IT’S SUCH A VISUAL THING, air travel.

Take a look some time at the famous photograph of the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903. The image, captured by bystander John T. Daniels and since reproduced millions of times, is about the most beautiful photograph in all of 20th century iconography. Daniels had been put in charge of a cloth-draped 5 X 7 glass plate camera stuck into Outer Banks sand by Orville Wright. He was instructed to squeeze the shutter bulb if “anything interesting” happened. The camera was aimed at the space of sky — if a dozen feet of altitude can be called such — where, if things went right, the Wright’s plane, the Flyer, would emerge in its first moments aloft.

Things did go right. The contraption rose into view and Daniels squeezed the bulb. We see Orville, visible as a black slab, more at the mercy of the plane than controlling it. Beneath him Wilbur keeps pace, as if to capture or tame the strange machine should it decide to flail or aim for the ground. You cannot see their faces; much of the photo’s beauty is not needing to. It is, at once, the most richly promising and bottomlessly lonely image. All the potential of flight is encapsulated in that shutter snap; yet we see, at heart, two eager brothers in a seemingly empty world, one flying, the other watching. We see centuries of imagination — the ageless desire to fly — in a desolate, almost completely anonymous fruition.

The world’s first powered flight, 1903, captured by John T. Daniels

I own a lot of airplane books. Aviation publishing is, let’s just say, on a lower aesthetic par than what you’ll find elsewhere among the arts and sciences shelves. The books are loaded with glam shots: sexily angled pics of landing gear, wings and tails. You see this with cars and motorcycles and guns too — the sexualization of mechanical objects. It’s cheap and it’s easy and it misses the point. And unfortunately, for now, respect for aircraft has been unable to make it past this kind of adolescent fetishizing.

What aviation needs, I think, is some crossover cred. The 747, with its erudite melding of left and right brain sensibilities, has taken it close. The nature and travel writer Barry Lopez once authored an essay in which, standing inside the fuselage of an empty 747 freighter, he compares the aircraft to the quintessential symbol of another era — the Gothic cathedral of twelfth-century Europe. “Standing on the main deck,” Lopez writes, “where ‘nave’ meets ‘transept,’ and looking up toward the pilots’ ‘chancel.’ The machine was magnificent, beautiful, complex as an insoluble murmur of quadratic equations.”

Still, you won’t find framed lithographs of airplanes in the lofts of SoHo or the brownstones of Boston, hanging alongside romanticized images of the Chrysler Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. I won’t feel vindicated, maybe, until commercial aviation gets its own ten-part, sepia-toned Ken Burns documentary.

Until then, when it comes to popular culture, movies are the place we look first. One might parallel the 1950’s dawn of the Jet Age with the realized potential of Hollywood — the turbine and Cinemascope as archetypal tools of promise. Decades later there’s till a cordial symbiosis at work: a lot of movies are shown on airplanes, and airplanes are shown in a lot of movies. The crash plot is the easy and obvious device, and more than 30 years later we’re still laughing at Leslie Nielsen’s lines from the movie Airplane. But I’ve never been fond of movies about airplanes. For most of us, airplanes are a means to an end, and often enough the vessels of whatever exciting, ruinous, or otherwise life-changing journeys we embark on. And it’s the furtive, incidental glimpses that best capture this — far more evocatively than any blockbuster disaster script: the propeller plane dropping the spy in some godforsaken battle zone, or taking the ambassador and his family away from one; the beauty of the B-52’s tail snared along the riverbank in Apocalypse Now; the Air Afrique ticket booklet in the hands of a young Jack Nicholson in The Passenger; the Polish Tupolevs roaring in the background of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalog, part IV.

Switching to music, I think of a United Airlines TV ad that ran briefly in the mid 1990s — a plug for their new Latin American destinations. The commercial starred a parrot, who proceeded to peck out several seconds of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” on a piano. “Rhapsody” has remained United’s advertising music, and makes a stirring accompaniment to the shot of a 777 set against the sky.

