History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (2 page)

Born in 1944, Allen Ruppersberg is by nature a collector, or a canvasser, someone who maps a territory by picking his way through it like a magpie. Possessed by the sense that “in some cases, if you live long enough, you begin to see the endings of the things in which you saw the beginnings,” he left the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, starting with the discovery of a one-dollar ten-inch Little Richard 78, circled through his native Ohio in a pursuit of the origins of the music, in thrift shops, church sales, library sell-offs, estate sales, and eviction auctions, ultimately amassing, along with boxes of sheet music, music magazines, music-themed family photographs, and fan club photos, more than four thousand 78s and 45s, beginning with so-called coon songs and minstrelsy, then moving through the musical country first mapped by Harry Smith’s 1952 eighty-four-song anthology of 1920s and ’30s 78s he originally gave the plain, definitive
title
American Folk Music,
through country, blues, gospel, and finally rock ’n’ roll as it announced and defined itself and, to Ruppersberg, reached its end, from Vess L. Ossman’s 1906 “Darkies’ Awakening” to Al Green’s 1975 “could I Be the One?” “Listening to these records,” he wrote, “the history that seemed so familiar in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame became again unfamiliar and a much richer and more original understanding was made possible.”

A key to a richer and more original understanding—or a different story from the one any conventional, chronological, heroic history of rock ’n’ roll seems to tell, from Nik Cohn’s
Pop from the Beginning
in 1969 to
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll
in 1976 and on down through countless books since then, the most notable likely Cohn’s
Rock Dreams
collaboration with the artist Guy Peellaert in 1982—might be to feel one’s way through the music as a field of expression, and as a web of affinities. Going back to the Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon to Know” in 1948 and forward to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” sixty-one years later and on from there to the present day, rock ’n’ roll may be more than anything a continuum of associations, a drama of direct and spectral connections between songs and performers. It may be a story about the way a song will continue speaking in a radically different setting than the one that, it may have seemed, gave rise to it, a story in which someone may own the copyright but the voice of the song is under no one’s
control. Rock ’n’ roll may be most of all a language that, it declares, can say anything: divine all truths, reveal all mysteries, and escape all restrictions. That was true from the first—which is to say that on the terms rock ’n’ roll has set for itself, positing a free-floating Möbius strip of signs, the present day may be an illusion.

As a seemingly newly discovered form of speech, rock ’n’ roll proclaimed its novelty in the way in which it became instantly self-referential, a world that, even as it was being built, was complete in itself, a Tower of Babel where whatever was said, however unlikely, no matter how close it was to speaking in tongues, regardless of whether it was babble and meant to be, was instantly understood. “Yahweh came down to watch the city and tower the sons of man were bound to build. ‘They are one people, with the same tongue,’ said Yahweh. ‘They conceive this between them, and it leads up until no boundary exists to what they will touch. Between us, let’s descend, baffle their tongue until each is scatterbrain to his friend.’” It didn’t work, even if Debbie Reynolds’s “Tammy,” a treacly movie hit so inescapable in 1958 it swallowed everything else on the radio, made it seem as if rock ’n’ roll was a trick its fans had played on themselves, made it seem as if it had never existed at all. That’s why the only history of rock ’n’ roll that works the way the music talks is Colin B. Morton and Chuck Death’s 1980s–1990s comic strip
Great Pop Things
—where, among
other manifestations of rock ’n’ roll as one infinite and inter-locking pun, as Bob Dylan takes the stage in Manchester, England, in 1966 and, with the Hawks behind him, against a chorus of catcalls from the crowd, storms through likely the most powerful music of his life and is about to launch into his last number, an outraged fan shouts not “Judas!” but, rather, “BOO! Do you know any Judas Priest?”

Whole intellectual industries are devoted to proving that there is nothing new under the sun, that everything comes from something else—and to such a degree that one can never tell when one thing turns into something else. But it is the moment when something appears as if out of nowhere, when a work of art carries within itself the thrill of invention, of discovery, that is worth listening for. It’s that moment when a song or a performance is its own manifesto, issuing its own demands on life in its own, new language—which, though the charge of novelty is its essence, is immediately grasped by any number of people who will swear they never heard anything like it before—that speaks. In rock ’n’ roll, this is a moment that, in historical time, is repeated again and again, until, as culture, it defines the art itself.

