Night Beat Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART 1 A STARTING PLACE: A JULY AFTERNOON

  Elvis Presley’s Leap for Freedom

  PART 2 SETTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORIES

  Beatles Then, Beatles Now

  Subterranean: Bob Dylan’s Passages

  The Rolling Stones’ Journey into Fear

  The Legacy of Jim Morrison and the Doors

  PART 3 REMAKING THE TERRITORIES

  Lou Reed: Darkness and Love

  Brothers: The Allman Brothers Band

  Keith Jarrett’s Keys to the Cosmos

  Life & Death in the U.K.: The Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd., Joy Division, New Order, and the Jesus and Mary Chain

  The Clash: Punk Beginnings, Punk Endings

  Punk: Twenty Years After

  Van Halen: The Endless Party

  PART 4 DREAMS AND WARS

  Bruce Springsteen’s America

  The Problem of Michael Jackson

  Upstarts: Over & Under the Wall, & into the Territory’s Center

  Clash of the Titans: Heavy Metal Enters the 1990s

  PART 5 LONE VOICES

  Randy Newman: Songs of the Promised Land

  Al Green: Sensuality in the Service of the Lord

  Jerry Lee Lewis: The Killer

  Miles Davis: The Lion in Winter

  Feargal Sharkey: Songs of Hearts and Thieves

  Marianne Faithfull: Trouble in Mind

  Stan Ridgway’s Wrong People

  Sinéad O’Connor’s Songs of Experience

  David Baerwald’s Songs of Secrets and Sins

  PART 6 ENDINGS

  Dark Shadows: Hank Williams, Nick Drake, Phil Ochs

  Tim Hardin: Lost Along the Way

  Dennis Wilson: The Lone Surfer

  Marvin Gaye: Troubled Soul

  No Simple Highway: The Story of Jerry Garcia & the Grateful Dead

  Tupac Shakur: Easy Target

  Ella Fitzgerald: Grace Over Pain

  Timothy Leary: The Death of the Most Dangerous Man

  Allen Ginsberg: For the Fucking and the Dying

  Kurt Cobain’s Road from Nowhere: Walking the Streets of Aberdeen

  PART 7 A LAST LATE-NIGHT CALL

  Frank Sinatra

  Publication Credits

  Permissions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also By Mikal Gilmore

  Copyright Page

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO:

  George Bouthilet and the late Grace McGinnis, teachers who taught well

  I’m forever grateful our paths crossed

  With a daytime of sin and a nighttime of hell

  Everybody’s going to look for a bell to ring . . .

  All through the night

  LOU REED,

  “ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT”

  introduction

  I guess I could say what many people of my age—or people who are younger or even older—might be able to say: I grew up with popular music encompassing my life. It played as a soundtrack for my youth. It enhanced (sometimes created) my memories. It articulated losses, angers, and horrible (as in unattainable) hopes, and it emboldened me in many, many dark hours. It also, as much as anything else in my life, defined my convictions and my experience of what it meant (and still means) to be an American, and it gave me a moral (and of course immoral) guidance that nothing else in my life ever matched, short of dreams of sheer generous love or of sheer ruthless rapacity or destruction.

  I can remember my mother playing piano, singing to me her much-loved songs of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams, or singing an old-timey Carter Family dirge, accompanying herself on harmonica. As I remember it, she wasn’t half-bad, though of course I’m forming that judgment through a haze of long-ago memories and idealized longings.

