American Studies (17 page)
Authors: Louis Menand
I
f you advised a college student today to tune in, turn on, and drop out, she would probably call campus security. Few things sound less glamorous now than “the counterculture,” a term many people are likely to associate with Charles Manson. Writing about that period feels a little like rummaging around in history’s dustbin. Just thirty-five years ago, though, everyone was writing about the counterculture, for everyone thought that the American middle class would never be the same. The American middle class never is the same for very long, of course; it’s much too insecure to resist a new self-conception when one is offered. But the change that the counterculture made in American life has become nearly impossible to calculate—thanks partly to the exaggerations of people who hate the sixties, and partly to the exaggerations of people who hate the people who hate the sixties. The subject could use the attention of some people who really don’t care.
f you advised a college student today to tune in, turn on, and drop out, she would probably call campus security. Few things sound less glamorous now than “the counterculture,” a term many people are likely to associate with Charles Manson. Writing about that period feels a little like rummaging around in history’s dustbin. Just thirty-five years ago, though, everyone was writing about the counterculture, for everyone thought that the American middle class would never be the same. The American middle class never is the same for very long, of course; it’s much too insecure to resist a new self-conception when one is offered. But the change that the counterculture made in American life has become nearly impossible to calculate—thanks partly to the exaggerations of people who hate the sixties, and partly to the exaggerations of people who hate the people who hate the sixties. The subject could use the attention of some people who really don’t care.
The difficulties begin with the word “counterculture” itself. Though it has been from the beginning the name for the particular style of sentimental radicalism that flourished briefly in the late
1960s, it’s a little misleading. For during those years the counterculture
was
the culture—or the primary object of the culture’s attention, which in America is pretty much the same thing—and that is really the basis of its interest. It had all the attributes of a typical mass-culture episode: it was a lifestyle that could be practiced on weekends; it came into fashion when the media discovered it and went out of fashion when the media lost interest; and it was, from the moment it penetrated the middle class, thoroughly commercialized. Its failure to grasp this last fact about itself is the essence of its sentimentalism.
1960s, it’s a little misleading. For during those years the counterculture
was
the culture—or the primary object of the culture’s attention, which in America is pretty much the same thing—and that is really the basis of its interest. It had all the attributes of a typical mass-culture episode: it was a lifestyle that could be practiced on weekends; it came into fashion when the media discovered it and went out of fashion when the media lost interest; and it was, from the moment it penetrated the middle class, thoroughly commercialized. Its failure to grasp this last fact about itself is the essence of its sentimentalism.
The essence of its radicalism is a little more complicated. The general idea was the rejection of the norms of adult middle-class life; but the rejection was made in a profoundly middle-class spirit. Middle-class Americans are a driven, pampered, puritanical, self-indulgent group of people. Before the sixties, these contradictions were rationalized by the principle of deferred gratification: you exercised self-discipline in order to gain entrance to a profession, you showed deference to those above you on the career ladder, and material rewards followed and could be enjoyed more or less promiscuously. To many people, the counterculture alternative looked like simple hedonism: sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll (with some instant social justice on the side). But the counterculture wasn’t hedonistic; it was puritanical. It was, for that matter, virtually Hebraic: the parents were worshiping false gods, and the students who tore up (or dropped out of) the university in an apparent frenzy of self-destruction—for wasn’t the university their gateway to the good life?—were, in effect, smashing the golden calf.
There was a fair amount of flagrant sensual gratification, all of it crucial to the pop culture appeal of the whole business; but it is a mistake to characterize the pleasure-taking as amoral. It is only “fun” to stand in the rain for three days with a hundred thousand chemically demented people, listening to interminable and inescapable loud music and wondering if you’ll ever see your car again, if you also believe in some inchoate way that you are participating in the creation of the New World. The name of the new god was authenticity, and it was unmistakably the jealous type. It demanded
an existence of programmatic hostility to the ordinary modes of middle-class life, and even to the ordinary modes of consciousness—to whatever was mediated, accomodationist, materialistic, and, even trivially, false. Like most of the temporary gods of the secular society, the principle of authenticity was merely paid lip service to by most of the people who flocked to its altar; and when the sixties were over, those people went happily off to other shrines. But there were some people who took the principle to heart, who flagellated their consciences in its service, and who, even after the sixties had passed, continued to obsess about being “co-opted.”
an existence of programmatic hostility to the ordinary modes of middle-class life, and even to the ordinary modes of consciousness—to whatever was mediated, accomodationist, materialistic, and, even trivially, false. Like most of the temporary gods of the secular society, the principle of authenticity was merely paid lip service to by most of the people who flocked to its altar; and when the sixties were over, those people went happily off to other shrines. But there were some people who took the principle to heart, who flagellated their consciences in its service, and who, even after the sixties had passed, continued to obsess about being “co-opted.”
