Simon and Garfunkel aren't to blame for the Me Decade, but a 1969 CBS television special they did called Songs of America might well have helped to pave the way. The special is featured on a DVD included with the 40th anniversary reissue of their iconic final album Bridge Over Troubled Water.
This was well before cable television, so a one-hour special on one of the three networks was a gigantic platform. That kind of power was not only a testament to Simon and Garfunkel's immense commercial stature, but to the fact that, in those days, the Establishment was obsessed with (and, to be honest, also repulsed by) What Young People Think. A cerebral and softly tuneful folk-rock act seemed like a safe escort into the hearts and minds of this huge new consumer demographic. And of course the special was also some nifty corporate cross-promotion: CBS happened to be a sister company of Simon and Garfunkel's record label, Columbia.
It's worth looking at the credits — Songs of America was "conceived and executed" by Charles Grodin and Simon and Garfunkel, basically meaning that Grodin directed and Simon and Garfunkel were the producers. (Grodin and Garfunkel had made friends on the set of Catch-22, in which both men played small parts. Simon was also reportedly in the film but his part wound up on the cutting room floor.) That was a tremendous amount of creative control, especially considering the team had almost no experience: Simon and Garfunkel, after all, were just a pop group, and Grodin's chief television production credits, by his own admission, were having been fired three times in a six-week period from the TV comedy show Candid Camera. (Presumably to bring some credibility to the project, the executive producer is Robert Drew, who happens to be the godfather of American cinema verité and worked with the likes of D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and the Maysles brothers.)
The one thing CBS and the show's sponsors hadn't counted on was Simon and Garfunkel's apparent need to stake out some cred. There's a curious moment when we hear Simon confessing in voiceover, "I can feel in the air that's there's something great going on all around. And I'm just... I have a feeling that I'm just missing it. That it's just right there and I'm right in the midst of it, but I can't quite get it." Songs of America seems like maybe it was an attempt to be a part of that great something that was going around.
Actor Robert Ryan, a well known progressive and pacifist, does a brief introduction, so the show's tone is set before it even begins. For the benefit of the squares in the audience, Ryan establishes Simon and Garfunkel's bona fides: "These two young men have attracted a tremendous following among the youth of America," which is another way of saying they might be able to explain what the hell kids are on about these days.
Ryan also promises Simon and Garfunkel's "lyrical interpretation of the world we live in," which is a fair enough description, but the songs don't actually have the overtly topical slant that this special claims for them — it's only when Grodin slaps some newsreel footage on them that they take on any kind of political resonance. And so America got its first listen to "Bridge Over Troubled Water" as the screen filled with footage of John F. Kennedy, who had been murdered only six years earlier, a profound tragedy still fresh in the nation's heart and soul. That's followed by footage of Martin Luther King, who had been assassinated only the year before, and the cross-country funeral train of Robert F. Kennedy, still deeply moving to those of us of a certain age. In this very fraught context, lines like "When darkness comes and pain is all around" take on a very specific weight, but it's almost like playing Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz.
"America" is set to footage of mostly rural and nature vistas, purple mountains' majesty and all that — until it abruptly switches to a gigantic garbage dump, a squalid ghetto, rock-throwing rioters, and a bewildered black man bleeding from the head. It's a heavy-handed tack. Grodin pulls the same trick a couple of more times: as "Scarborough Fair" unfurls in its pristine splendor, the visuals unspool a montage of idyllic hippie communion at Woodstock (which Simon and Garfunkel declined to play), then cut to horrific scenes from Vietnam, all spectacular explosions and writhing soldiers. Is that really what the song is about? For "Frank Lloyd Wright," clips of American cultural heroes like Flash Gordon, Hopalong Cassidy and Mickey Mantle give way to — horror of horrors — Lenny Bruce. The point is hammered home with all the subtlety of a baseball bat to the shins: there are some problems in America.
Grodin's irreverent wit only comes through as the self-consciously whimsical "Punky's Dilemma" plays under footage of various leading politicians of the day (Hubert Humphrey, Cyrus Vance, Ted Kennedy, et al.) looking bored at meetings.
