History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (24 page)

The movie is about Leonard Chess’s lifelong struggle to figure out what motherfucker means. People try to tell him—first Muddy Waters, finally Bo Diddley, who in this movie, which after the prelude goes only from 1947 to 1955, a chamber piece compared to
Cadillac Records,
is the last artist we meet—but the secret always eludes him. As Len Chess, Alessandro Nivola is slick, impulsive, daring, his eyes always burning; as the songwriter and bassist Willie Dixon, Chi McBride is the watchman, a huge man with a Cheshire cat smile, always casting a dubious eye as he sees through one moment into the next; David Oyelowo’s Muddy
Waters is part minstrel trickster, part struggling businessman, but most of all a well of pride and dignity: “You know that don’t do me no good,” he says without embarrassment when McBride hands him a sheet of lyrics for what turns out to be “Hoochie Koochie Man.” (“Does that mean what I think it does?” Chess says.) Playing the Etta James character, here a junkie named Ivy Mills who Len Chess falls for as if she were a well, who can’t sing on stage or get through two lines in a studio, Megalyn Ann Echikunwoke is almost too beautiful to look at, especially when you don’t expect her to live through another scene. “‘Gift of God,’” she says mockingly of her voice, sitting across from Chess in a restaurant. “I can sing better when I’m all doped up. What kind of gift is that? ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,’” she sings, part Billie Holiday, part Dinah Washington, mostly a dream singer who never was, and here the words are a suicide note, and they come out of her like foam.

The movie is one long gasp, the humor snapping, pain unforgettable and unredeemed, its theme never pressed, merely returning like Rumpelstiltskin. Chess plays a game with every musician he hires: he sits across from him, asks him what he thinks he’s worth, writes a number on a piece of paper, rips it off a pad, then hands the pad across the table. “My number or less, yes,” he says, but one penny more, no. The musician invariably writes something down, Chess stares at him; he crosses out his number and writes down a lower one. “That’s fucked up,” says one man. “Did it with me, I’m still here,” says Willie Dixon. “What he pay you for, anyway?” says the musician. “Dix is my mentor,” says Chess. “Your
what?
” “I am his guide,” Dixon says like a Sphinx, “into the exotic Negro world”—and, finally, Dixon will explain what motherfucker means. Late in the film, Bo Diddley sits down for his contract negotiation—and snatches Chess’s piece of paper out
of his hand. Dixon is thrilled. “All these years I been working with y’all I ain’t never seen nobody do that, let me shake this man’s hand.” He looks at the slip. It’s blank, and Chess changes before his eyes. “You know,” Dixon says, “this is the first time I ever look at you and see a white man. I guess that makes me the dumb nigger”—and with that Chess disappears from what he thought was his story, and the book closes behind him. You want to know what a motherfucker is? Look in my eyes, motherfucker.

Phil Spector quoted in “George Goldner Dies in His Sleep at Age 52 in New York,”
Rolling Stone,
28 May 1970, 9.

Langdon Winner, “The Chantels,”
Rolling Stone,
1 November 1969, 41.

“CRYING, WAITING, HOPING” 1959 / 1969

Buddy Holly,
Not Fade Away: The Complete Studio Recordings and More
(HIP-O Select, 2009). Covering 1949 to 1968, a superbly compiled and annotated six-CD collection, from Holly’s first and final home recordings to posthumous overdubs.

Bobby Vee, “To me,” to GM, 1970. In 2004, Bob Dylan described his brief days in Vee’s band the Shadows in 1959, and going to see him in the early ’60s at the Brooklyn Paramount with “The Shirelles, Danny and the Juniors, Jackie Wilson, Ben E. King, Maxine Brown . . . He was on the top of the heap now.” After the show they talked: “I told him I was playing the folk clubs, but it was impossible to give him any indication of what it was all about. His only reference would have been The Kingston Trio, Brothers Four, stuff like that. He’d become a crowd pleaser in the pop world . . . I wouldn’t see Bobby Vee again for thirty years, and though things would be a lot different, I’d always thought of him
as a brother. Every time I’d hear his name somewhere, it was like he was in the room.”
Chronicles, Volume One
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 80–81. On 10 July 2013, on tour in St. Paul, with Vee in the crowd, Dylan played “Suzie Baby,” Vee’s first record, from 1959, a song he’d written in Buddy Holly’s style, and both as a song and a performance it was perfect, a body made of regret, a mind made of reverie. The song was already looking back in 1959, when Vee sang it with Dylan backing him on piano; now, with a greater sweep, the tune was almost generic, a folk song, something that could have come from anyone, and something that hadn’t. See
minnpost.com
.

