LOONEY TOONS

LOONEY TOONS

Every Picture Tells A Story.. . Don’t It

DAVE MARSH

PART TWO

Well the rainman gave me two cures And then he said jump right in The one was Texas medicine The other was just railroad gin And like a fool I mixed ’em And it strangled up ray mind ,

Now people just get uglier And I have no sense of time O! Mama! Can this really be the end To be stuck inside of Mobile, with the Memphis Blues Again?

— Bob Dylan

Both “Memphis Blues Again,” and “Every Picture Tells A Story” say something that is dismally applicable to our new culture, if that is what we are building. There is no question that each of them belong to a very special set of songs, songs that comment on their audience and themselves with dignity and grace and fluidity, images that prance, music that dances and gurgles out of the record with power and strength. Yet, at the mornent, each of them says that it is we who are stuck in front of a mirror with the Memphis

Blues Again. “Every Picture Tells A Story.” Don’t it?

Here we are, in 1972, in front of the same old mirror, still solipsisticly denying, all too often, that the terrible plague of drugs and control has descended upon our wonderful vision of hash and acid and bellbottomed fucking. Or, if we recognize it, we refuse to admit that we can do anything about it. Or, if we think we can do anything something, our first instinct is to reject this central reality, in the alternative culture, and blame it on some vast conspiracy induced by outside agents: the Mafia, the CIA, the government. Or maybe it’s the devil.

I found out the reason I

Didn’t need anyone but me

I sincerely thought I was so complete

Look how wrong ya can be!

— Rod Stewart

Are we through with decadence? Some of us like to think so. I dunno. I love this song by Rod Stewart so much, it means so many different things to me, and its lyrics, which are a large part of what I love it for, are so sexist they border upon mysogny. I don’t think I shouldn’t like the song, it’s just that I ought to be able to hold the problem in my mind, or something.

But this is the central problem, that we all love what has emerged from the counter-culture so much that we’re almost afraid to criticize it when it goes wrong. Rock and roll is the easiest target, actually, because it is a public forum and the ideas that make up our music are constantly criticized by everyone from Spiro Agnew to the kid down the block. That’s great.

It’s the things that we avoid dealing with at all that worry me. Like drugs. O.K., if we’re going to deal with this, we all have to confess different things, I guess. At the risk of ostracism, or whatever, here it is: I don’t take drugs anymore. I don’t know how I’m going to feel if I see this in print. It bothers me.

But there is the problem. It does bother me, because I don’t think that people are willing to accept the fact that one can see drug use — especially psychedelic drug use — as a problem. I don’t just mean a problem for and indi-

vidual, thought that was the central element that forced me to stop taking drugs, but see drugs as a general problem. Heroin isn’t the only drug, youknow, that people use as a desensifier, as a crutch.

Maybe I have a misguided perspective. I do believe that given a view of the world that will allow such a thing to happen, marijuana is as liable to stultify as energize. LSD, I can say with even less doubt, has burnt out more than one kid; I’ve seen too many friends walking the street with holes in their minds, just from taking too much killer acid (in the Midwestern rock sense of killer of course) not to believe that this is an operative reality.

I don’t mean to posit drugs as the source of any of this, but I do think that even the use of psychedelics, and I mean especially the cult-use, the ritualized fantasy use, the use of psychedelics as a crutch, as a method of avoiding both personal and social problems, is a symptom. It’s not that people shouldn’t take drugs — I have no sympathy for either Meher Baba or Richard Nixon — but the constant romanticization of grass and acid and psychedelics in general isn’t any more realistic than the romanticization of sexuality or politics or anything else. We’re going to have to come to terms with grass and acid the same way that we came to terms with people like Che Guevara, in the end.

Che was, of course, a great guerrilla warrior, but our heroization of him for that, and that alone, was innately selfdestructive. This is' what Weatherman discovered by having some of their members blown up in a New York townhouse. Fighting in the streets is only a part of what Che was about; there’s another part of the man which really was a doctor. Unless we can apprehend both sides, we aren’t going anywhere.

The problem with drugs is similar. It’s great that we have seen the beneficent things that psychedelics can do; anyone who denied their central role in opening so many of us up in the sixties would be a fool. But drug use, like anything else, is.not a necessarily positive factor in people’s lives. It couldn’t be. No substance is possessed of only positive attributes, and if we don’t understand that, and begin to deal with the negative aspects of all drugs, as well as all the positive aspects, then we’re being ostrich-like. It is a dangerous time to be an ostrich.

Nuttall, writing in November of 1967, has this to say, as he concluded Bomb Culture:

It behooves us now to be something more than a preventive force. The drugs, while accelerating our strategy, could create a vacuum as desolate as any H-bomb crater. Two heads have used the same phrase to me recently. Lyn, of Thomas Traherne: “Well, what was he on?” Tim, of Max Ernst; “Well, what was he on?” It is clearly necessary now to get firm hold of the fact that the nature of vision is human, not chemical ...

That the id, the fundamental self, is nothing more than a part of the sum of cosmic energy, is, I believe, true. That the conscious mind, the ego, the identity is an obstruction to one’s union with the cosmos is also true. What is missed by the mystics, however, is that there is a purpose, and a divine purpose, to the human alienation from the cosmos. The recognition, definition of being in wonderment and ecstasy, can be carried out only by a conscious entity alienated from the eternal totality. You can’t dig IT if you are IT. No man beholds his own face . . .

