Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music by Vincent L. Stephens
Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles by Kenneth Womack
Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Johnny Hodges by Con Chapman
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If you are a jazz aficionado, you probably revere the 1963 classic album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. The only singer ever to record with Coltrane, Hartman was lauded by critics for his rich baritone and emotional sincerity – but he never gained popularity with a white audience that rejected the notion of a black man singing gorgeous romantic ballads to white women. A.B. Spellman, who wrote the album’s liner notes, defended Hartman as a model of the “big-voiced crooner” – but then revealed a different bias, claiming that “replacing the masculinity of the crooner with the effeteness of the lark is only another kind of premature destruction of artists by factors which have nothing to do with their art.”
The most prominent and successful “lark” was Johnny Mathis. During the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Mathis placed 27 singles on the Billboard Top 40 charts. Only Frank Sinatra sold more records. In Rocking the Closet, Vincent Stephens notes that “sentimental, sensitive, beautiful, and sweet represent a few of the adjectives commonly applied to Mathis’ signature sound” – attributes his audience commonly regarded as feminine. Stephens’ mission is to specify how four notable queer pop entertainers of the period succeeded in generating broad appeal by shrewdly managing their talents and personaes. Others have expounded on Mathis, Little Richard, Johnnie Ray and Liberace as breakthrough figures. But Stephens, the director of the Popel Show Center for Race and Ethnicity, merits our attention for his felicitous selection of secondary materials and his focus on the four singers as “masterful navigator(s)” who “employed a discernible group of queering techniques to shape their personae and build audiences.”
“The more I studied notions of authenticity within critical writing on popular music,” he writes, “the more I began to understand how biased this discourse is toward the music produced and/or frequently enjoyed by certain populations, especially girls, women, and queer men.” The heteronormative assessment of what matters in pop and rock started to appear to Stephens not just non-inclusive but simply in the dark about what mass audiences were enjoying and why they were enjoying it. But Stephens also dispenses with the “digestible teleological narrative” of LGBTQ emergence. He says, “I intentionally avoid our present-day tendency to label pre-Stonewall queers as closeted because this term misses the nuances of their negotiations.” The spirit of Rocking The Closet is enjoyed in how deftly Stephens illuminates those nuances. He is as lucid about the music as about the cultural moment, the entertainment business, and the lives of the musicians.
This is a story about mid-century “indivisible” America, divided as ever (though American pop culture’s willingness to open doors to entertainers whom they would not allow in other professions is a longer story). He quotes Michael Bronski: “Here was a country obsessed with ridding its government of ‘subversive’ homosexuals, yet it idolized performers like Liberace and Little Richard and refused to acknowledge their – rather evident to many – homosexuality.” Emerging through the optics and dramatic techniques of the 1940’s-50’s “chitlin’ circuit,” Little Richard “was keenly aware that mainstream audiences might reject his blackness and his sexuality” – but he calculated, in his own words, that “my image should be crazy and way-out so that adults would think I was harmless.” His freakishness became hyperbolic. Stephens says, “Richard needed to project an image that was not too threatening. This expectation led him to shift attention away from his sexual orientation by performing multiple acts of gender play that were on the edge of queerness but collapsible into a more general spectacle.”
When I was a kid, I asked my father, “What’s Liberace’s last name?” Laughing at his own joke, he replied, “Jones” – which I took to mean that he believed the musician’s lavishly styled act was a put-on. As a child, Liberace was regarded as a musical prodigy and a sissy; as an entertainer, he fused those perceptions into an act that offered joie de vivre for all. About the audience, Stephens says, “Whether they knew what he was sexually did not influence who he was to them emotionally and socially … If he adhered to their needs for fabulousness, they adhered to his right to have a private life.” Early in his career as a concert entertainer, he projected the persona of a “cheerful confidante.” With the rise of the TV variety show format in the 1950’s, he fluidly projected that persona through the small screen and into the privacy of the living room. His elegant appearance and dramatic set design implied a sensitivity to one’s person and surroundings – an instinct emerging within the general culture. Liberace called it out for celebration.
Prejudice, ignorance, fear – none of this is mitigated in Stephens’ study simply because heterosexuals bought Johnnie Ray’s records. “When audiences embrace your queering of expectations,” he writes, “how much can you trust their interests, how far can you go in a queer direction, and is it essential to tone down these elements for greater mainstream accessibility?” Stephens’ quartet succeeded – but Rocking The Closet underscores at what cost by portraying the turbulence in their lives. In one difficult episode, Mathis, who occasionally hired women to pose as escorts, faced a $40,000 lawsuit – highly publicized in Ebony magazine – filed by a model who claimed non-payment for her services. How Mathis shrewdly yet gracefully handled the controversy discloses both his mastery of the market and his endurance through distortion and discomfort.
