Not even the Jazz Age took popular music as seriously as people of my generation did. I was as serious as any of them–if not always about the same songs. For many of us, rock and roll wasn’t just music : it was a cause, a cult, a movement. It divided parents and children, it taught its devotees styles, attitudes, ideologies and behaviors. It gave strength and comfort to the alienated and misunderstood (a big constituency with us). Its basic stance was rebellion: rock and rollers were the first popular entertainers to be beloved because they refused to be ingratiating; there’s a straight line from Elvis’s sneer to Mick Jagger’s to Eminem’s.
The original rock and roll, like Beat poetry–1956 was also the year of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”–expressed energies and anxieties that the Eisenhower era had hoped to repress. Were we all to join the middle class now? Fine, we’d embrace the music of rough working-class blacks and whites who wouldn’t have been welcome in nice homes. Were we to ignore the recent Holocaust and the impending H-bomb? Fine, we’d turn up the record player. Those images in car ads, of families waving from a convertible as they cruised along Ike’s interstate highway system, begged to be blasphemed. And it was already happening: each car had a radio whose dial was a tick away from hot-rod tragedies and teen tomcats and kitties in heat, wailing that their lust would last forever.
If you stand back far enough, I look like Everyboomer–my family did take the interstates across the country, in a new 1960 Impala convertible. Red. I don’t recall what we listened to on the radio–surely not rock and roll–but the soundtrack of the movie version would have Dinah Shore singing “See the U.S.A./ In your Chevrolet.” In the ’50s, I was your crew-cut kid who watched TV Westerns and collected baseball cards. In the ’60s, the hair and beard, the pot and acid, the draft-dodging and dropouting. In the'70s, the retrenchment (in my case, a Ph.D. program). In the ’80s and ’90s, the good career and discretionary income–an advertiser’s dream date. Now, three times divorced and about to turn 60, God knows. Most baby boomers weren’t such clichés, and not all shared that supposedly uni-versal obsession with rock and roll. They might have preferred soul or country–both in exciting phases too–or, if they were intellectual types, anything from Coltrane to Bartok to Robert Johnson. And some, despite the peer pressure, just didn’t care about music.
I was the intellectual type–who yearned to be a thug. I turned off the radio (not for the last time) around 1960. Little Richard got religion, Elvis got drafted, Jerry Lee Lewis got ostracized (for marrying a 13-year-old cousin) and Chuck Berry got busted (for a Mann Act violation). When these unreconstructed characters gave way to the Frankie Avalons and the Connie Francises, I turned to Flatt and Scruggs, the New Lost City Ramblers, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis. I boycotted the Beatles’ U.S. TV debut, and when I first heard Bob Dylan, at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, I thought he was a bad joke; I’d come to catch the Stanley Brothers. Not until I first heard the Rolling Stones and the electric Dylan did rock and roll make sense to me again: raw, bluesy, sexy, transgressive. So: radio back on. At first, I didn’t see the music of the ’60s as innovative–I thought it was a return to traditional values.
For a while, I followed the hippies’ party line (though I avoided tie-dyed elves and trolls in VW buses). When Dylan sang with contempt about “Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s towers/While calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers,” I understood that literature was anti-life, and rock and roll was the Way. (Later, my almost-Ph.D. was in English.) My romance with what’s now called classic rock lasted only from 1965 to 1970 or so. Last week I looked through my old vinyl albums, and here’s what’s survived all the moves: one each by Cream, the Kinks and Moby Grape, two by the Band, two by the Byrds, three by the Who, four by the Beach Boys, five by the Beatles, seven by the Stones, eight by the Velvet Underground, 12 by Dylan. I couldn’t sit still for Jim Morrison’s naive artiness, Janis Joplin’s unskilled screaming or Jimi Hendrix’s pretensions (though that first album is a keeper). The Beatles’ cozy-cute aspect eventually ruined them for me. I resisted such supposed generational anthems as “All You Need Is Love.” (I liked the Who’s “My Generation” because it was sung in the persona of a stammering lunkhead.) And I declined a ride to Woodstock, which even before the fact sounded like hell itself.
And some of the ’60s music that would have stuck with me–Memphis soul, much of Motown, Aretha Franklin (and on and on)–has been overplayed for decades on oldies stations, in supermarkets, in ad-vertising. Sad to say, if I never hear the sublime “Respect” or “Dock of the Bay” or “My Girl” again before I die, I’m not going to be begging for the ex-tra three minutes. Thank God the Velvets never had a hit, and that not every good Stones song has been loved to death.
