Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter

DARK MIRROR

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DARK MIRROR The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter

Donald Brackett

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brackett, Donald, 1951– Dark mirror : the pathology of the singer-songwriter / Donald Brackett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99898–1 (alk. paper) 1. Rock music–History and criticism. 2. Rock musicians. 3. Rock music–Writing and publishing. I. Title. ML3534.B687 2008 782.4216409—dc22 2008019907 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright  2008 by Donald Brackett All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008019907 ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99898–1 First published in 2008 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Mimi

The men and women who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror. Marcel Proust

Table of Discontents Prologue: No Home on the Range Part One: Islands Introduction: The Singer-Songwriter As Solo Artist

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Chapter 1 The Story Teller: Bob Dylan

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Chapter 2 The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson

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Chapter 3 The Torch Bearer: Joni Mitchell

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Chapter 4 The Role Player: David Bowie

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Chapter 5 The Risk Taker: Marianne Faithfull

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Chapter 6 The Rabble Rouser: Tom Waits

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Chapter 7 The Anger Manager: Elvis Costello

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Chapter 8 The Dare Taker: Amy Winehouse

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Part Two: Continents Introduction: The Singer-Songwriter in a Partnership

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Chapter 9 The Seduction Shouters: John Lennon/Paul McCartney

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Chapter 10 The Party Givers: Mick Jagger/Keith Richards

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Chapter 11 The Pretension Wreckers: Pete Townshend/ Roger Daltrey

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Chapter 12 The Bridge Burners: Paul Simon/Art Garfunkel

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Chapter 13 The Love Addicts: Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks

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Chapter 14 The Emblem Benders: Elton John/Bernie Taupin

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Chapter 15 The Structural Units: Jack White/Meg White

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Afterword: One’s Company, Two’s a Crowd

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Notes

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Index

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Prologue No Home on the Range

The inimitable Elvis Costello once remarked, with typical sarcastic bravado, that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. Now, far be it from me to contradict one of our greatest singer-songwriters, not to mention one featured as an ‘‘island’’ in my own book; however, some exception must be taken to the talented Mr. Costello’s observation. First of all, let’s readily admit that he is utterly correct, insofar as music and the songs they convey are best appreciated in the temporal immediacy of the listening experience. But, by reflecting on the songs’ origins, their blueprints so to speak, one can often clarify how such songs occupy the landscape of both our culture and our own personal lives. Thus, we attempt to imagine the biography of sounds and visions and their ancestry in our lives. True, writing about music just might be like dancing about architecture, but it is also equally true that some architecture deserves to be danced to—such as Costello’s own quirky songs, for instance—especially when it seems so crystal clear that each song is also a kind of building, a building imagined to contain the message of the song itself, designed and constructed by the writer, and delivered in his or her own distinctive voice. Costello’s songs are little houses that take our breath away. Songs which, as a friend of mine recently told me, you can live inside of for a while. But how and why do these talented but often tormented tellers of tall tales speak on our behalf ? By telling us how they feel, they also somehow manage to tell us how we feel. We still need an adequate analysis, certainly more than that provided by the acclaimed author of Art and Artist, Otto Rank, of what makes the most creative individuals in the singing-songwriting business also

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the most personally vulnerable and emotionally wounded, with evidence culled from their own art form: the songs themselves. The talents and pathologies of singer-songwriters are manifested in the songs they write, through their relationships with their partners—whether creative or personal—and through their roles in the larger theatre of our popular culture. They somehow serve as our dark mirror.

Of course, poems and stories, especially when sung aloud, were the first means of transmitting the magical contents of many diverse cultures, and never more so than in the ancient traditions of preliterate societies. Poems and stories are the telegrams one time in history sends to another one. Personally delivered. The process still works the same way, though the tools of transmission have changed. The surviving poems and songs from the ancient eras, such as the Indian Vedas (2500 BC), the Sumerian tales of Gilgamesh (3000 BC), and the Greek tales of the Odyssey and Iliad (700 BC), are the earliest form of recorded cultural information that chronicles the lives and beliefs of peoples long gone. Poetic songs contain the DNA of a culture and its mythical foundations, whether prehistoric, ancient, or modern. Some songs even seem to predict the future. In preliterate societies, the epic poem was a means of transmitting vital data into the future. In literate societies, the lyric poem, with its shorter and more personal content, became the primary means of interpreting that history and recasting it in subjective and emotional terms that resonated with the readers’ own lives. In the twentieth century, the rise of the singer-songwriter tradition led to a creative mutation fueled by the combination of social wealth, entertainment, electronic media, and loud recording devices designed to convey those messages to mass audiences. Dark Mirror’s motley crew of spiritual savants are the inheritors of a distant tradition that first allowed them a format for their musings, but then each genius alone is the motor that changed that tradition so dramatically that we have to remind ourselves that they are indeed in the historic company of Homer and countless others who performed a similar role for their own societies. Back then, Homer was a kind of primitive radio/television set that his society tuned in to in order to learn about its roots and possible destinies. And for us today? Who knows, perhaps even a controversial rap artist like Eminem fulfills the same contemporary social role for us. Today, gifted story tellers who sing are doing the same service for our contemporary, and global, societies: they are the mirrors into which we gaze to see ourselves captured, contained, and reconfigured. David Baker, an academic participating in a symposium in search of the current lyrical trends with tendrils reaching back into the historic past, has

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identified one of the most crucial aspects of today’s chorus of voices—that of dealing with the problems between people. He chose to focus on the core essentials that inform what we write about, sing about, and listen to: ‘‘that we mourn, that we ache, that we want, that we lie, that we forget, that we fail, that we love, that we covet, that we deceive.’’1 Sounds like a catalogue of this book’s subjects and their own oeuvre! Baker pinpoints the main ingredients in the lyric form that construct a song from the stuff of our everyday lives: ‘‘The love poem and the problems of passion, heartbreak and betrayal; the elegy, and the problems of death and loss, or forgetting; the ode, and the problems of social rhetoric.’’2 Once again, a veritable menu of subjects some of today’s songwriters have explored for nearly half a century. Baker also identifies other ‘‘problematics’’ within the lyric mode: the sublime, and the problem of beauty; the narrative, and the problem of time; and the most important element at work in the poet’s toil—telling all of this in the first person and in the present tense. Songwriters also manage to perform one of the key jobs of all literary work: to enlarge a solitary existence. Baker comments that ‘‘such is the dream of the lyric in particular, that the self shall be revealed and enlarged.’’3 This is the task that singers of stories achieve so well, so apparently effortlessly, and so seemingly endlessly in their grasp of the human heart. By revealing and enlarging themselves, they somehow succeed in doing the same for all of us. Indeed, most of the writers and performers written about in this book set out with the same goal in mind, and they all achieved it with varying degrees of success. The result is that by expressing how they feel, they reveal how we feel, or how we might feel, if we could manage to cope with the current issues in each of our lives. Whatever the different styles and sensibilities of the artists being profiled, they all share one element in common—that of using emotionally raw content and personal vulnerability as a vehicle for their art. They each communicate for us by communicating to us, while we often communicate through them.

How is it that when we look inside the dark mirrors that these gifted contemporary singer-songwriters hold up for us we see not only ourselves, but everyone else as well, especially the artists themselves, depicted with the most extreme emotional intensity and yet the most accurate and forgiving manner? All of the key subjects in this book are extremely well-known popular music celebrities, among them Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, and the late John Lennon. Not to mention the tardy Amy Winehouse. All of them, despite their obvious stylistic differences, share something in common which links rather than separates them, and these links form the chain that ties these many

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remarkably gifted but often troubled troubadours to all of our collective emotional lives. Utilizing firsthand musical reflections on the nature of the singersongwriter psychology and occasional pathology and its consequences on art and private life, Dark Mirror explores the intricate nature of isolation and self-absorption in the singer-songwriter’s creative work. Singer-songwriters’ ruminations have a magical way of encapsulating all of our own sentiments and feelings. Yet all the singer-songwriters in this book (with the possible exception of Paul McCartney) sing in an exotic and raw vocal style—a style that one would not traditionally call reassuring—and still their profoundly unique voices appear to be the only ones capable of conveying their correspondingly unique messages to us. Indeed, some of them are downright dented voices. The fact that singer-songwriters often suffer from a deep sense of loneliness, associated with being the ‘‘only one’’ who can adequately sing and perform what they themselves compose, is a key element studied in this book. Often, even those who write within a famed partnership compose for that other voice exclusively, much to their own chagrin. The ironic danger being explored is basically that of each performer’s inclination to sink solely into self-absorption, expressing only what matters to him or her, while at the same time, and strangely enough, managing to speak for all of us in a way that connects with what we all feel. Emotional wavelengths are superimposed through songs.

Dark Mirror is divided into two principal sections: Part One delves into the singer-songwriters who function primarily as solo artists; Part Two explores singer-songwriters who function primarily as part of a team, and who wouldn’t write quite the same material for a different partner. The afterword surveys those who function as members of a larger thematic community or stylistic tribe, within which they share certain creative sentiments. In order to clarify, or perhaps polish the songwriting mirror in question, this work will intentionally avoid any pop psychologizing or projections of interpretive meaning by drawing from the well of the artists’ own unique prose. These artists’ words move us with the often simple but harrowing depth of the singer-songwriters’ own idiosyncratic insights into the human condition that we all share but which they alone can rhapsodize about so powerfully! We seem to use many gifted songwriters as surrogates through which we can travel to the edge without endangering ourselves personally. But to speak to us of our own deepest emotions, paradoxically they must perforce make records and sell them. For some singer-songwriters, that is easier said than done. Dylan once even compared making records to working in a coal mine, and at first one thinks it

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was just a classic dour Dylan commentary on the condition he was in. As usual with Dylan though, it was so much more than that. The coal mine metaphor is more far-reaching than it first appears to be, leading us to an image that can capture and contain some of the magic of these many talented tunesmiths. Basically, they all work inside coal mines, but in the coal mines of their own personalities and identities, real or imagined, into which they must first descend to scrape away at the dim walls of their own emotional mine shafts. The raw material they chip away out of the deep darkness, a coal blacker than belief, eventually becomes refined, baked under extreme pressure until it somehow is transformed into that other substance that originates as humble carbon but which we all treasure so greatly: the glittering diamond of a great song. Amazingly, all of the singer-songwriters we so treasure, and certainly all of the great ones being studied here, share one simple thing in common, regardless of the huge differences in their manners and methods. They all must lower themselves into that coal mine—their own emotional histories, their own personal little swatches of gritty territory—in order to chisel off portions of the damp cave itself. They are the grimy artistic canaries we use to signal safety or danger for ourselves in our emotional lives. These chunks are then meticulously dragged up into the daylight, and their ascent to the light, where the rest of us stand waiting to discover meaning, is fraught with an intensity of concentration that can only be likened to the vast amounts of pressure required to let that unique alchemy occur. Carbon atoms in their original form assume a raw form that all of us know well, the dusty lumps of coal that formerly served us all as fuel. But then something truly magical occurs, something that can only be attributed to the attentive suffering of the singer-songwriters themselves. Both coal and diamonds, and even the humble everyday graphite pencil itself, are merely carbon atoms, yet they are atoms of a different order, brought into being by the phenomenal pressures exerted though the feelings and insights of the writer, as if crushing them into a compactor made up of the humanity of the artist in question. In the case of the writing and singing of great songs, to become a diamond, an unsightly piece of coal undergoes this pressure almost willingly, or at least the writer in question willingly submits him- or herself to the twilight dangers of this mine shaft experience. Under this intense pressure, and especially heat, the carbon atom bonds have no alternative but to shrink into the tighter bonds of the covalent structures we call diamonds. At this stage, the diamond still resembles any other rock, yet after the cutting and polishing process, the process that gifted artists such as Dylan or Lennon so dreaded as a form of indentured servitude, the shining facets of a song that will last forever begin to emerge. So when we gaze into the dark mirror that each singer-songwriter holds aloft, we are at first puzzled, since we can clearly see that the substance itself is mere carbon, a lump of emotional coal, which is why we recognize ourselves in its reflection.

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But at the same time, we are astonished by the sudden brilliance and unexpected illumination that occurs and makes the finished product so precious and priceless. After all is said and done, there is a price to pay, but the writers pay it on our behalf: we get the diamond and they undergo a drastic convulsion of their emotional mine shafts. Sometimes the shaft caves in, as in the cases of Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, John Lennon of The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison or, in slow motion, Pete Townshend. Only the very fortunate can crawl back up through the dark dust out into the daylight again. Some only send their songs up above, remaining below in some sort of odd safety in Spector-land, while we await the well’s wealth. In many cases, these grandly talented individuals serve us the same way experimental animals served science in years past: bright birds sent down into the depths to see if survival is possible, sacrificed if necessary, so we can all carry on living with some semblance of civility, far above in the daylight we prefer to inhabit—that expensive daylight we so proudly call civilization.

Another image presents itself, similar in scale and scope and also dealing with exploring resources and creating energy—that of the oil well. On the surface of the landscape, our cultural landscape that is, each of the musical oil rigs that is a unique singer-songwriter appears quite distinct and different, naturally enough. But far below, deep in the underground chambers we can’t even visualize or imagine, let alone share in, the oil, that black liquid gold, is absolutely identical across all oil rigs. This is because the oil itself is the same as the carbon, coal, and diamond substance, an emotional fuel shared by all people with feelings, which is to say shared by everyone everywhere. It is only the rigs, the heavy artistic, literary, and musical equipment required to dredge up the liquid essence, which are so drastically different from each other. Once we have the oil they give us, once we have the diamonds they procure on our behalf, we can witness the magical sameness of those resources. We know that this is our oil, these are our diamonds, even though we needed to depend on the well, rigs, and pressure units in order to appreciate our own wealth. Luckily for us, especially for me, in order to appreciate the craft of the singersongwriters, it isn’t necessary to climb down there and watch them at work in the damp darkness. After all, it’s hard enough to descend into our own shafts and wells. It is more than sufficient to spread out the diamonds on a lovely piece of black velvet cloth and gaze at them. Our way of doing this is to fully listen to, with full attention and vulnerability, what their songs are telling us. Then we can speculate about what life down in the shaft must be like, and only then can we really appreciate just what it is they do for and to us, up here.

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For my purposes, I am content to scan the horizon and try to create an accurate map of the shafts, an alert assessment of the coal and diamonds, and a summary of why some simply end up having way, way more carats than others. It’s all in the pressure exerted, and in the clever cutting of their facets.

A brief word on the subtitle. I do not use the word ‘‘pathology’’ in any official sense, since I am not a psychiatrist, only an art/literary/music critic, so I use the word in the way it is easily understood by the average person: as the study of any process in the development of disease—and ‘‘dis-ease’’ is one of the hallmarks of all of these artists. However, as a critic of popular culture, one does develop a certain psychological proficiency in identifying overarching traits, and that is the map we can use to explore the songwriters’ personal territories. Indeed, we could even call it spiritual geography, on a bold day. We should also remember the words in one of Dylan’s most famous songs, ‘‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’’ Perhaps you don’t need a doctor to know which way the heart flows either. Let’s just try listening to the music together. In a way, my job reminds me of the lead character in one of my favorite films. In The Swimmer, directed by Frank Perry in 1968 (also a magic year in this book) and adapted from a short story by John Cheever, we follow the movements of Ned Merrill, a man who one day decides to travel back home to Connecticut using the novel method of swimming home via each of his neighbor’s lavish swimming pools. By diving into and jumping out of each of the swimming pools represented by these great singer-songwriters’ corpus, I manage to traverse an immensely huge landscape in a way that provides a haunting kind of coherence and continuity—even if the end result, just like in the film, is a discovery of a shared melancholy of alarming proportions. Each pool is as different as it can be from every other pool, each has different debris blowing across its surface, a different mixture of bacteria and chlorine, a different ladder, and a different diving board. Oh indeed, those diving boards are so different that each one tells us a special secret about that particular singer-songwriter. But the water itself, the cool and deceptively blue-green ripples and waves, that is the same as the oil, coal, and diamonds hidden far below. The water in the pools themselves, which can of course be painted any color and assume any shape according to the design of the household, is our own emotional life. The pools are merely various containers created to hold our cultural properties together, to keep the water from overflowing everywhere, to make it, in short, into a swimming pool. Next to the swimming pools of each singer-songwriter, which they fill with their own resources but which still manage to reflect all of us in their shimmering surfaces, stands the house that each artist has constructed for him-

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or herself. Their houses are often built from blood, sweat, and tears and are buildings constructed from the very breath of their own songs.

A brief note on the structure of the book. The fact that the parts are denoted as ‘‘Islands’’ and ‘‘Continents’’ with everyone else apparently being part of a community of singer-songwriters does not in any way suggest that the individuals considered in the island part are somehow more important than those considered in the continent part or indeed those many talents who form the rest of a very large cultural community. By now it is probably clear that no one could ever be more important than Lennon and McCartney. The designation is more attuned to the status of some as strictly solo performers, even though they often have an abundance of musical talent backing them up in a band. Hence Dylan, the ultimate solo artist, and Brian Wilson, the genius of The Beach Boys, are both islands, as are David Bowie, Tom Waits, and Elvis Costello. Their character is their content. Likewise for Joni Mitchell or Marianne Faithfull, artists whose personalities inform their content to such a degree that they are the message bearers, no matter who might be playing with and for them. And naturally, Michael Jackson is an island unto himself, if only because he doesn’t appear to even occupy the same planet or dimension as the rest. I chose not to include such obviously talented islands as Madonna and Michael Jackson, since they are clearly more dancers than writers. The notion of continents, large bodies of talent formed out of collaboration with a muse/partner, is therefore not a value judgment so much as an acknowledgement that some singer-songwriters work their magic in tandem with another. Usually their binary bond, an ultimate kind of polarization of talents united for a common purpose, is also slightly fractious. Not surprising, since such dynamic duos may as well be considered fractals, those rare designs of nature where each portion contains a reflection of the whole. Therefore, we have clusters of pairs who traditionally write together and can barely sustain themselves creatively when apart. Among these, Lennon and McCartney are undoubtedly the supreme masters of a unique kind of modern rhapsody, artists whose brilliance cannot even be approximated by others on their own, with the possible exception of Dylan, who is after all a law unto himself. To be a continent in this regard is to have formed a structural unit with a creative partner which is so strong that each half is impossible to consider without the other. So, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin are among this uniquely harrowing domain. Of course, the cartography of the larger community of singer-songwriters is equally paradoxical, since individual artists are grouped together into

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stylistic communities, tribes, or those sharing the same emotional and creative temperatures, whether intentionally or unconsciously. The fact that they are merged into temperamental villages of sorts does not diminish their individualism at all, because such beings are often possessed of such gargantuan selves that nothing can ever threaten their dominion. Nothing that is, except for the solipsism to which all singer-songwriters are so perilously prey. The conceptual grids that contain these remarkable villages, such as the shadowy doomed poetry of Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison and others, are merely fences surrounding their inherent wilderness natures. The women who walk on thin ice, such as Courtney Love, P. J. Harvey, Sinead O’Connor, or Yoko Ono, are all significant voices affirming the feminine right to equal self-absorption and charming torture. The radical notion that music can be used for comedic purposes, which usually conceals a harrowing insight beneath the grin, is aptly represented by Eminem, Steely Dan, Harry Nilsson, and Randy Newman. The idea that a black inheritance of long-standing traditions has been passed on to a somewhat rowdy wild bunch is equally heard through James Brown, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, and Lenny Kravitz, all of whom went down to the crossroads described so long ago by early blues pioneer Robert Johnson and made a bargain with each of their own personal devils. But not all of them, either, can be in this particular book.

To be exclusively unique and somewhat strange, which is after all the purview of all singer-songwriters everywhere, is magnified and projected to even grander proportions by those whose very distinctiveness seems to be their message. Among them are Ray Davies, Phil Ochs, Tim Buckley, and Bjork, figures who simply, and not subtly, imply that they are indeed not like everybody else. By far the most immediately applicable asset to the status of a successful singer-songwriter is the notion of writing one’s way out of sorrow, if not towards happiness then at least further from suffering, as a result of the alchemy of emotions which such poets always employ. To live life with nothing but a heartache, but still survive, or almost, is the key ingredient of Neil Young’s, Townes Van Zandt’s, Johnny Cash’s, or Carole King’s work. Transcending through wallowing, we could accurately call it. And since the stature of all these artists is such that they have been very successful at what they do for many decades and each has a staggeringly impressive body of work behind, if not in front of, him or her, the only way to consider their importance is to choose a song, a couple of songs, or one album, with which to study the reflections that each offers us in his or her own dark mirror.

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The artists are therefore each studied through certain signifying moments in their careers, or through the impact of a single masterpiece that sums them up most succinctly. Their music, their records, their performances, and their commentary thus become emblems for an enigma: how can they manage to speak so directly to our own feelings? Each record therefore takes on the impressionistic impact of a great painting, one that contains acres of insight in a single stroke. Each song is a sculpture of their individual souls. The result of the impact and power of a single song is often amazing, especially in the case of artists who have personalized the art form so extensively that their own lives and the songs they sing are almost indistinguishable. That, of course, is also the danger they court: becoming so self-absorbed, self-possessed, and self-obsessed that every feeling they share is part of their own impenetrable pathology, accessible only through the vehicles of each individual song in their creative canon. One lover of instrumental music recently opined, ‘‘Does music really need to come with stories attached?’’ Well, not exactly. Even in instrumental music there is often an element of the programmatic which conveys a narrative structure of sorts, however loosely, for the sounds themselves. The short answer to the question is probably yes . . . yes, music does become more influential when stories are attached to it. At least emotionally. That was, after all, the entire charm of the early troubadour movement in the first place, and also why the tradition split off into two distinct directions that are still with us today. The tradition of song that developed in Romantic times, exemplified in works by composers such as Schumann, Schubert, and Wolff, is different from that of the troubadours in many respects. Most importantly, these song composers were not poet-musicians, because they set to music the words of other writers. The same can be said of the most popular American songwriters of the first half of the twentieth century, who tended to work in teams (the Gershwin Brothers, Rogers and Hart, and various writers with composers such as Kern, Arlen, and Ellington). Critic and singer-songwriter Paul Zollo identifies one unique standout: An exception here is Cole Porter, who wrote both the words and music of his songs, and who therefore stands above the other songwriters in this regard, though he tended to write genre songs for the musical theatre, not direct expressions of personal experience. Despite their often high level of art or craft, songwriters and composers who set the words of others to music cannot create the kind of unified presentation of personal experience that the poet-musicians can.4

One possible exception to this otherwise accurate observation may be that of Elton John, who manages to achieve a true unity through his musical interpretations of early collaborator Bernie Taupin. But one way or the other, what

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makes a great singer-songwriter is usually his or her public telling of personal experiences and their effects—for good or ill. It is well worth quoting Saint-Andre on this subject: It is not until later in the twentieth century that we see again the resurgence of the poet-musician (singer-songwriter), in the form of folk-pop writers in America and Britain starting in the early 1960s and continuing today. The fountainhead of this genre is Bob Dylan, whose recording The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan paved the way for all who followed. Throughout the 1960s, Dylan competed creatively with the individual songwriters of The Beatles, who raised the status of modern popular music from tunes for dancing to songs for listening. While Dylan and The Beatles concentrated mainly on the ancient lyric topics of love and politics, together they defined the genre and the almost messianic role of the modern singer-songwriter.5

It is precisely that messianic role that most interests us here. Though that role changes somewhat over time, its essential core nature, that of ‘‘I have a secret to tell you . . .,’’ remains unaltered over time and still requires the song form to deliver the message. The song remains king—so much so that songs can be mined and cultivated to reveal the true face of an era, or the real spirit of any given zeitgeist. Gerald Marzorati has even mused that songs might be able to unearth what the French call the mentalite´ of an age: a given society’s prevailing world view and sensibility, as well as many of its interior thoughts and feelings. As he expressed it in his review of Nick Hornby’s Songbook, A hundred, two hundred years from now, a historian of our mentalite´ might well want to investigate the role played by recordings of popular music. How did those four-minute songs, listened to while driving or walking, at gatherings, or in the privacy of a bedroom, by youths especially (or those wishing to feel youthful); heard over and over again and then abandoned, but never forgotten, for new songs . . . these songs, the tens of thousands of them: how did they bind people together culturally, and how did they resound in the deepest reaches of the self?6

That ‘‘how’’ and perhaps its connected ‘‘why’’ are the two linchpins of this book. One music critic, writing in The Globe and Mail newspaper review section, has even surmised that the digital revolution has rendered the quaint old notion of a CD album obsolete. Songs rule now, Robert Everett-Green tells us, not albums, and this notion is changing the very nature of pop music. But of course, it is the very nature of pop music that it must change

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repeatedly, and quickly, in order to capture the flow of feelings that spill out of any given era. Or else it wouldn’t be pop. You’ve only got to spend a short time online to realize that songs, not albums, are the principal medium of exchange. Even without considering how they’re disseminated, songs over the past decade have become much more related to other songs than to albums. This promotes the idea of a song as a porous, dynamic entity in a maelstrom of other songs.7

One critical wag at the New York Times even went so far as to parody that famous Stones’ line about only being rock and roll but loving it for his essay on contemporary songwriting being considered a literary art form. In ‘‘It’s Only Rhyming Quatrains, But I Like It,’’ John Leland referred to a raft of new anthologies making the latest case for the literary afterlife of rock and roll lyrics and asked if such famous verses do succeed as poetry. And more importantly perhaps, is that really how their legacy should be judged? Back in 2001, Paul McCartney, one of the greatest exponents of the pop song of all time, invoked his own poetic license with the publication of a book of his lyrics from 1965–1989, all presented as poems. McCartney preceded a legion of fellow popsters who have let loose their lyrics on an unsuspecting poetry audience. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Suzanne Vega, Robert Hunter, Richard Hell, Henry Rollins, Tupac Shakur, and last (and least) Jewel have all followed suit. This either means that a grand pretension is underway to validate the material of pop stardom, or . . . that songwriting is the modern form that poetry takes in order to secretly slip into our modern souls. For that reason perhaps, Everett-Green opined that ‘‘Kids don’t give a rat’s ass about CD’s anymore . . . songs are no longer the contents to be poured into a predetermined container, because in the new music environment, songs rule!’’8 At the core of the affection we have for the song, whatever its shape or form, is the simple fact that it does something that few, if any, other art forms can do. The simplicity of the function is what struck Nick Hornby so powerfully about the nearly spiritual access that songs can provide for us, what we all long for in a song—that certain something in us all that we want and need poets to articulate on our behalf. Julie Wilson, at 82 one of the great interpretive singers with over 60 years in the business of delivering songs, recently summed up what makes a great song great in the most succinct terms imaginable: truth, she reported, it comes from the heart. In ‘‘The Music Is Sweet, The Words Are True,’’ Dinitia Smith pointed out the very important differences between poetry and song lyrics, even the most poetic song lyrics. In fact, she even declared that there may be very few similarities, a notion supported by one of the great writers for the musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim.

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Classical lyricists tell a story with wit, elegance and clarity while working within tight compositional rules and narrative restraints. Achieving that sublime poetic effect requires a mix of skill and art, tight discipline and free floating creativity.9

Sondheim describes it as ‘‘technically a very difficult craft, because you’re hemmed in by the music,’’ and his notion of a great lyric is ‘‘to make it not sound like there is a writer there . . . unlike written poetry, you can’t go back over lyrics, they exist only temporarily.’’10 Oh but what a marvelous temporary life they have, and perhaps the way we give them a more permanent life is to allow certain favorite songs to take up residence within us, whether in our actual memories or our remembered fantasies. Each individual singer-songwriter under consideration, whether a solo performer, a collaborative partner, or a member of the stylistic community of musical artists, is still most definitely a singularity. Each is idiosyncratic in the extreme, and perhaps that is the whole point, in the end. None of them had what one would call normal childhoods with idyllic home and family lives. But perhaps that’s also only because no one does. Many of them don’t know how to have a home, on or off the range, though there is something inside them that makes them hopelessly try to create families, usually a big mistake for all concerned. ‘‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’’ the poet Robert Frost remarked in his poem ‘‘Mending Wall.’’ True Bob, but something there is that wants and needs one. Frost also once remarked that ‘‘home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.’’11 How heartwarming. But home is the very place most of these writers have fled from, way, way off the beaten track, as if fleeing the horror that our roots sometimes inspire. And yet the artists always somehow manage to write home. They write home to all of us, no matter where we live. A house may not be a home, especially not for the restless spirits being celebrated in this book. But their houses, built of songs made from joy and sorrow in equal parts, are well worth swimming home towards. Home is where the art is, I suppose.

In most cases, the enigma of a particular singer-songwriter unravels easily, whether or not his or her content is fully understood at first. The artist’s most striking words and sounds are used as immediate entrances towards and through the darkness of his or her own specific mirror. Every mirror reflects a story. Here is the architecture to which we want to dance.

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PART ONE

ISLANDS

INTRODUCTION: THE SINGER-SONGWRITER AS SOLO ARTIST The seventeenth-century metaphysical poet John Donne once declared, in one of his famous meditations on emergent occasions, that ‘‘no man is an island.’’ In 1624 that certainly sounded true. But what did he know about pop music? He believed, quite rightly of course, that none are entire unto themselves, and that every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. True, but some individuals, and many who are clearly gifted in their fields, do appear more landlocked than the rest of us. They are indeed isolated by their greatness, surrounded by a sea of our perspectives, yet only approachable through the most stealthy of insights. Insights that are often hidden in plain view in their work—those remarkable songs. Some artists, the ones we can characterize as islands, do indeed mine a territory so personal that they might seem disconnected from the human family, even though everything they pen shows us so clearly that they are intimately tied to the emotional roots of that same family. They also, for reasons that differ according to their own biographies, have an insistence on telling that and only that particular truth which eventually becomes the hallmark of all their work. The great anthropologist of feelings, Ernest Becker, whose cheery little tome The Denial of Death changed many young minds in the early 70s, was also notorious for his own espousal of something he called ‘‘an anti-idealist

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position on the matter of communications.’’ It was almost as if he shared a sensibility with many solo singer-songwriters as well as an appetite for using communications to strip bare the illusions that usually move us to communicate at all. Many of the artists in this first part devoted to islands seem to share a belief that the purpose of singing is to engage in self-revelation of the highest order. As Becker stated way back in 1974, just after the greatest romantic social experiment in counterculture history had all but fizzled out, Each age has its own peculiar imperative. In our time this imperative seems to be that of the complete unmasking of human pretensions—pretensions to the discovery of ultimate truth, to be rational animals, even to having some special significance in the universe. The social self, the cultural symbol systems woven of mountains of words—all this we now see is a disguise over man’s basic animality, his creatureliness. In this real sense, each person’s world view is a private religion that permits his life to be saved from bogging down into futility; and since this fit seems so appropriate to his survival, he sees it as a holy writ which he must spread to others in order equally to save them, to make their lives as congruent with reality as his own. The symbolic gospel that we try to spread abroad is our own forced rationalization of a situation we do not too well understand. A final intriguing question is left at the end of a statement such as mine—which after all is a communication: with whom exactly does it communicate, and for what personal reasons?1

The stripping bare of all falsehood is definitely one of the primary urges of the solo singer-songwriters being examined in this Islands part of the book, where an appetite for truth is elevated far above the need for consolation or concealment. The self-consciousness of American popular musicians is certainly one of the major identifiers for their craft. In Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor have taken the examination of the social self of the singer-songwriter to new heights. Their examination reveals much about what makes certain islands so strong and so unforgivingly real. Ben Yagoda analyzed that urge quite well in his discussion of their book and what he called the ‘‘story of self-consciousness, of the ways significant performers chose, in the course of a song, to comment on themselves.’’2 Johnny Cash’s ‘‘Man in Black’’ or John Lennon’s ‘‘Ballad of John and Yoko’’ are two of the best examples of this phenomenon, but of course it applies equally well to Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Tom Waits, and Elvis Costello, to name only a few. James Taylor, choosing to not only comment on himself alone, goes so far as to comment on the very same song he is singing, as in, ‘‘Hey, Mister, I’m the one that’s singing this sad song.’’

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Many of the individualistic artists who must perform their own compositions, and who have practically put the former singer-songwriter ‘‘for hire’’ tradition out of business since the 60s, have been what Yagoda in his piece calls ‘‘stoked by powerful notions in the cultural air’’ and ‘‘inordinately interested in proving how real they are.’’ That description seems to summarize the impulses of all the islands being explored here. But Yagoda also astutely pointed out another stream of influence upon many of our best singer-songwriters, whether they work alone, in a partnership, in a group, or as part of a stylistic community. He referenced Lionel Trilling’s seminal 1972 book, Sincerity and Authenticity as a means of tracing the lineage of such tortured romantics as Neil Young and Kurt Cobain, not to mention John Lennon or Leonard Cohen, back to certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century denigrations of beauty ‘‘in favor of the energy and power of the sublime.’’ Such artists tell the truth as they see it, whether we want to hear it or not, preferring not to whitewash their insights with any illusions that help us cope with the information in the song. Nakedness of emotion, they seem to suggest, is all that matters. Artists of the stature of singer-songwriters who sum up their age and era do certainly tend towards the hermetic. As Trilling expressed so well, ‘‘The artist ceases to be the craftsman or performer, dependent upon the approval of an audience. His reference is to himself only, or to some transcendent power which—or who—has decreed his enterprise and alone is worthy to judge it.’’3 This tendency is exactly why so many of our greatest songwriters, having irrevocably altered the landscape of the entertainment industry by insisting on singing their own songs in so many unconventional voices, then plunge so far into their own quirks, complexes, fears, neuroses, compulsions, and pathologies in order to deliver their anti-idealist messages. It is also why so many of them veer so close to the edge of barely surviving their own great gifts, and why often their own craziness becomes the principal subject of their beautiful works of words and music. Ken Ludlow questioned that romantic adherence to a belief in the power of lunacy in his article ‘‘Crazy Ain’t Creative’’: It’s true that some of our most gifted writers have been crazy as a bag of hammers. But they have been brilliant despite their disturbances, not because of them. It’s a persistent myth that psychological torment and creativity are inextricably linked. According to the myth, we run the risk of drying up creatively when we attempt to heal ourselves emotionally through careful selfexamination or psychotherapy. The thinking is, if you exorcize your emotional demons, your creative angels will leave too. Our disturbances don’t help us keep our edge. Instead, they prevent free passage into the deeper, more spontaneous elements of the creative unconscious.4

These disturbances cause most singer-songwriters to choose the route of relentless self-examination over that of some sort of therapeutic remedy.

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In other words, they use the songs themselves as their own private form of therapy session, which we, ironically enough, just happen to listen in on while in the comfort of our own living rooms. Free spirits are always alluring and are more delightful to us the more passionate, lunatic, hedonistic and noble about their own situation they become on the scale of self-indulgence. Lord Byron, one of the first and finest of these momentary flashes known as universal artists (the ones who say something furtive and fast to the world in passing), and the one who is so powerfully evoked by all true rock stars, put it this way a long time ago: ‘‘A true voluptuary will never abandon his mind to the grossness of reality.’’ Reality can never obstruct the true visionary, of course, because the true visionary is less interested in the real world than in his reaction to and interpretation of it. And that is as it should be. That degree of fixation and focus gives birth to a particularly fruitful state of mind, the one in which the best songs come unbidden to the pen. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihali calls this state the condition of creative flow, an optimal experience where one is given over utterly to delivering a specific action, and one which enhances the end products enormously. And the conditions for this state of flow are uniquely pragmatic: We have seen how people describe the common characteristics of optimal experience: concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Selfconsciousness disappears and the sense of time becomes distorted. An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult or dangerous.5

Considering how difficult it might be for a masterful solo artist to achieve the state of flow required, say, to produce something like ‘‘Gates of Eden,’’ one can only imagine the dizzying heights of interactive quantum relationship required to yield something along the lines of ‘‘Eleanor Rigby.’’ What if the condition described above was available to some people, not in the sanctity of solitude, but only in the company of a certain partner with an undeniable need to collaborate? It’s a frightening question. A titan like Dylan, for instance, comes onto the scene precalibrated to another wavelength and able to attune himself to that flow state by generating a frenzy of free verse, simultaneous with the music to carry it forward. Now that is a dazzling ability—to collaborate with oneself. But it has a downside: you quickly outgrow people’s expectations and leave your audience bewildered by your rapid and accelerated evolution towards something utterly unknown to them. They don’t know that it is equally unknown to you, but that that is precisely what makes you so transcendent: the fact that you accept transformation without knowing the consequences in advance.

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John Rockwell, the music critic of the New York Times, once remarked that ‘‘in choosing to broaden his artistic palette into rock ’n’ roll, he [Dylan] was making more genuine folk music than the earnest strummers of acoustic guitars.’’6 This is a seminal kind of insight which one needs to apply to creative singer-songwriters in general as an artistic breed. That is the way to fully appreciate how and what they do in and to our popular culture. Rockwell characterizes the nature of our culture’s ritual consumption of content in a very perspicacious manner: Elitist pop culture critics must, in the end, be mindful of what large numbers of people actually see and read and listen to. Because the underlying mythology of pop culture is still the idea that the approval of large numbers of people validates that culture and the society that produces it. If something is truly loved by millions of people, it has touched those people, has tapped into some stream of universality that indicates a life force attenuated in more elitist art.7

There are two ways of looking at the fact that magnificent albums such as Rubber Soul or Revolver, by The Beatles, or Pet Sounds and Surf’s Up by The Beach Boys, might register the same or similar brainwave patterns, no matter where in the world those brain patterns live. As Rockwell so astutely pointed out, pessimists might see such a phenomenon as proof of pop culture’s mind control, whereas optimists might interpret it as evidence of artistic universality. And artistic universality is the only way to explain the empathy of singer-songwriters who function as dark mirrors while practicing the deepest kind of subjectivity imaginable. They cross the borderline between the personal and the collective, between the individual and the universal. They may operate as islands, but beneath their brittle surfaces, the same bedrock of human feeling exists, and that is what they tap into with their creative upheavals. That strange and somewhat magical symbiosis of music and words forms the platform for what the poet Baudelaire once called ‘‘the drastic expansion of individuality.’’ Indeed, the ordering of sound, including both the vocal sound and the instrumental sound, is a near universal method for fixing our awareness wherever it is required or desired. ‘‘Music, which is organized auditory information, helps organize the mind that attends to it, and therefore reduces psychic entropy, or the disorder we experience when random information interferes with goals. Listening to music wards off boredom and anxiety, and when serious[ly] attended to, it can induce flow experiences.’’8 Never have I heard a more understated explanation for why Joni Mitchell cures the blues, our blues: because she staves off the disorder of overloaded

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ideas and gives an actual shape to experience, the shape of the time it takes to listen to her songs. A surrogate sufferer, she becomes the designated mourner, so it’s little or no wonder that that way beckons depression. On the other hand, if craziness produces something as perfect as ‘‘My Back Pages’’ by Bob Dylan, then perhaps we should just leave it alone. Perhaps the truth is in the listening and the hearing, the knowing and the understanding, that such writers bring to bear on our otherwise cluttered minds. Also, I personally would never recommend that something like Zoloft be given to someone like Brian Wilson, if by doing so it meant that he wouldn’t have been able to create the song ‘‘God Only Knows’’! Is that being selfish of me? I don’t think so.

Another affliction that seems to plague the solo singer-songwriters so mercilessly is the obsessive search for authenticity in their art, a voice both poetically and vocally which is absolutely authentic to them, and therefore can be perceived by the audience as the real thing. This romantic holdover from the nineteenth century would be quaint in our age, were it not for the surfing of suffering which it so intensely induced in our best poets and singers. Naturally, if the fear of inauthenticity so paralyzes the solo artist, one can only imagine what it does to those trapped in a successfully symbiotic partnership, since they never know if their partners might be the key, or if it’s them, an even worse case of inauthentic phobia. In their recent and highly informative study, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor accomplished something that one critic celebrated as ‘‘diabolically provocative.’’ Greg Quill’s review of it focused on the impossible dreams of the enthusiastic amateur performers who appear on so-called reality idol programs, and how, due to their entry onto the pop arena, they will never be able to live up to the kind of scrutiny that genuinely attentive and caring music fans have applied to their artistic heroes: ‘‘They will never be the real deal. Then again, authenticity may be just as illusory as wannabe dreams. And given the abundance of heavily manufactured pop froth that’s cluttering up radio these days, credibility may not matter much at all in the future.’’9 Barker and Taylor pointed out that rock ’n’ roll was, at its core, self-consciously inauthentic music. It spoke of self-invention; if Elvis could reinvent himself, so could others; if he could assume a mask, so could anyone. Its inauthenticity gave it staying power. It’s hard to say how ‘‘realness’’ originated as a defining principle in the acceptance of music. I couldn’t say if the issue of authenticity was first raised by music fans or by the music industry itself.10

One way or the other, its arrival in our midst was an unexpected side effect of the reality television program known as The Sixties. Barker and Taylor also wrote:

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Authenticity was always important to folk musicians, who value their proximity to source material. But it crossed over into popular music in the 1960s, when the authenticity of politicians became an important cultural issue, and when the culture in general became obsessed with what was phony and what was real. Authenticity is both elusive and illusory. It’s a quest, not something that can be achieved.11

It’s an intriguing question, why these artists struggle to define themselves so authentically, and also why it seems they are simply never really satisfied that they might in fact already be authentic. The book on its quest posed an equally interesting answer: ‘‘Why is authenticity important to fans of punk rock and country music and unimportant to fans of disco or show tunes? Why was authenticity important to Neil Young and unimportant to Elvis? The answer lies in a philosophical question: should the aesthetic sense be allied to the moral sense?’’12 Perhaps the experimental filmmaker Jean Luc Godard was right when he suggested that it may be true that one has to choose between ethics and aesthetics, but whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the end of the road. In most cases, the enigmas of particular singer-songwriters unravel easily, whether or not their content is fully understood at first. All of their own most striking words and sounds are used as immediate entrances towards and through the darkness of their own specific mirrors. Every mirror reflects a story.

I mentioned earlier that it was not my intent to psychoanalyze these talented artists or their gifted work, something made all the more feasible since they have all already more than amply psychoanalyzed themselves through their many challenging and occasionally soothing songs. But it bears further emphasizing that this is the case by focusing on the highly personal nature of my insights, with an equally clear understanding that there are a myriad of other interpretations for this often mysterious creative material. In a very real sense, my firsthand accounts of a listener’s reaction to the continuum between these artists both allows me and helps me to keep my judgments from being overly speculative. I am merely writing about my own fused responses to their music and also about the subtle fact that, in the end, our culture is merely a mirror of ourselves. Whoever you may choose as your own preferred dark mirrors will be equally valid, since they do for you what all our dark mirrors do for all of us: articulate feelings we need to have expressed on our behalf. What I am doing, of course, is psychoanalyzing not the writers and singers themselves but rather their emotional impact on my understanding of my own perspectives as a person, of our understanding of all of our shared perspectives as a culture, and that obscure point at which the two intersect.

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This is one of the key advantages and main differences between an objective approach, which is impossible, and a purely subjective approach, which is after all the method that each of these particular artists themselves employ with such dexterity in the first place. The irony of avoiding an overly speculative psychoanalysis, while still drilling deeply into the shared meaning of the songs’ effects on us all, is explored and appreciated fully by not just admitting or acknowledging the personal nature of the perspective, but also by celebrating it as such. Thus it is naturally a highly subjective take, though one formed by the information available to an art and music critic, one who is synchronizing the outer and inner feelings provoked by songs and singers that serve as our significant signposts for personal growth. Remember, it is a totally different intersection point for each listener and each performer. Therefore, one might produce a completely different selection of dark mirrors, for instance one that included many of the worthwhile performers it was necessary for me to exclude here. For example, the remarkable songs of The Band could clearly have been included in the evolution of the new concealed confessional format created by Dylan. But they will have to be included in someone else’s book, someone for whom they performed the same elliptical function bestowed upon me by my own personal mirrors. If anything, I am more obviously psychoanalyzing my own personal reactions to their work on a firsthand basis via the intent listening I did from 1962 onwards. Back then, and without realizing it, my own obsessive listening habits eventually turned out to be research for the artistic phenomenon in question. During the fertile period covered in this text, illuminating the rise to ascendancy of the individual singer-songwriters and the communications revolution they augured, all of them contributed, willingly or unwittingly, to a specific analysis of their/our own feelings and a more general analysis of the character of the contemporary culture in which they/we lived and worked. That is precisely what makes the singer-songwriters discussed in this book dark mirrors, since it is often surprising that the most important things we need to realize, about ourselves and about each other, are often not conveyed in the most positive or consoling content, but rather more frequently in those insights which disturb, distress, disorient, and otherwise generally shake us and wake us up. Imagine these songs then as a kind of personal jukebox, with these particular songwriters loaded onto it, and then imagine focusing their overall sentiments severely on this particular sequence of songs. By doing so, the shared emotional temperature and temperament of these songwriters can become even more clear, as does their emblematic nature for so many of us. It could even be considered the soundtrack to the book. In fact, I burned several CD copies of this book’s soundtrack to give to friends and colleagues as a Christmas gift last year.

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In the case of this particular CD’s sequence, the theme appears to be that of seeking some sort of vague security or solid ground in a constantly shifting and changing world, a world of love and loss, exile and return. The CD opens with Bob Dylan’s ‘‘Queen Jane Approximately,’’ in which the author offers a strange variety of sanctuary. Dylan refers to a time, taken strangely for granted, when ‘‘you’’ (Queen Jane) have been abandoned and dismissed by your family, and then offers himself as a refuge—a refuge lacking all qualities except for its opposition to everything else in the song. Now naturally such a world-weary person is also going to be the ideal listener to Dylan’s unique brand of redemption. Furthermore, the ultimate offer (or maybe a requirement of sacrifice) is then proposed, when the narrator asks if you will come see him ‘‘when you want somebody that you don’t have to speak to.’’ That same weary soul is being lamented, or eulogized, in Brian Wilson’s song ‘‘Surf’s Up,’’ in which the Beach Boy who was swallowed up by the ocean inside of him uncannily crooned about ‘‘a choke of grief, hard hardened I,’’ who lies beyond the point of tears. In another startling example, Elton John wonders about the future of that same weary pilgrim, when he asks, ‘‘Where to now St. Peter, if it’s true I’m in your hands.’’ In fact, the question in this song is not only where the pilgrim should be heading, but also where he is. All dark mirrors ask questions more beautiful than the answers. All dark mirrors are messengers, and to paraphrase the best of them, Dylan, they are messengers with minds that multiply the smallest matter. Like many other listeners who were deeply affected by their messages, I have used these songs to both help understand myself and to clarify the shared confusions of mid–twentieth-century life. It is also equally true that we used them together, to understand, in a more abstract and neutral way, the times in which we all lived. It is therefore perfectly acceptable that this particular lineup of poets has been curated, in a manner of speaking, in order to create a coherent building in which our memories and emotions can reside, if only for the duration of a song.

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1 The Story Teller: Bob Dylan To Be on Your Own

When he and I went to Nashville in 1966 to work on Blonde on Blonde, it was the first time I’d ever seen a songwriter writing songs on a typewriter. We’d go into the studio and he’d be finishing up the lyrics to some of the songs we were going to do. I could hear this typewriter—click, click, click, ring—really fast; there was so much to be said.1 Robbie Robertson

In one of his most incisive recent songs, ‘‘Things Have Changed,’’ from 1999, the dynamic but still mysterious Mr. Dylan sings about an enduringly crazy universe and of a lasting confusion about one’s place in this world. Oddly enough, he seems to be saying the same essential thing that he said more than 40 years earlier in ‘‘The Times They Are a Changing,’’ but with one key difference. The hopes that fueled his insights then have all but abandoned him now (though his great poetic gift of disturbing insight remains). These changing times, however, leave him no alternative but to declare, later on in the same song, ‘‘All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.’’ The undisputed spokesman poet of his generation, whether he likes it or not, his elliptical verse and prose are still being interpreted and reinterpreted for the many layers of meaning they provide. After all, that’s what one does with poetry. And his work is a high yield crop. Dylan’s perpetual use of a

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mask and a constantly changing persona in order to deliver his pronouncements make him a perfect subject for exploring the amazing complexities of the pathology of the singer-songwriter. He has personally experimented with a dramatic range of extreme states of mind designed to connect him to his muse, and his sheer survival amongst us is clear proof of the English poet William Blake’s dictum that sometimes ‘‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’’ Dylan’s fame rests not only with the profound way he communicated his thoughts and feelings to his audiences but also with the huge influence he had on all the other singer-songwriters of his era, changing how we defined the whole art form. Robbie Robertson, founder of The Band and an early Dylan collaborator, said it best when he offered a creative homage to an old mentor by saying that Dylan had broken down the gates and opened up the sky to all of the possibilities of what a song could be.

When Bob Dylan declared at the beginning of his incendiary electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, ‘‘I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more,’’ he was doing far more than merely announcing that his own tastes had changed. He was in fact declaring that the very art of songwriting itself had changed irrevocably in his hands. As he launched into the volatile hurricane of amplified sound that propels that angry song forward, he was single-handedly altering the landscape of the singer-songwriting tradition, and using a song itself as the means of declaiming his intentions. Just in case anyone may have missed the point, he was also using the power of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band behind him, and especially guitarist Mike Bloomfield, as the machinery with which to deliver the electrified message. The crowd went crazy, some of them for the right reasons, some of them for exactly the wrong reasons. Either way, very few people, fans or otherwise, were adequately prepared for the future when it arrived on that soft and folksy day. As usual, Dylan was way ahead of the curve. In fact, he was pointing to a curve so far ahead that no one even knew it was there at all. But that didn’t matter to Dylan, and it still doesn’t. It’s his job, after all. He’s an artist, he doesn’t look back. The man, now 66 years old, won last year’s Grammy for Contemporary Folk Record, with Bruce Springsteen inexplicably taking the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Record for his nostalgic reworking of Pete Seeger ’s iconic songs. Furthermore, Dylan’s winning album, Modern Times, while essentially a classic take on his own blues and folk roots, is still a fast moving train hurtling towards an unknown destination that perhaps exists only in his own mind. That’s where all the best destinations are anyway. Ironically, it was Seeger who reacted most violently back in ‘65 to the future that Dylan represented, with legend telling us that he was so distressed by the

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daring new electrical format of his younger peer’s set that he lost control of himself and attempted to cut the power cords to the amplifiers. Literally true or not, the metaphor is so exquisite that we want to believe in its veracity. The past struggling to hold back the future, at all costs. That performance character, played by Bob Dylan portraying himself, is perhaps the greatest contemporary exponent of the ancient craft of singing stories. It has given us both the primary template for the perfect mastery of this craft, as well as the principal complaint lodged in opposition to what happens to Dylan’s own (and all) songs once they are written: the commercial recording process.

The brilliantly gifted Robert Zimmerman, who created an ideal persona for himself as Bob Dylan in order to deliver his existential mail to all of us, was the kind of poet through whom verse speaks like a kind of medium in a trance state, while paradoxically he managed to fix those fleeting visions into the portable format of records with only the greatest difficulty and anguish. In his excellent study of one of our greatest living cultural phenomena, Writing Dylan, Larry David Smith unearthed the perfect quote with which we can begin to appreciate Dylan as a model for both the heights and the depths to which a great songwriter is often prey. Dylan hated the side of the business that required him to flash freeze his visions onto vinyl, in those early days, and he was perpetually struggling against the industry that was essential to delivering his messages but anathema to his self-perceived role as a creative artist. This mass communications process is one of the most ironic we know. ‘‘Recording a song really bores me.’’ Dylan declared. ‘‘It’s like working in a coal mine. I never got into it on that level.’’2 Unlike, for example, several of the other writers we will encounter who lived to produce the perfect rendering of their songs on record, and toiled tirelessly until it was just as perfect as they imagined it to be. Brian Wilson and David Bowie are ideal examples of the artist who fully embraces the acoustic technology necessary to send his or her thoughts into the households of millions of listeners. Dylan is the kind who feels like a slave when he is forced to manipulate sounds until they do the right job on his own behalf.

As I’ve already intimated, it is not accurate to call Dylan the ‘‘voice of his generation,’’ if only because he hates the term so much. And yet, he is some kind of emblem for us all, the question is just a matter of what this emblem means and how it functions. My proposal is that he means exactly what he says, and that the best way to determine meaning is to listen only to what he says and nothing else, especially not the media hype surrounding his long and winding career.

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Bob Dylan is notorious for despising the media, and for good reason, since no one ever grilled Robert Frost or Dylan Thomas (from whom Robert Zimmerman borrowed a surname) to ask them what they meant by what they said. They were poets, and poets, like oracles, sometime speak in riddles. But since Dylan was a new breed, especially with his historic switch to electric instruments, reportedly after witnessing what The Beatles were able to do with theirs, the media has dogged him for 45 years in search of meanings. Maybe it was the way he looked, hyper-cool with his hooded speeddrenched eyes and his method-actor kind of attempts to explain himself, all of which only made matters worse for the listeners trying to come to terms with his mutable messages. He must know something, they thought. Even if he was the ‘‘voice’’ of our generation, that would in itself reveal something more about our time than about his songs, since his voice is so far from anything anyone had ever heard before being used as a communications tool. It is the voice of our age, howling its discontent, yet it is also a deeply human voice, expressing Dylan’s own dramas of fear and longing, cherished hopes, and the occasional redemptions. So, the best tack to begin appreciating his poetic place amongst us is to admit that everything critics say about him is usually wrong, probably including everything I am about to say as well. But as much as possible, I’d like to let him speak for himself, since that is what he does so well, whether or not we always clearly understand him.

Singers had of course existed for millennia, but not one with this harrowing degree of extreme vulnerability and haughty rage mixed in equal parts into a cocktail so supremely cool it made even the hippest rock stars seem conservative. Dylan’s single most important contribution, apart from the poetry in the songs themselves, was his own calculated collision of two historically opposed or parallel tracks: a carefully controlled conflict between telling a noble national story, as epic poetry does, versus telling a highly personal story, as lyric poetry does. Poetry is as poetry does. Its long shadow is cast towards us from the distant shadows of antiquity and engulfs even the modern songs that are its offspring, tying them together with a common thread of humanity and emotion. Poems, and the songs into which they evolved over time, were originally used as a means of recording oral history, and it is oral history, especially in the hands of a gifted poet such as Dylan, which still succeeds in conveying something uniquely unavailable to any other art form. Dylan has created three undisputed masterpieces and has painted them with his profound words: Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and the exquisite Blonde on Blonde (1966). If he had done nothing else, such glorious excursions past the limits of the heart would be enough. But of course, he has done so much more. John Wesley Harding (1968) and

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The Basement Tapes (recorded in 1967 but not released until 1975), the great records that followed the trilogy, are the rosetta stones which help us to decipher his perennially perplexing hieroglyphics. They themselves, by themselves, can be used as the best possible mirror in which to witness his magic at work. Essentially, Dylan grabs and mixes together the formal structures of the love song, the elegy and the ode, formerly separate entities, and he produces a colossal milkshake made from equal parts of both the epic and the lyric. He renders them indistinguishable. By doing so, he magnifies feelings until the borderline between what he says and feels and what we listen to and feel is blurred and dissolves into thin air. ‘‘The Great books have been written. The Great sayings have all been said. . . .I’m about to sketch you a picture of what goes on around here sometimes,’’ he claimed in liner notes from 1965. He said he was going to do a sketch for us. . .he never suggested you’d be able to understand what the sketch means. ‘‘Poets and writers tell us how we feel by telling us how they feel. They find ways to express the inexpressible. Sometimes they tell us the truth and sometimes they lie, to keep our hearts from breaking,’’ so spoke the unnamed publisher at Scribers for the preface to Bob Dylan’s Tarantula, his highly experimental stream of consciousness novel that had to wait five years, delayed by his motorcycle accident, until 1971, for its public release. It came and went without much fanfare, not surprising given its hermetic and convoluted structure, even more amorphous and shapeless than the songs and texts for which he had already become famous. That editorial insight by his bewildered publisher is well worth the price of admission to its dark and drug-addled depths. Finding ways to express the inexpressible, sometimes telling us the truth and sometimes a lie, to protect us from our own vulnerability—such is the perfect job description for all singer-songwriters, but it is rendered especially poignant in the face of Dylan’s great gifts. Dylan uses these considerable gifts to tell us stories, narratives that we may or may not recognize as our own, depending on how closely we pay attention and how openly we approach the darkness of his message. All singersongwriters are, to some extent, also story tellers, and therefore this book tells stories about the story tellers. But few of them spin their tales with either the poetic aplomb or downright daring of the former Robert Zimmerman. The arc of his incredibly long and creative career is stunning and inspiring both because of the accomplished audacity of his talent and for the sheer endurance of his longevity. The basic elements of the myth are straightforward enough: a kid from Nowhere, Minnesota, travels to New York after absorbing the key touchstones of the American folk idioms; he meets the dying Woody Guthrie in an encounter almost guaranteed to elevate his status to that of the interloping inheritor; he is discovered by producer John Hammond and embarks on the vast output for Columbia Records which is now legendary.

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In the notes for Bringing It All Back Home (1965), the first in his trilogy of masterpieces, he declares, ‘‘A poem is a naked person. . .some people say that I am a poet.’’ Indeed, he is and always has been a naked poet, even neurotically so. The kind that alarms the neat and tidy assumptions of the academy, again and again. The historical poet most easily associated with Dylan, apart from the obvious names such as Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, or Corso, is T.S. Eliot, the declaimer of the hollow men.

Interiority, the ability to engage in a dialogue with oneself, which is incidentally overheard by the outside world, is the essence of Dylan’s entire agenda. Don’t ask him what he means by what he says, since by saying it he is actually trying to figure out what it means himself. And the gesture of broadcasting one’s musings, via the art form of singing and songwriting, comes perilously close to the edge of the entertainment chasm—one runs the risk of being mistaken for an entertainer rather than a clanging alarm clock, which is what Dylan actually was, and still is. Jonathan Wallace, writing in the Ethical Spectacle, identified one of the best categories for the understanding of this dilemma when he called such artist/performers ‘‘accidental angels,’’ individuals who start out working within an existing framework of the entertainment industry but end up producing great art along the way, almost as if by accident. Bob Dylan is exactly this kind of accidental angel, perhaps the best example we have. Indeed, all his fellow singer-songwriters being explored and appreciated in this book have a shared and similar desire to escape from the confinement of the very industry that makes their work possible in the first place. Each one eventually discovered the limitations of his or her own admiring public, as soon as he or she decided to try something new, something that admiring public wasn’t quite prepared for. In Dylan’s case, however, it started almost immediately, when he was still in the formative stages of his career, due somehow to the alarming fact that he did indeed appear to be born fully formed, and even more important, fully informed about his own agenda and where he wanted to take it. Since he was in possession of great gifts that other artists would kill to have, he automatically began to chafe against the commercial confines of his own popularity, and he used his craft to plunge deeper and deeper into the dark mirror we have come to recognize and rightly laud as his own unique specialty. He did it through his mastery, of course, but also through the basic structure of what makes singer-songwriters so captivating and so essential to us: the deft combination of sounds with language as a means to control and contour emotions, the essential arsenal of the troubadour. Pierre SaintAndre is an academic who has extensively studied the troubadour tradition and has isolated its powers remarkably well.

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The marriage of words and music in song consistently presents thought and feeling as an integrated whole, something that other art forms can accomplish only fleetingly. Further, the performance of a song adds the element of sheer physical presence that we find also in live theatre and in spoken poetry—in these arts, the performer’s body and person are made to function as an artistic medium. Thus when the poet-musician performs his songs, he brings his own thoughts and feelings to aesthetic life through the medium of his own person—mind, body and soul combined in an organically unified presentation of the creator’s individual experience. It is this supreme integration of aesthetic elements, mirroring the integration of essential aspects of the individual person, that makes song so intensely personal an art form.3

Anyone who has ever seen Dylan perform, or indeed even seen film footage of his performances, knows how electrifying his presence can be as a delivery system for his content, with or without electric instruments. Live performance is clearly one of the keys to his longevity, since even at 66 years of age he is on stage an average of one out of three nights every week of the year. Since the passing of James Brown, Dylan may be in line for the crown of hardest working performer in show business. It’s a job. ‘‘My songs are written with the kettledrum in mind. A touch of any anxious colour. I have given up any attempt at perfection. I accept chaos. I’m not sure whether it accepts me.’’4 This he once declared about the business he so excelled at—bringing it all back home. Back a few years, just before his remarkable resurrection (or was it a renaissance?), when Dylan was interviewed by UNCUT Magazine prior to his 2001 Love and Theft album, someone came up with one of the most novel questions I’ve ever heard anyone have the nerve to ask him: ‘‘How easy has it been, being Bob Dylan?’’ At first, it seemed a facile inquiry, but then it elicited a telling response. Dylan stated that there have been a lot of ‘‘tricky parts,’’ where he had to assume another character in order to survive. He had to surrender his ambitions at a certain point, he continued, in order to get where he needed to be. A surprising answer, and the questioner pressed a little further, asking what kind of ambitions he had ever had to surrender. Dylan’s answer: That’s what you’re going to have to find out.5 But that was always his answer, in whatever exotic character he assumed in order to both survive and thrive. One of his most clarified and distilled remarks followed on the heels of that observation. He casually announced that he didn’t choose to do what it is we see him doing. It chose him. And that if he had anything to do with it, he would be doing something else. It is part and parcel of what Dylan means to us that he doesn’t even describe or define what it is he does. . .he merely alludes to ‘‘what you see me doing,’’ just as he has for almost the past half century.

