History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (19 page)

It was an epochal hit. Like Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” six years later, officially it reached no higher than
number 2, but in fact it was, in its moment, the only song anyone really heard, number 1 in the form of an idea that outweighed any facts. The music was new. It was bigger than life, it could feel, but then, as the record grew in strength every time it was played, bigger than that: as big as life.

Like Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” in 1956, the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” in 1958, or Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, it made everything else on the radio seem beside the point. Elsbery Hobbs curled his bass voice around the opening doo-wop phonemes—

Bomp baa

—which as Dock Green, Charlie Thomas, and Johnny Lee Williams came in, their last two syllables falling away from the four that preceded them like bodies thrown overboard—

Do-doot

Do do

Do do

—rose up to take the shape of something more dramatic than such sounds had ever described before, raising the curtain for King’s heroic lead. “There goes my baby, moving on, down the line”—an image opened up, of men and women shuffling out of the light and into obscurity, the singer seeing
his whole life, past, present, and future, fading before his eyes, following the shadow of the woman walking away from him until, finally, he saw himself in that same line, and heard someone else singing the song about him, heard someone forgetting his face, forgetting his name.

It set the commercial template: now Drifters records had strings. The weak “Dance with Me”—weak as an idea, tame as a sound—followed, stopping at number 15. A year would go by until Pomus and Shuman’s “Save the Last Dance for Me” reached number 1. But in between they brought in “This Magic Moment.” Though it would chart one place lower than “Dance with Me,” it would speak the new language the songs were making more clearly and more fully than any other record.

King doesn’t stride into the song. From his first word he is present at its center. It could be a common dream in which he has found himself exposed and must account for himself. The voice he’s speaking in could have come from Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, King’s own memories, the hopes of an entire people, God, or the look that Tom Dowd, the engineer on the session, was throwing his way. Regardless of who writes it, no successful song is a memoir, a news story, and no such song does exactly what its author—and that can be the writer, the singer, the accompanist, the producer— wants it to do. One must draw on whatever new social energies and new ideas are in the air—energies and ideas that
are sparking the artist, with or without his or her knowledge, with or without his or her consent, to make greater demands on life than he or she has ever made before.

That is true for the songwriter; it’s true for the singer. The song, as Louise Brooks liked to quote “an old dictionary” on the novel, “is a subjective epic composition in which the author begs leave to treat the world according to his point of view,” but the song, as it takes shape, makes certain things rhythmically true and others false, makes certain phrases believable and others phony—and someone speaking to the world by himself or herself is never solely that. Other voices, those of one’s family and musical ancestors, other singers competing on the charts, movie characters, poets, historical figures, present-day political actors, are part of the cast any good song calls up, and calls upon.

“I wrote ‘Gimme Shelter’ on a stormy day,” Keith Richards wrote in 2010. “I was sitting there,” he said, speaking of the Swinging London scenemaker Robert Fraser, “just looking out of Robert’s window and looking at all these people with their umbrellas being blown out of their grasp and running like hell. It was a shitty day. I had nothing better to do . . . I wasn’t thinking about, oh my God, there’s my old lady shooting a movie in a bath with Mick Jagger. My thought was storms on other people’s minds, not mine.” But it was 1968, when, while recording “Sympathy for the Devil,” the Rolling Stones had to change “Who killed Kennedy” to
“Who killed the Kennedys.” It was a year when Richards’s picture of umbrellas being blown out of people’s hands could serve as a metaphor for the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, on a deeper level against life as it was then lived and administered, spread from the U.S. to the U.K. In France and Czechoslovakia, governments, the very legitimacy of state power, shook, and many were sure they were only days from toppling. All of that is in “Gimme Shelter”—as it was made, and as it was heard. What has kept it on the radio for more than forty-five years is its music, and the unsatisfied history it carries with it. Who’s to say Ben E. King didn’t name himself after Martin Luther King? Not Ben E. King (
I had an uncle everyone called “King”—it sounded cool
). D. H. Lawrence’s “Never trust the teller. Trust the tale” is always right.

