Any Given Sunday: The Moment of Paul Revere & the Raiders

Hungry for Kicks: Singles & Choice Cuts 1965-69
Paul Revere & the Raiders
(Rev-Ola Import)

Let us not talk falsely now, as the Joker said to the Thief, so here’s a granular bit of truth from the 1960s that you might not get from the Revised Standard Rolling Stone Hall of Fame Canonical History of Rock & Roll. The distinctions that are made, in retrospect, between serious and lightweight music from that era, between high pop and low pop, between history-making art and disposable kitsch, were not nearly so obvious at the time as they seem now. The icons of the era, the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, etc., did not occupy the heights alone. In the interstices between their slots on the charts, lots of other music thrived. And—here’s the important fact—that other music was listened to, and dug, and taken “seriously” by the same people, the same kids, who put the Beatles/Stones/Dylan, etc. on the charts. Which brings us to Paul Revere and the Raiders.

The fact is that there were millions of real rockers who logged just as much time listening to Paul Revere and the Raiders between 1965 and 1967 as they did the Rolling Stones. That the kids who made “Like a Rolling Stone” a hit did the same with “Kicks” and “Good Thing.” That there was one point at which serious young men who might one day be rock critics could want to be both John Lennon and Mark Lindsay, the Raiders’ front man, at one and the same time.

Talking about the Raiders raises the larger topic of garage rock. Which runs the risk of turning the conversation serious, and if there’s one thing you shouldn’t be when talking about the Raiders, it’s serious...

Read the rest at The Bluegrassspecial.com.

This Week in the Secret History: Terrifying the Tots

This week marks the birthdays of American illustrator Edward Gorey, and of pioneering German linguist and folklorist, Wilhelm Grimm, who, with his older brother Jacob, created the seminal folk and fairy tale collection, Kinder-und Hausmärchen, better known to us as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the source of such tales as "Rumpelstiltskin", "Snow White", "Sleeping Beauty", "Rapunzel", "Cinderella", "Hansel and Gretel", and "The Frog Prince.”

Part of the revolutionary and romantic spirit of the early 19th Century was the notion that there could be wisdom and delight in the traditions of the rural poor, that such lore would tell you something you might not otherwise understand about your society, a knowledge that had heretofore been hidden from the literate urban elites.

No-one had previously conceived of these tales as being of any value. Now, for the first time, intellectuals sat and listened respectfully to old story-telling peasant women. It was people like the Grimms, in their generation, who began to open urban society’s eyes to the treasurehouse in the imagination of the poor.

Though more than a century separated the Grimm’s from Gorey, their work illustrates a shared insight—that childhood and terror go hand-in-hand.

In the Grimm Brothers stories characters regularly meet grotesquely awful fates. And the evil entities seem to have bubbled up out of some unhealthy Mitteleuropean nightmare, the id of the dank forests and the festering inbred little hamlets. The target of their frequently cannibalistic desires, are almost always children. The Grimms peasant informants knew that in the visionary realm, beauty and horror live close together.

But there’s a golden thread that runs through the darkness. Many of the stories in the Grimms' collection seem to resonate with some primal narrative that we were born knowing. Wilhelm Grimm said that the tales were “fragments of belief, dating back to most ancient times, in which spiritual things are expressed in a figurative manner. The mythic element resembles small pieces of a shattered jewel lying strewn on the ground all overgrown with grass and flowers, and can only be discovered by the most far-seeing eye…Their signification has been lost, but is still felt, and it imparts value to the story.”

And here’s a story you should know about the brothers Grimm:

In 1837, the Brothers Grimm joined five of their colleague professors at the University of Göttingen to protest against the abolition of the liberal constitution of the state of Hanover by the reactionary King Ernest Augustus I. This group came to be known as The Göttingen Seven. The professors were fired from their university posts and three were deported, including Jacob. Jacob settled in Kassel, and Wilhelm joined him there. Their last years were spent in writing a definitive dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the first volume being published in 1854.

