At the age of forty-four, Raymond Chandler lost his fancy oil company job during The Great Depression. Abandoned by his alcoholic father at an early age, Chandler's mother, Florence, thought it would be best for Raymond to be raised with a superior education in England. Supported by an uncle, Chandler grew up with his mother, an aunt, and his grandmother where he obtained a classical education at Dulwich. He always gravitated toward writing, composing romantic poems and cruising around Paris when he should have been at university. An unsuccessful reporter, Chandler met the known scribe Richard Barham Middleton who pushed him into writing. Unfortunately, Middleton followed his visions of guidance and inspiration by committing suicide. This plangent act echoed in Chandler sending him back to America. From 1922 until 1931, Chandler rose from correspondence-school self-taught bookkeeper to Vice President. A trail of bad decisions of his own making led to his sacrifice by the company as it entered its own dire straits.
Chandler started reading pulp magazines for one simple reason: they were cheap and easily accessible, in fact most readers tended to leave them behind where they once were. Chandler saw in the magazine Black Mask, that this writing possessed a definite style and yet still had room for growth. Chandler would not be the typical pulp writer, waxing over his stories for months while the other writer drilled them out weekly. From 1933 until 1941, Chandler published 22 short stories. When he shifted gears to novel writing in 1939 with "The Big Sleep," he wrote seven before his death in 1959. Unlike Cornell Woolrich or his idol Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of the Perry Mason character/series, Chandler took to prose that treasured honesty above all and always found a way to track the path of crime both away from and back to justice.
In 1953's "The Long Goodbye" (which he would later call "his best book,") we follow the daily adventures of his gumshoe Philip Marlowe. By now, his audience knows Marlowe fairly well with this being his sixth book. However, Chandler had to reconfigure his story originally because the publisher accused him in original drafts of making him "too soft." Outside of the dense machinations of Los Angeles and its tangle of both industry and tourism, Marlowe spends the first few chapters of "The Long Goodbye" focused on Marlowe's relationship with the down-and-out-then-filthy rich Terry Lennox.
With almost no real activity, Chandler draws you into the making (and we will say breaking) of their semblance of friendship. Outside the club The Dancers, Marlowe has the "good luck" of seeing a nearly catatonically drunk Lennox trying to get in his car at a valet station. Immediately, Marlowe draws a picture of Lennox as someone we would just love to hate: "yellow slacks, riding boots and a monocle." When the girl with him suggests they simply take a cab back home, get out the convertible and ride up the coast, Lennox retorts "I was compelled to sell it," to which Chandler writes "A slice of spumoni wouldn't have melted on her now."
Once Marlowe steps in to help the abandoned Lennox, their friendship is built in layers. In the beginning, Marlowe takes him home where he snores loudly for an hour before waking up completely clear-headed. The gracious Lennox understands his infractions socially and their results, but Marlowe sees him as an almost-forgotten shadow of a man who never forgot his manners. As his girl said in her earlier departure, "He was just a lost dog."
Their second meeting is more random and chaotic. In Chandler's well-illustrated consumer/commercial pre-Christmas landscape, no one on L.A. 's streets saw his disheveled body leaned against a store. No one except for Marlowe and a couple of beat cops. So again, Marlowe sweeps in to save Lennox. When Marlowe is not managing to get a physically bereft Lennox to move, he is fielding questions that would immediately send anyone else downtown.
Just a minute, Mac. What have we got here? Is the gentleman in the soiled laundry a real close friend?
In all of these conversations and interactions, Chandler is teaching us that Marlowe is a skilled investigator because he is quick to observe and question, but slow to judge. ("You're a problem that I don't have to solve.") While developing characters and hitting us with some short spikes of effective imagery ("she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile") and keeping us as readers at a safe distance from Lennox to Marlowe that makes us at least question the fact that both characters lack any real motives. (Lennox, "Why should I bother you?" Marlowe, "Looks like you had to bother somebody. Looks like you don't have many friends.")