Nik Cohn,
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom—Pop from the Beginning
(1969; London: Paladin, 1972), 32, 45.

Johnny Hughes, “Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Joe Ely, and the Cotton Club,”
virtualubbock.com
, January 2009.

Quarry Men, “That’ll Be the Day,” Philips Sound Recording Service, 1958, included on
The Beatles Anthology 1
(Capitol, 1995). With John Lowe on piano and Colin Hanton on drums.

Cathi Unsworth,
Bad Penny Blues
(London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009), 95–96.

Charles Harper Webb, “The Secret History of Rock & Roll,” collected in the anthology
Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll,
ed. Jonathan Wells (New York: Pocket/MTV, 2007), 156.

Paul Muldoon, “It Won’t Ring True,” in
The Word on the Street
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 39.

Rolling Stones, “Not Fade Away,” from
England’s Newest Hit-makers!
(London, 1964). Co-produced by “Uncle Phil” Spector.

Roy Orbison, “Go! Go! Go!” (Sun, 1956).

Bob Dylan, “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” from
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
(Columbia, 1963).

Jonathan Cott, “Buddy Holly,” in
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll,
ed. Jim Miller (1976; New York: Random House, 1980), 79–80.

Gerry Goffin and Carole King quoted in
The Songmakers Collection,
“The Hitmakers,” directed by Morgan Neville (A&E, 2001).

The phrase “country of songs” comes from Colson Whitehead’s
John Henry Days
(New York: Doubleday, 2001).

Carolyn Hester’s recordings of “Wreck of the Old ’97” and “Scarlet Ribbons” originally appeared on her
Scarlet Ribbons
(Coral, 1957); demo versions, with Buddy Holly on guitar, can be found on
Not Fade Away—Buddy Holly 1957: The Complete Buddy Holly
(El Toro, 2008). “Take Your Time” remains unreleased. She first recorded Holly’s “Lonesome Tears”—as she sings it, a tune that sounds like both a folk song and a pop song all at once—in 1963, though it was left unissued at the time (see Hester’s
Dear Companion,
Bear Family, 1995); an indelible version is on her
From These Hills
(Road Goes on Forever, 1996), a match for the smiling reading of the song she gave at the Festival della Letteratura in Mantua, Italy, in 2011, at the Teatro Bibiena, a terrifyingly steep opera house where Mozart once conducted. Along with the guitarist Bruce Langhorne and the bassist Bill Lee, Bob Dylan accompanied her on “I’ll Fly Away,” “Swing and Turn Jubilee,” and “Come Back Baby” for
Carolyn Hester
(Columbia, 1962). Hester’s producer, John Hammond, who signed Dylan to Columbia following the session, “had first seen and heard me at Carolyn Hester’s apartment,” Dylan wrote in
Chronicles, Volume One.
“She was going places and it didn’t surprise me. Carolyn was
eye catching, down-home and double barrel beautiful. That she had known and worked with Buddy Holly left no small impression on me and I liked being around her. Buddy was royalty, and I felt like she was my connection to it, to the rock-and-roll music that I’d played earlier, to that spirit” (277).

Fred Neil’s pop records, including “Listen Kitten,” are collected on his
Trav’lin Man: The Early Singles, 1957–1961
(Fallout). As a Brill Building writer his greatest success was Roy Orbison’s searing recording of his and Beverly “Ruby” Ross’s “Candy Man,” the B-side of Orbison’s greatest performance, “Crying” (Monument, 1961, number 2; “Candy Man” reached number 25 on its own).

Keith Richards, “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” outtake from the Rolling Stones’
Voodoo Lounge
, recorded in Dublin, November 1993, along with “Love Is Strange,” Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” and “John Wesley Harding,” and the Beatles’ “Please Please Me.” Included on, among other Rolling Stones bootlegs,
Acoustic Motherfuckers
. “Buddy Holly, he could write a lick,” Richards says at the end of “Crying, Waiting, Hoping.” “Check him out. That motherfucker.”

Cat Power, “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” from a video session recorded for
rollingstone.com
, posted 6 March 2007. It’s Chan Marshall, perhaps alone of all the people who have taken up the song, who finds a way to sing the song past itself, past the moon-spoon wish Holly had to include in a would-be pop song in 1958: that the boy and girl would get back together. “Maybe we’ll stop hoping,” she sings, the words coming out slowly, all thought. “No more crying, waiting, no more hoping, that you’ll come back to me.”

Brian Epstein diary excerpts from Debbie Geller,
In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story
(New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s,
2000), 6, 20, and
The Brian Epstein Story,
directed by Anthony Wall (BBC Arena, 2000).

Beatles, “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” Decca Records demo, 1 January 1962, available on various “Decca Audition” bootlegs.

——— “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” recorded 6 August 1963 at the BBC Paris Theatre, included on
Live at the BBC
(Capitol, 1994).

——— “Not Fade Away,” “Maybe Baby,” “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” and “Mailman Bring Me No More Blues,” recorded at Abbey Road studios, 29 January 1969, can be found on various Beatles bootlegs.

Pauline Kael, “The Glamour of Delinquency” (1955), collected in
I Lost It at the Movies
(Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1965), 44, and in the not-recommended posthumous collection
The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael,
ed. Sanford Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2011).

Devin McKinney,
Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 197. The best book on the Beatles.

John Lennon on “A Day in the Life,” from Philip Norman,
Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 290.

Jon Wiener,
Come Together: John Lennon in His Time
(1984; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Some of the best writing on “A Day in the Life” is in Mark Shipper’s novel
Paperback Writer: A New History of the Beatles,
in which a cult, the Drones, forms around the last section of the song, listening to it for hours on end. “The world record for Droning,” Shipper writes, “was set by a Cherry Hill, New Jersey girl, who was called ‘Drone of Ark’ by her friends, until she lost all her friends” (Los Angeles: Marship, 1977), 114.

“You never use the word”: John Lennon quoted in Hunter Davies,
The Beatles: The Authorized Biography
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).

Manuscript of Lennon’s original lyrics to “A Day in the Life” reproduced in
Bonham’s Magazine,
Spring, 2006.

Jann Wenner, “B/BE/BEAT/BEATLES/BEATLES/TLE/LES/ES/S,” review of
The Beatles, Rolling Stone,
21 December 1968, 10. “I read the very first review of this record that appeared,” Wenner wrote. “It was in the New York Times. In about 25 words the ‘critic’ dismissed the album as being neither as good as the Big Brother
Cheap Thrills
LP nor as the forthcoming Blood, Sweat and Tears album. You come up with only one of two answers about that reviewer: he is either deaf or he is evil.”

Tales of Rock and Roll: Part One, Peggy Sue,
directed by James Marsh (BBC Arena, first broadcast 7 April 1993).

INSTRUMENTAL BREAK: ANOTHER HISTORY OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL

The White House blues night on 21 February 2012 was broadcast as
In Performance at the White House: Red, White and Blues
(PBS, 27 February 2012).

“Robert Johnson at 100,” Apollo Theater, 6 March 2012, directed by Joe Morton, produced by Steve Berkowitz, Michael Dorf, Morton, and Patricia Watt.

Robert Johnson,
King of the Delta Blues Singers
(Columbia, 1961). Issued in 2011,
The Complete Recordings: The Centennial Collection
(Sony Legacy) presented all of Johnson’s surviving work, remastered with such delicacy that the songs came alive in
the air, putting the listener in the room, the person singing and playing present as flesh and blood.

Bob Dylan,
Chronicles, Volume One
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 282, 285, 286.

Cat Power, “Come on in My Kitchen,” from
All Tomorrow’s Parties 1.1
(ATP, 2002).

Gilbert Seldes,
The Stammering Century
(1928; New York: New York Review Books, 2012), 54.

Blue Bob, “Pink Western Range,” on
Blue Bob
(Solitude, 2003), lyrics by David Lynch, vocals by John Neff.

“Man, he was always”: Son House to Dick Waterman quoted in Michael J. Fairchild’s notes to Jimi Hendrix,
Jimi Hendrix: Blues
(MCA, 1994).

R. Crumb, “Charley Patton,” collected in
R. Crumb Draws the Blues
(San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1993).

“He sold his soul”: Son House to Pete Welding in Welding, “Hellhound on My Trail: Robert Johnson,” collected in
down beat Music ’66,
quoted in Patricia R. Schroeder,
Robert Johnson: Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture
(Urbana: University of illinois Press, 2004), 28. Researching his 2008 book
Delta Blues,
Ted Gioia asked the blues scholar Mack McCormick if “the time had come to put” the story of Johnson selling his soul “to rest.” “McCormick vehemently disagreed,” Gioia later wrote. “‘When I went to New Orleans in the late 1940s to visit some record collectors,’ he related, ‘they told me that same story. You need to remember that almost nothing had been published on Robert Johnson at that time . . . Yet these record collectors had heard about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the Devil. I
subsequently heard the same story within the black community. The fact that the same story circulated among these two groups—groups that had very little contact with each other—impressed me. It suggested that the story had deep roots, probably linking back to Johnson himself’ ”: “Did Robert Johnson Sell His Soul to the Devil?”
Radio Silence,
no. 1, 2012, 78–79.