Friday Music

A busy day today - some traveling (a nephew graduates high school this weekend; reminds me I am getting old); 70th anniversary of D-Day (might try to get a longer post up later - at least post some more Sam Fuller pictures.) So here we'll just run a quick shuffle for some music, to keep us going.

1. Sham 69 - I don't Wanna
2. REM - Accelerate
3. Beck - Already Dead
4. Deerhoof - Jagged Fruit
5. Doctor Nerve - I am not Dumb Now
6. Elvis Presley - Don't be Cruel
7. Johnny Cash - O, Bury Me Not
8. REM - Leave
9. Liars - Protection
10. Sly & THe Family Stone - Stand

Video? Here is The King:



And some aging punks - Sham 69:



And off the list, but - young punks:

Cold Harbor

Today in the Civil War was the climax of the Battle of Cold Harbor. It's an infamous day - another frontal assault by the Union army on entrenched Confederates, that ended in slaughter. There was a kind of traditional story - that the Union lost some 7000 men, in about 15 minutes of fighting - Gordon Rhea suggests that the numbers were really about half that. (I've been reading Rhea all spring - that explains why so many of these Grant posts, and no Sherman posts; since Sherman was busy this whole while as well. But all those Rhea books to read!) While that makes the carnage a little less awful, it's still pretty horrific - and the battle still plays as something of a precursor to the Somme.

The best thing about Rhea's account, though, is that he covers the whole campaign. I won't do so here - but the fact is, that this was the end of a week or so of marching and fighting, with Grant trying to get around Lee, Lee trying to head him off. That was the pattern of the whole campaign, really - Grant tried to get around Lee, Lee headed him off. Grant usually managed to steal a march on Lee - over and over, he gave him the slip - but a combination of sloppy planning, very bad coordination by the Union high command, excess of caution on the Union side at times, plus a bit of bad weather and luck, and especially Lee's ability to react to threats, and his soldiers' ability to march and dig, meant Lee ended up cutting him off, every time, forcing another confrontation over trenches. They did it at Spotsylvania, where Grant tried to hammer his way through with - well - some success, but nothing that lasted. They almost did it at the North Anna, but Grant realized he'd divided his forces around Lee's army (and the North Anna river), and got out as quick as he could. So they did it at Cold Harbor - marching south, Lee following, all of them coming together at Cold Harbor - Lee digging in - Grant attacking... stalemate. It wouldn't be the last time it happened.

Rhea goes through the minutia of the campaign - the skirmishes and marches, the commanders' thought processes, the breakdowns of communication. By this time in the war, there isn't all that much drama to the big confrontations - once the full armies were involved, they were usually dug in deep, and this is what happened - whoever left their trenches to attack got smoked. So the maneuver and the attempts to get at parts of the other side are where the challenge was. Oddly - the nature of battle in 1864 turned the war into a matter of position and movement, more than it had been. That was Sherman's campaign - flank the rebels out of their holes; and Johnston's - retreat to new holes to cu them off. Grant and Lee were probably not all that suited to it - both of them liked to get at the other guy and give them a thrashing - but they were also very good at it, conceptually at least. Though reading about the movements of the Army of the Potomac in the spring of 1864 is a painful thing - logistical carelessness and confusion, missed opportunities and so on. The only comfort is that for all their reputation, Lee's army didn't do much better - they were better at getting where they needed to be when they knew where they had to be - but by this time, Lee's subordinates were badly eroded, and Lee himself was breaking down. They did all they could to head off the Yankees.

Finally - the other thing Rhea's account does is show some of the details of the fighting in this time. For example, the disparity in casualties between veteran units and new units. I have something of a personal stake in this, since my great great grandfather was in a heavy artillery regiment - his is a recurring story. And it was played out here: a unit was ordered to attack - they went out, the veteran rather quickly determined if they had any chance, and if not, went to ground - the rookies and the heavy artillery men kept going, bravely forward. And so - Rhea claims that 900 of the II corps' 2500 casualties came from 2 regiments; half the 2500 came from a total of 5 regiments. By this time in the war, the men, if not the generals (and especially not the new regiments, who hadn't been doing this for 3 years), knew the futility of attacking trenches.

Bad History on Bad Television (A Rant)

By now, I have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the History Channel, glorious franchise of alien and templar fiction, junk collectors, and CGI Romans. But when I saw they were airing something called The World Wars, talking about the world wars, as one long war - well, what could I do? When I turned it on, they were talking about Churchill, who seemed about to invade Turkey - it looked worth a shot. Though not at the moment - I think the Red Sox were in the process of winning a game at the time, a great novelty, so I flipped away - but not before recording the thing to watch later. By the time I came back, though, I had come across a reference to it in the world, from no less that Charles Pierce - his remarks were acerbic and on point - but not enough to dissuade me from watching. Just enough to make me watch it to find out what it got wrong as much as any inherent interest. And when I started watching it - well - it didnt take long to turn into straight up hate-watching: ladies and gentlemen, this is just about as bad a history documentary as you are likely to see. Outside of vanity projects (check out Nietzsche and the Nazis sometime - if you want to know less about the rise of Nazism than you do now) or overt propaganda, this is about as bad as it gets. ("Better than The Eternal Jew!" - now there's a tag line to be proud of.)

The World Wars is comprehensively bad. Aesthetically, it is a mess. It's done as voiceover over mainly re-enactments, with some archival footage for variety, and the occasional talking head. The re-enacments are very lame: actors playing famous people strike characteristic poses (Churchill sips scotch and smokes cigars! Hitler stares maniacally at the camera! Patton rides on the back of a tank! Neville Chamberlain twitches! Tojo smokes a cigarette over a map!), and sometimes make speeches or have symbolic conversations; battlefield recreations; part 2 offers lots of aerial shots of planes and stuff on the ground. This stuff is bad, but I suppose I can't single it out - it's what passes for historical documentaries on much of TV these days, not just the History Channel. Still - this is 20th century history, and using cheesy recreations in place of the infinite supply of archival material seems odd; and when they cut to actual footage of the wars, it is very jarring - how much better looking the real stuff is, how much more dynamic, detailed, rich it is. It's not as if they use archival material all that well - but when they do, the film looks a lot less stupid. Because the recreations sure look stupid. I know this sort of thing is probably only interesting to military history nerds, but still - couldn't they have found someone to coach the actors in how to pretend to shoot a rifle? Poor old Churchill is shown in a trench banging away at the Hun, but when he shoots the thing, he's holding the rifle 3 or 4 inches away from his shoulder! what the hell? The nerd in me kept getting smacked in the nose by things like that - the cleanest WWI sets ever; Mussolini shooting the three stupidest soldiers in human history; some kind of post-war tank used to represent the Germans' invasion of France; German soldiers with panzerfausts in France, 1940; Japanese naval casualties at Midway called "soldiers;" British soldiers (helmets, anyway) in the Battle of the Bulge; even the archival footage had what looked like a B-17 bombing London in the blitz. I'm usually relatively forgiving of this kind of thing when it turns up in a historical movie - but in a documentary, when you have the option of showing actual footage - your recreations had better get it right. And top all of this off with the endless repetition of the thing - it's 6 hours long, but there feels like about an hour's worth of material - shots, sequences, narration, are repeated over and over again - they must assume no one is actually going to watch this thing from beginning to end, and design it so you can start anywhere. Felt that way, anyway...

Okay... for all that, it might be all right if the rest of it worked. But alas. Start with the organizing principal of the show - it is all organized around a handful of Great Men. Now - Great Man history itself is a tired old thing - but it works well enough for introductory history. I don't stray too far away in my Civil War posts, after all - it's an easy way to organize material. And might have worked here, if they had done it better. But they managed to make a mess of this too. First, it's really Great Men of WWII, right from the start - they ignore the Great Men of WWI in favor of the likes of Hitler and Patton and Mussolini. That might have worked if they focused on how the Great War shaped these men - they do that with Hitler (who's the star of the piece after all), since they can't really pretend a German corporal altered the course of history. But McArthur and Patton, especially, are pumped up well beyond their actual contributions. All while leaving everyone else out - all the people who did matter int he first world war - Pershing and Ludendorf and Douglas Haig are nowhere to be seen. This is the core of why this is so bad: they have chosen a number of men to follow, but then, instead of following them, while keeping an eye on the context, they have treated the men they are following as if they are the only ones who matter. And even more - they don't even bother to name anyone else. It's rather shocking to get through a show about WWI without hearing the names Franz Ferdinand or Kaiser Wilhelm or Gavrilo Principe or Tsar Nicholas II or David Lloyd George or Pershing or Haig or Ferdinand Foch, or, indeed, anyone French. In WWII, at least the people they name are important - but it is something, and not something good, to never hear the names Eisenhower, Montgomery, Nimitz, Hirohito, or any Frenchmen, or even any of the other famous Nazis! Hitler has Germany to himself, not having to share with the usual suspects, Goering and Goebbels and Himmler and Hess. Between these two bad habits - treating their named characters as if they were the only people who mattered, and ignoring everyone else - it becomes a very bad bit of history. But they are quite consistent about it - they treat McArthur and Patton as if their efforts broke the stalemate in France in 1918; they treat them as if they were the only Americans to matter in WWII; they treat all the relationships and decisions in the war (on all sides) as if they involved only their dozen or so named people. So Roosevelt decides whether to discipline Patton for slapping a soldier, not Ike; Roosevelt brings Patton back to active duty for the Battle of the Bulge (definitely more on that later), not Ike; Hitler invades France because Churchill becomes prime minister - etc.

