The Sound and the Fury: “Rocket 88" at 75

Jackie Brenston / Ike Turner handbill, April 1951. 

The pivotal rhythm & blues hit "Rocket 88" was recorded and released in March of 1951--75 years ago*. Many music writers and historians consider it to have been the first rock 'n' roll record, though whether it was or not is entirely subjective. The form had been gestating for several years, perhaps decades, and there's really no way to pinpoint a "first." With forerunners dating back at least to the mid-1940s--Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944), Louis Jordan's "Caldonia" (1945), Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "That's All Right" (1946), Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight" (1947) and Wynonie Harris' more upbeat cover of same (1948), Jimmy Preston's "Rock the Joint" (1949), Fats Domino's "The Fat Man" (recorded in 1949 and released in 1950), and a few others--the field is wide open for potentially legitimate claims to the title of The First Rock 'n' Roll Record. 

*According to author and critic Peter Guralnick, the disputed recording date was March 7 and the record was released three weeks later. 

Oldsmobile "Rocket" 88 print ad, circa 1951.

Named after a then-popular model of Oldsmobile that's now widely regarded as the first American "muscle car," "Rocket 88," performed by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (actually Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm--more on that later), is basically a revved-up rhythm & blues / jump blues number on high octane. The lyrics are sexually suggestive, a practice that would become fairly common in the just-over-the-horizon rock 'n' roll genre, but it was nothing new to the world of popular music (e.g., Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, et al.), let alone the blues tradition of creative euphemisms. The record was certainly an early influence on rock 'n' roll. And when listened to chronologically alongside other early 1950s #1 songs on Billboard's R&B chart, it stands out sonically and viscerally. The effect can almost be compared to the way the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sounds in the context of its early '60s Billboard Hot 100 #1 predecessors. It was definitely a game changer. At 75, it still motors along with a fresh, rambunctious, furious energy. 

Here's what the song's co-writer, Ike Turner, had to say about it in a later interview: 

"I don't think that 'Rocket 88' is rock 'n' roll. I think that 'Rocket 88' is R&B, but I think 'Rocket 88' is the cause of rock 'n' roll existing . . .  [producer] Sam Phillips got [radio DJ] Dewey Phillips to play 'Rocket 88' on his program--and this is like the first black record to be played on a white radio station--and, man, all the white kids broke out to the record shops to buy it. So that's when Sam Phillips got the idea, 'Well, man, if I get me a white boy to sound like a black boy, then I got me a gold mine,' which is the truth. So, that's when he got Elvis and he got Jerry Lee Lewis and a bunch of other guys and so they named it rock 'n' roll rather than R&B and so this is the reason I think rock 'n' roll exists--not that 'Rocket 88' was the first one, but that was what caused the first one." 

However you categorize it, this was a historically significant, highly influential record. Little Richard borrowed from it for his 1958 hit "Good Golly, Miss Molly," for one, while the distorted guitar sound anticipated the fuzzbox, which became popular when the recording was rediscovered in the 1960s (think the Beatles' "Think for Yourself"). Nick Tosches wrote that, though "Rocket 88" could not be described as the first rock 'n' roll record "any more than there is any first modern novel--the fact remains that the record in question was possessed of a sound and a fury the shear, utter newness of which set it apart from what had come before." 

The label credit denotes that "Rocket 88" was performed by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, but in reality, while Brenston sang the vocal and played tenor saxophone, the band was Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, with Ike on piano and the famous distorted guitar played by Willie Kizart*. The tenor sax solos were performed by 17-year-old Raymond Hill. Willie "Bad Boy" Sims was behind the drum kit. Brenston and Turner co-wrote the song, the melody of which, Brenston said, was based on that of "Cadillac Boogie" by Jimmy Liggins (1947). Varying accounts have the song being rehearsed at the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale, Mississippi, written on the way from Mississippi to the recording session in Memphis (Memphis Recording Studio), or crafted while in the studio. Sam Phillips, who soon after founded the famous Sun Records with royalties earned from "Rocket 88" (Brenston sold his half of the rights to him), was the producer; he licensed the song, along with the B-side, "Come Back Where You Belong," to the recently established Chess Records in Chicago for commercial release. Turner blamed Phillips for botching the label credits in the process of delivering the master recording to Chess. 

*As the story goes, the guitar amplifier was damaged when the band was changing a flat tire on Highway 61 en route from Mississippi to Memphis to record the song. After arriving at the studio, wadded newspapers were stuffed inside the amp's housing in an effort to keep the broken woofer cone in place. The unintentional result was a distorted guitar sound, which Phillips liked and thus left on the recording. 

