In November 1998, I had sex for the first and last time. I was 19, my boyfriend was 21, and we’d been together for 10 months, long-distance. I was at university in Lancaster, a small town in the north west of England, and he lived in Essex, in the south east. I had a week off from classes, so I spent six hours taking two trains to stay in the sporadically-tidied house he shared with friends from work. On Wednesday morning, I walked to the pharmacy down the street to buy condoms and KY Jelly, shaking slightly as I handed over the cash. That night, with Ally McBeal on TV in the background, we lay on his narrow twin bed, kissing and touching each other before we slipped under the covers. I worried it might hurt, or feel awkward, or be over quickly, but it was great. Afterward, we ate chocolates, drank Coke, and swore we’d have sex all the time from then on.
We tried. Later that night; the next day; a couple of months later, on vacation in Florida. Each time, it was as if my vagina had snapped shut and no matter how hard he pushed or how vividly I pictured a tulip’s petals unfurling, nothing could convince it to open. Eventually, we gave up and went back to the heavy petting and blowjobs we’d each enjoyed, respectively, before. We were best friends, we were in love, we both had orgasms. In theory, I knew that penis-in-vagina intercourse wasn’t the only way to define sex. But it seemed like the most important, and I felt like a failure for not being a “proper” girlfriend; for being unfuckable. Read more…
Music is contradictory. Highly personal expressions can become hugely popular. Tradition can be reinvented as something completely new. Understatement can often get a point across the most forcefully. Few musicians embody these contradictions more than composer, singer, and guitarist João Gilberto, who died on July 6, at age 88.
Gilberto almost single-handedly invented bossa nova — which translates from Portuguese as “new wave” — in the mid-1950s. He did so while isolated, during an ebb in his developing career. His intimate way of singing and playing would inspire every composer in the bossa nova genre, leading to incredible commercial success and the brief, if dazzling, resuscitation of jazz as a popular art form in America.
João Gilberto do Prado Pereira de Oliveira was born in Juazeiro, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, on June 10, 1931. From an early age he was utterly charming and only concerned with music. Singer Maria Bethânia described him as “simply … music. He plays. He sings. Without stopping. Day and night. He is very, very strange. But he is the most fascinating being, the most fascinating person, that I have encountered on the surface of the earth. João, he is mystery. He hypnotizes.”
After moving to Rio de Janeiro, Gilberto sang with the vocal group Garotos da Lua for a while, but in 1951 he was fired for turning up late for gigs — or sometimes not turning up at all. Never having a place of his own, he was a permanent houseguest for a revolving set of friends. “It was always understood by his hosts that he would never be asked to participate in paying the rent or covering other household expenses,” Daniella Thomposon wrote for Brazil magazine. “Occasionally he would bring home some fruit (tangerines were his favorites), but his most significant contributions were his surpassingly intelligent conversation and the captivating music he played.” Gilberto grew out his hair, wore shabby clothes, continually smoked marijuana, and refused to get a real job.
By 1956, Gilberto began an eight-month stay with his sister and her husband in Diamantina. Seldom changing out of his pajamas, he installed himself in the tiled bathroom, as much for privacy as acoustics, practicing guitar and voice nonstop. It was here at age 25 that he created bossa nova, largely by reducing the older musical form of samba down to its essence.
“I think João Gilberto did it like this,” guitarist Baden Powell once said. “He just took the rhythm of the tamborims [a small tambourine-like drum] of the Samba Schools to the exclusion of the other percussion instruments. That’s the clearest rhythm you hear in it all. He took out all the rest.”
Gilberto also began singing more quietly and without vibrato. He changed his phrasing and used his voice as its own percussion instrument — sometimes as a complement to the guitar, sometimes creating rhythmic tension.
Despite the musical breakthrough he accomplished in his sister’s bathroom, Gilberto’s obsessiveness caused concern. His sister and her husband sent him to live with his parents in Juazeiro.
Afraid of being ridiculed for his new vocal style, Gilberto practiced on the banks of the São Francisco river, where he wrote a song mimicking the sway of the washerwomen as they walked by, carrying baskets of laundry on their heads. He used his new vocal and rhythm techniques to compose “Bim-Bom,” and so it is considered by some to be the first bossa nova song.
Gilberto’s father, unimpressed with his abilities and embarrassed by his son’s lack of respectability, had him committed to an asylum. During one interview, Gilberto stared out the window. “Look at the wind depilating the trees,” he said. When reminded that trees have no hair, he responded, “And there are people who have no poetry.” He was released after one week.