There are two places in American society where this strain of puritanism persists. One is the academy, with its fetish of the unconditioned. The other is the high end of pop music criticism—the kind of criticism that complains, for instance, about the commercialism of MTV. Since pop music is by definition commercial, it may be hard to see how pop music commercialism can ever be a problem. But for many people who take pop music seriously, it is
the
problem, and its history essentially begins with
Rolling Stone.
the
problem, and its history essentially begins with
Rolling Stone.
Rolling Stone
was born in the semi-idyllic, semi-hysterical atmosphere of northern California in the late sixties. It began in San Francisco in 1967, and was edited there for ten years before it was moved to New York. The man who founded it, and who remains its publisher today, was Jann Wenner. In many accounts of
Rolling Stone
—and notably in the excellent history of the magazine by Robert Draper—Wenner figures as both the hero and the villain of the tale, the man who seized the moment and then betrayed it. This verges on making Wenner a little more complicated than he actually is. An opportunistic, sentimental, shrewd celebrity hound, Wenner was the first person in journalism to see what people in the music business already knew, and what people in the advertising business would soon realize: that rock music had become a fixture of American middle-class life. It had created a market.
was born in the semi-idyllic, semi-hysterical atmosphere of northern California in the late sixties. It began in San Francisco in 1967, and was edited there for ten years before it was moved to New York. The man who founded it, and who remains its publisher today, was Jann Wenner. In many accounts of
Rolling Stone
—and notably in the excellent history of the magazine by Robert Draper—Wenner figures as both the hero and the villain of the tale, the man who seized the moment and then betrayed it. This verges on making Wenner a little more complicated than he actually is. An opportunistic, sentimental, shrewd celebrity hound, Wenner was the first person in journalism to see what people in the music business already knew, and what people in the advertising business would soon realize: that rock music had become a fixture of American middle-class life. It had created a market.
Wenner knew this because he himself was the prototypical fan.
He was born in 1946, in the first wave of the baby boom—his father would make a fortune selling baby formula for the children to whom the son later sold magazines—and he started
Rolling Stone
(he is supposed to have said) in order to meet John Lennon. He met Lennon; and he met and made pals with many more of his generation’s entertainment idols, who, once they had become friends, and with or without editorial justification, turned up regularly on the covers of his magazine. Wenner was not looking for celebrity himself; he was only, like most Americans, a shameless worshiper of the stars. “I always felt that Jann had a real fan’s mentality,” one of his friends and associates, William Randolph Hearst III, explained. “He wanted to hang out with Mick Jagger because Mick was cool, not because he wanted to tell people that
he
was cool as a result of knowing Mick.”
1
He was born in 1946, in the first wave of the baby boom—his father would make a fortune selling baby formula for the children to whom the son later sold magazines—and he started
Rolling Stone
(he is supposed to have said) in order to meet John Lennon. He met Lennon; and he met and made pals with many more of his generation’s entertainment idols, who, once they had become friends, and with or without editorial justification, turned up regularly on the covers of his magazine. Wenner was not looking for celebrity himself; he was only, like most Americans, a shameless worshiper of the stars. “I always felt that Jann had a real fan’s mentality,” one of his friends and associates, William Randolph Hearst III, explained. “He wanted to hang out with Mick Jagger because Mick was cool, not because he wanted to tell people that
he
was cool as a result of knowing Mick.”
1
The person who is interested in Mick mainly because he thinks that Mick is cool is the perfect person to run a magazine devoted to serious fandom. But he is a potential liability at a magazine devoted to serious criticism. Wenner was not a devotee of the authentic, not even a hypocritical one. He was a hustler; he believed in show biz, and he saw, for instance, nothing unethical about altering a review to please a record company he hoped to have as an advertiser. “We’re gonna be better than
Billboard
!” is the sort of thing he would say to encourage his staff when morale was low.
