The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs

LD Beghtol

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781441130631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musikgeschichte & -kritik

A fully illustrated oral history of the Magnetic Fields' 1999 triple album, 69 Love Songs - an album that was afforded "classic" status by many almost as soon as it was released. LD Beghtol's book is chatty, incestuous, funny, dark, digressive, sexy, maddening, and delightful in equal measures. It documents a vital and influential scene from the inside, involving ukuleles and tears, citations and footnotes, analogue drum machines, and floods of cognac. Oh, and a crossword puzzle too. The centre of the book is the secret history of these tuneful, acerbic, and sometimes heartbreaking songs of old love, new love, lost love, punk rock love, gay love, straight love, experimental music love, true love, blue love, and the utter lack of love that fill the album - as told by participants, fans, imitators, naysayers, and others. Also included are a lexicon of words culled from the album's lyrics, recording details, performance notes from the full album shows in New York, Boston and London, plus rare and unpublished images, personal memorabilia, and much much more.

All his little words¹

A lexicon of the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs

... the behaviour of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, ...all is artifice and art more or less perfected.

— Nancy Mitford

THE PURSUIT OF LOVE (1945)

To paraphrase Saint Oscar² (writing of his own day, and uncannily of life a century later), the dislike of romanticism—as embodied in Stephin Merritt’s rejection of homespun, singer-songwriter egoism and spurious naturalism for appropriation, multiplicity and a consciously Warholian distance—is the rage of a rock journalist not seeing her own face in the glass; Wilde’s paradoxical take on that other dreaded R-word, realism, holds true here, too. For the amusement of such exclusive minds there exist whole galaxies of earnest, comfortingly prosaic music that, happily, are not the domain of this book.

Created out of disparate—almost random—parts, with a virtuosity that in retrospect seems half cunning and half pragmatism, 69 Love Songs is a sprawling, self-referential contemporary epic that comes with its own handy CliffsNotes—a Bayeux tapestry with a catchy soundtrack, a sonic parable that plays as well on “shuffle” as it does in the (almost) arbitrary sequence the songwriter gave it. Some listeners blithely sing along with these engaging tunes, taking all at face value. Others, despite another well-known Wildean admonition, peer into the shimmering depths, doing so “at their peril.” For these the following self-guided tour was written.

Stephin’s mirror of art is by turns mod Max Factor compact, fun-house looking-glass, mythic reflecting pool and interrogation room two-way glazing. The surface is deceptive—uneven and unreliable, by design. But the beauty of 69LS is this: Just when the listener thinks she’s found a song’s essential truth (those elusive “shadows of echoes of memories” from [2.3]), the light shifts, the stage whirls again and yet another outrageously beautiful spectre appears—to seduce then abandon, provoke and inspire, confound and delight. Perilous indeed, such promiscuous delving; but infinitely rewarding.

The total word count for 69LS—excluding song titles and repetitions of choruses or refrains—is 8,104, of which 1,557 are unique. The 20 most frequently used words are: you (342 iterations), the (285), I (279), and (252), a (176), to (153), me (131), in (118), my (114), of (107), it (104), but (98), love (96), your (73), is (72), all (69), for (64), be (62), it’s (62), and like (61). Of the almost 1,600 unique words, nearly 900 appear just once, of which the present author’s favorite is prowesslessnesslessness (assorted words, phrases and numbers set in bold are defined elsewhere in the text). Those who delight in such things should visit Brad DerManouelian’s 691ovesearch. com for the album’s complete vocabulary, a searchable database, and other texty diversions.

NB: Numbers in brackets, i.e. [1.23], refer to the “Indispensable 69 Love Songs Index,” as given on the tray card of Disc Three. Also, Magnetic Fields bandmembers and guest singers/performers are identified throughout by their first names.

7, 8½, 9, 10 Numerical sequence that concludes “Promises of Eternity” [2.12]:

a. Se7en by David Fincher (1995). A cinematic thriller starring Kevin Spacey as a serial killer obsessed with the Christian deadly sins: superbia (pride), avaritia (greed), luxuria (extravagance, later lust), invidia (envy), gula (gluttony), ira (wrath), and acedia (sloth). Notable for its strategic use of rain in nearly every scene except the sunlit finale, in which retributive chaos ensues.

b. 8½ by Federico Fellini (1963). A semi-autobiographical romantic drama starring Marcello Mastroianni as Fellini. Artistic and romantic chaos ensue.

c. 9 by Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston (1982). Musical adaptation of Fellini’s film (above). Professional jealousy ensued: 9 won the Tony for Best Musical over Dreamgirls and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

d. 10 by Blake Edwards. This “temptingly tasteful comedy for adults who can count” stars Dudley Moore as an aging sexist in search of his female “perfect 10.” Instead he discovers Bo Derek and her extraordinary hair on a Mexican beach. Numerical chaos ensues...

The incomparable Internet Movie Data Base (imdb.com) also lists titles for all integers from zero to ten—some with multiple entries—though the only other fractions are Martin van der Gaas’ 4¼ and Matthew Buzzell’s 6½. Decadent French poet-critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) said, “Ecstasy is a number,” but that’s not so for Stephin’s saloon singer, for whom mere numbers lack mystery (see Old Joe).

11 (adj) One more than 10; informally, the max [2.4]. As Nigel³ says: “It’s one louder, isn’t it?” See heaven.

