Cerebus Reviewed 1: Cerebus
Cerebus – the full three hundred issue story – is, if not the greatest art-work of the twentieth century, at least a strong contender for that role.
That may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not intended to be. And it’s not a statement made through ignorance. Place it up against any of the obvious contenders – Ulysses, The Rite Of Spring, Citizen Kane, King Kong, Revolver, Rhapsody In Blue, The Wasteland, Pet Sounds – any work of high or low culture, any revolutionary piece that overturned ways of thinking or any culmination of centuries’ worth of art – and I guarantee that it will match them for technical skill, for formal innovation, for emotional depth, for the number of ideas in there, and also for entertainment value. There are pieces of art I prefer to Cerebus, but I honestly can’t think of any that I can say are better.
But while Cerebus is a great work, it’s also a great body of work. From 1977 to 2004 – a period longer than, for example, the whole run of the original series of Doctor Who, a period that spanned punk at one end and the invasion of Iraq at the other – Dave Sim (and, from 1984 on, Gerhard, who drew the backgrounds), wrote, drew, lettered and published an average of five pages a day of a single story.
I can’t think of another example in history where that’s been the case, where an artist has made a single work the whole of their professional life. A few examples come close – Charles Schulz, for example, drew Peanuts for forty-nine years – but Peanuts isn’t a continuing narrative. You can read any of the strips in any order and be at no disadvantage. On the other hand, if you were to pick up (to pick an issue at random) Cerebus #273, you’d see an aardvark who thinks he’s a superpowered rabbi trying and failing to detach his foreskin, jumping and breaking his leg, then 16 pages of white lettering on a black background with no other pictures. We won’t even get into the essay at the back…
There’s something magnificent in this, the sheer chutzpah of deciding aged twenty-one what you’re going to be doing aged forty-eight and sticking to the plan, of sitting down every day for twenty-seven years and drawing one more page in the same story. As someone who merely said he was going to do a blog post about Cerebus every week – and is two weeks behind on the second one – that’s a level of discipline I find hard to comprehend.
But it means that all Sim’s ideas, all his obsessions, everything in his life entered the same story. As someone, I forget who, put it, Sim’s achievement is roughly equivalent to Alan Moore – if Moore had drawn, as well as written, Watchmen,From Hell, Promethea, Swamp Thing, Lost Girls, Marvelman, A Disease Of Language and A Small Killing – and if every one of those stories had been part of one larger story starring Maxwell The Magic Cat.
But of course, this also means that the beginning of the story is a bit of a slog (and that I’ll have less to say about this volume than about later ones). Sim started out as a 21-year-old with little obvious talent. The first few issues of Cerebus are very obviously in thrall to two creators. As an artist, Sim desperately wants to be Barry Windsor-Smith, while as a writer he clearly admires Steve Gerber. You could have worse models, of course, but it leads to the first few issues being like this:
Page one of Cerebus #1
These first few issues are essentially just Barry Windsor-Smith Conan comics, but with the title character replaced by an aardvark, with ‘hilarious’ consequences.
But what’s fascinating about this first volume is just how quickly Sim grows as an artist and writer, and how soon he starts pushing the boundaries of what’s doable in comics. By issue twenty (of the twenty-five included in this volume) we get this:
Cerebus issue 20, by Dave Sim
Read page by page, the grey and black areas represented different states of consciousness in which Cerebus, drugged by a kidnapper, talks alternately with that kidnapper and a telepathic communication from elsewhere, but the comic as a whole made the image above. When Alan Moore and J.H. Williams did the same thing thirty years later it was praised as wildly innovative, but Sim not only did it first, but had it make more in-story sense and had form and function fit better.
Over the course of this ‘phonebook’ (as the trade paperbacks of Cerebus are referred to – they’re often over 500 pages long, and printed on cheap newsprint, much like the Marvel Essential or DC Showcase series. Among the many things in the comic industry Sim pioneered was the now-standard practice of keeping everything in print permanently in trade paperbacks) one can see Sim shake off the influence of Barry Windsor-Smith and start trying on a variety of different styles. My particular favourite in this one is this Eisner-inspired panel from issue 11:
The Roach on an Eisnerian background by Dave Sim
But he was still definitely learning at this point, and also struggling with keeping to a regular schedule – one can often see the linework getting sloppier towards the end of an issue as he rushes to complete it by the deadline. At this time as well, Sim was still obviously having difficulty integrating the cartoony Cerebus into the more ‘realistic’ world he was creating:
In this panel, Cerebus looks like he's been pasted in from a different comic from the rest of the panel.
From very early on, though, we start seeing the characters who will form the supporting cast for the first 200 of Cerebus’ 300 issues. In issue three we get Red Sophia, an airheaded parody of Robert E Howard’s ‘female Conan’ Red Sonja:
Red Sophia
Issue four gives us Sim’s first really inspired creation, Elrod of Melvinbone. The albino last ruler of a dying race, with his black sword Seersucker, Elrod is Moorcock’s Elric in body, but with the vocal mannerisms of Foghorn Leghorn. Looney Tunes cartoons would be one of the main inspirations for this early phase of Sim’s work:
Elrod explains the concept of status
Issue six brings us Jaka, a dancer who Cerebus is drugged into loving and then forgets – for now. Their romance becomes one of the major driving forces of the story:
Jaka
There’s also the Cockroach – a mentally unstable man who takes on various guises throughout the series – The Cockroach, Captain Cockroach, Moon Roach, Wolveroach and so on – in a parody of the superhero genre that clearly (ahem) ‘inspired’ The Tick a few years later:
Captain Cockroach mourns the death of his assistant Bunky
And we have the first of the real-life figures (of sorts) to make his way into the story, in the person of Lord Julius, the rather familiar-seeming ruler of Palnu, who rules by instilling so much confusion in the bureaucracy that he’s the only one who understands the system:
Lord Julius
While introducing these characters, in stories that are mostly one-off stories (with the occasional two- or three-parter) parodying other comics (we have Professor Charles X Claremont’s School For Girls and the first meeting of Sump Thing and Woman Thing, for example) Sim slowly sets up the background against which the first two hundred of his three hundred issues will be played. Lord Julius is ruling the city-state of Palnu and is the most important political figure at the moment. ‘President Weisshaupt’ (a George Washington lookalike – a reference to the conspiracy theory that Adam Weisshaupt, head of the Illuminati, replaced Washington) is trying to take over the United Feldwar States.
