Fever (26 page)

By contrast, Lennon spun out of the Beatles raging at the pop gods with Phil Spector at the boards (on
Plastic Ono Band
), and Yoko Ono fueled his creative themes for the rest of his life. Lennon was explicitly on board with feminism as early as “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” back in 1971: “We make her paint her face and dance…” Whatever the real story was, Lennon was more at home in Yoko's avant-garde world than Linda seemed in McCartney's Wings lineup. Whether you bridled at Ono's pretensions or not, you had to admit their commitment to one another survived any number of superstar tantrums, failed pregnancies, an eighteen-month “lost weekend” of L.A. bingeing with Ono's hand-picked concubine, May Pang, and, finally, domestic stability and parenthood between 1975 and 1980. Lennon was shot dead by a “fan” while promoting his 1980 comeback,
Double Fantasy,
his first album devoted to rock parenthood, ideals that his earlier work could only point toward. If his craft hadn't quite caught up with his themes, he personified the reformed womanizer and wife beater reborn as the househusband whom feminists could only celebrate. The world grieved his assassination as “Woman” became a radio staple; Lennon's ultimate macho guy finally sounded humbled, subdued, and awed by the power of the womb. His middle-age persona was one very few rock stars have even hinted at since his death.

*   *   *

Rock couples came in two broad stripes: the doomed ideal and the damned. James Taylor and Carly Simon personified the golden singer-songwriter couple of the seventies, rock's Steve and Eydie. Taylor was already linked creatively with Carole King and Joni Mitchell, but the Simon hitch was of a piece with his East Coast pretensions: his family summered on Martha's Vineyard, her family was in publishing (Simon and Schuster). Apparently, Taylor's drug use interrupted the stable family life they both seemed to want, and his breakup song, “Her Town Too,” had more meat than their celebratory duet, “Mockingbird.” They were doomed, if not ideal.

The damned came in many forms. A key dance-card shuffle came from the seventies incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, which boasted two married couples at the center: Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, who joined up with the British blues-gone-pop outfit after a debut recording as a duo, and Christine and John McVie, the troupe's keyboardist and bassist. After the new lineup appeared on 1976's fluke hit
Fleetwood Mac,
both marriages crashed on the jagged rocks of sudden success. The follow-up,
Rumours,
was an irresistible smash about the spoils of divorce, telepathically cued to that era's divorce-happy culture. The relatively laid-back sound of hits like “Dreams,” “The Chain,” and “Go Your Own Way” mixed blithe resignation with an aura of cool, the only dignified way to march out onstage as a member of the world's most popular group with your former spouse. To some extent, their professional bonds overcame their personal turmoil well into reunion tours of the nineties and the naughts.

Rock's most successful duet act of the sixties, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell/Mary Wells, was black, completely professional, and imaginary, with irresistible numbers like “Your Precious Love,” “Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing,” and “Ain't No Mountain High Enough.” Gaye went on to marry his mentor Barry Gordy's daughter for a stormy, on-again, off-again relationship familiar to cocaine addicts. Perhaps his most telling act of manhood was the way he turned Gladys Knight's “Heard It Through the Grapevine” into a shocking display of male vulnerability, a shivering cry of cuckoldry worthy of John Updike.

There were plenty of other pairings and meltdowns in all genres to give the rock scene spice. The most aesthetically sublime was country rocker Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, who harmonized on numerous songs for his two solo albums (after leaving the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers): “Love Hurts” (the Boudleaux Bryant chestnut), “We'll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning,” and “Hearts on Fire.” Parsons overdosed in 1974, but Harris went on to enjoy a lengthy country career. Had Parsons lived, they might have been country rock's Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, or George Jones and Tammy Wynette (ideal country couples who made doomed and damned duets).

But few such rock acts existed. Delaney and Bonnie, an early-seventies couple act, roped in heavyweights Eric Clapton and George Harrison for their short-lived run, which revolved around a single hit (“Only You Know and I Know”) and a live show that stressed communal harmony. (In an odd sidebar, Clapton and Harrison remained friends despite loving the same woman, former model Patti Boyd Harrison, protagonist of both “Something” and “Layla.”) Nick Lowe and Carlene Carter produced an exhilarating recording of the old tune “Oh How Happy,” the Shades of Blue girl-group hit from 1966 (on Carter's
Blue Nun,
1981) before splitting in 1985. One of rock's most trenchant couple acts, Richard and Linda Thompson, created at least one masterpiece together,
Shoot Out the Lights,
about an intense love affair's private depths. They fell out on their 1984 tour behind that record, as though writing, recording, and then performing their intimacies was simply too much for honest romance to bear. Prince is famous for orchestrating the offbeat duet: with Scottish ersatz diva Sheena Easton (!) for “You Got the Look” on the otherwise skankified
Sign O' the Times,
and for touring with a human cyclone of a drummer like Sheila E., her tom-toms perched like accents to her cleavage. Of course, as with every other band member, he made sure to sit at her kit to show off how much more talented he was.

But Prince ultimately settled down to a far more normative home life than Michael Jackson (the white Prince). Jackson's Elvis Presley connection comes through his bizarre marriage to Lisa Marie, Elvis's daughter, in 1994, which was only one in a string of PR gambits to backfire. Jackson's story sets loose all kinds of gender riddles, conundrums, and creepy asides; he's beyond doomed, beyond damned, and inverts a few ideals long before he walks onstage. Greeting the world as Motown's boy wonder back in 1970, he had more rhythm and soul packed into his ten-year-old body than Diana Ross, the Motown siren who became his show-biz parent. Here was a kid who had absorbed all the soul produced in his lifetime and sang it back with a precocious sexual edge beyond his years. He was already expressing feelings most teens spend eons just getting acquainted with, and in the most direct rhythmic manner—without sounding as though he was in over his head. It was as if Frankie Lymon had come back to life with ten times the musical and business smarts. A song like “ABC” had supernatural overtones: it turned a spelling bee into a flirtation, then a celebration of horniness, and wound up on the dance floor with Jackson urging his partner to “shake it, shake it, baby, come on now!” This was an old idea in a new frame, a preteen parroting his elders' mating dance, and doing it better than most post-teens ever dreamt of. (The song even had a sneaky Phrygian-mode bass line to counter the hokey “A-B-C, 1-2-3” refrain.) Jackson's early solo bouts showed great promise (especially 1980's
Off the Wall
), but they paralleled increasingly distasteful plastic surgeries, presumably to emulate his idol and mentor, Diana Ross, and win points from Elizabeth Taylor's circle. When he finally crossed over huge in 1984 with
Thriller,
it was all most popsters could do to stifle snickers (music up: Nick Lowe's “Half a Boy and Half a Man”). An itinerant careerist, Jackson became known for picking the brains of the rich and famous whenever he could, which led to his following Paul McCartney's own advice and purchasing the Beatles' publishing catalog, alienating Sir Paul for the rest of his days. Just to keep everyone guessing, he covered “Come Together,” and brilliantly.

From then on, though, he became Wacko Jacko, a freak show that kept resetting a descending limbo bar of taste. Preoccupied with childhood, he built an enormous theme park, Neverland, with its own zoo of exotic animals. He declared himself the King of Pop. He bought the remains of the Elephant Man. He gave Lisa Marie Presley a famously awkward kiss at the 1994 MTV Awards later that year (boasting “They said it wouldn't last”) and divorced her soon after, in 1996, just after siring a child with a nurse named Deborah Rowe. He married Rowe, had a child with her, but they also divorced, in 1999. The Jackson-Presley marriage was seen as a public-relations gambit to counter allegations of pedophilia at his Neverland ranch (settled for $31 million out of court), which was quickly upstaged, first by O.J. Simpson's “alleged” double homicide and ultimately by the Catholic Church. Nobody knew what to make of the Rowe liaison, although Jackson felt compelled to assure everybody that the conception was “natural,” not “artificial insemination,” which was a bit like his sister LaToya insisting her
Playboy
spread was “tasteful.” Jackson kept right on plugging, and his antics seemed more and more desperate: parading around Manhattan one day in the summer of 2002 with a bullhorn, accusing his record company, Sony, of racism; deriding the paparazzi, then dangling his infant out of a hotel window in Germany. His one stable ally seemed to be Liz Taylor, who always came to his defense. (After all, that's what friends are for.) As one comic put it, “Who would have thought LaToya would turn out to be the
sane
one in that family?”

