Rolling Stones -- "Monkey Man" (1969)

I'm a fleabit peanut monkey
All my friends are junkies

The previous several 2 or 3 lines posts discussed the "American Cool" exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, which I visited a few weeks ago.  I've pretty much milked this topic dry, I think, so this will be the last 2 or 3 lines on the subject of coolness.  

Most of the 100 Americans featured in that exhibition are not really cool.  Too many junkies, for one thing.

Kurt Cobain, for one – he wrote and recorded some great songs, but he used a shotgun to end his screwed-up life at age 27, leaving behind an infant daughter.  Nothing about any of that is cool.

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The musicians of the last 50 years who made the "American Cool" list include Afrika Bambaata, James Brown, David Byrne, Kurt Cobain, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Deborah Harry, Jimi Hendrix, Chrissie Hynde, Jay-Z, Madonna, Willie Nelson, Prince, Bonnie Raitt, Lou Reed, Carlos Santana, Tupac Shakur, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Neil Young, and Frank Zappa.

There are a lot of great musicians on the list, but a lot of them aren't really cool if you ask me.  Maybe I'm just a tough grader.

Johnny Cash

Take Johnny Cash, for example.  "The Man in Black" was a great performer, and he had a very distinctive look and an amazing physical presence, but he struggled with drug and alcohol his whole life.  Drunks and addicts just aren't cool.  

I like Willie Nelson's music, but potheads aren't cool either.  All that weed probably explains why Willie supported the presidential campaign of Dennis Kucinich – who was highly uncool – in 2004.

Nelson and Kucinich

Bob Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters of all time, but the guy was much too big a weirdo to be cool.  (Did you ever see him in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid?  Dylan's performance in that movie is all mumbles and twitches – what in the world was Sam Peckinpah thinking when he cast him?)

Tom Waits?  Really?  (He's unlistenable, among other things.)

Neil Young?  He was born in Toronto and spent the first 21 years of his life in Canada.  So why is he on a list of the 100 coolest Americans?

Jimi Hendrix is probably the coolest guy on that list.  He was the greatest rock guitarist of all time, and setting his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival was without a doubt the coolest rock-concert move of all time.  But dying from aspirating your own vomit is a highly uncool way to go.

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One rock musician who is exceedingly cool is Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts.  He's not American, so he's not eligible for the "American Cool" list.  But the musicians on that list could learn a lot about being cool from ol' Charlie.

Charlie Watts -- then and now

Charlie Watts was a jazz fan as a teenager.  He started out playing with local jazz bands when he was an art student, and then joined an early-day R&B supergroup, Blues Incorporated.  He continued to play with jazz and R&B bands after joining the Stones -- including a great boogie-woogie band called Rocket 88.  He's also an accomplished graphic artist.

Watts got married in 1964, not long after the Stones were formed.  (You want to feel really, really old?  Charlie Watts joined the Rolling Stones OVER FIFTY-ONE YEARS AGO!)  He's still married to the same woman, and apparently consistently rejected the overtures of groupies during the band's many tours.  

Contrast Watts to long-time Stones bassist Bill Wyman, who wrote that he had slept with over 1000 women while with the group.  In 1989, Wyman – who was 52 – married his 18-year-old girlfriend, Mandy Smith.  They had been dating for five years!  (Let me get my calculator.  OK, 18 minus five is . . . oh my!)

Mr. and Mrs. Wyman

Wyman's son from a previous marriage later married Mandy's mother – meaning Wyman's son was also Wyman's father-in-law.  That's not cool – it's just weird.

Watts did use drugs and abuse alcohol in the 1980s.  "[My drug and alcohol problems were] my way of dealing with [family problems]," he once said.  "Looking back on it, I think it was a mid-life crisis. All I know is that I became totally another person around 1983 and came out of it about 1986. I nearly lost my wife and everything over my behavior."

Here's the coolest Charlie Watts story I know.  One night, an intoxicated Mick Jagger phoned Watts' hotel room in the middle of the night and asked, "Where's my drummer?"  Watts reportedly got out of bed, shaved, dressed in a suit and tie, went to Jagger's room, and punched Mick right in the kisser, saying: "Don't ever call me your drummer again!  You're my f*cking singer!"

Watts is a very natty dresser.  The British newspaper, the Telegraph, has named him one of the world's best dressed men.  In 2006, Vanity Fair elected Watts into the International Best-Dressed Hall of Fame.  (Other honorees include Fred Astaire, George Clooney, Prince Philip, Cary Grant, Peter Jennings, Calvin Klein, David Niven, and Yves Saint Laurent.)

