The Five Worst Beatles Songs

I had this one sitting around in my drafts for a while. I'm sure every fan has made one of these lists before. Don't think any of my picks are too controversial...

1. "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)" b-side of "Let It Be"

On April 11, 1970 Paul McCartney issued a press release which said he was no longer working with the Beatles. Thus this single, released exactly one month before this statement, is the Beatles' final single as a group of four living beings. The A-side is great: though written and recorded in early 1969, it is my personal favorite of Paul's allegories for the end of the greatest group in popular music history. The b-side, actually recoded in 1967 is the opposite of the a-side in every conceivable way. People will say that "Revolution #9" is self-indulgent (it isn't on this list. I like it!) but at least any sympathetic Beatles listener will recognize it as a work of genuine experimentation and curiosity. This is just a bunch of stoned British guys (including Brian Jones) making an audio collage of unfunny parodies of something stoned British guys might find funny.

This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact, as the b-side of their final single as a group of 

living individuals, this is technically the FINAL Beatles song. 

2. "Ballad of John and Yoko" a-side of "Ballad of John and Yoko"/ "Old Brown Shoe" 

One of the wonderful things about the Beatles is that there is no "leader" of the group. Yes, Lennon and McCartney hold "leader-like" positions but, as the b-side makes obvious, they weren't the only songwriting geniuses. Anytime one of the group tries to ascend to the leadership position, i.e. I am the most Beatle, it usually doesn't work. I refer people to the various quotations people not named Paul McCartney provided for their opinions of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." This is John's turn to imagine himself "bigger than the Beatles" within the Beatles. I love Yoko Ono as an artist and there are moments of John's solo catalogue that are transcendent. They both deserve their musical dues. But they also kind of seem like insufferable people, and mix that in with heroin withdrawal, a publicized wedding plus honeymoon "in bed for peace" or something and you have the very insufferableness described above. Now put all of that self mythologizing in a single in which only two of the Beatles played on. I mean, John really does sing "the way things are going/ they're gonna crucify me" really? Bigger than Jesus much? Listen to "Old Brown Shoe" instead. 

3.  "Run For Your Life" on Rubber Soul 

I just finished listening to a podcast, after having read a lengthy article, about the 9-hour 

Prince documentary that we'll never see. A good part of the reason why we'll never see it is

because, to the surprise of no one who actually has engaged with Prince's art for the last 

forty years, Prince had a very complicated relationship with women. He was abusive like 

his father (something he readily admitted in both the film and album Purple Rain) and eventually used his religious awakening to shame females in his audience (all the while 

becoming increasingly addicted to pain killers). John Lennon was abusive like his father, 

but his hatred of women really comes from his mother, who seems to have been one of 

the most negligent parents of all time. Such early childhood trauma might make me 

forgive Lennon this song but it's the final song on Rubber Soul, one of their greatest and

most significant records. The casual misogyny of "Norwegian Wood" is fascinating and, 

arguably, quite radical in its reversal of gender roles. This, on the other hand, is just 

standard, straight up, "look at another guy and I'll kill you" kind of misogyny. 

4. "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" from Abbey Road

Hard to decide whose misogyny is more fucked up: yes, John's threats to kill his paramour are disturbing, but Paul constructing a little ditty about a serial killer who bludgeons women to death might be more disturbing. Add the fact that the song might be the most annoying thing the Beatles ever recorded only makes it creepier. Yes, reading each of the Beatles complain about having to spend several days recording this thing is quite funny (so is, honestly, Paul's response of "big deal" in response to the rest of his bandmates' complaints). The fact that Abbey Road has both this and "Octopus' Garden" should automatically disqualify it from being a great Beatles record. That's a lot of work "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something" are doing there, but George had built up so much unheralded credit at that point that we can give it to him. For those people who claim to have wondered what happened to Paul during his solo career (I am not one of those people tbh), they clearly memory holed this thing because, honestly, this is worse than anything he recorded on his solo albums.  

5. "The Long and Winding Road" from Let It Be

If you're noticing a pattern here then all I can say is that the Beatles broke up at the right time. There's the possibility that the Beatles would have released one more great album 

in the early 70s, combining the then unreleased Get Back songs with some of the solo 

songs the individual members started writing towards the dissipation of the group. However, it's probably for the best that those songs ended up on solo records rather than a 

final Beatles record, because they would have most likely have had to share space with 

crap like this. As I mentioned above, in the last year of the band's existence, with the writing on the wall, McCartney started writing songs about the group, which is never 

really a good sign. Lennon started writing songs about himself and Yoko (see above) so

it was up to Paul to mythologize the group in real time (I have a much longer piece I want 

to write about how Paul ultimately "won" the Beatles, insofar as he's still alive to mythologize their story). This is the worst of them: "Let It Be" is the best, the half-side long suite at the end of Abbey Road isn't as good as people think it is, but it's good enough that I can forgive its more treacly moments. But this is just pure saccharine. The Phil Spector version is even worse: laying on the strings and choir and Paul choking up at the idea of being left outside the door (like a cake left out in the rain or some shit). It's a big reason why the Let It Be record wasn't very fondly thought of for a long time (almost as long as that winding road).    

Some thoughts on songs that often get put on this list, but, in my opinion, don't belong there

"Mr. Moonlight" from Beatles For Sale

This one gets brought up and I understand why: they sound tired, it's an old song that they played live for years, it's much closer to pre-Beatles pop than what they were recording at the time, etc. however,  it's hard to get mad at the song. The covers on Beatles for Sale are lacking compared to the leaps in songwriting evidenced by "I'm a Loser," "No Reply" (creepy misogyny that's kind of interesting rather than being merely violent), "I'll Follow the Sun," and "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party." I kind of like the exotica vibe of the organ on the song, and, at this late date, its the last vestiges of the pre-fame Beatles at least until the covers and early songs on Let It Be. 

