Book I: Stravinsky – Spector
“… the ‘romantic’ is the opposite of the Real. Romance is a thing that is in some sense non-existent. For instance, ‘romance’ is the reality of yesterday, or of tomorrow; or it is the reality of somewhere else.”
— Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man
In 1913, the ballet The Rite of Spring premiered. Subtitled “Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts,” the ballet depicted a series of pagan rituals culminating in the selection of a sacrificial virgin who dances herself to death. Critic Paul Rosenfeld described Stravinsky’s score for the ballet in 1920 as “pound[ing] with the rhythm of engines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and shrieks like laboring metal.” In The Rite, then, we have a violent depiction of a primitive past set against the jarring rhythms of the machine age, an aesthetic Archeo-Futurism that would go on to be one of the most influential compositions of the 20th century. One of the first composers to feel this influence was Edgard Varése, who expanded on Stravinsky’s angular rhythms and use of polytonality in his piece Amériques. Along with a conventional orchestra, the piece required wind machines, sirens, whips, gongs, sleigh bells, glockenspiel, and a lion’s roar.1 These additions to the orchestra are made to allow Varése as composer to create a sense of place and locality in the music, that place being New York City. When speaking about the name of the piece, Varése said it denoted “discoveries – new worlds on Earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men.”
With this in mind, let us turn our attention to another heir to Stravinsky: Les Baxter. Coming out of Lounge Music, in 1951 he produced the record Ritual of the Savage. The record sleeve shows a man and woman dancing in some sort of forest or jungle, dwarfed by the imposing sculptures depicting tribal drummers and warriors that take up most of the images’ foreground. Where Stravinsky’s Rite was a musical embodiment of savagery, here we’re presented with the “Sophisticated Savage,” as one of the tracks is titled. Despite paying lip service to Stravinsky, Baxter presents us with a set of music far more in line with the modernism of Satie’s Furniture Music. Despite the exotic sounds culled from various world music, we’re still very much in Lounge Land. This is music intended for a very specific environment, namely the Tiki Bar. Where The Rite of Spring has largely transcended the ballet it was written for, Ritual of the Savage and the Exotica it left in its wake are in many ways inextricable from the total environments they were written to enhance. That said, there are plenty of interesting sonic details in this music. If we look at the track “Jungle Jalopy,” we find the characteristic Latin rhythms and melodies with a vaguely oriental character rubbing against tried and true Lounge parts. We also find phrases that seem to flirt with Debussy’s whole tone scale, adding a hazy, dream-like quality to the track. Similarly, we find brief uses of harp with strong associations to film scores and classical music,2 connoting dreams and fantasy. We also find heavy use of piano struck from the sound board as opposed to played by keys, a rarity in pop music of the time. Then, at about two minutes and twenty seconds into the track, we get a very brief moment where a simple two note musical phrase is repeated across three different instruments, echoing Webern’s Klangfarbenmelodie, where a single musical phrase will be split across several instruments to create a tone color melody.3 Then, the piece ends with a cacophonous, very Stravinskian interpolation of the piece’s main theme.
Now, it’s important to remember that Exotica, emerging as it did from Lounge music, is a type of Jazz. Having more in common with the Jazz of Cab Calloway in so far as it was largely through composition and dispensed with improvisation, there was still a large overlap in instrumentation and ways of thinking about harmony and rhythm between Exotica and Jazz. Keeping with this, a key element of Exotica recording was the emphasis on group performance in specific spaces. This is especially true of the recordings of Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, who would record live to tape in the same Lounges in which they had performing residencies. An unintended, but sonically important, side effect of this was that their records had a natural room reverb that added an additional dream-like quality to the recordings. Essentially recording in echo chambers, the room reverb would blur the instrumentation ever so slightly, making it seem as though all of the sounds emerged from the same ambient soup.
