Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde
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Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde
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Overview
When and how did popular music earn so much cultural capital? To find out, Bernard Gendron investigates five key historical moments when popular music and avant-garde art transgressed the rigid boundaries separating high and low culture to form friendly alliances. He begins at the end of the nineteenth century in Paris's Montmartre district, where cabarets showcased popular music alongside poetry readings in spaces decorated with modernist art works. Two decades later, Parisian poets and musicians "slumming" in jazz clubs assimilated jazz's aesthetics in their performances and compositions. In the bebop revolution in mid-1940s America, jazz returned the compliment by absorbing modernist devices and postures, in effect transforming itself into an avant-garde art form. Mid-1960s rock music, under the leadership of the Beatles, went from being reviled as vulgar music to being acclaimed as a cutting-edge art form. Finally, Gendron takes us to the Mudd Club in the late 1970s, where New York punk and new wave rockers were setting the aesthetic agenda for a new generation of artists.
Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club should be on the shelves of anyone interested in the intersections between high and low culture, art and music, or history and aesthetics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226834573 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 08/31/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 381 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club
Popular Music and the Avant-Garde
By Bernard Gendron
University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2003
University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-226-28737-8
Chapter One
The First Wave
Origins of the First Wave: The CBGB Scene (1974-75)
A dank dive with a notorious bathroom in the seedy Bowery, CBGB's was an
altogether unlikely site for a major cultural movement. If it had not been
for the physical collapse in August 1973 of the Mercer Art Center, home to
the New York Dolls and other alternative bands, CBGB's would probably not
have left any trace on the city's cultural history. The various art
organizations that had occupied the Mercer, like the Kitchen, had no
trouble relocating. But unrecorded rock bands found themselves without
options in a nightclub scene geared mainly to showcasing nationally
recognized recorded acts.
As legend has it, the era of the New York new wave was initiated in March
1974 when the unsigned band Television convinced Hilly Kristal, owner of
CBGB's, to let them play in his venue. Kristal had never conceived of his
bar as a center of an avant-garde scene. His traditional and unimaginative
objectives were clearly expressed in the decoding of the acronym that made
up the full name of the club,"CBGB-OMFUG," which translated as "Country,
Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers." Opening
only a few months after Mercer's collapse, CBGB's appeared soon enough to
exploit the empty cultural space left by Mercer without having had the
time to settle into its originally conceived "roots" format.
A number of other groups followed Television's entry into CBGB's. The
Ramones debuted in August 1974 as did Blondie. But it was the Patti Smith
Group, with an already acquired notoriety in local art and rock circles,
that really set the CBGB scene in motion when they paired up with
Television on a two-month residency in the spring of 1975. The Talking
Heads' debut two months later completed what was to be the nucleus of the
new wave in its first incarnation, though at this time the scene was still
nameless. The local rock critic establishment-at the Village Voice and New
York Times-was slow to respond to the goings-on at CBGB's and not
enthusiastic when it first did. During the length of the first wave, the
brunt of local support came from the alternative press, initially the SoHo
Weekly News and later the fanzines Punk and New York Rocker.
The writers' initial vagueness reflected the vagueness of the original
CBGB scene. But even after a year or so, when the scene coalesced and the
individual groups took on a distinctive configuration, there were no
stylistic or attitudinal commonalities that welded it into one. How could
one stylistic rubric encompass the Ramones' "dumbed-down" lyrics and
speeded-up garage-band riffs, Patti Smith's snarling streetwise poetry,
the Talking Heads' spastic sounds and faux preppy lyrics, Television's
meandering improvisations, and Blondie's retro girl-group posturings? Yet
almost without exception, rock writers, even when expressing confusion,
acted as if there was an aesthetic homogeneity underlying these
oppositions, or as if the CBGB scene constituted a united musical field.
Whatever can be said about the musical diversity at CBGB's, there was
clearly a unified discursive field-a discursive formation-that
materialized around it and gave it the unity it might otherwise have
lacked. This is not to deny that individual writings about the new wave
differed considerably in the theories enunciated, the rhetoric, the
biases, and the stylistic idiosyncrasies. Even those critics who liked the
CBGB scene differed in which groups they chose to promote or disparage.
Nonetheless, if we put all these writings together, we discover certain
dominant structures, foci, and tensions. This is not surprising, since the
writings on the new wave grew out of the discourses on punk elaborated in
the early 1970s in conjunction with the canonizing discourses on the
Velvet Underground and their followers. Within discourse CBGB's was
constructed as a united musical field driven by the opposition of art and
pop, a unity in opposition, in the manner of the Velvet Underground. This
was evident not only in attempts to situate each group in the general
scheme, but also in debates about which label ("underground" or "punk" or
"new wave") best fit the CBGB scene. In the remainder of this chapter, I
discuss these art/pop discursive constructs insofar as they impacted on
group identities and label choices.