"Revolution #9," "Wild Honey Pie," "Honey Pie" from The Beatles (the White Album)

The Beatles is their most indulgent album, as if they four of them had enough ideas for solo albums for each member with songs left over. So, if you're throwing everything you've got at the wall to see what sticks, some things will work better than others. It's clear that these three "songs" are the ones that often get singled out. "Honey Pie" is Paul's final song in his music hall trilogy that started with "When I'm 64" on Sgt. Peppers. I don't like this song, but I don't think it's one of their worst. Paul always charms me in this mode and as someone who lost his mother young I can understand why Paul would want to write so many songs about songs his mother would know. "Wild Honey Pie" is barely a song, so you can just admire its goofiness for the minute or so it plays and quickly forget it. "Revolution #9" doesn't quite live up to the musique concrete and Fluxus sound art which influenced it, but it sounds expensively mixed (especially if you hear the blu-ray mix from 2018) and I love the curiosity that the Beatles always brought to their recordings. 

"Yellow Submarine" from Revolver

No. We're not taking "Yellow Submarine" off of Revolver. It's as much part of what makes the Beatles as "Tomorrow Never Knows." And, for those who have kids or have been around kids when this song is played, this is the Beatles' sub specie aeternitatis: this song is why you can imagine the end of civilization but can't imagine the end of the Beatles' influence on music. Children will know how to sing the chorus of this song before they know how to speak. And then they will inevitably ask to hear other songs by the Beatles. And the cycle begins anew. 

Reposition the Cup (David Thomas 1953-2025)

At first I thought I was too late to write this tribute to the late, great David Thomas from Pere Ubu but I just received an email for a Thomas tribute organized by what's left of the band Pere Ubu so I figure if the band itself took this long to organize a tribute, it's not too late to write my own.

Pere Ubu, Terminal Tower: An Archival Collection (Rough Trade 1985)

Pere Ubu, Cloudland (Fontana 1989)

Pere Ubu, Worlds in Collision (Fontana 1991)

Pere Ubu, Story of My Life (imago 1993)

Pere Ubu, Datapanik in Year Zero (box set, DGC 1995)

Pere Ubu, Trouble on Big Beat Street (Cherry Red 2023)

The first album I bought with my own money was Pere Ubu's Cloudland. I had a job during the summer of 1989 or 1990 working for a company that sold industrial staircases and tree grates manufactured in Nenah, Wisconsin. Ever since having that job at the age of 15 or 16 I instinctively look for the Neenah, WI marking on every tree grate I see. It was a strange workplace, a basement office that barely fit the four of us who worked there, and when the summer was over there was an absurd assumption that I would decrease the amount of time I spent in high school and increase the amount of time I worked there. I told the boss politely that my parents wouldn't exactly be thrilled at the idea of me dropping out of high school to work for a corrugated stairwell and tree grate middle man and that I would have to quit. The road not taken. 

There is something exciting about the first albums you buy with the money you've earned from a job. Basically, it means you don't have to beg your parents to buy an album (in most cases a cassette--the cheap, portable medium of choice growing up) or be with them when you were music shopping. Since I had mostly moved past toys (including video games at this point) buying cassettes with my own money was an important symbol of independence. It also meant that I was old enough to take the train into Boston and Cambridge to go record shopping. There were three conduits by which I discovered music: MTV (mostly 120 Minutes), Rolling Stone and music books. Pere Ubu was a band that covered at least two of those bases: "Waiting for Mary" was in heavy rotation on 120 Minutes and Lester Bangs, anthologized in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, sung the praises of the early Pere Ubu.

In 2024, I wrote an article about the television program Night Music (https://sevendeadlyfinns.blogspot.com/2024/06/night-music.html). A performance from that show which stayed with me was Pere Ubu's appearance in 1989: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hYqvtHzr48&list=RD1hYqvtHzr48&start_radio=1). If you want to see Philip Glass jamming with Deborah Harry and Pere Ubu (while Sanborn plays some sexy sax): (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiK-Lvwanq0&list=RDTiK-Lvwanq0&start_radio=1) I had already fallen in love with concert films by Talking Heads and Tom Waits, which demonstrated how lead singers/performers could take physical performance to new and undiscovered (at least for me as a suburban teenager) places. Yet, both Byrne and Waits were George Michael compared to Dave Thomas. As an overweight, awkward teenager who always seemed at two with my pubescent body, Thomas was a projection of what I felt each day. More so than any other "rock star" I had ever seen, he seemed blissfully unaware and/or unbothered by the audience's expectations. Watching the performances and "interviews" on this episode of "Night Music" one senses that Thomas isn't standoffish so much as not wanting to be misunderstood. Spending most of his career up until that point gyrating in the world of Cleveland's underground music scene, Pere Ubu's late 80s/early 90s ascendency to network television and MTV required Thomas to be a media presence who had to convince the uninitiated why they should listen. 

