History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (3 page)

No one would have thought of it that way, one might say—not Maurice Williams or for that matter any of the Zodiacs, not the Beach Boys, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers, or Dion covering Bobby Darin to fill out his
Runaround Sue
LP. One might say that, and one might be wrong.

In 2012 the record collectors Richard Nevins, Pete Whelan, and Dick Spottswood were sitting on Spottswood’s porch in Florida, talking about Mississippi blues singers recording
in the late 1920s and early 1930s, sometimes for ten dollars or a few shots of whiskey a song, singers who reappeared in the 1960s, found like records by collectors and brought north to appear at folk festivals and make the twelve-song album that in their time did not exist. They were arguing with the “cold dispassionate” blues scholars who said musicians “played the blues for money, they didn’t play for any other reason,” and “the over-romanticizing” musical historians who claimed “that the blues were a cathartic release of all this social pain.” “Black folks played music for the same reason white people did,” Nevins said. “They wanted money, they wanted women, they wanted to express themselves and be respected and they didn’t want to be out plowing 4 acres of cotton.”

“Well,” said Spottswood, “I would hope artistry becomes an end in itself. I know conversations I would have with Skip James, Robert Wilkins and John Hurt would be about the excellence of the music and what made the music good. And how they tried to be as good as they wanted to be, because being good was better than being bad. One thing that old blues records teach you, is that even people with very limited skills can play very personal, distinctive, and appealing music that has nothing to do with the extent of their technique. It was their artistry. It was their feeling.”

Shake Some Action

1976

The only thing that rock & roll did
not
get from country and blues was a sense of consequences,” the writer Bill Flanagan said to Neil Young in 1986. “In country and blues, if you raised hell on Saturday night, you were gonna feel real bad on Sunday morning when you dragged yourself to church. Or when you didn’t drag yourself to church.” “That’s right,” Young said. “Rock & roll is reckless abandon. Rock & roll is the
cause
of country and blues. Country and blues came first, but somehow rock & roll’s place in the course of events is dispersed”—and what a remarkable thing to say that is. “There’s a fish in my stomach a thousand years old,” Brett Sparks of the Handsome Family sang slowly, over a heavy, lumbering fuzztone in “Winnebago Skeletons” ten years after Young spoke—not likely meant as an image for rock ’n’ roll as a force, a spirit, a joke, that was there all along, like that fish waiting for the chance to get out, but it speaks the language.

You can hear Young’s epistemology come to life in a thousand records, from Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man” in 1950 to Young’s own “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze” to a group without a name yet stumbling on the right, preordained, never-known way to get from one place to another in their
version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which Kurt Cobain was once happy to admit was Nirvana’s version of “Louie Louie,” the all-time number 1 garage-band hit—a song lost by its composer, Richard Berry, in the throat-cutting small-label competition that ruled rock ’n’ roll in Los Angeles in 1956, and found, for good, when Rockin’ Robin Roberts picked it out of a bin in Tacoma in 1958. He recorded his own version in 1961. Two years later he watched, along with Richard Berry, as the Kingsmen and Paul Revere and the Raiders, who cut their versions in the same Portland studio one day apart, made it not only the most popular but, it was somehow clear, the most archetypal song in the country— the Raiders taking the Pacific Coast, the Kingsmen the rest of the nation—as if it had always been there. But I never hear Young’s words translated with more urgency, with more joy, than in the Flamin’ Groovies’ “Shake Some Action.” “I really try to do something every time I go out there that stretches my capabilities, that puts
me
on the edge of going too far,” Young said one October day on Skyline Boulevard, thirty miles down from San Francisco, in 1993. “Where it might not work. Where the song may be too new, may not be the right song—but if I deliver the song right, and I’m really into the song, then it’ll make people forget who I am.” You can hear that all through Young’s career, in the successively more impossible guitar passages in “Cowgirl in the Sand,” in “Over and Over,” in the music he improvised for
Jim Jarmusch’s film
Dead Man,
and you can hear it too in “Shake Some Action”—but with the certain feeling, in the song that was there all along, that for as long as it lasts the music has called up the players, not the other way around.

