Part 1 (1/2)

Night Beat

Mikal Gile Bouthilet and the late Grace McGinnis, teachers who taught well

I'rateful our paths crossed

With a dayti to look for a bell to ring

All through the night

LOU REED,

”ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT”

introduction

I guess I could say what er or even older-reith popularmy life It played as a soundtrack for my youth It enhanced (soers, and horrible (as in unattainable) hopes, and it emboldenedelse in my life, defined my convictions and my experience of what it aveelse in enerous love or of sheer ruthless rapacity or destruction

I can re to s of Patsy Cline and Hank Willia herself on harh of course I'o s

It was ht music into in to est of four boys; my oldest brother, Frank, was eleven years older than I, Gary was ten years older, and Gaylen, six years older As a result, by the time I was four or five in the ers-which ht in the early thrall and explosion of rock & roll As far back as I re (either on one of the house's raphs) early songs by Bill Haley & His Comets, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Fats Domino, the Platters, Buddy Knox, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Saest voice that hit est voice that hit the nation-was, of course, Elvis Presley's In the mid-1950s, every time Presley performed on nationwide TV (on the Milton Berle, Steve Allen, or Ed Sullivan shoas an occasion for a fa the few tiht Those ti Presley on our old Zenith were, in fact, a our few occasions of real shared joy For some reason, the appearance I remember most was Elvis's 1956 perfore Shohich was also the singer's national debut, and was followed by six consecutive appearances) I re oversize brown leather chair My father was not a man as fond of youthful iht brutal in his efforts to shut down my brothers' rebellions) At the same time, my father was ain show business, in fil about rock & roll's early outlandishness appealed to his show-biz biases (though his own ly to opera and BroadwayPresley on that first Dorsey show,to be around for a long ti” I kno cliche those re it all up for me, I asked my oldest brother, Frank (who has the best memory of anybody I've ever known), if he remembered as said after atched Presley on that occasion He repeated uess my father had a little more in common with Colonel Tom Parker than I'd like to admit, but then, like Parker, my father had also once been a hustler and bunco man

So rock & roll as popular entertainment elcomed into our home Rock & roll as a an to wear ducktails and leather an to turn up their collars and talk flip and insolently, likely as not they got the shi+t beat out of theht into one's heart and real home, could breed a dislike or refusal of authority-and like so many adults and parents before and since, he could not stand that possibility without feeling shaken to the rageful and frightened core of his being

I NEVER GOT TO HAVE my own period of rock & roll conflict with my father He died in mid-1962, when I was eleven, when ”The Twist” and ”Duke of Earl” werea child until he bled

