My Obsession with “The Elder”

July 25, 2013January 8, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

It all began with a dream, an actual dream that involved me walking into the record store. I often walked into our local record store, and I did so in this dream. I then spotted it, the KISS album Music from “The Elder” (The Elder). I nearly froze with excitement. The record store clerk eventually made his way to me, and I said, “I’d like to purchase that.” I pointed to the cassette tape, he retrieved it with typical record store clerk dismissal (If you weren’t purchasing an artist favored by Rolling Stone magazine back then, 99% of record store clerks had no use for you). In this dream, I ran home and plugged the cassette tape into my Walkman, and as I listened to it for the first time, I knew that my life would probably not get much better than that moment. I woke with a peaceful and serene smile that my “not a morning person” personality didn’t often permit. For reasons I would only be able to properly collate later, as an adult, I became obsessed with the Music from the Elder.

“It ain’t no dream,” my friend said, his tone loaded with ridicule. “It’s real. The Music from The Elder is a real album, it’s out there, in stores, on actual shelves in those stores, and it sucks. You just have to find it, or if you can’t find it, have a store clerk order it for you.” He then turned to a third party to drill down on my humiliation, “He just had a dream about buying a KISS album last night.”

I deserved that ridicule. Dreaming of buying an album was an odd, bizarre dream, but it defined my desire for that album in ways that were otherwise hard for me to define as a teenager. I wasn’t so simple-minded that I thought The Elder would act as an elixir to all that ailed me, but this desire for something, somewhat out of my reach, said more about me, and that era, when juxtaposed with the modern era, than it did about the quality of music on The Elder. The Elder might have been a symbol for all things out of reach. I might have assigned magical, almost mystical qualities to this album based on its limited supply at this time, but I still enjoy a number of the songs on this album.

As that last paragraph suggests, this piece is not so much a review of the quality of music on The Elder, as it is that special quality attached to a product through inexplicable and irrational desire, the rebellion to group thought, and the influence scarcity can have on a product. This piece is also about how the current lack of scarcity –abridged in the modern “on demand” world of MP3, file sharing, YouTube, etc.– may eventually cause music to be so much less prominent in our lives than it was for an 80’s kid who loved music so much that he felt an almost unquenchable desire for it.

For those who weren’t there, we 70’s and 80’s kids called into radio stations to request that they play “my song”, only to have those annoying DJs wait about an hour to play it? It was so exciting to hear that DJ finally played our favorite song and attach our names to it? “And now … as requested by Billy, in Millard, I give you Rhinestone Cowboy by Glenn Campbell.” We felt a special affinity with Glenn Campbell in the course of that effort? How many of us thought that a part of the success of Rhinestone Cowboy was a result of our continued requests? Is it just me, or did this association have a mystical attachment to it, that bred an irrational, and inexplicable, brand of loyalty, that cannot be touched in today’s MP3 world of “on demand” listening experiences. How many penniless young ones dreamed of one day living in an “on demand” world where we had more control of the when, where, and how we could hear our music that didn’t require assistance from DJs? How many of us would’ve loved to have a YouTube source where we could punch a song title into a search engine and hear it in two seconds? We all did, but now that it’s here, we have a “be careful what you wish for” warning for the world of music and music lovers.

No radio stations would play a song from The Elder, and there weren’t internet resources back then. I had to sit and stew in the bouillon of my desire. This scarcity was not intentional, and it was not a supply and demand tool put forth by KISS, or any of its associates, to increase demand for their product, but for one kid in Omaha, Nebraska, that’s exactly what it did. The scarcity was a result of the almost worldwide condemnation of the project. Critics and fans attached the word “flop” to The Elder, and they declared it KISS’s first commercial failure, after the near unprecedented levels of commercial viability they achieved with their previous albums.

The Elder proved to be such an embarrassment to the remaining members of KISS that guitarist Ace Frehley considered it emblematic of the new direction of KISS, and he quit the band as a result. Some of those involved in the project, adamantly refused to have their names listed in the liner notes of the album after hearing it. It embarrassed the remaining members of KISS so much that they decided not to tour in support of it, and by the time I began searching retail outlets for it, five years after its completion, I learned, firsthand, the economic concept of scarcity.

