Return of the Prodigal Band: Beggars Banquet

 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

—Matthew 5:13

Nineteen sixty-seven had not been kind to the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones were all arrested on drug charges between February and May, and their year-end LP, Their Satanic Majesties Request—an uncharacteristically trendy foray into psychedelia (hey, everybody was doing it)—was roundly lambasted in the press as an anemic attempt at imitating the Beatles’ game-changing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released that summer. Critic Jon Landau, writing for Rolling Stone magazine, called Majesties “an insecure album in which [the Stones] try too hard to prove that they too are innovators, and that they too can say something new. [. . .] The new ideas are presented in such an undeveloped state that they do not achieve a valid identity of their own.” (Today, Majesties doesn't sound all that bad—it was probably just a matter of poor timing that sentenced it to its undeserved but lingering reputation of being the poster child for rock and roll missteps.)

Prior to the drug busts and Satanic Majesties came Between the Buttons, in January—an album that isn’t without its merits (both in its UK and US iterations), but which suffers somewhat from an overall feel of vacillation and irresolution. It’s as though the band self-consciously tried to absorb as many contemporary influences as possible,* but rather than properly digesting and repurposing those sounds in their own Stones-like image, they only slightly reprocessed them, resulting in an album that comes off as a scattershot semi-entity, some aspects of which sound even more dated today than Majesties.

*Especially the Kinks. Oddly, though, other than the (psychedelicized) Bo Diddley-influenced “Please Go Home,” there’s not much trace of the blues or R&B—hitherto the Stones' raisons d’être. 

As had been the case in 1967, the Stones didn't completely avoid trouble in 1968, a year that is remembered primarily for its violence, assassinations, and political and racial unrest. Their August single, “Street Fighting Man,” was purportedly inspired by an anti-war rally at London's US embassy, in which Jagger had participated, as well as protests in the U.S. that had turned violent, though Keith Richards claimed a couple of years later, “it really is ambiguous as a song.” The 45 was released in the States within a week of the clash between police and protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and, fearing the song might incite further violence, several Chicago radio stations refused to play it. Fueling the flames, the picture sleeve featured a photo of police apparently kicking a fallen demonstrator at a political rally; the sleeve was quickly withdrawn and is now a collector's item. 

It wouldn’t be the last time that year that the Stones would have to bend to The Establishment’s perception of propriety. The cover art for their next album, Beggars Banquet, was initially slated to be a photo of a grimy public restroom, complete with toilet, and its graffiti-covered walls. At the behest of the record company, and despite a dispute from the Stones, the released cover would instead end up being a simple white mock banquet invitation.*

*The cover as it was originally intended was finally released on a reissue of the LP in the 1980s, as well as CD releases.

The proposed original cover for Beggars Banquet.

In the spring the Stones had convened at Olympic Studios in London with Jimmy Miller—the producer of their latest single and bona fide rock classic, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”—in tow to record Beggars Banquet, an album that would herald a return to the blues-rock form from which they had sprung in the early '60s, but with a grittier, more contemporary, world-weary edge. For many, including yours truly, it was with this record that the Stones found their real musical identity and became the force of nature that has ever since come to mind when the name The Rolling Stones is uttered. As Banquet recording engineer Glyn Johns put it, the album marked the Stones’ “coming of age . . . I think that the material was far better than anything they’d ever done before.” If the Beatles were reborn with the release of Sgt. Pepper, the Stones were also with the release of Beggars Banquet. It transformed them from a great singles band (and, IMHO, a merely above average cover band) to a great album band, setting their own course and beholden to no one.

It’s no coincidence that this transformation occurred just as Jimmy Miller entered the Stones’ orbit. Starting with Banquet, he would produce five of their finest albums, four of which—Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers (not entirely produced by Miller, but close enough), and the gold standard for double LPs, Exile on Main St.—are generally counted among the greatest rock albums ever made. They are the four highest ranking Stones LPs on Rolling Stone Magazine’s 2012 list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. As Phil Brown, an engineer at Olympic Studios said, “Jimmy Miller was this incredible kind of energy and drive and force. He made the session feel like you wanted to be there and make music. But he wasn’t a hands-on producer. There was more of an overall control, a bit of a vibe” [sic].