2
Morale was not thereby improved. For the people who produced Wenner’s magazine took the sixties much more seriously than Wenner did. It wasn’t merely that, like many editors, Wenner demonstrated a rude indifference to the rhythms of magazine production, commissioning new covers at the last minute and that sort of thing. It was that he didn’t seem to grasp the world-historical significance of the movement that his magazine was spearheading. “Here we were,” Jon Carroll, a former staffer, said, “believing we were involved in the greatest cultural revolution since the sack of Rome. And he was running around with starlets. We thought that Jann was the most trivial sort of fool.”
3
Billboard
!” is the sort of thing he would say to encourage his staff when morale was low.
2
Morale was not thereby improved. For the people who produced Wenner’s magazine took the sixties much more seriously than Wenner did. It wasn’t merely that, like many editors, Wenner demonstrated a rude indifference to the rhythms of magazine production, commissioning new covers at the last minute and that sort of thing. It was that he didn’t seem to grasp the world-historical significance of the movement that his magazine was spearheading. “Here we were,” Jon Carroll, a former staffer, said, “believing we were involved in the greatest cultural revolution since the sack of Rome. And he was running around with starlets. We thought that Jann was the most trivial sort of fool.”
3
Draper’s view, in his book on the magazine, is an only slightly less inflated version of Carroll’s view. “Quite correctly,” he writes of
the early years, “the employees of
Rolling Stone
magazine saw themselves as leaders and tastemakers—the best minds of their generation.”
4
Rolling Stone
covered the whole of the youth culture, though it generally steered clear, at Wenner’s insistence, of radical politics. (“Get back,” Wenner pleaded with his editors in 1970, after the shootings at Kent State inspired them to try to “detrivialize” the magazine, “get back to where we once belonged.”)
5
But the backbone of the magazine always was its music criticism, and its special achievement was that it provided an arena for the development of the lyrical, pedantic, and hyperbolic writing about popular music that is part of the sixties’ literary legacy.
Rolling Stone
wasn’t the only place where this style of criticism flourished, but it was the biggest.
Rolling Stone
institutionalized the genre.
the early years, “the employees of
Rolling Stone
magazine saw themselves as leaders and tastemakers—the best minds of their generation.”
4
Rolling Stone
covered the whole of the youth culture, though it generally steered clear, at Wenner’s insistence, of radical politics. (“Get back,” Wenner pleaded with his editors in 1970, after the shootings at Kent State inspired them to try to “detrivialize” the magazine, “get back to where we once belonged.”)
5
But the backbone of the magazine always was its music criticism, and its special achievement was that it provided an arena for the development of the lyrical, pedantic, and hyperbolic writing about popular music that is part of the sixties’ literary legacy.
Rolling Stone
wasn’t the only place where this style of criticism flourished, but it was the biggest.
Rolling Stone
institutionalized the genre.
This is what Draper responds to in the magazine, and where his sympathies as a historian lie. His principal sources are from the editorial side of the magazine, because that is his principal interest. He writes at some length about the editorial staff’s travails, but he gives a perfunctory account, as though he found it too distasteful to investigate, of, for example, the business staff’s “Marketing through Music” campaign—a newsletter for “Marketing, Advertising, and Music Executives,” circulated in the mid-eighties, that encouraged corporate sponsorship of rock concerts and the use of rock stars and rock songs in advertising. The business deals are mentioned in his book, but they are generally treated from the outside, and always as inimical to the true spirit of the magazine. From the point of view of social history, though, “Marketing through Music” is the interesting part of the story. For rock music, like every other mass-market commodity, is about making money. Everyone who writes about popular music knows that before Sam Phillips, the proprietor of Sun Records, recorded Elvis Presley in 1954, he used to go around saying, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound, I could make a million dollars.”
6
But Elvis himself is somehow imagined to have had little to do with this sort of gross commercial calculation, and when Albert Goldman’s biography of Elvis appeared in 1981 and described Presley as a musically incurious and manipulative pop star, the rock critical establishment descended on Goldman in wrath.
6
But Elvis himself is somehow imagined to have had little to do with this sort of gross commercial calculation, and when Albert Goldman’s biography of Elvis appeared in 1981 and described Presley as a musically incurious and manipulative pop star, the rock critical establishment descended on Goldman in wrath.
