Ed Ruscha | Records

Ed Ruscha

Records

Hollywood, USA: Heavy Industry Publications, 1971

[72] pp., 17.8 x 14.1 cm., softcover

Edition of 2000

Ruscha's fifteenth artist book is a photographic inventory of thirty vinyl phonograph records and their sleeves, presumably from the artist's personal music collection circa 1971. The titles included 

James Brown "It’s a Man’s Man’s World: Soul Brother #1”

Frank Zappa "Lumpy Gravy"

Ike & Tina Tuner "Greatest Hits"

Trio Los Tajuarines “Una Noche en Mexico"

Leslie Gore “I’ll Cry If I Want To” debut 1963

James Taylor  “Sweet Baby James” 

and two dozen others. 

Records is valued at between $1500 and $2200 for a clean copy.

"If all of Ruscha’s books are meant to be read and if they all present reading problems, Record is the most extreme. The book is a photographic documentation of thirty record jackets with their accompanying discs. It doesn’t read like a narrative. It’s obviously a list. But a list of what? It’s certainly not an exhaustive representation of the record industry. It’s hardly a Schwann catalog. Not only is it too small but there are too many categorical omissions. Where are Tom Jones in Las Vegas, The Singing Rambos, Ruth Rubin’s Jewish Love Songs, J.F.K’s Immortal Words, Beethoven’s Late Quartets, The Cat in the Hat or The Barber of Seville? It’s obviously a selected subset, but what are the selectional principles? How were these records drawn from the universe of possibilities?

If Ruscha employed a chance procedure, he may have entered a record store and, moving from rack to rack, pulled a record from each one randomly. It couldn’t have been a classy store because on a statistical basis it is highly improbable he would wind up with such a restricted set of categories and such a small percentage of the prestige ones, like Classical, Jazz, Old Blues or Folk. The documented collection consists of only three major categories–Rock, Rhythm and Blues and Country, with a couple of strays. He could have pulled such a selection by random procedures from a discount store like White Front, though there are some oddballs for a store of this type–Mason Williams, The Velvet Underground, Satie and Sonny Rawlins. But these places can actually be something of a pot luck affair. I picked up John Cage and Charles Lloyd one afternoon in Value Fair at eighty-nine cents apiece. The real clinker in this theory is the several discontinued items. I would love to get my hands on that particular Wilson Pickett disc (Wicked Pickett), but it’s no longer available, except possibly in a classy second-hand record store where it might have accidentally slipped in among the used Donovans.

But the random selection hypothesis is probably not very likely anyway since one can read very definitive taste trends from the collection. Let us suppose another selectional method. Ruscha is a man of many friends. He’s put them into his books from time to time so why not now? What if he took one record from each of thirty friends? There are likely reasons this could be so. This particular set of restricted categories is by and large what one would expect the L.A. art scene to choose. It’s hard to imagine anyone of these artists would choose a Beethoven late quartet or Barbara Streisand. If each record corresponds to a particular friend of Ruscha’s, how would we associate the record with the person? “If you were a record which record would you be?” Billy Al Bengston is ostensibly a friend of Ruscha’s. They collaborated on a book, Business Card Exchange, several years ago. Suppose Bengston gave Ruscha the Trio Los Tajuarines’s Rancheras Mexicanas. Would that mean that Bengston’s soul is a Mexican trio or is it merely his come-on? In either case it partakes of autobiography, but differently. This is all obviously nonsensical, because if Ruscha did pull in records from people, it would be a famous “in” story that everyone would know. On the other hand, what if he did the choosing secretly without telling anyone? Again we have to determine whether he chose the record that would most adequately represent his friend as he sees him or his friend as his friend sees himself. The biographical problem is even more complex than the autobiographical one. Several years ago I did two shows in which I set myself just this problem, assigning objects to characterize people. There are very many subtle considerations. For example: Los Angeles is a very sexist town. Which one of the boys would see himself as Wanda Jackson or Leslie Gore? Or conversely, who was Ruscha putting down by representing him as Linda Ronstadt? Mason Williams? His album is Hand-Made; hers is Hand-Sown. They both sound like Judy Collins. And who would represent himself as Satie, the lone classical record in the collection? Satie would be a good choice to represent Ruscha himself. They have strong relations when one thinks about it. Both artists are committed to what appears to be a casual, slight structure, with apparent idiosyncracy and superficial dopiness. But Ruscha would never choose Satie to represent him, any more than Satie would choose himself. But I don’t think Records is a roman à clef anyway. It’s always been Ruscha’s method to come across with something if you take the trouble to read him, and there really aren’t enough clues here to suggest that we are dealing with another The Sun Also Rises.

