Just like Franny Glass in another 1961 book, the stepdaughter Kate Cutrer is a young woman whose life of stasis - hides a state of crisis. Kate has lived in the shadow of her jocular father and "older sister"-like stepmother Emily. Percy does not quite give us all the backstory on Kate. So we are left to gather that she is at times shy and reserved, while at others fiercely independent.
This is a period of cognitive dissonance for many American women. After taking up the mantle of responsibility when we were in WWII, societal mores pushed many of them back into marriage, motherhood, and the pacifier of suburban consumer living. When Binx talks to Kate early in the book, she does what she does best: bringing old abandoned houses in New Orleans back to life. With her steel wool and solvents, Kate is, in effect, restoring the past. Yet to those of us reading, we only have a few strands to unite.
The main source of conflict seems to be that Emily wants Kate (and Binx as well) to become fully-formed adults with responsibilities and respectable occupations so that perhaps they too can occupy a space on her crowded mantle of memories. The issue is that Kate is slated to marry upstanding Walter and lead a so-called normal life. However, Kate is beginning to resist these trappings pharmaceutically and by separating herself. The sedatives she secretly indulges in are leading her away from all normal life. Kate is pacifying herself from the world of expectations. She will never be as "Catholic" as her father, nor a matriarch like Emily. Marrying Walter looks to provide an escape from Emily, but only into another world that is too familiar and probably as claustrophobic.
Analyzing Kate's actions and non-actions, especially in her best buddy-style friendship with the loner Binx, one cannot help but see in her most defiant moments she is eerily like Emily. The silences in their conversation often hint at elemental resistance, but her blatant answers of misdirection match the one she may be trying to separate herself from.
Interrupting their afternoon of her playing Chopin, Binx asks Emily about a picture on the mantle of a trip to Hungary where the hunting men are proud of their quail prizes. Emily elevates their standing in comparison ("The age of the Catos is gone.") and regales in the past. Pressed to explain her whereabouts, she reveals that she headed off to Germany on her own before "insisting" on going back to the Lake Country of England again.
Later when visiting Kate as she toils away, Kate "feels wonderful" because of a passing storm. Binx asks her directly about accompanying him to a parade where Walter is in a krewe. Kate rifles between tense/reactive and tentative/nervous. Binx can only follow along based on her breathing. When they discuss "Poor Walter," Kate's admission of admiration is that he carries a measuring tape with him. Binx presses her about marriage. She gives a tentative reaction, "I don't know."
Finally, there is Kate's puzzling yet defining moment. "Can you remember the happiest moment of your life?" she asks Binx. After he resists with an answer that cannot lead any further, Kate tells the story of the day she was traveling with her last fiancee Lyell and he perished in a car crash. The details spill out of her.
Spry (painted on the side of a car they passed) was the last thing I saw. Lyell ran head on into a truckful of cotton-pickers. I must have been slumped down so low that I rolled up into a ball. When I woke up I was lying on the front porch of a shack. I wasn't even scratched.
From here, Kate's thoughts become scrambled ("I could only think of one thing: I didn't want to be taken to Lyell's family in Natchez.") When she looks at her future husband, people think she is merely another onlooker. Now anonymous, tragedy has presented the strange opportunity of freedom as even the blood on her blouse disappeared in a nearby hotel laundry.
Binx presses her for her happiest moment. Kate says it was on that bus riding away from this terrible accident that she was lucky enough to escape unscathed. After this admission, her answer to marrying Walter has moved to "probably not" and she is content to escape all responsibility and thought about any future whatsoever by palling around with Binx.
I no longer pretend to understand the world. The world I knew has come crashing down around my ears. The things we hold dear are reviled and spat upon...the going under of the evening land. - Emily to Binx.
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Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
New MUSIC This Week
BEABADOOBEE -This is How Tomorrow Moves [BLUE LP/CD](Dirty Hit/RCA) • Where does one go after a TikTok smash and being handpicked to open for both The 1975 and Taylor Swift? Inward, of course. Beabadoobee gets introspective on her Rick Rubin co-produced third album. Much like "Beatopia," much of her imagination is revealed in fusing breezy, breathy Pop ("Ever Seen") with an intimate lo-fi Sgt. Pepper-ish wisp ("Coming Home.") The bittersweet 10,000 Maniacs at an Elliott Smith circa "XO" mild gallop "Take A Bite" is her most Americanized whisper of a hit.
KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD - Flight b741 [2LP](pDoom/KGLW) • King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard have made so many records now (this is their 26th!) that every one lives in wild transition from its predecessor. After the twin triumphs of the jammy "Ice, Death.." and showy Metallic melodic "Petrodragonic Apocalypse," Gizzard gets down to their level of basics. The harmonies are still intact, but "Hog Calling Contest" is a unique callback to both Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead (if they were played at double speed.) While they are busy plumbing Seventies American Rock, they even leap into some Glam-meets-Boogie on the falsetto-led "Le Risque."
