Even if you don't know who Glen Campbell is, you should watch the movie about his farewell tour, "I'll Be Me," tonight

I'll Be Me, which had a limited theatrical release in 2014, makes its TV debut tonight on CNN.

by Ken

The post title isn't facetious. James Keach, director and co-producer of I'll Be Me, the story of a "goodbye tour" that was scheduled for 5½ months when he got involved but stretched to 51 concerts over some two years, has already encountered the question "Who's Glen Campbell?" (If anyone needs reminding, the "official trailer" clip provides some reminders of how big a star he was, both as a recording artist and as a TV personality.)

But then, when James co-produced the 2005 Johnny Cash-June Carter biopic Walk the Line, as he explained at a screening of I'll Be Me Friday night at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, he heard the question "Who's Johnny Cash?" Notably when it came to selling the project to a studio, a bunch of studios passed, with the resident genius at Sony announcing that nobody cares about Johnny Cash. (James noted that several hundred million dollars' worth of box-office receipts suggest he was wrong.) It was in good part on the basis of the trust he'd earned with the Cashes that the Campbells were interested in having him work on their project. From James's standpoint, having been through the experience of Walk the Line made him not want to do such a project. But he agreed to meet with the Campbells, and was so taken by them, and by the fascination of how much of Glen there still was in the 75-year-old Glen, butted up against stark reminders of the Alzheimer's ravages.



Early in the film we see Kim explaining to Glen (likely not for the first time) that James is going to be working with them on a movie about him, and the always-jovial-country-boy Glen, approving, declares, "I'll be me."

By the time filming began, we see Glen making abundant use of his country-boy joviality to deflect questions about his already-impaired memory. Because by the time the 2011-12 tour documented in the film began, the public had been informed that Glen had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And yes, it's now possible to actually diagnose Alzheimer's. In the film we see him undergoing both an MRI and a PET scan, and we see doctors showing him and explaining both the picture of the shrinkage of his hippocampus, included in the Mayo Clinic clip, and a series of cross-section images of his brain that show sections that are afflicted with plaque. These are things that formerly couldn't be seen except at autopsy.



The thing that is most obviously riveting about the film is the extraordinary level of musical skill and artistry Glen retains, much of it still in evidence at the final concert, in November 2012. At one point Glen, asked how he's still able to do this, says he can't explain it, that it's all in his system somewhere. The doctors are at pains to explain that Alzheimer's deterioration is highly individual, and also speculate that Glen's ongoing deep involvement in his music seemed to be giving him some grounding, and may possibly have slowed the rate of deterioration in other aspects of his brain function.

Yes, at concerts the song lyrics are being fed to Glen on Teleprompters, and he forgets things and sometimes performs songs more than once, but the musical skills and the musicianship are pretty amazing. Already at the start of the film Kim tells us that he has become "unrehearsable," and over time his worsening condition but when it comes to performance time, he generally rises to the occasion, for audiences that clearly have come not just to see but to support him. From one concert there's a "dueling" duet with daughter Ashley on banjo and Glen on his guitar, and while Ashley seems to hope he will pick up on melodic cues she feeds him, he always has the rhythm of the cues, and as the two get deeper into the number, he generates a lot of heat.

The tour came about originally to promote a new record, made with an all-new, younger backup group (James says the record company was hoping to reach a younger audience), which included the youngest of his eight children, the three with Kim, his wife since 1982: in addition to Ashley, sons Cal and Shannon. All three come across in the film as not just gorgeous and highly talented but extremely personable. And for all the mixed emotions a project like the tour and film must have caused, they were all glad to have the opportunity not just to be with but to perform with their father over this period. Although it was a new musical group he was touring with, the road crew was his regular gang, clearly an extended family of sorts.



The family thought Glen would be up to the tour and the film, or they wouldn't have gone ahead with it. They also wanted to be open about his condition, and for the public to see that condition. From not long after they went public with the diagnosis, we see Glen appearing on The Tonight Show, doing two numbers with the band, and afterward we see Jay Leno, clearly deeply moved, coming back to thank him for appearing and inviting him to come back anytime he wants.

As James explains, Glen wanted people to see his Alzheimer's. Kim talks in the film about the importance they all felt of removing the shame from the disease, and James made a point of the considerable institutional support the film is receiving -- there are a lot of organizations involved with Alzheimer's (including Lily, which has a possibly helpful drug in the testing stages) strongly interested in getting this kind of portrait before the public.

