paranoid histories reader

8/10/2019 Paranoid Histories Reader

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9/42

IMAGINARY ESSAYS

III.

The loss of innocence, Andy,

The morpheme cence is regular as to Rule IIc, IIa and IIb

[cents] and [sense] being more regular. The [inn-]With its germinated consonant

Is not the inn in which the Christ Child was born. The root is

nocere and innocence, I guess, means not hurtful. Innocents

The beasts would talk to them (Alice in the woods with the

faun). While to Orpheus

They would only listen. Innocuous

Comes from the same root. The trees

Of some dark forest where we wander amazed at the selves of

ourselves. Stumbling. Roots

Stay. You cannot lose your innocence, Andy

Nor could Alice. Nor could anyone

Given the right woods. Jack Spicer, Morphemics

Julia Drescher


10/42

Let us fake out a frontier a poem somebody could hide in with a

sheriffs posse after him

a frontier a poem1

attempts an erasure to artificially re-construct what was already artificial to begin with,where an authenticperson might hide.2

Demanding permission to do sointhe act of asking. (Demanding permission from whom?)3

But, from the get-go, the poem is about losing somebody, something, in the process.

Quien es? Quien es?

Ever-widening holes in the ground of the poem as if for a coffin on either side a land sofull of false clues it appears there are nothing but false clues to grasp.

From here on out a veil. Clouded weather what the foot will do. Lifting it at the line as

if it were possible to transform an Historical inheritance in the asking to re(-)fuse it &

this lifting motion the last thing you really see. For even it does not know where itsgoing.

(Once you pass into an after or under world, a line crossed marks a ghost becoming. Another story, a whole

different animal the poet & readers of the poem. A correspondence like almost touching. Through the left

eye the words dancing as bullets.)

In an unfamiliar territory trying. To get a lay of the land is what names are for.

Say Billy The Kid over & over as means of grasping for a location, remembering that

wherewhere you are.hope not being hope

"Where there is a personal liking we go.#They say he need (present) enemy (plural)

I am not them. This is the first transformation.He wanted

it to be all mixed up, himself almost indistinguishable from the ground and trees and stones, peering out

from the brush like a jackrabbit or skunk cabbage, or like the sixteenth of a Blackfoot Indian he always

claimed to be. We$are great, and rapidly I was about to say fearfully growing! the death-plant in the skull

Grows wings and grows enormous.

The herb of the whole system.Systematically blotting out the anise weed

and the trap-door spider of the vacant lot.

Worse than static or crabgrass.

Thanatos, bone at the bottom, Saint

Francis, that botanist in Santa Rosa

(Bless me now, for I am a plant and an animal)

Called him Brother Death. In the census reports

[the frontier] is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square

mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition.


11/42

until all ground for hope has

vanisheda

Nothing

can kill anybody.4

*

Let us fake out a frontier 5

The poem shows another path to follow a frontier as an opponent to fake out. A

sheriffs posse deliberately misled in order to fool, makea fool (of). To plunder, wound,

kill to disfigure as a means of concealment.

Re-fusing a story as a means of creating a space for recuperation, where thisBilly The

Kid can hide when he shoots people

Defined. A frontier as a part of [a] country that faces and formsa line to another. i.e.

Time

(Folds. In a later poem:

The time changes

As you cross each border.

Daffodils, ceremonies of spring, sprang, sprung

And it is August

Another century.b

In a recording of Spicer reading this poem, I hear him say instead: And it is August / Another country.

%Stay there on the edge of no cliff. With no

conceivable future but progress long,

flat mesa-country. A flat piece of wrapping paper, already wrinkled, but wrinkled

again by hand, smoothed into shape by an electric iron

A painting

Which told me about the death of Billy The Kid. Shot

In the back by an arrow, President Kennedy

seemed to stiffen for a moment before

he assumed his place in history.&We do not like some things and the hero

doesnt; deviating head-stones

and uncertainty;

going where one does not wish

to go; suffering and not

saying so; standing and listening where something

is hiding. The hero shrinks

as what it is flies out on muffled wings, with twin yellow

eyes to and fro


12/42

What thought hides in another word ghost dragging on the line)

takes time trying to find an under in an overworld. Finding means you know where to

look means knowing where THEYbegin & Ior YOUends. Let us

Divested Historically

as performances that erase or cover over whats too hard to face, recognize the face of

applied so that the business of (the) living can continue unimpeded & satisfied.(Literally, business.)6

Torture gardens and scenic railways. The radioThat told me about the death of Billy The Kid

*

Let us fake out

For now we see through a glass, darkly

The terrifying face of History, its grin turns & turned toward.

A hand-me-down romanticized frontier. Maps a location to go towardin attempts toescape something or someone, only to face what you became. A wound. Forming a

country & Billy the Kid an apparition resurrected to perform as an apparatus of its

expansion.