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One of Dylan’s own principal inspirations, the modernist poet T.S. Eliot, once remarked that great art can communicate long before it is understood. He may as well have been referring to Dylan. Another precursor, the equally modern painter-writer Wyndham Lewis, also opined in a manner perfectly aligned to what Dylan has become for all of us. He claimed that the great artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future, because he or she is the only person fully aware of the nature of the present. Dylan’s magnificent contributions to that history are equally saturated with rage and romance, as he demonstrates that the nature of the present never really changes, it just morphs into constantly shifting alternate futures. The nature of his present, however, was drastically changing back in the stunningly transitional years of 1964–1965. The public was confused by his new persona, and the more unaware they were of the artifice of his old persona, the more mystified they were by the new one, just another artifice. Which is why he howlingly sang out those changes loud and clear, lest folksy listeners be further lulled by his former work: ‘‘I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.’’ When he returned for a second set at that notorious Newport Festival, where Pete Seeger lost his folksy marbles, and Dylan tried a more softspoken approach, singing exactly the same message but in the voice of his earlier and more acoustic style, the message was even more clear. With his gentle but sorrowful rendition of ‘‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,’’ he was declaiming that he was through singing folk songs the way everyone expected them to be sung. In a fluid world, with no clear past and a future that’s even more vague, Dylan simply says, ‘‘Strike another match, go start anew.’’ Because, as the title suggests, the old, at least, is done. Or maybe only changing. His very next album, Highway 61 Revisited, contains the history of the future in no uncertain terms. When a 15-year-old Bruce Springsteen, himself a future inheritor of Dylan’s mantle, first heard its astonishingly brilliant signature song, ‘‘Like A Rolling Stone,’’ he aptly described its sound as creating the feeling that somebody had kicked open the door to your mind. Phil Sutcliffe, writing in Mojo Magazine, described its surprising new direction as ‘‘rough and tough, like the Stones’ last three singles. . .and then some.’’6 That and then some tells us a great deal, for Dylan had suddenly pushed himself away from the dining table where his legions of fans were awaiting the next item on the menu, but he didn’t deliver a dish from that same menu. He delivered a recipe for a future which hadn’t even been imagined yet, not even by some of the most equally visionary of his peers, indeed not even by his most brilliant competitors, The Beatles, who were still caught up in the construction of their own utopian dream. They, like the rest of us influenced by their grandeur, were too busy being happily in love with love to notice that something was terribly wrong with the subculture they had helped to manufacture.

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Dylan not only noticed the early flaws in the 60s fantasy, ironically, almost as clearly as Frank Zappa did, but he also used the flaws to flesh out his own dark vision of what the real future would bring us. Which is, of course, precisely where it did bring us, and precisely where we are today, mired in melancholy. To date, there have apparently been some 170 cover versions of the songs on Highway 61 Revisited, many of them by bands in this century, not the last one. Its incendiary messages just keep resonating in larger and larger circles, largely because of that tricky little notion of Eliot’s, that great art communicates before it is fully understood. Thus Dylan is one of those special creatures who has a place in both our past and our future, since he is always running ahead of us like a manic scout on a doomed wagon train traveling off the edge of the world. Sutcliffe summed it up perfectly when he described the inherent anger inside Dylan that was finally being allowed out to play—the sour effect of a smile that bends the lips but never makes it to the eyes. Dylan, in good spirits, inspired musicians who had never played together as a unit to find new peaks individually; when that happened simultaneously, he had a track. Some feat of self-restitution for a man who had been having, or giving himself, a terrible time. Fame, booze, drugs, women of course. And musical differences within himself. But youthfully fleet, he could outrun any pain, or out think it. 7

Outthinking pain. Now there is one of the finest definitions for what this gifted man does so well. He outthinks and outruns his own pain, and as a result, he performs the staggering sleight of hand necessary for all of us to feel that he is also doing the same for our own personal and collective pains. With Highway 61 Revisited and the breathtaking followup recorded in Nashville during an even more chaotic bender of brilliance, Blonde on Blonde, Dylan completed a trilogy of masterpieces which has never been equaled, other than by himself that is, much later in his long and weird career. None of the exemplary studio musicians he assembled in 1966 in Nashville was really that familiar with the Dylan phenomenon quite yet. Johnny Cash was an exception in country circles, of course, having recorded ‘‘It Ain’t Me Babe’’ two years earlier, but Cash was always an exception to every rule, which is why he had a long and fruitful friendship with his younger peer. He was also equally blasted himself. But as Sutcliffe described it so well, Perhaps Nashville could be forgiven its ignorance. By the end of 1965, the gulf between Bob Dylan and the world outside Bob Dylan was vast and widening by the day. In the mainstream media he appeared as a scornful, jive-talking insect. And even to relatively hip observers he seemed stranded in a remote world of his own devising, isolated by his success, by his enigmatic public

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image and by dalliances with narcotics. Recently cast aside by the folk music establishment that had championed him, and by portions of his fan base, Dylan was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.8

His solution? Rock on, harder than ever. Push forward, further than ever. Not the healthiest approach perhaps, but definitely one designed to elicit the maximum amount of goods from his gift before it burned out. But the strange fact is that he, and it, never did burn out. Sure, he made many twists and turns, into and out of better or worse records released in the white heat of his own alarming awareness, but in the core of where it matters, he was always in it for the long haul. And he still is.

Larry David Smith’s fine study of Dylan refers to the masterful insight that Robert Zimmerman continued to write for the character of Bob Dylan to perform, and in it he poetically refers to his output as the ‘‘songs of a lonesome traveler.’’ Accurate enough; however, I prefer to think of what Dylan has demonstrated, especially by his longevity, his recent resurrections with Love and Theft (1997), Time Out of Mind (2001), and the 2007 Grammywinning Modern Times, as the loneliness of the long-distance runner. That phrase comes from the groundbreaking collection of stories by the British writer Alan Sillitoe in the early 60s. He wrote of a defiant young rebel called Smith who inhabited a no-man’s land of institutionalized postwar angst. As his steady jog-trot rhythm transports him over an unrelenting, frostbitten earth, ‘‘he wonders why, for whom, and for what he is running.’’9 Dylan has been wondering the same thing himself for about 50 years. What makes him unique is that while wondering what and why, he continues to sing about it, turning his damp wonderment into the dark mirror the rest of us can gaze into while he slowly plods along his long-distance run, past us, over the hill, and off into the distance. And then, by the time we catch up to where he has gone, he has once again gone on further ahead, ever the aimless scout pointing the way to a nonexistent destination. . .an invisible frontier the mere thought of which is enough to satisfy us. His are the peculiar, dark, or confusing moments which most people, and even most singer-songwriters, tend to avoid. The moments when an ancient truth becomes self-evident: that the sign of every great and profound truth is that its opposite is also equally true. Dylan’s vast and murky body of work is a veritable catalogue of such contradiction, and if he contradicts himself, that’s just fine (to paraphrase Whitman) because he does contain multitudes. Indeed, Dylan is a kind of Walt Whitman on wine and Herman Melville on dope, all rolled into one impossible package, a multifaceted jewel of Americana, especially in the case of Melville’s intricate and lesser-known works such as The Confidence Man. In that 1857 novel, long considered his

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strangest and least accessible, the author concocted a comic allegory aimed at the optimism and materialism of mid–nineteenth-century America. In it, a mysterious shape-shifting confidence man approaches the passengers on a river steamboat and, winning over his not-quite innocent victims with his charms, urges them to implicitly trust in the cosmos, in nature, and even in human nature—all with predictable results. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that critics rediscovered the book and praised its wit, stunningly modern technique, and its wry view that life itself may just be a cosmic con game. This persona has Dylan written all over it. Inspiring confidence through his casting of doubt, Dylan obviously tossed the net of his own tragic-comic allegory over the hyper-optimism and materialism of the 1960s, and indeed, over every decade since then. He is the exemplar of a certain literary device designed to utilize irony to its full creative effect—the untrustworthy narrator. The wearer of many masks. The artist without a discernible face beneath any of the masks, but whose selection of which mask, and when, tells us more than any real face ever could. Dylan can contradict himself in a brilliant manner, not only contradicting our established assumptions from album to album, but also sometimes from song to song and even, in some extreme cases, from one line to another within the same song. He looms large. The shadow he has cast is large indeed— larger, longer, darker, more obscure, and yet more authentic even in its artifice than any Whitman or Melville before him. Perhaps Ginsberg or Kerouac, a couple of his major precursors, have cast a similar cultural shadow, but his is still more significant, if only because his absorbed theirs and moved on much deeper into a dangerous country: the American mainstream of popular music and its attendant machinery. Examples of his exotic roaming from crumbling truths to tarnished dreams are legion, as are his moments of sheer crystallized poetic power at its most uncensored, unmediated, and elusively taunting. His last portion of the masterpiece trilogy, Blonde on Blonde (1966), contains two of the grandest love songs in our history, ‘‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’’ and ‘‘Visions of Johanna,’’ perhaps my own favorite Dylan song, and one that also contains my favorite line: ‘‘The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.’’ Even without knowing what that means, I do know for certain that I’ve seen it myself. Moreover, what makes them great love songs is the fact that they both contain their own opposite, contradicting themselves at every turn. No, not hate, but something worse: doubt, fear, dread, and doom. That’s what makes them still work so many years later, the inherent tension of knowing that what you sing about is mostly impossible. That plus the fact that the meanings of these songs are as difficult to determine as are their own unsavory emotional truths, embedded like diamonds in mud.

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Ever since first plunging into the manic publicity surrounding his arrival in New York and his first 1962 recordings, the artistic social and personal pace that Dylan developed was so white hot, so hyperactive, that something was bound to happen to slow it down, if not stop it all together. He once remarked to Robert Shelton, his earliest and best biographer, that it took a lot of ‘‘medicine’’ to keep up that pace. When Shelton inquired as to whether the burnt-out poet was happy, he received a characteristic reply: ‘‘I don’t need to be happy. Happiness is kind of a cheap word.’’10 But if, as he so often declared, Dylan had abandoned understanding himself, where does that leave the rest of us, so intent on trying to grasp his meaning? His meaning is simply that it can’t be grasped, and he’s told us so on multiple occasions over the years. When will we finally start believing him? Sutcliffe has suggested that only Dylan knows, and he’s not saying, but I’m not so sure about that. Why should he know the secret of himself any more clearly than either we know him, or we know ourselves? Hiding in plain sight has always been his best method of creative and personal survival. Long before he reached a private and public breaking point as a result of too much of everything, he was already employing an essential defense mechanism to protect his obviously fragile inner world from the encroachments that have wounded so many other singer-songwriters. He has described the pressures as unbelievable, and we believe him, since he didn’t have a group per se, with whom to share the tensions, the way bands of mates such as The Beatles did, at least in their early days. He was alone in the blinding lights that he himself had attracted. Sutcliffe chronicled: His sometime leading lady, Joan Baez, had seen signs of disintegration as early as 1964, on a UK tour during which she reckoned he was ‘‘spoiled to death’’ in an environment populated by sycophants who praised each new line that he peeled off his typewriter. Far too astute not to notice what was going on around him, Dylan developed coping mechanisms. ‘‘He held us all at a distance,’’ Baez described, ‘‘except for rare moments, which we all sought.’’11

All we know for sure is that throughout 1967, the so-called summer of love, Dylan was invisible, hiding out in Woodstock, New York, in an extended hibernation or accident-recovery period, and playing secretly with the members of The Band, producing what would eventually be abundantly bootlegged and revealed as some of his most profound work to date, The Basement Tapes. But The Basement Tapes, as astonishing as they were, and they still are, were a mere prelude to what I still consider to be his greatest record, unless that is, he releases another one next week. John Wesley Harding (1968), contains in its hard dusty shell the key kernel of Dylan himself, perhaps allowed to leak out inadvertently during a personal and professional period of recuperation, rejuvenation, and soul

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searching, conducted in broad daylight by the maker of all the masks— Robert Zimmerman. But all of his epistles, even from the very beginning and long before his actual crackups, were always about describing some form of disintegration, at first from a distance, then later from the center of a dangerous private hurricane. Disintegration and the desperate attempt to make things whole again have always been his primary subject matters—disintegration held together with the glue of a brilliant but deranged poet’s emotional fire. Even so, one has to agree with Sutcliffe’s astute assessment: Dylan’s genius is that it doesn’t matter. Dylan gave the impression of an artist moving almost too fast to breathe. ‘‘If you’re smart, you gotta just keep going.’’ He was chary of being described as an iconoclast, or even a rule breaker. ‘‘It’s not a question of breaking the rules, don’t you understand? I don’t break the rules, because I don’t see any rules to break. As far as I’m concerned, there aren’t any rules.’’12

The former Mekon member Jon Langford summed up that precarious breaking point, and the artistic rebirth of 1968’s John Wesley Harding as ‘‘The Great Escape,’’ and indeed it was, from the Houdini of songwriters himself. He’s in some foreign country at the end of his rope, and all the joy, wit and swagger has been sucked out of his sorry, skinny arse by purists, hacks and dolts. It’s time to leave the circus. Back in Woodstock, he maybe has a bike crash, but certainly sheds at least a couple of layers of Bob-skin. He doesn’t want to be the spokesman for a generation, he wants to change diapers, dodge bullets, curl up under the radar and sleep late. He’s mucking around in the basement with his Canadian mates and somehow, simultaneously perhaps, putting together a crop of songs that he’ll ship off to Nashville and turn into a low-key (sort of) comeback album called John Wesley Harding. Because we don’t get to hear The Basement Tapes until years later, this is our first sighting of a fully grown up Bob. Plunging deep into the songs and mythology of what Greil Marcus calls the old weird America, Dylan claws back some purpose and pleasure in playing music, while quietly trampling the beloved protest singer and back-combed electric Judas to death on the way.13

But he is also doing just exactly what he has always done, only quieter: he moves to the edge and declares it to be the center, then he makes the musical world reorganize itself around him. Talk about your weird old America. Dylan did the same thing again just last year (43 albums later!) with Modern Times, a masterful sleight of musical hand which won him a 2007 Grammy Award for contemporary folk music. Not bad for the 66-year-old ghost of that insanely exuberant shape-shifter.

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All the shapes he has assumed over the years have been burdened by the perpetual identifying of him as a prophet of this or that, something he clearly abhors. After all, if a man didn’t want to be the voice of his generation, why on earth would he want to be its prophet? Of course, Columbia Records has a slightly different take on his remarkable status as its premier artist, since like most industries, the record companies spell the word profit somewhat differently. Real prophets are often confusing. A gorgeous love song such as ‘‘Sad-Eyed Lady,’’ for instance, from Blonde on Blonde, allows us to follow a heartfelt but obscure trajectory. After addressing the sad-eyed lady of the title, Dylan asks, ‘‘My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums, should I leave them by your gate.’’ This and the whole rest of the song mean something that the left side of our brains may never be able to process, while the right side quietly sighs in agreement, yes, of course! Meanwhile, in ‘‘Visions of Johanna,’’ from the same album, he asks a question that anyone who ever loved anyone can comprehend: ‘‘Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?’’ Back then, Dylan transformed pop songwriting with the shocks and disjunctions of modernism—ideas he found in both the avant-garde and in old, weird folk songs. But lately he has made himself an emissary from a reinvented yesteryear, where he finds clues to eternal truths in both the blues and the Bible. ‘‘I practice a faith that’s been long abandoned,’’ he sighs. ‘‘Ain’t no altars on this long and lonesome road.’’14 The only difference, apart from that astounding voice, aging like fine Armagnac, is the former obsession with speed and immortality and the latter and current obsession with slowness and mortality. The poet Rilke once defined all art as the result of having been in some danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where one can go no further. The poet Bob Dylan is the living incarnation of this notion. He knows what it feels like to be on his own, to have no direction home. He knows what it feels like, so ironically given his vast fame, still to be a complete unknown. He also knows how it feels to cease living only for himself, whether he likes it or not, and by doing so to transform his personality into a distinctly revealing mirror, one capable of containing every contradictory notion we might imagine about him. Bob Dylan remains an enigma, and all of his songs are emblems of that enigma. Since there are as many interpretations of his songs as there are listeners for them, he also remains a reflecting surface par excellence. The perfect dark mirror. One of his personal and creative intimates, Robbie Robertson, perhaps summed it up best: ‘‘When he writes songs, he’s telling me things about himself, holding up a mirror—and I’m seeing it all clearly, like I’ve never seen it before.’’15

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Strangely enough, he does exactly the same thing for all of us. Even if his mirror does occasionally run the risk of breaking into a thousand pieces, it still reflects exactly the same two things—that which is really there and that which really should be. He often reminds me of a figure spoken of by another great American poet, Wallace Stevens, who referred to the watcher in the snow, the one who sees nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.16

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2 The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson I Just Wasn't Made for These Times

Brian fought hard against the industry attitude that if it works, run it into the ground. Music meant much more to him than that. He was trying to do something so much bigger with his teenage symphonies to God. In the process, he really rocked the boat and changed the world.1 Lindsey Buckingham

George Martin, The Beatles’ brilliant producer, remarked in 1996 that if there were one person that he had to select as a living genius in pop music, he would choose Brian Wilson. But Wilson, responding with characteristic embarrassment that same year, said that he wasn’t a genius, just a hard-working guy. Yet strangely enough, both of these apparently contradictory statements are true. Could there ever be a more day-and-night scenario, a starker human contrast than that between the messages and voices of Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson? And what voices! One coming up out of the lower darkness and the other descending down to us from above, in the tone of an angel in big trouble. One of the few singer-songwriters to ever potentially challenge the sonic supremacy of The Beatles, with his group The Beach Boys Wilson singlehandedly did what John Lennon required the help of Paul McCartney and producer George Martin (himself a living genius) to accomplish—the creation

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of technically revolutionary soundscapes that served to fuel the dreams of an entire generation of flower children. Wilson also buckled under the weight of his success, retired from performing, and descended into a maelstrom of drug-induced isolation, from which he has only recently emerged—to the global acclaim of multitudes—with the long awaited release of his experimental masterpiece, Smile, some 37 years after it was first composed for, but rejected by, The Beach Boys (as too weird and challenging). Unlike Dylan, but for the same self-survival instincts, Brian Wilson sought out sweetness and light in his lyrics and music, and he largely found them. Whereas Dylan and many others utilized their own personal flaws in the transmission of their genius, essentially telling us that the world had gone wrong for the following reasons, Wilson chose to prescribe a loving and spiritual attitude through an inherent appetite for happiness and joy. He didn’t run from heartache—far from it; he used his remarkably angelic voice to suggest to us that we all share the same needs, desires, and fears, and that by recognizing that fact we might be able to transcend our differences and work out solutions to what has gone wrong with the world. He descended into the same deeply depressive well of himself and his own limits as Dylan did, maybe even deeper, but he used his music as a salve and bandage to try to heal the wounds. And his wounds were very, very deep. Like Dylan, he began exposing those wounds to the world in the magic year of 1962, a year equally important for The Beatles and several others under consideration, as if by some strange synchronicity at play in popular culture itself. Whereas Dylan was an allegorical story teller, Brian Wilson was a straightforward teller of dreams, a fragile soul who approached the need to find a way out of despair from quite the opposite direction. Though they both had personal experience with those secret insights from the frenzy of fast and vast fame, and they both discovered the truth of the old adage that ‘‘celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,’’ as did all the subjects of this book in fact, they each took a drastically different approach to seeking survival under the bright lights. Whereas Dylan simply applied one new mask after another, in the form of fresh persona voices, Wilson’s valiant attempt was to live without a protective mask at all, a choice that scalded him severely and left him a mere shadow of his former self. That self was a genuinely gentle youthful spirit whose falsetto dreams of happiness echoed a generational urge—he used his own insecurities and fears as the raw material for some of the most emotionally direct and romantically dizzying songs of our age. But then soon, just like The Beatles, he began to outgrow the ‘‘brand’’ he had created with his brothers and cousin, and The Beach Boys began to undergo the kind of dark warping that stunts creative growth in favor of placating the marketplace. He personally started to explore a new musical terrain that his own group was neither musically equipped to handle nor temperamentally interested in traveling towards. If Dylan is our T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound rolled into one sneeringly hip container, then Brian Wilson is the Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost of popular

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music—deceptively simple, colloquial in phrasing, with a spare and evocative lyrical style embedded in the culture that created it. He celebrates his country and its potential at the same time that he celebrates the desire of every youth to be free, happy, and hopefully, in love. Never has love been evoked with a sonic texture so genuinely ecstatic as in Wilson.

Like his idol John Lennon, Brian Wilson was a drastically insecure and morbidly sensitive soul who suffered a nervous breakdown as a consequence of the pressures of his astronomical success and all the sheer creative power that goes along with it. That, coupled with an emotional and identity meltdown resulting from his conspicuous consumption of LSD, was followed by a disastrous period of therapeutic reconstruction. Again, his experiences mirrored those of Lennon. Great minds not only think alike, they melt alike. Both phenomenally gifted empaths, capable of reading our minds, they simply could not deduce how to best care for their own minds. In 1964, not surprisingly the year The Beatles invaded America, Wilson crumpled and withdrew from his hectic touring schedule with The Beach Boys, concentrating instead on studio composition and production. In 1965, just like Dylan, The Beatles, and so many of the forward-thinking singersongwriters under consideration, Wilson encountered the notorious ‘‘brain vitamin’’; thereafter his name would be forever associated with a historic acid burnout. In 1966, Wilson recorded Pet Sounds, probably the most exquisite pop record ever released, and certainly one of the most influential. In 1967, he attempted to create his masterpiece, Smile, in the looming shadow of Sergeant Pepper, but he threw in the towel, musically and mentally, after a mutiny on board the good ship Beach Boy. But his musical influence was so sublimely subterranean and so technically extensive, carrying on the mastery of his other idol, the felonious Phil Spector, that he inspired the work of countless other writers, producers, and musicians in a way that far outweighed the sordid sadness of his unfortunate creative collapse some 40 years ago. But he came back. In fact, his was the ultimate comeback.

There has always been something downright Shakespearean about the rise and fall and rise of Brian Wilson. The playwright wrote in Henry VIII: ‘‘I have touch’d the highest point of all my greatness and from that full meridian of my glory, I haste now to my setting: I shall fall like a bright exhalation in the evening.’’ But poor Brian fell so far after such a meteoric rise. The Beach Boys formed about 1961. In a way, the group itself had always existed as a germ inside the head of Brian Wilson, who at 12 years of age would regale his family with kitchen table sessions where each member was

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forced to repeatedly sing a verse until they added up to a jigsaw puzzle that Brian would finally sing on top of, unconsciously mimicking the way actual records were really made. After him, the art and craft of producing records would be done differently. Producing music, meaning both the making of it and the perfect technical production of it, was in Wilson’s blood almost from the beginning, before he even knew what it might mean. Given his fetish for organizing sounds, he was guaranteed a more appreciative understanding of what it means to capture the songs within a musical structure and a sonic package that approached the sublime, his perennial goal. As a result, and unlike Dylan, he also immediately appreciated the importance of the producer in making music possible. Wilson was a born producer of Mozartian scope and scale. Whereas Dylan loved performing and hated recording production, Wilson loved production and hated performing with a pathological passion. To say he was a shy person would amount to an understatement of profound proportions, given how entertaining his entire career, early and late, has been for all of us, his vampires. Both artists grew up in public before our eyes, Wilson literally from a boyhood of celebrity that would have challenged the character of even the boldest extrovert, let alone, him. At the risk of bending a metaphor too far, Wilson understood clearly what so many singer-songwriter artists do not: that a gifted producer is the master diamond cutter whose creativity completes the process of dredging up the raw material from the emotional coal mine, giving it full potential as a fine jewel. The great Memphis producer Jim Dickinson often described making records as the way a songwriter communicates with life after he’s gone. But why do these geniuses all seem like prodigies? For some odd reason, 23 years of age seems to have been the pivotal point at which everyone from Dylan, to Wilson, to Lennon managed to create the songs and music that so captivated their culture. How on earth was this possible? How can artists so young ever grasp truths which now seem so eternal? Even in the midst of his most accessible, youth-oriented, and fun fun fun period, Wilson was capable of creating and conveying several early pieces that gave us an indication of the insights of his later maturity. Some singersongwriters are performing artists, such as Dylan, Bowie, Costello, or perhaps the greatest live band ever, Fleetwood Mac—they want to see the whites of our eyes as they deliver their messages. Others are recording artists, such as Wilson, Lennon, or Van Morrison, all of whom prefer the emotional distance of records, history, and legacy as a means of measuring, or outrunning, their own greatness. Their work amounts to a screen, filled with their often hyper-personal content and images, but paradoxically also a screen on which our own reflections are received, reflected, and projected. So either way, all of the gifted writer/performers under study were integral to a massive overhaul of the

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song-making tradition: they each in their own way contributed to a revolutionary renovation of a tradition stretching back to Tin Pan Alley at the turn of the nineteenth century and into the 20s and 30s, followed by an equally drastic revamp of the tradition carried on by the Brill Building tradition in New York in the 50s and 60s. Prior to the revolutionaries we’re interested in here, those two earlier traditions were veritable factories of great songs, but they were songs written for others to sing. What made and makes our own contemporary masters so compelling is not only that they included a powerfully personal, subjective perspective to their work, their own private diaries of experience, so to speak, but also that they alone could sing their songs, so idiosyncratic did the art form become from the 1960s onward. Brian Wilson was one of the great avatars of this new perspective in songwriting. His unique gift, however, apart from his unerring sense of harmonic vocal and musical proportion, was the incredible technical virtuosity he brought to producing the records. He was his own George Martin, after all! Very few singer-songwriters express intense frailty or emotional vulnerability as deeply or severely as Brian Wilson did. John Lennon came close, but he armored himself and his work in a tough sarcasm that hid the scale of his fears. Only in the occasional song such as ‘‘Nowhere Man’’ or ‘‘Help!’’ did he let it leak out. Wilson assumes no armor and no masks; he attempts to reach us at a basic human level that can’t be camouflaged. Everything leaks out—rather than a shortage of feelings to convey in song, Wilson felt too much, and much too strongly. It was almost more feeling than a song can contain and still even be a song.

Like with Dylan and Lennon, Wilson’s two singer-songwriter peers who also changed the landscape of contemporary music, Wilson’s faithful audiences rebelled against his ongoing attempts to grow creatively as an artist. They revolted against his heartfelt desire to leave behind the ‘‘brand’’ that had endeared him to the masses in the first place. Evolution is always a dangerous proposition in pop music. One of the best studies of the impressive rise, shocking fall, and triumphant return of Brian Wilson is contained in Charles Granata’s Wouldn’t It Be Nice, taking its title from the joyous opening track on Wilson’s masterpiece, Pet Sounds (1966). In it, the trajectory from boy-wonder to adult composer is traced perfectly and leads directly to the creative impasse Wilson experienced when he tried to grow up, at the same time as competing with The Beatles and combating his pathological family (a white version of the Jacksons if ever there was one) all along the way. Why, nearly forty years after its creation, are people extolling the virtues of Pet Sounds? Why does it continue to draw the attention of younger listeners

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seeking enlightenment? What is it about the music that compels us to devour in-depth box sets, televised tributes, live performances and numerous writings on the subject? Pet Sounds is ageless. Its songs speak to us, their melodies striking emotional chords that resonate deeply within our souls. More than a musical statement, Pet Sounds is Brian’s magnificent breakaway from The Beach Boys. By writing from his heart, Brian reduced sadness and elation to their barest essentials. In making his triumphs and tragedies our own, he created a uniquely personal opus that ached with vulnerability.2

After channeling a cultural spirit with which he identified but in which he did not participate, the surfing craze and its buoyant bopping West Coast sounds, Wilson created a string of scintillating pop hits that echoed the tenor of the times. Before the arrival of The Beatles, that is. With charming, if slightly cloying, anthems like ‘‘Surfin’,’’ ‘‘Little Surfer Girl,’’ ‘‘Surfin’ USA’’ (the first blockbuster hit), ‘‘409,’’ ‘‘Shutdown,’’ and ‘‘Little Deuce Coupe,’’ he gave America its first hint of a self-contained rock band, even if it was one in the early formative stages of greatness. But even in the midst of some occasionally soft-centered dance songs, Brian Wilson was slowly letting loose a series of insights that were foreshadowing the depth of his songwriting feelings and the heights of his aspirations. The unreleased tune ‘‘Their Hearts Were Full of Spring’’ hinted at some of the deeper and darker substance below the dancing surfaces. After laying the groundwork for the idyllic story suggested in the title with talk of a boy and a girl who exchange love tokens and live in a state of perpetual happiness and youth, Wilson quickly transitions to the conclusion that ‘‘they did in fact die,’’ that ‘‘their graves were side by side.’’ Following this, he does, however, recapture and recolor that initial idyll with the suggestion that violets grow on their graves because, as the title says, they carried spring within them still. If you listen to this little-known track on the boxed set of collected Beach Boys music, with its unaccompanied voices swirling in a manner quite unheard of in America at that time, you’ll get the basic vibe that never leaves Wilson’s music, no matter how big the production values or the backing band becomes. It’s a quintessential vocal harmony that only the word angelic can adequately describe. Pale shades of Nat King Cole’s ‘‘Nature Boy’’ come to mind. Perhaps the first indicator of danger on the horizon came very early on. I have a well-worn vinyl copy of The Beach Boys in Concert from 1963 with a solo vocal version of ‘‘In My Room’’ soaring above the requisite screaming girl mania, in which Wilson was already intimating the full degree of his historic fragility. ‘‘There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to, in my room, in my room.’’ The big bopping hits just kept on coming: ‘‘Catch A Wave,’’ ‘‘Fun Fun Fun,’’ ‘‘Do You Wanna Dance?,’’and ‘‘I Get Around.’’ All of them captured the essence of what it meant to be growing up in Southern California just as the 60s were beginning to pick up and take off, but before it all became

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serious cultural business. None of them captured the essence of the shy genius at the control panel. At least not until the shy genius began to experiment with some newly popular psychedelic chemicals that were making the rounds of his golden community. Yes, surfers were among the first to trip out. Seriously. Suddenly Wilson’s songs altered their course; while still remaining shiningly simple odes, they began to drift towards more introspection, less fun fun fun perhaps, but more pleasure for sure, more joy, more ecstasy. ‘‘Please Let Me Wonder’’ and ‘‘She Knows Me Too Well’’ were Wilson’s post-nervous-breakdown songs, created in 1965, the year he began supplementing his diet with the same kind of potent psychic drugs that had already begun to take their toll on Lennon. The weirdly majestic ‘‘California Girls’’ and the willfully experimental ‘‘Good Vibrations’’ were among the first direct evidence that Wilson had changed his creative motivation from pure entertainment to pure music. As was his greatest record, Pet Sounds, steeped as it was in clouds of hashish and vials of intensely powerful lysergic acid. But most importantly, it was mired in the shift from adolescent angst to humanist poetry.

Most of the other hits had been co-written with Wilson’s cousin, Mike Love, but the boy genius was quickly moving far beyond anything that his youthful collaborator, or his family for that matter, could comprehend. From the beginning, under the tutelage of a brutally dysfunctional father similar in many ways to Michael Jackson’s patriarch, it had been a family affair: Brian played bass, composed and arranged the songs, and his father Murray, a failed musician with grandiose ambitions, was the manager and nominal ‘‘producer’’; brother Carl Wilson played guitar and provided equally gorgeous vocal harmonies; brother Dennis pretended valiantly to play the drums; college classmate Al Jardine added a few strums and his own lovely voice to the mix; first cousin Mike Love sang lead and co-wrote the lyrics. In those early days, popular music meant teenage music, or at least music for teenagers and their dreams. Indeed, The Beach Boys themselves were largely untutored kids who were moving quickly, but who were largely in the dark about what they were really doing or why. Both Carl, who was a mere 14, and Dennis were still in high school, while Mike was the only seeming adult around, at the ripe old age of 20. David Leaf’s liner notes to The Beach Boys boxed set traced the trajectory: From 1962–1965, The Beach Boys rode Brian’s musical wave, scoring sixteen top forty hits, with ‘‘Don’t Worry Baby’’ being one of the greatest double sided singles of all time and a number one smash for the group, at the height of Beatlemania! Listening to those hits and album cuts such as ‘‘Warmth of the Sun,’’ it is clear that Brian’s artistic development happened at lightning

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speed. In January 1965, determined to concentrate on his composing and record making, Brian retired from the rigors of touring.3

Basically, while The Beach Boys were away entertaining the world with his early hits, Brian stayed home and started cooking up something truly new, and even more crucially, with a new songwriting collaborator, Tony Asher. Asher was an advertising copywriter who had found a new product to extol, that of youthful longing and despair, and it was his words that gave flight to many of Brian’s own secret feelings. That, and of course, the dope. He was the first collaborator Wilson found who could match his musical ability with evocative lyrics, later to be followed by another, the uniquely gifted Van Dyke Parks, and both would find that though their creative connection with Wilson was an ideal one, the band and its brand, as well as the public in general, were not quite so welcoming to the changes they represented. Asher has mused long and hard about why the groundbreaking Pet Sounds was so soundly rejected by the audiences of its day, not to mention by the group whose name was ostensibly attached to the record. Some said the record label, notorious in the best of circumstances for its paucity of promotional activity, had no faith in the album, and in fact, the label did very quickly release competing Beach Boys product, suggesting that it had given up on Pet Sounds somewhat prematurely. Others felt that the album just wasn’t what Beach Boys fans were expecting—that it failed to reflect what they had grown to love about Brian and the boys. The fans wanted more of the same, and Pet Sounds was anything but that. Still others posited that the album was simply ahead of its time.4

Asher went on to note that a strange underground momentum kept building for about 30 years, until the record’s rerelease on CD, and later its inclusion in the boxed set, and even a special edition for fetishists like us, with three discs of the foundation tracks and sessions for the entire enterprise. Suddenly it had become the instant classic that it really always was. There’s no shelf life to genius after all. Asher stated, Perhaps of even more significance, I’ve encountered dozens and dozens of people, fans, music lovers, composers and lyricists—who have shared with me the often profound effect the album has had on their lives. Time and again, people have told me that for years they’ve wanted to thank Brian and me for ‘‘saving their lives.’’ Strangers who have endured difficult, often dreadful childhood circumstances have told me that the Pet Sounds album convinced them that there were other people out there who understood, and who had survived.5

One thing we can all agree upon: Brian Wilson is a survivor, he is perhaps The Survivor. Largely because he endured the tepid response to his masterpiece; endured his family’s rejection of his maturing musical taste; endured

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their open rebellion at his dedication to working with quirky lyricist Van Dyke Parks on his followup masterpiece, Smile (which took a full 37 years to get made the way he wanted it to be); and finally endured a creative collapse brought on by Beatles pressure, lysergic acid, and self-doubt, all of which left him crippled inside, bloated outside, and hiding out ‘‘in his room’’ for decades.

The songs in Pet Sounds revolve around a simple core that makes them part of a high concept: how to live through youthful heartache and the utter absence of faith in what you formerly held to be true. Its leadoff song ‘‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’’ is so gorgeous that it makes us forget that it’s really about kids wanting to be old enough to spend the night together. The more the two talk about the prospect, well, as the song says, ‘‘it only makes it worse to live without it.’’ Still, before saying good-night, they resolve to at least keep talking. The song ‘‘You Still Believe in Me’’ give us perhaps the essence of what love might be: to believe in someone even if they’re not quite perfect. ‘‘I know perfectly well I’m not where I should be,’’ the narrator offers, but instead of moving on to discuss improvement or some other solution, he is led to reflect, repeatedly, admiringly, on the belief that keeps the couple together. Perhaps one of the most articulate love songs ever written about not needing to articulate your love, ‘‘Don’t Talk, Put Your Head on My Shoulder’’ implores youthful love to listen. ‘‘There are words we both could say, but don’t talk.’’ The simple presence of a person, the muffled beating of a heart, these can be enough, he says. Sometimes they need to be. The song ‘‘God Only Knows’’ is remarkable, even more so with its mention of a deity in pop music, for its impeccable production values and the soaring heights to which it can take a declaration of love and the core question, ‘‘What would I be without you?’’ The very strange song ‘‘I Know There’s an Answer’’ was originally called ‘‘Hang On to Your Ego’’ (the title changed at the insistence of Mike Love in reaction against its LSD-induced quest for certainty), and it contains the essence of Wilson’s warnings about losing touch with one reality through effortless chemistry while coming closer to another one through the determined effort of talent. Here, the original line, ‘‘Hang on to your ego, though I know you’re sure to lose the fight,’’ is replaced by ‘‘I know there’s an answer, I know but I had to find it for myself.’’ Only on the boxed set years later did that song retrieve its true splendor in which it was allowed to express the singer’s dark feelings in unalloyed terms. Don’t do what I have done, it seems to warn; don’t let your identity be melted away during your search for enlightenment. It’s an artificial paradise, he cautions, since as Jack Kerouac once remarked, enlightenment wasn’t built in a day!

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But Wilson’s most personal revelation, and the sentiment that would remain his diary entry for the next 30 years, was contained in the harrowing but gentle little dirge, ‘‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’’: ‘‘Sometimes I feel very sad, sometimes I feel very sad, sometimes I feel very sad. . .I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.’’ Just in case you missed his point, sometimes he feels very sad. And the isolation of trying something new weighs him down, since he’s all alone in wanting ‘‘the new thing.’’ Furthermore, whenever he can find the energy and drive to try and make things better, he also finds himself utterly alone, with no one else interested, with no one else even around. In the end, it becomes perhaps the loveliest explanation for a complete mental collapse that we’ve ever heard. But it was his next recording project, a psychedelic wonder work designed to sum up his sentiments in a glittering little symphony of abstract poetry and powerful studio sounds, that really began to sink Brian Wilson. When The Beach Boys found out what their leader was intending to accomplish, and what he needed them to do in order to help make it happen, they didn’t just balk—they walked. And all because of lines like ‘‘Light the camp and fire mellow, cabin essence timely hello.’’ Talk about a change; this was to be an evolutionary leap forward into the complete unknown. How else could he possibly hope to compete with what The Beatles were cooking up over at Abbey Road Studios? Well, he couldn’t, of course. The word peer doesn’t apply to The Beatles. But what Brian could do and what he did do so well was to be the best version of himself that he could possibly be. Lindsey Buckingham, the volatile guitarist/producer for Fleetwood Mac, and one of many talented musicians who have declared their careers to be utterly inspired by Wilson, expressed it perfectly in one of his appreciations of The Beach Boys’ magic. The Beach Boys showed the way, and not just to California. Sure, they may have sold the California Dream to a lot of people, but for me, it was Brian Wilson showing how far you might have to go in order to make your own musical dream come true.6

The trouble was, however, that Brian Wilson could not go as far as that. . . he could only go this far and no further. Pet Sounds, his attempt to outdo The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, only resulted in inspiring The Beatles to create Revolver, and then while attempting to outdo that particular dizzying masterpiece by producing a prodigious song-cycle-opera in homage to the roots of Americana, The Beatles dropped the atom bomb of all experimental studio albums, Sergeant Pepper. So Smile, Brian’s own little psychedelic symphony, took a long vacation. Sylvie Simmons’s take on the great Brian mythology was apt when she wrote a Mojo Magazine piece titled, ‘‘Smile? Don’t Mind If I Do,’’ in which

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she characterized the holy grail of lost albums: ‘‘It was due in January 1967 but the Beach Boys Smile LP was shelved when its creator Brian Wilson refused to finish it.’’ Pop’s lost masterpiece. The sand pit in the living room, the dope tent in the den, recordings made at the bottom of an empty swimming pool, session musicians singing into their instruments and harmonizing on vegetables, an outbreak of fires in Los Angeles, humor and paranoia, universal love, Mike Love, and some very bad vibes. Simmons wrote: Of all the legends of lost songs, lost weekends and lost minds in rock history, nothing holds a candle to the mythical Great Lost Album: Smile. The album Brian Wilson began recording in 1966—24 years old and at his creative peak, and abandoned in 1967, a terrified, bed-ridden, mentally ill emotional wreck.7

The music he was trying to produce, a perfectly balanced abstract painting of sounds, was his joyous celebration of the summer of love, and Wilson was increasingly being recognized in serious music circles as the next step in the evolution of songwriting. Leonard Bernstein invited him onto a national television show featuring America’s newest composers. Solo at the piano, Wilson did a version of the song ‘‘Surf’s Up,’’ planned as the pivotal core of Smile, in which he reached a spooky peak of perfection. That song alone could have been just as drastic a telegram to his legions of fans as the one Dylan sent out when he plugged into an amplifier. Things have changed, the song seems to announce in its melancholy soaring tones, I’m not exactly that Beached Boy you used to know and love. Another chronicler of the rise and fall and eventual rise again of Brain Wilson, James Cunningham wrote evocatively in a piece called ‘‘How Brian Wilson Found His Smile’’ about the pressures that swamped the youthful genius. In 1966, Brian Wilson was at the top of the star making machinery heap. Bernstein would proclaim Wilson one of America’s most significant composers. The lyrics to ‘‘Surf’s Up’’ revealed a whole new Brian Wilson, one removed from Pet Sounds’s aching odes to teenage love—and a universe away from the paeans to girls, surf and hot rods of early Beach Boys hits. Let’s call it The Beach Boys own Gothic American pop soap opera: a family well beyond dysfunction, drugs, Dennis Wilson’s dalliance with Charles Manson, an obese Brian Wilson in a sandbox full of dog feces, madness, collapse.8

The album covers were ready, the pressing plant was ready, the label had produced both posters and radio promo spots, the public was ready, The Beatles were definitely ready. But Brian balked, and walked. He cancelled production and withdrew for a long, long time. According to him, they decided to put it on the shelf for a while. According to some witnesses

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to the events at the time, Wilson simply was unable to carry on personally or function professionally anymore. ‘‘It might have been the drugs, or the nascent mental illness that hounds him to this day, but Wilson cracked.’’9 Still, the deep underground influence of the album continued to flow unabated, and eventually to everyone’s irony-drenched surprise, Smile somehow slowly made its way back to the surface of pop culture’s consciousness. Cunningham wrote, What emerges is a deeply troubled—yet proud—artist who believes his day of vindication has arrived. In 2003, 37 years after Smile screeched to a halt, Van Dyke Parks (Brian’s co-writer) received a call one day from Wilson, who told him that he wanted to finish composing Smile, make a new recording of it, and take it on tour. Adds Parks, ‘‘I cannot tell you how stunning it is to see this come to life. I thought I would carry this project, like a dead child, to my grave.’’10

Brian Wilson’s second life, the second act that Americans, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, never get, had finally arrived. But way back in 1968, his three-piece rock opera about America, a happy teenage symphony to God, would be cannibalized by The Beach Boys, who had managed to reassert their authority, and spread it across a number of lesser records after Brian’s meltdown. ‘‘Surf’s Up’’ would resurface on the album of the same name released by The Beach Boys in 1971. And thus the long wait would begin, filled only with occasional esoteric bootlegs and the arcane compilations of the fetishists.

It is another couple of songs which seem to serve best as the dark mirror with which to capture Brian Wilson’s elusive genius: one is called ‘‘Cabinessence,’’ the other ‘‘Till I Die.’’ Both songs drove some of his former ardent fans, and especially his former writing partner Mike Love, simply beyond distraction. And it is for that reason that those songs serve as the best emblems of the kind of lofty creative transition that Wilson was searching for. By this time, his lyrics had become almost as obscure as Dylan’s. Maybe even more so. ‘‘Cabinessence,’’ one of the most beautiful and strange songs ever written, should have been on Smile but ended up on the later record 20/20. It has been parsed for meaning by Wilson-lovers for years, even though it resists any easy definitions, just as everything else pertaining to this paradoxical artist does. In the song, Wilson’s language drifts lazily from ‘‘you windblown facing’’ to romantic fields, to crows, and then dissipates again with ‘‘the thresher and hover the wheat field.’’ Questions dominate the song, with ‘‘who ran the iron horse?’’ standing starkly in the midst of these wandering images.

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One wonders, though, why earlier collaborator and cousin Mike Love, who was able to deliver such quirky lines as those in the earlier Beach Boys hit ‘‘Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow,’’ would have had such difficulty with those evocative and dreamy lyrics. But then again, Love has always taken himself far too seriously to have any linguistic fun. Love’s and Wilson’s feud over Brian’s new direction in 1967 has since solidified into one of the great anecdotes of pop music culture. History has managed to elevate Wilson to the status of a prophetic savant who triumphed in the end, while Mike Love has been relegated, along with his other original alumnus, Al Jardine, to touring the world as an old man, playing in casinos and delivering the ancient pop songs that his cousin wrote 45 years ago as a teenager. Not a pretty sight. ‘‘Til I Die’’ is an even more compelling and demanding declaration of a poetic young man’s challenges. It appeared on the 1971 Surf’s Up album, just before the last title track. For me, it captures the essence of both the tragedy and the triumph of Brian Wilson by enshrining his hyper-sensitive sense of self in a mode of perpetual transcendence. Wilson sings of a general sense of uncertainty, where elemental forces—the ocean, a landslide, the wind— sweep him up and push him on towards an unknown and even variable destination. After chronicling this metaphysical journey, he asks, ‘‘How long will the wind blow. . .Oh. Until I die,’’ repeated ten times, just in case the listener missed the point. Alas, but there is one more thing that Wilson will be until he dies: one of our greatest and most inspiring singer-songwriters, elevated to Olympian status by every serious musician since. Admired by the rest of us for his fierce devotion to the muse that fuels him. Loved by all for his living example as a creative human being who survives his own demons daily. And by surviving, he demonstrates to us that survival is possible, and maybe even probable, with enough poetry. That, in the end, is what we most want our poets to do. They tell us dreams that keep us from falling asleep in the darkness alone. Brian Wilson was a dream teller extraordinaire. Even when his dream turned into a nightmare, his abundance of raw spirit allowed him to carry on telling it like it might have been. Which is why it is so natural for us to go on listening. As long as there are dreams to listen to, there will be audiences ready to open their ears and hearts, and yes, even their wallets, to the wounded minstrel. To the kind of artist Anselm Kiefer once described as a story teller with a broken story.

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3 The Torch Bearer: Joni Mitchell Busy Being Free

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it’s just complaining.1 Joni Mitchell

‘‘Blue, here is a shell for you, inside you’ll hear a sigh,’’ she warbled in a voice somewhere between pain and bliss. Joni Mitchell is not just one of the greatest female singer-songwriters in the world. She is one of the greatest singer-songwriters in the world, period. Coming of both personal and creative age in 1967, the same magic summer that brought Wilson’s mature emergence as an artist, and arriving apparently as fully formed as Dylan did, without any real apprenticeship, Mitchell matches the heartfelt content and soulful delivery of both peers. But she also adds a deep feminine well of feelings to which she bravely returns time and again in order to dispatch her torchy reports to the world. Sometimes thrown at the world. Most importantly, she has that personal intimacy with anguish that often provides the best singer-songwriters with both their material and the combustible fuel with which to transmit it in performance and recordings.

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When she was inducted into the 2007 Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, her acceptance speech was so succinct it was surprising, coming as it did from an artist whose business is words: ‘‘I need to explore and discover, it’s just in my stars. There’s nothing I can do about it.’’ Many of her songs, originating from the depth of her early private experiences, have also become emblems of the times in which they were produced. They are signifiers, not just for the Canadian culture that created her perspective, but also of the global attitude she eventually began to reflect so ideally. ‘‘Clouds,’’ ‘‘Both Sides Now,’’ ‘‘Big Yellow Taxi,’’ and, of course, ‘‘Woodstock’’ (an event she didn’t actually attend) are shared brands now, as are the many deft experiments of her later mature period. Critic Guy Dixon asked a pertinent question while musing over Mitchell’s induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, one that applies to all composers of anthemic songs that somehow find their way into everyone’s heart and mind, reflecting what is there as if they were written specifically for them. ‘‘Once songs such as these become so legendary, do they effectively belong to everyone, with artists losing possession of them?’’2 James Taylor, one of Mitchell’s many fans who is himself a practitioner of the same arcane craft, turning personal lead into public gold, adds a note of clarification: Ideally, a handful of songs that one had written over a lifetime of writing songs will resonate so much with people that they mean a lot, that they are commonly held property. They mean so much to so many people that they become, certainly with a number of Joni’s songs, part of the cultural fabric, and contribute to the modern cultural myth that people use to assemble their own lives.3

Of course, this is also the ideal definition of what it means to be a dark mirror and how the reflections in those mirrors manage to speak on our own behalf. We start to assemble our own lives based on the truths and insights of those gifted individuals who sometimes seem to be suffering, professionally and publicly, for a living, and to sing about it, as if in stubborn jubilation. Mitchell has been suffering in public, or else exploring and discovering as she puts it more creatively, for a long, long time now. Another Canadian music journalist, Greg Quill, has observed that she is perhaps the best exponent of a songwriting tradition that has long nourished that country. ‘‘It could even be argued that the simple song provides the common language that binds and illuminates the nation more richly and completely than any other of our cultural endeavours in literature, film, drama, symphonic music, opera and even the visual arts.’’4 But, ‘‘simple song?’’ Joni Mitchell’s songs are anything but simple. Yet part of their huge charm is that they seem to be simple—like all the greatest art, they seem to be straightforward but are far from being easy. She herself helped clarify this misnomer:

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The chords I like are complex. They’re fresh in the history of harmony. They’re mostly suspended chords. It’s still taught in the schools not to stay on the suspended chord too long. I call them chords of inquiry. They’re unresolved, they went against the grain of normal composition. To enjoy my music, you need depth and emotionality. Those two traits are bred out of the white, straight males who control the press.5

Sorry Guy and Greg. Luckily for all of us, Joni Mitchell did not study in those schools which disparage suspension and the unresolved. Luckily, she studied in the same school the best songwriters always attend, the street. And when one graduates from the street, as did Dylan and his inheritors, you learn quickly that resolution is misanthropic. Resolution is anti-human, it is not our lot in life, as the best songwriters tell us again and again. If only we would listen. Joel Kroeker believes that our song sensibility owes a lot to the Toronto musical crucible of the 60s and 70s, his own included: What made Canadian songwriters different after that was the quality of their stories. They looked into their own psyches to find universal feelings and ideas that others shared. It’s too easy to go with the first rhyme that pops into your head. There’s nothing superficial about Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell’s lyrics. They often went into very dark places in their souls to find a poetic view of life. That’s the standard I hold myself to.6

Another Canadian writer and also a lover of Mitchell’s craft and style, Ron Hynes, points out, ‘‘It’s almost second nature for us to document ourselves in song. We’ve been doing it for hundreds of years, long before there was a music industry. Songs were written, still are, to document who and where people were and what happened to them. Some songs become so entrenched that they simply move like air from generation to generation.’’7 So it has certainly been with the deceptively simple odes of the one busy being Joni Mitchell.

Like the careers of Dylan and Wilson, her career has stretched miraculously over four decades—the same four decades, in fact. Her early work is scintillatingly soulful, while her later work is soulfully scintillating, tied together by a continuum of careful craftsmanship and manic creativity. The critic Richard Ouzounian called her a ‘‘young old soul’’ but then again, youth, middle age, and old age don’t seem to be words that apply very much to the mercurial Ms. Mitchell. Ouzounian’s observations were made in his own appreciation of Mitchell when she was inducted, and they focus quite rightly on the shock to our

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cultural systems of the arrival of a perfectly matured voice that was contained in the blonde wisp of a 22-year-old visionary. He alludes to the intensity of her formative years: This burst of songwriting activity followed an astonishing two year period in her life that included the loss of her virginity, an unwanted pregnancy, a marriage of convenience, giving her child up and a divorce from the man she thought was going to save her. Is it any wonder that a sensitive young woman with an urge to communicate her feelings in song would have so much to say?8

Her life has been a rough one, providing more than enough raw material for what would amount to a kind of creative crucible out of which all her poetic musings would be channeled. From the middle of Saskatchewan, afflicted with polio at the age of 9, an art student at 20, an accomplished painter as well as poet, Mitchell tried briefly to play the role of wife and singing partner with Chuck Mitchell, but all she really got out of the arrangement was the name by which we all know her today. Ouzounian’s take is a very clear-eyed and personal one, similar to the way Mitchell makes all of us feel: ‘‘For nearly forty years, fans such as myself have sung her melodies, memorized her lyrics and marveled at the knack she had of illuminating the dark corners of our souls where we thought we dwelt alone.’’9 What a perfect grasp of that role and function she has in our personal development. Illuminating the dark corners where we thought we dwelt alone. That is, after all, why she is among the most stringent and brave of all our dark mirrors. She has that merciless way of casting her critical gaze on herself first and on the world second, and then perhaps most witheringly, on the music industry third. Larry David Smith has characterized what she does as operating within the ‘‘torch song tradition.’’ While I hadn’t quite identified it that way over decades of listening, it does seem to be an accurate assessment of the flavor and structure of many of her wonderful songs. But she doesn’t only sing about a private love affair with someone for whom she continues to carry a torch. If anything, she also carries a torch for situations and circumstances, and for the questionable collective destiny we are designing for ourselves. Mitchell carries a torch for nature, in her insistence that the world has taken a disastrous turn away from what she refers to as the Eden experience; she carries a torch for art and poetry, in a commercial world gone mad for musical money and overdevelopment. This has not always made her as popular as she was in her meteoric beginnings. Many members of her audience wanted more of her romantic menu, her gorgeous odes to love lost or found, rather than her angry sentiments about what went wrong with a beautiful world and how we might go about repairing the mess in which we find ourselves. She wasn’t happy in 1998 with the tepid response to her then latest record, Taming the Tiger, and so she moved instead closer to the silent world of

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painted images where she first started, rather than the spoken pictures of her life of song. Most of us associate highly evocative images with that haunting voice of hers. But those early personal stories, sung-spoken in a harrowingly intimate voice, were the primary way for her to free herself of her own beginnings, an urge she shares with almost all of her peers included in this book. For Mitchell, playing her guitar gave her what she once called ‘‘a one way ticket over the next hill, and away from home.’’ She has also been very forthcoming over the years that, for her, songwriting was a mechanism with which she ‘‘wrote her way out of difficulty and disturbance.’’ She has even intimated that in her experience she has learned to be ‘‘grateful for trouble’’ since it enabled her to delve more deeply into both her own condition and the human condition. Naturally enough, we’ll see that particular interpretation of events recur over and over in this diverse community of creative strangers. Mitchell, after her early role as a duo partner dissolved, along with the marriage, launched herself into a series of song statements that were so personal that they left critics with no choice but to dub her a ‘‘female Dylan.’’ She is naturally a little churlish about such an association, and yet in essence she does indeed operate with the same set of emotional tools as does the Master. For her, ‘‘songs are charts of journeys,’’ and she never ‘‘puts lipstick or makeup on the truth.’’ The result, like with all the best practitioners of the ancient craft, invites us into a musical world which we can feel but can’t explain, perhaps largely because what she does so well is precisely what Dylan, Wilson, and a few others also managed to master. She has on many occasions stated that her basic modus operandi is to ‘‘erase who you are and let your songs be your voice.’’ As in, allowing songs to be a kind of stand-in for an actually discernible self, a screen in other words, presented to the world for interpretation.

Her construction of, and revelation through, a song-self makes her another ideal mirror with which to access the undercurrents we all possess but seldom are able to rationally articulate. Her first producer, the great singersongwriter David Crosby, founder of both The Byrds and the Crosby Stills & Nash supergroup, was also her last. Even though the results were quite scintillating for a youthful debut recording—known by two titles, Songs For a Seagull and Joni Mitchell (released in March 1968)—she was so immediately mature as an artist that for the rest of her career she solo-produced her own albums. Quite a technical achievement indeed, and one that indicates the level of personal control and commitment she would exhibit throughout her long career. The first album she produced herself was the shimmering folk work, Clouds, in May 1969. This was followed in breathtakingly rapid succession by Ladies of the Canyon in April 1970 and her truly gorgeous masterpiece, Blue,

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in June 1971. David Crosby, after watching her perform one night in a Florida club called The Gaslight South, reports that he was so stunned by the completely developed level of her craft that he literally lost his balance. Of course, he was rather prone to losing it. Crosby, up until that moment, had always assumed that artists tend to ‘‘arrive as a boulder and knock the corners off yourself until you are smooth like a river stone,’’ presumably by both living and writing hard. But here was someone who arrived perfectly smoothed out as an artist, requiring no evolutionary growth. She was simply perfect, as is. He said, ‘‘She sang for me, she was my voice, she was everyone’s voice!’’ And being everyone’s voice is what makes her an ideal dark mirror. If Dylan is a story teller, whose story becomes more and more refined and polished with age, and if Wilson is a dream teller, whose dreams don’t seem to tarnish because they’re made of some unearthly angelic metal, then Mitchell is a torch bearer, whose flame appears even brighter since it pierces a darkness too deep to imagine. The darkness of the human heart in extremis. It provokes echoes of Rainer Maria Rilke when he asked his rhetorical question: surely all art is the result of having been in some danger, of having gone all the way to the end, to where one can go no further? That is certainly the case in the graceful long-distance race of Mitchell’s work and career. It’s a veritable roller coaster ride of ups and downs through an extremely painful carnival midway that includes isolation, polio, teenage pregnancy, forced marriage, child abandonment, divorce, drugs, love affairs aplenty, and sonic acres of inventive contemporary songs crafted while being pursued by the twin demons of depression and a taste for complete and utter independence. As a woman, as an artist, as a person, Mitchell is one of the most idiosyncratic and uncompromising geniuses of our shared culture. Sure, her personal song-stories, as Larry David Smith points out very eloquently, are remnants or vestiges of a bygone age occupied by both medieval troubadours and modern Tin Pan Alley songsmiths. They are indeed torch songs, sort of, and I appreciate the entertaining insight; however, for me it is as the bearer of a torch leading us into the void ahead, by virtue of her own brilliant talent and her own unique pathological needs as an artist that she matters most. As a torch bearer, she is far closer to the notion of a cultural canary we use, just as we use all singer-songwriters, as a test subject who suffers down below on our behalf, and makes it all somehow vaguely better by doing so. Now, torch bearers aren’t always popular, if only because they tend to illuminate unseen things and to palpate unfelt sensations which on occasion can hurt us as deeply as we can bear. At such times, however, we are reminded that poets have that special relationship with the truth, one that enables them to also tell us certain lies to keep our hearts from breaking. Artifice is a better word than lie: the artifice that all artists use to represent the unnameable and to express the inexpressible. After all, how else could they do their jobs? As for Mitchell’s job, she was at the top of her game almost instantly. Hauntingly beautiful as a woman, radically strong as a person, and melodically gifted

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as a musician-poet, she strode into history as if she really did belong there. Like Dylan, she was and is a troubadour, and as such, she has special functions to perform in our society and its culture, especially the subculture of love. ‘‘Love knows no boundaries, and the troubadours charted romantic courses that transcended borders, creeds or social affiliations. Assuredly, they chronicled an essential part of the human apparatus. They told stories of love.’’10 In Smith’s astute reading of the tradition of singing stories of love, he goes on to allude to their pertinence to our own appreciation of the dim and murky reflections that possess and obsess the singing subjects who write the songs under study. ‘‘When music historians speak of the love song as a songwriting theme, their thoughts instantly turn to the troubadours of Southern France and their pivotal contributions to that genre’s development.’’11 He goes on to quote Richard Wilhelm in a clarification, ‘‘The troubadours did not leave us tourist guidebooks any more than they left candid memoirs of their sex lives or propaganda pieces about the superiority of women. They did however leave us their poetry, and this heritage binds them to us directly.’’12 As Smith points out, there are inherent boundaries to the love song format, even if there are none separating the people who consume them. ‘‘As twentieth-century songwriters massaged the love song, searching for some unique sentiment or insight, they encountered the same limitations that hounded their French predecessors.’’13 In fact, there was once an old love song that cheekily used its own tradition as the subject for itself, the 1930s charmer, ‘‘What Can You Say in a Love Song That Hasn’t Been Said Before?’’ What indeed? How many ways are there to actually say something that simple? Millions, it turns out, if not more. Smith wrote: While many Tin Pan Alley writers searched for adroit ways to communicate ‘‘I Love You in 32 bars,’’ a few pursued alternative formulas. One possibility involved the creation of musical hybrids that synthesized the strengths of existing genres into new forms. With that, the torch song was born.. . . The advent of the celebrity singer-songwriter changed everything. The composer-singer-songwriter roles converged into a single entity. The celebrity-singer-songwriter composite sparked the rebirth of songs with public personalities as it retrieved that tradition from the dusty court chambers that time forgot. . .like the troubadours of old, they brought personalities to their work in a fashion that made it original and memorable. Unlike the troubadours of old, they performed their work before international audiences who instantly praised or damned their efforts.14

Praise for Mitchell was hard earned, well deserved, and equally fleeting, just as soon as she did what all the best and bravest singer-songwriters

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always do: evolve, change, and create new and different sounds. Audiences generally don’t want new and different; they tend to be nourished by a steady diet of what they fell in love with you for in the first place—not some exotic dish you concocted after securing their adoration. I remember one folk festival Mitchell attended in Toronto around 1972, where her presence attracted a large number of other stars who were not appearing but who had to travel to see and hear her. Among them was a ragged-looking Bob Dylan wearing a red bandana, carrying a bottle of red wine in one hand and a perpetual cigarette in the other. I almost knocked him over in the rush to get a seat on the grass in front of Mitchell’s tiny stage under the swaying trees. She had just followed up her majesterial record, Blue, with the gorgeously surprising For the Roses. What we were all (including Dylan) tripping over ourselves to see and hear was something rare and precious, something that only comes along about as rarely as Dylan himself. This was the early and shockingly mature voice and music of a young woman who plumbed the depths of her own soul in order to provide commentary on those aspects of the public world that enraged her, as well as those aspects of her private world that strained so painfully to be expressed. This modus operandi, often accurately referred to as ‘‘confessional’’ songs delivered in a deceptively romantic vessel, was stunning to behold, especially given her arrival on the scene apparently fully formed and ready to roll into the arms of international fans. Her songs’ messages have remained as crystalline and clear as that first outing produced by a smitten David Crosby. Everyone who ever met her was equally smitten, including Crosby’s musical partner Graham Nash. The rest of us were content to be smitten from a distance. It was that apparent absence of any distance between her and her music, and her and us, which caused us all to fall in love with her songs in a surrogate fashion. ‘‘Cactus Tree,’’ from that first album in 1968, is perhaps a youthful summation of almost everything that would come later, even or especially the later sonic experiments that on the surface seemed to leave folk music far behind. The song celebrates a variety of men in her life but quickly heads to her favorite territory—the ambivalence of belonging to someone else, the pressures that a lover’s expectations can wreak on us, and Mitchell’s own refusal to meet anyone else’s standards but her own. ‘‘They have laughed inside her laughter, now she rallies her defenses.’’ Virtually all of Mitchell’s best songs are literally about ‘‘rallying her defenses’’ and refusing to submit to the expectations of either lovers or the music industry itself, which she has always seen as a problematic artistic relationship between craft and commerce. In one of her great early hits, often misinterpreted due to its rollicking rhythms, the song ‘‘Help Me’’ from 1974’s wildly popular Court and Spark, she makes her case abundantly clear. ‘‘I’d go back there [to Paris, where she felt entirely unbound] tomorrow but for the work I’ve taken on, stoking the star making machinery, behind the popular song.’’

