Take Those Old Records Off the Shelf
Dear Chris,
Here we are, on the 22nd anniversary of Elvis Presley's death, debating rock
'n' roll--or at least James Miller's version of it. Miller brings a deep
intellectual understanding of what certain major acts have contributed to rock
'n' roll but short-shrifts others. I admire Miller's erudition, but I found his
book dull.
Miller first heard rock in 1956 as a teen-ager, won early renown as a rock
critic in the late 1960s with Rolling Stone , and was rock critic for
Newsweek in the 1980s. He tells the history of rock anecdotally--through
a few dozen isolated vignettes--and conventionally. Here's how it goes. Rhythm
'n' blues (the music of the black South) and other manifestations of the black
"sound," like urban doo-wop, came to the attention of whites--like the record
mogul Ahmet Ertegun in Washington, the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike
Stoller (who wrote "Hound Dog" and "Kansas City") in Los Angeles, DJ Alan Freed
in Cleveland, and Elvis Presley in Memphis, who was totally immersed in black
music almost by accident. As Sam Phillips, Elvis' first producer, said, "If I
could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make
a billion dollars."
Miller's training as an intellectual historian is the source of most of the
strengths and weaknesses of Flowers in the Dustbin . In a To the
Finland Station sort of way, ideas have consequences, and Miller has an
intellectual genealogy for everything. Freed and Ertegun bring commercial
rapacity to rock. Dick Clark brings technical fixing, lip-synching, and the
dressing up of weak voices. The Beatles globalize this music. Drugs enter when
Bob Dylan turns the Beatles on to pot, and become central with the Grateful
Dead. The Velvet Underground (through Andy Warhol) marries rock to a bleak,
minimalist urban counterculture. Janis Joplin invents primal screaming and Jimi
Hendrix a kind of vatic solipsism. David Bowie brings in kitsch and hype.
Finally, the Sex Pistols unite all the nihilism and flimflam that's been
accumulating like sediment in the rock industry and the rock mind-set, and an
era ends--roughly around the time Elvis dies. All these "trends" strike me as
artificial and overdetermined.
One of the striking differences between this rock history and others is that
Miller looks at rock as being over --since roughly 1977, we've had
nothing but reprises of old themes. Do you buy that? I distrust it. When Miller
says that the "most profound sentimental basis" of rock is nostalgia , I
hear not a critical insight but the moaning of one who's, like the rest of us,
getting old.
And what about the general sweep of the narrative? I'm particularly
impressed with Miller's discriminations from the late 1960s and early '70s,
when rock must have been freshest to him. Marvin Gaye is every bit the giant
Miller paints him as, and Jim Morrison every bit the pseud. (Some of the
freshest lines in the book come with his description of Oliver Stone's film
The Doors , which "offers an inadvertent parody, a portrait of an amateur
oracle's excruciatingly dull metamorphosis into a pitiful, drunken slob.")
But I'm troubled by things that are missing:
Where is Sam Cooke, who is a plausible bridge between the Mills Brothers'
"I Found My Million Dollar Baby (In the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store)" and Gaye's
"Let's Get It On"?
Where's Woodstock, which played such a role in turning a counterculture
into a culture?
Where are the Beach Boys, whose dissolution, particularly Brian Wilson's,
shows that the drug-addled despair of the 1960s ran as deep in glee-club Middle
America as it did in Andy Warhol's Factory?
Where is disco, surely as reliable an indicator of musical decadence as the
Sex Pistols?
Where are Steely Dan and Frank Zappa?
And what do you think of Miller's take on race? Most accounts tend to view
rock as either 1) a fifth column in the war on racism, or 2) another venue for
capitalist race theft. Miller is subtler. On one hand, he shows just how many
1950s rock hits had two versions--a Bad White One (like Pat Boone's "Ain't That
a Shame") that hits No. 1, and a Better Black One (like Fat's Domino's "Ain't
It a Shame") that languishes in the middle of the charts. But he also shows
that borrowings worked both ways, and that white audiences were more daringly
receptive to certain rock innovations, if their delight in Little Richard's
filthy lyrics is any indication.
The musical descriptions in Miller's book strike me as flat and formulaic,
as in: "An up-tempo rocker built around a boogie riff and a dramatically
unconventional modulation between major and minor keys, 'Hold Me Tight' was
written in one style alone--that of John Lennon and Paul McCartney." This is
equal parts music theory, pseudery, and Teen Beat gush. But strip it
away and what are you left with? Business writing, a narrative of how
Agent X reneged on Performer Y's contract and took her to Label Z. So a closing
question for you, Chris: Why is it so hard to write well about rock?
Best,
Chris
