Several times in the past week I have found myself ruminating on Keith Emerson’s suicide.
It’s easy enough just to shrug and move on when an aging has-been rock star offs himself. The news cycle is so full of tragedy and madness that Emerson’s death could hardly be expected to register as more than a blip for anyone who was not a member of his shrinking fanbase.
Nevertheless, I find the thought of this once quite famous 71 year old shooting himself while alone in his home — apparently plagued by fears about his deteriorating ability to play — terribly sad and haunting. And learning that he had struggled with substance abuse — while no surprise for a 1970s era rock star — made this lonely, despairing death seem all the sadder. It set me pondering the vicissitudes of fame and taste, and the human cost of celebrity culture, and all that stuff …
And while I hadn’t actually sat down and played an ELP record in 20 years, I guess I have to admit — and it is a confession, given the degree to which ELP have been condemned by the critics — I have to admit that I am feeling all this because I was indeed once a fan of ELP.
When I was fifteen, like all my friends I wanted to be a rock star when I grew up. But I didn’t have the nerve to sing, my parents would never tolerate the drums, and everyone already seemed to play guitar.
So I became a nerdy keyboard player.
But keyboards seemed to be the one role you could have in a band that wasn’t automatically cool. I mean, when slapping became a thing, suddenly even bass players were cooler than keyboard players.
And looking back in pop history for a keys player that commanded the kind of admiration that the other rock gods inspired — well, there weren’t many. I now regard Jerry Lee Lewis as pretty damned awesome, but at the time, in the 1980s, it was too much like ancient history. Ray Manzarek of The Doors would get some props. But everyone knew who the sexy one in that band really was. (It didn’t help that Manzarek always struck me as a self-mythologizing bullshitter of epic proportions whenever he gave an interview.) And there were amazing jazz players, of course. But jazz was by comparison a niche interest, commanding none of the attention of rock and pop among my high school cohort.
And then there was Keith Emerson. A crazy showman with bags of talent — the “Jimi Hendrix of the keys”! Most people I knew did not give a crap about ELP in the early 80s, either, of course. But at some point I had caught a TV re-broadcast of a gig from the early 70s and was impressed. Wowed, even.
So this week I went back and had a look at some of that old footage. Here’s one of the moments I vividly remember from that old TV show — two minutes of inspired silliness.
Today, the antics with the daggers and the other forms of Hammond abuse strike me a bit differently. I took it all dead seriously when I was fifteen, in a way I just can’t now. But it still strikes me as a fascinating piece of rock theatre, falling somewhere between Spinal Tap (the scene where Nigel Tuffnell plays his guitar with a violin comes to mind) and Townshend smashing his SG, or Hendrix sacrificing his Strat at Monterey. It’s ridiculous — utterly — watching Emerson drag that massive bit of furniture around. But part of me still finds it awesome. Maybe it’s even slightly camp, in Sontag’s sense of the term — two contradictory things at once, both sublime and ridiculous!
Lost in all the theatrics, though, is the fact that this was a musician of great skill, able to play jazz and classical stylings with real fluidity — admired by such giants such as Oscar Peterson, and with a left hand technique that matches any concert pianist.
Just check out the first few minutes of this clip for an example of how dexterous and delightful his playing could be.
So … talent and showmanship … and yet, is the verdict ever since punk really true? Do ELP deserve their bad rep for rock excess, pretention and pointlessness? Were they really, frankly, just a bit shit?
It seems true that a lot of the material has aged badly.
But, but … at it’s best, I find there is still something in ELP for me. Something about the alchemy involved when those three individuals manage collectively to overcome their musical egotism just long enough to make an extraordinary thing. Something that does not sound quite like anything else. Something capable — if I let it — of inducing in me an experience close to rapture.
Witness: my single favorite ELP track:
The link is to the whole album — but just let the first track play. It’s called “The Barbarian” (I know, I know) and it’s an instrumental mini-epic, in three sections, all of which I find absurdly delightful. There’s the lumbering bass and Hammond of the first sequence, which closes out with a really cool little “call and response” part between the keyboards on one side and drums and bass on the other; then there’s the delicate jazzical Chopin-lite mid-section, with some lovely right hand flourishes from Emerson, and breathlessly rapid brushwork from Palmer; and then a third section that recapitulates the opening before taking off on the mad-as-fuck frenzy of the final 40 seconds.
I’d never heard anything like this when I first encountered it. I still can’t think of any thing else in the pop world that it resembles.
Critics are unkind. Hipsters are dismissive. And the crime of tastelessness was certainly one that ELP committed again and again.
But I think that sometimes they were actually pretty bloody good.
In the wake of the tragedies that have occurred in Paris over the last few days a number of commentators, some traditionally left-leaning and some more obviously right-wing, have suggested that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo contributed to the climate of extremism that led to these attacks. The arguments often take the form of a double assertion: first, that the cartoons in question were flagrant or “unnecessary” violations of the Muslim prohibition against images of the Prophet; and second, that these violations were motivated by Islamophobia and racism. The conclusion, merely implicit in some commentaries and more explicit in others, is that because the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were also racist bullies they bear a degree of culpability for what happened; consequently, they also make poor martyrs for either the profession of satirical cartooning or the right to free speech.
The cover of this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo.
There are several problems with this argument, however. Most troublingly, to imply that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo contributed to the radicalization of Muslims by repeatedly violating an important tenet of Islam reduces the wide range of Muslim opinions on this specific issue to the extreme position held by the terrorists themselves. To take up this position is to fail to understand that the so-called “prohibition against images of the prophet” is actually already a radical interpretation of Islamic doctrine. No such prohibition exists in The Qu’ran. In fact, significant numbers of Muslims do not hold to this supposed prohibition, and even among those who do, interpretations of the precise meaning and purpose of the relevant phrases in the hadith literature are diverse. (On this topic, see here.
But there are other reasons for resisting the argument that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were somehow responsible for creating the climate of extremism that led to this incident. The more I learn about the work at Charlie Hebdo (and I admit I have more research to do in this regard), the more I am convinced that this implication is unjust and unfair.
I am a British-born academic who has lived in the United States for over two decades; I am largely ignorant of contemporary French culture, and I confess I am only now becoming even superficially familiar with Charlie Hebdo (just like most of us, I suspect). But from what I have been able to ascertain in my preliminary investigations, while the cartoonists at the magazine were commenting satirically upon religious extremism, they were not creating it. The extremism was already there. They were calling it out — perhaps in a foolhardy way, perhaps courageously, and with varying degrees of mean and clever wit — but they were reacting to something that was already present in the culture, and that was being fostered by even more negative, reactionary, and ill-intentioned forces based outside France. (Indeed, no matter what one thinks of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, any role they could have played in radicalizing these particular terrorists is surely outweighed by Said Kouachi’s months of training in Yemen under a branch of Al Qaeda.)
Nor does it seem correct to accuse the editors at Charlie Hebdo of racism, as some have done. Experts who are better informed than me with regard to the history and culture of French comics (the brilliant Bart Beaty, for example) tell me that, on the contrary, the editorial position of the magazine was consistently anti-racist. This is not to say that a case against individual cartoons could never be made; caricature is an art-form built on principles of exaggeration and abstraction, and the point at which the visual “shorthand” of the cartoonist becomes a stereotyping technique cannot be fixed, but will vary from situation to situation and viewer to viewer. Nevertheless, any such case would have to be made within the larger anti-racist intentional context of the magazine, and nuanced accordingly. I’ve yet to read such context-sensitive work; it is not a feature of those denunciations of Hebdo as “racist” that I have seen. Nor does there appear to be any evidence that the editors at the magazine regarded the Muslim community in general with hostility. In fact, there appears to have been at least one person of Muslim heritage on the staff at Charlie Hebdo who was killed in the attacks: Mustapha Ourrad, a proofreader.
Yes, Charlie Hebdo published work that was profoundly hostile towards religious extremists within Islam; it was similarly hostile towards other religious authoritarians, too (which is probably why rightwing Catholics like Bill Donahue have been willing to suggest that the cartoonists were essentially asking for it). Indeed, the general stance of the magazine appears to have been one of gleeful contempt for religious and political hypocrites of all stripes. Certainly, the boost that explicitly racist politicos like Le Penn are currently seeing in the French polls in the wake of these events would have horrified Charlie Hebdo’s editor Stephane Charbonnier, a life-long left wing activist who was (according to the New York Times) raised in a family of French communists. In fact, I think Charb would be commissioning some bitterly ironic anti-fascist cartoons in the wake of the current xenophobic rightwing groundswell — if only he were here to do so.
In other words, the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo seem to have been exactly what you might expect satirical cartoonists in the French tradition to be: mockers of pomposity and demagoguery of all kinds.
I think I understand the motivations of at least some of the critics of Charlie Hebdo, even if I do not agree with their assessment of the magazine. They are concerned, rightly, that Muslims of good will should not be held responsible for these crimes or bullied into silence; and they are concerned, rightly, that ongoing incidences of the victimization of Muslims in France, Britain, America, Palestine, and elsewhere should not be overlooked or worse yet, justified, in the wake of this outrage. And they are right because at a time like this it is obviously very important that Muslim voices (in particular) are heard, in all their diversity. Indeed, it is absolutely necessary that Muslims of good will should be welcomed to the table, so that we can repudiate vile, greedy fools like Rupert Murdoch when they spew their poison and ignorance into the world.
But surely it must be possible to include Muslim perspectives on this kind of violence without accusing the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo of political insensitivity (a criticism that seems to misunderstand the very point and purpose of satire), let alone deliberate racism (a charge that thus far appears to me unjustified)? Instead, and perhaps more productively, we could chose to emphasize that a man of Muslim heritage worked and died alongside the cartoonists at the magazine; that another Muslim man, a police officer named Ahmed Merabet, died defending the cartoonists at the magazine; and that yet another Muslim man, Lassana Bathily, saved several hostages from another terrorist at a Kosher grocery the next day. If we keep reminding people that members of the Muslim community were victimized here, and others also acted heroically, that will go some way towards making the reactions of people like Murdoch seem absurd, and make productive dialogue between social groups more possible.