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Few artists, with the possible exceptions of Dylan, Lennon, and Cobain, have ever encapsulated their dread of celebrity and stardom with such sarcastic wit and verve. But The Torch Bearer does it in her own unique way. Like Dylan and Wilson, she also risked regularly alienating her established audience in the interest of stretching herself creatively and continuing to grow within the craft of her medium. Mitchell was and is a slave to risk, as are all the greatest songwriters, and all the greatest artists in any medium for that matter, so she plunged forward regardless of the commercial results. The Hissing of Summer Lawns, from 1975, was her first radical departure from the security of the folk foundations that had both informed her own growth as a writer and which she had, in turn, expanded in form and evolved in content. Her efforts were not well received, except by the lovers of her already highly experimental music who wished to join her on her excursions into the unknown reaches of free jazz and ever more unusual tuning techniques. She kept on keeping on despite an abrupt downturn in the worshipful reception; she was by then used to having accorded her work. Hejira (1976) and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977) extended her artistic reach remarkably, though neither one was fully recognized to be what both were—among her most adventurous and mature work. But audiences are audiences, and they adhere to a menu of their own choosing, so as time went on, Mitchell was finding herself more and more alone on her sojourns beyond folk. This had little effect on her creative psyche, since from the origins of her youthful flowering, that kind of solitude, though sometimes suffocating with sadness, was the wellspring from which she drew her unique voice, words, and music. Not even recording with the magnificent and mad legend Charles Mingus (in 1979, close to his death) afforded her the credibility she so richly deserved. You don’t get to play with Mingus unless you are the real thing. He was hardly able to bear lesser jazz players, let alone an interloper from the folk-pop world, so his ready acceptance of her stature should have told everyone something about her true validity as a musical artist. It was not until 1982, with Wild Things Run Fast, that she made a much heralded return to the so-called conventions of classical songwriting, even though from her very beginnings she had always managed to subvert and enhance those very same standards. Mitchell has continued to explore her own muse with dogged determination, in regular releases that followed a slight hiatus during which her disdain for the industry and her ongoing interest in painting allowed her a break from the constant supply of elegant sadness which we had all become so attached to over the years. Her masterpiece still remains the scintillating Blue, from 1971, a recording that simply gets stronger with each passing year. This collection of almost perfect songs, ideal production values, and carefully calculated instrumentation remains the truest testament to what has now, post-Joni, come to commonly be called the confessional style of songwriting.

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She moves from declaring that she is on a lonely road, traveling and traveling, looking for something and asking what it might be, to explaining that ‘‘songs are like tattoos.’’ And in the title song itself she intones, ‘‘Well everybody’s saying that hell’s the hippest way to go.’’ She’s not so sure, but is ‘‘going to take a look around it though.’’ She has been taking a look around it for a long time now; her reports from the battlefield of the aching heart have since become signposts for millions of unrelated relationships. She closed her masterpiece with a message that could apply to all great songwriters, not just to the legions of people for whom she is an emblem: ‘‘All good dreamers pass this way some day. . .only a dark cocoon before I get my wings and fly away.’’ Although, Mitchell has always had her wings, from the very beginning, and if she carries a torch for us, or for the entire planet, she holds it so high we can barely see it. But we can feel its warmth and imagine its flickering emotional light. And sometimes that is enough.

One of the more ironic codas to the Joni Mitchell canon is the fact that last year she signed a deal to release her new album, Shine, through the Starbucks record label now also favored by Sir Paul McCartney. It’s her first record since 2002, when the world was certain her distaste for the recording industry had reached its zenith and it was bye-bye forever. But wait, aren’t they one of the companies that ‘‘paved over paradise to put up a parking lot?’’ Go figure.

4 The Role Player: David Bowie The Man Who Sold the World

He has a melodic sense that’s well above anyone else in rock and roll. Most people could not sing some of his melodies. I saw him play here in New York on his last tour, and it was one of the greatest rock shows I’ve ever seen. At least as far as white people go. Seriously.1 Lou Reed

A very strange singer who used to be called David Jones chirped in a deceptively charming voice, ‘‘You and I will rise up all the way. All because of what you are: The Prettiest Star.’’ Though he was referring to his token wife Angie, we all knew he also meant himself. Imagine, having to change your real name to a stage name, all because another singer who was already more famous than you, Davy Jones, might cause confusion as to who was who and which was which. The first adaptation by this superlative mutant performer perhaps? Meanwhile, the aging former Monkee is relegated to performing at Casino concerts with aging former Beach Boys, while the newly minted David Bowie managed to scale the heights of stardom and celebrity in the most audaciously camp manner since Josephine Baker. And, he managed to do it for 40 years! The legendary chameleon of pop music, whose talents also include acting in both film and theatre, is clearly one of the ideal examples of a master

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singer-songwriter of our time. This is especially true of his compelling range of diva-like personas devised to tell stories in song that are an immediate mirror of the very society that consumes them for comfort. But Bowie’s mirror is simply sprayed with irony; his songs tell of a society of the spectacle beyond belief, a society of subcultures and masquerades—a world just waiting for the arrival of David Bowie, an artist who seemed to fall to earth at just the right time. Bowie is one creative figure who has managed to completely merge his personal pathology with his professional mythology, including his obsessions with alchemy, magic and protofascist imagery, all channeled through his art and behavior via his extraordinarily elastic personality and unique physical presence. He is a cultured savage howling at humanity; we love to watch him recoil into his own utterly cool weirdness.

I first encountered the exotic sounds of David Bowie back in 1972 upon entering an expatriate bar in Ibiza, Spain. The entire small room was sitting enraptured, listening to his latest record, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It was as if the whole tavern had been lifted off the crowded hippy island’s rusty ground and had started to float away through space, a private spaceship traveling towards an unknown destination called David. Bowie is still traveling, some 36 years later, and we are still passengers on his strange and beautiful craft, although the speed of his trajectory has slowed somewhat slightly since his heart attack in 2004 (and which may prevent any further stage jumping in the future). Every so often I imagine that little expatriate bar, still floating off somewhere in a dimension where it is permanently 1972. Yet somehow, just as mysteriously as his mysterious music, Bowie turned 60 years old in 2007, an occasion which prompted the entertainment editor of one paper to claim for him, an ‘‘evergreen fresh’’ status, which differentiates him so dramatically from Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, or most other members of the four-decade-old rock club. Remember, these are the people who invented rock music, and incredibly enough, the art form is only slightly older than they are. In that same piece, the entertainment editor Ben Rayner pointed out, ‘‘Ancient and decrepit though it may seem, rock ’n’ roll is still staggering through its first generational iteration. There are no rules for how rock should age, because the original practitioners are still, in large part, writing the first set of precedents. Still, if we were to pick an ideal role model for aging tastefully in rock ’n’ roll, David Bowie’s career arc would seem the right way to go.’’2 It should be abundantly clear by now that rock music, the global force that emerged from rock ’n’ roll, is still a new musical form, just as contemporary post-bop jazz is a new lineage descended from the giant steps of Bird and Trane. We ourselves saw rock’s mutant birth in the mid-60s, and we ourselves

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will have to assess its rapid changes of context, form, and content, and, eventually, even its reception into the canon of American indigenous music, albeit on the dissonant side of the scale, next to jazz and blues. One blue is more than enough, thanks. What better role model for continuous creative evolution than the role player par excellence himself, Mr. Jones? He doesn’t just tell stories, he performs them like a mime, but a mime who also sings aloud, imagining a new language of Artaud-like gestures. Listening to Bowie was like being swept into a phenomenal new hybrid of multiple musical and theatrical formats which was both sudden and accidental: the sparklingly idiosyncratic worlds of Hunky Dory, The Man Who Sold the World, and Space Oddity. Bowie was already moving precariously forward, slouching towards stardom like some rough beast waiting to be born. By the time I saw him in Toronto in 1974, he had already morphed into the Aladdin Sane persona, and then abruptly left it behind to mesmerize us with his Diamond Dogs persona, the second and third of many masks slipped on and ripped off with such wild and reckless creative abandon that the only historical precedent might be the outrageous brilliance of Oscar Wilde. Bowie was our Oscar. And unlike Dylan, Bowie held his masks aloft so we could all see the dangling strings attached. Rayner is so right when he astutely observes that this exotic alien figure, from poetic old Brixton England, appears to be aging in a different temporal dimension than his ‘‘dinosaur’’ peers. Not just because the cat looks impossibly good for someone who spent the 70s on a transatlantic chemical rampage, or because he can lay claim to fathering a child at 53 with his supermodel wife Iman six years ago, but because his age feels eternally youthful.3

Like the ineffable Warhol, who dyed his hair silver and then donned a grey wig as a very young man in order to preempt entropy (thus remaining forever in the present tense), Bowie’s embrace of a bewildering range of surreal selves to mime his story, and to sell his songs, has allowed him to remain apparently timeless behind his magic wardrobe of sleekly designed and seductively delivered theatrical stage roles. Unlike Dylan, Wilson, or Mitchell, who all encountered audience resistance to their own growth as songwriters if it meant changing what was most cherished about their styles, Bowie managed the supreme feat of making artistic change one of the central tenets of his entire slippery enterprise. He sells change wholesale. One of his most famous songs, from 1971’s still fresh sounding Hunky Dory, summed it up perfectly by making ‘‘changes’’ the whole point of being a creative artist. Whenever reaching a goal, Bowie seems to find the reward unsatisfying. In the song ‘‘Changes’’ he stated, ‘‘So I turned my self to face me, but I’ve never caught a glimpse, of how the others must see the faker.’’

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Bowie’s audience, much to his good fortune, is one that assumes the same masks as he does in order to deliver his message, in order to watch the spectacle and fully participate. The fans want to be invited into totally new theatrical zones of behavior. Rayner, as a music critic, reflected their appetites and interests perfectly when he declared, ‘‘If an artist is challenging himself, he should also be challenging his audience. That, more than anything, is what keeps the man young I think.’’4 As to his astonishingly mutable appearance, with his eyes of different shades (not really different colors, his left eye was permanently dilated after an early fistfight), David Buckley commented in the liner notes to the 2002 reissue of Ziggy Stardust: ‘‘Bowie’s was an alien physiognomy, not literally so, but alien to the culture of mainstream celebrity to which pop fans were accustomed.’’ Alien to the mainstream indeed. Bowie had to single-handedly invent a new stream for himself, almost along the lines of that other drastic and dramatic outsider Captain Beefheart, who once announced, ‘‘If you want to be a different fish, you have to jump out of the school.’’ Bowie was able to jump right out of the pond itself, veering off into film, theatre, books, and the fashion world in general. Iman in particular. James Perone wrote a very useful book back in 2007 which maps the amazing trajectories of this chameleon-like figure, and in it he quotes Stephen Erlewine from The All Music Guide: ‘‘Even when he was out of fashion in the 80s and 90s, it was clear that Bowie was one of the most influential musicians in rock music, for better or worse.’’5 Perone ably charts the artist’s significance as a figure who generated more contentious critical response than any performer in the modern rock era. ‘‘Bowie raised serious issues about sexual orientation in rock music, regardless of whether his claimed homosexuality was genuine or part of his on-stage character. His regular use of theatrical personas also raises interesting issues concerning authenticity and the perception of authenticity in rock music.’’6

Indeed, such questions of authenticity are at the very heart of what makes rock music such a mirror-like vehicle for self-expression. Bowie is one of those rare artists for whom perpetual shape-shifting makes him authentic in the first place, as opposed to the more artificial approach of some who try desperately to maintain a fixed personality throughout their entire careers, rather than submitting to the natural change and evolutionary leaps that the most creative among us are prone to seek. Again, the best artists are always slaves to risk. Bowie has made both risk and change his middle names. But this book is about music, not distinguished by its ethnic or cultural origins but rather by the temperament of the emotions it explores, and by the personal pathology of the artists who manufacture it.

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Therefore we need to seek out the overlapping lines that trace the development of each artist within his or her own unique sensibility, and to map those coordinates in a manner that clarifies the entire public phenomenon of contemporary song and its place in our private lives. Our culture has contour lines, just like any other map. The French poet Jean Cocteau once remarked that the artist is a mirror. ‘‘When you look into an artist you are likely to find out more about yourself than you will about him or his art.’’ This is the exotic but nonetheless everyday idea that helps to explain why someone as outlandishly and apparently alien, such as Bowie, still manages to reveal our own characters when we look into his art by listening to his songs. What do Bowie’s songs tell us about ourselves? We make their meanings, constructing them out of our own interpretations of his often highly abstract lyrics, and we consciously decide, assuming they suit our sensibility, that even these obscure and often dank insights are still about us. Right from the beginning, on June 1, 1967, when his first album was released on the same day as was The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, and was instantly swamped in its titanic wake, it was obvious that David Bowie was different—and not just because of his appearance or personal and intimate sensibilities. The character that David Jones chose to play in the theatre of pop music, the constructed Bowie character, allowed him to pursue creative directions in music he would never have considered without acknowledging himself to be an actor portraying a pop star. Of course! Someone once said that Elvis seemed like an actor performing the role of a singer, an amazing singer, but a singer presented as the portrayal of such by a consummate actor, one who had studied the role so perfectly that he ended up being utterly convincing in his own performances. In that same spooky way, Bowie seems to somehow perpetually move away from himself and towards his cult of stage doppelgangers, each one used and discarded like a snakeskin. Each one a variation on an early theme of difference and of a mainstream in denial. Bowie was cruising our whole culture, cruising us, and we didn’t even know it.

One of his major accomplishments, apart from survival in a culture obsessed with youth, is the manner with which he met one of the great challenges facing all purveyors of rock ’n’ roll music—how to overcome the fact that it is designed for the ultra-youthful appetites for rebellion and debauchery. Bowie has triumphed through a stealthy and strategic use of his varied personas in order to deliver a raucous rock message, not just to the same audience he has always had, but to a surprisingly constant stream of young and younger fans. Since the prime directive of rock music is young love and

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rejection of the outmoded, Bowie found a way to seduce each successive generation of listeners by providing subtle and canny variations on this one central message. That central message is still about the cardinal core subject of his rock music: sex and liberation; however, it has been channeled brilliantly and changed provocatively by removing the central conceit from its canon: sex with whom? Bowie’s answer—which has kept his music vital for over 40 years—have it with anyone you want! He consistently sells the seductive message of carnal knowledge to successive youthful generations of hormone saturated consumers, while still succeeding in selling to his original and aging audience the memories of misspent youth beneath an elegant veneer of sneer. No one quite sneers like Bowie, not even Elvis. For Lou Reed, founder of the Velvet Underground and one of our darkest rock poets, Bowie’s contribution to rock ’n’ roll has been wit and sophistication. ‘‘There had been androgyny in rock from Little Richard on up, but he put his own patina on it, to say the least. He was very aware of stagecraft, and made an entire show out of a character, and then he left it behind. He’s always changing, so you never get tired of what he’s doing. How smart can you get?’’7 Smart enough to put your faith in your incredible acting abilities and manage to pull off a strange hybrid performance, half clown and half mime, in which each scene leads to a scene in another act where the same character returns in disguise. Again and again. Bowie man is simply brilliant at not being there. The clown and the mime never meet together on the stage, for they are allergic to each other. But both the clown and the mime do get to occasionally play inside of the rough beast, as a kind of consolation prize for cooperating all these years. Mojo Magazine celebrated his perpetual presence and absence amongst us for four decades by devoting one of its classic editions to him, or rather to them, to all those many Bowies, in January 2007. The first rock star to use his persona as a songwriting tool, the loudly bisexual Bowie professed to be an artisan, but through the Seventies made epoch defining, exuberant music as Aladdin Sane or Diamond Dog. Heroically killing off each new image as it stuck, he became the white soul boy for Young Americans, introverted iceman for the monumental Low trilogy, perfectly cast movie alien and consummate eighties disco rocker. He remains charmingly unpredictable, music’s most articulate survivor, always stretching the vocabulary. There’s new, there’s old, there’s Bowie.8

‘‘He’s chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature,’’ sang Bowie on his groundbreaking Hunky Dory, and he’s been all these and more in a flamboyant, intriguing career. Along the way, Bowie morphed from an early Anthony Newly whimsical clone on drugs to the undisputed inventor of glam-rock, one of the more

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exotic excursions taken by rock music after its first decade of raunchy innocence. In 1970, Bowie’s future wife Angie, and his producer Tony Visconti’s partner Liz Hartley, in response to his declaration that what he needed was some ‘‘hype,’’ whipped off four flamboyant costumes to allow the players to dissolve into their fantasy roles, kicking off what came to be known as ‘‘pantomime rock.’’ ‘‘I thought it would be really interesting,’’ Bowie explained with mock innocence, ‘‘if each of us adopted a persona of some kind. Because it was all jeans and long hair at that time. But we got booed all the way through the show. People absolutely loathed what we were doing. It was great!’’9 Bowie seems to have written one of his iconic tunes, ‘‘The Prettiest Star,’’ for his newlywed wife, but he could just as easily have written it about himself. Their liaison would last only a decade, weighed down by the bicoastal and bisexual lifestyle that fueled both of them. During the wild ride, however, Angie encouraged Bowie to adopt as many outrageous styles as possible, everything from wearing women’s dresses to the incredible I Love Lucy mullet hairstyle of his alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust. ‘‘A drag-queen cult formed behind me. I said, fine.’’ That was how Bowie summed up the public’s reaction to his rapidly mutating performance art style, a style which often collided with how perfectly crafted his songs were at heart, while also concealing a little of the extreme darkness at their core with characteristic whimsy and wit.

For me, his two best albums still remain The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory, both from 1971. They are the secret locations where he buried many of his treasured meanings, content to which he would return for years to come. It was on Hunky Dory that he actually billed himself as ‘‘the actor’’— in an open admission that his approach to singing songs was the emotional equivalent to throwing his voice the same way a ventriloquist does, except we imagine we are seeing a ‘‘character’’ perform the songs. Was Bowie the first rock star to use his personas as a songwriting tool? Well, Dylan told his stories in a variety of masked voices, but the only persona that Robert Zimmerman ever created, and for whom he continued to write for, was the persona of Dylan. Brian Wilson told us his dreams, but always in a heartbreakingly singular form of authenticity, or as what a raw human might look like with absolutely no persona at all, for all to see and hear. Joni Mitchell developed a confessional approach that eschews the assumption of any persona other than the independent artist who is painting a picture we can listen to. So it seems true that Bowie alone slithered into and peeled out of a cast of characters designed to be perceived as much a contemporary art

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performance installation as any pop entertainment spectacle. Each new psychic skin gave him the raw material for a new reiteration of his basic, even primal, themes. David Bowie seems to be a perfect personification of a thought attributed to Ralph Bunche: ‘‘If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up as a person.’’ Bowie has wrapped himself up several times, a puzzle within an enigma, within a mystery. Martin Aston has written about the gothic splendor of Bowie’s lifestyle at this stage: Fired up on potent hash oil, Bowie’s hunger for spiritual knowledge began to ferment. Buddhism and Bob Dylan gave way to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his notions of the ubermensch, the superman. The initial result of this fevered imagination was the intellectually and musically heavy Man Who Sold the World, a monstrous netherworld of sex, space, violence and insanity. It embraced black magic, S and M, and a male sexual encounter with a frightening deity that could be God or Satan. The song ‘‘After All’’ included the Crowley line ‘‘do what you will’’ and in ‘‘The Supermen’’ Bowie imagined (by way of Lovecraft) a race of advanced mortals who’d once ruled the earth but were later sent into exile. The Nazi’s occult wing also believed this was the case.10

Bowie continued to stretch the limits of his audience’s ears and minds on Hunky Dory, inviting fans to follow his wanderlust in search for the meaning of the search. On a near descent into a staggering cocaine addiction that almost consumed his core, he still managed to send messages from his damp skull out into the pop culture at large, this time disguised as the role he assumed after his breakthrough as Ziggy Stardust. He became The Thin White Duke. He would barely survive being The Thin White Duke, due to the Duke’s fondness for those long, thin white lines.

By now it will have become clear that in this particular study we are borrowing a fancy term from the academic-scientific world, comparative morphology, in order to contrast the varying branches on the singersongwriting tree. Basically this means the comparison of the structure of organisms, or songs, or their composers, in a way that draws surface similarities out and clarifies deep differences beneath. Not only can we compare, therefore, the structure of a songwriter like Dylan to Wilson, and Mitchell to Bowie, we can also contrast the evolving structures and emotional temperaments within each artist’s individual career. Bowie is by far the performer with the most varied and outrageous career shifts and stylistic evolutionary leaps across his 40-year reign. Yet his output remains surprisingly consistent, both in theme and content, with many of his newest songs having the same degree of intensity and urgency and

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remaining as fresh as his earliest work. At the same time, he was always celebrating entropy in the extreme. The reason this kind of exotic application of comparative morphology works so well, even though it is more routinely applied to biological and botanical organisms, is that all the artists discussed here seem to have emerged from the same historical and cultural moment, the 1960s. They all share a certain sensibility, partly through their common absorption of varied drugs as inspirational tools and partly through the social and political shifts in which they all participated. They can therefore be compared as easily as roses and orchids, as long as we keep track of their core relationships to the popular culture we all inhabit. In the case of a remarkable, and a remarkably alien, talent such as Bowie, we can trace the trajectory of his personal evolution as an artist by gauging the emotions in his songs. Songs which, no matter how strange they might appear on the surface, have the identical degree of merger between autobiographical and social energies as the songs of his songwriting peers who also allow us to use them as our mirror. The self-portraits Bowie paints for us, however, have a peculiar charm and subterranean weirdness that keeps them constantly fresh long after his nervous shadow has left the public stage. His songs continue to mesmerize us partly because he continues to concoct new roles with which to deliver them. Perhaps he was aided in this theatrical versatility at a very young age when he studied with the famed experimental mime, Lindsay Kemp, who showed him the proper way to wear a mask, whether it was visible or not. ‘‘I taught David in expressionistic and exotic theatre, especially Kabuki. I taught him how to perform, how to project, how to enchant, and how to hypnotize the public when you step on stage.’’11 Bowie learned his early lessons well, donning a succession of captivating personas in order to elude the chief nemesis of all pop stars, time itself. From Space Oddity, a marvelous memorial to the period from 1969, which capitalized on the Stanley Kubrick film of the same year, to The Man Who Sold the World, modifying the title of a Robert Heinlein science fiction story, to Hunky Dory, his coming-out record, and to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, his breakthrough record, Bowie was The Alien. From Aladdin Sane, wearing its debauchery like a badge of honor, to Diamond Dogs, Young Americans, and Station to Station, he charted pure Orwellian dread, harshly observing the meltdown of the very social system he was engaging in melting down—he was The Decadent, warning us of his own arrival. But Bowie finally came into his own during what Mojo Magazine once called his art decade, creating three masterpieces with Brian Eno as producer/collaborator in Berlin. The sparkling creation of The Low Trilogy, for which he will always be best remembered, or should be, consisted of Low from 1976, and then Heroes and The Lodger. Eno rescued Bowie from himself, from his addictions, from his excesses, and from the potential bankruptcy of his musical ideas.

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Since then Bowie has pulled back from the brink, made shining dance music from hell, and somehow survived long enough to marry a supermodel and father some kids, a shocking turnaround for the ultimate role player. Or perhaps, just another role. The song ‘‘Time’’ from Aladdin Sane, has always struck me as being the quintessential way into the wicked world of David Bowie. Time is characterized here as a passive, implacable, and at times even crazy witness. In order to escape from our strange bondage we may find some temporary solace, in drugs, in people, in sleep, but in that solace we’re not actually conquering time. The escape isn’t even real, because the bondage is also, in a way, imaginary. Thus Bowie moves on to dreams. Throughout the artist’s own dreams, his love remained ‘‘kind.’’ But love also does something strange. ‘‘Love has left you dreamless,’’ he asserts. And although he can imagine smiles in ‘‘this darkness,’’ he concludes, ‘‘All I have to give is guilt for dreaming.’’ All Bowie has to give us is guilt for dreaming. Well, that’s the way in; finding your way out is up to you.

5 The Risk Taker: Marianne Faithfull Falling from Grace

Never feel secure with the woman you love, for there are more dangers in a woman’s nature than you imagine.1 Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

If there is a sadder singer-songwriter on earth, I’m not sure who it might be. Marianne Faithfull is sadder than Neil Young, sadder than Leonard Cohen, sadder than sad. She even exceeds the sorrow and bleakness quotient of one of the great lamenters of all time, Nico, the chanteuse of pain who originally performed with the Velvet Underground but who left them because they were probably too happy for her. Marianne Faithfull is the dark side of Joni Mitchell. While it’s true that Mitchell had her own dark side, Faithfull is the dark side of Joni’s dark side. She is an exile who lived in a dream world for so long that her reports from its frontier took on the documentary status of legend. She is an empath with a remarkable ability for turning survival into a religion. John Cage once remarked that, rather than being a musician and making music, what he was actually interested in was measuring sounds—phonometry, he called it. In the same way, Faithfull is most concerned with measuring the weight of certain emotions in her songs. Perhaps we could call it

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empathometry: the ability to calculate the exchange value between emotions and ideas, between suffering and salvation. Naturally, all artists, perhaps especially singer-songwriters, would admit to being slaves to risk. They accept creative and often even personal risk as one of the prices they pay to do the job at hand. But in Faithfull we have the ideal example of something truly scary, a person who will take the ultimate risks for everyone, on our behalf, and go to the very end of where that risk takes her. Well, almost to the end. Once one knows a little of her genealogy, perhaps the embrace of risk— both artistic and existential—in Faithfull’s work and life becomes a little more clear. Her mother Eva was the Baroness Erisso, hailing from a long line of Austro-Hungarian aristocrats, the Von Sacher-Masochs. If the name rings a bell, it’s probably because of one particularly famous, or infamous, member of the clan. Her great uncle was Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, whose novel Venus in Furs (1870), gave rise to the familiar term masochism. What a lovely and inspiring family legacy! Her immediate roots are no less dramatic. Her mother had been raped by occupying Russian soldiers, becume pregnant, and had an abortion, then met Major Glynn Faithfull, a British spy working behind allied lines. In a clear bid to escape her situation, Eva married the Major and fled from her distressed background. They split up fairly quickly, but not until establishing an eccentric household that would forever mark their daughter Marianne with the radical urges that eventually guided her own lifestyle choices. And what choices she made, almost as if driven by a kind of family karma that all but guaranteed her leap into the abyss that followed. It took almost 30 years to get the Glimmer Twins of The Rolling Stones to admit that it was Faithfull who wrote their iconic little ode ‘‘Sister Morphine,’’ which rose to fame on The Stones’ 1971 album Sticky Fingers, with their names, Jagger and Richards, listed as the composers, not Faithfull’s. Even though Faithfull released her own version of the song in 1968, it went nowhere largely because the public who had swooned to the lithe blonde singing ‘‘As Tears Go By’’ refused to sanction that same little angel’s descent into the darkness of drug addiction—something that was far more acceptable in the macho boys’ club of rock music. Her version is the more harrowing one. The ‘‘scream of the ambulance’’ was coming for her, personally. But she would exact some creative redemption when she finally released her very own masterpiece in 1979, Broken English, a record that clearly revealed her own prowess for powerful poetry and the dance of decadent doom. Her version of Lennon’s ‘‘Working Class Hero’’ alone is worth the price of admission, with that strange other worldly combination of a purring growl and a cracking cackle that made her ravaged voice so distinctive. By the time she penned Broken English, the times were far more favorable for her particular pathology as it played out in gritty, hard-edged songs that could never be confused with the soft pop of her swinging London origins. Even though ‘‘As Tears Go By,’’ performed when she was 17, was a bleak

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and monotone lament, it didn’t approximate the descent into darkness represented by her comeback record, which placed her in the forefront of serious singer-songwriters, and so far away from her beginnings as a gentle pop tart. For a while though, Faithfull was our counterculture Lolita, trying out each of The Stones in turn before eventually settling on Jagger.

By the late 70s, punk music was creating an angry answer to pop’s and rock’s massive commercialism, and it was this chilly climate upon which Faithfull was able to capitalize for her return to the spotlight after a decade of heroin addiction—from which she only barely survived. Faithfull was definitely the original material girl—there would likely be no Madonna if not for her—and there is simply no useful comparison between Faithfull’s strong plunge into feminist rock and the 80s dance queen’s solipsistic provocations. But back in 1968 when the original version of Faithfull’s ‘‘Sister Morphine’’ was written and it tumbled onto an unsuspecting audience, one perhaps more used to expecting more ‘‘blondeness’’ in her music (of the what the world needs now variety), the radio waves recoiled from her message of selfdestruction and oblivion. Though a few years later, when the song was sung by Jagger, audiences lapped it up. Why those reactions were not surprising is in the lyrics: ‘‘Sister Morphine, you better make up my bed, cause you know and I know in the morning I’ll be dead.’’ Faithfull wasn’t, of course, and the real shocker is that she had yet to fully taste the oblivion she craved when she wrote that song. Once or twice was all she tried the drug, testing it out for size. It was far more a romantic evocation of the condition from the outside, poetically projected through the rock environment that she inhabited with her main consorts, The Rolling Stones. I was delighted to discover the following quote from her autobiography, Faithfull, written with David Dalton, which seems to secure her position among the boys’ rock club and also solidify her membership in the wider union of sufferers. ‘‘Sister Morphine’’ was released in England in February 1969. It was out for a mere two days when Decca freaked out and unceremoniously yanked it off the shelves. There was no explanation, no apology. When it came out on Sticky Fingers two years later however, there wasn’t a peep about it, so perhaps it was the timing. I wasn’t being allowed to break out of my ridiculous image. I was being told that I would not be permitted to leave that wretched, tawdry doll behind. If I went on doing my nice little folksy songs, I could go on making records.2

Furthermore, and most importantly for our purposes here, Faithfull writes a descriptive phrase that was alarmingly synchronistic and one which I had not encountered before starting this book, ‘‘ ‘Sister Morphine’ was my

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Frankenstein, my self-portrait in a dark mirror. But unlike Mary’s, my creation wasn’t going to be allowed to see the light of day. Mine was a very pop Frankenstein, just a song, but in my mind I had painted a miniature gothic masterpiece, my celebration of death!’’3 She would exact a profound revenge, of course, with the ascent of her comeback in 1979. Broken English was her full-on twisted testament, and it revealed her to be a remarkable singer-songwriter with the potential to plunge just as deeply as could the rock boys’ club into the darkness and denial of the dank drug dream. Perhaps there was something after all in her constitutional makeup, something almost genetic and hereditary, stemming from both her strange childhood with extremely strange parents in a dysfunctional home, and the notso-distant echo of her mother’s great uncle, the man for whom masochism is officially named. For what else was her self-abnegation and near obliteration at the hands of the poppy but an extended and hopeless attempt to engage in a kind of transcendental masochistic philosophy, one from which she is lucky to have emerged at all?

So it is that Marianne Faithfull unwittingly provides the ideal template for all of the artists under consideration here, for she, like they all do, creates a self-portrait in a dark mirror. But when we gaze into it by listening to her words (and all of their works), we somehow manage to see ourselves reflected there. We seem to see our entire society pictured in the shadowy visions of these talented but troubled troubadours. It now seems entirely possible, given the presence of Sacher-Masoch blood in her blonde veins, that Faithfull’s background made her emotionally predisposed to submit to perhaps the greatest and most dangerous of sadists, King Heroin. Naturally enough, His Satantic Majesty also had close ties with quite a few of Marianne’s peers in this edgy profession. But in Broken English she wasn’t just exploring the scary side of her own pathology, a prerequisite for all dark mirrors everywhere; she also was personifying the dysfunctions of the late capitalist and postindustrial society. And in that husky (it’s too frightening a voice to call sultry after all) Marlene Dietrich growl of hers, Faithfull enunciates the questions we all want asked, even if answers will never be forthcoming: ‘‘Could have come through anytime, cold lonely puritan, what are you fighting for?’’ This leads us to the all-important question of that voice. That voice which at first seems it couldn’t possibly belong to a singer-songwriter who wants us to listen, and yet it has a seductive power that makes it impossible not to listen. This uncommonly odd singing style is something Faithfull shares with all of her peers under study here: each has a unique style we would never expect to succeed and yet one that transcends all of our conventional expectations. These voices simply force us to listen with different ears.

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Only Marianne’s is the kind of voice that could adequately deliver such incisive lyrics as those found in the harrowing songs on Broken English. Only a voice like hers would be chosen by thoughts like hers in order to be brought up into the light. In ‘‘Guilt,’’ for instance, she feels guilt, she sings, though she simultaneously proclaims her own innocence. She hasn’t lied to her lover, she hasn’t committed murder, but she feels a powerful guilt. ‘‘I’m like a curious child,’’ she sings, and concludes with her complicating request, ‘‘give me more, more, more, more, more, more, more.’’ After all, are you really sure you’ve done no wrong? In ‘‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,’’ an agonizing lament about a sheltered life that suddenly swings into fantasy overdrive, Lucy wakes up one morning in her whitewashed home and town, and dreams there of fantastic lovers: ‘‘till the world turned to orange and the room went spinning round.’’ At 37 she realized her cosmopolitan dreams were false hopes, and so instead she finds her solace in an idealized past and a fantastical (and false) future. In the meantime, the phone rings away, hinting at reality, but not so forcefully that she can’t dream on. In ‘‘Why D’ya Do It?’’—one of the most vitriolic responses to betrayal that I think anyone has ever had the nerve to commit to record (where it is memorialized forevermore)—she concludes with the appropriately memorable ‘‘ain’t nothing to laugh, you just tore our kisses right in half.’’ But she saved her most harrowing vocal performance for one of the most astonishing interpretations of another songwriter’s words ever delivered— in Lennon’s ‘‘Working Class Hero.’’ When the once wispy Faithfull begins to declaim in one of Lennon’s most biting self-vivisections ‘‘as soon as you’re born they make you feel small,’’ she manages to convey the blood in the words even more than the words themselves. We feel that she too is a working class hero, when in reality she was really quite favored by the gods—the gods of the counterculture and underworld. She was, after all, descended from aristocracy, even though it was the Aristocracy of Pain. But it was so compassionate of her to let us share all that pain with her, and as an empath, to make us feel the same pain ourselves in our own lives, somewhere, sometime. The guitar that accompanies those words is equally unnerving, a slow bass pulse simulating the doomed dance of the working class ascent. Marianne Faithfull was the only other artist capable of fully capturing and conveying Lennon’s tortured insights. And she did so on a record that was every bit as tortured and stripped down as Lennon’s own radical departure from being typecast, 1970’s Plastic Ono Band, his first truly solo record (without either The Beatles or Ono in collaboration), and the one with perhaps his most terrifyingly primal indictments of his former life.

From the very beginning, Faithfull’s roots in the cultural avant-garde of her time were well established. Her first lover was John Dunbar, a near mythical

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figure in London who ran the Indica Gallery co-owned by Barry Miles, where John Lennon first met Yoko Ono at one of her conceptual art shows. With money from Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon fame, and also crucial financial support from a young Paul McCartney, the gallery began to form the locus of a scene. This was 1963, after all, and London had not yet begun to swing. Faithfull and the others were among the new tribal forces of youth that started the pendulum moving. As she herself once put it, ‘‘The threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together.’’ Who knew then that the big stew of a scene would eventually turn global in its scope, liberating whoever wanted to be liberated, whether they were young or old. ‘‘We said, right this is our mission. Free love, psychedelic drugs, fashion, Zen, Nietzsche, tribal trinkets, customized existentialism, hedonism and rock ’n’ roll. And lo and behold, before long there was a definite buzz going on.’’4 Faithfull’s own words are the best way to the center of what that buzz was all about. Hers is the best commentary on the sultry blonde myth that surrounded her, especially because she herself knows precisely how much of it all was myth. According to Pop Mythology my life proper began at Adrienne Posta’s launching party in March 1964, for it was there that I first met Mick Jagger. Mick fell in love with me on the spot (or so the story goes), decided I was fit to be his consort, and wrote ‘‘As Tears Go By.’’ I, on the other hand, immediately began shooting heroin and having a lot of sex.5

In reality, of course, even though there was precious little of it to speak of, Faithfull’s persona was the construction of The Stones hyper-kinetic manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who saw in her the ideal female reflection of the times. Oddly enough, I recently watched a concert performance of one of the current queens of rough pop, Avril Lavigne, and was stunned to see that the persona is still in full flight 40 years later, right down to the incredibly straight blonde hair and monotone singing style. ‘‘I was never that crazy about ‘As Tears Go By,’ ’’ Faithfull wrote. ‘‘God knows how Mick and Keith wrote it or where it came from. The image that comes to mind for me is the Lady of Shalott, looking into the mirror and watching life go by. It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written, a song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life.’’6 It was even more astonishing for a girl of 17 to be chosen to sing the dark little ode. By the time she was fully in the grip of her heroin addiction, which was almost immediately thereafter, the resonance of the song would be far more ironic. Only Marianne Faithfull could have performed the song on stage a few years later with David Bowie (in 1973). She was wearing a catholic nun’s outfit (get it, she had a habit?). By then, the tears really were going by, and going dry.

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Yet the song so associated with her was not by her—that would come later, in lyrics that were more searing and sodden than anything even The Glimmer Twins could cook up. Faithfull stated, ‘‘As Tears Go By’’ was a marketable portrait of me, and as such is an ingenious creation, a commercial fantasy that pushes all the right buttons. It did such a good job of imprinting that it was to become, alas, an indelible part of my media-conjured self for the next fifteen years. I re-recorded it at the age of forty, and at that moment I was exactly the right age and in the right frame of mind to sing it. It was then that I truly experienced the lyrical melancholy of the song for the first time.7

Soon she would be plumbing the depths of her own pathology in order to project songs with such intense melancholy that they made ‘‘As Tears Go By’’ seem like a Disney jingle. And all this despite the fact that she hated performing and had a serious dread of personal exposure: ‘‘The nightly ordeal. Getting on stage in front of hundreds of hostile teenagers who had not come to see me but Freddy and The Dreamers or The Merseybeats. I was absolutely petrified. Still am. But I soon learned to make paralysis part of my performance.’’8 Indeed, that is one of the strange features we loved so much about her, the fact that she was different with a capital D. She remembered: The dolly girls all jiggled and jumped up and down and shook their moneymakers, doing little go-go steps in their thigh length white boots. I didn’t want to compete with that, so I decided to go as far as I could in the other direction. I simply stood in front of the microphone, very still, my hands dangling by my side and sang from some place deep inside me, and out came this clear, ethereal voice. It wasn’t the least sexy or hip. It was about as far as you could get from sexy.9

Oh, but it was sexy, precisely because she wasn’t trying. It was unbearable, in fact, and she soon developed a style that the dolly girls could never hope to compete with. ‘‘I’m still as scared now as I was in 1964. That hasn’t changed at all. The fear is exactly the same. I would have thought that after thirty years of this fucking game you’d get over it. But you don’t.’’10 This sort of bravery in the face of paralyzing fear is exactly what makes her one of the best emblems for the enigma we are exploring here. She was trying hard not to sink into the abyss that was spread before her like a banquet, a beggars banquet, it should be specified, but her own appetite for oblivion, shared by so many other dark mirrors, doomed her from the start. I vowed to myself that I was going to be good. Marry John, have my baby, stop going from man to man. I desperately wanted to escape this random

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life. But whatever arranges human destiny apparently cared little for my plans, because on April 26, 1965, God Himself checked into the Savoy Hotel. Bob Dylan came to town wearing Phil Spector shades and an aureole of hair and seething irony. Dylan was, at that moment in time, nothing less than the hippest person on earth. I wasn’t simply a fan, I worshipped him. I was aware that the tribute traditionally laid at the feet of pop stars by their female fans was sex. I was incredibly ambivalent. I never saw Dylan’s malicious side, nor the lethal wit that has often been ascribed to him. I never thought of him as amusingly cruel the way I thought of John Lennon. Dylan was simply the mercurial, bemused centre of the storm, vulnerable and almost waiflike. Within a matter of days, I had been elevated to Chief Prospective Consort. I was the chosen one, the sacrificial virgin.11

Once you start at the top, where else is there to go but down? In Faithfull’s case, down into the arms of the ultimate lover, albeit a pharmaceutical one, into the quivering arms of both cocaine and heroin, both cruel and unforgiving lovers who would erase the next decade of her life, and almost erase her life itself. Her fall from grace appeared to be sudden but was actually a long time in coming, since she herself has admitted that she consciously chose a direct route to oblivion. In ‘‘Falling From Grace,’’ a song on the album she made after a decade of hard living beyond what the average imagination can summon, A Child’s Adventure, she enunciates her karma from the vantage of 1983, long, long after the 60s dream had soured: ‘‘Feeling haunted, I’m lying low.. . .Put yourself in my place.’’ Put ourselves in her place? Well, we’ll try. In Dangerous Acquaintances (1981), perhaps the most aptly titled record imaginable for her, she was also asking her perennial question, this time titled ‘‘Truth Bitter Truth’’: ‘‘Where did it go, my youth?’’ Naturally, her youth slipped way into the same place all of ours did, down the drain of time; but she, unlike the rest of us, sped up the process through her own lifestyle choices. One of those choices included her telling all of us her own bitter truth. Still one of her best recordings, A Child’s Adventure pursued a personal demon that somehow manages to indict all of our shared cultural compulsions from the magic time she represents for all of us. She readily admits to being the icon for our urges, though she simultaneously laments ever having been caught up in the glare of those cultural headlights. In ‘‘Blue Millionaire’’ from the same record, she seems to project her own raw and wounded persona into the dazed materialism of the 80s, perhaps amazed that she’s still alive to do her job. She’s unable to present a happy face to the world because, in her words, ‘‘I am lost in the body, the passion of time.’’

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Like the true dark mirror she is, Faithfull is almost wistful about what we all watched her go through. ‘‘There are a lot of things I could have done at the age of nineteen that would have been more healthy than becoming Mick Jagger’s inamorata,’’ she lamented. ‘‘In the end, it doesn’t matter that hearts got broken and we sweated blood. Maybe the most you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.’’12 A few good songs, stretched out over some 60 albums and hundreds of searing songs, from the pen of a songwriter who will remain important before, during, and after Madonna’s illusory reign.

Faithfull is insistently incisive about how it felt growing up under our gaze. The Baroness’s Daughter, Pop Star Angel, Rock Star’s Girlfriend . . .even after the brutal bashing I’d given them, these demon dolls of myself would not go away. You couldn’t just shed them by cutting off your hair or getting fat. Even getting arrested or becoming a junkie on the street didn’t do it. Those things didn’t change the image, they just modified it. I was now the tarnished Pop Star Angel.. . .By the mid-seventies I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that if I were ever to obliterate my past, I’d have to create my own Frankenstein, and then become the creature as well.13

And that’s exactly what she did. She consciously descended down deeper into the darkest part of her own darkness on a sad search for the tiny light hidden there. The light that only certain singer-songwriters even know about, much less care to search for. ‘‘A Sixties icon sheds her past’’ was the way the editors of Mojo Magazine characterized her triumphant travails. Her 1979 release of Broken English, still her strongest with the possible exception of The Seven Deadly Sins, in which she interpreted Kurt Weill, was not so much a comeback as a breakthrough. She never returned from anywhere, as evidenced by her relatively recent performance in William Burroughs’s theatre piece The Black Rider with Tom Waits and Robert Wilson, since she is always a permanent risk taker, a legitimate part of the legitimate avant-garde. She didn’t come back; she just continually broke through to her next incarnation. ‘‘After cramming enough living into the 60s to last any normal lifetime, Marianne Faithfull effectively retired for the first half of the 70s—though it’s probably more accurate to say that her drug habit retired her,’’ the editors of Mojo Magazine reported. ‘‘‘The public’s preconceived image of me has always been a thorny problem,’ she says.. . .Marianne had been to hell and back, and knew the value of life. Broken English has the songs to prove it.’’14 For the details on her journey to and from the inferno, I highly recommend reading her autobiography, Faithfull. In it she reports how it feels to no longer be what the late great Warren Zevon once called a travel agent for death.

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I was as zealous as a convert to a new religion, poring over the old Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book as lovingly as any monk. One of my favourite passages is Step Two, which is about the savages. That’s very much what being an addict and an alcoholic is all about. You go back to a completely savage state. But once out of that feral stage one is not, alas, automatically cast into a state of grace: just being clean does not transform everything. Indeed, it is precisely the ‘‘everything’’ of life that is pretty much the same.15

She also describes telling old friends about how ecstatic it was to be clean, characterizing what had happened to her as incredible. But many seemed to miss the old Marianne, a reaction she says was fairly typical of the rock contingent. ‘‘They liked me better on heroin. I was much more subdued and manageable. It’s very common with rock stars. They surround themselves with beautiful and often brilliant women whom they also find extremely threatening. One way out is for the women to get into drugs. That makes them compliant and easier to deal with.’’16 When she called Keith Richards, the imperial leader of a rock clan who probably introduced her to the poppy in the first place and with whom she remains close friends, and told him her good news—how she’d stopped drinking and doing drugs—he was, she reports, sympathetic but a little worried. ‘‘He paused for a beat and then said: Ahh Marianne! But what about the Holy Grail?’’ Her answer remains unrecorded.

Like so many other creative artists and performers who survived the summer of hope, which last year celebrated its 40th anniversary, and which I believe should be more accurately referred to as the summer of dreams, Faithfull turned a fulsome 60 years of age. As if fate decided it wasn’t enough to have survived being Marianne Faithfull, harridan destiny gave her breast cancer in 2007, which she survived just like everything else thrown at her. True, it did interrupt her world concert tour, but once she was six months clear and free of the consequences, she simply jumped back on board the old rock star express, completing the tour like the weathered professional she is. In a tribute for her birthday year, music columnist Alexandra Gill lauded her as a ‘‘one-time junkie aristocrat who has spent a lifetime mythologizing the glamour of pain’’ and said that even ‘‘cancer didn’t stop her Blondeness.’’ Faithfull would be the first to concur with every word. That’s how brave she has always been. Gill writes, ‘‘Faithfull, who now lives a relatively quiet existence between homes in Dublin and Paris with Franc¸ois Ravard, her manager and lover of more than 13 years, admits that she was very lucky. In her alternate career as an actress, Faithfull recently starred in the Sam Garbarskidirected film, Irina Palm.’’17

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Having lived the life she has, it must sometimes be difficult remembering whether something actually happened, or whether it was a role she played in a film or one of her many remarkable stage appearances. But the most powerful role she has ever undertaken was the one of the smoldering train wreck who became a global pop star before even growing up, and then descended into the depths of a near hereditary self-punishment. Her most powerful role, then, is still that of Marianne. She’s the role model for every on-the-edge female singer-songwriter who has come along since Faithfull’s arrival on the scene 40 years ago. Dear Miss Winehouse, please take note. ‘‘In my music performance, I’m always trying to get closer to what I’m really like. Whereas with acting, I’m really interested in roles that are completely different to what I’m like,’’ Faithfull told Gill.18 Or, could it be that she has always been acting the role of singer-songwriter, in the same way Dylan, Wilson, Bowie, and Mitchell have been acting? If that were true, she, like them, would be a sparkling example of one of the darkest of the dark mirrors I have ever had the pleasure of gazing into. The more she conceals, the more she reveals, until there is nothing but a glimmering golden glow that somehow suffuses and relieves some of the pain. Not all of it, of course, but enough to make it all worthwhile.

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6 The Rabble Rouser: Tom Waits Angel-Headed Hipster

For me it’s also a craft. It’s not something that drops out of the sky. It’s not something where you sit at your picture window and watch the sun glistening off the trees and a deer walks by and whispers in your ear. It’s really a craft, and it’s hard work. It’s just a lot of discipline, and hopefully, you get better with each project.1 Tom Waits

Way back in 1955, when poet Allen Ginsberg chanted in Howl, ‘‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,’’ he could easily have been describing Tom Waits and his own literary mission. Or at least the outlaw Waits has so often and so well portrayed. Well, thank goodness some singer-songwriters have a sense of humor, and after all, why shouldn’t humor be allowed in music? Here’s a joke that Tom Waits told a journalist a few years ago: Two men are sitting on a bench in Central Park, talking about their retirement. ‘‘I got this new hobby,’’ says one. ‘‘I took up beekeeping.’’ ‘‘That’s nice,’’ says the other one.

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‘‘Yeah, I got 2000 bees in my apartment.’’ ‘‘Two thousand, huh? Where you keep ’em?’’ ‘‘Keep ’em in a shoebox.’’ ‘‘A shoebox? Isn’t that a little uncomfortable?’’ ‘‘Ah, fuck’em!’’

Oh yes, a joke, but since it’s a postmodern joke, it might at first be difficult to discern the punch line. It perfectly sums up Tom Waits’s role in our society and culture. The punch line is there, of course, it’s inevitable, and once you listen to enough of his music, it will become crystal clear to you. Perhaps even a little too clear. If Tom Waits hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. In the swift decade that followed the 60s countercultural revolution, which was proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to be mostly a mass hallucination perpetrated almost exclusively by The Beatles, the music world demanded an antidote to the soured dream. In 1977, even though it seemed like a thousand years after flower power, punk music seemed to provide some of the outlet for the anger that resulted from a dream deferred, and it definitely rejuvenated a bloated industry that had too hotly embraced the polish of late stage Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles. But the true antidote’s real name was Tom Waits. An example of the fact that our culture had given Waits license, around 1980, to plunge ever further into a soundscape of frenzied abstraction was his remarkable interview exchange with a journalist named Ian Hislop. During a show called Loose Talk, which ironically could have been the title for a Waits song or album, the interviewer innocently asked Waits if he could ‘‘speak up a little.’’ Waits’s reply was, ‘‘I’ll speak any damn way I please!’’ And indeed he did. He still does. He also wrote and sang songs any damn way he pleased. Eventually a book would be released by the songwriter himself, called Beautiful Maladies, which contained a multitude of lyrics for those searching for the meaning in his mumblings. One description of the volume, presented as the poetry it actually was, called it the ideal companion for the many listeners who had been leaning forward and straining to hear the words hidden inside his strange dark crooning. Crooning? That’s a first. Yes, in a way it was crooning, but it was also comparable to Bing Crosby on acid, after the twentieth century had eaten away at his wholesome soul, and after his voice had been destroyed by some unknown alien-occupying force. Waits croons even though he can’t, just like Mitchell carries a torch, even though she shouldn’t.

In ancient times, the rabble rouser was a figure who got the masses, the so-called citizens, riled up with a revolutionary fervor against the reigning

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monarchs. Today, however, the epithet applies to anyone who subscribes to radical or raunchy behavior designed to get the party going and to anyone who offers drastic alternatives to decorum in general, politeness in particular. In other words, one who rouses those few remaining atavistic urges in people until they boil over and alter their behaviors. Tom Waits is one of those iconic ‘‘postmodern’’ singer-songwriter figures who would not exist without the radical breakthroughs of certain predecessors such as Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart), beat poet Charles Bukowski, or the beat writers in general, such as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, or Allen Ginsberg. And yet Waits is nonetheless an authentic creative voice, both poetically and literally, and one who broke new ground for the format of personal confession–aggression and the celebration of pure decadence in song. Of course, things are relative and one person’s decadence is another person’s breakfast, but Waits has made a career out of singing the songs of his own professed tawdry lifestyle. It’s not a wholesome career, or a particularly wholesome lifestyle, but it is certainly a wholly unified and consistent one. Tom Waits is a genius. Let that be made clear at the outset. So if I say that he was discovered at the aptly but ironically named Troubadour Club’s amateur night, muttering to himself and pretending it was singing, I hope what follows will be taken in the spirit in which it is offered. Tom Waits is a genius; he is our Arthur Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century savant-like poet for whom a radical disordering of the senses was the road to both artistic and humanist freedom, and he is the closest thing we have to the tradition of a self-immolating genius such as the West Coast poet Gregory Corso, who rose to blinding but brief notoriety within the hallowed ranks of The Beats literary movement, with invigorating gems such as ‘‘The Happy Birthday of Death.’’ Waits is a crazy tossed salad of everything most sordid and brilliant about modern American culture. For him, the meaning of words is in the sound of words, and in the most exemplary of surrealist sensibilities, he seems to have taken quite literally Bob Dylan’s off-the-cuff explanation that ‘‘if two words sound the same then they mean the same.’’ Strangely enough, Waits doesn’t seem to scare people quite as much as one would expect. Except, of course, for those people whom he really does scare, but they are not quite involved in this conversation anyway. The artist who he most seems to channel, or even to enact a karaoke-like and career-long tribute performance to, is the mad musical painter Don Van Vliet, who didn’t so much as perform but incarnated himself through the shamanistic guise of Captain Beefheart, performance artist. But it was John Lennon, the tortured titan behind half of the greatest songwriting team in pop music history, who gave permission for all wounded souls to give voice to their inner demons and desires, in a vocal style so raw that no one, not even he, could have imagined that such a raspy and desperate sound could ever hope or dream to convey such powerful human emotions. Permission taken and trumped.

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The Waits Avatar, Beefheart was the creator of Trout Mask Replica, perhaps the strangest record ever made, and one made possible only through the intercession of Frank Zappa. It was Zappa’s manager Herb Cohen who stumbled upon Tom Waits in the troubled Troubadour one night and must have been frozen in his tracks. Here was a sound that flung a rusty tray of dirty dishwater into the face of the love-song-loving public. Almost overnight, Waits became infamous as one of Los Angeles’s most idiosyncratic and peculiarly pathological singersongwriters. He didn’t join a scene, he was a scene, all by himself. What makes each of the singer-songwriters in this book a dark mirror is the shared continuum they all occupy: they each chose to embrace a private dissonant emotional state that permits a unique kind of ugliness into their highly personal confessions. The pathology that feeds, fuels, and inspires this approach also serves them well, assuming they survive it. But this is ugliness in name only, since though it avoids or abandons the traditional notions of harmonic beauty and proportion, it also establishes an entirely new standard for self-expression—one that allows the grittier aspects of life to be felt, expressed, and shared, rather than hidden away under the camouflage of lovely little ditties. It is that shared creative uniqueness, which after all is not the relationship between the songs or artists themselves so much as the link between their compositions and expressions of similar emotions, which eventually coheres into an ironic innovative community of sorts. In this community of outlaws, Waits is perhaps the penultimate outsider, someone who occupies an amorphous yet central place in the pantheon. Sure, his peers also accepted some of the ugliness of modern times and channeled it, but no one did it with the sheer aplomb and frenzied fun of Waits. He would both write about and live what Mojo Magazine editors once called a bohemian, flophouse style, taking on the persona of a sentimental, grizzlyvoiced barfly and motel poet howling at the moon. Small Change (his third record), sums up Wait’s chequered relationship with jazz and beat poetry. The studied poetry of his previous records (Closing Time 1973, Heart of Saturday Night 1974, and Nighthawks at the Diner 1975), and his carefully nurtured gravelly timbre—was by now sufficiently lived-in to give this album an entirely plausible feel, even though in 1976 this kind of music was as idiosyncratic as his more out-there later work.2

That little passage contains one of the most prescient and telling comments on Waits’s music—the suggestion that his music is ‘‘lived-in,’’ which is indeed what separates him from even some of his most talented peers. They are still imagining what something feels like, while Waits is reporting what he knows something feels like. One fine example of his urge to generously share pain is captured on Waits’s record Closing Time, and is titled ‘‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You.’’ Here Waits describes a prosaic scene where music simply ‘‘plays,’’

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without any further adjectives, where the narrator has had a drink, and where, to make a long story short (as he does), ‘‘it being late you’d like some company.’’ Few, if any singers, would have the nerve to negotiate a sung romantic encounter with this degree of ambivalence. This is the kind of internal exploration that results in the most penetrating projections, and Waits is the tempestuous template for the disgruntled lover who always loses before he even begins to try to win. The song ‘‘Emotional Weather Report,’’ from Nighthawks at the Diner, could almost be the subtitle for his entire career, since what he is forever broadcasting is precisely that: an ongoing update on his state of mind over time.

By the 1980s, Waits had reached the apotheosis of his evolutionary arc creatively, and some would say his greatest achievement was that he was still alive at all. He has since proven himself to be not only a long-lasting talent but also one who is head and shoulders above his competitors—those who are often more caught up in entertaining audiences and selling records than in making musical history. Waits makes history first, then entertains his cultish fans, then finally sells enough records to be commercially safe in a weird world. Waits is also notable for being a crucial link in the formation of an alternative California sound, or rather an alternative to the alternative. In Waiting for the Sun, his excellent study of West Coast music and the mega-industry it spawned, Barney Hoskyns included a delightful chapter covering Waits called ‘‘Crawling Down Cahuenga on a Broken Pair of Legs.’’ Although on the surface he seems correct to surmise that Waits was that rare singersongwriter who made a beeline away from the laid back confessional style, when we dig deeper into the layers of Hoskyns’s thinking, Waits is actually raising the bar on the art of the personally sung confession to unheard of heights. He is, after all, readily confessing to things he himself may or may not have even done, or else he is confessing for everyone else, on our behalf. Nonetheless, it is still confession. It’s just got some strange colors plastered all over it. Waits carried his alcoholic/insomniac act to its logical culmination with the somewhat self-indulgent double album Nighthawks at the Diner, seventy minutes of small-hours trio jazz and gravelly Lord Buckleyisms. The album was like an Edward Hopper painting come to life, confirming Waits’s gift as a writer but paling next to Small Change, his first real masterpiece. Here was the same seedy milieu of strippers and Pepto-Bismol, but with the poetry anchored by gem-like arrangements.3

But Hoskyns is forgetting that this is exactly what we all want Waits to do, to indulge himself utterly until he gets as close to the edge of survival as possible,

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but without plunging over the precipice. For if he plunged, we wouldn’t be getting any more reports from the edge, which is what we need him for the most. We need him to sing out strangely on ‘‘Heart Attack and Vine’’: ‘‘you’ll probably see someone you know on heart attack and vine.’’ We need him to intone the terrifying self-analysis of ‘‘Saving All My Love for You’’: ‘‘I’ll probably get arrested when I’m in my grave.’’ We need it, if only as an antidote to the sugary love sung about by The Eagles, and we especially need it, if only because Tom himself is the one most guilty of spreading bad rumors about himself. That’s why we love him, even against our better judgment. It was with Swordfishtrombones that Waits really began to hit his stride as the ‘‘barfly troubadour.’’ The editors at Mojo Magazine reported, In the 70s, Tom Waits’ vivid song world of plump-hearted street loners and five and dime losers had earned him critical acclaim and a healthy cult status, but there was a sense that he’d taken the gruffly sentimental, seedy lounge approach as far as it would go. It was a time of upheaval for Waits, he had split with girlfriend Rickie Lee Jones and moved to New York, met and married girlfriend Kathleen Brennan and was keen to break the album-tour cycle of his existence. He credits his new wife with not only saving his life—there were reports that the line between himself and the drunken, broken characters in his songs was getting worryingly thin—but also giving him the confidence to break with his old management and production team. His record company passed on it, leaving Waits free to sign with Island and exploit his new-found inspiration and sometimes official creative partnership for another seven increasingly ambitious albums.4

Tom Waits is considered an island in this book for the same reason that both Madonna and Michael Jackson are not: he has composed incendiary poetry that reflects America’s dark side in songs that move us even if we don’t always understand what he is saying. He’s somewhat like Dylan in that respect. Whereas both Madonna and Michael Jackson, while certainly catching some of the zeitgeist in their music and managing to stay on top for a very long time, simply wrote dance music. For songwriting purposes, at least as explored here, there are few things dumber than dance music. The best songs in the world, those of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, Paul Simon, or Elton John, for example, require us to be lying flat on our backs to fully participate. They move us mentally and emotionally; all the dancing takes place in our minds. Others produce music that merely makes our limbs move.

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Perhaps even more importantly, Waits, along with his peers, serves us in a special way that twitching about on a dance floor never can: he is an empath, a being who feels what the collective feels but manages to express and articulate those feelings in a manner that makes us believe he knows us, inside out. He is projecting our own deepest desires and fears. As we have seen and heard clearly, to be an empath is one of the pivotal prerequisites for being considered a dark mirror. Even if what Waits expresses might only occur to us in our most distressing dream states, he still qualifies as an empath, if only because he says what we would like to say, if only we all weren’t so damn polite. ‘‘They’re alive, they’re awake, while the rest of the world is asleep,’’ he moans in 1983’s ‘‘Underground’’ from Swordfishtrombones. On the magnificent Frank’s Wild Years, from 1987, Waits desperately groans, ‘‘Get me to Reno. . .put my baby on the flat car,’’ imploring the now defunct saint of safety to help him reach yet another girlfriend stranded in the ether of Tom’s mind—it’s twisted in the most delightful way. As a profoundly gifted and highly disturbing empath, Waits also tells us things we don’t want to know but which we know are true. ‘‘The Black Rider’’ from 1998 (also sung by Marianne Faithfull) is a stunning collaboration between Waits, avant-garde theatre designer Robert Wilson, and the great Waits pin-up William Burroughs. In it Waits has others speak for him and on our behalf: ‘‘Anchors away with the Black Rider, I’ll drink your blood like wine.’’ The song promises a disturbing thrill, a morbid orgy where skin will be shed and skeletons can dance. That’s the only kind of dancing one can do to Waits, the kind with no skin and lone rattling bones to keep the percussion going. He knows he is an empath, even a pathological one, and he knows what his ‘‘job’’ is all about, even though he has often referred to ‘‘making up songs’’ as children’s work for which he appears to feel guilty. When asked to what extent the persona he has created on his recordings has merged with the real Tom Waits, his response was not just honest and telling, it was perfectly revealing as well: ‘‘You mean, am I Frank Sinatra or Jimi Hendrix? Or am I Jimi Sinatra? It’s a ventriloquist act, everybody does one.’’5 Actually, not everyone does it, only empathic dark mirrors can truly throw their voices to this remarkable extent, and Waits can throw his with the best of them. Even when he grew in maturity to the point where he was able to collaborate, mostly with his second partner, the gifted but shy songwriting muse, Kathleen Brennan, he still served as a conduit or channel for the unconscious urges of his own ironic-iconic personality problems. That’s why we love him, even more than healthy people. When asked about how such a collaboration could function beneath the blinding heat of his own identity, he gives an answer that is so simple it approximates a profound insight: ‘‘Oh, you know, one person holds the nail and the other one swings the hammer.’’ Such an insight may well have helped some of the collaborating partnerships, known as continents in this study, to

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survive longer than they did. If they had only been able to take turns holding the nail and swinging the hammer. The trouble with those equally talented partnering continents is their built-in misery over not functioning more freely as islands, a misery to which we’ll turn to in Part Two of this book. In the meantime, we have Waits to remind us what it means to be so solipsistic that the world appears to exist as a mere toolbox for your songs. In the case of 2006’s Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Waits sings, like so many of his fellow artists, about a profound uncertainty that only ceases at the point where he considers just how lost he is—something he is utterly convinced of. This exquisite expression comes from his alleged location ‘‘at the bottom of the world.’’ There he finds himself fixed to mythical ‘‘types’’ (‘‘the bishop’’ and ‘‘the barbershop liar’’) and flows into divine substances and poetic flights. But upon awakening he finds himself, strangely, in the company of a cardinal bird, ‘‘and when I wanna talk he hangs on every word.’’ It’s as if Charles Bukowski went on a blind date with Bob Dylan, chaperoned by Captain Beefheart. It also brings to mind an even more exotic reference and comparison, but one that makes perfect sense in the skewed world of Waits. The Nobel-prizewinning poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote about reading the ancient Japanese poet Issa, master of haiku: ‘‘In this world, we walk on the roof of hell, gazing at flowers.. . .To know and not to speak, in that way one forgets. What is pronounced strengthens itself. What is not pronounced tends to non-existence.’’ This is simply Waits all over. He insists on pronouncing what is often difficult for us to hear, but he does it so damn well and keeps it contained in a crisp musicality so damn intelligent that we readily travel with him, down to the bottom of the world. He has that rare gift of the metaphysical poets of the distant past, the gift for experiencing thought as feeling and feeling as thought. Which is why we return to him, again and again, for his intensely alluring emotional weather reports.

7 The Anger Manager: Elvis Costello Every Day I Write the Book

The words that are being spoken are serious, whether you take them at face value or listen to them at all. . .I’m not a preacher, I’m a singer. I can sing about serious things, but I don’t think I have to put on a pious face to do it.1 Elvis Costello

‘‘Well I used to be disgusted but now I try to be amused,’’ Elvis the Second once squeaked. Who would ever have expected that to be his trajectory, from angry disgust to detached amusement? Then again, who would have expected such an angry rock presence, born out of the powerful fumes of punk and new wave, to have settled down as a dad to create a family with Diana Krall, not exactly the kind of songstress one would at first imagine him breeding with. Elvis Costello was in charge of anger throughout most of the 1970s. He seemed to be single-handedly channeling the disappointment and disillusionment with the end of the preceding dreamy decade, and his music fed a growing appetite for dissatisfaction with dreams in general and utopias in particular. From all accounts, Declan McManus is not a very nice person. And Elvis Costello, McManus’s alias created by a manager (in a manner not unlike the way Colonel Tom Parker fashioned Elvis and Brian Epstein designed

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The Beatles), is not really that much nicer. Just better known—and certainly more recognizable than the sullen sulk who first came to prominence by highlighting everything that rock ’n’ roll wasn’t and rebelling against an industry that had become too fat and wealthy. His was the second generation, the reiteration of rock’s initial precepts to both an aging and a new audience, and his was the generation, along with Waits and others, that allowed despair and disappointment to be the credo for their creativity. It became, in fact, both their raw material and their modus operandi, and this abstract despair was a palpable disappointment that The Sixties didn’t really work, or at least not quite the way so many gifted artists had told us they would. We believed those guys. In the dark imagination of Declan McManus, it rapidly became clear that the 70s or 80s probably wouldn’t work either. Thus the artistic achievements of Costello and Waits were both inextricably linked to that broader, wider, and much deeper sense of derailed despair that fueled the twentieth century itself in so many ways. This included ways that permitted unexpected amounts of dissonance and the acceptance of and representation of ugliness as well as beauty as the proper purview of the true twentieth-century artist, and singer-songwriters were included in that open invitation to modernist experimentation. It was Declan McManus’s and Elvis Costello’s manager, Jake Riviera, which also sounds like a made-up name, who not only bestowed the new name but also choreographed the outfit, hairstyle, glasses, and entire gait. In fact, Riviera crafted the perfect anti-Beatle for the times, for a generation feeling disdain and in despair from the dream being over. After all, Lennon said it was. Riviera’s design for the Elvis Costello mask was a somewhat spastic look in keeping with the anger and right-wing pressures of the times, soulfully dragging out the demise of the West’s prominence on the world stage. It was during the disillusioned decades immediately following the dream’s end that the snarling ferocity of the Costello character declaimed his disappointments in the same tone of defiance as that used by the Dylan character created by Robert Zimmerman. The synchronicity of the dark mirror in action. All this artifice and stagecraft is a monument to irony, of course, considering how important authenticity and truth seem to be to this angry artist. But it is only the first of many such ironies and paradoxes that abound in the character of one of the first commercially successful musical artists to seriously bite the hands that fed him so well. Others had nibbled slightly; Costello chomped down with gusto. We see the late flowering of the same modernist dissonance that first found expression in Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Varese and Cage, but wrapped in the subversive packaging of a four-minute song—this is rock music’s version of an abstract experiment with the songwriting tradition. In fact, both jazz and rock ’n’ roll, the two quintessentially great American inventions in musical history, were rogue mutant forms arising from a strong anti-classical impulse in a country that loved to invent new things, since the

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country itself was first imagined and then built. Few inventions rival rock music for sheer dissonant glee. By rock music, for the purposes of the present survey’s scope, we mean the music that evolved out of rock ’n’ roll from about 1964–2004. In a way then, it’s not surprising that America would embrace fabricated figures, as far back as Samuel Clemens becoming Mark Twain, or Robert Zimmerman becoming Bob Dylan, or Don Van Vliet becoming Captain Beefheart, or even a raving Brit becoming a prickly persona called Elvis Costello. As Larry David Smith pointed out so astutely in his study of the torch-song tradition, unlike Dylan, McManus felt no particular urge or need to provide us with a back story to this new persona. That would have been old fashioned. And in the infernal postmodern angst factory where McManus toiled, it might have reeked of servitude. When Robert Zimmerman invented ‘‘Bob Dylan,’’ he devised elaborate accounts of Dylan’s life. The imaginative youngster concocted wild tales about his character’s parents, travels, musical influences and famous affiliations. ‘‘Dylan’’ knew no boundaries as he shared his inventions with friends, lovers, and of course, journalists. When Declan McManus (and Jake Riviera, whose name it turns out was also somehow concocted, imaginatively, from Andrew Jakeman) invented ‘‘Elvis Costello,’’ McManus not only refused to devise a personal history, he aggressively resented any inquiries into anything. ‘‘Costello’’ briskly resisted any discussion of musical influence, deftly avoided any talk of his youth, and fiercely attacked interviewers whenever possible—that is when he bothered to talk to reporters. We have then, two invented celebrity characters employing two distinct publicity strategies.2

McManus left the mask an utter blank, and wore it peevishly, as if we somehow were responsible for his chagrins. But then, perhaps that has something to do with the significance of the year 1977 and the dynasty of despair that was about to overtake the recording industry itself. A dynasty resulting in both big money and massive melancholy.

He was a ready-made myth, practically a Duchampian rock star. Whereas Dylan camouflaged his anger with metaphor, Costello stripped his rage of any clothing whatsoever, a prime indicator that his discomfort was a cultural and collective wave of disillusionment and disappointment. There was no longer any reason for pretending or entertaining, his actions and his act almost seemed to imply—everything has gone wrong and we all know it. He therefore didn’t dilute his venom in lyrics either, since the times in which he matured as an artist no longer required it, having entered the real live and actual king midas in reverse phase of our pop history. The times

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themselves, a mere decade after the summer of dreams, had transformed the job of the singer-songwriter from one of inspiration to one of consolation. If you could call Declan’s declamations, as sung by Costello, consoling at all, you could also call Louis Ferdinand Celine’s ‘‘Journey to the End of the Night’’ consoling. . .to the damned, perhaps. The year 1977 was paradoxical musically for many reasons. Some called it the ‘‘summer of hate.’’ That’s stretching it a bit, since in the same year both punk and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours hit the air, but there was a definite cynicism to both late Fleetwood Mac and punk, ironically enough. Punk because the music industry turned out to be just another industry after all, and Mac because if that was true, well then, we might as well cash in and buy the lear jet. Right? It somehow seemed like 100 years later than 1967, not a mere 10, and the cultural landscape was being irrevocably altered. The violent rush of punk music, a vital antidote to rock’s perceived sellout, was permitting talentless louts to roam the stage spitting disgust back out at the audience. Talk about dark mirrors, theirs were drenched in distaste. The Sex Pistols, even though they couldn’t really play music, were important because they could play rage. The Clash, who could play very fine music, were important as a countermeasure to the saturation of sweetness and love that had preceded them in time. Fleetwood Mac, having started as a brilliant British psychedelic blues band under Peter Green in 1967, before morphing into a gently experimental progressive rock band under Bob Welch in 1971, had finally evolved under Lindsey Buckingham into one of the most perfectly produced pop music ensembles in history. They found the pulse of the times in a spookily prescient way by celebrating their own dysfunctions and making us forget ours by wallowing with them. Their finger has never left that pulse: 2008 is the 40th anniversary of their long strange trip. Thus 1977 was a schizophrenic year indeed. On the one hand we had a blockbuster like Rumours being listened to by nearly ever pair of ears on the planet. On the other, we had the death of Elvis Presley in seedy circumstances befitting his own vast fall from early sparkling greatness to later somber weightness. And somewhere in between, we had the birth of a new kind of Elvis, a name chosen by McManus’s mentor, his very own Parker/Epstein in order to, as he put it, ‘‘command the musical world’s attention.’’ Amazingly, as fate would have it, he was young and just hungry enough to go along with this creative charade. Chance is the fool’s name for fate. His first record, My Aim Is True, even had a small line hidden in its checkerboard background reading ‘‘elvis is king.’’ Yes, but which Elvis? The one who just died, or the one who was just born in such a blaze of anti-commercial grandeur? The Costello character was drenched in irony in the same way the Dylan character had been drenched in sincerity. This was troubling. Concealing one’s identity during or through writing, to lie in order to protect either us or oneself, has to be one of the oldest of old literary

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traditions. Indeed, our tradition is largely a set of variations on to what degree that observation is true. In the case of utterly concocted characters who act out their songs as if presenting someone else’s sentiments, such as the supreme exemplar of Zimmerman’s Dylan character, and not far behind, McManus’s Costello character, we can see and hear the risky strategies of singer-songwriters who hide their faces behind a multitude of masks, perhaps in order to say with greater honesty, greater vigor, or even greater venom, what they think needs to be said. Declan even had the cheeky audacity to cloak himself in the name of the king of rock ’n’ roll! This is artifice declaring itself to be such, in broad daylight. Not surprisingly, such artists are under the intense sway of a central dictum that moderates and modulates all great songwriting efforts, as formulated once so well by Stephen Holden: if you dare to sing of truth you can’t avoid some pain. But our dark mirrors are addicted to the truth; every single one of them lives the melancholy life of the gifted poetic observer who must contend with a world largely controlled by the untrue and unreasonable. Thus the pain becomes, potentially at least, a prerequisite to poetry, or so it appears in the best of cases: Dylan, Wilson, Mitchell, Bowie, Faithfull, Waits, and Costello. Sounds like a law firm from hell. And it just might be. Great singing of great songs composed by the singer is definitely the same as great acting, as evidenced so clearly by these multifarious stage personas. Theirs is a dark but elegant poetry, stemming from a lidless lifestyle, like so many of our finest singer-songwriters. Or at least those that manage to survive themselves.

The artist known as Elvis Costello started at the top of his game, with his first record, My Aim Is True, containing a fully formed and mature talent just dripping with ironic disdain. From there he merely perfected an already incisive and intensely creative stance, one capable of sustaining the full range of rage-soaked feelings. It was a veritable shock and awe campaign aimed at the complacency of both British culture in general and what he perceived as a bloated music industry in particular. ‘‘Welcome to the Working Week’’ celebrates the quotidian existence of commuting labor forces with a sense of perfect authenticity, largely because Costello was just then working several simultaneous computer programmer jobs to support a family. It always amazes me that even the most unconventionally gifted artists want to also have a normal existence, to have a family and be a parent, even though their primary urges are all allied against such a venture. Bless them, I guess. The ‘‘working week’’ is infused with apathy, and there is even a subtle danger in Costello’s song. There’s a chance of utter annihilation here, but

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even more pressingly, there’s the surprise engendered by the fact that it doesn’t happen more quickly. In fact, surprise runs through the song. Thus Costello asks why anyone would want to befriend him, since he feels himself to be ‘‘like a juggler running out of hands.’’ The same dim assessments are cast over the constant subject of love’s labor lost, as in ‘‘No Dancing,’’ which closes with the repeated refrain ‘‘There’s gonna be no dancing when they get home.’’ One instantly senses that the dancing he is referring to is the same unique kind celebrated in a later song, ‘‘Mystery Dance,’’ the horizontal kind, in which that song’s character declares that he ‘‘can’t do it anymore and I’m not satisfied, I can’t do it anymore and I’m not satisfied, I can’t do it anymore and I’m not satisfied.’’ In ‘‘Blame It on Cain,’’ the kind of blanket blame that ravages all human frailty is suspended before our eyes by the song’s protagonist. Between repeated requests that we do as the song title directs, and not blame the narrator, he remarks on his own isolation, which he’s afraid is driving him to a kind of madness. This is complicated by the idea of blame, beautifully expressed in the lament that ‘‘it’s nobody’s fault, but we need somebody to burn.’’ The need for this ‘‘somebody’’ is at the heart of this piece, if in a somewhat abstract way, and it’s in following this thought back to the initial point of transgression that Costello makes one of his most interesting points—that one of the things most worthy of this blame is his own voice, which has been too self-involved and too self-contained. It’s one of those rare occasions when a singer-songwriter allows him- or herself to share some of the angst-ridden challenges of ‘‘talking to oneself too much,’’ which is, after all, the ultimate description of making a great song in the first place. Feeling too much, thinking too much, talking too much, and finally singing out, just the right amount for all of us to identify the shimmering images as our own reflections. Describing it in those terms makes it appear almost as odd and magical as it really is in fact. Few musical artists are as cranky, both in their work and in their management of public persona and image, as this Elvis Costello construction. Perhaps only Van Morrison has him beat when it comes to being notoriously difficult and prickly. Perhaps it’s the shared Irish Catholic childhood background that does it, who knows? But that sharp edge was evident in ‘‘Elvis’’ from the start, fully fleshed out as a career strategy, and, one senses, a sensitive but angry young man’s only reliable survival mechanism. In ‘‘Imagination (Is a Powerful Deceiver),’’ Costello pronounces the full measure of doubt, suspicion, and romantic skepticism that has become the creative hallmark of everything he does so well. And nowhere is this more apparent than in his declaration that imagination is at her most dangerous ‘‘when you try to believe her just a little too much.’’ In ‘‘Cheap Reward,’’ the joys of requited love are further explored for their pain-inducing potential. At one point Costello asks his lover how she could ever expect him to take her seriously, ‘‘with your cheap rewards,

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your blackmail and your comical rage.’’ This bitter revenge is underlined with the conclusion that this love is, basically, an exchange of commercial goods, as in when the ‘‘wages’’ stop being paid, the relationship will be over. Costello’s ultimate confusion is saved for a deeply distressed attempt to understand what can only be the mysteries of sexual relations, as euphemized in ‘‘Mystery Dance’’: Romeo asks Juliet about this mystery dance, because, in his words, he’s tried, but he’s ‘‘still mystified.’’ Strangely enough, how many of us have likely uttered, or at least thought, those very words, while contemplating the (often tense) joys of love? ‘‘Elvis’’ goes even further and enunciates the splendor of our doom. In bed he finds himself trying to disentangle himself from the physical confusion, and struggles to even distinguish his right foot from his left, but in the end decides ‘‘what’s the use of looking [at these pornographic pictures] when you don’t know what they mean?’’ ‘‘Waiting for the End of the World’’ casts the net of love across the whole of our civilization, in a Dylanesque series of poetic images. On a rambling train, a mythical hitchhiker, replete with a ‘‘two-ton bible and funny cigarettes. . . suntan lotion and castanets,’’ waits for the end of the world, certain only that he knows where he is, but with no idea where he’s going (maybe Spain?), and no idea when the end will come. One of Costello’s most popular songs was also one of his most catchy tunes— but it was one of his strangest as well. In ‘‘The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes,’’ he tattoos his message on our listening brains. The narrator has moved from disgust to amusement in the course of his life. He speaks of a bargain with the angels, in which he gives them his red shoes, and in return. . .well, he heard an offer he couldn’t refuse. He won’t get any older he says, and then moves quickly on to tell of how happy he had been, before ‘‘she said, drop dead, then left with another guy.’’ Angels have rusted wings, and that’s why they want his red shoes, but he’s been ‘‘punctured,’’ and views his life now as a punishment to be borne instead of a gift from above. Things descend to a fresh new level of weird in ‘‘Less Than Zero,’’ where Oswald is tattooed with a swastika, where a boy has a ‘‘V’’ (for vandal) cut into his skin, and the television serves to distract everyone else from the madness all around. ‘‘But everything means less than zero,’’ Costello decides. Everything, perhaps, except for his own songs? My personal favorite from that early masterpiece, My Aim Is True, has been subjected to endless variations on a terrible set of themes for the last 35 years, is a song so sad it’s almost hilarious. ‘‘I’m Not Angry’’ has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. In this classic song, Costello addresses a ‘‘you’’ who’s moved on to another man, and leaves her ex listening downstairs. He hears whispering and ‘‘the stutter of ignition.’’ But still, he insists: ‘‘ I’m not angry. I’m not angry anymore.’’ Right, we believe you. . .you’re not angry! But the torch this singer carries has already been extinguished by tears of rage. And he’s all out of matches.

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Every one of his successively more sophisticated albums seems to be a chapter in an ongoing drama playing itself out in the writer’s heart and mind, and the drama is reflected through the wonky mirror of Costello’s uniquely grumpy personality and aesthetic sensibility. On the Punch the Clock album, from 1983, he even uses the metaphor of a book itself to encapsulate his repeatedly miserable love affairs. In chapter one, ‘‘we didn’t really get along,’’ in chapter two he fell in love, in chapter three their love is declared, but in the last chapters—four, five, and six— ‘‘you were up to your old tricks.’’ Costello was always working on the sequel, with each album being both a precursor to the next and an answer to the last. His theme has remained consistent throughout, even though his anger level has appeared to mellow somewhat. By the time he made the utterly distasteful record North (a postKrall effort), many of us were wishing he’d return to his mean-spirited rants and sarcastic funks—they just seemed to produce better songs. And isn’t that what we really want, after all? But on 2001’s Spike, he did manage somewhat of a return to former greatness, even capturing his latest latent feelings in a song title that almost completely, and coincidentally, contains the essence of his whole oeuvre: ‘‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror.’’ The face of this mirror, he sings, will eventually ‘‘tell you things that I still love you too much to say.’’

Costello’s entire boisterous presence on the pop music landscape has been precisely that. He’s been telling us the same things ever since 1977, reiterating and rephrasing them the way a great impressionist painter might approach the same outdoor subject season after season. Costello’s is an indoor subject—the human heart. No one really knows who Declan McManus was or is, since he long ago vanished into the pathology of his creative endeavors. But the work he has created for Elvis Costello to deliver to us, like a distressingly angstridden letter from home, continues to arrive, season after season. He is perennial. He started out croaking, ‘‘Why is this happening to me?’’ and ended up moaning, ‘‘Why is this happening to us?’’ He moved from the personal to the political and back again, with the ease of the master singer-songwriter who can never be pinned down by meaning. He’s after the meaning of meaning. In Smith’s study of Costello’s oddly crafted torch-song tradition, he refers to author Brian Hinton’s still accurate assessment of Costello’s unique delivery: ‘‘The act was distinctive.’’ Hinton describes Costello’s intimate vocals on original songs that explored dark situations. ‘‘There is something almost too personal in their delivery, a sense of someone you just don’t want in your life, invading your brain.’’3

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Costello himself sums it up in this early take on careerism with his usual couldn’t-care-less attitude: I’ve had a strange career in the sense that I started out on an independent label. I was signed within six months to a very big corporation in America. I was a pop star—there was no other word for it. I found it really at odds with what I believed in being a musician for the long term was. From there on, I just did whatever the hell I wanted to. And left it to the record company to sort it out. That’s their job. Mine is to make music; theirs is to sell it. It never said in my contract that I had to make the same record over and over again.4

No, it didn’t, and no, you haven’t. I must agree with Larry David Smith in his assessment of the Costello character as a role containing multiple permutations of a single thesis over the years, and even his statement that Costello’s first outing, My Aim Is True, ‘‘reflects songwriting strategies that will control the budding auteur’s pen for the next 25 years.’’5 Twenty-five years ago, when a hapless journalist inquired as to why his songs were so ‘‘bitter,’’ the Costello character answered, ‘‘Because I’m an extraordinarily bitter person. I don’t like to sound like I’m too obsessed and can’t feel any other way, but it’s just that those songs evince those kinds of feeling, and therefore, the album is like that. I don’t like the idea of getting too analytical about it.’’6 Twenty-five years later, his form of self-expression, as an exemplar of the pathology of the singer-songwriter so perfectly personified by his precursor, Dylan, and his peer, Waits, can still not only unnerve the listening audience, but even unsettle the critical audience. And we’re supposed to be far too jaded to be scared. But I’ll make an exception in his case. Rolling Stone’s Kit Rachlis, reacting to the Costello character’s vituperative vocals, used this analogy: ‘‘Listening to Elvis Costello is like walking down a dark empty street and hearing another set of heels. His music doesn’t make you dance, it makes you jump.’’7 As far as I am concerned, in Costello we have the identical feeling of morbid sensitivity as that lifted, like Atlas, by Brian Wilson. He is the flipside of Wilson’s own self-abnegating niceness. For Costello, that feeling of being safe in my room that Wilson so innocently opined about was a long-lost surfer’s dream, melted away by two decades of disappointment. By that time the room had become a kind of monastic cell. Costello smartly refused to enter such a tight place. Smith astutely identified Costello’s use of ‘‘narrative impressionism’’ to convey the most ironic and sarcastic of emotional stances. In that way, he is achingly similar to Dylan, since both try to say things so immediately vital that often the only way to communicate those ideas is through a heavily veiled set of images and metaphors. We used to call it poetry, remember? It required our participation in order for it to work properly.

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Indeed, poetic anger was once perfectly valid as a literary art form, even if expressed through such utterly aggressive attitudes as displayed by the Costello character. Janet Maslin’s take is quite instructive: He sings about violence with a vibrant romanticism, and about love with murder in his heart. He writes short blunt compositions which don’t pretend to be artful, though they are, and don’t demand to be taken seriously, even though they’re more stunning and substantial than anything rock has produced in a good long while. No Costello song is without its axe to grind or its hatchet to bury, but at least some emotion, however strangled, comes through. Costello never sounds exactly willing to give himself over to sentiment, yet he works hard to make himself more than marginally accessible: a gangster with a heart.8

Gangster with a heart, indeed. A comment like that also helps shed light on one of Costello’s few peers, the doom-drenched Tom Waits (he of the equally idiosyncratic style and sensibility) and shows them both to be graduates of the same reform school. In fact, one can almost listen to Costello as if he were a British Waits and Waits as if he were an American Costello. We might already do that without even realizing it. Like Waits, who blossomed when he embarked into the serious theatre of Dark Rider, this gangster of love (with apologies to Steve Miller) rose well to the occasion of composing The Juliet Letters for the Brodsky Quartet. Yet even there, Costello was rearranging the rules in the ancient game of writing love songs, and it turned out that the songs were some of his very best in a long and brilliant career. This description by Smith in his study of the torch-song tradition sums it up so very well: ‘‘Elvis Costello may plead, confess, commentate, or celebrate; however, what he does most and what he does best is complain.’’9 Luckily for us, the more he complains, the more he explains. And his explanations have been so damn entertaining. The lie that tells the truth always is.

8 The Dare Taker: Amy Winehouse Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

I used to have a drug problem, but now I have enough money. David Lee Roth, Rock Beast, Lead Singer, Van Halen

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams. Charles Baudelaire, 1860

Two major music industry publications, Rolling Stone and Mojo Magazine, have recently anointed the gifted Amy Winehouse with flashy cover stories and revealing narratives that explored the inextricable link between the life and lifestyle and the artistry and performance of her haunting persona/presence amongst us on the world stage. The Rolling Stone article, called ‘‘Diva with Demons,’’ demonstrated clearly that you can examine the suffering in Winehouse’s songs but you can’t take the suffering out of her music, or her personal life, since they are literally dark mirror images of each other. The Mojo article, called ‘‘Killing Me Softly’’— a not too subtle reference to Roberta Flack, one of many songstresses (along with Edith Piaf, Judy Garland, and Billie Holiday) who Winehouse both emulates and also strangely surpasses—was an even more harrowing expose´.

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When it comes to making your life into your material and your material into a breathing emblem of your living sorrows, Winehouse seems to have achieved a new high watermark for such rare creative transformations, and also a new low depth for such deep and deranged personal indulgences in a private and public hell. For the record, I sincerely hope this incredibly talented young singersongwriter manages to survive her demons, her celebrity, and herself. People with her gifts are breathtaking and mind-expanding to others, and they come along all too infrequently. Even if only for purely selfish reasons—mostly that I want and need more of her music—I hope she survives because her special kind of poetic and musical gifts represent a transcendent dimension to which all art forms aspire. She has the same kind of edge as was shown by jazz genius Charlie Parker and the heavenly Nina Simone, all similarly exhibiting a haughty disdain for limits that sometimes hits heaven on the head. Sometimes. ‘‘And I said no, no, no.’’ Indeed, Winehouse says no, in no uncertain terms. Her whole frail and bony being seems to be but one sharp No. Something tells me this particular swimming pool seems to be filled with tears, and there is a rather garish sign preventing potential casual swimmers from even considering the arc of a dive into its lyrical depths.

Amy Winehouse, a Jewish girl from London, was minus-21 years old when Joni Mitchell and Marianne Faithfull first laid down the rules for diaristic-confessional songwriting. She is the latest and perhaps most tragically talented in a long line of torchy and torched female recording artists who appear to be forever on the ascendant. Yet, they are seemingly doomed to swift descent, at the same remarkable time. And in the same remarkable time. The young Winehouse has impeccable timing—all raw instinct rather than knowledge—and that timing comes very close to timeless perfection. But I mean, wait a minute, haven’t we seen this movie once or twice before? And isn’t that movie called ‘‘Janis’’? Depending on how Winehouse’s still potentially fruitful life turns out (after all, the prodigy of pain started writing at 14, started recording at 18, and won five Grammys for music she wrote and recorded at 23!), she will either go the forlornly familiar way of Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, or else she’ll climb out of her wreckage and sprint forward creatively like Marianne Faithfull or Joni Mitchell did. I do hope it’s the latter. Amy deserves to survive. Yet her current age is that magic age, that same creative peak that was reached with identical precociousness by Lennon and McCartney, Brian Wilson, The Stones, and many others. It’s not that her youthful brilliance is unheard of; it isn’t. It’s just that she has the history of all those who came before her and from whom she has a crucial lesson to learn about losing the bet with your mind that drug use truly represents. Alas, she is also now

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approaching that treacherous age of 27, and in pop music, that age has sinister overtones. But the following searing vision, written about by Paul Elliott in his article in Mojo Magazine—the one with the cover image of Winehouse looking like a tourist in hell—made my mind immediately return to Varsity Stadium in Toronto in 1969, when I watched Janis Joplin holding a microphone in one hand and her bottle of Southern Comfort in the other. It gives new meaning to the creative notion of what Elliott referred to as being lost in the moment. Elliot’s vision was only one year ago: Singing a song for her husband—‘‘Wake Up Alone,’’ written in 2005 after he left her for another woman—she breaks off in the middle of a word, pulls away from the microphone, and sheds tears for the man she’s so desperately in love with; a man currently held in a prison cell. All her songs contain intimations of that sorrowfully self-deprecating insight, ‘‘I’ll be some other man’s next woman soon.’’ Winehouse shields her face with one hand and takes several faltering steps backwards, overwhelmed with emotion, and apparently drunk. As the music plays on, she grabs at the mike-stand for support. Illuminated by a single spotlight, the tortured artist is laid bare in a moment of transcendent intensity.1

One imagines a present-day Judy Garland—she of the scary magic of her Carnegie Hall phase. What kind of songs can cause performers to behave in this manner, cause them to live in the manner required for it to be sung about with such a combination of fierce emotional gusto and insane dedication to divulging all? Well, the kind that Amy Winehouse pulls out of herself with the ease of an angel. The intensity that Elliott saw and heard is the principal feature of the near shamanistic realm of certain performers who remind us that performance is a ritual. The performers are the ones who invite us to transcend our own identities while we witness the shaman-singers living out their most devastating unconscious urges in songs that capture a deeply human feeling with crystalline clarity. As a journalist, what makes Elliott’s take on Winehouse’s mesmerizing alchemy of rapture and decay so valuable is that he was fortunate enough to have encountered her at two key stages of her meteoric career. He first interviewed her back in 2004, the year after the release of her debut record, Frank, to some considerable critical and public acclaim. That record was made out of the pain of the breakup of a relationship with an earlier boyfriend, someone as yet unnamed. The beginnings of a creative template and dilemma were already forming. Elliott was also in attendance at the notorious Birmingham concert in 2007, and his coverage was downright distinct in its acclamation—a judgment with which I enthusiastically

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agree—of her remarkable powers as a singer-songwriter. She is the finest female vocalist of her generation. However, since the release of her second album, Back to Black (2006), on which the spine-tingling single ‘‘Rehab’’ is but a mere hint of the shapes of darkness to come (and which was justly accorded that handful of Grammys), her life has replaced her art as a source of fascination for both the press and the public. Yet listening to Frank, a promising but uneven introduction when compared to the astonishingly mature masterpiece that would follow, it should have been clear at the outset that there never was any distance, no separation at all in fact, between Winehouse’s art and the life that fueled it forward. She is the latest proof of Updike’s marvelous insight that celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. This young troubadour has barely had time to adjust and define her writing mask (the way her predecessors did—artists like P.J. Harvey, Neenah Cherry, Sade, even Annie Lennox, to name a few), and already her mask is falling off before our eyes. The reason is simple: unlike Dylan or Lennon, who wore hundreds of masks, or Mitchell and Faithfull, whose masks are truly transparent, Winehouse doesn’t actually wear a mask at all. She hasn’t even had time to imagine one, and here we are telling her in no uncertain terms, ‘‘don’t bother, you don’t need a mask, we’ll be happy to watch your actual face melt away in real time.’’ Elliott stresses, ‘‘When she sings those songs from Back to Black, songs written for the man she loves when they were first apart—she’s keeping him close to her. This is not art imitating life, this is art as life and life as art. It’s what makes Amy Winehouse so compelling, and what makes her the greatest soul singer.’’2 Also important to note is the fact that, like the first one, this latest album was a response to the breakdown of her relationship with a boyfriend—the incarcerated one she unfortunately married, and who shall also be unnamed, at least in these pages. Does one instantly sense a pattern here? I hope not. Surely she’s too talented for that trap. But as we have seen, and heard, both lesser talents and greater talents can become addicted to the source of their musical and emotional raw material: their personal lives. ‘‘Music,’’ says Winehouse, ‘‘is something in my life where I can be completely honest, to the point where some of the songs I don’t want to sing sometimes, because they’re so raw, and it hurts me when I sing certain lyrics.’’3 Like another temperamental and youthful folk-soul singer from long ago, Janis Ian, who also started living out through music at about the same age of 15, Winehouse makes us all wince at the collision between young love and social conventions such as race, beauty, and gender. But she takes that touching torment way, way past that particular Janis, into a postmodern twenty-first–century schizoid stew. And she does it in such a damn hot way! Even at her worst, Amy is on fire physically and spiritually and finds a special place that only she can travel towards. It’s in that same place others

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have passed through, where they have carved their glistening names or initials into the walls. We just hope Amy doesn’t catch up to that other Janis.

In order to somewhat atone for her recent bad behavior, and even worse musical and artistic behavior, assuming she is able to overcome her own demons, she can win us back into her broken heart if she agrees to give us at least four or five more records: a followup to Back to Black, hopefully with a title like Back to Being Alive, then, three straight good albums produced by equally gifted producers (someone like Daniel Lanois would do nicely) until the grand finale, a mature masterpiece like those of Joni Mitchell’s middle phase, or Marianne Faithfull’s late phase, or those of the master, Dylan, at any time, even when he was in a trance. Why? Because only then can we really properly judge whether she belongs in the same book as those survivors. She seems to, from this woozy first-date kind of vantage point. Sure, those others suffer, they sing for us. But they survive. They are professional survivors. Keith Richards survived to sing, even if in a raspy way. David Bowie survived to croon and warble at us. Waits survived to growl and mumble his method acting style. Costello survived to snipe and bark at us; but keep it up Elvis, we love it. Even Brian Wilson survived himself to remind us of what music is actually supposed to be doing to and for us all— achieving the transformation of leaden pain into golden pleasure. Paul McCartney survived being John Lennon’s partner—no easy task considering that, as an innovator, John was accidentally as brilliant as Dylan. Sir Solo Paul even proved that, although light-hearted, his music is still truly blessed with magic. Paul Simon survived to whisper sweet nothings in our ear. Lindsey Buckingham survived being the lead guitarist and writer for Fleetwood Mac—an almost impossible task—only to demonstrate mature solo skills that were often submerged in the collective collaborative brilliance that was Mac. Incredibly, even Elton John has survived being himself and continues to impersonate the character created for him by his boyhood chum, songwriter Bernie Taupin. These folks were serious sufferers, clairvoyant entertainers who merely let us watch and listen to them living and dying. All we’re asking Ms. Winehouse to do is survive and make more music. That’s not asking too much, is it? We’ll find out.

Her first record, Frank, was an amazing entry onto a very crowded and creative stage. It was the kind of event where dancers clear the way for superior movers, where singers hush their voices and scratch their heads at what is being channeled there. ‘‘At 20,’’ Elliott explained, ‘‘Amy Winehouse could sing with the power and worldliness of a veteran, but was still growing up. She smoked dope, drank heavily and swore like a football manager, but she was still, at heart, an

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unsophisticated young girl.’’4 The personal narrative that caused this talent to form a short-lived rap group with a girlfriend at 10, to play with her brother’s guitar until she got one of her own, to teach herself how to play, to start writing her own songs at 14 because she seemingly couldn’t find any contemporary musicians who were expressing what she felt (remember, she was born in 1983, when Madonna and Michael Jackson were writing songs designed solely to move the body around, so she’s not only postmodern post-punk, she’s post-twentieth century) is the same which got her a record deal when she was only 16. Incredibly enough, she was a client of the same management firm that represented The Spice Girls, far away on another Svengali planet, which eventually got her a record label deal inked by Darcus Beese for an unsuspecting Island Records. Like some other teenage girls, unfortunately, Amy also experienced selfwounding, bulimia, and anorexia, along with any variety of private challenges, long before she became addicted to drugs and alcohol, as well as bad men. Those things, as she has pointed out so clearly in her song and the video for it, ‘‘Rehab,’’ are not the real problems; they are just her failed attempts at solutions to the real problem: depression. The downside of public therapeutic art making is acute. ‘‘Everything changed. Suddenly, her life was being played out, not only in her music, but in the press. When someone has their heart broken as Amy has, they can’t help but believe that only that person can put it back together,’’5 Elliott wrote. I hope that doesn’t mean that we have to wait for boyfriend number three before we can savor future sorrows in gorgeous songs.

But what, in the end, is she actually singing about? Her self’s search for itself, of course, just like all dark mirrors everywhere, except with a sizzling degree of vulnerability not seen or heard for years. Vintage Laura Nyro had some of the same emotional temperature. Winehouse’s debut album is now one on which she has cast her own critical doubts, commenting publicly that she would have done it differently. She is a little unhappy with the results, mostly because the label forced her to include certain things that were not really ‘‘her.’’ One senses she is correct and smart enough to know that the opening intro of random scat singing, in the style of Sara Vaughn or Ella, was a mere affectation and commercial emblem, almost as if to say, ‘‘Here is the great new girl on the block, listen to how she has absorbed the great goddesses of the past, listen to her jazzy inheritance.’’ That little cannibalism, and a few of the other songs that try to touch the past on the way to the future, are unnecessary and obstructive, since they merely delay the delivery of Amy Winehouse’s true greatness: her own soul, her own voice, her own incredible language and idiosyncratic stance.

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In addition, that album suffers from a certain flavor of production, a mix-master style that allows one song to slam into the next without pause, another affectation borrowed from the young club scene, where several turntables spin overlapping and rapidly morphing musical messages. Back then, those long six years ago, the image on the Frank cover was of a gorgeous young girl with smoldering semitic features, on a face that could have embraced almost any ethnicity. I was smitten, like so many others, right away. But it was only when she opened her mouth and her voice poured out that I fell in love; it was impossible not to, since every song is about that falling feeling, whether falling forward or falling backward. Everyone wants to fall, and Winehouse’s specialty is falling. After the useless and distracting, but thankfully very brief, intro of necrophiliac scat, the song ‘‘Stronger Than Me’’ bursts into our rooms as one of the clearly masterful debut songs in years, maybe decades. It is addressed mostly to the lost man, an ex-lover who, according to the song apparently was seven years older than Winehouse, and therefore perhaps should have been seven times as strong, seven times as wise. But he wasn’t. Although probably not the ‘‘Frank’’ of the album’s title (that character could just as easily be the black Scottish terrier being walked on a leash by the healthy, pretty singer on the cover, or even just the state of mind she espouses so well in song—that of being frank about love, life, and whatever else she chooses), whoever he was, the ex-lover could not make the grade because he was awed by her and unable to take control and be the man. Assuming she was about 18 at the time, given the time required to break up and produce the musical soundtrack for it, her ex-lover must have been about 25. This preternaturally aged girl, this retroactively old soul, cries out plaintively, ‘‘Don’t you know that you supposed to be the man, not pale in comparison to who you think I am?’’ She later emphasizes her point, as if the poor schlep hadn’t yet figured out her oddly Lolita-like message, that she doesn’t have any interest in meeting his mother. All she wants is to ‘‘rip’’ his body over hers. Welcome to the monkey house, Amy Winehouse! In quick succession, the torch begins to glow brighter and brighter, and in ‘‘You Sent Me Flying,’’ she intones, ‘‘And though he’s nothing in the scheme of my years, it just serves to bludgeon my futile tears, and I’m not used to this.’’ Commanding all the karmic ferocity stuffed into her meager years, the singer next declares that her new guitar, ‘‘Cherry,’’ understands her better than her ex-lover: ‘‘Maybe we could talk about things, if you were made of wood and strings.’’ Then suddenly, and without any warning, she shifts gears and creates a sparkling but subversive jazz-pop song (or is it pazz-jop?) in ‘‘Fuck Me Pumps,’’ an anthem to a different sort of girl power than the kind promoted by so many other more conventional female vocalists. ‘‘Don’t be mad at me coz ‘ya pushing thirty and your old tricks no longer work, you should have known from the jump that you’ll always get dumped, so dust off your fuck me pumps.’’

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The character in the songs then pushes past all the social limits placed upon young girls, especially the one about not emulating the behavior of their other peer age group, the boys. After describing the similarities between her ex-lover and the recent boy toy she has been sleeping with, she casually explains that it was dark, and since she was lying down, it was difficult for her to recognize that it was not her ex-lover she was with. As a result, she sarcastically pleads that it wasn’t really infidelity, since she was thinking of him when she came. ‘‘You are everything, he means nothing to me, I can’t even remember his name,’’ she sings, as if that is somehow going to make him feel better. The next song, ‘‘There Is No Greater Love,’’ is one of the ones she shouldn’t have even attempted, not because she couldn’t sing it, she could, but only because it was too tame and polite for her. As a result, it sounds like a Jekyll and Hyde scenario, which the album in fact really is, but it is also one which celebrates enough of the Hyde-Amy to give us a delectable taste of what is to come later on. Further down. Both ‘‘In My Bed’’ and ‘‘Take the Box’’ are shockingly mature attempts to express the road to maturity and beyond. In some ways, they express a maturity greater than any actual adults could ever hope to attain, since the character involved has yet to lose the innocent allegiance to impossible truths we refer to as childhood. ‘‘In My Bed’’ contains the first hint of an animal bleat that has recurred often in her still short career: ‘‘You’ll never get my mind right, like two ships passing in the night want the same thing when we lay, otherwise mine’s a different way.’’ ‘‘Take the Box’’ is a slow grinding goodbye saga that reveals her to be old beyond her years when she sighs with resignation, ‘‘Mr. False Pretense, you just don’t make, I just don’t know you, but you make me cry, where’s my kiss goodbye?’’ But the theme song of the path she would take and the soundtrack of the movie she would soon be starring in (the one we are watching unfold as 2008 draws to a close) is properly announced with the opening song in a sequence that ends the Frank album: ‘‘Amy Amy Amy’’ gives us all the goods. It points at a signpost down the road saying do not travel this way for on this way lay monsters. ‘‘Now you know you’re too hard to ignore, masculine within your shell, I think you’d wear me well, Amy, Amy, Amy, where’s my moral parallel?’’ What the meaning of ‘‘moral parallel’’ might be we would soon discover on her followup album, three years later. In the meantime, there was the messy life lived in public.

My sole interest here is in Winehouse’s apparently remarkable talent as a singer-songwriter and inheritor of a freedom to express the deepest darkest insights into human behavior.

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Yes, she, like absolutely every other figure in this book, did stumble into substance abuse, the kind of stumbling that wasn’t funny (like heavy rock icon David Lee Roth liked to pretend it was). It seems to be one of the inherent urges in them all, and one that makes Winehouse the latest and possibly most dramatic of dark mirrors. To write about her music is to write about her, because there is no artistic substance apart from that, which is why in addition to substance abuse, there should be a unique designation for something akin to personality abuse. All these seminal figures, including Winehouse, and especially most of her historic precursors, without exception fell prey to what the nineteenthcentury French poet Charles Baudelaire called artificial paradise, in his landmark study of the poetic effects of hashish use on the craft of creating ideas and images. The paradox is, of course, that in our celebrity-driven popular culture, a talented but zonked figure like Keith Richards can be chosen to be the new face for Louis Vuitton, the luxury accessory manufacturer. But back to Winehouse’s moral parallel, and Back to Black. I’m fairly certain that the black in question refers to a combination of dark depression and an actual blackout state. It’s been reported that the young singer expressed interest in an advance copy of a current biography, not, as the publishers feared, in order to squash it’s exposure, but rather because she was interested in learning about what she had been ‘‘up to’’ in the last few years. Especially since, according to one spokesperson, she has reported having vague memories of going into the studio in 2002 (to record Frank) but that everything is a bit blurred after that. This means, incredibly enough, that part of that blur was the astonishing creative burst of writing, composing, collaborating, performing, and recording the musical and emotional volcano which produced her followup album, Back to Black. All after tantalizing audiences with the single release of the song that provides the anthem and mantra chant for all things Amy: ‘‘Rehab.’’ And part of that blur was grabbing all those Grammys! No one watching that Grammy show was more surprised than Amy and her mother watching via satellite from London. This can’t be happening, their eyes and expressions seemed to say: ‘‘You mean I am (she is) actually being rewarded for living this way?’’ But she was rewarded, and she should be rewarded, at least for the singersongwriter part of it all. Yet, what subterranean logic could have predicted that this young white Jewish girl with a penchant for soulful heartache would encounter a black funk-soul group called The Dap-Kings, who had already released three albums of intense James Brown/Etta James fueled full-force funk? Winehouse borrowed The Dap-Kings, formerly of local ‘‘Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings’’ fame, for a clutch of cuts on Back to Black as well as for a multiple city tour of the electric and scintillating live performances that cemented her place as a contender for several ‘‘best of’’ categories. Now is the ideal time to register the proper acclaim for this incredibly tight unit.

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They built the shimmering scaffolding that supports her poetic melodrama as it plays out like an oceanic wave of melancholy that engulfs the audience, making it sway in some exotic state of collective rapture. Their performances were downright Grateful Dead-like. It was spooky. Even footage conveys it.

Back to Black is a masterpiece, every lamentable and inching moment of it; there is no doubt about that. The only question is whether she can live with the famous, wealthy, and celebrated person who now does the writing and singing, and there have been so many who could not. Now, that person who needs the new raw material for new albums must search for it in a different place, in a different way. She needs to take a reasonable amount of time off, surround herself with reasonably clean friends, and move into bigger and better digs with a builtin home studio, so she doesn’t have to stumble down the street looking for her producer. Speaking of which, she needs to bond with that producer, and with whoever her future band will be, enough for them to trust and love her as much as Big Brother and The Holding Company trusted and loved Janis, and with as much musical devotion. Since they need to worship Amy musically, but not baby her psychologically, there is a fine line to be walked. The record executives have a crucial role to play as well, avoiding at all costs becoming the corporate enabler, while also encouraging more creation and production of what it is they do have to sell, after all. Winehouse can only do all this second-stage growing up, at the ripe old age of 25, if she pays attention to the lessons of her elders, and to so many fellow devotees of that same artificial paradise first described by Chuck Baudelaire in 1860. But that also means she has to learn the lessons of both the living and the dead creative elders, in order to ever possibly record Back to Being Alive. And if the music really matters in the end, she will. Amy Winehouse has a huge musical legacy from the brilliant singersongwriters who rose to prominence in the 1960s and provided her with a map to this territory, but she also has a huge emotional burden tied to the now raging expectation that you top your best and do it again, and again, and again—the way Dylan, Mitchell, Faithfull, Waits, Costello, Elton, and others did. Over and over again. At first glance, today it would appear that there are several youngish contemporary reflections in Joni Mitchell’s dark blue mirror, and perhaps Sarah McLaughlin, Alanis Morrisette, or Kate Bush might qualify for a glimpse into its depths. But the same cannot be said for Norah Jones, Diana Krall, Joss Stone, Cat Power, or their softer stylistic tribes. Erykah Badu is, of course, the real thing, which is why she is about the only singer I can adequately compare Winehouse to.

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The wounded-goddess mirror, naturally enough, disconcerts certain audience members more used to hearing the heavy duty poetic pronouncements of real men who could play the blues, weep and rage at The Fates, who were usually depicted as feminine figures: the muse monster. But the kind of women who would emerge in the post-60s music universe were already themselves The Lady Killers: Yoko Ono and Patti Smith, followed through the decades by Madonna, Sinead O’Connor, Bjork, and perhaps the most talented one yet, P.J. Harvey. All of them were walking on thin ice, slipping and sliding on a skating rink owned by men, which made them still seem to be outsiders, no matter how successful they really ever became. After all, there have been lady killers aplenty who emulated the best of the worst life livers and death lovers. Patti Smith and Courtney Love obviously spring to mind readily, both being extremely talented girl guides to hell in their own rights. As Charles Chaplin once wistfully sang, ‘‘Smile though your heart is breaking.’’ Sometimes we get the blues so bad we have no recourse but to laugh, although it’s a low, dark laughter with more than a whisper of depression. Joni Mitchell has possibly the bluest mirror imaginable in this regard. The highly structured and male-dominated style of music known officially as the blues is merely a stylized version of the much more anarchic and chaotic emotional territory that both Mitchell and Marianne Faithfull explored in their own uniquely feminine ways. Unvarnished. These deep roots of the feminine psyche in popular music, stemming from the earliest days of Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith, is hugely evident right up to the present day, in the voraciously talented but utterly adrift Winehouse, or even in the much lesser talented but seriously committed Cobain widow icon. Back when Cobain famously intoned Nirvana’s grunge mantra, ‘‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’’ and croaked ‘‘With the lights out it’s less dangerous, here we are now, entertain us, I feel stupid and contagious, here we are now, entertain us,’’ he could have been chanting on behalf of dark mirrors everywhere, and perhaps especially invoking the skeletal ghost of Amy Winehouse, future multiple Grammy winner. The young Nick Drake in the early 70s and the stunned genius Kurt Cobain in the 90s were suitably scarred by their swift rise and fall and both ended sadly in a self-indulgent binge of Byronic proportions, as did the inimitable lizard king, Jim Morrison, another majestic salesman of musical mayhem and poetic madness. They, like Winehouse, were jumping at shadows. Jim Morrison of The Doors was evoking her same dank muse when he slurred, ‘‘The face in the mirror won’t stop, the girl in the window won’t drop, a feast of friends, ‘Alive’ she cried, waiting for me, outside’’ in ‘‘When the Music’s Over.’’ Jim and Amy obviously share the same ‘‘special friend.’’ It was people like Morrison that gave Winehouse the permission to do what she is doing now, live, right in front of our very eyes. Because he did it so damn well himself!

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Unwilling to let mere mortal men outdo her own histrionic dash to the grave (remember, it was her own mother who glumly speculated that her daughter might not live to see whether she would win any awards at this year’s Grammys, where she eventually won an unprecedented five big ones), Winehouse appears to be enacting a new wrinkle in the battle of the sexes: ‘‘Anything you can do, I can do better. Including destroying myself in front of the spotlights.’’ Now, it’s not as if Winehouse is the first gifted, popular, acting-out female artist to engage in extracurricular self-destruction, even if she has been anointed by all of our own favorite self-immolators: Brian Jones, Syd Barrett, Phil Ochs, Jimi Hendrix, or Tim Buckley. But Winehouse, a seriously accomplished musician and gifted gazer into the darkness, manages to take this game to a whole new level of danger, and in such a highly public manner, that she seems to be acting out something even deeper and darker than that now old-fashioned ‘‘Janis-Joplin syndrome.’’ Something considerably darker.

If the pop song evolved into the soundtrack for the last century, as it so clearly seems to have done, what does that tell us about the emotional movie we all live in? In Winehouse’s case, everything from her image and persona to her lyrics and instrumentation seems to be saying to all of us: ‘‘You too can be me!’’ What this might mean in our age of celebrity addiction and in light of our consistent appetite for the more prurient side to our icons is almost too scary to contemplate. After all, exactly which part of our collective social psyche does Winehouse mirror? Whereas her creative progenitors (the Joni Mitchell/Marianne Faithfull and Nina Simone/Billie Holiday star cluster) were still dark mirrors, in the young Winehouse we arrive at an artist who is more of a shadow. Instead of reflecting as those others do, she seems to cast and project her creative shadow across our cultural landscape in a most distressing manner. She’s just that good. Or, is her shadow telling us that, not only can we potentially be her, but also that she is just like us? After all, there have been dark-dwellers in the music field before, some of them very gifted and many of them utterly doomed emotionally. Leonard Cohen sang of doom but somehow survived, perhaps due to his personal regime of regular Buddhist psychic cleansings; Lou Reed was the poster boy for doomed darkness and somehow evolved into the senior statesman and ambassador representing the country of angst. For the moment, from Amy Winehouse and her astounding aura we have been taken on a musical ride of some consequence. The ride is called ‘‘Where’s my moral parallel?’’ Her message is tattooed onto our consciences. It is a masterpiece of melancholy music that melts in your mind, not in your ear.

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On this ride, the words are the safety belt we use to strap ourselves onto the music. Unlike Dylan’s method, that of crying out, ‘‘The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face’’ in one of his greatest songs, Winehouse doesn’t use fancy poetic metaphors like many female Dylanettes do; instead, she uses the vernacular of her world in a dream stew of hip-hop, classic jazz, soul/dance, and folk music from hell. It’s especially effective too, because oddly enough, the ghost of electricity does howl in Amy Winehouse’s face. And we all thought that was just some enigmatic Dylan metaphor! She says what she sees, even if what she sees is simply that which is staring back at her from her own mirror. The opening cut on Back to Black, ‘‘Rehab,’’ sounds like Judy Garland on acid, or perhaps Billie Holiday on ecstasy crooning from the grave would be more accurate. Winehouse’s special genius, apart from finding the absolutely perfect writing collaborators and a positively sublime backup band made in heaven just for her, is declaiming: ‘‘Cause there’s nothing, nothing you can teach me, that I can’t learn from Mr. Hathaway,’’ perhaps a reference to her incarcerated husband, or her high school teacher, or else, any man wearing a fine shirt. Though her current marriage with a convict is presently in a holding pattern, at least until visiting hours, that particular marriage made in hell provided the fertilizer for these songs when the husband was still only the boyfriend from hell, but who left temporarily only to return to conscientiously finish the job. What job? The job that bad boyfriends always do on brilliant singers like this one, singers who have embraced oblivion as their personal savior. What else is black, if not a combination of depression, bad boy, and blackout? After all, Ms. Winehouse has publicly admitted to only vaguely recalling going into the studio in 2002, after which the picture gets fuzzy. Some do it to themselves but most get some help along the way. Some of us would like to respectfully remind her that, yes, though admittedly on occasion she did embarrass herself, she also somehow managed to create this magical and mesmerizing music out of the deepest part of her bad girl’s heart and its breathtaking ache. She allowed all of us to have aural sex with her at the same time. And as Iggy Pop once famously declared, I want more! It’s difficult to adequately describe in words the feelings in the songs, and the feeling of her singing. Perhaps writing about music really is like dancing about architecture, like Elvis Costello said is was. These singer-songwriters are often proven correct both in advance and retroactively—no mean feat. In ‘‘You Know I’m No Good,’’ one of the most powerful songs on Back to Black, you know right away that this is no mere persona being presented by a performer. ‘‘I cheated myself, like I knew I would, I told you I was trouble, you know that I’m no good.’’ Troubled would be accurate perhaps, under the circumstances. But she is so very good at emotional vivisection via the popular song, today’s most potent form of communication. ‘‘Me and Mr. Jones,’’ the track that follows, is an

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unfortunate love song indeed, due to the circumstances apparently beyond the control of the challenged singer. ‘‘Just Friends’’ is a little too cloying to be included on an album such as this one, but with a sense of instant conscience, I have to wonder whether that means I’m guilty of wanting yet more suffering from her and criticizing her for having a somewhat stalwart human sentiment? I’m honestly not sure, but there certainly is an inherent danger here in getting too used to what a recording artist does too well. The best song is the rousing anthem-in-reverse, ‘‘Back to Black,’’ with its huge wall of sound echo environment, its Supremes style forward propulsion and its Spector-drenched girl-power ambience. ‘‘And I tread a troubled track, my odds are stacked, I’ll go back to black.’’ ‘‘Love Is a Losing Game,’’ one of the saddest love songs of all time, grips the heart of the listener who is brave enough to try to share the simple sentiment, ‘‘Over futile odds, and laughed at by the gods, and now the final frame, love is a losing game.’’ It grips but doesn’t let go, not only after the song is over, but even after the album is over. The listener can never forget the tone of resigned doom in the sweetly swirling voice of this desperately disappointed young woman. ‘‘My Tears Dry on Their Own’’—well, that’s true, but so, unfortunately, does the mascara. ‘‘So we are history, your shadow covers me, the sky above, a blaze that only lovers see.’’ But descriptive words can never fully capture the strange essence of Winehouse’s complex gift for melody, and that alone, apart from her stark staring honesty, is the one element in her mix that keeps her from becoming utterly maudlin or mawkish. Her ability to stretch a feeling across a sound and send it spinning out of that magnificent vocal equipment, hovering above the highly intelligent rhythms of the perfect band for her, is what separates her from the merely self-indulgent chanteuse. ‘‘Wake Up Alone’’ is the song that she couldn’t continue singing live last year. Some observations about behavior are so wounded, so deeply, that the concept of entertainment flies out the window. This is another fine line this artist treads, the chancy border between music and madness. It raises the question as to whether there is anything that might be simply too much to try to include in a song, or whether the pop song is the perfect contemporary tool for expressing what used to be conveyed in paintings or poetry in earlier ages. Only time, and her survival, will tell. ‘‘Some Unholy War’’ is a paradoxical take on supporting your lover no matter what, especially since some people really are fighting in unholy wars across the globe—not as characters in a song, but in real trenches instead of her battlefield of the human heart. Sometimes, we can take analogy only so far, before it stretches to the breaking point. But then again, the breaking point is the secret subject of all her music anyway: ‘‘He still stands in spite of what his scars say, I’ll battle till this bitter finale, just me, my dignity and this guitar case.’’ Suddenly the ideal motif for helping to understand Winehouse’s condition and its message has been incidentally provided: she is a singing scar, the

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reference to a wound that can’t or won’t go away. Or one that we won’t let her forget, if we keep rewarding her for pain upon delivery. In the closing lament, ‘‘He Can Only Hold Her,’’ Winehouse gets down to the brass tacks of the other woman her boyfriend left her for (before deciding that a better living could be maintained with Winehouse again, and so returning to wed, and perhaps seal her fate), unless, of course, she is referring to herself retroactively. But she seldom uses even conventional devices for telling a story in song, eschewing any artifice in favor of always calling things by their right names. ‘‘How can he have her heart, when it got stole, though he tries to pacify her, cause what’s inside her never dies.’’

It might be true that what’s inside never dies, but the outside is certainly not as invulnerable, and it is the vast outside semblance of being a person which this singer is so close to losing, in danger of transforming herself into a mere cipher for pain. It is here that we come to the central problem of Amy Winehouse, or one of them at least, and it is why I have devoted such length to considering her consummate craft—the danger of becoming utterly solipsistic and being distantly removed from any interaction with the world in which we have to live. Solipsism, the self alone, is the key danger or flaw that all the best singersongwriters occasionally court, some more than others. Its hazard is to focus so much on I, me, and mine that one’s self-absorption fogs up the mirror and prevents the audience from sharing the sentiment. In some circles it is even discussed theoretically, in philosophical terms, as the belief that the self alone exists, or can be proven to exist, even though it removes any possibility from positing a viable society of individuals sharing a consensus reality. It suggests that our world, my world, is the sole arbiter, and that the apparent existence of other people and their messy other minds is a mere hallucination. Solipsism is a flood that threatens all creative people, but especially singer-songwriters of the dark mirror variety. It swamped John Lennon and caused him to hide for five years in his apartment while his future widow took care of the business of a legacy he had long since denied and run away from. Unfortunately, he forgot that when one declares that ‘‘the dream is over,’’ it also portends the end of the dreamer, whether we like it or not. It swamped Kurt Cobain and caused him to feel that he had betrayed his own moral code of ethics by becoming rich and famous, with noisy and messy consequences indeed. Winehouse also seems to be recklessly emulating the late Nico, the nihilist vocalist with the early and historic Velvet Underground, who only sang about Nico, Nico, Nico. All we are asking, Amy, is for you to give yes a chance. But if Amy Winehouse really has no moral parallel, as one early song suggested, perhaps she might ironically be free from that kind of radical self-doubt. She is important because she has taken the notion of reflecting

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her human feelings in our human mirror to the ultimate extreme, often only hinted at by even greater talents. We are all witnessing the flood now rising around this musical marvel. Someone, please throw this girl a life jacket, because if her head goes under, her voice goes with it. Like I said, only time will tell. As the novelist Joyce Carol Oates once observed, ‘‘Time is the element in which we exist, we are either borne along by it or drowned by it.’’ Lately, while being so immersed in Winehouse’s deeply moving music, I have also been struck by the strange parallels between this talented singersongwriter and a fictional character portrayed by the late Suzanne Pleshette in a film adaptation of John O’Hara’s ‘‘Rage to Live.’’ It’s not just the curious clone-like nature of the beehive hairstyle worn by Pleshette in this vintage 1965 soap opera, or even the manias shared by both the singer and this cinematic character. It goes deeper and touches the sad but fitting epigram that O’Hara used in the book and that the film also utilized. The epigram was from the English poet, Alexander Pope, way back in 1740 in his prescient piece called Epistle to a Lady, Of the Characters of Women, and if Pope were alive today, he would undoubtedly be writing for either Rolling Stone or Mojo Magazine: ‘‘With pleasures too refined to please, with too much spirit to ever be at ease, with too much quickness ever to be taught, with too much thinking to have common thought: who purchase pain with all that joy can give, and die of nothing but a rage to live.’’6

PART TWO

CONTINENTS

INTRODUCTION: THE SINGER-SONGWRITER IN A PARTNERSHIP There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who believe the world is divided into two kinds of people, and the kind that don’t. But often, whether we like it or not, those two inevitably find each other. All of the island figures in the first part of this book, regardless of their personal styles or sensibilities, had one thing in common, apart from their remarkable talents as singer-songwriters and performers. They were each able to achieve that rare state of mind that psychologists refer to as the ‘‘flow state,’’ a state of intense concentration during which the world disappears, along with time itself, and all that remains is the powerful sensation of floating in a moment of pure movement, of creative flow, where their songs largely seem to write themselves. And they are each by themselves, within that somewhat hallowed and much sought after state of solitary creation and delivery. But just try to imagine the chagrin of creative artists who achieve that same flow state, but only in the company of a certain partner and collaborator, the one who provides the necessary and essential other ingredient required to make their music come to life. Sometimes the way to the flow state is doubled up in two interdependent creative partners. We don’t know why. Or, even more intriguing, why it is that each of the players is a perfect half of something whole. Such is the frustrating fate of the many talented duos covered in this second part of the book.

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For these creative marriages made in hell, since they are often highly combustible and fraught with competitive impulses, the prevailing theme soundtrack could well be that old Neil Sedaka song titled, ‘‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.’’ As a matter of fact, breaking up for this wild wrecking crew is not only hard, it is often all but impossible, since one without the other ceases to exist in the way they and we need them to exist in order to do the job at hand.