'You do know Graham how I love you and you love me

but nothing can stop the roar of the tide. The grail, not there,

becomes a light which is not able to be there like a

lighthouse or spendrift

No, Graham, neither of us can stop the pulse and beat of it

The roar. Then went

Samson downand behold, a young lion roared against himand [Samson] rent him as he would have

rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand And after a time he returnedand he turned aside to see the

carcase of the lion: and, behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion. And he

took thereof in his hands, and went on eating Heros

eat soup like anyone else. Falseground.

Soup

Of the evening

Beautifull soup

And the sky stays there not an image

But the heros

Like the image of an image

(What is made of soup from)

Zooms.


13/42

No manifesting of destiny if violence is accepted as fated fact.

Blurring the line between prophecy & memory, Historys face a curtain whose lifting is a

promise of revelation in the performance of images passed down its pretensions toward

reflection asrevelation. It rarely reallylifts.

(It was a five-act play, without head or tail, and it made no difference at which act we commenced the

performance. They have made

maps of every square inch of the world and imprisoned us inside those maps. Lets escape.)c

If the performance isthe curtain, & the intent is to make a place for escape,then howcould real&fakebe mapped for some body who wanted to avoid the traps? Let us 7

Maybe what I mean to say is(Having been given no

Right woods to begin from)8

Let us fake out an essay d

____ ____

( Eros

Do that.

I gave you my imaginary hand and you give

me your imaginary hand and we walk

together (in imagination) over the earthly ground.)When leaving he always told Jay Im going to Texas


14/42

*Marianne Moore,The Hero+Jack Spicer,from Thing Language,Language(1965),Buffalo Bill / Letter fromJack Spicer to Graham Mackintosh (1954)

-Bleeding together in the footnotes:

Marianne Moore, The Hero

Jack Spicer, Transformations James Herndon on Jack Spicer inEverything As Expected

John C. Calhoun, 1817

Jack Spicer, Thing Language Fredrick Jackson Turner

Jack Spicer, Intermission III Jack Spicer,Billy The Kid Jack Spicer, Love Poems, #9 Marianne Moore, The Hero

Jack Spicer, from The Book of Lancelot, The Holy GrailJudges14.5-9 Jack Spicer, Thing Language Jack Spicer, Love Poems, #9

James Herndon on Jack Spicer in the Poems and Documents section of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, RobinBlaser, ed.


15/42

IMAGINARY ESSAYS

IV.

To mess around. To totally destroy the pieces. To build around them.

Jack Spicer, A Textbook of Poetry, #16


16/42

Human being is at a loss

As location

Dis-

location e.g. without

Distance from the static the future (a prior path) exudes.

Where are you am I

In

Other words one substitution for another one after another multiplying with time (history)

Billy The Kid

A substitute

as Christ was a / substitute.1

*

The cover of the poem a headstone.

Love / for God or man transformed to distance.2

Decomposition as a primary composing position grasping

No love deserves the death it has3

If [l]ovetransformed to distance were read as a sentence, this distance could be heard as noun & verb.

Gasping

What I mean is

I

Will tell you about the pain

It was a long pain

One pain after an|other, similar to each other.


17/42

In the many reconstitutions of Billy the Kid (who drags up all that history from hell that dragged him down), what is really desired?

A resurrection or a funeral?

*

IX.

I can no more rememberWhat brought me here

Than bone answers bone in the arm

Or shadow sees shadow

Deathward we ride in the boat

Like someone canoeing

In a small lakeWhere at either end

There are nothing but pine-branches

Deathward we ride in the boat

Broken-hearted or broken-bodied

The choice is real. The diamond. I

Ask it.

If read as alternatives, the last or is a blatant lie It is only a realchoice for one who has & is such distance.

4

The under-currents of mourning in the poem (here from a desire for this false choice to be real) break the borders of a circle a zero a

period or a lake makes into a parenthesis creating, while pretending to contain, distances that, turning in on themselves, refuse to be

measured or mapped.

X.

Billy The Kid

I love you

Billy The Kid


18/42

I back anything you say

And there was the desert

And the mouth of the river

(In spite of your death notices)

There is honey in the groin

Billy

A spell of

Reading as

Elegy.

*

What is in what is not?

Billy the Kid (whose realbirthday is unknown, who was known by multiple names in his lifetime), is what he is because he is never

where he is.5

Escaping the confinement of maps by hiding from them, sliding line to line, section to section Spicers pronouns are merely one

active non-site in the poem. Using this form of scatter the poem reads as a homily on content that refuses to be trapped, refuses theterror of a particular salvation. The I in the poem becomes a personification of absence as botha running from, & a failing to escape

the trap of, a performance of the Historical.

The desire to close such inherited distance.

