The Philter

1969, Part 2

bill — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:15:50 +0000

I think this one pretty much speaks for itself.

1969, PART 2: THE LAST ISLAND OF BEAUTY

PLAYLIST:
1. The Last Island of Beauty/Richard Griffiths (Withnail & I)
2. Cirrus Minor/Pink Floyd (More)
3. Golden Hair/Syd Barrett (The Madcap Laughs)
4. The Lady Rachel/Kevin Ayers (Joy of a Toy)
5. The Old Laughing Lady/Neil Young (Neil Young)
6. Because/The Beatles (Abbey Road)
7. All Come to Meet Her/Alexander Spence (Oar)
8. Beechwood Park/The Zombies (Odessey & Oracle)
9. Pale Blue Eyes/Velvet Underground (Velvet Underground)
10. Golden Hair Instrumental/Syd Barrett (Wouldn’t You Miss Me)
11. Crying Song/Pink Floyd (More)

Electricity Wants to Go Home

bill — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 20:42:51 +0000

I can’t say too much about Dr. Thompson’s work over the last 15 years, because I stopped buying his books after shelling out $21.95 for Songs of the Doomed— which was awfully pricy for a book back in 1990, especially when you’re fresh out of college. I was not too happy to get home and discover that it consisted mostly of retreads from Hell’s Angels and The Great Shark Hunt, Examiner columns that hadn’t made it into Generation of Swine, and unpublished fiction that would have been better left unpublished. It seemed likely that the Doctor was going through one of his drunker phases, and his editors had thrown the book together from whatever they had at hand.

But even there, the real thing, the genius, would pop up once in a while. As in the short piece called “Electricity,” which you can hear here in the Doctor’s own voice:

ELECTRICITY

Although given how much the Doctor mumbles, you’re probably going to want a transcript.