It is now necessary to come back from inner space. Having revived the faculty of wonderment, it is necessary to apply it, to channel one’s cosmic self through one’s unique identity, to illuminate and strengthen the currently despised ego andthus to recognize the same cosmic energy manifest in the splendors of the outer material world. If we cannot translate the spiritual into terms of constructive physical action, if spiritual vision cannot inform our physical ocular vision, then the spiritual is none of our damn business . . .

I would suggest that not only is this alienation from the cosmos the condition which we call human (to such an extent that “alien” and “human” are almost interchangable adjectives), but that such separation is a vital element in the cosmic pattern, that man is naturally unnatural, and that this is an absolute enrichment rather than a psychic tragedy. I would suggest that any wish to escape this fundamental function is a wish to escape life, is a death wish.

There’s little I can add to that. There is the element of drugs that does just what Nuttall insists it might do, denies that our actions here and now make any difference. When people begin to think this way, when George Harrison and everyone on down begins to tell us that it’s all in our heads, and that everything is just groovy, that inner space is the only territory on which we hold any claim, then we are entering dangerous ground.

The Family is partially the story of how Charles Manson used hallucinogens to induce this sort of solipsistic mentality in his victims. In the Rolling Stone Mel Lyman story, David Felton intimates that Lyman and company use hallucinogens for much the same reasons.

Drugs, once posited as our salvation, are not now our enemy. But they aren’t the grandiosely benign and beneficient devices we had imagined them either. Technology — and drugs are psychic technology — isn’t neutral in any culture. Its value is determined precisely by the values of our culture. I guess what I’m really trying to get at is that we have to begin to question the values of the new society that we began to build in the sixties.

I hope this all doesn’t sound paranoid. It isn’t. We have to discuss this kind of stuff, immediately, before the derangement of the personality cults gets any worse. The counter-culture is still basically a consumer market, in too many ways, and drugs and rock and roll and everything else We like are marketable commodities within that context.

I hope we can get to some more of this next time, some other aspects. I took what I conceived as the most difficult for any of us to face this time, simply because I wanted to kick this off. One thing that I would like to see happen is a turning over of this space to other writers on the same theme. I hope someone takes me up on that offer soon. At any rate, see ya next month. And remember what our old pal Ringo has to say: it don’t come easy.

Two months without any levity, I think, would be too much. Thus, here’s the top ten records of the year, per Bob Christgau’s Pazz and Jop poll request in the Village Voice. I’ve even justified them a little bit. Anyway, scream at me, if you must scream at all:

l)Van Morrison Tupelo Honey (Warners): Not yours, mine. Tupelo Honey may not .have the heights of Astral Weeks and Moondance, it may reach them less often, but it doesn’t have the valleys either. For my money, the best Van Morrison album. Nearly perfect.

2) Smokey Robinson & The Miracles One Dozen Roses (Tamla): Nearly his last. Wonderful collection of non-hit singles, and “Tears of A Clown.” And it IS Smokey.

3) Rod Stewart Every Picture Tells A Story (Mercury): “Every Picture Tells A Story” is the unreleased, single of the year, and this is also the best album of the year, but for one thing: his fascination with folk music. Look Rod, we know you’re sensitive. But it’s just as obvious when you rock, and a lot more fun too.

4) Sly Stone There’s A Riot Goin’ On (Epic): By next year, even those who don’t like this will be converted, I bet. Sly has surely made the most conscious album of the year, it is almost certainly the best thing he has ever done, and it’s a lot lighter on the bullshit than it seems on first listening. A great record.

5) The Who Who’s Next (Decca): The best album the Who have made yet; nonetheless, their singles are still better. “Won’t Get Fooled” is the single of the year, still and all: the answer song to “American Pie.” Better than I thought at first, but not as perfect as some would have you believe.

6) The MC5 High Time (Atlantic): This album grows every time I listen to it. The best thing the Five had done yet. The best heavy album of the year.

7) Doug Sahm The Return of Doug Saldana (Phillips): Doug Sahm really knows his roots, and they are firmly implanted in the Texas rock tradition, one of the weirdest and funniest traditions we have. Not only Chicano but also hillibillie mythology here, and it is uniformly exciting. For Sahm, the Rock Brotherhood (sans bullshit) Award for ’71. Socially, Doug Saldana alone is enough to give the lie to Bangla Desh.

8) John Lennon Imagine (Apple): The best Beatle solo album, but still. . . One is tempted to wonder when John Lennon is going to mature. When he’s not being petty and/or maudlin, though, he sure can rock.

9) Nils Lofgren & Grin 1+1 (Spindizzy): The best new rock rock group; the first side of 1+1 is fantastic, driving and powerful. All that it should be. The second (“Dreamy”) side is less exciting but still plenty good. Perfect radio music.

10) Grand Funk E Pluribus Funk (Grand Funk/Capitol): When it comes down to it, I’ve been listening to this more than any of the couple dozen other good records that came out in ’71, so why not?