by Spitz, Marc
Today Seberg has become a fixture in the digital age. Her death at just forty (she was found in a parked car on a Paris street, overdosed on pills, on August 30, 1979) loans itself to conspiracy theory. Officially she was a suicide, but there have been books, websites, and multiple articles that claim the CIA was behind it, or drove her insane as payback for her opposition to the Vietnam War and being pro–Black Panthers. People have latched on to the tragedy as well as the image. Her second Preminger film, Bonjour Tristesse, was recently reissued on DVD. There are tribute videos all over YouTube. Kirsten Dunst (who played a doomed, Seberg-like figure in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides) expressed interest in starring in a biopic circa 2005. Had Seberg lived, she would be pushing eighty and surely wouldn’t be the icon that she is now—the same probably goes for James Dean. An early death endears an artist to the Twee.
The British were enjoying a New Wave of their own as memories of German buzz bombs and rations slowly receded and a new kind of postwar prosperity began to rise. Suddenly there were jobs again for working-class kids, rebuilding bombed-out sites along with the British economy. Many of these newly employed spent their paychecks on Italian suits and scooters, as well as classic British sportswear designed by Fred Perry. The mods (or modernists), as this group was dubbed, felt a kinship with the American working class. They prized and collected speedy dance tracks out of Detroit and Memphis from the labels Motown and Stax, songs that would form the backbone of what would come to be known as northern soul. The young mods who listened to it formed their own bands, such as the Who; the style would blossom again amid the Punk and New Wave movement, catalyzed most notably by the Jam, whose 1980 album Sound Affects is a key recording for many a modern Twee. The Mod look—clean, tapered Italian suits, zip-up boots, bangs (for both men and women), and peacock-pattern scarves and ties—permeates British film of this time period and is just as key to the foundation of Twee as a carelessly exhaled French cigarette.
British modern film of this decade is also concerned with the young and beautiful misfits, but ebbs toward the melodramatic, as in “kitchen sink” dramas like The L-Shaped Room. In the film we see Jane, played by Leslie Caron, down on her luck, fleeing her past and newly checked into an infested boardinghouse in Notting Hill. Jane strolls the gutter, Wilde-style, with one eye on the stars and another on Toby, the chiseled and likewise “skint” or down-on-his-luck writer (played by the hunky Tom Bell) who lives across the hall. Together they nest and spruce, spraying cheap perfume over the acrid smell of bedbug spray. It’s highly romantic stuff, and it introduces a beloved Twee cinema trope: two lovers kicking sweetly against the pricks (usually old pricks). Smooching on a blanket during a picnic in a public park, Jane and Toby are scoffed at by a matronly old woman. “Between her and the bomb, we don’t stand a chance,” he quips.
The war was over; the generation that fought it was giving way to a new one, but the threat of “the” bomb and the paranoia of the Cold War informed many of these sometimes-bleak romances. These films are largely about how lovers behave with death as a distinct possibility at any minute and the sweet, beautiful moments they steal amid the horrible gray English dread. In Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, Rita Tushingham plays the plucky, plain, but clever Helen, a cheeky working-class girl who may be pregnant with a black seaman’s child. As she waits for her test results, she spends long afternoons dreaming of “a place of one’s own” where she can not only fit in but celebrate her outsider status: “My usual self is very unusual,” she announces. Her only support comes from another outcast, the homosexual Geoffrey, one of the few people in her world who doesn’t cast judgment on her.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, based on a short story by Alan Sillitoe—and also beloved by Morrissey and, for good measure, name-checked in the song “The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner” by Twee heroes Belle and Sebastian—introduces a similarly unbreakable, tortured young English antihero in Tom Courtenay’s Colin Smith. Colin’s world is even more oppressive than Helen’s. He clashes with his parents, then is banged up after a botched bakery robbery and sent off to reform school, where he’s routinely beaten and bullied by the guards. Constantly scowling, he finds himself liberated when it comes to track and field. In a long scene we see Courtenay gliding, gazellelike, over the rocks and grass. He is graceful, clearly in his element, possessing something inviolate and pure. Exploited by a glory-minded warden, he is offered lenient treatment and even freedom if he competes and emerges victorious in an upcoming meet. He’s easily fleet enough to crush any contenders, but just before he reaches the finish line . . . well, I won’t spoil it.
