History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (18 page)

At the end of the song Lauper begins to shout. With a late, 1960s doo-wop scratch in her throat, more Reparata and the Delrons than the Shirelles, she can’t hold
money
the way she once could, but she can push it, stretch it, hammer it, try to break it, blow it up like a bomb, turn it into a nursery
rhyme, play the word as if she were a horn, embrace the word, the idea, the life as completely as Barrett Strong did at the end of his song,
money money money money money money money,
twenty times that feel like more than anyone could count.

This “Money Changes Everything” tells Neil Young’s story: rock ’n’ roll comes first, blues and country only later. How strange that, for both Tom Gray and Cyndi Lauper, a song they had fought over for twenty-five years and may be fighting over for years to come should finally find its way back into a body, a host, so unlike the punk body of noise, force, and defiance that, for both of them, the song started with: the body of an old folk song, a song people were singing long before either of them were born, a song with no original and thus no copy. The point, they found, was to play this song as if it had always existed, their task simply to keep it alive, to pass it on. And, in its way, in the conversation rock ’n’ roll has with itself and with the world at large, the same thing has happened with “Money.”

In the movie
Killing Them Softly,
released in 2012, it’s 4 November 2008, and with a 1930s version of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” floating over him like a cloud, Brad Pitt’s hitman walks into a bar to meet mob fixer Richard Jenkins to collect for the three people he’s killed. Jenkins is trying to short Pitt on the price; on the TV monitor above them, Barack Obama is giving his victory speech. “Ah, yes, we’re
all the same,” Pitt says. “We’re all equal.” “We have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of blue states and red states,” Obama says. “We are, and always will be, the United States of America.” Pitt puts a cigarette in his mouth. “Next he’ll be telling us we’re a community, one people,” Pitt says. “In this country,” Obama says, “we rise or fall as one nation, as one people.” “We’re one people?” Pitt says. “It’s a myth created by Thomas Jefferson.” “Now you’re going to have a go at Thomas Jefferson,” Jenkins says. “My friend,” Pitt says quietly, like a professor talking to a student. “Jefferson’s an American saint, because he wrote the words all men are created equal—words he clearly didn’t believe, because he allowed his own children to live in slavery. He was a rich wine snob who was sick of paying taxes to the Brits. So yeah, he wrote some lovely words and aroused the rabble and they went out and died for those words, while he sat back, and drank his wine, and fucked his slave girl.” He points up at the TV, his voice quieting even more. “This guy wants to tell me we’re living in a community? Don’t make me
laugh.
I’m living in
America,
and in America you’re on your own. America’s not a country. It’s just a business. Now
fuckin’
pay me.” Then the screen goes black and on the soundtrack Barrett Strong takes the story from there.

This Magic Moment

2007 • 1959

On 22 July 2007, in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Lou Reed took the stage to close a tribute to Doc Pomus, a songwriter who had died sixteen years before, in 1991, at sixty-five. Born Jerome Felder in Brooklyn in 1925, he was six when he contracted polio; by the late 1940s he was performing in New York clubs, a Jewish blues singer on crutches. The records he made were distinctive, but they didn’t sell. He had been composing songs for himself; writing alone or with partners, he began to offer his tunes to others, and wrote history, especially with Atlantic Records. He wrote “Lonely Avenue” for Ray Charles, “Young Blood” for the Coasters, “Viva Las Vegas,” “Little Sister,” and “Suspicion” for Elvis Presley, “There Must Be a Better World Somewhere” for B. B. King, and most memorably, for the Drifters, “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “I Count the Tears,” and “This Magic Moment.” Sitting heavily in his wheelchair with a fedora and a cigar, he was a ladies’ man, a legendary raconteur, a constant mentor, a beloved friend. “If the music business
had
a heart,” Jerry Wexler once said, “It would be Doc Pomus.”