My favorite interview from this initial promotional push in 1989 comes from the British television program "Rocking in the UK" (jfc what a generically terrible title): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UQsqFiyw9k. When asked if there was any part of their previous work/career that they/he now regretted or if he liked playing in Pere Ubu more then or now, Thomas answers simply that Pere Ubu is a way "to establish a language and develop things over a period of time." Like the great artists and musicians I had come to admire as I was getting into music as a teenager, Thomas didn't understand his career the way critics and journalists seemed to understand bands and musicians. It has always seemed to me that the greats think of their careers as continuums rather than individual periods marked by certain styles. He then switches tone to explain it only as Thomas could: "I don't care if you don't have enough time. You ask me these questions and I try to answer them." This might be understood as an example of Thomas' standoffishness but, as someone who has always been drawn to the margins of what language can express, I understand Thomas as searching for a way to discuss something he has only had to embody previously. He uses a paper cup to illustrate what Pere Ubu is like. Sometimes you look at a cup straight on and understand its use value. However, sometimes you only see the bottom of the cup or the top of the cup or what's printed on the cup and have no interest in it (technically, no interest in buying it, as Thomas emphasizes). Pere Ubu, according to Thomas, is making a career out of all of the various ways the cup can be repositioned and understood, regardless of its use value (my words, not his). Or, to quote a late 80s album title from fellow 70s travelers Wire, a bell is a cup until it is struck. 

The period in which I discovered Pere Ubu is one in which Pere Ubu looked an awful lot like a band in the  pre-Nirvana/grunge era of "alternative" music. Of course, Pere Ubu didn't just pre-date this era, but pre-dated the era that pre-dated the era which influenced the alternative bands of the early 90s. In fact, you could make the argument that Pere Ubu pre-dated everything. The band's first single "Heart of Darkness"/"30 Seconds Over Tokyo" was released in December 1975. Though Pere Ubu would come to be associated with punk rock over the following years, the truth is they had more in common with "proto-punk" bands like the Stooges, the Velvet Underground and CAN then their assumed contemporaries the Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. This isn't just due to their single being released before all of those bands but what they chose to emphasize in their music. Their influences came less from the usual Nuggets-era garage rock and pre-Beatles pop (although they did cover the Seeds "Pushin' Too Hard" in the early years and expressed a career-long love of The Beach Boys), than from a dark metal sound heard on early Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and the Groundhogs (a personal favorite of Ian Curtis from Joy Division). The songs on their first single were long, with "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" being over six minutes in length, once again breaking with the short, sharp song lengths of most punk singles. 

The early singles are collected both on the 1978 EP "Datapanik in Year Zero" (included in the 1995 box set Datapanik in Year Zero, which collects their then long out of print early work) as well as the expanded Terminal Tower, which I purchased along with Cloudland back in 1989. Though their early music was less pop than the material they would release in the late 80s it wasn't without its pop pleasure. "Cloud 149," "the Modern Dance" and, especially, "Heaven" all skirt around the limits of pop, keeping the value conscious, legible cup firmly within its sights. This mixture of the experimental and the almost, could have been, radio friendly single in 

the inverted world of Jarry's Ubu Roi (the absurdist play from which the band took its name) is the template for Pere Ubu's first two albums The Modern Dance and Dub Housing. As Pere Ubu moved into the 80s, their music became more difficult and abstract, although never without its nods towards pop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw9DsEay6Ak&list=RDBw9DsEay6Ak&start_radio=1). By 1982 the band seemed to call it a day and Dave started working on solo projects. 

Then in 1989 (after one "comeback" album The Tenement Year) Pere Ubu released Cloudland, an album partially produced by Stephen Hague. Hague spent the 80s producing bigger pop bands such as The Pet Shop Boys, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark and New Order. Though all of those bands had more experimental pasts which might have placed them in the same orbit as Pere Ubu, its clear that Hague wished to add some British chart production to Pere Ubu rather than attempting to ditch his pop sound for the underground. Songs like "Breath," the aforementioned "Waiting for Mary" and, perhaps most explicitly, "Bus Called Happiness" could have (and in the case of "Waiting for Mary" did) top the alternative charts (Pere Ubu was still too spiky to simply show up on the pop charts). And yet, as the MTV and Night Music appearances attest, the band still refused to become a facile pop presence. As I mentioned at the beginning of the piece, the combination of greater accessibility with a stubborn refusal to play by the public's rules prefigured a number of alternative bands that would be more successful in the 1990s. Case in point: the Pixies' Doolittle was released the same year as Cloudland with the minor alternative "hit" "Here Comes Your Man," a song that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Cloudland. When I saw the Pixies live for the Tromp Le Monde tour, Pere Ubu opened for them. 

There's a longer essay I have always wanted to write about when experimental musicians and/or musicians who come out of an experimental music community decide to write "pop" music. A foundational example for me is John Cale. When Cale left the Velvet Underground in 1968 to start a solo career, it wouldn't have been unexpected for him to return to the experimental, drone based music he made with La Monte Young and Tony Conrad earlier in the 1960s. However, his first solo record Vintage Violence sounded more like The Beach Boys, the Band as well as any number of "sunshine" pop from studio bands based out of L.A. than any of the minimalism out of which Cale started. This continued throughout the early 70s for Cale: Paris 1919 was produced by Procol Harum's producer and featured members of Little Feet on the album. Slow Dazzle opens with an homage to Brian Wilson. There are many other examples besides Cale that I hope to write about someday.

I would place the run of albums that Pere Ubu released between 1989-1993 in the category of experimental musicians making pop music. Ironically, none of these albums are currently available on streaming. Fire Records out of England reissued Cloudland and Worlds in Collision on vinyl recently, but 1993's Story of My Life remains an album lost to time. Released on the ill fated Imago label, it has never been reissued and as far as I can tell there's no plan to reissue it any time soon. This is a shame since it's one of my favorite Pere Ubu releases, with some of the strongest songwriting the band had ever done. The band has slowly been releasing concert recordings from David Thomas' personal tape collection and there is a great live recording of most of the songs off of Story of My Life available here (https://pereubu.bandcamp.com/album/the-lost-band). 