Gilberto returned to Rio and renewed his friendship with musician Antônio Carlos “Tom” Jobim, then a composer and arranger for Odeon Records. Jobim arranged his song “Chega de Saudade” for Gilberto to record, but the artist’s perfectionist streak held up the process: Gilberto chided the musicians for little mistakes, made the unheard-of demand for separate microphones for his voice and guitar, and argued with Jobim about the chord progression. “Chega de Saudade” and “Bim-Bom” were finally cut on July 10, 1958. After a slow start, the single became a regional success.
American guitarist Charlie Byrd heard Gilberto’s music in 1961 while on a Jazz Ambassador tour organized by the State Department. Byrd returned home with some Gilberto/Jobim bossa nova albums, which he played for saxophonist Stan Getz. “I immediately fell in love with it,” Getz remembered. “Charlie Byrd had tried to sell a record of it with I don’t know how many [record] companies, and none of ‘em wanted it. What they needed was the voice — the horn.”
Getz and Byrd released Jazz Samba in April 1962. It entered the Billboard pop album chart in early March and ultimately peaked at No. 40. Getz earned a Grammy for his performance of Jobim’s “Desafinado.” The bossa nova craze had begun, and its definitive statement would come two years later, when Getz collaborated with the genre’s originator.
“I’m not a sociologist, but it was a time when people in the States wanted to turn to something other than their troubles,” João’s wife Astrud Gilberto said in 1996. “There was a feeling of dissatisfaction, possibly the hint of war to come, and people needed some romance, something dreamy for distraction.” The eight tracks on the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto provided just that. Getz’s lyrical phrasing was a match for Gilberto’s intimate vocal. Jobim’s understated piano proved a perfect complement. Jazz critic Howard Mandel called the album “another tonic for the [Kennedy] assassination’s disruption, akin for adults to the salve upbeat the Beatles had provided for teenagers after their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.”
Jobim cowrote several compositions on the album, most notably its opener “The Girl From Ipanema.” João sang the first verse in Portugese; Astrud the second in an English translation.
Both the single and the album were an astonishing success. Getz/Gilberto spent almost 100 weeks on the charts and won four Grammys, including Album of the Year. “The Girl From Ipanema” is second only to the Beatles’ “Yesterday” as the most recorded song.
Gilberto went on to release albums for five more decades, making solo records as well as collaborating with American jazz greats like Herbie Mann, and a new generation of Brazilian musicians including Gelberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. He became a cult figure in Japan.
What might be hard to understand is that the João Gilberto who locked himself away in a bathroom and eschewed a day job is the same man who would go on to change Brazilian — and popular — music. He was fortunate to have been surrounded by people who valued him and trusted his artistic vision.
In the mid-’50s, Gilberto played, or sometimes just held court, at the Clube de Chave in Porto Alegre, appearing at any hour with his guitar. After being asked why he never finished a song, he admitted to not liking his guitar’s steel strings. The patrons, many of whom had changed their sleeping habits to conform to his, chipped in and bought him a nylon-stringed instrument. This one also wasn’t quite to Gilberto’s taste. When it was exchanged for another, he began a months-long residency.
Musicians, like music, can be contradictory. Sometimes their most idiosyncratic expressions are reflections of the universal. “João Gilberto does not underestimate people’s sensitivity,” Jobim wrote in the liner notes to Gilberto’s first album. “He believes that there is always room for something new, different and pure which — although it may not seem so at first sight — may become, as they say in the jargon, highly commercial. Because people understand love, musical notes, simplicity, and sincerity, I believe in João Gilberto, because he is simple, sincere, and extraordinarily musical.”
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Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.
No matter how many years pass, no matter how much I work in therapy, no matter how far I remove myself geographically from the site of trauma, whenever I open the YouTube video on a channel I cannot forget the name of, I start to drown. It is not a quick plunge underwater. When first the browser loads, I tell myself, as is my natural response to any inkling of pain, that I am fine.
The first sound is my laughter — a strained version. In the video, I hold my hands to my belly, as if emulating a kind of joy, before gripping the door frame to my college dormitory. My laugh reaches almost a shriek in pitch. Behind the camera, one of my former Division I college teammates cajoles, “Talk to us, talk to us, Jackie.”
I pause the video. I remind myself that I am here, in a new-to-me town in Pennsylvania, years and miles from this day, but my body tightens like a fist. I want to leave my apartment, to run beneath a sky tinged the soothing, sugar-spun pink of cotton candy. I want to weep. But instead, though I feel some kind of water rising around me, I press play again. I have to, I tell myself. I’m writing.