This scarcity resulted in a whole lot of self-imposed hype. It resulted in me briefly befriending those fortunate few lucky enough to have heard it. “What did you think of it?” I asked them, panting with anticipation. “What was so different about it?” I asked. “Why is it considered so horrible?”

“It just sucked!” was the consensus of those I knew who heard the album. When I would ask for a greater, more detailed explanation, they would dismiss me with, “I don’t know. I didn’t listen to it more than once. I just know it sucked!”

For reasons endemic to my personality, I only found this universal rejection of the album more compelling. I would later find the same level of intoxication –purposefully erected against group thought– with the comedy of Andy Kaufman, the infamous Crispin Glover appearance on David Letterman, U2’s Zooropa, and the other music of Mike Patton (other than Faith No More). I needed to know why the music on The Elder was so much worse than all the other KISS albums I adored. It was almost inevitable that I was either going to love the music on the album, or I would find that it was not as bad as my friends were telling me it was, for reasons native to my personality.

I would not say that the almost universal reaction to The Elder was my first experience with group thought. I knew about it, and I think I explored it on certain levels, but whenever you’re face to face with it, it feels like the first time. I’m also not going to pretend –as so many others do– that I’m impervious to group thought. I hear what other’s think, I read what critics think, but I’m more apt to force myself through such a hole if everyone dislikes something I decide I might like. I find intrigue in having an opinion that differs from group thought. I tend to find myself trying to have a converse relationship with it. Some believe that I do this to be difficult, or complicated, or artificially different, and that may be the case, but if it is, I’ve convinced myself of this lie so well that I now believe it. In the case of The Elder, however, my initial allure was such that I either never recovered from my desire to rebel against group thought, or the album wasn’t as bad as group thought suggested it was. I leave open the possibility for either in the case of The Elder.

In the space of the decades since its release, The Elder has spawned two camps: those who further their initial proclamation that it’s one of the worst albums ever made, and those who suggest that it now has a campy quality, similar to the movie Return of the Killer Tomatoes. Very few will suggest that it’s simply a good album with quality music on it. Q Magazine has ranked Music From “The Elder” 44th in their list of The 50 Worst Albums Ever. The same magazine ranked the album 6th in their list of 15 Albums Where Great Rock Acts Lost the Plot. The website Ultimate Classic Rock, quotes Paul Stanley saying that the Music from “The Elder” “Was pompous, contrived, self-important and fat.” “Critics pounced on the record and fans stayed away in droves.” The website KISS Elder Book states that Gene Simmons attached zero stars to it, and Stanley and Simmons have both admitted that they were “delusional” with the Bob Ezrin project. [Note the attempt to distance themselves from The Elder, by saying it was a Bob Ezrin project. A practice those who know their KISStory know all four members engage in when a project wasn’t well received. The album Destroyer was also a “Bob Ezrin project, but the four members climb all over each other to claim credit for it.] Ace Frehley said that he thought the idea of a Ezrin’s idea of concept album with The Elder “wasn’t a good idea to begin with.”

When almost everyone, including the band, crushes a brutha with group thought, the notions that we still like the album usually implode with “I don’t like it either” or “I like all of their albums, except The Elder” qualifiers that send shrapnel throughout the mind, until that person convinces themselves that their initial stance can no longer be maintained.

Maintaining such a stance can lead one to believe they are in the middle of a battlefield with friendly fire penetrating their belief. This lone soldier begins to believe they have no allies, especially when they cross the big four oh (forty years of age), and the idea that they still enjoy any KISS music proves to be a little embarrassing. At that point, a person has to qualify their affinity with words, sentences, and sometimes paragraphs that lead their friends and family to believe that they simply love the kitschy campiness of the act. By doing that, the soldier may gather some like-minded allies that say, “Well, I still like Duran Duran, Leo Sayer, or Michael Jackson, so I understand the attachment.” Saying that one still likes The Elder, however, will even cause like-minded KISS fans to strive for distance. “Sorry brotha, you’re on your own here,” they say to suggest that some loyalists are in too deep for them.