Electricity By Hunter S. Thompson

They laughed at Thomas Edison. It has been raining a lot recently. Quick thunderstorms and flash floods...lightning at night and fear in the afternoon. People are worried about electricity. Nobody feels safe. Fires burst out on dry hillsides, raging out of control, while dope fiends dance in the rancid smoke and animals gnaw each other. Foreigners are everywhere, carrying pistols and bags of money. There are rumors about murder and treachery and women with no pulse. Crime is rampant and even children are losing their will to live. The phones go dead and power lines collapse, whole families plunged into darkness with no warning at all. People who used to be in charge walk around wall-eyed, with their hair standing straight up on end looking like they work for Don King, and babbling distractedly about their hearts humming like stun guns and trying to leap out of their bodies like animals trapped in bags. People get very conscious of electricity when it goes sideways and starts to act erratic. . .eerie blackouts, hissing, and strange shocks from the toilet bowl, terrifying power surges that make light bulbs explode and fry computer circuits that are not even plugged in...The air crackles around your head and you take a jolt every time you touch yourself. Your lawyer burns all the hair off his body when he picks up the cordless phone to dial 911. Nobody can handle electricity run amok. It is too powerful...Ben Franklin was never able to lock a door again after the day lightning came down his kite string and fused that key to his thumb. They called it a great discovery and they called him a great scientist; but, in fact, he bawled like a baby for the rest of his life every time he smelled rain in the air. I find myself jerking instinctively into the classic self-defense stance of a professional wire wizard every time I hear rain on the roof. That is an atavistic tic that I picked up many years ago in my all-night advanced intelligence electronics class at Scott AFB, on the outskirts of east St. Louis — where I also learned about pawnshops, oscillators, and full-bore lying as a natural way of life. The stance was the first thing we learned, and we learned it again every day for a long, crazy year. It is as basic to working with serious electricity as holding your breath is to working underwater.... Lock one hand behind your back before you touch anything full of dissatisfied voltage — even a failed light bulb — because you will almost certainly die soon if you don't. Electricity is neutral. It doesn't want to kill you, but it will if you give it a chance. Electricity wants to go home, and to find a quick way to get there — and it will. Electricity is always homesick. It is lonely. But it is also lazy. It is like a hillbilly with a shotgun and a jug of whiskey gone mad for revenge on some enemy — a fatal attraction, for sure - but he won't go much out of his way to chase the bugger down if ambush looks a lot easier. Why prowl around and make a spectacle of yourself when you can lay in wait under some darkened bridge and swill whiskey like a troll full of hate until your victim appears — drunk and careless and right on schedule — so close that you almost feel embarrassed about pulling the trigger. That is how electricity likes to work. It has no feelings except loneliness, laziness, and a hatred of anything that acts like resistance...like a wharf rat with its back to the wall — it won't fight unless it has to, but then it will fight to the death. Electricity is the same way: it will kill anything that gets in its way once it thinks it sees a way to get home quick.... Zaaappp! Right straight up your finger and through your heart and your chest cavity and down the other side. Anything that gives it an escape route. Anything — iron, wire, water, flesh, ganglia — that will take it where it must go, with the efficiency of gravity or the imperative of salmon swimming upriver.... And it wants the shortest route — which is not around a corner and through a muscle mass in the middle of your back, but it will go that way if it has to. Some people had to have their loose hand strapped behind them in a hammerlock with rubber cords, just to keep their hearts from exploding and their neck nerves from being fried like long blond hairs in a meat fire when the voltage went through. But sooner or later they learned. We all did, one way or another. One night — perhaps out of boredom or some restless angst about the fate of Caryl Chessman or maybe Christine Keeler — I connected a 50,000-volt RF transformer to one end of the thin aluminum strap on the Formica workbench that ran around three sides of the big classroom; and then I grounded the strap to a deep-set screw in a wall socket. Severe shocks resulted when the generator jumped its limiter and began cranking out massive jolts and surges of RF voltage. A 50,000-volt shock ran through my stomach, just below my navel, burning a long, thin hole that I can still pull a string of dental floss through on wet nights. It was horrible, and still is, but it was also a massive breakthrough; and I will never forget the warped joy I felt when the first surge of electricity went through them. They squawked at each other and flapped their arms like chickens.... My own pain was nothing compared to the elation of knowing that I had just made an unspeakably powerful new friend — an invisble weapon that could turn warriors and wizards into newts, and cause them to weep.

Washington, DC, 1989

Ode to Steve, Part 5

bill — Sun, 14 Aug 2005 12:09:04 +0000

THE STEVE MARTIN GENERATION

Steve Martin was born on this day in 1945. I was born in 1967, which means that I was about 10 when A Wild and Crazy Guy came out in 1977, placing me squarely in the middle of the Steve Martin Generation.

Yes, there is such a thing—you know who you are. Those of us who listened to Steve’s records (and those are 33 1/3 revolution per minute long-playing vinyl records I’m talking about) until we committed them to memory, we tend to recognize each other right away. And not just because we often have that portrait of Steve signed “Best Fishes” in our cubicles. No, it’s because we’ve had our minds permanently bent by being exposed to existentialist meta-comedy in our formative years.

So how does a kid from Waco grow up to warp a whole generation? Well, let’s begin at the beginning.

Steve has never talked much about his childhood. In a 1980 Playboy interview, he said:

Nobody gives a shit about where I grew up and all that. That’s boring. Even I don’t give a shit. When I read an interview and it gets to the part where the person grew up, I turn the page.

About all I’ve been able to glean from my research is that Steve was born in Waco, Texas in 1945; grew up in Garden Grove, California; and had a real-estate-agent father who really had wanted to be an actor.

Starting at the age of 10, he worked at Disneyland for eight years, and then studied philosophy at Long Beach State for three years. Those two facts alone pretty much explain everything, and I feel like I could stop here; on the other hand, I’ve done all this research, so let’s keep going a little bit.

At 21 he got a job writing for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” This is an interesting move for a guy who has always claimed to be apolitical:

Why am I not political? One reason is purely aesthetic. There were too many political thinkers in the Sixties. The world didn’t need another political comedian. The world still doesn’t need another serious person.

