History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (17 page)

The melody hidden in the cracks of the song, tiny guitar rhythms pulling against the theme repeated by the organ, made the words sail through the story like bullets, one following the other with the inevitability of time passing. Gray’s voice started out strained, at the end he bellowed, but there was no melodrama. It didn’t feel like a play. It was all artless, and covered with death. As the song careened toward the end—no comforting fade, but a clumsy, stuttering
halt—you imagined what the man singing would do next: kill himself, or kill his mother, his father, and anyone else he could find. In some moods, listening, you can take the singer’s rage for your own; in others, the music is lumbering, and the singer just another complainer, someone who never gets a break, someone who can tell you why it’s never his fault, and you know too many people like that, and you might not want him around.

When Cyndi Lauper took the song up in 1983—during the sessions for
She’s So Unusual,
her first album under her own name, an album that would produce five top five singles and make her a star—Ronald Reagan was in his third year of a presidency that had marshaled all the powers of his office to divide the country into winners and losers, and what Lauper heard in the song was not, you could think, what Tom Gray had ever imagined anyone might hear.

On the cover of her album, Lauper was posed on a New York street in front of signs reading
THE WAX MUSEE
, barefoot in a party dress, looking as if she were about to fall down; on the back of the sleeve she flew into the air,
Starry Night
reflected on the soles of her shoes as she rose into the sky. The pictures captured her life well enough. She was born in Queens in 1953. She left home at seventeen to escape a predatory stepfather, and knocked around New York and New England for the next twelve years, working dead-end jobs, eating badly and sometimes not at all, singing when
she could, joining or forming bands, even putting out an album with one of them, leaving two rapes behind her, one by her own bandmates. In the studio, signed to Portrait, a small Columbia label, working with staff producer Rick Chertoff, she was looking for material: the company didn’t trust her songwriting. She was almost thirty; she was no kid. She had never learned to keep her mouth shut, and with a first chance to say who she was and why anyone should care, it was the last thing she wanted to do. “Rick would play me ‘Money Changes Everything’ in the style of a Bob Dylan song,” she wrote in 2012, “and I’d say, ‘Can’t we just start it off differently? Make believe you’re playing ‘London Calling.’” To her it was a Clash song, but no one else could hear what she heard. “I found myself trying to close my eyes and forget who I was,” she wrote, “and try to find the spirit of the story—but there they were, watching me.”

The song opens like a fire burning its way through a building, room by room as blowback shoots a woman and a man into the street. With the flames behind them—with Tom Gray’s fanfare still holding the music in place, but with the there-is-nothing-new-under-the-sun bass line from Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” at the heart of the sound—Lauper turns the song inside out.

I said I’m sorry baby, I’m leaving you tonight

Anybody else would have simply reversed the pronouns and made the victim female; Lauper sang not as a victim but as an avenger. As cold as Gray imagined the woman in his song, she is colder; the Queens so-what that makes her
yeah

I said yeah well I know

snap in the air like fingers can stick in your mind like a curse you half remember, as if somewhere, sometime, someone said something in exactly that tone to you, and you’re only now hearing it for what it was.

From a man’s lament the song turns into a woman’s manifesto. Glee drives the sound—
fuck you, loser
—and as the song goes on that
yeah
stays in the mind, changing shape, now not merely the coldest word in all of rock ’n’ roll, but something worse, the sound of not caring. And then the word changes again, and it’s worse than that, the sound of someone saying, I don’t care, and I never did. The song echoes back through the century, maybe to its source: “Just tell him the truth—that you never loved him—and it’s all wiped out forever,” Gatsby says to Daisy, and what if she did? She could turn around and say the same about him to someone else, and she would, and he’d know it, and he’d lie awake thinking about it, living it out in advance, as
long as she lay next to him. The song echoes back not to a source but to an American familiar always present whatever its form, here to Barbara Stanwyck in
Baby Face,
twenty-six as she walks in front of the cameras in 1933, her character maybe twenty as she appears on the screen. Pimped out by her father from the time she was fourteen, to escape Erie, Pennsylvania, where even with her father dead every mill worker knows her as a two-dollar whore, with the woman she’s running with casting a cool eye on her she seduces a guard in a boxcar, then makes it to New York and sleeps her way to the top in a single shot that begins at the ground floor of an office building and slowly rises to the roof. There may be self-hatred in Lauper’s voice, as there may be in Stanwyck’s face, but there’s more pride in both, and in the song as Lauper sings it even self-hatred, for the man a reason to crawl into bed and pull the sheets over his head, is one more engine: the sound is glamorous, not beaten.