Keith Richards, Jimmy Miller, and Mick Jagger. Photo: Robert Altman - Getty Images

The fact that the ouster from the group of the talented but troubled multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones occurred soon after this burst of rock and roll excellence began probably was just a coincidence. Nevertheless, the arrival of the gifted 20-year-old guitarist from John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, Mick Taylor—Jones’ replacement—elevated the overall quality of the Stones’ collective performance to a whole new level, and helped transform them into a great live band (and, IMHO, an excellent cover band, particularly when performing Chuck Berry numbers) in 1969, by which time they were fully firing on all cylinders. Beggars Banquet would be the last Stones album released during Jones’ lifetime.

Banquet’s leadoff track, “Sympathy for the Devil,” the recording of which was documented in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film, One Plus One (AKA Sympathy for the Devil), was emblematic of the tumultuous times in which the album was created. It originally included Mick Jagger's line, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed Kennedy?’,” but when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while the sessions were taking place—from June 4th through June 10th—the lyric was changed to “Who killed the Kennedys?”. The fierce performance (the energetic samba rhythm coming about under producer Miller’s influence) lays the groundwork for the album, yet it gives no hint as to what lies ahead for first time listeners.  

Pax Pacifica: Donovan’s Reef

This post is part of the John Ford Blogathon, hosted by Krell Laboratories and Bemused and Nonplussed. Oh, and there are spoilers.

John Ford turned fifty-five in 1949, and if his contribution of that year to the all-time roster of cinema classics, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, is any indication, retirement seems to have been on his mind. It’s hard to imagine him not seeing something of himself in Captain Nathan Brittles, the august and honorable but curmudgeonly and slightly antiquated commandant of Fort Starke, whom Ford gives an exalted sendoff, courtesy of Brittles’ extended U.S. Cavalry family.

In 1953’s The Sun Shines Bright, often cited by Ford as one of his personal favorites among his own films, he puts noble, patriarchal old Judge Billy Priest out to pasture as a parade of admirers—Priest’s extended family—passes his home in his honor. A parade of a different type passes the defeated Mayor Frank Skeffington in Ford’s The Last Hurrah in 1958. Unlike Brittles or Priest, Skeffington does have an immediate family, a son. Yet, besides a nephew, his cadre of political cronies—brothers in arms through many campaigns, as it were—comprise his real family . . . not unlike Ford, whose Field Photo Farm he used as a gathering place for former members of the Field Photographic Division of the Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA), who had served under Ford’s command during World War II. 

The overarching mood in each of these films is elegiac, melancholy.  

Five years after Hurrah, at the age of sixty-nine, Ford was considered by just about everybody but the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd to be a spent force, a former purveyor of beloved, if sentimental, historical fare and Westerns, despite his well-received, reflective elegy to the Old West and scathing exposé on western myth of the previous year, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. By this time Ford—once one of Hollywood’s elite directors, with six Academy Awards to his credit—needed the star power of his perennial leading man and alter ego John Wayne (whose career Ford had set on its upward course with 1939’s groundbreaking Stagecoach) to guarantee box office success for, and studio interest in, a film project. Yet he seems to have come to terms with his own perceived antiquity in the generally upbeat Donovan’s Reef.

Often dismissed as a brawling romp (which it is, up to a point), Donovan’s Reef, scripted by James Edward Grant and Ford veteran Frank S. Nugent, unfolds much like Ford’s The Wings of Eagles, with liberal doses of broad, free-for-all slapstick, transitioning into a serene, if not sober, reverie. Ford’s image of the dustbin of history, the purgatory of social impotence into which old soldiers are relegated, however laudatory their sendoffs (think of Spig Wead in Wings and Marty Maher in The Long Gray Line), has morphed into permanent residency in a tropical paradise, albeit a flawed one (as will be discussed below)—a Valhalla of sorts, according to film critic Andrew Sarris. The mood is lighthearted, especially for later Ford. The mortal enemies of Liberty Valance, John Wayne and Lee Marvin, have become friendly combatants who are bound by a shared birthday (significantly, December 7^th) and having fought side by side in the Pacific in the Second World War. 

