Appreciate all of this; regarding the square dancing bit--we had the same thing foisted on our (all-Black, inner-city vocational) high school as well. And the "small speaker" versions did seem to offer closer listening (especially through those later transistors that all looked like electric shavers).
Tommy was a revelation for me. It took me on a journey of sound through a world constructed entirely in my own mind. It was beautiful and entrancing and terrifying and comforting all at once. (When I saw the movie version later, is kind of regretted it because it was so at odds with my own mental movie version.) Townsend's later efforts with Quadraphenia were excellent (even though much of it was cobbled together from earlier album cuts), but Tommy got there first.
"Pete, how about this time we do a regular song. You know, like there's this bloke, see, and he's all hot for this bird...and she doesn't even know he exists. The best part is that we only have to play it for thee minutes, tops!"
“My ignorance did not prevent me knowing it was pretentious — but my ignorance did prevent me from knowing pretentiousness was bad. In fact, and this was a tendency I must admit I held onto for many years afterward, I was excited by its pretentiousness.”
I loved that passage, how it recalled a time of innocence and openness when we could experience something without as many cynical, predetermined ideas about how we were going to judge it.
In a silly, trivial way I try to recreate that when watching Antiques Roadshow. When an item appears that I don’t recognize, be it a painting or rug or some little knick-knack, I blurt out my gut reaction (to my wife’s bemusement/consternation) before they can tell me what it is, whether it’s significant, or if it has monetary value. It’s actually kind of fun and freeing to see something for ten seconds and say, “I like it.” Or “I don’t like it.” Or if you want to be more nuanced, “I don’t like it, but I appreciate it.” As you can clearly see, I am a nerd.
This is way cool, man. Music has always been the pegs on which my many pieces hang, so I admire how well you navigate between nostalgia and reality. It resonates.
I have never heard Tommy in its entirety, but maybe I should. By the time I came into my own views of popular music, The Who was doing "Eminence Front" and "You Better You Bet" and just singles and classic rock museum items. The real action was New Wave, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Run DMC for me, and MTV was getting off the ground (for better or worse -- it was no less a museum though of current content).
Now I sort of get why my eldest listened to this album over and over. He was older than you were here, but also just discovering Western pop culture since he’d grown up in Egypt and we came back here when he was 14.
Sheesh, Roy. Except for the fact that we have indeed been in the same room at the same time, I'd swear that we were actually the same person. Reading this sent chills down my spine and took me back to doing my homework at the dining room table listening to Radio KXOK. (No college FM station near; not that I knew of, anyway.) I too was impressed by listening to my first "rock opera" (or opera of any kind) And icing on the Similarity Cake? My mom wouldn't let me go to Woodstock either.
My first "free form radio" experience was KTCL in Ft. Collins. Wild to me, who in my early teens was obsessed with psychedelia & Pink Floyd & Neil Young. Later they had the first hip hop program in the entire state.
Clear Channel bought them a long ago. God knows what wretched bullshit they play now
As a gigging muso (though not much lately) I play in various outfits, one of which is a country dancing band. I love it because everybody who does it, loves it, kids (up to age 16) most of all.
I always felt the Who were a money making construct band, even with (and especially because of) Pete Townsend's guitar destruction and Keith Moon's drum smashing antics.
Nice write...that album Is a good example of searing ambiguity. I always found it funny how persons became unnerved by the “rock opera” aspect with their condescension. I would say, “so what if it is pretentious, it’s not about you.”
Roy, I'm really enjoying this bouquet of audio madeleines. (My individual experience is really different - I first encountered "Tommy" as a movie which was anything but austere, for example - but the business of encountering culture for which I didn't have the context and yet sometimes being moved and trying to figure it out is very resonant for me, and I really got something out of your description of these tunes. I spent a lot of teen years efforts on seeing revival-theatre movies, some of which were initially baffling to me, and have had different reactions re-engaging with some of them.)
I've encountered that Quartz article before and as a historical dance hobbyist I kind of hate it, so I am likely to go on about it way more than anyone wants to read. Sorry about that.
I don't know if I can say that that Quartz article is *wrong* - in a white supremacist society *everything* is a tool of white supremacy - but it is *bad*. I'm a dance history hobbyist and so I know a bunch about this stuff, and I can also follow an argument. The author doesn't actually make an argument; he just puts a bunch of things that were called "square dancing" next to each other, treats them as though they were all the same thing - which they were not! - and attributes Ford's motives (more on that in a minute) to everybody who ever promoted anything called square dancing.
I'll grant beforehand that Ford was overall, a terrible person, a thoroughgoing anti-Semite, a Hitler supporter, and also that he talked about then-modern music in terms that sure seem like coded anti-Black language ("jungle squawks"). He also actually really liked the dance of his youth unironically and unidealogically - there's a scene in "Ford, the Men, the Machines" of old Henry teaching the minuet (it says - the late-1800s thing would have been a Waltz-Minuet) to a new executive hire. He thought the dances themselves were fun and community-oriented, and I have to agree with him.