[Published by the University of Illinois Press on November 11, 2019, 248 pages, 16 b&w photos, $27.95 paperback]
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Nielsen Music has published its list of the best-selling vinyl albums during the past decade. At the top of the stack is the Beatles’ Abbey Road, which sold almost 200,000 more copies than Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, long regarded as the Beatles’ album masterpiece, came in seventh. What accounts for Abbey Road’s current favor? Kenneth Womack begins his book on the making of Abbey Road by quoting from its negative reviews – and noticing that many critics simply heard the music as “different” from its predecessors. What led to the album’s “more demure listening experience” when compared to Sgt Pepper?
Womack finds part of the answer in “the adoption of a new eight-track mixing desk that afforded the bandmates and their production team with solid-state technology over years of working with tube equipment.” In addition to expanding the tracking capabilities at EMI’s studio, there was more “brightness” and “warmth” in the output. The technical details come alive when Womack describes the creation of particular recordings. He quotes producer Geoff Emerick on the making of “Come Together”:
“With the luxury of eight tracks, each song was built up with layered overdubs, so the tonal quality of the backing track directly affected the sound we would craft for each overdub. Because the rhythm tracks were coming back off tape a little less forcefully, the overdubs – vocals, solos, and the like – were performed with less attitude. The end result was a kinder, gentler-sounding record.”
But the pulse of Solid State derives from the interaction and friction between the musicians. The story of the Beatles’ break-up has been told many times, but usually with an emphasis on their incompatible opinions on management. The first of those accounts I encountered, Philip Norman’s Shout! (1981), barely mentions Abbey Road, yet the days spent at EMI studios making the album were the last the quartet would experience together. Womack’s narrative is astute about the music (if too kind to McCartney’s contributions), the relationships, and the new technology.
The pace of the Beatles’ recording work was itself enough to generate tension and fatigue. In October, 1968, the Beatles were finishing up The White Album. In January, 1969, they were grinding out the Let It Be sessions and facing up to the “Get Back” debacle. Yet in February, they were back in the studio to record “I Want You” for what would become Abbey Road. Between February and April, John Lennon and Paul McCartney recorded “The Ballad of John and Yoko” (Paul on drums), Harrison’s song “Old Brown Shoe” for Let It Be and “Something” for Abbey Road, as well as Ringo Starr’s “Octopus’ Garden” and McCartney’s “Oh, Darling.”
The sniping continued. The foursome argued over business arrangements in the wake of Brian Epstein’s death. Meanwhile, the Beatles discussed writing a “mini-rock opera” – beginning with “You Never Give Me Your Money.” In July, while on vacation in Scotland with a pregnant Yoko Ono and two of their children, Lennon smashed his car. A laceration to his face required 18 stitches, and two of Yoko’s vertebrae were broken. Back at the studio, Lennon installed a bed for Yoko which annoyed the other three bandmates. Both Lennon and Ono were doing heroin; Lennon’s behavior was unpredictable. Yet on July 21, he recorded “Come Together.”
When Lennon returned from Scotland, he was furious that McCartney had spent so much time on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” McCartney’s near-vaudeville songs, like “When I’m Sixty-Four” or “Your Mother Should Know,” had always somehow integrated with the mix, but on Abbey Road “Oh Darling” (seemingly an excuse for McCartney to scream) and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” are dull indulgences. The melodies of the linked songs, including “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” and “Mean Mr. Mustard,” may be sweet, but the fragments don’t add up to something larger. Harrison’s strong contributions – “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something” – compensated for weaknesses.
EMI released Abbey Road in September, 1969 – as Lennon and Ono flew off to Toronto for a concert featuring their own band. McCartney and Harrison went directly into solo work, and soon Lennon did, too. The making of Abbey Road entailed many tiresome, vexing and antagonistic moments, as well as some conviviality — but Womack, who has written three other Beatles-related books, manages with some effort to keep the grim story going to its dispiriting end. His avidity for details, especially regarding the music-making and the allowances of eight-track, makes Solid State often solidly entertaining.
