What Spins our World: An appreciation for the franc zapper headline in the FT.

We all enjoyed the franc  zapper headline in the FT (11 September) in response to the Swiss monetary authorities’ efforts to cap the rise of the Swiss franc, as did other readers who wrote in to the FT to express their appreciation . Recently, I have been listening to Frank Zappa’s lifelong friend Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s “Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)” as my nightcap. I have to listen on headphones as my son thinks it sounds “angry” and finds it aggravates him. Beefheart (so named because he had a beef with society) aka Don Vliet aka Don Van Vliet (he changed his name when he decided he needed a Van) was one of Frank Zappa’s best friends but also best enemies – they used to aggravate each other to the point that they fell out on a number of occasions. Beefheart was one of the strangest and most mysterious of the counterculture heroes from America’s West coast in the sixties and seventies. Strange in a good sense – he was never one of the terminally psychotic casualties of the era, and had a very stable marriage to Jan, who became his permanent lifelong companion within three days of meeting him. Legends surrounding him abound – that he had a near-five octave vocal range and could break glass with his voice; that he never slept; that although a child prodigy he managed to avoid attending school; that he would walk over to a telephone a few seconds before anyone else heard  it ring to take a call. In his case, the legends are more entertaining than the unvarnished truth might be, although those close to him tend to vouch for some of the tall stories.  Marine biologist Jeff Tepper who became one of Beefheart’s guitarists said he never saw him sleep.  On one occasion Beefheart was bellowing forth within the confines of a supposedly soundproof booth and Zappa rushed downstairs enquiring what that noise was.

Zappa rescued his friend’s flailing career with a tour and live album they recorded together “Bongo Fury”.  On the record, Beefheart starts singing apparently spontaneously over a Louis Louis kind of groove “I wish I had a set of bongos, bongo fury!”, which gave the album it’s title.  On the album he sings about his own songs as “opaque melodies that would bug most people”. The cover photo has him hidden beneath the brow of a large hat wearing shoes without socks in an apparent reference to Einstein who was known for not wearing socks.  By the end of the tour the two friends were not on speaking terms, as Beefheart, never a particular fan of guitar solos, while still front stage would ostentatiously carry on with his sketching and drawing while Zappa was soloing.  After he gave up on the music industry Beefheart pursued a successful career as an artist and sculptor, which always his first passion. Zappa got his own back by referring to the shopping bags Beefheart always carried around with him, this because he was seemingly incapable of remembering his own lyrics and carried them around written out on notepaper  in shopping bags.  

The story of Bat Chain Puller is that for a long time it was only available as a bootleg, because not only did Beefheart forget his lyrics, he was equally forgetful of who he had signed contracts with. As a result when he first produced the record he was contractually obligated to both Warners and Virgin.  An impasse ensued and he had to re-record the whole album, dropping some songs and adding others, and with some changes in personnel.                       

In amongst his opaque melodies on the album were some musical gems and some surprisingly tender moments.  The overall tone of the album is probably psychedelic blues, which means it was never going to be top twenty material, although several record companies sponsored him down the years  in the hope that he would turn out to be a major commercial success.  Nevertheless Bat Chain Puller has moments such as this from “Love Lies”:

“Stopped by your house, saw your lamp lit

Not a sign of you in it

Where could you go at this hour?

Has all our love lost its power?

I said I’d be here with a flower

Streetlamps flutter like fireflies”

A Paul Krugman column for the New York Times (1 September) Eric and Irene contains an apparent reference to another of the songs on the album “Harry Irene”.  The album concludes with a chilling environmentalist poem “Apes-ma”  which I’ve only been able to listen to a couple of times – I now push the stop button before it reaches that point because the vision contained therein is too bleak for me to endure through repeated listenings. The album was dedicated to “Wildlife Preservation Organisations Everywhere”. 

This week’s Barron’s (September 19, p45) has a Q&A with James Grant, that most erudite and astute of market commentators and investors, author of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.  His definition of a bubble:  “A bubble is a bull market in which the user of the word ‘bubble’ has not fully participated”.  An observation he makes with which I concur is that much of the culpability for the present mess must be laid at least in part at the door of successive Chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board , for failing to distinguish between ordinary and desirable episodes of falling prices, and actual debt deflation, which they do need to combat.  He points out in the interview that “most Americans spend some part of the weekend hunting down everyday lower and lower prices”.  And with the expansion of the world economy in the digital age, “...wouldn’t you expect falling prices? That is called progress.  Deflation to me is trouble with debt, a symptom of which is falling prices.” 

Grant has just published a biography of a 19th century politician Thomas B. Reed entitled Mr Speaker!.  He says about what he learned in writing the book that “In Reed’s day, the final quarter of the 19th century, the wingnuts, the eccentrics, were those who argued for a paper currency uncollateralised by gold. Today, the eccentrics are the gold people. The establishmentarians are teaching at Princeton and running the central bank. I learned that cycles forever change  and that wingnuts and establishmentarians change places, even before you know it. “