Night Beat.
Mikal Gilmore.
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO:.
George Bouthilet and the late Grace McGinnis, teachers who taught well.
I"m forever grateful our paths crossed.
With a daytime of sin and a nighttime of h.e.l.l.
Everybody"s going to look for a bell to ring . . .
All through the night.
LOU REED,..
"ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT"
introduction.
I guess I could say what many people of my age-or people who are younger or even older-might be able to say: I grew up with popular music encompa.s.sing my life. It played as a soundtrack for my youth. It enhanced (sometimes created) my memories. It articulated losses, angers, and horrible (as in unattainable) hopes, and it emboldened me in many, many dark hours. It also, as much as anything else in my life, defined my convictions and my experience of what it meant (and still means) to be an American, and it gave me a moral (and of course immoral) guidance that nothing else in my life ever matched, short of dreams of sheer generous love or of sheer ruthless rapacity or destruction.
I can remember my mother playing piano, singing to me her much-loved songs of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams, or singing an old-timey Carter Family dirge, accompanying herself on harmonica. As I remember it, she wasn"t half-bad, though of course I"m forming that judgment through a haze of long-ago memories and idealized longings.
It was my older brothers, though, who brought music into my house-and into my life-in the ways that would begin to matter most. I was the youngest of four boys; my oldest brother, Frank, was eleven years older than I, Gary was ten years older, and Gaylen, six years older. As a result, by the time I was four or five in the mid-1950s, my brothers were already (more or less) teenagers-which means that they were caught in the early thrall and explosion of rock & roll. As far back as I remember hearing anything, I remember hearing (either on one of the house"s many radios, or on my brothers" portable phonographs) early songs by Bill Haley & His Comets, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Fats Domino, the Platters, Buddy Knox, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Sam Cooke, and Ricky Nelson, among others. But the biggest voice that hit my brothers" lives-the biggest voice that hit the nation-was, of course, Elvis Presley"s. In the mid-1950s, every time Presley performed on nationwide TV (on the Milton Berle, Steve Allen, or Ed Sullivan shows) was an occasion for a family gathering-among the few times my family ever collected for any purpose other than to fight. Those times we sat watching Presley on our old Zenith were, in fact, among our few occasions of real shared joy. For some reason, the appearance I remember most was Elvis"s 1956 performance on the Dorsey Brothers" "Stage Show" (which was also the singer"s national debut, and was followed by six consecutive appearances). I remember sitting tucked next to my father in his big oversize brown leather chair. My father was not a man who was fond of youthful impudence or revolt (in fact, he was downright brutal in his efforts to shut down my brothers" rebellions). At the same time, my father was a man who had spent the better part of his own youth working in show business, in films and onstage and in vaudeville and the circus, and something about rock & roll"s early outlandishness appealed to his show-biz biases (though his own musical tastes leaned strongly to opera and Broadway musicals). After watching Presley on that first Dorsey show, my father said: "That young man"s got real talent. He"s going to be around for a long time. He"s the real thing." I know how cliche those remarks sound. Just to be sure my memory wasn"t making it all up for me, I asked my oldest brother, Frank (who has the best memory of anybody I"ve ever known), if he remembered what was said after we"d watched Presley on that occasion. He repeated my father"s declaration, pretty much word for word. I guess my father had a little more in common with Colonel Tom Parker than I"d like to admit, but then, like Parker, my father had also once been a hustler and bunco man.
So rock & roll as popular entertainment was welcomed into our home. Rock & roll as a model for revolt was another matter. When my brothers began to wear ducktails and leather motorcycle jackets, when they began to turn up their collars and talk flip and insolently, likely as not they got the s.h.i.t beat out of them. I guess my father recognized that rock & roll, when brought into one"s heart and real home, could breed a dislike or refusal of authority-and like so many adults and parents before and since, he could not stand that possibility without feeling shaken to the rageful and frightened core of his being.
I NEVER GOT TO HAVE my own period of rock & roll conflict with my father. He died in mid-1962, when I was eleven, when "The Twist" and "Duke of Earl" were my picks to click. Hardly songs or trends worth whipping a child until he bled.
A little over a year later, President John Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Texas. It was a startling event, and it froze the nation in shock, grief, and a lingering depression. Winter nights were long that season-long, and maybe darker than usual. I was just twelve, but I remember that sense of loss that was not merely my own-a loss that seemed to fill the room of the present and the s.p.a.ce of the future. By this time, my brothers were hardly ever home. Gary and Gaylen were either out at night on criminal, drunken, carnal activity, or in jail. My mother had the habit of going to bed early, so I stayed up late watching old horror movies, talk shows, anything I could find. I remember-in January 1964-watching Jack Paar"s late night show, when he began talking about a new sensation that was sweeping England: a strange pop group called the Beatles. He showed a clip of the group that night-the first time they had been seen in America. It"s a ghostly memory to me now. I don"t remember what I saw in the clip"s moments, but I remember I was transfixed. Weeks later, the Beatles made their first official live U.S. television appearance, on February 9, 1964, on the "Ed Sullivan Show." The date happened also to be my thirteenth birthday, and I don"t think I could ever have received a better, more meaningful, more transforming gift. I won"t say much here about what that appearance did to us-as a people, a nation, an emerging generation-because I"ll say something about it in the pages ahead, but I"ll say this: As romantic as it may sound, I knew I was seeing something very big on that night, and I felt something in my life change. In fact, I was witnessing an opening up of endless possibilities. I have a video tape of those Sullivan appearances. I watch it often and show it to others-some who have never seen those appearances before, because those shows have never been rebroadcast or reissued in their entirety (there isn"t much more than a glimpse of them in The Beatles Anthology video series). To this day, they remain remarkable. You watch those moments and you see history opening up, from the simple (but not so simple) act of men playing their instruments and singing, and sharing a discovery with their audience of a new, youthful eminence. The long, dark Kennedy-death nights were over. There would be darker nights, for sure, to come, and rock & roll would be a part of that as well. But on that night, a nightmare was momentarily broken, and a new world born. Its implications have never ended, even if they no longer mean exactly what they meant in that first season.
