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photography from Guatemala, Maryland, Italy and elsewhere by Doug Terry |
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VISIT DC? AN ESSAY ON WHY EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN SHOULD VISIT |
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News, analysis, commentary, social trends, culture, politics, government, books, movies, travel, cycling and other stuff |
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T H E T E R R Y R E P O R T 2012 |
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Facts first, logic always, truth before everything |
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Okay, so here’s the deal. A group of highly self indulgent, whining young writers, in New York of all places!, has started an online journal and a club and they kind get together and tell each other how tuff it is to be young, talented and broke and they are hoping someone will notice them and notice that they are young, talented and, yes, broke, so maybe they’ll get a break. Get it? Out of this deep desperation, careers are born, while most of them will probably fail or at least get a job reading really dull manuscripts for some semi-big publishing house. But for now, they’ve got something to do, which is better than nothing. Lacking utterly the required sympathy for this group (having suffered brain damage in 6th grade English class, if you really want to know), I still like some of what they are writing. The TerryReport is re-publishing most of one essay on their site, with a link to the rest of it (which, if you insist on reading it, you will likely find mostly useless, but the link is there as a courtesy, anyway). |
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The Failure Addict
John Phillips mastered the art of serial disappointment by sharing it compulsively. This makes him a harbinger of the social media age by Rob Horning At best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment, therefore the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future It takes a special kind of self-absorption to believe that your failures will fascinate, a need to be loved not for your talents but despite them. John Phillips, founder of the Mamas and the Papas, the 1960s quartet that rode a string of deceptively sunny-seeming radio hits to become icons of hippie hedonism, exemplified this species of celebrity narcissism. Gifted but irretrievably dissolute, Phillips had always seemed more interested in romanticizing failure and squandering talent than applying his ample supply of it with any consistency. Even in his chart-ruling heyday, he seemed perversely, persistently drawn to themes of disappointment, betrayal, and regret (albeit cleverly masked by resplendent harmonies and catchy melodies). The Mamas and the Papas’ hits are preoccupied with ennui, broken relationships, and futile fantasies of escape: California dreaming on such a winter’s day. The first Mamas and the Papas album, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (1966) went to the top of Billboard’s album chart and spawned several hits, including “Monday, Monda”€ť and “California Dreamin’” ,” which have become durable folk standards. And already, on the group’s second album, rushed out later that year to capitalize on the band’s momentum, Phillips was exuberantly singing, “I can’t wait to let you down”. To become addicted to failure, you must first achieve some modicum of success to give it kick. Only then, when there are stakes, when there are strangers to disappoint, can you search in earnest for the one transcendent, spectacular failure to rule all failures, the one that can provide the enduring consolation all addicts seek, the repetition and the pre-emptive depredation that will seize back a sense of agency from the pointless inevitability of death. By 1970, Phillips had secured a lifetime’s worth of success and spent much of the rest of his life in its fading halo. The music Phillips made after the Mamas and the Papas demise did little to affect his reputation, which was instead destroyed by two tabloid items. At age 57, after years of self-confessed and well-publicized drug addiction, Phillips received a liver transplant. Months later he was photographed boozing again, and joked with Howard Stern that he was just trying to break in the new liver”.