Ford and Wayne on location for Donovan's Reef.

The film opens with “Boats” Gilhooley (Marvin) diving off a merchant ship after realizing he’s been shanghaied, and swimming to the nearby island of Haleakaloha, French Polynesia, which, we come to realize, is his annual destination on December 7th, where he carries out the time honored tradition of a birthday brawl with his old Navy buddy, “Guns” Donovan (Wayne). Later it is revealed that, following World War II, Donovan and his (and Gilhooley’s) former commanding officer, “Doc” Dedham (Jack Warden), made their homes on Haleakaloha, which they had defended against the Japanese, guerilla style, during the late war. Doc’s wife passed away while he was overseas and, though he had a young daughter back home in Boston, opted to stay in the island chain, where his physician’s skills were desperately needed by the natives. Donovan built a saloon—the Donovan’s Reef of the title—and Doc married Manulani, the granddaughter of the last hereditary prince of the islands. He had three children with her; she died giving birth to the third. His daughter by his first wife, Amelia (Elizabeth Allen), now an adult, stands to inherit enough stock from her great aunt to give her a controlling interest in the family shipping business if she can prove her father—to whom the shares were bequeathed—to be of less than acceptable moral character, “by Boston standards.” Donovan and Gilhooley get wind of her coming to Haleakaloha to meet her father.

As in all of Maine native Ford’s works, Boston is a breeding ground for all manner of screwballs, and it is presumed by those close to Doc that Amelia is a racist. Thus, a plot is hatched—unbeknownst to the doctor, who is currently on the outer islands ministering to the sick—by Donovan, Gilhooley, the local Catholic priest, Father Cluzeot (Marcel Dalio), and the governor of the island, Marquis Andre de Lage (Cesar Romero) to lead Amelia to believe that Doc’s children by Manulani belong to Donovan until Doc returns and can tell her in his own way that they are his. The kids and their belongings are removed from his house and are taken, in an almost funereal procession/parade, to Donovan’s living quarters above his saloon.

Next to the Governor, who is not much more than a scheming Lothario and a comic, benign descendant of Raymond Massey’s martinet of an island governor in Ford’s The Hurricane, Amelia is the nearest thing to a villain in Donovan’s Reef. But before all is said and done we, and the plotters, eventually realize that our/their presumption of racism on her part was unfounded. She and her eccentric, haughty assemblage of relatives are certainly no match for the controlling, bigoted WASP brain trust of the “New England City” of The Last Hurrah.

De Lage (Cesar Romero) attempts to charm Amelia 

(Elizabeth Allen) onto his list of conquests.

Nevertheless, other forms of racism do exist within this island community, a quasi-paradise at best: remnants of French imperialism, racism toward “half-castes,” de Lage’s Amherst-educated Chinese assistant’s prejudice toward his own “barbarian” countrymen. Ford also reminds us, through Amelia’s substituting “Donovan” with the first Irish name that comes into her head—a motif that would show up the following year in Cheyenne Autumn—that Irish-Americans were discriminated against for many years. There is jealousy: Miss Lafleur (Dorothy Lamour, another callback to The Hurricane), sees Amelia as a threat, and treats her with disdain. There is nepotism: the pampered, pompous Governor de Lage is cousin to the French minister of foreign affairs. It is a microcosm of society, warts and all.

Yet “pax” (a running gag between Donovan and Amelia*) can be achieved there. At a time when the world was in the deepest throes of the Cold War and religious unrest was beginning to rear its head in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, there is coexistence between various races and religions in Ford’s paradise. Catholicism lives peaceably alongside traditional Polynesian beliefs and rituals. One of the markers in the church graveyard bears a Star of David. Multiple races, cultures, and nationalities inhabit the islands, and all are allowed to live as they choose. While the white, Western minority is unmistakably the ruling class, according to the then-accepted post-WWII model, it rules with a soft touch, with benevolence and tolerance. 

* Pax Americana is a term that was used by then-sitting President John F. Kennedy. Amelia mentions the Kennedy family late in the film.