It is only in the last section (X) that the I arrives as close to particularity as it ever can perhaps only able to be located (& locate

itself) because ofthe absence of a response that the repeated call of Billys name suggests. Escaping even the Is love (& perhaps, the

ability to escapebeing the germ of this love in the first place), in such absence as remains, what is there to do but holler I love you

from whatever goddamned hole you find yourself in.


19/42

Failed homily

I both eater & eaten by.6

*

It was a long pain

About as wide as a curtain

But longAs the great outdoors.

Stig-

mata

Three bullet holes in the groin

One in the head

dancingRight below the left eyebrow

What I mean is I

Will tell you about his

Pain.7

Another trick in/of time in Spicers poem in this section (IV), the pain comes before what might be said to cause it. Stigmatais the

name given a mark made by an instrument. Or, taking it apart & reading in reverse, made| to prick. The word holding its wound as

what caused it.

A troubling hole, a settled relation reopens.

*

Moultrie: (to Billy) What is it? Whats wrong? You all right?

Youre not like the books! You dont wear silver studs! You dont stand up to glory! Youre not him!

(crying)

Youre not him! Youre not him!


20/42

In the movie The Left-Handed Gun, Moultrie is a writer an apostle, a Mary Magdalene, & a Judas in one.

*

In the dark mouth of the tomb where she weeps, Mary Magdalene hears somebody ask the question: Whom seekest thou?8

Her recognition of his voice & reaching out for it is one answer. His do not touch meis another.

Unlike the apostles she takes this to mean that ghosts possess speech only through their inability to be possessed.

Turning from the tomb, drifting through the desert searching for a different question to consume her,

Mary Magdalene

(Playing the Fool

She might as well have tried to touchThe moon)

Died trying to find it.

____ ____

"Jack Spicer, from The Holy Grail, Book of Gwenivere, #3#Jack Spicer,fromBook of Magazine Verse, Four Poems ForRamparts$Jack Spicer, fromLanguage, Phonemics%The poem prior to this reads:

So the heart breaks

Into small shadows

Almost so random

They are meaningless

Like a diamond

Has at the center of it a diamond


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Or a rock

Rock.

Being afraid

Love asks its bare question

If the meaning of the first & second Ors read certainly as equivalence (i.e. same/same), then the third (buried between broken-hearted & broken-bodied)

sneaks in dressed as an answer an excess of questions. The definitions of the word or would be the basis for these questions concerning the relationship (&

the meaning of it) between broken-hearted & broken-bodied too, if applied reflectively on bone/shadow: 1. Introducing an alternative 2. Offering a

choice of a series 3. Introducing an equivalent 4. Expressing uncertainty . Middle English, alteration of other,alteration of Old English oththe.(Also, the possible

o(a)rs).&Jack Spicer,from The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether,A Textbook of Poetry, #7'Jack Spicer, Vancouver Lecture 1. Q: And you would say that there isnt much hope in chasing [the sources of dictation] because you might find them or

people in there just might run away harder. Is that it? JS: You have to keep a kind of lookout for them. You cant catch them like canaries by putting salt on their

tails, but you sort of give them an even chance. I mean, show them theres a good dinner of blood like in the Odyssey where they dug the trench and slit the

throats of the sacrificial animals. And all of that is likely to summon them. The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, Peter Gizzi,

editor.(In addition to the shifting possibilities of content concerning the pronouns/possessive, the articlesare used like a mirage they seemquite stable & are

involved in specifically describing injuries. And yet, in addition to the switch from the/a pain to his pain, to say the groin rather than (for example) his or

our or your creates a dizzying proliferation of meanings.)Who do you seek? Who seeks you? Quien es? Quien es?


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31/42

"

Kurt Newman

For a Paranoid History, or, Bakersfield: Capital of the Twentieth Century

1.

In an essay on Walter Benjamin, Samuel Weber notes that a certain word favored byBenjaminBeziehungswahn, a German synonym of paranoiahas some interesting

connotations that the English nosological vocabulary lacks. Beziehungswahn is madeup of two component words: Beziehung, meaning relation, and Wahn, meaning

delirium.

So paranoia might be rendered a madness of relation wherein the paranoiac getscompletely carried away in making links and connections.

Presumably, Weber suggests, the madness lies in never knowing where to stop.

Manuel De Landa takes up the question of delirium in his fascinating and puzzling

bookDeleuze: History and Science.

(W)e can give a more detailed treatment of the different levels of scale at whichsocial entities operate. We can assume that the smallest scale is that of persons,

but only as long as the subjectivity of each person is itself conceived as emergingfrom the interactions between sub-personal components More specifically, a

subject crystallizes in the mind through the habitual grouping of ideas viarelations of contiguity; their habitual comparison through relations of

resemblance; and the habitual perception of constant conjunction of cause and

effect that allows one idea (that of the cause) to always evoke another (the effect).Perceived contiguity, causality, and resemblance, as relations of exteriority,constitute the three principles of association that transform a mind into a subject.

