Rock’s Secret History Revealed

Rock’s Secret History Revealed

BOOKS

AFTER THE BALL by Ian Whitcomb (Simon & Schuster)

Ian Whitcomb had a hit record called “You Turn Me On” and in an interesting reversal of what is supposed to be the usual run of things, proceeded to become a music writer. After the Ball is his first book, and it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with rock, except to clear up a few historical mysteries. Strangely enough, that’s what makes this book fine. After the Ball turns out to be one of the better music histories we’ve come across in the last couple years.

After the Ball is the secret history of rock, the stuff everyone (except maybe Ray Davies) tried to forget about after Elvis. Ian Whitcomb is the first person to realize the importance of Tin Pan Alley tradition — which is not to say that he is the first to realize the importance of Tin Pan Alley writers ^ in rock history, and that alone would make his book a valuable piece of pop writing. But there’s more to it than even that, for when in the final chapter Ian tells the story of his rise to pop stardom, the tale is so accurate you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

After the Ball is, in a sense, an attempt to explain what music could have been like before electricity. To understand the first half of this book you have to throw away the conceptions dealt you by the record player (and even motion pictures, television, perhaps the automobile). That isn’t an easy thing to do, and it is useless to try to convince anyone to listen to Mitch Miller versions of those “Standards.” Even rag-time, which Whitcomb loves inordinately (and which has a certain vitality of its own) still sounds horribly anachronistic to an electric ear. There’s no reason for the non-obsessed to try to relate to this stuff on any level except the historical. Whitcomb doesn’t proselytize, to his credit; he just states facts, and draws some pretty fair conclusions.

But that history is crucial to an understanding of the way pop works, both as a social force and as a business. You can hardly appreciate, say, the Carole King story, or the Phil Spector story, without some sense of what their antagonists in Tin Pan Alley were trying to preserve' from the devastations of rock’n’roll. True enough, what Tin Pan Alley was trying to protect was something vapid, harmless and eventually reactionary. But Whitcomb is the first rocker to admit that pre-rock pop had had eras of vitality.

But history is an intellectual’s province, for the most part. It would be false to pretend that most of us are going to pick up After the Ball for anything but the last chapter, which chronicles the story of Whitcomb’s success with “You Turn Me On.”

Whitcomb obviously understands this, or he wouldn’t have included the chapter, just as he understood what “You can count on two years of gravy and bread off one stone hit” meant when someone slipped that crucial slice of rock wisdom to him as “You Turn Me On” rode the charts. He did it: here is Whitcomb, the archetypal accidental rock star, working his way through the pop process backwards (maybe): from top to bottom. Entering America as a star at 18, leaving a has-been at 21.

It’s not surprising that Ian Whitcomb understood how to deal with the problems a two year career in the entertainment business can cause. He read the other chapters in After the Ball and found out how many other people it had happened to. It’s funny, to him and to the reader. Seems to me that a lot of budding, and not-so-budding rock stars of the ’70s would be well-advised to learn what the joke is about. This is the place.

Dave Marsh

SADNESS by Donald Barthelme (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Anybody with the kind and number of enemies Donald Barthelme’s got has to have something going for him. In fact, I’ve never understood why people get so uptight over Barthelme’s writing — it seems to me to be one of the very few bright signs in current fiction, and not only is his work vital enough that it keeps changing, it keeps changing for the better.

If you don’t believe me, may I point you toward his remarkable new collection of stories, Sadness. Sadness contains sixteen stories, all excellent, all in the distinctive Barthelme style. Making up characters is no problem for Barthelme, as his characters are either regular folks or landscape vehicles, so he concentrates his powers on the landscape. Be the landscape internal, as in “The Genius,” or external, as in the hilarious “A City of Churches” (in which a woman tries to set up a car-rental agency in a city where everyone lives in the church of their choice) Barthelme sketches it in with a master’s touch.

Does it really matter that the landscape is so absurd? What’s the matter — ain’t you never read Lewis Carroll? People worry about stories like “The Genius,” which is a series of paragraphs about a world-reknowned Genius. Why is he a Genius? Because he is. He discusses genius, everybody knows he’s a genius, and any eccentricity of behavior can be smiled at, any need he might have is filled instantly. What difference does it make that you can read the whole story through and never figure out what he does or what makes him a genius for doing it? Or “Departures,” a series of descriptions of things departing (kids from school, a tumor and one section that merely says in large letters “Dunkirk”) held together by nothing at all. Do the parts form a whole? I read it and they seemed to. You might not agree.

SADNESS

Donald Barthelme

Of course, fooling around with stuff that’s this far out can be tricky. Barthelme walks a thin line between experimental writing and nonsense,.and in his previous story collections, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts and City Life, he can be observed falling over the line in a few places. Not so with Sadness. It is a finely balanced, mature and wonderfully assured book, and if you care about the ways writing can expand your consciousness, or if you want to know what’s new in fiction or if, like me, you’re a confirmed Barthelme fan, you’ll want to pick up Sadness. You!ll be glad you did.

Ed Ward

RECORD Jules Siegel (Straight Arrow)

The other day, the butcher at the market where I shop (she’s a lady) asked me what I did for a living. “I’m a writer,” I told her. “Ooh that must be interesting,” she replied. Interesting, yes. Lucrative, sometimes. But rarely.

Jules Siegel is a writer. Record is his book. It tells you a lot about Jules Siegel — much more than you probably wanted to know, in fact — and it tells you even more about what it’s like to be a free-lance writer. If you’re interested, read on.

Record is a collection of pieces that Jules Siegel has written for various publications, many of whom drastically rearranged or rejected them. It is also filled with calligraphed mindspew from Siegel’s “trip books,” various postcards from friends and a couple ,of photographs. There is fiction, autobiography (“Family Secrets,” the first piece, not only lets you in on his past, but you can see how he’s used it and changed it in his fiction) and some very fine journalism. The journalism will tell you lots about Bob Dylan and James Taylor (the piece, “Midnight in Babylon,” was one of the finest things Rolling Stone ever published, although they almost went broke when they got his expense account) and the Black Panthers, but it’ll tell you even more about Jules Siegel. You read a piece, say “pretty good,” and turn to the back of the book, where you’ll find out who rejected it. “My God!” you’ll find yourself saying, “it must be impossible to get stuff this good published in this country.” Already, Siegel has given you an insight.

Oddly, the design of the book adds to its comprehensiveness. It’s designed like a ledger, one in which an egomaniac has been let loose with an Osmiroid. After you are a couple dozen pages into it, you feel like you’re reading Siegel’s scrapbook, in which he’s pasted all his published pieces — a not inaccurate description of the project.

I’m half-tempted to say that Record is worth the $3.95 for the famous Beach Boys piece alone, but it’s not. But if it’s good reading of good writing you’re after, you could do much worse, no matter which side of the typewriter you’re on.

Ed Ward