Just as the Twee of today is drawn to old forms, whether it’s canning and pickling cukes or plucking a ukulele, the dawn of rock’s second and perhaps greatest wave in the early and mid-1960s was marked by an embrace of musical forms that had long been discarded as outré. The nascent Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Yardbirds were record collectors, prizing forgotten blues B-sides out of Chicago. They played covers in clubs that featured “trad jazz,” or faithful renditions of American Dixie swing.
“England has always been a country with a great interest in the past,” says pop singer Ian Whitcomb, who would notch several hits during the British invasion, many of them like “You Turn Me On” and “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?” featuring old-timey music hall piano and the instrument that would years later come to be a symbol of Twee: the ukulele. “As I child I knew all the music hall songs my parents knew. Same thing with the Beatles. They knew all the songs you sing in pubs. We treasure our pop culture and hang on to it.” John Lennon, of course, led a group that played skiffle, a form of British folk often accompanied by a washtub bass. Upon kicking off their early songwriting partnership, Lennon and McCartney indeed did not throw out the book. Like Godard and Truffaut, they were students: they kept Cole Porter and Harold Arlen, Sammy Cahn and other composers of standards, and merely added Little Richard, Motown, and rockabilly touches the way Godard added jump cuts.
“The sixties and childishness both represent a simpler, happier, more genuine time. The sixties are seen as rock’s childhood, a moment of innocence before bloated middle age, before pop was overdetermined by criticism,” Simon Reynolds wrote. “A time when the idea of youth was young.”
The 1960s dream was heavily invested in keeping that youth spirit alive. Old men drank. Young men preferred to “Puff the Magic Dragon.” That song was a massive hit for folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary in 1963, signaling a sort of pop changing of the guard, and, depending on whether you are Greg Focker (“Who would’ve thought it wasn’t really about a dragon, huh?”) or Jack Byrnes (“Puff’s just the name of the boy’s magical dragon”), deploying a sort of global tree-house culture of coded language designed to weed out the squares and the old folks.
As new as the world seemed, the Twee arcane styles—blues, folk, and country—were what informed the giddy first wave of British pop songwriting. Cowed by their headmasters into a kind of pathological shyness, many of these pioneering Brits were in love with Americana but could never be as openly expressive, sexual, or vulgar, so they embraced the abstract. A would-be poet like Donovan would not be able to convincingly channel the freewheelin’ American writers he hero-worshipped: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. The British were too buttoned-up and polite for that, but that desire for transcendence and kinetic freedom was run through the British schoolboy filter and ushered in a new kind of cool, beatnik-informed but shy and elegant. The Rolling Stones probably were as sexual and alpha as any swamp or city picker, but they were among the exceptions. A band that was never virtuosic when it came to true blues was now free to pivot from the faux-gruff, manly-man blues style embodied by Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy, and Howlin’ Wolf.
The Kinks a misfit quartet from London now prized as almost a holy combo by the Twee Tribe, were a beneficiary of this shift as well. “They were the worst blues band of the entire era,” British music journalis
t Charles Shaar Murray has observed. “If they’d stayed a blues band they would have been in and out of the music business within their first record.” Leader Ray Davies almost stumbled into a sort of uniquely urban but openhearted rock and roll style. “I thought I was making blues, and people said, ‘Oh, you sound like Noël Coward,’” he has said. True, the grittier, thrumming early singles, like “All Day and All of the Night” and the immortal “You Really Got Me,” notwithstanding, there is a sadness and a gentleness to many of the Kinks’ singles, from “Tired of Waiting for You” to “See My Friends.” Even their most iconic song, “Waterloo Sunset,” is narrated by the lonely urban soul observing the world from afar. Davies is not the participant, not one of the two lovers meeting, but rather the kid watching “the world from my window.” He looked great, dandy-clad, but at heart was a gap-toothed nerd with not one shred of faith in either rock stardom or the pomposity of English morality, which he shredded to bits in character studies like “A Well Respected Man” and “Dedicated Follower of Fashion.” He was also unafraid of camp and sexual ambiguity, evidenced most famously on the hit single “Lola.” Echoes of the Kinks can be heard in the Buzzcocks, the Raincoats, and even twenty-first-century bands with wit and vulnerability to go with their punch, like Franz Ferdinand, the Libertines, and Kaiser Chiefs, among many others.
“We realized there was no future in just copying the blues,” says Whitcomb. “We all wanted to speak our own minds and create our own sounds.”
American bands, taking cues from Beatles songs like “Eleanor Rigby” and Rolling Stones ballads like “As Tears Go By” and “Lady Jane,” started producing pop that could be called “future baroque.” The Left Banke’s bracing and heartbreaking “Walk Away Renée” and “Pretty Ballerina” singles easily vie with “Waterloo Sunset” for exquisiteness (both songs had a vast influence on Belle and Sebastian decades later). The Lovin’ Spoonful (a fan of the old-timey conceits that Whitcomb was embracing overseas), Buffalo Springfield, even garagey Tommy James with “Crimson and Clover,” picked up on the scene the Beatles and the Kinks set—a mad tea party of sorts. Cues were coming from England daily, with each former blues-rock outfit flowering into troubadours. Manfred Mann offered “Pretty Flamingo”; the Hollies, “Bus Stop”; the Small Faces, “Lazy Sunday” and the divine and dappled “Itchycoo Park”: picture-postcard songs that seemed to defy their still standard running times and loan a sense of elegance to the middle-class and mundane.
There was nothing mundane (or middle-class) about the Beatles, relentlessly leading the charge into the future of fearless and thrilling pop. Their 1965 chart-topping singles “I Feel Fine” and “Eight Days a Week” signal an ethical reordering of sorts when it came to how a hit should or could sound. The former begins with a rubbery line of feedback from John Lennon’s Rickenbacker guitar. “For electric guitarists, feedback is a hazard of amplification,” the late rock critic Ian MacDonald observed in his classic Beatles-in-the-studio tome Revolution in the Head, “to either be avoided or incorporated into their sound in a controlled way.” Like bored, gifted children, the four wealthy, world-traveled, and powerful Beatles embraced and used the anarchy. Lennon, McDonald says, was “inordinately proud” of it all. Similarly, “Eight Days a Week” begins with a fade-in, the chords growing louder and louder until the rapturous verse hits. The following year’s “Rain,” the B-side to the hit “Paperback Writer,” finds the Beatles running the first verse backward as the track fades out. And this was before the acid period. By the time they followed with Revolver, which routinely tops the Best Album Ever lists the British music magazines seem to publish every year or two, they were intent on destroying not only the ego, as LSD gurus instructed, but also the studio, quite literally. Effects on the milestone “Tomorrow Never Knows” were achieved, according to McDonald, by breaking equipment as a child would after hours of enthustic play with a series of toys.
“Sending a voice track through the revolving speaker in a Leslie cabinet [was] a process which required physically breaking into the circuitry,” the author marvels. Tracks like “Yellow Submarine” were grown-up music for both children and adults, made by adults who had the means and the gifts to hold on to their childhood.
After hearing their Rubber Soul, in 1965, Brian Wilson, America’s greatest baroque futurist, joined in. By then Wilson was eating acid on an almost daily basis, smoking pot, and gorging on food, rejecting the path that destroyed Buddy Holly in favor of a controlled anarchy in his mansion or in the expensive studios that Capitol Records provided. He, like the Beatles, could do anything, indulge any whim on any schedule; the only pressure was to go farther and farther into the future, often by going backward. “I just wasn’t made for these times,” Wilson famously sang, and the flutes, strings, gongs, horns, bells, and lilting harmonies sounded like little else on the radio. Lyrically, Wilson was still writing about a California that didn’t really exist, full of wholesome and loyal blondes, tasty waves, warming sun, and hot rods. Meanwhile, footage of the Vietnam War was featured on the evening news every night, and many clean-cut Beach Boys fans were being sent off to the jungles of Southeast Asia. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older,” Wilson sang at age twenty-four, well beyond the voting age. He was using his gifts, his prestige, and his fortune (and a pile of drugs) to “revolt into childhood,” to borrow a phrase from Simon Reynolds. The very act was a middle finger to his more conservative band mates and his old-model music-biz-trained father, the domineering Murray Wilson. It’s no wonder that soon Wilson turned to fellow visionary Van Dyke Parks, a former child star, for collaboration, scrambling reality (increasingly troubling as the war escalated) in favor of highly abstract lyrics that confounded and sometimes infuriated his fellow Beach Boys but delighted the whimsy-worshipping genius. The theremin on “Good Vibrations,” the legendary sandbox constructed in the piano room (so he could feel the beach on his bare feet as he composed), even the sleeve of Pet Sounds, featuring the Beach Boys feeding a bunch of grateful goats, seem perfectly brilliant now that the album is revered, but at the time they were puzzling to both the label and the group’s many fans. “Teenage symphonies to God?” What happened to surfing?
“Oh, but I was so much older then,” the Byrds sang on “My Back Pages,” another of their hits and a jangly Bob Dylan cover. “I’m younger than that now.” The Byrds, out of Los Angeles, had both a Dylan connection (he was a friend and supplier of lucrative hits) and a Beatles connection (Derek Taylor, the Fab Four’s elegant publicity chief, also worked with them). The quartet—Jim “Roger” McGuinn, Gene Clark, David Crosby, Michael Clarke, and Chris Hillman—had a chic residency at Ciro’s, a hot Hollywood nightclub, and dressed, as Godard’s heroes did, like outlaws—in this case a combination of gangster and cowboy drag—while British rock stars seemed intent on dressing like nature-loving romantic poets. Many of the Byrds’ songs were recorded in L.A., backed by the same studio perfectionists who played on first Phil Spector and then Brian Wilson’s ambitious new compositions: the Wrecking Crew, as they came to be known. The Byrds had hits and style, and once Punk’s first wave of earth scorchers lifted a ban on all things ’60s, they emerged as heroes to the new post-Punk Indie school. Some of their members, like David Crosby, wore capes and did scads of drugs. They were soon singing songs like “Eight Miles High.” Still, a sense of utopia reigned, and pop music grew limitless and seemed infinite. Orchestral works like the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Past, the Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow, the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle, and the caddish Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson swelled into the ear via headphones.
“I saw it as retrograde,” says Whitcomb, who clung to the old-time style and stood as a classic Twee reactionary against a kind of zeitgeist overkill. “I didn’t like it when they all went psychedelic and got pretentious. I like simple pop sounds. Pure, simple bread-and-butter music. Pop music involved girls and sunshine and beaches. It wasn’t pretentious and serious. I liked the three-minute single. I like rock and roll
, not ‘rock.’ There’s a huge difference. ‘Rock’ died around 1965.” Whitcomb continued to pluck his uke and became a cult figure for those who grew to love the tiny, Twee guitar. “It’s easy to play and produces a very pleasingly plangent sound. A nice, novel sound,” Whitcomb says.
For a blip it seemed as if the New Left, the leaders of the antiwar movement, might use whimsy as a potent weapon. The Youth International Party, or yippies—a nod to hippies and the cry of a child when he’s having fun—nominated a pig for president in 1968. They burned legal tender as well as draft cards and would not let go the idea of a free society. “There is no ideology except that which each individual brings with him,” Abbie Hoffman writes in Revolution for the Hell of It. “The role he plays in building the alternative society will shape in some ways its ideology.” Fueled by this dream, the yippies (Jerry Rubin, Ed Sanders, and Paul Krasner were among the higher-profile members) embraced stunts and symbols over the kind of strategy that would require financing and endless meetings. When the Yippies did conspire, it was to determine how many people it would take to make a ring around the Pentagon so that it could be levitated and exorcised.
Needless to say, the building stayed put, but soon the hippies themselves started to jump out windows on LSD. Many of their leaders and heroes, such as Senator Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were, of course, assassinated (the childlike Andy Warhol nearly so as well). The war in Vietnam escalated. By the 1960s, death was already in the zeitgeist even as the “inner child” gained control. The Beatles classic “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the “sound event” of the era, was based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The boomers had grown up on children’s books, like Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches and Edward Gorey’s macabre The Gashlycrumb Tinies, that were suffused with death: not make-believe death, but actual despair-causing death. In 1964’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl depicts Violet Beauregarde’s mother’s horror as her daughter swells into a giant blueberry after ingesting something strange. She is but one of the horrible children who meet bizarre fates in Dahl’s work. Only the pure and innocent—like Charlie—get out alive.