That You May See the Meaning of Within: Deconstructing Revolver

At the end of “Lady Lazarus,” an episode from the fifth season of the superb cable TV period drama Mad Men, set in the 1960s world of Madison Avenue, ad man Don Draper is urged by his wife to listen to a specific track on the new Beatles album she’s just purchased. After she leaves their chic Manhattan apartment to attend her evening acting class, Don places the LP on the hi-fi turntable, drops the tone arm onto the last track, and lies back in his Danish lounge chair as the distinctively unconventional sounds of “Tomorrow Never Knows” fill the room. Before making it halfway through the song, he abruptly jerks the stylus across the grooves and off of the record and walks silently out of the room, apparently having had enough.

Small wonder, as this positively avant-garde recording must have sounded bizarrely foreign to the ears of anyone over the age of 30 in 1966, let alone 40, the age of the Draper character at the time (his wife, Megan, was in her twenties). Nevertheless, after a few moments of silence, the Mad Men credits roll and the song picks up where it left off on the soundtrack. The already rapidly changing world of the 1960s will move forward at an even faster pace than before, with or without the Don Drapers who inhabit it.

“Tomorrow Never Knows” is the most adventurous and experimental composition on an album filled with envelope-pushing music that has proven over time—more so than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as will be discussed—to be the creative apex of the Beatles’ career: Revolver. It took a while for the virtues of this inspired work to come into worldwide focus, mainly due to the fact that the U.S. issue, as was the case with all of the group’s albums up to that point, had been truncated prior to its release (three of its John Lennon-penned songs were preemptively lifted for placement on the patched-together “Yesterday”. . . and Today), thus preventing Stateside fans and critics alike from hearing the LP as it was intended, in many cases until the band’s catalogue was initially released to CD in 1987.

Following the magnificent, atmospheric Rubber Soul, Revolver—by turns edgy, poignant, lovely, whimsical, gritty, challenging, and always dynamic—completed the most overwhelming one-two punch of any musical artist of the rock era. Both have stood the test of time, sounding as fresh and inspired nearly 50 years later as when they were first released. Revolver, while maintaining the universal listenability* that had become a Beatles trademark, raised the stakes artistically for all of rock music like no album before or since.

* For the most part; as the Beatles ventured into uncharted musical territory they were a little apprehensive that some fans might not follow.

The three composing Beatles were firing on all cylinders. Lennon’s contributions were more richly compelling and cumulatively potent than on any other album. Paul McCartney broke new ground with deeply poignant lyrics (particularly with “Eleanor Rigby”) and more elaborate melodies than on any of his previous compositions, transcending his already well developed pop music sensibilities. George Harrison reached a new level and a personal best, not only contributing three numbers to a Beatles album for the first time, but even the one chosen to lead off the LP (the acerbic, funky “Taxman”)—despite the heavy competition for disc space from Lennon & McCartney at their peak.

The iconic cover art for Revolver was created by Beatle buddy Klaus Voormann.

Millions of words have probably been written about the Beatles over the years, possibly hundreds of thousands about Revolver, so I’m not going to even attempt to critique this masterpiece. Since I’ve practically grown up with it, I’m too close to it, and therefore incapable of doing it justice. Not only has Beatles authority Robert Rodriguez done just that, he has also placed the landmark album within the perspectives of both its own time and ours, while collecting all that is known of what went down in the actual recording sessions, in Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock ‘n’ Roll.  

Looking for the Veedon Fleece

If anyone has earned the right to belt out the Sinatra anthem “My Way,” it’s Van Morrison, though to my knowledge Van has never publicly uttered a stanza of those Paul Anka-penned lyrics. Whether howling the blues, evocatively crooning a soulful ballad, immersing himself in a jazz workout, cranking out a cynical, seemingly obligatory music biz diatribe, or plumbing the depths of his Celtic soul to meld all of those disciplines into some kind of empyrean sound of his own creation, he seems to have done exactly what he has wanted to do, while ignoring or outflanking the conjecture of critic and fan alike at every turn. As one expositor, who has as much of a handle on Van as anyone, Greil Marcus, has said, “Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of rock & roll, a singer who cannot be pinned down, dismissed, or fitted into anyone's expectations.”

