About Sean Michael Robinson

Sean Michael Robinson loves puppies, kitties, little children, and monstrous library book sales. When not writing about himself in the third person, he stays busy with drawing and playing music and contemplating the fates of the sparrows. He hopes to finish his debut graphic novel Discards sometime in the spring of 2012, or before he is dead.

The Music Machine: Black Glove and the Loneliest Garage

Posted on October 28, 2014 by Sean Michael Robinson

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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The Music Machine were —

Sean Bonniwell – vocals, guitar
Keith Olsen – bass
Ron Edgar – drums, vocals
Mark Landon – lead guitar
Doug Rhodes – organ, flute, vocals

I’m going to say it again – the “Canon” means nothing. Not in comics, not in literature. And certainly not in music.

There are the little demolitions. The knocks, the craters, the crumbling walls. But it’s not just the Harold Blooms of the world that hang onto the idea, however stupid, that popularity can ever be indicative of quality, that, in the end, in matters of taste, history is always right.

A simple demonstration.

What was the fiercest band of the mid to late sixties “garage rock” explosion? The smartest songs? How about the most adventuresome?

Ever heard of the Music Machine?

No biographical summary of mine would ever be equal to the writing of Richie Unterberger, who interviewed Music Machine singer/songwriter Sean Bonniwell for his 1998 classic book Unknown Legends of Rock and Roll. So for a more thorough overview of the band’s history, pick up a copy of the book, or check out a full transcription of Unterberger’s interview with Bonniwell here.

But really, the songs and performances are their own justification.

The Music Machine hailed from Los Angeles, California, and were formed out of the trio The Ragamuffins. Bonniwell, him of the tough songs and gruff voice, was a graduate of folk quartet The Wayfarers, who released three LPs for RCA in the early 60’s. Listening to those recordings now, it’s hard to imagine the sounds to which that sweet voice would be twisted.

Driven by Bonniwell’s taut songwriting and unhinged voice, the band rose to prominence in the L.A. rock and roll scene and spilled over nationally, scoring a top 20 hit with “Talk Talk,” their scattered, stabbing first single. Like all of the greats, they were discovered in a bowling alley, performing continuous, uninterrupted 90 minute sets for their attentive fans and, presumably, bewildered bowlers. These days, they’re primarily known as “that band” that future Fleetwood Mac producer/engineer Keith Olsen got his start in. (It’s him playing the mean detuned bass guitar on these recordings. He also designed and built the fuzz boxes used by the band.)

At this distance, what you might hear in the Music Machine is really dependent on your own familiar frames of reference. For 60’s popular music enthusiasts, what you have in this soup is essentially a smart, violent Iron Butterfly on speed instead of downers. (A glance at the relevant time lines will tell you which direction this influence lies — the L.A.-via San Diego band Iron Butterfly released their debut album in 1968, two years after the national success of the Music Machine’s “Talk Talk.”) As this comparison might suggest, as much as the “proto-punk” label has been thrown at the Music Machine, it’s perhaps “proto-prog” that’s most present in the arrangements, specifically the segmented nature of the instrumental hand-offs. The songs are rarely constructed by block chords moving around the neck of the guitar – rather, the unusual, doomy chords are suggested by interlocking melodic lines carried by multiple instruments, each staying within its own narrowly defined frequency range.

In the above, “Talk Me Down,” and “You’ll Love Me Again,” you’ll hear the same arrangement sensibilities, stop-start dynamics, gruff then shrieking vocals, wordless screams and pseudo-James Brown mannerisms and funky bass with roller-rink Farfisa organ skating along atop. The line up of the band that recorded (and apparently, endlessly rehearsed) these songs didn’t last long — breaking up sometime in 1967, less than two years into the life of the band. They were, it is said, plagued by bad luck, negligence, short-sightedness, and mismanagement at every turn. And yet, somehow, they managed to squeeze out at least a dozen perfect songs, even if a real full-length statement eluded them.

It’s a fate that could easily have met their contemporaries, Love, or The Zombies, both bands which had tremendous early success with singles that were just indications of the greatness to come, both of which managed to put together transcendent full-length albums before retiring to that great rock and roll second-hand shop in the sky– Forever Changes and Odessey and Oracle, respectively.

But in The Music Machine, we just have those scattered singles, two-minute angry screeds against, what, exactly? Girls. Loneliness. The human struggle for life in a hostile, hateful world of selfish pursuit and gluttonous predation? Complete with horrifying duck calls? Hell yes!

What’s that? You love that terrifying song, but you’d much rather hear it whilst watching the band limply mime the tune? And you’d really like them to be introduced by Casey Kasem? Here you go! Happy to oblige!

What happened to the Music Machine is almost too mundane to summarize. Dissatisfaction. Too little money, too many ways to split it. Exploitation and exhaustion. Too many bowling alleys, not enough nights in the studio. Regardless of the details, they went the way of any great group, leaving, unfortunately, with their ultimate promise unfulfilled.

But oh, what wonderful remains.

You can purchase the entire Music Machine catalogue in two meticulous releases from Big Beat– The Bonniwell Music Machine and the Ultimate Turn-On. If you’ve enjoyed these clips, you’ll love the heck out of these reissues.

It’s an interesting mental exercise to imagine future music enthusiasts digging through the past decade of music, looking for hidden gems of the era, unknown or forgotten bands of that time period. In the case of the Music Machine, they had the serious advantage of lots of regional exposure, hell, of a national hit, even if the trick wasn’t repeated. And even though the rest of their catalog was obscure, the flag, the signal flare, was there. “Here we are. Come listen.”

What hope, exactly, does a band have today?

