September 23, 2022 In Memoriam In Remembrance of John Train, 1926–2022 By The Paris Review A page from “How to Name Your Baby,” in issue no. 66. John Train, a cofounder of The Paris Review and its first managing editor—or “so-called managing editor,” as he often put it—died last month, at age ninety-four. It was Train who coined the Review’s name and, in its early days in Paris, as a member of the Café Tournon crowd, he pushed the magazine away from criticism, writing later that “theories, both literary and political, are the enemy of art.” Train went on to become “an operator in high finance and world affairs,” as the Times obituary put it today, but many will remember him best for his love of small idiosyncrasies: in the early fifties, while studying for a master’s degree at Harvard in comparative literature, Train noticed in Collier’s magazine a Mr. Katz Meow, which led to an earnest obsession with collecting what he called “remarkable names of real people.” You can find some of these in our Summer 1976 issue, no. 66, which features a fourteen-page list of names Train had unearthed in the records of a very real and now-defunct state department called the Office of Nomenclature Stabilization. (We published an appreciation of “How to Name Your Baby” online in 2015.) Train announced his departure from his post as managing editor, as George Plimpton and Norman Mailer recall, with singularly dry humor: One day in 1954, after a year of organizing things in the office, he left a note in his In-box stating, “Do not put anything in this box.” By this he meant to tell the rest of the staff that he was moving on to something else. From the Chelsea office, the staff of the Review are thinking of Train, his legacy and “In-box,” his family and friends. He will be missed.
May 31, 2022 In Memoriam Barry Lopez’s Darkness and Light By Sierra Crane Murdoch Barry Lopez, McKenzie River, Oregon. Photograph by David Liittschwager. Some days after Barry’s death on December 25, 2020, I pulled every book of his I owned from the shelves around my apartment and stacked them on a corner of my desk. Then I walked down the hill to the used bookshop in the small Oregon town where I live and found several books of his I did not yet own. For a year, I picked at the stack, revisiting passages I recalled vividly or had forgotten. The words would come when I was ready, I figured, so I scribbled sentences on scraps of paper, lost them, found them, rewrote them, in an ambulatory manner I thought might have pleased Barry. He was the only writer who made me feel virtuous for my slowness, which I once heard him call “patience,” though I believe even Barry knew the fine line between virtuousness and slacking off. He had told me he sometimes admonished his students, “I cannot teach you discipline, and I cannot teach you hunger. You have to find those things inside yourself.” It was his request that I write this essay. Or maybe it was not a request, but a suggestion. He had asked it in a way so gentle, so lacking in urgency, that I would sometimes feel as if I dreamed it, but then I would relisten to a voicemail he left me, which I had saved, and there it was: “I’ve got a kind of favor to ask.” Read More
April 1, 2022 In Memoriam Remembering Richard Howard By Craig Morgan Teicher Richard Howard receiving the 2017 Hadada Award. Matteo Mobilio. Richard Howard, poet, translator, critic, and poetry editor of this magazine from 1992 to 2004, died yesterday at the age of ninety-two. He was the last of a certain type of literary person, of which I am tempted also to call him the first—I can think of no one like him, except perhaps Robert Browning or Henry James, two of the writers whose work most profoundly animated his life. His approach to literature was both comprehensive and conversational—he lived in the books he loved, all the time, was ever in the midst of talking about them, ever encountering the great writers in his imagination, and reawakening them in poems that staged impossible meetings between literary and historical figures. These were his favorite fantasies: Richard Strauss addressing Arnold Schoenberg, Henry James reviewing a film released in 1942. Such figures (he loved that word) were his toys, and poetry his lifelong playroom, though in addition to the goal of finding and spreading joy in literature, he was committed to stewardship; he made it his business to ensure that the giants of the past weren’t forgotten. His most frequent and vehement complaint about other people was “They don’t read.” Read More