It was obviously a great time, though it would soon become (just as obviously) a complex and scary time. It was a time when almost every new song was shared, discussed, and sorted through for everything it might hold or deliver-every secret thrill or code, every new joyous twist of sonic texture. "The House of the Rising Sun." "Stop! In the Name of Love." "Help Me Rhonda." "Mr. Tambourine Man." "(I Can"t Get No) Satisfaction." "Positively 4th Street." "Help!" "California Dreamin"." "Good Lovin"." "When a Man Loves a Woman." "Summer in the City." "Sunshine Superman." "I Want You." "96 Tears." "Paint It, Black." "Over Under Sideways Down." "Respect." "Ode to Billy Joe." "Good Vibrations." "The Letter." It was also a time of many leaders or would-be leaders-some liberating, some deadly. Mario Savio. Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy. Julian Bond. Richard Nixon. George Lincoln Rockwell. George Wallace. Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X. Hubert Humphrey. Eldridge Cleaver. Shirley Chisolm. Jerry Rubin. Tom Hayden. Gloria Steinem. Abbie Hoffman. There were also the other leaders-some who led without desire or design, but who led as surely (and sometimes as liberatingly or as foolishly) as the political figures. The Beatles. Bob Dylan. Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, and Keith Richards. Timothy Leary. Jimi Hendrix. Jane Fonda. The Jefferson Airplane. Aretha Franklin. James Brown. Marvin Gaye. Sly Stone. Jim Morrison. Charles Manson.
As you can tell from those lists, the 1960s" ideals, events, and moods grew darker-and they did so earlier than many people would like to acknowledge. In the middle of 1967-the same season that bred what became known as the Summer of Love in San Francisco"s Haight-Ashbury, and the same period when the Beatles summarized and apotheosized psychedelia with Sgt. Pepper"s Lonely Hearts Club Band-I came across an alb.u.m I really loved (still perhaps my favorite of all time): The Velvet Underground and Nico. It was a record full of songs about bad losses, cold hearts, hard narcotics, and rough, degrading s.e.x. I took to it like a dog to water (or whatever dogs take to). It was the first subject-in a long list-of arguments that I would enter into with friends about rock & roll. In fact, it was my first rock & roll choice that actually cost me some fraternity. When I was a senior in high school, I was part of a Folk Song after-school group. We"d get together, under a teacher"s auspices, and sing our favorite folk songs-everything from "k.u.m Ba Yah," "Michael Row the Boat Ash.o.r.e" and "We Shall Overcome" to "Blowin" in the Wind" and (gulp) "Puff the Magic Dragon." At one meeting, each of us was invited to sing his or her favorite folk song. I sang Lou Reed"s "Heroin." I was never welcome back in the group.
A YEAR LATER I was out of high school, into college, not doing well. I was going through one of my periodic funks, following one of my periodic failed love affairs (the woman of this occasion became a born-again Christian and married the man who impregnated her; later, she became one of the most wildly game s.e.xual people I"ve ever known or enjoyed, but that is another story). In this period-the late winter of 1969 and the early winter of 1970-I was taking a lot of drugs, learning how to drink, and staying up all night until the sun rose, then I"d hit the bed (actually, the floor, which was my bed at the time), and finally find sleep. (Interestingly, at least to me, I returned to this pattern-the staying-up-until-sunrise-then-running-to-hide part-for the entire month in which I wrote and revised this current volume.) By this same period, something called the "rock press" had developed: magazines like Cheetah, Crawdaddy!, and Rolling Stone, where one could read pa.s.sionate and informed opinions and arguments about current music and, better yet, could also learn about earlier musicians who had helped make the late 1960s" and early 1970s" innovations possible-everyone from Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington to the Carter Family, Lotte Lenya, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Ornette Coleman (some of whom were still alive, making vital music) and countless more. As a result, the journalism (that is, the essays, rants, profiles, interviews and historical perspectives) of such writers as Ralph Gleason, Paul Williams, Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, Langdon Winner, Jonathan Cott, Lester Bangs, Paul Nelson, Nick Tosches, Robert Christgau, and Ellen Willis came to seem as exciting and meaningful to me as much of the music they were writing about-though too d.a.m.n few of them for my liking were willing to stand up for the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed (Willis, Nelson, and Christgau being notable and important exceptions).
It was not until 1974 that I began writing about popular music. What made this possible was Bob Dylan"s "comeback" tour (his first such American trek in eight years) with the Band. This was also a time, I should note, when I spent my days working as a counselor at a Portland, Oregon, drug abuse clinic and my nights smoking as much marijuana as I could find-a contradictory (probably hypocritical) turn of affairs, but hardly an uninteresting one. Then I saw Dylan in early 1974 (again, on the occasion of my birthday, ten years after the Beatles" debut on Ed Sullivan), and an old girlfriend suggested I write about the event for a local underground newspaper. After doing so, I never looked back. The piece, of course, was awful (at least to my eyes today), but that hardly mattered. I"d managed to put together my two greatest dreams and pleasures: writing (as a result of a love of reading) and music criticism (as a result of listening to music). When I finished that article, I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to write about popular music-it was pretty much all I cared about as a vocation. Within a season I had quit my drug counseling job (also had cut way back on my drug intake-a connection?), and started writing for a number of local publications. I also began writing jazz reviews for Down Beat (jazz, by this time, had come to mean as much to me as rock & roll-a pa.s.sion that isn"t evident enough in this present volume), and along with the help of some good friends, I was soon editing a Portland-based magazine, Musical Notes. A few dreams were now active in my life.
Then those dreams turned to nightmare, to the worst horror I could imagine. I am sorry if you have already heard this story-perhaps you have-but there is no way I can finish this introduction without being honest about this particular pa.s.sage in my life.
In 1976, when I was twenty-five, I began writing for Rolling Stone. When the magazine came along in 1967, it announced itself as a voice that might prove as fervent and intelligent as the brave new music that it dared to champion. From the time I began reading the magazine, I held a dream of someday writing for its pages. To me, that would be a way of partic.i.p.ating in the development of the music I had come to love so much.
In the autumn of 1976, I learned that Rolling Stone had accepted an article of mine for publication. I was elated. Then, about a week later I learned something horrible, something that killed my elation: My older brother, Gary Gilmore, was going to be put to death by a firing squad in Utah. It didn"t look like there was much that could stop it-and I didn"t know if I could live with it.
A few months before, in April 1976, Gary-ten years my senior-had been paroled from the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, to Provo, Utah, following a fifteen-year period of often brutal incarceration, largely at Oregon State Prison. Unfortunately, Gary"s new life as a free man shortly grew troubled and violent, and on a hot and desperate July night, my brother crossed a line that no one should ever come to cross: in a moment born from a life of anger and ruin, Gary murdered an innocent man-a young Mormon named Max Jensen-during a service station robbery. The next night, he murdered another innocent man-another young Mormon, Ben Bushnell, who was working as a Provo motel manager-during a second robbery. Within hours, Gary was arrested, and within days he had confessed to his crimes. The trial that followed was pretty much an open-and-shut affair: Gary was convicted of first degree murder in the shooting of Ben Bushnell, and he was sentenced to death. Given the choice of being hung or shot, Gary elected to be shot.
