White Guys Playing Black Music (Part 5 of 5)

The following is an excerpt of a 20 January 2015 email from Will to Art.


"Langston Hughes" by Original uploader was Alsop1 at fr.wikipedia - Transferred from fr.wikipedia. 
Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

I guess there's a fifth type, which would maybe be when there's a mostly black band with a white sideman or two, but Arthur White isn't a sideman, so I've left that option out.

I've also left out all commentary because I'm more interested in yours.

The racial politics vary in all of these groups, of course. I'm wondering where you see Arthur's bands fitting in these continuities. It would make sense that The Sweet World would be an integrated group if Will sought out the best players in Detroit--it was a thriving time for rock, soul, and jazz.

I tend to imagine it as an integrated group, but also imagine that Arthur barely knows anybody in the band besides Will. It could be a breeding ground for racial tensions. We could go with an exploitative Will deliberately choosing all black musicians. It also could make a ton of sense that Will is just doesn't spend much time with black people and has more of a rock background and only hires white people. My hunch is that an integrated but very tense band makes the most sense.

Brand New Life is probably all white if we keep it down to a four-piece, just because Joe Lazarus and Fr Bernard are white, so that's math. There are still racial issues to explore. Arthur may be oblivious to them all, but Will might see a black sound as a commodity. Who knows. It seems like there has always been in America a controversy over whether white people who play music in a black style are paying a loving tribute that binds the whole country closer together or exploiting and robbing black people.

It seems like a tension we have to explore as we look at Farthington as a non-white Kurtz and maybe Steffi Humboldt as a female Marlowe who outdoes Kurtz. I guess Arthur is one part boat pilot and one part Russian sailor. Will is the office manager. Most of the musicians are the natives.

We are appropriating a ton of texts here, but I think a good guidebook as we throw Heart of Darkness in a blender is Langston Hughes' The Ways of White Folks, which really takes an alternatingly comical and sardonic look at the white attraction to the misguided white perception of blackness.

Will's Canon of Influences Countdown - #8

I was just thinking that a nice entry or series of entries for the blog might be a list of some of the records that have inspired the project directly or indirectly. Maybe we could each do a top ten!

8.  Innervisions by Stevie Wonder

Arthur White's Brand New Life at its best would sound like Stevie's writing on this album.  Or Talking Book, maybe.

The History of Arthur White: Brand New Life

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 2 January 2013.

Will moved Arthur back into the family home and spent a few months nursing Arthur back to health.

He saw Arthur's downfall as his own fault and decided that he would do a better job this time around fulfilling his promise to their mother. He went to their local parish and got the name of Fr. Bernard, a priest with a counseling degree who was an accomplished musician and started bringing him by the house to counsel Arthur. Fr. B also spent a lot of time talking with Will and helped him realize the mistakes he had made with the Sweet World. Will decided that if he helped Arthur put a band together with people he liked who were living good, Catholic lives, and if he held back the pressures of touring and recording, Arthur would be able to become the person he was meant to be. Arthur loved the idea and named the group Brand New Life, which Will modified to Arthur White's Brand New Life.

The early days of Brand New Life were some of the best Will and Arthur had together. Will rented a home in the country and moved the whole band in together. Everyone, even Will, went to daily mass. Everyone played music, cooked meals, did chores. After a while, Agniesczka even visited with the children. Will was able to keep an eye on the company, which helped resolve some tensions with Anthony, who was still angry that Will completely dropped out of the picture during The Sweet World days. Arthur especially bonded with Joe Lazarus, a guitar player and recovering drug addict. The two of them became accountability partners and, for the first time, Arthur had a male friend he could trust other than his brother. He and Arthur both took to their therapy of praying while making felt banners, and together they made the album cover for the first Brand New Life album. The band played softball with the Rockets and other Detroit bands, which Will loved because it gave him a chance to goof around with his old buddy Johnny Bee Badanjek.