Are you sure?
says the look from Tom Dowd to Ben E. King. He is barely twenty-one, but he has to be sure. In the studio there may be as many takes as they need to get it right, but in the real life of the song this is the only chance to say it all, to say what’s never been said, for the singer to position himself against the cheat of life and win. He sounds as if he’s giving a speech. There’s a certain stiffness, a stentorian hesitation before each phrase, something built into the stop-time Brazilian baion rhythm as it’s lined out by almost subliminal acoustic guitars and bass fiddle, that gives the whole performance a humanness, a sense of contingency, a
smell of fear underlying the bravery that shoots out of every word King shapes in his mouth: “different,” “new,” “until,” “and then it happened.” The performance is a dare, made as much of nerves as heart. The singer could be running for office, fully conscious of how young he is, aware that people won’t take him seriously, that he will have to make them believe what their faces tell him they will never believe, but absolutely convinced of his right, duty, and ability to serve.

He is not singing his life—not like someone in that very moment offering a short story in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He is not necessarily singing what he knows. For that matter, there is no reason to think Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman were writing their lives or their experiences or even their desires and fears. They are professional songwriters trying to get another record made, to write another hit in the mold of previous Drifters hits. They are plugging into an established format of romantic ballads. But at the same time, both they and the Drifters, and especially Ben E. King, writers and singers with an inherited repertoire of gestures and vocal signifiers, are entering a constructed, fictional situation where they have to feel their way as if in the dark.

Here, in this new country, each word, each note, will suggest what might come next, what should, what could. The risks of failure in each choice increase from might to should to could—what could you say, what could you feel, what
sense of life could you pass on to others, what could you do that hasn’t been done before? To essay this, the writers and actors in this drama do have to draw on their experiences, their desires, their fears—consciously, subconsciously, cynically, with a sense of awe at what is coming out of their mouths as the songwriters sit at the piano in their Brill Building cubicle and Ben E. King stands isolated in the Atlantic studio, each one discovering both the song and himself, his own limits and his will, and his ability, to transcend them. “Along with a strong ethic in the power of individual performance,” the critic and guitarist Lenny Kaye wrote in 2001, “came Atlantic’s belief in the power of the musician’s instinct, always pushing the tape level to catch the wobble behind the note, the string moving just that extra millimeter higher, the rhythm in sharp focus even as you can hear a musical mind setting up the next phrase of the chords. The needs of the song were always held paramount, and the catchy three or four note melodies and backbeat then parted to make way for the singer: always the singer.”

As the song opens, it’s cotton candy—and then for all the gravity King brings to the performance as soon as he opens his mouth, it could be Lincoln trying to explain justice to a crowd, whether it’s a few layabouts in New Salem, Illinois, in 1832, or the African-American Union soldiers in the front rows for his second inaugural in Washington, D.C., thirty-three years later. There’s a rush of high, keening violins, the
strings running away from each other until they’re cut off just like that. “This magic moment,” King announces, each word bigger, more fully shaped and with more body, than the one before it. He doesn’t need more words; he could chant those words all the way through the song. The strings reemerge, but the guitars and bass carry more of the music, tracing a melody and a syncopated rhythm that go straight back to Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This,” number 1 for six weeks over the end of 1955 and the beginning of 1956.

It’s a piece of music so delicate and strong that in the 1990s Nan Goldin could use it to validate the closing montage of
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,
her slide-show portrait, taking shape from the late 1970s into the 1990s, of a family of friends “only satisfied by love, heroin, or chocolate”: an old man in a coffin, a blonde woman you’ve seen before passing in front of it, then the woman in her own coffin, no direct references to AIDS or an overdose, but any of that subsumed in the visual rhythm of connection, isolation, and memory. So there is a heart-shaped frame holding the portrait of a couple, a framed picture of hearts and before it a vase of flowers and a medicine bottle, an empty bed with tangled sheets, a bedroom wall splattered with blood, and then tombstones, a whole forest of mausoleums, and, as the very last image, a crude painting on the door of a shed of two skeletons making love standing up. Over it all hovers
the lightness and the strength of Dean Martin’s song, the chorus murmuring, Martin finding soul in the slide of the verses, the music endowing everyone you’ve seen with dignity.

