[T]he bicycle…is also a mechanism, which the buggy is not. Lacking fenders and chain guard, a bicycle of the 1890s unashamedly displayed its means of locomotion in pedals, sprockets, and chain. Its metal tubular frame, formed into a structurally efficient truss, proclaimed its connection with the machine age.
Paul C. Wilson, Chrome Dreams
"Bicycle Rider." We've grown accustomed to that name. It figures in many a discussion about the evolution of SMiLE; until the 2004 premiere of the completed work, the Bicycle Rider theme had a better SMiLE pedigree than the songs we knew as "Look" and "Holidays." Yet you will search in vain for an official tracklisting, old or new, in which it appears.
But if the Bicycle Rider theme was never a song of its own, it has always been an important SMiLE component. It was composed, recorded, re-recorded, arranged, rearranged, paired with lyrics, paired with different lyrics, overlaid with vocals, inserted into songs, pulled out of songs and reinserted into other songs. It's entirely fitting, of course, that a "cycle" motif helps to lead the listener through the SMiLE "cycle" of songs. When Van Dyke Parks named his own 1968 debut Song Cycle, he was calling the album what it was, to be sure; one wonders, though, whether he might have been slyly nodding back to that SMiLE element. (And the cover art for Parks’s 2013 album Songs Cycled – its title wittily rearranging the title of that first album – depicts a bicycle rider.) On the final SMiLE album, released in 2004, the theme figures prominently in the first movement: in the key songs "Heroes and Villains" and "Roll Plymouth Rock."
That first movement encompasses ocean liners ("Roll Plymouth Rock") and locomotives ("Cabin Essence"). Among these mighty symbols of industrial power, speed and global reach, the solitary bicycle rider, propelled by his own strength alone, may seem oddly out of place…especially in light of the lyrics under which the Bicycle Rider theme is played:
Ribbon of concrete – just see what you done –
done to the church of the American Indian!
Bicycle rider, just see what you’ve done –
done to the church of the American Indian!
What, exactly, has the bicycle rider done? To 21st-century sensibilities accustomed to jets and automobiles, this indictment may appear strange indeed. For us, the bicycle may seem like a throwback to a slower, quieter time, rather than a symbol of mechanization and speed. But that sort of nostalgia does violence to history – a history in which the bicycle occupies a unique place. To understand the role of the Bicycle Rider (initial caps) in SMiLE, we need to understand a little bit about the role of the bicycle rider (lower case) in the American past. We need context.
Although most early developments in bicycle design took place in Europe, the very first bicycle patents were issued in the United States in 1866. How quickly did the American bicycle industry grow? By the end of the century, there were two buildings in Washington, D.C. used for patent storage: one for bicycle patents, and one for…everything else. (You may want to read that sentence again.) 1
A year before that first patent was issued, an eccentric industrialist named Hezekiah B. Smith was searching for a location for his woodworking-machinery manufacturing company. Smith settled on the tiny New Jersey hamlet of Shreveville; he promptly bought the town, changed its name (to “Smithville”) and set up shop. In the 1880's Smith got interested in bicycles, and his company duly commenced manufacture of the high-wheeled Star model. When it was brought to the company's attention that many of its employees were having difficulty getting to work, an eccentric solution was devised: a bicycle railroad. Each rider supplied his own power, pedaling along a single elevated wooden rail that ran through woods and over creeks. When riders from opposite directions met, one gentleman simply unhooked his cycle and stood aside. Hezekiah Smith went on to serve in another decidedly eccentric institution: the United States Congress. 2
In 1892, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio – avid cyclists themselves – opened a bicycle shop in their home town. 3 The shop was a success, but Orville and Wilbur Wright are better remembered for other endeavors. Aside: it's no accident that Randy Newman picked "Dayton, Ohio 1903" as the name and setting for his affectionate valentine to turn-of-the-century small-town life. That song is a snapshot of the very last summer of a world that was about to be profoundly changed by those two boys from Dayton.
