—Rolling Stone, 2006
Now, reservations. The next two pieces depend on the stunt of writing about why I can’t deliver the piece I’ve been asked to write. That’s to say, a form of special pleading, made on ethical grounds I (obviously) wouldn’t want to have to get behind in any larger sense. These minor courtroom theatrics are embarrassing, but I like the outcome in both cases. “Open Letter to Stacy” preserves any number of outright errors regarding a band I’d really only heard, never learned even the first fact about, at the point when I wrote it. At least the piece had the cleverness not only to predict the errors but to claim them as its imperative. “Otis Redding’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” goes further, casting moral doubt on the editorial commission I’d accepted, that of projecting future unrecorded music by dead musicians (the method, it happens, of my favorite rock-and-roll novel, Lewis Shiner’s Glimpses). This piece, conflating the vicarious psyche of the “fan” with the dubious motives of a white person who yearns to supernaturally rescue a black singer from fate, but declines to do so, could be seen as The Fortress of Solitude in a grain of sand.
When a music writer riffs on his ambivalence toward an assignment, he or she is guilty of being influenced by Lester Bangs. I’ll just add that the emotional ambiance of both pieces (and probably a few others I’ve written) sounds, to me, to extend from a single line spoken by Marlene Dietrich in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil: “What does it matter what you say about people?”
Open Letter to Stacy (The Go-Betweens)
Dear Stacy,
When the Go-Betweens got back together and recorded a new album, I entertained fantasies of writing something about it. My first thought was to pitch it to Rolling Stone. I’d written an essay for them recently, and for reasons too elaborate to go into here, I’ve lately resurrected dormant fantasies of being a “rock writer.” The truth is, it’ll never happen. I’m too paralyzed by reverence, both for the musicians and for writers like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, and conscious anyway that research and interviewing aren’t really my strengths. Plus I suspect, or at least don’t understand, my own motives. But my reasons for not pitching a Go-Betweens piece weren’t only generic ones. They were strong and specific and they far outweighed the self-aggrandizing urge to announce myself in public as the Go-Betweens’ biggest fan, or to meet the band. In a Dylanesque “my weariness amazes me” way I found myself compelled by my own resistance to writing or thinking about the Go-Betweens reunion—to even buying the new record—compelled to such a degree that I began to want to write about that.
Here, then, are the reasons why.
1. The Go-Betweens are my favorite band. I listened to them in two distinct periods in my life: in the mid-’80s, when they existed and when I was living in California, and in the mid-late-’90s, when their entire messy, elusive catalog was reissued on CD for the first time. Their songs are characterized by a complexity and self-awareness I want to call literary—in fact I’ll do that. Their songs are beautiful and strange and emotional, but a lot of rock and roll is like that. The Go-Betweens are also smart and hesitant and not obvious. Not so much rock and roll is like that. There are a lot of historical facts surrounding the production of these songs: the punk context (they began in the late ’70s, couldn’t play their instruments at first, etc.) and the fact that they’re from Australia but took up residence in England. I care and I don’t care. I just don’t want to shift my attention from the enduring, rewarding confusion of being the songs’ devoted listener.
2. I have notions about the people in the band which are probably false, but they matter to me. Robert Forster and Grant McLennan are the Lennon-McCartney team at the heart of the band: They both write songs, they write some together, and they both sing. The third original member was a drummer named Lindy, and she’s not on the reunion record. In my mind the friendship between these three people is beautiful and complicated. In a rich, fascinating evolution over the course of the six “original” Go-Betweens records these three people welcomed four new members (and learned to play their instruments), but that triangle always felt to me like the band’s emotional and musical core.
3. Triangle, a key word. Here comes my falsely private confession: I’ve always imagined that Robert Forster and Grant McLennan were each Lindy’s boyfriend in turn, and that the difficulties and ambiguities of this long arrangement and disarrangement are the impenetrable knot at the core of the music, the mystery that keeps me coming back. I know that the rock-band love triangle is a Fleetwood Mac cliché, but glimpsed (if I’m right that I glimpsed it) through the prism of the Go-Betweens’ sensibility, it felt profound to me. In the ’80s, when the band existed, when I saw them play live, my own life was shaped by a long, devoted love triangle—one which persisted, though it was never static. I won’t say anything more about this, except that if we three had been a band our six albums would have sounded as different from one another as the Go-Betweens’ did. And we would have been as unmistakably the same band playing each time.