The thing about the video is that I do not remember it being recorded. In it, though I appear “normal” with my black Nike shorts, purple-framed glasses, dirty blond hair sleek to my shoulders, I am experiencing one of many mysterious neurological episodes that would plague me that semester. With the episodes came what doctors would later term aphasia and a transient alteration of awareness. In layman’s terms, this meant I would repeat a few words (“Sky News, Sky News, Sky News,” “Aurora, Aurora, Aurora”) for minutes at a time. I wouldn’t remember the episodes when I later woke up. A few of my teammates, gathered behind the lens of the camera, knew this. I don’t know what prompted them to film that day, if it was a gesture of care that turned cruel, or just a means of entertaining themselves from the beginning.
When I do speak in the footage, I first say, “I, um.” I glance down at the floor. Hoping to confuse me, the boys filming ask where I’m going tomorrow and where I’m going yesterday. I respond, “I, I, I” and look at my watch. As they continue to prod with their questions, my voice reaches a higher pitch. I shriek “No! Noo! I-no! I-no! I, I.” This is the part where I feel the water rising around me at my desk, where I know I’ll spend the rest of the day in what feels like a bottomless ocean, suspended by a grief I cannot name or easily swim out of.
I have been writing about this video for six years, as part of a memoir that I am still wrestling into being. After watching this video, when I am in the watery deep, I ask myself questions: How can I write ethically about my teammates, who both cared for me and inflicted deep pain in turns? What happens if they read this someday? Why, in a world where there is far more horrific news being reported daily, am I trying to add my voice? Why, if I don’t consciously remember this moment, can’t I let the video rot in oblivion where it belongs?
I have reported this footage to YouTube dozens of times. Each time, I select the option “Hateful or abusive content” and pick “Abusing vulnerable individuals.” I shrink away from the word “abusive,” telling myself it’s really not that bad, but then I remember that within the video, one of the girls observing — someone I considered a friend at the time — says, “You guys are so mean” and a boy from the team says, “she’s gonna cry” before they continue. Even while coherent, while completely within themselves, my teammates knew that their actions were harmful. And for me, though I don’t consciously remember this video being taken, my body holds a history of its own. The trauma lives in the way I isolated myself for years because I feared other people more than I feared my symptoms. The trauma lives in the way I used to scream when a tender former partner tried to care for me during episodes. The trauma lives in the fact that the video is a testimony I cannot ignore, a memory I cannot blur out of being like so many other incidents that happened that semester between the soft of my body and those teammates.
At times, these six years of writing have felt like living within a dense fog: I cannot see where I’m going or where I’ve been. The drafts seem to become both more refined and completely opaque as I press forward. But recently, my life has shifted in fundamental ways: I broke up with a partner who knew the contours of my history as well as he could and moved halfway across the country. Here, in this new place, alone, I have been working on a proposal version of the book. In some ways, the tectonic shifts in my personal life and geography have allowed me to see the story in a whole new way, as if I’m finally far enough away to make meaning. During this process, I have been practicing tenderness toward myself. I do leave my desk to chase cotton candy clouds each morning, all the while reminding myself to breathe. I email terrible drafts of my overview to writer friends who nurture me while I probe old wounds. And I have spent innumerable afternoon hours with the essays below, each writer’s words a lifeline pulling me from the deep.
I may have believed that to write The Thing down is to take one more step away from The Thing itself, one more step removed, one more page and another and another until there is a thick stack of proof, of growth, of Tada!—the restorative salvation.
After writing Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, T Kira Madden reckons with the idea that writing memoir is inherently cathartic. By closely examining her reaction to seeing a boy pounding his fists against the closed windows of his mother’s car, Madden considers the differences between life itself and life reexamined, and discusses the importance of allowing readers to enter a work.
Rather than providing her audience with a list of coping mechanisms, Morgan Jerkins told the truth: she never overcame fear, particularly the fear of sharing her work with her parents, but learned to acknowledge — and write within — its presence instead.
Amy Tan discusses unexpected sites of discovery, reconciling her memory of loved ones with alternative realities, cultivating empathy while writing, and the importance of community in this riveting interview about her new memoirWhere the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination with Nicole Chung.
Who we become has so much to do with the experiences we had, and how we survived. The book is not about happy situations — it’s about trauma, and the times when characters have to question who they are. It’s about my questions, and who I am.
Wanting to be a visual artist, Alexander Chee originally didn’t conceive of himself as a writer. One day, however, before a friend borrowed his typewriter, he wrote a story that “came out as I now know very few stories do: quickly and with confidence.”
Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that day ‘the consolations of the mask,’ where you make a place that doesn’t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory. But I didn’t know this then.
Chee, who most recently published How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, reflects on the significant impact Annie Dillard had on his beginnings as a writer.