A little over a year later, President John Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas, Texas It was a startling event, and it froze the nation in shock, grief, and a lingering depression Winter nights were long that season-long, and maybe darker than usual I was just twelve, but I remember that sense of loss that was not merely my own-a loss that seemed to fill the room of the present and the space of the future By this time, my brothers were hardly ever hoht on criminal, drunken, carnal activity, or in jail Myto bed early, so I stayed up late watching old horrorI could find I reht shohen he began talking about a new sensation that eeping England: a strange pop group called the Beatles He showed a clip of the group that night-the first tihostly memory to me now I don't remember what I saw in the clip's moments, but I remember I was transfixed Weeks later, the Beatles made their first official live US television appearance, on February 9, 1964, on the ”Ed Sullivan Show” The date happened also to be my thirteenth birthday, and I don't think I could ever have received a better, ift I won't say much here about what that appearance did to us-as a people, a nation, an e about it in the pages ahead, but I'll say this: As ro on that night, and I felt so an opening up of endless possibilities I have a video tape of those Sullivan appearances I watch it often and show it to others-some who have never seen those appearances before, because those shows have never been rebroadcast or reissued in their entirety (there isn't y video series) To this day, they remain re up, fro their instru a discovery with their audience of a new, youthful ehts were over There would be darker nights, for sure, to come, and rock & roll would be a part of that as well But on that night, a nightmare was momentarily broken, and a neorld born Its ier mean exactly what they reat tih it would soon become (just as obviously) a co was shared, discussed, and sorted through for everything it ht hold or deliver-every secret thrill or code, every new joyous twist of sonic texture ”The House of the Rising Sun” ”Stop! In the Name of Love” ”Help Me Rhonda” ”Mr Tambourine Man” ”(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” ”Positively 4th Street” ”Help!” ”California Dreamin'” ”Good Lovin'” ”When a Man Loves a Woman” ”Summer in the City” ”Sunshi+ne Superman” ”I Want You” ”96 Tears” ”Paint It, Black” ”Over Under Sideways Down” ”Respect” ”Ode to Billy Joe” ”Good Vibrations” ”The Letter” It was also a ti, some deadly Mario Savio Lyndon Johnson Robert Kennedy Julian Bond Richard Nixon George Lincoln Rockwell George Wallace Martin Luther King, Jr Malcole Cleaver shi+rley Chisolm Jerry Rubin Tom Hayden Gloria Steinem Abbie Hoffman There were also the other leaders-son, but who led as surely (and soures The Beatles Bob Dylan Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, and Keith Richards Timothy Leary Jimi Hendrix Jane Fonda The Jefferson Airplane Aretha Franklin James Brown Marvin Gaye Sly Stone Jim Morrison Charles Manson

As you can tell frorew darker-and they did so earlier than e In the middle of 1967-the same season that bred what becaht-Ashbury, and the same period when the Beatles sut Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-I came across an album I really loved (still perhaps round and Nico It was a record full of songs about bad losses, cold hearts, hard narcotics, and rough, degrading sex I took to it like a dog to water (or whatever dogs take to) It was the first subject-in a long list-of arguments that I would enter into with friends about rock & roll In fact, it was my first rock & roll choice that actually cost h school, I was part of a Folk Song after-school group We'd get together, under a teacher's auspices, and sing our favorite folk songs-everything from ”kum Ba Yah,” ”Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and ”We Shall Overcoon” At onehis or her favorite folk song I sang Lou Reed's ”Heroin” I was never welcoh school, into college, not doing well I was going through one ofone of my periodic failed love affairs (the woain Christian and nated her; later, she becaame sexual people I've ever known or enjoyed, but that is another story) In this period-the late winter of 1969 and the early winter of 1970-I was taking a lot of drugs, learning how to drink, and staying up all night until the sun rose, then I'd hit the bed (actually, the floor, which was ly, at least to -up-until-sunrise-then-running-to-hide part-for the entire month in which I wrote and revised this current volu called the ”rock press” had developed:Stone, where one could read passionate and inforuments about current music and, better yet, could also learn about earlier musicians who had helped make the late 1960s' and early 1970s' innovations possible-everyone fro, Bessie Ston to the Carter Faus, Thelonious Monk, and Ornette Cole vital music) and countless more As a result, the journalism (that is, the essays, rants, profiles, interviews and historical perspectives) of such writers as Ralph Gleason, Paul Williadon Winner, Jonathan Cott, Lester Bangs, Paul Nelson, Nick Tosches, Robert Christgau, and Ellen Willis caful to h too da to stand up for the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed (Willis, Nelson, and Christgau being notable and ian writing about popular music What made this possible was Bob Dylan's ”coht years) with the Band This was also a ti as a counselor at a Portland, Oregon, drug abuse clinic andas much marijuana as I could find-a contradictory (probably hypocritical) turn of affairs, but hardly an uninteresting one Then I saw Dylan in early 1974 (again, on the occasion of my birthday, ten years after the Beatles' debut on Ed Sullivan), and an old girlfriend suggested I write about the event for a local underground newspaper After doing so, I never looked back The piece, of course, ful (at least to ed to put together(as a result of a love of reading) andto music) When I finished that article, I knehat I wanted to do: I wanted to write about popular music-it was pretty much all I cared about as a vocation Within a season I had quitintake-a connection?), and started writing for a nu jazz reviews for Down Beat (jazz, by this time, had come to mean as h in this present voluood friends, I was soon editing a Portland-based azine, Musical Notes A few dreams were now active in htine I am sorry if you have already heard this story-perhaps you have-but there is no way I can finish this introduction without being honest about this particular passage in an writing for Rolling Stone When thein 1967, it announced itself as a voice that ent as the brave newthe es Toin the development of the music I had come to love soStone had accepted an article of mine for publication I was elated Then, about a week later I learned so that killedto be put to death by a firing squad in Utah It didn't look like there was much that could stop it-and I didn't know if I could live with it