Shortly after releasing Story of My Life, David Thomas wrote a review of the Beach Boys Pet Sounds box set for the Wire Magazine (I can't seem to find it online so it must have been a fever dream I made up). Much like Cale's fascination with Mr. Wilson (and Krautrock legends Faust's declaration on their debut album "I like the Beach Boys!") Brian Wilson seems to be a conduit between the experimental world and pop music. David Thomas might have been his greatest acolyte. You would think that the Cleveland influenced industrial sounds made by Pere Ubu would be a world away from the Southern California fantasias imagined by Wilson, his brothers, cousins and others. Yet, as evidenced by any of the music Wilson created after Pet Sounds, he has much more in common with the skewed upside down cup perspective of Pere Ubu than the surfing and car music that made the Beach Boys famous. This Friday we are blessed with the latest Beach Boys archival release The Brother Studio Years (https://shop.thebeachboys.com/collections/box-sets/products/the-beach-boys-we-gotta-groove-the-brother-studio-years) a box set which contains songs such as "Honkin' Down the Highway," "Johnny Carson" and "Solar System," all of which would not sound out of place on a Pere Ubu or David Thomas solo project. I plan on writing something about this box set later, but if you want to hear Brian Wilson's fascinating response to the musical world of 1977, and how remarkably close he was to the DIY and punk ethos of the time compared to many of his contemporaries, listen to the box set. 

After Story of My Life Pere Ubu left the world of major labels and pop production to return to the underground. I stopped listening to their new albums and lost touch with whatever David was up to. He seemed to get more cantankerous in his older age and I put him in the category of difficult lifers like Mark E. Smith, who seemingly would never die and would always be around to either see live or dip into a latest release if the curiosity arose. Of course, that's not how life works. Smith died in 2018 and, last year, Thomas passed as well. That makes Trouble on Big Beat Street his last will and testament. A song like "Crocodile Smile" (https://youtu.be/HVK_aOydWS0?si=QMXTqwP7itWkJz3S) proves that the band never lost their love a spiky, synth heavy pop, while later on the album the band covers the Osmonds' "Crazy Horses" (https://youtu.be/iXcj8dFOd1E?si=tqTgPmu3YpnKeTFg) demonstrating their continued love of pop detritus (fwiw, "Crazy Horses" kicks serious ass for a bunch of Mormons). 

Apparently in the band's final appearance around the LA area, they, like Cale back in the 70s, covered "Heartbreak Hotel" finding new meanings in a song that is now 70 years old. David Thomas aka Crocus Behemoth seemed to come from the depths of a cave in mid 70s Ohio, but, as his entire career has shown, he is another iteration of a sound, a feeling, a presence that has been part of the American voice for a long time. As the critic Robert Cantwell wrote about "Heartbreak Hotel" in his unpublished memoir Twigs of Folly Presley's performance: "opened a fissure in the massive mile-thick wall of post-war regimentation, standardization, bureaucratization, and commercialization in American society and let come rushing through the rift a cataract from the immense waters of sheer, human pain and frustration that have been building up for ten decades behind it." 

As much as this can be said for Presley, it can also be said for Thomas. "I don't see anything that I want" Thomas sang on the first Pere Ubu single "Heart of Darkness," rejecting the convenient world of mid 70's consumerism, while the flip side "30 Seconds Over Tokyo," is as much a "suicide ride" as Presley's suicide note from the Heartbreak Hotel twenty years earlier. Yet, like Presley and Brian Wilson, the howl of pain that comes from being "so lonely you could die" sits along side of dreams, solar systems, barbecues and raisin fields. To give David the last word, I'll quote the final line  from Pere Ubu's "Last Will and Testament," (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QujRVMs0GhY&list=RDQujRVMs0GhY&start_radio=1) a song that I often think is Pere Ubu's greatest and, therefore, a song as great as any Presley or Wilson ever recorded:

"Hope is a razor's edge/ a razor's edge calls to me/ I fear I know the things I hope" 

Estimated Prophet (Bob Weir 1947-2026)

The Grateful Dead, Cornell 77 (Rhino/Grateful Dead Records, 2017)

---. Dave's Picks Volume 55 [Le Zenith, Paris 10/28/90] (Rhino/Grateful Dead Records, 2025).

Bob Weir, Ace (WB, 1972).

---, Heaven Help The Fool (Arista, 1978).

---, Bobby & the Midnights (Arista, 1981).

I've wanted to write something about the Grateful Dead for a while, I started something after Phil Lesh's death but never got anywhere with it, but have a hard time finding a way into talking about their music. Perhaps it's because I got into the Dead late in life and don't have a retrospective desire to unpack what I was thinking and doing while getting into them in the halcyon days of 2009. If anything, getting into the Dead was about making peace with the elements of the music that I didn't like and didn't want to like, which seems like the opposite procedure when getting into music you'll spend a decent amount of time listening to and collecting over the next decade and a half. 

A number of people have already written about the significant re-evaluation the band has undergone in the last decade and a half. It hit its zenith culturally around 2015-2016 with the 50th anniversary of the band's founding. The remaining members of the band played three massive concerts not in the Bay Area, but in Chicago at Soldier Field. Trey Anastasio from the band Phish sat in for Jerry Garcia, cementing Phish's reputation (finally) as the heir apparent to the Dead. Bruce Hornsby, long-time substitute keyboardist for the band in its early 90s incarnation, played there as well. 

