Grim Reader, March 19, 2010: Alex Chilton, Peter Graves and Charles Moore

by Michael Schaffer

MARCH 19, 2010 TAGS: OBITS, MUSICIANS, ACTORS, CIVIL RIGHTS ADD A COMMENT

It was said of the Velvet Underground that not many people bought their records, but most of the ones who did wound up starting their own bands. Same goes for Alex Chilton, the iconic leader of the 1970s band Big Star who died this week. Word of Chilton’s death on Wednesday made its way around the universe of indy music fans the same way it does when a hero of any subculture passes: via a jungle-telegram of Facebook status updates, tweets, blog posts, links to Congressional tributes and comments like “I have no words.” Doubling down on Chilton’s hipster cred, a large percentage of the mini-tributes cite a song about Chilton by the seminal Minneapolis punk band The Replacements. "Children by the million,” the song goes, “sing for Alex Chilton.”

Chilton

But what of the mainstream Obitosphere, where music obits are often dominated by lists of number-one hits, platinum albums, and other milestones that figured only lightly in Chilton’s career? As of Grim Reader’s deadline, the early obits were taking their best shot at the old standbys, with CNN and the Associated Press going high with a chart-topper from Chilton’s early stint with a psychedelic soul band called the Box Tops. Nearly everyone cites Chilton’s popularity with highbrow rock critics, and seeks out a polite way to say that his popularity rarely extended to the CD-buying public. “Whether you know it or not, you owe half your music collection to that man,” is how Washington City Paper’s Jason Cherkis puts it.

Like Cherkis’, the smarter Chilton pieces are dominated by assertions about that hardest-to-quantify aspect of Chilton’s legacy: influence. Identifying Chilton as a “cult-rock icon” (MTV), “mercurial if influential” (The New York Times’ arts blog) and “rock iconoclast” (Chilton’s hometown Memphis Commercial Appeal), obituarists set out to illustrate this legacy in verifiable journalese — a tricky task, since it often involves Chilton’s having inspired even more obscure musicians. An early BBC obit notes that Chilton produced albums for punk bands like The Cramps and adds that “bands including REM, Wilco and Teenage Fanclub also credited Chilton as an influence.” Chicago Sun-Times critic Jim DeRogatis calls Chilton “one of the founding fathers of the power-pop movement” and says that Chicago indy musicians still hold an annual bash to celebrate their progenitor’s birthday.

Of course, with considerably less avant-garde cred, another MTV piece notes the real reason non-fans may be familiar with Chilton’s oeuvre: “Perhaps Chilton’s most notable legacy is as the writer of ‘In the Street,’ a Big Star tune that served as the theme song for ‘That ’70s Show.’” Given the glut of hipster mourning that followed Chilton’s death, Grim Reader isn’t sure whether to chide the piece for its squareness or applaud it for a ring of truth.

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Also this week, the very big and the very small appear in the Obitosphere. In America, football player-turned actor Merlin Olsen is remembered as a member of the Los Angeles Rams’ “Fearsome Foursome,” the aggressive squad that “helped popularize the star power of defensive linemen who could sack quarterbacks,” according to the Los Angeles Times. But the prototypically intimidating defensive threat gets equal obit-page billing with a post-football career where he starred in “wholesome frontier dramas ‘Little House on the Prairie’ and ‘Father Murphy’ and was the longtime spokesman for FTD florists,” as the Washington Post puts it. Olsen was hardly the first football star to become a Hollywood figure, but the 6’5’’ lineman’s typecasting in a series of sissy roles (flower pitchman!) deserves more attention than the obits gave it. One answer: Olsen was never a brute. A top scholar as a college star, he managed to get an MA in economics even as he menaced the nation’s quarterbacks.

On the other end of the weight scale, the world this week said goodbye to He Pingping, the Guinness record holder as world’s shortest man. Pingping, 21, was 2-foot, 1-inch tall; he died in Italy while filming a reality show. The New York Daily News, like all other outlets, explains that He was born with a form of “primordial dwarfism.” All the obits note that he’d become something of a pop-culture fixture, “often taking part in shows, photo shoots and other events,” according to the Associated Press. Everyone quotes Guinness’ editor, who somewhat patronizingly describes He as “an inspiration to anyone considered different or unusual” who “showed us that, despite the challenges we face, we can still make the most out of life.” Alas, no one offers any detail on just what He did to do that, other than pose for stunt photographs alongside, say, Svetlana Pankratova, the woman with the world’s the longest legs. Not to be outclassed, the United Kingdom’s Sun accompanies its obit with a picture of the diminutive He ogling one of the tabloid’s page three photos.