We shouldn’t forget the late Joe Strummer’s reference to the Douglas DC-10 in the Clash’s “Spanish Bombs,” but it’s the Boeing family that’s the more musically inclined. I can think of at least four songs mentioning 747s — Nick Lowe’s “So it Goes” being my favorite:

“…He’s the one with the tired eyes.
Seven-forty-seven put him in that condition…
Flyin’ back from a peace-keepin’ mission.”

Somehow the Airbus brand doesn’t lend itself lyrically, though Kinito Mendez, a merengue songwriter, paid a sadly foreboding tribute to the Airbus A300 with “El Avion,” in 1996. “How joyful it could be to go on flight 587,” sings Mendez, immortalizing American Airlines’ popular morning nonstop between New York and Santo Domingo. In November, 2001, the flight crashed after takeoff from Kennedy airport killing 265 people.

My formative years, musically speaking, hail from the underground rock scene covering a span from about 1981 through 1986. This might not seem a particularly rich genre from which to mine out links to flight, but the task proves easier than you’d expect. “Airplanes are fallin’ out of the sky…” sings Grant Hart on a song from Hüsker Dü’s 1984 masterpiece, Zen Arcade, and three albums later his colleague Bob Mould shouts of a man “sucked out of the first class window!” Then we’ve got cover art. The back side of Hüsker Dü’s Land Speed Record shows a Douglas DC-8. The front cover of the English Beat’s 1982 album, Special Beat Service, shows bandmembers walking beneath the wing of British Airways VC-10 (that’s the Vickers VC-10, a ’60s-era jet conspicuous for having four aft-mounted engines, similar to the Russian IL-62), while the Beastie Boys’ 1986 album Licensed to Ill depicts an airbrushed American Airlines 727.

The well-known Congolese painter Cheri Cherin is one of very few artists to commemorate a plane crash on canvas. His “Catastrophe de Ndolo,” seen below, depicts a 1996 incident in Zaire, as it was known at the time, in which an overloaded Antonov freighter careened off the runway at Kinshasa’s Ndolo airport and slammed into a market killing an estimated 300 people — only two of whom were on the airplane (a precise fatality count was never determined).

Cheri Cherin’s “Catastrophe de Ndolo” (1999)

I asked Sister Wendy Beckett what she thought of Cherin’s non-masterpiece. You probably remember Sister Wendy — art historian, critic, and Catholic nun — from the PBS series a few years ago. “A splendidly gory recreation,” she tells us. “We see a bloody, devastated marketplace marked with the hulk of a burning fuselage. Yet the true fury of the event is captured not in the fire and gore, but in the cries and gestures of the people. It’s the apocalyptic landscape of a Bosch painting seen through the anguished psyche of modern African folk art.”

In reality who knows what Sister Wendy might say. I made that up.

Cheri Cherin has nothing on a certain young artist whose pièce de résistance appears below. This work commemorates the horrific, completely fictional three-way collision between Swissair, American Airlines and TWA. I would date this to 1975 or so, when I was nine years-old.

Catastrophe Over Fenley Street. Patrick Smith (c.1975). Colored pencil on paper.

Last but not least, the Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry registers no fewer than 20 entries under “Airplanes,” 14 more for “Air Travel,” and at least another five under “Airports.” including poems by Frost and Sandburg. John Updike’s Americana and Other Poems was reviewed by Kirkus as, “a rambling paean for airports and big American beauty.” (And while I can’t seem to find it, I specifically recall an Allen Ginsberg poem in which he writes of the blue taxiway lights at an airport somewhere.) Subjecting readers to my own aeropoems is probably a bad idea, though I confess to have written a few. You’re free to Google them at your peril. Maybe it was the cockpit checklists that inspired me, free-verse masterpieces that they are:

Stabilizer trim override, normal
APU generator switch, off
Isolation valve, closed
Autobrakes…maximum!