The bowling alleys, the bars of listeners, the VFWs, the dance halls, the venues, all gone, as is regional radio. All the ways a band had to make themselves known to their neighbors. And so even while recording equipment gets cheaper and cheaper, cheap instruments better and better, the audience continues to shrink. What brave soul would wade into that sea of unfiltered musical content in an attempt to extract the unknown gem?

I don’t envy them the attempt.

I’ll leave you all with two last songs — “In My Neighborhood,” a Music Machine novel in two minutes, and a track from the much-maligned and almost completely invisible Sean Bonniwell follow-up to the Music Machine, which turns a more nostalgic eye toward the past, in retreat from the present.

Kate Bush and the Sensual World

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Sean Michael Robinson

Three weeks ago, one of the world’s greatest living songwriters returned to live performance after thirty five years of silence. Kate Bush is in the midst of a run of shows at the Hammersmith Odeon, the very venue where she last performed at the conclusion of her one and only tour, way back in 1979.

When Bush initially made a splash, at age nineteen, much of the media attention focused on her precociousness, her wide-ranging and sometimes shrill voice, and her elaborate, passionate dancing and sometimes wacky choreography. But in the decades since her debut, long after her peers have ceased to be relevant, after her beauty and even her fiery voice have weakened, it is her songwriting that remains her most remarkable trait, among many remarkable traits.

Like Emily Bronte before her, young Kate Bush was a fantasist. While her first three albums have thrilling moments, the truly remarkable aspects are her performances, and her work as a vocal and musical arranger. Her songs, on the other hand, are notable chiefly for how good they are for having been written by someone so young, with presumably so little life experience. They are best when they stay in the realm of the fantastic (“Violin,”), when they are overtly theatrical and over the top (“James and the Cold Gun,”), or coyly smart (“Them Heavy People,”) or lyrically vague enough to not draw attention away from the soaring, swooping melodies or the complex arrangements (“Wuthering Heights,” her first and biggest hit.)

When the songs move into the realm of the observation, such as “L’Amour Looks Something Like You,” the effect is something akin to a precocious teenager playing dress-up. No matter how compelling the melody and the arrangement, the scene is somehow distanced from reality, without the pleasure of the overtly fantastic.

I’m hanging on the Old Goose Moon
You look like an angel
Sleeping it off at a station
Were you only passing through?
I’m dying for you just to touch me
And feel all the energy rushing right up-a-me
L’amour looks something like you

But, really, this is comparing Kate Bush to herself. What teenager penned better songs? Who, exactly, were her peers as a songwriter?

In my estimation, Kate Bush’s fourth, fifth, and sixth albums, The Dreaming, Hounds of Love, and The Sensual World, stand as some of the greatest achievements in songwriting in the last half century. Unlike performers who step on the performance treadmill and run for as long as they are able, Kate Bush said goodbye to the stage in 1979, and said hello to self-production, self-direction, her own recording studio, her own goals, on her own time.

And presumably, the time off from performing and the increasing time between recordings meant time to live and to grow as a person.

“Mother Stands for Comfort” is a bit of an oddity on 1986’s Hounds of Love, sandwiched in between songs of greater length and complexity. But the streamlined lyric makes a useful comparison to the poetry-class noodlings of “L’Amour.” To the accompaniment of programmed drums, samples of breaking glass, grand piano, and a throbbing, alien fretless bass, Kate whispers and shakes her way through the oblique narrative.

She knows that I’ve been doing something wrong,

But she won’t say anything.

She thinks that I was with my friends yesterday,

But she won’t mind me lying,

Because

Mother stands for comfort.

Mother will hide the murderer.

The exact scenario isn’t clear from the lyrics. Is there a literal murder? An abortion? The narrative might not be forthcoming, but both the feelings and the dressings are explicit and real. The song is at once mournful and warning, cold and comforting.

It’s an oddity amongst the pulsing grandeur of the rest of the album, a breath between plunge and ascent, but for that it is no less great. Kate Bush takes this intimacy further on her follow-up album, 1989’s The Sensual World, an album full of songs that ramp up the fantastic and the mystical with the mundane details of a real life in the real world. In “Heads We’re Dancing,” it’s not just any charming manipulator she finds herself dancing with at a party– it’s Hitler. In “Rocket’s Tail,” two lovers walk along a bridge at night… I want to describe the story of the song, but the words do it so well themselves, conversational and clear and fitted to stunning unaccompanied singing by Kate and the Trio Bulgarka.

That November night, looking up into the sky,
You said,

“Hey, wish that was me up there–
It’s the biggest rocket I could find,
And it’s holding the night in its arms
If only for a moment.
I can’t see the look in its eyes,
But I’m sure it must be laughing.”

But it seemed to me
the saddest thing I’d ever seen,
And I thought you were crazy,
wishing such a thing.

I saw only a stick on fire,
Alone on its journey
Home to the quickening ground,
With no one there to catch it.

I put on my pointed hat
And my black and silver suit,
And I check my gunpowder pack
And I strap the stick on my back.
And, dressed as a rocket on Waterloo Bridge–
Nobody seems to see me.
Then, with the fuse in my hand,
And now shooting into the night

And then, silence.

After 1993’s disappointing The Red Shoes, it seemed as though Kate Bush’s recorded output might have met the same fate as her live performance, abandoned due to stress or personal needs or even disinterest. But after twelve years of silence came 2005’s Aerial.

It’s a difficult album to evaluate on its own merits, a sprawling mess of songs that go on too long and others that should have been cut completely. But amongst it all are some of the most ambitious songs I’ve ever heard.

The highlight of the album is the stunning “Mrs. Bartolozzi.” Dread and grief and remembered intimacies, all at a distance, as the couple’s clothes tumble in the spin cycle. Like “Mother Stands for Comfort,” the central fact of the song, the tragedy at the heart, is off-stage, this time never mentioned in the song itself.