A few months before, in April 1976, Gary-ten years my senior-had been paroled from the US Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, to Provo, Utah, following a fifteen-year period of often brutal incarceration, largely at Oregon State Prison Unfortunately, Gary's new life as a free rew troubled and violent, and on a hot and desperate July night, my brother crossed a line that no one should ever coer and ruin, GaryMor a service station robbery The next night, heMorer-during a second robbery Within hours, Gary was arrested, and within days he had confessed to his crimes The trial that folloas pretty reeof Ben Bushnell, and he was sentenced to death Given the choice of being hung or shot, Gary elected to be shot

All this had happened before I began writing for Rolling Stone, and a few azine, I neverabout my brother or his crimes to any of my editors or fellow journalists Only a handful of my friends knew about my strained relationshi+p with my troubled brother The truth is, I had put myself at a distance from the realities of Gary's life for many years; I told myself that I feared him, that I resented his violent and self-ruinous choices, that he and I did not really share the sas and his subsequent death sentence, I felt grief and rage over his acts, and I also felt deep and painful humiliation: I could not believe that my brother had left his family with so ive him for what he had done to the families of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell But in a way, the whole episode seeinning That's because part of me believed that Gary would never be executed-after all, there had not been any executions in America in a decade-and that he instead would siness of a Utah prison At the same time, I think another, deeper part of me always understood that Gary had been born (or at least raised) to die the death he would die

Any hope for serenity in my life had been destroyed Shortly after I heard about Gary's wish to be executed, I told -Torres, about my relationshi+p with Gary By this time, Gary Gilmore was a daily naazine had a right to know that I was his brother Fong-Torres, who had lost a brother of his own through violence, was extre the period that followed, and eventually he gave me the opportunity to write about azine To be honest, not everybody at Rolling Stone back in early 1977 thought it was such a great idea to run that article (”A Death in the Fas: After all, ould be the point of publishi+ng what y for histhe turmoil of Gary's death, I needed to find a way to express the devastation that I had just gone through, or else I ht never be able to cli-Torres and fellow editors Barbara Downey and Sarah Lazin, a fairly decent and honest piece of first-person journalisnificant portion of ed More ili at the center of an unstoppable national nightmare

In the season that followed Gary's death, I went to work for Rolling Stone full-tieles It wasn't an easy period fortoo ave me plenty of slack; an to find soain as a ave me the opportunity to meet and write about some of the people whose music and words had mattered most in hts lost in the dark and brilliant splendor of punk I liked the way the music confronted its listeners with the reality of our , saved aveto say about a movement (or experiment) that's first premise was: there are no simple hopes that are not false or at least suspect