There are various tribes of barbarians to the North, and there are at least three other groups – the Cirinists, a group who at this point seem like nuns, whose ‘only goal is to wipe out fun in our lifetime’, who worship the goddess Terim (rather than the god Tarim, worshipped by Cerebus), and whose holy book is called “The New Matriarchy”, the Illusionists, led by Suenteus Po, who at this point seem to be hippies-cum-Buddhists, who mostly just want to smoke dope and be left alone, and the Kevilists, about whom we’re only told they exist.
The power struggle between these different groups will power the main plotlines for Cerebus’ first eighteen years or so, but we also have some of the themes that will come up over and over again cropping up here. Two separate groups (the Pigts, led by Bran Mak Muffin, and the Cirinists) decide they want to worship Cerebus as the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. We have several oppositions between male and female (and a third, neutral, force) from Cerebus’ fight with Red Sophia through to the meeting of Sump Thing and Woman Thing. And we already have the sense that Cerebus is very important to all the groups and individuals who are jostling for supreme power, and that political and religious power are closer in this world than in ours.
Cerebus gives little clue as to just how great a cartoonist Dave Sim was soon to become, but of its twenty-five issues, maybe ten of them are at least as good as anything of its time. Had Sim given up after these issues (and had the rest of comics continued on the same course – an incredibly unlikely event, as for all that Sim has been airbrushed out of comics history he was probably the single most influential creator of the 80s) Cerebus would be remembered now as a pretty good Howard The Duck knock-off with a few funny gags and some nice ideas.
But it got much, much better quickly.
Next week (honestly, I promise) High Society
New Spotify Playlist: The Twenty Best Monkees Songs
I’d planned to do this later in the week, but Xianrex asked me on Twitter if I had a list of twenty Monkees songs for the neophyte, and in fact just last night I put together this twenty-song playlist. I’m posting it now, before finishing the Cerebus post, because my wife’s not a Monkees fan, and she’s out – I don’t especially want to subject her to multiple plays through of this music while I write about it.
I’ve been asked about this because I’ve been hugely excited that I’ve this week bought tickets to see the reunited Monkees (minus Mike Nesmith, who has decided to spend the time rolling around in his estimated $300M fortune and going “ha ha ha! I have *ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD!” Probably.) and most people have been saying “You mean the Monkees as in on the TV show? Why on Earth would you do that?”
I’m doing that because the run of four albums Headquarters, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd, The Birds, The Bees And The Monkees and Head is about as good as any four-album run in popular music, is the simple answer. But to explain why, before I get to talking about the individual tracks here, I’ll just deal with the two most common criticisms of the band.
The first one, and the stupidest, is “they didn’t play on their records!”.
It’s true that on the first two albums (of the nine they released during their original period together) they didn’t play on the backing tracks (though apparently Peter Tork added a few bits of guitar and banjo even there). That was, however, just common practice at that time. The Byrds didn’t play on Mr Tambourine Man, The Beach Boys barely played on anything during their commercial peak, the Mothers Of Invention were ‘augmented’ on their first album by session players, there are a couple of tracks on Forever Changes where Love don’t play, the Rip Chords didn’t even *sing*, let alone play, on their hit Hey Little Cobra… even in the UK, where the notion of the band was stronger, Ray Davies and Mick Avory of the Kinks didn’t play on their early records, Ringo didn’t play on Love Me Do, Jimmy Page filled out the sound of early Who records, and so on.
And unlike those other bands, the Monkees had a rather good excuse – they weren’t, at least to start with, a band. Rather they were performers in a TV show *about* a band. As they often say themselves, “no-one complains that William Shatner never really captained a Starship”.
What *is* worth noting is that after those first two albums, they *did* take control of their own music – even on the first album Mike Nesmith was writing songs for the band and producing tracks, in fact – and that the music *got better* when they got rid of the professional session musicians, producers and songwriters (or hired some of them on the Monkees’ own terms). On top of that they had the artistic bravery to make Head – a film which, as my friend Tdaschel puts it, is in a genre with only one other example, Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels. (Head both came first and is far more adventurous than Zappa’s film. It also features Zappa in a cameo, along with Sonny Liston, Victor Mature and Jack Nicholson. Nicholson also wrote the script).
The other criticism is that they were a purely manufactured band. This is true – and it’s actually their greatest strength. Under normal circumstances, it’s impossible to imagine these four people ever working together. Micky Dolenz is a former child star who just happened to turn into one of the great soul vocalists of all time (it’s not just me who says that – Carole King apparently thinks Dolenz is the greatest interpreter of her songs ever, which given that she’s had songs performed by everyone from the Beatles to James Taylor by way of the Righteous Brothers and the Beach Boys says a lot). Mike Nesmith is an intensely literate country songwriter and vocalist, someone who manages to tie the simplicity and emotional power of country music of the Steve Earle or Willie Nelson style to a literate, complex lyrical style. Peter Tork is a folk and blues musician, and a virtuoso on several different instruments. And Davy Jones is an annoying little tit.
