Best Things Ever #19 Monty Python’s Life of Brian

In deference to its subject matter, this started out as a nice little article about Monty Python's Life of Brian, but then it got silly and went off on a tangent.

Best Things Ever

#19 Monty Python’s Life of Brian

Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow 

ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals! 

Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals! 

Brian: You're all different! 

Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different! 

Man in crowd: I'm not...

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the true test of great comedy is in its repeat-ability. By that measure, Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a strong candidate for greatest comedy film of all time.

There is hardly a line in Life of Brian that doesn’t bare repeating. While other films, This is Spinal Tap, Withnail & I, Airplane etc.,  can boast of dozens of one liners, most films don’t step beyond the boundaries of the one liner. As a teenager, I was part of a clique that practically communicated in comedy one liners from a dozen films and TV series. Yet the strength of Monty Python was always in their finely crafted sketches and the Life of Brain script represents the Pythons at the top of their game. Virtually every scene is comedy gold and each of our clique had two or three sketches memorised that we would real off for the amusement of each other, like singing karaoke or bashing out the chords to our favourite songs on the guitar. My specialty was always, ‘Crucifixion’s a Doddle’. That and, ‘I Want to Have Babies’.

Beyond its repeatability though, Life of Brian is as good as it is because of its ability to interchange between ribbing religion and side swipes at the mentality of certain sections of 1970s Britain. One has only to think of Michael Palin chained to the wall in Pilate’s prison, shouting ‘nail ‘em up I say’ in reference to crucifixion and see the obvious parallels, even today, to the sections of the media that still want hanging brought back in this country, not out of a sense of justice but because of a thirst, a lust for blood. Or spot the same hypocrisies in the Daily Mail’s recent headlines about unions campaigning for paedophiles in the 1970s, while at the same time carrying countless pictures of underage girls in bikinis on their website. The Daily Mail: For the Self-Hating Paedophile.

Yet Life of Brian as much ridicules the left of the 20^th century. I read somewhere recently that when those on the left talk, they do so in a circle. The problem is that they stand in the same direction when they start firing. The schism between the People’s Front of Judea and the ‘fucking Judean People’s Front’, a hatred way and above the hatred felt for the Romans, perfectly parodies this situation (cf. The Spanish Civil War, where the fascists won because the leftist factions were too busy fighting each other):

Brothers, brothers! We should be struggling together!

We are! Oh!

We mustn't fight each other! Surely, we should be united against the common enemy!

The Judean People's Front?!

No, no, the Romans!

Life of Brain found itself in a lot of trouble for poking fun at religion and is still banned in a number of countries. Yet if Monty Python makes religion look silly that’s because religion kind of is silly. There is nothing in Life of Brain that shouldn’t be obvious to most people, but offense is taken in reminding the faithful that religion is silly, the elephant in the room to which most religious people don’t want attention to be drawn. Likely, it has as much to do with the fact that the one time we do see Jesus, at the beginning of the film, it’s during his Sermon on the Mount speech, which is one of the many bits of the teachings of Christ that you’re supposed to put as far from your mind as possible. If Christianity actually paid attention to the vast majority of the things Christ is purported to have said then Christianity as a for-profit organisation would be unable to function. After all, Christianity is a church dedicated to a man who said don’t go to church. Silly, see.

I’ve heard Anglican clergy that have expressed a love for Monty Python, even for certain sections of Life of Brian, but not for the end, because there’s nothing funny about crucifixion, especially when Christ was crucified. But was he? After all, Acts of the Apostles states that Christ was nailed to a tree and the Book of Galatians says he was hung and then thrown into a tree. The image of Christ crucified is a fairly recent innovation in the history of Christianity. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the fourteenth century, the pilgrims always refer to Christ as the man who was nailed to a tree. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus was tied to a stake and left in the desert to die (or was it yesterdie? – an old Goon Show joke, aw thank yew).

In the original texts, the word translated as crucifix could refer to a number of different punishments meted out by the Romans. I have heard it said that no one was ever crucified using the Latin cross, but rather the Tau or T-shaped cross. The Latin cross was purely ceremonial but impractical compared to the simpler Tau cross, which required less heavy timber. The Latin Cross was a pagan symbol and hanging a cross around your neck is therefore no more appropriate than wearing a pentangle.

There’s also something very fishy about Christ’s crying out at the point of death. Aside from Matthew, Mark and John all giving different versions of what Jesus actually shouted (My God, My God, why hast though forsaken me; Father, I commend myself to your spirit; and, It is done, respectively), the cause of death in crucifixion is by asphyxiation. You suffocate to death due to the fact that all the weight of the body is placed on the chest and lungs. So how could he cry out? Did he fake his death? Did he not come to Earth as a mortal man and was just taking the piss? Or are the gospels just fairy stories, expanded and refined over a century of retelling through the oral tradition, like the tales of Odysseus and the other heroes of Greek myth?

In one sense, Jesus is just another Greek hero. The popular image of Jesus in western art bears no relation to the historical man, if indeed he existed at all. The man we see is in actuality Apollo, the Greek and Roman God of the Sun, reflected by the disc of gold seen behind his head. The Greeks portrayed their gods as having long hair in order to show them as wealthy, in opposition to the shaved heads worn by slaves. Jesus would probably have worn prayer curls at the temples (as demanded by Leviticus, something the Religious Right don’t seem as keen on enforcing as bans on homosexuality). However, the rest of the hair on the head would have been short or shaved.

The Jesus story, including his parents fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod, is very much a retelling of the story of the birth of Apollo and his sister, Artemis, whose mother, Leda, was raped by Zeus and then had to flee the jealous rage of his sister-wife, Hera (as with much of the Bible, the Jesus story is a Greek myth with all of the women excised). And even the name Jesus is a Latinisation of a Greek name Iesous. But ‘Jesus’ was Jewish, so his name would have been Joshua. Ergo, the Jesus so revered in western tradition is really the pagan Sun God, Apollo.

James George Frazer in The Golden Bough notes that in The Gospel According to Luke the soldiers who beat Jesus and place the crown of thorns on his head are described as being Herod’s men. They therefore would all have been Jewish, putting a whole new spin on their mocking of Jesus as The King of the Jews. Frazer believed that rather than being commensurate to the Jewish Passover, the crucifixion took place during the Jewish festival of Haman, a Babylonian ritual or passion play brought back from their time as slaves in Babylonia.

Frazer identified in the crucifixion elements of a Mock King ritual, where one man would be sacrificed to the corn gods, whilst another, the Barabbas (a ceremonial title), would be set free to be executed the following year. Frazer thought that rather than Jesus being special, the ritual was carried out every year during the festival of Haman and Jesus, a troublesome Rabbi who wished to reform Judaism, was brought up on trumped up charges and ritually executed. His theories have a certain ring of truth about them, but who knows how close he came.