And then it goes from the ridiculous to the sublime. We're on a soundstage somewhere, workers walking around, musicians at their instruments, and a rehearsal is in progress. "And here it goes," Garfunkel says, and commences singing "Bridge Over Troubled Water." His voice is unspeakably beautiful.
It's now past the halfway point of the show, the bludgeoning newsreel collages are all finished, and we move on to some priceless footage: Paul 'n' Art working out the sublime "Frank Lloyd Wright" with mainstay producer Roy Halee; an astonishingly intimate scene where they're sitting together on a hotel room bed somewhere out on the road, singing "Feelin' Groovy"; working on the obscure BOTW outtake "Cuba Si, Nixon No"; and excerpts of live versions of "The Boxer," "Sounds of Silence," "For Emily," and a killer "Mrs. Robinson."
But Songs of America remains an extended political statement. "I think that much of what we're saying is extremely obvious," Simon declares between musical interludes. "Until they stop the war, until they feed the people, until they make everyone free and have equal opportunity — or as much as that can be done within this society, then it's the function of people to point it out and continually remind us." And those are brave and righteous words: the political atmosphere was toxically partisan then too. It's difficult to imagine a mainstream pop group doing anything remotely like Songs of America today, for fear of alienating a segment of their audience or getting boycotted by right-wing radio networks.
This was during a particularly turbulent social moment when people actually looked, in all seriousness, to pop musicians for political direction. Throughout the show, it's clear that these are a couple of bright Jewish guys from Queens who are all too consciously aware that they wield great influence, and that it was de rigeur for hip musicians to make sweeping political statements. Despite being terrifically intelligent and well spoken, both men sometimes fall prey to their own vanity — acutely aware that they're on camera, they sure say some dumb things sometimes.
One scene finds the duo heading somewhere in the back seat of what used to be known as a "station wagon." Simon mentions it's Beethoven's 200th birthday. Garfunkel scoffs knowingly, "He was a fool, Beethoven." It's difficult to tell whether he's kidding, but 1969 was many years before irony was invented, and so we should fear the worst. Especially when the camera cuts to the priceless expression on Simon's face.
But then it's Simon's turn to make us wince. Garfunkel notes that in a few years, America's 200th birthday is coming up too. Simon waits a beat, obviously aware of the golden opportunity to make a Big Statement, and oh-so-gravely intones, "Think it's going to make it?"
Now, Garfunkel was an architecture major, which amply explains his pompousness. Who knows where Simon got his, although massive fame, money and critical adulation would be one good explanation. The combination of all that attention and immense, nearly unprecedented record sales must have inflated egos beyond all comprehension. And so we have Art Garfunkel saying things like "all human beings have this wish to take their inner self and fuse it with the rest of humanity." Right then and there, you can hear the baby boomer-fueled Me Decade being born.
AT&T paid for the production but withdrew its name once they saw the finished product — the film's outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam was a non-starter. "You're using our money to sell your ideology!" raged a rep for AT&T's ad agency, also complaining that the film's strong stand for civil rights would alienate southern affiliates. The AT&T rep even criticized the sequence about the Kennedys and Martin Luther King — because "they were all Democrats." "We think of them," replied Simon, "as assassinated people."
The show's new sponsor became Alberto VO5 shampoo, who must have been delighted about the lengthening hair of the nation's youth.
Commercially, AT&T made the right call. Songs of America was not your usual entertainment variety special of the era, with sparkling, brightly lit sets pointedly oblivious to the tumult going on outside the studio walls. Americans just did not want to hear what Songs of America had to say. According to Grodin, a million people stopped watching Songs of America after the first round of commercials, likely switching over to NBC for a Peggy Fleming ice skating special co-starring José Feliciano. As Simon notes in a documentary about Bridge over Troubled Water that also appears on this DVD, "I think we were naïve kids from the northeast who thought that's the way the world was, and everybody thought that way. But they didn't."
