OUR STORY BEGINS just after midnight, not so very long ago. The Dick Cavett Show is in full swing.

Seated on Cavett’s left is John Simon, The New York Critic. On Cavett’s right, in order of distance from him, are Little Richard, Rock and Roll Singer and Weirdo; Rita Moreno, Actress; and Erich Segal, Yale Professor of Classics and Author of Love Story. Miss,Moreno and Mr. Segal adored Love Story. Mr. Simon did not. Little Richard has not read it. ^

Cavett is finishing a commercial. Mr. Simon is mentally rehearsing his opening thrust against Mr. Segal, who is very nervous; Miss Moreno seems to be falling asleep. Little Richard is looking for an opening.

Mr.v Simon has attacked Mr. Segal. Mr. Segal attempts a reply but he is too nervous to be coherent. Mr. Simon attacks a Second time. Little Richard is about to jump out of his seat and jam his face in front of the camera but Mr. Simon beats him out. He attacks Mr. Segal again.

“NEGATIVE! NEGATIVE NEGATIVE NEGATIVE!” screams Mr. Segal. He and Simon are debating a fine point in the history of Greek tragedy, to which Mr. Simon has compared Love Story unfavorably.

‘“Neg-a-tive,’” muses Mr. Simon. “Does that mean ‘no’?”

Mr. Segal attempts, unsuccessfully, to ignore Mr. Simon’s conifempt for his odd patios, and claims that the critics were wrong about Aeschylus. He implies that Simon would have turned thumbs down on the Orestia. Backed by the' audience, which sounds like a Philadelphia baseball crowd that has somehow mistaken Mr. Simon for Richie Allen, Segal presses his advantage. Little Richard sits back in his chair, momentarily intimidated.

“MILLIONS OF PEOPLE were DEEPLY MOVED by my book,” cries Segal, forgetting to sit up straight and slumping in his chair until his body is near parallel with the floor. “AND IF ALL THOSE PEOPLE LIKED IT —” (Segal’s voice has now achieved a curious tremelo) ‘7 MUJST BE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT! ”

The effort has exhausted Segal and as he takes a deep breath Little Richard begins to rise from his seat. Again, Simon is too fast for him. Simon attempts to make Segal understand that he is amazed that anyone, especially Segal, takes this trash to be anything more than, well, trash.

“I have read it and re-read it many times,” counters Segal with great honesty. “I am always moved.”

“Mr. Segal.” says'Simon, having confused the bull with his cape and now moving in for the kill, “You had the choice of acting the knave or the fool. You have chosen the latter.”

Segal is stunned. Cavett is stunned. He calls for a commercial. Little Richard considers the situation.

The battle resumes. Segal has now slumped even lower in his chair, . if that is possible, and seems to be arguing with the ceiling. “You're' only a critic,” he says as if to Simon, “What have yoy ever written? What do you know about art? Never in the history of. . .”

“WHY, NEVER IN THE HISTOR Y!”

The time has come. Little Richard makes his move. Leaping from his seat, he takes the floor, arms waving, hair coming undone, eyes wild, mouth working. He advances on Segal, Cavett, and Simon, who cringe as one man. The camera cuts to a close-up of Segal, who looks miserable. Then to Simon, who is attempting to Compose the sort of bemused expression he would have if, say, someone were to defecate on the floor. Little Richard is audible off-camera, and then his face quickly filjs the screen.

“WHY, IN THE WHOLE HISTORY OF AAAAART! THAT’S RIGHT! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! WHAT DO YOU KNOW, MR. CRITIC? WHY WHEN THE CREEDENCE CLEARWATER PUT OUT WITH THEIR “TRAVELEN’ BAND” EVERBODY SAY WHEEEOOO BUT / KNOW IT CUZ THEY ONLY DOIN’ ‘LONG TALL SALLY’ JUST LIKE THE BEATLESANDTHESTONESANDTOMJONESANDELVIS—/ AM ALL OF IT, LITTLE RICHARD HIMSLEF, VERY TRULY THE GREATEST, THE HANDSOMEST, AND NOW TO YOU (to Segal, who appears to be on the floor) AND YOU (to Simon, who. looks to Cavett as if to say, really old man, this has been fun, but this, ah, fellow is becoming ia bit much, perhaps a commercial is in order?)/ HAVE WRITTEN A E(OOK, MYSELF, I AM A WRITER, I HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK AND IT’S CALLED -

“HE GOT WHAT HE WANTED BUT HE LOST WHAT HE HAD! THAT’S IT! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! HE GOT WHAT HE WANTED BUT HE LOST WHAT HE HAD! THE STORY OF MY LIFE. CAN YOU DIG IT? THAT’S MY BOY LITTLE RICHARD, SURE IS. OO MAH SOUL!”

Little Richard flies back to his chair and slams down into it. “WHEEEEEE-OO! OOO MAH SOUL. OO mah soul...”

Little Richard, Prince of Fools, sits with the unclothed emperors of taste, oblivious to their bitter stares, savoring his moment. He is Little Richard. Who are they? Who. will remember Erich Segal, Dick Cavett, John Simon? Who will care? Ah, but Little Richard, Little Richard Himself! Now there is a man who matters. He knows how to rock.

Not much is left of the show. They keep on with it (even Mr. Richard, as Cavett calls him, like a fifties rock and roller trying for a follow-up smash): John Simon, Nasty Critic; Dick Cavett, Ringmaster; Erich Segal, Bestseller; and Little Richard, Weirdo. And yet. ..In the whole history of aaart... He ought to know, He’s the only artist on the set. The only one who broke rules, created a form, the only one who gave shape to the vitality that wailed silently in each of us until he found a voice for it. It’s Little Richard.

He is the' rock, the jive bomber, the noise-maker. “Keep A-Knockin’” broke off the radio over a decade ago and shuffled the polite manners of white youth just as the Weirdo on the Cavett Show busted up the bitter dialogues of the Nature of Art. Fine, fine, superfine.

But is it so neat as that? Is he anything more than a hired-out freak in a fright wig? Busting it up to earn his pay? Maybe not, but he still puts on a great show. He is a fantasy of the crudest rebellion, and on this night, anyway, he won.

Listening to his records now, it’s a marvel how he ever did it. Ba-dump-a.-dump-a-dump-a-dump-a-dump-a Dump-ba-Bump-Bump/Ba-dump -a-dump-a-dump-a-dump-a-dump-a Dump-ba-Bump-Bump dump-dump-dump BAAAAAAAAAA! KEEP A-KNOCKIN’ ’CUZ YOU CAIN’T COME INI KEEP A-KNOCKING’ ’CUZ YOU.. . He had his demon, his crazy muse. We got a piece of it. Peter Guralnick understands it as well as anyone: “We took Little Richard’s outlandish screams for a welcome relief, and the nonsense lyrics of Chuck Berry and Carl Perkings seemed to express an implicit view of the world each of us secretly shared.” That’s it. But whatabout the rest of the story? “Now the secret is out,” wrote Guralnick, “and everyone is covering up.”

The secret was the rock, a frantic parade of novelty and sound, put together by strange men and boys who dumped little musical events on us for over a decade, until the disorganized series of events formed itself into something Dave Marsh calls our aesthetic myth. As finally revealed by the Beatles, the Stones, and a lot of other people — basically a set of foreigners whose very strangeness of dress, hair, manner and speech provided the essential novelty necessary to a new pop explosion — this myth of ours came to be understood as fundamentally more valuable and more powerful than anyone this side of Chuck Berry had ever suspected it might be. We began to understand it as a kind of culturally secret parallel history for a community that recognized itself as such only through the rock. We began to see that the sound of the bye-gone Fifties had been a means to a sense of freedom and a testing ground for values, that Top 40 had given us an idea of the choices that we made and that we made and that were being made for us.

In the first years of the Sixties, these aesthetics were all but invisible, and for the most part the choices offered were almost (but not quite) too thin to bother with. By 1965, the choices available seemed the very definition of our condition. Now, as the pattern of those aesthetics dissolves, as events close in, as only the myth, mostly as a memory, remains, the sense of the choices offered by the rock may seem thinner than ever, if it is there at all. '

The sound never had power over the events that invade our lives, no matter what was claimed for it; at best, it gave us a common sense of how to deal with them. Which is to say: the rock is the sound of our times, but can the sound keep up with the times? In Guralnick’s brilliant formulation, the music of the Fifties meant “an implicit view of the world each of us secretly shared.” Now, if we’te not careful, we may end up with an implicit view of the world each of us secretly knows is fake. That is the contradiction between the hard invasion of events and the need of the rock to parallel events without imitating them, in a way that gives us an idea of the novelty in a situation while still linking it to a special tradition, the tradition of our own dim aesthetic myth of the sound of the rock, speaking to the presence of events without speaking their language. That aesthetic task takes place at the margins of our social condition, and since those margins are themselves hard to place, pulling it off is difficult and faking it is easy. The job is to articulate what many know but which virtually no one knows how to.talk about. The Lovin’ Spoonful did this with “Do You Believe In Magic” — they celebrated the value of rock and roll and perfectly defined that value in the fact that the rock was secret and couldn’t^ be shared. “It’s like trying to tell a stranger ’bout roqk and roll.” Everyone suddenly realized that was exactly what our link to the music meant — a birthright. And of course, none of Sebastian’s insight would have meant a damn if the music that brought us those words wasn’t as good as rock and roll can ever be — if the song didn’t prove the truth of its words with its music. But it did, and Sebastian’s song became a definition that helped make sense out of our cultural isolation and thereby strengthened-it. A bit later a few artists began to parody the love of the rock by recording “We Need A Whole Lot More of Jesus and a Lot Less Rock and Roll.” I don’t want to make any specious causative arguments, but oddly enough, that’s exactly what we got. Take the stage, James Taylor.

•Like I said, the. invasion of events and the need of the rock to parallel them without imitating them can be easily faked. The present trend to identify the solution to our social and cultural confusion with country comforts and homey religion is faking at the margins of our situation — a translation of common isolation into private withdrawal. “You got your god, I got mine,” goes next year’s hit, “And we’ll get it aH together in the summer time.” Backed up by drums and two acoustic guitars, no doubt. The rock has to stay at the edge of reality, not go the other way-. One job of the critic today is find out what in the rock is hitching up to that edgy margin, the way Dylan did, and then try to pull the audience along for the ride. He has to try to undermine what’s fake.

The music, if it is to matter, has to stake out its own ground without leaving the world, and begin to tell secrets about the world, those half-heard phrases of sound that turn your head in the middle of the day. The assimilation oFrock and roll into the general mass culture makes that difficult, because if rock and roll is in the public domain, which it mostly is now — the taste of the audience for James Taylor coincides with Time magazine’s taste — then “secrets” are worthless because there is nothing secret about the medium itself and its automatic value is merely commonplace. The rock, when it matters, is a means toward isolation and identity, a delightful buffer against integration into the cultural and social mainstream of the society. But now, rock and roll is mainstream music, and that mainstream assimilation has brought not power but dissipation. Our connection with the music is dissolving because to a good degree the rock was a buffer against what it has become and it cannot very well act as a buffer against itself.

The audience knows this, whether or not they have the words for it (we need a song for that). That is one of the reasons why the audience has fragmented into a whole set of cults that no longer relate to each other except as consumers; it’s an attempt to preserve some of the excitement of the music as a cultural secret. But that, of course, leaves out something that was crucial to Guralniek’s idea: the “each of us.” “An implicit view of the world that each of us secretly shared.” If there is no secret, if the rock itself is not a secret, and if we as a group that once dated ourselves by its calendar cannot keep hold of it, then there is no sense of a view of the world accessible to each of us.*

If we lose that, if the secret is out and we cover it up, then our parallel history dissolves into the events that were to be paralleled. Rock and roll becomes culturally synonymous with its own aesthetic opposition. The rock goes underground. The job of the critic today is to demonstrate the Value of the rock that still matters; to ferret out the parallel history of the rock when most of rock and roll is unable to live up to its ambitions. >

THE AUDIENCE

Police siren, flashing light I wonder who went down tonight?

Two lines quicken finally set the pace. They gather up all the tension of the first years of the Seventies and shoot it back like a bullet.

*“View of the world” does not mean some game plan for The Future Society. “I Get Around” is a view of the world and so is “Up Around the Bend.” It is a matter of hearing a song you know is being heard by millions like you all over the country / and responding: “Yeah. That matters.”

ARE YOU ON THE BEAM? Up to tty© minute news, every hour on the hour. This is the rock, brief and to the point. Without it you’d miss the point. ARE YOU ON THE BEAM?

I’m on the Randy Newman beam, myself. -

Me, I’ll take the Zep’s version anytime.

I mean, Captain Beefheaxt. Can you dig it?

No.

Whither the death of rock?

\ I like the Band, they’re real.

Buncha old men,gimme Grand Funk.

We are all rock. But is there anj> more «//-rock and roll music, directly and implicitly for-each of us, the way Chuck Berry, the Beatles, and “Satisfaction” were «//-rock and roll music? Now “Satisfaction” broke in the summer of ’65 and within a year was voted the greatest sqng of all time* in local polls all over the country. Those polls constituted something of an election, both in terms of the kind of statement communities of youth wanted to make and in terms of the choices they made about the form of their music. Somehow, those choices weren’t siniply made on the basis of “my favorite song,” Rather, thousands of us, with our postcards and pencils, realized that something was at stake. We had to make a decision. A^hatwas “the greatest song”? What song was good enough, strong enough, to carry that weight? “Satisfaction” was it and it carried the weight admirably. But the important thing is that odd fact of unanimity. Such a community choice — a choice that did not simply prove the prior existence of a community but also began to establish that community by demonstrating it, by revealihg things held in common — would not be possible today, because the kind of all-rock around which the community gathered, that it seized, is not accessible to us today, since as a musical community we have fragmented into little groups of age, taste, politics, geography, and self-conscious sophistication. Those things that divide us are clearer and more immediate than whatever it plight be that could link us together. There may be a song as good as “Satisfaction,” that rocks with the same power and that delivers the same edgy honest novelty of the present moment, but we can’t find it if there is; as a dissolving community, we no longer want to listen toreach other’s records.

*The first ten years of parallel history

The recent Search for a Stiperstar, which was about as successful as the Laos Invasion, demonstrates our inarticulate, uneasiness about and distaste for the fragmentation of the community the “Satisfaction” chpice revealed, because we remember that in the Sixties it was the presence of superstars — who emerged long before we needed a word for them — that showed us there were common things around which we could organize our search for values, excitement, cultural identity, and for the rock as a thing in itself — things wftich, when you add them all up, made it possible for us to maintain that cultural isolation from the mainstream of American life. Such an impulse was easy to focus: to Initiate an outsider into our scheme of things was to initiate him into the. Beatles; not the Beatles as legitimate music, but the Beatles as the Beatles — as noise,^ humor, fun, sound, bite, tradition, hair, and cynicism. Dylan, on the other hand, was indiot pursuit of the frontier*; the challenge was to keep up with him. He was exploring depths and contradictions inherent in the choices we were beginning to make.* Those contradictions were mostly hidden from us and for a time he took it upon himself to bring them out in the open. The glamour and i the glory of his music and his singing brought a sense of exhilaration and risk to his definition of what was at'stake in life in the middle Sixties. And since he was always ahead of us by a year or so, that simple time-lapse of experience sustained the direct impact of his music months and years after we first encountered it. His records maintained the power to re-interpret situations into which we stumbled or choices that we purposefully made. The Stones, for their part, fought for a place on the rough edge and preserved the sense that there was something in this music that could never be anything but ours — no one else would want it.

*With “Sign on the Window,” effective within the context of his last few records, he still is.

In time of course, the Beatles won acceptance in every nook and cranny of taste, and thus became less valuable to us. Dylan’s refusal of his own status undermined our urge to reflect off his vision, or that of anyone else. The role 'of the Stones was undercut by the falling off from the Beatles and Dylan and by the disorganization of their own career; they seem to have understood this, and fought back with one last grab for the brass ring, which is to say, with one last affirmation that there was a brass ring to grab for.

They got rid of Brian Jones, and replaced him; he died, and they dealt publically with his death. They set themselves up as the greatest rock and roll band in the world, and even if that claim seemed valid mostly by default, we mostly went along with the idea. They set out on a great tour of America, where, for reasons that will have to wait on a later piece, they blew their chance and presided over the dissolution of the community that had become known to itself partly through its common choice of the Stones as spokesmen for it. They hadn’t yet written the music that could give that community the chance to re-group, but at Altamont, they helped make possible the announcement that whether or not they or anyone else wrote the music there would probably be no community to receive it.

Altamont was an announcement, not the cause of a whole new chain of events; it made it possible for us to see things that were already taking place on our own streets and gave us a frame of reference which we could use to begin to understand what was going on. Among other things, Altamont was a formal and definitive announcement of the fact that we no longer credit our music or each other with the value that once seemed so obvious and necessary. That the value is no longer obvious is clear enough, but the necessity is still hidden in the catastrophe. The Search for a Superstar was in one sense an attempt to put Altamont back together again. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work. Joe Cocker and Elton John remained private tastes like everyone else.

The idea that anything is the music had a claim on each of us seemed quite unworkable, and it was; because if we accorded the music less value, and thereby debilitated our own flimsy sense of community and affection, of things shared and held in common, it was, clearly enough, because the music was less valuable. While we still have rock and roll music, we are missing the rock — rock and roll as a secret and common experience — and what we have is music accessible to everyone and not particularly valuable to anyone. When that happens we stop being an audience and become consumers, and we begin to judge the value of the rock in terms of its musicianship and the sound quality of the recordings.

With the loss of value, which was based on a sense of things held in common linked with a sense of exclusion, .comes fragmentation; with fragmentation comes a sense of loss. Since we understand that the essence of our sense of things held in common has its source in the rock, when that sense begins to fade we turn to the music and conclude that as music it’s no longer any good. Thereby the Death of Rock.

But this, of course, is nonsense. The music is in great shape. In fact, there is a resurgence of vitality and diversity at the moment that may, in its fragmented way, rival that of the middle Sixties.* This may be, as Bob Christgau argues, because the fragmentation of the audience, and its institutionalization into groups of consumers with specialized tastes which an industry can exploit and on which it can depend, releases the artist from the pressure of appealing to a vast community and allows him to orient himself commercially toward a smaller group that he knows will sustain him.* Since the audience for rock and roll has expanded so enormously, even such a fragmentary group may deliver a million dollars worth of album sales. But sales have little to do with the efficacy of the spirit of a community; Dylan’s albums had a far greater impact in the middle Sixties than they do now even though he wasn’t selling nearly as many.

*And because of that fragmentation, so much of it may pass each of us by that in a few years we will have an invisible storehouse of the rock just waiting to be discovered, forgotten parallel history that might serve as a new set of signposts not unjike those of the Fifties, many of which were discovered and used only in retrospect anyway. But I doubt if it’ll work out so neatly.

So the audience is bigger * the music is good, and still seems to matter far less. It’s not that there is anything wrong with the “music”; rather, there’s something wrong with its value. It is no longer ours; it is simple there.

Secrets eventually clear themselves up and get told. Norman O. Brown put it this way: “Societies originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret; and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged.”

Secrets are protective of vulnerable things, and the secret of any medium that is basically part of mass culture is vulnerable to assimilation by the mass. Rock and roll on the cover of Life with an article by Frank Zappa inside expands the market, debilitates the spirit of the audience, and fragments the audience, which then re-groups into smaller audiences each with their own trivial secret. Their secrets are trivial because the rock is also POP.