All this had happened before I began writing for Rolling Stone, and a few months later, when I did begin working for the magazine, I never mentioned anything about my brother or his crimes to any of my editors or fellow journalists. Only a handful of my friends knew about my strained relationship with my troubled brother. The truth is, I had put myself at a distance from the realities of Gary"s life for many years; I told myself that I feared him, that I resented his violent and self-ruinous choices, that he and I did not really share the same bloodline. After Gary"s killings and his subsequent death sentence, I felt grief and rage over his acts, and I also felt deep and painful humiliation: I could not believe that my brother had left his family with so much horror and shame to live with, and I could not forgive him for what he had done to the families of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell. But in a way, the whole episode seemed more like a culmination of horror rather than its new beginning. That"s because part of me believed that Gary would never be executed-after all, there had not been any executions in America in a decade-and that he instead would simply rot away the rest of his life in the bitter nothingness of a Utah prison. At the same time, I think another, deeper part of me always understood that Gary had been born (or at least raised) to die the death he would die.
Any hope for serenity in my life had been destroyed. Shortly after I heard about Gary"s wish to be executed, I told my editor at Rolling Stone, Ben Fong-Torres, about my relationship with Gary. By this time, Gary Gilmore was a daily name in nationwide headlines, and I felt that the magazine had a right to know that I was his brother. Fong-Torres, who had lost a brother of his own through violence, was extremely sympathetic and supportive during the period that followed, and eventually he gave me the opportunity to write about my experience of Gary"s execution for the magazine. To be honest, not everybody at Rolling Stone back in early 1977 thought it was such a great idea to run that article ("A Death in the Family," March 10, 1977), and I could understand their misgivings: After all, what would be the point of publishing what might appear to be one man"s apology for his murderous and suicidal brother? Still, following the turmoil of Gary"s death, I needed to find a way to express the devastation that I had just gone through, or else I might never be able to climb out of that devastation. With the help of Fong-Torres and fellow editors Barbara Downey and Sarah Lazin, a fairly decent and honest piece of first-person journalism was created, and in the process a significant portion of my sanity and hope were salvaged. More important, perhaps the people who read it got a glimpse into the reality of living at the center of an unstoppable national nightmare.
In the season that followed Gary"s death, I went to work for Rolling Stone full-time in Los Angeles. It wasn"t an easy period for me-I felt displaced, and (once again) was drinking too much and taking too many pills-but the magazine gave me plenty of slack; maybe more than I deserved. As time went along, I began to find some of my strength and purpose again as a music writer, and Rolling Stone gave me the opportunity to meet and write about some of the people whose music and words had mattered most in my life. It was also a season in which I spent many nights lost in the dark and brilliant splendor of punk. I liked the way the music confronted its listeners with the reality of our merciless age. Punk, as much as anything, saved my soul in those years, and gave me cause for hope-which is perhaps a funny thing to say about a movement (or experiment) that"s first premise was: there are no simple hopes that are not false or at least suspect.
I WROTE FOR Rolling Stone from 1976 until the present-sometimes as a staff writer, sometimes as a contributor. In the years after 1979, I also wrote for Musician and the Los Angeles Times briefly, and in the early 1980s I was (for a year or so) the music editor at the L.A. Weekly. In the autumn of 1982, I became the pop music critic of the (now defunct) Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where I worked until 1987. For the first two or three years, the Herald was a sublime place to write; it was a paper that allowed writers to find and exercise their own voice, sometimes at great length (I"m afraid I became a bit long-winded during that period, but brevity has rarely been my strong suit). Then, sometime in 1985, a new managing editor came in to the paper-a self-described "neo-conservative." I"ve never shared much affinity with conservatives of any variety (I"m pretty much an American leftist and have not been shy nor apologetic about that leaning). In August 1985, I reviewed a live performance by Sting for the Herald. Sting wasn"t a performer or songwriter I liked much-that was plain from my review-but I admired two things about his music at that time: his willingness to attempt adventurous, swing-inflected pop with a band that included saxophonist Branford Marsalis, and his acuity about the realities of mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher-defined British politics. I was particularly taken by his performance of a song called "We Work the Black Seams," and I wrote the following about it: "We Work the Black Seams" . . . was perhaps Sting"s only serious statement that wasn"t saved solely by the prowess of his band, as well as the only one that didn"t need saving. In part, that"s because with its lulling arpeggios and mellifluent chorus it is the one song in Sting"s new batch that is most like his Police material. But there"s more to it than that: It is also the one song uttered from outside Sting"s usual above-it-all perspective-a song told from the view of a British coal miner faced with the uncaring determinism of his government. In order to tell his tale . . . Sting climbs down deep inside the place and conditions where the character lives: He is aware that the fate of the miner"s professions-and therefore the future economy of his cla.s.s-has already been irrevocably shut off, and so he sings his account in a tired and resigned voice, but also with a dark, deadly, righteous sense of pain and anger: "Our blood has stained the coal/We tunneled deep inside the nation"s soul/We matter more than pounds and pence/Your economic theory makes no sense."
The Herald"s new editor was not pleased to read such sentiments in his paper. He sent a message to me via another editor: "Rock & roll is music about and for teenagers. Write about it from that point of view." I ignored the warning-in fact, I stepped up my politics-which meant that soon my life at the Herald was h.e.l.l. I wasn"t alone. I watched the paper"s managerial structure drive some of its best writers out of the company. The managers believed, I was later told, that it was perhaps the writers" affections for style and point of view that was costing the paper its readers (and h.e.l.l, maybe they were even right).
I left the Herald Examiner in 1987, but by that time I was badly disillusioned. Plus I was going through another of my end-of-the-world romantic aftermaths. I wasn"t sure I wanted to remain a writer-but what else did I know how to do? A sympathetic friend and editor at Rolling Stone, James Henke, gave me a series of a.s.signments. I remember hating writing each of them. All I wanted to do was sulk and drink and hate some more. Still, I had bills to pay. Looking back, I see how those a.s.signments helped save me and also taught me some invaluable lessons: one, that summoning the will to write-even at the worst points in my life-meant I had an inner strength that was invaluable and that I should trust; two, that I had not yet lost my love for popular music and its meanings and how it mattered to its audiences. Plus, I realized it still mattered to me-that is, it still helped me. Popular music, all said and done, was among the best friends-and one of the few real confidants-I"d ever known in my life. Whereas you could talk to and confide and hope and trust in a lover, that lover might still leave or betray you. A great song, by contrast, would talk to you-and its truths would never betray you. At 3 A.M., outside of the greatest and most sinful s.e.x, there was nothing that could mean as much as a pop song that told you secrets about your own f.u.c.ked-up and yearning heart.
