Fritz the cast

Pop music is the body cast that gets pushed around, but never loses its shape.

By Sarah Vowell

Apr 3, 1998 | One of the most tried-and-true visual gags in American TV and film is the body cast -- when they dress that unfortunate character who has suffered an accident of near-death proportions in mummy's clothing. The body cast is always in bed, usually in traction. For some reason, even though he has a mouth hole, the body cast rarely speaks, as if jumping out a window or whatever happened to land him in the hospital turned him mute. And even though you'd think a character who had broken every bone in his body would be used as a tragic emblem of pain, the body cast is actually a stock comedic character, a cartoon. You know the bit: His visitor trips on the traction wire or someone knocks him out of bed, or his gurney careens down a flight of stairs. For some reason, it's funny. Maybe because it's a perfect metaphor for life. The lesson of the body cast is that just when you think you couldn't hurt any worse, some klutz bumps into you and nothing short of a morphine bath is going to stop the pain.

Last night, I took two video strolls down pop music memory lane. After watching Ralph Bakshi's animated feature "American Pop" and VH1's first installment of the five-part series "The 100 Greatest Artists of Rock & Roll" back-to-back, I couldn't see American musical history as anything other than that body cast on the brink. Even though the music itself remains intact, the people telling its story are only clumsy torturers hindering its recuperation.

The idea behind "American Pop" is a promising one. It aims to tell the story of 20th century popular music in the United States by following four generations of a fictional family -- from the Jewish escapee of a czarist pogrom who ends up doing vaudeville in New York, on through to his rock star great-grandson selling out arenas in the '70s. Shown in theaters in 1981, it's finally been released on video, thanks to years of copyright battles for usage rights. Its soundtrack includes Gershwin, Dave Brubeck, Jimi Hendrix and Pat Benetar. In this relay of the generations, only a harmonica gets passed down. The vaudevillian's son becomes a jazz pianist, whose son becomes a junkie '60s songwriter, whose son becomes a punk enthusiast and Bob Seger sound-alike! (He grooves to the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant" and, not having learned anything, writes Seger's "Night Moves.")

Conventional wisdom might begin the story back on the farm. Or, more specifically, the plantation, sowing pop music's seed in the songs of slaves whose descendants turned those moans into blues and then jazz and so on. Starting the story in Russia must have taken a little Cold War chutzpah on Bakshi's part, though the contribution of Jews to American songwriting in this century is phenomenal -- Irving Berlin, the Gershwin boys, Lieber & Stoller and Bob Dylan, to name a few. Tracing the exodus from ragtime to rock from a pogrom is a marvelous idea, and a useful way to explore the tendency of great art to be made by outsiders busting into the mainstream. Which is why a synopsis of Bakshi's film is more satisfying than actually watching it.

The real story of pop accomplishment is one of self-determination and hard work. But "American Pop" is structured by the "accident theory" of history, the idea that the time line of art is merely a series of felicitous mistakes, instead of the work of intelligent agents of change. Years ago, I watched a made-for-TV movie about the Beach Boys. One scene in particular illustrated the way in which the accident theory presupposes a very narrow view of inspiration. The band walks out of a recording studio just in time to watch playboy drummer Dennis get picked up by a cute girl in a convertible. Mike Love says, "They'll have fun till Daddy takes her T-bird away." And the remaining Beach Boys look at each other as if to say, "Zoinks!" and head back into the studio to record, of course, "Fun, Fun, Fun."

But "American Pop's" director doesn't let his four generations make history. He imposes history upon them, letting one get killed by a Nazi soldier after playing "As Time Goes By" on the piano, plopping another into a beatnik coffeehouse to hear a ridiculous, beret-wearing "Allen Ginsberg" reciting "Howl" in overblown inflections. I don't have a problem with fictional condensation, such as in the way one character writes "A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall" and walks onto a stage to perform "Somebody to Love" in her best Grace Slick. I don't even have a problem with the film's insistence that great songs are written by druggies and bad decision makers, which is true enough. What I do mind is the distance between the filmmaker and his subject. What could be more fulfilling for an American than lovingly remembering all those great songs? Bakshi trots them out like he's marking off a checklist.

Rock 'n' roll is extremely difficult to characterize, but it's easy enough to caricature. Pete, the great-grandson '70s punk at the end of the film, is all sunglasses and snarls. It seems unfair to condemn a cartoon for being cartoonish, but looking at this leather jacket-wearing imbecile, you can forget why you ever cared about music in the first place. I'm sure this film felt differently in 1981, partly because in terms of animated commentary on popular culture, it didn't have "The Simpsons" to live up to, a cartoon that gleefully -- and faithfully -- walks the line between reverence and irreverence toward pop history. With the probable exception of Jim Morrison (whose Doors hit "People Are Strange" plays in the background of a shooting-up heroin scene), the pop practitioners who made history weren't dummies. But every musician in "American Pop" is a dolt, leaving the viewer to conclude that the great songs are written by, at best, idiot savants, and, at worst, just plain idiots. The vaudevillian, made to dress up in a costume as a horse's hind end, says, "I don't want to be a horse's ass forever." But that's all his family will become.

VH1's bungling "The 100 Greatest Artists of Rock & Roll" is equally capable of making our musical body cast cringe, though it really doesn't mean any harm. It's hosted by actor/"musician" Kevin Bacon, for starters, and its narration is howlingly bad. But this program is so random, so hit and miss, its lack of logic almost passes for suspense. All you want to know is, Who's next? VH1 polled musicians who have appeared on the channel over the years, asking them to vote for their favorite colleagues. So you get Fats Domino (No. 97) being lauded by Billy Joel, and both Neil Young and Charlie Daniels gushing over Lynryd Skynyrd (96). Once you get past the fact that what you're watching is heroes you care about being loved by musicians you hate, it's a real hoot. (The network will run all five segments as a block on Saturday night.) Though Nos. 94 to 92 are a Motown sweep of the Supremes, the Four Tops and the Temptations, most of the list is all mixed up, featuring what might be the first Ramones-to-Santana segue in history.

"The 100 Greatest Artists of Rock & Roll" is a mess, which works in the music's favor. Iggy Pop, at No. 83, has the misfortune of silly send-ups by Jim Kerr (the Simple Minds guy!) and Henry Rollins. Rollins barks, "When the chips are down, man, you put on 'Raw Power' by Iggy, and you're back in the mix." When the chips are down? In the mix? You'd think that Rollins' rock-talk would wreck your Iggy inspiration, but all he does is make "Lust for Life" sound that much better. And the first segment couldn't have a better ending: The Band, at No. 81, seen in clips from Martin Scorsese's "The Last Waltz." When the last piece of tape is Levon Helm screaming behind his drums, you almost forgive the cut to Kevin Bacon holding a guitar. Somehow, after the abuse of dumb hosting, bad narration and Daryl Hall interviews, rock 'n' roll keeps its shape. Because the most important thing to remember about the body cast is that the body cast always lives. No matter how many times he's shoved or dropped or mangled, he keeps on keeping on. He might groan. He might let out mousey squeaks of horror. But the body cast never dies. So go ahead and smack him around. That's what he's there for.

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