The Flamin’ Groovies—a name so stupid it can’t transcend its own irony, a name so stupid it’s embarrassing to say out loud (“Where’re you going tonight?” “I’m going to see the, the—you know, that San Francisco band Roy Loney used to have before he left”)—made more than a dozen albums, and one song, recorded in 1972, unheard until 1976. They began in 1965 as the Chosen Few; by 1976, with Chris Wilson at the microphone, the band was still playing bars. Cyril Jordan was still playing guitar and writing the songs. “It was the only free country left in the world,” he once said, not talking about America but about rock ’n’ roll in America, or anywhere else. “No boundaries, no passports. There wasn’t even a government.” By 1976, rock ’n’ roll might have seemed like an old story, fixed and static, its secrets all exposed, a fact to learn: precisely a government, run by a few record companies and half a dozen lifeless icons. But in “Shake Some Action” everything is new, as if the secret had been discovered and the mystery solved on the spot. No founding rock ’n’ roll statement—Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More Years,” the Drifters’ “Let the Boogie Woogie Roll,” Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” or “Ready Teddy,” Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” or “Lovin’ Up
a Storm,” the Chantels’ “If You Try,” Elvis Presley’s “Jail-house Rock,” Dion and the Belmonts’ “I Wonder Why”—creates the same moment more fully, but that is not really the point. The point is that before rock ’n’ roll, as it was defined by those performers, those records, and a thousand more, nothing like what happens in “Shake Some Action” had ever been heard on earth; the point is that rock ’n’ roll, as music, as an argument about life captured in sound, as a beat, was something new under the sun, and it was new here, in 1976, in the hands of a few people in San Francisco. In that sense, more than twenty years after that fact first emerged to be learned, “Shake Some Action” can itself serve as a founding statement. “OLYMPIA, the birthplace of rock,” you could have read on the back of an album issued by the Kill Rock Stars label of Olympia, Washington, in 1991. That meant rock ’n’ roll could be invented anywhere, at any time, regardless of any rumors that something vaguely similar might have happened before.

The story told in “Shake Some Action” is complete in its title—though in the song it’s a wish, not a fact, a desperate wish the singer doesn’t expect to come true. The words hardly matter: “Need” “Speed” “Say” “Away” are enough. It starts fast, as if in the middle of some greater song. A bright, trebly guitar counts off a theme, a beat is set, a bass note seems to explode, sending a shower of light over all the notes around it. The rhythm is pushing, but somehow it’s falling
behind the singer. He slows down to let it catch up, and then the sound the guitar is making, a bell chiming through the day, has shot past both sides. Every beat is pulling back against every other; the whole song is a backbeat, every swing a backhand, every player his own free country, discovering the real free country in the song as it rises up in front of him, glimpsing that golden land, losing it as the mirage fades, blinking his eyes, getting it back, losing it again—that is its reckless abandon, the willingness of the music, in pursuit of where it needs to go, where it must go, to abandon itself. “You have to go into a crowd and do something they can’t,” Young said that day in 1993. “Some of them are hearing it and some of them aren’t, but it doesn’t matter. The idea is the
tension.
”

In “Shake Some Action,” the tension is there from the first moments—that count is a count to the end, the dead end, the door you’ve locked from the inside and can’t open, and the whole song can feel like an attempt to escape the tension, to let it dissipate, until the musicians no longer remember that the theme that kicked them off was fate. Here, every element in the music is a leap. As different parts of the song slow, as others pick up speed, depending on where you are, which wave in the song you’re riding, the sense of imminent loss can disappear—and then the singer drops back and there is a guitar, more than a guitarist, replacing the story you’ve heard with one you haven’t.

