Looney Toons

Looney Toons

I don’t know exactly what’s going to fit in here this time. Maybe, since I’ve been reading Goldstein’s Greatest Hits, I can use him to explain why the Beatles broke up — or at least why it doesn’t matter:

“In substituting the studio conservatory for an audience, the Beatles have lost crucial rapport and that emptiness at the roots is what makes their new album a monologue. Nothing is real therein and nothing to get hung about.... What I worship about the Beatles is their forging of rock into what is real.... We still need the Beatles, not as cloistered composers but as companions. And they still need us, to teach them how to be real again.” Obviously that comes from a record review — of Abbey Road? Let It Be? No, Sergeant Pepper. And that’s the reason why the Beatles could break up now, when they’re no longer necessary. They’ve been , superfluous for three years, while everything around them has gotten more essential.

Sergeant Pepper opened a lot of doors for a lot of people but it also opened rock and roll’s true Pandora’s box — the idea that it could be an art-form. It’s been the downfall of everyone who’stried to prove it. It was Richard Goldstein’s downfall as a rock and roll writer (and, when he was at it, he was the very best there ever was) and it was the Beatles’ downfall as rock and roll people.

You can blame a lot of the bullshit we’ve suffered through in the last three years (musically and, one suspects, otherwise) on Sergeant Pepper, with that record, hippiedom started to take itself seriously. It became an art-form, or a culture, or something other than just whatever it was. And it’s our own introspection, it’s our own self-consciousness that inevitably fucks everything up and makes it a stone ideological drag. And so, while Richard Goldstein said that Pepper failed, because it was a flawed piece of art, I think it failed because it ever started out to be an artwork in the first place.

And I think it induced, as certainly as my smoking all these cigarettes, a form of cancer, precisely at the heart of where the Beatles lived. And it’s what eats us up, in so many ways, too. Too many of us couldn’t take rock and roll seriously until then, too many of us rejected it for something else until we could see it as an art-form and we hold that everything we do must be viewed and dissected and .analyzed, the motives searched out and the words dissected until it’s just fucking not worth talking to half the suspicious, righteous, self-paranoid, people one has to deal with.

And as long as I’ve gone this far, let me offer another example, much closer to my mind — the MC5. Who have decided that it is, indeed, very important to be good musicians. And have died. Because that is the death of rock and roll, and I sense a very real rot in our music; technique and content taking precedence over form, when the form is all there is. An artform is a hollow substance, waiting to be filled in with substance. And rock and roll’s form was (and is) all content, so when you try to put your fucked up, mentally-induced content into it, the form explodes in your face and you end up holding shards.

And that’s why the Beatles broke up kids and that’s why the next half dozen records you buy will probably be full of shit. That is also why people like the Rolling Stones or the Stooges are very necessary because they haven’t gotten to the point yet where they take themselves so seriously they forget that they’re playing rock and roll which is a doggerel form.

And it’s why I wrote this column, too, because I know that sometimes all of us take the whole thing way too seriously and maybe now when I go and listen to whatever I’ll listen to next I’ll know, enough to sense that it really doesn’t matter.

“He blew his mind out in a car He didn’t notice that the lights had changed

A crowd of people stood and stared They’d seen his face before Nobody was really sure If he was from the House of Lords” The other half of it is things like Kent which upset all of us exactly to the degree we hadn’t expected them. And should have. Kent was very predictable; the only miracle was that no one got murdered on all those trips to Washington.

Kent was (maybe) the beginning of the violent revolution in Amerika. Nixon and Agnew have now served notice that we’re bums, that we’re not at all important to them except as sheep and cattle to be .ledto their own peculiar forms of slaughter. And all we manage to do is walk up every Woodward Avenue in the world and mourn without really doing anything about it.

They know what to do and it’s sad that we haven’t caught on to their game as well as they’ve caught on to ours. If Agnew understands that our strongest weapon is media, if he understands that he can alienate all of us in order to gain our parents then we’d better start understanding that the lines are drawn. And that we gotta do something in a hurry.

In my weakest moments, I don’t think we will. In my most pessimistic hours, it doesn’t seem to matter. And in my most honest times, it seems like we’re all hooked up with each other and half of us want to be good Jews and get on the buses and just go and die and bitch and complain about it and do nothing.

Fuck man, we better get it together or we’ll lose. And that’s something that doesn’t occur to enough of us often enough. “They didn’t notice that the lights had changed”; we didn’t notice that the scene has changed and it’s ramming itself down our throats. All my barbed-wire pop-festival fantasies will probably come true in six months anyway. Fuck.

You’d be a lot further ahead to consider Jimi Hendrix’ “Machine Gun”, at this point, than Crosby Stills etc.’s “Woodstock”. And wake up to the fact that a mere belief in the-magic ain’t gonna set you free. Cause it’s Too late.

Dave Marsh