Between Rock and a Soft Place

I was driving north on Interstate 95 outside Boston in May of 1980, just back to America after a week at the Cannes Film Festival, where I had stayed in an overpriced hotel room, drunk beer at the scarifying price of $3.50 a bottle and eaten mostly ham-and-cheese bar sandwiches, because about all I could drag out of the shambles of my high school French vocabulary was "jambon et fromage." For me, everything about Cannes had been a bummer. Everyone was talking too loudly. All the men seemed to be wearing white pants and white shoes. There were too many cars, too many desperate-looking women, too much flak, too much hype. There were fat Germans, fat Frenchmen, fat Englishmenand fat Americans, all of them bellowing at one another over stupendous, overpriced drinks.

Flying home, I found myself thinking of the Chuck Berry tune Back in the U.S.A. Simple, cheerful, to the point. As the jet headed west, I found f couldn't wait to hit the ground and clear Customs. I decided on the spur of the moment to rent a car and drive up to Bangor from Boston's Logan Airport instead of flying that evening. I wanted to get behind the wheel after a week of cringing in the back of tiny taxis piloted by laughing suicidal Frenchmen; I wanted to stop at the McDonald's on Route 1 and scarf up some fries and a couple of Quarter Pounders with cheese; most of all, I wanted to dial some good rock 'n' roll and turn the volume up until the speakers started to distort.

At first, everything went just as planned. The jet cooled its engines, eased its wings and taxied to the terminal zone (as Berry says in The Promised Land, another classic to which no Linda Ronstadt cover could ever do justice). The Avis people were willing to rent me a car. The day was bright and clear. McDonald's was just where it had always been; some French fries and a burger and I'd know I was home.

Usually, on a drive from Boston to Bangor, I'd tune in WCOZ-FM (where the station break now goes: "WCOZ-FM, Boston ... kick-ass rock 'n' roll!"), switch over to WAAF-FM ("The rock-'n'-roll Air Force!") in northern Massachusetts, and then, as I approached the Maine--New Hampshire border, I'd go to the end of the dial for WBLM-FM ("You're cruising with Maine's rock-'n'-roll blimp!"). The one fly in the ointment was the rental car's lack of an FM radio, something I automatically specify in advance when renting.

Well, that's not really a problem--AM rock's cool, too, I thought. I tuned first to WRKO/Boston, the station of my misspent teenage years, and discovered a steady cavalcade of M.O.R. (middle-of-the-road) songs, sometimes called elevator music. The new Barry Manilow tune, the new Bee Gees tune, a new country-crossover tune. Nothing even resembling a fuzz-tone guitar. I fumbled for WMEX, one of the stations where I had discovered rock as a kid, mostly at night, wavering in and out like music from a distant jive planet, music that was powered at you by a hoarse-voiced, frantic disc jockey who called himself Arnie "Woo-Woo" Ginsberg and whose main claim to fame was unleashing Freddy Cannon on an unsuspecting world in the early Sixties. In those days, he was known as Freddy "Boom-Boom" Cannon, and he recorded for Swan records (which put the slogan "Don't drop out!" on each and every 45, including its single Beatles release, She Loves You). WMEX was still there--but it had gone to an all-news format.

In a mild panic now, I dialed my way straight across the AM band in search of rock 'n' roll, an activity roughly akin to sinking a core rod into an ancient Ethiopian midden. I heard Paul Harvey; Jerry Falwell; Jerry Lewis pitching for muscular dystrophy; Barbra Streisand; three phone-in shows; Jerry Reed singing the theme song from Smokey and the Bandit; news; John Denver yodeling Thank God I'm a Country Boy; Paul McCartney oiling his way slowly through Venus and Mars Rock Show; Community Calendar; ads for restaurants, gas stations, Zayre's, Sears, Budweiser, Busch, water beds, movies and everything else that the FCC says can be sold on the radio.

I reached the bottom of the band, where there was nothing left but faint static and blankness. Among the things I had not heard: a Who record. An AC/DC record. A Rolling Stones record. An Eric Clapton record--even something as relatively harmless as Wonderful Tonight (continued on page 238)Rock(continued from page 122) or Promises. Nothing bythe man who seems to me to be the artistic son of Freddy Cannon--Ted Nugent, a.k.a. The Motor City Madman. In short, I heard nothing that simply jumped out at me and belted me in the face; I heard nothing that knocked me back a step in my own mind, the way the guitar riff that opens Berry's Bach in the U.S.A. knocked me back when I was 12, or the way the headlong boogie of Bad Moon Rising knocked me back when I was 22. From 54 kilohertz to 160 kHz, what I heard was the audio equivalent of oleo.