The following year independent institution 4AD records released a multi-disc tribute to the Grateful Dead, Day of the Dead, produced by the Dessner brothers from the National. Most important bigger independent musicians making music in 2016 are on the record (from the worlds of jazz, international, jam and rock music among other genres) and it conferred upon the Dead a kind of coolness that they hadn't really experienced since the early 1970s. To say you were a Deadhead in the late 2010s elicited a very different response than at any other point during the previous couple of decades. As each member of the Dead have left this plane of existence (Phil Lesh and now Bobby Weir) musicians from every musical genre became a little more comfortable praising the Dead to the point where it's almost more unusual now to find someone who doesn't enjoy their music on some level. 

The world I grew up in was very different. The New Rolling Stone Record Guide from 1982, my bible for assessing what was and was not worthy of exploration, referred to the band as a "pox upon the face of pop." "Truthfully," Dave Marsh writes in their entry, "there simply isn't very much about this group that's impressive, except the devotion of its fans to a mythology created in Haight-Ashbury and now sustained in junior high schools across America." The last sentence particularly resonated with me. Marsh wrote that in the early 80s, when the Dead were at a commercial low. By the time I discovered the record guide, as well as heard of the Dead, they were in heavy rotation on MTV and, yes, much beloved by a certain cohort in my junior high. The people in my hometown who listened to the Dead were less hippies, more the chuds in backwards baseball caps who populated the parking lots outside of Dead shows trying to score drugs. This shouldn't be confused with the burnouts and drunks at my school who mostly listened to things like Sonic Youth and the Pogues. The people who listened to the Dead remind me of every guy who now comments on CNBC with a backdrop of vintage Dead posters and expensive guitars. They were the least cool people you could imagine, and in my teenage imagination I imagined them listening to the Dead while getting drunk and singing in front of a bonfire with other chuds, eventually sloppily fucking their girlfriends after.

A bit harsh, I know. By the time I got to college Deadheads had morphed into skinny white guys with dreads and thirty year old burnouts who hung around 18 year old students. Inevitably, if you wanted to get high, you had to endure sitting in someone's dorm room listening to indistinct guitar noodling playing in the background while some guy pointed out how Jerry started a guitar solo on this bootleg recording from 1978 that would eventually be finished by this other guitar solo recorded at a show in 1981. It was clear to me that the reason someone could make this absurd claim was that it all sounded exactly the same and was boring as hell. But, but! Even in the middle of my Dead aversion I did hear a song that I really liked. One day while getting high and playing chess with my friend Allan he put on "Unbroken Chain" from the album From Mars Hotel. I loved that song: the guitar tones, the vocals, the synthesizer that bubbled up in the background. It didn't sound like "Casey Jones" or "Touch of Grey" or any of the other big Dead songs that I had heard. I made a mental note and filed it away.

Honestly, between college graduation in 1995 (I remember hearing the news about Jerry Garcia's death but it didn't really register) and 2009 my life was pretty Dead free. My musical taste veered (or so I thought) far from the Dead into more abstract and electronic music. My favorite music related reading material was no longer the New Rolling Stone Record Guide was the magazine the Wire out of the UK. So I was pretty surprised when Biba Kopf, the pen name of writer and musician Chris Bohn, wrote a piece about the joy of listening to then new box set concert runs of the Dead in 1969 and 1973 (https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/3807/page/52). He ends the piece by writing "The six hours occupied by different versions of 'Playing In The Band' on my MP3 machine feel like nowhere near enough, but they'll do for a start." 

At that time, I had a newborn and spent most of my days holding them in a comfy chair while on my computer. As evidence by Kopf's piece, it was the age of the MP3 and I would often download torrents of music to my laptop to listen to while sitting with my newborn. So, given the praise Kopf was heaping on these Grateful Dead box sets I decided to seek them out and download them. If they sucked, no harm no foul and I could go back to not thinking about the Dead again. I did make the condition that I had to listen to the box set all the way through (10 CDs worth of music) before deciding if I liked the Dead or not. 

The set begins with "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" sung by their keyboardist Pigpen, and here already some doubts started to set in. If you haven't listened to Pigpen sing old rhythm and blues songs, I will say that the every bar band trying to sound authentically "blues-y" sounds like this; I don't mean it as a compliment. Pigpen would often improvise asides in his cover, including, unfortunately, the fact that he didn't care if she were underage. Anyways, this opening performance was far from auspicious. The next track "Doin' That Rag" was slightly better, although, again, the hokeyness of some 60s band talking about "doin' a rag" wasn't really expanding my mind the way I had been told it would and starting thinking that perhaps the Rolling Stone Record Guide and my teenage prejudices were correct. 

Things really didn't start to pick up until the "Mountains of the Moon->Dark Star" later on the first disc. In fact, the two "Mountains of the Moon->Dark Stars" on the set are still the highlights for me. They definitely were my gateways into the Dead: the former a gentile, mysterious psychedelic ballad the later being, well, Dark Star. Of course I had heard of Dark Star before hearing it on the box set: in fact, I had more than once been tempted to pick up Grayfolded, the John Oswald plunder-phonic "mash up" of 25 or so years of recorded Dark Stars. When it was released in 1994, music publications that generally avoid discussing the Dead were pretty universal in their praise. Oswald had been an important figure in tape collage and the sounds of the Dead were seen as further material for Oswald's plunder-phonic aesthetic Within the improvisation of each version of Dark Star I understood what people liked about it. It wasn't so much the "stoner" aspect--some of my favorite Dead listening experiences have been soberly cleaning my house on the first Saturday morning in upstate NY when you can open your windows after a long winter--rather it was music for thinking, for a having a pleasant feeling which, in turn, opens up a space for thinking. I realize that sounds like a stoner thought but it's not so different from some of the ambient projects Brian Eno has done over the years. 