With this in mind, let’s talk about Sun Ra. Having played in various Jazz combos throughout the mid-30s and ‘40s, in the early ‘50s he formed his group the Arkestra. Coming together in the post-Bop era, the group took the aggression of the Hard Bop style and began marrying that to sounds outside the purview of the average Jazz ensemble. After several years of playing out and finding their footing,4 they released Jazz by Sun Ra in 1957. Taking instrumental cues from Exotica and including a Harry Revel composition entitled “Possession” from the pre-Ritual of the Savage Les Baxter album Perfume Set to Music, Ra seemed to be playing with sonic as well as thematic ideas from the realm of Exotica. With track titles like “Street Named Hell, “Lullaby for Realville,” various allusions to demons, and an interest in theosophy and the occult, Ra seemed to be making an inverted Exotica. Whereas Exotica was concerned with conjuring images of far flung Edenic hideaways, Ra and the Arkestra were making music for the Urban Hellscape while simultaneously trying to envision a brighter tomorrow. During this period in Chicago, the Arkestra would produce two more albums; Super-Sonic Jazz and Jazz in Silhouette. These albums would take the basic tenets of Jazz by Sun Ra and extend them further to try to capture in music a rough parallel to what the Nation of Islam where attempting to achieve; a more noble past that acted as a counter-narrative to the prevailing story of African Americans in the ‘50s, as well as a vision of a New Tomorrow that, in the case of Sun Ra, took on a Cosmic Scale.
Moving to New York in 1961, Ra and the Arkestra took no time in getting back to recording. Though not released until 1965, a notable early recording from this period is Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow. This marked a radical shift in Ra and the Arkestra’s music, as drummer and engineer Tommy Hunter discovered that he could run a cable from the output jack of the mixing desk back into the recorder input to achieve an intense, manipulable reverb. The first experiments with this recording technique resulted in the ambient, percussion heavy tracks “Cluster of Galaxies” and “Solar Drums.” Having utilized electric sounds like the Hammond B3 Organ on “Sun Song” from Jazz by Sun Ra, these pieces on Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow took this impulse to its logical conclusion by using studio manipulation of live performances to create completely electric recordings that venture very close to sounding like tape music or musique concrète pieces. In this light, the discovery of this reverb technique became a way to bring the dreamlike reverb present on Exotica records to a fuller flowering that could then be reconciled with the thematically similar5 music of modernist composers like Varése.
However, Ra and his Arkestra were not the only people coming to similar aesthetic conclusions around this time. The first of these is Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound.
The Wall of Sound technique parallels the methods used to record the Exotica records of Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman to the extent that both revolved around live ensemble recordings that, in Spector’s case intentionally and in the cases of Lyman and Denny incidentally, captured a sonic ambiance that added a dream-like quality to the recordings. However, where the Exotica records excelled at making one feel as though they were in a physical place with the sounds of, for example, birds, the Spector Wall of Sound was upfront in its artifice. In effect a primitive form of synthesis, the whole point of the Wall of Sound was to create an undifferentiated sonic mass where the timbres of individual instruments could no longer be clearly discerned, leaving one to contend with wholly new timbres produced by the recording studio and the echo chamber.
It’s worth looking at Spector’s earliest attempt at the Wall of Sound on “Don’t Worry, My Little Pet” by The Teddy Bears. The record was produced by playing back a demo of the track over the studio speakers. The band then played along to this while recording, with the audio from the demo bleeding into the microphones. The end result is, for the time, an incredibly noisy rock number that isn’t that far off from what you hear on the first two Velvet Underground records. What this suggests, then, is that Spector was essentially in agreement with Adorno’s critique of popular music being vulgar noise, but took that as a positive and radical point of departure. It’s also worth noting that one of Spector’s early breaks came when Lee Hazlewood secured him an apprenticeship with Lieber and Stoller, most famous for penning a number of Elvis hits. Which is to say that Spector’s penchant for noise and the ways in which it could be further refined in a pop context doesn’t come out of nowhere. One need only listen to the yelping, slap-back echo laden Sun Records recordings of Elvis to realize there were new and thoroughly bizarre sounds coming out of early Rock’n’Roll.6
In 1961, as Sun Ra is discovering reverb and Spector is coming to prominence with his early hits, James Tenney produces “Collage #1 (Blue Suede).” A tape piece composed entirely from manipulated fragments of Elvis Presley’s recording of “Blue Suede Shoes,” it would be tempting to write off this selection or source material as arbitrary, as a gesture that any source material could yield interesting results for tape composition. I’d argue, however. that Tenney and Spector here are recognizing, independently of one another, the radical sonic potentialities latent within popular music. This choice of source material is a marked break from what one finds in the work of Varése7, who favored a Semi-Futurist set of sounds. The gesture of using “Blue Suede Shoes” as source at once signals that the same kinds of sounds utilized by Varése, Pierre Schaefer, or Pierre Henry are present within the pop sphere, as well as making the pseudo-Warholian point that pop music is just as much a part of the modern environment as the sounds of canal boats and sirens. Additionally, the seeming agreement here between Sun Ra, Spector, and Tenney foreshadows the meeting of high and low art that would come to characterize “postmodernism” and become an omnipresent characteristic of the best work to come out of the pop sphere in the decades to follow8.