17 (adj) To some, age 17 marks the burgeoning of sexual awareness (the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There”) that follows Chuck Berry’s “sweet 16;” for others, it’s the Age of Ambivalence (Eurythmics’ “17 Again”). On 69LS “I Don’t Want To Get Over You” [1.6], 17 is neither quite Beatle Paul’s lusty frug nor Annie Lennox’s Proustian stroll down memory lane. Rather, like the heroine of Janis Ian’s tearjerker “At 17,” Stephin’s sad-sack protagonist has “learned the truth” about love—the hard way. He’s haunted by a conflation of Emily Dickinson’s elusive “thing with feathers,” aka hope, and Stevie Nicks’ foundering one-winged dove (from her hit “Edge of 17”) that plagues him like an albatross—or a certain intractable raven (see birds). He has all the props for an undergrad existentialist comedy (see Prozac, Camus, clove cigarettes, vermouth) but he’s lost his motivation—and his co-star. His scream is a stagy cri de coeur.

Seventeen is also: a New York City street featured in “If You Don’t Cry It Isn’t Love” [2.8]; the seventh prime number; the number of syllables in a haiku; chlorine’s atomic number; a twee tween lifestyle mag; the movie Stalag 17, starring William Holden, which inspired Nazi TV comedy Hogan’s Heroes; the Greek Marxist group, 17 November; a July day sacred to the cult of the Yellow Pig; an interstate in Arizona; the state highway that runs between Virginia and Florida; baseball great Dizzy Dean’s jersey number; and the age of Abba’s young, sweet “Dancing Queen.”

Aa

Abbots, Babbitts, and Cabots are the arbiters of sexual restraint challenged in “Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits” [1.19]. In the Catholic monastic system an abbot (from the Hebrew word for “father”) is the leader of a group of monks, whose job is to help them maintain their challenging vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. “Babbitts” are smug middle-class folk of conventional morality named for Sinclair Lewis’ bestselling 1922 satirical novel, Babbitt. The exclusive Cabots of Boston,⁴ observed Dr. Samuel G Bushnell in his familiar poem “On the Aristocracy of Harvard,” “speak only to Lowells/And the Lowells speak only to God.”

David Jennings (691ovesongs.info) notes that this trinity is also “a kind of reflexive in-joke about rhyming dictionaries,” citing Merriam-Webster’s, which lists the rhymes for abit as: abbot, babitt, Babbitt and Cabot, etc., as proof. True enough. Anyhow, the folks in question are definitely not comedian Bud Abbott (wrong spelling), experimental composer Milton Babbitt (b-o-r-i-n-g despite the Sondheim connection) and burly actor/bear icon Sebastian Cabot—best known for his role as Uncle Bill’s “gentleman’s gentleman” on the unctuous television series Family Affair (1966–1971).

Abigail, Belle of Kilronan [2.22] is a pretty wench from County Galway, located in the province of Connacht along Ireland’s west coast. The tiny island village of Kilronan (Irish: Cill Rónáin) is accessible via ferries from Counties Clare and Galway. Abigail’s name in Hebrew means “my father’s joy” or “fountain of joy.” Abigail was the third of Biblical polygamist.⁵ King David’s eight wives; she is considered by some scholars to be an important early pacifist, and by others merely a very politically savvy hostess. In Stephin’s semi-strophic ballad, the love-besotted soldier/narrator begs young Abigail to forget him, since he might well not return from the unspecified, likely bloody battle.

Acoustic guitar (n) A canonical folk and blues musical instrument whose six strings are designed to be plucked or strummed, as in [3.5]. Often used to accompany cloying, confessional songs of questionable worth in which “sincerity” and “realness,” aka authenticity, are valued more than beauty, craft, or clarity of thought and expression.

Andy, John, Tom, Harry, Chris, Lou & Professor Blumen are—along with an unsightly automobile owner—the suitors of the love-object of “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side” [1.8]. Gender is problematic here, since half the characters’ names can denote either sex, and both the song’s protagonist and his/her favorite passenger are unnamed (and thus, unsexed). Further, it’s not made explicit how Prof Blumen makes his/her protégé “feel like a woman.” And just what are those tantalizing secrets shared with Lou?

Art (n) Like its kissing cousin Artifice, a form of industry practiced by craftsmen adept at creating mood, atmosphere, novel points of view and other forms of deception as an antidote to mere reportage and diaristic narrative. According to [3.4] the human heart is best studied not as itself, but rather objectified—which is precisely what Stephin does on his master work. Part manifesto, part publicity stunt, part limited-edition objet (at least in its miniscule initial pressing), 69LS is also a canny, if idiosyncratic, survey of pop culture, high and low. And though it may be seen primarily as an extended essay in genre exploration/subversion, its genius encompasses far more than music: Stephin makes historical and topical references both obvious and obscure to design, fashion and art; movies, books, and television; and a library’s worth of scientific and critical theory—all as witty lyrics and ravishing melodies. In pop music he is almost without peer or precedent, though Sondheim and Tom Lehrer are certainly his artistic progenitors in the related fields of musical theatre and cabaret. Taking Wilde’s “Nothing succeeds like excess” one step (or several) too far, 69LS embodies Mae West’s knowing view: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

As David McCarthy defines it in Pop Art (Cambridge University Press, 2000): “Pop eschewed the rigid, either/or strictures in some manifestations of modernism in favor of an art that was both visual and verbal, figurative and abstract, created and appropriated, hand-crafted and mass-produced, ironic and sincere.” McCarthy refers specifically to the brightly populist, often provocative visual works produced after World War II by Paolozzi, Warhol, Blake, Marisol, Lichtenstein and others; substitute 69 Love Songs for the word “Pop” and hey presto—what emerges is a precise précis of Stephin’s most accessible, enduring work to date.

Perhaps Boston-based NECCO (the New England Confectionery Company), maker since 1902 of those sloganeering, pastel-tinted ...