ANY OLD WAY YOU CHOOSE IT Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967-73

by Robert Christgau (Penguin)

Lester Bangs writes too fast; Jon Landau, always a little stiff, grew disaffected before switching to movie reviewing; Richard Goldstein's ambitions could no longer be contained by the form; Michael Lydon has taken up the guitar; Greil Marcus, after writing some marvelous stuff in his chilly way, began straining to meld music and politics; Richard Meltzer never accepted the simple fact that avant-garde positions can't affect masses, only editors and writers; Craig Karpel, more brilliant than Meltzer, suffers from a similar obtuseness; Miller Francis Jr., late of the Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, chose to stay submerged and uncontaminated, and so atrophies; Ed Ward remains a folksy kid. Of the other people known more or less as rock critics in the sixties and early seventies, only Ellen Willis and Robert Christgau are still functioning profitably, Willis at the New Yorker and Christgau at Newsday. Of the two, Willis is the classier writer, capable of great intellectual and — ahem — artistic density, but she writes infrequently and for some time has been preoccupied with the central but dreary fact of her own aging: can she continue to talk about a music that Belongs to the Young? Christgau, also aware of the problem, has come to terms with it and as this book shows, is getting better all the time.

Any Old Way collects most of the best music essays Christgau has produced, from his Esquire columns in 1967-68 to his Village Voice stuff from 1969-71 to his Newsday pieces of last year and this year. The growth in the writing is clear. The Secular Music columns in Esquire reflect an uncertainty and desire to please, uneasily co-existing with a skepticism that nevertheless wants to believe in the possibility of some kind of pragmatic utopianism coalescing one day, perhaps around the energy of rock ("Hooray for longhairs," he wrote in his last column, a defiance that only one who knows Harold Hayes may appreciate.) Secular Music spoke in a civilized yet hip voice to people whose intelligence the writer respected, who knew something and could use rock culture as a way of focusing on whatever else was happening.

Blindly, Esquire dropped Christgau, and he moved on to replace Richard Goldstein at the Village Voice. His new column was called Rock & Roll &, the final ampersand indicating how openended he wished it to be, allowing him to extend his persona and his theory of pop consciousness (pop art is superior to high art to the extent that it deals with "common realities and fantasies in forms that provide immediate pleasure". .. and is "vital aesthetically as work" and "vital culturally as relationship" because it moves and is moved by large audiences). Thus writing about pop art becomes a valid employment, not necessarily more important than writing about high art, but more appropriate for the bright children of the lower middle class just establishing beachheads at good American colleges and in the media. (Christgau, of Queens, is a Dartmouth graduate and a Phi Beta Kappa.) High art lacks either kind of vitality these days, probably because there haven't been many high artists lately. That editors of publications like the New Yorker, Commentary and the New York Review of Books fail to come to terms with this — after all, they do allow movie reviewing — and hire people to write about Alice Cooper, Puerto Rican Style or Subway Art, is a measure of the generation gap in American letters. ,

Among Christgau's better Voice columns is a piece written around his breakup with Willis. It is purgative, sometimes bitter, and for Christgau, disjointed, and it is more human than anything I've read by him. Unfortunately, it's against his nature to continue to write so personally. Christgau has a classic critic's mind. He seeks paradoxes, won't let contradictions lie, likes things neat. All of that is fine except when he deals with emotional matters like Women's Liberation. Then his attempts to be rational sound futile. Maddeningly, he sees this. While riding in a car with three women activists, he gets into an argument over the lyrics to "Wedding Bell Blues," and concedes that yes, the women are right, the song does} define women in relation to men, but it doesn't matter, the song still works as good schlock. A few pages later he says: "for the hard-core rock freak, a chick's place is not only in the home but between the sheets, and a feminist is more fucked up than fucked over and better off just plain fucked." One wonders if Christgau ever met Jennie Dean or Germaine Greer or even Angela Bowie, and why he believes so strongly in the power of sexist agitprop and not at all in revolutionary agitprop.

Of course contradiction is a given in media criticism; (Lester Bangs exults in it).

At Newsday, Christgau has worked most of the clumsiness out of his writing. There are no more sentences like: "Both C&W and R&B began as a manifestation of an insular racial (and economic) group from the South who used music to affirm cherished verities in the wake of seismic geographical and cultural movement." He'll deal with the grimness of growing up working class in England, then project lucidly on why Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes" should be taken more seriously than equally apocalyptic rock by Black Sabbath or Uriah Heep: "Hunter's vocals provided a mad note of urbane detachment. .. he achieved a little of what Dylan had... there was something in the raveups that cleansed while it scarified. 1. the record neither surrendered to nor tried to escape from the rebellious pessimism that had come to pervade English hard rock. Instead it confronted that pessimism, positing a possible survival against the likely obliteration." He'll also attend Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck concerts in suburban Long Island with his mother, using her as a filter: "What seemed so natural with Tom Jones seemed so contrived with this guy," said Mrs. Christgau. Her son concluded that Humperdinck's fans were too good for their idol, and rejoiced that the human spirit is able to preserve its utopian impulses, even in the heart of the Westbury Music Fair. Micro/macro writing of that sort objectifies Christgau's theory of pop consciousness. It's what makes him unique. For more examples, read his essays "Living Without the Beatles"; "Four-Pieces About Bob Dylan"; and "Rock Is Obsolescent, But So Are You", and such short pieces as "Trying To Understand the Eagles", "CouperTrooper" and "Adventures of the Dean of Long Island Rock Critics."

John Lombardi

MICK JAGGER By J. Marks (Curtis)

There are thousands of words floating around about the Rolling Stones, most of them superfluous. This one, written by a former Chicago Tribune and New York Times freelancer (who looks like Billy Jack — see back cover) is principally a rehash of what everyone has rehashed since Pete Goodman's Our Own Story, the quickie which followed "Satisfaction." If I sometimes feel that of all the Stones books, Goodman's has been the most satisfying, it isn't because I think 1965 was better. It is because I think density should have purpose, that analysis should be truly analytic, that all of those weighty words should suggest something more than that the writer has thought.

Really, of course, the best Stones book is David Dalton's music, lyric and critical text. Partially this is because it contains some of the best material on the Stones (e.g. Greil Marcus" review of Let It Bleed). But it is also true that Dalton put together information that had simply never been collated before; a worthwhile endeavor, anytime.

Marks has collected very little in his book. He draws heavily on all the other critical and historical works on the Stones, particularly Dalton's, appending some presumably personal observations and a pair of long tales, about a N.Y. drag queen and a California surfer, who are there to represent Stones fans. The fans" stories are not particularly wellhandled — CREEM readers have better fantasies, as those who read the results of our Stones" contest last March will recall. Similarly, Marks" personal observations are suspect, because they are so much like everyone else's (particularly Richard Elman's).

Unfortunately, this book illuminates almost nothing about Jagger; if you don't already know this much, and haven't had many of the same insights (whether or not you are articulate enough to have committed them to paper) you probably don't care very much, about Mick or the Stones. Marks thinks, I guess, that Jagger is the Stones, and that his story is theirs. I don't think a true fan would make that mistake. I've said I liked Brian Jones better, and thought he was more of the essence, but I never thought he was all there was to it. The same is true of Jagger. Too bad J. Marks (or Jamake Mamake Highwater, his real (?) name) doesn't know that.

Dave Marsh