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November 26, 2011 by Cyrus Patell

Some Girls and the MXR Phase 90

I’ve been listening to the newly released remastered version of Some Girls and enjoying the 12 bonus tracks that accompany it. I’ll be writing about those tracks here in the months to come with the idea of producing a Kindle-based companion volume to my book on the album, which appeared in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series.

Meanwhile, my friend and former doctoral student Robert Gunn (a member of the English Department at the University of Texas, El Paso) recently sent me this reminiscence prompted by his reading of the book:

I really enjoyed your reading of the album in the context of your personal experience of NYC as a kid.  As an ill-reformed rock and roll guitar player myself, I must say I also delighted in your discussion of the technical side of the Stones’ sound, including Keef’s infatuation with open G tuning on five strings.  As it happens, Some Girls was the first full Stones album I bought, in high school (I, too, began with Hot Rocks, and wore it out before bothering to venture deeper into the canon).  Nowadays, Beggars Banquet through Exile remain steady in the rotation (love the country blues stuff), but Some Girls has enduring appeal.

As I was reading, I felt wistful reflection back on my own unselfconscious identification with Jagger’s lyrics.  It was kind of comical, actually—I mean, I knew he was talking about New York in “Miss You” and “Shattered,” but somehow that place didn’t seem real to me; I was sure he was talking, instead,  about that somewhere else I always wanted to be, in a mystical zone of cool and where everyone had that jaded, faded, rocknroll strut.  And even if no one else knew what it was about, that’s where I belonged (and often felt I was, in my own mind).  And so I’d walk down the rainy streets of Eugene, Oregon, humming riffs to myself, thinking you needed to be tough tough tough tough tough tough to live in this town(!), and keeping an eye out for all of those Puerto Rican girls who (I dearly and earnestly hoped) were just dying to meet me.

But the best part was the sound—my best friend and I were in rival bands, and I was extremely envious of his old MXR Phase 90, which produced the “Shattered” sound perfectly; my band played that song for a while, too, but I dropped it because, ultimately, it sounded like shit approximated on my Peavey digital flanger (a truly worthless relic of 80s hair metal; I don’t think I ever, even once, produced a cool sound off of that thing).

You can hear Keith Richards talking lovingly about that MXR box, by the way, in a recent interview broadcast on NPR’s World Cafe show. The segment lasts about 30 minutes, with Richards getting the first 15 and Mick Jagger getting the second. No, they weren’t in the same room; in fact, the interviews were conducted by different interviewers. Apparently, after all the sniping that’s occurred in the wake of the release of  generated by Richards’s autobiography, Life, it’s hard to imagine the Glimmer Twins ever being in the same room together, let alone sharing the same stage.

In the meantime, I’m thankful that those Some Girls-era outtakes have been polished up and given a legitimate release. Wish they’d included “Fiji Jim” though.

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June 21, 2011 by Cyrus Patell

Remembering Some Girls and Marquee Moon at McNally Jackson

Bryan Waterman and I celebrated the release of our books for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series last night with a joint reading at the McNally Jackson Books in Nolita.

We talked about the ways in which we conceive of my book, The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, and his, Television’s Marquee Moon, as companion pieces that paint a portrait of New York in the Seventies and its influence on both established and emergent rock bands. After describing the counterintuitive proposition that opens my book — that Some Girls is a “New York album” by a “New York band — the Stones of the late Seventies and early Eighties” — I took a closer look at the song “When the Whip Comes Down,” suggesting that it might be seen as the bastard child of “Rhinestone Cowboy” as performed by Glen Campbell and the Ramones’ “53rd and 3rd,” from their eponymous debut album.  I closed by citing Robert Christgau’s Village Voice piece “The Stones in 1978,” in which the critic praised the band’s onstage rendition of “Whip” and other songs from Some Girls at its show in Passaic, NJ, but described Television’s Bottom Line show during the same week as a glimpse into the future of rock ‘n’ roll: “Television’s syntheses promise a future the Stones can no longer imagine.”