POP is energy publically organized around art. POP means that no matter how devoted the fan, listening to rock and roll with the solitary solemnity of a man pouring over the Dead Sea Scrolls will always lack what may be the most important thing of all: the POP sense of being where the action is. POP is a sense that someone else is missing something, but you’re not, and when it really works, it’s a sense that someone else is missing something, but we’re not. That is the spirit that lifted the Fifties rockers into fame, that made the Beatles matter, and like it or not, that makes Grand Funk a bigger draw than any other group in the country. There is virtually nothing POP about Van Morrison, Randy Newman, Rod Stewart, Jesus Christ Superstar, or Jesse Winchester, good as they all might be. POP at its most powerful links up to and takes advantage of the whole series of media accessible to music, drawing that part of the audience that matters to it and driving the rest away, making that crucial division. The music is so fragmented today that Grand Funk can’t even get on the radio and the POP action of 1971 is all but invisible to the old kind of eyesight. But POP is novelty that is one step ahead of the times. The audience cults of the present always seem to be part of last year, no matter how new they are. Their secrets don’t involve a sense of movement, but the stolidity of belief. The Laura Nyro cult knows that their girl is the most beautiful person who ever lived; the Melanie cult knows that their girl is the most beautiful person who ever lived. But Who cares? Both of them are boring.

*Let’s not forget this great scheme of parallel history ultimately comes down to profit, and the maintenance of enough space between the economic considerations of the industry to keep the men who run it off guard, so they’ll try anything. When they can really predict what we want, the jig’s up.

When the power of POP emerges, the risk of assimilation is right out front, since that emergence always challenges the whole mass audience. Eventually assimilation takes place, and something new is needed. We are in that position now, and we are all impatient. The secret that emerged in the POP dynamo of the Fifties was the discovery of a generation by itself, and its demand for, its own voice and its own language. When POP had burned itself out, that discovery was forgotten and the language no longer had anything interesting to say. The eruption of the Sixties made the same essential discovery, but intensified it beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. That intensification brought the exhaustion of the present, and inevitably, the discovery is going to be made again. The problem is that it may not happen in time — we are at the age, if we are over twenty, when fragmentation may tend to institutionalize itself. When POP comes charging back, we may not want it. It may not be our generation that is re-discovered; instead of maintaining ourselves as an audience ready for change and for the identity of POP, we may be off amusing ourself with our privacy when Quinn the Eskimo comes looking for a welcoming party.

Audience cults structure privacy out of what was once ruled by the thrill of POP, and they maintain rock and roll as music. Hopefully, that won’t really be enough to satisfy. The sense of loss of the POP commonality of which any audience cult is an objectification may well intrude as a reminder of the day-to-day enthusiasm we once knew as a musical community, and that sense of loss may be the thing that sustains the need for POP, for the rock on our terms. Today we have a set of highly individualized artists, each with a special vision and a special sense of music and image. There’s just gotta be one for each of us; problem is, there’s not one for all of us. If we wanted to introduce an outsider into our scheme of things, is there anything we could use?

In the last year or so probably more good records have been issued than in any such period in recent memory: Van Morrison’sMoondance, His Band and the Street Choir, and his single “Domino”; Randy Newman’s 12 Songs; Get Yer Ya-Yas Out; Don’t Crush That Dwarf by the Firesign Theatre; Rod Stewart’s Gasoline Alley; Keep On Truckin’ by the Frut; John Cale’s Vintage Violence, Nico’s Desertshore, and the Velvet Underground’s Loaded; Hoboken Saturday Night by the Insect Trust; the Rubber Dubber’s Band Live at the Hollywood Bowl; Stage Fright; Hollywood Dream by Thunderclap Newman; McCartney (and in spite of “Another Day,” the B-side, “Oh Woman, Oh Why?,” is just great); 1+1+1=4 by the Sir Douglas Quintet; Gene Vincent’s album with Sir Doug’s band;. The Rill Thing by Little Richard; The Hawk, another smoothie from bad old Ronnie Hawkins; Total Destruction to Your Mind by Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams; Workingman’s Dead; Nick Gravenites’ music on Be a Brother; Kiln House by Fleetwood Mac, which includes their classic unreleased single, “This Is the Rock”; Captain Beefheart’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby; Layla by Clapton; Johnny Winter And; Little Feat; Jesse Winchester; Pearl; The J. Geils Band; Our Daily Gift by Savage Rose; and a truly great album from Joy of Cooking. Creedence' Clearwater spun good music all over the place and firmly maintained their position as the most important American band. The Jackson Five conquered the world in one day with one record; there are still lots of people who will tell you “I Want You Back” is the greatest single ever made. They followed that with the middling “ABC” and the fantastic “The Love You Save,” and joined a host of others who made their mark on Top 40: Neil Diamond with “Cracklin’ Rosie,” B.B. King with “The Thrill Is Gone,” the Who with “Summertime Blues,” Hot Legs’ “Neanderthal Man” (certainly the most interesting work in its genre since “A Whiter Shade of Pale”), Christie with “Yellow River,” The Guess Who with “Share the Land,” The Supreme’s “Stone Love,” Linda Ronstadt’s “Long Long Time,” The Poppy Family’s “What Went Wrong,” Shocking Blue with “Never Marry a Railroad Man,” the Kinks’ “Lola,” Alice Cooper’s current “I’m Eighteen,” and maybe best of all, Creedence Clearwater with “Up Around the Bend,” the most wonderful single since “One Fine Day.” George 'Harrison dumped three good records on the market, John Lennon gave us an album that showcased what may be the finest rock and roll singing ever recorded (Yoko’s wasn’t bad either), and Bob Dylan came back from Self Portrait with New Morning.

None of these records enter the list because of mere technical excellence or because of their status as good music defined in strictly musical terms. They enter the list, obviously, because I liked them, and I liked them because ofitheir vitality, their ambition to do something new, their refusal of the dispirited exhaustion that most everyone who was supposed to listen to these records seemed to feel.

But there was still plenty missing. As far as I could tell — and I looked — the only time the release of any of these records constituted a more than fragmentary event, something around which a community that once had a fragile sense of itself could organize its excitement or through which it could interpret its predicament, was that week when “I Want You Back,” came out, if it even happened then. Our music, good as it is, hardly served as the necessary substance of conversation, movement, jive—a common affection—for a vital community that was once exposed to itself by “School Day,” Meet the Beatles, ox Rubber Soul, or that organized itself, like a town lining up behind a winning team, around Blonde on Blonde or even the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.”

It’s certainly possible that the only place in rock and roll that still flaunts the rock, that still moves with the excitement and that still has the power to maintain the values of exclusive possession that have made this music matter for fifteen years is the place now occupied by Grand Funk Railroad, who sold ten million (1.0,000,000) records last year and are now arguably the biggest group in the world, even though 1) Their music is not played on FM radio 2) Their music is not played on AM radio 3) Thier records are panned or ignored by the rock press 4) Many people who care about rock and roll don’t listen to them 5) Some people who care about rock and roll have never heard of them. This band, and their audience, now have possession of a music that connot for the moment be shared with the rock and roll audience as such.* Because it can’t be shared it is secret, and powerful. Grand Funk is not merely fragmenting the audience, like most everyone else; they may be dividing it. Not only are they big enough to do that, but they seem to be speaking directly to a new pop audience that is fast breathing down the neck of the old one and that may make the old one irrelevant. “[This group] has got something its competitors don’t have,” said Terry Knight recently. “You have to go to people like Presley, the Beatles, the Stones and Sinatra to find it. Grand Funk says something to its audinece that no other rock group says today; It is saying to its audience that ‘We are part of you. We are your voice.”’

The crucial point, it seems to me, is not that Grand Funk is the only rock group that says it is a part of its audience, but that they are the only big group who can say that and get people to believe them. The people who believe it are not the same old people, either. Mutter “shuck” at your peril.

It isn’t that rock and roll critics and their peers don’t like this music, though they don’t; they can’t listen to it. When they put it down, they are acting out the roles once played by archtypal rock and roll parents when, fifteen years ago, they threw Little Richard 45s in the trash can. But Grand Funk is rock and roll, proof that rock and roll is bigger than we are; the sound of the city as THE SOUND OF THE CITY. Their music has what matters to sound as sound: noise, anger, comradeship, and rebellion. It is inarticulate rebellion, because the Grand Funk audience is inarticulate; they aren’t looking for answers, they’re looking for confirmation.

The music and' the presence of Grand Funk confirms that rebellion and makes it concrete. You can own a piece of it; you can go see it. Most importantly, it can’t be co-opted or seized by the rest of the audience, just as, for a time, rock and roll couldn’t be co-opted or seized by the rest of the country. This music is the possession of teenagers who want something of their own; the fact that what they’ve got is scorned by the critics and the people they speak for can do nothing but heighten the sense of delight in being separate and selfcontained, bound together by a sense of common and exclusive experience.

But if it’s rebellion they want, why don’t they listen to the Stones? Or Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and “Ohio,” or “Woodstock,” or “Almost Cut My. Hair”? Grand Funk’s audience won’t bother to tell you, and they might not be able to. Telling them to listen to “Salt of the Earth” would be like telling a grape striker to read Marx in the original German. Not only would it have no meaning for him, it’s not what matters.

* And by definition certainly can’t be shared with anyone else.

With the strike, and a leader with whom he can identify, who can suggest possibilities inherent in him that he has never really considered, the striker has something of his own, but which at the same time links him to other men, in the community of the striked It’s not simply a matter of better pay or job security; the bonds that are forged between him and the other men in the strike as they try something new give him s sense of identity and inarticulate purpose that he never had before, that he does not completely understand; but that he wants to preserve. When the strike is won and he goes back to work with better pay and job security, he feels a sense of loss. He feels cut off from the men who ones'seemed so naturally to be his comrades. He could not have acted without them, and they could not have acted without hjm. Now he can act without them, and he possesses that thing he has dreamed about: the economic security necessary to his private life: The goals of the strike have been met, but the strike, which was to have been only a means to those goals, now has lost goals of its own. The striker is no longer part of something larger than himself, that made him a man different from those who merely watched the battles he fought; he is a man with a job.

A Grand Funk concert sets up, defines, invites and entertains a community which" forms itself around that event. The “goal” is to get off—and in the mystery of the rock, you get off on what’s yours. A Grand Funk concert is exclusive. Only certain people want to get in. They know who they are, too. Fuck that critic shit, man, siddown. This is the best thing going, and not only that, this is the biggest group in the world, and I [And here’s the POP] am in the same room.