All rock stars want to make money, for the same reasons everyone
else in a liberal society wants to make money: more toys and more autonomy. Bill Wyman, when he went off to become the Rolling Stones’ bass player, told his mother that he’d only have to wear his hair long for a few years, and he’d get a nice house and a car out of it at the end.
7
Even the Doors, quintessential late-sixties performers who thought they were making an Important Musical Statement, began when Jim Morrison ran into Ray Manzarek, who became the group’s keyboard player, and recited some poetry he’d written. “I said that’s it,” Manzarek later explained. “It seemed as though, if we got a group together, we could make a million dollars.”
8
Ray, meet Sam.
else in a liberal society wants to make money: more toys and more autonomy. Bill Wyman, when he went off to become the Rolling Stones’ bass player, told his mother that he’d only have to wear his hair long for a few years, and he’d get a nice house and a car out of it at the end.
7
Even the Doors, quintessential late-sixties performers who thought they were making an Important Musical Statement, began when Jim Morrison ran into Ray Manzarek, who became the group’s keyboard player, and recited some poetry he’d written. “I said that’s it,” Manzarek later explained. “It seemed as though, if we got a group together, we could make a million dollars.”
8
Ray, meet Sam.
Pop stars aren’t simply selling a sound; they’re selling an image, and one reason the stars of the sixties made such an effective appeal to middle-class taste is that their images went, so to speak, all the way through. Their stage personalities were understood to be continuous with their offstage personalities—an impression enhanced by the fact that, in a departure from Tin Pan Alley tradition, most sixties performers wrote their own material. But the images, too, were carefully managed. The Beatles, for example, were the children of working-class families: they were what the average suburban teenager would consider tough characters. Their breakthrough into mainstream popular music came when their manager, Brian Epstein, transformed them into four cheeky but lovable lads, an image that delighted the suburban middle class. The Rolling Stones, apart from Wyman, were much more middle-class. Mick Jagger attended (on scholarship) the London School of Economics; his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, herself a pop performer, was the daughter of a professor of Renaissance literature. Brian Jones’s father was an aeronautical engineer, and Jones, who founded the band, had what was virtually an intellectual’s interest in music. He wrote articles for
Jazz News
, for instance, something one cannot imagine a Beatle doing. But when it became the Stones’ turn to enter the mainstream, the lovable image was already being used in a way that looked unbeatable. So (as Wyman quite matter-of-factly describes it in his memoir,
Stone Alone
)
their
manager, Andrew Oldham, cast them as rude boys, which delighted middle-class teenagers in a different and even more thrilling way.
Jazz News
, for instance, something one cannot imagine a Beatle doing. But when it became the Stones’ turn to enter the mainstream, the lovable image was already being used in a way that looked unbeatable. So (as Wyman quite matter-of-factly describes it in his memoir,
Stone Alone
)
their
manager, Andrew Oldham, cast them as rude boys, which delighted middle-class teenagers in a different and even more thrilling way.
These images enjoyed long-term success in part because they suited the performers’ natural talents and temperaments. But it is pointless to think of scrutinizing them by the lights of authenticity. One reason popular culture gives pleasure is that it relieves people of this whole anxiety of trying to determine whether what they’re enjoying is real or fake. Mediation is the sine qua non of the experience. Authenticity is a high-culture problem. Unless, of course, you’re trying to run a cultural revolution. In which case you will need to think that there is some essential relation between the unadulterated spirit of rock ‘n’ roll and personal and social liberation. “The magic’s in the music,” the Lovin’ Spoonful used to sing. “Believe in the magic, it will set you free.” The Lovin’ Spoonful was an unpretentious teenybopper band if there ever was one; but those lyrics turn up frequently in Draper’s book. For they (or some intellectually enriched version of them) constitute the credo of the higher rock criticism.
The central difficulty faced by the serious pop exegete is to explain how it is that a band with a manager and a promoter and sales of millions of records that plays “Satisfaction” is less calculating than a band with a manager and a promoter and sales of millions of records that plays “Itchycoo Park” (assuming, perhaps too hastily, that a case cannot be made for “Itchycoo Park”). Theorizing about the difference can produce nonsense of an unusual transparency. “Rock is a mass-produced music that carries a critique of its own means of production,” the British pop-music sociologist Simon Frith has explained; “it is a mass-consumed music that constructs its own ‘authentic’ audience.”