Television customarily played a version of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” during their 1978 shows, and I played the version that can be found on the live album Blow Up as a segue to Bryan’s talk, which focused on Television’s debt to the Stones but then explored their invocation of other pop traditions that were important to the bands playing at CBGB’s. His exemplum was “Prove It.”

We’ll be doing another joint reading next Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m. at Word bookstore in Brooklyn, playing different songs as we explore connections between the two books. And we’ll be appearing at that morning on DJ Trouble’s show on WFMU. The program, “This is the Modern World with Trouble,” runs from 9:00 a.m. to noon on Tuesdays. We’ll be on  at about 10:30. Trouble did a guest playlist for us over at “Patell and Waterman’s History of New York” last week, one of a number of guest spots that Bryan has organized to celebrate the release of the books.

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June 24, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Thar She Blows: The Sound of Animals Fighting

I was investigating The Sound of Animals Fighting, a band that Chani suggested in response to my Globalize My Playlist post, and I came across their song “Ahab” from their 2008 album The Ocean and the Sun. At least, I think it’s a song. It’s definitely an acquired taste. Sample it for yourself:

I tried to make out the lyrics, but I couldn’t. So I googled the song and came up with this:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter – bitter”, he answered,
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

Interestingly, these words were not written buy members of the band. Nor were they written by Herman Melville.

These “lyrics” are in fact Stephen Crane’s poem “In the Desert,” which was included in his collection The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895). The novelist Joyce Carol Oates read the poem in college and later used its final lines as the title of her 1995 novel about a working-class city in upstate New York. In an interview with the journalist Don Swaim, Oates said that she understood the poem as “an allegory of the human condition,” in which bitterness and pleasure are intermixed, and also as an allegory of the writer’s relation to her subject. (You can listen to the interview here.)

Crane’s poem, translated into Farsi, also serves as the spoken word “Intro” to The Ocean and the Sun. The album as a whole is lousy with literary references.

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June 21, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Summertime and the Livin’ Ain’t Easy

7:28 a.m.

In my neck of the urban jungle, summertime officially begins — well, right now.

I’ve got Gershwin George Gershwin‘s melody and DuBose Heyward‘s lyrics going through my head as I write this, but in contrast to what they sing in Porgy and Bess, my summer looks to be anything but easy.

It starts off this morning with an NYUAD conference call about course selection and student mentoring by faculty and continues tomorrow with two weeks of jury duty. Meanwhile, I have to turn in a book manuscript to NYU Press and materials for a promotion review to my department by the end of the month. And then I have to get serious about my Rolling Stones book for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, which is due on September 1.

Meanwhile, in July I’m participating in the NYUAD Summer Colloquium and flying to Europe on NYUAD business at the end of the month. August will no doubt see me hunkering down to finish that book and then get ready for orientation at NYUAD in early September.

I think I have three days of vacation scheduled in August, but I’ll have to check. Not that I’m complaining or anything.

How to cheer up: watch these renditions of “Summertime” by two of my favorite singers on YouTube. The first is by the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald; the second is by the differently but equally incomparable Renee Fleming.

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May 1, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Moby-Dick the Opera, Part 1

It was definitely worth the trip. The world premiere of Jake Heggie‘s Moby-Dick last night at the Dallas Opera was a stunning operatic experience that I will always remember.

Moments after the chandelier at the Winspear Opera House has retracted into the ceiling to produce the illusion of a starry night, the orchestra begins the opera’s overture. Picking up the starlight motif, projections on the scrim create the illusion of traveling through space, but also suggest navigating by the stars, as lines join the points of light together to suggest constellations. These lines suddenly become dense, rotating and mutating to depict a whaleship at sea. The scrim rises, the projection zooms in to suggest rigging, and there we are among the sleeping sailors below decks on the Pequod. The projections, by Elaine McCarthy, combine brilliantly with Robert Brill‘s striking set design throughout the opera.