  It was my older brothers, though, who brought music into my house—and into my life—in the ways that would begin to matter most. I was the youngest of four boys; my oldest brother, Frank, was eleven years older than I, Gary was ten years older, and Gaylen, six years older. As a result, by the time I was four or five in the mid-1950s, my brothers were already (more or less) teenagers—which means that they were caught in the early thrall and explosion of rock & roll. As far back as I remember hearing anything, I remember hearing (either on one of the house’s many radios, or on my brothers’ portable phonographs) early songs by Bill Haley & His Comets, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Fats Domino, the Platters, Buddy Knox, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Sam Cooke, and Ricky Nelson, among others. But the biggest voice that hit my brothers’ lives—the biggest voice that hit the nation—was, of course, Elvis Presley’s. In the mid-1950s, every time Presley performed on nationwide TV (on the Milton Berle, Steve Allen, or Ed Sullivan shows) was an occasion for a family gathering—among the few times my family ever collected for any purpose other than to fight. Those times we sat watching Presley on our old Zenith were, in fact, among our few occasions of real shared joy. For some reason, the appearance I remember most was Elvis’s 1956 performance on the Dorsey Brothers’ “Stage Show” (which was also the singer’s national debut, and was followed by six consecutive appearances). I remember sitting tucked next to my father in his big oversize brown leather chair. My father was not a man who was fond of youthful impudence or revolt (in fact, he was downright brutal in his efforts to shut down my brothers’ rebellions). At the same time, my father was a man who had spent the better part of his own youth working in show business, in films and onstage and in vaudeville and the circus, and something about rock & roll’s early outlandishness appealed to his show-biz biases (though his own musical tastes leaned strongly to opera and Broadway musicals). After watching Presley on that first Dorsey show, my father said: “That young man’s got real talent. He’s going to be around for a long time. He’s the real thing.” I know how cliché those remarks sound. Just to be sure my memory wasn’t making it all up for me, I asked my oldest brother, Frank (who has the best memory of anybody I’ve ever known), if he remembered what was said after we’d watched Presley on that occasion. He repeated my father’s declaration, pretty much word for word. I guess my father had a little more in common with Colonel Tom Parker than I’d like to admit, but then, like Parker, my father had also once been a hustler and bunco man.

  So rock & roll as popular entertainment was welcomed into our home. Rock & roll as a model for revolt was another matter. When my brothers began to wear ducktails and leather motorcycle jackets, when they began to turn up their collars and talk flip and insolently, likely as not they got the shit beat out of them. I guess my father recognized that rock & roll, when brought into one’s heart and real home, could breed a dislike or refusal of authority—and like so many adults and parents before and since, he could not stand that possibility without feeling shaken to the rageful and frightened core of his being.

  I NEVER GOT TO HAVE my own period of rock & roll conflict with my father. He died in mid-1962, when I was eleven, when “The Twist” and “Duke of Earl” were my picks to click. Hardly songs or trends worth whipping a child until he bled.

  A little over a year later, President John Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Texas. It was a startling event, and it froze the nation in shock, grief, and a lingering depression. Winter nights were long that season—long, and maybe darker than usual. I was just twelve, but I remember that sense of loss that was not merely my own—a loss that seemed to fill the room of the present and the space of the future. By this time, my brothers were hardly ever home. Gary and Gaylen were either out at night on criminal, drunken, carnal activity, or in jail. My mother had the habit of going to bed early, so I stayed up late watching old horror movies, talk shows, anything I could find. I remember—in January 1964—watching Jack Paar’s late
night show, when he began talking about a new sensation that was sweeping England: a strange pop group called the Beatles. He showed a clip of the group that night—the first time they had been seen in America. It’s a ghostly memory to me now. I don’t remember what I saw in the clip’s moments, but I remember I was transfixed. Weeks later, the Beatles made their first official live U.S. television appearance, on February 9, 1964, on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” The date happened also to be my thirteenth birthday, and I don’t think I could ever have received a better, more meaningful, more transforming gift. I won’t say much here about what that appearance did to us—as a people, a nation, an emerging generation—because I’ll say something about it in the pages ahead, but I’ll say this: As romantic as it may sound, I knew I was seeing something very big on that night, and I felt something in my life change. In fact, I was witnessing an opening up of endless possibilities. I have a video tape of those Sullivan appearances. I watch it often and show it to others—some who have never seen those appearances before, because those shows have never been rebroadcast or reissued in their entirety (there isn’t much more than a glimpse of them in The Beatles Anthology video series). To this day, they remain remarkable. You watch those moments and you see history opening up, from the simple (but not so simple) act of men playing their instruments and singing, and sharing a discovery with their audience of a new, youthful eminence. The long, dark Kennedy-death nights were over. There would be darker nights, for sure, to come, and rock & roll would be a part of that as well. But on that night, a nightmare was momentarily broken, and a new world born. Its implications have never ended, even if they no longer mean exactly what they meant in that first season.

