Oldies but Goodies
Dear Chris,
Yes, I loved the anecdote about Bob Dylan's mishearing "I can't hide" as "I
get high." And you're right about how easy it is to get caught up in the sound
and supply your own meanings. Rock can be almost pure Keatsian negative
capability. For weeks in 1985 I thought the big Tears for Fears song was
"Everybody Wants To Live Alone." And for a good two decades--until about six
months ago, in fact--I listened to one of my favorite Tom Waits songs, "I Wish
I Was in New Orleans (In the Ninth Ward)," thinking the Ninth Ward was a wing
of Bellevue rather than a neighborhood in New Orleans. All this time I
knew what the Ninth Ward was--and the song is about New Orleans.
But my Will to Narrative, as Nietzsche might have called it, was stronger than
my ear.
My favorite such story, often told in the drug-dimmed dorm rooms of my
youth, was that Ralf Hutter (of Kraftwerk) wrote "(Wir fahren, fahren, fahren
auf der) Autobahn" after mishearing the Beach Boys' "Fun, Fun, Fun" as "She'll
have fahren, fahren, fahren till her daddy takes her T-Bird away." I
have always assumed it to be totally apocryphal. On the other hand, it makes
perfect sense.
The Dylan anecdote reminds me that the book is chock-a-block with excellent
tidbits--some familiar, most not--and it would be unfair to let the week pass
without sharing a few favorites:
Carl Perkins wrote "Blue Suede Shoes" never having seen the word "suede" in
print. ("Blue Swaed Shoes," he called it.)
Listen to the mere stage names of the overproduced Liverpudlian rock studs
who preceded the Beatles: Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Rory
Storm.
Dick Clark had no particular interest in the rock he was promoting, or in
music whatsoever. When, shortly before appearing on Edward R. Murrow's
Person to Person , he was told that Murrow would want to ask about a
record collection, he had to borrow one. He didn't have a record
collection.
I'm still trying to figure out what Miller means when he talks about rock as
a force for nostalgia. I'm convinced that this is largely a personal project.
There's much in the elegiac tone of this book that reminds me of Philip
Larkin's collection All What Jazz? Larkin, to whom "jazz" meant
everything you could hear in war-depleted Oxford--basically, Kid Ory and Bix
Beiderbecke and King Oliver--was turned loose as contemporary jazz
critic for the Daily Telegraph a quarter-century later, having not
listened to any jazz in the interim. He heard a lot of Mingus and Coltrane and
Monk and threw up his hands as if to say, "What's this crap?"
While Miller can't write like Larkin, his nostalgia project is a more
responsible one. He gives us a history of the term "oldies but goodies," and
mentions "In the Still of the Night," scarcely noticed when it came out in
1956, but by 1959 a staple of the oldies circuit. In my own life, I remember Al
Green as a serious but secondary musician in the mid-1970s; if the air-time on
oldies stations is any indication of his ultimate stature, he's one of the
giants. Similarly, I remember that on the Pretenders' debut album, "Talk of the
Town" and "Stop Your Sobbing" got the most play--but only on alternative
stations. The album didn't have any "hits." Today, no matter what town you're
listening to the "Classic Rock" station in, it's "Brass in Pocket"--maybe the
edgiest, least mainstream thing on the whole album--that gets all the
airplay.
Ahem ... after writing that sentence, I looked in a rock reference book and
found that "Brass in Pocket" hit No. 14 stateside. But I think I'll leave it,
as evidence that it's my memory that's failing. Perhaps rock history is
like retrospective politics. If you poll people on how they voted in 1960, 80
percent say they backed Kennedy, even though Nixon got 50 percent of the vote.
And if you ask people what they were listening to in the mid-to-late '60s,
they'll tell you, "Oh, you know ... a lot of Velvet Underground, a lot of
Hendrix."
But I don't believe it.
Best,
Chris.
