Actor Jared Harris

DATE March 27, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Jared Harris discusses his film career
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

(Excerpt from "I Shot Andy Warhol")

Mr. JARED HARRIS ("Andy Warhol"): Would you like to do a screen test?

Ms. LILI TAYLOR ("Valerie Solanis"): Yeah.

Mr. J. HARRIS: You would?

Ms. TAYLOR: Yeah, I would.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Really? Could we do one now?

GROSS: That's Jared Harris as Andy Warhol and Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanis
in a scene from the 1996 film "I Shot Andy Warhol." It's the film that made
many of us realize how good an actor Harris is. Further proof came with the
film "Happiness," in which he played a Russian cab driver who was a seducer
and thief. The cast of "Happiness" won the 1999 National Board of Review
Acting Ensemble Award. Harris played John Lennon in last year's VH-1 movie
"Two of Us." His other films include "Lost in Space," "Dead Man," "Smoke,"
"Blue in the Face" and "Natural Born Killers." He grew up in an acting
family. His father is Richard Harris; his stepfather, Rex Harrison.

In the new film "Shadow Magic," Jared Harris stars as Raymond Wallace, a
Westerner who introduces silent movies to China in 1902. It's based on
historical accounts of the period. Here's a scene from the beginning of the
film, in which Wallace has shown up at a busy photography studio in Beijing
and interrupts everyone's work to announce his arrival and the arrival of a
new, magical technology.

(Excerpt from "Shadow Magic")

Mr. J. HARRIS ("Raymond Wallace"): My name is Raymond Wallace. Raymond
Wallace. (Foreign language spoken)

Unidentified Actor: (Foreign language spoken)

Mr. J. HARRIS: My business (foreign language spoken). My pictures (foreign
language spoken). They move. (Foreign language spoken). Living photographs
that move. It's a worldwide phenomenon.

Mr. XIA YU: Hello.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Oh, you speak English.

Mr. YU: Hello.

Mr. J. HARRIS: You speak English.

Mr. YU: Speak Chinese better.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Yeah. He understands.

(End of excerpt)

GROSS: Jared Harris, welcome to FRESH AIR.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about your character in "Shadow Magic."

Mr. J. HARRIS: He--the character in "Shadow Magic" is based on about five or
six real people. The Western government, at the turn of the century, sent
representatives out--their salesman, essentially, out there to corner the
market in cinema in China. And they pretty much, all across the board, all
went out there with very little knowledge of China--no Chinese skills in
language and in understanding the customs, all failed miserably. Most of them
crawled back home broke.

And this character goes out there really to make money. He wants--he's a
merchant. He wants to--he's failed at home, his wife has left him, and his
fantasy is that he goes out to China, makes a killing, comes back home with
lots and lots of money and status and that his wife will see what a success he
is and crawl back and beg to be taken back. And it's some sort of stupid
fantasy like this, which of course he doesn't achieve at all.

It's all--instead, he, through his association with this character, played by
Xia Yu, who's a photographer's assistant, who is an artist himself, he learns
how to use this new medium as a sort of mode of expression. And then he gets
banished from China and bequeathed the equipment to Xia Yu's character, who
ends up making the first Chinese movie, which is historical. This--this
person, in real life, did make the first Chinese movie back in 1902.

GROSS: How did you get this part?

Mr. J. HARRIS: Someone--I don't know who--pulled out at the last minute, as
is often the case with movies, and so I got the script and was told, `A script
is arriving. You have to read it tonight. Tomorrow, if you're interested,
the director will call you up and if the phone call goes well and you are
interested and she's interested, then you're going to get on a plane at the
end of the week and head out to China.'

GROSS: And do you ever feel like, `Well, if they ever really wanted me, they
should have called me the first time around'?

Mr. J. HARRIS: No, not at all. You know, the people that they're talking to,
they kind of work their way down sort of a list of--the list is sort of a
mixture. It's not necessarily to do with ability. It's to do with--although
very good people are on the list, it's as much to do with fame, you know, as
it is to do with ability. So it's just part of the business side of making
movies, is you've got to have a name up there that has marquis value, you
know. And you can get marquis value in many different ways.

GROSS: Does your name have marquis value?

Mr. J. HARRIS: Well, it has some, but there were a lot of other people on top
of me on that list. There, they should have come to me first.