After listening to the 1969 box set and deciding I wanted to explore further, I moved on to the other box set mentioned in Biba Kopf's original piece in the Wire: Winterland 73. I knew that the Dead of 1973 was going to be different than the Dead of 1969. I also had a similar rule to the 69 box set: I would listen to it all the way through and then make up my mind, If I needed to overcome Pig Pen's blues numbers on the 1969 set, then the 1973 concerts would present a new problem up top: a bunch of cowboy songs, songs that sound like they could be cowboy songs and Chuck Berry covers. As someone who had already enjoyed songs like "Dupree's Diamond Blues" on the 69 set, I didn't mind when Jerry performed these songs, but whenever Bob Weir would belt out "El Paso" or "Mexicali Blues" or "Promised Land" I really had to resist the urge to end my exploration of the Dead right there. Weir doesn't have an unpleasant voice but he sounds like someone's science teacher's bar band playing at the local bar on a Saturday night. And that, of course, is conversely why he became kind of endearing to me after a while. Pig Pen became endearing to me after a while because I'm always fascinated by the outsider in a group of outsiders. Bob Weir became endearing to me because he always seemed excited at the idea that he was playing music on stage for people. Just like that fictional science teacher I was thinking about earlier. 

Which is why it's perfect that the song he will be most remembered for is entitled "Playing in the Band?" That song originally came off his 1972 solo record Ace, but it was quickly absorbed by the Dead and turned into one of their many exploratory jams. Ace, the album from which "Playing in the Band" comes, is a very good album, with a number of well-written concise songs that would find their way into Dead sets well into the 21st century. "Cassidy," a song about Bob's relationship with the writer Neal Cassidy, is the highlight for me: one of the loveliest melodies in the Dead catalogue. Even before I became a genuine Deadhead, I always enjoyed the song from Suzanne Vega's version on the Dedicated tribute album, an album I owned because of the overlap with a number of artists I liked (Elvis Costello, Warren Zevon, Vega) despite the fact that at the time I was baffled by their love of the Dead. 

My favorite Weir song, however, isn't from Ace but from the Dead's 1977 album Terrapin Station, "Estimated Prophet." The best version of the song is actually on the now officially released Cornell 77 concert. I've always thought of "Estimated Prophet" as the Dead's attempt to make a Steely Dan song. It has the shuffle, the horns and the sun soaked burned out vibe that the Dan would skewer as their jaundiced eye moved towards the west coast as the seventies moved on. Yet, what also reminds me of the Dan is a eschatological menace that's found in Dan songs like "King of the World," "Don't Take Me Alive" and "Third World Man." I have no idea if Weir thought of "Estimated Prophet" this way, but there's something about the narrator's insistence that the listener shouldn't "worry about [him]," the repetition of the "no's" and the "voices" the narrator hears in his head telling him where to go. It's a reminder that the merry prankster ethos was always adjacent to the more violent cultish aspects of communal life in the late 60s. Again, Weir seemed to believe in the utopian aspects of the Dead's dream caravan until his death, but "Estimated Prophet" suggests that something haunted the fire wheels burning in the sky in California. 

In the late 70s someone realized that Bob Weir was a good looking guy with an okay voice and maybe he could break out as a solo star. Look at the Fool is the yacht-rock record he made with studio musicians during that time. What people failed to understand was that as good looking and charming as Bob Weir was, he also reveled in the slop. The Dead were never about perfectionism the way that Steely Dan (or the Doobie Brothers or any other late 70s studio band you could name) were: the Dead were about the feelings that emerge from "playing in the band," more often than not that meant playing live (something Steely Dan hadn't done since 1974). This is where the (somewhat erroneous IMO) idea came about that the Dead didn't put much thought into their studio albums (certainly post Blues for Allah). Weir was too weird for Yacht Rock: just listen to any version of "Looks Like Rain," wherein Bob's yelping rage against the rain evolves or devolves into parody and excess. Bob followed up Look at the Fool with an album of competent bar rock blues tinged numbers credited to Bobby and the Midnites, but after that he pretty much just stuck to playing with the Dead.

As the brilliant Rob Mitchum pointed out on Steven Hyden's great substack Evil Speakers (https://stevenhyden.substack.com/p/the-36ftv-bob-weir-tribute-special) the series Dave's Picks offered a lovely unintentional tribute to Weir in their 55th volume (released shortly before Weir's death). The second disc opens with one of the more bizarre Weir songs "Victim or the Crime," from the final Dead studio album Built to Last. In this live version Weir theatrical vocals are surrounded by very late 80s MIDI sounds, easily some of the more experimental stuff the band was doing at the time. There's also a strong "Estimated Prophet' two songs later and, given how fatigued Jerry sounds on this recording and how checked out Phil Lesh had been sounding for most of the 80s, you could make the argument (as Mitchum does) that Weir had finally become the de facto leader of the band. 

This would only become more pronounced after Garcia's death in 1995 and the formation of the touring juggernaut Dead & Co after the Fair Thee Well shows in 2015. Weir would release one more solo record in 2016, Blue Mountain, which opens with one of his best songs "Only a River." But don't take my word for it, in 2023 while touring Japan Bob Dylan, one of Weir's heroes, covered the song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJMV0-RMAKw&list=RDwJMV0-RMAKw&start_radio=1) Weir may forever be known as "the other one," but if you live long enough, with all due respect to Bill Kreuzman and Mickey Heart, you may find yourself "the only one" left. 