For all the popularity of their music, Simon and Garfunkel lacked the common touch. "We're still no good at that — talking to an audience," Garfunkel admits late in the show. And the candid passages of Songs of America do reveal that the smugness, opacity and frostiness that hung around their all too impeccable music was rooted in their own personas. Songs are a way of venting feelings, Simon acknowledges, "But I don't think about getting through to somebody." Exactly.
The expectation that these soft-rock superstars could be spokesmen for a generation was unreasonable and pushed them and their music into places they didn't quite belong — like a one-hour network TV special about the state of the nation. Being unable to rise to the occasion and instead covering themselves in self-importance and self-indulgence seems like an all too accurate portent of what was to come.
ENO'S APOLLO MUSIC AT THE WINTER GARDEN
When Brian Eno made his classic semi-ambient 1983 album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, he probably didn't mean it as a requiem. But that's how it came off Friday night at a live performance of the album at the Winter Garden in New York City.
Composed for a documentary about the Apollo space program, the music was originally recorded by Eno on a variety of heavily processed synths, accompanied by his protégé, pedal steel virtuoso/guitarist Daniel Lanois, and Eno's brother Roger. This time there was a core band of pedal steel guitar, electric guitar, electric bass, violin, and a vintage Yamaha DX7 synthesizer (which host John Schaefer pointed out now qualifies as a historical instrument). As a large screen behind the band displayed stock footage of space missions and lunar landings, some guest guitarists — David Torn, Noveller, and Tortoise's Jeff Parker — wandered in and out of the soundscape.
The vast, reverberating Winter Garden is tailor-made for long, slow tones such as these, and the music produced apt sensations of weightlessness, distance and stasis. The accompanying footage of spacewalks and booster rockets looks quaint now, and although the musicians were funneling their instruments through what must have been a battery of digital effects, the gesture of painstakingly rendering this synthetic music by hand seemed an appropriate way to evoke a thoroughly bygone era.
Apparently some of the Apollo astronauts brought along Buck Owens and Merle Haggard tapes, hence the pedal steel, played by session ace and longtime Dylan sideman Larry Campbell. But the instrument's distinctly country flavor also recalls those Texan accents from Mission Control and the uniquely American nature of the achievement. More profoundly, it conveys a sense of, appropriately enough, wide open spaces, the frontier. As that quintessential rural American sound brushed up against the otherworldly, Campbell's pedal steel softly sang like a space cowboy.
But that night, the pedal steel, along with the Apollo footage, seemed even more poignant than it usually does. The last manned lunar landing was in 1972. Well over half the current population of the United States was born after that, and has no memory of people walking on the moon, or of any really colossal feat of human exploration. The Apollo music, with its long, tolling waves of sound, became an elegy for the ghosts of American astronauts.
DVD REVIEW: Some Girls Live in Texas 1978
The last great peak and subsequent artistic decline of a great rock & roll band — maybe the greatest rock & roll band — was signified by one t-shirt.
Said t-shirt was on display on a roastingly hot July night in 1978 when the Rolling Stones played Ft. Worth's Will Rogers Memorial Center on their tour to promote the newly released Some Girls. The show, nicely filmed on grainy 16mm stock and vividly recorded, is just out on DVD as Some Girls Live in Texas 1978 (Eagle Rock Entertainment).
The Stones had been on the ropes lately: not only was Keith Richards facing a heavy prison sentence for possessing some 22 grams of heroin, but the band was coming off three consecutive mediocre albums, as well as a damaging scandal over a viciously sexist ad for their previous record, Black and Blue.
And then there was the matter of punk rock. The Stones were all too aware of punk and how it directly refuted the luxuriant torpor of their mid-'70s work. The Stones had been integral players in rock's evolution — through the British Invasion, blues revivalism, baroque pop, psychedelia, pastoral rock and '70s excess — right up until punk. This was the first musical movement that the Stones were simply too old to have been a part of. Which must have been pretty tough to take, especially for the vain and trendy Jagger. All they could do was don punk's vestments, like Hannibal Lecter wearing the skin of his murder victims.