In point of fact, the bicycle was a symbol of technological progress: the bicycle was to its era as the jet plane was to the 1950s, as the rocket was to the 1960s, as the personal computer was to the 1980s. In the 1950s, American carmakers borrowed the fins and turbines of jet aircraft, turning them into non-functional design elements suggestive of speed and innovation. In the 1880s, manufacturers of consumer goods appropriated the image of the bicycle, hoping to convey quality, newness and excitement. The "Bicycle" brand of playing cards, featuring the image of Cupid riding a two-wheeler, is still regarded as the world's favorite such brand. It first appeared during the 1880s:
During this same period, cycling – on unicycles, bicycles, and tricycles – was taking the country by storm. It was also in the latter part of the decade that Russell & Morgan, the forerunners of the United States Playing Card Company, decided to produce a line of cards of the highest quality. Employees were asked to suggest an attractive name for the new product, and a printer, "Gus" Berens, offered "Bicycle." His idea was enthusiastically accepted, and the Rider Back made its debut in 1887. Since then, while the Bicycle brand has featured dozens of different designs, the Rider Back has never gone out of production. 4
Another aside: the Bicycle card has a distinguished history of its own; but it has also, on occasion, played a role in the larger events of American history:
The Ace of Spades served a famous purpose in the war in Vietnam. In February, 1966, two lieutenants of Company "C," Second Battalion, 35th Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, wrote The United States Playing Card Company and requested decks containing nothing but the "Bicycle" Ace of Spades. The cards were useful in psychological warfare. The Viet Cong were very superstitious and highly frightened by this Ace. The French previously had occupied Indo-China, and in French fortunetelling with cards, the Spades predicted death and suffering. The Viet Cong even regarded lady liberty as a goddess of death. USPC shipped thousands of the requested decks gratis to our troops in Vietnam. These decks were housed in plain white tuckcases, inscribed "Bicycle Secret Weapon." The cards were deliberately scattered in the jungle and in hostile villages during raids. The very sight of the "Bicycle" Ace was said to cause many Viet Cong to flee. 5
The iconic power of the Bicycle card design was not lost on Van Dyke Parks, who offered these observations in a 2004 interview:
"Bicycle Rider,ˇ for example, is the first playing card that was used in the rough and rowdy West when people were coming this way for fortune. That thought seemed to me to be a natural extension of an image from the cantina. That's where people won and lost their fortunes: in a deck of cards. That was a very important ingredient in the Wild West. It's that rough and tumble…. [I]t's safe to say that we wanted to create an American fantasy. 6
The importance of the bicycle in late-19th-century America was no "American fantasy"; its significance can hardly be overstated. For many people, the bicycle offered the first liberating experience of speed entirely under the control of the rider. Horse-drawn wagons, toboggans, sleds, railroad trains: all were capable of high speeds. But with the advent of mass production, the bicycle, relatively inexpensive to produce and purchase, became readily available to most citizens. The bicycle connected the rider directly to the vehicle, without the need for an external power source (horse or steam engine); in fact, the rider himself became the power source. The bicycle – unlike the toboggan or sled – offered complete control, the vehicle responding precisely and instantaneously to the rider's movements. Truly, the bicycle provided a "connection with the machine age" that was uniquely direct and uniquely intimate. The "bicycle craze" was gearing up in the 1880s, and was in full swing in the 1890s:
When a craze of any kind really catches on in this republic, restraint does not characterize its reception. The great bicycle craze of the Gay Nineties offers a fairly good example. Listen to the editor of the New York Tribune in 1895: “The discovery and progressive improvement of the bicycle is of more importance to mankind than all the victories and defeats of Napoleon, with the First and Second Punic Wars…thrown in.” Hear also the official voice of the United States Census, at the end of the same decade: “Few articles ever used by man have ever created so great a revolution in social conditions….”
The craze hit all ages…and it started the movement toward decent roads. It was the great leveler, too, demonstrating as never before the American principle that every man is as good as any other and maybe better.