€ť More disturbingly, his daughter Mackenzie Phillips alleged, in a 2009 tell-all bio and on Oprah, that she had had a decade-long incestuous relationship with him after they had started using drugs together. Phillips’s own sordid memoir, Papa John, published in 1986 after he was convicted of drug trafficking, is appallingly unreflective. It’s more of a memory dump that ends up coming across as an elaborate dodge, a winking copout. Phillips takes palpable pleasure in narrating his sexual and chemical exploits including his needle sharing with Mackenzie, and then tacks on an obligatory mea culpa at the end. But the memoir mostly reads like just another symptom of his peculiar malady, the overwhelming self-pity, the same lacerating melancholy and compulsion to romanticize disappointment. Phillips consistently presents himself as powerless to do anything but register his own selfishness, as if it were an inevitable fact. He habitually flees responsibility and refuses to consider what causes his flight. Instead he seems to expect, pathologically, that he will be forgiven totally for all his transgressions. He doesn’t go in for trying to justify his behavior; all he can muster is the implicit excuse of hedonism, typified by such passages as this: “The France was as elegant as you could get. We had our own wine stewards and did our best to consume as much of the dope as possible. We swam, read, sunbathed, drank, and I stayed high the whole time.” €ť Sometimes he adds a dash of hippie lebensphilosophie: “The dope was out on the tables, in vases and bowls, and money never seemed to change hands. That’s how I wanted it in my house. We were there to share and party. And the partying never let up.” Throughout Papa John, it’s clear that Phillips had no particular aspiration to express the utopian ideals of the 1960s. After all, one of his signal achievements was to trivialize the countercultural youth movement by writing “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”. €ť In his memoir, he buys into the hype about himself retroactively, the voice of the love generation. Yet in warmly recounting the generosity of the scene, Phillips seems to forget that the money had to come from somewhere. The square record-buying public ultimately fueled his drug-consumption spree, and they didn’t really get to share in the piles of pills at the Bel Air parties. All they got is the second-hand appreciation of his lifestyle as it filtered out in gossip magazines, self-referential songs, and autobiographies. Phillips’s publisher perhaps encouraged him for commercial reasons to offer sensationalistic details: he claims to have had a threesome with Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda; he says he turned down an invitation to party at 10050 Cielo Drive on the night the Manson family showed up and murdered everyone, but in running through his litany of dissolution, Phillips seems like a spectator to his own memories. He sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself that his trip through life was gloriously frenetic even though he seems passive in the face of overwhelming fame. Notoriety unleashed appetites that made his old ambitions into afterthoughts, rationalizations. Unexpected attention on an unfathomable scale seems to have permanently disoriented him, made all his choices seem, finally, arbitrary. Though I knew the Mamas and the Papas’ music from oldies radio, my personal fascination with Phillips began in earnest in 2001. I had dropped out of a Ph.D. program that I had somewhat arbitrarily enrolled in, moved home from the west, and worked only when one of the half dozen temp agencies I had enrolled with could get me an assignment. Several of these at least put my English degrees to appropriate use by having me alphabetize files. After 13 years away from home, I was back in the town I grew up in. Before I left school, I’d had a falling out with a close friend, and he emailed to tell me that I was a coddled, pseudointellectual phony who would never amount to anything and who would probably live out the rest of his days in his mother’s basement, where I was now, in fact, living. I didn’t think all that much of Phillips or the Mamas and the Papas — they seemed of a piece and interchangeable with, say, Three Dog Night — until I came across Phillips’s 1970 solo album on a Usenet newsgroup. Self-titled but generally known as “John, the Wolf King of L.A.” after a poem on the back cover by his girlfriend at the time, the record is saturated in narcissism, with lyrics confronting self-inflicted failure in the midst of decadent excess. It is shot through with cynicism and references to junkies, letches, hangers-on, and a whole host of post-1960s casualties trying to put together the pieces. It suggests that the California dream the Mamas and the Papas had so effectively evoked wound up dissolving not even into a nightmare but, perhaps worse, a banal, spiritless malaise. As is typical with Phillips, he masked misery with musical red herrings: in this case, a languid country-rock sound supplied by the Wrecking Crew, top L.A. studio musicians of the period. On the album, Phillips doesn’t hesitate to transform the potentially embarrassing details of his personal life into frank songs — perhaps the most egregious example is “Let It Bleed, Genevieve,” which recounts his skin-popping heroin use with another woman while his girlfriend was upstairs having a miscarriage. Phillips seems to find this tell-all approach irresistible, pitilessly recounting his foibles as if putting the memories up for sale in song excuses his behavior — as if the right blend of self-pity, oversharing, and callousness could achieve true pathos. At the time I was entranced by this sort of brazen self-revelation. To me, “ John, the