As part of our shared cultural memory, we can clearly witness the dynamics of one supremely successful collaboration, that of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. We can also examine the exotic extremes of the somewhat less successful but still highly charged emotional and creative collaboration between Lennon and Yoko Ono, which replaced the first collaboration. Obviously, there is a definite public perception that one was a good collaboration and one was a bad collaboration. But which is which and how can we tell? In 1968, commenting on his famous songwriting partner’s ‘‘liaison’’ with the infamous Ono, McCartney himself sarcastically said, ‘‘When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience.’’ Yet he could almost have been describing the Lennon-McCartney musical miracle itself, just as easily as the Lennon-Ono heresy. He could also have been describing the pivotal and crucial feeling we all experience when we encounter, enjoy, and experience the results of the nearly sacred partnerships being explored herein. There is indeed a curious star-crossed element to the encounter between any two great creative partners, nearly to the point of a synchronistic destiny best summed up by that astute observer of human nature, the surrealist Andre Breton, when he declared that in all our lives what at first appears to be coincidence is later revealed to be merely ‘‘desire reaching its quarry.’’ So it is with a great creative team. In other words, certain creative equations involving certain artistic individuals seem nearly inevitable, or at least hard to imagine otherwise, whether or not the collaboration in question is a heavenly or a hellish one. Their shared state of creative flow operates at a truly stellar level, despite the fact that their relationships are often so incendiary and charged with dreadful hubris that they are pretty well spontaneously combusting with every egomaniacal breath they take. It struck me that the Lennon and McCartney relationship of creative collaboration, so fertile and astonishing in its abundance, and the subsequent Lennon and Ono collaboration, so controversial and naı¨ve in its audacity, were similar in many important ways to their less mainstream counterparts.

Suddenly and almost without realizing it, I began exploring the odd fact that, so often, the best artistic work in our culture (modern and postmodern Europe and North America that is) is produced in partnership by polar

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opposites who can barely tolerate each other. They remain in partnerships because no one else seems able to spark their creative magic as well as their most intimate enemy—their mortal friend. Perhaps creative people see the hand of destiny in their own desires, who knows? After a while, I began to see this subject as a study of artistic marriages made in hell, an ironically entertaining subject for the rest of us, as it turns out, since we are the consumers and beneficiaries of the diverting and riveting cultural side effects of their artistic suffering. Just consider the range of these names and the stature of the work they produced together, with some of them still going at it after all these years. We have the permanently troubled waters of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, the glimmering spotlight contest of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the explosive angst of Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, the raunchy obsessions of Neil Young and Steven Stills, the doomed domestic vortex of Richard and Linda Thompson, and on and on. Exactly what is happening here? What does all of this mean? According to Vera John-Steiner, in her book Creative Collaboration, all of us have been held in the thrall of an illusory cultural assumption. Rodin’s famous sculpture, ‘‘The Thinker,’’ dominates our collective imagination as the purest representation of human inquiry. . .the lone, stoic thinker. Yet while the western belief in individualism romanticizes this perception of the solitary creative process, the reality is that artistic forms usually emerge from the joint thinking, passionate conversations, emotional connections and shared struggles common in all meaningful relationships. Many of these collaborators complemented each other in major ways, meshing different backgrounds and forms into fresh styles of thinking, while others completely transformed their respective fields.1

Her book also clearly indicated that some of them simply loathed working together in the first place. John-Steiner illustrated that the creative mind, rather than thriving on solitude, is clearly dependent upon the reflection, renewal, and trust inherent in sustained human and professional relationships. Such compelling depictions demonstrate the key associations that nurtured our most talented artists and thinkers. While compelling, the creative alliances she studied are generally synchronized and synergistic, where supportive compromise reigns. What motivates such extended collaboration is generally some deep compatibility. What is equally intriguing is the coupling of certain successful creative ‘‘ensembles’’ who are woefully, utterly, and entertainingly incompatible. What fascinates me much more than mere disharmony, however, are those teams where the creative discord itself is the key to success. They are the perversely clever ones who compel our attention.

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And so this glimpse into the geography of the imagination triggers one of our most puzzling cultural questions: why is it that much of our great music is so often produced collaboratively by creative partners who can’t stand the sight of each other? Why do some of the most inventive partnerships involve individuals who can barely be in the same room together, even though they seem to share only one creative soul between them and thus they grudgingly acknowledge their reluctant codependence? This is especially the case if their partnership is one that is collectively celebrated by a wide popular audience that perpetually rewards them for their shared struggle. During my research travels through this territory, I even encountered the work of a scientist who claimed to have developed a genetic theory of coupling. He speculated that in every couple-equation there was a genetic predisposition for one person to live more in the future and one to live more in the past, and that the partnership dynamics proceeded along those fault lines. He even used impressive Greek names like alpha and beta to designate them. If anything, we want to unearth the psychological or even spiritual template that sheds light on creative combat, not just hide behind the blind innocence of our chromosomes. This is more than a question of conflicts between mere gender and creativity being played out in partnership, since some of the collaborative teams are intimate partners and some are not, while some of the same-gender teams seem to encounter an intimacy even more harrowing than that of their literally married artistic peers. It is also not a historical but rather a human phenomenon we need to explore: pairs of creative partners for whom relating to the other is like relating to another distinct part of themselves, even though such personal interactions are often as painful and claustrophobic as they are productive and enriching. There’s more to synchronicity than meets the eye. Thus there exists a shared creative context for these couples who mine their own shared personal and emotional lives even more dangerously than solitary or independent artists do. The complexities of companionship are also the origins of otherness, as ably suggested by Whitney Chadwick’s and Isabelle De Courtivron’s well edited study of intimacy within working partnerships, Significant Others. This suggests a special category outside the customary parameters of private and public, individual and couple, a unique territorial category that I can only refer to as ‘‘significant otherness’’: the curious sensation that a couple’s music somehow thrives on an edgy proximity that draws them closer together while simultaneously driving them further apart, while we look and listen on with glee. In Shari Benstock’s related book, Intimate Warriors: Portraits of a Modern Marriage, she made a major contribution to investigating such notions of collaboration by focusing our attention on ‘‘the partner’s struggle in search of fulfillment and self-expression within bonds.’’2 This domestic equation can be easily expanded to include the often exotic relationships of creative couples, or professional partners, whose works are

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mutually created and who depend on one another for separate but key ingredients to the success of their artistic enterprise. The crucial concept of interest to us here is that of creative and artistic selfexpression in pairs, not just the personal struggle for self-expression which engages all of us, and the key dynamic we need to clarify is that of creativity within the boundaries of a collaborative professional partnership. We need to unearth the ‘‘quantum level’’ of creative partnership, and that means finding the basic foundational level at which point all of these different sets of creative partners intersect. We also want to uncover the shared compulsions of the creative pathology that they have in common. Sorting out the complex balancing act between such mutual muses also provides a way of separating creative myth from actual artistic practice, of disentangling the image of the partners from the lives of the players, and most importantly, of appreciating what Benstock has also called ‘‘the uniquely singular achievements within the collaborative process itself.’’ Another equally important question is posed by the apparent success of certain creative collaborators who seem to connect with a large audience and thrive, despite the fact that they reserve a special and significant contemptuous antipathy for the very person who shares their gifts most intimately. Among these ironic survivors are the titanic creative teams propelling The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Fleetwood Mac, each of which has become a current corporate entity, a ‘‘brand’’ name that soldiers on regardless of the heated hubris of their leaders. It also helps that the creative partnerships of the couples under consideration each make for a great dramatic story in their own right. Seldom has comedy melted into tragedy, and back again, so seamlessly as in these iconic couples. Such teams realize that working together, as distressing as it might be, is the only means to reaching that obscure magic which is only available by ‘‘looking through’’ their partner’s eyes. Vincente Todoli once described the creative collaboration between artists Richard Hamilton and Dieter Roth in terms that apply across the board here: ‘‘The surprising thing about their partnership was their contradictory personalities, a meeting of opposites. As in physics, poles of the same charge repel each other and those of the opposite attract each other.’’3 Artist Richard Hamilton put it well when he reluctantly attested that ‘‘Art is a solitary occupation. Creativity in general is the act of an individual. But there are times when the ivory tower is opened to admit a partner.’’4 Bands like Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, The Who, or even cranky partners such as Simon and Garfunkel, survivors all, seem to realize implicitly that the brand identity they worked so hard and long to create jointly often prevents them from ever having a private identity separate from their corporate entities, or—painfully enough—from the partner they need in order to make their work work.

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And how do they just keep on keeping on? Two things: allegiance and obedience to their successful brand and . . .nobody does it better. The same factors apply to those other tempestuous teams, Jagger-Richards of The Stones, and Townshend-Daltrey of The Who. The former team, one of them now shockingly somehow a Sir, seems quite content to embrace and celebrate the sheer joy of permanent adolescence.The latter, even burdened with Townshendian personal ‘‘image problems,’’ will likely be moving into action soon with a necrophiliac tour containing a taped sample of their dead bass player’s licks. Nobody does it better? Key factors to reflect on are childhood and the dynamics of young friendship. I took a look at the list of creative collaborators toiling in a gifted but troubled partnership and suddenly noticed that of all these tortured teams, the ones who still succeed in staying together today, are the ones who have known each other the longest, some of them literally since their beginnings. Simon and Garfunkel met when they were 11, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey met when they were 14, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met when they were 7, Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet met when they were 15, Lennon and McCartney met when they were 15, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks met when they were 18, and Brian Wilson and family met when they were born. This entire creative and chaotic crew formed their initial bonds together while they were still practically children, before they had fully formed their own characters and identities, and in alliance together against a confining adult society. They each accepted the complex differences between them as part of the price they paid, first as comrades in arms and then as creative teams, as they literally grew up together, or didn’t grow up at all, as the case may be. At least in these uniquely youthful teams, that bond has long outlasted the slings and arrows of their shared outrageous fortunes.

The mysterious dynamic that makes partners different from each other eventually makes them different from themselves. A profound alienation emerges, one seemingly associated with what in the West has become a rather shared obsession: the search for perfect and pure authenticity. Particularly prevalent in pop music because of its vast scale and influence, this desire for realness only gets worse when it is doubled by the brilliant teamwork of collaborators in a partnership. In pop music we have an example of an experimental framework for understanding the dynamics between two individuals, and for assessing the reasons some are so successful at sharing the spotlight, if only temporarily, while others are so incompatible that they never manage to meld to the degree necessary for the creation of a joint product such as a great pop song. Who can properly explain why ‘‘Mrs. Robinson’’ still kicks ass, for instance? Or, why Simon and Garfunkel’s music is so lovely even though they eventually, rather rapidly, just hated making it together.

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Another important factor is a unique theory of conflict resolution called governing or ‘‘nonprevalent dynamics.’’ Many people are aware of the remarkably gifted mathematician John Nash (portrayed by Russell Crowe in the recent movie A Beautiful Mind), but unfortunately he is more famous for being crazy than for the subtle cognitive concept he was working on. It sounds more difficult than it really is: nonprevalent dynamics is a theoretical form of resolving two competing forces, whatever they may be, in a manner where neither one prevails over the other, where no one is a winner and no one is a loser. This theory of Nash’s seeks a means of moving forward by negotiation and requires a tacit agreement that the best solution will be one where both parties win and no one prevails exclusively. In short, it suggests that a psychological compromise is equally essential for both parties, one that enables the team itself to thrive rather than one member or the other. What is the motivation for creative collaborators to engage in such a compromise? Surprisingly, that motivation is provided by all of us. We want them to resolve their differences because we want to hear their music, and we reward them accordingly if they do so to deliver it. Whatever the artistic discipline and musical style, and however harrowing their personal relationships, these teams of creative collaborators desperately don’t want to say goodbye, they can’t say goodbye, even though for most of them, it’s been a hard day’s life! Imagine turning the lead of your persona, even your very hubris, into the gold of your legend. Once you’ve found a way to become a whole person, by virtue of your ideal alter-ego, your second self, your perfect substitute, breaking up is indeed hard to do. Collaborators create a dynasty of dissonance, let alone despair—successful on the surface, celebrated on the outside, psychically subservient on the inside, tormented by turmoil beneath. The factors that make a great singer-songwriter team are exactly the same as those that make a great solo artist: intuitive insight, inspired innovation, and incandescent interpretation. And since we live in a future partially visualized and personified by the work of these many gifted but troubled teams of singer-songwriters, in a curious sense all of us become their collaborators too. We collaborate with them by deciding who becomes enshrined in history and exactly what it is for which they will be remembered. After all, our collective memory is a museum of their dreams.

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9 The Seduction Shouters: John Lennon/Paul McCartney I'm Looking Through You

Michael Jackson can sell records till the end of time but he’ll never matter to people the way The Beatles did. Every record was a shock when it came out. Compared to rabid r & b enthusiasts like The Rolling Stones, The Beatles arrived sounding like nothing else. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were exceptional songwriters. One of the reasons The Beatles had to stop performing? The songs weren’t theirs anymore. They were everybody’s.1 Elvis Costello

Their music was a seduction aimed at a world in need of a new affair of the heart. But their seduction had to be shouted at a mass audience that was louder than the original sung message itself. Those wishing to understand the curious frenzy swirling around them would do well to pick up a fascinating little book by Nobel-prize-winning author Elias Canetti. In his tome, Crowds and Power, he abundantly explained the organic and unconscious nature of the relationship between the desires of crowds on the verge of becoming mobs, and the power of those who are in the eye of the storm and are engulfed by the appetites of an abstract mind multiplied by thousands. John Lennon is an ideal and exemplary symbol for the implicit psychic dangers of the creative art form of contemporary songwriting under such circumstances. Telltale examples of The Beatles’ music penned by Lennon

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effortlessly reveal the secret torment at the heart of his genius and how this torment made him even more attractive to an audience that needed the nourishment provided by both his inspiring images and his often dark insights into the limits of popular fame and public identity. John Lennon was a child of trauma, but he was also the father of a musical revolution and sadly, one of the first sacrificial victims offered to the savage god of celebrity . . .the rest, you know. He was also, along with his boyhood hero Elvis Presley, perhaps a tragic but ideal personification of novelist John Updike’s disturbing image of celebrity: ‘‘celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.’’ McCartney has a totally different form of pathology than Lennon, but only on the surface. His particular compulsion is to perpetually entertain us, to soothe us. His half of the amazingly creative team that fueled The Beatles was also fraught with remarkable insecurities—the desire to please and the anger he somehow managed to sublimate and transform into perpetually soothing anthems of hopeful happiness and wistful loss. Until ‘‘Helter Skelter,’’ of course. Paul McCartney was likewise a child of trauma, having lost his mother young, and he experienced the trauma as deeply as did the young Lennon. There are different ways for all of us to cope with and process our own traumas, whatever they may be, and John and Paul each responded in drastically divergent ways. And yet, their ways eventually met and intertwined. A good example of this personal convergence and harmonic divergence would be to examine two different songs on roughly the same subject, such as the McCartney creation ‘‘Penny Lane’’ and the Lennon creation ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’’ Both songs are about their childhoods, but while one is a lyrical romp through a kindhearted fantasy world concocted through the generosity of Paul, the other is a fantastic visit to the real estate of abandonment courtesy of John. Both are among their best songs. Sometimes I wonder which is the real world and which is the imagined one. But more importantly, both songs are made possible through the agency of the other partner, even if one or the other is officially considered the nominal author of the song. Each of these superb artists looks through the other, both mirror and window, in order to marshal their forces to uncommon creative heights. Until, that is, Lennon decided he didn’t want to do that anymore—or that he couldn’t. It is by now a commonplace notion, indeed almost a cliche, that Lennon believed being with Yoko freed him from himself and from his bandmates: he clearly felt that they were almost two halves of something and that together they made up the whole. One wonders why he didn’t realize that the same was true of his creative relationship with McCartney. Just as Dylan was the gold standard for and apotheosis of the singersongwriter as a solo artist, the singer-songwriting duo at the heart of The Beatles forms the absolute template of what it means to create music in tandem. A team so perfect it’s totemic, so perfect it’s almost like one person. On the periodical table of the singer-songwriter elements and their

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relationships to one another, if Dylan is the gold standard with his infamous long thin mercury sound, then Lennon and McCartney are the rare diamonds of a given era. Certainly in terms of revolutionary influence alone they are the equivalent of the Gershwin Brothers and Rogers and Hammerstein together with Rogers and Hart and Bacharach and David, with all the powerful drugs thrown in for good measure. Although I enjoy the romance of Costello’s reason why The Beatles had to stop performing, and I agree that the songs did indeed become all of ours, the actual reasons are far more simple, and far less romantic. First, they grew up and grew apart, eventually starting to despise the codependency of their talent and fame; second, they could never hope to adequately perform the music they had collage-composed in the studio. Their studio compositions placed them far ahead of their time technologically too. Nowadays music of the most complex colors imaginable can be presented live with little or no difficulty, but that was not the case when Lennon and McCartney were performing. Once they stopped performing to their audience, their days were numbered, and their demise was inevitable. Of course, the utter vanishing of John Lennon’s identity down a drain of drugs and paranoia didn’t help matters either. Even so, the eight years they gave us musically were pretty much irreplaceable and irreproducible, and the shouted seduction they injected into the world’s suddenly shrinking culture was priceless. Synchronicity was clearly at work in the lives of these two seemingly star-crossed songwriters. Lennon’s voice by itself would have been almost unbearable; its rawness is rare and requires the ameliorating influence of McCartney’s mellow tone. Lennon’s was a vocal allure from beyond questions of mere good or bad. Taste had nothing to do with what he accomplished. David Stubbs of UNCUT Magazine wrote: As Ian MacDonald has pointed out, much of it was in his voice—that broad, grainy, Scouse-inflected yet perfectly pitched voice, bristling with wit, insolence, naı¨ve sincerity, pain and love. Bob Dylan can certainly lay claim to partial credit for the invention of rock and roll attitude, and certainly the two artists influenced each other. But Dylan’s voice didn’t register anything like as loudly as Lennon’s did across the globe. Subsequent artists have all taken a chip of Lennon—John Lydon amplified his sneer but was unable to match the remaining spectrum of emotion, Liam Gallagher has recaptured but not surpassed his laryngitic sandpapery edge.’’2

The two were a match made in heaven and a marriage made in hell. Lennon’s relentless self-revelation was so honest, even when it was hidden, that he seemed to be speaking, and singing, on behalf of everyone. And he

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was both rewarded and cursed accordingly. At least McCartney had the common sense and good manners to realize they were part of something bigger than just their own flawed separate personalities: ‘‘The Beatles are as mysterious and wonderful to me as they are to everyone else. Probably more so. The mystery and the magic of it just go on and on.’’3 In Lennon/McCartney and Lennon/Ono, we encounter the most creatively intertwined and neurotically overgrown jungle of blinding brilliance and youthful beauty ever to grace the public popular culture stage. The Beatles’ creative core, including the astonishing George Martin, provided the standard of excellence for all groups after them to aspire to, even though it was crystal clear that no one ever could quite match that towering level of co-creative exchange. Their secret was a simultaneous set of songwriting miracles melded with a miraculously powerful drummer and an emotionally advanced guitarist. ‘‘This is my story both humble and true, take it to pieces and mend it with glue,’’ John Lennon sardonically quipped in his memoir Skywriting by Word of Mouth; well, 1969 was the year it all unraveled. He took it to pieces for us before our eyes, of course, so we’ll just have to try and put it back together again, if only to really appreciate how magnificent it all was before he imagined he had to abandon it. It’s all a question of pieces. You see, he was half of something, whereas Dylan was the whole thing. So, are Lennon and McCartney two Dylans, something inconceivable, or are they each half a Dylan, which is something truly mystifying?

The young lunatic Lennon, whose uniquely raspy and nasal voice, a voice so powerful that it transcended normal definitions of what is ‘‘beautiful,’’ once pleaded as he sang ‘‘Is there anybody going to listen to my story, all about the girl who came to stay’’ was probably shocked to discover that most of the civilized world was willing to listen to his story. Until that is, only a mere two years after declaiming ‘‘Girl’’ on his revolutionary Rubber Soul, when he innocently tried to communicate across the expanding chasm of his own scarred celebrity, ‘‘She’s not a girl who misses much’’ in his ode to Yoko Ono on the brilliantly doomed The Beatles (aka The White Album). That’s when he discovered the apparent limits of even his own form of especially sexy godliness. His original brand suddenly evaporated. Many diners had big trouble with the new dish on his creative menu, and also with the new partnership that was looming so large on his horizon. But to be blunt, although it is now historically clear that Ono was using Lennon, by then a spaced-out zombie, to her own ends, it is equally clear that he was using her in order to break his band of boys to pieces, in the only way he knew to do it. Case closed—a case of reciprocal maintenance if ever there was one. The creative intimacy of Lennon-McCartney, mutual muses and mirrors par excellence, produced an icon and archetype relationship that changed

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songwriting and popular culture history. The creative intimacy of LennonOno, tortured love-twins caught in their own powerful auras, produced a surrogate and shadow relationship that cleverly changed with history, in order to evade its own mythology. In the end, we all had to carry that weight together. Why, we don’t know. Probably because the gifted Lennon’s story was so powerful and so tragic, and likely also because our culture’s appetite for the glow of greatness is just so insatiable, I suppose. This is greatness at its saddest, however. That’s what is so poignant about the 60s in general and The Beatles in particular: what started out so happily free, ended up so dismally dark as a result of our own inability to live up to the utopian hype we all created together. In other words, reality bit. By far the most engaging and informative study of The Beatles phenomenon was executed by the late great Ian MacDonald in his 1994 book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. Its accessibility and clarity is largely the result of MacDonald’s ability to contextualize the Beatles as artists and social beings. More than enough has already been said about the astronomical stature of these musicians, but it has generally been a treatment of their talents which cuts them off from those very popular culture roots that informed their genesis and growth, almost as if they arrived full blown from another planet ready to awaken the rest of us with their songs. The beauty of Revolution in the Head is the manner in which it places The Beatles within a cultural and historical continuum, demonstrating their greatness largely by examining how they managed to capture the essence of a deeper social and cultural evolutionary change which was then occurring in western civilization at large. The creative intimacy of popular culture, a profoundly magical mirror into which singer-songwriters pour their pain, and out of which we draw these emotional emblems for the entertaining enigmas in our lives called songs, is based on an agreement between the parties. Both artists and audiences know what ritual is being enacted when a concert or a recording provides a way to go on living, especially for young people, the primary and primal audience for which rock ’n’ roll music was originally created.

The Beatles, navigated by John’s and Paul’s cooperative geniuses, were clearly surfing a massive wave of energy from the collective unconscious, energy that surfaced after the war in the shapes of multiple art forms, energy that made them into legitimate archetypes and unwitting symbols of desire. As George Harrison so succinctly put it in August 1969, ‘‘The fans gave us their money and their screams but we gave them our nervous systems.’’ And no one gave away more of his nervous system than did Lennon. But his role as a writer, visual artist, designer, filmmaker and performance artist has been overshadowed by his obvious greatness as a singer-songwriter.

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And when we examine those strong impulses at his core, so often sugarcoated by the pop machinery, and we glimpse his need to express himself directly in ways unrelated to audience expectation or satisfaction, we can arrive at a vantage point where it is very easy to detect both the personal search which led him to Yoko Ono and the personal pressures which led him away from The Beatles, especially his incredibly gifted alter-ego songwriting partner, Paul McCartney. Lennon and McCartney were the content providers as well as the distribution system for an abundance of baby boomer dreams, needs, and appetites. They offered an ongoing menu of stylistic hipness which was so classy in its delivery and so overflowing with sheer exuberance that even utterly straight people were allowed to imagine that they too could be hip. Lennon’s ‘‘brand’’ was largely the concoction of his savant-like manager Brian Epstein, who was sensitive and smart enough to realize that when he saw The Beatles, he was witnessing ‘‘the future.’’ It was this single recognition that makes him at least as important as the other builder of the brand, the gifted producer George Martin, who was sensitive and smart enough to assist raw genius in finding its formal manifestation. One built the image, the other built the sound. Together, they made us weep. The love affair between a music lover and the artists they most identify with reveals a secret emotional equation that allows us to calculate the weights of certain feelings, the temperature of others, the colors of still other sensations. This is, of course, an open secret. Anyone who has ever experienced a shiver of energy go down his or her spine when some powerful favorite song comes on knows what the secret tells us about ourselves: who we are, or at least who we imagine ourselves to be, which might be even more revealing in the long run. Pop music is actually all about a secret—knowing something others don’t know unless they listen to the same music. Listen. On The Beatles album Please Please Me (1963), we hear: ‘‘I’ve known a secret for a week or two, nobody knows, just we two.’’ But another sort of secret also exists at the heart and core of the most successful musical partnership in history. I’m not referring to the kind of secret like John being in love with Paul, though that was undoubtedly true (wouldn’t you be if you were him?). No, the secret is the other one, the fact that they were really only one person, or rather two halfpeople who truly became what Pete Townshend would later allude to as quadrophrenic. It inspired the almost magical alchemy between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The same secret exists at the center of the most notorious personal partnership in pop cultural history. It animates and explains the star-crossed and storm-tossed romance of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The same secret fuels the ongoing animus between the remaining members of an astonishingly fruitful and truly unique lover’s triangle, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. As early as the Help! period, Lennon was already suffocating with the weight of dreams fulfilled, and he was acting accordingly, or acting out

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perhaps. Then, by 1966, when the art of recording replaced the act of performing, his dissatisfaction had reached truly epic proportions, as had his plunge into his ego-melting medicines of choice. The closest thing to an autobiography John Lennon ever penned, apart from the harrowingly beautiful ‘‘Nowhere Man’’ in 1966 or its updated versions, ‘‘I’m Losing You’’ and the last gasp of ‘‘I Don’t Want to Face It,’’ from 1980, was his deceptively simple and exceedingly brave little book, Skywriting by Word of Mouth. Released posthumously, it was composed during the five-year period of seclusion leading up to his departure and has a goon-like spirit similar to that of his first two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, though less snappish and mean-spirited than either of these texts written in the first blush of his astronomical success. What it reveals, in his usual combination of brutal brilliance and subtle sensitivity, is the strong desire to be an artist rather than an entertainer, and the unbearable tension that this dichotomy caused him throughout his life and career. The pain he felt at the world’s reaction to his passionate love affair with the artistic woman he believed to be his soul mate is also in evidence, a simmering pain embedded between every vulnerable line he wrote.

For similar reasons, both Paul and Yoko loved and needed the remarkably gifted but emotionally doomed John Lennon. First, in order to transform the common base metal of everyday life into the gold of scintillating pop songs with striking poetic power. Second, to transmute the less lustrous fool’s gold that emerged from a somewhat pathological love affair played out on the world stage. Lennon was obviously weighed down by the inherent contradictions he felt in his public role and, paradoxically, he was equally burdened by his creative contributions to a radical new cultural landscape. His lot was to change forever the popular structure of music through experiment and innovation but also to motivate and fuel a massive entertainment machine that inhibits the free expression of that very innovation itself. So, he was able to start a revolution but was prevented, he thought, from continuing to be a revolutionary. Recall that Lennon curiously quipped (in Skywriting), ‘‘This is my story both humble and true, take it to pieces and mend it with glue.’’ All right then, we will. Lennon remains a glorious, inspiring, infuriating, and cracked jigsaw puzzle, all at once. But he is also surrounded by many other equally obscure and mystifying people-puzzles that also resist a clean assembly. Paul’s genius as a creative counterpart is undeniable, as is the complex puzzle of his own tenacious personality. But all puzzles tend to pale in comparison to the chameleon-like Yoko. She shares an intimate connection with the apparently sanguine McCartney, one which casts doubt on the myths attached to both of them.

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Lennon’s internal irony overload and meltdown was contained in that simmering paradox: how to have everything you ever dreamed about without losing your grip on the identity and personality out of which those dreams emerged. How could his group be both radically avant-garde and immensely popular at the same time? It was a case of fulfilled-dream syndrome, if ever I saw one. The subplot to this collision of the art and pop worlds is centered on Lennon’s unique creative relationships with his musical partners, which disintegrated prior to and in the wake of Yoko’s arrival on the pop culture stage. Lennon moved ever closer to creating a new kind of art with a different kind of collaborative muse. The key overlapping theme in both plots, however, was that of the mesmerizing opposing forces of highly combustible creative collaborations. As no less a contemporary musical maestro than the great American composer Aaron Copeland has remarked, ‘‘If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.’’ But although the music of The Beatles in general, and John Lennon’s caustic brilliance in particular, has now been enshrined in popular history and counterculture folklore, the values inherent in the historic period of the 60s which both produced and reflected his genius are still quite controversial. Still, the music remains, as enlivening and innovative as ever, and Lennon’s personal contribution to the culture’s forward momentum is undeniable. And though his own personal choices remained sacrosanct for him, even his most lurid mistakes being elevated to the status of a genius’s foibles, he himself was not as tolerant of the era he so personally helped to manufacture. MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head asks a very pertinent question about the mirror images of The Beatles and the 60s, wondering how, if their music was so intimately wedded to the times, it could ever escape the occasionally plausible criticisms of that period and its heady dreams. John Lennon was one of the first people to reject and repudiate The Sixties phenomenon. Talking to Rolling Stone in 1970, he dismissed the preceding years of social upheaval and countercultural revolt as little more than a clothes show: ‘‘Everyone dressed up but nothing changed.’’4 To Lennon, then rendered austere by Janov’s primal therapy, both the 60s and The Beatles seemed to have been divorced from reality: middle-class daydreams funded by unprecedented affluence and fueled by delusive drugs. So, insisted the therapeutically transformed and almost but not quite detoxified ex-Beatle, the ‘‘Dream’’ was over. Another equally important point to consider is the success of certain creative collaborators, such as The Beatles, who seem to intimately connect with the whole world as an audience and thrive doing so, yet they reserve a special and significant contempt for the very people who share their gifts most intimately: their songwriting partners. They disdain the very one on whom they depended in order to be fully complete. This can be witnessed most clearly in the inescapable facts of personal and professional needs. John

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Lennon was simply unable, after suffering his identity crisis, to ever acknowledge the necessity of Paul McCartney as his crucial partner in this remarkable alchemy. He could never ever actually say, ‘‘I need you,’’ to Paul, whereas in the case of his looming mother-goddess fixation, he could never say anything else to Yoko but ‘‘I need you.’’ But eventually, unlike Harrison’s plaintive love song of the same name, Lennon’s love affair would also include heroin, something obviously even worse for him and his creativity than LSD, the earlier expansive drug which had melted away his identity in the mid-60s. His pursuit of oblivion was relentless.

It was this drastic disillusionment of Lennon’s, fanned by his own creative insecurities after the beginning of the demise of The Beatles as early as 1965 (coinciding precisely with his discovery of lysergic acid) and thus long before the advent of Ono, which prompted his radical dismissal of his own rich history, his band, his success, his influence, and even his own identity. He was desperately searching for a way to reembrace an edginess in his work and beliefs that he associated with his proper birthright as an experimental artist (as he pondered: how could a truly dangerous and radical artist ever be so phenomenally successful from a purely commercial point of view?). In this passionate need to reassert that edginess, he was completely certain that his new love affair provided a way out of the morass of comfort food his own vital poetry had become. The discrepancy between his own fear and mistrust of the avant-garde and the profoundly avant-garde aspects of his own musical appetites has often been remarked upon. It spotlights not only his own wobbly sense of self but also the key differences between himself and his youthful songwriting partner, who was apparently considerably more comfortable at first with broad experimentation. It also focuses on the differences between their own unique teamwork and nearly everyone and everything else in that period of popular culture. The precious music of The Beatles, forged in the nearly supernatural merging of the sarcastic rage and profound insecurities of John Lennon with the sweet optimism and emotional self-control of Paul McCartney, remains inexplicable in its fresh energy and appeal to human hopes, even today. Today’s mega-pop groups such as Oasis, Blur, and U2 are but pale imitators. Clearly, Paul was able to ‘‘utilize’’ the maniacally raging John as a surrogate of sorts, traveling through him to an edge he could never reach alone, while John must have likewise benefited by using Paul as a surrogate for tender human feelings otherwise inaccessible to him. There was a surprising discrepancy between John’s and Paul’s own personal appreciation for the artistic edge, considering how truly trailblazing Lennon’s vision was and how conventional, though brilliantly conventional, McCartney’s vision was and remains to this day.

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In Revolution in the Head, MacDonald characterizes their curious amalgam as a classic clash between truth and beauty. Reflecting his sedentary, ironic personality, Lennon’s melodies tend to move up and down as little as possible, weaving deviously through their harmonies in chains of repeated notes. Basically a realist, he instinctively kept his melodies close to the rhythms and cadences of speech, coloring his lyrics with bluesy tone and harmony rather than creating tunes that made striking shapes of their own. McCartney’s lines by contrast display his extrovert energy and optimism, ranging freely across the stave in scaled steps and wide intervals, often encompassing more than an octave. His is the creation of the natural melodist, a creator of tunes capable of existing apart from their harmony—whereas Lennon’s lines tend to be allusive, moody affairs which make sense only when accompanied, particularly the more chromatic creations of his later style. McCartney’s method is, in terms of intervals, ‘‘vertical’’ (melodic, consonant) and Lennon’s is ‘‘horizontal’’ (harmonic, dissonant). Seeing music as a vehicle for thought and feeling, Lennon stressed expression at the expense of formal elegance, which held not interest or value for him per se. Intuitive, he cared little for technique and nothing for the rules, which he would go out of his way to break.5

But soon Lennon would court disaster: by abandoning the boys, by embracing a radical ‘‘art chick’’ from the future, by trying so desperately to purge himself of his success, or at least to top it somehow, he would break one rule too many for their and our liking. He, whose fragile personality buckled under the weight of drastic consciousness expansion, and whose identity was literally burned away under the constant torrent of acid he poured into his gifted brain, was desperately looking for a way out. Lennon was a mere shadow of his former self. Unfortunately, however, in order to save him, Yoko Ono somehow needed to become, not just his muse, but also his lost mother. In Dave Stubbs’s profile for UNCUT, the vulnerable Lennon was described as still bleeding from ancient wounds, Lennon took solace not just in a bad drugs habit, but in Yoko. . .Lennon retreated into a world of drugs, dreams and diaries . . .such a withdrawal elicited comparisons with Howard Hughes . . .while Lennon wanted peace for mankind, deep down he did not want peace in his own life, or rather, he was incapable of enjoying it.6

And now, both Sir Paul and Queen Yoko are the colegislators of a brilliant and beautiful legacy hammered together out of the white-hot competitive codependence of these two polar opposites. The 1998 rerelease of the so-called Let it Be. . .Naked original sessions from 1969, minus the Spector-drenched wallowing waterfall of sound, is a clear

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indication of Paul’s ongoing compulsion with ‘‘getting back’’ to his roots in a revisionist manner. As is Ono’s simultaneous release of The John Lennon Anthology box set, her own personal compulsions being evident in her perpetual tending to the garden of Lennon’s memory. Unfortunately for Paul, his powerfully creative and muse-like connection with John is all the more obvious today, when one recognizes that all of his post-Lennon music, while being perfectly crafted and very popular, is about as compelling as traveling in a cozy elevator. I do agree, however reluctantly, that it is indeed exquisitely beautiful elevator music. In contrast, Lennon’s astonishing collaborations with McCartney seem to be perpetually futuristic and fresh beyond measure. In the case of those rare examples of truly scintillating visionaries, such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Brian Wilson, in their evocative and emotional art they seemed to show us a future that we are still living in, perhaps one that hasn’t even arrived yet.

Ironically enough, it was the avuncular Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, someone who had his very own love-hate, master-muse relationship with mentor Sigmund Freud, who provides some of the most instructive explanations for the intriguing phenomenon of dynamic creative duos. He left us several useful blueprints for what amounts to a comparative morphology of totems. He put forth salient and seminal insights such as synchronicity, that destiny-drenched confluence of circumstances and temperaments that permits dynamic partnerships. He described the archetypes of the collective unconscious, that tantalizing template for the looming shapes these celebrated creators assume in all our lives. He presented his principle of psychological types, that cunningly balanced centrifugal force that binds an extreme introvert to an extreme extrovert and allows a pair of partial people to harmonize together into an archetypal myth. Uncle Carl apparently had more than a few canny insights into at least some of the mysterious alchemy at work here. Imagine, something as deceptively simple as his introvert-extrovert equation (translation: the question of whether we project our libidinous energy outward towards the objective world of objects and people or inward towards the subjective world of thoughts and ideas) shedding light on something as complex as these combustible creative partnerships and the effect their accomplishments have on our collective consciousness. These partnerships are all searchers on a quest for the holy grail of Lennon’s and McCartney’s kind of partnership, and even Lennon’s and Ono’s unearthly level of shared creativity. All other partnerships can be measured against the superlative merging of creative minds at work in the band from Liverpool. The Beatles, in general, as a creative unit of mutant

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musical magic, and Lennon and McCartney, in particular, as two halves of a significant whole best experienced together, are emblems of sterling shared talent at its most intense. Today they still provide the ideal lens through which to understand and appreciate one of the principal themes of this book. Both of the late Lennon’s ex-partners, the Superbowl-safe McCartney and the permanently enigmatic Ono, are still embroiled in their collaborative turmoil, and they are fully expected to make serious investment bids on the financially troubled Michael Jackson horde of musical rights to about 250 Beatles songs—each for their own perfectly justifiable reasons. ‘‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,’’7 John Lennon once cavalierly joked, in the usual off-the-cuff manner that often belied the profound truths hidden beneath his vulnerable and humorous armor. Few people he encountered would ever catch a glimpse of the soft soul crushed under that hard shell. The two people who did both feel it and fully appreciate it would later become his first songwriting partner and his second wife. It gives the term love triangle a whole new meaning. And today, Sir Paul keeps on keeping on, and keeps on trying to ‘‘get back,’’ as he tells us in his latest single, from last year’s album of the same name, Ever Present Past. This pervasive sense of what is gone drives him to question the reality of those times, and hope ‘‘there’s something to find,’’ in that vague history ‘‘that has gone so fast,’’ and that once seemed to be eternally guaranteed. No sarcastic remarks here about his current level of songwriting, just a wistful sigh in recognition of how much we all miss John Lennon. And no one misses him more than what’s left of Paul McCartney.

10 The Party Givers: Mick Jagger/Keith Richards Beasts of Burden

The acceptance of Jagger’s voice on pop radio was a turning point for rock and roll. He broke open the door for everybody else. It was completely unique: a white performer doing it in a black way. There were no other white boys doing this. White singers stood there and sang, like The Beatles. Not being in control: that’s what Mick Jagger was communicating.1 Steve Van Zandt

The Rolling Stones were often referred to as the Anti-Beatles, and, of course, stylistically they were. But they were also the anti-fabs in another way, a more emphatic way which has allowed them to survive and thrive where their magnificent peers could not. They somehow knew, early on, that rock ’n’ roll, apart from being a lifestyle, was also a business, a big corporate business. They never shunned the fact that they were in the business of satisfying desire. Money mattered, and it wasn’t the root of all evil, it was just the root of them. No one else writes in the personally-propelled style of these two great 60s titans, each one composing his own vision but also sharing it with the stylistic voice of his partner in a highly combustible relationship. The relationship has lasted more than 40 years and is still fueled by the same emotional ingredients and individual compulsions that gave birth to a perpetual inability to get ‘‘no satisfaction.’’

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The obvious reason they were able to outlast and outplay their great rivals, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, is really twofold. First, they were fully aware of how much they needed each other in order to accomplish their mission, and they were ready to make the necessary compromises to do so. Second, they fully realized the sordid fact that music is about entertainment, no matter how much we tend to be transported by its tangible transcendental qualities. Both groups also had a Svengali-like packaging genius to guide them through their early days, Brian Epstein for the Fabs and Andrew Loog Oldham for the Dregs. Oldham all but manufactured the madness surrounding Jagger and Richards, especially when it came to the ascent and conquering of America. Arriving stateside only four months after The Beatles arrived, The Rolling Stones, not yet the global entity we know as The Stones, were not so much made by America, like The Beatles, they were literally made in America, like a brilliant product which no one knew we really desperately needed. They became American, and subsequently global, by totally accepting the roots of the music which had so inspired them as reckless youths. And what raw youths they were. Mike Jagger and ‘‘Keef’’ Richards were childhood neighbors and first became school chums, then gang chums, then musical cult chums, and finally, songwriting chums. The similarities between the two competing groups were always stronger than their differences, apart from the obvious surface details. The Stones managed to remain exactly as they were, exactly as raunchy as The Beatles had been in the sweaty, amphetamine-drenched bars of Hamburg before becoming global stars. The Stones maintained their grip on their grit, in an almost maniacal and compulsive manner. The Beatles had been performing at a fever pitch in Germany, clad in black leather, snarling sexuality and rage, and they would commence doing something vaguely similar at the famous Cavern back in England, but they would quickly be redesigned by the brilliant Epstein, whose personal vision and lifestyle focused on their latent homoerotic energies.Once he stuffed them into those cute suits, however, the paradox of the power contained and the energy released was so perfectly balanced, in an off-kilter kind of way, that the world literally went quite bonkers for his boys. Epstein was a primitive fey genius! The Stones, by contrast, held on to that same dark frenzy as if it were their own, and indeed it was: they were about to make being a wicked alternative to The Beatles into a lifelong business venture, one that left their early competitive mates in the dust of trying to change the world. The Stones didn’t want to change the world, they wanted to own it, and now, at least in terms of being the sole rock legend currently operating at an intense level, they still do. No one else but The Who managed to inject as much fury, lust, and wealth into the search for psychological bliss and oblivion. The two gifted impresarios who basically invented both The Beatles and The Stones, Epstein and Oldham, respectively, both took their groups into

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an arena where they commanded ultimate respect, but each were respected for different reasons. The Beatles were Olympian because they gave everyone what they wanted, a vision of the world wrapped in sparkling joy; The Stones were Olympian because they gave everyone else what they needed, a snapshot of the world as an endless party designed to satisfy every appetite, no matter how sordid. And one other similarity, a sad and wistful one, bound and binds them together historically: the leaders of each group, Lennon and Richards, sank into a self-induced vegetative state due to overzealous indulgence in the psychic vitamins of the 1960s. In both cases, the bands had to be redirected by a collaborative partner, McCartney and Jagger, who each took control of his group once his partner was so out of it that reliable creative or business decisions were out of the question. In both instances, the angst that resulted from the nominal leader’s dethronement threatened to destroy the perfectly balanced dynamics of the partnerships. For The Beatles, that angst succeeded in doing so, with Lennon continuing to strip himself of every shred of personal identity until he ended up a ghost in the Dakota in New York, psychologically dead long before his actual murder. With The Stones, however, even though Keith Richards had sadly and literally turned into the late Brian Jones, acting out the wasted wretch role for the next four decades, something inside him, and even more importantly, something inside of Jagger, prevented them from going down in the same selfindulgent ego flames that engulfed their great competitors. John’s group lasted eight years, during which the group changed music and culture on a grand scale. Keith’s group lasted five times that long, reinventing several times the black music the group had inherited, and living on a grand scale unimagined by even the most successful of its peers.

Only Fleetwood Mac managed to survive the 1960s so profoundly, morphing, like The Stones into a successively evolving institution, which, in Mac’s case at least, led the group from being a British Blues band to an American progressive rock band, and finally, to a Californian pop band of supreme sophistication and equivalent commercial success. But The Stones did it without ever really softening their style, as The Beatles did originally, or mutating it, as Mick Fleetwood continues to do, but rather by digging deeper into the guts of what makes them who they really were and are. They did it through writing their lives while living it, just as all the best songwriters always do. Since this is a chronicle about the dark mirror reflecting the pathologies that make for great songs, and because some of those songs can only be born from the doubled-head of two partners, we need to devote special attention to the near mystical relationship between songwriting partners who complement and complete each other, as well as contradict and compete with each other.

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The result of their shared spirit is that shiny but scary raw material we are all looking for: a perfect song. Songs like ‘‘Highway 61,’’ ‘‘God Only Knows,’’ ‘‘Urge for Going,’’ ‘‘Young Americans,’’ ‘‘Hang On St. Christopher,’’ ‘‘Shipbuilding,’’ ‘‘I’m Only Sleeping,’’ or ‘‘Gimme Shelter.’’ Great songs tumble like dice out of the clenched and dented imaginations of their makers, whether alone or writing eyeball to eyeball. McCartney’s ‘‘Yesterday’’ and Richards’s ‘‘Satisfaction’’ were both written off the cuff in a semi-conscious state of near-slumber, from which their messengers suddenly emerged with ‘‘the riff.’’ Then it was back to bed and blank oblivion, the only safe and secure place for either a Beatle or a Stone. Though Lennon and McCartney were the holy grail of contemporary singer-songwriters in a partnership, just as Dylan was and still is the highwater mark for doing it solo, no template can adequately explain the magic itself. Not even the songwriters themselves really know where these things come from. ‘‘If I knew where the good songs come from,’’ Leonard Cohen once remarked, ‘‘I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.’’2 Paul Zollo, author of Songwriters on Songwriting and himself a practitioner of the dark craft, put it this way, Through the years, I’ve hoped to find some formula, some trick or method, that would make songwriting simple. But there is none. Unlike magicians who create the illusion of magic, writing a song is genuine magic, miraculous even to those making the miracles. Most songwriters are in awe of the great songs that came through them, and not one can offer an easy answer as to how they do it because there are no easy answers. That’s what makes it so attractive, Bob Dylan said, there’s no rhyme or reason to it, there’s no rule.3

But still, it is a game of sorts, and all games have rules. As usual, Mr. Dylan was being horrifyingly oversimplistic, which is what he does so well, reducing everything to a few glittering kernels in the palm of your hand. If there were no rules, then we would have no way of according a masterpiece such as ‘‘Like a Rolling Stone’’ the proper worship it truly deserves. We wouldn’t be able to recognize what makes ‘‘Drive My Car,’’ ‘‘Paperback Writer,’’ or ‘‘Sympathy for the Devil’’ so magnificent. So, there may not be any rules for making magic, but there sure are plenty of them for appreciating it. For Zollo, both a maker and an appreciator, the confirmational aspect of appreciating great songs is tied to the realization that at bottom, These songwriters, all of whom have created extraordinary work, are regular folks who dwell in our ordinary world. And it’s a peculiar kind of realization, because their songs are infinite and eternal—everywhere at once—untouched by time. Yet the songwriters themselves are as finite and earthbound as the rest of us. It underscores the knowledge that all songwriters are in the same boat,

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and that even the most enduring and magical of their songs began where all songs begin—with a single spark of inspiration that is balanced with the mastery of craft that comes from years of work.4

In their four most creatively realized and idiosyncratically perfect albums, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street, The Stones literally invented the location where rock ’n’ roll turns into rock music. In their three best albums of sheer male mayhem and magnificently raunchy mysticism, Aftermath, Between the Buttons, and Their Satanic Majesties Request, they abandoned all constraint and made themselves into a mythical monster that would be able to survive, against all odds, for nearly half a century. As usual, the founder and still nominal leader of the group, Keith Richards, said it best: We’d somehow turned into a bete noir for the British establishment. And they really pulled all their big guns on us. But you can’t keep a good man down. I really felt that the establishment was out to split up The Stones. They realized that they’d buttered up The Beatles too much and that they couldn’t hit them because they’d given them medals. Right? So we were obviously the ones they hit on. We were the flavor of the year for several years actually. Not that we didn’t ask for it in some ways.5

Whereas The Beatles, utilizing a rare gift that has yet to be equaled, seemed to peel off perfect songs relentlessly, The Stones’ composers had to rip the material out of their insides. They literally had to be locked in a room together by Loog Oldham in order to get their first original song out of them. But when it did surface, ‘‘As Tears Go By’’ became a clear indication of the competitive creative spirit at work between Richards and Jagger. Though their work came with some degree of difficulty attached, it did have some unique qualities that set the songwriters apart from their peers in a clear and dangerous manner. For one thing, they avoided the use of anything metaphorical in their messages, eschewing any kind of euphemism for what they were really saying. When The Stones sang ‘‘I want to be your lover baby, I want to be your man,’’ in a song bestowed upon them by John and Paul in a moment of early communal sharing (‘‘I Want to Be Your Man’’), no one had to wonder what they meant. From the beginning, they told it like it was, like it is, to successive generations of mostly young males who needed a place to store all of their angry lust and youthful bravado. So they stored it in the warehouse known as the glimmer twins, Richards and Jagger. Like John and Paul, they were pals from childhood, and also like them they styled their intimacy and closeness on the model of brothers who can fight

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each other passionately while managing to commit themselves with equal passion to their mission: world domination. Or at least domination of the musical world, where they have rested on an ever-increasing pile of laurels for a longer time than any one of us ever thought possible. One critic recently bravely inquired as to the obvious: ‘‘How do you respond to those critics who say The Stones should have had the decency to pack it in long ago?’’ He received the following ideal response from Richards: Since nobody has sailed this sea before, one expects some storms and some choppy waters. Why we’re still here is simply because we love what we do and there’s loads of people out there who want to see it. When it comes down to it, that’s really all it is. It would be easy for me to give up and say I can’t be bothered to be sniped at any more about ‘‘wrinkly rockers’’ and all of that. But then what do the critics know? They’ve never been on this sea before and neither have we. We’re just floating out there and seeing where it can go.6

Wait a minute, The Stones and decency in the same question? What do critics know, indeed? What they should know, at least, is that Richards is making a very telling point. The fact is that rock music is almost the same age as The Stones are. It started in 1956, and five years later, The Stones had mastered its morphing styles and made them their own. The true experiment here is not one of corporate greed at all, but rather the option of treating rock music with the same veneration as senior players in any other musical style. We all accepted the fact that Duke Ellington played jazz until he couldn’t stand up anymore, and Muddy Waters, a personal icon for Richards, was still playing blues long after he could walk properly. The Stones are asking us all a simple question by their longevity: yes, we know that rock is about youthful rebellion, but isn’t it just possible that it’s really more about rebellion in general? And to the same critic who asked the decency question, Richards answered a question as to what was the best thing about being 60, with exactly the same degree of brutal honesty: ‘‘The fact that people still dig what I do, which gives me the licence to carry on being myself.’’7 In other words, it’s us, all of us, who give him permission to do what he continues doing so well. We are the ones who want to see just how far he can go, especially since he’s already gone all the way in the first place. He went all the way with his first big hit, ‘‘Satisfaction,’’ ages ago. As Loog Oldham, The Stones’ early mentor and manager said so long ago, ‘‘How to keep the dream alive? Keep it moving!’’8 He also described the kind of camaraderie that keeps a cult like The Stones in functioning order, quite apart from the special brain vitamins they consumed like candy in order to inspire more creativity. ‘‘We would talk ourselves into the bravura of protective armor we’d need to wear to confront those in our way. We can change the world, was the mantra of the day, the universal law and order would come later.’’9 But, of course, the new order

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never did arrive—the world remained unchanged; it was just better entertained by the majesty of both their excess and their success. Soon enough, as Oldham famously put it, ‘‘A thirsty evil was starting to permeate our proceedings.’’10 It always does. It happened to The Beatles on a grand scale, just as it happens to everyone the public anoints in a like manner. The Stones were just gutsy enough to put up with it, not only longer than anyone else (perhaps with the exception of The Who), but also with greater stage grace and emotionally manipulative skills.

For Pete Townshend, another of the great dark mirrors trapped in a volatile creative partnership made in hell (with Roger Daltrey), the distinctions that made The Stones unique were perfectly clear. He declared: The Beatles were very remote as people. They were already huge cumbersome stars. I used to think The Beatles were very old fashioned, even when they were new. That’s how it seemed. Because The Stones built the wall, they couldn’t see it as clearly as we would, The Who, or Small Faces. I think that The Stones also could not see that they’d built it and The Beatles hadn’t. The rules were laid down: you do not sing about fucking love, you don’t do it, you don’t sing soppy love songs. That was just ruled out.11

Living the life you sang about suddenly became more important than longing for the life you loved, and it was Oldham’s early influence on The Stones that prepared them for their longevity, and for a life of authentically raw rock sensibility. That’s why he remains so important historically, long after The Stones left him behind to become corporate monsters. Alan McGee, the head of Creation Records, along with Immediate, one of the first independent record labels, got it right when he said, If all Mr. Oldham had ever done in this life was to bring to stardom The Rolling Stones, that would be enough in itself to merit an award of some kind. But in reality we are looking at someone who did nothing less than originate the pop life as we live it. Not many people fundamentally changed the rules of the world they work in. Here’s to one who did.12

The band he pulled together and pointed in their current direction some four decades ago continues to perpetuate the climate of radical change in which they themselves were born, even though that wistful utopian illusion was actually over by late 1968. ‘‘Quite simply,’’ Oldham said in his memoirs, I personally feel that The Rolling Stones are the world’s best rock ’n’ roll band. Mick wants to do new things. He would much prefer to be David Bowie than have to work with Keith Richards, because when he makes a

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record now he has to deal with the fact that Keith Richards wants to be like Muddy Waters and grow old and die playing the blues.13

What keeps them together is knowing that they can never function properly apart, that and the fact that what doesn’t kill them definitely makes them stronger. But stronger than what? Well, since the crux of most creative collaborations and partnership collapses is egomania and the denial of mutual need, apparently The Rolling Stones have proven to be far stronger than The Beatles. Stronger than dirt. The Beatles were larger than life, but for more than 40 years, The Stones have been stronger than death.

11 The Pretension Wreckers: Pete Townshend/Roger Daltrey Can You See the Real Me?

The Who began as a spectacle. They became spectacular. They asked, what were the limits of rock and roll? Could the power of music actually change the way you feel? The songwriter-listener relationship grows deeper after all the years.1 Eddie Vedder

Things had gotten pretty fancy in the world of pop music, things had become a lot more serious than its progenitors— Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley—had probably ever intended. Things had gotten out of hand. Someone had to come in and return to the roots, to shake up the party and storm the pretentious castle. But this being rock, they had to do it in an even more bombastic and outrageous fashion than the very stylistic inflation they were trying to wreck. Hidden behind blue eyes, the novel mind of Pete Townshend produces marvelous lyrics that apparently can only be properly interpreted and delivered by his longtime performing companion, Roger Daltrey, his surrogate and emblem. The ongoing history of The Who is one of ultimately dangerous mindsets, which nonetheless sums up many of the insecurities, fears, and foibles of the average listener, reflected through the performer. How they manage to do this is the subject of a chapter that will take a cold, hard look at whether Townshend is a fully functioning creative artist or a dysfunctional

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emotional wreck who succeeds in hiding his troubled torment behind the power and voltage of his band’s musical ventures. Or perhaps, both? There is a definite inkling that of all the singer-songwriters under examination, Pete Townshend, who after all is The Who, or rather they are his living surrogates for self-expression, is probably the dark mirror par excellence. In him we see the most unconcealed and unvarnished examples of the pathology of this kind of self-referential singer, songwriter, and artist. In him we see the living entity once called by Edgar Allan Poe, the ‘‘imp of the perverse,’’ the spirit deep inside that advises us to do the very thing that is often against our own best interests. And for all of us, that imp is somewhat different, if equally self-destructive. When his intriguing but jumbled project called Lifehouse collapsed in 1970, under exactly the same circumstances that caused Brian Wilson’s Smile project to fall apart in 1967 (namely, the fact that their bandmates simply could not understand the striking new direction these artists were attempting to formulate for the experimental phase of their brands), Townshend revamped the material in order to launch the ideas in the more trusted format of a straightforward rock record. The result, Who’s Next, remains a masterpiece of Who purity, containing some of their finest anthems, whereas Wilson imploded and retreated to his bedroom for years, leaving The Beach Boys to cobble together ersatz Smile fragments over three subsequent recordings. Townshend has a similar vulnerable and fragile self-image, but it is encased in a brilliantly sharp and brittle armor that could not be broken or dented by the mere lack of comprehension of his band. It was, however, severely scratched, and that led to a further disintegration of an already volatile working collaboration with all concerned—especially Roger Daltrey. After Live at Leeds, possibly the greatest live rock record in history, he reformulated his pattern again, this time exploring the very disintegration of his band through the dazzling template of his double record Quadrophenia, an even more daring sonic experiment than his more famous Tommy opera. Quadrophenia documented the dissolution of his band, of all bands, with exactly the same rigor as did The Beatles’ White Album, except The Beatles were doing it unconsciously, making four different records disguised as a group release. Townshend and The Who, however, disguised nothing; they never did, since it was their task to counterbalance the profound sanctity that had grown up around rock music and to return it to its nastier, grittier, and louder roots. ‘‘Who’s Next is about the way music works, and how an audience is ostensibly there to see a band but really there to see itself.’’2 This is one of the best unconscious descriptions of what it means to be a dark mirror, to mine your own misery, and occasionally your own bliss, for the emotional raw material of your songs.

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It’s been the same through Townshend’s and his band members’ careers, although often camouflaged by the intricate and ornate structures Townshend builds to protect his own vulnerable pathologies: If you look at The Who’s history it’s easy to forget that we started with ‘‘I Can’t Explain,’’ which was a desperate copy of The Kinks. The Kinks were just spectacularly brilliant. People in America talk about The Beatles, The Stones, The Who. For me, it’s The Beatles, The Stones, The Kinks.3

Seldom is a genius quite so modest as this, especially in rock music, not an industry known for sharing glory. But from the very beginning, under the tutelage of the visionary Kit Lambert, The Who’s own Brian Epstein and Andrew Loog Oldham, Townshend knew that their vital role was also a crucial one if rock was to not only survive but evolve. As Townshend himself put it, ‘‘He [Lambert] knew there were pretensions to be broken.’’ 4 And wreck those pretensions they did, along with their instruments and amplifiers as well, just for good measure, in case any in the audience were too out of it to notice their musical mission statement.

Once Townshend and Daltrey had clearly established their grasp of ‘‘the angry young sound of pop art in motion,’’ they also defined the age in which they were living. But with their own aging, as well as the corporate rock culture that developed around them (and The Stones), even their personal dynamics have softened somewhat. Well, a lot actually, considering the roots of their rage towards each other. UNCUT Magazine captured its essence a couple of years ago when it examined the fact that these two just cannot stop, either fighting or creating together. One thing quickly becomes clear: Roger Daltrey, for years Townshend’s foil and combatant in The Who, and once famously referred to by Pete as ‘‘the little cunt,’’ is these days the object of nothing but praise. Since they first played together as The Detours in 1962, the friction between the two men has driven the group, and their polarized personalities—Roger, the non-nonsense Sherpard’s Bush hardman, Pete, the free-thinking art student—have punctuated virtually every chapter in The Who’s story with off-stage rows, songs, money, drugs, direction, leadership.5

Today, with their two key musical mates dead and gone but they themselves unable to stop their creative pattern, Endless Wire is their latest outing. But at this late date, even some of their own diehard fans are starting to wonder what makes them carry on as they delve deeper and deeper into a dimly lit dead-end street of personal hubris and professional exorcism.

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One correspondent even used unusually caustic but highly insightful language to describe his own distaste for the bottomless well of Townshend’s suffering in public. Keith Rodway wrote to Mojo to express his incisive displeasure in these terms: Having lived with the new Who album for just under a week, I’ve reached the conclusion that the world no longer needs to hear from Pete Townshend, as his world-view has become micro-solipsistic to the point that he’s incapable of writing about anything but himself. And frankly, what Pete does, thinks or writes, is irrelevant to a world that has, in the 24 years since The Who’s last album, or more importantly, 33 years since their last good album, simply moved on. Moreover, the fact that it ‘‘sounds’’ like The Who smacks of a marketable merchandise rather than the natural work of an artistic mind. The Who were great in their day. This is not their day. The Who are a monument to the past, but no longer a vital force capable of changing the world. But let’s not pretend that it means anything to anyone but Pete himself, and diehard Who completists. If he has anything to say about the world as it exists beyond his own self, let’s hear it.6

But Rodway is forgetting two important things about the dark mirror phenomenon of singer-songwriters in general, all of the singer-songwriters in this book for instance, and about Pete Townshend in particular, whether young or old. First, the early music of all of the brilliant geniuses in question, but especially of The Beatles, The Stones, and The Who partnerships (and also the gargantuanly gifted Mr. Dylan), only sounded like it was changing the world. The world did not exactly change so much as morph into where it was headed all along. The artists did, however, provide the soundtrack to the movie we all watched and thought or imagined was capable of changing the world. Second, the danger of solipsism, the notion that only the self exists or can be proven to exist, is one of the inherent and key occupational hazards of being a dark mirror in the first place, whether as a solo artist or in a partnership. Solo ipsis, from the Greek, is the great challenge facing all those who go down into the mining shaft to retrieve the raw ore that we mine into our precious little gems and jewels: songs that articulate our own feelings. But whose perspective, other than solely their own, do we honestly expect our singer-songwriters to use? That, after all, is what draws us to them—the fact that they can craft beauty out of their own plight.

The Who’s music, and all of Townshend’s private creative output as well (almost as impressive), was always only about them, and him. We only dreamed that they were speaking to and for and about us. We mistook the reflections in their mirrors for our own faces, largely because they do their job of projection so perfectly well.

