Some Girls: Bianca Jagger

Part two of my three part Jagger girls post: Bianca Jagger.

I think Bianca Jagger would have done better to be someone's first lady... she has a sort of regal bearing that sits well with high fashion, and with high society, but not so much with high times in rock and roll. Mick Jagger married his Nicaraguan lookalike in 1971, and she was his chief partner through much of the Studio 54 era, rubbing elbows with the likes of Warhol and Halston, doing tons of drugs; in general, "making the scene" as Mick Jagger never had done before and from what I can tell never did again. There was haymaking for sure with Jerry Hall in the 80's, but not on the level of decadence that seemed to go on during Bianca's reign as Mrs. Jagger.







Bianca Jagger style, much touted at the time, seems neat but far from avant garde when viewed thirty years later. I love, love, LOVE the way the woman could wear a boater or a bowler, and her lithe, petite frame looks as great draped in Edwardian/Victorian frippery as it does in sleek cut suits or spaghetti strap disco dresses. All that taken into consideration, I'm still not as impressed with her fashion as people seemed to be at the time...I wonder if they still are... there's a boring kind of "look at me, look at me" going on that doesn't seem as edgy as it does needy. She has a very androgynously pretty face, but it relies mainly on her youth and dark coloring for extra wattage... despite soaking myself in a solution of mainly Warhol intimate biographies and memoirs throughout high school, I don't "get" Bianca Jagger.

These preconcevied notions of mine were reinforced by the article below, a five page spread in People focusing on how unique and vivid Bianca Jagger is-- as principally told by, and in the opinion of, guess who, Bianca Jagger. Many times in real life as well as in biographies I've read, you run into significant others of creative types with the "Zelda Fitzgerald" complex, which Bianca cites in the byline of the article. She seems to think that the artistic success Mick Jagger has somehow hampered her own-- I say it's apples and oranges....or, to be less kind, complete B.S. Zelda Fitzgerald was capitalized upon by her husband-- fine. He took her diaries and incorporated them into fictionalized retellings of their lives-- not very fair, but ok, fine. Valid concerns, all. What, exactly, did Mick Jagger take from Bianca Jagger? Bianca adds a great deal of glamor to his life, sure, but he's in the ROLLING STONES, forgoodnesssake. It doesn't get much more glamorous than being in the biggest rock band in the world ever period. She has dramatic aspirations, fashion aspirations...lots of lip service to what she COULD be good at if people could only disassociate her in their collective minds from being "Mrs. Mick Jagger". I just don't think she would have even achieved the fame she did without being Mrs. Mick Jagger.

If you click on the pictures below, you can see each page full size. Give it a read and see what your take on the tone is. Maybe I just hate everyone, who knows.



I could say it's all just jealousy on my part, that I would like to be Michael Caine's exgirlfriend (Bianca was) and celebrate my twenty-seventh birthday by riding a white horse lead by a painted, naked man into Studio 54 (Bianca did) and get to make out with Mick Jagger (kind of a given) and look exotic and bold in all white frock dresses (not that I don't, but having black hair and black eyes adds something dramatic to any color scheme, I've always wanted to have said coloring)... but I don't think it is. I just don't go for Bianca Jagger.

Which is why, you'll see, I'm 100% team Jerry in the next posting. Jerry Hall, you're up next!

Some girls: Marianne Faithfull

Mick Jagger-- despite whatever faults you may possess, you have the BEST. TASTE. IN WOMEN. The best. That may sound kinda off coming from me, Mick, but I'm sincere. I was thinking of style icons the other day, and realized that three out of my top thirty are all connected by having long term relationships with the indefatigable frontman of Ye Olde Stones. The glamour of being a Rolling Stone is impressive-- but I'd have to say the glamour of being a well dressed, well heeled woman on the arm of a Rolling Stone is just about as to-die-for. But you have to be THE RIGHT ONE. Note that as neat as Anita Pallenberg and Patti Hansen are, I think Marianne Faithfull, Bianca Jagger, and Jerry Hall are like a holy trinity of examples of the girlfriend to which any girlfriend should aspire to be-- sexy, singular, and breath of frost cool.

Examine, part one of my three part rant, about the lives of the loves of Mick Jagger.

