BOOKS

RINGOLEVIO: A LIFE PLAYED FOR KEEPS by Emmett Grogan Little, Brown

I wish Ringolevio were as simple as those who make of it mere counter-cultural history think it is.

It�s not only that both Ringolevio and Emmett Grogan are both far more complex and far less pretentious than mere history (which they are) — seeing Ringolevio as just another writing-myaut obiogr a phy-to-get-the-advance-so-Ican-buy-aVW-camper-and-head-for-thehills is to refuse, also, to own up. And that is precisely what Ringolevio is about: owning up.

Grogan is the mirror-image of Turner in Performance. He sees his indentity change (s) not as vehicles for grand-stand or compulsion, but as necessary, integral, healthy methods of survival and sanity in the later twentieth century. Rather than identity crisis, Grogan opts for a new, critical identity.

On one level, Ringolevio is about becoming the critical identity. On another, it is about what is wrong with the idea of identity itself. And, perhaps most importantly, it is about one of the few attempts ever made to dispense with identity altogether, in favor of something both fresher and more self-assured. It hardly matters that Ringolevio itself is both evidence and source of the failure of that attempt. As with the Apollo program, it really isn�t where we're going, it's how we�re getting there that has to concern us at the moment.

The message of ringolevio and Ringolevio is �Allee AUee All Free!� Which is, after all, what this whole youth culture business (a good, healthy, reasonable term for what the y.c. has become) was supposed to be all about or at least working towards.

Unfortunately, Abbie Hoffman�s idea of �free� and the loss of . . . or rather, the denial of (or even, the withdrawal from) ... identity was to write a book, have his name in the advertisements, his picture on the cover and sign it pseudonymously. Like setting up. a bank to cover your ego losses.

Ringolevio is not, however, concerned totally or even primarily with Hashbury interworkings and how-I-got-

f r e e - f o o d-i n -1 h e-park-every-day-f or-ayear. (They stole it, it was not from the garbage dump; neither was the merchandise at the Free Store, which wasn�t called the Free Store in the first place, but rather the Trip Without A Ticket.) Ringolevio is about Emmett Grogan (nee� Kenny Wisdom) and his search for anonymity. About his several murders and his dozens of perfect-crime b-and-e�s. Most of which were committed before he was 15.

By the time he reached 15, Kenny Wisdom had realized his ambition: �to steal Park Ave.� He didn�t do quite that, but he managed to accumulate several hundred thousand dollars and he would have completed the heist had not the local syndicate caught on and begun to make noises about turf infringement. Wisdom caught the next steamer for Europe.

Kenny had already been a junkie ... when he was 1.2. He had been in jail... when he was 13. He had gone to a private boarding school on a scholarship ... which is how he got to case the mansions of the mighty over on Park Ave."

IS THIS OR IS THIS NOT THE AMERICAN REALITY-NIGHTMARE?

Europe: Rome as a hustler, England as an assistant poronographer, Ireland as an I.R.A. associate. Monaco and the Alps and the Riviera. Home, then drafted at 20, because Kenny Wisdom had been so busy letting the world register that he had forgotten to register himself with Selective Service.

In and out of the U.S. Army in 90 days, and no wonder. Then to * San Francisco, and that�s how we found out about him.

For half it's 500 pages Ringolevio is like nothing so much as a heterosexual Thief's Journal. Like Genet, Grogan has an eye for detail and a sensitivity for the mores and systematology of what either might call the work-a-day criminal. Like Genet, Grogan has the ability to see �the ones that throw it all away. They�re everything anyone wants to be. They�re the cream of the streets and their frame of reference is a style of life and death that has been censored from history and condemned to hearsay since man learned to read and write. They are the ones who survive the plagues . . .

�The best music — the best of everything that is expressive of all this country�s got to give is by and about them.

�The blues are finally a people who are going to take care of business.�

Emmett Grogan sees the blues people and understands their necessity without once using the word lumpenproletariat!

