In 1698 doctor of physick Thomas Guidott popularised the waters of Bath, writing, "A true and exact account of Sadlers Well, or, The new mineral-waters lately found out at Islington treating of its nature and virtues: together with an enumeration of the chiefest diseases which it is good for, and against which it may be used, and the manner and order of taking of it."
This still quite rural location became famous for both water and for music. More wells were dug and the exclusiveness of Sadler's Wells declined along with the quality of the entertainment provided. The clientele became, "vermin trained up to the gallows". By 1711, Sadler's Wells was characterized as "a nursery of debauchery."
By 1989, Saddlers Wells had a brief respite from the inevitable downward progress when the Residents visited before the departure of the Lilian Baylis Theatre. It was not a great time for Theatres. The Minister, Mister Luce, even answered questions about the ungreatness of the times in Parliament.
To ask the Minister of Arts how many theatres he has visited in the last 12 months ; and if he will list them.
I have made 19 such visits since December 1988. In that month I visited the Apollo theatre, Shaftesbury avenue, and the Unity theatre, Liverpool.
In 1989 I have so far visited Sadlers Wells (on 18 January and 3 April) ;
the Old Vic (16 February) ;
the Royal National theatre (1 March) ;
the Tricycle theatre (8 March) ;
the Mercury theatre, Colchester (22 March) ;
the Derby Playhouse (25 April) ;
the Marlowe theatre, Canterbury (3 May) ;
the Theatre Royal, Norwich (8 June) ;
the Theatre Royal, Margate (30 June) ;
the Stephen Joseph theatre in the Round, Scarborough (12 July) ;
the Cricklade theatre, Romsey (14 July) ;
the Hawth theatre, Crawley (28 July) ;
the Theatre Royal, Newcastle (12 September) ;
the Theatre Royal, Brighton (27 October) ;
the Theatre Royal, Bury St. Edmunds (9 November) ;
and the Savoy theatre (28 November).
On 1 December I shall again visit the Unity theatre, Liverpool.
The Minister was not simply going to the Theatre for a night out. He was invited to each to hear why they should not have Arts Funding withdrawn. The list of Theatres provides a handy guide to what the Government hated about Culture.
The Unity Theatre, Liverpool, was formed in the 1930s as the Merseyside Left Theatre. In 1944 it became the Merseyside Unity Theatre. It has maintained a radical and experimentalist theatre tradition. It is based in a converted Synagogue in Hope Place off Hope Street. The Minister was visiting because the Unity Theatre had put on some plays by Black Writers.
Liverpool does not have a great record with Black People; although, that may simply not be as true as the headline. It might well be an alternative fact of Black History in Liverpool. Take, for example, The Zong Massacre. The Gregson slave-trading syndicate, based in Liverpool, owned the Zong. As was common practice, they took out insurance on the lives of the slaves as cargo. 133 slaves were thrown overboard by the crew beginning on the 29 November 1781. In the resulting court case (Gregson v Gilbert (1783) 3 Doug. Kings Bench Matter 232) yielded the opinion:
had no doubt, though it shocks one very much, that the Case of Slaves was the same as if Horses had been thrown over board ... The Question was, whether there was not an Absolute Necessity for throwing them over board to save the rest, [and] the Jury were of opinion there was ...
Lord Mansfield was very much interested in ensuring commercial law was upheld. The Insurers had argued that Captain Collingwood of the Zong had made "a Blunder and Mistake" in sailing beyond Jamaica; that the slaves had been killed so their owners could claim against the insurance premium; and that Collingwood did this because he did not want his first voyage as a slave ship captain to be unprofitable. The slaves were treated as property not people.
I had a ticket for Saddlers Wells. I could have gone. It was a present. I had stopped listening to music for a while. The world was in turmoil and it was not really possible to enjoy the world. My friends were invisible people. Even in Karlsruhe it was not possible. When I did begin to listen to
Cube E: Live in Holland I realised I could have been in the audience but, once again, failed to accept a ticket from a friend. Sometimes people are practical in the moment and idiots in retrospect.
So, I manage to fantasise about what if I had been in the audience. The Netherlands are a marvellous place - what I have seen of them. I was told the night life and social scene was magnificent. Unfortunately, I was being practical. Which meant doing practical things and not enjoying myself. Which was fine. It made the fantasy all the more desirable.
The
Buckaroo Blues and
The King and Eye sections were marvellous. Solidly worthy and all of that. But it was the
Middle Passage Black Barry that I really care for. The Zong navigated the
Middle Passage which was the name for the eight to ten week journey across the Atlantic on slave ships. Maybe the Residents hate the Beatles because of Slavery. It would make sense.
Black Barry crosses
Buckaroo Blues and
The King and Eye much like the Zong.
The King and Eye is a marvellous pun on
The King and I the musical that took Yul Brynner to fame. Ironically, Brynner was also a UN Special Consultant on Refugees.
