Words of Danny O'Bigbelly My idea of a good time

Perhaps as a response to my essay about Tommy on Sunday, readers have brought to my attention a new group that they predict will be the next super monster group of rock.  As they put it, this group will be huge, epic, historic, and mammoth.

This group is in its formative period, and is changing names on a daily (perhaps hourly) basis.  I can certainly appreciate the challenges that any group has on choosing a good name, given the current emphasis and expectation that group names be short, easily remembered, and contain a sexual innuendo, a euphemism, and a snide reference calculated to annoy fans of other generations and/or types of music.  This is why “The Rolling Stones” will never be as great as “The Beatles”, and why both bands were trumped by “The Faces”, “The Who”, “Kiss”, and the exquisitely named “Yes”.  The additional requirement–that the name not already be in use–is the real killer, however, because after decades of mining the vernacular, all the good ones are taken.  This leads to disastrous names composed from the names of the artists, which in turn leads to desperate measures such as artists changing names to avoid conflict, making up names to sound cooler, stealing names from songs, or even more drastic steps.

When their name has remained the same for more than a week, I’ll be happy to share it, but in the meanwhile all I can tell you is that the group desires to have a very short name, because a short name appeals to their core and over-arching goal, which is to be the “greenest” band in the world, and a short name will help to achieve that goal by reducing the amount of ink on their posters, dye on their t-shirts, light bulbs on their marquees, and time required to google them.

I spoke Tuesday with several members of the band during breaks from a rehearsal that took place in an unheated and poorly-lit Boston-area studio, where they are rehearsing for their premiere performance, which is tentatively scheduled for the late Spring, when it is warm enough to play outside or in the subway without, as they put it, “freezing their asses off.”  They asked me to keep their identities anonymous, at least until they choose appropriately memorable and copyrightable stage names, and so instead of their given names, I will use names based on their favorite cookies.

While Snickerdoodles and Necco worked out some of the details with Double-stuffed Oreo, Congo Bar explained to me some of the implications of the group.  She explained that they only play acoustic instruments, made from long-lasting, non-toxic and renewable materials that can be constructed using low-carbon offset techniques.  Thumb-print, the lead guitarist, for example, plays a guitar made from wood and bamboo, with a fretboard made of puka shells (no, neither one of  us knows what they are either) and strung with catgut strings, created from the intestines of contented pigs that have died a natural death after a long life consuming a diet composed only of garbage.  Some of the other members of the group play only virtual instruments, or conserve energy by simply appearing on stage, looking good and providing emotional and spiritual support for the members who, in the service of their art, do suffer the guilt of consuming natural resources; despite her best efforts, Ginger Snap, for example, has been unable to find a saxophone that is not constructed from metal, and nobody has any idea where to find a microphone that doesn’t require wires, batteries, or both.

The group does not perform live concerts, due to their concern about the resources required to transport themselves and their audience to and fro and amplify their instruments, the noxious chemicals required to clean up after a typical rock event, and the toxic, non-biodegradable karma exuded by ticket scalpers.

They do not release recordings of their music on CDs or LPs, but instead only release their music for digital download, and encode their music using lossy and some would say crappy MP3 parameters designed to favor conservation of bits rather than fidelity.  They do not use any sort of DRM, but instead make it easy to share and download their music from any source, which means that it is not necessary to permanently allocate storage for their music.

Their music is engineered to sound good at low volume; the group estimates that the environmental impact of listening to their entire catalog will be less than that of listening to the full-length single of “Highway to Hell” played at appropriate, window-rippling loudness.  In fact, they believe that if they make their songs simple and quiet enough, then their fans can easily commit them entirely to memory and reproduce them at will, without any electronics at all but simply through a combination of clapping, humming, and facial expressions.

I later spoke with Peanut Butter, the manager, light technician, roadie, backup-vocalist, and chief hype officer for the band, about sex and drugs, the other two pillars that hold the rock-and-roll world erect.  Peanut Butter explained that these subjects were the focus of much ongoing discussion, and he was not sure that consensus had yet been reached, and therefore was very careful to qualify his remarks as reflecting his own views, and not necessarily the view of his bandmates.  As far as drugs and other mind-altering substances are concerned, the group restricts itself to chemicals that can be produced through natural or semi-natural processes.  Alcohol is permitted, as are mushrooms and mescaline.  Marijuana is permitted, but the band only permits themselves to get baked via baked goods, such as cookies or brownies–smoking is strictly forbidden, because of the obvious impact of the smoke on the environment.  Heroin is off the list, at least until fair-trade heroin is available, and not even this bunch is stupid enough to try meth.