In sum, and while there is no doubt much more that could be said, I think the suggestion that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo are in any significant way culpable for the climate of extremism that led to these tragic events is unfair not only to those cartoonists but also to the many members of the Muslim community who would never in a million years respond to a cartoon — however offensive they deemed it — with a bullet. It also just puts the cart before the horse. After all, if a right wing Christian were to shoot Andreas Serrano for making “Piss Christ” I would not repudiate blasphemous artists for unnecessarily provoking radical Christians; instead I would ask what forces were at work to make some Christians feel that murdering artist-provocateurs was a necessary and acceptable defense of their faith. I wouldn’t think the act was somehow the responsibility of Christians everywhere, but neither would I blame Serrano himself — for all that “Piss Christ” is more readily legible as a desecration of a religious icon than any of the cartoons at Charlie Hebdo I’ve seen. (And I am aware that Serrano himself declares the work to be devotional.)
I write these remarks in the hope that they will be interpreted not as an attack upon those with whom I disagree, but in what I hold to be a spirit of fairness both to the dead and to the living, of all faiths and of none.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.
This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Cardiacs are a British band from Surbiton. They were active from the late 1970s through 2008 — a lengthy career that can be divided into at least two distinct phases — and in that time they produced several difficult-to-describe albums. I like aspects of all their records and rank certain pieces alongside any earthly music that I have heard, from any era and any nation. (In fact, some of you might just want to cut to the chase and check out my personal favorite Cardiacs composition, “The Everso Closely Guarded Line,” before reading any further. It’s the final track from their 1989 album, On Land And In The Sea: an attention-demanding eight-minute mini-epic distinguished by recapitulated sequences of Baroque-style melodic counterpoint. The last three or four minutes coalesce into a rhythmically complex, anthemically rousing passage of such startling beauty that my heart swells in my chest and my eyes get all watery every time I listen to it. I recommend turning off the phone and the lights before hitting play. It’s available here in HD audio:
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Don’t forget to adjust your YouTube settings for full quality!)
Adoring the band as I do, I have often thought that it would be nice to share my enthusiasm with friends and acquaintances. But Cardiacs can be a tough sell. Most people have simply never heard of them. But it also turns out that lot of the people who have heard of them don’t like them.
They are a challenging proposition. I’ll concede that right away. Their overall sound is a rebarbative fusion of punk and progressive rock. Like a lot of classic punk acts, their music is often abrasively loud and manically fast, and combines grating, adenoidal vocals with aggressive guitar-based riffing. But like a lot of progressive rock bands, they have a penchant for odd time signatures, multi-layered arrangements, surprising chord modulations, and unpredictable song structures that eschew the traditional verse-chorus-verse template. Tim Smith’s lyrics are also strange and obscure, shot through with grotesque humor and playful mock-infantilism. Themes of suburban alienation (“A Little Man and a House”), the confusion and profusion of sexual desire (“Buds and Spawn”), and apocalyptic religiosity (“Fiery Gun Hand”) are all discernable, but rarely resolve into a coherent statement; the results can be entertaining, frustrating, and unsettling, by turns.
I think this unlikely blending of two ostensibly opposed popular musical genres — punk and prog — aggravates some listeners for reasons that are as much ideological as aesthetic. To be more precise: I think the music of Cardiacs inadvertently exposed the deep formal conservatism behind the putatively radical aesthetic assumptions of the British music press in the 1980s, according to which punk and prog were regarded as essentially equivalent to matter and anti-matter. Certainly, the punk-worshiping journalists of the early 80s were primed to despise anything that smacked of prog almost reflexively; the idea that a band might try and bring both genres together to forge a new idiom simply could not be countenanced. Consequently, Cardiacs were repudiated more harshly than many bands of the same era that committed the (more ordinary) musical sins of blatant commercialism and shameless derivativeness.
For example, reviewing the Big Ship 12-inch (1986) — Cardiacs’ first vinyl release — Mick Mercer of the Melody Maker suggested that somebody should “arrest these peasants before they get another chance.” For Mercer, it was as if the band had committed some kind of musical crime. A year later, reviewing A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window for the New Musical Express, Jack O’Neill was even harsher: “Cardiacs are the sound of both feet in the grave,” he opined. What’s more, shortly following O’Neill’s review, the editors at the NME — a powerful organ of musical opinion at the time — seem to have taken the unusually vindictive step of blacklisting the band altogether. Even if another musician or band cited Cardiacs admiringly, the subsequent article or interview would eliminate the reference; no one was allowed to say anything good about them!
It wasn’t just the press who reacted with revulsion in those early days. I witnessed at first hand the hatred that Cardiacs could inspire in an audience on what was (tragically, for me), the only occasion that I ever saw them perform live. The year was 1984, and I was fifteen years old when I caught Cardiacs as the support group for a headline act that I am now embarrassed to name — although of course it was that headline act that I had actually gone out to see. (OK, it was Marillion, but please don’t hold that against me, or more importantly against Cardiacs, who really don’t sound anything like Marillion at all.)
I can still clearly recall that both Tim Smith (lead guitar, vocals, principal song-writer) and Sarah Smith (saxophone) were wearing garish, clown-like make-up, to disturbing fake-jolly effect. I also remember a few obviously choreographed bits of cabaret-style theater. For example, there was a curious Brechtian mini-drama during the final number, in which Tim was joined onstage by an MC-figure in tie-and-tails who presented him with a bottle of champagne and then showered him in confetti — a display that seemed to move Tim to tears. (You can see a version of this set-piece here, played on a much larger scale and stage for a more receptive crowd.)
Cardiacs were hardly the first band to incorporate such antics into their act, of course. But at the time, even the slightest gesture towards such self-consciously “arty” theatricality was very much out of fashion. I doubt most of the teenagers in the crowd had ever seen anything like it — I certainly hadn’t — and the unfamiliarity of the performance style might partly explain why the response was so blisteringly savage. Within a few minutes of taking the stage, Cardiacs were under attack; bottles, cans, and homophobic obscenities (anything different was “queer” in Cardiff in 1984) were hurled at them in a barrage that lasted for pretty much the entire set. (In retrospect, the viciousness of the crowd only made Tim’s clown-child onstage persona seem even more vulnerable and incongruous — thereby adding to the affectively off-kilter dynamic that he was clearly trying to generate.) It was a pretty horrifying scene, really, but the band just played right through the storm of missiles and insults as if it wasn’t happening. Perhaps they had already got used to that kind of reception; I’ve read it was even worse at other gigs on this tour. (Apparently, at one show irate audience members set fire to the stage curtain in an effort to drive the band off). Still, it cannot have been easy to keep going in the face of such violent hostility.
As for me — I pretty much loved the band instantly. I’m not sure what it was, but I just knew the audience had got it wrong — and that something was happening on that stage that was a lot more interesting and unexpected than what I had come out for that night, even if I wasn’t fully able to process it. The sound and the look were unusual, no doubt about it. But it got under my skin and into my head and I knew I wanted more.
Unfortunately, I didn’t even know what the band was called. The ticket and posters just said “Marillion plus support.” It would be some days before I learned the name, talking to an older kid at school who it turned out had also been at the gig (apparently he’d seen the word “CARDIACS” stenciled on an amplifier or equipment box or something). And even when armed with this information, I could not find any records by the band in the local shops. (Reasonably enough; Cardiacs had yet to release anything on vinyl, as it turns out, although they had released several recordings in a cassette-only format of very limited distribution. In the absence of the Internet, however, I had no way of knowing any of this.)
In fact, almost three years would pass before I finally stumbled over a Cardiacs album one fateful day in 1987, while browsing the racks in Cardiff’s justly famous Spillers Records. It was called A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window; the cover image was a black and white photo of a giant daisy. I saw the name, I remembered that weird, intense, disconcerting gig from what already seemed like eons ago (three years is a long time when you are a teenager), and I bought the thing, unheard and untested, and eagerly caught the bus home to play it.
I loved this record instantly, too, and even recognized some bits and pieces from the show I had seen (such as the repeated refrain of “that’s the way we all go” from the title track and the song “RES”). This time, though, I was encountering them in the context of an ambitiously “modernist” concept album (or near enough) about the fear and loneliness and false bonhomie engendered by contemporary urban life — and the idea that something bigger than the big city might be glimpsed out of the “whole world window.” (For a lengthy review that does a superb job contextualizing both the band and this unusual record, check out the essay by Sean Kitching in The Quietus from last year)
I was now a bona fide Cardiacs fan; nevertheless, I somehow missed their next album (1989’s on On Land and In The Sea) — probably due to my being wrapped up in my final year at university — and then in the early 90s I left the UK for the United States, and got distracted by … well, a whole bunch of things. After a few more years I even got rid of my record player (though not my records) and over a decade passed when I didn’t listen to the Cardiacs music at all.
But just a couple of years ago I was going through my old vinyl records with a view to finally selling them off when I found my (now more than twenty-years-old) copy of A Little Man and a House … and found myself wondering “what happened to these guys?” And this time, thanks to the marvelous technology of the Internet I was able to make a belated rediscovery of the band. I think this is the closest I have come to that uniquely 21st century experience of hooking up with an old high-school sweetheart in middle age via Facebook. I feel as if I should have loved this band all my life; that other groups were mere dalliances by comparison to this — the real thing. Getting back into Cardiacs has felt like coming home, and for the last few years I’ve listened to them with more passionate interest than almost any other band, almost as if I’ve been trying to make up for lost time.
I swiftly learned that they too had gone through some major transitions in the early nineties, transforming from a six person line-up featuring saxophone, keyboards, and a second percussionist along side guitar, bass, and drums, into a leaner and meaner guitar-driven quartet. To my delight, I also discovered that I liked this later incarnation as much as the band I first fell for back in the 80s. The musical texture of their sound obviously changed with their instrumentation, but all the things that I loved — the strangeness and complexity and inventiveness and emotional intensity — were still there in abundance. They still had the capacity to disturb and they still had that wild, ecstatic, manic joyfulness.
Rather less happily, I also learned of the terrible series of strokes that laid Tim Smith low and almost ended his life in 2008 (apparently when he was just on the eve of completing the first Cardiacs album of the 21st century). According to several reports, while Tim’s mind is as sharp as ever, he is now partially paralyzed and badly in need of ongoing physical therapy. I continue to hope that one day we may hear better news from the Cardiacs camp regarding his condition, but for the time being, at least, it seems unlikely that he will be able to lead his band onto to a stage again. (The story is covered here in article from The Guardian. I suspect this article represents the only time Cardiacs ever got a write up in the mainstream British press, which is a bitter irony and a damned shame all by itself.)
