CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

“I AM MR. ED...”

HORSE S NECK by Pete Townshend (Houghton Mifflin)

J. Kordosh

If you’re looking for an expose on the Who—or merely another look at the big rock/big bucks gutter—you won’t find it in Horse’s Neck. Or perhaps you will, but only from a skewed angle, and only in an emotional—not a literal— sense.

Undoubtedly this collection of 13 short stories, held together by Townshend’s horse-as-beauty (or truth) metaphor, smacks of the autobiographical. “Ropes” is a first-person narration by a nameless musician who refers to his entourage as “my rodent family.” In “Tonight’s The Night,” the story of a psychotic girl’s relationship with a musician named “Pete’.’ is told from the third-person. And in “Fish Shop,” the narrator is an unnamed childhood friend of a now-popular guitarist named, you guessed it, “Pete.” (“He was swinging his guitar like a battle axe,” we are told.)

A veil this thin might be a bad joke in another writer’s hands, but in Townshend’s stories—riddled with dream sequences, flashbacks and, generally, minimal plot structures—it’s a satisfactory device. Only two musicians are named by name: Rod Stewart (in “Tonight’s The Night”) and John Lennon (in “Winston”). In the former, Stewart is incidental to the story, While in the latter, Lennon’s death serves as a springboard to damn both the concept of the star (“Stars are attributed with intelligence they don’t have, beauty they haven’t worked for, loyalty and love they are incapable of reciprocating, and strength they do not possess.”) and the audience (“They scramble the innate rhythmic response granted man by a generous God with getting high in smoke-filled discos, or throwing Coke cans and firecrackers at stadium concerts.”) Interestingly, Lennon himself is described as a “stelliform soul who, behind all this rabblerousing, is a real being, with real talent.”

The best moments in Horse’s Neck, though, come in Townshend’s explorations of obsessive drinking—“Champagne On The Terraces” is an expertly sympathetic view of a drunkard—and obsessive sex, which is practically the book’s dominant theme. "The Plate,” the longest story here (and one

of the most imaginative), explores the unravelling of a detective’s life when he becomes neurotically preoccupied with a junkie whose boyfriend was killed in a grotesque and symbolic fashion. The youthful sexual-obsession of “Fish Shop” rings as true as the alcoholic’s viewpoint in “Champagne.” It is in these stories that Townshend finds his metier—based, we presume, on experience.

Horse’s Neck is exceptionally good reading; one can only

hope that Townshend continues writing. His style is direct and his characters—notably Jaco, the aging flamenco guitarist of “Fish Shop,” the “crazy bint” of “Tonight’s The Night,” and “Rastus’s crazy friend, Binky”(!) of “Ropes”— are portrayed with vitality. And, as Raymond Chandler once said: “Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality— there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.”

HER HOMETOWN

IN COUNTRY by Bobby Ann Mason (Harper & Row)

by Cynthia Rose

Seventeen-year-old Sam Hughes lives with her late father’s brother Emmett in a small Kentucky town. To a soundtrack of MTV, heavy metal and radio oldie stations, she agonizes over her future, her friends, and her boyfriend, while dreaming of Jim Morrison and Springsteen. In Country, the first novel from awardwinning writer Bobbie Ann

Mason, is the story of Sam during the summer of 1984...the summer Born In The USA is released, a soundtrack for Sam’s decision to uncover the truth about the war in which her father died. The album, becomes a metaphor for all Sam discovers about the conflict which changed America forever.

Mason’s book is titled from the vet’s phrase Sam spends her summer trying to comprehend—only to sense that she is behind the lines herself: part of the same war as Springsteen, as her best friend Dawn, as the mother she never sees. It is the battle to reassert and maintain the basic dignity America originally promised.

Ail this sounds very sober for a work which reverberates with the laughter, sex and the charisma of a whole spectrum of wonderful humans. But at a time when Rolling Stone let Steven Spielberg brag about how rarely he reads, it’s worth stressing how important In Country is. As important—and just as deft, moving and tough—as Born In The USA itself; Mason writes with the best qualities of rock ’n’ roll.

In Country, however, was written before Springsteen’s LP was released. Only during revisions did Mason update her plot to occur during the summer of ’84. But the nature of her themes is no accident. “Originally,” she told me, “l envisioned it as a story about unemployment, about Sam and her boyfriend just out of high school and not able to make it. But once I realized how Sam’s father had died, Vietnam became a necessity in the book. There are so many of these kids now who know nothing about Vietnam and care nothing about it but who—like Sam’s boyfriendare quite vulnerable to being sent off to fight just such a war.