GROSS: The movie that I think you first became really known for was "I Shot
Andy Warhol" in 1996. And this movie is about Valerie Solanis, who wrote the
"SCUM Manifesto" and actually shot Andy Warhol, seriously wounding him and
nearly killing him. Lili Taylor played Valerie Solanis. You played Andy
Warhol. How did you get the part?

Mr. J. HARRIS: I auditioned. You know, I knew it was a part that they would
cast a--an English-speaking actor--I mean, an English actor for. Generally,
when you're over here, you--if you're English, you tend to get the parts
that--well, this sounds a bit silly--not that nobody wants, but, you know, you
get the kind of odd parts, the character parts or the sort of--the kind of the
villain parts. So I knew this was an American role, which is an important
thing for a foreign actor working this country to get--is to try and get your
first American roles, you know. So I was all gung ho to try and land this
part, and played some little mind games to get it.

GROSS: What did you do for the audition?

Mr. J. HARRIS: You know, I went in and met them first and I had a beard and
everything, and I deliberately tried to look as unlike the guy as I could, and
then said, `I'd like to come in, but don't ask me to come back here in two
days time or three days time.' I said, `You give me two weeks or three weeks
to really focus on this and try and get it right and you'll have an idea of
how close I can get. And if you've got any material, tapes and stuff like
that, you know, I'd love to get that, because that'll, you know, cut short
that process,' which is what I did. I studied for a couple of weeks and I
came into the audition and I thought it would be too weird if I sat down
talking, as I do now, and suddenly put on this persona, so I went in and did
the whole thing as Andy. And then I thought, `Well, he would do something to
try and flip the tables on these people, because he--he didn't like to be put
on'--he liked to be in the spotlight, but not having it pointing at him. He
liked to be pointing the spotlight. So I was trying to figure out how to turn
the tables. And I--I got hold of a little video camera and made a movie of
them auditioning me.

GROSS: Now you play Andy Warhol as if he's pretty disconnected from his body
and almost as if his body doesn't have much weight or energy.

Mr. J. HARRIS: I thought that's true, looking at the photos of him and
seeing him move around. I think he'd become pretty disappointed in his sexual
experiences, and I think he hated the way he looked and he hated his body. He
didn't like the way it looked. That's before he got shot. He deteriorated
greatly after he got shot. And I also noticed that in all of his pictures, he
always covered up his crotch.

GROSS: Hmm.

Mr. J. HARRIS: You always see in the way he stands, he's always sort of
covering it up and shielding himself.

GROSS: Gee, what did that mean to you?

Mr. J. HARRIS: I'm not--well, I think that. I think that he was
uncomfortable and was disappointed in the act of sex and was, in some way,
disappointed in his physical being, you know?

GROSS: Well, that disappointment in the act of sex comes up in the scene that
I want to play here. This is a scene that takes place at one of Andy Warhol's
parties, and everyone at the party is in a kind of druggy trance, or they're
dancing. And Warhol is the outsider, even at his own party. He's just
watching everyone else. And in this scene, he and Valerie Solanis are sitting
next to each other on a couch. Here's the scene.

(Excerpt from "I Shot Andy Warhol")

Mr. J. HARRIS: Hi.

Ms. TAYLOR: Hi.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Gee, everyone's having such a good time. Would you say
something to me?

Ms. TAYLOR: What?

Mr. J. HARRIS: Yeah. You know, I have, like, an hour's worth on tape here,
you know, and I was just wondering, maybe you could just do, you know, like a
monologue for me.

Ms. TAYLOR: No. I mean, I can't just monologue like that. I mean, I need a
stimulating person like yourself, you know, to talk to. Yeah, I can't just do
it on my own.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Oh, come on, Valerie. Say something dirty. It's so easy
for you, so placid. Sex is really nothing, isn't it?

Ms. TAYLOR: I could read you something from my latest masterpiece, "SCUM
Manifesto."

Mr. J. HARRIS: Oh, yeah?

Ms. TAYLOR: Yeah.

`Sex is the refuge of the mindless. Sex is not part of a relationship. On
the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of
time.'

Mr. J. HARRIS: Wow. So true.

(End of excerpt)

GROSS: I think this scene has what you were talking about when he says that
he thinks that sex is really nothing.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Mmm.

GROSS: Tell me about the vocal inflections that you used as Warhol.

Mr. J. HARRIS: You mean the accent.