And so at this concert, we witness the unseemly spectacle of Mick Jagger parading around in a t-shirt with the word DESTROY atop a swastika. (Back then, even provincial squares would have picked up on the shirt's punk rock style; today, Jagger would be accused of being a Nazi sympathizer.) The thing is, Michael Philip Jagger was born during World War II; the swastika had a much different significance to his generation than to the punks, precisely why the latter used it to twit their elders, thereby setting themselves apart from them. It's one thing for Sid Vicious to sport a swastika, but when Mick Jagger does it, it's a calculating and somewhat desperate pose. For the Rolling Stones, the writing wasn't just on the wall, it was on Mick Jagger's chest.
Jagger's bandmates are beginning to modify their look too, metamorphosing from the debauched cocaine gypsy look of earlier in the decade and into what would become the postmodern Kennedy-era mode of the '80s, which signified a period the Stones had actually lived through and utterly demolished. So now, in their mid 30s, the Stones were starting to lose their cultural currency.
They shot back with Some Girls, which incorporated modern brevity and a punky kick up the BPMs, while dispensing with the horns, synths and backing singers that had draped all over the previous few albums like an ostrich boa.
It was their last great album, and the start of rock's agonizingly slow generational changing of the guard. Even the Rolling Stones bowed to its power, but it would be 13 long years until punk broke.
In a 20-minute 2011 interview included on the DVD, Jagger says punk had more of an effect on the band's playing than its writing, which accounts for the Ft. Worth show's sped-up takes on just about every song in the set — and they've streamlined everything, eliminating the extended guitar soloing of yore, as well as minimizing the number of musicians on stage.
The minimalism ran deep on this tour. The Stones played a great variety of venues on that tour, from theatres to arenas to stadiums, partly to keep things interesting, partly to echo the intimacy of punk shows. This show was a convention center gig — 3,000 capacity, a tiny room for such a huge band.
Ron Wood indulgently changes guitars for virtually every song, but that's about the most decadent aspect of the show's production values. Unlike the previous tour, there are no gigantic inflatable phalluses or Chinese dragons spewing confetti from humongous unfolding lotus flower stages — like Some Girls itself, it's a stripped-down presentation. On the 1975 tour they were often on stage for two and a half hours, which is either indulgent or generous, depending on how you look at it; perhaps as a reaction to punk concision, perhaps owing to drug-induced malaise, this show is well under an hour and half.
And after years of coasting on their back catalogue, the Stones were determined to coast no longer: despite the fact that fans had had barely five weeks to absorb the new material, the band plays seven songs in a row from the new album, sandwiched by several deep cuts from previous albums, two Chuck Berry covers and only three bona fide hits. They begin with a four-song career recap (Berry's "Let It Rock," "All Down the Line," "Honky Tonk Women" and "Star, Star"), and then dive into most of Some Girls. It's hard to imagine they had ever before played seven songs in a row from their most recent album. They almost certainly haven't dared to do it since.
At the time, Jagger in particular was hitting downtown Manhattan clubs, picking up on not just punk but disco and rap (as it was then commonly called), and the way the hippest New York bands synthesized it all. And it shows up in the new music they were playing. True, they were still clinging to old warhorse covers like "Love in Vain" and "Let It Rock" but they were also absorbing the most important underground musical trends of the late '70s. And now they were somewhat boldly bringing them to the hinterlands.
It was a wildly uneven tour — a Houston newspaper critic wrote of a show only two days later: “It was a dismal experience — to be endured, not enjoyed.” But perhaps because the cameras were rolling this night, the band bore down and cranked out a kick-ass rock show.
There's life in the old boys yet. They might have seemed silly asserting bad boy status while being millionaire jet-setters but the prospect of Richards serving very lengthy jail time must have been as hardcore as it gets for the entire band, and it shows in a truly bad-ass performance.
The Stones had been playing together for 16 years by this point, and were 20 shows into the tour, so they were warmed up. Like the Led Zeppelin concert footage that finally got issued some years ago, Some Girls Live in Texas 1978 shows a world-class rock group in action, the better to understand its mechanics, its sonic architecture. Richards, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman form a V-8 rhythm section, the close-shorn Watts kicking ass like a pissed-off monk.