What’s the difference between a tell-all and a reckoning? How does audience change how a book is both written and read? What effect can memoir have on the level of personal relationships as well as within the realm of larger cultural conversation? Kiese Laymon addresses these questions and more in a brilliant interview by Abigail Bereola, as they discuss his groundbreaking memoir, Heavy.
I think people conflate memoir with autobiography a lot, but memoir is the artful rendering of an experience. For me, to get to the artfulness of it, I had to think of a person who could help me keep the good fat and cut out the bad fat.
Allie Rowbottom’s father, after reading a draft of her memoir, JELL-O Girls, says he feels suicidal. In this ruminative piece, Rowbottom provides a window into her writing process as pertains to the ethics of representing others, as well as conveys how important it was for her to stay true to her own story, even if it revealed wounds that others had not yet reckoned with.
I’m doing it right now, as I did when I sent my dad my book, as I did when I wrote it, chronicling my experience on the page, saving myself through writing, despite the painful fear of what the work I produce might lead my father to threaten or create. Facing this fear is the most challenging work I have ever done.
She might just as easily, as many have done before her and many continue to do, ask how one could post about books on a day when there’d been a mass shooting, a day when babies were in cages, a day when toddlers were gassed, a day when… well, any other day, really.
How — and should we? — write or celebrate art with so many atrocities in the world around us? By examining historical instances of people writing in the midst of unimaginable horrors and considering the context within her recent novel, The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai asserts that art, now, as much as ever, can serve as a vital form of resistance.
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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.
On the morning of December 14th, 2012, one of my twin daughters stayed home from school. Warm from fever, Samantha drifted in and out of sleep as I cleaned around her. The house was still out of sorts from the girls’ 6th birthday party only two days prior. Shortly after 10 a.m., I started receiving texts from my more news-conscious friends alerting me to a school shooting unfolding at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Sandy Hook. It would be the first and last time I would ever hear those two words and not feel an ache somewhere inside of me.
I turned on the news and saw dozens of children with terror on their faces, walking in connected ropes, hands on shoulders through the parking lot. As the minutes ticked by, reporters began saying numbers. Two, four, six, twelve. I remember thinking that’s a dozen. A dozen children are dead. I tried hard to busy myself. I washed the same dish three times, dismantled the bathroom faucet and scrubbed every part with an old toothbrush, anything to keep from thinking of that number. Then, a CNN text alert: Dozens dead. They had added an “s.”
I couldn’t hide any longer. I turned the television on low. There it was on the Chiron: 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 were dead. I struggled to breathe. Twenty. Twenty children the same age as my twin daughters. I pressed my spine against the doorframe of my kitchen and sobbed. I prayed the frame would hold my pain.
I watched the coverage in drips as Samantha was waking up. I remember thinking she should not associate first grade with murder. She will never go back. I came up with explanations I would use if she woke and discovered the news. I came up empty. I worried that I would never be able to adequately explain what happened at Sandy Hook. I also worried about school. I prayed my other daughter, Penelope, who was tucked away in the safety of her Kindergarten classroom, didn’t know. Can I ever assume she is safely tucked away there ever again? I wondered if I should call the principal and ask him not to tell her. Not to tell any of them? I made a promise to myself right then and there that I would be a bucket for my daughters, and that I would carry this for as long as I could so they didn’t have to.
Shortly before 2:30 pm, I dressed a groggy Samantha and took her with me to pick up Penelope. The school was only blocks away, and we rode in silence. As we waited outside the elementary school exit for the students to emerge, I scanned the other parents’ faces for any sign of worry or anguish. They seemed fine, relaxed, smiling. Did they know? Many looked like they came right from work. I envied them in that moment, in that place, the not-knowing. I wished I could warn them. There was a bomb of heartache waiting for them at home. Tick, tick, tick.
By the time we got home, the country knew more. Six educators were also killed. We learned it was a lone gunman. We learned what collective heartbreak felt like. Shortly after 3 p.m., President Obama spoke to a stunned and grieving nation. I set the girls up with some Legos in the other room so I could watch. He fought to hold back tears at first. Then, he let them fall. In that moment, he wasn’t our President, he was also Sasha and Malia’s dad. I ran into the small guest bathroom, locked the door and called my mother. I cried harder than I ever have in my life. Read more…
She was hauling a 24-pack of Poland Spring to bring to my brother’s new dorm room. She was proud of him because he was finally moving out. She had struggled to raise two children who had themselves struggled immensely along the way. My mother was tireless, indestructible, “high energy” as she described herself, but lately she had seemed worn to me. Aside from a high-powered law career, she spent the last few decades caring for her husband and her children, the community, her grandmother, and her mother. When I learned about God as a child, I remember thinking: He had nothing on Mom.