At this point there are fewer and fewer people who haven't had a personal experience of Alzheimer's, and James rattled off some numbers about the likelihood of each of us actually having it which were scary enough that I didn't register them. The odds, it seems, are getting worse for each of us. I'll Be Me gives us a kind of view of the disease that just hasn't been available before. I expect I'll want to watch it again, and apparently there will be "extras" on the DVD that give us even more.

No doubt CNN will give the film a bunch of airings beyond tonight's premiere. It's worth checking the schedule.

#

Tangled Up In Yoo

Last week David Swanson wrote this really great song, "Tangled Up In Yoo." This version was sung by Margaret Flowers. I thought watching the video would be an uplifting way to start the week.



Not everyone is enamored of the use of anthemic songs like this for social and political causes (although you rarely hear people crying anymore when their favorite classic turns up in an ad selling a crappy car or detergent). Kay Bailey Hutchison, a right-wing Texas senator running against a further right secessionist governor for his position, uses songs on YouTube clips, as does the secessionist. The secessionist has an air of corruption around him-- a well-deserved one-- and Hutchison has been using the O'Jay's For the Love of Money. "Political campaigns like ours have long considered the use of such songs in Web videos as acceptable under fair use rules," Hutchison campaign spokesman Joe Pounder said. The secessionist's spokesperson agrees. "It's an inexpensive way to put out a message. The goal in the campaign is to use every outlet possible to get your message out." Usage like the one above isn't for narrow political gain, but for the benefit of mankind.

WHAT MAKES MUSIC THRILLING?

Towards the end of 1996 I was in Hamburg visiting Warner Bros' German subsidiary, my favorite of all of our international companies. While I was there one of the guys turned me on to a local song that was about to be released but that had no home outside of Europe. I listened to it and got goosebumps. It sounded like a smash-- but certainly not a sure thing for unadventurous American radio. Because it was... well... like opera. But it transcended category and is intensely emotive. It was a duet by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman, "Time to Say Goodbye," itself a remake of "Con te Partiro" (I'll go With You"). It was a farewell song for a German national hero, a boxing champion named Henry Maske, enough of a story to guarantee a #1 on the German charts. But in America? Henry who? Opera? And yet... the song had something... I couldn't put my finger on it and I didn't know a word for it, but I was sure it had that special element that can touch a universal soul. I brought an advance copy back to my company. I played it for our A&R department-- blank stares. I played it for our promotion and marketing departments-- more blank stares. Even the people who liked it said it would never mean anything to anyone in the U.S.

I was scheduled to take a 4 hour dj slot on a radio station in L.A. that was closing down. I opened my set with "Time to Sat Goodbye." Four hours later the phones were still ringing from woman, some sobbing, about the beauty of the song. I was more sure than ever it would be a smash. No one at Warner Bros agreed with me. They just said radio would never play it; it might be great but if It couldn't get any exposure, what good would it do? I was the president of the company but I let my team talk me out of it.

It remained at #1 in Germany for 14 weeks and broke every sales record for singles there and in several other countries! It went to #2 in the U.K. and when Danny Goldberg at Mercury Records had the good sense to release it in the U.S. the album, Romanza went platinum and made it into the Top 40. It got exposure in America in in several films and on TV shows from South Park and Sesame Street to The Sopranos. Perhaps if I knew the word frisson at the time I could have better explained the inevitability of the song's success to my colleagues.

fris·son     [free-sohn; Fr. free-sawn]
–noun, plural -sons     [-sohnz; Fr. -sawn]
a sudden, passing sensation of excitement; a shudder of emotion; thrill: The movie offers the viewer the occasional frisson of seeing a character in mortal danger.
[Origin: 1770–80; < F: shiver, shudder, OF friçons (pl.) < LL fricti?nem, acc. of fricti? shiver (taken as deriv. of fr?gére to be cold), L: massage, friction]

Sandy Pearlman has been one of my closest friends since 1965. He introduced me to music. Probably best known as the producer (and writer) for Blue Oyster Cult, he also produced albums for The Clash, The Dictators, Pavlov's Dog, Dream Syndicate and many other artists. Yesterday he told me about a talk he and another friend of ours, Prof. Don McLean, Dean, Schulich School of Music of McGill University in Montreal. The two of them wrote an abstract of the talk they're planning on the application of the frisson concept to music. They said I could publish it at DWT.