So while we are spending considerable time trying to figure out why Marlowe keeps mixing it up with Lennox, Chandler is leading us along in the development of their friendship. Lennox leaves Marlowe to go to Las Vegas to meet a friend and get cleaned up for real this time. Their third interaction comes a few weeks later, kicked off by a Christmas card that announces "Sylvia and I are starting a second honeymoon." The doubt is ours. The hatred is Marlowe's.
I caught the rest of it in one of those snob columns in the society section of the paper. I don't read them often, only when I run out of things to dislike.
The next meeting with Lennox is more gracious but also laborious. Outside of his flamboyant clothes and "wedding present" of a new convertible, Lennox opens the conversation with sober bitterness ("I'm rich. Who the hell wants to be happy?") and his stories no longer matching begin to weigh on Marlowe. So, Lennox decides to drop in on Marlowe with more consistency and subject himself to Marlowe's terse questioning. As soon as Marlowe thinks he has it figured out, Lennox interweaves another level of so-called confidence that cannot mask doubt ("Big production, no story, as they say around the movie lots.") And then, the beast of a writer that Chandler is wears us down on Lennox and his coded pleas for sympathy ("Could be. I was raised in an orphanage in Salt Lake City,") and attention ("Mostly I just kill time, and it dies hard.") Until at the precise moment, you as reader are thinking "I have grown so tired of Lennox," Marlowe as narrator bellows:
I liked him better drunk, down and out, hungry and beaten and proud. Or did I?
Chandler has given us pages with relatively no action, just the mysterious happenstance of a relationship where we finally obtain the answer as to why everyone in the beginning told Marlowe precisely why they were leaving the unresponsive drunk behind. Yet the proverbial machine has started, and in its low purr drawn us into two worlds that do not match or mesh. The only aspect they have in common, the liminal presence of our shamus Marlowe. Without knowing it, like Marlowe, we too are now "infected" and must ride it out no matter what.
It must be something like the tertian ague, he (Terry) said, "When it hits you it's bad. When you don't have it, it's as though you never did have it."
MUSIC THIS WEEK
STURGILL SIMPSON - A Sailor's Guide To Earth [RHINO RESERVE LP](Rhino)
On what may be Sturgill's perfect album, "Sailor's Guide" takes a lot of chances (setting up his course for future records in his catalog) without announcing its intent. The result is a journey that is unusually poignant for Sturgill fans with multiple surprises (the recalculated Nirvana cover) and a thrilling finish that should be followed by end credits.
FLAMING LIPS - Clouds Taste Metallic [RHINO RESERVE LP](Rhino)
Outside of the bad news regarding the split in their nucleus this week, Oklahoma's still-wondrous Flaming Lips take us back to the moment in time in 1995 when near-success opened the door to alter their acid-damaged blisteringly-loud madness for a more colorful but still dense work with a hint of Brian Wilson and The Beatles even as Coyne and company were creating Psychedelic rock love songs ("When you smile, all the subatomic pieces come together and unfold themselves in seconds) and they still unusual excursions into sound construction.
JOHN PRINE - Sweet Revenge [RHINO RESERVE LP](Rhino)
History should tell us that any artist brought to light during a Folk revival cannot last long on guitar-and-vocal only records. Even outside of Pop, the battle for consistency in writing is often matched with a need to match changes with more production. The house-recorded/Bluegrass approach of "Diamonds in The Rough" was altered by producer Arif Mardin to bring in the band. History should also tell us that when you have a songwriter who writes at the level of early Prine, it does not matter who or where he is playing - classics ("Sweet Revenge," "Please Don't Bury Me," and "Dear Abby") are coming your way.