The ring and middle fingers of bassist Bill Wyman's fretting hand are taped together — he'd broken a knuckle in a stage fall days earlier — and even still, he's laying down some incredible lines, with a loopy, loping tone that directly recalls bassists for the likes of Slim Harpo or Howlin' Wolf. As much as anyone in the Stones, Bill Wyman was keeping it real. He is perhaps the most underrated bassist in rock history.
The stage arrangement is actually kind of bizarre: with no less than five fridge-sized amplifier cabinets, Wyman occupies the entire right half of the stage, and everyone else — Richards, Wood, the two keyboardists and, for the most part, Jagger — inhabit the other half. And so Wyman, virtually stock-still except for his hands, is out there all by himself, mostly in the dark. No one in the band even seems to look at him as he stares straight out in the crowd, presumably scouting for chicks. It really is peculiar, and the band was probably so dysfunctional that they didn't think twice about it.
Ron Wood also gets a fair amount of onstage stick. He is (and always will be) the new boy in the band, and Jagger constantly reminds him of that fact. At one point, Jagger takes Wood's cigarette and crushes it out on the floor; at various points in the show, he whips Wood with a towel, spanks him on the ass, pretends to slap his face and fondles his crotch while the poor man is trying to play a solo — just in case Wood still didn't understand the band's pecking order. Jagger doesn't dare attempt anything of the kind with the forbidding Richards.
Wood and Richards' guitars are helpfully panned hard left and right in the stereo mix, respectively, the better to hear their interplay, what Richards called "weaving": constantly and seamlessly passing lead and rhythm parts between the two guitarists.
Wood's predecessor Mick Taylor played flowing, lyrical narratives; Wood merely plays series of tough-sounding notes in the same key as the song. So where Taylor's solos were spotlights for his stunning talent, Wood's solos are merely placeholders, an occasion for Jagger to take a breather before singing another verse. Wood's solo on "Love in Vain" is little more than a tribute to the one Taylor played on Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out. The move away from epic showcase soloing suited the band's new, more compact approach anyway: Some Girls Live in Texas 1978 catches the band in transition, between the '70s blues-rock Stones and the '80s "Start Me Up" Stones with their day-glo spandex and corporate sponsorships. It also shifted the focus even more squarely on Jagger and Richards.
The Stones had always adapted to changing trends while stubbornly — or helplessly — maintaining their bluesy essence. The only extended workout at the Ft. Worth show is the eight-and-a-half-minute discoid chug of "Miss You." It boasts no less than three separate guitar solo sections, but that's authentically disco — it's a live extended mix. They hit an incantatory stride on the tune, and afterwards Watts whoops it up on the drums in celebration. (Charlie's good tonight, ain't he?) Just about everything gets played at a much faster tempo than on record. Towards the end of the show, Jagger sarcastically announces that "If the band is lacking energy, it's because they spent all last night fuckin'… We do our best," a comment laced with several layers of irony.
One of the great things about that rendition of "Miss You" is that Jagger sings the lyrics like they're really about missing someone, as opposed to some affected Mick Jagger pose of missing someone. Maybe it's just because he knows he's being filmed, but particularly on the new material Jagger really seems to mean what he's singing, instead of merely making lubricious sound-shapes with those giblet lips. Or maybe it's because Some Girls is one of their most autobiographical albums — "We're talking heroin with the president," Jagger yowls in "Respectable," and there are plenty of other self-referential songs, like "Beast of Burden" (apparently a metaphor for Mick and Keith's working relationship in the wake of the latter's drug addiction), "Shattered," and Keith's "Before They Make Me Run" (which they don't play here, unfortunately).
And when Jagger isn't singing, he erupts into particularly energetic dancing. Sometimes one is struck anew by Jagger's absolutely freakish stage manner, a language all his own that he willed everyone else to understand. It's completely unself-conscious and yet totally self-aware at the same time. The only time Jagger really looks awkward is when he picks up a guitar for several songs and plays one, maybe two (nearly inaudible) chords at most, and for the rest of the song the guitar is an albatross around his neck; he simply doesn't know what to do with this foreign object.
