Mussorgsky's Head

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky_^[1]

Mussorgsky's Head^[2]

LP Compilation (Various Artists), Orphic Egg, London, OES 6910 (1973)

^{Transcription and annotations by Lester Bangs Archive management}

Way back in the early Sixties before the Beatles even, back when I was just a naive prepubertal tad, I was but one among the multitudes unafraid to call themselves classical music fans. What’s more, we were bold enough to embrace the classics on our own terms. I liked lots of what I heard, I listened to what I liked and didn’t give two duck farts whether anybody else did or what they thought about my tastes. In other words, my ears were in a state of optimal independence. 

I’ll never forget the first time I heard Ravel’s Bolero. I’d just bought some madras shirts and my very first jock strap, preparatory to entering the seventh grade. I’d breezed into the store, leaned over the counter and addressed the clerk in a conspiratorial whisper: “Uh . . . do you have . . . what is known as a —jock strap?”

He smiled, looked melodramatically to the right and left, leaned across and whispered: “Well, yes, I do believe we have the item you’re seeking. Wait right here and I’ll go dig one up in the back room.” 

I got the exotic gizmo safely into a plain brown bag, and since Aaron’s Records^[3] was only a block away I figured a few minutes of quiet browsing through the Shorty Rogers Meets Tarzan^[4] and Bud & Travis albums^[5] would be good therapy. But destiny rumbled in that store: as soon as I walked in I heard a sound that floored me. I’d never heard anything build with such perfect, ominous, methodical power as Bolero, and in the instant that I heard it I knew that I had to have the record and that I would never forget it as long as I lived. 

I use Bolero as an example of a primal classical experience partially because its status in the elite tastes of snobbery of “true” classical fans is analogous to that of works like Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain. All these pieces are, often, ever-so-slightly pooh-poohed by those who consider themselves connoisseurs of “serious” music.

I wasn’t even able to shave yet, but I recognized the Millennium when I heard it, so I scarfed up first Bolero,^[6] then a whole raft of classics in a gleefully indiscriminate orgy of discovery. I scrounged enough quarters from school lunch money to make my Bolero a respectable RCA Red Seal, but names meant little and the interpreter was really nothing to me so Beethoven’s Moonlight and Pathétique sonatas came for $1.98, courtesy of a cheesy jacketed RCA Camden album.^[7]

I’ve forgotten where and when I got my first Pictures at an Exhibition, and even what orchestra performed it, or who conducted. Who cared? It was on a cheapo label, and it had a picture on the cover that looked like the product of a seven year old snapping a Polaroid Swinger at passing traffic with his knuckles while dangling it from his teeth.^[8] I do remember the frigid pomp of the opening “Promenade,” and sitting in my 9th grade living room, listening to “The Old Castle” while staring out the window at my suburban lawn, feeling a ghostly chill pass over combined with a deep haunting sensation that drugs could not quite duplicate years later. And I recall becoming sufficiently obsessed with Ravel’s orchestral version to steal a copy of Entremont’s rendering of Mussorgsky’s original piano score from an invalid of my acquaintance who was too senile to need it anymore.

It was several decades from Mussorgsky's penning when Ravel set Pictures for full orchestra, but that version has remained the standard. It carries fully half of this album, is not only prime (exceeded perhaps by the Newbeats' "Pink Dally Rue"^[9], though not anything by the MC5)^[10], but also a great place to start if you're a novice classics listener. Almost pure program music (Webster's: "Program Music: Thematic essays written for or associated with specific programs, viz. 'Theme From F Troop,' 'Melancholy Serenade,' 'Galloping Gourmet Polka' "), it was originally intended to describe certain paintings hanging in the Louvre (that's in Paris, Zeke.)^[11]

The succession of short sequences, each representing a different painting, are joined together by the initial statement and several reprises of the "Promenade." Which goes through ramiform changes itself as it reflects and perhaps comments on the wildly diverse moods of the paintings.

Every recorded edition of Pictures in history previous to this one has taken pains to describe the content of the original paintings, but they won't be gone into much here; for one thing, the titles speak for themselves: do you really need to have a piece of music called "Gnomes," say, annotated for you while you're listening to it? Also, since an awful lot of the purchasers of this here disk have probably spent their adolescence taking drugs just so they can watch TV with the sound turned down and the record player on instead, it really doesn't make that much difference at this point unless we had a super deluxe foldout album with reproductions of the originals if they ever even existed in the first place which I don't even know.

