Trials of the Rock Writer

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Ian Mac Donald

by

Trials of the Rock Writer

Around this time of the year, rock publications begin to plough out forms of questions which all add up, eventually, to: Who do you wanna read about next year?

There's no way of ignoring that. If Group X comes out top of the poll and none of the writers like Group X, then it'll be difficult to blame any circulation-loss in "75 purely on a general recession. Gotta write a good few articles on Group X, right?

And you can attack them in print only so often before it gets boring — for everybody — and then you have to get set for "objectivity," which means finding some way to be harmless about Group X without selling out. You can claim, in so doing, to be merely dispassionate — but how will that look when, on the opposite page, Singer-Songwriter Y is being busted in the mouth just like the good old days? It'll look like Group X is being accepted.

In any case, there are so many rock papers and so many rock writers that a Prevailing Opinion is only likely to crop up on certain V.Important figures; below that it's every man for his favourite group in a mad rush (which, in Britain at least, occurs once every week with the publication of the three or four leading rock periodicals).

Add to that writer-egotism, topicality, press-office games with exclusives and swap-deals, and simple mistakes such as any harrassed quality-controller is prey to, and what have you got? Very little genuine, independent, consistent criticism, that's what.

Take the poll-situation so far in the U.K.

Most readers, according to the Melody Maker's last count, go for technoflash, i.e., they like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, and have one particular Second Division fave in the same field — say, Gentle Giant or Genesis (although Genesis, it appears, have just about achieved

promotion into the upper echelons by now).

That's awkward, since most journalists hate all these bands with unconcealed fervour. Most rock-paper journalists, that is. Establishment papers, like The Sunday Times, only know rock from the records that get sent to them — and thus their critic (middle-aged jazz-writer Derek Jewell) will swallow the bait and go for technoflash in a big way, along the "Sgt Pepper" debatelines of whether or not rock is capable of either confirming or denying the classical tradition.

Critic Tony Palmer (of The Observer, another Fleet Street heavy) once put it something like this: "To be accepted as genuine Art, The Beatles" music has to be able to stand up alongside that of Schubert and be counted." i.e., something/might have heard of.

America has less trouble with this than Britain, not having a particularly strong indigenous classical tradition (although "The Stooges vs Charles Ives" might be just the right sort of thing to break it up on our side of the ditch). In the U.K. it's achieved something on the scale of a conspiracy between The General — as in "caviare to ..." — and The Establishment, with The Rock Critics romantically dug in between them.

The thing is, the trenches of Rock Critic City are full of another type of shit.

Aware as they are of the Rock - as -extension - of - the - Classical - endeavour conspiracy, most Rock Critics retire immediately to the other end of the shooting gallery and hole up as near to Ethnic Credibility as they can get. In the States that's cool, of course. The kids are rich enough and certainly careless enough to be able to buy albums by Yes and The Allman Brothers on the same afternoon.

But Britain had its Blues Purity scene some eight years ago and anyway can still count on the Who and the Stones to provide traditional excitements that make the U.S. Southern bands look kind of simplistic. So we feel

naturally suspicious of any cat who just wants to lay back — seems like an unnecessary luxury to us.

Except that saying The Who and the. Stones (and whoever) are still what's happening gets just as boring as putting down Group X — which is, of course, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, by the way. A sizeable proportion of Britain's quota T3 of critics are very prone to lowering 1 their shields, leaving their swords stuck = in the carcass of some technoflash dupe, ■5 and stumbling out West to look .for The 2 Real Thing, i.e., Jesse Colin Young, The | New Riders Of The Purple Sage, Allen Toussaint, etc., etc.

Which means that a British lad like Robert Pqjmer can wander off to the States and make a painfully lame Americanized album, and get away with it on the strength of collaboration with the admittedly fine Lowell George. In fact, more than "get away with it" he can fool virtually everybody and start pick' ing up points on the Critics " Polls.

This second error emerges from the same "Sgt Pepper" debate as the cultural misapprehension which upholds technoflash. It's the side that "denies" the classical tradition instead of "confirming" it. It's the side that starts out on the discrimination games with two questions: (1) Can ya dance to it? (2) If you can't, does it have a-classical roots? (i.e., Where's da slide-guitar, man?).

Neither approach is likely to pinpoint rock's true vitality since the definitions beneath the conflicting premises are equally phoney and inflexible. And anybody who wants to operate between the two has therefore to spend most of his time ducking shells fired from either side which, since they're aimed at nothing real (Dylan: "anything with no real existence is bound to become an international phenomenon"), always come down in the no-man's-land where it's all actually happening.

Soon the New Musical Express readers will come out with their votes for Yes, ELP, blah-blah, and the writers will come out with exactly the opposite. CREEM will probably get a more rounded, centralized vote by virtue of being a monthly — like the elitist Let It Rock over here. But the no-m^n's-land will only get hit "by accident."

What about a New Year's Resolution? Say: fire off one your trustiest guns, whichever side of the line you're on, and pay attention to where it lands, since it obviously can't reach the target you've been imagining it's supposed to hit.

Could be you'll land a number right on top of one of those guys that get habitually treated to the ""Totally Unclassifiable" line of critical leastresistance.

Hey — you might even be in time to understand Blood On The Tracks!