(To be fair to Davy Jones, who is after all from Manchester so deserves benefit of doubt, he’s apparently the nicest person in the band by quite a substantial margin, according to those who’ve met him. But he’s a stage-school brat whose musical tendencies are towards bad Broadway numbers).
To show the differences between them, we just have to look at the songs they perform (or performed) as their solo spots on Monkees reunion tours. Micky will sing the blues song Since I Fell For You (most famously performed by Nina Simone). Mike would perform his solo hit Rio. Peter would perform a Bach two-part invention, and Davy would sing a medley of songs from Oliver! (he originated the role of the Artful Dodger on Broadway).
That combination would never, under normal circumstances, have been brought together. They’re neither musically, nor by all accounts personally, compatible in any normal sense, but it gave their music a breadth and diversity matched by few other bands.
This playlist is a mixture of hits, fan-favourites and genuine obscurities that I’ve put together to try to explain why I think the Monkees deserve to be treated as one of the more interesting, inventive, and talented bands of the 60s. It’s biased towards songs by Mike, and towards songs with Micky on lead, because those are my personal favourites, but I hope it gives a good flavour of the band as a whole.
St Matthew from the rarities collection Missing Links Vol 2 is a country song written and sung by Mike Nesmith. The lyrics to this actually remind me of Leonard Cohen, but musically this – and many of Nesmith’s other songs from this era – could only be described as psych-country, with the ‘heavy’ sound of the era applied to arrangements that are at base standard country songs. This is the kind of thing that Gram Parsons would get a huge amount of credit for several years later.
(I Prithee) Do Not Ask For Love is a very odd track indeed – a pseudo-Elizabethan, almost madrigal, song by Nesmith’s friend Michael Murphy, turned into a baroque pop track by Nesmith’s production. This was actually recorded with vocals by three different band members – a version sung by Tork appeared on the 331/3 Revolutions Per Monkee TV special, and this backing track with vocals by Jones appeared as a bonus track on the CD release of More Of The Monkees. It’s sung here, though, by Micky, who is far and away the best vocalist in the band. This version is also from Missing Links vol 2.
Randy Scouse Git is written and sung by Micky and is from Headquarters, the band’s third album, on which they played all the instruments themselves. It manages to go through an astonishing array of different musical styles in its 2:34, from angry almost proto-punk to scat-sung semi-jazz. The fact that Micky didn’t actually know what a ‘randy Scouse git’ was when he wrote the song just makes it all the better.
Calico Girlfriend Samba is a Nesmith song that was recorded for The Monkees Present but not released until it became a bonus track on the CD reissue (though Nesmith later recorded it on his solo album Magnetic South. It is, as the title suggests, a samba, and a good one.
Mommy And Daddy is a rather sixth-formish political song by Micky, a bonus track on The Monkees Present, but it’s quite astonishing sounding, sounding to me like an early 80s post-punk thing far more than late 60s pop – until the ending, which is pure 60s pop apart from the dissonant horns and throbbing drums.
A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You is a non-album single included as a bonus track on Headquarters. A Neil Diamond song, this shows just what a master songwriting craftsman Diamond is, under his Vegas exterior. Davy Jones does a decent enough job on lead vocals.
Magnolia Simms is a Nesmith song, a gorgeous Western Swing number made to sound like an authentic 1920s 78, right down to the slight speed wobble and the needle hiss. (And note that this was from more than a year before the Beatles did something similar with Honey Pie). Nesmith is the only Monkee credited on this track, the rest of the instruments being provided by session musicians, but as well as Nesmith’s guitar there’s definitely a ukulele on there, and I think either a mandolin or banjo as well. I wonder if they were Tork?
Propinquity (I’ve Just Begun To Care is another Nesmith country song, left unreleased in this version until the Missing Links Vol 3 rarities collection. Nesmith gave this song to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and later recorded it himself on his solo album Nevada Fighter. As with many of Nesmith’s songs, this sounds now ‘just’ like extremely good country-rock, but Nesmith invented country-rock – this was before Gram Parsons and Gene Clark started following in Nesmith’s footsteps.
Cripple Creek is a low-fi live recording from 1967. I’ve included this because Peter Tork is often overlooked in the Monkees, because he took very few leads on the studio recordings (the only ones on the ‘canonical’ albums are the comedy track Your Aunty Grizelda and the second verse of awful ballad Shades Of Grey). However, he was the only first-rate instrumentalist in the band – and a multi-instrumentalist at that. This live performance shows off his banjo-picking on an old-time folk song.
Two Part Invention In F Major and here’s Tork on the piano, playing a Bach piece. He fluffs a couple of notes, but then this was just him playing around in the studio between takes, not intended for release. Pretty good for someone in a band who ‘couldn’t play their instruments’ – especially as keyboard is Tork’s third instrument, after banjo and guitar.
Don’t Call On Me is Nesmith stepping outside of his comfort zone, providing a gorgeous soft/lounge pop-jazz song in the vein of Paul Williams or Burt Bacharach. Melodically similar to Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying, Nesmith actually wrote this long before joining the Monkees, and it’s hard to see why it was left until the band’s fourth album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd, before they recorded this. Nesmith’s lead vocal also sounds utterly different to anything else he did.
Cuddly Toy is another track off Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd, this time written by Harry Nilsson. The bouncy, cheery melody covers up possibly the most vicious, misogynistic, nasty lyric ever written in pop music (though Nilsson was, of course, writing in character). Davy Jones takes the lead, and Micky is harmonising with him.
Love Is Only Sleeping a song from the Barry Mann/Cynthia Weill songwriting team, this actually sounds like a Nesmith original. A psych-country track in the vein of What Condition My Condition Was In, this has a driving riff in 7/4 time and a great air of menace. From Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd.