Never fear: this music will conjure visions for you. It may be important to know that some of the more vaguely-titled sections were conceived as follows: "The Hut of Baba Yaga" is the hovel housing an old witch by the same name, and "The Great Gate at Kiev" was tantamount to the Brooklyn Bridge of its day (bankrupt tycoons and frustrated lovers used to jump off it). "Ballet of Unhatched Chicks" is like something straight out of Disney's Fantasia, and "Tuileries" was/is a verdant section of Paris where young love strolls and old lust leers out at them with one hand between its legs and one holding the leaves back to get a better view. So many muggings were reported in the Tuileries in the year 1893 that the French government threatened to turn it into a giant Turkish bath where all the frowned-upon sexual minorities commonly labeled "perverted" could stroll and loll unmolested. That didn't seem like such a good idea, though, and was cancelled at the last minute. Today the Tuileries has all but withered on the vine, having wound down to a seedy row of porno cinema houses and massage parlours (see what I mean about the paintings vis-à-vis the music?). 

If you really get hooked on this piece, you might want to pick up a curiosity by an obscure bunch of greasers called  Emerson, Lake & Palmer.^[12] Released about a year ago, it's a moogified modernoidal Pictures complete with lyrics and blues variations on Mussorgsky's themes. It's a little flakey, and they stole the idea from The Swingin' Medallions, who did the original rock version backed with a Tex-Mex arrangement of Alban Berg's Wozzeck on a legendary album released in 1965 on the Smash label and called The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.^[13]

The lead off jams on side one of this present platter were also pop-ularized, as my old barstool buddy Art Fiedler^[14] used to say. P.F. Sloan changed the lyrics and arrangements of several choruses from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov for his Dunhill album Ramblin' Thru the Soot in 1966.^[15] His version went:

Boris was a badass
He beat his mother's buns off and took manna from the plates of the masses
He's ain't got no smarts
Like a cop he never read Hegel
When he saw the starvers in Biafra
He quipped, "Let 'em eat bagels!"*

Nobody but cretins wonder why P.F. Sloan is now a hasbeen mouldering somewhere behind a diner counter in Austin, Texas (no I take that back, Jimmy Webb^[16] wondered and he's a genius, but he's the only one), but Boris Godunov serves us as well as it ever did P.F. His translation was rather free anyway, his original attraction to the piece being based on the fact that Mussorgsky also had the propensity, shared by P.F. and his younger brother Bob Slonotwicz^[17] who also achieved some measure of public recognition (though never quite emerging from P.F.'s shadow) when he toured and recorded under the theatrical Anglicisation Bob "Dylan"; the propensity, as I said, toward long lyric lines, the stanzas sometimes attaining a length of as much as 18 feet, and bearing in addition an extraordinary affection for the adjective, sometimes to the point of composing an entire line of nothing else but. Boris Godunov was not only the "Eve of Destruction" of its day but one of the pinnacles of Russian opera (exceeded in popularity only by Zhivago's celebrated Minsk Side Story^[18]), and if the too-brief slices here whet your buds, you'll just have to hope for the complete multi-record masterpiece, especially since half the fun is reading the libretto while you listen so you can glean such imperishable one-liners as the translation of some particularly thorny bit of Russian mushmouth hollering into "Hey Joe—take a walk on the wild side!"^[19] (That's what Boris says to his probation officer just before committing suicide by eating 17 barge captains from Dubrovsk in the third act—see, I told you it'd grab yer gonads!) 

Listen closely to the two excerpts from the piano version of Pictures featured here; they have a secret message about Judge Crater^[20] between the lines. Also they once turned Leon Russell^[21] autistic for three days.

