History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (7 page)

You cheated

You lied

—with Williams and Wright deepening the Slades’ measured Judgment Day doo-wop chorus, Belvin, in a ghostly, wordless falsetto, floated over the music, swam through it, lifted the song into the air it would soon occupy all over the country.

It was how pop magic worked. You took something ordinary, in this case Frankie Ervin’s voice, which betrayed his thirty-two years, all the groups he’d joined and left, all the records his voice had marked without credit or more money than might last the day or the week, and linked it to something that seemed not quite real—here, the ghost the
song as its writer shaped it never knew it had. You let the plainness of one part of the music throw what was beautiful, what was strange, into relief, but you never let the light in the sound blind the real people marching through it. You kept the magic just out of reach, a receding element that made you come back for more, certain that, the next time, you could catch it in your hand. And it was here—Jesse Belvin finding the real song in what it didn’t or couldn’t say, making Frankie Ervin sound square as he dutifully walked through the lyric, just as with the backing vocals in “In the Still of the Nite” finally taking the song from Fred Parris’s plummy lead, Parris himself had escaped the prison of correct singing in his embrace of the wordless wail—that the soul music of the next decades began. The music of what, if it was to be music at all, had to be there—the music of what you couldn’t see. “Jesse’d write these songs but actually all he might have were six words on a piece of paper,” Belvin’s friend Gaynel Hodge said in 1986, talking about how Belvin sold songs. “He’d go into the record companies and start singing, just making up shit, and hypnotise them with his voice because he had such a strong effect on people when he sang. But after he left with his money, the people would realize the song had been all Jesse and all they were left with was smoke.”

The Slades kept trying. They all but covered themselves with Burch’s “You Gambled.” With the hard-nosed New
Orleans singer Joyce Harris drafted for a day, they answered themselves with “I Cheated.” eventually Domino Records closed up shop and the Slades went on to real life. Near the end of their story, in 1959 or 1960, they spent an afternoon in their rehearsal space. The sound on the tapes they made that day is suppressed, narrow, staticky—you can picture one mike in a metal shed. They were doing warm-up exercises, loosening their fingers and vocal chords, opening their chests on the Crows’ 1954 “Gee Whiz,” the Five Keys’ 1955 “Ling Ting Tong,” the Casuals’ 1957 “So Tough,” the Elegants’ 1958 “Little Star,” the Bell Notes’ 1959 “I’ve Had It.” There was nothing special, nothing to suggest how close they came—as close as
American Bandstand,
all the way to Philadelphia to mime “You Cheated,” only to have it fall to the Shields’ version on the same show the very next day, for that matter to have their song turn up on the rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins’s
Mr. Dynamo
not two years later, but credited to one Levon Helm, Hawkins’s teenage drummer—nothing special, except for “In the Still of the Nite.”

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime performance. In Don Burch’s straining lead, with the rest pushing their doo-wops in front of him and a single acoustic guitar keeping time, you can hear someone driving past his own limits: as a singer, but also as a person consumed by desire and terrified of loss. The song is revealing someone who wasn’t there before. The song isn’t telling him what to do or what to feel; he
is reaching for this song because, suddenly, more so with each phrase, he needs to say what it says. His voice is thin, reedy, tailing off the last words of the lines, the words standing out in a new way, with
still
threatening and harsh,
night
open, beckoning, a garden under the moon—and when he reaches the last “night,” the last word of the song, he won’t let it go. He caresses the word, lets it fall slowly through his fingers like sand, watching the last grains glisten as they fall, each one its own true note.

With the second verse, Burch adds something to the song that was never there before this day, and never after it. “I remember, that night in May,” he sings, “When you kissed me”—and the hesitation that caught Fred Parris in the first verse now catches Burch. He double-pumps on “When,” letting the word fragment into two parts, and then rushes across the line, letting it shudder through him. He puts everything he has into the four words of the line, and it sweeps him up. “I could hear you say”—but he never says what she said. Maybe he was too consumed by the moment to hear more than the sound of her voice.