The worst of it is probably in Russia. The revolution is all Lenin and Stalin (and the Germans, who apparently planned and funded the whole thing). They even stage it like that - Lenin comes back to Russia, gets off a train, and meets Stalin in a vast empty train station. Gone the masses, gone the Revolution itself, just Lenin and Stalin, giving Stalin far more of a role than he had in fact. It's a perfectly Stalinist move - dropping everyone except the Great Leaders. The show tops it in part two though - there, they surpass Stalin himself, and erase Lenin from history... But we're getting to that.

All of this is small potatoes next to what they do to history itself. They don't do much of anything right, historically. They can't even tell a story - it's very hard to piece together a good chronology out of it all. They hop around in time (all through the show), never quite stitching anything together. It's even harder to put together a narrative (to work out the causes and effects.) And if you know the history - oh: it gets painful. They sometimes stab at explaining events - but they make such a hash of the chronology, the narrative makes no sense. They tell things out of order, they conflate historical events (as if they are adapting someone's biography, and conflating characters for efficiency sake - I suppose that might explain Ike's disappearance, for instance.) This is carelessness - but it verges on outright deception - and a few times, goes well beyond that. Saying Patton conquered Italy in 6 weeks - or that he was held out of combat from August 1943 until the Battle of the Bulge - those aren't just errors. Those are flat lies.

I was thinking about that: if this were a paper, a student project, turned in to a class - you would have to give it a straight F, for the history alone. They get some things so shockingly wrong it's almost impossible to explain. The claims about Patton and Italy - it might just be an editing error - he was instrumental in conquering Sicily in 6 weeks, sure - not Italy. Maybe they meant that - but think what it means that a mistake like that would get into the final script of a show like this. If it's an accident - how does that happen? It's too big an accident - it's a lie.

It's not the only one. The moment that knocked me over when I started watching it came in the first episode - after building up to Gallipoli and its aftermath, they turned to Russia - and Lenin, Germany's secret weapon. Now - that's a bit of a stretch, though the Germans certainly hoped he'd do what he did. But the kick comes in what the show claims he went to Russia to do - it says, he went to overthrow the Tsar. And later - they say he did overthrow the Tsar. But Lenin didn't overthrow the Tsar - the Tsar was out before Lenin started back; the Revolution was well under way. And he didn't overthrow the Tsar in October 1917 - he overthrew Karensky's provisional government. How do you get a thing like that wrong? you can look it up on Wikipedia, and get it right. Why would they put that in the show? I might understand if this were part of their Great Man of History approach -but they don't bother to name Nicholas II; he's not part of the story. So... why not get it right? Of course, they make it worse in part two - there, Stalin seizes control of Russia and establishes Communism - Lenin has been written out of the story; written out after he was the star of part 1!

That's one, and not the last. Let's see - according to this show, the Night of the Long Knives is when Hitler wiped out his political enemies and seized total control of the state. They've basically conflated the knight of the long knives with the Reichstag fire. Or - they reverse the order of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz - putting the Blitz first. I don't know why, though I suppose the gist of the reason is to make Hitler look worse than he really was (kind of pointless really). This kind of thing is endemic - they can't get the chronology straight in the best of times - it's almost hopeless trying to list all the places they screw things up. Hitler's rise to power; the events after the Munich accords that led to the war; US/Japanese relations in the Pacific - all are incoherent. They almost get WWII right - though they skip long stretches of it (nothing seems to have happened in the Pacific from Midway to the invasion of the Philippines; Russians jump straight from Stalingrad to Berlin; etc.) They mess up a couple pieces pretty badly, though - they have us invading Italy, then Mussolini is overthrown - and that is the end of the fight in Italy. Which would come as news to my uncle who got shot in the Liri Valley 70 years ago last month. They credit this victory to Patton - who was gone before the Invasion of the Italian Peninsular took place. And add that he then was out of combat until the Battle of the Bulge, where he was called on (by Roosevelt, of course) to save the Allies from defeat - almost every word of which is nonsense. Patton led the Third Army through France. Ike called on Montgomery to save the day after the Battle of the Bulge - and Patton to take charge of the southern half of the battlefield. And - etc. What can I say?

It's not just the facts they get wrong - they get larger issues wrong too. Like completely ignoring the importance Hitler always put on attacking the USSR - making it seem like his invasion of the USSR was a terrible and inexplicable betrayal of his great friend Stalin. Or screwing up all the reasons the western powers fought in 1939; or the progress of trouble in the Pacific; or the reasons for the battle of Stalingrad; and on and on. And if we go into the sins of omission - this post will go on forever. (It's getting there already.) But - all the details from the wars are gone. The Pacific campaign in WWII is gone. (Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, all gone.) The North African campaign is gone. Most of the Italian campaign is gone. Everything after Stalingrad and between D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge are all gone. Other than Pearl Harbor and Midway, and the Lusitania, back in WWI, the naval wars are gone. The air wars are gone, other than the Blitz, the Battle of Britain (in the wrong order) and the 2 a-bombs. France is gone, from both wars - no Frenchmen are named in either war (though apparently DeGaulle gets a moment in the international edition of the stupid thing.) Someone does mention that 100,000 of them died in the 6 weeks of 1940, which might be the only mention of anyone's casualties, other than the 100 million total...

And non-military? Let's go back to the end of WWI - they use archives and show a bunch of newspaper headlines about the Armistice. One of the newspapers has a story about a camp set up to house flu victims - the only mention of the epidemic of 1918, that killed more people than the war. BUt then again - they mention the Final Solution, death camps and so on - but not Kristallnacht, or any of Hitler's racial laws - do they use the word "holocaust"? It's horrible.

And I did say comprehensively bad - I haven't mentioned the commentators yet, have I? They have their usual run of professional historians, biographers of famous men and the like - but they've supplemented the experts with a perfect rogue's gallery of 21st century failures. Maybe the likes of John Major and Leon Panetta are harmless enough - but who in god's green earth thought it would be a good idea to let Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell out of their cages? Not to mention John McCain and weeping Joe Lieberman, who turns up at the end to talk about the holocaust. Stanley McChrystal, I suppose, might have some qualification for his speaking parts - though it's tempting to think his main qualification is that like Douglas McArthur, he knows what it means to forget that in the USA the military is most definitely subservient to the civilian government. But how can you get around Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell? Unless it's someone's idea of a joke - to bring in lying fools to lend their voices to a show that butchers history. They are what Pierce is exercised about up there - Crooks & Liars too, though they don't seem to notice how bad the history is. (And to show this is not just a partisan rant - here's NewsBusters taking a shot at the thing.) I can't quite say the show is committed to the kind of right-wing politics the commentators would indicate - most of the politics are as incoherent as the rest of it... though the show it pretty explicit in its pro-army bias. (I'd say pro-military, but the navy and air force, most of the time, are completely invisible.) In part 2, they play scene after scene contrasting Hitler's greatest military the world had ever seen, to crazy Brits and Americans building dams and power plants and houses, and keeping Oklahoma from flying into the Atlantic, instead of giving Churchill and McArthur all the tanks they want. And of course bringing on the Bush boys to nod soberly and talk about the importance of a strong military... After 3 or 4 of those scenes the thought must enter someone's head that for all Germany's militarism - who won the war?

Okay: I am done. Almost. There is one more thing I have to say about the commentators - I suspect very strongly that more than one of them - historians as much as politicians, maybe more so - were scripted by the show's writers. Because the commentators repeat the same kinds of things the show does - the same personalization of the war; especially around Patton. Real historians would talk about Eisenhower's appointments of Patton - real historians, if they were talking about D-Day would mention Ike somewhere. Sure, maybe they cut it out - but there are lots of places where they talk about things that clearly involve someone other than FDR and Patton, FDR and Churchill, Hitler and Stalin - and they use the same phrasing the show does, make the same interpretive mistakes the show makes. I don't know why they are doing - but the talking heads are certainly not providing expertise. I may be too harsh in this - more than once, I could tell the except was talking about something completely different than the show made it seem like they were talking about. One guy talks about the Russian Winter - how the German march on Moscow was stopped (in 1941) by the cold, the Siberian reinforcements who came up, and their own lack of preparation - but the show edits this bit into its own discussion of Stalingrad. Another case of conflation. But I don't think there's much doubt - a lot of those historians were just reading lines...

All right - that is all. I could run up another 2500 words I fear, but I won't. Not now anyway. I am almost calm again! it is almost out of my system! though since this thing will be replayed every week for the next 20 years - I am sure it will annoy me again before too long...

