Book review: All the Leaves are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart

 

A deeply troubled, musically-inclined man enters the folk music movement of the late 1950s, divorces his wife for a teen groupie, connects with two other folk musicians via drug parties, writes folk songs, goes broke, learns that west coast folk-rock is replacing east coast folk, moves across the country, writes folk-rock songs, goes more broke, walks into a recording studio with his dirty, hungry quartet, records a song, watches it go platinum, catches his young wife in the arms of his best friend, writes more songs, does more drugs, makes more records, makes more money, does more drugs, organizes (and performs at) the Monterey Music Festival, then watches (and assists) his quartet disintegrate. As he does more drugs.

You might call that the timeline of John Phillips, leader of and songwriter for The Mamas & the Papas, a musical comet that sailed briefly and brightly through the folk-rock constellation of the 1960s. I requested a review copy of Scott G. Shea’s new biography, All the Leaves are Brown, because, like most Boomers, the lovely “California Dreamin’” has a permanent spot in my musical memory and I never tire of hearing it. I distinctly recall walking to the bus stop one wintery morning while the song—already in its seventh year of existence--played in my head. And one dull Sunday afternoon, my flautist sister was able to perfectly mimic the song’s flute solo after we listened repeatedly to my 45.

But enough with the personal connections and on to Shea’s book. I was initially thrown off by the amount of detail he includes, especially the opening chapter which lays out Phillips’s ancestry. However, by the third chapter I was completely hooked on his conversational, accessible writing style and the details are what kept me reading. Shea also provides a masterful arc of the 1960s pop music scene while relating how the Mamas & the Papas found their place in it.  Here, the details not only fascinate but illuminate the entire era. 

The interpersonal relationships of the four were unbelievably chaotic, which makes the creation of their two mega-hits all the more remarkable. How could such beautiful meldings of melody and lyric performed with perfect harmonies emanate from these four substance-addled friends/combatants/lovers/wannabe lovers? The irony embedded in that question is part of what makes the book so absorbing and why I finished it in a couple of days, skipping very little.

Shea’s writing has been criticized for its lack of robust editing, and I won’t necessarily disagree with that assessment but on the other hand, because the prose doesn’t call attention to itself, the reader can instead focus on a fascinating story, largely well-told. 

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Mamas & the Papas saga and the world they briefly inhabited.

Book Review: The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know (& Love).

 

Before glancing through The Great American Songbook: 201 Favorites You Ought to Know (& Love): I naturally assumed I’d be familiar with a solid percentage of its contents. After all, I grew up playing the ubiquitous green Reader’s Digest Family Songbook; was a fan of old films before there was a TCM; and spent the past two decades researching and performing America’s classic songs.

But I only recognized 69 out of the 201. Either I’m not as well-versed in American song as I thought I was (pun not initially intended but deliberately left in), or author Steven Suskin did some serious digging. Perhaps both are true. And how he managed to squeeze the history of 201 songs into 254 pages is simple: most entries are only three paragraphs long. But he masterfully fills those entries with an entertaining blend of pop history and moderately simple music theory, the ratio depending on whatever seems to interest him most about any particular song.

Occasionally, the theoretical aspects of his entries can get a bit technical, but they’re always fun. For instance, towards the end of a lengthy paragraph describing the keys, bars, and melody patterns of “I Get a Kick Out of You”, Suskind writes that lyricist/composer Cole Porter “effortlessly spreads, like fresh-churned butter, a six-pointed rhyme…over a mere nineteen beats.”

The “The Man That Got Away” entry points out the song’s A-B-A-B (and a surprise C) form but here Suskind seems far more interested in the song’s compositional history. The tune had been written a decade earlier, paired with what composer Harold Arlen later described as a melody-depleting lyric. However, when united with the mighty pen of Ira Gershwin, the tune, said Arlen, suddenly “sounded like the Rock of Gibralter.”

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” had a similar genesis. Jay Gorney’s tune was originally written for a never-used torch song which included the following forgettable lines: “I could go on crying/big blue tears.” But when the same melody connected up with Yip Harburg’s lyrics, the song became a searing collective cry of an entire generation, struggling in the ravages of the Great Depression.

Speaking of the above song, Suskind also includes a plethora of entertaining anecdotes like this one: Gorney’s wife eventually divorced him and married Harburg, at one point quipping, “Oh, my dear, I wouldn’t marry anyone who didn’t write ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.’”

If one can tell a great deal about a culture from an encounter with its popular songs (and one definitely can), then reading through this labor of love is an addictively entertaining way to access the golden age of Hollywood and Broadway.

Book Review: Act Naturally: The Beatles on Film

I once knew a woman who would begin a topic, branch out into a related subject, add a few footnotes before launching into a similar train of thought until the air between us was filled with such a variety of crisscrossing themes that had the conversation been visible, it would have resembled the veins of a leaf as viewed under a microscope. Not everyone had the kind of time on their hands or patience necessary to listen to all Marianne’s exhaustive (and occasionally, exhausting) monologues, but anyone who did came away enriched and entertained.

I thought of Marianne when I read Steve Matteo’s Act Naturally: The Beatles on Film because while it certainly does fulfill the promise of its subtitle, it also presents a plethora of well-written background information that might be fascinating to some, overwhelming or even dull to others.