So Kenny Wisdom changed his name to Emmett Grogan. Or that is what he does in the book. Some say this is probably the way it really went. Others claim that his name was Grogan all along, or that it never was and he doesn�t exist: it�s all a scam.

Does it matter? Do you care if Clifford Irving interviewed Howard Hughes? If William Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon? Did the Warren Commission tell the truth about the Kennedy assassination?

Maybe Emmett Grogan was only the conventional Wisdom of the Diggers. So what?

Whoever wrote this book is on to precisely what the counter-culture lost.

; We�re respectable now, we can walk down any Little American Town�s main drag and chances are, even in Mississippi, no one will try to shave our heads. Neither we nor the Little American Town is better for it. Grogan admits it. He admits it all, and says it is all his fault. Everything except one thing:

�And Meredith Hunter dying like a sniveling maniac instead of like a determined man — that was his fault.�

Perhaps that is Emmett Grogan�s downfall. Or, perhaps Ringolevio, which reads in its weakest moments like a surly penitent�s alibi for absolution, is.

You can�t believe in Emmett Grogan any more, you know. Even if you wanted to, it�s there in black and white, in the San Francisco Chronicle, with the Realist for support: �Whenevera Digger identifies himself as �Emmett Grogan,� it means nothing since all Diggers call themselves Emmett Grogan on the genera^ principle that anything which confuses the straight world can�t be all bad.�

Like Santa Claus, pmmett Grogan was a comfortable fiction we had to give up, the way we have had to give up a lot

of illusions recently. If Emmett Grogan really wrote this book, then the answer is �Yes Virginia there really WAS a Santa Claus.�

I wonder how many people can imagine living a life that could run 500 finely detailed pages at age 28?

Ringolevio is a third person tragedy: for you, for me and, most of all, for Kenny Wisdom. He even lost his suntan.

Dave Marsh

ROLLING STONES: AN UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY IN WORDS, PHOTOGRAPHS AND MUSIC edited by David Dalton Amsco Music Publishing Co.

Ummm, yeah, the Stones, last of the myths.. 1 oil tour again, new album — and now this book.

Covers lots of territory, lots of years, lots of psychic switches, lots of karma. Most everybody who plays guitar knows at least two of their songs, and how many have boogied, balled or soared and crashed with the Stpnes providing the soundtrack???

First off, the book is a thick mother .. . and so is the price,. ($6.95, paper). But somehow it seems worth it. You know how some books, no matter how long or how small the print, seem empty? This one seems more than full — there�s too much to digest at one shot, you have to space it out a bit.

But part of that is what you put into it — somebody wrote that the Stones

always seem to provide background music for history as it�s being made . . . and that�s true ... I can date a lot of where-was-I-at thoughts by Stones singles or albums ... I remember the night the news of Brian Jones death over the teletype much more clearly than any assasination .. .

And this book, covering the early days of the Stones right up to the current LP and tour, brings a lot of memory time with it. The title makes this into a three factor bio, so take it a factor at a time ....

WORDS: First comes an intro by David Dalton (you all remember him from JANIS) that gives a quick sketch of the Stones, followed by a �book of days� which lists important Stone dates (first bill-topping tour — with the Ronnettes by the way) with current events (death of Sir Winston Churchill) etc — it goes from, their first gigs up to November 1971 — more instant YouAre-Thereism. There are several long excerpts from the Keith Richard interview in Rolling Stone, Andrew Oldham�s liner notes to Decembers Children, the Mick Jagger interview from way back (also in RS), the interview with MJ by Tom Donahue done in France and released on LP to many radio stations, the RS piece on the never-shown TV special �The Rolling Stones Circus�, an article on the farewell tour of England (also from RS), the A1 Aronowitz piece after the death of Brian Jones, a section from Richard Neville�s book dealing with the Hyde park concert .... in other words, if you�re any kind of Stones freak you�ve probably read most of these. But there are a few new pieces; one deals with the Stones� drug busts and trials, another a semi-fictional concert review .... also included are several film and record reviews. If you aren�t a Stones freak, you�ll be glad to see all these words (but why are you reading this if you aren�t?) — if you are, even tho you already read them it still might be nice to have it all in one place.

