History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (8 page)

Worrying also meant just that—that you could hear the singer worrying that he or she would not be able to get across what he or she was trying to say, that the singer would fail not
only him or herself, but the listener and the song. Otis Redding pushed it farthest: in “Try a Little Tenderness,” “These Arms of Mine,” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” worrying a line dramatized a contract between the singer, the song, and the listener.

The contract was that each would give what they had; that each would try, the singer speaking as he or she sang, the song speaking as it was sung, the listener speaking as he or she listened, to mean what they said. You could imagine, as you listened, that as the singer changed the song, the song changed the singer, and you could imagine that both would change you. Nothing would be left the same.

Some forms of music spark the freedom of singers to say, in words or how words are sung, in pace, hesitation, timbre, shouts, or silences, what they most deeply and desperately want to say; other forms take it away. The essence of melisma after soul music was captured in a comment by the presidential historian Rick Perlstein, writing about how, in the 2012 campaign, for Mitt Romney a lie, hundreds upon catalogued hundreds, in all forms, in all tones of voice, the tiniest adding credence to the most profound, had changed from a mere political trick into a form of discourse, from a short con into, in Perlstein’s words, a long con, the rules of which were understood equally by both speaker and audience. “It’s time,” Perlstein said, “to consider whether Romney’s fluidity with the truth is, in fact, a feature and not a
bug: a constituent part of his appeal to conservatives. The point here is not just that he lies when he says conservative things, even if he believes something different in his heart of hearts—but that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant on
American Idol
is supposed to sound.” Curlicuing around the note allows a singer to mimic the sense of event in soul music, the sense that something is happening which has not happened before and cannot be repeated, by mimicking the apprehension of soul, those moments when singers dramatize their struggle to bring out of themselves what lies buried in them, inaccessible, until this moment, even to themselves. As worrying is mimicked into melisma, it is also, behind the curtain of the effect, in a lie no one who tells it will ever admit to, satirized. What was once a sign of meaning what you said is transformed into a device by which singers communicate that they don’t. Perhaps reaching its limit with Jennifer Hudson’s performance of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” to open the inaugural ball, with Barack and Michelle Obama beaming, or trying to keep a straight face, music shifts from a means by which one can signify that one is not faking emotional commitment to a means by which one can signify that one is. It goes back to gospel, both the technique and the soul. As the singer must convince you that as he or she sings, he or
she has, by a commitment God can recognize, called down a visitation, then the tradition in which Beyoncé works is not merely bad music, but a form of blasphemy—though, unlike the outrage among devout African-Americans when Ray Charles or Sam Cooke or even Aretha Franklin used the gospel sound to sing about not God’s love but that of men and women on earth, no one is offended. The opposite is true: as with Rick Perlstein’s Romney, the falsity itself, felt and embraced, delivers its own kind of gratification, its own thrill.

That, at the Super Bowl, for nearly fourteen minutes, as in almost her entire career, was what Beyoncé had to say. She seemed someone entirely composed of money. Her gorgeousness was a concept, and as a concept it was automatic and finally bland. Unlike Elvis, Little Richard, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Tupac Shakur, Eminem, or Lady Gaga, she divided no one from anyone else. You didn’t have to have an opinion about her; you only had to acknowledge her mastery, and it was impossible not to, even though the longer you looked, the less there was to see.

The first two words of Etta James’s “All I Could Do Was Cry,” from 1960, are the most devastating. She was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles in 1938; at fifteen, living in San Francisco, she formed a vocal trio. Johnny Otis was in town with his band; after a hotel-room audition, James faked
a permission note from her mother, lied about her age, with Otis went back to Los Angeles and cut an answer-record to Hank Ballard’s huge hit “Work with Me Annie”: “The Wallflower (Roll with Me Henry),” with the parenthetical changed to “Dance with Me” when DJs objected. In 1955 it was number 1 on the R&B charts for a solid month. As covered by the radio singer Georgia Gibbs, it was number 1 on the pop charts. James spent the next five years on the road, sharing stages with Little Richard, Bo Diddley, and Elvis Presley, writing songs, making more than a dozen singles, and falling farther into a barely adult oblivion, sleeping on buses, and learning the codes and disguises that came with marijuana, cocaine, and heroin: “I liked to see the needle stuck in the vein between hits,” she wrote years later, with a double meaning that could have hung over most of her career. In 1960 she was hired at Chess Records in Chicago as a staff writer and singer. “All I Could Do Was Cry,” her first single on her own for the company, was a number 2 R&B hit. The next year a version of “At Last,” once a big-band hit for Glenn Miller with country-club vocals, now a chiming soul ballad, was another number 2—though over the years, as it reappeared in movies, TV commercials, covers by Celine Dion and other singers, it became an inescapable standard, and finally a self-erasing cliché, as if James had never done anything else, as if she’d never written “I’d Rather Go Blind.”