Marianne Faithfull

I read MF's autobiography, Faithfull, sometime in mid-high school, when I was hip deep in a dusty copy of the double album compilation Rocks Off, and high off the mike from Tony Sanchez's Ups and Downs with the Rolling Stones, a quintessential 60's/70's rock fan read. From what I can remember off the top of my head, Andrew Loog Oldman, the manager of the Rolling Stones, met MF at a Stones launch party in the mid 60's and started her off with a her own singing career. On her several charting singles from the sixties', her voice is slightly low, sweet, and clear-- kind of like a less clangy France Gall. "As Tears Go By" was a Jagger/Richards penned semi-hit in 1965.






Some other weird things from the autobiography-- her mother was a baronness, the great-niece of Baron Sach-Masoch, after whom the term "masochism" is named (not sure what the deal is about that without looking it up, but what a strange "claim to fame"). She married John Dunbar in the early 60's, founder of the Indica Gallery, the art space that John Lennon and Yoko Ono first met, at one of Ono's exhibitions. She had one child with Dunbar and then dropped him for Mick Jagger, shortly after having hooked up with Keith Richards (one of those things, I guess). Faithfull said that in the 60's your main hookup line was always something to do with some esoteric knowledge that became a criterion for whether or not you slept with the person. If you asked the guy something about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or Tristan and Isolde, and he knew it, he was in, otherwise, he was obviously not "cool enough" to sleep with. Ah, the swinging sixties'. If you did that now, you might end up a nun the rest of your days.

I have ALWAYS wanted to wear bangs across my forehead like this tiny slip of a girl child wore bangs across her forehead, yet I was cursed with a half a dozen cowlicks and was never able to make them lay quite like hers do. I do love the girlishness of most of her outfits-- even when she would wear something completely Carnaby, she managed to pull it off with an air of femininity that a lot of the more androgynous mod's lacked. Her STYLE, and pale blonde, fragile sort of beauty is what puts her as tops enough to be a Jagger girlfriend, and yet her post Jagger output is really for what the world should remember her.

It's so weird to me, after all these years, that THIS Marianne Faithfull would later become the Marianne Faithfull we have now-- on the cultural currency level of maybe a Nick Cave or a Tom Waits. To say that you could mention MF and Tom Waits in the same breath, judging only from her sixties' output ,would be akin to saying Cilla Black or Lulu would have any kind of major impact on the New Wave/Punk scene of the early 80's. You'd have to be nuts. AND YET. Take a listen to her breakthrough success on 1979's Broken English, after almost ten years absence from the music scene. Who knew she had it in her?

She has that fey, stepped-out-of-Lewis-Carroll kind of a face in the earlier photos I posted which later, after ten years of hard living aged her twenty, took on such a preternatural, flintily prescient cast, you'd think they were two completely different people. Her sixties' recordings are pretty...like a less clangy, more mellifluous France Gall...but her back-from-the-grave late 70's and early 80's cuts are much deeper, showing herself as an artist in her own right. I first heard "Tenderness" on a mixtape I bought at the thrift store and went nuts for it, shortly thereafter getting into her work with the Brecht/Weill music of Weimar Republic era Germany. Her phrasing on some of the songs, "Mack the Knife", "Pirate Jenny", "The Soldier's Wife"...is. SO. AMAZING. You wouldn't believe she hadn't been raspily belting out Threepenny Opera et al her whole life.

Next up: Bianca Jagger. People, get ready.

Vintage Disneyland Posters

I was looking for...I'm not exactly sure what...something else on Google image search when I came across these vintage Disneyland posters from the late fifties' and early sixties'. At first glance, the posters look like remakes in the style of mid century illustration...that retro-futurist kind of stuff you saw with the press materials for Down With Love . I thought about PIXAR, and the guys that do Venture Brothers, and just assumed these were some neat, throwback items.



BUT! These are NOT new-made-to-look-old! While most of the images I've brought over from Google Image are reproductions, they are reproductions of actual 1955-1971 Disneyland advertising. Which brings up the interesting idea that some things that are authentic-to-period don't look authentic-to-period because the market is so rife with close imitations that the original....looks....fake?