  It was obviously a great time, though it would soon become (just as obviously) a complex and scary time. It was a time when almost every new song was shared, discussed, and sorted through for everything it might hold or deliver—every secret thrill or code, every new joyous twist of sonic texture. “The House of the Rising Sun.” “Stop! In the Name of Love.” “Help Me Rhonda.” “Mr. Tambourine Man.” “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” “Positively 4th Street.” “Help!” “California Dreamin’.” “Good Lovin’.” “When a Man Loves a Woman.” “Summer in the City.” “Sunshine Superman.” “I Want You.” “96 Tears.” “Paint It, Black.” “Over Under Sideways Down.” “Respect.” “Ode to Billy Joe.” “Good Vibrations.” “The Letter.” It was also a time of many leaders or would-be leaders—some liberating, some deadly. Mario Savio. Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy. Julian Bond. Richard Nixon. George Lincoln Rockwell. George Wallace. Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X. Hubert Humphrey. Eldridge Cleaver. Shirley Chisolm. Jerry Rubin. Tom Hayden. Gloria Steinem. Abbie Hoffman. There were also the other leaders—some who led without desire or design, but who led as surely (and sometimes as liberatingly or as foolishly) as the political figures. The Beatles. Bob Dylan. Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, and Keith Richards. Timothy Leary. Jimi Hendrix. Jane Fonda. The Jefferson Airplane. Aretha Franklin. James Brown. Marvin Gaye. Sly Stone. Jim Morrison. Charles Manson.

  As you can tell from those lists, the 1960s’ ideals, events, and moods grew darker—and they did so earlier than many people would like to acknowledge. In the middle of 1967—the same season that bred what became known as the Summer of Love in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, and the same period when the Beatles summarized and apotheosized psychedelia with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—I came across an album I really loved (still perhaps my favorite of all time): The Velvet Underground and Nico. It was a record full of songs about bad losses, cold hearts, hard narcotics, and rough, degrading sex. I took to it like a dog to water (or whatever dogs take to). It was the first subject—in a long list—of arguments that I would enter into with friends about rock & roll. In fact, it was my first rock & roll choice that actually cost me some fraternity. When I was a senior in high school, I was part of a Folk Song after-school group. We’d get together, under a teacher’s auspices, and sing our favorite folk songs—everything from “Kum Ba Yah,” “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and “We Shall Overcome” to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and (gulp) “Puff the Magic Dragon.” At one meeting, each of us was invited to sing his or her favorite folk song. I sang Lou Reed’s “Heroin.” I was never welcome back in the group.

  A YEAR LATER I was out of high school, into college, not doing well. I was going through one of my periodic funks, following one of my periodic failed love affairs (the woman of this occasion became a born-again Christian and married the man who impregnated her; later, she became one of the most wildly game sexual people I’ve ever known or enjoyed, but that is another story). In this period—the late winter of 1969 and the early winter of 1970—I was taking a lot of drugs, learning how to drink, and staying up all night until the sun rose, then I’d hit the bed (actually, the floor, which was my bed at the time), and finally find sleep. (Interestingly, at least to me, I returned to this pattern—the staying-up-until-sunrise-then-running-to-hide part—for the entire month in which I wrote and revised this current volume.)

  By this same period, something called the “rock press” had developed: magazines like Cheetah, Crawdaddy!, and Rolling Stone, where one could read passionate and informed opinions and arguments about current music and, better yet, could also learn about earlier musicians who had helped make the late 1960s’ and early 1970s’ innovations possible—everyone from Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington to the Carter Family, Lotte Lenya, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Ornette Coleman (some of whom were still alive, making vital music) and countless more. As a result, the journalism (that is, the essays, rants, profiles, interviews and historical perspectives) of such writers as Ralph Gleason, Paul Williams, Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, Langdon Winner, Jonathan Cott, Lester Bangs, Paul Nelson, Nick Tosches, Robert Christgau, and Ellen Willis came to seem as exciting and meaningful to me as much of the music they were writing about—though too damn few of them for my liking were willing to stand up for the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed (Willis, Nelson, and Christgau being notable and important exceptions).

