Author: Spitz, Marc
Category: Other3
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Gorey, who appeared as a bearded, cat-loving New Englander on the outside, was perhaps the most twisted author of this time. His 1957 book The Doubtful Guest was quietly terrifying, with a speechless creature—an upright-walking otter in a woolen scarf—that enters a family’s home and stays for seventeen years without ever uttering a word. This guest is perhaps death, or the awareness of death itself.
Much of Gorey’s output is told in a deceptively cheery rhyme. Perhaps his most famous book, 1963’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, is an alphabet of children and how they met their demises: “N is for Neville who died of ennui.” There are more violent deaths included, by ax, by poisoning, et cetera. The Gilded Bat, from 1966, finds its characters sent to insane asylums and dealing with actual ennui, just the kind that did in poor Sylvia Plath. Maudie, Gorey’s heroine in The Gilded Bat, becomes Mirella, a celebrated ballerina who perishes when a “great dark bird” flies into the propeller of her plane. The Iron Tonic (1969) returns to rhyme: “It is known the skating pond conceals / a family of enormous eels.”
That same year, 1969, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross released the best seller On Death and Dying, which famously broke down the idea of accepting death into five stages: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The mid-1960s seemed to be all about denial. The next three stages, by 1968, became a kind of tsunami of drugs and misty madness that would stun brave, astronaut-like man-child artists like Wilson, or Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd. The latter, a dark-eyed beauty in the throes of lysergic epiphany/meltdown, would eschew the expanses of his old band in favor of playful children’s poetry, long walks in nature, and an embrace of a kind of pre-rock jug band aesthetic. A cult hero hermit, he would, at the height of Punk, inspire a classic “Whatever happened to . . .” essay by the great British journalist Nick Kent as well as an irresistible novelty song by the Television Personalities, “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives,” complete with very Twee sped-up vocals and bird calls.
Dr. Kübler-Ross’s final stage, acceptance, saw music and film grow darker and more knowing toward the end of the decade too. Facing the darkness—and showing resolve against it—became vogue, the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” being a good example. There was also a postpsychedelic back-to-the-land movement, as evidenced by the Band’s Music from Big Pink and the embrace of canyon living, organic farming, and earth tones. The Beatles broke up and John Lennon inevitably seized the last word concerning “the dream” on his early solo track “God”: it was over. Decade-ending films like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, and even Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run are shot through with a sort of cynicism that betrays a dashed spirit.
Dr. Kübler-Ross includes a caveat maintaining that throughout the stages of grieving, there is a sixth or perhaps a constant state that accompanies the cycle: hope, “the one thing that persists.” Even in their death throes, the 1960s produced a few flowers that would be, as one generation turned to the next, as constant as hope. In this way the decade would never truly end, even as it died a rather ignoble and disappointing death.
Perhaps the most beautiful and childlike of all the era’s natural-born stars was Nick Drake, the greatest proto-Twee icon to ever pick up a guitar and sing while staring at his worn-out shoes.
Drake was from a well-to-do family and attended Cambridge. He managed to perform at several concerts during the folk-rock boom of the late 1960s that produced Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention, but was reportedly so shy he could not look anyone in the eye or carry on much of a conversation. Listening to any of his three albums today—1969’s Five Leaves Left, 1970’s Bryter Layter, and 1972’s Pink Moon—it’s hard to imagine someone tongue-tied. Drake sings in a hushed, jazzy, and almost regal baritone, like a sort of terribly English Leonard Cohen, but even more haunted, if that’s possible.
Built out of Drake’s unmistakable voice, his acoustic guitar, and studio string arrangements, Five Leaves Left was woefully obscure when it was first released; according to legend, it sold only three thousand copies in its day. It was this sense of obscurity, however, that helped fortify the Drake myth, as, of course, would his death, via an overdose of antidepressants in 1974 at age twenty-six. But unlike icons like James Dean or even Ian Curtis, Drake’s art won attention over his early demise. The music grabbed young fans first, a quarter century later, and the tragedy, discovered most likely via a Web search, only sealed them as devotees.