Case in point, I was at Goodwill the other day thumbing through men's short sleeve button up shirts for something a cute man would like to wear (you know who you are, Babu), and came across a blue, tiki-lounge kind of shirt about which I was immediately on the fence. It wasn't stupendous to begin with, but I was having one of those dry-spell days at Goodwill, where you carry this one plate shaped like the state of Florida or a t-shirt you're not really in love with but you can't go shopping for forty five minutes and buy NOTHING, come onnn....I looked it over once, then twice, then squinted, deep in thought as to whether or not it was more lounge or more louche. I had to check the tag to see if it really WAS from the 1960's (I'm not a snob about things being "for real vintage", but sometimes if it's from 1999, it'll take three washes before becoming a shadow of its former, color-vibrant self, and the buttons will fall off every five minutes). The faded, battered piece of cotton provided a provenance that probably was mid-century department store rack. And yet! I could not buy it.


I was stuck on the idea that it looked like a bad K-mart knockoff... poorly aped 60's style, when in fact, it was the real deal. The UBIQUITY of those poorly made, something-tacky-always-added psuedo lounge shirts actually kept me from buying a real one. As much as I love clothes, and will wear clothes that are outside the safety zone of t-shirts and jeans, I am no Isabella Blow. You have to care a little about what other people think of what you wear (unless you are, in fact, Isabella Blow, in which case, go'onwitchabadself).I know good and well from my own experience that people (both the ones you want to and the ones you don't want to) will look at your clothes and make an immediate judgement call as to what you're "about". While I do, habitually, dress Matthew up in a fashion that might err too much on the side of Kramer, I still have, in my heart of hearts, 60's man-about-town in mind for him. And if not that, at least rock n roller par excellence. Thus, having him go out in a black pair of pants and that shirt...with its discount-brand ambiguity...was not what I wanted. Again, this is coming from someone who never spends more than ten dollars on any piece of clothing, and believes in bargains-a-palooza, but gauche + lack of quality = you done lost y'mind, put that back in your closet.

I wonder, with mid century madness at a fever pitch as Mad Men trudges through its fourth (and excellent) season on air, how long it will be until some of the things I love become alien in my affection. Is it enough to love it like it is? The same phenomenon happens with music-- how you can't put "Start Me Up" on a mix cd without people thinking about car commercials, or "It's Getting Better" and Philips spots... will there come a breaking point? Or do some things remain classic regardless of paltry imitations and over exposure?

With that said, you can enjoy (unmitigatedly or not) these Disneyland posters, as the genuine article. Maybe a little too mordant for an article mainly illustrated by just the loveliest, whimsical travel-ish posters, but it got me thinking.

And as penance for the wanton way in which I ripped off these websites for a lot of the images, please direct your attention to the very bottom of this post for more websites that know a LOT more about these pictures than me. Me, I just enjoy them...authentico or no. :)

• Better scans of some of these on Flickr
• Vintage Disneyland ephermera of every shape and size here
• Links to Eric Tan, who did a great job of using these images as inspiration for some of the print materials surrounding the PIXAR release Up, here and here
• Disney posters/history here
• And, as a special bonus, the "secret" and exclusive Disneyland "Club 33"
  

Rev. Gary Davis

"If I Had My Way", by Rev. Gary Davis, was included on a blues/gospel compilation I borrowed from the George F. DeVine music library sometime during my four year stay at the University of Tennessee. I remember how lucky I felt that my dorm was about two blocks from an EXTENSIVE collection of rare blues discs (Yazoo re-releases, Library of Congress reissues from their mighty fine LP recordings made in the field, long ago) and that my honors student status allowed that I should take them from the building, in their pristine status, back to said dorm, in order to give them a very close listening. "If I Had My Way" stood out for the barrelling guitar work, that twinges all the way up the neck and comes back down in tiny picks and whines and slides which to my unattuned ears were at once as delightful as they were surprising. I listened to a lot of Robert Johnson, Skip James, and kind of early piano ragtime kind of stuff in high school (the aforementioned Yazoo records were available through the library catalog, before someone took off with them, never to return), but it was my first brush with "how gospel can be fun", a lesson to be taken up again with Rich Amerson and Rev Utah Smith recordings.