Happy Friday Music

Another quick one this week, as March winds down. No - May - just feels like March. I still see people wearing gloves sometimes... what fun... Anyway - onwards! enjoy your weekend!

1. Beatles - Eleanor Rigby
2. Mogwai - Blues Hour
3. Replacements - Take Me Down to the Hospital
4. Ric Ocasek - People We Know
5. Melt-Banana - Scrubber
6. Butthole Surfers - Tornadoes
7. John Zorn - Inside Straight
8. The Warlocks - Inside Outside (live)
9. Conway Twitty - Lonely Blue Boy
10. The Ramones - Oh Oh I Love Her So

Video - start with Conway Twitty, pop star:



Here is a Beatle, singing Eleanor Rigby:



And I think I need at least one mutiguitar drone here - Warlocks, live works:

Musical Interlude

Another Friday - another list - nothing fancy: have a happy Memorial day weekend, everyone!

1. George Harrison - Ballad of Sir Francis Crisp
2. Naked City - Erotico
3. Brian Jonestown Massacre - THeir Satanic Majesty's Second Request (Enrique's Dream)
4. The Who - Road Runner
5. Human League - Fascination
6. Frank Zappa & The Mothers - Mon & Dad
7. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Spread Your Love
8. Charlie Parker - Dark Shadows
9. Jeffrey Lewis - Octopus' Garden
10. Ghost - Sun is Tangging

What have we got for video today? BRMC seems right:



And how about the Human League? miming on Top of the Pops... good advice of friends unheeded...

Harris Farm

The Battle of Spotsylvania is just about done in 1864, but this morning, 150 years ago, there was one last fight. Lee sent Richard Ewell's corps (which had been chopped to pieces at the Battle of the Bloody Angle) on a kind of reconnaissance in force - march around the right flank of the Union army, see if they could find out what Grant was up to (Grant was up to something), and maybe cut them off and force them to change their plans. Ewell did so - and found the right rear of the Union army fairly open. His men ran into a brigade of Heavy Artillery regiments - men who had enlisted as artillerymen, had spent most of the war posted in the Washington defenses, but were converted to infantry in 1864 and sent off to die with Grant in Virginia. There were, as it happened, more men in this brigade's 5 regiments than in all of Ewell's corps - but when the rebels found them, they didn't think about that. They were confident, and they were fighting rookies, and they expected to win, so they attacked - which turned into a hard little battle. The raw artillerymen fought, not always well - but they held - and eventually reinforcements arrived, and the rebels did well to get away.

One of the regiments there, seeing action for the first time, was the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery. I mentioned them last year - my great-great-grandfather was there. This was their first battle - like the other heavies, they stood up to the attack - unfortunately, like the other heavies, they stood up a bit too literally. By 1864, infantrymen had pretty much learned not to fight in the open unless they had no choice - even in a battle line, veterans would do all they could to find cover, at least kneel, make themselves small - anything except stand in well dressed 18th century style battle lines and blast it out with men who'd been at this for 3 years. But that is what the heavies did. Stood and fought - and eventually chased the rebels off - but took a beating doing it. The 1st Maine brought 1800 men into the fight (more than some of Ewell's divisions, the one at the point of the mule shoe on May 12, anyway) - they lost 523. (Per Gordon Rhea.) That would prove to be just a warm up for what would happen to them at Petersburg - but it's staggering.

My great great grandfather came out unscathed - he would't be so lucky in a month, though he would survive... Not so John P. Higgins, ae 17 yrs. 2 mos.



Meanwhile, though this delayed Grant's plans, it didn't stop them - he was done with Spotsylvania, and soon would be heading south, looking to lure Lee out of his trenches, make him fight in the open. And while he never managed to get him in the open, he did, increasingly, manage to control where the fighting would take place, until he had backed Lee into a corner at Petersburg. Though a lot of men would die on the way...

Friday Random Ten

Another Friday, another 10 songs, tossed up by iTunes. Been a grimly busy week, with more to come; been warm and humid too, without quite turning pleasant... we'll see. Spring is here at least, though it takes a while to get used to it - especially the humidity. Last weekend, I set out to put my CDs in some order - most of them are in crates, but when I put them there, I didn't make any effort to organize them - so I set out now to at least alphabetize. Ugh. I have too many CDs for that sort of thing - and doing it one of the first warmish days made it an increasingly unfortunate chose. Still... So this week we'll be keeping it simple - your basic shuffle... have a good weekend!

1. Grant Hart - I Am Death
2. Shonen Knife - Burning Farm
3. Melt Banana - Giggle on the Stretcher
4. AC/DC - You Shook Me All Night Long
5. Quicksilver Messenger Service - Dino's Song
6. Merle Haggard - Swinging Doors
7. Bob Dylan - Maggie's Farm
8. Andrew W.K. - Party Hard
9. Spiral Stairs - Maltese T
10. Sleater Kinney - Modern Girl

Video? We hit some big names this week - no harm in enjoying them. Merle Haggard:



And the Bob:



And the brothers Young and company, doing what they do:



And that'll do it...

Spotsylvania Courthouse

Today, May 12, 186, the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse reached its climax.

My last couple Civil War posts have had a bit more to them - I've been thinking about the future, about how war will develop in the next 50 years after this, dropping hints about WWI and the trenches. Well - you can probably say that Spotsylvania is where the previews of coming attractions really started. It's there in the widespread and permanent use of fieldworks; it's there in the murderous, and hopeless attacks on trenches; and it's there in the sustained combat. I mentioned it after the Wilderness - that Grant changed the nature of the war, by not stopping after a battle - and when the armies get to Spotsylvania, that gets ratcheted up another notch. The armies arrived, fought - the Confederates dug in and the Yankees attacked; both sides dug in, and the Federals kept on attacking, over and over, day after day, attack after attack. And when Grant finally had enough of it - he started trying to move to a new position to attack again - not after a week or a month, but the next day. And on and on it went.

To sketch the events, broadly: Grant marched around the Wilderness, angling for the crossroads at Spotsylvania. Lee figured out where he was headed and got there first - the two armies ran into one another, fought, dug in, fought some more. Grant brought up his army - I already said this, didn't I? attacked. But by now the rebels were dug in, and were able to demolish any attacks. Grant tried going around their left, but Lee attacked there as well, and that fell apart. Grant sent Burnside against the rebel right, and might have been able to achieve something there, but Burnside was about as incompetent an officer as either side left in positions of authority for most of the war, so nothing happened. So Grant tried more head on attacks, without much success - he kept trying to get the whole army to attack at once, figuring they had huge numerical advantages and they should be able to find a weak point, but it never worked that way. Though things did happen - more later, but on May 10, Emery Upton, a Bright Young Man, launched an attack that broke the confederate line, but failed, due to lack of support; so Grant organized another attack on the same principals for the 12th - which also broke the line, and then bogged down, for lack of support... (Read Bob Bateman's post on Upton here.)

It was an ugly battle, Spotsylvania. (I've been reading Gordon Rhea's books on the 1864 campaign - depressing, but fascinating reading.) It's not Grant's finest hour, nor the Army of the Potomac's. Grant's decision to go south lifted the army's spirits - but it didn't solve the problems that had emerged in the Wilderness. Grant was increasingly making decisions and giving orders - but he still left things to Meade and the corps commanders, and they did not generally share Grant's aggression. Maybe because Grant was trying not to take over the army, maybe for other reasons, his planning was slipshod and careless - orders were vague or impossible and often got crossed up - with the result that the Federals were constantly losing the race to whatever spot they aimed for, were constantly attacking without preparation, without coordination, never coming close to getting their numbers into play at once. And since Grant was determined to try - it meant they kept attacking trenches, and kept getting shot to hell with no hope. They never quite shook that sort of thing - though later in the campaign, as Grant got his bearings, it seemed, the effect grew even more stark - at Cold Harbor and Petersburg, Grant stole a march on Lee - got his men to their objectives ahead of Lee - and then frittered the advantages away, and ended in bloodbaths. But that's still to come.

But there is a common theme, and it's a theme that also hints at what happens in 1914: it was possible to break trenches - the Union did it twice at Spotsylvania. It was possible to maneuver, get around the enemy - but almost impossible to stay there. The Army of the Potomac never really solved the problem of command, at the broader, operational level - and no one really solved the problem of how to move men through a battlefield to take advantage of the advantages they could get. Not in 1864, not in 1914.

So how could you break a strong trench line? Well - let's go to Emory Upton: what did he do? He proposed taking a force in as fast as possible, on as narrow a front as possible, pile-driving through the line. Basically, a form of attacking in column, instead of line - make a narrow front, move fast, break through and exploit the break. It worked - partly because Upton prepared the force for the attack: they deliberately chose the ground, they prepared the men making the attack, his superiors gave him a large enough force to do what he planned to do. And it worked, perfectly - they broke through - they started rolling up the rebel lines on either side of the breach - but it came to nothing. No one came to support them - the attacks that were supposed to happen after hue attacked either had already happened (and gone to nothing) or didn't happen... so back he went. But Grant was paying attention, and on the 12th he tried it again, this time with an entire army corps.