Today, Watts and his wife of 49 years live in rural Devon, where they raise Arabian horses.

Mr. and Mrs. Watts

Charlie Watts is usually a very understated drummer – not a big showoff like Keith Moon was.  (Don't get me wrong.  I loved dear old Keith, but he was a bit of a diva.)  

Here's a video of Watts drumming during a performance of "Monkey Man" that nicely demonstrates his style:  

So let's review the bidding, shall we?  (That's a pretentious catchphrase I use now and then so you're aware that I know how to play bridge, which about a billion other people know how to do better than I do.)

Watts is one of the best in the world at what he does – but he is content to remain in the background when he performs and let others get all the attention.  He has generally resisted the siren songs of drugs, alcohol, and promiscuity.  He's good-looking and very well-dressed.  All that sounds very cool to me, n'est-ce pas?

Click here to listen to "Monkey Man," from the Stones' 1969 masterpiece, Let It Bleed.

Click below to order the song from Amazon:

Nice Peter and EpicLLOYD -- "Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates" (2012)

A man uses the machines you built

To sit down and pay his taxes

A man uses the machines I built

To listen to the Beatles while he relaxes

The last several 2 or 3 lines posts have been about a few of the 100 people featured in the current "American Cool" exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.  (The exhibition closes on September 7, so you have plenty of time to visit it.)

The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery
and American Art Museum

I'm not sure exactly what makes people cool.  But I am sure that a lot of the folks who made the cut for "American Cool" are not cool at all.

Someone who is cool is not necessarily admirable.  Cool people are often vain and self-absorbed.  And cool people can be clueless -- much of the time, the reason that a cool person remains cool under pressure is that he or she doesn't comprehend just how bad things are.

The "American Cool" exhibition

Not surprisingly, virtually everyone on the "American Cool" list is a pop culture figure.  Actors and popular musicians dominate the list.  There are a number of athletes as well, with a sprinkling of authors and even a couple of artists thrown in to make the whole exercise seem a little classier.

The only person on the list who clearly doesn't fit into one of the above categories is Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple.  There are no other entrepreneurs or business leaders on the list -- and no politicians, no scientists or inventors, and no lawyers or physicians or religious leaders or military figures on the list.

So don't take "American Cool" too seriously.  Despite its scholarly co-curators and its Smithsonian seal of approval, the exhibition panders to the hoi polloi as much as any reality TV show.

Walter Isaacson's
biography of Jobs

Let's get back to Steve Jobs.  Was Jobs a cool guy?  Here are some an excerpts from a New Yorker article about Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Jobs.  You be the judge:

Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. . . . Jobs, we learn, was a bully.  “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson.  

Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his.  He parks in handicapped spaces.  He screams at subordinates.  He cries like a small child when he does not get his way.  He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour.  

He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times.  He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 p.m., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”)

Steve Jobs on a cool motorcycle

None of that is the least bit cool.  But sometimes people who start out as uncool eventually learn how to be cool.  Did Jobs put uncoolness behind him before he died?

Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created.  He then charts the even greater triumphs at Pixar and at a resurgent Apple, when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey.  

He never does.  In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes.  “At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated,” Isaacson writes.  "Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. . . . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex."

Jobs with Bill Gates

Steve Jobs's company may make cool products -- especially compared to its bête noire, Microsoft.  That's the point of the lyrics from today's featured song that are quoted at the beginning of this post: PCs are for bean counters, while Macs are for more creative types.

But according to the lyrics of today's featured song, Steve Jobs was not a cool guy:

You blow, Jobs

You arrogant prick

With your secondhand jeans and your turtleneck

Jobs in his jeans and turtleneck

Nice Peter and EpicLLOYD (whose real names are Peter Shukoff and Lloyd Ahlquist) are the guys behind Epic Rap Battles of History, a YouTube video series that features rap battles between famous (or infamous) historical figures.  Previous Epic Rap Battles of History episodes have featured Darth Vader vs. Hitler, the Mario Brothers vs. the Wright Brothers, Frank Sinatra vs. Freddie Mercury, Miley Cyrus vs. Joan of Arc, and Donald Trump vs. Ebeneezer Scrooge.  

The Jobs-Gates Epic Rap Battle video has been viewed over 70 million times to date, making it one of the most popular of the series.  

