Fever

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Preface

1. Are You Lonesome Tonight?

2. Chains

3. Private Dancer

4. I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself

5. Man Overboard

6. Walk Like a Man

7. Double Fantasies

Discography

Bibliography

Permissions

Acknowledgments

Index

Also by Tim Riley

Copyright

 

To my mother, Nancy Grace Druding Riley:

Flying Colors skipper, University of Colorado English teacher,

opera and ballet buff, enthusiastic alto,

ukulele maestro, memoirist, MSW,

and amateur critic

 

And to my boys, Moses and Adam,

who have forgotten more about manhood than I'll ever know;

my sisters, Jenny and Ann, women of the world;

my stepfather, Dr. Conrad Riley, who helped out

more than he realizes;

and my wife and hero, Sara Laschever:

“Petticoat Junction”

PREFACE

The second half of the twentieth century, we are told, suffered from a dearth of heroes. From statesmen (John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton) to sports stars (Joe DiMaggio, Daryl Strawberry, O.J. Simpson) to warriors (the entire military-industrial complex responsible for Vietnam, the crooked 2000 presidential election, and the security breakdown behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks), disillusion reigns. Young men, in particular, have supposedly been forced to struggle into manhood without any positive role models.
Iron John,
by Robert Bly,
Stiffs,
by Susan Faludi,
Real Boys,
by William S. Pollack, all best-sellers, were built on this thesis.

This observation mystifies me. What about rock 'n' roll? What about rock 'n' roll's role models? The boomers born after World War II, both men and women, learned much of what they know about how to be young, how to seek and earn love, and how to struggle toward adulthood from the popular music they listened to. When a figure as compelling as Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes sang “Be My Baby” in 1963, it expressed the power and sweetness of female desire without shame or false coyness. Women rockers such as Tina Turner and Chrissie Hynde made young women feel that sex was not just for “bad girls” and that at its best sexiness in a woman could express both strength and softness. When a band as potent as the Who made adolescent issues roar, it said to younger men, “We've been there, we know what you're feeling, we're with you.” Later, when Bruce Springsteen sang “One Step Up,” the song told both men and women, “Marriage is fragile. Protect it.”

Young fans who embraced rock 'n' roll during those years absolutely saw their rock idols as models for the kinds of men and women they could choose to be if they dared. To the fans, rock stars didn't represent what they did to establishment culture (the lawlessness and decadence of two-dimensional acts from Grand Funk Railroad to Alice Cooper to Guns N' Roses). The best rock celebrated honesty, intimacy, and openness; it encouraged emotional expressiveness (Joni Mitchell), honored tolerance (from Boy George to Melissa Etheridge), individualism (from Bob Dylan to PJ Harvey), and social responsibility (Bonnie Raitt, U2's Bono, Bruce Springsteen).

Rock stars helped their young fans grow from boys to men and girls to women by exploring and celebrating the nature of that struggle—the full range of sexual bewilderment, frustration, and longing (from the Who's “I Can't Explain” to Bonnie Raitt's “Nick of Time”). Moreover, the music gave them the simultaneously liberating and frightening realization that they possessed enormous power simply because they were young. These older men and women made their younger listeners feel admired by dedicating their craft to telling their stories.

The rock stars who prospered endorsed unconventional life choices, took huge professional and artistic risks, and acted out an unfiltered appetite for experience. They depicted the world as a place waiting to be explored and enjoyed rather than as a system of tests to pass or fail, whether it was the Beatles singing “Hey Jude,” the Who singing “Join Together,” or U2 doing “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.” For these rock figures, the challenge of building an original identity, rather than accepting a received identity predicated on the values of their parents, became a necessary life passage. These were all messages listeners wanted to hear. And they are messages very much in tune with the essential American ethos that celebrates individualism, personal courage, and the nerve to explore life's frontiers.

When Elvis Presley leapt onto the popular stage ten years after the end of World War II, shaking his hips and singing with a new gusto and tenderness about love, he shattered prevailing notions about masculinity and femininity so completely that they never recovered. In the space of a few short months in 1954–55, Presley set off a wave of psychosexual change that washed over the American consciousness, and has yet to ebb. No longer did John Wayne—“strong,” silent about his feelings (if he had any), and massively restrained about his sexuality—represent the American masculine ideal. Now women wanted to love Presley's new man, and men wanted to be like Presley—warm, sensual, and openly enthusiastic about sex.

Elvis wasn't just different from the male icons of the World War II generation that came before him. In Smiley Lewis's “One Night,” he adored a completely different kind of woman than Frank Sinatra ever had, and not just in more explicit terms. When these women answered his call, they responded with completely revised notions about the men they desired. Tina Turner had her first hit in 1960 with “A Fool in Love,” laying out women's answer to Presley's challenge in under four minutes as it etched a radical new idea of womanhood, retooling rock's formula (downtrodden lyrics sung to triumphant music) as an irrepressible feminist gauntlet. Her husband, Ike, cast her as front person to his Ike and Tina Turner Revue, but the act was subsumed by her charisma, and she commanded attention as a woman on a vastly different imaginative plane from her peers. (She beat Betty Friedan's
Feminine Mystique
to this punch by three years.) Together, Elvis and Tina became totems of all the new ideas about gender first expressed through rock.

Take girl groups, for example. “Leader of the Pack” (from 1964, by the Shangri-Las) fantasizes about completely different male qualities than those sung about by fifties stars like Brenda Lee and Connie Francis. And other girl groups of the early sixties, like the Shirelles and the Cookies and especially the Ronettes, took new stances not just in the kind of man they sought, but in how they presented themselves: they were women with desire, ambition, and an aggressive beat all their own, one that rang out with new seductive appeal to men (records like the Crystals' “Girls Can Tell” and Darlene Love's “Fine Fine Boy”).

*   *   *

My main argument about the impact of rock 'n' roll on our gender ideals has two parts. The first is that contrary to the fears of parents, educators, and politicians over the past fifty years, what Elvis and Tina set in motion had an overwhelmingly positive impact on its listeners. Rock 'n' roll helped baby boomers and later generations become better parents, better partners, better friends—probably even better citizens. And it did this by addressing these themes directly in song, and indirectly through new celebrity styles, both onstage and off.

The second part of my argument is that rock's sexual politics were way ahead of every other medium. As early as 1970, TV role models (like Mary Tyler Moore) paled in comparison to rock's (Joni Mitchell). Rock actually helped lead the culture toward a healthier, happier paradigm of male-female relations, one in which men can acknowledge, even enjoy, their emotions and feel confident enough to talk about them; one in which women can be self-confident and self-determining, as well as aggressive, angry, and independent; and one in which love is a work in progress that requires constant attention, humility, and a sense of humor. By exploring the difficulties of adult relationships in song after song, rock drove the culture toward many of these changes rather than merely recording them as they occurred.

To make this argument, I've selected a few key figures whose work dramatizes the changes wrought through popular music in the rock era: Elvis and Tina, girl groups, Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Joni Mitchell, Rosanne Cash, Chrissie Hynde, Deborah Harry, Bruce Springsteen, and, finally, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. These figures tell completely new stories about gender and romance than those their parents did, and their views intriguingly overlap to create a larger narrative about the gender upheavals that their listeners lived through.

Of course, there are quite a few rock figures who remain unexamined here: Elton John was the first to go from self-consciously asexual to bisexual in a notorious 1976
Rolling Stone
interview (and the release of
Blue Moves,
an early chink in his wall of hits), but his music reflected little of this. In fact, most pop stars associated with androgyny and gender tricks used such ploys more as marketing tools than as thematic subjects: David Bowie's androgyny did more for rock fashion than for gay rights; Boy George paraded around as rock's first bisexual (eunuch?), standing on Elton's shoulders, but failed to sustain a longer story line. It took Rod Stewart, by then a parody of a macho womanizer, singing “The Killing of Georgie” in 1977, for an explicitly gay story to hit the top forty.

From the female perspective, in a single song, 1967's “Respect,” Aretha Franklin funneled civil rights energy into a towering new feminist anthem. Janis Joplin updated the blues as an intensely female cry that confronted rock's lingering macho codes. Sinéad O'Connor's radically shaved head may have punctuated her Catholic dissent politics, but it never diminished her music's sex appeal. Rap and hip-hop culture has its own stories concerning absent fathers, tough-and-tender women like Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliot, the value of long-term relationships, and the ongoing scourge of misogyny, machismo, and homophobia. Elvis and Tina, however, built new rock monuments to Male and Female, and they still frame the way we think about gender ideals.

Ultimately, this book is about how rock influenced everybody's ideas about gender in the decades since Elvis and Tina first broke Hollywood's spell to enact what it means to be a man and a woman in the rock era. Rock's compressed, three-minute radio jolts expressed the fears, desires, obsessions, and thrills of ideal lovers, and in the process, changed our society in profound yet largely unrecognized ways. The story of rock has been told as a story about race; as a tale of intergenerational conflict; as a saga of class triumph and regional vitality. The story I want to tell is different: it's a story about how rock songs both bombastic and delicate rang out with new spins on tired macho stereotypes and emergent feminism; about how rock idealizes, chases, and romances the opposite sex; and about how new men and women stormed the world's stages, transforming gender ideas even more decisively than they changed attitudes toward race, class, and fashion.

CHAPTER 1

Are You Lonesome Tonight?

The rock 'n' roll revolution in our ideas about manhood begins—as so much in rock begins—with Elvis Presley. Presley released his first single, “That's All Right, Mama,” a cover of an Arthur Crudup blues side, in July of 1954. Just two months earlier, the Supreme Court had handed down the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision, a ruling that would begin to transform America's racial landscape. The two events have become symbolically linked: imagine the legal and emotional surge of change that rippled through the Bible Belt. Blacks and whites didn't even go to school together yet in the preintegrated South, making it doubly shocking for people to see Elvis swivel his hips and moan in direct imitation of male and female R&B shouters like Wynonie Harris and Big Mama Thornton. Initially, Presley's race stylings and class come-uppance upstaged his gender mingling.