GROSS: That kind of flatness. Well, not the accent, so much as the kind of
flatness with which he speaks.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Well, you know, I listened to a lot of audiotapes and then,
luck be the first day of filming, I was there, Billy Name, was on the set, and
he--he gave me a whole bunch of clues about how to--how to do that, his
particular rhythms and patterns. But when he was in public--he had a public
and a private persona, definitely. And he played Andy Warhol in public.
And it was this very blank, flat, non-responsive, almost like a white screen
for people to project onto. But when he was in private, he was very chatty,
and a big gossip. So I tried to distinguish between those scenes where he was
in public and in private, and that was a scene where he was in public. He was
talking to a stranger, you know, and he was in this big, big party scene. But
other scenes in the movie where he has this sort of breathless quality where
he can't decide which sentence he wants to start first and he starts about
three of them and he gets all `a--a--a--a,' you know, he jumbles all this
stuff on. And so I tried to get both of those on, although the movie mostly
dealt with his public persona.

GROSS: What else did Billy Name tell you?

Mr. J. HARRIS: He said he wished that we would leave the factory there for
him to live in, the set that we had there, because it was exactly like it and
it was the best days of his life.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. J. HARRIS: And he said, you know, they were crazy, crazy, crazy days.
Our version of it, naturally, was a kind of PG version of it. He said you
were constantly finding people having sex in the bathroom or having sex
outside on the couch in the middle of--you know, with people walking by. So
he said it was wild, people doing drugs and everything, you know, right out in
the open.

GROSS: After playing Andy Warhol, did you feel any more strongly about his
art or his movies?

Mr. J. HARRIS: Yeah, I did. I definitely did. He was a very successful
commercial artist, making a lot of money, and he abandoned that career to
become a fine artist. And that's a really difficult thing for somebody to do.
In the middle of their life, if you like--well, it was early in his, but
still, once you've achieved success in a career, to abandon it and become an
artist and, you know, risk abject failure and poverty, that's a huge risk to
take.

GROSS: My guest is actor Jared Harris. His films include "I Shot Andy
Warhol," "Happiness," "Smoke," and "Dead Man." More after our break. This is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Jared Harris is my guest, and his new movie is called "Shadow Magic."
Now you were--you had a great role in the movie "Happiness," which was
directed by Todd Solondz. You played a Russian cab driver who's a little like
the Dan Ackroyd/Steve Martin wild and crazy guys from "Saturday Night Live."
Do you want to describe him?

Mr. J. HARRIS: He's a conscience-free Russian immigrant come to this
country, presently driving a cab, can barely speak English,
opportunist--absolute 100 percent opportunist, I guess who gets involved with
Jane Adams' character, his teacher, his English teacher, and takes her for as
much as he can.

GROSS: Let's hear a scene in which he's using his cab to drive Jane Adams,
his English teacher, home. And she is, by the way, now a regular on
"Frasier." So he's pulled up in front of her door, and before she gets out,
he starts putting the move on her.

(Excerpt from "Happiness")

Mr. J. HARRIS: Why are you not married?

Ms. JANE ADAMS (Actress): Oh, Vlad, life is so different in America. Here a
woman can--I know this is difficult to understand, but a woman can fulfill her
potential. There are opportunities to do something, do good, really improve
the world.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Do you like men?

Ms. ADAMS: Yes, but it's not so simple.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Are you a lesbian?

Ms. ADAMS: No.

Mr. J. HARRIS: It's all right if you are lesbian. I like lesbian.

(End of excerpt)

GROSS: This character of the Russian cab driver is really the opposite of
Warhol, physically, you know. Where Warhol...

Mr. J. HARRIS: Sure.

GROSS: Where Warhol lives outside of his body and thinks that sex isn't what
it's cracked up to be, this cab driver sees himself as macho and swarthy and
the great seducer. Talk about the body language you got for this character.

Mr. J. HARRIS: I just--you got it: an arrogance, great sense of pride,
possession of space and a domination of his surroundings. The great fun--and
like I said before, I think what distinguished him from every other character
in that movie is he had no conscience whatsoever. I read an interesting
statistic when I was studying for this character, which is that the long--they
did a study of first-, second- and third-generation families who immigrate,
people immigrate to this country, and this--the finding was that the longer
you are in America, the more mental health problems you develop. And this guy
hadn't been here long enough to be tortured by, you know, guilt and conscience
and he's doing the right thing or the wrong thing. I mean, he took a little
bit, obviously, too far. You know, he was a--he was a thief.