A FEW YEARS AGO, after the publication of Shot in the Heart (a story about my family"s generational history of violence), I received several letters from readers asking me to compile some of my earlier writings for publication. I didn"t much like the idea. I thought my pop writing was too disjointed and had covered too much musical stylistic terrain to work in any cohesive volume. Also, I"d just finished a book about looking back at my past. I wasn"t anxious to start another-especially since reading my old writings always made my skin crawl. Instead, I preferred to write my own original history about rock & roll"s epic patterns of disruption, but that idea didn"t excite most of the people I talked to. After all, it was a season when pundits like Allan Bloom and William Bennett could write depthless and malicious indictments of popular culture and achieve fame and success for doing so. A history (and defense) of rock"s agitation did not prove an appealing idea to most editors.
Then, following an article I wrote for Rolling Stone in 1996 about the death of Timothy Leary, I again received requests for a collection of writings. I felt a little more receptive to the idea by that time, because I knew I had a handful of articles I"d like to see enjoy a second (if only brief) life. At first, though, the process of selecting those articles was not fun. I"m a big believer that one should never read too much of one"s own writing; you begin to see all the repet.i.tions, all the flaws. A week into the project, I felt like bailing out. Also, I"d written so much about some subjects-such as Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, punk, and Bruce Springsteen-that I wasn"t sure which piece (or pieces) to pick as the most representative.
Then one morning, about 2 A.M. (my favorite hour-that is, next to 3 A.M.), I came to understand something that should have been apparent all along: Without realizing it, I had been writing my own version of a rock & roll history for over a generation. I began to see how I could collect some of my preferred (at least to my tastes) writings, yet also refashion them to construct an outline, a shadow, of rock & roll history-and that is what I have tried to do here. This is not, of course, a proper history of rock & roll; there is far too much that is not addressed in this book as widely as it should be (including blues, punk, jazz, and hip-hop-all of which have been great adventures that have made rock & roll count for even more). Instead, I"ve tried to construct a volume out of a mix of personal touchstones (Bob Dylan, John Lydon, Lou Reed, and others), interview encounters (such as the Clash, Sinead O"Connor, Miles Davis, and Keith Jarrett), and a sampling of critical indulgences (Feargal Sharkey and Marianne Faithfull"s "Trouble in Mind," among the latter). Some of these pieces are printed here pretty close to their original published form, but most have been revised, rea.s.sembled, rewritten, or newly thought out. The Bob Dylan chapter, for example, includes elements from over twenty-three years of articles I"ve written about Dylan, plus many new pa.s.sages.
I"ve tried to put it all together in an orderly way that might make for a story arc of sorts, from Elvis Presley"s invention and weird fame to Kurt Cobain, and the horrible costs of his inventions and weird fame. A Starting Place: A July Afternoon, is about Elvis, where it all begins-or at least where it began in my own life. Setting Out for the Territories is about the people who took Elvis"s possibilities and expanded them-the obvious folks: the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones; in this section, the story moves from the 1950s to the 1960s. Remaking the Territories is more or less about what happened in the 1970s (with the exception of disco, which is addressed in the following section). These are stories about people who began to expand and remake rock-sometimes with wonderful and sometimes horrible results. Dreams and Wars is largely about what happened in the 1980s, as rock (again) took on the powers that be-or actually, the other way around: the powers that be took on rock & roll, in big, bold, ugly ways. This section forms the story (in my mind) of some of what rock means in America and what it has said about the nation, its promises, betrayals, and politics; what Americans think of rock & roll in return; how dance music and heavy metal and rap work and matter for their audiences; and how moralists have tried to shut the whole thing down. There"s also a Michael Jackson chapter in this section, because it"s the best place for it and after a while, Jackson too became part of the problem. Lone Voices is a section about people (some well known, some obscure) who made lone and brave choices and music in the 1980s and 1990s. Endings is exactly what its t.i.tle proclaims: stories about how some people lived and died, in both their music and their lives. And A Last Late-Night Call is about another ending.
IT IS NOW 1998, as I revise this edition. I am a forty-seven-year-old man. I still spend far too many post-midnights listening to new and old loved music. (And far too often hear from my girlfriend: "Could you please turn that down just a little? And when are you coming to bed?") I still love popular music-from Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Sinatra to Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Tupac Shakur, and (still and always) Bob Dylan-above all other twentieth-century popular culture forms.
And yet there is something about today"s music that bothers me terribly-or to be more accurate, about today"s music business. I am troubled by the way the music industry (and not just major corporate labels, but also numerous independent outfits) sign or record artists for what these labels see as a certain sound, quirk, style, nuance, niche, or whatever-and are loathe to allow those artists to expand or develop much beyond that one thing. That is partly why we see so many one-hit wonders-or one moment wonders-whether it"s Green Day, Cowboy Junkies, the Offspring, Faith No More, and countless others. These artists are milked, drained, toured, and discarded before they even have a shot at a second round. It"s a new kind of pop hegemony-a blockbuster hegemony, not at all unlike the blockbuster mentality that has made so much modern film tiresome, predictable and limited. As much as I"m not a real fan of U2, R.E.M., or Pearl Jam, I admire the way they resist being stratified, directed, or contained.
Still, I don"t want to sound like a grumbler or somebody who has lost faith. Pop music hegemony is nothing new. The industry loves it, seeks it-that is, until somebody shatters the security of that dominance: somebody like Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the s.e.x Pistols, Nirvana, N.W.A. Then, the industry goes off in search of artists who can parlay all the new dissidence and invention into yet another newer, hipper, profitable version of dominance. It"s maddening, but it"s also fine-sometimes, in fact, it"s great fun. That"s the way things work. Somebody makes a moment or career out of sundering the known order and sound, and then the industry and culture try to make that act of sundering into a model for ma.s.s commodity. I"m not sure it"s entirely bad-if only because it guarantees that, come tomorrow, somebody else, somebody new and wonderful and daring and deadly, will have something to disrupt and displace, to the pleasure and outrage of many.