That exclusiveness, like that of the rock itself, is vulnerable. When the critics begin to move into the hall, or if the band bends to the critics and makes “music,” Grand Funk will be through. They may sell more records, but they won’t matter. The kid who fought his way in and stood in' line for Live Album will no longer be part of an audience; he’ll be a consumer. There will be that sense of loss. The audience that once defined itself by the concerts Grand Funk gave will fragment, just as the audience that once defined itself by the Beatles has fragmented. Grand Funk will be accessible to everyone, but no one will care.

Well, ok, now you know how to get rid of .Grand Funk.* But how do we get out of the trouble we ’re in, those of us who love the rock but find ourselves stuck on the margins of POP? What’s left over for those of us who want something else, but can’t be satisfied with music that lacks the force to move out of an audience cult to challenge the whole audience to a test of nerve?

There may be sopie possibilities. Recently Bob Christgau wrote a column ip which he detailed the current pop malaise, and suggested with a finbe sense of pop reversal, that the Beatles might yet be the ones to get us out of the mess we’re in. The Beatles, as I’ve said, lost their kick when they became what the interviewers at the Hard Day’s Night press conference wanted them to be. When they could no longer be obnoxious, outrageous adolescents they opened their arms to the whole world and declared their love for all creation. By making it possible for everyone to love them they made it possible for us to ignore them.

Paulie is now Nasty Paul, and the creepiness of his recent activities makes it impossible to take his riice-Nellie music seriously (when Ringo takes the stand against him, you know it must be true). I can’t imagine feeling strongly one way or the other about Father George; he’s far too serious to take seriously and far too good a music-maker to really dislike. Ringo remains Ringo: And then there’s John.

If you think back on his last few years as a rock and roller, as opposed to his last few years as a' failed social phenomenon, you find a remarkable toughness to his best work, something stronger than almost anything else in rock. Think of “I’m So Tired,” which may be his greatest song of anger and desperation, a work far more effective than the “ok-boys-I’m-gonna-do-my-primal-scream” codas of the new album; “Yer Blues,” which I love for the line, “Feel so suicidal/Even hate my rock and roll” the same way I love Sebastian’s line in “Do You Believe In Magic,” and which I love even more for its music, which tries to escape from that fear by rocking out; “Revolution Number 9,” which, as John said at the time, makes hash out of “Revplution”; “Come Together*’ (at the Toronto Pop Festival?); “I Want You/She’s So Heavy,” which, fronting the musicale of Abbey Road, served as an achor for that album; “Cold Turkey,” “Instant Karma,” the glorious “Don’t Let Me Down,” which is, almost Lennon’s “Like a Rolling Stone”; and finally, the new album, pure rock in structure, pure fad in lyrics most of the time, with singing that can shrivel the heart (no one’s voice breaks like John’s does on “God,” and no one in rock and roll has ever sung better than he does on that song’s last lines), and occasionally, as with “Well Well Well,” a song that proves that John Lennon always sees through, his own messages even when he’s in the process of dishing them out. The fad vanishes; John Lennon rocks.

*As if that were something that ought ter be done. The argument against Grand Funk is essentially an art-argument, that comes out of a claim that rock and roll should be art, and a conviction that Art Is Good For''You. Rock and roll, however, is noise, fun, and sound, before it is anything else. Grand Funk may not be art but they are certainly rock and roll. No one has ever proved that un-art is bad for you; as Pauline Kael argues, trash can give us an appetite for art, which is, in fact, precisely what rock and roll does. Recently Captain Beefheart played to hard-core Grand Funk audiences in places like Wilkes-Barre and Ft. Lauderdale, and you know what? Those kids didn’t have the slightest idea of who he was, and they thought he was just great.

Grand Funk Railroad, who sold 10 million records last year and are now debateably the biggest group in the world, even though

1) Their music is not played on FM radio.

2) Their music is not played on AM radio.

3) Their records are panned or ignored by the rock press.

4) Many people who care about rock and roll don't listen to them.

5) Some people who care about rock and roll have never heard of them.

Underneath whatever he chooses as this year’s Answer there remains a fundamentally angry man, and beneath that man is an artist who wants to make a tougher record -than “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” who, as John himself once put it, “has these fucking songs to write.” His anger ultimately leaves him uncomfortable with the solutions he chooses, and the artist in him ultimately refuese to pretend that any of those solutions can change him. I think it would be silly to take the Arthur Janov “Primal Scream” routine any more seriously than the Maharishi, and I’d be surprised if in the long run Lennon fails to see them both as part of a process that will continue long after both of them are forgotten. Lennon is stuck: he is Lennon. The man who emerges on the new album is irritating, angry, and obnoxious, even to the point, unthinkable for a Beatle, of engaging the pure bad taste of “Mummy’s Dead.” But the pure bad taste of “Mummy’s Dead” is no doubt truer' than the earlier version of the same song, “Julia” — bad taste is liberating, sometimes. John is now in a position where he is putting people off, alienating them, coming on too strong — and he remains the one great rocker we have. He is, at his best, the best. With his stunning interview in Rolling Stone, he emerges as a pop star who is willing to challenge his own audience for their legitimacy, and he simultaneously slips out of the grasp of the great mass audience that learned to “love” the Beatles.

Elvis was an obnoxious threat to “parents,” as were the Stones, and the Beatles in their early days. But “parents” are no longer the issue by a long,shot. LennPn is now making music and statements that may well be obnoxious to us, and he is rasing a question as to what part of the audience will want to stay with him. Furthermore, outside 6f Grand Funk (who may be leading their new rock and roll audience to places where they as a band will no longer be able to deliver what their audience wants), John Lennon is the only rock star who is big enough, both in terms of the market he automatically commands and in terms of the affection we feel for him, to divide the rock audience instead of merely fragmenting it. By dividing the audience he might preserve it as something more than a market; he might set the stage for a relentlessly , tough new music that is emotionally difficult and cruelly self-critical, a music athat gives the lie to the self-conscious celebrations of current rock and roll and that simultaneously taunts and insults that part of the audience that clings to them.

I am not speaking here of Lennon’s recent pyschological lyrics. The last thing we need is for a whole set of musicians to go into therapy in order to publically ana profitably regurgitate their childhoods (though we will probably get some of that). I am talking about the hard edge that has always lurked somewhere in Lennon’s music, the edge that now seems to have come to the surface as a foundation for his action as an artist and as a public figure. Some musicians may understand the real impulse of his new music and find themselves challenged by it; they may be drawn into a new music, a new rock and roll, that is not so much simply there as it is on the attack: against sentiment, against, in the end, that part of the audience that resists it.

Eric Burdon saw the Sixties transition in these terms; in his number, “The Story of Bo Diddle^,” he saw his band and others like it consciously destroying the music of Bobby Vee. The job of the new rock would not be so much to destroy today’s music as to make most of it irrelevant. Lennon’s album is not really good enough to do that, and one man, no matter how good, can’t do it alone. Lennon first has to make the other beatles irrelevant, and I think he is on the way to doing that. The superiority he assumes when he speaks of Paul or Ringo or George 4s not only obnoxious, irritating, and hard to take, it’s real, and he is proving it with his music. In time, he and a few others may be ready for the rest — the audience along with the musicians.

Such a fantasy of a,new rock and roll js, to say the least, nothing to Count on. And while it may be the most intriguing possibility, there are other matters that may give us an idea of what, in a vastly different way, the rock has to learn to say.

THE POLITICS

Police siren, flashing light I wonder who went down tonight?

Those lines have something that matters to the Seventies. They might be a place to lean against and a place to push off from, a stance that makes some sense of a repetitious apocalyptic mood that grows out of terror and a desire to fight. Those lines might be the beginnings of a way to carry yourself through the decade, just as these lines

You can do anything That you wanta do But uh-uh honey Lay offa them shoes Don’t you Step on my blue suede shoes

were a stance and an idea of action for a much earlier, simpler time. ' “This is what we really [wanted] to say,” wrote Michael Lydon. Well, it isn’t what we really want to say anymore. We want to say something else. There are various sources available for something to say, but it is the rock that can bring the force of commonality to our language; because rock and roll, in terms of media and technology, is immediate and accessible, and because even with out sophisticating and our fragmentation, rock and roll is spmething we dig, for its noise, its irresponsibility, and its fun — we are more inclined to trust its sound and whatever comes with it than we are to trust anything else. Verbally re-creating the sound in situational conversation, the right words snagged onto the best beat, thrown into chords and half-hidden in noise, sung not too clearly, words that "eventually move out of their song as a musical phrase representing the sound itself, taking force from the illusionary power of music as such, not as words for a slogan, but a phrase out of the sound capable of being dumped on or inserted into all sorts of situations that_by their reception of metaphor become linked to on^ another and are made coherent as shared experience — this might be the repeating announcement of a fragmenting community that wants to ask for the measure of its own predicament and that might discover it in the found politics of the rock.

.. .“Well Well Well/' a song that proves that John Lennon always sees through his own messages even when he's in the process of dishing them out. The fad vanishes; John Lennon rocks.

The seventies are here and we want to know how to live in them; we have to grasp, quick enough for action, the personality of a new decade.

Among the contenders for oracle is Charles Reich, “The Quiet One” of. Yale’s Gold Dust Twins, offering The Greening of America as a sort of Politics of Love Story, and there are many takers for his proclamation of a community whose" thought need go no farther than taking itself for granted. The urge toward optimism of those who accept his puerile vision is a product of scary events for which we never prepared ourselves: Kent State, Jackson State, Altamont, the Marin Shoot-out. Bringing the War Home necessarily meant bringing it horne to us, but the urge toward community that might conceivably have sustained such action announced its own failure one day on a California dragstrip. The failure of that community seems to be leading directly toward a privacy that pretends to fraternity. The wish for fraternity, however, is real, and it probably cannot be given up without a rationale that can make its loss invisible. Reich provides that rationale that can make its loss invisible. Reich provides that rationale by equating the perception of a goal — and a questionable goal at that — with its accomplishment. His theory is to reality what Love Story is to love. The former may be more attractive than the latter, because they represent something near the opposite of our real condition, and that condition is not a pleasant one. ’ V

For one of the legacies bestowed by the Sixties on the Seventies is an enormous burden of unfinished politics, and that burden has been seized by the" government even as it has been abandoned by those who once found themselves politicized. “ ‘Youth revolution,’ my ass” wrote a friend of mine once, “we’ll all have cancer and rheumatism be ford we see the end of it.” Youth, given a sense of its own identity, has a capacity to focus rebellion, but that rebellion can be subverted by an impatience that is no less youthful; the de-politicization for which Reich’s ideas are a rationale is to some degree a matter of impatience: if action will not bring the goal, one still cannot admit the goal is lost; therefore the goal will come by itself. Therefore it is for us only to wait, knowing we are fit to receive it. But the message of “Quinn the Eskimo,” of , course, is that Quinn never comes. Reich argues a very weird sort of optimism that is contradicted, by the very reasons that give rise to it. Politics, however, will take place whether we like it or not. The danger is that we may learn to like it.