  It was not until 1974 that I began writing about popular music. What made this possible was Bob Dylan’s “comeback” tour (his first such American trek in eight years) with the Band. This was also a time, I should note, when I spent my days working as a counselor at a Portland, Oregon, drug abuse clinic and my nights smoking as much marijuana as I could find—a contradictory (probably hypocritical) turn of affairs, but hardly an uninteresting one. Then I saw Dylan in early 1974 (again, on the occasion of my birthday, ten years after the Beatles’ debut on Ed Sullivan), and an old girlfriend suggested I write about the event for a local underground newspaper. After doing so, I never looked back. The piece, of course, was awful (at least to my eyes today), but that hardly mattered. I’d managed to put together my two greatest dreams and pleasures: writing (as a result of a love of reading) and music criticism (as a result of listening to music). When I finished that article, I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to write about popular music—it was pretty much all I cared about as a vocation. Within a season I had quit my drug counseling job (also had cut way back on my drug intake—a connection?), and started writing for a number of local publications. I also began writing jazz reviews for Down Beat (jazz, by this time, had come to mean as much to me as rock & roll—a passion that isn’t evident enough in this present volume), and along with the help of some good friends, I was soon editing a Portland-based magazine, Musical Notes. A few dreams were now active in my life.

  Then those dreams turned to nightmare, to the worst horror I could imagine. I am sorry if you have already heard this story—perhaps you have—but there is no way I can finish this introduction without being honest about this particular passage in my life.

  In 1976, when I was twenty-five, I began writing for Rolling Stone. When the magazine came along in 1967, it announced itself as a voice that might prove as fervent and inte
lligent as the brave new music that it dared to champion. From the time I began reading the magazine, I held a dream of someday writing for its pages. To me, that would be a way of participating in the development of the music I had come to love so much.

  In the autumn of 1976, I learned that Rolling Stone had accepted an article of mine for publication. I was elated. Then, about a week later I learned something horrible, something that killed my elation: My older brother, Gary Gilmore, was going to be put to death by a firing squad in Utah. It didn’t look like there was much that could stop it—and I didn’t know if I could live with it.

  A few months before, in April 1976, Gary—ten years my senior—had been paroled from the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, to Provo, Utah, following a fifteen-year period of often brutal incarceration, largely at Oregon State Prison. Unfortunately, Gary’s new life as a free man shortly grew troubled and violent, and on a hot and desperate July night, my brother crossed a line that no one should ever come to cross: in a moment born from a life of anger and ruin, Gary murdered an innocent man—a young Mormon named Max Jensen—during a service station robbery. The next night, he murdered another innocent man—another young Mormon, Ben Bushnell, who was working as a Provo motel manager—during a second robbery. Within hours, Gary was arrested, and within days he had confessed to his crimes. The trial that followed was pretty much an open-and-shut affair: Gary was convicted of first degree murder in the shooting of Ben Bushnell, and he was sentenced to death. Given the choice of being hung or shot, Gary elected to be shot.

  All this had happened before I began writing for Rolling Stone, and a few months later, when I did begin working for the magazine, I never mentioned anything about my brother or his crimes to any of my editors or fellow journalists. Only a handful of my friends knew about my strained relationship with my troubled brother. The truth is, I had put myself at a distance from the realities of Gary’s life for many years; I told myself that I feared him, that I resented his violent and self-ruinous choices, that he and I did not really share the same bloodline. After Gary’s killings and his subsequent death sentence, I felt grief and rage over his acts, and I also felt deep and painful humiliation: I could not believe that my brother had left his family with so much horror and shame to live with, and I could not forgive him for what he had done to the families of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell. But in a way, the whole episode seemed more like a culmination of horror rather than its new beginning. That’s because part of me believed that Gary would never be executed—after all, there had not been any executions in America in a decade—and that he instead would simply rot away the rest of his life in the bitter nothingness of a Utah prison. At the same time, I think another, deeper part of me always understood that Gary had been born (or at least raised) to die the death he would die.