Joan Baez – "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word" (1968)

I can say nothing to you

But repeat what I heard

That love is just a four-letter word

In the summer of 1983, the late Steve Jobs – the 28-year-old co-founder and chairman of Apple Computer, Inc. – met a 21-year-old University of Pennsylvania student named Jennifer Egan at a dinner party.  

Steve Jobs in 1983

According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, Jobs was immediately smitten with Egan, and the two dated for about a year.  

Years later, Egan wrote A Visit from the Goon Squad, a tour de force novel that examines life through the lens of pop music.  The iPod and the iTunes Store – two of Jobs’ signature achievements – had transformed the pop music universe by the time Egan’s novel was published.  Since Isaacson’s biography was published over a year after Goon Squad, I was surprised that  Isaacson didn’t mention Egan’s novel.

(If you haven't read it,
what are you waiting for?)

That omission is even more surprising when you think about the fact that the tour de forcest  chapter of Goon Squad is written in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.  As Isaacson notes more than once, Jobs loathed the PowerPoint software and refused to sit through PowerPoint presentations.  Years before Egan wrote Goon Squad, Apple had released a rival presentation software program called Keynote, but Egan didn’t use Keynote for her chapter – she used PowerPoint.  (I’ve been buying Macs for years, but I had never heard of Keynote before now.  PowerPoint continues to dominate the presentation software space.)

*     *     *     *     *

Jobs came to the dinner party where he met Egan in the company of Joan Baez.  

He was 27 and Baez was 41 when they met in 1982.  “It turned into a serious relationship between two accidental friends who became lovers,” Jobs told Isaacson.  “I thought I was in love with her, but I really just liked her a lot. We weren’t destined to be together.  I wanted kids and she didn’t want any more.”  (Baez had a 14-year-old son.)

Joan Baez in 1983

Jobs could have used a little help when it came to romancing women.  One night he told Baez about seeing a red Ralph Lauren dress that he thought would be perfect for her.  He drove her to the nearest Polo store, showed her the dress, and told her, “You ought to buy it.”

Baez told him she couldn’t really afford it – she was a world-famous musician, but wasn’t wealthy – and was taken aback when he didn’t offer to buy the dress for her.  (How could such a smart guy be so dumb?)  After he bought several shirts for himself, they left the store.

“He was both romantic and afraid to be romantic,” Baez told Isaacson.

*     *     *     *     *

One of Jobs’s college friends believed that one of the reasons Jobs was attracted to Baez was that she had been Bob Dylan’s lover.

Dylan and Baez

From the time he was a teenager, Jobs had worshipped Dylan – he had no fewer than 21 Bob Dylan albums on iPod when Isaacson asked to see his playlist.

Jobs’s iPod also had selections from four albums by Joan Baez, including two different versions of today’s featured song, which was written by none other than Bob Dylan.  

Baez recorded “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word” a total of four times.  I’m not sure which two of those four recordings were on Steve Jobs’s iPod, but I’m guessing that her original 1968 recording of the song was one of them.

Here’s Joan Baez’s 1968 recording of “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Sleepers -- "No Time" (1978)

Though I know that the world is dying

I bet you'd run away from me

Just like a chick with a problem

The epigraph of Jennifer Egan's 2010 novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, quotes Marcel Proust on how certain places have the power to elicit memories:

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth.  

For Egan – and for me – music is one way to bring back to life "the self that we were long ago."  Is there anything that can call up old memories more vividly than an old song?

Author Jennifer Egan

One critic has called A Visit From the Goon Squad – which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction – a "rock and roll novel," noting that popular music is both "subject matter and key inspiration" for Egan.  The novel's main characters include fictional musicians and record producers and music fans, and the book drops the names of dozens of bands and records.  It not only depicts scenes from rock music's past, but also imagines its future.

Egan was born in Chicago in 1962, but was raised in San Francisco.  She regrets being born too late to have really experienced the sixties:

I grew up in the 1970s, and my friends and I felt very keenly that we had missed the sixties. We were bummed out about it. I grew up feeling like I wanted to grow up ten years earlier . . .