But I enjoyed the idea that we had--all these other people are tripping up all
over themselves, over their desires, which they can't own up to, so it ends up
everyone is referred to, in that film, through sex, through their drive for
sex, or their ambition for love. And because they can't express it, it twists
and contorts their personality and they end up, I guess, exhibiting deviant
behavior and going about it in very strange ways, and some of them completely
abhorrent ways--the Dylan Baker character.

But this guy, he wasn't messed up about it, you know.

GROSS: He just messed up other people.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Yes and no.

GROSS: Who did--who did you observe for this character? There's something so
recognizable about him.

Mr. J. HARRIS: I live in the East Village, right in the thick of this
Ukrainian neighborhood, so I used to go hang out in Ukrainian bars and stuff
like that and watch people. So there was no one specific person.

GROSS: In the scene that we just played, you're wearing the shiny, clingy
polyester shirt that's coming out of your pants. Who dressed you?

Mr. J. HARRIS: I forget. Sorry, I forgot the costume designer's name.

GROSS: But it was the costume designer.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Yeah.

GROSS: You didn't go to the store and find it yourself?

Mr. J. HARRIS: No, no, no, no. No, when we--no. We consulted on it, but
yeah, it was the costume designer. I--when I went in to audition for that
part, I wore a really big, loud shirt. You see that in the neighborhood. You
see, particularly on Sundays, in good weather, what you see is a family.
You'll see the husband, the wife and the daughter--that's how I--particularly
sticks in my mind right now--the wife was dressed in furs. The daughter would
be dressed in sort of hip Tommy Hilfiger clothes, and would either be walking
five yards ahead or five yards behind her parents, completely disgusted with
them. And the husband would be in bright, shiny track suit top and track suit
bottom. You know, like a gangster or something, you know, sort of the idea of
a gangster. I thought this guy had seen--he'd come over from Russia and he'd
seen all these--in Russia, he'd seen all these '70s American TV shows and
that's what he had decided yeah, that's what America was like. He was kind
of--he was like a character on "Starsky and Hutch" or something, you know. I
see he had this idea in his mind that that's where he was living.

GROSS: I love your description of the family each making their own statement
through their clothing, and each of the statements is totally contradictory
with the rest of the family.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Absolutely, yes.

GROSS: Now I think of you as being a real chameleon in some of your movies,
and I think it's great for you, as an actor. I think the only problem would
be that people don't necessarily recognize you from role to role, and
therefore it might be a little harder to build up a reputation for being Jared
Harris.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,
ding....

GROSS: That's been a problem?

Mr. J. HARRIS: Absolutely. Good for the craft, crap for the career. It
is. In this country, a good actor is confused with a famous actor.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. J. HARRIS: You know. So, yeah, that's made it a longer journey.

GROSS: Jared Harris will be back in the second half of the show. He stars in
the new movie "Shadow Magic" as the Westerner who introduces silent movies to
China in 1902. It opens in New York and Los Angeles April 6th, and then will
begin opening in other cities. Here's another scene from the film in which
Harris is talking to the still photographer who has become his assistant. I'm
Terry Gross. And this is FRESH AIR.

(Excerpt from "Shadow Magic")

Mr. J. HARRIS: A story doesn't need morals. It needs someone like you to
carry this magnificence to the outside world. Just think of it: you, me,
recording life before it changes. Show it to the whole world. Might even go
down in history.

Mr. YU: The whole world, huh? Where is that?

Mr. J. HARRIS: Yu, leave that photo shop and become my partner. The future
belongs to the moving picture.

(Soundbite of music)

(End of excerpt)

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with actor Jared Harris. He
stars in the new independent film "Shadow Magic" which opens next month. His
other films include "I Shot Andy Warhol," "Happiness," "Lost In Space,"
"Smoke," "Sunday" and "Dead Man." Harris is the son of actor Richard Harris.
Richard Harris is known not just for his movies but for this fluky 1968 hit
record.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. RICHARD HARRIS: (Singing) Spring was never waiting for us, girl. It ran
one step ahead as we followed in the dance, between the parted pages, and were
pressed in love's hot fevered iron like a striped pair of pants. MacArthur's
Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet green icing flowing down. Someone
left the cake out in the rain. I don't think that I can take it 'cause it
took so long to bake it and I'll never have that recipe again. Oh, no.