“Almost everyone I have ever talked to about Nick Drake says that they heard the music before they knew the story,” says Joe Boyd, who discovered Drake and produced his first two albums. “It is the music and just the music. The story is tragically romantic for some, and that can enhance the effect, but it simply starts with his musical genius. The fact that he was handsome doesn’t hurt, but it is a small part of the phenomenon.”
Madison Avenue had been plundering youth movements since the end of World War II and continues to do so well into the twenty-first century; this odd up-from-the-streets-and-into-suburban-homes phenomenon is a continuum. In 1989 Barney Rubble, in dookie gold chain, shades, porkpie hat, and sneakers, busted a few rhymes in a Fruity Pebbles commercial. Fred Flintstone cut up some vinyl on a turntable supported by a green dinosaur. There was the notorious Subaru Impreza ad from 1992 that featured actor Jeremy Davies stating, “This car is like Punk rock. Just trust me. This is relevant. Remember when rock and roll was really boring and corporate? Well, Punk challenged all this and said, ‘Hey, excuse me, but here’s what’s cool about music.’ Remember? Now Subaru with its Impreza is challenging some car thinkin’ . . .” Scary stuff.
Then there were the 1-800-Collect commercials with actor Calvert DeForest (David Letterman’s Larry “Bud” Melman) dressed in full-flannel grunge regalia. Informed that he can save on his long-distance calls to, of course, Seattle, he turns around and shouts, “Thanks, phone dude!”
Drake’s albums, according to Boyd, first received notoriety during the 1980s and ’90s, when bands like R.E.M. and singer-songwriters like Elliott Smith began giving him shout-outs in zines and major music magazines. “It was word of mouth,” Boyd insists.
Then came the “Milky Way” ad spot for Volkswagen, which made Nick Drake a supernova, something he strove for in life but never enjoyed, which certainly played a factor in his depression.
Volkswagen’s Beetle and bus had long been embraced by young people for their affordability and practicality. Many an Indie-rock band toured the country in one of those VW buses. By the late ’90s, Volkswagen had reintroduced a modern version of the discontinued Beetle to capitalize on that generation’s fervor for all things retro. The New Beetle made its debut in a stark ad tracked to Spiritualized’s dreamy, druggy 1997 Britpop hit “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space.” It was the right product synched up to the perfect song. No hard sell. The Cabriolet, however, did not have the same high level of cultural currency. The car company was on the verge of discontinuing its convertible in favor of a top-down edition of the New Beetle when it approached its ad agency for a low-impact retail spot designed, mostly, to unload the remaining stock.
The Boston-based Arnold Worldwide had done the successful New Beetle campaign, as well as the popular hatchback ad featuring German New Wave act Trio’s “Da Da Da.” “We sort of said, ‘Maybe there’s something more we can do with this,’” says Arnold’s then co–creative director Alan Pafenbach. Pitching ideas with his partner Lance Jensen, Pafenbach came up with an angle. “We asked, ‘What’s interesting about convertibles?’ Everybody usually associated convertibles with four blond girls on a sunny California day. Lance said, ‘One of the things that’s cool about a convertible is when you drive it around at night.’”
The presentation was simple. A full moon, a cruising convertible; a timid group of four kids pulls up on a house party, looks inside, sees a bunch of lunkheads getting drunk, and decides to blow it off in favor of more night driving. No pitchman. No info on price breaks or deals. “We created a kind of back story,” says Paf
enbach. “These were kids who all worked together at some summer job, and it was the last weekend of summer. They were all going to go out and celebrate.” The drivers aren’t dressed “young,” but rather somber and Indie. Even the “California blonde” looks subdued. They are mixed gender, mixed race, but look as if they belong together. “We tried to cast something that looked more like an independent film,” Pafenbach says.
Video-directing team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris were hired after the ad team saw their video for the Smashing Pumpkins single “1979,” which also features a crew of real-looking small-town kids joyriding. Dayton and Faris went on to direct Little Miss Sunshine years later, another milestone in the mainstreaming of Twee.
