STUPID STUFF PEOPLE SAY ABOUT ELVIS (Quote the Fourteenth)

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Okay, first the usual:

“It was while overseas that Elvis also met a nymphet named Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he would make the mistake of marrying in 1967 (a mistake because Elvis never wanted to behave as anything but a bachelor).”

James Wolcott (Source: “King of Kings” Vanity Fair, November, 2001)

Then, for comparison’s sake:

“No one had more freedom than Mackenzie Phillips, now 42, sober and acting again. At 13, after running away from her mother’s house, she showed up at her father’s Bel Air mansion, where he was living with his third wife, Genevieve. In step with the latest trends, John Phillips answered the door wearing a floor-length, tie-dyed Indian caftan and a Jesus beard and smoking a joint.

“‘Dad, I’m moving in–could you pay for the taxi?’ Mackenzie remembers saying

“‘Sure kid, come on in.’

“‘What are the rules?’ Mackenzie asked.

“‘Well, let me see,’ he said. After a moment of heavy contemplation, John replied, ‘You have to come home at least once a week. And if you come home from going out the night before and it’s light out, always bring a change of clothing, because a lady is never seen during daylight hours wearing evening clothing.’

“She walked in to say hi to Dad’s friends–Gram Parsons, Keith Richards, Donovan, and Mick Jagger, most of whom she wanted to have sex with. Her little girl’s dream came true, when, at the age of 18, she found herself over at Mick’s place making tuna sandwiches with her father. John left to go get mayonaisse, and ‘Mick turned around and locked the door, and looked at me, and said, “I’ve been waiting to do this since you were ten years old,”’ Mackenzie recalls. ‘My dad is banging on the door, “Mick, be nice to her! Don’t hurt her.” And I’m going, “Dad, leave us alone. It’s fine.” And we slept together.’ The next morning Jagger gave her a beautiful robe and fed her tea, toast and fresh strawberries.”

Evegenia Peretz (Source: “Born to be Wild” Vanity Fair, November, 2001)

Laying aside whether James Wolcott (or anyone) could know how Elvis Presley (or anyone) “never wanted” to behave, I do think it’s kinda’ creepy to say anybody else’s marriage is a “mistake” unless they themselves say it first (which I don’t believe either Elvis or his “nymphet” ever did).

I mean, I wouldn’t even say that about the multiple marriages of John Phillips or Mick Jagger, neither of whom–in keeping with a rather normal, albeit distasteful, standard for celebrity males which Elvis hardly challenged, let alone exceeded–ever thought much about “behaving as anything but a bachelor” (at least not until age or infirmity slowed them down).

But then again, I doubt James Wolcott would say that about Phillips or Jagger either. There’s no way to prove that, of course, but I’ve certainly never seen the slightest bit of evidence that he finds them to be what he clearly considered the un-marriage-worthy Elvis–namely, the wrong sort of people–or that he could continue being published in any periodical as swank as Vanity Fair if he did.

No need to speculate either, about what Elvis himself might have done if he had lived a bit longer and somehow found himself in a situation where Mick Jagger (or anyone) was jumping Lisa Marie’s eighteen-year-old bones on the other side of a locked door, though I’m guessing he wouldn’t have plaintively begged Mick not to hurt her and then doped and raped her and forced a ten-year incestuous affair on her, as Mackenzie would later reveal (or, if you prefer, claim) her own father had done, beginning a year or so after the charming incident related above.

For that you need the right kind of people.

On that cheery note, I’ll leave you with the old Japanese proverb, which is one thing that applies equally to even the crit-illuminati‘s definition of wrong and right sorts of people

“In the beginning the man takes the drugs. In the end, the drugs take the man.”

And proof of how far the fall can be, even for the right sort:

The Mamas and the Papas “Safe In My Garden” (Studio recording with appropriately haunting photo montage…from the moment before the drugs took John Phillips for good)

 

WHAT HE SAID…EDGING BACK TOWARD JOHN FORD TERRITORY

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For reasons I explained a couple of posts back, I’ve been off Ford much longer than I intended. As I’m getting back on track, here’s a great response from Kent Jones on the Ford/Tarantino flap a few months back (which I wrote about at length…newcomers can access my take under the Ford categories at the right. Kent is much calmer than me…and extremely effective.)

