edited by Greil Marcus

foreword by Robert Christgau

PRESS
CAPO
DA
Stranded
Ctra ndéd
Rock and Ril
for a Desert dialebe

edited
with a new preface by

GREIL MARCUS
new foreword by

ROBERT CHRISTGAU

,
DA CAPO PRESS
Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all permissions
acknowledgments, they will be continued on page 303.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to
reprint previously published material:
Asco Music INc.: Excerpts from “Stray Cat Blues,” “Parachute Woman,”
“No Expectations,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Dear Doctor,” “Salt of the
Earth,” and “Street Fighting Man.” All songs written by Mick Jagger and
Keith Richard. All songs copyright © 1968 Abkco Music, Inc. Reprinted
by permission. All rights reserved.
BEEFHEART Music: All songs from the Trout Mask Replica album, copyright
© 1969 by Beefheart Music. Used by permission.
First Da Capo Press edition 1996
Second Da Capo Press edition 2007
This Da Capo Press edition of Stranded is an unabridged republication of
the edition first published in New York in 1979, here supplemented with a
new foreword by Robert Christgau about the contributors. It is reprinted
by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright © 1979 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
“Treasure Island” and discography copyright © 1979 by Greil Marcus
New preface copyright 1996 by Greil Marcus
New foreword copyright 1996 by Robert Christgau
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher,
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Stranded: rock and roll for a desert island/edited by Greil Marcus.—
p. cm,
Essays.
Previously published: New York: Knopf, 1979. With new introd.
Discography:
HC: ISBN-10 0-306-80682-7 (alk. paper)
HC; ISBN-13 978-0-306-80682-7
1, Rock music—History and criticism. I. Marcus, Greil.
ML3534.S8 1996 95-47747
781.66—dc20
PBK: ISBN-10 0-306-81532-X; ISBN-13 978-0-306-81532-4

Published by Da Capo Press

A Member of the Perseus Books Group
http://www.dacapopress.com
 CONTENTS

FOREWORD
Robert Christgau ix
PREFACE
STRANDED: THE INSIDE STORY XV
INTRODUCTION XIX
ProLocue: THE SEa’s ENDLESS,
AwrFut RuytHM & ME WirTHOUT
Even a Dirty Picrure
Nick Tosches 3

“Ir’s Too Late To Stop Now”

M. Mark 11

Breccars BANQUET
Simon Frith 29

PRESENTING THE FABULOUS

Ronetres FEATURING VERONICA
Jim Miller 40
Tue WILD, THE INNOCENT AND
THE E STREET SHUFFLE
Ariel Swartley 49
Trout Mask REPLica
Langdon Winner 58
VELVET UNDERGROUND
Ellen Willis 71
 vi | Contents

DESPERADO
Grace Lichtenstein 84

Lirtte WILuiz JOHN

Joe McEwen 93

SOMETHING ELsE BY THE KINKS

Janet Maslin 100

RocxeT To Russia
Tom Carson 107

THE PRETENDER
Paul Nelson 118

New York DOLts

Robert Christgau 132
Huey “Piano” Smitn’s
Rock & Rott Revivat!
Jay Cocks 148

Precious Lorp
Tom Smucker 161

DECADE
Kit Rachlis 171

ASTRAL WEEKs
Lester Bangs 178
LIvING IN THE U‘S.A.
John Rockwell 188

Onan’s GREATEST Hits

Dave Marsh 219

DEDICATED To You
Ed Ward 228

EpmocuvE: TREASURE ISLAND

Greil Marcus 252

Contrisutors 300
My thanks to Robert Gottlieb,
Wendy Weil, Darlene Pond, and
James Raimes for their advice ©
and support. —G.M.
 FOREWORD

I remember how I felt when Greil Marcus called to offer me $750 for
an original essay about my favorite rock album of all time. I felt as
if all my dreams were coming true. Granted, except for the $750 that
wasn’t precisely how he put it—essay isn’t a term Marcus favors (me
either; we’re journalists, so we write pieces), and the album wasn’t
supposed to be my favorite but rather, you know, a “desert island disc.”
For the record (as the IRS agent said to the rack jobber), my desert
island disc is probably something by Thelonious Monk—Brilliant Cor-
ners, maybe Misterioso—or, these days, Sony’s four-CD Louis Arm-
strong box, which | still know so slightly it could keep me interested
for quite a while. Certainly no rock record I chose would be as harsh
as New York Dolls. I’d want something that didn’t anger the blood—
maybe Van Morrison’s Moondance, which I haven’t played in years,
or some life-music by George Clinton or James Brown, or the right
Neil Young, or a Beatles compilation. But nobody asked and I didn’t
tell. Let the other guys muse about the philosophical and technologi-
cal pitfalls of the desert island conceit, about palm trees and too much
fish, about what “favorite” means. What each of us had been granted
was the chance to be paid good money—in 1978, very good money—
 x | Foreword

for a substantial appreciation of music we loved. Finally the world was

recognizing our enduring literary value.
Well, fat chance, I knew that—knew the book would never earn
back its advance. The opportunity was justice, and all but a few of
the twenty contributors had earned it. But it was also a quirk of the
marketplace, one of the silly guesses the publishing industry runs on
even more than the music industry. In or out of journalism, there was
virtually no demand for serious, in-depth rock criticism of any real
length, and damn little for criticism period, as Knopf knew: boldly
designated “the critics” on the back cover, we were billed—in the clas-
sic fudge—as “rock writers” on the front. Stranded wasn’t going to
change these market conditions—almost two decades later, the de-
mand is as puny as ever. Rock criticism is primarily a reviewer’s me-
dium, and although lead pieces are sometimes ceded enough space
to accommodate the big picture, they almost never get the focus
tight—if only because reviews are written on short deadlines while
important records reveal themselves over long ones. For essays that
don’t devote themselves to the artiste’s transcribed views on the edu-
cational system, A & R weasels, and punk rock’s undying flame, your
best recourse is academia or fanzines. And without sinking into an
old fart’s lament for days of literacy past, I’ll simply note that good
criticism is actively discouraged in both realms.
And that above all is reason to treasure this book. The opportunity
was so irresistible, and Marcus’s masterminding so astute, that it
avoids the famous pitfall of the format, which is that if you ask twenty
of the best writers you know to produce something original for a col-
lection, a third of them will end up making like they had something
better to do. Some pieces here are less good than others, naturally,
and there are a few duds that will remain nameless (pick your own).
But the success rate is up around eighty or ninety per cent. If they
ever teach Rock 101 like they oughta, such informal, idiosyncratic, yet
intellectually legible matchups as Langdon Winner-Captain
Beefheart, M. Mark-Van Morrison, Ellen Willis-Velvets, and Simon
Frith—-Stones will be required texts.
But it’s the more freewheeling entries that best suggest something
else to treasure: how impiously most of these ’60s-based writers con-
ceived the craft of criticism, Nick Tosches tells a scabrously anti-uto-
 Foreword | xi

pian tale of the counterculture, Robert Stone without glitz or gore,

that barely grazes his designated Stones album. Dave Marsh imagines
a compilation that will enable him to achieve orgasm by thrusting his
tongue into his cheek. John Rockwell rolls out a superhighway of mu-
sical detail about the latest-not-greatest album by a much despised
female singer whom Marsh expressly bans from his island, preferring
to pound his pud in perpetuity. Paul Nelson commits the intentional
fallacy on a bus out of Binghamton. Ed Ward fabricates the history
of the R & B group he adores (whose real story, by the way, he tells
in the notes to Rhino’s Ward-programmed 1994 “5” Royales set). And
Marcus himself tops all contributors with a pithy, provocative, fun
catalog that simultaneously defines and undermines the rock canon.
There’s a profusion of aural minutiae, the sort of formal description
cum prose poetry that journalism has no room for, and loads of mem-
oir and social theory. The book could be even crazier—Lester Bangs’s
unkempt hymn to Van Morrison is positively monklike from a man
given to recounting General Thieu’s theory of rebop and cough-syrup
visions of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and there’s nothing from the ir-
repressible Richard Meltzer. But long before self-promoting pomo sub-
jectivism infested the university, these wordsmiths were challenging
conventions of objectivity that constricted grad school and J school
alike—while insisting that supposedly debased popular works merited
the scrutiny and respect normally accorded Shakespeare, Mozart, Pi-
casso, and The World According to Garp.
As I look back nearly two decades, balanced precariously on the crest
of an ever-changing music that’s now forty years old instead of just-
turned-twenty-one, Stranded does admittedly seem very much of its
time, for 1978 turned out to be a crucial moment in rock aesthetics.
Not counting the Ramones piece by Tom Carson, the youngest writer
here by almost five years, and to a lesser extent Willis’s on the Velvets
and mine on the Dolls, none of the essays pays much mind to the
fissure that was right then opening up. I hate to leave disco out of
this, but rather than getting completely lost we should take the low
road and call the fissure punk—not the ironic brutalism of that style’s
formal preferences but the disdain for the mass market that was taken
for granted by many of its most gifted creators and consumers, who
would eventually evolve into the “alternative” subculture. Sure the for-
 xii | Foreword

mulation is contradictory and problematic. Nevertheless, something

of the sort really did happen, and you can feel it in these selections.
Except for the Dolls and the Ramones, the artists chosen all came
up in the ’50s and ’60s; except for the Velvets and Captain Beefheart,
all conceived themselves as pop stars. Take away those four and they
all sounded fundamentally similar as well—blues chords and body
thythms were the bedrock of the individual genius with which all of
them, from Thomas Dorsey to the goddamn Eagles, worked their ma-
terials, Seventeen years later, a younger fan will almost certainly find
much of this music classic, but old-fashioned.
I’ve often fantasized during those seventeen years about the Son of
Stranded: Living Albums to Die For I might edit. Couldn’t use many
of these people, most of whom—Marcus, Marsh, Frith, and myself
are the exceptions—don’t cover contemporary music anymore. For
starters I’d seek out black contributors, Although Marcus might argu-
ably have importuned Ishmael Reed or a comparable outsider, he had
little choice—rock’s African roots were a truism, but there wasn’t a
single African-American critic of any note working when Stranded was
assigned. (He did well to land five women, only one of whom was
writing regularly about music at the time.) But these days black critics
are various and legion, which would presumably eliminate one of
Stranded’s more regrettable peculiarities—which is that the four black
albums chosen are also the only pre-Beatles artifacts so honored. It
would be nice to encounter James Brown or George Clinton or Public
Enemy in this context; rope in a few gay critics, who are also easier
to find these days, and maybe disco too would get some respect.
And after that I’d mostly think young. For while I have an old fart’s
reservations about the up-and-comers within firing range, their ranks
have swelled with the rise of “alternative,” and many of them are
plainly smart—sometimes with a sense of history, which after forty
years counts as an impressive attainment even if their story doesn’t
conform to mine. Accustomed to either the crassness of personality
journalism or the indulgent self-regard of the nonprofit press, they
might have trouble comprehending the freedom and responsibility of
the chance. But cognizant of the tradition represented here whether
they like it or not, they’d eventually figure out how to go crazy with
it. And for certain many of them would choose a record so eccentric,
 Foreword | xiii

so deeply unpredictable, that only a little craziness would do it justice.

That wasn’t the dream I thought was coming true. It’s too much like
chaos, which rock and roll has never taught me to equate with free-
dom—like all but a couple of the writers in this book, I envisioned
a world that was fundamentally enriched by rock and roll, not a world
that would be even worse off without it. At least, however, it’s still a
world where writers can strive not only to make sense, but to find
deep human possibility in the music that lifts us over and gets us
through. And now Stranded is back to show them how.

—Rosert CuHrIsTGAU
New York, September, 1995
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 PREFACE

STRANDED:
THE INSIDE STORY

Right about the time the Sex Pistols broke up, I received a call
from an editor at a publishing house of unparalleled venerability and
prestige. He asked me if I would be interested in editing the rock &
toll volume in his publisher’s planned set of desert island books.
“What's a desert island book?” I asked.
‘A book where we ask people from various fields what this or that
from their field they’d take to a desert island,” the editor replied.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What fields?”
“Oh,” he said, “painting, sculpture, the novel, drama, classical mu-
sic, opera, jazz, architecture—all the arts.”
“Architecture?” I said. “You mean, ‘What building?’ Like an out-
house?”
I must admit now that, as opposed to the mild disclaimer I stuck
in my original introduction to this book, I thought this was an in-
credibly stupid idea. But the money was good, and people got a
chance to write at length about something they cared about in a for-
mat of their own choosing—a rare opportunity at any time, close to
non-existent in 1978, unless you were paying yourself nothing in your
own fanzine. So I said yes. “Great,” said the editor, “In fact, we’ve
decided not to do the whole series at once—we want the rock book
to come first, sort of the flagship for the series, because we know rock
books sell.” I didn’t consider it my obligation to disabuse him of this
notion.
 xvi | Preface

Not long after, the book was completed. The piece that pleased me
most, in a lot of ways, was Nick Tosches’s. It was partly that the thing
was so odd it could appear only outside the book’s main body, as a
prologue, just as nothing could have followed Ed Ward’s gnostic his-
tory of the “5” Royales; partly that the essay was so perfectly written
I wasn’t tempted to change a single word, and never did; partly
that Nick had used a typewriter with the same typeface my typist
was using, so I didn’t even have to have his piece retyped. Though |
would never have copped to it at the time, I also secretly thought put-
ting Nick’s screed right up front might piss some people off. Little did
I know.
Some time later, after the book had been copyedited, and un-copy-
edited—it was never edited as such, at the publisher’s—I was on the
phone with my editor, talking the literary equivalent of the weather.
The book had been accepted, everyone had been paid, we were talking
about what to do for a jacket, and he mentioned, “You know, one of
the secretaries here was very offended by the Nick Tosches piece.”
“Really,” I said. “What about it?”
“Oh, I think it was that ‘Fuck me till blood runs down my leg’
stuff,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “I’m sorry she’s offended. But when you come right
down to it, so what? Things offend people.”
“Right, so what,” my editor said, and we talked about something
else and hung up.
A week or two after that he called again. “You know that secretary
who didn’t like the Tosches piece?” he said. “She’s gotten all the other
secretaries and other people in the office involved in this thing, with
a petition or something. I think maybe we ought to think about some
changes.” I said that was ridiculous and that I wouldn’t consider it,
though I was already trying to think of a fall-back position, and failing:
“Fuck me till blood runs down by leg” was the heart of Nick’s essay,
or one of its hearts, anyway. Then the editor called and insisted we
remove that one line. I said no. Then that we ask Nick to come up
with an alternative. I told him this was between him and me and
Nick was not to be brought into it. The matter reached a senior editor,
who considered the evidence and declared himself outraged, after
which the manuscript arrived on the desk of the editor-in-chief,
 Preface | xii

who announced that in no way or fashion would this book ever be

published by his house with Nick Tosches’s chapter anywhere within
its covers. “That piece goes or there’s no book,” my editor said, as
if just to talk about it was now making him feel dirty, too. I should
have said something as sharp as Without that piece there’s no book;
instead I said, “Fine, kill the book. We've all been paid. We don’t
care.”
The fact was, though, that by this time I’d come to like the book,
and the people who'd written wanted their work to see the light of
day. I talked the matter over with a couple of the contributors—still
not including Nick. We considered mau-mauing the publisher for
prudery and censorship. We did some digging and discovered that the
secretary who started the whole brouhaha was reputed to be a folkie—
who hated all rock & roll. We thought of marshalling the feminist
credentials of various Stranded writers against those of our opponents.
Finally I received word the publisher was going ahead with the book,
axing Nick’s chapter on its own, as if the legal actors in this bad-joke-
gone-rotten had ceased to exist.
Stymied, I called up Robert Gottlieb, then editor-in-chief of Alfred
A. Knopf. I told him the story; he said he’d take a look. I sent him
the manuscript by overnight mail, and two days later he agreed to
buy out the original publisher—which, needless to say, never brought
out any other desert island book—and publish Stranded forthwith. On
one condition: that I consider his suggested additions and changes
for my closing discography. Within a week, a handwritten, annotated
list of well over a hundred records I’d omitted, forgotten, or with big-
otry aforethought excluded arrived in the mail. We talked, we nego-
tiated, we traded, we joked, and then we hit a wall. He argued. I
argued. I affirmed author’s rights.
“Add two more Stevie Wonder records or I don’t publish the book,”
he said. It still bothers me that I gave in.

—Greit Marcus
August 29, 1995
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 INTRODUCTION

The premise of this book was simple: ask twenty writers what rock
and roll record they would take to a desert island. It’s an old ques-
tion and a good one; absurd, but irresistible. When I began to call
up people I thought would be interested and asked them that ques-
tion, asked them to contribute, the response was enthusiastic, but
in many cases for a reason I hadn’t anticipated. “A great idea,” said
one person after another. “I feel like I’ve been living on a desert
island for years.” |
Rock and roll, black music altered in one way or another by
white culture, began in the early and mid-fifties as something like
a secret, the apprehension of a strange, wildly various, and unde-
niable new sound. By about 1955 it had achieved the status of a
rumor. The arrival of Elvis Presley turned rock and roll into a deeply
shared culture, the password of millions, a means to identity and
delight, and the advent of the Beatles intensified that process be-
yond all expectation. One listened in a lot of ways, but one always
listened as a member of an audience; ten years ago one would have
said as a member of a generation, or a community.
For many reasons—some of them having to do with rock and
roll itself, some of them having to do with political facts of life—
 xx | Introduction

this is no longer so true. As happened in the late fifties and early

sixties, with the disappearance of rock’s founders, the music and
the audience lost their center in the late sixties, when the Beatles
disbanded and Bob Dylan eased up; in any case, the music had
lasted far too long to be the possession of any identifiable genera-
tion, and the audience had likely grown too big and broad for any
center. Rock and roll, as culture, lost much of its shape. The mass
movements of the sixties, which for many brought a sense of com-
mon endeavor and shared fate to almost every aspect of life, frag-
mented; people who before took pride identifying themselves as
members of a group, no matter how unorganized or spectral, found
that they could best identify themselves by their names, and life
became more private, more isolated.
Rock and roll has never been remotely monolithic—there have
always been countless performers to pin your hopes on; though one
may have found identity as a member of an audience, one also
found it by staking a place in that audience, defining one’s self
against it—but in 1965 virtually no one who cared about rock and
roll could fail to care about the Beatles, just as in 1956 you had to
have an opinion about Elvis. For a long time now, there has been
no single figure one has felt compelled to celebrate or denigrate.
People have staked out their territory in rock and roll, but they don’t
feel much like members of anything big enough to take over the
world—which, as Robert Christgau points out in his piece on the
New York Dolls, is what rock and roll is supposed to do.
The objects of the obsessiveness that has always been part of
being a rock and roll fan, or a rock and roll critic, are no longer
obvious—which means, for one thing, that while one’s sense of the
music may not have perfect shape, it’s probably a lot richer. I’m
sure that if this book had been written ten years ago, the Beatles
and Bob Dylan would have not only appeared in it but perhaps
dominated it, and not just because their records (in Dylan’s case,
his most exciting) were newer then. At that time, the very idea of
shared obsession was often controlling; that there is no one now
around whom rock and roll turns, no one who defines it, makes
the rest of rock and roll more visible—and more compelling.
The choices the writers of this book have made (their ultimate
 Introduction | xxi

record) are, many of them, quirky—at least within the context of

official rock and roll history, certified masterpieces, or already cleared
common ground. As shared obsession becomes less possible, one
joins smaller audiences—one feels allegiance to punk, or to soul, or
to one’s part of the country, or to one’s generation—or one is thrown
back upon oneself. Captain Beefheart, an obsession that can (as
Langdon Winner almost insists, must) be nurtured in isolation,
may speak more vitally to the state of things than an obsession with
the Beatles, which, after ten years, may seem chimerical, if it hasn’t
simply worn out. Albums become less touchstones than compan-
ions, though of course writers and fans continue to try to turn them
into touchstones; artists become less symbols than figures with
whom one can carry on a long-distance, perhaps lifelong, dialogue,
and one grows dubious about making anyone into a symbol.
I chose the writers for this book because they were to me clearly
the best people to write it, and because they were the people I most
wanted to work with. They, however, didn’t necessarily choose to
write about the album they thought was “the best”: their number-
one choice on the all-time list that critics are always being asked to
compile, and that everyone else compiles for their own pleasure.
I asked for those lists: the Beatles did show up (not Sgt. Pepper,
which today seems artificial where Rubber Soul still seems full of
life), as did Bob Dylan and most everyone else you might expect.
(The absence of Chuck Berry or Elvis from this book is as scanda-
lous as the fact that the Beatles are missing, and as sensible.) The
records most often mentioned were Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited
and Blonde on Blonde, Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade (or Greatest
Hits), James Brown Live at the Apollo, Rubber Soul, Elvis Presley’s
Sun Sessions, the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed and Exile on Main
Street, none of which anyone chose to write about, and Van Mor-
rison’s Astral Weeks, which Lester Bangs claimed. The essays that
follow, all written specifically for this book, have more to do with
what these writers care about than with what they think deserves
the first spot in the Hall of Fame; they're fans’ statements, among
other things, written out of involvement more than judgment, and
they mean to tell tales not everyone has heard, or that have yet to
be told at all. The long annotated Discography that ends the book—
 xxii | Introduction

a history of rock and roll in records—is my attempt to give everyone

who’s rightly earned it a place in the romance.
In her piece on Bruce Springsteen, Ariel Swartley says an inter-
esting thing about his characters: they “live on islands close enough
to shore to see the mainland, too far away to make the crossing
light or easy.” This book begins on the islands where so many feel
stranded these days, but what it is about, finally, is the effort to
make that crossing: less to head off into exile with a single piece of
rock and roll than to bring it home, along with a story good enough
to make others want to listen.

—Grem Marcus
Berkeley, December 2, 1978
Ctra nded
 PROLOGUE

THE SEA’S ENDLESS,

AWFUL RHYTHM
& ME WITHOUT EVEN
A DIRTY PICTURE

NICK TOSCHES
Call me Gilligan. As I confront in earnest the problems of divine
retribution, way-out sex, and the value of the Folk Mass, so I con-
front the desert-island question.
I must say that the idea of being marooned somewhere with
neither whiskey nor Jewish girls troubles me greatly, and I believe,
as the nightmared child believes in morning and its peace, that the
God of the New Testament shall see to it that I am accompanied
upon the rough-hewn raft of my solitude by at least a case of Tul-
lamore Dew and La Louise in Diorissimo ultrasheer, off-black panty-
hose. But, Lord, I am a humble man, and would settle for Carstairs
and my first wife.
And what book should I take with me from the lending library
of poetic justice? Perturbed by the fate of the Russian ivory-hunter
in Heart of Darkness, who was stranded with naught to read but
An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship, I have given the
matter much thought, and have chosen Richmond Lattimore’s
translation of Pindar’s Odes (Chicago, 1947), with issue number
twenty-six of Leg Art (San Pedro, 1976) concealed between its
pages. And Mr. Kurtz be damned.
But the phonograph record. Ah, the record. Presuming that some
 4 | NICK TOSCHES

dolt and colleague, less dignified with the meter and metaphor than
myself, has elsewhere in these pages brought something not wholly
unlike wit to bear upon the Las Vegas odds against encountering
electric circuitry on an uninhabited island, I shall ignore the oppor-
tunity for runny-nosed humor—reminding all who would not of
Goethe’s remark to Chancellor von Miiller, “The possible will be
attempted only because we have postulated the impossible”—and
instead, sacrificing at the altars of charm and hyperbole as little
honesty as possible, speak from the heart. Together, in my bath-
room, like this.
The record I would take is Sticky Fingers, by the Rolling Stones.
There is something about the dullness of my choice that bothers
me; but Sticky Fingers it is. The Tullamore Dew, La Louise, the
Odes, Leg Art—of these things I am sure beyond doubt. But Sticky
Fingers is a choice as mysterious and as difficult to explain to my-
self as to anyone else.
At first, I thought of bringing a Jerry Lee Lewis album. The
Killer has been a constant inspiration to me, and I’ve always be-
lieved that he’s the last man to have been touched by the Holy
Ghost of Gnosis. The powers of his music—that loud, unspeakable
philosophy of his Horus-Snopes soul; the search through mania
and excess for that unknown, unknowable sin without which there
can be no redemption or damnation more thrilling than any re-
demption or damnation known to the gelt rest; the pitting within
of good against evil without knowing, maybe even caring to know,
or refusing to know, one from the other—are more than rock ’n’
roll, or whatever you want to call it. They are powers of light and
dark, wickedness and strength, and they are powers that can cure
and heal and cause miracles. The trouble is that Jerry Lee has never
made a great album, largely because of Jerry Kennedy, the member
of the Nashville mediocrity conspiracy who produced his work
from 1968 to 1978. For these sins, as sure as the Venerable Bede
deals three-card monte in the hereafter, Jerry Kennedy will pay. And
I will disembark upon my desert island without the music of Jerry
Lee Lewis.
Then I thought of the Chieftains, and how I love to play Bona-
parte’s Retreat in the middle of the night, and how I could listen
 The Sea’s Endless, Awful Rhythm & Me Without a Dirty Picture | 5

to it forever, But there is something too eerie, too wraithful in the

Chieftains’ wedding of pagan joy and Gaelic mourning. To be left
alone with such music, especially after the whiskey ran out, could
be quite dangerous to my spiritual well-being, the stability of which
has not commonly been likened to a large rock. Besides, it is rare
for me to hear the Chieftains without thinking of (a) La Margaret,
the prodigious mucus of whose lust I was anointed with while “An
Chéad Mhiairt den Fhomhar’” filled the Nashville night and the first
chill hours of 1978 with the caws of estrangement, and (b) the
Bells of Hell, that New York bar where I sat, leaning toward 4 a.m.,
hugged by perniciousness, listening to the Chieftains’ sullen juke-
box magic, night after wasted night. No, it simply wouldn’t do.
I turned to the Doors, to their reduction of all to sex, death, and
thythm. Before I decided which Doors album I would bring, J
realized that, in solitude, I wouldn’t want to be wit! the voice of
someone so newly dead. I wanted a memento vivere, not a memento
mori. For the same reason, I resolved not to bring Lynyrd Skynyrd’s
Gimme Back My Bullets, an album I listen to far more often than
Sticky Fingers.
I listen to Randy Newman more than I listen to anyone else,
but while Randy Newman’s songs give me more pleasure, and im-
press me more, than anyone else’s, I don’t think one of his records
could much assuage my solitude, for his are songs of people and
people’s delicate mysteries (of which I would not care to be re-
minded on my unpeopled isle), and little of his work reaches, with
word or rhythm, into the greater, indelicate mystery—Ta Mvornpiov
DeLuxe—which makes and vanquishes the lesser mysteries. And
here even I cease to understand what I’m saying; so let’s move on.
The Rolling Stones supplied the soundtrack for much of my
grown-up life. When I first heard “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,”
I was fifteen years old, and had never gotten laid. I remember sit-
ting with my citrulli friends on the concrete steps of a store, where
one could either play the numbers or buy dog food, beer, cigarettes,
and the full line of fine Contadina products, on the corner of Clen-
denny and Miller in Jersey City, smoking two-cent loosies, and
hearing that new Rolling Stones song blare from a transistor radio.
It was unlike anything else to be heard that summer of 1965, Lurid,
 6 | NICK TOSCHES
loud, and concupiscent, it was at once a yell of impotence and of
indomitability. Its conspiratorial complaints sanctified our frustra-
tions, and its vicious force promised deliverance. It gave us power
over girl-creatures, and made of our insignificant, wastrel cocks
spigots of wordless insolence—which, of course, we had always
wanted them to be. I was arrested for the first time that summer,
for D&D.
When I first heard “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Stand-
ing in the Shadow,” I had taken five blood-orange capsules of Dexe-
drine and was riding with friends through the streets of Hoboken,
looking for girls who would let us share the miracle of physical love
with them. It was the first really cold night of the fall, 1966. The
apocalyptic dissonance of the record struck me first, and then the
surly notion of throwing at the face of the neurotic, castaway girl-
friend the image of her mother, and sneering, in afterbreath, at the
girl’s pregnancy. Swathed and speeding, we prowled with the win-
dows shut against the black coldness, looking for feminine throats
in the shadows, where there were none, listening to that, smiling
terribly, and feeling, with something like orgasm, our existences
contract beatifically into that terrible smiling.
In the late summer of 1969, I wasn’t thinking of music. I had
then terminated two years of bliss, or its reasonable facsimile, with
La Dominique, the lovely daughter of Perpignan and of the sea,
upon the small of whose lithe back I had painted a perfect Day-Glo
Ronsonol can, its spouter cocked, like the slender finger of Botti-
celli’s Calumny, toward the dimple of her dextral shoulder, and
within the penetralia of whose softness I had, for seven-times-seventy
nights, studied the craft of prostatial eloquence. I was employed as
a paste-up man for Lovable Underwear in New York, devoting my
creativity to tasks such as the production of cordate stickers for
pantyhose packages which bore the legend, “No bag! No sag!” I
knew contentment. One night I went into Ojay’s Bar on Ninth
Street near Avenue A, right around the corner from Ed Sanders’s
Peace Eye Book Store. I stood at the bar between a moist short man
with dried blood on the front of his shirt, at whom the bartender
frequently glared, and a young couple who hissed at one another
in clipped cadences of wrath—there was a journey to Pennsylvania, to
 The Sea’s Endless, Awful Rhythm & Me Without a Dirty Picture | 7

visit someone’s relatives, involved; also a matter of stingy behavior

regarding the sharing of egg rolls. And from the jukebox came the
lewd, commanding sound of Charlie Watts’s cowbell, making with
a stick and a piece of copper a truer, greater rhythm than most can
make with a wealth of electric equipment. I realize now that
“Honky Tonk Women” was welcome detumescence for the sixties,
and a surly, languid waking from the restless sleep of ideology. It
strutted its indolence, as one who nods off while fucking. As “Sat-
isfaction” had been innocent in its discontent, “Honky Tonk
Women” was wise in its slavering contentment. It washed my mind
—indeed, washed Ojay’s and the slow river of dark night that ran
without—in a perverse peace; and before the evening was over, it
had become my favorite song.
And I will tell you of crab music, and of much else besides. In
the spring of 1972, my friend Charlie and I were living in Tampa,
and were without money. Charlie had been working for Budweiser
and wanted to get fired so that he could lay back for a while drawing
unemployment. With that end in mind, he had sat down with a
crisply sharpened Budweiser pencil, a Budweiser Clydesdale calen-
dar, and a small pad of Budweiser stationery. To be eligible for un-
employment benefits, he needed a minimum of twenty work-weeks
under his belt. After checking, double-checking, and triple-checking,
he had circled upon his Budweiser Clydesdale calendar the date that
would mark his hundredth day of loading Budweiser beer into Bud-
weiser trucks. The hundred-and-first day was to have been M-day.
There was only one sure way to be canned at his job. On his first
day at work, his supervisor (a man who, it is said, listed “Gum” as
his hobby on a job application) had informed Charlie that anyone
stupid enough to crack open a ceiling sprinkler valve while oper-
ating a forklift would immediately receive his walking papers. Such
was the Budweiser lex non scripta. ‘Two in the past had been care-
less enough to transgress, and they had both been fired before—and
here came the phrase the supervisor savored—the first drop of water
hit the floor. Thrilled by the notion of whiling away the summer
drinking Georgia peach wine in the Clearwater sand, Charlie had
arrived at work on M-day, mounted a forklift, scooped up eight feet
of clanking Budweiser cases, looked to be sure his supervisor was
 8 | NICK TOSCHES
nearby, elevated the lift to its maximum height, drawn a bead, and
proceeded to smash into a sprinkler valve. The next afternoon, while
sitting in the downtown unemployment office, certain errors in his
computations had come to light. Pencil, pad, and calendar notwith-
standing, Charlie had somehow fallen short of the hundred-day mark
by eleven days. His reply to. the lady at the unemployment office
included strange allusions to the miracle of the loaves and feverish
indictments of those who would manufacture defective calendars.
As for myself, I had been fired from my job as editor of TV
Weekly (“The Bay Area’s Only TV Magazine”), for a number of
devious deeds, such as fabricating an exclusive interview with Joan
Blondell, in which La Blondell confessed that she had cooked and
eaten her three-year-old daughter. (“‘‘It tasted like blanquette de
yeau, which I love,’ said the former star of ABC’s Here Come the
Brides, indicating with coy fingers the bloated, sixty-year-old flesh
of her midsection, which mutely testified to the love she pro-
fessed.”) The publisher, who was also a local disk jockey, told me,
upon delivering my final paycheck, that I was deranged. I told him,
in response, that I planned to blow his bowels asunder with my
AMP .44.
Charlie and I sat and thought. Between us, we had ninety dollars
in folding money and a pint jar of pennies and dimes, We owed
ninety-eight dollars for the rent and fourteen for the electric. It
was then that we conceived Grab-a-Crab.
Our closet contained thirty cases of beer, conservative estimate,
which Charlie had stolen from Budweiser over the months. We
decided that we could load the trunk of our car each morning with
beer and boiled crabs (which we were to harvest from Tampa Bay),
and drive to the Courtney Campbell Causeway, where, parked on
the side of the road, we would sell our goods to the beach traffic, For
a dollar, you’d get a crab and a beer. Perhaps we would include a few
saltines to fancy things up. Since paper plates and napkins were to
represent our only overhead, profits would be considerable. Soon,
Grab-a-Crab franchises would proliferate along the Gulf. We would
acquire great wealth, wed lovely girls with hyphenated names and
masochistic streaks, sire children with strange, Nordic noses. Money
would lose its value, but greed would not. I would sit, high above
Newark, gazing into the night and pondering the meaning of it all:
 The Sea’s Endless, Awful Rhythm & Me Without a Dirty Picture | 9

Charlie dead by his own hand; the woman of my life’s summer locked
in a home for the sweepingly insane. I sip the fine Armagnac, watch-
ing passion pull at the face of La Contessa. She grasps my arm. I
look into her eyes and see something I would never dare betray
unto words. She speaks, and the sound of her voice makes me think
of the Aegean and that night in K4limnos, how many years ago?
“Fuck me,” La Contessa says. “Fuck me till blood runs down my
eg.”
To celebrate the birth of the Grab-a-Crab empire, Charlie and I
ate many micrograms of psilocybin and lay by the sea, A crab—the
Magna Mater of all crabs—marched from her saline source and
danced at our feet. She reared up and snapped her claws, command-
ing silence throughout the garden of God. In the distance, the
voice of a he-child whined, “I don’t want no hamburger. I want a
crab, mommy! I want a crab!” As the child’s voice faded, the crab
spun around and marched back into the sea. And from somewhere
came, quite loudly, the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,”
a record perfectly suited, we realized at once and forever, to the
hermetic dance of crabs. The song’s demonic owlings whistled
through us as day became night, and we felt fate to be a faithful
wife at our feet, and we felt blessed.
But we discovered that it took nearly two hours to pluck a lone
crab from the gazpacho of pollutants that is Tampa Bay. We knew
pain and emptiness, and eventually we knew eviction. I soon found
myself, thick newspapers wrapped around my legs with wire, hunt-
ing snakes in the Everglades. Doctor Haast of the Miami Ser-
pentarium, the nation’s largest dealer of antivenin, paid two dollars
per foot for live rattlesnakes and cottonmouths; more for coral
snakes, America’s only neurotoxic reptile. And there was a stand-
ing reward of a thousand dollars for anyone who could bring in a
rattlesnake over six feet long. One morning, hung over unto the
point of apoplexy, I was bit on the shin, right through the real-
estate section of the Sunday Herald. Next to me in the emergency
ward was a boy who held a Maxwell House coffee can to his neck,
to catch the blood that dribbled from a cut in his throat. In his lap
was a cassette recorder playing the new Stones album, Exile on
Main Street.
And from there things got worse. But I was young. I got over it.
 10 | NICK TOSCHES
[Here occurs a pause, the gravity of which mere indentation
could only hint at, but which additional leading would render too
melodramatic. ]
The Rolling Stones have always been looking over my shoulder,
and I feel comfortable with them. I probably would not play Sticky
Fingers too often on my desert island, but I know it would, like
Pindar, like Leg Art, fulfill a need finely. Whenever I felt as if I
were missing something back home, I could play “Bitch” or “Dead
Flowers” to inspire cynical estrangement. “Moonlight Mile” would
be perfect for staring out into the white-capped nothingness. For a
spiritual anthem, I’d have “You Gotta Move,” that song of sacred
fatalism written by my father, Fred McDowell, and the Holy Ghost,
and done best by the Rolling Stones. And should the days of soli-
tude run into years, I might even figure out the lyrics of “Sway.”
And when that devious-cruising Rachel, in her retracing search
after her missing children, finds me, I will tell all about it. You can
kill Grab-a-Crab, but you can’t kill the dream. No, never.
 “IT'S TOO LATE
TO STOP NOW”
VAN MORRISON (WARNER BROS. 2760)
1974

M. MARK
A few months before she died at age 91, my grandmother gave me
a memorable lecture on the value of disobedience. The night before
her funeral, I gave my grandmother a goodbye gift. That evening
her house was filled with kneeling people. I slipped away from the
reverent whispers and walked the streets of Greene, Iowa; then I
began to run, knocking over every garbage can in sight, creating
clamor and frenzy among neighborhood dogs. I would have liked
to give her a wake. The Irish, as everyone knows, are adept at
mourning—we’re famous for our funerals. My grandmother was
Irish to her soul.
Three years later, when I was fifteen, W. B. Yeats came into my
life, and with him the image of a wondrous moonlit dance—figures
whirling and leaping, falling down, clambering back up, and once
in a great while leaving the ground. On the periphery of the vision
stood other figures: those who watched. I knew right then that I
didn’t want to be an observer and wrote a passage in my diary
repudiating the English in me and vowing to pursue extravagant
passions, I had begun to understand that being Irish implies a
willingness to go too far, to risk it all—which includes the risk of
making fools of ourselves. The hope of the indomitable Irishry is
that if we’re foolish, it will be on an impressive scale.
 12 | M. MARK
Van Morrison is Irish, Irish to his very soul. His songs take me
home. If I were to be banished to some warm and sunny place with
a single record to keep me company, I’d choose one of Van’s. The
music is a peculiar mix of moonstruck story-telling and bar-band
groove, country blues and R&B and gospel and jazz and soul. It’s
mystical Celtic poetry with a rock and roll beat and all the contra-
dictions that amalgam implies—body and soul music which takes
itself very seriously half the time. Unless the relentlessly balmy
weather impaired my perspective, Van’s music would remind me
to take an occasional look at sihaan ecb dreaming—and have
a good laugh.
A few weeks ago at dinner with a friend, I held forth on V. Mor-
rison and W. B. Yeats and my conviction that they share something
more complicated than their status as Irish visionaries. My friend
the Jewish visionary agreed, but both of us had trouble finding the
words. We sat in the restaurant attempting to define a gesture: left
hand over left shoulder, a fluttering movement, allusive and elu-
sive and quicker than the eye. The pitcher winds up; before the
ball leaves his hand, a great pitcher does something akin to music.
A dove appears in the magician’s hand, then flies away.
There’s another version, of course. Both Morrison and Yeats are
acquainted with the mystic and both sing the ancient ways. That
coat covered with embroideries out of old mythologies would fit
Van just fine. In his early poetry, Yeats created an iridescent faery-
land inhabited by the Sidhe, a gentle race who spent a lot of time
dancing beneath the moon. Morrison has his gypsies singing ’round
the campfire, living in time out of mind. He also has a timeless
lovers’ landscape: woods and fields and waterfalls and secluded
lanes. Yeats summons up Cuchulain, Conchubar, Aengus and Fer-
gus, the Red Branch warriors, the Fenian tales; he summons up an
ancient Ireland and, in his late poetry, a Byzantium where souls
clap hands and sing. Morrison sings of Caledonia, an ancient land
which sounds like home to him, a land where his ancestors made a
brand new start and where bagpipes gave birth to the blues.
If the devil makes a covert appearance in Yeats’s grappling with
his sexuality, angels dominate most of Morrison’s work. In this re-
spect his is a soul sensibility: sexual connection as salvation and
rebirth, lovers as guiding lights, the profane as sacred, as wholly
 “It's Too Late to Stop Now” | 13

holy love. But here as elsewhere Yeats and Morrison speak the same
language. Both worship romantic love; both delight in it and define
it as the crooked thing; both have loved and pined and publicly
whined. And both get away with more sentimentality than any
writer should expect to. Yeats and Morrison know how to make
extreme romanticism work. They have fanatic hearts.
And they use language in an extraordinary way. The associative
authority of their words—the power to evoke—is mystical call and
response. Even when Morrison and Yeats are wandering-witted fools
(and they are, on occasion), they can touch us in places we don’t
know how to defend. This alchemy is sometimes clothed in straight-
forward conversational language, sometimes in symbolism. Through
night and the moon and ships in search of harbors, through dancing
and singing, through astral bodies and astral weeks, they speak of
embracing both Thanatos and Eros, of naming the fear and going
beyond.
They seek what Yeats described as “images that constitute the
wild,/The lion and the virgin, /The harlot and the child.” The lion
is a significant image for both of them. Yeats speaks of a dream
that a lion dreamed till the wilderness cried aloud; Morrison listens
to the lion in his soul. Yeats again: “A vast image out of Spiritus
Mundi/Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert/A
shape with lion body and the head of a man.” The lion is both a
resident of the Great Mind and a guide to it, one of those im-
mensely potent archetypal symbols. When the music or the poetry
turns magic, the borders of our minds shift, just like Yeats said they
would, and art takes on the authenticity of dreams that know their
own meaning better than we ever will. This, needless to say, is the
stuff of transcendence.
Comparing one of our greatest poets to a rock star is, needless
to say, the stuff of absurdity. There’s the obvious high/pop incon-
gtuity, and the fact that one wrote Words for Music Perhaps and
the other writes words for music exclusively; there are other incon-
gruities as well. Yeats was a Dublin aristocrat who spent all his life
in Ireland and felt at home among the stately swans at stately
Coole. Morrison is a Belfast street kid with a pilgrim soul, an exile
who writes with obsessive yearning about Cyprus Avenue, a place
of trees and money and mansions on hills. Yeats belonged with
 14. | M. MARK

Lady Gregory inside the house shaken by land agitation; Morrison

has always been outside, with the agitators if not of them.
Still, Yeats paid those visits to Mme. Blavatsky, the Theosophist
necromancer, and Morrison has been known to extoll the virtues
of Rolfing. They share something—and it has to do with what Ed-
mund Wilson called the dreaming and mocking Irish mind. Yeats
and Morrison want to believe in magic. They search for unity, but
view the world through an aesthetic and philosophical filter that
creates oppositions. Their struggle to come to terms with unresolv-
able conflicts is what puts the lion and the moon in their poetry.
Yeats spent most of his life worrying about action versus con-
templation and rationality versus mysticism; he even devised a the-
ory of interpenetrating opposites. In The Vision he laid out his ideas
on Husks and Daimons as if he truly believed in them—though
every few paragraphs the twentieth-century man, the Protestant
man in Yeats, would announce that the supernatural beings were
only poetic symbolism. Yeats also wrote the famous line about
making rhetoric out of our quarrels with others and poetry out of
our quarrels with ourselves. Van Morrison sings amid uncertainty,
too. His music is defined by the quarrels he has with himself, and
his art depends on oppositions of the most fundamental sort: black-
white, open-closed, real-surreal, parts-whole. Without these contra-
dictions, he would be an interesting musician; because of them,
he’s a great one.

Van Morrison is Leadbelly and Otis Redding, Brendan Behan of

the pub brawls and St. Brendan of the quest. He’s a white soul
singer with the black Irish blues; he sings in a way that affirms his
musical roots and transforms them into something altogether his
own. In his category of music, the bat, ball, and vacant lot belong
to him. Because jazz and the blues and R&B and soul are part of
him, Van’s music has nothing to do with borrowing or imitating.
In his best songs, all the elements are there, now one in ascendance,
now another—intertwined, suspended, playing off each other, creat-
ing resonances in the space where they merge or clash.
Van has excellent taste in roots. As a child, he listened to his
 “It's Too Late to Stop Now” | 15

father’s Leadbelly collection, then moved on to Bo Diddley and

Little Richard. In the mid-sixties, before and during the rowdy blues-
raunch days with Them, he assimilated Ray Charles’s sound. It’s
clear that he has also listened to Bobby Bland, Muddy Waters, Wil-
lie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, James Brown,
Chuck Berry, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones
(not to mention the Holy Ghost). It’s clear, too, that he has been
heard—by Bruce Springsteen, Graham Parker, Bob Seger, Phil Lyn-
not. In a sense, Van’s got family. But he has trouble getting home.
When he sings, “It’s a long way to Belfast,” the line rings true. He
could do a great cover of Bobby Bland’s “Lead Me On”: “You know
how it feels, you understand/What it is to be a stranger, in this
unfriendly land.”
Van has spent most of the last ten years in America, the country
that gave birth to the music that gave birth to his. He tried to find
love here, to make it all blend. After marrying Janet Planet, his Cali-
fornia flower-child Maud Gonne, he wentto Woodstock for some
heavy-duty utopianizing with the Band, who were on a similar quest
for lost and found American dreams (perhaps because all but one of
them are Canadian). Van was in a dreamland, a condition that
intensified both his ambivalence about being Irish and the Irishness
itself, (Which isn’t as contradictory as it sounds. An illustration:
When I lived in Iowa, my wardrobe and vocabulary were as sophis-
ticated as possible, befitting one bound for the Big City; now that
I live in New York, my wardrobe consists of jeans and my vocabu-
lary is littered with phrases like “real good,” befitting one reared in
the heartland. I don’t recall deciding to make these changes.) Roots
are a complicated business. Real complicated.
Neither the marriage nor the utopia worked out, but for a while
Van was content. His Band and the Street Choir and Tupelo Honey
prove it. They're his rendition of Dylan’s family-man music; and,
like New Morning, they're short on transcendence. The acknowledg-
ment of unalterable homelessness and the struggle against it are
essential to the awesome poetry of Van’s masterpieces, Astral Weeks
and Veedon Fleece; he wrote the music for both of them during
visits to Ireland. From 1971 to 1976 he lived in California, which in
brogue sounds a lot like Caledonia, After his marriage fell apart, he
 16 | M. MARK
told an interviewer, “I never fit into California. It’s strange I stayed
here so long.” He moved to England, home of his country’s ancient
enemies. In 1978 he moved back to California.
More contradictions: Van is a fine lyric poet who has trouble
with words. Going through clips at Warner Bros., I ran across a
homemade bio from the late sixties, awkward and typo-ridden. At
the bottom Van had scrawled a note to his agent: “Perhaps you
could add or subtract these facts.” Realizing that the sentence
needed fixing but apparently not quite knowing how, he’d stuck a
“to” after “subtract.” He gets his music from another part of him-
self—out of the medium’s mouth or the slipstreams of his mind.
(Joyce, whom he calls a soul writer, turns up in his lyrics, as do
Joycean puns and mystical Catholic terror.) The songs just come to
him, Van says, and often he doesn’t know what they mean. Like
Mrs, Yeats with her automatic writing, he receives messages and
passes them on. His singing is intense because it’s the language he
really knows—it’s his native tongue and his release.
At its best, Van’s music transcribes an intensely personal vision;
his profession is an intensely public one. Because pop culture im-
plies mass audiences, he searches for hit singles as well as the lion
in his soul. And he finds them, “Here Comes the Night,” “Mystic
Eyes,” “Gloria,” “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Domino,” “Wild Night,”
“Jackie Wilson Said,” and ““Wavelength” are rock and roll hits from
a man who would never be mistaken for a rock star. Van is short,
pudgy, gloomy, uncharismatic, uncharming. He tends to disappear
between albums, he gets defensive during interviews, and at con-
certs he can never think of anything to say between songs.
Van is capable of giving .transcendently wonderful concerts and
transcendently awful ones. He has earned his reputation as an er-
ratic performer—galvanizing an audience with his passion, or stand-
ing rigid, clutching the mike stand as if he’d only just decided not
to enter the abyss, covering his eyes with his hand, turning his back
like an Irish folk singer having a private relationship with his song,
attempting to hide behind shades and a less than convincing simula-
tion of cool, sending out waves of distrust and hostility, walking off
stage in mid-set. There’s nothing Brechtian or punkish about this
alienation—it’s too raw and self-punishing to be part of the act.
 “It's Too Late to Stop Now” | 17

Although he wants to touch his listeners directly and deeply, he feels

violated by their presence. He needs a measure of distance to come
close, and he finds it through the wonders of modern science.
Records allow Van to obliterate distance. And second-degree
distancing—records played on the radio—is even more intimate for
him. The radio as receiver as sexual and emotional current as con-
nection is one of his central images. (Wavelength has a twist:
“We're on the telephone and we're connected.”) Van takes this
imagery seriously. He’s lived it. After Astral Weeks, he was down
and out in Boston—few friends, little money, some whiskey. He
spent his evenings telephoning DJs to request blues songs. One
afternoon he heard something on the radio—“The Weight,” as he
recalls, or “I Shall Be Released”—and in response wrote “Brand
New Day.” The rest of Moondance followed.
Another come-close-keep-your-distance convolution has to do
with content and form. Many of Van’s songs are about the pursuit
of direct emotional response, about breaking through barriers, shed-
ding psychological armor, recovering innocence. These messages are
delivered in a formal, mannered vocal style. His voice is a remark-
ably flexible instrument: it can be a saxophone or a guitar or a
violin, gentle, sweet, rich; it can be hard and untouchable. He’s a
master of dynamics—from a whisper to a scream or from a line as
fluid as the ocean to a percussive staccato. He pushes and pulls at
words, he scats and wails and stutters. “Just-a like going home,” he
sings, and “leavin-uh me behind.”
Some of his mannerisms—dropping the first or last word in a line,
for example—come from the blues. Many of them come from gospel
and soul; Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and James Brown leap out of
his mouth from time to time. So does Wilson Pickett, with whom
Van is seldom compared—perhaps because he lacks the Wicked’s
arrogance (Van aims for 100 percent but would never revile 992).
For the Morrison inflection on “all right,” listen to “In the Mid-
night Hour”; for the “huh” that can be either a sexual grunt or a
small sad laugh, listen to “Mustang Sally.” Van also does idiosyn-
cratic variations on jazz mannerisms: he uses hypnotic repetition to
create emotional intensification, and he uses verbal fragmentation
to create unity. He takes songs apart in order to make them whole,
 18 | M. MARK
isolates words and syllables, repeats them, scatters them in the air.
When this technique works, the parts coalesce in magic-lantern
shapes.
Unity of another sort has eluded Van. For a few heady months
in 1963 at Belfast’s Maritime Hotel, he belonged to a group caught
up in the spirit of shared purpose and communality. But by the time
Them began to make a name for itself, Van was being backed by a
revolving crew of studio musicians. Since then, he’s been a star
singer with a more or less faceless band. He doesn’t aim to be an
outsider, but he’s not cut out to be a communard. His back-up mu-
sicians change from album to album, partly because he wants differ-
ent sounds at different times, partly because he’s notoriously difficult
to work for. The bands aren’t able to build the sort of wholeness
that musicians achieve after they've lived with one another for a
while. Still, in Van’s best music, all the instruments, including his
voice, are wholly integrated, They become one big instrument, per-
fectly tuned, expertly played.
There’s more. All of Van’s songs—the rockers, the romantic bal-
lads, the mystical reveries—are of a piece. All of them are about his
search for the right ways to say the right things, ways of caging the
lion or setting it free. In spite of or because of the internal contra-
dictions, all of Van’s music is part of one song, one great incantatory
hymn of praise and propitiation. Which is why it’s ridiculous to
take a single album (a mere verse in the supersong) to the desert
island.
Which is why I refuse.

When the editor of this book—a soulful man, but temporarily an

agent of the English—instructed me to choose one Van Morrison
record, I took the quantitative approach and “It’s Too Late To
Stop Now,” Van’s only double album. But one is clearly not
enough. (Did I mention that the Irish have a deep and loving rela-
tionship with excess? Did I mention that we tend to be pugna-
cious?) Out of good manners and a knowledge of who’s got the
upper hand, I’m willing to limit myself. To a degree. The following
are nonnegotiable demands, If I go to the island, they go too.
 “It's Too Late to Stop Now” | 19

Them (1965, about the time Dylan was bringing it all back
home). “Gloria,” of course: an all-time rock and roll classic of the
growls-and-balls variety. “Mystic Eyes”: chilling graveyard imagery
and a guitar that sounds like a weapon. “One Two Brown Eyes”:
bossa nova beat and devastating lyrics (when Van sings, “I’m gonna
cut you down to size,” you know he’s not gonna do it with his sharp
tongue). “Don’t Look Back’: a blues ballad by John Lee Hooker,
touching precisely because it does look back, with tenderness, with-
out meaning to.
Them Again (1966). “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”: a fine
cover, sadder than Dylan sings it. “My Lonely Sad Eyes”: romantic,
naive, with Dylan’s habit of crowding more syllables into a melodic
line than seems probable. “I Can Only Give You Everything”: Van
sings “I trahee and I trahee” (Q: Who was he listening to? Hint:
I'll leave this cut behind if I can take Out of Our Heads). “Bad or
Good”: Ray Charles-flavored gospel rock, “Bring "Em on In”: Van’s
first I-was-walkin’-down-the-street-checkin’-out-the-boats-in-the-water
song.
Blowin’ Your Mind (1967). On his own, with mixed results: the
second side is a mess, the first side a conceptually brilliant whole
containing a masterpiece. “Brown Eyed Girl”: playful sunlit imagery
of lovemaking in the grass (“Do you remember when we used to
sing shah lah Jah lah lah lah lah Jah-lah lah-lah-tee-dah, lah-tee-dah”)
with a hint of darkness near the end (“So hard to find my way now
that I’m all on my own”). “He Ain’t Give You None”: darkness
intensified, obsessive blues, an edge of desperation. “T.B. Sheets”:
the masterpiece, out of a great tradition (Leadbelly’s ““T.B. Blues,”
Hooker's “T.B. Sheets”) into the viscera. A ten-minute exploration
of claustrophobia and of purgatory (where, in Yeats’s terminology,
outraged souls confront one another again and again until the out-
tage is expiated). Van, who once had tuberculosis, wrote these blues
out of fear; every time I hear him cry “Gotta go,” part of me be-
lieves that neither he nor I will get out of the song alive.
Astral Weeks (1968). An album without which desert-island sur-
vival is impossible. Every cut goes with me. “Astral Weeks”: an
infinitely gentle celebration of sex as rebirth—beautiful flutes and
strings, romantic imagery that goes straight for the Spiritus Mundi,
 20 | M. MARK
and in the middle a disturbing passage filled with muted accusa-
tion. “Cyprus Avenue”: Van contemplates little girls and craziness
way up on way up on way up on the avenue of trees. “Madame
George”: a novelistic work of genius. More scenes from Cyprus
Avenue, with George—whose name may be Joy—falling into (or
inducing) a trance. The boy, Van, says goodbye—“Gotta go”—and
as he leaves, “the room is filled with music laughter music dancing
music all around the room.” “Ballerina”: a song which Van says may
be about a hooker (he’s not sure, it doesn’t matter) and which
haunts like a beautiful dream or a nightmare. “Slim Slow Slider”:
guitars and eerie horns create another dream, more haunting still.
Death and bereavement hover above Ladbroke Grove.
Moondance (1970). Into the mystic, on the mellow side. “Stoned
Me”: quintessential Morrison, stoned just like goin’ home by a
summer shower. “Crazy Love”: an incredibly sweet acknowledg-
ment that her fine sense of humor is something to love .. . I'll take
every cut on the first side, with the exception of “Moondance,” a
jazz song about which Van once said, “Frank Sinatra wouldn’t be
out of place singing that.” Well, exactly. Its replacement: “Brand
New Day” from side two.
His Band and the Street Choir (1970). Pleasant melodies, play-
ful hooks, and as Van himself said in an interview, not much going
on, I'll settle for “Blue Money,” a pun-filled song about time and
cash. Take five, honey.
Van the Man. A classic bootleg recorded mostly at concerts in
1970 and 1971. “Just Like a Woman’; an unembellished, deeply felt
version I like better than Dylan’s, “Moondance”: loose and easy and
very peaceful. “Caledonia Soul Music”: eighteen minutes of mes-
merizing guitar, mandolin, piano, and Van’s voice, which hums like
an ancient tenor horn and chants, “Caledonia soul music/Tell me
what it is.” What it seems to be is something that lolls in the air,
delights, and soothes.
Tupelo Honey (1971). More scenes from the marriage. “Wild
Night”: the one lonely song on the album, a mix of fear/despair/
epiphany and unstoppable beat—the wind catches your feet (sends
you flying, crying) and the inside jukebox roars out just like thunder.
“You're My Woman”: slow, powerful R&B that builds for intense
 “It's Too Late to Stop Now” | 21

lovers-as-shining-lights imagery and then recedes. “Tupelo Honey”:

child of “Crazy Love,” every bit as sweet as.
Saint Dominic’s Preview (1972). Post-marriage toughness and
grace, “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m in Heaven When You Smile)”:
(a) neatly deals with the sacred/profane dichotomy; (b) rocks out.
“Redwood Tree”: catchy tune, uplifting story about a boy, his dog,
his dad, and what they may have learned. “Almost Independence
Day”: Van singing like a guitar (with a Moog) (for a bit too long)
about boats, harbors, fireworks—about America. “Listen to the
Lion”: something like what Yeats had in my mind when he wrote,
“my language beaten into one name.”
Hardnose the Highway (1973). Turgid Vietnamese-peasant-sees-
dove-of-peace cover art, leafy imagery that connotes the Small Mind,
and a self-righteous ditty called “The Great Deception” (“Have you
ever heard about the great Rembrandt/ .. . he didn’t have enough
money for brushes”). Everybody scrapes bottom sometime. A pass.
Veedon Fleece (1975). A magnificently gentle album of Gaelic
mysticism, lit from within—recorder, flute, and guitar music that
sounds centuries old and utterly newborn. I’m taking every cut and
giving special praise to a few. “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights”:
the mournful tale of a man who loved the little children and took
the law into his own hands. “Who Was That Masked Man?”: a
sad, high vocal like Curtis Mayfield gone to heaven and lyrics like,
“Oh, ain’t it lonely/When you're livin’ with a gun.” “Bulbs” and
“Cul de Sac”: uptempo, filled with puns and mystery. “You Don’t
Pull No Punches but You Don’t Push the River’: blues sensibility,
more puns and mystery, and a search for apocryphal fleece.
Period of Transition (1977). Too loose, too self-conscious (assis-
tance from Dr. John), short on evocation, but with a Memphis/New
Orleans groove that makes me more forgiving than I ought to be.
“The Eternal Kansas City”: a chorus out of “You Can’t Always
Get What You Want,” a lonesome question asked again and again
as if persistence might actually help, homage paid to Charlie Parker
and Billie Holiday. “Joyous Sound”: energetic gospel rock. “Fla-
mingos Fly”: an old Morrison song that points toward the mystic.
“Heavy Connection”: in remembrance of Percy Sledge.
Wavelength (1978). Mystical imagery (nights, stars, dancing)
 22 | M. MARK
but without the big risks and short on magic. First-class commercial
music. “Wavelength”: a very good rock and roll song. “Kingdom
Hall”: a not at all bad rock and roll song (its literal-minded com-
mand to throw away all inhibitions, though, is typical of what hap-
pens when the language of the edge is brought back to a safe place).
“Santa Fe”/“Beautiful Obsession”: written with Jackie DeShannon
in 1968, the old rich melodic patterns and a new ending that takes
Van’s fondness for protracted fadeouts to its logical conclusion—a
whole new song, in fact. “Take It Where You Find It’: Lost
Dreams and Found Dreams in America, Part 132, not quite into
the mystic.
The Last Waltz (1978). “Tura Lural Lural (That’s an Irish Lul-
labye)”: a Bing Crosby chestnut as impassioned blues-rock. “Well,
it’s often in dreams that I wander .. .” By the time I knew my grand-
mother, she lived in town, but this song seems to be about the farm
she worked for nearly fifty years. Someone—my grandmother? my
mother?—is rocking me outside the kitchen door. I am a child,
capable of being wholly comforted. This is what the old Spiritus
Mundi is all about.

Over the centuries, the Irish have learned that life is easier if you
placate the boss:
“It’s Too Late to Stop Now,” my desert-island album, was re-
corded in L.A. and London in 1973. It’s not Van’s greatest (live
records seldom are), but it’s a good deal more than a Greatest Hits
Jr. The band is excellent. And large. And fancy. In addition to
standard-issue piano, organ, guitar, bass, and drums, it has promi-
nent saxes, a trumpet, three violins (first: Nathan Rubin, concert
master of the Oakland Symphony), a viola, and a cello. They play
fine. More to the point, they play fine rock and roll. (Opposition,
tension, art.)
Since rock and roll started out to be a revolution against every-
thing safe and smooth and processed, raw edges are as close to its
true spirit as anything is. Live albums omit the overdubbing and let
you listen to the singer clearing his throat; they also let you listen
to the audience listening to the band (which, in a variation on one
 “It's Too Late to Stop Now” | 23

of Van's lines, is listening right back at them). Live albums are

about people touching other people, about intercourse. Because of
Van’s built-in distancer, the audience side of the intercourse on “It’s
Too Late to Stop Now” has more to do with respectful enthusiasm
than abandoned ardor. (When they do get a dialogue going, the
comments—and the decibel level of same—are reminiscent of those
you'd expect at a first-rate jazz concert.) The album has little ex-
traneous chatter, no tedious stretches of applause, and almost none
of the slightly off-the-beat clapping that can make live albums pain-
ful. Spontaneity hasn’t been used as an excuse for sloppy sound.
All that, and an intelligent selection of songs that draws on six
of Van’s records and five of the musicians he learned from. Like
most live albums, this one’s short on concept—but not on structure.
The shape corresponds to a line Van improvises on “Cyprus Ave-
nue”: it’s about a process. Each of his albums synthesizes the past,
and each adds up to more than the sum of its parts. “It’s Too Late
to Stop Now” restates the past and resynthesizes it in another di-
mension. Van listens to several lions on this album, and to several
of his lions’ more or less domesticated relatives. He gets into the
mystic, he gets down, and he gets down to basics, which is to say
roots.
Cat’s Crave: (No Neep To) Fee. Like A FaTHERLEss CHILD.
On one-third of the cuts, Van gives us context; he sings four blues
and two soul covers, Although Van’s post-Them sensibility has little
to do with such blues preoccupations as sex and the devil, he ob-
viously feels right at home singing black American blues, particu-
larly if the music is rural and electrified. “Help Me,” by Sonny Boy
Williamson, is raw country boogie; Van’s version takes you out on
the dance floor and back to the Biscuit Boys. His cover of William-
son’s “Take Your Hand Out of My Pocket” is the only one on the
album that sounds emulative—as a result, the bitterness seems
forced and the arrangement tricky.
No problems at all with the slurred, low-down vocal on Willie
Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” a much recorded song
(by, among others, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Bo Diddley, Chuck
Berry, Etta James, Lou Rawls, the Stones). Dixon played bass for
Muddy Waters in the fifties and wrote “Hoochie Coochie Man” and
 24 | M. MARK
“Little Red Rooster’—blues for a Chicago shouter. Van shouts
hoarsely, sings a duet with a guitar, and demonstrates his mastery of
dynamics. (I JUST. wanna’ make, Love. to You.) “Ain’t Nothin’
You Can Do” was done by Bobby Bland with a soulful balance of
dignity and despair that builds toward agonized cries. Van’s version
has a more complex arrangement, a stronger groove, and (apart from
the first few lines, which sound strangely reassuring) a rougher
approach. |
He also roughens up his soul covers. “Bring It on Home to Me”
is gritty and hungry and miles away from Sam Cooke’s sad gentle-
ness. For his tribute to Ray Charles, Van includes “I Believe to My
Soul,” which Ray wrote in the days before his impeccably dressed
soul began frequenting the middle of the road. Ray sings, “I think
I’m gonna have to use my roar,” and follows through on the threat
with a gospel chorus; Van does it with horns. “These Dreams of
You” is another tribute, a song Van wrote after dreaming about
Ray Charles. It has blues lyrics, an R&B groove, and an odd but
characteristic shape—the song begins in anger, sketches several hos-
tile encounters, and ends with an angel-filled lullabye/love song.
There’s also a tribute within the tribute: Stagger Lee and Billy the
Lion come out of the mythology of black American music and into
Van’s nightmares (“Dreamed we played cards in the dark/And you
lost and you lied’”’).
Srray Cat: Freex Like a Srreet Ficut, (Or, as Carl Perkins put
it, “Rave on, cats!” This is rock and roll.) The Beatles sang, “Here
comes the sun”; Van, with Them, sang, “Here comes the night,”
and immediately won my heart. Too bad it isn’t his song. It was
written by wheeler-dealer Bert Berns, who brought Van to the U.S.
for Blowin’ Your Mind (and who showed the Isleys how to Twist &
Shout). The Them version begins with a great “WOW! Here it
comes!” but gets mired in a popsy sound; this version is vitiated by
strings and a too moderate tempo. Nothing could vitiate “Gloria,”
which comes complete with dirty guitar, dirty vocal, and orgasmic
screams. Listening to it, you know that Jesus died for somebody’s
sins—Van and G,L,O,R,LA are likely candidates. “Domino,” from
Street Choir, isn’t in the class of “Wild Night,” but you can’t sit it
out. Good hot sax and horns, some intriguing laissez-faire psychol-
 “It's Too Late to Stop Now” | 25

ogy, and a line which gets at a primary need in Van’s life: “Just
wanta hear some rhythm and blues music on the radio. Uh huh. All
right.”
House Car: Free: Lixe Stayinc Home. This otherwise well-
balanced album is short on ballads about hearth and cream and love
sweet love. “Warm Love,” written after Van’s divorce, has a banal
story about picnicking amid “green grass so tall” sung in a dis-
tinctly nonloving staccato. But later in the song Van’s voice becomes
a horn that twines among other horns and he sings fluent variations
on “it’s everpresent everywhere.”
Lion; Freer Lixe Goinc Home. (Or, as Yeats put it, “A passion-
driven exultant man sings out/Sentences that he has never thought.”
This is the mystic.) In these songs, Van makes his own blues.
“Cyprus Avenue” sends him back to Belfast in pursuit of Naboko-
vian pleasures and pain. On “It’s Too Late To Stop Now”’—which
has a less soulful, more sketchy version than the one on Astral
Weeks—he leaves out “No one can stop me from lovin’ you, baby/
So young and so bold/Fourteen, yeah I know.” Like most of the
mystical songs, ‘““Cyprus Avenue” alternates between sharply per-
ceived scenes and abstract passages about emotions. It calls up
familiar imagery—autumn, trees, lonesome trains that take lovers
away, wine that eases the loneliness, olden-day ladies returning
from olden-day fairs. The song ends with an invocation: dozens of
sanctified changes rung on “You were standing there in all your
revelation.”
“Saint Dominic’s Preview” is also about Ireland—about being
far from home during troubled times. The title is related to a mass
for Irish peace held at St. Dominic’s church in San Francisco, where
Van was trying to make a new life. The imagery is glancing, oblique,
and for the most part forlorn: people determined not to feel any-
one else’s pain, freedom marchers who feel the pain but can’t solve
the problems, a celebrity who has to face reporters and his own
worst smile, orange crates scattered at the Safeway supermarket in
the rain. Violins and horns take flight in beautiful and intricate
patterns; the music sounds like a lament.
The two Moondance songs are lighter and more hopeful. “Cara-
van” cuts between gypsies ’round the campfire and a twentieth-
 26 | M. MARK

century love story in which difficulties are illuminated/eliminated

when electric lights and radios are turned on. The music is lush and
contrapuntal: Vivaldi as soulman. (Listen to the first few bars of
“Caravan” for an illustration of that gesture my friend and I tried
to define.) “Into the Mystic” is a great song about finding connec-
tion and going home—except that part of the time Van seems to be
singing, “When that foghorn blows/You know I won't be coming
home.” (His lion thrives on ambiguity.) Near the beginning, a
violin soars high above the rest of the music, then floats down, a
leaf. Near the end, horns modulate from brassy to majestic, accom-
panied by quick, high, flighty violin figures. A song to rock the soul.
In “Listen to the Lion,” Van’s love comes tumblin’ down (it’s
obviously the midnight hour), he searches his soul for the mys-
terious leonine thing, his tears like water flow. The words are clichéd.
The song is utterly magical. Listening for the lion, he hears the Holy
Ghost and chants in tongues—glossolalia, ecstatic utterance that
sounds not unlike a roar. The song ends with a leap back in time;
we sail from Denmark way up to Caledonia, and for a little while
we can believe in the possibility of mystical rebirth.