QUIVERS - Oyster Cuts [LP/CD](Merge/AMPED) • While it may be a bit insulting to say this is a great new Kiwi Rock band from Australia, Quivers's outsider take on Flying Nun-style bright guitar Pop makes it feel different. "Pink Smoke" might as well be slowed down a little further to head-nodding speed and become the latest from Wednesday/MJ Lenderman or even World's Greatest Dad. While the synth-draped title cut is a natural for the year's ongoing love of Eighties Pop, the Stones-y surprise of the incandescent "Apparition" (and its Exile-ish chorus "Oh my God/Oh my God/Everybody's got/Everybody's got a reason") is a late-summer burner.
FOUR YEAR STRONG - Analysis Paralysis [BLUE/PURPLE LP/CD](Pure Noise/The Orchard) • Worcester's "Easycore" (not our moniker- but it fits) Four Year Strong continues their identity crisis on their eighth album. The crunchy radio-ready production (courtesy of producer Will Putney of Fit For A Autopsy) makes the jarring transitional ideas fit together better. "Dead End Friend" should be a major-league kiss-off (therefore manna for the remaining Alt. Rock/Active Rock programmers out there) but it is too repetitive leading it to sound less universal and more of a blatant commercial reach. Instead, they fare better on the turbo-charged "Uncooked" with its weird twist of Nu-Metal oomph (that Deftones-ian razor-sharp Damoclean "I'll beeeee fiiiiinnne") and a heated Pop/Punk chorus.
REISSUES OF THE WEEK
SMASHING PUMPKINS - Rotten Apples: Greatest Hits [2LP](Virgin) • Going from revered to reviled is a lengthy journey for Billy Corgan and his ever-changing band. Fortunately, this 2001 double vinyl collection of hits captures them just before they stare down the precipice of bloated, wildly inconsistent albums. Sides one through three are everything you remembered about them (including well-placed cuts from the film "Singles" and a Fleetwood Mac cover) before you wanted to forget the rest (Oh, "Machina.")
ELVIS PRESLEY - Memphis [2LP/5CD BOX](Legacy) • "Memphis" was everything to Elvis. So, this massive compilation puts every Memphis session and existing live performance from the city together to paint The King's history of coming home. Newly mixed and stripped down by producer Matt Ross-Spang, "Memphis" in the Sixties specifically shows how well The King was at energizing studio players at both American and Stax studios. Also, of particular interest is a 1973 Memphis live performance, the famous "Jungle Room" recordings from Graceland, and the final days where Elvis, though in poor health, still summoned the magic of his home.
ART BLAKEY - Moanin' [BLUE LP](Blue Note)
WAYNE SHORTER - Speak No Evil [BLUE LP](Blue Note)
PHAROAH SANDERS - Thembi [LP](Verve)
ELVIN JONES - Heavy Music [LP](Verve)
Now that high quality Jazz reissues are becoming more frequent, we thought we could round them up. The Blue Note cool Blue vinyl anniversary pressings continue with 1958's "Moanin'" from legendary drummer/bandleader Art Blakey. "Moanin'" establishes the structure of Hard-Bop/Blues mixing albums to come in the Sixties. Blakey trades off with pianist Bobby Timmons (the classic title cut,) and "Are You Real?" with extended parts for saxophonist Benny Golson and trumpeter Lee Morgan.
As a member of Miles Davis' quintet, the late Wayne Shorter was established as a fantastic player/songwriter. However, as a bandleader this 1964 recording (released in 1966) introduced Avant-Garde voicings to Hard-Bop leading everyone away from the standard "Coltrane-esque" music of the day. Backed by legends Herbie Hancock, Elvin Jones, Freddie Hubbard, and Ron Carter, "Speak No Evil" (especially the pacing of the second side) defined where traditional Jazz needed to go to survive the onslaught of Rock N'Roll and Free Jazz.
Pharaoh Sanders cut his teeth playing beside John Coltrane. After Coltrane's death, Sanders even picked up the mantle of responsibility for long, exploratory sweltering songs that maintained tension and intensity. In 1971, Sanders that he wanted to go "Electric" per se (Lonnie Liston Smith on electric piano) but kept the tracks short and aimed at both current trends of creating "astral" tunes while celebrating Afrocentrism.
Finally, drummers tend to make heavy records. So in 1967, Coltrane's longtime percussionist Elvin Jones formed his quartet to work out some Funk. Working with bassist Richard Davis (about to record on Van Morrison's legendary "Astral Weeks,") pianist Billy Green, and saxophonist Frank Foster, "Heavy" pushes the Hard Bop to its limit - even introducing Jones playing guitar on one track.
