Remember 2017, that dark year following trump's fascist triumph over
Clinton's neo-libralism, when our Talking-head Intelligentsia tripped
over themselves trying to explain how such an inexplicable thing could
happen? The entirely-too-long-string of sleep-inducing best-sellers written by A-team influencers who accomplished the
Olympic-worthy contortion of admitting they were incapable of seeing trump
coming while at the same time claiming to be the very ones who possessed the
secret sauce worthy of a lucrative book contract to explain it to us plebes?
Grrr!
Well, here we are again, with another over-inflated monster making a
spectacle out himself in full view of our unregulated monster world. This
time it's Elon Musk, who not only just
"fired" a bunch of volunteers who made up a non-regulatory, soft-and-squishy
Trust and Safety Council meant to take the place of real media regulation of
destructive material surfing through our (that's OUR) airwaves, but
endangering their personal safety by amping up his own hate speech--against
his former volunteers!--on his own cyber-platform! In case anyone out there
is feeling soft and/or squishy about what this overfed crybaby is doing with
our (that's OUR) airwaves, I'll repeat the handiest, most-obvious word that
fits. He's a fascist, of the Joseph Goebbels' "Lies-As-Truth" school. And
once again, the punditocracy is shocked--just shocked!--by yet another
unregulated billionaire-ass's behavior.
Which reminded me of a story, which I wrote about a few years ago when the
media pundits were scratching their heads over trumpism as if they'd never
heard of mirrors, let alone looked in one. For a bunch of narcissists, these
guys and gals in media land are truly inscrutable. They don't really have to
go any farther than their noses (or at least the flickering image of it on
their real-time monitor) to merely note and possibly educate the rest of us
plebes that the airwaves, including those within which
Twitter, Facebook, CBS and MSNBC operate within belong to the public.
Us. That was established when the idea of airwaves was a new one, and the
damage that unregulated (read: private) ones could do to a society if left
untended by grown-ups. The Nazis definitively proved that point, but the
point was made long before that by Americans abusing their ability to
construct a radio tower and mass-feed bullshit to a population of
well-meaning but not always highly-informed citizens. The Federal Radio
Commission (FRC), which evolved into the current Federal Communications
Commission, was created by a Congress realizing the necessity of claiming
this new massive and impactful medium to be "public domain" to be used for
the purpose of benefitting the public, which was what the
Fairness Doctrine, which Reagan flushed down the toilet, was all about.
1930's era anti-monopoly laws also held a cherished place in holding these
ubiquitous signals to account, laws which Clinton flushed down the toilet
with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, in the name of creating the very
uncontainable monster that Baby Elon has become.
By the way, all these hyphenated strings of words deserve an
explanation. For starters, I making up these mouthfuls of pop-politics as I
go so don't bother googling them. I'm not ever sure what they mean.
Secondly, it's not like I'm trying to be long-winded about this fascism thing,
but in this era of vacuum-brained celebrity politicians and their billionaire
handlers equally-endowed with air and space where their hearts should be, I
feel I need some new insults to the English language to explain our modern
world's lurch toward the Reality Manglers (another one!) that is otherwise
unexplainable. Necessity is a mother. Apologies for that.
Time marches on
Snake Oil, Country Music and the Future of the Planet
In 1991, when French super-model and future first-lady of France, Carla
Bruni, was falsely accused of having an affair with Donald Trump (by Donald
Trump), her response was that she had no romantic interest whatsoever in
someone she termed, “the King of Tacky.”[i]
Observations like this were commonplace in news outlets back in the 90s
when Trump was manipulating journalists into portraying him as a “playboy”.
And indeed, who would care whether he was or not... right?
Let’s not fool ourselves. Large swaths of Americans spend their waking
lives caring very much about such things and, due to the craven nature of
for-profit journalism, such things found their way into print and the
airwaves ad naseum. It was no secret, then, to anyone even mildly paying
attention to the proclivities of media moguls that, long before he rocketed
himself into his present gig by manipulating craven journalists into similar
contortions, Trump was a sleaze. In fact, he was quite proud of it and, in
the under-regulated high-powered business world created for sleazes by every
president since Reagan within which he operated, he used his sleaziness to
his financial advantage.
Now that he’s our president, we find that he is still a sleaze, and we are
shocked? This is just an observation, and I don’t want to make too much of
it because, God knows we’ve had some close calls before. Nixon comes to
mind, Bush the Younger, Bill Clinton etc. etc... but Trump is the Proof in
the Pudding. The Genuine Article, a certified sleaze with verifiable Mafia
connections as our president, and so it seems to me we should be able to use
this as a Learning Moment for the advancement of our ultimate
betterment.
Which of course we’re not doing, dammit! And furthermore, what kind of
Kool-Aid has the aforementioned-craven punditocracy been drinking that they
must now collectively gnash their perfect teeth and rend their trendy
garments in public displays at how horrified they are that such an
unimaginable thing as a Banana-Republic-quality crook in our White House
coming to pass? And furthermore still: What kind of sleeping pills has
America been on all these years to not have seen this train wreck meeting a
wrecking ball coming? (Hint: television, but that’s for another blog).
Well, as a folk musician as well as a mere mortal, I like to pretend I know
the answers to hefty questions. After all, human pathos and the quirky
stories spun off of that amoeba are what folk music is all about, isn’t it?
Reality, though, is something that folk musicians like to ignore as much as
anyone else, and so I have to admit that--in reality--folk music doesn’t
give you any more insights than, say, herding chickens. But I do think it
does give you some hints at a few of those hefty answers’ clues which, I
know, is pretty tenuous grounds to opine from on such a subject as fascism
(which is the subject I’m talking about). But since any attempt to explain
the origins of this mess from any other quarter, from physics to
psychotherapy to homeopathy, has been equally nebulous, and since walking on
clouds (nebulae) is the essence of music in general and folk music in
particular, I insist on making the attempt.
Therefore, drawing on the depth of my decades of experience singing
country-western songs with my tongue firmly in cheek (which takes lots of
practice, let me tell you!) I’d like to at least suggest a perhaps-more
pertinent question that addresses our present fascist moment:
What is it about snake oil salesmen that Americans just can’t seem to
resist?
To point: In 1923, a 38-year-old man bought a radio station in Kansas to
promote his booming business of transplanting goat testicles into men’s
scrotums to cure impotency. KFKB was one of only four radio stations in the
whole country at the time and by 1928, when Dr. John R. Brinkley had it
ramped up to 5 kilowatts, it was one of the most powerful stations licensed
by the newly-created Federal Radio Commission (FRC). Ironically, the FRC was
created specifically to referee this new and powerful mass-medium on behalf
of the “public interest”. This was because after only a few years of
existence these newly discovered public airwaves were being sorely abused by
the likes of--you guessed it-- Dr. John R. Brinkley, who was making himself
a small fortune by airing “hillbilly music” to attract listeners in order to
hawk his goat-gland operations as well as to sell large quantities of such
formerly-rare items as autographed pictures of Jesus. Given the power of
these newly-discovered airwaves, maybe this was inevitable, and don’t get me
wrong. It really was miraculous how many autographed pictures of Jesus
turned up after commercial radio appeared. But our ever-perceptive Congress
duly-perceived that something, even if only a little something, needed to be
done, and so they did it, and in so doing they rocketed the goat-gland
“doctor” into radio and country music history as a pioneer of both. Not bad
for a man who, far from being a real doctor, started his career as an actual
snake oil-salesman back before synthetic snake oil was invented. “Dr.”
Brinkley was the Real Deal, the Genuine Article and, as with “President”
Trump, he was no ordinary man.
Briefly: Brinkley grew up poor in North Carolina where his father, a
Confederate Army medic who parlayed that bloody experience into becoming a
“country doctor” back home, started out his own working life at 16 with
Western Union as a telegrapher. Honest enough work, and it apparently got
him by, but he figured himself destined for greater things than tapping out
Morse Code over thin and fickle wires. He wanted to be a doctor, and as soon
as he came of age, he and his young wife went on the road posing as Quaker
doctors, travelling the rural circuit giving medicine shows where they
hawked virility tonics and other “patent medicines”.
After a while they settled in Chicago where Brinkley attended Bennett
Medical College, an unaccredited school specializing in “eclectic medicine”.
After some ups and downs he eventually finished his “studies” which amounted
to his purchasing a degree from the Kansas City Eclectic Medical University,
a diploma mill. After that, he pulled a stint in North Carolina where he and
a partner opened up a storefront clinic selling shots filled with colored
water they claimed was “electric medicine from Germany” and then there was a
quick exit from that town and its creditors. But his “eclectic” medical
degree allowed him to practice medicine in eight states, and Brinkley
finally answered an ad to take over the office of a doctor in Milford,
Kansas, which is where he set up his goat-gland “treatment” clinic. After a short series of serendipitous publicity coups, including the birth
of a child who, if you followed the thread of the con to its natural
conclusion was part goat, business blossomed and more opportunities availed.
Harry Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times, became a “believer” and
“reported” on him, which gave Brinkley the free publicity he needed to
expand his business to movie stars (Sound familiar? In modern Trumpian
terms, think CBS, Ted Nugent and Clint Eastwood). He would have moved his
“clinic” to L.A. except that California was one of the states that didn’t
recognize “eclectic” medical degrees.
What Brinkley had done, and what the “eclectic medical schools” had no
doubt taught him, was to tap into the ancient, bottomless—and huge--demand
for aphrodisiacs. Brinkley, who apparently had an intuitive understanding of
capitalism (i.e., you don’t need to be honest to be successful, you just
need a good business model and a good line) hired an advertising agent,
began a direct mail blitz and promoted his soundbite. “Be the ram that am
with every lamb.” And Voila! Lessons learned about selling snake oil in
America. First: have a good business model and second: speak American, the
latter being far more important than the first and has been used by every
one of a long, long line of successful charlatans in this country who
followed him. Don’t over-worry about telling the truth, the Golden Rule
goes, but whatever you do say, say it in American.
And lo! Business boomed some more, and by the time commercial radio came
along, Brinkley was well off enough to buy a station, and through it he
quickly proved that by applying the Golden Rule of Piracy (er…I mean
Capitalism) to this now-limitless audience, you could reap spangly success,
which is what he did. People came from all over the country to rejuvenate
themselves, and, as was inevitable in the course of such things, more than a
few of them started dying. No one knows how many people actually paid the
ultimate price for horniness, but Brinkley officially signed several dozen
death certificates for people who showed up healthy at his clinic and then
headed south. A chain of events followed: The American Medical Association
got wise and started hounding him, the FRC was invented by Congress (in
1928, in no small part to further hound Brinkley), and eventually he lost
his license. His response was to sue the FRC and run for Governor of Kansas,
which race he lost by a mere hair. He lost his lawsuit, too, and in doing so
established one of the early landmark cases in broadcast law. The 1931
decision, KFKB Broadcasting Assoc. vs FRC, answered fundamental questions
concerning how far the newly-minted FRC could go in denying station licenses
by determining what programming is or is not in the public interest. It
defined our newly-discovered airwaves as being Public Domain, to be
regulated by the FRC (later the FCC) for the public good. That meant (and,
notwithstanding the punditocracy who tells you differently, still means)
that you can’t legally use your expensive bandwidths to sell such things as
goat-testicle operations, autographed pictures of Jesus or almost any of the
various snake oils that have been the cornerstone of FoxNews and
Clearchannel these last three decades since Reagan flushed the core of that
decision, the Fairness Doctrine, down the toilet (again, another blog).
So Brinkley lost his license but remember: Brinkley, like Trump, was no
ordinary man. He was a visionary, could see the future in fact, and like so
many mountebanks who followed in his footsteps he also headed south,
physically, to Mexico. The reason for this was that when the United States
divided up North America’s bandwidths, it gave none of them to Mexico where
the “public interest” apparently did not apply in the minds of the dividers.
Mexico got righteously pissed-off at its ever-imperious northern neighbor
(an old, old story) and were glad to grant Brinkley a fifty-thousand-watt
radio license that could step all over America’s radio stations. Brinkley's
XERA AM became the first of what would be a plethora of X-series radio
stations, the so-called “border blasters”. Brinkley set up XERA in Villa
Acuna, Coahuila, just south of border from Del Rio, Texas, where he in turn
built his new, expanded “clinic” and dubbed XERA “the sunshine station
between the nations.” Thus on the border, Brinkley re-applied his
possibly-most-important rule of American Snakeoilsmanship once again, and
once again Americans flocked, business boomed.