The way Burch puts an event into the song—
you kissed me
—something physical, intimate, irreducible—is shocking. Suddenly this is not just a song. Someone is telling you what happened to him, and you believe him—as pain floods over him, you have to believe him. The girl in the song is present, and he is not just sitting in his room, dreaming of
what almost happened, something he wants so much he can almost believe it did happen: “Oh I couldn’t sleep / For on my mind / Was the image / Of a girl / I hope to find,” as the Safaris put it in 1960, embarrassing a good part of the nation as they did so.
When you kissed me
—it’s a moment that can’t be taken back. “What you do to me, baby, it never gets out of me,” Geeshie Wiley sang in 1930 in “Last Kind Words Blues”; that’s where, that day in Austin, life found Don Burch, or the person he was able to become when he sang “In the Still of the Nite.”

A half-century after that afternoon rehearsal, the
Wall Street Journal
ran a piece titled “Should Bob Dylan Retire?” “When to Leave the Stage,” ran the subhead: “A generation of music icons is hitting retirement age, along with their baby boomer fans. Is it time for Bob Dylan to hang up his hat and harmonica?” “The issue of whether Mr. Dylan should pack it in has been an enduring parlor game in music circles,” John Jurgensen wrote. “Most alarming to listeners devoted to his seminal recordings: the state of Mr. Dylan’s voice, decades on from its first signs of deterioration. Dr. Lee Akst, director of the Johns Hopkins Voice Center, says it’s impossible to diagnose Mr. Dylan without examination, but . . . ” Illustrating the piece was a remake of the cover of Dylan’s second album,
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
with the singer and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo hugging his arm as they walked
through the snow on a New York street, shining with the pleasure of being in the right place at the right time, embodying youth, love, sex, freedom, and possibility, and so fully that the single block of Jones Street in Greenwich Village in 1963 could open onto every highway and back road in the United States. But now you saw a man and woman from behind. He was heavy and his hair was white; she leaned into him as before, thick and stooped, holding onto her walker in the slick of slush on the pavement. The story was bizarre from its premise: the notion that it was up to the public to decide when Bob Dylan or anybody else should “leave the stage”—which really meant shut up, or die. The subtext was the presentation of age as a disease you could catch if you got too close—something to turn away from, something decent people should not have to look at, as the figures on the album now titled
The No Longer Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
acknowledged, turning their faces away from the viewers’ gaze, sparing them their disgust. Suze Rotolo died less than three months after the story appeared; Fred Parris, enormous, his features locked in place, was still singing “In the Still of the Nite.” Jesse Belvin never had to worry about it. He died in a car crash on 5 February 1960, after a show in Little Rock with Little Willie John and Jackie Wilson.

Some months before the
Wall Street Journal
ran its story, the Slades gathered in what looked like a locker room to rehearse for their own appearance on a PBS doo-wop special.
Two of the four were fat; they were all bald. They sang “You Cheated,” and then they sang “In the Still of the Nite.” Tommy Kaspar did not allow himself even the slightest change of expression as he carefully picked the strings of his guitar through his backing vocal; John Goeke and Jimmy Davis bore down as well. Don Burch, his guitar far out in front of his body, resting on his huge stomach, his eyes smiling, made his way through the song like a swimmer without a doubt in his mind that he’d make it to shore. He didn’t sing “When she kissed me.” As the other Slades chanted “I remember” around him, maybe that was something he didn’t.

All I Could Do Was Cry

2013 • 1960 • 2008

In early 2013 Beyoncé bestrode America as a colossus. On January 21, at Barack Obama’s second inauguration, following James Taylor’s rendition of “America the Beautiful,” Kelly Clarkson’s of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” a strong inaugural address, a poem by Richard Blanco, and a benediction by the Reverend Luis León, she closed the ceremonies with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Less than two weeks later, on February 3, she took the halftime show at the Super Bowl. She was inescapable, a pop image so overwhelming that the person inside of it seemed not unreal but beyond reality, and beyond criticism. When the
New Yorker
columnist George Packer wrote that her Super Bowl performance left him “a bit cold—a highly polished combination of corporate marketing and pole dancing,” the scent of failure came off the words. You could feel that he had demeaned himself, not her.