Under the Sign of the Blackstar: Ten Years of David Bowie's "Blackstar" (Part Two)

Brexit

What did Bowie’s death and the release of “Blackstar” unleash, through their respective spacetime-warping force? If we play along with this speculative fiction, Brexit is the most relevant geographic, historical and political effect. I’ll begin with two quotations from novelist Hanif Kureishi after Bowie’s death: 

“Bowie attended the same school as me, Bromley technical high school in Keston, but 10 years earlier. It is important to note what a shit-hole it was: bullying, violent, with incompetent teachers. Education, in those days, for working- and lower-middle-class children, was hardly considered essential or even necessary. We were being trained to be clerks for the civil service…[t]he more imaginative boys, or the ones who could draw, went into advertising, which Bowie did after school, working on a campaign for a slimming biscuit called Ayds.”

“British pop had always been lower middle class and came out of the art schools rather than universities, which is where all the other British culture – theatre, movies, the novel – came from. Pop was always more lively: the music-mad kids were rebellious, angry and ornery. They always had a chip on their shoulders when it came to class and education. Social disadvantage has always been essential to pop: the hilarious incongruity of kids brought up in small houses without central heating and eating Spam for tea suddenly finding themselves living in mansions after writing a song.”

This narrative is repeated again and again. Let’s use two additional examples from post-war British pop: John Lennon and Brian Eno. Lennon, a child of a single mother in Liverpool, attended art school in Liverpool after failing out of high school (his O-levels). Without the ability of a child from a single-parent household to go to art school with poor grades and less money, the history of pop music would be quite different. Eno, the child of postman, went to two different art schools—one associated with the technical college in Ipswich, the other the Winchester School of Art—neither of which were in the university system at the time. While a postal worker’s son might have opportunities not afforded to the child of a single mother, nevertheless, both biographies suggest a social safety net allowing for children of the working and service class to transform art (in this case music) in significant ways. And, yes, advertising was quick to snag these aspiring artists, but it was a time when advertising, whether we like it or not, often spurred their creativity rather than stifling it (Andy Warhol, favorite of Bowie's, would be an American example of this). 

What also marks this generation of pop artists is a willingness to experiment as well as an openness to other cultures and musics. Again, both Lennon and Bowie flirted more than once with the uglier aspects of dominant British culture (misogyny and colonialism in Lennon’s case, White Nationalism and Crowly-ish “homo superiority” in Bowie’s case); and Eno has always been guilty of a type of paternalistic, professorial quality, often deflecting his own role in the creation and continuance of the dominant neoliberal culture through conceptual obfuscation.  Yet, at least in Lennon and Eno’s examples, the type of materialist critique has never been far from their public personas: Lennon’s deep, to the point of self-parody, commitment to U.S. leftist politics of the late 1960s during the early 70s;  Eno’s outspoken views in the last several years on Palestine, war crimes, debt and, yes, Brexit (I write more about Eno's politics here: https://sevendeadlyfinns.blogspot.com/2016/06/brian-eno-ship.html). 

The relationship of Bowie’s art to history and politics is more complicated. Shortly after his death, the philosopher Simon Critchley gave an interview explicitly about Bowie’s politics: 

“You can’t really identify Bowie with an obvious, normal political position—he didn’t support the Conservative Party or Labour Party as far as I am aware, but I think the way he saw it was that there was something about art, and particularly pop music, that had insurrectionary quality and could question and bring down authority. For him, music was a political tool or could be used as a political tool to question forms of political and theological authority.”

I think that’s true, but it is often this open-ended, repressive hypothesis, that popular music is a tool for questioning authority and is therefore, in itself, political, has led to its cooption into a dominant consumerist culture at least since the 1960s. Mark Fisher writes about this in Capitalist Realism: 

“The protest impulse of the 60s posited a malevolent Father, the harbinger of a reality principle that (supposedly) cruelly and arbitrarily denies the ‘right’ to total enjoyment. This Father has unlimited access to resources, but he selfishly—and senselessly—hoards them. Yet it is not capitalism but protest itself which depends upon this figuration of the Father; and one of the successes of the current global elite has been their avoidance of identification with the figure of the hoarding Father, even though the ‘reality’ they impose on the young is substantially harsher than the conditions they protested against in the 60s.”

In a world where the authority figures Critchley cites have been supplanted by the likes of David Bowie, it becomes harder to ascribe Bowie’s critique of authority any political weight. As the chiding subheading of the interview with Critchley mentions, proving the pointlessness and toothlessness of Bowie’s insurrection : “Though there was that attack on the Crusades.” 

For Critchley, Bowie’s political intervention lies is in the politics of gender and sexuality: 

"The cool thing about Bowie is why working-class heterosexual boys like me found in Bowie a new landscape of possibility in relation to identity. We were dying our hair red and wearing mascara. And women were doing the same. What Bowie brought about was a kind of plasticity, or malleability, around questions of gender and gender identity. For him, there was something absurd about the standard heterosexual understanding of sexuality, and sexuality required a larger field of possibility and imagination. I think the liberating effects of that were felt by his fans.”