What makes defending The Music From The Elder so difficult is that I still don’t know why I love this album so much. I’m not sure if the reasons lie in those aspects of my personality that loves things other people don’t, or if I romanticized the album so much in my youth that I can’t defeat the feelings of nostalgia I feel for that time and place where I desired the album to the degree that it invaded my dreams one night. I also can’t determine if the music on the album simply appeals to me in that intangible manner that some music appeals to one person more than others, or if the album contains great music that people “won’t” like, because they fear the counter arguments (see ridicule) from their peers.

What I do know, or guess based upon my interactions with current, young music fans, is that this relationship with music may never happen again. It’s the human condition to want what you want, when you want it, but the reality of actually getting it “on demand” as many times as one wants it, often results in little satisfaction, no irrational, magical qualities that they can’t explain attached to it, and no loyalty. At some point in the process, songs become nothing more music. One song may be more creative than another and that may be why we like it, but we lose all personal attachments to it when we can listen to it hundreds of times, on our own time. It’s the want, the chase, and the desire, that ultimately defines the irrational love of the intangible.

This isn’t to say there isn’t demand for music anymore, but it pales in comparison to the youth-driven demand that caused young girls to swoon at Frank Sinatra, scream at Elvis and the Beatles, or fire up radio station, phone lines for the latest Hall and Oates song. We later experienced the magic of albums like, Appetite for Destruction, Nevermind, and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Is that magic still there for young music lovers? It may be, brilliant music is still brilliant music, but that relatively unquenchable demand for songs that spawned loyalty may never happen again due to the ubiquitous availability of music on the internet today. I’m sure there are still “some” albums that are hard to find, but for the most part the “on demand ‘if you want it, you got it’” era of music that those of us once dreamed of, is now here in the form of MP3’s. If you can’t find it in the MP3 universe, you can go to file sharing sites, or YouTube. There’s no more want any more for a young kid who loves music, because the idea of scarcity is almost nonexistent, and as a result, there’s no such thing as hyping something up to the degree that you’re so consumed by it, that you dream about it one night, and you’re still somewhat embarrassed to be obsessed with it decades later.

The Best Piece of Advice I’ve Ever Heard

July 15, 2013September 4, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

“You’ll figure it out,” Rodney Dangerfield informed a young, aspiring standup comedian who sought his counsel on “something in comedy.”^[1]

Prior to this aspiring comedian approaching Rodney Dangerfield, we can guess that just about every comedian sought career advice from him. Not only was he one of the most successful standup comedians of his era, but he failed so miserably that he quit, and he didn’t just quit, regather, and form a comeback. He quit show business for ten years.

“To give you an idea of how well I was doing at the time I quit,” he recalled later, “I was the only one who knew I quit.”

Every comedian but they didn’t know what he figured out in his eventual comeback. They might have wanted to know what he figured out, how they could apply it to their act, or they might have wondered if he thought they should just quit too. The latter might have been the underlying question that no one asks aloud. “Now that you’ve seen my act, what do you think? How can I fix it, is it fixable, or “Should I just quit?”

The unknown, aspiring comedian who approached Dangerfield in this particular scenario was Jerry Seinfeld. We can guess that Dangerfield was probably trying to dismiss Seinfeld, hoping that yet another comedian would just leave him alone with their career-defining questions, or he found the answer to that question to be so loaded with variables, and so time consuming, that he didn’t want to go down that road with yet another aspiring comedian. Whatever the case, we can surmise that Seinfeld was disappointed by Dangerfield’s response, but Rodney probably thought it was the best piece of advice to hand out to anyone aspiring to be anything. We can probably translate his advice to “Hey, I had to figure this thing out for myself, and you do too. If you don’t want to, then you’ll have your answer.”