…Thanks, as usual, to April Lane’s definitive Ford site Directed by John Ford for making this readily availabe.

STRANGE SOMETIMES, THE SCENES THAT FIND YOU…(Ray Manzarek, R.I.P.)

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“He always saw the good side of people and that was his genius. He was the only guy at UCLA who saw something good about Jim. Everyone else thought Jim was a phony or worse. He saw the genius of Jim’s words and the rest is history.”

Robby Krieger (Posting immediately after the announcement of Ray Manzarek’s death).

My mother passed away in 1987. For reasons that aren’t relevant to this little story, I waited five years to visit her grave. On the lazy spring Saturday afternoon I finally decided to drive over, I bought a basket of her favorite flowers (daisies) and, instead of the hop, skip and jump on the interstate, took the long, casual route through the Florida Panhandle on Highway 90 (from Tallahassee, one of the college towns Jim Morrison happened to pass through on his way to meeting up with Fate in Los Angeles, to Campbellton, which is just west of Faye Dunaway’s old childhood haunts in Two Egg and a little bit north of Cottondale, where Dionne Warwick used to grab a headline whenever she visited her grandmother–it really is a small country in some ways).

In those days, like a lot of days prior and more than a few since, the AC on my car wasn’t working (record collectors with modest incomes understand why, at least in youth, certain things are luxuries, even air conditioning in Florida) so I drove with the windows rolled down and the radio on.

It happened that as I pulled up to the stop light directly in front of the Florida state mental hospital, which we really do keep in a place called Chattahoochee, a rough-looking (by which I mean a bit unkempt, not threatening) teenage boy was humping it along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the road, hunch-shouldered, head down, sneakers and a long-sleeved jacket in 85-degree weather, generally doing the James Dean thing.

The breeze must have been blowing in his direction, because, on hearing the music from my radio, he slowed down and then came to a complete stop.

He looked both ways for a bit, as if trying to determine that we were alone.

And then straight at me.

Then he smiled and began nodding his head.

So there, with the sun just beginning to turn to late afternoon gold and the radio playing and me trying to keep the box holding my mother’s basket of daisies from slipping into the floorboard, I found myself suddenly confronting one of those situations that remain indelible ever after because they are occasions for recognizing one of life’s little truisms.

In particular, this:

From about 1967 until some future date yet to be determined, if some rough-looking teenage kid walking in front of a mental hospital doing his James Dean thing suddenly stops and looks both ways and then straight at you and then starts bobbing his head and smiling and knows he doesn’t need to say a word, then the Doors must be playing.

It happened that, at this particular self-defining moment, the song was “Riders on the Storm,” but it probably could have been anything the band ever did.

That’s how it operates in those moments when the Doors–and only the Doors–must be on the radio.

* * * *

To tell the plain truth, I came to the Doors late. I never had a lot of James Dean–and certainly not a lot of Jim Morrison–in me.

If I’m gonna’ be a rebel, I’m gonna’ need a cause.

And, that being the case, I probably did have a little Ray Manzarek in me. I’m still kinda’, sorta’ looking for my cause. He found his when he met Morrison at UCLA in the mid-sixties and it’s very likely that no one else could have synched up with the future Lizard King so thoroughly that great, rough, mind-expanding, era-challenging records would be bound to result.

I like that image from Robby Krieger about others seeing Morrison as a phony and Manzarek’s ability to see through to the core being a genuine gift. Because Jim Morrison was a lot of things but phony wasn’t one of them. (Poseur? Of course, he was that–but, at least the way Jim Morrison played it, that’s a very different thing, because the way Jim Morrison–the one true Rock God who shared full credit and full profits with his bandmates–played it, it just meant that he was kicking the world before it could kick him.)

The way I came to see it finally, when I did come around to the Doors, is that in the Summer of Love, when a whole lot of people saw perpetual grooviness extending into a bright, trippy future and professional cynics like Frank Zappa thought themselves exceptionally clever because they saw new wine in old bottles, Jim Morrison was the one who looked down the long, black tunnel of The Future and saw Charlie Manson and Ted Bundy waiting.

