History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (21 page)

What Marclay did onstage with “Ghost” is what he did on video with
Guitar Drag.
In 1998 he was on an airplane, reading
Time;
there was a story about the James Byrd murder. The only photo was of the back of the killers’ Ford, rust
covering the insides and outside of the truck, with the license plate dead center, smashed, bent, the paint scratched to the point where TEXAS was barely legible. The picture stayed in Marclay’s mind as an image that wanted to be taken farther. A year later, in San Antonio as a resident artist, he determined to do it. He borrowed a truck—“from Linda Ronstadt’s cousin,” he said in 2013. “A Ford, a flatbed—or a Chevrolet, which has rock & roll resonance all over the place.” He recruited two people to shoot from the truck bed; he scouted locations. He mounted a Trace Elliot amplifier in the back of the truck.

As the video begins, a thin man, his face obscured by a baseball cap, is holding a new Fender Stratocaster. He plugs it in; with forceful gestures, he knots a rope around its neck and secures it to the back of the truck. He gets into the driver’s seat, starts the engine, and drives off. “I didn’t know if it was right, as a white artist, with a race crime,” Marclay said in 2013—even though, as the driver, he was throwing himself all the way into the story: he was the killer. Isaac Julien, a black British installation artist and filmmaker, was with Marclay in San Antonio: “Do it,” he said.

Immediately, the guitar is jerking, turning over, every movement, every movement inside every movement, shouting out of the amplifier, and at first you are attuned to the guitar as an instrument, interested to see what kind of noise it will make, and how long it will last. There is no reference to
James Byrd. But within seconds you are drawn into the destruction as a thing in itself, an act with its own imperatives, rules, values, and aesthetics, and that destruction soon casts off any perspectives not completely sucked into an irreducible violence.

Marclay takes the truck down a paved road. Even if no thought of James Byrd enters your mind, even if you are sorting through art-world or rock ’n’ roll references—“the tradition of guitar-smashing,” Marclay has said of his own sense of the piece, “of the destruction of instruments in Fluxus”—the guitar is becoming a living thing, an animal or a person, something that can feel pain, and you are hearing it scream. The truck turns onto what looks like a dead swamp, a field of scrub and weeds, as if to drown the guitar in dirt. The sound it is making is full, undiminished, shooting out in too many directions. The truck races into woods, down back roads. There are constant cuts—sometimes Marclay stopped the truck and changed places with one of the videographers and vice versa—but there is no feeling of that. This is a race, a race to see how long it will take to destroy the guitar and whatever symbols and allegories, along with leaves, vines, and rocks, are wrapping themselves around the neck and tuning pegs—allegories like Dock Boggs’s stalker’s version of the murder ballad “Pretty Polly”: “He led her over hills and valleys so deep / He led her over hills and valleys so deep / At length Pretty Polly, she begin to weep.”

You are watching torture. You begin to flinch. You might turn away, but even if you don’t look there’s no stopping the sound. There is no abstraction. The truck pulls back onto a paved road, swerving hard to the left, to the right, the guitar swinging on the rope from one side of the road straight to the other, and while there may be a thinning in the sound, a hollowness, there’s no way to anticipate when the volume will shoot up, when a sound the guitar hasn’t made before will rise up and die. The truck slows down, speeds up, pulls the guitar over railroad tracks, through rocks and ever rougher surfacing, the guitar still speaking. The truck turns onto a wider road, a highway, the guitar slamming the pavement, by this time perhaps all the strings gone, the tuning pegs broken, and sound still streaming out of the body. What was clandestine before—the swamp, the field, the back roads—is now public, a crime in progress, anyone can see it, and you think, surely the police will stop it? There is no one else on the road. Is the man still in the cab of the truck? Is this some drama now so caught up in its own momentum it can play itself?

“We could not kill it,” Marclay said in 2013. “We tried to: that moment when the guitar goes over the train tracks, embedded in the ground, but it still jumps into the air—the tracks marking the racial divide.” As the piece ends—and you can feel it ending, slowing down—the truck crests a hill in a haze of sun and dust, like the end of a western, John
Wayne framed in the light in the cabin door in
The Searchers,
any movie cowboy trailing off into the sunset with his horse. There is no resolution, no real ending at all. “Once you go down that road,” Marclay said in 2013, echoing
Detour
or
Raw Deal
or so many other noir films of the 1940s, “there’s no way out.”