For all we know, Rodney sat in the audience during that Seinfeld’s act and decided that he didn’t know how to perfect it, fix it, or help Seinfeld personalize it better. We can guess that he didn’t think it was so bad that he didn’t know how to fix it, but that Seinfeld’s act was so unique and different from Rodney’s that that might have been the reason Rodney didn’t know how to fix it. Rodney might have even loved the Seinfeld’s act so much that he couldn’t wait to see how the comedian would fix all of the intricacies of the act. Perhaps he was a fan, and he didn’t want to meddle with another man’s act. Whatever the case actually was, “You’ll figure it out” seems dismissive, but as with all good advice and all perfect strawberries, it becomes tastier the more you chew on it.

Some advice is more immediate and usable. Former Major League pitcher Randy Johnson once talked about the advice fellow pitcher Nolan Ryan gave him. After watching “The Big Unit” pitch, Nolan informed him that the finishing step of his pitching motion should end approximately one inch further to the left. Randy said that that seemingly trivial piece of advice changed his whole career. He stated that he wouldn’t have accomplished half of what he did without it. He even went so far as to say he owed Nolan Ryan a lifelong debt for that career-changing advice. Some of us have received such advice, but for most of us, advice is more oblique and requires personal interpretation.

The best piece of advice I’ve ever heard combines an acknowledgment of the struggle to succeed with a notice that the recipients of such advice must find a unique, individualistic method of applying it. The best advice I’ve ever heard does not involve miracle cures, quick fixes, or the elusive true path to instant success “That can be yours for one low installment of $9.99!” Most of the best nuggets of information I’ve heard, such as “You’ll figure it out,” are so obvious that the recipient thinks they’ve wasted everyone’s time by asking the question.

The underpinning of “You’ll figure it out” suggests that there are no universal methods to achieving true individual success, especially in the arts. A struggling individual can watch a how-to video or read a training manual. They can study the various expert techniques and the experts’ interpretations of those techniques. They can internalize the advice offered by everyone and their brother, but at some point, individuals who hope to achieve true success eventually have to figure it all out for themselves.

Instant success is as rare in the arts as it is in every walk of life, but if an individual is lucky enough to avoid having to figure it out, they’re apt to find the level of success they achieve meaningless when compared to those who experience failure, adjust accordingly, and struggle to carve out their own niche.

In the course of my career in low-paying jobs, I worked with a number of flash-in-the-pan employees who didn’t think they needed to to figure anything out. They considered themselves Tom-Cruise-in-shades naturals. They were the high-energy, fast-talking, glamour types who focus so much energy on their new job that they burst out of the gate to thunderous applause. Trainers and bosses love them. “Look at Bret!” they say, high-fiving Bret in the hall, hoping to inspire everyone within earshot to be more like Bret. The one thing the powers-that-be do not see, or don’t know, is that these high-energy, fast-talking, glamorous, flash-in-the-pan types often burn out after reaching the immediate goals that define them as successful.

Those who experience a measure of instant success are often the darlings and studs of the training class. They can answer every question, and they often enter the training seminar with quotes on success from the famous and successful. They treat training classes as a competition, as one would an athletic event, and they’re not afraid to do touchdown dances soon after the release of the initial productivity numbers. They wear the clothes and drive the cars to foster the image. They may even go so far as to have someone in authority catch them reading a personal success guide that one of them may read to chapter two. Most of them won’t read that far, however, because most of them aren’t in it for the long-haul.

Bullet-point, large idea minds have no patience for the time it takes to figure out the minutiae the rest of us will pine over in the agonizing trial-and-error process. The instantly successful don’t heed Rodney Dangerfield’s advice to “figure it out,” because they already have it all figured out. Either that or they’ve done so much to foster the image of one who already has that they don’t want to stain that image with new knowledge. They seek the quick-learner perception, and most of what they attain after the flurry-to-impress stage lies in either the knowledge they dismiss as something they already knew or inconsequential minutiae. They just know what they know, and that’s enough for the show.

