Something's Happening

In How to Read Derrida, philosopher Penelope Deutscher describes Derrida’s tendency to take apparently definitive statements and turn them inside out: Anytime someone posits an essence, claims that something “is” a certain way, that can be seized upon as an opportunity, a veiled question: What makes it so you can claim that? What’s at stake in closing off the other implicit possibilities? A statement by an authority figure invariably “deconstructs itself, drawing itself to alternative possibilities and performing far more imaginative work than the speaker would admit.” That is, even the most depressing or affirmative assertions imply the possibility of overcoming them; they betray the weakness of the position in the very need to assert them. Rather than read them at face value, we could see them as casting the negative outline of other possibilities, bringing them into a potentially sharper focus. When Gene Simmons insists that he wants to "rock and roll all night and party everyday," we should understand that as an admission that not only does he fail to do those things, but he is in dire need of convincing himself that he actually wants to.  
 
Deutscher (in an either-or that Derrida himself would presumably reject) frames this approach to reading as a question: “Do we find as much literalness in the statements with which we are bombarded, or do we find as much non-literality as possible?” Why not do both? Though I am skeptical of the political usefulness of treating everything as unstable irony, I find that, for better or worse, I perform this sort of operation with lots of dubious art. I have a self-limiting tendency to look for reasons to dismiss things rather than engage with them, so to disrupt that habit, I try to take that rejecting impulse as an indicator that I’m missing the point. It seems much more interesting in the end to assign implausible or outlandish intentions to an artist than oversimplified ones. If something seems like a total failure, maybe it is better appreciated as an exploration of failure, exposing the sorts of criteria I rely on to make that determination. If a TV show seems hackneyed, maybe it’s foregrounding genre clichés intentionally, for a kind of Brechtian alienation effect. Maybe over-the-top prog albums like Tales From Topographic Oceans and Tarkus are not egoistic displays of virtuosity but commentaries on ego’s role in crafting music; maybe we were meant to laugh with them and not at them after all.
 
What started me thinking about this (as some of these examples might suggest) was the process of unpacking my record collection. I recently moved, and for several months all my records were in boxes. Now that I finally have them unpacked, I was surprised to find how many of them I would be tempted to describe as "trash." It's loaded with things I bought not out of a desire to listen to them exactly and not even out of a collector's impulse toward completeness or a self-aggrandizing idea of archival responsibility, but with records that confront me with the puzzle of their apparent onetime popularity. The first record I ended up playing wasn't anything rare or even good. Instead, it was Dave Mason’s It’s Like You Never Left.

If you’ve ever flipped through a dollar bin, you’ve probably seen this record, along with any number of Mason’s other albums, like Split Coconut or Let It Flow. I probably saw it a hunded times before I finally broke down and bought it, wanting to understand how so many copies of it managed to survive through the decades, let alone exist in the first place. I knew of Mason primarily as a former member of the band Traffic who later sang the soft-rock hit, “We Just Disagree,” a deeply depressing midlife-crisis divorce song. (“There ain't no good guys, there ain't no bad guys, / There's only you and me and we just disagree.”) I just couldn’t fathom how at some point in the 1970s, apparently every American household with a record player must have contained one of his albums.
 
Try as I might, I don’t think I have been able to successfully deconstruct the metaphysics of presence in It’s Like You Never Left. It has a song called “Silent Partner,” which is also the name of the dishwasher model in our new apartment. There is a guest appearance by Stevie Wonder, who plays an indifferent harmonica solo on a track called “The Lonely One.” Graham Nash sings backup vocals on a few songs.It’s largely forgettable. I want to reinterpret that forgettability, in Derridean fashion, as a positive quality, as a particular kind of memorability, as the necessary condition for remembrance or something. But I can’t hear in this music what made it compelling to people then, and it haunts me. I start to convince myself that Americans in the 1970s really wanted ways to consume forgetfulness.
 
As I listen to this Dave Mason record, I come to realize that the reason I bother to have a record collection at all (there’s nothing like moving to make you realize how inconvenient it is) is because I feel compelled to try to preserve the material culture of a time that I dimly remember from growing up but could never understand. Did adults then really enjoy this? I am trying to listen in as non-literal way as possible. I think I remember seeing these Dave Mason records at Listening Booth, on the wall of new releases with Linda Ronstadt and Cheap Trick, bright promotional stickers on them to indicate the would-be hits. Or at least that is a memory I am now reconstructing based on the detritus I see now in record stores.

This is probably why people younger than me now collect cassettes or VHS tapes; they make obsolescence tangible and seemingly reversible. These objects were once wanted, they were once integral to someone’s imaginative life, and that affect seems bound up in them, regardless of whether you can play them. But I actually can listen to these old records. Taking some of them home makes my reconstructed memories feel more concrete. The Dave Mason record reminds me of the peculiar mysteries of my childhood, and I listen to it in part to reawaken that mystery. It's like I never left. 
 
Another album I have been playing a lot, in this same spirit, is Frampton Comes Alive! Its massive success — and the ubiquity of double-live albums in general in the 1970s — has always fascinated and confused me. Why did every band have to release one, even though they typically amounted to greatest hits packages with poorer sound and unnecessary solos? Was there anything more to it than a cash grab or a fulfillment of contractual obligations? I see Frampton Comes Alive! as the quintessential double-live album because it established rather than drew from the popularity of the performer who made it. Until he "came alive" Frampton was more or less interchangeable with a bunch of other second-tier English guitar acts, including Humble Pie, the "supergroup" he quit (and which also released a prototypical double-live album, Performance: Rockin' the Fillmore). Among the shows recorded for Frampton Comes Alive! were gigs in Plattsburgh and Commack. Yet somewhat mysteriously, it became the best-selling album of 1976 and remains one of the best-selling albums in the U.S. ever. 

I’ve written about double-live albums before and concluded that they were meant to simulate the sensory surfeit of the arena-rock-concert experience through deluxe packaging, gratuitous exclamation points, and dubbed-in crowd noise. I drew this conclusion from Kiss Alive!, and especially the back cover, which featured a preposterous photo of two stoned-looking teenagers holding up a crude homemade banner. You were, I thought, supposed to identify vicariously with them more than with the band themselves. 
 
But Frampton Comes Alive! doesn't seem to support any kind of vicarious participation. And it's somewhat lethargic from a music perspective: It consists mainly of methodical, midtempo songs with aggressively generic lyrics. The first track, “Something’s Happening,” effectively captures the mood: “It’s all right, something’s happening.” Nothing in particular, just something, just enough.

Still, it seems productive to me to regard this extreme featurelessness of the music as intentional, as integral to its popularity, a clue to a lost structure of feeling. Maybe people wanted something packaged as excitement that was distinctly not exciting. Maybe albums like Frampton Comes Alive! were experienced as reassuring, reminding listeners they weren't missing out much on anything at all if they were settling into the sort of life that didn't involved getting stoned at rock concerts.

More clues can be found in reading the liner notes (by a 19-year-old Cameron Crowe) against the grain. These begin with a paragraph about how Frampton fulfills the stereotype of an artist “whose art often burns with the passion of a man possessed” but is otherwise “a soft-spoken personality away from their craft.” In other words, Crowe concedes there is something plainly mundane about Frampton, but listeners should take that as proof of his commitment and perhaps of his subordination to the audience. He’s too focused on guitar playing to have a personality, and you at home are probably more interesting to talk to. Crowe then traces Frampton's career trajectory and emphasizes his “versatility,” a coded concession that Frampton main distinguishing feature is his professionalism — the utility infielder of rock! Crowe then singles out a few Frampton solo songs as "live staples,” which helps establish his concerts as part of a bland sustenance diet. In the final paragraph, after highlighting the how the audience plays “a major role throughout” — i.e. you should let their applause function like a laugh track — Crowe gives the somewhat backhanded endorsement that “Frampton & Band perform with the earnestness and competence that we’ve come to expect.”
 
But who was expecting that? Why did they expect so little? Why would it be noteworthy that Frampton was performing in earnest? Is the idea that he wasn’t performing ironically, the way Frank Zappa would while heaping contempt on his audiences? Reading between the lines of the liner notes, you start to get a sense of the gulf between performers and audiences, and the ways live albums tried to both bridge and reinforce it. Frampton is presented as boring and amazing at the same time, relatable and an unfathomable "man possessed." He's not even who he seems to be to himself.  

For me, though, the most revealing statement is when Crowe insists that "Frampton Comes Alive! is much more than a souvenir." So in other words, it was a seen as a souvenir, but a plausibly deniable one. It perhaps feels more potent as a souvenir when we are pretending it isn't one. "It is a testimony to Peter Frampton in his natural habitat," Crowe concludes, which makes the album a souvenir for him, of a place where he is and you the listener will never be. It is a way to remember something that never happened, a place you never were and I will never be, except in nostalgic reconstructions of my earliest memories. A live album is about being there without being there, presence in absence and absence in presence. Me in my childhood home, listening to this strange, boring record, holding the gatefold open in my hands, wondering if this was really all there was to coming alive.