Donyale Luna: Behind Every Great Face is a Greater Spirit

 

Born Peggy Ann Freeman (1945-79), in Detroit. Later, by her own hand, she becomes Donyale George Tyger Luna. 6’2”. Slim. Her parents married and divorced on four separate occasions. In January 1965, her mother fatally shot her father in self-defense. Luna stayed away.

First Black model to appear on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar—although Harper’s likened her to a Masai warrior. A supermodel before the term was born.

She said: “I wasn’t accepted because I talked funny, I looked funny, and I was a weirdo to everyone. I grew up realizing I was strange.”

Sometimes, she told people she was Polynesian or Mexican. Some thought she was Indian. Whatever they wanted her to be… She could wear colored contacts and once expressed a desire to be white, blonde, and blue-eyed. Did it really matter? Never a shapeshifter because she always controlled the light.

She palled around with Andy Warhol, Otto Preminger, Salvador Dali and Federico Fellini. Restless, pursued by demons from long ago and far away.

She joked that her home was in the cosmos, hence ‘Luna’. Possible, for her beauty was untethered and somehow intellectually seductive. Very rare. Great photographers know that beauty itself is banal and strictly limited—just a matter of proportions: behind every great face there must be a greater spirit.

Marriage failed, a nervous breakdown, so off to swinging London as 1966 got underway. Then her most famous photo, a cover for British Vogue. Her pose was a riff on Picasso’s ocular-centric portraiture. One of Luna’s eyes playfully peers from between her fingers.

Eccentric, even for a model, she spoke of her love for LSD and had a habit of not wearing shoes while walking on city streets.

The end came from drugs. Too many, too soon. Luna is gone.

When asked in 1966 about what her success might mean for other people of color, she said, “If it brings about more jobs for Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Negroes, groovy. It could be good, it could be bad.” She thought for a moment. “I couldn't care less.”  Cosmic for sure—because the farther up you go in the sky, all of the Earth looks blue.

 

#donyaleluna #model #vogue  #harpers #beatles #rollingstones #1960s #fashion #andywarhol #film

Hey Hey The Monkees and the Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The Monkees really becoming a band was like the equivalent of Leonard Nimoy really becoming a Vulcan.” – Mickey Dolenz

Mike Nesmith. Mickey Dolenz. Davy Jones. Peter Tork. 

The Monkees took a lot of heat.

Just crazy kids

The hippies’ blissed-out quest for authenticity was itself muddled with conflicting definitions of ‘authenticity’. The Monkees bugged them because the group was assembled by TV producers, not tie-dyed, flower-slinging record producers or concert/nightclub promoters or other really authentic types. 

(Elvis was promoted by a former carnival barker and the Beatles achieved planetary grooviness through the tireless dedication of a troubled furniture store salesman. But man, keep it on the low).

They were entertainers, not rock guys. They mostly  sang songs written by professional songwriters, not by singer-songwriters. But other musicians didn’t seem to mind. Ask Stephen Stills (who auditioned for the Monkees). Or ask Jimi Hendrix (who opened for the Monkees).

The 1960s had a tough time dealing with big bad commercialism. The Establishment was commercial...so it follows that those who worked the land or sold sea-shell trinkets were uncommercial. The intent was well intended though the logic was weak.

They called them ‘The Pre-Fab Four’. Their music was ‘bubblegum’. They were an insubstantial

The Monkees find a litterbox

vapor given form by klieg lights and back-lot set designers. So what? ... the unbearable lightness of being.

So now, 50 years later, with the hippies long buried under Altamont Speedway, the Monkees continue to entertain, to help you forget, and to help you remember.

What? No concert t-shirts? Sell outs!

The charm of entertainment is that it is as unauthentic and manipulative as the Beatles’ matching Pierre Cardin suits... But don’t be too harsh on the hippies. They sometimes died in taking action against what they saw to be corrupt and toxic. We don’t do that much anymore. There’s no money in it. Gotta stay authentic baby.

The Beatles: Forever On Their Way to Capistrano

"I think their music could only appeal to adolescents and retarded adults." - Shirley Mair, Macleans Magazine, 1965




There was so much talent that you ignored the raw ambition. How else to explain our willful disregard of their psychotic work regime backed by matching haircuts and suits. The first drip-dry, bespoke boy band.

In (less than) three minute segments, infused with jangling guitars and timpani, Lennon and McCartney delivered truffle-weight paeans to teenage angst. For a brief time, they were the best in the world at it.

Forever winging through the great cosmic clouds

But then something happened. The great space-time tidal bores of fate, talent and time criss-crossed like never before. Drugged-out rock musicians became prominent and respected social icons. And the Beatles reigned from the electronic Olympus of sound reproduction.

But against all expectations, they just got better and better. They actually improved. ‘She Loves You’ was subsumed by the layered dream scape of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ belonged not only to a different band, but a different century, than ‘I Am the Walrus'.

Massive WTF.

The Beatles were embedded gypsies of the day-glo, patchouli-laden 1960s, so hyper-responsive to both their temporal and secular surroundings, that they could move swiftly, without footprints, from Los  Angeles to Rishikesh, from the dank bricks of the Cavern Club to the swirling valleys of the Himalayas.