By 1895 more than 300 manufacturers were producing bicycles, not counting the many small assembly shops…. The biggest company, with five factories running day and night, was turning out the machines at the rate of about one every minute. At least a million people in the United States were already awheel. Armories, roller-skating rinks, and dance halls had become riding academies to teach beginners in scores of cities and towns. One in Washington had hundreds of daily pupils. 7
On the one hand, the bicycle was widely praised. Scientists have pointed out that "bicycles enlarged the gene pool for rural workers, by enabling them to easily reach the next town and increase their courting radius." 8 Clearly, however, the women were not merely waiting in their parlors for their gentleman friends to pedal along. Women began to ride in great numbers, and ladies' bloomers became a popular part of the feminine riding costume. A woman by the name of Annie Cohan cycled around the world, leaving Boston in June of 1894 and arriving in Chicago in September of 1895. 9 A year later, Susan B. Anthony said of bicycling that it had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." 10 And Maria Ward, author of Bicycling for Ladies (1896), declared that "the bicycle [was] an educational factor…creating the desire for progress, the preference for what is better, the striving for the best, broadening the intelligence and intensifying love of home and country." 11
On the other hand:
Many critics were certain that bicycle riding threatened women’s health, morals, and reputation. Critics opposed wearing union suits (to absorb perspiration) or bloomers, and worried about the privacy and potential liberty bicycling granted to young men and women. Physicians Thomas Lothrop and William Poter posited that the bicycle inevitably promoted immodesty in women, and could potentially harm their reproductive systems. Other critics argued that women bicyclists favored shorter skirts, thus "inviting" insults and advances. 12
Sunday became a day for bicycle outings rather than a day of worship; one writer has called the bicycle "the first big-scale assault of technology on institutionalized religion." 13 Ellen White, an early Seventh Day Adventist, opined in print that participation in the “bicycle craze” was a “species of idolatry.” 14 (Apparently the bicycle threatened all churches – not just the American Indians'.) Horse traders complained of a decline in business. In hindsight, we may see the bicycle as a symbol of a slower, more rural America; but at the time it was seen as a symbol of the speed and technology that threatened that bucolic ideal. Angry townsfolk were known to carpet the roads with tacks in hopes of keeping the crazed "wheel men" away. 15
Tack-strewn streets were an impractical option for the New York City of 1895. So the New York City Police Commissioner – one Theodore Roosevelt – organized the city's first bicycle patrol for the express purpose of controlling bicycle riders who exceeded the speed limit of eight miles per hour. The speedy officers became known, in short order, as the Scorcher Squad. 16
But New York was an eastern metropolis. Miles across the continent, speed limits were of little concern. Two short years before New York's Scorcher Squad was founded, the bicycle played a role in what has been called "the largest, most spectacular competitive event in history": the great Cherokee Strip Land Run of 1893. 17
In 1828, the United States government had given to the Cherokee Indians a 266-mile-long parcel of land, thereafter known as the Cherokee Strip or the Cherokee Outlet. Located in what is now Oklahoma, the Cherokee Strip was never settled by the Cherokees; it was the tribe's "outlet" (hence the name) to its hunting grounds further west. In 1866 – the year of that first bicycle patent – the government asked the Cherokees to sell portions of the tract to several other tribes – the Osage, the Pawnee and the Ponca, among others – who settled there. When the Cherokee Strip was finally opened to white settlement, each tribesman was offered an individual land allotment of eighty acres…half of the allotment given to settlers who successfully made the Land Run.
At noon, on September 16, 1893, a single shot signaled the start of the event: more than 100,000 settlers racing for some 42,000 government land claims. In a letter dated November 5, 1893, one Newton Franklin Locke – the first to file at the land office – described the remarkable scene:
The line at our point was 14 miles long and at 12 o'clock when the signal sounded, the ground start was made, I looked down the line for an instant and it appeared like a huge serpent moving. It was the most people I ever saw together. The crowd was composed of all nationalities. All classes of men from the gray haired Grand father [sic] to the boy of 12 years, dudes, school mamas, bicyclists, and the train with 33 cars and 3 engines was all in the start. 18
The Bicycle Rider theme is most closely linked to the conquest of the American frontier: a conquest to which the Cherokee Strip Land Run wrote a sort of "tumultuous finale." 19 And sure enough, the bicycle rider was there, incongruous (to modern eyes) on his high-wheeled "ordinary," racing through the wind-driven dust alongside the wagons, carts, dogs and Missouri race horses. His image has been preserved in a mural at the Museum of the U.S. Department of the Interior, painted by John Steuart Curry in 1939 (that’s it, up at the top). And he appears in the 1925 silent film Tumbleweeds, the last film of early western-movie legend William S. Hart, then 60 years of age. ("Boys," says Hart's character at a pivotal moment, "it's the last of the West.") 20 But the west, as portrayed in the film, had one final spectacle in store:
The movie's most impressive sequence remains the land rush. All manners of vehicles – covered wagons, surreys, stagecoaches, even a large-wheeled bicycle – bounce over the prairie in the mad rush to claim land. Other films would attempt to recreate the Oklahoma land rush – such as Cimarron, which won the Best Picture Academy Award in 1931 – but Tumbleweeds remains the best example. 21
It is sobering to reflect that when Tumbleweeds was made, in 1925, the Cherokee Strip Land Run of 1893 was an event still very much within living memory. The time between the event and its celluloid recreation? A mere 33 years. Consider, by way of comparison, the time between the planned release date of a certain 1967 record album…and its actual release in 2004.