Now about this lion. It’s more than a sound—something like living
up to the blues, something like what Yeats had in mind when he
wrote about climbing to a place swept bare by the salt sea wind.
The lion is related to extremities and dislocation and questing, to
big questions and possibly big answers. It’s related to defenseless-
ness and instinctual response.
Late one night, the prisoners described in Cold Stone Jug go
beyond the level of desperation they’ve learned to live with. First one,
then another, then dozens of them begin to bay at the full moon.
The next day they pretend it didn’t happen. In “The Cat and the
Moon,” Yeats writes of a black cat who stares at his nearest kin
and dances to the elemental music of the night: “Minnaloushe
creeps through the grass,/Alone, important, and wise,/And lifts to
the changing moon/His changing eyes.” The cat and the moon are
the lion.
There’s another kind of defenselessness: the intensity which
 “It’s Too Late to Stop Now” | 27

comes from discarding self-protection because you figure that you

don’t have a choice or that you’ve got nothing left to lose. Robert
Johnson singing out of his demons. Janis Joplin crying, “It ain’t
fair!” Neil Young—drunk, angry, off-key—mourning his friends in
“Tonight’s the Night.” Eric Clapton, on his knees, finding the blues
at the beginning of “Layla.” The lion also has something to do
with the overwhelmingly beautiful music after the piano break in
“Layla”—pain accepted and transcended, the peace that lies on the
other side of despair.
Leadbelly dealt with his demons in bed and in jail and on the
run. Unlike Robert Johnson, he lived long enough to reach a place
where demons seemed like home to him and he could be calm. In
“Good Night Irene,” he sings the line about sitting down by the
fireside in much the same way he sings, “Sometimes I get a great
notion to jump in the river and drown.” He also sings, “You gotta
ride it like you find it.” Van Morrison has a version of that attitude:
“You don’t pull no punches but you don’t push the river, you don’t
pull no punches and you don’t push the river.”
My grandmother was fond of taking solitary moonlit walks and
listening to baseball games on the radio; she could recite fantastical
fairy tales and Cub RBIs. The summer she turned ninety, her doc-
tor suggested that she might consider eating more sensibly—say,
toast and tea for lunch. Most days she had toast and tea .. . and
half a dozen radishes. My father, her son-in-law and friend, some-
times played a lonesome harmonica late at night. Their friendship
was based on a shared fondness for wisecracks. One day, watching
her eat radishes, he said, “Don’t they come back on you?” She
grinned. “Come back better every time.”
Willie Mae Thornton sang with the blend of resignation and
rebelliousness and pride that poor people learn early on. She made
a wonderful recording of “Hound Dog,” that consummately silly
imitation black song (written by white men) which eared Elvis
buckets of money. It earned Big Mama Thornton about fifty cents.
In the middle of her version of the song, with a neat mixture of
drollery and rue, she turns to her guitarist and says, “I like your tan.”
The lion has something to do with humor that encompasses pain.
In the end, of course, it gets away, as lions ought to, Leadbelly
 28 | M. MARK
once remarked that black people like the blues because they were
born with them. He added, ‘“‘Now everybody have the blues. Some-
times they don’t know what it is.” Van Morrison sings, “There’s
something going on/It fill you up, it fill you up, it fill you up now./
Well you don’t know what it is,/But you don’t know what it is,/But
you don’t need to know.”
One night last year, “Into the Mystic” was playing; I was danc-
ing. The music built for “I want to hear it, I don’t have to fear it,
and I want to rock your gypsy soul.” On about “want to rock” I
came down from a leap—the sort of maneuver I’ve been unable to
do since ruining my knee on ballet ten years ago. The leap was not
physiologically possible. It happened. I limped for a few days after-
wards, but it didn’t matter much: for an instant, I left the ground.
Step right up, just like a ballerina, And step right up and step
right up. Ballerina. You're going somewhere and I know you won't
be back, I know you're dying (a girl at play that, it may be, had
danced her life away, for now being dead it seemed that she of
dancing dreamed). Could you find me? Would you kiss my eyes?
Lay me down in silence easy, to be born again (grown nothing,
knowing all) in another place, in another time, you go out, you
come back. Gotta go. Come back. (Come back better every time.)
Looking for a brand new start, for a brand new...
Or: Shah lah lah lah lah lah lah lah-lah lah-lah-tee-dah. Lah tee
dah.
 BEGGARS BANQUET
THE ROLLING STONES (LONDON PS-539)
1968

SIMON FRITH
I’ve had the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet ten years already and
it still makes me laugh. It’s the cleverest record the Stones ever
made and the subtlest, and it includes all the usual arrogance, dance,
and dirt.\If I ever stopped learning from Beggars Banquet 'I could
still jump up and down to it and reminisce. I don’t know how Mick
Jagger became the symbol of rock and roll but he did and I’ve had
to think about him and his band and his music more than I’ve had
to think about anything else in rock.\—, cai
Which isn’t to say that I’ve ever been much of a Rolling Stones
fan. In the days when people paired off and cool people were Stones
people, I was a Beatles fan—they were more comfortable—and later,
when the Stones became The Greatest Show on Earth, I couldn’t
get a ticket. I’ve only seen them once and that was later still, a rou-
tine show featuring Percy the Plastic Phallus and Billy Preston danc-
ing. I wasn’t that impressed. Over the years I’ve bought few Stones
records and liked fewer; “Satisfaction” remains, for me, the most
overrated record ever. Mick Jagger and Keith Richard were the first
stars I ever interviewed but even that was a mistake—I’d been hoping
for a few words with Andrew Loog Oldham.
Even then, in 1965, I was asking Johnny Rotten’s question:
 30 | SIMON FRITH
“Who cares?” My Stones pose was weariness, a pose I’ve feigned
pretty well ever since. But it’s a pose that’s taken effort to maintain
and reflects a furtive obsession. Making sense of rock has meant
making sense of the Stones and when Beggars Banquet came out in
1968 I changed my usual habits—bought this white album, left the
Beatles’ white album on its parallel shop floor pile. The Beatles
still made more comfortable music but Beggars Banquet was the
most interesting record I’d ever heard.
Most rock records aren’t difficult to understand. They draw on
commonplaces of community and adolescence: easy listening, good
dancing, simple emotions, and sharp images. From this point of
view Beggars Banquet isn’t difficult either, just a mainstream Stones
LP, party music with a sneer and a leer. But its cleverness makes the
difference. The Stones, as intellectuals, share an acute, almost con-
temptuous grasp of their own paradoxes: British makers of Amen-
can music, white romancers of black culture, middle-class triflers
with working-class urgencies, adult observers of youth, aesthetes of
body music. Beggars Banquet is the celebration of the contradictions
of British rock culture.
Which means, for a start, that the Stones are not musical ge-
niuses. They’re solid and insistent (the best rhythm section in
rock) but their talent is hard-working rather than magical; theirs
are craftsmen’s skills, with craftsmen’s loving knowledge of the tools
of their trade. The basis of the Stones sound is not an up-front
flashiness, but the background rhythms; Brian Jones’s contribution
to Beggars Banquet is unclear but since he’s been gone the Stones
have used journeyman guitarists, Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood,
comrade artisans, nothing startling.
It’s up to Mick Jagger to carry the charisma and the result is
mannered; on record Jagger continually cuts back from his own
emotions, mocks his own pretentions as a white blues singer. Irony
is implicit in his Stones persona. Similarly, as writers Jagger and
Richard are efficient but self-conscious. Their songs rarely take the
breath away—no images to haunt like Bob Dylan’s, no language as
beautiful as Smokey Robinson’s, none of John Lennon’s plain talk.
The Stones tend to vulgarity, to the slyly pounding use of rock
clichés. The magic of the Stones lies in their transformation of the
 Beggars Banquet | 31

ordinary into the extraordinary and if this transformation is hard

to grasp analytically, it clearly rests on their awe-inspiring commit-
ment to rock and roll itself.
The Stones have commented on this themselves, but “It’s Only
Rock ’n Roll” was a shoddy record, evading the questions it raised.
Keith Richard is “only” a rock and roll star (the only rock and roll
star?) but it is a life, not a pose, a life that is disturbing and not
much to be envied. The spirit of Keith Richard, gaunt and bad-
toothed, a never-sleeping swirl of sound, hovers over the uneasy
dreams of all rock fans, and this haunting image can’t be exorcised
by boogie clichés. It needs more sensitive, more cerebral expression
and Beggars Banquet is the Stones’ most intellectual account of
their rock and roll values.
Hedonism is usually taken as the basis of these values—rock and
roll and sex and drugs and if it feels good, do it. But hedonism isn’t
really what the Stones are about. Sex is the key to their pleasure
(they’ve rarely celebrated drug use, hippie-style) and the Stones’
pleasure in sex is notorious. Beggars Banquet includes one of Jagger’s
most explicit sexual performances, “Stray Cat Blues.” Over a seedy
blues backing he slurs a smug commentary on young groupie sex:
“Bet your mother don’t know you can scratch like that!”
What’s erotic about this track is not its abandon but its detach-
ment. Jagger isn’t wheedling these girls up to his rooms, he’s taking
their presence for granted. It’s not his needs he’s worried about, but
their plain expression, without romantic or psychological frills. The
music is sensuous in its very laziness: this isn’t a boogie band’s mas-
turbation fantasy, a simulated urgency, it’s a blues, and Keith Rich-
ard’s chord changes are churned out with a sure solidity, a sexual
certainty that is much more disturbing than a rock guitarist’s usual
phallic come-on. As Jagger’s vowels get longer and longer, more and
more insidious, it becomes obvious that his contempt is less for the
girls involved—children going about their pleasure business—than
for the straight world that can only experience such simple sex as
cheap, nasty, titillating.
And so Jagger plays the part of the leering seducer, parodies the
Jagger image his listeners need to measure against their own respect-
ability. The Stones’ own sexual morality is expressed not in “Stray
 32 | SIMON FRITH
Cat Blues” but in “Parachute Woman,” a clearer statement of sex-
ual need. It’s solid again, R&B thrust and chorus, but Jagger is
deeper-voiced, uses his harmonica to make the traditional demand-
ing sound and says matter-of-factly what he wants. Lyrically, the
song is unimpressive—standard blues metaphors without much res-
onance, wit or point—but emotionally it makes clear the Stones’
claim to adult status. Their case is made without musical rhetoric,
teenage self-pity, or male drama. “I’m in for a spell of paradise” is an
assertion, not a dream; life on the road and the morality of the mo-
ment. A sexist song but without sexist consequence, because what
is being expressed is not sexual pride but emotional disinterest.
Most popular songs are love songs, but love is too sociable a con-
cept for the Stones. They’ve made love songs, but they’re atypical.
“Angie,” for example, is dependent on the language and sentiment,
the pretty tune and vapid rhythm, of pop convention. The best
Stones songs about love are non-love songs, statements of non-
involvement, no commitment. “No Expectations” is the Stones’
finest non-love song. In an acoustic blues of great tenderness, Jag-
ger never once pulls back from his argument that “love is like water,
that flashes on a stone.” Spells of paradise are conveyed now by a
stately but inexorable musical movement. The emotional point is
that a traveler’s life is incompatible with domesticity: no ties mean
no expectations, no expectations mean no ties. The argument is de-
scriptive, not moral: the road and the home each have their own
decencies, loyalties, and self-respect, neither life is better than the
other. The music is dignified, the slide guitar adds pathos. What is
involved here is not hedonism, or even self-indulgence.
In the beginning, Andrew Loog Oldham decided that the best
way to sell the Stones was in shock horror headlines. Out went Ian
Stewart (looked too much the car-cleaning suburban man) and in
came silly album sleeves. The Stones soap opera has run ever since
and Oldham’s original pranks have had sinister consequences, pro-
jecting the Stones into their roles as the villains of Altamont, the
idols of decadent chic. The dumbest track on Beggars Banquet is
“Sympathy for the Devil.” Jagger as Satan wends his way through
famous dark events from the Crucifixion of Christ to the assassina-
tions of the Kennedys. Lyrically, the song is idle in the extreme. The
 Beggars Banquet | 33

images are strung together with little rhyme or reason—is the Rus-
sian Revolution really equivalent to a Kennedy assassination? Jagger
indulges in some surprisingly glib moralizing. “After all,” he smirks,
“it was you and me.”
Bullshit. It wasn’t him or me that killed the Kennedys. Any
interesting point the song might make about popular obsessions
with evil and violence is lost in the swirl of “ooh oohs,” in the
falsetto riffs. Any sense of doom is undercut by the song’s jolly beat;
lyrical portentousness is punctured by the chirpy percussion. “Sym-
pathy for the Devil” has been heard as the Macbeth of rock music,
a song with the mysterious power to impel new dark deeds, but
that’s not how the Stones play it. If “Stray Cat Blues” is a cosmic
commentary on their supposed sexual appetites, “Sympathy for the
Devil” is a comic comment on their supposed outrageousness. It’s
funny, sure enough, and as a piece of devilcraft it’s about as disturb-
ing as The Omen and much less upsetting than Beggars Banquet’s
other religious song, “Prodigal Son.”
I’ve always lived a decent, sober, careful life, and I’ve always
found the story of the prodigal son the most unpleasant in the New
Testament. It’s straightforward enough: A father has two sons. One
day the younger one asks for his share of the property, gets it, con-
verts it into cash and takes off for a good time. Eventually, when he
has squandered it all “in reckless living,” is destitute and starving, he
goes back home again. His father sees him coming, rejoices, kills a
fatted calf to celebrate the prodigal’s return. The older brother, who
has meanwhile been working dutifully for his father, keeping the
family income going, is dismayed and won’t join the feast—his fa-
ther has never celebrated his good behavior. “But,” his father
remonstrates, “your brother here was dead and has come back to
life/Was lost and is found.”
As a parable of forgiveness, I suppose this is okay but the secu-
lar emotion it inspires (at least in all of us who identify with the
older brother) is resentment. In the same circumstances I’d sulk
even worse. The Stones, of course, identify easily and naturally with
the prodigal. The version of the tale they chose—written by black
sanctified singer Rev. Robert Wilkins—is a blues story: simple, un-
adorned, detached. Jagger narrates in the first person. He is the
 34 | SIMON FRITH
prodigal son, returning to his father, not expecting the fatted calf
but not surprised by it either. For the prodigal the whole affair is
neither emotional (as it is for his father) nor is it instructive (as it
is for his brother); it is just another episode in the prodigal life that
creates its own morality as it goes along.
The Stones’ performance of the story is stately and without ten-
sion; their self-assurance is stunning. The real point of the Stones
soap opera turns out to be that they get away with behavior most
of us daren’t risk for fear of the consequences. They take the risks,
get away with them, and don’t much care either way. Sex and drugs
and rock and roll: no expectations but no consequences either, and
for the rest of us, engaged in constant behavioral calculus, it is the
Stones’ lack of interest in moral accounting and not their supposed
“sinfulness” that is shocking.
1968 was a good year for the Stones to consider the story of
the prodigal son. It was a very moral year. Counter-culture and
counter-politics came together with an intensity of self-righteousness
that even the Stones had to respect. The year did, in a sense, mark
the Stones’ retum to their domestic base. After the arty indul-
gence of Their Satanic Majesties Request, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and
then Beggars Banquet reached back to the values and sounds of the
Stones’ R&B dance music days, These records had an Englishness,
a provinciality, that belied the Stones’ international aura, But the
1968 problem for the Stones was not to respond to some notion of
the people’s morality. They never renounced their success or their
style; they weren’t, whatever happened, John and Yoko. The
Stones’ problem in 1968 was, rather, that their reckless living
had exhausted their resources. They needed to go home again and
going home, in this context, meant a grappling with a notion of
collectivity. Politics was much more of a challenge than psychedelia.
The counter-culture had given the Stones another version of indi-
vidualism and indulgence; counter-politics posed the problem of
joining.
Their response was “Street Fighting Man,” their finest single and
the cornerstone of Beggars Banquet. On the surface, “Street Fight-
ing Man” is an ironic commentary on the Stones’ own position in
1968: their detachment from everyone else’s passions, their doubts
about the effectiveness of such passions in sleepy London town, their
 Beggars Banquet | 35

own cop-out—“What can a poor boy do, but to sing in a rock and
roll band?” But beneath the lyrical commentary is a more subtle
musical commentary. “Street Fighting Man” makes a direct link
between rock and roll and politics that qualifies the wry alternatives
of the lyrics. Rock’s beat is made military, its steadiness and uni-
formity are emphasized, its power and vigor become ominous. The
Stones borrow a Pete Townshend device, opening with strummed
thythm guitar before thundering in with the sustained sounds of
electricity. The transformation of rock language into militaristic
marching music reverses the point of the lyrics: the argument is not
that rock is a source of revolutionary energy and solidarity (the
Yippie suggestion) but that revolution in its 1968 youth expression
had no more solid basis than the community of rock and roll con-
sumers. Politics, the Stones concluded, is just a matter of style. If
marching in the streets was collective behavior, it was still no more
meaningful than any other form of rock and roll behavior. The
oblique reference is to “Dancing in the Street,” Martha and the
Vandellas’ 1963 hit, but while that dancing record later took on
resonance for black rioters in the streets, the Stones’ “Street Fight-
ing Man” was only a dance record. The street activities of 1968
became, in the Stones’ sneer, just another metaphor for self-
indulgence. The Stones had come home, but only to scoff.
For Mick Jagger, son of the middle class, London School of
Economics student and elitist, the biggest joke has always been his
fans’ romanticization of the working class. His own false cockney
accent and all-purpose dumb prole pose have been a useful way of
keeping the press distant, but the Stones’ music has rarely ex-
pressed any affection for workers. The normal line is a bohemian
contempt for the commonplace and a long-standing Stones conven-
tion is the jokey redneck song. On Beggars Banquet we get “Dear
Doctor”—“Oh help me, dear doctor, I’m damaged”—sung in nasal
harmonies to a raucous bar-band backing. And we get to laugh at
some poor dolt who’s got involved with a wedding. The theme is
not sympathy for a victim of the tension beween love and freedom,
but contempt for someone who can only suffer such tension pas-
sively. The track has a musical coldness that only a highly intellec-
tual rock band could manage.
Most of the time the Stones have got away with their contempt
 36 | SIMON FRITH

for everyone else because it answers the snobbery of their audiences,

but in 1968, when everyone in Europe was busy identifying with
the proletariat, this position needed justification. The Stones’ most
touching 1968 song was “Jigsaw Puzzle,” an all-purpose Bob Dylan-
style number, instant pop in which Jagger tries to persuade us that
he does have a social critique, that he too has been an outcast all
his life. It’s the jigsaw puzzle of life—the Stones’ imagery is from a
bad sermon, a series of familiarly resonant pictures: the tramp on
the doorstep, the bishop’s daughter, the queen shouting, “What the
hell is going on?” Desolation Row again and just as meaningless but
less literate and not as witty. Funnier, though—by the time we get
to the twenty thousand grandmas screaming which side are you on
we might as well be listening to the Bonzo Dog Band. Jagger sings
convincingly, the rhythm section is masterful in its persistence, and
the result is monoto-rock that I could listen to forever.
As sociology, however, “Jigsaw Puzzle” is silly—the Stones don’t
need to make their political points through poetry. Oscar Wilde
once remarked that he favored socialism because it would free him
from the burden of having to worry about other people. The Stones’
position is the same, and the imagery of “Jigsaw Puzzle” is mislead-
ing. The Stones are voluntary outcasts and their attitude toward
other outcasts isn’t solidarity but curiosity and amusement. Beggars
Banquet the album is called, and the inside sleeve makes the mes-
sage plain—the Stones as beggars, gorging on the: illicit fruits of
some bourgeois kitchen. The picture is straight from a Bufiuel film.
But unlike Bufiuel, the Stones don’t see their grotesques and losers,
their exiles on mainstreet, as sources of grace or honesty but rather
as the objects of aesthetic titillation. The value of outcasts is simply
in their contrast to the ugliness of the mundane, or even, in 1968,
to the working class.
In 1968 the Stones were too bright not to make their own com-
ment on capitalism but their critique was exclusively aesthetic.
Capitalism is condemned for its ugliness; the working class are espe-
cially exploited because they are especially ugly. “Factory Girl” is
an acoustic song, almost a folk track, with Jagger again taking the
worker's voice—but stolid now, not jokey. He’s waiting for a girl
with curlers in her hair, with stains all down her dress, but he’s
 Beggars Banquet | 37

waiting patiently, his feet are getting wet. The girl is described
without emotional comment; there’s no suggestion that she’s worth
anything more than the description, no reference to qualities under
her curlers or even under her dress, The song is profoundly unerotic
and it is not clear what our response is meant to be. The simple
strummed sound and Jagger’s easy vocal suggest an innocence, but
an innocence to be pitied rather than admired or enjoyed. This fac-
tory worker is pathetic, a far cry from 1968 political myths, and the
Stones’ music, for once, has no anger in it. The irony involved is
more a matter of distaste than outrage. “Is this the working class
you want us to march with?”
The Stones return to the theme in Beggars Banquet’s closing
track. “Salt of the Earth” is a drinking song. It combines the mili-
taristic musical references of “Street Fighting Man” with the music
hall references of “Factory Girl’ and comes straight from a pub.
A hearty melody, a solid sound, and Jagger ringing the changes,
drinking to hard-working people and uncounted heads and back-
breaking men and common foot-soldiers and stay-at-home voters.
The music builds up the sense of jolly community and only slowly
does its irony seep through—this emotion is false, these are the
emptily patronizing phrases the ruling class has mouthed through
the ages. When Jagger steps out of the chorus it is to make a differ-
ent point about the people: “They don’t look real to me, in fact they
look so strange...” And still the music builds, the chorus soars,
until, as the populism peaks, the Stones have achieved the maxi-
mum distance between what the music feels like and what the music
means. The references as they echo back across the album—
references to marching in the street, to working-class ea. to
styles of collectivism—are plain and sour.
Which is why I’ve never really been a Stones fan. I’ve always
heard them as petit bourgeois jesters, who’ve taken delight in
standing morality on its head but ‘retained a touchy egotism, a con-
tempt for the masses that they share with any respectable small
shopkeeper. Their rebellion has been a grand gesture, an aesthetic
style without a social core, It is a politically ambiguous position
and the Stones’ sharp worldliness has always been confused by child-
ishness, sexism, a surly individualism. The British punk point—“No
 38 | SIMON FRITH
more Stones in ’77!”—rests on the angry argument that however
excitingly the Stones say it, they have nothing socially significant
to say.
I share the instincts of this argument, but then I listen to
Beggars Banquet again and know that the punks have got it all
wrong. The Stones’ best music remains the source of rock’s great-
est energy and joy, and even for the punks—especially for the punks
—the Stones remain the greatest symbol of rock and roll possibility.
It’s back to my own Stones problem: bad politics, good rock and
roll—how to reconcile them? The punk cliché is that the Stones were
politically okay once, but got rich and famous and irrelevant. This
is nonsense. The Stones haven’t changed their position from the day
they started; their rock and roll may have got worse but their poli-
tics were never any better. Which leaves only one other possibility:
good rock and roll equals bad politics. Don’t the grace and power
and dignity of Beggars Banquet depend on its social detachment?
I’ve spent ten years of my life avoiding the conclusion and I’m
quite happy to spend the rest of my life at it. I mean, if I had to
choose between rock and Marxism I’d choose rock, but I still don’t
think the choice is necessary because Beggars Banquet moves me,
makes me laugh, but it has also made me think, about rock, about
politics, and, for all the Stones’ snooty bohemianism, their account
of their world fits my account of mine. It even illuminates it.
Beggars Banquet is constructed around a series of paradoxes but
all its puzzles rest on the central ambiguity of the Stones’ history:
are they earnest, hard-working craftsmen or dilettante, pleasure-
seeking playboys? This ambiguity isn’t unique to the Stones. All
popular entertainers work at our play, dedicate themselves to our
relaxation. The importance of the Stones is that they take pleasure
completely seriously. Their commitment to it is total and the result
is neither hedonism nor outrage but an awesome self-sufficiency.
Beggars Banquet makes its own comment on the Stones’ stardom,
on their lives of glamour and excitement; the music has a pathos,
an appreciation of the false promises of pleasure that has been
matched in rock only by Elvis Presley.
And it is in this respect that Stones music is political: not as an
analysis of conflict or exploitation, certainly no commitment to party
 Beggars Banquet | 39

or class, but powerful and critical all the same. Punk’s political
ideologues, like sixties politicos before them, measure musical se-
riousness by reference to reality; my point is that play is as much a
reality as work—and the Stones have played more seriously than
anyone else. Beggars Banquet, so intense in its pursuit of pleasure,
lays bare the weight borne by our notions of love and sex, the secret
melancholy of life in the consumer collective. These are as much
effects of current capitalism as dole queues and boring jobs and
material squalor and the Stones’ pleasure perspective gives us a
new sense of them, a sense strengthened, not weakened, by the
Stones’ own aesthetic stance, In other words, the function of the
Stones’ rock and roll dedication (which, in 1968, seemed cynical)
is not self-indulgence or escape but defiance. Beggars Banquet cele-
brates the reality of capitalist pleasure and denies its illusions. No
expectations, a lot of laughs—the Stones’ strength derives from their
prodigality, from their denial of consequence.
The Stones aren’t an activist band—“Street Fighting Man” is
still the fairest comment on that—but this no longer bothers me.
Like them, I no longer believe in the political possibilities of counter-
culture—no useful revolution is going to announce itself through
stereo headphones. I value the Stones differently. As the poets of
lonely leisure they’ve made more sense of my “free time” than any-
one else, and I can’t live my nights and weekends without them.
Beggars Banquet is pre-revolutionary art and can’t get me complete
satisfaction. But what the hell, it’s the best there is.
 PRESENTING
THE FABULOUS RONETTES
FEATURING VERONICA
THE RONETTES (PHILLES PHLP—4006)
1964

JIM MILLER
Don’t want to spend my life,
living in a rock’ roll fantasy
Don’t want to spend my life,
living on the edge of reality
Don’t want to waste my life,
hiding away anymore.
—Ray Davies,
“A Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy”

Her motel was down the strip from the shopping center where the
Ronettes were appearing. This was her first tour in almost ten
years. In 1964, the Ronettes had headlined at the Brooklyn Fox and
the Copa and toured with the Beatles and Rolling Stones. In 1973,
they were playing suburban clubs catering to dimly-lit memories.
A colleague had invited me to help interview Veronica, lead
singer for the Ronettes and once upon a time wife of Phil Spector,
the world’s greatest rock and roll producer. In their heyday they
had made sublime records together. But after she married him in
1966, the Ronettes disbanded, and Veronica virtually disappeared.
In the following six years, Spector cut only two singles with her—
 Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica | 41
Fos

records that scarcely approached the glories of “Be My Baby,” the

Ronettes’ first and biggest hit, released in 1963.
She was staying in a suite with her mother, who chaperoned
our interview with the same discreet care she must have once
devoted to the career of the original Ronettes—a trio consisting of
her two daughters, Estelle and Veronica Bennett, and their cousin,
Nedra Talley. Veronica’s family was committed to entertainment.
Her grandmother, who insisted that Ronnie learn three-part
harmony with Estelle and Nedra, helped launch their career as
“The Dolly Sisters”; later, they were called Ronnie and the
Relatives. Billed as the Ronettes, the trio eventually found them-
selves dancing and singing with Joey Dee at the Peppermint
Lounge, warming up audiences for Murray the K at the Brooklyn
Fox, singing back-up on records by Bobby Rydell. Ronnie was
scarcely sixteen.
One day, Estelle dialed a wrong number and got Phil Spector
on the phone. After apologizing, she discovered that Phil had
heard of the Ronettes, needed singers for a Crystals session, and
would the Ronettes be interested in coming over? Or so the story
goes.
Veronica greets us sweetly. Weary of living the life of a caged
parakeet with Spector and hopeful of resurrecting her career as a
singer, she has fled his sanctuary for a tour of the East Coast oldies
circuit—venues numerous enough to sustain five different versions
of “The Original Platters,” depressing enough to dissuade all but
the most desperate from making it a way of life.
Her teased hair cascades around eyes that are no longer quite
hidden beneath a mountain of mascara. On stage, she still plays to
the image of the tough chick. But in her room, she seems vulner-
able, girlish, and rather at sea in the world. After confiding my
own incurable passion for “Be My Baby,” she thanks me with a
kiss on the cheek.
On a desk lay several boxes of matches with gold-on-black block
lettering: VERONICA ESTELLE NEDRA. Ronnie explains
that Phil had gotten a number of these boxes made for the group’s
debut at the Copacabana, but that since few people outside the
industry had attended that engagement and the extra boxes were
 42 | JIM MILLER

cluttering the house, she had decided to bring some along to use
on this tour.
Phil had not wanted her to make the trip. He disapproved of
having his wife cheapen herself in nightclubs. He didn’t like her
exposing herself to the seamy side of show biz. Despite her pleas,
he had also refused to reissue the one Ronettes album he had
released on Philles, his own label, in 1964. Veronica said she felt
sorry for the fans. I said I felt sorry for her.
After seeing her act at the oldies club, I felt even more sorry.
Sounding like Helen Reddy with inflamed adenoids, she staggered
through a set handicapped by a plodding pick-up band. Without
the strings, horns and handclaps, ““Be My Baby” and “Walking in
the Rain” were empty. But she gamely went through the motions,
relishing what little applause she won. Such recognition was a
tangible symbol of her autonomy, proof of her independence from
Spector. Several months later, they were divorced.
The main memento I carried away from our encounter was an
autographed copy of Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring
Veronica, For years, I coveted this album. In what I count as my
greatest find as a collector, I had discovered a copy in 1970, in a
supermarket cut-out bin. Ronnie was very obliging, signing my
copy “To Jim, Very nice to meet You, Love always, Ronnie S.
Ronettes.” She drew an arrow from her name to her picture on
the cover—as if she could be mistaken for anyone else.
But then, the album that presented her as an idol had also put
her in her place. If the cover proclaimed “Featuring Veronica,” the
label, dropping her name, stated plainly, “Producer: PHIL
SPECTOR.” Ronnie might be elevated on a pedestal and Phil
might even marry her, but for the record there. was ‘no question
who was in command, Larry Levine’s liner notes set the tone:
“When I first met The Ronettes I didn’t think they were going to
be a very good group. Phil had said to me, ‘I found this group,
they’re good looking, but they don’t sing too well.’ So I said, ‘Well,
why bother?’ He said, ‘I kind of promised their mother.’ ”
He had already proven himself as producer, entrepreneur,
megalomaniacal mogul of pop. He had created his own record
company. With the Crystals, Darlene Love, a small band of crack
 Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica | 43

Los Angeles sessionmen, arranger Jack Nitzsche, and engineer

Larry Levine, he had forged his own unique “wall of sound.” He
was rock’s most eccentric version yet of the self-made man.
His real gift was his ear for music. A child of fifties rock and roll,
a composer and singer on a number one record at the age of
seventeen, an understudy on the hits produced by Jerry Leiber and
Mike Stoller for Ben E. King and the Drifters, Phil Spector culti-
vated a street-wise flair for image and melody. He was after a new
concept in recorded sound. He took as prototypes uptown producers
like George Goldner, uptown performers like the Chantels and
Frankie Lymon, Brill Building songsmiths like Doc Pomus and
Mort Shuman, Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Uninterested in
merely emulating them, he was obsessed with outstripping them,
doing what they had done, but doing it unimaginably better,
making rock and roll records that were more refined, more direct,
more sophisticated, and more powerful than anything anybody had
ever heard before. With an astonishing mélange of raw instinct
and Tin Pan Alley panache, he pushed “teen-feel’” pop past
adolescent sit-coms and straight into the heart of a sonic blitzkrieg
that could have but one architect: Phil Spector, auteur, artiste,
self-crowned king of rock and roll.
What Spector heard in Veronica’s voice is hard to say. Under
the kindest of circumstances, it is an unsteady instrument. Her
wavering vibrato wobbles off pitch; her diction is slurred; her timing
awkward, Yet in this ungainliness and in the native forcefulness of
her voice, Spector encountered the sound of sincerity. Handed the
most banal moon-June lyrics, Ronnie made them feel brand new,
simply by sounding so anxious to please. She claims to have been
in awe of Frankie Lymon. It shows in her expression of romantic
sentiments with pre-adolescent innocence, an incongruity all the
more seductive coming from a voluptuous 18-year-old dressed to kill.
Spector fell in love, not with Veronica Bennett, struggling
singer, but rather with the sultry chanteuse he tried to transform
her into. For a producer who specialized in throwaway albums,
Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes shows signs of caring—and not
only because it collects five of Spector’s best singles. Ronnie
brought a human presence to Spector’s grandiose vision. In her
 44 | JIM MILLER
voice, Spector found a challenge, and also a way of resurrecting the
most shopworn sentiments with a conviction that was both pure
and powerfully erotic—a rock and roll Lolita for the airwaves of
America.
He chose to present her, not in the urban melodramas he had
perfected with the Crystals, but instead in a succession of un-
adorned lyrics about love, written with the help of Ellie Greenwich
and Jeff Barry, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Vin Poncia and
Peter Andreoli. His first single with the Ronettes, “Be My Baby,”
introduced the group with a glorious thunderclap of percussion.
As if on the brink of losing herself, Veronica strains to hit her
notes—an impassioned struggle surrounded by a clatter of castanets
and Jack Nitzsche’s string arrangement, scored for subliminal cellos
until the magisterial break for full orchestra. The air of incandes-
cence is Only amplified by Ronnie’s slightly breathless urgency.
Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes puts that song in a new con-
text. On one level, of course, the album is simply a glorified
greatest hits package. It would be a classic even if it only contained
Spector’s first five Ronettes singles: “‘Be My Baby,” “Baby, I Love
You,” “Breakin’ Up,” “Do I Love You,” and “Walking in the
Rain.” Spector was forced to do battle with the British Invasion in
his sequels to “Be My Baby.” Released in the same year that saw
the Beatles transform the nature of rock, none of them sold par-
ticularly well. Yet in retrospect it seems clear that Spector was
staking his claim to rock and roll immortality, driven by the fresh
competition and the feelings he could articulate through Ronnie’s
voice.
The album’s first cut, “Walking in the Rain,” was also Phil’s
last real hit with the Ronettes. It gives stately expression to the
theme that dominates the album as well as the string of singles:
Ronnie’s yearning for The Boy—the Perfect Man who will make
life right. “I want him/And I need him/And someday, some way,
whoa-oh-whoa, I’ll meet him.” Ronnie’s “whoa-oh-whoas” pack a
world of meaning. Here, as on “Baby, I Love You” and “Be My
Baby,” they are executed with a clumsiness that defines a kind of
chaste rapture, the ineffable longing of someone who is incurably
romantic but not quite in command of the appropriate etiquette,
 Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica | 45

As the lyric makes clear, Ronnie will not settle for just any boy.
He'll be shy, dreamy, willing to share wishes under a starry sky—
and because he’ll be all these things, she’ll know that he’s The
One. .
This record is Ronnie’s show. She faces Spector's gulch of
glitter—which includes peals of thunder and the plip-plop of
puddling water—and rises above it, largely by throwing herself
without reserve into the lyrics. As with all of Spector’s singles, the
instrumental track took hours to perfect, with Phil rehearsing the
rhythm section until a platoon of instruments meshed seamlessly,
locked into an ineluctable riff kicked along by drums and percussion,
sweetened with legato strings, anchored by the ubiquitous buzz of
baritone saxes. Ronnie’s vocal, by contrast, was cut in one take—
and in that contrast lies one secret of this album’s power,
Except for a feeble version of “What'd I Say’—a ringer that
throws Ronnie’s limits into unflattering relief—Presenting the
Fabulous Ronettes is of a piece with the hits that form its
heart. The sequencing mixes the singles with two dreamy ballads,
“So Young” and “When I Saw You,” both awkwardly sung with
great feeling, in a delicate shimmer of strings and echo. Also
included are two songs, “You Baby” and “Chapel of Love,” that
could have been singles. The spirit of “You Baby” is summed up
in the marvelous naiveté with which Veronica pouts “uh” on the
fade; it has a serenity most of the other songs don’t even try for.
“Chapel of Love” evokes a different mood. Surrounded by an
armada of rattles, the anarchy of Spector’s vocal arrangement
sounds simultaneously irreverent and soulful—a far cry from the
rather timid hit version cut by the Dixie Cups several months later.
While a bass man goes bomp like a Jew’s harp gone berserk, a
falsetto hovers uncannily in the distance, like some refugee from
“Over the Mountain.” There is a slightly daft informality about
the cut, as if the tension of longing—and Spector’s search for the
perfect single—had abruptly been relaxed. Here at last the quest
for The Boy finds its issue. It seems only fitting that “Chapel of
Love” closes the album.
The appeal of these records is difficult to dissect. In the single-
mindedness of his play with surface elements—in his attempt to
 46 | JIM MILLER
concoct cavernous sonorities, in his search for a monolithic epiphany
of melody and rhythm fused in one drum beat—Spector contrived
a veil that both solicits and defies analysis. To rationally account
for this hermetically sealed universe of superficial splendors would
be to dissolve its essence. A certain trashiness and an aura of magic
are both integral aspects of Spector’s achievement.
What brings me back to these records is the inexhaustible
density of their surface. Each listening reveals a new profile, a fresh
nuance, Spector’s productions invite an obsessive response that I
have willingly given them. Each time I listen, I scan the backdrop
of instruments, hoping to throw into relief what by design is dimly
perceived—like the harmonica on “Breakin’ Up,” or the hammering
harpsichord triplets on “Walking in the Rain.” Spector’s was an
aesthetic of excess, and unpacking the litter of his imagination has
given me hours of solitary pleasure. He made records to get lost in
—and that, I think, is the key to his appeal.
Rock works on many levels: as shared enthusiasm, public enter-
tainment, communal experience; but also as secret fantasy, private
escape, a personal obsession. The public aspect is easier to celebrate:
memories of drive-ins and love-ins can service nostalgia for years to
come. The private aspect—the way rock has entered the existence
of persons who date their lives and measure their desires by it—is
less easily represented, perhaps because it suggests that beneath
the flashy surface lies an obsessive solipsism: the real basis of
America’s popular culture.
Phil Spector was reclusive enough to know all about the obsessive
possibilities of rock; and like Brian Wilson after him, he refined
his private fantasies to the point of implosion. His records gradually
became more intricate, more convoluted, more garbled with echo.
And when an audience could no longer give him the gratification
of admiring the sounds inside his head, he simply stopped recording
them.
For the self-satisfied hermit, rock is not really about sex or
dancing or living dangerously, but instead about daydreaming,
imagining, fantasizing all these things in their immaculate perfec-
tion and impossible abundance. The narcissistic rocker lives life at
one remove, and perceives it through a filter of unthreatening
 Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica | 47

stereotypes. Phil Spector might have never felt at ease making love
or dancing or having fun in the customary ways. But in those
fantastic miniatures he affectionately called “little symphonies for
the kids,” he was free to create his own utopia of love, dance and
fun, a world where he was in complete control. On his records, he
could let his imagination run riot, building a personal paradise out
of rock and roll bric-a-brac, the unlikely ambitions of a self-taught
perfectionist, and, on the Ronettes records, the instinctive eroticism
of his fantasy princess.
The plentitude of this world was a fiction, It existed only through
the records he made. By fulfilling her function in his musical
mise-en-scéne, Ronnie could flourish. But once they were actually
married—in the same year he virtually retired from recording—her
star went into eclipse. She disappeared in Spector’s Bel Air castle.
“It was like being in the dark all the time,” Ronnie explained ten
years later. “You're on stage, you’re with the bright lights, you’re
with people and having fun, traveling and seeing the world, and all
of a sudden everything turns black. I lived in twenty-three rooms.
Phil went out annually, so that meant I didn’t go out either. I
stayed home a lot. And it was like my whole world for five and a
half years. I must have been walking in a daze.”
Ironically, it was the source of her unhappiness who helped her
create the indelible image of bliss she will be remembered for.
When Phil’s romantic fantasies took flight with Ronnie’s anxious
singing on the album they made together, it was precisely his
narcissistic absorption in his runaway imagination, his icy command
over her touching attempts to evoke worldly happiness, that made
for such a curiously moving metamorphosis of the most common-
place desires. Veronica’s struggle to fill the role he cast for her
lent resonance to the simple dreams she expressed, just as Spector's
effort to create great rock and roll gave that struggle grandeur and
meaning. She brought to Spector’s fantasy-land the element of
authenticity and the possibility of disenchantment. With a stroke
of her wavering voice, she let us all in on the hopeless fragility of
her fondest wishes. Darlene Love, Tina Turner, even the Righteous
Brothers fulfilled their appointed parts in Spector’s scripts with
more skill and finesse. Ronnie, though, believed in what she sang,
 48 | JIM MILLER
and tried desperately to make it seem real. Amid Phil’s sandcastles
of sound, she was able to turn clichés into fragments of feeling.
Through early adolescence, I believed in the same clichés
Veronica and so many other rock stars voiced. But those clichés
were merely pawns in a larger strategy of isolation and escape. In
the beginning, rock mattered to me as an untroubled world of
serene romanticism and exotic mysteries. The first time I heard
rock and roll, I was visiting an older cousin. It was late at night,
and I was dozing in the top bunk of his bed, while he stayed up
to’catch the local imitation of Alan Freed’s “Moondog Matinee.”
At 11:00 his radio emitted a succession of echoed howls and the
distant strains of “Night Train,” followed by a babble of disc jockey
jive and “Don’t Be Cruel.” Lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling,
and wondering what it was all about, I had the sense of entering
another world. I sought that feeling of wonder again. For a long
time, it was something I didn’t want or need to share with anyone
else. I fled school for the sanctuary of my room, where I could
summon a world with a choice of singles. ‘That was what rock and
rol] meant to me.
Because it connects with that experience, I return to Presenting
the Fabulous Ronettes. ‘There I have always found my most primi-
tive desires renewed in Phil Spector’s never-never land of rock and
roll romance. Meeting Veronica confirmed what I already knew:
that vision of romance is cruel in its unreality. Yet every time I
hear “Be-My Baby,” I smile.
 THE WILD,
THE INNOCENT
AND THE E STREET
SHUFFLE
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN (COLUMBIA 32432)
1974

ARIEL SWARTLEY
The band’s playing and the singer’s singing
something about going home.
—“Incident on 57th Street”
It must have been the summer of ’65 when Sandy’s, our late night
rendezvous, closed down and the action moved across the street.
The Cave & Pit was in tune with the times—two entrances and a
wall down the middle that divided more than the bar and burger
halves of the establishment. You didn’t just go in one door or the
other; you picked a side and made a stand: dope or booze, freak or
straight, FM or AM, dove or hawk. Lines were drawn down the
middle of everything, including old friendships. But down in back
where the jukeboxes were, there was a connecting door that was
always open. And standing in that doorway you were on the firing
line in the loudest confrontation of them all—the battle of the
bands, Nightly the Kingsmen fought it out with Dylan, party boys
against the prophet, Louie knocking at the gates of Eden. Usually
I knew which side of the wall I belonged on (and where I couldn’t
get served). But back between the Wurlitzers I was caught out on
the fence, wanting both: the visions and the dumb exuberance, a
prophet and a party, rock and rock and roll.
 50 | ARIEL SWARTLEY

It still seems like the perfect combination. A kind of ethical

hedonism, an enlightened savagery, a wise naiveté. An American
dream out of Fenimore Cooper or Mark Twain—but I don’t want
to talk about history. All I want is for a voice to come out of the
wilderness and the stereo to crackle in flames like the burning bush.
I don’t want to have to ask, “Are you talking to me?” I want to
know. And then I want to dance. In other words, I’m going to be a
sucker for someone who takes rock and roll as a religion, and
romanticizes the hell out of mundane details. For someone who
says “Sparks fly on E Street when the boy-prophets walk it handsome
and hot.” Bruce Springsteen wins my heart with the first line of
The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, wins it over and
over again. Used to be only rock critics took lyrics that seriously
and turned the romance of the streets so explicitly into myth. But
while Springsteen’s making his pronouncements the horns are
waggling their hips and sassing him. And just when you think the
song’s going to collapse under the weight of its verses, the party-
time chorus shouts the immortal instruction: “Everybody form a
line.” Then the only thing left on anybody’s mind is the latest
step—the E Street Shuffle or the Bristol Stomp. James Joyce meets
the Dovells? Creation myths from The Land of a Thousand
Dances? Yes, I say. Yes. Yes.
With its mumbled lyrics, its street slang, nicknames, and local
references, the song, “The E Street Shuffle,” seems as deliberately
insular as the kids it’s describing. But then dance songs have
always flaunted their authenticity and traded on an exclusivity
that’s an open invitation: learn the steps, join the crowd, they’re
doing it in Philly, instructions included. Springsteen’s insularity is
just as artificial and provocative a barrier. The narrator doesn’t
figure you know the neighborhood—he points out the spots of
interest—but he assumes you're on his side. It’s an assumption that’s
hard to resist, as rock and roll has always understood. From the
start its appeal has been partisan (call it anti-intellectual, anti-
establishment, provincial, chauvinistic, ageist, sexist, all or none of
the above—doesn’t matter). All you have to do to join is want to.
Having gotten you to buy into the rock and roll myth, Springsteen
invites you to examine it. He plays with associations the way he
 The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle | 51

plays with overtones on the guitar: picking at them while he’s

playing a line and just letting them ring.
Nice word, “shuffle.” It applies so well: to the motion of the
corner boys, their heel-and-toe strut before the girls, their ironic
and provocative defiance of authority. And to the wild cards and
jokers who fan out when the cops come, only to rearrange them-
selves at another hangout. It’s all a dance—Little Angel changing
partners, the dos-si-dos with the riot squad, the poses and the
posturing and the attitudes. The cosmic E Street Shuffle. Even
Leonard Bernstein saw the light: put the corner kids on the stage,
wrapped them up in literary allusions, and orchestrated the thing.
But Springsteen leaves the dance on the street where it lives. He is
a participant as well as an observer, and he takes the details as
seriously as their metaphoric possibilities. The song’s final scene
has the hypernaturalism of a closing shot in a grade B western:
“He slips on his jeans and they move on out down to the scene—
all the kids are there.” That string of adverbs is as deliberate as a
walk into the sunset. It’s a hero’s exit, except the boy-prophet’s on
his way to the hop. For if it’s all a dance, it’s also just a dance,
and that’s enough. Springsteen’s laughing like the party’s starting
and all his oldest friends have just walked in the door and he picks
up a guitar and twangs out lines the Ventures would have killed for.
Smack dab in the visionary tradition of Dylan and Van Morrison,
Springsteen’s got the former’s faith that words, stretched and piled
on fast enough, are music; the latter’s feel for the grinning warmth
and greased motions of R&B. Listen to Springsteen and you know
he’s listened to them both, and also to garage bands, Little Eva,
one-shot singles, late-night TV giveaway deals. He hasn’t only
learned from masters. But it’s not the knee-jerk nostalgia of teen-
scene verité he’s after in his authentic dialogue and his blasts from
a past that never seems so bright except in retrospect. He treats rock
and roll history as our common language, our shared mythology,
and thereby reinforces rock and roll’s promise of community.
Spectoral echo, (James) Brownian motion, Dion-ysian brawl—he
triggers memories like you were a jukebox and he was the man with
all the quarters; plays it like a slot machine and wins. Hell yes, he
exploits rock and roll’s past, just like he exploits the language itself
 52 {| ARIEL SWARTLEY

—turning it inside out, digging for the metaphors under the

surface of conversation.
The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle is Springsteen’s
most extravagant and most easygoing album. He insists you can
have rock and roll both ways—even the title makes it clear. Two
value judgments and a dance step—what’s going on here is syn-
thesis. But Springsteen’s double vision doesn’t have an ironist’s
cruel double edge. Sure, characters in his dramatic monologues
reveal themselves. The narrator of “Sandy” is an adolescent loser,
the kid whose shirt gets stuck in the fun-fair ride, leaving him
stranded and looking like a fool. You’d think he was ruining his
chances with the girl: he can’t stop telling her about his humilia-
tions, about the girls who led him on, about the waitress that got
tired of him. He can’t even hand her a line without blowing it:
“I promise I’ll love you—forever?” Springsteen’s voice squeaks
incredulously. Oh, there’ll always be another girl; adolescence is
something you grow out of. But that’s cold comfort and Spring-
steen’s offering something warmer and more immediate: the moon
is rising, the organ notes twinkle like stars, the “sha la las” are
triumphant and irresistible. The chorus promises romance despite
the odds. |
“New York City Serenade” opens with a piano riff as night dark
and extravagant as the song’s title, as glitteringly arrogant as the
city itself. A marching band tootles at the beginning of “The E
Street Shuffle,” fat and self-important. Springsteen doesn’t just
establish a mood or a groove; his songs begin with gaudy overtures
—instrumental trailers for the story that’s to follow. The piano in
“New York” is stilled by a single acoustic guitar note coming soft
and startling like an unexpected kiss; the marching band is taunted
by a cheeky guitar and an electric piano line that sprints away before
they can retort. The action begins before Springsteen sings a word.
When his voice finally comes, it seems to be fighting its way through
the elaborate arrangements, the flood of words, determined to get
to you, to grab you, to convince you. Intimate against the grand
scale of the songs, compelling in its compulsion to be heard,
Springsteen’s voice is that of a man possessed. His techniques are
those of a master storyteller: the whispers to get your attention, the
 The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle | 53

shouts to bring you to your feet, the teasing expectations. He

builds songs into an ache of tensions, laying on strings like whips,
applying pressure with drawn-out horn notes; dissolves the tensions
in chants as rowdy as a Bronx cheer. But release is only temporary:
he pulls the next phrases taut, the percussion threatens, the horns
renew their urgency. Springsteen’s timing reels you in through the
artifice and sentimentality in “Wild Bill’s Circus Story.” The
verses, spun out wide-eyed, filmed in ever slower motion, lead you
on, “past the kids, past the sailors, to his dimly lit trailer/And the
ferris wheel turns and turns like it’s never going to stop.” He
delays the punch line till the last possible second, then spits it out
in a rattle of phlegm and tobacco juice: “Hey sonny, wanna try the
big top?” Who wouldn’t be a fool for a tall tale? Springsteen’s one
himself. Sprawling, methodical, impassioned, and manipulative,
The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle teeters on the
edge of melodrama and slips into rapture. “Ooh, ooh, ooh, it’s all
tight”; “Good night, it’s all tight, Jane.” Springsteen’s final choruses
are incantations. Benedictions, Acts of surrender. He’s caught up
in his own spells.
If Springsteen is a storyteller, so are his characters. In some
sense hustlers, both he and they live by their lines, by their powers
of persuasion (and self-persuasion), by their ability to transform
prosaic material into something shining. His stories are set in a self-
absorbed, circumscribed world of adolescents, small towns, closed
communities, where appearances count and reputations are as un-
shakable as a nickname. No one travels Springsteen’s streets
incognito. He identifies them all: Spanish Johnny, Lover Boy, Jazz
Man. Even nouns. They aren’t modified, they're christened: fire
trails, rude boys, bruised arms, blond girls. More than descriptions,
the adjectives, like nicknames, have the force of characterizations.
Say “the girls were blond” and you're talking about the color of
their hair. Say “blond girls” and they're something special, blond
all through, a race apart. It’s the old rosy-fingered dawn trick: the
epic-maker’s device for turning ordinary words symbolic and loading
details down with implication. But it’s not like the songs lay out
in neatly knitted metaphors (or plots)—one tug and they’re un-
raveled. They come at a rush and you grab what you can, Still, the
 54 | ARIEL SWARTLEY

implications are felt. The omnipresent compounds in “The E Street

Shuffle’—double-shot, sweet-sixteen—drag at the verses like heels
scuffing the pavement. Each stretched-out line ambles on, coolly
oblivious to the insistent jab of the horns, the frenetic blather of
wah-wah and percussion: “But the boys are still on the corner
loose doin’ that lazy E-Street shuffle.” The rhythm of the words
is as nonchalant as the boys, and it’s only when Springsteen
finishes “shuffle” with a wheeze and a gasp for breath, that there’s
any suggestion that that cool costs an effort to maintain. Some-
times the implications are felt in the sheer weight of words: “with
bruised arms and broken rhythm and a beat-up old Buick—”
(“Incident on 57th Street”). They beat up on the line till it’s punch-
drunk, so that the phrase that steps out clear when the dust settles
seems all the more defiant ““—but dressed just like dynamite.”
Spanish Johnny’s clothes and cornerboy’s shuffle are gestures
falling somewhere between courage and bravado, between a hustle
and a good story. Johnny plays the gallant promising Janey he'll
take her away from the battles on the street, but she’s got his
number: “Those romantic young boys/All they ever want to do is
fight.” She knows they’re not going anywhere. The corner is “The
E Street Shuffle,” the boardwalk in “Sandy,” the hometown alleys
of “Kitty’s Back,” even the traveling midway of “Wild Bill’s Circus
Story,” the tenement neighborhood of “Incident on 57th Street,”
the back roads and parent-and-school-dominated world of “Rosalita”’
—Springsteen’s settings are territories in limbo. Satellites of the
metropolis, overshadowed, robbed and ruined; resort towns begging
to be invaded, dependent on other people’s leisure and mobility;
home turf staked out and fought for but never owned. And adoles-
cence itself. Like the “man-child” or the “boy-prophet,” neither one
thing or the other. All of Springsteen’s characters live on islands
close enough to shore to see the mainland, too far away to make
the crossing light or easy.
But isolation is chosen as well as imposed, Caught in the middle,
challenged from the outside, each community is self-protective,
fiercely partisan. When Kitty comes back, it’s almost too good to
be true, for her departure was a double betrayal, forsaking the
hometown and the kids in the alley for marriage and the big city,
 The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle | 55

power, prestige, and opportunity. Her return not only vindicates

her small-town admirer, but all of those who’ve never left. And
their victory is as sweet and keen-edged as the notes of Springsteen’s
guitar. Yet her defection raised doubts and questions that still
hang like the sax’s final whistling high note. As envied and dis-
dained as a resort visitor, as threatening and tempting as the city,
adulthood glimmers just over the horizon too. And like the Comer
or the Street, it has to be claimed. The final song on the album
confronts growing up and the metropolis head-on: “New York City
Serenade” is a rite of passage. Enticing with its jazz and drugs and
promises of plunder, dangerous—“a mad-dog’s promenade”—the
city is a domineering mistress, sneering like Fishlady that corner-
boys are too easy, grinding supplicants in their own insignificance.
In her hostile, garishly-lit embrace, manhood becomes a matter of
self-assertion—“I’m a young man walking real proud for you”—and
self-respect: “Sometimes you just have to walk on.”
But then, he dosen’t sing the line quite straight; there’s a gulp
in his voice, an exaggeration to his drawl. Dangers over the horizon,
oppression at home—what’s a poor boy to do? One solution is
obvious, and Springsteen concedes the point so fast you trip over it
in the album’s most explicitly autobiographical cut. In “Rosalita”
he’s no street fighting man, and no more under the thumb of
circumstances, adults, and authorities than any other kid. When
he comes to the door he may be a truant, a hot-rodder, and what
your mother would call a bad influence, but rock and roll is his
guarantee of respectability. Hell, that record company advance is
probably a lot bigger than Rosie’s father’s salary. There’s an edge
of mockery that keeps Springsteen’s heroism honest. He’s found the
perfect escape: work that’s fun, rebellion that’s legitimate, eternal
youth, a name that’s known not just on the corner but on the
global street, all that stuff. But however much he romanticizes
rock and roll as an ideal or a code, he only plays the star in fun.
Sometimes it seems like he’s deliberately burying his voice in the
mix, as if to deny that he’s anything but another member of the
band. Sometimes it seems like he and the other guys have never
left the corner at all.
Certainly the songs seem like they were filmed on location, or
 56 | ARIEL SWARTLEY
maybe it’s just that the settings feel almost like characters them-
selves. Springsteen is a compulsive recorder of detail—the sheets
“damp with sweat,” the girl “bopping down the beach with a
radio.” But it’s not like you’d call him a realist. Sometimes it
seems as though he’s looking back at the corner through a rearview
mirror—the streets turned shimmery and the action blurred by the
speed at which he’s traveling. It’s not just that the language slips
out of the colloquial into the high-flown. It’s as though he’s caught
up in the rhythm and led on by his own words to more and more
audacious leaps. From neat tricks like putting hard girls on easy
street, to metaphors that are high wire acts: “Let the black boys in
to light the soul flame.” (I mean, I always figured that phrase had
to do with turning the radio to an R&B station. But?) And finally
he skips beyond probability and any tidy interpretation to visions:
Of “golden-heeled fairies” fighting with .38s (and it’s anybody’s
guess what kind of fairies), Of “barefoot street boys” throwing
down their switchblades and kissing each other goodbye. Visions
of the natural order he’s been at pains to record turned on its head.
But then, calling the kids on E Street “boy-prophets” was a leap as
well. Springsteen’s double vision, seeing the what-is beside, on top
of, through the what-could-be, is consistent enough to take on a
moral force. Like a hardboiled detective, he observes as though his
life depended on it, on recognizing the shift in stance that tells you
the other guy’s about to go for his gun. And like the detective,
once he’s established the facts, they’re not enough. His characters
aren’t presented as free agents: they’re shown, if not as victims, at
least as products of an environment. And still, they're held
accountable for their actions. They can walk on or not. The choice
may be only a gesture, but the space between courage and bravado,
between a hustle and a good story, is also the place where appear-
ances become truth. Where Fishlady’s gibe is picked up and worn
as a badge of honor: “Hey babe, I’m easy, won’t you take my arm?”
Where the only names that matter are the names you give or call
yourself.
Knowing the score is how you survive; knowing, for instance,
that midnight in Manhattan is not the time to get cute. Faith, on
the other hand, is how you manage—well—whatever it is that’s
 The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle | 57

more than survival. Yeah, it sounds hokey, but faith in these songs
isn’t just some smarmy, self-help est-uary. It’s nothing more or less
than an act of imagination (like the songs themselves), Envisioning
a junkman dressed in satin is as absurd as falling in love. The facts
don’t justify the faith; no loved one ever lives up to a lover’s dream;
still, no love ever survived on facts alone. So buy the vision. Believe
the lady’s sawed in half. Be willing to be made a fool. Listen to
the junkman. If only every act of faith were just as easy.
Still, held in any kind of limbo, trapped in stupid circumstances,
it’s nice to hear him singing. Singing something about the towns
I grew up in and the boys I loved. And why I left and why I care
about them still. But I didn’t grow up in towns much like the ones
he describes. Or something about the songs I listened to and the
beat I danced and turned around, But he remembers songs I thought
were silly and tunes I never heard. Something then, about growing
up. But I’m already grown. Aah, it doesn’t matter. The band’s
playing and the singer’s singing something about a prophet, some-
thing about a party. And rock and roll’s going to take me home.
 TROUT MASK REPLICA
CAPTAIN BEEFHEART (STRAIGHT STS 1053)
1969

LANGDON WINNER
Having lived in something of a shipwreck for the past several years,
I understand that the question of which record I would want to
play on a desert island must be taken literally. It is not a matter
of what my favorite album happens to be. At issue is a kind of
music rich enough, substantial enough to enable this castaway to
endure a place of desolation over a very long haul. My own first
requirement for any such record, therefore, would have to be its
power to construct, furnish, and enliven a world in and of
itself. In this setting almost all rock and roll records would be
worse than useless. Their content so thoroughly presupposes
the material and social circumstances of modern civilization that,
except as cues to frustrated nostalgia, they could provide little joy,
inspiration, or solace. There is only one album I know of that
deliberately and successfully sets out to devise a special world of its
own as if in defiance of the prevailing norms and fashions of con-
temporary society: Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. Cre-
ated in isolation by a renegade artist/genius/madman and his band
of unquestioning disciples, hermetic almost to a point of catatonia,
yet challenging in every moment of its seventy-nine-minute dura-
tion, Trout Mask is a record uniquely suited to years and years of
isolated listening.
 Trout Mask Replica | 59

Of course, in the decade since the album was released the vast
majority of rock and roll fans have found it to be completely un-
listenable. No record alienates the ear of modern America faster
than Beefheart’s magnum opus. Its guitars wail along in cacopho-
nous jerks and starts that seem designed to offend our appetite for
harmony and order. Beefheart’s singing, actually an unrestrained
bellering on most songs, shocks us with the visceral impression
that the man is either angry or just plain deranged. Why would
anyone sing in the voice people usually reserve for telling tres-
passers to get the hell off their property? The lyrics, similarly,
appear either senseless or so thoroughly contrived for freaky
effects that no one other than clinical psychiatrists could take them
seriously. For those who were humming along to Crosby, Stills and
Nash or It’s a Beautiful Day when Trout Mask Replica was first
issued, and for the millions who nurture themselves on a diet of
Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, and Linda Ronstadt today, Beefheart’s
music offers none of the qualities of a “good” record: engaging
melodies; a solid, interesting groove; poignant hook lines; and an
intelligible reflection of the life of the listener. One reason, then,
that Trout Mask Replica would be my personal choice for a
desert island is that a desert island is possibly the only place where I
could play the record without being asked by friends and neighbors
to take the damned thing off.
On its own terms, the popular judgment of the work is entirely
justified. If the purpose of a phonograph record is to soothe us, to
provide a beat for dancing, a pulse for making love, a set of themes
to reassure us in the joys and troubles of life’s daily commerce,
then Trout Mask fails utterly. Anyone who tried to make love to
these infernal rhythms, for example, would have to be carted off to
a chiropractor. But if a record is legitimate in trying to overthrow
our somnambulistic habits of hearing, seeing, and touching things,
if it is valid in seeking to jolt our sensibilities and restructure the
way we experience music and everything else, then Beefheart’s
strange collection of songs begins to make sense. Beneath the
apparent chaos of its surfaces are structures of remarkable intricacy.
Beyond the ugly noise that assaults us on first listening is a wealth
of ingenious melodic and harmonic inventions. As one penetrates
 60 | LANGDON WINNER
the apparent hysteria of its tunes and lyrics, one discovers a realm
of surprisingly serene and happy freedom.
Trout Mask Replica wastes no time announcing its basic inten-
tions. Where most popular records try to entice listeners with a
catchy riff in their opening few moments, this one begins with a
rugged test of endurance. Beefheart’s Magic Band launches into a
grating, off-center guitar line that sounds like a sawmill given a log
too heavy to cut and slowly grinding itself to pieces. Beefheart
enters howling a tune that, oddly enough, matches the music
exactly: “My smile is stuck. I cannot go back t’ yer Frownland.
My spirit’s made up of the ocean and the sky ’n the sun ’n the
moon ’n all my eye can see. I cannot go back to yer land of gloom
where black jagged shadows remind me of the comin’ of yer
doom.”* Disgusted with the world we normally inhabit, he’s gone
in search of a new place, a homeland “where uh man can stand by
another man without an ego flyin’, with no man lyin’ ’n no one
dyin’ by an earthly hand.” Beefheart openly entreats his listeners
to leave “those old worlds, take my kind hand” and join him on
his mission. Although its tone is anything but alluring, the invita-
tion is explicit. Beefheart is not concerned to build bridges for his
audience or to make it any easier for anyone to come along. Either
you're interested or you're not.
As the musical barrage of the first minute and a half abruptly
subsides, we receive our first glimpse of the land to which we've
been invited. Unaccompanied by any instruments, Beefheart be-
gins crooning softly in an old granny’s voice. “There’s ole Gray
with ’er dovewinged hat. There’s ole Green with her sewing
machine. Where’s the bobbin at? Tote’n old grain in uh printed

* Among the innovations that characterize Trout Mask Replica are cet-
tain idiosyncrasies of spelling and grammar. Captain Beefheart regularly
employs “uh” for the words “‘a,” “an,” and “of” and uses colloquial con-
tractions such as “’n’”’ for the word “and,” and “-in’”’ on words ending
with “ing,” to represent the sounds actually sung or spoken. I have used
his spelling and punctuation here. The reader should consult the song
sheet given in the first edition of Trout Mask but, criminally, left out of
subsequent pressings.
 Trout Mask Replica | 61

sack. The dust blows forward.’n dust blows back.” Memories of

country life flood the woman’s addled consciousness in a panorama
of senility. “What am I gonna die?” she asks. “Uh white flake
riverboat just flew by.” At about its midpoint the song suddenly
changes (or at least confuses) the gender of its imaginary singer
as old grandma becomes an old geezer remembering his fishing
expeditions. “Bubbles popped big ’n uh lipstick Kleenex hung on
uh pointed forked twig. Reminds me of the bobby girls, never was
my hobby girls,” Beefheart moans, making up a distracted tune as
he goes along. “Hand full uh worms and uh pole fishin’. Cork
bobbin’ like uh hot red bulb . . . Well I put down my bush ’n I
took off my pants ’n felt free. The breeze blowin’ up me ’n up
the canyon far as I could see. It’s night now and the moon looks
like uh dandelion. It’s black now ’n the blackbird’s feedin’ on rice
’n his red wings look like diamonds ’n lice.”
The images in the song are those of a pleasant, unromanticized
American landscape described in the motley vernacular of old time
rural culture. Its lyrics reshuffle a set of experiences and expressions
from everyday American life to sketch comic portraits in miniature.
While the specific references to places, times, characters, colloquial-
isms, and material artifacts change throughout the album and
while dark themes often intrude upon the comedy, Beefheart’s
approach to his subject matter remains the one we see at work
here. He begins with elements that are ridiculously familiar to
everyone and plays with them until he’s produced extraordinary,
unsettling effects. How he accomplishes this and what it all means
is something I’ll come to later. But for the time being it is sufficient
to notice that the vision of Trout Mask Replica is fundamentally
that of an American primitivist surrealist. The land he asks us to
visit is one we already know very well. It is not, as many of his
fans have supposed, outer space or the realm of late 1960s hippie,
psychedelic weirdness for weirdness’ sake. To accompany Captain
Beefheart on this journey is to re-experience the nature and artifice
of the American continent through a vast project of surrealistic
reclamation.
If one is to enjoy Trout Mask Replica’s twenty-eight songs on a
desert island or anywhere else, two major obstacles must be over-
 62 | LANGDON WINNER
come: its music and its lyrics. Of these two, the music is by far the
more difficult. Beefheart’s desire to disconnect and reorder things
according to novel principles extends to the way he employs instru-
ments, voices, melody, harmony, and the song form itself. Trout
Mask willfully violates almost every convention—technical and
psychological—that gives music its appeal. We generally expect,
for instance, that a rock and roll song will start off with a repetitive
beat and keep it going, at least for a while. Beefheart delights in
jamming these expectations, His songs begin a rhythmic pattern,
let it run for a couple of measures, and then break it off only to
strike up something completely different. In the two and a half
minutes of the instrumental -“Hair Pie: Bake 2,” for instance,
there are no fewer than fourteen separate beats and melodies
quickly introduced, briefly run, and abruptly junked, Throughout
the whole album, just when you think you’ve begun to groove on
something, just when your toe starts tapping, it’s vanished and
something else has taken its place.
Trout Mask also tramples upon all normal standards for what is
tuneful and harmonious. Its guitars and bass play in abrasive
twangs, strangely pinched notes, and ringing discords. On many
songs the melody is composed of a progression of guitar discords or
even two separate but simultaneous discordant lines wandering in
vermicular patterns. Beefheart’s vocals, similarly, rely less upon
the melody of any given tune than upon the music present
in the way people actually talk. Thus, the singing—and it is
definitely singing—on “Pachuco Cadaver” takes the form of the
rising and falling emphatic tones of an Old West storyteller. Beef-
heart loves the voices of everyday American folks and changes his
own Trout Mask voice to mimic and spoof as many of them as
he can.
Now, rock and roll is (or at least has become) an extremely
conventional music. Performers who observe its stylistic traditions
most faithfully—Bruce Springsteen is the most obvious example
at present—are the ones likely to win the largest following of fans
and critics. Beefheart’s notion of musical liberty, however, requires
the transcendence of all deeply rooted habits. He refuses to use
them in his playing. More importantly, he will not allow his
 Trout Mask Replica | 63

listeners to depend upon them for satisfaction. The steady beat

and pleasant melody are, as far as he’s concerned, simply ways of
lulling people to sleep. Trout Mask tries to achieve for a guitar,
bass, drum, and vocal ensemble—the rock and roll band—the
same degree of freedom, the same overstepping of traditional
boundaries that John Coltrane achieved for the tenor saxophone
in jazz. Its mistake, if one can call it that, is that it challenges
too many conventions too quickly. Its songs leave most listeners
in a state of unhappy vertigo. Is there nothing we can hold on to?
Whatever else may be said about Beefheart’s music, it cannot
be called sloppy. One feature that characterizes Trout Mask is its
unbelievably thorough attention to detail. Every note of the
guitars and even the noise of the drums is meticulously tailored
and carefully controlled. The work is perhaps best seen as an
attempt to sculpture sounds in the same way that Don Van Vliet
(Captain Beefheart’s real name) sculpted clay animals as a little
boy. Each song hangs together as a long string of intricate effects
one piled on top of another and balanced with a good supply of
paste and baling wire. In “My Human Gets Me Blues,” to cite
merely one case, Beefheart fashions a delicate musical contraption
and then, by playing the piece loudly at top speed, takes the thing
out for a peak performance road test. Will this buggy hold
together? the listener might well ask. It does and in fine style.
Perhaps the best place to review the Captain’s compositions would
be not the rock press but Popular Mechanics or Road and Track.
Beefheart has stormed the castle of musical authority and
brought about a personal revolution in its operating structures. He
has devised his own ingenious way of writing songs, of using
guitars, of singing, of playing drums, of combining voice and
instruments, and of weaving the whole thing together. In its own
terms and for its own purposes, the achievement is nothing short
of dazzling. The ultimate success of any revolution, however,
depends upon getting a good number of people interested in the
changes you propose to make. That is something that Beefheart
has never accomplished. With the exception of a few punk rock
guitarists who have imitated Trout Mask Replica licks, most rock
and roll performers have ignored his work. Even Beefheart’s small
 64 | LANGDON WINNER

but devoted cult following shows, by its generally inane behavior at

concerts, little comprehension of what the man is trying to do.
But on a desert island none of this would matter. The listener
always completes an artist’s work. In this regard Trout Mask offers
two features that other records do not: (1) an enormous variety of
musical puzzles that require a considerable amount of time and
concentration to figure out, and (2) a seemingly inexhaustible
supply of unfinished ideas that one can fill in oneself. From frag-
ments the record makes available, the castaway could begin to
create whole new musicals, symphonies, island anthems, and the
like. As my own lingering puzzlement gave way to unbothered
pleasure, I could imagine myself sitting on a coral reef charting the
rise and fall of hits contained within this one album. Flash:
“ ‘Neon Meate Dream of an Octafish’ edged out ‘Sugar ’N Spikes’
for the number one position this week as a new dance craze based
on the last several bars of ‘Pachuco Cadaver’ swept the island!”
Even after a person has begun to understand Trout Mask
Replica’s music, its lyrics will pose an awesome barrier to enjoy-
ment. Of the songs on the album, only “The Blimp,” with its out-
rageous mock mass hysteria over the similarity between dirigibles
and human breasts, ever won favor with rock fans, Recorded over
a telephone, the voice of Magic Band member Antennae Jimmy
Semens parodies the radio broadcast of the 1937 crash of the Hin-
denburg: “Tits! Tits! The blimp! The blimp! The mother ship!
The mother ship! The brothers hid under their hood. From the
blimp, the blimp! . . . Daughter don’t you dare! Oh momma, who
cares! It’s the blimp! It’s the blimp!” Rock audiences evidently
liked this number as much for the simplicity of its words as for
the fact.that, unannounced, Trout Mask’s producer Frank Zappa
and a couple of the Mothers of Invention provide instrumental
background on this one cut. But to be amused by “The Blimp” is
one thing; to understand and take pleasure in songs like “Hobo
Chang Ba” or “Pena” is quite another. How, after all, are we to
penetrate the meaning of phrases like: “Whale bone farmhouse,
cayorts girdled in latters uh lite, cavorts girdled in latters uh lite”?
Patient listeners eventually notice that Trout Mask’s songs fall
into a few roughly coherent clusters. There are about half a dozen
tunes that describe more-or-less contemporary people involved in
 Trout Mask Replica | 65

more-or-less recognizable social situations.* Four numbers turn out

to be songs with a fairly explicit ecological or anti-war message.t
Two songs consist of extremely rapid free association fantasies
recited to wild musical accompaniment.** There are three straight
instrumentals, one conventional blues, and three song-poems that
stand out as mini-epics in an unfinished Beefheartian saga.t+ Then
there are several songs, Beefheart’s commentaries on one thing or
another, that simply defy any convenient classification. So much
for categories.
Typical of the lyrics on contemporary predicaments is “When
Big Joan Sets Up,” a rugged song that treats the question of why
Americans are embarrassed about their bodies. As the band whips
up a fast, repeating two-bar riff, Beefheart roars: “Hoy, hoy. When
Big Joan comes out, her arms are too small, her head like uh ball.
She tied off her horse ’n galloped off into the moonbeams. She
pulled up her blouse ’n compared her navel to the moon.” Big
Joan seems to be a friendly young lady, but she’s afflicted by having
body parts that are the wrong size according to current fashion.
When she goes to the beach they laugh at her because her hands
are too small. “She ain’t built for goin’ naked, so she can’t wear
any new clothes,” Beefheart explains in truthful paradox. The
song points to the shame and glory of Southern California where a
person’s freedom to enjoy the beautiful climate is limited by social
preconceptions of how people ought to look. Beefheart tells the
woman that since she’s too fat to go out in the daylight, he'll sit
up with her all night (if she promises not to talk about her hands
being too small). “Hoy, hoy. Is she uh boy?” he shouts. The

* “Filla Guru,” “Moonlight on Vermont,” “Pachuco Cadaver,” “Bills

Corpse,” “Sweet Sweet Bulbs,” “My Human Gets Me Blues,” “When
Big Joan Sets Up,” “Fallin’ Ditch” and “She’s Too Much for My Mirror.”
t “Dachau Blues,” “Ant Man Bee,” “Wild Life” and “Veteran’s Day
Poppy.”
** “Neon Meate Dream of an Octafish” and “Pena.”
t The instrumentals are “Hair Pie: Bake 1,” “Hair Pie: Bake 2” and
“Dali’s Car.” The blues is “China Pig,” and the epics in miniature are
“The Dust Blows Forward and the Dust Blows Back,” “Orange Claw
Hammer” and “Old Fart at Play.”
 66 | LANGDON WINNER
answer, of course, is yes. Big Joan is none other than Captain
Beefheart recalling his own traumatic visits to the beach.
While many of the album’s lyrics express love and contentment,
the most powerful songs deal with the troubles. and suffering of
life. Clearly, something is wrong in the human world and Beef-
heart offers a number of explanations. “Bills Corpse” points to the
way that parents, especially mothers, psychologically cripple their
children by pushing them in directions contrary to nature, “She
smiled and twisted, she smiled and twisted hideously looking back
at once was beautiful,” he sings in his most offensive rasping
voice. “My Human Gets Me Blues” laments a more general con-
dition of mutual estrangement between God and human beings.
God, it turns out, is unhappy because people have always made
him a boy and never let him have a doll to dress. For that reason,
men and women on earth have been clothed in perpetual misery.
“I saw yuh dancin’ baby in your x-ray gingham dress. I knew you
were under duress, I knew you under yer dress, Just keep comin’
Jesus, yer the best dressed. You look dandy in the sky but you don’t
scare me,”
On some cuts, Beefheart’s criticisms are so explicit that they
become protest songs of a peculiar sort. “I cry, but.I can’t buy
your Veteran’s Day Poppy,” he announces during the record’s last
moments, “It don’t get me high. It can never grow another son
like the one who warmed me my days after rain.” Another song,
“Dachau Blues,” dwells on the details of this century's mass car-
nage in images that even Beefheart fans find hard to stomach, “War
One was balls ’n power ’n blood ’n snow. War Two rained death
’n showers ’n skeletons danced ’n screamin’ ’n dyin’ in the ovens.”
The song suggests that our age has been playing a lethal children’s
game with Satan. “They're counting out the devil with two fingers
in their hands, begging the Lord don’t let the third one land.”
A central Trout Mask hypothesis is that because human beings
vastly overestimate their standing in the natural order, they feel
entitled to cause all kinds of destruction. The words to “Ant Man
Bee” observe that only two creatures in God’s garden, men and the
ants, are unable to live in harmony with their fellows. Both species
are aggressive organizers ready to wage war over a lump of sugar.
While a number of songs bemoan the lack of peace in man’s
 Trout Mask Replica | 67

dealings with nature, “Wild Life” actually contemplates defecting

to the other side. Things have gotten so bad that Beefheart is
going “up on a mountain, find me a cave ’n talk the bears into
takin’ me in, Wild life,” he concludes, “is a man’s best friend.”
Very few moments on the album, however, are devoted to
Beefheart’s biological politics. Trout Mask covers an astonishingly
broad range of topics both serious and comical with surprises at
every turn. By far the most elegant statement of all is “Orange
Claw Hammer,” one of. Beefheart’s epics in miniature, a song
about an old sailor who returns home after thirty years at sea, walks
down main street and, in his besotted, barnacled mind, believes he
“recognizes” things and people. Borrowing the tune of a familiar
sea chantey, Beefheart croons, “Uh little up the road uh wooden
candy stripe barber pole ’n above it read uh sign ‘painless parker.’
Licorice twisted around under uh fly ’n uh youngster cocked ’er
eye. God before me if I’m not crazy is my daughter.” The old
salt is overcome by mistaken feelings of affection and remorse. He
offers to buy the little girl a cherry phosphate, and says he’ll “take
you down to the foamin’ brine ’n water ’n show you the wooden
tits on the Goddess with the pole out full sail that tempted away
your peg legged father.” The child, who must be totally confused,
hears the sailor explain that many years ago he was shanghaied by a
“high hat beaver mustache man ’n his pirate friend.” Left behind,
although time and place are lost in his delirium, were seven babies
and a beautiful lass with brown skin, “Thirty years away,” he says,
“can make uh seaman’s eyes, uh round house man’s eyes flow out
water. Salt water.”
The song has no particular point. On one level it is merely a
collection of fragmentary impressions held together by an extremely
odd premise. But like so many of Trout Mask’s pieces, “Orange
Claw Hammer” achieves an effect that goes far beyond anything
specifically identifiable in the content of its lyrics. What we
experience is a marvelous sense of comedy and compassion that
derives from a resonance with myths and memories deeply buried
in America’s past. The song works not for what it says to us but
for the way it joggles out an inherited store of fantasies about
drifters, seaports, pirates, and the separation of fathers and
children.
 68 | LANGDON WINNER
In the last analysis, the content of any given song on the album,
even the content of the very best of them, matters much less than
the pattern that informs Beefheart’s lyrics as a whole. There is
method in this madness, a victory of form over substance. Not that
any particular methodology is being consciously applied; Trout
Mask Replica is probably the one rock album least influenced by the
application of a rational, step-by-step procedure. Consistently pres-
ent, however, is a way of using language, a form of speech that sets
words and the world spinning in a perpetual dance. While specific
utterances in this tongue vary greatly in texture and complexity, the
general approach can, like Beefheart’s music, be grasped in fairly
straightforward terms that can help overcome our discomfort at
what passes before our ears.
Beefheart tries to engage his audience in a continuing change
in the focus of imagination: from microscopy to telescopy to kalei-
doscopy and back again. He inevitably begins with a microscopic
moment in which something very small is inspected under his con-
ceptual lens—a beetle’s wing, a plume of smoke, the blue of a Bromo-
Seltzer bottle, the diamond back of a rattlesnake, an automobile
brodey knob, or some other object, color, shape, or sound. For one
brief moment we examine that thing very carefully and endow it
with the greatest possible significance. Little things take on an
exaggerated importance; they contain, Beefheart believes, whole
worlds within them. In the wink of an eye, however, the focus
shifts to a telescopic point of view. Our attention is directed to
some faraway object—the moon, the sea, a distant hill—or to some
larger category of human experience—death, love, fear, longing or
the passage of time. Once again a significance is bestowed upon the
thing involved; we look at it and say, “Yes, there it is.” But the tele-
scope is almost never allowed to rest on distant or abstract objects
for very long. Almost immediately the mind’s eye is drawn back
to the furnishings of everyday experience seen under Beefheart’s
rapidly scanning view finder. Things large and small, things of
grave importance and of seeming insignificance, are given exactly
equal status.
The overall effect of this movement is that we begin to experi-
ence the whole world as if through a kaleidoscope. A panoply of
 Trout Mask Replica | 69

freely associated perceptions of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch

cross their normal boundaries and form new: patterns. Visual
images and audible textures trade places. Verbs become nouns and
vice versa. Whole new words—“formaheap,” “fedlock,” “drazy
hoop,” and “bluesferbones”—are concocted to fill spaces left vacant
by ordinary English, Natural creatures and artificial objects pair off
in strange new matings to produce, if only for a brief second,
amazing little beings that vanish like the quarks or charmed
particles of modern physics. Butterfly droppings become little
worms that soon transform themselves into the tucks and rolls of
hot rod upholstery. Custards make ominous clicking sounds. An
oriole’s tail at twilight becomes indistinguishable from an orange
claw hammer.
Most prominent of the kaleidoscopically generated hybrids is the
trout mask replica itself. Shown waving “hello” on the album cover,
the beast finally makes its appearance in “Old Fart at Play,” a tune
that portrays Captain Beefheart’s surrealistic reclamation of every-
thing under the sun as a perfectly acceptable way of life. The Old
Fart (a little boy?) has never lost his love of things astonishing. He
notices parts and pieces of the world that other people take for
granted and has a grand time rearranging the environment to suit
his fancy. One afternoon, just for the hell of it, he puts on his
homemade wooden fishhead and pokes it through the kitchen win-
dow to surprise his mother. “Momma was flatten’n lard with her red
enamel rollin’ pen when the fishhead broke the window, rubber eye
erect ’n precisely detailed,” Beefheart observes in the voice of an
old time yarn spinner. Through the holes of the mask the Old Fart
sees his mother lick her lips like a cat, peck the ground like a rooster,
pivot like a duck, and continue preparing food over a hot stove. As
he looks on, a metamorphosis begins to take place in him. The mask
grows more and more fish-like. The boundaries between man, arti-
fact, and natural creature quickly vanish. His head grows the fleshy
protuberances of a “very intricate rainbow trout replica.” Is it fish?
gizmo? funny? grotesque? Beefheart is the master player who will
not let us pause long enough to figure it out. He tips his hand only
for a brief second with the following confession: “The old fart
inside was now breathin’ freely from his perfume bottle atomizer
 70 | LANGDON WINNER
air bulb invention. His excited eyes from within the dark interior
glazed, watered in appreciation at his thoughtful preparation.” There
is no doubt as to the Old Fart’s identity.
It remains a legitimate question whether any record, indeed any
work of art, has the right to demand as much of its audience as
Trout Mask Replica does. To enter the album requires an almost
total suspension of all normal structures of perception, rationality
and belief; we are asked to drop everything and come along. If we
accept the invitation, there is no guarantee that to travel this path
will not bring us to a destination equivalent to madness. Beefheart
offers no warranty of safe passage; in fact, he cannot. Through it all,
one must never forget that the single element that prevents this wild
experiment from flying to bits is the power of one man’s imagina-
tion, At the center of all the delightfully unrestrained playfulness
is an awesome, if not downright dangerous, degree of control. The
musicians on Trout Mask, the members of the Magic Band, even-
tually came to believe that whatever Beefheart’s intentions may have
been, their own personal autonomy was not enhanced by playing
this music or by having their names changed to Zoot Horn Rollo,
Rockette Morton, and the like. To a man, they all eventually left
the group and went looking for a sense of selfhood that their
participation in this ambitious quest for total freedom could not
provide.
On a desert island, nevertheless, the question of why anybody
in his right mind would willingly abandon a rationally constructed,
smoothly functioning reality just to listen to a mere phonograph
record would be irrelevant. One’s accustomed reality would already
have been lost and the task at hand would be to install a new one.
In that case Trout Mask Replica’s otherwise crazy offer—to purge
our senses and return us to the world as if it were something totally
new, something entirely wonderful—would seem very attractive. And
if it turned out that this project contained hidden elements of insid-
ious control, so much the better! After I had listened to the album
for a while, fathomed its music, deciphered its lyrics, and solved
its puzzles, I could then take up the struggle against its tyranny.
Trout Mask Replica would become an exquisite test of character,
an opportunity to learn how the sources of liberation can be distin-
guished from the causes of enslavement.
 VELVET UNDERGROUND:
GOLDEN ARCHIVE SERIES
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND (MGM GAS 131)
: 1967-1969/1970

ELLEN WILLIS
1. tu Ler You Be in My Dream

A change of fantasy: I have just won the first annual Keith Moon
Memorial Essay Contest. (This year’s subject was, “Is Ecstasy
Dead?”) The prize is a fallout shelter in the bowels of Manhattan,
reachable only through a secret entrance in CBGB’s basement. It is
fully stocked: on entering the contest I was asked to specify. my
choice of drugs (LSD), junk food (Milky Way), T-shirt (“Eat the
Rich”), book (Parade’s End), movie (The Wizard of Oz), rock-
and-roll single (“Anarchy in the U.K.”), and rock-and-roll album.
The album is Velvet Underground (not to be confused with The
Velvet Underground), an anthology culled from the Velvets’ first
three LPs. (My specially ordered version of this collection is slightly
different from the original; for “Afterhours,” a song I’ve never liked
much, it substitutes “Pale Blue Eyes,” one of my favorites.) The
songs on Velvet Underground are all about sin and salvation. As
luck would have it, I am inspecting my winnings at the very moment
that a massive earthquake destroys a secret biological warfare labora-
tory inside the Indian Point nuclear power plant, contaminating
New York City with a virulent radioactive form of legionnaire’s dis-
ease. It seems that I will be contemplating sin and salvation for a
long time to come.
 72 | ELLEN WILLIS
2. I LovE THE SounpD oF BREAKING GLASS