I WROTE FOR Rolling Stone from 1976 until the present-sometimes as a staff writer, sometimes as a contributor In the years after 1979, I also wrote for Musician and the Los Angeles Times briefly, and in the early 1980s I was (for a year or so) the music editor at the LA Weekly In the autumn of 1982, I becaeles Herald Examiner, where I worked until 1987 For the first two or three years, the Herald was a sublime place to write; it was a paper that alloriters to find and exercise their own voice, so-winded during that period, but brevity has rarely beeneditor came in to the paper-a self-described ”neo-conservative” I've never shared much affinity with conservatives of any variety (I'm pretty etic about that leaning) In August 1985, I reviewed a live perfor wasn't a perforwriter I liked s about his ness to atte-inflected pop with a band that included saxophonist Branford Marsalis, and his acuity about the realities of aret Thatcher-defined British politics I was particularly taken by his perfor called ”We Work the Black Sea about it: ”We Work the Black Sea's only serious statement that wasn't saved solely by the prowess of his band, as well as the only one that didn't need saving In part, that's because with its lulling arpeggios and 's new batch that is most like his Police material But there'suttered fro told fro deterovern climbs down deep inside the place and conditions where the character lives: He is aware that the fate of the miner's professions-and therefore the future economy of his class-has already been irrevocably shut off, and so he sings his account in a tired and resigned voice, but also with a dark, deadly, righteous sense of pain and anger: ”Our blood has stained the coal/We tunneled deep inside the nation's soul/We matter more than pounds and pence/Your economic theory makes no sense”

The Herald's new editor was not pleased to read such sentie to me via another editor: ”Rock & roll is ers Write about it fro-in fact, I stepped up my politics-which meant that soon my life at the Herald was hell I wasn't alone I watched the paper's erial structure drive soers believed, I was later told, that it was perhaps the writers' affections for style and point of view that was costing the paper its readers (and hell, ht)

I left the Herald Examiner in 1987, but by that tih another of my end-of-the-world romantic aftermaths I wasn't sure I wanted to remain a writer-but what else did I kno to do? A syaveeach of them All I wanted to do was sulk and drink and hate so back, I see how those assignhtthe will to write-even at the worst points in th that was invaluable and that I should trust; two, that I had not yet lost s and how it mattered to its audiences Plus, I realized it still mattered to me-that is, it still helpedthe best friends-and one of the few real confidants-I'd ever known in my life Whereas you could talk to and confide and hope and trust in a lover, that lover , by contrast, would talk to you-and its truths would never betray you At 3 AM, outside of the greatest andthat couldthat told you secrets about your own fucked-up and yearning heart

A FEW YEARS AGO, after the publication of Shot in the Heart (a story about enerational history of violence), I received several letters fros for publication I didn'twas too disjointed and had covered too much musical stylistic terrain to work in any cohesive volu back at my past I wasn't anxious to start another-especially since reading s always inal history about rock & roll's epic patterns of disruption, but that idea didn't excite most of the people I talked to After all, it was a season when pundits like Allan Bloom and William Bennett could write depthless and malicious indictments of popular culture and achieve fa so A history (and defense) of rock's agitation did not prove an appealing idea toan article I wrote for Rolling Stone in 1996 about the death of Tiain received requests for a collection of writings I felt a little more receptive to the idea by that time, because I knew I had a handful of articles I'd like to see enjoy a second (if only brief) life At first, though, the process of selecting those articles was not fun I' believer that one should never read too in to see all the repetitions, all the flaws A week into the project, I felt like bailing out Also, I'd written so much about some subjects-such as Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, punk, and Bruce Springsteen-that I wasn't sure which piece (or pieces) to pick as the , about 2 AM (my favorite hour-that is, next to 3 AM), I ca that should have been apparent all along: Without realizing it, I had been writing eneration I began to see how I could collect sos, yet also refashi+on them to construct an outline, a shadow, of rock & roll history-and that is what I have tried to do here This is not, of course, a proper history of rock & roll; there is far too much that is not addressed in this book as widely as it should be (including blues, punk, jazz, and hip-hop-all of which have been great adventures that have made rock & roll count for even more) Instead, I've tried to construct a volume out of a mix of personal touchstones (Bob Dylan, John Lydon, Lou Reed, and others), interview encounters (such as the Clash, Sinead O'Connor, Miles Davis, and Keith Jarrett), and a saal Sharkey and Marianne Faithfull's ”Trouble in Mind,” a the latter) Soinal published form, but most have been revised, reasseht out The Bob Dylan chapter, for example, includes elements from over twenty-three years of articles I've written about Dylan, plus ether in an orderly way that ht make for a story arc of sorts, from Elvis Presley's invention and weird fame to Kurt Cobain, and the horrible costs of his inventions and weird fa Place: A July Afternoon, is about Elvis, where it all begins-or at least where it began inOut for the Territories is about the people who took Elvis's possibilities and expanded the Stones; in this section, the storythe Territories is more or less about what happened in the 1970s (with the exception of disco, which is addressed in the following section) These are stories about people who began to expand and remake rock-sometimes onderful and soely about what happened in the 1980s, as rock (again) took on the powers that be-or actually, the other way around: the powers that be took on rock & roll, in big, bold, ugly ways This section forms the story (in my mind) of some of what rock means in America and what it has said about the nation, its promises, betrayals, and politics; what Americans think of rock & roll in return; how dance music and heavy metal and rap work and matter for their audiences; and howdown There's also a Michael Jackson chapter in this section, because it's the best place for it and after a while, Jackson too became part of the problem Lone Voices is a section about people (some well known, some obscure) who made lone and brave choices and s is exactly what its title proclaims: stories about how some people lived and died, in both their ht Call is about another ending