Since Ruscha tends, as a rule, to be autobiographical, in the sense that he uses the materials he finds close at hand, these records may belong to his personal collection and might be read as a representation of himself. He’s represented his girlfriends, so why not his records? But since he’s never recorded his own psychological experiences, there is no reason to assume he did so now. Perhaps he is representing “Ed Rsucha,” “the hip Los Angeles Pop artist.” In this case we are no longer dealing with the much simpler problem of one man, one record. There is no way of dealing with thirty records without classifying them. Without a classification system of some sort we wouldn’t know which features to consider relevant. Obviously our ideas of relevance will be dependent upon the categories we choose. This presents a straight genre problem. The standard method would be to divide this collection into three main classes, Rock, Rhythm and Blues and Country, with one each from the classes of Jazz, Spanish, and Classical and two from Folk. Unfortunately for us, the genre boundaries have been breaking down in music just as they have in the other arts and we can’t be too certain we are representing certain artists adequately when we place them in a particular box.

Where does one place Linda Rosenstadt? She comes out of Judy Collins and Joan Baez so I suppose she could be classified as Folk, with a little bit of “hip” electronics thrown in, which may have been what distinguished Collins from Baez in the first place. What goes by the name of Folk in contemporary music is a strange hybrid in itself. Certainly Jean Ritchie or the Carter Family wouldn’t recognize it. Ronstadt also sings some Rock and even a straight Country number on this disc. Where can we place Mason Williams with his mixture of Dada poetry, Hollywood camp, sweet ballads and “Jose’s Piece” written for Jose Feliciano? “Boys, we’re going Country,” Conway Twitty announced to his Rock group after they cut their first Country record. As a matter of fact, there is hardly a white musician in the collection, outside of some of the Country singers and The Rolling Stones, who hasn’t invented a place where several genres come together. This might provide a clue to another classification system. Suppose we divide the records into two groups, Black and White. This is the perfect binary system much in use among musicians and their listeners. It is often used to mean Black is Beautiful and White is derivative. It always means Black is soul and White is nonsoul. The book puns with this system. Steppenwolf 7 (white) with two giant skulls on the jacket is followed on the next page by Screaming Jay Hawkins (black) opening a plush coffin. Is it the resurrection? The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet (white) is followed by Otis Redding and Carla Thomas’s King and Queen (black). The Wicked Pickett (black) is followed by Hank Snow (white) singing over a white fence to a little lady of five years. I’ve never heard of a white singer cutting a record for the Motown people in Detroit. I have a Dutch friend with a collection of over 700 Jazz records. He recently played his new Coltrane disc for me and while I listened to the fluencies of that cool elegant sound, my friend touches the “Black experience.” Then he played Ike and Tina Turner and every time Tina let loose with a mechanical scream, my friend saw Black. I called him a racist and he threw me out. Personally, I prefer Lorca’s duende to the word “soul” because Lorca’s is a three-part system in which the duende will cover almost anything that soul does while the two remaining categories will cover everything else. 6  It’s a less prejudicial system because it makes room for other possibilities. There is a lot of interesting and even exciting music which doesn’t have “soul.”