GROSS: This recording was made at the height of the hippie era. It's a song
that people really love to make fun of, in part, because of that kind of inane
and bombastic lyric about someone leaving the cake out in the rain. Have you
ever figured out what that means, by the way?

Mr. J. HARRIS: I knew you were going to say, `What does it mean? What did
he mean?' It's a metaphor for a relationship.

GROSS: Oh, OK. What did you think of the record when it came out? And what
was happening in your life that year, 1968?

Mr. J. HARRIS: I was enduring my first year in a prisoner of war camp, what
was a private school called Lady Cross.

GROSS: It was like a high school?

Mr. J. HARRIS: Yeah, it was a boarding school.

GROSS: So everybody in the school must have known this. Did this help or
hurt your reputation?

Mr. J. HARRIS: Did they know? I remember seeing him on "Top of the Pops"
singing "My Boy," but not that one.

GROSS: Well, I guess it wasn't that big in England, huh?

Mr. J. HARRIS: No, it was. But, you know, I was at a boarding school. You
know, you didn't have radios.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. J. HARRIS: You weren't allowed to watch television. You didn't have
access to, you know--where would you hear it? You didn't have little record
players or CDs or anything like that.

GROSS: But when you saw your father and your stepfather acting, was it acting
or the actor's life that you found appealing?

Mr. J. HARRIS: I wasn't aware of my dad being an actor when I was young. I
remember there was an Australian children's entertainer on television called
Ralph Harris. And when I'd say my father was an actor and kids would say,
`You know, is he Ralph Harris?' and I'd say, `No,' and then they would lose
interest, so I was disappointed he wasn't Ralph Harris for a long time. But I
wasn't aware of him as an actor. I think, obviously, I had the benefit of
both his success and my stepfather's success in being privileged to go and
see a lot of the world when I was very young, you know. So a taste for that
rubbed off definitely.

GROSS: What were the Richard Harris and Rex Harrison movies that made the
biggest impression on you when you were young?

Mr. J. HARRIS: I remember seeing "Camelot." I do remember seeing "Camelot"
and a film called "The Snow Geese." Oh, I think it was the third or the first
film that he made that kids could go and see. My father mostly was known, you
know, mature themed movies. Rex, I remember seeing him in "Cleopatra." He
played Caesar opposite Elizabeth Taylor.

GROSS: That must have been fun.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Yeah, I loved it. And "Cleopatra" was great fun with all
these battles and everything.

GROSS: When you started acting, did you feel that there was anything you had
to live up to from your father and stepfather's reputation or that you would
be compared to them in any way?

Mr. J. HARRIS: Well, obviously, I compared myself. It was important to me to
establish myself on my own terms. I had opportunities to act with him very
early on in the movie "The Field." They had trouble finding somebody. And I
was talking to the director about playing his son in "The Field" and he was
leery of it and so was I. And it was important to me for me to be established
and recognized on my own rights before I went and, you know, I guess, went
down that route, you know, tried to coattail, you know. I didn't want to do
that.

Otherwise--you know, I wanted to fail on my own terms. You don't know if
g--everybody has to think that they've got something special to get into this,
because the chances of succeeding are so slim, but if I had nothing special
and I was going to fail, then, you know, I wanted to do it on my own terms
rather than sort of be fooled, you know.

GROSS: Is there anything that you've seen in your father or stepfather's
careers that either influenced you or convinced you to do it differently?

Mr. J. HARRIS: Well, Rex had and my father still has incredibly successful
varied careers, so I'd be thrilled if I could get mine up to that kind of a
level. I think the lesson that I remind myself is it's not giving up. You
know, they didn't want Rex Harrison to play the part of Henry Higgins in "My
Fair Lady" when they were going to make the movie. They didn't want him for
it. And he'd played it on Broadway and he played it in the west end, but he
wasn't a movie star. And so they were going to get somebody else, and, of
course, we're campaigning for him to play this part. And so they demanded
that he audition for it and send a photograph of himself in, you know. And
they were trying to--you know, they put him through some humiliating or
attempted to put him through some humiliating hoops to get this part. And he
sent in a photo of himself straddling over one of those little, you know, boys
that piss into a fountain. And he sent that in as his picture.