Goin’ Down was a B-side, now included as a bonus track on Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd, that grew out of a jam session around Mose Allison’s Parchman Farm. This is one of the most startlingly good vocal performances in the Monkees’ repertoire, with Micky Dolenz apparently effortlessly managing a song whose rapid flow of syllables would tie the tongue of pretty much any rapper. The lyric (about an attempted suicide by drowning who eventually decides just to float down the river on his back) is a great one too, though it takes many listens to make it all out.
Porpoise Song is the theme from Head, the Monkees’ film, and seems to have been written by Goffin and King as a parody of psychedelia – certainly I can’t imagine them writing lyrics like “a face, a voice, an overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice” with a straight face (the line “riding the backs of giraffes for laughs is all right for a while” is a reference to the TV show Circus Boy, on which Micky had been a child star). But musically it’s gorgeous, and the vocals (by Micky on the verses and Davy on the choruses) absolutely sell the song. Jack Nitzsche’s arrangement is also stunning – the coda, with diving bells (representing the images in the film, where the band have all committed suicide by drowning at the start) is an extraordinary piece of arrangement work.
She Hangs Out is a great little garage rocker by Jeff Barry, of the sort that could have been done by a thousand bands of the time, but is still enjoyable enough. Davy turns in one of his better vocals here. From Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd
The Door Into Summer is, yet again, from Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd (guess my favourite Monkees album? Bet you can’t…) . Written by the band’s producer Chip Douglas and Nesmith’s friend Bill Martin, this is a country rocker based on a Robert Heinlein science fiction novel, with Nesmith on lead.
Someday Man
A gorgeous Paul Williams/Roger Nichols soft pop song, this was the B-side to Listen To The Band and was eventually released on CD as a bonus track on Instant Replay, the band’s first album after Peter Tork left. Structurally, this is fascinating, with all sorts of different little melodies coming and going, and shows again why the easy listening and soft-pop end of the musical spectrum from that time is far more interesting than much of the supposedly more ‘progressive’ music of the same period. Davy Jones sings lead, and does a far better job than you’d expect given that he’s Davy Jones.
Daddy’s Song is another Nilsson song, this time a Broadway-style uptempo song-and-dance number about Nilsson’s parents’ divorce. In the film Head this was sung by Davy Jones, but this version, a bonus track on the soundtrack album, has Nesmith singing lead in the style he used on Magnolia Simms.
Daydream Believer You probably know, but it’s still one of the best singles ever recorded. Written by folk musician John Stewart, this is sung by Davy Jones and has Peter Tork on piano – apparently the only track on The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees on which Tork features, the band having started to drift apart by that point (Tork would remain for one more album, Head, before quitting). Tork also arranged the track.
Quick Question
I’m working on my Cerebus post now – expect it some time this evening, with a Pet Sounds one tonight, and the next part of How We Know What We Know tomorrow. But I’ve got a question:
I’ve got a pretty good idea for an interesting science fiction novel, and I’ve been planning to serialise it on here. But working out the plot, I’ve hit a brick wall. I’ve got my protagonist, my antagonist, a big mystery, several smaller mysteries, the conflict between protagonist and antagonist and the cause of that conflict. I’ve got a theme, and a science fiction idea I actually think hasn’t been done before. What I haven’t got – and what I can’t see any way to get – is a way to satisfactorily resolve the conflict.
Now the way I’m planning on structuring this is as twelve independent short stories, each of which can be read on their own, but which fit into a wider framework, with at least some jumping around in place and time rather than being a strictly linear story. Think of it like a TV series with a ‘story arc’ but independent episodes. But for this to work I would *need* to have the principal conflict come to a head in about the ninth story, and I’ve hit a brick wall in my planning there.
Should I start writing and posting these stories – at a rate of roughly one a week – and hope that I get an idea within the two months or more it would take for me to get to that point (or that an idea falls out of what I write in that time), and take a chance on leaving the story unfinished, or should I wait til I’ve got everything worked out?
Last Six Hours For My Kindle Sale
The results of my Kindle sale have been mixed – per-day sales tripled during the last week. Unfortunately, I’d need to sell ten times as many books to make the same amount I was making previously. So at 5PM UK time I’m going to return my books to the original, still-pretty-cheap, $5 price.
If you want to grab them for 99c while you can, the links are:
The Beatles In Mono Kindle US Kindle UK
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! Kindle US Kindle UK
Cerebus post tonight (ETA make that tomorrow night. Migraine. Hate everything
Linkblogging For 22/02/11
Sorry for the lack of new content for a couple of days – had a busy couple of days and a few crappy things have happened. I’ll have a Cerebus post up tomorrow – just a week late.
Meanwhile, some links:
Good news – The Monkees (of course unfortunately not Mike Nesmith) reforming for a 45th anniversary UK tour. (Now if we can only get the Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary tour this summer to play more than the one UK date…)
Bad news – Dwayne McDuffie died. Just one reason why he was great.
The OpenPC project – pre-built PCs with Free Software installed
Lisa Ansell, a member of Labour, explains why she attacks the Labour party as much as the current government over cuts.