Material components would include the routine mental labor performed toassemble ideas into a whole, as well as the biological machinery of sensory

organs needed for the production of impressions. Habit itself would constitute themain process of territorialization, that is, the process that gives a subject its

defining boundaries and maintains those boundaries through time. Habit performsa synthesis of the present and the past in view of a possible future. This yields a

determinate duration for the lived present of the subject, a fusion of immediatelypast and present moments, and generates a sense of anticipation, so that habitual

repetition of an action can be counted on to yield similar results in the future. Aprocess of deterritorialization, on the other hand, would be any process that takes

the subject back to the state it had prior to the creation of fixed associationsbetween ideas, that is, the state in which ideas are connected as in a delirium.1

1Manuel De Landa, Deleuze: History and Science. New York: Atropos, 2010, 14-15.


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#

To deterritorialize, then, would be to seek out a madness of relations, to induce adelirium of never knowing where to stop. Might this not be a productive operation for

historians to pursue?

2.

We who work on the history of the Left often find ourselves confronted with strangefailures of this madness of relations. The Lefts madness seems to lie in never

knowing where to start.

Consider one of the twentieth centurys most famous cases of failed recognitionAmerican leftists systematically missing the proletarian character of film noir.

As Robert Pippin writes:

The story of this designation is well known. After a long wartime period during

which no American movies could be shown in Paris, French critics wereastonished at what they saw when the films returned. They especially expressed

amazement at what had happened to the American gangster film or crimemelodrama or private-eye thriller, and some argued that the movies being

produced were qualitatively different, as if a new genre altogether, much darkerand stranger than those previously made. In 1946, the journalist Nino Frank

compared the films to the srie noire novels and coined the name film noir.Eventually Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton published a very influential

book in 1955, and the convention was firmly established: the Americans had beenmaking film noir, even though all during the classic period of the 1940s no one

had any idea that they were making such film noir.2

Why did it take the French to discover this exemplary form of the proletariangrotesque? Why couldnt most American radicals discern the political potency of these

movies, even though many of the producers of film noir had been card-carrying leftists(some even went to jail over their political commitments)?

3.

Those are questions for a different essay, although they guide us to the happily paranoid

reading we are pursuing here: a reading that insists that the music of Buck Owens and theBuckaroos, of Bakersfield, California, was a pivotal achievement in the history of

American proletarian aesthetics. The event of Bakersfield conjured in Buck Owens andthe Buckaroos ritournellesreshaped the psycho-geography of American working class

culturea miraculous series of coincidences of time and space that brought a largecohort of the last generation of southern sharecroppers to Kern County at precisely the

moment that working class culture was both literally and figuratively electrified.

2Robert B. Pippin,Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy. Charlottesville:

University of Virginia Press, 2012.


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$

4.

From a very negative review of a forgotten popular melodrama inBoston Weekly

Magazinein 1818:

Our modish writers appear to be extravagantly fond of Aristotles maxim, thatthe marvelous is always delightful. Accordingly a plot is made up in their hands

of a very ingenious snarl of perplexities, the unravelling of which constitutes thegreat interest of the piece. These dramatic storytellers lead their readers into paths

well puzzled with mazes, and the argument consists in extricating their heroesand heroines from what, in real life, would be unpoetically considered as

inextricable difficulties. Their fable is a labyrinth of delightful perplexities: and ifthey succeed, by the imminent dangers of their situations, and the dexterity of

their nick of time escapesto raising the readers curiosity to such a pitch ofintensity as to prevent any scrutinizing attention to the utter barrenness of the road

over which they hurry himthe design is answered.

3

5.

We wish to single out here the music of Buck Owens and the Buckaroos producedbetween the late 1950s, when a shift from Western Swing-tinged honky-tonk music to the

distinctively baroque textures of the Bakersfield Sound becomes audible, to 1969,when Owens assumed hosting duties on CBSsHee Haw.

Unlike the pastoral landscapes of the republican homesteader heartland so often

associated with country music, Owenss Bakersfield is the site of buzzing, crowded,

sweaty ambiences. Owenss music is a lyricism of rented spaces (to borrow AmyKaplans description of early twentieth century literary realism). Owenss Bakersfield isorganized not around the factorys clock, but rather around the aleatory time of wildcat

trucking and seasonal work.

Owenss Bakersfield is a space that emerges after the momentous event described byJonathan Crary in his book 24/7when capitalism decided that the world should be

awake twenty four hours a day. And thus gave birth to a whole new series of desires andpleasures to be chased in neon rooms and in the sonic folds of Don Richs guitar and

Tom Brumleys pedal steel.