The mid-1950s incarnation of Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm. Jackie Brenston is in the back row, far left; Raymond Hill is to the right of him. Turner, wearing a white jacket, is in the center.

Following the Success of "Rocket 88"--it spent three weeks atop the Billboard R&B chart, plus two at the top of their Most Played Juke Box R&B Records chart--there was a clash of egos between Turner and Brenston, resulting in Brenston leaving the band to join Lowell Fulson's group. He returned to the Kings of Rhythm a couple of years later, with Turner allegedly barring him from singing "Rocket 88." By the 1970s, he had left the music business. Ike became a session musician (backing other artists with his Kings of Rhythm on records), a production assistant for Sam Phillips at Sun Studio, and a freelance talent scout, discovering, among others, Howlin' Wolf, Little Junior Parker, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and Little Milton. In 1956, he met aspiring singer Ann Bullock, who by the early 1960s was the lead singer and star of his band, under the stage name Tina. Ike and Tina were married in 1962 and proceeded to write another chapter in R&B / rock 'n' roll history.

The 1954 Essex reissue of Bill Haley's version of "Rocket 88," originally released on Holiday Records in 1951.

An original Chess pressing of "Rocket 88" on 7-inch 45 or 10-inch 78 is something of a holy grail among record collectors. Bill Haley & His Comets (then called Bill Haley & the Saddlemen) covered the song, country swing / rockabilly style, in June of 1951 on Holiday--that record is also much-sought-after by collectors. 

© Jon Oye, 2026 

Records and print ad are from my collection. 

Brenston/Turner "Rocket 88" handbill photo source. 

Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm photo source. 

1965-66: Bob Dylan and the Birth of Rock Sans Roll

You don't have it? That is perverse, don't tell anybody you don't own f*****g Blonde on Blonde!

--Barry Judd, High Fidelity

A linguistic conceit that I started to notice in my youth was the term "golden age," which was casually and frequently employed by adults, particularly in the media, to describe what they perceived to have been a better time in the not-too-distant past. Aside from politics, you don't hear it as much anymore.* In the late 1960s, for example, the "golden age of baseball" meant the 1920s of Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby; by the 1970s, it had become the 1930s of Lou Gehrig and Dizzy Dean. Hollywood's golden age was considered the 1930s--especially 1939, the year of The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and the then-excessively beloved epic, Gone with the Wind. The golden age of radio was the 1930s and pre-TV 1940s. The golden age of television referred to that medium's embryonic years--the late '40s and early '50s--when the likes of Uncle Miltie, Sid Caesar, Howdy Doody, and Lucy ruled the ever-growing number of small screens in homes throughout America; later, it alluded to TV across the entire decade of the 1950s. 

*An apparent exception is in the world of comic book collecting, about which I admittedly know next to nothing.

The origins of the phrase date back to ancient Greece and the works of the poet Hesiod, who envisioned the history of humanity up to that point as being encompassed in five ages, the first being the Golden Age: a time of peace, happiness, prosperity, and harmony with nature and the gods. Historians later utilized the concept to delineate eras or epochs throughout human history when certain civilizations or nations enjoyed a level of cultural, scientific, or economic prominence or enlightenment that is seldom realized. Like the Renaissance. However, Ada Palmer, a Renaissance scholar at the University of Chicago, claims that such golden ages have never really existed, that they were only myths propagated by various powers that be through the years, often for political reasons. 

Anyway, that late 20th century perception of "golden age" that I recall from my younger days also applied to popular music. Bear with me here. In the 1970s, when a wave of 1950s nostalgia hit the public and struck a chord with the Silent Generation--those born from roughly the late 1920s to the mid-1940s--the "golden age of rock 'n' roll" referred to the mid-to-late '50s. Suddenly, performers who had become passé in the "Swingin' Sixties," like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis--the accepted founders of rock 'n' roll--were en vogue once again. Beginning sometime later, though, as baby boomers reached middle age, that 1950s golden age of rock 'n' roll was marginalized and eventually nearly forgotten in favor of the era that spawned what is now called "classic rock," which apparently currently represents the genre's golden age.* As Oscar Levant said, "Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember." 

*I've never known Gen-Xers to use terminology like "golden age," but have known more than a few members of that cohort to wax nostalgic about the '90s. 