For a few years after this disaster, the Cardiacs website was dormant and the albums slipped out of print (although old copies would sell for quite shockingly inflated prices on eBay). As of last year, however, the shop at their website re-opened, and you can now buy all their albums once again, direct from the UK. So if after reading this and listening to any of the tracks I’ve chosen as a selection, if you do decide you want to hear more, PLEASE consider ordering the CDs from Mary at the website. A good portion of the proceeds will go towards Tim’s ongoing medical expenses, so you can actually feel good about an act of self-indulgence, even as you acquire some of the most interesting and under valued British pop music of the last century. Humanity point and hipster points in one happy purchase — you can’t go wrong!
OK, time now for a few sample tracks from across the career. This is an entirely personal and idiosyncratic set of choices — other Cardiacs fans might have made a very different selection — but I’ve also tried represent some of the different musical phases of the band with the few choices.
1. TO GO OFF AND THINGS
That link to the disturbing original video, although personally I’d rather just listen to the track which is intense enough as it is. This version is from the CD re-release of one of those obscure “cassette only” albums from the early 1980s, The Seaside. I actually remember them playing this when I saw them; the stop-start riff was very distinctive, and the whole band would freeze each time the music stopped. I think it’s this kind of track led music critics to call Cardiacs a Pronk band (after the unlikely mixture of Prog and Punk). Tim rejected the label, preferring “psychedelic” — if you have to have a label for us, he said — but this is indeed pretty pronky, IMO. Recently covered by Napalm Death.
2. A LITTLE MAN AND A HOUSE
A fade-in and crash, followed by some ominous parping on the horns and strings, and then those too fade away, replaced by muted industrial clanking sounds, over which a tentative, anxious character sings of his eagerness to get to work on time. And things get stranger from there. I think this album really needs to be heard of a piece … but maybe this first track will whet your appetite. (You should skip I’m Eating in Bed if listening to the whole thing, BTW, and listen to it later; it’s a fine track — but it was not part of the original album release and doesn’t really belong there.)
3. THERE’S TOO MANY IRONS IN THE FIRE
A delirious single from 1987. I. Inspired performances from the rhythm section in particular. Love this one. Echt Cardiacs.
4. BUDS AND SPAWN
This version kindly uploaded in HD so your dog can appreciate the higher frequencies. From On Land And In The Sea. This track completely defies my powers of description. It comes in so many different pieces and the tempo shifts are truly boggling — I can’t imagine the amount of rehearsal required to pull this off. And yet it really doesn’t feel like prog-muso showing off to me. It’s just too damn manic for that. I hear something new in it every time.
5. DAY IS GONE
Can’t find this in higher than 240p, but this should be good enough to get the flavor. With this track we jump to 1992 and the Heaven Born and Ever Bright Album album — the first by the more stripped-down four-piece the band became in the 1990s. This is a remarkable composition that manages to look backward to 1960s psychedelia and forward to the future of pop, at the same time. In another instance of the band’s bad luck, ROUGH TRADE (the record label) went bankrupt shortly after this record was released and the album became impossible to find till 1995 when Tim was able to re-release it on his own label.
6. FIERY GUN HAND
A relatively straight-ahead rocker (well, almost … the instrumental break is quite mental). From Sing To God (1996), a double album that most fans consider to be Cardiacs’s masterpiece. I think I like on On Land And In The Sea (1989) slightly more, but both are wonderful, and Sing To God has just been re-released in a deluxe 180g vinyl pressing for all you true audiophiles.
7. DIRTY BOY
For this one, I’m just going to quote a section of Sean Kitching’s recent review of that deluxe new vinyl edition of Sing to God, since he offers a better summary of this song than I could possibly write myself.
‘Dirty Boy’ is perhaps the album’s crowning achievement. It begins with a guitar riff reminiscent of Alice Cooper’s ‘I’m Eighteen’ and alchemically transmutes its base material over the course of its nearly nine minutes duration with celestially ringing sounds constructed by innumerably overlaid strata of acoustic guitar and incredibly drawn out sustained vocals that when performed live had an undeniably consciousness-altering effect on all those present.” (For the whole review, go here.
8. THE EVERSO CLOSELY GUARDED LINE
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Here it is again just in case you didn’t play it already. And here they are doing it live many years later — bootleg sound, of course, but they pull it off.
Keith Moon would have turned sixty-eight on August 23rd of this year — a slightly mind-boggling thought, if only because it’s so difficult to picture him as an elderly person.1 But I wish that I could imagine such a thing, because few people that I have never met hold such a place of affection in my heart. What is it about Keith Moon that can inspire such feelings of warmth, delight and sorrow in me, more than thirty-five years after his death? What is it about his extraordinary musical personality that strikes me as so compelling and charismatic? In honor of Keith’s birthday, I’d like to beg your indulgence and spend a little time ruminating over these questions here.
I can distinctly remember the first time that I became aware of Keith Moon’s existence. It was the summer of 1978, and I was nine years old, sitting in the living room of my family home in Cardiff, Wales, watching Top of the Pops on the BBC. In the age of the Internet, it can be shocking to recall just how limited the media outlets for rock music once were, particularly in Britain. But the Thursday night screening of Top of the Pops provided fans with what was at the time a very rare opportunity to see their heroes in action — perhaps the only such opportunity for a younger viewer like myself who was unlikely to see a live show. Indeed, for much of my childhood and into my early teens, watching Top of the Pops was a required weekly ritual, as well as the fodder for intense schoolyard analyses the following day. So it was that on this particular July evening I happened to catch one of the first British broadcasts of the promotional film for “Who Are You?”
I was not then an admirer of The Who — the most popular album at my junior school that year was the soundtrack to Grease — and even today I don’t rate “Who Are You?” as much more than a late reach for past glories: “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” again, only not as good. But that night in 1978 was the first time that Keith Moon surprised me into laughter. His round face framed by large earphones ludicrously secured to his head with industrial tape, Keith played with a dynamic kineticism quite unlike anything that I had seen before. Other drummers, even the least sedate, tended to stay in one place in their seats, whatever their arms and legs might be doing; this makes good sense from the point of view of technique, since ideally one wants to keep all parts of the drum set within reach at any given moment. However, Keith’s style seemed to require movement throughout his entire body, with abrupt lurchings off in one direction across his massive kit, and then hurried rolls back the opposite way, all the while striking out in every direction like a monkey in a gnat swarm. He didn’t hit his cymbals so much as pounce on them, roaring. With his puffed cheeks and bulging eyes he might have been trying out for the part of the villain in a children’s pantomime — one of those melodramatic performances intended to evoke giggles rather than fear — and I think it probably was to his facial expressions that my nine-year-old self most strongly responded, rather than his percussive prowess. I have since watched this clip many times and have seen and heard a great deal more in it than I was capable of discerning initially. But my childhood intuition that this funny, crazy drummer played an essential role in distinguishing his band from the competition has only been re-confirmed.
The song begins by creating an atmosphere of sonic suspense. Townshend’s jittery licks flicker across a stuttering synthesizer sequence, setting the stage for a gentle but insistent chorus of high harmonized voices that repeatedly pose the question of the title over the nervous chatter and splash of Keith’s hi-hat. The combination establishes a mood of anticipation, whetting our appetite for the inevitable entrance of the band at full bore. But in Jeff Stein’s film, we can see that Keith’s hi-hat has not been placed, as in a traditional set-up, tucked inside the main structure of his drum-kit, but away beyond a flank of tom-toms. This unusual placement reflects Keith’s relatively infrequent use of what is, for most drummers, a central element of the rhythmic arsenal, and serves as a neat reminder of just how idiosyncratic his approach was. But Keith’s set-up also has the effect of requiring him to lean out over his instrument towards the camera and the other musicians; from his first appearance in the clip, then, we know that this is a drummer who will refuse to disappear behind his drums. No mere timekeeper, his presence contributes as much to the theatrical, visual appeal of the band as to the overall sound. In fact, as he glances back and forth at his bandmates, Keith seems to be vying as much for their attention as for the gaze of the camera. The impression that Keith is reflexively performing for his fellow performers is confirmed as the film progresses through sequences in which we watch him mugg and gurn in an effort to amuse a cranky Pete Townshend, and a typically taciturn John Entwistle, while ostensibly recording handclaps and backing vocals.
Keith’s comic antics work, of course; neither Townshend nor Entwistle can keep a smile off their faces for long around him. But behind the laughter, Keith’s troubles had become a source of desperate anguish for those who loved him, and the extent of his problems would soon be obvious to the rest of the world as well. For the “Who Are You?” film depicts the last occasion that Keith Moon entered a recording studio with his bandmates. He would play only once more with The Who, on May 25, 1978, on a soundstage at Shepperton, in a sub-par performance recorded for the movie, The Kids Are Alright. He died a little more than three months later — only a few weeks after I saw him on television for the first time — as a result of what was probably an accidental overdose of the barbiturate Heminevrin (a medication that he had been legally prescribed as an adjunct to treatment for chronic alcoholism). With the benefit of this hindsight, Keith’s performance in the “Who Are You?” film is inevitably as poignant as it is captivating: impossible to watch without an awareness that the end is near.2
The band had opted to re-record the song for the film-shoot rather than merely mime, and while this decision unquestionably adds to the interest of the clip, Keith’s drumming is far from flawless. In the context of his looming fate, these audible errors inevitably resonate with ominous significance. For example, the middle section of the song contains a kind of mini-crescendo, culminating as Roger Daltrey cuts loose with his best Acton Town blues-howl: “Whoooooo are yoo-oo-oo!” This false musical climax is then followed by a slightly unexpected shift into another quiet instrumental passage. But if you listen to the film sound track carefully, you can hear Keith momentarily forget this pianissimo-fortissimo-pianissimo structure, instead taking off immediately after Roger’s bellow with the snare and bass drum rhythm that actually drives the final section of the song. He stops abruptly, realizing his error, to re-trench sheepishly behind a wash of cymbals. (Some might consider it fanciful to suggest that cymbals can convey embarrassment; nevertheless, that is what I hear. Even Keith’s mistakes as a drummer can be powerfully emotionally expressive.)
