History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (26 page)

Do it! No, don’t! Please, please, do it! No, no, no!

He brings you back into his drama, and you relax. He tells you he’s writing a letter; it’s stained with tears from his eyes. You can almost savor the coming repetition in the next verse: you can experience again something that you have already gotten through, stood up to, not run from. And then the levees break. Again there is the first “Why,” almost crooned. Then the second, exploding
as before. Then the next line, and you can feel the water rising around the singer’s legs, around yours. And then, even out of this maelstrom, the shock of a long, wordless scream, a cry of anguish so extreme you have to close your eyes in shame over witnessing it, because this man is now before you, begging you to save him. And then more, farther, deeper, the now long and tangled line “You know you left me—alone and so empty” twisted into a knot that can never be undone, left behind in the wreckage of the sing-er’s future.

“GUITAR DRAG” 2006 / 2000

Christian Marclay, “Guitar Drag” (Neon, 12-inch, 2006).

———
Guitar Drag
(Paula Cooper Gallery video, New York, 2000).

———
Ghost (I Don’t Live Today)
(Paula Cooper Gallery video, New York, 1985).

——— “Ghost (I Don’t Live Today)” (Eight & Zero 12-inch, 2007). Soundtrack to a 9 March 1985 performance.

———
Records
(Atavistic, 1997). A collection of 1981–89 samplings, compositions, performances, radio broadcasts, and distortions, including those made from collaged LPs. With the 1981
Guitar Drag
precursor “Phonodrum”: “This piece makes use of a
phonodrum,
a primitive homemade rhythm machine,” Marclay writes in the notes, before warming up and barreling off into somewhere in the middle of Monty Python’s “Architect Sketch.” “The mechanism consists of a short piece of guitar string taped to the tone arm as an extension of the needle, the string drags across a record or a wooden disc riddled with nails and bounces around. The vibrations are picked up by the needle and highly amplified.

The high pitch is made by using the little lever meant to switch needles from 33 to 78 RPM to scrape the record like a fingernail on a blackboard. I first used this device while playing with
The Bachelors, even,
a music/performance duo formed with guitarist Kurt Henry in 1979, when we were students at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. It was then that I started using records as musical instruments.”

“When a record skips”: Jan Estep, “Words and Music: inter-view with Christian Marclay,”
New Art Examiner,
September– October 2001, rpt. in Jennifer González, Kim Gordon, and Matthew Higgs, eds.,
Christian Marclay
(London: Phaidon, 2005), 116.

“Bands were being formed”: Scott Macaulay, “Interview with Christian Marclay,”
The Kitchen Turns Twenty: A Retrospective Anthology,
ed. Lee Morrissey (New York: The Kitchen, 1992), rpt. In González, Gordon, and Higgs,
Christian Marclay,
114–15.

“The record”: Claudia Gould, “christian Marclay” in
New Work for New Spaces
(Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1991), rpt. in González, Gordon, and Higgs,
Christian Marclay,
121.

“A projection”: Kim Gordon, “Kim Gordon in Conversation with Christian Marclay,” in González, Gordon, and Higgs,
Christian Marclay,
20.

Quotations from Christian Marclay in 2013 are from conversations with GM.

Th Faith Healers, “Everything, All at Once, Forever,” from
Imaginary Friend
(Too Pure, 1993). I’ve always loved the band’s story that they lost the e in their The to Thee Hypnotics in a poker game. Unless it was Thee Headcoats.

Colson Whitehead,
John Henry Days
(New York: Doubleday, 2001), 265.

John Phillips, notes to
Monterey International Pop Festival
(Rhino, 1992).

Jimi Hendrix, “I Don’t Live Today,” from
Are You Experienced
(Track, 1967).

John Lee Hooker, “John Henry,” from
The Unknown John Lee Hooker
(Flyright, 2000). Recorded in Detroit in 1949. “I don’t think anyone wants to hear that old stuff today,” Hooker said; among the songs he took from the air were “Jack o’ Diamonds,” “Two White Horses,” a version of “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” “Catfish Blues,” and “Rabbit on a Log.”

Jon Langford, “Lost in America,” from
Goldbrick
(ROIR, 2006).

Little Richard, “Keep A-Knockin’” (Specialty, 1957). Originally a fifty-seven-second fragment from the film
Mr. Rock ’n’ Roll
—where Mr. Rock ’n’ Roll was Alan Freed, not Little Richard—then looped by Richard’s label into a two-minute, twenty-second number 8 hit after he turned his back on sinful music to serve God.

Charles Wright, “Sun-Saddled, Coke-Copping, Bad-Boozing Blues,” from
Buffalo Yoga,
collected in
Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll,
ed. Jonathan Wells (New York: Pocket/MTV, 2006), 51.

American Hot Wax,
directed by Floyd Mutrux, written by John Kaye (Paramount, 1978). Kaye went on to write two searingly original Los Angeles noir novels,
Stars Screaming
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997) and, combining arcane early L.A. rock ’n’ roll 45s, the death of rockabilly singer Bobby Fuller, and the Manson Family,
The Dead Circus
(New York: Atlantic Monthly
Press, 2002). Regarding the
American Hot Wax
D.A.’s “Look at that filth” at the sight of black and white teenagers in the same place, there was, in Richard Cohen’s 11 November 2013 column in the
Washington Post,
a reminder that one can never afford to be smug about the supposed distance between the past and the present: “Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled—about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane Mccray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts—but not all—of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.” Or, presumably, his.

“TO KNOW HIM IS TO LOVE HIM” 1958 / 2006

Teddy Bears, “To Know Him Is to Love Him” (Era/Dore, 1958).

Phil Spector,
Back to Mono
(ABKCO, 1991). A four-CD set covering productions from “To Know Him Is to Love Him” to the Checkmates Ltd.’s promethean “Love Is All I Have to Give” in 1969. After mostly failed collaborations with the Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Dion, John Lennon, and the Ramones, Spector was out of the music business, a frightening legend, when in 2003 he was charged with murder in the death of Lana Clarkson. He claimed that it was an “accidental suicide” and that she “kissed the gun” he had displayed to her. Focusing often on interviews with a cool, rationally megalomaniacal Spector and on the summation by his attorney Linda Kenney Baden at Spector’s first trial, in 2007, Vikram
Jayanti’s 2009 documentary
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
can leave you almost certain that Spector did not kill Clarkson; after watching his attorneys present the forensic evidence which hung the jury 10–2 for conviction, you can see Spector bringing out a gun, showing it off, listening to Clarkson talk about how worthless her life had turned out to be, and then handing it to her:
Go ahead and kill yourself, I don’t care.
He was convicted in a second trial, in 2009, and in 2012 the Supreme Court refused to review the case.

Penguins, “Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine)” (DooTone, 1954). One of the first Los Angeles doo-wop singles, with Cleve Duncan singing over heavy, then skipping piano triplets as if he didn’t hear them: a record that has proved as enduring as anything else America has turned up over the past sixty years, including Martin Luther King’s address to the March on Washington, the legend of Sylvia Plath, or James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause.
The song lived as true a life as in any other place or time when in 1962 Philip Roth had it hover over the pages of his first novel,
Letting Go,
finally letting it play behind what might be the saddest line he ever wrote, and this time you could imagine Cleve Duncan hearing Roth’s young woman, someone, caught up in a kidnapping, for whom the song had been a receding promise that she would not always be poor, that she would not be a man’s property, that someone might be nice to her: “She could not believe that her good times were all gone.”

“There used to be”; “It’s like when somebody dies”: Jann Wenner, “Phil Spector: The Rolling Stone Interview,”
Rolling Stone,
1 November 1969, 23, 27.

“I didn’t really know”: Phil Spector, talk at the University of California at Berkeley, 1967.

Nik Cohn, “Phil Spector,” in
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll,
ed. Jim Miller (1976; New York: Random House, 1982), 159, 152.

Shangri-Las. See the their weirdly titled collection
Myrmidons of Melodrama
(RPM, 2002, releases from 1964 to 1966), and also “Wagner versus the Shangri-Las—The Ring Cycle vs. Leader of the Pack” (“Shangri-Las: About 3 minutes long sung by babes in cool ’60s clothes, pristine pop music with a producer ‘Shadow Morton’—father of Rockette, son of Jelly Roll—on lead motorcycle / Wagner: 13 hours long, sung by large women with metal bras on—combines opera / heavy metal / brass bands: the three worst sorts of music in the world”) in Colin B. Morton and Chuck Death,
Great Pop Things (
Portland, Ore.: Verse Chorus, 1998), 33.
The Red Bird Story
(Charly, 1991) is a four-CD set that mixes Shangri-Las recordings with singles by Bessie Banks (“Go Now”), the Ad-Libs (“The Boy from New York City”), the Dixie Cups (“Chapel of Love,” the number 1 hit that put the label on the map), the Jelly Beans (“He’s the Kind of Boy You Can’t Forget”), Evie Sands (“Take Me for a Little While”), the Tradewinds (“New York Is a Lonely Town”—“When you’re the only surfer boy around”), and actually issued 45s by Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry.