The subject of sexual mores is clearly one that the band has not resolved, and opinions are still somewhat divided on key issues.  Peanut Butter believes that sex is simply ecologically indefensible and has chosen to remain celibate, while Snickerdoodles, who is gay, believes that only homosexual sex is environmentally friendly, because there is no possibility of offspring.   Necco and Thumb-print, who are straight, have stated for the record that although they are uninterested in personally participating in gay sex, they would have no objection if Ginger Snap and Congo Bar, the two female members of the group, happened to turn out to be bisexual, especially if they are permitted to watch.

Necco, who is perhaps the most out-spoken of the group, did speak strongly on the subject of groupies:  “Although in some sense groupies are a renewable resource, they’re really an enormous, unsustainable burden on the environment.  It takes anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five years for a groupie to reach maturity, and even then only one in ten or maybe one in a hundred groupies make the cut, and then typically only for a short time.  It’s an enormous, senseless waste!  Much worse than eating beef or wearing leather.   We completely reject the culture of disposable groupies.”

Peanut Butter, claiming to speak for the rest of the group, wanted to make sure that my readers know that Necco “can sound like a real douche-bag sometimes, although he has a heart of responsibly-mined gold.”

It wouldn’t be right to neglect to mention my appreciation for the fact that my wife has stoically endured several iterations and variations of Tommy over the last forty-eight hours.

It wouldn’t be right.

There’s a story that has been told a thousand times, eventually becoming a self-parodying idiom: a kid goes to see a rock concert, gets inspired, buys a guitar, learns to play, becomes a rock star, and inspires the next generation. It certainly is plausible; the fruits of early rock music were fairly low-hanging, the glamor obvious, and the path to success short enough that a good concert could conceivably give a teenager with nascent musical abilities enough of a push to start a career. It doesn’t take much imagination to imagine how a repetitious rhythm, a few chords and simple lyrics might inspire a group or maybe two, which might in turn spawn variations, deconstructions, loving homages, and composites that reference several earlier generations.

There’s another story, however, which is much rarer. It’s the story of a person who goes to see a rock concert, gets inspired, walks out of the theater with a new and better understanding of themselves and their place in the world, and this feeling has enough inertia to sustain him or her through major life events over the next few decades. That’s the sort of story that people tell about seeing The Who perform Tommy live.

Tommy, which has been called the first true “rock opera” (although in its original form it didn’t really satisfy many of the canonical criteria for opera, the later film and Broadway incarnations of the music and story arguably may), is an intricate and rich tapestry of great complexity, knit together into a musically cohesive structure of nearly flawless majesty. You could think of its components as a sort of musical Noah’s Ark: everything needed to repopulate the rock world in the case of some sort of musical catastrophe is included, but there’s also nothing extraneous or gratuitous. The nuance and subtlety of the music was lost on some reviewers, who were distracted by the reputation of The Who as the loudest performers in a cohort known for a profound lack of restraint.

The plot of Tommy doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but that’s not really a problem because it’s just a delivery vehicle for the points that The Who wish to convey. Many of the listeners of the individual songs or medleys from the album don’t even know that there’s a story, or would be hard-pressed to explain what it might be. Fixing the story so that it seems plausible or realistic would simply add a bunch of unnecessary baggage that would take time away from the real points; nobody ever criticizes the parables in the Bible because they lack context, character development or even names for most of the major characters, just as nobody cares that Batman, Iron Man, and The Green Hornet are all essentially the same story. The story is just a scaffolding.

When the eponymous Tommy was a young boy, he witnessed something awful and fraught with lasting and dire implications, but was told by his parents to pretend that he didn’t see or hear anything, and that he mustn’t ever tell anyone. Tommy acts on this command far too literally and without proper qualification, thereby becoming deaf, dumb and blind. While the Beat generation was trying to batter down the doors of perception and explore what lay further, Tommy was caulking his shut. Alone with his thoughts, Tommy was given much time to think, and much to think about, and he eventually attains a state of limited enlightenment.

In the meanwhile, back in the real world, people are beginning to suspect that Tommy is not physically crippled, but that his isolation is self-imposed. This is particularly obvious when Tommy demonstrates a nearly prescient aptitude for the game of pinball, a game which usually requires a keen eye and hearing, but which, in Tommy’s case, he is able to play entirely by touch, and perhaps, as his vanquished opponents conjecture, by sense of smell.