“It’s like saying, ‘Get all the pop music, put it into a cartridge, put the cap on it and fire the gun,’” Pete Townshend of the Who said in 1968. “Whether those ten or 15 numbers sound roughly the same. You don’t care what period they were written in, what they’re all about. It’s the bloody explosion
that they create when you let the gun off. It’s the event. That’s what rock and roll is.” Any pop record made at any time can contain Pete Townshend’s argument. Any such record, from “Breathless” by Jerry Lee Lewis to “Breathless” by the Corrs, will make that argument—which is to say that this book could have comprised solely records issued by the Sun label in Memphis in the 1950s, only records made by female punk bands in the 1990s, or nothing but soul records made in Detroit, Memphis, New York City, San Antonio, New Orleans, Los Angeles, or Chicago in 1963.

From that perspective, there is no reason to be responsible to chronology, to account for all the innovators, to follow the supposed progression of the form. The Maytals’ “Funky Kingston” is not a step forward from the Drifters’ “Money Honey,” or OutKast’s “Hey Ya” a step forward from “Funky Kingston.” They are rediscoveries of a certain spirit, a leap into style, a step out of time. One can dive into a vault as filled with songs as Uncle Scrooge’s was filled with money and come out with a few prizes that at once raise the question of what rock ’n’ roll is and answer it.

Who, as the music took shape and developed a memory, was really speaking to whom? What if the real, living connection is not between, say, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but between the Beatles and Buddy Holly—or simply, which is to say not simply at all, between a single Buddy Holly song and the Beatles’ attempts, across the entire
length of their life as a group, to play it? What if Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” finds its best audience not in any of the crowds that from 1964 to the present have cheered for the line “Even the president of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked” but with A.J. and his new friend sitting in his SUV in the last episode of
The Sopranos
? There they are, kids just out of rehab, parked in the woods with the motor running, A.J. stiff and nervous behind the wheel, the much hipper Rhiannon calm and smoking in the passenger seat. They listen in silence as Dylan’s unstoppable rant against every manifestation of modern life reaches such a pitch that “All is phony,” the three words sealing a verse, feels like a throwaway. “I know you said this guy was good,” A.J. says, as he hears “He not busy being born is busy dying.” You can’t tell if he’s truly shocked or if he’s trying to seem cool. “It’s amazing it was written so long ago,” Rhiannon says, as if she’s talking about someone who lived before the civil War. “It could have been written today.” As the camera shows smoke from leaves catching fire beneath the SUV coming through the vents, Rhiannon climbs on top of A.J. and begins to pull off her top. Flames rise up under the dashboard. A.J. and Rhiannon tumble out and run. Just before the vehicle explodes, we hear the tape melting, the words and music slowing down into an ugly, indecipherable smear, the song not floating off into the ether but sinking into the slime it was made to
describe, until the next person, never having heard of Bob Dylan, stumbles across it.

The official, standard history of rock ’n’ roll is true, but it’s not the whole truth. It’s not the truth at all. It’s a constructed story that has been disseminated so comprehensively that people believe it, but it’s not true to their experience, and it may even deform or suppress their experience. “I think we all have this little theater on top of our shoulders, where the past and the present and our aspirations and our memories are simply and inexorably mixed,” the late Dennis Potter, the creator of sometimes deliriously life-affirming television and movie musicals—
Pennies from Heaven, The Singing Detective, Lipstick on Your Collar
—said in 1987. But what if your memories are not your own, but are, rather, kidnapped by another story, colonized by a larger cultural memory? “It gets dark, you know, very late in Boise, Idaho, in the summer,” David Lynch once said of 9 September 1956, when Elvis Presley first appeared on the
Ed Sullivan Show
—a show supposedly watched by 82.6 percent of all Americans watching TV that night. Lynch was ten. “It was not quite dark, so it must have been, like, maybe nine o’clock at night, I’m not sure. That nice twilight, a beautiful night. Deep shadows were occurring. And it was sort of warm. And Willard Burns came running towards me from about three houses down the street, and he said, ‘You missed it!’ and I said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Elvis on
Ed Sullivan!
’ And it
just, like, set a fire in my head. How could I have missed that? And this was the night, you know. But I’m kind of glad I didn’t see it; it was a bigger event in my head because I missed it.” “What makes each one of us unique,” Dennis Potter went on, talking about his little theater of past and present, aspirations and memories, “is the potency of the individual mix”—and in the history of rock ’n’ roll as I hope to trace it, the likes of Lynch’s story might count for more than whatever happened on TV that night. Records that made no apparent history other than their own, the faint marks they left on the charts or someone’s memory, might count for more than any master narrative that excludes them.