Little wonder he ended the way he did.

Wouldn’t you, if you were him?

The miracle is that he got the chance to put those visions on record at all, and Ray Manzarek was probably more responsible for that than anyone, including perhaps Morrison himself.

And, of course, being a congenial guy, who saw talent–genius even–where others saw fool, wouldn’t have mattered in the least if Manzarek hadn’t also been a wizard on the keys, as the distance between the organ and piano parts below should suffice to demonstrate:

The beginning…

The Doors “Light My Fire” (Live on the Ed Sullivan Show, from which the group were banned because Morrison sang the line “Our love is like a funeral pyre,” after, er, being told not to)

and the end.

The Doors “Riders on the Storm” (Live/Video edit)

(And all this moody reflection does leave me wondering whether the several downtown apartment complexes who claimed they were the place JIm Morrison stayed when he went to FSU are still using it to bump the rent!)

 

BLOOD HAS BEEN SWEAT…

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And all of my photo links have finally been restored (so far as I can tell!). Please let me know if you find any still broken or missing.

…I’ll be back to my series on The Searchers soon. Really had to get this out of the way and figure out exactly what went wrong before I could contemplate any more photo essays (cause I sure don’t want to have to go through this again!)

SEGUE OF THE DAY (5/18/13–Lester Flatt and Ronnie Isley)

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About this time a year ago, I found out I was going to have to replace my roof and my hardwood floors by the end of the year in order to keep my house insurable. These things got done, at the expense of reordering my life for months on end. And I’m just now returning to something like “normal” status, meaning, among other things, that my record player is fully operational again.

So here in the last week or two I’ve been pulling vinyl like mad, acquainting and re-acquainting myself as it were.

And sometime Saturday in the very early a.m., I was sure I had found the “new” acquaintance of the week/month/year when I discovered Flatt–on an old double-LP titled Bean Blossom (a live recording from Indiana’s Bean Blossom bluegrass festival in 1973 which I’ve had for years but have rarely played and never really paid strict attention to before)–turning “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” aka “The Theme From the Beverly Hillbillies” into a laconic, world-weary, working man’s blues.

Flatt’s studio version was already far dryer and a good deal more cautionary than the chipper version that resides in the national subconcious via endless re-runs, but here, he made lines like “poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,” sound like they were being sung from the bottom of a mine.

So that had to be it, right? The new thing most likely to expand my consciousness here in the latter stages of my recovery phase?

Really, I should know better.

No matter how tired I get, I should never forget that rock and roll is bottomless.

Not twenty-four hours later, I’m in my car listening to the final album in a stark-raving incredible five album set from the Isley Brothers which, in amongst the hardcore funk-rock and straight soul, features lots and lots of covers of White America’s AM Gold playlist circa the early seventies, nearly every one of which they transformed.

Seriously: “Ohio” to “Summer Breeze” to “Listen to the Music” to “Love the One You’re With” to “Fire and Rain.” Good records, great records, trash records. It would be easy to think it was just catch-as-catch-can, trying to keep up with the era’s insane recording schedules–easy except Ronnie Isley kept finding ways to make everything personal.

“Just yesterday morning,” he sings “they let me know you were gone.” And suddenly it hurts. There’s no distance, no comfort, no displacement, no opacity, no self-pity, just real fear and real transcendence. As if somebody or something is really and truly gone.

Same with “four dead in O-hi-o.” Same with “There’s a rose in the fisted glove.”

And so on and so forth.

But even with all that coming at me during my drive times this week, I wasn’t any way prepared for Ronnie to take on Jonathan Edwards’ consummately fey (and consummately catchy) “Sunshine,” which, I confess, I never knew meant anything at all after hearing Edwards sing it a few hundred times on the oldies’ stations of yesteryear (most often with me shouting right along, incidentally).

Here, it starts out sounding like a man who is standing next to Lester Flatt in that imaginary mine, shouting up–”Sunshine go away today, I don’t feel much like dancing”–and then follows along as he proceeds to lift himself up inch-by-inch until he can just about see the light.