Neal Stephenson on rockets and path dependence
Attack Ships On Fire on Blood Simple
Plok on How Canada Works
Parsingphase on the AV referendum
Gavin Burrows reviews a Patti Smith gig
And Why We Should Believe Nick Clegg When He Promises To Restore Liberties Stolen By Labour in the Observer
Thank You All
I’m extremely exhausted, and can’t write anything coherent today, but I have got to the point where I’m feeling a bit maudlin, and it just hit me what a great bunch of people visit and comment on and link to this site, and how lucky I am to know them. So I’d just like to say thank you to Holly and Debi and Mat and Jennie and Andrew Ducker and TAD and Tilt and Plok and Zom and Botswana Beast and David Allison and Gavin Burrows and Lawrence Burton and Gavin Robinson and Mike Taylor and Andrew Rilstone and Andrew Hinton and Alex Wilcock and Richard Flowers and Dave Page and Rachel Zall and Prankster and Wesley and TDaschel and Colsmi and Burkesworks and Bill Reed and…
And I know I’ve missed a bunch of you out. A lot of you. Because I’m too tired to think. But I just wanted to say that far more than anything I’ve written here, I’m proud of the people who visit this site. And thank you. If you’re a regular commenter here and I’ve missed you out, you’re probably actually the most important one.
(I’ll probably delete this in the morning, when I’m coherent enough to realise this was a bad idea).
Linkblogging For 20/02/11
I tried to get a Cerebus post up today but failed miserably – it’ll be up tomorrow with luck. Meanwhile, have some links:
Via Alex WIlcock, I’ve discovered that Lulu are, until the end of tomorrow, having a 20% sale – type HAPPYUK305 in the promotion box when you order. Now obviously, it would be nice if you used it to buy my books, but if you’ve already got them, you could buy Andrew Rilstone’s books (his books are on Watchmen, Doctor Who, folk music and theology, and are all excellent). Or you could buy Simon Bucher-Jones’ poetry book, my uncle’s great science books (including one in which I co-authored a chapter on Agile programming, and which my wife Holly co-wrote), or Lawrence Burton’s books. Support independent authors (who are friends or relations of mine, or who are me!)
Peer reviewers get worse with experience
British drugs caused an executed man to die in agony. Shameful.
Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer on the No2AV anti-democracy campaign and how they think we’re stupid.
Classification of young American females according to Brian Wilson
Leonard Pierce on the declining art of criticism
Kate Beaton did a Doctor Who comic without ever having seen the show.
How We Know What We Know: 1 – Feedback
One of the reasons I’ve started this series of posts is because I have a huge respect for the scientific method – in fact, I’d go so far as to say that I think the scientific method is the only means we have of actually knowing anything about the world, or indeed anything at all – but I think that even many other people who claim to believe science to be important don’t fully understand how it works. I also think that many of the people who do know how the scientific method works are not fully aware of the implications of this.
This is not to say, of course, that I am an authority or an expert – in fact, questioning authority and experts is one of the things that defines the scientific method – but it does mean that I’ve thought about this stuff a lot, and might have something worthwhile to say.
To start with, let’s look at what the scientific method isn’t. When I talk about the scientific method here I’m talking about what is, in effect, a Platonic ideal version of science. Science as it is actually practiced has all sorts of baggage that comes with being a human being, or with working in a university environment. Try and imagine here that I am talking about the things that a hypothetical alien race’s science would have in common with ours.
The most important thing for us to note as being unnecessary for science is peer review. That’s not to say peer review is a bad thing – in fact it can be a very good thing, a way to separate out crackpottery from real science, and more importantly a way to discover what your embarassing mistakes are before you become committed to believing in them – but it’s not necessary for doing science. That can be shown rather easily by the fact that neither Newton’s Principia or Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species were peer-reviewed, but it would be hard to argue that Newton and Darwin weren’t scientists.
More importantly, there’s some evidence that peer review actually doesn’t do any better at telling good science from bad than choosing at random. I have some problems with the methodology of that study (I think meta-analyses are, if anything, actively bad science rather than just being neutral as peer review is), but other studies have shown that in fact the majority of published studies in peer-reviewed journals are likely to be false.
So if I’m not talking about science-as-it-is-practiced, with all its flaws and human errors, what am I talking about? What is the core of the scientific method?
Well, the first, and most important, part is feedback.
Feedback may be the single most important concept in science – so much so that it’s been reinvented under different names in several different disciplines. Feedback is the name it’s given in cybernetics – the science of control systems, which is what I’m most familliar with – and in information theory and engineering. In computer programming it’s known as recursion. In biology it’s known as evolution by natural selection. And in mathematics it’s called iteration. All of these are the same concept.
Feedback is what happens when the output of a system is used as one of the inputs (or the only input) of that system. So musicians will know that if you prop an electric guitar up against an amp, or have your microphone too near a speaker, you quickly get a high-pitched whining tone. That’s because the tone from the speaker is going into the guitar’s pickups, or into the mic, in such a way that the low frequencies cancel out while the high frequencies add up. The sound goes straight out of the speaker and back into the pickup or mic, and can quickly become overwhelmingly loud.
That’s what we call ‘positive feedback’. Positive feedback leads to exponential growth very quickly – in fact it’s pretty much always the cause of exponential growth. We can see how easily this happens using a computer program:
#!/usr/bin/perl
$myNumber = 2;
while ( $myNumber > 0 ) {
print $myNumber. ” “;
$myNumber *= $myNumber;#This says that as long as myNumber is greater than
#0 – which it always is – the program should
#multiply it by itself, after printing it to the
#screen.}
This program starts with the number two, multiplies it by itself, and then takes the number it gets and uses that as its input, multiplying it by itself. When I ran this program on my computer, the numbers got so big that the computer couldn’t cope with them before I had a chance to blink – it just kept saying the answer was infinity. The first few outputs, though, were 2, 4, 16, 256, 65536, 4294967296, 1.84467440737096 x 10^19. That last number is roughly a two with nineteen noughts following it, for those of you who don’t know exponential notation.
So positive feedback can make things change a huge amount very, very quickly. So what does negative feedback do?