They are also not good at taking criticism, as most constructive criticism calls for a restart, and they’re much too smart for a restart. To be fair, some of this criticism is bestowed on quick learners by jealous types who enjoy feeling they have greater authority on the subject, but some of that criticism is constructive. It falls upon all of us to figure out whether we are receiving helpful criticisms or competitive insults. Some criticism should make us wonder if we’re deluding ourselves with the belief that we’re as accomplished as we think. Some suggests that to find success in our craft, we should humbly consider doing it like someone else. In some cases, the criticism is correct, for there’s nothing wrong with following a proven path to success. That advice can be right or wrong for us, but that is just something else we have to figure out.

✽✽✽

“Do you have any tips on how to keep writing?” a fellow writer once asked me. My first inclination was to tell him about a book I knew that covers this very topic. I empathized with the idea that writing has few immediate rewards, and I enjoyed the perception of being a writer who knows what he is talking about when it comes to writing. I never read that book about writing, but I was sure it was loaded with all the usual ideas: “Keep Post-it notes on hand, so you don’t miss out on those little inspirations that could turn into great ideas.” Another solid idea they offer is, “Write a story that occurred in your life, for your life is an excellent cavern that can be mined for constant gems.” Then there is the ever-present, “Read, read, and read some more.” I could’ve told that writer about that book I never read, but even if I did take the time to read it and I found it invaluable to me, my recommendation would have been half-hearted. Experience has taught me that true success in writing requires nuanced ingenuity and creativity, and the writer has to figure these elements of the process out for themselves. If they don’t want to go through that time-consuming and laborious process, they should go do something else. That idea would form my addendum to Dangerfield’s quote: “You’ll [either] figure it out … or you won’t, and if you don’t, you might want to consider doing something else, and you’ll need to figure that out too.”

✽✽✽

I’m quite sure Jerry Seinfeld, sought Rodney’s advice, because he knew all about Rodney’s well-documented failures. Seinfeld likely knew that Rodney was so frustrated with his inability to achieve anything in the field of comedy that he just quit, and he didn’t try again for almost ten years. Seinfeld probably thought Dangerfield could give him a shortcut out of his personal cocoon and transform into a bona fide star. “You’ll figure it out!” the answer Rodney Dangerfield offered to the young Seinfeld, alluded to that struggle a butterfly goes through in its efforts to escape its cocoon. Yet, as any nature lover knows, if an outside influence cuts the butterfly’s struggle short, it will not gain the strength necessary to survive in the wild.

On that note, some critics grow frustrated with the amount of self-help charlatans moving from town to town in their Miracle Cure stagecoaches, who promise placebo elixirs to those seeking advice. They should direct these frustrations, instead, at those seeking shortcut exits from personal cocoons. When Seinfeld approached Dangerfield, and the aspiring writer approached me, they sought an alternative to learning from experience and failure, but Rodney’s advice suggests that he never found one. “You’ll figure it out,” might sound dismissive, but it also speaks to learning from experience and failure, and the resultant, almost imperceptible adjustments a craftsman must make to separate their final product from all of the others. The final answer for those seeking a quick fix is that there is no perfect piece of advice that we can give another who is unable or unwilling to display the temerity necessary to endure the necessary elements of failing, learning from that failure, and making all of the frustrating, time-consuming, and tedious little adjustments that must be made along the way. The final answer will be the answer you find. The final answer is that the struggle provides answers. The struggle informs the craftsman whether or not they are capable of fixing what is wrong with their presentation, and if they are desperate enough to do what is necessary to carve out some individual definition of success in their craft, and if they aren’t, they’ll figure that out too.

Chuck Klosterman on who wears the black hat in our society

July 15, 2013June 4, 2016 RilalyLeave a comment

Chuck Klosterman’s new book I Wear the Black Hat is mostly a list of villains throughout pop culture and History. The list, at times, is a little kitschy, and at times it’s a little serious, but whether you agree with him or not, Klosterman always has plenty of material to back up his claims.

In one of the passages of his book, Chuck Klosterman informs us that it’s no longer PC (Politically Correct) to call the PC movement PC. He says that the very term PC is now nothing more than a “quaint distraction” that “no one takes too seriously anymore,” and “it feels like something that only matters to Charles Krauthammer.” Klosterman says that the last time it was a “correct term to use to describe the linguistic issue in America was (roughly) between 1986 to 1995.”