January 7, 2022 In Memoriam Flip It: A Tribute to bell hooks By Niela Orr Books on Orr’s bed, her “second desk.” Photo: Niela Orr. bell hooks died last month of kidney failure at age sixty-nine; she was, according to her niece, surrounded by her loved ones when she passed. Small towns in Kentucky were the bookends of hooks’s life: She was born and raised in Hopkinsville, and departed this plane seventy miles east, in Berea, home of Berea College, where she’d taught since 2004 as a Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies, and where she had founded a research center, the bell hooks Institute, in 2014. In a chapter called “Kentucky is My Fate,” from her 2008 book Belonging: A Culture of Place, hooks writes: If one has chosen to live mindfully, then choosing a place to die is as vital as choosing a place to live. Choosing to return to the land and landscape of my childhood, the world of my Kentucky upbringing, I am comforted by the knowledge that I could die here. This is how I imagine “the end”: I close my eyes and see hands holding a Chinese red lacquer bowl, walking to the top of the Kentucky hill I call my own, scattering my remains as though they are seeds and not ash, a burnt offering on solid ground vulnerable to the wind and rain—all that is left of my body gone, my being shifted, passed away, moving forward on and into eternity. I imagine this farewell scene and it solaces me; Kentucky hills were where my life began. Read More
November 30, 2021 In Memoriam The Fourth Rhyme: On Stephen Sondheim By Adrienne Raphel a letter to the author from Stephen Sondheim. In the late fifties, Stephen Sondheim, who died last week aged ninety-one, performed a song from the not-yet-finished musical Gypsy for Cole Porter, on the piano at the older composer’s apartment. As Sondheim recalls in Finishing the Hat, his mesmerizing and microscopically annotated first collection of lyrics, Porter had recently had both legs amputated, and Ethel Merman, the star of Gypsy—in which Sondheim’s words accompanied music by Jule Styne—had brought the young lyricist along as part of an entourage to cheer him up. Sondheim played the clever trio “Together.” “It may well have been the high point of my lyric-writing life,” he writes, to witness Porter’s “gasp of delight” on hearing a surprise fourth rhyme in a foreign language: “Wherever I go, I know he goes / Wherever I go, I know she goes / No fits, no fights, no feuds, and no egos / Amigos / Together!” Read More
August 27, 2021 In Memoriam The Shuffle and the Breath: On Charlie Watts By Christian Lorentzen Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones during a concert at the Royal Lawn Tennis Stadium in Stockholm, 1965. Photo: Owe Wallin. © Tobias Rostlund / Alamy Stock Photo. The drummer Charlie Watts died on Tuesday, aged eighty. Watts took up the drums as a child after cutting the neck off his banjo and converting it to a snare. Born in London during World War II, the son of a truck driver and a homemaker, he was a jazz aficionado from the age of twelve, and went to art school in his teens. In 1963, the Rolling Stones hired him away from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, and Watts—cultivating a stoic demeanor and known for his refined fashion sense—remained a member of the band until his death. Mike Edison’s 2019 biography Sympathy for the Drummer is a work of music criticism in the spirit of Lester Bangs. Watts did not speak to Edison for the book, but after its initial publication he called the author and left him a message: “Hi, you don’t know me, my name is Charlie Watts, I want to thank you for writing this lovely book… and for having Charlie Parker on your voicemail…” Later they spoke, and Watts invited him to come see him when the Stones got back on tour. Unfortunately, the pandemic intervened and kept the band off the road. I spoke to Edison about Watts and the Stones on Thursday morning. INTERVIEWER What made you write a book about Charlie Watts? MIKE EDISON It took me forty-five years to write this book! In the interim I’ve written thirty-something other books. But when I started playing the drums when I was a kid, I knew this was a cypher I had to crack. Charlie Watts is so special, and so deceptively simple, I knew it wasn’t the kind of thing you can ever truly learn. It’s the kind of thing you have to live with—you have to breathe with it, you have to vibrate close to the frequency that he was working on. You know, you can go on YouTube and look up “How to play like Charlie Watts” and you will find almost nothing, because you can’t teach it. But search for “How to play like Rush” and