Books

Books

OUTLAW BLUES - A BOOK OF ROCK MUSIC - BY PAUL WILLIAMS - DUTTON - $1.75 -191 PAGES

JIM MORRISON AND THE DOORS: AN UNAUTHORIZED BOOK - BY MIKE JAHN -GROSSETT AND DUNLAP -$1.00-95 PAGES

ROCK AND ROLL WILL STAND - EDITED BY GREIL MARCUS -BEACON PRESS - $2.95 - 182 PAGES

We all live lives driven by the energies of our music, rock and roll. It incites us, inspires us, and most of all, it accompanies us. We rap about it incessantly, we eat and sleep with it, we fuck and drink and smoke dope and party to it. We live with it; simply because it encompasses us so, we all want to get into the act and we all can. So some of us ball the rocksters and some of us make their clothes and some of us carry their equipment and some of us book them or manage them, some of us play their music on the radio. The really lucky ones, the ones it centers on (sometimes), are those who get to play it and sing it and write the songs. And some of us, because we can’t think of any other way to get into it, or because we just dig doing that, write about it.

We’ll never know enough about our music to satisfy us. Tons of words and mounds of stories, and it’s never done. Not one thing about it is ever done because it’s real and alive and it’s growing. And every minute it grabs hold of another one of us, sucking us into it’s rhythms, it has a newer, even more bizarre manifestation.

We’re crazed to know more and more about our music. Rock and roll maniacs love to know, need to know, what Jimmy Page thinks of Michael Bloomfield. Or stuff like that, anyhow. All of which is fine, if the proper perspective’s there; that these dudes are really just like us, as much as we love and respect them and their music. And as long as we, and they., know that, we want to know everything about rock.

That brings us, sort of, to these books. Paul Williams knows about all that because he was really first. He started Crawdaddy! And when there wasn’t anything else there was Crawdaddy! (Like a whole lot of other innovations, as soon as there was something else, Crawdaddy! ceased to exist.) The only relics left, save for whatever back issues are hoarded in hippie attics across America, are these essays, all written by Williams, in Outlaw Blues. They’re a real treat. All the joy that Paul Williams found in rock and roll is here. Even with his far too frequent (for me) pretensions of considering rock and roll an “art form”, Williams’ book is like a gift from the beyond.

The article on Satanic Majesties is fresh still, a flash; remembering what it was like to see that bizarre package, remembering hearing “2000 Man” and “She’s A Rainbow”. There’s a lot of calm deja vu here, calm because Paul Williams, even in his youthful enthusiasm, is the most clinically placid of rock and roll journalists. There’s no pre-planned nostalgia, though (c.f. the current “rock and roll” revival) and tha’s a good part of the joy of finding this book on someone’s shelf when there’s nothing else going on. (Which is how I first found it.) Williams’ writing was completely of the moment; it could only have come out of early 1966-67 psychedelia. Outlaw Blues captures the feeling of the era so well that you, almost assuredly won’t believe it til you’ve read it. And if you haven’t you must. (The book’s been out for a year.)

Unfortunately, any conscious attempt to recreate the feeling of a performer or group in a particular segment of space/time is well-nigh impossible, even with the high-speed techniques of recording. A book, of all media, is the slowest and it simply can’t come anywhere near to grabbing the feel of a high energy rock and roll band. Thus, Jim Morrison and the Doors by Mike Jahn fails totally. It doesn’t seem to capture the Doors at any particular point in their careers and the overview is simply too late to be of any real value. It’s not current even to The Soft Parade and, with Morrison Hotel upon us, the book pales even further.

The mcluhanist electrospeed with which rock moves is the doom of Jahn, the doom of the book and sooner or later the doom even of journalism (damn it). Or at least print journalism. The book is, stylistically, similar to what Norman Mailer has been attempting in Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, it’s but of infinitely inferior quality. It’s too short, points are all too obvious to be really taken seriously and, worst of all, it’s written in a manner which suggests that, though we may have improved our vocabularies in the last few years, we’re still about as perceptive as the readership of Sixteen, Apparently, Jahn doesn’t feel that we’ve matured at all. It might have something to do with the people he’s credited with writing for (the New York Times and Ingenue); they’re certainly respectable venues, too respectable to have anything to do with the people who make up the Doors audience.

Part of it is his seemingly disconnected perspective; Jahn fails to capture any of the frenzy that is the Doors (especially live). Where Williams, no matter how obscure, always captures the essence of the performer (probably through a proper choice of subject matter) Jahn just can’t seem to relate. One suspects that the worlds that Jahn and Jim Morrison live in aren’t quite congruent.