Taken as a whole, there’s practically nothing to which the music of George Ivan Morrison can be likened. Alternately defined by critics as rock, pop, blues, folk, jazz, jazz fusion, soul, blue-eyed soul, Irish soul, or Caledonia soul, it has always, throughout Morrison’s nearly fifty years of recording, defied any specific genre classification. He came by this ability to evade pigeonholing naturally, as his musical influences (thanks to a father who could boast of the most expansive record collection in Ulster, Northern Ireland in the 1950s) ranged from itinerant bluesmen Lead Belly, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters to Scottish skiffler Lonnie Donegan to country and western troubadour Hank Williams to original soul men Ray Charles and Solomon Burke to divine gospel wailer Mahalia Jackson—all of whom, incidentally, Van would eventually either refer to in song or perform with in person. Consequently, his music has influenced the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, U2, Sinéad O'Connor, and several others.

And there’s that voice: both guttural and celestial, piercing the air and stirring the soul while soothing it at the same time . . . a matchless force of nature. Again, Greil Marcus put it best: “As a physical fact, Morrison may have the richest and most expressive voice pop music has produced since Elvis Presley, and with a sense of himself as an artist that Elvis was always denied. ”

For my taste, Van as spiritual, soul-searching Irish mystic—an incarnation he doesn’t seem to be able to assume at will—has produced his most resonant works: Astral Weeks, Saint Dominic’s Preview, Veedon Fleece, Common One, No Guru No Method No Teacher. Of these scattered, transcendent few, Veedon Fleece stands out. Recorded in 1973 and ’74 after his divorce from his first wife and a visit to Ireland, it is one of the most richly ethereal, metaphysical creations of any artist in any musical genre you’d care to name.

Van performs “Bulbs” live at the Montreux Jazz Festival, June 30, 1974.

When broaching the prospect of discussing Veedon Fleece, one comes up against the same difficulties as with attempting to discuss Pet Sounds, or the works of Terrence Malick: one finds oneself pondering the imponderable, and words simply don’t cut it. Nevertheless, it is worth the effort, even if skirting the fringes is the best that can be hoped for. A wistful, stream of consciousness song cycle, there is a haunting, impenetrable mystery to all of the pieces, which are all of a piece.

The album itself seems to ponder the imponderables of human existence. What exactly is the Veedon Fleece of the title, referred to in the contemplative “You Don’t Pull No Punches But You Don’t Push the River”? Is it a tangible thing, like the Golden Fleece of Jason’s quest? Or is it the object of a quest for spiritual enlightenment? The latter is a subject explored often in Morrison’s later work, and it’s part of a continuum of pastoral images and essences, characters and places, that flow throughout this album and the rest of his oeuvre. “You Don’t Pull No Punches” gives the impression, musically, of floating inexorably down a river, an elliptical piano prologue eliciting images of swirling eddies before the tempo changes and we are set on our bass-driven, violin and flute-augmented course. Never one to shy away from literary, cultural, or religious references, Van evokes William Blake and the Sisters of Mercy, who are indeed “looking for the Veedon Fleece.”  

Peckinpah is in the Details: Junior Bonner

Robert Preston and Steve McQueen as father and 

son in director Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner.

America, if not the world, was in a state of flux in 1972, as the alternative values that had made their presence unequivocally known in the 1960s began to slowly but surely weave themselves into the fabric of daily life. At its most superficial and visible level, this transition was evidenced by the disappearing ears of traditionally conservative types—then called “squares”—as they became increasingly obscured by steadily growing hair . . . with previously nonexistent sideburns keeping pace. On the female side, less was the new more when it came to wearing makeup, and pants were replacing skirts as the norm as closet feminists began pushing their own personal envelopes. New was supplanting old at a rapid pace; generations-old Victorian storefronts and other building exteriors were being hidden like family skeletons behind more simple, modern-looking façades.

Familiar ways of life were receding into the sunset as well, only on a more permanent basis than fleeting haute couture and temporary, cosmetic architectural fixes. The landscape was changing, literally and figuratively. It is this reality that is layed out in the background tableau of Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner, the story of an aging rodeo champion—played by ’sixties icon Steve McQueen in a quietly inspired performance—who is dealing with the dissolution of his family as he continues to age in a young man’s business.  