Our new decade begins with ,a widening war, a legitimation of the betrayal of the blacks, a persistent amputation of the Bill of Rights, and with imprisonment, trials, and the possibilities of execution. In California, Angela Davis faces the gas chamber, along with Ruchell Magee, George Jackson, and other inmates of the California prisons who are charged with murdering their keepers. In Pennsylvania, Catholic militants grouped around the imprisoned Berrigan Brothers face life in prison. The Seattle Seven face a year for contempt, and after that another trial on a Federal riot rap for a demonstration that took place the day after the Chicago Seven were convicted. Another seven in Seattle face Federal felony convictions for a demonstration organized to protest last year’s invasion of Cambodia. The Chicago Seven, free on appeal, still face five years. Pun Plamondon and John Sinclair are on trial for conspiracy in Michigan. All across the country, Black Panthers face trap-set charge of conspiracy and attempted murder. In New Haven, Bobby Seale ^nd Erica Huggins are fighting to stay out of the electric chair. And, somewhere in America, the Weathermen, many doubly indicted for federal crimes, remain at large. They will not leave the country, much as their audience wishes they would; their disappearance into a youthful underground has emerged as not so much a defensive move as an offensive one; it becomes clear why they have no taste for exile. Occasionally, they act, flaunting the ability of the government to catch them and the ability of their abandoned “own side” to dismiss them. They are read out of the movement, read out of the official youth culture, and’read out of the American tradition. Still, they will not go away, and their latest communication, New Morning-Changing Weather, makes their presence all the more real.*

The Weathermen continue to exist at a point of tension in American life that they themselves have brought into being. They occupy a phantom middle ground in America, pursued by' the government and denounced by those who oppose those in pursuit [but who may very well not oppose the pursuit itself]. Someday, one of these days, the government mqy begin to catch the WeathermerfPerhaps some will shoot it out, and die. Others may be taken, tried, and sent away to prison, either for contempt of court or for those offenses of which they have been accused.

Their trials may not receive the attention granted to those of Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, or the Chicago Seven. We may be tired of trials by then; the Weathermen will most certainly seem to be guilty, if not of those offenses with which they will be charged, then of others so much like them it will hardly seem to matter. The likely illegality of the laws under which they will be prosecuted will matter less than it has before, because the Weathermen will be bad risks for the courts no less than for us. And finally, and most disgustingly, we may come to see them as fools who deserve no better than to be ignored and put away, as blind rebels who stubbornly refused the dispensation offered bw Reich, and who thus could never grasp the wholesome idea that everything was going to work out fine anyway: rebels who will be punished by the government for their crimes and by us for their stubbornness. When the government begins to move in, when the trap that is set right between Nixon and Reich is sprung, it will no doubt be time to find out what it is we really have to say. The chances are good we won’t have the words for that.

Police siren, flashing light V I wonder who went down tonight?

Those lines matter now, and they will matter even more in the coming years. If we celebrate the snake-oil optimism that is now on the market, those lines, far from being any statement of value or contingency, will be instead our reminder of the action that proceeded without us. The fraternity to which our privacy pretends will be made hollow by those lines.

. But of course, that will be true only if we hear them. Chances are we won’t; we don’t all listen, to the Band. And perhaps one of .the reasons we don’t W why we don’t have to — is that those lines that seem to carry so much weight are buried in an unremarkable song that by itself can make no real claim on us.

The problem here is that rock and roll is out of touch with its own context, ,

THE SHAPE I’M IN

Those lines ^ to enforce the possibilities implicit in them — belong on a hit single, or at the very least on the finest track of an album that none of us can really afford to ignore.*1 The Band, who play those lines, dropped them onto the wrong side of Stage Fright, an album with one good side, one great rock and roll song, and one good hook line that makes the listener pay attention. The one good side — the second one — begins with the one great song with the one good hook line: “The Shape I’m In.” The question, finally, is not what the rock means, but how it works, and how it works on us. Tom Smucker, one of the best writers who ever Set his hand to rock and roll, sent me a, letter a year ago, and he gives a better sense of why we try to answer those questions than I can:

*Ohe has to wonder if that communication would have been issued if Bob Dylan hadn’t come out with a fine new album with an appropriate title. In an odd sense, the Weathermen may understand the relationship between art and politics in the same way this article does. It may not be so much a matter of Bernardine Dohrn ripping off some of Bob Dylan’s popularity in order to shore up her politics as it is a matter of the album and the communication reinforcing each other, sharing a sense of pop time that is translated into a sense of evenju,

*Which, since I’ve already more or less said there aren’t any of those at the moment, means “on a hit single.” On something that everybody wants to talk about, something you can’t really get away from, like you can’t get away from Love Story and you coukhrt get away from “Hound Dog” or “I Want You Back.”

“The Shape I’m In” should be one of the classic singles, a natural point of demarcation, a focus for new definitions, an event of pure sound like “Hound Dog,” “Chantilly Lace,” “Louie, Louie,” or “Satisfaction.” All of them verbally ask for a little more than they can give; that is, they ask questions they can’t really answer. All of them deliver the rock; they are sound before they are anything else, and that sound — strong, powerful, and novel — forces the impression that the song can give answers, or be taken for one. Songs of this order structure the day as they are heard, making the listener aware of his own predicament, which only the song may have made intelligible to him.

Records of this sort give us an idea of what’s at stake in the present moment. Take “Hound Dog,” for one, when it mattered most: when it came out. The song took some of its power from the fact that it was threatening to “destroy” popular music as we knew it, and we dug that, but for a moment, try to rehearse the record simply in terms of song and listener. There you are, moping around, pissed off at someone, with no way to express it. You’re too polite, too reserved. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, because . .. well, because you’ve heard its bad to hurt someone’s feelings. Which leaves you with your own. There’s a song on the radio: “You treat me so mean, Eileen ...” Yeah, right, she treats you so mean. But where does that leave you? Treated mean by Eileen, that’s where. You need a voice for your emotions, you’ve gotta get them out of the box they’re in. You tell yourself it doesn’t really matter, and then suddenly the DJ finishes his commercial and —

YOU AIN’T NOTHIN’ BUT A HOUN’ DOG YOU AIN’T NOTHIN’ BUT A HOUN’ DOG YOU AIN’T NOTHIN’ BUT A HOUN’ DOG YOU AIN’T NO FRIEND A’ MINE!

— there it is. You find out you can be rough, hard, impolite, crude, and honest. The force of the stunning guitar that cuts the song into quarters makes it seem that much more real. The record lets you cherish your anger, brings you in touch with a part of yourself that you had no words for. And that’s the gift of the rock.

With “The Shape I’m In” all of this is virtually beside the point. Those lines that might matter so much to the Seventies are not in this song, they’re in another one, probably written by the same man, sung by another, gasping for air in the wrong tune. And anyway, “The Shape I’m In” was not the hit the Band’s still looking for. It wasn’t any kind, of hit. It’s just another album track.

Stage Fright seems mostly characterized by musical and thematic variety, as opposed to both Music From Big Pink and The Band. On the first album the group as a whole asserted and proved their unique musical and vocal identity, paid their debt to and acknowledged support from Dylan, and began to explore themes that were confusing, weird, ironic and ultimately compelling. There was sex on the album, but it wasn’t the usual adolescent variety. It was difficult, like sex on Dylan albums, but somehow more direct. On the second record their music had a more controlled face to it. The wild exhuberance and fundamental disdain for lyrics that highlighted “Chest Fever” was organized into the careful construction and easy-to-hear cadence of “Look Out Cleveland.” This made sense: with that second album, the Band, and Robbie Robertson in particular, set out to make a whole series of statements — or perhaps situational definitions — about the possibilities and risks of American life, about the last echoes of the frontier tradition, of the adventure that ultimately turns into defeat: Stagecoach leading inexorably to Monte Walsh. Literally, the Band toured America, racially, sexually, historically, and mythically, dropping place names as the songs rolled by; and, as was perhaps necessary, they ended the album with a magnificent, chilling song that defined the disappearance of the very style of life that had given most of the previous situations of the record their meaning. Instead of falling into the conventional trap of attempting td fit the “meaning” of each song into an appropriate genre of music, they blithely set the whole affair right in the middle of their own music, which emerged as more coherent and effective than any simple “style” ever could have. There was some truth to that slogan, “The Band, Playing The Music. ” They brought an American music into being, and it was so so mature and so sure of itself that attempts to trace its roots always ended in a dead end, no matter what one said about the Carter Family or Jerry Lee Lewis or James Burton or Bo Diddley. The Band had brough the strains of the music we were learning to understand as our own together, but only they could use it. They had a lot of weight to carry.

Stage Fright almost had to be an anti-climax for a band that had established its musical identity and made an important statement about why their sense of that identity was valuable to them. Instead of extending the music they had created, the Band stayed within old limits, and strayed only to what was familiar to us from other sources: pop, hard rock, even a waltz. In other words, they dismissed any awesome sense of possibility and simply set out to make a solid, entertaining record.