It drives some of us “really, really crazy” when an individual tells us that a term, or phrase, that we use to describe a movement no longer properly describes that movement. These people are prone to say, “You should stop using that term,” or something like, “That is so yesterday dude.”

‘Ok,’ I mentally respond, while reading this particular condemnation in the book I Wear the Black Hat (Or should I say African-American Hat). ‘What term, or phrase, would Mr. Klosterman prefer we use to describe the current incarnation of the PC movement?’ The answer, we find by dutifully reading on, is that we don’t replace it, unless you’re Charles Krauthammer. It’s, apparently, just not a phrase that people should use anymore. In other words, the cynical would respond, “it drives certain people (like Klosterman’s wife) really, really crazy” to try and defeat the idea that some people are trying inflict speech codes upon our language, so just drop it, and we can all get along a lot better.

If the import of Klosterman’s message on PC speech codes were that I’m not to be considered hip anymore when I use a term like PC, I’ll take that, because I’m admittedly about as far from hip as one person could possibly be. If he’s telling us that the term PC is no longer an apt description of the attempts to control language, however, he’s going to have to provide us with a substitute. I wouldn’t use that substitute, of course, but it would strengthen his argument to do so.

I was going to argue that the PC movement may not be as overt as it was between 1986 to 1995, but it is, we’re just more assimilated to it now. Those of us that railed against PC speech codes in that era, as Klosterman later points out, simply lost the war. The difference between the culture that existed between 1986 to 1995 and now, is that it’s simply less shocking to us now when someone tries to control how we speak. It’s one of those sad but true facts that we’ve all learned to accept and a code we now have to lived by.

It used to be shocking to some of us when someone, be they a politician, or an obnoxious member of a particular group, would tell us that we weren’t speaking correctly, and it would elicit rebellion back then. That rebellion was put forth by many, but in Klosterman’s opinion no one did it more often, or as loudly, as Andrew Dice Clay and 2 Live Crew. Klosterman states that PC climate of that era provided an historical window in which an Andrew Dice Clay could become a megastar, and that “he would not have been a megastar in any other historical window—if (Dice Clay) had happened at a time when vulgarity somehow felt less important.”

Klosterman declares that that PC era was “painlessly oppressive” and those in that era experienced “low level anxiety” when they argued in public in which “Even casual conversation suddenly had the potential to get someone fired.” He describes how sexism and racism were given birth, or at least re-birth, during this era, and that the “backlash was stupid and adversarial.” In other words, if we are to read Klosterman correctly, we presumably should’ve all acquiesced to the PC crowd a lot sooner, so they could’ve won the war a lot quicker and saved us a whole bunch of adversarial exchanges.

I don’t know much about Klosterman’s life, and if he has experienced the hammer of the PC police personally, but those of us that have know that the PC police don’t just go away. They move onto the next thing, whatever that thing is. To some of us, it is very important, and at the risk of inflating it beyond reason, vital to the the free speech clause that we continue to provide them the “stupid and adversarial” backlash that keeps them somewhat close to being in check.

In the final portion of this chapter, Klosterman does concede that the winners of this war, these advocates of speech-limitation, “Didn’t necessarily make a better argument, they just wore the culture down. Almost everything that these advocates wanted in 1990, have been adopted by the world at large, in that we now err on the side of caution for the potentially offended.” So he basically admits that the PC crowd is still on the march, but that it’s just not PC to call them PC anymore.

The Villians

The much ballyhooed (and selling point for the book) chapter on O.J. Simpson doesn’t live up to the hype. The hype that the publishers used to try to move the book, was that Klosterman was going to tell us O.J.’s second biggest mistake. The second biggest mistake O.J. made, in Klosterman’s opinion, is that O.J. didn’t go into hiding after the trial exonerated him of the brutal slaying of his wife and Ron Goldman (yawn). Klosterman advises O.J., as O.J.’s adviser Alan Dershowitz advised O.J., that he should’ve kept a low profile, or move, or do anything but what he did by going out and living the O.J. lifestyle that O.J. knew pre-incarceration. Klosterman, would’ve advised O.J. against writing that book, or going on talk shows to give his side. A much more interesting chapter, as if it hasn’t been covered already, would’ve been to focus on our society’s reaction to O.J. post-verdict. It would’ve been interesting to read Chuck’s analysis of the young kids (who never knew O.J. the running back, announcer, or Naked Gun star) asking for O.J.’s autograph, the manner in which he was fawned over in public, and he could’ve tied this into the culture’s glorification of bad guys dating back to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Billy the Kid, and those that wore the black hats.