9
To which all one can say is that when you have to put the word
authenticity
in quotation marks, you’re in trouble.
9
To which all one can say is that when you have to put the word
authenticity
in quotation marks, you’re in trouble.
The problem is more simply solved by reference to a pop music genealogy that was invented in the late 1960s and that has been embraced by nearly everyone in the business ever since—by the musicians, by the industry, and by the press. This is the notion that genuine rock ’n’ roll is the direct descendant of the blues, a music whose authenticity it would be a sacrilege to question. The historical scheme according to which the blues begat rhythm and blues,
which begat rockabilly, which begat Elvis, who (big evolutionary leap here) gave us the Beatles, was canonized by
Rolling Stone
. It is the basis for
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ’n’ Roll
(1976), edited by Jim Miller, which is one of the best collections of classic rock criticism; and it’s the basis for
Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock ’n’ Roll
(1986), by Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, which reads a little bit like the kind of thing you would get if you put three men in a room with some typewriters and a stack of paper and told them that they couldn’t come out until they had written
The Rolling Stone History of Rock ’n’Roll.
which begat rockabilly, which begat Elvis, who (big evolutionary leap here) gave us the Beatles, was canonized by
Rolling Stone
. It is the basis for
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ’n’ Roll
(1976), edited by Jim Miller, which is one of the best collections of classic rock criticism; and it’s the basis for
Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock ’n’ Roll
(1986), by Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, which reads a little bit like the kind of thing you would get if you put three men in a room with some typewriters and a stack of paper and told them that they couldn’t come out until they had written
The Rolling Stone History of Rock ’n’Roll.
All genealogies are suspect, since they have an inherent bias against contingency, and genealogies to which critics and their subjects subscribe with equal enthusiasm are doubly suspect. The idea that rock ‘n’ roll is simply a style of popular music, and that there was popular music before rock’n’ roll (and not produced by black men) that might have some relation to, say, “Yesterday” or “Wild Horses” or “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”—songs that do not exactly call Chuck Berry to mind, let alone Muddy Waters—is largely unknown to rock criticism. The reason that the link between Elvis Presley and the Beatles feels strained is that we are really talking about the difference between party music for teenagers and pop anthems for the middle class—between music to jump up and down to and music with a bit of a brow. Even the music to jump up and down to is a long way from the blues: adolescents from Great Neck did not go into hysterics in the presence of Blind Lemon Jefferson. An entertainment phenomenon like Mick Jagger, with his mysteriously acquired Cockney-boy-from-Memphis accent, surely has as much relation to a white teen idol like the young Frank Sinatra as he does to a black bluesman like Robert Johnson. Except that Robert Johnson is the real thing. Of course some of the music of Jagger and Richards and Lennon and McCartney appropriated the sound of American black rhythm and blues: that’s precisely the least authentic thing about it.
This is not to say that rock ‘n’ roll (or the music of the young Frank Sinatra, for that matter) doesn’t come from real feeling and doesn’t touch real feeling. And it’s not to say that there aren’t legitimate
distinctions to be made among degrees of fakery in popular music. When one is discussing Percy Faith’s 1975 disco version of “Hava Nagilah,” it is appropriate to use the term “inauthentic.” But the wider the appeal a popular song has, the more zealously it resists the terms of art. The most affecting song of the 1960s was (let’s say) the version of “With a Little Help from My Friends” that Joe Cocker sang at Woodstock on August 17, 1969—an imitation British music-hall number performed in upstate New York by a white man from Sheffield trying to sound like Ray Charles. On that day, probably nothing could have sounded more genuine.
distinctions to be made among degrees of fakery in popular music. When one is discussing Percy Faith’s 1975 disco version of “Hava Nagilah,” it is appropriate to use the term “inauthentic.” But the wider the appeal a popular song has, the more zealously it resists the terms of art. The most affecting song of the 1960s was (let’s say) the version of “With a Little Help from My Friends” that Joe Cocker sang at Woodstock on August 17, 1969—an imitation British music-hall number performed in upstate New York by a white man from Sheffield trying to sound like Ray Charles. On that day, probably nothing could have sounded more genuine.
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