Peckinpah, for all the slow motion violence and carnage he splashed across the screen in his influential and lauded The Wild Bunch, for which he is best remembered today, also had a markedly serene, bucolic side. This undercurrent of tranquility showed itself in the spiritual high road he took in Ride the High Country, a sadly forgotten 1962 masterpiece, and again in the quirky and personal The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970). It is revealed in all its pastoral, pensive glory in Junior Bonner. In this starkly scintillating, reflective film, scripted by Jeb Rosebrook, Peckinpah’s camera records the world of the American Southwest of the early 1970s in a strikingly realistic manner, often using local folk from the Prescott, Arizona filming location as actors, and incorporating an actual Fourth of July parade that took place during shooting.

Junior’s father, Ace, a former rodeo champion himself and a local hero in Prescott, is basically a sixty-something boy who refuses to grow up, drinking in the residual adoration of the community with the same gusto one imagines he did in his prime. Yet his world and his family are deteriorating under his nose; his home has been bulldozed to make way for a trailer park that’s being developed by his other son, Curly, and he and his wife have long since parted ways, thanks to his cavalier improprieties through the years. Richly played by Robert Preston with his usual charming bravado, Ace is for all practical purposes an older version of Professor Harold Hill, the character he had immortalized ten years earlier in the film version of The Music Man, which Peckinpah admired. 

Junior’s ostensible Moby Dick is a bull named Sunshine, a nemesis which earlier—revealed in snippets of flashback—prevented him from winning a bulldogging competition, and which appears to be the device that drives the plot forward. Reading between the lines, one can surmise that Junior sees a successful repeat ride on Sunshine as a way of maintaining his hometown hero status, as well as staving off the encroaching end of his rodeo career—and a perhaps inevitable descent into his father’s irresponsible lifestyle. Yet the denouement occurs almost as a throwaway; Ace and his estranged wife (Ida Lupino) are enjoying one last hurrah together before Ace leaves for good for Australia, and Junior’s real estate developer brother (Joe Don Baker), himself an instrument of change, is off somewhere else as well. It is in the alternately rapid fire/invisible editing by Frank Santillo and Robert L. Wolfe that Peckinpah’s theme is revealed: an America in transition, as old ways and traditions become things of the past. 

It’s a Family Affair: There’s a Riot Goin’ On

When I was growing up, in the pre-Internet/Wii/Netflix/iPhone/satellite radio era, the main source of entertainment for a small town kid, besides television (only one channel if you had “rabbit ears” like we did, three with a rooftop antenna), was Top 40 radio. It was an airplay format based on the popularity of songs recently released on 45 rpm records, the more popular ones being played more frequently per hour or two than those further down the list. Every major U.S. city had its own Top 40 station, usually on the AM dial, and each city had its own top forty most popular songs, though they weren’t necessarily limited to forty. WLS, the 50,000-watt powerhouse station located in Chicago, for instance, migrated from forty, to thirty, to sometimes twenty-five songs on its weekly survey over the years, and every New Year’s Eve would count down the top 89 hits of the year, to coincide with its number on the dial.

Billboard magazine, just as it does now, maintained a nationwide weekly ranking based on sales, airplay, and surveys. Unlike now, its charts were fewer and less fragmented, with Country and Western, Rhythm and Blues (R&B), and Popular (Pop) being the primary genres tabulated. The Pop charts were considered the barometer of the nation’s tastes, and the goal of most artists, regardless of their musical style, was to top that chart, “with a bullet” if possible. With the advent of FM radio and album oriented rock (AOR) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the previously unchallenged institution of Top 40 became a target of derision for everyone from musical elitists and audiophiles to various proponents of the ‘60s counterculture, and it was often held up as a symbol of everything that was wrong with mainstream society. My main beef was the maddening amount of repetition inherent in such a limited playlist, and when I was thirteen I started listening almost exclusively to what was then an oldies station, WDZ in Decatur, before discovering, and succumbing to, FM.