Besides, for all the inevitable corporate appropriation that goes on in popular music, rock & roll and hip-hop still face much more serious problems and enemies: All those folks like William Bennett, C. DeLores Tucker, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and (I hate to admit it since I voted for the f.u.c.kers twice) Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who still blame rock & roll for social problems, and who still refuse to acknowledge their own hand in lining the "bridge to the twenty-first century" with some deadly potholes. I am glad that popular music continues to seem like a risk and threat to those people, and I am glad it still seems like an opportunity and voice for liberation (and offense) for others. I am also immensely thankful that I was allowed to come of age in an historical moment-that is, to "grow up"-when rock & roll made some bold and upsetting advances, and I am thrilled with the realization that I will "grow old" with music that will continue to do the same.
That"s why, today and tomorrow, I"ll look to artists like Sleater-Kinney, Trent Reznor, Royal Trux, Marilyn Manson, Tricky, Master P, Bikini Kill, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, P. J. Harvey, Mary Lou Lord, Elliott Smith, and Lucinda Williams for the kind of courage, insight, and beautiful violation that have made rock & roll such a great adventure and such a great disturbance in our culture, our arts, and our values. Without these artists, and others like them, the future won"t count for as much as the past-and all tomorrow"s nighttimes of sin might not be as illuminating.
MIKAL GILMORE.
MARCH 17, 1997.
LOS ANGELES.
(REVISED AUGUST 12, 1998).
PART 1.
a starting place: a july afternoon.
elvis presley"s leap for freedom.
It was a typically heat-thick July day in 1954 in Memphis-a city steeped in raw blues and country traditions. Sam Phillips-a local producer who recorded such bluesmen as Howlin" Wolf, Bobby "Blue" Bland, B. B. King, and Walter Horton at the beginning of their careers for Chess Records, and had started his own fledgling hillbilly label, Sun-had been working steadily for months with a nineteen-year-old, long-haired, bop-wise kid, both of them groping for some uncertain mingling of black credibility and white style. Phillips and the kid-Elvis Presley, who had a startling musical apt.i.tude and a first-hand flair for the blues-understood that hillbilly and black music forms were on the verge of a pop-mainstream breakthrough. Both men were ambitious enough to dream of spearheading that change; one was daring enough to turn his ambition into a hook for generational rebellion, though he probably saw it as little more than an act of impulsive swagger.
What happened that afternoon was both hoped for and totally unexpected, and comes as close to a real myth-producing event as pop culture has yielded since the unreal flight of Huckleberry Finn. By all accounts it was a casual occurrence. Presley was in the Sun studio with guitarist Scotty Moore and ba.s.sist Bill Black, working up some country numbers for the heck of it, trying to get a feel for throwing a song on tape with enough life to bounce back. The impromptu band took a break and Presley impulsively began playing the fool-the most acceptable guise for his inventive verve. He fell into an Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup song, "That"s All Right," and the rest of the band fell in behind. Elvis turned the moment"s frolic into a vaulting exercise in rhythm and unconstraint, and Phillips, working in a nearby room, recognized that it was something to be captured. He had the band reenact the moment, and under that impetus, Presley turned his performance into a grasp for freedom, quite unlike anything else in American pop history.
The record of that performance-with a hepped-up version of the bluegra.s.s standard, "Blue Moon of Kentucky," on the flipside-made Presley an immediate local hillbilly star, though many listeners reacted to the music with immediate shock and anger. (By September he was playing the Grand Ole Opry, where he was ridiculed.) No matter. A year later, Presley was on the national charts, still being slotted as a hillbilly cat. Six months after that he was the most famous and controversial figure in America-an unstoppable force who served to reshape the pop mainstream (making black and hillbilly music not just imminent but dominant), and who almost singlehandedly redefined what it meant to be an American visionary, an American artist, in a fierce new time. No other modern legend was to be so widely d.a.m.ned at first as a threat or joke, only later to be understood as one of our purest, most commonly acclaimed heroes.
NOW, THESE MANY YEARS later, it is almost impossible to consider the subject of Elvis Presley without giving ground to the demands of myth and hyperbole. Perhaps that"s the way it should be. Presley is one of the few American post-World War II heroes who remains largely undisclosed by the particulars of his "real" life-he seems no more knowable for all that has been learned about his private reality. Was Presley, as writer Albert Goldman charged in his lurid anti-Southern, anti-indigent, anti-rock biography of the singer, a vile womanizer and overgorged drug abuser, a cra.s.s rube unworthy of his fans? The answer-at least in part-might well be yes. Does this knowledge somehow diminish the value of the singer"s influence or the verity of his importance? The answer, this time, resoundingly, is no. As Presley biographer and critic Dave Marsh has commented, "You don"t need to be a great man to be a great artist," an acknowledgment that, in the pa.s.sage from untidy truth to exalted myth, certain artists and celebrities earn their shot at transfiguring our culture, and maybe our lives to boot, regardless of their character lapses.
Of course, there"s an equally unnerving truth to be faced here: Simply, that great art isn"t exactly the vindication for a life or career poorly lived-that great art, in fact, doesn"t necessarily exonerate the person behind the art or bring us any closer to the real experience of that person"s life. Thus, after a point, after his impact was enough to change the course-indeed, the meaning and reach-of popular culture, Presley"s art no longer stood for or belonged solely to him: It also became whatever we made (and remade) of it. That is why his effect remains so overpowering forty-four years after his initial explosion of fame, and a generation after his pitiable death.
And yet the irony of all this is that Presley himself-possibly the one figure more people in contemporary American pop history have agreed on than any other (have lovingly elected as hero, leader, saint, cynosure)-stays as elusive as he is enticing. Some of us delve in to his s.e.xual and religious preoccupations as a way of comprehending or "knowing" him; others pore over the minutiae of his music. It"s as if we expect something to fall into place one of these days, expect to learn whether this young iconoclast turned fallen nighthawk and wretched glutton was really a bunco man, fool, traitor, conqueror, or simply one of our greatest involuntary democrats. The true object, though, of this delving is always our wayward selves: Somewhere along the line, some of us feel, we mislaid something by loving Presley-that when he lost touch with his own sublime fire, some shared joy dropped into the darkness and was never fully recovered. By looking for Presley, we are hunting after the terrible mystery of how many of us lose our dreams yet keep our power. Consequently, we may want-or need-more from the singer now than we did that July afternoon over forty years ago when Elvis Presley made a unique reach for fame and liberation that had the effect of making rock & roll a transformative-no doubt unstoppable-national fact.