Tom Maxwell | Longreads | June 2019 | 20 minutes (2,599 words)
Discouraged by the British Invasion, producer and songwriter Lee Hazlewood wasplanning to retire in 1964. The 35-year-old had certainly earned enough money to do it. Then Hazlewood’s next-door neighbor asked if he wanted to produce Nancy Sinatra, daughter of Frank.
“I’m not interested in producing second-generation artists,” Hazlewoodsaid flatly— he’d already done that with Dean Martin’s son’s band — but then he agreed to a meeting.
“Everybody knows I drink Chivas,” Hazlewood remembered about that night. “When I walked in their house to meet with Nancy (she was living with her mom then), all along the walls, cleverly displayed, were all these bottles of Chivas lined up. And a bunch of my friends were there. It was Bobby Darin, a bunch more, and I’m thinkin’, ‘Wait a minute, what is this? I haven’t seen these people in months.’ … Halfway through the evening her dad comes through the door and meets me. They go in the kitchen and they’re talking. He comes out, shakes my hand, and says ‘I’m glad you kids are going to be working together’ and then walks out the door. I had only said that I’d come over and meet her!”
Having accepted an offer he couldn’t really refuse, Hazlewood set about updating Nancy’s image. “You’ve been married and now you’re divorced, and people know that,” Nancy said he told her. “So, let’s lose this virgin image. Let’s get rid of it.” He had Sinatra sing in a lower register. “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” his original song that she agreed to record, became a No. 1 hit. The lyrics caused a bit of a stir.
“The controversy was [the word] ‘mess,’”Hazlewood, who grew up in the South, said. “‘Mess,’ down here where I live, in those days, was ‘fuck.’ If somebody said, ‘What did you do last night?’ ‘I was out messin’.’ I thought it was that way all over the world. But it wasn’t that way in Chicago, New York, or L.A.”
And that is the story of Lee Hazlewood’s most famous song and collaboration. Not as well-known are Hazlewood’s many other songwriting credits, his groundbreaking production techniques, or his foundational work creating a voice for the electric lead guitar. Then there’s the previously unreleased surf music record that Hazlewood wrote and produced.
“What I was struck with right off the top,” Hazlewood friend and collaborator Marty Cooper said about Cruisin’ for Surf Bunnies, “it sounds to me, because it’s got 12 songs on it, and the albums in those days had 12 songs on them, this is an album in search of a band, in the sense that it doesn’t actually sound like a band, but it’s too complete to not have been submitted as … ‘find a band.’ Maybe even like the Monkees or find the successors to the Beach Boys over on Capitol. I got that impression. There are certain things about it — the fact that Lee did not write all of [the songs]. It’s very meticulous.”
No one knows exactly why Cruisin’ for Surf Bunnies by Lee Hazlewood’s Woodchucks (a catch all name for his studio band) was shelved. When it was issued in September 2018, 11 years after his death, it seemed an odd postscript to an already iconoclastic career. Instead of an outlier, it’s further proof that, as a sculptor of sound, Hazlewood’s life as a songwriter and producer ranged more widely than most of his successful peers.
Born in Oklahoma in 1929, Hazlewood and his family moved with his itinerant oilfield father’s jobs through Louisiana and Arkansas, and finally wound up in Texas. He studied medicine before leaving university to serve in the Korean War. “My mom liked pop music and my dad liked bluegrass,”Lee once said. “So she complained always about his liking bluegrass — which, by the way, was a ‘love’ complaint — I grew up kinda all mixed up. I mean with music. And then I fell in love with Stan Kenton and the blues ’cause blues comes from this part of the world. So everything’s all mixed up.”
Instead of an outlier, Cruisin’ for Surf Bunnies is further proof that, as a sculptor of sound, Hazlewood’s life as a songwriter and producer ranged more widely than most of his successful peers.
By 1955, Hazlewood found himself working as a radio DJ and the owner of his own small record label in Phoenix, Arizona. He was also writing new material. Borrowing ariff from Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, he wrote and produced the song “The Fool” for rockabilly singer Sanford Clark in 1956 — Hazlewood’s third single — a hit later covered by Elvis. Hazlewood also developed a new sound for local session guitarist Al Casey, who played on “The Fool.”
“I had to have an echo,”Hazlewood explained years later. “We just went out driving around, ’cause there’s a lot of places around Phoenix with small grain elevators. So we just went out and yelled in ’em all day. I yelled and yelled and yelled ’til I found one. … So we set it up outside the studio and put a little microphone at one end and a little speaker at the other. It worked very nice. …The only problem that we ever had with it is that birds would sit and chirp on it. It wasn’t a problem on the heavy stuff, but on the ballads, the quiet things, the birds would like to sing along. So we had to have someone out there to shoo the birds away.”