Though they pretty much succeeded in doing that, which is more than you can say for a lot of groups, they still had the problem of the expectations of the audience for something more. So the anti-climax of Stage Fright matters both in terms of the seamlessness of the album and the general indifference with which it was received by most of the audience, including the critics. The release of their first album was perhaps the major musical event, as purely musical novelty, of the last few years, and the release of the second was a confirmation and an extension of that original excitement, something which organized the support the Band was beginning to receive. With Stage Fright the Band apparently took an opportunity to do a number of things they hadn’t time to do before: fool around, take their commercial success for granted instead of worrying about preserving it, and go after that big hit single that had, frustratingly, completely eluded them. They made a very commercial album, in anyone’s terms but theirs, with numerous cuts that should have looked good on a 45 (“Strawberry Wine,” “Just Another Whistle Stop,” “The Shape I’m In”). Their singing completely reversed the strange out-of-time ensemble shouts that made Big Pink so marvelous, so hard to take for granted, and so rich (you could always hear something new in “The Weight” or half-a dozen other songs). Instead, numbers were given over to solo voices most of the time, and when all three Band vocalists were called into action, the result was a queer trade-off between Manuel, Danko, and Helm, which could either produce a rather humorous kind of fake drama, as on “Daniel and the Sacred Harp,” or something so stiff it fell flat on its collective throat, as in “The Rumor.”

The basic result of all this was to make the Band easier to listen to, less outrageous, and less fun.* The music was clear-cut instead of inviting, and while the album was hardly a musical failure, it was clearly a failure of context, of rock and roll as such. This gave people pretty much what they expected; and while Sgt. Pepper did as much, in that case no one had any idea how much fun what they expected could be. State Fright, unlike Sgt. Pepper, didn’t deepen expectations, but simply confirmed them. The Band, faced with an anti-climax, made an anti-climax album, submitting to the obvious context of their development instead of somehow setting up their own context (say by making a whole album of devastating hard rock), as Dylan had almost always done. Unlike Dylan, they haven’t learned how to manipulate the excitement of their audience, which is ok, since almost no one else has either.

So, we could file Stage Fright away and wait for the next one, or not wait for the next one, depending on how we feel about it. If we do that, though, we submit to the context as much as the Band. Part of our job as an audience, now that the context of rock and roll is so seamless, is to break through the obvious to discover what really matters in our music. The contextual blandness of Stage Fright as a whole obscures music that might matter, by robbing the album of its necessity, which those first two records surely had. You had to listen to the Band, even if you didn’t like them. Otherwise, you knew you were missing something. To this writer, what matters here is not so much the great music or the great song but the great song that wasn’t quite written. The impulses of this album are scattered, but some of them are crucial impulses, and worth looking for.

There are a bunch of songs here. Some of them lean toward parody of Band themes and of styles that were really not that broad to begin with: Helm again attempting to sound like an eighty year-old codger on “Medicine Show,” or Robertson contributing another incredibly meaningful topper to close the album, “The Rumor,” except that “The Rumor” turns out to be vastly meaningless and has pieces of Van Morrison thrown in to boot (what a great name for a band, though). On the other hand, some of it is terrific: “The Shape I’m In,” with Robbie playing the toughest guitar he’s ever cared to exhibit on a Band album, and “Daniel and the' Sacred Harp,” to name just two. Danko finally steps out to make clear his own contribution to the personality of the Band’s music, working with Helm and Manuel to find a new kind of Motown beat for the clean music of the rest of the band. The drumming on “The Shape I’m In,” along with that weird extended throat rasp they use to punctuate the song, constantly lifts the number out of the 11'su.al patterns of hard rock and tosses the listener into something beautifully novel. The humor of “Daniel” may be the best thing about it, especially on ah album where the humor is either pretty thin or too obvious to be any fun. Here’s this great religious song (the only God-song you can really dig, instead of “appreciate”), all about miracles and sin and retribution and un-cast shadows, and off to the side, time and again, this old cracker not paying the least attention to the “message”: “Daniel, Daniel, do you mind? If I look it over?” Robertson wins: that line is both the real message of the song and the thing that allows him to get so serious and still keep the song blithely in the rock. “Just lemme touch it, kid. Just once.” Beautiful.

*Appropriately, Stage Fright isn’t a very sexy album; I get the idea Robertson writes songs with sex in them when he’s just so gassed with what he’s doing that he can’t resist edging toward something obscene, as with “Cripple Creek;” on, say, “Medicine Show,” where there is a hint of the lacivious, everything is really quite under control.

The song that holds the most possibilities is “The Shape I’m In,” and oddly enough other songs on the album seem to comment on it, giving a sense of why “The Shape I’m In,” though it seems obviously the toughest thing here, isn’t as strong as it ought to be, or could have beeh. The music, is hard rjck, shot through with surprises of timing and changes that are just a bit faster than one could have expected, and brilliantly played. The music comes first, after all: great music with dumb lyrics makes great rock, great music with great lyrics makes great rock, and bad music with great lyrics arguably fails to make any kind of rock whatsoever. Sound adds immediacy and impact to whatever the song wants to “say” in its lyrics, and the formulation given just above is one reason why so much basically dumb stuff affects us so powerfully from time to time. /

The story the song tells is a sort of prosaic, common-placcer“Memphis Blues Again”: the singer is caught in one trap after another and he’s trying to get out. Like Dylan in the earlier song, he senses that his confusion is street-corner fate, and the real questions are not “how do I get out” but “how do I survive” and “what comes next.” “The Shape I’m In,” like “Memphis Blues Again,” tries to define the social and personal condition we live in. “This is it, kids. Dig it.”* Typically for rock and roll, there is no pretense of giving the answer (which is part of the problem with “The Rvtmor,” which ultimately sounds like a Sunday School lesson), but there is a strong claim to defining the situation, and thus making the listener aware of his own predicament — from a perspective the listener might have missed or forgotten — and a claim of sharing that predicament.

If this all comes off — if the singer and the band are really able to convince the listener, automatically or through repetition (and here, of course, is where singles can matter so much more than album tracks), that they do share a predicament — that reinforces the sense of the predicament as defined by the song. To some degree, this is what makes a record powerful. Divisions between the artist and the listener — he’s a star, he’s rich, he’s a pig — are obscured or simply cease to matter (even though they can get in the way, on the level of informed consumerism — “I’ll buy it, but I won’t let it fool me” — which despite fashionable rhetoric, is not, I think, any more than that).

“The Shape I’m In” could hardly be more direct. Levon Helm is singing, with a boost from Manuel. He’s busted. He gets out. He’s back on the street — stranded. Ije can’t find his girl. Kids are rioting and he knows why but he’s cut off from them and can’t take part. He has a sense of the stake ,— “Save your neck, or save your brother/Looks like its One or the other” — but he doesn’t much like them. He wants it both ways, or maybe he doesn’t want to choose at all. “You don’t know the shape I’m in.” But you do know, says the song; you’re in the same shape yourself.

That’s the impulse of the song. Since it’s the common-place set to rock, and not the risky transformations of “Memphis Blues Again,” the song doesn’t really challenge the world to a duel, but simply organizes what is close at hand, packages it, and shoots it back, with a certain ainij of course. As a hit single, it would have given us some sense, worth having, of our situation. As an album track on an album that is by no means crucial it s a first-rate song, but a vehicle for more than it carries.

*Or, with Dylan, way back then, “Stand back, kids. This is it. Dig it if yoq can.”

There’s something thin about the lines of “The Shape I’m In.” They’re too neat. This wouldn’t ordinarily matter, except that this song is ambitious, it has possibilities, but it doesn’t quite deliver what its music is capable of bearing or what its lines suggest. “Two young kids/Might start a ruckus” — now that doesn’t really sum up what’s been going on in this country; though, given the context of the song, it more or less claims to. Things have been a bit more extreme than that. And the answer — “You know they feel/You’re try in’ to shuck us” — is too apologetic. Sort of like the old The Problem of Youth Today Is A Problem of Communications routine. More to the point is that they’re trying to shuck us because deep down they’re trying to fuck us, and maybe everyone else, in the bargain. And the song ought to know that because its singer has already been busted on general principles. If we’re to take that seriously the song has got to take the situation it’s setting up more seriously. There has to be a sense of risk, calamity, danger or fear to bring out the possibilities of this song.

Now in a couple of other numbers on Stage Fright hints of this kind of seriousness creep in, almost out of context. In the rollicking good-timey “Just Another Whistle Stop,” we find not only those lines I’ve been quoting all through this article and for which I’ve been claiming so much, but also this:

And it’s odd man out You know that’s the rule

A chilling line, if it reminds you that in the movie of Odd Man Out James Mason is an Irish revolutionary, who, fatally shot, abandoned by his comrades, and shunned by the people, wanders the streets bleeding to death until he and the girl he loves are shot to death by the police. Are you supposed to hear it that way? Perhaps not, but it hardly matters if you do hear it that way. Rock and roll is a continuum of association, among other things, and not all the associations have to go back to rock and roll. Dylan once wrote a song out of Psycho, after all.

Things are getting interesting, here in the midst of “Whistle Stop,” which, given Manuel’s loose vocal, the good cheer of the band, and the constant Little Engine That Could feeling of the chorus, is simply the wrong song for these two couplets. Stuck in their song, they tell us mainly that certain things were on Robertson’s mind when he sat down to write songs for Stage Fright, and that most likely those thoughts were too new to him to be really focused in one song. A few fast words — “I wonder who went down tonight” or a glance at the odd man out — are just what “The Shape I’m In” needs to carry that sense of risk that might make the song really matter to us: the knowledge that we can be swept away, put away, with no doors opening after sixty days, that in spite of the perfect humor of Helm in Trouble, when you come right down to it, “it ain’t no joke.”

There’s another comment in “The Rumor,” that, like everything else in that song, seems out of place, but which maight have a place in “The Shape I’m In”:

Now all you vigilantes Gonna make a move Maybe they don’t You know I sure hope they don’t...

What do they mean by that, by “vigilantes”? Right-wing extremists? The Government? Or us?

