In this fascinating new episode, Daniel is joined by Betsy Phillips to talk about her forthcoming book Dynamite Nashville: The KKK, the FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control, the story of three unsolved bombings in Tennessee during the late 50s and early 60s.

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Betsy’s Twitter

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: The wicked irony behind a new Cobb County home for Democrats

Killing King: Racial Terrorists, James Earl Ray, and the Plot to Assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. by Stewart Wexler

Clarion Ledger: Mississippi Burning Killings: Religious Terrorism? by Stewart Wexler

House Committee on Un-American Activities Ku Klux Klan…

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Cool on Your Island (1988)

Cool on Your Island (single mix, 1988)

Cool on Your Island/Hey Jupiter (first performance, 1996)

Cool on Your Island (official bootleg, 2005)

Cool on Your Island (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Cool on Your Island (live, 2011)

Cool on Your Island (live, 2017)

On an album of misfires, “Cool On Your Island” stands out as the song that Amos has most readily accepted and reintegrated into her canon. It is not the first song from the album that she played live—we’ll deal with that next entry as we wrap up this stretch so that we can actually get into the good stuff. But it is the one she has ultimately played the most—seventy-two times over the course of her tours, more than “Girl” (70), “Professional Widow” (57), or “Muhammad My Friend” (42). If you’ve seen a Tori Amos concert, there’s around a one in twenty chance she played it—it’s one of her hundred most common choices (out of a gobsmacking 485 unique songs played live across her career). And it comes the closest to being a song she’s spoken about, if not warmly, at least not entirely coldly, amusingly suggesting in 1998 that “’Cool on Your Island’ works more than anything else, and I wrote that, I think, with Kim Bullard, but you’ll have to check the credits because I’ve been using too much deodorant lately,” and a year later upgrading the assessment to “there are moments that I think were right for the time on Y Kant Tori Read. I think ‘Cool On Your Island’ had moments that were right for 1987, which was when I recorded it.”

What immediately distinguishes “Cool On Your Island” from the other half-dozen songs of frustrated or anguished love on Y Kant Tori Read is that it is sung from a position of strength. It opens with an ultimatum—”if you don’t treat me better / baby I’ll just run away,” and stays in this vein of strength, most obviously in the pre-chorus “come on baby /  I’m much stronger than you know / sometimes / I’m not afraid to let it show.” These lines prove the beating heart of the subsequent live performances, with Amos clearly relishing their delivery, letting her voice jump to a growl, or accompanying the line with an actual fist-pump in the 2011 performance linked above. 

The song is by no means perfect, nor even necessarily great. Its central metaphor is murky—Amos declares that “I can take only so much / cool on your island” before asking, “Is it cool on your island?” But why a cooling breeze on a tropical island (the location is ultimately established by the song’s arrangement, which we’ll come to) should serve either as a mark of a relationship gone sour or, for that matter, a bad thing at all is desperately unclear. Amos is trying to work a double meaning between “cool breeze” and the notion of cool as something disaffected and detached (as evinced by the eventual substitution of “you’re so cool baby” for “is it cool on your island?”),…

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There’s a TARDIS Eruditorum tradition of writing farewell posts to major creative figures. But one never really got one: Terrance Dicks. I covered one of his two Tenth Doctor novels with a sense of valediction, but it never felt permanent. There always felt like the possibility he could swoop in one more time. Heck, he just wrote a story for that Target Storybook, which I’ve not gotten around to looking at, but which serves to extend his tenure as an active figure in Doctor Who by another decade. I was right not to count him out. Except, of course, now he’s gone, it’s the end, and I am hopelessly unprepared, sitting around on a cool September morning without the faintest idea of how to react to something I’ve known was coming for years. 

I mean, how does one begin grappling with the legacy of Terrance Dicks? He invented the basic structure of a Doctor Who story as we recognize it today. He did as much for childhood literacy as anyone ever has. He wrote seminal stories for six different Doctors in six different eras—more if you break up the Tom Baker years a bit. He’s a lion—as legendary a figure as the history of Doctor Who has. 