While Egan was too young for the "Summer of Love," Monterey Pop, Altamont, and the glory days of the Fillmore, she was the perfect age to experience the glory days of the San Francisco punk scene circa 1979, which is the setting for chapter 3 of A Visit From the Goon Squad.

The narrator of that chapter  is Rhea, one of a group of high-school girls in "dog collars and safety pins and shredded T-shirts" who hang out with the Flaming Dildos, a punk band whose members (all male, of course) are students at the same school. 

Rhea is "waiting for" Bennie, the band's bass player.  (I take it that "waiting for" means something between having a basic crush and full-fledged love.) 

But Bennie is waiting for Alice (a rich girl who used to go to a fancy private school).

Alice is waiting for Scotty (the band's charismatic singer and guitarist).

Scotty is waiting for Jocelyn (a beautiful Chinese-American girl).

Jocelyn is waiting for Lou (a famous forty-something record producer from Los Angeles who is married and has several kids and who picked her up when she was hitchhiking).  

Unfortunately, no one is waiting for Rhea, who blames that on her freckles.

I don't know how much of herself Egan put in Rhea, but it appears from the picture of Egan as a teenager that she did have some freckles:

Jennifer Egan as a teenager

The group dreams of the day when the Flaming Dildos will be invited to perform at the Mabuhay Gardens, where the crème de la crème of San Francisco's punk bands play.  Until their big break comes along, the group goes to "the Mab" every Saturday night.

We've heard Crime, the Avengers, the Germs, and a trillion other bands. . . . During the shows we slam-dance in front of the stage.  We tussle and push and get knocked down and pulled back up until our sweat is mixed up with real punks' sweat and our skin has touched their skin.

  

Despite her dog collar and green hair rinse, Rhea doesn't consider herself a real punk.  When I asked Jennifer Egan about her experiences in San Francisco in those days – like Rhea, she was in high school there in 1979 – she admitted that she was just a wannabe punk as well.  "The closest I came to being a punk was putting on raccoon eye makeup a few times," she said.

*     *     *     *     *

I lived in San Francisco from 1980 until 1982, but I never made it to the Mabuhay Gardens or any other punk band venue.

Poster for a Sleepers appearance
at the Mabuhay Gardens

The closest I got was listening to a weekly punk radio show on the local Pacifica station.  The show, which was called "MaximumRockNRoll," was hosted by Tim Yohannon and Jeff Bale, who later started the punk fanzine of the same name, which continues to be published today.  Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys was a regular on the show.  I have about 50 hours of cassette tapes of that show, which I plan to get around to cataloging any day now.  (I've been kinda busy the last 30 years.)

Egan mentions a number of punk bands in chapter 3 of A Visit From the Goon Squad: the Avengers, the Cramps, Crime, the Dead Kennedys, Eye Protection, Flipper, the Germs, the Mutants, and the Sleepers.  Most were from the San Francisco area.

The Sleepers 1978 EP, Seventh World

Egan told me that her favorite San Francisco punk group was the Sleepers, which was one of the more distinctive bands of that era. 

The two friends who formed the Sleepers in 1978 wanted former Crime drummer Ricky Williams (he was known as "Ricky Tractor" until he was kicked out of Crime) to do vocals for their new band "because he was so awesome looking."  Here he is:

Ricky Williams (later of Flipper)

Williams couldn't be bothered to write out song lyrics, preferring to improvise the words on the fly.  Add a lot of speed and acid to the psychedelic influence of a Bay Area upbringing and you end up with music that "broke free from the punk template," according to one critic.

  

When the Sleepers broke up the next year, Williams help found Flipper, which was the most influential of all the San Francisco punk bands of the era.  (Williams came up with that name after going to a beach while he was high and finding the remains of a dolphin that had been mangled by a shark.)  

But Williams was reportedly too weird for his bandmates to tolerate, and was kicked out of Flipper before they released any records.  He died of a heroin overdose in 1992 when he was 36 years old.