The most interesting chapter, in my opinion, other than the “Eagles” chapter that was covered in one of my previous blogs, is the chapter concerning how Muhammad Ali is a villain. Klosterman takes on this icon’s current, glorified status, stating that Muhammad Ali ruined a man’s life (Joe Frazier) for the expressed purpose of getting in the man’s head to win a fight.

I must painfully admit that I have been on Muhammad Ali’s side for much of the history of the Ali/Frazier story. I was too young to have firsthand knowledge of the fight, or the debate that followed, and much of what I’ve seen, heard, and read has been after the fact analysis. I was also very young when the debate started springing up around me, so I took the star’s side. When I later learned that that put me on the same side of this debate as TV personality Bryant Gumbel, I knew I was on the wrong side. I didn’t yet know the specifics of why I was wrong, but I knew that Gumbel was consistently and obnoxiously, on the wrong side of history. Thanks to Gumbel’s obnoxious takes on the matter, I began to strive for more objectivity on the story. The productions I watched from that point on, including the one put together by HBO, “The Thilla in Manilla”, convinced me that Ali was a bad guy, and a bully, that would stop at nothing to humiliate Frazier, until it reached what some have termed an historical level of betrayal.

The other illuminating fact Chuck unearths, that I must say I didn’t know, is that Ali met with the KKK to discuss their shared belief on the evils of interracial marriage. One has to think that even the obnoxious Bryant Gumbel would not have been eager to agree with Ali on this point, as Gumbel’s mother, and his wife are white. If you have ever watched Gumble interview a subject he sides with, however, you have to think this may have been a possibility. Gumble is, if nothing else, consistently obnoxious. The likely outcome, if Ali brought this up in a Gumble interview, would’ve been a surreptitious edit. It is possible that this obnoxious, succumbent to African-American stars may have found a surreptitious way of agreeing with Ali, and he may have found a way of calling those that opposed an “(effing) idiot” for disagreeing with whatever “the greatest” had to say on the matter. Klosterman concludes this piece by asking how many icons, other than Ali, could’ve survived with their image intact after such a meeting with the KKK, and such a shared belief, as that.

Klosterman also states that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a villain, because he was once mean to a guy from Pearl Jam. Klosterman says that the guys from Pearl Jam are nice guys, and they have a history of being appreciative of their fans, and Jabbar purportedly does not. These facts, when put together, should lead the reader to believe that Jabbar is a villain. Did Jabbar thump an autograph-seeking child in the forehead, did he push an old lady to the ground, or did he set Mother Teresa on fire after a particularly heated debate on the virtues of altruism? No, he was mean to a guy from Pearl Jam. Mean may even be a relative term in Chuck’s description of what happened. I read dismissive more than mean, but apparently no one can be dismissive of guys in Pearl Jam, or they’ll write a song about them, and Klosterman will like that song so much that he’ll feel enough allegiance to call the one that dismissed them a villain on that basis alone.

Chevy Chase is also a villain in Klosterman’s view, and this is based on the fact that Chase doesn’t take his role in entertainment seriously enough. Klosterman does lay out the fact that none of Chase’s co-stars in movies or on TV showed up for his roast, and that that pretty much means that those co-stars didn’t care for him. Chuck revisits a fight scene between Bill Murray and Chevy Chase, where Bill Murray called Chevy a “medium talent”, to suggest that Chase was overrated and underachieving at the same time. Chuck writes that the book “Live from New York, as oral history of Saturday Night Live” is littered with people taking pot shots at Chevy, and that the creator of the show “Community” called him a bad word, but Klosterman believes the nut of why Chevy is a bad guy exists in the fact that Chevy hates himself. Klosterman writes that one of Chevy’s most famous lines: “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not” is not something he’s happy about. Klosterman also writes that Chevy “never opted for the serious roles that so many comedians vie for throughout their careers.”