MUSIC: Most of the Stones original songs are included here (it might be all, my LP collection is in twenty different

boxes at this writing) — from the begin-' ning up thru �Sticky Fingers�. I don�t read music so I can�t judge how accurate that is, but I know the words aren�t always the ones you hear. But what the hell. . . make up your own, the Stones did it when they changed �she had my nose open� to �she heard my eyes open� in �It�s All Over Now�. (Just one question — how come only one verse to �Satisfaction�?)

PHOTOGRAPHS: If the other parts of the book ain�t so great, here�s where the real value lies — every picture tells several stories don�t it? And the pictures here range from good to outstanding. Dig the group shot on the first inside page — compare that to an early shot of Mick, Brian and Bill in dog-toothed check suits with velvet collars ... or the shots from the first gig at the Marquee Club . . . Keith serious as ever, Jagger. short-haired and wide-mouthed ... of Jagger with a tamborine, a chick with a vise-grip on him, an usher grabbing her, Brian watching from astride his guitar, just waiting ... or Mick and Keith with a vet wearing a jacket that says �When I die I�ll Go To Heaven Because I Spent My Time in Hell� ... or the group shot with a model captioned �Miss Lamarge is wearing a crepe dress called Miss Muffet with long slim sleeves and wavy white cuffs� — Bill Wyman has an arm on her shoulder and a look on his face like she just crawled out of a cess-pool. Lot�s of snap-type shots too . . . ex-manager Allan Klein with a four-barrel (and I don�t mean carb), Mick and Marianne Faithfull taking the air in Tangier, Keith . with a pipe . . . Brian on the way to court — looking almost transparent, fragile blond god-child, haunted by legalities . . . Mick and Bianca�s marriage, her plunged neckline exposing lots of skin . . . Keith and Marianne in front of his house holding up newspaper with headlines saying NUDE GIRL AT STONES PARTY — Keith cocks an index finger, Marianne has a shit-eating grin . . . the last posed photo ever taken of Brian, the years and tears haunt his smile, what have those eyes seen? A black woman, looking like a beautiful African sculpture, applies eye makeup to Jagger, he looks sensually patient.. . Anita and Marian,, the Nordic icegoddess with regal and funky ways .. . Bianca looking tough and sleek .. . Keith floating on his back in water, arms outstretched, waiting for the liquid crucifixion . ..

And more . . . The words are okay, they tell some story, but we all know a lot of it already. It�s the pictures where the meat of the book is — there are lots, they are good, they are deep, you can stare at some a long time and drift in and out of your and their fantasies.

The Stones exist in fantasy as much as reality — it�s not so much that their pictures look like them as that they look like their pictures — and how real is one split second? Is it more or less real than the hours that preceede and follow it?

Don�t ask me, I�m out of philosophy, all I know is that this book is a groove and I�ve spent time with it and will spend more. The Stones have occupied a special place in the psyches and thoughts of a lot of people, and this book gives some clues to what life is like on the Olympus they inhabit — at least in somebody�s reality.

One more thing — it ain�t authorized, which means it ain�t the Stones just hustling more bread, so no need to get salty. Just take it for what it is, or leave it alone — the Stones don�t care. Myths never do, right???

Tony Glover

MUG SHOTS: Who�s Who�s In the New Earth by Jay Acton, Alan Lemond and Parker Hodges (Photographs by Raeanne Rubinstein) World/New Earth

Perhaps I am .overly rancorous to be insulted at being included in a book with such subtitular pretense and lack of substance. But Mug Shots, misses, both through its own lack of a sense historical continuum operative in the counter-culture and because it is trying to discuss personality in a subculture in which personality is a festering toenail.

Omissions abound., The most startling, I think, are basically beats, expatriate: William Burroughs, in so many ways the father of the whole thing, other niks like Corso, Trocchi and Burroughs� closest associate, Brion Gysin, but also younger people: the brilliant rock writer Charlie Gillett, Richard Neville of Oz and numerous other rock writers.