To my ears this is straightforward, almost mundane. But the music of Buck Owens andthe Buckaroos in the 1960s is not heard this way. In fact, it is heard as just the opposite

and will remain unheard as long as we refuse the delirium of relations that is required ifwe are to know how to retrieve our repressed, collective memories of radical desire.

3David Grimsted,Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1968.


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%

6.

Just as the 1940s and 1950s intellectuals did not see film noir for what it was, so, too,when the New Left looked around in the 1960s, they did not see that Bakersfield country

was in fact a fount of radical affect.

Left political observers in the Johnson Era wrote articles like To the Nashville Station,as if the New Rights ascent as vanguard party would naturally launch from the Grand

Ole Opry.

In different ways, historians have seen commercial country music as part of an insidioussouthernization of American conservative politics. The last hopes for the Woody

Guthrie-ite southern songster as cultural leader, in this reading, was extinguished withMerle Haggards turn to Nixonian politics with Okie From Muskogee.

This reading is, in almost every particular, imaginatively impoverished and politically

illogical. To put it another wayit is not nearly paranoid enough.

Alain Badiou calls such readings symptomatic of a deadly didactic schema forinterpreting art.

4Art, in this schema is supposed to teach: if one does not leave a concert

hall slightly less stupid than when one entered, the performance must register as apolitical failure.

Art, as semblance of truth must be a phenomenon either to be condemned or to be

strictly supervised. Art, properly, serves to verify a truth imposed from outside its ownpractices. Acceptable art, in this view, must be subjected to the philosophical

surveillance of truths.

More appealing, I think, is a properly paranoid schema.

7.

I propose that we take advantage of a certain mystical coincidence.

Let us consider the overlap of two Crystal Palaces, separated by an ocean and morethan one hundred years. The first Crystal Palace is, of course, the Crystal Palace built in

London for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the glass phantasmagoria that announced thearrival of full-fledged commodity culture and the society of the spectacle.

The second Crystal Palace is, of course, the Crystal Palace concert venue/tourist

attraction that Buck Owens opened in Bakersfield in 1996.

As Bruce Fink writes, building on Freuds 1909 Notes Upon A Case of Obsessional

4Alain Badiou, and Alberto Toscano.Handbook of inaesthetics. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press,

2005.


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&

Neurosis: Symptoms often disguise their meaning and origin by taking advantage of homonyms to form verbal bridges between one idea and another that is seemingly

unrelated.5

In the history of critical theory, the Great Exhibitions Crystal Palace is perhaps most

famous as the central figure in Walter Benjamins analysis of the new public culture ofcapitalism in Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. What Benjamin is looking for,always, are the conditions of emergence of a particular phenomenon: a Baudelaire

poem, the Paris arcades, the German Trauerspiel.

We will use, then, the convergence of these two Crystal Palaces to authorize anapplication of Benjamins interpretive strategy vis--visthe cultural consequences of

French capitalism to a close reading of the conditions of emergence of Buck Owensand the Buckaroos in Bakersfield, California in the 1960s.

8.

To understand the conditions of emergence of Buck Owenss Bakersfield, we need to

do some deep background work we need to wager, that is, that there might be somedeep link between a preference for singing a ballad a certain way, the joy of plucking a

low string of an electric guitar so that it vibrates in such a way as to go slightly sharpbefore returning to pitch (and thus conjuring twang), or the pleasures of certain kinds

of machinic co-relations among members of a country band, on the one hand; and whatwe would usually call politics, on the other.

As historians, what we are listening for is the aural equivalent of the dialectical image,

described by Benjamin as the appearance of dialectic at a standstill.

Via the dialectical image, Benjamin writes, every epoch not only dreams the one tofollow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.

Benjamin emphasizes that noveltyspurs the creation of dialectical images.

For the first time in the history of architecture, Benjamin writes of the Paris arcades

(using the formulafor the first timethat recurs, over and over, in the essay) anartificial building material appears: iron.

Benjamins meditation on newness is particularly apposite given the centrality of

newness (new kinds of instruments, new forms of recording and distributing music, thetransition, however incomplete, from black and white to full color printing, film, and

television) in the music of Buck Owens.

5Bruce Fink,Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. New

York: W.W. Norton, 2007, 98. 1909 was the year of Freuds visit to the United States.


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'

It is via dialectical images that we discern the arrival of the event. Dialectical imagesalso call attention to the constructedness of naturalized social formations, and thereby

open up space for imagining new kinds of relations.