It could very well be us, or people like us, the political vigilantes that are roaming the land with hit-and-run attacks on law and order. These lines, pointless in “The Rumor,” could make an interesting kind of sense in “The Shape I’m In,” and which, along with the other lines I’ve mentioned might lift th$ ambitions of “The Shape I’m In” high enough to make it the classic song it almost promises to be. The lines from “The Rumor” in particular would introduce a sense of the ambivilance we really feel about the bombers into the song, and while these lines as a verse of “The Shape I’m In” would hardly have more “meaning” both they and the song would have more reality. They would toughen the song — the real problems that matter would all draw on that ambivilance we cannot, for the moment, escape. Those lines in the right song could give us a sense of our own divisions, and the choices that really flow from those divisions, when linked to

Police siren, flashing light I wonder who went down tonight?

For we are linked to that; we are linked to “the vigilantes” even if we hesitate along with the Band. That contradiction, in fact, makes up the drama of the film of Odd Man Out I mentioned earlier; those who would give the dying revolutionary a drink only to send him on his way, refuse to give him shelter even as they comfort themselves with the satisfaction of knowing they did not betray him. But do they betray him, when you come right down to it? We are going to be faced with the same choices in the coming years, not on the abstract level of paper and ink, but on the simple level of things that will be in our power to do or not to do. If a song can make us aware of those choices — that and nothing more, because a song can’t ell you what risks to take, it can, at its most effective simply tell you what those risks might be — or define the possibilities of living through a decade in which you’re no longer quite so sure of what side you’re on, because the eary moral superiority of the Sixties has.disappeared, then that is a song we can’t afford to miss. Even if it wasn’t quite written.

The job of the music-maker is to make sure we don’t miss it without forcing it down our throats. Seduction, in a word. The Band did most of it, setting up their first real motherfucker of a hard rock smash to make us listen, jerking the reality of their lyrics into view as the lines of the song grew out of the kicks of the music. They set the stage for the apocryphal political drama that is woven into the fabric of Stage Fright, but they never really put the drama on the stage; that is, into “The Shape I’m In.” We find the Band in the odd position of playing hide-and-seek with itself, as far as the stuff I’ve been talking about goes. Still, that gives us somethihg to stumble over in the dark, and the power is in the surprise, if anywhere.

The things that matter are at the margins, rather than out front. Found politics means the politics are where you don’t expect to find them; they’re accidental, or seem that way. If, as with “Street Fighting Man” and “Salt of the Earth,” an affirmation of politics is the first thing you hear, that first impact usually turns out to be a screen for the ambivilance hidden within, that is meant to undermine the easy assumptions that are so easy to hear, an ambivilance which constitutes the real politics of the matter.

It’s not accidental that these various “political” songs I’ve been mentioning are all by foreigners, or that I haven’t devoted page after page to the mysteries of stuff like Volunteers or Blows Against the Empire (ha!). The fact that Grace Slick tried to take Abbie Hoffman to a White House tea is far more interesting than “Tear Down the Walls.” “Tear Down the Walls” is a clumsy song that, as it says, is proud of itself, too proud of itself to be taken seriously. The Airplane, or any rock group that is really selling politics, simply does not have the means within the good hard limits of rock and roll to make interesting arguments as to why we ought to do this or that. Rock was never meant to carry grand theoretical statements or position papers, but only to haphazardly investigate the present moment as an after-thought in the middle of a chord change. More effort than that might go into the writing of a song, of course, but it has to be heard that way, especially outside of a local, self-contained community. In that situation, as the MC5 must have proved, a band can demonstrate politics within a context that is musical without having to pull any punches. But try it on the radio, or on an album, and that tough left hook turns out to be powered by an arm that’s turned to jello. An American band can’t take America in stride, as a plurality of happenstance and possibility, as something fundamentally ambivalent; it suffers America and has to take it seriously. An American band is guilty of America, and thus must first and foremost be honest. It has to care. It has to worry. It has to prove its righteousness.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE - JOHN LENNON & THE PLASTIC ONO BAND - APPLE 1830

The lyrics are good, the saxophone rocks, J ohn sings up a storm, and “Power to the People” would be a better record, and thus more politically effective, if there weren’t anyone but John singing the chorus, or if they just dropped it altogether and let the title carry the weight. This elitist contradiction peeking out of the impulses of mass culture is called politics. Right on, John.

BABY DON’T YOU DO IT - THE BAND - JUST WAIT

The Band have done their best to obscure the fact that they are one of the toughest hard rock organizations in the country. Occasionally, especially on stage, they slip up a bit and the secret gets out, but their albums make it easy to forget “Slippin’ and Slidin’” or the way they do “Look Out Cleveland” or “Wheels on Fire” or “Chest Fever” live. Or to forget “Baby Don’t You Do It”, an old Marvin Gaye number they use to close out the evening once in a while.

The Band plays Motown because one of their other secrets is that Motown is one of the main elements of their music; not just of their rhythm section, but of, dare I say it, their roots. It’s not all moldy MacGruder primers and cornbelts, after all. The Band has a lot more Motown in its music than, say, Rare Earth - or one of those groups, and I don’t mean Motor City Killer High Energy, but Motown -Berry Gordy. A lot of the singing on Music From Big Pink comes from “Heatwave” just as some of it comes from Hank Williams; Levi Stubbs is there along with Bob Dylan (“Levi Stubbs is black Dylan,” said Phil Spector . . .). Rick Danko is not just a Canadian country boy, although because he is that he can sing the Four Tops’ “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever” as if it was a country song.

Danko at his best sounds like a Motown session man, and I doubt if there is anything in the world that sounds better than a Motown session man playing bass, unless it’s a Motown session man playing guitar on “I Want You Back.” The bass on Motown records can be ornamental and captivating — Paul McCartney has learned from that — or deep, compelling, and aggressive pand Danko has taken his lessons at that school.

It is worth remembering that this is not a recent development, or a facile borrowing. The men in the Band have been around, after all, playing the music as long as some of us have been listening to it. And their beginnings neatly coincide (more or less) with the beginnings of Motown. (The Beatles pre-date Motown. John and Paul started getting it on together about the time of “Heartbreak Hotel”. The Stones are a bit post-Motown. The old Hawks and the early Creedence Clearwater — Blue Velvets, I think — are right in the middle.)

When I first saw Danko play, with Dylan in the late fall of ’65, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I’d come to see Dylan, and he was great, but it was a true effort to pay attention. Danko’s bbdy translated his musical lines into physical motion. “He looked like he could swing Coit Tower,” Ralph Gleason wrote of that show, and he couldn’t have said it better.

When Dylan and'the Hawks made their tour of England in the spring of 1966 they recorded their music just about every night, and now, five years later, tapes of those performances have begun to surface on occasional FM stations. The music played by that band was far less Motown — or country, or anything — than the music played by the Band, because it was more aggressive, glamorous, and loud. Dylan was not singing Motown in those days. He told a Detroit interviewer he liked The Motown groups but he was speechless at the suggestion he share the stage with the Supremes.

His music and that of the Hawks was frenzied stuff, extreme, pushing and breaking the limits, and the music of the Band, and Motown, is more restrained, and most importantly, controlled. Such control usually proscribes the moments of pure triumph each member of the Hawks (not to mention Dylan, who was not dealing in moments) achieved in those performances. As the Band, their recorded hard rock — “Jemima Surrender”, “Look Out Cleveland” — tends toward the predictable, which doesn’t simply mean that you can follow the rhythmic progression of the song, but that the good moments, when they come, pretty much fit into your pattern of expectations and never overwhelm you with a clout that cannot be encompassed by memory or anticipation. Those moments are the thrill of the music, and everyone has his own - you know they’re there, you wait for them, you get ready for them, and they’re always more powerful than you remembered. Only “Chest Fever”, of all the Band’s hard rock album cuts, has that power of permanent renewal that the best music needs. The rest of their hard rock is — and I hate to say it — stiff. It never cuts loose. “What you’re missing is the best Blam Blam,” as Spector put it.

There may be a good deal to be said for that kind of attitude, but be that as it may, it leads to terrible rock and roll songs. A group like the Guess Who, safe in their Canadian vacuum, cutting “American Woman” (“I don’t need your war machine/I don’t need your ghetto scene” — heavy, huh?), and then playing for Tricia Nixon at the White House, can still make a better political record than the Airplane, partly because they know more about hits and partly because (heir Canadian status releases them from any responsibility of taking their political impulses seriously, letting them flow naturally into a song that is supposed to be nothing more than a hit.

Oh, they’re very crass. They went right out in public and said that “Share the Land” was just a good way to make money and they even hired an Indian to pose on the Share the Land album that followed up the “Share the Land” hit. The paradox of pop is that while the Guess Who may be phony as hell, “Share the Land” is real.

The song turns on just one word, a word that the ordinary exploitation song would never have thought of (and by that I don’t mean that “Share the Land” isn’t an exploitation song, only that it isn’t an ordinary one).

Have you been aware You got brothers and sisters who care About what’s gonna happen to you In a year from now... Maybe I’ll be there to shake your hand Maybe I’ll be there to share the land That they’ll be giving away When we all live together

Part of the problem comes down to Robbie Robertson, as a guitarist. With Ronnie Hawkins, with Dylan and with the Band on stage, he’s achieved wild moments where he walked the edge of musical disaster and ended up the creator of rock that dared itself to go out of control. It’s there on the live single of ‘‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and on_ Ronnie Hawkins’ “Who Do You Love”, which is available again on Roulette. These moments of risk are missing from all of the Band’s official recordings. That’s not to denigrate what he’s done on record, but what he’s done is a long way from what he can do, and he may be leaving out what is most valuable of all.

“Baby Don’t You Do It” is hard-rock and it makes even “The Shape I’m In” sound fragile. It was recorded as a practice tape when the Band was trying out a new studio. It might have been a single, but it runs about five minutes, and perhaps after using it on stage the Band got tired of it, or thought if was too good to cut short, or felt odd about releasing a Holland-Dozier-Holland song in a bid for the charts. An FM station in LA broke a tape df it on the radio some time ago and then withdrew it after an official request and the promise of official release. But it never was released.

Even people like me, who think Stage Fright is hot stuff and play it all the time, still feel that something’s missing. As Dave Marsh said when he reviewed the lp in CREEM, Stage Fright needs just one cut to shake things up. “The Shape I’m In”, good as it is, isn’t it. “Baby Don’t You Do It” is.

