"It is difficult not to write satire."
-Juvenal, Satires, 60 BC
Sex
I wasn't entirely unkind in the first version of my review. I noted that John Strausbaugh is the editor of the New York Press, and with several decades of music writing under his belt, he's no hack. Just bitter that he can't rock like he once did, perhaps. In America, when men start feeling less virile with age, they tend to join forces with conservatives and get all moralizing on society's ass. Tune in to C-Span for ten minutes to see what I mean. Is that what Strausbaugh's going through? You tell me. "Rock is youth music,"(italics his, not mine) he writes on page 2, laying bare
his philosophy on music and the basic assumption of his book.
To be fair - as I pointed out in the original review (gawd that was good) - Mick Jagger isn't alone on Strausbaugh's hit list. He virtually has anybody over thirty still playing rock 'n' roll in his cross hairs. Pete Townshend, Grace Slick, what's left of The Grateful Dead, all The Eagles, but not Sting. Sting's not a rock 'n' roller. Pop artists aren't subjected to the same rules as rockers in Strausbaugh's world. A world in which true rock 'n' roll is extinct, having been replaced by Middle of the Road Rock (MOR) with the advent of mid-seventies commercial powerhouses Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen. (In the lost review I had quotes to support my statements, but can't be bothered to dig them up for you now. Trust me, they're there. And if you
don't believe me, read the book for yourself.) Jackson Browne and his ilk, so claims Strausbaugh, put the final nail in rock 'n' roll's proverbial coffin.
feel-good corporate philanthropy (The Body Shop, David Geffen,
Ben & Jerry's), scrappy rock outfits by billion dollar industry
(The Stones, Virgin Atlantic, Rolling Stone), and he'll have none
of it. He might as well tell the moon to be made of cheese.
Rock 'n' Roll
Now, lest I sound like a Strausbaugh convert, let me add this: John Strausbaugh is ageist. Although he might have a point as to the perverse nature of rock 'n' roll when performed by our dinosaur idols - lacking the spontaneity/creativity of the raw medium - I gotta say I've been to a few Dead shows he can label as nostalgic museum pieces (and to a percentage of the audience perhaps they were), but to the majority of the freaks tripping out to Jerry's subtle licks or Mickey's percussive inventions, the band was anything but a nostalgic, souless artifact on display.
Curiously, Rock Till You Drop ends with a series of interviews with standouts from New York's rock scene. Coming from an author who despises nostalgia, it is, well, nostalgic. Stemming from a Giorgio Gomelsky project called "Rock in New York", the interviews capture in their own words the artists' and hanger-ons' recollections of events memorable to them. (The irony here is that Gomelsky was "effectively the Rolling Stones' first manager, and his showcasing them at his Crawdaddy Club put them on the road to superstardom". Wow. A quote.) Venue owner Jim Fouratt recalls the night Jackson Browne (yes, with coffin nail in hand) rolled into town, and Tuli Kupferberg of sixties radical band The Fugs (who incidentally didn't get started in rock 'n' roll 'til long after he hit the thirty years of age ceiling, earning him the dubious distinction of "World's oldest rock 'n' roll star") reminisces about his early days as a poet.
That this section comes off as nostalgic blather (although interesting nostalgic blather), is really no fault of the author's. We're living in a world where nostalgia is practically instantaneous. Who hasn't heard it in G. Dubya's voice each time he mutters the term "Nine-eleven." Hell, in the face of a war gone terribly awry, nostalgia got him re-elected. It's tricky, powerful business, nostalgia.
My final, and perhaps strongest, criticism I save for the book's continuity. Strausbaugh is a columnist, and he admits much of the content of Rock 'Til You Drop is pulled from his pieces. That's fine, but knitting a book together from pieces written over some period of time has inherent problems, as Kupferberg's inclusion attests. The focus is unclear at times, non-existent at others, and the path to a conclusion becomes a multiple-lane highway, the book a vehicle with one purpose in mind: Bashing Jann Wenner. I'm no fan of Wenner's, but having read Rock 'Til You Drop I'm as suspicious of Strausbaugh's motives as I am (and apparently am supposed to be) of Wenner's. The tour bus may be ablaze in Strausbaugh's ideal world, but in mine it's got a full tank of gas, available seating, and will be stopping at a corner close to home. God bless this crazy mucked up world of rock 'n' roll.
posted 10/01/05
THE BUS STOPS HERE
John Strausbaugh hates front man Mick Jagger almost as much as he hates Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner. Maybe it's an association thang. Maybe, just maybe, Strausbaugh has an aversion to the term "Rolling Stone", and therein lies his fomenting hatred of Jagger and Wenner. I wrote a lengthy review of his book Rock 'Til You Drop (Verso, $25.00),
but when I went to retrieve it, the floppy (which by the by aren't floppy and haven't been for a good decade and a half) had gone tits up and the review - a Pulitzer contender for sure - irretrievable. Too bad. It was a really great piece.