This came into focus for me one day in December 2012, in a diner on Mulberry Street in New York called Parm. They play oldies, some obvious, some not. This day there was Bill Haley and the Comets’ 1954 version of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” the Beach Boys’ 1966 “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ 1960 “Stay,” a version of “Dream Lover” that seemed just slightly off until I realized it wasn’t Bobby Darin but Dion, in a 1961 recording I didn’t know existed, a speeded-up remix of Sam Cooke’s 1960 “Wonderful World” with gruesome strings, Marvin Gaye’s 1968 “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” the Chiffons’ 1963 “One Fine Day,” and Little Richard’s 1956 “Long Tall Sally” (I remembered W. T. Lhamon, Jr., writing that while “most audiences probably did not suspect” that Little
Richard’s songs were full of gays, transvestites, adulterers, and prostitutes, not to mention adulterous gay transvestite prostitutes, the charge in the music came partly because “the singer knew,” the producer Bumps “Blackwell knew, and so did the musicians in Cosimo Matassas’s J & M Studio, where they were recording”).

In this rich assemblage—random, programmed, which would be more satisfying?—“Stay” stood out. Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs were a South Carolina doo-wop group that formed in 1956 as the Royal Charms. In 1957, as the Gladiolas, they recorded “Little Darlin’” (a song the Canadian glee-club combo the Diamonds, whose EPs included the likes of “On, Wisconsin!” found so cretinous they redid it as a parody of rock ’n’ roll, only to see it top the charts as the real thing). The Gladiolas became the Zodiacs in 1957—and compared with what they had done before, “Stay,” recorded in 1959 in South Carolina, issued in 1960 in New York, was a cataclysm. A number 1 hit barely a minute and a half long—and a sketch for Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” five years later—so much was happening on the record it seemed much longer. Note by note, measure by measure—with Williams’s laconic come-on-baby not climbing but suddenly surging to the mad falsetto that, playing off the group’s chanted “
STAY! STAY!
” reached the impossible high note in “Sayyyyyyyyyy / You
will
” that had people all over the world, like Tim McIntire’s Alan Freed in
Floyd Mutrux’s 1978 film
American Hot Wax,
twisting their faces around that last note in joy and wonder until they swallowed it—the record seemed to turn the radio upside down. It was the invention in the music that was so striking —the will to create what had never been heard before, through vocal tricks, rhythmic shifts, pieces of sound that didn’t logically follow one from the other, that didn’t make musical or even emotional sense when looked at as pieces, but as a whole spoke a new language.

The music—and the market, the audience that it at once revealed and created—was a challenge to whoever had the nerve to try to make it. The ear of the new audience was fickle, teenagers knowing nothing of where the music came from and caring less, and why should they care? It was new, it was different, and that was what they wanted: out of a nascent sense that the world in which their parents had come of age had changed or in some deeper, inexpressible manner disappeared, a sound that made the notion of a new life a fact, even if that fact lasted only a minute and a half. To make that fact—to catch that ear, to sell your record, to top the charts, if only in your dreams—you had to try something new. You had to find something new. You had to listen to everything on the market and try to understand what wasn’t there—and what wasn’t there was you. So you asked yourself, as people have been asking themselves ever since, what’s different about me? How am I different from
everybody else—and why am I different? Yes, you invent yourself to the point of stupidity, you give yourself a ridiculous new name, you appear in public in absurd clothes, you sing songs based on nursery rhymes or jokes or catchphrases or advertising slogans, and you do it for money, renown, to lift yourself up, to escape the life you were born to, to escape the poverty, the racism, the killing strictures of a life that you were raised to accept as fate, to make yourself a new person not only in the eyes of the world, but finally in your own eyes too. A minute and a half, two minutes, maybe three, in the one-time, one-take fantasy that takes place in the recording studio, whatever it might be—for “Stay,” a Quonset hut—or forever, even a year, even a few months, in the heaven of the charts, where one more hit means the game isn’t over, that you don’t have to go back to the prison of fate, that you can once again experience the satisfaction that only art, only the act of putting something new into the world, can bring.