I watched them go ’round and ’round
my blouse wrapping itself around your trousers
and oh the waves are going out
my skirt floating up around my waist
as I wade out into the surf
oh and the waves are coming in
oh and the waves are going out
oh and you’re standing right behind me
little fish swim between my legs

“Mrs. Bartolozzi” reaches a peak that few songs ever even aspire to, beautiful and ugly, both soothing and thrilling, explicit and mysterious. It’s a song that took Kate Bush a lifetime to write, even if the basic skills required were with her almost from the very beginning.

I don’t know who exactly reads these things, what your motivation might be for making it this far. If you’ve heard these songs and really listened you probably don’t need convincing. If you haven’t heard these songs, I don’t think it’s very likely you clicked through in the first place.

But sometimes, when you see something spectacular, you need to tell someone else, if only to affirm to yourself, yes, I saw that spectacular thing. I saw it and it burned up as it shot across the sky and we were there to see it then, weren’t we?

Thanks Kate for the lifetime of music, and thanks to all of you for making it this far.

Kate Bush discography

The Kick Inside 1978
Lionheart 1978
Never for Ever 1980
The Dreaming 1982
Hounds of Love 1985
The Sensual World 1989
The Red Shoes 1993
Aerial 2005
50 Words for Snow 2011

This post is part of a series called Panoptisongs, focusing on multi-dimensional analysis of songs and song craft.

Make a Rock Sound Here: Prowlin’ with a Cool Rider

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Sean Michael Robinson

I’m gonna show you cats some action,
Like you’ve never seen before.
We’re gonna get some satisfaction
Down at the grocery store

Once upon a time there was this terrible musical that was turned into a terrible film that rode the wave of nostalgia for 1950’s America into the theaters and straight to the bank. Hoping to turn this terrible film into a terrible franchise, a sequel was released a few years later, a sequel that, mercifully, bombed, and thus destroyed any future prospects for the terrible franchise.

By many standards of evaluation, Grease 2 is one of the worst films ever made. It’s crassly manipulative, it’s incoherent, it’s undeniably stupid, and perhaps most offensively, it seems gleefully unaware of many of its own flaws.

All of this makes it a good sequel, sharing all of these characteristics with its parent film. Also like its progenitor, Grease 2 features a cast of teenagers portrayed by men and women in their 20’s and 30’s. More damaging, the producers appear to have cast the film without regard to singing ability. And the cast is definitely doing their own singing.

The Pat Benetar role is sung by the charming but vocally strained Michelle Pfeiffer, who is at least capable of communicating with her voice, even when the style of the songs doesn’t suit her reedy tone. An early song, the atrocious Cool Rider, makes clear both her charms (funny and somehow sensual dance with a stepladder) and her vocal limitations. But things don’t get truly disastrous until her duets with her co-star Maxwell Caulfield, who possesses neither the voice for the role nor, apparently, a sense of pitch.

Pfeiffer wants a rider. That’s Cool. A Cool Rider.

Love Will Turn Back the Hands of Time, otherwise known as, Harmony is Hard When Your Possibly-Dead Motorcycle Angel Boyfriend Can’t Sing.

Worse yet, the songs themselves are a mess of slick eighties instrumentation, pseudo-50’s rock, and ridiculous sexual innuendo, making only the barest of attempts to connect themselves to the thin plot that proceeds around them. The songs are so unrelated to the action that they could easily have been written for any other sex and nostalgia-obsessed musical floating around at the time.

So why write about Grease 2 in the first place? And why have I even seen it?

I managed to make it into adulthood without being exposed to either of these movies, and I might have made it even further, if it wasn’t for my friend and pop culture obsessive/some-time employer James Brendlinger, who in 2007, paid me the princely sum of $30 a piece to record karaoke tracks for a quasi-legal one-off stage production. What can I say? I was young, I needed the money.

This, as you might be able to imagine, was a punishing job, and having “Girl For All Seasons” in my head for an entire week is not how I fantasized I’d be exploiting my rock and roll skills as an adult.

Yet, that one song– that one about sexy times at the grocery store. That one was pretty good. And who was that singer?

Adrian Zmed, of T.J. Hooker fame. Adrian Zmed, it appears, is a great fucking singer.

On TJ Hooker, Zmed portrays the green cop, the wide-eyed Italian-by-way-of-Romania who is the young foil to William Shatner’s weary, seen it all Sergeant Hooker. While he’s excellent on the show, it’s not exactly a part with a lot of room to stretch.

But man o man, does Zmed make the most out of his minutes here.

Not surprising for a movie directed by a choreographer, Grease 2 is filled to the brim with dancing and arranged movement of all types, including motorcycular. But among all the color, all the gyration and spectacle, it’s Zmed that stands out, Zmed that stalks the screen, grinds his hips, yowls, and suddenly collapses, clumsy and shy and vulnerable. It’s Zmed that has the voice, the strength, and the commitment to transcend the very clear limitations of this material.

It’s Zmed that should have been a star.

Zmed2

And yet it’s Pfeiffer that survived this turkey, along with director Patricia Birch, who would continue to work as a successful choreographer, even though her directing days were over.

It’s one of the things that’s most intriguing about truly bad group art– about art that fails not from over-reach, but from lack of any real ambition in the first place. Somewhere inside this accidental assemblage of cliche and commercial concession, there are all of these possibilities, all of these what-ifs waiting to be written. If great art can be intimidating, even distancing in its perfection, then truly bad art can sometimes be approachable, hopeful.

