History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (20 page)

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 whine, bass strings being fingered, 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.

At two and a half minutes there’s the unmistakable sound of a car starting—the only unmistakable sound, it will turn out, that you’ll hear. Immediately a harsh noise kicks up, relentless, monochromatic; then a second noise, higher, then under the surface of the first two tones a bass counterpoint, so much bigger than the other sounds it almost drowns them out, then a treble sound raised over the others and held.

Another minute and a half has gone. The higher tone has shifted under the lower. The harsh noise has disappeared. Then the guitar begins to screech and reach; you can feel it trying to make a chord. There’s a bass rumble, then a scramble, the pace picking up: the simultaneous levels of sound are constantly changing position, fighting for primacy, bass versus treble, treble versus bass, scattered noise versus steady tone. You try to make a narrative out of it all, to see the music, because it is beginning to come across as some kind of music, going somewhere. Guitar Drag? For a moment you forget the label you read: maybe that’s the name of the band, a drone band like Th Faith Healers, with their mesmerizing thirty-two minute “Everything, All at Once, Forever,”
which pretty much covers the territory. You hear the car engine again, revving up, increasing speed, until it vanishes under a furious sonic back-and-forth, yes no yes no yes no, that breaks any picture you were trying to make.

At seven minutes, the sound begins to fade, or seems to— the piece, or the documentary recording, or the computer manipulation, whatever it is you’re listening to, seems to assume a kind of shape. If you can’t find a story in the noise, or make one up, you can get used to the noise, stop hearing it, erase the story you can’t decode. The sound rises slightly, more modulated, less frantic, dissonant but with direction. Then the noise doubles into a high screech, then it narrows, so that there’s less to hear, and then you’re looking straight into a chainsaw, everything cut and torn apart, then quiet, an object being pulled through water or gravel, and then a surge of speed and volume, then the volume up and the speed down, a moment of suspense, a breath drawn, and at eleven minutes you don’t like where this is going.

Before that sensation can turn into a thought, the terrain the sound is making is invaded by the loud, focused sound of something boring into something else. Everything begins to break up. Even in the chaos you get used to it. The sound isn’t quieter but it seems to be. The boring noise recedes, replaced by a high scratch, the sound band narrowing even further as the car again picks up speed, even sounds, feels as if it’s swerving from one side of the sound, or the road, to
the other. With the screech constant, for the first time you begin to hear as if you’re listening from inside of the noise as it happens, as it is made, as it occurs—no epistemology rules any more than any sound does, but what you’re hearing is alive, trying to speak, trying to form a language.

You can distinguish three levels of sound. As at the start there is rumbling, feedback, but without a sense of movement, a slowing down, the sound narrowing from a dark mass to a single line drawn in pencil down a page. The sound holds, and, at just over fourteen minutes, it disappears.

Colson Whitehead’s novel
John Henry Days
centers on vastly different appearances of the ballad about the race between the great steel driver and the steam drill built to replace him, the story of how John Henry beat the machine at the cost of his own life: of how, as countless singers black and white have sung, from some time in the 1870s or the 1880s to this day, “he laid down his hammer and he died.” Parading through Whitehead’s pages are an unnamed singer searching the old song for new words, the Tin Pan Alley song plugger who at the start of the twentieth century becomes the first man to copyright it, a Mississippi blues singer recording it in Chicago in the 1930s, a crackhead singing it on the street in the 1990s. Alternating with their stories are the cynical adventures of a hack journalist named J., on a junket to Talcott, West Virginia, one of various places where the great
race was supposed to have taken place in the years after the Civil War, now in 1996 celebrating the issue, right there in Talcott, of a thirty-two-cent first class John Henry stamp. The town is celebrating the first annual John Henry Days festival. It’s going to put the town on the map.