And - again - it worked. There was some luck in play this time. The attack was launched against a salient in Lee's lines; and Lee had guessed wrong about Grant's intentions, and pulled his artillery out of the salient, thinking he would need a head start on pursuing Grant. That made a big difference - artillery plays holy hell with columns of men (a big reason you saw so little fighting in columns in the Civil War). In any case - the II corps attacked at dawn, May 12 - again, in deep stacked masses of men, coming straight on to the tip of the rebel salient, following as much of Upton's pattern as possible, moving fast, moving as silently as possible - and they broke straight through and rolled it up with ease. And then? They piled in, broke the line, routed the front line of the rebel army - but were so broken up by the attack, that they could not keep going. I think this problem was somewhat inherent in Civil War era tactics - you had to attack in formation to be effective. You had to attack in a line to bring enough firepower to bear - since the rate of fire was too slow to sustain a really killing fire from a skirmish line. The problem is, a line is an easy target for another line of men - the line behind a pile of dirt is going to win that fight. So you could attack in column, mass formations like Upton's and Hancock's (II corps) - they broke the lines, but they lost all formation when they did. They needed to transform the spearhead into a firing line - they had to do it under fire in a killing zone. Suffice it to say, they did not succeed.

There were reasons. Certainly the Confederate response was one - they rushed men in and fought desperately to seal the breach. And of course, the attack had disordered the attackers. This was made worse by the attack's success - the whole II corps went in, all of them - and they were all caught in the confusion. What it added up to was an inability to shift men from the assault to exploitation of the break. Maybe they didn't expect a breakthrough - at least not the kind they got. No one thought about how to how to get another line of men into the battle after the breakthrough, in a position to attack the next line. But here again - while it's easy, and justified, to look at the shortcomings of the Union high command, I think you can ask yourself - how, exactly, could they have gotten another line in there? Grant tried to get his whole army to attack at the same time - to pin down the rebel army to allow any breakthrough to lead to a large one - but the army didn't do this, and it's doubtful it would have done any good if they did. Men in trenches were going to execute men attacking them in all but the most extraordinary cases. Maybe if they had planned some kind of attack in echelon, like Longstreet planned to do the second day of Gettysburg - when one unit started to waver, they were hit on the flank by another attack. Some of that happened at the Angle - but didn't extend beyond it. What was needed was a way to get troops through the Angle in good order - they needed to be able to move troops through the battlefield to the front, still intact, to attack Gordon (the Confederate general leading the counterattack), and then onwards, breaking Lee in half. But even with a plan - could they have done it?

They hadn't figured it out by WWI. It took a while to figure out how to break a line there - they tried frontal attacks, suppression fire (artillery and gas), all kinds of things. The front waves tended to get massacred - but even when they figured out how to take a line of trenches, they did not figure out how to get beyond it. There was no way to move fast enough to get at then before they built a new line. When breakthroughs occurred - they foundered for exactly this reason: that by the time you were through the first line, the second line was forming. It was impossible to get troops forward fast enough to stop this. Impossible - it wasn't quite a matter of tactics: it was physically impossible to get men across the battlefield before a new line, and a counterattack formed. And while Spotsylvania didn't quite pose the physical barriers to movement that the aftermath of a WWI battlefield did, it came close - especially given that it poured rain all day on the 12th of May. None of this changed, then, until tanks appeared, airplanes, ways to get past lines, or break up defensive lines before they could form. When you read about battles like Spotsylvania, or some of the fighting in WWI, you start to realize - there was nothing else they could do, except not fight. Once the armies dug in, they weren't going anywhere, until someone invented a better machine, or someone's economy collapsed. Or - as Grant eventually did: pin the enemy's best army in place, and let your vast resource advantages chew up the rest of the country.

And so: May 12, 1864 - Hancock's men broke through the rebel lines, but their attack bogged down. The rebels counterattacked, but only so far. The two sides basically hunkered down, in some places on opposite sides of the original trench lines, and proceeded to spend the rest of the day and night killing one another in the rain. a full day of face to face, almost hand to hand combat, neither side moving, or capable of moving the other guy, Grant feeding in fresh troops - Lee hanging on with what he had, while his reserved dug a new line in the rear. And that was the battle of the Bloody Angle.

And then? they kept at it - Grant trying to move around to find some weak spot, though much hindered by bad weather and a week of bloodletting. Lee trying to anticipate Grant's moves, avoid being caught out. And onward, until Grant decided to move south again. And another stage in the campaign was underway...

Yellow Tavern

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Yellow Tavern - where Phil Sheridan and the Union cavalry beat the Confederate cavalry, and JEB Stuart was killed. It was an ambiguous victory - Sheridan's raid was big and splashy, but probably did the Army of the Potomac more harm than good, taking away their cavalry, their intelligence, in much the way Stuart's raid during the Gettysburg campaign took away Lee's intelligence, and handicapped him. Sheridan's men got Stuart, but didn't really break the rebel cavalry, who continued to perform their main function (scouting and the like), without the temptation to go riding off on romantic adventures, like this one.

But - but. First - the raid did establish the union cavalry as a military force to be reckoned with. At the beginning of the war, they had been at a terrible disadvantage vs. the south - by 1863, things were starting to come around (Joe Hooker did a lot to turn them into a real force); they fought a number of successful battles in 63, and played a significant part at Gettysburg (holding off the initial advances for a couple hours until the infantry came up, and later driving Stuart off the union rear). And this, in 1864, more or less confirmed the point: they were a force to be reckoned with on the battle field.

But that also indicates something about how Sheridan thought about his cavalry, and something about the changes in the nature of the war. He was an infantry general in the west - and the truth is, he treated his cavalry corps as something very close to a mounted infantry unit. He expected to fight with them - attack; use their mobility to get into positions to cause serious problems to the enemy; and to be able to hold their own in any situation. And they did it, for a number of reasons - some of them technological. Union cavalry were increasingly armed with Spencer rifles - 7 shot repeaters that used metal cartridges - that meant they could put out a massive firepower - and could do it with guns that didn't foul because of wet. The Spencers and other carbines didn't have the range that rifled muskets had - and cavalry had a hard time mustering the mass firepower that usually made the difference in the Ciil War - but they could put out so much lead, they could hold their own.

The power of repeaters was shown in the west - Wilder's Brigade had Spencers, which they used to great effect; at Chickamauga, the 21st Ohio regiment was armed with Colt repeaters, that allowed them to do immense damage. Sheridan was a fighter - he used the cavalry corps almost like one of those mounted infantry units - fast, mobile, and able to outshoot anything they ran into. It didn't really bear fruit in early 1864 - but it became more and more effective as the year went along, and by the spring of 65, Sheridan would be able to use his troopers, and indeed, much of the union infantry, in that kind of mobile, high firepower way. It didn't quite unbalance the Civil war - there weren't enough of the repeaters around, and the tactics weren't there yet. But it is another of the things that hint at the future. Movement and firepower - well - a future that didn't quite come into being until the internal combustion engine replaced the horse. But the idea was there...

The Songs Pour Down Like Silver

This month's Band of the Month post has a good deal less autobiography than most of them. Richard Thompson appeared somewhere in the background, on the radio in the mid-80s, but I didn't really start paying attention until the end of the 80s, when I started listening to Fairport Convention. (Probably by way of the Waterboys, who I was very big on in those days.) Unhalfbricking and Liege and Leaf mainly, and I listened to them a lot, especially Liege and Leaf. That happened just before I stopped listening to rock and started listening to jazz - though during the jazz years, I kept breaking those records out now and then. I mentioned last month that I came out of my jazz obsession by way of jazz guitarists - Sonny Sharrock and Bill Frisell and James "Blood" Ullmer and John McLaughlin - a guitar obsession that led me to Richard Thompson. I picked up the Watching the Dark box set and listened to it obsessively for a year or so. Then started buying all his back catalogue, solo, Fairport, etc. And of course buying all his subsequent releases - which though underrepresented on my lists, remain satisfying pieces of music, with occasional moments of transcendence.

Those no real mystery why he's one of my favorites - he's one of the best guitar players rock music has produced (my favorite by a country mile.) He's also one of the most consistent and intelligent song writers in the business. And a unique and powerful singer - though there's no denying that his material sounded even better when he had Linda or Sandy Denny to sing it. It's impressive - based on his songs, his records, he would deserve to rank very high - especially considering the music, the accompaniment, the arrangements... But when you factor in his soloing - he's in the elite.