That lightness, that strength, hovering over anyone’s everyday life like a cloud, is what Ben E. King is reaching for. That’s what he finds and what, as his song reaches its end, he never surrenders. The other Drifters are barely there at all, merely another element in the sound. Even when, after the instrumental break, the rhythm the strings are making cuts back against itself, against the singer, forcing him to make his words swim upstream against the melody, King betrays no doubt. The delicacy in the way he handles Pomus and Shuman’s shopworn “sweeter than wine” is confirmed with the awe he gives their startling “Everything I want I have.” The force King puts into the line is so great that there is no chance that what he wants, what he has, will itself ever grow shopworn—this is a moment, not a life, a moment rescued from life, the moment you return to when life itself turns the truth of the feeling with which King endows the words into the lie the words contain. But you don’t have to hear any of that.

In
AKA Doc Pomus,
a documentary film from 2012, you see a hand go to a car radio dial. The critic Dave Marsh is talking: “You’ve got a radio on, right? And what’s coming across, most of the time, frankly, is static and nothing. And
then, this
thing
—and that’s the Drifters.” On the soundtrack, “This Magic Moment” begins to play. There’s a close-up of the Atlantic label with the song title and the writers’ names as Marsh goes on: “And that’s Doc Pomus, that’s Mort Shuman, and it’s Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun, and Tom Dowd, and all the people who recorded it, and then ultimately, that’s you and me.”

What it is, coming out of and entering into all of those people in a swirl of transubstantiation, is soul music, here taking a shape so stark that it makes the style, in the deepest sense of the word, turn around the record as if that seven-inch disc were the sun, with the first, struggling attempts in the 1950s to discover the music—Ray Charles’s “What Would I Do Without You,” the Chantels’ “If You Try,” the Five Keys’ “Dream On”—and the deep-soul records of the mid-’60s that can seem to take the style, now a form, as far as it could go—Irma Thomas’s “Wish Someone Would Care,” Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” and Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” Lonnie Mack’s “Why,” most of all Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna come”—the planets that circle it. And because soul music is the limitless affirmation of the individual despite his or her past sins and all obstacles in his or her way, an affirmation that remains even in the moment before suicide, as it can seem to be in “Wish Someone Would Care” and “Why,” each of these
records can, in the moment in which you hear them, be the sun, and all the rest, “This Magic Moment” spinning with them, again mere planets, maybe even, someday, should they ever fade, and their lies speak more loudly than whatever truths they tell, written out of the book and taken down from the sky, like Pluto—except that once a song has gone into the ether, it never disappears.

Guitar Drag

2006 • 2000

It’s 2013, maybe 2014. You walk into one of the vinyl shops that are beginning to dot cheaper commercial neighborhoods—the Lower East Side in New York, Skid Row in Seattle, West Hollywood, maybe Stranded on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. In a used bin you find a twelve-inch disc with a blurry photo on the cover. You can see rope and some kind of machinery. You turn the sleeve over and on the back there’s a distorted but decodable picture: what seems to be an electric guitar with two leads attached, one taut, one loose, on a brown surface that might be a road. There are no words or even lettering on either side; the spine reads “Christian Marclay Guitar Drag Neon Records.” You pay $7.95—“It’s pristine,” says the guy at the counter—take it home, slit the shrink wrap, take out the record, put it on your turntable, info label side up: “Soundtrack from the video Guitar Drag, 2000. Recorded San Antonio, Texas, on November 18th, 1999. Released by Neon Records, Sweden 2006.” You cue it up and the tone arm slides right to the label. You adjust the weight and try again, with the same result: there are no grooves on the record. You turn it over, where the label again shows the blurry photo—now you can see the six tuning pegs of a guitar, a rope around the top of the neck, and a dirt road. 33 RPM, it says. Now it plays.