In New York City in the middle sixties the Velvet Underground’s

lead singer, guitarist, and auteur, Lou Reed, made a fateful connec-
tion between two seemingly disparate ideas—the rock-and-roller as
self-conscious aesthete and the rock-and-roller as self-conscious punk.
(Though the word “punk” was not used generically until the early
seventies, when critics began applying it to unregenerate rock-and-
rollers with an aggressively lower-class style, the concept goes all the
way back to Elvis.) The Velvets broke up in 1970, but the aesthete-
punk connection was carried on, mainly in New York and England,
by Velvets-influenced performers like Mott the Hoople, David
Bowie (in his All the Young Dudes rather than his Ziggy Stardust
mode), Roxy Music and its offshoots, the New York Dolls and the
lesser proto-punk bands that played Manhattan’s Mercer Arts Center
before it (literally) collapsed, the anti-punk Modern Lovers, the
arch-punk Iggy Stooge/Pop. By 1977 the same duality had surfaced
in new ways, with new force, under new conditions, to become the
basis of rock and roll’s new wave.
There are important differences, both temperamental and musi-
cal, that divide today’s punks and punkoids from the Velvets and
other precursors and from each other; American punk (still centered
in New York) and its British counterpart are not only different but
in a sense opposed. Yet all this music belongs to a coherent genre,
implicitly defined by the tension between the term “punk” and the
more inclusive “new wave,” with its arty connotations. If the Velvets
invented this genre, it was clearly anticipated by the Who: Pete
Townshend, after all, is something of an aesthete, and Roger Dal-
trey something of a punk. It was not surprising that the impulse to
make music that united formal elegance and defiant crudity should
arise among working-class Englishmen and take shape among New
York bohemians; each environment was, in its own way, highly
structured and ridden with conflict. And as a vehicle for that im-
pulse rock and roll had unique advantages: it was defiantly crude,
yet for those who were tuned in to it it was also a musical, verbal,
and emotional language rich in formal possibilities.
The Who, the Velvets, and the new wave bands have all shared
this conception of rock and roll; their basic aesthetic assumptions
 Velvet Underground | 73

have little to do with what is popularly known as “art rock.” The

notion of rock-as-art inspired by Dylan’s conversion to the electric
guitar—the idea of making rock and roll more musically and lyrically
complex, of combining elements of jazz, folk, classical, and avant-
garde music with a rock beat, of creating “rock opera” and “rock
poetry’”—was from the rock-and-roll fan’s perspective a dubious one.
At best it stimulated a vital and imaginative eclecticism that spread
the values of rock and roll even as it diffused and diluted them. At
worst it rationalized a form of cultural upward mobility, concerned
with achieving the appearance and pretensions of art rather than
the reality—the point being to “improve” rock and roll by making
it palatable to the upper middle class. Either way it submerged rock
and roll in something more amorphous and high-toned called rock.
But from the early sixties (Phil Spector was the first major example)
there was a counter-tradition in rock and roll that had much more
in common with “high” art—in particular avant-garde art—than
the ballyhooed art-rock syntheses: it involved more or less con-
sciously using the basic formal canons of rock and roll as material
(much as the pop artists used mass art in general) and refining,
elaborating, playing off that material to produce what might be
called rock-and-roll art. While art rock was implicitly based on the
claim that rock and roll was or could be as worthy as more estab-
lished art forms, rock-and-roll art came out of an obsessive com-
mitment to the language of rock and roll and an equally obsessive
disdain for those who rejected that language or wanted it watered
down, made easier. In the sixties the best rock often worked both
ways: the special virtue of sixties culture was its capacity for blurring
boundaries, transcending contradictions, pulling off everything at
once. But in the seventies the two tendencies have increasingly po-
larized: while art rock has fulfilled its most philistine possibilities in
kitsch like Yes (or, for that matter, Meat Loaf), the new wave has
inherited the counter-tradition, which is both less popular and more
conscious of itself as a tradition than it was a decade ago.
The Velvets straddled the categories. They were nothing if not
eclectic: their music and sensibility suggested influences as diverse
as Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol, Peter Townshend and John Cage;
they experimented with demented feedback and isolated, pure notes
and noise for noise’s sake; they were partial to sweet, almost folky
 74 | ELLEN WILLIS
melodies; they played the electric viola on Desolation Row. But they
were basically rock-and-roll artists, building their songs on a beat
that was sometimes implied rather than heard; on simple, tough,
pithy lyrics about their hard-edged urban demi-monde; on rock and
roll’s oldest metaphor for modern city life—anarchic energy con-
tained by a tight, repetitive structure. Some of the Velvets’ best
songs—‘‘Heroin,” especially—redefined how rock and roll was sup-
posed to sound; others—‘‘I’m Waiting for the Man,” “White Light/
White Heat,” “Beginning to See the Light,” “Rock & Roll’—used
basic rock-and-roll patterns to redefine how the music was supposed
to feel.
The Velvets were the first important rock-and-roll artists who
had no real chance of attracting a mass audience, This was para-
doxical. Rock and roll was a mass art, whose direct, immediate ap-
peal to basic emotions subverted class and educational distinctions
and whose formal canons all embodied the perception that mass art
was not only possible but satisfying in new and liberating ways.
Insofar as it incorporates the elite, formalist values of the avant
garde, the very idea of rock-and-roll art rests on a contradiction. Its
greatest exponents—the Beatles, the Stones, and (especially) the
Who—undercut the contradiction by making the surface of their
music deceptively casual, then demolished it by reaching millions of
kids. But the Velvets’ music was too overtly intellectual, stylized,
and distanced to be commercial. Like pop art, which was very much
a part of the Velvets’ world, it was anti-art art made by anti-elite
elitists. Lou Reed’s aesthete-punk persona, which had its obvious
precedent in the avant-garde tradition of artist-as-criminal-as-outlaw,
was also paradoxical in the context of rock and roll. The prototypical
rock-and-roll punk was the (usually white) working-class kid hang-
ing out on the corner with his (it was usually his) pals; by middle-
class and/or adult standards he might be a fuckoff, a hell-raiser, even
a delinquent, but he was not really sinister or criminal. Reed’s punk
was closer to that bohemian (and usually black) hero, the hipster:
he wore shades, took hard drugs, engaged in various forms of poly-
morphous perversity; he didn’t just hang out on the corner, he lived
out on the street, and he was a loner.
As white exploitation of black music, rock and roll has always
had its built-in ironies, and as the music went further from its origins
 Velvet Underground | 75

the ironies got more acute. Where, say, Mick Jagger’s irony was
about a white middle-class English bohemian’s (and later a rich rock
star’s) identification with and distance from his music’s black
American roots, his working-class image and his teenage audience,
Lou Reed’s irony made a further leap. It was not only about a white
middle-class Jewish bohemian’s identification with and distance
from black hipsters (an ambiguity neatly defined when Reed-as-
junkie, waiting for his man on a Harlem street corner, is challenged,
“Hey white boy! Whatchou doin’ uptown?’’) but about his use of
a mass art form to express his aesthetic and social alienation from
just about everyone. And one of the forms that alienation took
pointed to yet another irony. While the original, primal impulse
of rock and roll was to celebrate the body, which meant affirming
sexual and material pleasure, Reed’s temperament was not only
cerebral but ascetic. There was nothing resembling lustiness in the
Velvets’ music, let alone any hippie notions about the joys of sex-
ual liberation. Reed did not celebrate the sadomasochism of “Venus
in Furs” any more than he celebrated heroin; he only acknowledged
the attraction of what he saw as flowers of evil. Nor did he share
his generation’s enthusiasm for hedonistic. consumption; to Reed
the flash of the affluent sixties was fool’s gold. Like Andy Warhol
and the other pop artists, he responded to the aesthetic potency of
mass cultural styles; like Warhol, he was fascinated by decadence—
that is, style without meaning or moral content; but he was un-
moved by that aspect of the pop mentality, and of rock and roll,
that got off on the American dream. In a sense, the self-conscious
formalism of his music—the quality that made the Velvets uncom-
mercial—was an attempt to purify rock and roll, to purge it of all
those associations with material goodies and erotic good times.
Though it’s probable that only the anything-goes atmosphere of
the sixties could have inspired a group like the Velvets, their music
was prophetic of a leaner, meaner time. They were from—and of—
hard-headed, suspicious New York, not utopian, good-vibes Califor-
nia, For all Lou Reed’s admiration of Bob Dylan, he had none of
Dylan’s faith in the liberating possibilities of the edge—what he
had taken from Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde was
the sound of the edge fraying. Like his punk inheritors he saw the
world as a hostile place and did not expect it to change. In rejecting
 76 | ELLEN WILLIS
the optimistic consensus of the sixties, he prefigured the punks’ at-
tack on the smug consensus of the seventies; his thoroughgoing
iconoclasm anticipated the punks’ contempt for all authority—in-
cluding the aesthetic and moral authority of rock and roll itself.
Throughout this decade rock and roll has been struggling to
reclaim its identity as a music of cultural opposition, not only dis-
tinct from but antagonistic to its own cultural conglomerate, rock.
The chief accomplishment of the punks has been to make that an-
tagonism explicit and public in a way that is clearly contemporary—
that is, has nothing to do with “reviving” anything except the spirit
of opposition itself. What is new in rock and roll—what is uncom-
fortable and abrasive and demanding—is the extent to which it in-
sists on a defensive stance; the authentic late seventies note is
nothing so much as cranky. Though the British punk movement was
in some respects a classic revolt of youth—a class-conscious revolt,
at that—its self-mocking nihilism is a classic crank attitude, while
the American new wave makes up in alienated smartassism for what
it lacks in shit-smearing belligerence. The power and vitality of the
crank posture is attested to by the way it makes less discordant
sensibilities sound corny, even to those of us who might prefer to
feel otherwise. Bruce Springsteen may still pull off a credible mélange
of fifties teenage-street-kid insurgency, sixties apocalyptic romance
and early/mid-seventies angst, but he is an anomaly; so is Graham
Parker, whose stubborn and convincing faith in traditional rock-and-
roll values recalls John Fogerty’s. Patti Smith, on the other hand, is
a transitional figure, half cranky messiah, half messianic crank. The
rock-and-rollers who exemplify the current aesthetic do so with wide
variations in intensity, from Johnny Rotten (maniacal crank) to
Elvis Costello (passionate crank) to Nick Lowe or Talking Heads
(cerebral cranks) to the Ramones (cranks of convenience). (The
Clash, one convolution ahead, is boldly anti- or post-crank—the first
eighties band?) The obvious core of their crankiness is their con-
sciousness of themselves as a dissident minority, but it’s more com-
plicated than that. Real, undiluted rock and roll is almost by
definition the province of a dissident minority (larger at some times
than at others); it achieved its cultural hegemony in the sixties only
by becoming rock—by absorbing competing cultural values and in
 Velvet Underground | 77

turn being absorbed, making a new rebellion necessary. What is

different now is that for the first time in the music’s twenty-five-year
history, rock-and-rollers seem to accept their minority status as given
and even to revel in it. Which poses an enormous contradiction, for
real rock and roll almost by definition aspires to convert the world.
So we are back to the paradox of the aesthete-punk. In some ways
the crankiness of current rock-and-rollers resembles the disaffection
of an earlier era of bohemians and avant-gardists convinced they had
a vision the public was too intractably stupid and complacent to
comprehend. But because the vision of rock and roll is inherently
populist, the punks can’t take themselves seriously as alienated art-
ists; their crankiness is leavened with irony. At the same time, having
given up on the world, they can’t really take themselves seriously as
rock-and-rollers, either. They are not only anti-art artists but anti-
people populists—the English punks, especially, seem to abhor not
only the Queen, America, rich rock stars, and the uncomprehending
public but humanity itself. The punks’ working-class-cum-lumpen
style is implicitly political; it suggests collective opposition and there-
fore communal affirmation, But it is affirmation of a peculiarly
limited and joyless sort. For the new wave’s minimalist conception
of rock and roll tends to exclude not only sensual pleasure but the
entire range of positive human emotions, leaving only what is hard
and violent, or hard and distanced, or both: if the punks make sex an
obscenity, they make love an embarrassment.
In reducing rock and roll to its harshest essentials, the new wave
took Lou Reed’s aesthete-punk conceit to a place he never intended.
For the Velvets the aesthete-punk stance was a way of surviving in a
world that was out to kill you; the point was not to glorify the punk,
or even to say fuck you to the world, but to be honest about the
strategies people adopt in a desperate situation. The Velvets were
not nihilists but moralists. In their universe nihilism regularly ap-
pears as a vivid but unholy temptation, love and its attendant vulner-
ability as scary and poignant imperatives. Though Lou Reed rejected
optimism, he was enough of his time to crave transcendence. And
finally—as “Rock & Roll” makes explicit—the Velvets’ use of a mass
art form was a metaphor for transcendence, for connection, for re-
sistance to solipsism and despair. Which is also what it is for the
 78 | ELLEN WILLIS
punks; whether they admit it or not, that is what their irony is about.
It may be sheer coincidence, but it was in the wake of the new wave
that Reed recorded “Street Hassle,” a three-part, eleven-minute anti-
nihilist anthem that is by far the most compelling piece of work he
has done in his post-Velvets solo career. In it he represents nihilism
as double damnation: loss of faith that love is possible, compounded
by denial that it matters. ““That’s just a lie,’ he mutters at the be-
ginning of part three. “That’s why she tells her friends. Cause the
real song—the real song she won’t even admit to herself.”

3. Tue Rea Sone, or I’xt BE Your Mrrror

If the Velvets suggested continuity between art and violence,

order and chaos, they posed a radical split between body and spirit.
In this way too they were closer to the Who than to any other con-
temporaries, Like the Velvets, the Who were fundamentally ascetic;
they too saw the world as hostile—particularly the world as organized
by the British class system. Their defiance was cruder than the. Vel-
vets’, their early music as hard and violent as any to come out of the
new wave. But they were not cranks; they were determined to con-
vert the world, and Townshend’s guitar-smashing expressed his need
to break through to his audience as well as his contempt for author-
ity, including the authority of rock and roll itself. That need to con-
nect also took another form: even before Townshend discovered
Meher Baba, the Who’s music had a side that could only be called
religious. If it seemed, at first, surprising that the same band could
‘produce music as uncompromising in its bitterness as “Substitute”
and as miraculously transcendent as the “You are forgiven!” chorus
of “A Quick One,” it was no contradiction; on the contrary, it was
precisely Townshend’s sense of the harshness of life, the implacabil-
ity of the world, that generated his spiritual hunger.
The same can be said of Lou Reed, except that “spiritual hunger”
seems too self-important a phrase to apply to him; the Velvets’ brand
of spirituality has little in common with the Who’s grand bursts of
mystical ecstasy or Townshend’s self-conscious preoccupation with
the quest for enlightenment. It’s impossible to imagine Lou Reed
taking up with a guru, though he might well write a savagely funny
(and maybe chillingly serious) song about one. The aesthete-punk
 Velvet Underground | 79

and his fellow demi-mondaines are not seeking enlightenment,

though they stumble on it from time to time; like most of us they
are pilgrims in spite of themselves. For Townshend moral sensitivity
is a path to spiritual awareness; for Reed awareness and the lack—or
refusal—of it have an intrinsically moral dimension. While he is not
averse to using the metaphors of illusion and enlightenment—
sometimes to brilliant effect, as in “Beginning to See the Light” and
“T'll Be Your Mirror’—they are less central to his theology than the
concepts of sin and grace, damnation and salvation. Some of his
songs (“Heroin,” “Jesus,” “Pale Blue Eyes”) explicitly invoke that
Judeo-Christian language; many more imply it.
But “theology” too is an unfairly pretentious word. The Velvets
do not deal in abstractions but in states of mind. Their songs are
about the feelings the vocabulary of religion was invented to describe
—profound and unspeakable feelings of despair, disgust, isolation,
confusion, guilt, longing, relief, peace, clarity, freedom, love—and
about the ways we (and they) habitually bury those feelings, deny
them, sentimentalize them, mock them, inspect them from a safe,
sophisticated distance in order to get along in the hostile, corrupt
world. For the Velvets the roots of sin are in this ingrained resistance
to facing our deepest, most painful, and most sacred emotions; the
essence of grace is the comprehension that our sophistication is a
sham, that our deepest, most painful, most sacred desire is to recover
a childlike innocence we have never, in our heart of hearts, really
lost. And the essence of love is sharing that redemptive truth: on the
Velvets’ first album, which is dominated by images of decadence and
death, suddenly, out of nowhere, comes Nico’s artless voice singing,
“T’ll be your mirror/... . The light on your door to show that you’re
home./When you think the night has seen your mind/That inside
you're twisted and unkind/. . . Please put down your hands, cause I
see you.”
For a sophisticated rock-and-roll band with a sophisticated audi-
ence, this vision is, to say the least, risky. The idea of childlike
innocence is such an invitation to bathos that making it credible
seems scarcely less difficult than getting the camel of the gospels
through the needle’s eye. And the Velvets’ alienation is also prob-
lematic: it’s one thing for working-class English kids to decide life is
shit, but how bad can things be for Lou Reed? Yet the Velvets bring
 80 | ELLEN WILLIS
it off—make us believe/admit that the psychic wounds we inflict on
each other are real and terrible, that to scoff at innocence is to in-
dulge in a desperate lie—because they never succumb to self-pity.
Life may be a brutal struggle, sin inevitable, innocence elusive and
transient, grace a gift, not a reward (“Some people work very hard/
But still they never get it right,” Lou Reed observes in “Beginning to
See the Light”); nevertheless we are responsible for who and what
we become. Reed does not attempt to resolve this familiar spiritual
paradox, nor does he regard it as unfair. His basic religious assump-
tion (like Baudelaire’s) is that like it or not we inhabit a moral
universe, that we have free will, that we must choose between good
and evil, and that our choices matter absolutely; if we are rarely
strong enough to make the right choices, if we can never count on
the moments of illumination that make them possible, still it is
spiritual death to give up the effort.
That the Velvets are hardly innocents, that they maintain their
aesthetic and emotional distance even when describing—and evoking
—utter spiritual nakedness, does not undercut what they are saying;
if anything it does the opposite. The Velvets compel belief in part
because, given its context, what they are saying is so bold: not only
do they implicitly criticize their own aesthetic stance—they risk
undermining it altogether, ending up with sincere but embarrassingly
banal home truths, The risk is real because the Velvets do not use
irony as a net, a way of evading responsibility by keeping everyone
guessing about what they really mean. On the contrary, their irony
functions as a metaphor for the spiritual paradox, affirming that the
need to face one’s nakedness and the impulse to cover it up are
equally real, equally human. If the Velvets’ distancing is self-protec-
tive (hence in their terms damning) it is also revelatory (hence re-
deeming); it makes clear that the feelings being protected are so
unbearably intense that if not controlled and contained they would
overwhelm both the Velvets and their audience. The Velvets’ real
song is how hard it is to admit, even to themselves.
That song in its many variations is the substance of Velvet
Underground. This album can be conceived of—non-linearly; the
cuts are not at all in the right order—as the aesthete-punk’s Pilgrim’s
Progress, in four movements. (“Sha la la, man, whyn’t you just slip
away?” I can hear Lou Reed say to that.)
 Velvet Underground | 81

One: Wortpiy SEDUCTION AND Betrayat. “Sunday Morning,” a

song about vague and ominous anxiety, sums up the emotional tone
of this movement: “Watch out, the world’s behind you.” “Here She
Comes Now” and “Femme Fatale,” two songs about beautiful but
unfeeling women (in the unlovable tradition of pop—not to men-
tion religious—misogyny, Lou Reed’s women are usually demonic
or angelic icons, not people), sum up its philosophy: “Aah, it looks
so good/Aah, but she’s made out of wood.” These songs underscore
the point by juxtaposing simple, sweet, catchy melodies with bitter
lyrics sung in flat, almost affectless voices (in “Sunday Morning,”
Reed’s voice takes on a breathiness that suggests supressed panic).
“White Light/White Heat,” a song about shooting speed, starts out
by coming as close as any Velvets song does to expressing the eu-
phoria of sheer physical energy; by the end of the trip the music has
turned into bludgeoning, deadening noise, the words into a semi-
articulate mumble.
Two: Tue Sin or Despair. “Heroin” is the Velvets’ masterpiece
—seven minutes of excruciating spiritual extremity. No work of art I
know about has ever made the junkie’s experience so powerful, so
horrible, so appealing; listening to “Heroin” I feel simultaneously
impelled to somehow save this man and to reach for the needle. The
song is built around the tension between the rush and the nod—
expressed musically by an accelerating beat giving way to slow,
solemn chords that sound like a bell tolling; metaphorically by the
addict’s vision of smack as a path to transcendence and freedom,
alternating with his stark recognition that what it really offers is the
numbness of death, that his embrace of the drug (“It’s my wife and
it’s my life”) is a total, willful rejection of the corrupt world, other
people, feeling. In the beginning he likens shooting up to a spiritual
journey: he’s gonna try for the Kingdom; when he’s rushing on his
run he feels like Jesus’ son. At the end, with a blasphemous defiance
that belies his words, he avows, “Thank your God that I’m not
aware/And thank God that I just don’t care!” The whole song seems
to rush outward and then close in on itself, on the moment of truth
when the junkie knowingly and deliberately chooses death over life
—chooses damnation. It is the clarity of his consciousness that gives
the sin its enormity. Yet that clarity also offers a glimmer of redemp-
tion. In the very act of choosing numbness the singer admits the
 82 | ELLEN WILLIS

depths of his pain and bitterness, his longing for something better;
he is aware of every nuance of his rejection of awareness; he sings a
magnificently heartfelt song about how he doesn’t care. (A decade
later Johnny Rotten will do the same thing in an entirely different
way.) A clear, sustained note runs through the song like a bright
thread; it fades out or is drowned out by chaotic, painful distortion
and feedback, then comes through again, like the still small voice of
the soul. Reed ends each verse with the refrain, ““And I guess that I
just don’t know.” His fate is not settled yet.
THREE: PARADISE SouGHT, GLIMPSED, RECOLLECTED. This move-
ment consists of four songs about world-weary sophistication and the
yearning for innocence. “Candy Says” defines the problem: “I’ve
come to hate my body and all that it requires in this world/.. . I'd
like to know completely what others so discreetly talk about.”
“Jesus” is a prayer: “Help me in my weakness, for I’ve fallen out of
gtace.” In “I’m Set Free,” the singer has his illumination, but even
as he tries to tell about it, to pin it down, it slips away: “I saw my
head laughing, rolling on the ground/And now I’m set free to find a
new illusion.” In “Pale Blue Eyes,” the world has gotten in the way
of the singer’s transcendent love: “If I could make the world as pure
and strange as what I see/I’d put you in the mirror I put in front of
me.”
Musically these songs are of a piece. They are all gentle, reflective.
They all make use of the tension between flat, detached voices and
sweet melodies, They all have limpid guitar lines that carry the basic
emotion, which is bittersweet: it is consoling to know that innocence
is possible, inexpressibly painful that it always seems just out of
teach, In “Pale Blue Eyes,” a tambourine keeps the beat, or rather is
slightly off where the beat ought to be, while a spectacular guitar
takes over completely, rolling in on wave after wave of pure feeling,
Four: SALVATION AND Its Pirratts. “Beginning to See the Light”
is the mirror held up to “Heroin.” I’ve always been convinced that
it’s about an acid trip, perhaps because I first really heard it during
one and found it utterly appropriate. Perhaps also because both the
song and the acid made me think of a description of a peyote high
by a beat writer named Jack Green: “a group of us, on peyote, had
little to share with a group on marijuana the marijuana smokers
were discussing questions of the utmost profundity and we were
 Velvet Underground | 83

sticking our fingers in our navels & giggling.” In “Beginning to See

the Light,” enlightenment (or salvation) is getting out from under
the burden of self-seriousness, of egotism, of imagining that one’s
sufferings fill the universe; childlike innocence means being able to
play. There is no lovelier moment in rock and roll than when Lou
Reed laughs and sings, with amazement, joy, gratitude, “I just wanta
tell you, everything is all right!”
But “Beginning to See the Light” is also wickedly ironic. Toward
the end, carried away by euphoria, Reed cries, “There are problems
in these times/But ooh, none of them are mine!” Suddenly we are
through the mirror, back to the manifesto of “Heroin”: “I just don’t
care!” Enlightenment has begotten spiritual pride, a sin that like its
inverted form, nihilism, cuts the sinner off from the rest of the
human race. Especially from those people who, you know, work very
hard but never get it right. Finally we are left with yet another ver-
sion of the spiritual paradox: to experience grace is to be conscious
of it; to be conscious of it is to lose it.

Copa: I’> Love To Turn You ON

Like all geniuses, Lou Reed is unpredictable. In “Street Hassle”

he does as good a job as anyone of showing what was always missing
in his and the Velvets’ vision. As the song begins, a woman (or
transvestite?) in a bar is buying a night with a sexy young boy. This
sort of encounter is supposed to be squalid; it turns out to be tran-
scendent. Reed’s account of the odd couple’s lovemaking is as tender
as it is erotic: “And then sha la la la la he entered her slowly and
showed her where he was coming from/And then sha la la la la he
made love to her gently, it was like she’d never ever come.” Of
course, in part two he almost takes it all back by linking sex with
death. Still. ;
What it comes down to for me—as a Velvets fan, a lover of rock
and roll, a New Yorker, an aesthete, a punk, a sinner, a sometime
seeker of enlightenment (and love) (and sex)—is this: I believe that
we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind
of nihilism. I believe that body and spirit are not really separate,
though it often seems that way. I believe that redemption is never
impossible and always equivocal. But I guess that I just don’t know.
 DESPERADO
THE EAGLES (ASYLUM 5068)
1973

GRACE LICHTENSTEIN
The Eagles’ Desperado is a bit like the shard of. prehistoric Indian
pottery I once found in New Mexico—a fragment of Americana
whose private associations are for me as valuable as the thing itself.
More than any rock album in my collection, Desperado conjures up
visions of the Western United States as I saw it and lived in it for
several years, as well as the desperate state of mind I was often
immersed in when I listened to the record.
Pretentious in spots, trivial in others, deliciously melodic through-
out, the album spells out a connection between the popular music
my contemporaries have produced and the heritage, musical and
historical, upon which they draw. I know I can hear it over and
over without tiring of it, the way I can look at my pottery endlessly.
Unlike so much of my favorite rock music (Beatles, Rolling Stones)
it is quintessentially American, and when I’m away from home the
album becomes my American talisman. In their rock and roll way,
the Eagles are wonderfully patriotic, though I assume their choice
of the national bird for their name stemmed from its relationship
to nature, not nationality.
Desperado is quite consciously a “concept” album. Each song
relates to the others, while the first song on the first side, “Doolin’
 Desperado | 85

Dalton,” combined with the title song, becomes a reprise at the end.
The medium is generally laid-back early seventies Los Angeles
country-rock, yet the story line relates to some historic gunfighters
in the Oklahoma region toward the end of the 19th century. There
actually was a Bill Doolin, who got caught in the Coffeyville, Kan-
sas, shootout in 1892. In their own hometown, trying to pull off a
raid on two banks at once, the Daltons wore disguises, but neighbors
recognized them anyway. The result was a bloody showdown that
left four townsmen and two Daltons dead. Two Dalton henchmen
were also killed, and a photo of the corpses piled up in the street
is imitated on the jacket of the Eagles’ album, Part of this story
is related in “Doolin’ Dalton.” Another member of the gang who
was later killed was named “Bitter Creek” Newcomb; his first name
turns up as the title of another song on Desperado. The real Daltons
were never lawyers, despite the Eagles’ reference in “Doolin’ Dal-
ton” to laying aside one’s lawbooks, but they did serve for a time
as law deputies to the notorious “Hanging Judge” Parker.
Bill Doolin himself later went on to a career as a famous bandit,
though he never received the national recognition accorded Billy
the Kid or Jesse James. Doolin was more interested in money than
fame anyhow, so his robberies were less spectacular. Even so, the
man described by contemporaries as a slight, ordinary fellow from
rural Arkansas had become, by 1895, the “King of Oklahoma Out-
laws,” and his capture at an Arkansas health spa while reading a
newspaper in the warm baths made front-page news regionally.
Desperado equates the lives of these frontier outlaws of the real
and mythic American West to those of latter-day rock musicians, a
conceit often used by white folk singers, hard-rock groups, and coun-
try & western singers alike. But the Eagles were the first to root the
equation in a real-life story from the past that carried an album
from start to finish, adding an extra dimension to songs that without
it might sound routine.
The Bill Doolin who joins the Dalton gang at the beginning
of Desperado regards himself as a young but immortal hotshot
(“Twenty One’), loses his innocence in a romantic encounter with
a married woman (“Tequila Sunrise”), faces isolation in his passage
to adulthood (“Saturday Night”), and confronts the emptiness of a
 86 | GRACE LICHTENSTEIN

life on the road (“Desperado”). Yet he still hones his skills (“Cer-
tain Kind of Fool”) to become the best of the bunch, while at the
same time he turns cynical about fame (“Bitter Creek”) and even-
tually recognizes that life isn’t what he expected it to be. Instead
of a full house, it’s a stacked deck (reprise), inevitably winding up
in violent death.
This desperado, though, is only partly the famed Bill Doolin,
King of Oklahoma Outlaws. He is also the Eagles, and every young
hotshot rock-and-roller with a quick draw on his guitar. What makes
Desperado extraordinary is that any sympathetic listener (such as
myself, a woman writer rather than a male musician, or indeed any-
one with the thirst for fame and adventure Americans seem prey to)
can identify with the album. The concept is close to a rock version
of the time-honored bildungsroman—a story that relates the de-
velopment of character in a young person as he or she grows to
adulthood.
The lyrics deal with much weightier themes than are found in
most Eagles’ albums, with the exception of Hotel California, There
is the American penchant for violence, in the initial tale of the
Dalton Gang’s disastrous raid on Coffeyville, in the rowdy nights
in frontier towns, in the ultimate showdown. There is the inevitable
rebellion against one’s parents, the feeling that the rebel is differ-
ent from his conformist peers. This second theme is introduced in
the first cut (“‘A man could use his back or use his brains/But some
just went stir-crazy, Lord, ’cause nothing ever changed”) and ex-
pands into “Outlaw Man” and “Desperado.” Mixed with this psy-
chological separatism is the craving for fame, not just adoration by
faceless crowds but acceptance from one’s parents of one’s own
way of life (“I can’t wait to see the old man’s face/When I win
the race”). There is the impermanence of love, from the outlaw’s
doomed first affair, to his defiant warning to a woman who loves
him in “Outlaw Man,” to the bitter conclusion in the “Desperado”
reprise—which buries the hope of love for good. Finally, there is
the concept of honor. The rebel joins the Daltons not just for fame,
money, and women but to help them avenge the deaths of their
brothers. As he grows into the desperado, he still has enough honor
 Desperado | 87

left to express guilt when he cheats on a friend by sleeping with the

friend’s woman, and to show up for the last act.
The album progresses very quickly from youthful, lusty enthu-
siasm to regretful disillusionment. Many of these themes, especially
the idea of life as a gamble, and a risky one at that, have been
treated well by other rock songwriters; ‘The Dealer,” Bob Ruzicka’s
song sung by Judy Collins on True Stories, is just one example that
comes to mind. But in Desperado, the themes are all of a piece,
more like a musical comedy/drama than a rock performance. Only
the Who’s Tommy seems to have been conceived with such close
lyric connections and a coherent story line.
The unexpected density of the lyrics is complemented by a va-
riety of musical styles within the basic L.A. country-rock frame-
work. The Eagles have written at least four waltzes, something of a
novelty in seventies: rock, and “Saturday Night” is a lovely one in-
deed, conjuring up one of the musicale set-pieces in a John Ford
western. (The other Eagles waltzes are “Hollywood Waltz,” “Take
It to the Limit,” and “Pretty Maids All in a Row.”) Hard rock
(“Out of Control”) blends with the more country & western sound
of “Tequila Sunrise,” the banjo-picking folkiness of “Twenty One,”
the bluegrass in the introduction to “Outlaw Man” and the piano-
and-strings lushness of “Desperado.” Not until Hotel California
several years later did the Eagles once again dive head-on into such
a complex mix of musical and lyrical ideas. Hotel California, more-
over, is about modern America. Desperado, more interestingly, is
about America both past and present.
Then there is the vocalizing. From their first hit on their first
album, the Glenn Frey—Jackson Browne song “Take It Easy,” the
Eagles have produced some of the most pleasing close harmony in
rock and roll. Neither of the leads, Frey and Don Henley (nor Bernie
Leadon and Randy Meisner, who occasionally soloed on the early
albums), has, individually, the most compelling male voice in West
Coast rock; that title undoubtedly goes to Neil Young. One can
also halve the “woo-woos” in a lot of the Eagles’ music and double
the pleasure. Nevertheless, taking their cue from groups of the mid-
dle and late sixties such as Buffalo Springfield, the Flying Burrito
Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Eagles’ singing
 88 | GRACE LICHTENSTEIN

has a sweet hypnotic force that made not only “Take It Easy” but
lesser songs such as “Lyin’ Eyes,” “Take It to the Limit,” and “Best
of My Love” huge AM hits.
On Desperado, the musicianship was hardly flashy. In the middle
of a CSNY album, Neil Young could nail a listener to the wall with
his voice and guitar work on “Southern Man,” but around that song
was an awful lot of blandness. Without the fleshiness of a Young, or
a Joe Walsh, who joined the Eagles with Hotel California, Desper-
ado still hangs tough. The guitar playing is gutsy (listen to “Bitter
Creek” and “Outlaw Man’), adding just enough tartness to those
sweet harmonies. The musicians have borrowed judiciously from
almost every American popular music genre except rhythm & blues.
(Henley’s charming, scruffy tenor does owe something to black sing-
ers, while the falsettos used in so many of the songs are also of black
origin.) The one quality I do miss in the album is humor.
Of course, there’s a reason for choosing to spend one’s life with
Desperado rather than, say, a Randy Newman album, whose fun
would probably pale quickly. Beyond its central concept of outlaw/
rock star, Desperado presents the idea of the man or woman alone,
his or her own worst enemy; there is an oddly comforting quality
to the idea when one hears the album all by oneself. Sure it’s sad,
but also instructive. If we are all alone, then being all alone at the
moment isn’t so awful, is it?
In effect, I took Desperado to a desert island in 1975, two years
after the album’s release, when I moved to Colorado to be a roving
newspaper correspondent covering the Rocky Mountain west. Al-
though I loved the album before, it now became my cassette com-
panion on many roads “where the desert meets the sky.” One may
argue whether the music, coming out of the L.A. rock establish-
ment, is inauthentic in the “real” cowboy/outlaw West. That’s not
the point. In a four-wheel truck crossing a rutted mountain pass
that led to the played-out silver mines where, in the 1890s, “Baby
Doe” Tabor scandalized the country, Desperado was utterly appro-
priate on a car stereo in the 1970s. At times hardly any other music
would do. The only album that came close was Willie Nelson’s Red
Headed Stranger. I had adored Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, the
Rolling Stones, the early Supremes. But that was city music. I
 Desperado | 89

couldn’t play it in my circumstances. Mick Jagger does not work in

a car in Utah the way he does in a living room in New York. Des-
perado worked superbly, as did the other Eagles albums; it kept me
company, through Utah, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona,
New Mexico, Nevada.
Nor was it my companion alone. By 1975, the title song was suf-
ficiently popular among many amateur and smalltown professional
musicians that one often found it in their repertory. I heard it,
without requesting it, dozens of times at live shows out west. (By
1978, the song was so well known the McGarrigle sisters sang a
parody of it at a New York club date.) The song seemed to follow
me. One particularly eerie evening, around a campfire in Utah’s
Canyonlands National Park, fifty miles from the nearest paved road,
6,000 feet atop a spectacular red-rock desert plateau overlooking the
Colorado River, a young woman in a cowboy hat who was cook on
our camping trip began strumming the chords I knew by heart. I
tried to sing along, but her pitch was too high for me and there was
a lump in my throat. It was the first night of what turned out to be
a magical visit to the Utah desert, where sixteen people started as
strangers and seven days later became friends for life. A few days
into the trip, as we hiked to see some ancient granaries used by the
Anasazi (early Pueblo) Indians, I asked the cook why she had sung
“Desperado” on our expedition’s opening night. “It’s my favorite
song,” she replied fervently, both of us squinting into the pure light
of desert noon, a light that makes you feel as alone as a person can
be, a light that makes you want to metamorphose into a lizard. “I’ve
always felt like that song was sort of written for me,” she continued.
“It’s as if I was just misplaced when I was born.”
She was twenty-five years old, a native Californian who hated her
home state and had come to the inland west in search of cowboys,
desert, adventure, the myth. I was ten years her senior, a New Yorker
who loved my native city and who had come to the Rockies in search
of the same things. We were talking of a song, written by two young
men, one from Texas, the other from Detroit, who had both quit
their homes to live in California. At that moment, what we had in
common was that “Desperado” spoke for us, in terms more powerful
than the spoken or the written word speaks.
 90 | GRACE LICHTENSTEIN

My love for Desperado occasionally had its absurd moments.

Once I was driving through a desolate stretch of southwest Wy-
oming toward an appointment many miles ahead in the Tetons. It
was early September, the rainy season. The sky was leaden. Soon
it began to pour. In my rented Avis, Desperado was playing on my
small cassette player. As I approached Jackson Hole the rolling plains
of sagebrush began to give way to hillocks and then to offer glimpses
of the etched mountains beyond. Almost at the exact point where
Don Henley sings, “It may be raining, but there’s a rainbow above
you,” the rainbow appeared in my smeared windshield, summoned,
I was certain, by Euterpe, the musical muse. I screeched to a halt
on the shoulder of the road, jumped out of the car, and stood in the
stinging rain to stare at the rainbow, A minute later, a state trooper
pulled up behind me.
“Anything wrong, Ma’am?”
“Uh, no, officer, nothing. I’m just looking at the rainbow,” I
replied, feeling drenched and foolish.
He responded with one of those she’s-crazy-but-harmless nods,
“Gonna get wet that way,” he said with a shrug, and climbed back
in his car and sped off,
I got wet, but the feeling of foolishness disappeared when he did.
The Rocky Mountain west is a strip of real estate so enormous, so
empty, that it makes human beings feel quite small. The very
splendor of the scenery induces reflective pensiveness about one’s
life even as it lifts the soul with its beauty, The feeling expressed
in the music of “Outlaw Man,” “Out of Control,” “Tequila Sun-
rise,” and “Desperado” captured that sense of the west for me time
and time again. Eventually, it seemed it was not just the west, but
the general rootlessness of my then-current life that was the heart
and spirit of Desperado.
Looked at another way, the album was the one that moved me
the most among those in the subgenre of “toad” music. Rock musi-
cians, as we are reminded constantly in magazine profiles, spend part
of their glamorous time moving from Holiday Inn to Holiday Inn
like so many traveling salesmen. Or traveling business executives,
Or traveling journalists. The difference is that in rock, life on the
road has been elevated to something of an existential state, a meta-
 Desperado | 91

phor for the anomie of the post-industrial society. Since I was one
of those traveling persons, with a fondness for rock, I turned to those
songs for comfort in my green shag cinderblock motel rooms the
way my neighboring traveling salesmen turned to their pints of gin,
the way rock musicians turned to their groupies.
My favorite road songs included Gram Parsons’ “Grievous
Angel,” a lament about purposelessness and the need for love that
is a first cousin to “Desperado”; James ‘Taylor's “Highway Song,”
an ironic tribute to the lure of the road; Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia,”
a complex homage to Earhart contrasted with the singer’s own
wanderings; and Carole King’s “So Far Away,” a sad acknowledg-
ment that nobody these days stays in one place for long, physically
or emotionally.
After I returned from the west to New York, Jackson Browne’s
road album, Running on Empty, was released to critical acclaim.
Had J still been in Colorado, it undoubtedly would have joined my
suitcase cassette collection immediately. But I was home. The
album reached me (I especially enjoyed the multiple suggestions of
the title song) yet it did not move me. Of Browne’s many “road”
songs I prefer “Take It Easy,” less inner-directed, more adventurous
(how many of us have made a stop in Winslow, Arizona, because
of that song?), better sung by the Eagles than by the composer.
Once I was home, L.A. country-rock, most Eagles albums included,
did not have the same power over my emotions that it did when
I listened to it out west. Suddenly I was more interested in Bruce
Springsteen’s urban “Badlands” than in Willie Nelson’s rural ones.
Carly Simon’s urbane musings about love were once again more
accessible than Emmylou Harris’s countrified ones. Graham Parker’s
and Elvis Costello’s hard-edged rock brought me closer to my rock
’n’ roll teenage days than the Outlaws.
Maybe it’s a question of listening to music in context. The big
exception, obviously, is Desperado, which never loses its hold on
me. I’d like to think it’s a better album, overall, than Running on
Empty. I can’t make a fair judgment, nor is it necessary. Desperado
is now part of my own history. I can no longer separate a particular
riff in “Outlaw Man” from a group of creepy “Wild Bunch” gun-
toting right-wingers I met in Virginia City, Montana, nor the line
 92 | GRACE LICHTENSTEIN

about freedom in the title song from the squalid Ada County Jail
in which I spent a night in Idaho, nor the almost-silly raunchiness
of “Out of Control” from a beer-crazed roadhouse I danced in north
of Albuquerque.
The Eagles’ attempts at taking a crack at the old and new wests
have been noble ones, with Desperado the prettiest of them all.
While others in the L.A. rock scene—Neil Young (who isn’t truly
part of it), Browne, J. D. Souther—seem to be turning psychologi-
cally inward, the Eagles continue to tell fine stories with a socio-
logical point of view in close harmony: stories like the title song on
Hotel California, “Life in the Fast Lane,” and the less successful
“Last Resort.”
Not long ago, the title song of Desperado, my favorite rock story,
was accidentally put to the test of my present tolerance level. My
clock radio went off one morning as a set of songs was beginning
with a new one I like a great deal, Springsteen’s “Badlands.” I lay
there half-asleep, and the music—tough, here-and-now, street-wise,
big city—segued into “Desperado.” Alone, yet not any longer des-
perate nor western, back home at last, a street-wise big city woman,
I started to sob into my pillow, not for the Springsteen song, but for
the Eagles’.
 LITTLE WILLIE JOHN
LITTLE WILLIE JOHN (KING 5004X)
1953-1962/1977

JOE MC EWEN
When I was young, I had a gut feeling that energy and swing could
transcend even the most lingering (and banal) adolescent traumas
and depressions. As a teenager, I was often morose, though the
music that attracted me—“Cool Jerk,” “Shotgun,” “Papa’s Got a
Brand New Bag’—rarely ever was. I liked ballads well enough,
but with few exceptions (James Brown’s “Lost Someone”) such
songs were either overwrought or slight. Mood music, even ““Tracks
of My Tears,” was never moody enough.
Little Willie John was a teenager when he recorded his first
hit, “All Around the World,” for King Records in 1955. When he
faded in 1962, he was a grizzled veteran of 23. Though rock and
roll singing was once the province of the young, few under-twenty
singers have been able to communicate more than jittery restless-
ness or poignant ache. Little Willie John’s records are filled with
much more. The songs on Little Willie John, a collection of his
fifteen biggest hits, are dark and mature; sometimes messy, some-
times desperate. John sounded old, but his music was also delicate
and vulnerable—he wasn’t afraid to show his age. But more than
anything, John’s songs seemed to speak for every growing pain
and young adult awkwardness. His music was an expression of
 94 | JOE MC EWEN
longing and desire beyond physical love and romance. Little Willie
John understood.
Little Willie John, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and (to a
lesser extent) James Brown changed the manner of black popular
singing. Each was a stand-up, church-reared vocalist who had a
high regard for the stock tools of the trade: technique, presentation,
and flair. That alone made them different from most, though
older rhythm and blues singers like Ruth Brown and Roy Brown
had similar upwardly mobile concerns. But the real difference was
in style, and the very manner of a Little Willie John or Sam
Cooke suggested a measured cockiness and self-assured presence
that was inescapably black and soulful, no matter what the song.
The new music, more gospel-derived and personal than that of
the forties and early fifties, also implied a new stance, for each of
the singers, in his own way, mastered the art of Cool.
Cool had been a part of black popular music before: in the
zany antics of Cab Calloway; in the style of Billy Eckstine, the
urban Mr. B. But the jive of Calloway and the dapperness of
Eckstine never left a lingering impression, maybe because emo-
tional expression was never part of the package: Calloway had his
Hep Dictionary and Eckstine made women swoon with rococo
Tin Pan Alley ballads that melted, one after the other, like land-
scapes on the open road, The implications of Cool for Cooke,
John, Wilson, and Brown went beyond the surface, combining
polished talent with swagger and acumen. Cool offered the
potential for self-determination, and even irresponsibility. Above all,
it meant a new day for black people. Cool, for one, meant you
didn’t have to answer to anybody. For two, it meant you had what
it takes.
Though most soul singers in the sixties aspired to the mantle
of Cool, only Aretha Franklin really possessed the breadth of talent
necessary to support it. Soul music itself required a kind of
clumsy involvement: Solomon Burke needed a witness and raising
your hand just wasn’t part of Cool. There was always Motown, of
course, but Motown was primarily a teenage music. And when
Motown singers tangled with anything other than Motown music,
the results were usually contrived and embarrassing. The Four Tops
 Little Willie John | 95

on Broadway converted few people. Besides, the choreography,

which was part of Motown’s flash, also helped confine its practi-
tioners to the ghetto. A few years past its time, choreography
could look awful corny. Coo] knew no such restrictions, save race
perhaps, in its appeal. In 1971, when the last Soul Man, Al Green,
surfaced, he registered Cool’s lingering influences: Cooke, Wilson,
and John were ticked off as favorites.
Cool was indisputably urban, and, in a sense, Sam Cooke was
its epitome. Cooke sang like an urbane, soulful crooner, projecting
feeling without seeming to sweat and often giving the impression
that his sad songs were only momentary dissatisfactions with the
state of things. Cooke ran his own show and even had his own
record label. Above all, Sam Cooke exuded class in everything he
did.
For Jackie Wilson, Cool was a magnificent voice that could
tackle blues, rock ’n’ roll and the most unregenerate schmaltz;
Cool was a hair-raising stage show that aroused audiences with
splits, spins, slides, and knee-drops. Though Wilson was almost
as active as James Brown on stage, he was never as intense—and
besides, Wilson was much better looking. But it wasn’t the
sexual hysteria Wilson aroused that made him cool; Jackie Wilson
overwhelming “Danny Boy” or “Night” for a black audience—that
was Cool.
James Brown had much to overcome. He had a rural Georgia
background; he was a fierce performer on stage. But Brown invented
new dance steps and spoke the hippest slang. Like Cooke, he also
ran his own operation, designed his own clothes, produced his own
records, and made sure he got his money. Brown could get away
with screams and grunts, and an occasional gauche outfit, simply
because he was James Brown. But for real Cool, James Brown was
too kinetic, too down, too black.
Jackie Wilson had more range and Sam Cooke more purity and
grace, but no one had a voice like Little Willie John. While he
did share a nasal, cigarette rasp with James Brown, John could
punctuate even the harshest of phrases with a wild falsetto or
suddenly retreat into a muffled, choked sob. John also had a
fullness that Brown never possessed—a quality that gave his blues
 96 | JOE MC EWEN
and ballads a heavy, drenching kind of melancholy. At the same
time he was capable of great delicacy; his phrasing on the subdued
“Let Them Talk” is meticulous and tender. At his best, John’s
voice simply sounded eerie. He wore snap-brim hats, smoked a
pipe, and stood inches over five feet; like Sam Cooke, he could
move an audience without acrobatics or show. Little Willie John
had style.
Little Willie John was bor in Camden, Arkangas, but moved
to Detroit at an early age; R&B bandleader Johnny Otis remembers
eyeing a 13-year-old John at a Detroit talent show in 1951. Otis
passed the word to Syd Nathan of King Records, who ignored
John and signed a group of entrants from the same show, Hank
Ballard and the Royals. Through the early fifties, John made brief
appearances fronting the bands of Duke Ellington and Count
Basie, and toured more extensively with tenor saxophonist and
R&B hitmaker Paul Williams. Little Willie John didn’t lack for
proper schooling..Though precious little has been written about
John and his influences, those listed by Jackie Wilson (who also
grew up in Detroit) serve the point well enough: Al Jolson, the
Mills Brothers, the Ink Spots, Clyde McPhatter, the Dixie Hum-
mingbirds, Louis Jordan.
When “All Around the World” was released, Little Willie John
was seventeen and sounded thirty. Pop audiences didn’t pay much
attention. In fact, through his career, John nudged only two
songs—‘“Talk to Me” and “Sleep’—into the Top 20. He hasn’t
been particularly well served by rock historians either. He receives
only passing mention in both The Rolling Stone Illustrated History
of Rock & Roll and Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City, the
two most comprehensive works in the field. In other, lesser treat-
ments, John is simply ignored altogether; the only sustained ref-
erence to the singer that I know of (liner notes aside) is the
two-hundred-word biography in Norm N. Nite’s entertaining Rock
On. The best tribute accorded Little Willie John came from a
surprising source: James Brown, who recorded an album called
Thinking of Little Willie John and a Few Nice Things.
But such oversights are understandable. If rock historians are
drawn to anything, they're drawn to commitment, and a glance at |
 Little Willie John | 97

the range of material John recorded in his career (the fifteen

songs on Little Willie John span just seven years) reveals a notice-
able lack of commitment to any form or genre. The commitment
is to Making It, and a song as awkward as “Autumn Leaves” (re-
corded by John on The Hot, The Sweet, The Teen-Age Beat) was
probably regarded by John as every bit as appropriate a vehicle as
“Need Your Love So Bad,” probably his most moving record, It
was cynicism of a sort, though that attitude was more confined
to record company presidents, A&R men, and producers. No doubt
for John it was all just a way out.
The songs on Little Willie John don’t quite evidence the jumbled
variety Of material that can be found on his oddball King LPs. He
recorded everything: squeaky pop-rock, “Flamingo,” blues, soul
ballads, punchy funky, novelty songs, and even one funny record
called “Spasms,” on which he hiccups like Jerry Lee Lewis. “All
Around the World” was different: a jaunty, big-band piece
that sounded like any number of Joe Tumer’s pre-rock ’n’ roll
records for Atlantic. But such variety was all part of Cool, and
mastering the least likely material only added to the singer’s
worldly luster. The Copacabana and the Apollo weren’t mutually
exclusive. A few years later, soul singers like Wilson Pickett and
Al Green would try to mix the same oil and water, with much
less success. The bottom of soul, after all, was commitment.
In a way, listening to a Little Willie John album is like lis-
tening to any number of post-Sun Elvis Presley records. Some-
where, amidst the show tunes and schlock, are moments of great
passion and clarity. Such moments come, go, and come in bright
flashes, like a dazzling move from some lazy or bored playground
basketball legend. For the most part, the hits were the best of
Little Willie John’s work, as if to remind us that all the trendy
contrivances and weird gimmicks were only so much album filler
between the Real Thing. But that wasn’t always so: the intensity
of “Suffering with the Blues” is still a scary thing to listen to, and
the gently shuffling “Home at Last” has the same doomy flavor
that saturates “Need Your Love So Bad.” Neither were hit 45s.
On the other hand, “Sleep,” a bizarre mismatch of bad orches-
tration and a song that had previously been associated with Fred
 98 | JOE MC EWEN
Waring’s Pennsylvanians, became John’s biggest pop hit, as if to
confirm all the industry's worst instincts.
Little Willie John is an uneven album, yet it’s a record that
stands quite alone. It was rhythm and blues, but when inspira-
tion struck, John (and producers Henry Glover and Ralph Bass)
locked into emotions that were more complex than those in stock
blues and more mature than Utopian, Boy-meets-Girl, teenage
love stuff. Though his best records run a gamut of emotional ex-
pression, rarely did John ever sound happy. For a mature adult,
a performance as dark and knowing as “Need Your Love So Bad”
would have been an achievement worth a lifetime; for a recently
turned seventeen-year-old, the song is staggering in its depth and
sensitivity. “Need Your Love So Bad” is rendered as a spare blues
ballad, with no accompaniment other than a light rhythm section.
The tinkling triplets of the piano are simple and familiar, but
what John sings is no mere recitation of words. The phrasing is
deliberate, marked by fuzzy slurs and sighs, and at times it seems
as if the plea is so desperate, and the singer so lonely, that he’s
beyond verbal expression. It’s a despair that hovers near some
cavernous, internal abyss.
Occasionally John was able to transfer his brooding pathos to
uptempo songs, and the staccato, James Brown-inspired “Heart-
break (It’s Hurtin’ Me)” is a worthy successor to better-known
ballad hits like “Talk to Me” and “Let Them Talk.” There’s one
moment in “Heartbreak” when it all seems to pour out: “This
morming I was happy/Tonight I got ’em bad/Heartbreak, it’s
killin’ me.”
It’s hard to say what effect all this heartbreak and fever had
on someone who had yet to tum twenty-two. After “Heartbreak”
came “Sleep,” and then a quick slide downhill. The spark that
flourished in a late adolescent never quite returned after “Sleep”
(released in mid-1960), and even straight-ahead ballads like “The
Very Thought of You” lack the glimmer and taut emotionalism
present in John’s work only a year earlier. Maybe the psychic
trauma of being a very young man caught up in a fantasy world
of hit records and cross-country touring took its toll. Or maybe
the juice was just drained dry. By the end of 1961, Little Willie
 Little Willie John | 99
John was off the charts for good. Seven years later, after a con-
viction for manslaughter, he died in prison, of pneumonia, in
Walla Walla, Washington, the stuff of legend.
Little Willie John is an album full of ambiguities. It doesn’t
define its time the way the early Sam Cooke hits did and it
doesn’t offer the apocalyptic drama of a James Brown song like
“Please, Please, Please” or “I'll Go Crazy.” It contains more
mediocrity than it should (though even the mediocre songs prove
to be illuminating, like the failures of all great artists), certainly
more than the singer deserved in a retrospective album of this
type. But the songs that move me on this record reach private
emotions that I’ve kept sealed off since I was a teenager. When
John sings “Need Your Love So Bad,” I think of the lonely week-
ends I spent in high school wishing for a girl who not only com-
bined a dozen mythic qualities, but who also felt the same bat-
tery of desires, fears, and depressions that haunted me. Naturally
such a girl would be quite different from the rest, and “Let Them
Talk” (with that wonderful phrase, “Idle gossip comes from the
devil’s workshop”) is my bravado answer to sticking out like a
sore thumb. “Fever” is surging sexual passions, and “Heartbreak
(It’s Hurtin’ Me)”—well, that speaks for itself. Some of these
emotions were simple and laughable, some poignant, and some
worthy of the inarticulate rage I felt at the time. All remain as
fresh and vivid as last night’s dinner.
For the playground legend, the sum of the parts is always more
important than the whole. And while self-sacrifice, drive, and hustle
are the all-important ingredients of a successful team, there’s a
thrill beyond words in watching an athlete display skills that he
alone owns, even if such gifts are eventually self-destructive. When
thinking of Little Willie John, I’m reminded of that. When listen-
ing to Little Willie John, my life passes before me.
 SOMETHING ELSE
BY THE KINKS
THE KINKS (REPRISE 6279)
1968

JANET MASLIN
At first I thought the biggest problem would be one of acoustics,
but then I thought again. No friends. No enemies. No Christmas
shoppers, but no Christmas presents, either. No way to start a
stamp collection. No date at the movies. Hold the phone—no
movies at alll! Or books! Or talk shows! Or magazines (except for
one yellowing copy of People, with Gregg and Cher and Baby
Elijah on the cover)! Or records! No records!
Hah. One record, and—this being something of a trumped- up
dilemma—all the time in the world to choose it. The final selec-
tion process didn’t take me anywhere near that long: Something
Else by the Kinks, and there’s no second choice. If I couldn’t pack
that, I’d have to make other travel plans.
If it were just a matter of setting the proper mood for a long
journey, I might want to take Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty
for its all-night road songs, Bruce Springsteen’s Greetings from
Asbury Park or Born to Run for warding off any possible hint of
drowsiness, and the Bee Gees’ Main Course for dancing in the
car. If the idea were to fall into a state of perfect relaxation once
I got there, then Abbey Road or Arlo Guthrie’s Amigo or The
Hollies’ Greatest Hits would be best for morning, Van Morrison’s
 Something Else by the Kinks | 101

Saint Dominic's Preview or Jimmy Webb’s El Mirage for the late

afternoon. Judy Collins's Who Knows Where the Time Goes
would work well at that hour too, but I’d save it for later, since
it’s one of the best things I know for falling asleep happy.
On nights when I didn’t care about sleeping and stayed awake
brooding long after the fish had gone to bed, I’d want to hear
Leonard Cohen’s Songs from a Room, Phil Ochs in Concert, Ralph
McTell’s You Well-Meaning Brought Me Here, Elvis Costello’s My
Aim Is True, or Warren Zevon. Days that made me miss the city
would cry out for Steely Dan’s Katy Lied, or Laura Nyro’s Eli
and the Thirteenth Confession, or anything by Randy Newman.
And balmy days, days for being merry and tan and sorry for only one
thing—-that I can’t swim—would mean the Beach Boys, who are my
favorite band during that minority of the time when the Kinks
aren’t, All Summer Long? Pet Sounds? Wild Honey. Or The Beach
Boys Love You.
But there are certain things about this situation that make it the
Kinks’ cup of tea. For one thing, they’d be invaluable tour guides,
having made this same journey themselves any number of times. Yes,
it may have started out as something of a joke—in “I’m on an
Island,” on The Kink Kontroversy, Ray Davies sang, to a beat mid-
way between rock and cha-cha, of being literally left high and dry
because he’d lost his girl. The trip had made him nothing if not
cheerfully redundant: “I’m on an island/And I’ve got nowhere to
run/Because I’m the only one/Who’s on the island.”
That was in 1965. By 1967, on Face to Face, the Kinks were
ready for a more elaborate vacation, only to discover that a “Holiday
in Waikiki,” spent beside billboards and high-priced souvenirs, in
the company of hula dancers with New York accents, might not be
the right choice. Since then, there have been the tropical exile on the
Lola album, that flight in a “Supersonic Rocket Ship” from Every-
body’s in Show Biz, and a more ominous convalescence on Muswell
Hillbillies’ “Holiday.” And those are only the literal trips. The Kinks
are capable of making anything sound like a secluded retreat,
whether it’s a newly empty house (in “Sunny Afternoon”), or a
room overlooking a busy train station (in “Waterloo Sunset”), or a
café that’s suddenly missing one’s usual companion (in “Afternoon
 102. | JANET MASLIN

Tea”). In the Kinks’ scheme of things, being alone is a given even

when it isn’t specified.
The trip on Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround is the
closest the Kinks may ever come to smooth sailing. On side one of
the album, the adventures of a would-be rock star are detailed in the
most beautifully melodic song Ray Davies has thus far written (“Get
Back in the Line”) and one of the funniest (“Moneygoround”’).
The singer is down on his luck, but then he writes a hit (“Lola”—
Ray really did write a hit, his first in four years), tastes success
(“Top of the Pops”) and has a devil of a time collecting his royal-
ties. By side two, he’s given up trying. On “This Time Tomorrow,”
a serene song full of unexpectedly tranquil harmonies, the singer is
on a plane musing about making his lonely getaway.
He looks down upon “fields full of houses” with the Kinks’ par-
ticularly sharp awareness that everything has its price. The many
Kinks songs that set up figures in opposition—like the two sisters in
the song of the same name, one a housewife and one a glamorous
bachelorette, or the competing politicians in Preservation—aim at.a
notion of seesawing destinies as well as at simple dramatic conflict.
They suggest that one rival is happy only when the other is miser-
able, that cities are built at the expense of landscapes, that the
cheerful rogue in “Sunny Afternoon” is only happy because some-
one, somewhere, has run off crying. And yet there’s something
benign about all this, something very much in keeping with Ray
Davies’s characteristic mixture of longing and revulsion. It’s quite
consistent with the idea, in so many of his songs, that life is at its
most vivid when seen from a distance.
The Lola album’s runaway has a dream of winding up in the
jungle, in which he maintains that the only time he’s happy is when
he’s swinging from the trees. “Oh what a life of luxury!” he cries.
When Davies writes of “luxury” he’s usually sending it up, as with
that stately home and yacht in “Sunny Afternoon.” But the mention
here is more authentic. For one of Davies’s super-civilized recluses,
true luxury really would mean being able to run around in a loin-
cloth without a second thought about whether it was well-tailored.
And that’s one freedom this music never even hints at, except in jest.
That’s what would make any Kinks album at home on a desert
 Something Else by the Kinks | 103

island; it would help you celebrate being away while still reminding
you—keenly, keenly—of exactly what you were missing.
And although it would be hard to leave behind Lola or The Kink
Kronikles—for “Days” and “Autumn Almanac” and “Dead End
Street,” particularly—I’d take Something Else, from 1968. Of the
earlier albums, the first are too raucous and uneven for me to be sure
I'd want to hear them endlessly. And Face to Face, which I would
never be without if I had a reasonable choice in the matter, is too
close to a bad dream at times (“Little Miss Queen of Darkness,”
“Rainy Day in June’) for me to be sure I could always stare it down.
Much as I love the live Everybody's in Show Biz, I wouldn’t want to
be reminded of how many wonderful concerts I’d be missing. And
since a lot of the Muswell Hillbillies material.is most memorable in
its live form, that would stay home, too.
So would Preservation and Soap Opera, because they need to be
listened to all at one sitting (and that could be tricky, depending
upon the tides); cut-by-cut, they aren’t a match for more concise
Kinks records, Also left behind would be Schoolboys in Disgrace, the
only Kinks record I actively dislike. Sleepwalker is something I
seldom listen to, and like The Great Lost Kinks Album, it never
strikes me as being all of a piece; if I wanted a collection of unrelated
songs I’d take the Kronikles. Arthur is still a mystery to me; I'll al-
ways hear it as the soundtrack of a British TV special I’ve never
seen. The Village Green Preservation Society would have to stay
home, I suppose, but it would be damp with tears. And so, I think,
would be Misfits, although we haven’t had nearly enough time to
get to know each other.
Certainly Something Else is as exquisitely book-ended as a Kinks
album could be, with “David Watts” for its beginning and “Water-
loo Sunset” for a finale. There’s a pure bitterness in “David Watts”
that hasn’t come through as bluntly in the Kinks’ music before or
since (although on the same album there’s “Harry Rag,” sung with
an uncharacteristic rudeness and in much the same spirit). David
Watts is the schoolboy who has everything, the one whom everyone
envies, a familiar figure who takes many forms (when I knew him,
he was a little girl). There are later Kinks attacks on the same fellow
—he’s the “Mr. Big Man” of Sleepwalker—but none of them are
 104 | JANET MASLIN
brave enough to go after the little prig without using satire as a club.
“David Watts” is plain, liberating malice, not coincidentally one of
the Kinks’ toughest rock songs, and one of their most breathlessly
economical performances. Even the first few seconds of introduc-
tion, with Ray instructing the band to make it “nice and smooth,”
contribute to the ferocity. They don’t just begin this song; they tear
its throat out.
When Ray goes machine-gunning his favorite middle-class squir-
tels, he’s being every bit the bully that David Watts is. But “Tin
Soldier Man,” setting its description of a pitifully regimented work-
aday Johnny to a military beat, is an unusually palatable example of
Kinks Overkill. If any song is going to represent that genre, this
might as well be the one.
Dave Davies’s songs on Something Else are both good enough to
have established a reputation for him independent of his older
brother’s and enough like Ray’s to dovetail gently with the rest of
the record. “Death of a Clown” and “Love Me Till the Sun Shines”
are probably the best known of the three (or, more properly, two-
and-a-half—Ray has a co-writing credit on “Death of a Clown”).
But it’s “Funny Face” that remains the most intriguing: here is, all
at once, a sense of murk and mystery to match Ray’s on “Lazy Old
Sun,” a blitheness like the spirit Ray brings to singing “End of the
Season,” the peculiarly bland affirmation of the title (“Funny Face”
is “all right” the way Dandy is “all right” or Waterloo Sunset is
“fine”). And a starkly vivid physical picture: “I see you/Peering
through frosted windows/Eyes don’t smile/Al] they do is cry.”
More interesting than either the prevailing fogginess of a song of
such bizarre familiarity that the singer might just as easily be address-
ing his Uncle Phil, or the vaudeville phrasing at the end of each
otherwise gloomy verse, are the abrupt swings between seemingly
disjointed moods. There’s a similar clash of tones on “End of the
Season,” with its gray opening and then more vaudeville crooning,
this time from someone who describes himself as covered with mud
and dreaming of flowers. Even the painfully controlled romantic
overtures the singer makes in “Afternoon Tea” are at odds with that
song’s jaunty, lighthearted sound, as the singer cheerfully encourages
his date to “Take as long as you like/’Cause I like you, girl.” (By
 Something Else by the Kinks | 105

the end of the song, she has vanished; he wonders why.) In all of
these songs, neither the overt attitude nor the trouble glimpsed be-
hind it, is as compelling as the play of these various elements, the
way they intensify and undermine one another. The song is that
much better for being an imperfect expression of the singer’s state
of mind.
Some of Ray Davies’s most haunting work has been written and
delivered in the spirit of inaccurate expression, of subdued turmoil.
Perhaps what places “Waterloo Sunset” a cut above any other
Kinks song is the way it takes a perfectly forthright route yet still
arrives at the old ambiguity. Whatever that “dirty old river’ sug-
gests to the singer about himself, he’s long since quietly resigned
himself to it; whatever he means by saying someone is “in paradise,”
the phrase hangs just a tiny bit closer to weariness than to hope. He
sits in a room at twilight, watching the crowds of tiny figures around
a railway station; he singles out one couple and, with evident arbi-
trariness, imagines them to be singularly blessed. Ray was once an
art student and, indeed, he might as easily have painted this as set
it to music. That’s another argument for choosing Something Else,
for that bonus: an imaginary picture to hang on the imaginary
lean-to wall,
There’s one last reason I’d settle on a Kinks record, perhaps the
best reason of all: because rock doesn’t often have the effect on me
that it used to. Ten years ago, I wasn’t quite twenty, and there was
nothing to mitigate the fun of being a fan. Whatever the occasion,
there was always a perfect record to make part of the moment: the
right Sly or Stones or Four Tops or Creedence record to dance to,
the right folk singer when things were quiet, even the right Byrds
album for doing homework if there was noise in the dormitory hall-
way. I did a year’s worth of math problems to the tune of “Mr.
Tambourine Man.”
I had forgotten, until lately, how much buying a record could
mean to me: if I bought one, even on a whim, I felt a simple obli-
gation to listen to it over and over, through and through. By not
admitting the possibility of bad judgment, I saved myself from feel-
ing faint-hearted.
Things have gotten easier since then, and harder too: a record
 106 | JANET MASLIN

that arrives in the mail doesn’t have the same value as a record that’s
chosen, and purchased, and owned at the expense of owning some-
thing else. And listening to certain artists because you ought to
makes it harder to be anyone’s fan. A while ago, I’d begun giving
up: most new music either saddened or bored me, and too many
old records felt like relics of irretrievable moments, But I’m not fool
enough to imagine my formal knowledge of rock amounts to any-
thing, and neither am I liable to forget that hearing just the right
record at just the right moment is a thrill for which there’s no easy
equivalent. So I quit paying attention to new records I didn’t really
care about—life is simply too short for me to get to know disco, And
I decided to stop neglecting the records I love best; I’ve begun re-
placing the ones that have disappeared or worn out, when I can find
and afford them. I’m due for a new copy of Something Else pretty
soon, and it’s long since out of print, so finding one isn’t going to
be easy. But it’ll be a pleasure.
One grim liability of getting older is running the risk of meet-
ing—even liking—people who aren’t now and never have been rock
fans. These people, I have begun to find, are likelier to take an in-
terest in the Kinks than they are in hearing the entirety of one’s
Doors collection. And who would deny that having friends is nearly
as important as having records?
So that’s one extra selling point for Something Else: I'd want to
have something to play for a new acquaintance, if the tides were
to change and a likely-looking person swam by. After all, the wind
might shift. Perhaps a shipwreck, or a stray plane, or new neighbors
on the atoll next door.
Desert island? I don’t need a desert island. Something Else by the
Kinks is with me anyway, wherever I go.
 ROCKET TO RUSSIA
THE RAMONES (SIRE 6063)
1977

TOM CARSON
In mid-summer of 1977, Sire Records released “Sheena Is a Punk
Rocker,” a new single by the Ramones. That summer was the high-
water mark of the punk era—an era which had begun the year before,
when the first wave of New York underground club bands started
getting record contracts, and would end, for all practical purposes,
with the breakup of the Sex Pistols in January of ’78. After that,
though punk survived, it was no longer a revolution. But that hadn’t
happened yet. At CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, the atmosphere
was heady with confidence. Everyone was ready to believe that by
the end of the year punk rock would have taken the Top 40 by
storm, and brought the mainstream of the culture to submission in
one quick and easy battle; it was the old fantasy of the American
bohemian underground, of finally being accepted by the rest of the
country—a dream much older than rock ’n roll itself. There was a
sense that people all around you were doing fine things, in a way
they might never have the chance to again. To be in New York that
summer was to have some sense of what it might have been like to
live in San Francisco in 1966 or 67, or in London when the Beatles
and the Stones first hit.
“Sheena” caught the mood. From the shout of “Go!” that kicked
 108 | TOM CARSON
off its raucous guitar attack, the chords bumping into each other in
an endlessly ascending spiral, to the ethereal, soaring fadeout two
minutes and forty-five seconds later, it was an unremitting frenzy
of all-out exhilaration: it blew away the posturing nihilism of “Blank
Generation,” the only previous punk-rock anthem, in an explosion
of pure, cataclysmic joy. Sheena, the girl who didn’t want to go to
a disco and went out looking for something better, was punk’s first
great convert, and there was a whole world of tension teetering in
the infinitesimal pause after “Sheena is . . .” before the band broke
loose into the yammering liberation of the chorus; the pride of
“Well New York City really has it all” told the other half of the
story. It was as casual as a throwaway—a good dance tune, no more
—but it was also one of those rare songs that not only define the
tempo and aura of a certain time and place, but suggest, almost
compel, a whole way of life.
At that time, the Ramones had released two albums—Ramones
and Leave Home—and occupied a position of almost unparalleled
authority in the punk community. More than any other band, they
had defined the music in its purest terms: a return to the basics
which was both deliberately primitive and revisionist at the same
time, a musical and lyrical bluntness of approach which concealed a
wealth of complex, disengaging ironies underneath. It was zero-based
rock ’n roll, and the conquest was so streamlined that the smallest
shifts in nuance, when they came, had enormous implicit resonance.
At the same time, the band set the attitude: a comic resentment
toward the rest of the world, a defiant pleasure in trashiness, and the
tawdry excesses of urban lowlife, Punks, in the original sense of the
word, were the sort of people who were such hopeless losers that
they couldn’t even be convincing as outlaws; far from romanticizing
that status, the Ramones glorified their own inadequacy. Their
leather jackets and strung-out, streetwise pose weren’t so much an
imitation of Brando in The Wild One as a very self-conscious
parody—they knew how phony it was for them to take on those
tough-guy trappings, and that incongruousness was exactly what
made the pose so funny and true. And yet they were genuinely sexy,
too; in spite of everything, they were cool. American myths are never
so immediately recognizable, and irresistible, as when they’re turned
into a joke.
 Rocket to Russia | 109

The Ramones lived out that double-edged vision in all sorts of

ways. They were raised on the pop-culture religion; they believed in
the Top 40 as the melting pot of the teenage American dream, where
clichés and junkiness and triviality take on the epic sweep of a myth
and the depth of a common unconscious. But they themselves were
minority artists, working far outside the mainstream, and that, para-
doxically, gave them the freedom to live out everyone’s private fan-
tasy that the Top 40 really told the truth, instead of being the
shoddy compromise it always actually was; they were also sophisti-
cated modern ironists, working with all the alienation and distance
that implied. Rocket to Russia isn’t imitation Top 40; it’s a fan’s
vision of what the Top 40 ought to be.
What that meant, among other things, was that they could play
as fast, loud, and mean as they wanted to; they could deliver on the
anarchic promise hidden beneath the pieties of AM radio, And
because they had no use at all for the empty fluency and virtuoso
craftsmanship of most seventies rock (“‘‘tasty licks,’ and all that
Traffic twaddle,” as Lester Bangs once put it, being a little unfair
and dead right at the same time), they could get their effects with
an economy and verve. On stage, they rammed their way through
their sets at the speed of a subway express slamming from station
to station; Johnny and Dee Dee leaped to the rim of the stage,
thrusting out their axes with the comic ferocity of Popeye tripping
out on spinach, while Tommy acted smooth and unruffled and Joey
just wrapped himself around the mike stand, hanging on for dear
life. On Rocket to Russia, there’s never any grandstanding, none of
the careful preparation you hear in most modern rock ’n roll: there
just isn’t time for any of that. Even the occasional flourishes—the
perfect simplicity of the four tom-tom beats that break into the
last chorus of “Rockaway Beach,” the faint echo on the shouts of
“Jo-ba-to-may!” that open “Teenage Lobotomy”—have a utilitarian
speed. The musicians just grab for what they need, set it down, and
rush on, and it all goes by in a blur.
Ramones was a tour de force of deadpan comedy; there was a
furious, galvanizing wit in its reduction of rock ’n roll to the dumb,
howling noise everyone always loved it for before they loved it for
anything else, and in its reduction of modern urban horror to the
glazed-eyed banality of a punk’s “What, me worry?” shrug. It had
 110 | TOM CARSON
the kick of a shared secret dragged out into the open—of a high-
school dirty joke that you suddenly realize every other tenth-grader
in the country knows, too. Shortly after it was released, I remember
running into a redneck acquaintance of mine from Virginia, a sort
of teenage derelict-in-training whom I hadn’t seen in years; he
wanted at once for me to tell him everything I knew of the Ramones,
and later on in the evening I remember him chanting the lyrics to
“Beat on the Brat” with an expression of blissful contentment on his
face. It was about the only thing we had in common, but it was
enough.
The sequel, Leave Home, necessarily didn’t have quite the imme-
diate excitement of Ramones, but in many ways it had more depth,
lurking beneath the bombed-out surface. If there were plenty of
parodic songs with titles like “You’re Gonna Kill That Girl,” there
was also “I Remember You,” with that lovely moment when the
excitement in Joey’s voice turns the single word “you” into pure
poetry; and the wistful “What’s Your Game.” Most important, per-
haps, in retrospect, was “Oh Oh I Love Her So,” a near-perfect
evocation of teenage romance in the neon-lit urban landscape which
the Ramones had already claimed as their own turf: “I met her at
the Burger King,” Joey began, “we fell in love by the soda ma-
chine. . . .” All very funny, but genuinely evocative, too. Having
completely negated the whole superstructure of received ideas which
had been the bane of rock ’n roll for years, the band could now
begin to approach the old clichés and stereotypes as their own
discovery, and make them come alive again in this new, ironic
framework,
Even so, “Sheena” was a breakthrough. Formally, the playful
Beach Boys harmonies and the bouncy freedom of the riff went far
beyond anything the band had done before; the lyrics, though full
of teasing allusiveness, were utterly without the disengagement of
irony—they drew you inside in a spirit of open celebration. Once
again, the Ramones were reworking a hackneyed genre—the rock ’n
roll song about rock ’n roll—and making it their own. On Ramones,
there had been a cut called “Judy is a Punk,” which was no more
than another comic-horrible put-down; it’s the addition of the word
“rocker” that makes all the difference, and the message of “Sheena”
 Rocket to Russia | 111

