Night Beat Page 2
Any hope for serenity in my life had been destroyed. Shortly after I heard about Gary’s wish to be executed, I told my editor at Rolling Stone, Ben Fong-Torres, about my relationship with Gary. By this time, Gary Gilmore was a daily name in nationwide headlines, and I felt that the magazine had a right to know that I was his brother. Fong-Torres, who had lost a brother of his own through violence, was extremely sympathetic and supportive during the period that followed, and eventually he gave me the opportunity to write about my experience of Gary’s execution for the magazine. To be honest, not everybody at Rolling Stone back in early 1977 thought it was such a great idea to run that article (“A Death in the Family,” March 10, 1977), and I could understand their misgivings: After all, what would be the point of publishing what might appear to be one man’s apology for his murderous and suicidal brother? Still, following the turmoil of Gary’s death, I needed to find a way to express the devastation that I had just gone through, or else I might never be able to climb out of that devastation. With the help of Fong-Torres and fellow editors Barbara Downey and Sarah Lazin, a fairly decent and honest piece of first-person journalism was created, and in the process a significant portion of my sanity and hope were salvaged. More important, perhaps the people who read it got a glimpse into the reality of living at the center of an unstoppable national nightmare.
In the season that followed Gary’s death, I went to work for Rolling Stone full-time in Los Angeles. It wasn’t an easy period for me—I felt displaced, and (once again) was drinking too much and taking too many pills—but the magazine gave me plenty of slack; maybe more than I deserved. As time went along, I began to find some of my strength and purpose again as a music writer, and Rolling Stone gave me the opportunity to meet and write about some of the people whose music and words had mattered most in my life. It was also a season in which I spent many nights lost in the dark and brilliant splendor of punk. I liked the way the music confronted its listeners with the reality of our merciless age. Punk, as much as anything, saved my soul in those years, and gave me cause for hope—which is perhaps a funny thing to say about a movement (or experiment) that’s first premise was: there are no simple hopes that are not false or at least suspect.
I WROTE FOR Rolling Stone from 1976 until the present—sometimes as a staff writer, sometimes as a contributor. In the years after 1979, I also wrote for Musician and the Los Angeles Times briefly, and in the early 1980s I was (for a year or so) the music editor at the L.A. Weekly. In the autumn of 1982, I became the pop music critic of the (now defunct) Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where I worked until 1987. For the first two or three years, the Herald was a sublime place to write; it was a paper that allowed writers to find and exercise their own voice, sometimes at great length (I’m afraid I became a bit long-winded during that period, but brevity has rarely been my strong suit). Then, sometime in 1985, a new managing editor came in to the paper—a self-described “neo-conservative.” I’ve never shared much affinity with conservatives of any variety (I’m pretty much an American leftist and have not been shy nor apologetic about that leaning). In August 1985, I reviewed a live performance by Sting for the Herald. Sting wasn’t a performer or songwriter I liked much—that was plain from my review—but I admired two things about his music at that time: his willingness to attempt adventurous, swing-inflected pop with a band that included saxophonist Branford Marsalis, and his acuity about the realities of mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher-defined British politics. I was particularly taken by his performance of a song called “We Work the Black Seams,” and I wrote the following about it:
“We Work the Black Seams” . . . was perhaps Sting’s only serious statement that wasn’t saved solely by the prowess of his band, as well as the only one that didn’t need saving. In part, that’s because with its lulling arpeggios and mellifluent chorus it is the one song in Sting’s new batch that is most like his Police material. But there’s more to it than that: It is also the one song uttered from outside Sting’s usual above-it-all perspective—a song told from the view of a British coal miner faced with the uncaring determinism of his government. In order to tell his tale . . . Sting climbs down deep inside the place and conditions where the character lives: He is aware that the fate of the miner’s professions—and therefore the future economy of his class—has already been irrevocably shut off, and so he sings his account in a tired and resigned voice, but also with a dark, deadly, righteous sense of pain and anger: “Our blood has stained the coal/We tunneled deep inside the nation’s soul/We matter more than pounds and pence/Your economic theory makes no sense.”
The Herald’s new editor was not pleased to read such sentiments in his paper. He sent a message to me via another editor: “Rock & roll is music about and for teenagers. Write about it from that point of view.” I ignored the warning—in fact, I stepped up my politics—which meant that soon my life at the Herald was hell. I wasn’t alone. I watched the paper’s managerial structure drive some of its best writers out of the company. The managers believed, I was later told, that it was perhaps the writers’ affections for style and point of view that was costing the paper its readers (and hell, maybe they were even right).
I left the Herald Examiner in 1987, but by that time I was badly disillusioned. Plus I was going through another of my end-of-the-world romantic aftermaths. I wasn’t sure I wanted to remain a writer—but what else did I know how to do? A sympathetic friend and editor at Rolling Stone, James Henke, gave me a series of assignments. I remember hating writing each of them. All I wanted to do was sulk and drink and hate some more. Still, I had bills to pay. Looking back, I see how those assignments helped save me and also taught me some invaluable lessons: one, that summoning the will to write—even at the worst points in my life—meant I had an inner strength that was invaluable and that I should trust; two, that I had not yet lost my love for popular music and its meanings and how it mattered to its audiences. Plus, I realized it still mattered to me—that is, it still helped me. Popular music, all said and done, was among the best friends—and one of the few real confidants—I’d ever known in my life. Whereas you could talk to and confide and hope and trust in a lover, that lover might still leave or betray you. A great song, by contrast, would talk to you—and its truths would never betray you. At 3 A.M., outside of the greatest and most sinful sex, there was nothing that could mean as much as a pop song that told you secrets about your own fucked-up and yearning heart.
A FEW YEARS AGO, after the publication of Shot in the Heart (a story about my family’s generational history of violence), I received several letters from readers asking me to compile some of my earlier writings for publication. I didn’t much like the idea. I thought my pop writing was too disjointed and had covered too much musical stylistic terrain to work in any cohesive volume. Also, I’d just finished a book about looking back at my past. I wasn’t anxious to start another—especially since reading my old writings always made my skin crawl. Instead, I preferred to write my own original history about rock & roll’s epic patterns of disruption, but that idea didn’t excite most of the people I talked to. After all, it was a season when pundits like Allan Bloom and William Bennett could write depthless and malicious indictments of popular culture and achieve fame and success for doing so. A history (and defense) of rock’s agitation did not prove an appealing idea to most editors.
Then, following an article I wrote for Rolling Stone in 1996 about the death of Timothy Leary, I again received requests for a collection of writings. I felt a little more receptive to the idea by that time, because I knew I had a handful of articles I’d like to see enjoy a second (if only brief) life. At first, though, the process of selecting those articles was not fun. I’m a big believer that one should never read too much of one’s own writing; you begin to see all the repetitions, all the flaws. A week into the project, I felt like bailing out. Also, I’d written so much about some subjects—such as Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, punk, and Bruce Springsteen—that I wasn’t sure which piece (or pieces)
to pick as the most representative.
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
It 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 Huckleb
erry 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.