I’m not suggesting you watch Grease 2, not unless you’re a masochist for this kind of thing. But I am suggesting that you give this sequence a spin and wonder with me. What if? What if Adrian Zmed had been given a role equal to his talents, a role that required equal parts vulnerability, sensitivity, confident physicality, and lusty vocalization? When we regard an actor, do we regard him for his role, or what he manages with what he has been given?

It is the curse of the actor to be limited to the words and works of others.

What are you doing now, Adrian Zmed? It’s been over thirty years. It might finally be time to revive the franchise. What do you say? Want to give being a teenager another spin?

I leave you with something excellent, and stylistically related — the Paul Williams-penned “Goodbye Eddie, Goodbye,” from Brian DePalma’s Phantom of the Paradise.

This post is part of a series called Panoptisongs, focusing on multi-dimensional analysis of popular songs.

Utility and Art, Satan and Paradise: Depeche Mode and Gustave Doré

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Sean Michael Robinson

Promises me I’m as safe as houses
As long as I remember who’s wearing the trousers
I hope he never lets me down again
Never let me down

Twenty five years ago this month, Depeche Mode was one of the biggest groups on the planet. Three men and one prop. Martin Gore, the pretty face and the songwriting talent, the man with the melodies and the ideas and the sometimes daft lyrics. Dave Gahan, the thug, the angel, the unbelievable voice, cold and controlled and icy, somehow vulnerable even in his strength. Alan Wilder, the musician, the arranger. Taking Gore’s chords and melodies and transforming them into a synthetic dance onslaught. Textures layered and melding together, the artificial alongside the organic, hook upon hook weaving through, implying and extending Gore’s harmonic structures. Fourth member Andy Fletcher? A non-musician mime that mutely stands on stage, ventrilloquizes, manages the band.

Nine years into their careers Depeche Mode embarked on a grueling 101-show international tour, in support of their album Music For the Masses. The tour culminated in a staggering show at the Rose Bowl, attended by more than 60,000 people.

The show was filmed by director D.A. Pennebaker for a documentary on the band and its fans, eventually released, along with an album of the performance, as Depeche Mode 101. (Pennebaker is probably best known for his Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, but it’s his David Bowie concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars that Depeche Mode 101 most resembles)

Prior to the concert footage, the documentary gives insight into some of the on-stage strangeness of the band, and of the group’s internal politics. Off-stage, singer Gahan comes across as loutish and arrogant. Songwriter Martin Gore disappears, even when he’s on screen. Fourth wheel and non-musician Fletcher briefly makes himself useful by describing the band. “Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around.” And musician/arranger Alan Wilder proves him right, with little fanfare, in a sequence shot from behind a bank of keyboards, as he casually describes how different sounds are split across the instruments, and how the live arrangements are split between himself, songwriter Martin Gore, and a tape machine.

On-stage, Gahan at least is transformed, his pre-gig bluster changing into some kind of strange, thrusting energy. Unrestrained by any instrument, he stalks the stage, he shouts between singing, his voice hoarse and unrestrained. And at other moments he seems lost and weak, until the hook rolls back around and he rises to and assaults the crowd again.

At the end of their set they and their tape machine launch into “Never Let Me Down Again.” They are to a man sweaty and weary looking. Between phrases you can see Gahan’s mouth working in closeup,his face tightening, spastic, body rebelling even while his voice is restrained. “I’m taking a ride with my best friend.” The music ominous, the melody almost literally monotonous, droning. “I hope he never lets me down again.” The lyrics are stupid, real “moon in June” stuff, but they’re set in such a strange context, and the delivery is so intense, that it begs consideration.

Like many of Depeche Mode’s most affecting songs, there’s a distance, and a loneliness and despairing of communication, of being heard, of hearing. This sung by a man throwing himself about the stage in a desperate attempt to reach the audience in front of him, while the man who wrote it sings harmonies from behind his keyboard.

Gahan stops, breaths, staggers, thrusts out his hips, yells wordlessly, an octave higher than the sung range of the song.

“Let me hear you,” he screams. “Let me hear you!”

Finally he steps out onto the thrust of the stage and starts gesturing to the audience, waving his hands from side to side. And the lights come up and for the first time the camera sees Gahan and the audience together, the towering mass of waving arms rising above him, in front of him, all around him.

I get chills every time. It’s not just his confidence, the strutting and yelping, or the pulsing, looping chords. It’s an aesthetic reaction to him, to the whole scene, the beautiful lone figure thrust out over and surrounded by the massed crowds. It evokes the grand religious visions of Gustave Doré, particularly in his illustrations of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Of Satan, before the assembled cohort of angels, or looking out over Paradise.

Doré himself had a career not dissimilar to Depeche Mode. He was a prolific and tireless craftsman who was energetic and inventive, who relied on his collaborators, the engravers whose labors caused his pencil and wash drawings to take form in wood, to bring his work to its final form. (Like a band name represents a group of individuals, so we might think of “Gustave Doré” more accurately as a group of men, a kind of syndicate of illustrators and engravers, that shared their collective name with that of their founding member and progenitor.)

And like Depeche Mode, Doré was one of the most popular artists of his era; but critical acclaim eluded him. He was a good draftsman, critics sniffed. But. But. Was he just too well-known to be well-respected too? Or too well loved?

Not to mention the “illustrator” issue…

You see, the past two hundred years of aesthetic criticism have not been kind to function.

It’s why “craft” is a pejorative. It’s why design forms its own sub-category of visual art, related, somehow, to the field, like a second cousin once removed. It’s why soap operas and romance novels and video games and quilts and pottery and wood carvings and, hell, flower arrangement have been kept at an arm’s length from Art, an asterisk at best. Function implies craft. Function precludes intelligence, the demands of function displacing the desires of author.

