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TIMELESS RECORDING SOCIETY'S MEMORIBILIA ARCHIVE Though forewarned that Sandy Bull's stage conduct ranged from bizarre to irresponsible, I looked forward to a concert performance by this young guitar wizard since I first heard his astonishing records. One of the very few artists to breach the Generation Gap, Bull turned on parents and offspring alike. His multiple-track Vanguard recordings--an artful blend of classical, jazz, down-home blues, country and western, indian raga and folk-rock played simultaniously on oud, banjo, amplified guitar, concert guitar and electric bass--made Bull an overnight minor diety of the young groovies. His concert at San Francisco's New Committee Theatre was announced for 8 p.m. At 8:20 the lanky, blond guitarist ambled diffidently on stage to begin hooking up a cathedral of speakers and amplifiers. He was still hard at it by 9 p.m. For twenty minutes he painstakingly tuned his wonderous array of stringed instruments. At 9:30 he stretched into his first number which lasted ten minutes. Following another tune-up session, he began his second offering nearly two hours after the publicized opening time--it was exactly the same as the first. Too cowardly to raise my voice in outrage, I left quietly, thinking with admiration upon that enlightened assemblage of Britons who recently booed Judy Garland off the stage--and it was about time--for showing up 90 minutes late. In contrast, San Francisco's audience accepted with tittering docility such cavalier deportment as "being part of the act." If true, it is a damned miserable act, indeed. It is rather like paying $4.95 for a Sandy Bull album only to find the entire first side taken up with the arrangement of mikes and half the inverse devoted to tuning up. I'd take the fraud back to the record store for a refund, and only the most cowed and conformist of concert audiences would fail to do the same. Such on-stage aberrations are neither the invention nor the exclusive property of Sandy Bull. Today, an increasing number of performers are prone to similar caprices of concert behavior, and as a corallary, an audience of youthful nihilists has sprung up that takes open delight in these foibles under the mistaken notion that the Sandy Bulls are thus "putting down the Establishment." Those brainwashed into embracing a four hour Andy Warhol home movie devoted to little else but a wispy homosexual idly sucking on a slice of orange are hardly about to hoot down 90 minutes of Sandy Bull tuning his oud. The emergence of indifferent performers and an audience that accepts them has it's roots in the musical and socialogical revolt in the jazz world of the mid-Fourties, known as "be-bop." Amid the urban unrest during World War II, a new generation of black jazzmen, many of them conservatory trained, rejected both the artistic and social outlook of their forebears as typified by Louis Armstrong. "We are musicians, not entertainers. If we can't get our musical ideas across without grinning, Uncle Tomming, jiving and yuk-yukking for the White Man, we'll get out of the business. The public is going to have to accept us as artists with dignity--not as happy-go-lucky minstrel men." Aside from a superb natural clown like Dizzy Gillespie, many of these Young Turks affected a studied hauteur bordering on hostility. Tunes were not announced, jokes were not told, audience applause was resolutely ignored. Inpenetrable dark glasses and two-button Italian silk suits were the required uniform. The image was "cool." The be-boppers, among their many stunning accomplishments, built an audience who asked nothing of the jazzman except that he play music. The Modern Jazz Quartet offered a golden mean between the soft-shoe shuffling of older generation and the sullen indifference of the Miles Davises. No group in jazz history comported themselves with more austere dignity than the MJQ, which at the same time, was committed to giving the public it's money's worth and to demolishing the popular stereotype of the jazz musician as a whimsical zany. Whether in a night club or concert hall, you could set your watch by the arrival and departure of the MJQ. However, a few enormously influential jazzmen, like the indulged spaun of permissive parents, pushed the concept of indifference to extremes that would be intolerable in the classical concert world, though not in the realm of modern jazz where a new audience seemed titillated by far-out on-stage hi-jinx. Crowds formed at a Thelonious Monk concert to see if he would show up. Part of the fascination with Miles Davis was to watch him glower malevolently at his adoring fans, mutter two choruses of If I Were a Bell and then stalk off stage, not to return for the final set. Members of the folk-rock generation threaten to out-do the jazz crowd in the benign toleration of the irresponsible stage behavior of the Sandy Bulls who, like Andy Warhol, know just how far it can be pushed. Apperently the limits have not been reached--except for me. So goodbye, Sandy Bull. Next time you give a "concert" this aging hipster will be home listening to your records. |