Edward Gorey's illustrated (and sometimes wordless) books, with their vaguely ominous air and ostensibly Victorian and Edwardian settings, have long had a cult following. Gorey became particularly well-known through his animated introduction to the PBS series Mystery! in 1980, as well as his designs for the 1977 Broadway production of Dracula, for which he won a Tony Award.

Gorey’s imaginative backdrop is woven out of themes from mystery and horror fiction of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras in England. Because of the settings and style of his work, many people have assumed Gorey was British; in fact, this person who made a life’s work out of channeling the elegantly perverse dream life of pre-WWI Britain never actually so much as visited the place. Gorey classified his own work as literary nonsense, the genre made most famous by Englishmen Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.

Gorey has become an iconic figure in the Goth subculture. Events themed on his works and decorated in his characteristic style are common in the more Victorian-styled elements of the subculture, notably the Edwardian costume balls held annually in San Francisco and Los Angeles, which include performances based on his works.

This Week in the Secret History: The Strangest Day in Military History?

Within the space of one day--January 22, 1879-- the British army, which had taken and held the largest empire in human history, suffered one of its most appalling defeats, and achieved, a few hours later, an astonishing triumph.

At Isandlwana in Zululand, South Africa, the British suffered the worst defeat ever inflicted on a colonial army by a native population. 950 British soldiers and 850 Basuto auxiliaries were wiped out by the army of the Zulu king, Cetsewayo.

A few hours later, and a few miles away at Rorke’s Drift, a temporary supply depot for the army’s invasion of Zululand, a force of about 80 British infantrymen, standing behind a low barrier made of hastily stacked grain-sacks, repelled continuous assaults, over the space of almost 12 hours, from a force of 4000 Zulu warriors. It is one of the freaks of military history—people are still trying to figure out how they did it.

The British had invaded Zululand to break up the Zulu nation, and in particular to destroy its huge (40,000-strong) army, eliminating what they perceived to be a threat to European settlers in Natal Colony, which bordered the Zulu kingdom. The British, looking diligently for a casus belli, had blown a few border incidents out of proportion, and responded with a series of ultimatums to Cetsewayo, with which they knew he would not or could not comply (e.g., disbanding the army, which formed the framework of the Zulu state). When Cetsewayo rejected the ultimatums, the British declared war.

The Zulus had never shown any intention of mounting a general assault on British colonists in Natal. On the other hand, the Zulus had a long established history of ferocious aggression against their tribal neighbors in South Africa, many of whom had been displaced by Zulu expansion and who understandably feared and despised them. It was from these that the British recruited some of the native auxiliaries who accompanied them in their incursion.

So the British invasion force crossed the Buffalo River into Zululand. The force was split into three columns, in order to converge in a pincers movement on the Zulu capital at Ulundi. The central column, under Lord Chelmsford, moved at an agonizing crawl, hampered by its huge supply train of hundreds of oxen-drive wagons which could only make a few miles each day. After several days marching, they made camp under the hill of Isandlwana (the Place of the Lion) a dramatic rocky outcropping with a sphinx-like profile, overlooking a broad plain bordered on the immediate north by the nQutu plateau.

The hill of Isandlwana that anchored the British left, shortly after the battle

On the morning of January 22, Lord Chelmsford divided his force in two and set off with half the central column to hunt for the main Zulu army to the west. He left behind about 950 Europeans, including regular British troops, wagoneers and sutlers, and colonial volunteers; and 850 Africans, mostly of the Basuto tribe, of the Natal Native Contingent.

The half of the column left at Isandlwana made breakfast and sent out scouts. One party of mounted scouts rode up on to the nQutu Plateau. There they saw some Zulu boys herding cattle. The scouts gave chase. They saw the Zulu boys disappear into what they assumed was a minor dip in the terrain. They rode up to the edge.