There’s a pair of obits this week for investigators associated with historic crimes (or non-crimes). The Boston Globe remembers former Cape Cod District Attorney Edmund Dinis, who “watched his political fortunes crumble in 1969, after he launched an inquest into the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s actions at Chappaquiddick.” Dinis was caught between critics who said that he was either too easy on the powerful Senator (Kennedy was never indicted) or too hard on him (the publicity did even more damage). The latter group included many of Dinis’ fellow Portuguese-Americans, who voted him out a year later. … The New York Times writes up Arthur Christy, the first special prosecutor appointed under a since-lapsed law requiring independent investigators for alleged Executive Branch wrongdoing. The allegation: Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff had used cocaine at Studio 54. The accusers: the club’s owners, then facing federal charges of their own. Christy did 100 interviews and 19 grand jury sessions before deciding there was no there there — and now, three decades later, it’s Studio 54-gate, and not Christy’s 1959 conviction of mobster Vito Genovese, that dominates his obit.

The Wall Street Journal, among others, covers Dr. Arnold Patz, who solved the mystery of the blind preemie. Before Patz, blindness was a common condition of nearly 10,000 premature babies whose neonatal survival had been assured by modern medicine. Patz figured out the cause: the pure oxygen routinely pumped into incubators. Initially, the medical establishment resisted, speculating that his idea of regulating incubators’ oxygen would kill the fragile babies. Patz experimented by showing that oxygen blinded cats. “Never in the history of ophthalmology has a blinding condition become so quickly widespread and equally rapidly been abolished,” a scholar is quoted saying.

Everyone remembers Peter Graves, who according to the Times of London had “a fine career playing upright, slightly humorless heroes” in shows like Mission: Impossible, before lampooning his own image with an equally straight-laced performance in the zany 1980 classic Airplane! “One of the small screen’s leading authority figures,” Time calls him. ... There’s less attention, alas, to a real-life hero, Air Force General A.P. Clark, who as a WWII POW helped organize the jailbreak that inspired Steve McQueen’s The Great Escape. The obits are distinctly light on pulse-quickening detail. “He is credited with managing the production and hiding supplies in support of the escape of 76 POWs from the camp in 1944,” says the Los Angeles Times’ wire-service obit. Clark later ran the Air Force Academy.

Also this week, there are obits for Johnny Alf, who’s remembered by one top Brazilian music writer as “the true father of bossa nova.” (The New York Times’ headline, playing it safer, refers to Alf merely as a founder of the genre.) ... The Rev. Robert Carter is acknowledged as one of America’s first openly gay Catholic priests. (And maybe one of its last: In 2005, according to a Carter obit, the Church officially declared the priesthood off-limits to “those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture.’” ... And Berkeley Prof. Charles Muscatine was a renowned scholar of Chaucer, but his Obitosphere claim to fame is more likely his refusal, in 1952, to sign a loyalty oath that McCarthy-era California was forcing on public university teachers. He was summarily fired, only to be reinstated by a court the next year.

Less admired for taking a stand: Wayne Collett, the American sprinter banned for life from the Olympics because he refused to face the flag and casually chatted with a colleague while “The Star Spangled Banner” played following Collett’s 1972 400-meter-dash victory. Not quite as dramatic as the protest by two fellow black American athletes four years earlier, Collett’s goal was the same. “For maybe six or seven years, I’ve stood at attention while the anthem has been played, but I just can’t do it with a clear conscience anymore the way things are in our country,” he told a reporter. He wound up getting a law degree and working in real estate.

A more influential civil rights figure was Charles Moore, who’s remembered by the Los Angeles Times as “a photojournalist who both chronicled and helped alter the course of history through extraordinary photographs that reflected the brutal reality of the civil rights movement in the South.” The BBC has a nice slide show of his work here.

Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.