Now, it should be said here that everyone just mentioned and every rocker from Elvis to Brian Wilson were part of a generation for whom radio, not television, was the dominant form of mass entertainment. While they surely saw films9, their first and primary mode of thought wasn’t the image, but rather sound. We also must remember that sound entertainment went beyond music. Radio plays and dramas were just as, if not more, popular10. What this means is that when people who grew up on radio began making music, they, in part, were making it for radio. With this as at least a partial context for where their music would be placed, naturally they started to think about their music in different terms. They began to incorporate, consciously or otherwise, sonic ideas from radio dramas, namely sound effects. Early on, this would largely be in the form of conventionally musical gestures that evoked either a sense of place or a mental image. A great example of this are the hand claps at the beginning of Buddy Holly’s “Everyday.” When set against the opening toy piano figure, the sounds conjure the image of a playing card flapping against the spokes of a revolving bicycle wheel glistening in the sun. This is yet another quality shared between Rock’n’Roll and Exotica: the musical evocation of place and/or image. Coming after radio means that the minds’ eye is given prominence over and above the actual eye. Spector’s innovation here, then, is in using the recording process as a method of synthesis that, as well as creating new timbres, also utilized recognizable instruments in highly evocative ways and mobilized all of this to create highly stylized backdrops for the vocal performers he worked with. These modes of synthesis were mobilized to create elaborately detailed set pieces for a theater of the mind.
Spector often spoke of himself as attempting to make “Wagnerian Pop.” When we look at his compositions from the perspective of traditional music analysis, going through the chord changes, scales used, etc., we find very little in common with Wagner. What’s more, Spector was hardly concerned with Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk or anything outside of musical performance captured on tape and, most importantly, blasted over the airwaves. However, these musical set pieces, this theater of the mind, in many ways surpasses the Romanticism of Wagner. Wagner felt the need to realize his work on the stage, to have it manifest on the physical plane. Spector’s work, by contrast, exists purely in the mind. While music in some ways does modulate the real in terms of sound waves moving air in various ways, these modulations of the real are brought together and made sense of via faculties of the mind.
But the concept of “Wagnerian Pop” gestures at something else, as well. We’ve talked a lot about backdrops and settings, but what’s actually happening on stage in Spector’s theater of the mind? While Exotica presents a Romanticism of escape, Spector and the rock and pop of his time present a more conventional, even stereotypical, Romanticism. It’s the big emotions of young love, heart break, irrational attraction, etc. All of early rock music is like this to a degree. So much of it revels in the absurdity of young love and teenage angst surrounding struggles to gain independence. What sets Spector apart, however, is how stone faced he takes all of this. This is life and death stuff for Spector. “River Deep, Mountain High” would be unthinkable were that not the case. Spector’s body of work is a testament to certain personality traits he possessed. One cannot be extricated from the other. Spector was creating sonic set pieces that manifested the interiority of the vocalist in a given song. These vocalists inevitably gave voice to different aspects of the dreamworld inhabited by Spector. It doesn’t matter that Spector wasn’t a performer in most cases. It doesn’t matter that he wasn’t always the songwriter. It doesn’t matter that he wasn’t the arranger. What matters is that all of these constitutive elements came together under his guidance in service of his totalizing vision.
The idea of a totalizing vision is important here as a link between Spector and Exotica. While Exotica is a pop-surrealist orientalism that acts as Satie-esque furniture music for the escapist dream world of the Tiki experience, Spector’s oeuvre is a manifestation of his own solipsism that then becomes a Teenage Daydream for the kids buying his records in the ‘60s and using them as the soundtrack to their lives. The audiences of both are buying into a fantasy, but Exotica theoretically has a specific setting that one steps in and out of. Spector’s dream world is one that overlays the listeners day to day existence.