Far more illuminating is
Sophisticated Boom Boom: The Shadow Morton Story
(Ace, 2013), issued after Morton’s death in 2013; he was seventy-two. Along with extensive and satisfying notes by Mick Patrick, it collects Morton’s teenage singles, with his own thin lead singing, with the Markeys (“Hot Rod,” 1958) and the Lonely Ones (“I Want My Girl,” 1959), and his productions for a stunning, stripped down demo of the Shangri-Las’ “Remember” (with fourteen-year-old Billy Joel on piano); Janis Ian’s then-shocking interracial love story “Society’s Child,” from 1966; Vanilla Fudge’s
heroically turgid cover of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” from 1967; Iron Butterfly’s horrifyingly influential psychedelic travesty “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida,” from 1968; the New York Dolls’ cover of the Cadets’ 1956 “Stranded in the Jungle,” from 1974; and, from 1966, Morton’s own unreleased out-of-tune tone poem “Dressed in Black”—in which during a heartrendingly cynical spoken bridge, he all but confesses that his real ambition all along was less to make hit records than to become a Shangri-La himself. It was George Goldner who named him: “Before ‘Leader of the Pack’ came out,” Patrick quotes Morton, “I did my usual—I disappeared. I did the bars on Long Island, shot some pool . . . When Goldner heard the record, he was running with it, he had to put down the credits. I had been using several different names . . . Nobody knew where to find me. Goldner said, ‘Nobody knows anything about this kid. We don’t know where he comes from. We don’t know where he lives. He’s like a shadow. As a matter of fact, I’m going to put that down on the record.’ So he did, and I became Shadow Morton.”

In the obituary “Yeah, Well, I Hear He’s Bad . . . ” the journalist David Kamp recalled a conversation with Morton in the 1990s. “He kept talking about ‘the Ba-CAH-di’ that did him in . . . [He] seemed especially remorseful about his behavior towards Mary Weiss, the striking lead singer of the Shangri-Las; he said the Ba-CAH-di had made him do some things to her so terrible that he didn’t want to go into them”—to my mind, the kind of things George Goldner did to Arlene Smith;
DavidKamp.com
, 16 February 2013. Mary Weiss attended Morton’s memorial. “With George everything was a chapter,” she said afterward. “Now I close the book” (to GM). Shangri-La Mary Ann Ganser died in 1970 at twenty-two; her twin sister Marge Ganser died in 1996 at forty-eight.

George “Shadow” Morton, Jerry Leiber, and Mary Weiss on the Shangri-Las in “The Hitmakers” segment of
The Songmakers Collection,
directed by Morgan Neville (A&E, 2001).

“New York will never be the same”: Mary Weiss, in GM, Real Life Rock Top Ten,
Salon,
1 October 2001.

“She could not stand fame”: in GM, Real Life Rock Top Ten,
Believer,
October 2011, 50.

Amy Winehouse,
Back to Black
(Island/Republic, 2006, number 2).

——— “To Know Him Is to Love Him” (2006), collected on
At the BBC
(Island/Republic, 2012), with the Arena TV documentary
Amy Winehouse: The Day She Came to Dingle,
tracing Wine-house’s 2006 appearance at the Other Voices festival in the remote Irish town Dingle: with earnest interview footage throughout, a set of exquisite performances—Winehouse singing in a church, accompanied only by bass and guitar, tiny under her bouffant, dressed in black jeans, trainers, a low-cut sleeveless top, two face studs, and her tattoos.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go first to Steve Wasserman at Yale. We first met when he was a student in a class I was teaching at Berkeley (the last I would teach for almost thirty years). Soon he was in publishing, and I wrote for him when he was an op-ed editor at the
Los Angeles Times
and later when over many years he edited the
Los Angeles Times Book Review,
which he made into the best book publication in the country, and he is my editor now. At Yale I also thank John Donatich and Chris Rogers for their warmth and enthusiasm, copy editor Dan Heaton, Jay Cosgrove, Heather D’Auria, Brenda King, Ivan Lett, Jennifer Doerr, Sarah Patel, Sonia Shannon, Erica Hanson, and proofreader Jennie Kaufman. I miss the counsel of my late agent, Wendy Weil, and am deeply lucky to be able to work with Emily Forland, Marianne Merola, and Emma Patterson at Brandt and Hochman.