IT IS NOW 1998, as I revise this edition I am a forty-seven-year-oldto new and old loved irlfriend: ”Could you please turn that down just a little? And when are you co to bed?”) I still love popular , and Frank Sinatra to Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Tupac Shakur, and (still and always) Bob Dylan-above all other twentieth-century popular culture for about today's music that bothers me terribly-or to be more accurate, about today's music business I am troubled by the way the music industry (and not just major corporate labels, but also nun or record artists for what these labels see as a certain sound, quirk, style, nuance, niche, or whatever-and are loathe to allow those artists to expand or developThat is partly e see so many one-hit wonders-or one moment wonders-whether it's Green Day, Cowboy Junkies, the Offspring, Faith No More, and countless others These artists are milked, drained, toured, and discarded before they even have a shot at a second round It's a new kind of pop hegeemony, not at all unlike the blockbuster mentality that has made so much modern film tiresome, predictable and limited As much as I'm not a real fan of U2, REM, or Pearl Ja stratified, directed, or contained

Still, I don't want to sound like a grue new The industry loves it, seeks it-that is, until somebody shatters the security of that dominance: somebody like Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the sex Pistols, Nirvana, NWA Then, the industry goes off in search of artists who can parlay all the new dissidence and invention into yet another newer, hipper, profitable version of do, but it's also fine-sos work So the known order and sound, and then the industry and culture try tointo a model for mass couarantees that, come to and deadly, will have soe of many

Besides, for all the inevitable corporate appropriation that goes on in popular music, rock & roll and hip-hop still face much more serious problems and enemies: All those folks like Williarich, Bob Dole, and (I hate to admit it since I voted for the fuckers twice) Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who still blame rock & roll for social problee their own hand in lining the ”bridge to the twenty-first century” with solad that popular music continues to seelad it still seems like an opportunity and voice for liberation (and offense) for others I ae in an historical row up”-when rock & rolladvances, and I arow old” with music that will continue to do the same

That's why, today and tomorrow, I'll look to artists like Sleater-Kinney, Trent Reznor, Royal Trux, Marilyn Manson, Tricky, Master P, Bikini Kill, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, P J Harvey, Mary Lou Lord, Elliott Sht, and beautiful violation that have reat disturbance in our culture, our arts, and our values Without these artists, and others like them, the future won't count for as ht not be as illu

MIKAL GILMORE

MARCH 17, 1997

LOS ANGELES

(REVISED AUGUST 12, 1998)