The Quartz article goes on to suggest that Lloyd Shaw solely built on Ford's publication "Good Morning" for his book "Cowboy Dances", but in fact Shaw, a high-school teacher, pulled from many sources, including the international folk dance pioneer Elizabeth Burchenal, who in the early 1900s promoted international cultural understanding through dance. Shaw found he could engage his students through this dance form, and by promoting a demo dance team ("The Cheyenne Mountain Dancers") could get boys and girls working together in teamwork in a healthy activity.
From at least the 1900s forward there's records of Black square-dancing, and some film of that. It's arguable whether, as some claim, the tradition of "calling" or prompting dances - telling the dancers what to do when they're supposed to do it - comes from enslaved musicians learning the dances done in the big house and teaching them in the slave quarters - but that may be one source of it. (There's definitely white people doing some prompting by the 1880s.)
In the late '30s and '40s, square dancing with a lot or regional variations became very popular in many parts of the country. I have square dance books from Palo Alto, Chicago, New York, as well as more self-consciously country-fied stuff from Arkansas, etc. These dances drew on figures from Appalachia, sometimes had string-band music (which has a lot of black influence), etc, etc. There were public dances at some beach resorts that drew thousands of people.
The Modern Western Square Dance movement came out of a post-war desire to standardize figures and calls so that you could go to a square dance anywhere in the country and know the calls. My strong impression is that the really ill-advised move to try to get MWSD declared the state folk dance of each state wasn't about whiteness so much, because often the competitor state folk dances (the Shag, the polka) were dances associated with white populations. Note that by the MWSD era the dances they're doing are pretty much unrecognizable, except for square formations, if you're only used to the stuff Ford was promoting.
Thanks for indulging that rant. tl,dr; The quartz article is right about Ford and tars everybody else it mentions by unscholarly association.
Bravo. I was a "rich" kid, able to buy tapes, hear them on decent stereo, and read the magazines, and I'm very grateful at this late age to learn of your own very different tween experience of the culture of that time. We loved the same thing. Tommy rocked for sure, but in a salon fashion, a literary experience. It probably honed me for college, and I hope I'm not treading on any toes by saying that.
Appreciate all of this; regarding the square dancing bit--we had the same thing foisted on our (all-Black, inner-city vocational) high school as well. And the "small speaker" versions did seem to offer closer listening (especially through those later transistors that all looked like electric shavers).
Tommy was a revelation for me. It took me on a journey of sound through a world constructed entirely in my own mind. It was beautiful and entrancing and terrifying and comforting all at once. (When I saw the movie version later, is kind of regretted it because it was so at odds with my own mental movie version.) Townsend's later efforts with Quadraphenia were excellent (even though much of it was cobbled together from earlier album cuts), but Tommy got there first.
Try to imagine the band discussions after '68.
"Pete, how about this time we do a regular song. You know, like there's this bloke, see, and he's all hot for this bird...and she doesn't even know he exists. The best part is that we only have to play it for thee minutes, tops!"
Never having liked anything by The Who, now I feel like a Philistine. Beautiful explication, Roy.
“My ignorance did not prevent me knowing it was pretentious — but my ignorance did prevent me from knowing pretentiousness was bad. In fact, and this was a tendency I must admit I held onto for many years afterward, I was excited by its pretentiousness.”
I loved that passage, how it recalled a time of innocence and openness when we could experience something without as many cynical, predetermined ideas about how we were going to judge it.
In a silly, trivial way I try to recreate that when watching Antiques Roadshow. When an item appears that I don’t recognize, be it a painting or rug or some little knick-knack, I blurt out my gut reaction (to my wife’s bemusement/consternation) before they can tell me what it is, whether it’s significant, or if it has monetary value. It’s actually kind of fun and freeing to see something for ten seconds and say, “I like it.” Or “I don’t like it.” Or if you want to be more nuanced, “I don’t like it, but I appreciate it.” As you can clearly see, I am a nerd.
This is way cool, man. Music has always been the pegs on which my many pieces hang, so I admire how well you navigate between nostalgia and reality. It resonates.
I have never heard Tommy in its entirety, but maybe I should. By the time I came into my own views of popular music, The Who was doing "Eminence Front" and "You Better You Bet" and just singles and classic rock museum items. The real action was New Wave, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Run DMC for me, and MTV was getting off the ground (for better or worse -- it was no less a museum though of current content).
Now I sort of get why my eldest listened to this album over and over. He was older than you were here, but also just discovering Western pop culture since he’d grown up in Egypt and we came back here when he was 14.
Sheesh, Roy. Except for the fact that we have indeed been in the same room at the same time, I'd swear that we were actually the same person. Reading this sent chills down my spine and took me back to doing my homework at the dining room table listening to Radio KXOK. (No college FM station near; not that I knew of, anyway.) I too was impressed by listening to my first "rock opera" (or opera of any kind) And icing on the Similarity Cake? My mom wouldn't let me go to Woodstock either.
