Night Beat Page 3
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.
PART 2
setting out for the territories
beatles then, beatles now
BEATLES THEN
In the 1950s, rock & roll meant disruption: It was the clamor of young people, kicking hard against the Eisenhower era’s public ethos of vapid repression. By the outset of the 1960s, that spirit had been largely tamed, or simply impeded by numerous misfortunes, including Elvis Presley’s film and army careers; the death of Buddy Holly; the blacklisting of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry; and the persecution of D.J. Alan Freed, who had been stigmatized on payola charges by Tin Pan Alley interests and politicians, angered by his championing of R & B and rock & roll. To be sure, pop still had its share of rousing voices and trends—among them musicians like Ray Charles and James Brown, who were rapidly transforming R & B into a more aggressive and soulful form—but clearly, there had been a tilt: In 1960, the music of Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka, Connie Francis, and Mitch Miller (an avowed enemy of rock & roll) ruled the airwaves and the record charts, giving some observers the notion that decency and order had returned to the popular mainstream. But within a few years, rock would regain its disruptive power w
ith a joyful vengeance, until by the decade’s end it would be seen as a genuine force of cultural and political consequence. For a remarkable season, it was a widely held truism—or threat, depending on your point of view—that rock & roll could (and should) make a difference: that it was eloquent and inspiring and principled enough to change the world—maybe even save it.
How did such a dramatic development take place? How did rock & roll come to be seen as such a potent voice for cultural revolution?
In part, of course, it was simply a confluence of auspicious conditions and ambitious prodigies that would break things open. Or, if you prefer a more romantic or mythic view, you could simply say that rock & roll had set something loose in the 1950s—a spirit of cultural abandon—that could not be stopped or refused, and you might even be right. Certainly, rock & roll had demonstrated that it was capable of inspiring massive generational and social ferment, and that its rise could even have far-reaching political consequences. That is, admiring and buying the music of Elvis Presley not only raised issues of sex and age and helped stylize new customs of youth revolt, but also inevitably advanced the cause of racial tolerance, if not social equality. This isn’t to say that to enjoy Presley or rock & roll was the same as subscribing to liberal politics, nor is it to suggest that the heroism of R & B and rock musicians was equal to that of civil rights campaigners like Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, or Rosa Parks, who paid through pain, humiliation, and blood for their courage. But rock & roll did present black musical forms—and consequently black sensibilities and black causes—to a wider (and whiter) audience than ever before, and as a result, it drove a fierce, threatening wedge into the heart of the American musical mainstream.
By the 1960s, though, as the sapless Eisenhower years were ending and the brief, lusty Kennedy era was forming, a new generation was coming of age. The parents of this generation had worked and fought for ideals of peace, security, and affluence, and they expected their children not merely to appreciate or benefit from this bequest, but also to affirm and extend their prosperous new world. But the older generation was also passing on legacies of fear and some unfinished obligations—anxieties of nuclear obliteration and ideological difference, and sins of racial violence—and in the rush to stability, priceless ideals of equality and justice had been compromised, even lost. Consequently, the children of this age—who would forever be dubbed the “baby boom generation”—were beginning to question the morality and politics of postwar America, and some of their musical tastes began to reflect this unrest. In particular, folk music—led by Peter, Paul, and Mary; Joan Baez; and, in particular, Bob Dylan—was gaining a new credibility and popularity, as well as an important moral authority. It spoke for a world that should be, and it was stirring many young people to commit themselves to social activism, especially regarding the cause of civil rights. But for all its egalitarian ideals, folk also seemed a music of past and largely spent traditions. As such, it was also the medium for an alliance of politicos and intelligentsia that viewed a teen-rooted, mass entertainment form like rock & roll with derision. The new generation had not yet found a style or standard-bearer that could tap the temper of the times in the same way that Presley and rockabilly had accomplished in the 1950s.
WHEN ROCK & ROLL’S rejuvenation came, it was from a place small and unlikely, and far away. Indeed, in the early 1960s, Liverpool, England, was a fading port town that had slid from grandeur to dilapidation during the postwar era, and it had come to be viewed by snobbish Londoners as a demeaned place of outsiders—in a class-conscious land that was itself increasingly an outsider in modern political affairs and popular culture. But one thing Liverpool had was a brimming pop scene, made up of bands playing tough and exuberant blues- and R & B-informed rock & roll.