We might think of Buck Owenss My Heart Skips A Beatstructured around a literal

skipped beat drum figure as providing a particularly elegant example of a dialecticalimage. The image of the heart skipping a beat calls to mind these observations of FredricJameson on the dialectic:

[Dialectical thinking is] an intensification of the normal thought process There

is a breathlessness about this shift from the normal object-oriented activity of themind to such dialectical self-consciousnesssomething of the sickening shudder

we feel in an elevators fall or in a sudden dip in an airliner The shock indeed isbasic, and constitutive of the dialectic as such: without this transformational

moment, without this initial conscious transcendence of an older, more naveposition, there can be no question of any genuine dialectical coming to

consciousness.

6

Benjamin emphasizes ephemerality: it is no surprise that the most important initiativesare often those that burn out the fastest.

This leads us to Benjamins recovery of failed and transitional forms in Parisfeuilletons

that would be replaced by novels and newspapers, and panoramas that would not survivethe birth of cinemaas a model for a radical kind of historical hermeneutics.

Benjamins notes on these ephemeral forms help us to conceive of how we might listen

for the radical strains of Bakersfield country music in the 1960s, even as the braying

donkeys and wooden clog dancing ofHee Hawthreaten to retroactively drown outOwenss urgent yelps, the magnificent twanging of Don Richs telecaster, or the snakingmelodies that streamed out of Tom Brumleys pedal steel guitar.

9.

Bakersfield is an agriculture and oil town. Beginning with the World War II era, federal

highway construction was to become especially significant in the formation ofBakersfields identity. The town assumed a central place on an automotive circuit

populated by various nomads: truckers both legal and wildcat, bachelors and familiesmoving frequently from job to job (an indicator of increasing working-class power in a

full-employment economy), and entertainers making a living via an endless string of one-nighters.

For Buck Owens particular poetics of space, this nomadic movement and automobility is

foundational. Owens sings frequently of driving, often from the perspective of theprofessional motorist; love, desire, and infidelity are often staged within the liminal world

6Fredric Jameson,Marxism and Form; Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972, 307-08.


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(

of temporary attachments and fleeting passions of the road. Cars and trucks of the timewere loud, humming with unmuted motors and suffused with the smell of smoke and

gasoline; speed limits were high or nonexistent and were honored more in the breach, inany case (according to legend, Buck Owens drove as fast as possible at all times, leading

his musicians to attach a gizmo to their vans motor that would disallow travel at speeds

faster than 82 mph).

Driving for a living, staying awake on a steady diet of coffee and uppers (this was

certainly the case with most of the Buckaroos, although Buck Owens himself apparentlydisliked stimulants): musical artists who spend their days and nights this way might be

expected to channel the sensations of the road into sound, and this must explain at leastsome of the stimulus to the Bakersfield musicians pursuit of speed and volume.

Finally, the states sponsorship of car culture facilitated the traffic between Bakersfield

and the West Coasts culture industry hub, Los Angeles. In the early 1950s, CapitolRecords began to treat Bakersfield as a farm team for its country division. Gene Autrys

TV show Melody Ranch and the Compton-based Town Hall Party often featuredBakersfield talent like Roy Maphis, Ferlin Husky, Billy Mize, and Tommy Collins.

The LA-Bakersfield circuit also explains how LA-based country musician Wynn Stewartand his pedal steel guitarist Ralph Mooney could invent the Bakersfield sound while

living in southern California. To a significant degree, cheap gas and highways meant thatLA and Bakersfield were, for a time (however paradoxically), the same place.

10.

The ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl drove hundreds of thousands of displaced Okies

and southerners, like the Owens family, to the Bakersfield area (between 1935 and 1940,

upwards of 70,000 migrants made their way to the San Joaquin Valley).

But without the federal relief infrastructure, the Farm Security Administration camps, and

the massive highway construction initiatives coincident with the arrival of the defenseindustry in California, the musical culture of Bakersfield would never have consolidated

in the first place.

Visitors to the federally funded work camps of Kern County noticed that music was anespecially vital part of the ad hoc migrant communitiesdespised by locals and exploited

by anti-union employersthat formed in the San Joaquin Valley. Library of CongressArchive of American Folk Song researchers Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin reported

from the Bakersfield area in the late 1930s: the camps, they noted, were filled with old-time country music.7

With the arrival of World War II, this traditionalist culture morphed into a commercial

honky-tonk one: as communities like Little Okie and Oildale began to gain permanence,

7Scott Bomar, Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, and Loud, Loud Music: The Story of the Bakersfield Sound,

16.


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)

clubs like Batemans, Ma Scotts, and the Chicken Coop sprung up, complementinglonger-established Western Swing-oriented dance venues like the Barn on Stine Road.

Texas musician laureate Bob Wills began a weekly stint at Beardsley Ballroom in 1946.New clubs were built along Edison Highway: The Clover Club, the Lucky Spot, and the

Sad Sack. During the 1950s, the most important venue was the Blackboard Caf, hosted

by Bill Woods (with Buck Owens on guitar): the loudest, liveliest, smokiest, and, somesay, the most dangerous club with frequent fights, shooting and stabbing, and severalmurders.

