Night Beat (3 page)

Then one morning, about 2 A.M. (my favorite hour—that is, next to 3 A.M.), I came to understand something that should have been apparent all along: Without realizing it, I had been writing my own version of a rock & roll history for over a generation. I began to see how I could collect some of my preferred (at least to my tastes) writings, yet also refashion them to construct an outline, a shadow, of rock & roll history—and that is what I have tried to do here. This is not, of course, a proper history of rock & roll; there is far too much that is not addressed in this book as widely as it should be (including blues, punk, jazz, and hip-hop—all of which have been great adventures that have made rock & roll count for even more). Instead, I’ve tried to construct a volume out of a mix of personal touchstones (Bob Dylan, John Lydon, Lou Reed, and others), interview encounters (such as the Clash, Sinéad O’Connor, Miles Davis, and Keith Jarrett), and a sampling of critical indulgences (Feargal Sharkey and Marianne Faithfull’s “Trouble in Mind,” among the latter). Some of these pieces are printed here pretty close to their original published form, but most have been revised, reassembled, rewritten, or newly thought out. The Bob Dylan chapter, for example, includes elements from over twenty-three years of articles I’ve written about Dylan, plus many new passages.

I’ve tried to put it all together in an orderly way that might make for a story arc of sorts, from Elvis Presley’s invention and weird fame to Kurt Cobain, and the horrible costs of
his
inventions and weird fame. A Starting Place: A July Afternoon, is about Elvis, where it all begins—or at least where it began in my own life. Setting Out for the Territories is about the people who took Elvis’s possibilities and expanded them—the obvious folks: the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones; in this section, the story moves from the 1950s to the 1960s. Remaking the Territories is more or less about what happened in the 1970s (with the exception of disco, which is addressed in the following section). These are stories about people who began to expand and remake rock—sometimes with wonderful and sometimes horrible results. Dreams and Wars is largely about what happened in the 1980s, as rock (again) took on the powers that be—or actually, the other way around: the powers that be took on rock & roll, in big, bold, ugly ways. This section forms the story (in my mind) of some of what rock means in America and what it has said about the nation, its promises, betrayals, and politics; what Americans think of rock & roll in return; how dance music and heavy metal and rap work and
matter
for their audiences; and how moralists have tried to shut the whole thing down. There’s also a Michael Jackson chapter in this section, because it’s the best place for it and after a while, Jackson too became part of the problem. Lone Voices is a section about people (some well known, some obscure) who made lone and brave choices and music in the 1980s and 1990s. Endings is exactly what its title proclaims: stories about how some people lived and died, in both their music and their lives. And A Last Late-Night Call is about another ending.

IT IS NOW 1998, as I revise this edition. I am a forty-seven-year-old man. I still spend far too many post-midnights listening to new and old loved music. (And far too often hear from my girlfriend: “Could you
please
turn that down
just a little
? And
when
are you coming to bed?”) I still love popular music—from Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Sinatra to Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Tupac Shakur, and (still and always) Bob Dylan—above all other twentieth-century popular culture forms.

And yet there is something about today’s music that bothers me terribly—or to be more accurate, about today’s music business. I am troubled by the way the music industry (and not just major corporate labels, but also numerous independent outfits) sign or record artists for what these labels see as a certain sound, quirk, style, nuance, niche, or whatever—and are loathe to allow those artists to expand or develop much beyond that one
thing.
That is partly why we see so many one-hit wonders—or one moment wonders—whether it’s Green Day, Cowboy Junkies, the Offspring, Faith No More, and countless others. These artists are milked, drained, toured, and discarded before they even have a shot at a second round. It’s a new kind of pop hegemony—a blockbuster hegemony, not at all unlike the blockbuster mentality that has made so much modern film tiresome, predictable and limited. As much as I’m not a real fan of U2, R.E.M., or Pearl Jam, I admire the way they resist being stratified, directed, or contained.

Still, I don’t want to sound like a grumbler or somebody who has lost faith. Pop music hegemony is nothing new. The industry loves it, seeks it—that is, until somebody
shatters
the security of that dominance: somebody like Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Nirvana, N.W.A. Then, the industry goes off in search of artists who can parlay all the new dissidence and invention into yet
another
newer, hipper, profitable version of dominance. It’s maddening, but it’s also fine—sometimes, in fact, it’s great fun. That’s the way things work. Somebody makes a moment or career out of sundering the known order and sound, and then the industry and culture try to make that act of sundering into a model for mass commodity. I’m not sure it’s entirely bad—if only because it guarantees that, come tomorrow, somebody else, somebody new and wonderful and daring and deadly, will have something to disrupt and displace, to the pleasure and outrage of many.

