The Reed-Hendrix Syndrome, and Other Rock Maladies
Dear Chris,
You're right. Surely I'm in the advanced stages of Reed-Hendrix Syndrome--if
I liked something, it must have been the most esoteric thing on the album.
Your sharp demolition of Miller's Velvet Underground chapter--and
man-oh-man, I would not like to be on the wrong end of your critical
contempt--convinces me that he suffers from a parallel syndrome. Call it John
Cale-Brian Jones-Glenn Matlock Disorder. Except in the case of the Beatles,
where he's a convinced Lennonolater, Miller seems compelled to place at center
stage the lesser-known members of any band. He grants Mick Jagger only a
marginal role in the early Stones. Same with Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols.
(Here Miller seems to be leaning too heavily on Jon Savage's Sex Pistols book
of seven or eight years ago, another rock history overstuffed with intellectual
genealogy. Savage attributes such Svengalian omnipotence to Malcolm McLaren,
and focuses so heavily on McLaren's intellectual antecedents, from
structuralism to the Situationist International, that you could easily forget
there was any band there at all.)
Trying to deny Lou Reed any meaningful role in the Velvets, as Miller does,
is a little tortured. I'm grateful to Miller for sticking up for Nico, whom a
lot of people dismiss as a rock stunt, a kind of Eddie Gaedel-but-sexier of the
downtown art world. "All Tomorrow's Parties" haunts me as much as it did when I
first heard it sometime during the Carter administration, and "I'll Be Your
Mirror" has some claim to be the Great Rock Love Song. But if there's a lyrical
voice to the Velvets it's Reed's, particularly when he's in good humor:
Yes, there are problems in these times,
But--wooooo!--none of them are mine!
Miller is to be admired, too, for pointing out the role of "texture" in the
Velvets' best music. Mo Tucker's drumming on "Run, Run, Run" is groundbreaking,
and Cale and Sterling Morrison on "Heroin" ... well, what compares to them? But
it's Reed's song, for goodness' sake--you could even call it his "anthem"--and
trying to give Cale all the credit for such things is like claiming "A Day in
the Life" is a great piece of music by the London Symphony Orchestra.
One thing I wanted to raise with you before I sign off on this very pleasant
week: What did you think of Miller's reggae chapter, which seems to make
Jamaica stand for all of Foreign Rock? In a book so preoccupied with
intellectual ancestries, Latin music seems to have gotten short shrift. Not
just "La Bamba" and Carlos Santana and "Feliz Navidad"--but also such
thoroughly Latin American songs as "P.S. I Love You" and "Will You Still Love
Me Tomorrow?"
I have another, more morals-focused question about his treatment of reggae.
Miller describes Bob Marley's stance as "uplifting unruliness," and notes that
when The Harder They Come set Jamaica's record for box-office take, it
replaced The Sound of Music , "a musical that perfectly symbolizes the
goody-goody moralism that, for better or worse, reggae, like rock and roll,
mocked, ridiculed, and beat into cultural retreat." Did it? Rock seems to have
its own mile-wide streak of goody-goody moralism (with some standouts like
Janis Ian, Jackson Browne, and Bruce Hornsby who are nothing but). After all,
we live , as all smokers realize, in an age of goody-goody moralism. So
what is it in rock and roll that has allowed it to maintain its cultural
pre-eminence in such an age?
Someone ought to know. After all,
If there's a rock 'n' roll critics' Heaven,
You know they got a hell of a Faculty!
Best,
Chris