—like that of Lou Reed’s classic “Rock & Roll” itself—is that her
life was saved by rock ’n roll. For all their tongue-in-cheek humor,
the Ramones, like Reed, meant it literally; in fact, it was the only
kind of redemption they would admit to.
Rocket to Russia followed in late autumn. Though “Sheena” was
easily the best song on it, there were still many surprises; the rest
of the album took its cue from “Sheena,” and took off in all sorts
of new directions to affirm what “Sheena” was all about. More than
anything else, it was the band’s new assertiveness, their brazen pride
in their own identity, that opened up the album. From the punning
title—“rocket” for “tock it”—to the invocation of “Ramona” and
the wonderful double entendre of “Rock, rock, Rockaway Beach,”
the Ramones never let you forget that this was rock ’n roll, and
they had just as much of a stake in it as anyone else.
The music was manic, driving, exquisitely controlled; the séngs
were as barbed and funny as ever, but they also had surprising
warmth. “Teenage Lobotomy” was another portrait of a modern
urban zombie, but now it had turned into a gleeful, openly self-
delighted boast; “I Can’t Give You Anything” sounded more like
a promise than a threat; “Locket Love”’s free-floating, merry-go-
round rhythms belied the bitterness of its lyric. The ballad, “Here
Today, Gone Tomorrow,” put the disassociated bleakness of the
Ramones’ sound to tellingly emotional use in a painfully, comically
direct account of the burnt-out end of a love affair.
Everywhere on the album, the Ramones pushed their punk
ironies to the limit, and then turned around and trampled those
boundaries with an infectious, all-embracing zest. Conceptually, per-
haps, a song like “Rockaway Beach” is an East Coast take-off on a
California surf epic—since Rockaway Beach, in Queens, is one of
the few beaches in America you take a subway to get to—but it
breaks the parodic mold to become a genuine celebration of the
place; there’s a palpable delight in the very absurdity of this arti-
ficial teenage paradise stuck in the middle of the urban concrete.
Very little in seventies rock is genuinely urban; in fact, most of it
doesn’t have much sense of place at all—synthetic substitutes, like
the Eagles’ Desperado, seem to come at you out of a vacuum. The
triumph of the Ramones is that they were urban, as urban and mod-
 112 | TOM CARSON

em as Martians in their black leather jackets, and were able to find

pleasure and even joy in that transient, junky, corrupt milieu.
One of the chief delights of rock ’n roll is that it’s trash music
for a trash culture; when Chuck Berry wrote down his version of
the American dream, it wasn’t any chaste pastoral grandeur he chose
to mythologize, but jukeboxes and hamburgers and neon. What
makes the music liberating is that it’s resolutely not respectable.
This is obvious enough, but it’s something rock ’n roll is trying to
forget—as jazz, for instance, successfully forgot: I’m sure that there
are all kinds of people out there who would give a moue of distaste
if you told them the stuff started out as whorehouse music.
When rock turned classy and “mature” in the late sixties, the
move was inextricably tied up with the utopianism of the counter-
culture; the possibility of revolution was the only thing that gave
Sgt. Pepper and the flood of pretensions in its wake credibility.
When the countercultural dream died, it turned all that visionary
artiness into pure sludge—icing with the cake shot out from under
it. The first five years of the seventies were a long tunneling out
from the wreckage of the sixties, and they were among the worst
years in rock ’n roll history, as smugly reactionary as the void be-
tween the apostasy of Elvis and the arrival of the Beatles; like the
generation it created, the music had lost its focus. What gave a
post-punk resurgence like Some Girls its marvelous kick was that
after years of playing the seventies game, and being depressingly
polite about it, the Stones were turing around and pissing on
respectability, pissing on the gas-station walls again—while Mick
wrote obscene put-downs of his own ex-wife in the men’s room, no
less|—and sounded as if they were having a great time doing it, too.
They had remembered trash.
The Ramones, however, never: needed to be reminded. The
Edenic, anti-materialist sentimentality of an event like Woodstock
would have been utterly alien to them, as alien as the glossy empti-
ness that followed it; they were living out Nabokov’s dictum that
nothing is more exhilarating than Philistine vulgarity. They took
Berry’s message even further than he had, because they capitalized
on the random violence and brutality that went hand-in-hand with
the raw, funky charge of big-city life; it’s that sense of danger—in-
 Rocket toRussia | 113

stant and enormous—that gives their music its panicky, brutalized

edge. And yet the violence was so extreme, and so anonymous, that
it became just another pop cartoon. If that was a depressing truth,
the Ramones were cocky enough, and heretical enough, to say that
it was ridiculous too; and even to say that it was not without its
appeal. Their reveling in the trashy vitality of such an overwrought
atmosphere was a life-affirming manifesto.
So their songs were two-minute artillery barrages of pounding
thythm without a shred of melodic soothing, and both on stage and
on record they played the role of mutant Dead End kids, brain-
damaged cripples, teenage fascists. Some of that was pure shock
tactics; some of it was a deliberate subversion of the whole sixties
peace-and-love, acid-trance sensibility, which by the time they came
around had turned into the Quaalude sensibility, and which they
loathed because it was false. But mostly it was just a caricatured,
hence accurate, reflection of their own experience. (“The young . . .
are Germans, one and all, from fifteen to twenty-one,” Leslie Fiedler
once wrote, in a line that rings a lot truer than almost anything the
youth-consciousness pundits ever said; “We're the members of the
master race,” the Dictators told the teenagers of America, not too
long before the Ramones came out with “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “To-
day Your Love, Tomorrow the World.”) The Ramones turned
themselves into campy pseudo-Nazi grotesques because identity jus-
tified their reality, and their rebellion, as much as Jerry Garcia’s
acid-fuzzed religiosity justified his.
Their best anthem before Rocket to Russia was a song called
“Pinhead,” from Leave Home, which was both a joke (“I don’t
want to be a pinhead no more/I just met a nurse that I could go
for”) and a call to arms: they used to finish their stage shows with
its closing chant of “Gabba Gabba Hey!,” with Joey holding those
words aloft on a placard. “Pinhead,” of course, derived from Tod
Browning’s 1932 underground classic Freaks. When it was first
released, the movie—a story about the assorted cripples, geeks, and
pinheads of a circus sideshow, who wreak their revenge on the nor-
mality symbolized by the icily beautiful blonde trapeze artist who
betrays one of them—was presented as straight horror. When it was
revived in the seventies, however, the new teenage underground had
 114 | TOM CARSON
no trouble identifying with the freaks’ attack on the straight world.
Self-proclaimed freaks themselves, they dug the misshapen outcasts
on the screen as their own mythic self-image.
The Ramones brought that identification into the open, and if
they instinctively treated it as black comedy, they also glorified it.
By the time Rocket to Russia came out, those images had become
familiar, and the jokes had become a great deal more than jokes:
they had taken on the faceless universality of the girls in the
Beatles’ early rockers or the Beach Boys’ California surf. “Cretin
Hop,” the lurching dance song that opens Rocket to Russia, has a
crazed grandeur that goes all the way back, in its arrogant, incan-
descent silliness, to “Rock Around the Clock” or Little Richard’s
earliest assaults on human sanity. It’s no accident, either, that
“Teenage Lobotomy,” on side two, segues immediately into the
classic, sensual grace of “Do You Wanna Dance”: the grotesque
and the celebratory are one.
But for the Ramones there had never, really, been that much of
a distinction to be made; they had inherited a sense of life as pure
camp from the early sixties, from Twiggy and Warhol and movies
like Beach Blanket Bingo, The bands which influenced them most
weren’t the established greats of the era, either—just to cite the most
obvious example, Dylan might just as well never have been born for
all the Ramones cared—but such semi-cool, semi-laughable second-
echelon groups as Herman’s Hermits (not only Joey’s put-on
Cockney accent, but a lot of his phrasing, too, derives directly from
Peter Noone), the Troggs, the 1910 Fruitgum Company, the Ven-
tures, and Paul Revere and the Raiders (what was the black-leather-
and-jeans uniform, after all, but a seventies equivalent for those
neat little Colonial outfits?). It was music that was close to bubble-
gum, and in the seventies the Ramones remained, subversively, close
to bubblegum: from the cute conceit of their assumed names down
to their logo—a caricature of the Great Seal with a baseball bat
in the American eagle’s claw and the message LOOK OUT BELOW
clutched in its beak—their whole iconography came out of the cheer-
ful travesties of sixties pop. They were like a teenybopper magazine’s
Dream Date gone film noir.
Rocket to Russia had all the fun of bubblegum, but it was em-
 Rocket to Russia | 115

phatically not innocent: precisely what makes a song like “Sheena”

so satisfying is that its exuberance is knowing and earned, not in-
genuous. The peculiar astringency of the Ramones’ style—Joey’s
insistence on keeping the “I” in his vocals separate from himself,
and in a song like “Why Is It Always This Way” separating that
“Y” from everything it observes—is the result of their not being a
sixties bubblegum band, but seventies revisionists fully aware of
everything that’s happened in between. The Rolling Stones de-
pended instinctively on that kind of relativism from the start, which
is why a cut like “Out of Time” sounds as up-to-date as ever, while
the Beach Boys and a lot of the early Beatles, for all the undeniable
greatness of the music, now sound, not false, maybe, but incom-
plete: you have to forget a little of what you know to enter into
that world completely. The sixties harmonies on Rocket to Russia
are intentionally distant echoes—they’re like a half-forgotten mem-
ory floating in the background of the songs.
However, implicitly from the start, and overtly by the time
Rocket to Russia came out, the Ramones weren’t content to point
up that ironic distance; if they were the children of sixties pop ab-
surdism they never really succumbed to the pop nihilism which was
its psychological nerve. For all its images of alienation and disjunc-
tion, Rocket to Russia is comically exultant, a conquest; the affiirma-
tion has an overwhelming power because it’s wrestled out of such
debased and ugly circumstances.
The attractiveness of the comic loser, the man at the end of his
rope whose private victory is his own defiant pride in not letting go,
is the closest thing we have to the idea of the holy fool. You can
hear him in Lou Reed shrugging off the sex-and-suicide despair of
Berlin with the hilariously tight-lipped moral, “Just goes to show
how wrong you can be”; or in Gary Gilmore saying irritably to a
Playboy interviewer, “Accidents can happen to psychopaths just as
easily as anybody else, man.” In most places, a line like “Hang on a
little bit longer/Hang on, you’re a goner” from Rocket to Russia’s
“Locket Love,” would be a baffling paradox. In America, it makes
perfect sense, because failure is the national joke; failure is freedom.
When, in “I Wanna Be Well,” Joey follows the line “Daddy’s
broke” with the gee-whiz bemusement of “Holy smoke,” and
 116 | TOM CARSON
answers “My future’s bleak” with the mocking question, “Ain’t it
neat?,” he sounds outrageously pleased with himself.
The low appeal of turning failure into comic pride, of twisting
the whole hierarchy of success and defeat around to make it say
the opposite of what it seems to mean—of the subversive gesture—
is most of the fun of Rocket to Russia, and most of its art as well.
“Why Is It Always This Way” is about a suicide, but it’s set to an
almost frolicsome, upbeat rhythm, with a bouncy “hey, hey, hey”
in the chorus; “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” is as lovely and open
a song as any the Ramones have done, but it’s still played off against
the up-yours kiss-off of its title; and these flippancies, far from blunt-
ing the impact of the songs, are exactly what gives them their vitality
and kick. It’s not graffiti transformed into art so much as it’s art
redeemed by the spirit of graffiti.
The Ramones are such a pure expression of Anevind pop cul-
ture—devious, dumb, brilliant, and exhilarating—that it’s an almost
irresistible temptation to intellectualize about them. You can have
analytical fun trying to figure out the interplay of irony and authen-
ticity in “Teenage Lobotomy,” say, or noticing the way the word
“time” is used in three consecutive lines, with three different mean-
ings, in “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow.” That may not be com-
pletely irrelevant, but it somehow misses the point. The real revela-
tions come elsewhere. They come when Johnny, for instance, plays
a guitar solo on “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” which lifts the
song right off the ground, not just because the idea of Johnny play-
ing a solo is so beautifully unexpected but because it suddenly seems
so exactly right and necessary. Or when you hear the ecstatic longing
in Joey’s singing on “Do You Wanna Dance,” struggling to stay
afloat above a churning storm of heavy-metal riffing. Or in the
sudden sweetness of “Ramona,” a song which captures the essence
of what the Ramones mean to their audience, and vice versa, in four
wonderfully easy and seductive lines:

You're getting better and better

It’s getting easier than ever
Hey you kids in the crowd
You know you like it when the music's loud . . .
 Rocket to Russia | 117

Or in a dozen other moments one could name, when the guitar,

the pumping, insistent bass, the graceful punctuation of Tommy's
drumming, and Joey’s back-street, punky-tough voice twisting itself
around a lyric all come together with a throat-catching immediacy
which has nothing to do with analysis, and everything to do with
the galvanizing, primal joy of rock ’n roll itself. You could say that
it’s all a joke, done just for fun; but in America, simply having a
good time is an elusive, tricky ideal, and even jokes have a moral
significance. The achievement of Rocket to Russia is that it makes
its own brand of fun stand for something a lot deeper and more
liberating than all the heavy profundity of most of the profound -
and heavy albums you could name-It’s the kind of deadly serious
kidding that rock ’n roll, and America, couldn’t live without.
 THE PRETENDER
JACKSON BROWNE (ASYLUM 7E-1079)
1976

PAUL NELSON
Doing a piece with a desert-island premise is like writing a suicide
note and then sticking around to cry over it. You either lapse into
sentimentality (“I not only accept loss forever,” Jack Kerouac once
wrote, “I am made of loss’) or try to Bogart your way through with
some wryly stylized stoicism. Either way, you're lost.
Because, though it isn’t, being here is too much like real life. On
these sands, you’ve got plenty of past, a severely pinched present, |
and no future. Everything is an afterthought. Or, worse, all that
finely honed autobiographical angst you’ve been saving turns inex-
plicably into something that’s much funnier than if you’d embraced
it as a joke in the first place. Even before I was marooned, I’m not
at all sure I knew what was funny anymore.
So here I sit, with only my memories, my fondest quotations, a
phonograph, and a copy of Jackson Browne’s The Pretender. Back
in the saddle again with things instead of people. You find ’em, you
lose ’em, you hope to find ’em—a woman, family, friends, ideals—
that’s what The Pretender’s all about. What could be better than
that?
Ross Macdonald has a wonderful line in The Doomsters: “Watch
it, I said to myself; self-pity is the last refuge of little minds and
 The Pretender | 119

aging professional hardnoses.” Gatsby, the real Pretender, had it

down cold: he both mourned and sought that last, lost golden mote
of summerin the second act of his very American life. Probably
because Americans make the poorest nihilists, he never quit. Neil
Young summed it up best: “It has often been my dream/To live
with one who wasn’t there.” Mine, too.
Two of the truest songs I know—i.e., songs that hit me straight
in the heart—are Bob Dylan’s randy and exhilarating “Spanish
Harlem Incident” and Jackson Browne’s passionate hymn to ro-
manticism, “Farther On.” Though vastly dissimilar (youthful sexual
gunfire versus a remembrance of things past), both numbers are
built on the bias of hope and an ability to be consumed and trans-
formed by emotion and thought. But if the former exemplifies the
jangling pulsebeat of a chance meeting with a pretty girl on the
street, then the latter might well refine, reflect upon, and ratify
equally volcanic circumstances to represent a (possibly) more ma-
ture overall philosophy concerned with the occurrences of a lifetime.
“Farther On,” like the majority of Jackson’s work, has its eye firmly
fixed on long distances.

But the angels are older

They can see that the sun’s setting fast
They look over my shoulder
At the vision of paradise contained in the
light of the past
And they lay down behind me
To sleep beside the road till the morning
has come
Where they know they will find me
With my maps and my faith in the distance
Moving farther on

Back in New York City, I was aware of the profundities in Jean

Renoir’s credo: “You see, in this world there is one awful thing, and
that is that everyone has his reasons.” Stranded now on another
island, I’ve got time to think about the specific reasons. While the
previously quoted final verse of “Farther On” is the one I'll un-
 120 | PAUL NELSON
doubtedly end my days with, the song’s initial stanza once and for
all pins to the wall the cosmic haze of growing up. When I first
heard it, I was absolutely unable to put any space between myself
and someone else’s childhood.

In my early years I hid my tears

And passed my days alone
Adrift on an ocean of loneliness
My dreams like nets were thrown
To catch the love that I'd heard of
In books and films and songs
Now there’s a world of illusion and fantasy
In the place where the real world belongs

As an adult on this peculiar island, still I look for the beauty in

songs. As the sun beats down, I’m reminded that memories are as
warm as the climate here, and the loved ones who haunt those mem-
ories are warmer still. Though these sands and songs bear traces of
mother and father, long-lost wife and child, friends, enemies, lovers,
their presences exist once again as works of art—nice to think about,
pleasant to listen to, but it gets very cold at night. In a college of
soft knocks, some professional pessimist once told me that all of
existence could be reduced to a cycle in which false expectations,
harsh education, and darkest despair went round and round until it
was simply too painful for anyone to make the swing from despair
back to expectations again. These days, a lot of optimists would
probably relate the same fable, adding only that it’s too late to stop
now. The reason I picked The Pretender was that it seemed to
pick me.

If there were people who sold sleep for a living, they’d never make
more than a few cents off Jackson Browne. From late October 1975
through February 1976, he worked in Los Angeles producing his
friend Warren Zevon’s first LP for Asylum, taking only a few weeks
off to marry Phyllis Major, the woman with whom he’d been living
for over three years. Jackson, Phyllis, and their three-year-old son
 The Pretender | 121

Ethan spent most of December in Hawaii. Warren Zevon was com-

pleted on February 29. On March 1, Jackson began recording The
Pretender, his fourth and perhaps finest album. Early in the mom-
ing of March 25, Phyllis Major Browne committed suicide by taking
an overdose of sleeping pills. All work on the record was suspended
until May 6. In May, June, and July, Jackson was in the studio five
days a week. Throughout most of August and September—except
for a camping trip with his son—he worked on the LP every waking
hour, weekends included. Mastering was finished on September 27.
About ten days later, on an all-night bus ride from Binghamton,
New York, to’ Manhattan, Jackson (just starting a forty-five-city
tour) and I are talking about The Pretender, For a week now, I’ve
been avoiding an essential question, and I know I’m finally going to
ask it. For the first time, I feel like the journalist-as-ghoul. “This
album is going to be widely taken as the story of you and Phyllis,”
I say. “Is it?”
Jackson. looks out the window for a minute. But he refuses to be
as melodramatic as certain writers. “Yeah,” he says. “It was like
looking at a photograph coming up in a solution. When I started
to see these songs coming up and I began to see the image, it sort
of scared me for a while. It scares me but, in the final analysis, it
doesn’t bother me. It’s all right. The Pretender depicts the last
couple years of my life. It picks right up with Late for the Sky. How-
ever, its coming together was a rather sudden thing. All of these
things were sort of like half songs and half ideas—and then, at cer-
tain moments, there was really nothing to do but sit down and put
them all together.
“You’ve raised a fundamental question, though. I’m not sure
how worthwhile my describing such a personal tale is—as a matter
of fact, I think it would be more worthwhile if it weren’t that way
—but it’s something I simply accept about myself. The nature of
my music has to do with dealing with very fundamental things by
depicting my own experience. That’s the way it is, and I guess it’s
okay. I mean, the truly personal and private things are not in there—
there’s nothing that isn’t pretty fundamental, you know.”
Jackson Browne’s art works in a wide arc—and never more so
than on The Pretender, a record of life and death, love and the lack
of it, staying or leaving, birth and rebirth. One mood is almost al-
 122. | PAUL NELSON
ways balanced by another, and the emotions in the songs tend to
flow into each other. It is always darkest (“Your Bright Baby
Blues,” “Linda Paloma,” “Here Come Those Tears Again,” “Sleep’s
Dark and Silent Gate,” “The Pretender”) just before the dawn
(“The Fuse,” “The Only Child,” “Daddy’s Tune”). And, of course,
vice versa.
“The Fuse” is the first—and probably the last—song in the circle:
it sounds very different once the rest of the story is told. If any piece
of music can offer forewarnings about both life and death—and
make each seem equally ominous and triumphant—then I guess this
composition can. The singer hears something in the desert and is
reborn, but what he’s probably heard is the LP’s introductory pro-
gression of formal, funereal bass notes that portend nothing but
disaster. Invocations to eternity abound, and God is called upon (as
He often will be throughout The Pretender). Though we've got
maps and—sometimes despite the palpable proof of doom right in
front of our eyes—an inherent faith in the distance, somehow that
fabled “farther on” always appears to backfire on us. The postman
never stops ringing.
In “The Fuse,” Jackson manages a fusion of youthful learning/
yearning and ageless wisdom: the start of an odyssey, the conclu-
sions of one. What’s set up is an effective Arthurian California myth
—the young man on a quest. His journey takes him through such
darkness that romanticism can’t possibly be the same again.
“The Fuse” begins with some apparently hard-earned apocalyptic
complexities and then seems to regress into a sixties-style simplicity
that ends with the image of children laughing. Though the artist
acknowledges loneliness, uncertainty, and “years that I spent lost
in the mystery,” his viewpoint becomes passionately, almost naively
positive. By song’s end, Jackson sings out with affirmation (questions
like “Oh Lord/Are there really people starving still?” are answered
by the unrefined reformer’s buoyant claim: “I want to say right now
I’m going to be around/. . . I will tune my spirit to the gentle
sound”) after proffering advice that strongly suggests that destiny
is anything but fatalistic (“Forget what life used to be/You are
what you choose to be”).
But that’s just the there’s-a-better-world-a-comin’ portion of “The
Fuse.” The other, perhaps more important, more mature part ignites
 The Pretender | 123

the whole of The Pretender (“Through every dead and living thing/
Time runs like a fuse/And the fuse is burning”) and illuminates
the writer’s thematic strategy: he hits more archetypes than anyone
else because they’re what he’s aiming at.
In “Your Bright Baby Blues,” burned-out boy meets mixed-up
girl, and the LP’s on-again, off-again love story begins. Years seem
to have gone by since the optimistic last verse of “The Fuse” —rather
than thinking about what he can do for mankind, Jackson is now
desperately hoping that a woman can do something for him—though
the tone and some of the deliberately unsophisticated early imagery
of “Your Bright Baby Blues” still suggests the late sixties and early
seventies.
The song starts small, with a blues image—the singer “sitting
down by the highway,” wanting to go home, feeling completely
useless, and watching what he perceives as a purposeful world go
by—and then slowly blossoms into a remarkably full picture of not
one but two lost souls. The man is seeking nothing less than salva-
tion and wants badly to escape from himself and into another per-
son. He meets her. “Baby you can free me,” he says, “I can see it
in your eyes.” Then he adds, rather chillingly, “You’ve got those
bright baby blues,” and we realize that he’s talking about a lot more
than his lover's eyes here. He’s talking about his own problem—i.e.,
bright-baby blues—as well as hers (and probably yours and mine).
These are two smart, too-smart people who can’t help but question
the hell (or, more likely, the heaven) out of everything. When
Jackson sings

You don’t see what you've got to gain

But you don’t like to lose
You watch yourself from the sidelines
Like your life is a game you don’t mind playing
To keep yourself amused
I don’t mean to be cruel baby
But you're looking confused

he’s indicting himself, the woman he loves, and a whole generation

who saw only the positive side of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling
Stone.”
 124 | PAUL NELSON
Because mere independence can never carry the day. In addition,
there are drugs and the problems they cause (in a conversational
aside, the singer tells this story on himself: “I thought I was flying
like a bird/So far above my sorrow/But when I looked down/I was
standing on my knees”) to go along with the pure panic. In the end,
Jackson merges dope and. dependence, hope and helplessness, love
and sex, an awareness of character flaws and an Alice in Wonderland
fantasy into a single image: “Take my hand and lead me/To the
hole in your garden wall/And pull me through.”
“Linda Paloma” is the cruelest cut of all. The girl’s gone, Grown
up—or not grown up—and left. Romance and romanticism weren’t
enough. In “Your Bright Baby Blues,” Jackson, under the influence,
mistakenly thought he was a bird; here, it’s his lover who sees him
as “the endless sky” and herself as his Mexican dove. Older now, the
singer has become something of a realist (“I know all about these
things”). The couple look at each other across the table in a Mex-
ican restaurant. She’s disappointed in him, and he feels he exists
primarily as an idealization in her eyes.
While the woman, “looking through tears,” equates music to
love, the man who wrote songs about her now equates love to
dreaming. He thinks it could all work out “If tears could release the
heart/From the shadows preferred by the mind,” Love dies in a
remarkably subtle verse that can’t help but remind one of these
lines from “The Fuse”: “It’s coming from so far away/It’s hard to
say for sure/Whether what I hear is music or the wind/Through
an open door.” There, though uncertain, the singer felt that some-
thing good was on its way. Now, as he looks at the sleeping face of
the woman he loves, he’s obsessed with death. There is both sym-
bolic and real death here (the “Love will fill your eyes” line is par-
ticularly terrifying in this context), with not a word wasted.

Like a wind that comes up in the night

Caressing your face while you sleep
Love will fill your eyes with the sight
Of a world you can’t hope to keep
Dreaming on after that moment’s gone
The light in your lover's eyes
Disappears in the light of the dawn
 The Pretender | 125

Jackson on “Linda Paloma”: “Let me tell you a personal thing.

One of my wife’s and my favorite songs is this Mexican song called
‘Cu Cu Ru Cu Cu Paloma.’ When my wife and I first met, we
used to hear it quite often because we'd go to this certain restaurant
and a certain couple of mariachis would always sing it to us.
“So I sort of set out to rip off this song in ‘Linda Paloma.’ I think
I came closer to ripping off Ry Cooder’s version of ‘Maria Elena’
instead, though. I love Mexican music and wondered how close I
could come to sounding authentico. It’s a genre I felt comfortable
with to write about a particular subject—the classical, ah, goodbye.
I mean, I don’t know whether you focus on whether or not the
girl is leaving and whether that is important to you, or whether
or not what seems to be wrong is that a person has illusions about
what love should be rather than who people are.
“It was a comfortable place to go with an idea which began with
the opening image: ‘At the moment the music began/And you heard
the guitar player starting to sing/You were filled with the beauty
that ran/Through what you were imagining.’ Now I was singing
about Phyllis, It’s funny but every time I sang that for her, she never
heard ‘You were filled with the beauty that ran/Through what you
were imagining.’ She heard me singing: ‘You were filled with the
beauty of the man/That you were imagining.’
“At some point, I really feel that I’m going to have to write in
some more classical genre because the parts I could write are end-
less—they occur to me forever. In ‘Linda Paloma,’ I could have
written an entire Mexican song, sung in Spanish, where the ma-
riachis in the background are singing these rather cynical and funny
lines describing this moony couple at the table with their little
problems of love. I hope I got at least some of that feeling on the
record. In the end, when I sing ‘Fly away/Linda Paloma,’ the Mex-
icans in the restaurant were going to say, “That’s right, man, throw
the little ones back. Forget it. Forget it, man. Let her go.’”

“Here Come Those Tears Again,” unlike “Linda Paloma,” finds the
man crying over the woman. Years have gone by, and during that
time, there’s been a lot of staying and leaving; the “open door” of
“The Fuse” has now become the door through which Jackson’s lover
 126 | PAUL NELSON
often departs. This song has its own vicious circle, and the singer,
hurt and closing himself off fast, finds he simply can’t handle the
reconciliations anymore. So he makes what may be a negative
promise (“I’m going back inside and turning out the light/And I'll
be in the dark but you'll be out of sight”), yet one that previews
the allegedly positive promises in “The Pretender.” If the man suc-
cumbs to symbolic death here (“I'll be in the dark”), the woman
actually dies somewhere after the final notes of side one.
Side two begins with two songs about families. Tied to “The
Fuse,” both compositions are concerned with either a boy (Jackson’s
son, Ethan, in “The Only Child”) ora young man (Jackson himself
in “Daddy’s Tune”) just starting out. In the former, the saddened
singer offers all the comfort and advice he can to a boy whose
mother has just died, and who, as the years go by, will think back
on his tragedy:

But take good care of your mother

And remember to be kind
When the pain of another will serve you
to remind
That there are those who feel themselves
exiled
On whom the fortune never smiled
And upon whose lives the heartache has
been piled
They're just looking for another
Lonely child

During his 1976 tour, Jackson refused to play “Ready or Not,” a

courtship composition manifestly about Phyllis. When someone
yelled out a request for it in Toronto, the performer spun around,
grabbed the microphone, and snapped: “I don’t do that song any-
more, I know it but I don’t do it. What I do instead is that other
song, “The Only Child,’ about my son.”
Thinking about his son’s future, the singer remembers the
estranged father in his own past. “Daddy’s Tune” recalls the time
of “The Fuse” and “Your Bright Baby Blues”—in fact, its first few
 The Pretender | 127

lines are practically a combination of the beginnings of both early

songs, though the “wind” from “The Fuse” is “dirty” now. In
“Daddy’s Tune,” after a “Your Bright Baby Blues’—like call for
help, Jackson ties the “sound of the drum/Like a part of me” refer-
ence from “The Fuse” right to his jazz-musician father in a wonder-
ful, Woody Guthrie-style passage about growing up and hitting the
road in America:

No sooner had I hit the streets

When I met the fools that a young fool meets
All in search of truth and bound for glory
And listening to our own heart beats
We stood around the drum
Though it’s fainter now
The older I become

By song’s end, a familial reconciliation has taken place, as, to

soaring Dixieland music, Jackson realizes:

But Daddy I want to let you know somehow

The things you said are so much clearer now
And I would turn the pages back
But time will not allow...
Somewhere something went wrong
Or maybe we forgot the song
Make room for my forty-fives
Along beside your seventy-eights
Nothing survives—
But the way we live our lives

A lot is happening here (and, in a way, those last two lines serve
as the album’s message and happy ending). Jackson’s reconciliation
with his father is meant to perform symbolic and emotional double
duty: the singer looks back into the past to try to come to terms
with the dead wife (who was every bit “The Only Child” that
Jackson and Ethan are), while looking ahead toward a future in
which Ethan may well be singing “Daddy’s Tune” to his father.
 128 | PAUL NELSON
But happy endings are rare—remember, The Pretender isn’t over
yet. “Sleep’s Dark and Silent Gate” paints a stark picture of the full
impact of a death in the family. The woman’s dead—nothing can
change that—and the finality of it is overwhelming. The man can
do nothing but think back about the missed chances, good times and
bad times, when and why. While the song’s similarities to “Linda
Paloma” and “Here Come Those Tears Again” are obvious (all
three numbers equate death and departure to nighttime), it’s really
the last chapter of “Your Bright Baby Blues.” Compare the chorus
(“Sitting down by the highway/Looking down the road/Waiting
for a ride/I don’t know where I’ve been’’) to the first verse of the
earlier tune.
In “Sleep’s Dark and Silent Gate,” the singer is lost, hurt, con-
fused. As he tries to understand what’s happened—

Never should have had to try so hard

To make a love work out, I guess
I don’t know what love has got to do with
happiness
But the times when we were happy
Were the times we never tried

—his voice cracks (“Oh God this is some shape I’m in”) and so do
we when, for a brief moment, he reunites husband, wife, and child
at the close of the chorus: “When the only thing that makes me
cry/Is the kindness in my baby’s eye.” Small wonder that the com-
position ends with the feeling that everything is finished.
Thus, “The Pretender’: one of Jackson Browne’s “big” songs
(e.g., “Rock Me on the Water,” “For Everyman,” “Before the Del-
uge,” “The Fuse,” “The Load-Out”/“Stay”) and one of his finest.
Ostensibly a series of promises or vows—

I’m going to rent myself a house

In the shade of the freeway
I’m going to pack my lunch in the morning
And go to work each day...
 The Pretender | 129

I’m going to find myself a girl

Who can show me what laughter means . . .

I’m going to be a happy idiot

And struggle for the legal tender—
And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Thought true love could have been a contender

—from a man who’s experienced marital tragedy and now desires

nothing so much as an utterly conventional, safe, suburban-com-
muter life, the title track (not unexpectedly) turns out to be about
a lot more than that. Between the hero’s mundane, everyday prom-
ises, he’s still a haunted man who wants some real answers (“I want
to know what became of the changes/We waited for love to bring/
Were they only the fitful dreams/Of some greater awakening”) and
who can neither forget nor escape from the romance—and roman-
ticism—of his past.
When Jackson sings, “Out into the cool of the evening/Strolls
the pretender/He knows that all his hopes and dreams/Begin and
end there,” the listener feels the chill of death and realizes that this
“pretender”/“contender” may never again be whole. Looking out
into the night, the man sees and remembers, in the LP’s most heart-
breaking message:

Ah the laughter of the lovers

As they run through the night
Leaving nothing for the others
But to choose off and fight
And tear at the world with all their might
While the ships bearing their dreams
Sail out of sight

Yet the natural urge to try again prevails. One can pretend that
it doesn’t, choose commerce over compassion, ask God, “Are you
there?/Say a prayer—For the pretender/Who started out so young
 130 | PAUL NELSON

and strong/Only to surrender.” But, soon enough, these lines from

“The Fuse” roll around again:

Though the years give way to uncertainty

And the fear of living for nothing strangles
the will
There’s a part of me
That speaks to the heart of me
Though sometimes it’s hard to see
It’s never far from me
Alive in eternity
That nothing can kill

I once asked Jackson how “The Pretender” could possibly be

autobiographical.
“Tt is—it’s completely about me,” he insisted. “But what I’m say-
ing is that it’s not merely about me, it’s about a lot of people. After
the sixties, people began to decide that they would just work in a
bookstore or be a plumber or drive a truck—and that would be cos-
mic, you know, Or—hey, Bob Dylan saying all he wants is a cabin
in Utah and a couple of kids who call him Pa, What an amazing
thing for him to say after having been the most rebellious and surly
and unhappy and blindingly sarcastic and satirical person. Every-
thing was based on that fundamental attitude he had, you know,
and for him to capitulate was wonderful—it was very warming and
startling and sad, too.
“Then you come up with this little hope that you’re going to
find this girl. And right away, you're talking about fulfilling each
other’s most predictable and mapped-out ideas. It’s utterly humor-
ous. It’s funny. It’s black. ‘I’m going to find myself a girl/Who can
show me what laughter means’? I could have written that when I
was eight—and meant an entirely different thing.
“What is romance? Romance isn’t necessarily positive, is it? ‘And
then we'll put our dark glasses on’ is a cynical thing to say because
putting your dark glasses on is basically hiding yourself. ‘And we'll
fill in the missing colors/In each‘other’s paint by number dreams’?
Remember those little squares with the numbers on them? This is
 The Pretender | 131

supposed to be blue, this afternoon is supposed to be lovely, this is

a picnic. It’s prefab, you know. I’d be very unhappy if the ‘paint by
number’ line were misread. I mean, I think that’s the most cynical
thing I’ve ever said—that your dreams are rather prescribed and
determined.
“But you can’t escape thinking of life as beautiful. It’s the natural
thing to do—the one thing we’ll always do—and that’s what’s posi-
tive about “The Pretender,’ not all those vows he makes. That you
can actually just laugh at yourself and say, Well, here I am, I’m
dreaming about this girl again. She’s going to be all these things,
we're going to do all these things. And in the middle of that realiza-
tion, you go, Yeah, well, the truth is that you keep your fucking
dark glasses on, you wear your cheaters. We'll probably just keep
our shades on and fuck in front of the TV. If you weren’t like that,
you'd probably just check out. A lot of people do, you know.
“So ‘The Fuse’ not only comes before “The Pretender,’ it’s a refu-
tation of ‘The Pretender.’ The overall message at the end of “The
Pretender’ is that he’s pretending—he knows it and you know it.
He’s going to pretend that all he gives a shit about is getting his
paycheck, but even then he’s saying, ‘Say a prayer for the pre-
tender,’ ”
Every time I hear The Pretender, it makes me feel that it just
might be possible to get out of this place.
 NEW YORK DOLLS
THE NEW YORK DOLLS (MERCURY/UK 1234)
1973 AND 1974/1977

ROBERT CHRISTGAU
Although an American re-release has long been rumored, the two
New York Dolls albums—New York Dolls, produced by Todd
Rundgren in 1973, and New York Dolls in Too Much Too
Soon, produced by Shadow Morton in 1974—are currently avail-
able only as a two-LP reissue on English Mercury. A living
memorial it is. Out of catalogue and then raised from the dead
3000 miles away, all within three years of release—that’s what you
call a legend in its own time. Of course, the legend seems rather
more heroic in England—where the Dolls inspired the most
interesting music (whatever else, punk is/was undeniably interest-
ing) to hit the U.K. since the Beatles—than in the city that
spawned them, where the details of their suicide are too well-
remembered. And elsewhere in the universe their story is cherished
primarily by fanzine readers and other big-beat aesthetes. Still, a
legend is what it is.
There are people who love the Ramones or the Sex Pistols yet
continue to find the Dolls deficient in melody or power or punch,
“I guess you had to be there,” they say, at once paying their
respects to history and implying that those of us who actually
were there are no more fit to judge the resulting phonograph record
 New York Dolls | 133

than fans of Frampton Comes Alive! It must be admitted, though,

that seeing the Dolls on stage helped you understand their music.
They didn’t play any better than on record, and—despite the
theatrical reputation of “glitter rock,” a reputation based on. the
attraction of photographers to unusual clothing and of David
Bowie to mime—they didn’t “put on a show” in the Alice Cooper
or Bruce Springsteen sense. But they certainly tried to look like
something special, and they succeeded. °
Just as the impressionable listener was often deafened psycho-
logically by the sheer rapid fire of the Dolls’ music, so the impres-
sionable onlooker was often blinded by the sexual ambiguity of
their roles. It ought to be established, therefore, that the only time
the Dolls ever affected vampy eyes, bowed red lips, and pancake
makeup was on the cover of their first album. Ordinarily, their
gender-fuck was a lot subtler. It did capitalize on a slight natural
effeminacy in the speech patterns and body language of leader
David Johansen and bassist Arthur Kane, but at its core was
Johansen’s amazing flair for trashy clothes. The man was a
thrift-shop genius. So Arthur, who was tall and ungainly even
without his platform shoes, would squeeze his torso into a child’s
dress or put on a crotch-length hockey jersey over white tights;
David would wear a shorty nightgown instead of a shirt, with
fishnet stockings showing through the rips in his jeans; Syl would
turn into Liza Minnelli doing a Charlie Chaplin impression.
Partly because it coincided with Bowie’s publicly gay phase, this
stuff seemed very significant at the time, and symbolically it was.
But in retrospect it’s clear that the rather sweet street-tough aliena-
tion projected by guitarists Johnny Thunders and Syl Sylvain and
drummer Jerry Nolan was where the collective sexuality of the
band was really at. These were boys who liked girls; they shared the
traditional rock and roll machismo, which is adolescent and
vulnerable. What made them different was that their sweetness and
toughness and alienation knew no inhibitions, so that where love
was concerned they were ready for anything. By their camping
‘to the world that hippie mindblowing was a lot
they announced
more conventional than it pretended to be, that human possibility
was infinite. Of course, between Arthur’s instinctive awkwardness
 134 | ROBERT CHRISTGAU

and Syl’s clowning and David’s pursuit of the funny move, they
suggested in addition that human possibility was hilarious. And the
band’s overall air of droogy desperation implied as well that
human possibility was doomed.
All this was conveyed from the stage without props or bits or
any but the most elementary business—David and Johnny share
mike, Arthur steps forward for falsetto phrase, like that. But in
another way it was the real living theater. To be a Doll was to
appear twenty-four hours a day in an improvised psychodrama, half
showbiz and half acting out, that merely got wilder in front of
the microphones. Arthur played the beloved weirdo and Syl the
puckish jack-in-the-box; Jerry was the all-American dynamo who
kept the machinery juiced. But the big parts went to David, whose
mobile face and body accentuated the humor, smarts, and pur-
pose not just of the lyrics but of everything the band was, and
Johnny, who threatened constantly to detonate David’s volatile
handiwork. David was a benevolent ringleader; his exaggerated
moves and gestures made fun of the whole crazy project even as
they sharpened its meaning and established his authority. But
Johnny was forever testing the flexibility of David’s conception.
He was a j.d. with a bomb sticking out of his pocket, careening
from microphone to amplifier to beplatformed fellow Doll without
ever (almost ever) knocking any of them down or ceasing to
wrench noises from his guitar. He was Chaos personified, put on
display virtually untamed for our pleasure and edification.
Of such stuff are legends made—and from such stuff does all
this I-guess-you-had-to-be-there stuff proceed. The Dolls prove
how easy it is to dismiss a legend as nothing more than that,
especially when it’s crude and raucous and flashy. That their
music was consciously primitive was obvious; what wasn’t so
obvious was that it was also difficult. Even people who loved their
records found those records hard to listen to—not because the
concept (or legend) was greater than the music, but because the
music wasn’t merely fun. The Coasters and the Beach Boys and
even the Rolling Stones were each in their own way avatars of
fun-filled if alienated affluence. But the joy in the Dolls’ rock and
roll was literally painful; it had to be earned. The Dolls carried to
 New York Dolls | 135

its illogical conclusion the egalitarian communalism that was one

logical response of fun-filled affluence to alienation: they refused
to pay their dues. So we had to pay instead. These weren’t Wood-
stock brethren—skilled, friendly musical specialists plying their
craft in organic harmony, eager to help the energy go down. They
were lonely planet everyboys, ambitious kids who'd drifted in from
the outer boroughs of Communications Central and devised new
ways to cope with information overload. Although they were
addicted to the city, they knew damn well that “Sométhin’ musta
happened/Over Manhattan.” And they wanted their music to
sound like whatever it was.
Especially after a siege of pent-up urban frustration—although
the Dolls could also provide welcome relief from pastoral o.d.—I
found no rock and roll anywhere that delivered comparable satis-
faction. It articulated the noisy, brutal excitement the city offered
its populace as nothing else ever had, and so offered a kind of
‘control over it. The Dolls were at once lumpenkids overwhelmed by
post-hippie New York and wise guys on top of it. They lived in
the interstices of the Big Apple war zone on their wit and will, their
music at once a survival tactic and a kind:of victory. They never
whined because it was fun making do, and they rarely complained
about their powerlessness because they were too busy taking
advantage of what ordinary power the city provided its citizen
denizens—mobility and electricity especially. That’s why it seems
completely appropriate to me that their music evokes nothing so
much as the screech of a subway train.
I’m not talking about lyrics here—the lyrics were wonderful,
and they do convey comparable messages, but not so unequivocally.
It’s the music that makes the Dolls hard to listen to, and the
music that satisfies. Since neither album affords the kind of pristine
sound quality that distinguishes cleanly between garage-band
guitarists, it’s impossible to be sure, but as I hear it Syl is the only
Doll who doesn’t add something unique to a sound that pits the
competent-plus musicianship of David and Jerry against the rude
thrashing of Johnny and Arthur. And it is the playing of Johnny
and Arthur—one a primitive genius, the other a primitive klutz—that
is the Dolls’ contribution to musical history.
 136 | ROBERT CHRISTGAU

Johnny’s offering was buzzsaw guitar charismatic enough to vie

with heavy-metal fuzz in the hearts of rock and rollers everywhere.
Ron Asheton of the Stooges and Wayne Kramer and Fred “Sonic”
Smith of the MC5 were the fathers of the style, going back to
Pete Townshend’s rhythm chords with the Who as opposed to
Eric Clapton’s lead licks with the Yardbirds, to the Link Wray of
“Rumble” rather than the Duane Eddy of “Rebel-’Rouser,” to create
a drone-prone guitar countertradition that was not only loud but
tumultuous. It was Johnny, however, who made buzzsaw definitively
young, fast, and unscientific, undercutting the elephantine beat that
had deadened hard rock since the early days of Led Zeppelin and
the only days of Blue Cheer.
Despite heavy metal’s ill-mannered pretensions, its guitar move
was always (relatively) discreet because it was (relatively) discrete,
often simply responding to the call of the vocal line with a neat,
standardized electroshock phrase that incorporated both factory-
approved sound effects and natural feedback. Not that there was
no galvanic spillover—amplifiers were molested until they screamed
in conspicuously unpredictable revolt. But for Asheton and Kramer
and Smith spillover was the be-all and end-all. Exploiting their own
continuous, imprecise finger action a lot more than the fuzz box,
they threw together an environment of electric noise with which
everything else had to contend, replacing the deracinated call-and-
response of heavy metal with music that was pure white riot. With-
out violating the primordial totality of this environment—if any-
thing, the Dolls intensified buzzsaw’s drone—Thunders made it
speak, gave it shape and idiosyncrasy and a sense of humor.
To be fair, Johnny couldn’t possibly have made all that noise
himself. Syl pitched in with a will and a wink, laying a bottom for
Johnny’s jerrybuilt ideas; you can hear his essential racket in its
pristine state, a little bluesier than one might expect, on the first
guitar break preceding “It’s Too Late.” But while a lot of guys
could have done Syl’s work for him, Johnny made up his own job,
varying the tasks to suit his eternally teenaged sense of what was
and wasn’t boring. Often he created the impression of perpetual
motion with intermittent music, as with the scalar figure that
turns into a solo on “Jet Boy” or the fills of sheer sonic matter that
 New York Dolls | 137

surround Syl on “Looking for a Kiss” or the squawking licks that

decorate his own “Chatterbox.” The bursts of ersatz slide that he
explodes at regular intervals through “Babylon” add up to a drone,
while on “Subway Train” he breaks a whole drone into components,
playing each half of a primal background riff for a full measure
instead of alternating the two four times a measure as in workaday
buzzsaw. And even when he provided a straight drone, he was too
loose (or too sloppy) to leave it at that, and that was his gift. The
crude variation on Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk” that opens
“Human Being” soon devolves into something more general, yet
though it never quite regains its shape it never stops gathering
force either; “Pills” thrusts forward on the almost tuneless phrase
that Johnny repeats throughout the track. In both cases, the
charge of the music is equivalent to the severely delimited (Johnny
was obviously no technician and didn’t improvise in the usual
sense) yet unmistakable (boom) expressiveness of his playing. You
get the sense that even though Johnny’s lines could probably be
notated, he was too restless (and too lazy) to master them
absolutely. His mistakes are indistinguishable from his inspirations.
Each of his solos and comments and background noises on these
albums is a point in an infinite series of magically marginal
differentiations.
If Johnny’s contribution was the fruit of irrepressible individual-
ity, Arthur’s was a by-product of individuality repressed by incom-
petence. Johnny’s untutored spirit found voice in technique, but
Arthur (playing the instrument fellow bumpkin Ringo Starr de-
clared “too hard”) never got that far. You can hear how much bass
he’s learned in between the two records, but it’s not nearly enough
to play around with. If he doesn’t sink a blues line under Johnny’s
force field on (Bo Diddley’s) “Pills” on the first album, it’s only
because he doesn’t know one that fits; by the time of (Sonny Boy
Williamson’s) “Don’t Start Me Talkin’” on the second he is
double-timing an utterly conventional Willie Dixon part as Johnny
sows discord all around him. In general, on the first LP he either
echoes the rhythm guitar or just thumps along on a minimum of
notes, sometimes difficult to distinguish from the bass drum. By
In Too Much Too Soon his playing has definitely acquired a lilt,
 138 | ROBERT CHRISTGAU

funky on “Bad Detective” and bluesy-tuneful on “Stranded in the

Jungle,” echoing the melody after a showpiece walk on “It’s Too
Late.” But when he really wants to generate excitement, as on the
climactic “Human Being,” he resorts to the old thunderthud.
Arthur was the key to the Dolls’ unyielding and all but undance-
able rhythms. Harmonically, he could have been a far more
sophisticated technician without doing the band anything but good
—tricky melodic hooks helped make their music lovable. But
although the Dolls would have been tastelessly aggressive and
urban even without Arthur, his inability to come up with a catchy
counter-rhythm, to supply the kind of syncopation that sets the
body swaying, left them no room to be anything else. His style
was anticipated to some extent by various protopunk pioneers,
notably John Cale, and he shared more than Thunders did with
the purveyors of heavy metal. But Arthur Kane is the definitive
punk bassist, the source not only of Dee Dee Ramone’s wall of
thythm but of Paul Simonon’s military intricacies. As for Sid
Vicious, well, it sounds as if he studied with Arthur—Sid was the
more confident player only because he didn’t have to prove it
could be done.
Admittedly, there’s reason to wonder just how much Arthur was
capable of proving: nobody else ever carried the Dolls’ anyone-can-
do-it gospel so far. Even among the English punks, only X-Ray
Spex aimed for self-transcendence with such passionate inaccuracy.
The responsibility of compensating fell to Syl. Syl’s guitar was the
band’s fulcrum. By mediating between rhythm and melody, a
bassman’s work, he picked up some of Arthur’s slack. And while it’s
really true that he had nothing unique to add to the Dolls’ sound,
he wasn’t an ordinary circa-1971 hard rock guitarist either. If he
had been, the band might well have sunk under his weight, but Syl
was a Doll because he was in love with speed, and he knew
enough to counteract Arthur’s inertia by keeping his touch, un-
usually light. There’s even a sense in which his ordinariness—the
very fact that he had nothing unique to bring to the sound—
provided a modicum of conceptual stability, a common ground
where the band’s primitives could meet the musicians,*

* Thanks to Lenny Kaye for helping me think about Syl Sylvain.

 New York Dolls | 139

But for all his love of speed Sy] didn’t have the drive to power
the band himself, and if the forward motion had been left to
Arthur, the Dolls might never have gotten anywhere at all. He
just followed along, defining the beat in his own peculiar fashion, as
Jerry Nolan provided the propulsion. Insofar as the Dolls believed
in music cum music—in the power of rock and roll alone and un-
aided to provide salvation—Jerry embodied that belief. He was an
ordinary rock and roll madman at heart—schooled in 1-2-1-2, with
the jumbo-size panoply of rolls, cymbal accents, and crossbeats at
his disposal. He led the band in chops, but like so many punk
drummers he never showed any conceptual commitment to the
forced rhythms that are punk’s mainspring. Not that this is
surprising in a style whose innovators on the instrument—Maureen
Tucker, who rejected the backbeat, and Tommy Ramone, who
went so minimal he made Charlie Watts sound like Elvin Jones—
had never struck a tom-tom in earnest when they first tried out for
their jobs. Ignorance can be the mother of invention too—it
guarantees an uncluttered mind.
As it happens, though, drummers aren’t required to use their
minds much, not in rock and roll—they’re just supposed to follow
the right instincts (or the right orders) and play the right stuff.
This Jerry certainly did. However traditional his conceptual com-
mitments, he played with obligingly modernist steadiness; although
drawn to the backbeat, he submerged it, never funking around the
way, for instance, Frankie LaRocka of David Johansen’s current
band likes to. This was essential discipline in what was supposed
to be a definitively white style. The effects and rhythm changes
were there when needed—he provided more dramatic support for
David than anyone else in the group—but for the most part held in
check. There was no bombardiering or gratuitous noisemaking, In
short, Jerry never showed off. As explosive as his sound seemed, it
turned out to be surprisingly even in the moment-to-moment
execution. His only self-indulgence was to play unceasingly, on
every beat. The faster the tempo the happier he was.
Nolan was not an original Doll—he succeeded Billy Murcia, a
cofounder of the group with Thunders and Kane who died of a drug
overdose during the Dolls’ first tour of England in 1972—and he
always seemed a little simpler than the others, Syl, for instance,
 140 | ROBERT CHRISTGAU

acted no less happy-go-lucky, yet at the same time projected a

dirty old man’s sagacity. But Jerry was street-smart without being
street-cynical, so unfailingly eager that later, after he’d dyed his
hair bright blond and helped compose a classic song about heroin
for the Heartbreakers, he still seemed a naif clumsily astray in the
rock and roll demimonde. He was the band’s link to what people
smugly consider normal emotions, and his musicianship did the
same job—like any drummer who does his or her work well, he
provided roots.
David Johansen was Jerry’s converse in all this, both as a
public figure and as the band’s other practical technician. The
most worldly of the Dolls, the group’s lyricist and concept-master,
David took an undisguised pleasure in the ironic persona play
that is the privilege and/or responsibility of rock’s leading men,
although his style of humor was a lot more generous than Dylan’s
or Jagger’s—he was as dedicated to the principle of fun as any great
rocker since the Beatles themselves. But it seemed that this group
might require more musicianly skills from its leader. With such a
defiantly amateurish concept, wouldn’t the concept-master have
to do more than strike poses and think a lot if the music was to sur-
vive the force of its own forward rush? After all, without decoration
and identifying detail it would turn into instant blur.
A great vocalist like Little Richard could sing right over this
endemic rock and roll problem, but more often it has been solved
by means of hooks. These are usually tuneful little snatches of
provisional significance that are composed into a song or added by
some clever musician or producer, but in a pinch almost anything
memorable will do, And because David’s specialties were striking
poses and thinking a lot, he was compelled to fashion more hooks
out of less melody than a tone-deaf Eskimo. He did it, though—in
constant consultation with his boys—and as a result the Dolls’
music ranks not only with the hardest and fastest ever made, but
also with the wittiest and most charming. A few touches on the
Dolls’ LPs must have been donated by Todd Rundgren (e.g., the
two-tone double-track at the end of “Personality Crisis,” not to
mention the piano playing) and Shadow Morton (e.g., the soul
girls on “Stranded in the Jungle”). But most of them were part
of the Dolls’ music long before it got inside a studio, offshoots of
 New York Dolls | 141

David’s acting (as opposed to singing) ability and of his encyclo-

pedic fondness for rock and roll trivia, If Jerry’s craftsmanship
provided roots, David’s bestowed spirit. He struck poses, he thought
a lot, and he came up with what the group needed.
Even by modernistic standards, Johansen was not a great
vocalist. He was competent-plus in the post-Dylan manner—he had
presence and rhythm and a teasing knack for enunciating just
enough to whet your word hunger—but Little Richard he wasn’t.
His range was quite narrow and his timbre rather dry, and with the
Dolls his singing was neither deeply expressive (that came later,
when he went solo) nor acutely phrased. Yet his histrionic flair
saved him, and not just live, where his rubber mug and felicitous
gesticulations tended to overshadow his equally deft (and broad)
vocal role-playing. His shifts of character and caricature on these
records are an ongoing delight. “Personality Crisis,” directed at a
schizy imagemonger, pauses dramatically before David roars back
with: “And you're a prima ballerina on a spring afternoon/Changed
on into the wolfman howling at the moon.” Shape up, that’s cer-
tainly his warning—but disapproval doesn’t prevent him from
whistling a birdie-type tune (and doing a plié, although the rustle of
tulle gets lost in the mix) after the first line, or awhooing joyously
after the second, It is on the great novelty covers of In Too Much
Too Soon that David really indulges his taste for this kind of
impersonation—the 14th Street high stepper of “Showdown,” “Bad
Detective” ’s all-too-scrutable Charlie Chan, and (most exorbitantly)
the alternating Amos ’n’ Andy reject and lover’s-lane ass man of
“Stranded in the Jungle.” But on occasion he would momentarily
change the gears of his basic vocal transmission, which filters a
drawling pout through a tough, loud New York accent—as in the
adolescent-reverting-to-childhood dudgeon of “‘you better tell me”
on “Who Are the Mystery Girls?” or the maidenly “oh—all right”
that closes “Private World.” And every one of these personality
crises helps to decorate and identify the song.
But David’s tricks didn’t stop there. He stole mnemonic devices
from everywhere and made up a few of his own, and his desire to
work with Shadow Morton, rock ‘and roll’s greatest sound effects
man, was not a casual one. A cut might begin with a gong, a
harmonica, sighs, some sloppy power chords, monkey chatter,
 142 | ROBERT CHRISTGAU

hand-claps, a whistle, a spoken intro, a shouted “One-two-three-

four,” a pouted “Oh . . . break-down,” or the greatest of all the
Dolls’ credos: “Aah-ooh/Yeah yeah yeah/No no no no no no no
no.” It might end with a gong, a harmonica, a sigh, a saxophone
coda, a big fat kiss, a drum roll, a rifle shot, some climactic feedback,
a shouted “Whatcha gonna do?,” a pouted “oh—all right,” or the
greatest of all the Dolls’ metaphysical questions: “Do you think
that/You could make it/With Frankenstein?” The Dolls also
loved to quote obscure classics—the Edsels’ “Rama Lama Ding
Dong,” Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” the Shangri-Las’ “Give Him a
Great Big Kiss,” Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange’—and would
refer more allusively to anything from Jan & Dean to Chinese
movie music to “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” This kind
of fooling around had a recontextualizing effect, of course—“Love
Is Strange,” for instance, pins down the meaning of “Trash”—but
it also provided additional hooks, and time-proven ones at that. No
wonder the group believed that if you were smart enough you
didn’t have to practice.
Since there are still people who label this kind of craft “gim-
micky,” as if that were a devastating insult, it ought. to be em-
phasized that David’s gifts as a practical technician went beyond
what I’ve been describing. He knew how to use his voice (in the
post-Dylan manner) and he knew how to put a song together (his
basic compositions—which on the two albums comprise three
written solos plus eight collaborations with Johnny, three with Syl,
and one with Arthur—are moderately catchy in a primitive way).
As if to prove his competence-plus, he suddenly became a “better
singer” who wrote “better melodies” when the more conventional
concept of his solo career demanded it. Admittedly, I could have
the order wrong—maybe increased competence is what David,
whose father is an opera buff, would have preferred all along. But
that wouldn’t mean he was right. His melodies and his singing
with the Dolls weren’t merely adequate to the artistic venture—
they were brilliantly appropriate to it. The most charmingly tune-
ful Dolls song, “Lonely Planet Boy,” is also the most anomalous,
and was written solo by David before he joined the band.
Finally, David offered one additional accoutrement—lyrics every
 New York Dolls | 143

bit as apposite as his music, lyrics that focused and aimed the
band’s thrust. His father may have been an opera buff, but his
mother was a college librarian, and like the good rebel he was he
betrayed and fulfilled both birthrights simultaneously, Of course,
in an era of pop surrealism, the bedlam of the Dolls’ music had
fewer precedents than the elusive logic of their words. But David’s
lyrics distinguished themselves from the post-Dylan norm by one
simple expedient—they never sounded at all like poetry. It was to
be expected that sometimes they wouldn’t even sound like words—
indecipherability was a rock and roll tradition, one David respected
with a passion that passed all understanding. But the avoidance
of imagery that declared itself to be imagery was a mark of
sophistication that he shared with very few contemporaries, espe-
cially in America. Even a master of the colloquial like Jaime
Robbie Robertson, that fervent opponent of “glitter rock,” was
capable of something as “poetically” obscure on the face of it as
“The Weight.”
The Dolls’ obscurities were at once deeper and less considered.
Often the inexactness of their words, like that of their music,
seems unintentional, so that the opacities of “Subway Train,” for
instance, bespeak careless workmanship more than anything else.
But David clearly regards ambiguity as a significant mode. How
else to explain “Trash,” in which “Please don’t you ask me if I
love you” is followed first by “If you don’t know what I do,” then
by “’Cause I don’t know why I do,” then by “’Cause I don’t
know if I do,” and the “life” in “Don’t take my life away” changes
at various times to “knife,” “night,” and “lights”? Yet so fetching
was the hook—‘“Trash! Pick it up! Don’t take my life (knife)
(night) (lights) away!”—that you could hear the song dozens of
times without ever puzzling over such quiddities. Especially as
David performed them, all the lyrics offered some turn that earned
a chortle of recognition, and the tendency was to leave it at that.
Since the phrases that stood out often signaled “decadence”
and/or “camp,” this tendency reinforced the impression that the
Dolls were purely (and exploitatively) decadent and campy. Even
when it was quite explicit, for instance, that David was looking for
“a kiss not a fix,” the song’s shooting-gallery ambience (not to
 144 | ROBERT CHRISTGAU

mention the way David used to tie off with the mike cord and
jab himself in the bicep as he sang) wasn’t calculated to imprint
this on one’s mind. And in “It’s Too Late,” which posits lessons
from trivia history against the latest nostalgic fads, the name of
camp heroine Diana Dors has far more initial impact than the
speed-kills putdown she’s featured in. On the verbal surface, this
is a band of kitsch-addicted, pill-popping teen Frankensteins on the
subway train from Babylon to nowhere. Not only do they consort
with bad girls, mystery girls, and other trash, they aren’t even sure
whether that jet boy up there wants to steal their baby or be their
baby.
Like the Dolls’ musical. surface, this verbal surface offended
many, but although the band certainly wasn’t above sensationalism,
their intent wasn’t merely sensationalistic, Once again they were
trying to create an environment that jibed with their experience.
Just as it was dumb to write sensitive melodies that went un-
challenged by anything else in the music, it was dumb to moralize
in a benign, namby-pamby universe. This was the modern world
the Dolls sang about—one nuclear bomb could blow it all away.
Pills and personality crises weren’t evils—easy, necessary, or what-
ever. They were strategies and tropisms and positive pleasures, and
David wasn’t so sure that those who disapproved even deserved to
be called human beings: “Well if you don’t like it go ahead and/
Find yourself a saint/Find yourself a boy who’s/Gonna be what
I ain’t/And what you need is/A plastic doll with a/Fresh coat of
paint/Who’s gonna sit through the madness/And always act so
quaint/Baby yeah yeah yeah.”
Well, nobody ever called him humble, But his arrogance is
moral arrogance as opposed to the arrogance of power, and it’s
moral arrogance of the best sort, infused with comedy and a feeling
for human limits. His basic theme is authenticity—sometimes as an
explicit subject, as in “Personality Crisis” and “Puss in Boots,”
sometimes in tales of lost “kidz” like “Babylon” and “Subway Train”
—in the midst of massage parlors, Vietnamese babies, and other
seventies exposés, and his solution (counsel?) (message to the
world?) is a little surprising only because it is so traditional.
Johansen is a kind of cartoon prophet—a prophet posing as a bitchy
 New York Dolls | 145

scold. Don’t you start him talking, he’ll tell everything he knows.
And what he knows is love 1-u-v.
The only reason this denouement qualifies as any kind of big
deal is the context, and David does go out of his way to avoid
making a big deal of it himself. It’s almost as if love enters his
music by accident, because it happens to be the classic rock and
roll subject. In “Bad Girl,” when he tells the waitress who makes
his heart hurt that he’s “gotta get some lovin’ ’fore the planet is
gone,” he reduces his world view to a way to get laid; in “Trash,”
when he wonders whether his “lover’s leap” will land him in “fairy-
land,” he belittles his own proud (if ambiguous) pansexuality. But
on the other hand, maybe the reason David is attracted to rock
and roll is that it’s always been a way to connect the cold cruel
world with love l-u-v. Pills and personality may be okay up to a
point, but they’re obviously not going to get anyone past that point.
In fact, the mood and message of these songs is not only expressly
anti-phony (Dolls, not plastic dolls) but also expressly anti-drug
(just like Bo Diddley); what David tells that Diana Dors freak is:
“You invite us up to that speed trip/Well that’s nothing new on
me/That reminds me of Buck Rogers/Back in 1933.”
For the Dolls, the old answers can’t be revived—the only
conventional I-love-you songs here are Johnny's jokey, roughly
affectionate “Chatterbox” and David’s “Lonely Planet Boy.”. But
the old answers can be adapted to the dangerous world where the
Dolls’) music finds its life, just as rock and roll itself can be
reinterpreted to get rid of most of its sexy backbeat and twenty
years of acquired polish. By the seventies, the love-suffering of
“Lonely Planet Boy” was a hoary pop cliché and the love-nastiness
of “It’s Too Late” a virulent one. But the sardonically optimistic,
quadruple-edged contingency evoked by songs like “Looking for a
Kiss” and “Trash” and “Bad Girl’—so far from the self-serving
transience of the rocky-road mythmongers and the fashionable
equivocation of the sensitive singer-songwriters—was always unique
to this band. In “Frankenstein” and “Vietnamese Baby” Johansen
even moved from eros to agape, an agape that negated the uni-
versalist mush of the music-as-brotherhood sermoneers because it
was rooted in horror.
 146 | ROBERT CHRISTGAU

This was tough stuff in every way, and if the Dolls’ record
company couldn’t put it to use, neither could the Dolls. The
arrogance of power wasn’t in their karma—they didn’t lust after it
enough to trouble themselves with the discipline it required. It
took them much too long to learn that getting your name in the
papers was not equivalent to world conquest, and in the end they
didn’t even win over the city that taught them everything they
knew. After it became obvious that Mercury wasn’t going to
break them, they did some touring and gigged sporadically for
their sizable local cult, even hooking up briefly with Malcolm
McLaren, who later devised the Sex Pistols. But their failure had
put a damper on the New York rock scene, and before the punk
audience had redefined itself at CBGB the Dolls were down to
David and Syl. The first album sold perhaps 100,000, the second
rather less.
As far as their legend goes, it’s just as well that they were never
forced to translate permanent insurrection into success. But the
split meant the end ofall their most invigorating tensions: between
feeling and alienation, love and escape, craft and anarchy, Arthur,
who’d fallen away well before the final breakup, surfaced looking
very ravaged, first in a disturbingly Nazoid outfit called the Corpse
Grinders and later behind Sid Vicious, of all people. David wrote
deeply felt conventional I-love-you songs with an unconventional
come-on-boys spirit and was joined by Sy] in a band to match. And
Johnny and Jerry became the soul of the Heartbreakers, who some-
how managed to make junkiedom sound like laughs and fast times.
It was on the Heartbreakers’ L.A.M.F., rather than David Johansen,
that the old gestalt came through most emphatically. After all,
what made the Dolls the Dolls was the way they energized nega-
tives.
For me, even that is a side benefit, because for me, the Dolls
perfect—in a properly inexact way—a new aesthetic. Camp or no
camp, theirs was not a cause of “a seriousness that fails,” of this-is-
so-bad-it’s-good. On the contrary, the Dolls were the ultimate
instance of the miracle of pop, using their honest passion, sharp
wits, and attention to form to transmute the ordinary into the
extraordinary. Like the greatest folk artists, they plugged into an
 New York Dolls | 147

enormously expressive (and accessible) cultural given and then

animated it with their own essence. But this was not a folk
process—not orally transmitted, naive, somehow “natural.” It was
consciously aesthetic, rooted in bookish ideas about art that were
alive in the downtown boho air. Their music synthesizes folk art’s
communion and ingenuousness with the exploded forms, historical
acuity, and obsessive self-consciousness of modernism. As culture,
it is radically democratic and definitively urban; as art, it is crude
and sophisticated at the same time. It epitomizes why rock and
roll began and why it will last.
 HUEY “PIANO” SMITH’S
ROCK & ROLL REVIVALI
HUEY “PIANO” SMITH (ACE 2021)
1957-1959/1975

JAY COCKS
“You got me rocking whenIJought to be rolling”
—“Don’t You Just Know It”
Rock was the tough part, the part that made you holler. The fun
was all in the roll, and in the beginning, down in New Orleans,
they rolled the finest.
Leave the fury to the rockabillies, with their middle-finger
salutes in rhythm and their eight-bar assaults on hit parade gentility.
In New Orelans they found the groove, made music that, like the
gulf town it sprang from, devoted itself to easeful enjoyment and
antic meditations on absolute insignificance.
Elvis and Jerry Lee found the angry edge, used it to hack even
when it wasn’t full sharp enough to cut. Chuck Berry wrote deft
short stories, tunes that defined the backseat horniness of rock with
the lecherous, lyric precision of a prancing Pan who played guitar,
not pipes, and could do a mean jump-split into the bargain. The
black rockers of New Orleans voiced those themes in a different
way. Whether raw and rambunctious, like Professor Longhair;
unruffled, ever truthful of heart, like Fats Domino; whether bereft,
like Ernie K-Doe, or burned and jumping, like Chris Kenner; or
 Huey “Piano” Smith's Rock & Roll Revival! | 149

even berserk, like Little Richard—all these New Orleans cats always
seemed cool at the core, ever bemused. Or wise-assed, like Huey
“Piano” Smith. My man.
Huey Smith can stand as a fitting example of the hilarious,
careening excesses of rock, New Orleans-style. Now, he’s usually
been considered a first figure of the second rank, shadowed by
Professor Longhair, who influenced him, and Fats Domino, who
outsold him, then bypassed by Allen Toussaint, who learned a few
lessons from him before moving along. But to me, Huey Smith’s
always been the town’s premier roller.
Today Huey has embraced a different faith. He’s a Witness
now, a roller no longer, and can be found around town on occasion
distributing copies of the Watchtower to the benighted, He hasn’t
made a record under his own name in a decade, although it is
possible—one must rely on rumors—that he has contributed his
inimitable piano to some obscure gospel recordings. There, pre-
sumably, his rollicking style has been somewhat subdued, his
insinuating left-hand rhythms dressed, for the occasion, in Sunday-
go-to-meeting.
This Smith style, which knotted chords and made heavy-handed-
ness into a paradoxical marvel of dexterity, can be caught, at its
height, on any oldies anthology that includes “Sea Cruise.” It can
also be heard, in all its goofy glory, on an Ace retrospective collec-
tion called Huey “Piano” Smith’s Rock & Roll Revival! For sheer
velocity, for its typical but very special kind of innocent hedonism,
for its sense of unstrung celebration and never-ending play, I'd
match it against any record I know.
Huey Smith’s great strengths are also his severest limitations.
The beat gets repetitious, the lyrics are nonsense. The songs are
often without a subject and usually without a point. None of that
ever bothered Huey, of course. Good times was good enough for
him, and of what he wanted, and what he chose, he provided an
abundance.
Those who rank Smith as a minor figure take his limitations
too much into account, don’t hold thoroughly to heart Smith’s
humor, the feeling all his music passed along of having been made
by a touring medicine show in the throes of a never-ending
 150 | JAY COCKS
party. His considerable keyboard skills have been diminished, it
seems, by Smith’s own deprecating, even sardonic attitude toward
his gifts as expressed in the full-throttle whimsies of his music, and
as well by musicologists and critics who see this attitude as a
statement, not a posture,
In fact, Smith was one of the best sessionmen around New
Orleans; you can hear him rolling true in the intro to Smiley
Lewis’s “I Hear You Knocking.” He even laid in some piano
behind the eruptions of Little Richard. Richard denies this—
heatedly—but it is inarguable that Smith was working out his style
while Richard was still singing Dinah Washington tunes, and it was
that very style—no matter who supplied it on records—that
Richard steam-heated and mutated into his own.
Press a little and you could say that Huey’s romps along the 88s
were not only an extension of the prevailing piano style around
town, but a loving parody of it. Professor Longhair, probably New
Orleans’s most redoubtable R&B legend, gets the historical credit
for putting this style together out of the hot sounds in the air.
Years before, Jelly Roll Morton had done much the same thing by
deflecting some of the Caribbean rhythms off the docks and into
the whorehouse jazz he was knocking out nightly. There’s a
distinct Caribbean undertow in Professor Longhair’s: music—in
“Tipitina,” “Bald Head” and, most especially, in “Mardi Gras in
New Orleans’—but his approach was bluesier, closer to country
roads than Rampart Street. The second line lays snug beneath his
music, but so does the sardonic growl of the blues, raw but tipped
over into something a little more casual. A shrug, maybe, instead
of a snarl.
Huey Smith built on this approach, then cut it up and knocked
it over. He was a joker. His group was called the Clowns, and,
like a lot of wise guys, Huey stowed a lot of wild aggression behind
his easy smile. On some of his early sides—a couple are included
on Savoy’s The Roots of Rock & Roll—he plays pretty straight-
ahead R&B, prancing on the keys where, a few years later, he’d
commence to pounding. This older music is adept, if not altogether
distinguished. It would take the giddiness, even the inconsequence,
of mainline rock to turn Huey into a demolition expert.
 Huey ‘’Piano”’ Smith’s Rock & Roll Revival! | 151

Huey started training for the call early. He was fifteen when he
hit the road in 1949, with Guitar Slim and a drummer named
Willie Nettles, to embark on what Slim later called ‘a nationally-
known tour.” In the early fifties, Huey settled into session work,
mostly for Specialty, playing dates behind Lloyd Price and Smiley
Lewis. According to John Broven’s Walking to New Orleans (a
book you can’t do without, and the source for many of the facts I’ve
used here), Huey also toured with Shirley and Lee besides backing
Richard on those Specialty sessions. It’s worth noting that work—
Richard’s first for Specialty—resulted in some solid, down-the-
middle R&B, and one raver, “Tutti Frutti.” Richard took over
piano on that one. The song was an afterthought, a goof, and
Bumps Blackwell, Richard’s manager-producer, had only fifteen
minutes of studio time left to cut it, hardly enough to teach Huey
the arrangement. So Little Richard sat down on the bench and let
fly. Sure sounds like Huey, though, which may not be all that sur-
prising when you figure that Richard had been listening to. Huey
take his turns on every other tune.
There’s little question that Huey was a far more adept player
than Richard. Dave Bartholomew, the great band leader who wrote
and arranged a lot of Fats Domino’s best material, once tipped
Huey that his playing was too perfect—technically, that is—and
suggested he bang out a few wrong notes “like Little Richard.”
What put Richard over was his delirium tremens vocalizing; he
used the piano to batter and bash himself along. Now, this
approach could not have been entirely lost on Huey. He may not
have taken Bartholomew straight at his word, but Huey’s first hit,
“Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” released in the
summer of 1957, a year and a half after “Tutti Frutti,” had much of
Richard’s anarchy. Smith played fine bust-a-blood-vessel piano—no
wrong notes, either—but, ever shy of singing, enlisted the Clowns
to handle the vocals. Along with James Black and a gent named
“Scarface” John Williams, the original Clowns featured Bobby
Marchan, whose voice could rip and shriek like a pair of nylons
being torn by a fingernail.
During his time with the Clowns, and lates gone solo, Marchan
paced Little Richard in dementia and, some say, for a time almost
 152 |. JAY COCKS

outdistanced him. Marchan was partial to makeup and leapt into

falsetto vocals that dared the upper register to crack. He kicks off
Huey’s “High Blood Pressure” by revealing his symptoms—“I get
high blood pressure when you call my name’—with the pride of
an inveterate cruiser showing up for mandatory inspection at the
VD clinic. On the flip side, “Don’t You Just Know It,” Marchan
and the rest of the Clowns set down the call-and-response theme
(“Ah ha ha ha, hey-ey you, gooba gooba gooba’’) like a gang of
twisted Masons shouting a password. It was Huey’s fleet piano,
though, that anchored both songs; on “High Blood Pressure” he
rolled right into the middle break with the same riff he’d used
twice before, on “I Hear You Knocking” and a wonderful Earl
King tune, “Those Lonely, Lonely Nights.” “People started to
complain when I had done it three times,” is the way Huey
defends himself in Broven’s book. “But it was such a damn good
piano solo.”
Marchan’s singing with the Clowns pushed Huey and his gang
over the edge of eccentricity into free-fall. Their sound could have
been low-down sinister, but the sense of what they sang was safe
and serene as only nonsense can be. “I want to holler, but the
joint’s too small”—if that’s in fact what’s being sung at the be-
ginning of “Rocking Pneumonia”; it’s hard to say exactly—sounds
scruffy enough, a fearful dilemma, part of the parcel of troubles
that goes with this particular affliction. As much as Marchan
might camp it up, he was at rock-bottom a blues belter, so the
silliness was never thorough, just—like Richard’s—a gesture of
caricature sensuality and grand defiance.
Huey’s own vocalizing, which is short on fine shading but does
have a fair share of gruff gumption, can be heard on occasion,
fighting for life against the roundhouse force of his piano. On
Rock © Roll Revival, Greg Shaw, who compiled the record, in-
cluded an alternate version of “Sea Cruise,” minus the bells and
foghorns and white singer Frankie Ford. Huey sang, with the
excellent Gerri Hall (a member of the Clowns by that time)
setting down a sprightly track which apparently sounded a little
saw-toothed to Johnny Vincent, who ran Ace Records. He
scrubbed it up with Frankie Ford, presided over the laying in of
 Huey ‘’Piano”’ Smith’s Rock & Roll Revival! | 153

the maritime effects, and put out one of the great singles in rock &
roll history.
Today Frankie Ford is underrated and still looking for his due,
probably because of what many consider his ofay incursions. But
his Let’s Take a Sea Cruise album on Ace is a snug, near-
masterful collaboration with Huey Smith, who played on the
record and provided most of the material. Huey sounds bushy-
tailed as ever all over the set, and Frankie Ford was too good to
be slick. He just smoothed the music out, made it go down a
touch easier. The best thing about the official version of “Sea
Cruise” is still the rhythm track, and nobody messed with that.
“Sea Cruise” has a fine melody, but to get an idea of how
thoroughly the record is Huey Smith’s, how it craves his piano,
listen to any remake—say, John Fogerty’s. It’s game, but it drags.
It’s got bells and horns and a little lapping water, too, but it
doesn’t have the dazzle. Fogerty plays piano on the cut, and that’s
what trips everything up. Huey had such ease on the keyboard he
made it all sound a cinch. »
Huey could get a little unhinged. He never strayed from the
groove, but he pressed its limits once in a while. His one original
album—the others were mostly made up of recycled sirigles—is
likely the wildest record he ever made: "Twas the Night Before
Christmas, copies of which can still be found occasionally in
oldies stores, priced forbiddingly. It was a collection of seasonal
tunes—a standard or two like “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night”
were given the New Orleans treatment and laid down to rest
beside such originals as “’T'was the Night Before Christmas” (a
song featuring “Boogie woogie Santa Claus, comin’ down the
chimney makin’ lots of noise”). The record is flush with holiday
spirit, made on a whim, it would seem, and performed as a goof.
It could have been recorded in a rumpus room; each successive cut
sounds looser than the last. The only thing missing at the end of
side one is the sound of bottles being emptied and next-door
neighbors bellowing for quiet.
The record isn’t so much a celebration of Christmas as a
definition of the essential spirit of New Orleans rock & roll, so free
it can never shake down. Huey played better elsewhere—pressures
 154. | JAY COCKS
of the revels may have finally foxed him into making a few of
those Little Richard mistakes—and the Clowns’ horseplay had
certainly been sharper. The material would challenge no one. But
the humor that prevails, the good-natured cool and untroubled
technique are definitive. Phil Spector’s grander Christmas album
has the same enterprise, but misses the irreverence. The only
place I’ve ever heard traces of this same giddy, gleeful spirit is in
the commercially unreleased version of “Santa Claus Is Coming
to Town” that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band put on
the radio in 1977. They may have gotten the idea from Spector,
but the momentum’s all toward Huey Smith.
The unstrung core of New Orleans music comes out of a casual
professionalism common to musicians of the fifties. Even when
Huey lets things unravel, as on the Christmas album or “Beatnik
Blues,” a fiercely silly single, there’s a certain border of discipline
he never crosses, a barrier of pride and skill. Certain of those few
who followed along after him—like Dr. John—weren’t so particular,
an attitude that could sap the music of spirit, turn it toward
unchecked indulgence. The Dr. John of The Last Waltz, laying
down his lazy, sexy “Such a Night,” is the best Dr. John, the true
Mac Rebennack; the Night Tripper was for the tourist trade.
Rebennack has the skill, and he can show the fire. He did an
album in homage to New Orleans, Gumbo, and included a Huey
Smith medley that was respectful and sassy in rightful measure.
His hoodoo masquerade was always jive, though, part of his
cynical side, even though it could be argued that the backwater
decadence of the Night Tripper was just another extension of the
time-honored New Orleans playfulness which Huey had raised to
such a pitch of raggedy perfection. After Dr. John latched onto it,
coated it in gris-gris and set it loose to pass for some sort of bayou
psychedelia, the good times turned synthetic. When Little Richard
or Bobby Marchan strutted their stuff, they keyed their energies
too high for pure camp. It took the Doctor to write that particular
prescription. Huey always had a taste of shuck in his music, but
again—even at its silliest—he held fast to his craft. It was his
particular pleasure to make light of his skill, as well as his music.
Fats Domino did the same, in a homier, fond-uncle sort of way; so
 Huey ’’Piano’’ Smith’s Rock & Roll Revival! | 155

did Professor Longhair, and Allen Toussaint, who dazzled only

in his music and arranging, using shyness and modesty—reclusive-
ness, even—to mask his pride just as Huey hid behind his humor.
Toussaint never caught a terminal case of the rocking pneumonia,
as Huey did. Like all bold experimenters, Huey infected himself
with the disease before he could diagnose its symptoms. Judging
from his example, the terminal stages of the disease do not impair
any vital functions or talents. They only bring on a fit of the giggles.
Such home truths can only take you so far; the same problems
come up every direction you take, and the thought is inescapable
that Huey took his music the furthest he could on a very short
path. Styles changed, sure, and R&B slid into soul. Regional music,
which in the fifties had a toehold in Top 40 radio, began to lose
ground in the sixties: when business got bigger, record companies
enlarged, and smaller regional labels—like Ace, Instant, Minit—
had to bust ass harder than ever to get proper distribution. It
wasn’t only commerce that made the music change, though. It was
taste, the particular fickle nature of the pop audience, then the
coming of the British groups. That combination of circumstance
and commerce contrived to move rock & roll in directions that
were barely on the compass, Huey, of course, tried to follow along.
When the changes first consolidated and started to hit, in 1962,
Huey was enjoying his first chart single in over three years, a
novelty dance number called “Pop-Eye.” It was his last score.
Treading water during the deluge that followed, Huey tried to get
a fix on high ground. He started tuning up his social] conscience,
released a couple of sides like “Ballad of a Blackman” and
“Epitaph of Uncle Tom” that invoked Martin Luther King,
Booker T. Washington and other luminaries. Huey’s intentions
were all of the best—a little desperate, maybe, though still sincere
—but he couldn’t shake his old antic disposition. Even preaching
and paying due homage to black pride, Huey sounded like he was
cutting up. Messages didn’t sit easy with such a good-time fella.
Moving into the late sixties, Huey started his own label, Pity-Pat,
and recorded a variety of soul acts like the Pitter-Pats (for whom
he played piano) and the Soulshakers. He even had a small local
hit in 1968 off a tune called “Coo Coo Over You” which must
 156 | JAY COCKS

have sounded, in that stormy year, comfortingly quaint, a little

memento of innocence. A while after that, Huey took up the
Bible. .
The question remains—will always remain, with no hope of
sure solution—how much longer the whole New Orleans sound
could have continued before it fizzled into redundancy. By and
large the stuff that sounds best today—Huey’s, Fats’s, Smiley
Lewis’s and Chris Kenner’s and Ernie K-Doe’s—is the music made
during the prime years that stayed true to form. Subsequent
attempts to retool and adopt the sound, as the Meters have done,
come out bottom-heavy and a little contorted. Allen Toussaint,
the great guiding spirit of New Orleans in the seventies, is a
musician in whom all traditions are replenished, and from whom
flow all kinds of marvels. His work with Lee Dorsey marries funk,
soul, and a little dab of disco to the high, sweet spirit of days gone
by. The music is intricate, full of cunning tricks, and Dorsey is
not just the best singer now working out of New Orleans, he’s one
of the most enduring and gifted R&B singers of the seventies. Still,
the Toussaint/Dorsey collaborations don’t have the deep colors
of the older material. Maybe those come with time and distance;
maybe it’s the perspective that makes them more vibrant—that,
and sentiment, too.
In other quarters, R&B had a more diabolical edge or could
sustain a greater social urgency. In New Orleans, the good times set
the limits of the music. There was just so far you could go and
so much you dared say without souring the party. After all the
other arguments and considerations have been cut away, it is this
prevailing attitude that finally fences the music in. It doesn’t date
it. Music doesn’t need to freight a major message in order to
survive. But it does need to be powerful enough, all on its own, to
transport us to its time and place without auxiliary power: special
interest, scholarship, nostalgia. New Orleans R&B can do that;
Huey Smith can sure do that. All the music’s glory is right in
that. Its weakness is that this is a place to revel in, but then to
pass through.
The music’s special, particular, and persistent value, its rough-
house joy, is not only inseparable from this weakness, it almost
 Huey '’Piano”’ Smith’s Rock & Roll Revival! | 157

depends on it, thrives on impermanence. I’d take an over-the-

shoulder guess that Huey Smith thought no further than the
charts, and hoped no higher than a gold record, every time he went
into the studio. There is no deliberation behind his music, little
calculation beyond a kind of instinctive reliance on commercial
novelty. Thoughts of history, concerns about the staying power
of the music, would have been considered presumptuous at best,
notions puffed up past any recognizable or manageable size. It was
immediate impact folks thought about then, not resonance. Once
you hear an echo, it means the music is already fading away.
That it’s lasted this long is a simple wonder. That it will endure,
age, but never turn antique, seems a safe augury. The joy of Huey
Smith’s records is retroactive and regenerative, self-perpetuating
past any arbitrary limits. That spirit travels well, too, because, like
Huey’s keyboard skill, it seems so spontaneous and effortless, so
true. This gift of joy is so generous, not only to have but to spread
around, that it should never be a matter of just settling for it, and
missing all you may be sacrificing. Transitory though it may be,
joy like this is substantial enough, and its own reward.
-So rock has always told us, anyhow. But this is dangerous
territory, vulnerable to scrupulous reasoning. You need a kind of
innocent hedonism—just what Huey delivers—to live here in
harmony, and you must accept, as a precondition, that you will
always be prey to assaults of rationality that beat at you like a
bad conscience. You know, at these times, that you’ve come too far,
gone through too much, grown too old, to still believe that pleasure _
is where it all starts and stops. As much as you know that, though,
as hard as you hold to it, Huey Smith and that piano can sucker
you every time.
If you want to reflect, and experience has warned you away
from exploring the social implications or pop-myth infrastructures
of the work of Huey P. Smith, if you want to ruminate a minute,
and not dance, and not feel guilty, either—then, as Huey takes his
souped-up jitney races across the keyboard, you might think on the
role of the piano in rock & roll. You might think, as I have, that
the piano is the keystone rock instrument. You might realize that
the guitar sends out the flash, but the piano carries the weight.
 158 | JAY COCKS
You might even reckon that though a record heavy on guitar
might be just right for a time capsule, it’s an album of rock
piano you’d want tucked under your arm if eternity was giving
you the eye.
When Huey lets loose—or Professor Longhair, for that matter,
or Fats, or Toussaint—the very prankish agility of his gifts can make
you banish all the other instruments to the rear of the stage. That
has in part to do with the particular vibrancy of the performer, cer-
tainly. But the fact that the piano is often back-seated in rock has
something to do with the paucity of good practitioners, and even
more with the very practical matter of portability. Try kicking out
the jams on a Steinway,
All Huey’s musical hi-jinks notwithstanding, he was, by all
reports, a fairly contained stage performer. Huey and the Clowns
may have romped, but they romped in place. Same with the Pro-
fessor. Little Richard used the piano kind of like a launching pad,
from which he would surge forth on his unlikely trajectories, (Elton
John’s been trying to get into this same orbit for years.) The
original piano stomper himself, Jerry Lee Lewis, used his instru-
ment as the object of both affection and aggression, and took
things about as far as they can go, even once setting fire to his
instrument on stage at the Apollo. Jerry Lee could stand, knock
the bench aside with the back of his knees and start pounding.
He could stomp the keyboard with the stacked heel of his lizard-
skin boot, and get a great sound all the while, too. But he couldn’t
compete with the guitar as a talisman, and no matter what he
tried, he couldn’t beat the final damn dignity out of the piano.
No way to best the figurative as well as literal electricity of
the guitar, and no way either that you can do the same sort of
stunt flying with any other instrument. You can stand still and play
great, like Ry Cooder or Dave Edmunds or Eric Clapton. But you
can also jump around and rave up and play great into the bargain,
like Chuck Berry or Pete Townshend. With a piano, you just play.
Showboating’s such an integral part of rock—sheer physical move-
ment, as well as musical momentum—that the very presence of a
piano seems to promise inflexibility, no matter what kind of sound
comes out of it.
 Huey “Piano” Smith’s Rock & Roll Revival! | 159

There is another, even stronger preconception at work here.