Every hit album needs a ballad for ballast. Even the MC5, who essayed the rest of the classic "Back in the USA"^[22] at 120 MPH, had to pause for 4 boring minutes of "Let Me Try." Even the Stooges, who got a hit in East Jerusalem with the reggae version of "We Will Fall"^[23], even though it was the worst piece of music set to wax since Paul Whiteman was raped and disemboweled by Mau Maus on the corner of 124th and Lexington way back in 1934.^[24] Which makes it such a pleasure to report that our Mussorgskian change of pace relaxant, the lovely Khovanschina Prelude (the title is a pidgeon [sic] alcoholic slur corruption of "Come on over and see my new china, Gertrude"), is perfect balm for the harried late 20th Century terminal spastic. It lilts and lolls but never lulls or lazes. It's what's known as quiet power, or being strong enough you don't have to carry a big stick, substantial enough to lay back a spell. It's even better than "Unchained Melody."^[25]

The obvious and perfect finale for this album, of course: "Night On Bald Mountain." I'm sure you all remember how Walt Disney stamped his own image track for it on our brains for all time in Fantasia: The medieval belladonna night where a million bats flaked off the dark hillside and fluttered away leaving the very mountain to unfold itself with great gangrenous wings stretching out in razor winds and white light-white heat^[26] eyes blazing to life as the cackling maw creaks open spitting brimstone and sen sen and Beelzebub Himself materialises from the loam we're bound for. It was always a chillingly evocative piece of music, and it's good to hear it slithering and flapping into pestilential life once more, good to feel that rust in your veins. 

None of the music on this album will ever get old. The only problem is when you grow up and come round years later drinking wine with friends who played in the school band maybe and know the classics inside and out or let on that they do, the very people you maybe taught to like the Stones instead of huddling defensively with their Masterworks, and here they finally get around to asking you what kind of classical music you like, and you say, "Oh, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition's always been one of my favorites." 

And they snicker. Either that or look at you with an expression of such ennui-dripping disgust at your benighted condition that you want to smash the Gallo bottle^[27] over their heads. Maybe they don't even bother to comment that your tastes in classical music are just so, well, gauche, plain Don Ameche Longines Symphonette-Tell TV Offer of the Month level.^[28] All of which makes you feel just dandy, a perfect yahoo.

Well, if that humiliating experience has ever fallen your way, friend, then this record (or the back of it at least) is dedicated to you. With teeth and brooking no apologies. Because you don't have to know anything about classical music to love what's in here. Because I sure don't (know, that is), and they even let me write notes for these things. Because it's for everybody. Because the music herein is not only perfect, a supremely appropriate place to start getting into the classics if you haven't already. It's also music that you're never going to grow out of or get tired of no matter how long you live or how sophisticated you get. It's also some of the greatest music ever made. It's also a sound that goes down as easily as anything you ever heard. It's even better than Emerson, Lake & Palmer. You can even get drunk on it. I'm going to right now. 

*Copyright 1966 Moose Mung Music (BMI)

^[1] _{Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. b. 1839. Russian composer renowned as one of the innovators of the Romantic movement in Russian music and for his orchestral tone poem, Night On Bald Mountain, of which the Leopold Stokowski arrangement was used in the score for Walt Disney Studios' 1940 animated film, Fantasia.}

^[2] _{From 1971 to 1973, Orphic Egg Records released the "Head" series of classical albums showcasing the genius of Western civilization's greatest composers. Other "Head" releases included Bach, Debussy, Mahler, Mozart, Prokofiev, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Beethoven; the latter, Beethoven's Head, was yet another album for which Lester Bangs was enlisted by Orphic to compose its sleeve notes.}

^[3] _{Aron's Records, in El Cajon, California. Bangs consistently (and understandably) misspells the name of the store "Aaron's" in his other writings.}

^[4] _{Credited as one of the principal innovators of West Coast jazz, Milton "Shorty" Rogers composed the score for Metro Goldwyn-Mayer's 1959 film, Tarzan, the Ape Man (directed by Joseph M. Newman).} 

^[5] _{San Francisco folk music duo Bud Dashiel and Travis Edmonson released nine albums between 1958 and 1965, mostly on the Liberty label. They parted ways in 1965 and went on to enjoy successful careers as folk revival solo acts.}

^[6] _{Maurice Ravel's Boléro, one of Ravel's last written and most famous musical compositions.}

^[7] _{Sonata in C-sharp minor, op. 27, no. 2 (a.k.a. Moonlight Sonata) and Sonata no. 8, in C minor, op. 13 (a.k.a. Pathétique). Pianist, Ania Dorfmann. RCA Camden, 1958 (CAM-59).  The "cheesy" cover of this "New Orthophonic" High Fidelity Recording featured a black canvas bearing a Spirographic drawing. (A Spirograph is a geometric drawing tool, invented by Bruno Abakanowicz in the late 19th century and popularized by Hasbro as a toy in 1965, seven years after the RCA Camden LP was released.)}