you’ll find twelve thousand kids playing “Tom Sawyer” flawlessly in their bedrooms, because you can learn how to do that. So, with Charlie Watts, listen to the hi-hats opening up in the weirdest places, the off-kilter rolls, an accent that in other hands would have been a mistake, things other people would never allow to make it onto a record. All those snare-drum riffs and tattoos he does at the beginning of songs where he’s speeding up to catch up with Keith—sometimes he even gets ahead of himself before Keith comes in. Some very professional drummers have told me they would get fired if they played like that, and they say that in awe. The sloppy-but-tight thing is what makes it work. So much of the personality of the Stones comes from the drummer—you know it’s the Stones from the snare drum, even before Mick Jagger starts his caterwauling. INTERVIEWER The Stones famously passed through different phases—R&B, psychedelia, blues rock, disco, reggae. How are those phases reflected in Charlie’s drumming? MIKE EDISON The stork didn’t deliver Charlie Watts to the Rolling Stones’ doorstep as a fully developed drummer. On the early records they’re basically a talented cover band. On “Satisfaction,” he opens up and starts stomping—that’s the beginning of punk rock, at least in any mainstream sense. It’s relentless and very aggressive, especially live. And that guy is not the same guy who’s playing on “Street Fighting Man” and “Gimme Shelter” a few years later, where there’s more nuance. “Rip This Joint,” which opens Exile on Main Street, is the fastest song in their whole catalog. It’s like a splatter painting. He’s gone from impressionism to extreme impressionism. The band has gone from playing songs to playing music. Charlie goes from just playing the drums to playing the band. In the early seventies, the Stones are at their absolute pinnacle. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones, the document of their 1971–1972 tour, is the apex. It’s vicious. I sit and listen to it and reconsider everything I do. From there, it did roll off, there’s no question. As Keith said, Mick had “a ticket to Jetsville,” and was busy falling in love with himself for the twenty-fifth time. He wanted to hang out in Hollywood. Keith had a ticket to Dopesville, the opposite direction. They weren’t showing up for work at the same time, and Jimmy Miller, their great producer—it’s hard to hang around these guys and not pick up their bad habits. Goats Head Soup suffers for it, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll suffers. There’s a murkiness to the recordings. Goats Head Soup always sounds to me like there’s dirt on the needle. INTERVIEWER Didn’t they record that in the Caribbean? MIKE EDISON In Jamaica, because it was the only place Keith was allowed to go, drug addict and felon that he was. It was exciting because Dynamic Sound Studios, where they recorded most of The Harder They Come, was the O.G. reggae studio. Going to Kingston, Jamaica, was not like going to Switzerland or Paris. INTERVIEWER How does Charlie figure in the moves they made toward reggae and disco? MIKE EDISON Mick always wants to make the record he heard in the club the night before. He loves chasing trends, and that’s where they always step in it, like trying to copy the Beatles on Satanic Majesties Request, trying to be au courant or some goddamn thing. But what people may not know is that Charlie loved dance music, too. He would go with Mick to discotheques in Munich. He loved the Sound of Philadelphia, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, all of that. He loved Motown. And you can hear how good he is at playing it, not just on “Miss You” but on all the disco songs on Emotional Rescue, too. The drums sound so sharp. This is all part of Charlie’s evolution. They’d always been making dance music, it just wasn’t called “disco” yet, things like “Fingerprint File” or “Hot Stuff.” The big mystery is how they managed to put over “Miss You” at a time when rock ’n’ roll fans were screaming, “Disco sucks!” For them to make a dance record was on brand, the Stones were all about great Black music, but it just happened to be at the same time when the Kinks and Pink Floyd had copped the disco beat, because that was what some suit told them they had to do to stay in business. That big hi-hat swoop of Charlie’s is what seals it for the Stones disco records. He knew how to do it right. As a reggae player, Charlie doesn’t really do the one-drop thing. It’s reggae-like—if you listen to “Cherry Oh Baby” on Black and Blue, he is really teasing all