The subject matter of the lyrics, first popularized by Blind Willie Johnson, is actually the Samson and Delilah story from the Old Testament. Though "If I had my way, I would tear this building down" became an oft sung response to "How's work?", it refers to Samson pulling down the columns, in that part of the Samson story where he's pulling down the columns (I never said I was a biblical scholar). I love the colloquial approach to the storytelling-- it puts the idea that hymns have to be sacred and reverent on its ear, this "hymn" earns something in the approachability it preaches.

"Well Delilah, she was a woman fine and fair
She had good looks, God knows and coal black hair
Delilah, she came to Samson's mind
The first he saw this woman that looked so fine
Delilah, she set down on Samson's knee
Said tell me where your strength lies if you please
She spoke so kind, God knows, she talked so fair
'til Samson said 'Delilah, you can cut off my hair
You can shave my head, clean as my hand
And my strength 'come as natural as any a man' "

And you really have to listen to the way its delivered. Which, you can do, as I posted a live video of the man himself...right here.



Another of his, "Sally Where'd You Get Your Liquor From?", as he picks it out on an afghan covered couch. This is someone's living room he's filling up with that sound. Gorgeous.

More songs of his on youtube? "Cocaine Blues" , "Death Don't Have No Mercy", "Candyman". How's THAT for titles?

Today I was reading an interview with Rev. Gary Davis (alternately referred to as "Blind Gary Davis", as he was that too), and was struck with how much his vernacular matches my grandaddy's when I was growing up. South is south, in some cases, I guess. I love how colorfully people used to speak, even about serious things. Some highlights:

• I was born on the last day of April, which is the thirtieth, in 1896. I was raised in Laurens County, South Carolina, on a farm, way down in the sticks, too. Way down in the country, so far you couldn’t hear a train whistle blow unless it was on a cloudy day.
• My grandmother mostly raised me. You see, my father gave me to my grandmother when I was a child because he knowed that there was no confidence to be put into my mother. She was always from one place to another, going from different towns and dances. Things like that. So my father gave me to my grandmother. I had one brother. He was a good guitar player. I taught him. He used to keep me up all night long to teach him how to play the guitar. He got killed in 1930. The woman he was going with killed him.
• Do you know why I hardly never do anything like that? Because its cheap guitar playing stuff. I don’t play no cheap stuff.
• He suffered a kidney trouble. That’s what killed him. His thigh wasn’t as big as this guitar neck here. That’s the way he went away.
• His home was in Rockingham, North Carolina. He came up to Durham later. When I first run across him he didn’t know how to play but one piece and that was with a knife. He wanted to take some of my training. I’d sit down and he’d come up to my house everyday and sit down and play. I taught him how to play. He would have been alright if I kept him under me long enough.
• I knew his wife first. He had gotten away from her. She come to my house, I met her in the streets the first time, lookin’ for him. I took her home with me to my mother’s house. She had been out all night long and hadn’t slept yet. Gave her my bed so she could lay down and sleep. Next day she happened to stumble up upon him, you know. He had got away from her and she didn’t know where he was. She was awful fond of him. She was crazy about him. She never wanted to get too far from him. I can’t talk too much about it because you women know how it is, even if you ain’t married! When you come across somebody that you love you like to keep them close to you.
• Sometimes people get drunk and get fightin’ and shootin’. All like that happened. I would stop playing and find somewhere to go when that happened because you know me and bullets don’t set horses.
• I ain’t never heard anybody on a record yet beat Blind Blake on the guitar. I like Blake because he plays right sporty. Blind Lemon Jefferson plays like he wants somebody to feel sorry for him.
• Well a lot of things I could tell a person if I just had the time to study what they were fishing for. To play blues on a guitar I’d teach them to play the guitar like a piano.
• When I was coming up, it was so.
• I played everything I thought of. No religious songs though. Around then I was keen in my "young ways".
• Long about them days what they called playing well wasn’t what I could call playing well today.
  
  (You can read the whole interview HERE)

Between what he's talking about and the WAY he's talking about it, you could see how I was mesmerized by the interview. If I can find an old burned copy of his early recordings (the copy I found when I came back from college is STOLEN), I think I'll nose around the track listings and see what else I can dig up about the man. That song alone, however, ought to be enough to sell anyone.

Wikipedia on Rev Gary Davis
A homepage of sorts