It's nearly an hour into the show before they ease up on the throttle with the throwaway country pastiche "Faraway Eyes." It really is shaky, with the band almost clumsily feeling their way through the song; Jagger even gets fed up with his keyboard and moves to another midway through the tune, and throws a wobbly cue for guest violinist Doug Kershaw to start his solo. Jagger then continues to sing a song that is dreadfully condescending to southerners — to a roomful of them.
After "Love in Vain," they begin to lift the show out of the doldrums and into a stratospheric final sprint: "Tumbling Dice," "Happy," "Sweet Little Sixteen" (interesting that they play Chuck Berry tunes at such crucial places in the set), "Brown Sugar" and then "Jumping Jack Flash" with an extended coda, Richards ordering up another round of the closing riff as if he just can't bear to leave the stage.
In the '60s and early '70s, the Rolling Stones vividly embodied things about their generation, and even the culture at large. "They weren't just a musical group," the New York Times' Robert Palmer once wrote, "they were news." On this tour, they proved that all over again. The Stones may have cynically co-opted punk rock, but in doing so they embodied something momentous: the passing of the rock & roll torch. To their everlasting credit, as demonstrated on nearly every minute of this film, they did it with consummate flair.
A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS: YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU OWN
I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas every year throughout my childhood. It was an actual event — this was before there were VCRs, much less DVDs or TiVo, and you actually had to wait an entire year to see it again. My family didn't celebrate Christmas and yet this Yuletide classic made a huge, lifelong impact on me. It's quite a subversive little piece of work.
The set-up is when Charlie Brown goes to his familiar brick wall and confides to Linus that he's "depressed" because he can't relate to the holiday spirit. He's alienated by the "commercialism," a five-syllable word I needed my parents to explain, of Christmas. Those were some heady ideas for an eight-year-old. In today's parlance, they occupied my mind.
Everyone around Charlie Brown has been sucked in by commercialism. For Christmas, Lucy wants "real estate"; Charlie Brown's little sister Sally wants money — "in 10s and 20s." Even Snoopy decks out his doghouse with several gaudy box-fulls of decorations and wins first prize — "money, money, money," grumbles Charlie Brown — in the neighborhood's lights and display contest. Charlie Brown's alienation is so profound, he seeks psychiatric help (from Lucy, who is more excited about collecting her five-cent fee than she is about helping her patient). His therapy is to direct the school Christmas play, a non-commercial statement of the holiday's true meaning.
(The show is larded with sarcasm, yet another intellectual conceit I was just starting to get my head around. Linus knocks his little fist on a fake Christmas tree with a hollow metallic clang and remarks, his adorable little lisp bearing all the bitterness it can muster, "This really brings Christmas close to a person.")
Commercialism is everywhere and has devalued everything: Lucy complains to the piano-playing Schroeder that no musician is great unless they've been on a bubblegum card.
Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz felt this commercialism thing deeply, and it pervades the show in many, sometimes not-so-obvious ways. The purposely slow pace, simple artwork, deadpan humor and long silences all defy modern glitz and velocity. In Schultz's biography, producer Lee Mendelson recalled the cartoonist adamantly refusing to allow a laugh track, then de rigeur for network television comedy. Schulz, Mendelson said, wanted to "let the people at home enjoy the show at their own speed, in their own way." Which is entirely in keeping with the show's message.
Mendelson objected to Linus' speech from the Gospel of Luke, feeling it would narrow the audience for the show. Instead, it became one of the classic moments in television history — and not necessarily because it directly preached Christian doctrine. Even though I'm not a Christian, that speech affected me deeply, and still does. It showed me — very, very early in life — that consumerism can infiltrate personal relationships, and even your own heart and soul, but that you can refuse and resist. All you have to do is think for yourself. It changed me forever.
It's ironic, then, that the reason why the show-closing "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" fades out before the final line is that originally an announcer broke in to proclaim that this touching ode to anti-commercialism was "Brought to you by the people in your town who bottle Coca-Cola!" As Charlie Brown would say… Aaugh!