But don’t take my word for it…go have a listen–as “He’s got cards he ain’t showing,” takes on new meaning in the mouth of a black man negotiating the fall-out of post Civil Rights America as the New Jim Crow began to meet the Old Jim Crow and he helps you ponder the paths not taken–bear in mind Ronnie’s own maxim that rock and roll was the only music that let everything in:

The Isley Brothers “Sunshine (Go Away Today)” (Studio recording)

 

I LOVE THIS IDEA NOT LEAST BECAUSE IT WILL CAUSE HEADS TO EXPLODE AMONG THE CRIT-ILLUMINATI (Found In the Connection, Rattling Loose End #12, Pistol Annies and Patty Loveless)

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…The Pistol Annies and Miranda Lambert having so often received the kind of love from rock critics that Loveless has generally been denied….Good to have confirmation that they know what they are about even if so many others don’t (original post at the ever invaluable Pattyloveless.net):

The Pistol Annies aren’t just content with collaborating on their own music — they want to write songs for other people, too.

Actually, one person: Patty Loveless.

The trio is on a mission to get Loveless back into the recording studio. Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley consider Loveless their hero and when the “You Don’t Even Know Who I Am” singer came to one of Lambert’s shows, the women pounced on the opportunity to persuade her to make new music.

Loveless’ last album, “Mountain Soul II,” won a Grammy Award in 2010 for Best Bluegrass Album.

“We were like, ‘Are you going to do anything anytime soon?’ ” Presley recalls. “She was like, ‘I don’t know, I might be done.’ We were like, ‘No! We will write you a record and when we do, you better cut it.’ ”

“I still want to do that,” Lambert says. “It gives me chills.”

The women ended up in the bathroom at the BMI Awards last year with songwriter Matraca Berg and Morgan Stapleton and started texting Loveless.

“We literally had someone guarding a door,” Lambert says. “(The text) said, ‘These girls in this bathroom are going to come get you, kidnap you, take you to the Smoky Mountains for a week and write your record. We’re going to listen to you talk and then write the songs.’ And she was like, ‘Well, I might think about doing that.’ ”

And if they came up with an album full of this sort of thing (and they just might–the sensibility sounds pretty well-synched to me) my feelings would not be hurt in the least:

Patty Loveless “Tear Stained Letter” (Live Performance)

…on the other hand, if they talked her into something like this, my head might explode:

Pistol Annies “Takin’ Pills” (Video)

 

 

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW…MUSCLE SHOALS, ALABAMA: 1970 (Great Quotations)

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“…Ronnie Van Zant’s voice mesmerized me. When he’d go ‘Yeaaaaow,’ it just wiped me out. I couldn’t wait to work with him because I’d never worked with an artist that distinctive. He had that fingerprint sound man, and nobody sounded like him, nobody!”

Jimmy Johnson, original Muscle Shoals “Swamper.” (Source: Liner notes to Skynyrd’s First: The Complete Muscle Shoals Album, 1998)

Bear in mind that Johnson, as ace session guitarist and some-time producer and engineer, worked with practically everybody: Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Etta James, the Rolling Stones, Mavis Staples, Linda Ronstadt, Jimmy Cliff and so on and so forth–and had worked with most of them by the time he first heard Ronnie’s voice. I mention this only because I don’t think a lot of people put Ronnie Van Zant in that same class of vocalist and, frankly, they should.

Of course Van Zant, likely the last truly epic blues singer, white or black, who will ever find a mass audience, eventually repaid Johnson’s faith in him (and gave a rousing shout back) in the Swampers’ chapter of a little epic called “Sweet Home Alabama.” The Swampers’ chapter, for those who don’t recall, came right after the chapter where the shout-out to George Wallace went, “Boo, boo, boo!”

Which–since it emanated from a working class southern white boy whose habit of performing in front of a Confederate flag was not likely to be forgiven just because he confounded so many other stereotypes, up to and including making a record called “Sweet Home Alabama,” which was taken into the stratosphere as much by a chorus of black female background singers as by its famous stone cold riff or Van Zant’s own powerhouse lead vocal–was/is automatically stereo-typed by many as being pro-Wallace.

Oh well. We really did all do what we could do.

Lynyrd Skynyrd “Sweet Home Alabama/Don’t Ask Me No Questions” (Performing in Studio–1974)

SO WHAT WAS 1960 REALLY LIKE?….I MEAN, JUST MUSICALLY SPEAKING.