Also in Talcott is Pamela Street, there to sell the town the contents of her late father’s John Henry Museum, which filled her family’s apartment in Harlem, a museum containing hundreds of recordings of the song, every sheet music version, lawn jockeys, paintings, theatrical programs and costumes, even five spikes a salesman claimed came from the Big Bend tunnel in Talcott, the very spot where John Henry stood side by side with the steam drill and a pistol shot sent them off. Her father bought all five—“the new school clothes could wait”—and hung them over the mantel. To a little girl they were five scary, threatening fingers: “a railroad hand,” a dead man’s hand, reaching out to grab her in the night. She hates everything about John Henry: her father’s obsession took away her childhood. But in spite of herself, she knows everything about John Henry.

She and J. approach the Talcott John Henry: a statue of a hugely muscled black man, stripped to the waist, with a hammer in his hands. They read the plaque: “This statue was erected in 1972 by a group of people with the same determination as the one it honors—the Talcott Ruritan Club.” in Whitehead’s novel, every time anyone confronts
the song—a folklorist in the 1920s, seeking to prove the legend true or false, a little girl on Striver’s Row in Harlem in the 1950s cheating on her piano lessons with what her outraged mother calls gutter music—they are, in their own way, singing it, and so Whitehead imagines the Talcott sculptor: “The artist was forced to rely on what the story worked on his brain. He looked at the footprint left in his psyche by the steeldriver’s great strides and tried to reconstruct what such a man might look like.”

“You see those dents in the statue,” Pamela says to J. “People come around here and use it for target practice. One time they chained the statue to a pickup and dragged it off the pedestal down the road there. Then the statue fell off and they drove off so they found it the next day just lying in the road.” “Probably not much to do here on a Saturday night,” says J.

This isn’t merely a story. The novel is made of accumulating detail, Whitehead researching down more than a century and then imagining every setting, every character’s milieu, what a room looks like, how people talk there, what they wear, what the air is like. But there are also coded, hidden details, and this—“One time they chained the statue to a pickup and dragged it off the pedestal down the road”—is one of them. It’s an illustration of the twists and tangles folk songs take as they emerge from real life, live on in the imaginative life of generations of singers and dancers, and then as
the songs are pulled back into real, lived life, until you can’t tell the song from the events behind it and in front of it, the real from the imaginative—when you can’t tell if an event caused the song or the song caused the event. Here, the tale of people chaining the statue to a pickup truck and dragging it off of its pedestal is an inescapable, folk-fictional version of an actual historical event. For a novel published in 2001, there is no way that this is not a version of the murder of James Byrd, Jr., in Jasper, Texas, on 7 June 1998.

Byrd was forty-nine and black. He was walking home from a party. Three white men in a Ford pickup, John King, Russell Brewer, and Shawn Berry, offered him a ride; he climbed in. They drove behind a store, pulled him out, beat him with a baseball bat, chained him by his ankles to the truck, and dragged him to death. When they finally dumped the body at the gate of a local black cemetery, there was no head and no right arm. Investigators determined that Byrd had tried to keep his head off the ground until the driver swerved and smashed him into a culvert. King and Brewer were both white supremacists—King had a tattoo of a black man hanging from a tree. Berry was sentenced to life; Brewer and King were sentenced to death. Brewer was executed in 2011.

In
John Henry Days,
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.” And it’s an argument that the song itself—whether called “John Henry,” “The Death of John Henry,” “Nine Pound Hammer,” “More About John Henry,” “New Railroad,” or “Spike Driver Blues”—is a symbolic unsinging of any and every lynching of a black person, an affirmation of the power of a single African-American to deny and defeat the white power set against him, even if it costs him his life, but not his dignity, with the song rolling down the decades from the 1920s, when it was first recorded, taken up by Uncle Dave Macon, Mississippi John Hurt, Paul Robeson, the Monroe Brothers, Woody Guthrie, in the present day by Bruce Springsteen, the Los Angeles techno duo Snakefarm, the Boston bluegrass combo Crooked Still, and, taking John Henry from a factless past into the historical present, the British punk singer Jon Langford. Christian Marclay’s “Guitar Drag,” emerging out of this complex of real and imaginary situations, is another version of this version of the song.

