“BUT DON’T YOU MISNAME IT...”

“BUT DON’T YOU MISNAME IT...”

ROCK OF AGES: THE ROLLING STONE HISTORY OF ROCK & ROLL

by Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker

(Summit)

Chuck Eddy

Unless you count the supercool fact that it’s named after a Def Leppard song, there ain’t a whole lotta laffs in Rolling Stone’s latest rock-history text Rock Of Ages, which is a shame; rock-scribing’s always more credible when it at least tries to connect to the excitement the music’s been known to provide, but the trio of well-respected vet scholars who contribute a chronological 200-pages-or-so each here are too self-serious to climb down from their pseudo-objective third-person lecterns (and, in ’60s-chronicler Geoffrey Stokes’s case, ditch the uppity foreign-phrasedropping and hokey technical jargonese) and clue us in on why this garbage really matters to them. But that’s the least of this book’s evils: worst is the way it’s hitched to the far-flung (that is, false) assumptions that worthwhile r’n’r is made in conjunction with a socially united "community” (or by the usual icons) rather than by unknown individuals acting in marketplace-dictated isolation, and that the music should “grow up” with the generation that first adopted it as a "political” entity. So not only aren’t there many laffs, there ain’t much you can’t already get somewhere else: nobodies out to communicate for themselves, innovators like the Sonics and Shaggs and Sir Lord Baltimore and Soft Boys, all of whom owed infinitely more to the spirit of Icon Elvis than the volume’s ubiquitous Joan Baez ever did, are ignored. As is Def Leppard.

Ed Ward, tasked to the rock era that spans from the beginning of mankind to the ocean-crossing of the Icon Beatles, actually kicks off Rock Of Ages on fairly firm ground, unpretentiously demonstrating how the World Wars and related sociohistorical factors made teenagedom and rock 'n' roll inevitable. Ward tends toward internal redundancy (he carries his Little Richard/Martian analogy too far), but he’s an ace crossanalyzer—it’s impressive how he ties together "School Days," the IGY, the Beats and Salinger, all within a page.

But Ward’s teenagedom is forgotten soon after Stokes takes over—after eternally dissecting the folk-revival and folk-rock to the detriment of Del Shannon, he follows over 11 pages of San Francisco with half a page of garage, then later manages half a page of bubblegum. Stokes can’t decide whether three or four people died at Woodstock: he claims the Stooges’ records "seemed contrived” and "records by Doors-influenced bands like Alice Cooper haven’t worn well” (compared to his beloved CSNY, I guess); he opines that, "since guitarist Leigh Stephens was neither Clapton or Hendrix,” Blue Cheer was “pretty boring.” If only geniuses can make interesting noise, how can rock be a democratic artform?

Despite an admittedly breathtaking description of “Stairway To Heaven,” Ken Tucker condescends toward teen music even more than Stokes. Anybody who considers Uriah Heep art-rock should hear "Easy Livin’ ”; anybody who considers Nazareth “impersonal radio fodder” should hear “Hair Of The Dog”; anybody who thinks New York post-punk lacked “innovation and aggression” should hear No New York. And Tucker’s sloppy getting facts straight—he misstates the titles of Mott The Hooples’ debut and Al Green’s last secular LP, not to mention the release year of Icon Bruce’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town. He’s wonderful on disco, he takes a smart swipe at Bryan Ferry, and I like his formulation on why ’70s rock didn’t penetrate mainstream culture. But his error with this last point is assuming fragmentation was harmful; the '80s have saved rock, he figures, because they’ve restored "political” messages, media personalities, and radical unity. So he lies that AOR racism is extinct, and never suggests that CHR's melting-pot homogenization could mean the death of R&B. And (of course) he overlooks the indie labels that really have kept rock breathing this decade.

On second thought, Rock Of Ages just might be a joke after all.