The King and Eye is at two removes from the original story of
Anna Leonowens, a widow with two young children, was invited to Siam by King Mongkut, who wanted her to teach his children and wives the English language and introduce them to British customs. Presumably, King Mongkut was immune to the British Idea of imposing a caste system onto the world; or, perhaps, Anna was a sultry woman touched by the Oriental. Her grandmother might well have been Indian - a
faux pas on the part of her Grandfather. That kind of cultural shadow suggests
The King and Eye owes more to the ideas of the Civil Rights Movement and the radical transformations of the 1960s than it does to adulation of
Elvis Presley.
The King and Eye convinced me that the Residents hired an Elvis Impersonator to front the entire debacle. Not that I am decrying a debacle. Far from it. If I were imagining being in the Audience in Holland, a debacle would be the apotheosis of the performance. The Moment that the Narrator - the Ageing Impersonator - realises it is all over is the moment that the Beatles begin vomiting out their
Scouse version of his class
Blue Suede Shoes. At the other end of History to King George III,
The King and Eye blunders into an ignoble death of another king. The end of
The King and Eye section of
The History Of American Music in Three E-Z Pieces is the perfect moment to begin to play
Third Reich 'n' Roll making it the
"End of History" in a Frances Fukiyama sort of way.
Buckaroo Blues is a bizzarely seductive foreshadowing of later storytelling works. The idea that MIDI music is somehow inferior fades with the first praire dog howls. There are hints of all sorts of cowboy poets from the New Mexican S. Omar Barker's
Buckaroo Ballads (1928) right through to Johnny Cash in
Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie. The origins of
Bury Me Not On The Lone Praire lie in the Sailors Song
"The Sailor's Grave" or
"The Ocean-Burial".
"The Ocean Burial" was written by E.H, Chapin in 1839, and put to music by George N. Allen. As an adaption of
"The Sailor's Grave" it not only connects the Prairie and the High Seas but the multiple sectarian factions that made America great by transporting slaves through the Middle Passage.
The Sailor's Grave has several versions including some from Scotland which are anti-Irish and some from America which hint at the innovations that would be taken by the Cowboy Poets in getting to the lone prairies. The core of
Buckaroo Blues is the kind of folk music that links working communities together.
In the delusional version of
Cube-E there is little room for
Buckaroo Blues as it simply sets the stage for the Middle Passage of
Black Barry. It gives hints as to why the Residents hate the Beatles but not a full and expansive explanation. It simply ensures that the arrival of
Black Barry is as radical as the arrival of Jazz was in the Dada Era between the last Imperial War of 1914-1922 and the first Liberal War of 1939-1948. History gets rewritten a lot. These may not be real wars or, indeed, accredited by actual historians.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None by Freddy "the Horsekisser" Nietzsche, puts forward the fictional sayings of Zarathustra, whose namesake was the founder of Zoroastrianism. It also inspired the tone poem
Also sprach Zarathustra (Opus 30) by Richard Strauss. In the Delusional Version of
Cube-E the whole of
Black Barry is structured to begin with slave chants and end with an overture (
Ober) that combines
Autobahn by
Kraftwerk with
Also sprach Zarathustra by
Richard Strauss. Which then foreshadows the need to play
Third Reich 'n' Roll after
The King And Eye. It is a complicated delusion. The
Autobahn hints and nods towards the late
Philip Lithman while
Also sprach Zarathustra hints at the turmoil and optimism of the 1960's. Even being told that
Ober does not contain these tunes has no role in the delusion. The supposed twelve bar blues structure simply builds to a magnficient crescendo that proves everything is true.
On 3 January 1889 Friedrich Nietzsche kissed a horse. This was put down to tertiary syphillis but may have been manic depression. It was during this period his sister began to take control of his writings and Nietzsche became associated with the Hitlerian Fascism. The Horse Kissing Phase came after alleged brothelling - which may, or may not, have been with men or women. The Nietzschean argument that ideas of equality allowed slaves to overcome their own condition without hating themselves makes sense in
Black Barry as the Middle Passage of
Three E-Z Pieces. By denying the inherent inequality of people slaves acquired a method of escape. They create the new. Which is what
Black Barry does. Freddy the Horsekisser went mad for the benefit of
Black Barry.
Everything about
The King And Eye that connects to
Buckaroo Blues is created by
Black Barry. The King is little more than a night soil gatherer elevated to monarchy by luck and transformed into an Impersonator of
Black Barry or, perhaps, Elvis. The truly creative core of all three pieces is
Black Barry. As lamented in
Wonderful:
Life would be wonderful...
If our good friend Snakefinger
Hadn't had a heart attack
If we had a negro singer
Who could do some mellow rap
Everything seems to be about the immigrants - both voluntary and involuntary.
Buckaroo Blues has wandering cowboys,
Black Barry has people imprisoned by the ancestors of the Beatles and
The King and Eye has the inevitable end of
the King at the harsh hands of the Beatles. Which is really why the Residents hate the Beatles:
Slavery.