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“Nineteen hundred and sixty was probably the worst year that pop has been through. Everyone had gone to the moon. Elvis had been penned off in the army and came back to appal us with ballads. Little Richard had got religion. Chuck Berry was in jail. Buddy Holly was dead. Very soon, Eddie Cochran was killed in his car crash. It was a wholesale plague, a wipeout.”

(The always prone to understatement, but undeniably trenchant, Nik Cohn’s opening paragraph to the chapter titled “Rue Morgue, 1960″ in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, 1970)

When Cohn wrote these words he was basically summing up what a lot of third-rate romancers–mostly male, mostly white, mostly collegiate whether or not they had yet been to college (or would ever go)–had been saying and writing since, well, 1960.

1960 sucked and blew. Well, really that whole 1958 (the fall!) to 1963 (waiting for the Beatles to save us all!) period had sucked and blown.

But 1960?

That was the worst, the nadir (good collegiate word), the pits (as the actual greasers might have put it).

1960 was spiritual death. The bottom that had to be reached some time before the resurrection (Beatlemania!…or more accurately, the highly inventive new-chord-progressions-and-the-truth music and supremely witty collective style of the Beatles demonstrated in their respective persons, since mania was a highly unstable state, particularly redolent of suspicion as it was likely to be the specific province of screaming girls, who collegians and greasers both knew could give you cooties) could properly occur.

So the story goes. Give Cohn credit. He nailed the entire ethos in a few clipped lines.

Like I said. Trenchant.

That’s what you call controlling the narrative.

Well, you know I like to put these little narratives under a microscope once in a while, so I can’t really say if it was entirely a coincidence that–having just completed a re-read of Cohn’s classic account of rock’s early years–I took the occasion of my weekend drive (itself, the occasion for laying a Mother’s Day rose on a headstone) to pull out the mighty Bear Family’s Blowing the Fuse: 31 R&B Classics That Rocked the Jukebox In 1960 for company.

Let me just say that if 1960 was the bottom of the pop barrel (as opposed to the political barrel, which really was dire in many respects) I wish we could go back there.

Bobby Bland, Jerry Butler, James Brown, Etta James, Fats Domino, Brook Benton, Ike and Tina, Gary U.S. Bonds, Jimmy Reed, Jackie Wilson, one-offs the likes of “Stay,” or “Something’s On Your Mind,” or “Let the Little Girl Dance,” or “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” (wait til the spell checker get’s hold of that one!).

And all of that’s before you get to the real kicker, which involves Howlin’ Wolf’s “Spoonful” (the only cut here that wasn’t an R&B hit, and virtually the only one that didn’t cross over to the Pop charts) running straight into the Shirelles’ “Tonight’s the Night,” followed by a teen-ager named Jimmy Charles giving a perfect imitation of the era’s white teen idols on “A Million to One” and a young woman who called herself Sugar Pie DeSanto (whose then producer/hustler husband went on to become a bank robber after they divorced–baby that was rock and roll) doing a straight cop, arrangement wise, on the Everly Brothers (who, of course, were still crossing over regularly to the R&B charts, though these sort of collections never acknowledge such things–not even when they are done by the Bear Family. The Nik Cohn’s of the world have had their effect).

1960, incidentally, was the year Cash Box, the other major trade magazine that competed with Billboard, suspended it’s R&B Chart for a time because the overlap between R&B and Pop, barely noticeable before rock and roll, was by then so great there seemed little point in keeping them separated. (Billboard would follow with a similar experiment in late 1963–that experiment lasted a bit longer than Cash Box‘s but was  nonetheless ended a little over a year later once the Beatles and the British Invasion had safely re-segregated the charts and more or less ended the post-racial dream which had caused so much panic sweat to rise from the thin, tender skin of Nik Cohn and the Future of Rock Criticism in the dread days of 1960, when black people and girls and, well, black girl people, were starting to litter up the pop charts and the hallways of the Brill Building like nobody’s business.)

Oh well. I guess one man’s “worst year that pop has been through” is another man’s extremely interesting times.