[Published by Cornell University Press on October 15, 2019, 296 pages, 12 b&w halftones, $26.95 hardcover]
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In “Lagomorphology,” a chapter found towards the end of Rabbit’s Blues, Con Chapman reprises some of the essential facts about Johnny Hodges: the saxophone models he played, his habits (smoked cigars, rooted for the Yankees) and his austere behavior. The chapter comprises a charming gesture — a scrupulous biographer’s acknowledgement that something of his subject has eluded him. “He had an aloof bearing that others interpreted as bored or distracted … a placid man-who-has-seen-it-all mien … his imperturbability became impregnable,” Chapman writes. But for more than two decades, Hodges reigned as the most admired alto sax jazz player – only Benny Carter rivaled him in the polls. “Hodges’ art endures,” says Chapman, “because he kept his tenderness in reserve – never laying it on too thick – and used technique to express emotions without maudlin flourishes.”
Like his subject, Chapman also refrains from laying it on too thick, an occupational hazard for some jazz biographers – not that Hodges’ life evokes much drama. He seems to have devoted his life to his work, and he worked constantly. He drank moderately and didn’t use drugs regularly. He insisted on being paid in cash but was careful with money. He was married twice and his wives often traveled with him, perhaps to keep him in tow. He didn’t brawl but his dry humor could turn acerbic. He showed up for work on time and played well with others. And again, his posture and attitude: “He was small, like a rabbit. His stage demeanor was impassive, and his face was a mask that camouflaged his emotions in much the same way a rabbit stands still against a natural background to avoid detection.” Thus his nickname, though he was also known as “Jeep.”
But Chapman has created a robust narrative out of these seemingly modest materials – and a richly discerning book on jazz in the last century. The story of Hodges’ remarkable rise and enduring career illuminates the arrival and continued evolution of jazz itself and the role of the saxophone, from the music’s early forms in New Orleans and New York, through the big band era, the advances in recording, the formation of jazz ensembles, and the raucous arrival of bebop. During these changes, one thing stayed consistent – Hodges’ tone, “by turns languorous and inflamed.” Chapman quotes Philip Larkin on the sound: “So bland, so clear, so voluptuously voiced with portamento (gliding gracefully from note to note) and glissandi (gliding from one pitch to another but not continuously, unlike portamento) and yet so essentially hot.”
Chapman follows young Hodges from his birth in Cambridge in 1907 and youth in Boston’s South End where he picked up the saxophone after seeing one in a store window. He seems to have taught himself to play with the help of friends and some instruction. His young neighbors Harry Carney and Charlies Holmes would go on with him to play professionally. The New Orleans-inflected sound of Sidney Bechet was his first major influence. By 1926 at age 19, Hodges was in New York and playing soprano sax in his Bechet’s band. That year, Hodges moved on to Chick Webb’s band. And in 1927, not yet 21 years old, Hodges was hired by Duke Ellington.
Rabbit’s Blues is a story about stolid persistence as Hodges single-mindedly advanced to take prominent roles as an Ellington soloist and recording artist. It’s also a story about competition between blowers – Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Jimmy Dorsey, and later, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. But at the center of the tale is Duke Ellington and the productive and occasionally contentious relationship between him and Hodges. In 1938, Billy Strayhorn entered Ellington’s circle and profoundly enriched the repertoire and boosted Hodges’ performances. Hodges stayed with the big band until 1951, often taking the opportunity to work with other artists on stage and in the studio. After a brief period leading his own band, he returned to Ellington.
Chapman vivifies all of these connections, tracks the development of the music, the changes in the public’s tastes, the critical view of Hodges as Parker and Coltrane emphasized the “rage and introspection” of new jazz, and Hodges’ influence on younger players like Don Byas, Sonny Criss, Cannonball Adderley and Ben Webster. The links between these characters come alive through anecdote – as when Coltrane joined Hodges’ band in 1952, only to be fired for nodding out on heroin during sets.
Discussing Hodges’ tone, Chapman points out that Hodges “changed the placement of the mouthpiece of his sax depending on the tone he wanted to produce; when he desired a softer sound or to release a note, he held it a bit off center, on the right side of his lips, and when he wanted to blow more forcefully or with the vibrato that characterized his most passionate flight, he’d edge it back to the middle.” Details matter here because precision — of intention and effect — lie at the heart of both Hodges’ art and Chapman’s care for his subject and text.
Hodges’ mastery of the blues idiom (despite hailing from Boston) melded with both the melodic emphases of jazz standards and Ellington’s innovative scores. “Innocent pleasure seemed to disappear as a proper emotional subject for jazz shortly before Hodges died” in 1970, Chapman says. The innocent exuberance of a boy playing expressively and sweetly for adults – this is what I hear after following Johnny Hodges’ life through Chapman’s carefully modulated portrayal. So this afternoon, I drove to Cambridge and parked across the street from 137 Putnam Avenue, Hodges’ birthplace, and listened to “Jeep’s Blues.”
[Published by Oxford University Press on September 2, 2019, 240 pages, $27.00 hardcover]