Stuart Sutcliffe: Those We Leave Behind

 

"[He is my] alter ego ... a spirit in his world ... a guiding force.” – John Lennon

 

It would be cosmically ironic if Stuart Sutcliffe (1940-1962), an original member of The  Beatles, ever wanted to be a famous musician. But he quit the group early on to begin a life behind an easel, not a guitar. Anyway, he had the eyes of a painter, not a musician.

The universe-wide divide between the anonymous solitude of his death and the raucous, global fame of the Beatles leads us to question the role of those we leave behind. Does their essence – like static, temporal monuments - demark the progress of our lives, or are they as unchained as the wind, always with us, changing but unchanged?

 So Stuart Sutcliffe, a leather-clad, pale face angel, ghostly and delicate, decides to emerge on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – called the greatest rock album of all time. There he is, a silent sentinel, defiant but reassuring, imparting that wisdom shared only by the departed – nothing dies if remembered, nothing leaves if loved.

Just listen to the way he sings Love Me Tender with an ethereal, driving determination - like a playful prayer - sure to leave footprints in the sand. 

 

 

 

Of Peripheral Celebrity and Collateral Damage: The ballad of Suki Potier

Suki Potier: Collateral
Damage

You’ve read the news, oh boy: December 18, 1966, Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, plows his Lotus into a van on Redcliffe Gardens, South Kensington. Dead. He is 21. John Lennon hears about it and writes A Day in the Life…something about a lucky man who made the grade but blew his mind out in a car.

Browne’s passenger that day? Model and all-around It Girl Suki Potier.

If ever someone walked under a rain cloud through the rarefied world of 1960s popism, it was poor Suki.

What to make of peripheral celebrities who suffer collateral damage? They appear as secondary characters, necessary to turn the pages of history.

Brian Jones. Suki. Tara Browne.
Bad karma

It wasn’t long after Browne’s death that Potier surfaced in the arms of Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Given what we know now about Brian Jones and women, this wasn’t going to turn out well.

July 3, 1969: Potier leaves Jones’ country house just thirty minutes before he drowns. Not quite in the passenger seat this time, but close.

Jones/Potier: Blonde on Blonde

Then, after Jones’ death, she marries wealthy Hong Kong business man Robert Ho.

And it’s now that the rain cloud bursts. June 23, 1981: Suki and husband die in a car crash while on holiday in Portugal.

Fate can be cruel but rarely is it so aggressively personal.

Brian Wilson: Tin Pan Became Beach Sand

In the beginning...

Given the phosphoric nature of his creativity, it couldn’t last beyond the next riptide.

He had no John Paul George or Ringo for that matter. Not even a George Martin.

In the middle...

So he lived without irony, which is to live unprotected, and alone offered up lazy-daisy melodies, two-minute paens of teenage angst, deep from within dark studios and collapsed dungeons of an exhausted mind.

Somehow the California sky birthed those sounds, glazed in light beams and downy floss. Tin Pan became beach sand. And the warm blue Pacific curled down the coast and sailed him in a glass-bottom dream.

So it was that ironic and that irony shoved him from a wave’s crest and he fell like an Icarus into the arms of startled sea nymphs. Then Charles Manson came around for coffee. Bad vibrations. Flat harmony.

In the end...

He remains a frozen-faced sentinel, Buddha in exile, now resting on a piano stool, the center of attention, while dancers shimmy and shake to those long-ago melodies raised by a young man (a nod to Yeats) tossing on his bed, rhyming in love’s despair.

Brian never made it out, but his songs race with summer children, forever kicking the sunset waves at Malibu, cheering storm clouds, knowing you can only see real fun fun fun in the rear-view mirror, hanging off the cracked windshield of a Little GTO.

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...

A Tragic Confluence: Charles Manson and the Danse Macabre

It was a terrible, tragic confluence of illness, character, and chronology. And Charles Manson's mental state prospered.

 


We all began as kids...

His messengers were much like him – outsiders, dispossessed, the psychotic, the poor and desperate. Yet under the shambling guise of California hippies, replete with guitars-by-the-bonfire, no-money, communal living and free love, they murdered with glee.

Manson knew the end of the world was nigh, that African-Americans were plotting to subsume white culture, that he was the only guy who recognized this and the only way to get control was to ignite a race war – to kind of get the jump. Hence, ‘Helter Skelter’, a term he borrowed from his very own personal prophets, the Beatles, a term that, for Manson, implied a significant military strategy.

So he'd sent out his Zombie-Hippies at night, and they would return to the compound/commune fresh from successful sprees of premeditated, debauched murder. One of his victims was over eight months pregnant. Manson became a proud, energetic leader. He had plans to expand.

All of this happened just a few months before Woodstock. Flower Power had grown a malignant, creeping vine yet no one noticed. Manson demonstrated how fragile the whole leaderless, youth-based, drug-oriented subculture really was.


Mental illness in full flight

Whereas Bonnie and Clyde wouldn’t have had much of a career in our retina-ID, DNA, chopper-patrol, insta-cash, WiFi world, so Manson, without the off-the-grid, tie-dyed infrastructure of late 60s California, would have been just another sick hipster, hustling street corners, knocking off dime stores, to be killed in a knife fight at the back of a pool hall at 3 a.m. and forgotten forever.

The times don’t always make the man. And the man doesn’t necessarily make the times. (When it goes wrong, they embrace and whirl each other across the floor in a danse macabre while the rest of us line the walls, Easter Island-like, to witness a timeless, terrible harmony.)

Sometimes they make each other.

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.