To further explicate this link between Rock and Exotica, let us turn our attention towards The Asphalt Jungle. The 1950 Sterling Hayden vehicle is your standard jewel-heist Noir, but the framing provided by the title is nothing short of poetry. The casting of urbane criminality as analogous to tribal savagery and cultural degeneration is very post-war and very much cut from the same cloth as anxieties surrounding the corrupting influence of comic books and, more importantly for us, the birth of Rock’n’Roll. However, these anxieties go back farther than this. If we look back to just before the dawn of the 20th century, H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau ends with Edward Prendick returning to civilization with fears that his fellow countrymen could devolve into a state of animality comparable to what he’d witnessed on the Island at any moment. Similarly, Lovecraft’s work is littered with backwoods hill-folk in league with madness inducing, civilization destroying, extra-dimensional elder gods.11
It’s important to keep in mind that Rock’n’Roll unleashed a deluge of libidinal energy into mass culture. As important is that this energy was pouring out of dirt-poor hillbillies and black folk. Hell, you’ve even got a token Native in Link Wray. Point being: none of them were WASPs. The early Rockers and Soul singers were, in effect, the antagonists found in Lovecraft. To the prevailing social order of the time, Elvis might as well have been Wilbur Whately, Little Richard some Voodoo Priest12. Important here is that we’re talking about music, which has historically been a product of communal, oral culture13. We need not belabor this point, but let us not forget the crimes routinely committed by the music industry against artists. While contractual and fiduciary trickery from the industry is obvious to the point of cliché, what’s more important here is that the medium itself is also a form of entrapment. Recorded music, from the machinations of the industry to the vinyl itself, was a means for WASP culture to capture the extant oral culture in the scribal net.
Bearing this in mind, it becomes apparent that Exotica and Rock’n’Roll are complimentary halves to the world picture that reaches ascendancy after the Second World War. While Exotica proper is mostly concerned with evoking idyllic island atmospheres, there are always subtle sonic and visual allusions to savages lurking around the periphery that could shatter the dream at a moments notice. Rock’n’Roll, on the other hand, is presented as the music of metaphorical savages. We quickly realize, however, that Elvis is merely posed as a savage, The natives implicit in Exotica and Tiki aesthetics could rush in, but, in actuality, never will. Like the sculptures adorning the cover of Ritual of the Savage, they are mere effigies to a previous threat already conquered. Little Richard and the Grass-Skirted Hula Girl are just animatronics on the It’s A Small World ride.
However, Spector and several of his compadres were busy blending the two images together. Produced by Lee Hazlewood, Nancy Sinatra’s rendition of “The Shadow of Your Smile” is unambiguously indebted to Exotica. Spector’s own productions had always had a tinge of the exotic due to the infatuation he developed with Latin instruments and rhythms growing up in Spanish Harlem. Gene Pitney, writer of early Spector hit “He’s a Rebel,” was finding himself on hits with some interesting production decisions as well. If we listen to the backing vocals on Pitney’s “Town Without Pity,” an otherwise Jazzy, noir inspired number, we notice striking similarities to the vocals often found on Exotica records. If we take a listen to “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart,” we find a use of glockenspiel and a lilting rhythm that feels downstream of Martin Denny, with lyrics such as:
Something’s gotten hold of my heart
Keeping my soul and my senses apart
Something’s gotten into my life
Cutting its way through my dreams like a knife
Turning me up, turning me down
Making me smile, making me frown
In a world that was war
I once lived in a time
That was peace
With no trouble at all
But then you came my way
And a feeling I know
Shook my heart
And made me want you to stay
All of my nights
And all of my days
with the following verse including the line “something has invaded my night,” I think it’s safe to say that a theme is emerging. The Beloved is presented to us as an invasive force, with the knife line conjuring the image of some intrepid explorer cutting through the brush to clear a path. The Other, in the form of the Beloved, is being depicted as an almost colonial force. Similarly, The Ronettes “You Came, You Saw, You Conquered,” taking its name from Caesar’s “veni, vedi, vici,” is a song that describes a woman falling in love with a man in explicitly military terms. This is the clearest expression of themes running through Spector’s work and life. Love is cast as a military campaign, the conquest of The Other is front and center here. One standout line from the song goes “hello, sweet ties of love that bind.” On its own, this would be innocuous enough. However, given the context we have, it reads as something more sinister. It brings to mind Samuel Richardson’s novel, Clarissa, a novel littered with descriptions of the rake Lovelace’s pursuit of Clarissa that are overtly militaristic.