That was when I began to worry--to seriously worry--about rock 'n' roll. First I thought my worries may be groundless: rock was, after all, alive and well on the FM band. WCOZ, WAAF, WBLM--they are only New England examples of hard-rocking FM stations; they have counterparts all across the country. And. I reasoned, even though over-all sales of rock albums are down and sales of concert tickets are also down, rock is still rolling in the clubs: even in Iowa and Nebraska, there's apt to be a roadhouse within driving distance where you can catch a smoking local band on Friday or Saturday night. When the sun goes down, the Fenders and Stratocasters and the Gretsch drums come out. So I rolled on for a while, feeling slightly reassured. Every now and then, I'd glance at the silent and useless--to me, at least--Am rental-car radio and feel a return of my puzzled dismay.

Then I happened to think of my friend Peter Straub, who also writes horror stories for a living.

Peter is a total jazz, freak, and has been since the early Fifties, when the girl next door played a Dave Brubeck record for him. Now, Peter can have all the jazz he wants: he has upwards of 2000 albums, he has a cassette system in his car and there is an FM jazz station that he is able to pick up handily from his home. Similarly, there's at least one FM jazz station in or near almost every major market in the country.

But the fact that a musical form is there doesn't mean that it is the prevailing musical form. From the late Twenties until the early Fifties, jazz really was the dominant American musical form. If there had been commercial FM radio back in those days, you would not have found jazz there; you would have, more likely than not, found classical music there, and chamber music, country-and-western music, and the first dim stirrings of rock 'n' roll, which in the late Forties and early Fifties was known as race music, bopster music, juke-joint music and, in New York's Greenwich Village, as reefer bop.

This is not to offer you another history of rock 'n' roll--there are now so many that you could line a whole bookshelf with them, I guess--but to suggest that AM radio, with its large geographical reach, has always been and still is the place where broad popular tastes in music are formed. FM is the home of the special-interest groups--the jazz freaks, the chamber-music freaks, the guys who tune in faithfully every week to hear an hour of bluegrass music on the local PBS-radio outlet. And now, as amazing as it might seem at first thought, rock 'n' roll has joined those special-interest groups. Stated even more bluntly: AM stations are the shock troops of popular musical taste; FM is the fallback position.

Something weird happened to rock 'n' roll between the appearance of Donna Summer with her first hit, Love to Love You, Baby, in 1976 and the advent, four years later, of Rockpile. the now-defunct superpop group that was unable to put a single into the Top 40. While the rock critics argued about the differences between punk rock and power pop in the pages of Rolling Stone and Circus, while Time and Newsweek proclaimed Bruce Springsteen America's next great pop idol (thereby setting his career back three years), while hard-rock mavens plastered disco is dead, but Rock is Rolling bumper stickers on the back bumpers of their Saabs and VWs, rock 'n' roll quietly died. It happened while the heirs apparent were arguing over the body so vociferously that nobody noticed that the subject of the discussion had begun to cool.

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Of course, the death of rock 'n' roll has occurred only in one broad sense; in a narrower sense, Danny and the Juniors were right when they sang in 1958 that rock would never die. Any kind of music isn't dead as long as some people play it and others gather to listen to it. But in a cultural sense, rock is dead, and any musical form is dead when it has ceased to influence the culture in any broad way. Wcoz in Boston does, indeed, play "kick-ass rock 'n' roll," and if you're in the metro Boston area and if you have an FM radio, you can listen to it. But the 12-year-old kid who lives in Scarborough, Maine, and who has only a pocket-sized Am transistor ... well, that kid is stuck with the Maine stations and WRKO, which used to play rock 'n' roll and which now plays the Carpenters and country crossovers such as Eddie Rabbitt's Drivin' My Life Away. And even if WRKO breaks an occasional hard-rock single such as Patti Smith's Because the Night, it ain't never gonna play Adam and the Ants, the Snivelling Shits or The Dead Kennedys. But it never did, you're saying.

Oh, yeah?

Think about it this way. Fix the number-one AM pop station in your mind, the one that broke songs like Bette Davis Eyes in your area. That is the one you probably wake up to if you have a clock-radio set to auto rather than alarm. It's the one you probably listen to while you're going to work, unless you have an FM converter in your car.