ASK ST. CECILIA: OR, FRISSON, CHILL FACTOR, AND DARK INFORMATION-- MUSIC AS META-COMMUNICATIONS CHANNEL


In music, frisson is experienced by the listener as an inexplicable moment of intense excitement, variously defined as ‘a shiver, chill, cold shudder, thrill, tingle; shaking, shakiness, trembling, quivering, vibration …’. Frisson is an experience not voluntarily generated. As in another intimately related context, the “subliminal frisson” that Dracula evokes (Houston 2005:122). What is this phenomenon, and how is it triggered? What elements of musical design and structure contribute to its effect? How does this response compare with other charged psycho-physiological experience? For example, is frisson ultimately experienced as a gating function, opening a gate to the numinous? As in a massive compression of Fear and Trembling, the paradoxical Kierkegaardian moment, access to this noumenon of music seems fleetingly grasped, a glimpse of what could be, with the somewhat disturbing recognition that our relationship to such a state appears involuntary. That the neural and perceptual systems are configured to grasp this effect, and that our relationship to it, whether invoked by the music (legalistic in its compulsion of neural structure) or evoked by the music (extracted from neural structure) is a neural computational process, preprogrammed for activation upon the perception of certain musical information (compare the curious case of the opiate receptors, Pert and Snyder 1973, and subsequent).

As a potential gating function, the reality of frisson poses a challenge to the assumptions and ambitions underlying the existence of a music industry that produces pop commodity objects: musical consumables. As with the sex industry, this raises the question, is music an activity that should never have been industrialized? To which the answer is: only if and when the existential disjunction between the production of ecstasy and the production of consumables is ruled collapsed. For in reality frisson is not—and should not be—that easy to produce. So much so that its occurrence is both rare and often regarded as miraculous: the St. Cecilia effect. Indeed, frisson is so special an occurrence that even in contexts that would seem to demand its ‘regular’ invocation it is not produced with any consistency. Take the case of horror film music: which does not actually much evidence frisson. Rather what we encounter are signals that we should be experiencing frisson. Horror film music often resorts to a playbook of off-the-shelf referential mood induction modules from a vast plunderbox of all the music in the world, to signal the audience: ‘time to get uncanny’. But being merely ‘in the mood’, does not equal the radical neurological event, the dark information function, that is frisson. The deployment of a Theremin, or of decontextualized Bruckner tremolandi, does not accomplish access to the inexplicable Ungrund of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony itself.

Once again, the ineffable qualities of music do not compute. Or do they? Frisson implies more information in music than can be accounted for. Does Frisson implicate dark information? Heretofore unaccountable content? Ultimately frisson should be a matter of pattern recognition. But what kind of pattern? And to what purpose? Or is ecstasy self-sufficient? Ask St Cecilia.

This paper is intended as a provocative overview of a salient musical and apparently universal psycho-physiological phenomenon, and is part of a larger research project examining relations between musical design and emotional response. (A significant stage of this research will be completed shortly before the CUMS conference, which is one of the reasons we feel presentation would be timely.) In presenting the paper, we set up selected literary and philosophical roots of reference to musical frisson (Heinrich von Kleist, St. Cecilia, or the Power of Music [1810]; Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Either/Or [1843]; Thomas Mann, Magic Mountain [1924]; Claude Sautet’s film, Un Coeur en Hiver [1993]).  We then review the (to date still) fairly modest research on the physiological and psychological aspects of this salient musical effect (Panksepp 1995, Blood and Zatorre 2001, Panksepp and Bernatzky 2001, Huron 2006, Levitin 2006, Peretz 2006, Guhn, Hamm, and Zenter 2007), introduce the concept of ‘faux frisson’ in relation to certain decontextualized signaling instances in horror film music and pop music, and provide analytical insight into the design of several powerful moments of frisson from classical, popular, and global/world music.

Sample selected musical excerpts may include:  Bach, Magnificat; Beethoven, Violin Concerto; Berlioz, Requiem; Gounod, Faust; Bruckner, Symphony no.8; Mahler, Symphony no.4; Holst, The Planets; Janacek, Sinfonietta; The Doors, Light My Fire and When the Music’s Over; Patti Smith, Horses and Bird Land; Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald; Stan Rogers,The Mary Ellen Carter; Mercan Dede, Breath; Ali Akbar Khan, Raga Marwa. A more comprehensive list of frisson-engendering examples will be distributed as part of the presentation.

REFERENCES CITED:

Blood, A.J. and Zatorre, R.J. “Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion.”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98 (2001): 11818-11823.

Guhn, Martin; Hamm, Alfons and Zenter, Marcel. Physiological and Musico-Acoustic Correlates of the Chill Response. Music Perception 24:5 (2007): 473-483.

Houston, Gail Turley. From Dickens to ‘Dracula’: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction. Cambridge, 2005.

Huron, David. “Biological Templates for Musical Experience:  From Fear to Pleasure.” International Symposium on the Neurobiology of Music, unpublished paper, 2006.