Guitar Drag
is a scratch in the record—the historical record. If you put the soundtrack record back on with all of this in the front of your mind, other music begins to rise out of it. There is most of all Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock transformation of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the greatest and most unstable protest song there is: every time you hear it, it says something else. In the twisting abstractions of that performance, in the music of
Guitar Drag
—you can’t call it chance music; you could call it forced music—you can begin to hear the droning abstractions in the blues. The gonging in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1928 “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” The intimations of the uncanny and the unknowable in the way Robert Johnson’s guitar strings seem to stand apart from his fingers in his 1936 “Come on in My Kitchen.” The push toward wordlessness, into a music of pure signs, the refusal to even approach a narrative, in John Lee Hooker’s “John Henry,” with a pace that, if the true context of Hooker’s song is not a private recording for a record collector in 1949 but a video by an sound artist more than half a century later, can seem to match the pacing of
Guitar
Drag
so completely that Hooker’s own guitar could have been cut right into the noise made by the amplifier on the truck and the guitar on the road. “John Henry laid his hammer down / And headed back to his hometown / But someone turned the signpost round / Someone took the road signs down,” Jon Langford sang in 2006 in his strongest Welsh accent in “Lost in America,” a song about the American Dream as snake oil that the singer buys in spite of himself—and soon John Henry is everywhere, taking the place of the engineer in “Wreck of the Old 97” in Virginia in 1903, “Scalded to death by the dream,” then, one September morning just two years short of a century after that, reappearing in the last verse to reveal Superman as merely one more version of the superman who was there first, John Henry stepping forth, once more, to “turn the planes around today / Make them fly the other way.”

John Henry, the man who denied the machine, the machine that, in the Disney version of the story, comes out of the other side of the mountain as a single metal scrap, the former slave who traces his country’s history in “Lost in America,” is in
Guitar Drag.
“The record is supposed to be a stable reproduction of time,” Marclay said in 1991, speaking of any recording, by anyone, “but it’s not. Time and sound become elusive again because of mechanical failure. Technology captures sound and stamps it on these disks. They then begin lives of their own. Within these lives, technological
cracks—defects—occur. That’s when it gets interesting for me, when technology fails. That’s when I feel the possibility of expression.” Isn’t that what John Henry says, when he challenges the steam drill to a duel?

You can hear the heedlessness of “Shake Some Action” in
Guitar Drag;
you can hear Little Richard’s “Keep a Knockin’.” I imagine Little Richard alone in the setting Marclay designed for viewings of
Guitar Drag
—“a projection, it has to be loud, it has to be experienced in a black box where you can lose track of time and space, lose your balance. The image is jerky and you may get dizzy. It has to be a physical experience you need to feel it through your body”—and I imagine Little Richard tapping his foot. I think of the end of
American Hot Wax.

In this 1978 movie, it’s 1959. Tim McIntire’s Alan Freed arrives outside the Brooklyn Paramount for his big rock ’n’ roll extravaganza, with Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis topping the bill—appearing in the movie as themselves, Berry time-traveling effortlessly, Lewis making it by sheer force of will. There’s a huge crowd outside. As Freed heads for the entrance, standing straight, moving to his own beat, snapping his limbs like fingers, he’s accosted by a Dion figure. He’s got this group, Mr. Freed, he wants to audition right on the street; Freed calls for quiet and they go right into an acappella “I Wonder Why.” Freed’s grin is tight, hinting at fear, fatalism, even suicide. His career is crashing all around
him. He’s about to be kicked off the air, blacklisted for payola; the D.A. is going to shut down his show and throw him in jail. McIntire, like Freed an alcoholic, a drug addict, carried all that with him, dying at forty-one, eight years after playing Freed, who died at forty-three: “Dead frequency, Slick, over and out,” Charles Wright wrote of McIntire in 2005. “It’s mostly a matter of what kind of noise you make.”

Through the window of the D.A.’s car, hovering on the edges of the crowd, you see a ragged figure, in a state of utter obliviousness, pounding on an overturned garbage can, his pompadour flopping into his face, shouting out “Good Golly Miss Molly” so tunelessly you can barely recognize it. This is less Little Richard not invited to the Brooklyn Paramount but showing up anyway than it’s the Little Richard specter—the specter of the excluded, silenced, worthless music hovering behind every finished piece of rock ’n’ roll, the unheard music that reveals the music that is heard as a fake. In his car, plotting strategy, the D.A. doesn’t notice the bum in the alley, he isn’t listening to him, but subconsciously he hears him, and what he hears is what he sees. “Look at that filth,” the D.A. says of the boys and girls, black and white, crowding into the theater.