4. In Berkeley I lived on Chestnut Street, three blocks from a homely rock club called Berkeley Square. Every poor, scraping-along act touring California would get stuck there for a night, and it was rarely a full house. For years of afternoons I’d sit at home writing with the radio tuned to KALX, the college radio station, and when they gave away tickets to shows at the Berkeley Square I’d call up and answer a trivia question and get my name on the list, then walk over a few hours later and see the show. I’m good at trivia. I saw the Proclaimers and the Violent Femmes and the Throwing Muses there, along with other bands whose names I’ve forgotten. I was once one of literally five people at Berkeley Square for a My Bloody Valentine show on a Tuesday—we stood at the lip of the stage and endured the harshest volume I’ve ever experienced. When the announcement came that the Go-Betweens—an Australian band, whose very existence seemed mythical—were coming to the Berkeley Square, I don’t know whether I purchased or won my ticket, only that I wouldn’t have missed it, you know, for the world. They played to about twenty-five or thirty people, a loosely packed herd of worshippers, but our worship couldn’t console the Go-Betweens, not this night. They were at the end of a tour that must have been some kind of disaster, and twenty-five bookstore clerks in Berkeley weren’t going to turn it around. The band had been arguing, I think, before the show even began, and Lindy, the drummer, the original Go-Between, had been drinking. Really drinking, so she was lurching and obvious and couldn’t keep time. By the fourth or fifth song Robert and Grant were both glaring at her in turn, and expressly showing her their hands on the guitars to try to dictate the tempo. The violinist, another woman, wouldn’t look at her. They were miserable. They made it through a song, argued again, and then Lindy stormed off, between the two singers, toward the bar. She weaved. At the bar she got something—another drink? Water? Carrying it she lurched back to the stage, and as she moved through the crowd she brushed me, a butt-against-lap swipe, the kind which happens late at night at crazy parties, when intentions are blurry. I know this seems ridiculous, but it happened. She was taunting one or both of the men onstage by making physical contact with men in the audience, and in the small, loosely populated room it was apparent that it was having an effect, though what sort I wouldn’t presume to say. The horrible intimacy, the unexpected access to the band’s unhappiness, was wrenching. It was also terribly sexy—I learned something that night about how vivid a smashed woman can be.
5. Lindy, as I said, isn’t on the new record. I bought it and took it home today, and I listened to the first three songs in the car before I started crying, for myself and who knows else, and took it off. “The Go-Betweens” are now Robert Forster and Grant McLennan and a bunch of names I don’t recognize (they’ve also got the help of Sleater-Kinney, a good sign, probably, in a general sense). Now, forget love triangles for a minute, there’s something I’ve always liked about Led Zeppelin’s refusal to exist for even one minute after John Bonham’s death. And I’d always felt the opposite about
the Who—that they betrayed their audience by carrying on after Keith Moon. And that the saddest single fact about the Beatles’ decline was that Paul McCartney played drums on some of the tracks on The White Album. Poor Ringo. I mean, songwriters come and go, but the drummer is the band. I’ll certainly play this record, and I may come to like it, but I guess if I had to give you one reason why I’m not going to try to write about the Go-Betweens’ reunion, it’s that I’m carrying a torch for Lindy. Her name isn’t even in the thank-yous. There’s a story there, I know there is, and the thing is, having come as far as I have with the idea of the Go-Betweens standing in for so much I’ve felt and lost, I don’t want to know it.
—Open Letters, 2001
Otis Redding’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Otis Redding’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
1967: Otis Redding plays the Monterey Pop Festival and becomes the official favorite soul singer of the rock audience; Otis Redding retreats from live performance for two months, the longest such break of his career (!), during which time he writes, among other songs, “Dock of the Bay,” and is reportedly obsessed with playing, repeatedly, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP; Otis Redding records “Dock of the Bay,” the unexpected sound of which baffles and dismays his friends and advisers, as well as his record company, who oppose releasing the song (whistling on the song’s outro, instead of vamp-singing—how could Otis lose touch with his most basic gifts? Where’s the soul-singer’s intensity? Where’s the love object? Wherefore all this chipper melancholy, or jolly resignation, or whatever you wanna call it, in the place of pleading, desperation, cajolement, flirtation, all the stuff that makes “a soul number”? What is this shit?), despite Redding’s repeated expressions of confidence at the commercial viability of what he sees as a creative breakthrough, and the first evidence of a new sound, a leap in his own expressive capacity comparable to that of the Beatles—“This is it,” he says, “my first number-one record” (“Try a Little Tenderness” had reached number two); Otis Redding dies in a small plane crash on his way to a gig in Madison, Wisconsin; “Dock of the Bay” reaches number one on the soul and pop charts, though whether it does so out of inescapable intrinsic fatedness or as the result of morbid sentiment, who knows?
With a Little Help from My Friends
What little authority I bear in this matter is secondhand: My facts, and my quotations, all come straight out of Peter Guralnick’s book Sweet Soul Music, or from Guralnick’s commentary track on Criterion’s Otis at Monterey DVD. Though Guralnick’s not responsible for my projections—and a speculative piece of this sort is utterly mired in its author’s projections—he is responsible for his own, which are pretty damn persuasive. Yeah, though I sway in the storm of my own raging losses, the displacement of which causes me to weep each time I contemplate the beauty of Otis Redding’s music, his ambition and confidence and unbearable charisma, his very presence on this planet, in those months before his death, I am but a puppet made very much of Guralnick’s notions and his (admittedly contradictory) reportage. I never saw Redding sing, I was three years old when he died, and I required an array of concepts gleaned by reading critics like Guralnick to understand Redding as a revolutionary artist, or “Dock of the Bay” as a revolutionary song, as opposed to a sweetly irresistible “oldie” taken as much for granted at its debut as it is in retrospect. Just for one instance, I never would have heard a trace of the Beatles in “Dock of the Bay” in a million years of listening. I’m adamant that this exoskeleton I walk inside be made visible.