Levitin, Daniel J. This is Your Brain on Music: the Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Dutton, 2006.

Panksepp, Jaak. “The emotional sources of ‘chills’ induced by music.” Music Perception 13 (1995): 171-207.

Panksepp, Jaak and Bernatzky, Günther. “Emotional sounds and the brain: the neuro-affective foundations of musical appreciation.” Behavioural Processes 60 (2002): 133-155.

Peretz, Isabelle.  “The nature of music from a biological perspective.”  Cognition 100 (2006) 1-32.

Pert, Candace B. and Snyder, Solomon H. “Properties of Opiate-Receptor Binding in Rat Brain.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 70:8 (1973): 2243-2247.

See if this works for you, Holst's "Mars, Bringer of War" from The Planets. Did you feel the frisson?

If you've ever wondered how music works its magic on us, an expert on the subject undertakes to explain why most everybody loves the Beatles

"Today the Beatles catalogue is cross-culturally loved--the product of a six-year burst of creativity unparalleled in modern music. . . .

"On the bus to my office, the radio played 'And I Love Her' and a Portuguese immigrant my grandmother's age sang along. . . .

"One hundred years from now Beatles songs may be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people will have forgotten who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like 'Oh Susannah', 'This Land Is Your Land', and 'Frere Jacques'."
--Daniel J. Levitin (author of This Is Your Brain on Music), in "Beatles on your brain," in The Guardian (June 2)

I can tell you to the year how long I've known Howie: since 1961, the year my family moved to Brooklyn and the year he and I entered James Madison High School. One of the curious features of our relationship is that, while music has been at the center of both our lives, our musical tastes couldn't be more different--he's all rock and I'm all classical. Even so, though, it's been a bond of sorts, and it was only natural that when he was in New York awhile back, he mentioned a book by a McGill University colleague-friend of his (one thing you learn about Howie is that he knows everybody) which has--apparently to the surprise of the author and publisher--turned into something of a runaway hit.

The book is called This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, and as Howie told me what he knew about it, I began to suspect that his friend Dan Levitin--who rather uniquely is trained as both a musician and a neuroscientist--has been researching a subject I've grown more and more curious about over the decades: how music works on us. Dan has actually figured out how to research the subject scientifically in his lab at McGill, drawing on his dual background in music and psychology. (Before he drifted into scientific research, he did some serious pop record producing.)

Howie even wangled me a precious author's copy from the author (moral: knowing people who know people can be lucky), and I've fiddled with it a bit, but I haven't had a chance to attack it with the attention it deserves, which I look forward to doing as soon as I can get my head clear enough. Alas, the daily assault of the real world leaves me fantasizing about reading a book purely for stimulation and pleasure the way God meant for us to fantasize about having lurid sex.

Now I've gotten a foretaste from a piece Dan has written for The Guardian on the occasion of the Sgt Pepper 40th anniversary, and I suppose with a view to the forthcoming British publication of This Is Your Brain on Music. In the piece, he backs up his love for the Beatles' music with some of what he's learned in his research.

He has no doubt about the quality or longevity of that music:

The Beatles incorporated classical elements into rock music so seamlessly that it is easy to forget that string quartets and Bach-like countermelodies and bass lines (not to mention plagal cadences) did not always populate pop music. Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change. Paul McCartney may be the closest thing our generation has produced to Schubert--a master of melody, writing songs that seem to have been there all along.

If you too have ever wondered about how music--of all kinds--operates on us, let Dan explain.

Why can we listen to certain songs across a lifetime and still find pleasure in them? Great songs activate deep-rooted neural networks in our brains that encode the rules and syntax of our culture's music. Through a lifetime of listening, we have learned what is essentially a complex calculation of statistical probabilities of what chord is likely to follow what, and how melodies are formed. Skilful composers play with these expectations, meeting and violating them in interesting ways. In my laboratory we've found that listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as sex or opiates do. But there is no one song that does this for everyone; musical taste is both variable and subjective.

From the dual vantage point of the brain researcher and the musician-slash-music professor, Dan concludes:

To a neuroscientist, the Beatles' longevity can be explained by the fact that their music creates subtle and rewarding schematic violations of popular musical forms, causing a symphony of neural firings from the cerebellum to the prefrontal cortex. To a musician, each listening showcases subtle nuances not heard before, details of arrangement and intricacy that slowly reveal themselves across hundreds or thousands of listenings. I have to admit, they're getting better all the time.

UPDATE: STERLING

Actually, I meant Stirling, Stirling Newberry of The Agonist. He's written a fascinating, totally killer review of Dan's book.