Wolf King of L.A.” €ť was about a very recognizable kind of depression, in which you can conceive great ambitions for yourself and even recognize the means for fulfilling them, but then you balk at the effort it would take and withdraw instead into various fantasies and feints. I identified with this to an unwholesome degree. The song on the record that I found most devastating was “Topanga Canyon”, a deceptively easygoing track that relocates the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for My Mama” €ť to the fabled artists’ enclave in the mountains outside Los Angeles. In place of Lou Reed’s restlessness, Phillips is laconic; instead of gritty urban squalor, there’s sun-soaked ennui. The song is about an apathetic addict, and it should be hard to summon much sympathy for him, but the chorus somehow allows drug addiction to evoke and emblemize broader failures, serial self-disappointments: Oh, mama, I’m in deep water, As Phillips waits for his man in fruitless anticipation, he is crushed by the sense that those who have cared about him have been waiting in the same way for him — waiting for him to achieve something definite, something he can’t say he is incapable of but something he nonetheless can’t bring himself to ever accomplish, something on the order of the everyday business of life, in all its humdrum plainness and contingency. Or perhaps something even more insignificant, like a dissertation on 18th century literature, the disorganized notes for which I had in a bunch of yellow legal pads that I could no longer bring myself to open. You don’t have to be a junkie to appreciate what the song’s getting at. Anyone who has ever felt oppressed by the feeling of being ordinary will recognize that sort of despair, the sense that the strategies one has chosen to make life seem special have turned out to be traps. You are left waiting for something to happen. Today, for me, that means scanning around the different places online where someone might send some indication that they have noticed me, send some message that tells me I exist — one that says, Everyone thought I was smarter. The 1970s were halcyon days for the music industry. Margins at the major labels were apparently fat enough to let them coddle rock royalty wrestling with their egos and their growing irrelevance. After the Mamas and the Papas’ breakup and that lone solo record, Phillips’s intermittent efforts to make new albums yielded nothing but a disarray of unfocused, unfinished masters. Still, he must have managed enough flashes of brilliance and charm that his friends in the business kept staking him. Listening to those recordings now — released posthumously by Varese Sarabande — you vicariously experience the thrill of Phillips’s heedless burning of entertainment-industry money and reckless destroying of brain cells in the futile search for a creative spark. A lot of delusion must have went into those late-period recordings. At some level, everyone involved must have known that these efforts were not going to return him to artistic respectability after years of drug-addled disrepute. On an song called “Pussycat,” from aborted sessions with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Phillips pours out his heart for the dancers at his favorite strip club, with whom he clearly empathizes. Right at home in yet another habitat of broken dreams, Phillips confesses his intimate familiarity with the scene and sheepishly admits that if he had “a million hearts to give,” he would give one to all the girls who work onstage. A booming backing vocalist repeats the line “If I had a million hearts to give”ť (listen here) bringing the song to a complete halt, as if to upbraid us with the magnitude of the wish Phillips just expressed: That he deeply feels the pain of those compelled to expose and exploit themselves for a jeering or indifferent universe of spectators, and he wishes he could comfort them. He wishes he could comfort himself. But then the song lurches back into its insouciant rhythm, undermining its own poignancy. It is a microcosm of Phillips’s entire career. |
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I have a bucket full of comments to make about this piece, but no time to make them in full at the moment. There are a couple of observations to share, however. First, there is no mention of the hit song that John Phillips wrote with the Beach Boys in 1988 entitled KoKomo. It was a hit, the last time the Beach Boys would ever appear on the charts with a new song and the last time for Phillips, too. That song, while enjoyable at its own level, is kind of a throwaway pop tune, probably revealed Phillips intentions in regard to music more than anything else: he viewed it as a way to financially support his excessively hedonistic lifestyle and little else. When he needed more money, he wrote a song and made a basket of money to keep the drugs and laze going. There is a real sense in which rock n’roll and popular music is not music at all, but a collection of repetitive cords, beats and hooks designed to get the public