Ok, you got that AM station fixed in your mind? The one with the morning man who makes the bad jokes (but tells you how the Phillies did last night, or the Mets, the Knicks, the North Stars, the Packers or whoever), the one to which your kids listen for the no-school announcements on snowy days, the one where you first heard that tune you can't quite remember but that keeps running through your head.

Now ask yourself: Would that station break Little Richard's Tutti-Frutti or Lucille if Little Richard were starting to record today, instead of in 1955? Would it play Land of 1000 Dances, by Cannibal and the Headhunters? How about Surfin' Bird, by the Trashmen? Hang on Sloopy, by the McCoys? Or the all-time garage classic, often imitated but never duplicated, 96 Tears, by ? & The Mysterians?

Granted, all radio is carefully programed. And it is perfectly true that most rock stations get a little tougher at night; in between the Carpenters singing We've Only Just Begun and the latest Bee Gees tune, you may hear Renegade, by Styx, New York Groove, by Ace Frehley, or that gorgeous good-time rocker by Steve Miller, Rock'n Me.

But you don't hear Rockpile, though its only album consists of one straight-ahead rocker after another; you don't hear punky groups such as the Inmates, The Romantics, the Motels, The B-52s or the Vapors (whose single Turning Japanese received little air play in some parts of the country).

The punks got off on the wrong foot and never managed to get it together for AM radio, which has grown fat on profits and sleepily satisfied with ballads by soloists like Neil Diamond and groups like Air Supply. In rock's early days, opponents who were appalled by the new music's life, sexuality, decibel level and pure energy worked their asses off to create some sort of damning mistake. Riots at a Boston rock show put on by Alan Freed were blamed on "young boys and girls whipped into a frenzy by rocking and rolling." Christian magazines showed Elvis Presley, his guitar giving off brimstone vapors and horns peeking out of his D.A. haircut, leading a parade of jitterbugging teenagers into hell. In the South, it was seen as "subversive nigger race music," because, following Elvis, it was sometimes very hard to tell if the performers were black or white. Milton Berle laughed openly at Elvis (as Dean Martin would laugh openly at The Rolling Stones on The Hollywood Palace a decade later) and, following what was essentially a good-ol'-boy brawl at a Memphis filling station, conservative antirock papers (that was almost all of them) tried to paint a picture of the ex-truck driver as a beetle-brained juvenile delinquent.

Rock had its good boys--boys like Frankie Avalon, Tommy Sands and Ricky Nelson--but there were others, alarming-looking people you wouldn't want to have in your living room, people like Gene Vincent, Little Richard (who, in his prime, looked so crazed that he would have made Frank Zappa look like the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit), Jerry Lee Lewis ("Come on ovah, baby," Jerry Lee leered from his Pumping Piano, "we got chicken in the barn!"), whose hair hung in his face like some weird Moorish rugrunner's and whose career cooled when he later ran off and married his 13-year-old cousin! For every nice-looking white boy like Bobby Rydell, it seemed that there were two or three lunatics like Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who was wheeled onstage in a coffin and who sometimes wore a bone in his nose. And not even all the white boys seemed completely safe. There was a slightly crazed look in Buddy Holly's eyes when he sang Rave On. Eddie Cochran looked like the sort of boy who might try to get to second base--maybe even to third--on the first date. Buddy Knox said he wanted a party doll--now, just what was that supposed to mean? Sandy Nelson's Teen Beat sounded like music to strip by. And then there was Chuck Berry, who sang: "I boogied in the kitchen, / I boogied in the hall, / I boogied on my finger and I wiped it on the wall."

So the adults watched and waited, and they had their victories from time to time. Alan Freed was fired during the payola scandals, though it can be argued that he was actually the victim of a radio-advertising situation that was changing so rapidly that it seemed a full-fledged hurricane was going on (the crowd that had listened to The Make Believe Ballroom and the crowd that listened to Freed were obviously not buying the same products). Jerry Lee Lewis was blackballed and never had another rock Top 40 hit, though he had umpty-ump C&W hits during the Sixties and Seventies. A number of young performers, dazed by sudden success, got heavily into drugs. Some, such as Little Richard, survived; others, such as Frankie Lymon of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, did not. Some wags joked that Dick Clark himself survived the payola scandals only because there were enough Senators with teenaged daughters to assure his clean bill of health. It was damned hard, these wags argued, to censure a man for payola after you'd asked for his autograph.