Indeed, it is painfully apparent by comparison with earlier footage and recordings that in musical terms, at least, the drummer in the “Who Are You” clip is only doing a passable impression of himself: Keith Moon playing “Keith Moon.” I don’t evoke this mimetic paradox simply to be clever; as it turns out, the idea that Keith’s personal identity became a horribly demanding role — one that exhausted and ultimately consumed its creator — is actually a recurrent theme in the posthumous mythology that has grown up around him.3 Less commonly noted, however, is the fact that this symbolic concept or role of “Keith Moon” has now managed to detach itself almost entirely from the creative category of “musician,” instead coming to denote a whole lifestyle based on endless, reckless hedonism: an anarchic, destructive, and yet apparently insatiable capacity for sensual pleasure and alcohol-fuelled excess. It seems to me central to an understanding of the man’s misfortune to note the extent to which this idea of “Keith Moon, the craziest guy in rock” splits off from and ultimately obscures the notion of “Keith Moon, drummer.” I’d go so far as to suggest that Keith’s spectacular percussive gift remains under-appreciated in some quarters as a consequence of this symbolic division. That’s why I want to celebrate Moon the Musician today, and not Moon the Cartoon-Loon, wrecker of hotel rooms and serial smasher of television sets.
Keith Moon was both the youngest member of The Who and the last to join, at the age of seventeen, in 1964. Daltrey, Entwistle, and Townshend had all known one another since high-school, and had already been playing together for more than a year under the name of The Who (and The High Numbers), with more than one different musician in the drum seat. Keith would joke later that his status as drummer was never made official: “I’ve just been sitting in for the last fifteen years,” he deadpans in The Kids Are Alright. “They never actually asked me to join the group. I knew it by instinct.” Like all good jokes, this one is illuminating at both a conscious and unconscious level. On the one hand, Keith’s place in The Who is presented as entirely natural, a fit so self-evidently perfect that it did not even require articulation: instinctively correct. This perspective accords with the majority verdict of rock historians everywhere, most succinctly summed up by Tony Fletcher in his statement that the “band … never gelled before it found [Keith, and] never gelled again after it lost him.” On the other hand, the joke emphasizes Keith’s sense of himself as not quite “part-of,” as standing a little outside of a previously established fellowship. The self-deprecatory claim to be merely “sitting in,” while painting his position as far more precarious than it actually was, hints at a deeper sense of insecurity.
Still, even if Keith was never officially invited to become The Who’s permanent drummer, in the years since his death his bandmates have openly allowed that he brought something essential to the mix (although these acknowledgements would come only after a lengthy period of denial, the sheer extent of which may indicate just how painful Keith’s loss was, particularly to the group’s leader, Pete Townshend). In one of the most generous of these statements, Roger Daltrey has remarked that, whatever they may have called themselves at different times, “The ‘Oo were not really The ‘Oo” before Moon’s arrival.4 I’m tempted to go further; in my opinion, for at least the first year of their career, the most innovative, ear-catchingly distinctive element of The Who’s sound is to be found in Keith Moon’s contribution. At the outset, The Who is a band driven from the drum seat.
Consider, for example, the first single, “I Can’t Explain.”
As many have observed, the basic riff owes a good deal to prior records by The Kinks, although the lyric is pure Townshend: a teenage boy, “dizzy in the head,” struggles to describe surging, narcotically powerful emotions that he cannot precisely name or articulate. The rapid mood-swings of this archetypal Mod-figure convey a kind of adolescent urgency to which the stabbing chords and upbeat tempo of the song are entirely suited. But in other ways the music and lyric are less than obviously matched. For while the singer cannot distinguish love from confusion, telling us that he feels “good,” “sad,” “blue” and “mad” all at once, the music is much less emotionally complex. It’s a blast of exuberance that ultimately transcends the theme of frustrated adolescent desire to express sheer, light-hearted joy.
This feeling of exuberant joy owes more to Keith’s drum part than any other single element of the track. Tony Fletcher writes that “I Can’t Explain” “would only have been a great song without Keith Moon’s input, never a great record,” an observation I would extend to cover almost everything The Who put on an acetate in this very early period.5 The importance of Keith’s contribution is more apparent if we first consider the song in its immediate musical context of mid-60s British pop. I am hard-pressed to think of any prior recording from that era that leads so prominently from the back. The song is predominantly in 4/4 time, but the basic “1-and / 2-and /3-and /4-and” rhythm is established and sustained throughout not by the drums, but by the guitar. “I Can’t Explain” thus reverses the conventional arrangement of most beat-driven pop of the era; rather than stringed instruments and vocals playing relatively intricate lines around and on top of a simple rhythmic back-drop created by, say, a bass guitar and snare drum, we have a series of ever-changing and intricate drum-fills playing around and behind the rhythmic spaces delimited by the guitar and vocals. Moreover, when the time signature of “I Can’t Explain” alters slightly at the end of the second and third verses, the steady 4/4 giving way to three heavy beats played by the band in unison to emphasize the vocal (“I know what it means,but…”) it is the drums that step forward into the pause created by this overall rhythmic shift, with a double burst of three sixteenth-notes on the snare, announcing the transition from verse to chorus. Such moments in which a drummer steps forward at the end of a bar or phrase are, of course, common enough in many great early rock songs — one might think of the rapid-fire triplets that end each verse on Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock,” for instance. But D. J. Fontana brings “Jailhouse Rock” to a startling dead-stop at those moments, while the effect of Keith’s little break is more like that of an intake of breath — a percussive gasp for air that precipitates not a sudden stop but rather a series of even more complicated drum rolls played on the entire kit.
The distinctive elements of Keith’s drumming — most particularly his use of the instrument as a vehicle for emotional expression and musical punctuation rather than as a pace-setting and time-keeping device — are more apparent in an early live performance of this song on the TV show Shindig than they are on the original studio recording.
In the studio we find him tapping with relative restraint on the hi-hat, playing the basic four-four rhythm at double-speed. On the Shindig performance, by contrast, Keith’s hi-hat is relatively inaudible (and played almost entirely with his foot — he rarely if ever strikes it with a stick). In place of it’s insistent tick-tick-ticking, he adds an almost constant wash of sound from a ride cymbal. He would increasingly adopt this distinctive style in live performances, producing a continuous wave of noise with his cymbals from out of which the toms, bass drum and snare burst forth explosively.
Something else we can observe in this Shindig appearance is the way Keith draws the gaze of the camera, even in the relatively short space of this song. Most early TV appearances of pop-groups display a fixation upon the singer as the primary point of visual interest, with only occasional cutaways to other musicians (particularly when they sing a backing vocal). Drummers, notoriously, rarely catch the focus for long. This performance starts out as if governed by a similar directorial policy. The first close-up is of Roger, desperately struggling to project the image of Shepherd’s Bush hardnut while actually conveying all kinds of self-consciousness and anxiety in his stiff, awkward body language. The second close-up is of John, singing accompaniment. The camera cuts back to Roger again, and then finds Keith, momentarily. We revert to brief shots of Roger and John, but then the camera switches back to Keith almost if in a double-take: “wait a second, what about this guy!” (Meanwhile, poor old Pete still hasn’t received a look-in.) This time the shot lingers over Keith for slightly longer before cutting away, and when it returns to him for a third close-up, as the song cycles into the first iteration of its chorus, it’s clear that he has won the battle for attention. From this point on, he gets at least as many close-ups as the front man, and even when the camera pulls away on the final chords for a shot of the whole band, it’s Keith who catches the eye, twirling his stick and pointing at us from the side of the frame.
It probably doesn’t hurt that at this stage of the game he is by far the cutest member of the band, with his boyish features, wide, doll-like eyes and jet-black hair. His uber-stylish mod sweater with the target design and his animated facial expressions also contribute to his overall appeal. But he also displays another kind of seductive charisma, here: the charisma of his unique musical style.6 He approaches his instrument with such casual, loose-wristed abandon, his sticks whirling and turning like batons in the hands of an ambidextrous orchestral conductor as he improvises his rolls around the metronomic rhythm-pattern established by Townshend’s guitar. You need look no further than this clip for a definition of sprezzatura; it’s an effortless genius, spellbinding precisely because it seems so unlabored. (There have been and continue to be many theatrically expressive and talented drummers, of course. Stewart Copeland has a cat-like, delicately pouncing violence to his cymbal-strokes; Tony “Thunder” Smith can project an innocent glee while playing like a demon; Terry Bozzio can ham it up while hammering it out. But still, I’ve never seen anyone, before or since, who moves at the kit quite like Keith Moon.) No wonder that once the Shindig camera-crew notices him they are compelled to return to him, even during the guitar-breaks.
But importantly, Keith is selling the song here every bit as much as he is selling himself. To elaborate on that observation of Tony Fletcher’s, it’s not just that Keith’s performance makes the song great; it’s that he plays this competent but slightly derivative pop-song as if it’s great — as if playing drums behind Pete’s riff were not merely an act of musical accompaniment, but one of the most exciting thrills imaginable — and in the process he goes a good way towards winning us all over to his own belief in the material.
On this and other primal recordings (such as second single, “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,”), Daltrey, Entwistle, and Townshend sometimes sound as if they are struggling to keep up with the button-faced little dervish who had unexpectedly answered their cattle call and then quite literally beaten the available competition into submission. But by the release of third single, “My Generation,” the band has started to figure out how to make more measured use of its strengths. Townshend fully embraces the role of time-keeper, with his brazenly simple two chord riff, around which Keith’s bass drum and snare thump and pop like fireworks — while the main instrumental break is carried (unusually and famously) by John Entwistle’s teeth-rattling bass guitar.7 Townshend’s willingness to keep the beat and allow his astonishing rhythm section — and particularly his drummer — to play more expressively proved to be the key that released The Who’s signature sound, allowing the band to stand out from the crowd of guitar-fronted groups that had formed in the wake of The Beatles’ success. Keith continues to play the part of a lead instrumentalist in later singles such as “Happy Jack” and “I Can See For Miles,” while the stringed instruments essentially keep time; and even as Townshend grew in confidence and technique as a songwriter, he would continue to leave room for Keith to break out in many of his most important compositions. Songs like Tommy’s “The Amazing Journey” and Quadrophenia’s “The Real Me,” for example, are fundamentally built around the concept of the thunderous, heart-quickening drum fill.
Within the basic parameters of the late 20th century pop group, such a close alliance between a guitarist and a drummer might be considered relatively unusual. But the complementary nature of Moon and Townshend’s personalities is clear, even in offstage interviews. Thrust by his ambition into the position of spokesperson for the idea that pop music could be “art,” Townshend, by his own admission, can sound glib and pretentious when interviewed alone; but with Moon at his side, he became half of the funniest comedy duo in the history of British rock & roll, a kind of musical Rik Mayall to Moon’s madcap Adrian Edmundson (the Russell Harty interview segments interspersed through The Kids Are Alright provide the best instance of this double-act to have survived). But obviously it was as a musical collaboration that the bond between the two men expressed itself most strongly. In fact, I’m inclined to regard the relationship between Pete and Keith as one of the great musical love affairs of the era — right up there with the romance between Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards — even though Keith never shared a writing credit.
Their creative intimacy is already apparent in live footage from the earliest days of the band; for example, at the 1965 National Jazz and Blues Festival in Reading, musical transitions and changes of volume and tempo are usually presaged by an exchange of glances between Pete and Keith. But by the time of the Isle of Wight show in 1970, the two men can barely take their eyes off each other. During the more exploratory stretches of improvisatory jamming they are clearly exchanging visual as well as aural cues in order to regulate the rise and fall of the musical dynamic. Their gazes regularly interlock, and often Pete will step right up to the drumset, as if playing to Keith alone. Still more often, you can see him playing with his head turned over his shoulder, away from the crowd, as if to keep his manic collaborator always in the corner of his eye. Aside from occasional attempts to engage Entwistle by making him laugh, Moon generally returns Townshend’s look; and when Pete’s focus is elsewhere (as, for example, when Townshend attempts to talk to the audience between songs) Keith constantly interrupts him with a stream of comments and rude noises. It would be easy to interpret these interjections as a symptom of Keith’s relentless need for the spotlight, but often it strikes me that he’s trying to get Pete’s attention at least as much as that of the audience — rather in the manner of a boisterous younger sibling seeking the approval of an adored older brother.
The members of The Who have often stated that they considered themselves better as a live-act than a studio band, and the onstage rapport between Pete and Keith — almost impossible to recreate in studio conditions — may well be part of the reason this assessment carries some weight. Certainly, it would be easy to point to many terrific live performances by the band that foreground the dynamic between Pete and Keith, and which also leave the studio recordings of those same tracks in the dust: the electrifying version of “My Generation” at the Monterey Pop Festival, for example, or the almost religiously enthusiastic rendition of “A Quick One” from the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. But I think the quintessential clip — perhaps the first one I would show to someone if attempting to win them over to Keith’s playing — is the performance of “I Don’t Even Know Myself” from the Isle of Wight concert.
I should admit upfront that as a musical composition, this song isn’t actually that strong. The riff is almost echt-Townshend — too close to things we’ve heard him do before (the chords are very similar to those of “The Seeker”). The lyric, too, is a bit of an exercise in Pete’s default mode of bitter alienation. Some of the lines slide from the lazily composed into the downright ludicrous (“C’mon all of you big boys/ C’mon all of you elves!”). But none of these flaws matter to Keith. It’s another classic from the pen of Pete Townshend, as far as he is concerned, and at this show he plays it with the same enthusiasm that he would bring later to such sublimely perfect songs as, say, “Bargain” or “The Punk and the Godfather.”
It’s apparent that he can barely contain himself during the introduction, which involves a relatively quiet interplay between Townshend’s guitar and Daltrey’s harmonica; he sits and grins and spins his sticks like a majorette before leaning back on his stool (it’s more of a seated-limbo movement, actually — an inch further and he’d fall right off his perch), and then swoops forward to cut loose at full power as soon as the occasion permits. The first verse comes crashing to an end on a series of left-to-right drum rolls, each one of which he ends by pulling a face at John Entwistle from behind his crash cymbal, like a child playing peek-a-boo. The song then enters a quiet passage that he augments with an erratic clip-cloppity pattern on a woodblock, looking for all the world like a mad scientist gloating over his latest discovery. The song repeats this structural pattern (loud verse, quiet chorus) and Keith repeats his moves: making silly faces at John, rocking dangerously, and then gleefully tapping his wood block while shaking his head and rolling his eyes like Animal from The Muppets. (If any single rock-drummer served as an inspiration for Animal, it surely has to have been Keith?) And then we reach the instrumental break. Briefly locking eyes with Pete to take his cue, Keith’s excitement now knows no bounds. Now he can really make a noise.
The camera angle shifts so that we are positioned behind Keith and so have an interesting perspective on his technique here — if technique is even the correct word. You can see, among other things, how often his right arm flails across his body to strike repeatedly at two cymbals that are positioned on opposite sides of the kit. (The first time I showed this clip to a drummer friend of mine he laughed out loud at this; he found it at once breathtakingly audacious and wildly counter-intuitive. “I’d never even think to just bash away at my cymbals like that,” he said, “but if I were going to do it, I wouldn’t set them up that way. It’s sheer madness!”) Against this near constant metallic crashing, he then sets up a rapid, falling pattern of double stroke rolls with his feet (he’s playing with two bass drums, which allows him to thump out multiple low “notes” far more rapidly than a single bass drum set-up will permit). The overall result is just inches away from chaos, a dance with disaster, the sound of a Premier drum-kit falling down a moving staircase, but somehow managing to do so in time. And then, as the break comes to an end, and the entire band pauses momentarily, Keith cannot stay in his seat. He jumps to his feet, waving his right arm in the air in a triumphant salute … and accidently tosses away his drumstick. (The precise moment occurs at about three minutes and twenty seconds into the song, if you want to check it out, and is clearly unintentional — though, of course, Keith was prone to throwing his sticks around deliberately at times, too.). The stick arcs and drops somewhere behind the kit but almost before it has even hit the stage floor, Keith passes his other stick from his left hand to his right, and (still standing) strikes his right hand cymbal — quite literally without missing a beat. He obviously has plenty of other sticks stashed nearby in case of this eventuality, and has a new one in his left hand before he has even sat down.
No one else in the band even notices.
I once showed this clip to another friend, who happens to be in a 12-step program. We paused to rewind the “stick toss” incident a couple of times, both of us marveling at the combination of ebullient genius and unforced error, not to mention the smooth rapidity with which Keith recovers from his mistake, his obvious preparedness for it, and the blissful obliviousness of the rest of the band to this entire mini-drama. “Now that,” said my friend, “is functional alcoholism!”
It was not intended as a patronizing or reductive observation; he spoke in admiring, even wistful tones. But I winced a little, nonetheless. Because yes, of course, Keith is clearly pretty loaded — probably on more than one substance — during this performance.8 And to acknowledge this fact is, among other things, to acknowledge that my desire to discuss Keith’s musicianship without becoming distracted by his legendary hedonistic persona is finally impossible. The reason that this performance is so exciting is because it feels like it is teetering on the edge of chaos; but it feels that way precisely because it is teetering on the edge of chaos, just as Keith himself is teetering drunkenly on the edge of his stool. He doesn’t fall off, here. But there were nights when he did — perhaps most legendarily at the Cow Palace in 1973, when he passed out twice, and found himself replaced on the second occasion by a nineteen-year-old named Scot Halpin, pulled almost at random from of the audience by promoter Bill Graham (and that is surely as Punk Rock as it gets). So if it is true, as I believe, that the wild legend of “Moon the Loon” has tended to overshadow the critical reputation of Moon the musical genius … well, Keith himself must bear the greatest burden of responsibility for that fact.
My point is not simply that Keith was a genuinely wild and crazy guy, after all, but — more sadly — that Keith himself seems to have valued his lunatic status more highly than his percussive abilities. How else can we explain the fact that on his only solo album, the critically reviled Two Sides of the Moon, he does not even play the instrument that propelled him to international fame and success, choosing instead to croon ballads in an atmosphere of soused self-indulgence like a bad karaoke wannabe? Indeed, Two Sides of the Moon is so inexplicably and unnecessarily unlistenable that it raises the question of whether Keith radically misunderstood the nature of his own gifts.
Alternatively, our general comprehension of the kinds of neuroses that drive addictive behavior may leave us better positioned to recognize something less obviously apparent at the time: the possibility that Keith’s investment in the role of “Moon the Loon” was rooted in more profound problems of self-esteem. If so, then the lesson of Two Sides of the Moon is not that Keith really wanted to be a lounge singer, but that being who he actually was — one of the most exciting, innovative, and original drummers in the rock and roll pantheon — was not enough for him. His inability to take lasting comfort in the prodigious talent for which others so freely adored him may now strike us as the most painful aspect of his tragedy. Although capable of winning the love and affection of thousands of fans, the all-too-familiar kernel of his story may simply be that he did not like himself very much.
I don’t wish to conclude with these perhaps too-pat psychologistic claims, however. Suffice it to say that, like all of us, Keith clearly knew, and caused, his share of pain. But in the distillation of the life that we now have left — in the body of recorded work — the dominant mood is anything but tragic. As the critic James Wood has written in a wonderful tribute to Keith’s musicianship:
it could be said, without much exaggeration, that nearly all the fun stuff in drumming takes place in those two empty beats between the end of a phrase and the start of another … [and] whatever their stylistic differences, the modest and the sophisticated drummer share an understanding that there is a proper space for keeping the beat and a much smaller space for departing from it, like a time-out area in a classroom. Keith Moon ripped all this up. There is no time-out in his drumming because there is no time-in. It is all fun stuff.9
In other words, if Keith wanted (absurdly, against all logic) to “have a good time all the time,” then he managed to express that desire not merely in the antics of his daily life, but in the very substance of his art. Of course, “have a good time all this time” is perhaps not the most sensible life-plan, since it is impossible to realize. It represents a child-like impulse, at best, and a childish one at worst. But few professions have been more dedicated to trying to pull off this impossible project than that of the rock-star. And maybe that, as much as anything else, is why Keith will always remain a contender for the title of “Rock’s Greatest Drummer” — because his unique style in some sense embodies the central hedonistic edict of the musical culture from which it emerges. Outside of a pop-song, we know, no one can have a good time all the time. But inside one … that is when it really can be all fun stuff, all the time. I will always love Keith Moon’s drumming for suggesting this possibility.
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I am grateful to Noah Berlatsky, Anthony DeCurtis and Loren Kajikawa for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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1. This could just be a sign of my own creative limitation, but many people who knew Keith personally have also reflected on the difficulty of imagining him growing old.