WITH THE IMPORTANT exception of Martin Luther King, Jr., no other activist or popular hero has better defined the meaning, potential, and shortcomings of the modern American birthright-no other figure has mixed the ambitions and risks of American myth so promisingly-as Elvis Presley. He defined revolt, aspiration, opulence, humility, pettiness, generosity, frivolity, significance, prodigy, waste, renewal, corruption, dissolution, and a kind posthumous transcendence. He did it all without design, with little more than intuition and nerve, and interestingly, he accomplished it with only the a.s.sertive mix of his own raw talent and provoking personality. He did not perform as a "creative" force per se-a songwriter or pop philosopher-but as a man of deeds, action, and experience.
This may not seem so much when compared with the work of such musical figures as Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Hank Williams, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Duane Allman, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Randy Newman, or Bruce Springsteen. One could claim that all of these artists made lasting legacies out of personal vision and defined themselves as much by their thought and work-their creative invention-as their personality. In a certain way, perhaps all are greater artists than Presley. That is, they are all folks who wrestled with the meaning of their place in American society with uncommon self-awareness, who expressed their discoveries, doubts, and inventions with exceptional (if only sometimes instinctive) understandings of the state of the culture around them, who could apply a full-fledged sense of history and tradition to modern styles and predicaments-which is something that Presley only managed occasionally. For that matter, one might infer that whatever sense of culture, history and politics the singer did possess was, as often as not, depressingly uninformed-and one might even be right.
And yet Elvis opened more doors, bounded into the unknown with a greater will to adventure than those other artists, and that is why, all these years later, we still remember him with a special thrill. Without Presley as an exemplar, rock & roll may have proved less of a lasting force because it may also have proved less alluring: It was the idea that any of us could grow up to be like Presley-rather than we could grow up to be like James Dean, Marlon Brando, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, a soldier or an astronaut-that made rock the most vital of our national a.s.sets this last near-half century. Better than anybody but Martin Luther King, Jr., Presley personified and stylized the modern American quest for freedom, experience, and opportunity. Chances are, we will be enjoying (or recoiling from) the aftereffect of his exploits for many years to come.
If one accepts Elvis Presley as the definitional American modernizer, and rock & roll as the primary postwar art form, then it is interesting to examine rock (and not just American rock) for how well its successors have made good on Presley"s promise: That is, after the call to freedom has been sounded, what"s next? How does one raise the stakes, expand the territory? In some ways, that is the main question that the rest of this book will try to explore, though no volume can yet be close to providing final answers.
PART 2.
setting out for the territories.
beatles then, beatles now.
BEATLES THEN.
In the 1950s, rock & roll meant disruption: It was the clamor of young people, kicking hard against the Eisenhower era"s public ethos of vapid repression. By the outset of the 1960s, that spirit had been largely tamed, or simply impeded by numerous misfortunes, including Elvis Presley"s film and army careers; the death of Buddy Holly; the blacklisting of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry; and the persecution of D.J. Alan Freed, who had been stigmatized on payola charges by Tin Pan Alley interests and politicians, angered by his championing of R & B and rock & roll. To be sure, pop still had its share of rousing voices and trends-among them musicians like Ray Charles and James Brown, who were rapidly transforming R & B into a more aggressive and soulful form-but clearly, there had been a tilt: In 1960, the music of Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka, Connie Francis, and Mitch Miller (an avowed enemy of rock & roll) ruled the airwaves and the record charts, giving some observers the notion that decency and order had returned to the popular mainstream. But within a few years, rock would regain its disruptive power with a joyful vengeance, until by the decade"s end it would be seen as a genuine force of cultural and political consequence. For a remarkable season, it was a widely held truism-or threat, depending on your point of view-that rock & roll could (and should) make a difference: that it was eloquent and inspiring and principled enough to change the world-maybe even save it.
How did such a dramatic development take place? How did rock & roll come to be seen as such a potent voice for cultural revolution?
In part, of course, it was simply a confluence of auspicious conditions and ambitious prodigies that would break things open. Or, if you prefer a more romantic or mythic view, you could simply say that rock & roll had set something loose in the 1950s-a spirit of cultural abandon-that could not be stopped or refused, and you might even be right. Certainly, rock & roll had demonstrated that it was capable of inspiring ma.s.sive generational and social ferment, and that its rise could even have far-reaching political consequences. That is, admiring and buying the music of Elvis Presley not only raised issues of s.e.x and age and helped stylize new customs of youth revolt, but also inevitably advanced the cause of racial tolerance, if not social equality. This isn"t to say that to enjoy Presley or rock & roll was the same as subscribing to liberal politics, nor is it to suggest that the heroism of R & B and rock musicians was equal to that of civil rights campaigners like Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, or Rosa Parks, who paid through pain, humiliation, and blood for their courage. But rock & roll did present black musical forms-and consequently black sensibilities and black causes-to a wider (and whiter) audience than ever before, and as a result, it drove a fierce, threatening wedge into the heart of the American musical mainstream.
By the 1960s, though, as the sapless Eisenhower years were ending and the brief, l.u.s.ty Kennedy era was forming, a new generation was coming of age. The parents of this generation had worked and fought for ideals of peace, security, and affluence, and they expected their children not merely to appreciate or benefit from this bequest, but also to affirm and extend their prosperous new world. But the older generation was also pa.s.sing on legacies of fear and some unfinished obligations-anxieties of nuclear obliteration and ideological difference, and sins of racial violence-and in the rush to stability, priceless ideals of equality and justice had been compromised, even lost. Consequently, the children of this age-who would forever be dubbed the "baby boom generation"-were beginning to question the morality and politics of postwar America, and some of their musical tastes began to reflect this unrest. In particular, folk music-led by Peter, Paul, and Mary; Joan Baez; and, in particular, Bob Dylan-was gaining a new credibility and popularity, as well as an important moral authority. It spoke for a world that should be, and it was stirring many young people to commit themselves to social activism, especially regarding the cause of civil rights. But for all its egalitarian ideals, folk also seemed a music of past and largely spent traditions. As such, it was also the medium for an alliance of politicos and intelligentsia that viewed a teen-rooted, ma.s.s entertainment form like rock & roll with derision. The new generation had not yet found a style or standard-bearer that could tap the temper of the times in the same way that Presley and rockabilly had accomplished in the 1950s.
WHEN ROCK & ROLL"S rejuvenation came, it was from a place small and unlikely, and far away. Indeed, in the early 1960s, Liverpool, England, was a fading port town that had slid from grandeur to dilapidation during the postwar era, and it had come to be viewed by sn.o.bbish Londoners as a demeaned place of outsiders-in a cla.s.s-conscious land that was itself increasingly an outsider in modern political affairs and popular culture. But one thing Liverpool had was a br.i.m.m.i.n.g pop scene, made up of bands playing tough and exuberant blues- and R & B-informed rock & roll.