Here's "Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates."  But before you watch it, click here to read the lyrics and the Rap Genius annotations to the lyrics.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Nirvana -- "Come As You Are" (1991)

And I swear that I don't have a gun

No, I don't have a gun

No, I don't have a gun

Everyone wants to be cool.  But most people are not cool.  (For example, you . . . and you . . . and especially you.)

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I told you that the co-curators of the "American Cool" exhibition -- which recently opened at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery -- had chosen William S. Burroughs as one of the 100 coolest Americans ever.  (Click here if you missed that 2 or 3 lines.)

The "American Cool" exhibition

Burroughs was a prolific author (his novels include Naked Lunch, Queer, Junky, and The Soft Machine) and a Beat Generation icon who hung out with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.  (Burroughs makes an appearance in the most famous Beat novel, On the Road, in the guise of the fictional character Old Bull Lee.)

Norman Mailer said that Burroughs was "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius," and he was admired by many other famous writers -- including J. G. Ballard, Jean Genet, Lester Bangs, William Gibson, and Ken Kesey.

Some of the musicians who say they were influenced by him were Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, and Kurt Cobain (all of whom are featured in "American Cool"), and a number of bands took their names from Burroughs's novels (including Steely Dan, the Soft Machine, Thin White Rope, the Mugwumps, and the Insect Trust).

That all sounds pretty cool.

William Burroughs practices his quick draw

But Burroughs also had a very uncool side.  He was addicted to morphine and heroin for much of his life.  (One of his biographers wrote, "Virtually all of Burroughs's writing was done when he was high on something.")  He cut off the end of his little finger in hopes of impressing a guy he had a crush on.  He shot and killed his wife during a drunken game of "William Tell."

And he wasn't exactly a candidate for the "Best Father of the Year" award -- he introduced his teenaged son to drugs when he came to live with him in Tangiers (where some of Burroughs's friends allegedly tried to rape him).  The son, who blamed Burroughs for most of his problems, died at age 33 from the effects of drug addiction and alcoholism.

When I balance the cool and the uncool aspects of Burroughs's life, I think the scale tips decidedly in the direction of uncool.  But what do I know?  I'm just a wildly successful blogger with absolutely no academic credentials qualifying me to make cool/uncool judgments.  So let's hear what the experts have to say.

Beat Generation icons

One of the co-curators of "American Cool" is a professor of American Civilization at a major Southern university, and the other is the co-director of the museum of art at a New England college.  They didn't make their picks based on their subjective opinion of who was cool and who wasn't.  Instead, each potentially cool figure was considered with a "historical rubric" in mind.

Of course, anyone who uses terms like "historical rubric" is definitely not cool, and almost surely has no effing idea who is cool.

Ceci n'est pas une rubric

Here are the four criteria the curators applied.  To be on the list, you had to meet at least three of the four listed criteria:

1.  An original artistic vision carried off with a signature style

2.  Cultural rebellion or transgression for a given generation

3.  Iconic power, or instant visual recognition

4.  A recognized cultural legacy

That all sounds well and good.  But if you look at the list, you quickly see that each of the hundred picks were actually chosen on the basis of these criteria:

1.  He or she is famous

2.  His or her choice reflects well on the co-curators, and makes them look cool and politically correct

I wouldn't disagree that virtually all of the people on the list are talented and successful.  But being talented and successful doesn't make you cool.  

To the contrary, the primary talent that most cool people have is a talent for seeming to be cool, and the thing that cool people are more successful at is making others believe they are cool.

You know what I think about William Burroughs.  Let's look at one of the other people on the "American Cool" list -- the man behind today's featured song, Kurt Cobain.

Kurt Cobain

Why was Cobain chosen for the exhibition?  Obviously he did well when it came to the "historical rubric" the co-curators applied.  

Looking at the first of their four factors, did Cobain have an "original artistic vision carried off with a signature style"?  I think he did.  Cobain wrote some remarkable songs, and Nirvana certainly had an original style -- although they only recorded three studio albums before Cobain's death.

Second, did Cobain represent "cultural rebellion or transgression for a given generation"?  I think the answer to that question is certainly yes.

Third, does Cobain have "iconic power, or instant visual recognition"?  Probably -- or at least he did at one time.  He certainly doesn't have instant visual recognition among most people today but he probably still does among Generation X'ers.

Finally, does he have "a recognized cultural legacy"?  I'm not sure how this really differs from the first factor discussed above.  But I'll give Cobain this one -- he has a legacy, although its depth and breadth may not be that great.

A very young Kurt Cobain

So Cobain clearly seems to be eligible for the "American Cool" list because he meets the criteria set out by the co-curators.  But does that make him cool?