2. What for fans is merely poignant must remain painful for those who knew Keith well; and watching the bright-eyed percussive wunderkind of the 1960s transform into the bloated melancholy clown of the later 1970s was surely horrifying, up close. Tony Fletcher captures the anguish of several of Keith’s friends in his highly recommended biography, Moon (HarperCollins, 2000).
3. Consider, for example, John Entwistle, cited in Fletcher, 501: “Of course he was a good actor … he’d been acting at being Keith Moon all those fucking years.” Also worth mentioning is Keith’s own oft-cited description of himself (even as his skills began to slide) as “the best Keith-Moon-type drummer in the world.”
4. In contrast to Roger’s frequent expressions of warmth, Pete is often inexplicably harsh about Keith in interviews, even in recent years. For example, in a 2011 documentary about the making of Quadrophenia, he opines that he didn’t think Keith was actually a very good drummer. I’m inclined to see this tendency charitably, as a sign of Townshend’s residual grief manifesting as anger — but sometimes his unpleasantness about his former collaborator can be quite shocking.
6. In an early draft of this essay, I wrote “the charisma of musical technique” before deciding that “technique” was not quite the word I wanted. I don’t want to get into a long discussion here about Keith’s technical limitations — you can check out the comments below any number of YouTube videos to find people insisting upon them — but I should perhaps say that I am fully willing to concede the point that Keith is not a “technically accomplished” drummer in the way that phrase is usually employed by practicing musicians. But this fact, for me, only makes his drumming more interesting. One of the most remarkable things about Keith Moon is that he can achieve so much, viscerally and emotively, while making mistakes that most drummers strive to eliminate. In any number of recordings you can hear him accidentally clicking his sticks together or striking his rims in the middle of a roll. Sometimes you can hear him losing “the beat” altogether — even in the midst of a performance that somehow remains utterly dazzling. (Check out the isolated drum track from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnVjpymrbIY for an example: the awkward stumble at 1.18 and the ridiculously brilliant bass drum flams between 2.06 and 2.16 are all part of the same package.) Although instinctively capable of generating rhythms of sometimes startling complexity, the appeal of Keith’s playing goes well beyond “technique,” and it’s that something beyond that I’m striving to catch at, here. What he lacked in technique, he made up for in style.
7. The stop-start structure of the song means that these rapid thumps leap out of silence and onto the ear like an insistent but irregular heartbeat; Keith’s bass drum pumps “My Generation” with an aggressive vigor that both mirrors and counterpoints the quality of adolescent confusion conveyed by the stuttered vocal. Again, this represents a boldly original utilization of part of the kit that is more often relegated to the elementary metronomic function of marking the first and third beat in a conventional four-four time signature.
8. Townshend says somewhere — perhaps on the DVD extras that accompany the most recent release of this concert — that he was a bit worried before the show about Keith’s condition, although I’m presently unable to locate the exact source.
9. James Wood, The Fun Stuff and Other Essays (Picador, 2012), 6. I’d written most of this essay before discovering Wood’s piece, or else I would probably have cited it more often; as it is I recommend it, along with Tony Fletcher’s book, to any serious enthusiast of Moon’s work.
Editor’s Note by Noah: Ben originally wrote this on a thread at the Comics-Scholars listserv in response to what he called “the banal, tendentious, flat-footed, and largely comics-ignorant commentary of Manohla Dargis and AO Scott. I asked to reprint Ben’s piece here, and he kindly agreed. With his permission, I’ve edited his piece slightly so it can stand alone without confusing references to a conversation we’re unable to reprint in full. I’ve included ellipses to show where I’ve made deletions.)
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…as someone who can enjoy some superhero comics and films, and who can even find things to admire and teach in the work of superhero comic-book creators from the 1930s to the present, I have a mixed reaction to the (very common) ideological critiques of this material – that is, critiques that focus on the supposed racism, nationalism, and sexism of the genre.
Depending on the degree of intellectual subtlety and rhetorical talent of the critic, I can find such responses stimulating, informative, educational, and provocative; but I can also find them reductive, repetitive, self-righteous, and (occasionally) no less ideologically dubious than the material purportedly being “critiqued”. Most often, though, I just find ideology critique boring.
To be clear: I am entirely persuaded that the superhero genre as a whole is vulnerable to critiques in term of racism, nationalism, and sexism.
So is the genre of the Western. So is the Crime/Noir genre (in fact, I would say the problem of misogyny is far more fundamental to the crime genre as a whole than it is to the superhero genre; and I like a lot of crime/noir stuff, too). So is the SF genre. (Any Robert Heinlein readers out there?) So is the Romance genre. And on, and on, and on.
My point is NOT that “all these genres can be politically problematic, so why pick on superheroes.” (Although an honest, aesthetically searching discussion of why different genres at different times get cut all sorts of critical and ideological slack, while other get dismissed on such grounds – well, that might be worth reading.)
My point is rather that ideological critique can only take us so far. It tends to proceed as if works of art (or acts of representation, if you prefer) are best judged in terms of their political content and efficacy. In other words, the (generally unspoken) assumption of such criticism is that politics should serve as the primary evaluative yardstick by which the “success” or “failure” of a work of art (or act of representation) can be measured.
I happen to disagree, strongly, with this assumption (although that does not mean that I do not have an interest in and cannot learn from or do not sometimes practice ideology critique!).
One serious problem with the “superhero movies are racist, nationalist, sexist” arguments (and I use the term advisedly) of Dargis and Scott is that it insults those members of the audience who consider themselves to be anti-racist, anti-nationalist, and anti-sexist. I would number myself in that crowd.
And do I really need to add that there are in fact quite a lot of women, people-of-colour, and non-Americans, who enjoy superhero fantasies? How are they supposed to respond to the “arguments” of Dargis and Scott? “Oh my, you are so right! What a fool I have been for enjoying the propagandist “entertainments” of my oppressors! Would you please supply me with a list of approved movies and books so that I may become as enlightened as a New York Times journalist – for surely there is no one wiser or kinder on God’s green Earth!”
I suppose one could make some argument about false consciousness in order to “explain” the phenomenon of, say, a woman-of-colour who just enjoyed the heck out of, say, The Avengers. But personally I find such arguments deeply patronizing, and self-evidently inadequate.
A more productive line of reasoning (to my mind) would be to ask what it is about superhero fantasies that attracts so many people (across lines of race, gender, and generation), DESPITE the ideologically troubling aspects of many of those fantasies.
Isn’t it possible – just possible – that there is something genuinely emotionally compelling and even aesthetically powerful about the best examples of this genre? (Just as there is about the best examples of the Western, the Crime genre, the Romance genre, and so on?) Isn’t it possible – just possible – that sometimes people are responding to those compelling and aesthetically powerful aspects of these narratives (and not just, say, giving in to their inner fascist)?
It might also be worth pointing out that it is possible to be aware of the ideologically poisonous aspects of an art work (or act of representation) such as, say, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or (to take a more recent and perhaps even more disturbing example), The Birth of A Nation, while also considering those artworks important enough to be worth teaching, and even defending in terms other than the political.
And BTW, I don’t find a movie like The Avengers to be anywhere near as troubling as D W Griffith’s racist version of history, or even Shakespeare’s The Merchant. I’m not arguing for some sort of equivalence between these texts – I’m arguing that ideology critique is, at best, an opening move, in critical terms. To my mind, you have to have more things to say about a movie or book than “it’s racist/sexist/homophobic” if you are really engaging with it as a professional critic. Of course, you don’t HAVE to engage with any text critically if you don’t feel like it or think it’s worth it. But if you aren’t engaging in that way, don’t pretend that you are.
Scott and Dargis, I submit, fail this basic test of critical engagement when it comes to the superhero genre… Scott and Dargis just come off as art-movie-snobs, and their attitude is all too lazily familiar. But hey, we already knew that the NYTimes doesn’t have much of a clue about pop culture. This is the same NYTimes that just criticized Comic Con for being too serious, after all. (And they say superhero movies are stupid and incoherent!)
For those of you who might be interested, I’ve found Jonathan Dollimore’s book, SEX, LITERATURE & CENSORSHIP to be very smart and useful when it comes to parsing out the vexed relationship between aesthetics and politics – and in moving beyond the more knee-jerk tendencies of ideology critique. Dollimore’s work is definitely somewhere in the back of my mind as I write all this, and it seems appropriate to give him a nod.
It’s easy to knock corporate super-hero comics. There’s the relentless, unthinking sexism; the apparent paucity of fresh concepts; the tendency to confuse horrific violence with thematic sophistication (and the related inability or unwillingness to address younger readers); the summer crossovers that so often and so transparently put sales figures ahead of internal coherence or aesthetic quality; and the frequent reboots, which may once have been justified as a way of shedding the weight of unwieldy continuity, but now smack of greed, desperation, and cluelessness in about equal measure.
These various problems can be diagnosed as symptoms of a fundamental disrespect for the comic book audience at the corporate level. But creators, too, are often subjected to this same disrespect, even as they continue to labor within the constraints of the current system. Probably no one reading this needs to be told about the historic injustices that have arisen out of the “work-for-hire” production model; nor is it hard to imagine the chilling effect that this model must have over time for even the most successful practitioners of the genre. (Indeed, it’s probably no coincidence that many of my personal favorite writers and artists often seem to do their best work when engaged with creator-owned projects; by comparison, producing comics under a “work-for-hire” contract must feel like swimming with weights.)
The writers and artists who do manage to produce work of consistent quality within the corporate system, on a monthly basis, sometimes for years on end, have therefore beaten some long odds, in my opinion. And perhaps in such circumstances it is all the more important to offer commendations when commendations are due.
I am here, then, to sing the praises of Brian Michael Bendis and his various co-conspirators for their work on Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man.
First, and for the tiny handful of you who might not know this (“Hi, Mum!”): Marvel’s so-called Ultimate universe was initially conceived back in 2001 or so, as a way of re-starting the adventures of the most well-established Marvel characters from their origin stories — with a clean-slate, as it were. The official reasoning was that creators would no longer be tied to decades of prior continuity, and that this would also encourage new readers to jump on board. Less often acknowledged, but probably equally important was the opportunity to jettison aspects of the older narratives that had simply dated. For example, in the 1960s, Stan Lee’s default “origin story” involved some sort of inadvertent exposure to radioactivity. But radioactivity is a less mysterious concept today than it was sixty years ago. We don’t expect it to give us superpowers; we do expect it to give us cancer. Consequently, in the Ultimate universe, corporate and government sponsored experiments in genetic mutation — almost always carried out at the behest of the military — have taken up the plot function that was once fulfilled by radioactive “isotopes.” (And there’s probably a whole essay of the cultural studies type that could be written about the political and cultural implications of this particular shift of emphasis within the superheroic fantasy, but I’m not going to write it.)