These are official historical events, now folded into the official American story. As they happened, they echoed endlessly off the sides of the American mountain. “America the Beautiful” is unendurable to begin with; James Taylor’s autumn-leaves stroll through the number could have been a recruiting video for a second-rank New England prep school, if not Austin Riggs. “I have to admit, this shows how far we have come as a nation,” Stephen Colbert said that
night, appearing as the right-wing talk show host he has played on
The Colbert Report
since 2006, the year he appeared at the White House Correspondents’ annual dinner to eviscerate both attending President George W. Bush and the toadying White House press corps itself. “A black guy who likes James Taylor! ‘’Cause I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain,’” he crooned, “‘but I’ve never seen a black guy at your shows.’” Suddenly Barack Obama turned into Steve Martin in his “I was born a poor black child” standup routine, explaining how as a white foundling he was raised by a family of black sharecroppers, only discovering his true self—not as a white person, but as a music lover—when, as a young man, he heard Montovani for the first time. It was a parable of American identity restaged most expansively in Martin’s film
The Jerk,
in 1979, with the family gathered around their radio:

“ . . . and that concludes this Sunday night Gospel Hour, live from the Four Square Gospel Church at the Divine Salvation in St. Louis, Missouri, the Reverend Willard Willman, Pastor. And now, music throughout the night. Music in a mellow mood.”

“Don’t touch that radio! Don’t touch it! Turn it up! Turn it up! I’ve never heard music like this before! It speaks to me! Taj! Dad! This is unbelievable . . . If this is out there, think of how much more is out there! This is the kind of music that tells me to go out there and be somebody!”

“My Country ’Tis of Thee” was the song Martin Luther King, Jr., seized on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963: “And this will be the day—this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, ‘My Country ’tis of thee. Sweet land of liberty. Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride. From every—mountainside, let freedom ring’ and if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.” There was no pause at all between the last word of the song and the
and if
that followed, suspending America’s greatness between past and future, a future American might never serve. As King spoke, his own words entered the song, and Kelly Clarkson appeared to be listening to the song, and hearing that story telling itself within it, as she sang.

She had to follow Aretha Franklin, who had performed the song at Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and she didn’t shame herself. As she slowly turned the song toward a bigger and bigger presence, she was both a star and self-effacing, commanding and modest. Moving into the forgotten third verse, then the fourth, she made the country start, saying,
There is so much we don’t know, there is so much to remember.

Let music swell the breeze,

And ring from all the trees,

Sweet freedom’s song;

Let mortal tongues awake;

Let all that breathe partake;

Let rocks their silence break,

The sound prolong.

Joe Biden looked shocked, and thrilled. You couldn’t tell whether he hadn’t heard the verse Clarkson sang before, or if he hadn’t heard her before.

Beyoncé closed the show; swathed against the cold in clothes that looked like extensions of her blonde hair, of her aura, she did the National Anthem as a show-closer, drawing attention to her own gorgeousness. Near the end she raised her left hand in the gesture of an orator emphasizing a point; the gesture was so much more that of a politician than of a singer it let you imagine she was inaugurating herself. As the song ended she remade it into the last number of some quasi-historical-religious Hollywood epic,
Ben-Hur
if not
Les Misérables:
“Brave, brave—
the Brave!
” Back in the real world, Beyoncé and her husband, the hip-hop emperor Jay-Z, seated behind her, made up almost as big a power couple as Hillary and Bill Clinton; that night, according to the next day’s news, she danced until three at the White House with the president. But as a show-closer this was also a warm-up.

With a $50 million contract with Pepsi, with her face on the cover of
Vogue
and half a dozen other magazines, with the ghost of Vince Lombardi providing a voice-over that
kicked off the performance less as a pole dance than a Tony Robbins rally—“The will to excel, the will to win, these are the things that endure”—at her Pepsi-sponsored Super Bowl show Beyoncé appeared on a pedestal as her own statue. She brought herself to life as her own Pygmalion, breathing into her own mouth. Throwing off the restraint of the inauguration, she plunged into the melismatics that turn every song into a mirror into which the singer gazes at her own beauty. From her first records with Destiny’s Child— the group brought back together for this night—through her long string of number-one hits, “Crazy in Love,” “Baby Boy,” “Check on it,” “irreplaceable,” “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” she followed in the footsteps of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey in replacing even a memory of soul music with its counterfeit. The transformation is magical in its completeness. What used to be called worrying a line — in the old sense of the word, where to worry something, a singer with a fragment of a song, a writer with a sentence, a child with a nail or a piece of wood for a toy, was to move something back and forth, up and down, until it gave up its true meaning, or even, as singing, revealed that the singer would never reach that final truth, but dramatizing how close he or she came—was erased by its fraud.