Dig : sound and music in hip culture

321 Pages·2013·3.541 MB·English

by  Ford, Phil

Dig
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Dig
SOUND AND MUSIC IN HIP CULTURE
PHIL FORD
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ford, Phil, 1969–
Dig : sound and music in hip culture / Phil Ford.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-993991-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Popular music—
History and criticism. 2. Music—Social aspects. I. Title.
ML3470.F68 2013
781.64—dc23 2013005947
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Clare Ford, my Mum
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Acknowledgments
Th ere is an esoteric book somewhere that lists the author as “Th e Interdependent
Universe,” and this seems pretty apt to me. Th e interdependent universe is the
real author of every book: no book was ever written without the support of a
thousand and one connections, large and small, between its author and everyone
he or she encounters in the process of writing. But even though I could just
thank the interdependent universe and call it a day, that would be no fun for
anyone, since the point of the acknowledgments page is to provide pleasurable
suspense to those who might plausibly fi nd their names written therein—a
suspense to be resolved either in the satisfaction aff orded by seeing one’s contri-
bution noted or (more likely) in the disappointment of having been forgotten.
To those soon to experience the latter, I am sincerely sorry. Th e interdependent
universe is a big place and I have a poor memory, so it was bound to happen.
Whether or not your name appears here, it is nevertheless true that if you have
ever so much as suff ered one of those hallway-ambush conversations for which
I am known, you deserve to see your name here, and you have helped me in ways
for which I am truly grateful.
Suzanne Ryan, my editor at Oxford, is the Good Fairy Godmother of Hip.
From the moment in 2007 when she fi rst listened to my idea for this book and
then for the next fi ve years as she waited for me to fi nish it, her faith and patience
have allowed this project to take form and ripen. I am also grateful to her edito-
rial assistant, Adam Cohen, and to the design and production staff at Oxford
University Press.
I am especially grateful to my colleagues in the musicology department at the
Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Special thanks go to Peter Burkholder
and Massimo Ossi, who as department chairs supported my research and guided
me through my fi rst years at IU; to Tina Muxfeldt, for her conversation; to Dan
Melamed, for his shrewd advice; and to Michael Long, who read my work with
sympathy and understanding. Halina Goldberg, Ayana Smith, and Giovanni
Zanovello have all generously put up with the aforementioned hallway ambushes
viii Acknowledgments
and generally brightened up the place with their good cheer. I would also like to
thank Gwyn Richards, the dean of the Jacobs School of Music, whose grant of a
semester course release gave me the time I needed when I needed it, and to the
Indiana University Offi ce of the Vice Provost for Research for the award of a
Summer Research Fellowship.
My students at the Jacobs School have helped me forge and sharpen the ideas
in this book. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the participants of my “Sound,
Music, Counterculture” seminar and my course “Process Music” (whatever that
is). Dan Bishop, Kerry O’Brien, Jon Yaeger, and Alisa White have been invalu-
able interlocutors throughout my time at Indiana. Special thanks go to Carolyn
Carrier McClimon, who found order in the chaos of Norman Mailer’s draft man-
uscripts for “Th e White Negro,” and to Joanna Helms, who assisted me with
many aspects of this book’s fi nal formatting and editing.
Th is book originated in the research I did for my dissertation, whose fl aws are
entirely my fault and should refl ect no discredit on the teachers with whom I was
fortunate to work, especially Michael Cherlin, David Grayson, James Hepokoski,
and Joel Weinsheimer. But I have always been fortunate in my teachers: the pia-
nists Michel Block and Leonard Hokanson and the Zen teacher and translator
Shohaku Okumura have contributed in other, less obvious ways to my development
as a musician and a human being.
My fi rst and best teachers, though, were my parents. Jay Ford’s deep feeling
for the written word and old-school ethic of humanist learning has always stood
as a model of scholarly engagement to me. Clare Ford has been the greatest
infl uence on my life. An unassuming person, she has taught me what it is to
undertake large works and persevere in them; a gentle person, she has shown me
what toughness really is. To her this book is dedicated.
Th is book owes its largest intellectual debt to art historian and curator
Graham Larkin. When we were both fellows at the Stanford Humanities Fellows
Program (then under the enlightened stewardship of Seth Lerer), Graham tipped
me off to the signifi cance of Marshall McLuhan, and our regular Chinese food
truck conversations about McLuhan, media, and mediated presence led me to
many of the basic insights of this book. Graham’s meticulous and insightful
reading of the book during and after its composition contributed many new
ideas and saved me from a great many infelicities of prose.
Over the years, many friends have helped me write this book in countless
direct and indirect ways. Th anks and warm aff ection go to Byron Almén,
Jonathan Bellman, Elizabeth Bergman, Patrick Boley, Jim Buhler, Tim Dunne,
Andy Flory, Heather Hadlock, John Howland, D. D. Jackson, David Brent
Johnson, Richard Leppert, Mark and Jill Mazullo, and Albin Zak. I am also
indebted to other scholars in the hip biz—Michael Szalay, Melissa Goldsmith,
Joel Dinerstein, and especially Lee Konstantinou—who shared their work-in-
progress with me.
Acknowledgments ix
I owe a special thank-you to Peggy Brooks, whose late husband, John, is the
focus of this book’s last chapter. She has been tremendously generous with her
time, her memories, and her collection of John’s scores, recordings, books, and
letters. More than that, though, her support and encouragement of my work on
John Benson Brooks is one of the greatest gifts I received in the course of writing
this book. I also thank Don Heckman and Gunther Schuller for speaking to me
about their work and friendship with Brooks, and to the late Robert Lucid for his
encouragement of my work on Norman Mailer.
Securing copyright permissions is no one’s idea of a good time, but on occasion
it did allow me to make contact with the families of artists (and sometimes the
artists themselves) whose work has been so meaningful to me over the course of
writing this book. I would like especially to thank Gary and Laura Grimshaw,
Charna Halpern, Danny Hellman, Mary Hicks, Serena Naeve, and Margo Shustak.
Special thanks go to Naz Pantaloni, who contributed invaluable advice on
securing copyright permission for the images, poems, song texts, musical exam-
ples, and archival materials that appear in this volume.
I would like to thank the librarians and staff at the Institute of Jazz Studies
archives at Rutgers University at Newark, the Harry Ransom Center at the
University of Texas at Austin, the Stanford University Special Collections,
the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, the Lilly Library at Indiana
University at Bloomington, the Kent State Special Collections and Archives, the
University of Southern California Libraries Special Collections, the Bentley
Historical Library at the University of Michigan, the Louis Round Wilson Special
Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Bill
Schurk at the Jerome Library at Bowling Green State University.
My wife, Helen Ford, is my best reader and a damn good editor. She is the
brains of the outfi t, and I cannot begin to do justice to her infl uence on every
word in this book. I am deeply grateful to Helen’s parents, Phil and Barbara
Shively, and to my sister, Julia, for their constant love and support. Try as I
might, I fi nd I cannot avoid acknowledgment-page clichés, and it gets harder the
nearer I get to the heart of my heart, my family. “I thank my wife for putting up
with me” . . . “this book could never have been written without” . . . “words cannot
express” . . . blah blah blah. But it turns out that some clichés are clichés because
they are so obviously true. Helen and my children, Nicholas and Alice, did have a
certain amount to put up with (absences while traveling for research, boring din-
nertime lectures on magical hermeneutics, etc.); I never could have written this
book without them; and words cannot express my gratitude and love.