Since the early fifties, guitar has been the symbolic instrument of
rebellion. The piano is what your parents wanted you to play. Not
even clown anarchists like Huey Smith could completely dispel
hovering shades of relentless piano teachers and pitiless metro-
nomes. You learned guitar from your friends, or—better—off records,
in your room, by yourself. Guitars traditionally have been a poor
man’s instrument, for the field and front porch, and pianos graced
proper gatherings of the gentlefolk. But less obviously, pianos have
a saving dark side: they were the instrument of choice in the cat-
house parlor. It’s a comfort to keep that.in mind.
Huey Smith can help you remember. In all his music, even
the giddiest rock, there is fond remembrance of the rolling syncopa-
tion that comes straight from the back streets. It wasn’t only
Caribbean inflections that Huey and everyone else heard in Jelly
Roll Morton, and it wasn’t just calypso that Professor Longhair
busted up in a compound fracture and reassembled along his key-
board. It was the below-the-belt rhythm of jazz. This proudly
dishonorable piano tradition doesn’t—and likely can’t—go far
enough to dispel all the received notions and stubborn ghosts that
bedevil the instrument. Huey Smith suffers fallout from those
prejudices; so does most other New Orleans rock. It’s piano-moored
and horn-based. It’s hard to think of a hot guitar player from the
Crescent City.
So the action moved elsewhere, and hasn’t returned. While
younger musicians hungry for material and tradition have ransacked
most every other territory from rockabilly scruff to the Wagnerian
summits of Phil Spector, New Orleans has remained pretty much
untouched and untraveled. In the early seventies, Dave Edmunds
had a hit off a loving revival of “I Hear You Knocking.” Smack in
the middle of the tune, right in the instrumental break, Edmunds
shouted the names of the New Orleans pantheon with all the
fervor of the last true believer: “Smiley Lewis! Fats Domino! Huey
Smith! Dave Bartholomew!”
Because there are so few keeping the faith, the speculation has
arisen that the New Orleans sound has died. Apparently this news
has not reached Louisiana. Allen Toussaint writes, makes his own
 160 | JAY COCKS
records, produces others. The Meters, the Neville Brothers, the
aptly named Wild Tchoupitoulas, are still productive. According
to the eternally enthusiastic owner of the town’s largest oldies
store, even Huey is thinking on the possibility of settling into some
secular music again.
Most important, though, is that New Orleans continues to
honor these musicians as generative figures, not waxworks to
respect, then dismiss. Their music hasn’t been stashed away in
the archives. In New Orleans, it’s never a question of music being
outdated, or out of style. This is a town where tradition. is the
style.
The weekend that Muhammad Ali danced his championship
away from Leon Spinks, the city was alive with music. Clarence
“Frogman” Henry was holding down his regular gig on Bourbon
Street. The wonderful Irma Thomas was serenading the tourists
on a moonlight cruise aboard a paddlewheel steamer. And her
name was carved, fresh and bold—swEET 1RMA THOMAS—into the
timber of a club where Professor Longhair was holding forth. swEET
IRMA THOMAS: the inscription of a fan for whom there is no past
history, only persistent good times.
And the Professor played on, about as sassy as ever before an
audience that did a whole lot more than just cherish him. The
club was called Tipitina’s in his honor, but the people who came
weren’t there to pay solemn tribute or to hunker down for some
serious ethno-musical history. It was Saturday night, and they were
there to party. The Professor blistered through his repertoire,
paying no mind to time, not wanting to stop, and the people
responded as they should, as they were meant to, all dancing to
the music.
 PRECIOUS LORD:
NEW RECORDINGS OF THE
GREAT GOSPEL SONGS OF
THOMAS A. DORSEY
(COLUMBIA KG 32151)
1973

TOM SMUCKER
When black slaves sang, “I looked over Jordan and
what did I see, Coming for to carry me home,” they
were looking over the Ohio River. “Steal away’ meant
to sneak into the wood for a secret slave meeting, and
“Follow the Drinking Gourd’ meant following the
Great Dipper to the Ohio River and freedom, But...
not all black slaves could hope to make it to Africa,
Canada, or even to the northern section of the United
States. ... And blacks also began to realize that the
North was not so significantly different from the South
as they had envisioned, particularly in view of the
Fugitive Slave act of 1850 and the Dred Scott Decision
of 1858... . Thus they found it necessary to develop
a style of freedom that included but did not depend on
historical possibilities.

—James H, Cone,
The Spirituals and the Blues:
An Interpretation
 162 | TOM SMUCKER
Some mysteries.
I’m a little boy, and I’m playing an old 78 by Arthur Godfrey,
“For Me and My Gal,” on the old phonograph that’s been
demoted to the breezeway. To my astonishment, I find I can play
this one record over and over and over again without getting tired
of it.
My older brother’s old enough to be a teenager and an Elvis
Presley fan. We’re visiting grandparents in Kansas City and he
buys two early EPs; one with “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “I Love
You Because,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” and “Blue Moon,” and
one, oddly enough, that’s all religious, with “I Believe,” “It Is No
Secret,” “Precious Lord,” and “Peace in the Valley.”
I’m too young to be a juvenile delinquent and too frightened of
the sex and rebellion to try when I’m older anyway. Pat Boone’s
my man—clean, Christian, smart, and popular; but it’s “Blue
Moon” by Elvis that I keep coming back to. And I can’t figure out
how someone so sleazy can sound so involved with religion on his
“other” record. It’s more than a ploy to confuse parents (or
younger brothers) who. want to disapprove. In fact, by comparison,
Pat’s devotional fervor sounds suspicious.
“T Believe” and “It Is No Secret” are at least familiar to me,
although not with Presley’s heavy emoting and hillbilly embellish-
ments, but “Precious Lord” is a shock. “Take my hand” sung by
Swivel Hips, the man whose TV appearance inspires my brother
to threaten to wear blue jeans to church? It’s too physical, too
personal, too self-affirming for me to grasp, while “Peace in the
Valley,” lacking the disturbing sensuality of “Precious Lord,” is
worse for being perfect in its balance of despair and hope. My
young mind reels—this has got to be my favorite religious song, if
not the best song ever. It’s also a big hit for Elvis. What is going
on?
I’ve escaped an unhappy adolescence in the suburbs and folk
music is my bag. The FM side of my radio, which is folk and
classical, is broken, so I’m listening to big hits on the AM. The
Beach Boys come on singing I don’t remember what anymore and I
realize that this is me. I accept the revelation, but I wish it was
about something bigger than pop music and better than the Beach
Boys.
 Precious Lord | 163

Months later I’m living in a black neighborhood in Detroit,

spending the kind of collegiate interracial Christian summer I
doubt still exists. This is long ago, before the riot, before Motown
Records leaves Motown for L.A. Detroit has great AM radio (still
does, they tell me), and “Satisfaction,” “Like a Rolling Stone,”
“Tracks of My Tears,” and “Since I Lost My Baby’ are the hits.
Who needs FM? The words to “Since I Lost My Baby” are
writtenon a wall in the neighborhood. A guy I meet knew the
Supremes in high school. At the black church we attend the
singing gets so enthusiastic people faint, and I’m surprised to find I
like some of the songs as much as the ones I’m listening to on the
radio. Three little sisters who live down the block sing great gospel
music together and one of them asks me why all of the songs that I
sing when I play ‘my banjo are about freedom. The teenager down-
stairs, who practices Bach for her piano lessons, can accompany the
sisters on gospel piano, evidently without trying.
At the settlement house where I help out, the Summer Bible
School is changed to a Freedom School and we point out to the
kids that they should use a brown or black crayon to color in the
faces of Ralph Bunche and Frederick Douglass in their coloring
books, instead of using the Flesh-Color crayon. A black minister,
Rev. Cleage, who’s running in the city elections, preaches that
Jesus was black.
After spending the next summer getting stoned and listening
to the Beatles and Bob Dylan I buy the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds
in the fall, just out of curiosity. I’m shocked to find that the more
I listen to it, the better I like it. On acid my suspicions are con-
firmed—a great record.
Most of my acquaintances, however, prefer the Rolling Stones,
Dylan, Aretha, and Otis Redding. One song that Otis sings, “A
Change Is Gonna Come,” overwhelms me—it seems more political
and spiritual than his other stuff—and I have a secret obsessive
desire to be able to sing it. But Otis sounds so black and I’m so
white. For some reason I resolve the problem by deciding that if I
did sing the song, I would sing it like Pete Seeger would if he
sang it.
The next year I move to New York, hoping to become a hippie
or a radical. Events are transpiring, particularly in Viet Nam, that
 164 | TOM SMUCKER
make the second possibility easier and easier. But, while crashing
the New Left in time to witness its collapse, I also find myself—for
the first time—with a full-time job and, as they say, some discre-
tionary income. I indulge my obsession with the Beach Boys, who
are between their early sixties and late seventies popularity. Record
stores are clearing out their Beach Boys stock at bargain prices and
I buy everything and find, oddly, that I like it all. I get paid to
write an article about the Beach Boys that is never published, but
which nonetheless justifies my extravagant purchases.
Time goes by and I find that if you write about rock and roll,
record companies will send you free records, most of which aren’t
any good. If you only write infrequently, as I do, only some record
companies send you records, In 1973 I am temporarily on Columbia
Records’ freebie list and get a record called Precious Lord. It
doesn’t look like something I’d want to listen to, but it looks like
something I should own. It’s two LPs, it’s got a classy cover, and
it’s gospel music, which maybe I should learn a little about. I file
it away.
(Two footnotes. Somewhere along the way I find out that
country & western star Red Foley, who is Pat Boone’s father-in-law,
had a hit with “Peace in the Valley’ before Elvis, and I mis-
takenly decide that Foley wrote the song. Also, one day while
examining my Otis Redding records I notice that Sam Cooke,
someone I’d never thought much about, wrote “A Change Is
Gonna Come” along with some other Otis trademarks, I’d always
taken Cooke for a black pop singer the Stones improved upon, but
now I wonder.)
A couple of years later, I actually play the Precious Lord
collection of Thomas A. Dorsey songs and of course, I’m surprised
that I want to play it again, that it’s not just interesting but enjoy-
able, that I haven’t noticed any duds, and that it bounces around an
amazing variety of styles. One day, listening a little more closely, I
notice that both of my old Elvis bugaboos—“Precious Lord” and
“Peace in the Valley’—are on the record, that they were both
written by Dorsey, and that “Peace in the Valley” is sung by a
guy named R. H. Harris who impossibly enough outstrips Elvis’s
fervor with his urgency, commitment, and desperation. The notes
mention that Harris was in the Soul Stirrers gospel group before
 Precious Lord | 165

Sam Cooke, that he taught Cooke his style, that Cooke replaced
him and continued to acknowledge his debt to Harris after he went
Pop.
And I fall through a hole, listening to this record, back to my
childhood puzzling over Elvis, back to that summer in Detroit,
back to being Christian, being white, being a radical, Toward a
place where mysteries are explained.
I found that Elvis had frightened me with a little black gospel
music, which he may have gotten via Red Foley—his version of
“Peace in the Valley” is a hipper, more emotional reworking of
Foley’s basic structure—but which came originally from Thomas A.
Dorsey. Born in 1899 and still living, Dorsey—inspired in 1939 by
thoughts of the war in Europe—wrote what sounded like a hillbilly
pastoral infused with the feeling of the blues. His past reflects the
complexity of his music. Before he began writing gospel about
1930, Dorsey was a well-known blues musician who called himself
Georgia Tom, particularly famous in the late twenties for his
suggestive, double-entendre lyrics; he took credit for the introduc-
tion of the blues moan into black religious music, and for the
invention of modern gospel music itself.
Ten years after “Shake, Rattle and Roll” it was common to
consider Elvis some sort of original, primordial hippie-yippie, and
to point to his introduction of black blues into white culture as a
prefiguration of the explosions of the sixties. But Elvis also
utilized the reverential (more as time went on) and apocalyptic
(less as time went on) qualities of evangelical southern Christianity.
And what I heard, and what confused me with its sensuality,
despair, and hope, were two songs by a black bluesman, adept at
1920s pop, who turned to gospel without turning his back on any-
thing he’d done before. Buried under the obedient sound of Red
Foley’s hit were liberating feelings. Elvis discovered this, and |
spotted his discovery with some alarm.
This is also what I heard that summer in Detroit in church,
and what shocked me with its closeness to what I was listening to
on the radio. Both kinds of music were coming from the same
source, even if I didn’t know it—because while for a white group
like the Rolling Stones the debt to black blues was direct, the
debt to black gospel was indirect, through transitional figures like
 166 | TOM SMUCKER
Sam Cooke. “A Change Is Gonna Come” was Sam Cooke’s
reworking of gospel despair and hope in a pop context—no wonder
I wanted to sing it. And no wonder, though it seemed odd at the
time, that I resolved to sing it like Pete Seeger. Seeger’s brand of
American left-wing folk song had often used black religious music
with secularized lyrics to promote its secular message of despair
and hope—from Paul Robeson to “We Shall Overcome.” The
spirit that I felt in the frenzy of those Sunday mornings, that
inspired the frightening feelings buried in those Elvis records, and
that flowed through Sam Cooke and Pete Seeger, was the same
spirit that rose up and laid the bus boycott on Martin Luther King
when he was a young minister in Montgomery, Alabama, in the
1950s. But King not only came out of and identified with this
culture—“Precious Lord” was the last song he requested before
he was assassinated—he understood its political potential. When the
spirit of the black church confronted him in historical specifics in
Montgomery he knew what was going on, and he was able to carry
that spirit, at least temporarily, from Alabama to a nationwide
explosion, even while much of the black church as an Ri ibincuies
remained relatively cautious.
Thomas A. Dorsey has been writing gospel music for forty
years, in every style from show-biz to blues (Mahalia Jackson called
him “our Irving Berlin”); Precious Lord, among other things, is
pure pop product. Dorsey’s songs are performed here by seven
different venerable gospel groups and soloists who stretch pretty
far across the black gospel, and therefore pop music, spectrum. The
production’s great. The whole record’s shot through with the feeling
of classic expression and fresh improvisation. It’s as if the artists
are driven by their all-star surroundings to do their best recorded
work,
But more important, as the best and most varied collection of
black gospel that I’ve heard, this record is interesting for me to
listen to, think about, and use to define myself. And it sounds
like it will continue to interest me for a long, long time. It speaks
to some of my unanswered questions. It solves some mysteries, and
points to others.
Originally I thought of my potential island shipwreck as a
 Precious Lord | 167

metaphor for my worst left-wing paranoid fears. What would I be

like if the fascists (or Stalinists, Maoists, S.L.A., or Third World
terrorists) tortured and imprisoned me? What would I be like if I
were the Rosenbergs? (Or Solzhenitsyn?) But life as a castaway
felt so much less social, less logical, less comprehensible, more
catastrophic and ultimate. I’m all for throwing anything at all
against the void of Existential Despair. But what kind of parody of
political obsession would it be to spend out my days, and die alone,
contemplating the class struggle, the ERA, or the elections in my
union back in New York City? So when I contemplated an
abandoned existence I thought, “Hmm. A good time to catch up
on my religious thinking.”
But luxuriating in the ultimate, while listening to this record
in preparation for my long, solitary sojourn, I was constantly
reminded of the here and now. The familiar religious themes were
stated, but stated with a desperation and ecstasy I wasn’t used to.
Of course, ecstasy can become a “trick” of gospel music, as surely
as an exhausted rock star on tour sometimes fakes his interest in
a guitar solo. But I began to wonder why ecstasy and desperation
were the central themes of Precious Lord, rather than just em-
bellishments. And my thinking went back to that black church,
and then back to rock music in the sixties.
The hostile analysis of this religious frenzy contends that it’s
a safety valve for letting off steam that is more rightfully directed
as revolutionary anger, or at least directed toward concrete condi-
tions. And of course this is partially true: I remember, along with
the frenzy of Sunday mornings, how run-down the church building
in Detroit was, and the new wood paneling in the preacher's
private office. But the positive analysis, which I feel to be true, and
think is more historically accurate, argues that experiencing the
Holy Ghost is a way of having one’s human worth and eventual
liberation confirmed, even if it’s not possible in that historical
time. “Every day will be Sunday by and by,” Dorothy Love Coates
sings, meaning to me that somehow, in some time, everyone will
feel the freedom and self-confirmation they get on Sunday on
every day. When R. H. Harris pleads an eerie “Send Your spirit,
now and then,” or Marion Williams demands of her Precious Lord,
 168 | TOM SMUCKER
“Here’s what I want You to do for me” and then begs, “Please
Sir, please Sir,” experiencing the Holy Ghost begins to sound
crucial, rather than like a pay-off for being good, as it’s often
conceived of in white Christianity.
Revolutions are caused by changes in ninectabicins! not changes
in circumstances, But how can you have the expectation of freedom
in an unfree world unless you're in touch with a freedom that
judges history, but is independent of it? Seen in this way, my
catastrophic shipwreck isn’t apolitical if I can have a vision of my-
self that surpasses the constrictions of my circumstances, social and
personal, including my isolation and death. The trick is just in
understanding how to invite the spirit into the reality of each
situation.
But what right do white people have ripping off black Chris-
tianity for their own personal use? No right at all, of course, and no
interest either, for this Beach Boys fan. Except that through social
movements, and through rock and roll from Thomas A. Dorsey to
R. H. Harris, to Sam Cooke, to Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin,
Elvis, Janis Joplin, and the Rolling Stones, these ideas have been
transmitted to me anyway. So long as I’m ite about them,
why not refer back to the source?
Listening to Janis Joplin’s imitations of ai dint now, she
sometimes sounds pathetic to me. She sounds so transparent. Yet
it’s only accurate to describe her attempt to appropriate black music
and its spirit as, yes, liberating. And maybe she’s pathetic because
she risked so much. The independent-of-history ecstasy we white
fans of Janis Joplin felt with her music convinced us of the
possibility of our own kind of historical liberation. Ask any
feminist. If Janis (or Thomas A. Dorsey, even, maybe) didn’t have
a Clear politica] line, she had a political effect. Her creation was
larger than politics, but not directed against it.
But in a way, didn’t the chaotic disintegration of rock and roll
culture, of the New Left, and Janis’s own death convince us that
maybe the ecstasy wasn’t worth fooling with? That the domestic
caution of maybe Carole King was more conducive to survival? Yes,
but.
What can be seen as the potential radicalism (many of Dorsey’s
 Precious Lord | 169

songs can be transformed into “Civil Rights” anthems just by

changing the social context of their performance) but actual
conservatism of black religious music can also be seen as an accurate
assessment of the power of the experiences involved. Divine
revelation can convince us of realities beyond our human limita-
tions, but it can also chew us little humans to shreds unless
prudently applied. As all the burned-out hippies who lusted after
ecstasy ten years ago have shown.
Elvis and Janis discovered something, and discovered how to
transmit it as white people to white people. But they couldn’t figure
out how to hold onto it. Elvis let it go. Who knows what Janis
would have done. Sam Cooke died before he could work out a
similar problem: you can hear him trying on “Good Times” and
“A Change Is Gonna Come.” But R. H. Harris can frighten me
singing “Peace in the Valley” when he’s in his fifties, as I’m sure
he could have thirty years ago.
White people have an annoying habit of approving of every-
thing black people produce except what they are producing in the
present. Or finding in black culture an archetypal model for
bohemianism or radicalism, and disapproving of everything that’s
black that doesn’t fit into that model. Sometimes I think that white
fans of black blues who find soul or disco too watered-down are
speaking to their own fears of assimilation and lack of roots, and
that the classic era of gospel that Dorsey represents is ripe for
such an odd appreciation, if only it will slip safely into the past.
Perhaps I’m only tripping out on my own doubts and insecurities
by focusing on a scene that I can never get inside of. But listening
to black gospel music reawakened my desires for certain things
related to, but beyond, the blues-based needs for reality and self-
affirmation. I felt how much we all need community and hope.
Recast in a way that’s true to this white boy’s experiences. But
recast to withstand, as Dorsey's music does, the paranoia of
personal (i.e., social) betrayal and the ultimate bummer of one’s
own death.
I keep wondering about that little girl in Detroit who asked
me why all my songs were about freedom, meaning, Why was the
name of Jesus changed to freedom in every song? The answer may
 170 | TOM SMUCKER
have been that there are times when freedom should be expressed
in terms of its historical possibilities, and that summer felt like such
a time. But there might be situations when freedom should be
invoked independently of the historical circumstances, and right
now might be such a time, ora desert island might be such a place.
Maybe, if this is true, Thomas A. Dorsey and R. H. Harris have
something to offer me; maybe this is something Sam Cooke was
trying to work out; maybe Al Green is working this out right now.
Who knows?
Ever since my encounter with Arthur Godfrey I’ve been de-
veloping a mode of social- and self-contemplation connected with
listening to records, a mode confirmed by my Beach Boys revela-
tion, nurtured in the AM summer of Detroit, brought to flower
that pothead summer with the Beatles, and unleashed when I
found I could make money off it. Or at least as much money off
it as I spent on it, thus staying even.
If I’m going to be on an island without a working phonograph,
or with one I can count on only until the batteries run down, then
I'd like to be marooned with my beloved Pet Sounds by the
Beach Boys, preferably in the original mono version with the
pictures from their Japanese tour on the back. Gazing at it, I could
recall every cut, I’ve listened to it so often. Just having it near, I
would be reassured. This is the record that defines me; it’s a symbol
of my own self-acceptance,
It would be a kind of rock and roll fan’s hell to be stuck with
only one record no matter what it was, to have to listen to that
record forever: a version of those Japanese soldiers who continued
to fight World War II in isolation twenty years after it was over.
ROCK CRITIC EMERGES FROM DESERT ISLAND IN 1990s AFTER ANALYZING
“BLONDE ON BLONDE” FOR THIRTY YEARS. Being a rock and roll
fan is an identity forged in the consumer culture—it’s dependent
on new product.
But if I can have only one record, and a phonograph. that
works, give me Precious Lord. With it I could make a stab at the
eternal, and think about the possibilities for liberation that include
but aren’t dependent on history. With it, I would try to prepare
both for my death in isolation and for my return to the American
culture and politics that I love and depend on so much.
 DECADE
NEIL YOUNG (REPRISE 2257)
1966~1976/1977

KIT RACHLIS
It’s the voice that gets you. A high, wobbly voice, so thin it’s a
wonder it supports as many words as it does. It comes out of no-
where—certainly not rock tradition or R&B or country. Oh, you
probably could argue that it belongs to the lonesome whistle and
far-away whine of old time Appalachian singers, and you wouldn’t
be wrong. But those are the voices of upright men trying to main-
tain dignity and order in a world that offers little of either. If it’s
the years of varnish that those singers are showing off, what inter-
ests us now are the cracks in their voices. Neil Young understands
that. His voice is all cracks and no varnish. If this makes him an
archetypal Appalachian singer, it somehow misses the point, for
there is nothing upright or dignified about his singing. Or rather,
dignity and righteousness are questions that Young has given up on.
His voice is that of a child—messy, vulnerable, insistent, halting, so
transparent that everything, every catch, howl, and yammer, is on
the surface. It’s a voice that points rather than explains, that can
hold two or three different impulses without sorting them out, a
voice so ambivalent that its jerky grate and listing falsetto are rhe-
torical devices, not sexual ones, And it’s in that gap between impli-
cation and explanation, between simile and surface that Young’s
voice finds its riches. I prefer to think that it belongs to the night—
 172 | KIT RACHLIS
fit company for an insomniac’s pacing and a child’s plea. That it
has risen out of some gaseous swamp, to frighten and reassure us—
and never let go.
“What am I doing here?” Young cries out about three-quarters
of the way through “Love in Mind,” wrenching the song back into
focus. He repeats the question two more times, his voice tighter and
more strained, the tremor more apparent each time he comes down
on “here.” There’s nothing in the song that leads logically to that
question—we don’t even know where “here” is. Two minutes long,
the verses three lines each, “Love in Mind” is exactly that—an in-
terior dialogue about love lost and love found that veers wildly from
adulthood to adolescence, from bedroom to backseat. “What am I
doing here?” bursts across the song like an act of will, yanking
Young out of his early morning reverie, stretching his voice across
the jagged ruins of his piano chords. It’s not a story-teller’s flourish,
a magician’s wave of the cape—but a cold slap across the face that
resolves nothing, just breaks the dreamer’s spell.
Young’s songs often come down to a single moment, a gesture
that crystallizes and then breaks the tension, because they depend
so much on the vagaries of mood. This undoubtedly is one of the
things that Young has found so attractive about folk—the sense it
often conveys of being a found music, with tone and atmosphere
almost everything. A song could be whipped up on thespot, like
a talking blues, and what mattered was not the proper convergence
of theme and metaphor, but comic timing. If you were good, the
process of making up the song—how long you paused to fit the right
word into the rhyme—was as important as the completed song it-
self. A half-finished verse, a redundant refrain, was valued if it hit
the moment. Young has always loved those kinds of throwaways;
long after they became passé even in folk circles, he has persisted in
dotting his albums with such songs as “Love in Mind,” “Till the
Morning Comes,” and “Crippled Creek Ferry,” one- to two-minute
fragments that end in ellipsis.
Their open-endedness is the source of their power. The repeti-
tion of “till the morning comes” takes on the obsessive double-edge
of a domestic quarrel: the impatient threat and the imploring re-
quest of a lover who has drawn the line, but secretly wants to see it
 Decade | 173

crossed. The sudden fadeout of “Crippled Creek Ferry” (it’s over

before the credits roll) leaves us hanging—which is exactly its point.
Young doesn’t put much stock in resolutions. He has said that in
making his first album he learned that “everything is temporary.”
By themselves, those words are clunky; they drip with supermarket
mysticism, but I think that Young means them to be taken at face
value: that his albums are about the passage of time, They're like
journals—brutal, detailed, ingenuous, trivial, spilling out with all the
art and artlessness of day-to-day life. Young has the megalomaniacal
belief—and the diarist’s faith—that everything he says is important.
Which, of course, isn’t true. He has never made a perfect album—
one that has the conceptual unity of Sgt. Pepper or the spiritual
unity of Astral Weeks. The closest he has come is Zuma, and even
that is marred by the gauzy nostalgia of its conclusion—Crosby,
Stills, and Nash harmonizing on “Through my Sails.” But you
don’t expect perfection from journals, even if they are meant for
public consumption—by definition they are raw, immediate, and
incomplete.
Because his honesty is often confused with intimacy, Young
creates the illusion that no gap exists between public appearance
and private truth. This trick—what F. Scott Fitzgerald once called
“a trick of the heart’”—is necessary to confessional songwriters and
is probably Young’s deepest inheritance from the folk movement
of the sixties (which of course denied that it was a trick at all). In
its blanket repudiation of pop (everything from Jerry Lee Lewis to
the Ronettes), the folk movement championed the unadorned per-
former. Electric guitars and drums, perfectly calibrated hooks and
neatly hinged lyrics, dance steps and matching suits—these things,
according to the folk pieties of the day, spoke of slick-talking sales-
manship and money-grubbing ambition; sincerity, casualness, au-
thenticity were the values that folk clung to its breast. Like Dylan,
Young sidestepped folk rhetoric and used its strategy for his own
ends. He lays himself open in order to shut you out. His songs, like
those of all confessional songwriters, invite you into his house, but
when he opens the door all you see at first is a goddamn mess. Sen-
tences are strewn around like forgotten laundry, images are piled
up like last week’s dishes. Lyrics end like the half-opened magazine
 174 | KIT RACHLIS
on the bathroom floor. The disorder seems overwhelming, the piles
of books and records arbitrary. What does Richard Nixon’s soul
have to do with the night Young’s fictional lover wept or, for that
matter, with “roads that stretch out like healthy veins” (“Cam-
paigner”)? If Young is oblivious to your discomfort—since Time
- Fades Away he has rejected the demands of his record company and
his fans—it’s because he knows where to find everything, and what
the hell, he’s probably going to change it all around next week any-
way. Truth in Young’s hands—and that means not having pop
music’s maid clean house for him—is a way of keeping everyone at
bay.
Like all of us, Young is caught between memory and desire, pri-
vate acts and public events. ““The Loner” who announced himself so
boldly on the first cut of his first solo album is the same person who
warns us in “Star of Bethlehem” that all our dreams and lovers
won't protect us. It’s Young’s refusal to give himself any outs that
gives his work its moral edge. I don’t mean the easy generalities of
“Southern Man” or “Alabama,” but the leap of imagination that
allows him to envision himself as both Montezuma and Cortez
(“Zuma”), that can suggest that Nixon’s got soul. When Young
picks up his guitar in “Like a Hurricane,” he’s not offering protection
—he’s like an Ahab maniacally and crudely lashing the chords to the
mast. When he seeks refuge in the slow white heat of the guitar’s
upper register it’s no different than the uneasy peace he finds in his
falsetto. But it is the uneasy peace he has settled for and the only
one he’s holding out. If Young’s fatalism allows him to identify with
Cortez or Nixon or Ahab—convinces him that he will ruin whatever
he touches—the rest of him recoils at the idea, “I know all things
pass/Let’s make this last,” Young says in “Hey Babe,” but he is
rarely that assertive. When he tells his lover in “I Believe in You”
that he comes to her at night and feels all his doubts, he means it
quite literally; most of his love songs (“When You Dance,”
“Journey Through the Past,” “Harvest’’) are structured around ques-
tions. And the music shows it, even—no, especially—at its most
violent. With Crazy Horse, those questions emerge from massive
blocks of chords for Young’s guitar to hack its way through, turbu-
lent rhythms for him to find his sea legs. With Nashville sessionmen
 Decade | 175

the questions are in the ornamentation—a piano that’s a little more

aggressive than intended, a steel-guitar lick that arcs too high. “Out
of pitch but still in tune,” is how Young describes “Tired Eyes,” but
he could be talking about any of his songs. With Young the pitch is
almost always strained—it’s the overreaching of a performer still in
the midst of discovering what he wants to say and how he wants to
say it, and not afraid to let the process show.
That process is what holds together Decade, Young’s three-record
“selected works,”’ which was released at the end of 1977. Collections
are invariably frustrating, and your first response to Decade is to
throw half of it away and rearrange the whole thing. It places too
much emphasis on Young’s early career, overlooks Time Fades
Away and includes only five songs from On the Beach, Tonight's
the Night, and Zuma; in short, the four albums that contain Young’s
most barbed and eccentric work are given the least attention. But
it would be a mistake to view Decade as another haphazardly com-
piled “Greatest Hits” package. It is as carefully assembled as ““Am-
bulance Blues” or “Don’t Be Denied”—Young’s earliest attempts
to sum up cultural history and his place in it. Neither song is on
Decade, but they can be heard rattling down its halls, anticipating
every turn. Like Decade, they deliberately try to conjure up the
past, try to put a lid on it, only to discover that is has slipped their
hold.
“An ambulance can only go so fast,” Young says and the one he’s
driving in “Ambulance Blues” is going about as fast as a hearse—
picking up bodies on the back streets and broad avenues of what
once passed for the counter-culture, the years that Decade encom-
passes. Chasing down’ names without faces, dates without events,
Young has got Richard Nixon, Patty Hearst, and several burnt-out
hippies strapped down in the back. “It’s hard to know the meaning
of this song,” he says at one point, but Doug Kershaw’s fiddle,
which intermittently stabs the air, gives the lie to that line. “Am-
bulance Blues” is a dirge for a past that promised more than it gave,
and Young’s punch-drunk harmonica and staggering guitar is lead-
ing the way. If Young’s not sure whether to take his detritus to the
hospital or the morgue, it’s because he prefers his memories neither
revived nor dead, as removed and persistent as his own ghostly voice.
 176 | KIT RACHLIS
“Don’t Be Denied” is the flip side of “Ambulance Blues,” as explicit
and celebratory as Young gets. On the surface, it’s the stuff of press
releases, a rocker’s tale of victory over adversity—parents’ divorce at
three, sudden move to new town, fights in the school yard, playing
music all night, hitting it big—and “don’t be denied” is its rallying
call, But the crack in Young’s voice, the. nervous kick in the drums,
the rush of the final verses, gives the game away: “He’s a million-
aire through a businessman’s eyes.” It’s not a matter of corroded
dreams; Young is escaping his adolescence all right, but the song
cuts because he’s still inside those dreams, can still remember the
white bucks he wore, because he still thinks that rock and roll prom-
ises more than innocence and corruption—that it’s possible to play
for the highest bid and not sell yourself short.
To be a rock and roll star, especially a confessional songwriter
whose stock-in-trade is personal rapport, is to discover that a lot of
people you’ve never met consider you their best friend. It is, of
course, a relationship that works both ways. To have a great number
of people see their lives. in your own is pretty heady stuff, One’s natu-
ral response (certainly the initial one) is to encourage it, sharpen
the stories, get the tone down, which is what Young did with After
the Goldrush and Harvest. But to play father confessor is also an
enormous responsibility, and you begin to resent the next time the
phone rings, the next time the crowd roars. If you resent it enough,
you begin to withdraw or lash out—or not to be there when they
expect you to. In his notes for Decade Young says that he found
the middle of the road a bore and headed for the ditch; he turned
the seventies notion of the confessional songwriter on its head.
His songs went beyond the personal and entered his own fantasy-
morality world; the “I” of his early songs became a ghost, a figment
of his own psyche that hovered over but did not dominate his songs.
The wide-open spaces of After the Gold Rush and Harvest gave way
to the compression chambers of Tonight’s the Night and Zuma.
Tonight’s the Night is Young’s most roughshod and freewheeling
album and not coincidentally the one he considers his best. In-
spired (if that’s the right word) by the drug overdoses of Crazy
Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, it’s Young’s
semi-documentary (with Young as director and star) about dope and
 Decade | 177

death, the scarred remains of the counter-culture and the bloody

brotherhood of rock and roll. The film is grainy and the camera
wobbly. On Decade Young reduces the tale to a triptych—“The
Needle and the Damage Done” (from Harvest), “Tonight’s the
Night,” and “Tired Eyes.” They are the closest Young has ever come
to the blues: the slow recitation of description, the broken voice
tearing through the dispassion of fact, the lethargy of defeat and
deceit. Tonight’s the night for what? To mainline, to die, to exor-
cise it all? Close whose tired eyes? Young is as vague as the vio-
lence—not because he doesn’t want to tell, but because he doesn’t
know.
“It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” Young says in “My
My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue).” Decade is about not burning out
or fading away. By closing with “Long May You Run” the album
comes full circle. Young writes that the song is about “his first car
and last lady.” Don’t let him kid you. It’s his benediction on the al-
bum and his career, With the notes falling perfectly into place
with the inevitability of the future, it’s his hymn to friendship,
things coming to an end and things continuing. It’s the only song
on Decade that doesn’t have a moment of dread, which makes it
suspicious.
 ASTRAL WEEKS
VAN MORRISON (WARNER BROS.-SEVEN ARTS WS. 1768)
1968

LESTER BANGS
Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks was released ten years, almost to the
day, before this was written. It was particularly important to me
because the fall of 1968 was such a terrible time: I was a physical
and mental wreck, nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming
and squatting across the mind. My social contacts had dwindled
almost to none; the presence of other people made me nervous and
paranoid. I spent endless days and nights sunk in an armchair in
my bedroom, reading magazines, watching T’V, listening to records,
staring into space. I had no idea how to improve the situation, and
probably wouldn’t have done anything about it if I had.
Astral Weeks would be the subject of this piece—i.e., the rock
record with the most significance in my life so far—no matter how
I'd been feeling when it came out. But in the condition I was in, it
assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores
of the murk; what’s more, it was proof that there was something left
to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction. (My other
big record of the day was White Light/White Heat.) It sounded
like the man who made Astral Weeks was in terrible pain, pain most
of Van Morrison’s previous work had only suggested; but like the
later albums by the Velvet Underground, there was a redemptive
element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of
 Astral Weeks | 179

others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right
through the heart of the work.
I don’t really know how significant it might be that many others
have reported variants on my initial encounter with Astral Weeks.
I don’t think there’s anything guiding it to people enduring dark
petiods. It did come out at a time when a lot of things that a lot
of people cared about passionately were beginning to disintegrate,
and when the self-destructive undertow that always accompanied
the great sixties party had an awful lot of ankles firmly in its maw
and was pulling straight down. So, as timeless as it finally is, per-
haps Astral Weeks was also the product of an era. Better think that
than ask just what sort of Irish churchwebbed haints Van Morrison
might be product of.

Three television shows:

A 1970 NET broadcast of a big all-star multiple bill at the Fillmore
East. The Byrds, Sha Na Na, and Elvin Bishop have all done their
respective things. Now we get to see three or four songs from a set
by Van Morrison. He climaxes, as he always did in those days, with
“Cyprus Avenue” from Astral Weeks. After going through all the
verses, he drives the song, the band, and himself to a finish which
has since become one of his trademarks and one of the all-time
classic rock ’n’ roll set-closers. With consummate dynamics that
allow him to snap from indescribably eccentric throwaway phrasing
to sheer passion in the very next breath, he brings the music surg-
ing up through crescendo after crescendo, stopping and starting and
stopping and starting the song again and again, imposing long mani-
acal silences like giant question marks between the stops and starts
and ruling the room through sheer tension, building to a shout of
“It’s too late to stop now!,” and just when you think it’s all going
to surge over the top, he cuts it off stone cold dead, the hollow of a
murdered explosion, throws the microphone down and stalks off the
stage. It is truly one of the most perverse things I have ever seen a
performer do in my life. And, of course, it’s sensational: our guts
are knotted up, we're crazed and clawing for more, but we damn
well know we've seen and felt something final.
1974, a late night network TV rock concert: Van and his band
 180 | LESTER BANGS

come out, strike a few shimmering chords, and for about ten min-
utes he lingers over the words “Way over yonder in the clear blue
sky/Where flamingos fly.” No other lyrics. I don’t think any instru-
mental solos. Just those words, repeated slowly again and again,
distended, permutated, turned into scat, suspended in space and
then scattered to the winds, muttered like a mantra till they turn
into nonsense syllables, then back into the same soaring image as
time seems to stop entirely. He stands there with eyes closed, sing-
ing, transported, while the band poises quivering over great open-
tuned deep blue gulfs of their own.
1977, spring-summer, same kind of show: he sings “Cold Wind
in August,” a song off his recently released album A Period of Tran-
sition, which also contains a considerably altered version of the
flamingos song. “Cold Wind in August” is a ballad, and Van gives
it a fine, standard reading. The only trouble is that the whole time
he’s singing it he paces back and forth in a line on the stage, his
eyes tightly shut, his-little fireplug body kicking its way upstream
against what must be a purgatorial nervousness that perhaps is be-
ing transferred to the cameraman.

What this is about is a whole set of verbal tics—although many are

bodily as well—which are there for reason enough to go a long way
toward defining his style. They’re all over Astral Weeks: four rushed
repeats of the phrases “‘you breathe in, you breathe out” and “you
tur around” in “Beside You;” in “Cyprus Avenue,” twelve “way
up on” s, “baby” sung out thirteen times in a row sounding like
someone running ecstatically downhill toward one’s love, and the
heartbreaking way he stretches “one by one” in the third verse; most
of all in “Madame George,” where he sings the word “dry” and then
“your eye” twenty times in a twirling melodic arc so beautiful it
steals your own breath, and then this occurs: “And the love that
loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to
love the love that loves to love the love that loves.”
Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or
verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost
conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or pic-
ture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats
 Astral Weeks | 181

certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem

ridiculous because he’s waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as un-
obtrusively as possible to nudge it along. Sometimes he gives it to
you through silence, by choking off the song in midflight: “It’s too
late to stop now!”
It’s the great search, fueled by the belief that through these
musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at
least be glimpsed.
When he tries for this he usually gets it more in the feeling than
the Revealed Word—perhaps much of the feeling comes from the
reaching—but there is also, always, the sense of WHAT if he DID
apprehend that Word; there are times when the Word seems to
hover very near. And then there are times when we realize the
Word was right next to us, when the most mundane overused
phrases are transformed: I give you “love,” from “Madame George.”
Out of relative silence, the Word: “Snow in San Anselmo,” “That’s
where it’s at,” Van will say, and he means it (aren’t his interviews
fascinating?).What he doesn’t say is that he is inside the snowflake,
isolated by the song: “And it’s almost Independence Day.”
You're probably wondering when I’m going to get around to tell-
ing you about Astral Weeks. As a matter of fact, there’s a whole
lot of Astral Weeks I don’t even want to tell you about. Both be-
cause whether you've heard it or not it wouldn’t be fair for me to
impose my interpretation of such lapidarily subjective imagery on
you, and because in many cases I don’t really know what he’s talk-
ing about. He doesn’t either: “I’m not surprised that people get
different meanings out of my songs,” he told a Rolling Stone inter-
viewer. “But I don’t wanna give the impression that I know what
everything means ’cause I don’t. . . . There are times when I’m
mystified. I look at some of the stuff that comes out, y’know. And
like, there it is and it feels right, but I can’t say for sure what it
means,”
There you go
Starin’ with a look of avarice
Talkin’ to Huddie Ledbetter
Showin’ pictures on the walls
And whisperin’ in the halls
And pointin’ a finger at me
 182 | LESTER BANGS
I haven’t got the slightest idea what that “means,” though on one
level I’d like to approach it in a manner as indirect and evocative as
the lyrics themselves. Because you’re in trouble anyway when you
sit yourself down to explicate just exactly what a mystical document,
which is exactly what Astral Weeks is, means. For one thing, what
it means is Richard Davis’s bass playing, which complements the
songs and singing all the way with a lyricism that’s something more
than just great musicianship: there is something about it that’s
more than inspired, something that has been touched, that’s in the
realm of the miraculous. The whole ensemble—Larry Fallon’s string
section, Jay Berliner’s guitar (he played on Mingus’s Black Saint
and the Sinner Lady), Connie Kay’s drumming—is like that: they
and Van sound like they’re not just reading but dwelling inside of
each other’s minds. The facts may be far different. John Cale was
making an album of his own in an adjacent studio at the time, and
he has said that “Morrison couldn’t work with anybody, so finally
they just shut him in the studio by himself. He did all the songs
with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of
it around his tapes.”
Cale’s story might or might not be true—but facts are not going
to be of much use here in any case. Fact: Van Morrison was twenty-
two—or twenty-three—years old when he made this record. He
sounds ageless, Certainly it is not a young man’s record; there are
lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but
truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record
about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in
their skins, their ages, and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what
in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and
terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both
infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human
ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern
mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some
Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie.
Maybe what it boils down to is one moment’s knowledge of the
miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse
of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.
Transfixed between rapture and anguish. Wondering if they may
 Astral Weeks | 183

not be the same thing, or at least possessed of an intimate relation-

ship. In “T.B. Sheets,” his last extended narrative before making
this record, Van Morrison watched a girl he loved die of tubercu-
losis, The song was claustrophobic, suffocating, monstrously pow-
erful: “innuendos, inadequacies, foreign bodies.” A lot of people
couldn’t take it; the editor of this book has said that it’s garbage,
but I think it made him squeamish. Anyway, the point is that cer-
tain parts of Astral Weeks—“Madame George,” “Cyprus Avenue”
—take the pain in “T.B. Sheets” and root the world in it. Because
the pain of watching a loved one die of however dread a disease may
be awful, but it is at least something known, in a way understood,
in a way measurable and even leading somewhere, because there is a
process: sickness, decay, death, mourning, some emotional recovery.
But the beautiful horror of “Madame George” and “Cyprus Ave-
nue” is precisely that the people in these songs are not dying: we
are looking at life, in its fullest, and what these people are suffering
from is not disease but nature, unless nature is a disease.
A man sits in a car on a treelined street, watching a 14-year-old
girl walking home from school, hopelessly in love with her. I’ve
almost come to blows with friends because of my insistence that
much of Van Morrison’s early work had an obsessively reiterated
theme of pedophilia, but here is something that at once may be
taken as that and something far beyond it. He loves her. Because
of that, he is helpless. Shaking. Paralyzed. Maddened. Hopeless.
Nature mocks him. As only nature can mock nature. Or is love natu-
ral in the first place? No matter. By the end of the song he has
entered a kind of hallucinatory ecstasy; the music aches and yearns
as it rolls on out. This is one supreme pain, that of being imprisoned
a spectator. And perhaps not so very far from “TB, Sheets,” except
that it must be far more romantically easy to sit and watch someone
you love die than to watch them in the bloom of youth and health
and know that you can never, ever have them, can never even speak
to them.
“Madame George” is the album’s whirlpool. Possibly one of the
most compassionate pieces of music ever made, it asks us, no, ar-
ranges that we see the plight of what I’ll be brutal and call a love-
lorn drag queen with such intense empathy that when the singer
 184 | LESTER BANGS
hurts him, we do too. (Morrison has said in at least one interview
that the song has nothing to do with any kind of transvestite—at
least as far as he knows, he is quick to add—but that’s bullshit.) The
beauty, sensitivity, holiness of the song is that there’s nothing at all
sensationalistic, exploitative, or tawdry about it; in a way Van is
right when he insists it’s not about a drag queen, as my friends were
right and I was wrong about the “pedophilia”—it’s about a person,
like all the best songs, all the greatest literature.
The setting is the same as that of the previous song—Cyprus
Avenue, apparently a place where people drift, impelled by desire,
into moments of flesh-wracking, sight-curdling confrontation with
their destinies. It’s an elemental place of pitiless judgment—wind
and rain figure in both songs—and, interestingly enough, it’s a place
of the even crueler judgment of adults by children, in both cases
love objects absolutely indifferent to their would-be adult lovers.
Madame George’s little boys are downright contemptuous—like the
street urchins who end up cannibalizing the homosexual cousin in
Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, they’re only too
happy to come around as long as there’s music, party times, free
drinks and smokes, and only too gleefully spit on George’s affections
when all the other stuff runs out, the entombing winter settling in
with not only wind and rain but hail, sleet, and snow.
What might seem strangest of all but really isn’t is that it’s
exactly those characteristics which supposedly should make George
most pathetic—age, drunkenness, the way the boys take his money
and trash his love—that awaken something for George in the heart
of the kid whose song this is. Obviously the kid hasn’t simply “fallen
in love with love,” or something like that, but rather—what? Why,
just exactly that only sunk in the foulest perversions could one hu-
man being love another for anything other than their humanness:
love him for his weakness, his flaws, finally perhaps his decay. Decay
is human—that’s one of the ultimate messages here, and I don’t by
any stretch of the lexicon mean decadence. I mean that in this song
or whatever inspired it Van Morrison saw the absolute possibility of
loving human beings at the farthest extreme of wretchedness, and
that the implications of that are terrible indeed, far more terrible
than the mere sight of bodies made ugly by age or the seeming ab-
 Astral Weeks | 185

surdity of a man devoting his life to the wobbly artifice of trying

to look like a woman.
You can say to love the questions you have to love the answers
which quicken the end of love that’s loved to love the awful inequal-
ity of human experience that loves to say we tower over these the
lost that love to love the love that freedom could have been, the
train to freedom, but we never get on, we’d rather wave generously
walking away from those who are victims of themselves. But who is
to say that someone who victimizes him- or herself is not as worthy
of total compassion as the most down and out Third World orphan
in a New Yorker magazine ad? Nah, better to step over the bodies,
at least that gives them the respect they might have once deserved.
Where I live, in New York (not to make it more than it is, which
is hard), everyone I know often steps over bodies which might. well
be dead or dying as a matter of course, without pain. And I wonder
in what scheme it was originally conceived that such action is
showing human refuse the ultimate respect it deserves.
There is of course a rationale—what else are you going to do—
but it holds no more than our fear of our own helplessness in the
face of the plain of life as it truly is: a plain which extends into an
infinity beyond the horizons we have only invented. Come on, die it.
As I write this, I can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of people
opening heterosexual S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like,
“S&M is just another equally valid form of love. Why people can’t
accept that we’ll never know.” Makes you want to jump out a fifth
floor window rather than even read about it, but it’s hardly the end
of the world; it’s not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on every-
where everyday that are taken so casually by all of us as facts of life.
Maybe it boils down to how much you actually want to subject
yourself to. If you accept for even a moment the idea that each hu-
man life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look
at a wino in a doorway, you've got to hurt until you feel like a
sponge for all those other assholes’ problems, until you feel like an
asshole yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop
feeling. But you know that then you begin to die. So you tussle with
yourself. How much of this horror can I actually allow myself to
think about? Perhaps the numbest mannikin is wiser than some-
 186 | LESTER BANGS
body who only allows their sensitivity to drive them to destroy
everything they touch—but then again, to tilt Madame George’s
hat a hair, just to recognize that that person exists, just to touch
his cheek and then probably expire because the realization that you
must share the world with him is ultimately unbearable is to go only
the first mile. The realization of living is just about that low and
that exalted and that unbearable and that sought-after. Please come
back and leave me alone. But when we're alone together we can talk
all we want about the universality of this abyss: it doesn’t make any
difference, the highest only meets the lowest for some lying succor,
UNICEF to relatives, so you scratch and spit and curse in violent
resignation at the strict fact that there is absolutely nothing you can
do but finally reject anyone in greater pain than you. At such a
moment, another breath is treason. That’s why you leave your lib-
eral causes, leave suffering humanity to die in worse squalor than
they knew before you happened along. You got their hopes up.
Which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion. Viler than
the ignorant boys who would take Madame George for a couple of
cigarettes. Because you have committed the crime of knowledge, and
thereby not only walked past or over someone you knew to be suf-
fering, but also violated their privacy, the last possession of the
dispossessed.
Such knowledge is possibly the worst thing that can happen to
a person (a lucky person), so it’s no wonder that Morrison’s pro-
tagonist turned away from Madame George, fled to the train station,
trying to run as far away from what he’d seen as a lifetime could get
him. And no wonder, too, that Van Morrison never came this close
to looking life square in the face again, no wonder he turned
to Tupelo Honey and even Hard Nose the Highway with its entire
side of songs about falling leaves. In Astral Weeks and “‘T.B. Sheets”
he confronted enough for any man’s lifetime. Of course, having been
offered this immeasurably stirring and equally frightening gift from
Morrison, one can hardly be blamed for not caring terribly much
about Old, Old Woodstock and little homilies like “You’ve Got to
Make It Through This World on Your Own” and “Take It Where
You Find It.”
On the other hand, it might also be pointed out that desolation,
 Astral Weeks | 187

hurt, and anguish are hardly the only things in life, or in Astral
Weeks. They’re just the things, perhaps, that we can most easily
grasp and explicate, which I suppose shows about what level our
souls have evolved to. I said I wouldn’t reduce the other songs on
this album by trying to explain them, and I won’t. But that doesn’t
mean that, all things considered, a juxtaposition of poets might not
be in order.

If I ventured in the slipstream

Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where the mobile steel rims crack
And the ditch and the backroads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again

—Van Morrison

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.

—Federico Garcia Lorca

 LIVING IN THE U.S.A.
LINDA RONSTADT (ASYLUM 6E-155)
1978

JOHN ROCKWELL
What I’m going to write here is a piece of passionate advocacy, and
one doesn’t normally introduce advocacy defensively. My defensive-
ness, such as it is, derives from the nature of my intended audience.
Linda Ronstadt hardly needs defenders in the world at large. She is
the most popular woman singer of the 1970s, and perhaps ever, as
measured by record sales; in 1977 she had the most commercially
successful album by any solo artist, with Simple Dreams.
But with popular music the relationship between popularity and
critical approbation is an especially complex one. Rock critics are
by definition populists, yet simultaneously they must trust their own
instincts with the same elitist ferocity as any high-art connoisseur.
In rock criticism, commercial success doesn’t so much attest to qual-
ity as corroborate it; if you like something the millions like, their
general enthusiasm adds resonance to your private enthusiasm, cer-
tifying its universality.
In Ronstadt’s case, her reputation among rock critics is not very
grand. In Britain especially, she is widely regarded as a mindless
puppet in the hands of her producer, Peter Asher—which must be
an odd irony for Asher, who was a British pop star once. A typical
 Livingin the U.S.A. | 189

passing crack about Ronstadt in the British rock press comes from
a recent Melody Maker, in which Michael Oldfield grumbles that
“it’s ridiculous that the most successful female rock singer is Linda
Ronstadt, whose voice is nothing special, but who has made it
through ruining other people’s songs.” And the British attitude, or
at least something approaching it, is shared by many of the best-
known American rock critics; Ronstadt didn’t even make the index
of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, which
was a compendium by exactly the writers I’m talking about—many
of the same people who have contributed to this book.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that several of
those writers are my friends, and so is Linda. My love for her music
long antedated my friendship with her, and that friendship has re-
mained the exception rather than the rule in my dealings with the
peopleI write about. But knowing her both adds to my knowledge
of her music and reinforces my desire to champion her work with
my peers. As you will see below, I am by no means blandly uncriti-
cal about Ronstadt’s accomplishments. But ultimately I love both
the accomplishments and the accomplisher, and it frustrates me
that more people whose sensibilities I respect don’t get as much
pleasure as I do from this wonderfully pleasurable music. My friend
Dave Marsh thinks I’m the ringleader of a media plot to win Ron-
stadt some critical respect, and he’s right.
Before I launch into my advocacy, I should say something about
why I’ve chosen her latest album, Living in the U.S.A., as my osten-
sible subject. I was originally going to write about Heart Like a
Wheel, which came out in late 1974 and by early 1975 had made
her a superstar after nearly a decade of cult success. This was her
first album produced entirely by Asher, and it inaugurated a string
of discs that have defined both her commercial dominance and her
mature artistry; even the weakest of her Asher-produced albums,
Prisoner in Disguise of 1975, is superior to any LP she’d done with-
out him. Heart Like a Wheel is also the album least disliked (most
liked?) by critics who generally find Ronstadt uninteresting, al-
though at this writing Living in the U.S.A. has just been released,
so its critical reception has yet to be determined.
Heart Like a Wheel remains a fine album, I can remember put-
 190 | JOHN ROCKWELL

ting it on my turntable for the first time and being instantly thrilled
by the new authority and assertiveness of the singing on the first
track, “You’re No Good,” which eventually became the first of the
album’s two number one singles. For all the diversity of its person-
nel, the album boasts a convincing focus and a solid consistency;
there are no obviously weak or misguided selections here, even if
“Tt Doesn’t Matter Any More” and “You Can Close Your Eyes”
don’t seem really memorable. But there are both specific and theo-
retical reasons for picking Living in the U.S.A. One, quite simply,
is that although I haven’t lived with it as long as the others, it’s the
one I’m fired up about right now. That means I am still in the
process of thinking it through, which may lend the whole enter-
prise of writing once again about Ronstadt a certain spontaneity.
Another is that after ten or fifteen listenings it seems about as strong
an album as she’s done. And as her most recent, it is more charac-
teristic of her evolution in the past five years than Heart Like a
Wheel, whose arrangements sound more pop and less rock than her
recent work. Quite apart from her growing intelligence and range as
an interpreter, there’s been a steady shift since 1974 from innocence
and vulnerability to sophistication and aggression, and that’s a shift
worth considering.
In any case, I planned all along to devote as much space to Linda
and her work in general as to whichever specific album I finally
chose. Partly that’s because any selection of a “best” or a “favorite”
is a distortion. All of Ronstadt’s records have things on them I’d
want on a desert island, and nearly all of them have what I consider
“mistakes” —songs that she might better not have sung. Beyond that,
for all my love for Linda, I would not seriously suggest that she was
the most important single artist in the history of rock music. But
she is the one I’ve been the biggest fan of, the one whose music has
meant the most to me over the longest time. Pop music has always
been about emotional release, about passionate responses to artists
who might not rank at the very top of our rational hierarchies. There
are those of us who like to think about why that happens, and this
book offers us at last the chance to explore our compulsions in depth.
What follows is for those who could be moved by Ronstadt, by one
who has been.
 Living in the U.S.A. | 191

Any consideration of Linda Ronstadt has to start with her voice.

Objectivity may be a myth in art, but it’s hard to avoid the flat
statement that Ronstadt has the strongest, most clearly focused,
flexible, and simply beautiful voice in popular music. As a physical
instrument, it is capable of authoritative usage in almost any kind
of pop music, and with a bit of technical work, could encompass
most any classical style, as well. Many of the great voices of the
past have been “natural”; subsequent technical work has served only
to refine an already extant gift. Most pop voices are defined by a
certain huskiness, which is generally the result of a vestigially de-
veloped voice or one that has been driven to a near-hoarseness by
strain. At its best, such huskiness can serve as a metaphor for pas-
sion or warmth; one need only think of Rod Stewart. But at its
worst the huskiness leads to nodes or nodules on the vocal cords
that can so reduce a singer to whispery silence that an operation be-
comes necessary, and sometimes that operation can radically alter
a voice (occasionally for the better, as in the case of Bonnie Tyler)
or end a career. With Linda the only huskiness is that which she
consciously applies to specific syllables as coloration. Her voice has
a strength, size, and basic technical security that enable her to sing
with force, yet without the sort of strain that leads to its rapid degen-
eration. And it has a focus or “edge” that helps lend it that ulti-
mately undefinable character that constitutes her essential “sound.”
Throughout her career that sound has been there, and apart from
the natural shifts of aural color and the slight lowering of basic
range that comes with age, it will probably serve her well for decades
to come.
Ronstadt is a soprano, although she never worked to develop
the ringing upper extension that constitutes the climactic top oc-
tave or more for an operatic soprano. She can in fact sing in an
overtly “operatic” way, plummy and full of a marked vibrato, and
by so doing can reach higher notes than she normally attains. But
that method of vocal production doesn’t sound stylistically appro-
priate to her for the music she sings. By choosing not to deploy that
register of her voice, she has constricted her range from what it
 192 | JOHN ROCKWELL

could be. What’s left is not really wide in operatic terms, as anyone
who heard her bull her way through “The Star-Spangled Banner”
during the 1977 World Series can attest. Her effective range is from
around G below middle C to the C above it, with a few notes be-
yond that in falsetto.
Compared to the average pop singer, however, that range is rela-
tively wide. Singers with multi-octave voices, operatic or otherwise,
attain their breadth through the more or less smooth knitting to-
gether of several distinct registers, from a booming chest voice
through the middle and up to various head-voice or falsetto top
extensions; operatic training consists largely of the cultivation of
those registers and of evening them out—of engineering transitions
between them that don’t sound too inadvertently disjunct. For all
practical purposes Ronstadt’s great natural instrument, her wide-
ranging and near-perfectly focused middle register, has never been
subjected to any vocal training (which is different, of course, from
a steady improvement in her musicianship and her command of
various musical styles), She lacks a chest register, at least in the
sense of an operatic contralto, She thinks of the lower notes of her
range as her “chest voice,’ and feels them resonate in a different,
deeper part of her body than her top notes. But at the very bottom
of her voice, the sound could hardly be heard at all in concert with-
out amplification. It is defined mostly by its characteristic vibrato—
the rapid pulsations that nearly all singers have and most modern
instrumentalists affect to excess. Too much vibrato can sound mawk-
ish and, at its extreme, can be a sign of near-terminal vocal strain.
Too little vibrato sounds plain and churchy, and makes the attain-
ment of proper pitch needlessly difficult.
As she moves up the scale into her middle and upper-middle
range, which she calls her “pharyngeal voice,” the body of her so-
prano fills out. This is the typical Ronstadt sound, loud or soft, and
most of her singing is done here. As she ascends in pitch, toward
the C above middle C, her limitations at the top become apparent:
the vibrato thins out and the voice can sound like a hard, nasal yell.
That can have its expressive virtues, especially in hard rock (cf. the
end of her live version of “Tumbling Dice,” in the FM soundtrack
album). But at the very top it’s neither a very grateful nor a very
 Livingin the U.S.A. | 193

controlled sound, and when she’s not singing at her best in concert,
the voice can crack at that altitude; eventually, one suspects, it will
become increasingly difficult for her to hit such notes consistently,
and she may have to pitch some of her standards down a half or a
whole step. Even now on records, in material that courts operatic
comparisons like Sigmund Romberg’s “When I Grow Too Old to
Dream” from 1935 (unless otherwise specified, all Ronstadt songs
mentioned henceforth are on Living in the U.S.A.), it’s possible to
wish for just a bit more operatic control, tone color, and flexibility;
on the other hand, there’s a folkish naturalness to Ronstadt’s sound
that an operatic fullness and upper extension would preclude.
Above the “natural” top of her middle register comes her fal-
setto, which she has been employing more and more in recent years.
This is really a delicate version, thin and tenuously supported, of
the operatic head voice she could develop if she so chose. She uses
it partly for expressive purposes, and sometimes it works very nicely,
as at the end of “Alison” or throughout “Ooh Baby Baby.” In that
song she makes the shifts between mid-volume full voice and fal-
setto smoothly, but on the whole her falsetto remains undeveloped
in comparison to the confident power of her full middle voice, and
too often (e.g., at the very end of “Blue Bayou” on Simple Dreams)
it sounds simply as if she had no other way to reach a high note.
Now, this is all semi-technical description, and it quite com-
pletely avoids the issue of one’s gut response to the sound. There
is nothing inherently superior, aesthetically, to a well-produced
voice (““produced” in vocal terminology, that is, rather than in the
recording-studio sense). But the actual sound of a voice is indeed
an aesthetic consideration, perhaps the prime one for a singer. And
a voice with a solid technique (natural and/or acquired) not only
secures the vocal quality over time, but ensures a wider and more
varied use of that quality. In Ronstadt’s case the sheer joy and
physicality of her singing has always been instantly communicable
to me, and the specific coloration has seemed intensely moving. To
take just one example—and we're still speaking here of sound alone,
not the interpretive uses to which it is put—consider Linda’s ver-
sion of “Just One Look.” Doris Troy, who had a hit with the song
in 1963 (her version is on Vol. 6 of Atlantic’s History of Rhythm
 194 | JOHN ROCKWELL

© Blues series), sang it with a good deal of gusto, and the Ronstadt
arrangement and phrasing emulate her record in every respect but
one. Troy essentially fades out on the phrase “just one look” after
the last chorus; I say “essentially” because she raises the note values
slightly on the last two repetitions. Ronstadt constructs an entire
coda that’s not in Troy’s version at all, full of exhilarating “come on
babys” and other shouting manifestations of lust. She can do this
because her voice has all the authority and strength of Troy’s in the
lower-middle range, but can extend upward to climactic upper-
middle notes in a way that Troy’s simply cannot. For a direct com-
parison, listen to both women’s treatment of the word “wrong” in
the second line of the bridge; next to Ronstadt’s joyous vocal au-
thority, Troy sounds hard and pressed. And of course it’s ultimately
impossible to separate technical and interpretive issues entirely, The
sort of buoyant strength Ronstadt flaunts in her “Just One Look”
makes an aesthetic and emotional statement all by itself; when she
sings the line “without you, I’m nothing,” you don’t believe her for
a minute.
People who can’t respond to the sheer power of Ronstadt’s voice
sometimes complain about her “belting” style: they don’t find the
sort of vocal musculature that epitomizes her sound at its loudest
either very attractive or very appropriate to much of the music she
sings. Partly this is a question of the husky sound-color that charac-
terizes most popular-music voices, forming the model against which
many pop critics compare Ronstadt. In my own case, after an early
fascination with pre-rock pop and mid-fifties rock and roll, I became
immersed in classical music, and only came back to pop in the 1960s
after my tastes in vocal music had been crucially influenced by op-
era. Today I can love all sorts of vocal sound, but my longtime
attraction to Ronstadt’s voice, dating back to the late 1960s, was
clearly reinforced by my instant appreciation of its operatic qualities.
The most provocative theorist of classical and popular vocal
singing has been Henry Pleasants, in his book, The Great American
Popular Singers. To compress his argument brutally, Pleasants sug-
gests that the original Italian notion of bel canto some four hundred
years ago was an intimate, highly flexible vocalism, built around
declamation. Over the course of centuries, under the pressure of
 Living inthe U.S.A. | 195

man’s innate tendencies toward virtuosic and rhetorical display and

the growing size of opera houses (itself a result of the democratiza-
tion and popularization of opera), opera evolved (or devolved) into
a more brilliant, less expressive excuse for clarion vocal athleticism.
The introduction of the microphone and electronic amplification
after 1925 has meant that singers like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra
could be freed from the need to sacrifice expressivity on the altar of
volume and could revert to the traditional virtues of bel canto. Thus,
one could conclude with a straight face, Frank Sinatra was a better
bel canto singer than Jussi Bjoerling.
Pleasants himself has never paid much attention to rock; gen-
erationally it’s beyond him. He tends to regard rock singers as brutes
who bellow into the microphone even when they don’t have to.
Quite apart from the blues-rock shouters, there is indeed a whole
school of semi-operatic rock emoters, epitomized by Bruce Spring-
steen, But of course a great deal of contemporary popular culture
corresponds exactly to the models Pleasants himself has posited for
pre-rock pop, particularly the folk style that underlies both modern-
day country music and the folk-rocking singer-songwriters. Next to
them, Ronstadt can sound like an anachronistic reversion to the
semi-operatic emoting of Al Jolson and back to the days of the
American vaudeville stage. For me, though, that aspect of her vocal
style can be very appealing, since it both echoes the operatic singing
I love and evokes a whole image of nineteenth-century America. It’s
not just a matter of vocal style, either; Linda’s way of pronouncing
the English language is very much of this country. In fact, of con-
temporary women popular singers, only Bonnie Koloc, with her
wonderfully direct mid-American declamation, surpasses Ronstadt
for the sheer Americanness of her singing—in that respect, the
otherwise somewhat spurious “American” theme of Living in the
U.S.A. makes perfect sense. Anyhow, “belting” isn’t all Ronstadt
can do; her soft singing combines the purity of an operatic voice
with the simple plaintiveness of folk-singing, and her clarity of focus
and security of pitch makes her harmony-singing a special joy.
When one says “American,” one means white America. Until
the advent of jazz, blues and soul-singing in this century, white
culture was American culture; blacks made their influence felt on
 196 | JOHN ROCKWELL

the mainstream, but usually in such white translations as Stephen

Foster. No doubt John David Souther meant something deeper and
broader by the phrase “white rhythm and blues” in his song on
Living in the U.S.A., but it seems to me that it suggests something
important about Ronstadt’s singing style. Even when singing black
songs she remains an inescapably white singer. This could be—and
has been—taken as a condemnation, a proof that she has no busi-
ness assaying such songs. Her critics complain that some of her cover
versions of black hits have sounded uncomfortably close to the
bland reductions that Pat Boone used to inflict on Little Richard
(e.g., her version of “Heat Wave” on Prisoner in Disguise). But at
her best, it seems to me, she has developed a most convincing solu-
tion to her black material, with a style that simultaneously evokes
the original interpreters yet remains honorably white.
But terms like “black” and “white” are both vague and possibly
racist, and in any case we should realize that by this point we have
moved into a discussion of Ronstadt’s interpretive abilities, as op-
posed to her voice. Blacks have represented the principal symbols
and agents of passion, spontaneity, and rebellion in recent white
American culture, and most of the best white rock singers have not
only built their music on black foundations, but assumed similar atti-
tudes. Linda’s singing has been criticized interpretively on a number
of grounds, but all of those grounds have a common theme. As the
most popular woman singer of the 1970s and a quintessential South-
ern Californian, she epitomizes for her critics all that is soft, safe,
and retrogressive about this decade. Her singing has been called stiff
and hopelessly uptight, with that uptightness carried over into her
stage shows, which rarely approach the mass celebratory rapture of
great rock events. Her records, and in particular Peter Asher’s pro-
duction, have been branded as too coldly, clinically “perfect,” a
studied formalization of songs meant to be sung with loose, improvi-
satory fervor. Her song selection has been dismissed as formulaic
(mechanically trying to recreate the pattern that made Heart Like
a Wheel such a hit) and misguided, in her frequent selection not
only of black songs, but material by such as Randy Newman and
Warren Zevon that supposedly suggests subtle, ironic, or abstract
connotations that she’s too dumb either to understand or to project.
 Living inthe U.S.A. | 197