PUNX NOT DEAD
The photo above has been making the rounds of Facebook the past couple of days. Some people might think it's making fun. But I think it's beautiful.
The man on the right is former Black Flag singer Henry Rollins. The man on the left is his nearly life-long friend Ian MacKaye, who led the great punk bands Minor Threat and Fugazi. Yeah, they're both 50 or thereabouts but they're both still bad-asses.
But the fact that they're bad-asses is beside the point. Those guys might have grey hair and a few wrinkles, but they're still punker than you'll ever be. Ian, in particular, helped to rescue punk from knee-jerk nihilism and bring it into something profound and productive, something that can last all the way through one's years and apply to any situation. After Ian and people like d. boon and Mike Watt of the Minutemen, punk rock meant something else: essentially, think for yourself, and they consistently embodied that concept both on and off stage. For what it's worth, that idea is why I called my book Our Band Could Be Your Life, because you could apply their ideas to things far beyond rock bands. And far beyond your youth.
Punk rock might be for the young. But being punk rock is for everyone. That's what I get out of that picture. There is no shame in going to bed at a reasonable hour if, the next morning, you wake up and fight the good fight.
NEVERMIND INTERVIEW
I recently did an e-mail interview with the estimable Kerrang! writer Hardeep Phull for a piece he wrote about the 20th anniversary of Nevermind. If you're not already burned out on coverage of this topic, here's the full transcript.
At what point did you begin to realize how big/important 'Nevermind' was becoming?
The impact of Nevermind was obvious even before it was released, with the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" single. That song was all over the place — in grocery stores, blaring out of passing cars, not to mention on heavy rotation on MTV and the radio. Often, when you'd see a band, the guitarist would test out his amp before the set started by playing the opening riff — that kind of stuff happened all the time. "Teen Spirit" defined the moment if only because it was everywhere.
Was their [sic] a particular show you saw them play (circa 1990/'91/'92) that stands out as being especially exciting?
I covered Nirvana's 1992 Reading Festival show for Rolling Stone. There was a lot of speculation about whether Kurt would even play the show — the rumors were that he was terribly messed up on heroin and it was touch and go as to whether he could even appear that evening. But they did go on. Kurt, well aware of the rumors, dressed in a hospital gown and was rolled onto the stage in a wheelchair. To say it was a great show is an understatement — it was transcendent. I felt like my feet were barely touching the ground. I was on the stage, and I looked out at the packed-solid crowd and as far as the eye could see, people were pogoing up and down throughout the set; they got so overheated in the cool summer night that vast clouds of steam evaporated off them, which made the entire audience look like a human forest fire.
What was it about 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' that connected so intensely to American music fans?
"Teen Spirit" is an impeccably crafted, very catchy song based on primordial chord changes that go back at least as far as the immortal "Louie, Louie." Right away, it sounded like one of the great rock songs of all time. But there was much more to it than that: after years of inane dance-pop (Milli Vanilli) and inane hair farmer bands (Warrant), kids wanted rock music that spoke to and about them, instead of focus-grouped junk approved by a bunch of greying, coked-up baby boomer record execs. "Teen Spirit" did precisely that. And it had a crucial edge because it encapsulated a lot of the underground and alternative music those kids had probably heard bits of but hadn't been able to get into because it was too raw and unmelodic — or just too hard to find. This song had that indie sound, but it had a glossy coat to it that made it possible for everyone to hear its profound soul and awe-inspiring power.
The subject matter of 'Polly' seems to have shocked people at the time. Why do you think that was and what did the song say about Kurt as a songwriter?
"Polly" was a pretty shocking song. And even in 1991, people were starting to get so blasé that being shocked by something was itself pretty shocking. That song uncovered some uncomfortable truths about our society — about violence towards women and the misogyny that still pervades our culture — and it was incredibly controversial considering it wasn't even a single. A good songwriter will point out things that we're unable or unwilling to think about, and that's exactly what Kurt was doing with "Polly."
Aside from that, what do you feel are the other most important songs on 'Nevermind'?