Henry Rollins of Black Flag described Flipper in these words: "They were just heavy.  Heavier than you.  Heavier than anything."  (I couldn't have said it better myself.)

Flipper's first album was titled Generic Flipper.  Here's the cover, which is certainly generic:

Classic California punk is usually pretty disaffected stuff, and the lyrics to "Shed No Tears" are about as disaffected as you can get.  Here's a sample:

Shed no tears for the suicide
He has made his choice

The pain of life is great
And some will find it sweet 

To rot beneath the earth

Click here to listen to "Shed No Tears."

*     *     *     *     *

In Goon Squad, the Flaming Dildos eventually get their Mabuhay Gardens gig, opening for the Cramps and the Mutants.  Lou, the famous record producer who had picked up Jocelyn, drives up from L.A. and goes to the gig with Rhea and her – he says he'll give the band a record contract if he likes them. 

 The group closes its set with its best song, "What the F*ck?"

You said you were a fairy princess

You said you were a shooting star

You said we'd go to Bora Bora

Now look at where the f*ck we are

What the f*ck?

What the f*ck?

What the f*ck?

Afterwards, the band members and the girls go to Lou's San Francisco apartment, which has walls covered with electric guitars and gold albums.  Lou shows Bennie (the band's bass player) his recording studio, explaining the function of each piece of equipment.  Bennie eventually becomes a successful record producer himself.  

Bennie and Scotty – the band's frontman – have a brief encounter in New York City many years later, when both men are in their thirties.  "I want to know what happened between A and B," Scotty says, and then elaborates: "A is when we were both in the band . . . . B is now." 

Scotty has abandoned music and is eking out a living as a sanitation worker.  Bennie is the very successful owner of Sow's Ear Records.  It's hard to imagine two lives that contrast more sharply, but Scotty understands something that most people haven't grasped:

[T]here was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park.  In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

Click here to listen to "No Time" by the Sleepers, which was released on their 1978 EP, Seventh World.

Semisonic -- "Closing Time" (1998)

Closing time -- 

Every new beginning comes from 

Some other beginning's end 

The last 2 or 3 lines discussed Jennifer Egan's remarkable novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, which she has described as a concept album in print form.  (Click here if you missed that post.)

Chapter 12 of Goon Squad has attracted considerable attention because it is written as a PowerPoint presentation.  The putative creator of that PowerPoint is Alison, a teenaged girl who writes about her brother Lincoln's close study of rock songs that have pauses -- brief moments of silence that sometimes make you think the song is over when it's not.  (Lincoln has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism that is often manifested by an obsessive interest in some seemingly random topic -- like Lincoln's obsessive interest in the pauses in songs.)

I have no idea how many songs Egan considered before she identified the 13 (including Semisonic's "Closing Time") mentioned in that chapter.  I wouldn't be surprised if she listened to hundreds of songs to find a baker's dozen with pauses.

One of the essential themes of A Visit From the Goon Squad is time and time's effects on the lives of the book's characters.  Time is the "goon" alluded to in the book's title.  "Time is the stealth goon, the one you ignore because you are so busy worrying about the goons right in front of you," Egan has said. 

There's certainly a lot of talk about time in chapter 12 of the book.  Lincoln's analysis of the "pause songs" that he is obsessed by includes a statement of precisely when each pause begins and when it ends.

One of the slides from chapter 12

And several of the songs featured in that chapter are quite literally about time.  The previous 2 or 3 lines featured the Zombies' "Time of the Season," and this one features "Closing Time" by Semisonic.  "Good Times, Bad Times" by Led Zeppelin is another one of the pause songs mentioned in chapter 12.

People say that time passes more quickly as you get older, and I would agree with that.  I vividly remember a summer vacation when my kids watched MTV a lot, and when the "Closing Time" video seemed to appear almost hourly.  I would have said that summer vacation wasn't too many summers ago, but the song was released in 1998.

The "Closing Time" video is all about timing.  It is really two distinct videos (running side-by-side on the screen at the same time) that depict two contemporaneous sequences of events.  

As it begins, the band is rehearsing the song in the video that appears on the right side of the screen.  In the video running on the left side, the lead singer's girlfriend cleans up a closed restaurant.  She calls the singer, but he doesn't answer in time because he didn't hear the phone over the music.  She hangs up, locks up the restaurant, and leaves.

At about that time, the singer notices what time it is and rushes out of the studio.  Suddenly you see him enter into the left-hand shot, which has stayed on the front door of the restaurant after the girlfriend leaves -- but he has arrived at the restaurant too late to catch her.

As he leaves the restaurant and heads back to the rehearsal, the girlfriend appears in the right-hand video, hoping to find him still at the studio.  But they just miss each other, each ending up on the other side of the screen.  

Both then go to a club, which is apparently where they had planned to go that night after meeting up.  But he arrives a few seconds later than she does, and they never see each other as they walk through the crowd, once again switching from one side of the screen to the other.

Both videos are continuous shots -- there are no cuts -- and both sequences had to be timed precisely so that they would match up at the end.  There's no sense that the couple's missed connection that night will have consequences beyond his needing to apologize for being late and standing her up.  I suppose it's possible that their relationship will come to an end as the result of their near-misses, but that doesn't seem to be the point.

Here's the video:

"Closing Time" was written by Semisonic's lead singer, Dan Wilson.  The group's drummer, Jacob Slichter (a Harvard grad who later wrote an autobiographical book titled So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star) says that the song was written by Wilson in anticipation of becoming a father.  

Wilson's wife delivered their first child just as the band was beginning to record the album that "Closing Time" appears on.  But the Wilsons' daughter was three months premature.  She weighed only 11 ounces at birth, and was given little chance of living.  But she overcame the staggering odds and survived.  "Closing Time" was released the same day that the Wilsons took her home -- almost a year after she was born.  

Taken literally, "Closing Time" is a song about a bartender or bouncer clearing out a bar full of young people at closing time.  "Gather up your jackets, and move it to the exits," he announces.  "You can't stay here."

But as the lines quoted at the beginning of this post indicate, "Closing Time" is about more than simply leaving a bar at the end of the evening, either to return home or (if you get lucky) go home with someone else.  The closing of the bar is symbolic of one phase of your life coming to an end, and the necessity of moving on to the next phase.  "Closing Time" is about making a new beginning -- leaving the past behind and striking out into the future.  

Who spends the most time in bars?  College students, or recent college graduates.  A bar is just a way station on life's journey, and so is college.  Sooner or later the bar closes -- or you graduate from college -- and you have to go somewhere else.  You don't have to go home, but you can't stay there.

When it's closing time at a bar -- or when you graduate from college -- it's "time for you to go out into the world."  Before you can go out into the world, you may need to "go back to the places you will be from" -- the place where you grew up, but which is abut to become your former home -- gather up your jackets and other stuff, and move on.

We often think that children become adults when they complete their education and leave the nest to embark upon a career and establish a new home.  That's certainly a significant transition.  But it's far from being the most significant transition in life -- which is the transition from being someone else's child to to being someone else's parent.  

One way to interpret "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end" is as meaning that the birth of a child -- which is the ultimate "new beginning" -- marks the end of childhood for its parents.  One's own childhood truly ends only when one becomes a parent.  That transition was much more protracted and difficult for the Wilsons than for most parents, but perhaps that made the day they took their little girl home all the more joyous.

Jennifer Egan

A Visit From the Goon Squad is often characterized as being about music and about time, but it's also about parents and children.  

We see most of the major characters in both roles.  Goon Squad opens with a chapter about Sasha, who is a 35-year-old single woman fighting a compulsion to commit petty theft.  Later we see her a 19-year-old who has run away from her mother and stepfather's home, and is bumming her way around the word.  Finally, we see her as the fifty-something mother of Alison (the author of the PowerPoint) and the obsessive Lincoln.

I can't think of a single parent-child relationship in the book that is completely untroubled -- even the happier parent-child pairs have their ups and downs, while tragedy strikes several of the others.

But the final chapter, which is set ten years or so in the future, depicts the huge and euphoric audience that has gathered to hear an outdoor concert -- a latter-day Woodstock, but one whose audience consists mostly of ecstatic parents and their equally ecstatic children.  

Later, hours after the concert is over, it's closing time at the restaurant where a large group of those who made the show happen and their families have gone to eat and drink and celebrate together.  Alex, the character who is largely responsible for the event's success sends his wife and child home in a cab, and wanders the streets of New York City.  At one point he walks by an apartment building where he once spent an evening with a woman soon after he moved to the city, and he imagines that if he walked into that apartment at that moment, he would become "his young self, full of schemes and high standards, with nothing decided yet."

But no one answers when Alex pushes the buzzer to the apartment, and he begins to realize how silly his fantasy is.  As the song says, "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end" -- and the new beginning Alex made when he became a father would not have happened if that earlier phase of his life (the previous new beginning he made when he left home and moved to the city) had not ended.  

He closes his eyes, listens, and wonders if the quiet hum he hears is "the sound of time passing."  We regret the passage of time.  Is there any other possession that is more precious to us?  But without the passage of time, there would be no progress in our lives -- no "new beginnings."  The passage of time is part and parcel of the experience of living.

Click here if you'd like to purchase A Visit From the Goon Squad from Amazon:

And click here if you'd like to purchase "Closing Time":

Zombies -- "Time of the Season" (1968)

What's your name?

Who's your daddy?

Is he rich like me?

Has he taken any time

To show you what you need to live?

Jennifer Egan describes her 2010 book, A Visit From the Goon Squad – which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction – as a concept album.

At a recent reading by Egan that I attended, she mentioned the Who's Tommy and Quadrophenia, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust as examples of the sixties-era concept albums that inspired the unusual structure of her book.  

*     *     *     *     *

Concept albums have a unified theme or tell a story, but the songs on a concept album are usually quite varied in style and content, and the connection between the individual songs may be quite tenuous.

That description fits A Visit From the Goon Squad, which has been characterized as a novel by some, but as a collection of linked short stories by others.  (I lean toward calling it a novel, so I describe the book's 13 sections as "chapters" rather than "stories.")

Author Jennifer Egan

Each of the chapters takes place at a different time (the time period covered by the book goes from 1973 or so until 2025 – the book jumps back and forth in time rather than proceeding chronologically) and has a different protagonist or narrator (each of whom is directly related to some but not all of the other major characters).  Individual chapters are written in first person or third person, and in present tense or past tense.  

*     *     *     *     *

Chapter 12 of Egan's book – the last chapter she wrote – is a tour de force in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.  The creator of the PowerPoint is Alison, a teenaged girl whose mother, Sasha, is one of the most important characters in the book.

Jennifer Egan as a teenager

 A Visit From the Goon Squad opens with a chapter set a few years ago in New York City that features Sasha as a 35-year-old single woman who is struggling with a compulsion to steal small items (pens, soaps, screwdrivers) from friends and casual acquaintances.  In a subsequent chapter, we travel back in time and see her as a 19-year-old runaway living in Naples in 1991 or so.  

In the PowerPoint chapter, Sasha is a fifty-something wife and mother of two, living in the California desert in about 2025.  Her son, Lincoln (Alison's brother) seems to have Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism that is characterized by an obsessive interest in a random topic.  

*     *     *     *     *

Lincoln's obsession is popular songs that feature moments of silence.  Some of these pauses make you think the song is over, while others simply use a brief silence as a means of punctuation or emphasis.  (Instead of continuing to play through an unaccented fourth beat in the last measure of a phrase, for example, a band may suddenly stop playing at all for a beat, then pick up the song on the first beat of the next measure.) 

One of the songs with a pause that Lincoln has discovered is the Four Tops' "Bernadette."  At about 2:34 of the song, the singers hold a note as the volume fades until there is only silence.  It doesn't really sound like the song is over, but the pause last long enough for you to begin to wonder – then Levi Stubbs suddenly shouts out "Bernadette" and the music continues.