The absolutely last group photo

By the time an entire generation became lost and despondent on the long and winding road to nowhere, the Beatles themselves had vanished just as fast as they had arrived, leaving few clues to their genius, never to fully reform (anticipating the extreme fragility of collective memory).

Long after their peers have been sealed up silent in tombs of black vinyl, the Beatles are still heard, disembodied melodies, riding the backs of swallows winging through cosmic clouds, forever on their way to San Juan Capistrano. 

It's the next best thing to be...

Tara Browne: a little life rounded with a sleep



...our little life...
rounded with a sleep...

Guinness Heir, 21, Is Killed In London Sportscar Crash

LONDON, Dec 18 (1966) - Tara Browne, 21-year-old heir to the Guinness brewery fortune and a leader of London’s “mod” social set, was killed early today when his sportscar smashed into a parked truck in the South Kensington district.

- New York Times

There are some people whose purpose in life — in a cultural sense — is to offer context to the lives of their contemporaries. They are rarely catalysts for action; rather, they provide a kind of mood music or a subtext for movement. Tara Browne (1945-1966) was like that.

The short, happy life of Tara Browne survives in print and pictures for what he represents, not what he did (although his twenty-one years were not without merit and accomplishment). And what he represents is that burst of color and noise and fashion that ran amok through the Carnaby district of London, from about 1964 – 1970, give or take.



Melted into thin air

Perhaps he represents a little more. By its very nature, ‘Pop’ doesn’t do anything, doesn’t feed the hungry or house the poor. It just is, like Tara. No creativity required, no mesmeric eloquence or moon-lit beauty: you just have to be there in the right place in the right clothes. That’s it – but it’s not that easy because we only know where there is in retrospect. Tara seemed to know.

Browne  spooned some of his inheritance into a fashion store called Dandy (on King’s Road) which sold clothes made by his tailoring business. He also had a failing marriage, kids and girlfriends.



A brief, happy life

He was a little bit Edie Sedgwick, a tiny touch of Porfirio Rubirosa, a dash of David Bailey, a pinch of Sir Guy Grand — with a lime wedge of poor-little-rich-kid. He was well liked. When Tara died, John Lennon wrote about it in ‘A Day in the Life’ and the Pretty Things recorded the more literal Death Of A Socialite’…Every little bit counts.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air…
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

It’s been suggested that when Shakespeare wrote those words — almost the final words he ever wrote — he was saying that all art is ephemeral, nothing more than thin air. He was wrong of course (as his own longevity proves — and he knew in his heart): art, just like a person, endures if it — or they — touches the Truth.

Whatever smartly-dressed Tara Browne discovered long ago - under a white Mary Quant umbrella -dancing in a warm rain down Kingly Court - is a mystery - but it must have been some wonderful, deathless, fashionable Truth.

Phil Spector: An Inescapable Wall of Sound

When the Wall of Sound turned into bricks

We’ll kill the fatted calf tonight

So stick around

You’re gonna hear electric music

Solid Walls of Sound

- Elton John

Nobody better personifies the quintessence—and possibilities—of 60s pop music more than Phil Spector.

On a higher level, he is the single most important producer in rock history—one of the few of whom you can say, if he had never existed, what comes out of the radio today would be different.

But he was, and is, a ‘difficult’ man.

It’s quite possible that sometime during the late 1960s, he began to crack. Or maybe he got the pills-booze quotient wrong, as has been surmised. Whatever happened, Phil began to lose it. And the hits stopped forever.

Phil has discussed his mental illness. His father committed suicide when Phil was nine.

It appears 69-year-old Spector is in jail for eighteen years, having been convicted of second-degree murder. He shot and killed an actress in the foyer of his home. Phil has an extensive history of domestic abuse.

Spector has pulled many guns on many people, including Leonard Cohen and John Lennon. When he was arrested for murder in 2003, Spector had more than ten handguns in his house. That’s a lot.

Speaking of a lot, I’m reading over a list of Spector’s hits: Be my Baby, Da Do Ron Ron, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, Then He Kissed Me, Walkin’ the Rain, Spanish Harlem, Unchained Melody…It goes on for a while. Pop music offers us few geniuses, but if put to the test, I’d say Spector has his foot in the door.

Technically, we know how he developed his famous ‘Wall of Sound’. But nobody, not even when using Phil’s studio engineers, has been able to reproduce it.

Author Tom Wolfe wrote a famous essay about him called ‘The First Tycoon of Teen’. Phil did indeed make millions, sometimes in questionable ways. He also made a lot of people big stars.

He produced the Beatles’ last album ‘Let it Be’, although Paul McCartney hated the results – and still does — though McCartney is getting a little cranky in his dotage.

Rolling Stone magazine ranked Spector # 63 in the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

Spector is renowned for his ability to scream at people, for up to half an hour, without losing his voice. He’s also known to be generous to friends and strangers in financial trouble.

He stands 5’ 5”, wears elevator shoes, lived as a recluse, and went weeks without leaving the walls of his mansion.

For decades people have wondered why such a small man ever felt compelled to create such a gargantuan sound.

Phil’s life is about walls...some keep people in, some keep people out. Sometimes they're made of music, sometimes brick. It's no difference to Phil. For like any significant artist, he knows the only way to create is to create alone.

It's been said that silence is a sound you can't hear. Be it ironic, merciful, or both, Phil Spector must face an inescapable Wall of Sound until the day he dies.