Utility is at the heart of the critical attitude towards dance music.

Like pornography, you can evaluate dance music by the bluntest measures possible – it’s efficacy. Did you dance? Did other people dance? How many other people? How vigorously? The crassness of this measure tends to ward off deeper examination.

And that could be why Depeche Mode will likely remain a band well loved, but largely un-examined. Why some of the most interesting music made in the past four decades could be relegated to roller skate rinks and cut-out bins.

And when I squinted the world seemed rose-tinted
And angels appeared to descend
To my surprise with half closed eyes
Things looked even better than when they were opened

Dreaming Small — “Rhinestone Cowboy”/”Deacon Blues”

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Sean Michael Robinson

Last week 78-year old singer Glen Campbell appeared in the news for the first time in a long while, for reasons personal rather than musical. Since then, I’ve had Campbell’s much-maligned “Rhinestone Cowboy” in constant rotation on my cranial radio. I thought it would be a good time to revisit the song and try to figure out why it is exactly I love it so much, and see if I can bring a little bit of the pathos of the subversive song back to its surface.

Campbell himself was hardly a subversive figure. Although he’d started his career as a side-man and in-demand studio musician, by the close of the 60’s he’d successfully transitioned to the life of a popular country crooner, scoring hit after hit with the songs of other writers. His first major hit was a cash-in cover of Buffy Saint Marie’s pacifist anthem “Universal Soldier,” a song whose message the singer didn’t seem to exactly align himself with. “The people who are advocating burning draft cards should be hung,” Campbell told an Albuquerque newspaper in an interview about the song. “If you don’t have enough guts to fight for your country, you’re not a man.” A few years later his hit-hunting would pay greater artistic dividends when he recorded a series of songs penned by songwriter and former music transcriber Jimmy Webb, including the semi-mystical, harmonically complex “Witchita Lineman.”

Several years and several albums later, Campbell first heard “Rhinestone Cowboy,” as performed by its author, singer Larry Weiss. It would prove to be the song that would define Campbell’s career.

Larry Weiss’ rough and tumble delivery gives the downbeat lyrics a rugged authenticity. “I’ve been walking these streets so long,” he intones with his intense baritone voice while acoustic guitars and a harpsichord chime away in the background.

Where hustle’s the name of the game
and nice guys get washed away
like the snow and the rain

And suddenly the melody rises yet again, Weiss’ voice intense and clipped.

There’s been a load of compromising
on the road to my horizon
and I’m gonna be where the lights are shining on me
Like a rhinestone cowboy!

Throughout the verse the chords have wandered away from the tonic, only to triumphantly return at the chorus, Weiss shouting the lyrics as the melody rises to the top of his range. He’s joined by a soaring unison string section that had only teasingly entered before, now intertwining with the vocal, playing with full intensity.

And what exactly are the compromises that have led him to dream of the life of a rodeo star? What kind of hustles exactly are we talking about here? There are few answers, and only a handful of clues, the chief of which is the intensity of Weiss’s delivery, and the painfully shallow dreams evident in the chorus. What is the great triumph, the wonderful victory on the horizon for the narrator?

Like a rhinestone cowboy
Ridin’ out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo
Like a rhinestone cowboy
getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know
and offers comin’ over the phone

The horse and the rodeo is incidental, the details sketchy. The important part? People contacting him, caring about him, even people he doesn’t know. It’s a vision of a man who’s at the bottom, who’s highest aspirations are a glitter of the lowest kind.

In Campbell’s version the grit and drama is replaced with Campbell’s expertly employed voice, complete with almost operatic vibrato. The key has been raised a whole step to accommodate Campbell’s vocal range, and the string part squared off. Campbell’s version brings the song even closer to it’s second cousin, the 1966 Walker Brother’s hit “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” a song with which it shares a general rhythmical thrust and melodic arc. (Walker’s own operatic vocalizations, however, are almost painfully intense, elevating the lyrical nonsense to obsessive ode through his delivery alone).

So, is it possible that the “hustle” presented in “Rhinestone Cowboy” is that of an urban prostitute? The image itself was certainly in the air, thanks in part to 1969’s Academy-Award winning Midnight Cowboy. Even if the specifics aren’t divulged, the narrow dreams of the narrator make the likely options rather grim. The soaring chorus isn’t cheery; it’s the desperate dreamings of a man at the end of his options.

The narrative strategies at work in “Rhinestone Cowboy” appears again in a rather unlikely place, on the 1977 Steely Dan song “Deacon Blues,” written by Donald Fagan and Walter Becker.

At first glance the songs seem to have nothing in common, at least musically. “Deacon Blues” leads off with a series of shifting extended chords that finally settle into a recognizable but constantly modulating verse, the harmonization throughout almost mockingly complex, while the arrangement and instrumentation is as polished and ornate as the design of a bottle of scotch.

The lyrics of the verse, narrated in the first person, describe with slurred detail the ego-maniacal imaginings of a drunken man. Ejected from his regular nightclub, he staggers through the streets dreaming of his ultimate revenge, which arrives at the catchy, eminently singable chorus–

learn to work the saxophone
I’ll play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
and die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
and I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

It’s surely one of the weirdest songs ever to be a success, novelty-level strangeness masquerading as smooth, pseudo-intellectual jazz. The great triumph of the narrator is the imagined life and fame of a saxophone player, a skill that the singer is so unfamiliar with that he can’t even find the right words for the job.

And once he’s learned to “work” his instrument of choice, it’s drinking and dying spectacularly that he dreams about, and the attendant attention and recognition that would surely follow. He’s undoubtedly a loser, and in his imaginings of what it’s like to be a winner, he’s exactly the same, but everyone loves him. His dream is the re-imagining of his own failures and vices as virtues instead.