And her overall image of love and sexuality has been called both
manipulative and reactionary.
There is a bit of truth to every one of these charges, especially in
years past, although I would argue that some of the criticism of
Ronstadt on feminist grounds is itself just a bit sexist: it’s uncon-
sciously suspected that someone who is small and pretty and who
admits openly to emotional vulnerability can’t simultaneously con-
tribute creatively to her own music and image, and that to the ex-
tent that she does so, she is a manipulator.
Before we consider the charges point by point, however, three
other issues need to be raised. Linda Ronstadt is an interpretive
singer, even if she collaborated on two songs from her 1976 album,
Hasten Down the Wind, and may one day compose more (accord-
ing to her collaborators, she played the determinant role in both
songs). Composers as executants of their own music have by no
means always been the rule, in either classical or popular music. In
the Tin Pan Alley days—think of Crosby or Sinatra—singers gen-
erally sang others’ songs. But with the advent of rock, the two func-
tions have tended to merge. This has led to an unparalleled intensity
of personal expression in the music, even if the composers weren’t
always particularly fluent singers. But critics used to the singer-
songwriter (or his rock equivalent, stripped of that term’s folkish
connotations) generally prefer the composer’s original, no matter
how roughly executed, to another’s interpretation; it’s somehow
assumed that a “mere” interpreter will lack the insight of the creator.
Furthermore, the very roughness of a singer-songwriter’s voice some-
how symbolizes an honesty that a more polished interpretation sup-
posedly must lack.
Now, in my own hierarchy of musical values, a composer may
indeed rank higher than an interpreter; clearly Bob Dylan and Neil
Young are more important to the history of rock music than Linda
Ronstadt. Yet such a bias need hardly consign all interpreters to the
slag heap. And insofar as interpretive singers can project a focused, in-
teresting image through the music of others, welding disparate ma-
terials into a new unity, they can make their own cohesive artistic
statement. Besides, not all composers are great singers, even within
the terms of a singer-songwriter aesthetic; it’s no accident that Linda
 198 | JOHN ROCKWELL

has enjoyed some of her greatest successes with the work of Zevon,
Souther, and Eric Kaz. And not having to come up with an ever-
better collection of ten tunes every year enables interpretive singers
to develop more steadily and surely than many composers; if Karla
Bonoff, for example, fails to match the quality of songs of her pre-
vious album, it won’t make much difference how well she sings.
There’s another basic bias to consider before we go on. It isn’t
just that contemporary rock critics prefer husky, untrained voices
over more polished varieties, or that they tend sometimes unthink-
ingly to doubt that any interpretation can conceivably equal the
composer's original. There is a widespread prejudice against beauty
per se in present-day popular music. People are so appalled by our
culture’s tendencies toward slickness and surface packaging that
they seize hold of almost any rougher alternative. Pretty voices,
pretty faces, pretty songs all become suspect to such a sensibility.
Yet surely we have to allow for that part of life if the rebellious alter-
natives are to have meaning.
Or at least we do if we tend toward an attitude that in some
crucial sense accepts things as they are. For better or for. worse, I
have always been the kind of person that tries to keep things in
balance. I may be drawn to extremes in art and behavior, but I find
them most desirable when contained within the sum total of human
experience. And with my longtime fascination for German art and
thought, I ultimately conceive of extremes in terms of the dialectical
tension between them.
This runs counter to the extremist positions about art, politics,
and life that shaped the ideology of today’s active rock critics, people
who grew up in the 1960s. I spent most of that decade in Berkeley,
and in my parents’ eyes I was a hopeless hippie. But I never really
rejected them or their values, however much I may want to see
changes effected in the way society works. Most serious rock critics
think in more radical terms, whatever their day-to-day lives may be.
For them the greatest rock serves as an explicit or implicit call to
battle. For me it can well do that, but it can also echo the softer
sides of life. They think of the polarities between rock’s extremes—
or between the extremes and the middle ground—as combatants in
which only one side can be victorious. For me, there may be slow
 Living in the U.S.A. | 199

movement of the whole societal and artistic organism in a progres-

sive or retrogressive direction, but all positions along the scale from
radicalism to conservatism have at least some potential for validity.
Those three speculative considerations aside, however, a rational
defense of Ronstadt’s interpretive style and public image has to
begin with the admission that she has been and still can be a con-
strained performer. She herself has often worried in interviews (es-
pecially in years past) about being considered a “lame” singer,
particularly by the circle of musicians and songwriters who are her
closest collaborators. And even during the making of Living in the
U.S.A., one song was ultimately left off the album because, as Linda
put it, “I sang it like a librarian.” Related to that constraint is her
stiffness in public performance. Ronstadt has never been one to
whip up her audiences to rock frenzy; if your standard of compari-
son is Bruce Springsteen, then she is certainly a failure.
But of course Springsteen can’t be the standard, since what he
is doing and what she is doing are so different. Admittedly, Ron-
stadt’s stiffness could be relaxed to her own advantage, and it has
been over the past few years, especially in the matter of her singing.
But as I’ve already indicated, that stiffness can have its own validity
and charm, as an echo of a particular kind of white, churchish gen-
tility. Her performing manner can be effective on its own terms, too.
Often the simple sight of her standing there with her blend of
beauty and shyness can be intensely touching, and serve as a fine
foil for her sassier rock numbers. And when she’s singing well, the
sheer soundof that voice absolutely aceing a song can be just as
thrilling as the most frenzied rock celebration.
There’s also some validity to the charge of the “cold perfection”
of Peter Asher’s production, even if some of those qualities derive
from Linda’s own fears and perfectionism. In any case, one man’s
clinical coldness can be another’s jewel-like beauty. Much of the best
rock has striven for spontaneous passion above all else, with tech-
nical correctness far down on the scale of virtues: Bob Dylan’s delib-
erately helter-skelter recording technique is the epitome of this
tendency. Asher is trying for something different, something ap-
proaching the formal clarity and abstraction of classical music, that
holds up under repeated listenings in a manner akin to precisely
 200 | JOHN ROCKWELL

structured Western art music. At its best—and perhaps especially

for those of us with a strong background in classical music—the
sheer taste and rightness of his work has a real conviction of its own.
But to what extent it’s his work and to what extent it’s that of
Ronstadt and her other collaborators is an extremely difficult matter
to judge, even for them. Which in turn makes the assumption by
some critics that Ronstadt is a mindless puppet a misapprehension.
The one thing Asher does indisputably in both the recording studio
and on the road is organize details like a computer. But the arrange-
ments are a joint matter between Linda, the band, and Asher, with
Linda’s role far more crucial than her detractors might think. And a
simple consideration of her last few albums indicates that her clos-
est collaborators in the band have had an influence that rivals
Asher’s, and that shifts in personnel become a key way to vitalize
and extend her sound. In particular, the change from Andrew Gold
to Waddy Wachtel as unofficial band-leader was a significant one.
Gold has a sensibility that is very close to the McCartneyesque
British-pop cleverness that underlies Asher’s style, and the two of
them together pushed Ronstadt’s work a bit too close to the ornate
and brittle. That phase reached its peak on the last Gold album,
Hasten Down the Wind, in 1976; the arrangements are often sup-
portive and always ingenious, but Linda herself had grown uncom-
fortable with the distance that the sound had traveled from the
harder and/or more folkish roots of the music she loved best. Thus
the next album had a tougher, sparer sound that reflected not only
her own inclinations but the more rock-oriented spirit of Wachtel,
its title, Simple Dreams, referred in part to the arrangements.
As an interpretive singer, Ronstadt needs collaborators even more
than singer-songwriters, and thus her interaction with her musical
co-workers is a complex and delicate one. She has to cultivate song-
writers and performing musicians both, and she has to develop
relationships with them that work to her advantage yet aren’t either
domineering (which would be self-defeating) or unduly submissive.
Her success in this regard (for all her periodic insecurities) is a
quite remarkable one. Linda stands at the center of a number of
overlapping musical worlds. She is the queen of the so-called L.A.
school of rock—a “school” that these days seems stylistically ever
 Livingin the U.S.A, | 201

more the anachronistic invention of some rock critics, given the

distance some of its members have traveled from the old country-
tock clichés. But it remains a viable grouping in a social sense, as
a network of friends who share songs, appear on one another’s rec-
ords, and support one another in various ways. Ronstadt is also the
leader of the burgeoning crop of women singers that has helped
define one crucial aspect of 1970s rock. She is not only the best-
known and most commercial of the lot, but she has gone out of her
way in numerous specific cases (Karla Bonoff, Nicolette Larson, the
Roche sisters, Annie McLoone, etc., etc.) to help younger singers
get recognition and record contracts. In that sense, the long brooded-
over trio album with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton would be
not only a joy to hear, but a fitting symbol of the cooperative, lov-
ing spirit of this musical community in general and its women in
particular.
In light of all this, the charge of supposedly “formalistic” song
selection and sequencing on Ronstadt’s. albums since 1974 seems
silly. As an interpretive singer and a leading member of a musical
community, she naturally works with the best songwriters she can
find. And since many of those songwriters are her friends and since
good songwriters generally write more than one good song, she often
goes back to the same people. There has perhaps been a tendency
to choose well-known hits of the past over more obscure songs that
would free her from invidious comparison, and a slightly recurrent
pattern in her selection of oldies composers. But there’s been greater
variety than repetition; each album finds new names entering the
lists, with new themes—or fresh variants on the old themes—under-
lying the song-by-song selection. Thus whereas earlier albums pro-
duced by Asher relied on people like the Eagles, Lowell George, and
James Taylor, she later moved through close identification with the
music of Kaz, Bonoff, Zevon, and Mick Jagger; Souther remained a
constant throughout. In no case has she broken with any of these
songwriters, but as circumstances shift (e.g., Bonoff needing all her
new material for her own albums) the search for songs and song-
writers moves on. And songs don’t of course always come directly
from songwriters. Linda relates as intensely to people as she does to
music itself, and hence her wide network of friends has been a con-
 202 | JOHN ROCKWELL

tinual source of suggestions for oldies and promising contemporary

songs.
Some of these relationships are romantic; others are friendships.
It would be absurd, in the light of her own past interviews, to deny
that Linda has been romantically involved with many of her col-
laborators. For her, consciously or unconsciously, sex is a way of
getting what she wants. I don’t mean it is just a device for her, that
she is a cold manipulator; vivacity, warmth, and honesty define her
nature, But she is an overtly sexual person, and she likes to relate
to men on that level (or, with her many women friends, on a non-
sexual but deeply emotional level) and is often ready to fall back
on flirtation when she feels insecure about dealing with men in an
intellectual or musical way.
Many of the troubles that some rock critics have with Ronstadt
as a performer and a public image have to do with this sexuality, and
because of it, I think, judgments about her recorded work sometimes
become tangled unwittingly with preconceptions about her person.
The first thing that needs to be said on this subject is that whatever
one may think of Ronstadt as a sex bomb, it is by no means a false
representation of the “real” person—all that public iconography,
right down to the airbrushed album covers, is part of the same
process whereby she attempts to make herself as alluring as she can.
Now, this flies in the face of many feminists’ convictions; for
all sorts of good reasons they are deeply suspicious of women who
prettify themselves in conventional ways that serve to reinforce male
expectations. In my own case, although ideologically and emotion-
ally sympathetic to feminism, I’ve always enjoyed people of either
sex who try to look sexually desirable—how they try to do that can
vary widely, but the effort itself bespeaks a commitment to style and
social generosity that I can respond to. In the case of Linda, what
appealed to me about her image back in the late 1960s was the overt
blend of good-girl gentility, hippie rebellion, and Los Angeles tough-
tramp sexuality. I had moved to Los Angeles from Berkeley at the
very beginning of 1970. By then I had grown heartily sick of girls
in army jackets, and was ready for a little flash.
What makes Ronstadt fascinating in terms of image is not that
she is a stubbom holdout for Total Womanhood in an age of
 Living inthe U.S.A. | 203

guerrilla feminism. It’s the tension of the opposites she incorporates.

Any fantasy-object (which is what she is for her fans) and any
love-object (what she is for her lovers and close friends) have within
them the ability to suggest all possibilities: we see our own contra-
dictions mirrored in the other. But Linda embraces more strongly
articulated alternatives than most people I know. She is at once
sensual and clever, sweet and irrational, vulnerable and strong. Per-
haps all of us contain these opposites; it’s just that she denies very
little of herself, and thus nearly all the facets of her character coexist
in a state of high intensity.
It is the strength of these differing aspects of humanity, and their
incorporation into one person of uncommon charm, that not only
make her unusual as a person but help explain the really quite
extraordinary diversity of musical styles that she can successfully
encompass. Most interpretive singers (and certainly most singer-
songwriters) are identifiable in terms of a specific style or focused
concentration of styles. With Ronstadt, the range is far broader.
She is often thought of as a country singer, and of course her best
work in that idiom (I think of Hank Williams’s “I Can’t Help It
If I’m Still in Love With You” from Heart Like a Wheel, with
Emmylou Harris’s angelic harmony-singing) has made her about the
most popular woman country singer of the day—even when she’s
been downright stingy about including real country songs on her
recent albums. She herself regards both the pop songs of her teen
years (i.e., the late 1950s and early 1960s, the period of nearly all
her oldies covers) and the Mexican ranchera style as her principal
formative influences. This last, which she learned from records, the
radio, and her father, is epitomized by the work of Lola Beltran,
and probably contributes as much to Ronstadt’s “belting” style as
do opera and the semi-operatic vocalism of 19th-century America.
In her own recorded work, the. most obvious manifestation of
ranchera singing is her Spanish-language version of “Blue Bayou,”
released as a single only under the title “Lago Azul.”
Aside from country music, Linda is justly praised for her way
with soaring ballads in the folk-rock idiom—“Long, Long Time”
from Silk Purse and the title track of Heart Like a Wheel, to name
the two best known, plus all the Souther songs she has sung. This
 204 | JOHN ROCKWELL

style—and country music, of course—is related to the acoustical

folkish material she’s recorded, often singing in harmony with
Harris or Parton. There was “The Sweetest Gift” from Prisoner in
Disguise, “I Never Will Marry” and “Old Paint” from Simple
Dreams and, maybe, “Love Me Tender” from Living in the U.S.A.
More recently her ballads have evolved into more sophisticated
torch songs that suggest the genre of Broadway and cabaret—her
own “Try Me Again” and Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” from Hasten
Down the Wind, Kaz’s “Sorrow Lives Here” from Simple Dreams,
and several more. And there are the grander, anthem-like extensions
of this style, full of gospel passion, in Tracy Nelson’s “Down So
Low” and Bonoff’s “Someone to Lay Down Beside Me,” which end
Hasten Down the Wind in that order,
If her ballads are most valued by those who collect her albums,
it is the covers of early rock and black songs by which listeners to
AM radio and purchasers of Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits know
her best. Here her work has been more erratic, “You’re No Good”
and “When Will I Be Loved” from 1974’s Heart Like a Wheel may
have been brilliant successes, But interpretations of better-known
songs like ““Tracks of My Tears,” “Heat Wave,” and “Many Rivers
to Cross” (all from Prisoner in Disguise) and “That'll Be the Day”
(from Hasten Down the Wind) were not so good. For me, they
still retain an undeniable charm, but her detractors condemn them
out of hand. She’s been somewhat more consistent recently, sug-
gesting a real growth. To this taste both “Blue Bayou” from Simple
Dreams and “Back in the U.S.A.” from the new album seem only
moderately convincing. But “It’s So Easy,” “Poor, Poor Pitiful
Me,” and “Tumbling Dice” from Simple Dreams are all fine up-
tempo covers—with “Pitiful Me” a nice bit of self-parody and
“Dice” her best-ever hard rock song—and “Just One Look,” “All
That You Dream,” and “Ooh Baby Baby” uphold that standard on
the new album, Except for hard-core disco, it’s hard to think of any
style she hasn’t tried at least once,
Ronstadt has not only become a persuasive interpreter of most
every idiom she has assayed, she’s also not diffused her image in the
process. Singers who try to sing everything generally fragment them-
selves, With Linda, the end effect is not a grab-bag, but an over-
 Living inthe U.S.A. | 205

arching personal style. Part of her secret is simply an instinctive

musicality and a willingness to work hard on phrasing. But in a
larger sense it is the very multifaceted cohesiveness of her image that
binds the diverse styles together, helping to make them all believable.
And at the base of both the music and the image, I think, is the
nature of her involvement with people. She may well relate better
to individuals than she does to crowds. But audiences clearly can
identify with the intensity of her private passions.
Linda has sometimes compared the voice with the kiss; both for
her are infallible indices of a personality. In other words, she thinks
it’s possible to perceive pretty much all you need to know about a
person from how his or her voice sounds or how he or she kisses
you. I can’t speak about her kisses, nor judge her theory about voices
in general. But it does seem to me that the key to her own voice’s
remarkable appeal—quite apart from its sheer strength and quality
in the abstract—is the way it mirrors her. People feel they can see
into her heart when she sings, and they’re right. The range of vocal
colors in her singing, from childlike intimacy to punkish yell to
commanding assertion to shaky vulnerability, reflects the facets of
her private person with infallible candor, and makes her recent pub-
lic discretion about her private life no real defense at all.
Ronstadt has spoken of herself as a “real seventies person,” by
which she means that she admits to and identifies with the notion
of her music as personal statement rather than political or ideo-
logical manifesto. But especially from a musical standpoint, I think
she’s better thought of as a blend of the sixties and seventies, and
perhaps of earlier'decades as well. Her singing combines the rhetori-
cal strength of an earlier America, the folkish honesty of the sixties
and the frank willingness of this decade to concentrate on personal
sentiment. Ultimately what I wish those who are hostile or indif-
ferent to Ronstadt’s music would do is try to open their ears—to
perceive what she does well without damning it by standards that
simply don’t apply. Of course, rock can be rebellious and angry, and
new wave rock has reaffirmed that part of the music. But it can be
softer, too, as can people. At her “shining best,” as she once put it,
Ronstadt can suggest those extremes better than any singer of our
time.
 206 | JOHN ROCKWELL

All of which serves as a prelude to a more detailed discussion of

Living in the U.S.A. As I indicated early on, it is still too soon
after the album’s release to say definitively how it ranks in the Ron-
stadt canon, even if one subscribes wholeheartedly to the notion of
hierarchy in such matters in the first place. The actual making of the
album was a more difficult process than with some of her records,
and she worried in the days after the final mixing and sequencing
that the song selection lacked depth. On the other hand, there are
no tracks here that seem outright mistakes, which makes it her first
disc about which that could be said. And from an interpretive
standpoint, this is her finest album yet. On song after song, the sing-
ing is both technically commanding and stylistically impassioned.
Living in the U.S.A. is the first-ever Ronstadt record with no
string arrangement on any cut. In fact, except for Mike Mainieri on
vibraphone on one song and David Sanborn on alto saxophone on
two, plus a few background singers, all the music here is made by
Ronstadt and her band. This continues the trend begun with Simple
Dreams of paring down the arrangements from the Gold-Asher
days, and reinforces the tendency toward harder rock that Wachtel
and Jagger, among others, have encouraged. Conversely, some con-
stants from earlier Ronstadt records are in short supply or absent
altogether. Chief among them is the duet-harmony singing with
other women, from Parton to Harris to Maria Muldaur to Wendy
Waldman. Also missing is any conventional country song. The
closest is “Love Me Tender,” which will probably be a country hit,
given its association with Elvis Presley, but which in musical style
is somewhere between a folk song and a nursery rhyme. There are
also no extensions here of her earlier explorations of the cabaret-
Broadway idiom, or any songs by her.
None of Ronstadt’s records has been a “concept album” in the
sense of a common theme varied from song to song. Yet so firmly
focused is her image and so single-mindedly has she concentrated
on love that her records can be used to trace an evolution in her
own life from vulnerability and pain to a new-found strength and,
even, defiance. Living in the U.S.A. doesn’t contain a single song
 Living in the U.S.A. | 207

that quite fits the old Ronstadt stereotype of the desperately yearn-
ing but abused woman who will do anything to get back her man.
And, indeed, one suspects that may be what she really means when
she worries about the quality of the material on this album—that
not only the songs but the new, tough way of singing them have
robbed her of a bit of the innocence in herself that she cherishes.
Simple Dreams had a greater depth of self-revelation, more songs
in which the old sorrowing Ronstadt persona retained its vulner-
ability, even when the expressive terms were more mature both
musically and emotionally. On Living in the U.S.A. there is one
song that continues that development—Souther’s exquisite “White
Rhythm and Blues.” But otherwise that place on the emotional
spectrum is taken by two songs that confront the passage of time
with a strange, prematurely aged resignation—‘““When I Grow Too
Old to Dream” and “Blowing Away” (or “I’m Blowin’ Away,” its
actual title). Yet both songs are sung with a force that belies the
weakness of age. And the other song that confesses to abject depres-
sion, “All That You Dream,” both ends positively and is couched
throughout in an exotic, passionate musical idiom that denies weak-
ness from the outset. Otherwise, the songs here are exultant, in-
tensely personal, overtly erotic or simply tender—which is pretty
much the emotional range one has come to expect from a Linda
Ronstadt record.
The album’s ten songs can be divided evenly between covers of
older material and contemporary numbers, and in every case but
two direct comparisons can be made either to the original or to the
best-known interpretation. The two exceptions are “When I Grow
Too Old to Dream,” which first appeared in a film of 1935, The
Night Is Young, and has since come out in innumerable cover ver-
sions, and “White Rhythm and Blues,” a new, unrecorded Souther
song.
“When I Grow Too Old to Dream” has words by Oscar Ham-
merstein II and music by Sigmund Romberg, and as such is the
first song Ronstadt has sung that is a direct representative of the
-operetta-Broadway tradition I’ve referred to, even if it did actually
originate in Hollywood. Apparently there was a good deal of experi-
mentation in the studio as to just how to sing it and with what
 208 | JOHN ROCKWELL

arrangement. The solution was an extremely spare combination of

Don Grolnick’s consoling, patiently plodding piano chords (hardly
adjectives that normally characterize the work of one of the finest,
most stylistically wide-ranging pianists ever to play in a rock band)
and the eerie overlay of Mike Mainieri’s vibes. Against this Linda
sings the song about as “straight” as she can, “reading right from
the lead sheet,” as she put it. The result is interesting but not en-
tirely successful. The arrangement serves to defuse the song of
its latent sentimentality, and its coldness perhaps underscores the
feelings of loss inherent in the lyrics (cf. “I’m Blowin’ Away,”
below). But without the sentimentality the song seems a bit four-
square. And Linda’s singing is slightly reminiscent of her version
of “Blue Bayou” (another interpretation I didn’t much like) in its
alternation of low soft singing with high loud singing. Ronstadt
went through a period a couple of years ago in concert of overdoing
the dramatic effect of shifting suddenly from quiet to loud and
back again. Here the bottom part of the voice seems pressed just a
bit lower in pitch than is comfortable for her, and the loud singing
sounds forced in comparison to what a trained operatic voice could
accomplish with this same music. Still, the interpretation is an
undeniably interesting one, and the commercial success of “Blue
Bayou” proved that a lot of people like just what gives me pause
in her singing.
“Love Me Tender” was added to the Ronstadt tour repertory
shortly after Elvis Presley’s death in August of 1977, and subse-
quently included in the concert footage in FM (although not on
that film’s soundtrack album). It doesn’t appeal to me particularly
as a song, but it’s sweet enough, and Linda sings it with a nice deli-
cacy (better than Elvis did, with his sagging pitch), Some may find
this the most obvious instance on the album of Linda’s supposed
predilection for sentimentality. For me, the singing is honorable
enough in itself, and once again a sparse, telling arrangement avoids
all hint of goo. Waddy Wachtel plays guitar and contributes decent
harmony singing, and Grolnick’s sustained but light-textured organ
in the choruses sounds elegiac. Linda cuts Presley’s first verse and
repeats the chorus at the end, changing words slightly but in no
important way from Presley’s 1956 original.
 Living in the U.S.A. | 209

Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.” dates from 1959, provides

the album’s theme and was its first single. Linda’s cover falls right
about in the middle of her other versions of rock and rhythm-and-
blues from this era. The vocal is nicely energetic, and the band
matches Berry’s arrangement, with Grolnick doing a lovely job of
invoking Johnny Johnson’s original piano part. Linda’s version does
without the doo-wop “‘uh-uh-uh’s” and “oh yeah’s” that fill up the
gaps in the original, which she and her collaborators found dated,
and replaces Berry’s fadeout with a not-all-that-interesting coda. The
singing provides a decent example of Ronstadt’s way of coarsening
her naturally “clean” vocal production when she feels the need to
project a tougher persona—as on the syllables “God,” “box” in
“jukebox” and the second “I’m” in the phrase “I’m so glad.” But
this is nothing new for her; the most obvious previous example was
the recurrent grow] on the word “fall” in “It’s So Easy” from Simple
Dreams.
What’s missing in this “Back in the U.S.A.” is the easily seduc-
tive lilt that Berry and his band attain. In a live performance of
the song in May of 1978 at the Oakland Coliseum, just after they'd
recorded it, Linda’s band launched into the music at breakneck
speed and maintained it throughout. Linda apologized later for the
tempo, but it lent the proceedings a hectically improvisatory quality
that is preferable to the stiffness of the recorded version. The stiff-
ness is suggested by Linda’s precise flatting of the tag-syllables on
the ends of key lines (‘“-way” in “runaway,” “A.” in “U.S.A,,”
“Lou,” etc.). Berry flats the same syllables, but it’s done casually,
as a sexy accent, rather than deliberately. With Linda it sounds
calculated and rote.
The final two oldies covers, “Ooh Baby Baby” and “Just One
Look,” are far better. No doubt some Smokey Robinson loyalists
won’t be able to accept her version of the former. As a pure piece
of singing, Robinson’s version of this song surpasses Linda’s. First,
there’s the whole issue of the erotic symbolism of the male soprano,
a symbolism that has operated with infallible effect since the days
of the great operatic castrati in the 17th and 18th centuries. The
ethereal sexual yearning of Robinson’s voice makes an inevitably
different and-more distinctive impression than a woman in the same
 210 | JOHN ROCKWELL
register, especially when combined with his odd but endearing prissi-
of little
ness of enunciation, In addition, Robinson’s singing is full
felicities that heighten the sexual ambience—the delicious hesitation
on the second “baby” in the first line of the third chorus, for in-
stance, or the wonderful little ornamental quivers on the words
“believe” and “here” in the third verse, or the magical phrasing of
“mistakes too I’m” in the second verse. It’s the performance of a
man at the very end of his sexual tether.
But in a smoother, more luxuriant, more sexually fulfilled way,
Linda’s version works too, and it could very well become a wonder-
ful AM radio make-out song. Like Robinson, Linda makes a fine
effect with the switching between a breathy, erotic natural voice
and falsetto. And what distinguishes her arrangement from Robin-
son’s is the use of David Sanborn’s saxophone, especially as it blends
with Ronstadt’s vocal coloration in words like “pay” in the first
verse (an even more telling instance of that blend comes with. the
final syllable in the song “Alison,” in which Sanborn’s sax emerges
as if from within Linda’s last falsetto note).
I’ve already indicated my feelings about Ronstadt vs. Doris Troy
on “Just One Look”—I think Linda’s version is superior on every
count, and not just because she has the better voice. What Troy
does offer is a tough, gospelish blackness of enunciation and phras-
ing, but I for one don’t think that’s a necessary ingredient of the
song; and Linda’s white predatory-female protagonist is fully appro-
priate. Furthermore, her band plays better and is far better recorded,
and the arrangement builds subtly with the addition of tambourine
and cowbell, both played by Asher. To cite just one further nicety
in the coda that Ronstadt et al. append to the song, listen to the
way Linda interrupts the repetitions of “Just one look, that’s all it
took” in the middle of the word “it” to yowl out an orgasmic “whoa
baby.”
If Ronstadt has somewhat variable results with her oldies covers,
her accounts of contemporary songs here are all persuasive. “White
Rhythms and Blues” is another of those John David Souther com-
positions that Linda sings to near perfection. Whether or not
Souther can finally achieve a viable performing career, he has cer-
tainly found a rare interpreter in Ronstadt. The music of this song
boasts a fine melody and a host of exquisitely crafted subsidiary de-
 Livinginthe U.S.A. | 211

tails, and the lyrics, too, seem rich and evocative, especially the full
title phrase, “Black roses, white rhythm and blues.” Metaphors
don’t always have to be precise to be evocative. That phrase in
Souther’s song will strike some as unspecific, .as will the title of
Warren Zevon’s “Mohammed’s Radio.” For me, despite all the dif-
ferences in the poetic and musical feeling of the two songs, they
both suggest something about a mixture of darker passion and sur-
face charm that is very close to Linda as an artist and a person.
The arrangement is spare yet telling in the best manner of her
past two albums, with another of those autumnal, slow-moving or-
gan lines that reinforce the slightly chill, lonely feeling of much of
the disc as a whole, and a restrained pedal steel guitar part from
Dan Dugmore. Linda’s singing, apart from her general sympathy
for Souther’s music and its idiom, is full of lovely touches. The
enunciation on the word “lose,” to take one tiny example, is a clas-
sic case of the Americanness of her accent. The yearning sound of
the voice being let out on words like “stay,” “whole,” and “your
eyes’ are typical examples of Ronstadt’s command of balladic rhet-
oric. And her own background singing at the end, merging with
Wachtel’s electric guitar on the repeated phrase “Black roses,” makes
a magical effect. The only reservation I have is the falsetto on the
line “I don’t know what else I can do.” Linda argues with some
logic that the character in the song is showing her weak side at that
point, and hence the falsetto becomes metaphorically appropriate.
But it doesn’t sound very attractive to me, even though it’s handled
tidily enough from a technical standpoint.
Her choice of Eric Kaz’s “I’m Blowin’ Away” offers an especially
interesting comparison. The best-known version of this song is
Bonnie Raitt’s (which Linda says she’s never heard, even though
the two women are friends), and most rock critics of the sort I’ve
been referring to throughout this essay think of Raitt as a positive
corrective to all the faults they perceive in Ronstadt—in fact, the
several critics with whom I’ve spoken about Living in the U.S.A.
all prefer Raitt’s version. Raitt sings in her usual warm, direct,
honest manner; for her the song becomes a consoling, rolling an-
them. She achieves this by her tendency to elide lines and words,
chopping short one note and hurrying on to the next; by the repe-
tition of the chorus at the end; by an arrangement full of sustained
 212 | JOHN ROCKWELL

strings and French horns and by a production that turns the har-
monies of Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, and Souther into a
small chorus (and blurs their individuality in the process).
Next to this, Linda’s account may sound tense and rigid. The
arrangement is far sparser, beginning with an eerie pedal steel effect
from Dugmore and full of odd, distancing touches, such as the dabs
of conga-drum color that Russ Kunkel occasionally applies. Linda’s
singing fits this mold. It is tight and self-contained, with what
sounds like a greater amount of echo (although that may be partly
a psychological illusion). The song in this version is no anthem at
all, but a series of isolated phrases, cold and distant. Yet in two ways
Raitt’s version is more austere than Ronstadt’s. She sings the recur-
rent word “shadows” in the chorus on a high C which drops to the
F a fifth below. This is an extremely stark effect, hardly softened by
the quick G grace-note that she interposes before she actually
reaches the F. Ronstadt sings both an A and a Gon her way down
from C, puts more weight on those notes and holds them longer.
The result is altogether softer, and more conventional. The other
major difference in the way the two women handle the actual
materials of the song (as opposed to their arrangements and sing-
ing styles) is that whereas Raitt repeats the chorus at the end, with
its refrain of “Shadows keep taking my love/and leaving me,” Ron-
stadt does the final chorus only once, and then appends a final
sentence of “You keep taking my love/and leaving me.”
Given the traditionally creative role performers play in popular
music, neither woman can really be said to be more faithful to what
Kaz intended. If the unusualness of the precipitous C-to-F drop in
Raitt’s version seems preferable, Ronstadt’s switch to “you” at the
end is more controversial. Ronstadt’s detractors may well complain
that this is yet another instance of her failure to comprehend an
abstract or cosmic metaphor unless it’s reduced to the most imme-
diate personal terms. But it seems to me that in switching from
“shadows” to “you” as the agent of the protagonist’s despair, Linda
keeps the more universal implications of “shadows” and achieves a
powerful dramatic effect in the sudden personification. The device
is precisely the same as Neil Young’s abrupt shift to the personal in
his “Cortez the Killer.” In more general terms, there can be no
denying the musicality and beauty of Raitt’s account of this song,
 Living in the U.S.A. | 213

and, perhaps, its lesser self-consciousness. But for me Ronstadt has

by far the more distinctive voice, and the coldness and agony of
her version strike closer to the essence of the song. That essence is
reinforced by all sorts of details in the phrasing, from the hymnlike
inflection of the line, “My life has lost its mystery,” to the despera-
tion and passion of the full-voiced attacks on syllables like “wild”
and the “sha-” in “shadows.” Listen, too, to the way she chops off
her voice on such words as “romanced” and “away,” twisting the
pitch down with a grimness that would do justice to a pioneer
woman. Linda Ronstadt is not often thought of as an intellectual
singer, and perhaps the process by which this version evolved was
intuitive. But as an interpretation it’s downright smart.
The performance of Little Feat’s “All That You Dream” by both
her and the band not only far surpasses the original, but ranks
among their finest efforts. Little Feat’s recording is only functionally
sung and not very interestingly arranged. Ronstadt sings the song
with an exact yet unstudied command of pitch (especially impor-
tant with this song’s highly chromatic vocal line) and tough, defiant
persona. The toughness is reinforced by several devices—the familiar
growls, slurred diction and precise touches of vocal color here
and there, as in the switch to falsetto on the word “you” and the
tendency to let sustained notes shift through several changes of
vowel-sound (most. impressively on the final syllable of the word
“everyone’”). The highlight of the arrangement is Dan Dugmore’s
pedal steel guitar break, the closest to progressive synthesizer-rock
that a Ronstadt song has ever come.
This leaves two more songs, and they may very well be the ones
that provoke the most vituperation in reviews by critics who see in
Ronstadt the antithesis of all that is strong and rebellious and
macho in the best new rock. Those songs are Elvis Costello’s
“Alison” and Warren Zevon’s “Mohammed’s Radio.” Costello is
one of the most respected of the British new-wave rockers, and both
in his music and in interviews he has posited himself as a scourge
to cleanse the world of 1970s pop pap—he’s even specifically iden-
tified Ronstadt as a principal purveyor of that pap. And quite apart
from their stances within the polemics of late-1970s rock, there is
the question of whether this particular song should be sung by a
woman.
 214 | JOHN ROCKWELL

As far as the first issue is concerned, all I can say is that Linda’s
version works for me. Costello doesn’t actually sing the song very
well, although admittedly this ballad’s mere existence within the
rest of his repertory, which is heavily weighted toward uptempo
rockers, makes its own kind of statement. Of course Costello fans
could argue that polished singing is beside the point; “Alison” is
indeed partly a matter of the projection of an attitude through
phrasing and inflection. But it’s also a beautifully crafted song,
both in lyrics and music—which Costello will surely admit when he
calms down. As might be expected, Linda’s singing and the arrange-
ment (especially the interaction with Sanborn) are elegantly shaped.
What’s surprising is the punkish aptness of her phrasing, which
manages to echo Costello (she didn’t really feel she understood the
song until she experienced the full impact of Costello as a performer
at a concert at Hollywood High) and add something of her own.
But what of her own? In Costello’s version the song makes clear
if emotionally complex sense, as a song from a man to a woman he
has loved, now sees as superficial but deep down loves still. Cos-
tello’s own guardedness about overt tenderness fits the singer's
persona ideally—the song’s rich sentiment owes much to its very
refusal to be sentimental. But Linda is not only a woman, she has
very often pushed the element of sentiment in her music ‘to the
point that many of her detractors consider her a hopeless senti-
mentalist. I have generally found her sentiment to be unsentimental
(which no doubt means that I am a sentimentalist myself), so that
aspect of her “Alison” doesn’t bother me. But it did take me a long
time to get used to the idea of a woman singing this song. It can
only reach its full emotional depth when the intensity of the pro-
tagonist’s feelings toward Alison becomes fully manifest. It would
seem hard to understand a woman singer’s barely contained feeling
for Alison unless the woman were herself deeply in love with her.
But that seems to imply a bisexual love triangle, which not only
needlessly complicates an already complex song, but introduces a
disconcerting lesbian element into Linda’s public image (the com-
bination of a commanding voice and girlish charm has indeed won
her a good many gay women fans).
Here is one case in which knowing a performer can be helpful
 Living inthe U.S.A. | 215
in purely aesthetic appreciation. After a long and vigorous explana-
tion from Linda as to how she conceived the song and what she
thought of intense friendship between women, and even an analysis
of the particular woman friend she had in mind as Alison—an ag-
gressive, insecure, selfish, generous, and beautiful young girl who
in her own way is very much a punk—it’s begun to make sense.
There are some who simply don’t bother about such questions of
persona in the first place. But for those of us who do, “Alison” not
only now seems logical in Linda’s version, but far more appropriate
for her than, say, Lowell George’s “Willin’” from Heart Like a
Wheel or “Carmelita” from Simple Dreams.
Which brings us, finally, to Zevon’s “Mohammed's Radio.” This
is both the capstone of the album and an artistic breakthrough for
Ronstadt as a singer in the same way that Karla Bonoff’s “Someone
to Lay Down Beside Me” was on Hasten Down the Wind (as an
anthem of mature womanhood) and “Tumbling Dice” was on
Simple Dreams (as a hard-rock war cry of independence). It rep-
resents not only an overpowering piece of singing and an inspired
arrangement, both far truer to the song than Zevon himself can
muster, but also the first time Linda has attempted with sovereign
success a song that transcends the humanistic, amorous-psychologi-
cal basis of her music and moves into the realm of metaphorical
abstraction. Yet her detractors think her version of “Mohammed’s
Radio” is one-dimensional and uncomprehending, with the meta-
phorical implications of the lyrics reduced to their most obvious and
trivial meanings.
It should be inserted here that my feelings about the song are
conditioned in part from having heard it several times during her
August, 1978, tour. Although Linda says she far prefers working in
the studio to singing on stage, it often happens that her live ver-
sions of songs just recorded improve during the subsequent tour.
That certainly happened with “Tumbling Dice,” as documented in
the live performance on the FM soundtrack, and it makes her and
Asher’s continued resistance to a live album debatable. The live
performances of “Mohammed’s Radio” were not only sung and
played with even greater passion than on record, but they dispensed
with the slightly obvious and clichéd wailing female soul duo on the
 216 | JOHN ROCKWELL
choruses and included such niceties as the word “alas” pitched
higher and hence still more intensely.
Still, the disc version is fine enough, and it’s hard once again to
avoid the notion that those who can’t appreciate it are the victims
of their own preconceptions. Linda Ronstadt is known as a singer
of boy-girl homilies; therefore it’s impossible she could tackle a
song like this with any perception. Reinforcing that bias is another
problem. All four of the people whom I know to dislike her “Mo-
hammed’s Radio” are in some way associated with Rolling Stone
in New York, and in an interview for that magazine she analyzed
the song in words that were more breezy than profound. Her tone
may have made her critics even more convinced than before that
for her this song is simply a little ditty about listening to rock on
the radio. But to me she’s talked with some fluency about the song’s
multiple meanings. And in any case, one has to pull back from pre-
conceptions and behind-the-scenes information and simply listen
to what one hears. The devices artists use to make their art are just
that—devices. The fact that Maria Callas talked inarticulately about
the characters she portrayed hardly detracts from her status as the
greatest operatic actress of the century, nor does Beethoven’s pecu-
liar brooding about his nephew compromise his music’s universality.
Even if Linda does use her own psychological tools to get inside a
song—even if she approaches the abstract through the personal—
that hardly matters if the result is as overwhelming as it is here.
As with “White Rhythm and Blues,” the words of “Mohammed’s
Radio” may not be susceptible to precise analysis—in fact, were such
analysis possible, the song might well seem unevocative—and yet
may still strike one as emotionally true. This song is about the re-
demptive power of rock and roll. But it’s also about rock as escapism,
about the place of blacks within a white culture, about mystical
religion and the driving force of the irrational beneath society’s
troubled surface.
Linda’s version works so well in part because of the minimal role
that ironic inflection plays in this particular song and in part because
of the primary function of music in determining the essence of any
song. In “Mohammed’s Radio” the multiple meanings are inherent
in the words, and in the relationship between the words and music,
 Living inthe U.S.A. | 217

rather than a function of the singer’s delivery. What makes opera

and song such a complex and fertile business is this three-way inter-
change. Music is both the deepest and most emotionally intense
of the arts; independent of words it is rarely successful as a medium
for wit and irony. Words lack music’s emotional power but can be
far more focused; the combination of words and music, then, can
function as a dialectically potent artistic marriage. (Richard Wag-
ner, who articulated many of these ideas in his theoretical works
and then realized them in his music dramas, liked to link words with
the masculine principle and music with the feminine.) A singer
can freight the words with still further layers of complexity by way
of vocal color and inflection, And thus a woman (already linked
archetypally with emotion, if you’re a Jungian or Wagnerian) who
sings can tap profound depths beneath our everyday existences. If
the woman in question is already one whose whole life revolves
around emotion, you begin to get some hint of the wellsprings of
Linda Ronstadt’s appeal.
In the past, however, she has sometimes had trouble with songs
in which a composer-interpreter’s vocal personality has been an
essential ingredient of the song, or if the song has had a heavy
component of irony built into both the words and their potential
interpretation. For both these reasons perhaps the all-time least
successful Ronstadt cover version was her account of Randy New-
man’s “Sail Away” on her Don’t Cry Now album of 1973. Some
critics find hints of a mordant irony on Zevon’s part in “Moham-
med’s Radio” that make the passionate directness of Ronstadt’s
performance seem misconceived—above all his very use of the word
“alas.” For me, though, whatever irony Zevon may possibly have
intended seems decidedly secondary, and in any event is in no way
denied by Linda’s interpretation. Besides, Zevon’s voice and singing
style, while effective enough for emphatic rockers, are far too limited
to suggest much subtlety. The same critics see a real ambivalence
on the part of the Zevon protagonist: He recognizes the redemptive
power of music but simultaneously distances himself from it, espe-
cially in the “village idiot” stanza, in which rock seems to have
reduced its devotees to escapist vegetables. This may well be part
of the song, but for me it’s more of an accent than a central mean-
 218 | JOHN ROCKWELL

ing. In any event Linda recognizes this particular ambivalence very

clearly, and has even heightened its ambiguity by two minor textual
alterations. The second verse in Zevon’s original begins, “You know
the sheriff's got his problems too/And he will surely take them out
on you.” Linda broadens the second phrase to make it “me and
you.” Later on in the same verse the “village idiot” appears; the
idiot is masculine for Zevon and feminine for Ronstadt.
The real secret to the song lies in contemplating the words in
conjunction with the music, and not in the abstract, as I think too
many rock critics are prone to do, The music here is not rock and
roll in the ordinary sense, even with the refrain of “Don’t it make
you want to rock and roll/All night long.” Instead it’s a dirgelike
anthem, a rolling, inexorable attestation to the darker, more pas-
sionate side of life. It is this passion, power, and even rage Linda
and her band capture so perfectly—and without necessarily denying
the distancing implications inherent in the “village idiot” passage,
since those implications remain inseparable from the words them-
selves.
As for the band and the arrangement, Zevon’s version (on which
Wachtel played lead guitar) pales by comparison. His production
fails to realize whatever hymnlike potential might have been latent
in the use of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks for the har-
monies on the chorus, and Bobby Keyes’s sax solo sounds even more
irrelevant than does Linda’s soul duo. Ronstadt’s musicians attack
the music with a real ferocity. The whole hard-edged, weighty,
metallic quality the band has taken on since Andrew Gold’s de-
parture is completely appropriate here both to the song and the
singing.
Ultimately, though, it is Linda who makes this interpretation so
special. The vocal range suits her exactly, and here her growing
artistry of the past few years reaches a new height, with beauty of
voice, strength of persona, and intensity of delivery all at the service
of the music. It is a performance in which the vocalism illuminates
the material, transforming it in a way that its creator could never
himself achieve. As such it reaffirms the place of interpretation in
contemporary popular music, and provides an experience of enor-
mous emotional import for any listener able to open up and respond
to the glory of great singing.
 ONAN'S
GREATEST HITS
(WANKER 0000)
1978

DAVE MARSH
The English have the perfect word for it. They call it wanking.
The word isn’t as descriptive as its counterparts in American slang
(we say: jerking off, beating meat, pounding pud) but it’s more
poetic. Considering how central wanking will be to a desert island
existence, the poetry is actually quite functional.
The problem with desert island fantasies is that they're so
goddamned impractical. To approach this chapter as an existential
decision about what music I’d really prefer to be stranded with, it
would be necessary to spend the rest of my life walking around
with a cassette of Who's Next in my pocket. (It’s difficult enough
to pack when you've got a month’s notice.) And anyway, at such
a juncture, even loving rock obsessively, there are other priorities
that come well ahead of it: like a fifth (or a case) of Remy Martin
and a carton of Pall Malls. I’m not gonna drink fermented coconut
juice and smoke palm fronds just because some editor had a
notion.
This particular question has a strategic limitation, too, Rock is
not like a book, which can be appreciated even without candlelight,
if you get up before dark. (One of the advantages of civilization is
that you might not.) But you can’t exactly sharpen your fingernail
and decode the information on a disc, using your sinus cavities as
 220 | DAVE MARSH

an amplifier, What comes with this fantasy (face it) is a cassette

deck and a lifetime supply of Duracells. Not quite traveling light,
is it?
Anyway, my idea of an island on which to be stranded is
Manhattan, or, in a pinch, Great Britain. Something paved, at
least. A desert island’s only advantage is that it would probably
be the one place where you could avoid being kicked around by
corporations. So I’ve declined to choose an album that would be
possible to assemble corporately, at least during the current epoch.
Call it Wanker’s Delight (Onan’s Greatest Hits), music devoted
to the adolescent’s favorite pastime. Divided, naturally, into a
soft side and a hard side.
Rock, they say, is about fucking. That’s a laugh. Ball to that
beat and you'll wind up bruised. And the singers are always bleating
about being left lonely, which is less conducive to interpersonal sex
than its hairy-palmed alternative. The rea] truth is that rock was
invented by teenagers with pimples, and acned adolescents are
mostly getting it on with their fingers. This is the secret reality of
rock sexuality—what all rock listeners have in common—which is
probably why so many of us have Catholicism and Judaism in our
backgrounds. If Portnoy had been ten years younger, he’d have had
a ten-transistor radio in there with the liver. And Philip Roth
might have written a rock opera rather than a novel—or (I can
hear the gallery) rock criticism rather than either. Mea culpa.
Not that I feel guilty, exactly. As my colleague Robert Christgau
pointed out to me, for the act itself, pornography of a more
literary or visual order is desired. Music lacks a kinetic dimension;
at least with a book, you have something to do with the other
hand. But, as it turns out, a great deal of my favorite rock is about
wanking, at least in a general sort of way.
Still, I kept to a fairly strict set of rules in assembling the
record that dare not speak its name. First of all, the songs had to
fit onto a single LP. The final collection runs a bit on the long
side—something more than 45 minutes—but not inconceivably so.
Secondly, it had to be music I’d prefer to listen to. The fact is,
I'd rather be stranded with these songs than with Linda Ronstadt
in the flesh.
 Onan’s Greatest Hits | 221

I was interested in wanking as a matter of solitude; that ruled

out the Supremes’ handjob classic, “Buttered Popcorn,” and Eddie
Cochran’s “Sitting in the Balcony.” But mostly, I wanted to
explore the outer limits of wanking as a theme in rock. So, while I
regret the omission of Jimi Hendrix’s “Love or Confusion” and
Percy Sledge’s “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms),”
songs like the Atlanta Rhythm Section’s “Imaginary Lover” and
Jackson Browne’s “Rosie,” which are fables literally concerning
self-abuse, are less sorely missed. Nor did I want to get too obvious
or crude—so neither the Miracles’ “Come On Do the Jerk” nor
the Capitols’ “Cool Jerk” (dance records, ha ha) are here. Grin’s
“Slippery Fingers,” Faye Adams’s “Shake a Hand” and Sam and
Dave’s “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby” were left off
for similar reasons, while the Band’s “The Weight,” the Zombies’
“She’s Not There,” and Chuck Berry's “Sweet Little Sixteen”
finally seemed just too abstract. But with those titles, you don’t
even have to have a dirty mind to get the picture, though if you
lack a certain kinky turn of thought, why you're interested in
rock—or being stranded on a desert island—is beyond me.
But even the most salacious minds can sometimes make a slip.
In 1973, I reviewed a Bruce Springsteen concert for Newsday, the
Long Island family newspaper, and quite unthinkingly quoted the
lines from the first verse of his “Blinded by the Light” which
conclude with an adolescent pumping into his hat. Nobody cut it
out—much to my surprise the next day—and nobody ever made a
comment about it, at least not to me. Perhaps they never knew, or
were too embarrassed if they did. Though I have always wondered
—too embarrassed for me, or for themselves?
I feel about the same this time. Nevertheless, here is Onan’s
Greatest Hits, a record which neither Warner Communications
nor CBS is likely to release in our lifetime.

Sort SIDE

“The Beat” Elvis Costello

“I Want You” Bob Dylan
“Pictures of Lily’ The Who
 222 | DAVE MARSH
“Only the Lonely” Roy Orbison
“In My Lonely Room” Martha and the Vandellas
“Party Lights’ Claudine Clark
“He Ain’t Give You None” Van Morrison

Harp SE

“Whole Lotta Shakin’” Jerry Lee Lewis

“Mona (I Need You Baby)” Bo Diddley
“Shake” Otis Redding
“A Hard Day’s Night” The Beatles
“Goin’ Home” The Rolling Stones

It is appropriate that the album opens with Elvis Costello, the

youngest artist here, rather than one of his more celebrated
colleagues. ““The Beat” confirms the continuing presence of mastur-
bation in the rock tradition—it’s a 1978 song—and especially
the continuing interest in the theme by major artists. One of the
interesting things about researching this record was discovering
that wanking is a more prominent theme among very famous
rock performers than among obscure ones; with the exception of
Claudine Clark, there is virtually no singer represented here who is
not a household word, at least in the rock community. One wonders,
of course, what drives our greatest stars to write such songs—is it
merely reminiscence, or is it part of the terrible price they pay
for fame and consequent isolation? Either way, they deserve it.
Ostensibly, of course, “The Beat” is addressed to a girl or
woman. But this only demonstrates how cautiously even New Wave
(or “Punk’”’) artists have had to be when dealing with this taboo
topic. It is quite clear, certainly, what Costello is referring to in the
chorus when he talks about good boys never playing with their
“toys.” And the insanely repetitive organ triplet, which stands alone
for the first few bars of the bridge, is another kind of clue.
Elvis Costello is best known for his rampant hostility, which
borders on sociopathy (the far side of the border, at that), and his
version of the wank fantasy is extremely vengeful, though it is
expressed personally, rather than with the generalized societal
 Onan’s Greatest Hits | 223

hostility of “A Hard Day’s Night.” It’s also interesting that on

Costello’s This Year's Model, “The Beat” is followed by “Pump It
Up,” which is not a song about a gas station attendant. (I knew
one of the latter, in my high school days, who insisted his name
was Jack Mehoff. He used to eat lit cigarettes.)
Costello is a man at war with his psyche. The verses of “The
Beat” counsel moderation, and some sort of conciliation with
humanity. The chorus mocks this asserted wisdom, which is one
of the reasons the misanthrope Costello is so perfect for desert
island reverie. Listening to him, you might feel almost cheered by
banishment from society.
Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” is also desperately psycho-dramatic—
the singer again has no self-control, a typical wanker’s symptom—
but here, he seems to be longing for a loved one. But Dylan’s love
object is far too perfect to be merely another person. (With that
early reference to the Queen of Spades, one hesitates to be too
insistent concerning gender.) As in Eastern mysticism, Dylan
tefers to the Beloved—and as in mysticism, the Beloved is
intimately connected to the Self. Lyrically, the references to horns
in the first verse are clearly phallic, as is the symbol of the “broken
cup” in the second verse. (“Broken cups” indicate spillage—of
liquids or, perhaps, seed.) But the musical motif in this song that
gives away its true or inner theme is the drumming—particularly
the solo beats at the beginning. Masturbation, of course, is in-
timately connected to drumming, since it is one of man’s most
primitive forms of percussion. (Compare Kenny Buttrey’s rhythm
patterns here with the anonymous stutter-step on Claudine Clark’s
“Party Lights,” for instance.)
The Who’s imagery is far less obtuse. In fact, it’s as brazen as a
pimple cream commercial. “Pictures of Lily” may be the only. hit
record (well, it made number four in England) that is explicitly
about wanking. It is also one of the Who’s finest songs: Keith
Moon’s drumming is pure clotted cream, and Pete Townshend’s
guitar rumbles along like an adolescent id itself. Perhaps the
record’s most brilliant passage is John Entwistle’s climactic trumpet
ejaculation in the bridge.
“Pictures of Lily’ is a tribute to modern, progressive parenthood.
 224 | DAVE MARSH

The singer is having difficulty sleeping so his father pastes pictures

of Lily on the wall above the son’s bed. The cure works:

Pictures of Lily, made my life so wonderful

Pictures of Lily, helped me sleep at night
Pictures of Lily, solved my childhood problem
Pictures of Lily, helped me feel all right

But pop hasn’t reckoned with his son’s susceptibility to infatuation.

The boy falls in love with Lily, and when he goes to ask dad
where he can meet her, he replies: “Son, now don’t be silly. She’s
been dead since 1929.” The song ends in mournful confusion,
Townshend bashing away at his guitar like a maniac. This is
typical of the Who—and I would not want to be anywhere, no
matter what the population, without something from this group. It
cheers me up—compared to Pete Townshend’s psychological fables,
I always seem the picture of health.
“Only the Lonely” is not a song about masturbation, but
masturbation may be the only solace for an artist whose persona is
as desperately paranoiac as Roy Orbison’s. All of Orbison’s songs
are in some way maddened by his fantasies— in “Running Scared,”
he reaches a peak of terror by imagining that his girl might some-
day see a guy she’d like more than him, and cools himself out only
by imagining she’d finally come back to him, anyhow. But “Only
the Lonely’ presents the lover isolated in the most exquisite
sense: it is the perfect setting for the utter self-pity that so often
accompanies wanking, as Roy mourns pathetically about how only
someone so desolate as he could possibly understand his plight.
In its way, this record is every bit as bombastic as the Who's,
except that rather than Townshend’s guitar and Moon’s drumming,
Orbison copes with strings that pound furiously and vocal choruses
that sing “dum-dum-dum-dumdee-doo-wah,” which is perhaps a
gibberish equivalent of “How goddamn dumb we all are.” I have no
notion of what Roy Orbison’s adolescence might have been like,
something for which I am profoundly thankful each time I hear
this song.
The only rock song more abject in its self-pity than “Only the
 Onan’s Greatest Hits | 225

Lonely” is the Beach Boys’ “In My Room.” It is not included here,

not because we don’t know what most of us were up to in our teen-
age sanctums, but because Brian Wilson sounds too completely
out of it to find his tool, much less play with it. (Readers who
have not heard this record are advised to take a Valium and
listen to it now, before I spend all my credibility.) More impor-
tantly, I think if I heard “In My Room” on a desert island, there
would be no other recourse than suicide.
The logical substitute for “In My Room” is Martha and the
Vandellas’ much brighter “In My Lonely Room,” which has less
to do with privacy than with romantic failure. Her guy is fooling
around, of course, and right in front of her eyes. She goes home
and cries. Well, actually, this song has nothing to do with jerking
off. It’s just that Martha Reeves was one of the three or four most
powerful voices in the history of rock and roll, and anyway, my
room was where I used to do it. (The bathroom was cold, and we
had a big family who resented long-term occupancy.) Which is
why “In My Lonely Room” is here. In loving memory, as the
English are wont to say of Buddy Holly. Who would have under-
stood.
The inclusion of “Party Lights” is more purposeful. It makes
a simple point: They drove us to it! Their nagging, their prohibi-
tions—all of it left us no recourse. And I am reminded of this, over
and over again, as Claudine Clark looks out her window and
watches the party across the street that her mother will not let her
attend. I wish I could say that “Party Lights” represents the female
perspective on masturbation, but my understanding of women sex-
ually stops far short of that. (If I knew women better, the rest of
this chapter would be a lot less well-informed, probably. You count
your blessings, I’ll count mine.) Also, “Party Lights” is one of rock’s
great one-shots, which is a nice wanking metaphor, too.
Side one closes with “He Ain’t Give You None,” in which Van
Morrison grapples with the problem of understanding women and
comes up short. I haven’t understood a Van Morrison lyric since
“Gloria,” so if you can figure out what it all means, write the pub-
lisher. But maybe the way the music builds has something to do
with why this song felt like it belonged here. It’s real pretty and
 226 | DAVE MARSH
teal demented—by the end of the song, Morrison sounds like he
really has grown hair on his palms. And maybe there is something
to “He Ain’t Give You None” in the way of metaphor. What’s
this business about Old John of Curzon Street who “flogs his daily
meat”? Curzon is in Mayfair, London’s wealthiest district—surely
Van isn’t implying the guy’s a pimp, in those posh precincts? But
there is only one other explanation .. .
Side two is much more direct in its emotions. Compared to Jerry
Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” for instance, even Elvis
Costello and the Who seem discreet. “Whole Lotta Shakin’”’ is
so defiant, its rhythms so insistent, Jerry Lee so transcendently free
of guilt at his emission of pure lust that the song may fairly be
construed as this album’s anthem. As such, it sets the tone of this
side, which eschews the mild diffidence and perplexity of some of
side one for sheer ribald revelry. If there is any doubt of these
songs’ connection to the matter at hand, simply slip into the
thythmic groove each of them offers as its central delight.
“Mona” has been done by a variety of singers, but no one has
improved on Bo Diddley’s original—except possibly Bruce Spring-
steen, in his epic on-stage performance, and then he has to incor-
porate both “Not Fade Away” and “Gloria,” plus his own “She’s
the One,” to pull it off. This is Bo’s beat at its heaviest, and also
a superb pre-coital fantasy. (In. my experience, Mona is one of
of those names, like Aloysius, that nobody has much anymore and
if someone does, you're better off to avoid them, but Bo has no
such scruples.)
Sam Cooke’s “Shake” was a great dance record, but Otis Red-
ding’s interpretation of it—particularly on Otis Redding Live in
Europe, which is what I have in mind here—is more outright in
its carnality. All those “got-ta, got-ta” grunts and shrieks need no
explanation, except for the incredibly naive. Whether Redding re-
fers to a consummated passion, or a solitary one, is hardly the
issue; in context, this is perfect.
Similarly, “A Hard Day’s Night” is probably exactly what it
seems to be. But in their appropriation of Little Richard’s groove,
the Beatles do not neglect the difficulties the working-class male
has in finding time for sexual fulfillment. You know, by now, what
 Onan’s Greatest Hits | 227

the only alternative can be. This song seems jolly—and when you
think about it, maybe it is—but there’s also an untapped reservoir
of anger and frustration implicit in the music, which undercuts
the cohabitive import of the lyrics.
The climactic item, however, is the Rolling Stones’ “Goin’
Home,” the longest tribute to his own sexual prowess that Mick
Jagger has ever written. Wanking is not always a matter of frustra-
tion or alienation, of course. For Jagger and the Stones, it is—like
everything else—an expression of narcissism. In the trippy days of
the sixties, this song may have been taken as a metaphor for fuck-
ing—“Goin’ home” as the return to the womb, and all that—but
this singer is far too confident of success for that. There is an
utter absence of humility in “Goin’ Home,” and the manner in
which the harp and drums continuously build while Keith Rich-
ard’s guitar strokes to a furious conclusion is telling. Fourteen years
of observation of the Stones at work have not convinced me, at
any rate, that Mike Jagger finds anyone but himself truly exciting,
in a sexual sense. Whether this is a result of Jagger’s delusion or
his honesty is open to question, in certain circles, but there is no
question that it’s true: Mick Jagger is the world’s greatest expo-
nent of self-love.
There are other Jagger songs that tell the same tale with equal
effectiveness, and more concisely—for one, “Rocks Off,” in which
Jagger confesses that he only gets his rocks off when he’s dream-
ing. (Dreaming of who? Well, who is the one person who’s always
in one’s dreams?)
But for all its over-inflated self-importance, “Goin’ Home” is
the only song in the history of rock and roll that could end this
album. Stranded on a desert island, going home is all you have
to look forward to, and there’s nothing you can do about it but
lie back and enjoy yourself.
 DEDICATED TO YOU
THE “5” ROYALES (KING 580)
1958

ED WARD
As I remember Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the summer of
1962, it was hot, and the air was thick, not only with humidity, but
with a smell that I remember pervading the South, and can no
longer describe. I was on vacation with my parents and sister, and
we'd just come from Kitty Hawk, a place that was completely
empty, like I imagined Cape Cod must have been before it was
discovered. Winston-Salem, though, was a city I’d never heard
of that was as packed and congested as New York at its worst.
The heat seemed to be pressing the people down toward the side-
walk, and we were stuck in traffic.
I’m not sure why it surprised me that everybody was black. I
was a fervent (verbal) supporter of civil rights and read the Times
every morning in study hall to see how things were going down
South. I knew—certainly I knew this far into the trip—that blacks
and whites were kept separate as much as possible. But there was
something different about the black faces I saw that set them apart
from the faces of the people I worked with at the church-sponsored
reading program in Harlem. Maybe it was the heat, maybe not.
Our destination, as we sat‘in traffic, was just outside of town,
the factory that dominates Winston-Salem: R. J. Reynolds, maker
 Dedicated to You | 229
of Winston, Salem, Camel, and the rest. Although signs through-
out the state advertised cicarets 25¢, I noted that none of the
black people in the lunchtime throng were smoking. Nor was any-
body at the factory, a huge, one-story industrial park-style build-
ing. It was air-conditioned inside, with slippery varnished wooden
floors. A guide showed us around, and I remember the rolls of
filter, the long sheets of cigarette papet, and the packages folded
and filled in seconds. I was a real factory-tour buff at the time, and
this was one of the’best I’d had.
In mid-tour, however, the Cokes I’d been drinking to fend off
the heat took hold in the air-conditioning. The guide pointed to
his left, and I walked toward the bathrooms. And that’s why
Winston-Salem has stayed in my memory so long: in 1962, in a
building that reeked of the upward mobility of the “New South,” I
stood in front of two doors marked MEN and COLORED, and felt
a pain in my stomach, I knew I had a choice to make, and I sus-
pected that whichever choice I did make would be the wrong one.
If I went into Men, I would be betraying my principles, but what
if I went into (MEN. and the guide or some other RJR employee
saw me? Or if, through some chance, a black man took offense at
my presence on his turf? My parents’ oft-repeated adjuration “Don’t
rock the boat” rang in my bladder, and I clenched my jaw, knowing
that some day I’d pay this debt. (In fact, I did sooner than I
expected: on my way out, I took a long drink from the colored
water-fountain. Nobody noticed, either.)
The tour finished, I refused a free pack of cigarettes in favor of
a Winston pen, We got back in the Buick, and we drove away.

That same day, almost a thousand miles away in Memphis,

Tennessee, a middle-aged black man was straddling a chair, his
arms folded on top of its back, his chin gingerly resting on his arms.
He’d drawn the curtains in the motel room he sat in, a habit he’d
acquired over a decade ago so he wouldn’t have to look at the
drabness of the rooms he rented. On the bed, illuminated by a
streak of light that escaped between the drawn curtains, sat his
cousin, a year or two younger than him, and next to him, a Bible.
 230 | ED WARD
It was open, and there was enough light in the room that the man
could see the blocks of red print alternating with the black.
No words were passing between them, although the man on the
bed looked worried, and there was just the slightest suggestion that
he was about to cry. They had been staring at each other like this
for fifteen minutes, neither one uttering a sound. The man on the
bed lowered his eyes, then looked up again. The man on the chair
sat up slowly, unfolded his arms, and placed his hands on his
thighs. He sighed. “Okay Clance,” he said, “I'll go phone Willie,
and when the boys get back, tell ’em to stick around—we got a
meetin’.” The man on the bed bit his lip and lowered his eyes.
All he could do was nod. His cousin stood up and put the chair
back under the dressing-table, eyes on his shoes. As he touched the
doorknob, he heard the man on the bed speak in a raspy voice.
“Pete, I’m sorry. You know I’m sorry, but it’s . . .” Pete turned his
head. “Yeah man, I know.”
God’s will, Pete thought, as he stepped out into the summer
afternoon, God’s will that after fifteen years it ended like this, with
him shuffling across the parking lot of a colored motel in Memphis,
not too anxious to reach the pay phone located outside the motel
office, but this is the way it should have been, and he had to do
what had to be done. Funny, that’s one thing he and Clarence and
the other guys had always had, and it’s probably the thing that
kept them together as solid as they'd always been. He’d even
written a song about it, and he could hear Clarence singing it as he
had so many times:

I'd rather hear it coming from you, yourself

Than to hear it from someone else
And if there’s anything you want to tell me
Why don’t you SAY IT!

His hand clutched a guitar-neck that wasn’t there. Boy, he thought

to himself, could I rip off a lick on that motherfucker now! I need
to rip one off. But first I gotta call Willie.
“Home of the Blues,” purred the phone. “Uh, Willie Mitchell,
please.” “Mr. Mitchell’s in the studio—may I say who’s calling?”
 Dedicated to You | 231

“Pete Pauling.” “Oh, hi, Pete—hold on, please,” and she put him
on hold. Say it, his mind kept singing, even if it hurts me. The
fingers on his left hand moved, but no strings resisted. I could sure
play that boy now, he thought, I surely could. Well, count your
blessings, Pete. You ain’t out in the cold, and you ain’t gonna be,
thanks to your friends. Willie’s gonna be sad that it ended, but it
won’t be like the end of the world for him, either. Those last
records didn’t hardly make a dent, and maybe Willie was right
about the way things been changing. Groups ain’t getting it any
more, Willie kept telling him, at least not the kinda stripped-down
group you got. Oh, sure, now and again a group like the Sensations
would get a hit with something like “Let Me In,” which, it’s true,
was just like their old stuff, almost, but the rest of it was all twist
shit and those big production numbers. Teenagers didn’t care about
how good you could sing—hell, they didn’t care about nothin’,
from the sound of it.
“Pete! My man!” He snapped back to awareness. “What's the
good word, Pete?” Say it, Pete. “Willie, I, uh, been talkin’ to
Clance .. .” “Oh, he finally told you, huh? Yeah, man, he called
me last night, and I told him that you own the name and all that,
and if you wanna dissolve it legally, you gonna have to, uh... .”
“Well, I think we gonna do it.” “Pete,” Willie said after an awk-
ward pause, “like I keep tellin’ you, you’re worth just as much, if
not more, as a songwriter. You still havin’ hits with your songs, and
the “5” Royales ain’t had a hit in four years! Tell you what, come
in tomorrow and we'll talk about it, okay?” “Naw, Willie, not
right away. I gotta think about some shit, so I think me and
Clance and any of the other boys that wants to gonna drive back to
Winston-Salem. I ain’t seen mama in a while, and 1... I dunno.
I call you in a couple weeks, okay?” “Sure, Pete,” Willie said,
worried. “Anything I can do, call me collect.” “Yeah, Yeah.” Pete
hung up the phone. Well, that was that.
He stood outside the phone booth looking off across the road,
not really seeing anything, just breathing as if he had to marshal his
strength to make that long walk across the parking lot again. He
might have stood there forever if he hadn’t heard a white disc-
jockey’s voice quacking out of a car radio. “That’s Neil Sedaka with
 232 | ED WARD
our number one song, ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.’” Pete snapped
his head up and snorted. No shit, he said, chuckling, as he walked
back to his room, no shit.

In 1962, it really had been over fifteen years since Lowman “Pete”
Pauling had begun his varied and successful show-business career.
As it almost always did, it started in church, with three of his
cousins and a friend of theirs forming a gospel quintet. Since the
interior of North Carolina is divided between agricultural space
and textile factories, there must have been hundreds of tiny
churches and tent revivals to which the group could have traveled,
opening for bigger acts or providing the musical interlude for a well-
known evangelist with whom they had connections, The Royal Sons,
they named the group, and their show-stopper, the song that
walked ’em, made folks have church, was an adaptation of an old
hymn by Thomas A. Dorsey that the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet used
to do, all about sitting at the bedside of a neighbor who was about
to cross the swelling tide. Lowman would hold the long bass notes
while he played nervous, angular lines on his guitar, and his cousin
Clarence would ask the neighbor to tell Jesus he was coming over,
too, and the ladies would rocket off the pews, hands in air, eyes
squeezed shut, a sinuous motion snapping their bodies upward from
the base of the spine, shrieking words that were and weren’t words
until the ushers or their neighbors laid on the hands, sometimes
catching the spirit themselves. When the song ended, there would
be a dampness in the air, a funky smell sometimes, and the arpeggio
Lowman plucked for the song’s end would be answered with a few
“Yas Lawd”s and the ubiquitous rising inflection of a ‘““Waaal?” The
church would be silent but for some sniffling after that, and it would
be up to the organist or piano player to break the mood so the
preacher could speak.
Lowman learned how he could use pieces of chords played on
his guitar to fill in the tiny holes in the vocal parts, and he listened
closely to the big-time groups they played with, picking up some of
their vocal tricks and taking them back to the Sons’ rehearsals.
One night they caught the ear of someone from Apollo Records—
maybe Bess Berman herself—and were told that if they could make
 Dedicated to You | 233

it up to New York, they had a contract. If? Apollo in 1948 was the
biggest gospel label in America, riding high on the virtually im-
possible success of Mahalia Jackson’s “Move On Up a Little
Higher,” a song that had sold well over a million copies and was
still selling. If? The Royal Sons would make it to New York if they
had to walk until their feet were bloody stumps to cut a record for
Apollo, And which song to cut? “Bedside of a Neighbor,” with
“Journey's End” on the flip.
But the Royal Sons who cut Apollo 253 (that was the record’s
number) were already changing. Two original members, William
Sanders and Anthony Price, had stayed behind in Winston-Salem,
and the Tanner Brothers, Eugene and John, replaced them. New
York turned their heads right away. They got more worldly, more
cynical, Like all the greenhorns before them, they courted respect
with a vengeance, and probably worked harder at it because they
had touched down in the hippest place in the world, Harlem, The
women who walked those streets bore no resemblance to the heavy-
hipped countrified girls who had sought them out after tent shows
down home, and a lot of the men weren’t even mildly deferential
to white people.
Another thing people didn’t do there was buy old-timey gospel
records like the Royal Sons made. On gospel shows, they were
stuck toward the bottom of the line-up, and any gospel observer
will tell you that nobody ever shows up for the early innings of such
shows except very old ladies (and, nowadays, white people). Hip
young people never went to gospel shows. Hell, half of ’em never
went to church.
So the Sons were stuck cutting records that didn’t sell, with a
contract to fulfill for Apollo. The decision they made was probably
not a tortured one. Most likely they really wanted to go where the
action was, where the chicks hung out. In the early 1950s, that
meant they should cut blues. Not blues in the country sense, not
even blues in the Wynonie Harris/Roy Brown/Big Joe Turner
sense, but the kind of music that was getting known as “rhythm
and blues.” The group sound was catching on in New York, with
such pioneer vocal groups as the Ravens and the Five Keys scoring
hits as early as 1946.
Clarence was probably the last holdout, but he surely saw the
 234 | ED WARD
advantages for himself. He was the front-man, the one the spot-
light focused on, especially during the ballads. He relented, and in
mid-1952, the Royal Sons met with Bess Berman and told her that
they'd decided to become a blues group called the “5” Royales.
Lowman had gone to work writing songs (and rewriting gospel
songs) and came up with some pretty wild stuff, including a
number about laundromats, those new places people took their
clothes and had an attendant do them in a machine, called
“Laundromat Blues,” where he praised his laundromat baby, who
put him in a spin. The first couple of sessions were cut with tenor-
man Charlie “Little Jazz” Ferguson, late in 1952, They didn’t go
exactly as Lowman had hoped. He thought that Jazz spent too
much time honking his hom, and he was mad that he was hardly
allowed to play any guitar.
When Bess Herman heard “Baby, Don’t Do It,” she knew she
had a hit, and even though it was Thanksgiving week, she released
it. Sales went nuts all over the country, and the hit carried through
the Christmas season and on into the next year. Lowman never did
find out how many copies it sold, but it was over a million. The
“5” Royales were always busy doing stage shows including—sweet
revenge—the Apollo, where they’d languished at the bottom of so
many Sunday afternoon gospel bills. In the spring, they went back
into the studio to cut some more with Jazz, and the first release
out of this was a plaintive ballad, “Help Me Somebody,” with
Clarence wailing his heart out so strong that you just had to
remember the church.* It was too intense, and they followed it
tight away with “Crazy, Crazy, Crazy,” a song that was silly, silly,
silly, but was a lot of fun to do on stage.
That was another thing they were learning. In a gospel show,
you had to wait till the audience got the Spirit before you could
cut up your own self, but with blues it was different—you started
by cutting up. And could the “5” Royales cut up! Hank Ballard,
whose Midnighters were second to none in lasciviousness, the first
vocal group to have their records consistently banned, always freely
admitted that his group stole moves wholesale from the Royales

* Nine years later, this was the last song they cut with Willie Mitchell.
 Dedicated to You | 235

and still couldn’t come close to them at their most outrageous.

Attired in powder-blue, pink, or white jackets, white shirts, black
bowties and dark pants, they’d go nuts—leaping into each other’s
arms, humping the mike stands, Lowman playing the guitar with
his tongue, Clarence doing somersaults, skinny Johnny Tanner
doing splits. But they were always in tune, always right on it on
time. Audiences ate it up, and pastors in some of the towns they
played denounced them with uncommon fury.
Finally, Apollo awarded them an unusual honor: an album
entitled Rockin’ with the “5” Royales, Apollo’s first non-sacred
long-player. The artwork was terrible (five rocking chairs), but the
music was right there. Unfortunately, not long after its release,
Apollo began to run out of steam, something it kept doing for the
next ten years. An independent label, it was seldom able to keep up
with the rest of the market. Sure, it had Mahalia, but gospel sells
slow and steady, and doesn’t give the quick, high-volume spurts you
need to build the cash-flow. Without the cash-flow, your promotion
department begins to fall apart, and without it, you don’t get
airplay.
Thus, after a show in Cincinnati one night, the Royales. were
approached by a very slick-talking black man who said he worked
for King Records. He’d been watching them for some time, he said,
and thought that Mr. Nathan could offer them a better deal than
they were getting at Apollo. Lowman muttered that in his opinion
that wouldn’t be too hard to do, Furthermore, the man said, King
had ties with some really superior booking agencies, and could get
them on tours that didn’t dissolve at midpoint, leaving you stranded
in Keokuk with no way to get back home. He knew they’d seen a
couple of those (and he suspected that Lowman suspected they
were doing another one), and before long Lowman was shaking his
hand, agreeing to come in and talk to Nathan Monday morning.
Syd Nathan was certainly one of American pop music’s more
unlikely heroes. Very nearly blind, with a temper that seemed to
have no upper limit, he was an ordinary guy doing one of the few
things (dry goods, importing) that Jews were allowed to do in
German-and-Wasp-dominated Cincinnati, and doing okay but not
great. At the age of fifty, his blood pressure had risen so high that
 236 | ED WARD
his doctor urged him to retire or get into a business that wouldn’t
irritate him so much. For reasons known only to himself, he chose
to start a record company, and began recording the hillbilly artists
who broadcast on WCKY, in Covington, Kentucky, across the
river. As the King roster grew, Nathan began signing blues
artists like Wynonie “Mr. Blues” Harris, Roy Brown, and the
Dominoes, and, since he owned a good chunk of the publishing,
he began urging country songs on blues artists and vice versa,
resulting in some doomed hybrids (the bluegrass Stanley Brothers’
version of Hank Ballard’s “Finger Poppin’ Time” comes to mind)
as well as some brilliant ones (Moon Mullican’s Western bop
rendition of Bull Moose Jackson’s “Cherokee Boogie,” and Freddie
King’s inspired reworking of a steel guitar classic, “Remington
Ride”). Racial barriers never meant a whole lot to Syd Nathan,
and whites and blacks played on the same sessions, country and
thythm and blues.
Located in a red brick factory building on tree-lined Brewster
Avenue, on the fringes of a multi-racial (but heavily black) ghetto,
King was just the place for the Royales. It was big enough to have
clout, and small enough that the artists all seemed like a family.
House songwriters would pitch your songs right along with theirs
to people on and off the label, and they seemed to have a real good
ear for what an artist could do with a song. The recording studio
was state-of-the-art, with big, expensive RCA microphones, a mixing
board, and, later, even a four-track recorder. The engineers seemed
to know what they were doing, and the recordings came out much
clearer than the ones the “5” Royales had made for Apollo.
Of course, there were disadvantages, too. For one thing, with
so many artists in a field to promote, sometimes the promotion men
didn’t do such a good job, losing your record in the pile they were
delivering to the stations. Second, Nathan had a terrible habit of
type-casting you, and, having decided the Royales were clowns,
had them cut a slew of novelty tunes. (They weren’t alone, as
Lowman found out while waiting to see Nathan one day. He began
talking to a hillbilly singer named Jimmy Osbome, who’d had a
huge hit with “The Lonesome Death of Little Kathy Fiscus,” based
on a newspaper story. His A&R man had stuck him with tragedy
 Dedicated to You | 237

after tragedy, and Osborne was watching his career shrivel. “Ain’t
my fault the public gets tired of dead kids,” he’d bitched at
Lowman, who nodded sagely.) Some of these songs were delightful,
like “School Girl,” the tale of an insatiable female minor with a
nice, explicit chorus:

(Would she?) You think she wouldn't?