With Jerry Lee Lewis as the last act, standing on top of his burning piano and the stage covered with cops, teenagers grabbed by police as others are trampled as they rush down the stairs, the audience flees into the night. Freed clutches
a small boy. In the last shot, the bum stands on the now-deserted street, playing for the sky, pounding his can: “I say a wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom. Got a girl. Named Sue. She knows just what to do. Got a girl”—and the movie is over. That scene too is in the music of
Guitar Drag.

To Know Him Is to Love Him

1958 • 2006

In 1958, the Teddy Bears released “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” a number 1 hit written by Teddy Bear Phil Spector, a song that took forty-eight years to find its voice. When Amy Winehouse sang it in 2006, her music curled around Spector’s, his curled around her, until she found her way back to the beginning of his career, and redeemed it. Whether he has ever heard what she did with his music, or whether she ever heard what he thought of what she did, are unanswered questions. He isn’t talking; she can’t.

Since 2009, when he was convicted of second-degree murder in the 2003 shooting death of the nightclub hostess, unsuccessful actress, and sometime blackface Little Richard impersonator Lana Clarkson at his mansion in Alhambra, California, Phil Spector has been serving nineteen years to life at a division of Corcoran State Prison. Amy Winehouse has been dead since 2011. If you listen to the Teddy Bears’ record now, and ignore what Spector did with the rest of his life, or even what he did in the few years after he made “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” his fate may not seem like such a tragedy. If you listen to Winehouse sing the song, you can hate her for what, as over a few July days she drank herself to death, she withheld from the world.

Phil Spector was born in the Bronx in 1939; his father, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant and a failing businessman,
killed himself ten years later. In 1953 Spector’s mother moved herself and her son to Los Angeles. At Fairfax High School—where only a few years before the would-be song-writer Jerry Leiber was sketching out his first rhythm and blues lyrics—Spector fell in with other students in love with the doo-wop sound in the air of the town: with the Penguins’ rough, inspiring “Earth Angel,” Arthur Lee Maye and the Crowns’ complex and surging “Gloria,” the Robins’ comic operas “Framed” and “Riot in Cell Block #9,” written and produced by Leiber and his partner Mike Stoller, a hundred more. Among Spector’s classmates were Marshall Leib, a singer; Steve Douglas, who would go on to play saxophone on dozens of Los Angeles hits, most unforgettably Spector’s 1963 production of Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” a record so spectacular that for years Love has appeared every Christmas season on the David Letter-man show to re-create it, and succeeds; and Sandy Nelson, a drummer, who in 1959 would make the top ten with “Teen Beat” and in 1961 with “Let There Be Drums,” though in 1964 “Teen Beat ’65” reached only number 44, and in 1965 “Let There Be Drums ’66” disappeared at number 120. Spector met Lou Adler, a would-be songwriter at Roosevelt High (with Sam Cooke and Herb Alpert, he would write “Wonderful World,” which Cooke made into as perfect a record as rock ’n’ roll ever wished for), and Bruce Johnston, who turned up a few years later in the Beach Boys.

All of them were listening to the records coming out of other high schools, on Dootsie Williams’s DooTone label or Art Rupe’s Specialty. Out of Jefferson High and the half-black, half-white Fremont High, where every other person seemed to be in a group, came the Penguins, Richard Berry, who passed through many groups before making “Louie Louie” with the Pharaohs, Cornelius Gunter of the Coasters, Jesse Belvin, who co-wrote “Earth Angel” when he wasn’t singing on half the sessions in the city, or maybe when he was, and Don Julian and the Meadowlarks, with their lovely, ridiculous “Heaven and Paradise.” From different schools in Compton and Watts there came the Medallions’ even more ridiculous “The Letter,” which leader Vernon Green didn’t seem to know was ridiculous at all: “Let me whisper,” he declaimed, as if he were in a school play delivering Romeo’s plea to Juliet on her balcony but got lost, “sweet words, of dismortality, and discuss, the pompitus of love. Put it together, and what do you have?
Matrimony!
” “There used to be hundreds and hundreds of black groups singin’ harmony and with a great lead singer,” Spector said years later. “You used to go down to Jefferson High on 49th and Broadway and could get sixteen groups.” All over town, Spector and the rest sang the songs together until they got them right. They wrote their own songs.