And then similarly, they didn't want my father for the role in "Camelot"
either, to play King Arthur. They wanted Richard Burton. When he turned it
down, they were going elsewhere. And he campaigned like hell to get that
part, I mean, even to the point of tracking down Jack Warner in some party out
in Palm Springs to convince him to give him a shot at this role, you know. So
those are the things that I remember. When you see something that you know
you're right for, go after it and, you know, not to give up while you still
have the desire and the ambition, you know.

GROSS: Well, you really got your start, I think, in independent films and
you're still making a lot of independent films.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Sure.

GROSS: Is that because it's the sensibility or the group of people that you
gravitate to or has it just been easier to get good parts in those films?

Mr. J. HARRIS: I tell you I was out in LA in '93. And in one week, I went
out for a serial killer, "The Ghost of a Serial Killer" and a
computer-generated serial killer. And at that point, I just said, `I've had
enough.' And I was fed up with the opportunities that were available to me
out there. It was kind of like having a race horse and then just have him
trot around on some sort of country fair, you know, on a small padded circle
or something.

And I'd been trained and I wanted to stretch and see what I could do, you
know. And it seemed to me that those opportunities were going to be in
theater and independent movies, so I made a point of coming back to New York,
finding a place with really cheap rent, so if I was doing a play for $200 a
week, I could pay my rent and concentrating on that and hoping that I'd be in
movies that would break through and that would allow me to do more interesting
roles in bigger, more better paid movies, you know.

And, in general, I just find the material is more interesting. They used to.
It's getting harder and harder now for independents to do this, but the
material used to be riskier. And they would try stuff that you--in a studio
movie, often, by page 10, you know exactly what's going to happen. You know
who the good guy and the bad guy is. And the bad guy's unlike anyone you've
ever sort of seen because they're randomly, you know, vicious and unkind. For
some reason, they feel compelled to get on the phone and tell the bad guy, the
good guy that they're actually alike one another and they're really brothers
in spirit. At the same time, he's trying to rough up his girlfriend or
something because, you know--there's all this stupid manipulation of the
audience to make you like one character and hate another character. So when
they decapitate them at the end of the movie, you can cheer. And that's my
spiel on Hollywood movies.

GROSS: OK. Jared Harris, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Is that the end?

GROSS: Yes, it is.

Mr. J. HARRIS: Oh, my, time just flew by.

GROSS: Jared Harris stars in the new independent film "Shadow Magic." It
opens in New York and Los Angeles April 6th and then will begin opening in
other cities.

Coming up, rock historian Ed Ward remembers "Pub Rock." This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Profile: History of pub rock
TERRY GROSS, host:

Can a whole genre of rock 'n' roll disappear with no notice? It almost
happened in the mid-'70s with pub rock, an unpretentious but enjoyable twig on
rock's family tree which wound up preparing the way for punk and new wave.
Rock historian Ed Ward has the story.

ED WARD reporting:

Despite its name, pub rock didn't start in a pub. It started instead with one
of the biggest PR disasters in the history of rock 'n' roll.

(Soundbite of music)

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ: (Singing) I want to go where my country girl goes. That's
where my green grasses grow. And I feel at ease with my country girl, yeah.
She knows how to groove me.

WARD: In 1970, Brinsley Schwarz was an up-and-coming band named after their
guitarist, blessed with an easy-going sound and a great songwriter named Nick
Lowe. They'd been calling themselves Kipington Lodge(ph), but new management
saw great things ahead for them, so great that they got the band on a bill at
New York's Filmore East, charted an Aer Lingus plane to fly a planeload of
British over for their debut and the best laid-plans and all of that.

The band hadn't gotten work permits, the plane was delayed several times,
leaving London and Shannon(ph), and truth to tell, the show was awful. Back
in England, the band retreated to a house in the country, but down in London,
things were changing.

(Soundbite of music)

Unidentified Band: (Singing) I went down to the factory just to pick up my
pay. Boss man said, `You've got no more job here.' I said, `That's good. I
was leaving anyway.' What I want to work here for, feel like scum on the
Earth? I push a button from 9 till 4. Now you tell me what that is worth.
Called my baby...

WARD: An American band called Eggs Over Easy had gotten stranded in London.
And because they wanted to play, they approached the owners of the club across
the street from them, The Tallyho, which had been featuring Dixieland. The
Eggs soon drew a crowd and an idea was born. Soon enough, they were joined by
other bands, including Brinsley Schwarz.

And there were other bands, too. In an era where you seemingly had your
choice between the endless soloing of virtuosos, the cerebral hogwash of the
progressives and the teen allure of the glam bands, there were some rock 'n'
roll fans who just wanted to put on a pair of jeans and hear a good band in
unpretentious surroundings. And there were bands who wanted to play for them.

(Soundbite of music)

BEES MAKE HONEY: (Singing) Well, feel free to knock my backdoor any old time.
They'll be scrubbing tables, sweeping floors, there's washing on the line.
You can slip in around the side the next time you're in town. It's music
every night with a pint to help it down. The place is...

WARD: If there was a manifesto, Bees Make Honey's "Music Every Night" would
have been it. Ironically, though, the very informality and offhandedness of
much pub rock is what put off a lot of people at the time. Few pub rock
albums were ever released in the United States and virtually none of the bands
toured outside of the British Isles. Nor was the sort of modified country
rock the Brinsleys and the Bees played the only sound in the pubs.

(Soundbite of music)

DR. FEELGOOD: (Singing) Hey! You walk right in, don't see nobody, turn
around. Got no dimensions. You're just a face in any crowd. But some let
you know the good times are gone. You can just wait until your time is right,
keep it out of sight...

WARD: Dr. Feelgood was basically a blues band from Canvey Island, an obscure
corner of London. And in Loco Johnson, they had a guitarist with a decidedly
visual approach to the stage. They were incredibly popular and were one of
the few pub rock bands to make it, albeit only in England. Then there was
Ducks Deluxe.

(Soundbite of music)

DUCKS DELUXE: (Singing) All right. Kids, are you ready? Are you ready for
some rock 'n' roll? Yeah.

I got ...(unintelligible) of this ...(unintelligible) man. (Unintelligible).
Sisters by the ...(unintelligible). ...(Unintelligible) alive. I sit down in
my seat, masqueraders ball. I'm going to play my guitar for a dollar a
minute. ...(Unintelligible) I'm going coast to coast and see how far we can
go. I'm going coast to coast...

WARD: The Ducks were a fearsome-looking crew. And heaven only knows what
Sean Tyla was singing about at any given moment. But they left behind two
supremely rocking albums. And, of course, there were the inevitable art
students.

(Soundbite of music)

KILBURN & THE HIGH-ROADS: (Singing) Here we go. Billy Bailey moved to London
early in the day. Off to Quigley, stands to reason ...(unintelligible).
Blimey, (unintelligible) Move along there. ...(unintelligible). You'll be
like me. Billy Bailey ...(unintelligible).

WARD: But Kilburn & the High-Roads weren't just any art students. Their lead
singer was their teacher. Hugh Diller(ph) later gave up teaching art for a
career in rock 'n' roll while his fellow Kilburn and student Humphry Ocean
became a famous painter. There were more: the Kursaal Flyers, Chilly Willi &
the Red Hot Peppers, and the one band in the whole bunch to have a US hit,
Ace.

(Soundbite of music)

ACE: (Singing) How long has this been going on? How long has this been going
on? Well, it's crazy to think...

WARD: Strictly from a business standpoint, one can say that pub rock was a
failure. There were few hits, nobody made any money and it barely made it out
of London, let alone the UK. But it also launched the careers of a number of
people who go on to forge the next big thing to come out of England: the punk
and new wave movement. And just as importantly, it gave some of us who were
disgusted with how boring rock music was in the '70s something to listen to.

GROSS: Ed Ward would like to thank the Kursaal Flyers' drummer Will Birch,
author of "No Sleep Till Canvey Island: The Great Pub Rock Revolution," for
his help with this piece.

(Soundbite of music)

Unidentified Band: (Singing) Well ...(unintelligible) ever dreamed about this
place. At just about midnight, we get excited and call it a day. Now there's
nothing that's left here on their mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got a
little ...(unintelligible). I got to drive. Yeah. ...(Unintelligible) to
the rhythm that is following him home. Oh, she was dumb, she was dirty.
Yeah, but she was a princess. ...(Unintelligible) right into his arms. She
could thrill him, she could chill him--whoo--down to the bone. But he was in
his teens, yeah. He had his ...(unintelligible) surrender to the rhythm that
is following him home. I used to stay...

GROSS: Coming up, Geoff Nunberg on the pretentious use of a word that's
supposed to ridicule pretensions. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Commentary: Use of the word lucubration
TERRY GROSS, host:

Our linguist Geoff Nunberg has been following the use of a word that you might
not yet have noticed, but if you did, you might not have known what it meant.