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Daltrey once astutely referred to what they do together as ‘‘musical wrestling,’’ and that’s still the best description I’ve ever heard of the process that they shared with the almost combative partners in their peer bands, The Beatles and The Stones. And this doesn’t mention the many other creative marriages made in hell we’ll cover through charting this tempestuous territory. ‘‘The Who’s turbulent history: it’s a tale of triumph, disappointment, betrayal, failed technology, mental instability—and mounting tensions between Townshend and singer Daltrey which erupted into arguably the most celebrated fistfight in rock ’n’ roll,’’7 declared Pat Gilbert in Mojo Magazine. And after yet another Townshend reunion with his iconic front man, Keith Rodway observed in UNCUT: ‘‘Fans will be intrigued by the revelation that the pair are bickering just like they did in the old days. ‘Let’s just say we don’t please each other all the time’ says Daltrey. Also adding the crux to their credo, ‘He is able to get inside of my head and I get inside his.’’’8 This last line illustrates why creative collaborators who form lasting and iconic partnerships can’t do it with anyone else, and why they feel so trapped and doomed by that intimate bond. They want to be solo artists, or at least to do what they do with someone else, anyone else sometimes, but they can’t—it just doesn’t work that way. Lennon without McCartney is a viciously sarcastic moaner; McCartney without Lennon is a sappy sentimentalist. Together, they’re the greatest songwriting team in history. The same goes for the others, with varying degrees of the same stylistic proviso: Richards and Jagger, Simon and Garfunkel, John and Taupin, and so many, many others. Once the chemical compound of opposites is taken apart, nothing exists—the magic has vanished before our eyes, and of course, our ears. Ben Ratliff of the New York Times was underwhelmed by one of The Who’s many perpetual reunions back in 2004 at Madison Square Gardens: Mr. Townshend and Mr. Daltrey could be writing more new songs, but this band has been breaking up, each time theoretically for good, since drummer Keith Moon died in 1978. They could change their sound, or find new stimuli, or be more elegant and stop publicly calling it quits. But having problems with being in a rock band has always been The Who’s chemistry.9

Actually, that’s the chemistry of all dark mirrors everywhere—having to do what they don’t want to do, but have to do, because no one else but them can do it. Besides, we won’t let them stop, because if they’re too old to rock, then we’re too old to roll!

When Sean O’Hagan interviewed Townshend around the time of his dire and distressing dalliance with Internet child pornography, he summed up his stance regarding Townshend’s invulnerable importance perfectly, after carefully navigating around Townshend’s notoriously brittle exterior:

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The Who, you see, were not just an ordinary pop group. They were one of the select few who changed the way a generation, and every ensuing generation, looked at the world. In England, as Townshend has often said, they were a reaction against the stultifying conservatism of the times and against what he calls ‘‘that whole sense of postwar denial.’’ Unlike The Beatles, who were lovable, and The Stones, who were sexual, The Who were simply fucked up and angry. Their music evinced aggression and frustration, and spoke of a deep and violent sense of impatience with the old order. And, they were Mods: modernists who merged terrace hooliganism with art school attitude. Long before punks stole their stance, The Who, and Pete Townshend in particular, seemed both supremely bored and effortlessly provocative. He didn’t pen silly love songs about being 64; he said what he felt about a world run by people who seemed suddenly to be old and in the way.10

Like most of the talented titans who rose to the top of the heap during this upheaval period, Townshend has often eschewed the very format that got him there and lamented the lack of ongoing inspiration available through the vehicle that he himself invented. This is what leads him to make provocative statements like his recent comments about certain famous Who songs that have been licensed to television. He has declared, in fact, that he would much rather sell his songs to the varied CSI mystery franchises, rather than ever have to perform those f’ing Who songs again. As if we would ever believe that, when the evidence is so much to the contrary. But his disingenuous statements bring up a valuable point: just how do such raucous and revolutionary songs become morphed into the themes for highly commercial television fodder, which on the surface at least are operating in the opposite direction from the insights that fuel them? The same way we suppose, that Beatles, Stones, and Dylan songs have been co-opted to sell everything from cars to shoes. Everything dangerous eventually becomes safe, or at least safely dangerous. Thus, the original CSI program used ‘‘Who Are You,’’ the song from the album of the same name which was the last gasp of the great drummer Keith Moon back in 1978. ‘‘Who are you, who who, who who?’’ But then, of course, that program had no use for the rest of this interesting song that had lines such as, ‘‘I spit out like a sewer hole, yet still receive your kiss, how can I measure up to anyone now, after such a love as this?’’ For the CSI: NY version of the series, a classic song from Who’s Next was given the same opening theme treatment, the mysteriously magical ‘‘Baba O’Reilly’’: ‘‘The exodus is here, the happy ones are near, let’s get together, before we get much older. Teenage wasteland, they’re all wasted!’’ The show’s ‘‘theme’’ song eliminates the most compelling parts of the song’s lyrics. And for the latest installment of the murder mystery series, CSI: Miami, another song from Who’s Next gets the cash-in treatment, this time

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one of Townshend’s best, ‘‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’’: ‘‘I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution, take a bow for the new revolution, smile and grin at the change all around.’’

Larry David Smith, in his excellent study of Townshend’s creative dynamic and personal demons, isolated an impulse that is of great importance to our understanding—not just of The Who’s magic, or of Townshend’s own brilliant rage, but of the creative nature of any singer-songwriter who needs to share space with a partner in order to get his or her message across. That impulse is the powerful desire to divest oneself of a partner and be a successful solo artist in one’s own right. Due to Townshend’s apparent ideal reflection of his audience’s appetites, he often appears to be more approachable, at least on the surface. In reality, he is the same stature of rock god as Lennon or Dylan, but his immediacy and ability to voice his audience’s fears and feelings makes him open to being accosted in surprising ways. In the earliest days he was accosted by young kids in the streets of London who thanked him for giving voice to their concerns in both ‘‘I Can’t Explain’’ and ‘‘My Generation.’’ As corny as it sounds, that was the moment when he knew he had a sense of responsibility to tell the story, their story, adequately. In the later Who days, the late 80s, after the band had largely used up its usefulness to Townshend as a rock-auteur, he was accosted by people his own age who griped: ‘‘Why don’t you blokes do something fucking decent, like in the old days?’’ Weirdly, it could have been the same person—a young kid applauding his idol one minute, and an older peer the next, though separated by some 40 years or so. Smith astutely points out: This is the minstrel’s dilemma: a condition fostered by the complex relationships that exist between artist, his/her artistic aims, the commercial art industry, and his/her audience. According to Townshend, the audience gives you stardom and demands that you do what it wants. Therefore, artists negotiate. If they are unwilling to enter into these negotiations, disappearing is a likely option.11

Townshend is the exemplar of the clever negotiator, but all great creative stars, no matter how long they burned, were challenged by the same forces in the marketplace—they needed to deliver what was on the menu designed by the diners, or in this case, the listeners. Tensions over audience expectations dogged Dylan, the dark mirror exemplar. His actions occasionally backfired on him, when he tried to introduce the future too quickly. Brian Wilson faced a wave of resistance to his revised compositional style, which knocked him off his imaginary surfboard and confined

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him to bed. Audience expectations persistently pester Elvis Costello, as he continually changes his delivery system to match the design of his content. Expectations typecast Marianne Faithfull, first as the ingenue muse deluxe, and later as the whore junkie divine. They haunted Joni Mitchell until she almost resigned as the torch bearer in protest about how the music business had turned her into ‘‘cookies.’’ David Bowie was not as impacted by expectations, because the audience gave him permission to be ‘‘different’’ every time he appeared on its fickle altar. Self-expectations, amplified by the most intense public response in history, started to erode The Beatles from the inside, until they really were a living embodiment of the quadrophrenic personality. But out of this whole motley crew of equally gifted and equally twisted geniuses, only The Stones and The Who, and later Pete Townshend as a successful solo artist, managed to morph along with the audience as it aged, as it allowed them to age with it and to continue reflecting their collective face and faces. Now, it is only Townshend who continues to consistently give voice to a troubled audience. He refuses to conceal his frailty, his vulnerability, his compulsions, and his pathology. His surrogate self and voice, Roger Daltrey, once commented that Pete would be a great songwriter only as long as he had the proverbial blues hellhound on his trail. Either Daltrey is buying into a popular myth about suffering producing great poetry, or he is right on the bull’s-eye in a disturbing way that cautions us about projecting too much into these dark mirrors, or reading too much into what they reflect back. Let’s approach the subject, however, as if both options were true, because, as usual, they are. Townshend, like his polar star, Costello, crafts songs out of the thin emotional air inside his rarefied personality, including all its roughhewn edges. I can’t really explain what happens when I write songs. I think writing is a mysterious process until you look back on it. And then like a critic—like a clever critic—you can see clearly. Why I’m attracted to the idea of storytelling, as a songwriter, is because it allows me to get closer to people with my heart ideas. . .. I don’t think that genius is a part of rock and roll, I think it’s an instinctive process. A bit like sport. If you can do it, you can do it.12

The purpose of rock music, its function, is patently obvious to someone like Townshend. And Smith’s critical context sets the stage for it: ‘‘Rock addresses a specific moment in our individual lives and provides a means for our individual search for identity.’’13 He stopped just short of describing the dark mirror aspect of the singer-songwriter’s craft and curse—the hyper-personal realm of the solipsist. Then Townshend clarifies it so utterly: ‘‘I think the function started to be about the fact that we needed music which was about escape. I think rock and roll now can be defined as this: it’s the dynamic between confrontation and escape.’’14

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This has to be one of the most perfectly awake and alert observations about the energy source at the molten core of rock and roll music (when it’s created by masters at the level of The Beatles, The Stones, The Who [and yes Pete, The Kinks]) that I’ve ever heard. This observation is equally true of those whose own idiosyncratic musical styles took them far up the road from the raw elements of original rock: David Bowie, Tom Waits, Elton John, and even Fleetwood Mac eventually. They all used their personal lives as the raw material for missives directed to a specific and unique audience, one that gets cranky when it is no longer being reflected quite the way it feels it ought to be—the way it imagined it was being celebrated in the first place.

In the case of Townshend and Daltrey, since one is the theatrical evocation, manifestation, and even simulacrum of the other, we see the epitome of the collaborative process so exemplified and raised to high art by Lennon and McCartney, Richards and Jagger, Simon and Garfunkel, and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Perhaps the long lost sublimated romance of Elton John and Bernie Taupin puts them in this same category of collaborators. These successful collaborations are marriages made in hell, where one’s intimate partner is someone with whom one creates great art, in this case wonderful songs and music, but with whom one is at war on all other levels. Townshend faced this battle throughout his career with The Who and beyond it, to this day tied to Daltrey in the public imagination in exactly the morbid way that Paul Simon is tied to Art Garfunkel and Paul McCartney, even sadder, is tied to John Lennon. These are the ties that bind, securing the other half of their creative spirits, personifying a part of their own pathologies. Two brilliant half-components that together make something above and beyond the considerable talents of either one separately—kind of like a human personification of the dynamic between confrontation (Lennon) and escape (McCartney). Suddenly the creative personality phenomenon of the singer-songwriter takes on a clarity usually associated with those eureka moments in science: we can see clearly how distressing it must be to realize that when it came to the secret of making some of the most unique and permanently fresh lyrical music in our popular musical history, they were merely half a person. Creatively speaking of course. Islands deliver their message alone and continents deliver theirs in tandem with an alter ego so profoundly connected to their success that they barely have a tangible existence apart from their sibling-like mirror image, and through whom they look together in order to both write and sing the songs. This is truly a remarkable case of one mirror facing another, surely the only metaphor suitable for describing the results when Lennon and McCartney sat down to write a song ‘‘eye to eye,’’ as they often liked to put it, or even more staggering, when Bob Dylan sat down by himself to write his own. When it

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comes to doing what we need dark mirrors to do, that’s the gold standard by which everyone after needs to be judged.

Townshend spent himself through his successive phases: singles greatness (almost as rapid and rare as The Beatles’ early ‘‘proto-punk’’ stage); the operatic phase, which he himself largely invented (apart from The Pretty Things’ contribution of SF Sorrow in 1968); The Who phase; his rich mature solo stage; and even his inevitable reprise of The Who brand with 2007’s Endless Wire. All are part of his original Holy Grail—that schizoid dynamic between leaping and fighting or running and hiding that is his own personal rosetta stone. The energy he brought to each of his projects, Who or otherwise, remains constant. ‘‘The Who reinforced its violent image through the words of a songwriter who could instinctively articulate individual cries of frustration and rebellion. Moreover, Towshend was quite willing to cultivate those instincts to accommodate commercial objectives.’’15 Shockingly, after all he’s been through, he still is just as ready as ever to either capitulate or go kaput, since his role and function, like all the others who would challenge the dangers of utterly solipsistic self-absorption in order to reach an apparently selfless universal emotive message, is to entertain us while also delivering usually bad news about the state of human affairs, especially his own. The Who are (like the Fleetwood Mac group was in its own distinctive way) first and foremost a performing band. I think that in a sense everything that I always had—if it was written for The Who—it was obviously gonna be a stage piece, we were a performing band. We weren’t a studio band like The Beatles had become and so that was the distinction I would make to myself is that we can’t do a Sgt. Pepper type thing, we can’t do a Pet Sounds kind of thing, we can’t do a studio masterpiece, we have to do something that we can play.16

And play and play and play. Townshend, like all continents who require the support of either partners or bandmates, however loosely affiliated in order to proceed, passionately wanted to be an island, one of those solo artists whose messages are transmitted via a single persona, their own, regardless of who helped them with the delivery. I’m sure I invented punk, and yet it’s left me behind. If anything was ever a refutation of time, my constant self-inflicted adolescence must be. Damage, damage, damage. It’s a great way to shake society’s value system.17

As Smith pointed out so well in ‘‘The Minstrel’s Dilemma,’’ ‘‘Townshend’s pen merely evoked his state of mind. As we have seen, the artistic obligations that surrounded The Who established a context for deteriorization.’’ 18

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But Townshend’s solution, his resolution of the minstrel’s dilemma, was to materialize in what Smith calls the ‘‘impulse’s opportunity.’’ For Townshend, The Who had become an impediment to his own selfexpression, even though, on a grand scale seldom seen before or since, the entire group was always precisely just such a vehicle mostly for his own self-expression. The Who, being famous for what they were famous for, don’t turn out many ballads. They also don’t turn out much that isn’t heavy in some way or another. As a group we are self-consciously aware of our image—we were one of the English bands who grew up in that Beatle maniacal era when image was almost as important as sound, probably more important. We’ve never lost that feeling, it’s somehow intrinsic to the band.19

Townshend’s solo career, longer than his band career, became the impulse’s victory, and in a way that few other global superstars have ever been able to pull off, a testament to his uniqueness even among fellow dark mirrors. The evidence for this is plain to see and hear in his marvelous Scoop projects, vast recordings of privately and personally made solo demos that clearly indicate that he was The Who and the band itself was his instrument.

Ages ago, the great critic I.A. Richards stipulated the sense of a balancing act between self-control and abandonment that all great artists share. That the artist is not as a rule consciously concerned with communication, but with getting the work, whatever it is, right, apparently regardless of its communicative efficacy, is easily explained. He cannot stop to consider how the public, or even how especially well qualified sections of the public, may like it or respond to it. He is wise therefore, to keep all such considerations out of his mind altogether. Those artists and poets who can be suspected of close separate attention to the communicative aspect, tend to fall into a subordinate rank.20

So it is with the best of the best—they change for personal reasons, they change sometimes severely, like Dylan did and does, with the absolute and incontrovertible belief, though not without occasionally shaky moments, that if they fulfill their side of the bargain as dark mirrors, the public will fulfill their own side, and follow the minstrel down whatever twisted and tortured path he or she may choose to travel. Townshend’s own surrogate voice in the band, Roger Daltrey, has perhaps the most wistful assessment of his mate’s achievements: He had an incredible perspective on what was happening around him. He writes with incredible courage and incredible honesty and it’s not

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always easy to write like that, especially in those early years of your life when you’re all mixed up, not sure about this, not sure about that. And he obviously had his finger on the pulse of what so many people were thinking, but maybe not saying, and he managed to say it for them in music.21

Accidentally, Daltrey also hit upon the reason why poetic and musical mirrors of all sorts manage to articulate our core doubts: by having the bravery, or perhaps even recklessness, to express their own lack of certainty about this or that, they express all of our own lack of sureness about anything and everything. Which is exactly why we need them and, in some rare cases, we revere them. One thing we know for sure by now is that people who are sure about something are also usually making a mistake. Except perhaps for someone like T.S. Eliot, who observed that great art is often communicated before it is fully understood. So it is with many dark mirrors, since they so often reflect a future which has yet to occur, at least to anyone but them.

12 The Bridge Burners: Paul Simon/Art Garfunkel I Am an Island

Of course, it’s great when you have a hit and disappointing when you don’t. But I don’t think we’d get together if the potential for a joyous reunion wasn’t there. We’d never decide to grit our teeth just to make a couple of million dollars.1 Paul Simon

Paul Simon’s unique song stylings were for many years shared and interpreted by the angelic voice of his partner Art Garfunkel, with whom he has been fighting and feuding since they were both 13 years old. They are perhaps the most famous feuding performers in folk/pop music. The manner in which Simon sublimates profound self-doubt and transforms it into a brave forward motion through relationships is the key to his and their success, even after all these years. With Simon’s new record, Surprise, the first in eight years, he adds himself to the long list of performers who have sought creative rejuvenation at the hands and in the ears of master producer Brian Eno. Yes, Simon could also be categorized as an island. No doubt. Simon and Garfunkel? Weren’t they a phenomenon based in time and history which was both finite and already finishing itself off even before the decade ended—a dream deferred? Yes, and that is precisely why it’s possible to speak about, the continent of Simon and Garfunkel apart from the island of

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Paul Simon. They did indeed capture and become emblematic of the spirit of the times, but they were also an example of an even more unique and special variety of emblem—the emblematic empath. By now it appears abundantly clear that all singer-songwriters, to varying degrees, are empaths. Because of their personalities and their usually uniquely tragic melancholies, they are in exile from the normal people they succeed in reaching through their exotic communications—their songs. As empathic exiles they voice the feeling of everyday people without ever really hoping to experience what it means to be an everyday person. That resulting schism is the vault where great songs are stored. The temperature is low in there, and the air is thin. The songs occupy little shiny shelves glistening in the darkness. Until we listen to and activate them. An empath, by definition, feels what other people feel, and is able to express it in a manner that let’s people know that he feels it, without necessarily feeling that feeling originally himself. He is a screen, so to speak and pun intended, on which feelings play out in public in a ritualized and stylized form known as popular music.

One of our best singer-songwriters himself, James Taylor, captures the essence of who and what Simon and Garfunkel are when he describes his appreciation of them in Rolling Stone magazine’s ‘‘Immortals’’ issue. The music stood by itself, quite apart from anything else around at the time. Simon and Garfunkel brought something new to music: they brought themselves. Through it all, whether they were together or not—they’ve remained a force in American music and culture. Their impact has been huge.2

Like all the rest of us who encountered Simon and Garfunkel’s music when it was new, when it first arose, Taylor agrees that ‘‘they scored some of the best years of our lives.’’ But he is also cognizant, more so than even their biggest fans might be, of the friction that sparks that particular creative plug. ‘‘That kind of partnership is like a marriage, only more difficult and more public. You have two very strong willful individuals sharing this tight space. You realize it’s not an uncommon pattern.’’3 Indeed, it was a marriage made in hell, like all the rest of the best symbiotic collaborations we’ve been examining. Perhaps that’s why the Olympian Dylan stayed so far away from ever truly collaborating with a partner, save for the remarkable Desire in 1975 with Jacques Levy. This body just ain’t big enough for both of us. There are two Simon and Garfunkels, one of which is timeless and lives in the music, the other a tempestuous duo of arch rivals who occupy a joinedat-the-lip intimacy both together and in their own independent lives and drastically different careers. Taylor is effusive in his praise:

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Paul Simon has just always been one of our best songwriters. Paul’s breakthrough came at a time when there was so much in the air, and many of his songs were picked up as anthems. He creates an unusually rich and full world, and he has such a broad palette, from basic and elemental folk music to later songs with far greater sophistication and more worldly approaches on solo work.4

With the Simon and Garfunkel brand, we are entering the quintessence of what reflective and empathic songs are all about, especially when it comes to transmuting turbulent competition into angelic harmony. Only Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young managed to manufacture such heavenly harmonies from the ego-soaked drug-addled rancor that made up the real people involved. No one else has come close. Paul Zollo put it quite admirably when he said, ‘‘Regardless of genre or generation, all songwriters are connected by this singular pursuit of merging music and language to create songs.’’5 Referencing and agreeing with the Pete Seeger characterization that all songwriters are links in a chain (but a pretty strange chain, one that includes both Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell), Zollo concurs that, ‘‘Songwriters are forever united in this delicate balancing act of finding words that seamlessly match the mandate of music, and music that enhances that lyric with a sense of resonance and organic grace.’’6

In the case of the Simon and Garfunkel brand, the songs reveal a chemistry between the two men which, as Stephen Holden pointed out during one of their many reunions, echoes the message of ‘‘The Boxer’’—one of their greatest songs: ‘‘After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same.’’ ‘‘Garfunkel’s pristine, quivering folk-pop tenor filtered Simon’s wry, angstridden musings into a romantic soft focus, and the duo’s close harmonies transformed dark compositions of doubt into warm exchanges of feeling.’’7 Like all the other highly successful practitioners of this ancient craft, this duo encountered the huge challenge of trying to create something timeless out of something mired in a specific time, and especially within a business environment that is ultimately concerned with fresh product lines using the same ingredients once they have been proven popular. They don’t call it popular music for nothing. Zollo wrote, For songwriting is much more than a mere craft. It’s a conscious attempt to connect with the unconscious; a reaching beyond ordinary perceptions to grasp images that resonate like dreams, and melodies that haunt and spur the heart. Even those who scoff at the suggestion of a spiritual source for songs admit that the process is mysterious and can’t be controlled. Paul Simon said that mostly it’s a lot of waiting, waiting for the show to begin.8

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But by waiting for the show, Simon wasn’t referring to the time when he goes on stage, he was referring to the interior show that results from attending to and encouraging inspiration. Inspiration is the real show. The show the rest of us see is only the result of the initial spark in a songwriter’s brain, a transparent moment when he or she becomes capable of giving voice to universal and invisible ideas and feelings. These feelings, felt by the empathic exiles who become masterful singersongwriters, also invariably become as melancholy as Paul Simon’s lyrics can become if they are given full reign. We can just as easily gauge the emotional temperatures of the other selected singer-songwriters in this book through the obvious similarities they all share personally and professionally, as diverse as the Table of Discontents may be. The salt in the wound for those dark mirrors who require the partnership of a collaborator, whether to write or voice the words, is that their genius only materializes fully half way. It, their genius, and them, its tool, need the salve of the other half, their reciprocal doppelganger in order to appear at all. Stephen Holden once expressed it very well: In all their years as a singing team, these two boyhood buddies somehow never learned how to talk to each other. Personal tics caused tension, and quibbles accumulated into quarrels. Nothing major, but unpleasant memories lingered.9

Even though they called it quits in 1970, every 10 years or so they rejoin and rejoice, to both celebrate what they had together and to realize that it never quite goes away. Central Park’s 1981 reunion was a case in point, and then again in 1993, and again in 2003. Oliver Poole described his reaction to the latest of these forays into the future past at the Staples Center in Los Angeles in 2003. (Even before the lights went up to reveal the two figures on stage, a video montage of their former selves was played on a giant screen suspended above them.) Here were Simon and Garfunkel as the children who met aged 11, the crew-cut teenagers in ties and jackets, the 60s folk singers traveling through New Mexico, the early 70s incarnations walking separately down the same road. ‘‘This year is the 50th anniversary of when we first met,’’ Art Garfunkel told the audience. ‘‘And the 47th of when we had our first argument,’’ interrupted Paul Simon, before reaching out to touch the hand of his oldest musical collaborator.10

In that LA concert, the 62-year-olds played the hits that marked the high point of their shared career—it was like a set of sacred hymns to a more hopeful time. But the songs were a flow of hits that ended when their difficult

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creative partnership did, 33 years before, half a lifetime away. Simon has since shown himself to be worthy of consideration as a master American composer of popular music, one at the melodic level of Brian Wilson but the lyrical level of Randy Newman. Simon and Garfunkel’s brand sustains itself solely because of the heat generated by the hope they sang about, so deeply and personally in fact, that, like The Beatles, their music still seems fresh and futuristic. This is mostly because the music of that time period always was and always will be primarily about the future, or even better, a future. Their songs, created with Simon’s gifts for melody and mystery, do something different than did Lennon’s and McCartney’s. They almost make us nostalgic for the present. A wistful present moment wafts through all their songs, and even or especially through the later mature works of the supremely successful solo Simon. Paul Zollo, himself a songwriter as well as literary writer who shares the search for what makes a great song great, finds that magic quantum in: lines that resonate deeply; you find your self thinking about them at unexpected times. They are funny and serious, simple and complex, big and small, clear and perplexing; they work on many levels at once, and speak to the heart and mind at the same time.11

Like the music of most dark mirrors confined within the sort of partnerships explored in this book, the music Simon made with Garfunkel remains indelibly etched into our collective memory, largely because it alone achieved an iconic vibrational level of sorts. Only those artists who transform their personalities into what Proust called ‘‘a kind of mirror’’ are the ones universally recognized as the kind of genius who becomes a brand name. That’s the whole point.

As if destined to intertwine and entertain as one, they were raised literally a block away from each other in the same neighborhood of Queens, New York. They met backstage in a school production of a Lewis Carroll story and started singing a capella together in 1954 when they were 13, learning music by doing it rather than studying it. They quickly formed the oddly named duo Tom and Jerry, emulating such fine teams as The Everly Brothers, not only in their harmonies, but also in their immediate sense of near sibling rivalry and creative competition and in their clashes, conflicts, conflagrations, and collaborations. While still in high school they performed on American Bandstand, the great showcase of the day, and after releasing an original song called ‘‘Hey Schoolgirl,’’ attempted to emulate their heroes with teenaged enthusiasm. But their next three records were not as well received as their first lucky strike, and incredibly enough, they broke up for the first of many, many times.

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In 1964, they rejoined and used their own names for the first time, recording the classic folk album Wednesday Morning, 3 AM for Columbia, an album that was not especially popular and caused them to break up again. While Simon was away in England writing some of his greatest future songs on his own, a producer added some instrumental fire to one of his earliest efforts, ‘‘The Sounds of Silence,’’ and it became a hit, much to Simon’s consternation. He believed its pop-rock feeling had compromised its folkish roots. Simon returned from England and reunited with Garfunkel again. They managed to remain a team for the next decade, creating many contemporary classics whose tenderness, hurt, and harmonies have yet to be equaled. The albums Sounds of Silence, Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, Bookends, and Bridge Over Troubled Water (perhaps their masterpiece) secured them a permanent place in the folk-rock pantheon. Early on, however, they both realized two things: they didn’t like working together, and the world wanted them to work together. It wasn’t the waters that were troubled, it was the bridge itself that was the problem, and no amount of architectural restoration could repair it, or so they thought. They were two best friends who didn’t need to look far for an enemy to fight. In 1970, after Bridge Over Troubled Water became a massive hit, they broke up once again, with Simon attempting again, and quite successfully this time, to launch a solo career on his own terms. His terms clicked almost at once: Paul Simon, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, Still Crazy After All These Years, One-Trick Pony, Hearts and Bones, and of course, Graceland and The Rhythm of The Saints. He had the magic touch, one we have often wondered about the origins of, considering at first he was writing pop ditties of little consequence. Suddenly he came into his own voice and never lost it for four decades, maturing into a serious poet of pain along the way. I’m trying to find out if there’s anyone besides Bob Dylan who influenced me. . .but I can’t really imagine that there was. It might not have been Dylan directly but it was the folk scene in Greenwich Village. Dylan was so dominant a force that in a way you can attribute it to him. Although I’m sure he was influenced by the street too. That scene probably influenced that kind of writing.12

Never have truer words been spoken, because in a way, a very real way, absolutely everything in this book can be attributed to Dylan. He is the mayor of the town that all the rest of the singer-songwriters of our age now live in. There was simply nothing that emerged from turmoil quite so effortlessly as the unique balancing act between Simon and Garfunkel at their best, regardless of the fact that Simon has so obviously established himself as a solo American song master ever since. Sometimes a good journalistic question elicits more than the anticipated response, as when Paul Zollo asked Simon what amounted to a question about the role of suffering in the creation of beauty.

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He commented, ‘‘Gerry Goffin (Carole King’s partner) said that since his life has become so comfortable, it’s not as easy for him to write. He felt he needed some turmoil in his life to stimulate him.’’ Simon responded, ‘‘I’m not really sure. Turmoil does provoke or elicit emotions more. But I wouldn’t put my life into turmoil in order to write. There’s plenty of turmoil that you contain with you for years and years and years that you can tap into.’’13 The strange thing about listening to the music made by the entity known as Simon and Garfunkel—the songs that Simon wrote for that echo voice of his —is that, whenever you hear one, you think the song is about you, or your best friend. We know that ‘‘The Boxer’’ is supposed to be about Dylan, though Simon says he doesn’t know what it’s really about. Ever notice how all the best songs are utter blanks to their composers? That’s because they weren’t really there when the pieces were written, not really. They were in that special empathic trance that allows us to be there. When we listen to ‘‘The Boxer,’’ it is us in the clearing. How is it that this song, or some of his other greatest songs—‘‘The Only Living Boy In New York’’ or ‘‘America’’ for instance—allow us to experience what we are already experiencing but through the lens of someone at a distance who is reflecting the experience back to us? Simon explains, The subject of popular song has been the same forever. And if you put it in the right setting, that is the subject matter for popular songs. People need it. They never get tired of hearing. . .songs about love. It’s one of the big things that we think about, and this is one of the areas where we can express it. You’ve only got words and rhythm. So you’ve got to make those words say something. Writing songs is what I do. I’m grateful that people are still interested after all this time. I’ve been interested in writing songs and making records since I was thirteen years old. And I’m still absolutely enthralled by it.14

Simon and Garfunkel’s two masterpieces remain Bookends (1968) and Bridge (1970), both made when they were falling apart but at the same time ascending the ranks of superstardom, a common happening for dark mirror partnerships. Bookends was well characterized in The Mojo Collection as their massively successful breakthrough album as ‘‘former folkies’’ who, by that point, had shifted from their roots significantly enough to be considered pop stars. Their fourth album, it was the first to actually reach a mass audience. With side one’s song suite outlining a journey from life to death, Simon had emerged as one of the great voices of the age, both literary and vocal, though, at the time, he still needed the soaring angel voice of his echo-brother to soothe his rough edges. Simon and Garfunkel only had complete control of three of the five albums they recorded together, and in many ways Bookends stands as their finest

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moment. The duo stood in charge of the production and overall sound, and were eager to leave the formulas of pop-production and experiment, which may help to explain the album’s timeless quality.15

It took two years of wrangling before the ‘‘all-conquering but by comparison to Bookends, a little sterile’’16 Bridge appeared, which Mojo correctly called a ‘‘generation-defining, multi-platinum farewell to the 60s.’’17 By the time S and G came to make Bridge Over Troubled Water, they were drifting apart. Art was preoccupied with his acting career and consequently Paul felt he was no longer pulling his weight. ‘‘It was a tough album to make,’’ Garfunkel has admitted, but tough is one of the words that leads to great results. That it still stands as their definitive statement is a measure of Simon’s tendency to shine brightest in adversity. Ironically, just as the duo had split up just before their first hit, ‘‘Sounds of Silence’’ in 1965, by the time Bridge scooped six Grammys on March 16, 1971, Paul Simon was a solo artist.18

Just what he had always wanted—to be alone. To be free of his echo—free of his shadow.

13 The Love Addicts: Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks Storm Songs

Conflicts between collaborators are not always resolved. In some intense personal partnerships, they failed to resolve the tension between their cooperative and competitive drives. The sustainability of a collaboration depends on the supporting structures in which it is embedded.1 Vera John-Steiner

There are many examples of personally intimate partners engaging in a professional creative collaboration in music, and indeed in several other spheres of endeavor, but not many as famous and infamous as Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. They became a kind of iconic brand for the age-old artistic curse of only being truly creative with someone you don’t even like anymore, and the curse of having to do it for the sake of this amazing music, and of course, the lifestyle consequences of that lofty level of success. They are the guitarist/producer and the writer/vocalist of Fleetwood Mac, in their third and most successful incarnation, with their most notable contributions to that band’s astronomical commercial success being Fleetwood Mac (1975) and, Rumours (1977). Very few people of a certain age will fail to know those records well. They know them too well perhaps. Lovers who try to be artistic partners are legion in the annals of sheer emotional hell and its redemption through the aesthetics of reciprocal

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maintenance: Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Henry Miller and Anais Nin, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. And even Lucy and Desi. The list appears to be endless. But each member of these artist couples still made separate works, albeit works that were drastically influenced by their partners. Songwriting and musical performance is all about the challenge of merging five or so separate and volatile personalities into one balanced musical machine. A rare feat on a good day—an absolute miracle to repeat it over and over. Imagine trying to write a song together, or trying to compose one for the voice of your significant other, then having to perform it live in concert after recording it for months, if not years, during which time you and your lover have mutually experienced firsthand the living out of the song’s not too subtle subtexts of jealous rage and competitive loathing. Imagine doing it in front of everybody on a big global tour again and again because your harrowing tale of romantic woe has become a hit listened to by every couple on the planet having an argument in their car. Suddenly, the radio crackles and on comes ‘‘Go Your Own Way’’ by Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac. Or it could be ‘‘The Ballad of John and Yoko,’’ or even ‘‘Jet’’ by Paul and Linda McCartney, or anything at all by the great Carole King and Gerry Goffin. A wonderful book by Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle De Courtivron called Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership takes great strides towards understanding the dynamics of this contest between claustrophobia and creativity. The authors addressed the alluring topic of the challenge to creative freedoms that is inherent within an intimate relationship structure that is unbalanced by nature and amplified by art. In their book they delved into the complexities of partnerships and collaborations, the painful as well as the rewarding. They explored the negotiation of new relationships with stereotypes associated with solitary creative struggle. In general, their work indicated that artistic relationships are less fixed, more open to both conscious and unconscious negotiation than history leads us to believe. They describe dynamics across the board which reveal the complexities of a union between two artists, especially when one has an antipathy to competition and the other is either extremely sure (or unsure) of himor herself. Added to which, in the cases of the couples who interest me here, there are the additional unbalances commonly associated with highly strung emotional songwriters (empaths). All of this collides in a testy cocktail of codependency and bottomless sorrow. Performing artists, who are after all mediums in a manner of speaking, are often the most prone to the pitfalls of varied pathologies being allowed to play out in and through the creative act. In Vera John-Steiner’s book, Creative Collaboration, she captures some of the reliance on sparks that becomes so prevalent in pop music partnerships. She says, ‘‘There are many examples of close collaboration among intimates

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where mutual support and criticism contribute greatly to each partner ’s success, or to the success of a single endeavor valued by both partners.’’2 So it is with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, perhaps the most famous feuding spouses in musical history. Their single endeavor, valued by both, was the astronomical blockbuster success of Fleetwood Mac. So it is also with their substantially less famous British counterparts—Richard and Linda Thompson. It was very instructive for me to realize that this creative dynamic operates in multiple cultures, in different styles and for different reasons, all the while remaining identical with regard to the core components of the collaborative nightmare: Must I work with this person alone to achieve anything like this magical success? The answer is, yes. John-Steiner wrote, ‘‘A fierce belief in the work of one’s ‘significant other’ as well as a willingness to criticize it characterizes most accounts of artistic and intellectual partnership.’’3 Such was certainly the case in the songwriting teams of Buckingham/Nicks and the Thompsons. Though I’m sure that both couples would be surprised to hear themselves spoken of in the same context as Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, or Will and Ariel Durant, nonetheless they do belong amazingly close together.

Having written extensively about the Buckingham/Nicks contribution to late Fleetwood Mac (1975–2003) in my previous book, Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to focus more attention on the grueling creative marriage of this team and its totem, the addiction to love. Whether or not I subscribe to the idea that their mature pop phase was Fleetwood Mac’s finest, the addition of this divorce-doomed couple to comingle with the also divorcing leaders of the group was certainly a case of destiny speaking loudly—especially since all the ingredients of Fleetwood Mac, apart from a rhythm section of genius, of course, already existed in the Buckingham Nicks album. The session playing drummer and the bassist even sounded as if they unconsciously wanted to sound like Fleetwood and McVie but didn’t know how, not surprisingly. With the album’s sexually suggestive cover, a nude from the chest up portrait of Nicks as a classic hippie girl with her Svengali-like partner Lindsey, it introduced us to a new kind of candor when it comes to emotional confessions of the heart’s fresh damages. Lindsey Buckingham and Stephanie Nicks first performed professionally in 1968 in a San Francisco band called Fritz, opening on the same bills as big names such as Santana, Chicago, and Hendrix. Following the band’s demise in 1971, the two remained together and released the Buckingham Nicks album in 1973. Even though he had heard the tape of this record only once, it was Mick Fleetwood who requested, early in 1975, that Buckingham and Nicks become part of Fleetwood Mac. But they were not just part of, they actually became

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Fleetwood Mac. ‘‘Once you hear this album,’’ the liner notes declare, ‘‘you’ll know why.’’ From the very beginning, and as he would throughout his Fleetwood Mac career (right up to their latest recording in 2003), Buckingham is bemoaning what appears to be his disintegrating relationship with Nicks. This ironic self-analysis would serve as the raw material for practically every song the duo ever wrote, whether together or apart. From the public perspective, they are the key elements and the brand name behind the hugely popular band Fleetwood Mac. Their personal relationship and their songwriting relationship are equally complex and are fraught with the cunning and curious replaying, again and again, of similar domestic, marital, and romantic themes. Theirs is the veritable template for romantic myth and emotional alienation which can be expertly disguised as danceable, feel-good pop music. This sensational love-hate dialogue is something like what Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning may have penned back and forth if they had been rock stars, if they had been even more dysfunctional than they were, and if their lives had been consumed by celebrity and numbed by cocaine.

Suddenly, overnight they were surfing on the crest of a breaking wave known as Fleetwood Mac, which by now had taken on a life of its own and only had to be prodded with a stick a little to the left or right in order to reach the big time that always seemed just around the corner. But this time, the big time really was just around the corner, and the big stick they were given, like a gift of manna from heaven (or hell, in the case of all the suffering involved with their newest partners) came to them in the form of two more Californian dreamers. Someone once said that the whole is less the sum of its parts than the movement between each of them. The emotional movement between Buckingham and Nicks, charged with dark hubris at the best of times, would soon be perilously but creatively merged with the intense and abstract emotional movement between the historical and hysterical parts of Mac, charged with a mania for making music even in the worst of times. The result would be spontaneous combustion indeed, even though it took a full 10 years for it to spontaneously explode on an unsuspecting musical world. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are so intertwined, personally, professionally, and creatively, that their lives can be viewed in tandem, since that indeed is the way the art of their songs is crafted and delivered. They met each other at a party where a casual sing-along was in progress, apparently a Beach Boys song according to accounts, and from the moment they began to harmonize together, they instantly realized the creative charge that existed between them. They later explored this charge, or tried as best they could, in their youthful band called Fritz, which played locally and even performed at their own 1967 graduation party.

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Ironically, in that year’s summer of hope, as Peter Green was forming Fleetwood Mac in London, Buckingham and Nicks were forming a romantic and musical bond of their own that would only come into full fruition some seven years later when they would be utterly stunned to be invited to join the revolving-door band on the strength of their first and last solo record together. Their peculiar love affair, so fraught with the ups and downs of highly emotional and self-centered artists and their egos, would form the crux and crucible of the dynamic energy that came to be synonymous with the soon to be globally famous pop group, Fleetwood Mac. Their quite beautiful harmonies, when merged with the deep voice and deeper feeling of Christine McVie, would create that unique and signature melodic style that would soon make Mac into a corporate brand of astonishing scale, scope, and influence. If anyone had listened carefully to the self-titled Buckingham Nicks album of 1973, their only recording under that name, they would have clearly heard the future of Fleetwood Mac. That record, especially the track ‘‘Frozen Love,’’ not only told the whole story, it also seemed to be a prophecy of the whole whirlwind ride that was awaiting them. Unfortunately, few people bought or listened to the record. It would be rereleased to much acclaim in 1977, after the chemical and emotional magic of the newest combination of sounds and souls was blissfully obvious to everyone. After Rumours made it obvious. But Mick Fleetwood listened, and he listened hard. He admits to being floored by the technical prowess of the guitar style of Buckingham and the gorgeous harmonies he produced with his young girlfriend, Stevie Nicks. Fleetwood at that moment in 1974 heard the future of Fleetwood Mac as clearly as if a time machine had opened its jaws and spit the sultry couple out onto his lap.

The 70s, the decade of a dream deferred, and the 80s, the decade of a dream cashed in, would be the perfect social and political fodder for the new Mac’s strategy for world domination: turn the basic blues into a slickly produced pop package that celebrates the transcendence of suffering through a compulsive immersion into its very core. It would become the soundtrack for a society intent on living as if there was no tomorrow. By diving so deeply into their own personal lives, sustaining their professional relationship for the sake of the music, while their emotions and psyches melted down in public, Buckingham and Nicks in particular and the Fleetwood Mac brand in general succeeded in capturing the tenor of the times as few before them had done. ‘‘Long Distance Winner’’ contains many prescient moments that appear to encapsulate the dynamics of both their relationship and their future fame. This time it’s Nicks, making a statement to her lover with a song that also

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serves as a cautionary tale for a band she didn’t even belong to yet. ‘‘But not unlike the blue white fire, you burn brightly in spite of yourself, I bring the water down to you, but you’re too hot, too hot to touch.’’ The two most important songs on their solo record are ‘‘Crystal,’’ reproduced to great effect by Mac’s eponymous white album in 1975, and ‘‘Frozen Love,’’ the classic from the record that made Mick Fleetwood stand up and take notice. As mentioned, what he noticed was his own future. When Nicks intones the mournful celebration of her lover in ‘‘Crystal,’’ she creates a magical kind of adulation. Amazingly, the Mac version of this song increased its weirdly worshipful tone, while at the same time injecting it with the necessary punch and unique harmonies to make it one of the band’s first big hits together. Few songs capture the essence of a love affair run aground like the harrowing ‘‘Frozen Love,’’ the song that rewarded Fleetwood for always trusting his first initial feeling. Comparisons of this quite beautiful but disturbing love song with either the title song of the latest Mac album, Say You Will (2003), or with their shared closing epistles on the same record, ‘‘Say Goodbye’’ and ‘‘Goodbye Baby,’’ will send chills up and down your spine. This Fleetwood Mac swan song record (unless they surprise us all again) debuted at #3 on the billboard charts and was supported by a successful, if largely nostalgic, world arena tour through 2004. Say You Will harkens back to the debut Buckingham Nicks album and appears to retread some of those intense stories from a retrospective point of view. Where the first record looked forward to a dream, the last record looks backward at a dream, with predictable results. In some ways, it is the best real Fleetwood Mac record in years, even with Nicks’s shattered voice and monotone nasal renderings. It captures what the fuss was all about in the first place. Yet another solo Buckingham record that got away from him, Say You Will is a perfect climax to a perfect career path, unless there is yet another swift kick left in the old brood yet. Unfortunately, Christine McVie was missing from this last album, peacefully retired from the fray. ‘‘What’s The World Coming To?’’ starts the coaster rolling in fine style; Buckingham laments in fine fierce form. Nicks does her usual diva turn with ‘‘Illume’’ and ‘‘Thrown Down’’ but manages to reach a true emotional clarity with the title track, ‘‘Say You Will.’’ And her ‘‘Silver Girl,’’ directed towards some of her songstress offspring such as Sheryl Crow, offers cautionary tales to any young girl who thinks rock and roll might be a suitable lifestyle. Her grand ‘‘Destiny Rules’’ serves as a synopsis of why the group has been through so much together and what the glue might be that links the chains that bind them. As if saving the best for last, and also choosing to summarize their own frayed bond together as both lovers and collaborating artists, the artists close the album with Buckingham’s ‘‘Say Goodbye’’ and Nicks’s ‘‘Goodbye Baby.’’

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Buckingham: ‘‘Once you said goodbye to me, now I say goodbye to you.’’ Nicks: ‘‘Goodbye baby, I hope your heart’s not broken, don’t forget me, yes I was outspoken.’’ But some goodbyes are not just long goodbyes, some goodbyes go on forever.

For Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, a tortured duo of undeniable talents guided by a technical production wizard of prodigious gifts, there is obviously more blood left in this so very, very smooth stone, polished from years of mutual creative caressing. Even if sometimes with a clenched fist, caressed smooth nonetheless. When Stevie and Lindsey proceeded to fall apart at the seams as a couple, they remained creatively committed. Just as when Mick split from his wife, and when the McVies, after years of troubled togetherness aggravated by John McVie’s alcoholism, finally divorced each other, they too remained wedded to the musical group. It was a harmonic collision all right. The breakup of Lindsey and Stevie was very public. Then, after Mick’s long-strained marriage finally fell apart, and he himself, ever addicted to fresh chaos, eventually embarked on a two-year affair with Nicks, Christine sought solace in the arms of a man who fixed her spotlight. All the while, the personal entries and letters they each penned in their diaries, containing everything from confessions to declarations, slowly surfaced like ripples on the pop culture pond. And they were all true. Their love-hate letters to each other, and their diary entries to themselves, were transformed into strangely haunting and universal anthems of a special sort of shared angst every one of us could get into with gusto. It was the kind of dangerous and obsessive musical ride that would only be possible if shared between intimate partners who also worked together professionally, and whose shared intimacy became the very core of their work as singer-songwriters. Such a ride has the kind of venom that is often only possible between either siblings or ex-lovers. It was this deep tenacity and hunger for ultimate success that would hold them all in good stead during the making of their blockbuster, and even beyond, keeping them as together as a scarily dysfunctional family. The link of the shared desire of this group as a whole, bonding them all through a force hard to define for mere mortals like the listening audience, would form the emotional glue that no amount of excess, drug addiction, or interpersonal mayhem could unstick. Fleetwood Mac would eventually evolve into something like a cult in its own right. There was just no leaving, and the only reason for staying was to provide music for the audience—they would never break the chain. Now, why couldn’t The Beatles figure that out?

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14 The Emblem Benders: Elton John/Bernie Taupin Madmen across the Water

People like to label you. I’ve never liked being labeled. I can’t take it because I’m never going to do the same thing over and over and over. I hate being limited. I hate being put in a box. The music that I’ve made, the way that I’ve carried myself, I’ve always had this weird broad audience.1 Elton John

Elton John (aka Reginald Dwight) is an artist who utterly reinvented himself, creating his own new and exotic persona. Considering how fateful and laden with synchronicity their career together has been, it is ironic that Elton John first met Bernie Taupin under circumstances so chancey they were almost incredible. According to Bernie Taupin’s own hilariously self-serving book of lyrics, The One Who Writes The Words for Elton John, their partnership could easily never have happened at all. In 1967, Bernie Taupin answered an advertisement in New Musical Express for songwriters. His interest, he says, was pure curiosity, though still being a teenager his mother heavily encouraged him to enter the contest, even going so far as to take the crumpled coupon out of the waste basket and handing it to him again to reconsider. The result of this fluke was one of the most famous and effective songwriting teams of the last century.

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Reginald Dwight had also sent in his submission, that of an equally young and starry-eyed kid with delusions of grandeur. He could write music but not words, whereas Taupin could write words but not music, so the executives in charge showed each of them the other ’s work and introduced them. Nine years later they were on top of the world, and Taupin’s book of lyrics was being published. And Elton, who by then had clearly found himself a new and ultra-mutable identity, wrote the following tongue-in-cheek foreword to the book: I always managed to keep him under wraps, well out of the way, but now the little twerp wants fame, fortune, recognition of his own. During the last part of his tribute, John is seen tearing his hair transplant out and gradually frothing at the mouth. The audience starts to rush the exits. Sobbing frantically now, John screams at them, and as the last remaining chords of ‘‘Your Song’’ echo around the now virtually empty room, the last words trickle from this pasty little troll of a man.2

Well, one can clearly see why Elton never wrote his own lyrics, or at least not in the beginning. His partner in crime in making gold records, Taupin, got his suitable sarcastic revenge on the little troll who became larger than life; he wrote in his preface that followed his boyhood friend’s jibes: Hey you, you sad-eyed old friend of mine, there’s a song that I’ve heard but it’s drifting away on a wavelength that crackled and died. And I remember the singer, in fact he was a legend. I’ve a book full of interesting names, a scratched forty-five and so many memories. Somehow without music it’s just not the same. It was simple to us, we were born children of fate sold to the world in twelve inch frames, given our tickets, herded to heaven in a private plane. But unmistaken, the music sailed above us. It’s power on the masses never died. But when our systems fed the voice, it was the words upon his lips that made the crowd that watched him cry.3

Now that has to be one of the most incisive indictments against mistaking the message of a song for the sounds that convey it that I’ve ever heard. It is also spookily prescient. Even in their early- to mid-career phase, it was clear that the power of their music on the masses would not die anytime soon, and it’s still clear that it was Taupin’s words over which the audiences wept wicked tears. But then again, here was a situation not unlike that of Lennon and McCartney, or that of any other superlative creative team. You just could not separate them, or even tell one from the other—at least when the magic was working really well. Yet it was also true that eventually, very quickly in fact, these two young sojourners on the yellow brick road did not exactly like each other very much. They needed each other too much. And like almost every other remarkably successful singer-songwriter team in this book that became a lasting brand,

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they first knew each other when they were still basically children—long before their individual personalities had really developed. Then, when their personalities did develop, each one, like always happens, chafed against the confines of the other—that other person who had formerly served as the other half of his own unformed future self. Their first big hit, ‘‘Your Song’’ now seems like a personal letter or an entry in a diary, and one can easily imagine it cast as an epistle, an epistle to Elton: Dear Elton, If I were a sculptor, but then again, no, or a man who makes potions in a traveling show, I know it’s not much, but it’s the best I can do, my gift is my song, and this one’s for you. Yours bluely, Bernie

But, of course, it is one of the powerful and strange qualities of being a dark mirror that made us all imagine, when he crooned, this is your song, that he meant this was our song. Still, whoever it was written for, it has become ours, permanently. Such is the alchemy of the mirror. We own its fantasies.

The three masterpieces John and Taupin created together were Tumbleweed Connection (1970), Madman across the Water (1971), and Honky Chateau (1972), with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) thrown in as a fine chaser. As they matured, and as their connection began to fade, they were still able to access the high wire and work without a net in order to produce Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975), perhaps their most personal and autobiographical offering. Mojo Magazine’s Tom Doyle had the perfect take on John’s longevity and his ability, like a great painter, to return to form regardless of how many bad paintings he might turn out. There is always another great one waiting in the wings for his voice to animate its words. But Doyle was equally accurate in his reference to John’s well-known volatility (and volatility is the polite word to use here). ‘‘He trampled America, hung with his idols and took every drug in the tin. Elton John defined 70s rock superstardom from the heights of his stack heels to the depths of his depressions. Yet behind the goofy glasses seethed a complex relationship with his success, his sexuality and his songwriting partner.’’4 As Tom Doyle revealed in his 2006 profile piece for Mojo, Elton John’s latest album revisits his golden age in more ways than one. The early 70s saw him achieve ‘‘vertical take off,’’ but he also engaged in a horizontal slide psychologically from which he is in permanent recovery. And part of that recovery includes the release of his 44th album, The Captain and The Kid, the 2006 autobiographical sequel to 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, a return to format at least, if not fully to form.

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This whole question of cowboys and the Americana of the frontier is a compelling and strange quality in the hands of two young kids floating around London during the long ago summer of hope. When John (then still Dwight) and Taupin met in the summer of 1967 after that fateful magazine advertisement brought them together, they too could see that Chance is the fool’s name for Fate. ‘‘I was expecting someone very hip,’’ Taupin commented. ‘‘He was incredibly young, I was very nervous,’’ observed Elton. ‘‘But we hit it off straightaway. It was a kismet thing. He became the brother I always wanted. It was one of the happiest times in my life because we were inseparable.’’5 They were about to embark on a profoundly puzzling partnership and musical journey that continues, albeit somewhat limping, to this day, a journey that somehow allowed two young Brits to spookily channel some of the rootsy spirit of American consciousness—the spirit that was also perfectly embodied back then by The Band. The Band’s 1968 Music From Big Pink changed the musical horizon of the time; we knew that, but few expected their spirit to inspire these English lads to create the frontier experiments of Tumbleweed, Madman, and Honky. When the core message of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is examined, it becomes clear that Taupin in particular really was that kind of frontiersman, that it wasn’t an affectation by any means. He actually did disdain the sparkling world of John’s persona and really did want to go back to his plough. Their intense and intimate relationship, possibly laden with delirious sublimation, and forged through the nearly perfect and seemingly fully developed sound of their debut album Empty Sky, became even more cemented when Taupin began to encounter the darker and more conflicted side of John, almost immediately. The bond, though bad, was also brilliant. Almost bright enough to light up their shared darkness, but not quite. The pair shared a flat in Islington with Elton’s fiance´e (that’s right, his fiance´e), Linda Woodrow, ‘‘until his confusion and desperation over his sexuality became apparent when he tried to gas himself, only to be discovered by Bernie.’’6 John now declares that he had backed himself into a wall, he didn’t really want to get married and one night when he went out drinking with Long John Baldry, his friend and mentor, Baldry told him, ‘‘For fuck’s sake, you’re more in love with Bernie than you are with this woman. . .come to your senses.’’7 He came to his senses in a big way, devoted himself to being who he really was and is, and never looked back, though his love-hate relationship with his creative partner became ever more fractious as time went on. Doyle encapsulated their personal and professional dynamic quite succinctly: Reg Dwight’s transformation into Elton John was well underway. But if he was Elton on the exterior, inside he felt still very much like Reg. ‘‘I was very comfortable on the stage but not very comfortable off of it. Although I was having a ball, you’re still stuck with the insecure nervous person inside. And just being successful doesn’t cure it. No way. In fact, it makes things

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worse because then the difference between your stage persona and your normal self is so far removed.8

Shades of the infamous Lennon syndrome, mixed of course with the prerequisite fulfilled-dream syndrome favored by rockers.

Bernie Taupin was the gritty backwoods recluse who put those distressing words under the shiny coating of Elton’s magisterial pop bombast. That’s why it is such a treat to read the words to certain lesser known or unknown (or unreleased) songs and then come upon the mental symphonies that ensue when you read the words to a huge hit. As words. The music and the words are inseparable, the words could never have come into the air except through that particular melodic vehicle. But when you look at the actual words, they are rather dark indeed, especially once their partnership was paralyzing and Taupin began writing songs about Elton himself, which he had to belt out under the blazing lights of his own lunacy. Even the apparently most benign Taupin song has hidden recesses that only seem to emerge fully inside the voice of John’s idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and melody. It’s spooky. Always will be. Friends (1971) was a soundtrack album for a medium scale film the two worked on—a film with a synchronistic scenario that mirrored their own. In it Bernie has Elton sing: ‘‘It seems to me a crime that we should age, these fragile times should never slip us by; a time you never can or shall erase, as friends together watch their childhood fly.’’ But in was on Madman across the Water that I believe a lyrically maturing Taupin made an effortlessly brilliant Elton say the most incredible things. Breathtaking and beautiful. ‘‘Goodbye’’: ‘‘For I am a mirror, I can reflect the moon, I can write songs for you, I’ll be your silver spoon.’’ This same album reveals the beginnings of incipient solipsistic rage when Taupin has John say, ‘‘We’ll come again next Thursday afternoon, the in-laws hope they’ll see you very soon; but is it in your conscience that you’re after, another glimpse of the madman across the water?’’ And then, as if to demonstrate for all to see just how much like ventriloquism songwriting really is, on the same record Taupin has Elton say: ‘‘If I were an artist who paints with his eyes, I’d study my subject and silently cry, cry for the darkness to come down on me, for confusion to carry on turning the wheel.’’

Meanwhile, in their real personal lives, confusion really was turning the wheel. Through the mid-70s, just as it did for the third incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, cocaine reared its tantalizing head before the boys in the band.

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By 1975, the moment of one of their finest efforts, Captain Fantastic, the lads had developed gargantuan habits. Their party place was Caribou Ranch, among suitably snow-capped mountains, where all roads led to the palace of excess but none of them came back with any wisdom. Elton remembers that, ‘‘We always used to say there was more snow inside than outside. That period was pretty much the apex of our abuse.’’9 According to Tom Doyle, In spite of this, the first half of the year saw them turn in Captain Fantastic, arguably the duo’s finest album and their first to debut at number one in the US (Rock of the Westies followed). Nostalgic for their earlier struggles— notably less than a decade earlier, though Elton says it felt much further away—and self-mythologizing, it painted Elton as Superstar and Bernie, through his passion for horse-rearing, as the Western fan now in the saddle. Lyrically, Taupin had always written as half-Bernie, half-Elton, but Captain Fantastic seemed more vividly autobiographical than usual.10

Elton suddenly understood the meanings of the songs, since, as he has admitted, it was about us. To be able to write about yourself at your creative peak is a rare treat. Few artists, save for those at the lofty level of John Lennon, Keith Richards, or Pete Townshend, have been able to accomplish that feat, though, naturally to some extent, that is the very crux of what makes the best singer-songwriters in the first place. The best have the obscure ability to write about themselves and project empathy for others’ feelings at the same time— in short, they act as a medium. ‘‘It just flowed out of me,’’ Elton has said of the process of peak performance (what I have earlier referred to as the flow state). It is uniquely true that he has maintained this flow state for as long or longer than many of his peers, usually when he works with Taupin at his side—mostly when he does, in fact. This makes the comparison between their 1975 masterpiece and their 2006 update of the myth, The Captain and the Kid, all the more poignant. As John himself put it, ‘‘We were dealing with failure on the first one. The new album’s all about dealing with the fucking success.’’11 Doyle has a good take on the inherent irony of revisiting the present: One key track on the new record, ‘‘Tinderbox,’’ deals with the combustible relationship between Elton and Bernie come 1975: ‘‘Two sparks could set the whole thing off, rubbing up together around the clock.’’ In the aftermath of the jacked-up Rock of the Westies, and the jazz and folk-flecked Blue Moves, 1976, there was little left of their relationship but ashes. Both were in a bad way, and for the first time Elton turned down some of Bernie’s lyrics as too depressing.12

One can only imagine just how depressing something would have to be for Elton, the emperor of angst, to find it depressing. And yet, 32 years later, on The Captain and the Kid, up pops yet another little ditty about cocaine

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psychosis. The Doyle interview also revealed a long-standing glue that holds their relationship rogether. ‘‘Blue Moves was our Mount Everest,’’ the lyricist said. ‘‘We’d gone to the top. I’m sure drugs, alcohol, the geographical thing, it all contributed. But the base core of it was I don’t know if we knew what we were going to do next. Or if we could do it. But we never argued about it.’’13 Sounds too good to be true.

Elton says that he never had an argument with his partner, at least not the kind one would expect from a pair of dark mirrors trapped in a windowless room with a band, drugs, and nothing but one’s own imagination to work with. ‘‘Which is extraordinary when you think of some of the great partnerships that have fallen foul of each other because of jealousies and egos,’’ states Elton.14 We can think of 20 or so right off the top just by glancing at the Table of Discontents in this book. But if there is a renaissance of sorts between these long-time collaborators and their remarkable shared musical vibe, it certainly shines through in the dark lyrics from Taupin that have punctuated their return to sharing it. While listening to these rousing mature rockers, loud with emotion but not volume, I was reminded of one of my favorite things about that old copy of Bernie Taupin’s lyrics book that I saved—the one with the modestly declarative title, The One Who Writes the Words for Elton John. Towards the last page there is a section called ‘‘Credits.’’ Within that section is a full-page spread of Taupin, photographed from the rear with his hands behind his head, underneath a blazing old typewritten headline: ‘‘Credits? What do they mean, credits? I wrote the words. That’s it, isn’t it?’’ One can almost imagine a small, strange, self-proclaimed pasty troll’s voice answering that last sarcastic question with, ‘‘Except for me.’’ And that voice would be the voice of the words.