It wasn’t a dip. It was a long, wide gully. And in it were Zulus. Tens of thousands of them, covering the landscape to the horizon. Squatting on their haunches, tensely awating their orders, taking the stimulant/hallucinogenic snuff they used to prepare for battle. At the sight of the British riders, the Zulu host rose and started to run--the deadly, loping run that characterized all Zulu battlefield movement; the run that always surprised their enemies, as it surprised the British this very day, with how fast a mass of men could cover the South African grasslands; running toward the dumbfounded scouts, and then the British camp.

It was not necessarily criminally stupid of Lord Chelmsford to split his forces in the vicinity of the enemy. The British knew from previous experience, and from the experience of other nations' colonial armies, that a formation of modern European infantry could hold off many times their number of indigenous warriors. This was the result of British infantry drill (at which they were the acknowledged masters in Europe)--specifically the discipline of volley fire; and most lethal of all, volley fire by rank. If you have seen the movie Zulu, volley fire by rank is how the outnumbered British soldiers repel the final Zulu attack. It means that you have multiple lines of soldiers—two, three, four—one lined up closely behind the other, who fire in sequence, starting with the front rank. As the other ranks take their turn, the front rank reloads and prepares to fire again. So on through the succeeding ranks. In this way, fire is continuous and massive, an unbroken sheet of lead, and the effect hideously, astonishingly lethal. The Gatling Gun, and later the machine gun, were attempts to mechanically reproduce the effect of volley fire by rank.

In this way a relatively small number of disciplined riflemen could kill a remarkable number of native fighters, as long as those natives did not possess good rifles and European training.

The Boers, the Dutch settlers of South Africa, had learned one other vital lesson in their many years of fighting with the Zulus, one theystrongly recommended to the British: Every time a Boer force made camp, they put their wagons into laager—in the argot of the American West, they circled their wagons. This gave them both protection, and more important, some kind of defensible perimeter.

These things did not happen at Isandlwana. The British force encamped there was wiped out, almost to the man. Why? What happened to volley fire? The answer lies, for the most part, with the behavior of Lieutenant Colonels Athony Durnford and Henry Pulleine, who Chelmsford had left in command of the camp. Durnford had gone with a troop of local volunteer horse, on a reckless sorty out across the plain and toward the Zulus. Pulleine, who had never commanded a force of this size and never been in combat, inexplicably ordered about 600 British regulars, the core of his force, to take up position in an arc about a mile long, well in front of the camp where their supplies and ammunition lay stacked. The individual soldiers were in one thin rank, not multiple ranks, and they were yards apart from each other. Meanwhile, Durford’s excursion had left the right end of the British line dangling in the air, just waiting for the Zulu left horn to race around it.

The classic Zulu attack, created by the great King Shaka who had founded the Zulu nation, took it’s symbolic shape from the charging bull buffalo. The center of the Zulu force was the chest of the buffalo—they made an al-out massed frontal rush trying to come to grips with the enemy center. With the enemy center engaged and distracted, the two horns of the buffalo, left and right, raced around the flanks of the enemy to attack the position from behind. The loins of the buffalo were the reserves behind the chest, who were thrown in to support the chest once it had become fully engaged, to add the final pressure that would overwhelm the enemy.

The Zulu "horns" envelop the British position at Isandlwana

Even thin as it was, the British firing line apparently held off the Zulu chest for about an hour. Then something happened to slow their rate of fire. The majority opinion among historians is that the flow of ammunition from the camp to the front line slowed. The slackening of the rate of fire was just enough to let the bravest of the Zulu warriors finally cross the killing ground and come to grips with the soldiers. In colonial warfare, this was the nightmare, the situation to be avoided at all costs. When tribal warriors actually closed with European troops, when it got to hand-to-hand, the end was near. As the individual soldiers struggled with the attackers,, the rest of the men of the chest swarmed between the wide gaps in the line, turned and attacked the line from behind.

That was that.