Out comes the tattooed harpooner Queequeg (bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu), who begins to pray, much to the disgruntlement of a green sailor known only as “Greenhorn” (tenor Stephen Costello), who turns out to be the man who will become “Ishmael.” There is an ominous banging of wood against wood, suggesting Ahab’s pacing the deck of the Pequod.

The set design is  marvelous, as the bleached wood of the stage curves backward and up to become a rear wall with three sets of handholds. Through the use of projections, this rear wall is used to suggest, at different times, the aft portions of the ship, the side of the ship, and the three whaleboats that are used when Ahab finally allows the crew to lower and hunt. After the hunt, about three-quarters of the way through the first act, the center of the wall opens up to reveal the tryworks, above which a portion of the whale’s carcass is hanging.

Heggie and his librettist Gene Scheer have done a superb job of streamlining the novel’s plot while remaining true to Melville’s story and central thematic interests. The opera focuses on the characters of Ahab (tenor Ben Heppner), Starbuck (baritone Morgan Smith), Greenhorn, Queequeg, and Pip (soprano Talise Trevigne), with Ahab and Starbuck, and Greenhorn and Queequeg, emerging as paired characters, much as they do in the novel. The parallel between Ahab and Starbuck — each of whom has a wife and a young son back on Nantucket — is emphasized more in the opera, and Ahab interacts with Greenhorn in a way that Melville never dramatizes in the novel. The character of Pip is also made more central. His near-drowning is dramatized in a mesmerizing coup de theatre in which he is suspended in the air while blue projections on the scrim behind suggest the vastness of the ocean. Two episodes are compressed so that Pip’s rescue is effected by Queequeg during a rescue mission manned also by Starbuck and Greenhorn. Later it is an injured Pip’s blood that Ahab uses to temper his harpoon and baptize it “in nomine diaboli.”

One casualty of the stripping down of the narrative is Fedallah, and with him the Zoroastrian motif that has been the subject of much of my recent thinking about the novel. I didn’t mind, however, because the effect of his excision is the intensification of the relationship between Ahab and Starbuck: with no Fedallah present, Ahab has only Starbuck to serve as confidante and foil. Within the context of the opera, it works brilliantly.

The opera is structured around scenes of conversation and public ritual: Ishmael’s meeting with Queequeg at the Spouter Inn is transferred to the opening scene below decks, and it is followed almost immediately by a dramatization of the rituals of nailing the doubloon to the mast and the crew’s oath to seek Ahab’s vengeance on Moby Dick. Some of my favorite scenes from the novel become the scenes that structure the opera: in addition to “The Quarter-Deck,” Scheer draws powerfully on “The Try-Works,” “The Musket,” “The Candles,” and “The Symphony.” Many of my favorite lines and speeches from the novel find their way into the libretto, and Scheer’s additions blend seamlessly with Melville’s prose.

The conversation between Ahab and Starbuck (“But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer …”) is extracted from the scene and made to follow the drinking of the grog, which has the effect of rendering highlighting the conversation and making it more intimate, establishing the strange bond that will link the two men. Three days into the voyage, Ahab will threaten to kill Starbuck and Starbuck will contemplate murdering his captain in a powerful aria that concludes Act 1. (The two musket scenes are moved up in the voyage so that they occur near the beginning rather than the end.) Later, in a compressed sequence in which Queequeg is helped down from a masthead after falling ill, Greenhorn requests permission to leave his watch and accompany his friend downstairs. Ahab at first refuses, but relents after each of the mates volunteers to take Greenhorn’s place. Instead, Starbuck is ordered to raise Ahab to the masthead so that the captain will be the one to see Moby Dick and win the doubloon. When Starbuck reacts with surprise, Ahab asks him, “Who else would I trust with my life?”