For all the grief leveled at the phenomenon that was Top 40 radio in its heyday, by the late ‘60s-early ‘70s it nevertheless reflected popular tastes that were capable of simultaneously embracing the likes of Al Green, Johnny Cash, The Temptations, Engelbert Humperdink, Bob Dylan, Glenn Campbell, Bobby Goldsboro, Louis Armstrong, The Rolling Stones, The Jackson Five, Aretha Franklin, Ferrante and Teicher, Isaac Hayes, The Carpenters, Edwin Starr, Tammy Wynette, Neil Diamond, Carole King, Harry Nilsson, Tom Jones, Janis Joplin, Frank Sinatra, Santana, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, John Denver, the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, The Partridge Family, Marvin Gaye, Joan Baez, Perry Como, The Doors, The Osmond Brothers, Led Zeppelin, The Bee Gees, Barbra Streisand, James Taylor, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Cat Stevens, Diana Ross, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles. Ponder for a moment what all those names could possibly have in common, other than the fact that they all performed some type of music, and you get the point.

WLS music survey flyer listing the "Top 89" hits of 1970.

It’s safe now to admit that the musical pulse of the American public was being taken from a more culturally diverse sampling under that much-maligned system 40 years ago than any of the myriad current genre-based measuring sticks—bastions of isolationism that they are—manage to do today. In retrospect, the Top 40 of four decades ago could be described not as the whirlpool of homogeneity that AOR hipsters would have us believe at the time, but rather as a fountain of tolerance and heterogeneity. For all of our current penchant for self-congratulatory back patting based on the canard of “how far we’ve come,” what do we have today that compares to the original concept of Top 40 as a celebration of, and showcase for, diversity—both musical and cultural? If you think American Top 40 with Ryan Seacrest fits the bill, then you may as well stop reading this right now.

No stranger to Top 40 radio in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s was Sly and the Family Stone, itself a model of diversity—not only in the music which that aggregation created, but also in the physical makeup of the group. It was one of the first racially integrated rock groups (only the Del-Vikings and Booker T. & the MG’s come to mind as precursors), as well as being multi-gender. This thanks to the band’s founder and front man, Sylvester Stewart, a.k.a. Sly Stone, who cut his musical teeth with multi-racial groups as a gospel- and doo-wop-singing youth, later going against the grain by occasionally spinning discs by white artists as a disc jockey for the San Francisco R&B radio station KSOL. 

Everyday People. Left to Right: Greg Errico, Rose Stone, Sly Stone, Cynthia 

Robinson, Freddie Stone, Jerry Martini, and Larry Graham.

The name itself suggests brotherhood/sisterhood. In addition to the fact that the group was comprised of, in part, Sly’s actual siblings, the implication was that even non-relations, including the two white members, Greg Errico and Jerry Martini (despite Black Panther demands that they be replaced with black musicians) were brothers and sisters as well, part of a utopian family of man. And the music lived up to the name. Hits like “Dance to the Music,” “Stand!,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Everyday People” (which popularized the phrase “different strokes for different folks”), “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” and “Everybody Is a Star” perforated racial barriers at a time when race riots were a not infrequent fact of life.

By late 1971, though, after having taken up residence in the LP and singles charts for a solid couple of years, and after sealing their place in the pantheon of rock’s superstars with a knockout performance at Woodstock, Sly and company had not produced an album of new material in nearly two and a half years. This was pop music suicide at the time, hit singles notwithstanding—Sgt. Pepper and FM radio had recently made the LP the standard currency in the business—and their record label, Epic, resorted to the stopgap measures of repackaging their first album and releasing a greatest hits collection.

Entertaining Angels Unawares: Hail the Conquering Hero

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: 

for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

—Hebrews 13:1-2

Our attitude toward our fighting men and women has fluctuated dramatically over the years. Since the first Gulf War we’ve freely given the respect, admiration, and honor rightly due our homecoming professional soldiers, despite whatever our feelings may be toward the conflicts they’ve willingly answered the call to participate in while leaving behind their homes and families. A generation earlier, troops returning from Vietnam were alternately ignored, spat on, or slandered to varying degrees for following orders and fighting what ultimately became an unpopular war.