But let’s begin with the positive. Matteo is an excellent, descriptive writer. I won’t soon forget the image he paints of the Beatles waving to cheering crowds during the Liverpool premier of Hard Day’s Night while the city police band below them plays “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Ditto for the scene of Paul McCartney sketching out the idea for Magical Mystery Tour on airline stationery while flying home from the US. And while the following might not be news to diehard fans, I found this summation of the White Album quite illuminating:

“The album reflected not only the violence of the era, including protests against the war in Vietnam and nuclear proliferation and the assassination of political and social leaders, but also meditations on a variety of subjects, originally written on acoustic guitars in the tranquil days the group spent in India.”

Matteo also provides a plethora of insightful background material to set the stage for each new cinematic venture. For instance, I never connected the dots between the plot of Help! and the James Bond films popular at the time. But yes, for all its comedy and musical numbers, Help! is indeed a spoofy tale of international intrigue. Matteo brilliantly (if a bit tediously) sets the film within its historical context by listing and briefly describing each Bond film in chronological order before diving into Help!

However, more than occasionally, Matteo’s fondness for detail overwhelms his narrative, making the writing less descriptive and more encyclopedic. For instance, consider the following paragraph, which I quote in its entirety:

“Much has been said about the Beatles’ deal with UA. The initial budget of the film was 200,000 pounds for a black-and-white film. UA hired Walter Shenson to produce; he would be paid 12,000 pounds, splitting the profits 50/50 with UA. His company, Proscenium Films, had two separate deals with Brian Epstein: one with Northern Songs for the songs Lennon and McCartney would supply for the film (and, most importantly for UA, for the soundtrack), and one with NEMS Enterprises on behalf of the entire group. In the original deal, Epstein had said he wouldn’t accept less than an advance of 20,000 pounds and 25 percent of the net profits). Epstein then passed on the negotiations to his lawyer, David Jacobs. Jacobs quickly realized the number Epstein had floated was too low and eventually negotiated an advance of 25,000 pounds and 20 percent of the net profits.”

Interesting to anyone into numbers and percentages, but most likely, few others.

Act Naturally may not hold the interest of the average Beatles’ fan, but it is certainly an insightful and detailed labor of love and will be appreciated by anyone willing to take some time and a deep dive into the history of the Fab Four’s cinematic endeavors. 

Book Review: Holding the Note: Profiles in Popular Music

Artists who take the advice presented in most books on aging and productivity might find something to do at 60 related to but distinct from what they did at 20. Apparently, the artists featured in David Remnick’s Holding the Note: Profiles in Popular Music, didn’t get the memo, for when Remnick wrote the chapters for this book--originally individual pieces featured in The New Yorker--these aging musicians were actively pursuing their original craft.

What compelled them to carry on when their most productive and lucrative years were already in the past? Perhaps because they could still fill amphitheaters, or perhaps because they couldn’t think of anything else to do, becoming, as Remnick describes the Rolling Stones, “unfailing jukeboxes of their earlier selves.” And while he seems to admire Bruce Springsteen’s continued stage athleticism, his take on Mick Jagger’s current antics is not complimentary: “at his best evoking the spawn of James Brown and Gumby, at his worst coming off like someone’s liquored-up Aunt Gert, determined to trash her prettier sister’s wedding with a gruesome performance on the dance floor.”

Ouch. Remnick is equally honest—though less snarky—regarding the aging Luciano Pavarotti when he quotes an opera critic from the 1990s who told him that “Pavarotti’s high notes ran out some time ago. Now it’s often a strangled bleat.” Like the Stones, Pavarotti continued to perform, in part, simply because audiences kept purchasing tickets. But he also kept singing opera well past that genre’s normal retirement age because he felt the pressure of being “The Last Italian Tenor.” Similarly, Mavis Staples, the surviving member of a once-crowded family act, sings for the love and the legacy of those who have passed on. The work of late great blues players is ever present in the mind of Buddy Guy, who told Remnick he feels “like one of those aging souls who find themselves the last fluent speaker of an obscure regional language.”

Should aging singer-songwriters please their audiences with their old material, becoming those “unfailing jukeboxes,” or should they please themselves with the creative process? Bob Dylan tends towards the latter, creating entirely new albums—granted, not at his former speed of multiple songs per day---and still fills concerts with (perhaps) disappointed fans aching to hear old songs from their old prophet. Conversely, when stage-shy introverted Leonard Cohen took a lengthy world tour in his later years to recoup what an embezzling employee had stolen, he never stopped composing, but gave his audiences plenty of his old songs (albeit in a different key to accommodate the lower range of his aging voice).

Sir Paul McCartney walks a line between Dylan and Cohen, justifying the creation and performance of what he told Remnick was “wisdom art.” But ever the pleaser, he also gives his audiences “Hey Jude” so that, in his words, “everyone goes home happy.”

Holding the Note lacks the glossy section of photographs so often included at the center of biographies, collective and otherwise, perhaps because Remnick’s writing includes elements that most casual observers might miss in a photograph. For instance, Dylan’s strange Newsweek cover of October 4, 2004, is Googleable (and the story behind it even stranger unless you are aware of Dylan’s narcissistic streak), but Remnick’s description is more detailed, not to mention far more entertaining: “By then he was in his mid-sixties and looked like Vincent Price wearing Hank William’s clothes; pencil mustache, white Stetson, and cowboy suit.”

Anyone can watch Aretha Franklin’s 2015 Kennedy Center performance of “Natural Woman” on YouTube, but Remnick’s description shows more: “Aretha comes out onstage looking like the fanciest church lady in Christendom: fierce red lipstick, floor-length mink, a brocaded pink-and-gold dress that Bessie Smith would have worn if she’d sold tens of millions of records.”

Holding the Note is filled with wit, pathos, sharp observations, profound questions and is well worth a read. (less)