The grain silo echo effect proved popular with Hazlewood’s other collaborator, twangy instrumental guitarist Duane Eddy. Eddy’s 1958 anthem “Rebel-‘Rouser” — another Hazlewood composition — began a streak of big sellers. Hazlewood helped create a new lead guitar sound in the process.
“When I was in high school, there was a piano player I admired with slicked-back oily hair from New York called Eddy Duchin,”Hazlewood said, “and he played the melody way down there. I always thought that it would be nice if a guitarist did the same thing. When I first met Duane, I told him that I wanted to make a record with those low notes and he said, ‘I can do that.’ … We sold 25 million records over four years, which wasn’t bad.”
Hazlewood released his first solo record in 1963, a concept album called Trouble Is a Lonesome Town.
You won’t find it on any map
But take a step in any direction and
You’re in Trouble
It’s at once wry, hokey, and perceptive. Hazlewood has the vocal authority of Johnny Cash, the melodic sense of Roger Miller, and the just-this-side-of-parody folksiness of Tom T. Hall. He introduces songs on Trouble Is a Lonesome Town with extended spoken-word character sketches and cowboy poems. The instrumentation is acoustic and spare, and the touch of reverb transforms the songs into a dreamscape. Musically and thematically, Trouble Is a Lonesome Town is entirely self-contained and uniquely Lee Hazlewood. “That was a demo,” Hazlewoodrevealed in 2000. “I didn’t know it was a concept album. I wrote a complete story of a make-believe town.”
It says a lot that Hazlewood could put so much effort into a project he would later dismiss as only a demo. His success gave him the luxury to tinker in the studio, regardless of expense, in the same year when the Beatles recordedtheir first album in less than ten hours.
With this understanding, it’s easy to see how Cruisin’ For Surf Bunnies came into being. Surf music, popular since 1962, was largely instrumental and featured a typically reverb-laden lead guitar. In other words, whether its practitioners knew it or not, surf owed much of its expression to Lee Hazlewood. Working with Duane Eddy and using his grain silo reverb, he’d helped develop the technique. He had the producer’s savvy to take advantage of America’s latest musical craze. Now living in Los Angeles, Hazlewood had the connections to assemble the best studio band available — one that would famously become known as the Wrecking Crew.
“I didn’t call em the Wrecking Crew,”Hazlewood recalled. “That wasn’t my name. I brought Al Casey with me from Phoenix. I used a rhythm guitarist that nobody else used, a guy named Donnie Owens. [Drummer] Hal Blaine worked for me before he worked for anybody. He was working for Patti Page, then he worked for me, then of course we all spread the word about Hal and all the rest of the guys. Over here they were called the Wrecking Team, but when they worked for Sinatra they were called the B Team. I just called them my rhythm section ’cause I started a lot of them. Not started, but I got a lot of them a lot of work. And sometimes I couldn’t get ’em, and that really broke my heart. A year earlier you could call Hal and get him anytime.”
The reason for this is that Blaine and the rest of the Crew had becomethe most in-demand session players in the business, backing Jan and Dean, Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, the Monkees, Herb Alpert, and Sonny and Cher, among others. They became the Beach Boys’ house band at the time of Brian Wilson’s greatest musical achievements, and were often employed by “wall of sound” producer Phil Spector,who began his career working for Lee Hazlewood.
“Phil had just started to make records and he came over to Phoenix a few times,” Hazlewoodonce said plainly. “I liked Phil. He was more Lester Sills’s protégé than mine. Although Phil asked a lot of questions, and I answered as many as I could.”
In other words, whether its practitioners knew it or not, surf music owed much of its expression to Lee Hazlewood.
“I told him on a number of occasions that I reckoned Spector had stolen his ideas: You only have to listen to Lee’s early work and then compare it to Spector’s to suspect that they may well be connected,” Hazlewood biographer Wyndham Wallaceonce said. “But Lee would dismiss this suggestion with a wave of the hand.”
As would be expected, when the prolific Hazlewood died, he left a cache of reel-to-reel tapes of both finished and unfinished recordings in his studio vaults. Matt Sullivan, music lover and entrepreneur, gained access to Hazlewood’s vault, and Sullivan’s Light in the Attic record label began releasing material as part of their Hazlewood archive series. “Deep in the LHI tape archive,” the label wrote ontheir website, “hid a mysterious tape marked ‘Woodchucks.’” When you write and record as much as Hazlewood, you leave a trail of tapes in your wake that others get tasked with sifting through. Only a talent who could dismiss a fully realized record as a demo could so casually shelve a session as complete as Surf Bunnies. Unfortunately, Hazlewood didn’t leave many details about the writing or recording of the record.