To be continued …

[Photo: Ben Heppner as Ahab; Associated Press/LM Otero]

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May 1, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Winspear Opera House

The Dallas Opera moved into its new home at the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House last fall. The building, which is part of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, still has that new-building smell (the NYU Abu Dhabi downtown campus building has it too). It’s surrounded by lots of construction, as the Dallas Arts District takes shape around it.

The opera house itself is a red circle in a square (though in fact it’s shaped more like a horseshoe than a circle). It has a sixty-foot glass facade, with an interior that features brushed steel, metallic grey paint, reflective curved red panels. Every portion of it seems to have been given a sponsor’s name, as you can see from this description on the Dallas Opera’s website:

A 21st century reinterpretation of the traditional opera house, the 2,200-seat Winspear Opera House’s principal performance space, the Margaret McDermott Performance Hall, is designed to be the environmentally conscious, state-of-the-art standard against which future opera houses will be measured.

The opera house’s principal entrance, known as Rosemary and Roger Enrico Family Gateway, features the Annette and Harold Simmons Signature Glass Façade that ascends to the full 60-foot height of the building, creating a seamless flow between the opera house and the surrounding park. The transparent façade provides dramatic views of McDermott Performance Hall, which will be clad in vibrant red glass panels, in addition to the Grand Lobby, the staircase and the Mary Anne and Richard Cree Box Circle and Grand Tier levels. From within the Winspear Opera House, the Simmons Glass Façade will provide a sweeping view of downtown Dallas and portions of Uptown.

One of the ways in which the hall is a “reinterpretation of the traditional opera house” is in it use of the chandelier. When you walk in, the auditorium is dominated by a chandelier that is made of illuminated rods hanging down from the ceiling. In an homage to the Metropolitan Opera’s rising chandeliers, this chandelier also rises: each rod is fully retracted into the ceiling, leaving a starfield pattern on the ceiling — which then  twinkles as the house lights go down completely.

I liked the acoustics from where I was sitting in the dress circle, and the hall seemed quite cozy compared to the Met. My one complaint: I don’t think I’ve ever sat in a more aggressively air-conditioned venue.

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April 30, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Whaling in Dallas

I’m feeling very twenty-first century at the moment, even though part of my mind is firmly rooted in the nineteenth. That’s because I’m typing this post on an iPad at an altitude of about 32,000 feet, connected to wi-fi on an American Airlines flight to Dallas, where I’ll be attending the world premiere of Jake Heggie‘s opera adaptation of Moby-Dick.

I just received an e-mail from my sister who writes that she recently read about the production in American Airlines’ in-flight magazine. Apparently not this month, however, because there’s no article about it in the copy of the magazine that’s in the seatback pocket in front of me.

Wait. Hold on. I’m connected. Googling …

Here it is. It was in last month’s issue. And if your interest is now piqued, you can read more about the opera at the Dallas Opera’s website.

Heggie won a Guggenheim five years ago and is the composer of four other operas: Dead Man Walking (premiered in 2000, libretto: Terrence McNally), The End of the Affair (2003, rev. 2004-2005, libretto: Heather McDonald), To Hell and Back (2006, libretto: Gene Scheer), and Three Decembers (2008, libretto: Scheer).

Moby-Dick, which was commissioned by The Dallas Opera together with San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, Calgary Opera and State Opera of South Australia, is an opera in two acts, with a libretto by Gene Scheer. It has eight major roles and a 40-voice men’s chorus. It is scored for an orchestra of 3 flutes, 3 oboes, 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, 2 percussion, harp, strings). It’s premiering tonight at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas, TX, and here are the credits: Conductor: Patrick Summers. Director: Leonard Foglia. Set Designer: Robert Brill. Lighting Designer: Donald Holder. Costume Designer: Jane Greenwood. Film and Projections: Elaine McCarthy. CAST: Ben Heppner (Ahab), Stephen Costello (Greenhorn), Morgan Smith (Starbuck), Jonathan Lemalu (Queequeg), Talise Trevigne (Pip), Robert Orth (Stubb), Allan Glassman (Flask), Jonathan Beyer (Gardiner).