"In Bloom" is the key song on that album. It's a huge singalong, and Kurt knew that before he even played it for anybody — he even has lyrics about people singing along. The song uncannily anticipates the band's fate: people who love their music but "know not what it means." And then there is the mention of guns. That song was astonishingly prescient.
What are your memories of Nirvana playing SNL? They seemed to take a lot more pleasure in playing 'Territorial Pissings' than 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'…
The band got pretty tired of playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" very quickly. It was kind of an albatross around their neck. Kurt intentionally screwed it up every time I saw them play it. They wouldn't even call it by name — if they had to refer to "Teen Spirit," they just dismissively called it "The Hit." So it's no wonder they didn't play "Teen Spirit" with much gusto on Saturday Night Live.
I was part of the entourage when Nirvana played SNL the second time. By now, Kurt, Krist and Dave were old hands at television and they weren't terribly nervous. Still, I think Dave was pretty excited — he'd had his life changed by seeing the B-52's play SNL when he was a kid. RuPaul was also on the show and before he changed into drag for his appearance, he and Kurt had a nice little chat and Kurt was kind of tickled about that. Anthony Kiedis also stopped by and he and Kurt had a private conversation that no one dared interrupt.
At what point do you think Kurt’s increasing fame started to become a problem for him?
Kurt's fame probably became a problem for him not long after "Teen Spirit" came out. He'd been living in the college town of Olympia, Washington, where the underground scene absolutely disdained big-time rock music and "the corporate ogre," as local label K Records put it. Coming from an unsophisticated rural background, Kurt wanted the approval of those people very much and he was sure that they frowned on what was happening — in its Olympia version, punk was ostensibly about no one being more special than anyone else. But now Kurt was being singled out as "the spokesman for a generation." There was nothing more un-punk than that and it made him deeply uncomfortable.
[At this point, I should have emphasized that this discomfort really played no significant part in Kurt's fate. He suffered from chronic and profound depression, a very serious condition which was pretty much untreated, and when that's the case, the result is all too often suicide. It's that simple.]
Is there any aspect of band during the 'Nevermind' era that you feel is underrepresented or not talked about enough?
So much is made of Kurt's pain and angst. But, as he told me many times, he wrote and played music specifically as an antidote to that pain and angst. (Hence the band name, I guess.) So Nirvana concerts were joyous and cathartic — you were transported. A good metaphor for the experience is Dave's drumming — it looks like he's angry, punishing the drums, but he was actually incredibly happy, ecstatic even, while he was flailing away. That's how everybody in the audience felt too, even when they were bashing into each other. Nirvana's music was a balm for the soul, and it still is — we can't ever forget that.
KEEPING IT REAL
I just came across this Onion AV Club essay by Marah Eakin about the TV show The Adventures of Pete and Pete. There's a couple of lines I'd like to highlight:
"[Nostalgia] puts this hazy veil over everything in the past, and all the time we spend thinking about those things, we're not making new things, pushing art and culture forward."
"Watching old DVDs to try and recapture the feeling you once had the first time you saw something might be fun, but it can be a little pointless, too... Pete’s lesson—and our lesson—from this show is not just 'find a song and love it,' but rather, 'if you love something, go make something someone else can love.'”
This reminded me so much of a phenomenon in music: the futility and artistic bankruptcy of trying to emulate sincerity and passion simply by copying the style of a musician who had it.
And that's happening in a lot of indie music right now.
With the collapse of the major music industry and the commercial explosion of what I'll loosely call "indie," it's gotten very difficult to tell what is authentic and "real." Consequently, there's an outbreak of musicians who imitate latter day paragons of realness — in particular, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. A little artistic Xeroxing is typical of the nascent artist — look how derivative even the early Stones, Dylan, and Beatles were — but this is something past that.
The imitators are missing the point by a mile. Springsteen and Young (I refuse to call them Bruce and Neil; I don't delude myself that I know them personally just because I think I understand their music) didn't get over because they imitated anybody. They got over because they were being themselves without compromise and they were engaging with the present, not trying to recreate some overly hallowed moment 40 years prior.
Musicians, find your own self. Engage this moment. Because Jimmy Fallon does a better Neil Young impression than you ever will.
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