Thursday, May 15, 2008
Aug 26, 2002 | 1) Jaime O'Neill, "It's only rock 'n' roll, but it's enough, already" (San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 4)
After dismissing the notion of the teenager as "a marketing construct" and seemingly regretting that, at 58, he ever was one, rejecting all forms of youth culture as manipulations, frauds and posing, O'Neill hits the clincher: "The anthems of the '60s anti-war movement have killed more of us than the war itself." Inarguable, of course, but we need details: How many people did Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" kill as opposed to Freda Payne's "Bring the Boys Home"? Country Joe and the Fish's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" vs. Edwin Starr's "War"? Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" vs. Sgt. Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets"? Oh, right, wrong question, that was a pro-war song -- how many lives did it save?
2) Bruce Springsteen, "The Rising" (Columbia) It's too long -- at 72 minutes, longer than the Rolling Stones' storied "Exile on Main Street." The poorer songs -- "Into the Fire," "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)" -- seem to go on forever. The set may well be what the film critic Manny Farber defined as "white elephant art": as an indirect but inescapable picture of the world in which Americans have lived since a New York headline proclaimed "U.S ATTACKED," it is certainly "an expensive hunk of well-regulated area."
It is also less like any sort of pop music album than a speech -- maybe a speech given without an audience, like Lincoln out in the woods declaiming to the trees. The speaker tries on many voices, rhetorical devices, exercises in repetition or metaphor. As with Martin Luther King's 1963 address to the March on Washington, neither the classical passages ("Further On [Up the Road]") or gratuitous grace notes ("Empty Sky") make it obvious that what the speaker is doing is building a platform to support the weight of what, in fact, he has to say -- and for the grandeur with which he means to say it.
That is the title song. As "The Rising" begins you can hear the speaker stand with his feet planted on the platform, which may be no more than a tree stump; the music his voice summons tips him off the stage and out of the forest, off to search for his audience, to see his face in others' faces. The song is at once enormous and simple, an act of will and a ready-made. It has room in it -- room for the dead and for those who mourn them, for those who care and those who don't, for those who believe they can't be touched and those who already have been.
It may be that the song actually has room for the enormity of the event it means to enclose. It may be that the song speaks the language of the event: not the language of those who perpetrated it, but the language of people trying to make sense of it, to translate it, to at once accept and resist its reality. The song seems much too short, so when it's over you play it again.
3/4, Elvis Presley, "Elvis Talks About His Career," on "Live in Las Vegas" (RCA) and "Hound Dog" on "Roots Revolution" (Tomato) or "Good Rockin' Tonight: The Evolution of Elvis Presley -- The Complete Louisiana Hayride Archives" (Music Mill)
If you want to know who he was and where he came from ("From my side of the story. There's a lot that's come out about what happened, but never from my side"), listen to the astonishing onstage monologue that ends the first disc of this four-CD set. It's August 24, 1969, three weeks into the engagement at the International Hotel in Las Vegas that brought Presley back to life as a performer, and he feels happily naked, sly, sardonic, coolly nailing his enemies, one by one: "So they arranged to put me on television. At that particular time there was a lot of controversy -- you didn't see people moving -- out in public. They were gettin' it on in the back rooms, but you didn't see it out in public too much. So there was a lot of controversy ... and I went to the Ed Sullivan Show. They photographed me from the waist up. And Sullivan's standing over there saying, 'Sumbitch.' I said, 'Thank you, Ed, thank you.' I didn't know what he was calling me, at the time."
To hear the controversy as a thing in itself -- the event from which half the country was fleeing while the other half was running right for it -- listen to the version of "Hound Dog" Presley offers on the December 15, 1956, broadcast from the No. 2 country radio show ("They've been looking for something new in the folk music field for a long time, and I think you've got it," the host says hopefully to Elvis at his first Hayride appearance, in 1954). On "Roots Revolution," new musicians have done note-for-note re-recordings of the original, very distant backing parts from guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black and drummer D.J. Fontana (not Jimmy Day's steel guitar), but the difference is marginal -- the sound is still bad, the performance is still shockingly fast, hard and mean, and the screams from the crowd comprise the most excited sound you'll ever hear in your life.
5) Emry Arthur, "Man of Constant Sorrow," on "Man of Constant Sorrow and Other Timeless Mountain Ballads" (Yazoo)
Arthur backed the Virginia mountain singer Dock Boggs on guitar in 1929; "he couldn't reach the chords," Boggs remembered. "He'd been shot through the hands. Bullets went through his hands." From that same year, you can hear those shots on the first recording of a song that during the folk revival of the 1960s would be sung by Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and countless others, and that in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Dan Tyminski (vocals) and Soggy Bottom Boy George Clooney (lead lip-synch) turned into a rave-up you had no trouble believing could sweep the South. Arthur maps the same territory, but as an exile. Singing haltingly, in a high voice, testifying shamefully that he has no lover, no friends, no home and deserves no better than an unmarked grave ("You're dreaming while you're slumbering/ While I am sleeping in the clay"), he might as well be hitting the strings with blunt instruments.
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