Issue 3

FRESH PERSPECTIVES: BEYOND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEXUS

When Chapter&Verse was unveiled just a year ago, my network of contacts were broadly considering Anglo-American topics and were principally researching in the UK and the US. Rock’n’roll has become a global phenomenon but the discourse remains heavily weighted in favour of matters that arise in New York and Los Angeles, London and Liverpool. For that we can both praise and blame the ongoing hegemony of the English language.

In Issue 3 of the journal we attempt to right that imbalance just a fraction as Roberto Avant-Mier draws attention to the ways in which the rise of rock not only permeated the Spanish-speaking territories of Mexico but also shaped a literary tradition, best personified by novelist José Agustín, a rebel on the page, a rebel in life, and a man who appropriated sources of musical style and resistance from north of the border to inform a generation of younger Latin brothers and sisters.

And while Asbjørn Grønstad takes on further American tales in his engaging de-coding of the Handsome Family, he approaches that remarkable musical grouping from a northern European perspective, offering some interesting insights into the notions of the outsider in popular or traditional music-making, and pulling into play a range of US folk and historic, religious and literary texts that inform their output.

I am delighted, too, to draw attention to the second part of Roy Burkhead’s magnum opus on the musical and literary endeavours of Steve Earle and Rosanne Cash. The first instalment of this story earned some deserved acclaim. Jason Gross, editor of legendary web publication Perfet Sound Forever, saw fit to include the piece in his best music writing lists in 2004.

Elsewhere two giants, almost brothers of the rock avant garde, are the focus of a pair of essays. Michael Prince addresses the influence of science fiction on the satirical mindscapes of the late Frank Zappa, citing L. Ron Hubbard, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley along the way. Quirkier still, Captain Beefheart is the figure at the heart of Andrew Norris’ intense unwrapping of Don Van Vliet as living, breathing artist and complex human being, an account that draws a diverse cast – Chopin and Poe, Byron and Barthes included – into the loop.

As for the Review section, British poet Michael Wyndham Thomas, whose new collection Port Winston Mulberry, has just been accepted by Peterloo Poets, and who appears as guest poet at the Robert Frost Festival, Key West, Florida this April, contemplates the life of John Lennon – musician, poet, artist, activist – as considered by Janne Mäkelä’s recent volume on the Beatle with many creative causes to his credit.

Pop polymath Harvey Kubernik’s latest collection This is Rebel Music which includes interviews with major players on the stage where rock and literature plot common agendas – Allen Ginsberg and former Doors member Ray Manzarek, among them – is also under the C&V spotlight.

Our Retrospect item looks back at a novel by a rock journalist who has moved seamlessly between print and the web, a clever trick in these days when the virtual is mounting such a mighty challenge to the actual. Barney Hoskyns, once of the NME, erstwhile US editor of the magazine Mojo and a rock biographer of high repute, is now one of the leading lights in that dazzling net resource called Rock’s Backpages. If you want to delve into an unbeatable archive of pop prose, check it out. In the meantime, read our reassessment of his 1995 novel The Lonely Planet Boy and our Q&E with the penman himself.

Finally, but never ever leastly, the extraordinary bearer of a half-century flame, a truly renaissance man of modern times, composer/arranger/writer David Amram, Jack Kerouac’s spoken word collaborator and an under-sung colossus of post-war American culture, drops us another inimitable line, reflecting on a meeting with Neal Cassady’s son John and a nostalgic trip to a remarkable hot dog house in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a vivid vision of “a vanishing America”.

When I met up with David at his upstate New York farm on a scorching afternoon last July, he was heading back into Manhattan that very evening for a red carpet showing of the re-made The Manchurian Candidate, more than thirty years after his film score helped make the original flick one of the masterpieces of the US cinema. His unflagging energy, in his eighth decade, continues to leave me, and others, quite breathless.

NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS

If Chapter&Verse is of interest to you and you have articles - or ideas for articles - that might fit the brief, do write to the Editor, Simon Warner, at journal@chapterandverse.org.uk

Please note that the fourth issue of Chapter&Verse is scheduled for Autumn 2005. Potential contributors to that edition should be aware that there is a July 30th, 2005 deadline for proposals which should come, initially, in the form of a 200-300 word abstract. Proposed submissions will then be considered by members of the Editorial Board. If you would like your submission to be refereed, please advise the Editor in advance.

Articles should range in length from 3,000-6,000 words, but longer pieces may be accommodated, even over two issues. Shorter contributions - reviews of relevant works in print, recordings or live events or comment pieces, for example - are also invited with a suggested length of 1,000-1,500 words. Do contact the journal if you have suggestions for items you might wish to cover.

The section Restrospect aims to consider, in around 500-1,000 words, a book or recording that has been significant or influential or even under-reported in this field. Suggestions and submissions are invited. For example, you may want to consider a piece of cult fiction (by, say, Colin MacInnes or Hunter S. Thompson, Stewart Home or Douglas Coupland) or an album inspired by literary sources (say David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, the Kerouac tribute Kicks Joy Darkness or Stan Tracey’s Under Milk Wood) or a spoken word collection that incorporates a musical element.

NOTES TO PUBLISHERS/RECORD LABELS

If you have items – printed or recorded – which you feel may be of interest to Chapter&Verse, do contact the Editor at journal@chapterandverse.org.uk or telephone on +44 (0)1422 824414.

Books or recordings for review can be mailed to:

Simon Warner
Editor (Reviews)
Chapter&Verse
School of Music
University of Leeds
LEEDS LS2 9JT
United Kingdom

EDITORIAL INFORMATION

EDITOR

Simon Warner teaches popular music at the University of Leeds in the UK and is director of PopuLUs, the Centre for the Study of the World’s Popular Musics. He has been a rock reviewer with the The Guardian, published the book Rockspeak: The Language of Rock and Pop in 1996, contributed a chapter in the 2004 volume Remembering Woodstock, and writes for various websites including the "Anglo Visions" column for PopMatters (popmatters.com). His next volume, Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll: The Beats and Rock from Kerouac and Ginsberg to Dylan and Cobain, has been commissioned by Continuum.

EDITORIAL BOARD

David Amram

Jazz musician and composer of more than one hundred orchestral, chamber and operatic works, whose ground-breaking collaborations with Jack Kerouac are recalled in his memoirs Vibrations and Offbeat.

Daphne A. Brooks

Assistant Professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University and author of two forthcoming books, Bodies in Dissent (Duke UP) and Jeff Buckley's Grace (Continuum Press).

Sarah Champion

Editor of the Chemical Generation short fiction collections DiscoBiscuits and Disco 2000.

Michel Delville

Teaches on the Modern English Literature and American Literature programme at the University of Liege in Belgium.

Oliver Double

The first person in the country to receive a PhD for a thesis on stand-up comedy, for 10 years he worked as a professional comedian. He now teaches at the University of Kent, UK, and has a particular interest in spoken word andperformance poetry.

Simon Frith

Professor of Film and Media at the University of Stirling, UK, and author of Sound Effects and Performing Rites, he has also been a rock critic with numerous publications.

Bruce Horner

Director of Composition in the Department of English of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is co-editor of the volume Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture.

David Meltzer

Poet, novelist, folk performer, rock artist with Serpent Power and editor of Reading Jazz and Writing Jazz., he teaches humanities at the New College of California, San Francisco.

Thom Swiss

Professor of English at the University of Iowa and co-editor of Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture and Mapping the Beat, he is also a widely published poet in print and online.

Sarah Zupko

Founder and editor of the webzine PopMatters (popmatters.com) and the website Sarah Zupko's Cultural Studies Center (popcultures.com). Based in Chicago, she is an Internet executive at Tribune Media Services.

Issue 1 Editorial Information

Issue 2 Editorial Information