I think this political dimension to Bowie’s work cannot be overstated, and can be connected back to his time in art school. Though the gender and sexual critique can still be viewed through the lens of Fisher’s larger critique of capitalism and rebellion (it’s worth remembering that Bowie would later “out” himself as a “closeted heterosexual”), as someone who is neither gay nor transgender (but am happily raising a transgender child), I cannot imagine what Bowie’s permission must have felt like on a corporeal level. Yes, from the larger system of ideological critique, it’s important to be critical of this type of liberation politics, but, as Michel Foucault teaches us, there are multiple ideologies being played out on the body each and every day. In a sense, the idea of being able to imagine oneself, one’s sexuality and one’s gender as an aesthetically mutable costume, and having that mutable costume available to working class kids, many of whom are gay and transgender, really is a revolution of the self. 

The following are quotations from Theresa May’s speech to the Tory party October, 2016:

“[I]f you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means [….]  Just listen to the way a lot of politicians and commentators talk about the public.  They find your patriotism distasteful, your concerns about immigration parochial, your views about crime illiberal, your attachment to your job security inconvenient.”

Brexit is a cultural-political event, as much, if not more so, than an economic event. Part of the reason that the aftermath of the Brexit referendum has been so chaotic is that there never was an economic plan to put into effect, but was always about cultural politics. The Brexit campaign was about resentment: 

“On June 16 the Farage wing of the Brexit campaign unveiled its most dramatic poster. Entitled ‘Breaking Point,’ it featured a bedraggled column of Syrian refugees marching toward what was, in fact, the Slovenian border. It had little to do with Brexit as such, but it gave new meaning to the slogan of taking back control” (Crash, Adam Tooze 553). 

Brexit is about a cultural politics that would reassert the prominence of the British once again on the world stage, while shrinking the experience British citizens would have of foreigners and the world outside of the UK. It’s as if they all listened to the Kink’s Village Green Preservation Society and imagined themselves as the narrator of the title track listing all of the things he “missed” about the local village green:

“They [the Brexiteers], in fact, imagined that leaving Europe was a way to restore Britain’s greatness and freedom” (554).

Someone once sang that the film, this film, is a saddening bore, because we’ve seen it ten times or more. That generation of “rebellious,” “angry,” and “ornery” working class kids had already pointed out the vacuousness of this form of cultural parochialism. Here’s the second verse of Bowie’s “Life on Mars?”

"It's on America's tortured brow

That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow

Now the workers have struck for fame

Because Lennon's on sale again

See the mice in their million hordes

From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads

Rule Britannia is out of bounds

To my mother, my dog, and clowns"

Part of what makes Bowie’s politics difficult to pin down is his unwillingness to give us a coherent point of view with an articulated political statement. Even Eno, notorious for ascribing little meaning to his often random lyrics, entitled a B-side after the Red Army Faction in West Germany, concluding with the voice of Judy Nylon screaming “No sacrifice!” There’s little politics to be easily discerned from the “girl with the mousy hair.” Even so, the provincialism of “rule Britannia,” as well as the sneering use of mummy and daddy at the beginning of the song, demonstrates a longing outside of the world constructed by capitalism (“America” “Mickey Mouse” growing up to be big as a cow, workers striking because their favorite pop hero “Lennon” is on sale again) and the exclusionary nature of nationalism (if America’s metaphor is “Mickey Mouse,” England’s synecdoche is “Rule Britiania!”).

In that sense, the constant reference to the titular question “Life on Mars?” suggests a desire to escape a world constricted by the binaries of American capitalism and British nationalism (and Soviet communism filtered through the homonym Lenin/Lennon). The possibility of this outside was opened up to working and lower middle-class kids through outlets such as a robust Arts Council (which was founded by the economist John Maynard Keynes). The decline of art and aesthetics being a possibility of escaping the life one was leading as a working class or lower-middle class youth has been replaced with ossifying the either or choice between global capital or provincial nationalism:

“Sixty percent of Labour voters turned out for Remain. But that went only to show that in much of the country, the Labour Party was largely divorced from poorer and less-well-educated voters. Apart from education, the other socioeconomic variable that weighted heavily in the balance was the pain inflicted by austerity since 2010, and that hurt worst where decline was a long-term phenomenon” (Tooze 553).

The program of austerity that the UK had enacted during the financial crisis of 2010-2012 has inflicted such acute damage to the poor and working class of England, that even outside observers are beginning to have grave concern about the country’s ability to properly care for the most vulnerable members of society: the poor and the young.  On a less urgent, but no less damaging, level, funding for education, arts and cultural programs have been devastated since the beginning of the decade. 

This is all to say that when we all collectively agree that there will never be another David Bowie, that we don’t fall into the trap of the genius that has cursed aesthetics at least since the eighteenth century. Yes, David Bowie was amazingly talented and creative. Yet, that talent and creativity does not exist in a vacuum. He was a living breathing being in a society that afforded him the opportunity to be “rebellious, angry and ornery.” Having the space and material support to experiment through those feelings, though one might have grown up eating Spam, must also be seen as part of Bowie’s genius. 

I’m reminded of a quotation from one of my father’s (who also passed away in 2016) favorite authors, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. In 1979 Gould concluded his essay on the shape and size of Einstein’s brain with the following: 

“The physical structure of the brain must record intelligence in some way, but gross size and external shape are not likely to capture anything of value. I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” 

This is the true “blackstar” opened with Bowie’s death and Brexit: the feeling post-89 that the narrative we had held onto for a long time in which thought, freedom and subjectivity cannot be conditioned by history, politics and economics is false. Bowie in life seemed to embody this very walking fiction, and we all enjoyed it. A genius who had the means and talent to teach the world how to be, at times, in the best and freest sense possible. But those fictions must be put to rest, Bowie tells us with "Blackstar," , even if it means violently ripping the mask off our own spacetime to reveal the world we inhabit. A world undergoing a sixth extinction, in which the fate of the human is not so certain.