Now I agree with Marlon Brando that it doesn’t take a lot of talent to act in movies, but perhaps Chevy feared some sort of revelation of his “medium talent” in those roles. From the rare glimpses we’ve seen of Chase’s obnoxiousness, it’s hard to believe he’s a good guy, and as Klosterman writes, we can take some of Chevy’s cohort’s criticism as jealousy, but to suggest that he’s a villain based on the fact that he didn’t take his career serious enough might be a bit of a stretch.

In the “Eagles chapter” that has little to do with the villain premise, except perhaps thematically, Klosterman writes that he doesn’t think certain bands, and singers, are bad guys, he takes a moment to suggest why Mr. Bungle is not as great as some people think.

Mr. Bungle “was way more interesting than it was” writes Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman claims Mr. Bungle was a “self-indulgent side project”. He calls it “my real world introduction to The Problem of Overrated Ideas”. He says that Mike Patton, in particular, was “improvisational and gross. Musically and otherwise: He (Patton) stated that he would eat huge portions of mashed potatoes and chase it with schnapps,” Patton told MTV News, “Then he would sneak into his local laundromat and vomit into washers and dryers.” The fact that Klosterman does not mention Mike Patton by name, only as the singer, suggests that there may be some personal animus that drives his review of the band, but I could be wrong. Klosterman also basically claims that Patton should’ve stuck with the more mainstream Faith No More.

First of all, a decent study of Mike Patton’s history would show Klosterman that not only was Faith No More Patton’s other band, but it was his side project (not the other way around). At one point in his career, Patton did give Faith No More his full concentration, but it was mostly viewed as a promotional vehicle for Mr. Bungle. As evidence of this, Faith No More’s first video “Epic” shows Patton in a Mr. Bungle T-Shirt.

All personal preferences and disagreements aside, it says a lot about Klosterman’s listening habits that they’re, at least in part, dictated by things said in interviews he finds distasteful. Klosterman writes that Patton’s improvisations are “gross musically”, and this leads the informed reader to believe that Klosterman has probably only listened to the first Mr. Bungle album. I’ve listened to this self-titled debut ad nauseum, and I’ve basically reached a point where I’ve deleted all of the silly and gross improvisations from that album on my iPod, and I used to delete the same portions from the audio tapes I recorded the album onto. What you’re left with, when you delete the silliness, is a great piece of work from a bunch of teenagers. (As a side note, Mr. Bungle’s other two albums succeeded without such deletions. Those albums were tight in their musical structure, and all the silliness lay behind them by this point.) Perhaps, Klosterman should do more homework on a subject he apparently knows little to nothing about.

Are you telling me, Chuck, that Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue never did anything silly and gross (like biting the heads off bats), and they’re never been immature in interviews? How old were your peeps when they snorted a line of ants? The guys in Mr. Bungle were teenagers when their self-titled, first album came out, and teenagers love bathroom humor and fart jokes, but the members of the group eventually grew up and produced two of the best, most consistent, and serious albums of music I’ve ever heard.

I’ve always thought that the best reviews were those that dissected a book in a negative manner, as opposed to those glowing, sound bite style reviews (“A Tour de Force”) that the reviewer writes, so that he might get his name on the cover of the book. It may be just me, but I’ve always thought that negative reviews act as an EKG monitor for the heart of a book, and positive reviews usually act as a fawning mechanism for the star status of the author. I also don’t care what a person’s personal review of the book is, if it’s based on the fact that they like Muhammad Ali, I want to know if it was a good book or not, and I think a thorough dissection of a book, can only be done in a negative manner. If you do want my opinion, however, I Wear the Black (African American) Hat is an excellent, fun read that dissects our era (Chuck and I are about two years a part) in a manner, it appears, that only Chuck Klosterman can do this well.