Not in my book.  I think an essential quality of coolness is -- to use a cliché that I really don't like -- being comfortable in one's own skin.  Someone who is cool is also relaxed and confident and generally satisfied with themselves.  He or she doesn't worry about failure because he or she never contemplates that failure is a possibility.  

Cool people don't sweat the small stuff.  In fact, they don't sweat at all.  (I suspect that many cool people aren't very smart, and that the secret to their gift for staying cool under pressure is that they don't really understand how bad things are.)

Cool people usually are good-looking -- that's just the way it is, boys and girls -- and dress with a certain je ne sais quoi. 

They usually have some kind of talent -- many authors and musicians and star athletes are cool -- but that talent must appear to be mostly natural because it's not cool to struggle and work too hard.  

Nirvana

Many cool people have a lot of money, of course -- it's a lot easier to act cool when you're not worried about paying the rent.  But it's very uncool to talk about your money, or to spend it in a showoffy way.  (Cool guys don't go to strip joints and throw handfuls of cash at the dancers.)

Cool people are not necessarily good people, of course.  They can be vain, and selfish, and not very bright.  (If a cool person is very bright, he or she needs to keep that from showing too much.)

In fact, it's very possible to be cool and an assh*le at the same time as long as you don't act too much like an assh*le in public.  A lot of cool people are at least semi-assh*les, but manage to conceal that fact.

So was Kurt Cobain cool?  I don't think so.  

Kurt Cobain seems to have been a train wreck waiting to happen.  He struggled much of his life with various physical and mental illnesses.  He first used marijuana when he was 13, consumed a considerable amount of LSD, abused alcohol and sniffed solvents, and eventually became a heroin addict.  He had a lot of problems, many of which may not have been his fault -- but people who are screwed up as Cobain are the opposite of cool.

To compound his problems, Cobain married Courtney Love.

Kurt and Courtney

Love's mother was a psychotherapist and her father was the ex-manager of the Grateful Dead.  He allegedly gave her LSD when she was a toddler, which could explain a lot.  When she was 12, Love auditioned for the Mickey Mouse Club TV show, reading a Sylvia Plath poem.  (You can imagine how well that went over.)

A couple of years later, she was arrested for shoplifting and sent to a correctional facility.  After a few years in foster care, she became legally emancipated at age sixteen and immediately went to work as a stripper.  

To make matters worse, she developed a substance abuse problem that was as bad as Cobain's, which didn't help things when they got married.  (Cobain wore green pajamas to the ceremony.)

I don't mean to belittle Courtney Love.  She was a talented musician and a talented actress -- she was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actress for her role in The People v. Larry Flynt.  (Coincidentally, Love portrayed William Burroughs's wife -- the one he shot in the head while playing "Drunk William Tell" -- in the 2000 movie, Beat.)  But she was a hot mess.  

At age 27, Cobain killed himself with a shotgun.  That is not at all cool.

Cobain with his daughter,
Frances Bean Cobain

He left behind Love and their 20-month-old daughter.  That is about an uncool as it gets.  (By the way, Love tried to commit suicide on her 40th birthday, and eventually was sentenced to six months of locked-down rehab.)

Courtney Love with Frances Bean

Kurt Cobain suffered from torments the likes of which probably far exceeded anything that you and I will have to battle.  He was a very talented musician, but he was not cool -- it's just not cool in the slightest to become an heroin addict and decide to put the barrel of a Remington model 11 autoloading shotgun under your chin and pull the trigger.

By the way, I just learned that Kurt Cobain and William Burroughs were friends and admirers of one another.  The two collaborated on a 1992 EP titled The "Priest" They Called Him, which consisted of a reading Burroughs did at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, combined with a guitar accompaniment recorded in Seattle by Cobain.  Cobain then asked Burroughs to appear in the video for Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" single, but Burroughs declined.

Cobain drove to Kansas to meet Burroughs in October 1993.  The two exchanged presents — Burroughs gave him a painting, while Cobain gave him a Leadbelly biography that he had signed.

Burroughs and Cobain in 1993

After Cobain committed suicide, Burroughs wrote this: “The thing I remember about him is the deathly grey complexion of his cheeks. It wasn’t an act of will for Kurt to kill himself. As far as I was concerned, he was dead already.”  Burroughs is one of those who feel Cobain “let down his family” and “demoralized the fans” by committing suicide.

There a number of other musicians who made the "American Cool" list who aren't cool either -- for example, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits, and Bonnie Raitt.