Certainly “The Smothers Brothers” served as an object lesson on the dangers of being overtly political: After a long battle with CBS about political content, the show was cancelled on a flimsy pretext, and Steve was out of a job. After that he wrote for other, less edgy TV shows. Shows starring people like John Denver, Glen Campbell, Sonny, and Cher. But in the meantime he was a developing a master plan that was subversive in its own way:

We were in the midst of the Sixties when I was starting to formulate this idea. I’d say, “Someday this consciousness will grow tiresome….” I knew that someday we’d have to change, just out of boredom, and that’s what I was formulating.

As if he had been waiting for the 70s, Steve quit TV writing in 1970 to focus on performing. Since at the age of 25 he’d already been in showbiz for 15 years (if you count Disneyland as showbiz, which I do), he had a pretty good idea of what his act would be.

There were several premises. First, that I played a character onstage who assumed that everything he said was brilliant. He had total confidence, with nothing to back it up. Comedy was jokes and I thought, What if there were no jokes?

There’s a very primitive but accurate theory about comedy as a building up of tension and then a release of it…. I thought, What if you cut out the punch lines completely, and had a comedian who just announced that he was a comedian? The tension would have to break of its own accord – the audience would eventually have to break it for themselves. And that was him, me, the guy in the white suit. A professional comedian with no act and supreme confidence.

Now, I think that Steve’s being a bit disingenuous here, much as Bob Dylan is when he says he was just trying to make it rhyme. Steve was a master manipulator of audiences, and he knew where the laughs were going to come; it’s just that they would come at unusual times. Often there were delayed reactions as the audience took a moment to process what Steve had just said. Like when he used to have crowds recite the “Non-Conformist’s Oath”:

Steve: I promise to be different!

Crowd: I promise to be different!

Steve: I promise to be unique!

Crowd: I promise to be unique!

Steve: I promise not to repeat things other people say!

Crowd: I pr… (trailing off into laughter)

And he did write punch lines, but they always had some kind of reverse twist on them:

One Way to Leave Your Lover

But the point remains valid: What Steve was doing was not comedy but meta-comedy, and everything he did was a comment on the idea of being a comedian.

It’s not that the arrow through the head is funny, it’s that someone thinks the arrow through the head is funny. It so happens that the nose glasses are funny, but my point was, it’s gone beyond the glasses; it’s the putting on of the nose glasses that is funny.

I’m not sure that Steve invented meta-comedy—other comedians of the era, most notably Martin Mull, were working in similar areas—but he certainly crystallized it. He put it this way to Playboy:

I see myself as a success of timing, having the right act at the right time, when everybody was sort of starting to think that way. That’s why I was a phenomenon rather than just another comedian.

He was a phenomenon, alright—the first rock star comedian, complete with platinum albums, sold-out stadiums with million-dollar grosses, and a genuine hit single (see photo at top). This is what gave him the power and influence to twist young minds the way he did, and we are all the better for it.

Well, that about wraps things up for Steve Martin week. Before I go, though, I’d like to address a few words to Steve personally, just in case he ever Googles himself and stumbles across this page:

Steve:

Well, first off, thanks for the laughs. And the rest of it, too. The whole thing. The last 30 years would have been a lot less interesting without you.

I know that you’ve said you’ll never do standup comedy again. But remember on A Wild and Crazy Guy, when you were doing the financial disclosure bit and, as a joke, calculated that if you filled a 3000-seat hall at $800 a ticket, you’d make $2,400,000? Well, you could actually do that now. I would find a way to get ahold of 800 dollars to see you, and I have no doubt there are at least 2,999 others out there like me. You wouldn’t even have to put on the bunny ears or do any of the old bits—well, maybe “Cat Handcuffs.” Anyway, think about it: One show, goodbye.

Finally, I’d like to remind you that you said this in your 1980 Playboy interview: “I’d like to take LSD when I’m 60.” So if you’re looking for someone to, like, get weird with, I can be there in a few hours.

Your fan,

Bill