But the next time you hear that America needed the Beatles because of the Kennedy assassination or some such rigmarole (or better yet, to “rediscover” the black music which the British Invasion in fact shoved back to the sideline), just remember the carefully modulated warning later rendered by that most British of all prophets, when he said: Don’t get fooled again.

Sugar Pie DeSanto “I Want to Know” (Studio recording…Reaching the bottom no doubt.)

HEY IT TURNS OUT THAT EVEN BACK IN SIXTY-EIGHT, IVY LEAGUE EGGHEADS REALLY WERE GOOD FOR SOMETHING BESIDES GETTING NAKED, GIVING COPS THE FINGER AND DREAMING OF THE DAY WHEN THEY WOULD BLOW STUFF UP! (Found In The Connection: Rattling Loose End #11, Jerry Butler and the birth of Philly Soul)

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“We got to talking about some writer from Yale who’d complained about how Curtis Mayfield and the Temptations were experimenting with new sounds like the wah-wah pedal. He’d said it ruined the purity of R&B. We thought artists should use everything around them and Kenny said ‘Hey, only the strong survive.’ I added in some things I’d heard growing up and 45 minutes later, we had a song.”

Jerry Butler, on the inspiration for “Only the Strong Survive,” the most monumental record to come from the sessions that Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff used as the foundation stone, both creative and commercial, for The Sound of Philadelphia, i.e. what black music would get up to in the seventies and then some.

(Source: Liner notes, The Philadelphia Sessions: The Iceman Cometh, Ice on Ice and More, 2001)

Jerry Butler “Only the Strong Survive” (Television Performance)

Update: No word on whether the Yalie in question ever joined Weatherman. Just know that he was evidently simpatico. The terror masters are always really good at telling others what they should think of themselves.

APRIL BOOK REPORT–O.J. SIMPSON, ALAS and ROCK FROM THE BEGINNING (4/13)

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American Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the Simpson Defense (Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth, 1996) and Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away with Murder (Vincent Bugliosi, 1996)

I actually ended up reading these side by side–a few chapters of one then a few of the other–because a couple of hundred pages into Shiller’s massive tome, I felt the need for an antidote. The way Schiller saw it from the inside, O.J. Simpson’s defense attorneys–not to mention Simpson himself–were precisely the slick pieces of central-casting crapola they seemed at the time. Whatever Bugliosi is–and I find it hard to have a completely positive view of anyone so convinced of his own righteousness and general superiority to the rest of humankind–he isn’t slick.

Anyway, this is the first month of my life I’ve devoted to the Trial of the (Last) Century and rest assured it will be the last. Of the two, I would probably actually recommend Schiller’s book. Bugliosi makes his main points in about fifty pages worth of real argument scattered here and there throughout a book that (when footnotes and appendices are included) stretches well over four hundred. Beyond that you end up reading a lot about how much smarter Vince is than the rest of us poor incompetents and wishing he had chosen to transport some of that erudition through his typewriter or expend it on something other than the prosecution’s generally mind-boggling incompetence (viable as that point is, it does wear thin after a bit). Guy put the Manson family away so I cut him a lot of slack, but he’s pushing the limits of a commoner’s patience here.

As for the Schiller version…well, to be fair, he came up with an interesting angle.

With Simpson’s guilt in little doubt, the verdict already well-known to all at the time of publication, and little to be gained by heading in Bugliosi’s direction of excoriating a team of prosecutors evidently grown so fat and lazy on the high conviction rates guaranteed by a system that routinely stomps those who can’t afford “dream teams” into the ground that they couldn’t get out of their own way, he decided to make his 700 page opus about the souls of the lawyers!

On the surface this might seem, er, implausible as a subject of interest in a case where the defense team’s highest moment was the inspired decision to replace pictures of Simpson’s nude girlfriend with a picture of a Norman Rockwell print of a young black girl overcoming segregation on the occasion of the jury’s visit to Simpson’s home.

Don’t laugh, though.

