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Letters on rock and roll.

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...from Buffalo, to Washington...

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...from Buffalo, to Washington...

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...from Buffalo, to Washington...

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Blame it on my WILD HEART American Apparel tee t shirt Heathered vintage style screenprint ladies scoop top

Image printed in black ink unless stated. Please note, darker colors with black ink will have a more subtle look. Junior fit American Apparel

Fill in the blank:  this generation’s going to feel about Stevie Nicks the way the last generation felt about ____________.

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It’s not exactly intuitive that rock and roll should be beautiful. It’s rough music, loud and sweaty. That’s one reason “True Love Ways” and “Julia” and “Shine A Light” hit as hard as they do. Anyway, I don’t think there’s a prettier moment in rock and roll than this one--Stevie Nicks singing while getting her makeup done.

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“The gonging in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1928 “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” The intimations of the uncanny and unknowable in the way Robert Johnson’s guitar strings seem to stand apart from his fingers in his 1936 “Come on in My Kitchen.” The push toward wordlessness, into a music of pure signs...”--GM, The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs

James Wood: It’s as if you want to be done with language in some way, and yet obviously you return to it, you have to return to it. It’s the only way you can express your desire to get beyond it.

Karl Ove Knausgaard: Yes, although this gets very difficult to talk about. In Book Six I discuss a poem by Paul Celan for, I think, thirty pages. Celan is the one who got closest to that kind of wordlessness. His language has been destroyed by what happened in Germany, by the Holocaust. It is Hitler’s language.--The Paris Review

What accounts for that unholy moan at the heart of the blues? 

(It’s slavery.) 

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JD McPherson playing two of his own songs “North Side Gal” and “Dimes for Nickels,” and also covering “Mystery Train.”

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I interviewed JD McPherson for This Land magazine. We talked about Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, growing up in southeastern Oklahoma, and the lyrics on his 2015 record Let The Good Times Roll. 

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“Crazy Man, Crazy” by Bill Haley with Haley’s Comets (usually known as Bill Haley & His Comets) was the first rock and roll song broadcast on television, on the soundtrack for 1953′s Glory in the Flower (feat. James Dean).

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In the beginning, rock and roll barely knew itself, barely knew its own ancestry. Robert Johnson’s first “record” (in the sense we use that term now–not his first recording, obviously, but his first album, his first pop music event:  his advent, if you will) was released in 1961:  King of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia). 

This was late enough in the history of rock and roll that Bob Dylan was already on contract with Columbia. That’s how he came to hear a prerelease copy of King. 

“I immediately differentiated him from anyone else I had ever heard,” Dylan said. 

Dave Van Ronk, Dylan’s folk music mentor, didn’t know about Johnson either. No one did, “outside of small circles of such Mississippi-born Chicago bluesmen as Muddy Waters and equally small circles of fiercely cultish blues record collectors,” wrote Greil Marcus. 

There’s an estrangement between the pioneer days of rock and roll and its origins in the country blues. I’m reminded of myths like Luke Skywalker or Clark Kent, some youthful orphaned hero embarking on a quest without knowing the secret of his parentage, nor its relevance to his ultimate destiny.

Pioneer rock and roll might not have been aware of its origins as a matter of history–but mysteriously, one might even say magically, it didn’t need to be. Early rock and roll understood its sources and wellsprings emotionally.

Consider the case of the Shangri-Las’ 1964 chart-topper “Leader of the Pack.” The Shangri-Las were a pair of sisters–Betty and Mary Weiss, plus Mary Ann and Marge Ganser, from Queens, NY. 

“Leader of the Pack” is about teenage love, class, death–and grief. A girl from the right side of town falls in love with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. This is a good metaphor on its own for the first years of rock and roll, when parents worried their children would fall in with that “dangerous crowd” and their “devil music.” 

(Note, too, how the railroad tracks are used to divide a town into the right (wealthy/white) side and the wrong (poor/black) one. And once you see train tracks as a metaphor for separation, a stand-in for the doom that hangs over this romance, then you’re partway to rethinking "Leader of the Pack” as a young white girl’s cover of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain.”)

In the video above, from an episode of “I’ve Got A Secret” that aired in 1964, the Ganser sisters sing and act out the song, led by Mary Weiss. 