Lou Reed had himself recorded “This Magic Moment” in
1995 for
Till the Night Is Gone,
a Doc Pomus tribute album. Contributions included Bob Dylan on “Boogie Woogie Country Girl,” originally written for Big Joe Turner; after I reviewed a 1970 version by the now-forgotten Southwind in
Rolling Stone,
Pomus, who I’d never heard of, was on the phone for over an hour, at first haranguing me for failing to mention who’d written the song, then talking about how songwriters never got credit for anything (“People think the
artists
write the songs!” he said with utter incredulity), then talking about everything under the sun. The highlight of the album was a crawling version of “Viva Las Vegas” by Shawn Colvin, singing as a hooker just after being pushed down the stairs from the escort service to the street. Reed took “This Magic Moment”—with the tenor Ben E. King in the lead, a number 16 hit for the Drifters in 1960, a Velveeta number 9 in a 1968 cover by Jay and the Americans, taken up lifelessly by Marvin Gaye in 1969 and Rick James twenty years after that, but never altogether off the air or out of mind—as if the challenge was to retrieve the Drifters’ sense of wonder from the dank pit of hipster cynicism where Reed had buried it long before. But his heart wasn’t in it—that was the drama he played out as he sang. It wasn’t that the singer couldn’t believe the love-will-never-die promises of the song; he didn’t want to, and to disguise that pain, Reed’s performance was a study of cool. The recording only came to life a year later, when David Lynch used it to orchestrate
that moment in
Lost Highway
when the mobster’s lover played by Patricia Arquette gets out of a black Cadillac convertible in an auto garage and, in super-slow-motion, passes under the gaze of Balthazar Getty’s mechanic, and stops him cold.
Look out look out look out!
the song says as Reed shreds it on his electric guitar.
You’ll never get her face out of your head! You’ll never get out of this song alive!

“These are a few words, last words for tonight, from the great man, Doc Pomus,” Reed said in Brooklyn. He held up a page and read. “‘The important thing is to be the poet. Not the famous poet. There’s so many uncontrollable intangibles that make up recognition and success. It’s the life we choose that sets us up, in the hierarchy of humans, that proves our courage and understanding, and sensitivity. I’d rather be the worst poet than the best agent.’” “It gives me great pleasure,” Reed said, “to bring in Ben E. King. ‘This Magic Moment.’” You can hear what he said more plainly, and more personally: “Ben E. King. This magic moment.”

At sixty-six, dressed in a dark suit and an open-necked white shirt—a far cry from oldies performers at oldies revues, with their Omar-the-Tent-Maker stage suits in garish colors and tails and ruffled shirts—King looked ten years younger, handsome and confident. He could have been a former ballplayer now doing color commentary for ESPN. But you couldn’t tell: he also looked like an alcoholic dragged out of a shelter and cleaned up for the night.

With that jolt of realism in his appearance, he led the crowd in slow clapping. He sang very carefully, fitting his voice to the original cadence of the song—but, really, too carefully, not sure, in the moment, that he could climb the steps of the rhythm. Then the tension eased, and he began to stretch the song out, not to let it end, barely to let it begin, the whole performance an introduction to a book it was forbidden to open.

He could be preaching. The music is faint; then there’s a high, grating gypsy violin, an intrusion, then pizzicato, which settles the tone. But there is jeopardy in each measure of the song—something of the feeling that sneaked out when Reed had played it twelve years before—and with each sung line you can feel the song fall through the cracks, the cracks of real life. Even when the song first appeared on the radio, the most swooning listener knew that “This magic moment . . . will last forever / Forever till the end of time” wasn’t true, but you let it go—after all, it was just a song. But now you can’t let it go. You can’t not hear, behind the words Pomus wrote with his partner Mort Shuman, their own cynicism, and as he sings King hears that too—that was the drama that, this night, he played out.

Sadness and knowledge—Bob Seger’s wish-i-didn’t-knownow-what-I-didn’t know-then—flood the quiet performance, but it doesn’t feel like a performance. It feels like a confession, a wish to be forgiven for propagating the myth that the song could be true.

He takes his time. Bowing his head, holding the microphone with his right hand and clenching the fist of his left, then touching his chest in time, still not lifting his head, King speaks to the song. “Oh, magic moment,” he says, as if it is a person, with its own will, its own failures, its own cruelty. “Say magic,” he pleads, then letting the words explain themselves: “Say, ‘magic moment,’” but the words refuse to answer back. Now the performance is a séance. Watching the words dance around him, he stays with the theme for a whole minute, then lets the words dance him off the stage.