It’s what the singer is afraid of losing defined now purely in the positive, as flight, as freedom, in Norman Mailer’s words loose in the water for the first time in your life, because no matter how many times in how many pieces of music you are swept away as the instrumental passages in “Shake Some Action” can sweep you away, it’s always the first time. When the guitarist steps onto the magic carpet of his first solo, it is a picture of everything the singer is certain is slipping away from him, but it is not slipping away, it is present, you can hold it in your hand, see it glow. At the end, the guitarist again steps forward—and while the notes played might on paper be the same as they were before, in the air they are speaking in a different tongue. The drum roll that has tripped the song into the instrumental passage that will end it has tripped it over a cliff, and you feel not the worth of what the singer wants, but what it was worth, before it vanished, before it went back beyond memory, into fantasy, as if desire never had a face. Is that why you have to play the song again, to make it come out differently? Or because you can’t live without that beat?

Transmission

2007 • 1979 • 2010

In Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film
Control,
it’s 20 September 1978, in Manchester, England: the local television show
Granada Reports
is about to present a new band. “Seeing as how this is the first television program which brought you the first appearances from everyone from the Beatles to the Buzzcocks, we like to think we bring you the most new and interesting sounds in the North West. They’re called Joy Division, and are a Manchester band except for the guitarist, who comes from Salford, a very important distinction,” says the Granada host Tony Wilson, played pallidly by Craig Parkinson, speaking quietly in a monotone broken only by a condescendingly ironic twist on
very.
“This—is called ‘Transmission.’” As the camera pulls back, we see a fancy, corny set, with each musician—the singer Ian Curtis, the guitarist Bernard Sumner, and the bassist Peter Hook, born in 1956, and the drummer Stephen Morris, born in 1957—isolated on his own round riser. Wilson steps off the riser he’s been sharing with Curtis, standing much too close to him.

The odd thing about this conventionally flat introduction, which despite the fact that it lasts only twenty seconds is almost unbearable, is that, throughout, Sam Riley, playing Ian Curtis, who would hang himself twenty months after the actual Granada broadcast, is standing behind Wilson
with his head bowed. He doesn’t move. You can imagine that he’s praying, for some dark night of his soul or just that Wilson will finish and get off the go-go dancer platform and leave him alone. You can imagine you’re watching more than that: someone suddenly paralyzed by doubt, self-loathing, or a wish to disappear.

Led by a thick, ground-up bass shudder—the guitarist’s
ba-DING ba-DING
of the first Manchester punk single, the Buzzcocks’ “Boredom” from late 1976, now a harsher, threatening sound, the bassist’s sound of a train coming to a stop in the middle of nowhere,
ba-DAH ba-DAH
—the band breaks into a slow, up-and-down drone, its own kind of monotone. Curtis—Riley—sways back and forth behind the microphone stand. His eyes flash on whatever is before him in the studio, then close; they seem to fall closed. The camera shifts to Stephen Morris, played by Harry Tread-away, Peter Hook, played by Joe Anderson, Bernard Sumner, played by James Anthony Pearson, Morris concentrating hard, Hook looking serious and altogether at home, Sumner careful. On the soundtrack, the actors are playing their own instruments and Riley is doing his own singing, but there’s no sense of that. The actors have disappeared into the gravity of the song as it begins, each modulation in tone seeming like a promise that the rhythm will move forward, a promise that is immediately taken back.

After a little more than half a minute,
Riley—Curtis—begins to sing. “Radio,” he almost barks in his own monotone. “Live transmission,” he croons, the words spinning. His voice is deeper than you expect from his slight frame, or the home-cut of his Roman bangs. He looks as if the words are hard to get out, as if they weigh too much—that these three bare words carry too much social or aesthetic meaning, or that they are too burdensome simply as verbal objects, as phonetic facts you must form in your mouth, facts the singer might prefer to deny, but can’t. Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio,” a raging, superbly constructed pop song with a punk heart, would be on the radio that same year, damning everything about the medium from the giant transmitter in London to the little box in the singer’s bed-sit as instruments of a zombie culture that will lead to the extinction of all human emotion everywhere on earth—“I want to bite the hand that feeds me,” the pop singer says, and you believe him—but what is coming out of Curtis is on another plane, closer to a dream, or insomnia. Regardless of the unstoppable ride Costello gave his argument, at bottom he defined a political problem. “Transmission” is not an argument. It’s a dramatization of the realization that the act of listening to the radio is a suicidal gesture. It will kill your mind. It will rob your soul.