Archives for November 11, 2019

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” I’m writing about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

20. The Best of Booker T. and the MG’s (Stax)

Most of the twenty-five albums on this list have something important in common: with few exceptions, they’re very white. So, for the most part, were my childhood and youth.

Smalltown, U.S.A., is some twenty-odd miles from the banks of the Mississippi River. In certain ways it’s always been more southern than Midwestern: I’m just old enough to remember separate entrances and drinking fountains, and it wasn’t until I entered sixth grade in 1967 that black children started turning up in my classrooms. Blacks and whites never made friends with one another at school and rarely mingled elsewhere, and my neighborhood was lily-white long after I left Smalltown to make my way in the larger world. This sharp division of the races is easy enough to understand, for it happens that a black man was lynched in Smalltown in 1942, and there were still plenty of people around when I was a boy (including my father) who remembered that terrible day well, though I never did run into anyone who was willing to talk about it.

All this notwithstanding, I’ve been fascinated by black art and culture for as long as I can remember—without, however, succumbing to the Quentin Tarantino-like temptation to pretend that I’m anything other than what I am, which is…well, very white. I’m content to be a sympathetic onlooker, and delighted when the seriousness of my interest in a culture not my own, and the modesty with which I approach the task of trying to understand it better, are acknowledged by those to whom such things come naturally. When I wrote a one-man show about Louis Armstrong, one of the actors who played the role said to me midway through a rehearsal, “I can’t believe a Caucasian wrote this.” You should have seen the smile on my face.

How could such a thing have happened? Music bridged the gap, flinging wide the door that my cloven community nailed shut for as long as it could. I loved jazz as soon as I heard it, and I was similarly excited by much of the black pop music that started to be played on our local radio station around the time I first started listening to rock and roll. Not all, though: I didn’t care for Motown, which I found too slick by half. I might have felt differently if I’d heard Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder, but the only Motown artists I remember hearing on the radio in Smalltown were the Supremes and the Jackson 5, who didn’t suit me at all.

So I became a Stax man, thanks mainly to Booker T. and the MG’s. In addition to serving as the house rhythm section for Memphis’ Stax Records, they cut dozens of instrumental singles on their own, some of which became modest crossover hits. One of them, “Hip Hug-Her,” came out in 1967, and it knocked me across the room when I first heard it a couple of years later. Everything about that no-nonsense record is perfect: Steve Cropper’s everybody-listen-up guitar introduction and terse background riffs, Booker T. Jones’ purring solo organ lines, Al Jackson Jr.’s hard-as-nails backbeats, “Duck” Dunn’s dirt-simple bass playing.

If you’d asked me, I suppose I would have said that “Hip Hug-Her” was “black music,” but I didn’t think of it that way. To me it was music, period. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all to learn that Cropper and Dunn were white, something I didn’t find out until much later. Rightly or wrongly, I took it for granted that their music, like jazz, belonged as much to me as it did to anyone. John Fogerty, lately of Creedence Clearwater Revival, felt the same way, and I can’t better what he wrote about Booker T. and the MG’s in Fortunate Son, his 2012 autobiography: “For years and years I have said that Booker T. & the M.G.s were the greatest rock ’n’ roll band of all time. I’m talking about soulfulness, deep feeling, the space in between the beats. How to say a lot with a little.” I would have killed to play bass in a group like that.

Not until later in life did I get to know other, older kinds of black pop music. Several more years went by before I heard and fell for Louis Jordan, Ray Charles, and B.B. King, and it wasn’t until I saw Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World eighteen years ago that I became passionately interested in country blues. I had no idea when I first heard Crosby, Stills & Nash, for instance, that the unaccompanied vocal introduction to “49 Bye-Byes” that David Crosby sings is a very close imitation of the first line of Robert Johnson’s Come On in My Kitchen. But I’ve loved soul music ever since I was a teenager, and it was Booker T. and the MG’s who first brought me the good news.

(To be continued)

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Booker T. and the MG’s play “Hip Hug-Her”:

Booker T. and the MG’s play “Green Onions” on stage in Norway during the 1967 Stax-Volt European tour:

Thora Birch listens to Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman” in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

To read about album #13, go here.

To read about album #14, go here.

To read about album #15, go here.

To read about album #16, go here.

To read about album #17, go here.

To read about album #18, go here.

To read about album #19, go here.

I posted this for the first time on November 11, 2008. It’s still relevant, and (I suspect) always will be.

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On October 9, 1918, an HMV sound engineer named Will Gaisberg set up a primitive piece of recording equipment immediately behind a unit of the Royal Garrison Artillery stationed outside Lille and recorded a British gas-shell bombardment. His purpose in doing so was to preserve the sounds of war before the coming armistice caused them to vanish forever from the face of the earth.

According to HMV’s catalogue, the recording, which was commercially released, consisted of

the actual reproduction of the screaming and whistling of the shells previous to the entry of the British troops into Lille. It is not an imitation but was recorded on the battlefront. The report of the guns and the whistling of the shells is the actual sound of the Royal Garrison Artillery in action on October 9th, 1918. No book or picture can ever visualise the reality of modern warfare just the way this record has done…it would require only the slightest imagination for one, by means of this record, to be projected into the past, and feel that he is really present on the battlefield witnessing this historic chapter of the war.

Here is Gaisberg’s own account of the making of the recording:

Gradually we came within the sound of the guns, and eventually, when only a short distance from Lille, we pulled up at a row of ruined cottages, in one of which the heavy siege battery had made its quarters. In the wrecked kitchen we unpacked our recording machines and made our preparations before getting directly behind a battery of great 4.5′ guns and 6′ howitzers, camouflaged until they looked at close quarters like giant insects. Here the machine could well catch the finer sounds of the “singing,” the “whine,” and the “scream” of the shells, as well as the terrific reports when they left the guns.

Dusk fell, and we were obliged, very reluctantly, to pack up our recording instrument and return to Boulogne–and to England; but we brought with us a true representation of the bombardment, which will have a unique place in the history of the Great War.

This recording is one of the most haunting and disturbing documents of the past that I know—one made all the more haunting by the knowledge that Will Gaisberg accidentally inhaled some of the gas from the attack, which damaged his lungs irreparably. In London he fell victim to the international flu epidemic that was then ravaging the city, and died on November 5, just six days before World War I came to an end.

A century later, I can’t help but wonder how many Americans now understand the original meaning of what used once upon a time to be called Armistice Day. “This is either an indictment of the American public school system or my own curiosity and comprehension, but I still can’t summarize what World War I was fought for,” a well-educated friend of mine tweeted over the weekend.

What seems sadly clear, though, is that our collective awareness of that unimaginably terrible conflict is fading fast, perhaps in part because no one who served in what Woodrow Wilson called “the War to End War” is still alive. Frank Buckles, the last American veteran of World War I, died in 2011, at the age of 110.

If you think of Frank Buckles and his comrades today—and you should—take a moment to think about Will Gaisberg as well.

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HMV D378, “Actual Recording of the Gas Shell Bombardment, by the Royal Garrison Artillery (9th October, 1918), preparatory to the British Troops entering Lille”:

UPDATE: Is this recording completely authentic? Read more about it here.

British Pathé newsreel coverage of the hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities on August 25, 1948, during which Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers publicly confronted one another for the first time. Chambers testified that Hiss had helped him spy on the U.S. for the Soviet Union:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (trans. Constance Garnett)