There are obviously other guitarists with a claim - Hendrix anyway - but basically, he's a finalist for the best rock guitarist of them all. And he's absolutely my favorite. You can start by being surprised by his versatility - he can rock; he is a master of lyrical, folk and jazz inflected extended solos; and he is capable of moving into avant grade territory. He can surprise, even shock, with his solos, as well as playing the most beautiful and perfect pieces. He's inexhaustible. His most characteristic style, I suppose - those long, beautiful, lyrical, tonally precise solos, like Calvary Cross, Night Comes In, When the Spell is Broken - define his greatest strengths - his melodic, harmonic and rhythmic sense; his patience, the ability to build long, slow pieces with mounting tension and drama; the tonal command, the drones and overtones and fingerpicked multiple parts. And he can ratchet it up - those wild folk rock excursions in the Full House/House Full era - Matty Groves and the like - sped up and pushed out, seemingly with no limits on what he can play. Though it's when he really cuts loose - the songs that shift away from the pretty solos, that get strange, biting - like on A Sailor's Life, Shoot Out the Lights (especially the later versions), Can't Win - that he moves from greatness to something jaw-dropping.

There were a lot of guitar players in the 60s, sometimes after, trying to imitate jazz saxophonists - Roger McGuinn, Tom Verlaine (or their fans) name drop Coltrane and company often enough. Thompson earns it. He uses the guitar like they played - full of overtones, slurs, the notes played on top of drones, the incorporation of Asian or celtic musical influences. Much of his career was spent in the folk-rock, singer-songwriter universe - but at the beginning he was playing with Hendrix; by the 80s he was playing with David Thomas (and a host of avant grade musicians), with John French, Fred Frith and Henry Kaiser - he kept a connection to that side of rock... And it turns up in some of the solos - and was there in the early ones.



In the end - I think he is something of a model for guitarists like Tom Verlaine, Glenn Mercer, the Velvet Underground fans who wanted to solo. Thompson is a pretty strong influence on their style. Songs like Marquee Moon, 1880 or So, Slipping (Into Something), Find a Way are all built on something like a template of Thompson's songs. And other guitarists (I mean, who are heroes of mine) covered him directly - Peter Laughner covering Calvary Cross; Bob Mould doing Shoot Out the Lights. I never get tired of any of them...

And so - one list won't do, for Thompson, since he is so good in such different aspects of the music. So - 3 might do it. First - the overall best (no matter who wrote it):

1. A Sailor's Life
2. For Shame of Doing Wrong
3. Dimming of the Day
4. Calvary Cross
5. Night Comes In
6. Matty Groves
7. Jenny
8. From Galway to Graceland
9. Sir Patrick Spens
10. Bird in God's Garden

Then his originals:

1. For Shame of Doing Wrong
2. Dimming of the Day
3. Jenny
4. From Galway to Graceland
5. A Heart Needs a Home
6. Hokey Pokey (The Ice Cream Song)
7. Night Comes In
8. Jet Plane in a Rocking Chair
9. Shoot Out the lights
10. Never Again

And finally - the guitar parts. Mostly solos, but a couple are here for the riffs. These are also more specific in the version I mean:

1. A Sailor's Life - version on the Watching the Dark set, without the fiddle - though the fiddle version is a thing of immense power. It's a magnificent ensemble piece - glorious as Thompson's playing is, Lamble's drumming is almost as captivating; Nicol lays down a monster riff behind Thompson - and Denny is almost overwhelming. Swarbrick's fiddle somewhat cuts Thompson's solo, but it creates a thrilling blend - I could list the two versions of that song 1-2 here easily.



2. Shoot Out the Lights (Live from Austin)
3. Calvary Cross (the Watching the Dark version, again)
4. Matty Groves (House Full) - as blood curdling a tune and performance as you will hear.
5. Night Comes in (Guitar, Vocal)
6. For Shame of Doing Wrong (Concert November 1975)
7. Time Will Show the Wiser - here seen live on French TV in 1968!



8. Can't Win (watching the dark)
9. Sloth (House Full)
10. When the Spell is Broken (watching the dark version)

And Video - I found more of this than I expected, especially those really old clips. This post will take an hour to load. Oh well.

Here's another clip from that French TV show - "Reno Nevada" - Thompson playing a Les Paul, and ripping it. Looking younger than his 19 years. It's rather startling to think how young they were - Thompson, Simon Nicol, Martin Lamble and Judy Dyble were all still just teenagers in 68. It's probably part of why the early version of the band seems a bit too derivative, with their American covers and somewhat affected vocals. But Thompson isn't derivative - this solo leaves the rest of the song miles behind. And the same is pretty much true for Lamble as well. (Nicol, too, who is a superb rhythm guitarist, already, here.) I'm not sure Thompson has ever managed to find someone to match Lamble's drumming in his later career (other than collaborating with others, like John French or Chris Cutler on the Thomas records.) Anyway - it is nice to see some cool footage of Lamble here, too...



Here is the House Full era lineup playing a half hour set on French TV - including a fantastic Sloth:



And two gorgeous songs featuring Linda Thompson - Dimming of the Day from 1981:



And A Heart Needs a Home, 75 or so:



And a perfectly thrilling version of Shame of Doing Wrong, Germany 1980:



And of course, Thompson's still going strong. Here he is with the Liege and Leaf era band doing Tam Lin in 2007:



And Calvary Cross, playing with Dawes on a cruise ship, 2013:



And finally, Can't Win, with his Electric trio, 2013, featuring very energetic drumming, and one of his more avant-garde inspired solos:

Battle of the Wilderness

150 years ago, The Battle of the Wilderness began. It was a nasty, bloody contest, though most significant for what happened when it ended - because it changed the shape of the war - maybe of war itself.

The battle itself was a nasty piece of work. It got its name from where it took place, in The Wilderness - the same second growth woodland where the Battle of Chancellorsville happened the previous year. It was a hideous place to fight - dense woodland, full of cuts and streams and swamps, where no one could see anything, generals had the devil's time maintaining control of their men, no one could move through all the woods, and once the shooting started, the whole thing caught fire and turned it into a hellscape. No one really intended to fight there - Grant's idea was to march throughout the wilderness before Lee could get to him, to fight on the open ground to the south. But Lee got wind of the movement and moved to block it, attacking the Army of the Potomac in the woods. And that's how it went.

There were two main roads running throughout he woods, and the battle was fought almost as two separate engagements on and around those roads. On the union right, Warren’s V corps ran into Ewell's corps, entrenched in the jungle - Warren was ordered to attack, and did, but in an uncoordinated and piecemeal fashion that gained no ground and led to great slaughter. On the union left, a separate battle developed between other Union troops (Hancock’s II corps, mainly) and AP Hill’s men - here, strong Union numeric advantages went to nothing because of the mix of bad coordination and the impassable terrain the battle was fought over. Both sides fought until dark and then waiting to do it again in the morning.

They picked up where they left off the second day. The union left (especially) tried to get into position for an early attack, but things bogged down, and dragged out - but they did finally get their numbers to bear, and started to drive Hill's men back. And finally, it went beyond that - they drove Hill back, and broke the lines, and finally came close to a complete breakthrough. But in the best of circumstances, in the Civil War, any battle demolished the formations of the men fighting, the winners as much as the losers. Over and over, you read of attacks that shatter the enemy, but peter out because the victors are as disorganized as the losers. And here, the Union army was driving them, but they were coming apart - and this was far worse than the usual circumstances. Command and control were almost impossible to maintain in the wilderness; combined with the tendency for organization to disintegrate in the face of too much success or failure, the Union attack was ripe for the picking.... And they ran square into Longstreet’s corps, which had spent the previous day slogging around in the woods, far from the battle, only to turn up here and now, just when it counted. They hit the union army when it was disorganized, out of control, and worn out - and blew the line to shreds. They drove them back to where they started, but the Yankees had fieldworks built there - so when the rebels came in the Yankees were waiting. And the same thing happened that usually happened when men attacked entrenchments in the Civil War. They were wrecked.

And that was that. They hung around another day, but neither side had much stomach left for fighting. The battle had a lot in common with Chickamauga, actually, as well as Chancellorsville. Much like Chickamauga, this was a terrible ground for a fight; much of the battle was the same kind of back and forth uncoordinated slog; and once again, it was a Longstreet attack (or counter attack) that caved in the Federal forces; and that led to the same last ditch stand by the Union that wrecked the southerners almost as bad as they were wrecked. HOwever, unlike Chickamauga, where the Army of the Cumberland was wrecked by the battle, The Army of the Potomac was still going strong. They were shot up - but they had a lot of men, and whatever troubles they had at the command level (and they had some pretty serious commend problems in the spring of 1864), they were structurally intact and ready to keep going. In that, this fight looks more like Chancellorsville - hard fighting, a few moments of total disaster, but the army intact and mostly ready for more.

Still, the north had been beaten. Warren’s corps never really got anywhere (getting shot up the first day, then again the second day, then ending the whole thing by getting routed out of their position by a flank attack that only dissolved because of the night time woods.) Hancock on the left had been shot up badly as well. (Sedgwick’s VI corps, and parts of Burnside's IX fought on both sides of the battle, often in the middle between the other two - with no more success than anyone else had.) The Union had been stopped cold, trying to get through the Wilderness, at significant loss. Lee was still waiting with plenty of fight. In the past, when the Yankees invaded the south and lost, they tended to go back home and try again. But this time, everything changed.