“
IIIIIIII
heard”—with a tone as rich and deep as any in rock ’n’ roll, James doesn’t so much sing the opening words of “All I Could Do Was Cry” as let them out, stones hidden in her lungs for twenty years. As the guitarist John Fahey once wrote of the first line of Hank Williams’s “Alone and Forsaken”—“We met in the springtime”—“By the fifth word, you know it’s all over,” and here it only takes two. “It is enough to shrivel the heart to see,” James Agee wrote of the last shots of Charlie Chaplin’s
City Lights,
back-and-forth close-ups of the once-blind girl recognizing that her benefactor is not the rich man she imagined but the ruined, filthy tramp who now recognizes himself in her gaze, and this studied moment, in which the singer’s whole life, her future as well as her past, seems to float behind her eyes as she sings, is the same.

James was twenty-two; she could have been sixty, or have lived a dozen lives without reaching twenty-three and remembered all of them. “I heard church bells ringing,” “All I Could Do Was Cry” begins; the singer’s beloved is walking down the aisle with another woman. It’s a hundred soap operas, a thousand other songs. Here the chorus is shapely and elegant, the verses off-balance, the “Earth Angel” triplets on guitar and piano an anachronism, the backing singers a distraction. None of it matters.
They met in the springtime:
in her first two words James is all sweep, fog rolling in over the hills in San Francisco and then all across the country,
her tone so clear you can see straight through to the end of the song. As it goes on there are terrible, subtle shifts into a lower register, terrible because each degree of shading speaks for a despair that would shame anyone who tried to put it into words. She worries
hands
for only a second, but worlds of loss, of one hand coming away from another, never to touch again, are in that moment. She comes down harshly on certain words, pushing them away from her, trying to push the images they call up out of her mind. She seems to be remembering something that happened a long time ago, or imagining what’s going to happen, and how she’ll feel when she remembers it. Time stops, swirls, and fades out.
I heard
—James’s sound is so full of beauty it’s hard to stand it, and nothing that follows will even approach the purity of her sound, right here; it will draw you back to the song again and again, to see whether the spell will wear off, as you half hope it will, to see if the sound can again take you to unglimpsed countries in your own heart, which it will.

Etta James was not happy when in 2007 she heard that Beyoncé Knowles, born in 1981 in Houston, had been signed to play her in
Cadillac Records,
a film about Leonard Chess and the Chess label. “She’s going to have a hill to climb, because Etta James ain’t been no angel,” she was quoted as saying. “I wasn’t as bourgie as she is, she’s bourgeois. She knows how to be a lady, she’s like a model. I wasn’t like that. I smoked in the bathroom at school.” But the scene in
which Beyoncé records “All I Could Do Was Cry” is so powerful it can make the rest of her career seem like a cheat—a cheat she played on herself, and her own talent, more than anyone else.

Leonard Chess was born Lejzor Czyz in Poland in 1917; along with his mother, his sister, and his brother and future partner Phil, he arrived in the United States in 1928. After the war he and his brother opened the Macombo, a blues and jazz joint on the South Side in Chicago; by 1947 they were in the record business. Muddy Waters put them on the map; they effectively wiped every other label in town off of it. Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Dale Hawkins—for the future members of the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and other British blues bands, the Chess studio at 2120 South Michigan Avenue wasn’t merely legendary, it was Shangri-La. Leonard Chess died in 1969 at fifty-two, in his Cadillac, of a heart attack, driving away from the offices of the company he had sold months before.