The success of Brand New Life was a complicated blessing. Arthur's therapy and prayer life helped him so much that he not only regained his ability to return to the Sweet World almost at will, but he realized that the woman was the Virgin Mary and her child was the baby Jesus! Arthur's channel to the divine reopened, and this time around, Arthur could enter it as a healthy adult. The result was that by the time Arthur was supposed to make the second Brand New Life album, he was ready to make an album of prophecy about Christ's redemption of a fallen America--not at all the sort of record Will wanted the group to make. Will was like most Catholic Americans: he believed in a happy medium of heaven and earth in which heaven is the optional cherry on top of the sundae of a productive life. He was like parents who get their kids Catholic educations to get them into college--not heaven. Will would see Kierkegaard's ethical sphere as the highest acceptable sphere of existence, but the religious sphere is just nuts.

Somehow, he never once had an experience of God that disrupted his concrete view of reality even for a moment.

This Creepy Nihilistic Thing

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 29 May 2014.

Plot-wise, I feel like the Farthington stuff is really coming together.

Thief starring James Caan and Tuesday Weld

The problem I'm seeing is that it has in some ways crowded out the stories of Joe Lazarus, Arthur White's Brand New Life, and Will Witkowski. I don't want to undo any of the Farthington stuff; it's really good. I just want to figure out how to revise and reinsert a few things it has eclipsed.

Originally (and I think we disagreed on this one a bit), I really loved the idea that at some point, Arthur came really close to making the sort of music he was born to make. I saw Brand New Life being the first step in that process and an escape with Joe Lazarus being the closest he came to fulfilling it. Before Farthington, Will was the nemesis who crushed Arthur right when he was about to become the artist he was supposed to become.

The Farthington plot eclipses all that in a lot of ways, so we've got to figure out how to give its impact back. I really don't want to lose the idea that, at some point, Arthur almost became the artist he could have been. He won't stand up as a protagonist if we never feel that he could have been great. At the same time, that feeling we develop is something to make suspect, as the bit of heaven Arthur can show people on earth is only a faint glimmer of what heaven has in store for us. We should be torn between the idea of loving the bit of heaven we see through Arthur and the lesser thing rooted in the American Dream, lamenting that Arthur could have "made it."

So, I don't want to touch the Farthington plotline.

I just want to make room for an Arthur who almost made it and wasn't just a victim; a Joe Lazarus who almost saved Arthur and was dashed by failure; a Will who is the flawed but protective brother who tries to save Arthur from Carlton Farthington; and a Brand New Life that for a period sets Arthur on a positive path.

Reasserting these ideas may complicate the story a bit, but if we're thinking of five TV seasons, we need several ups and downs and some squirminess in terms of how the audience reads the characters.

I don't yet have a clear picture of how to reintegrate these pieces, but my hunch is that after Will rescues Arthur from Farthington and gets him his first treatment, Joe Lazarus helps bring Arthur back to his true form; Will then works with Joe to put Brand New Life together; Will sees the initial success and starts doing a bunch of dumb commercial stuff in his eagerness to make Arthur a star; and the tension that creates between Will and Joe drives Arthur back into the predatory hands of Farthington, who validates Arthur's vision and lures him into the heroic quest to save Iceland.

Maybe after Will kills Farthington, we think he's a good guy looking out for his brother. But then he has Arthur committed until the money runs out, at which points he dumps him on Linda. So maybe what looks like Will's heroic quest actually ends up being this creepy nihilistic thing...more like the end of Thief starring James Caan and Tuesday Weld.

The Comeback

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 22 December 2012.

The ending of Arthur White only works if it's comic, but there should be two tragic phases.

The first is Arthur succumbing to hubris, worshipping himself, and losing everything. The second is Will, through his best intentions, destroying Arthur.

I think we almost need to invent a new type of tragedy here...not tragedy of fate or tragedy of will but tragedy of culture...the culture of the American Dream. Of course, you've already pointed out Arthur Miller here. Just as a Willy Loman spared the American Dream would have been a talented and happy carpenter, an Arthur White spared the American Dream would have been a Therese of Lisieux.

Instead, he'll have to take the low road as a tortured, disfigured version of what he was made to be. I see the first round of tragedy as the anarchic individualism of the American Dream coming out of the sixties. I see the second round as the homogenizing effects of the American Dream of the mid-seventies and eighties.

I see Brand New Life as having two phases: a very happy, promising early phase, and then a convoluted mess phase...kind of like Love.

There have been something like 70 members of Love. There is the "real" Love from the first three albums (mediocre musicians who made great music), the second Love (outstanding musicians who made lame music), and then whomever Arthur Lee could find until he died. The last decent version was a group called Baby Lemonade who just did perfect covers of the original group's recordings.

I think Arthur White wants the right things out of life but finds little guidance until the early days of Brand New Life, which is full of fallen people on a path to redemption, like Joe Lazarus Sr.

Will thinks he wants the right things in life but doesn't. Still he pursues them like a faithful, disciplined soldier. Joe Jr. has no confidence in any sort of reality, and like Pilate asks, "What is Truth?" Agniesczka is a lioness who protects her kids first, then her husband; she is probably materialistic partly because she wants to protect her kids and partly because she's a little vain. Will isn't all that different: he likes to be known as his little brother's protector.

I see late-seventies Arthur being destroyed for doing the right things musically, and Will being a tragic figure for destroying something beautiful and holy out of a misguided faith in the American Dream.

The story of the last thirty years is that Arthur has pace been healing at a snail's pace, and, over the past year or so, has gotten to the point that he can play music again, recording it on cassette tapes in hopes of getting it to Joe Lazarus Sr.

It's a really sad, pathetic-seeming plan, but Arthur is responding to God's voice telling him to get this last album out to the public. He thinks Joe is the only one who will understand. Unfortunately, Joe is dead, which is even more pathetic. But God gets the tapes to Joe Jr., which can bring him healing and shape a new destiny for him.

For the past thirty years, Will has had to cope with Arthur.

At first, he had him committed so he wouldn't have to deal with him. Then he couldn't afford the bills, so his girlfriend, a nurse, said they could care for him at home. Will stuck her with him, and, as she cared for him, she was converted and left Will to join a convent. Will resented Arthur for that, but has seen the empty place his dream has led him to.  He's just about at that point where he is ready to admit his failures and repent. He just doesn't know how...

That's where the comeback comes in.

An Early Chronology of Songs (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 26 August 2012.

Arthur White's Apotheosis:

Not sure how this happens, but Arthur White loses his band and his family at this point.  The loss of The Sweet World occurs at the end (or perhaps before the end) of the Asian tour.  Thus in "Tokyo Nights," he muses: "Wonder if I could bail on the boys in the band."  Apotheosis is kind of like Hendrix's Band of Gypsies with maybe only a live album.

• Tokyo Nights
• Losing Game
• Tell Me Why (You Took Away My Children)

Asian spiritual odyssey (kind of like Richard Alpert/Ram Dass or Leonard Cohen): Burned by these losses, Arthur White tries to find solace in the spiritual, parting ways with the band after their show at the Budokan (perhaps he leaves between the first and second show).

• Arthur White Theme
• Centerstage
• Paradise Parade
• High Time
• Tryptych

Arthur White's Brand New Life

Whereas I personally would likely have gone with an austere Zen or Theravadin Buddhist monastic tradition, I think these are too imaginatively impoverished for Arthur White.  He gets embroiled in some arcane, convoluted cult run by some megalomaniac charlatan, ultimately signing over all his possessions, including his entire discography.

I see him having been asked to destroy his music because it is too worldly, but the cult double deals with him and actually holds onto the rights, thinking they may be valuable later.  He does eventually get out, but there are rumors of him being followed and even that his life is in danger.  Having undergone brainwashing, he is racked with doubts about his choice to escape. There are probably some more difficult romantic relationships in here as well.

• Seven Storey Mountain
• Mountain Cave
• The Splinter

Somehow, Arthur finds the peace of mind necessary to bang out some very strange, new songs--a seeming total departure musically and lyrically from things he's written in the past (wonder why!).  Maybe he starts trying to reconnect with his children, etc.  This could be a burst of clarity right before his ultimate demise, almost like he has a premonition of his imminent transcendence and is no longer grasping.

• Brand New Life Theme
• Selling My Gold
• Retire the Empire
• Helen of Troy

"Let the Atheists Themselves Choose A God"

The following is an excerpt of a 29 December 2012 email sent from Art to Will wherein Art answers certain questions about Arthur's involvement in Carlton Farthington's cult.

I like the idea that Brand New Life begins with a burst of newfound creativity and productivity.

I like the idea that Arthur is on the verge of sainthood (although that sounds a little like confounding sainthood with enlightenment) and that Will is likewise on the brink of success.

I agree that this is when Will starts to have concerns and steps in (with ECT), because he sees these two things as mutually exclusive.

I also agree that God wins in spite of all of this. 

If you haven't already, you need to check out the movie Household Saints and in particular the resolution of the whole sainthood thing. Without giving the ending away, sainthood is achieved in utter defeat--even the defeat of the protagonist's pursuit of saintliness! 

It seems borderline blasphemous, but I feel this notion is totally orthodox, having its roots in the utter defeat and scandal of the cross.

Here is one of my favorite Chesterton quotes (from Orthodoxy):

[Atheists] will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

It's true that Will is successful in releasing Arthur's gift of prophesy. But I think the profoundest irony is that electroshock, which was designed to bring prophecy within the fold of profitability and predictability, actually releases it to an even fuller extent.

So in the process of totally scrambling Arthur's brain, Will inadvertently pushed Arthur into the final phase: the soul in a state of perfection.

Now, it's important to note that he exists here in a borderline catatonic state, but that was how God accomplished his will in its consequent form.

No, it's not ideal that someone would reach sainthood with a severely addled intellect, but it illustrates the paradox of human freedom and the supreme will of an omnipotent God.

Aufheben

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 3 January 2013.

As for playing the old material...

There are certainly precedents for not playing it.  For instance, Gerard Manley Hopkins burned all of his pre-priesthood, secular poetry.  

I want to play the old stuff, even during the Brand New Life phase.  I want to because, whether he is lucid about this or not, even the most worldly of these songs originated in an impulse toward intimacy with the other...and, ultimately, with The Other.  

I don't want to get to the point where we are always parsing who "you" is in the various songs.  I love the mystery of Shakespeare's dark lady, of the feminine ideal Barry White is always serenading...  We need to allow a good amount of that to happen "in the dark" without always saying who's who, who did what with whom, etc.  

The bottom line is that Arthur turned his attention from The Other to the other (and more probably, the others).  This happens to a lot of saintly-seeming children when adolescence hits.  But with one is destined to be a mystic, it takes on its own character...in short, it becomes a distortion of the antecedent ideal.  Once the "fall" occurs, one has to go through something of a platonic process to get back to The Other again.  

As in sex, the speaker and spoken-to can get fused together in some seemingly paradoxical ways:  "The Treatment" and "Venetian Blinds" could be seen as Arthur speaking to some shadowy, unnamed woman (namely a certain past girlfriend), but they could also be seen as the words of a jealous God as his bride (namely me) prostitutes herself.  

My point here is that we should play the old material because it has been, in some sense, redeemed and--to use some Hegelian terminology--"sublated" into the comprehensive whole.  Not redeemed in the way that insipid Christian music and poetry tries to redeem itself all the time (thus making it impossible to be modern), but in a way that surpasses human understanding, rationality, or contrivance.  Words that were profane and mundane become pregnant with hidden mystic heft (I first wrote down "meaning," but, again I don't want it to be something to be analyzed or attributed or otherwise "figured out").  

More pragmatically, I think Arthur is past the point of falling back into sin again, broken as he is.  So playing his songs in a loose redemptive framework would not be putting him in any danger at this point.  

I think even our counselor priest would see the psychological/spiritual benefit in playing through the old material, if for no other reason that it has grounded Arthur back with his brother, given him something productive to do, has him going to Mass again, etc.  

But, again, I want that framework of redemption to remain fairly loose...I don't think we should downplay anything thing that was said/done by saying that it was all about The Blessed Virgin Mary or his wife or this or that cult member. 

Hope that helps.  And again, thanks for all your amazing drum work!

What Comes Out is Pure Prophesy

The following is an excerpt of a 19 December 2012 email sent from Art to Will.

I agree with you that the other characters need to be developed, to be protagonists in their own right.

I may have less insight into them because their personas derive (at least in part) from you and Joe.  Also, having written more poetry and songs than fiction, I'm not as adept at juggling multiple characters in a large, expansive plot as you are.

The only thing that I'm trying to represent is my sense of my own character and the songs, many of which I haven't had a chance to play for you yet.  I don't think it's that big of a difference of opinion philosophically.

Actually, it may be less philosophical as it is the organization of events.  

Without getting into super long paragraphs again, I just think that the marriage/children have to come first (toward the end of the Sweet World era) for the progression of songs to make sense.

Then losing the band-->short stint with Apotheosis-->losing wife, kids-->joining a cult, getting out of the cult-->getting electroconvulsed-->getting propped back up by Will to front Brand New Life.  

Brand New Life is ironic because for Will it's just an attempt to do definitively what he has been trying to do all along: whitewash all the mystic mumbo-jumbo and bring Arthur back down to the Kierkegaardian aesthetic sphere where he can be made profitable.  

The irony is that this "final solution" actually does the exact opposite, making Brand New Life a true resurrection of the original Arthur, catapulting him definitively into the religious sphere, never to descend again.  

Now, in spite of (because of?) his destroyed mental state, he speaks prophetic words that cut like a double-edged sword.  He's kind of like Dave Bowman has become by the movie 2010.  Unlike Dave, however, Arthur may be thoroughly broken on a human level--mental anguish can still be occurring.

But when he sings, what comes out is pure prophesy.

Who is Arthur White? (Part 2 of 2)

The following was written in January 2007 to introduce potential new band members to the origins and history of the Arthur White concept.

In Arthur White's Brand New Life, several of these aforementioned archetypes have developed further.

On the most superficial level, the name change follows the precedent of Arthur Brown in naming his second band "Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come."  The questions and longings expressed in the Sweet World have found answers, or at least openings.  There is the suggestion that a spiritual journey--albeit shrouded in utter obscurity like most things about Arthur White--has occurred in the intervening "lost" years.  Whereas the former Arthur White used to dress to the nines, the new Arthur White dresses to the nines except that he wears his feet bare or with sandals, sort of like a George Harrison or John McLaughlin.

Arthur White arrives on the scene like I once saw blues guitar legend Son Seals arrive.  His band had played a good 30 minutes, muttering among themselves about his whereabouts between numbers.  To that end, the band needs to be skilled enough to play fairly good blues, R&B, and/or jazz for an entire night if necessary.  In this case, Seals did ultimately arrive, plug in and play.  I see Arthur White arriving to the strains of the "Brand New Life Theme," being introduced by a member of the band and immediately launching into the next number, perhaps "Arthur White's Theme."

This seeming attitude of gracing others with his presence comes from his countless experiences being "center stage under the lights," experiences to which he makes vague but frequent references in his songs.  It's not so much that he is a megalomaniac as that he is uninterested in this kind of attention after an apparently harrowing transformational experience.  So there's a sometimes overt annoyance at the trappings of performance and fame.