Put aside for a moment the critical praise that has been heaped upon this late sixties experimental electronics psychedelic folk-rock music group and their one and only album over the decades and listen to me: The United States of America suck. 1968’s The United States of America is a diabolical slog and war crime, released just ten days before that other war crime the My Lai Massacre, and comparisons can be made. It also happens to be one of the approximately 485 discs from 2005’s 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die you’ll be lucky NOT to hear before you die. Indeed it could well be—if you have a heart condition or good taste—the LAST album you hear before you die.
How to describe the album? Well, it’s well nigh impossible, but let’s just call it The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as conceived by minor Fluxus composer/ ethnomusicologist/ social satirist/ member in good standing of the Communist Party USA/ electronics tinkerer Joseph Byrd and vocalist Dorothy Moskowitz, who worked in musical theater production and once sang in a vocal group with that other Fluxus legend, Art Garfunkel. Along with a cast of avant garde sympathizers, one of whom plays the electric violin and ring modulator but none of whom condescend to play the electric guitar. A former member of Canned Heat was involved early on. But he wisely asked himself why he would want to go from Canned Heat to an even worse band and promptly made himself scarce.
A few of the songs on The United States of America are relatively straightforward, but the big production numbers are infernal machines complete with lyrics every bit as smug and condescending as those of Frank Zappa. It’s not an edifying combination. The only positive thing to to be said about The United States of America is it includes brief flashes of hard-driving dissonance reminiscent of the Velvet Underground. But they’re few and fleeting, and too often buried in songs best left to those who enjoy being flogged by sound collages.
The United States of America were innovators, but they were also squares—Blood, Sweat & Tears with avant garde bona fides. Their only album is an ethnomusicologist’s dream, but Byrd’s area of expertise (the music of the Civil War) speaks volumes about some of what you hear within, although it doesn’t account for the infernal Gregorian chant wannabe “Where Is Yesterday,” the “wacky” music hall attack on middle class mores that is “I Won’t Leave My Wooden Wife for You, Sugar” (which sounds like something the Bonzo Dog Band might have come up with if they were humor-impaired), or the derivative Beatlemania (“She’s Leaving Home,” to be precise) of “Stranded in Time,” which is yet another not-very-blistering attack on middle class mores, which these bozos actually make me want to defend by saying something to the effect that the only thing worse than a suburban nine-to-fiver is a moralistic long-hair.
Diversity is the watchword here, and the album’s diversity is not a strength. The appropriately titled “Cloud Song” is a pastoral ditty with children’s verse lyrics sung in a too-pretty voice by Moskowitz. It’s boring in a boring kind of way. “Love Song for the Dead Che” simply confuses me—it’s a conventional love song with conventional love song lyrics sung by Moskowitz, and supposedly reflects Byrd’s revolutionary ideals but I’ll be damned if I know how. Beyond its title there’s nothing revolutionary about it, unless (and this is a stretch) the very banality of its lyrics are supposed to be an indictment of the American Way of Life, which Byrd (ever the reductionist) views as a series of lifeless cliches. But when push comes to dialectics I don’t need to understand it. I need only not listen to it.
The title of “The Garden of Earthly Delights”—which is enhanced by some spacy electronic effects and rocks, kinda, in an English folk-rock sort of way—is purest irony: the words that come out of Moskowitz’s mouth concern themselves with flora of the deadly variety (“Blackening mushrooms drink in the rain/ Sinister nightblooms/ Wilt with the dawn’s welcoming pain”). It’s all a bit overwrought (“the dawn’s welcoming pain”?), but child’s play compared to the lyrics of “The American Metaphysical Circus,” which is where the United States of America hunker down, take off the gloves and really make you pay for their pretensions.
“The American Metaphysical Circus” is a take-off of sorts on The Beatles’ “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” but it’s a far darker creature, so dark that (get this) “the cost of one admission is your mind”! And they’re not fooling. It opens with a calliope playing a US marching song, a ragtime piano playing “At a Georgia Camp Meeting,” and not one but two marching bands, each of which plays a separate patriotic favorite, with the two switching between left and right channels, with all of this more or less happening at the same time. Sound unbearable? You can’t imagine. Fortunately it all fades away at around the one-minute mark, like a passing nightmare, at which point Moskowitz comes in, accompanied by lots of electronic sound, to sing “At precisely eight-o-five/ Doctor Frederick von Meier/ Will attempt his famous dive/ Through a solid sheet of luminescent fire.”
Well that sounds harmless enough, but from there things we take a swan dive into horror, with Moskowitz singing (in a rather wooden voice) about bear torture, “children you can bleed/ In a most peculiar way” (the tools you’ll need are on the house), and other exhibits I thought might have been inspired by J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, except the LP preceded the book by two whole years! I’m not quite sure what the message is—capitalism is sadism perhaps? The Vietnam War is killing our children? It’s time we eliminated bear-baiting once and for all? What I am sure of is that the whole carnival returns at the end, like a psychopathic murderer returning to the scene of the crime.
If the LP’s other dubious tour de force, the triptych “The American Way of Love” demonstrates one thing, it’s that Byrd is one very sexually uptight hippie. In the first part, the very square (oompah included!) rocker “Metaphor for an Older Man,” he expresses nothing but contempt for the men, straight but primarily gay, seeking sex on NYC’s 42nd Street. Byrd described it as a song about the “realities of love under capitalism,” but that’s not what’s happening. What we have here is prim-lipped literary homophobia: “Later on an indiscreet/ Encounter in the men’s room/ And you tell yourself that a natural urge prevailed.” Well it did, and good for it, but don’t try telling Stodgy McPuritan that. He knows a natural desire when he sees one, and he screams when he sees one that isn’t. And is it possible he thinks that all of this will change when the capitalist system collapses? That under the dictatorship of the proletariat, where human naturalness will blossom, that guy in the men’s room will become a happily adjusted straight person?
Get beyond the squarejohn flourishes and there’s some interesting noise in “Metaphor for an Older Man.” Such cannot be said for the second part, “California Good-Time Music,” which doesn’t sound like any California music I’ve ever heard and isn’t remotely my idea of a good time. And the “satire” is beyond lame. If you ask me, anyone who sneers at the great music of sunny California is an enemy of the people, although the Velvet Underground get a pass because they’re healthy drug addicts. The last part, “Love Is All,” opens with some mad cool noise, only to devolve into a tedious collage made up of fragments of all the songs that have come before. Basically it’s unlistenable, a herky-jerky hodge-podge of calliope, marching band music, ragtime, space warble, and everything else the band could throw into the great musical melting pot. By the time Byrd gets around to sarcastically repeating “How much fun it’s been” you’ll have realized he’s right. You didn’t have any fun at all! It was awful! Just as was the case with the good folks in “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” the price of admission was your mind!
The album’s only saving graces are “Hard Coming Love” and “Coming Down,” and they’re hardly undiluted triumphs. The fuzz, drive, and dissonance of “Hard Coming Love” demonstrate that, had these folks been hipper and done more interesting drugs, they might have given the Velvet Underground a run for their money. Unfortunately the band had far more on its agenda than making fascinating noise, as they prove when Moskowitz comes in midstream sounding like your standard Carole King type. And by the time the band returns to do truly dastardly things with electricity, it’s too late. Still, it’s a very good song that deserves to be heard, although I can’t help but wish these tight-assed hippies had had the courage to throw musical hygiene out the window and go “European Son” on the mother.
“Coming Down” is more of a piece, and reminds me of a sort of prototype for Stereolab—the song goes from driving electric extravaganza, with Moskowitz playing nice on top, to prettier, more melodic number, and back again, over and over. “Coming Down” is as close as The United States of America ever came to producing a wholly satisfactory track, and all I can wonder is what might have become of them if they’d given up on petty morals and indulged in a steady diet of sordid underbellies and high-test amphetamines. Speed saves!
The United States of America suffers from a crippling multitude of indefensible faults, including but not limited to Byrd and Company’s collective case of attention deficit disorder, calliope addiction, a bad record collection heavy on the kinds of Folkway records Byrd helped to compile, undiagnosed Puritanism of the fatal variety, an unhealthy fixation on bad social satire, terminal unhipness, wooden tonsilitis, and (worst of all) the tendency to throw everything into the old blender and turn it on. At least they spared us the classical music. That should count for something, but it doesn’t.
Pity The United States of America never sat down and listened to the second Velvet Underground album ninety-eight times in a row. But they didn’t. Why? Because “Sister Ray” was vicious and depraved and would be promptly banned when the revolution came, and god knows it couldn’t come soon enough. Instead The United States of America did us all a kindness and dissolved their Union. And the United States of America won!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