Country music is a mestizo form that nevertheless often serves as a metonym for white

music. Without question, the culture of Bakersfield country was articulated to a certainnormative whiteness. But there was always, as always with American popular music,

promiscuous cross-cultural syncretism and borrowing. Bill Woods, a popular Bakersfieldmusician with whom Owens served an apprenticeship, learned music in Texas migrant

labor camps from Mexican sharecroppers. Buckaroos guitarist Don Rich often seemed tobe channeling blues guitarists like Muddy Waters and Earl King. In the 1950s, young

Buck Owens often went shopping for R&B records at a kind of black record store onCalifornia Avenue, according to Bakersfield veteran Don Markham, while trying to

formulate his aesthetic agenda. At one point, in fact, Owens described his style as amixture of Bob Wills and Little Richard.

11.

Walter Benjamin writes endlessly about iron. Why is Benjamin so interested in iron? The

most profound motivation, it seems, is that iron is the first artificial construction material.Iron is untimelyin Paris of the 1850s, it is a material from the future: too futuristic, in

fact, to be properly understood by its earliest adopter. Irons essence is functionality and

engineerability. The destiny of iron is the bridge and skyscraper, not the faux-Hellenicstructures of midcentury Europe. This living contradiction the Grecian column cast iniron, for exampleserves, then, as a particularly potent dialectical image.

It is not difficult to see the parallels with Bakersfield country music, which hinges not

just on the arrival of new instruments and new recording technologies, but also on thedissonance between those materials and the purposes to which they are put.

Importantly, the introduction of electricity and drums to country music was not just aquestion of playing traditional music on more technologically evolved instruments. In

this sense, the ban on drums at the Grand Ole Opry until well into the 1960s, and thestrict control of volume and timbre of electric instruments at the Ryman Auditorium was

not just aesthetic backwardness. The arbiters of traditionalism in Nashville understoodthat the preservation of country music required such control at the level of

instrumentation.

This perhaps also explains why Owens always maintained an arms-length, if not hostilerelation to the Grand Ole Opry and Nashville, attempting to create a rival organization in

Bakersfield in the 1960s, and crafting a pledge of allegiance to country music publishedin 1966 in NashvillesMusic City News:


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*

I Shall Sing No Song That Is Not A Country Song. I Shall Make No Record That

Is Not A Country Record. I Refuse To Be Known As Anything But A CountrySinger. I am Proud To Be Associated With Country Music. Country Music And

Country Music Fans Made Me What I Am Today. And I Shall Not Forget It.

This, despite the fact that it was Owens and the Buckaroos whoat least to the untrainedearwere creating powerfully un-traditional country music. I think Owens was sincere

when he drafted the pledge. He was correcthis music was more faithful to the values ofcountry music than the records being released at the time by the Nashville

establishment.

What this means, however, is that we must grapple with the question of Bakersfieldcountrys characteristic gesture of maintaining fidelity to tradition by demonstrating

marked infidelity to tradition.

The invention of these new instruments was provoked by the new social circumstances ofthe postwar honky-tonk (loud, smoky, riddled with aggression and sometimes violence)

and the imperative to craft a kind of music sympathetic with this affective environment.The use of these instruments required innovation and experimentation, discovery in the

direction of their fundamental nature and capacities. What the music of Buck Owens andthe Buckaroos of the 1960s represents is exactly the sort of transitional aesthetic

movement that Benjamin is seeking to capture with the idea of the dialectical image.

12.

A photograph: Buck Owens and the Buckaroos perform on television in the mid-1960s.

The set is made to look like Owenss Bakersfield ranch, although it is a reconstruction ina New Mexico studio. It is a color image, from a color broadcast. Recall that it was onlyin 1965 that television underwent a color transition (with networks switching to

majority color programming). The popular GE Porta-Color was introduced in 1966. Thisis a photograph suffused with newness.

The mise en scne, the instruments, the uniforms, and the Buckaroos particular approach

to orchestration and arrangement: all of this speaks to what Zora Neale Hurston called thewill-to-adorn, the almost compulsive drive to ornamentation so common across

proletarian art forms.

The Buckaroos instruments are all comparatively recent inventions: the drum kit datesback to the 1930s, the Fender bass, Telecaster, and amplifiers are products of the 1950s

(with the silver-sparkle grilles and instrument finishes telegraphing a space-age futurism).Tom Brumleys modern, Nashville E9 pedal steel guitar is an innovation of the early

1960s.