One Sat.u.r.day morning back in 1961, a young customer entered a record store called NEMS, "The Finest Record Store in Liverpool," on Whitechapel, a busy road in the heart of the city"s stately commercial district. The young man asked store manager Brian Epstein for a new single, "My Bonnie," by the Beatles. Epstein replied that he had never heard of the record-indeed, had never heard of the group, which he took to be an obscure, foreign pop group. The customer, Raymond Jones, pointed out the front window, across Whitechapel, where Stanley Street juts into a murky-looking alley area. Around that corner, he told Epstein, on a smirched lane known as Mathew Street, the Beatles-perhaps the most popular of Liverpudlian rock & roll groups-performed afternoons at a cellar club, the Cavern. A few days later, prompted by more requests, Epstein made that journey around Stanley onto Mathew and down the dank steps into the Cavern. With that odd trudge, modern pop culture turned its most eventful corner. By October 1962, Brian Epstein was the Beatles" manager, and the four-piece ensemble had broken into Britain"s Top 20 with a folkish rock song, "Love Me Do." There was little about the single that heralded greatness-the group"s leaders, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, weren"t yet distinguished songwriters-but nonetheless the song began a momentum that would forever shatter the American grip on the U.K. pop charts.
In many ways, Britain was as ripe for a pop cataclysm as America had been for Presley during the ennui after world war. In England-catching the reverberations of not just Presley, but the jazz milieu of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac-the youth scene had acquired the status of a mammoth subcultural cla.s.s: the by-product of a postwar population, top-heavy with people under the age of eighteen. For those people, pop music denoted more than preferred entertainment or even stylistic rebellion: It signified the idea of autonomous society. British teenagers weren"t just rejecting their parents" values-they were superseding them, though they were also acting out their eminence in American terms-in the music of Presley and rockabilly; in blues and jazz tradition.
When Brian Epstein first saw the Beatles at the Cavern, he saw not only a band who delivered their American obsessions with infectious verve but also reflected British youth"s joyful sense of being cultural outsiders, ready to embrace everything new, and everything that their surrounding society tried to prohibit them. What"s more, Epstein figured that the British pop scene would recognize and seize on this kinship. As the group"s manager, Epstein cleaned up the Beatles" punkness considerably, but he didn"t deny the group its spirit or musical instincts, and in a markedly short time, his faith paid off. A year after "Love Me Do" peaked at number 17 in the New Musical Express charts, the Beatles had six singles active in the Top 20 in the same week, including the top three positions-an unprecedented and still unduplicated feat. In the process, Lennon and McCartney had grown enormously as writers-in fact, they were already one of the best composing teams in pop history-and the group itself had upended the local pop scene, establishing a hierarchy of long-haired male ensembles, playing a popwise but hard-bashing update of "50s-style rock & roll. But there was more to it than mere pop success: The Beatles were simply the biggest explosion England had witnessed in modern history, short of war. In less than a year, they had transformed British pop culture-had redefined not only its intensities and possibilities, but had turned it into a matter of nationalistic impetus.
Then, on February 9, 1964, following close on the frenzied breakthrough of "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand," TV variety-show kingpin Ed Sullivan presented the Beatles for the first time to a ma.s.s American audience, and it proved to be an epochal moment. The Sullivan appearance drew over 70 million viewers-the largest TV audience ever, at that time-an event that cut across divisions of style and region, and drew new divisions of era and age; an event that, like Presley, made rock & roll seem an irrefutable opportunity. Within days it was apparent that not just pop style but a whole dimension of youth society had been recast-that a genuine upheaval was under way, offering a frenetic distraction to the dread that had set into America after the a.s.sa.s.sination of President John F. Kennedy, and a renewal of the brutally wounded ideal that youthfulness carried our national hope. Elvis Presley had shown us how rebellion could be fashioned into eye-opening style; the Beatles were showing us how style could take on the impact of cultural revelation-or at least how a pop vision might be forged into an unimpeachable consensus. Virtually overnight, the Beatles" arrival in the American consciousness announced that not only the music and times were changing, but that we were changing as well. Everything about the band-its look, sound, style, and abandon-made plain that we were entering a different age, that young people were free to redefine themselves in completely new terms.
All of which raises an interesting question: Would the decade"s pop and youth scenes have been substantially different without the Beatles? Or were the conditions such that, given the right catalyst, an ongoing pop explosion was inevitable? Certainly other bands (including the Shadows, the Dave Clark Five, the Searchers, the Zombies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Manfred Mann) contributed to the sense of an emerging scene, and yet others (among them the Kinks, the Who, the Animals, the Rolling Stones, and-especially-Bob Dylan) would make music just as vital, and more aggressive (and sometimes smarter and more revealing) than that of the Beatles. Yet the Beatles had a singular gift that transcended even their malleable sense of style, or John Lennon and Paul McCartney"s genius as songwriters and arrangers, or Brian Epstein and producer George Martin"s unerring stewardship as devoted mentors. Namely, the Beatles possessed an almost impeccable flair for rising to the occasion of their own moment in history, for honoring the promise of their own talents-and this knack turned out to be the essence, the heart, of their artistry. The thrill and momentum wouldn"t fade for several years; the music remained a constant surprise and delight, the band, continually transfixing and influential, as both their work and presence intensified our lives. In the end, only their own conceits, conflicts, ambitions, and talents served as decisive boundaries.
In short, the Beatles were a rupture-they changed modern history-and no less a visionary than Bob Dylan understood the meaning of their advent. "They were doing things n.o.body else was doing. . . . ," he later told biographer Anthony Scaduto. "But I just kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else thought they were just for the teenyboppers, that they were gonna pa.s.s right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew they were pointing the direction that music had to go. . . . It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn. This was something that never happened before."
