Night Beat (2 page)

Then those dreams turned to nightmare, to the worst horror I could imagine. I am sorry if you have already heard this story—perhaps you have—but there is no way I can finish this introduction without being honest about this particular passage in my life.

In 1976, when I was twenty-five, I began writing for
Rolling Stone.
When the magazine came along in 1967, it announced itself as a voice that might prove as fervent and intelligent as the brave new music that it dared to champion. From the time I began reading the magazine, I held a dream of someday writing for its pages. To me, that would be a way of participating in the development of the music I had come to love so much.

In the autumn of 1976, I learned that
Rolling Stone
had accepted an article of mine for publication. I was elated. Then, about a week later I learned something horrible, something that killed my elation: My older brother, Gary Gilmore, was going to be put to death by a firing squad in Utah. It didn’t look like there was much that could stop it—and I didn’t know if I could live with it.

A few months before, in April 1976, Gary—ten years my senior—had been paroled from the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, to Provo, Utah, following a fifteen-year period of often brutal incarceration, largely at Oregon State Prison. Unfortunately, Gary’s new life as a free man shortly grew troubled and violent, and on a hot and desperate July night, my brother crossed a line that no one should ever come to cross: in a moment born from a life of anger and ruin, Gary murdered an innocent man—a young Mormon named Max Jensen—during a service station robbery. The next night, he murdered another innocent man—another young Mormon, Ben Bushnell, who was working as a Provo motel manager—during a second robbery. Within hours, Gary was arrested, and within days he had confessed to his crimes. The trial that followed was pretty much an open-and-shut affair: Gary was convicted of first degree murder in the shooting of Ben Bushnell, and he was sentenced to death. Given the choice of being hung or shot, Gary elected to be shot.

All this had happened before I began writing for
Rolling Stone,
and a few months later, when I
did
begin working for the magazine, I never mentioned anything about my brother or his crimes to any of my editors or fellow journalists. Only a handful of my friends knew about my strained relationship with my troubled brother. The truth is, I had put myself at a distance from the realities of Gary’s life for many years; I told myself that I feared him, that I resented his violent and self-ruinous choices, that he and I did not really share the same bloodline. After Gary’s killings and his subsequent death sentence, I felt grief and rage over his acts, and I also felt deep and painful humiliation: I could not believe that my brother had left his family with so much horror and shame to live with, and I could not forgive him for what he had done to the families of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell. But in a way, the whole episode seemed more like a culmination of horror rather than its new beginning. That’s because part of me believed that Gary would
never
be executed—after all, there had not been any executions in America in a decade—and that he instead would simply rot away the rest of his life in the bitter nothingness of a Utah prison. At the same time, I think another, deeper part of me always understood that Gary had been born (or at least raised) to die the death he would die.

Any hope for serenity in my life had been destroyed. Shortly after I heard about Gary’s wish to be executed, I told my editor at
Rolling Stone,
Ben Fong-Torres, about my relationship with Gary. By this time, Gary Gilmore was a daily name in nationwide headlines, and I felt that the magazine had a right to know that I was his brother. Fong-Torres, who had lost a brother of his own through violence, was extremely sympathetic and supportive during the period that followed, and eventually he gave me the opportunity to write about my experience of Gary’s execution for the magazine. To be honest, not everybody at
Rolling Stone
back in early 1977 thought it was such a great idea to run that article (“A Death in the Family,” March 10, 1977), and I could understand their misgivings: After all, what would be the point of publishing what might appear to be one man’s apology for his murderous and suicidal brother? Still, following the turmoil of Gary’s death, I needed to find a way to express the devastation that I had just gone through, or else I might never be able to climb out of that devastation. With the help of Fong-Torres and fellow editors Barbara Downey and Sarah Lazin, a fairly decent and honest piece of first-person journalism was created, and in the process a significant portion of my sanity and hope were salvaged. More important, perhaps the people who read it got a glimpse into the reality of living at the center of an unstoppable national nightmare.

In the season that followed Gary’s death, I went to work for
Rolling Stone
full-time in Los Angeles. It wasn’t an easy period for me—I felt displaced, and (once again) was drinking too much and taking too many pills—but the magazine gave me plenty of slack; maybe more than I deserved. As time went along, I began to find some of my strength and purpose again as a music writer, and
Rolling Stone
gave me the opportunity to meet and write about some of the people whose music and words had mattered most in my life. It was also a season in which I spent many nights lost in the dark and brilliant splendor of punk. I liked the way the music confronted its listeners with the reality of our merciless age. Punk, as much as anything, saved my soul in those years, and gave me cause for hope—which is perhaps a funny thing to say about a movement (or experiment) that’s first premise was: there are no simple hopes that are not false or at least suspect.

I WROTE FOR
Rolling Stone
from 1976 until the present—sometimes as a staff writer, sometimes as a contributor. In the years after 1979, I also wrote for
Musician
and the
Los Angeles Times
briefly, and in the early 1980s I was (for a year or so) the music editor at the
L.A. Weekly.
In the autumn of 1982, I became the pop music critic of the (now defunct)
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
where I worked until 1987. For the first two or three years, the
Herald
was a sublime place to write; it was a paper that allowed writers to find and exercise their own voice, sometimes at great length (I’m afraid I became a bit long-winded during that period, but brevity has rarely been my strong suit). Then, sometime in 1985, a new managing editor came in to the paper—a self-described “neo-conservative.” I’ve never shared much affinity with conservatives of any variety (I’m pretty much an American leftist and have not been shy nor apologetic about that leaning). In August 1985, I reviewed a live performance by Sting for the
Herald.
Sting wasn’t a performer or songwriter I liked much—that was plain from my review—but I admired two things about his music at that time: his willingness to attempt adventurous, swing-inflected pop with a band that included saxophonist Branford Marsalis, and his acuity about the realities of mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher-defined British politics. I was particularly taken by his performance of a song called “We Work the Black Seams,” and I wrote the following about it:

“We Work the Black Seams” . . . was perhaps Sting’s only serious statement that wasn’t saved solely by the prowess of his band, as well as the only one that didn’t need saving. In part, that’s because with its lulling arpeggios and mellifluent chorus it is the one song in Sting’s new batch that is most like his Police material. But there’s more to it than that: It is also the one song uttered from outside Sting’s usual above-it-all perspective—a song told from the view of a British coal miner faced with the uncaring determinism of his government. In order to tell his tale . . . Sting climbs down deep inside the place and conditions where the character lives: He is aware that the fate of the miner’s professions—and therefore the future economy of his class—has already been irrevocably shut off, and so he sings his account in a tired and resigned voice, but also with a dark, deadly, righteous sense of pain and anger: “Our blood has stained the coal/We tunneled deep inside the nation’s soul/We matter more than pounds and pence/Your economic theory makes no sense.”

The
Herald
’s new editor was not pleased to read such sentiments in his paper. He sent a message to me via another editor: “Rock & roll is music
about and for
teenagers. Write about it from
that
point of view.” I ignored the warning—in fact, I stepped up my politics—which meant that soon my life at the
Herald
was hell. I wasn’t alone. I watched the paper’s managerial structure drive some of its best writers out of the company. The managers believed, I was later told, that it was perhaps the writers’ affections for style and point of view that was costing the paper its readers (and hell, maybe they were even right).

I left the
Herald Examiner
in 1987, but by that time I was badly disillusioned. Plus I was going through another of my end-of-the-world romantic aftermaths. I wasn’t sure I wanted to remain a writer—but what else did I know how to do? A sympathetic friend and editor at
Rolling Stone,
James Henke, gave me a series of assignments. I remember
hating
writing each of them. All I wanted to do was sulk and drink and hate some more. Still, I had bills to pay. Looking back, I see how those assignments helped save me and also taught me some invaluable lessons: one, that summoning the will to write—even at the worst points in my life—meant I had an inner strength that was invaluable and that I should trust; two, that I had not yet lost my love for popular music and its meanings and how it mattered to its audiences. Plus, I realized it still mattered to
me—
that is, it still helped me. Popular music, all said and done, was among the best friends—and one of the few real confidants—I’d ever known in my life. Whereas you could talk to and confide and hope and trust in a lover, that lover might still leave or betray you. A great song, by contrast, would talk
to you—
and its truths would
never
betray you. At 3 A.M., outside of the greatest and most sinful sex, there was nothing that could mean as much as a pop song that told you secrets about your own fucked-up and yearning heart.

A FEW YEARS AGO, after the publication of
Shot in the Heart
(a story about my family’s generational history of violence), I received several letters from readers asking me to compile some of my earlier writings for publication. I didn’t much like the idea. I thought my pop writing was too disjointed and had covered too much musical stylistic terrain to work in any cohesive volume. Also, I’d just finished a book about looking back at my past. I wasn’t anxious to start another—especially since reading my old writings always made my skin crawl. Instead, I preferred to write my own original history about rock & roll’s epic patterns of disruption, but that idea didn’t excite most of the people I talked to. After all, it was a season when pundits like Allan Bloom and William Bennett could write depthless and malicious indictments of popular culture and achieve fame and success for doing so. A history (and defense) of rock’s agitation did not prove an appealing idea to most editors.

Then, following an article I wrote for
Rolling Stone
in 1996 about the death of Timothy Leary, I again received requests for a collection of writings. I felt a little more receptive to the idea by that time, because I knew I had a handful of articles I’d like to see enjoy a second (if only brief) life. At first, though, the process of selecting those articles was not fun. I’m a big believer that one should
never
read too much of one’s own writing; you begin to see all the repetitions, all the flaws. A week into the project, I felt like bailing out. Also, I’d written so much about some subjects—such as Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, punk, and Bruce Springsteen—that I wasn’t sure which piece (or pieces) to pick as the most representative.