What the Band do with Gaye’s song is what most white rock and roll groups have always done with black material: they hold to the original arrangement, amplify the beat, and make it louder and more raucous (that Little Richard material is an exception to this process goes without saying). They delight in the technology of two or three electric guitars, an electric organ, supermilked drums. Technology is the white man’s cultural heritage, as well as his burden, and at least rock and roll musicians occasionally know what to do with it; they can relate to technology as black artists sometimes cannot. They don’t worry about “worrying” a line into an elusive rendering of “soul”; they just sing as hard as they can. They hit everything hard and if the Band caught this same spirit on stage they might knock over a micrpphone. ^

Robertson is all over the music. Helm plays as if he has four hands. Danko is almost impossible to find in the clattering noise, but he’s there like fuel injection on a Corvette. While Hudson lets loose the mighty screech of rock and roll, Manuel holds on to the song with sounds like one finger piano. “My biggest mistake was lovin’ you too much —” BLAM BLAM “And letting you know —t BLAM BLAM.

Gaye’s performance 4s good, I suppose, but after the Band’s version it’s a bit difficult to hear. It’s thin, it’s careful, a piece out of the “Ain’t That Peculiar” groove, genre music, defined by a careful play on the expectations of an audience that has already shown it will buy something that sounds like it. Motown makes music incrementally, after all. The Band’s performance is every man at his limit, perhaps without even knowing it until they hear the playback and shake their heads in wonder that they can really play like that. It is stunning and powerful partly becausee it is so unlike any record of theirs we have ever heard, but it is strong on its own terms and it would sound as good if it were the Stones following up “Honky Tonk Women”.

Gaye sings against a polite soul chorus, and you get the idea that she really won’t do it, break his heart, because after all she and many of her sisters are right there on the record singing with him. The Band enlists their whole arsenal of voices, each man coming in at his own pace and shouting for all he’s worth, “Oh, baby don’t do it, don’t break my heart, pleeeeeze don’t do it,” marching across the battlefield of broken dreams like an army of men ready to give it all for love. The Band push the song and they top themselves on every chorus, in the way that the guitar solo on “Whole Lotta Shakin’” is even better than Jerry Lee’s piano even though you’d expect it not to be, simply because the guitarist had the nerve to try and top the star. They wail on until they reach that point where the song should end, and suddenly Robertson takes over and plays as if he’s trying to drive straight out of the music. They cut him off and slam it to a close.

The Band plays the best hard rock in the world when they want to. Now, why don’t they release this and give us a chance to believe it?

Greil Marcus

The song turns on “maybe” — the sense that things are really up for grabs and there’s no point in taking anything for granted, that the dreams of sharing* the land are really that: dreams. And there is that weird feel for the future, that “in a year from now,” with the hopeful affirmation that there are people who will help you if you find yourself in deep trouble, along with the half-made assumption that you will. The song, on some level, is a celebration of a community that the song knows never really existed and that the song ho longer believes in. It’s a song powered by doubt and a feeling for the risks that are not so much being chosen as they are being imposed.

Maybe I’ll be there to shake your hand Maybe I’ll be there to share the land

Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll be in jail. Maybe I’ll be on the run. Maybe I’ll be dead. Maybe you’ll be dead. Or maybe my records will have stopped selling and you won’t be interested.

You half-hear the Guess Who — fake revolutionary rock band — and you half-hear the role the singer wants you to hear; that is, you half-hear the song outside of its commercial context. If you can do that, whatever truth there is in the song, may spill over until the song itself becomes valuable every time it comes off the radio.

“Share the Land” isn’t a Woodstock song, it’s an Altamont song. In a way, it says more about the disappearance of what we used to take for granted than even the Dead’s magnificent “Speedway Boogie,” because again, the Dead had a responsibility for what that song’s about, and the song is as much an attempt to live up to the responsibility as it is anything else. The Guess Who, in their pop clothes, have about as little responsibility as you qould hope for, so they afe safe to worry only about what might strike a responsive chord in the audience. Their “maybe” gives the song its edge and sharply undermines all the easy affirmation that we almost hear, until “Share the Land” becomes a depressing song that is fully alive because the depression it invokes is about real things, and that depression is so very close to a dream that in its way is just as vital. Volunteers, to me, takes “the revolution” for granted, and “Share the Land” finally takes nothing for granted and matters so much more.

And it’s a good joke on the Airplane, since the Guess Who copped all their licl^s. ,

Things aren’t all that different for the Band. All but Levon Helm are Canadians, of course; Helm is a southerner, like so many rock and rollers. And yet there is something about this foreign rock band that allowed Robbie Robertson to write a song for Helm that tried to sum up his very position as an American; and with all the southerners in rock and roll, isn’t it surprising that it took a Canadian to come to grips with the south in a rock song? (unless you count Carl Perkins’ “Tennessee,” where he invented his pride in hailing from the place where they made the first atomic bomb).

Probably only a man who wasn’t born here could have done it. The Band is linked to America in various ways: through Levon Helm, Ronnie Hawkins, Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan. Most of all, they are linked to this country through a life-time of love for its music, first as they sought it out on radio shows and later as they learned to paly it* and wonder of wonders, define it. They came out of the7 great cultural nothingness of Canada into a world that was rich and vital, a place that had given birth to the blues, to country music, to rock and roll, to jazz, to gospel, to white church music, to bluegrass.

They were neither exiles or immigrants; they were musicians, playing their way up and down the spine of the nation, then all around the world with Dylan," and then fettling in Woodstock because that’s the way the cards fell.

While American bands were toying with the idea of leaving America (Steve Miller’s “Living in the USA,” Canned Heat’s “Goin’ Up the Country”), tl\p Band was investigating the place.

Weird country, America. Wonder what it’s all about?

The Band, as outsiders, with no rage for what America was doing in their name, because it. wasn’t in their name, could afford to ask that sort of question. While young Americans were learning how to feel like exiles in their own Country, the Band could consider ‘the country’s possibilities,, things that we understood to be personal, but not “American”: sex, open spaces, bigness, weather, tradition, music, dreams, failure. They found a way to understand and to present those things in a context that was American, and to the degree their presentation was effective they brought us in touch with the place where we all had to live,

Robertson, not just because he is Canadian, but mostly because he is brilliant, understood that accepting America was not the whole story. “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” lets us in pn the secret that the grand parade of the second album is supported by a hope that is really only a memory, the years of waiting for King Uairest( that finally turned the farm into skid row. It’s a city bum who is singing the great song of the American land, and the man who could feel free because he owned a piece of it now makes only a pitiful cry that devastates him: “Just don’t judge me by my shoes.” Then Garth Hudson’s organ takes us back into the dream, and the song, finally, traces a circle.

Robertson’s isolation from the guilt that is now part of being an American, his insulation from the debilitation of the spirit that guilt can bring, allows him, I think, a finer sense of the possibilities and the dangers of American life than is accessible to most American songwriters when they deal with problems that are, in the end, deadly serious. The American ends up screaming “I mean it,” and he almost has to; Robertson can feel his way along the margins "and say more by saying less.. The American would write a song about repression; Robettson needs'only two lines, in the right song, once he has the beat down.

One of the jobs of the critic, in these seamless times, is to illuminate the margins; surely if someone needs help to understand that “The Shape I’m In” has the sound of a great rock and roll song there is little the writer can do to help him. All the writer can do is make the song inviting. I know “The Shape I’m In” has a great beat and amazing drumming and terrific quitar playing, but if the listener doesn’t get off on that great beat the marginal politics that eventually matter to hearing the song certainly can’t matter at all. Otherwise the lines in “The Shape I’m In” and the more interesting lines that might have strengthened it are simply thin little statements about nothing much at all. A line from a great poem can ring in your mind; “Police Siren, flashing light” is not great poetry, it’s not poetry at all, but it’s pretty good rock when it’s part of a rock song, and given that, it can ring in your ear as the music thumps into your chest, and achieve that moving, semi-conscious effect of a great line of poetry, that might serve as a signpost and a metaphor for all sorts of disparate, incoherent situations.

... In a weird way, I feel like the heavier political climate I’ve been living in (due to repression) has led me to have less faith in political-rock and more in just plain old music, you dig? Like I would rather listen to Gary Lewis and the Playboys in the background going through a day of fears, depression, despair (that old counter-revolutionary existential reality), and freak-out, than sit there analyzing Volunteers and how listening to that album is going to stop the pig from busting through your door.

Nevertheless I feel that at some point you know I will get it all together again and say something INTERESTING -p'you know, like it might be that Bubble-Gum music_ is the class-conscious music of America or some far-out bullshit like that.

At the moment though, I don’t feel like I have much to say that would be worth saying, which is not to say that I feel like Calvin Coolidge, but rather that you know why would I want to say anything? Why would I want to say it? I could say you know well the Stones blah blah blah Altamont, smack-heads, Mitchell therefore what?-The Grande Ballroom? —--but I don’t feel hip to anthing RIGHT A T THE MOMENT.

Oh wow.

In a weird way I feel like the thing I learned from Rock and myj Strange Obsession with the Beach Boys is that you break out of a lot of shit and find out what is happening just by relaxing yourself and finding out f What It Is That You Really Dig, you know and the thing that you really dig is never the pretentious shit, the shit that they say you should like, or the shit you think you should like but it’s you know old Rock and Roll. At first you think well I’m a low-level type of guy but this is what I like and that’s me. And then after a while you think well maybe after all this stuff I thought was crummy is really groovy and where it’s at and in fact better than what I was supposed to like and it’s good to be a cat that digs old rock and roll and so at the moment I would just like to find out who I am again and see what it is that I really dig and then make some assumptions from there. Did I ever think I would be someone who sat around trying/to change the way he related to Everything because he didn’t want to be a male chauvinist (I never even heard the word until recently) — really actually digging Hank Williams — fantasizing about really going to jail, killing someone, becoming old and bitter and out of it? No.

But that’s who I seem to be.

“Don’t nickname it,” the Showmen sang in It Will Stand, “You might as well claim it.” They were right' Rock on.