Within the current continuity of this Ultimate universe, a teenager named Miles Morales has recently taken up the webbed mantle and power-and-responsibility mantra of Spider-Man. Miles resembles his predecessor, Peter Parker, in many ways — he’s intellectually gifted, ethically centered, and terribly young to be a hero — just thirteen years old, in fact. But unlike Peter Parker, who was obviously Caucasian, Miles is the child of an African-American father and a Hispanic mother. Marvel’s decision to re-boot one of their flagship characters as a person of color has generated a fair degree of media interest, and even seems to have ruffled the feathers of a few right-wingers and white-supremacist types. I’ll say a bit more about that, but for now I just want to note that this is just one of the reasons that I like the comic. Here are some others.
1) It is a great “all-ages” book — or a great 10-years-old-and-up book, at least. This is important, because there are just not that many quality genre comics that can engage both younger readers and adults out there these days. In fact, most of my favorite current genre titles (Casanova, Criminal, The Sixth Gun, Scalped) are not appropriate for kids at all.
It is ironic that great comic books for younger readers should nowadays be so very hard to find, given the original target audience for the medium; but perhaps it should not be much cause for surprise. Quality children’s literature has always been unusual, after all — which is partly why works like Alice In Wonderland or the Oz books or Where The Wild Things Are become objects of veneration. The really good stuff is rare as hens’ teeth.
I’m not saying that Bendis’s work on Ultimate Spider-Man is an achievement to be ranked alongside Carroll’s or Baum’s or Sendak’s. That would hardly be comparing like-with-like, after all. I’m simply saying that there are only a tiny handful of quality monthly genre titles that can engage an adult audience while remaining appropriate for younger readers — and Ultimate Spider-Man is one of them. (If you are looking for others, Atomic-Robo and Princeless are also pure, joyous fun, but of course neither of them are superhero books. In fact, it really would be hard for me to name another superhero title with the “all-ages” appeal of USM right now.)
2) While it is easy (and often appropriate) to be cynical about any gesture made by Marvel or DC towards traditionally marginalized members of the readership, I think Bendis’s decision to take one of Marvel’s most recognizable characters and recast him as a person of color is not only entirely commendable, but has also been (thus far) very well handled. Yes, Marvel and DC can always create “new” non-Caucasian heroes, but the fact is that if the marquee, iconic figures are always white, well … the marquee, iconic figures are always white.
And yes, it is possible to belittle or undermine this move by saying it’s “only” the Spider-Man of the Ultimate universe that we are talking about — as if that makes this a less “real” change. But even leaving aside the silliness of arguing which version of Marvel universe is more “real,” I think that the people who are inclined to say this have not been following the comics for some time, and therefore don’t realize that the Ultimate universe has now been established for well over a decade. For a lot of readers, the Ultimate Marvel Universe IS the “real” Marvel universe. What’s more, the recent Marvel movies owe at least as much to the characters as they are presented in the Ultimate line as they do to the regular 616 line. So this is not the equivalent of a “what if” or “imaginary” story in which someone other than Peter Parker gets bitten by that magical spider. It’s a much bigger deal than that.
Nor can the invention of Miles Morales be written off simply as an attempt to boost flagging sales with a headline grabbing plot twist. While comic book sales in general are apparently regarded as dismal, Ultimate Spider-Man has (I believe) been the most consistently successful Ultimate title. It’s certainly the longest running — and I’ve personally enjoyed it more than almost any of the Spider-Man books published in the 616 universe for the last decade. (I’ll admit that Bagley’s art put me off for quite a while. But I gradually got over it, and eventually came to appreciate his considerable storytelling skills, even though I still generally dislike the details of his faces and figure work.) So this wasn’t a “hail Mary” pass, or a last ditch effort to save a dying title. On the contrary, it appears to have been a thoughtful, considered, and even potentially risky move, given the relatively high profile of the book in question.
When we first meet Miles and his parents it is at a “lottery” for places in an elite private school. They are surrounded by other anxious parents and children, and the importance of this lottery for these families — as a possible route for their children out of the broken public school system, and into the middle class — is made very clear. When Miles’s number comes up — in a nice touch, the same number is marked on the genetically modified spider that will later bite him, and give him powers — his mother embraces him weeps in relief: “You have a chance. You have a chance.”
By means of this “school lottery” subplot, then, larger themes of race- and poverty-based exclusion have been placed at the center of the new Spider-Man’s origin story. This doesn’t make USM a political tract. But it suggests that Bendis understands something very important. He understands that the history of racism — and the attendant problem of the representation of race in various forms of media — is not simply rectified by a change in the hero’s pigmentation. Miles Morales’s experiences also need to be different from Peter’s — and not just because he is a different person, but also because he is a person-of-color living in a culture where race relations are vexed (to put it laughably mildly).
Those who haven’t read the title, please don’t get me wrong. Miles’s race is not THE only or even the central issue in the comic; but it is part of the fabric of his experience — just as it should be.
This is tricky stuff to pull off, in any medium, in any genre. So far it seems to me Bendis is getting it absolutely right. He deserves praise for that.
4) Finally, the mere creation of Miles Morales seems to have genuinely pissed off Glenn Beck. Of course, Beck is the king of manufactured outrage — but if Bendis did manage to get under Beck’s toad-like-skin for even a minute, that only makes me want to cheer him on.
So, to come back to my initial observations: it seems to me that there’s a lot of instinctive critical hostility out there online (and also in academic circles) among comics critics when it comes to the superhero genre, and some of it — maybe even most of it — is justified.
Nevertheless, I can’t help feeling that some of this critical hostility is misplaced — almost like what some philosophers would call a category mistake. Perhaps the confusion originates in the confused status of the genre itself, as something that began as a form of children’s entertainment, and which therefore gets into all kinds of difficulties when it aspires to “adult” sophistication. But just as it makes no sense to criticize Wall-E for not being Vertigo, similarly, it makes no sense (to me) to attack superhero comics for being superhero comics. (For being badly drawn or badly written, yes; but for conforming to certain well-established genre conventions, no.)
To put it another way: I don’t expect a Bendis superhero comic to deliver the kind of introspective reflections on parenting and childhood that I expect from, say, the new Alison Bechdel book (which I recently purchased and am keen to read). I don’t expect his representation of high school to mirror that of an autobiographical cartoonist such as, say, Ariel Schrag. But within the established conventions of the superhero genre, I find his work consistently entertaining, and often brilliant. And I think he deserves the highest praise not only for his current work on Ultimate Spider-Man, but also for his previous decade of scripts for the title.
In fact, over the course of his long USM run, Bendis has written some of the only superhero comics that have given me the same “fall-into-the-page” experience that I used to get from the genre when I was a kid (and none of the comics that I read as a kid still work for me THAT way — even when I can find other things to appreciate about them). Inspired by the latest issues, then, I recently re-read some of those earlier comics from the run — Bendis’s version of the Peter Parker era. In all honesty, I wasn’t planning on writing critically about these comics, or even thinking too hard about them. I was too tired for anything that I felt would be more “demanding” — I was just looking for a bit of escapist fun, after a long day teaching (both Hamlet and Watchmen, as it turns out — though not in the same class, I’m sorry to say).
I picked the Venom arc — Venom being a character I never liked in the original Spider-Man universe (an antipathy apparently shared by Bendis himself), but found myself enjoying in his Ultimate incarnation. In Bendis’s revision, the Venom project is something that Peter Parker’s father was working on before he died — a piece of medical research that Richard Parker ends up not owning because (get this) he produced it under a “work for hire” contract for an evil corporation. The temptation to read this as a self-reflexive commentary on the exploitation of comic book creators is surely irresistible. The story arc ends with a sequence in which Richard Parker speaks from beyond the grave to his son, Peter, via an old VHS tape. He talks about the feelings of impatience and creative ambition that first led him to sign this flawed “work for hire” contract, and acknowledges that not owning his ideas sucks. But he also insists on the importance of taking responsibility for one’s own mistakes. He concludes by telling Peter how much he loves his family — and how having a family at all finally helps him deal with the frustrations he has encountered in the world of his work. Peter, who has just endured a particularly emotionally punishing series of adventures, is depicted listening to his father with his head bowed. It’s not the portrait of a winner. On the contrary, Peter seems utterly crushed. But as readers we cannot help but nod in assent when Richard Parker expresses hopeful pride in his young son, and faith in the kind of man that his son will become.
The emotional tone of this moment is complex. It poignantly and powerfully evokes our admiration for the hero not in his moment of triumph, but in the depths of his despair. And it moved me to reread this sequence. Indeed, it moved me as much as anything I had encountered earlier that day in the classroom, teaching the works of Shakespeare and Moore.
The critical cliché would be to claim that at moments like this in his Ultimate Spider-Man run Bendis has “transcended the genre.” But fuck that. I LIKE genre work, and I wouldn’t patronize any great genre writer with this supposed compliment. Brian Michael Bendis doesn’t need to transcend the genre to transport me.
“There is no enemy so cruel or so ruthless as a once-defeated criminal who seeks revenge.” With this typically portentous opening sentence, William Moulton Marston lets us know that we can expect to see a few familiar villainous faces over the course of Wonder Woman #28. And sure enough, the story makes enjoyable use of a device that has since become a cliché of the genre: the super-villain team-up. But Marston’s resort to this now standard trick from the hack-writer’s grab bag was probably prompted by something more than the ordinary motivations of a professional comic-book scribe. Having recently received a fatal diagnosis of cancer, he knew he faced the ultimate deadline, and that this story would likely be his swan song. Whereas the standard comic book “blast from the past” is an opportunity to say hello, again, to members of the rogue’s gallery that we have come to know and love, Marston was saying goodbye. Wonder Woman #28 is his fond farewell, then, not only to the character that had finally brought him fortune and fame, after a long search for the spotlight, but also to her entire supporting cast.
