Sam Shepard, and qualities past compare

Shepard & Lange by Bruce Weber, 1984

I wish someone had told me Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange broke up, because I’m nearly sure that, oh, thirty years ago or whatever, their getting together was the chief reason I started to believe in romantic love. Of course you have to grow up sometime, and I’d have missed a big point about Shepard’s celebrated writing if I clung too close to a comforting shadow. But then you may perhaps recall the special allure of the Shepard/Lange story.

Circa 1981, he was married, but not happy. (In a poem of the period he wrote feelingly, ‘I’ve about seen/ all the nose jobs / capped teeth / and silly-cone tits / I can handle // I’m heading back to my natural woman.’ This was reproduced in a book to which we will shortly turn, and next to a photo of his first wife...) As for Lange, she had a daughter (named Shura!) from another relationship (with Mikhail Baryshnikov!). But then she and Shepard crossed paths, and that was that. ‘No man I've ever met compares to Sam in terms of maleness’, Lange was quoted a few years down the line. Patti Smith, a former Shepard flame, had formed a similar impression: ‘He was just everything that one could want... he had this animal magnetism. It was almost visceral... He was born for rock n' roll.’

That’s a very high bar to set in terms of ‘maleness’; and I just can’t think of a man who wouldn’t be impressed by these estimations, coming from such estimable women. But here’s what really got me dreamy about the Shepard-Lange fandango. In an interview he gave to The Face around 1984 – which took place in some diner, likely close to the locations for a movie he was making with Lange called Country – the reporter recorded Shepard noticing Lange pass outside the window, maybe 20 yards or so away, whereupon he pushed open a slat in the window (one of those windows, see) and shouted for her to come over and give him a kiss. Playfully she fended his request away for some moments, but he kept imploring, unabashed, and at last she sashayed his way, and he tried to lean out the window, only those damn slats proved too obstructive. So Shepard spend a minute or so wheedling a slat right out of its frame. So he could lean out and Lange could give him a kiss. Which she then did.

Now, we should all have that kind of relationship: it’s what God wants.

As late as 2010 Shepard was telling the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr that he and Lange’s relationship was ‘tumultuous’: ‘Yeah, well, we're definitely an incredible match. But, you know, not without fireworks… although at this point, you know, she's the only woman I could live with... What other woman would put up with me?’ Now it appears as if the relationship may well have been over when that interview took place. Must all things change, et cetera?

I found out this distressing news from googling about after reading a Paris Review interview with Shepard about his craft, which, like every Paris Review writer’s Q&A I’ve ever read, is utterly superb and constitutes a lesson in how and why to write.Shepard, it has to be said, is a more striking and compelling figure of a man – has led a rather more intriguing life – than the average scribe; and it’s a very easy thing to get pulled into his laconic, reticent telling of the way he’s gone about things.(Consider, too, this fine Details interview with Jeff Gordinier in which Shepard's  very succinctly right reflection on what age will do (‘It’s crazy, you know. Time is just nuts’) leads him without fuss into an anecdote about resuming his friendship and working relationship with Patti Smith, including a recording of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on which Shepard played guitar, which is quite a thing.)

In fact, the more I think about Shepard, the more I feel as if he’s been – if not everything to me – then a very great many things.

(i) Frances (1982) was one of the first grown-up movies I saw, and aside from being generally impressed by its grit and pathos, I felt about the 'chemistry' between Shepard and Lange the way people talk – and I appreciate but don’t see – about Bogart and Bacall (since Bogart was no pin-up, whereas Shepard in his prime looked... well, like Patti Smith said.) The Right Stuff (1984) drove this 'attractiveness' thing home. Of course Shepard has offered many great variations on why he never felt like being a movie star, turned down umpteen big films, quite often because he ‘couldn’t be bothered to take his shirt off.’ We should all be so lucky to be so unbothered.

(ii) When I was 13 I had a car-windscreen sticker stuck onto my schoolbag that read I ❤ Paris Texas: arguably the ineffective and yet greatest piece of movie marketing ever attempted. (Bravo, Palace Video.) And I can’t say the lads in the schoolyard were very impressed. But I really did love Paris Texas: adapted by Shepard from his book Motel Chronicles, and possibly the first ‘art movie’ I ever saw, and the one that sort of instructed me in the near-mesmerically uneventful rhythm of those kinds of pictures. One sort of knew it had been made by a foreigner, which also seemed to explain the presence of Nastassja Kinski. Yet it was equally clear to me that it was a Western; and that may be why for a few years I preferred Paris Texas to the kinds of Westerns that had cowboys in them.

(iii) On account of this Paris Texas love, I went out and bought my own copy of Motel Chronicles, possibly the first book I owned from the imprint of Faber and Faber. Young people have always got besotted by America because of its art, even terse and tough and non-ingratiating art such as Motel Chronicles, because wide open spaces under big skies where still one can connect nothing with nothing have their very own poetry. Motel Chronicles had that effect on me. (A dozen or so years later, once I had the extraordinary good fortune to be published by Faber and Faber myself, I learned about the key role in all this of the influential figure of Walter Donohue, who had worked with Shepard on the Paris Texas script, overseen the picture’s green-lighting at Film Four, and acquired Motel Chronicles for Faber once he took up an editor’s chair there. Like many things to do with Mr Donohue, that is another story. The main point is that a link to Faber must have been quite important for Shepard – because they published his hero, 'Mr Beckett'.

(iv) The first Shepard plays I saw were filmed versions, beginning with True West, on television, starring the Chicago Steppenwolf boys, Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.(Shepard has called Malkovich – and I agree – ‘one of my favourite actors on stage because he is so outrageous. I mean, he just doesn’t give a shit.' And True West could instruct a young man how to write a play, if not necessarily a good one. As Shepard says of the play’s brothers: ‘I mean, basically they’re the same person. It’s just a split. I just wrote ’em as two characters, but they’re basically two conflicting parts of one person...')

Then came Robert Altman’s theatrical film of Fool for Love, which, you can see even by this trailer, wasn’t particularly good. But then Shepard was never sure about the play, which was sort of about him and Lange: ‘More than anything, falling in love causes a certain female thing in a man to manifest, oddly enough’, he told Paris Review. ‘I had mixed feelings about it when I finished. Part of me looks at Fool for Love and says, This is great, and part of me says, This is really corny. This is a quasi-realistic melodrama. It’s still not satisfying...’

(v) The play of his I finally got to see on stage was Lie of the Mind, around 1987, at the Royal Court. It’s 25 years ago now but I can still see and hear in my head the stunning coup de theatre where Beth (Miranda Richardson), beaten half to hell by her husband and comatose since, sits up in her bed with a terrible shriek.

(vi) The first exchanges I had with Sean Penn over my effort to persuade him to approve my writing a book about his life and work were in autumn 2000, while he was rehearsing Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss in San Francisco, with Nick Nolte and Woody Harrelson. Sean raised his eyebrows when I told him the book might take as little as three months of his time, if it were done with passion. Three years later I was still dogging him around Marin County... And round that same time Harrelson explained to me why autumn 2000 was a testing time for Shepard, who had been drinking too much for a while, an illness that beset his father and which, by all those references to ripple wine in Motel Chronicles, the reader might have feared. This is what Harrelson said:

'Sam was going through some stuff. Within a week into it, Sam doesn’t even come to rehearsal. We all come in, he’s not there. Comes in the next day, he’d had some major deal with his heart... And the doctor’s told him he can’t smoke any more cigarettes, but – but [laughs] – a glass of wine in the evening can help to thin the blood, you know? Well, he didn’t know who he was dealing with... The good thing about Sam, even though he was smoking cigarettes like a fiend, he wasn’t drinking. Well, once the doctor opened that door for him, it was a whole different ball of wax...'

(vii) A musical score for Henry Moss was composed and performed on the stage by T-Bone Burnett, the brilliant songwriter-musician-producer who can even be forgiven for turning Bob Dylan on to Jesus. Back then I’d loved Burnett’s contributions to records like Elvis Costello’s King of America and The Golden Palominos’ Blast of Silence without putting down the money for his solo albums. The one I finally bought, quite recently, was The Tooth of Crime, a set of songs that he wrote originally for a mid-1990s staging of Shepard’s play about a war of style between two rockers young and old, Hoss and Crow. It’s a wonderful record and it puts you strongly in mind of the moods in Shepard’s work. This song is 'Dope Island.' 

(viii) And now it turns out that a whole new record of songs has been released, inspired by Motel Chronicles. It’s by The Dark Flowers and called Radioland. The Dark Flowers are a loose ensemble and for this project they’ve enlisted vocal talents ranging from Jim Kerr of Simple Minds and Peter Murphy, once of Bauhaus – bands I listened to before I even saw Frances – to Dot Allison and Catherine AD, whose work is held in high regard around this parish.

(ix) There’s a view that over the last 20 years Shepard has acted in more movies than have been useful to his productivity as a writer. Though I don’t think Shepard takes that view himself, and I am not qualified to comment. I do wish I had seen States of Shock, written around the time of the first Gulf War, and The God of Hell, which was timed for that year’s US presidential election. Maybe the chance will come again. I wouldn’t want to just read them, that’s for sure.

(x) In 2009 Shepard gave Paris Review some new vignettes in the style of Motel Chronicles, including the one known as ‘the one about Shania Twain.’ His voice is inimitable.

(xi) In 2010 he told Carole Cadwalladr: ‘The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness. All this stuff is happening. And yet it is not what you are after as a writer... there's this feeling… what is it, then? And, I guess, it's the writing itself which is important.’

(xii) And right at the front of this extract from a PBS documentary (below) we return to where it probably all began for Shepard, and where, as it happens, Shepard began for me, and for so many people: Shepard on his father, from Motel Chronicles.

Randy Newman and his audience

In April this year Randy Newman will enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in the company of Rush, Heart, and Public Enemy. (Custom has it that acts who are still alive perform at their induction: ‘I sure wouldn't want to follow any of them’, Newman told Rolling Stone, no doubt sincerely.) Newman has earned his place in that pantheon, for sure, and he knows it, and has always been clear-eyed about why the recognition has taken so long. ‘Rock critics are very Bolshevik’, he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999. ‘If you use the wrong chords, like any that aren’t in Led Zeppelin tunes, then forget it.’

It’s relatively recently, thus rather belatedly, that I began listening to Newman’s music – that is, buying the records of his well-regarded songs, as opposed to overhearing him on the musical scores of Pixar films that my children watch. And I say 'belatedly' because Randy Newman is meant to appeal to people like me. Y’know the type, (if you’ll forgive a slip into cod-Newman vernacular) – kind of liberal people, who got they’sel some culture, and a college education, so they think they smart.

Yes, a big part of Newman’s appeal is his sly, searching address to questions of history and politics, often with a grand reach, if always in an American accent. He tends to deal in mordancy and irony, his apparent concern with the sheer badness of the world, the human animal's compulsively appalling behaviour. The tone tends to be lamenting; and wherever he seems to exult, you sense he intends you to shudder in discomfort. With an artist as brilliant and productive as Newman it's well-nigh fruitless to pass some political-propriety meter over the work and ask ‘Which side is he really on? What does he really feel?’ The songs thrive on ambiguity and contradiction like art is meant to, and even when Newman is going all-out to be cold and unfeeling – and he usually is – still, you’re meant to feel it.

It does take a sort of genius to attempt, with affection, a refutation of Marx – as Newman does in 'The World Isn’t Fair' – by twinning a music-hall jaunt through young Karl’s intellectual formation with Newman’s own well-heeled, late-life, ageing-dad experience of taking his kids to a new school and marvelling at the yummy mummies (‘just like countesses, empresses, movie stars and queens’) who are squired by ‘men much like me / Froggish men, unpleasant to see / Were you to kiss one, Karl / Nary a prince would there be.’) This clip isn't the best for sound quality, but you get a lot about Newman's gift for being the seemingly reluctant raconteur from his longish spoken intro.

Newman’s pride in his own achievement with that song is clear in this quite brilliant interview with Paul Zollo, which should be read by anyone with an interest in the craft of songwriting and scoring. If Newman considers The World Isn't Fair to be 'about the best song I ever wrote', still he's instantly self-critical about its construction ('It’s like one long verse. It doesn’t get to a tonic, or something. It never stops...). But he also comes around to telling Zollo pretty clearly what he really feels about it, such that maybe not a great deal more needs saying:

"It’s a giant subject in as few words as could be done... The guy in “The World Isn’t Fair” is interesting as a character. He’s glad. It’s me. I’m glad the world isn’t fair. I’m glad that Marx was wrong. In a way, you know. I’ve been very lucky. And yet, I’m not that happy about it. [Laughs]" 

Here's what I would add. One bonus of coming late to the Newman oeuvre is that I can pick and choose from recorded versions of the songs just as if I was some Wagner buff deciding whether Solti's Ring is more worthy of my £24 than Karajan's. A couple weeks ago (sorry, Newman cadences again...) I downloaded a range of his tunes from across the pair of sets he released in 2011: Live in London, recorded in 2008 at the LSO St. Luke’s, where Newman was backed by the BBC Concert Orchestra; and Volume II of The Randy Newman Songbook, in which he revisits his old tunes in the studio on solo piano.

Why Live in London, not, say, Paris, New York, Amsterdam? As ‘Rand’ told Rolling Stone, ‘I'm always surprised when I go to England and they think so highly of me in terms as a writer.’ They certainly do. There’s a fair bit of delighted crowd noise on the record, rightly so, though I find one could wish people didn’t feel the urge to emit a showy kind of laugh at Newman’s mordant zinger-lines, much like the way the National Theatre crowd still pretend to crack up at Shakespeare’s comedies.

When, for instance, Newman plays 'A Few Words in Defense of Our Country' from 2008 – in which he laments the waning American imperium, and makes a carefully derisory defence of the outgoing Bush presidency against its worldwide detractors by dint of some arch references to a few more atrocious leaders from the annals – well, you would expect a London audience to lap that up, and they sure do. But I suppose it's part of the pleasure of the night out - the ticket price and the babysitter and all that - and Newman plays up to it. As he told Zollo: 

'If you’re offensive and it isn’t clear that you’re joking or it isn’t clear that you know what you’re doing, you lose the audience. People in my audiences at shows know I’m joking. But a lot of people don’t get the joke.' 

So it's important to Newman's audience as to him that they stay on the right side of 'the joke'. Updating his very astute appreciation of Newman in Mystery Train back in 1975, Greil Marcus agonised somewhat over the success Newman achieved with his Good Old Boys record and the subsequent concert tour in which he delighted a growing audience. Performance and acclaim, Marcus thought, coarsened one’s feeling for the fineness of what Newman had achieved on record. ‘A Wedding in Cherokee County’, about the impotence of a backwoods farmer, evoked not winces but laughter from a crowd who’d paid their money and wanted their wicked fun. And Marcus saw Newman complicit in this, not just by how he put the song across but in his droll spoken preambles: 'He promised that the song was a joke, that its characters were jokes, and that their predicament was something those smart enough to buy tickets to a Randy Newman concert could take as a freakshow staged for their personal amusement.' 

Would Marcus be so tough on Newman and his audience today? Maybe so, maybe not, since we are, let's face it, all a little bit older. Anyhow, don’t get me wrong, I still relish Newman's brilliant tunes, whoever's chortling all over them, and I’m glad I bought these new downloads, and Live in London is really swell, the orchestra are terrific. But if I had to take one disc to the desert island I would spend the £11 on the Songbook Volume II. The one off that I keep playing is 'My Life is Good', which typifies one Newman style, as defined by Robert Christgau, of 'targeting a privileged class that explicitly includes the artiste.' This clipped version below is from younger days, but he plays it much the same as on Songbook Vol. II. And of the barroom whoops that greet his mordant zingers? All I'd say is that they sound a little more agreeable coming from a smaller audience...

'Balancing Acts' revisited

This morning I read a comment piece by Martin Kettle in the Guardian, in praise (a little overstated, in my view) of the present Home Secretary’s accomplishments to date. I then gritted my teeth and scrolled through some of the readers’ Comments. They weren’t, altogether, so bad. But one of the bad ones – who tried to contend that the Guardian has no sane and cogent writers on its books, just Kettle on the right of Labour and Polly Toynbee on the left, balancing/cancelling one another by their commensurate wrongness – reminded me of someone... yes, the late muckraker Alexander Cockburn, who wrote the following in the Nation on October 27 1984, having thrown aside his New York Times in despair at the Reaganaut fervour of William Safire followed so hard upon by the dead liberal hand of Anthony Lewis:

  

This is what Op-Ed intellectual discourse has got us into. So long as you can strike some sort of ‘balance’ it doesn’t matter that on one end of the seesaw sits a man saying things that in a rational world would have him held by doctors for observation...

So I didn’t agree with that Guardian Commenter, see – just as I didn’t agree much with Alexander Cockburn, at least in the later years. And yet the conviction they had in common seemed to rise up again like a rank odour when I saw the guest list for tonight’s BBC Question Time, onto which the show's entertaining bookers had shoehorned – alongside the now customary comedian – the Guardian’s Zoe Williams and the Telegraph’s James Delingpole. Christ alive. And you wonder why you never hear a decent argument on that show? Evidently they make it incoherent on purpose. And presumably people still watch. I don’t think I can manage that now, not after Harry Enfield’s rightly praised parody, which took out the show’s middle stump with a fairly straight and medium-paced delivery.

David Stacton: He did it his way

David Stacton 1923-1968

Last Saturday the Guardian Review kindly published a longish piece of mine about the late American novelist David Stacton, a swathe of whose novels I’ve recently reissued as Faber Finds. 

It’s always a pleasure to occupy the Guardian’s retrospective 'Re-Readings' slot (I was last there with this piece on Yukio Mishima’s The Seaof Fertility) and it's a good fit for for me since, for better or worse, I tend now to re-read rather more than I read...

David Stacton is a rare and strange and special case, and certainly the sort of writer about whom one wants to spread the word. As I say in the piece, his subjects included Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Lord Nelson and Ludwig of Bavaria, Cardinal Richlieu and Axel Oxenstierna, Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. And I just don’t believe you can read that without getting at least a little bit curious.

In describing Stacton as an ‘ambitious’ novelist – in the creative rather than career sense – I want very much to stress the inspiring example he still offers to those who would write fiction. In an age of so much teaching of creative writing, so much focus on storytelling conventions, on shaping personal experience into 'pitching your book', bringing the story to market and building the author’s career/brand – the whole industry now devoted to realising the novels often thought to lie inside each one of us… it’s useful, now and then, to be reminded of a writer who set out to do grand and astounding and unconventional things on a page, beyond even his own ken, and without first asking anyone’s permission.

I certainly don't mean to say that writers don't benefit greatly from skilled tutelage and/or by extending themselves to the imagined reader - only that once in a while it's good to have someone around who makes it up pretty much all by themselves.

Stacton’s incredible productivity was such that you have to believe he loved writing (or felt bound to it) as much as any scribe who ever lived. Certainly it’s difficult to imagine there was any time when he wasn’t deeply immersed in writing a book or else researching it. Rewriting was probably as distressing for him as it is for most working novelists, but he brought it on himself: he had the exceedingly common writer’s self-delusion that his next project would be relatively ‘short’ and delivered on time, but his ambitions simply didn’t tend that way. 

As he wrote or edited he always kept one or more grand and enthralling project on his horizon simultaneously. When I sifted Stacton’s archived correspondence with his Faber editor, the great Charles Monteith - whom he was very fortunate to have as his champion - I laughed aloud to read Stacton mentioning almost off-handedly to Monteith, ‘I thought recently it would be fun to take the Popes on whole – a big book about their personal eccentricities...’ Big that certainly would have been. But had he lived longer he might have done it, you know. He did nearly everything else.

One last embroider on what I mention in the piece about Stacton’s mind being temperamentally inclined to bold patterns and designs – such that every novel had to form part of a trilogy on a theme, the trilogies themselves interlocking within the larger oeuvre... This is the mark of an artist who liked to set seals upon things. And in 1954, at the very outset of his relationship with Faber, Stacton sent the firm a ‘logotype’ he had drawn, an artful entwining of his initials, and asked that it be included as standard in the prelims of his novels (‘Can I be humoured about my colophon as a regular practice?’) 

A tad grand in one so young, perhaps - but Faber thought it worth obliging him, as have I with these new reissues, each of which bear the Stacton colophon as shown.

Economic Growth: Desperately seeking 'some thrilling and utterly unexpected change'

Cameron at Davos: (AP Photo/Keystone, Laurent Gillieron)

When I'm after some pointed comment on economics I often read Chris Dillow, the avowed Marxist who writes a column for Investor’s Chronicle and a blog (rather more noticeably Marxisant) called Stumbling and Mumbling. He posts a lot, always provocatively; but with the UK economy shrinking over another quarter – this piece from a US vantage in The Atlantic, ‘Britain's Economy Is a Disaster and Nobody Is Entirely Sure Why’, pretty well sums up the dismal mood - I'm reminded that I've kept revisiting a post on Dillow’s blog from August 2011, ‘The Growth Problem’, which still seems to these eyes to tell the whole predicament. There's no good bolthole for capital to flock to, the Eurozone isn’t buying, generous credit is for yesterday, the coming industries we ought to have nurtured and developed we lag hopelessly behind in, our austerity - whatever you make of its degree - isn’t working, because none of the conditions under which it’s worked previously are now present - and so on. Last week Dillow suggested he believes the economy is being further depressed by ‘irrational animal spirits that drive [investor] sentiment and capital spending.’

Another economics commentator I look to a lot is Merryn Somerset Webb at Money Week, who is not a Marxist, or at least I doubt she is. She ended 2012 on a note not so far from that Dillow sounded in 2011: 'It is perfectly obvious that, barring some thrilling and utterly unexpected change in our national circumstances, we should continue to be in a low growth environment for the foreseeable future. It is also pretty obvious that there isn’t much we can do about it.'

And there was me thinking I was a black pessimist... In the past I may have sounded sarky on this page about Ed Balls’ Five Point Plan, but then the leading critiques of it have argued that Balls isn’t indicating willingness to borrow/spend what it might take; and for various reasons, he’s not going to get a chance to do that. As for the government, I have in recent times been quite sympathetic to David Cameron’s arguments that the UK must ‘rebalance its economy’ and ‘pay its way in the world’, but now I think – trying to be charitable to myself – that I’ve been wasting my own time, talking a load of wishful rot. I guess these are nihilistic times. Here's to the surpassing of rock-bottom expectations, then - or else to that thrilling, bolt-out-of-the-blue change...