The truth is, throughout the war, there were few examples to this point of armies fighting battles and then trying to press their advantage (let alone continuing after a defeat, if they had a choice.) Lee during the Seven Days; Lee after Second Bull Run; Lee after Chancellorsville - Lee, that is. And after victories; not after a defeat. And of course, there was the Vicksburg campaign - a series of coordinated attacks and battles, one after another, with no space given to the confederates to regroup. Which is to say, Grant. And here was Grant again. And while he had been blocked on his first attempt to get into the south, he was not the sort of man who looked at failure as anything forgone. So after a day resting, he got his army up and marching, and turned them south - marching around the Wilderness, headed for Spotsylvania Courthouse.

And that made all the difference. The Army of the Potomac certainly thought so - every account is full of the thrill the men in the ranks felt when they discovered they were heading south, looking to take the battle to the enemy, not go back home and think about what to do next. And this is despite their knowing that this meant blood and death for them. I doubt anyone imagined just how much blood and death would be coming - I don't know how they could, though you might have gotten a notion of it looking at the carnage of Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and Chickamauga - sustained carnage. But the men in the ranks seem to have understood what Grant understood - that you had to fight until you were beat, really beat - and they weren't beat.

Somewhere in here, probably at Spotsylvania in fact, you can see 20th century warfare being born. Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg prefigure WWI, that is certain: trench warfare; extended warfare - those are all new. But that change started in the Wilderness. Civil War battles tended to be battles - armies marched around to get to a position to fight - they fought - then went where they went to think about what to do next. Other than Lee at the 7 days and Grant at Vicksburg, there aren’t a lot of examples of armies fighting a sustained series of battles, day after day until the issue was decided. Even when one battle led to another, as Second Bull Run led to Antietam, or Chancellorsville to Gettysburg, or Chickamauga led to Chattanooga - there were gaps. Armies separated and began new campaigns. But not so much here. Grant headed off around Lee - Lee moved to cut him off again - they ran into each other and did it again a couple days later. Then Grant moves, Lee moves, they tried again - not quite coming to blows at North Anna, but then moving again - another slaughter at Cold Harbor - move again - Petersburg. And then siege.

It was different. Grant started the battle and kept at it. So did Lee, though he had less choice. But this period of the war, changed the way war was waged. It became steady, endless, relentless. Even before this, it was very difficult to win a battle and win a war, though everyone still seemed to think it was possible. Europe got fooled by Sedan, a big decisive battle that sort of stopped the Franco-Prussian war: only sort of, since the French people repudiated the government that surrendered and kept on fighting... But it did leave Europeans thinking they could win a decisive battle and through it a war. But it didn't work like that anymore, and wouldn't until the Blitzkriegs. In 1864, Grant pressed on, fight by fight, trying to get around Lee, but always ready to fight when they met again. In the end, he settled for a siege, to keep Lee in place while Sherman, later Sheridan, beat the South - but either way, he waged an endless campaign. As did Sherman - who don’t have to fight Johnson for every river crossing as Grant did Lee - but the principals were the same. Move around this line, confront the next line. Sherman was less willing to attack directly, Johnston was less willing to force a fight than Lee was, and both of them had more room to move around in. So there was less bloodshed in the west - but there were no rests, no stops. Sherman would push on until he had won - as Grant did.

A Simple Friday Random Ten

We have sun and warm weather today, and I think I will keep the old Friday randomizer as simple as possible:

1. Neutral Milk Hotel - Avery Island-April 1st
2. Bruce Springsteen - Does this Bus Stop at 82nd Street?
3. Dangerdoom - No Names (Black Debbie)
4. Mars Volta - Ilyena
5. Green Day - American Idiot
6. Husker Du - Celebrated Summer
7. Wire - Bad Worn Thing
8. Donna Summer - I Feel Love
9. Gordon Lightfoot - Sundown
10. Of Montreal - Authentic Phyrrhic Remission

Video? Hope I'm not getting too far ahead of myself, but - I imagine summer is going to be celebrated pretty enthusiastically this year:



Sometimes I think it's a sin when I feel like I'm winning when I'm losing again... take it Gordon:



and - it occurs to me that Wire is always worth a listen- - live on the radio:

May Day 2014

Then to the maypole haste away for 'tis now a holiday - featuring Maddy Prior:



For those of you of a more diabolical turn of mind, here's a recording of Black Sabbath, when War Pigs was Walpurgis:



And finally, on the political front, Paul Robeson, singing Joe Hill:

Friday Random Ten

This week is going to be pretty minimalist here - the default, random 10 post. In fact, that's about all I have to say. The racist welfare queens can take care of themselves. The Red Sox can't. The weather seems to be stalled in a gray early spring blahness... April is almost done - May should be a busy time around here, with Grant and Sherman on the march, and Wonders in the Dark's Romance Countdown. So today - here are some songs, as expertly chosen by the gnomes inside my computer:

1. Pixies - Vamos
2. Saint Etienne - Goodnight Jack
3. Syd Barrett - Waving my Arms in the Air
4. Johnny Cash - Greystone Chapel
5. Beastie Boys - Egg Man
6. George Harrison - Out of the Blue [George rocks out!]
7. Brian Jonestown Massacre - No Come Down
8. Abba - Lay All Your Love on Me
9. Black Sabbath - Jack the Stripper/Fairies Wear Boots
10. Damon & Naomi - Helsinki

Start in 1988 with the Pixies - play if Joey:



And maybe some old Sabbath while we're at it:



Have a good one!

Punk, Ubu Style

Friday again, more music - and I have to follow up on last week. Actually - go backwards from last week - from Pere Ubu, to Rocket From the Tombs, mostly. A couple weeks ago, I went to see a kid I know who plays in a band - high school kids, they're a punk band, hammering away at their stuff, pretty good at what they do - though it sometimes gets very disconcerting watching them. Teenagers playing a 40 year old type of music, their parents pogoing and moshing along.... it is all very strange, given the claims of punk, then and now, to rebellion - to being a rejection of the past. All the talk back then about rejecting the worn out mainstream rock and roll - nonsense in the 70s, of course, but extremely bizarre now. It's another illustration of my theory that rock stopped in the mid-80s (say) - this bunch of kids (the first couple bands we saw) are playing their parents' music - without any anxiety about it at all. Which is fine with me - though I wish if they were going to play oldies, they'd play better oldies. I kept wishing they'd play Sonic Reducer.

Because before punk even existed, David Thomas and company pretty much summed it up and moved along, a lot of it in two songs: Sonic Reducer, Final Solution. They are very good - and very smart, the way they play their teenaged angst both for real and for a joke, and as something that's already old hat in 1974. Since it was old hat in 1974. They're so smart - their irony, their mix of wild hyperbole and solipsism (which is pretty close to the adolescent condition: hyperbole and solipsism), their distance and knowingness, playing alongside the sense that, at some level, he really means it - or meant it, when he was younger. Something like that. The way those songs embrace the fact that there is nothing new in their teenaged blustering, that it has always been thus for the Youth of Today, and that it has been pretty much exactly thus since rock and roll became the sound of Youth of Today... while at the same time, getting across the point that the reason teenagers keep repeating the same kinds of things is that this is what it feels like to be a teenager - ready to explode and being stomped down at the same time - "they all just pass me by, but I'm not just anyone..." And that became something like the point of an awful lot of punk rock, ever since - and it's all there, more self-aware than it would be again, in 1974. That self-awareness helps, too - it doesn't seem ridiculous to me for 60 year olds to play those songs - they were never a direct expression of teenaged angst - they were always about it, and always in on the joke, and written in a way you could be in on the joke when you are 50, partly because they make you remember just what it felt like to be 15. Always balanced between the real thing and making fun of it - balance of those classic rock riffs and the sense of their ridiculousness, which plays out in the straighahead parts of the songs and the ironic parts and the weird parts. They are nostalgic and mocking, modern and old; they rock out and deconstruct rock. They are fascinating.

It's interesting that Pere Ubu, especially, came up with some songs that seem a bit more direct in their angst. Heart of Darkness and My Dark Ages especially - they seem like a more adult kind of angst, with their literary and film references, their sense of restlessness and solitude, and a kind of loneliness that doesn't feel like it is going to go away any time soon. And musically, they are moving past the standard rock and roll templates - with their drones and minimalism and Ravenstine taking a bigger part. I recognized myself in those songs, far more than the others (especially when I first started listening to them) - I was never a particularly angtsy teenager in the usual sense, but I was a lonely and over analytical young adult. And shoot - there are days, you get in a certain mood, and everything I see seems so deformed - none of the faces fit a human form... you get that....

So - I wish those kids would cover RFTT. Pere Ubu if they want, but hey - they're just a punk band. Rocket is fine. Sonic Reducer is a better punk song than anything since, and not really done to death - it's in there with a couple others early punk songs - Final Solution, Suspect Device - that just never get old.