around it but the groove is still very deep. Black and Blue, that’s a very underrated record. There are some great songs like “Hand of Fate” but a lot of it is just jams, like “Hey Negrita” or “Crazy Mama.” It’s not overproduced. It’s just guys playing together. INTERVIEWER They were auditioning guitar players. Did you ever hear that Neil Young said he felt disappointed that he wasn’t asked to try out? MIKE EDISON I had not heard that! I always thought Johnny Thunders would have been good for that role, but maybe two junkies in the same band wouldn’t have been a such good idea. Ronnie Wood seems like the right guy, right? You know, by Some Girls, a gauntlet had been thrown down by the Sex Pistols and others. And if you listen to that record, especially “Respectable” and “When the Whip Comes Down,” they’re playing some very convincing punk rock, but if you unfurl it, it’s all just country riffs. That tour was fantastic because it was the last time they felt like they had something to prove—they really did not like being called old men. Remember, they were in their thirties! But no one could yet imagine a sixty-year-old Bruce Springsteen coming down the road. The 1978 Stones tour was brutal, they just said, Fuck you. After that things became more corporate. INTERVIEWER Is there any redeeming the Stones’ output after Tattoo You in 1981? Millennial fans seem to have rehabilitated all of Bob Dylan’s late work, whereas there was a time when everything he did after Blood on the Tracks and Desire was considered dreck. MIKE EDISON No, no, no, no, no. Bob Dylan lost his way in the eighties, but the solo acoustic records of the early nineties got him back to his roots, which is a music-industry cliché but true in his case, and much of what he’s done since has been great. INTERVIEWER Can the same be said of any late Stones record? MIKE EDISON The last great Stones song is “Had It with You,” on Dirty Work, generally considered their worst record. “Had It with You” is just nasty, primitive and raw, no bass, grinding drums, Mick pouring out the anger, the great trash cymbal Charlie Watts plays—it’s really mean and it’s sleazy. It’s punk rock. INTERVIEWER Steel Wheels, Voodoo Lounge, Bridges to Babylon? I’ll put my cards on the table, I think Bridges to Babylon, from 1997, is a really good record. MIKE EDISON You can always find a moment, and largely because of Charlie. If you notice, over the years, he keeps getting louder in the mix. From Tattoo You on, the snare drum starts to sound like a machine gun. It really becomes their signature sound, and they knew it. INTERVIEWER What about Charlie’s solo records where he returned to jazz? MIKE EDISON Charlie was the only one of the Stones who made perfectly lovely solo records that were beyond criticism. He was just pursuing his passion, and it was beautiful. Nobody’s going to confuse the Charlie Watts Quintet with Charlie Parker’s band or the Max Roach Quintet, but I saw him on tour and he had the biggest smile on his face, like the Cheshire cat. It took over the stage. But you know, even with a pretty good Keith record, you still wish you were listening to the Stones. When Mick started making his own records, Keith said, “Fuck off, disco boy. You’re really gonna go play with the Schmuck and Balls Band when you could play with the Stones? If you wanna make an album of Irish ballads with Liberace, do it, but if you wanna make a lousy rock record, do it with the Stones.” What’s shocking, the last surprising thing, was the Stones’ blues record from 2016, Blue & Lonesome. I expected something kind of droll, maybe I would play it a few times—but then I found myself playing it over and over again. Charlie’s shuffles are impenetrable, and so hard to play. That’s the genius of Charlie, and it goes back to when Brian Jones and Keith Richards sat him down in the early sixties and said, Listen to Jimmy Reed, you gotta learn this. They made him internalize it. It is repetitive, it is a tempo that almost drags but somehow never does. There’s that extra breath between things, and it is so hard to play. This is the reason why most blues bands at the local bar suck. The Doors are like the worst thing imaginable. They’re a blues band that can’t play the blues. Despite all their bona fides and all the other things they might do well, their John Lee Hooker sucks, their Bo Diddley is craven, they ought to be arrested for their Howlin’ Wolf. They didn’t do their homework the way Charlie did. Somehow white guys got the idea that it was easy to play the blues, and it is not. Christian Lorentzen lives in Brooklyn.