Lorca described three different inspirational sources, the Muse, the Angel and the duende. If we recognize these categories as metaphors and apply them with a light hand we can point up some distinctive features of many of the records. Ike and Tina Turner, for instance, at their best create a rich smooth surface, texturally very like a madrigal, but, their dark skins notwithstanding, they have no duende. They are good professionals and may be said to have a Muse. The Muse is the guiding figure of the classical artist, whose aim at its highest is a noble elegance like that of Chuck Berry, and at its least, the perfect decorum of the professional. The one thing about a professional is he will never embarrass you. Wanda Jackson, Lefty Frizzell and Ike and Tina Turner are the Muse’s true professionals. The Angel is the tutelary spirit for those who artists whose distinguishing mark is overwhelming sweetness. Probably Neil Young is the ideal representative of the Angelic artist. Since he isn’t in this collection, its representatives must be Leon Russell (though he might refuse her), Mason Williams and Wilson Pickett, and as for Baby James Taylor, who was obviously meant by Ruscha for the Angelic category, he has defective wings. Perhaps he is a Fallen Angel. And all this time the duende casts its dark shadow over Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones and even, on occasion, over Conway Twitty. Lorca’s essay represents him as moving freely through the entire domain of European culture. His artists are drawn out of an immense range of artistic experience, but he makes no hierarchical distinctions between members of a class. He encounters the duende equally among gypsy dancers from Cadiz, a street singer singing “Oh, Marie!” in a Madrid tavern, the great bullfighters, Saint Teresa of Avila, Goya and Jorge Manrique. Ruscha’s world, on the other hand, is represented by thirty records drawn from an area of musical possibilities so narrow that, in the end, it is the omissions which most clearly define the range of his sensibility. It is a “Pop” sensibility and the collection delineates its deficiencies very precisely.

But why should I accuse a man of not being Lorca? As Heraclitus says, “Man’s character is his fate,” and Ruscha must choose his records as he chose his girlfriends–for love. He documented a set of “old flames” of the fifties and continued his confessions with Five 1965 Girlfriends. Obviously a photograph of one girlfriend would tell more about her than her lover but five girlfriends with one boyfriend tells more about him. Who is Ed Ruscha, the boyfriend? The fifties girlfriends have already slipped out of reach into the pathos of high school yearbook photography, but the sixties girlfriends are somewhat more accessible. I suppose from the point of view of a man they are all variously pretty, but what looks most striking to me as a woman is that they all have a certain fragility or, perhaps, even vulnerability. None of them looks formidable. They are as vernacular as his records and present as restricted an area of experience. If Records represents Ruscha’s soul, we must consider it something of an artistic triumph to have created a work requiring so many pages to describe what is essentially such small-scale material. But how can we be certain the collector is Ed Ruscha? Is the poet-hero “Lorca,” so dark, so famous, and one might say, so professional a Spaniard, the real Lorca, or is he the graduate student, Federico, living on the top floor of John Jay Hall, studying English (hopelessly) at Columbia and walking out his nights in solitude through the noisy streets of Harlem? Just because he said so? Lorca and Ruscha can confess to anything they please.

As I suggested earlier, perhaps Ruscha is representing a fiction and the hero collector is not Ed Ruscha but “Ed Ruscha,” the Sunset Kid. When he exchanged cards with Billy Al Bengston (Business Card Exchange) they both looked like a couple of dopes. Is this the same kid implicit in the Girlfriends or the modest record collector? Otis Redding may be the one concession Ruscha ever made to the grand style. Ruscha certainly has a foolproof method for being amiable and evasive. In Los Angeles is that the same thing? Los Angeles isn’t a city, it’s a deprivation. Is “Ruscha” Los Angeles, the way “Lorca” is Seville? Any takers? We have no more certainty that the Records represent either Ed Ruscha, the man, or “Ed Ruscha,” the Los Angeles artist, than we have that they represent his friends. Ruscha’s books always, in the end, come back to his phenomenological concerns with the nature of reading an equivocal text.”

- Eleanor Antin