(Could she?) Aw, you think she couldn't?
(Will she?) You think she won't?
(Do she?) You think she don’t?
(Oh!) Oh! (Oh!) Oh, but she did.

(There are people around today who would kill for a film of the
routine the Royales performed when they did this tune.) But most
of the novelties, like “Monkey Hips and Rice,” “Right Around the
Corner,” and “Mohawk Squaw” were pretty ordinary.
Lowman knew they could do better. He knew the public knew,
too, because they hadn’t had a hit since “Too Much Loyvin’”
dented the bottom of the R&B charts in September, 1953, when
they were still on Apollo. He knew that the sincerity of “Help Me
Somebody” was a strong point they hadn’t exploited, and that
Clarence could get the girls swooning when he sang something like
“When You Walked Through The Door” or “Tears of Joy.”
Lowman also wrote a different kind of love song, one that dealt
with real things men felt that the ooh-baby-be-mine sort of song
didn’t come close to, like the fact that men could be weak, or that
you gotta let your girl get hers, too. This last idea had become a
song called “Get Something Out of It,” and boy, it was such a
weird song that if the guys hadn’t sung their asses off on it, Syd’d
never have let it out, even as a B-side.
In the four years since their last hit, the group had toured with
dozens of package shows, working their way down the bill as time
passed. First Johnny Tanner’s brother Eugene had quit in disgust,
and then Windsor King, who’d been a Royal Son with Lowman
and Clarence, split. There wasn’t much money to pay them off, and
there wasn’t much to offer a new guy in the way of fame and
fortune. But there were always those to whom the lure of the bright
 238 | ED WARD
lights was irresistible, and Lowman’s spirits raised considerably
when he auditioned Obediah Carter, who was as extroverted and
ebullient on stage as Johnny Tanner, and handled the tenor parts
right up into a show-stopping falsetto, even higher than Windsor
had gone. Eugene they replaced with Johnny Moore, a sober, quiet
guy who kept tabs on the guys’ drinking and served as the group’s
money-man after Lowman discovered that he had a phenomenal
memory for details. From the wildest to the mildest, Lowman
would think sometimes, watching them sleep on the converted
schoolbus that hauled the colored groups from show to show.
Finally, one hot summer afternoon in the King studio, Lowman
decided that the time had come to make the big change. He
started them off with a novelty, just so Syd could say that the
session hadn’t been a total waste, but then he pulled out one of
his most soulful ballads yet, “Tears of Joy,” which featured an
unbelievable, complicated acappella opening and one of Clarence’s
best vocals ever. Lowman insisted on using his guitar on this session,
and he warned the sax player to keep his distance, a warning
Obediah underlined by patting his back pocket. Then Lowman
started clapping—one, clap, three, clap/one, clap, three, clap—and
as soon as they had it, he threw in a chant—Think!, clap, Think!,
clap—and then he started snaking around with his guitar. An hour
later, it was done. It was easily the best thing they'd ever waxed,
and Lowman had been so ecstatic by the second take that he’d
woken up the sax player to take eight in the middle. They knocked
off one more ballad for good luck, called it a day, and went off to a
joint in Kentucky to celebrate.
“Think” was released five years to the day after “Baby, Don’t
Do It,” and it duplicated the earlier record’s odd staying power.
They even got a very ritzy supper-club New Year’s Eve gig out of
it, but more important, they were back on top of the bill wherever
they played. Lowman, more confident now, was getting further out
there with his guitar, because he had accidentally bought a Gibson
Les Paul Signature. It was impossible to play pear-shaped Charlie
Christian lines on such a wild axe, impossible to play those gospel-
style arpeggios, either, unless you were turned way down. Turmed
up, it screamed, the “too hot” pickups overloaded, and when you
 Dedicated to You | 239

played block chords, the effect was positively orchestral. Lowman

had bought it for its solid body (important when you threw it
around the way he did on stage) and its creamy white color, but
the more he fooled with it, the more crazy ideas he got. They tried
them out in rehearsal, and one song in particular, “Say It,” became
a showcase for freakish guitar sounds. Lowman worked up a routine
where he’d beg, get down on his knees, with the guitar standing
straight up between them as he squeezed out the licks, finishing by
turning it all the way up and putting it behind his head so that the
strings faced the amplifier and it squealed with feedback. It worked.
There was another song, too, that he wanted to do, but it was
important to him, and it was giving him trouble. Lowman had
married a fine lady in Winston-Salem a couple of years back, a
nurse with a degree from Tuskegee that had gotten her a good
job at Winston-Salem’s colored hospital. She was incredibly under-
standing, insisting that the boys eat and sleep when they'd pull in
at 4 a.m. after an all-night drive from the last stop on a tour, drunk,
babbling, high on tea and bennies, glad to be home. Her very
presence would invest civilization even in Obediah, who would slow
way down and start calling her ma’am. She was an especially good
influence on Lowman, who loved her so much that sometimes he’d
imagine she was leaving him and he'd write songs that pleaded,
begged, and boasted. Or he’d imagine he’d just met her and write
one of his worshipful love ballads.
But what he wanted to do with this song was to talk about her
as she really was, not as some fantasy figure; how she was so good
to him, stuck by him, and put up with his weird life. He had a
tune, they had harmonies, but all Clarence did was sing nonsense
syllables and the few verses Lowman had come up with. In
desperation, he turned to Ralph Bass, a King staff songwriter, and
together they commandeered a rehearsal room and sang and played
the song over and over until the song fell together and all the
words fit. The lyrics still weren’t the best Lowman or Bass had ever
written, but Lowman was proud of the entire first verse, and the
melody, coupled with a guitar line that didn’t quite fit, made you
want to hear the song again and again.
On the day of the session, Lowman showed up with another
 240 | ED WARD
guitar player, and the Royales were certain he’d lost his mind until
the other guitarist took his instrument out of its case. Johnny
Tanner took one look at it, did a comic double-take, and said
“Whaaaat is that?” “That,” said Lowman, “is a Fender Precision
electric bass guitar.” “Oh, no, Pete,” said Clarence, “you ain’t
gonna fuck up a session that’s this important with some damn fool
idea of yours.” But they struck up the new tune at Lowman’s in-
sistence, and the new guy played quietly and subtly, except in one
or two places where his support buoyed the song up unexpectedly
and, they all had to admit, made it sound better.
“You clowns are ready, we can cut some phonograph records,”
the recording engineer said through the intercom. The group was
eager to do the new song the new way, so after the usual mike
balancing to make sure the instruments didn’t overwhelm ‘the
vocals, Clarence stepped up to his microphone and half-sung, half-
spoke the words that would make him immortal:

This is dedicated
To the one I-I
Love.

Lowman burned on the guitar, the bass. man did his part, and
Clarence and the Royales sang with all the churchy fervor they
could come up with. They did three takes, but that was just for
safety’s sake. Even the engineer caught the spirit, and remarked
“Gittin’ hot, gittin’ hot!” after they listened to the playback. Next,
they decided to do a gospel tune Lowman had -rewritten as “Don’t
Be Ashamed to Call My Name,” which had some pretty haphazard
lyrics (the second verse is a nursery rhyme, for instance), but which
allowed Lowman and the bass player to get a real nice chunga-
chunga-chunga bop-BOP! riff going in between the lines, Lowman’s
guitar playing on this number got pretty extreme, so that when he
announced “Say It” as the next tune, Johnny Moore looked at
Johnny Tanner and rolled his eyes heavenward, but they shrugged
and went into it. About half-way into the first take, the engineer
interrupted to tell Lowman that his guitar was distorting, so he
should turn it down. “I want it that way,” he snapped, but the guy
 Dedicated to You | 241

was insistent, so Lowman made a show of turning the amp down,

turning the guitar up with his pinkie so the engineer couldn’t see,
and of course this made it distort just as much as before. After
four aborted takes, Lowman and the engineer, a skinny white kid
just out of the Signal Corps, were almost at blows, so Johnny Moore
went into the control room and talked to him. “Do it any damn
way you please,” the intercom finally barked, “just do it. Take five.”
Take five went without a hitch, and Lowman miraculously kept
his final solo under enough control so that while the guitar roared,
it didn’t go into the squealing or buzzing it sometimes did,
although the amp made a frying noise that showed up on the tape.
Lowman listened to the playback with his eyes closed, and when it
was over, the engineer asked him if he wanted to do another take.
Lowman toyed with him for a minute just to worry him, and then
he declined in favor of going back in and knocking off a novelty.
He did, however, insist that “Say It” be released as a single before
“Dedicated to the One I Love.” He thought it was a bigger hit (he
was also the sole writer), and was the direction he wanted the
Royales to go in, but the public disagreed. Some radio stations
wouldn’t play it because it sounded too much like a blues tune,
although not enough like one to put it on the late-night blues hour,
and others rejected it just because it was too weird. The folks at
King didn’t sweat promoting it, because they knew there was a
stone hit in the can, and in April, 1958, they released it.
Over the years, Lowman Pauling probably made more money off
of his half of “Dedicated to the One I Love” than he made off of
all his other songs combined. The “5” Royales took it to the top in
1958, the Shirelles did likewise—but on the pop charts, too!—in
1961, and the Mamas and Papas did it yet again in 1967. Some-
where along the way, a third name appeared on the credits and
quickly vanished, because Ralph Bass was nobody to steal a song
from—he knew that game backwards.
Right after the “Dedicated” session, the “5” Royales posed for a
group photo in color, because King had decided to release an album.
In the picture, the Royales, dressed in pink tuxedo jackets, white
shirts, and baggy blue trousers, stand by the acoustic tile of the
studio wall. Lowman is in the center, his Les Paul tucked into his
 242 | ED WARD
tight armpit, and he is hunched down slightly, smiling into the
camera. To his right stand Obediah Carter and Johnny Tanner,
leaning way back with their arms spread out, and on his left
Clarence and Johnny Moore mirror them, although they aren’t
leaning back quite as much, and they’re very slightly out of focus,
Clarence staring a bit above the camera. They all look pleased.
They should—an album, even that late in the game, was a very
special tribute for a group that didn’t “cross over” to the white
charts, the way Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers or the Del-
Vikings did. King only released albums on their biggest-selling acts,
like Little Willie John, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Earl
Bostic, and Bill Doggett. Of course, albums didn’t make up much
of the record market in 1958, with the focus being on singles and
EPs, but Dedicated to You sold pretty well, probably because it
had two “million-sellers” on it.*
The “5” Royales were now stars at King; 24” x 36” posters of
them were sent to sepia record stores, and they were accorded
respect by deejays, record executives and, aspiring stars alike, One
youngster who seemed to worship them was a small, wiry kid from
Georgia, an ex-boxer whose group, the Famous Flames, was pat-
terned after the “5” Royales in many ways. Their guitarist,
Cleveland Lowe, played in a style similar to Lowman’s but without
his inventiveness, and when the vocalists, John Terry, Sylvester
Keels, and Bobby Byrd harmonized, the sound was very much like
the Royales. The kid’s name was James Brown, and Lowman had
never seen such a little bundle of confidence, just as he’d never had
anyone follow him around the way this kid did. Lowman didn’t
always care for the kid’s music—“Please Please Please” was plenty
emotional, for instance, but where was the story, where was some-
thing for the listener to identify with?—yet he had a sense that he
might be on to something. “I’m gonna record some of your stuff
someday, Pete,” James often said, and Lowman would say, “Just
don’t scream the words, boy,” and they'd crack up.
“Cross country tours are nothing new to the “5” Royales, and

* There was no regulatory body to verify claims of million-sellerdom in

those days, but in this case it seems entirely likely that it is true.
 Dedicated to You | 243

with each stop they set records for attendance,” said the liner notes
on Dedicated to You, and for once a set of King notes told the
truth. One memorable tour combined them with James Brown,
Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Little Willie John, Otis
Williams and the Charms, and Bill Doggett, whose band provided
support for the vocalists. It was a King All-Stars tour, and the
Royales alternated top billing with James Brown, depending on
which act was bigger in the town they were playing. Meanwhile,
King, impressed with the sales of Dedicated, and eager to cash in
on the success the group was having on the road, threw together
another album, The “5” Royales Sing For You, an indifferent mix-
ture of old and new stuff that infuriated Lowman, because he knew
there was much better stuff they could have released. It didn’t even
have a hit on it, so it sold less than 10,000 copies, and is nearly
impossible to find nowadays. Also, the hysteria surrounding a
package tour like they were on made it impractical to sell albums
from the stage or in the lobby like you could do at a gospel show,
so they couldn’t even get rid of them that way.
When the tour deposited them back in Cincinnati in July, 1959,
the group cut a couple more sessions, and Lowman felt sure he had
a hit in one or two of the songs. Either the heart-stopping ballad
“Miracle of Love,” with Clarence singing stronger than ever before,
or “My Sugar Sugar,” which really rocked, would take off. He also
spoke to Syd Nathan about the album fiasco, and together with
the head of the rhythm-and-blues artists-and-repertoire department
he programmed King 678, The “5” Royales, so that it featured
some of their very best songs (“School Girl,” “When You Walked
Through the Door,” “Get Something Out of It,” “Wonder Where
Love Has Gone”), as well as the ones they had just cut. King put
it out as soon as “Miracle of Love” began to take off, and the
Royales went back on the road.
What they didn’t know was that “Miracle” took off, but it didn’t
stay launched very long. King scrambled among the tapes and
released “Tell Me You Care,” a pretty indifferent ballad with the
Royales singing out of tune, backed with “Wonder Where Love
Has Gone,” a better song, on the B-side. When it flopped—which
was quickly—they put out “My Sugar, Sugar,” and things began
 244 | ED WARD
looking better right away. It wasn’t a hit, exactly, but it wasn’t
really a dud, either. And in those days, it took a bit longer to find
these things out, since the rhythm and blues record business hardly
made enough money to warrant demographic or market research.
Even so, a pattern was emerging.
One night, as they were leaving the backstage of a show, a teen-
ager had called Obediah “an old Caldoniafied nigger,” and the rest
of the guys had to hold him back to keep him from outright throt-
tling the kid. Back on the bus, they shunned the usual card game
and huddled together to talk. “Kid’s got a point, you know,” said
Johnny Moore. “We ain’t gettin’ any younger, and we ain’t even
havin’ that many hits these days. They don’t put the right records
out, and they don’t promote ’em right, and sometimes they do
okay, you know, but lately they ain’t even been doin’ that well.
Pete, you told me you couldn’t even get Nathan on the phone that
time you needed dough to get Obediah out of jail in Lake Charles.
I betcha they drop us real soon. We better be lookin’ out for
somethin’ else to do.” “Go back to the church,’ mumbled
Clarence. Lowman looked at him hard, and then grinned. “Sheeeit,
walkin’ old ladies, is that your style, homeboy? Cuz if it is, you
can go, but me, I can just think back to a couple hours ago, and I
can see those people yellin’ and screamin’ just like they always have.
So what if some young punk don’t like us? There’s always somebody
don’t like you. They don’t like you because you ain’t the Dixie
Hummingbirds or they don’t like you because you ain’t the
symphony orchestra or they don’t like you because you ain’t Nat
King Cole. But I know, even if y’all don’t, that we ain’t seen this
thing to the end yet, that we got some more years yet before we
can call it a day, and if you don’t want to do it no more, go on
ahead and go, and I'll hire me some niggers that do want to do it.”
There was a silence in the bus after this outburst, and even the
card game lowered its collective voice. Nobody knew what to say.
After all, Lowman was right, the crowd did dig it, but about the
rest of it...
In June, 1960, they found out. Their contract came up for
renewal, and King passed on its option. Their last two singles, “I’m
With You” and “Why,” had been dead on arrival. Syd Nathan
 Dedicated to You | 245

apologized, and kept repeating that he was a businessman, and if it

were a purely personal decision they'd be welcome to stay forever,
but he didn’t look Lowman in the face when he shook his hand and
wished him well. And then—irony supreme—the “5” Royales were
without a record label in the same month that the very label that
had dropped them released one of Lowman’s songs done by that
skinny kid who'd kept saying he’d do it, and they sat by and
watched James Brown rocket to the top of the charts with his
eccentric version of “Think.” James had become quite a star since
’56, and yet he always remembered the people who'd helped him
out. He had been irate when he’d learned about the Royales being
dropped, but he didn’t feel he was secure enough in his position
at King yet to make waves. He did his best to see that the group
kept working the road, and he assured Lowman that he’d do
something for them as soon as he could. Lowman thanked him, but
wondered just how much James could do, now or ever.
Even without a label, things weren’t too bad for the “5” Royales.
Unlike the rock and roll audience, the rhythm and blues audience
is very devoted. Once you’ve shown your stuff, you can be assured
of people coming to see you for quite a while. They'll keep you
going through dry periods of up to ten years, so long as you'll sing
your hits, do your act, and try not to act too bored when you do.
They'll fill a club over and over, and there will be enough of them
so you'll get asked back next time you're in the vicinity, just so long
as that isn’t too soon. The Dells have been living this way since
1955, the O’Jays and the Manhattans almost as long. If by 1960 the
sort of music the “5” Royales did best was on its way out, at least
among youngsters, there was still a market for their talents as live
performers on the much-maligned chitlin’ circuit.
It was after one of these gigs that they met young Willie
Mitchell, who led the house band and did some producing at Home
of the Blues, a small Memphis label with leasing deals at several
larger labels. He’d become a “5” Royales fan after he’d bought a
copy of their last album in a drugstore, and, with the Shirelles
heating up the charts with their version of “‘Dedicated,” he felt the
Royales deserved another chance. (Syd Nathan, never one to pass
up a buck, re-released the Royales’ version). They cut several songs
 246 | ED WARD
for Mitchell, and he put them out. They sounded tired, even though
Clarence’s vocal on the new version of “Help Me Somebody”
completely eclipses the one they hit with on Apollo. But Mitchell
had an idea, one he was sure would give the “5” Royales a new
start. He called Lowman in Winston-Salem, and three days later,
they were checked in to the Blue Bird Motel, Memphis’s finest
colored motel. It was summer, and it was hot.

As Lowman crossed the parking lot, the sounds of traffic receded,

and the clanking of the motel’s air conditioner got louder. He saw
that the station-wagon was back, which meant that Johnny,
Obediah, and Johnny were back. Was this gonna be hard? He
realized that he didn’t know, himself, Maybe the right question
was how hard is this gonna be? He didn’t want to go in the door.
He didn’t want to have to look into their faces, didn’t want to have
to answer their questions, didn’t want to have to pay them off and
then turn his back and.walk away on all of it.
And it was just then that a feeling, both warm and cool, swept
over him. It seemed to start simultaneously at the bottom of his
belly and in his heart, reaching out arms and turning once like the
hands of a clock. As if from a distance, he felt himself exhale, and
the feeling redoubled, hugging him from within. He witnessed the
sound of the blood in his temples without really feeling that he was
in them, and then he exhaled again, and a drop of sweat fell cold
from his hair onto his neck, and he inhaled, and he exhaled, and he
knew he was home again.
Eight eyes looked up when he walked into the room, but nobody
spoke for a long while, and, of course, it was Johnny Moore who
broke the silence merely by saying “Hey, Pete.” Lowman suppressed
a strange chuckle and sat down on the dressing table. “Well, y'all,
I guess you know why we’re here.” “It’s cool, man,” Obediah said.
“We been seein’ it comin’, but we knew you had to see it on your
own time, Pete. But it’s cool.” Well, no shit, he thought, and then
he said it: “Well, no shit,” flat like that. They were all smiling by
now, even Clarence, who’d winced at the profanity, and he spoke
next. “Pete, git your axe and let’s sing a song, brother.” Lowman
 Dedicated to You | 247

grabbed his cousin’s glance with his own, and narrowed his eyes to
see if there were double-dealing in it, but there wasn’t. And he
knew which song it would be, a song about parting, of course, but
a song of hope, and he unpacked the Les Paul while the tiny
Fender Princeton amp warmed up, and suddenly he realized where
the feeling he’d had had come from.
He gripped the neck and played the G arpeggio as he’d done so
many times, and they started to sing, but much slower than they
usually did:

I was sitting by the bedside of a neighbor

Who was just about to cross the swelling tide
And I asked himif he would do me a favor
Kindly take a message to the other side.

Somehow it didn’t jump like it used to, but somehow that didn’t
matter any more because the jump had been replaced by some
other quality that meant just as much. The guys were taking chances
with the harmony that Lowman had only dreamed about, and yet it
stayed in there, and he was playing a guitar obbligato against the
verses that seemed to go everywhere at once, but clung to the
sound nevertheless. He had never heard Clarence sing like this, and
he wasn’t sure but what he might not want to hear him sing like
this again. They were all singing like, well, not like their lives
depended on ‘it, somehow, but like something else of equal im-
portance did. And, as Lowman steered the chords around that final
plagal cadence, that instrumental a-men, he caught sight of what it
was, and something inside of him rejoiced, because he knew that
now, even this far down the road, it would never, never leave him,
and it never did, never again.

I made all of that up. Not all of it, actually, but most of it. The
part about me at R. J. Reynolds is true, but the rest of it only
touches down here and there. I didn’t really do any research before
I wrote it, partially out of laziness, partially because I didn’t quite
know where to go for some of the information. I did call Winston-
 248 | ED WARD
Salem information to see if Lowman Pauling was listed, and found
out that there were quite a few Paulings, but no Lowman. The
next day, quite by accident, a friend told me that he’d seen his
obituary in the January, 1974, issue of Jet, and that it hadn’t said
much. He also told me that James Brown had produced some
sessions with a group called the “5” Royales (Bootsy Collins, who
played bass with Brown, remembers playing these sessions, and told
me that “those songs was some bad boys, too”), but King hadn’t
released anything, and that there exists a record by “Lowman
Pauling and the Royalton” on Federal. But I never called Winston-
Salem back once I’d ascertained the approximate names of the guys
in the group (approximate because my only sources are a madden-
ingly incomplete reissue record with terrible liner notes and a book
on “oldies” that’s riddled with inaccuracies), even to see if
Clarence’s last name was Paul or Pauling. I never called the
performing-rights societies (ASCAP or BMI) to see who gets
Lowman’s royalties, failed to follow up a lead that Ralph Bass is
working for TK Productions in Chicago, and didn’t seek out James
Brown or Hank Ballard for recollections.
I don’t feel particularly terrible about this crime against scholar-
ship, especially because the body of songs that Lowman Pauling
left behind on his records has already given me more to think about
and enjoy than I could ever top, except with a time-machine and a
ticket to one of their shows. I enjoy looking at them on the cover
of Dedicated to You, an album I bought because the guy in the
record store told me it was “rare,” and wondering who they were,
how they felt, what sustained them, and what happened to them.
I'd like to read a “real” article about them, with interviews and
information about the sessions, and maybe some greying out-of-focus
photos from some fan’s Brownie camera as illustration, but I’m
not the guy who’s going to write it.
There’s another reason I don’t feel bad about the lengthy
counterfeit above, and it’s a bit more difficult to explain, although
it’s a corollary to the first reason: I think that the mystery has been
completely taken away from rock and roll, that it has been over-
explained, over-analyzed, and, in the process, it has become effec-
tively neutered, incapable of shock and joy. I think that for many
“rock” artists, the impulse toward fun has been smothered by an
 Dedicated toYou | 249

increasingly rigidified sense of what is and what isn’t acceptable,

destroyed by a flock of vultures who won't be sated until the corpse
is picked clean, the roll removed from the rock, and every secret,
no matter how trivial or irrelevant to the creative act, is iaid bare.
And when the self-censoring impulse provides the shadow between
the impulse and the act, you're dead, Jim, but you just don’t know
it.
Unfortunately, the audience for current rock and roll has bought
right into this process. People expect exegesis as a preamble to
pleasure, and accept obfuscation and pretension as necessary com-
ponents of both art and entertainment. Programmed by an insidious
process that started before Woodstock, they have become passive
consumers, confusing novelty with innovation, an attitude fostered
by “rock critics” who unreasonably demand that an artist never fail,
constantly better his work, and provide complete access to his
thoughts and actions at all times. Of course, the androids who
produce “alternative” FM radio are as much to blame for this as
the critics, since they, too, would rather present mediocre new
product by an artist than play the old stuff, even if it’s less self-
conscious, and less “important” than the new. The music that is
the end-product of this process is undanceable, for the most part,*
has lyrics that are often about nothing at all and show no inspiration
from real-world experience, and clearly shows that it was constructed
bit by bit in the sterile atmosphere of a very complex recording
studio. The roll, the fun, the noise, the craziness, is gone. Yet
people still buy it, identify with it, and go see it performed. It’s
amazing to me that so many people fell for this so quickly, and
with so much seeming pleasure, and that it’s generated the amaz-
ingly lucrative industry that it has. The book you hold in your
hands is testament to this, as, I suspect, is the fact of your holding
it.
I’m not innocent in this affair, either—far from it. I began
writing about rock and roll a dozen years ago because at the time
it was the only way a young writer without newspaper experience

* The portion of it which aspires to being art music, as opposed to dance

music, is (with exceptions) lamentably out-of-touch with the goings-on
in real contemporary art music, yet it gets ten times the press.
 250 | ED WARD
could break into print. Right along with my peers, I declared “rock”
to be the “art of our times,” and wrote more than my share of
fatuity and fustian. At the time, I guess none of us realized that
we were digging our own graves, that the “rock press” would soon
become a ghetto from which most of us could not escape. We were
told by editors and writers that there are certain things “rock
critics” shouldn’t even attempt (like serious analysis, or reporting
or criticizing anything at all outside the music biz), and we were
held in contempt by a journalistic establishment that perceives the
rock press as the most ass-licking, weak-spined, corrupt sector of the
Fourth Estate, an impression the rock press itself has done almost
nothing to rectify or change. It has narrowed its focus so much
that it has spawned an entire generation of readers oblivious of its
own accomplishments in fiction, art, drama, politics, “serious”
music, movies, comics, science, and sports—not to mention the
lives and works of past artists, thinkers, and performers whose
ideas inspire the present. Talk about a desert island! I cannot bring
myself to believe that rational, thinking human beings have volun-
tarily brought this to pass, but the voices of protest are so muted,
and there is so little being done about it that it’s an almost in-
escapable conclusion.
The more time I spend with “rock” (a term I hate as much—or
had you guessed?—as I hate being called a “rock critic’), the less
it means to me in many ways. There’s too much missing from it. I
know because I remember the sense of joy I experienced when
certain events of my life coalesced around a rock and roll song, or
the sense of adventure I felt as an eight-year-old, tuning in Alan
Freed or Harlem’s WLIB to hear real “teenage” music. It never
occurred to me—then or later—that I was part of a community,
because I wasn’t. I never believed that the words to a rock and roll
song could give me any insight into how to live or love, because
they couldn’t do anything but suggest, no matter what the rock
critics say.
Hey, the poets of our time are poets, not rock lyricists; the
musicians who will leave a mark are musicians, not rock musicians;
the story-tellers of our time are writing fiction and journalism, not
rock criticism; the important artists of our time are artists, not rock
artists. If their lives or works of art touch rock and roll, well and
 Dedicated to You | 251
good, and damn near unavoidable, but please don’t confuse cause
and effect, form and content, or structure and meaning. There’s a
big wide world out there—don’t you want to know about it? There
are people who are a lot more exciting than anyone you've seen on
television—don’t you want to know what they're doing?
Maybe I’m an idiot, but I am, despite everything, cautiously
optimistic about the future of this country’s cultural life. I’m just
enough of a believer in the human animal to feel that, just as
America’s eaters have begun rejecting Wonder Bread for the real
stuff, there is bound to be a reaction to the insipidity of America’s
cultural diet. Entertainment is as essential as vitamin C, but it
won’t work in the absence of serious artistic endeavor and intellec-
tual activity, and I’d like to believe that people are becoming dimly
aware of that fact. Of course, I’ve got a vested interest there, too. I
would like to make enough dough writing so that I could stop
regarding such things as clothing and medical care as luxuries. At
the moment, the things I want to do, the values I hold dear, the
goals I want to. reach in my life are out of fashion. If—and this is a
hard one—I can keep the bitterness that sweeps over me when I see
what my peers have made out of this culture from overwhelming
me and poisoning my attitudes, if I can stay alive and healthy,
mentally and physically, until the pendulum swings back and what
I do—hell, what I am—becomes socially acceptable again, there is
literally no telling what I, and all the other people like me who are
wasting their talents on trash and ephemera or hiding out and
waiting, might be able to accomplish.

Life can never be

Exactly like we want it to be

Lowman Pauling and Ralph Bass wrote that one afternoon in

Cincinnati. I’ll buy that, but I'll never give up believing that it
can be more like I want it to be than it currently is, and that, with
help, I can make it that way for myself and help others do it for
themselves, The freedom to let my imagination roam that the very
best music—including the very best rock and roll—gives me has
become an important element of the help that I need to do it
right. That’s all I need to know about it, and all you need, too.
 EPILOGUE

TREASURE ISLAND

GREIL MARCUS
My colleagues whose essays you have read were placed in a
privileged position: they were obliged to confront destiny only
with an eye to their own pleasure, sustenance, or, as the case may
be, enlightenment. But someone must put selfishness aside—some-
one must take responsibility for the tradition. The desert island
question, after all, has always had its corollary: the Martian
question. That is, were a Martian to land on Earth and ask you
the meaning of rock and roll—a likely prospect, given the Chuck
Berry record NASA shot into space a while back—what would you
play to explain? And this question, forcing the respondent into a
position where he or she must represent the human spirit to an
alien, has never been nearly so manageable as the desert island
conundrum,
You start, perhaps, with “She Loves You.” “That,” you say with
pride, “is rock and roll!” But what if the Martian doesn’t catch
on? What if he/ske/it is a musicologist, and wants to know where
“She Loves You” came from, or where it went? Or what if, after
spinning “She Loves You,” you think of “There Goes My Baby,”
and find yourself saying, as you inevitably will, “Hey, wait a minute,
you gotta listen to this...” You and the Martian will be there for
a long time.
 Treasure Island | 253

For these reasons, and because recent research has shown without
a doubt that Martians love to land on godforsaken places (where
do you think all those big heads on Easter Island came from?), my
choice of an artifact that could represent all of rock and roll is all
of rock and roll. Or my version of it, anyway.

For the long list that follows, I tried to rethink the story of rock
and roll, in terms of spirit, not sales (though luckily the two come
together more often than one has any right to expect). I tried to
think of all the singles and albums that would leave essential gaps
in that story were they passed over, and didn’t worry about a few
historical gaps (such as, what about Hank Ballard or the Mamas
and the Papas? Well, what about them? They just don’t live up to
that spirit, despite what you—or I—might have thought at the
time).
When a performer’s contribution to the story (not his or her
career) could be fairly summed up by a single record, I looked for
that record. A lot of artists, particularly rock’s founders, arrived
with a style and never really changed it; I generally left out the two
or ten first-rate LPs a performer made if there was one that
genuinely spoke for all of them, going farther only when a definite
shift in style or themes demanded it.
The length of annotation from artist to artist, or the number of
entries an artist receives, is meaningless as to the performer's
“Gmportance.” It took me more space to fix the Clovers’ place in
the story than the Coasters’ because the Clovers are more obscure,
not because they are more interesting (and in fact my criterion was
the record, not the artist; a lot of people have been enormously
influential, at least for a time, without ever making a record that
deserves inclusion—one need only think of Iron Butterfly, or Bill
Haley). Most singles aren’t annotated because space prohibited it
and because singles stand on their own, so many of them glorious
one-shots from performers with only one thing to say, or worth
hearing.
Though I relied on a lot of greatest hits packages, I included
only a few anthologies by various artists, and then only when they
 254 | GREIL MARCUS
collected music unreleased in any other form, or when, as anthol-
ogies, they made a statement as coherent as a good one-shot single.
Most of the records cited are original releases, and many (and many
of the reissues, too) are out of print. Almost all of the singles were
hits, and are easily available on oldies collections, and many of the
albums have been reissued in one form or another. I’ve omitted
information on such collections and reissues simply because they
generally remain in print for less time than it takes a book to go
through the press. It’s a seeker’s game, anyway.
On notation: entries are alphabetical by artist; when the artist’s
name appears in an album title, there is generally no separate
noting of the artist’s name (i.., The Best of the Animals). Non-
U.S. releases have been included only when a record wasn’t issued
in the U.S., or when it came out in a form inferior to the version
I’ve chosen (the case with many early Beatles and Rolling Stones
LPs, which were often jumbled by American labels); when not the
US., country of origin is indicated after the label is noted (i.e.,
CBS/UK). When two labels are listed for a single (i.e., Downey/
Dot), the first is the label on which the record was originally
released, the second the label that, usually about a month later,
picked it up and made it a hit. When there is more than one date
after an album entry (i.e., 1950/1960, or 1950-1955/1960), the
first date(s) indicates the year the music was originally released,
the date following the slash the year the album in question was
released. And, when there are two dates, but no third date follow-
ing a slash (i.e., 1950-1955), it means I wasn’t able to determine
when the album in question was released, but only when the music
on it, usually various singles, first appeared.
The rest of this book, then, is my idea of the best of rock and
roll, slightly more than thirty years of it. If this seems like a lot to
squirrel away on some lonely island, a treasure held against someone
to play it for—just think of how much stuff Robinson Crusoe
hauled off that shipwreck of his.
Jounny Ace, Again .. . Johnny Sings (Duke). The first rock and roll
ghost, this deep-voiced ruler of the blues ballad died in a game of
Russian roulette, and sang as if he saw it all coming. 1952-1955.
Fay Apams, “Shake a Hand” (Herald). 1953.
Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts (Bright/UK) .Head-down, into-
the-wind punk from a band with the humor and determination to
make you think their album title wasn’t altogether a joke. 1978.
AttmAN Brotuers Banp, Eat a Peach (Capricorn). The endless
boogie didn’t wear out, but it was stopped in its tracks, Following the
violent deaths that broke the band, one noticed the reveries, guitar-
ists’ bids for peace of mind: the after-the-rain celebrations of “Blue
Sky,” and the ageless, seamless face of “Little Martha,” front-porch
music stolen from the utopia of shared southern memory. 1972.
ANGELS, “My Boyfriend’s Back” (Smash). 1963.
The Best of the Animals (MGM). When I first heard this group an-
nounced on the radio, I laughed out loud at their name—and then,
as “House of the Rising Sun” crawled out of the radio, shut up. This
was trash R&B from Newcastle, England, and especially when the
focus shifted from American blues to savage pleas for release from
working-class slums, more powerful than it had any right to be. 1964—
1965/1966. }
Asuton, Garpner & Dyke, “Resurrection Shuffle” (Capitol). 1971.
 256 | GREIL MARCUS

Tue Banp, Music from Big Pink (Capitol). Frontier sounds from bar-
band vets who brought rock back to roots much older than “Slippin’
and Slidin’””—though sometimes that too was thrown in, The album
was an American mystery (crafted by Canadians, nailed in place by
an Arkansas drummer); the clue might have been found off the
record, in something like “The Coo Coo,” an ancient hillbilly ballad
about an omen as predatory as it was beautiful. 1968.
The Band (Capitol). A heartland adventure, with mysteries re-
placed by road maps, good booze, and dirty stories. “Up on Cripple
Creek” was its center—and in American folklore, Cripple Creek is
like the Big Rock Candy Mountain, a place where all fears vanish
beyond memory, This record took you there; it also showed you why Te
T
a
S
a

you had to make the trip. 1969.

——Rock of Ages (Capitol). On stage, with Allen Toussaint’s horn
charts and Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Do It”—the sound of a storm warn-
ing. With their own “Get Up Jake,” the tale of a man who would
have slept through it. 1972.
Beacu Boys, Best of the Beach Boys, Vol. 2 (Capitol). A concept album
about middle-class teenage boys in pursuit of California girls—but
only to validate their own honor, 1962—1965/1967.
“Be True to Your School’/“In My Room” (Capitol). Brian
Wilson didn’t so much create a California myth as get the details of
[

its pop life right. Irony must have been in there somewhere, but at
the time, you could have fooled me. 1963.
“Fun, Fun, Fun” (Capitol). 1964.
Beach Boys’ Party (Capitol). Trash heaven, summed up by “‘Bar-
bara Ann” (lead vocal by Dean of Jan &), a shaggy dog story about
doo-wop that after more than ten years feels better than anything on
Pet Sounds—or Sgt. Pepper. 1965.
——“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” (Capitol). 1966.
——Wild Honey (Capitol). Shaken by Brian’s collapse after his at-
tempt to top the Beatles, the group, heading into many years in the
wilderness, gathered for one last gesture. Deceptively modest, it was
no less utopian than “Surfin’ U.S.A.” Just listen to “Country Air.”
1967.
Breatues, Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany (Bellaphon/
W. Germany). With years in Liverpool clubs hanging over them,
they stood on the edge of world conquest. But they didn’t know that,
and so, with the arrogant wit that would carry them through the
decade, they played only for the next drink. It was the crassest, most
 Treasure Island | 257

brutal rockabilly, straight legacy of Presley, Perkins, Richard, and

Vincent, manhandled into a sound that was authentically new—and
more than a little scary. Recorded 1962/released 1977.
—-Please Please Me (Parlophone/UK). With a shout of “One, two,
three, faah!,” Paul McCartney kicked off the first cut of their first
album, and for millions, it was the cry of the music coming home.
Lennon-McCartney originals (“I Saw Her Standing There,” the
slashing title song, the incandescent ‘There’s a Place”) sealed the
triumph, and with an urgency the audience had—and has—all but
forgotten. Number one in the UK for thirty consecutive weeks. 1963.
——With the Beatles (Parlophone/UK). After this, it was all over.
With its doomy, take-it-or-leave-it sleeve, the album was an act of
force, leaping out of silence with “It Won’t Be Long” and battering
to a close with John Lennon’s titanic version of “Money,” perhaps
the toughest piece of rock of all. Threatening, absurd, determined,
innocent and bitter, it broke the history of the music in half. Number
one in the UK for the next twenty-two consecutive weeks. 1963.
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” (Capitol). 1964.
—“She Loves You” (Capitol). 1964.
——A Hard Day’s Night (Parlophone/UK). Side one, the soundtrack
music, was hot stuff; side two was unnerving. “Things We Said
Today” and “I’ll Be Back” were mature, careful, deadly—the first
hints of Art, and proof the Mop Tops were . . . smart! 1964.
——Beatles for Sale (Parlophone/UK). By now the toast of about
eight continents, their rebellion dimmed by the Rolling Stones, they
sang with great confidence, with an easy joy. But “What You're
Doing” pressed on toward the still-unimaginable Rubber Soul, and
“Eight Days a Week” remains the most beatific record ever made.
1964.
——“Help!”/“I’m Down” (Capitol). 1965.
—“Yesterday” (Capitol). 1965.
——“Day Tripper” (Capitol). 1965.
——Rubber Soul (Capitol). Exchanging assault for seduction, they de-
livered the most serious love songs, exploring contingency, ambiguity,
pleasure, and guilt. Where before they had taken pop music by storm,
here they remade it from the inside out. Their best album. 1965.
——Revolver (Capitol). Classy, arty, but gleaming with intelligence:
saved from its pretensions (as the next album would not be) by the
golden rain of “And Your Bird Can Sing” and the embrace of “Here,
There and Everywhere.” 1966.
 258 | GREIL MARCUS

—“Strawberry Fields Forever’/‘‘Penny Lane” (Capitol). A curse on

childhood, lifted on the flipside. The first concept 45? 1967.
——“I Am the Walrus” (Capitol). Sgt. Pepper strangled on its own
conceits; after those conceits were vindicated by. world-wide acclaim,
John, Paul, George & Ringo made this single, radical where The
Greatest Album of All Time was contrived, passionate where it was
brilliant. It stands as a signpost to a future never quite reached;
Sgt. Pepper was a Day-Glo tombstone for its time. 1967.
——tThe Beatles (Apple). The “white album,” cut following manager
Brian Epstein’s death and their infatuation with and (save George)
rejection of the dread Maharishi: a tour de force, masterpieces scat-
tered like crumbs, and a preview of the breakup to come. It con-
tained their hardest rock in years, both musically, with “Yer Blues”
and “Helter Skelter,” and emotionally, with John’s “I’m So Tired.”
He meant it. 1968,
——"Don’t Let Me Down” (Apple), Overlooked on release, this was
to be their last shining moment. John was not exactly singing to his
audience—this was Yoko’s song—but he might have been, and after
ten years, one can hardly hear the tune as anything but an honest and
worthy farewell. 1969.
Bee Gees, “Holiday” (Atco). 1967.
Betmonts, “Tell Me Why” (Sabrina). 1961.
Cigars, Acapella, Candy (Buddah). Dion’s old back-up singers
return with the ultimate rock and roll lullaby. The music was unac-
companied by instruments, and strictly from the fifties—the sound
of men who were forced to grow up. 1972,
Jessie Bevin, ‘Goodnight My Love” (Modern). 1956.
More Chuck Berry (Chess). From the Originator, the Brown-Eyed
Handsome Man, the St. Louis I’lash—fourteen performances, all
your favorites, that will forever define the spirit and the form of rock
and roll. Also issued as—Chuck Berry Twist! 1955-1960.
Richard Berry and the Dreamers (United Superior), First-rank anarchy
from a forgotten pioneer of the crazed style that was Los Angeles
black rock. He carried the cool-as-a-corpse lead on the Robins’ (later
Coasters) historic ‘‘Riot in Cell Block #9,” followed it under his
own name with “The Big Break,” threw himself on the mercy of the
courts in ‘“‘Next Time,” profoundly affected everyone within earshot
(Ritchie Valens, the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart),
and still sounds strange. 1953-1956.
 Treasure Island | 259

Bic Borrrr, “Chantilly Lace” (D/Mercury). 1958.

Bic BroTHeR AND THE Hoipinc Company, “Coo Coo” (Mainstream).
1968.
Bic Youtn, Screaming Target (Trojan/UK). Addled Jamaican stays up
all night raving about Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. 1973.
Bossy “Bive” Brann, “It’s My Life” (Duke). 1955.
Two Steps from the Blues (Duke). “You know how it feels—you
understand/What it is to be a stranger, in this unfriendly land.” Thus
Johnny Ace’s inheritor of the blues ballad caught the fate of a whole
people, as he does on every cut of this record, from “I Pity the Fool”
to the horrifying “St. James Infirmary.” 1961.
Blondie (Private Stock). Little Egypt lives. 1977.
Brive Rince Rancers, “Back in the Hills” (Fantasy), 1973.
Bive Swepe, “Hooked on a Feeling” (EMI). 1973.
Bos anv Eart, “Harlem Shuffle” (Marc), 1963.
Bos B. Soxx & THE BLUE Jeans, “Why Do Lovers Break Each Other’s
Heart” (Philles). 1963.
Gary “U.S.” Bonps, Greatest Hits (Legrand). Along with coolly en-
shrining Daddy G and the Church Street 5 in the annals of Ameri-
can culture, Bonds supposedly used the sound of jets taking off to
give his clattering singles more density. He gave us “Seven Day
Weekend,” “School Is Out” (the follow-up, “School Is In,” flopped
—not even Bonds could triumph over that concept) and “Dear
Lady Twist,” but there is no more exciting passage in rock than the
slow build of pressure that finally erupts into the celebrations of
“Quarter to Three.” 1960-1962.
Boston, “More than a Feeling” (Epic). 1976.
Don’t Look Back (Epic). The premise was Jimi Hendrix, but the
result was as white as the Beach Boys; the band’s triumph was the
emotion they were able to get into the soaring guitar lines, the
cathedral-like organ, the endless overlays of vocal sound and texture.
There was no personality: just an undeniable insistence on the
grandeur of the pain and longing of even the most ordinary young
men, 1978.
Daviw Bowie, Hunky Dory (RCA). A seductive study of the displace-
ment of pop life, and a fair bid for an English Blonde on Blonde.
“Life on Mars?” remains the decadent aesthete’s first and last ques-
tion—his whole world is proof there’s none here. 1971.
——Pin Ups (RCA). Despite noble experiments in the late seven-
ties with Low and “Heroes,” this flashy tribute to the English scene,
 260 | GREIL MARCUS
circa 1966, remains his quirky triumph—not that he’d ever come up
with any other kind of triumph. I mean, who else could sing “Here
Comes the Night” like a raving queen and make it sound right? 1973.
Jan Braptey, “Mama Didn’t Lie” (Formal/Chess). 1963.
Donnie Brooks, “Mission Bell” (Era). 1960.
Buster Brown, “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” (Fire). 1960.
James Brown, “Try Me” (Federal). 1958.
“Night Train” (King). 1962. |
——Live at the Apollo, Vols. 1 & 2 (King). The Prisoner of Love
comes to Harlem and lives up to his name. These albums, the apothe-
osis of Soul Brother #1, make up a passion play in cold sweat: every
moment rehearsed and every moment real. 1962 & 1968.
Roy Brown, Good Rocking Tonight (Route 66/UK). Barely older
than Chuck Berry, he remains an almost unknown founding father.
He gave the high wail of freedom to Elvis, Jackie Wilson, Smokey
Robinson, and countless others, and lived to see them do more with
it than he did. 1947-1954/ 1978.
Jackson Browne, “Running on Empty” (Asylum). 1978.
Browns, “The Three Bells” (RCA). 1959.
Bucuanan & Goopman; “The Flying Saucer” (Luniverse). 1956.
Buffalo Springfield (Atco). A retrospective drawn from the three albums
cut by this sharp, combative, and moody bunch of L.A. rockers, one
of whom (Stephen Stills, composer of the definitive “Rock ’n’ Roll
Woman”) almost quit the business when he failed his audition to
become a Monkee. (For Neil Young’s contribution, cf, Kit Rachlis’s
chapter.) 1966-1969/1973.
Eric Burpon & THE ANIMALS, “Sky Pilot” (MGM). 1968.
SoLomon Burke, “Cry to Me” (Atlantic). 1962.
JoHNNY BurNETTE & THE Rock ’N’ Rott Trio, “Train Kept A-Rollin >»

(Coral). 1956.
Burninc Spear, Garvey’s Ghost (Mango). A dub (instrumental) ver-
sion of the reggae band’s Marcus Garvey, this is Jamaican surf music
—which is to say that slave ships are visible on the horizon. Pro-
duced by Jack Ruby, who in an earlier incarnation had his own
Caribbean connections. 1976.
Buzzcocks, “Spiral Scratch” (New Hormones/UK). 1977.
Byrps, Mr. Tambourine Man (Columbia). The Beach Boys sing Dylan
—until “The Bells of Rhymey,” when the Sirens sing Pete Seeger.
The sound was gloriously lyrical, and called “folk rock,” for some
reason. 1965.
 Treasure Island | 261
——Turn! Turn! Turn! (Columbia). Protest songs that sound like love
songs, love songs crying with loss and memory, all riding on waves
of electric guitars, Phil Spector might have liked it; certainly the Byrds
liked Phil Spector. 1965.
——“Eight Miles High” (Columbia). 1966.
——The Notorious Byrd Brothers (Columbia). Gentle, and just about
all melody, this album caught the secret remorse of late sixties rebel-
lion like nothing else. 1968.
Jerry Byrne, “Lights Out” (Specialty). 1958.
Capets, “Stranded in the Jungle” (Modern), 1956.
Capitiacs, “‘Speedoo” (Josie). 1955.
J. J. Carz, “Going Down” (Shelter). 1973.
Joun Catz, Vintage Violence (Columbia). Cale came from the Velvet’
Underground, but he was also Welsh. Here he began with present-
day urban fantasies of isolation and revenge, then drove them back
a thousand years until they merged with imprisoned maidens and |
starving crusaders. It was as if Cale had said, Yes, fear eats the soul,
but not if the soul eats it first. 1970,
FRepp1E Cannon, “Palisades Park” (Swan). 1962.
Capris, “There’s a Moon Out Tonight” (Planet/Old Town). 1960.
CapTaIn BEEFHEART AND His Macic Bano, Mirror Man (Buddah).
One night’s pursuit of the avant-garde, summed up in 19 minutes of
“Tarotplane” (the reference is to Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane”), a
growling, impossibly sustained leap back to the country blues of the
thirties—music that was almost as far ahead of its time as it was
behind it. Recorded 1965/ released 1973.
—“Diddy Wah Diddy” (A&M). 1966.
——tTrout Mask Replica (Straight). As unique and true a vision of
America as rock and roll has produced, but I know one person who
blames a kidney stone attack on it. (Cf. Langdon Winner’s chapter.)
1969.
CLARENCE CarTER, “Patches” (Atlantic). 1970.
Cextxos, “Rang Tang Ding Dong (I Am the Japanese Sandman)”
(Apollo). 1957.
Gene CHANDLER, “Duke of Earl” (Vee-Jay). 1962.
Cuantays, “Pipeline” (Downey/Dot). 1963.
The Chantels (End). The first and most impassioned of the girl groups—
Arlene Smith’s 15-year-old voice was as great as any in rock, and pro-
ducer George Goldner’s studio would later turn up in Phil Spector’s
head. “Maybe” and “I Love You So” are still overwhelming, but it’s
 262 | GREIL MARCUS

the enormous sound of “If You Try” that cracks open the history
of the music to make room for five black girls that most have for-
gotten, or never heard at all. 1959.
The Ray Charles Story, Vol. One (Atlantic). A towering, inescapable
figure, Charles scandalized many black performers when he brought
gospel piano and vocals into a secular, even salavious blues context.
You can hear his musical personality take shape on these delightful
early recordings; the indelible authority that marked his later career
is present only in snatches. 1952-1956/1962.
——Modern Sounds in Country &©Western Music (ABC-Paramount).
The preeminent black singer in America, he’d always loved Hank
Williams, but here he went beyond him. Williams sang about a home
in the sky; Charles sang as one who'd been there, and now suffered
exile, 1962.
Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul (ABC-Paramount). Supposedly a
compromise to “reach a broader audience” (reaching the broadest
possible audience is what Charles’s career has been all about), this
was mainstream material (‘You'll Never Walk Alone,” etc.) made
over into the deepest expression of longing and anguish, “That Lucky
Old Sun” remains a lost masterpiece. 1963.
——“I Don’t Need No Doctor” (ABC), ‘“They gave me a medicated
lotion/But it didn’t SOOTHE my emotion!” 1966.
——A 25th Anniversary in Show Business Salute to Ray Charles
(ABC). Thirty-six hits: “What'd I Say,” the ultimate rhythmic state-
ment; “Georgia on My Mind,” the ultimate ballad; ‘(Drown in My
Own Tears,” the ultimate defeat. Listening, one realizes that it
wasn’t simply Charles’s mastery that allowed him to define soul
music before it was named—it was also his warmth. 1953-1971/1971.
Currrons, “One Fine Day” (Laurie). 1963.
Cur-Lites, Greatest Hits (Brunswick). Sixteen rich, graceful versions of
a crucial seventies black persona: anti-macho, thoughtful, accepting,
honest. A leap over the Wilson Pickett swagger of the mid-sixties
right back to the shattered heart of Bobby Bland—sexual politics in
profound harmony, 1969-1972/1972.
CLAuDINE CLArk, “Party Lights” (Chancellor) .1962.
Dave Crark Five, “Catch Us If You Can” (Epic). 1965.
Dee Crarx, “Raindrops” (Vee-Jay). Featuring the supreme rock
couplet: “There must be a cloud in my head/Rain keeps falling from
my eye-eyes.” 196].
The Clash (CBS/UK). Unsettling English punk: rock and roll busted
up with echoes of Trout Mask Replica, and reassembled according to
 Treasure Island | 263

sprung reggae rhythms, all tumbling down in the caterwauling vocals

and guitar rave-ups of ‘Police and Thieves.” The momentum was
purely political: this record meant to organize a youthful community
that had appeared out of nowhere. 1977.
——‘“Complete Control” (CBS/UK). Produced by Lee Perry of Ja-
maica, and one of the most powerful hard rock records of all time.
1977.
Curertonss, ‘‘Heart and Soul” (Gee). 1961.
Jimny Curr, “Vietnam” (A&M). 1970.
——The Harder They Come (Mango). Soundtrack to a reggae film
that as a rock and roll movie outran Jailhouse Rock, the set collected
the best of Jamaica’s rhythm masters and cut through the miasma of
the early seventies with the freshness and vitality—not the bravado
—that Berry, Richard, and Fats brought to the mid-fifties, Child of
New Orleans rock (itself formed partly by Caribbean sounds), the
music was mournful (the Melodians’ “Rivers of Babylon,” Cliff's
“Many Rivers to Cross”), defiant (Cliff’s “You Can Get It If You
Really Want”), desperate (the Maytals’ ferocious “Pressure Drop’),
The Rolling Stones would have killed to make this record. 1972.
Crovers, Their Greatest Recordings—The Early Years (Atco), Com-
bining vocal anonymity and catchy material, the Clovers now sound
like essential doo-wop product; “Love Potion Number Nine,” a late
Coasters-style hit, sparks this LP as an anomaly, as does the para-
lyzing blues guitar on “Down in the Alley.” The deep appeal of the
group is in the way it disappears into and thus perfectly represents
one of rock’s founding genres—that, and the fact that the Clovers
had the most lugubrious bassman in history. 1951-1959/1971.
Coasters, Their Greatest Recordings—The Early Years (Atco). Stepin
Fetchit as advance man for black revolt, with script by two Jews,
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Out of scores still remembered, their
best lines: “You’re gonna need an ocean/ Of calamine lotion.” From
“Riot in Cell Block #9” to “Little Egypt,” this was rock ’n’ roll.
1955-1961/1971.
——‘“What About Us’/“Run, Red, Run” (Atco). Stepin Fetchit
drops his mask, and pulls a gun. 1959.
Eppre Cocuran, “Summertime Blues” (Liberty). 1958.
Commoporgs, “Machine Gun” (Motown). 1974.
Contours, “Do You Love Me” (Gordy). 1962.
——“First I Look at the Purse” (Gordy). 1965.
The Best of Sam Cooke (RCA). Along with a few others, he invented
soul music, but only Cooke could have made “Chain Gang” sound
 264 | GREIL MARCUS

both slick and true. Interestingly, the number that has grown most
over the years is “Wonderful World,” which could have been written
by Buddy Holly. (Cf. Joe McEwen’s chapter.) 1957-1962/1962.
“Another Saturday Night” (RCA). 1963.
“A Change Is Gonna Come” (RCA). The greatest soul record
ever made—released just after Cooke was shot to death—and a
tender, terrifying prophecy of what the racial changes already at
work in the land would cost; a prophecy, finally, of what they would
be worth. (Cf. Tom Smucker’s chapter.) 1965.
Auice Cooper, “Eighteen” (Warner Bros.). 1971.
Exvis Costetto, My Aim Is True (Columbia), Bad news boy, Buddy
Holly after shock treatment, he emerged out of England simul-
taneously with the disappearance of his namesake, Just twenty-two,
master of every rock and roll move, he sang of neurotic retreat, sexual
disorientation, social pathology, the death of God, and denied every-
thing. 1977.
——& THE Attractions, This Year's Model (Columbia). With his
new little. band heading straight into the wilderness of punk, his
pop sensibility heated up and produced music that recalled the wit
of Randy Newman and the raging momentum of Bob Dylan in his
glory years. This was an urban horror story, thuggish fury hiding an
edge of compassion, and it all came to a head in ‘Radio, Radio,”
wherein the misanthrope joined his audience—if only to tell its
members they had nothing to lose but their chains, 1978.
Country Joz AND THE Fisu, “Bass Strings’/‘Section 43” (Rag
Baby). 1966.
Counts, ‘Darling Dear” (Dot). 1954.
Fresh Cream (Reaction/UK). This was the roar of the country blues,
juiced with Eric Clapton’s English electricity, an awesome sound.
1966.
CREDENCE CLEARWATER RevivaL, “Proud Mary” (Fantasy). 1969.
——Green River (Fantasy). Stuck in the suburbs of San Francisco and
dreaming of the Mississippi, John Fogerty crafted a timeless vision of
America: a white boy (Fogerty) and a black man (Fogerty’s heroes:
Howlin’ Wolf, Little Richard) sharing a raft, drifting south, finding
friendship, defeat, fear, and salvation. In other words, Elvis’s Sun
singles, without their innocence, 1969,
——wWiillie and the Poorboys (Fantasy). The rural echoes were still
there, but the action shifted to the city, and all the warnings in
Green River’s. “Bad Moon Rising” came true. 1969.
 Treasure Island | 265

——“Up Around the Bend” (Fantasy). 1970.

Crests, “Step by Step” (Coed). 1960.
Crossy, Stitys, Nasu anv Younc, “Ohio” (Atlantic). 1970.
The Crystals Sing Their Greatest Hits! (Phil Spector International/
UK). Unlike the Ronettes, this perfect girl group, led often by
Darlene Love, had no image, just passion—and, despite the S&M
leanings of a couple of cuts here, an unconquerable warmth. Their
soul went into their hits, and “(Da Doo Ron Ron” (Spector called it
“a little symphony for the kids”; he could have called it a little
A-bomb), “‘He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” and “Then He Kissed Me”
are in the souls of all who’ve heard them. 1961-1963/1975.
Curr Linxs, “Guided Missle” (Dootone) .1957.
Jounny Cymsat, “Mr. Bass Man” (Kapp). 1963.
Danteers, “One Summer Night” (Mercury). 1958.
SPENCER Davis Group, “Gimme Some Lovin’” (UA). 1966.
Desmonp Dekker & THE Acgs, “Israelites” (Uni). 1969.
De ts, “There Is” (Cadet). 1968.
Devt-Vixincs, “Whispering Bells’ (Dot). 1957.
Derex & THE Dominos, Layla (Atco). The two great guitarists of the
era, Eric Clapton and Duane Allman, raising an epic tapestry of
romantic blues—an anguished and somehow heroic statement, just
before the fall. 1970,
Jacxre DeSHannon, “What the World Needs Now Is Love” (Liberty).
1965.
Diamonps, “‘Little Darlin’ ’”’ (Mercury). 1957.
Bo Dipper, Got My Own Bag of Tricks (Chess). The King of
Raunch (true godfather to the early Rolling Stones?) can pack
almost as many classics into a greatest hits set as Chuck Berry: their
charm is grimier, for Bo’s greatness is in his shamelessness. Sly
growls like “Cops and Robbers” or even “Who Do You Love’ pale
next to “Say Man,” which is right up there with the most ridiculous
records ever to crack the Top 40. 1955-1963/1972.
Dion, “Abraham, Martin and John’”/“Daddy Rollin’ (In Your Arms)”
(Laurie). 1968.
——Everything You Always Wanted to Hear by Dion and the Belmonts
—But Couldn’t Get! (Laurie). Sizzling Italian doo-wop from the
Bronx—the dynamics of “I Wonder Why” were faster than sound—
that turned into rough, wailing post-Presley hard rock when Dion
went solo. Priceless stuff. 1958-1963/1975.
Fars Domino, Legendary Masters (UA). Not a legend, like the rest of
 266 | GREIL MARCUS
rock’s founders, but a song and dance man, the shape of his whole
career can be heard in the piano intro to “The Fat Man,” his first hit.
1950-1961/1971.
Dominoes, “Sixty Minute Man” (Federal). 1951.
——The Dominoes Featuring Clyde McPhatter (King). No hits but
heavenly music from the group that virtually fathered doo-wop. In
emotion if not style, McPhatter’s clear teenage tenor went back to
the shaken gospel of Blind Willie Johnson, forward to the eroticism
of Elvis; no rock singer’s touch has been more delicate, or more
doomstruck. 1950-1953/1977.
Rat Donner, “Girl of My Best Friend” (Gone). 1961.
Donovan, Sunshine Superman (Epic). An original, he summed up the
mindlessness of the hippie, but also the expansive delight of the
hippie’s playful idealism, His precise evocations of Arthurian
England, bad trips, and haute demimonde scene-making would have
been nothing without the evocativeness of the settings provided by
producer Mickie Most, who made each song the signpost of a different
world. Those worlds were mostly benign—but not in the still-scary
“Season of the Witch,” where Donovan stretched out his syllables
until they hung over you like a curse. This was as sure a warning as
the horrors breeding within the idealism as the Stones’ “Gimmie
Shelter,” and a lot more prescient. 1966.
The Doors (Elektra). If the music hasn’t worn well—Jim Morrison now
sounds inordinately full of himself—at the time it hit with almost
the impact of Clyde McPhatter in the early fifties, and trashed the
more casual pretensions of the San Francisco psychedelic bands. In-
cluding “Light My Fire,” “The End,” and the lovely “Crystal Ship,”
this debut album was called “only a map of our music” by the Doors,
but it was as far as they got. 1967.
Dove ts, “Bristol Stomp” (Parkway). 1961.
Dr. Hook AnD THE MeEDIcINE Suow, “Carry Me, Carrie” (Columbia).
1972.
Drirters, Their Greatest Recordings—The Early Years (Atco). Found-
ing black rock: hard stuff with the hilarious “Money Honey,” sexy
ways with “Adorable” and the almost pornographic ‘Honey Love,”
rebellion with the scabrous (and beautiful!) “White Christmas,” all
shaped by astonishingly intricate vocal backings for the transcendent
lead of Clyde McPhatter, whose influence on Elvis was as true as the
legacy he left Jackie Wilson, Smokey Robinson, and Al Green. 1953-
1959/1971.
——Golden Hits (Atlantic). A wholly different group—led by Ben E.
 Treasure Island | 267

King, Rudy Lewis, and Johnny Moore—that. dominated the charts

with sophisticated yet tough string arrangements of romantic yet
brittle Brill Building songs (‘There Goes My Baby,” one of about a
dozen “greatest records ever made,” “Up on the Roof,” “On Broad-
way,” “I Count the Tears”), and in the process came up with as
apt an orchestration of teenage life as the Beach Boys. 1959-1964/
1968.
Duss, “Could This Be Magic” (Gone). 1957.
Bos Dyan, Bringing It All Back Home (Columbia). His high school
rocker’s past well buried, the king of folk music heard the Beatles,
hired a band, and replied with an edgy, madly funny set of songs
about the failure of rational humanism in these United States. He
also made the charts, and bought some new clothes. 1965.
—“If You Gotta Go, Go Now” (CBS/Netherlands). Recorded
1965/ released 1967,
——Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia). Like a rolling stone, if a
Minnesota Isaiah calling down the spirits of Hank Williams and
Robert Johnson could be a Rolling Stone. This was an explosion of
vision and humor that forever changed rock, and a piece of music
that stands as its signal accomplishment. It was also a journey through
America (with a stop at a Mexican border town and a destination
beyond the law), a map of its traps and glories. 1965.
Blonde on Blonde (Columbia). The journey completed—if ‘not
over—the new king of rock stepped back and offered dandy’s blues,
vivid, highly charged, insular, destructive, tempting: the sound of a
man trying to stand up in a drunken boat, and, for the moment,
succeeding. His tone was sardonic, scared, threatening, as if he’d
awakened after paying all his debts to find that nothing was settled.
1966.
The Royal Albert Hall Concert. The sound the dandy made on-
stage with the Hawks, when together they performed as the greatest
rock and roll band in the world—and, for their time, as the loudest.
Recorded 1966/ bootlegged 1971.
The Basement Tapes (Columbia). Having pushed to all known
limits, he went into retreat, settled in with the Hawks (now calling
themselves the Band), and rewrote American music as a pilgrimage
to the confessional, broken up by stops at the bawdy house. It was
intimate and echoed, probing the farthest Appalachian hollows, burst-
ing with rock and roll drama, insisting on mysteries their author
would eventually flee along with the rest of us. Recorded 1967/
released 1975.
 268 | GREIL MARCUS

John Wesley Harding (Columbia). As Paul Williams wrote, it was

as if he came out of the oblivion of pop retirement, went south to
where it all began, and reinvented rock and roll as it might have
sounded just days before Elvis made his first record. 1968.
“Lay Lady Lay” (Columbia). 1969.
“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (Columbia). 1973.
—‘“Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” (Asylum).
1974.
——Blood on the Tracks (Columbia). After years of desultory albums
and haphazard inspiration, he roared back, and what returned was
the intensity of his performance, the impossibility of getting out of
his way. As he always had in his best moments—ever since he dis-
covered that more linked Carl Perkins, Dock Boggs, Blind Lemon
Jefferson, and Little Richard than separated them—he sang in a
voice that brought home menace and acceptance, age and rebirth,
terror and peace, dust to dust. 1975.
Eactes, “Hotel California” (Asylum). (Cf, Grace Lichtenstein’s chap-
ter.) 1977.
Easyseats, “Friday on My Mind” (UA). 1967.
Epsets, “Rama Lama Ding Dong” (Twin). 1961.
Tommy Epwarps, “It’s All in the Game” (MGM). 1958.
Exastic Oz Banp, “Do the Oz” (Apple). 1971.
Exvporapos, “At My Front Door” (Vee-Jay). 1955.
Execants, “Little Star” (Apt). 1958.
Suirtey Exuis, “The Name Game” (Congress). 1964.
Lorraine Evuison, “Stay With Me” (Warmer Bros.). 1966.
Eguats, “Baby, Come Back” (RCA). 1968.
Ever_y Brotuers, Original Greatest Hits (Barnaby). Perfect songs
from Boudleaux and Felice Bryant let two mother’s-son Kentucky
punks—stuck between Elvis and Frankie Avalon—dramatize a genera-
tion’s worth of high school anguish, longing, and glee. 1957-1961/
1970.
Farrport Convention, Fairport Chronicles (A&M). Folk-rock out of
Bleak House, Morte d’Arthur, and the Basement Tapes: guitarist
Richard Thompson wrote straight from the plague years, and the
incandescent Sandy Denny spoke for Emily Bronté’s ghost—though
now one hears her own, Starting at Stonehenge (pictured on the
cover of this superbly compiled retrospective), they told the emo-
tional history of Albion, pausing here and there for a romp through
“Million Dollar Bash,” a bow to Dion, a nod to Buddy Holly. 1968-
1972/1972.
 Treasure Island | 269

Marianne Fairurut, “As Tears Go By” (London). 1964.

“Sister Morphine” (London). 1969.
Fatcons, “You're So Fine” (Unart). A good record, but included for
the rolling piano notes that open it—salvation in ten seconds flat.
1959.
Cwar.ig FEATHERS, “One Hand Loose” (King). 1956.
Bryan Ferry, “These Foolish Things” (Atlantic). An outrageous set
of oldies covers, where Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” sounds
trashier than Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party.” Thanks to Ferry’s Dracula-
has-risen-from-the-grave voice, one of the decade’s funniest produc-
tions, but since all that melodrama only glamorizes the pathos that
ultimately rises to the surface, also one of its most bizarrely moving.
1974.
The Bride Stripped Bare (Atlantic). Or, The Revenge of Lust, a
tale that leaves all parties free to live out their cruelest, most self-
pitying fantasies, and then to pay for them, An extraordinary
dramatic achievement, with a sound so rich and full of presence it’s a
wonder almost no one listened. 1978.
Sonny FisHER AND THE Rockinc Boys, Texas Rockabilly (Ace/UK).
Bitter, world-weary white R&B out of Houston, music of sexual boast-
ing and social defeat. The pace was slow, compared to the stuff
Sam Phillips was turning out at Sun, but more sinuous; the bite came
from Fisher’s unfriendly drawl and Joey Long’s guitar, which sug-
gested nothing so much as a very poisonous snake. 1955-1956/1979.
Five Du-Tonss, “Divorce Court’”’/“Shake a Tailfeather” (One-derfull).
1963.
Five Keys, “The Glory of Love” (Apollo). 1951.
——tThe Five Keys (King). On the downslide of their career, this
elegant black quintet caught the end of one era and the beginnings
of the next, moving with great passion from the doo-wop that had
brought them fame to (with “Dream On,” the best Jerry Butler
record Jerry Butler never made) the man-alone tragedy that was the
essence of early soul. 1959-early sixties/ 1978.
“5” Royates, Dedicated to You (King). A black vocal group, with a
guitar player. Once upon a time, Eric Clapton would have paid to
hold his coat. (Cf. Ed Ward’s chapter.) 1958.
Five Satins, “In the Still of the Nite” (Standard/Ember). 1956.
Friars, “Foot-Stomping Part I” (Felsted). 1961.
FLEETwoop Mac, Greatest Hits (CBS/UK). Despite memorable
forays into hard pop (“Oh Well”) and early soul (“Need Your
Love So Bad”), this troubled British band took the white blues cult
 270 | GREIL MARCUS

farther than anyone else; there isn’t a guitarist in the world who
wouldn’t claim the terrible, shattered peace of Peter Green’s “Love
that Burns” for his own. 1968-1971/1971.
Fleetwood Mac (Reprise). Carried up the charts by “Over My
Head,” a seventies ““Tonight’s the Night,” this was a showcase for the
broken romanticism of Christine McVie, the premier white female
singer of the decade. 1975. |
Rumours (Reprise). By now an unlikely team of English veterans
and young Californians who ruled the Top 40, they paid for their
success with the collapse of two marriages, and held on to it with a
set of love songs so blasted and unflinching (especially “Gold Dust
Woman” and “Go Your Own Way,” which stand as the best rock
ever to come out of Menlo-Atherton High School) they made a fair
match for those of Blood on the Tracks. 1977.
Tue FLeetwoops, Greatest Hits (Dolton). Close harmony from two
gitls and a boy, and the flipside of teen rebellion: the sound of awful
yearnings, quiet defeats, of a love always just out of reach. 1959-
1961/1962.
Let’s Take a Sea Cruise with Frankie Ford (Ace), They dumped a white
pretty boy on Huey Smith’s crack New Orleans band, and then
discovered the pretty boy could sing out of the top of his head and
make lines like “I pawned my pistol, I pawned my watch and chain/
I would pawn Roberta but Roberta can’t sign her name” seem real-
istic, With the strange “What’s Going On,” in which Frankie shows
up at his girl’s house to find it surrounded by cops, is forced to run
for his life, and never does find out what happened. (Cf. Jay Cocks’s
chapter.) 1960.
Four Deuces, “W-P-L-].” (Music City). 1955.
Four Seasons, “Walk Like a Man” (Vee-Jay). 1963.
Four Tops, Greatest Hits (Motown). Once past the optimistic romance
of “Baby I Need Your Loving” and “Without the One You Love,”
they became Motown’s gloom-masters, hell-bound and brave. Their
greatest hit was “Reach Out I'll Be There,” which Levi Stubbs. sang
as if he were calling to a buddy in a firefight. 1964-1967/1967.
ARETHA FRANKLIN, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
(Atlantic). This album shocked the music world. The down-to-the-
ground guitar, the wake-the-dead horns, the surging attack—she
made it all seem secondary, and she also made the Rolling Stones
sound like little kids. More directly than Ray Charles or anyone else,
she brought the apocalypse of gospel into pop, reaching for love with
 Treasure Island | 271

the desperation, urgency, and grace with which she once reached
only for salvation, and thus made love and salvation seem like the
same thing. 1967.
Aretha’s Gold (Atlantic). Containing four cuts from I Never
Loved a Man, and included here for “(You Make Me Feel Like) A
Natural Woman,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” and most of all for the
long fall of “Ain’t No Way,” now heard as a premature epitaph for
a career that was already cracking when this record was released. 1969.
STAN FREBERG, “The Old Payola Roll Blues” (Capitol), 1960.
Free, “Wishing Well” (Island). 1973.
Aan FREED, Rock ’n Roll Dance Party (Coral). An answer record to
Stan Freberg’s “‘Payola Roll Blues,” even though it was released
first. 1957.
Bossy FREEMAN, “Do You Wanna Dance” (Josie). 1958.
Don GarpNer AND DeEE Deer Forp, “I Need Your Loving” (Fire).
1962.7 \’
Marvin Gaye, Super Hits (Tamla). Motown’s Mr. Suave cut his groove
with a string of rough-edged pop R&B classics, from the churchy “Can
I Get a Witness” to the immortal “Hitch Hike.” Perhaps the most
charming of Berry Gordy’s stable of singers, he seemed too endearing
to carry real force—until “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which
crept out of the radio like pop voodoo. After that (see singles below),
whether he was singing about politics or sex, his commitment seemed
limitless. 1962-1969/1970.
“Inner City Blues” (Tamla). 1971.
“Let’s Get It On” (Tamla). 1973.
AND TAMMI TERRELL, Greatest Hits (Tamla). Gaye made records
with a number of women; the best were cut with the late Tammi
Terrell, whose death has been the subject of almost as much specula-
tion as that of Marilyn Monroe. The team is best remembered for
“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”—a masterpiece of affection, and,
oddly, not much of a hit—but their story wouldn’t be complete
without their aching revival of “For Your Precious Love,” not to
mention “You're All I Need to Get. By.” 1967—1969/1970.
Lestey Gore, “You Don’t Own Me” (Mercury). 1963.
Granp Funk Ratxroap, “We're an American Band” (Capitol). 1973.
Grass Roots, ‘““Where Were You When I Needed You” (Dunhill).
1966.
Grateful Dead Live at the Pyramids (Arista). Who knows what it’ll
sound like: the concept is staggering. Recorded 1978/release pending.
 272 | GREIL MARCUS

Doste Gray, “Drift Away” (MCA), 1973.

Great Society with Grace Suicx, Conspicuous Only in Its Absence
(Columbia), You want the fabled San Francisco Sound? The Jefferson
Airplane never got it down on record, but on the live side of this
album, featuring a cataclysmic version of “Somebody to Love,” the
Great Society did. Recorded 1966/released 1968.
At Green, Greatest Hits (Hi). In the Memphis tradition of spare,
direct, unadorned rock—a tradition born at Sun in the fifties and
nurtured at Stax in the sixties—Green emerged as the true heir of
Otis Redding. Yet he was a better songwriter, a cooler presence; he
had none of Redding’s bravado and none of his bathos, Green sang
about limits: he came to make his plea and then give thanks. This
odd combination took him to the top of the charts again and again,
most memorably with “Look What You Done for Me,” a song that
might have been about impotence but is surely the only rock and
roll record that can be called vulnerably virile. 1971-1974/1975.
——Call Me (Hi). Like all great pop singers, Green trashed barriers.
This LP, surely his best, combined Hank Williams, self-penned
gospel, and soul that was mainstream only because there was no one
else left to sing it. “Funny How Time Slips Away” seemed to draw
from every era of black music without imitating any; Green took the
whole history of rhythm & blues on his shoulders with this tune, and
carried it like a coat he’d had made especially for him. 1973.
The Belle Album (Hi). The soul man as supplicant as exile.
Coming off a violent incident that left a woman dead and his career
up in the air, Green turned to Jesus, but unlike almost every other
singer, white or black, who’d done the same thing, he didn’t
proselytize. Instead, wandering through country bars and down
southern back roads, he let you share a sense of peace; he even made
you feel you’d helped earn it. 1977.
Guess Wuo, “Share the Land” (RCA). 1970.
Gurrar Sim, “The Things That I Used to Do” (Specialty). 1953.
Hacxamore Brick, One Kiss Leads to Another (Kama Sutra), Long
before the Ramones, this New York band, with more wit and a better
sense of rhythm, had all they reached for well in hand. My favorite
moment comes when the singer’s girl falls out of the window during
a drag race; he doesn’t notice because he’s humming along with the
radio, which is playing their song. Like that girl, these modern
Coasters-cum-Velvet Underground vanished without a trace. 1970.
Harptones, “A Sunday Kind of Love” (Bruce). 1953.
 Treasure Island | 273

Joyce Harris, ‘“‘No Way Out” (Infinity). c. 1960.

Wixzsert Harrison, Let’s Work Together (Sue). The Kansas City
Man after ten years in oblivion, weary-voiced and open-hearted. Per-
forming as a ragged, barely amplified one-man-band, he sang from
the netherlands of R&B, where defeat reaches its limit and turns
back for the last good kiss. This was the sort of music folklorists
record on street corners, but somehow, Harrison got a hit out of it.
1969.
Dare Haweins, “Susie-Q” (Checker). 1957.
RonniE Hawkins, “Who Do You Love” (Roulette). 1963.
SCREAMIN’ JAY Hawxins, “I Put a Spell on You” (Okeh). 1956.
Heart, “Crazy on You” (Mushroom). 1976.
HeEartseEats, “A Thousand Miles Away” (Rama). 1956.
Jim1 Henprix Experience, Are You Experienced? (Reprise). This
record didn’t simply change the way the guitar was played, or merely
explode the ambitions of the music. Its best songs—‘‘Purple Haze,”
“I Don’t Live Today,” ‘The Wind Cries Mary”—represent a titanic
struggle to reconcile tradition and innovation, black rock and white.
Brave, reckless stuff. 1967.*
Live at Monterey (Reprise). While on the first side Otis Redding
plays it safe for the elite white audience at the Monterey Pop
Festival, on the flip Hendrix claims his music, turning ““Wild Thing”
and “Like a Rolling Stone” into fair equivalents of what your parents
were afraid would happen if you hung out with blacks. Recorded
1967/ released 1970.*
——Electric Ladyland (Reprise). A sprawling, mighty mess, with the
spirit of “Voodoo Chile” entering into “All Along the Watchtower,”
in which Jimi eats Dylan alive and, like the whale vomiting up Jonah,
spits him out better for the experience. 1968.
CLARENCE “FRrocMAN” Henry, “I Don’t Know Why, But I Do”
(Argo). 1961.
Herman’s Hermits, “A Must to Avoid” (MGM). Not only a good
record, but a classic of rock phrasemaking. 1967.
Jesse Hixx, “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” (Minit). 1960.
Justin Hines anp THE, Dominogs, Jezebel (Island). Buddy Holly’s
shade surfaced after his death in many forms, This still-waters-run-
deep reggae group was one of the more unlikely. 1976.
Hours, “Bus Stop” (Imperial) .1966.