Even the comparatively small size of the band spoke to historical exigencies. Themusicians who began to move to Bakersfield in the 1940s were primarily Western Swing


40/42

"+

aficionados from Texas and Arkansas (like Owens himself). The Western Swing band isa huge, sprawling orchestra, with twinned fiddles and horns to ensure a sound loud

enough to project in large dancehalls. Bakersfield musicians thus welcomed the inventionof electrical instruments as a means to the end of performing in smaller ensembles. This

was at once an aesthetic and an economic lure (the smaller the group, the more money for

each group member). It meant that smaller dives, which could not accommodate norafford a full Western Swing orchestra, could be turned into live-music venues. As aconsequence, Bakersfield country came to embody a series of unique aesthetic values: a

certain sonic individuality and differentiation, a sparser sound with more air, and agreater audibility of the gestural figuration that in classical rhetoric is called deixis

(pointing functions, as in a guitar passage that leads to a new section of a song, or a drumfill that tilts towards the end of a solo).

Though the image is static, the video that recorded the performance is extant: it reveals

that the performance is not in fact live. The Buckaroos mime a performance of aprerecorded track (which takes advantage of the crisp sonic separation allowed by other

comparatively recent innovations, stereo multitrack recording and the introduction of theWestrex single-groove stereophonic record cutterhead).

The Buckaroos wear matching, tailored, outfits, crafted either by Nudie Cohn or Nathan

Turk, the visionary Jewish rodeo tailors who came to California from the Pale ofSettlement and created the visual language of country music couture out of extravagant

needlework, rhinestones, and loud, colored fabrics and memories of Buffalo Bill Codyand the traje de luces worn by traditional bullfighters. Cohn and Turk called the sequins

that they sewed onto the suits of performers like the Buckaroos schmaltz (Yiddish forgrease).

Along with Cohn and Turk, California in the early 1960s was home to a variety of otherinnovators in the field of visual bling, particularly in the world of hot rods and kustomkars: new experiments with resins, lacquers, and the incorporation of metal flakes into

industrial paint. In the corridors of high art this initiative would provide the inspirationfor a group of artists known as the Finish Fetish school.

The shimmering suits and sparkling finishes of the instruments crackle synaesthetically

with the treble-y, sharp, highly focused sound produced by the group. It is hard tounderstand how this extraordinary synthesis was not apprehended thenand that it is not

apprehended nowas the dialectical flash for which Benjamin would have us ever beon alert.

13.

InNixonland, Rick Perlstein writes:

A memo by Kevin Phillips was making the rounds: Middle America and theEmerging Republican Majority the language was new, but the theory was as

old as the crusade against Alger Hiss: elections were won by focusing peoplesresentments. The New Deal coalition rose by directing peoples resentments of


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economic elites, Phillips argued. But the new hated elite was culturalthetoryhood of change, condescending and self-serving liberals who make their

money out of plans, ideas, communication, social upheaval, happenings,excitement at the psychic expense of the great, ordinary, Lawrence Welkish

mass of Americans from Maine to Hawaii.8

The silent majority, thenfor Phillips at leastwas not composed of the public thatBuck Owens and the Buckaroos were calling into being in the mid-1960s. It was instead a

great, ordinary, Lawrence Welkish mass.

The response of musicians like Buck Owenswho was quickly losing his connection toBakersfields proletarian culturewas to become Lawrence Welk.Hee Haw, launched in

1969 by CBS, forcefully defanged what remained radical in the musical initiative of thelast generation of sharecroppers in the 1960s.

Ironically, Owenss turn toHee Hawcame at precisely the moment that the work of the

Bakersfield country faithful to erect an alternative to the increasingly toothless countrybeing produced in Nashville (an accelerating trend of producers removing pedal steels,

twangy guitars, and fiddles, ostensibly in response to the complaints of the new FMformat radio station DJs) seemed to be on the verge of paying off.

California country rock was deeply Bakersfield-influenced, leading to renewed interest

among countercultural music fans in the roots of the sounds that were being channeled byThe Byrds, the Grateful Dead, and New Riders of the Purple Sage. Media reports

suggested that Bakersfield was mounting a serious challenge to Music City: in the 1970s,the San Joaquin Valley played host to the Country Music Awards; Bakersfield boosters

promised that within ten years, Chester Avenue would be Music Row West.

14.

Declension narratives are no fun: I have no interest in charting why this or that didnthappen. The point remains the one with which we began: that we should experiment with

a certain paranoia, a Beziehungswahna madness of making connections. This, itseems to me, is also what Buck Owens and the Buckaroos were doing in that moment in

the 1960s, in their articulation of aural wish images.

In which, as Benjamin observes the collective seeks both to overcome and to transformthe immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organization of

production what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneselffrom all that is antiquated, which includes also, somehow, the recent past. 9

8Rick Perlstein,Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. New York: Scribner,2008, 277.

9Walter Benjamin, and Michael William Jennings. The writer of modern life: essays on Charles

Baudelaire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006, 97-98.


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