Writers such as Ken Alder, Geoffrey Bunn, Les Daniels, and Gerard Jones, among others, have provided a wealth of information regarding Marston’s career prior to the creation of Wonder Woman. Consequently, we now know that Marston’s various previous attempts to convert his academic credentials into money and celebrity had met with a measure of success, but had not provided him with a platform on the scale of his dreams, let alone financial security. From his earliest correspondence with pioneer publisher M. C. Gaines, however, Marston seems to have grasped both the commercial and communicative potential of comic books — seeing possibilities for both profit and proselytizing in a new medium that most members of his generation and class could only dismiss with disdain. His faith proved well placed. He scored big on his first try-out, creating one of the most immediately recognizable and indelible images of female empowerment to emerge from the mass-cultural milieu of 20th century America. But Wonder Woman was no mere lucky strike, or the product of a sudden epiphany. On the contrary, she was in many ways the culmination of more than twenty years of sustained intellectual work on Marston’s part — the comic book incarnation of half a lifetime’s meditation on the subjects of human psychology and sexuality.
Inspired by and at some level perhaps even a partial composite of Elizabeth Marston and Olive Byrne, the two real women with whom Marston lived in a polyamorous relationship, Wonder Woman was without doubt conceived as part of a sincerely feminist vision (which is one reason why she can claim such prominent figures as Gloria Steinem among her fans). But Wonder Woman was also a complex fantasy object for her creator, a projection of and vehicle for the transmission of his erotic and political desires — two categories that were equally inextricably linked in many of the publications he produced throughout his academic and journalistic careers. I’ve written about Marston’s intellectual and emotional investment in Diana at considerable length elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point here; but suffice it to say that at times Marston seems to have imagined (perhaps only half-seriously, but nevertheless with all the creative energy at his command) that he could change the world through his Wonder Woman comics. Working through her, he believed he could contribute to the reformation of the basic structure of sexuality itself, at least as manifest in 1940s American society.
As Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt hopefully opined from his own deathbed: “He that no more must say is listened more/ Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose.” Marston surely felt a similar hope when he sat down at his typewriter to enter Diana’s world for the last time; for in Wonder Woman #28 his idiosyncratic liberationist project resurfaces with a fresh urgency and insistence. The resulting three-part tale — “Villainy Incorporated,” “Trap of the Crimson Flame,” and “In the Hands of the Merciless” — is therefore more than just an affectionate backward looking glance at some of the weird and wonderful antagonists from Wonder Woman’s past (though it is clearly that, too). It is also a restatement of many of Marston’s key themes, as they had been sounded throughout his entire tenure on the title. More poignantly, it is his last attempt to lay out a set of principles that he seems to have honestly believed might mitigate some perennial aspects of human suffering.
The story begins in media res, reminding readers of Wonder Woman’s recent defeat of an invasion from Saturn. The first illustrated panel (the second on the page, the first being taken up entirely with text) shows Diana having captured a large group of Saturnites in her golden lasso — which seemingly could expand or contract in length as needed, and here must be a few hundred yards long. Interestingly, artist H. G. Peter initially depicts a mixed group of Saturnite invaders, of both male and female genders.
But in what I would regard as a telling slip, by just the second illustrated panel, the men in this group have mysteriously vanished; Diana (and Marston) is apparently only interested in the disposition of the female captive Saturnites, while the fate of the males is simply passed over. Attractively coiffed, and garbed in skintight costumes of bright scarlet, these “evil” young women are bound together in single file with their hands behind their backs, and transported by Diana in her invisible plane to the ominously named “Transformation Island” — the Amazon correctional facility. There, we are told, all prisoners are required to wear Venus girdles, a garment made from a “magic metal” that “compels complete obedience to loving authority.” This last phrase is spoken by the chief Amazonian prison officer in the final panel of the first page of the story; but it is repeated almost verbatim in the final panel of the very last page, by Diana’s mother Hippolyta: “The only real happiness for anybody,” we are assured there, “is to be found in obedience to loving authority.”
“Obedience to a loving authority.” Even for a reader unfamiliar with Marston’s psychological theories about the “primary emotions” of dominance and submission, the bookend status of this recurrent phrase signals the thematic significance of such concepts for the story at hand. And, indeed, the adventures that take place in between this repeated assertion depict several dizzying and occasionally hilarious oscillations between expressions of the impulse towards dominant assertion, on the one hand, and expressions of longing for a life of service, on the other. Thus, over the course of the first few pages, Eviless, a villainous (if rather unimaginatively named) Saturnite, turns the tables on her Amazon captors by forcing them to wear the Venus Girdles they have imposed on their prisoners, and thereby inverting the hierarchical structure of dominance and submission that characterizes the healthy “norm” of Transformation Island. However, while briefly wearing a Venus Girdle herself, even Eviless is momentarily tempted to surrender to the joy of captivity: “Now to remove this girdle … But I want to wear it — I feel so peaceful and happy!” As if to confirm the validity of those swiftly denied feelings with regard to the pleasure of obedience, several of the prisoners that Eviless subsequently attempts to release proclaim that they do not actually wish to be liberated at all. (“No, No! We don’t want our girdles removed!”). Eviless dismisses their desire to remain captive, of course — “You’ve let these Amazons break your spirit,” she declares — but later in the story, when some of these same happy prisoners have their girdles removed anyway, against their will-to-submit, we discover that a more profound change has actually taken place. “Without the girdle I feel dominant — invincible!” a girl named Irene discovers, “But I don’t feel cruel and wicked as I used to — the Amazons have transformed me! I love Wonder Woman and Queen Hippolyte … I must save them!”
At this moment, the regime of Transformation Island would seem to have produced the paradoxical ideal female of Marston’s psychological theories. Irene is “dominant” rather than submissive, but ruled by “love” rather than selfish “appetites.” (Marston’s preferred word in his academic writings for selfish-dominants is “appetitive”; he contrasts the appetitive type with unselfish-dominants, who he thinks can save the world by taking up the role of “Love Leaders.” Seriously. Read the last five or six pages of The Emotions of Normal People if you don’t believe me.)
In other words, the newly liberated Irene is just like Wonder Woman herself. She is an ideal personality type (in Marston’s preferred psychological terms), with a strong will to dominate that is nevertheless somehow conjoined with an equally strong will to love and serve others. We are encouraged to draw this parallel between Irene’s “new” post-Venus-girdle personality and that of Wonder Woman’s when she subsequently (and suddenly) develops Wonder-Woman-like powers: breaking free of her bonds, bending the bars of her cage, and freeing the other “good” prisoners. Irene goes on to lead a second rebellion of submissive-dominant prisoners against the prior rebellion led by Eviless and her dominant-dominant prisoners (the redundancy seems necessary if we are to keep track of who gets to “top” whom in this curious world of dominant and submissive flip-floppers). Irene then frees Wonder Woman (who had also been captured by Eviless), and together they restore order to Transformation Island; by which I mean that aggressively dominant types such as Eviless are once again placed in Venus Girdles, which cause them to happily accept roles of submission and service, while their mistresses (now including the formerly submissive prisoners who had earlier refused liberation at Eviless’s hands) once again dominate over them — lovingly, of course.
The inversions and reversal of the categories of top and bottom that produce this strange and paradoxical notion of order — in which loving-submissives-who-have-learned-to-dominate rule over recalcitrant dominant personalities that have been magically converted into submissives — are head-spinning. But they are also an inevitable consequence of Marston’s attempt to fuse his psychological theories, which assume the fundamental importance of the oppositions of dominance and submission in all human relations, with a liberationist-feminist philosophy of loving kindness.
This fusion should render certain arguments about Marston’s comics moot. For example, Trina Robbins has stated, on this website and elsewhere, that it is male readers (or “boys” as she sometimes calls them) that like to worry the issue of bondage in these comics, while female readers prefer to focus on the message of empowerment. Robbins is a creator and comics historian whose work I respect, but I’m strongly disinclined to accept this dubious gendering of our interpretive responses. (In fact, I can only wonder what Robbins would say to a woman who is interested in the depiction of bondage in these comics; would she accuse her of having more in common with “the boys” than with a woman such as herself, on the basis of such an interest?) But even if I were willing to reduce individual interpretive responses according to such gendered and heterosexist lights, the specific example of Wonder Woman #28 finally suggests to me that the very concepts that Robbins wants to separate — bondage and empowerment — actually cannot be disentangled in Marston’s imagination. As strange as many of Marston’s ideas undoubtedly seem, surely one of the single most frequently reiterated messages of his Wonder Woman stories is that there is no necessary contradiction between taking pleasure in bondage games (which, after all, form part of the regular recreational life of Paradise Island) and a commitment to female empowerment. On the contrary, for Marston, submission — of a very particular kind — turns out to be the best route to liberation. He said as much, prominently, twice, in this last story, so we wouldn’t miss it: “The only real happiness for anybody is to be found in obedience to loving authority.” The bondage sequences of his comics only make sense in the context of that curious philosophy.
Sharon Marcus describes the resultant imagery as “maternalist bondage.” This is a superb locution, in part because it acknowledges the fetishistic dimension of Marston’s scenarios while at the same time providing a strong indication as to the degree to which those scenarios depart from the typically polarized power structures of “traditional” BDSM, as superficially understood. (And yes, it is I think part of Marston’s achievement that a serious discussion of his work will lead one to posit a kind of BDSM that is “traditional,” simply in order to understand what the hell he is doing that is different.) But at the same time, and as Marcus has also clearly recognized, the phrase “maternalist bondage” also suggests some of the limits or problems inherent in Marston’s vision. At bottom (so to speak) the idea of submitting to your loving Mom is probably more disturbing or even icky than it is sexy for most of us. Of course, the reasons why that may be so are the basic stuff of psychoanalysis, and (as Marcus’s hints in her brief expositions of Jessica Benjamin’s work) these questions may even bring us closer to some of the (repressed) origins of the erotic charge present in what I am again forced (with delighted irony) to call more “normal” bondage. In other words, what we have here might have considerable potential as a psychoanalytic allegory — even if it probably isn’t going to bring about Marston’s larger project, which, as I’ve already said, was nothing less than the attainment of world peace through the reformation of sexuality. If we understand Marston’s logic, then, we can perhaps avoid getting caught up in a few older arguments about the politics of bondage — and even generate some newer and more productive ones.
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The index to the entire roundtable on Wonder Woman #28 is here.
