It Came from the Liner Notes: The Soul of Flamenco

Back when pterodactyls prowled the skies and people could talk about the things they loved without applying a thin coat of irony, record albums sometimes came with essays by authoritative eggheads, who would basically articulate in ELEVENTY THOUSAND WORDS why the album should be placed in a time capsule to represent the zenith of human artistic achievement.

The Soul of Flamenco, with the Renowned Cuadro Flamenco

The Soul of Flamenco was released in 1965, at the height of florid-liner-note madness. The cover art has a bright woodcut folkiness that smells like tofu stir-fry in earthenware bowls, and I can see Peggy Olson propping it against her record player as she brainstorms a tagline for Kotex. The music is just exactly what you think of when you hear the word flamenco, and a nice spiky soundtrack to a rainy mellow Sunday. But the real story here is the MAGNIFICENT liner-note essay by singer/guitarist/music archivist Cynthia Gooding, a moderate Big Deal in the Greenwich Village folk scene back in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Suck it, Katy Perry’s liner notes

Cynthia’s essay on The Soul of Flamenco is a masterwork of deep-purple prose. She describes the dancers and musicians in the Cuadro Flamenco with the kind of holy fervor typically reserved for saints, great humanitarians, and members of One Direction. Here’s what she has to say about Angel Macheno:

His face is that of an archangel who has not yet decided whether he’ll take the road to Hell or the road to Heaven. . .When he dances, he becomes passion incarnate, mouth contorted, thunder upon his brow, disdain and desire quivering within him. . .He is not a colt nor yet mature but has the dramatic driving power of untrammeled youth.

As a lover of junky pop music, I am not the type of person to handwring over how far society has fallen, but music archivists just don’t apply handcrafted phrases like these to Flo Rida or that dude from Train with the rectangle face. Also, going on this description alone, I kinda want to write a paranormal romance about Angel Macheno.

Here’s Cynthia on Pepa Reyes, the lone female in Cuadro Flamenco:

She is impassive, aloof—with no intent to snub—dignified within herself, yet aware of his actions. She seems to be looking sideways all the time; one is not aware that she ever looks directly at an object.

I guess a camera doesn’t count as “an object.”

The accompanying photo of Pepa Reyes seems to uphold this assertion; her head and torso are indeed cocked in different directions, though before I read the liner notes I assumed this condition was temporary. Studying her contorted frame, I can sense “her eyes are blind to the light that illuminates their beauty,” and also that she’s a bit inconvenient at crosswalks and subway turnstiles.

Cynthia reserves the big guns for guitarist Juan Garcia de la Mata:

His habitual expression is one of questing irony. He looks politely not at but through people as though he were searching for a quality they masked. He has very dark wide set eyes, an intelligent aquiline face and a dark moustache that expresses its own anarchistic being within that thin sardonic face.

This is where I start getting SUPER-depressed, because I’m fairly sure I’ll never be interesting enough to inspire a description like this. If I could grow a “moustache,” it would express polite dissent at the most; anarchy would be out of the question.

There’s more, but I’m sort of afraid the ghost of Cynthia Gooding will rise and give me a nasty review on Amazon if I keep it up. Besides, I like her, though she does use the phrase “his handsome being” and whips out “untrammeled” twice in two columns. There’s something fantastic about this. Almost fifty years ago, the Cuadro Flamenco inspired nine paragraphs of breathless adoration, which all the members probably memorized and kept under their pillows. And today I’m holding this artifact in my hands, studying Pepa Reyes’s dress and the “aggressive male pleasure” of the elastic dancer behind her, only because someone cared enough to go public with her passion in such a grandiose way I couldn’t help but listen. It’s cool. It makes me want to document all my obsessions and bury them in a time capsule somewhere, so some futurefolk will dig them up and make fun of them. And maybe fall a little in love at the same time.