Some version of the Wrecking Crew assembled to cut Cruisin’ For Surf Bunnies on October 26, 1964, in Studio E at United Records studios in Los Angeles. “I’m not sure everybody that played on it,” Hazlewood collaborator Marty Cooper said after hearing the tapes, “but I can tell you that I can’t imagine anybody but Al Casey being the guitarist on that. If you go back to [Casey’s] ‘Surfin’ Hootenanny,’ which was on that label out of Chicago that Lee got a bunch of money for … there again, he could depend on Al to give him these various sounds. That’s my first impression.”
Cooper was interviewed by Hunter Lea, who wrote the liner notes for the album when Light in the Attic Records issued Cruisin’ For Surf Bunnies in 2018. Cooper had his own surf music credentials, having written “The Lonely Surfer,” a hit for Jack Nitzsche in 1963.
“It’s got every gimmick on it that you can have,” Cooper continued. “The other thing that makes me feel like it was a project as opposed to demos: it’s so assiduously non–Duane Eddy. One of the tracks has a little bit of tremolo, but there’s no tremolo guitar, there’s no lonely surfer guitar, there’s no Duane Eddy Fender tremolo. It’s just not there. That’s what makes me think [Lee] must’ve had a grand plan for [the project] that didn’t work out.”
Only one single from the project, “Angry Generation,” was released at the time, after being “sweetened,” in Lea’s words, “with overdubs.” Later covered by surf music architect Dick Dale, it communicates an incandescent menace.
Dale wasn’t the only artist to help himself to this musical buffet. Other Surf Bunnies songs were covered by the Astronauts, Jack Nitzsche, the Ventures, and the Surfaris — as well as John Paul Jones, later to become Led Zeppelin’s bassist. The Duane Eddy low-note lead guitar is present and correct on Jones’s version of “Baja.”
The next year Hazlewood would consider retirement, then enjoy the career catapult of “These Boots Were Made for Walking.” Hazlewood and Sinatra would also duet with great success, most notably with 1967’s lush “Some Velvet Morning.”
“Some velvet morning when I’m straight,” Hazlewood sings without fear of censorship, “I’m gonna open up your gate.”
“I write songs with double and triple meanings,” Hazlewoodtold writer Spencer Leigh in 2004. “I know that my songs are a little different and I would say that I am the best writer of Lee Hazlewood songs.”
Another Hazlewood/Sinatra production, the Les Paul–inflected bonbon “Sugar Town” was actually about drugs.
As would be expected, when the prolific Hazlewood died, he left a cache of reel-to-reel tapes of both finished and unfinished recordings in his studio vaults.
“In those days they were taking sugar cubes and putting acid on ’em,” he told rock ‘n’ roll archivist and collector Billy Miller. “And of course that would be ‘Sugar Town,’ wouldn’t it? You had to make the lyric dingy enough where the kids knew what you were talking about — and they did. Double entendre. But not much more if you wanted to get it played on the radio. We used to have lots of trouble with lyrics, but I think it’s fun to keep it hidden a little bit.”
Hazlewood continued releasing solo albums, as well as duetting with actress and singer Ann Margret. He founded a new record label, Lee Hazlewood Industries, which signed country rock pioneer Gram Parsons’s first group, the International Submarine Band. When Parsons later joined the Byrds, his vocals on Sweetheart of the Rodeo had to be erased because of a contractual dispute with LHI. (“We had some problems there,”Hazlewood remembered, “but we straightened them out. [Parsons] had to pay back all his royalties and everything. But he had to pay back through earnings, and I knew he never would.”)
After moving to Sweden in 1970, Hazlewood kept a low profile, releasing albums in a fitfull manner. In the late ’90s, Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley began reissuing Hazlewood records to a receptive crowd that included Beck and Jarvis Cocker. Lee’s final album, 2006’s Cake or Death, contains his epitaph, the string-laden “T.O.M. (The Old Man)”:
Have you seen the mountains? They still hug the snow
And have you seen the old man? He’s ready to go
And his tongue — his tongue tastes forever, and his mind wonders what forever will bring
In this place they call forever, will there be any songs to sing?
Hazlewood died of renal cancer the following year. “I’ve been around long enough now,”he told the New York Times shortly before his death. “I’ve lived a pretty interesting life — not too much sadness, a lot of happiness, lots of fun. And I didn’t do much of anything I didn’t want to do.”