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15 The Structural Units: Jack White/Meg White I'll Be Your Mirror

Friends are the siblings God never gave us. Mencius

Nothing is improbable until it moves into the past tense. George Ade

The perpetually irascible satirist-sage Frank Zappa once observed that rock journalism is all about people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t think, for people who can’t read. Well, the first and third categories exempt us, dear reader, and the young fourth-generation inheritors of the big shiny sound unearthed by 60s progenitors such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and Velvet Underground, are often far cannier than one might at first imagine. This seems to be the case with the hyper-articulate Jack White. What’s true of most musicians, the axiom that once set apart from their songs themselves they are rendered somewhat mute, especially on the subject of exactly how they do what they do, can never apply to Mr. White, the inventor of a curious music machine called The White Stripes. He has even been clever enough to invent his followup band already. He has obviously taken the trouble to learn

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some key dance steps from the avant-garde of the other arts, not just confine himself to a musical playground, or to becoming a living museum of rock music. He has the smart-ass savvy of an intellectual who uses music as a tool under several names, bands, and personas. But a tool to do what with has yet to be fully explained. He’s still in the process of conducting his experiment. More than a decade into their career, their highly successful brand of deconstruction-blues-rock seems to be deepening and darkening with each successive album, now six in all, as they undertake a single-handed recapitulation of a century of popular American music. Make that double-handed, since this duo-band consists only of an eccentric drummer, his ex-wife Meg, and the eccentric guitarist himself, the one who channels acres of multiple instrumentation through one electric waterfall of distortion. Electricity and power are Jack’s best friends. White, a peculiarly millennial figure who could not have arisen at any other time in our collective cultural history, is that rare artist who, like Dylan, changes the environment around himself by doing nothing other than his job, but by doing it really well. He is the phantom performer who takes an ice pick to the frozen chunks of today’s corporate music industry, and, of course, they applaud him for doing so, because he wins Grammys for them. They never mind the bite on their hands they receive when feeding him, since those hands always end up stuffed with mega-cash. This is how White announced his end-of-the-century manifesto, in the 2000 liner notes to The White Stripes’ second album De Stijl: When ideas become too complicated, and the pursuit of perfection is misconstrued as a need for excess. When there is so much involved that individual components cannot be discerned. When it is hard to break the rules of excess, then new rules need to be established. It descends back to the beginning where the construction of things visual or aural is too uncomplicated to not be beautiful. But this is done in the knowledge that we can only become simple to a point and then there is nowhere else to go. There are definite natural things which cannot be broken down into lesser components. Even if the goal of achieving beauty from simplicity is aesthetically less exciting, it may force the mind to acknowledge the simple components that make the complicated beautiful.1

Every so often, someone has to come along and rejuvenate rock and pop music, and it seems to have been The White Stripes’ turn this time around. In the 60s, it was The Beatles who revolutionized what a pop song could be and what it could mean, by pushing the envelope of personal expression and technical virtuosity as far as it could go, and maybe farther, making ‘‘the studio’’ into an additional band component, and making their brilliant

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producer into a kind of invisible band member. Now, at least to these ears, Jack White has declared that new rules need to be established and has gone some distance towards establishing them. He has also done so with a heavy dose of irony, since he has made breaking the rules of excess into an art form itself, while at the same time painting music that on the surface is deceptively basic and simple. His music is not simple; it is an incredibly complicated matter to achieve something so primal and primitive—and so private—in public. In this new century, still a foreign country really, it appears that a character who started out as John Gillis, and paired with his soon-to-be ex-wife/still friend-partner, the idiosyncratic drummer Meg White, for whom Mr. Gillis changed his name to Jack White, has somehow managed to rejuvenate rock music, but by taking it backwards. This is indeed music as manifesto, something akin to both the futurist and vorticist movements in experimental visual art. After the couple’s divorce, and in the best musical, if not marital, tradition of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, they stayed together for the sake of their exotic creative bond in a musical collaboration called The White Stripes. Enjoying and encouraging the fabricated narrative that they were actually siblings, that the only other member of The White Stripes was his ‘‘big sister,’’ or possibly just a good friend, the fledgling character created by John Gillis began to quickly consolidate his position as a retrograde postmodernist genius. The future, he declared, lies in the past of the blues, but turned way, way Up. First of all, he can play up a storm, incorporating both bass guitar and rhythm guitar into the torrential force field of his own astonishingly proficient lead guitar, in a hyper-aggressive manner that I haven’t seen or heard since Rahsaan Roland Kirk did it with several saxophones in the avantgarde jazz field back in the 60s. Jack White has plundered brilliantly, and only from the best—he has synthesized the preceding five decades of rock ’n’ roll through a Motor City anger machine of his own meticulous and Buckingham-like creation, second only to Iggy Pop for sheer rage quotient, and he has packaged his own persona(s) in a highly confident manner for one so young. But then, it was at that magic age, 24, the age of The Beatles members when they peaked, and the age of Amy Winehouse when her music wove her dark damaged magic over the Grammys in 2007, that White hit his stride. While the wickedly talented Ms. Winehouse was wolfing down five Grammys for virtually the best new everything, The White Stripes were accorded top honors for two major categories, Best Alternative Rock Record for Icky Thump, and Best Alternative Rock Performance by a Group (or in their case, a dynamic duo) for the same record. If Winehouse appears to have rejuvenated the solo artist who sings achingly personal material in a blistering spotlight (now if we can only rejuvenate Ms. Winehouse), then in rock music, The White Stripes appear to have rejuvenated a relatively new tradition in its second or third stage of

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reiteration, and they have apparently saved it in an unlikely and unexpected manner—by stripping it of all pretension, perfection, and technical prowess.

The Beatles’ famous failure, Let It Be, essentially the tortured Get Back Sessions of 1969 prior to the triumphant return of George Martin for a final masterpiece, Abbey Road, was an ironic attempt to do precisely what the Jack White character contrived by John Gillis succeeded in doing at the turn of the last century. But The Beatles attempted their aesthetic experiment far too soon in history, and far too late in their own corrosive interpersonal relationships. Being true visionaries, they were even ahead of their time in their desire to get back to the original roots of their own musical style, the style of playing up-tempo blues without technological wizardry, seeking their own exotic form of rhythmic folk music, the kind we eventually called progressive rock. They didn’t realize that the music industry had yet to expand itself up to super-scale dimensions, if only in order for the industry to catch up with what those four amazing artists had initiated. Their prescience backfired on them. But for Jack White, the time was just right for a dramatic return to even more hard-core blues motifs that had been cleverly hidden beneath the shiny surface of pop music, at least as it evolved and was mutated in the hands of The Four. But ‘‘Best Alternative’’ to what?, some listeners might fairly ask. The answer is: alternative to absolutely everything that has been produced since Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and of course, The Beatles. In order to move radically forward, White and his quirky ex-wife drummer Meg have stepped way, way back into the shadows of the treacherous emotional experiment known as the singer-songwriter in a partnership. This pair of singer-songwriters appeared to have a head start on all those other famously repeated dual-patterns, where two creative artists become so close in collaborative musical partnership that they might as well be siblings. John and Paul, Mick and Keith, Roger and Pete, Lindsey and Stevie, Paul and Art, Elton and Bernie—they all simulated the close intimacy supposedly associated with fraternal and infernal creativity. But since our age has lost much of the utopian flavor that spiced up the last half of the twentieth century, The White Stripes actually are pretending to be siblings, and the best of friends, when of course they are neither one nor the other, and they are thus delivering their raw goods already deconstructed for us, to save us all the trouble. The public simply loves their pretend brother-sister hybrid personas in this quirky two-person, electrified-blues-band format, as does the fervent cult that has long since grown around them, and it hardly seems to matter that actually they were a married couple and are now a divorced couple—one which uniquely formulated itself into an exotic partnership capable of rivaling any of the other gargantuan oddities contained in this book. Unlike the

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hopeful Beatles, who eventually became submerged in their own myth, The White Stripes have adopted a defiantly postmodern and hopeless stance and have thus arrived pre-mythologized as part of their own sardonic selfpackaging. They come post-obsolescent. Such is our age, that we are looking at them looking backwards at us, towards the beginning, not the end.

For those readers not yet enlisted in the cult of The Whites (and I use this word in the best possible sense of its meaning, like the following that gathers around a true visionary such as Don Van Vliet, who created the performing persona of Captain Beefheart about 40 years ago to say things that Don could never say, and whose ferocious music is the most similar to Jack White’s you’ll ever hear), a brief history of the duo’s marvelously entertaining histrionics is called for at this point. Both hail from Detroit and were born Meg White and John Gillis in 1974 and 1975, respectively. They married in 1996, they formed The White Stripes in 1997, and released their initial music on actual alternative labels until they were absorbed into the musical mainstream by an industry and audience that had grown weary of the digital sameness of so many big contemporary corporate bands that had their own brands to feed. They divorced in 2000 and made that familiar deal with the devil at the crossroads, in order to continue creating music. If the British blues genius Peter Green hadn’t lost his marbles and his confidence by the end of the 1960s, his own musical direction may very well have paralleled that of Jack White. His writing and playing on Then Play On (1970), especially the majestic ‘‘Oh Well,’’ has haunting similarities to White’s own recent song from Icky Thump (2008), ‘‘Little Cream Soda,’’ in which he combines a viral vehemence, as he laments losing one quality of himself after another, with dystopian disappointment, until eventually he is as free as. . .nothing at all. As principal songwriter, guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, the sinister Jack-doll pulls us all through a variety of failed romances and conflicts with modern life itself, while his drummer and percussionist Meg, who also doubles as a vocalist, thumps her way through the history of pounding-it-out, from Ringo Starr, whose old band she creatively channels, to John Bonham, whose old band she evokes with a torrid empathy all her own. This girl can really hit! Although it’s in an odd, Shaggs-like manner merged with the style of the late Buddy Miles, as if she must hurriedly build the leantwo shack that Jack then jumps on and proceeds to kick to pieces with his high-wire scream and breathtakingly shrill lava guitar—it definitely rocks in the most muscular sense of the word. If Pete Townshend had formed a new band after The Who first ended, and if it had been just him on all guitars at once and Keith Moon, in drag, playing drums (slowed down to match Meg’s hypnotic and heavy heartbeat style), the band would have sounded like this

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back to basics garage-style rock band—The White Stripes—that sometimes makes even Nirvana sound slick and sentimental. White’s ability to concoct brilliant cover versions of other artists’ songs, as well as his ability to produce the work of other artists and participate in multiple ancillary projects, sets him apart from most singer-songwriters, those who tend to stick to their own swimming pools. Raw is the only word for the duo’s naked, low-fidelity sound and sensibility, equally inspired by punk, folk, and country music, but brought to a rapid blues boil and flung in the air, so we can all watch the abrupt pattern shifts and emotionally purple riffs as they spill all around us. This music is LOUD! But I don’t mean the word to convey volume, not at all, since, like The Beatles, whose early music is still sparklingly loud whether the volume is high or low, White Stripes music is emotionally loud, intellectually loud, sexually loud, and even perhaps spiritually loud. It is also saturated with the suburban rage that White perfected while still a member of The Go. This was during the first two years of his White Stripes experiment, and then he abandoned them for whiter pastures, merged with Meg, and launched their debut in 1999, with music he called, ‘‘Really angry . . .the most raw, the most powerful, the most Detroit-sounding record we’ve made.’’2 Shades of early MC5, sprinkled with some spices from The Raconteurs—another of Jack’s persona playgrounds: a band-in-waiting solo project, should he ever need one for backup. This is a clever lad; he’s learned his lessons well from his role models, and most certainly better than Amy learned from hers.

Some people have referred to the White Stripes sound as punk-blues, and that seems to be a good enough provisional name to describe the band’s anti-aesthetic crusade against the future. Indeed, for the concept of their second release in 2000, Jack reached back to an avant-garde arts movement of the 20s called De Stijl (the style) in order to implement a bare bones kind of approach that hasn’t been toyed with quite so creatively since Lindsey Buckingham’s 1979 sonic experiment, Tusk. Buckingham and White have a good number of things in common, though their style is not one of them, and Stevie and Meg also share something, in that they were/are both part of a creative and intimate structural unit. The real connection, though, is powerful producing skill, and that is what puts White over the top when it comes to moving the history of music forward and sideways. This is ecologically sound blues-rock-folk music from hell, of the most economical sort, something which hasn’t quite been attempted since the fabled Basement Tapes were recorded. Now, rather than have a whole gaggle of zonked-out musical legends gather to party and record, just for fun, the hidden folk music of America, we have just foxy anger-king Jack White and his incredibly cute thumper, Meg.

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De Stijl (2000), eschewed all varnish and decoration and aimed instead for an essentialist revival of the roots-oriented hybrid favored by the early Who. It was recorded on 8-track analogue equipment in Jack White’s home, another similarity to both Buckingham and Brian Wilson, perhaps the most famous of the technical innovators who used simplicity as the raw material for their new musical directions. The first real success came with the release of The White Stripes’ next two albums, White Blood Cells (2001) and Elephant (2003), on which their skeletal garage sound, mingled with the charm of their personal mythology surrounding primary colors, triad numbers, and appliance objects, contributed to a buzz uncommon in today’s jaded musical environment. Elephant even provided them with what amounts to a hit single in ‘‘Seven Nation Army,’’ but of the eccentric sort favored by few peers in a business that has evolved, mutated, and morphed into a dimension of discontinuity, based primarily on Cold Hard Cash, but also paradoxically inspiring a dynasty of dissonance in which Radiohead, Arcade Fire, and Nine Inch Nails can coexist with Amy Winehouse, P. J. Harvey, Bjork, and the fantastic Lucinda Williams. In 2004, Elephant won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album, while the catchy little love anthem ‘‘Seven Nation Army’’ won for Best Rock Song. Not alternative, just best Rock Song. Period. The change was underway. They had somehow done what all great radical artists do—they move to the edge, they declare it to be the center, and they force the industry to reorganize itself around them. And that is exactly what’s been happening with The White Stripes, a band name I am convinced refers to the spaces in an early Dutch modernist painting, usually mistakenly thought to be empty, when in actuality they are not nothing—they are a piece of the color white.

While their music at first hearing appears to be missing certain elements, it also has filled itself up to bursting with other elements in their place, and it is carried forward by a genuine neurotic energy and attention surplus bordering on overload. The stripping bare process has allowed for the minimalist content to be expanded to near architectural scale, and their unique sonic signature to be magnified to near monumental scale. Like Winehouse, White’s trademark is the desperate torch song, but whereas Amy’s torch is nearly extinguished by her own tears, White’s torch explodes into angry fireworks, because he appears to toss gasoline rather than tears into the mix. It is the blues taken to extremes, and beyond. He has the purples, and with each album they get louder, heavier, and more menacing. The White Stripes, who seem to be encountering some of their own private tribulations, with Meg White suffering towards the end of 2007 from something publicists called ‘‘acute anxiety’’ and having to cancel the remainder of the tour

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designed to support Icky Thump, their recent Grammy-award-winning monument to the art of making the simple sound as complicated as the complicated is simple, are rocking on the rocks. At that time, there was public surmise as to whether the structural units known by their shared surname would ever be performing in public again. These circumstances not only echo the eventual breakup of the band who made all the other bands of today possible, The Beatles, they also evoke White’s own modernist inspired motif for his musical paintings, and the persona architecture that houses them, on stage and off. Method actors like White don’t suddenly leave their persona in the theatre; they bring it home to practice and experiment with it in everyday life, which makes one wonder about the dynamics of the White household—fire-haired supermodel mom and permanent iconoclast Jack White, as performed by John Gillis. Icky Thump is a remarkable record indeed, and Jack White’s commentary on the liner notes, a kind of poisoned-pen love letter to the world in general, is worth taking seriously as the crystallized insights of a restless but highly innovative mind. Somewhat self-absorbed, it is true, but what else is new in the realm of the dark mirror? I saw an image of someone I once knew today and it made me write down my first impressions. I don’t normally tend to do that. Guess that makes me an Impressionist. I do like impressions though. I once saw a man completely impersonate another man who was not unlike myself if you thought about it. Which I did. They make a symbol in sheet music when the writer wants you to keep playing until the cows come home, but I forget what it’s called. I like that idea though. What’s the longest it could go on? When there’s world record for something, it’s an extreme thing. How big is the biggest of its kind? And how did it get to the point where the conditions called for something so massive to be constructed? It’s baffling. Beautiful though. Icky Thump.3

Icky Thump is a Welsh phrase meant to evoke something truly unusual and rare, to which we are taken aback.

Some singer-songwriter mirrors are so cloudy we can barely see anything inside. Cloudy isn’t necessarily the same as dark, but the end effect on us is similar. Brian Wilson’s mirror reflected our longing for the pure state of being which we mistakenly think of as nostalgia for childhood, when it is actually nostalgia for a future we have lost—childhood’s end. There are multiple ways to break the blues, or to try to do so. Some do it by singing the blues, like John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, for instance, or Mayall’s ‘‘kids,’’—the early Fleetwood Mac. Others, like Wilson, try to happy themselves practically to death. Still other singer-songwriters, equally immersed in woe, tend to shift their attention towards a different response, one more capable of providing a much

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needed defense—the sarcasm of sardonic humor, calculated to bring us face to face with the darkness and, at the same time, make us laugh at it outright. This kind of blues-breaker comprises a group as varied as Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, and to some extent, even Frank Zappa. They exhort us to laugh, or maybe sneer, in the face of fate, but we discover only too quickly that it only hurts when we laugh. In response, they ask us to look into the ways that a smile can hide the horror. Humor has always had a subtle but hidden role to play in popular music’s means of communicating important social issues. The best historical illustration of this is perhaps the peculiar synchronicity of performers such as Spike Jones and his City Slickers and the rock satirist par excellence, Zappa. They both decided to utilize the funhouse mirror. And we see, especially when studying Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman, that the ability to provoke controversy and change through parody is a skillful and incisive weapon. In their cases, they wield a sharp social scalpel in exactly the same manner that a great writer such as Jonathan Swift used a pen, and for exactly the same reasons. In Jack White’s case, his probing satirical scalpel is usually leveled at both the hand that feeds him, the record and music industry and its historical structure, and the romantic object of his affection. The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Led Zeppelin are the groups that most informed and inspired (and still do today) the mayhem of Jack White. Those classic groups have remained messy, mad and bad in spirit, even if time is eating away at their biting impact. A quick listen to The Who’s early songs such as ‘‘Here ’Tis,’’ ‘‘Zoot Suit,’’ and ‘‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’’ instantly shows us the grail that White sought for and found in his Detroit garage, and which he mixed even more violently with his own personal musical messiahs, the black and blue sound of Blind Willie McTell, Son House, Robert Johnson, and Howlin’ Wolf. Listening to The White Stripes, all two of them, perform Son House’s ‘‘Death Letter’’ live in concert is an incendiary experience that leaves you wondering exactly how White managed to get away with this supernatural concoction of everything that came before him into a massive mountain of sound colliding with a dangerous toying with rock star personas etched in stone.

It is difficult to find comparable parallels to what White seems to be accomplishing when he tears down and rebuilds the traditions that make him possibly the most unlikely star. His entire mask is one of disdain for stardom and the deep disillusionment inherently embedded in the postmodern sarcasm of twenty-first–century pop culture. However, the creative parallels here are perfectly clear if we look just a little further afield: Charlie Parker and Miles Davis in jazz; Charles Ives and Erik

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Satie in classical; James Joyce in literature; Pablo Picasso in painting; Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture; Robert Johnson in blues music; and Neil Young first in folk music and then in electric anthems. Especially in the case of Young’s angry and brilliant control of the raw electric lava at his disposal, he is an artist strangely similar to White in temperature, if not style—one who has certainly turned up the emotional volume on looking into the darkness and using the force of feeling as a weapon against the night. Some early reviewers of The White Stripes have even compared their revolution to that caused by The Beatles’ abrupt style shift with the release of Rubber Soul, and definitely the about-face contained in their masterpiece, Revolver. It is only after a protracted course of listening to all of their simple yet sophisticated music that one begins to twig to the fact that this may be more than a mere fancy cooked up in a record reviewer’s overheated and solitary reverie. The White Stripes did evolve from primitive beginnings to technical grandiosity within the span of creatively disparate but exhilarating songs and sounds, and they developed a love affair with the press, especially the British press, in a very Beatle-like manner. They have also lasted two years longer than the legendary ones, though lately one begins to wonder two things. How do they stylistically remain outsiders if they have become the consummate insiders? And, how long can the interpersonal emotional bond of collaborative partnership be sustained under the pressures exerted by massive celebrity as it collides with deeply hidden self-doubt? It happens to the best of them, nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it did happen to the best of them—The Beatles—and to every single other supernaturally gifted partnership in the annals of singer-songwriter history. Success can submerge talent itself when the force that made the miracle possible in the beginning, a gift for refreshing the core tradition, becomes another new tradition in itself. The cult of personality can paralyze fragile talents, even quirkily gifted ones like certain drummers. The celebrity attached to the ascent becomes too big to handle, too massive to move, too tantalizing to change, and too rewarding to run away from.

So for The Whites, it’s back to black, but literally, back to the black beginnings of rhythm and blues, ignited with punk sensibilities, and smothered in a thick gravy of personal relationship demons. In other words, back to the blues as a motif, a language, a style, but also as the kind of self-expression that needs to refresh itself regularly at a fierce fountain of suffering in order to work. White has gone down to the same crossroad that Prince and Hendrix plugged into, gathering up a huge history of black guitar angst in his skinny white arms, but luckily for him, and us, this young man can really play. And that’s what matters most, as per Peter Green, doomed founder of the original Fleetwood Mac.

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White is a brilliant example of using a dingy mirror to great effect, using it so well, in fact, that we see right under there with him, beneath the emotionally disturbing grime. Sometimes the bright lights can be blinding. Sometimes one’s partner is blinding. The polarities and dualities inherent in the creative artist and audience relationship are varied and vulnerable, just as the singer-songwriters themselves usually are, and sometimes a songwriting partnership can be as intimate as a marriage. Sometimes a marriage can become the basis for and the entropy of a great songwriting team. The personal relationship at the heart, perhaps the broken heart, of The White Stripes reminds me of the lines written by another gifted dark mirror, Lou Reed, cofounder of Velvet Underground: ‘‘I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are, in case you don’t know.’’ But it is more than gender polarity or genius duality at work in all these dynamic songwriters, whether composing alone or in tandem; it is almost a kind of unique personality paradigm at work in the unconscious of our culture. All these singer-songwriters, especially Jack White, are salesmen (and salesladies) for the Unconscious. These artists are exploring the potential for words and music as a transcendental force that can cure existential angst. There is both a terrible sadness and a blissful glee in the art and craft of such explorers of the darkness. Many are depressive troubadours whose often triumphant but tragic lives were a veritable cautionary tale for any singer-songwriters willing, or foolish enough, to slip into the dizzying sanctuary of solipsism, one of the chief perils to which all poets, and in particular many singer-songwriters, are prone. Jack is gifted, he might be a postmodern impressionist, but he’s also most certainly a good old-fashioned depressionist, writing his way out of his own deep well, after descending voluntarily so he could sing back his reports to us. One of our finest dark poets, Leonard Cohen, expressed a similar statement about the ancient craft in his ‘‘Tower of Song.’’ There he asks Hank Williams bluntly, ‘‘how lonely does it get?’’ Instead of an answer, however, all that the questioner hears in reply is Hank Williams’ coughing, high above, in ‘‘the tower of song.’’4 The White Stripes appear to be intentionally ‘‘playing’’ with rock persona stereotypes, melting the masks invented by their own ancestral icons of rock music in order to reinvent the genre. Despairing rock-poets like White, by plunging all the way to the bottom of their subjectivity, remarkably still somehow manage to serve as perfect emblems for the entire singer-songwriter phenomenon, both its pathology and its paradox. By dipping down so deep into the personal, they succeed in arriving at a universal message—an objective reality that all of us can share, relate to, project upon, listen to, sing along with, and make love or fall asleep to. The Whites, like all the other dark mirrors, somehow manage to do what the most successful singer-songwriters always do, no matter what their style—they articulate something that we want them to say on our behalf; they say what we would say, if we only could.

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We listen to the tales woven, the dreams told, the seductions shouted, and the parties thrown by attending to the unique words of pawnbrokers, confidence men, coal miners, and ventriloquists who throw their diverse and distressing voices at us. Fueled by a duality and polarity at the heart of any creative enterprise, the singer-songwriter phenomenon, which has indeed already had its classical rise and fall, is one of those unique and deep mysteries that makes listening to music so magical. And that same internal dinergy still makes songs the most powerful means of conveying a feeling from one person to another, or to millions of others. The White Stripes seem to be fulfilling something of the promise that The Beatles were only able to reach for, since The Beatles wildly succeeded musically but not dynamically through the ongoing interplay of a collaborative partnership. Or at least not dynamically for an extended period of time, given the intense emotional heat of Beatlemania. A whole decade of The White Stripes, a 10-year terrorist-saturated stretch that overlaps with the new millennium, perhaps indicates that there still is, after all, a method to the madness of sustaining a close personal creative partnership based on reciprocal maintenance. How else can we explain the origins and trajectory of their remarkably quirky career?

Their new ‘‘functionalist’’ approach and the ‘‘minimalist’’ music that results consists of a daring maneuver, where all surface decoration has been eschewed in favor of a full frontal attack of high-voltage simplicity, with each album being another chapter in an ongoing manifesto delivered to the ears before the mind. This is different from the other form of late twentiethcentury avant-garde music known as minimal (Riley, Young, Reich, Glass). The ear experiences something that can obviously only be referred to as maximal when we listen to The Whites. As simple as their latest music may seem at first, it remains to be seen and heard whether the basic components of emotive composition laid bare by White can accumulate enough insight to be shared by larger and larger numbers of people, without changing its core values. There is also the danger for White that, like Winehouse, he might become so ensconced in his admittedly hermetic kingdom that he too veers perilously close to the edge of isolation, solipsism, and utter self-absorption. Unless, of course, those are the very territories from which he launched himself when he first began. After all, consider the procedural leitmotif and ongoing process of his unraveling personal traumas of the heart, in the best tradition of the torch singer, but also appreciate the dangerously selfenclosed world he occupies. Perhaps it is Jack White and not John Gillis who says and does these things (just the way it was Dylan and not Zimmerman who said and did what that lightning in a body accomplished as far back as 1962).

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The lyrical liturgy that White embeds within his torrents of blues lava flow is an obscure and highly personal one, much as Lennon’s was and Townshend’s still is, but with White, we enter a whole new stage of publicprivate persona play, one that can only be called, in keeping with the age in which we live and the era that spawned him, a postmodern dark mirror with a philosophical bent. His song lyrics are a veritable catalogue of conflicts, a love search in perpetual peril. From the very first album, The White Stripes (1999), we were deluged with a big sound that was beautiful in spite of its own strategies for offending, with astonishing renditions of blues classics like Robert Johnson’s ‘‘Stop Breaking Down’’ sandwiched between two White originals. Those songs formed a devastating triad. With lyrics every bit as hyper-personal as Winehouse’s are, but with a more secure sense of his grasp of a living avant-garde tradition, White has an obscure and reclusive meaning that hides behind each song. Propelled by a wave of pure energy, nasal howling, and truly phenomenal guitar playing, the song is clever enough and fast enough to stay just ahead of meaning. In other words, it grabs us by the throat and we start willingly traveling along with it, long before we wonder what it all means. This is one of the key secrets of a great song—facilitating comprehension before understanding, or perhaps before delivering precognitive meaning is a better description of such a truly transcendental occurrence. It’s also one of the secrets that made John Lennon a great singer-songwriter—great, even though occasionally his elliptical lyrics were carried by a strangely rough and unconventional singing voice. White has that same kind of merger between misanthropic yet hauntingly human insights and the animal magnetism of a weird but wonderful throat. On occasion, White will use that voice to throw rage back in the face of perceived abuse of power, as in the third song (on their first record), ‘‘The Big Three Killed My Baby,’’ in which he skewers the American dream as choreographed by giant automobile manufacturers like those who once ruled White’s home town, and once even ruled the world: ‘‘30,000 wheels are rollin’ and my stick shift hands are swollen, everything involved is shady, the big three killed my baby.’’ He concludes by pleading for giant industries not to feed his planned obsolescence and declaring that he is about to have another blowout. Musically, and as a blisteringly hip metaphor for this millennium, Jack White is the sound of the tires on the wheels of rock ’n’ roll blowing out after being retreaded one too many times by giant monster bands. He returns down the long road of American music, far on the other side of that familiar crossroad where Robert Johnson first made his Paganni-like bargain with the devil in order to play up a storm, but only for a very short lifetime. After all, listen to ‘‘I Fought Pirhanas.’’ After a few hearings you begin to realize that this is the essence of blues music, no matter who plays it—the

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personification of pain in music. This is definitely one of the greatest blues songs I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s living death.

Jack White seems to have figured out how to sustain the show without melting down, at least for a decade now, unless the recent Meg meltdown of acute anxiety that inhibited the duo’s travel is the first rumbling of the underground pressures at work inside this band. But he has a long-range plan; White has married a red-haired supermodel named Karen Elson, and marrying a supermodel is definitely making a down payment on a long-term reality investment of time and energy. His supermodel wife entered the picture shortly after he split with Meg. He kept Meg’s name, of course, because it was now the name of a famous rock star that he channels. It was actually Meg who enthusiastically insisted that Jack propose to his girlfriend. Not many of our ex-lovers manage to be so important to us that we not only stay in the business of making music together, we also follow their advice regarding matters of the heart. But then, Meg White is not your average ex-wife/big sister/best friend/ musical partner. She’s definitely not your average drummer either. In fact, many Stripes fans are constantly complaining about her rudimentary but nonetheless enigmatic and alluring skills. The best one can say about her style, apart from finding her incredibly cute, as I do myself, is that she perfectly blends into and balances the Jack-doll’s histrionic brilliance. If The White Stripes had a normal drummer, the chemical compound would not be the same, kind of like the Ringo factor, and that is precisely what makes them eligible for the dark mirror award for reciprocal maintenance in the twenty-first century. And just at the end of that last century, with an eponymously titled debut record that was as revolutionary as it was appetizing, Jack White began to make an exhibition of himself, quite literally. He was already banging on the door of the future we now occupy, the first decade of which has brought a soundtrack from him. ‘‘If the wrinkle that is in your brain has given you quite a sting, your fingers have become a crane, pulling on these puppet strings,’’ he laments in ‘‘Sugar Never Tasted So Good’’ (from The White Stripes album), announcing that romance is going to feel different in the new age. He also declares himself personally, introducing to us a nihilistic character who will subsequently return from album to album.

For White, characters are a device, just as they were for Lennon. They also provide a way for him to hide safely behind the armor his sensitivity requires or demands of him, and White has remarked that such characters allow him,

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or even compel him, through his exploration of them, to know himself better. I feel better myself already. The record that followed, in the first millennial year, was a utopia gone awry. Named after the 1917 Dutch avant-garde art movement created by the great Theo Van Doesberg, De Stijl (2000) was indeed the declaration of and manifesto for a new style of rock music. White really begins to loosen up with this one, leaving the punk steam a little in the background and cranking up the blues lava to an alarming and ecstatic degree. In the searing ‘‘Hello Operator,’’ he pleads with some kind of celestial or demonic power to control his communication problems. ‘‘Find a canary, a bird to bring my message home, carry my obituary, my coffin doesn’t have a phone.’’ In the majestic version of Son House’s classic ‘‘Death Letter,’’ it becomes instantly clear why White has been lauded by public, industry, and critics alike as a savior (of sorts) for the rock myth. This is the staggering point where one realizes how good a guitarist he really is, and where the color of his skin suddenly vanishes, just as Peter Green’s did, all those years ago. Just as my appreciation for White’s guitar genius was slow in coming, it took a similarly long time for me to admit how marvelous a player Lindsey Buckingham is, suggesting that maybe the best of the best are not ever destined to be immediate deliveries. The best always take a little longer to sink and lodge in the soul. But once there, they force their way back onto the surface of our awareness rapidly, upon awaking each morning and before we can even get out of bed. If we’ve been listening properly, that song, whatever it is, starts playing again inside our brain. A song like the White Stripes’ ‘‘Truth Doesn’t Make a Noise’’ seems to be capable of that kind of effect. There, White weeps over his lover’s heart of stone, as well as the fact that she’s constantly picked on. The narrator seems likely to be guilty of that kind of abuse himself. She gives blank stares in return for his sympathetic advice. But then again, ‘‘her stare is louder than her voice, because truth doesn’t make a noise.’’ Other times it’s the schizophrenic inclusion of a Blind Willie McTell song, ‘‘Your Southern Can is Mine,’’ to deviate from what, up to that point, had seemed a seamless homage to the electric form of towering rage. But by including it, in a peculiar down-home and warped party vibe, they have secured their place as the masters of irony, for the moment. But then, the moment is all the group really cares about, which, in fact, is why they might end up being surprisingly timeless and universal. History’s funny that way. Speed of recording is another return to the past which the band employs to special and profound effect. De Stijl was recorded in Jack’s living room in the blink of an eye and perhaps a wink at Brian Wilson and Buckingham, two other obsessively creative homebodies who have each informed the White ethos in ways that lurk below the surface and have more to do with psychology than with technology. White Blood Cells (2001) marked the arrival of a full-fledged cult around the band, creating that rare supercharged heat that every so often anoints someone as the messiah of modern music. It was Jack’s turn. This is rarely a

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comfortable place for any creative artist to be, since the loftiest work is usually made with complete indifference to the cash register. Their next album, Elephant (2003) was recorded in two weeks at Toerag Studios in London. The 2005 followup to that, Get Behind Me Satan, was also recorded in two weeks, but with each creative venture they consolidated their production values and became ever so slightly more sophisticated, despite the outward gloss of primitive anti-industry aesthetics. Their frenzied production speed is matched by a parallel looseness in performance, with no two gigs being even remotely similar, due to Jack’s instinctual choice of what comes next and also how long the given solos are in any given show, which is unofficially known as what comes during. All the best dark mirrors deviate right there in the middle, right before our very eyes. 2004 was the beginning of their annual pilgrimage to pick up Grammys, for best rock song, or best alternative music album, or best rock performance, or all at once, and with Elephant, they seemed to hit creative pay dirt in a way that also translated into global sales output. Elephant is both a musical and a communicative masterpiece that heralds the arrival of a mature talent, one who has gotten used to the sudden rush of adrenalin associated with overnight success and is comfortable having his rock star status hammered into submission by the artist-master. So far, so good. And it has been good, and getting better all the time. The only serious question is one similar to that surrounding Winehouse, but for very different reasons. How long can the emotional intensity associated with angry struggle be sustained in the midst of capitalist splendor, a supermodel wife, and a reputation as the shape-shifting prophet of a future musical age? We’ve heard that assessment before, of course, in the cases of Dylan and Lennon, but in their cases it sadly turned out to be true—perhaps it always is. But White seems to have resolved that particular dilemma, and given his rapid rise and ongoing evolution, we owe the gifted and mercurial Mr. White more than a benefit of the doubt to see where he takes the carnival of conflict from here. I trust him, for some frightening reason, to make good on his promise, even if it drives him mad. Don’t worry Jack, we’ll be there to catch you (or at least watch with great interest if you fall) because, like we do with Winehouse, we want to emphasize how much we enjoy your talents. But we also need to remind you that the culture likes to watch people sing about drowning, yet we don’t actually want to see someone really drown, do we?

The Jack-doll is the same kind of talented confidence man who occasionally visits another gifted trickster-artist, David Bowie, in a different guise but with similarly spectacular and inspiring songs and performances that take place at the same emotional temperature. His character in ‘‘Seven Nation Army,’’ the fierce opener to Elephant, shrieks ‘‘I’m gonna fight ’em off, a seven nation army couldn’t hold me back’’ as the combat anthem in his losing battle with

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forces who will eventually bleed him dry—this is a character who bears watching. Few writers can provide commentary on the creative act of writing a song while still immersed in the craft and creation of it, but White is warning us of a drought yet to come, a point in the journey when the words are going to bleed out of him until he won’t have to think anymore. Even fewer dark mirrors would characterize their craft so compellingly as writing away their need to think, whether about sorrows or joys. Not many songs capture the hyper-personal essence of the blues quite so grippingly as ‘‘Ball and Biscuit,’’ also from Elephant. It’s the guitar-playing and animal snarl present there that etch White’s burning venom into the wailing wall of American blues. In a propulsive but ambiguous sequence of thoughts, he proclaims himself his lover’s third man (possibly), as well as ‘‘the seventh son’’ (definitely), and then goes on threateningly: ‘‘right now you could care less about me, but soon enough you will care.’’ White’s more than just the seventh son though; he’s the seventeenth seventh son! With The White Stripes’ next album, Get Behind Me Satan (2005), they entered a pantheon reserved for the very rare artists whose artifacts somehow manage to sum up an age, whether we like it or not, in a way that is wildly self-indulgent, commercially huge, and yet artistically advanced and revealing at the same time. Robert Hilburn, the Los Angeles Times staff writer responsible for keeping his eyes on the edge, had this to say in between gasps of praise: ‘‘Inspired and determined, Jack White gets personal, crafting a White Stripes CD so surprising it recalls The Beatles’ creative leap on Rubber Soul.’’5 The most surprising thing about certain so-called alternative artists is that they also, on rare occasions, reflect the times we live in so well that they achieve staggering sales success while still being on the edge. This is proof that some follow the old avant-garde adage that advises the most daring artists to move to the edge, declare it to be the center, and wait with a stern expression. Hilburn goes on to say, A daring creative advance in which he and drummer Meg White have added layers of imagination and depth to what was already a thrilling new sound. Despite all the gloom surrounding the record industry at the way bottomline consciousness at major labels stifling creativity, White shows how a fiercely independent artist can still make music that is both cutting edge and commercial. White sets aside his signature blistering guitar lines on most of the tracks, marimbas dominate one song, grand piano and/or drums highlight others, and he mixes them in dazzlingly original ways.6

Original, and certainly the most caustic dark mirror thus far, in terms of sharing intimate stories of woe is me romance, an even deeper blues spirit mashed together with even heavier but somehow smoother textures, leaving the semblance of punk disdain but varnished ever so lightly with a faint coat

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of accessibility. Maybe it’s just that, against all our better instincts, we actually end up liking the Jack character, even though we know it might not be good for us to be his friend. Throughout these song-maps to a territory of loss, it is White’s humor, his wildly inventive voice, and his magical guitar that keep him from drowning in the self-pity blues. Instead, he is ready, willing, and able to surf the hellwave as expertly as Duane Allman, though less pretty sounding, and as proficiently as Jimmy Page, though only slightly less narcissistic. Feedback is Jack’s friend, and he shakes its raw hand with the grasp of a master. According to Hilburn, There was a child-like innocence to much of the Stripes music and even their red and white peppermint outfits. But the new songs are more complex, more wary, more revealing—as White struggles, sometimes with Biblical imagery, over classic matters of integrity, honor and temptation. ‘‘I don’t need any of your pity,’’ he snarls in one song, ‘‘I’ve got plenty of my own!’’ In singing about betrayal and rejection, he’s not exempting himself from guilt. There are times in the songs when he could be alluding to his own misdeeds as easily as someone else’s.7

But we always need to remember that with all dark mirrors, it’s impossible to tell the difference between the songwriter and the character he or she embodies temporarily. They are all someone else already, and permanently.

With their most recent release, Icky Thump (2007), another Grammy grabber, The White Stripes have consolidated their hold on today’s music scene with a nervous and pale fist. Whether they can consolidate the apparent cracks in the armor of their collaborative partnership is another question. One hopes so, for the obvious and selfish reason that more music is required. Or is it that their job is now done after a decade, and the task has been passed to someone else to up the ante even further? As in, ‘‘I’ll call your Icky Thump, and raise you my. . ..’’ But how does one top Icky Thump? It’s possibly the heaviest record I’ve heard in years, and that’s taking into account that I still have the ringing in my ears from live Who and Led Zeppelin concerts. This little gem of a record, recorded in a whole three weeks (while some star status bands take up to three years these days), has proven to be their most melodic swim through mayhem in some time. It also contains one of my favorite and very rare examples of Meg getting a chance to sing a few words, harmonizing on ‘‘St. Andrew (The Battle Is in the Air),’’ a truly strange song about abandonment that reaches for and achieves new heights of existential angst, but without the usual prerequisite howling. If we are lucky, we could see another studio album round about 2009. Ironically, they now face a problem shared by Amy Winehouse. How do they top

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themselves once they’ve reached an almost supernaturally creative peak? Where do they go from here, and how do they satisfy the bottomless appetite of our entertainment expectations? In the meantime, in March 2008, The Raconteurs speedily released their second record, Consolers of The Lonely, featuring Jack White, which means he must have been cooking up this little surprise dish before, during, and after winning those Grammys for Icky Thump, and therefore right in the midst of his partner Meg’s condition of acute anxiety that prevented travel, performance, or interview. The Raconteurs’ first album, Broken Boy Soldiers (2006), was a little bit of relaxation that Jack White engaged in while resting between his own White Stripes projects, Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan. Beginning to get a clear picture? Now, we have Consolers of The Lonely to console us, so to speak, should there be no more Stripes music to follow. Pity about the cute, anxiety-ridden drummer. Clever lad though. Synchronicity? Or just the dark mirror reflecting itself back at itself, and back at us? There is an utterly fantastic term that I must enlist at this point to describe White as the most emblematic of all the dark mirrors, whether in solo or partnership format. The dynamic at play is enantiomorphism, and it’s easier to understand than it sounds. Jack White is an enantiomorph par excellence. The terms comes from Greek ‘‘enantios,’’ meaning opposite, and ‘‘morphe,’’ meaning form. An enantiomorph is described as: either of a pair of objects related to each other as the right hand is to the left, that is, as mirror images that cannot be reoriented so as to appear identical. Both the Meg White/White Stripes combination and The Raconteurs can be defined as a racemate: a mixture of equal quantities of two enantiomorphs, or substances that have dissymmetric molecular structures that are mirror images of one another. Each enantiomorph rotates the plane of polarization of plane-polarized light through a characteristic angle, but, because the rotatory effect of each component exactly cancels that of the other, the mixture is not super-imposable. Though identical, they are opposites. Thus we arrive at an even more appropriate word, given the context of singer-songwriters in tandem or alone—that of resolution. I have referred to the pairs of partners in all great musical collaborations as parts of a chemical compound, whether it be the individual Beatles, the individual White Stripes, or The Raconteurs, White’s replacement band-in-waiting, and this is the grandest and most operatic example of all. In chemistry, resolution is any process by which a mixture called a racemate is separated into its two constituent enantiomorphs, or pairs of substances that have dissymmetric arrangements of atoms and structures that are non-super-imposable mirror images of one another. Basically the equation is as follows. White Stripes equals Jack White equals Raconteurs equals Jack White.

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The fact that music that is basically the blues (even that ratcheted up to the purple rafters like The White Stripes music) is so popular must be a sign of the times we are living through. Again, the white part of the abstract paintings so loved by the brilliant John Gillis is often thought to be the empty part, but what if it isn’t? What if white is a color after all, and what if the empty part is the part with the most potential, because the full part is already full? The Stripes may have become full, while The Raconteurs, an equally talented unit that includes his old friend Brendan Benson, a rollicking group of lads who definitely excel at telling stories and anecdotes effectively, if loudly, are only just beginning to fill up quite nicely. But there’s plenty of Jack left to go around and for them to fuel up and move fast forward into the gap left behind, if The White Stripes should go missing. That’s one thing we can be sure of—there will always be plenty of Jack. If only the primitive genius of John Lennon and the gifted polish of Paul McCartney had found a way to cooperate together creatively while also coming and going into projects outside the structural unit of their initial band. But this is a postmodern idea. And we’re also talking about a very smart young musician. It is anti-brand on the surface, and all-brand underneath. Lennon and McCartney were the ultimate enantiomorphic binary unit in our musical history. If only they had been able to cooperate and come and go at the same time, then The Beatles may have survived even longer, fostering the growth of the individual identities within the unit for the benefit of the collective identity that brought them together in the first place. If those formative pop visionaries had somehow been able to learn the lesson that it seems their youthful inheritors could only have absorbed 30 years later, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, then they may have lasted as long as The White Stripes have, and as long as The Raconteurs might. So, to Jack White, in the hopes that his restless and multifaceted creativity might continue apace, and in the esteemed words of one of the darkest of the dark mirrors, here we are now—entertain us.

Afterword: One's Company, Two's a Crowd There has been a remarkable musical revolution, actually several in succession, and usually once every decade, since the post-60s era began, as if that tumultuous decade wasn’t enough when it came to transforming the margins into the mainstream. The truly staggering marriage of country music and blues, which took place in 1956 at the hands of Chuck Berry, and in 1957 at the hands of Elvis Presley, and gave birth to the rock ’n’ roll format inherited by the British masters The Beatles, who perfected its radical mixed-race template, had by 1967 elevated itself to incendiary levels of form, volume, content, and commercialism. After that initial explosion, rock ’n’ roll then turned into rock music, which eventually adopted a massive power base for delivering ever heavier sounds and sentiments to bigger and bigger crowds, as exemplified so well by The Who, Led Zeppelin, Cream, and others. It seemed like we all suddenly needed a rejuvenating plunge back into the history of the music’s roots— perhaps if only in order for the precursors and their inheritors to remain relevant for both their original and newly expanding audiences. In one sense, it was time for a return to basics, technical innovation having been taken about as far as it could possibly go by innovative groups such as Grateful Dead and Yes. In another sense, it was a case of the creative cycle reincarnating some of the essence of what started the whole pop stampede in the first place. The personal song, written and delivered by the writer himself (or herself), was once again on the ascendant curve, having almost been drowned out entirely by exhilarating experiments with astronomical amplification and ever more ambiguous lyrical content. The surprising source of the one such rejuvenation was the musical location—the location that had first inspired rhythm and blues artists to go on a date with accelerated bluegrass traditions—the country. Major rock musicians took a refreshing detour back to the country. The Byrds morphed into the Flying Burrito Brothers, who influenced some of Grateful Dead’s most compelling forays forward—their albums American Beauty and Workingman’s

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Dead. In turn, those albums inspired the making of softer melodies by groups such as America and, most famously and successfully, The Eagles. But the newly minted tradition inherited from Dylan by today’s most compelling lyricist-musicians has also undergone a surprising mutation and evolution in a totally different direction. This particular back to the roots direction chose to embrace classical jazz and blues as its point of departure, as exemplified so well by Amy Winehouse and Jack White. Still, and once again, the only thing more difficult than doing the songwriting deed alone is doing it with a creative partner. In his remarkable study of creativity, The Duality of Vision, Walter Sorell drew our attention to the powerful dynamics at work between genius, versatility, self-image, and the mystique of communication itself. He clearly explored how the push and pull conflict between two great partners is also found in the great solo artists, who often compete even, or especially, with themselves alone, much to their occasional peril. These figures tend to internalize the struggle between introversion and extroversion most commonly experienced by dual collaborators and accomplish their ends all by themselves. And they all have the solo scars to show for it. It is especially evident, he pointed out, in cases where a master of one art form decides to branch out and express him- or herself in a different but parallel medium. Sorell was surprisingly stringent on the survivors and those who were lost in their wake. ‘‘All art is a rebellion against man’s limitations and a triumph of his greatness. Riches exist everywhere for the strong, temptations for the weak. Only the would-be artist can suffer under the burden of an abundance of talent.’’1 By that demanding yardstick, John Lennon would have to be considered almost a failure, while Bob Dylan would be once more heralded as the true Olympian he suddenly appears to be. Lennon buckled under the weight of his own achievement in creating the most revolutionary group in pop music history, yet Dylan somehow got his 61st wind, soldiered on, and delivered himself a magisterial lifelong body of classic work. That same yardstick indicates that Amy Winehouse seems to suffer from the burden of her own prodigious talent, whereas Jack White manages to thrive despite it. Indeed, Peter Green, the burned-out founder of Fleetwood Mac; Syd Barrett, the freaked-out founder of Pink Floyd; and Brian Jones, the brain-toasted founder of The Rolling Stones, all of whose bands went on to mega-fame and ultra-wealth without them, would also have to be considered washouts according to Sorell’s stringent criteria. A little harsh perhaps, given that one must make certain allowances for at least some kinds of shared human frailty. But Sorell’s take on what he called the ‘‘psychological angle’’ is also especially revealing when it comes to trying to fathom the sources and end results of all the massively creative singer-songwriters in this book, not to mention all the many truly talented artists who couldn’t be in this book only because of scale (but who will be featured in a future study). Sorell emphasizes some of the true mystery surrounding great songs and their sometimes troubled

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interpreters. ‘‘Psychology, by its founder’s own admission, can do nothing towards the elucidation of the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the way the artist works. Probably the least impressive of Freud’s observations was that desire for fame, power, and the love of women lay behind the creative will of the artist.’’2 Well, while those last motives certainly would seem to apply abundantly to most rock and pop musicians, the origins of their gifts remain as hidden as ever, most likely because what makes them gifts in the first place is the very fact that they are hidden from the majority of people. Luckily, I’m not a psychologist, only a music lover like all the rest of you, and my interest is mostly in marveling at the magnificent works of art—the scintillating songs—produced from the depths of frequent misery and isolation, yet sounding to us, against all reason, as though they were written for us. We felt them ourselves, these feelings in the best of the best songs, in our own secret heart, but these particular singer-songwriters also spoke them aloud for the world to hear. This is why I find the thoughts of Sir Francis Galton in Hereditary Genius, to be so tantalizing and yet so disturbing at the same time. He believed that no true genius can remain hidden and must perforce assert himself, whether alone or in company. As answered by Sorell in his excellent study of duality in the arts, this focus provides even more evidence for the exceptional creative capacities and emotional capabilities of the dark mirror kind of artist in general, and of these unique singer-songwriters in particular: Although it is difficult to prove the contrary, it is obvious that certain defects in our mental make-up, inertia for one thing, dissipation for another, may easily prevent talent from developing. There is always more than a grain of truth in well-worn sayings, and one of them is that character defeats genius. Moreover, the very same genes which carry with them the blueprint of any creative potentiality, may also carry failure and defeat. Galton thought that ‘‘the compelling drive of creativeness, sometimes contrary to the conscious wishes of its possessor, may give the creative activity the semblance of a special kind of addiction for which there is no cure.’’ Many geniuses are endowed with an almost seismographic sensibility, and their inventiveness has a touch of clairvoyance.3

Sounds to me like one of the most unintentionally perfect summaries of Dylan’s harrowing ‘‘It’s All Right Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’’ that I’ve ever heard. And at this point, after engaging in so much reverie about singersongwriters, while also denying that I was ever psychoanalyzing them, I’m more than pleased to let a specialist such as Sorell make the following psychic observation: ‘‘Trying to deduce the reality of the man from the artist’s work leads to disappointments because the creative genius often hides in the habit of a man, unconsciously denying its shape.’’4

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Perhaps there should be a kind of periodic table for singer-songwriters, the way there is one for the scientific elements and their interactive relationships. Maybe there is one, and we just haven’t noticed what it looks like. Does the table of their relative values and weights as elements amongst us resemble the Grammy Awards? No, it couldn’t. Otherwise Don Van Vliet would have won a Grammy years ago for his wonderful portrayal of Captain Beefheart, before retiring to return to his first love—painting. Would the periodic table of singer-songwriters resemble Rolling Stone, UNCUT, or Mojo magazines? Maybe on occasion, but the actual table, though invisible, is much more self-evident and obvious than the relative interpretations of professional critics. And no, it couldn’t just only be the cash register, over which you and I have control as consumers, though it must be true that the best singer-songwriters simply have to connect with the largest number of people. It’s part of their magic in the first place. Perhaps history itself is the true location of the periodic table of elemental singer-songwriters. And why not, since that at least places them in the same context and perspective of the great earlier exponents of other forms of music. This leads us to the question: which singer-songwriters will eventually be ranked, if only by sheer creative survival, at an equally valued and parallel position as those historically important examples of other musical greatness, the classics? For instance, which singer-songwriter would last as long, and serve as flexibly for successive generations, as Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Gershwin, Armstrong, Parker, Davis, or Coltrane? The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who? Bob Dylan, certainly. If two is company and three is a crowd, then what is a ritualistic but disconnected gathering of separate individuals who share a similar sensibility and pathology and who carry on long distance conversations with each other, and us, through bodies of literary and popular musical works? A community? A tribe? A style, perhaps. Let’s consider for a moment singersongwriters as a community of strangers, a community of shadows—a select group of strange sociopaths for whom one is company and two’s a crowd. Ironically, it is this same group of metaphysical malcontents who most perfectly and beautifully mirror our own human condition back to us. Cut off from the common clay by celebrity and just downright orneriness, they nonetheless are such superior empaths that either alone or together, they read our minds. And their dark mirror sings them back to us. I’m sure you’ll notice that it’s difficult to catch the image clearly when the mirror is always spinning around, say, like Dylan’s does. Now Mr. Dylan, of course, sees it spinning so fast that he conjures up a single unified image from its ongoing blur. The rest of us see hundreds, if not thousands, of separate images, sounds, and words. But as long as he stands in front of us, and in front of the moving mirror, we remain confident that the message means what we feel it means, and not necessarily even what we think it means. This is the mystery of communication prior to comprehension—the outsider as prophet.

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Of course, an artist of the sophistication and rank of David Bowie could never actually be mistaken for a real outsider, no matter how much he may parlay his alien sensibility and futuristic sex appeal into a cabaret act. But there are some for whom outsider status is more legitimate, the ones whose theme song could be a certain great Kinks song, ‘‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else!’’ These artists investigate the borderline where the unique becomes the curse. These talented tunesmiths have a rare but real following that amounts to a special cult status. Don Van Vliet, Van Dyke Parks, Bjork, and others really are from somewhere else. The musical miracle, however, only seems to occur when representatives of the great outside manage to reach the mainstream loud and clear, and to channel our feelings even more accurately than they can manage their own. Ray Davies’s gloriously sadistic song sums up his own passionate turmoil over being gay in a world of macho male rock stars, a predicament that placed him squarely within the same challenging matrix as many of the female stars being studied as well, that of fitting in. Being considered on the fringe, or performing in a style that feels utterly foreign to the mainstream audience, can sometimes fog up the mirror. Or, even more strangely, it can sometimes achieve a triumph of connection and serve as our own emotional emblem, for reasons we may not even fully understand. Once again, and still after all these years, Dylan is the titular mayor of the town in which all these other singer-songwriters are citizens. He didn’t take over the place. They elected him. He doesn’t even want to be mayor. He doesn’t see all the other singer-songwriters lined up behind him, as they really are lined up behind him, as if waiting for the bus to poetry heaven. He only sees the back of his own head in that special moving mirror, and he is no closer to his real face than the rest of us are, standing behind him in line. We get more guesses though. He has no actual peers if we define a peer as someone who has had a similarly seismic effect at revolutionizing musical tradition. To find such parallels we would have to place him in the context of Elvis Presley or The Beatles, if only because they alone loom as large. They are people after whom their professional field was no longer the same—people who will never leave us because we carry them inside of us. The sorrowful substance of their songs, by often turning its gaze inward, sometimes reflects it outward. These artists have all turned up the emotional volume on looking into the darkness and using the force of feeling as a weapon against the night. Indeed, theirs was a golden age that, especially from 1962–1992 was a grand spectacle to behold. And to behear. So we end where we began, with the enigma of Bob Dylan’s amazing words and music. And we must ask ourselves further questions when the songs end, as end they must: what messages did we really want delivered by these exemplars of empathy—the great singer-songwriters? We need to ask ourselves what our intimate relationship with the messages in these powerful songs really means, but then strangely enough, Dylan actually

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wrote a song to tell us that already, before we actually knew what we wanted, and it’s the song we are listening to right now. The song is called ‘‘The Wicked Messenger,’’ it’s from John Wesley Harding, released 40 years ago, and it forgives the consequences as it outlines the confrontation with the dark mirror which opens up his heart: ‘‘If ye cannot bring good news, then don’t bring any.’’ Well, no one can sum things up better than Mr. Dylan. However, there is one other observation made by a fine singer-songwriter who, though not considered a dark mirror, nonetheless has provided ideal insight for appreciating the phenomenon itself. Steve Winwood, founder of the classic progressive rock band Traffic, penned a remarkable ode to the persona, expressed perfectly, during the end of that magic year of 1967, and written from the perspective of the audience itself. In his marvelous song, ‘‘Dear Mr. Fantasy,’’ addressed to all purveyors of songs who become a veritable conduit for their audiences’ feelings, desires, appetites and even demands, he appeals to Mr. Fantasy (a generic musical artist who could be literally any of the tortured talents in this book) to play a tune, but one that will make the whole audience happy and one that does anything required to take the audience out of its shared collective gloom. He (we) then suggests and cajoles the artist to sing a song and play guitar, and to do it quickly, on demand so to speak. The crucial portion of this grand testament song is his announcement that only Mr. Fantasy can make us all laugh, but that by doing so he breaks out in tears. But the audience has a reassuring pledge to make to Mr. Fantasy, and it is one that covers all the powerfully creative personas we have just been appreciating: ‘‘Please don’t be sad, if it was a straight mind you had, we wouldn’t have known you all these years.’’5

Most of us have experienced the internal battle between our desires for, on the one hand, prurient personal content and, on the other, the poetic transformation of raw grey emotional metal into shiny songwriting gold. In other words, we want to know what lies behind the masks that artists show us, and beyond their public personas, in the soft-focus hinterland of their actual personal lives, where, like us, they also have their share of turmoil, trials, and tribulations. This curious dichotomy between our desire to be entertained and to be told only the ‘‘good news,’’ and our desire to celebrate our surrogates’ sufferings, is a strange conflict indeed. On the one hand we have Mr. Difficulty, bringing us down with reality sandwiches, and on the other hand we have Mr. Fantasy, uplifting our taste buds in his search for some vague utopian ambrosia which will explain life, or at least make it more meaningful, if only for a moment. Things happen quickly in the overheated world of pop music. Its practitioners, like exotic purebred canines, seem to age at seven times our usual

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rate, and they often spin out of control right before our eyes while we all forget that we are no longer watching a theatrical performance but an actual private life being acted out in public. As a postscript, and as of this writing in August 2008, both Amy Winehouse and Meg White seem to have entered a kind of tabloid hell reserved for only the most unique specimens. They are both experiencing some of the more profound difficulties of fame, celebrity, youthful indiscretion, and astronomical anxiety, but each for very different and very personality-specific reasons. Always enough sorrow to go around, after all. I found that after immersing myself in the worlds of Amy Winehouse, and The White Stripes in particular, it was sometimes necessary to take an aural bath in the Moody Blues in order to find an antidote to the relentless sadness and passive anger simmering in their extremely powerful music. And the deeper the examination of the source of their travails, the more unsavory is the realization that we are collectively feeding on their public pain. The former child actor Gary Coleman once summed it up very well when he opined, ‘‘The world needs people like you and me who’ve been knocked around by fate. ’Cause when people see us, they don’t want to be us, and that makes them feel great.’’6 Though certainly an ironic take on the service provided by public suffering, his sad observation also contains a kernel of what we experience every time we read about either the frenzied actions of Amy Winehouse or the quiet withdrawal of Meg White. The mask of their celebrity has indeed eaten into their faces, the lovely faces of talented young artists each with the misfortune of being temperamentally unsuited to the vagaries of global acclaim. In the case of Meg White, superbly strange drummer for the White Stripes, her arrival in tabloid hell was especially surprising to many, considering that the shy and reclusive star seldom seemed to want to makes waves, cause trouble, or even answer simple questions from interviewers (leaving all those tasks to ex-husband and pretendbrother, Jack, who can more than handle them all by himself). In the White Stripes’ song ‘‘Passive Manipulation’’ from 2005, and in one of her rare vocal efforts, the drummer mysteriously intones a rather ominous chanting lyric, ‘‘Women, listen to your mothers, don’t just succumb to the wishes of your brothers,’’ and she follows that with a warning not to mistake your father for your lover—with the exact same lyric repeated three times in three stanzas, just to make sure we get the overall message. But sadly, it appears that she herself succumbed to someone’s wishes at some early stage of her career, and the tape of their sexual encounter caused her quite a shock back in September 2007. To be fair, her spokespeople declare that it is not her in the tape, it is an imposter, and the tape is a cruel hoax. I have to accept that statement at face value, having some sympathy for a musician who has long been on the receiving end of nasty critical attention over the many fruitful years of her toiling in Jack’s brilliant shadow. Whatever the truth may be, it’s a cruel hoax, played either by a bizarre fan or else the result of her own fateful mistake, one so dazzling in its disturbing

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notoriety that it causes her fans to speculate on whether the dangling ‘‘D’’ that she wears might relate to one of their best songs, ‘‘The Denial Twist,’’ a song on the same album as ‘‘Passive Manipulation,’’ Get Behind Me Satan. ‘‘If you think that a kiss is all in the lips, you got it all wrong man!’’ From September 2007 to September 2008—an eternity in the music business —Meg White dropped out of the spotlight, appearing only once in public at a June concert by her partner’s ‘‘new’’ band, The Raconteurs. But she didn’t perform, only came out on stage after being introduced by White, idly tapped on the drummer’s kit a couple of times, then fled back to wherever embarrassed rock stars hide out these days. But the erstwhile Jack White has also declared that after his current Raconteurs’ tour is over, he definitely plans to ‘‘get back with Meg’’ and begin to produce their long awaited seventh album. Whether his partner wants to get back with him, and more importantly, to expose herself to the glare of flashbulbs illuminating her personal discomforts, that might be quite a different matter. Maybe if we all agree to agree that it’s not her in the tape, she will come back to construct the quirky rhythms some of us have grown rather fond of over the last decade. Maybe Jack will be nicer to her this time. Music lovers, myself included, truly hope so, and for the usual selfish reasons: we want, we need, more White Stripes music, and she is one of the only two people who know how to create it. She’s Ringo’s second coming. Best wishes for your speedy recovery from reality Meg; come back soon to take us all to that other place. In the case of the troubled Amy Winehouse, we have an even more severe cautionary tale: a brilliant artist who is so out of it that her father has to explain to her why there are so many people following her around and waiting outside for autographs. ‘‘Because dear, you’re the number one recording artist in the world’’. . .‘‘I am?’’ Let’s just say you know you’re really in trouble when your wax effigy in Madame Tussaud’s famous museum, installed in July 2008, looks better and healthier that you do in real life. Wasn’t it always supposed to be the other way around? How can we laugh at those wax figures otherwise? Especially once its real-life inspiration has contracted early emphysema, and was hospitalized overnight in late July for a reaction to some ‘‘medication.’’ How can we laugh at all? But this again raises the uncomfortable question: why do we so diligently delve into the every move of apparently doomed performers, as if waiting for the inevitable to happen? This is especially disturbing to me since I’ve attempted to write about the art and craft of such gifted people and yet find it difficult, if not impossible, to avoid staring something very unpleasant right in the face: the all too human hubris of the truly doomed. That and the fact that we allow ourselves to be as entertained by the backstage drama as by the songs themselves. If Meg White is an innocent victim of circumstances, since whether it is her in the tape or not, she is still somewhat innocent, then Amy Winehouse is a

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guilty participant in a terribly sad passion play of her own making. After all, it is still ostensibly love which is at the root of all her problems. Love for the wrong man, love for the wrong stimulants, love for the wrong reasons, and most crucial of all, not nearly enough love for herself. She has lost the chance to sing the James Bond theme song from the new movie, coincidentally called Quantum of Solace, a title suitable for her next album, if she ever makes it. But the third album has also been scuttled, or at least permanently postponed, by her understandably alarmed record label. Her producer has said he can’t work with her, and every day there is another soiled report of her chaotic nocturnal ramblings. Her less than helpful husband will remain incarcerated for assault/ obstruction until December of the new year, by which time it remains to be seen whether he returns ready, willing, and able to do what Amy inexplicably wants to do: have five children. Talk about a desire for unconditional love, somewhere in the dark of her soul Ms. Winehouse has decided that she and her husband are ideal material for a Mom and Pops life. On what planet? On planet dark mirror. We have watched this scenario play out before, and sadly it is nothing new. Think back to Judy Garland’s late Carnegie Hall performances, or Marlene Dietrich covered in black gauze and still croaking Lily Marlene, or Edith Piaf turning into a living wound in Paris, or Marilyn Monroe misplacing herself in her last role in the fatefully titled film, Something’s Got to Give, or Billie Holiday singing with Lester Young when she could hardly hold her head up, or Elvis slowly melting in Vegas. But at least they had somewhat longish careers and repeated achievements, while in the case of Winehouse, an artist with considerably less emotional intelligence than musical talent, we are witnessing a youthful implosion of horrifying proportions. It is one, however, that raises unsettling questions about our collective relationships with our dark mirrors, whoever they may be. The answer to the question of why we are paying so much attention to her living demise contains one of the most complex and ironic contradictions which is inherently embedded in our celebrity-drenched pop culture. It comes with an exotic pedigree: schadenfreude. The word is a root composite of ‘‘damage’’ and ‘‘joy’’ and emphasizes the peculiar pleasure we sometimes take at the misfortunes of others, apparently for the sole reason that it is they and not we who are suffering so. Dying of a rage to live, for instance. Even more telling, it is they who are in a commanding cultural position, and yet they still cannot escape even the simplest of dilemmas to which we are all prey. Strangely, this somehow gives us comfort, as does the lyrical content of so many of the dark mirrors to which we listen so intently that we somehow magically manage to transform their songs into private insights about our own personal lives. Basically, anyone who has ever enjoyed a blues song (my baby done left me all alone)—which is just schadenfreude writ large in twelve bar format—has been taking this secret joy to heart. Of course, blues songs change somewhat

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when they suddenly become our song, about us, at which point someone else is experiencing the exquisite distance required for schadenfreude to come actively into play. Shades of Dylan’s ‘‘when I was down you just stood there grinning . . ..’’ Positively Bob, positively schadenfreude! But how else to explain our transfixed state while hearing Dylan declare in 1966 that he is sitting so patiently, waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice, when he was ‘‘stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again. . ..’’ Or when we hear him warn us, 23 years later, that we live in a political world, ‘‘In the cities of lonesome fear,’’ where we revolve in our small circles and never quite know why. We tend to let him wonder why for all of us. That’s his day job after all isn’t it: wonderment? Just so, why were we so mesmerized that an angelic genius like Brian Wilson took to his bed for decades due to the pain of his self-defined defeats, or so elated when we heard that he had been reincarnated by the Wondermints and was performing Pet Sounds and Smile alive again? We didn’t take pleasure in his pain but we did savor that special expression of our loneliness and isolation when he lamented that he ‘‘keeps looking for a place to fit where I can speak my mind’’ but that no matter how good intelligent people tell him he is, it does him no good, since apparently he ‘‘just wasn’t made for these times.’’ Perhaps for the same reasons, we misted over when Joni Mitchell announced in ‘‘Down To You’’ that ‘‘pleasure moves on too early and trouble leaves too slow. . ..’’ We simply knew it was also down to us. And who can resist one of the strangest songs that The White Stripes ever produced (only the second with her voice) when Meg prays to St. Andrew, patron saint of performers, ‘‘Don’t forsake me, I travel backwards in ecstasy, where are the angels?’’ So, when Amy declares that love is a losing game, we believe her, at least the way she plays it, and we should all be somewhat careful, or at least hopeful, that our favorites of her songs don’t ever actually become our song. If John Lennon was right in his song from his first solo, post-Beatles record, that ‘‘God is a concept by which we measure our pain,’’ doesn’t that make all of the singer-songwriters in this book missionaries of a new and unique religion? And the many others, too numerous to include but almost as talented in the same relentless task, they seem to form a community of shadows, showing us our own dark sides. By doing so, they are certainly telling us the truth, but also sometimes intentionally telling us a lie, so they don’t entirely break our hearts. On both counts, it seems quite generous of them.