Negative feedback does the opposite, of course, which means that it keeps things the same. The easiest example of negative feedback at work I can think of is a thermostat. A thermostat is set for a temperature – say eighteen degrees – and controls a heating and a cooling device. When the temperature hits nineteen degrees, it turns the heater off and the cooler on, and when it hits seventeen it turns the cooler off and the heater on. Again, the output (the temperature) is being used as the input, but this time the output does the opposite of what the input is doing – if the input moves up the output moves down – and so it keeps it steady.
Negative feedback is used in all control systems, because negative feedback looks just like an intelligence trying to find a particular goal. That’s because it is how intelligent agents (like people) try to get to their goals.
Imagine you’re driving a car – the input is what you see through the windscreen, while the output is the way your hands turn the steering wheel. You want to go in a straight line, but you see that the car is veering to the left – as a result, you turn the steering wheel slightly to the right. If it veers to the right, you turn the steering wheel to the left. If you’re a good driver, this feedback becomes almost automatic and you do this in a series of almost imperceptible adjustments. (If you’re me, you veer wildly all over the road and your driving instructor quits in fear for his life).
So what happens when you put positive and negative feedback together? The answer is you get evolution by natural selection.
A lot of people, for some reason, seem to have difficulty grasping the idea of evolution (and not just religious fundamentalists, either). Evolution by natural selection is actually a stunningly simple idea – if you get something that copies itself (like an amoeba, or a plant, or a person), eventually you’ll get tons of copies of it all over the place – positive feedback. But things that copy themselves need resources – like food and water – in order to make more copies. If there aren’t enough resources for everything, then some of them will die (negative feedback from the environment – the environment ‘saying’ “OK, we’ve got enough of you little replicators now”).
Only the ones that live will be able to make more copies of themselves, so if some of the copies are slightly different (giraffes with longer necks, or people who are clever enough to avoid being eaten by sabre-toothed tigers), the ones whose differences help them live longest will make the most copies.
And those differences will then be used as the starting point for the next rounds of feedback, both positive and negative – so the differences get amplified very quickly when they’re useful, and die off very quickly when they’re useless, so you soon end up with giraffes whose necks are taller than my house, and humans who can invent quantum physics and write Finnegans Wake, within what is, from the point of view of the universe, the blink of an eye.
But what has that to do with the scientific method?
Everything – in fact, in essence, it is the scientific method.
To do science, you need to do three – and only three – things. You need to have a hypothesis, perform an experiment to test that hypothesis, and revise your hypothesis in accordance with the result. It’s a process exactly like that of natural selection.
In particular, for science we want negative feedback – we desperately want to prove ourselves wrong. We come up with a hypothesis – let’s say “All things fall to the ground, except computer monitors, which float”. We now want to see if our hypothesis will survive, just like our giraffes or people did. So we want negative feedback. So we have to ask what test will prove us wrong?
What we don’t want is a test that seems to confirm our hypothesis – that’s boring. We got our hypothesis from looking at the world – maybe I dropped a cup on the floor and it broke (that’s where positive feedback from the environment comes in – we need something from the environment to start the ball rolling). So we don’t want to run a test where we already know the answer – we’re not trying to prove to ourselves that we’re right. So we don’t try dropping another cup.
A test that might go wrong there is dropping a computer monitor. If we try that, we discover that our initial hypothesis was wrong – computer monitors don’t float. So we revise our hypothesis – maybe to “All things fall to the ground, and if you put your foot under a monitor when you drop it, it really hurts” – and then we test the new hypothesis.
When your hypothesis matches experiment time and again – when everything you or anyone else can think to throw at it, that might prove it wrong, matches what your hypothesis says – then you’ve got a theory you can use to make predictions. You’ve suddenly got the ability to predict the future! That’s pretty impressive, for something that is, in essence, no different from what my guitar does when leaned against an amp.
You can also use it to ‘predict’ the past, in the same way – which is why things like paleontology are sciences, and why social sciences like history are called social sciences rather than arts. You can do the same thing there, except that the experiments involve looking for things that have already happened but you don’t know, rather than trying new things and seeing what happened. You might, for example, come up with the hypothesis “Tyrannosaurus Rex was actually a vegetarian.” Using that hypothesis, you’d make various predictions – that if you looked at a T. Rex skull it would have lots of flat teeth, suitable for grinding vegetation, for example. Then you’d go and look at the skull, and examine the teeth, and see that in fact it had tons of razor-sharp teeth suitable for ripping flesh, and revise your hypothesis, maybe coming up with “Tyrannosaurus Rex was actually not a vegetarian.”
(Apologies to my friends Mike and Debi, whose field I have grossly oversimplified there).
This is the big difference between scientists and other groups – like conspiracy theorists or a sadly-large number of politicians. Conspiracy theorists go looking for evidence that confirms their ‘theories’, and they find it. You can always find confirmation of anything, if you’re willing to ignore enough negative evidence. If you go looking for evidence that you’re wrong – and you do so sincerely, and invite others to aid you in your search – and you don’t find it, you’re probably right.
Next week – how to choose between alternative theories.
The Beach Boys On CD: The Beach Boys Party!/Stack-O-Tracks
A revised version of this essay appears in my book The Beach Boys On CD. If you like this, please consider buying it. Hardback Paperback PDF Kindle (US) Kindle (UK) Kindle (DE) All other ebook formats
This is going to be the shortest of these Beach Boys articles. Partly, this is because I plan on writing at least two more blog posts this weekend – the Cerebus and scientific method ones (and maybe the first chapter of my novel) (and I’ve also got to get some stuff done for work). Mostly, however, it’s because where other albums have filler tracks, this is an entire filler CD. It can be listened to on Spotify here, if you must.