It's not that Springsteen and Waits and Raitt are drug addicts or suicidal.  It's simply that their music sucks.  And if your music sucks, you're not cool -- at least not as far as 2 or 3 lines is concerned.

Here's "Come As You Are," from Nirvana's 1991 album, Nevermind:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Steely Dan -- "Dr. Wu" (1975)

Are you crazy?

Are you high?

Or just an ordinary guy?

William S. Burroughs was many things -- he was crazy and he was usually high, but never "just an ordinary guy."

Burorughs was also cool.  In fact, the co-curators of the "American Cool" exhibition, which recently opened at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in downtown Washington, DC, chose Burroughs as one of the hundred coolest Americans ever.

William S. Burroughs

The Portrait Gallery is just across the street from my office, and I visited "American Cool" shortly after it opened.  I was not in a good mood that day, which may explain why I reacted somewhat negatively to the exhibition.  If you ask me -- or even if you don't -- it featured a lot of very uncool men and women.

Of course it was not at all cool of me to walk through the exhibition, muttering under my breath (most of the time) how stupid the choices were. 

The next several 2 or 3 lines posts will relate to "American Cool" and a number of the authors, musicians, and athletes, who made the list of coolest Americans.  Today we will consider the coolness of William S. Burroughs, the author of Naked Lunch and a Beat Generation icon.

(By the way, the Beats are way overrated when it comes to cool.)

Burroughs graduated from Harvard with honors in 1936.  He was attracted to men more than women, and cut off the end of his left pinkie in a Van Gogh-esque gesture intended to impress a man he had a major crush on.  

Unaware that Burroughs was a homosexual, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg introduced him to Joan Vollmer, and the two quickly moved in together.  The couple (who believed they were telepathic soul mates) both became addicted to drugs in short order -- Burroughs favored heroin and morphine, while Vollmer's drug of choice was Benzedrine.

Joan Vollmer

Vollmer gave birth to a son in 1947.  After a drug bust in New Orleans, Burroughs jumped bail and decamped with his family to Mexico City.  A few years later, the happy couple got drunk at a party -- Joan had given up Benzedrine in favor of tequila -- and decided to play "William Tell."  

Joan balanced a glass on top of her head, and Burroughs pulled out the pistol he usually carried and fired at the glass from about nine feet away.  Unfortunately, his aim was not true, and the bullet hit Vollmer squarely in the forehead, killing her instantly.

Burroughs hired a prominent Mexican attorney, and persuaded a couple of witnesses to testify that the gun had discharged accidentally.  But rather than take any chances, Burroughs jumped his bail and returned to the U.S.  (He was eventually convicted in absentia, but received only a two-year suspended sentence.)

Burroughs later wrote that his shooting of Vollmer was what made him become a writer:

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. . . . [T]he death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

Burroughs was every bit as big a disaster as a father as he was as a husband.  After he shot and killed Joan, he sent their  four-year-old son, Billy, to live with his paternal grandparents.

William S. "Billy" Burroughs, Jr.

When Billy was 13, he flew to Tangiers to join his father, who introduced him to drugs.  Billy later wrote that several of his father's friends attempted to rape him.

After returning to the United States, Billy became addicted to amphetamines and later became an alcoholic.  When he was 19 he had a liver transplant, but continued to drink.

Billy became a writer, and penned an article for Esquire blaming his father for ruining his life.  He died from a gastrointestinal hemorrhage when he was 33.

According to Call Me Burroughs, a new Burrughs biography by Barry Miles, "Virtually all of Burroughs's writing was done when he was high on something."  

A recent New Yorker review of Miles's book included this observation on Burroughs's oeuvre:

While always comic, Burroughs is rarely funny, unless you're tickled as he was by such recurrent delights as boys in orgasm as they are executed by hanging.

The reviewer went on to say that a Burroughs trilogy is "easier to read than, say, Finnegan's Wake," which is damning with the faintest praise possible.

None of this really persuades me that Burroughs was one of the hundred coolest Americans ever.  Cutting off your finger to get someone's attention, becoming addicted to narcotics, shooting your wife in the head while playing a dumb game, and ruining your only child's life add up to an extremely uncool life.

But that's just me.

"Dr. Wu" was released on Steely Dan's 1975 album, Katy Lied.  I really had to feature a Steely Dan song when writing about William Burroughs.  After all, the band took its name from "Steely Dan III from Yokohoma," which was the name Burroughs gave to a strap-on dildo featured in his best-known novel, Naked Lunch.

Here's "Dr. Wu":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: