Loony Toons

THE MYTH OF THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

Rock and roll begain in a twilight zone, a pure thing swirling in out of a pretty pristine void. That it grew from blues and rhythm and blues, and that those were pretty much musically pure mediums, as well as being culturally pure, is well known. How it chanced to come again and again to the fucked up Paul Anka state of the late fifties and early seventies is another story.

When rock originated as a radio idea, it was done by disc jockeys who had freedom to choose their own music, who felt no commercial responsibility to do other than entertain. Alan Freed, for example, didn’t work on a station

with a “rock format” because that didn’t exist... there wasn’t anyone else around in radio who could conceive of such a show, let alone call it a “format”. It wasn’t a form, the music was a form — and the form of the show was to expose the music in a manner (witness the language the earliest jocks used) that had to do with the audience. Not talking down to the audience., as the later jocks did, but talking with them.

With the success of programs like Freeds, the rock format was developed and stylized. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough disc jockeys in the radio biz who understood the music (i.e., listened to it) and so anyone who had any superficial sense of what it was about could do a “rock format”.

The same thing happened to the music. Where Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry and the other early innovators developed a personal style that grew directly from their music, which was generally written by themselves or someone close to them (as was the case with Buddy Holly and Norman Petty) as the Biz took over, it developed its own S*T*A*R*S from its knowledge of rock. That it was superficial can be appreciated when we look at the prime examples of those it created in the early years — the Pat Boone/Connie Francis/Crewcut school of ripoffs, who did cover versions of

black stars hits and made them palatable (not to the masses of kids, but to white executives in the radio/music Biz).

If the Pat Boones and the Connie Francises weren’t bad enough, if they merely took the energy out of the music without totally devitalizing it, the next step was even worse; S*T*A*R*S began to emerge who were part of a great process of amalgamization. Bobby Vee stepped in with the Crickets when Buddy Holly died, because the Biz thought it could manufacture what Holly had been. It didn’t work.

But Tin Pan Alley did understand enough of the superficial so that it could manufacture enough readymades and parlay it into enough S*T*A*R*S to satisfy old, white radio dudes and thus make more and bigger S*T*A*R*S — just the way you could take the basic energy principles of a car like the Model T and parlay that into the gas-eating monster that is a Cadillac.

And thus entered the era of the Paul Ankas and the Bobby Rydells, the Annettes and the Fabians and the Frankie Avalons and all the rest. They didn’t ripoff their tunes directly from established black hits — they just combined Tin Pan Alley technique with a superficial understanding of the rudimental tenets of rock’n’roll songwriting and made those tunes into hits on the honky controlled stations and that made those stars into even bigger S*T*A*R*S.

So for a while the music died and a few years of teenagers were lost to the music. Not really though, because the younger ones were listening to the Beach Boys, for example, who spoke directly to their automobile/surfboard/drive-in interests or the older ones to people like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez or other folksingers who spoke to the politics and movements that they had become conscious of. But for the most part, that music didn’t get on the radio, except for one or two Beach Boys tracks from every album (not “Summertime Blues”, though, which they did on their very first album) which got released in singles. No Dylan though or any of the others.

It was a big shock to the Ed Sullivan Biz heads then, when the Beatles and the Stones and the rest of the British wave returned with rock’n’roll music to tantalize the innards of all of us. It didn’t surprise us half as much, though. We’d survived on Golden Oldies Weekends for too long to forget that once there were songs like “Roll Over Beethoven” — or at least the older ones of us had. The younger ones merely responded to the meat energy of it all without any sense of its roots, primarily because there wasn’t any real youth culture around conscious and proud enough of its roofs to talk and write about it to them.

The next logical step was to develop our own music which a number of people went right ahead and did. Primarily, they were older, were aware of rock’n’roll and the folk process and how the two went hand in hand. Dylan came out with the nightmarish world of Bringing It All Back Home which so confused most folkies that they just gave it up and jumped in on rock and roll. Dig what Dylan said; too, about that time — “I’m younger than that now.” Butterfield and Mitch - Ryder, most prominently among the Americans, revitalized soul music and gave it a gigantic push in the right direction (which, since we were traveling on a circle, forward and towards the beginnings at the same time) and the Lovin’ Spoonful summed it up the way Chuck Berry used to do so poignantly: “The magic’s in the music and the music’s in me.”

As more and more bands began getting farther and farther out, the Biz shyed farther and farther away from them, recouping its losses and wondering why it didn’t understand any longer. Most of the bands just went “Fuck it! We want total control and if we have to record for them, we’ll do it on our terms or not at all.” Probably because they, remembered what happened before — but reflecting a sort of collective youth culture unconscious even if they didn’t.

But the Biz, picking up on the superficial once again, also picked up on the culture where it was weakest — on younger bands, who either had never remembered any roots because they were too young or else weren’t really developed enough, artistically, to record. And some of them were really good too. But not having any roots in the music, they could only cop riffs from their heros, people like Clapton and Jagger and the Beatles and all the rest, at th e most superficial level. Thus most young white American bands really do love blues, but because they heard Eric Clapton do them, not

because it is a Black, emotional music that is summed up in the fingers of B. B. King.

But, as with Pat Boone and Connie Francis and the Crewcuts, that wasn’t so bad; some of it, just like some of the white copiers of the fifties, was good arid it was still essentially our people doing it. What we didn’t pick up on at the time (and this wasn’t so long ago, either) was that it was a killer symptom, a manifestation of a crazed control virus that would suck the life out of our music.

And, just like any sick person, a lot of people still don’t want to see the Paul Anka/Bobby Rydel phase we’re in now. It was bad enough when Three Dog Night were doing Crewcut-style Laura Nyro burns but now .1.

Now we have the 70s Paul Anka, in the person of Elton John, who has taken his music from Tin Pan Alley crossed with pseudo-Dylan lyricism and (at best) watered-down Beatles music when the Beatles aren’t farout (or even existant) anymore. All the readymades are there and Elton’s a smash. Even his stage show is remnants of the Who arid Jerry Lee Lewis and everyone knows that Little Richard’s been throwing parts of his clothing to admirers for years. But everyone doesn’t know, because everyone knowing is the first step in the cure.

(If further confirmation of Elton John’s status as Pud of the Year is necessary, take a look at his roots. A writer in Britain’s Tin Pan Alley for years, recorded on the most archaic label in the world (Uni, owned by Decca, owned by super-decadent old-time biz oriented MCA).

The only answer, though, is to educate people. As much as I tried to say where Grand Funk came from, in my GFRR review an issue back, it’s a necessary thing to know where Elton John and the like come from. But Elton himself presents a partial cure — he talks about old rock records.

What is needed is another rediscovery of the old jams, just the way the old jams were rediscovered ten years ago when the Stones were rapping about Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Fats Domino and Sam Cooke. And a killer sense that we WON’T LET IT happen again, once things are straightened around, the way they have to be. The music has to retreat from being pop for awhile, maybe, to heal but then it will Come back stronger than ever and with that much more history to learn from. Because this time we can not only emulate the killer jams of the 50s but the killer jams of the 60s, of the early British invasion. (Oh, how I wish for someone to re-cut “Gloria” or “Shakin’ All Over” or “Mystic Eyes” or “Here Come the Night” or a non-sissy version of “Satisfaction”!)

But the first step is to know that the iriusic is fucked up and to know that it is precisely the very pop scene that papers like this perpetuate in some degree that causes the virus. I hope that answers some of the letters about Grand Funk, I hope that explains articles like Craig Karpel’s Das Hip Kapital and I hope that sets a direction for my writing about the music this year.

Just one additional note:

Greil Marcus sent me a tape of Bob Dylan and the Hawks (the Band of today), done in ’65 and ’66, in England, which he suggested I write about here. I think I probably will next time out, because that’s exactly the kind of music that needs to be talked about. And maybe we can get into the heavy tale of how the new Bob Dylan is a symptom, roughly comparable to Bobby Vee trying to replace Buddy Holly.