The genius of the song is in the precise way that it inhabits its alcoholic narrator, and imagines him as he imagines himself, an “expanding man” whose greatness can only be greater once it is extinguished by death. The only missing components in this dream? A saxophone and a grandiose nickname.

An audience at a play or a film understands that every actor isn’t playing a role that reflects themselves. We sometimes extend this courtesy to novelists, and occasionally cartoonists as well; but when it comes to pop singers, audiences are often painfully literal. It’s why every singer dead before their time has their lyrics strip-mined for meaning and premonition, regardless of who authored the songs in question; it’s why every banal utterance is analyzed for autobiographical content.

Let us therefore embrace the brave; those willing to give voice to the little dreamers, those willing to be misunderstood.
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This is the first in a series of posts called Panoptisongs, focusing on pop songs.

How Not To Make a Graphic Novel

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Sean Michael Robinson

Every once in a while I’ll get an email from someone who wants to know. “Whatever happened to that graphic novel you were working on? Did you ever finish?”

Discards. I worked on it for four years, completed more than three hundred pages while working full-time as a high school art teacher. And now it sits in a box in my closet, unread by all but a few friends, several of whom largely hated it.

What went wrong?

I’m still a teacher. I look at the pile of effort and time and in the right light I see something that might be useful to another cartoonist. I did after all make it that far. Hundreds of pages of finished comic art is in itself nothing to sneeze at. And there’s no doubt in my mind that those hundreds of pages, along with my high school teaching, brought me the skills that I have today, skills that employ me as a freelance illustrator, even if my cartooning itself isn’t in much demand these days.

I was twenty-six when I started, a high school teacher with an almost fevered desire to work, to make things, to bury myself in the aspects of my life I could control. For several years, making Discards provided me with the focus I needed to forget all the other things in my life that were making me miserable.

But somehow, of all the projects I’ve been involved in, this was the one I was unable to drag across the finish line. What went wrong?

But first —

What Went Right

There are reasons I got as far as I did, things I did that I would recommend to anyone pursing long-form comics. For one, I wrote a script — multiple drafts, in fact. The story started out as prose, a manuscript called The Three Thrift Kings. On second revision it lost its title along with most of the text, and became Discards.

The first draft was a loosely interconnected set of stories largely set at a thrift store in rural Florida. The protagonist Michael (I know, I know) has returned to his childhood home for unspecified reasons and takes a job as a janitor at a thrift store. It’s a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress, in a retail outlet, with drugs and lots of monologues about video games.

As a first draft, the story was a structural mess. I had written it as a receptacle for a series of autobiographical anecdotes about my time as a janitor, back-up man, and finally furniture-electrical pricer at a large thrift store in Casselberry Florida. The smaller nested anecdotes were stories I had refined over a long period of story-telling, but the central plot that linked them all together had been grafted on later in the process. (This too was a “found” element. After talking with a fellow teacher about all the strange things I had encountered working at the store, he told me about one of the strangest jobs he had ever worked — cleaning out evicted properties. His story of finding a stash of drugs, and the subsequent return of the owner of said drugs, would provide the missing through-line necessary to make a coherent story out of first draft.)

The second draft refined the physical environment of the story until it took place in essentially two locations– Michael’s house, the thrift store, and the walk between the two. It also strengthened the main events of the narrative by introducing those strands of plot earlier on. In short, it was structurally sound, something that would have been impossible to do had I tackled the pages graphically directly from the onset.

The setting for the story was visually rich as well, and I knew that my intimate knowledge of the minutia of the environments I would be describing would make for interesting comics.

After completing the second draft of the script, I made my second smart move – I drew layouts for the entire book.

Years of studying page mechanics, and the two or three hundred pages I had drawn in my life so far, meant that the layouts came easily, once I warmed to the task. After some initial slowness, I worked my way up to a speed of about 20 pages of layouts a day, working on sheets of discarded paper folded in half, mainly to discourage myself from feeling too precious about my drawing.

In fact, the faster I worked, the better things seemed to go. If I got bogged down on a page, trying to figure out the spacial mechanics of a scene or movement of the characters or placement of dialogue, I’d just crumple it up and continue on another sheet. After a few days of this my layouts were getting much stronger, even as my drawing itself got looser and looser. By the end of the month I had laid out the entire 400 page book.

Not having a final length in mind led me to expand and contract sections at my own whim, and I brought an almost perverse joy to extending certain sequences that had in the script been only a sentence or two of description. Other scenes were recast dramatically, especially dialogue-heavy scenes, which often had added physical action as my “actors” took over from my writer.

And if this were a happy article about personal fulfillment and artistic success, this might be where I would end, with the satisfied artist and his stack of folded copy paper, a readable story in his hands mere months after first imagining.

But I’m afraid that’s not what happened.

What Went Wrong

What am I looking at, and why do I care? Discards, page 25

A. Millions of Tiny Little Lines/ Working Too Large

When I started Discards, I had some experience in pen and ink, with a wide variety of tools and textures at my command. But I had virtually no experience working for reproduction. By the time I had drawn my first 50 pages, it was clear two things were already very wrong.

For one, I was working at a scale much too large to be useful for me. Specifically, I was working with an active page area of 11” x 15”, i.e. double the size of my folded letter-paper layouts. Huge originals plus a mania for tiny little lines and an initial fear of bold application of blacks equaled pages that seemed anemic and washed-out, no matter how many layers of lines I added.