As it appears on that album, the Bicycle Rider theme is a strangely evocative motif. In its unaccompanied keyboard arrangement, it can seem almost child-like, almost innocent. It is mournful yet restless; elegiac yet energetic. And there is something more: a sense of relentless forward motion, as if the "cycles" described by the music go on forever, unstoppable. And in that relentlessness is an undercurrent of menace, an undercurrent made explicit in some of the more fully orchestrated arrangements of the piece…and in the lyrics married to its melody. Jules Siegel was describing that same sense when he called it "inexorable bicycle music, cold and charming as an infinitely talented music box." 22
The equivocal emotions evoked by the musical theme reflect the equivocal role of the bicycle at the moment of its greatest early popularity. It brought liberation to some: to women, to rural suitors, to young people eager to escape stern chaperones. But its heedless speed destroyed the peace and pace of main streets and country lanes. And as it bounced, half-comically, across the dusty plains, it presaged the taming of the American frontier and the subjugation of the native peoples. Where the bicycle rider went, the "ribbon of concrete" would inevitably follow. "Bicycle Secret Weapon" indeed.
In some ways – and this speaks to the "connection with the machine age" – the bicycle was a more powerful symbol (if not a more powerful vehicle) than the mighty iron horse. The railroad was a huge, fast, brutal machine, powered by a fearsome steam engine, built to enclose and carry human beings. But the bicycle rider does not sit in a rail car towed by a locomotive. He is not a passenger; he is not a human piece of luggage. He becomes one with the bicycle, powering it with his own muscles, bones and nerves. (The music-box parallel operates on several levels: the music box is another human-powered machine, its energy provided by a hand-wound spring rather than a set of pedals.) Man-machine: humanity seemingly compromised: a truly terrifying notion.
And so the single rider is what it all comes down to: machine-age man, rushing headlong through a world that is forever changed by his transit. We are comfortable, now, with that reality, because we live in that changed world. The Bicycle Rider theme – haunting us as it seems to cycle endlessly – is the echo of his passing.
Footnotes
1 http://www.jimlangley.net/ride/bicyclehistorywh.html
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezekiah_B._Smith
3 https://web.archive.org/web/20050104091830/http://www.first-to-fly.com/History/Just%20the%20Facts/wright_bicycles.htm
4 https://bicycle-cards.co.uk/about/history-of-cards/
5 https://bicyclecards.com/history
6 Van Dyke Parks, 2004 interview; source unavailable
7 https://www.americanheritage.com/great-bicycle-craze
8 https://web.archive.org/web/20050127094556/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle#Social_and_historical_aspects
9 https://web.archive.org/web/20050127085835/http://www.ibike.org/historytimeline.htm
10Ibid.
11https://web.archive.org/web/20050301034722/http://www.victorianstation.com/leisurebicycle.htm
12Ibid.
13https://web.archive.org/web/20230913025317/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug02/hendrick/negative.html
14https://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/112.284#296
15https://web.archive.org/web/20230913025317/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug02/hendrick/negative.html
16https://web.archive.org/web/20031002040401/http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/nypd/html/transportation/newpage5.html
17https://web.archive.org/web/20050212011720/poncacity.com/history/cherokee_strip.htm
18https://web.archive.org/web/20050112230957/http://pan-tex.net/usr/l/drlocke/oklaland.htm
19https://web.archive.org/web/20050212011720/poncacity.com/history/cherokee_strip.htm
20http://www.imagesjournal.com/2002/reviews/tumbleweeds/text.htm
21Ibid.
22http://www.cafecancun.com/bookarts/wilson.htm (link no longer available; not archived)
コメント