^[8] _{Lester is probably referencing the 1958 Mussorgsky-Ravel LP on the Stereo-Fidelity label (SF-7800), with Wilhelm Schuechter conducting the Nord Deutsches Symphony Orchestra.  The album cover features an uncredited abstract work (in the medium of paint on glass) that is reminiscent of a melting film cel.}

^[9] _{American vocal trio Larry Henley, Dean Mathis, and Mark Mathis, formed the The Newbeats in the early 1960s. They released their 1964 hit "Bread and Butter" on the Hickory Records label; "Pink Dally Rue" was the b-side track. Henley went on to co-write the 1982 megahit, "The Wind Beneath My Wings."}

^[10] _{Detroit rock band Motor City 5 formed in 1964 with Rob Tyner, Fred "Sonic" Smith (whose name inspired the band name chosen by Sonic Youth), Wayne Kramer, Dennis Thompson, and Michael Davis. Shortening their name to MC5, the group released three albums between 1969 and 1972, the first of which, Kick Out the Jams, was Lester Bangs's very first published music review (Rolling Stone magazine, April 5 1969). Lester lambasted the album for being "ridiculous, overbearing, [and] pretentious." Nevertheless, Kick Out the Jams went on to stand the test of time and is now regarded by many enthusiasts of the era as one of the best albums ever made.}

^[11] _{Most likely a reference to Tommy "Zeke" Zettner, who was briefly the bassist for The Stooges. After the release of the Fun House album in 1970, Zettner was booted from the band and replaced by Dave Alexander. Zettner died of a heroin overdose in late 1973; his death is referenced by Iggy Pop in his song about The Stooges, "Dum Dum Boys," which appears on Iggy's 1977 debut solo album, The Idiot.}

^[12] _{The progressive rock group Emerson, Lake & Palmer, formed in London in 1970 by Keither Emerson, Greg Lake, and Carl Palmer, became one of the most successful acts of the 70s and one of the earliest to capitalize on the Moog synthesizer. The recording to which Lester is referring here is their live album, Pictures At an Exhibition, first released on the Manticore Records label in 1971.} 

 ^[13] _{Lester's attributions here perhaps should not be taken too literally, but rather as a convoluted moment of commentary about the possible influences of classical composers like Mussorgsky on the music of Bangs's era. R&B group The Swingin' Medallions, who formed in 1962, released their first and last album, Double Shot, in 1966. Glam rocker David Bowie's fifth studio album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, was released six years later and is considered by many to be one of the greatest albums ever made. Neither artist seems to have any overt connection to each other, nor do they acknowledge Austrian composer Alban Berg, whose first opera, Wozzack, was completed in 1922 and credited as the first stylistically avant-garde opera to be written in the 20th century.}

^[14] _{Long-time Boston Pops conductor, Arthur Fiedler. Bangs, of course, is being humorous; Fiedler and Bangs were not associated in real life.}

^[15] _{In his heyday during the mid 1960s, pop-rock singer-songwriter P.F. Sloan and co-writer Steve Barri produced chart-topping hits for The Turtles, Jan and Dean, The Mamas & the Papas, Herman's Hermits ("A Must to Avoid," 1966), Barry McGuire ("Eve of Destruction," 1965), and Johnny Rivers ("Secret Agent Man," 1966). In 1966, Sloan and Barri under the name The Grass Roots, did release an album on the Dunhill records label, but it wasn't called Ramblin' Thru the Soot, which is more than likely Lester's joking reply to the question posed in the actual title of The Grass Roots album, Where Were You When I Needed You?}  

^[16] _{American composer and singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb was P.F. Sloan’s contemporary and is responsible for dozens of iconic hits from the era such as ”Up, Up and Away," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "MacArthur Park,” and "Wichita Lineman”—the latter being one of many successful collaborations with Glen Campbell during his career. The Songwriters Hall of Fame inducted Jimmy Webb in 1986, and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame followed suit in 1990.}