And all those little lines added precious time to each page. My work sessions took place every day after ten hours of teaching. I timed them. Each page was taking between 10 and 15 hours to complete, the majority of this time spent embellishing. “Well, you’re fearless, aren’t you?” cartoonist Jim Woodring told me once, staring at a page consisting of nothing but shopping carts in a darkened room. I don’t think he meant it as a compliment.

B. Shifting Designs

Even worse than the huge amounts of largely invisible effort was the waste caused by ineffective designs or “off-model” characters.

Somewhere, some when, some genius said it first. “In comics, style is way less important than consistency.” Whomever it was, I’d like to shake their hand, and then ask them to please build a time machine and head over to Seattle circa 2009 so that they can let me know in person.

My initial designs for my characters just weren’t very well-thought out. They weren’t easily distinguished from each other, not by body type, not by facial structure. And as a consequence of that initial failure, I just kept on tweaking even as I produced “finished” pages.

The result of this was a stylistic mishmash, where characters were sometimes only identifiable by the type of screen-tone applied to their hair. Had I applied some basic rules of design to differentiate them from each other at the start, it would have saved me a lot of grief.

This “design drift” was made even worse by the rudimentary nature of my cartooning. As an observational draftsman, I had some skills to draw upon at the start of the project, but as a cartoonist producing stylized forms from my imagination, I had a lot of work to do. And the better I got at these tasks, the more inadequate the previous pages seemed to my eye.

The crudity of the drawing was made worse by the surface polish of the inking and rendering.

Sylistic drift of this kind would have to be very dramatic to be visible over the time scale of, say, a ten page or even 25 page story. But a graphic novel is one contained unit. You can hold it in your hand, flip through it, stick your fingers between the pages. The first panel exists with the last in perfect simultaneity, no matter how much time passed in the process of creation.

This is not unlike the difficulty of assessing the work of, say, Dave Sim and Gerhard and their 26-year project Cerebus. The early issues of Cerebus, crude as they could be visually, still stood unified stylistically as they appeared, issue by issue. But as collections, the early work reads very differently. Much of this difference is undoubtedly due to this stylistic drift. What was an asset in the serial format (improvement of the artist over a prolonged period of time) becomes a liability when the format is changed.

Had I been publishing or otherwise making these portions of Discards publicly available as I worked, it’s possible that I would have been able to make peace with the early portions of the book. But as it was, unseen by anyone save my fellow Seattle cartoonists, the early pages shortly seemed unbearably crude to my eyes. And the more I developed, the wider the “awkward” phase of the book seemed to be.

“Be like a shark,” cartoonist Jon Morris tried to warn me. “A drawing shark. Don’t stop swimming. Just keep eating stuff.” And had I been working on a series of short stories, something where each unit could be its own contained unit, then I might have persuaded myself he was right. But this was a novel, dammit. Shouldn’t the first page look like the last?

C. Didn’t You Know What A Jerk You Used to Be?

The real end to all of this wasn’t my frustration with my drawing, or the labor of the large-format pages. I actually managed to correct course on both of these problems mid-way through the book, switching to a much smaller scale, working with more dramatic blacks and incorporating bold brush into some pages, and finally settling in to drawing the characters with an acceptable amount of consistency.

What finally sunk it was this – so much time had passed since the initial idea, I hated the whole story.

It was two cartoonist friends of mine, David Lasky and Helen America, that gave me the bad news that I was making a book about an asshole. He’s completely unlikable, they each told me over tea and cake. Why should we care about him at all?

This was a hard blow. I was, after all, in the process of making a story about someone who possessed many of my memories and experiences, if not always my actions or personality. How could they say something so harsh about him? About me?

And then, with their reactions in mind, I sat down and read what I had made.

I hated him.

Really, I hated me.

Here was a story about someone who is essentially a tourist in the lives of the people around him, who observes them from the comfortable distance of condescension. Several of the choices I made as a cartoonist reinforced these distances – the facial caricature, the dialect. Here, truly, was a book about a brash young man who is in fact an asshole. Who happened to have been based, at least partially, on myself.

I tried a few fixes, specifically, adding a sequence in the very beginning that gives the character some self-awareness of these deficiencies, letting the audience into his thought process a bit while introducing hints as to the events had shaped him into the person he was.

But it was too little too late. The project was definitively killed a month or two later, when I had my first taste of being paid to make things I was interested in. My labor was done, although Discards never would be.

What’s The Point Here, Anyway?

When I think about my brief time making comics for public consumption, I’m struck by the oddity of it all, that my most widely-read comic written and drawn in a single twenty-four hour period, was not labored over in any way at all. How different would my cartooning have been if I had used all the time I spent on Discards making other short, spontaneous comics instead? How many thousands of pages might I have now had I focused on content rather than the pursuit of some awkward perfection?

Of course, who knows what those comics that never were might have been like, and what kind of things they might have said about who I was at that time. Although the unfinished things in our lives can be painful, in some ways it’s the finished ones that are the worst, in that our failures are so clearly articulated by our own labors.

For me, finally, I’m happy for Discards to finally be what it is, a journeyman work in a box in a closet. A personal example of what can happen when you want too much and know too little. And, maybe, an example of how not to make a graphic novel.

Sean Michael Robinson is a writer, illustrator, and musician. You can contact him at LivingtheLine.com, or at seanmichaelrobinson at gmail dot com.

Music or Comics, or, Making a Joyful Noise

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Sean Michael Robinson

The Comics and Music roundtable index is here.
______________

Suggested Background
Alphonse Mucha was a cartoonist.

Unnecessary Personal History, or, I Did That
I turned 33 last December. In the past fifteen years I’ve been employed as, among other things, a car washer, a janitor, a furniture pricer, an art model, a candy delivery man, an audio engineer, a high school art teacher, a graphic designer, an illustrator, a mercenary Christmas caroler, a writer, a cartoonist, a musician.