The Church’s 1988 hit “Under the Milky Way” was earmarked for the soundtrack, but once in the editing bay, the team realized it didn’t quite match the lilting feeling of the spot. “It was a little too Gothic,” says Pafenbach. “And so we pulled out this Nick Drake cut and gave it to the editor. It just worked. It was more magical. It lent it an ambience.”
There was nothing else on TV like it, a sort of blue-bathed grace moment of shyness and gentleness—used to sell a car. There was also an unusual sense of morality to the spot.
“The kids drive up to a drunken brawl and decide not to go drink their faces off,” says Pafenbach. “They’ve apparently matured enough to realize the experience they’re having with their friends is better than just being a drunken idiot.”
The car company ran the hell out of “Pink Moon,” and Nick Drake, who in his lifetime had failed at fame so mightily, was suddenly a star. In just over a minute, he was brought back to life, with people stopping to ask, “Who was that?”
Here was one of the first modern ads to assume its target was intelligent, emotionally sophisticated, and weary of the old hard sell. Nick Drake, dead twenty-five years, killed the jingle and brought back the 1960s, and in a way, launched that second summer of love—that new digital ’60s. Many a long-dead ’60s troubadour found new life in advertising and on soundtracks starting in the 1990s, from Harry Nilsson to Phil Ochs to Karen Dalton to Tim Hardin.
If it was obscure, dark, and hailing from the ’60s, it was not only fascinating: it was money. “His songs are very atmospheric, but there is no one mood—each song is different,” says Boyd. “Nick never pushed himself at the listener, he lured them into the music, which can be effective when using a song as underscore.”
Here were the heroes buried in the 1960s. They did not get out of there alive—but eventually the Twee would come to dig them out, and take to them with open hearts and open wallets.
Chapter 3
The Wild Things
1972–1977
In which Punk rises from the death of the 1960s dream and responds to chagrined hippies and a lack of opportunity by embracing nihilism and antifashion and consigning anything from the previous era to the great tar pit of irrelevance. Some older artists are right there with them. Others seem determined to neutralize their Stalinist approach and make the world safe for butterflies and ice cream men.
Maurice Sendak’s monsters and the Sex Pistols were both on the cover of Rolling Stone, less than one year apart, in 1976 and ’77. One might say, “Well, that’s a coincidence,” and have a good point. The magazine also featured actress Louise Lasser and the Grateful Dead on its covers during those years. It is, however, the embrace of Sendak by the children of the 1970s, a decade of escalating war, supply shortages, freaky cults, cocaine culture, and deadening and repetitive progressive rock that is most interesting. It is also interesting that Rolling Stone—then, as it is now, the arbiter of zeitgeist—gave a children’s book author the same real estate that it gave the poster children of early Punk.
Elvis was on the outs. He’d be dead by the end of the coming summer. Sendak, then in middle age, was a king of rock.
Sendak’s work contained a sort of innate empathy for suffering and perseverance; most of his endings were happy, even in his darkest fare such as Pierre, from 1962’s Nutshell Library, in which the protagonist is literally, albeit briefly, devoured by a lion (spoiler: Pierre is spit out). Sendak was born just a little more than a year before the Great Depression started, and as a child in Brooklyn he was one of those Ray Davies–like window watchers, observing and drawing his more socially outgoing neighbors. He was haunted first by the disappearance of the Lindbergh baby and next by the Holocaust, news of which filtered back to his family dinner table; suffering and death were never far from his mind. Sendak used the terror, distilling it into something selfless and palatable.
The story of Punk’s advent has been told and retold to the point that it’s tedious. But for the sake of context, and to align the genre with the bleakness of one of its unsung “Punk” voices—Sendak—it requires framing. In mid-1970s England there were miners’ strikes, and therefore frequent blackouts because of a lack of coal. Garbage piled up. Kids left school with almost no hope of getting a job. Their rock and literary heroes didn’t articulate much rage anymore. The Rolling Stones certainly didn’t; Lennon, like Dylan before him, had disappeared into domesticity in the Dakota with Yoko. Into this void came a sense of, for a time, sincere nihilism. Johnny Rotten sang, on the Sex Pistols single “Pretty Vacant,” “We’re so pretty, oh so pretty . . . we’re vacant . . . and we don’t care!” echoing, eerily, little Pierre, whose mantra is, until the lion devours him anyway, “I don’t care!” Pierre shouts this repeatedly.