During the Second World War, the GIs—“our boys”—constantly had their praises sung by the public and the media. Nearly an entire generation of men were called to duty, and they were the sons, uncles, fathers and cousins of nearly every one of us . . . so it was personal. As a result, Hollywood, though its intentions may very well have been honorable and the cause just, produced a lot of flag waving drivel to promote the war effort at home and on the fighting front, especially during the early years of the war.

Enter Preston Sturges who, along with John Huston, became one of the first screenwriters to make a successful transition to directing feature films in the sound era. Sturges, who is recognized as a genius of cinema comedy, with at least seven masterpieces of that genre to his credit in the 1940s, was too clever a character—and also a trifle too sardonic—to dally in the jingoism that was in vogue at the time. Nevertheless, he showed his admiration for, and paid his respects to, the American fighting man in no uncertain terms in Hail the Conquering Hero.  

Hail the Conquering Hero is a comedy, but it forgoes much of the slapstick visual humor that Sturges spread liberally across most of his other signature films, including The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels, both from 1941. In its place Sturges, who really authored no visual cinematic style to speak of prior to Hero, utilizes crowded compositions of wall-to-wall people to match the snappy, inventive, wall-to-wall dialogue he was known for. The film moves along briskly, with abrupt, well-timed cuts, as he propels his plot nimbly forward. 

Preston Sturges

The professed hero is one Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken, who also starred in Sturges’ brilliant The Miracle of Morgan's Creek), a chronic hay fever sufferer rejected by the Marines, who was born on the day—at the very moment in fact—that his genuine Marine hero father was killed at the Battle of Belleau Wood during World War I. Consequently, he’s had enormous shoes to fill his entire life, and can’t summon the nerve to return home to face his mother, his town, and the music (literally, as it turns out). To make matters worse, he’s written his mother that he’s a Marine, and has been fighting in the Pacific for the past year. 

But the real heroes of the film are six tapped-out, battle-hardened leathernecks fresh from Guadalcanal, who emerge from the evening mist on a city street, stopping to bicker with one another outside the tavern in which Woodrow happens to be drowning his sorrows. Woodrow buys them sandwiches and a couple of rounds of drinks, winning their respect by way of his fidelity to The Corps, and their sympathy by way of his unenviable position: an inability to make the grade in his perceived birthright branch of the service. (During WWII, soldiers were routinely held up as examples of America’s finest, and it was the goal of every male from schoolboy to young adult to be one, or else suffer derision and raised eyebrows.)

Through a series of well-intentioned ruses perpetuated by his new, uniformed buddies, Woodrow returns with them to his hometown a conquering, decorated hero. His long-suffering mother (who keeps a shrine to her late husband with his photograph prominently displayed), as well as his former girlfriend (who has become engaged to marry the hapless, buffoonish son of the conniving, windbag mayor, the latter wonderfully played by Sturges stock company favorite Raymond Walburn) and the whole community welcome him at the train station with open arms and several marching bands. Things have clearly gotten out of control, and not only does the town pay off the mortgage on his mother’s home and propose a statue of him and his father, they ultimately nominate Woodrow as a candidate for mayor, solely on the basis of his military exploits, which in reality never happened.

None of this sits well with Woodrow, who tries tirelessly to tell the truth to anyone who’ll listen, but the entire town is swept away in a rapture of pride and patriotism, and is deaf to his exhortations. Even if they wanted to they wouldn’t get the chance to hear his side of the story, as Sergeant Heppelfinger (William Demarest), the leader of the small group of Marines, constantly adds to the tangled web, building on Woodrow’s legend at every turn.

It’s here that Sturges sets himself apart from the pack. He deftly yet nearly invisibly pokes fun at blind hero worship and even exploitation of the military, while at the same time paying tribute to our men in uniform who are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf. And he fulfills in spades the number one requirement of a Hollywood movie in the heyday of the studio system: he entertains us. “Laugh and the world laughs with you, frown and you frown alone,” says a character in the film, echoing a line from Leo McCarey’s Going My Way, released earlier that same year (1944), and likely a mantra for those on the home front during World War II.