In the lost review I shot holes through Strausbaugh's premise of Rock 'Til You Drop, which basically is that rock 'n' roll is youth music, can only be enjoyed by youths, and should only be played by youths. Jagger, youthful as he may appear when wiggling his ass in front of tens of thousands of fans and curiosity seekers, is not youth. He's old, and accordingly, should be stuffed in a wheelchair hidden out of sight. If
that bit of drivel sounds ageist, it's because it is, although the author is simply trying to protect us from what may otherwise result in an unseemly aesthetic: Old people rockin' out in anything other than rocking chairs. See, in Strausbaugh's perfect world, the tour bus has not only been decommissioned, it's been ransacked and set ablaze.
[Rock 'n' roll] is best played by young people, for young people, in a setting that is specifically exclusionary of their parents and anyone their parents' age. It is the music of youthful energies, youthful rebellion, youthful anxieties and anger - "a young people's (and by young I mean teenage) art form," as British novelist-essayist Will Self has written. "[U]nlike every other great genre of American pop," American rock historian James Miller concurs, "rock is all about being young, or (if you are poor Mick
Jagger) pretending to be young." (Italics mine, not his.)
Drugs
Strausbaugh has been rubbing elbows with sixties radical rockers for years. If not a mover and a shaker himself, he's on several occasions held the position of the "anointed one" - the guy who gets to engage in intimate conversation with the rockers who built a culture around their music. I gave him high marks for that in the lost review. It's this insider knowledge that makes Rock 'Til You Drop readable. Although he dedicates too many pages to trashing Jann Wenner for using Rolling Stone as a medium for trashing industry people he doesn't like (hello, earth to Strausbaugh: people in glass houses shouldn't throw rolling stones), his stories are often
funny, eye-opening and in any other industry, libelous. He shares one story which took place during the Nixon administration. Grace Slick had somehow gotten on the list of invitees to a tea at the White House. Now, the Nixon administration was notorious for being out of touch (the President, purportedly meeting a sequin-suited Elvis Presley, had to ask who he was. How lame is that?), which lends some believability to this tale. Accepting the invitation, Slick, with beat poet Abbie Hoffman in tow, arrived at the white house with a hit of acid they'd planned to slip to the First Lady. Unfortunately, after hanging a peace sign on the White House fence, Secret Service wouldn't clear
them. One can't but wonder if a different outcome might have changed the course of history.
Strausbaugh rails against nostalgia. He came up with a great definition (it was in the lost review), having something to do with nostalgia as being the remembrance of things not as they were, but as we wish they'd been, and unfortunately we don't see the difference. That's a good reason to not look at history through rose-tinted lenses. With this definition in hand, Strausbaugh makes a pilgrimage to the new temple of rock 'n' roll, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Being that the Hall of Fame was largely the brainchild of his nemesis Jann Wenner, you know he's going to blast it, which he does, but for good reason. He asks, Can rock 'n' roll exist as a museum piece? The obvious answer is No, it can't. He writes:
Here's a tom-tom Keith Moon once played. It's a drum, like any other drum. Without the identifying placard, you wouldn't have the foggiest idea it's supposed to be a special drum. And even when you know it's a drum Keith Moon played, the drum itself just sits there behind its security perimeter, powerless to move you, to instruct. The spirit of rock 'n' roll cannot reside in a tom-tom drum once touched by Keith Moon, like a wood nymph in a hollow log, and it's the most infantile form of magical thinking to pretend that it does. The visitor has to accept the Museum's word that Keith Moon did in fact touch this very drum, thereby transferring to it some sort of ineluctable rock 'n' roll mojo; as with many collections of artifacts, it's the label itself
that has the juice here, not that undistinguished tom-tom.
And in a flash, without really meaning to, Strausbaugh clarifies what his beef is with aging rockers. It's not what they bring to the table (age) that deters his affection. It's what they don't bring. They lack the uncontrollable angst, the rebellion, the spirit that embodies rock 'n' roll. Jagger et al are, in a sense, museum pieces. They're writing and touring because it's their jobs, not out of a carnal need to make rock 'n' roll. People flock to their mega-stadium shows not out of a connection with the performance, but largely out of curiosity. When you have several generations of "fans" attending a show, you know more than a handful are there to see what moved mom and dad when they were kids. They might as well be looking at a showroom of antique automobiles.
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