Robert Goulet rides onto stage in a motorcycle. He mugs for the camera. Giggles pop in the audience. A sticky, sickly -sweet unseriousness slathers itself over everything, like a Blob made of cotton candy. Anyone paying attention to the singer and the song should be shocked at this display of callousness, of heartlessness. There’s an obscenity to it, like a bubble-gum bubble snapped at the moans of a grieving widow. 

Or is that no worse than a person dancing to the rhythm of the blues?

–btj

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One day in 2006 Winehouse stepped to the microphone in a BBC disc jockey's studio to sing "To Know Him Is to Love Him," and with a guitarist softly fingering doo-wop triplets, a drummer tapping, and a bassist counting off notes as if he'd thought about each one, she unlocked the song. In the three seconds it took her to climb through the first five words, to sing "To know, know, know him," you were in a different country than any the song had ever reached before. All of Winehouses's commitment to the songwriter's craft, the way her professionalism was inseparable from her fandom, was brought to bear as she sang; it also disappeared, leaving both  her and the song in limbo, out of time, no need to go forward, no need to go back.

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At first there's silence, then intermittent rumbling noises, scraping noises, the noise of something hollow. After a minute, you catch the high pings of a guitar being tuned, then feedback turning into a while, bass strings being finered, a quiet strum on the strings that echoes into more feedback, making a sound far too big for whatever it is you're picturing as the action behind what you hear [...] Byrd was forty-nine and black. He was walking home from a party. Three white men in a Fork pickup [...] and in history, this event can be seen--heard--as an unsinging of "John Henry," with the black man stripped of his hammer, chained to the steam drill, and pulled through the tunnel like a coal car. It's an argument that any lynching of a black American is an unsinging of "John Henry" [...] Even if no thought of James Byrd enters your mind, even if you are sorting through art-world or rock 'n' roll references--"the tradition of guitar-smashing," Marclay has said of his own sense of the piece, "of the destruction of instruments in Fluxus"--the guitar is becoming a living thing, an animal or a person, something that can feel pain, and you are hearing it scream [...] There is most of all Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock transformation of "The Star-Spangled Banner," the greatest and most unstable protest song there is [...] you can begin to hear the droning abstractions in the blues. The gonging in Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1928 "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean." The intimations of the uncanny an unknowable in the way Robert Johnson's guitar strings seem to stand apart from his fingers in his 1936 "Come on in My Kitchen." The push toward wordlessness, into a music of pure signs [...]

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Lou Reed, “This Magic Moment.”

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Lou Reed introduces Ben E. King to sing “This Magic Moment” at a tribute to Doc Pomus in Brooklyn in 2007.

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The voice he's speaking in could have come from Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, King's own memories, the hopes of an entire people, God, or the look that Tom Dowd, the engineer on the session, was throwing his way. Regardless of who writes it, no successful song is a memoir, a news story, and no such song does exactly what its author--and that can be the writer, the singer, the accompanist, the producer--wants it to do. One must draw on whatever new social energies and new ideas are in the air--energies and ideas that are sparking the artist, with or without his or her knowledge, with or without his or her consent, to make greater demands on life than he or she has ever made before.

--Greil Marcus, The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs

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Delta Moon is playing the Melting Point in Athens, Georgia. For "Money Changes Everything," with Mark Johnson on electric guitar, Frahner Joseph playing bass, and Marlon Patton drums, Gray is holding an Appalachian dulcimer, standing up, bending his head toward his instrument. [...] The notes coming out of the dulcimer are bright, high, and pretty, and all the more awful for that. The sound of the band is full, but the song as Gray shapes it gets smaller, quieter, and more hopeless than it ever seemed before, and Gray disappears into it, angry as he ever was, or even angrier, because he knows what his anger will get him:  nothing, other than another chance to sing the song.

--Greil Marcus, The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs

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In 2005, looking for a hook, an angle, a way back, late for the train of MTV's 1990s Unplugged shows, she redid her old songs for an album called The Body Acoustic. [...] There's still comfort, even joy, in the way the melody sways in the trees, in the heart everyone puts into the music, but the old folk wisdom the tune is carrying is all shadows and hideouts. This is life, and there's nothing you can do about it. Life, as Fitzgerald said in a line he didn't give to Gatsby, is essentially a cheat, but we're together, and no matter what the words we're singing say, the rhythm comes first. The story we're telling is about imprisonment, but the music we're making is about freedom, the tiny moments of freedom you steal from a life you don't own, that doesn't belong to you, that you have to live.

--Greil Marcus, The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs