Night Beat (49 page)
Says Ian: “I think there’s a pretty good percentage of our audience—you know, white middle-to-lower-class kids—that hates black music and probably hates blacks as well.
Why
they hate blacks, they probably don’t know; it’s a prejudice that they’ve never questioned. I’m exposed to it all the time. People see me wearing a Public Enemy T-shirt, and they ask me, ’Why do you like that nigger music?’ I can’t really talk to somebody like that, you know? I don’t care if they’ve bought every one of our albums, I’m just not going to waste my time talking to somebody like that, and I’m certainly not going to condone their attitude just because they’re an Anthrax fan. They can like us or not, but I still think they’re an asshole.”
Ian pauses for a moment and shakes his head. “I wish there were a way to reach those people,” he says after a bit. “Maybe for some of them the music
does
make a difference. Maybe they can hear a song like “H8Red’ and understand that it’s a song about being hated just because of the way you look—whether it’s because you have long hair or you’re a skinhead or you’re black.
“I mean, I think for a lot of our fans who are into this music, things aren’t easy. Some of them are working jobs they can’t stand, and they aren’t sure who to blame for their lives, and so some of them end up getting drunk all the time or turning to drugs. I think what we try to say to them is: ’Hey, we’ve all gone through some of the same shit, but, you know, you can find a place in your life where you can make it. You know, you may hate your parents and hate your job and hate your life, but it’s
your
life, and you just got to fucking do what you got to do to make yourself and your world better.’ I think if Anthrax has any message, that’s it: Make yourself and your world better.”
A short while later, Scott Ian and the other members of Anthrax—singer Joe Belladonna, drummer Charlie Benante, bassist Frank Bello, and guitarist Dan Spitz—are onstage in Houston, spreading that message the best way they know how: by playing brilliant and enlivening rock & roll. It’s debatable, of course, whether the audience completely understands or agrees with what the band is saying in its music; maybe for many of those here the sheer visceral impact of the band’s performances is the only real meaning that matters. Still, there is something heartening about watching Joe Belladonna deliver a song like “Keep It in the Family”—which admonishes the band’s fans not to fall into the easy traps of their parents’ legacies of racism—and witnessing the audience flailing and thrashing to the words, as if this were a declaration worth raising a ruckus over.
A little later, though, when the band gets around to “Antisocial,” there’s no question that everybody knows what is being talked about. On record, the song is a rousing attack on a man who uses law and order and wealth to beat down the people he doesn’t understand. But in concert, it becomes something else. “You’re anti, you’re anti
social,
yowls the band, pointing its fingers at the audience, and the audience stands up on its chairs and roars back the same line—”You’re anti, you’re anti
social”—
pointing back at the band. Finally the band and the audience are yelling the same refrain to each other at the same moment, over and over, until the voices rise into the thousands. In that moment, both the crowd and the band are taking a term that has been used for years as a method of branding young people as outcasts and they turn that epithet into both a mutual accusation and a mutual affirmation. They are telling one another that they know exactly how the world views them, and that they are proud to be known by those terms. In that moment, Anthrax and its audience are forging a bond of community that, quite likely, they rarely find outside the society of heavy metal music. It is a way of saying: “We are here for each other. Whatever the rest of the world might say about us, we are here for each other.”
In the world that heavy metal and its fans are consigned to live in, that isn’t such a bad promise.
PART 5
lone voices
randy newman: songs of the promised land
Coming over the pass, you can see the whole valley spread below. On a clear morning, when it lies broad and colored under a white sky, with the mountains standing far back on either side, you can imagine it’s the promised land.
ROSS MACDONALD
THE WYCHERLY WOMAN
T
rouble in Paradise,
Randy Newman’s first pop album since 1979’s
Born Again,
is perhaps the most forceful, full-formed statement about life in Los Angeles that popular music has yet produced. In it, Newman regards the city’s infamous frivolity and relentless, pacific gloss with humor, affection, fury, and bite—and he affirms them as worthy images (and even worthier ends) for a city with an incurable fixation on surface appearances. Newman also acknowledges that beneath such surfaces (and perhaps because of the broken confidence and swift hatred that those surfaces can also breed—particularly for those buried under those surfaces) there lurks an inevitable undertow of disillusionment and fear. Disillusionment that can turn quick fun into quicker meanness, especially when arrogance and indulgence become common ways to attain pleasure.
Trouble in Paradise
is only partly about Los Angeles, but it’s those parts that give the record such resonance and depth. And by and large, it’s the city’s sheen and exuberance that compel Newman here. In the surging, boastful, “I Love L.A.,” Newman barrels along in a sleek convertible, a “big nasty redhead” beside him, and calls out the names of the city’s most familiar symbols of opportunity and escape. In a rousing, challenging voice he shouts: “Century Boulevard!” And a boisterous chorus roars back: “We love it!” “Victory Boulevard!” “We
love
it!” “Santa Monica Boulevard!” “We LOVE it!” “Sixth Street!” “WE LOVE IT!”
Some critics regard “I Love L.A.” as an ironic pose rather than a heartfelt anthem, as if what Newman says in the song is that this city is all quick surfaces and images. Well, he
is
saying that, but if you think he says it with cynicism or disdain, think again. Newman means what he purports here: He
does
love L.A.—in no small part because it’s the place he calls his home, but also because he’s fascinated by its knack for promoting veneer as its own distinction. Which isn’t to say Newman is oblivious to the empty-headedness the city cultivates. In “My Life Is Good,” an obnoxious
nouveau riche
songwriter declares to his son’s schoolteacher that wealth and position guarantee a claim to license and the servitude of others; by song’s end, Newman has deflated the haughtiness and sense of privilege that many in this city brandish as unassailable rights. At the same time, Newman isn’t so sure that the shallowness L.A. fosters belies its claim as the last American promised land. After all, a promised land is as good as a land of last hope. And when last hopes are gone, what often emerges is a place whose people are resentful of its culture and of one another, and who verge on ethical (not to mention aesthetic) desperation. The displacement born of this desperation is what has always made L.A. such an alluring place to write about—and an increasingly risky place to live.
Newman’s advocacy of L.A. is an interesting position for anyone to stake out in early-1980s pop music. Since the pop explosion of the 1960s (when Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, Lou Adler, and the Byrds created versions of L.A. sound that set new standards in rock fun and studio art), and throughout the 1970s (when such artists as the Eagles and Jackson Browne forced those conceptions of fun to accommodate a new, heavily idealized ethos), Los Angeles has stood for a measured, bright-toned sound, espousing certain romanticized truths. The city’s music has also depended upon mass popularity (meaning accessibility) to assure its validity.
But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, L.A. became the setting for a revealing conflict of pop styles. Though the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Toto, and other well-bred L.A. acts continued to command a mass audience, a sharp-tempered and persistent underground movement also rose, spawning bands like X, the Germs, the Go-Go’s, Black Flag, and Fear—all of whom sought to give as much definition to the sound and ideals of modern L.A. as any of the bands that came before them. There’s a part of me that would like to think Newman’s
Trouble in Paradise
is a record that’s smart and expansive enough to contain both versions of L.A. (Warren Zevon’s records, too, might be seen as working this trick, though Zevon perhaps too strongly represents personal concerns as an exemplar of cultural style.) Certainly at its best, Randy Newman’s lyricism is as acerbic as that of, say, X, and obviously a lot wittier and more adept at parody than the tiresome punk burlesque of Fear.
Even the best and brightest of today’s punk-derived artists could learn an invaluable lesson from the way Newman wields point of view, and the way he inhabits and animates a song. The character in “There’s a Party at My House,” who winds up what began as an innocent saturnalia with an implied vision of rape (maybe even sportive sex murder), isn’t repugnant merely because of his dangerous impulses, but because he speaks to us in a way that can arouse our own desire to join the party. As a result, the song is more powerful than the anti-misogynist rock of Gang of Four, or for that matter, the
pro-
misogynist rock of Fear.
Yet what clearly separates Newman from the punks isn’t so much his idea of intelligence or viewpoint as it is his particular allegiance to sound. To be sure,
Paradise
is, in places, an assaultive, even bombastic record—in fact, Newman’s
most
physical sounding rock & roll since “Gone Dead Train” on 1970’s
Performance
soundtrack. But it is also a meticulously crafted, professionally realized work—a work that asserts precision and control as clear-cut aesthetic choices. “I Love L.A.” may roar and careen like a fine, fast, heady ride down the Imperial Highway, but there isn’t a reckless turn or offhand moment on the whole track, or anywhere else on the album.
In effect, Newman’s attention to artifice amounts to something of a recasting of his former sound. Though elaborate arrangements often graced the music of
12 Songs, Sail Away,
and
Good Old Boys,
they almost never determined the actual form or temper of Newman’s Tin Pan Alley- and blues-infused songwriting. But on
Paradise,
the arrangements—the very outward show and force of some of the songs—are often as much a part of the songs’ meanings as the characters and wordplay that make up their textual detail. This may be Newman’s way of saying that he stands for (and stands
up
for) that exacting refinement which so many critics identify with the L.A. sound. Newman has as much as said so in recent interviews: The good values, he asserts, are not the guileful intelligence that a songwriter like Elvis Costello employs, or the social-minded bravura of the Clash, but rather the stylish dourness of Don Henley and the fastidious musicianship of Toto. To underscore his point, Newman rounded up several Los Angeles signature performers (including Henley, Rickie Lee Jones, Christine McVie, and Linda Ronstadt) as a way of reaffirming that, at its best, the L.A. sound was always more the result of shared community than cliquishness.
Which all means that Newman’s championing of that sound is much like his backhanded advocacy of L.A. as a culture of veneer: Either one can accept the city (and its music) for its surfaces, or one can accept it for the variety of truths those surfaces conceal, even nurture.
In some ways, this is where
Paradise
achieves its greatest literary effect. Both the sound and the meaning of its songs contain a vision of fun that does not end in mere fun, and a darker vision which is too complex to give in to rote notions of L.A. as a vast, sprawling network of desperation. According to Newman, desperation alone isn’t any more notable as a version of truth than fun is. In a sense, such recent L.A. bands as the Go-Go’s and X approach a similar conclusion, though from differing angles. Each band represents a contrary truth about this city—quick fun, or desperate action. But neither can fully convey the idea that to find the truth of this city, you must first penetrate those poses of fun and trouble and examine the way the search for fun (and the inability to capture it for very long) creates trouble and despair. (Neither do X or the Go-Go’s reveal enough about how trouble can enrich the idea of fun, or at least make its invention necessary.)
So what does Randy Newman say when cruising down the fabled mean streets that have fed the dark ruminations of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Charles Bukowski, and Joan Didion? He says: “Roll down the window/Put down the top/Crank up the Beach Boys, baby/Don’t let the music stop.”
Trouble in Paradise
so often weaves fun with darkness and gentleness with meanness that they begin to seem interchangeable, and
then
they seem inseparable. It tells us that hard truths wouldn’t matter much—wouldn’t be endurable—without the chance to hit the highway, where the wind can cleanse us of thoughts and the radio can fill the gaps in our feeling the way it fills the shiny, dirty sky around us.
It’s the way we’ve learned to ride out hell, in the City of Angels.
al green: sensuality in the service of the lord
W
hen Al Green takes a stage, both miracle and mystery attend his arrival. Miracle, because the man sings heartfelt, revealing praises to his idea of God, in a wonder-working voice. Mystery, because the man has willfully—pointedly—abdicated the massive pop audience he could so easily command (and still actively merits) at the same time he has raised his performing talents to new pinnacles. Quite simply, when we witness Green, we are witnessing our greatest living soul singer—witnessing him stare down the vista of a self-willed, commercially barren future, smiling at the promise of boundless riches at the end.
But whether Green commands a substantial audience is beside the point, at least in his own mind. At L.A.’s Greek Theater one night in August 1983, where he played to a perhaps half-capacity crowd, he dismissed the importance of popular acclaim, exhorting the crowd, “Clap your hands and give the praise to
God.
That’s a fittingly deferential gesture for a performing Christian (though I can hardly picture Bob Dylan or Jerry Lee Lewis offering similar directives), but the piety of it is also beside the point. This is a knotty issue, but it’s only fair to offer my own prejudices up front: I enjoy many religious performers (not only gospel vocalists, but also sufferin’ rockers like Van Morrison and Pete Townshend) for much the same reason I can enjoy angry eccentrics like Bob Dylan and Johnny Rotten: because the conceit of their conviction manages to fuel their jeering conception of modern life as a loathsome hellhole, and because that conviction gives order and purpose to the unruly limits of their pain. It doesn’t matter, in terms of their art, whether their beliefs amount to “truth” or not; it suffices that theirs is a self-sustaining vision that informs and shapes their regeneration.
In the same respect, the fact that Al Green promotes God as the
raison d’être
of his art doesn’t particularly secure or sanctify Green’s music. It’s fine, I suppose, to limit music’s purpose to a celebration of God, but music as a way of canvassing for salvation—which is what much of modern gospel is—is an inevitably self-advancing notion. Or at least it’s self-centered more than purely great-hearted or altruistic: The supplicant is concerned with proclaiming himself as a model for deliverance by virtue of personal faith and received grace, which is a lot like the sexual boasting Green
used
to sing about, but not at all like true outgoing, reciprocal romance. Somehow, I always thought there was as much integrity in Albert Camus’ affirmation, in
The Rebel,
of those religious insurrectionists (or resisters) who reject the certainty of salvation for themselves because of its elitist, nonegalitarian conditions. Of course, the day I hear a pop (or gospel) song about
that
view, I’ll figure real miracles are afoot. It’s just that a hardbitten look at real life seems a bit more demanding than a blithe contemplation of a distant afterlife; real life is where spiritual hope is tested and tempered—and remeasured.
In any event, Al Green clearly feels that today’s pop world is anathema to the purposes of his music, and given his talents, I wouldn’t slight his current repertoire. “The Lord taught me how to sing,” Green explained to his audience at the Greek, “but I rewarded him by singing ’Love and Happiness’ and ’Let’s Stay Together.’ ” The audience roared hungrily at the mention of the songs. “And people ask me, ’Why can’t you still sing “Call Me” or “For the Good Times.” ’ Well, Jesus brought me through all that—He brought me through ’How Can You Mend a Broken Heart’ and ’I’m Still in Love with You.’ Good songs, good times, but I want you to know I found the
Rock . . . ,
and with that, Green moved into a beautiful rendering of “Amazing Grace,” and it seemed just as well that something
had
brought him through all his previous greatness, because his new greatness is so sweetly convincing.
Ah, but what greatness it once was. Green, who possesses as well-mannered a drawl as R & B has ever yielded, was pretty much
the
classy singles artist of the 1970s, producing an even more consistent string of high-art hits than Stevie Wonder or Elton John. Between 1971 and 1976, he slotted thirteen Top 40 singles, including the aforementioned “Love and Happiness,” “Let’s Stay Together,” “Call Me (Come Back Home),” and “I’m Still in Love with You,” as well as “Sha-La-La (Makes Me Happy),” and “L-O-V-E (Love).” Produced by Willie Mitchell for Memphis’ Hi Records, Green’s records were exemplary post-Stax soul: sparse, bass-driven arrangements covered and colored by Green’s breathy, high, fragile crooning. They were records that also bespoke unfathomable reserves of casual, elegant sexiness, and Green’s image as a ladies’ man was further enhanced by a swoony, physically stirring live act in which his lithe yet unrestrained presence gave new depth to sexual euphoria.
Apparently, the image also carried over to his personal life. In 1974, a woman who loved Green and had tried to fasten him to a promise of marriage, grew wild at his rejection. Embittered, she reportedly attempted to wound him with scalding grits before killing herself. Green’s career fell into quick disarray, and he never recorded another major hit after the incident. When he recouped in 1977, producing himself for the first time, Green seemed still pulled by some of the same old urges, but also reanimated by a new spiritual awareness. “It’s
you
that I want but it’s
Him
that I need,” he sang in one of his finest songs, “Belle” (from
The Belle Album
), and it sounded as if Green were firmly trying to shut out the hope of pop heroism for good. Whatever conflict remained, Green resolved it fairly quickly: All of his albums since that date—including
Truth ’n’ Time, Higher Plane, The Lord Will Make a Way, Precious Lord,
and
I’ll Rise Again—
have been gospel affairs, sometimes transfixing, sometimes miscast, but never less than masterly sung.
Perhaps gospel is Green’s way of making up for the implicit excesses of his previous sex style, but that sexiness—that revelry in loss of inhibition, that surrender to sensual movement—is still very much a part of Green’s live act. At the end of a lovely and rousing version of “People Get Ready,” he tossed off his beige, double-breasted jacket and prowled the stage like a fierce, balletic wolf, as ravenous and alluring as his former carnal self had ever seemed. And just as jolting, too: When, early in the show, he stripped off his black bow-tie, one woman to my left, who had been shouting “Hallelujah” only moments earlier, suddenly shrieked, “Take it
all
off,
Al!
Revelations indeed.
But Green didn’t seem entirely comfortable with this response. During one point when he attempted to venture into the audience and was rushed by women trying to plant fervent kisses on his face, he fairly begged, “Shake my
hand,
please!” Religious fervor is as much a way of covering for past fears as it is a way of expressing necessary worship, and in those moments, Green looked like a haunted, fearful man.
But the fear and the correlated joy he has found in his supplication has made of Green a better singer and greater artist. That last trait is what is central here, for what is truly transcendent about Green isn’t the spirituality of his songs so much as the uplifting art he brings to bear upon his religion, for Green is still the most dazzling soul singer around—only now he takes the calling literally. Indeed, he’s as riveting a live vocalist as Frank Sinatra or Dylan. His reading of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” was the ideal example: He curled around the song’s imperative spirit with an impossible effortlessness, imbuing his pinched, high breathiness with the same old tested sensual elegance.
It was a lot like hearing religion, and also a lot like hearing sex, but nothing like the playful manner in which Marvin Gaye or Prince might mix the two extremes. Green has been through the fire of the latter, and the fiery balm of the former, and he sees nothing light or trendily shocking in juxtaposing the two. But I doubt that I’ll hear anything more sensually pleasing than that vocal on “People Get Ready”—a physical expression of spiritual longing that made me feel good all over, and also made me feel sort of transported. I could listen to Al Green from here to Judgment Day and it would seem like salvation to me. Or at least close enough for this hell on earth.