In a way, these omissions make sense, however; the �New Earth� (my good lord, who came up with that one?) is far too nebulous a thing to be chronicled in this manner. And even if it could be, what would be new or earthy about a �Who�s Who?�

I don�t know what budgetary and other strictures were imposed upon the various et al�s involved in Mug Shots, and this certainly has something to do with its flaws.

On the other hand, the very idea is part and parcel of the vanity that is the ruination of everything good about being a hippie. Maybe lessons could be taken from Emmett Grogan�s Ringolevio on anonymity before anyone signs a book contract dealing with any aspect of the counter-cjulture; maybe we should forget the idea altogether and �go back to the caves,� as someone suggested after a �love-in� in Detroit in 1967. (It was in the Detroit Free Press, honest.)

And anyway, I�m 22, not 27, if you please.

Dave Marsh

OUT OF HIS HEAD THE SOUND OF PHIL SPECTOR Richard Williams Outerbridge & Lazard

Take your Jimmy Page posters off the wall; Phil Spector, whether you realize it or not, is probably closer to the man you want to be. Not the man who makes the music, the man who makes the music happen. The man who

understands the music better than the musicians; feels it somewhere deep inside of him and can make a very private magic accessible to anyone within earshot of a transistor radio.

Despite his recent work with John Lennon and George Harrison, Spector is still regarded in certain snotty teenage quarters as a relic from some earlier generation, an Edsel on an eight-lane freeway. What they fail to realize is that Phil Spector was perhaps the man who made it possible for us to flaunt our teenage consciousness and get away with it. You have Phil Spector to thank for the fact that it�s respectable — maybe even virtuous — to be teenage in America today.

Because — aside from making the producer an aesthetically valid and noteworthy part of the process that delivers the music we spend so much time listening to and thinking about — Phil was among the first to spit on the sjnusic industry�s shoes, the first to make them sit up and take notice that a mere kid could do their jobs better than they could. And he didn�t stop at merely producing the records; his fierce personal drive eventually led him to where he was pressing and distributing those records himself.

• Richard Williams� account of the Spector Years and his analysis of their impact is about as comprehensive as one could expect from a non-participant observer. Williams, because nobody is ever allowed to penetrate very far into the network of myth and defense which Spector has created around himself, was forced to maintain a distance from his subject, a forced objectivity at once helpful and confining. He has to piece the story together from old clippings and observer�s recollections; to do a truly thorough job of it, Williams would have had to approach Phil Spector the same way Ed Sanders unraveled Charles Manson in The Family. Spector sometimes seems the tougher subject.

Williams can�t always plug the holes left by historical document with enough of himself; too often instead of a book about a man, Out of His Head is a sketchy portrait of a career. Williams hints throughout at Phil�s personal eccentricities —. his bodyguards, fear of planes, excessive paranoia about his security in general — but never gets down to the business of applying those convolutions to the construction of an explicated persona.

With no explanation from Spector (and it is obvious that, while Williams had access to the man, that access was severely limited in both time and depth), Williams had to* rely on the implications of observers and hazy references to even hazier events. If it

were impossible for him to probe any deeper, then the book might have been better devoted to a development of the questions, letting the reader provide his own solution to the mystery.

•Far too much time is spent attempting to lay out the musical impact of Spector�s songs on linear terms, when their realy power was emotional. Rock and roll is much more thaii notes on a chart, or even bass drum intros. Out of His Head is markedly more successful when — as with the coverage of the �River Deep — Mountain High� fiasco — it frames the music in a detailed case of peripheral reportage.

On the other hand, it�s unreasonable to expect any writer to capture the magic listening to �Be My Baby� or �You�ve Lost That Lovin� Feelin� � summons forth. Phil Spector�s genius is essentially non-verbal. Richard Williams has done a credible job of placing that genius in some kind of coherent context. More than anything, Out of His Head is a well-written introduction to an old friend few of us ever got to know very well. The rest is for you to discover.

Ben Edmonds