to buy. Gimmicks, in other words. Anyone with deep musical talent or, talented or not, musical ambitions, can easily feel hemmed in by the music and by success. It is as if popular music is a joke played on the public by these really smart guys who make millions, tour the world and have sex with every female in sight. What a deal. I have met with and seen rock musicians on tour and it ain’t pretty. If one watches the documentaries and mockumentaries about this kind of thing, the sense comes through that the lads in the groups felt they are pulling one over, in a big, big way, on all the dumb, cornpone hicks who buy their music. There is something to that notion. In the process, were they pulling one over of themselves and creating the basis of raging self hatred? They are showered with money, fame and personal opportunities to connect with others, but many wind up feeling that none of it is deserved and that the human connection, man to woman, is something for which they don’t have the time or the energy. Searching for love, they find only mindless copulating with women who are doing it to a star, not a person. Success robs them of the fruits of their success. All the while, they know that their fame springs from luck, timing and what are perhaps minor tricks of musicality or voice that are magnified a thousand times over by the eager need of fans for hits. All of this, fueled by drugs and deep personality disorders (which might be the origin of some of the creative impulses in the first place), can make Johnny a very unhappy boy. What was so new and special about the Mamas and the Papas that made them icons of the late 60s and 70s? Their gimmick was to have two women and two men singing with the voices layered over each other in the song. What else? Wow, the song would pause a really critical moments. Both Monday, Monday and California Dreamin’ have dramatic pauses. Both are laments. Monday suggests that death or suicide would be preferable to living to see Tuesday. Dreamin’ suggests that getting back to “LA” would be the solution to all problems and laments winters in general. Are these profound sentiments? No. Taken at their most basic level, they aren’t much beyond a written temper tantrum of a 2nd grader, which suggests that this might be the highest level of maturity Phillips reached. What’s more, they were written before the group had a big commercial success and show him decrying, in advance, the imposition of work and fame. The song California Dreamin’ was written after the group, taking drugs and living on the beach in the Virgin Islands, was busted back to New York in the wintertime by American Express canceling Phillips over used and abused card, which the group had been using for all expenses in paradise. It is, in a very real sense, a lament about having to be in New York recording a hit song rather than lying on the beach, having sex and taking drugs. The real purpose of Phillips existence, in other words, was interrupted by making music. It is not too great a leap from there to see a template for Phillips’ life: things would be fine, if he just didn’t have to go into the studio and do fake things for the entertainment and amusement of all those dumb kids out there. One very important fact, often forgotten, is that many, if not most, of the people making music for the so called boomer generation were not themselves boomers. Phillips was not, Dylan was not, the Beatles were not, the Beach Boys were not. In fact, if you go down a list of the 60’s and 70’s icons, the actual boomer is the exception rather than the rule. This is important because even a few years separation allowed song writers to distance themselves and to mock the social/cultural phenomenon they were pretending to chronicle and, in some cases, lead. These were not dreamy eyed 17 year olds, they weren’t even dreamy eyed 22 year olds when a lot of the social change hit the fan. Some merely moved to exploit what was happening. Many, like Simon and Garfunkle, had tried to have musical careers in advance of that time (Tom and Jerry was the name S&G used before the folk rock period opened new pathways to success.) Many just jumped on the new styles as if they had been born hippies when, in fact, that had put on the ethos of another era a few years before trying to make it big. Was Phillips little more than a cynical adult trying to make money off the kids? He was a person trying to make money anyway he could and music allowed him to be massively indulgent without working very hard. While the destitution of his life that money allowed, plus the ick factor of his reported sexual excesses, make Phillips a figure of some unavoidable, if rancid, note, I don’t really want to figure him out or puzzle over what happened to him and his legacy. He’s best forgotten, washed away by the sands of time, perhaps appearing briefly in some psychology text book about human disasters. I prefer to think of Phillips as just another addict. Doug Terry, 12.1.11 ps: Best wishes, really, to The New Inquiry .
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