THE BEATLES, of course, were hardly alone in transforming the 1960s" pop soundscape. Bob Dylan-inspired by the Beatles" creativity, freedom, and impact-moved on to electric music in 1965, to the outrage of the folk community though also to an incalculable benefit for rock & roll. The Rolling Stones-whose pop careers the Beatles helped make possible (in fact, Lennon and McCartney wrote the band"s first hit single, "I Wanna Be Your Man")-were already impressing nervous adults as being a bit repellent for the obvious s.e.xual implications of a song like "(I Can"t Get No) Satisfaction." And there was much more: Some of the most pleasurable and enduring music of the 1960s was being made by the monumental black-run Detroit label, Motown-which had scored over two dozen Top 10 hits by 1965 alone, by such artists as Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, Mary Wells, and the Four Tops. By contrast, a grittier brand of the new soul sensibility was being defined by Memphis-based Volt, Stax, and Atlantic artists like Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the MGs, Wilson Pickett, Carla and Rufus Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, Eddie Floyd, James Carr and William Bell, and most memorably, Otis Redding. In other words, black forms remained vital to rock and pop"s growth (in fact, R & B"s codes, styles, and spirit had long served as models for white pop and teen rebellion-especially for the young Beatles and Rolling Stones), and as racial struggles continued through the decade, soul-as well as the best jazz from artists like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Sonny Rollins-increasingly expressed black culture"s developing views of pride, ident.i.ty, history, and power. By 1967, when Aretha Franklin scored with a ma.s.sive hit cover of Otis Redding"s "Respect," black pop was capable of signifying ideals of racial pride and feminist valor that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.
Yet perhaps the greatest triumph of the time was simply that, for a long and glorious season, all these riches-white invention and black genius-played alongside one another in a radio marketplace that was more open than it had ever been before (or would ever be again), for a shared audience that revered it all. Just how heady and diverse the scene was came across powerfully in the 1965 film The T.A.M.I. Show-a greatest-hits pop revue that, in its stylistic and racial broadmindedness, antic.i.p.ated the would-be catholic spirit that later characterized the Monterey Pop and Woodstock festivals. For those few hours, as artists like the Supremes, Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Jan and Dean, James Brown, and the Rolling Stones stood alongside one another onstage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, rock & roll looked and felt like a dizzying, rich, complex, and joyous community, in which any celebration or redemption was possible.
IN ONE WAY or another, this longing for community-the dream of self-willed equity and harmony, or at least tolerant pluralism in a world where familiar notions of family and accord were breaking down-would haunt rock"s most meaningful moments for the remainder of the decade. Unfortunately, the same forces that would deepen and expand the music"s social-mindedness-that would make rock the most publicly felt or consumed part of an actively self-defining counterculture-were also the forces that would contribute to the dissolution of that dream. In 1965, after waging the most successful "peace" campaign in America"s electoral history, President Lyndon B. Johnson began actively committing American troops to a highly controversial and deadly military action in Vietnam, and it quickly became apparent that it was the young who would pay the bloodiest costs for this horrible war effort. Sixties rock had given young people a sense that they possessed not just a new ident.i.ty but also a new empowerment. Now, Vietnam began to teach that same audience that it was at risk, that its government and parents would willingly sacrifice young lives for old fears and distant threats-and would even use war as a means of diffusing youth"s new sovereignty. The contrast between those two realizations-between power and peril, between joy and fear-became the central tension that defined late "60s youth culture, and as rock reflected that tension more, it also began forming oppositions to the jeopardy.
Consequently, the music started losing its "innocence." The Beatles still managed to maintain a facade of effervescence in the sounds of alb.u.ms like Beatles for Sale, Help, and even Rubber Soul, but the content of the songs had turned more troubled. It was as if the group had lost a certain mooring. Lennon was singing more frequently about alienation and apprehension, McCartney about the unreliability of love-and whereas their earlier music had fulfilled the familiar structures of 1950s rock, their newer music was moving into unaccustomed areas and incorporating strange textures. Primarily, though, the band was growing fatigued from a relentless schedule of touring, writing, and recording. Following the imbroglio that resulted from Lennon"s a.s.sertion that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, and after one last dispirited 1966 swing through America (in which they were unable to play their more adventurous new material), the Beatles called a formal quits to live performances. Also, it was becoming evident that youth culture (especially its "leaders": pop stars) were starting to come under fire for flouting conventional tastes and morals. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones were arrested for drug possession in a series of 1967 busts in London, and were pilloried by the British press and legal system. "I"m not concerned with your petty morals which are illegitimate," Richards bravely (or perhaps foolishly) told a court official at his trial-and it was plain that generational tensions were heating up into a full-fledged cultural war.
Maybe these developments should have been received as harbingers of dissolution, but the vision of rock as a unifying and liberating force had become too exciting, too deep-seated, to be denied. By this time rock & roll was plainly youth style, and youth was forming alternative communities and political movements throughout Europe and America. In the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, something approaching utopia seemed to be happening. Bands like the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Charlatans were forming social bonds with the same audiences they were playing for, and were trying to build a working communal ethos (and social redemption) from a swirling mix of music, drugs, s.e.x, metaphysics, and idealistic love.
In mid 1967, after a year-long hiatus, the Beatles helped raise this worldview from the margins to worldwide possibility with the release of Sgt. Pepper"s Lonely Hearts Club Band-a cohesive, arty, and brilliant work that tapped perfectly the collective generational mood of the times, and that reestablished the foursome"s centrality to rock"s power structure. It wasn"t that the Beatles had invented the psychedelic or avant-garde aesthetic that their new music epitomized-in fact, its s.p.a.cey codes and florid textures and arrangements had been clearly derived from the music of numerous innovative San Francisco and British bands. But with Sgt. Pepper, they managed to refine what these other groups had been groping for, and they did so in a way that unerringly manifested the sense of independence and iconoclasm that now seized youth culture. At the alb.u.m"s end, John Lennon sang "A Day in the Life"-the loveliest-sounding song about alienation that pop had ever yielded-and then all four Beatles. .h.i.t the same loud, lingering, portentous chord on four separate pianos. As that chord lingered and then faded, it bound up an entire culture in its mysteries, its implications, its sense of power and hope. In some ways, it was the most magical moment that culture would ever share, and the last gesture of genuine unity that we would ever hear from the Beatles.
Sgt. Pepper was an era-defining and form-busting work. To many, it certified that rock was now art and that art was, more than ever, a ma.s.s medium. It also established the primacy of the alb.u.m as pop"s main format-as a vehicle for fully-formed conceptual ventures and as the main means by which rock artists communicated their truths (or pretensions) to their audience, and by which they conjoined and enlightened that audience. Rock was filled now with not only ideals of defiance, but dreams of love, community, and spirituality. Even the Rolling Stones-who always sang about much darker concerns-would start recording songs about love and altruism (that is, for a week or two). "For a brief while," wrote critic Langdon Winner of the Sgt. Pepper era, "the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young."
But that blithe center couldn"t forever hold. By the time Sgt. Pepper was on the streets, San Francisco"s Haight-Ashbury was already turning into a scary and ugly place, riddled with corruption and hard drugs, and overpopulated with bikers, rapists, thieves, and foolish shamans. In addition, a public backlash was forming. Many Americans were afraid they had lost their young to irredee