“He was a master — there’s no question about it,” Marty Cooper noted. “He invented sounds that no one was doing.” When genres like surf music employed some of those sounds, Hazlewood played with those expressions too. Then he moved on.
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Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.
Sarah Watts | Longreads | June 2019 | 10 minutes (2,998 words)
Every Friday in the summer of 1997, my mom tended bar to pay for her master’s degree and my dad took us to the movies. My twin brother Adam and I were 9 and our little brother, Jake, was 7. Because younger kids got in free, my dad would tell the ticket taker we were all under 6, and he waved us in every time without scrutiny.
We went to the drive-in not far from our house — nothing more than an enormous screen looming over a gravel parking lot, littered with weeds and broken bottles. Under the screen, kids turned cartwheels, shrieking and darting out in front of the cars that crawled past. Some parents would park backward and open up their trunks, lining the bottom with blankets and pillows for the kids to lounge in; others would crack open beers from the comfort of fold-out chairs. Not us — we parked facing the screen, windows up, air-conditioning running. Read more…
Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel, defendants in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial, walk from the jail to the courtroom. August 7, 1970. (Bettmann / Getty)
The story of how Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS: Charles Manson, The CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties came to be is almost as crazy as the story of the book tells in its pages. Twenty years ago, an editor at Premiere magazine asked O’Neill to write something about the 30th anniversary of the Manson murders — whatever he thought would be interesting. Now, on the 50th anniversary, that magazine story is finally being released in the form of a 400+ page book.
The intervening years take O’Neill from the backyards of LA drug dealers to the offices of CIA agents doing research on the drugged out hippies in San Francisco’s Haight District. At one point, he gets four haircuts from a barber who intimates that Manson might have been involved with the mob. And as the story spins wildly out of O’Neill’s control, defying reduction to a single, simple narrative, only one thing seems certain: that the settled story of what happened in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969 might not be as straightforward as we’ve all been lead to believe. Read more…
Two thousand, eight hundred employees at Miami Dade College have unionized. Will their efforts help get suffering adjunct professors healthcare, professional support, and a livable wage?
A PhD might help land someone a teaching job, but it does not afford them a livable wage. Rather than a respectable salary, professors at many universities and private colleges earn a small hourly wage, often less than the legal minimum wage. They have no health insurance, have to float classroom to classroom, receiving their semester schedules right before the term starts, and teach at multiple schools, often racing between campuses, to cobble together an income. Others sleep in their classrooms or cars, unable to afford rent on their adjunct wage. For Splinter, Hamilton Nolan spends time at Miami Dade College, one of the largest colleges in the US, to see how their dedicated adjunct educators have unionized, and whether their efforts can earn them and adjuncts around the country any financial and emotional stability.
…The long term trend in higher education has been one of a shrinking number of full-time positions and an ever-growing number of adjunct positions. It is not hard to see why. University budgets are balanced on the backs of adjunct professors. In an adjunct, a school gets the same class taught for about half the salary of a full-time professor, and none of the benefits. The school also retains a god-like control over the schedules of adjuncts, who are literally laid off after every single semester, and then rehired as necessary for the following semester. In the decade since the financial crisis, state governments have slashed higher education funding, and Florida is no exception. That has had two primary consequences on campus: students have taken on ever-higher levels of debt to pay for school, and the college teaching profession has been gutted, as expensive full-time positions are steadily eliminated in favor of cheaper adjunct positions. Many longtime adjuncts talk of jealously waiting for years for a full-time professor to die or retire, only to see the full-time position eliminated when they finally do.
So what do adjuncts’ daily lives look like?
“I would work morning, noon, and night. That is my problem—to be able to make a living, that’s what I had to do,” says Renee Zelden, who adjuncts at both Broward and Miami Dade Colleges. “I teach more than full-time faculty.” Indeed. This summer, Zelden is “only” teaching five classes at two schools—fewer than her usual six to eight classes at three schools per semester. Most schools cap adjuncts at four classes per semester, hence the multiple institutions. The gas money Zelden spends to commute from her home to Miami can eat up more than the $50 she is paid for a single hour of class, so she must be sure to get multiple classes on the same day just to make teaching worth her time. Fifty dollars for an hour-long class sounds decent, until you break down the time it takes to prep for class, commute, teach, and then grade papers for 25 or more students. “If I figured it out, I’d be afraid I’m only making like five dollars an hour,” says Zelden, “so I don’t want to figure it out.”
She needn’t be so negative. Other Florida adjuncts who have figured it out told me that, factoring in all of the time they spend on teaching and related work, they make as much as seven dollars an hour—less than Florida’s minimum wage.
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