It kind of works. Schiller’s real protagonist–who would be completely forgotten now if not for the strange, source less, perfect-in-its-disturbing-way celebrity of his insidious offspring–is Robert Kardashian. Mostly this is because the now deceased Kardashian was the guy who drew him into the case as the kind of “journalist” who could help shepherd the defense through the technical difficulties of transcribing Mark Fuhrman’s infamous, game-changing tapes (a “favor,” designed to increase trust and access for the improvement and/or existence of this very book, a service which one LAPD detective attached to the case deemed crucial to the single most important element in setting Simpson free, though one could, of course, argue that Fuhrman’s own vileness was more important still), all while believing fervently in Simpson’s guilt.

Certain kinds of journalists are, like certain kinds of lawyers, a special breed.

In any case, Schiller stumbled onto the one really interesting angle. Namely, what did Kardashian–the only lawyer in the case who was genuinely close to Simpson either before or during the trial, the only one who had a material role in Simpson’s cover-up, the only one who renewed his license to practice criminal law so that he specifically could not be called to testify about that role, and, oddly, the only one who seemed to possess anything a normal person might recognize as resembling a conscience–know and when did he know it. And Schiller the journalist milks this for all it’s worth, right down to never letting us know the answer but giving us all the information we need to make an educated guess.

Like I say, not a place I ever care to go again, but together, these two books certainly tell any moderately interested person everything they will ever need to know about this particular bit of madness.

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, aka Rock From the Beginning (Nik Cohn, 1970, revised 1973)

A re-read.

Whoo boy.

One of the first “histories” of rock and roll. On the surface Cohn is pretty much a constant fingernail on the chalkboard of my particular sensibility. Whatever I like least in a smart-ass he tends to represent in spades:

Desire to be at least as important as his subject? Check.

Not too keen on the facts, especially if they interfere with his own reality? Check.

Literary pretensions sans literary discipline and training? Check. (He got past Tom Wolfe on talent alone, but I suspect he was aiming for the D.H. Lawrence of Studies in Classic American Literature at the very least, even if no torture has ever been devised that would make him admit it.)

Dismissive of anything he doesn’t like but weirdly (by which I mean, not quite sincerely) apologetic about what he does like? Check.

Hipper than thou, even when (or especially when) he’s pretending to anti-hipness? Check. 

Professional huckster? You bet! (His other main claim to fame is writing the story for New York Magazine upon which Saturday Night Fever became based. Turned out he made it up. Of course he did.)

Women problems? The rock critic’s ever-abiding occupational hazard–or perhaps job requirement?

Check and double-check.

I mean this is a guy who, privileged with a sharp brain and a front row seat–make that a Front Row Seat!–to the madness of the sixties, makes it very clear that the only two things which truly frightened and disoriented him were Brenda Lee’s pipes and Tina Turner’s butt.

Admittedly, two cosmic forces, but still….

So, with all that going against him, why is this still an essential read?

Well, for one thing he could write. Boy could he write.

Among English language critics who have covered the arts in the last hundred years, he and Lester Bangs are the only ones who I would ever recommend reading for style. Whether there is any significance to the two men being so close in age and both covering rock and roll–at least in those days, the red-headed stepchild of “the arts”–is a discussion best left to shrinks and sociologists. And I don’t mean to really compare the two. I mean, Bangs is what Cohn might have been if he hadn’t been a huckster.

All that said, he was often insightful in spite of himself and his commentary on the London scene from which he sprang is probably unparalleled, (and he was particularly good–not to mention almost eerily prescient–on both the Beatles and the Stones, not a bad trick for 1970, when seeing them clearly could not have been easy).

And believe me, for this sort of description, I can easily put up with having every single one of my buttons frequently and fervently pushed:

“I remember seeing them [Ike and Tina Turner] in a London Club one time and I was standing right under the stage. So Tina started whirling and pounding and screaming, melting by the minute, and suddenly she came thundering down on me like an avalanche, backside first, all that flesh shaking and leaping in my face. And I reared back in self-defence, all the front rows did, and then someone fell over and we all immediately collapsed in a heap, struggling and cursing, thrashing about like fish in a bucket.

“When I looked back up again, Tina was still shaking above us, her butt was still exploding, and she looked down on us in triumph. So sassy, so smug and evil. She’d used her arse as a bowling ball, us as skittles, and she’d scored a strike.”

Forget Tom Wolfe, even D.H. Lawrence himself never beat that.