Comics and Music
It took years to develop the cartooning skills that I have, hours crammed in to a brutal teaching schedule, thousands of hours at the white drafting table while the world continued on outside. All that’s left now is a few scattered short stories and several hundred pages of a graphic novel in a box in a storage unit in Olympia, Washington. Oh, and the paid work, which came at the tail end of my interest in cartooning– 50 pages worth of deadline-motivated inking assistance on David Lasky and Frank Young’s Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song, and another 30 pages or so on their Oregon Trail book a year earlier. (I’m not counting plenty of paid illustration work—more on that below.)

from the unfinished Discards.

When I think back to those years, what I mainly remember is how little agency I felt in my own life at the time, how many decisions seemed like inevitabilities, the way that something had to be versus how I might want it to be. In that light it’s not hard to imagine the appeal of cartooning, of taking the imaginary and making it real on the page. There’s nothing you can’t control in that world that is nothing but promise before pencil hits paper, assuming the skills are in place. And even developing those skills necessary gave me back an illusion of control. The skills, the work, these were the things I could apply myself to. The people on the paper.

Punk or Liszt

It’s an accident of history and aesthetics that aligned indie comics and various punk rock or indie rock scenes. From a production standpoint, Jaime Hernandez has more in common with classical pianists than, say, a bass player in a hardcore band.

For a million-seller manga-ka, drawing comics might be more like being on a baseball team: for a cartoonist in the North American “commercial comics” scene, it’s more like pulling a sleigh with three other horses and knowing that any of you might beshot and eaten at any minute, and while the survival rates isn’t good, I’m sure the omnipresent threat of disaster lends things a certain excitement– but for the rest of us out there, making comics is a lonely, lonely process.

It seems crazy, in a way, working for 5 to 15 hours on a page that will probably be read by its audience in less than 5 seconds. By contrast, a classical pianist might put in 15 to 50 hours a week of practice, alone, as solitary as the cartoonist in question. And a tremendous amount of that practice might be devoted to just a few seconds of the piece, a single difficult run. But even if the pianist plays with no other musicians, when it’s time to perform, their audience is in the room with them, ready to receive their performance. A performance, then, is still partly exchange. The cartoonist, even if she’s fortunate enough to have found an audience, is denied even that. (Unless, of course, her friends are willing to be watched while they flip through her new effort.)

What Type of Nib? I’d Suggest the One Shaped Like a Guitar, or Maybe A Dulcimer

Seriously, kid. You’re telling me you have equal enthusiasm for music and for comics, have put some time into both and have found your interest aligns pretty well with your early aptitude? Well, I respectfully submit that you might be happier making a joyful noise with your fellow human beings than spending the next decade making tiny lines on paper to prepare yourself for better making tiny lines on paper.

What’s that? Money? Oh, don’t worry about that part—there’s no money in either. At least not directly. While there are still theoretically people making a living off of playing music, doing so under your own terms and without the supplementary work of teaching or wedding performance etc is about as likely as … well, as making a living as a cartoonist without doing the same.

Varied income sources for some of the best cartoonists of my acquaintance–

freelance illustration for local weeklies, until they decided to stop paying
posters for local bands, until they decided to stop paying (possibly because they’re not getting paid either)
freelance illustration for various cell phone and video game companies, which mostly still pay
freelance illustration for various ego maniacal individuals via craigslist
selling original artwork for an entire book to a private collector prior to the book existing, in order to enable the book to be produced in the first place
making pizza

Q. What do you call a drummer [cartoonist] who just broke up with his girlfriend?

Making A Joyful Noise

I’m biased. I associate my years of dedicated cartooning with the most difficult and inward time of my life, and I associate making music with all of the things that have brought me joy—my closest friends, the love of my life, bringing happiness to other people, learning to be the kind of person who can open himself to others and not retreat in the face of sentiment.

And although there was a lot of upfront investment in the skills involved, over time I found that those skills could continue to develop in the presence of other human beings, that just playing music with other people made me better at playing music.

It’s not that I never had any dissatisfaction with playing music. I hated the bar scene. I hated being an alcohol salesman, a cigarette pimp. I hated the atmosphere, the cigarette hangover, the rock and roll hangover of the ringing ears and wheezy breathing, like I’d spent the night firing a gun and sucking on a tail pipe. I hated competing for attention, hated the soup of bands and bookers and cred payola, hated the omnipresence of the array of measuring sticks of cool. That was, after all, some of the appeal of comics for me in the first place– ten years ago, anyway, it seemed like there was virtually no competition, and so many hills to climb and plant your flag on.

Caution: Sentiment Ahead

But two years ago I met her and it was a blur, a whirl-wind, if you prefer, and both are cliches but either describes the feeling perfectly, everything happening at once, no way to really sort through all of the rush other than staring at the calendar and dumbly repeating “we met each other WHEN?” She was a busker, a fiddle player and vocalist and crafter of the most delicate songs I had ever heard, and it seemed impossible that we would do anything other than dedicate ourselves to making things together, to each other.

And that’s what we’ve done since. We haven’t had a home since September of last year, but we’ve played for tens of thousands of people, mostly on the streets of Italy, with a winter of writing and pub gigs in Florida. It’s a nice life, although like everything else the writing is sometimes delayed by the rest, the pressure to perform as often as the opportunity presents itself, the chaos of travel and negotiation and occasional arguments in a language we understand only a little and speak even less.

But the songs continue to come, and the work continues to develop, at it’s own pace. No forcing, but still continuous effort, always more improvement, but this time, in tandem with another human being.

And, as always, other art forms beckon.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Sean Michael Robinson