The irony here is that Frazer also notes that the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis was never meant to be taken as a literal event that actually happened, but rather an allegory designed to stop child sacrifice amongst the Israelites, a practice which was common in the Middle East and elsewhere at that time. If Frazer’s theories have any truth to them, then it seems Judaism returned to this common practice later on.

(James Joyce puns on Frazer’s Abraham/Isaac theory in the opening page of Finnegans Wake: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac – in other words, before animal sacrifice had replaced the bland/commonplace practice of kings sacrificing their own children.)

All in all then, given the lack of a clear method of execution mentioned in the Bible, the Latin cross not used as a method of execution, the parallels to Greek mythology, the doubtfulness of the descriptions found in the Gospels, as well as James George Frazer’s speculations on the Gospel accounts, I think we’re on pretty safe ground to sing, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ from atop a couple of dozen crucifixes. As with most cries of ‘blasphemy’, what those shouting really want is for no one to think for themselves and have the bleeding obvious pointed out to them. Without frequent recourse to the Church’s various inquisitions, Chrstianity (as I prefer to call it) wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

Life of Brian is also a meta film, a film poking fun at other films about religion and the time of the Romans. ‘I’m Brian and so’s my wife’ is a brilliant parody of ‘I’m Spartacus’. Or the quintessentially British notion of a petty argument about noses going on in the background of one of the most important events in religious scripture (The Sermon on the Mount). If Tom Stoppard had written Life of Brian it would be considered art rather than comedy. Indeed, there is more than a little of Becket and Brecht in Life of Brian. Despite employing an alien space battle as a deus ex machina at one point, which I’ve always suspected was shoehorned in to give Terry Gilliam something to play with, Life of Brian is in many ways the Python’s most serious film as well as their funniest.

Life of Brain is a great film and a great British film exactly because it is so iconoclastic. British comedy, British life in general, has always been about poking fun at authority figures. In the same way that Londoners stood on the banks of the Thames in 1834 to watch and cheer as the Houses of Parliament burned down, so Monty Python gleefully send up religion and politics and British life.

Left to the film industry, Life of Brian would never have been made. It was considered too controversial. Thankfully, George Harrison financed the film and gave birth to Handmade Films in the process, which also came to make Withnail & I, one of the few films that gets anywhere near Life of Brain in terms of quote-ability (I’ll come back to Withnail & I in a later article). The Beatles were falling apart just as the Pythons were coming together. It’s satisfying that it was a Beatle that helped the Pythons stay together just a little longer (although they’d essentially gone their separate ways by this point). The Pythons occupy the same place in the annals of comedy that the Beatles occupy in music.

I rewatched Life of Brian before writing this piece and despite knowing just about every word from start to finish, I was still giggling to myself even as I repeated the lines like repeating the catechism at church. A love of comedy is quite like a fervour for religion. The only difference between religion and comedy is that comedy doesn’t mind admitting that it’s silly.

Get it done.

Best Things Ever #18 Bill Hicks: Rant in E-Minor

Today we mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks. 

Best Things Ever #18

Bill Hicks: Rant in E-Minor

“Bill Hicks, blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a gun around. Pay attention to Rant in E Minor, it is a major work, as important as Lenny Bruce's. He will correct your vision. His life was cut short by cancer, though he did leave his tools here. Others will drive on the road he built. Long may his records rant even though he can't.”

          Tom Waits

Twenty years ago this month, the comedian Bill Hicks died of pancreatic cancer at the tragically young age of 32. Three years later in 1997, two posthumous album were released by Rykodisc: Arizona Bay and Rant in E-Minor. In this article I am going to concentrate on Rant in E Minor, which I consider to be both the greatest comedy album and the greatest spoken word album of all time.

The material for Rant in E Minor was recorded at the Laff Stop Comedy Club in Austin, Texas in March and October 1993 and at Coobs, San Francisco in July of the same year. Unlike the albums Dangerous and Relentless that were released during Bill’s lifetime, Rant in E Minor, as well as Arizona Bay, presents the material in the form of chapter points rather than as a traditional live comedy album. It’s more like a concept album, the live material interspersed with musical interludes performed by Bill and his producer and childhood friend, Kevin Booth.

I’ve always found the music on Arizona Bay to be somewhat intrusive, though it’s still a good album (it’s a Bill Hicks album). With Rant in E Minor though, the music is pitched perfectly and serves to divide the seventy five minute album into a series of movements or acts.

The other thing to say about Rant in E Minor is that most of the material included is unique to this one album. There have been a number of subsequent albums released, as well as countless bootlegs of other Bill Hicks’s gigs, which all have significant overlap between them. Yet aside from the bootleg of his final gig at Igby’s, which does include some of the material featured on Rant in E Minor, it’s a pretty unique set list. Even the Igby’s set contains many well-worn routines that you won’t find on Rant in E Minor.

Rant in E Minor is Bill Hicks at his bravest, his angriest, his most free and his most engaging. The material from the later recordings at the Laff Stop was recorded when he knew he was ill and any pretence that Bill was holding back at all is gone. To hear him screaming at his audience, “You fucking morons, you fucking morons.” is cathartic. As Hicks himself says:

“That’s what this is all about, man. It’s supposed to be a fucking catharsis, man, you know. It’s supposed to be a release from the fucking daily grind.”

In that catharsis, Hicks takes aim at the anti-abortion lobby, Christianity, Billy Ray Cyrus, the perpetrators of the raid on the Waco complex, including Bill Clinton and Janet Reno, homophobia in the military, women who defend abusive partners and Rush Limbaugh. One of the reasons that the comedy of Bill Hicks stands the test the time is both because of the universality of it content matter, but also, depressingly, because of how little seems to have changed and how much has come full circle in twenty years. If Bill was alive today, instead of riffing about hosting a TV show called, ‘Let’s Hunt and Kill Bill Ray Cyrus’ it would be have to be called, ‘Let’s Hunt and Kill Miley Cyrus (with special guest, Robin Thicke)’. Rush Limbaugh is still allowed a platform from which to spout his moronic opinions. The show Cops has been replaced by a thousand and one equally fascistic “reality TV” programs and rather than senselessly slaughtering women and children in Waco, Texas, it is instead in Pakistan and the Yemen that women and children are gunned down with drones by executioners who never leave the comfort of their armchair in some military base in the desert wilds of the United States, or have the decency to look their victims once in the eye.