As Brinkley well knew, fifty-thousand watts was more than enough to reach
Kansas, so he ran for governor there again, using the telephone to call in
broadcasts to the transmitter. When Congress declared this assault on the
public interest illegal (specifically via the Brinkley Act) he pioneered the
first pre-recording technology in order to circumvent his namesake law. He
lost his second bid for governor, but XERA quickly ramped up to 150,000
watts, and then to a million, making it the most powerful station on the
planet and, almost incidentally, more powerful than the Governor of Kansas.
It could be heard as far away as Canada and along the border towns it could
be tuned in over barbed wire fences and dental devices. Healthy? No.
American? Yes.
So that’s how Brinkley became a pioneer in radio broadcasting,
institutionalizing the form of early-20th century tonic-hawking
that has now, unfortunately, become unquestioned staples to us, and this is
a big thing to thank a snake oil salesman for. But maybe the biggest thing
we can thank Brinkley for is pioneering the paradigm he established for
radio entertainment, the “hillbilly music” medium through which he sold his
goat gonads and Jesus paraphernalia.
The genesis of modern, commercial country music is usually traced back to
the Bristol, Tennessee sessions, which, in a general way, is true. The
Victor Talking Machine Company, under the direction of Ralph Peer (talent
scout, record producer and pioneer in field recordings) recruited a few
talented locals steeped in the regional Appalachian music, recorded them at
a warehouse in Bristol and then sold the recordings on the burgeoning
“hillbilly” record market that Peer was also helping to establish. Jimmie
Rogers and the Carter Family showed up at these sessions, Peer recorded them
and those recordings in turn established the commercial standard that still
reverberates deeply throughout the industry today, in no small part because
of XERA AM.
Jimmie Rogers had died of tuberculosis by the time Brinkley cranked up
XERA in the mid-30s, but by the late 30s the Carter Family was a live
staple on the air, along with many other up-and-coming country acts like
Red Foley, Patsy Montana and Gene Autry. Music historian, Bill C.
Malone has written that “the border stations popularized hillbilly music
throughout the United States and laid the basis for country music's great
popularity in the late '40s and early '50s," [ii] which is about
right. Waylon Jennings, who grew up in Littlefield, Texas, remembers
his father pulling the family truck up next to the house and running
battery cables to the radio so he could listen to the Carter Family.
Johnny Cash cites the border stations as having a major influence on
his music as well as being where he first heard his future wife--June
Carter, then 10 years old—sing. Brinkley’s influence on modern American
culture—and snakeoilsalesmanship—can’t be overestimated.
The Carters came by their material honestly and organically, through the
folk-process of listening to other people play the old, old songs and tunes
and then copying it, and copying it well. Their material remains among the
gems of the public domain and I am thankful they were preserved. But
something else besides cultural preservation was going on in Peer’s mind
and, later, in Brinkley’s. The music of the ages became a product, a
copyrighted one, to be bought and sold, and to be used to sell other
“products” such as goat-gonad operations and pictures of Jesus, which is
exactly what Brinkley used early commercial country music for and, as an
industry, it has never fully recovered.
I’ve had conversations with now-elderly people who gravitated toward
50s-era rock ‘n roll because they couldn’t stand country music. “It’s so
commercial!” they would say in various ways, and I would wonder about that,
because I always use the music in its truncated form, as songs, and I dearly
love them. The best of them speak to a history most of us have forgotten.
But I’ll just make a leap here and leave you to your own wondering (or
damning):
Have you ever wondered how we got to the state of affairs where someone
could get in front of a T.V. camera and claim with a straight face that
Obama was a Kenyan? Or that Sandy Hook didn’t happen? Or that military-style
weapons with mega-round clips should be sold in supermarkets? Or that a
sleazy real-estate mogul who lies about his sex life in front of millions
would make a good president?
Well, they’re just following in the footsteps of Dr. John R. Brinkley,
early pioneer of radio, and, sad to say, "politicians" like the current
Donald Trump. When you add in the evolution of country music, it’s plain
that the problem goes right to the core of our being. We let the bastards
get away with it with our own culture! And now the con virtually IS our own
culture! What to do?
How about, for a start, speaking American? It’s got (that’s right—not “it
has”) a proven history of spangly success, much more so than neoliberal
position papers or intellectual talking points about animal rights. Follow
the basic rule that any credible artist in any medium follows, even con
artists. Consider your audience, and then speak to it. You don’t have to be
a snake oil salesman and God knows: it’s not rocket science and it ain’t
cheatin’.
And I ain’t lyin’.