What is a Punk, anyway, but an idealist? Johnny Rotten sang “God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the UK” not because he wished to see England burn but because he wanted to save it. And while the band’s image was that of a crew of drooglike thugs, they were all intellectually curious—even Sid Vicious, who read any book that David Bowie, his idol, happened to mention in the press.
Their managers, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, clothiers before entering the rock business, studied philosophy like situationism and existentialism and never saw the group as much more than an art project or prank—and certainly a way to take money from the wealthy, Merry Men style.
Sendak had his nihilistic side as well. When director Spike Jonze, who would later adapt Where the Wild Things Are into a dark, puzzling, and enchanting feature film, asked the author and artist, “Do you have any advice for young people?” he replied, “Quit this life as soon as possible.” But Sendak was also, crucially, a mensch and an aesthete. The Nutshell Library is a perfect fetish item; beautifully illustrated little books that fit into a tiny case. He knew the power of the book as object.
“There’s so much more to a book than just the reading,” he has said. “I’ve seen children touch books, fondle books, smell books, and it’s all the reason in the world why books should be beautifully produced.”
Sendak’s most famous story is, of course, Where the Wild Things Are—published in 1963, and by the mid-1970s already a children’s classic, winner of multiple awards and a must-read. Unlike most children’s books, which open on a high note, Wild Things opens with its hero, Max, frowning. He is in the midst of what would come to be known as “acting out,” brandishing a hammer, chasing his poor dog, and dressed in a wolf costume. There’s no father in the picture, and Mother cannot control him with her threats and scolds. Max is a Punk before there was a word for it, before Iggy Pop ever had the notion to join a band. The writer Dave Eggers penned a novelization of the Spike Jonze adaptation (for which he also wrote the screenplay) and surmises, “Max’s dad lived in the city and phoned on Wednesdays and Sundays but sometimes did not.”
Deprived of his supper, Max decides, like Johnny Rotten, to “use the enemy.” He sails toward the unknown and the frightening, albeit in his imagination. Escape would mark a later Sendak book as well, the lesser-known but just as enchanting Higglety Pigglety Pop!, from 1967. There, a pampered dog, Jennie, wonders, “There must be more to life than having everything,” and sets out on a journey. “I am discontented,” the pooch complains. “I want something I d
o not have. There must be more to life.”
Jennie encounters danger in the cold woods (“There must be more to life than having nothing!” she then says, shivering), and later great success, becoming a star at the Mother Goose Theater. Sendak seems to be introducing ideas of the search for utopia in many of his books. The cynical part of Sendak clearly knows it’s another illusion, a pipe dream, but a vital one, especially given the cruel realities all around. As horrible as the real world is, we must never stop looking.
Like Jennie, Max looks for his own utopia. He escapes his bedroom via boat and finds himself on an island full of beasts who “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth.” There he makes himself the wildest thing of all, much in the way the Punks did. (What is a shredded T-shirt, bondage trousers, Doc Marten stomping boots, or a safety pin through the face if not a form of wolf suit?) “Be still!” he demands, and these creatures obey, and a wild rumpus starts. Just like London in ’76.
“Maurice Sendak understood what he was doing when he wrote that book,” the writer/actor and expert on most things Twee, John Hodgman, says of Wild Things. “The boy loses his control, loses his temper, and he consequently loses his mother.” Twee rebels don’t want to destroy everything around them. Rather, they want to fix it. And if creativity requires a temporary destruction, as most agree it does, and a few tantrums must be thrown, so be it. Critics of Twee complain that this isn’t rebellion at all, that one must be prepared to sacrifice everything and lose oneself forever in the darkness. The Punks seemed to be in this corner. Not so the Twees, which is why Max, who travels only so far before returning home to a (hopefully) better relationship with his mother, is such an archetype.