But rock survived the Fifties, partly due to parental indulgence, partly due to the unstudied grace of such performers as Fats Domino, Ritchie Valens and Freddy Cannon (whose first big hit, Tallahassee Lassie, was written by his mother), partly due to such canny managers as Colonel Tom Parker (who once claimed he sold Elvis mostly by selling Elvis' love for his momma), and perhaps mostly due to good luck.

As the Sixties moved on, rock became stronger, more able to withstand such occasional gaffes as John Lennon's remark that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus (the remark, meant to show what a sad state of affairs the world had gotten itself into, was quickly--and perhaps deliberately--misinterpreted by the latent antirock forces, who got busy burning rock records as fast as they could) or Jim Morrison's pants-off act in Miami. I wonder if rock could have survived if Berry had dropped his pants onstage back in 1956, or if Elvis had proclaimed himself bigger than Jesus. Rock has lived and thrived on a certain amount of outrage since the very beginning, of course. Etta James released a record called Roll with Me, Henry (which was quickly changed to The Wallflower and covered by Georgia Gibbs as Dance with Me, Henry). The Fish Cheer was one of the high points of Woodstock, and The Rolling Stones went the groupie phenomenon one better by singing gleefully about star fuckers.

(A single, rare survival of the tradition is pointed out by Mighty John Marshall, rock disc jockey at Bangor's WACZ, perhaps the last Am hard-rock station in the country [see sidebar, page 122]. "When I was doing a talk on communications at Orono High School," says Marshall, "some little sophomore asked me why we kept on playing Rapture by Blondie. I asked him what he meant, and the kid says, 'Don't you know she says something about finger fucking at the start of the record?'"

"Does she say it?" I ask; suddenly, I'm a high school sophomore again--drooling over the possibility of Debbie Harry's saying something naughty on the radio...and getting away with it.)

The punks, who at first looked like yet another rebirth of rock 'n' roll, wrapped, as always, in the placenta of outrage, were not so lucky. Spawned of a worked-out, dreamed-out and fucked-out English working class (Lennon's song Working Class Hero foresees the punk movement with almost eerie prescience), their rise in the clubs of London, Manchester and Liverpool almost exactly paralleled the political resurgence of the Thatcher-style conservatives. The punks, of course, were epitomized by the Sex Pistols, and it seems to me that it was with the Pistols that rock's luck finally ran out.

That their rock is real is doubted by no one who has heard their only album released in the United States, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. The social comment in God Save the Queen is not funny, or ironic, or witty; it drives over you like a big, fuming truck. Pretty Vacant sums up all of the working-class anger of the Seventies; Holidays in the Sun offers a bluntly searing indictment of the English middle class; and Anarchy for the U.K. is, quite simply, one of the best rock-'n'-roll songs ever recorded.

In a way, the political commentary, the working-class-hero bullshit, the pins in the ears and the nihilism got in the way, obscured the fact that, above and beyond all else, the Pistols--and the punk music of which they were a part--were making incredibly good, incredibly powerful rock 'n' roll.

The Pistols were invited onto a British talk show, where they were repeatedly egged on by the host to say or do something as outrageous as their image. Johnny Rotten finally responded by screaming "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!" in the host's face. It was outrageous, all right; outrageous enough to give them an advance reputation that turned their only American tour into a disaster.

In truth, the Pistols might have survived the outrage; a more bitter truth was simply that in America they were laughed to death, as were most of their contsemporaries. Basic minimalist rock has never really died in England; the fans continue to enjoy its primitive beat and its half-stupid sense of humor (Robert Gordon's version of the rock-a-billy oldy My Girl Is Red-Hot, Your Girl Ain't Doodly-Squat peaked at number 83 on Billboard's charts but is a cult classic in the Isles).

American rock fans, as they have moved from AM to FM, have lost their love for the primitive, driving sound. A Newsweek article on rock published shortly before Lennon's death complained that the whole top ten had a glossy, flossy, overproduced sound; instead of raw chunks of the rock, American pop had taken on an oddly freeze-dried quality, symbolized, perhaps, by Blondie's Call Me (arranged for synthesizer by disco maven Giorgio Moroder). There have been exceptions; The Knack's My Sharona was a monster hit, but American rock fans in the past five years seem to have preferred the elaborate quadra-tracking of Boston's first album or the echo-chamber-cum-cathedral effect of REO Speedwagon's Hi Infidelity.

