi­ra­tion from Charles Bukows­ki: You Might Be Old, Your Life May Be “Crap­py,” But You Can Still Make Good Art

Is Charles Bukows­ki a Self-Help Guru? Hear Five of His Bru­tal­ly Hon­est, Yet Odd­ly Inspir­ing, Poems and Decide for Your­self

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance” 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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