1950s nostalgia on 1970s TV: Love and the Television Set (top photo), an unsold pilot that takes place in the early 1950s (TV's "golden age"), aired on the ABC anthology show Love, American Style in 1972. It was reset in the late 1950s (rock 'n' roll's "golden age") as Happy Days (bottom photo), which premiered on ABC in 1974 and became one of the most successful sitcoms of the decade.

Similarly marginalized in more recent years is the pop-rock music of the mid-1960s, a brief but visionary epoch seemingly stifled by a general enthusiasm for what immediately followed it: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Monterey Pop Festival, the Summer of Love, Woodstock, the rise of FM radio and prog rock, the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cream, the Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin, et al.--the dawn of classic rock. Since the 1980s, give or take, the late 1960s through the 1970s has represented, thanks to the commercial engines that tend to drive our perception of popular culture, the de facto golden age of rock. A lot of great music came out of that decade-or-so. Yet I can think of no more innovative, creative, and interesting time in the history of the genre since Elvis, Scotty, and Bill got together with Sam Phillips than the ~fifteen-month stretch that predated the perceived classic rock era: roughly from the summer of 1965 into the fall of 1966. Before that fleeting but wildly transformative span of time, there was rock 'n' roll. Afterwards, it was rock. 

I love the pop, R&B, and rock 'n' roll of the late '50s-early '60s, but the radical conversion that young people's music underwent mid-decade was the creative equivalent of going from suborbital flight to space travel, and it appears to have been denied its place in pop culture history. It was then that popular music, fueled by the social, political, and cultural turmoil that was brewing at the time (in some cases with an assist from mind-altering chemicals) started being about something more than just romantic love. 

Consider the following. Bob Dylan released the rock benchmark LP Highway 61 Revisited (whose centerpiece was the revolutionary single, "Like a Rolling Stone") in August of 1965. The Beatles' Help! came out in the same month. The Yardbirds' Having a Rave Up hit the streets in November. Rubber Soul, a Beatles turning point, was out on December 3rd, as was the Who's debut LP, My Generation, followed later that month by the Byrds' second highly influential folk-rock long-player, Turn! Turn! Turn! Simon and Garfunkel's The Sounds of Silence and the hard-rocking, blues-driven Them Again both appeared in January of 1966. The Beach Boys' transcendent masterpiece Pet Sounds came out in March and the Rolling Stones' first all-self-composed LP, Aftermath, arrived in April. Dylan's double-LP pièce de résistance, Blonde on Blonde, dropped in June (or July, depending on the source). The Yardbirds' "Roger the Engineer" (US title: Over Under Sideways Down) and John Mayall's Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton both emerged in July, as did the Byrds' third consecutive great album, the proto-psychedelic Fifth Dimension. Then came the Beatles' game-changing Revolver (its UK incarnation is, in my opinion, their best) in early August--not to mention their May 1966 single, "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" (the B-side of which in particular explored new sonic territory). And the Kinks' Face to Face hit the streets in late October, with Buffalo Springfield's self-titled first LP following closely on its heels. Not only were these extraordinary records (and timeless ones--most still sound fresh and vital today), but nearly all of them were also steps forward creatively for their respective artists, in an era that was off the charts as far as breaking new musical ground. 

The Beatles at the New Musical Express Annual Poll-Winners' All-Star Concert at the Empire Pool in Wembley, London on May 1, 1966. It would be their final scheduled live performance in Great Britain. 

The Black music scene was arguably more vibrant than it had ever been, outside of the jazz world. James Brown was still proving he was The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, touring relentlessly and releasing three LPs between November 1965 and March 1966. Berry Gordy's Motown hit factory was possibly at its peak, with Stevie Wonder (Uptight, May '66) and Marvin Gaye (Moods of Marvin Gaye, also May '66) moving forward creatively, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles releasing the hit laden Going to a Go-Go (November '65), and the Supremes ("I Hear a Symphony," "You Can't Hurry Love") and the Temptations ("Beauty is Only Skin Deep," "(I Know) I'm Losing You") at or near their zeniths in popularity. Gloria Jones, whose 1960s recordings would fuel the Northern Soul movement in England in the early 1970s, released her first album, Come Go with Me, in 1966. Artists at the Atlantic and Stax-Volt labels, like Otis Redding (Otis Blue, September '65) and Wilson Pickett (The Exciting Wilson Pickett, August '66) et al., were enjoying heydays (Aretha Franklin was still about a year away from stardom), helping establish soul music as a commercial as well as an artistic presence to be reckoned with. 

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 scholar Peter Wollen. 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. Native leis decorate the cross that marks Princess Manulani's grave on Christmas Day. 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.