The surge of the original arrangement and what it once brought out of him are completely gone, and that’s the point, in a way that’s the satisfaction—to have outlived the song, to have solved its mystery and escaped its spell—but still, he’s going to let this boat drift all the way down the river. His swollen face looks bruised from the inside. Now, as he disappears into shadows of the stage, he could be Rabbit Brown, serenading sweethearts on Lake Pontchartrain in 1927 with the minstrel bounce of “Never Let the Same Bee Sting You Twice” or the quiet, rippling
bump-baa
’s of his “James Alley Blues.” He could be Joe Louis in 1955, once the greatest prizefighter of his generation, a national hero for his defeat of the so-called Nazi puppet Max Schmeling in 1938 (“I wouldn’t even pay my house rent / Wouldn’t buy me nothing to eat,” Memphis Minnie sang: “Joe Louis says, ‘Take a chance with me / I’ll put you on your feet’”), now a greeter at
a Las Vegas hotel—at the Moulin Rouge, the first hotel on the Strip to admit black people. “We’re not trying to prove anything here,” Louis said; it had been four long years since taxes forced him back into the ring and the whole world saw Rocky Marciano knock him out. “First of all we are in business to make money. If it helps the racial situation here in Vegas, so much the better.”

The year before, in 1954, with
Brown v. Board of Education,
the Supreme Court ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional. By an implication that has never been settled, the unanimous court said that all racial segregation violated some essential premise of American life, that it was a crime against the very idea of an American identity. Six months after Joe Louis helped open the Moulin Rouge in Las Vegas, the NAACP activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and was arrested, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, with a then-unknown preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., as its commanding voice, upended the city and sounded a call that echoed across the country. With that and
Brown,
the words
civil rights
began to enter the national conversation. By 1959 it was the ruling question of national life: would America live up to its promises, or deny that they had ever been made?

The resignation and sorrow over how incomplete that answer would turn out to be is in “This Magic Moment” as
Ben E. King sang it in Brooklyn in 2007, with a black community once vitalized by a mission that was both spiritual and political long since smashed by the unapologetically racist backlash of the Nixon and Reagan administrations, by the drugs, gangs, and casual murder those years left as the fastest route to self-affirmation, and maybe the surest. The sound of a different notion of self-affirmation—of people feeling themselves on the verge of remaking both their country and themselves—is in “This Magic Moment” as the Drifters recorded it on 23 December 1959.

Nine months earlier they had made “There Goes My Baby.” Though as a name on a record label the Drifters went back to the early 1950s, to the impishly sexy lead singing of Clyde McPhatter and such glorious Atlantic hits as “Money Honey,” “Let the Boogie Woogie Roll,” “Honey Love,” and a zoot-suiter’s transformation of “White Christmas” that made Irving Berlin smile, after McPhatter left the group it withered into hack work. The Drifters’ manager, George Treadwell, owned the franchise; he fired those who were left and made a deal with one Lover Patterson, the manager of a group called the Five Crowns. With their lead singer Benjamin Nelson—the sharper monicker Ben E. King would come later—the Five Crowns became the new Drifters. Nelson—King—was born in Henderson, North Carolina, in 1938; from the age of nine he grew up in Harlem. Now, with the shell of a famous group to fill, he cradled his guitar and
sketched out a song. With final credit going as well to Patterson, Treadwell, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who produced it, “There Goes My Baby” made the world forget anyone else had ever called himself a Drifter.

It bore no resemblance to any record that had had the name Drifters on it; it bore no resemblance to any rock ’n’ roll record anyone had ever made. Inside the song was something more than a song, something closer to an epic; to bring it out, Leiber and Stoller hired a conductor and ten string players. There had been violins and cellos on rock ’n’ roll hits before; the Platters were using them on anything that moved. It was the standard way to shift a teenage idol into the nightclub market. Buddy Holly recorded a slew of hearts-and-flowers arrangements in 1958. But this sound wasn’t pretty; it wasn’t sweetening. It wasn’t nicely coiffed hair, capped teeth, and a polite knock on the door. It was bad weather: huge, sweeping, dark, harsh, and threatening. In America as it was chronicled in the Top 40, the record was a foreign country: an intrusion of the blues, a sign of the adult world that from its first bars enacted what it signified. As so many people said, it sounded like the radio dial was stuck between two different stations; it sounded like an accident, a mistake, a collision of songs that had been floating in time since the first radio signal went into the ether.