Besides, for all the inevitable corporate appropriation that goes on in popular music, rock & roll and hip-hop still face much more serious problems and enemies: All those folks like William Bennett, C. DeLores Tucker, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and (I hate to admit it since I voted for the fuckers twice) Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who
still
blame rock & roll for social problems, and who still refuse to acknowledge their own hand in lining the “bridge to the twenty-first century” with some deadly potholes. I am glad that popular music continues to seem like a risk and threat to those people, and I am glad it still seems like an opportunity and voice for liberation (and offense) for others. I am also immensely thankful that I was allowed to come of age in an historical moment—that is, to “grow up”—when rock & roll made some bold and upsetting advances, and I am thrilled with the realization that I will “grow old” with music that will continue to do the same.

That’s why, today and tomorrow, I’ll look to artists like Sleater-Kinney, Trent Reznor, Royal Trux, Marilyn Manson, Tricky, Master P, Bikini Kill, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, P. J. Harvey, Mary Lou Lord, Elliott Smith, and Lucinda Williams for the kind of courage, insight, and beautiful violation that have made rock & roll such a great adventure and such a great disturbance in our culture, our arts, and our values. Without these artists, and others like them, the future won’t count for as much as the past—and all tomorrow’s nighttimes of sin might not be as illuminating.

MIKAL GILMORE
MARCH 17, 1997
LOS ANGELES
 (REVISED AUGUST 12, 1998)

PART 1
a starting place: a july afternoon

elvis presley’s leap for freedom

I
t was a typically heat-thick July day in 1954 in Memphis—a city steeped in raw blues and country traditions. Sam Phillips—a local producer who recorded such bluesmen as Howlin’ Wolf, Bobby “Blue” Bland, B. B. King, and Walter Horton at the beginning of their careers for Chess Records, and had started his own fledgling hillbilly label, Sun—had been working steadily for months with a nineteen-year-old, long-haired, bop-wise kid, both of them groping for some uncertain mingling of black credibility and white style. Phillips and the kid—Elvis Presley, who had a startling musical aptitude and a first-hand flair for the blues—understood that hillbilly and black music forms were on the verge of a pop-mainstream breakthrough. Both men were ambitious enough to dream of spearheading that change; one was daring enough to turn his ambition into a hook for generational rebellion, though he probably saw it as little more than an act of impulsive swagger.

What happened that afternoon was both hoped for and totally unexpected, and comes as close to a real myth-producing event as pop culture has yielded since the unreal flight of Huckleberry Finn. By all accounts it was a casual occurrence. Presley was in the Sun studio with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, working up some country numbers for the heck of it, trying to get a feel for throwing a song on tape with enough life to bounce back. The impromptu band took a break and Presley impulsively began playing the fool—the most acceptable guise for his inventive verve. He fell into an Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup song, “That’s All Right,” and the rest of the band fell in behind. Elvis turned the moment’s frolic into a vaulting exercise in rhythm and unconstraint, and Phillips, working in a nearby room, recognized that it was something to be captured. He had the band reenact the moment, and under that impetus, Presley turned his performance into a grasp for freedom, quite unlike anything else in American pop history.

The record of that performance—with a hepped-up version of the bluegrass standard, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” on the flipside—made Presley an immediate local hillbilly star, though many listeners reacted to the music with immediate shock and anger. (By September he was playing the Grand Ole Opry, where he was ridiculed.) No matter. A year later, Presley was on the national charts, still being slotted as a hillbilly cat. Six months after that he was the most famous and controversial figure in America—an unstoppable force who served to reshape the pop mainstream (making black and hillbilly music not just imminent but dominant), and who almost singlehandedly redefined what it meant to be an American visionary, an American artist, in a fierce new time. No other modern legend was to be so widely damned at first as a threat or joke, only later to be understood as one of our purest, most commonly acclaimed heroes.

NOW, THESE MANY YEARS later, it is almost impossible to consider the subject of Elvis Presley without giving ground to the demands of myth and hyperbole. Perhaps that’s the way it should be. Presley is one of the few American post-World War II heroes who remains largely undisclosed by the particulars of his “real” life—he seems no more knowable for all that has been learned about his private reality. Was Presley, as writer Albert Goldman charged in his lurid anti-Southern, anti-indigent, anti-rock biography of the singer, a vile womanizer and overgorged drug abuser, a crass rube unworthy of his fans? The answer—at least in part—might well be yes. Does this knowledge somehow diminish the value of the singer’s influence or the verity of his importance? The answer, this time, resoundingly, is no. As Presley biographer and critic Dave Marsh has commented, “You don’t need to be a great man to be a great artist,” an acknowledgment that, in the passage from untidy truth to exalted myth, certain artists and celebrities earn their shot at transfiguring our culture, and maybe our lives to boot, regardless of their character lapses.

Of course, there’s an equally unnerving truth to be faced here: Simply, that great art isn’t exactly the vindication for a life or career poorly lived—that great art, in fact, doesn’t necessarily exonerate the person behind the art or bring us any closer to the real experience of that person’s life. Thus, after a point, after his impact was enough to change the course—indeed, the meaning and reach—of popular culture, Presley’s art no longer stood for or belonged solely to him: It also became whatever we made (and remade) of it. That is why his effect remains so overpowering forty-four years after his initial explosion of fame, and a generation after his pitiable death.

And yet the irony of all this is that Presley himself—possibly the one figure more people in contemporary American pop history have agreed on than any other (have lovingly elected as hero, leader, saint, cynosure)—stays as elusive as he is enticing. Some of us delve in to his sexual and religious preoccupations as a way of comprehending or “knowing” him; others pore over the minutiae of his music. It’s as if we expect something to fall into place one of these days, expect to learn whether this young iconoclast turned fallen nighthawk and wretched glutton was really a bunco man, fool, traitor, conqueror, or simply one of our greatest involuntary democrats. The true object, though, of this delving is always our wayward selves: Somewhere along the line, some of us feel, we mislaid something by loving Presley—that when he lost touch with his own sublime fire, some shared joy dropped into the darkness and was never fully recovered. By looking for Presley, we are hunting after the terrible mystery of how many of us lose our dreams yet keep our power. Consequently, we may want—or need—more from the singer now than we did that July afternoon over forty years ago when Elvis Presley made a unique reach for fame and liberation that had the effect of making rock & roll a transformative—no doubt unstoppable—national fact.

WITH THE IMPORTANT exception of Martin Luther King, Jr., no other activist or popular hero has better defined the meaning, potential, and shortcomings of the modern American birthright—no other figure has mixed the ambitions and risks of American myth so promisingly—as Elvis Presley. He defined revolt, aspiration, opulence, humility, pettiness, generosity, frivolity, significance, prodigy, waste, renewal, corruption, dissolution, and a kind posthumous transcendence. He did it all without design, with little more than intuition and nerve, and interestingly, he accomplished it with only the assertive mix of his own raw talent and provoking personality. He did not perform as a “creative” force
per se—
a songwriter or pop philosopher—but as a man of deeds, action, and experience.

This may not seem so much when compared with the work of such musical figures as Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Hank Williams, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Duane Allman, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Randy Newman, or Bruce Springsteen. One could claim that all of these artists made lasting legacies out of personal vision and defined themselves as much by their thought and work—their creative invention—as their personality. In a certain way, perhaps all are greater artists than Presley. That is, they are all folks who wrestled with the meaning of their place in American society with uncommon self-awareness, who expressed their discoveries, doubts, and inventions with exceptional (if only sometimes instinctive) understandings of the state of the culture around them, who could apply a full-fledged sense of history and tradition to modern styles and predicaments—which is something that Presley only managed occasionally. For that matter, one might infer that whatever sense of culture, history and politics the singer did possess was, as often as not, depressingly uninformed—and one might even be right.

And yet Elvis opened more doors, bounded into the unknown with a greater will to adventure than those other artists, and that is why, all these years later, we still remember him with a special thrill. Without Presley as an exemplar, rock & roll may have proved less of a lasting force because it may also have proved less alluring: It was the idea that any of us could grow up to be like Presley—rather than we could grow up to be like James Dean, Marlon Brando, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, a soldier or an astronaut—that made rock the most vital of our national assets this last near-half century. Better than anybody but Martin Luther King, Jr., Presley personified and stylized the modern American quest for freedom, experience, and opportunity. Chances are, we will be enjoying (or recoiling from) the aftereffect of his exploits for many years to come.

If one accepts Elvis Presley as the definitional American modernizer, and rock & roll as the primary postwar art form, then it is interesting to examine rock (and not just American rock) for how well its successors have made good on Presley’s promise: That is, after the call to freedom has been sounded, what’s next? How does one raise the stakes, expand the territory? In some ways, that is the main question that the rest of this book will try to explore, though no volume can yet be close to providing final answers.