Paul Williams seems to have understood, perhaps intuitively, the essence of “medium is message” and, therefore, his writing is still relatable even two or three years later. But, since Mike Jahn doesn’t seem able to grasp the times at all, he’s only barely readable six months later.

His style is simply too stodgy to capture the Doors, too much like the Times or Ingenue. Better to have the rock critic from the Berkeley Tribe or Ann Arbor Argus write about the Doors; you need a high energy linguist who knows what that band is about, since they have similar lifestyles. Mike Jahn’s approach to the Doors is that of an alien, an intruder (and whether or not he is is largely irrelevant). The perceptions about Morrison and the crew that he so laboriously explicates are immediately obvious to those of us who live the music. It’s simply not directed to “Woodstock Nation”, it’s certainly not written on our terms and most of us, I think, are gonna be very bored and frustrated with it. If we read it, which I can’t really recommend. It’s just not worth it unless you’re as big a Doors freak as me. Even then you’ll probably want it as much for the graphics as the prose. (A major fault with the other two books is that they don’t have any pictures. A good picture is generally worth about two books on any rock and roll star.)

Rock and Roll Will Stand is disappointing on an entirely different level. Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone’s record review editor, is certainly an excellent rock journalist and his writing is the high-point -here. But ..it’s all so pointless.

Outlaw Blues has a raison d’etre -it’s an anthology of the premiere stylist of a certain kind of rock journalism. (Just like Richard Goldstein’s Greatest Hits (PrentisHall, $7.95) will be an important work, equal to the importance of what it’s author has been doing all these years. Just like anthologies of the work of Robert Christgau, Jon Landoo and Rudnick/Frawley would be invaluable.) And it is an excellent representation of Williams’ style, of the period in which he wrote (he seems to have retired or I don’t read the right papers) and, most importantly, is interesting as a piece of rock and roll trivia. An adjunct to any record collection.

Jim Morrison and the Doors, for all it’s shortcomings, is an attempt to understand and grasp the importance of the Doors. Even if it doesn’t succeed, you immediately sense the idea behind it. And it doesn’t really bore you, just frustrates the hell out of you because you know all those neat things that could be said about Morrison / Krieger/ Manzarek/Densmore/sex-deaththeatre-politics and the Doors. (Even if you’re not sure you could say them. It moved me to a deep depression.)

But Rock and Roll Will Stand is futile because it’s so purposeless. Like all those bands that are there just because it’s far-out to be a rock and roll band, it’s doomed from the start. It’s neither a catalogue of a particular genre nor an attempt to anthologize anything but a series of pretty undistinguished writings about rock music.

There’s nothing particularly interesting about a whole lot of the articles contained herein either. Sandy Darlington’s long series of articles is more boring than even the psychedelic obfustacation which Richard Meltzer used to pour, like a bizarre concoction of mescaline syrup, over his unsuspecting readers in the days of Crawdaddy!

Probably the heaviest thing in the book is Marvin Garson’s piece “Hoodlum Friends Outside” which doesn’t have all that much to.do with rock, except the music is an adjunct to understanding politics in the sixties/seventies.

Marcus’ “Who Put the Bomp”, though it suffers from the aforementioned fault of being consciously nostalgic, is an excellent piece of reminiscence, as is “Blind Steamer Trunk”, a quick piece of contemporary folklore. They’re concerned with rock and roll trivia, a sport which we all have engaged in. But the pretentious essays which make up the bulk of the book (it’s to be filed .under either Music or Sociology, the back cover says) coupled with the occasional “why rock is an art form” pseudoscholarly epics that make up the rest are enough to put Jann Wenner to sleep. Ifs kind of like rock and roll euthanasia.

There are certainly a whole lot of books remaining to be written about rock and roll, as a music and as a lifestyle. A number of anthologies could come out, to go along, with the Rolling Stone Books; things like a Crawdaddy! anthology (with the Richard Meltzer section dedicated to Deday) and a collection of John Sindaifs “Rock and Roll Dope” columns from the Fifth Estate would be infinitely further out than almost anything here.

Unfortunately, only one of these books is really worth owning; the other two serve their functions however. The Doors is great for people who just want pictures and words about that band (and don’t give a damn what they are. And Rock and Roll Will Stand is for those, I guess, who figure that they need everything about rock and roll no matter how turgid it is. At $2.95 they’ll have to want it real, real bad though.)

But by all means if you love rock and roll, you really need Outlaw Blues. Y ou owe it to yourself.

Dave Marsh