The song Pinball Wizard, which illustrates this part of the story, which was allegedly added to Tommy as a quickly-written afterthought (to lighten the mood of the overall piece, which was seen as too dark and serious), and which the Pete Townsend, its composer, called “the most clumsy piece of writing [he’d] ever done”, became an enormous pop hit and radio hit as a single, even though the lyrics make absolutely no sense without context. One must wonder whether Townsend is being self-deprecating, or perhaps is simply so facile at his craft that his worst is better than most composers best–after all, if you asked Beethoven to choose his least favorite symphony, he’d have to pick a number from one to nine. In any case, the chord progression over a droning, pulsing tone at the beginning of the song, and the vivace strumming that follows is immediately recognizable, more than forty years later. In fact, I would wager that most listeners could recognize this song from the first three notes, played by any performer, on any instrument, at any reasonable tempo, simply because so few other composers use this structure. Certainly by the time the intro is played–a sequence of consisting of sixteen unique chords–anyone who isn’t tone-deaf and amnesiac and has been in the vicinity of a radio during the past forty years is likely to be able to recognize the song.

Most concert footage of The Who focuses on Roger Daltry, the singer, or on Pete Townsend jumping around and windmilling his guitar, or on Keith Moon doing things that defy analysis–although it’s great fun and rewarding to try–so it’s hard to figure out what Pete Townsend is doing to produce those sounds. In particular, there’s one moment important phrase change in Pinball Wizard when the guitar chords seem to transition impossibly far in an impossibly short period of time–through a suspended chord, but not to its resolution, but instead another suspended chord in a different, much higher position. It seems impossible to play, and watching someone with great technical proficiency play it at full speed, with the camera focused on his fingering, is even more impressive–at least at first glance (the change is around the thirty-second mark).

The truth, as explained by the talented and articulate Peter Autschbach in this clip, is that what appears to be resolving into the next chord is not a conventional chord at all. It’s the sound of the pick being strummed across all of the strings open, as revealed clearly at the 3:15 mark. It’s not something that one would ordinarily expect to find in a piece of music, but it fits here. Perhaps Townsend never got around to finishing this part, and just wanted to keep the cadence going while his hands shifted for the next chord, or maybe there’s another message: simplicity suffices. There’s certainly a message here from Tommy, who, though apparently blind, can play pinball with nearly supernatural skill–just as many of us are able to accomplish amazing feats of skill and cognition, whether ingenious engineering marvels or scintillating blog entries, while still being utterly oblivious and ignorant of so much that is going on around us.

Tommy eventually breaks free of his self-imposed exile from his senses, and reveals his enlightenment to his pinball followers, becoming a somewhat messianic figure in their eyes. Tommy is a gracious, although very skeptical and somewhat cynical, spiritual leader; his growing number of disciples beg for spiritual guidance, but he offers little. In stark contrast to the other self-proclaimed messiahs roaming the landscape of the mid-sixties, Tommy is a reluctant messiah, and makes few promises. After all, as he points out, he doesn’t have anything to say that hadn’t been said, and said well, by the messiahs who came before–and if Jesus et alia hadn’t been able to teach them, then why should they expect him to do any better?

The song I’m Free details this transition (if “details” is the proper word, since the lyrics are shorter than my description of them), and contains another item of musical inspiration. When the music begins, it seems to fit the triumphant moment–a strident, simple melody, in march tempo, played by the guitar. All goes according to expectations for the first four seconds or so, until the rest of the instruments and the singer join in, and it becomes apparent, after several seconds of readjusting where the listener believes that the beat falls, that the melody the guitar is playing is syncopated and ahead of the beat. By the time the phrase repeats, we’ve completely forgotten we were ever confused, but I defy anyone, no matter how many times they’ve heard this song, to get the count right for the first eight bars without careful concentration. Tommy is an eighth-note ahead of us, but that’s it. It’s enough to confuse us at first, but it soon becomes delightful.

The Who weren’t playing hard-to-get messiahs. Unlike some other groups, who claimed some spiritual insight, or at least to be well-intentioned, the message from The Who is always grounded in a gritty, cynical view of society and the world we live in. One need look no further than their overshadowed, underappreciated later masterpiece, Quadrophenia, in which gangs of teenagers, unified by race, religion, geography, income, social status and other beliefs, ostracize and murder each other over differences of opinion regarding haircuts, jacket styles, and musical preferences. If it’s not one thing, it’s another; people will always be able to find a way to make themselves miserable, unless they all devote all of their energy to fight against this most basic of human tendencies. But even good intentions are not always enough; when the live performance at Woodstock of excerpts of Tommy was interrupted by Abbie Hoffman, who attempted to grab a moment of stage time to speak about a social issue he thought should be of wide interest, Townsend explained, in unambiguous terms, that he didn’t wish to concede the floor, and underscored the point by clubbing Hoffman off of the stage with his guitar. While there is some question about whether this event was accurately reported by the media, the fact that it is widely believed and reported as fact is as important as the truth. Assuming that it is true, Hoffman probably was fortunate that Townsend got to him before Moon or Entwhistle–especially if Hoffman made the mistake of reminding them of plumbing fixtures. The Who might have been spiritual gadflies, but they certainly never claimed to be spiritual leaders and nobody ever mistook them for saints.

