THE AGE OF ROCK, VOL. 2 -JONATHAN EISEN, ED. - RANDOM HOUSE VINTAGE - $2.95

It’s a prank. It’s also the best rock book ever published. The reason that’s so is because it isn’t a rock book at all but a very good book which happens to have something to do with music but not much. What has made most rock books dull has been that they have been about music and the freaky scene and the musicians and what they have been about music and the freaky scene and the musicians and what they do and the groupies who ball them and philosophy and shit like that. They have all treated rock. The Age of Rock (I) was a great book but it too was essentially a treatment, even though some of the writing in it took off on its own. It was all content.

Which isn’t to say the new volume is all form. It is merely that the form and the content have moved to a higher level, meant in both senses of the word. It is “about” rock and all that but it is not reportage, history, or analysis, the great triumverate of occasional fantastic head trips but mostly dullness. People like Abbie and Jerry and Vonnegut and Pyncheon and Brautigan and Escher have all influenced Eisen’s approach to his subjects matter, which means that The Age of Rock, while still anchoring itself in the linear print medium has taken off in terms of head trips possible from that medium. All the experimentation is in the writing, which is jes fine because anything else would have been distracting. It’s a fine book: everything fits.

It begins with something called “Mad Michael’s Song” which is a mad song written by Michael Rossman who is no rock freak at all but merely one of the most articulate revolutionaries of our age, one of the main moving forces in the Bay Area for the last seven years. It is a political song about our wretched time. It is beautiful. It is followed by the sheet music which is terrible. Rossman can’t write music. You begin to wonder about this book.

Then you hit Peter Stampfel’s ‘The Acquiring of Musical Instruments” one of the old pieces from Crawdaddy! when it was the best thing going in the country. Stampfel is in the Holy Modal Rounders which is cranking up again for another try. It is a memoir of his days with the band. It also incidentally takes up the concept of what is real. And being forced to learn something at gunpoint, and was there ever a gun. Very heavy.

Next is Walter Breen’s famous essay, “Apollo and Dionysus”, also from the early Crawdaddy! It is a tour through the two forces in music and tripping.

Shall I continue? The book is a trip itself, a great excursion through the collective mind as it applies itself to Rock. What he has done next, after this analytical narrative of sensitivity, depth and complexity, is to run a series of letters from the Sunday New Yaork Times by highschool music teachers explaining why they refuse to teach rock in school. The point is clear. But that’s not the fun. You can really get off on these people. We are so used to the new writing we have forgotten about the people who still condemn the new music in terms of Elvis’ “hip swinging.”

The problem with rock writing is that it has become merely another area, another subject to which to turn our attention. What Eisen’s new book does is to refocus our minds to the possibilities for change generated by the music itself. Not merely physical action but our whole posture toward life. Which is why it doesn’t make much sense to describe the articles to

you or even to dissect them analytically. It is the aesthetic of rock, as in Meltzer’s phrase, and Meltzer is amply represented in this volume.

Can anyone write about Meltzer’s stuff? Can anyone say what it is? If there are words, are they necessarily put together in normal subject/object sentences, and if you think this is all beside the point you should read this lunatic. Once you begin to fool around with the words, once you catch yourself struggling with the problem of thought expression, you are into the aesthetics of rock. Which is what The Age of Rock 2 is all about, which is

why it is important.

Though only if we let it be. There are lots of important books. They rarely catch our attention. Eisen is fortunate. His first book really became a standard of sorts. It was the rock book to buy, and still is.

Take a look at his second one. It will flip you out, if not the aesthetics, then the individual pieces themselves. The Bob Dylan interviews (he has a real one, an original neverbeforepublished which is great, and a fake one) are worth the price of admission alone.

Kathleen Westray