It’s worth mentioning that Spector’s whole aesthetic is very in line with the German proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang movement that gave us Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. While the emotional intensity of your average Spector production may bear a surface level resemblance to Werther, the important distinction here between the two is that Werther assumes a critical perspective on the material contained in it. In other words: it’s a thoroughly anti-romantic text. While it would be reductive to say that Werther is “about” a single thing, and despite the fact that it’s actually quite easy to find readings of the text that view it in pro-romantic terms, it strains credulity to read Werther as a text that positions its protagonist as being in the right. The text may be understanding of Werther’s plight. It may even be sympathetic to him to the extent that parallels can be drawn between Werther and Goethe during a certain period of his life. However, it would be dishonest to say that Werther’s suicide is anything short of an evil visited upon himself and the people around him. I want to stress this potentially obvious point so that we can examine the reasons why Werther’s fate plays out in the manner it does. Werther succumbs to suicide because of an alienation not just from the people around him, but from empirical reality. There is no shortage of examples of Werther’s delusions regarding his idealization of Charlotte being contradicted by his own observations of events taking place before him. Time and time again he dismisses these in favor of his fantasy. When faced with giving up the fantasy and moving on with his life, he commits suicide.
Both Clarissa and Werther are epistolary novels, a form that prioritizes the extended monologue over genuine dialogue. Werther is comprised of letters exclusively from the title character’s perspective until the tail end of the novel, charting his retreat from the world and eventual death. Even in Clarissa, where there’s correspondence between characters, these exchanges largely don’t affect the course of the novel, but merely document them. One is left with the clear sense that events are happening in a separate realm, which the succession of letters can only gesture at from singular, subjective perspectives. The events of the novel are not actually present within it, only accounts thereof. Clarissa and her cohorts are presented to us as only engaging in a world of competing fictions.
The Pop song of Spector’s day was quite similar to the epistolary mode in terms of perspective. Pop songs largely dealt with a single perspective that manifested through a vocalist. With groups like The Supremes or The Ronettes, where multiple vocalists were present, there would still be a primary vocalist to provide the dominant perspective with the other singers acting as a sort of Greek chorus. An exception to this trend is the duet. However, if one examines Spector’s body of work, the only duets one finds are from the Righteous Brothers. What’s interesting about this is that their voices act more as complementary aspects of a single voice or perspective than as voices singing to one another. Spector’s body of work, then, could be viewed as an epistolary novel where Spector assumes different masks to articulate various aspects of the fantasy world he inhabits that are then sent out as bits of personal propaganda across the airwaves as a mass consumable dream. To speak of Spector as a figure aside from his work, one comes to realize that he’s quite similar to characters like Werther and Lovelace. At the height of his fame, he buys what he terms a “castle” and marries Ronnie Spector. He essentially holds her prisoner in the “castle” at gunpoint for 7 years, until she’s finally able to escape. Already notoriously difficult to work with, by the mid ‘70s he holds countless other collaborators hostage by gunpoint in the studio14. After the early ‘80s, his career mostly peters out, stuck alone in his “castle” like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, until he drunkenly brings home a Hard Rock Cafe hostess in 2003 and blows her brains out after she refuses to have sex with him. Then, it’s 6 years of trials until he’s thrown into a prison cell where he’ll eventually die.
I say all this to show that, like Werther, Spector spent the lion’s share of his life living in a dream world that eventually led to his demise. And like Lovelace, Spector, when confronted with The Other in its myriad forms, would force it to bend to his will while staring down the barrel of a gun. In the final analysis, however, Spector isn’t quite like either character. To give Wagner one final side-eye, Spector is more like the Hitler who said he’d “make a religion out of Parsifal.”
“Crime is only the left handed form of human endeavor.”
— Alonzo D. Emmerich, The Asphalt Jungle
- To clarify: this is actually a percussion instrument, but its name is indicative of the sound it produces.
- Including Varése’s Amérique.
- The literal translation of the phrase.
- Including alleged experiments in modal Jazz in the early ‘50s that, if true, would be typically forward thinking for Ra.
- But aesthetically very different.
- I would encourage anyone reading this to listen to the rendition of “Blue Moon” on the first Elvis record back to back with “Cluster of Galaxies” or “Solar Drums” by Sun Ra. The sonic similarities are quite striking.
- With whom Tenney had studied.
- As an aside, it should also be mentioned that Pierre Henry would come to similar conclusions in the late ’60s when he worked with the rock group Spooky Tooth.
- Presley’s cinematic encounter with James Dean most relevant here.
- See: Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of War of the Worlds.
- It’s also worth noting the phonetic resemblance Lovecraft’s Cthulhu bears to Cuthullin from The Poems of Ossian. Possibly coincidental, but given Lovecraft’s well known racial animus and anglophilia, as well as the thoroughly celtic character of Ossian, it’s thematically appropriate and something I’ve been thinking about for a while now.
- See: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.
- Classical music excepted.
- The Ramones being probably the most infamous example of this during The End Of The Century sessions.
— Will Samson is; writer, podcaster, DreamWeaver