Born in 1955 in California, raised in Switzerland, Marclay is best known for
The Clock,
first shown in 2010: his twenty-four hour, minute-by-minute video collage of clips from thousands of movies that, playing only in real time— when you enter the viewing space in a gallery or a museum at 10:13 a.m., it’s 10:13 a.m. on the screen—creates a picture
of an entire, mythic day. With hundreds of projects behind him, Marclay is an inveterate visual and sound artist who has always worked with musical themes, at first taking commercial albums and fitting them with new covers and labels, breaking and reassembling LPs and fitting the pieces of different records together into one that would actually play, redesigning, deforming, and distorting every kind of musical instrument or sound equipment, even scouring cities to photograph music-themed signs, advertisements, tattoos, and sound holes in walls and elevators. He is an omnivorous assemblage artist drawn to destruction: everything in his work is about taking something out of one context and putting it into another, or recognizing the way in which an object has lost its original, seemingly defining context and occupied another, so that every element of a construction, or deconstruction, begins to tell a story it never told before—but, the feeling is, a story it always wanted to tell.

Marclay’s real life as an artist began in 1977, when, attending the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, he found a children’s Batman record in the street, run over but still intact. It played; Marclay was drawn to the sounds made by the tire tracks on the grooves and the dirt and gravel embedded in them. “When a record skips or pops we hear the surface noise, we try very hard to make an abstraction of it so it doesn’t disrupt the musical flow,” he said years later. “I try to make people aware of these imperfections and accept
them as music; the recording is sort of an illusion while the scratch on the record is more real.”

On the art-world edges of the New York punk scene in the early 1980s, Marclay became a club disc jockey, a turntablist with as many as eight records spinning at once, scratching back and forth between them until a new music emerged and just as quickly erased itself. He invented the Phonoguitar, allowing him to scratch, distort, and remix a phonograph record while performing as if he were a guitarist, right down to bending the top of his body back in full guitar-hero mode. In 1983, at the Kitchen in New York, he first played “Ghost,” a scary, trance-like version of Jimi Hendrix’s utterly despairing “I Don’t Live Today,” from 1967. Nearly twenty years after his death, Hendrix remained larger than life, an unsolved mystery: “I think Jimi’s gonna be remembered for centuries, just like people like Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins,” John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas said in 1992. “He’s really a folk hero, another John Henry.” “Will I live tomorrow? / Well, I just can’t say / Will I live tomorrow? / Well, I just can’t say / But I know for sure / I don’t live today.” Marclay didn’t sing those words—or he sang them in his own way. Moving the disc back and forth, he found tones in the grooves that had never been heard before. He turned words into echoes, and battered them in the air with complaints, criticisms, denials, all the sounds of distortion, until Hendrix could seem present, as a ghost presiding over
the whole affair, and, as a ghost, as physically, cruelly dead as he had ever been. “Bands were being formed right and left,” Marclay said in 1992. “Grab a guitar for the first time and start a band. You would get a club date before even starting rehearsals. That’s how raw it was. A lot of it was bad but it didn’t matter. It was the energy that mattered.”

I grabbed a turntable and used it like a guitar.
Ghost
was an homage to Jimi Hendrix. I was using a turntable-console strapped around my neck like a guitar . . . I’d play Hendrix records, scratch them bad, crush the tone arm through the grooves, and shove the thing in the amp to get feedback. I also used a wah-wah pedal. It was very loud. The portable turntable allowed me to move around and get into some Hendrix moves. What I always liked about Hendrix is the way he was pushing the limits of his instrument, looking for new sounds even if it meant burning his guitar. But
Ghost
was also dealing with the absence of the performer—the absence or death of the performer because of the recording technology. I was playing these records, going through the motions with my surrogate guitar. It was very ritualistic. I sort of became Jimi Hendrix. Instead of playing air-guitar, I was playing records.