GEOFF NUNBERG:

I picked up a copy of Commentary awhile ago and there was Norman Podhoretz
decrying the feminist doctrines that originated in what he described as the
`arcane lucubrations of marginal academics.' That word lucubrations seems to
be a favorite of critics out to ridicule the pretensions of artists,
intellectuals and other self-important people. John Simon uses it of Wallace
Shawn's plays, James Kirkpatrick uses it of the editorials in The New York
Times, and the literary critic Joseph Epstein complains about `the opaque
lucubrations of structuralists, semioticists and deconstructionists.'

The wonder is that the word is still around. It originally comes from the
Latin for work by lamplight and refers to laborious study, or more generally
to any writing that's learned or pretentious. I first looked up the word a
number of years ago when I ran into it in one of Dr. Johnson's essays.
That's the nice thing about words like lucubrate is that you can have these
precise memories of your first encounters with them.

But it was clearly a rare and mock pompous word even back in the 18th century.
And by all rights, it should have disappeared when English gave up trying to
refashion itself as a dialect of Latin. It should have gone the way of
clancular, cubiculary, deuteroscopy(ph) and the other Latinate mouthfuls that
Johnson filled his dictionary with.

For some reason, though, lucubration has managed to cling to life in the
penumbra of the English vocabulary, maybe because it smacks of the very
pedantry it describes. I've never actually written the word myself. I've
always thought of it as one of those items that you're better off just taking
a quiet pride in knowing. But I can understand the urge to stick it in. It's
a fine-sounding string of syllables. You have the feeling that whatever
lucubrate denotes, it's probably a very good name for it. And as a word like
that gets increasingly rarefied, it tends naturally to slip from its moorings
and drift off on a plane of pure sound symbolism.

Carried away on the assonance of all those youths, people start to use
lucubration to mean all sorts of things. Sometimes it seems to mean just
ramblings or banalities and sometimes it means something like rummaging
around. Even the redoubtable William F. Buckley used lucubrate incorrectly
as a transitive verb when he described the defense attorneys in the O.J.
trial as lucubrating a defense thesis.

I expect that Buckley meant something like dreaming up or conjuring up, but
you can be sure that Dr. Johnson would never have used the word with a direct
object. You could lucubrate on a defense, but that would have a different
meaning. And there was an even more startling malapropism in a review of a
Tom Wolf novel that Norman Mailer published in The New York Review of Books.
It contained the sentence, `No one will ever be the same after reading Wolf's
set piece on the massive copulation of a prize stallion with a thoroughbred
mare, after she has been readied for this momentos event by the lucubrations
produced in her by the mouth and nose of a third horse Sad Sam.' I don't know
exactly what Mailer imagined was going on in the mare, but it presumably
wasn't scholarly musing. Probably he was misled by the resemblance to
lubrication and lubricious.

But it's notable that the gap eluded the editors of The New York Review as
well. When William F. Buckley, Norman Mailer and the editors of The New York
Review of Books have all lost their grip on the meaning of a word, maybe we
should think about putting it out to pasture. And while we're at it, there
are other Johnsonian holdovers that we might want to give notice to, like
lambent, etiolated, chergerbization(ph), rebarbative and jejune. Jejune in
particular is almost always a bad idea.

Of course, the second you propose dropping a word like lucubration, the
friends of the English language will be up in arms to remind you of our
obligation to preserve all the fine distinctions and shades of meaning that
have been handed down to us. But those were gone a long time ago. It isn't
just that most people don't have any context for a word like lucubration, but
that whatever nuances it might have had once are washed out now by the pure
resplendence of its syllables. When a word starts to sound that elegant,
nobody can hear what it's trying to say anymore.

Of course, none of this is going to stop people from using the words. They
may annoy or puzzle most of the people who read them, but then when you see
somebody using a word like lucubration or etiolated, you can be pretty sure
that it wasn't stuck in for the reader's benefit in the first place. And
sometimes you have to forgive a writer for indulging a love of big words,
particularly when they're as delectable a mouthful as lucubration is and
even if, unlike Dr. Johnson, they're not flogging a dictionary on the side.
But let's face it, it isn't communication, it's gargling.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist at Stanford University and the Xerox Palo
Alto Research Center.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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