Though on the subject of RFTT and angst - the Peter Laughner songs are a bit of a different matter. Ain’t it Fun - jesus christ. That’s murder. You get contempt, self-contempt, despair, laid out like a patient on an operating table. In some ways it has distance, but it's almost the inverse of the Thomas songs: something that sounds like it's standing outside the angst, but is all of it exactly accurate. I mean - as far as I can tell that song is pretty much a straight recitation of Peter Laughner's sins. Right up to knowing you're going to die young. It has bite. (And every time I listen to it, I remember a remark someone made about the original RFTT recording - the way in the middle, Laughner takes a guitar solo - and it's completely drowned out by Cheetah, who's amp is closer to the mic.... Poor Pete - he was extraordinarily talented, and drank himself to death at 24, quite knowingly, guessing from Ain't It Fun.)

Videos - latter day Rocket from the Tombs:



Cheetah singing Ain't It Fun:



And maybe Joey Ramone playing Sonic Reducer, with Cheetah Chrome on guitar:



And finally - Living Color doing Final Solution:

Fort Pillow

I've been neglecting my Civil War anniversaries - though that's going to change around the beginning of May. Winters in those days usually meant everyone went into camp and tried not to die of dysentery and pneumonia, and went back to shooting one another in the spring... And that's what happened 150 years ago - Nathan Bedford Forrest set out on a raid, and on April 12, attacked Fort Pillow, in western Tennessee, on the Mississippi river. A vigorous fight resulted - the Union troops were outnumbers badly, and in a bad position, though they were entrenched - after a few hours of fighting, Forrest demanded their surrender, they refused, and the rebels charged, broke through - and the battle turned into a massacre.

The reason it did, and the reason it became such a touch point afterwards, is that most of the men killed were U.S. Colored Troops. (Though it didn't help, probably, that the white Union troops at Ft. Pillow were Tennesseans.) It was not unique - the Confederates treated Colored Troops appallingly - sometimes murdering them in cold blood, usually selling the prisoners as slaves. The massacre brought all this into the center of attention - leading, for instance, to the breakdown of arrangements for exchange and parole of POWS. The north demanded that captured black soldiers be treated the same as any Federal POW - the south refused. So during 1864, prisoner exchanges ended, and prison camps such as Andersonville became horrific death zones. The war became exceedingly hard in 1864 - Ft. Pillow contributed to that, directly, and as part of the larger changes marked by the use of Colored Troops. It was becoming a different kind of war - talk about a war to free the slaves became less talk, and more reality - blacks fought directly for their freedom; and Northerners increasingly accepted their cause as identical to the cause of the Union.

Boy That Sounds Swell

After I posted last month's Feelies essay, I remembered something I should have said. It's something that contradicts the gist of that essay - or at least reminds me that most of what I posted I wrote in 1989-90. That image of the Feelies as caretakers of dream albums comes from The Good Earth, and their later records; it doesn't fit Crazy Rhythms so well. Now, back in 1989, I didn't have much doubt which I preferred - I remember talking to my boss about the Feelies, before I saw them play that year - he said he loved Crazy Rhythms; I said, that's a great record but I like The Good Earth more... I did - for all the reasons I wrote about last month. But that was 1989, this is 2014; you should take note of the balance of songs on my top 10 - 3 top 5, 4 top 10, the top cover, all from the first record. You might notice the title I gave the essay. You might well ask - what IS your favorite Feelies record, anyway? WOuld I still say The Good Earth? Actually - yeah, I might - but that would be mostly because it stands as a proxy for their live shows. That 1989 essay was written on the occasion of the 7th time I saw them play, and it is rooted mainly in their live performances - which transcend the differences among their albums, turning everything into something fast and sleek - integrating the edginess of the first record with the pastoral and rock of the later ones...

But really, in isolation, as a record, today, Crazy Rhythms would be my favorite. And it's not just a matter of preferring one record by a band to another - it's a matter of preferring a sound, an approach, maybe a tradition. (And this is about preferring one thing I love to another thing I love - a matter of ranking within my favorite things, not about things I like and don't like). It's something that changed in the 90s - in 1989, my tastes were defined by the base of classic rock, and the immediate, conscious influence mostly of the Velvet Underground (plus some country floating around). 10 years later - the ground had become classic rock plus the Velvets and punk plus jazz (and floating country) - but the band at the center was different. I start with Crazy Rhythms, then, because its aesthetic reflects that change in taste - and because it provides a direct tangible link, in the person of Andy/Anton Fier, to the cause of this change. By the end of the 20th century, Pere Ubu was The Band.

There's a fair amount of autobiography involved in how that happened. Like most things, I discovered Pere Ubu late - I heard them - heard OF them - back in 87, about the time they got back together to make The Tenement Year. I bought that record and liked it, without, maybe, overdoing it; at more or less the same time, I found a copy of Terminal Tower, their singles compilation, and that, I will say, hit hard. Even now, their singles are what they are known for, among non-obsessives at least - Heart of Darkness, Final Solution, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo - and they certainly convinced me. They weren't a radical departure, of course - those early songs grow pretty directly out of the Velvets and Stooges and such, which I was long since immersed in back then. And I was immersed in a lot of 80s bands that had certainly been listening to Pere Ubu for a while - Mission of Burma, Husker Du, Butthole Surfers all have their moments. (And the Pixies, though they might have gotten prominent a bit later.) So I took to Pere Ubu fast, and took to them hard - hard rock, literary allusions, Jimmy Doolittle, guitar solos - they had it all, and I was convinced. I found a copy of 390 Degrees of Simulated Stereo; I went to see them play (fall '88 - the people who were supposed to go with me bailed for some reasons - work, most likely, so I went alone, and had to take a cab home - spending some $50-60 on the gig - the most money I have ever spent to see a show, I think, to this day.) I listened to them obsessively for a while, and over the years associated them very strongly with the beginning of summer - something about Street Waves makes me think of the first hot day of June... maybe I should have waited to write about them...

What I didn't do at the time is buy more records. The most flattering explanation I can come up with is that the early ones were out of print - that might even be true. I seem to remember seeing a couple of them - The Modern Dance, maybe Dub Housing - as imports or rarities, wrapped in loose plastic, priced over $20 - as a poor graduate student who wanted to buy as many records as possible, that did not seem to be a good investment. And why didn't I buy Cloudland? I don't think I knew it existed - they weren't on the radio, they didn't get talked about anywhere; and I admit, I rather thought of them as a 70s band, trying to relive the past... But what I had was a good start - and between the singles and the love record, I had most of the early stuff, most of the Modern Dance - even on those old bootlegs, I could tell that was the real thing - if I could find the record, it would probably become one of my favorites; the live record was up there. (One song I didn't have was the one about boozy sailors that made the strongest impression when I saw them live - if I'd known what it was called, or what record it was on, I would have bought that.) In any case - they were one of my favorites in the late 90s...

And then came a real disruption to my musical habits. I went to New Orleans in late 1991 - and when I came back, more or less simply decided that from now on I would listen to jazz. And I did - for half the decade - obsessively - buying everything I could (I had a job; I could buy lots of records), reading about it, etc. And then - I had worked throughout he history of jazz, arriving at last at electric Miles, John McLaughlin, Bill Frisell, Sonny Sharrock, James Blood Ullmer - guitarists - and found myself drawn back into rock and roll. Specifically to Richard Thompson, since this was mostly a guitar obsession; but also - Raygun Suitcase, which came out about that time. And had about the same effect that Terminal Tower did - I listened to it obsessively... and this time, I had money, and their old records were in print - not just in print, packaged in a nice big box.... which I listened to, end to end, singles, 5 LPs, live record and fellow Cleveland bands, for the next 3-4 years.... and came to measure everything else against them.

The seeds were there in the 80s. Terminal Tower has the singles arranged in order - you can work your way into them, trace their development, trace the development of the aesthetic they represent. Call it post-punk - a style looser, more angular than punk, usually more rhythmically interesting, less consumed by its attitude. It's a style that includes Pere Ubu - Television - Joy Division - Gang of Four - Minutemen, all very dear to me; PIL, Mission of Burma, Young Marble Giants, Pylon; that first Feelies record - it leads more directly (I think) to more avant grade music - Sonic Youth and DNA (another direct link to Pere Ubu), the Butthole Surfers; or even backwards, to prog and its ilk - especially Krautrock, Captain Beefheart, Red Crayola (another direct link), Soft Machine, etc... And in Pere Ubu's singles, you can hear it coming - hear it emerging, almost like a process of stripping things away. The extra guitar player, the classic rock sound, the denser, hard rock style riffing - being dropped, bit by bit as you move from the strange noisy rock of 30 seconds Over Tokyo to the classic rock/proto-punk of Heart of Darkness and Final Solution - until they arrive, at the song that probably tipped me, more than anything, to the fact that they were different: My Dark Ages.