Tommy’s disciples and followers soon leave him, abandoning his path to spiritual enlightenment after realizing that self-sacrifice and hardship are required. Tommy is alone again; he can see, hear, and speak, but there is a question about whether anything has actually been gained. In the final song, Tommy pleads with the world to “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me” and he explains that although the inspiration he provided to his followers might have been ephemeral, the inspiration that he gained from them is eternal:

Listening to you, I get the music
Gazing at you, I get the heat
Following you, I climb the mountain
I get excitement at your feet
Right behind you, I see the millions
On you, I see the glory
From you, I get opinion
From you, I get the story

The lyrics repeat as the song builds in volume, passion, and tempo, più mosso alla doppio movimento. By 3:20, Townsend is windmilling; at 4:10, I start to really worry whether Daltry will survive another verse, but the song ends after five minutes simply because there’s nowhere left to go. The song is over, the instruments are silent, but the performance is not complete without the final footnote. As Townsend, almost shyly, thanks the audience for their applause, we realize that these aren’t only the words that Tommy wants to tell his former followers–they’re the words that The Who wants to say to us, and the words that we could be saying to each other.

A few years ago, when I was writing something I don’t even remember anymore, I needed a name to use in a story. Because of the parameters of the story, it needed to be the name of a well-known, young, somewhat exotic, attractive, successful, and completely unobtainable female. The canon was to use Jessica Alba, Paris Hilton, or that actress from Battlestar Gallactica (choose your favorite), but I decided to go a different route, as I tend to do. I picked Guo Jingjing, and I’ve been using her name ever since.

So, who is she? Guo Jingjing was one, if not the, preeminent 3-meter springboard diver in the world up until her (alleged, but not certain) retirement last year.

I misjudged on the “well-known” aspect. She’s a household name to millions of people, but if you’re reading this blog, chances are that you know only a few of them–perhaps none other than myself. Tabling that aspect for a moment, let’s go down the list and see if she qualifies:

She’s young; well, 29 seems young enough to me. She was younger a few years ago. Plus, as a diver and professional athlete, she has a physique that defies time.

She’s somewhat exotic; with a name like Jingjing, she doesn’t really need to do anything additional to qualify.

She’s attractive enough to have a successful modeling career; these things are subjective, of course, but many people think she looks good.

She’s successful; her product endorsement and modeling careers have made her one of the wealthiest women in the PRC, according to what I’ve read. She moves a lot of Wheaties, among other things. In her core competency, she won individual and/or synchronized events the world cup in 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2004; the world championships in 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009; the diving world cup in 1995, 2000, 2002, and 2004, and gold medals in the Olympics in 2004 and 2008. She has a heap of other medals from the most competitive events in the world of diving, but these are the highlights.

Finally, she’s unobtainable in the way that only a person from the other side of the world, who speaks no languages that I know, has her own security detail, is considered a state treasure of China, and has a jealous playboy billionaire boyfriend can be.

We all know that sometimes a modicum of success (or even no success whatsoever, but simply being in the right place at the right time) can be leveraged by a savvy agent into an enormous career. Is Miss Guo really that good, or does she just have a good marketing department?

She really is that good.

Consider her performance in the 2008 Olympics. In Olympic Women’s Springboard, each diver performs five dives per round. At this level of competition, each dive is crucial; a single error can cause a diver to drop several places in the rankings. A dive that does not match the basic elements of its description–a so-called ‘fail dive’–can eliminate a diver entirely.

By the third and final round, there are only twelve divers remaining. Each round starts with a fresh new score sheet; an outstanding score in the first round will not save you from mistakes made in the second round, and nothing can save you from mistakes made in the third.

It would be tempting to say that if Miss Guo had entirely flubbed one of her dives in the last round, throwing away 20% of her score, she would have still won, but that simply wouldn’t be true. That would be analogous to playing basketball or hockey a man short.  At this level, nobody can afford to sacrifice 20% of their score. She was competing against the best divers in the world, a cohort who could hold their own against any team of divers in history.

She would have finished sixth.