At the end, bearing down on the chorus again and again, she begins to hold words. It seems like a device, something to dramatize passion, to fake it, and then the device explodes itself. With an intensity so great it is barely human, she holds the word
money
over the song for what feels like an impossible eleven seconds, the tone inside the word shifting, questioning itself, answering itself, deciding, and as the word does not fade but crashes down recommitting itself to the story the word is telling, the story of how, that night
on the porch, the song became the singer’s own declaration of independence, and she left everyone else, her one-time husband or lover and for that matter part of herself, the little girl who believed life could be any different, behind. A year later, with an adoring crowd at her feet, her eye makeup so smeared it looked as if she’d been beaten up, her hair flying, for “Money Changes Everything” she kicked a garbage can around the stage, and finally, still singing, she climbed into it. A hoist lifted her over the audience. Was she saying that Gray was right, that to take the role in the song that she did, trashing all values for the dollar, she had turned herself into garbage? It didn’t matter if she was saying that or not. Flying over the crowd, she was still above it.

As the Beatles went beyond Barrett Strong, Cyndi Lauper went beyond the Brains. Listening to what she did with “Money Changes Everything,” it’s clear she owns the song, for good. She lives in its house. She might as well have her name on the deed.

Tom Gray didn’t hear the story that way. As the years went on, Lauper’s career faded. All too many people made her out as a brain to Madonna’s bimbo, and, the right magazines said, “a real feminist”—after all, while Madonna was vamping around like a streetwalker, Lauper got “She Bop,” a song about female masturbation, into the top ten. But by the time of “Like a Prayer,” six years later, Madonna was breaking taboos as if she were following a script by Camille
Paglia and Cyndi Lauper was a face in the crowd. In 2003, Gray had formed a blues band called Delta Moon; by 2007, for the album
Clear Blue Flame,
the group was down to a core of the guitarist Mark Johnson and Gray playing guitar, dulcimer, and lap steel guitar, and Gray took up “Money Changes Everything” again. He looked like the Virginia banjoist Dock Boggs, less as he arrived in New York in 1927 to record Gothic blues and folk ballads than as he appeared forty years later, after the folklorist Mike Seeger found him living as a retired coal miner in the Appalachian mountains at the western tip of Virginia, and gave him a second public life at folk festivals from Newport to Berkeley. As Gray and Johnson recorded it, “Money Changes Everything” dried up quickly—but that same year, Gray appeared onstage in Atlanta, at a place called Club 29, to sing the song with the Atlanta punk band the Swimming Pool Q’s, and he began to take it back.

It was an inflamed performance. If to festival audiences in the 1960s, an older, genial Dock Boggs didn’t seem half as scary as he was, this night Gray was scary enough. He was thick in the face and around the waist, but in a way that signified resistance, not surrender. With the band to one side, he stood at the organ, playing with one hand, turning toward the crowd, his long gray shirt mottled with ugly sweat stains, his hair gray, looking as if he were fighting a war that should have killed him long before. Over a broken
beat, he didn’t so much sing the song as act it out, floridly, with stiff, clumsy gestures signaling an idea, a value, a violation, and it was, like Boggs’s churning “Country Blues” or the demonic “Sugar Baby,” a performance of guilt and death. Again, melodies crept out of the rhythm, gathering at the feet of the simple up-and-down fanfare Gray played on the organ, whispering, screeching, asking for more. The riff went right to the heart, and as the band bashes away there are moments when the music seems to pause and you hear a single musician, the guitarist, the drummer, emerge from the noise to say, yes, I hear this, I’ve lived this, I’ve died from this. Gray’s singing is flat, there is no range, his voice is torn, he cannot lift his voice, and the melody and cadence he wrote into the song—now, its shudder—are so strong they carry him through it like wind. And a year later, in 2008, he was ready to do something he hadn’t done before: to let the song speak through him, to listen to it as he sings, to let the song sing itself, with its writer its finder, its singer only a medium for any of the many things that, on any given night, the song might choose to say, with each note, each word, telling the next what to do, and why.

Delta Moon is playing the Melting Point in Athens, Georgia. For “Money Changes Everything,” with Mark Johnson on electric guitar, Frahner Joseph playing bass, and Marlon Patton drums, Gray is holding an Appalachian dulcimer, standing up, bending his head toward his instrument.
in 1927, the Brunswick label marketed Dock Boggs’s records as Old-Timey; that’s the sound that Gray, with a rolling, lyrical ensemble around him, has in his grasp now. The modal notes of a mountain ballad, “Little Maggie” or “East Virginia,” emerge from the dulcimer, and the song starts up. The voice is as rough as it ever was, but you haven’t seen this person before. He no longer looks like the middle-aged pharmacist on the back of last year’s Delta Moon album. He’s thin, and dressed the way the song now sounds, austere, spare, insistent, dignified, with a good haircut, a good-looking sports jacket, a good pair of trousers, a lawyer who’s taken his tie off after work.

The notes coming out of the dulcimer are bright, high, and pretty, and all the more awful for that. The sound of the band is full, but the song as Gray shapes it gets smaller, quieter, and more hopeless than it ever seemed before, and Gray disappears into it, as angry as he ever was, or even angrier, because he knows what his anger will get him: nothing, other than another chance to sing the song. There was shell-shock on Gray’s face when he began and acceptance when he finished; when he said thank you at the end it felt like he’d just confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.

Two years later, it would be an act: Delta Moon as a three-piece, Johnson playing an acoustic guitar, Joseph a bass fiddle, Gray sitting down with a lap guitar on his knees, the three of them posing on a house porch, in the country, all
but chewing on hayseed, playing “Money Changes Everything” old-timey style, not as sound but as a concept, and the song is dead. The song holds still for no one’s museum. But Lauper had already claimed the territory.

In 2005, looking for a hook, an angle, a way back, late for the train of MTV’s 1990s Unplugged shows, she redid her old songs for an album called
The Body Acoustic.
In the video she directed for “Money Changes Everything,” six or seven musicians stand or sit on the steps of an old apartment house, with Lauper at the bottom, strumming a dulcimer, a harmonium in the hands of the man next to her, others with guitars, tambourine, dancing, clapping hands, your eye drawn most of all to the fiddler at the top, one Allison Cornell. She kicks off the music, which is immediately seized by a bass drum sound so big the hidden instrument might as well be the building itself, and then the steps are filled, the crowd more than doubled, until it looks and feels like the whole town is there to sing this old-timey song. Lauper rags the tune, letting her voice fall behind the beat—it’s a singalong, good-time music, how can a feeling so right leave anyone without a smile? And then Cornell, her head shaved to a burr, a knowing look on her face, swoops into a solo, and the song is startled into a different life.

Now the only language it speaks is the language of mourning, pain, desperation, and defeat. It’s all in the tone, and the tone is there from the first note: you’re no longer
in the Virginia mountains, you’re in a cabaret in Central Europe, Café America, sometime in the thirties, maybe Munich, maybe Budapest, maybe Prague, and with you in the crowd are Weill and Brecht, Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla, Eric Ambler’s Soviet spies Tamara and Andreas Zaleshoff and Philip Kerr’s Berlin cop Bernie Gunther, all contemplating the compromises they’ve already made, figuring their chances of coming out on the other side of the next war, Cornell’s sound as serious as night, and when the song comes back to Lauper it has changed. There’s still comfort, even joy, in the way the melody sways in the trees, in the heart everyone puts into the music, but the old folk wisdom the tune is carrying is all shadows and hideouts. This is life, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Life, as Fitzgerald said in a line he didn’t give to Gatsby, is essentially a cheat, but we’re together, and no matter what the words we’re singing say, the rhythm comes first. The story we’re telling is about imprisonment, but the music we’re making is about freedom, the tiny moments of freedom you steal from a life you don’t own, that doesn’t belong to you, that you have to live.