To put a cosmic seal on the mayhem below, the sun was eclipsed that afternoon over Isandlwana.

At that point, one wing of the huge Zulu impi, about 4000 to 4500 strong, who had been held in reserve and did not see any fighting, got a wild hair. With their honor at stake, because they had not gotten to “wash their spears” in the blood of the enemy, they decided to go after the next closest group of British soldiers, even though King Cetsewayo had expressly forbidden to army to cross the river into Natal Colony. Nevertheless, there the British were, at the supply dump for the invasion force, using a commandeered two-building mission station called Rorke’s Drift.

Terrified refugees had brought news of the disaster at Isnadlwana to the force at Rorke’s Drift throughout the afternoon. The soldiers at the depot, B Company of the 24^th Foot consisted of about 140 men. Of these, 35 were in the hospital. Excluding cooks, orderlies and teamsters, there were about 80 actual riflemen fit for duty. But they had been reinforced by about 200 colonial horsemen, and around 100 of the Natal Native Contingent. Lieutenant John Rouse Merriott Chard, an officer of the Royal Engineers with very limited combat experience, had been left in charge by the camp’s commanding officer that morning. Chard had only recently arrived at the post to build a pontoon bridge acriss the Buffalo River.

Chard ordered that a defensive perimeter be built linking the storehouse and the hospital with piles of hundred pound grain sacks and biscuit boxes. He judged that with about 450 rifles lined up behind even a token bit of shelter, they stood a chance.

The Defence of Rorke's Drift
by Alphonse de Neuville

That was until the sentries Chard had placed on the surrounding hills came racing down to report the imminent arrival of the Zulus. At that point, with the enemy on top of them, both the colonial horse and the native levies broke, and disappeared down the road into Natal. One the of 24^th shot and killed one of the native’s European officers as he ran with his troops.

At the last possible moment, the defending force had been reduced from around 450 to about 80 men. Quickly Chard ordered that another biscuit box wall be built, cutting their perimeter in roughly half. Then the Zulus appeared.

For the next eight to ten hours, the fighting went on without a significant pause. But Chard had done three things that the commanders at Isandlwana had not. He created a fortified, albeit haphazard perimeter to protect his men. When the colonial volunteers and the native troops left him, he made provisions for shrinking the perimeter and concentrating his fire; and he made sure that the men had a steady and adequate flow of ammunition.

The sun of January 23, 1879 rose on a scene of terrible carnage. There were fifteen dead Englishmen, and hundreds of dead Zulus, piled everywhere around Rorke’s Drift. Around 7 am, a huge line of Zulus appeared on the hills around Rorke’s Drift. The defenders braced for the end. But the Zulus has been marching and fighting for days without rest or food. And they knew they were going to face the wrath of their king for disobeying his orders. The Zulus disappeared. The Battle of Rorke’s Drift was over, an event without real parallel in military history. The Western way of war had suffered one of its great rebukes, and one of it’s most astonishing affirmations, in one terrible day under the African sky.

The most readable narrative of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, its causes and its aftermath, remains Donald Morris' classic, The Washing of the Spears. Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture incorporates the most recent research into his chapter on Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift as part of his larger analysis of war and culture.

All Hell Breaks Loose: The Jim Jones Revue Shows Them How It's Done

Most first year anthropology students learn about something called "cargo cults," a phenomenon observed during and after World War II among the remote Melanesian populations of the South Pacific islands. As Wikipedia tells us:

During the war, large amounts of food and goods were flown in by the Japanese and American combatants, and this was observed by the natives of the islands. When the war ended, the flow of goods and materials ceased. In an attempt to attract further deliveries of goods, followers of the cults engaged in ritualistic practices such as building crude imitation landing strips, aircraft and radio equipment, and mimicking the behavior that they had observed of the military personnel operating them.

Go downtown this weekend to wherever the music clubs are. Odds are you won't have to stop in to more than two or three before you find a genuine 21st century cargo cult in action. Up there on the stage, whether it's a national touring act or someone from your local indie-alt-post-rock scene, you'll see the same hopeless ritual being enacted. There's the two-guitar, bass and drums configuration that hasn't changed since the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. Maybe there's a quirky frontman acting out his angst in front of his band. Obeying an inchoate impulse from the pop unconscious, they apparently feel that by arranging the externals the same way they once were when people experienced the collective ecstasy of rock and roll, the power may be induced to descend again and flow through them. But that's just a hope, only half conscious. Most of the time, like those Pacific Islanders, they seem to be going through motions that they don't really understand, their guitars as harmless as rifles made of sticks.

And then, every once in an epoch, a real plane lands again.

Read the rest at TheBlueGrassSpecial.com.

In the New Old Fashioned Way

If On a Winter’s Night…
Sting
Deutsche Grammophon

Through the Bitter Frost and Snow
Susan McKeown & Lindsey Horner
50-50 Music

Over the years, the seasonal mood has been shotgunned into unions, more or less unnatural, with every known variety of popular music. You might think you’ve got to pretty much work yourself into contortions to do something distinct with a Christmas album at this point in time. But not necessarily. All you really need is the merest hint of feeling for the season, a dash of concept, and a few decent players willing to throw themselves into the spirit of things, and--able as you are to ride the momentum of centuries of sentiment and celebration--you can do pretty well without an especially visionary take on the season. And then every once in a while, an artist happens down the Xmas trail through whose senses we can feel the season freshly; combine that with those aforementioned centuries of festive associations, and you can really have something.

Read the rest at the BlueGrassSpecial.com.

Gilding the Lily: The Remastered Beatles

As with every mystery, literal and metaphorical camps battle over the interpretation of the Beatles. The literalists want there to be a literal, comprehensible, even if awful, solution to the mystery of the Beatles. The search for the pseudonymous bootleg, the lost killer outtake, the “Carnival of Light,” the Masked Marauders, the clues to the death of Paul, even, down at the abyssal end of the chain, the Manson family’s Helter-Skelter delirium--these are all at one end or the other of the literalist quest.

But just as scriptures are richest when read metaphorically, so too with the Beatles.

Don’t look outside the work for miraculous validation, says the metaphorical view. Look deeper into it. The miracles are buried layer on layer in the work. Understand the puzzling, suggestive, evocative elements not as mysteries with a literal solution like a detective story, but metaphors designed to produce, as Owen Barfield said about poetry, “a felt change of consciousness.”

With its implied suggestion of a definitive revelation, of long-buried gold coming to the surface, the remastered Beatles catalog released this fall is in one sense a classic literalist project. The CDs come with a lot of fanfare and some inevitably excited expectations. “You’re going to be knocked…out,” my CD-store guy—normally cool as a cucumber in the face of hype—breathlessly assured me.

To get a manageable handle on the remastered catalog, I’ve taken two albums, one from the early ‘60s beginnings—With the Beatles--and one late ‘60s high point—Revolver. I then picked a “good part” from each song—a hook, a chorus, a riff, a bass line, a drum fill, a noise, a shout, the bits of gratuitous inspiration that great performances throw off. At these isolated high water marks, I’ve compared the remastered version with the previous CD version. Here are the results.

Read the rest at BlueGrassSpecial.com

This Week in the Secret History: The Gothic Novel Alters Western Consciousness

Gothic fiction (sometimes referred to as Gothic horror) is a genre of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. As a genre, it is generally believed to have been invented by the English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto.

Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses.

The stock characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains, bandits, maniacs, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens, femmes fatales, madwomen, magicians, vampires, werewolves, monsters, demons, angels, fallen angels, the beauty and the beast, revenants, ghosts, perambulating skeletons, and the Wandering Jew.

The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole. Gothic literature is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. In a way similar to the gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere. The ruins of gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations—thus the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals.