Should Museums Show Their Johnsons? (Part 2)

Philip Johnson's Glass House (1947-49), which he said was inspired by the denuded chimney of a house that was destroyed by the Nazis. (Photo credit: Staib, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

I suppose Part 1 should have been enough about the underside of our Johnsons. Yet, hard on the heels of the Seward folly comes another riposte from the cancel culture of modern arts activism. "Erasing Philip Johnson's Name" was the original title of the NY Times article that describes the open letter of the "Johnson Study Group" (okay... hereafter "JSG") calling on MOMA and other institutions "to remove the name of Philip Johnson from every leadership title, public space and honorific of any form" due to Johnson's "widely documented white supremacist views and activities". A week later Harvard University responded by changing the title of a building to eliminate the reference to Johnson. MOMA, as of this writing, has said only that they are "taking this issue very seriously and extensively researching all available information".

El Papgayo thinks he can help MOMA out. What is "widely documented" is that this Johnson's support for fascism, as well as his anti-Semitism, went far beyond mere words. Johnson, born into a very wealthy Cleveland family, began working as MOMA's first curator of architecture and design in 1929; hardly surprising that he fell out of college directly into this cushy position given his family's upper class social connections. After co-curating the 1932 exhibition on "The International Style" which introduced architectural modernism to the U.S., he went to Germany, attended a Hitler youth rally, and was highly impressed. As the naive Johnson recalled later, "You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it". (One can imagine his opinion of a Trump rally. He worked with the Donald at least twice, on Riverside South and Trump Tower, both pretty dismal works of architecture.) 

In 1934 Johnson announced that he was leaving MOMA to help Huey Long's campaign in Louisiana and to found a right-wing party. From then until the U.S. entered the war at the end of 1941 he was an ultraright political operative. After Long was assassinated he went on to work with Father Coughlin and tried to found a fascist political party. Both Long and Coughlin were favorites of the fascist agitator Lawrence Dennis, whose writings Johnson had begun to follow. He made several more trips to Germany, and to Poland, where he lauded the Nazi invasion. He wrote extensively in support of fascism, opposed French and British resistance to the Nazis and U.S. entry into the war, expressed sympathy for the annexation of Poland, and even applauded the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and Modlin as a "stirring spectacle". He unleashed an endless stream of hate-filled invective about the Jews, perpetuating and adding to the most idiotic Jewish conspiracy theories in both Europe and America. According to Mark Lamster, he also contributed financially to an anti-Semitic organization called the Christian Mobilizers. (Some quotes from Lamster and Johnson are reprinted in The Architect's Newspaper on November 6, 2018.)

A gay man, Johnson seemed little disturbed by the Nazi atrocities against gay people, even issuing a variety of remarks about his homoerotic fascination with blond boys in uniforms. This glib attitude towards one of the most homophobic regimes in history was typical of Johnson's overall narcissism. As long as he himself was feted and solicited by the Nazis, who asked him to help identify fellow travelers in the U.S., he demonstrated little sensitivity to the plight of gay people in Germany, some of whom were arrested, tortured and murdered.

After the U.S. entry into the war it became politically impossible for Johnson to continue his open support of fascism; he was investigated by the FBI under the Smith Act, but never tried, unlike some other equally perfidious American fascists. (One reason for that is that being so rich himself he did not need to take money from the Nazis, as some others had done.) He entered military service, remaining in the U.S., then took a degree in architecture at Harvard, and was accepted back to a leadership position at MOMA in 1946. 

To my knowledge, there was no public statement from the MOMA Board of Trustees regarding his Naziism when they invited him back as curator of architecture; he was simply welcomed back to the fold like a lost sheep. According to one source, when Johnson was up for election to the Board in 1957 and someone raised the question of his background, John D. Rockefeller's wife Blanchette responded: "Every young man should be allowed to make one large mistake." Decent of her, no? And of MOMA to "research" the issue almost 75 years after they re-instated the anti-Semitic American fascist in an influential position in American architecture.

Philip Johnson in 1933, a year after his first visit to Nazi Germany. (Photo credit: Carl van Vechten, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

The JSG says that Johnson "used his office and his curatorial work at MOMA as a pretense to collaborate with the German Nazi Party". I don't know what their source is for this claim, but according to most sources he left his post at MOMA to become a full-time political miscreant, and had, at least officially, abandoned politics by the time he returned there. Perhaps his tenure there gained him certain privileges as a "journalist" in Europe, but he was not officially associated with the museum during this time, but rather with Father Coughlin's ultraright newspaper Social Justice. In later interviews he retracted his support for fascism, once calling it "utter stupidity", while at the same time making various self-exculpatory statements about it. As late as 1964 he was quoted as saying that Hitler was "better than Roosevelt".

He never publicly issued any explicit retraction of his rabid anti-Semitism. In 1956 he donated a design for a synagogue in Port Chester, NY, which has been interpreted as a kind of apology; but he also admitted there were pragmatic reasons for doing it (he was advised that he needed to have some credits for larger structures than the houses he had so far designed), and never made the apology explicit. In fact there are serious questions about his intentions. See this article on the building by biographer Mark Lamster, and the comments below it, including the one by Gavriel Rosenfeld, author of this book on Jewish architecture, who states that Johnson first tried to sell the design to a temple in Greenwich, CT, and donated it to the Port Chester synagogue only after it was rejected. It may not be Johnson's fault that the Ibram Lassaw altar backdrop reminded some congregants of barbed wire, but in my opinion the barracks-style form of the building bears an eerie similarity to Nazi concentration camp architecture, and from the outside the narrow vertical windows resemble prison bars.

Johnson's Nazi sympathies may not have been widely known until recently, but they were certainly known, or knowable, to anyone who was interested. They absolutely were known to MOMA, where he was joined in his fascist sympathies by Alan Blackburn, another MOMA official. Here is some of what MOMA officials might include in their "research":

• December 18, 1934: Johnson's leaving MOMA to found a "Nationalist Party" of "Gray Shirts" was reported by both the New York TImes and the Herald Tribune. 
• September 1940: An "article in Harper's listed Johnson as among leading American Nazis." (Wikipedia, "Philip Johnson")
  
• 1941: William Shirer's  Berlin Diary published. He knew what Johnson stood for in 1939 when the two were assigned to be roommates as journalists covering the rise of the Nazis. Johnson was working for Father Coughlin's Social Justice, a publication sympathetic to fascism.
• January 1969: David Harry Bennett's Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-1936 is published by Rutgers University Press. Johnson and Blackburn's activities are noted in relationship to Father Coughlin's short-lived Union Party and their own effort to form a "Nationalist Party".
  
• October 1988: Michael Sorkin publishes "Where Was Philip" in Spy magazine. This revealing article offers a concise overview of Johnson's activities on behalf of fascism and his anti-Semitic writings.
  
• November 1995: Kazys Varnelis, "'We Cannot Not Know History': Philip Johnson's Politics and Cynical Survival", is published in the Journal of Architectural Education, 49:2, 11/1995, pp.92-104. (No link is provided here because access requires a JSTOR account.) An informative essay on Johnson's politics, with many historical and scholarly references, some of which I have utilized here. Varnelis has also published some of Johnson's early writings on his web site.
  
• June 1996: Franz Schulze's Philip Johnson: Life and Work, the first full scale biography, is published. In spite of the author's sympathetic stance, Johnson's wretched politics and hate-mongering are on display. Check out the comments on the Amazon page, none of them particularly sympathetic to Johnson as an architect, much less as a political figure.
• January 31, 2003: Robert Hughes publishes "Of Gods and Monsters" in the Guardian, in which he relates that in a 1978 interview, Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, named Johnson as the person who would be best to replace him if another Hitler came along. Speer sent along a signed copy of a book of his own work as a gift for Johnson. (According to Hughes, Johnson was anything but pleased to receive it, having made a lifelong effort to dodge responsibility for his allegiance to the Nazis.)
  
• January 31, 2005: A week after Johnson dies, Mark Stevens, art critic of New York magazine, publishes an Op-Ed in the NY Times, "Form Follows Fascism", reminding readers of his Nazism as well as his mixed legacy as both an architect.
  
• April 2016: Marc Wortman's 1941: Fighting the Shadow War: A Divided America in a World at War details many of Johnson's fascist activities.
• April 2016: Wortman's book is excerpted in a Vanity Fair article entitled, "Famed Architect Philip Johnson's Hidden Nazi Past".
  
• November 2018: Mark Lamster's The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century offers more details about Johnson's politics.
• December 2018: Nikil Saval's article "Philip Johnson: The Man Who Made Architecture Amoral", based on Lamster's book, is published in The New Yorker, again documenting Johnson's nefarious activities on behalf of fascism. Lamster is interviewed in Metropolis magazine, and again discusses Johnson's Naziism.
  
• July 2020: Ian Volner's Philip Johnson: A Visual Biography published by Phaidon, again discusses Johnson's Nazi past and adds unsavory details of his personal politics as well.
• July 2020: Volner's book is the lead item in a Bloomberg News summary by James Tarmy entitled "Why Hasn't 'Starchitect' Philip Johnson Been Canceled?". The subheading reads, "A new book shines a light on his enduring architectural legacy, despite a 'flirtation' with Naziism", followed by the comment, "Philip Johnson's Nazi past was probably the worst-kept secret in New York, but it wasn't the only piece of the superstar architect's character that was reprehensible."
  

So, yes, there is some "extensive research" to be done at MOMA: call it a deep dive into what has been known to the world about their Curator of Architecture for some 85 years, with the Greek chorus reaching a dramatic climax in the last five years, including two new biographies and other books and plenty of press. I mean, weren't MOMA's trustees, curators and directors in lockdown for much of this year? Plenty of time to catch up on some reading. 

I mean, seriously, who are they trying to kid with this "research" bullshit? They surely know, and have known for a very long time, that MOMA helped foster the career and influence of this fabulously wealthy man who became even more wealthy under the noses of their filthy-rich benefactors, and that he was a raging anti-Semite and Nazi supporter. What is their supposed research going to turn up? Johnson bragged about having mentored several prominent Jewish architects. He was apparently friends with Shimon Peres. So what does this buy him, after concocting a hit list for the fascist "revolution" that began with his Jewish friend and classmate (and fellow gay man) Lincoln Kirstein?

The JSG has actually taken a mild approach to calling this man's various honors into question; maybe the question should be why does this architect of mixed reputation and despicable morals have his name attached to an AIA Gold Medal and the Pritzker Prize? What is the state of our culture in general when a university, art museum or professional organization cannot figure out that someone like this should not be honored? Why does it take a movement and public prompting from political activists? As we know from the last four years, when you let hate speech and racial scapegoating go it can one day find fertile soil to flourish. A son of privilege who climbed the artworld ladder through social connections, a bitter anti-Semite, a fascist operative, a purveyor of discredited racial theories, an architectural chameleon without a distinctive personal style, and a vocal worshipper of the dollar bill - this was Philip Johnson. Yet MOMA has to do "research" before dropping his name from an exhibition gallery and curator title.

A list of Johnson's commissions - all of them subsequent to his pro-Nazi activities - says just how much America's cultural and political elite cared that this Dutchman of Half Moon ancestry hated Jews and all racial minorities. It includes not just corporate buildings like Seagrams (most of which was done by Mies van der Rohe), the Lipstick Building and Trump Tower, but arts and cultural institutions galore, the JFK Memorial in Dallas, university buildings and labs, the New York State pavilion for the 1964 World's Fair, libraries, religious centers, and more. Sure, he may have suggested that the murder of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto was a glorious thing, but hey, let's give him another million dollar contract and more public monuments to enshrine his name! 

I mean, we still buy Fords, right? No, better than that - even Jews now drive around in Volkswagens and Mercedes Benz's, love their Wagner recordings, and read Heidegger, so why the hell should we care that some American architect made a few stupid remarks?

Is it any wonder why 74 million people voted for a man who calls neo-Nazis "very fine people", tells neo-fascist groups like the Proud Boys to"stand by", and initially expresses little concern about Jews murdered by another anti-Semite in Pittsburgh? This is where our collective amnesia about such haters leads: to a president who wreaks havoc on our political system, tears children away from parents, makes racism and sexism publicly acceptable, denies basic science, and helps cause the deaths of thousands through misguided leadership during a health crisis. Yes, it really does have disastrous practical consequences when we let these kinds of people off the hook, under the lazy assumption that their dumb words are just mistakes that we can ignore and move on from.

Obviously we cannot count on business or institutional leaders to sound the alarm about such cultural self-destruction: to them, Johnson's fascism was just some ineffective and discarded political ideas, with no real impact and in any case protected by the First Amendment. But those who can't see the impact should not be leading anything, much less Lincoln Center (where Johnson designed the NY State Theater) or MOMA (where he designed the roof garden). If not sent to jail for treason he should have at least been a pariah to every decent human being in a leadership position. That was clearly not the case.

So this piece of "cancel culture" is not about the erection of a 26-foot statue with a cinematic rear end shot, it's about the pornographic mark left on the American landscape by a devout admirer of Adolph Hitler. The question about him really is, how did this despicable person ever get a commission, a post, an award or an honor after his perfidious activities in support of the Third Reich? What does it say about the moral fiber of our society in general that he was able to carry on after being a traitor to his country and a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Semite? At minimum, it shows that no decisions about morality, or indeed culture, can be left to the rich and the business interests that fund the construction of large buildings, control cultural institutions, and anoint architects with museum appointments. The Rockefellers have plenty of blood, or at least crud, on their hands for the sponsorship of this Nazi.

The problem is not merely that Johnson's name is attached to some gallery or design institute. Certainly it should not be. The much larger problem is that the nation is now dotted with monuments to a morally corrupt individual for architecture students to gawk at, scholars to write about, critics to hold up as examples of the craft and museums to put on exhibitions about. Take away the institutional honors and titles that the JSG objects to and we are still left with dozens of prominent glass towers and structures. Albert Speer's architecture is mostly a thing of the past; but Johnson's will stand for a very long time. JSG says, "There is a role for Johnson's work in archives and historic preservation." This sounds a bit like wishful thinking, when his "work" moons us from the sidewalks all over New York City and around the country. Billions of footsteps will traverse the shadow of his towers, the careers of many generations will be spent inside his steel and glass structures, before he is committed to the archives. Their point, though, is why add insult to injury by naming things after him? We are just getting around to "canceling" Confederate generals, who rank no higher than fascists on the moral spectrum. Do we have to wait 150 years to consign Johnson's name to the archives, even if we can't get rid of his buildings?

Sure, I anticipate the response: But he created some great buildings, outstanding contributions to American architecture, structures that have helped make the urban landscape what it is. Are you squawcking that you would rather just be without this cornucopia of creativity? Answer: that is a false dichotomy. For every Philip Johnson with his dozens of commissions, there are less well known but highly creative talents who would have been employed to build those structures. The JSG says that Johnson excluded all black architects from his exhibitions, and it could be added that some of those architects might well have given us better buildings than Johnson did had the world consigned Johnson to the dustbin of history with his Nazi idols. We might have benefited more, not less, if Johnson had been limited to building factories for Henry Ford. (Okay, Trump Tower is just as appropriate.) Where a need opens up, whether in architecture or the other arts, there will usually be more than one person capable of filling it. I won't deny the beauty of some of what he created (the MOMA garden has always been an appealing spot), but I could live without it if its absence were to send a message that haters and fascists get what they deserve - in this case, obscurity.

So the objections of the JSG are not just well taken, but an understated approach to what should be said and done about Johnson. We can't very well tear down everything he built - one can wish something never existed but acknowledge it has some merit while it does, like Heidegger's philosophy, and Wagner's music, and the work of too many literary anti-Semites and racists to name. Better those people should have gone to hell after a life of obscurity; but as fate, and human weakness, would have it, they left something behind that deserves recognition, even if they personally deserve scorn. (Quite a few people have commented on Johnson's fondness for Nietzsche, but while I don't have much use for his philosophy, the simplistic association of his "superman" with Naziism is mostly a misunderstanding.)

It was courageous of the JSG to challenge the institutional sainthood of this icon-itect and to focus on his exclusion of architects of color from MOMA exhibitions during his long tenure there as curator of architecture and design. But the letter makes it sound like that is the most reprehensible thing he did, and the very reason he should be dis-honored by the powers that be. To say the least, that needs a lot of refinement, because the record so far made public shows that he was as vile an anti-Semite as there ever was, applauding the earliest forms of genocide and championing the Nazi cause long after Krystallnacht. To make a public statement calling for the removal of Johnson's name from various sites without so much as alluding to his anti-Semitism seems very curious, as if being a political operative and possible spy who colluded with the perpetrators of the Holocaust is on the same plane with a failure to include black architects in museum shows. It is like criticizing the administrator of a Jefferson Davis memorial for making an unkind remark about Jews, without so much as mentioning their primary function in honoring the slave system. It just seems skewed.

The JSG does make explicit the fact that Johnson was a proponent of, and collaborator with, Nazism. But they begin by describing his "white supremacist views", and their discussion of his Nazi activities slides directly into the point about his racist curatorial practices. The logic of removing his name from institutions is based on this. It is hard not to notice the awkward absence of a single reference to his hatred of Jews, as if it were preferable to let people infer that from the words "Nazi" and "fascist" without saying it outright.

But when Johnson ranted, as he often did in his writings, about the need for the "white race" to band together and defend itself, and the like, "white" was not primarily contrasted with "black" but with Jews, and sometimes with people of Japanese heritage. (The Japanese are the only explicit target of Johnson's eugenics-infused essay, "Are We a Dying Race?", though one can infer his other antipathies easily enough.) In every quote I have seen from his racist writings, when he is being explicit about an enemy, it is these two groups he is talking about. Of course, the man was almost certainly as racist towards black people and all other people of color as Hitler himself was. If, as JSG suggests, he consciously excluded all architects of color from his exhibitions, that is further evidence. (I say "consciously" because a curator hardly needs to be a Nazi sympathizer to unconsciously exclude non-white architects from exhibitions; that, I am certain, happens on a daily basis, though perhaps somewhat less after some very recent consciousness-raising within the art world.) But I think it is important, as a matter of historical accuracy, to be clear that the "racist" and "white supremacist" Johnson, though he may well have hated blacks and other people of color just as much, nevertheless directed almost all his venom at the Jews and Japanese.

On the other hand, one can't exactly leave it at this; because, to ask a blunt question, where the devil have all the Jewish spokespeople been on the Johnson issue for the past 20, 50 or 85 years?? Searches on the web sites of the Anti-Defamation League, B'nai Brith, the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, Tikkun and Jewish Currents turned up not a single reference to Johnson, nor did numerous kinds of Google searches for Johnson material turn up a single link to any Jewish advocacy organization or web site. Ada Louise (Landman) Huxtable and Paul Goldberger, long time architecture critics for the NY Times, apparently had little to say about Johnson's Nazism. And if you want to see just how important the Jewish Museum thought the past of an American Nazi was, read Michael Wise's article in Forwards describing their purchase of some of the original artifacts from the Port Chester synagogue. A September 2016 essay by Richard Hurowitz in the Jerusalem Post sums up Johnson's anti-Semitic history pretty well. But I can't find anything that explicitly calls into question the bestowal of numerous honors on a man who was a notorious hater of Jews. 

In his later years, Johnson was a mentor to Daniel Liebeskind, Richard Meier and other Jewish architects. Did they know or care that the man had called the bombing of Warsaw "a stirring spectacle"? Or that 20 years or more after the war he said that he prefered Hitler to Roosevelt, that WIlliam Shirer was irresponsible for reporting on his fascist sympathies, and that his biggest complaint about the Nazis was that their architecture was poor? Taking a few Jews under your wing cannot erase that kind of history. Nor helping to create the Rothko Chapel. If the man uttered a peep about the Holocaust before he died it was not recorded. The liberal Jewish establishment seems to have totally dropped the ball on this, or rather, never picked it up.

So, while I find the absence of a reference to anti-Semitism in the JSG's presentation uncomfortable, in the end I want to thank them for doing what has never been done by the people Johnson most explicitly despised. Johnson seems to have danced with agility between his own raindrops; if there is any one consistent feeling among the various authors cited here, it is that due to his wealth, connections, charisma and in some cases inspiration, he continually avoided accountability for his nasty past; as one journalist put it, "his comeuppance never came". Actually getting an institution to take some action regarding the Johnson stain on the artworld, as the JSG has done, is quite an accomplishment, and if what it took was a group of black architects and their supporters raising a cry about his racism, that just shines a spotlight on the utter lack of Jewish leadership on the matter.

Which brings me to a disturbing thought: that today (and perhaps not just today) the charge of anti-Semitism simply doesn't move insitutions enough to even raise it; it doesn't get anybody in the world of education or art institutions all bent out of shape to point out that their institutes or chairs are named for a man who actively supported a regime that murdered 6 million Jews, and who tried to foment the same sort of hatred here. But if the same man unfairly failed to recognize black architects, that moves people to take action. There seems to be both a sickening blindness in this society to the depravity of anti-Semitism, and a disturbing kind of stasis among Jews and their alleged defenders, as if all we need to do to stand our ground is rally around Israel's right to exist, rail about the dangers of BDS, and argue about the latest definition of anti-Semitism. Who cares if lowlifes like Johnson become world famous symbols of American architecture? We have Israel, and a few jerks in the U.S. aren't going to hurt us, so why waste energy on them?

I don't want to get sidetracked into a discussion about it here, but I have experienced anti-Semitism in the U.S. so many times I would need to write a book just to describe all the instances. Not too long ago I witnessed a confrontation between a loud but peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration and a group of white patrons at an outdoor dining area who seemed intent on harrassing them. As tempers flared, an elderly white man shouted at the crowd, "Tell it to George Soros!" The direct object of his enmity was the anti-racist protesters, but the content of the remark was pure anti-Semitism, Soros being the latest stand-in for the kind of garbage about Jewish bankers and their conspiracies that Philip Johnson did much to promote. This took place in New York City. Good luck elsewhere trying to pretend that we can just ignore anti-Semitism and it will go away.

If the JSG is really a "study group" and not just an ad hoc list of people who signed a letter then I assume we can expect more from them than this missive. It would be interesting to find out just what Johnson's level of engagement was with African-Americans and other racial and national minorities. JSG has posted one dismissive comment he allegedly made in 1973 about building "a monument for blacks", but has not documented the source or context of this remark. So far, the picture that emerges of his attitude towards minorities other than Jews is one of not-so-benign neglect. If more can be done to document his racism towards people of color, then that and his anti-Semitism together would make an even stronger case for a general reappraisal of the man's legacy.

We are not going to tear down bridges and highways that Robert Moses built, even if we no longer consider him a godsend to the city, and in fact recognize the racism that was part and parcel of his master plan. Maybe Philip Johnson will be the next colossus to fall, even as his monuments remain standing. 

A bigger question, though, is whether New York City, or anywhere else in the U.S., will ever be known not only for more humanitarian architects, but for a truly humanitarian architecture. In his NY Times columns Michael Kimmelman has often described the potential of architecture to not only beautify spaces but humanize them, bring people together, diminish differences. Just the opposite of Robert Moses, who built low walkways over the expressways to his beaches in order to prevent poor black folks who didn't own cars from getting there on buses. Although architectural humanism goes back almost six centirues, we have yet to establsih a mandate for architecture in the service of humanity. This would require much more than an architect with great humanitarian instincts; it would mean institutions, regulations and cultural priorities that push those values to the forefront. To put it mildly, we're not there yet.

Johnson's aesthetics, to the extent that he had any, seem to have been about him, mainly, a Nietzschean drive to aestheticize his life. The broader critique of what he stood for would start there. For example, the soaring atrium of 550 Madison Avenue was originally sold to the public as a space that would serve some community function; but it quickly became clear that it was all about grandeur and schmaltz and had no particular appeal to anyone as a public area. The self-involvement of a human being like Johnson manifests itself in his works.

The critique of Philip Johnson and what he stood for, both as a person and as a builder, could serve a higher purpose in this respect. It could put on notice the developers - the Trumps, Kushners, Helmsleys, and Ratners - and the architects who serve them that their legacy will be judged not by poured concrete, steel girders and panes of glass, but by their success or failure at making people and communities better by their works.  

Canceling fascists, racists and anti-Semites may help improve the ideological composition of art institutions, and keep future bigots from running them. But that should not be the ultimate goal. To have a real impact it should be no more than a stepping stone to a reorientation of urban architecture towards humanizing urban spaces. We see this happening in dribs and drabs; then we see horror shows like the Atlantic Yards and the Downtown Brooklyn development plan. Once we get rid of rascals like Johnson there is still a lot to be done.

Should Museums Show Their Johnsons? (Part 1)

 

God, I haven't had that much fun creating a title in a long time! I guess the opportunity was arranged by the Fates and Muses in some occult ritual. 

Cries had just gone up regarding the planned placement of Seward Johnson's monumental sculpture of a slightly exposed Marilyn Monroe near the entrance to the Palm Springs Art Museum, when a group of anonymous scholars threw into question the naming of museum institutes and university buildings after Philip Johnson, the modernist architect and one-time American fascist. These days, it seems that having a Johnson is not always an asset.

Let's do Seward first. His 2011 Forever Marilyn depicts the movie star in a famous shot from The Seven-Year Itch, where a gust of wind from a subway tunnel blows her dress up above her knees as she tries to press it back down.

"Forever Marilyn, by Seward Johnson" (Photo: Christopher Lance)

 

No less an authority than the Palm Springs Art Museum's Director, Louis Grachos, as well as three former directors and other Palm Springs cultural luminaries, have spoken out against moving the statue there. Here's a quote from Grachos: “When you exit the museum, you are going to see the exposed backside of a 26-foot-tall Marilyn Monroe, including her underwear,” he explained by phone this week. “That’s not the message we want to give to our community.”

"Exposed backside?" Listen, um, Louis, and your predecessors, with your undoubtedly shining credentials as artworld  judges of taste and propriety, I have one piece of advice for you: Don't go to Florence!

Michelangelo's David at the Academia Gallery in Florence

 (Photo: Anton Alterman)

I mean, seriously - from directly below the statue you can look up at Marilyn Monroe's underwear... So what the hell is in your museum, Mr. Director, if you are so horrified by the thought of the Marilyn's underwear outside the museum? Just still lifes and Abstract Expressionist canvases? Or are you saying it's okay to show depictions of privies within your hallowed halls, but outside you'd better be more cautious? (Actually, don't go to Florence, but do go to the Vatican - where a guard stands outside the Sistine Chapel checking that there are no bare shoulders or knees about to enter, while a priest inside warns over a PA that "this is a house of god". But I digress.)

Let's keep in mind that Johnson's Marilyn has been around the block and behind the bushes once or twice. Forever Marilyn has resided in a public plaza in Chicago, at Grounds for Sculpture, Johnson's public sculpture park, in New Jersey, and in Downtown Palm Springs. This has not, to my knowledge, resulted in the deterioration of the moral fabric of society. (Okay, that fabric has deteriorated - but that has more to do with a certain New York demagogue than a New Jersey sculptor.) The brouhaha is all about moving Marilyn from Downtown to a spot near the art museum's entrance. I guess the culture czars of Palm Springs were too busy to raise the cry of poisoning the public mind when the statue was downtown, so they made it a NIMBY issue. Terribly responsible of you folks.

What, then, is the right "message" to send to the Palm Springs community? How about: "We will do absolutely nothing to offend your presumed 19th century sexual morality. Indeed, we are not so much an art museum as a repository of artifacts pre-approved by a committee of West Coast evangelicals, the Pope and the local Republican establishment..." 

Wait! What? This is actually a liberal southern California city, one with the highest concentration of LGBTQ households in the country, who just elected an openly bisexual woman as mayor, and where a Republican is lucky to get forty percent of the vote in a local or national election. What is this community doing imposing such anachronistic Victorian prudishness on their art institutions?

According to the directors and their cohorts, the objections are not due to phony religious scruples about sexuality. Rather, putting the statue at the museum "elevates an approach to women that is inappropriate in 2020, introducing a blatantly sexist statue in front of our most significant cultural institution." They refer to it as "a 26-foot statement about women and sexual appeal". Johnson's monumental "war memorial" statue of a sailor kissing a woman at the end of WW II has similarly been criticized for its upskirt view and the woman's submissive pose. (He called it "Unconditional Surrender", obviously relishing the double entendre.)

But women have been depicted in sexually suggestive and submissive poses since, oh, Botticelli's Venus? To say nothing of the frankly pornographic works of Picasso and others. Or Lautrec's prostitutes. Today, though, we know better than to show a woman's undies. Today we know that when men depict women's bodies they are being used as sex objects. In fact, why focus on secondary works like Forever Marilyn - what about The Seven Year Itch itself? Not to mention other Marilyn Monroe films, and of course, her Playboy spread. She didn't actually agree to be in Playboy, but she agreed to pose nude for photographer Tom Kelley, who sold the pictures to Hugh Hefner; apparently, she didn't mind the attention it got her. So, is the idea that the best way to honor her is never to show the films and photographs in which she is, clearly, depicted as an icon of beauty and sexual attraction - a role she conspired in over the course of a roughly 15-year career? Or am I missing some hidden logic? 

Sorry, I don't see any more sexual objectification in this derivative work than in numerous cinematic and photographic images that Marilyn participated in hundreds of times. But perhaps the narrative is supposed to be something like, "Marilyn was forced to let the male-dominated studio system make a sex object out of her in order to have an acting career, but we need not endorse that grim reality." (I believe something like this was argued by Gloria Steinem in a book on Marilyn.) 

There have been plenty of cases where women were taken advantage of in film and other visual arts, and I have no doubt that in order to break into the field Marilyn had her "MeToo" moments. But a blanket label of "blatantly sexist" for representations of her as a sex symbol is blatantly false. She was actually a trend-setter in taking control of her career; she formed her own production company, carefully managed her image, and forced the world to take her seriously as an actress after having edged into cinema in "dumb blonde" roles. I regret if it doesn't fit the pretentious piety of the #MeToo era to point out that some women want to be admired specifically for their beauty, glamor and desirability, but, whatever her other troubles (they were many) Marilyn was apparently very comfortable with expressing her sexuality in a variety of ways. There's absolutely no reason to think she would have been disturbed by Stewart Johnson's sculpture.

It seems that even art directors toss around casual judgments about sexuality without so much as a thought about the broader implications of what they are saying. To give the slightest credit to their offhand comments about sexual morality would be to write off a vast segment of the plastic arts, film, theater, vocal music in various genres, ballet and perhaps much else, past, present and future, as an affront to decency and something from which to protect the impressionable minds of society at large. It is frankly quite disturbing to see people who ought to be upholding principles of liberty, progress, openness and artistic freedom buying directly into a moral agenda that could equally come from the playbook of the religious right. 

But this, sad to say, has been my experience of the left in general, going back many decades, and the more so the more left they are. The unfortunate truth is that there is a thin line between the fulminations of the Moral Majority or the Catholic Church about the sanctity of family, with its narrowly defined limits on what constitutes legitimate sexual expression, and feminist scruples about sexuality and sexual oppression. The latter run side by side with reactionary efforts to suppress female self-expression when it happens to take sexually liberated forms that they do not understand as empowerment. 

Left and right, using superficially different vocabularies, attempt to suppress explicit sexual expression that doesn't fit their political narrative. But before modern feminism and gay liberation and the coming out of transgender people, what happened was the sexual revolution of the sixties, and you cannot go backwards to undo that without taking a lot else with you. We need to sharply distinguish between the critique of moral transgressions like rape, domestic abuse and the sort of serial predatory behavior that #MeToo targets (when it is on target, which it often isn't) and the celebration of sexuality as a game, a skill, an art form and or just a facet of human nature. Otherwise the public conversation is like a coin with the same face on both sides. Attacking a work of art with feminist rhetoric about "sexual objectification" adopts a different language to achieve the same ends as conservative monitors of aesthetic propriety

Let Marilyn's butt wave free. Maybe her message is just what Seward Johnson's was: if you don't like it you can kiss my ass.

Before I leave this part of the Johnson disputes, it seems worth adding that the Palm Springs art directors, before they got into their feminist rant, were complaining about the fact that the statue would obscure the art museum itself. Though it seems like a problem easily solved by judicious consideration of its exact location, I bow out of that conversation. It certainly was possible to debate that point without bringing in spurious social critiques.

But more interestingly, they did not even address other more serious issues of aesthetics and morality in their statement, to wit:

1. The statue, like many of Johnson's other works, was copied from a shot in Billy Wilder's film, and Johnson might be accused of plagiarism, as he was with Unconditional Surrender (apparently based on a famous photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, V-J Day in Times Square). I'm not endorsing this view, for there is a robust tradition of secondary uses of images from previous artworks, and Johnson's sculptures surely add an aesthetic dimension that is not there in the original. But this is a more serious discussion, and one suspects that the relevant authorities had no taste for intellectual challenges, preferring to haul out some trendy epithets about sexism that need not be backed up with real logic in the current climate.

2. This and other Johnson works have also been described more than once as kitsch, not real art. His manufacturing process, employing CAD (computer-aided design) software to create works from existing images, has also put his originality in question. I have been to Grounds for Sculpture, where many of Johnson's works reside, among hundreds of works by other sculptors whose content ranges from contemporary abstractions to, let's say playful humor and fantasy.

Seward Johnson, "Dejeuner Déjà Vu" (Photo: Anton Alterman)

 

I've been to enough sculpture gardens to say that the range felt liberating. There is nothing wrong with modernist mountainsides like Storm King or rolling estates like the one at the Nassau County Museum of Art. But a visit to Grounds For Sculpture can relieve you of the tendency to stomp your foot and insist that "this public sculpture stuff is Very Serious Business!" And whether it is or not, I see Johnson's work being in the tradition of Warhol and the artists who used popular culture as a jumping-off point. He had an eye for the iconic, and if his work is kitsch or lacks originality then so does that of a hell of a lot of pop artists who stand in modern art museums all over the world.

3. There is also a more legitimate reason to at least consider the charge of sexism, though against Wilder, not Johnson. I recall that it was reported not very long ago that Marilyn, though she had agreed to the famous shot in which a gust of wind blows her dress up from below, was not expecting the strong blast that not only blew it above her knees but made it impossible to push the dress back down, exposing her for several seconds on the movie set in public.There was some suggestion that this was all intentional and that she was not very pleased about it. (I am not going to hold up this post trying to find the reference, but I believe it was in the NY Times; I'll keep looking.) Even if true, Johnson would not have known this when he created the statue. But one might argue that it rubs the wrong way to have an embarrassing moment so monumentally immortalized. The problem is, it is already immortalized in the film and a thousand reproductions of the clip. Making a sculpture of it does not necessarily endorse the original motivation, and if someone finds the statue disturbing, all the better. Andy Warhol did silk screens of an electric chair and other unsettling images. This is your culture, make of it what you will.

4. Finally, in this era when support for the arts by morally bankrupt corporate executives, and in particular by those involved with predatory pharmaceutical companies, has become an issue, it might have been interesting to raise the question of the extent to which Johnson's monumental sculptures owe their existence to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, spoils of a drug company that has been involved in plenty of ethical controversies. Seward Johnson was the grandson of Robert Wood Johnson, the company founder, one of whose sons (Seward's uncle) ran the company, and fired him from a job there at the age of 32. Seward became CEO of The Atlantic Foundation, a non-profit established by his father. Though he was not a direct heir of the Johnson & Johnson fortune (he even had to wage a legal fight for a small portion of his father's estate) it seems likely that his studio, artworks and sculpture park were at least indirectly subsidized by money from the pharmaceutical company. It has been an ethically rocky road for Johnson & Johnson, perhaps tainting Seward's work like a bottle of Tylenol or talcum powder. I say "perhaps", since I remain a bit skeptical of this charge too, given Seward's minimal connection with the company himself. But someone might develop such case, and it might even have more sticking power than the sexism label for Forever Marilyn.

So the putative art experts with their feminist consciences decided to shoot from the hip about the exposure of the metallic undergarments of a woman who is known the world over as a symbol of beauty and sexuality, because it was an easy potshot to take, while other objections would actually require an argument. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a sad reminder of another recent public art debacle by the liberal West Coast intelligentsia - the decision by the San Francisco Board of Education to paint over, then (after an outcry) to cover up instead, Victor Arnautoff's historic WPA murals in George Washington High School, out of fear that they may be exposing minority high school students to uncomfortable realities of U.S. history. (Read what the Parrot had to say about this one here.) Maybe California should just remove all its public artworks, close its art institutions, and take a breather.They have Disneyland and the Hearst Mansion, anyway; do they really need all these sculptures and murals too?

I think I have discovered something about myself. When forced to choose between freedom of artistic expression in just about any form, and political correctness in at least some forms, I stand with the artists, ready to endure the slings and arrows of self-righteous activists for the long-term good of our cultural heritage. But (there's always a "but"), there are limits. Peppering the landscape with works by admirers of Adolph Hitler is one of them. I'll talk about that in the next post.

Closer to Home? 50 Years Later, It Seems Prophetic

Happy June 15, everyone! Yes, even before this Friday (Juneteenth) we have an anniversary to celebrate!

As everybody knows,1970 was the year that rock and roll died. It was the year in which, as I vividly recall, I read a music review in one of the underground New York newspapers (maybe The East Village Other) referring to the "Grand Funk and James Gang garbage" that had begun depreciating the airwaves. I knew who Grand Funk were. I had never heard the James Gang, and in the half century since I don't think I have ever listened to an entire album by them.

The year the Beatles broke up. The year Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died. Or, how's this for contrasting "egad!" occasions: the year Black Sabbath releases their first album, and The Partrdige Family have a #1 hit with "I Think I Love You". There were always artists who you thought must have had to bribe DJ's to play their records - you turned out to be right, in some cases - but suddenly you had this influx of soon-to-be superstars whose records you could turn up as loud as you wanted and still not feel like they should be in your rock collection: The Carpenters. James Taylor. The first U.S. release by a sort of piano-bar type guy named Elton John. In general, everything was too loud, or not loud enough, and nothing was just right.

Or so it seemed. What a difference a day makes, or at least a half-century.
 
In June 1970 my junior year of high school drew to a close. The civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation and especially protests against the war in Vietnam had gripped the consciousness of people my age. Revolution was in the air; there were so many self-styled Marxist groups around that you could take any combination of "revolutionary", "worker", "socialist", "league", "world" and "party" and there'd be a group for that. The Strawberry Statement became a film, and so did Joe - the one, an exaltation of student rebellion, the other an outlet for reactionary anger at everything associated with the Hippie movement of the 60's. Nixon, the redbaiting politician from California, was busy invading Cambodia, with the support of his notorious National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, who would later win a Nobel Peace Prize for the humiliating peace treaty he was forced to sign after the death of about a million Vietnamese and 50,000 Americans.

March 6, 1970: The Weathermen explosion, as self-styled revolutionaries accidentally blow up a Greenwich Village townhouse. 3 unlucky members die, the others are arrested.

April 13, 1970: The Apollo 13 explosion, a near-disaster. 3 lucky astronauts survive.

May 4 1970: National Guardsmen open fire on a student protest at Kent State, killing four. The day goes down in infamy. A few days later, hard hat construction workers attack student protesters on Wall Street. (When I marched about a week after that they merely threw rivets at us from the upper girders of construction site.)

May 15 1970: After some rowdy behavior on the campus of mostly black Jackson State College in Jackson, FL, police officers pump 460 bullets over 30 seconds into a dormitory filled with unarmed black students, killing 2 and injuring 11. The news is quickly forgotten.

May 25, 2020: The entire world watches a video of the brutal police murder of George Floyd, the streets of major cities erupt in protest for weeks, and some long-overdue changes may finally take place. It only took another 50 years, and hundreds if not thousands more black lives being exterminated by the "justice" system, for anything at all to change.)

The country was in the grip of a major recession for most of 1970. The average rate of inflation was 5.7%, the highest since 1951. (It would be more than double that 10 years later.) The unemployment rate was over 6%; the economy grew by .2 percent. The U.S. position as postwar economic leader of the "free world" was eroding rapidly.

Look for things to love about 1970 and you come up pretty empty-handed. But I have one. And it is calculated to make every rock critic in America hold their forehead with two hands as if they just woke up with a major hangover. If I could only get every... any?... rock critic in America to read this.

So, yes, this was the year that everything went to shit in music; it wasn't just Grand Funk and the James Gang; we were suddenly inundated with noise bands who sounded like they had possibly heard Little Richard once and figured if they could just learn to play three chords and a couple of simple blues riffs they could be rock and roll stars. And they were right. Sabbath, Spooky Tooth, Slade, Wishbone Ash, REO Speedwagon, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Mountain, Savoy Brown, Iron Butterfly - you keep going if you want. It all sucked. True, some of those bands managed to come up with a song or two that was not completely worthless; one or two even managed an album that I would not melt down for the value of the vinyl. I can think of only one - Aerosmith - that managed to turn my head around and make me a fan. But all this dreck - pre-metal or degraded rock&roll or whatever you want to call it - we knew it was garbage and rock music was more or less over. We knew that because we knew Hendrix and Cream and Led Zeppelin and we didn't think these guys got it about how to play hard rock.

The end of the decade more or less confirmed that we were right; for in place of the sorry list above, you could now make a new one: Journey, Foreigner, Styx, Kansas, Rush, Toto, Boston, Kiss, Steve Miller, and a lot more bands I have never had any use for. Inbetween came another sorry lot - Montrose, Van Halen, Foghat, Slade and those endlessly productive one-hit wonders, Golden Earring, who had actually been around forever until they got on anyone's radar. To say nothing of peripheral progressive rock acts like Starcastle and Uriah Heep. Once again, here and there a song or two managed to climb up from the mire and prove that there was life beneath the surface. Provoked by one of my brothers, I was recently forced to acknowledge "Separate Ways" as a so-called "guilty pleasure". There may be more than that buried in these bands' combined output, but having just taken a refresher course in the Grand Funk discography, I am not inclined to do a listening project to see what I missed. I know that the 70's start out bad, and get worse.

And yet... the thought that this assessment might be a little too harsh pushes its way into my consciousness, due to the all but criminal intervention of a friend way back when, at a time when teenage angst was as ripe as a week-old banana and even the distant chimes of romance were about as sweet. I put up valiant resistance, to the music at least. She was a big Grand Funk fan, had all of their albums - three or four, at that point. I would show up at her house, where, if I recall, a sister or brother and mother and maybe a few pets would be wandering about, but we had something remotely resembling privacy in her room - at least if the music were loud enough that no one could hear us. And Grand Funk was loud, nobody would deny them that. She played their first album a few times; I hated it and told her so. "What about 'Heartbreaker'?" Although the single only charted in Canada, it somehow struck GF fans as a hit. I found it no less annoying than the rest of the disk. Besides, by the time our story takes place, there had already been a song called "Heartbreaker" - actually more like a few dozen, but the one I had in mind was not only a great song but had one of the greatest guitar solos ever recorded. I was a huge Zep fan from almost the day their first album came out, and this was a lot of nonsense by comparison.

She played their second album and thought I had to like that. It had already gone Gold by that time, for reasons that people of discerning taste are still trying to figure out. I thought it sucked. She probably would have thrown me out, had it not been for their third album.

By way of hindsight, let me just add that today I find their early albums less offensive in certain ways than I did then. Though neither of them will ever have much of a place in my heart, or ears, I no longer hear them as collections of incompetent, not to say cynical, junk. In fact, while you can point to places here and there where Farner's guitar solos seem to just die, or never get started, and Brewer's drumming is not always convincing (and usually of little creative interest), there are plenty of other places that demonstrate a fair amount of competence. Farner's lyrics are usually pretty forgettable, but the songwriting, especially from "Heartbreaker" to the end of On Time, has some sparks of creativity. Toss them in with all the hard rock bands that were crawling out of the woodwork at the time and they sound like more of the same. But give a good listen and you can see that while he's no Eric Clapton, Farner was already a bit better than quite a few rock guitarists at that time, and he was willing to take a few chances, while Brewer - again, no Ginger Baker he, but the extended solo he manages on T.N.U.C. is not compatible with complaints about the band's competence. Brilliant, no, but more than competent.

June 15, 1970: Capitol Records releases Grand Funk Railroad's Closer to Home. It was the album that made them a household name. The latter may not be something to celebrate, but the album surely is.

There used to be this industry thing about third albums; something like, "Either this one hits or we're going to stop wasting our money promoting you." I don't know if anyone told that to Mark Farner, the songwriting, singing and guitar-playing engine of Grand Funk Railroad. At the time of which I'm writing, the single "I'm Your Captain" had already made the rounds, and I could not deny it was a good song, maybe a great song. It was not the kind of song that made you think, "Oh shit, the 60's are really over now;" it was, on the contrary, the kind that made you feel like there might be hope. So, even though it was delayed gratification, being the last cut on the 2nd side, I listened a little more attentively to the whole album. And it grew on me, and grew, and... well, finally, I bought the album. Many years later, I bought the remastered CD. I downloaded it and put it on my CD Walkman, on my mp3 player, on my smartphone. If I could only bring 10 albums it would probably go with me to a deserted island. What the funk happened to me?

First thing - it is one of those relatively rare albums - I know you have some - on which I can honestly say I look forward to every track. Second, unlike their first two albums, it has a clean, professional sound, though not as clean as it would become on E Pluribus Funk. Third, the songwriting is top notch - and for the most part not in the least addressed to Top 40 radio, as nearly every song is more than four minutes long. "Sin's a Good Man's Brother" is built around a riff that's up there in the "Day Tripper" class. "Aimless Lady" is just incredibly well constructed, a great melody (not always Mark Farner's forte, to say the least), with a terrific bass line from Mel Schacher and an irresistable beat. In contrast to "Heartbreaker" and some other early tracks, the 2-part harmonies are not perfunctory but really put some bite into the chorus. It's a kind of vocal sound that practically identifies GFR, and when they work they work - e.g.. on the chorus of "I Don't Have to Sing the Blues", which opens the album's second side, or on a song like "Black Licorice" from We're an American Band (albeit in the latter case behind lyrics that just about hit rock bottom, and in both cases are borderline offensive). "Nothing Is the Same" is another great composition. Starting with another very nice guitar intro, it becomes a fine rocker that sort of boils over as the song goes into double-time towards the end. The two cuts that stand out least, "Get it Together" and "Hooked on Love", are blue-eyed soul efforts (which I suppose a lot of Farner's songs could be called), and since I will unabashedly say that some of my favorite soul is of the blue-eyed kind (The Righteous Brothers used to be regulars on my turntable) I happen to like them. And "Mean Mistreater", a title familiar from more than one old blues song, is enough all by itself to paralyze me with nostalgia for days gone by, a ballad of uncanny power in its simplicity. A by no means minor virtue of the album is some note-perfect solo work by Farner, pretty much throughout the first side.

Songs about sailors, or with sailing metaphors, were not exactly uncommon in rock at that time. The years 1966-72 featured Billboard top 10 hits like "Yellow Submarine", "Sloop John B.", "Come on Down to My Boat Baby" and "Brandy", not to mention hosts of others that didn't chart much but burned into our skulls nonetheless, like "Wooden Ships". In 1970 Blues Image contributed their still familiar hit "Ride, Captain, Ride". So "I'm Your Captain" had plenty of thematic company, and its strong acoustic component was right on target in a year when James Taylor was a big star and even Led Zeppelin released an album full of acoustic and folk-derived tracks. On the other end of the musical spectrum, producer Terry Knight somehow managed to hire musicians from the Cleveland Symphony, one of the world's leading orchestras, to record the instrumental overlays at the end. Not that the parts are so difficult they demand top flight professionals, but the silky string sound is what you would expect from that ensemble. (I doubt that George Szell was conducting - though if he was, that might help explain why he kicked the bucket a month later.) The harmonies are great throughout, and in particular they give the bridge ("Am I in my cabin dreaming/Or are you really scheming/To take my ship away from me") the kind of depth needed to keep things moving forward as the D chord changes to minor and the song suddenly assumes a new level of harmonic complexity. But ultimately, it's the success of the simple, repeated chant "I'm getting closer to my home" that makes you keep listening and want to raise your voice and chime in. Add to all that some of Mel Schacher's most interesting bass guitar work. (On the album as a whole Schacher's work has a good parallel: John Paul Jones' work on Zep II, which still seems like the best thing he ever did.) All of that behind an unusually fine set of lyrics from Farner.

At the time, a version of the song cut down for Top 40 play made it to #22. Now, I'm no big fan of the listener-polled "Top 1043 Classic Rock Songs" released every year by Q104.3 in New York City (there's another early post in this blog on that topic). But apparently, in 2015 "I'm Your Captain" ranked #9. Those rankings are heavily affected by the station's rotation in any particular year; the 2019 poll had it at #52. Whatever - for a song that didn't even make the Top 20 playlist when it was released, it has had remarkable staying power.

And here's another thing to make you scratch your head: it is usually interpreted as having something to do with misgivings about the Vietnam War. Farner has never confirmed this, and I personally don't find it compelling. But it does have an odd thematic similarity to Amazing Grace, the song by and about a slave ship captain who felt "mighty sick", turned around and brought his enslaved cargo back home.

"I'm getting closer to my home...": is it Farner's "Amazing Grace", or the anthem for a national quarantine? If it seems prophetic, with its mood of impending doom and its exaltation of the virtues of being home, that is just one more thing that adds to the mystique of Closer to Home. There is a long list of groups with one great album, writers with one great book, and filmmakers with one great movie. Put this on the list: Closer to Home is one of the greatest albums ever made, no matter what you think of Grand Funk Railroad, Mark Farner or 70's rock.

Anniversaries are a good opportunity to re-evaluate things, and in that spirit I have taken it upon myself to listen once again to some of GFR's albums, which I had once dismissed as rubbish. I am not about to become a Grand Funk fan, other than Closer to Home. But I am willing to say that my degree of antipathy towards their other albums has somewhat diminished. The first two still don't impress me, though the first, On Time, seems a bit more creative, and the second ("Red Album") just a bit more polished, than I used to think. Survival doesn't do much for me, quite a letdown after Closer to Home. But E Pluribis Funk suggests that after finally getting their act together on Closer to Home, and then losing it again on Survival, they at last found their groove. It's not going to any deserted islands with me, but it is a respectable, possibly even good, album. The band and the sound are both extremely tight, and Farner's guitar work, which was already excellent on Closer to Home, has become first rate - or maybe second rate, since he is no Clapton or Page, or Hendrix for that matter. But whatever the merits of the view that GFR emerged from the streets of Flint as a trio of hacks, it is completely untenable by the time E Pluribus Funk comes out. Phoenix, their next album, is, like most of their albums, a land of peaks and valleys, the latter being the points at which you are pretty sure you were right about them the first time, and the former constantly challenging that with more creative songwriting and flashes of instrumental inspiration. We're an American Band is similarly tight and instrumentally excellent, though I don't like the material as much as on the previous two albums.

That, to me, is all the important albums they made, and it turns out that out of the six there is at least one outstanding gem, one pretty decent hard rocker, and one that might get a "not bad" in a generous moment. Now, think of another band that tends to get a bit more respect, alleged cowbells and all. I refer, of course, to Blue Oyster Cult. Their first album was pure genius, start to finish; their next best, Agents of Fortune, a respectable effort, with of course one of the greatest singles of all time; and their only other collection even worth talking about, Fire of Unknown Origin, might get a "not bad" in a generous moment. The rest is pretty much on a par with the worst of Grand Funk, if not a drop below. The difference comes down to maybe two BOC hits that are a bit over GFR's level (the other, of course, being "Burnin For You"). Mountain gets way more respect than Grand Funk, for reasons that are obscure to me, as they do not even have one album as good as Closer to Home. (Not to mention it was really "Mississippi Queen" that had the cowbell!)

Sadly enough, Mark Farner, the creative force behind GFR, the man who sang, on Closer to Home, "I don't care who you are, I love the human race", is now a raving rightwing lunatic, given to conspiracy theories and other nonsense of a sort currently enjoying a pulpit on Pennsylvania Avenue; he has been quite explicit about their anti-Semitic content, which even the Trumpet of the White House has not enunciated publicly. In 1972 he wrote "I Just Got to Know", which asks if you're ready "to stand up and fight for your rights" and "tired of the war and all that shit". The album also contained a rather dubious appeal in the name of Jesus to stop overpopulation "so you won't have to die". What's more, "The world is full of pollution/and Jesus is the solution". Okay, if that's your bag... but where was this heading? Farner's 1976 song "Don't Let 'Em Take Your Gun" (from their god-awful Zappa-produced Good Singin', Good Playin') has become an anthem for "Second Amendment people", while 1983's What's Funk? features an ignorant anti-communist rant against the revolution in tiny El Salvador, as if a victory of the downtrodden peasantry there would have been an existential threat to Farner's freedom in the U.S. (Recall how the revolution in Nicaragua toppled democracy in America...)There is so little to love about his politics that it is hard to believe he was once a hippie and a liberal. "Talk about a revolution/It seems to be the only solution", he sang on Closer to Home's opening cut, "Sin's a Good Man's Brother", at a time when the "revolution" was supposed to be about peace and love and and legalized pot and an end to war and rigid conservative values. He wrote environmentalist songs before that was a thing, peace-love-and-brotherhood songs, and anti-war songs. It's hard to understand how that guy became the person he is today.

As a Jew living amidst growing anti-Semitism I am not about to forgive Farner for promoting hatred and religious fanaticism. On the other hand, as a human being I cannot fail to admire his devotion to a son who tragically became quadriplegic after some ordinary teenage antics, and died a couple of years ago at 29 after a 10-year battle for survival. I wish I could put the two men together, as I wish I could put the genius of Closer to Home together with GFR's more prosaic efforts. The difference between a good human being and a cynical jerk can go act by act, and that between a great band and a mediocre one can go album by album.

I have discussed at some length in a previous post the unforgiving assessment of Grand Funk Railroad by my lifelong friend (and professional rock critic, which I can hardly claim to be) Ira Robbins, so I won't repeat myself here. The main reason to mention it again is that you can now read it on the magnificently updated Trouser Press web site, which has its own rewards if you like to read about rock; and that, if you appreciate the great writing in that piece, you can now partake of more of it in Ira's second novel, Marc Bolan Killed in Crash. (I already plugged his first one in that 7-year-old post I just referred to!) That should get you in the mood for a golden anniversary trip through 70's rock if anything will. In any case, GFR will never be a favorite of critics, and though I can't quite find my way to the Voldemort view that Ira takes of them, there are some good reasons for this.

But what I now want to go into is another aspect of their legacy that picks up again where I began, with the demise of worthwhile rock and roll in 1970. The year that rock music got sucked down a sinkhole, never to quite make it back, as we all know.

Well, here's an album playlist in which you might find a redeeming song or two:

Bridge Over Troubled Water, Moondance, Sweet Baby James, Ladies of the Canyon, Deja Vu, Elton John, McCartney, Let it Be, Workingman's Dead, BS&T 3, Time and a Word, Cosmo's Factory, John Barleycorn Must Die, A Question of Balance, Stage Fright, After the Gold Rush, Abraxas, Jesus Christ Superstar, Zep III, Tumbleweed Connection, American Beauty, The Man Who Sold the World, Layla, Naturally, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Tea for the Tillerman, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, All Things Must Pass, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

I don't care how old you are, if you don't know and love most of those 26 albums you are not a person I can go out for beers with. Well... okay, maybe that's a bit hasty, but it would be more fun if you did! They all came out in 1970. I could try to boil it down some more, but already, most of those are arguably the best, or one of the best, efforts the respective artists ever produced. Maybe not Zep III; maybe not Let It Be, though in its stripped down version (Let It Be... Naked) it is up there, for me. Maybe The Man Who Sold the World is not Ziggy or Hunky Dory. Maybe...

Let me put it this way instead: in 1970, The Band, Blood Sweat and Tears, ELP, Eric Clapton (with Derek and the Dominoes), CCR, CSNY, the Grateful Dead, George Harrison, Elton John, The Moody Blues, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, Santana, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, Three Dog Night, Traffic and Neil Young each released what is either their best or one of their two best albums. The only reason Joni Mitchell and Yes are not on that list is that they each made too many albums of surpassing brilliance to choose one or two. All four of the Beatles released their first solo albums, and all four convincingly demonstrated that their solo careers were going to live up to our expectations. The Dead and Elton John each released two great albums in the same year. What a terrible year for music.

Lauro Nyro's Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, even if not her best, was part of a trio of albums that opened a door through which Elton John, Joni Mitchell and a long list of later artists, including Kate Bush and Tori Amos, were happy to walk. (You can argue that Stevie Wonder deserves some credit there, but Nyro brought in a quality of freedom from pop limitations that I think anticipate his 1973 Innervisions and later work.)  Melanie's Leftover Wine and Candles in the Wind and The Carpenters' Close to You came out too - you can mutter "But that's not rock!" all you want, they won a lot of fans.

Still, I may have undersold 1970, in some ways. Perhaps you are a Ten Years After fan, you're going to add Cricklewood Green, I guess. If you are a prog rock fan you can point to early albums by about a dozen important prog bands, from Hawkwind and Van der Graaf Generator to Jethro Tull, Genesis and Gentle Giant. There is some classic underground stuff like Soft Machine's Third, if 2, Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother, a couple of Zappa albums, a Beefheart album, and, if you wish, Bitches Brew.

I have not mentioned 2 albums each by Dylan, King Crimson, The Doors, Badfinger and T Rex, and albums by the Beatles, Beach Boys, Todd Rundgren, Pretty Things and Poco, among many other noteworthy efforts, because they might not be those artists' best recordings. I ditched all live albums and posthumous releases (Cream, Hendrix, Stones, even The Who's Live at Leeds) and lots of other stuff. Chicago, marred by a few too many instrumental breaks of questionable merit, still had "25 or 6 to 4" and some other great songs. Jethro Tull's Benefit came out, and The Guess Who released by American Woman and Share the Land.

I have plenty of personal favorites that year, though they might not be yours: One Day at a Time, my favorite Joan Baez album, for example. Also three albums that Wikipedia seems not to know the exact release date for, all of which I think I still have: the eponymous Seatrain (with "13 Questions") and Sugarloaf (you do remember "Green-Eyed Lady", right?) and The Jaggerz' We Went to Different Schools Together (you should recall "The Rapper" too).

Beyond that, just a buttload of interesting stuff, take your pick: Argent, The Strawbs, Spirit, Faces, Canned Heat, Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Fairport Convention, Mott the Hoople, Blue Cheer, Shocking Blue... It seems that while we were pining away for sixties music, musicians were busy re-inventing it, in spite of the James Gang crowd. It wasn't all them and Sabbath and Savoy Brown at all. Maybe there was a bit more in the "Hmmm, that's interesting" category than the "OMG what a brilliant album" category. Maybe Jefferson Starship's Blows Against the Empire, another 1970 release, does not match up with the best Jefferson Airplaine albums. There was a lot of searching for direction, some underwhelming experimentation, but overall, a lot of life.

It turns out we had our heads up our asses, so we could only see the shit that was coming out, while the next era in rock was unfolding. It was driven in large part by folk music, in part by technology, as new synthesizers, keyboards, mixing and amplification equipment were rolled out, and to some extent by a turn toward classical music, at least in the prog rock contingent. Still to come, amidst all the dreck, were The Yes Album, Fragile and Close to the Edge, Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, Aqualung, Madman Across the Water and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Joni Mitchell's other jazz-inflected middle period albums, nearly the entire, brilliant output of Steely Dan, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and some great work by the later Genesis, the best Moody Blues albums, and terrific work by some of my personal favorites - Nektar and 10cc, for instance. A certain guy named Bruce was about to spring from the Jersey Shore, initially to be dismissed by serious music fans as a Dylan wannabe; so, we had been wrong before. Across the ocean was a guy who didn't just make great music, he sort of re-ordered our thinking of what popular music was, again and again; I refer of course to David Bowie. And though a regrettable schism opened up between rock and R&B, and between white and black artists - another charge frequently heard in reference to the 70's - albums like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On?, Isaac Hayes' Shaft soundtrack,  and work by Sly Stone and others still broke through the artificial barriers.

Take it all together, and it was one of the greatest decades for music. The year 1975 alone had a slew of incredible albums - if I'm still blogging then, tune in for my next golden anniversary post.

And, finally, as if this is not enough fun already, there's this 1970 timeline story from Wikipedia:

"Grace Slick is invited to a tea party at the White House by Tricia Nixon, daughter of U.S. President Richard Nixon. Slick arrives at the party with Abbie Hoffman, who is on trial for conspiring to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The pair planned to spike Nixon's tea cup with a heavy dose of LSD. Slick is recognized (although Hoffman is not) and told to leave because she is on the FBI list."

Now, look, Ivanka, you can do better than Tricia Nixon, can't you? So who can you get to help with that? I'm voting for Courtney Love, but you can use your imagination - Carrie Brownstein's an option, maybe even Lady Gaga? I do admit that there's a slight problem with this plan: if your Dad got dosed and lost his grip on reality, who would ever know the difference?

Oh, how far we've come since Richard Nixon! Maybe we'll get some great music this decade.

(Note: Originally posted at 9:00 a.m., and substantially updated at 4:25 p.m.)