^[17] _{Bob Slonotvich: P.F. Sloan did not, of course, have any younger brother by this name, but Bob Dylan was an open admirer of Sloan's writing, especially "Eve of Destruction": in a 1965 interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, Dylan stated, “There are no more escapes. If you want to find out anything that’s happening now, you have to listen to the music. I don’t mean the words. Though 'Eve of Destruction' will tell you something about it.”}

^[18] _{West Side Story’s original 1957 Broadway production marked Stephen Sondheim's Broadway debut and, in 1961, was adapted to an Academy Award-winning film directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. Novelist Boris Pasternak’s 1957 book, Doctor Zhivago, was translated to a 1965 film directed by David Lean; its soundtrack’s leit motif, “Lara’s Theme” (a.k.a., “Somewhere My Love”), garnered international success for composer Maurice Jarre; the next year, Ray Conniff released a version of “Somewhere My Love” that reached #9 on Billboard Magazine’s Hot 100 chart.}

^[19] _{"Hey Joe—Take a walk on the wild side!": A chorus lyric from Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" (Transformer, 1972).  Produced by David Bowie, the song lyrics reference a number of the Warhol Superstars, with whom Lester Bangs had become familiar by his association with Reed and the Velvet Underground.}

^[20] _{Last seen leaving a restaurant to attend the theatre, New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater made front page news in 1930 when he mysteriously vanished. His unsolved disappearance continues to be regarded as one of the most notorious missing persons cases of the twentieth century. Once again, Bangs is being jocular.}

^_[21] _{American session musician, solo artist, and songwriter, Leon Russell is among those credited in the 1950s for innovating the “Tulsa sound” begun in the Tulsa nightclubs where he performed. After settling in Los Angeles, he became a highly in-demand sessions keyboardist and guitarist, and is credited on albums by dozens of recording artists from the era, including Ray Charles, Eric Clapton, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, J.J. Cale, B.B. King, Joe Cocker, and the Rolling Stones. In 2011, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.}

^[22] _{Chuck Berry's 1959 Top 40 hit, "Back in the U.S.A.," was covered by MC5 in 1970 as the titular track of their second album.}

^[23] _{"We Will Fall" first appeared on The Stooges's eponymous 1969 album, the selfsame LP that included "I Wanna Be Your Dog," a song now considered to be a punk standard.}

^[24] _{American bandleader Paul Whiteman led one of the most popular dance bands in the U.S. during the 1930s and produced successful recordings that earned him the moniker, “The King of Jazz." His two 1934 hits, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and “Wagon Wheels,” were two of the many Jazz standards Whiteman introduced during his career. The Mau-Maus, a Hollywood punk band originally formed by Greg Salva, Roderick Donahue, and Rick Torres, relocated to New York City in 1979, where the group underwent a change of personnel over the next few years, including former Cramps bassist Scott Franklin, and guitarist Mike Livingston. Livingston also appears on rock critic Richard Meltzer’s VOM 4-track E.P. Once again, there is no literal connection between the Mau-Maus and Paul Whiteman other than in Lester Bangs’s imagination.} 

^[25] _{"Unchained Melody," one of the 20th century's most recorded songs, was composed by Alex North (lyrics written by Hy Zaret). The 1965 cover by the Righteous Brothers entered the Billboard Top 10.}

^[26] _{"White Light/White Heat" is the titular track on The Velvet Underground's 1968 album. It has been covered by many artists, including Gary Numan/Tubeway Army and, most notably, David Bowie.}

_^[27] _{Sonoma County winery Ernest and Julio Gallo was boycotted in 1973 by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers of America, who charged the company with exploiting vineyard workers, many of whom were migrant farmers.}

_^[28] _{In this reference, Lester is conflating American actor Don Ameche with his radio announcer brother, Jim Ameche. Initially building his career in the 1940s as a radio entertainer, Don Ameche stepped down as host and announcer of The Chase and Sanborn Hour, letting his younger brother, Jim, step into the job. Jim Ameche went onto be a prominent voice in radio for the next several decades, and in the late 1960s he was enlisted to be the voice of Longines Symphonette Society’s anthology LP of old-time radio broadcasts. The LP was offered as a mail-order only album, and Bangs appears to be taking some creative license in its association with budget labels like K-Tel; the Longines Symphonette Society records were pressed under Longines private label until the business was sold to Warner Music Group.}