One Saturday morning back in 1961, a young customer entered a record store called NEMS, “The Finest Record Store in Liverpool,” on Whitechapel, a busy road in the heart of the city’s stately commercial district. The young man asked store manager Brian Epstein for a new single, “My Bonnie,” by the Beatles. Epstein replied that he had never heard of the record—indeed, had never heard of the group, which he took to be an obscure, foreign pop group. The customer, Raymond Jones, pointed out the front window, across Whitechapel, where Stanley Street juts into a murky-looking alley area. Around that corner, he told Epstein, on a smirched lane known as Mathew Street, the Beatles—perhaps the most popular of Liverpudlian rock & roll groups—performed afternoons at a cellar club, the Cavern. A few days later, prompted by more requests, Epstein made that journey around Stanley onto Mathew and down the dank steps into the Cavern. With that odd trudge, modern pop culture turned its most eventful corner. By October 1962, Brian Epstein was the Beatles’ manager, and the four-piece ensemble had broken into Britain’s Top 20 with a folkish rock song, “Love Me Do.” There was little about the single that heralded greatness—the group’s leaders, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, weren’t yet distinguished songwriters—but nonetheless the song began a momentum that would forever shatter the American grip on the U.K. pop charts.
In many ways, Britain was as ripe for a pop cataclysm as America had been for Presley during the ennui after world war. In England—catching the reverberations of not just Presley, but the jazz milieu of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac—the youth scene had acquired the status of a mammoth subcultural class: the by-product of a postwar population, top-heavy with people under the age of eighteen. For those people, pop music denoted more than preferred entertainment or even stylistic rebellion: It signified the idea of autonomous society. British teenagers weren’t just rejecting their parents’ values—they were superseding them, though they were also acting out their eminence in American terms—in the music of Presley and rockabilly; in blues and jazz tradition.
When Brian Epstein first saw the Beatles at the Cavern, he saw not only a band who delivered their American obsessions with infectious verve but also reflected British youth’s joyful sense of being cultural outsiders, ready to embrace everything new, and everything that their surrounding society tried to prohibit them. What’s more, Epstein figured that the British pop scene would recognize and seize on this kinship. As the group’s manager, Epstein cleaned up the Beatles’ punkness considerably, but he didn’t deny the group its spirit or musical instincts, and in a markedly short time, his faith paid off. A year after “Love Me Do” peaked at number 17 in the New Musical Express charts, the Beatles had six singles active in the Top 20 in the same week, including the top three positions—an unprecedented and still unduplicated feat. In the process, Lennon and McCartney had grown enormously as writers—in fact, they were already one of the best composing teams in pop history—and the group itself had upended the local pop scene, establishing a hierarchy of long-haired male ensembles, playing a popwise but hard-bashing update of ’50s-style rock & roll. But there was more to it than mere pop success: The Beatles were simply the biggest explosion England had witnessed in modern history, short of war. In less than a year, they had transformed British pop culture—had redefined not only its intensities and possibilities, but had turned it into a matter of nationalistic impetus.
Then, on February 9, 1964, following close on the frenzied breakthrough of “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” TV variety-show kingpin Ed Sullivan presented the Beatles for the first time to a mass American audience, and it proved to be an epochal moment. The Sullivan appearance drew over 70 million viewers—the largest TV audience ever, at that time—an event that cut across divisions of style and region, and drew new divisions of era and age; an event that, like Presley, made rock & roll seem an irrefutable opportunity. Within days it was apparent that not just pop style but a whole dimension of youth society had been recast—that a genuine upheaval was under way, offering a frenetic distraction to the dread that had set into America after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and a renewal of the brutally wounded ideal that youthfulness carried our national hope. Elvis Presley had
shown us how rebellion could be fashioned into eye-opening style; the Beatles were showing us how style could take on the impact of cultural revelation—or at least how a pop vision might be forged into an unimpeachable consensus. Virtually overnight, the Beatles’ arrival in the American consciousness announced that not only the music and times were changing, but that we were changing as well. Everything about the band—its look, sound, style, and abandon—made plain that we were entering a different age, that young people were free to redefine themselves in completely new terms.
All of which raises an interesting question: Would the decade’s pop and youth scenes have been substantially different without the Beatles? Or were the conditions such that, given the right catalyst, an ongoing pop explosion was inevitable? Certainly other bands (including the Shadows, the Dave Clark Five, the Searchers, the Zombies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Manfred Mann) contributed to the sense of an emerging scene, and yet others (among them the Kinks, the Who, the Animals, the Rolling Stones, and—especially—Bob Dylan) would make music just as vital, and more aggressive (and sometimes smarter and more revealing) than that of the Beatles. Yet the Beatles had a singular gift that transcended even their malleable sense of style, or John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s genius as songwriters and arrangers, or Brian Epstein and producer George Martin’s unerring stewardship as devoted mentors. Namely, the Beatles possessed an almost impeccable flair for rising to the occasion of their own moment in history, for honoring the promise of their own talents—and this knack turned out to be the essence, the heart, of their artistry. The thrill and momentum wouldn’t fade for several years; the music remained a constant surprise and delight, the band, continually transfixing and influential, as both their work and presence intensified our lives. In the end, only their own conceits, conflicts, ambitions, and talents served as decisive boundaries.