*   *   *

If Jackson was a pure product of pop gone crazy, punk pushed hard against gluttony and spun off false martyrs like discarded Popsicle sticks. Punk treated romance, like politics, with disdain, but it ponied up one of the better screen love stories with
Sid and Nancy
(1986), the Alex Cox film based on the express-train-to-hell junkie melodrama of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious and his biggest fan, New Jersey's Nancy Spungen. For a style with no patience for irony, the story lit up the screen with reverse pleasures: Sid (Gary Oldman) banging his head against a brick wall to express devotion; Nancy (played by Chloe Webb) cheering on Sid's squalid performance of “My Way” with guileless gush. Let it be said: while the Sex Pistols performed symbolic rock harakiri at the perfect moment, Vicious was punk in haircut only; his main thrust was self-destruction, but he didn't signify much beyond a lost junkie's soul. Moreover, given their mission, the band's lack of commercial success in America was a twisted triumph.

But Sid and Nancy's mystique would have unintended consequences for rock's biggest couple since John and Yoko: Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. Unfortunately, for both rock's better progressive tendencies and their own family's well-being, Cobain and Love's stretch as rock's most famous couple now seems nothing more than a pitiless interaction between two self-destructive heroin addicts who suddenly became famous just as they suddenly became parents. Cobain's suicide in early 1994 sealed his persona for the ages: the blistering-hot punk talent who was way too sensitive for either fame or the cruel industry it sprang from. But with Charles Cross's thoughtful biography,
Heavier Than Heaven
(2001), this pabulum can be laid to rest.

Cobain's ghost lives on in Love's court battles with his exbandmates from Nirvana, which, despite her band Hole's many breakthroughs, are platforms for her savvy sense of grunge widowhood. As
Rolling Stone
's Rob Sheffield put it after one of her industry tirades, “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you, and just because they're after you doesn't mean you're not stupid.”

*   *   *

Within weeks of his suicide on April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain had taken his place in the pantheon his mother had warned him about: “that stupid club” of dead rock stars. And Cobain's loss cast a shadow on the rest of pop culture. Everyone from fans to newspaper columnists to network commentators spewed pieties about today's price of fame. Neil Young, who had seen his share of waste, memorialized Cobain's anguished “sacrifice” in “Sleeps with Angels” and “Change Your Mind.”

Cobain's psychodrama stretched back to 1992, when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became punk's first bona fide smash. It carried the album
Nevermind
past triple platinum and kept right on selling well after his death. Led by Cobain, a dirty blond with a cackling voice that caught an epic exasperation, Nirvana's alienated thrash was festooned with catchy melodies. The success of “Teen Spirit” ridiculed the superficial styles that had dominated popular music since the mid-eighties. “Here we are now, entertain us,” went the refrain, casting its audience as zombies purchasing shock therapy (much the same way Pete Townshend's Tommy viewed his followers). The lyric was sarcasm on a stick; the sound was indignation drenched in hilarity.

But for Cobain, the whole process of becoming famous rubbed hard against punk's anticorporate integrity, even as his musicianship projected both knowhow and history. Since he made the simplistic equation that popularity meant selling out, and the matter was quickly out of his hands, he spoke as if it was a tragic fluke of fate that so many had responded to his music. Cobain seemed to fear that too much popularity might turn him into a freak, a grunge Michael Jackson. He wore a dress for a
Saturday Night Live
appearance simply to piss off any homophobes in his audience. During its heady 1992–1994 reign, Nirvana worked up an excitement in rock that had been missing since the glory days of the Clash ten years earlier. But behind every hope were rumors of despondency, an air of desperation that the music couldn't forestall. Cobain was in and out of drug rehab, and his daughter, Frances Bean, was conceived while Cobain and Love were still using.

Disabled by a chronic stomach ailment, Cobain's canceled shows earned him an unreliable professional reputation, which is akin to being labeled a drunkard in Russia. There was enough goodwill and cash changing hands to keep the machine churning, but Cobain took every opportunity to describe how much he hated stardom, how distanced he felt from listeners, and how the precious Seattle scene had been corrupted by unwelcome gate crashers and corporate raiders. Of course, through Cross's biography, we now know this was so much double-talk from a heroin user trying to change the subject.