I think Bill Hicks would be appalled at the level to which soldiers have been elevated to the level of heroes, protectors of freedom, even as they are used as instruments of brute terror and blunt force to destroy freedom in favour of corporate profit. He was never one to shy away from criticism of the military, questioning why a suicide bomber was a coward but firing Cruise missiles from a ship hundreds of miles away in the Gulf was a heroic act. In dealing with the issue of gay people serving in the armed forces, Hicks says:

“Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in... I don’t care how many sit ups you can do, put on a helmet, go wait in that fox-hole, we’ll tell you when we need you to kill somebody.”

Now, I’m sure that Bill didn’t really mean a lot of the things he said but, like Jonathan Swift, used extreme views to present certain arguments as reducio ad absurdium, as well as a way to get laughs. My parents met in the Royal Navy and I exist because of the armed forces, so I tend to give serving personal the benefit of the doubt that they are merely following orders and they simply trust that those orders are given in good faith. Yet I don’t think there is anything particularly heroic about following orders, especially when the Nuremberg Trials established that “I was only following orders” is not a valid defence (although Nuremberg also established the invasion of another sovereign state to be the supreme international crime under law, but that doesn’t seem to stop us).

For all the supposed threat from Al Qaida in the last decade or so, the simple fact of the matter is that the most successful terrorist organisation in the last hundred years is the CIA. More coups against democratic regimes and more loss of innocent life than Al Qaida could ever even dream of taking. They kill thousands, we kill hundreds of thousands in retaliation. In America the repeated mantra is, “Support the troops, they protect your freedom. “ If you need protecting, you are not free. And all that all this killing really achieves is to intensify the level of retaliation that will be visited upon your children after the empire falls. You would think that the richest country in the world would have at least grasped the basic fact that all debts get called in eventually. That’s karma, man. It’s also the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Bill’s routine on gays in the military manages to correct one of the niggles I have with his early routines, especially on Dangerous and Sane Man, where his material is somewhat homophobic (although he did out George Michael several years before George’s own actions did it for him). Again, this could simply be a matter of taking things to extremes for deliberate comic effect. I like when graphic images of gay sex are used as a weapon against homophobes and other fatheads, so Hicks’s observation that Rush Limbaugh reminds him of “one of those gay guys who likes to lay in a tub while other men pee on him.” is especially brilliant. Although it gets too graphic for me when he comes to the part about Barbara Bush unrolling her flaccid labia, then shitting in Limbaugh’s mouth. Then I have to skip forward.

I’ve described Rant in E Minor as my favourite spoken word album, as well as my favourite comedy album, because as funny as Rant in E Minor is, it also represents Bill Hicks at his most philosophical. The power of comedy is in its repeatability and yet with Rant in E Minor there are so many lines that are as much like stanzas from Dylan’s It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) as anything else and worth listening to whenever you are feeling down or need a call to action. As well as his comments on catharsis, one further example will suffice here:

“The argument doesn’t work with me Flapjack. Go back to your fucking crackerjack lifestyle and I’ll meet you at the evolution bell curve. I’ll be sitting there awhile, it’s kind of a tortoise and the hare story.”

Many comedians and sitcoms can make me laugh till I cry, even after I know every word, but there is only Rant in E Minor that can make me actually cry. To hear Bill talk about thinking about taking his own life, but not having the balls to do it, and to realise that in that instant he is facing up to his mortality and the fact that he is going to die is heart breaking to hear. He’d struggled to build an audience in his home country, but was a star across the Atlantic. He was about to have his own TV show for real in Britain and died right on the cusp of major success. On that day, the world lost a true comedy genius.

In many ways, Bill Hick was a visionary and a man ahead of his time. Some of his material, like his alter-ego, Pan the Randy Goat-Boy, was considered extreme at the time. His honest discussions of his use of pornography were not applauded by all and yet to listen to many comedians these days, his comedy seems somewhat mild by comparison. The ubiquity of the internet, it seems, has made us more voyeuristic and more cruel.

If you read Agent of Evolution, the Bill Hicks biography consisting of interviews with the people who knew him, you see that there were elements of his life about which he didn’t talk openly (like visiting brothels and experimenting with just about every drug yet invented, not just the fashionable ones). He could go too far sometimes, but there was also as much that he held back. Compare that with, say, the average Doug Stanhope routine, where very little is censored or held back. I love Doug Stanhope, by the way.

There has been a lot written about Hicks in the media in this twentieth anniversary week, especially by other comedians. He has been lauded as a fine comedian, but some question his elevation to the level of Messiah. I don’t think Hicks was the Messiah, but I do think that some art and artists transcend the medium in which they exist. Was Shakespeare just another playwright? Is the Mona Lisa just another portrait? When Billie Holiday sang Strange Fruit to hushed audiences, was that just another artist singing another jazz standard?

There’s nothing wrong with being a comedian, making people laugh is a fine way to make a living, but it doesn’t mean that some comedians can’t transcend comedy. Bill Hicks wasn’t/isn’t the Messiah but with the greatest respect to many other comedians that I listen to and love, neither was Bill Hicks just another comedian. He was somewhere halfway between comedian and Messiah and his genius in no way devalues the comedy of others, only drags it up by its bootstraps. If you want to realise the potential of stand-up comedy, listen to Rant in E Minor.

It’s hard to say what Bill Hicks would be doing if he were alive today, 52 and grumpier than ever, but I like to imagine him having his own weekly podcast. Anyone who listens to Greg Proops’s podcast, The Smartest Man in the World, can get a sense of what that might have sounded like. Proops has his own style, his own rhythms and way of doing things, but he also channels the spirit of Bill Hicks, frequently citing Hicks as the bravest comedian he ever saw. The Smartest Man in the World is one of the highlights of my week and I can highly recommend it.

It’s useless to dwell on what might have been, only what is. Bill Hicks died too young, but his comedy lives on through his recorded material. Rant in E Minor is his crowning achievement and remains a call to action against hopelessness. If he could be this funny and thought provoking as he was dying, imagine what we can achieve even as we live.

Get it done.

See also (click link)

Best Things Ever #8 Roadmaps for the Soul: The Music of Bill Hicks

In Appreciation of Captain Beefheart

Today, Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart

In Appreciation of Captain Beefheart

The first year of the millennium found me working at a temp job with a girl who would become my girlfriend during the course of the contract. There was only the two of us working in the room, so she brought in a tape deck and we would take turns to play music for each other. As we listened to The Kinks, The Beatles, The Clash, Stones, Elastica, Joy Division and Dylan (even Bill Hicks and Eddie Izzard), we’d also talk music to while away the hours.

One day the conversation turned to Captain Beefheart and how neither of us knew much about him, except that ‘Trout Mask Replica’ was supposed to be a masterpiece that sounded like white noise when you first heard it. We ended up driving to the local library that lunchtime to see if they had it. They did, but the CD was out and someone had it reserved for when it came back. I ended up buying a copy from HMV after work and putting it on tape for the next day.

She was either hung over or hadn’t got much sleep the night before, but what I remember is her with her head cradled in her hands, begging me to turn it off because it was making her brain bleed. She’d lasted twenty minutes into an hour and twenty minute long album.

Someone once told me that if you’re going to be drinking mixed spirits, like rum and coke, you should always have the first one neat. This will make every subsequent drink taste mild by contrast. I mention this only because the comparison with Captain Beefheart’s back catalogue is apt. Listening to ‘Trout Mask Replica’ first renders everything else the Captain did mild by comparison. ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is a masterpiece by a twisted genius, who kept his band under cult-like conditions in a house in the suburbs of LA for eight months, where they were made to practice the tortuously complicated compositions for fourteen hours a day. On coming to record the album, produced by Frank Zappa, the majority of the music was recorded in one four and a half hour session.

‘Trout Mask Replica’ is a difficult album, full of free jazz and irregular rhythms and off key horns. Not being a musician, the only thing I can compare it to is that perennial favourite of mine, the novel ‘Finnegans Wake’. The first time through it simply makes no sense and even by the tenth, the hundredth time even, parts of it will remain bafflingly obscure forever. Like jazz, you have to learn to speak a new musical language in listening to Beefheart. ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is like a Latin primer for everything that sits around it. I read somewhere that ‘Dachau Blues’ is the song you play at the end of a party when you want to get rid of the last stragglers. I agree. A masterpiece to be sure, but fourteen years after first hearing it, ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is a still a masterpiece I have to be in a very particular mood to be able to listen to.

It’s only the first shot of the evening though. If you can survive ‘Trout Mask Replica’ then you’re well on your way to appreciating Captain Beefheart’s genius. His first two albums, ‘Safe As Milk’ and ‘Strictly Personal’ almost sound like typical 60s pop records when placed next to his third. Almost. ‘I’m Glad’ could be a Motown single, but with ‘Ah Feel Like Acid’ and ‘Electricity’ we’re in more familiar Beefheart territory. What makes his music unlike almost any other artist in musical history is Beefheart’s refusal to conform to anything like a regular rhythm. His music rarely does what is expected of it. Even reggae isn’t as offbeat as Beefheart.

The first couple of offerings are as near to mainstream as anything Beefheart ever recorded, mixing blues, rhythm and blues and 60s psychedelia. His dig at the Beatles and Rolling Stones in ‘Beatle Bones ‘N’ Smokin’ Stones’ (“strawberry moth; strawberry caterpillar strawberry butterfly; strawberry fields”) signified the change that was about to occur.

After ‘Trout Mask Replica’, he never looked back. ‘Lick My Decals Off Baby’ is almost a continuation and again I have to be in the mood. Yet, ‘The Spotlight Kid’, ‘Clear Spot’ and especially, ‘Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)’ are extraordinary albums that can lift the mood in a heartbeat. Boy bands and a thousand and one guitar orientated rock clones send the workforce somnambulistically to production line office death camps for the soul. Try listening to ‘Bat Chain Puller’, ‘When I See Mommy I Feel Like a Mummy’, ‘Sun Zoom Spark’ on your way to work and see how long it is before you despair of your situation. I doubt many ‘X-Factor’ contestants who sang ‘Run Paint Run Run’ or ‘Big Eyed Beans From Venus’ would get through the auditions, or whatever it is they do. I don’t know, I’ve never seen ‘X-Factor’. I have thumbs.

Tom Waits’s fans subdivide his back catalogue into two eras, the one before he heard Captain Beefheart, and the period after he heard Captain Beefheart. The Captain’s influence on his music is obvious and it is revolutionary, for which we have to thank Waits’s wife, Kathleen Brennan, who got him deeper into Beefheart (Waits and Beefheart shared a manager in the 70s). Waits released some great albums pre-Beefheart, like ‘Blue Valentine’ and the live album ‘Nighthawks at the Diner’, where he’s virtually channelling the spirit of Jack Kerouac. Since1983’s ‘Swordfishtrombones’ up to 2011’s ‘Bad As Me’ inclusive, Waits has been on another level. In recent years, he has eclipsed even Dylan as my favourite recording artist. The influence of no-one else seeps through to his music quite like Captain Beefheart.

Beyond Waits, Beefheart’s influence is wide. You can hear ghosts of his rhythms in many ‘Talking Heads’ albums, particularly ‘New Feeling’ and ‘Psycho Killer’ from their debut, ‘Talking Heads: 77’. ‘Beck’ and ‘The White Strips’ have covered songs by Captain Beefheart. You also hear his influence in much of ‘The Fall’. It’s what makes ‘The Fall’ so great, Mark E Mark the Mancunian Beefheart (compare, ‘Who Makes the Nazis?’ with ‘Dachau Blues’). He even recorded a version of ‘Beatle Bones ‘N’ Smokin’ Stones’ on one of their peerless performances for John Peel (see ‘The Complete Peel Sessions’ disc 5). Peel himself said, “If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of pop music, it’s Beefheart.”

Then there is Beefheart’s influence on PJ Harvey, a woman whom I can’t say enough about (though I had a go, see ‘The Sombrer Opacities of the Gloom’). Up until his death in December 2010, Harvey would send Beefheart advance copies of her albums. This fact alone makes her more boss than virtually any other artist alive. Her early albums are infused with Beefheart’s influence, but of all his musical godchildren, Harvey found her own way. PJ doesn’t stay still for very long and by the time of her own masterpiece, ‘Let England Shake’, very little trace of Beefheart remained.

In 2004, I saw former members of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band perform a full set of his tracks at the Manchester Bridgewater Hall. It wasn’t all that. Without the Captain’s effervescence, it felt like we were watching session musicians going through the motions. The middle section of the set was entirely instrumental. I saw a few hard core Beefheart fans walk out in vocal disgust. The real deal hadn’t recorded an album in over thirty years, not since 1982’s ‘Ice Cream for Cow’. His music never gained the widespread appeal it deserved and he abandoned the music industry for painting. He became a ‘recluse’ (a label used by journalists for people with who don’t want to talk to them). He’d also started to suffer symptoms from the onset of multiple sclerosis.

Sadly, as is often the way, it was only after the Captain’s death that I went back and discovered the rest of his back catalogue. ‘Trout Mask Replica’ should have opened to doors to discovery, but I was too engrossed by his disciples. We get where we need to be in the end. Now Beefheart is ingrained deep down in my soul. Safe as milk.

Get it done.

Best Things Ever #3 Highway 61 Revisited

No preamble, no pissing about, Ladies and Gentlemen...

Best Things Ever

#3 Highway 61 Revisited

ruce Springsteen described first hearing the opening snare shot of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ as sounding “like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind.” The first track on Bob Dylan’s 1965 album, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, is certainly a powerful statement of intent. That opening salvo expands outwards, like the illuminated initial letter of a medieval manuscript, heralding the arrival of the soon to be sneered opening words, “Once upon a time...” Few other rock n’ roll albums begin so perfectly.

“Once upon a time...” let’s us know exactly where we are. This is myth making country, the land of fairy tales, reinvention and the American Dream. Here do we find jugglers, clowns and mysterious tramps. Napoleon is in rags and the Cheshire Cat has become Siamese. As abstract to the remainder of the album, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ sets a chain of events in motion that spiral, snowball and roll all the way to the Desolation Row of its final track.

Movement plays a major role in the dynamic of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’. The real Highway 61 runs, or ran, from the Canadian border in the north to New Orleans in the south. Known as the ‘Blues Highway’, it was aptly named. Not only did Bessie Smith die in a car crash on a stretch of the road, but the intersection with Highway 49 is believed to be the mythical crossroads where Robert Johnson  made his legendary pact with the devil. Elvis grew up on a housing project not far away and it was in a motel off the Memphis leg where Martin Luther King Jnr was assassinated in 1968. 

Highway 61 also ran past Duluth and Hibbing, two nondescript towns in Minnesota. The former gave birth to Bob Dylan, the later served as his childhood home. To the young Dylan, Highway 61 must have seemed like an escape route, a road to freedom from small town America. In a country where the automobile is king, the highway is a powerful symbol of liberation. ‘Highway 61 Revisited‘ is an album about liberation, with parallels to both Woody Gutherie’s ‘Bound for Glory’ and Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’.
 

The twin themes of momentum and transience run through the lyrics like tarmac. The action is observed from both Buick 6 and mailtrain. Miss Lonely’s inertia transports her to the gutter like a rolling stone. The lyrics are peppered with sword swallowers, clowns, midgets and myriad circus freaks, the circus being the embodiment of nomadic transience. In the title track, there is but one response to any dilemma: head down to Highway 61. There everything is allowed. There the failures of the past are forgotten.

Much has been made of the comparison between the title track and Wilfred Owen’s, ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’. In his poem, Owen gives a modern retelling of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son to Jehovah. Yet unlike the biblical version, where Jehovah sends an angel to stay Abraham’s hand at the last possible moment, Owen’s version has a very different ending: 

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ is a denunciation of the killing fields of the First World War. The first verse of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ follows a similar vein:

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61." 

On March 8^th 1965, the United States deployed 3,500 troops to South Vietnam. By December that year, the number had increased to over 200,000. ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ was released on August 30^th 1965 and resonates with references to war, past, present and future.

In the final verse of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, we see the roving gambler trying to create the next world war and finding a promoter to help him. In a country where public opinion is everything, US politicians and the mainstream media have a history of carefully manipulating public perception to promote the benefits of war. Vietnam was the first television war and, contrary to the revisionism practiced by some historical commentators, the American media continued to support the war until it was obvious just how unpopular the conflict had become. Even today, Vietnam is denounced in many quarters not as an invasion that cost the lives of as many as four million Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotians, where more tons of TNT was dropped than by all sides during World War Two, but as the country’s first defeat.

In ‘Tombstone Blues’, we hear of the king of the Philistines who, ‘fattens the slaves and sends them out to the jungle’. A disproportionate amount of African-Americans, descendants of the slaves, were sent to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. Highway 61 bisects the United States like the civil rights movement that was dividing the country at the tiime. The opening lines of ‘Desolation Row’, “They’re selling postcards of the hanging” recalls the sickening practice of photographing and selling souvenirs of the lynchings of black men, women and children, even in Dylan’s home town. African-Americans could be sent to die for their country, but not to expect anything to have changed when, if, they came home.

‘From A Buick 6’ reads like the tale of someone trying to dodge the draft. He’s being hidden by his girl (could be his ‘mamma’ but given Dylan’s repeated use of the word, seems more likely to refer to a girlfriend). If he should die, his simple request is that she should put a blanket on his bed (again, this could be his mother, repeating a ritual dating back to childhood):

Well, if I go down dyin’, you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed.

The word “bound” in the refrain has a double meaning, like ‘determined’ in Richard III’s, “determined to prove a villain.” The woman bound is obliged to put a blanket on his bed, but there is the doubt that she might forget. The jaunty, blues feel of ‘From A Buick 6’ detracts from the grim imagery. The idea of needing a shovel and a dump truck to deal with the dead puts one in mind of WWII and the extermination camps.

One can compare the whole of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ to ‘Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream’, a track from the other album he released in ’65, ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ is ‘Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream’ writ large. The walls between fantasy and reality, past, present and future break down. A cavalcade of characters, both real and fictional, swell the lyrics, a kingdom for a stage, with princes (and princesses) to act: Einstein and Galileo, Ma Rainey and Beethoven, Romeo and Ophelia, Paul Revere, Jack the Ripper, Abraham, Cain and Abel, The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Jack the Ripper, John the Baptist and F. Scott Fitzgerald (not to mention Woody Guthrie, Kerouac and Rimbaud, who haunt the album without ever receiving recognition). By comparison, Dylan’s next album, ‘Blonde on Blonde’, mentions only Shakespeare by name.

Then, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ is a very different beast even to its immediate predecessor. There are no love songs of the kind to be found on ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. No ‘She Belongs to Me’ or ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’. ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’ comes closest, but even here our hero is on the run from love (“Don’t my gal look fine, when she’s comin’ after me?). The characters of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ are all escaping from the past or find themselves in situations not of their own devising: Poverty, skid row, the cops, death, addiction and the draft.

As much transient movement as there is on the album, it is all ultimately futile. The action begins in New York City and it ends in New York City, via Highway 61 and Juarez in Mexico, to form a Dantean circle of hell. The rolling stone that began tumbling during the opening track by the end has come crashing down to Desolation Row. The same note of bitterness which opens proceedings, brings matters to a close:

“Don’t send me no more letters, no, not unless you mail them from Desolation Row.”

In the year of the album’s release, Dylan faced accusations that he had abandoned the protests songs of his folk era for the bright lights of mainstream electric guitar music. While it is true that ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ represents Dylan’s first wholly electric album (excluding the eleven minutes of ‘Desolation Row’), the irony is that the album is one of Dylan’s most politicised works. Sure, it doesn’t contain the sledgehammer subtlety of previous compositions like ‘Masters of War’, ‘With God on Our Side’ or ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, but politics, gender and race abound on ‘Highway 61 Revisited’.

Dylan had matured as a song writer, become more nuanced, and the harsh black and white texturing of his folk songs just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. With an electric guitar in hand and a band to back him, Dylan broke forth into glorious Technicolor. ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ represents his most vivid composition.

Get it done.

See Also (click link)

Bringing It All Back Home

Bringing It All Back Home

Now, if you were any kind of devotee of my writing (and you’re not, please stop lying to yourself <humour, it’s all good, please relax), you would notice that there is an omission from my occasional series of glibly titled fanboy pieces, ‘Best Things Ever’. #1 deals with Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and #2 with the elixir of life that is tea, but then it jumps to #4 Joyce’s Eveline and #5 ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. What, I don’t here you ask, happened to #3?

#3 was meant to be about the Bob Dylan album, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, but I got stuck. Back then (and notice I don’t say ‘back in the day’ here, because people who say ‘back in the day’ should be shot through the throat so that they can never say it again), I hadn’t really got the hang of the mechanics of writing and if things didn’t immediately work out the way I wanted, I became disheartened and gave up. Thankfully things are a lot better today. Sort of.

Anyway, at some point I decided to complicate matters and write not just one piece about ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, but two more pieces about the albums which preceded and followed it, ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ and ‘Blonde on Blonde’ , which to me constitute the three greatest albums ever recorded in a row.

Over the next three days, I’m going to publish written pieces relating to each of those albums. Tomorrow, finally, will be unveiled my article on ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ (which is now written), followed by something slightly different relating to ‘Blonde on Blonde’ on Saturday.

For today, I present the one review I actually finished at the time, the one about ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. I’ve left it pretty much as it was written at the time, with some minor edits. It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever written, but is published here in order to contrast with tomorrow’s much delayed offering.

Cheers.

Bringing It All Back Home

To understand the impact of Bringing It All Home, it has to be seen in context to Dylan’s previous releases. For fans and critics alike, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and especially The Time They Are A Changin’ were proclamations of a generation’s disenfranchisement with the established order. With Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War and A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall; With God on Our Side, Only a Pawn in Their Game and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, Dylan vocalised what many were thinking and saying . He was seen as spokesman for disaffected youth in America. He was only in his early twenties himself. The issues of racism, inequality and questionable war that had already dominated the 60’s, and which would continue to do so throughout the decade, were all to be found here. And like his hero, Woody Gutherie, a guitar and harmonica were all that Bob Dylan needed to arm himself with.

With his next release, Another Side of Bob Dylan, it appeared that he had all but abandoned social commentary. It was a more light hearted Dylan that emerged. His ability to put a fresh twist on the traditional love song was further illustrated with masterpieces like It Ain’t Me Babe and Spanish Harlem Incident. But the gaps were filled with far jokier tales, interspersed with giggles mid verse. Already he had tired of the presumption that he was somehow the property of the folk and civil rights movements. The chorus of My Back Pages, ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now’, seemed a direct rebuke to that assumption.

It was against this backdrop that Bringing It All Back Home was released. The first two chords of Subterranean Homesick Blues, like the false start of 115 Dream, seemed to issue a warning. I’ll write politicised lyrics, Dylan was saying, but it’s gonna cost you. The first bend of the lead guitar reveals what that price was. The first half of Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan plays with a full band. He’d done so before, but for never more than a track or two.

At the time there was outrage. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems like a small price to pay. A full band added a new dimension to Dylan’s song writing. The title of the album is a reference to The Beatles. Chuck Berry, Elvis and others had popularised rock n’ roll in America, but it had become stale. The Beatles reinvented and returned it across the Atlantic. Their example galvanised Dylan to look again at a style he had toyed with and rejected as a teenager. Now he grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and threw out some of the most important songs ever written. From the surreal and the abstract, to the romantic and bitter, to the anthemic and the empowering, Bringing It All Back Home is a tour de force which has only ever been matched by Dylan himself.

She Belongs To Me and Love Minus Zero/No Limit are love songs of extraordinary beauty and imagery. The former tells of a woman with the power to bend men to her will. She is free and emancipated. In the later, nothing is expected of the lover and yet she exceeds all expectations. Cliched romantic gestures don’t fool her and yet she’s soft and feminine enough to desire intimacy.

Maggie’s Farm is reminiscent of the great socialist novels of John Steinbeck, like The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle. In Outlaw Blues, Dylan imagines being on some Australian mountain range, foreshadowing his retreat from public life, two years later. The lyric, She’s a brown skinned women, but I love her all the same, must has seemed repulsive to a deeply segregated America.

Side one ends with Bob Dylan’s 115 Dream. Here he is at the height of his creativity. The barriers between past and future;  fiction and reality break down. A melting pot of ideas which mirrors the ethnic mix of the city in which the action takes place. Like his later epics, the lyrics are littered with a cavalcade of characters. Captain Ahab (or Arab) and Columbus, French women and English men. And yet the most hostile reaction the hobo sailor receives is from a house displaying the stars and stripes. Indeed, penetrate the abstract imagery and you find a damming indictment of the hostility and selfishness of American society.

If side one is fact paced and energy packed, then side two is literally the reverse. The rhythm section have departed and Dylan is left all but alone. Four songs, twenty two minutes in length. Mr Tambourine Man, remains a favourite among fans and occasional subscribers alike. The verses seem to stretch on forever, giving a feeling of time standing still. The effect perfectly portrays the sense of being stoned.

In Garden of Eden, the acoustic guitar pounds out cords which accompany lyrics that themselves are like a sledgehammer hitting the words home. And unlike the desolation row of the following album, everybody wants to get into the garden.

My favourite song on the album, probably my favourite Dylan song of all, is It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). Like Subterranean Homesick Blues, it’s lyrics are packed full of life affirming aphorisms:

Advertising signs  that con you into thinking you’re the one, that can do what’s never been done, that can win what’s never been won, meantime life outside goes on all around you. 

Old lady judges watch people in pairs, limited in sex they dare, to push fake morals, insult and stare, while money doesn’t talk it swears, obscenity who really cares, propaganda, all is phoney.

It deserves to be played every morning to remind one not to take life to seriously. Given his more recent guise as a salesman for lattes and red wine, perhaps Dylan should be made to listen to it himself on a regular basis. Live, he still plays it regularly. The line, But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked is always guaranteed to be received by a cheer. The first time I saw him live was the same week that President Dubya was in London and it seemed all the more poignant.

The album ends, as Highway 61 Revisited begins, with a tale of a girl turned vagabond. It could almost be a prequel to Like A Rolling Stone, but whereas the later is heavy with bitterness and sarcasm, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, is more tender and regretful. A fait accompli, that the narrator wishes wasn’t so.

Dylan had moved on and it was up to his fans to catch him up. He would never entirely abandon the unaccompanied strumming of his first few albums, but from hereon the energy of rock n’ roll would be the last piece in the puzzle. The style that he had developed in isolation meant that when he came to play with a band, he rarely explained to the other musicians what was meant to happen. This is perfectly exemplified in 115 Dream’s false start. It leant an edge to the performances and set the tone for everything that was to follow. In chaos, it seems, genius emerges.

Get it done.

See Also (click on links)

Best Things Ever #6: All Along the Watchtower

Best Things Ever #8: The Music of Bill Hicks

Three in a Row

Best Things Ever #17 Star Trek: Deep Space 9

Another late blog entry, but this one's about four month's late. Sometimes writing something new can be like trying to find the open end on a roll of sellotape, you run your nail over and over the surface, but it just won't catch. Today, finally, I found the edge I'd been missing. Enjoy!

Best Things Ever

#17 Star Trek: Deep Space 9

I recently watched again the entire seven season run of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (DS9). It certainly has some flaws, too many below par episodes, especially in the first couple of series, too much of the kind clunky expositional dialogue that would today be handled by a ‘Previously on…’ montage at the front of each episode.

That said, DS9 can boast of having produced the two greatest episodes of any Star Trek spin off, namely, ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ and ‘Far Beyond the Stars’. It can also boast of the finest ship, captain and crew. For a few minor imperfections, it remains not just my favourite Star Trek franchise, but one of my favourite TV shows of all time.

Like all Star Trek spin offs, DS9 centres on the adventure of Starfleet, the exploratory and  military wing of the Federation of Planets, an alliance of galactic races, with its headquarters on Earth. What differentiates DS9 from all other series is rather than take place on a Federation starship, usually one incarnation or another of the USS Enterprise, DS9 takes place on the eponymous space station from which the series takes its name. Deep Space 9 is a recently abandoned ore processing plant around the planet of Bajor, built and operated by the Cardassians, a brutal race who until recently had occupied the planet for over fifty year, forcing the Bajorans into slavery.

Other Star Trek series take place in a controlled environment on board a starship. In DS9, the Bajoran provisional government has asked for the Federation’s help in rebuilding their society after half a century of brutality and Starfleet sends Commander (later Captain) Benjamin Sisko to assume control of the station, commanding a crew comprising a mixture of Starfleet and Bajoran personnel.

Sisko’s second in command is Major Kera Nerys, a former member of the Bajoran Resistance. Kera believes that the Federation has no place being there, that the Bajorans have replaced one kind of occupation for another, and she and Sisko lock horns at regular intervals.

DS9 not only features characters that are not affiliated to Starfleet, but characters who are not affiliated to anyone. There’s Quark, the Ferengi barkeeper, whose shady dealings see him continual conflict with Odo, the station’s shape-shifting head of security. Odo’s own origins are something of a mystery. The thrust and parry of repartee between Odo and Quark is one of the highlights of the show.

Indeed, it’s the banter between characters that sets DS9 apart from Star Trek’s other incarnations. On board a starship, dominated by the chain of command, conflict between rank and file officers is almost always in absentia. The bashing of heads between Sisko and Kira, Quark’s  scheming under Odo’s nose, the intrigues of the station’s only Cardassian resident, Garak, as he spins a web of half-truths for the entertainment of an impressionable Doctor Bashir, give the programme its strength. There’s even conflict between Starfleet personnel, with Bashir seemingly oblivious to how much he annoys Chief of Operations, Miles O’Brien (a transfer from the Enterprise and Star Trek: The Next Generation). Their emerging bromance played out over seven seasons is as another of the show’s strengths.

The advantage of setting the series on a space station, rather than dicking about in space (the crew of the Next Generation spent seven years ferrying diplomats about, rarely ‘boldly going’ anywhere), is its potential for longer story arcs. In the feature length opening episode, the crew of DS9 discover a stable wormhole in the Bajoran sector, allowing safe passage to the other side of the galaxy.

It is the wormhole that is the real star of DS9. Everything salient which happens during the series is generated by the wormhole. It offers safe, stable passage, because it was constructed by a race of aliens that live inside it and outside of time. To the Bajoran people the wormhole aliens are gods, The Prophets, and Sisko, in discovering the wormhole and making first contact with them, comes to be adopted as their Emissary, The Sisko, revered as a religious leader by the Bajoran people. It’s basically a mediation upon religious life in America, as Star Trek has always been a meditation upon America’s place in the world (compare Klingon tradition with that of Japan for instance).

The wormhole also generates DS9’s great threat (sustained threat, as it is titled in film classifications). The Dominion, a despotic empire governing great expanses of the other side of the wormhole, the Gamma Quadrant, grow tired of ships coming through from the Alpha Quadrant and declare war on the Federation. They invade the Alpha Quadrant, occupy worlds, subsume civilisations. Deep Space 9 stands on the frontline in this war and the Federation’s increasingly futile situation leads its crew into areas darker than Star Trek had hitherto explored, aside from its occasional forays into the so-called Mirror Universe.

In what is for me the greatest episode of any Star Trek series, ‘In the Pale Moonlight’, Captain Sisko recounts how he came to bring the Romulans into war, turning the tide in favour of the Federation. The course of his downward spiral from trying to find evidence of a Dominion attack upon Romulus, to manufacturing that evidence for himself, to becoming embroiled in the terrorist attack which finally brings the Romulans into the war is brilliantly done, especially the ending. The episode shows war stripped of its usual veneer of false dichotomy, good and evil, us and them, and shows how even the best of us can fall so quickly from grace. The road to hell, as Sisko reminds us, is paved with good intentions.

What differentiates DS9 from most other sci-fi shows of recent years, most television of recent years, is its ability to tackle contemporary events. The best science fiction has always been about contemporary issues and fears, removed to another time and space in order to be considered with some degree of objectivity. We see this in the fears about science and technology evinced in ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Brave New World’, the anti-communist paranoia of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, or the anxieties about thermonuclear annihilation in much of the original ‘Twilight Zone’.

By showing Sisko fabricate reasons to bring the Romulans into the war, ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ recalls the events of Pearl Harbour. I’m far from being a conspiracy theorist, but it does seem to me clear that public opinion in America at the time of World War Two was firmly against entering another costly war (as it had been during  the First World War, hence the promotion of the infamous Zimmerman Telegram) and a plan was concocted to goad the Japanese into an attack, precipitating reasons for America’s entry into the war. Documents released under Freedom of Information show an eight point plan to bring the Japanese into the war through military hazing and out and out attack.

Whether or not you think this was ultimately a necessary evil or not is of course down to personal opinion. It seems to me fairly pointless to speculate on what might have been. Far more important to clarify what did happen, in order to apply the mistakes of the past to the future. Certainly with the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Vietnam War or Iraq’s phantom weapons of mass destruction, the need even to encourage an attack has been superseded by false reporting and fear mongering. ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ reminds us that war is rarely anything but ugly and messy.

In fact, what strikes one as surprising about DS9 is just when it was first aired. The series was originally broadcast from 1993-1999, ending two years before the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Yet so much of what makes DS9 enthralling is its treatment of the kinds of issues that we have had to deal with in the west as a consequence of those attacks. Section 31, the shadowy subsection of Starfleet security, is basically the NSA. The rule of law is suspended for dubious reasons (Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges - At a time of war, the law falls silent). Those who were once considered terrorists are called freedom fighters now that they are resolved to our cause.

One of the chief writers on DS9 was Ronald D. Moore, who would go on to captain the ‘Battlestar Galactica’ reboot. ‘Battlestar Galactica’ in particular reflects the aftermath of 9/11 and the consequences of the so-called War on Terror. What I think makes ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ an especially fine episode is that, retrospectively, you can see in it the entire premise for ‘Battlestar Galactica’ being framed. ‘Battlestar Galactica’ contains all of the same tough questions, the same shades of grey as the DS9 episode, magnified a hundred fold to include suicide bombing, torture and extraordinary rendition. It, more than any other science fiction programme in the last fifty years, is a show about contemporary events. It’s science fiction for people who hate science fiction, stripped of any the usual time travelling, doppelgangers or parallel universes. There are robots though. Lots and lots of robots. It’s also about the only science fiction programme that is actually better than DS9 (though the radio version of ‘The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ is obviously the best thing that has ever been made by anyone, ever).

DS9 is proper science fiction and so there are plenty of time travelling episodes, as well as forays into the Mirror Universe, imposters and doppelgangers, even a nod to ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ in ‘Suspicions’, a personal favourite from the early series. The show was made at a time when model shots were slowly being replaced with cheaper CGI effects and so DS9 can boast of more high energy battle scenes than any of its previous incarnations. These invariably feature DS9’s own heavily armed battleship, the USS Defiant. Tough little ship.

The show even had a real life romance behind the scenes between Doctor Bashir (Alexander Siddig)and Major Kera (Nana Visitor). On occasion, signs of a relationship break the surface, as they do an early scene in the episode, ‘Rejoined’, where the body language between the two is highly suggestive. When Visitor later became pregnant, the show incorporated her pregnancy into the show in a way that only science fiction is capable.

DS9 also has Worf. Once Lieutenant Commander Worf transfers from the Enterprise at the start of season four, the show ascends to a whole new plateau of awesomeness.

Ultimately though, what makes DS9 stand out from all of the other Star Trek franchises is Captain Sisko. This is why I could never live with Sheldon Cooper of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ (apart from all the other reasons): When asked to chose between Captains Kirk and Picard, I would have to Kobayashi Maru his ass and go with Sisko. Sisko has many of the qualities of both of his predecessors, but no other character in the Star Trek universe came to have such depth. Not only is he commander of Deep Space 9, Emissary to the Prophets and imperfect human being who sometimes makes the wrong decisions for the right reasons (or the right decisions for the wrong reasons), but he is also a single father and a strong, leading black character in a genre with a poor record of relegating black actors to bit parts, if including them at all. 

This is why I nominate ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ as second only to ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ for strongest episode in the history of Star Trek. In this episode, Sisko suffers from a hallucination in which he is a writer living in 1950s America. His alter-ego, Benny Russell, writes a short story about his real self, an African-American captain in charge of a space station. The publishers of his magazine though won’t accept the story, even when he makes the whole thing a dream in the final reveal.

The remit of the original Star Trek series was that of a nations working and living together in harmony. It’s a scenario borne in the optimism of the 1960s. With each new incarnation, Star Trek became something different, from the obsession with external threats in the Star Trek movies of the paranoid 70s and 80s, to the touchy-feelyness of The Next Generation with its on-board ship’s counsellor. By the time of DS9, there was very little optimism left in the world. Parts of the United States saw racial segregation at levels little improved since the 1960s and DS9, in the finest tradition of science fiction, dealt with the issue head-on. 

(Someone should, if they haven’t already, write a dissertation on the history of black characters in science fiction. From Uhura as telephone receptionist in the original Star Trek to Uhura as ass kicking love interest in the big screen reboot, taking in Dave Lister, Morpheus and Martha Jones along the way. I would read that.)

I love the symbolism of baseball in the show, a sport which hasn’t been played in two centuries, but which Sisko and his son, Jake, are obsessed with. It’s amazing how many times baseball can be employed in different contexts, from its use by Sisko in the opening episode to explain the concept of linear time to the wormhole aliens, to Jake’s quest in, ‘In the Cards’ to procure for his father a Willie Mays baseball card, to Michael Dorn, usually heavily made-up in the Klingon prosthetics of Worf, playing a barely concealed version of Willie Mays himself in ‘Far Beyond the Stars’. Sisko bonds with his future wife, Cassidy Yates, over baseball, and the presence or absence of a baseball on Sisko’s desk can speak volumes about his future intentions.

Star Trek creator, Gene Rodenberry, died a little more than a year before DS9 first aired in January 1993 (Rodenberry died October 1991). By all accounts, he would not have approved of the dark turn that Star Trek’s newest franchise had taken. A pity, but the world has moved on since 1966. Even since 1987, when The Next Generation first aired. DS9 signposted the way to a darker television dawn, past ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and ‘24’, all the way to ‘The Wire’ and ‘Breaking Bad’.

Truly great science fiction television seems to be on something of a hiatus for the moment. All the money is being ploughed into fantasy drama like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘The Walking Dead’ (which is fine, they’re both excellent shows). Before New Line made ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, they were going to adapt Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series. I hope someone still does, along with Clive Barker’s ‘Weaveworld’, one of the best fantasy novels of the twentieth century (see also, ‘Imajica’). Science fiction will eventually come back with a vengeance. One hopes that Peter Capaldi will inject some much needed darkness into the cloying sentimentality that has infected Doctor Who since its reboot.

In the meantime, there’s always DS9 reruns. Little else pleases me more.

Get it Done.