It's the first record they made with their classic lineup - Thomas, Herman, Krauss, Maimone, Ravenstine - and it's a song that really defined post-punk, before punk had really gotten going. Even now, it's rather shocking how bare it is - they've pared things down to something a bit beyond the basics, stripped to the bone, digging into the bone - guitar, bass, a bit of drum, and some kind of splatty synth riff, a splash of piano, all separated, with miles of space between them, with lots of empty spaces in the sound, none of it in any hurry - and Thomas coming in like a taxi dispatcher muttering into a mic... I loved Heart of Darkness, but I loved My Dark Ages almost as much, and it was something new - it was strange, it was beautiful, it was haunting and a bit scary, it evoked night in the city where the air can shine - it was great. And there was a guitar solo! (I'm a sucker for electric guitar, and for solos.) A real one, and as thrilling and radical as the song itself - those long, slow slides, the strings of single notes, the biting, acidic tone. Tom Herman’s style is remarkable - simple enough, but brilliantly controlling the tone. His solos are fantastic, absolutely ace. Punk never made much of guitar solos (though that's not fair - American punk, especially, produced a swarm of superb guitarists - Verlaine and Lloyd, Quine, D. Boon, Mould, Kurt Kirkwood), but Herman played solos, solos that didn't sound like much of anyone else - he is hugely underrated... This clip, from 1995, I think proves my point:



It's startling, even now, to notice how spare they are, and almost always have been. My Dark Ages is something of the extreme in their early days (though they certainly stripped things down even more on some of the more experimental records - Lost in Art!), but they almost always have as much space in their sound as any band. Rocket From the Tombs was not spare - two guitarists battling for space, the whole thing dense and powerful - but Pere Ubu's versions of the RFTT songs are already stripped down, cleaner, patient. They stay like that - sounds distinct (even played live) - parts related, complimentary, but not getting in the way. Instruments coming in one at a time, circling each other - maybe coming together into a neat little chorus, only to break up again, wander off, into a guitar solo, a bit of synthesizer or theremin weirdness, a found recording, or Thomas doing his thing... They were never afraid of losing the plot - partly because from the start, they were tight enough to come back to the organizing riff without missing a beat - and when they wanted to, they could swing. They could do anything, and did - abstraction, solid rock songs, pop songs, various warped forms of country, folk and such - all at once! They weren't, in any meaningful sense, a jazz band, but my own enthusiasm for jazz certainly helped me become the obsessive fan I am - it tied to their avant grade tendencies, but also to their ability to navigate the twists and turns their songs took, the skill to get back to the beat when they needed to... and it made me pay attention to things like tone, tones - Herman's slides, the sounds from Ravenstine's synths - less notes, more sounds, something jazz relies on...

And finally - I can't stop this without writing about David Thomas' lyrics. Song by song, they are good enough - but I am not sure anyone has supplied such a store of lines that echo in my head...

I don’t get around, I don’t fall in love much
Image object illusion, go down to the corner, where none of the faces fit a human form
Yeah, I oughta know that nothing's worth the half of half of what it used to
Mom threw me out 'til I get some pants that fit
Out in the real world, in real time, technoramic heartache!
walked around took the bus walked around took the bus
Here's to the details that so often get overlooked
If the devil comes, we’ll shoot him with a gun, if he shows his face, we'll laugh
Don’t fret now baby! Don’t be so tired
On a day such as this insist on more than the truth
(The folderol of fretful peregrination)
one day they're crawlin in the streets, afraid of a strange, free, wide open land
Marchin on the Home of the Blues
In the ghost town inside of my heart the downtown is parking lots
I want to hang around in your Greyhound terminal
One day I will be the best that you can do.
And the radio, AM radio, oh the radio will set you free

There are concrete reason for the excellence of his work - all those turns of phrase; but also the imagery - sharp and clear, and usually concrete - things, places, actions, real or imaginary, realized in clear imagery - we'll drive around and oh we'll fall in love... night in the city where the air just shines - they evoke a place you can see. The emptiness of the nighttime city streets, the loneliness of the lone driver. The settings change - the city in the early songs, the open road, usually, in the late records - always cars, though, diners and bars... All this runs along with his literary and film allusions - titles, lines (maybe in a secret lab works Dr. Moreau), stories (30 seconds over Tokyo), situations - books and movies weave through his work along with the roads and cars and skies and rain... and who doesn't want songs about books and movies?

So finally - when push comes to shove - other than the Beatles maybe, maybe the Stones - this is it: Pere Ubu might as well be my favorite band. Maybe more than that, they are, more than anyone else in this series, mine. I like them more than anyone I know in real life; they have a pretty strong claim for being my favorite band; they are the band I identify with most. I did it literally back in my AOL days - stealing a song title for a handle (instead of a secondary villain in an atrocious juvenile book) - actually, using a couple song titles as handles, figuring it would signal the right people that they were both me - it is a credit to the people I hung out with that more than one of them made the connection. If I ever go to that desert island, and take one band's music along, it will be theirs - if I took one CD along, it would be the first CD in the Datapanik in the Year Zero box set, with the Modern Dance and the singles on it.

Songs - I am tempted to split this out: first run - post-reunion, maybe. Not a balance, but they were better during their first run - but not so much better I like to see the later stuff swamped by the early songs, which is what happens this way. Longevity counts - the fact that they have continued to produce excellent records right to the present day is no small part of my affection for them. I should list off my favorite records, while I am at it.... But - well - start with the top 10:

1. Heart of Darkness
2. Humor Me
3. My Dark Ages
4. Caligari's Mirror
5. Memphis
6. Go
7. 30 Seconds over Tokyo
8. Wine Dark Sparks
9. Final Solution
10. Beach Boys

But I am willing - 10 pre-breakup:

1. Heart of Darkness
2. Humor Me
3. My Dark Ages
4. Caligari's Mirror
5. Go
6. 30 Seconds over Tokyo
7. Final Solution
8. Street Waves
9. Misery Goats
10. Over My Head

And Post reunion:

1. Memphis
2. Wine Dark Sparks
3. Beach Boys
4. Busman's Honeymoon
5. Dark
6. Folly of Youth
7. Electricity
8. I Hear They Smoke the Barbecue
9. Kathleen
10. Rhythm King

And, finally - 5 best LPs:
1. The Modern Dance - you need to memorize this.
2. Raygun Suitcase - a very welcome return to the experimentation of their early records, which simultaneously contained some of their best songs
3. Dub Housing - things are starting to get odd, but this still kicks
4. Art of Walking - really you say? hell if I know. This is as strange a record as I have ever heard, and certainly the strangest record I have listened to end to end dozens of times... but it's fascinating, and contains 2 classic tunes...
5. The Tenement Year - a nice set of songs, with plenty of noise going with it - how much of their style can be traced to the guitarists, I don't know - but they do seem distinct - when Laughner was in the group, they sounded like the Velvets and the Stooges; Herman's records all of a version of that stripped down sound I wrote about; Mayo Thompson makes AOW and SOABM sound like Red Crayola; the Jim Jones records are built around solid indy rock songs, almost pop; the Keith Moline records verge on electronic music - it's noticeable... Anyway - there's nothing in their catalogue quite as strange sounding as Cloudland - pop songs with pop productions - and David Thomas singing? Rhapsody in Pink becomes reassuringly normal after that... But Tenement Year hasn't gotten there yet - it sounds like 30-somthing art punks, like later Wire say - and that is a very good thing.

And now, video. They can be frustrating - there is very little old stuff - nothing before Birdies, in Urgh! A Music War:



They are very well documented in the 00s - here's a complete set from 2013:



And Sonic Reducer, played in a Borders in 2006; you might see something stranger or cooler somewhere, but I doubt it:



In between you can find things - they were on Letterman, and David Sanborn's show, back in the late 80s; here they are with Sanborn and Loudon Wainwright... children point and say he is the one...



And finally - Final Solution, in 1988 - I saw this tour - they were a force of nature, with Chris Cutler and Scott Krause in the back - I was still somewhat of a neophyte as far as they went, but that was a great show:

April Songs

Finally, this week, things start to look like spring - temperature in the 50s, sun out, baseball games being played - a wonderful thing. Now to come out of hibernation myself - I owe myself a bunch of film reviews and posts; next week, a band; and - ought to revive my director of the month stuff. And next month, Wonders in the Dark launches another countdown - Romantic movies... I have plenty of things to do - I hope I can shake my current indolence. (Which isn't really indolence; it's misdirected effort... but that's another post, maybe...)

Enough of that - here are 10 songs, generated not quite at random....

1. Benny Goodman - Santa Claus Came in the Spring
2. Jolie Holland - Springtime Can Kill You
3. Burnt Sugar - Ghost Track Springtime for Chillun
4. Pentangle - Spring Time Promises
5. Pere Ubu - Silent Spring
6. Pylon - Springtime
7. Rites of Spring - Spring
8. Waterboys - Spring comes to Spiddal
9. PJ Harvey and John Parish - April
10. Thelonius Monk - April in Paris

Video? Well - rites of spring, doing spring - that sounds right:



How about PJ Harvey, singing April? Live in Paris...



And Ella Fitzgerald can take us there...