I’m particularly excited to hear Heppner whom I’ve heard before at the Met as Tristan. At the moment, I’m listening to a collection of Heggie’s songs, entitled The Faces of Love – The Songs of Jake Heggie, which features Renee Fleming, Sylvia McNair, Jennifer Larmore, Frederica von Stade, and Carol Vaness among others. At first hearing, the songs (which are settings of poems by a variety of poets, mostly contemporary) are stylistically varied, but strike me overall as lush, lyrical, and witty. I particularly like the jazzy “Eve Song; Snake,” which imagines Eve’s response to the serpent’s proposition in the Garden of Eden and is sung by McNair.

It bodes well for tonight.

[Photo: Tenor Ben Heppner as Ahab; credit: Karen Almond, Dallas Opera.]

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March 26, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Fibonacci Heavy Metal

I’ve been asking the candidates who attended one of NYUAD’s weekend visits to suggest pieces of music to help me globalize my iTunes playlists.

This suggestion, from Nacif Taousse is so cool that I had to give it a post of its own. The YouTube video below explains the ways in which the song “Lateralus” by the progressive heavy metal band Tool draws on the Fibonacci sequence, which my dad the mathematician taught me when I was very young. The Fibonacci is a sequence of numbers in which each term is the sum of the previous two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 … The series has some very interesting properties, which you can discover if you click the previous link.

The Wikipedia entry for the song “Lateralus” explains that “the syllables of the lyrics follow the Fibonacci pattern, and the time signature of the chorus rotates between 9/8, 8/8, and 7/8 time, referring to the 17th Fibonacci number, 987. The theme of the song describes the desire of humans to explore and to expand for more knowledge and a deeper understanding of everything. The lyric “spiral out”, which is sung repeatedly throughout the song, refers to this desire and also to the Fibonacci spiral, which is formed by creating and arranging squares for each number in the sequence’s 1,1,2,3,5,8,… pattern, and drawing a curve that connects to two corners of each square. This forms a never-ending and infinitely-expanding spiral.”

Enjoy!

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March 21, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Globalize My Playlist

One of the things that I have loved about attending the Candidate Weekends at NYU Abu Dhabi is hearing about all the different kinds of music that the candidates have on their iPods.

So I’m asking for help from those of you who have attended one of the weekends: I need new music to listen to, and I’ll bet that I’m not alone. Please leave a comment below in which you make a listening suggestion, something that you enjoy and that you’d like to bring to the attention of the friends that you made during your visit to Abu Dhabi.

It can be a song, an album, a piece, or a playlist. Give us the information that we need to find it and also tell us either why you like or what we should be listening for as we hear it (or both).

My iPhone thanks you in advance.

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February 22, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Next Season at the Metropolitan Opera

The Metropolitan Opera announced the schedule for its 2010-2011 season today. It’s good timing for me, because I’m currently putting together the syllabus for next January’s J-term course on “New York and Modernity,” and I’d like to include a series of co-curricular trips to the opera, the symphony, and the theater.

I’m thinking that a good choice might be the production of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, which I’ve never managed to see live in more than a quarter-century of opera-going. The production marks the 100th anniversary of the opera’s premiere at the Met and stars two wonderful singers, Deborah Voigt and Marcello Giordani. If we can manage to get tickets (which may be tough, since the only performance that would work is the Saturday matinee), I can pair it with the first chapter of Alex Ross’s marvelous study of twentieth-century classical music The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which includes a brief account of the genesis of the opera in a trip that Puccini made to the U.S. in 1907. Most of that chapter is about Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, and guess what — the New York Philharmonic is featuring some Mahler in the first week of January. Now if only there were an O’Neill play next January …

[Click here to read the press release about the Met's new season. And click here to read the New York Times's take on the season (written by one of my college classmates).]

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