Notes

PROLOGUE 1. David Baker, ‘‘I’m Nobody,’’ Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2007: 197. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Paul Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting (New York: De Capo Press, 1997), xiii. 5. Pierre Saint-Andre, ‘‘The Individualism of the Poet-Musician,’’ Thoughts.com, January 1996: 4. 6. Gerald Marzorati, ‘‘Hitsville UK,’’ New York Times, February 16, 2003. 7. Robert Everett-Green, ‘‘Wonder, Joy and Magic,’’ Globe and Mail, January 27, 2007. 8. Ibid. 9. Stephen Sondheim in Danitia Smith, ‘‘Music is Sweet,’’ New York Times, January 7, 2007, A3. 10. Ibid. 11. Robert Frost in Margo Jefferson, On Michael Jackson (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 28.

PART ONE INTRODUCTION 1. Ernest Becker, ‘‘An Anti-Idealist Statement on Communication,’’ Communication 1 (1974): 121–27. 2. Ben Yagoda, ‘‘Songs of Myself,’’ New York Times, March 4, 2007. 3. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 121. 4. Ken Ludlow, ‘‘Crazy Ain’t Creative,’’ Screenwriter Magazine, Winter 2002: 21. 5. Mihaly Csikszentmihali, Flow (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 71. 6. John Rockwell, ‘‘Reverberations,’’ New York Times, April 16, 2004. 7. Ibid. 8. Csikszentmihali, Flow, 109. 9. Greg Quill, ‘‘Oh Canada, We Pen Great Songs,’’ Toronto Star, April 14, 2007.

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10. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid.

CHAPTER 1 1. Robbie Robertson in ‘‘The Immortals,’’ Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 66. 2. BBC interview, ‘‘The Bob Dylan Story,’’ quoted from Larry David Smith, Writing Dylan: Songs of a Lonesome Traveler (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 434. 3. Saint-Andre, ‘‘The Individualism of the Poet Musician,’’ 3. 4. Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Liner notes (New York: Columbia Records, 1965). 5. Ian Penman interview, ‘‘Love and Theft,’’ UNCUT Magazine, October 2001: 24. 6. Phil Sutcliffe, ‘‘The Road to God Knows Where,’’ Mojo Magazine, January 2007: 78. 7. Ibid., 84. 8. Ibid., 78. 9. Alan Sillitoe, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1959), 21. 10. Robert Shelton, No Direction Home (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986), 87. 11. Sutcliffe, ‘‘The Road to God Knows Where,’’ 79. 12. Ibid., 87. 13. Jon Langford in Sutcliffe, ‘‘The Road to God Knows Where,’’ 88. 14. Penman interview, ‘‘Love and Theft,’’ 29. 15. Robertson in ‘‘The Immortals,’’ 66. 16. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1954).

CHAPTER 2 1. Lindsey Buckingham in ‘‘The Immortals,’’ Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 84. 2. Charles Granata, Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (Chicago: A Capella Books, 2003), 13. 3. David Leaf, Good Vibrations Set, Liner notes (Los Angeles: Capitol Records, 1996), 6. 4. Tony Asher in Wouldn’t It Be Nice, 8. 5. Ibid., 10. 6. Buckingham in ‘‘The Immortals,’’ 85. 7. Sylvie Simmons, ‘‘Smile?’’ Mojo Magazine, March 2004: 44. 8. James Cunningham, ‘‘How Brian Wilson Found His Smile,’’ Globe and Mail, October 2, 2004. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid.

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CHAPTER 3 1. Joni Mitchell, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/joni _mitchell.html. 2. Guy Dixon, ‘‘That Music Gels Straight To MY Heart,’’ Globe and Mail, January 29, 2007. 3. James Taylor in ibid. 4. Greg Quill, ‘‘Oh Canada We Pen Great Songs,’’ Toronto Star, January 28, 2007. 5. Joni Mitchell in Alexandra Gill, ‘‘Joni Mitchell In Person,’’ Globe and Mail, February 17, 2007. 6. Joel Kroeker in Quill, ‘‘Oh Canada We Pen Great Songs.’’ 7. Ron Hynes in ibid. 8. Richard Ouzounian, ‘‘Something’s Gained,’’ Toronto Star, January 28, 2007. 9. Ibid. 10. Larry David Smith, The Torch Song Tradition (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), xiv. 11. Ibid., xv. 12. Richard Wilhelm in ibid. 13. Smith, The Torch Song Tradition, xv. 14. Ibid., xvii.

CHAPTER 4 1. Lou Reed in ‘‘The Immortals,’’ Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 129. 2. Ben Rayner, ‘‘David Bowie, Evergreen Fresh,’’ Toronto Star, January 7, 2007. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Stephen Erlewine in James Perone, The Words and Music of David Bowie (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007). 6. James Perone, The Words and Music of David Bowie. 7. Reed in ‘‘The Immortals.’’ 8. Mojo Magazine, ‘‘60 Years of Bowie, A Special Tribute,’’ 2007. 9. David Bowie in ibid., 20. 10. Martin Aston in ibid., 25. 11. Lindsay Kemp in ibid., 14.

CHAPTER 5 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

See http://thinkexist.com/quotes/leopold_von_sacher-masoch/. Marianne Faithfull, Faithfull, (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1994), 210. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 31.

204

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10. Ibid., 35. 11. Ibid., 45. 12. Ibid., 69. 13. Ibid., 223. 14. The Mojo Collection, ed. Jim Irvin (Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate Books, 2003), 433. 15. Faithfull, Faithfull, 276. 16. Ibid., 278. 17. Alexandra Gill, ‘‘The Queen of Blonde,’’ Globe and Mail, May 29, 2007. 18. Marianne Faithfull in ibid.

CHAPTER 6 1. Tom Waits, http://www.artquotes.net/. 2. The Mojo Collection, 382. 3. Barney Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 284. 4. The Mojo Collection, 478. 5. Tom Waits in ‘‘What’s He Building In There?,’’ Mojo Magazine, April 1999: 78.

CHAPTER 7 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Elvis Costello, http://thinkexist.com/quotation. Smith, The Torch Song Tradition, 128. Brian Hinton in ibid., 83. Elvis Costello in ibid., 127. Smith, The Torch Song Tradition, 168. Elvis Costello in ibid., 153. Kit Rachlis in ibid., 171. Janet Maslin in ibid., 184. Smith, The Torch Song Tradition, 249.

CHAPTER 8 1. Paul Elliott, ‘‘Killing Me Softly,’’ Mojo Magazine, January 2008: 51. 2. Ibid., 52. 3. Winehouse in ibid., 53. 4. Elliott, ‘‘Killing Me Softly,’’ 53. 5. Ibid., 56. 6. Alexander Pope, ‘‘Epistle to a Lady’’ 1740, in John O’Hara’s A Rage to Live (New York: Modern Library, 1949).

PART TWO INTRODUCTION 1. Vera John-Steiner, Creative Collaboration (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 202.

Notes

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205

2. Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle De Courtivron, (eds.), Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 11. 3. Vincent Todoli, Collaborations (London: Hansjorg Mayer, 2003). 4. Richard Hamilton in ibid.

CHAPTER 9 1. Elvis Costello in ‘‘The Immortals,’’ Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 64. 2. David Stubbs, ‘‘John Lennon Portrait: We All Shine On,’’ UNCUT Magazine, Spring 2004: 62. 3. Paul McCartney in Jon Wilde, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows, ’’ UNCUT Magazine, Spring 2004: 66. 4. Jann Wenner, ‘‘The Lennon Interview,’’ Rolling Stone, January 7, 1970. 5. Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head (London: Pimlico Press, 1998), 11. 6. Stubbs, ‘‘John Lennon Portrait,’’ 41. 7. John Lennon, Skywriting by Word of Mouth (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1987).

CHAPTER 10 1. Steve Van Zandt in ‘‘The Immortals,’’ Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 70. 2. Leonard Cohen in Paul Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting (New York: De Capo Press, 1997), xiii. 3. Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, xi. 4. Ibid., xii. 5. Keith Richards in Nick Johnstone, ‘‘Portrait of The Tiredest,’’ UNCUT Magazine, January 2004: 90. 6. Ibid., 64. 7. Ibid., 57. 8. Andrew Loog Oldham, 2Stoned (London: Vintage, 2003), 9. 9. Ibid., 29. 10. Ibid., 42. 11. Pete Townshend in ibid., 261. 12. Alan McGhee in ibid., 392. 13. Oldham, 2Stoned, 409.

CHAPTER 11 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Eddie Vedder in ‘‘The Immortals,’’ Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 115. Pat Gilbert, ‘‘Look Back in Anguish,’’ Mojo Magazine, February 2006: 71. Pete Townshend in ibid. Pete Townshend in ‘‘Extreme Online Risks,’’ Globe and Mail, May 7, 2007. ‘‘Speaking For A Generation,’’ UNCUT Magazine, January 2003: 49. Keith Rodway, ‘‘Letters to the Editor,’’ Mojo Magazine, February 2006. Gilbert, Mojo Magazine, 71.

206

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8. Roger Daltrey in ‘‘Maximum Who,’’ UNCUT Magazine, January 2007: 159. 9. Ben Ratliff, ‘‘Who Knew,’’ New York Times, May 24, 2004. 10. Sean O’Hagan, ‘‘Death and Glory,’’ The Observer, December 2003. 11. Larry David Smith, The Minstrel’s Dilemma (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 24. 12. Pete Townshend in ibid., 29. 13. Smith, The Minstrel’s Dilemma, 33. 14. Pete Townshend in ibid. 15. Smith, The Minstrel’s Dilemma, 49. 16. Pete Townshend in ibid., 85. 17. Ibid., 139. 18. Smith, The Minstrel’s Dilemma, 153. 19. Ibid., 169. 20. I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism, rev. ed. (Edison, New Jersey: Transaction Press, 2004), 198. 21. Roger Daltrey in Smith, The Minstrel’s Dilemma, 208.

CHAPTER 12 1. Paul Simon in Stephen Holden, ‘‘Class Reunion,’’ Rolling Stone, March 1982. 2. James Taylor in ‘‘The Immortals,’’ Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 129. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, xii. 6. Ibid. 7. Stephen Holden, ‘‘Class Reunion,’’ 62. 8. Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, xii. 9. Holden, ‘‘Class Reunion,’’ 26. 10. Oliver Poole, ‘‘Still Crazy After All These Years,’’ National Post, November 2003: 11. 11. Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, 88. 12. Paul Simon in ibid., 95. 13. Paul Zollo and Paul Simon in ibid., 111. 14. Paul Simon in ibid., 117. 15. The Mojo Collection, 126. 16. Ibid., 200. 17. Ibid., 207. 18. Ibid., 201.

CHAPTER 13 1. John-Steiner, Creative Collaboration, 202. 2. Ibid., 16. 3. Ibid., 23.

CHAPTER 14 1. Elton John, http://www.quotemonk.com.

Notes

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207

2. Elton John in Bernie Taupin, The One Who Writes the Words for Elton John (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1976), 5. 3. Taupin, The One Who Writes the Words, 7. 4. Tom Doyle, ‘‘Elton John: The Ultimate Rock n’ Roll Interview!,’’ Mojo Magazine, October 2006: 81. 5. Bernie Taupin and Elton John in Doyle, ‘‘Elton John: The Ultimate Rock n’ Roll Interview!,’’ 84. 6. Doyle, ‘‘Elton John: The Ultimate Rock n’ Roll Interview!,’’ 84. 7. Long John Baldry in Doyle, ‘‘Elton John: The Ultimate Rock n’ Roll Interview!,’’ 85. 8. Doyle, ‘‘Elton John: The Ultimate Rock n’ Roll Interview!,’’ 86. 9. Elton John in ibid., 89. 10. Doyle, ‘‘Elton John: The Ultimate Rock n’ Roll Interview!,’’ 89. 11. Elton John in ibid., 89. 12. Doyle, ‘‘Elton John: The Ultimate Rock n’ Roll Interview!,’’ 90. 13. Bernie Taupin in ibid., 88. 14. Elton John in ibid., 87.

CHAPTER 15 1. Jack White, De Stijl, Liner notes (Olympia, WA: Sympathy For The Record Industry, 2000). 2. The official White Stripes band contact/information Web site, http://www .whitestripes.net/faq.php, September 26, 2006. 3. Jack White, Icky Thump, Liner notes (Detroit: Third Man Records, 2007). 4. Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man (New York: Columbia Records, 1988). 5. Robert Hilburn, ‘‘Little White Truths’’ Los Angeles Times, June 5, 2005. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid.

AFTERWORD 1. Walter Sorell, The Duality of Vision (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970): 370. 2. Ibid., 20. 3. Ibid., 22. 4. Ibid., 24. 5. Steve Winwood and Traffic, Dear Mr. Fantasy (New York: Warner-Tamerlane, 1967). 6. http://www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtracks/a/avenueqlyrics/ schadenfreudelyrics.html.

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Index Abbey Road (The Beatles), 174 A Beautiful Mind (movie), 113 A Child’s Adventure (Faithfull), 68 acoustic technology, 13 Ade, George, 171 Aftermath (Rolling Stones), 131 Aladdin Sane (Bowie), 53, 56, 59, 60 Allman, Duane, 188 The All Music Guide (Perone), 54 ‘‘America’’ (Paul Simon), 153 American Beauty (Grateful Dead), 191–92 ‘‘The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes’’ (Costello), 87 ‘‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’’ (The Who), 179 Archetypes, 125 Art: authenticity in, 6; great art, 18, 19; Rilke on, 24 ‘‘Artificial paradise,’’ 99 Artistic marriages. See Creative pairs Asher, Peter, 66 Asher, Tony, 34 ‘‘As Tears Go By’’ (Faithfull), 62–63, 66, 67 ‘‘As Tears Go By’’ (Rolling Stones), 131 Aston, Martin, on David Bowie, 58 Authenticity in art, 6 Back to Black (Winehouse), 94, 99, 103 ‘‘Back to Black’’ (Winehouse), 104 Badu, Erykah, 100 Baez, Joan, on Bob Dylan, 22

Baker, David, x–xi Baldry, Long John, 166 ‘‘Ballad of John and Yoko’’ (Lennon), 2 ‘‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’’ (Faithfull), 65 ‘‘Ball and Biscuit’’ (The White Stripes), 187 The Band, 166 Barker, Hugh, 2, 6 Barrett, Syd, 192 The Basement Tapes (Dylan), 15, 22 Baudelaire, Charles, 91, 99, 100 The Beach Boys: about, xvi, 27, 28, 29; history, 29–30; ‘‘In My Room,’’ 32; members, 33; ‘‘Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow,’’ 39. See also Wilson, Brian The Beatles (album), 118 The Beatles (group): Abbey Road, 174; about, 18, 28, 122, 123, 125–26, 128, 129, 131, 172, 174; ‘‘I Want to Be Your Man,’’ 131; Lennon-McCartney partnership, 108, 112, 115–26, 130, 190; Let It Be, 174; Please Please Me, 120; Revolver, 36, 180; Rubber Soul, 36, 118, 180, 187; self-expectations, 142; Sergeant Pepper, 36, 55; The White Album, 118, 136. See also Lennon, John; See also McCartney, Paul Beat writers, 75 Beautiful Maladies (Waits), 74 Becker, Ernest, ‘‘The Denial of Death,’’ 1

210 Beggars Banquet (Rolling Stones), 131 Benson, Brendan190 Benstock, Shari, Intimate Warriors: Portraits of a Modern Marriage, 110 Bernstein, Leonard, Brian Wilson and, 37 Berry, Chuck, 191 Between the Buttons (Rolling Stones), 131 ‘‘The Big Three Killed My Baby’’ (The White Stripes), 183 ‘‘Big Yellow Taxi’’ (Mitchell), 42 Bjork, 101 The Black Rider (Burroughs), 69, 79 ‘‘Blame It on Cain’’ (Costello), 86 Blonde on Blonde (Dylan), 14, 19, 21, 24 Bloomfield, Mike, 12 Blue (Mitchell), 45–46, 48, 49 ‘‘Blue Millionaire’’ (Faithfull), 68 Blue Moves (Elton John), 169 Blues, 101, 190, 191, 192, 199–200 Blues-breaker music, 179 Bluesbreakers, 178 Blur, 123 Bookends (Simon and Garfunkel), 152, 153, 154 ‘‘Both Sides Now’’ (Mitchell), 42 Bowie, Angie, 57 Bowie, David, 51–60; about, xvi, 2, 95, 195; acoustic technology and, 13; Aladdin Sane, 53, 56, 59, 60; art decade of, 59; artistic change, 53; cocaine addiction, 58; David Bowie, 51; Diamond Dogs, 53, 57, 59; evolution of, 59; expectations of, 142; Heroes, 59; Hunky Dory, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59; The Lodger, 59; Low, 59; The Low Trilogy, 59; The Man Who Sold the World, 53, 57, 59; masks, 53, 54, 55–56, 57, 59; mime and, 59; ‘‘pantomime rock,’’ 57; ‘‘The Prettiest Star,’’ 57; producers, 59; The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 52, 54, 59; Space Oddity, 53, 59; Station to Station, 59; ‘‘Time,’’ 60; Young Americans, 56, 59 ‘‘The Boxer’’ (Simon and Garfunkel), 149, 153 Brackett, Donald, 157 Brennan, Kathleen, 78, 79 Breton, Andre, 108

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Index Bridge Over Troubled Waters (Simon and Garfunkel), 152, 153 Bringing It All Back Home (Dylan), 14, 17 Brodsky Quartet, 90 Broken Boy Soldiers (The Raconteurs), 189 Broken English (Faithfull), 62, 64, 65, 69 Buckingham, Lindsey: about, 84, 95, 157, 158; on Brian Wilson, 27, 36; Buckingham Nicks, 157, 158, 159; ‘‘Crystal,’’ 160; ‘‘Long Distance Winner,’’ 159–60; partnership with Stevie Nicks, 112, 143, 155–61; ‘‘Races Are Won,’’ 160; similarity to Meg White, 176; Tusk, 176; See also Fleetwood Mac Buckingham Nicks (album), 157, 158, 159 Buckley, David, on David Bowie, 54 Bukowski, Charles, 75 Bunche, Ralph, 58 Burrough, William, 69 Bush, Kate, 100 The Byrds, 45, 191 ‘‘Cabinessence’’ (Wilson), 38 ‘‘Cactus Tree’’ (Mitchell), 48 Cage, John, 61 ‘‘California Girls’’ (Wilson), 33 Canetti, Elias, Crowds and Power, 115 The Captain and The Kid (Elton John), 165, 168 Captain Beefheart, 75, 76, 175, 194 Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (John and Taupin), 165 Cash, Johnny: ‘‘It Ain’t Me Babe,’’ 19; ‘‘Man in Black,’’ 2 ‘‘Catch a Wave’’ (Wilson), 32 Celebrity: Bob Dylan on, 28; Brian Wilson on, 28, 29, 30; John Lennon on, 29; John Updike on, 116; Joni Mitchell on, 49 Central Park (group), 150 Chadwick, Whitney, 110, 156 Chaplin, Charles, 101 ‘‘Cheap Reward’’ (Costello), 86–87 ‘‘Cherry’’ (Winehouse), 97 City Slickers, 179 The Clash, 84 Closing Time (Waits), 76

Index ‘‘Clouds’’ (Mitchell), 42 Clouds (Mitchell), 45 Cobain, Kurt, 101, 105 Cocteau, Jean, 55 Cohen, Herb, 76 Cohen, Leonard: about, xx, 102, 181; on good songs, 130 Cold Hard Cash, 177 Cole, Nat King, ‘‘Nature Boy,’’ 32 Coleman, Gary 197 Collaboration. See Creative pairs Collective unconscious, 125 Comparative morphology, 58, 59 The Confidence Man (Melville), 20–21 Consolers of The Lonely (The Raconteurs), 189 Copeland, Aaron, 122 Corso, Gregory, 75 Costello, Elvis, 81–90; about, xvi, 2, 95, 142; ‘‘The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes,’’ 87; anger of, 81, 82, 90; on The Beatles, 115, 117; bitterness, 89; ‘‘Blame It on Cain,’’ 86; on careerism, 89; ‘‘Cheap Reward,’’ 86– 87; ‘‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror,’’ 88; ‘‘Imagination (Is a Powerful Deceiver),’’ 86; ‘‘I’m Not Angry,’’ 87; The Juliet Letters, 90; ‘‘Less Than Zero,’’ 87; masks, 85; My Aim Is True, 84, 85, 87, 89; ‘‘Mystery Dance,’’ 86, 87; ‘‘narrative impressionism,’’ 89; ‘‘No Dancing,’’ 86; persona, 82, 83; Punch the Clock, 88; Rumours, 84; sexual relations, 87; Spike, 87; ‘‘summer of hate,’’ 84; ‘‘Waiting for the End of the World,’’ 87; ‘‘Welcome to the Working Week,’’ 85; on writing about music, ix Court and Spark (Mitchell), 48 ‘‘Crazy Ain’t Creative’’ (Ludlow), 3 Cream, 191 Creative change, 29, 48, 49, 53, 142 Creative Collaboration (John-Steiner), 109, 156–57 Creative flow, 4, 117, 168 Creative pairs, 107–13, 156–57 Crosby, David, on Joni Mitchell, 45, 46, 48 Crosby Stills & Nash, 45

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211 Crowds and Power (Canetti), 115 ‘‘Crystal’’ (Buckingham and Nicks), 160 CSI: Miami, opening theme, 140 CSI: NY, opening theme, 140 Csikszentmihali, Mihaly, flow, 4 Cunningham, James, on Brian Wilson, 37, 38 Dalton, David, Faithfull, 63, 69–70 Daltrey, Roger: about, xvi, 135, 139, 145– 46; partnership with Pete Townshend, 109, 112, 135–46; See also The Who Dance music, 78 Dangerous Acquaintances (Faithfull), 68 The Dap-Kings, 99 Dark mirrors, 76, 85, 102, 181, 189, 194 Dark Rider (Waits), 90 David Bowie (Bowie), 51 Davies, Ray, ‘‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else,’’ 195 ‘‘Dear Mr. Fantasy’’ (Winwood), 196 ‘‘Death Letter’’ (The White Stripes), 179 De Courtivron, Isabelle, 110, 156 ‘‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’’ (Costello), 88 ‘‘The Denial of Death’’ (Becker), 1 Desire (Dylan and Levy), 148 De Stijl (art style), 176 De Stijl (The White Stripes), 172, 177, 185 ‘‘Destiny Rules’’ (Fleetwood Mac), 160 Dialogue with oneself, 16 Diamond Dogs (Bowie), 53, 56, 59 Dickinson, Jim, 30 ‘‘Diva with Demons’’ (article), 91 Dixon, Guy, on Joni Mitchell, 42 Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (Mitchell), 49 Donne, John, 1 ‘‘Don’t Talk, Put Your Head on My Shoulder’’ (Wilson), 35 The Doors, 101 ‘‘Down To You’’ (Mitchell), 200 Doyle, Tom, on Elton John, 165, 166, 168 ‘‘Do You Wanna Dance?’’ (Wilson), 32 Drake, Nick, 101 Dregs, 128 The Duality of Vision (Sorrell), 192–93

212 Dunbar, John, 65–66 Dwight, Reginald. See John, Elton Dylan, Bob, 11–25; about, xii–xiv, xix, xvi, xx, 2, 28, 30, 43, 83, 130, 141, 192, 194, 195–96, 200; as accidental angel, 16; anger of, 19, 83; appearance, 14; The Basement Tapes, 15, 22; on being Bob Dylan, 17; on being celebrity, 28; biography, 16; Blonde on Blonde, 14, 19, 21, 24; Bringing It All Back Home, 14, 16; collaboration, 148; Desire, 148; dialogue with oneself, 16; expectations of, 141; Faithfull and, 68; flow state, 4; on happiness, 22; Highway 61 Revisited, 14, 18, 19; ‘‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,’’ 18; ‘‘It’s All Right Ma, I’m Only Bleeding,’’ 193; John Wesley Harding, 14, 22–23, 196; on Joni Mitchell, 48; ‘‘Like a Rolling Stone,’’ 18, 130; loneliness, 20; Love and Theft, 20; love songs, 21, 24; media and, 14; Modern Times, 12, 20, 23; ‘‘My Back Pages,’’ 6; performance style, 17; persona, 57; as prophet, 24; ‘‘Queen Jane Approximately,’’ 9; on recording, 13; ‘‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,’’ 21, 24; Seeger and, 12–13; as story teller, 28; Tarantula, 15; ‘‘Things Have Changed,’’ 11; Time Out of Mind, 20; ‘‘The Times They Are a Changing,’’ 11; ‘‘Visions of Johanna,’’ 21, 24; voice, 27, 117; ‘‘The Wicked Messenger,’’ 196; Woody Guthrie and, 15 The Eagles, 192 Elephant (The White Stripes), 177, 186, 187 Eliot, T.S., 18, 19 Ellington, Paul, 132 Elliott, Paul, on Amy Winehouse, 93, 94, 96 Elson, Karen, 184 ‘‘Emotional Weather Report’’ (Waits), 77 Empty Sky (John and Taupin), 166 Enantiomorphism, 189 Endless Wire (The Who), 137, 144 Eno, Brian, 59, 147

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Index Epic poetry, x, 14 Epistle to a Lady, Of the Characters of Women (Pope), 106 Epstein, Brian, 120, 128 Erlewine, Stephen, on David Bowie, 54 Ethical Spectacle (Wallace), 16 Everett-Green, Robert, xix, xx Ever Present Past (McCartney), 126 Exile on Main Street (Rolling Stones), 131 Fabs, 128 Faithfull (Dalton), 63, 69–70 Faithfull, Major Glynn, 62 Faithfull, Marianne, 61–71; about, xvi, 68, 69; A Child’s Adventure, 68; ‘‘As Tears Go By,’’ 62–63, 66, 67; ‘‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,’’ 65; ‘‘Blue Millionaire,’’ 68; on Bob Dylan, 68; breast cancer, 70; Broken English, 62, 64, 65, 69; Dangerous Acquaintances, 68; expectations of, 142; ‘‘Falling From Grace,’’ 68; family history, 62; ‘‘Guilt,’’ 65; heroin addiction, 64, 66, 69, 70; Lennon and, 65; on performing, 67; performing style, 67; Rolling Stones and, 63; sadness, 61; The Seven Deadly Sins, 69; ‘‘Sister Morphine,’’ 62, 63–64; Sticky Fingers, 62, 63; ‘‘Truth Bitter Truth,’’ 68; voice, 64; ‘‘Why D’ya Do It?,’’ 65; ‘‘Working Class Hero,’’ 62, 65 Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (Barker and Taylor), 2, 6–7 ‘‘Falling From Grace’’ (Faithfull), 68 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 75 Flack, Roberta, 91 Fleetwood, Mick, 129, 157, 158, 161 Fleetwood Mac (album), 155 Fleetwood Mac (group): about, 84, 95, 111, 129, 155, 192; Buckingham-Nicks partnership, 155–61; cocaine, 167–68; ‘‘Destiny Rules,’’ 160; Fleetwood Mac, 155; ‘‘Goodbye Baby,’’ 160; Green, Peter, 159, 175, 192; ‘‘Illume,’’ 160; ‘‘Oh Well,’’ 175; Rumours, 84, 155; ‘‘Say Goodbye,’’ 160; Say You Will, 160; ‘‘Say You Will,’’ 160; ‘‘Silver Girl,’’ 160; Then Play On, 175; ‘‘Throw

Index Down,’’ 160; ‘‘What’s The World Coming To?,’’ 160. See also Buckingham, Lindsey; See also Nicks, Stevie Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos (Brackett), 157 Flow state, 4, 107, 168 Flying Burrito Brothers, 191 Folk songs, Dylan on, 18 For the Roses, 48 ‘‘409’’ (Wilson), 32 Frank (Winehouse), 93, 94, 95, 96–98 Franks’ Wild Years (Waits), 79 Friends (John and Taupin), 167 Fritz, 157, 158 Frost, Robert, ‘‘Mending Wall’’, xxi ‘‘Frozen Love’’ (Buckingham and Nicks), 159, 160 ‘‘Fuck Me Pumps’’ (Winehouse), 97 ‘‘Fun Fun Fun’’ (Wilson), 32 Gallagher, Liam, 117 Galton, Sir Francis, 193 Garfunkel, Art: about, xvi, 147; biography, 151–52; Bookends, 152, 153, 154; ‘‘The Boxer,’’ 149, 153; Bridge Over Troubled Waters, 152, 153; Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, 152; partnership with Paul Simon, 109, 111, 112, 143, 147–54; Sounds of Silence, 152; voice, 149; Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, 152 Garland, Judy, 91, 199 Get Behind Me Satan (The White Stripes), 186 Gill, Alexandra, on Marianne Faithfull, 70, 71 Gillis, John. See White, Jack Ginsberg, Allen, 73, 75 ‘‘Girl’’ (Lennon), 118 ‘‘Glimmer Twins,’’ 62, 131 The Go, 176 ‘‘God’’ (Lennon), 200 Godard, Jean Luc, 7 ‘‘God Only Knows’’ (Wilson), 35 ‘‘Goodbye Baby’’ (Fleetwood Mac), 160 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (John and Taupin), 165, 166 ‘‘Good Vibrations’’ (Wilson), 33 Graceland (Paul Simon), 152

·

213 Granata, Charles, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, 31 Grateful Dead, 191–92 Great art, T.S. Eliot on, 18, 19 Great artist, Lewis on, 18 Green, Peter, 159, 175, 192 ‘‘Guilt’’ (Faithfull), 65 Guthrie, Woody, Dylan and, 15 Hamilton, Richard, 111 Hammond, John, 15 ‘‘Hang On To Your Ego’’ (Wilson), 35 Harrison, George, 119 Hartley, Liz, 57 Harvey, P.J., 101 ‘‘Heart Attack and Vine’’ (Waits), 78 Heart of Saturday Night (Waits), 76 Hearts and Bones (Paul Simon), 152 ‘‘He Can Only Hold Her’’ (Winehouse), 105 Hejira (Mitchell), 49 Hell, Richard, xx ‘‘Hello Operator’’ (The White Stripes), 185 ‘‘Help!’’ (Lennon), 31 ‘‘Help Me’’ (Mitchell), 48 Hereditary Genius (Galton), 193 ‘‘Here ’Tis’’ (The Who), 179 Heroes (Bowie), 59 Highway 61 Revisited (Dylan), 14, 18, 19 Hilburn, Robert, on The White Stripes, 187, 188 Hinton, Brian, on Elvis Costello, 88 Hislop, Ian, 74 The Hissing of Summer Lawns (Mitchell), 49 Holden, Steve, 85, 149, 150 Holiday, Billie, 91, 199 Honky Chateau (John and Taupin), 165 Hornby, Nick, Songbook, xix, xx Hoskyns, Barney, Waiting for the Sun, 77 House, Son, 179 Humor, in music, 179 Hunky Dory (Bowie), 53, 56, 57, 58, 59 Hunter, Robert, xx Hynes, Ron, on Joni Mitchell, 43 Ian, Janis, 94 ‘‘I Can’t Explain’’ (Townshend), 141

214 Icky Thump (The White Stripes), 173, 175, 178, 188 ‘‘I Don’t Want to Face It’’ (Lennon), 121 ‘‘I Fought Pirhanas’’ (The White Stripes), 183–84 ‘‘I Get Around’’ (Wilson), 32 ‘‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You’’ (Waits), 76–77 ‘‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’’ (Wilson), 36 ‘‘I Know There’s An Answer’’ (Wilson), 35 ‘‘Illume’’ (Fleetwood Mac), 160 ‘‘Imagination (Is a Powerful Deceiver)’’ (Costello), 86 ‘‘I’m Losing You’’ (Lennon), 121 ‘‘I’m Not Angry’’ (Costello), 87 ‘‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’’ (Kinks), 195 Indica Gallery, 66 In His Own Write (Lennon), 121 ‘‘In My Bed’’ (Winehouse), 98 ‘‘In My Room’’ (Beach Boys), 32 Intimate Warriors: Portraits of a Modern Marriage (Benstock), 110 Irina Palm (film), 70 ‘‘It Ain’t Me Babe’’ (Cash), 19 ‘‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’’ (Dylan), 18 ‘‘It’s All Right Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’’ (Dylan), 193 ‘‘I Want to Be Your Man’’ (The Beatles), 131 Jackson, Michael: about, 78; acoustic technology and, 13; rights to Beatles songs, 126 Jagger, Mick: about, xvi, 69, 128, 131–32; ‘‘As Tears Go By,’’ 66; partnership with Keith Richards, 109, 112, 127–34, 143. See also The Rolling Stones Jakeman, Andrew. See Riviera, Jake Jardine, Al, 33, 39 Jazz, 192 John, Elton: about, xvi, xviii, 9, 95, 163– 64, 166; Blue Moves, 169; The Captain and The Kid, 165, 168; Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, 165; Empty Sky, 166; Friends, 167; Goodbye Yellow

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Index Brick Road, 165, 166; Honky Chateau, 165; Madman across the Water, 165, 167; partnership with Bernie Taupin, 143, 163–69; Tumbleweed Connection, 165; ‘‘Your Song,’’ 165 The John Lennon Anthology box set, 125 Johnson, Robert, 183 John-Steiner, Vera, 109, 155, 156–57 John Wesley Harding (Dylan), 14, 22–23, 196 Jones, Brian, 129, 192 Jones, David. See Bowie, David Jones, Norah, 100 Jones, Rickie Lee, 78 Jones, Spike, 179 Joni Mitchell (Mitchell), 45 The Juliet Letters (Costello), 90 Jung, Carl, 125 ‘‘Just Friends’’ (Winehouse), 104 Kemp, Lindsay, 59 Kiefer, Anselm, 39 ‘‘Killing Me Softly’’ (article), 91 Krall, Diana, 81, 100 Kroeker, Joel, on Joni Mitchell, 43 Ladies of the Canyon (Mitchell), 45 Lambert, Kit, 137 Langford, John, on Bob Dylan, 23 Lavigne, Avril, 66 Leaf, David, on The Beach Boys, 33–34 Led Zeppelin, 191 Leland, John, xx Lennon, John: about, xvi, 75, 95, 115–16, 123, 139, 192; ‘‘Ballad of John and Yoko,’’ 2; The Beatles, 118; on celebrity, 29; disillusionment, 122, 123; Faithfull and, 65; ‘‘Girl,’’ 118; ‘‘God,’’ 200; ‘‘Help!,’’ 31; ‘‘I Don’t Want to Face It,’’ 121; ‘‘I’m Losing You,’’ 121; In His Own Write, 121; on life, 126; musical style, 124; ‘‘Nowhere Man,’’ 31, 121; partnership with Paul McCartney, 108, 112, 115–26, 130, 190; pathology, 117; Plastic Ono Band, 65; relationship with Yoko Ono, 108, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125; Rubber Soul, 36, 118, 180, 187; self-revelation, 117–18; The Sixties, 122; Skywriting by Word of

Index Mouth, 118, 121; solipsism, 105; A Spaniard in the Works, 121; ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ 116; voice, 117, 118; The White Album, 118, 136; See also The Beatles ‘‘Less Than Zero’’ (Costello), 87 Let It Be (The Beatles), 174 Let it Be. . .Naked (McCartney), 124–25 Let It Bleed (Rolling Stones), 131 Lewis, Wyndham, 18 Lifehouse (Townshend), 136 ‘‘Like a Rolling Stone’’ (Dylan), 18, 130 ‘‘Little Cream Soda’’ (Fleetwood Mac), 175 ‘‘Little Deuce Coupe’’ (Wilson), 32 ‘‘Little Surfer Girl’’ (Wilson), 32 Live at Leeds (Townshend), 136 The Lodger (Bowie), 59 ‘‘Long Distance Winner’’ (Buckingham and Nicks), 159–60 Love, Mike, 33, 35, 38, 39 ‘‘Love Is a Losing Game’’ (Winehouse), 104 Love and Theft (Dylan), 20 Love songs, Bob Dylan, 21, 24 Low (Bowie), 59 The Low Trilogy (Bowie), 59 Ludlow, Ken, ‘‘Crazy Ain’t Creative,’’ 3 Lunacy, 3 Lydon, John, 117 Lyric poetry, x, 14 MacDonald, Ian, 117, 119, 122, 123 Madman across the Water (John and Taupin), 165, 167 Madonna: about, 63, 78, 101; acoustic technology and, 13 ‘‘Man in Black’’ (Johnny Cash), 2 The Man Who Sold the World (Bowie), 53, 57, 59 Martin, George: about, 120; Beatles, 118; on Brian Wilson, 27 Marzorati, Gerald, xix Maslin, Janet, 90 Masochism, origin of term, 62 ‘‘Material Girl,’’ 63 Mayall, John, 178 McCartney, Paul: about, xvi, 66, 95, 123, 125, 139; biography, 116; Ever Present

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215 Past, 126; Let it Be. . .Naked, 124–25; musical style, 124; partnership with John Lennon, 108, 112, 115–26, 130, 190; pathology of, 116; ‘‘Penny Lane,’’ 116; poetic license, xx; relationship with Yoko Ono, 120; voice, 117; ‘‘Yesterday,’’ 130; See also The Beatles McGee, Alan, 133 McLaughlin, Sarah, 100 McManus, Declan. See Costello, Elvis McVie, Christine, 159, 160, 161 McVie, John, 161 ‘‘Me and Mr. Jones’’ (Winehouse), 103–04 Melville, Herman, The Confidence Man, 20–21 Mencius, 171 ‘‘Mending Wall’’ (Frost), xxi Miles, Barry, 66 Miller, Steve, 90 Milosz, Czeslaw, 80 Mingus, Charles, 49 ‘‘The Minstrel’s Dilemma’’ (Smith), 144 Mitchell, Chuck, 44 Mitchell, Joni, 41–50; about, xvi, xx, 2, 5–6, 101; ‘‘Big Yellow Taxi,’’ 42; biography, 44; Blue, 45–46, 48, 49; ‘‘Both Sides Now,’’ 42; ‘‘Cactus Tree,’’ 48; career, 43–44, 45; on celebrity, 49; ‘‘Clouds,’’ 42; Clouds, 45; ‘‘confessional’’ songs, 48, 49, 57; Court and Spark, 48; creative growth, 48, 49; Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, 49; ‘‘Down to You,’’ 200; expectations of, 142; For the Roses, 48; Hejira, 49; ‘‘Help Me,’’ 48; The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 49; Joni Mitchell, 45; Ladies of the Canyon, 45; on love, 47; producers, 45; Shine, 50; Songs for a Seagull, 45; Taming the Tiger, 44; as torch bearer, 44, 46, 49; as troubadour, 47; Wild Things Run Fast, 49; ‘‘Woodstock,’’ 42 Modern Times (Dylan), 12, 20, 23 Monroe, Marilyn, 199 Moon, Keith, 140 Morrisette, Alanis, 100 Morrison, Jim, 101 Morrison, Van, 86

216 ‘‘Mrs. Robinson’’ (Simon and Garfunkel), 112 Muddy Waters, 132 Music: cultural history, x–xi; humor in, 179 Music From Big Pink (The Band), 166 ‘‘The Music Is Sweet, The Words Are True’’ (Dinitia Smith), xx My Aim Is True (Costello), 84, 85, 87 ‘‘My Back Pages’’ (Dylan), 6 ‘‘My Generation’’ (Townshend), 141 ‘‘Mystery Dance’’ (Costello), 86, 87 ‘‘My Tears Dry on Their Own’’ (Winehouse), 104 ‘‘Narrative impressionism,’’ 89 Nash, Graham, 48 Nash, John, 113 ‘‘Nature Boy’’ (Cole), 32 Newman, Randy, 179 Nicks, Stevie: about, 157, 158; Buckingham Nicks, 157, 158, 159; ‘‘Crystal,’’ 160; ‘‘Frozen Love,’’ 159, 160; ‘‘Long Distance Winner,’’ 159– 60; partnership with Lindsey Buckingham, 112, 143, 155–61; ‘‘Races Are Won,’’ 160; See also Fleetwood Mac Nico, 61, 105 Nighthawks at the Diner (Waits), 76, 77 Nilsson, Harry, 179 ‘‘No Dancing’’ (Costello), 86 Non-prevalent dynamics, 113 ‘‘Nowhere Man’’ (Lennon), 31, 121 Nyro, Laura, 96 Oasis, 123 Oates, Joyce Carol, 106 O’Connor, Sinead, 101 O’Hagan, Sean, on The Who, 139–40 ‘‘Oh Well’’ (Fleetwood Mac), 175 Oldham, Andrew Loog, 66, 128, 131, 132, 133 One-Trick Pony (Paul Simon), 152 The One Who Writes The Words For Elton John (Taupin), 163 ‘‘The Only Living Boy In New York’’ (Paul Simon), 153 Ono, Yoko: about, 101, 126; The John

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Index Lennon Anthology box set, 125; partnership with John Lennon, 108, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125; relationship with Paul McCartney, 120 O’Reilly, Baba, 140 Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (Waits), 80 Ouzounian, Richard, on Joni Mitchell, 43 Page, Jimmy, 188 ‘‘pantomime rock,’’ 57 ‘‘Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow’’ (Beach Boys), 39 Parks, Van Dyke, 34, 35 Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme (Simon and Garfunkel), 152 ‘‘Passive Manipulation’’ (The White Stripes), 197 Paul Butterfield Blues Band, 12 Paul Simon (Paul Simon), 152 ‘‘Penny Lane’’ (McCartney), 116 Perone, James, on David Bowie, 54 Pet Sounds (Wilson), 29, 31, 33, 34, 36 Piaf, Edith, 91, 199 Pink Floyd, 192 Plastic Ono Band (Lennon), 65 ‘‘Please Let Me Wonder’’ (Wilson), 33 Please Please Me (The Beatles), 120 Pleshette, Suzanne, 106 Poems, cultural history, x Poetry, in Dylan’s work, 14 Poole, Oliver, 150 Pope, Alexander, 106 Pop music, 112, 120 Porter, Cole, xviii Power, Cat, 100 Presley, Elvis, 84, 191 ‘‘The Prettiest Star’’ (Bowie), 57 Prophecy, 24 Punch the Clock (Costello), 88 Punk-blues, 176 Punk music, 63, 74, 84 Quadrophenia (Townshend), 136 Quantum of Solace (movie), 199 ‘‘Queen Jane Approximately’’ (Dylan), 9 Quill, Greg, 6; on Joni Mitchell, 42

Index ‘‘Races Are Won’’ (Buckingham and Nicks), 160 Rachlis, Kit, 89 The Raconteurs, 189, 190, 198 Rank, Otto, ix Ratliff, Ben, on The Who, 139 Rayner, Ben, on David Bowie, 52, 53, 54 Recording music, Brian Wilson and, 30 Reed, Lou: about, xx, 102, 181; on David Bowie, 51, 56 ‘‘Rehab’’ (Winehouse), 94, 96, 99, 103 Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Record and the Sixties (MacDonald), 119, 122, 123 Revolver (The Beatles), 36, 180 The Rhythm of The Saints (Paul Simon), 152 Richards, I.A., on Townshend, 145 Richards, Keith: about, xvi, 70, 95, 99, 128, 129, 131–32; partnership with Mick Jagger, 109, 112, 127–34, 143; ‘‘Satisfaction,’’ 130, 132. See also The Rolling Stones The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (Bowie), 52, 54, 59 Riviera, Jake, 82, 83 Robertson, Robbie, on Bob Dylan, 11, 12, 24 Rock music, 52, 55–56, 82, 191 Rock ‘n’ roll, 52, 82, 191 Rockwell, John, on Bob Dylan, 5 Rodway, Keith, on The Who, 138 The Rolling Stones: about, 62, 111, 127– 28, 129, 132, 179, 192; Aftermath, 131; ‘‘As Tears Go By,’’ 131; Beggars Banquet, 131; Between the Buttons, 131; Exile on Main Street, 131; expectations of, 142; Jagger-Richards partnership, 109, 112, 127–34, 143; Let It Bleed, 131; ‘‘Sister Morphine,’’ 62; Sticky Fingers, 62, 131; Their Satanic Majesties Request, 131. See also Jagger, Mick; See also Richards, Keith Rollins, Henry, xx Roth, David Lee, 91, 99 Roth, Dieter, 111

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217 Rubber Soul (The Beatles), 36, 118, 180, 187 Rumours (Fleetwood Mac), 84, 155 ‘‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’’ (Dylan), 21, 24 Saint-Andre, Pierre, 16 ‘‘Satisfaction’’ (Richards), 130, 132 ‘‘Saving All My Love for You’’ (Waits), 78 ‘‘Say Goodbye’’ (Fleetwood Mac), 160 Say You Will (Fleetwood Mac), 160 ‘‘Say You Will’’ (Fleetwood Mac), 160 Schadenfreude, 199 Seeger, Pete, 12–13, 149 Self-examination, 3–4 Sergeant Pepper (The Beatles), 36, 55 The Seven Deadly Sins (Faithfull), 69 ‘‘Seven Nation Army’’ (The White Stripes), 177, 186–87 The Sex Pistols, 84 Shakur, Tupac, xx Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 99 ‘‘She Knows Me Too Well’’ (Wilson), 33 Shelton, Robert, 22 Shine (Mitchell), 50 ‘‘Shutdown’’ (Wilson), 32 Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (Chadwick and De Courtivron), 110, 156 Sillitoe, Alan, 20 ‘‘Silver Girl’’ (Fleetwood Mac), 160 Simmons, Sylvie, on Brian Wilson, 36–37 Simon, Paul: about, xvi, 95, 147; ‘‘America,’’ 153; biography, 151–52; Bookends, 152, 153, 154; ‘‘The Boxer,’’ 149, 153; Bridge Over Troubled Waters, 152, 153; Dylan as influence, 152; Graceland, 152; Hearts and Bones, 152; One-Trick Pony, 152; ‘‘The Only Living Boy In New York,’’ 153; Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, 152; partnership with Art Garfunkel, 109, 111, 112, 143, 147–54; Paul Simon, 152; The Rhythm of The Saints, 152; ‘‘The Sounds of Silence,’’ 152; Sounds of Silence, 152; Still Crazy After All These

218 Years, 152; Surprise, 147; There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, 152; Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, 152 Sincerity and Authenticity (Trilling), 3 Singer-songwriters, x–xii; coal mine metaphor, xii–xiv; creative change, 29, 48, 49, 53, 142; dark mirror, 76; long and waning careers, 199; messianic role, xix; oil well metaphor, xiv; in partnerships, 107–13, 192; risk and, 62; schadenfreude, 199; solipsism, 105, 138, 167; as solo artists, 1–9, 107, 143, 144; swimming pools metaphor, xv–xvi ‘‘Sister Morphine’’ (Faithfull), 62, 63–64 Skywriting by Word of Mouth (Lennon), 118, 121 Small Change (Waits), 76 ‘‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’’ (Cobain), 101 Smile (Wilson), 28, 29, 35, 36, 136 Smith, Dinitia, xx Smith, Larry David: on Bob Dylan, 13, 20, 83; on Elvis Costello, 83, 88, 89; on Joni Mitchell, 43, 46, 47; on Pete Townshend, 142, 144–45 Smith, Patti, xx, 101 Solipsism, 105, 138, 167 ‘‘Some Unholy War’’ (Winehouse), 104 Sondheim, Stephen, xx–xxi Songbook (Hornby), xix Songs for a Seagull (Mitchell), 45 Songwriters on Songwriting (Zollo), 130 Sorrell, Walter, 192–93 ‘‘The Sounds of Silence’’ (Paul Simon), 152 Sounds of Silence (Simon and Garfunkel), 152 Space Oddity (Bowie), 53, 59 A Spaniard in the Works (Lennon), 121 Spector, Phil, 29 Spike (Costello), 88 Springsteen, Bruce, on Bob Dylan’s music, 18 ‘‘St. Andrew (The Battle Is in the Air)’’ (The White Stripes), 188, 200 Station to Station (Bowie), 59

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Index Stevens, Wallace, 25 Sticky Fingers (Rolling Stones), 131; Marianne Faithfull, 62 Still Crazy After All These Years (Paul Simon), 152 Stills, Steven, partnership with Neil Young, 109 Stone, Joss, 100 The Stones. See The Rolling Stones ‘‘Stop Breaking Down’’ (Robert Johnson), 183 ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ (Lennon), 116 ‘‘Stronger Than Me’’ (Winehouse), 97 Stubbs, David, 117, 124 ‘‘Sugar Never Tasted So Good’’ (The White Stripes), 184 ‘‘Surfin’ ’’ (Wilson), 32 ‘‘Surfin’ USA’’ (Wilson), 32 ‘‘Surf’s Up’’ (Wilson), 9, 38, 39 Surprise (Paul Simon), 147 Sutcliffe, Phil, on Bob Dylan, 18, 19, 22, 23 The Swimmer (movie), xv Swordfishtrombones (Waits), 78, 79 Synchronicity, 125 ‘‘Take the Box’’ (Winehouse), 98 Taming the Tiger (Mitchell), 44 Tarantula (Dylan), 15 Taupin, Bernie: about, xvi, xviii, 95, 163–64, 167; Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, 165; Empty Sky, 166; Friends, 167; Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, 165, 166; Honky Chateau, 165; Madman Across the Water, 165, 167; The One Who Writes The Words For Elton John, 163; relationship with Elton John, 143, 163–69; Tumbleweed Connection, 165; ‘‘Your Song,’’ 165 Taylor, James: about, 2; on Joni Mitchell, 42; on Simon and Garfunkel, 148–49 Taylor, Yuval, 2, 6 ‘‘Their Hearts Were Full of Spring’’ (Wilson), 32 Their Satanic Majesties Request (Rolling Stones), 131

Index Then Play On (Fleetwood Mac), 175 Theory of nonprevalent dynamics, 113 There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (Paul Simon), 152 ‘‘There Is No Greater Love’’ (Winehouse), 98 ‘‘Things Have Changed’’ (Dylan), 11 ‘‘The Thin White Duke,’’ 58 Thompson, Linda, 109, 157 Thompson, Richard, 109, 158 ‘‘Throw Down’’ (Fleetwood Mac), 160 ‘‘Till I Die’’ (Wilson), 38, 39 ‘‘Time’’ (Bowie), 60 Time Out of Mind (Dylan), 20 ‘‘The Times They Are a Changing’’ (Dylan), 11 Todoli, Vicente, on creative collaboration, 111 Tommy (Townshend), 136 Townshend, Pete: about, xvi, 135; career, 144; expectations of, 142; ‘‘I Can’t Explain,’’ 141; Lifehouse, 136; Live at Leeds, 136; ‘‘My Generation,’’ 141; partnership with Roger Daltrey, 109, 112, 135–46; Quadrophenia, 136; on Rolling Stones, 133; Tommy, 136; Who’s Next, 136; Won’t Get Fooled Again, 141; See also The Who Traffic (band), 196 Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity, 3 ‘‘Truth Bitter Truth’’ (Faithfull), 68 ‘‘Truth Doesn’t Make a Noise’’ (The White Stripes), 185 Tumbleweed Connection (John and Taupin), 165 Tusk (Buckingham), 176 20/20 (Wilson), 38 Updike, John, on celebrity, 116 Van Vliet, Don: about, 75, 175, 194; partnership with Frank Zappa, 112 Van Zandt, Steve, 127 Vedder, Eddie, 135 Vega, Suzanne, xx Velvet Underground, 56, 61, 105 ‘‘Visions of Johanna’’ (Dylan), 21, 24

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219 Von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, 61, 62 ‘‘Waiting for the End of the World’’ (Costello), 87 Waiting for the Sun (Hoskyns), 77 Waits, Tom, 73–80; about, xvi, 2, 69, 95; career, 75; Closing Time, 76; Dark Rider, 90; ‘‘Emotional Weather Report,’’ 77; as empath, 79; Frank’s Wild Years, 79; ‘‘Heart Attack and Vine,’’ 78; Heart of Saturday Night, 76; ‘‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You,’’ 76–77; Nighthawks at the Diner, 76, 77; Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards 80; as rabble rouser, 74–75; ‘‘Saving All My Love for You,’’ 78; Small Change, 76; Swordfishtrombones, 78, 79; voice, 74, 76 ‘‘Wake Up Alone’’ (Winehouse), 93, 104 Wallace, Jonathan, Ethical Spectacle, 16 Wednesday Morning, 3 AM (Simon and Garfunkel), 152 Welch, Bob, 84 ‘‘Welcome to the Working Week’’ (Costello), 85 ‘‘What’s The World Coming To?’’ (Fleetwood Mac), 160 ‘‘When the Music’s Over’’ (Morrison), 101 White, Jack: about, 171–72, 173, 175, 183, 184, 192; marriage to Karen Elson, 184; The Raconteurs, 189, 190, 198; relationship with Meg White, 171–90 White, Meg: about, 173, 175, 197, 198– 99; acute anxiety, 177–78, 189; relationship with Jack White, 171–90 The White Album (The Beatles), 118, 136 White Blood Cells (The White Stripes), 177, 185–86 The White Stripes (album), 183 The White Stripes (group); about, 171, 173, 174–75, 177, 197; ‘‘Ball and Biscuit,’’ 187; ‘‘The Big Three Killed My Baby,’’ 183; ‘‘Death Letter,’’ 179; De Stijl, 172, 177; Elephant, 177, 186, 187; evolution, 180; Get Behind Me Satan, 186; ‘‘Hello Operator,’’ 185; Icky Thump, 173, 175, 178, 188; ‘‘I Fought Pirhanas,’’ 183–84; ‘‘Little

220 Cream Soda,’’ 175; musical sound, 176; ‘‘Passive Manipulation,’’197; ‘‘Seven Nation Army,’’ 177, 186–87; ‘‘St. Andrew (The Battle Is in the Air),’’ 188, 200; ‘‘Sugar Never Tasted So Good,’’ 184; ‘‘Truth Doesn’t Make a Noise,’’ 185; White Blood Cells, 177, 185–86; The White Stripes, 183; ‘‘Your Southern Can is Mine,’’ 185. See also White, Jack; See also White, Meg The Who: about, 111, 135, 139, 141, 144, 179, 191; ‘‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,’’ 179; Endless Wire, 137, 144; expectations of, 141–142; ‘‘Here ’Tis,’’ 179; history of, 139; TownshendDaltrey partnership, 109, 112, 135–46; ‘‘Zoot Suit,’’ 179. See also Daltrey, Roger; See also Townshend, Pete ‘‘Who Are You’’ (TV, CSI series), 140 Who’s Next (Townshend), 136 ‘‘Why D’ya Do It?’’ (Faithfull), 65 ‘‘The Wicked Messenger’’ (Dylan), 196 Wild Things Run Fast (Mitchell), 49 Wilson, Brian, 27–39: about, xvi, 2, 6, 28– 29, 69, 95, 112; acoustic technology and, 13; biography, 28; ‘‘Cabinessence,’’ 38; ‘‘California Girls,’’ 33; ‘‘Catch a Wave,’’ 32; on celebrity, 28, 29, 30; comeback, 29; creative collapse, 29, 38–39; ‘‘Don’t Talk, Put Your Head on My Shoulder,’’ 35; ‘‘Do You Wanna Dance?,’’ 32; emotional vulnerability in music, 31; ‘‘409,’’ 32; ‘‘Fun Fun Fun,’’ 32; ‘‘God Only Knows,’’ 35; ‘‘Good Vibrations,’’ 33; ‘‘Hang On To Your Ego,’’ 35; ‘‘I Get Around,’’ 32; ‘‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,’’ 36; ‘‘I Know There’s An Answer,’’ 35; ‘‘Little Deuce Coupe,’’ 32; ‘‘Little Surfer Girl,’’ 32; on love, 29; persona, 57; Pet Sounds, 29, 31, 33, 34, 36; ‘‘Please Let Me Wonder,’’ 33; as producer of music, 30; psychedelic drugs, 33, 34; recording music and, 30; ‘‘She Knows Me Too Well,’’ 33; ‘‘Shutdown,’’ 32; Smile, 28, 29, 35, 36,

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Index 136; ‘‘Surfin’,’’ 32; ‘‘Surfin’ USA,’’ 32; ‘‘Surf’s Up,’’ 9, 38, 39; ‘‘Their Hearts Were Full of Spring,’’ 32; ‘‘Till I Die,’’ 38, 39; 20/20, 38; voice, 27; ‘‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’’ 35; ‘‘You Still Believe in Me,’’ 35; See also The Beach Boys Wilson, Carl, 33 Wilson, Dennis, 33 Wilson, Julie, xx Wilson, Murray, 33 Wilson, Robert, 69, 79 Winehouse, Amy, 91–106; about, 92, 173–74, 177, 192, 197, 198–99; Back to Black, 94, 99, 103; ‘‘Back to Black,’’ 104; biography, 92; ‘‘Cherry,’’ 97; eating disorders, 96; Frank, 93, 94, 95, 96–98; ‘‘Fuck Me Pumps,’’ 97; ‘‘He Can Only Hold Her,’’ 105; ‘‘In My Bed,’’ 98; ‘‘Just Friends,’’ 104; ‘‘Love Is a Losing Game,’’ 104; masks, 94; ‘‘Me and Mr. Jones,’’ 103–04; ‘‘My Tears Dry on Their Own,’’ 104; ‘‘Rehab,’’ 94, 96, 99, 103; self-destruction, 96, 102; ‘‘Some Unholy War,’’ 104; ‘‘Stronger Than Me,’’ 97; substance abuse, 96, 99; ‘‘Take the Box,’’ 98; ‘‘There Is No Greater Love,’’ 98; ‘‘Wake Up Alone,’’ 93, 104; wounded-goddess mirror, 101; ‘‘You Know I’m No Good,’’ 103; ‘‘You Sent Me Flying,’’ 97 Winwood, Steve, 196 Won’t Get Fooled Again (Townshend), 141 Woodrow, Linda, 166 ‘‘Woodstock’’ (Mitchell), 42 ‘‘Working Class Hero’’ (Faithfull), 62, 65 Workingman’s Dead (Grateful Dead), 191–92 Wouldn’t It Be Nice (book, Granata), 31 ‘‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’’ (song, Wilson), 35 Writing Dylan (Smith), 13, 20 Yagoda, Ben, 2, 3 Yes, 191 ‘‘Yesterday’’ (McCartney), 130 ‘‘You Know I’m No Good’’ (Winehouse), 103

Index Young Americans (Bowie), 56, 59 Young, Neil, partnership with Steven Stills, 109 ‘‘Your Song’’ (John and Taupin), 165 ‘‘Your Southern Can is Mine’’ (The White Stripes), 185 ‘‘You Sent Me Flying’’ (Winehouse), 97 ‘‘You Still Believe in Me’’ (Wilson), 35

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221 Zappa, Frank: about, 76, 179; partnership with Don Van Vliet, 112; on rock journalism, 171 Ziggy Stardust, 57, 58 Zimmerman, Robert. See Dylan, Bob Zollo, Paul, 130, 149, 151, 152–53 ‘‘Zoot Suit’’ (The Who), 179

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About the Author

DONALD BRACKETT is an art and music critic based in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos (Praeger, 2007) and has also written extensively on the subject of creative collaboration in the arts. He is currently researching and writing a study of twentiethcentury modernism.