The joys of punk simply never got through to Americans. On several Eddie Cochran cuts recorded in the late Fifties (including that all-time ball buster Summertime Blues), there are no drums at all; just a guy whopping away on a cardboard box with his bare hands. There were singers like Fabian, who couldn't sing; guitarists like Elvis, who couldn't play; idols like Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, who sometimes showed up too drunk to perform--and then performed anyway. Many of them were stupid, and many more were just naïve. But somewhere they were tuned in to an apocalyptic big beat of almost killing force, and they made musical history.

So it was with the punks--except, in the years 1977--1979, Americans decided they didn't want it. In the Fifties, kids risked the derision of their peers and endured the anguished howls of their parents to comb their hair back like Elvis or, in the Sixties, down over their foreheads like the Beatles; kids had bought the albums of Bob Dylan and ritually discussed songs like Ballad of a Thin Man and Like a Rolling Stone (and surely Dylan's angry bray made Johnny Rotten sound almost like Perry Como); they patched their jeans in the late Sixties until they were nothing but patches, they got high, they grew their hair down to the smalls of their backs.

And then...somehow...it simply ended. And after it ended, they dressed up in ice-cream suits like John Travolta and boogied down to the local disco with Disco Inferno by the Trammps playing out of their AM radios: they strapped on roller skates and danced on them to the tune of More Than a Woman (to Me); they necked to Pilot of the Airwaves and Kiss on My List. What they didn't do was get swastikas or upside-down American flags tattooed on their cheeks, or get their ragged crewcuts dyed green or orange or purple. They didn't buy Ramones records by the millions, they didn't sell out the first Clash tour and their knowledge of Elvis Costello probably ended with the news that he had drunkenly called Ray Charles a blind nigger.

When the Stones appeared on The Hollywood Palace, a mid-Sixties variety show, they, like the punks, looked like visitors from another world among the tuxes and glitter; everything seemed to stop in shock, horror and amazement. Nothing had prepared America for the sight of a Mick Jagger or a Keith Richard, who capered insanely across the stage like a revival minister on a speed trip. The host, Dean Martin, can be excused his laughter, the audience its boos--the Stones had the last laugh. Their records began to be played on AM radio, and suddenly they were the second-biggest rock band in the world. In spite of their almost unbelievable scruffiness and strangeness--their almost unbelievable punkiness--they were a salable commodity and their songs--including Let's Spend the Night Together and Brown Sugar--were played routinely on the AM.

But Costello, perhaps the most popular New Wave artist in America, has never had a Top 40 hit; The Police have had only three; The Clash, only one. Bruce Springsteen may be the only really successful American punk. He combs his hair punk style, he plays a lot of straight-ahead rock 'n' roll and he returns obsessively to the subject of the American working class with its dreams in ruins. Springsteen is tremendously popular, of course--on the FM. But it still takes AM to make a hit record, and Springsteen has had only four Top 40 hits. One, Hungry Heart, made it into the top ten. Prove It All Night, and Fade Away peaked in the mid-30s and his anthem, Born to Run, topped out at number 23.

"I have seen the future of rock 'n' roll and its name is Bruce Springsteen," Jon Landau is supposed to have said.

He might have added: on the FM, yeah. On WCOZ-FM, where they play kick-ass rock 'n' roll, yeah. But on the AM, where rockers like Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins once woke the teenagers of America and rocked them into the Sixties? Uh-uh. On the AM, you can forget Springsteen; on the AM, the future of rock 'n' roll is Barry Manilow, Juice Newton, REO Speedwagon.

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Maybe what happened to AM is perfectly simple: It got old. It hung in there through Woodstock, and then it started to run out of gas. Even Dick Clark is starting to show signs of age. It's a sad thought, and it's a little startling, but it fits and it has its own comforting logic. None of us thought we were going to get old when we were 15, and look what happened. If it has to be FM, it has to be--the same way a guy like me says, if it has to be 33 going on 34, with all-of-a-sudden white in the beard and those funny little wrinkles around the corners of the eyes, it has to be. When we were young enough to believe that rock 'n' roll would live forever, we believed the same of ourselves.

So I sit at my desk, trying to put my notes into some sort of coherent order. And suddenly, as Rapture by Blondie comes on the radio, I forget everything and turn the volume up. And....

It's on there! It's on there! She really says it!

I laugh like a loon! My wife comes in, looks at me, shakes her head and leaves again. It is, after all, only Steve, pretending he's 18 again.

But maybe, like rock 'n' roll itself, that's not such a bad idea.

From 54 kilohertz to 160 kHz, what I heard was the audio equivalent of oleo."