Cadillac Records
is one thing after the other, all story and no ambiance, no sense of place or purpose, until Beyoncé appears. Off camera, we hear her singing, and Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess calling “Cut, cut.” “Fuck you,” Beyoncé says. “What the hell you know about the blues?” We see them in the studio, Beyoncé in a short blonde Etta James wig. James wasn’t pretty; here neither is Beyoncé. “I gave
you a
damn
good track,” she shouts, then closing her face with her eyes open, putting down the lead sheets. “You want it,” she says matter-of-factly, “you sing it.” Brody turns to the band, a what-can-you-do expression on his face. “Now she wants me to sing it. Now go home, go home. Forget it. Everybody go home. What you smilin’ at?” He goes up to Beyoncé as she’s gathering her things, and bears down on her like a mugger: “My mistake. You ain’t woman enough for that song.” “I’m plenty woman,” Beyoncé says, and with the way her teeth fill her mouth for the second word, making
plenty
weight the line like an anchor, you begin to hear the music that wasn’t there when the scene began. Brody presses harder, contempt covering his disgust. “That song’s about being in love, you know what that is?” Beyoncé pulls into herself: “I know about love,” she says with an absence of inflection that tells you you don’t want to know what she knows. “Yeah?” says Brody, and now he’s enjoying himself; he might have gotten out of bed this morning just for the chance to say what he’s going to say. “Motherfucker ever walk out on you? Huh? Huh? Fucking not only walk out on you, but takin’ another broad down the aisle?” Beyoncé’s face as she walks away from him, as he stalks her around the studio, is blank, ugly, going dead. “Know what that feels like, baby? Huh?”

It’s the storied George Goldner move. As a producer and record man he was as creative a force in the beginnings of
the new music as anyone else—“There would have been no rock & roll without him,” Phil Spector said when Goldner died, in 1970. Just months before, Goldner told the
Rolling Stone
writer Langdon Winner the story of how he got Arlene Smith, the seventeen-year-old lead singer of the Bronx quintet the Chantels, to do what she did—to go into the depths of doo-wop ballads like a maiden sacrificing herself to volcano gods. Winner had published a retrospective review of
The Chantels,
issued on Goldner’s End label in 1958, raving about Arlene Smith: “What’s so great about her voice? Well, to be frank, it starts where all other voices in rock stop . . . When she reaches for a high note she just keeps going. There is never a hint of strain. Nothing drops out. Her tone expands in breadth to match the requirements of high pitch . . . Like a three-thousand dollar stereo system playing Beethoven’s Ninth, the highs, lows and mid range extend into infinity.”

“Shortly after the review appeared,” Winner wrote me in 2013, “I received a telephone call from George Goldner, legendary New York City record producer and businessman who’d recorded a number of early R&B, doo-wop and rock groups including the Chantels. He said he was coming to San Francisco on business and invited me to dinner. During a two-hour conversation, Goldner told a number of marvelous stories about Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Crows, the Flamingos, and other groups he’d produced over
the years. It was clear that he was happy to be getting some notice in the pages of
Rolling Stone
and wanted to make sure he was receiving sufficient credit for his contributions to rock and roll. At one point, for example, he proudly explained that the ‘boy’ celebrated in the Ad Libs’ 1965 hit ‘The Boy from New York City’ was actually he himself.

“Eventually,” Winner went on, “I asked Goldner about the extraordinary intensity in Arlene Smith’s vocals. ‘Obviously, she has a great natural ability and control of her voice,’ I said. ‘But she sings in a way that often seems right on the brink of emotional break down. Where did that come from?’ ‘You see,’ he said, ‘the Chantels were always very well prepared and sang beautifully. The first take of any of their songs was usually just about perfect. But I realized what a phenomenal talent Arlene Smith was. I wanted to push her to reach for something more. My strategy was to record two or three takes of a song and then storm out of the booth and start ranting. “This is horrible! Your singing today is lifeless, sloppy. Haven’t you been rehearsing? We’re just wasting our time here! What the hell’s the matter with you?” I’d look Arlene right in the eye and yell at her until she was nearly in tears, and then finally say, “OK, I give up. Let’s try it again.” The next cut was always the one I was looking for. The edge you hear in her voice, the tone of desperation approaching hysteria is what I was trying to pull out of her. And sometimes I succeeded.’”