Closing note:

Looking at that Boeing 727 tail section on the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill album, there are several things that give it away as an American Airlines plane. First is the angled-off tricolor cheatline — red, white, and blue — visible just forward of the engine. Those obviously are AA markings. Then you’ve got the all-silver base — another tradition of that carrier — as well as the whitish, off-color section of cowling over and around the center engine intake. This section of cowling was made of a different material, so they couldn’t use the bare silver here, going with a grayish-white paint instead. This gave the tails of AA’s 727s a mismatched look. Oh, and lastly, notice the black lettering to the lower right of the flag. This is the precise spot where the registration decals went. It would say, for example, “N483AA” Except, in this case it says “3MTA3 DJ.” The DJ part is for Def Jam records. The “3MTA3” means nothing…. until you hold it in front of a mirror.

Greg Norton, Grant Hart, and Bob Mould in 1984.

September 14, 2022

TODAY MARKS the fifth anniversary of the death of Grant Hart, drummer and co-vocalist of the Minneapolis trio Hüsker Dü. He passed away on September 14th, 2017, from liver cancer. He was 56.

I’ve been known, in my obsessive, not-at-all objective fan-boy opinion, to describe Grant as the greatest songwriter of the 1980s. While such statements are presumed to contain a measure of hyperbole, how much so is the question. The pantheon of 1980s songwriters is a formidable one. There’s Pat Fish and Billy Bragg. There’s the long-forgotten Roddy Frame. And Strummer and Jones, of course (most of whose brilliance had petered away by 1982 or so). Thinking as unbiasedly as I’m able to, I suppose I’d put Grant in third place, just behind Pat Fish (a.k.a the Jazz Butcher, another of my heroes who died recently) and Bragg.

Grant’s old band-mate, Bob Mould, is somewhere on that list as well. Although Mould ended up more famous, and continues making music to this day, it’s hard to argue that Grant wasn’t the more talented songwriter, if not the more prolific one. Perhaps ironically, among Grant’s finest moments are his backing vocals at the end of one of Mould’s best songs, “Divide and Conquer,” from the Flip Your Wig album in 1985. He almost steals it away.

Grant Hart’s greatest hits…

“Terms of Psychic Warfare”
“Pink Turns to Blue”
“It’s Not Funny Anymore”
“Books About UFOs”
“Keep Hanging On”
“Diane”
“The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill”
“Standing by the Sea”
“Turn on the News”
“She’s a Woman (And Now He is a Man)”

Subject to change, depending on my mood. If you’re unfamiliar and curious, you can do the YouTube thing and have a listen.

That final one on the list, I’ve always felt, rests as Grant’s most under-appreciated song. It’s also the last song I ever saw Hüsker Dü perform live, at a club called Toad’s, in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1987. He later sang a delicate acoustic version (a recording of which is one of my most treasured possessions), the last time I saw him play, in Boston around twelve years ago.

I was fortunate to meet Grant on several occasions, the first time in 1983, and I corresponded with him occasionally over the last couple of years of his life. Always gregarious, kind and accommodating, he even lent quotes to a few of my posts. I was a co-executive producer of “Every Everything,” the Gorman Bechard documentary about Grant’s life and work.

I could go on. I’ll finish with a small memory from a night in 1984. I was with some friends at a nightclub called The Living Room, in Providence, Rhode Island, standing in the parking lot just outside. Grant was there, feeding pieces of cheese to a stray dog. He’d hold out the pieces, one by one, raising his arm a little bit each time. And the dog would keep jumping, higher and higher, as everyone watched and laughed.

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Hüsker Dü photo by Daniel Corrigan.
Grant Hart thumbnail photo by Naomi Petersen.

October 8, 2021

IT’S WITH CONSIDERABLE shock and sadness that we mark the passing of Pat Fish, the Oxford-educated musician better known to fans worldwide as the Jazz Butcher. He died unexpectedly on October 5th, of causes yet unknown but rumored to be related to sleep apnea. He was sixty-four.

You’ve never heard of the Jazz Butcher. That’s all right, nobody has, for all intents and purposes. There’s that annoying expression, “cult following,” and seldom has it been more apropos, for better or worse, than here. Pat’s music wasn’t widely known, but for those who discovered him, it was like finding buried treasure. You don’t simply like the Jazz Butcher; you love the Jazz Butcher.

I certainly do. For me it began in 1991. I’d heard the name tossed around once or twice, but knew almost nothing about him. I’d been a devotee of underground for years already, which gives you an idea of how unknown this guy was, at least on these shores. Then one night, at a friend’s apartment in Brighton, Massachusetts, I spied a cassette tape of an album called “Bloody Nonsense,” and asked to borrow it. I believe it was the song “Rain” that I first latched on to. I never returned the cassette, and I have it still. Thirty years later my obsession with Pat’s music has barely diminished. Pat Fish is my favorite singer-songwriter of all time.

I can’t really describe what he sounds like. I guess it’s the music a wickedly bright and clever guitarist would make, slightly inebriated, and always spiced with a sly but upbeat sense of humor.

Pat was never a pop star because, as one fan described it perfectly on his tribute page, the music world simply had no idea what to do with him. Into what category could this man possibly fit — this fearlessly idiosyncratic, troubadouring punk rock gentleman who studied philosophy and refused to scowl? Punk? Post-punk? Mainstream pop? It was all of that, from thrashers to ballads to drinking songs. But never in a pretentious or throw-away style. Even his quirkiest cuts were — how else to put it? — serious. A novelty song like “Love Kittens,” when you really listen to it, is actually a finely crafted gem. Which brings us to another annoying expression: “art rock.” I suppose this comes the closest. But traditionally this label connotes the moody and dour. Pat wasn’t like that. This was art rock for happy people.

From the author’s compact disc collection.

I once made a list of every Jazz Butcher song that includes a lyrical reference to animals. I came up with sixty-two. He’s also responsible for the only cover version of the Modern Lovers’ classic “Roadrunner” that I ever could stand.

How many albums did Pat release? Beats me. There are so many complications, re-releases and whatnot in his canon that they’re hard to quantify. All I know for sure is there are more Jazz Butcher records in my collection than those of any other artist (including Husker Du, yes). The photo above shows about half of them. If you want somewhere to start, I’d recommend the Draining the Glass collection.

Somewhere in that discography, too, is a tragically neglected album called This is Sumo, from a short-lived band called Sumosonic, in which Pat shared vocal and guitar duties. I almost hate bringing this up, because I don’t want to de-emphasize Pat’s legacy as the Jazz Butcher, but this record, for all its obscurity, is a masterpiece.

The picture up at the top, from the back of the Big Questions album, is my favorite shot of Pat. There’s something quintessential about it; the guitar, the smile, the sneaky insouciance. It’s a photo you can just about hear. The framed poster that hangs in my office room, partially visible in this photo, was stolen from the window of a club called Tramp’s, on 21st Street in Manhattan, in May of 1992. I own a setlist from that tour as well, on which Pat drew the letters “o” in the shape of small hearts.

I came to know Pat a little bit through Facebook. He was always good enough to answer my questions. Beyond that, I knew him only as a musician, not as a friend — so much as those things are necessarily the same and completely different. We can only assume he was as kind, funny, and dazzlingly interesting as his music.

This sucks. Most of my heroes are dead now. Grant Hart, Joe Strummer, Spalding Gray, Vonnegut. But this might be the heaviest gut-punch of all. It’s just not fair. Our condolences to Pat’s family, his galaxy of friends, and to his longtime collaborator Max Eider.

A toast to the Jazz Butcher, in three parts….

SOUTHERN MARK SMITH
SOUL HAPPY HOUR
KEEPING THE CURTAINS CLOSED