Of the two albums on this CD, one, 1968′s Stack-O-Tracks consists entirely of instrumental mixes of tracks from previous records, so I won’t be dealing with it at all here – all I’d be saying is “It’s Darlin’ without the vocals – see the entry for Darlin’ under the Wild Honey album.”
The other album, though, Beach Boys Party!, requires at least a cursory glance through.
Beach Boys Party!
band membership – Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston (uncredited)
Also features – Marilyn Wilson (backing vocals), Dean Torrence (vocals), Hal Blaine (percussion), Billy Hinsche (harmonica)
I can name the other participants simply here because unlike the albums that surround it, Beach Boys Party! is as far from being a complex, heavily-orchestrated masterpiece as possible. The band’s next real album, Pet Sounds would not be ready for several more months, but Capitol Records wanted a Christmas cash-in release. The two obvious ideas – a live album and an album of Christmas songs – had both been done the year before (we’ll deal with these when we get to 1969 and 1978, so we can deal with the other albums that share the CDs with them). So this time, it was decided to record a ‘live-in-the-studio’ album as if it were recorded at a party the band were attending,
So the band got together in the studio with a few acoustic guitars and Hal Blaine on bongos, and knocked out a set of incredibly sloppy cover versions of songs chosen seemingly at random, and then got friends to add party noises, and added a few wild tracks of party effects. This means that even the better tracks on the album have mistakes left in and general chatter and noise over the top.
The album might well have made a great soundtrack to a teenager’s party in 1965 – and even today for that matter – but as music, as a listening experience, it ranges from pretty decent to outright horrible, and tends towards the latter.
Hully Gully
A song originally recorded by The Olympics in 1959, this starts the album as it means to go on – a fun party tune with silly lyrics. Generally speaking, the album is split between songs that the band knew as teenagers (like this one) and ones by their contemporary influences. A nothing tune in this version, the original by the Olympics is a nice, strutting R&B track in the style of the Coasters, with a laid-back groove totally missing from this version. Mike takes lead.
I Should Have Known Better
The first of three Beatles covers on the album – all covers of Lennon songs (lending credence to my belief that Lennon, rather than McCartney, is the closer songwriter to the Beach Boys’ style). This features just the first two verses and middle eight of the song, sung in unison by several people. At various points the most prominent voice in the mix is Al (always the strongest vocalist in the band), Brian or Brian’s wife Marilyn (a singer herself, with girl-group the Honeys, though not a particularly good one). Mike tries to add some character with some “bow bow bow” backing vocals in the middle eight, but this is just a crowd singing along with an acoustic guitar…
Tell Me Why
The second Lennon cover, this is a more creditable performance, as the song’s simple block harmonies and four-chord changes make it perfect for this kind of atmosphere – especially since the band don’t bother with the instrumental intro from the original (like the previous song, on the A Hard Day’s Night album). Even so, the performance falls apart at the end of the middle eight like before.
I’m still unsure who’s singing lead here – Wikipedia says Carl and Al, and it could be them – but it could also be Brian and Carl or Brian and Al. No matter how many times I listen (and I’ve listened multiple times just now to the finished version and to two outtakes) I can’t decide for sure – this is in precisely the range where those three sound most similar.
In a nice touch, Brian added this to the acoustic ‘party’ set when he performed in Liverpool in 2004 on the Smile tour, in this arrangement (such as it is).
Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow
The best track so far, this was actually the second time the band had recorded this song, originally by The Rivingtons, in a year – it had appeared on the Concert album the previous year. This is actually the better of the two versions, because the fun in this song is almost entirely in the vocal performance – Love growling the ‘papa oom mow mow’ part in a comically low bass voice, while Brian screeches, yowls, whoops and wails in falsetto. The looseness of this setting allows them to go to ridiculous extremes with this, and the result is genuinely enjoyable.
Mountain Of Love
Originally by Harold Dorman, a one-hit wonder, this had been a hit the previous year for Johnny Rivers, and it’s Rivers’ arrangement the Beach Boys are clearly copying here, down to the backing vocals. A simple twelve-bar blues with little going for it, the song obviously stuck with Brian Wilson – twelve years later he copied the middle eight note for note for his song Little Children (which remained unreleased for another eleven years and eventually became a track on his first solo album). Love sings lead, and rudimentary harmonica is provided by Billy Hinsche, of the minor teen-pop band Dino, Desi and Billy. Carl Wilson would marry Hinsche’s sister Annie the next year, and Hinsche became a regular member of the Beach Boys’ touring band from the early 70s, adding keyboards, guitar and backing vocals until the mid-90s.
You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away
The third Lennon cover on the album, and one of only two tracks that could really be counted as in any way good here, Dennis takes lead and plays the song straight (though the party crowd do all join in on the “Hey!” parts). While it’s spoiled by the party noises (this is anything but a party song), Dennis’ soulful croak is perfect for this song, one of Lennon’s best and most mournful. It also, more than any of the other tracks, puts the lie to the ostensibly spontaneous nature of these recordings – Dennis is very sloppily double-tracked here.
This song actually entered the band’s setlist as Dennis’ vocal spot (taking over from The Wanderer ). If you want to hear just how good the song sounds without the party noises, at least three concerts featuring the song have been widely bootlegged (two from Michigan in excellent quality soundboard recordings, one from Japan as an audience recording with some nice added harmonies), not that I could ever recommend taking such action of course, but even here this is far and away the best thing on the album so far.
Devoted To You
And this is the best thing on the album full stop. A rather light little ballad written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant for the Everly Brothers, here Mike and Brian sing it, with Carl accompanying on the guitar, and they are absolutely stunning. While the Everlys are possibly the greatest vocal harmony duo of all time, Devoted To You isn’t one of their better efforts – giving the melody to Phil while Don sang low harmony (usually Don would sing melody while Phil would take high harmony) means it doesn’t play to their strengths. On the other hand here Brian and Mike still have the vocal similarity that comes from being family members, but Brian gets to sing the song in a gorgeous falsetto while Mike harmonises in a rich baritone.
Off the top of my head I can’t think of another time when Brian and Mike have harmonised so closely – the signature Beach Boys style required the two of them to be almost antiphonal, playing off each other while the rest of the band did block harmonies in the middle. And later on, of course, the band moved away from harmony to a great extent and towards counterpoint.
But this shows how much this was a conscious choice – these two voices, alone, are absolutely spellbinding. Much as I love Brian’s more complex vocal arrangements, I’d still kill to hear an album of Brian and Mike singing two-part harmony a la Simon & Garfunkel, the Everlys or the Louvin Brothers.
The party noises are mixed down for this one, but if you want to give the track the respect it deserves, the rarities CD Hawthorne, Ca has a mix of this with the noises mixed out altogether.
Alley Oop
Originally a country single for Dallas Frazer, this song about the cartoon caveman had become a hit for the Hollywood Argyles in 1960. The Hollywood Argyles were a studio creation put together by Kim Fowley (a schoolfriend of Bruce Johnston who managed to be involved in a minor way in almost every major music event for thirty years despite having no discernible talent – he made some of the first surf records, played on Frank Zappa’s first album, is the announcer on John Lennon’s Live Peace In Toronto and so on – he’s the LA hipster equivalent of Zelig) and their take on the song was essentially to turn it into Hully Gully (and indeed they had a hit with a cover of that song in 1961).
This is also (along with The Monster Mash) one of two songs covered by both the Beach Boys and the Bonzo Dog Band, who presumably came across both songs from the Beach Boys’ versions.
I mention all this because there’s little to say about the song itself, which is just Hully Gully with lyrics about dinosaurs.
There’s No Other (Like My Baby)
A four-chord doo-wop ballad written by Phil Spector and Leroy Bates for the Crystals, this is played fairly straight, sticking close to the template of the original record, with Brian singing the Darlene Love lead part, and the rest of the band and ‘party guests’ singing the unison vocal choruses. Other than You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away and Devoted To You this is the most straightforward, respectful cover on the album. Unfortunately, it’s a straightforward, respectful cover of a plodding dirge, but you can’t have everything.
I Get Around/Little Deuce Coupe
A ‘hilarious’ comedy medley of two of the Beach Boys’ own hits, where Mike Love tries to improvise funny parody lyrics and fails miserably.An example is that after one of the “I get around” bits he sings “square”. Oh my aching sides.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Al Jardine, the band’s resident folkie, here gets a chance to sing a Dylan song. One always gets the impression from Jardine, with his whitebread earnestness, that he wishes he’d been in one of the bands parodied in A Mighty Wind – whereas Brian Wilson obsessed over the Four Freshmen, Jardine was a Kingston Trio fan, and his later contributions to the band are often either attempts at protest songs (Lookin’ At Tomorrow, Don’t Go Near The Water) or clean-cut versions of old folk songs (Sloop John B and Cottonfields. It tells you everything you need to know about Jardine that it was his idea to do Sloop John B but that at the recent reunion performance he added “but not too much!” after the line “drinkin’ all night”).
Jardine obviously likes the song, and does a very creditable job, punctuated by random shouts from the crowd, who seem less than impressed.
Barbara Ann
Oh dear…
Dean Torrence, of Jan & Dean, was known as a nice person. However, it was equally well known that he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, even if that bucket were inside another bucket with an easy-carry handle, and if he were aided by two professional bucket-carriers and a bucket-carrying machine. He sometimes wasn’t even allowed to sing on Jan & Dean’s own records, the falsetto parts being as likely to be sung by Brian Wilson or P.F. Sloan as by Torrence himself.
Nonetheless, he was there in the studio, and it was decided that he’d be allowed to sing lead on this, a cover of a song written by Fred Fassert for The Regents, which Jan & Dean had recently covered themselves. After all, this was a filler album, no-one was going to pay attention, right?
Carl Wilson, thirty-one years later, called this song “the bane of my life”. Released as a single by the record company without the band’s knowledge or permission, this sloppy, hideously off-key (Brian can be heard during a session outtake groaning “Hey Dean, sing on key! Jesus!”) cover version, where the band forget the words half-way through and with someone who isn’t even in the band on lead vocals, somehow became one of their biggest ever hits, and they had to sing it every working day for the rest of their lives.
Just goes to show that you should never just pump out filler crap for the money, or it can come back to bite you…
Linkblogging For 17/02/11
Sorry for the lack of proper updates this week, but I’ve been ill. Scientific method, Cerebus, Beach Boys and the first chapter of my novel, all this weekend if possible.
If you were wondering if my low-pricing experiment was a success…:
But I’m not (yet) selling enough more to justify keeping prices that low. We’ll see though.
Something else that’s low price at the moment is Toby Hadoke’s Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf, the download of which can be purchased for under two pounds.
Good Vibrations, the greatest single ever released, is 45 today. Here’s a Metafilter link to YouTube videos of various versions.
A simple explanation of quantum computing
A great list of stuff that – this week the Lib Dems have achieved in coalition. Marred by some sexist language, but still makes me happy. This week we’ve blocked the sale of the forests, stopped Housing Benefit cuts, got the AV referendum through, started the process of equalising gay marriage and got the Freedom Bill started.
An astoundingly good interview with Gerhard – parts one, two and three. This has made at least two people decide to take the plunge and read Cerebus.
Give to the Yes To Fairer Votes campaign
Why can’t programmers program?
Michael Leddy links to five free Van Dyke Parks live MP3s, plus links to other performances from this tour.
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