The Unity Theatre is housed in a Synagogue. Which is where it arrived after being closed down by the Minister, Mister Luce. Take away the funding and they will disappear being the enduring theory of Arts under the
Tories. Much like the Zong where the assumption was always that business could trump morality and people could be dumped overboard. For a century or two, the Beatles exported slavery to the Americas. Not personally. Then at the end of the 1950s, just as America was thundering into a tumult of Civil Rights and the starting of the final croakings of Slavery, the Beatles come along with a bunch of tunes they had stolen from Black Culture.
There is a rumour that, during the first Liberal War of 1939-1948, the Third Reich had two sets of powerful, directional, radio transmitters that transmitted Jazz. Not the anodyne, derivative Jazz of the Master Race that was permitted within the Reich but Jazz with actual Negros and other Untermenshen. The two beams of transmission were rumoured to cross above Liverpool. Thus giving a powerful radio presence with subversive music over the City. Thus, the young Beatles would have been influenced - even prenatally - by the presence of Black Music. It might well be apocrypha; but the truth is Liverpool was always well supplied with music from America and the rest of the world through the Shipping trade. Perhaps the Beatles simply heard a lot of bootlegs.
Without a healthy hatred for the Beatles - dubbing them George Crawfish, John Crawfish, Paul Crawfish and Ringo Starfish - the Residents were always ready to summon the presence of
Black Barry. Just as the Beatles were able to summon huge crowds to chant and swoon, somewhere the Residents had learned to summon demons of their own.
Black Barry is that demon.
Before
Ober Black Barry manages to live with a little bitty woman, in poverty with her big feet. Which led him towards a
New Orleans. A feat repeated with the
Loris Gréaud: Sculpt whose entire existence seems contingent upon the whims of a
Voodoo Queen. Even in
The Gospel Truth can be heard the rising tones of what might be the longest
Shepard Tone experiment in history. By the time we get to
Voodoo Queen everything from Church music to the erotic keyboard tappings of the likes of
Little Richard. In stark contrast to
Buckaroo Blues and
The King And Eye - whose preoccupations are narrow by comparison - the story of
Black Barry throbs with variety.
When
What Am I Gonna Do sleazes into
Organism it becomes apparent that
Autobahn has been lifted. Not only
Autobahn but a gamut of other tunes such as the theme to
Born Free. This is not the same as the critique of the appropriation of Inuit culture in
Eskimo this is
North Louisiana's Phenomenal Pop Combo appropriating anything careless enough to stray within earshot. From Strauss to the Beatles to Partch, each moment slides yet one more musician into the mix. As if, in a single work, the Residents had decided to complete the
American Composers Series. Perhaps the apparent presence of
Autobahn was simply a sly nod to
Snakefinger whose cover of
The Model plundered Germany with equal facility.
And in doing so, the
North Louisiana's Phenomenal Pop Combo summoned
Black Barry the secret Vodoun deity behind all modern Western Music: from Blues to Jazz to Rap and back. Which is, to all intents and purposes, what the Residents achieve a survey of by the end of
Ober. The
History Of American Music is summarised in an eight note theme that recurs. When you listen to
Third Reich 'n' Roll after hearing
The History Of American Music In Three Easy Pieces then you hear the same motif sliding in and out of everything. Until, eventually, you hear whifflings of
Vileness Fats and you realise the lesson that the old musicologist, Senada, had imparted to the Residents. At which point the overture of
Ober becomes the retrospective culmination of the process begun in
The Gospel Truth.
At this point the truth occurs: the whole of
Black Barry has been the narration of the rise of
something from deep within. Even
Also Sprach Zarathustra becomes melded with that eight note motif and anything that follows will be merely a variation on silence.
When
Black Barry ends there is a realisation that the whole of
Cube-E continues the works of
Stars & Hank Forever and
George & James and, in some strange ways, completes the project without ever mentioning it to anybody. The History of American Music is part of the History of Black Music. Much as though American Composers might want to suppose an Exceptional American Identity, it is an illusion. Much like the uniqueness of the Beatles. There never were "Four Lads from Liverpool". There was always just mythopoesis. Which is what the Residents saw early on in their career. Which is where the idea that the Residents hate the Beatles comes from: the fact that making myths is hard work.
Black Barry is an epic work of mythopoesis that constantly gives insight. It encapsulates the horrifying truth of the Zong Massacre: that slavery really did form the nation. Like it or not. It encapsulates the stunning truth that, History is not just about writing down a list of dates and people. It is about the accumulation of experiences - even if you have no idea who the people accumulating the experiences are.
The names of the people thrown overboard from the
Zong are not, generally, believed to be recorded. When the Residents invoked
Black Barry they were calling upon people more anonymous than themselves such as the Zong
Cargo. The Cowboys of
Buckaroo Blues and the King of
The King and Eye have something of an identity. Whereas
Black Barry was only accessible through the music that the Beatles has stolen. As a History,
Cube-E bears as much thought as
Third Reich And Roll. Which is, in a very perverse way, how the anonymity of the Residents connects them to the murdered slaves of the Zong: Anonymity.