*This entry by Dave Marsh

 274 | GREIL MARCUS
Buppy Hoty, The “Chirping” Crickets (Coral). His debut album,
released under the name of his group: a fifties Rubber Soul. 1958.
The Complete Buddy Holly (MCA Coral/UK). A cheat, given
the Draconian selectivity of this section, but included because you
can actually sit down and listen to all six LPs, from imitation-Elvis
Texas demos to posthumous New York overdubs. And how could I
leave out “Well... All Right” or “Crying, Waiting, Hoping”? 1954—
1959/1973.
Joun Lee Hooker, Detroit Special (Atlantic). Hooker has put out
scores of albums in his thirty-year career; all I’ve heard are good,
because all feature his crawling kingsnake guitar, his pounding foot,
his stoic, doomy rage. As a bluesman he has never catered to rock—
except to sit in with Van Morrison, who has always catered to Hooker.
1951 & 1963/1972.
Hot ecs, “Neanderthal Man” (Capitol). 1970.
How ttn’ Wo tr, “How Many More Years” (Chess). The Sun sound—
before Elvis. 1951.
——Howlin’ Wolf (Chess). Mississippi terror, Chicago Back Door
Man, the late Chester Burnett rode the blues like a man breaking
a mustang; the blues never gave an inch, but the Wolf was never
thrown. The purest rock in blues dress (“Going Down Slow,” ‘Down
in the Bottom,” “Wang Dang Doodle,” “You'll Be Mine”), this
album, with the famous rocking chair on the cover, inspired a genera-
tion. The first LPs by the Rolling Stones were honest attempts not
to catch up with it, but simply to come close enough to holler and be
heard. 1959-1962.
Impressions, The Vintage Years (Sire). Jerry Butler and the Impres-
sions (led by singer, writer, and guitarist Curtis Mayfield) started out
together; pursuing separate careers, they defined the failing heart,
the pleading desire, that was Chicago soul. This set collects their
music from “For Your Precious Love” and “Gypsy Woman” in the
fifties to “Only the Strong Survive” and “Freddie’s Dead” more than
ten years later—yet their supreme moment came almost at the
beginning, with Butler’s delicate and hopeless “He Will Break Your
Heart,” led every step of the way by Mayfield’s guitar. 1958-1972/
1976.
IsLey Brotuers, “Shout” (RCA). 1959,
“This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You)” (Tamla). 1966.
Jackson 5, “I Want You Back” (Motown). 1969.
——“The Love You Save” (Motown). 1970.
 Treasure Island | 275

Mick Jaccer, “Cocksucker Blues” (Ruthless Rhymes Ltd./W. Ger-

many). Recorded 1970/ bootlegged 1976.
The Best of Elmore James (Sue/UK). Compatriot of Robert Johnson,
from whom he took his style (though he took only a small part of
Johnson’s), he found fame in Chicago, when he was ready to rock.
This set collects his best sides, made for the Fire label. Not a deep
singer, he had humor, a fine sense of blues classicism, and most of all
the careening drive of his electric guitar. When he died in 1963, only
forty-five, disciples like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds were
already wired to his amp. 1956-1962.
The Best of Tommy James and the Shondells (Roulette). The Elton
John of his time, he began imitating ‘‘Be-Bop-a-Lula” and ended
psychedelicizing his sound with “Crimson and Clover,” which was
at once a statement of utter abstraction and a natural number one:
exactly what Brian Wilson has been aiming for, lo these many years.
1966-1969/1969.
Jamies, “Summertime, Summertime” (Epic). 1958.
Jan & Dean, Legendary Masters (UA). Comedians, until in less than
a year (summer ’63 through spring ’64) they knocked off “Surf City,”
“Drag City” (“Fuck City” remains unreleased), and the monu-
mental “Dead Man’s Curve,” and became Southern California myth-
makers in spite of themselves. After which they went back to being
comedians, until in less than two years Jan rammed a truck and
knocked off the top of his head. 1958-1968/1971.
JarMeE Ls, “‘A Little Bit of Soap” (Laurie). 1961.
JAY AND THE Americans, “Cara Mia” (UA). 1965.
JEFFERSON ArRPLANE, “Runnin’ Round This World” (RCA). 1966.
JeEwELs, “Hearts of Stone” (Imperial). 1954.
Exton Joun, “Tiny Dancer” (Uni). 1972.
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (MCA). The great sweep of pop
romanticism from a great pop fan who dominated the pop charts
of his time. Conceived in hype, he lived up to all of it, proving, as he
does here with “Love Lies Bleeding,” that he too was born to rock.
1973.
—“Philadelphia Freedom” (MCA). Supposedly written as a tribute
to Billie Jean King’s tennis team, and a work of genius. 1975.
Jounniz AND Jor, “Over the Mountain, Across the Sea” (J&S/Chess).
Oddly ignored today, but an unquestionable match for “In the Still
of the Nite” and “Earth Angel.” 1957.
Janis Jopiin, “Kozmic Blues” (Columbia). A number of recordings
 276 | GREIL MARCUS

were made that captured her power, including “Ball and Chain”
from the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967—but none have ever been
released. This, along with “Coo Coo,” listed under Big Brother, came
closest. 1969.
KaxerposcorE, Side Trips and Beacon from Mars (Epic). L.A. eccen-
trics, kin to the Band, they didn’t so much combine country blues,
hillbilly murder ballads, loud music and cajun stomps as place them
side by side—still proving those disparate rural forms were similarly
effective as sources of passion and regeneration in an urban world. A
very old kind of fatalism hangs over the sound: the fatalism of
Appalachian snake-handlers. 1967.
Kaun Twins, “When” (Decca). 1958.
Paut KELLY, “Stealing in the Name of the Lord” (Happy Tiger). 1970.
Curis Kenner, Land of a Thousand Dances (Atlantic). Trance-like
black Indian singing countered by producer Allen Toussaint’s elegant
horn and piano arrangements, falling together in unstoppable syncopa-
tion and creating hits: the emblematic title tune, “I Like It Like
That” and the amazing “That’s My Girl.” In other words, the rock
utopia turns out to be the Crescent City. 1961-1966/1966.
Erniz K-Dor, Mother in Law (Minit). The all-time novelty hit, plus a
definitive summation of early sixties New Orleans R&B, courtesy of
producer Allen Toussaint, as usual. 1961.
B. B. Kine, “The Thrill Is Gone” (Bluesway). 1969.
Ben E. Kine, “Stand by Me” (Atco), 1961.
Carore Kinc, Tapestry (Ode). A rough, intimate, broken-voiced testa-
ment to endurance and desire, and after all the years King spent as
the anonymous melodist behind so many unforgettable songs (“One
Fine Day,” “When My Little Girl Is Smiling,” “Some Kind of
Wonderful”), a shock. 1971.
KincGsMEN, “Louie, Louie” (Jerden/Wand). 1963.
The Kinks’ Greatest Hits! (Reprise). The hardest rock of the British
invasion, and probably the meanest. 1964-1966/1966.
“Sunny Afternoon”/“I’m Not Like Everybody Else’ (Reprise).
1966.
—Something Else by the Kinks (Reprise), Commercial failure turned
head Kink Ray Davies back on himself. What he found were the
futile aspirations to gentility harbored by the English working class:
the pain of living within limits one could not afford to damn, because
that would mean admitting they existed. To end this sad tale, he
offered “‘Waterloo Sunset,” one of the most beautiful songs in all of
 Treasure Island | 277

tock, the brief life of a man whose only pleasure comes from the
lovers he watches from his window. It was a finale of a piece with the
rest of the story, and also its transcendence. (Cf. Janet Maslin’s
chapter.) 1968.
——“Lola” (Reprise). 1970.
——“The Way Love Used to Be” (Reprise). 1971.
——“20th Century Man” (RCA). 1971.
KNICKERBOCKERS, “Lies” (Challenge). 1965.
Giapys KNIGHT AND THE Pips; “Midnight Train to Georgia”’ (Buddah).
1973.
Sonny Knicut, “If You Want This Love” (Aura). 1964.
Lep ZepPreLin, Zo-So (known as “Led Zeppelin IV”) (Atlantic).
Deservedly the most popular hard rock record ever made, inspired by
Robert Johnson and the Druids, with a bow to “Book of Love,” this
music meant to storm Heaven, and it came close. 1971.
Curtis Leg, “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” (Dunes). 1964.
Lert Banke, “Pretty Ballerina” (Smash). 1967.
Joun Lennon, ‘“‘God” (Apple). 1970.
Jerry LEE Lewis, Ole Tyme Country Music (Sun). A cruel misnomer:
taken from his auditions for Sam Phillips, this is one long Louisiana
roadhouse stomp. Recorded 1956/released 1970.
Rockin’ Up a Storm (Sun/UK). ‘Twenty-eight of the biggest from
the Great Sinner and His Pumping Piano. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ ”
remains the ultimate statement, but when “Lovin’ Up a Storm” was
first played on the radio the National Weather Service picked it up
and named a hurricane after it. 1957-1962/1974.
Smitey Lewis, “One Night of Sin” (Imperial). 1955.
Gorpvon Licutroor, “If You Could Read My Mind” (Reprise). 1970.
LitTLe ANTHONY AND THE IMPERIALS, “Hurt So Bad” (DCP). 1965.
Littez Eva, “The Loco-Motion” (Dimension). 1962.
Lirtte Peccy Marcu, “I Will Follow Him” (RCA). 1963.
Little Richard’s Grooviest 17 Original Hits! (Specialty). Anarchy in the
U.S.A., about the time the Sex Pistols were born. This was some
kind of unhinged New Orleans R&B, at first anyway, but even Fats
Domino must have wondered what the hell was going on. (Cf. Jay
Cocks’s chapter.) 1955-1958/1969.
——“I Don’t Know What You’ve Got But It’s Got Me” (Vee-Jay).
1965.
Litrte Witure Joun, “Need Your Love So Bad” (King). (Cf. Joe
McEwen’s chapter.) 1956.
 278 | GREIL MARCUS
Love, “Alone Again Or” (Elektra). 1968.
Darene Love, “A Fine, Fine Boy” (Philles) . 1963.
Lovin’ Spoonrut, Do You Believe in Magic (Kama Sutra). The tune
that asked the question also defined its terms, and the old blues and
jokey new folk songs that filled out the album did well enough, That
John Sebastian never learned to frown rather compromised his con-
templation of the abyss, but in the glory days following the Beatles’
arrival, who needed the abyss? 1965.
“Summer in the City” (Kama Sutra). 1966,
ae
ae
ee
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e
Nicx Lowe, Pure Pop for Now People (Columbia), Or Chuck Berry
for Perverts. 1978,
Rosin Luxg, “Susie Darlin’” (International/Dot). 1958.
Barsara Lynn, You'll Lose a Good Thing (Jamie). A young woman’s
Louisiana blues, shaped by the pop premises of New Orleans: the
sound of going down slow, but not all the way. 1963.
Lynyrp Sxynyrp, Street Survivors (MCA). Leaving brutal mortality-
play hits like “Saturday Night Special” in their wake, this Florida
guitar band barnstormed America throughout the seventies until they e

were destroyed in a plane crash. This was their last and best LP:
aching, emotionally mature, the guitars striking fire and drawing blood.
1977.
LonnigE Mack, The Wham of That Memphis Man! (Fraternity). The
first to see the limitless rhythmic possibilities of Chuck Berry’s then-
obscure “Memphis,” he was an early guitar hero, and guitar heroics
are mostly what this set is about. But it ends with an open wound:
“Why,” a soul ballad so torturous, so classically structured, that it
can uncover wounds of your own. Mack’s scream at the end has never
been matched; God help us if anyone ever tops it. 1964.
Macazing, “Shot by Both Sides” (Virgin/UK). 1978.
Macic Sam, “21 Days in Jail” (Cobra). 1958.
Mayors, “A Wonderful Dream” (Imperial) .1962.
Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (Polydor). Highlighted by a synthesized
version of Randy Newman’s “Living Without You” and the sad
story of a man looking for a job after an atomic war, this was the
decade’s most successful attempt at “progressive” music—probably
because the musicians never lost their sense of humor. 1972.
Manrczzs, “Blue Moon” (Colpix). 1961.
Bossy Marcuan, “There Is Something on Your Mind” (Fire). 1960.
Mar-Keys, “Last Night” (Satellite). 1961.
MarsHayy Tucker Bann, “Can’t You See” (Capricorn). 1973.
 Treasure Island | 279

MARTHA AND THE VANDELLAS, Greatest Hits (Gordy). “Dancing in the

Street” will be sung (and rewritten—see the Stones’ “Street Fighting
Man” and Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street” for the story so far)
as long as rock lasts, and it wasn’t even their best. “Love (Makes Me
Do Foolish Things)” is as quiet a testament to vulnerability as the
music has produced, but you can hear a smile in it; “Heatwave” may
be Motown’s masterpiece. The furious call-and-response between the
Vandellas and Martha (“Go ahead, girll”), the devastatingly com-
plex yet uncompromised syncopation, the absolute confusion and
affirmation of Martha herself—rock has never been any stronger, and
a‘l who’ve covered this tune have made fools of themselves. 1963-
1965/1966.
MarveELeETTES, Greatest Hits (Tamla). Motown’s only true girl group:
sassy, sexy—thanks to a bit of U.S, Bonds in the sound, very tough,
thanks to sneaky catch-phrase lyrics, very smart. But no producer
or lyricist could have guaranteed the high swoop at the end of “‘Play-
boy,” the unexpected delight of “Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead,” or
the happy longing of “Beechwood 4-5789,” a tune Brian Wilson was
likely answering when he wrote “I Get Around.” 1961-1966/1966.
Dave Mason, Alone Together (Blue Thumb). Just out of Traffic, he
joined with Eric Clapton to pursue the legacy of Cream, and caught
it. 1970.
John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton (London). Almost
fifteen years ago, the words “Clapton Is God” began to appear on
London walls. This is why. 1965 (UK) /1967 (US).
Maytats, Monkey Man (Trojan/UK). Rough roots reggae from a
three-man vocal group who offered heart-of-darkness visions cut with
wild good humor, all carried by a beat Huey “Piano” Smith would
have appreciated, Sure-fire smash: “African Doctor.” 1971.
Funky Kingston (Island). A landmark in the history of rhythm &
blues, because of the 478th valid version of “Louie, Louie,” an im-
possibly soulful cover of John Denver's “Country Roads,” but most
of all because of the title song. It began with ragged, seemingly African
chants, then conquered the territory that once belonged to “Hold
On, I’m Comin’,” and finally slammed home; the cryptic, scattered
story-line—driven by music so infectious and a vocal so alarming you
couldn’t bear not to understand—had something to do with why
reggae was born in Jamaica and why it could never really thrive any-
where else. Thus, like all great pop, the tune drew a line, and
allowed every willing soul to cross it. 1975.
 280 | GREIL MARCUS

Paut McCartney & Wincs, Band on the Run (Capitol). Pure pop for
all people, bursting with hooks—and underneath the shiny surface,
pretty hard stuff. With “Jet,” the most exciting single of its year,
though all who heard it will die without knowing what it was about.
1974.
MCS, Back in the U.S.A. (Atlantic). The vinyl equivalent of a Silver-
tone stereo, with politics to match. 1970.*
Grorce McCrag, “Rock Your Baby” (TK). 1974.
Barry McGuire, “Eve of Destruction” (Dunhill). 1965.
Wayne McGinnis, “Rock, Roll & Rhythm’/“Lonesome Rhythm
Blues” (Meteor). 1956.
Don McLean, “American Pie” (UA). 1971.
Crype McPuarter, “A Lover’s Question” (Atlantic). 1958.
Meapow-arks, “Heaven and Paradise” (Dootone), 1955.
Mepattions, “The Letter’ (Dootone). ‘Let me whisper, sweet words
of dismortality, and discuss the pompitus of love, Put it together, and
what do you have? Matrimony!” Weird. 1955.
Mexiowxincs, “Tonite-Tonite” (Herald). 1957.
Harotp MELVIN AND THE BiuenoTEs, “If You Don’t Know Me by
Now” (Philadelphia International). 1972.
MFSB, “TSOP” (Philadelphia International). 1974.
Mickey anp Sytvia, “Love Is Strange” (Groove). 1956.
Steve Miiuer Bano, Children of the Future (Capitol). On side one,
a gorgeous (if, as history proved, cynical) celebration of innocence; on
side two, a freewheeling (if, as history proved, cynical) celebration of
experience, as captured in Chicago blues. 1968.
Garnet MimMs AND THE ENCHANTERS, ‘‘Cry Baby” (UA). 1963,
Minx DeVi1tz, “Cadillac Walk” (Capitol). 1977.
The Miracles’ Greatest Hits from the Beginning (Tamla). Motown’s
Renaissance man, Smokey Robinson took less than four years to move
from a neat answer to the Silhouettes’ “Get a Job” to the soaring
“What’s So Good About Goodbye,” which established him as the
finest craftsman (and punner) in rock. He claimed Frankie Lymon
as his inspiration, but Lymon only dreamed of sounds like these.
1958-1964/1965.
——Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 (Tamla). No one broke hearts with Smokey’s
elegance, or put them back together with his grace. On this most

* This entry by Dave Marsh

 Treasure Island | 28)

perfect of albums, each tune was more beautiful than the last—until
“The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage,” a song so brilliantly
conceived, so carefully written, so indelibly arranged and sung, it made
most everything that surrounded it on the radio seem faintly obscene.
1964-1967/1968.
Moby Grape (Columbia). Hard country rock from a golden age San
Francisco band—but almost as a clue to their quick disintegration,
this flawless debut LP turned a strange corner near the end (“I'll just
lay here, and decay here,” moaned a voice), and, as it closed, with the
crazed, receding visions of “Indifference,” dropped straight into an
exalting and dangerous psychic anarchy. As such, it caught the true
spirit of the Haight at just that point where it turned back on itself.
1967.
Moldy Goldies: Colonel Jubilation B. Johnston and His Mystic Knights
Band and Street Singers Attack the Hits (Columbia). “Secret Agent
Man” is croaked to the half-time beat of “Rainy Day Women” and
mixed with “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean”; a demented hillbilly
utters “The Name Game” as if he’s sure it holds the secrets of the
universe. Cut right after the sessions for Blonde on Blonde, when
producer Bob Johnston and his pals were still glued to the ceiling.
1966.
Monoronss, “‘Book of Love” (Argo). Ultimate one-shot, single of
singles. 1958.
Moopy Buss, “Go Now” (London), 1965.
Jounny Moore’s Turee Biazers, “Merry Christmas, Baby” (Exclu-
sive). 1949.
Van Morrison, “‘Brown Eyed Girl” (Bang). 1967.
——Astral Weeks (Warner BrosSeven Arts). Belfast: childhood,
initiation, sex and death—and Richard Davis’s bass, (Cf. Lester
Bangs’s and M. Mark’s chapters.) 1968.
——Moondance (Warner Bros.). “‘Ray Charles was shot down, but he
got up”—or, into the mystic, with one foot digging into the American
earth. (Cf. M. Mark’s chapter.) 1970.
——vVan the Man (Amazing Kornyphone). Blazing live performances
(“Friday’s Child’’!) on one side, and a riveting, unspeakably gentle
instrumental (“Caledonia Soul Music”) on the other. Recorded
1970-1971 /bootlegged 1974.
——Tupelo Honey (Warner Bros.). The brooding black Irishman
celebrates true love, and walks down Broadway in his hot pants. But
were they pink? 1971.
 282 | GREIL MARCUS
——Saint Dominic’s Preview (Warner Bros.). The brooding black
Irishman strips off his hot pants and dives into the sea. Visions clash:
the selfishness and fraud of American life, the helpless fury of Belfast,
the distant call of an even older homeland—and, ending it all, the
absurd but irresistible promise of “Almost Independence Day.” (Cf.
M. Mark’s chapter.) 1972.
——“It’s Too Late to Stop Now” (Warner Bros.). (Cf. M. Mark’s
chapter.) 1974.
Veedon Fleece (Warner Bros.), Drifting ballads, Blakean journeys.
If the piano on “Linden Arlen Stole the Highlights” was a prayer,
“You Don’t Pull No Punches But You Don’t Push the River”
defined a quest that will always be out of Morrison’s reach—for he
can never stop pushing. 1975.
Into the Music (Warner Bros.). Which means, perhaps, that
Morrison must wait for the river to come to him, He pushed hard in
the last years of the decade—junking some LPs, releasing others—
and finally, after missing badly, stepped forth as if he had been
overwhelmed: by the clarity of faith, the endless renewal of sex, the
ordinary mysteries of romance. Summoning the cadences of “Madame
George,” he grabbed hold of it all in the eight minutes of “And
the Healing Has Begun,” and rode it home. 1979.
Moruer Eartn, Living with the Animals & Make a Joyful Noise
(Mercury). A wry hippie R&B band that nevertheless reached for the ee
e
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country side of the dial, they were led by Tracy Nelson, whose ‘“‘Down
So Low” came from places Janis Joplin never got to. 1968 & 1969.
Moruers oF InvenTION, Absolutely Free (Verve). Is there any facet
of American popular culture Frank Zappa hasn’t pissed on? If so,
write and tell him what it is, and he'll get a beer out of the re-
frigerator and unzip. From “Concentration Camp Moon,” a prescient
satire of hippies, to the anti-disco culture “Dancin’ Fool,” he’s been
there. On this early effort, though, the wit was liberating, the noise
of the band not merely Absurdist but actually absurd—and, all ques-
tions of smugness aside, who could resist a high school anthem called
“(I’ve Got My) Status Back, Baby’? 1967.
The Motown Story (Motown), The history of James Jamerson’s bass
playing, on fifty-eight hits. 1958-1970/1970.
Morr THE Hoopte, “All the Young Dudes” (Columbia). 1972.
Mott (Columbia). With pointed, dramatic rock and Ian Hunter’s
sardonic songs and vocals—virtually every moment rooted some-
where on Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde—this hard-luck
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British band caught the noble weariness of those who kept the faith
in a time when it had to seem only they believed. Hunter must have
smiled when he saw the punks of the late seventies reach the audience
he was sure had to be out there somewhere—smiled, and wondered
if anyone remembered “I Wish I Was Your Mother,” a shatteringly
beautiful horror story that no punk has touched on record, though
Sid Vicious may well have lived most of it out. 1973.
Move, “Do Ya” (UA). 1972.
Music Macuine, “Talk Talk” (Original Sound). 1966.
Mystics, “‘Hushabye” (Laurie). 1959.
Jounny Nasu, “Some of Your Loving” (ABC-Paramount). 1960.
“I Can See Clearly Now” (Epic). 1972.
Nationat Lampoon, Radio Dinner (Banana-Blue Thumb). The
Persecution and Assassination of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Joan
Baez, held together by two preppies earnestly explaining how George
Harrison’s 1971 Concert for Bangladesh showed them exactly where
the seventies are at, man. 1972.
Ricxy Netson, Legendary Masters (UA). The best rockabilly a Holly-
wood kid could buy, and I’d take it over Eddie Cochran’s or Johnny
Burnette’s. Pick to click: “Be Bop Baby.” 1957-1963/1971.
“Garden Party” (Decca). 1972.
Nervous Norvus, “Transfusion” (Dot). 1956.
Aaron NEvILLE, “Over You” (Minit). 1960.
Tell It Like It Is (Par-Lo). Pop blues from New Orleans: light
on the surface, deadly at the bottom. Neville’s high tenor conveyed an
acceptance of life’s worst in the sardonic “Jailhouse”; in the incom-
prehensible “Space Man,” he countered with a Mardi-grassed refusal
to believe in anything but life’s best. 1967.
New York Dolls in Too Much Too Soon (Mercury). Marvelous rock
archaeology, combined with churning affirmation in the face of a
void they couldn’t have done without. With “Human Being” as a
last word, they made history if not the charts. (Cf. Robert Christgau’s
chapter.) 1974.
Ranpy Newman, Sail Away (Reprise). “The ship? Great God, where
is the ship?” 1972.
TuunpvercLap Newman, “Something in the Air” (Track). 1969.
Nurmecs, “Story Untold” (Herald). 1955.
O'Jays, “Love Train” (Philadelphia International). 1973.
Otympics, “Dance by the Light of the Moon” (Arvee). 1960.
Roy Orsison, “Ooby Dooby’”/“Go, Go, Go” (Sun). 1956.
 284 | GREIL MARCUS

—— All-Time Greatest Hits (Monument). “I knew his voice was pure

gold,” Sam Phillips of Sun Records said of the Texas rockabilly. “I
also knew if anyone got a look at him he’d be dead inside of a
week.” Thus, Roy kept his shades on, and four years later began a
string of gorgeously over-orchestrated hits that defined pop roman-
ticism in the early sixties. There were a few winner’s songs—‘‘Mean
Woman Blues” is the classic—but most offered tragedy so sweet that
today, when Bruce Springsteen strains for notes he can’t hit, you
know it’s not just angst he’s in love with, but Roy, too. 1960-1964/
1972.
Or1oxgs, “It’s Too Soon to Know” (Natural). 1948.
Ortons, “Don’t Hang Up” (Cameo). 1962.
Paciric Gas & Exectric, “Are You Ready” (Columbia). 1970.
GRAHAM PARKER AND THE Rumour, Howlin Wind & Heat Treatment
(Mercury). Harbinger of the English New Wave, with roots in the
hardest soul music and ska of the sixties, Parker burned with anger
and romance, class resentment and a sense of fate, all powered by a
questing spirit that blew away the fog of the mid-seventies. As for the
Rumour, they came up with the drama that made Parker’s every
gesture seem like a last stand. 1976. e

——“Discovering Japan” (Vertigo/UK). 1979.

Junior Parker (Charly/UK). Though he went on to a long, rich career
at Duke, his early Sun sides (cut under the name of Little Junior’s
Blue Flames) were most vivid and prophetic. The sizzling “Feelin’
Good” sums up the erotic rhythms that, of all elements of R&B,
whites have been least able to catch; after a quarter-century, “Mystery
Train” still sounds as if its tracks end only at the Styx. 1953/1977.
Brit Parsons, “The All American Boy” (Fraternity), 1958.
Passions, “Just to Be with You” (Audicon). 1959.
PauL AND Pauta (originally Jill & Ray), “Hey Paula” (LeCam/
Phillips). 1962,
Pencurns, “Earth Angel” (Dootone) .1954.
Carx Perkins, Original Golden Hits (Sun). As much as anyone, he
defined rockabilly: the snapping guitar, the hillbilly’s bid for freedom
and excitement, the unexpected bursts of feeling (his cover of the
Platters’ “Only You”) and humor (the Memphis razor follies of
“Dixie Fried”) that he pushed too far ever to live out. Today he is
undiminished as a performer, spared Elvis’s fate because it was never
he who became famous, but his songs: “Matchbox,” “Honey Don’t,”
“Boppin’ the Blues,” and the tune that begins, “Well, it’s one for
the money . . .” 1956-1957/1969.
 Treasure Island | 285

Prrsuasions, Chirpin’ (Elektra). A veteran black acappella group, the

Persuasions are singers to make you cry, and here they do—with an
altogether savage account of the implacable divisions of race in
“Willie and Laura Mae Jones,” with a heartbreaking celebration of
doo-wop in “Looking for an Echo,” and with a ghostly, desperate,
single-voiced tribute to the fallen Jackie Wilson, “To Be Loved.” The
story of black rock is in this record. 1977.
PETER AND Gorpon, “I Go to Pieces” (Capitol). 1965.
Tom Petty AND THE HEARTBREAKERS, “American Girl” (Shelter). 1977.
Pu Puriuirs, “Sea of Love” (Khoury’s/Mercury). 1959.
The Best of Wilson Pickett (Atlantic). Stag-o-lee in a mohair suit, he
promoted a sly carnal urgency, but it was “In the Midnight Hour,”
more plea than brag, that made him immortal. Pickett climbed
mountains, crossed rivers, braved storms, all within his room, until
the door opened and love came tumbling down. As Jon Landau said,
this was not a classic, it was an epic. 1959-1967/1967.
Gene Pitney, “Every Breath I Take” (Musicor). 1961.
—“Mecca” (Musicor). 1963.
Prastic ONo Bann, “Cold Turkey” (Apple). 1969.
PiattTers, “My Prayer” (Mercury). 1956.
Potice, ‘So Lonely” (A&M/UK). 1978.
Porry Famuy, ‘That’s Where I Went Wrong” (London). 1970.
Exvis Prestey, The Sun Sessions (RCA). They ranged far back into
the hills, kept the radio tuned to the latest Memphis blues, and thus,
on five singles, Elvis, guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black, and
producer Sam Phillips performed ‘“‘the giant wedding ceremony,”
marrying white culture to black, and invented rock and roll. It was as
if all the contradictions of American music had been resolved in a
dream; as Nik Cohn has written, it was also the sexiest thing anyone
had ever heard. 1954-1955/1976.
Good Rocking Tonight (Bopcat/Netherlands). Revelatory early
takes from the Sun sessions, with unbelievable studio dialogue from
the founders. Plus various rockabilly classics and a deadly serious
argument between Jerry Lee Lewis, and Sam Phillips over the in-
herent blasphemy of “Great Balls of Fire.” 1954-1958/1972.
——Elvis’ Golden Records (RCA). If the Sun singles created rock,
these put it across. 1956-1957/1958.
——Jailhouse Rock (RCA). An EP, with “Young and Beautiful” and
the wonderful “(You're So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care.” 1957.
——Elvis is Back! (RCA). From the Army, and ready for the blues.
1960,
 286 | GREIL MARCUS

——“Crying in the Chapel” (RCA). Recorded 1960/released 1965.

Elvis’ Golden Records, Vol. 3 (RCA). The best of his overblown,
irresistible ballads, plus some real rhythm & blues. 1960-1962/1963.
Elvis-TV Special (RCA). The great comeback, ten years after the
Amny cut his hair, with the live, small-combo, Samson-in-the-Temple
version of “One Night,” the finest music of his life. 1968.
From Elvis in Memphis (RCA). Mature, soulful, desperate. 1969.
——‘Suspicious Minds” (RCA). 1969.
“Burning Love” (RCA). 1972.
——A Legendary Performer, Vol. 1 (RCA). Summa: from Sun folk-
ways to number-one hits to “Peace in the Valley” to three more
staggering shots from the TV special, all ending with “Can’t Help
Falling in Love.” Peace in the valley? R.I.P. (Cf. Tom Smucker’s
chapter.) 1954-1968/1973.
Luioyp Price, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” (Specialty). 1952.
——“Stagger Lee” (ABC-Paramount). 1958.
P. J. Prony, “Mission Bell” (Liberty). 1965.
Procot Harum, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (Dream). 1967.
Proressor Loncuair, “Bald Head” (Mercury). 1950.
Put Your Cat Clothes On (Sun/UK). Rare Memphis rockabilly, and
startling: “Rockin’ Chair Daddy” from Harmonica Frank Floyd, an
early avatar; Roy Orbison’s “Domino,” a prophecy of surf music; Ray
Harris’s searing “Come on Little Mama”; Jack Earl’s “Slow Down,”
which doesn’t; Carl Perkins’s title tune (the first rock and roll attempt
at a theme that would finally blow its cover with Lou Reed’s “I
Wanna Be Black” )—and more! 1951-1958/1973.
Quin-Tongs, “Down the Aisle of Love” (Hunt). 1958.
Rays, “Silhouettes” (Cameo). 1957.
REBELS, “Wild Weekend” (Swan). 1962.
Mac ResBennack, “Storm Warming” (Rex). c. 1960.
Otis Reppinc, Pain in My Heart (Atco). His crucial influences were
Little Richard and Sam Cooke, but this Memphis R&B is a version
of the Sun sound (Elvis was also an influence): clean, uncompro-
mised, and intense, with every emotion from hilarity to devastation
fully realized. 1964. :
——Otis Blue (Volt). He was committed to his calling like few. of his
contemporaries; that allowed him to make “I’ve Been Loving You
Too Long” more than a love song, allowed him to make it some-
thing like a statement of ethics. But it also led him to worry some
of his lines to death, and when that heppened, you simply heard the
 Treasure Island | 287

band: Al Jackson’s remarkably personal drum beats, Duck Dunn’s

isolated bass, Booker T’s rolling piano, and Steve Cropper’s guitar
accents—or, as on “‘Rock Me Baby,” his rare, X-ray solos, 1965.
——Dictionary of Soul (Volt). Meant to sum up the genre, and it did.
1966.
Live in Europe (Volt). The last LP before his death late in the
year, with the audience on the verge of a religious experience. The
roll-call of hits ends with “Try a Little Tenderness”; you can hear
a woman in the crowd cry out to Otis for salvation, and you can hear
her get it. 1967.
Dock of the Bay (Volt). Can one call Otis Redding the black
Van Morrison when Van Morrison would like nothing better than to
be called the white Otis Redding? 1968.
Lou Reep, Street Hassle (Arista). The mechanics of compassion, or,
as Reed might have it, a recognition of just how bad bad luck can
be. (Cf. Ellen Willis’s chapter.) 1978.
RevE:s, “Church Key” (Impact). 1961.
Paut REVERE AND THE Rarpers, “Just Like Me” (Columbia). 1965,
Jovy Reynotps, “Endless Sleep” (Demon). 1958.
The Many New Sides of Charlie Rich (Smash). A Sun veteran, Bobby
Bland’s white soul brother found his style on another label, with the
sardonic “Mohair Sam” and the despairing “Down and Out.” Rich
didn’t belong with the rockabillies; he sang as if he’d never been
young. 1965.
The Best of Charlie Rich (Epic). Later, he fulfilled the promise of
Elvis’s early ballads, trivializing the country version of heartbreak and
making a lot of soul music sound histrionic, offering the bitter accept-
ance of ‘“‘Life’s Little Ups and Downs,” the damage of “Sittin’ and
Thinkin’,” the compassion and lyricism of “Set Me Free.” 1968—
1971/1972.
Jonatuan Ricxman, “Roadrunner” (Beserkley). 1975.
AND THE MopeErn Lovers, Rock ’n’ Roll with the Modern Lovers
(Beserkley). All-acoustic rockabilly, begging for the strait-jacket (just
listen to the incredible “Dodge Veg-O-Matic,” and the way Jonathan
says “I like to watch it rot”): the closest anyone has come to “Flying
Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll” since Sputnik. 1977.
Ricutgrous Brotuers, “You've Lost that Lovin’ Feeling” (Philles).
1964.
Bitty Lee Ritey ano His Lirrte Green Men, “Flying Saucers Rock
’n’ Roll” (Sun). 1957.
 288 | GREIL MARCUS

Jonny Rivers, “Secret Agent Man” (Imperial). 1966.

Rivinctons, “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” (Liberty). 1962.
Marry Rosins, “El Paso” (Columbia). 1960.
Vicx1 Sue Rosrnson, “Turn the Beat Around” (RCA). 1976.
Rops, “Do Anything You Wanna Do” (Island). 1977.
The Rolling Stones (London). With the best name and the rel
ominous album cover in the history of rock, they were undeniable
before you got their first LP out of its jacket. The music was cool
and ruthless: classic R&B stripped of all doubt, the demand for
pure aggression and excitement sweeping everything from its path.
1964.
——12 x 5 (London), English robber barons laying tracks across the
U.S.A., they seized huge chunks of right-of-way, foreclosing on modern
soul with “Time Is on My Side,” careening to apocalyptic heights
with “It’s All Over Now,” and terrifying all opposition as the guitar
that opened “Empty Heart” reached out and grabbed your very
soul. 1964.
The Rolling Stones, Now! (London). A sexual tour of the Deep
South. 1964.
——*“Play with Fire” (London). A sexual tour of the English class
system. 1965,
“Satisfaction” (London). A sexual tour of mass culture. (Cf. Simon
Frith’s chapter.) 1965.
December’s Children (London). With “The Singer Not the
Song,” their first nod at lyricism (at, dare it be said, humility), yet
framed by “She Said Yeah,” the fastest song they ever cut. 1965.
“19th Nervous Breakdown” (London). A sexual tour of parental
neglect. 1966.
Aftermath (Decca/UK). Like everyone else, they were stunned
by Rubber Soul; this set, more than fifty minutes long in its UK
version, was their answer. For the first time, Mick Jagger and Keith
Richard wrote every song, and the “way of life” then-manager
Andrew Loog Oldham had promised the Stones would carry forth
fell into place. Bohemians roamed London, flashing contempt for all
things bourgeois while toying with their ruling-class equivalents.
They posited a duel between the sexes, choosing weapons of scorn
and humor. Sensitive to the disasters of the world they passed
through, they refused its claims anyway. They skirted decadence by
the pace they kept, and avoided it because they were driven not by
idle curiosity, or even narcissism, but by the most delicate and brutal
 Treasure Island | 289

shadings of lust, given absolute and final form in eleven-and-a-half

minutes of “Goin’ Home,” which they never really did. 1966.
Between the Buttons (London). Like everyone else, they were
stunned by Blonde on Blonde . . . 1967.
‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (London). A sexual tour of child abuse.
1968.
Beggars Banquet (London), Worthy of Parnell, but catered by
Fortnum & Mason. (Cf. Simon Frith’s chapter.) 1968.
— “Honky Tonk Women” (London). A sexual tour of hard rock.
1969.
—Let It Bleed (London). Like everyone else, they were stunned—
well, impressed—by the fact that the open possibilities of the sixties
were on the verge of implosion; this set, beginning with a heroic call
to dig in for the long haul (“Gimmie Shelter,” which as the greatest
rock and roll recording ever made both denied shelter and delivered
it), moved through hilarious celebrations of sex, stardom, and tom-
foolery, and ended with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,”
sure watchwords for the seventies: a stirring documentary about the
collapse of Swinging London that somehow made the future the
Stones were dreading along with their audience seem more than
possible—made it seem like honest work. Their best album. 1969.
——LIVE r Than You'll Ever Be (Lurch). A searing concert bootleg
from Oakland, California, with the definitive versions of “Love in
Vain” and “Midnight Rambler.” 1969.
“Brown Sugar” (Rolling Stones). A sexual tour of racist irony.
1971. |
Exile on Main Street (Rolling Stones). “Self-conscious public
creators careering down the corridors of destiny, burying Mick’s
voice under layers of cynicism, angst, and ennui” (Robert Christgau),
they met the seventies and beat them, two falls out of three. Fave
rave, symbolically and in every other way: Robert Johnson’s “Stop
Breaking Down.” 1972.
——Some Girls (Rolling Stones). With the awful, suspended longing
of “Just My Imagination,” the comic rush of “When the Whip
Comes Down,” and the sleazy, sweaty embrace of the title tune, a
sexual tour of everything under the’sun. 1978.
Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica (Philles). Rock
for the gods and the girls’ bathroom. (Cf. Jim Miller’s chapter.)
1964.
Lrnpva Ronsrapr, “You're No Good” (Capitol). 1975.
 290 | GREIL MARCUS

Rosi£ AND THE OriciNnaLs, “Angel Baby” (Highland). 1960.

Dana Ross AND THE SUPREMES, Greatest Hits (Motown). Ten number-
one singles: lush, aching, worldly, unstoppable. In 1966 I was
appalled when a writer claimed “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” was a
better record than “Like a Rolling Stone,” but it might be true,
1963-1967/1967.
The Roxy London WC2 (Jan—Apr. 77) (EMI/UK). The birth of
punk: rough, unfocused, screeching, and impossibly alive. 1977.
Roxy Music, Stranded (Atco). Emerging in the wake of David Bowie,
but outclassing him in imagination and humor, Bryan Ferry and his
band orchestrated the adventures of a pan-European Don Juan,
dropping only the slyest hints that the persona was the disguise of a
very scared hustler. Thus the tension was all implicit, but when it
broke—as in “Amazona,” with the astonishing instrumental stutter
that finally cracks into Phil Manzanera’s guitar solo—the relief was
devastating. 1973.
“All I Want Is You” (Island/UK). 1974.
Siren (Atco). Don Juan Faces Life. With the band hitting the
limits of the music that grew from Rubber Soul, Ferry dismantled his
lounge lizard act bit by bit, until all that was left was what his entire
career had meant to hide: “an average man,” but one with enough
emotion in him to record for Motown. 1975.
MerriLteE RusH AND THE TurnaAsBouts, “Angel of the Morning”
(SpearSound/Bell) .1968.
Sararis, “Image of a Girl” (Eldo). 1960.
SANTO AND Jounny, “Sleep Walk” (Canadian American). 1959,
SavacE Rose, Your Daily Gift (Gregar). This odd, intelligent Danish
group made a series of striking LPs in the early seventies. Here they
anticipated the art rock of David Bowie and Talking Heads, merging
the high, bizarrely twisted vocals of Anisette with the threatening,
doomy sounds of the band, until all. you wanted was peace, and with
the title tune gently closing out the album, got it. 1971.
Boz Scaggs (Atlantic), Duane Allman’s playing on “Loan Me a Dime”
grows from country blues to city blues to the most intense rock; he
traces a history of the music, and nothing is dropped along the way.
With Peter Green’s work on Fleetwood Mac’s “Love that Burns,” it’s
the farthest any white guitarist has ever traveled. 1969.
Jack Scott (Ponie). First-rank rockabilly from a Canadian: a lasting
marriage of the Sun band sound and the vocal style Elvis used on
“IT Was the One.” Chartbound: “Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye).”
1956-1960/1974.
 Treasure Island | 291

Linpa Scort, “Don’t Bet Money Honey” (Canadian American), 1961.

Szarcuers, “Needles and Pins”/“Ain’t That Just Like Me” (Kapp).
1964.
Neix Sepaxa, “Calendar Girl” (RCA). 1960,
Bos SEcEr & THE SILveR Butyet Bann, “Night Moves” (Capitol). The
mystic chords of memory. 1976.
Ronnie SEtF, “Pretty Bad Blues” (CBS), 1957,
Sensations, “Let Me In” (Argo). 1962.
Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols (Warner Bros.). The
return of the repressed: a snarling, nihilistic, altogether heroic act of
pop rebellion in the grand tradition of “Hound Dog,” Down and Out
in Paris and London, and Un Chien Andalou. Fun, too. 1977.
SHANcRI-LAs, “Leader of the Pack” (Red Bird). 1964.
——“TI Can Never Go Home Anymore” (Red Bird). 1965.
The Best of Del Shannon (Dot). There were two versions of early
sixties teen life: the Bobby Vee version, where everything works out,
and the Shannon version, where nothing works out and the kids run
scared—from each other, from their parents, from the detectives hired
to find them, from life itself. Boy, did it sound good. 1961-1965.
SHEP AND THE LiME.icuts, “Daddy’s Home” (Hull). 1961.
Su1Evps, “You Cheated” (Tender/Dot). 1958.
SHIRELLES, Greatest Hits (Scepter). The class of the girl groups, thanks
to Shirley Alston’s restraint, spare Drifters-style arrangements, and
superb songs. “Baby It’s You” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”
enriched countless teenage romances, but “‘Tonight’s the Night’ is
still the sexiest record I’ve ever heard. 1959-1962/1963.
SuirEy AND Lee, “Let the Good Times Roll” (Alladin). 1956.
SHIRLEY (AND Company), “Shame, Shame, Shame” (Vibration). 1975.
Suocxinc Buuve, “Never Marry a Railroad Man” (Colossus). 1970.
Troy SHONDELL, “This Time” (Goldcrest/Liberty). 1961.
SHOWMEN, “It Will Stand”/“Country Fool” (Minit). 1961.
SituovetTEs, “Get a Job” (Ember). 1958.
Carzy Simon, “You're So Vain” (Elektra). 1972.
Sxyxiners, “Since I Don’t Have You” (Calico). 1959.
The Best of Percy Sledge (Atlantic), Beginning with “When a Man
Loves a Woman”—Sledge never matched it, no one could have—this
was soul so deep it seemed to rise slowly from the bottom of the sea,
and, as each song ended, to return from whence it came. 1966-
1969/1969.
SLY AND THE Famuty Stone, Greatest Hits (Epic). The Lost City of
Sixties Rock: a joyful, edgy celebration of a community rooted in
 292 | GREIL MARCUS

black power and white counter-culture, powered by “Everyday People”

and blessed by “Everybody Is a Star.” 1967-1970/1970.
There’s a Riot Goin’ On (Epic). The sixties turn into the seventies,
and the Lost City burns to the ground. This was Muzak with its finger
on the trigger, and it wore a death’s head mask. As a statement of
pessimism, “Thank you for talkin to me Africa,” the album’s last
word, ranks with “Bartleby”; as music, with Robert Johnson’s “Come
on in My Kitchen.” 1971.
SMALL Faces, “Here Comes the Nice” (Immediate/UK). 1967.
Huey “Piano” Smith’s Rock ’n’ Roll Revival! (Ace). Forget the stupid
title: this is bedrock fury, stone age confusion. (Cf. Jay Cocks’s
chapter.) 1956-1958/1972.
Warren Smith (Charly/UK). A quirky Sun singer, his heart was in the
lonesome wail and ancient modal figures of the Elizabethan ballads
Appalachian mountain boys were raised on—and so, while submitting
to rockabilly classics like the racist ““Ubangi Stomp,” he slipped in the
fantastic “Red Cadillac and a Black Mustache,” and subverted
country rock with spooked echoes of “House Carpenter”, which was
one true source of the music he was paid to make. 1956-1959/1977.
Sonny AND Cuer, “But You’re Mine” (Atco). 1965.
Jummy Sout, “If You Wanna Be Happy” (S.P.Q.R.). 1963.
Jor Soutn, “Games People Play” (Capitol). 1969.
Put Spector, A Christmas Gift for You (Philles). The producer as
artist, and millionaire, he put $50,000, a shocking sum for the time,
into this project, and didn’t get it back: still recovering from
November 22, America was not in the mood for the loudest—and
sexiest—Christmas music in the history of Christendom, With
Darlene Love leading the way with “Christmas (Baby Please Come
Home),” and the Ronettes, the Crystals, and Bob B. Soxx & the
Blue Jeans chasing after her with souped-up standards, America has
been listening ever since. 1963.
SPIKEDRIVERS, “Strange Mysterious Sounds” (Reprise). 1967.
Best of the Spinners (Atlantic). With Thom Bell producing, this could
almost be Clyde McPhatter’s Drifters: the sound and themes are
dapper and modern, but the aesthetic is completely intact. 1972-
1976/1978.
Spirit, “I Got a Line on You” (Ode). 1965.
Dusty Sprincrizxp, “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” (Phillips) . 1964.
——Dusty in Memphis (Atlantic), Guided by Jerry Wexler, Aretha
Franklin’s producer, a white English pop singer matches the Queen
of Soul in style and Diana Ross in eroticism. 1969.
 Treasure Island | 293

Bruce SprincstEEn, Darkness on the Edge of Town (Columbia). The

great romantic of the seventies makes an album about working-class
defeat—and, leaving most of his innocence hanging in the air, comes
away ready for a long, uncertain fight against cynicism. 1978.
Epwin Starr, “War” (Gordy). 1970.
Rinco Srarr, “It Don’t Come Easy” (Apple). 1971.
Stax/Vott Revue, Live in London (Stax). The Memphis soul kings
and a queen (the MC’s, the Mar-Keys, Eddie Floyd, Otis Redding,
Carla Thomas) driven past themselves by a near-hysterical audience;
a show that ended in glory when the band locked into the horn riff
of Sam and Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’ ” and brought down the
walls of Jericho. 1967.
STEELY Dan, Countdown to Ecstasy (ABC). They burrowed through
the decade, scoring scabrous, deeply controlled hits about people for
whom control was just a memory. Here, busting up the joint with a
ditty about Eastern cults, terrifying the unwary with the inexplicably
apocalyptic “Bring Back the Boston Rag,” and savaging the rich and
the poor in “Show Biz Kids,” they turned the Band’s second album
upside down, If that record showed Americans they couldn’t and
shouldn’t escape their country or their history, this one showed why
it likely wasn’t possible to fully join either one—and made the
prospect sound groovy. 1973.
Pretzel Logic (ABC). This album (named, said auteurs Donald
Fagen and Walter Becker, for the swastika, because the title song
was about Hitler, though not even he would have been able to
figure out just how) led a crowd of fans through a land where
nothing worked. The only nods to pleasure were tributes to jazz, to
the past. The songs were uniformly inspired—colloquial, enigmatic,
piercing—and the music, mainstream rock, was untouchable. 1974.
—Katy Lied (ABC). Again, the breakdown, but this time it went all
the way. The LP began with a (the?) stock market crash, caught a
Vietnam vet mulling over a vision that took in a spoonful of junk,
Nixon’s Cuban connection, and his own ghost, and almost jumped off
the planet with the blasted truths of “Any World (That I’m Welcome
To),” a song about disenchantment so strong not even suicide could
satisfy it. Hidden in all this despair were two of the finest lines rock
and roll has produced about itself: “All night long, we would sing
that stupid song/And every word we sang I knew was true.” 1975.
Bitty Stewart, “Summertime” (Chess). 1962.
Rop Stewart, Every Picture Tells a Story (Mercury). With his band
of eccentric British rockers (Ronnies Lane and Wood, Mickey Waller,
 294 | GREIL MARCUS
Martin Quittenton), he went after the sound Bob Dylan got on
Blonde on Blonde; he missed, and the result was the most satisfying
album of the seventies: bone-hard rock cut with compassion, humor
and friendliness, ballads driven by blues feeling, an explosion of
lyricism. 1971.
“Tonight’s the Night” (Wamer Bros.). As defined by the Shirelles,
but sung from the other side of the fence, 1976,
The Stooges (Elektra). The sound of Chuck Berry’s Airmobile—after
thieves stripped it for parts. 1969.
Stories, ‘Brother Louie” (Kama Sutra). 1973.
Barret Stronc, “Money” (Anna). 1960.
Surraris, ‘““Wipe Out” (DFS/Dot). 1963.
Donna SuMMER, “Hot Stuff” (Casablanca), 1979.
Swamp Docc, Total Destruction to Your Mind (Canyon). A lost
masterpiece of late soul: a delicate, crying voice, shining horn charts,
and the sensibility of a very addled protest singer—and cuckold, 1970.
Swincin’ Mepattions, “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” (4 Sale/
Smash). 1966.
Koko Taylor (Chess). Blues from the belly—and, with the horrifying
“Insane Asylum” (a recasting of “St. James Infirmary” that makes
a corpse.on a slab seem like a comfort), four and a half minutes of
electroshock. 1970.
The Teenagers Featuring Frankie Lymon (Gee). They were big, really
big, taken off New York streets to turn front-porch acappella and
13-year-old Frankie’s ghetto reveries into bigger money, as the pint-
sized prodigy cried “I’m not a juvenile delinquent!” and played. god-
father to the Jackson 5, who he wouldn’t live to see. Why do fools
fall in love? 1957.
Temptations, Anthology (Motown). From the glorious “My Girl” to
the exquisite “I Wish It Would Rain,” from the ‘Heroin’-like
“Cloud Nine” to the withering drama of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,”
the Tempts preserved the tradition of the black vocal group even as
they made it their own. Comparable to the Rolling Stones in their
absorption of trends and politics while keeping track of the essential
business of sex and romance, they were unsurpassed over the long
haul. 1964-1972/1973.
Jor Tex, “Hold On to What You’ve Got” (Dial). 1964.
Tem, Here Comes the Night (Parrot). Riveting, humorless, no-hope
R&B out of Ireland—and, with “Mystic Eyes” and “Gloria,” the first
signs of Van Morrison’s visionary obsessions. 1965,
 Treasure Island | 295

Them Again (Parrot). Without compromising his pessimism,

Morrison turned lyrical, with “Call My Name,” “Could You Would
You,” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” where he outdistanced
Dylan’s original. It would be some time before he caught up with
himself. 1966,
B. J. THomas, “Rock and Roll Lullaby” (Scepter). 1972.
Caria Tuomas, “Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes)” (Satellite/Atlantic) .
1964.
InMA THomas, “Wish Someone Would Care” (Imperial). From happy-
go-lucky New Orleans, and the saddest record in all of rock. 1964.
Junior THompson, “Raw Deal’’/““Mama’s Little Baby” (Meteor). 1956.
PETER TOWNSHEND, Who Came First (Decca). As with the Who’s
Who’s Next, which came first, the focus was on enlightenment and
politics (“Let’s See Action” seemed to be about a revolutionary on
a secret mission, but the alternate title is ‘Nothing Is Everything”).
But what Townshend must have really been after, as he overdubbed
himself into a complete rock and roll band, was a certain joyousness
and a certain toughness: on “Pure and Easy” he found both, and out-
classed every record the Who made in the seventies. 1972.
Traffic (UA). Loose, funny, sexy, and dark: a British version of Music
from Big Pink. It was Dave Mason’s record, not Stevie Winwood’s
—except on “No Time to Live,” his highest moment. 1968.
Joun TRavoitTa anp OuiviA Newron-Jounn, “You're the One that I
Want” (RSO). 1978.
TRASHMEN, “‘Surfin’ Bird” (Garret). 1963.
Troccs, “Wild Thing” (Fontana). 1966.
Doris Troy, “Just One Look” (Atlantic). 1963.
Tuses, “White Punks on Dope” (A&M). 1975.
Tommy Tucxer, “‘Hi-Heel Sneakers” (Checker). 1964.
Tursans, “When You Dance” (Herald). 1955.
Jor Turner, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (Atlantic), 1954.
Ike Turner’s Kincs or RuytuM, I’m Tore Up (Red Lightnin/UK).
A&R man and bandleader for the Sun label in its pre-Presley blues
days, Turner’s own music of the time can best be described by the
name of the label that reissued it. 1954-1958/1976.
Ike AND Tina Turner, “River Deep—Mountain High” (Philles). “That
record,” said producer Phil Spector, “sounds like God hit the world
and the world hit back.” 1966.
Conway Twirry, “It’s Only Make Believe” (MGM), 1960.
Rircure VALENS, “La Bamba” (Del-Fi). 1959.
 296 | GREIL MARCUS

Bossy VEE AND THE SHADOws, “Suzie Baby” (Soma/Liberty). 1959.

Velvet Underground (MGM). (Cf. Ellen Willis’s chapter.) 1967-
1969/1970.
Loaded (Cotillion). A last stab: the sound softened, the tone
turned pleasing on the surface and mythical beneath it, and Lou
Reed produced the songs that would carry him through a good part
of the seventies—“‘Rock & Roll,” “Sweet Jane,” “Head Held High,”
and the strange “New Age.” Reed’s negations had a unique aspect:
they were suffused with affection. 1970,
Venturss, “Walk-Don’t Run” (Blue Horizon/Dolton). 1960.
Visrations, “My Girl Sloopy” (Atlantic). 1964.
Gene Vincent, Greatest (Capitol/UK). The most tortured of the early
rockers and the dirtiest, almost forgotten in the U.S.A. at the time
of his death in 1971, he seemed totally committed to the beat, to hit
and run love, to the most sensual and destructive rockabilly noise.
1956~1959/1978.
Vouumes, “I Love You” (Chex). 1962.
Waters, Catch a Fire (Island), Leaders of the abortive reggae in-
vasion, they were Jamaican heroes, a true group with years behind
them. Chroniclers of exile, they took homelessness, a secret theme of
the blues, as a first principle. Their politics—as a’ group and as
spokesmen—made the incredible ‘“‘Concrete Jungle” comparable to
both “Gimmie Shelter” and “In the Still of the Nite.” 1972.
Burnin’ (Island), After negation, revolt—not as salvation but as
justification. “Get Up, Stand Up” (the real “Street Fighting Man’)
led the charge; the fast draw of “I Shot the Sheriff,” undercut by
profound fatalism, hinted at why it might not matter if the charge
went in circles. 1973,
Bob Marley and the Wailers—Live! (Island), Often called their
island’s Rolling Stones because of dark tones and snaking rhythms,
the group scattered, and Marley emerged as a performer who recalled
no one so much as Bob Dylan in the mid-sixties. Here, he made his
way through a racial drama of revenge and compassion with true
pop glamour. 1975.
Jerry Jerr WALKER, “Mr. Bojangles” (Atco). 1968.
“L.A. Freeway” (MCA). 1973.
Junior WaxxeEr, “Shotgun” (Soul). 1965.
Jor Watsx, “Life’s Been Good” (Asylum). The Coasters in whiteface
—with lotsa money. 1978.
Wak, “Slipping into Darkness” (UA). 1972.
 Treasure Island | 297

Dionne Warwick, “Don’t Make Me Over” (Scepter). 1962.

Gino Wasuincton, “Gino Is a Coward” (Ric Tic/Son Bert). 1964.
Muppy Waters, Sail On (Chess). This Delta-to-Chicago bluesman
chilled the earth with the stark, spidery lines of his masterpiece,
“Rollin’ Stone,” after which he set up for a fifteen-year battle of the
bands with Howlin’ Wolf. If the fear of God lurks in the rock and
roll heart, he helped put it there. 1950-1954/1969.
Jounny “Guitar” Watson, “Cuttin’ In” (King). 1962.
WE Five, “You Were on My Mind” (A&M), 1965.
Lenny WELCH, “Since I Fell for You” (Cadence). 1963.
Tony Joz Wuire, “Roosevelt and Ira Lee” (Monument). 1969.
Wao, “I Can’t Explain” (Decca). 1965.
——The Who Sing My Generation (Decca). They sang it and claimed
it. This was British rock so hard-nosed (and, thanks to the feedback
chords of Pete Townshend and the hell-bound drumming of Keith
Moon, so surprising) it threw off fans as fast as it attracted them,
and neither the band nor their audience ever caught up with it. 1965.
— ‘I’m a Boy” (Decca). 1966.
—Happy Jack (Decca). The Who meet the Beach Boys, with un-
nervingly funny results, especially on “A Quick One While He’s
Away,” their first—and best—‘“rock opera.” 1966.
——The Who Sell Out (Decca). Townshend’s ability to at once cele-
brate and expose the most obvious and obscure aspects of pop life
threatened the group with artiness, so he put off the day of reckoning
with music alternately ethereal (“Rael,” “Tattoo”) and crushing (“I
Can See for Miles’’), all couched in a loving parody of British pirate
tadio. The Who wrote and performed their own commercials; if they
could have found a way to slip themselves payola, they probably would
have done that too. 1967.
Maurice WILLIAMS AND THE Zop1acs, “Stay” (Herald). 1960.
Cuucx Wi111s, “It’s Too Late” (Okeh). 1956.
——I Remember Chuck Willis (Atlantic). When the saddest-voiced
R&B singer of the fifties asked, ‘““What am I living for,” he made you
wonder; when he sang “‘C.C. Rider’? you knew he was never coming
back. Dead one year to the day after the latter song made the charts,
he didn’t. 1956-1958/1963.
Wittows, “Church Bells May Ring” (Melba). 1962.
Jackie Wixson, “Reet Petite” (Brunswick). 1957.
——Greatest Hits (Brunswick). Clyde McPhatter’s replacement in the
Dominoes, then Mr. Excitement, he was master of the lightning
 298 | GREIL MARCUS
knee-drop and its vocal equivalents. Remembered for the spotlight
drama of “‘To Be Loved,” the joy of “That’s Why,” he lives out what
time is left to him in a coma, the result of a heart attack suffered
on stage as he sang the key lines of “Lonely Teardrops”: “My heart
is crying, crying—” 1956-1968.
Jesse Winchester (Ampex). Lean and hungry rockabilly from a
Tennessean hiding out in Canada: mature, bitter, looking hard for
Saturday night, but not exactly trusting it. 1970.
Jounny Winter, Second Winter (Columbia). Leaving behind one of
the great forgotten albums of the sixties, the albino Texas guitar flash
shattered all categories, somehow merging a dozen sorts of blues,
classic rock, Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” and (in Lester Bangs’s
words) “Bill Haley preaching Armageddon” into a thrilling personal
statement matched only by Eric Clapton’s Layla. Then, like Clapton,
he turned to heroin. 1969.
Wire, Chairs Missing (Harvest/UK). The English punk assault broke
down so many doors that in Britain anything became possible, and
surfacing along with a lot of angry young men and women was a
whole new strain of minimalist, highly ironic, wittily existential rock
and roll. This band, which hid melodies in almost impenetrable lyrics
about dislocation, pleasure, and doom, probably owed more to
Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave than to that of anyone else. 1978.
Birt Wirners, “Lean on Me” (Sussex). 1972.
Stevie Wonper, Greatest Hits (Tamla). Motown put him onstage as
the 12-year-old successor to Ray Charles, but he was his own mannish
boy, beginning with the ridiculous “Fingertips, Part 2,” hurtling
across the hilarious “Contract on Love,” and arriving with the irre-
sistible “I Was Made to Love Her.” Still, no one took him seriously,
and so, listening hard to the Beatles and Bob Dylan, he got serious,
and people took him less seriously. 1963-1967/1968.
“Superstition” (Tamla). Number one, and hard rock the Rolling
Stones would have envied. 1972.
Innervisions (Tamla). Finally, Wonder’s seriousness paid off: he
staked his claim to the paradoxes of black culture and the bland
certainties of enlightenment, and people took him too seriously.
Winner of so many Grammy awards he began handing them out to
other artists, he became the most over-rated performer of the decade.
This album, containing the extraordinarily bleak “Living for the
City” and the searing “(Higher Ground,” was his best. 1973.
Linx Wray ‘and His Ray Men, “Rumble” (Cadence). 1958.
 Treasure Island | 299

X-ray Spex, Germfree Adolescents (EMI/UK). A seminal punk band

led by one Poly Styrene, who wore braces and screeched like some
bizarre New Wave version of Annette, they offered an unfettered
attack on teenage self-pity, pop narcissism and grown-up priggishness.
With “Let’s Submerge,” at once a tale of sex and riding on the
Underground, they also proved themselves fearless in the face of
simple good times—or, for that matter, complex good times. 1978.
Yarpsirps, Shapes of Things (Charly/UK). British R&B without
ancestor worship, and you could cut your hands on it. With Eric
Clapton or Jeff Beck on guitar, their attack ranged from Elmore
James’ “‘Ain’t Done Wrong” to “You’re a Better Man Than I,” a
heart-stopping protest song cut in—of all places—the Sun studios in
Memphis. 1964-1968/1978.
Younc Rascats, “Good Lovin’ ” (Atlantic). 1966.
Katuy YOUNG AND THE INNocEnTS, “A Thousand Stars” (Indigo). 1960.
Neit Younc, Decade (Reprise). Some music that ranks with the most
commercial of the seventies, and a lot that ranks with the most un-
compromised. (Cf. Kit Rachlis’ chapter.) 1966-1976/1977.
Tonight’s the Night (Reprise). Dopers on the run in the 1970s:
clattering sounds of teeth in a skull as the connection is made and
the connection is broken. 1975.
——anp Crazy Horse, Rust Never Sleeps (Reprise). Of all bankable
stars, Young was most affected by the English punk explosion, perhaps
because his own best music had been just as rough. This album—
half acoustic meditations on decay and illusion, half hot-metal elec-
tricity driving straight through both, was his tribute to the flameout
of Johnny Rotten and the death of Elvis Presley, and, almost
incidentally, final proof of Young’s status as the truest rocker of
the seventies. 1979.
The Youngbloods (RCA). Named for a Coasters song, they played
quick and tight New York folk-rock. The pastoralism that would later
smother the band was present here, but on ‘Four in the Morning,” a
lost-love urban horror story, they stomped it like a cockroach. 1967.
Trm1 Yuro, “What’s a Matter Baby” (Liberty). 1962.
Warren Zevon (Asylum). With a cold eye, a boozer’s humor and a
reprobate’s sense of fate, this California rounder put L.A. back on the
rock and roll map, and nearly blew the Malibu singer-songwriter
crowd right off it. 1976.
Zurvans, “Close the Book” (End). Release date unknown.
 CONTRIBUTORS

LESTER BANGS was born in Escondido, California in 1948 and died in

New York City in 1982. Beginning at Rolling Stone in 1969, he
pushed critical prose to its limits, gaining his greatest notoriety at
Creem in the 1970s. His first record, “Let It Blurt,” was released in
1979, and followed in 1981 by Jook Savages on the Brazos (credited
to Lester Bangs and the Delinquents); “Birdland” with Lester Bangs
appeared in 1986. Lester redefined the fan-bio in 1980 with Blondie
(Simon and Schuster), and with Paul Nelson was the co-author of
Rod Stewart (Delilah, 1981). The anthology Psychotic Reactions &
Carburetor Dung was published by Knopf in 1987. He is missed,
Tom Carson was born in Germany and lives in Arlington, Virginia.
He is a staff writer for the Village Voice.
Ropert Curistcau, a New Yorker, is a senior editor and chief music
critic at the Village Voice. He is the author of Any Old Way You Choose
It; Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967-1973 (Penguin, 1973), Christgau’s
Record Guide: Rock Albums of the ’70s (Ticknor & Fields, 1981),
and
Christgau’s Record Guide: The ’80s (Pantheon, 1990), the
latter two
reissued by Da Capo Press,
Jay Cocks is a contributor to Time and coauthor of the screen
plays
The Age of Innocence (with Martin Scorsese, 1993) and Strange
Days
 Contributors | 301
(with James Cameron, 1995), He was born in New York and lives there
now.
Simon Frith, this book’s token Englishman, is the director of the John
Logie Baird Centre at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. He is the
author of Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ’n’
Roll (Pantheon, 1981), Art into Pop (Methuen, 1987, with Howard
Horne), the collection Music for Pleasure (Routledge, 1988), and Per-
forming Rites: The Aesthetics of Popular Music (Harvard, 1996).
GraCE LICHTENSTEIN chronicled her adventures as Rocky Mountain bu-
reau chief for the New York Times in Desperado (Dial, 1977). She is also
the author of A Long Way Baby: Behind the Scenes in Women’s Tennis
(Morrow, 1974) and, with Laura Dankner, Musical Gumbo: The Music of
New Orleans (Norton, 1993). She is a contributing editor of Aspen Maga-
zine and Fitness Magazine, and lives in New York.
M Mark founded the Voice Literary Supplement in 1981 and edited
it unti] 1994, Born in Waterloo, Iowa, she arrived at the site of Buddy
Holly’s plane crash, just outside of Clear Lake, only hours after the
fact.
Dave Marsu was born in Pontiac, Michigan and cofounded Creem
in Detroit in 1969. He is the author of Born to Run: The Bruce Spring-
steen Story (Delilah, 1979) and Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the
1980s (Pantheon, 1987). Among his other books are Fortunate Son
(Random House, 1985), The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Great-
est Singles Ever Made (Plume, 1989), 50 Ways to Fight Censorship
(Thunder’s Mouth, 1993), and Louie Louie: The History and Mythol-
ogy of the World’s Most Famous Rock ’n’ Roll Song; Including the Full
Details of Its Torture and Persecution at the Hands of the Kingsmen,
J. Edgar Hoover’s FB.I., and a Cast of Millions; and Introducing, for
the First Time Anywhere, the Actual Dirty Lyrics (Hyperion, 1993). He
is editor and publisher of Rock & Rap Confidential, and recently pro-
duced the third edition of his maddening The New Book of Rock Lists,
coedited with James Bernard (Simon and Schuster, 1994). An unre-
pentant member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, he edited the all-
author rock ’n’ roll band’s tour book, Mid-Life Confidential (Viking,
1994), and stil] shows his face in polite company.
JANET MASLIN is the chief film critic of the New York Times.
 302 | Contributors

JozE McEwen, once known to Boston radio listeners as Mr. C, is an A

& R executive for Warner Bros. Records. He lives in Montclair, New
Jersey. -
Jim MILLER was born in Chicago, lives in West Roxbury, Massachusetts,
and is nevertheless professor of political science and director of Liberal
Studies at the New School for Social Research in New York. He edited
the original editions of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock S

& Roll (Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1976 & 1980), and is the
author of Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (Yale, 1984), “Democracy
Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Simon
and Schuster, 1987; reissued by Harvard), and The Passion of Michel
Foucault (Simon and Schuster, 1993).
ae
e
r
e

PauL NELSON was born in Warren, Minnesota and cofounded the Little
Sandy Review in Minneapolis in 1961. A former record editor of Roll-
ing Stone, he now writes fiction and lives in New York.
Kir RACHLIS was born in Paris and now lives in Los Angeles, where he
is a senior editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine.
JOHN ROCKWELL was born in Washington, D.C. A longtime music critic
for the New York Times, he is now director of the Lincoln Center
Festival. He is the author of All American Music: Composition in the
Late Twentieth Century (Knopf, 1983) and Sinatra: An American Clas-
sic (Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1984), and coeditor of A Vir-
gil Thomson Reader (Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
Tom SMUCKER was born in Chicago and now works for the New York
Telephone Company, where, to his horror, he was recently offered early
retirement.
ARIEL SWARTLEY was born in Boston and lives in Los Angeles, where
she is writing a novel.
Nick ToscHEs was born in Newark, New Jersey and now lives in New
York. He is the author of two novels, Cut Numbers (Harmony, 1988)
and Trinities (Doubleday, 1994), along with Country (Stein & Day,
1977), Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (Scribners, 1982), Unsung
Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll (Scribners, 1984), Power on Earth (Arbor House,
1986), and Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (Dou-
bleday, 1992). That last is a real spinner.
 Contributors | 303

Ep WarD was born in Port Chester, New York and now lives in Berlin.
He contributes musical profiles and history lessons to “Fresh Air” on
National Public Radio and appears regularly on Jazz Radio Berlin. He
is the author of Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American
Guitar Hero (Cherry Lane, 1983) and coauthor of Rock of Ages: The
Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll (Rolling Stone Press/Summit,
1986). He programmed and wrote the extensive (factual) liner notes
to the definitive “5” Royales anthology, Monkey Hips and Rice (Rhino,
1994).
LANGDON WINNER was born in San Luis Obispo, California and now
lives in upstate New York. He is professor of political science at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and author of Autonomous Technol-
ogy: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (MIT,
1977) and The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age
of High Technology (Chicago, 1986).
ELLEN WILLIS was born in the Bronx and now lives in Brooklyn. She
is associate professor of journalism and mass communication at New
York University, where she directs the program in Cultural Reporting
and Criticism, and writes a column on politics for the Village Voice.
She is the author of Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-
and-Roll (Knopf, 1981; reissued by Wesleyan) and No More Nice Girls:
Countercultural Essays (Wesleyan, 1992).

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Seabury Press, Inc.
Sexpax Music Corporation AND Haverstraw Music Pus .isHinc: Excerpts
from “Trash.” Copyright © 1973 Seldak Music Corp. and Haverstraw Music
Pub., ASCAP.
Bruce SPRINGSTEEN AND LaureL Canyon Music, Ltp.: Excerpts from “Inci-
dent on 57th Street,” “The E Street Shuffle,” “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,”
and “New York City Serenade” by Bruce Springsteen. © 1974 Bruce Spring-
steen and Laurel Canyon Music, Ltd. Used by permission.
TRO-Essex Music anp Fasutous Music Lrp.: Excerpts from “Pictures of
Lily.” Words and music by Peter Townshend. Copyright © 1967 Fabulous
Music Ltd., London, England. TRO-Essex Music, Inc., New York, controls all
publication rights for the U.S.A. and Canada. Also reprinted by permission of
Fabulous Music Ltd., 19/20 Poland Street, London WIV 3DD, United
Kingdom. Used by permission.
Unitep Artists Music Co., Inc.: Excerpts from “I’m Blowing Away” by Eric
Kaz. Copyright © 1975, 1977 Glasco Music. All rights administered by United
Artists Music Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Warner Bros. Music: Excerpts from “The Fuse,” “Your Bright Baby Blues,”
“Linda Paloma,” “The Only Child,” ‘“Daddy’s Tune,” “Sleep’s Dark and
Silent Gate,” and “The Pretender.” All words and music by Jackson Browne.
All © 1976 and 1978 Swallow Turn Music, All rights administered by WB
Music. Excerpts from “Here Come Those Tears Again.” Words and music by
Jackson Browne and Nancy Farnsworth. © 1976 and 1977 Swallow Turn Music
and Open Window Music. All rights administered by WB Music and Warner-
Tamerlane Publishing Corp. Excerpt from “Farther On.”” Words and music by
Jackson Browne. © 1974 and 1976 WB Music Corp. Excerpt from ‘These
Days.” Words and music by Jackson Browne. © 1967 and 1976 Warner-
Tamerlane and Open Window Music. Excerpt from “Doolin’ Dalton.”’ Words
and music by Glenn Frey, John David Souther, Don Henley, and Jackson
Browne. © 1973 WB Music Corp. and Kicking Bear Music. Excerpt from
“Bitter Creek.” Words and music by Bernie Leadon. © 1973 WB Music Corp.
and Kicking Bear Music. Excerpt from “Desperado.” Words and music by Don
Henley and Glenn Frey. © 1973 WB Music Corp. and Kicking Bear Music.
Excerpt from “Domino.” Words and music by Van Morrison. © 1969 WB
Music Corp. and Caledonia Soul Music. Excerpts from “Into the Mystic” and
“These Dreams of You.” Words and music by Van Morrison. © 1970 WB
Music Corp. and Caledonia Soul Music. Excerpts from “Who Was That
Masked Man” and “You Don’t Pull No Punches.” Words and music by Van
Morrison. © 1974 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. and Caledonia Soul
Music. Excerpt from “Rock and Roll Fantasy” by Raymond Douglas Davies.
© 1977, 1978 Davray Music Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Zevon Music: Excerpts from “Mohammed’s Radio” by Warren Zevon. ©
1976 Zevon Music.
 A NOTE ABOUT THE EDITOR

Grei Marcus was born in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley. He is

the author of Mystery Train: Images of America In Rock ’n’ Roll Music
(Dutton, 1975), Lipstick Traces (Harvard, 1989), Dead Elvis (Dou-
bleday, 1991), Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92
(Doubleday, 1993, titled In the Fascist Bathroom in the U.K.), and The
Dustbin of History (Harvard, 1995), and the editor of Lester Bangs’s
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (Knopf, 1987). Since 1992
he has believed that Corin Tucker of Heavens to Betsy and the Sleater-
Kinny Band is the most interesting singer in the United States.
CPSIA information can be obtained
at www ICGtesting.com
Printed in the USA
LVHW032030060819
626771LV00002B/8
“One of the most fascinating books yet written about
poe <s 6 0) = Michael Goldberg7San Francisco Chronicle
“Each chapter of STRANDED is thoughtful, superbly
focused, precisely written. There exist very few
comparable efforts? - 2 ee ee:
In 1978, Greil Marcus asked twenty writers on rock—including Dave Marsh,
Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, Ellen Willis, and Robert Christgau—a question: what one
cole) MMM coliM- lol lasmucelli(oM (oll Me-1<M com-Mel-1-1-14 @t-ir-laleiraMal -Me-t-10] lila leM-t-t-r- NM -1g
collected in Stranded, twenty passionate declarations to such albums as the Rolling
Stones’ Beggars Banquet, the Ramones’ Rocket to Russia, Something Else by the
Kinks, and more. Universally revered as the ur-text of rock criticism, Stranded is an
indispensable classic.

Nick Tosches on the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers

M. Mark on Van Morrison's It’s Too Late to Stop Now
Simon Frith on the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet
Jim Miller on the Ronettes’ Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica
Ariel Swartley on Bruce Springsteen’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle
Langdon Winner on Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica
Ellen Willis on the Velvet Underground's:Velvet Underground: Golden Archive Series
Grace Lichtenstein on the Eagles’ Desperado
Joe McEwen on Little Willie John
Janet Maslin on the Kinks’ Something Else by the Kinks
Tom Carson on the Ramones’ Rocket to Russia
Paul Nelson on Jackson Browne's The Pretender
Robert Christgau on the debut of the New York Dolls
Jay Cocks on Huey “Piano” Smith’s Huey “Piano” Smith’s Rock & Roll
Revival!
Tom Smucker on Precious Lord: New Recordings of the Great Gospel
Songs of Thomas A. Dorsey
Kit Rachlis on Neil Young's Decade
Lester Bangs on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks
John Rockwell on Linda Ronstadt’s Living in the U.S.A.
Dave Marsh compiles “Onan’s Greatest Hits”
Ed Ward on the “5” Royales’ Dedicated to You

Greil Marcus is the author of Mystery Train, Lipstic

k Traces, The Shape of Things to
Come, and other books. He writes a monthly column
for Interview. He lives in Berkeley.

-MUSIC/ESSAYS
Da Capo Press .
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Cover design by Alex Gamlin
www.dacapopress.com _ Cover photographs © Getty Images and Corbis