My first "free form radio" experience was KTCL in Ft. Collins. Wild to me, who in my early teens was obsessed with psychedelia & Pink Floyd & Neil Young. Later they had the first hip hop program in the entire state.
Clear Channel bought them a long ago. God knows what wretched bullshit they play now
As a gigging muso (though not much lately) I play in various outfits, one of which is a country dancing band. I love it because everybody who does it, loves it, kids (up to age 16) most of all.
I always felt the Who were a money making construct band, even with (and especially because of) Pete Townsend's guitar destruction and Keith Moon's drum smashing antics.
Nice write...that album Is a good example of searing ambiguity. I always found it funny how persons became unnerved by the “rock opera” aspect with their condescension. I would say, “so what if it is pretentious, it’s not about you.”
Roy, I'm really enjoying this bouquet of audio madeleines. (My individual experience is really different - I first encountered "Tommy" as a movie which was anything but austere, for example - but the business of encountering culture for which I didn't have the context and yet sometimes being moved and trying to figure it out is very resonant for me, and I really got something out of your description of these tunes. I spent a lot of teen years efforts on seeing revival-theatre movies, some of which were initially baffling to me, and have had different reactions re-engaging with some of them.)
Be fair to Henry Ford - his objections to popular music of the 'teens and 'twenties were at least as much anti-Semitic as anti-Black.
I've encountered that Quartz article before and as a historical dance hobbyist I kind of hate it, so I am likely to go on about it way more than anyone wants to read. Sorry about that.
I don't know if I can say that that Quartz article is *wrong* - in a white supremacist society *everything* is a tool of white supremacy - but it is *bad*. I'm a dance history hobbyist and so I know a bunch about this stuff, and I can also follow an argument. The author doesn't actually make an argument; he just puts a bunch of things that were called "square dancing" next to each other, treats them as though they were all the same thing - which they were not! - and attributes Ford's motives (more on that in a minute) to everybody who ever promoted anything called square dancing.
I'll grant beforehand that Ford was overall, a terrible person, a thoroughgoing anti-Semite, a Hitler supporter, and also that he talked about then-modern music in terms that sure seem like coded anti-Black language ("jungle squawks"). He also actually really liked the dance of his youth unironically and unidealogically - there's a scene in "Ford, the Men, the Machines" of old Henry teaching the minuet (it says - the late-1800s thing would have been a Waltz-Minuet) to a new executive hire. He thought the dances themselves were fun and community-oriented, and I have to agree with him.
The Quartz article goes on to suggest that Lloyd Shaw solely built on Ford's publication "Good Morning" for his book "Cowboy Dances", but in fact Shaw, a high-school teacher, pulled from many sources, including the international folk dance pioneer Elizabeth Burchenal, who in the early 1900s promoted international cultural understanding through dance. Shaw found he could engage his students through this dance form, and by promoting a demo dance team ("The Cheyenne Mountain Dancers") could get boys and girls working together in teamwork in a healthy activity.
From at least the 1900s forward there's records of Black square-dancing, and some film of that. It's arguable whether, as some claim, the tradition of "calling" or prompting dances - telling the dancers what to do when they're supposed to do it - comes from enslaved musicians learning the dances done in the big house and teaching them in the slave quarters - but that may be one source of it. (There's definitely white people doing some prompting by the 1880s.)
In the late '30s and '40s, square dancing with a lot or regional variations became very popular in many parts of the country. I have square dance books from Palo Alto, Chicago, New York, as well as more self-consciously country-fied stuff from Arkansas, etc. These dances drew on figures from Appalachia, sometimes had string-band music (which has a lot of black influence), etc, etc. There were public dances at some beach resorts that drew thousands of people.
The Modern Western Square Dance movement came out of a post-war desire to standardize figures and calls so that you could go to a square dance anywhere in the country and know the calls. My strong impression is that the really ill-advised move to try to get MWSD declared the state folk dance of each state wasn't about whiteness so much, because often the competitor state folk dances (the Shag, the polka) were dances associated with white populations. Note that by the MWSD era the dances they're doing are pretty much unrecognizable, except for square formations, if you're only used to the stuff Ford was promoting.
Thanks for indulging that rant. tl,dr; The quartz article is right about Ford and tars everybody else it mentions by unscholarly association.
Bravo. I was a "rich" kid, able to buy tapes, hear them on decent stereo, and read the magazines, and I'm very grateful at this late age to learn of your own very different tween experience of the culture of that time. We loved the same thing. Tommy rocked for sure, but in a salon fashion, a literary experience. It probably honed me for college, and I hope I'm not treading on any toes by saying that.
This is the best video on YouTube, The Who live 1970: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts5_2Hqp0SQ
watching Syberberg’s Our Hitler....
My God, me too. And Das Boot, the original German one, with sub-titles. Because the English dub is terrible, don’t ya know.
I am so old.