“There is also something which is not really admitted in America,” says Mason, ‘‘and it has to do with class. And I take what I guess is basically an anti-elitist attitude toward a lot of things, such as our supposed ‘high culture’. It seems to me that people with power, or money, often manage to make a lot of these class divisions on the basis of taste.

‘‘Like if you put somebody down for loving velvet paintings, or reading the Enquirer everyday or not liking the ‘right’ band, then it makes you feel superior and it sets you apart and it gives you status. I just try to write about this in a psychological sense, about the stress it causes when you try to move from one class to another. Because that is virtually impossible in America— although it seems to be possible with somebody like the rock stars Sam sees and hears. People who are suddenly very rich and very famous, coming from nowhere.”

When young people and pop fans alike are insulted by the hype surrounding rubbish such as Bret Ellis’s nonsensical “MTV novel” Less Than Zero, it’s wonderfully dignifying to discover a work as fine and genuine as In Country. So if you only invest in one book this year, make sure it’s Mason’s.

AMERICAN MUSE

FORTUNATE SON by Dave Marsh (Random House)

Robert Hull

Dave Marsh was a punk when he worked for CREEM from 1969 through 1973. He was such a troublemaker in fact that he coined the term “punk rock” in an early issue of this magazine to identify a kind of music that he felt was being neglected (American garage-rock and Detroit’s highenergy noise). Over a decade later, he’s still making trouble.

Fortunate Son is an intriguing document, part autobiography and part criticism, moving from one to the other, handin-hand, as if Marsh were continually arguing with himself while walking in a circle. The work only poses as a collection of essays, reviews, interviews, excerpts from other books. Each section and each chapter is introduced, put into context, and explained by Marsh in a voice clearly of the present.

Although not a stylist like Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus or Nick Tosches, Marsh is a good writer. He explores the marrow of a subject, not just its surface* always finding a larger issue buried in a rock ’n’ roll moment.

But it is Marsh’s ideas, ; ultimately, not his writing ability or his musical taste, that must be dealt with. Defined loosely, some of these are: rock music is a form of culture for the uncultured; class can provide the missing link among diverse American musicians; there are no useless Elvis albums; the Beach Boys were responsible for the California rock of the 70s, which was responsible for electing Reagan; Bob Seger’s The Distance is the best album since Springsteen’s The River, the MC5 and CREEM invented punk rock; Detroit is underrated; the Band was overrated.

What sets Marsh’s criticism above most of the current laissez-faire rock writing is not his politics or his barbed wit, but his sense of America—and his place in it. He cannot understand America and interpret it for us except in terms of a rock ’n’ roll experience. It is of America that Marsh heard Springsteen singing early in his career, and of course, he has been proven correct in his estimation—only Reagan can compete with Springsteen as the present-day symbol of America.

For this reason, Fortunate Son is of a piece with Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway and Bill C. Malone’s Southern Music/American Music (maybe even James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), and yet, too much of a hodgepodge to rank with these substantial works. Marsh’s articles on Rod Stewart, the Rolling Stones, and the MC5 lack depth, and most of the early pieces for CREEM, he admits, are embarrassing. But Marsh’s later work is generally insightful and complex, especially when he’s discussing black artists such as Sly Stone, Muddy Waters, Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye, and always when he’s analyzing Elvis.

It’s a wonderful essay, “The Lonesome Death of Florence Thompson,” which stands as the centerpiece of the book. Marsh even points to its sixth paragraph as his strongest statement on the purpose of writing about rock. The essay concerns Dorothea Lange’s Depression photograph of Florence Thompson’s face, entitled “Migrant Mother,” and the Stanley Brothers’ “Rank Strangers,” the “Mystery Train” of bluegrass music. Marsh writes: “I’ve always felt that one of the secret strengths of rock ’n* roll was that it provided a voice and a face for the forgotten and disenfranchised. In a way, Florence Thompson’s serves for all the others. At least in its beginnings, rock was one of the few ways that poor people, country people, black people and Southerners had of making themselves visible in a country whose media increasingly depict it as solely urban, affluent, white and northern.” Marsh continues by mentioning the renewed Depression and how bluegrass, gospel and blues now speak to him as eloquently as rock. “As history unravels,” he says, “this becomes more the case.”

It is the statement of a critic who has come to terms with his country’s musical past and present. We are most fortunate to have him around.