Sometime in the early ’70s, I turned off pop radio for good–more or less–and stopped caring what my generation, or anybody else, was listening to. I was too damn old to stay tuned for hours to hit one good song, or to put up with a bad song for the sake of a sweet moment. (Like the five-note organ figure in “I’m a Believer.”) Naturally, I missed a lot. It took me until the ’90s to discover Fleetwood Mac (now my favorite guilty pleasure), Al Green and the ’70s James Brown, which may be the best music on the planet, ever. But I didn’t give up on the Stones until what-ever the thing was after “Steel Wheels,” and stayed withDylan through thick and thin and thick again. I dove into the music of what Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America”–the music Dylan and the Stones revered–and never did come up. I had a soft spot for Elton John’s early hits, but mostly ignored Springsteen, Pink Floyd, Billy Joel and Madonna. A little Aerosmith or AC/DC went a long way–though I did need a little, along with Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded”–and I doubt I’ve ever heard Kiss. Six months ago, a friend played U2 for me for the first time. It was OK.
But I must have listened more than I thought. Every once in a while a pop hit would grab me–remember “This Is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan? I had my Police phase, just like a regular person. And I can tell you exactly where I was driving when I first heard Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop’Til You Get Enough” (Route 29, Culpepper, Va.), Beck’s “Loser” (Route 30, Hartford, N.Y.) and the Notorious B.I.G. (where else but the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway). These days radio stations don’t tell you what they’re playing–how does everybody but me find out?–so I had to ask NEWSWEEK colleagues whom those girl singers were calling “Biggie Biggie Biggie,” and who that guy was playing Delta slide guitar with a drum machine. This spring I was so taken with a dancehall reggae song I was hearing everyplace on the dial–where people go “oh-oh”?–that I asked around and got Sean Paul’s CD. If only the other tracks had been that good.
Maybe i’ve kept up out of contrari-ness. Some of my co-evals got off the train at disco, unable to recognize that this was the most danceable music since the waltz, or to hear such classic soul singers as Donna Summer and Patti LaBelle through the cultural noise. Others dropped away when they didn’t get the Ramones or the Sex Pistols or Elvis Cos-tello or Talking Heads. ( Now they think they liked them all along.) And when hip-hop arrived, many white boomers–some 40-ish blacks too–suddenly got old and cranky. You should’ve been there when, in my first naive enthusiasm, I played “F— Tha Police” for a longtime music buddy. I might have felt the same, if I hadn’t been writing about it for a news magazine. But come on: trance music with block-rocking beats and cusswords? I’d been waiting for this since I was 9.
Sometimes I get tired of listening to me: at 13, I bewailed the good old days of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee; at 59, I’m bewailing the good old days of Public Enemy and N.W.A. But I really did grow up in a golden age. Consider: it took pop music just 10 years, from 1955 to 1965, to get from Elvis’s “Mystery Train” to Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” and the Stones’ “Satisfaction.” That is, to the sort of art-pop music rockers are still making. Then, between 1965 and 1970, something equally remarkable: people followed Dylan, the Stones and above all the Beatles, as they leaped from one radical change to the next to the next, gladly allowing their tastes to be challenged and educated–as if they weren’t mere consumers, but a true public.
No subsequent music has ever caught so many people up in such excitement. In the 50 years since rock and roll drowned out Gershwin, Porter and Berlin, only hip-hop has reimagined the genre entirely. Fifty years before rock and roll, Teddy Roosevelt was president and the Model T Ford didn’t yet exist. Are we due for a new national music–or has America become so musically tribalized that no single form can ever be the lingua franca rock and roll was? That’d be fine with me. There was never quite the musical consensus among the boomers that we now imagine. And the dissenters who first embraced Dylan and the Stones never wanted their counterculture institutionalized.
So for me, this seems like a better time to be alive than the Admiral radio days. Most new music will always be product–so are most new books and movies–but there’s no need to put up with it now. Back in the ’60s, it was a grind to be a musi-cal explorer: I would’ve had to collect rare 78s to hear the complete recordings of the black gospel singer Washington Phillips, or of the left-handed white guitarist Seven Foot Dilly. I’ve got ’em now. Today, almost everything of any consequence (or inconsequence) is a mouseclick away. Seven CDs of Arthur Godfrey? (Loved him when I was 8.) A 20-CD series of Indonesian field recordings? Everything ever recorded for the Library of Congress? The Silver Jews? DJ Assault? All the other songs, with alternate takes, by a thousand one-hit wonders? (You never know.) I’ll take ’em all. Probably some of ’em legally. I won’t live long enough to hear half of it–neither will someone who’s a 9-year-old today–but I can try.