The Players: Patti Smith
Patti Smith was both of and not of the first wave, an originator and
intermediary more than a full-fledged participant. A poet who later came
to rock 'n' roll, she never shed the identify of a poet who does rock 'n'
roll, an artist who explicitly combines poetry and rock 'n' roll. She went
from reading poetry at St. Mark's Place in early 1971, to opening as a
poet for Teenage Lust and other rock bands in the heyday of the Mercer Art
Center (1972), to forming a performance duo with guitarist Lenny Kaye
(1973), the producer of the punk-retro album Nuggets, and finally with him
to forming a rock band, the Patti Smith Group (1974).
Smith was said to have brought "rock 'n' roll rhythms to poetry," thereby
having "reversed the process" initiated by Bob Dylan, who gets "credit for
introducing poetry to rock 'n' roll." This brand of explicit art/pop
synthesis, in which the art and pop components maintain an easily
differentiable presence, was not at all typical of the CBGB scene. Though
the founders of Television, Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, were poets
before they became rockers, the music of Television was never perceived as
the marriage of poetry and rock. And, of course, the Talking Heads, as
former visual art students, did not present themselves as combining rock
with the visual arts. This is not to say that the poetry and art
backgrounds of these musicians did not contribute to the construction and
marketing of their images and the aura of "art" that surrounded their
work. But the fact remains that the art and pop components in the rest of
the CBGB music scene were not so easily differentiable and separable as
they were in the Patti Smith aesthetic.
Such was the intermediate character of Smith's aesthetic that as easily
looked back to Dylan, or more recently to Springsteen, as it looked
forward to the Ramones and Blondie. She was perhaps not sufficiently
understated in her "artiness" for the CBGB scene and was already too
established to benefit from inclusion in it and definition by it. Her
press coverage thus made little reference to her connections with CBGB's.
Not surprisingly, in the first canonizations of the new music, Smith was
relegated to the role of "godmother" of punk, paralleling Lou Reed's
"godfather" role, a precursor rather than participant.
In the narrative of the CBGB scene, Patti Smith is more important for what
she gave to the scene than what she got from it, and in what she gave,
more important in providing exposure and audience than in shaping the
aesthetics. For it is the Patti Smith Group, with their already
established reputation, who transformed CBGB's into a cultural venue to be
contended with during their two-month joint residency there in spring 1975
with Television. More significantly, they brought in a "following drawn
from the art fringes," an "art-rock crowd," who quickly "cemented" a
permanent relationship with the bedraggled "rock & roll crowd" already
ensconced at CBGB's.
Television: Verlaine versus Hell
In 1974, in the first review of any CBGB band, the SoHo Weekly News
described Television as "loud, out of tune," and with "absolutely no
musical or socially redeeming characteristics." Less than a year later,
SoHo Weekly News reported that "since their last stand at CBGB's,
Television have improved considerably, tightening up their sounds and
consolidating their influences into a powerfully cohesive entity."
Meanwhile, the two coleaders of Television, Tom Verlaine (formerly Tom
Miller) and Richard Hell (formerly Richard Myers), were developing
opposite aesthetic personas, which as it turned out fit neatly in the
binary template of art and pop. Verlaine would occupy the art end of the
spectrum and Hell the pop end-an opposition that, as it intensified, led
to Hell's departure from the band.
In their self-descriptions, however, Verlaine and Hell each positioned
himself on the art/pop boundary. Hell stressed the influence on him "by
the twisted French aestheticism of the late 19th century like Rimbaud,
Verlaine, Huysmans, Baudelaire." He even gave an artistic spin to his torn
shirt and cropped hair look, soon to be imported to England as the emblem
of punk. "There were some artists that I admired who looked like that.
Rimbaud looked like that. Artaud looked like that. And it also looked like
the kid in 400 Blows, the Truffaut movie." Verlaine, more the musician,
"started composing on the piano when I was in the fifth grade." But then
he "heard John Coltrane, ... got a saxophone," and later became "a huge
fan of Albert Ayler," the free jazz saxophonist with whom he continued to
identify throughout his career. On the pop side, both Hell and Verlaine
were inspired by the "sort of American punk of the late Sixties that was
made by the groups on Lenny Kaye's Nuggets Album, like the Standells, the
Shadows of Knight, the Seeds." According to Hell, Television was
emphatically not "in the tradition of the late Sixties worship of guitar
playing, exquisite jams and precious music."
But as the band developed, Hell and Verlaine found themselves, not
happily, on the opposing ends of the art/pop spectrum. While Verlaine was
already experienced with the guitar and worked unrelentingly on his
skills, Hell was a neophyte on bass and sought to turn that into a virtue.
"What I wanted to convey," said Hell, was "that anyone can go out and pick
out a bass," which he admitted was "a completely different attitude toward
performance" than Verlaine's. "To me, it's a total catharsis, physically
and mentally," whereas for Verlaine "it's just mental." Hell "used to go
really wild on stage," which he recalled irritated Verlaine, who "said he
didn't want people to be distracted when he was singing." Verlaine's
focus, on the other hand, was "how do I get this song to sound better?" He
stated that his "whole orientation was towards music and performance
rather than getting the photographs right." He "got bored" with those
three-minute songs "real quick and got more into the improvisational
stuff." Hell, who "really liked the Ramones" for their "short, hard,
compelling and driving music," recalled that Verlaine "thought they were
beneath contempt."