And yet articulating his virtues in 2019 is a strangely challenging task. The ones that stand out sound vaguely condescending or patronizing—he was a master of a clean and readable prose style, he had a sly knack for a good turn of phrase, and he could bang out entertaining adventure yarns with seemingly no end. All perfectly good things to be good at, but when organized into a list scarcely a convincing case of his legendary prowess.

On top of that, he’s got some glaring downsides. He was a quietly reactionary figure, not in a grandiose and programmatic way, but in the sense of being a kind of small-minded little Englander who believed the British Empire to have been a good thing, was routinely sexist, and who consistently opposed things like a female Doctor. He’s one of those figures you’re mostly glad kept quiet in his later years for fear of what he might have said about Brexit or SJWs or god only knows what. If you wanted to make an argument that the modern Doctor Who writer who is the most direct heir to Terrance Dicks was Gareth Roberts, you’d frankly be spoiled for choice.

And yet this seems part and parcel of his legacy. Dicks has been an object of loving mockery within fandom for decades, whether for his effective but highly noticeable recycling of descriptions (all together now, “a pleasant, open face”), his distinctive speech patterns, or his at times hilariously middling books for the BBC Books line. (Case in point, the delightful crackfic Warmonger, subject of what remains my favorite redemptive reading across TARDIS Eruditorum.) He’s a titan, but he’s also a faintly ridiculous figure. Where the other people who round out a list of Doctor Who’s most significant writers are all figures who invite arguments for their objective literary genius, Dicks was a dogged professional, a jobbing hack of the best sort, and has always been loved as that.…

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You Go To My Head (1988)

Like “Heart Attack at 23,” “You Go To my Head” is a track that poses a significant challenge to anyone looking to argue that Y Kant Tori Read is unfairly maligned. (And, fittingly, the other song from the album that Amos has never revived in concert.) The song is not the cringeworthy mess of bathos that “Heart Attack of 23” is, but is instead something considerably more banal in its inadequacy: a largely forgettable song that furthers its general sense of petering out after “Floating City.” The fact that it was picked as the b-side for “The Big Picture,” the lead single, speaks volumes about how ill-conceived promotion for the album was. 

Musically, the song is the album’s inevitable and doomed Prince rip-off. Bassist Tim Landers gives it his best funk groove, but the production is at once flaccid and lacking the clear sharpness of Prince’s actual hits. The guitar has all the enthusiasm of someone who’s just been asked to work the weekend, the synths in the second verse are as if a kazoo has just learned about cyberpunk, and the saxophone solo in the middle sounds like a middle aged man sidling up to you in the bar. None of this is ever quite egregious enough to feel like a howling error, but Sign O’ The Times it ain’t. Amos gives a spirited vocal performance over it, but she’s swallowed by the sea of utter mediocrity into which she’s set.

Things are spectacularly not helped by the lyrics, which see Amos at her most abject, begging in the opening couplet “sweet love, hello / make a slave of me,” while the chorus ends with the proclamation that “you know I can never say no / to you and your friend.” It’s not all bad—“all that light in your eyes is from the wine” is actually a great, wryly funny line. But for the most part the song is pretty gross in its sense of sexuality. On top of that, the song is weirdly structured backwards, with the verses containing the really lurid stuff bout being her lover’s slave while the chorus is left to offer the declaration that “you go to my head,” a sentiment so mild that it’s not even clear in and of itself that it’s a bad or dangerous thing as opposed to just a sentiment from a straightforward love song.

The real grossness of the song, however, is in the context of Amos’s life up to this point and career going forward. In 1985, early in her stay in Los Angeles and before she got Y Kant Tori Read together, Amos was raped by a man who asked her for a ride home after the show. Eventually Amos will write about the experience, and so I’ll save the bulk of the discussion for that, but that knowledge, and Amos’s admission that much of Y Kant Tori Read is the product of her trying to avoid writing about her rape while also desperately needing to process it and grapple with it makes Amos’s groveling and begging for her own objectification in this song deeply uncomfortable and gross-feeling.…

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