Otis in the Sky with Storm Clouds
What are we going to have to do here to get this piece off the ground (ha ha): Have Otis survive his crash? Walk away unscathed? Or heed some time traveler’s imperative and never board the plane? Then, either way, vow to waste no more time and dash into the studio to lay down his masterwork? Shit. I hate this stuff. Forget about the butterfly effect, what about all the human hours wasted reversing irreversible plane crashes? What if we could have those back—the hours of our pointless musings? Because the plane always goes down, we know this.
Getting Better
Thinking this way invites cognitive dissonance. More than that—thinking this way consists solely of cognitive dissonance and nothing else. And it has a delicious quality. That unbreachable gulf between the finished, epochal, four-disc-set accomplishments of the actual guy who died and the masochistic dwelling on what might have been, the fact that the actual guy believed he was getting better, was about to roll out the good stuff and really blow some minds. The simplest definition of cognitive dissonance I know is the Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes”: The grapes look good/I can’t have the grapes. Then, dissonance’s resolution: Those grapes are surely sour, so I didn’t want them anyway. Can we believe in the album that my (Guralnick’s) fable implies—an album as good as the triangulation between “a soul Sgt. Pepper” and “Dock of the Bay” and Otis Redding’s confidence in his growing power implies? Do we want to?
Fixing a Whole
Would the end of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons be as good as the film implied in the desecrated ruins that exist? What about Sappho’s poems—do we want them complete? “Dock of the Bay,” thanks to Guralnick (and now, for you, my reader, thanks to me), may have gained in beauty as the cornerstone of some imagined masterwork—or perhaps as the entrance to a vanished new world. But the gain is the beauty of the fragment, so much dreamier than the whole.
She’s Leaving Home
C’mon, do it with me (or for me, since I’m admittedly avoiding the imperative of this piece: to imagine it for you): thirteen songs as beautiful and diverse and delicate as the array on Sgt. Pepper. But in a “soul” vocabulary, whatever that is. Forget that Pepper isn’t your favorite Beatles LP (I don’t mind if it is, though). You know what it sounded like at the time. That album’s meaning in terms of the previous history of pop (or rock, or whatever) is etched in its grooves, and when we resist it now, as we often do, we’re resisting that notion of the masterwork which changes everything because we’re so disappointed at the revolution’s double failure—both in the rejection and the adoption of its revolutionary terms, even in the lives of its own fomenters. So, c’mon, stay with me here: Otis Redding’s about to do the same thing for soul. There’s no reason he couldn’t have titled a song “She’s Leaving Home,” agreed? But what would it have sounded like? Maybe we’re pushing into Brian Wilson breakdown territory here. Maybe “Dock of the Bay” is to the projected Redding album as “Good Vibrations” is to “Smile”—an unkeepable promise. Maybe we’re speculating on a terrible compromise, some crap, some mush, some intolerable pretension, some horrible ’70s bloated art-rock suite we’d never have forgiven Redding for. I keep flinching. Those grapes suck.
Being for the Benefit of Mr. White
The Love Crowd, that’s what he called them, to their delighted faces, when he played at Monterey. He was nervous as shit, despite his confidence, at least that’s what’s been reported. He followed Jefferson Airplane and their light show (and can’t you actually hear a little bit of the San Francisco sound in the electric guitar line in “Dock of the Bay,” come to think of it? More that—or a trace of the Velvet Underground—than Beatles). This whole project has an uneasy foundation in aspirations to “crossover”: the demolition of the chitlin-circuit segregated world of which Otis Redding was the current prince at the time he played Monterey and supposedly introduced so many deaf hippies to soul. And what is Sgt. Pepper if not the single whitest album in rock’s history to that point, the one which left Keith Richards/Bob Dylan–esque race-mummery the furthest behind? What exactly are we pining for Redding to have done to soul, anyway?
Within You Without You
We’re fooling with ghosts here, and we probably deserve to be punished. We’re trading on a stock market of pop notions against a backdrop of real pain. We went into karmic default from the moment we took the needle off the record, quit communing in a bodily se
nse with the beauty and yearning of the voice of the dead man, and began reading and thinking and, worst, pretending that the history of the reception of the commodified recording of that voice has any spark in it worth kindling in speculation. Notice I’m saying “we.” Because I don’t want to be alone here.
When I’m Sixty-four
More practically, we’re pretending we really want to meet the aging Otis Redding. You couldn’t have been thinking we’d kill him off again right after getting our precious album—we’re not that sick, are we? So we keep him alive after, and risk the embarrassment we associate with, uh, Little Richard, James Brown, Chuck Berry. Hell, Paul McCartney. Seeing the purity wrecked, along with the body. Not that I’d ever wish anyone dead to preserve their purity, no, no, I didn’t mean that. God, this is getting ugly.
The Ecstasy of Influence Page 37