In March 1975 Hell left Television and cofounded a new band, the
Heartbreakers, with Johnny Thunders, formerly of the New York Dolls, whose
"fuck art, let's rock" attitude seemed more congenial to Hell's
aesthetics. But only a year later, Hell left the Heartbreakers, again
because of an art/pop tension, which in this case situated him at the art
end of the spectrum. Hell remembered: "It was just that the music was too
brutish for me. It was clear that it wasn't gonna have any kinda musical
ambition except to stomp out rock & roll which I liked, but I wanted to be
able to extend it more." He formed the new group Richard Hell and the
Voidoids, whose continued commitment to "short, hard, compelling and
driving music," according to a reviewer, proved quite consistent with
Hell's poetic sensitivity and Robert Quine's highly proficient guitar
chops. "The Voidoids suggest an uneasy compromise between jazzy lucidity
and a tone-deaf thickheadedness that lends everything they do a dizzy
mobility." Thus, the art/pop tension reappeared in Hell's own groups.
Meanwhile, under Verlaine's exclusive leadership, Television moved toward
the art end of the CBGB art/pop spectrum, hardly maintaining that
oppositional dynamic with pop exhibited by the other bands in that scene.
Taking a cue from his nom de plume, reviewers turned to the mythology of
French symbolism in trying to get a fix on Verlaine's aesthetic persona.
He was described as the pure artist, "pallid and gaunt," with a "strain of
genius," who "fus[ed] an attractive symbolist
disordering-of-all-the-senses aesthetic with a rich musicality and austere
personal style." Conveying "a suggestive thoughtfulness," he "lack[ed] the
brashness" to "overwhelm through a more overtly violent rock and roll."
This "genuine auteur," who "had sprung up in the precious soil between the
cracks in the concrete," did not quite seem to belong in the rock 'n' roll
world. "Verlaine is too sensitive for this crummy Bowery bar," and
"Television is a little too ambiguous and yes, a little too uncommercial
as well." From mid-1975 on there was endless speculation, even confusion,
on what was distinctive about Television's fine musicianship, and how this
fit in with the rest of the CBGB scene. "Television is not a band that is
easily pigeon-holed." By 1976 Television had ceded center stage at CBGB's
to the Ramones and the Talking Heads, whose play with art and pop was more
ebullient and focused.
The Ramones
The Ramones, who began to accrue critical attention by mid-1975, were the
first in the CBGB underground to acquire a distinctive and strongly etched
profile. They were consistently positioned in discourse on the pop end of
the CBGB spectrum, which was reflected in the recurrent predictions that
of all the CBGB underground bands, they had the best chance of breaking
into the pop charts.
From the beginning, the discourses over the Ramones employed the full
panoply of concepts associated with the punk aesthetics previously
developed by the Creem-Bomp circles-assaultiveness, minimalism, rank
amateurism-even before "punk" became a label of preference for the CBGB
scene. Their music was typically characterized as "loud, hard and
relentless," as "furious, blasting rock 'n' roll" that is "intent upon
piercing a hole in the ozone layer." At their "fierce, assaultive best,"
they were like the "wild bunch" of the Peckinpah movie, "a beautiful
self-destroying machine," leaving "nothing behind them but scorched
earth"-"a perilously overheated chopper," ready to "go up in flames."
These overwrought descriptions give only one side of the story. Whatever
was shocking about the Ramones' music, and it was never terribly shocking,
was neutralized by their charm and humor. A British critic found them
"simultaneously so funny, such a cartoon vision of rock 'n' roll and so
genuinely tight and powerful that they're just bound to enchant anyone who
fell in love with rock 'n' roll for the right reasons." For Lisa Robinson,
the Hit Parader critic, a Ramones performance is "funny" and "couldn't be
cuter." "All their songs sound exactly the same, each one is under two
minutes long, they start out each number with a shouted
'one-two-three-four,' and then rush ahead at breakneck speed. Then they
just stop suddenly."
Continues...
Excerpted from Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club
by Bernard Gendron
Copyright © 2003
by University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments1. Introduction
POP INTO ART: FRENCH MODERNISM
Section A: Cabaret Artistry (1840-1920)
2. The Song of Montmartre
3. The Black Cat Goes to the Cabaret Voltaire
Section B: Paris in the Jazz Age (1916-25)
4. Jamming at Le Boeuf
5. Negrophilia
ART INTO POP: AMERICAN POSTMODERNISM
Section A: Jazz at War (1942-50)
6. Moldy Figs and Modernists
7. Bebop under Fire
Section B: The Cultural Accreditation of the Beatles (1963-68)
8. Gaining Respect
9. Accolades
Section C: New York: From New Wave to No Wave (1971-81)
10. Punk before Punk
11. The First Wave
12. No Wave
13. At the Mudd Club
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index