ALT-J - An Awesome Wave [GOLD LP](Rhino)
In 2026, your playlist is dotted by music like this underrated album from 2012. As if a computer (the group's name is derived from a Mac command) was carefully selecting the music of the day that would best elicit a response (hang on to that notion,) "An Awesome Wave" mixed the heady Folk textures everyone was still after with the brain-shaking electronics of Radiohead. In hindsight, what remains the strangest aspect of their success is how Alt-J could create these wintry harmonies ("Tessellate") using normally icy synth ideas to promote warmth. At its best, this was an experiment in sound that encouraged the Leeds band to expand their music further by using everything at their disposal. At its worst, it created the wave of "neutered" Alt.Pop that hits us every week now with artists eager to make wispy Electronic-detailed Indie Rock.
STEVE MARTIN - Let's Get Small/Comedy Is Not Pretty [LP](Rhino)
For a moment in time in the Seventies, the comic reigned supreme on Rock stages as an eager zeitgeist-mocking opening act. In the golden age of Carlin and Pryor, there was Steve Martin. While he could crush a tight five on Carson with a bit that either was shaped to/announced as a bit or felt like it was being molded from spontaneity, Martin live could extend his bit into that stream of linkage that would be defined today as meta. Martin, the writer (an Emmy-winner for the Smothers Brothers,) took absurdism to soaring new heights with an act that could honestly be about nothing. As hip as his smarmy demeanor was to the audiences of the day, there was a habit of look at me-look at me-look at me-don't look at me from Martin that made his comedy golden. "Let's Get Small" mocks the nightclub act, toys with audience participation, drug humor, and classic gags on its surface. However, raised to a higher level of consciousness, Martin could turn a bit on just his phrasing ("I'm so mad at my mother") and then escalate the lowest humor (the constant calls for "mood lighting") to high art. This one plays like Side One and Side Two to this day. It is no wonder that Martin found left-field success with "King Tut" from "Comedy Is Not Pretty" in 1978 because every step of the way (the miniature giggler "Cat Handcuffs" to the massive linkage "Philosophy/Religion/College/Language") was a signal that he was carving a path to success while gleefully making fun of it the whole time.
OUTTA POCKET - Your Last Breath (Daze/Vydia)[LP/CD]
PEELINGFLESH - PF Radio (Daze/Vydia)[LP/CD]
HOLDER - Holder (Daze/Vydia)[LP/CD]
Indie label Daze/major distributor Vydia is taking a real shot with a handful of very Hardcore releases this week. Outside the exhausting ring of a bashed snare, Outta Pocket is the Punk equivalent of a slow-moving coup. At their hectic normal pace, they double up on the kick drum and pound mercilessly on the title track. However on the pitch dark closer "Memories," they slow down to the same pace as Black Flag's immortal "My War" and unleash their real rage.
Tied for second place are Oklahoma City Death Metal-meets-Hip-Hop group Peelingflesh and Massachusetts HC/Emo Rockers Holder. Peelingflesh has a lot going on during this "radio-sounding" EP. Somewhere between the Death-ly guttural growl and the rolling drum machines, they are going to arrive at something for fans of $UICIDEBOY$ and Sleep Token. With a better shift between these two gears, Peelingflesh offers a bone-chilling potential. Holder comes at Hardcore with Metalcore screeching (although, honestly Peter Searcy yowled just like this in Squirrel Bait.) Holder sling some huge riffs ("Five") and pump out potent slowdown/wind-up breaks that could make your house into a pit.
CADAVER SHRINE - Into The Horrible Depths [LP] (Chaos UK)
One-man bands mixing Death and Doom metal require some serious alchemy. MdeJong handles it all pretty well on this bracing and deep album. The vocals wear down on you pretty quickly but MdeJong has a lot of interesting instrumental ideas. There are some subtle twists on the opener, and a thunderous almost Tool-like ending to "From The Maw of Madness," before "Cauterized Wounds" develops a punishing Doom riff into a part that fits over two different tempos. "The Horrible Depths" ventures into Ministry-esque turf before "Carnage Reigns" takes a little tri-tone down toward Doom-meets-classic Metal terra incognita. With the right producer and maybe a vocalist, MdeJong could be making Death/Doom that is more forward-looking than most, especially when he swerves around the clichés.
Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
