"Not tied into a more coherent narrative history": a 2021 specious review about TEB book/CD by Richie Unterberger.

 

A December 2021 review by Richie Unterberger found by chance on the web at the page
http://www.richieunterberger.com/wordpress/2021/12/
offers me an opportunity to reflect on my idea of musical biography.

Unterberger writes: 

 

"Third Ear Band, The Dragon Wakes (ReR/NOVEMBeR Books). Subtitled “the legendary unreleased album” and lasting a little less than half an hour, this was issued only as a CD bound into the book Glen Sweeney’s Book of Alchemies: The Life and Times of the Third Ear Band, 1967-1973. The Third Ear Band had a sizable underground following in the UK during that time, though they weren’t exactly rock, and more like an instrumental trance music group blending elements of classical and world music, with some jazz-influenced improvisation. Their instrumentation was rather far afield from rock as well, with hand percussion, cello, violin, and oboe. Their recordings will never get more than a niche audience, involving as they do a lot of repetition than many will find wearying.

This disc’s subtitle is a little misleading: a third album titled The Dragon Wakes was announced in Melody Maker in August 1970, but the band did a number of unreleased recordings in late 1970 and early 1971 that might have been considered for such an LP, not just the six previously unissued ones that are on this CD. Other unreleased studio recordings from the era are on the three-CD expanded edition of their second album, 1970’s Third Ear Band, if you’re keeping track.

Small-print details aside, I find this more accessible than most of the Third Ear Band material I’ve heard. It’s still entirely instrumental and based around repetitive riffs likely meant to induce trance-like states, but the riffs are a bit catchier, though not as memorably digestible as those of actual early space rock outfits like Pink Floyd. The use of electric guitar on some tracks, though seen by some fans and critics as a dilution of their purer original sound, adds some welcome texture. For these reasons, overall it’s more likely to be appreciated by lovers of psychedelic/early progressive rock than much of their official output from the time.

The book it accompanies, however, isn’t so hot. It’s a kind of disjointed collection of interviews with and memories by band members and associates that doesn’t coalesce into a coherent history, or an especially interesting one if you’re not familiar with much of their background. A detailed timeline and discography at the end help put the pieces together, but it’s unfortunate the ingredients weren’t tied into a more standard, coherent narrative history."

 

The controversial elements of this review, which could be taken as paradigmatic of the subculture with which rock journalism has always operated, are more than one, which I summarize below:

1- from a strictly journalistic point of view, it is really amateurish to review a CD attached to a book without mentioning the author of the book, especially if, as Unterberger does, he is given detailed criticism. In Western countries it has to do with the classic rule of the five Ws (where/when/who/what/why). An article, whatever it may be, cannot be said to be correct if it is not based on all the five Ws. It also attends, as is evident, to the ethics of the journalist;

2- the reviewer disputes the subtitle of the CD, claiming it is misleading because it would not be the band's “legendary third record,” but as I explained in detail in the accompanying booklet, also based on the testimony of Danny Bridges who donated the original recordings to me, that is exactly what it is. Unterberger, who seems not to have read the booklet, speciously disputes the assertion, maliciously suggesting that the publisher wanted to play on a title to lure the reader. Not only that, by never citing me as the author/editor of the book and CD booklet delegitimizes my credibility as a researcher...;

3- as for the comment on the book, in the final paragraph of the review, apart from the omission of me as an author I find laughable and simplistic the criticism that the book is a disunited collection of interviews and materials. I can understand the frustration of not being faced with a classic biography, to which rock readers and journalism are accustomed, but for my part I believe more in the value of documentation than in the questionable, subjective opinions of an author. History is built first and foremost from sources, from documentary materials, and there is no such thing as a definitive biography, as authors and editors have always been going on about.

 

Do you want recent proof? 

 

When Patrick Humphries' biography of Nick Drake, launched precisely as the “definitive” one, was released by Bloomsbury in 1997, it was rightly thought to be so, so thorough and documented did it appear. A few years later (2014) an extraordinary volume entitled “Remembered for a While,” subtitled “The Authorized Companion To The Music Of Nick Drake,” was published by Little, Brown & Company. It had been edited directly by Drake's sister, Gabrielle, and collected documents, photographs, and letters from her brother's family archive.

This year, when it was legitimate to think that everything possible had been written about Drake, Richard Morton Jack published for John Murray Press his biography on him "The Life," however once again cast as "definitive."

 
What need was there, one might think?

This example among many demonstrates in my opinion one thing Unterberger has not yet realized: that there is an abysmal difference between documents and the interpretation of them. Which makes legitimate all biographies written and to be written about Drake (or the Third Ear Band...), based on in-depth study of existing sources.

My book on the Third Ear Band collects all the interviews published on this Archive (which Unterberger is careful not to cite...) over the years; programmatic manifestos; poems; Sweeney's writings; detailed discography; chronology... a jumble of objective and non-objective sources that can serve anyone to construct their own biography of the band.

This structure of the book, which I wanted and which the publisher has intelligently supported, is also a reaction to the deterrent logic of the author's authority dispensing his knowledge to the reader, offering arbitrary, subjective reconstructions, logical and temporal connections as if they were objective. Hence the desire, even at the cost of being pedantic, to report different recollections of the same historical event (e.g., that of the theft of the instruments).

This also has to do with the chronic passivity of the reader who expects a definitive biography that cannot exist, because every existence, no matter how thoroughly reconstructed, is fatally elusive, impregnable.

With all due respect to music journalists like Unterberger.

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