Click here to listen to "Bernadette."

The Zombies' 1968 hit, "Time of the Season" – today's featured song – doesn't have a false ending like "Bernadette," but rather has regularly-spaced pauses at the end of each verse.  The first one is about 40 seconds into the song, just after the vocalists sing "It's the time of the season for loving" a cappella, with an unusual chord change on "lov-ing."  The same thing happens 40 seconds later, at the end of the second verse, which leads into an organ solo that ends with the same chord change and brief silence before the third verse is sung. 

The Goon Squad PowerPoint chapter mentions 13 songs with pauses.  (The book has 13 chapters, for what it's worth.)  Lincoln notes the length of each pause, the length of each song, and the year each song was released, and also rates the power of each pause and the overall excellence of each song.  The chapter ends with several slides presenting his findings in graphical form, which look like something out of a presentation by a scientist at an academic conference.

*     *     *     *     *

Like many kids with Asperger's syndrome, Lincoln lacks social and communication skills.  Rather than interacting with his peers, he only wants to listen to music and analyze the pauses.

A slide from chapter 12 of "Goon Squad"

Any parent can understand how sad and frustrating it is for Lincoln's father, a surgeon named Drew, to realize that his son is not "normal" and that he is powerless to make him normal.  Lincoln's mother and sister are more accepting of him, but is their acceptance what is best for Lincoln in the long run?  

Imagine if Lincoln were seriously overweight, and his family never pushed him to lose weight, but accepted or even indulged his overeating?  Would that be good for him?  Or would it result in his being condemned to living a severely limited and isolated (not to mention unhealthy) existence?

Drew wants to "fix" Lincoln – or he wants Lincoln to fix himself – although as a doctor, he must realize that his son's condition is not something that Lincoln can overcome just by wanting to do so.

*     *     *     *     *

The different attitudes that Lincoln's father and mother have regarding him is the cause of considerable tension between them.

"Should we be encouraging this?" Drew asks Sasha one evening after dinner as Lincoln is expostulating on his latest song-with-a-pause discovery. 

"Of course we should," she answers.

"How is this helping him connect to other kids?" he asks.

"It connects him to the world," Sasha answers.

Drew is unconvinced by his wife's responses, and eventually runs out of patience with Lincoln's single-minded chatter.  He yells "Stop!" at him, which causes his son to burst into tears and run from the room.  Sasha follows him, furious that Drew has upset Lincoln.

But Drew's sense of powerlessness in the face of Lincoln's obsessive, abnormal behavior is not the only thing that contributes to his losing his temper that night.  

*     *     *     *     *

One of Alison's PowerPoint slides is titled "Signs That Dad Isn't Happy," and one of the signs she lists is "He's on his second gin and tonic" – which no doubt has something to do with his blowing up at Lincoln.  

But why is Drew on his second gin and tonic?  The day before, he had operated on a girl with a serious heart problem – a girl who was even younger than Alison.  After the ugly scene with Lincoln, Drew takes a walk with Alison and tells her that "The girl from yesterday . . . with the sick heart . . . she died this morning."  

"I've got to do better with Lincoln," Drew tells his daughter during their walk – he's speaking to himself as much as he is speaking to Alison – but it's clear he has no idea how to make it up to his son.  Alison suggests that he help Lincoln create the graphs for the slides that appear at the end of the chapter.  "I'm terrible at graphing," Alison tells her dad.  Maybe she is – or maybe she is just exceptionally wise for her age.

Click here to go to Jennifer Egan's website and view chapter 12 as a actual slide show (complete with music).

*     *     *     *     *

In the next 2 or 3 lines, we'll feature another one of Lincoln's songs and explore A Visit From the Goon Squad further.

Click here to listen to "Time of the Season," which was on the Zombies' Odyssey and Oracle album.  

The band broke up months before the album was released – and about a year before "Time of the Season" made it to #3 on the Billboard "Hot 100."

Here's a link you can use if you'd like to buy the song from Amazon: